The "Free Health Scheme" Myth (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard 

It was all worked out so that sick people in Britain could be looked after and seek treatment undeterred by the financial disaster it previously entailed. So they were told — but it didn’t work out that way. In capitalist society you get nothing for nothing and the politicians (outright callous Tory or two-faced hypocritical Labour) make no bones about their ‘need’ to modify workers’ wages for (and limit the benefits of) a health scheme which fails to satisfy the “cheap healthy work force” expedient of those who planned it.

For let there be no mistake about the motive of those who devised the idea of a National Health Service, telling the world it was to ensure unfettered medical attention for all who needed it. It was (as many publications inadvertently disclose) to cut the cost to British capitalism in working hours lost to their businesses through workers’ sickness.

Now, these Capitalist interests are not happy with their own deal. They feel that British doctors are not doing their bit in the cheap maintenance of healthy wage slaves, but are spending too much capitalist money in the process by “overprescribing” for the sick who turn to them for help. A “free” health scheme (in fact it costs 20p per item on each prescription and there’s a lot of Parliamentary agitation to make it more) is all very well in the interests of the country’s employers — but if general practitioners take the thing too far they will have to be pulled into line. Thus Mr. Mike Thomas, Labour MP for Newcastle, has introduced a Bill demanding that registered medical practitioners be limited in the drugs they may prescribe to a small list and that their surgery treatment notes be made available to a panel who may have to “discuss” with them the treatment they arc making available to patients on the “National Health”.

Quote, from the doctors’ periodical Pulse 10.7.76: —

‘‘The Government may be forced into taking more radical action to reduce the level of prescribing, both within general practice and the hospital service in order to peg the rising drugs bill. Minister of State for Health, Dr. David Owen has called for ‘better prescribing overall’ and has reminded the profession, yet again, that it is now having to make economic decisions within the context of tightly reined resources. Unfortunately both Dr. Owen and Social Services Minister, Mr. David Ennals have reached that stage where they are issuing repeated warnings on the need for constraint in each sector of the Health Service, but no one knows precisely how the Government intends to cut back costs or what level of toughness it is prepared to use. The Department of Health circular issued last week, for example, was supposed to represent ‘Guidelines’ on the much-vaunted review of NHS management costs . . . Dodging the perfectly justifiable suggestions from one Tory questioner that there was need for a realistic uprating of prescription charges which still remain at their pre-inflation rate, Dr. Owen replied: “What is needed is better prescribing overall and a recognition by patients that not every ailment is cured by pills . . . The medical profession must recognize that it has to make economic decisions. At present the prescription Bill has no cash limit and is open-ended . . . But if the medical profession is not able to show some form of economic restraint in its budget, any Government would be forced to look at other measures ... At the moment we prefer to rely on education and we hope to keep the drugs bill within reasonable bounds by that method.’ ”

The article in Pulse continues:

The drugs bill to which Dr. Owen was referring amounted to £379 million during the last financial year in England. At £7.00 a year per person, was that not good value for money? Dr. Owen took this opportunity, replying to Labour back-bencher Dr. Maurice Miller, to confirm that the pharmaceutical industry was not guilty of drawing any excess profits — and that any blame for the escalating drugs bill lay with an over-demanding public and over-generous profession.

In other words, Dr. Owen has the gall to represent himself as unaware of how notorious drug firms are for their enormous profits, and upset by patient’s demands for adequate treatment and doctor’s desires to provide it!

Health at a Price

Quoting from the doctors’ periodical General Practitioner, 16.7.76, on page 8 we read:

A blunt warning that the National Health Service must ‘live within its means’ was given by the Prime Minister last week. Only 24 hours after the Cabinet began a series of meetings to prepare for public spending cuts totalling about £1,000 million next year, Mr. Callaghan made it clear that the NHS would not escape the treasury act. He told members of the Royal College of Surgeons at a dinner in London that ‘difficult choices and unwelcome decisions’ lay ahead in many areas of public expenditure. Doctors would be faced in their everyday work with a difficult period of adjustment from a fairly rapid rise in the amount of resources available in recent years to more stringent conditions.

This, of course, is a typical politician’s mealy-mouthed way of avoiding saying that National Health Service patients will have to suffer neglect by being denied benefits once promised by the British capitalist class. But to add insult to injury, listen to the sheer two-faced double-talk the Labour Leader follows it up with. Quote: “At a time when the ordinary wage earner is voluntarily cutting his own standards, the health service too must live within its means.”

In other words, Mr. Callaghan feels that if workers are being deprived in one way it is only fair that they also be deprived in another! This is the depth to which opportunist politicians will sink and a measure of the contempt they have for their wage slaves’ discernment.

This is but one of the many degrading aspects of life under capitalism, where men can dictate how much medical attention and care their fellows are “entitled to.” In a Socialist society such inhuman parsimony would be impossible. There would be no leaders able to hoodwink anyone, and not just  health care but all goods and services would be free to every one.

R. B. Gill

Political Notes: Social Democrats so what (1982)

The Political Notes Column from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social Democrats so what

Who cares about the leadership of the Social Democrats?

Well Roy Jenkins cares. No banqueting table ever received so delighted a slaver from him as when, declared the winner of the leadership contest, he contemplated the new brilliance of his once-glimmering hopes of becoming Prime Minister. “Our aim is to . . . make a major breakthrough to government". he asserted. David Owen cares. Second in the two-man race, he did not actually say "I want an important job in any future SDP government". What he did gulp out of his chagrin was: "Roy Jenkins is a friend of mine and we will work very much together". The SDP membership cares. Nearly 76 per cent of them cast their votes in the election for the man who, they hope, will head the next government over British capitalism.

But should anyone care about the outcome of this supreme non-event? A little more than 47,000 members of the SDP expressed a preference for one or other of two politicians who are inseparably associated with one of the most dismal failures in recent history. Jenkins’ time as Chancellor of the Exchequer was marked by a savage assault on working class living standards and by a succession of economic crises, all of which were clearly beyond his control. Owen was Foreign Secretary through an average period of international tension and conflict (including early rumblings of the Falklands war). If he had any ability or knowledge of how to eliminate these problems, he successfully concealed it.

Politicians have to base their appeal on a veiled assurance that there is some sort of magic trick of competence, learning or skill which can be applied to make capitalism run in the interests of its peoples. So far, even the slickest of them have not been able to perform the promised miracle. It is depressing, if unsurprising, that there are 65,000 workers in the SDP who are naive enough to believe that a tedious rehash of the discredited tricks of the other parties of capitalism can have any effect on the system's ailments.

An authentic desire to break the political mould would lead to the discarding of all the parties who stand for capitalism. To the detriment of the human race, few workers care about that at present.

Polish capitalism

For several months now, Poland has been under martial law, and very little information has been forthcoming about developments there. But there are still thousands of trade unionists imprisoned for their activities. Solidarity is still operating underground. There have been several demonstrations against the regime which the armed thugs of the state have brutally put down with water-cannon and truncheons.

But why is independent trade-union activity and the wage rises it might gain such a horrible threat in the eyes of Jaruzelski and the other representatives of capital and profit in Poland? On July 7, Polish leaders met their Western bank creditors in Vienna to negotiate the further rescheduling of debts. The Polish rulers are still over 27 billion dollars in debt, having borrowed large amounts to finance the boom of the 'seventies.

With the onset of world recession in the 'eighties, they are finding it impossible to repay these debts, both because of the lack of resources internally and the decreased purchases in the West of Polish exports — the preferred method of repayment.

As the Financial Times put it: “Even if Polish productivity accelerated sharply, the world recession would prevent the West from buying as much as the generals in Warsaw would like” (26 January 1982). Previous rescheduling has meant that two billion dollars of capital, plus interest, are due to be repaid this year.

The Polish rulers say they can do neither, and although some of the Western governments have made hypocritically pious noises about the martial law regime, the bankers themselves are generally anxious to see their Polish counterparts do anything they can to screw more wealth out of the Polish workers, for the repayment at least of the interest. They complain that their capital has been invested without purpose since they have not seen a profit.

All of these developments prove beyond the slightest doubt that state-capitalist countries like Poland and Russia are giant corporations, which fit quite consistently into the overall framework of world capitalism, with its exploitation of wage labour by capital to accumulate profit.

Anyone for democracy?

Even for the House of Commons — where they are not unwaveringly in touch with reality — it was a remarkable day when David Owen got up to voice his concern for the welfare of the trade unions. Was this the man who was Foreign Secretary in the government which ruled during the infamous winter of discontent?

Worse was to come. Owen’s unoriginal opinion that the collapse of the NUR strike proved the need for an extension of democratic procedures in the unions was applauded by Margaret Thatcher. Was this the Prime Minister presiding over the present ruthless assault on the unions?

Thatcher foresaw the introduction of new laws to force the unions to hold secret ballots before calling a strike. It is popularly viewed that such laws would drastically reduce the number and incidence of strikes. The theory is that stolid, responsible trade unionists who want only to be left in peace to surrender up the maximum of surplus value to their employers are being harassed and misled into strikes they oppose by militant trade union leaders. Just let the silent majority have its voice, runs the theory, and there will be very, very few strikes.

It is not so long ago that the opposite theory was popular with the likes of Owen and Thatcher. In those days the union leadership (men like Arthur Deakin and Tom Williamson) were respected as bulwarks resisting the pressure for strikes from the union membership. The result was often that the pressure boiled over into "unofficial” strikes — which meant that the members were in favour of them but the leadership would not organise them. The House of Commons then did not hear calls from vain politicians for the majority of trade unionists to have its way. Instead, it heard thanks and praise for the undemocratic, resisting leaders.

In any case, Thatcher and Owen got it wrong. There is no evidence that ballots would reduce strikes; it is very possible that a strike called after a ballot would be that much stronger and determined and therefore difficult for the employers to break. Above it all is the fact that industrial disputes arise directly, unavoidably, from the class struggle. There is no doubt which side Owen and Thatcher are on. A more democratic, more powerful trade union movement will be built in spite of their opposition.

Running Commentary: Patriots at work (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Patriots at work

In the whole of the world there are probably no more fervent patriots than Peter Wright and Oliver North.

To prove it, they were prepared to go to unusual lengths. North arranged to supply arms to the Contras in defiance of a Congressional decision against it and then made elaborate arrangements to hide the evidence in the memory holes and the shredding machines of Washington. One senator described it as a military junta established to circumvent the checks and balances of the American Constitution.

Wright, in his own words, "bugged and burgled" his way wherever and whenever it suited his purpose. He knew of other officers in M15 who tried to organise a romantic covert operation to undermine the democratically-elected Wilson government — on the grounds that, in the view of these officers. Wilson was a "menace". And he kept quiet about all this until he went into an embittered retirement.

Both of these men justify what they did on the grounds that they were acting in the "national interest"; both deny that they would ever contemplate doing anything likely to harm "their" country. Peter Wright is now rather too old and sick to look like an example of tragic heroism; but Oliver North — well, we all know about the adulation his confessions provoked among his fellow patriots in America.

But one thing patriots are supposed to worship and to protect is the way of life in "their" country — which must include its system of government and its laws. Obeying the law is not a matter of convenience or expediency — something to be done at one time and not at another, something for others to do but not for yourself. If a country's governmental system and its laws are "good” — as Wright and North, as staunch patriots, must think — then to obey them and to conform to them should be a matter of pride and pleasure rather than of anguish and hardship.

So what are we to make of these patriots, who claim the right to choose when and how they accept what "their" country represents? Of course they cannot claim to be consistent or sincere in their beliefs. But that is only the beginning. Patriotism — which, as we have said, is no more than a belief — is not consistent or logical. We are justified in being proud only about our achievements but the place where we are born, our parents, the nationality label which is stuck on us, are accidents and not achievements. So the basis of patriotism — pride in country — is false.

Patriotism claims that the artificial national state boundaries of capitalism divide the human race not just in terms of territory but of ability and temperament: but there is no evidence to sustain this. Across all the boundaries — of race and sex as well as of nation — the class divide of capitalism operates and it is the only one which is of any significance when we consider human interests and progress to a better society.

So if Wright and North are confused — or deceitful, cynical, ruthless, whichever is preferred -— they are really only behaving as patriots must. And that should be enough to convince anyone of the case for international working class unity.

Gorbachev’s gift

We all know how Mikhail Gorbachev is seen as a "liberalising reformist" leading the Russian people to "communism". He urges people to work harder and improve productivity and factories to become more independent in pursuit of greater profit.

Gorbachev, however, is not just good at telling others what to do. He is himself participating in the process of glasnost and perestroika (openess and restructuring). With this aim in mind the state capitalist boss has donated 50,000 roubles (£50,000) to the Soviet Cultural Fund for a statue of Vasili Tyorkin to be built in Smolensk (Central Russia). Vasili Tyorkin is the soldier hero in a poem by Alexander Tvardovsky.

This money, we are told by Soviet Weekly (11 July 1987) came out of the foreign royalties for Gorbachev's books and other writings. As a member of the Russian ruling class, with a few roubles to spare, Gorbachev is quite happy to use his pin money like this for two reasons.

Any new monument which is not another tribute to Lenin will be welcome by most people and will enhance the popularity of the present leader.

A statue which helps to spread absurd patriotic notions that Russia is worth dying for is likely to be welcomed by the whole Russian capitalist class since it is their way of life that the working class might one day be called on to defend in war.

Mike Tavener

Dictatorial democrats

This is a good time to remember that the Gang of Four broke with the Labour Party partly because of their anger and dismay at that party's persistent internal feuding. Break the mould of these outworn, traditional parties, they argued, and instead fashion a new one in which reason and moderation would prevail. Then all disputes would be settled simply because nobody would be adopting preformed, dogmatic stances. Sounded good, thought a lot of people who were also fed up with Labour's apparent will for its own destruction.

Trouble — serious trouble — started when the Alliance, having kidded themselves that they were about to become a serious prospect to have an influence in the government, were so badly mauled in the last election. The response of the mould-breakers to this was anything but innovative. They resorted to the excuse which Labour and Conservative Parties regularly use when they lose an election. There is nothing wrong, they asserted, with our principles or our policies; the problem lies with our failure to present them effectively enough.

In the case of the Alliance, they decided that they had suffered precisely because they were an alliance — that the regular appearance of two Davids on our TV screens cost them crucial support among workers who like consistency, strength and single-mindedness in their leaders. It was thus that the Alliance came up with the idea of a formal merger between the Liberals and the SDP — one party, one leader.

Now moderation and reasonableness should have welcomed such an idea — or at least been prepared to discuss it in an objective. constructive frame of mind. In fact, the campaign leading up to the referendum on the merger was notable for its lack of these very things. Abuse and mud-slinging would be moderate terms to describe what was said by some Alliance members about others.

If that were not enough many members of the SDP. including some of its leaders, made it quite clear that if the vote went against their wishes they would not accept it. David Owen adopted this attitude. Rosie Barnes was another: "If merger takes place." she said. "There will be a Social Democratic Party which remains behind. Four of the MPs will remain Social Democrats and David Owen will be our leader

So this is a good time to ask: What sort of democrat is it (and what sort of democracy do they envisage) who contests an issue leading to a vote but has no intention of being influenced if the majority is against them.

The merger debate in the Alliance has revealed, if it were still needed, the true nature of that organisation — as another party of capitalism with all the cynicism and trickery of those they claim to despise.

The NHS — nothing for something ? (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The love or my life”, Barbara Castle called it, and her successors still try to tell British workers that they’re getting something for nothing.

But what are the facts? Dr. David Owen, until recently the Health Minister, says: “The NHS was launched on a fallacy. We were going to finance everything—cure the nation—and spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed now we realise that no country, even if prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”

“Supply everything”! What does it supply?

On the “free” health service a specialist consultation for a patient requested by a general practitioner has to wait for anything up to 10 months. In some places an appointment for a child with recurrent tonsillitis to see the ear, nose and throat surgeon may take 4-5 months and then, if the surgeon thinks removal of the tonsils is indicated—the wait for operation is measured not in months but in years. A middle-aged woman may have to wait as long as seven years to receive her hysterectomy.

And most of the hospitals where the operations are done are ramshackle, overcrowded and out of date. Beds are close together, operating rooms have damp-stained ceilings and peeling walls. Furniture is battered and linen thread-bare. Only 41 of Britain’s 2300 hospitals are less than 30 years old.

The sport at Oldham General Hospital among patients is taking bets on the number of cockroaches crossing the floor in a given time span. One local medical officer says: “This hospital is so permeated with the filth of the ages that the only answer is to raze it.”

One feels there should be an energetic programme to build new hospitals, but the reverse is the case. New hospitals are not being completed and existing ones being closed down. John Pilger in the Daily Mirror (25th Jan. 1977) tells us of the coming closure of the Connaught and Metropolitan Hospitals as part of the Government’s public spending cuts. Both hospitals' secretaries say that closure will mean “unimaginable suffering” for ill patients who will have to be sent home. Quote: “Mr. Peter Richardson, secretary of the Connaught, a 121-bed community hospital, which closes on Monday said last night, 'To close down now, in the middle of winter, is madness. We have a “yellow alert” at this hospital right at the moment and that means the beginning of an emergency. Many of our 100 patients are the elderly with chest infections, such as bronchial pneumonia’.”

Also from John Pilger, the Daily Mirror (26th Jan. 1977) quotes the surgeon at the impoverished Northampton hospital who pleaded: “How can I allay the fears of a woman who has to wait weeks and weeks for a breast cancer operation?” And at the Hackney General Hospital the casualty department was being forced to turn away children. The Daily Mirror continues: “Northampton and Hackney are typical of a great many British hospitals which have been starved of funds for years and are now being called upon to make cuts which are impossible without incalculable suffering and—as the doctors have said—deaths.”

But “solutions” appear to be on the way—though not very pleasant ones for the working class. Apparently the time has come for them to pay (even more) for their “free” health service. A front page headline in Medical News, 19th Jan. 1977, announces: “£2 a Day Charges for Hospital Patients would raise £300 million.” Below we read: "BMA Council believes that the Royal Commission should consider approving hotel charges for hospital patients . . . Council is recommending daily charges for bed and board in hospital, and increases in prescription charges. It believes a flat rate weekly compulsory payment for health services to be paid into an independent NHS fund should also be looked at . . . Basically the Council was unanimous in feeling that a totally free NHS at the point of consumption led to the undervaluing of the health service. Charges would impose a more thoughtful attitude on the part of the public, and also among doctors, who sometimes have no idea what the treatment they prescribe is costing.” Says Medical News: “. . . the feeling was that quite serious illness could be treated at home by a GP, and the patient there had to pay for his accommodation and food, so there was no reason why the hospital patient should not do so.”

And on the front page of Medical News 26th Jan. 1977: "Doctors Warned to Monitor Prescribing Costs —or Else.” The article reads: “If doctors do not monitor their prescribing patterns in terms of both efficacy and cost more effectively, they may have controls imposed on them.

"This is the underlying message for doctors following a report into the work of the Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA) published last week.

“The main recommendation of the report is that the work of the PPA should be computerised to speed up the processing of prescriptions and also to provide a better flow of information on prescribing patterns and costs.”

Mr. Tricker told Medical News, amongst other things: “The report makes no recommendations on the control of prescribing, and I argue for self monitoring by the doctor. However, the report does raise the question of alternative forms of control by the state if doctors seem unable to control prescribing for themselves.” Various forms of controlling prescribing were considered. Two suggestions were the exclusion of certain drugs from free treatment under the NHS, or restricting doctors’ prescribing to the BNF (British National Formulary).

Another form of control would be to introduce a local drug expenditure based on the population of an area. Funds would be allocated by the DHSS. The budget could be monitored by the local medical and “local peer group interest could be brought to bear” on a doctor. (In other words—set general practitioners to compete with each other to supply the least and cheapest treatment.)

In Doctor (10th Feb. 1977), however, we read: “Mr Ennals (Social Services Secretary) was full of praise for the prescribing standards of GPS. They were unequalled in the world, with the cost of drugs per head of population being lower in this country than elsewhere in the EEC.

“ ‘But there may still be scope for further economy (in drug costs) without harm to patients,’ he added.” Thus we learn from the boasters of the best community health service in the world that although we’re doing it the cheapest—we might still do — “better?”!

And now there are new worries for those professing to have the welfare of the sick of Britain at heart. Quote: General Practitioner, 21st Jan. 1977: “Fears Mount on Doctor Surplus. The BMA is demanding an immediate inquiry into the threat of unemployment among doctors in the early 1980s. Fears that medical schools are producing too many graduates have been highlighted by the Hospital Junior Staffs Committee after a four year investigation. The BMA is to ask for an interim report on whether these fears are justified in its evidence to the Royal Commission. The juniors believe that unless medical school places are cut immediately by 1000 a year, there will soon be too few jobs for newly qualified doctors.”

And in Medical News, of 26th January, 1977, Cyril Clarke, the retiring president of the Royal College of Physicians, has urged Britain’s 26 medical schools to consider cutting back student intake to prevent the hardship of an unemployed “bulge” later.

“The situation, he said, could not wait for the Royal Commission. It was far too urgent.”

“We must not run into a school teacher situation,” said Sir Cyril. “We should not bank on too much NHS growth.”

So, while patients wait for months for appointments, years for operations and queue up for hours in outpatients’ departments to see junior doctors who are elsewhere and working 80 hours a week, the powers that be are at pains to decrease medical manpower. Tragically—like other unenlightened workers—some junior doctors think that this is a “solution”. They fear the threat more help from an increased number of colleagues would make to their industrial bargaining power. There is, of course, and will be for a long time to come, a dreadful shortage of doctors in real terms. Apart from the dearth in existing premises there is a desperate need for them to man many vital hospitals. The trouble is that those hospitals are either not being built, or not being completed or being closed down.

The situation is similar with trained nursing sisters. They find themselves redundant whilst their colleagues desperately try to cope with endless lines of patients.

It is a “teacher situation”. Students rallied to the call for more teachers to reduce the numbers in school classes. Result—most of them out of work and still we have overcrowded classes.

And it’s all because people aren’t working hard enough, isn’t it. Mr. Callaghan? They’re not getting their backs into it and paying their way. Why don’t you leave it to the Tories to tell the working class that the trouble is they don’t like work? They’ve had (a bit) more practice at it than you have!

All this rottenness doesn’t have to plague us. There are enough men and women who want, and have the ability to be—good doctors, nurses, teachers, hospital and school-builders and organizers, to make mankind healthy, happy and secure. Only the capitalist system, which the vast majority of workers support, maintains need amidst potential plenty in every sphere of human life. Why not vote that system out of existence?

R. B. Gill

Alright, John? (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Alright?'’ Every day, millions of people are greeting each other with this friendly enquiry. "Ça va?" "Wie geht's?". And every day, millions of people are giving a dishonest answer. Think how unpopular you would become if every time someone asked "how are you?'' you pointed out that your position as a wage or salary worker is insecure and degrading. "I'm alright, but what's going on around me isn't. Even if we survive the decade without a nuclear war (which is by no means certain) we're still living in a ridiculously outdated system of poverty for the productive and prosperity for the parasites . . ." Think what trouble you could cause, and what thoughts you could provoke, by interrupting the flow of small talk in this way.

In actual fact, if an individual person suffered from the same in-built contradictions and insanity as our present social system, they would be far from "alright". The present social system is based not on satisfying people's needs, but on producing a profit and capital accumulation. This increases the power of those who possess capital. As part of this process, the whole of human society has become enslaved by the world market. Every item, every service, even every human emotion and activity becomes turned into a commodity, an object of commerce to be bought and sold. In the September 1986 issue of International Management Alan Sugar, who owns the Amstrad computer company, stated: "If there was a market in mass-produced portable nuclear weapons, we'd market them too". A man who understands capitalism.

Within this world wide capitalist system of society nothing is ever produced or distributed unless it can be sold at a profit. And this means that if people s needs are not backed up by sufficient buying power  — "cash demand" — then the system dictates that those needs must go unmet. As a result, many thousands of human beings are starving to death daily, according to sources such as Oxfam. the United Nations and even the World Bank. When food is produced which is surplus to market requirements, it is stored or destroyed rather than being freely distributed, as free distribution would lower price levels and reduce profit margins. So we get the revolting spectacle of people starving to death on the one hand and on the other, so-called food surpluses being referred to as a “problem" to be disposed of and avoided in future:

  There are more than 20 million tonnes of unwanted food in the community's bulging stores, including 15 million tonnes of grain, around 1.5 million tonnes of butter and about 600,000 tonnes of frozen beef. . . The parliamentary inquiry was first mooted in September . . . The brief would be not only how to get rid of the food mountains, but also how to ensure, through price policy and production controls, that they never reappeared.

(Guardian, 1 November 1986).

This conflict between human needs and the needs of the buying and selling system can be seen throughout society today, together with the universal insanity which it breeds. There was a period of human history when time was just time: the fourth dimension. Now, it has become not only the means of measuring the "exchange value" of goods by the amount of labour-time embodied in them, it has even become a commodity itself. If you dial the talking clock ("Tim", as it used to be so affectionately named) you will hear the startling statement that: "The time, according to Accurist. is . . ."

Over the past few years, one of the few boom industries in Britain has been the service offered by personal telegrams. Again, there was a time when the communication of feelings between human beings was regarded as a personal and sensitive matter, to be approached delicately by the people involved. But the capitalist social system, in its fanatical drive for profit, continues to wipe away all discrimination or subtlety of feeling. Sentiment is made uniform, just like fashion clothes or indistinguishable pop records, in order to exploit a mass market more cheaply. So in the 19 May 1986 issue of Ms London magazine there is one page which contains adverts for as many as seventeen different "Kissagram" companies. For a cash fee ranging from £16 to £45. a message or greeting can be sent to a friend by one of these professional intermediaries, dressed up (or undressed) in the most bizarre range of supposedly shocking outfits. Those on offer include Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan or Prince Charles lookalikes (nice birthday surprise), as well as various sexual stereotypes. "Quasimodo", nuns and frogs. This kind of gimmick might be regarded as a piece of harmless fun but it is in fact another instance of the corruption of basic human relationships by the money god.

We are encouraged from an early age to have priorities which will enable us to put up with the insane social system we live under. At Northwood, in Middlesex, there is one of the biggest NATO bases in the country which, in the event of a nuclear war. would be a prime target. The local residents' association. whose members are kept awake at night by their deep but secret fears that Thatcher might really be a "wet", started campaigning a year or so ago on this issue. Had they finally decided to question the symbolic siting on their doorstep of one of the world's two biggest machines of mass murder? Had they felt compelled to discuss how we might rid the world of all war and all of its weapons? Not quite. The campaign was to oppose the building of a helicopter landing pad on top of the local NATO base, as the noise from the helicopters might cause some disturbance. And nowhere in any of the literature generated by this campaign was there any acknowledgement of the terrible danger and threat, the ultimate disturbance, represented by any large military base of that kind.

Workers in every country are being employed to build the weapons of their own destruction. Instead, technology could be adapted for useful purposes, to satisfy human needs in health, housing and food. The real choice in the world today is not between one power bloc and another, or one type of government and another, or one kind of weapon and another. International conflict is not like a football match in which the crowds of spectators must choose which side to support. People who want peace should not concern themselves with the question of whether nuclear destruction is worse than conventional destruction, or chemical warfare more palatable than biological warfare. The real question which faces us is how we can abolish all warfare.

The only way this can be done is by abolishing its cause. You cannot remove an effect permanently without getting rid of its cause. Religion spreads the fatal myth that the problem lies in the in-built wickedness of human beings. Because Adam, presumably bored to tears by the perfect paradise of the garden of Eden, took a bite out of the apple of knowledge, they say, we are on the verge of the most horrific destruction imaginable. Most people who talk about the innate aggression and violence of humanity are themselves servile wimps. The real cause of war, regardless of which weapons are used to fight it, is social. War is generated by the conflicts which exist in property based systems of society. But the property which is at stake does not belong to the millions whose lives are sacrificed on its altar. Wars are fought over the material interests of the powerful and parasitical elite which dominates in every country, including those like Russia where instead of shareholders, they are called Party officials.

Within the next eighteen months, there will be a general election in Britain. The Labour, Conservative and Alliance campaigns will each be at great pains to show how different they are from the others, and that only they possess the magic formula to solve the problems which continue to plague us. In reality, though, none of them even begins to confront the major issues of class and poverty, hunger and health, housing, energy, war and so on. They never will be able to, because they are all founded on a false assumption: that the profit system, in one form or another, must drag on forever. This belief is based on ignorance: the present social system has only lasted for a few hundred, out of the many thousands, of years of human existence. It will end. just like all previous social systems have ended, when they became outdated.

The other political parties all stand for the perpetuation of capitalism. The bankruptcy of their ideas is obvious from the basing of their campaigns on negative attacks on each other. They say they will, if elected, be not quite as terrible as their evil opponents. Not quite. They even seem to have realised that there is some limit, nowadays, to the number of lies that workers will let politicians get away with. For example, in the past, every Labour government came to power promising to solve the unemployment problem and every Labour government since 1924 left office with unemployment higher than when they went in. So now Neil Kinnock is making the half-hearted offer that if he is elected and if their plans all work, they might be able to make some reduction in unemployment, after some years. And even this tentative promise rests on Keynesian policies of increased state spending, which were tried and failed miserably during the seventies, when government spending increased from about £20 billion to £80 billion but unemployment virtually quadrupled as a result of the inevitable periodic recession in the trade cycle of the world capitalist system.

At election time, we are presented with the spectacle of stale and sterile ideas being sold to us by slick, hi-tech advertising agencies like Saatchi and Saatchi on the one hand and trendy bandwagons like Red Wedge on the other, with Neil Kinnock having made his pop debut some time ago with his appearance (only a cameo role) in a Tracey Ullman video of a song originally done by Madness (pure coincidence). Now. it appears, never far behind when there is a chance of some opportunist vote-catching, the SDP have decided to ditch their stuffy image and get hip. They have recently formed a youth campaign called "Sound and Vision" and the organiser has been quoted as saying that the reason for the name is that the SDP is "sound" in not making false promises, and has "vision" because "we reject the bitterness of confrontation between management and unions" (National Student, November 1986).

It may be true that SDP politicians make fewer false promises. Their way of achieving this is very clever: by making fewer promises, true or false. They must know the secret of how you tell when a politician is lying: because you can see his lips move. As for rejecting the bitterness of class struggle, that is simply a very old trick of persuading the exploited to link arms with their exploiters — very good for business. More entertaining, however, is the "Sound and Vision" promo video, which apparently features David Owen as "Max Headroom" (wonder if you could pay him to do it as a kissagram), complete with vocal distortion and trendy computer graphics in the background. Making some of those false promises which the SDP never make, he claims they will "improve" jobs, "help" the Health Service and oppose nuclear energy "unless it's safe" (better just drop a line to the CEGB then, and ask them). It seems that the script, as well as the pop image, was taken from the "zany" Max Headroom show.

These politicians are the jesters of modern society, the jokers and clowns. The last laugh will be on them, though, when a majority decide to reject their rotten social system, which has planted a policeman and a cash-register in every head and which sours all human relationships and productive activities. So next time your mate asks you, "Alright?", why not give a straight answer? We need to change the world; produce wealth to satisfy human needs, not for the market. We need socialism —now.

Clifford Slapper

Running Commentary: Don't Do As I Do (1978)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Don't Do As I Do

"Confetti money” is the trendy phrase which all the publicists are now using to explain how wrong-headed and greedy the workers are when they try to achieve the same real wages as they got a year ago. What's the point of getting more bits of paper — so the industrialists and their yes-men say — when it’s only going to buy less because of inflation? At the recent second annual conference of the Confederation of British Industries (Daily Telegraph, 8.11.78), the chairman of the Scottish region denounced "the crass stupidity of strikes for confetti money", and the chairman of Dunlop appealed to the work-force to "give up confetti money for something with a solid ring to it" (which is like appealing to someone who is drowning to give up water for land).

In other words, the workers must accept that the employers have the right — while charging more on the market for their goods whenever they believe the consumer will pay — to make a cut in their employees' real wages from year to year and from month to month. But you can always tell that a piece of reasoning is bogus when the reasoner applies it only to others, never to himself. On October 20 last, the one news carried a clip of a representative of the Ford management warning the Ford workers against putting in for higher wages, since it would only be “confetti money”. But Folds themselves have put the price of their vehicles up during the last year not only to keep pace with inflation, but considerably beyond it — hence the bitterness and determination in the Ford strike. And that morning the papers recorded that there had been 344 price increases in groceries that week alone, including biscuits, cakes, canned meat, cheese, lard and so on. The total of price increases for the year had reached 9655 (Daily Telegraph, 20.10.78).

That means that the management of companies had considered the “confetti money” argument 9655 times so far in 1978, and had rejected it on each occasion. But they still expect it to convince their employees.

State Capitalist Board Smashes Strikes

Whether an industry is owned by private capitalists, or by the executive committee of the capitalist class, the State, makes no difference to how the business is run, nor to the altitude taken by the bosses towards the workers. Wage-increases will be conceded if there is no alternative, and rejected wherever the chips are stacked on the employers' side of the table. The State-owned British Transport Docks Board is firmly rejecting any claims which would mean that their employees could attain the standards of living they thought they had agreed to work for a year ago. The chairman said: “We shall not be moved from whatever pay guidelines there are” (Daily Telegraph, 3.11.78). The managing director added: “We will also refuse to enter any productivity deals. We will not enter the charade of so-called deals." The board has already scored some notable successes over its employees.

  Already men at one of the board’s ports — Fleetwood — have settled for five per cent. Two major confrontations. one at King’s Lynn, and the six-and-a-half week strike at Southampton, have been met and defeated. In both instances the men returned to work, having lost up to £300 in lost earnings, on the board's terms . . . Another dispute, settled on the board’s terms, was at Plymouth where men were out for two weeks demanding higher pay for handling passenger ferries.

(A five per cent pay increase would still be well below the rate of inflation in the past year: in fact, allowing for the usual deductions, the effective increase is more like three and a half per cent in nominal pay, which means a sharp drop in real pay.) Years ago the Labour Party said that nationalised industries would benefit the workers because they would “lead the way" in improving real wages and conditions. Clearly they don’t: more and more Stale-employed workers are finding themselves at the back of the queue when they try to maintain their real wages. The State boards only lead from the rear: like the Duke of Plaza Toro, who led his regiment from behind — he found it less exciting.

But either way, nationalisation has nothing whatever to do with socialism.

Catholicism In The Blood

The Polish Cardinal Wojtyla. installed as Pope John Paul II. made a large claim in his inaugural speech:

  His native country, he said, had for 1000 years remained faithful to the See of Rome (Daily Telegraph, 23.10.78).

This claim, to put it kindly, is not all that true. In the 16th and 17th centuries many Poles became Lutherans or Calvinists (that is. Protestants), and many others belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Catholics themselves labelled Poland "the paradise of the heretics". In the 18th century, despite the fact that the Polish constitution guaranteed complete religious toleration, the Roman Catholic Church deliberately stamped out the Dissenters. or non-Catholics. They were forbidden to hold public office or sit in Parliament, their churches, schools and monasteries were either destroyed or seized by the Catholics for their own purposes, and they were subject to many disabilities and persecutions. When their ill-treatment provoked religious riots, as at Thorn in 1724. heavy repression followed. In "the Blood Bath of Thorn" as it came to be called, the rioters’ leaders were executed, along with the Protestant Mayor and town officials for not preventing the trouble.

In this way the Poles returned to Holy Mother Church, and the pope is now able to claim that they were never anything but loyal.

Survival Of A Tyrant

The rule of the Shah over Iran has not been notable for its genial tolerance towards any opposition, nor for a reluctance to display his abounding wealth alongside the extreme poverty of many of the Iranian people.

In recent years, in an effort to damp down the growing hostility to his reign, the Shah has been offering reforms with a desperation to match a man on a sledge being pursued by a pack of starving wolves.

One minister after another has been sacked: the Shah has even ordered an investigation into his own wealth and that of his family, But the demands that he should go have continued and in the demonstrations something over a thousand people have been killed by the Persian Army.

In some respects there is little to choose between the Shah and his opponents: some of the demonstrations were religiously inspired opposition to his offers of land reform and of raising the low status of Iranian women.

This gave British Foreign Secretary David Owen an excuse for Britain's support for the Shah, on the grounds that his opponents were "right wing, reactionary and fanatical". Such pious mouthings should deceive nobody; the true reasons for the British capitalist class’ support for the Shah and his despotic rule are less reputable.

Firstly, Iran is a strategically placed country: it has a border with Russia and stands athwart the route to the Middle Fast oilfields. Secondly, it is one of the area's great oil-producing countries, although as far as Britain is concerned this is of less importance with the opening of the North Sea.

Thirdly, Iran is one of British industry’s big customers; in 1977 British exports there were worth £654 million — the biggest market in that part of the world. Arms make up a large part of this total but valuable exports have also been in building, power stations and heavy generating machinery.

To expect, in face of this, that David Owen would denounce the Shah as an outmoded tyrant would be unreal. He is, after all, paid to represent the interests of British capitalism, even if this entails giving support to characters more unsavoury than even the normal run.

Caught in the Act: Cutting Up (1989)

The Caught in the Act Column from the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cutting Up
A left-winger's medical nightmare might be to look up, drowsing into anaesthesia on the operating table, to recognise that the gowned and masked figure wielding the scalpel above them was none other than Dr David Owen.

Nightmares of the political kind have been induced in many of those treated by Owen since the days when, surprisingly elevated to the job of Foreign Secretary, he was spoken of by adoring hacks as the Anthony Eden of the 1970s. After that, who knew? With his good looks he could have been Labour's next Prime Minister. But it all went wrong when the voters decided they didn't want another Labour Prime Minister. Owen decided that this mortal blow to his ambition was the fault of all those left-wingers and their delusion that a Labour government is supposed to be something other than an imitation of a Tory one. Since then Owen has been in and out of the operating theatre, amputating one political member after another until now only three lonely MPs represent his drive to change the face of British politics forever.

How you regard this must depend on your overall attitude to politics. If you are aware that all the parties which want to reform some aspects of the present social system, rather than do away with it, must put winning votes before sticking to principles you will have the basis of an understanding of what motivates David Owen and the other reformists. You will also be aware that what they offer as new and radical policies are really a re-arrangement and a dressing-up of old ones which have been tried and have failed.

For example, Owen's latest ruse is to tout around the prospect of an alliance. It does not especially matter which party or parties join the alliance—Labour and the SLD would be most welcome—as long as the end result is seen as a presentable opposition to the Thatcher government. According to Owen, when he made his outdoor speech to the SDP delegates after the bomb scare at their Conference (which was widely praised as a brilliant example of extempore oratory but which—if we may say so—was not a patch on the style and delivery always practised by Socialist Party speakers) the worst possible fate confronting us is another spell of Thatcher at Number Ten. So we must all unite to kick her out.

Stitching Up
The first thing to be said about this is that it is by no means a new policy. Formal political alliances are not common in Britain as in some other countries but the informal kind often operate. For example, Denis Healey when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer always worked closely and amicably with his Tory shadow Geoffrey Howe, even if he did once say that being attacked by Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. The Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929 were kept in office through Liberal support and although these experiences caused what was left of the Labour Party in 1931 to swear that never again would they form an alliance with the Liberals that was just what the Callaghan government did. Between 1931 and 1935 Britain was governed by a ‘National” government of Labour. Tory and Liberal politicians and in 1940 there was the wartime coalition under Churchill, who had swapped sides often enough to be an alliance all by himself. All these alliances were justified on the grounds that the priority was to defeat or frustrate a common enemy; the Lib/Lab pacts were aimed against the Tories, the “National" government was supposed to organise the chaos of British capitalism during the slump of the 1930s. and the 1940-45 Coalition was formed when the enormity of the effort needed to defeat Germany became not just apparent but inescapable.

The second thing to be said about Owen's desperate fishing for friends is that it is out of step with what he once offered as a political principle. One of the more emphatic reasons given for the founding of the SDP was the urgency of getting away from “Two Party" politics, in which power bounced to and fro between Labour and the Tories. A third political force, it was argued, was essential to counteract the extremism (for that was how some of the Labour and Tory policies for running British capitalism were described by the SDP) of the two big parties. Of course, with the SLD and the SDP we now have four political forces but let that pass. The point is that if the SDP succeed in forming an anti-Thatcher alliance we shall be back with the “Two Party" politics which the Gang of Four once said was so damaging and frustrating.

Waking Up
But could the other parties' reluctance to rush into Owen's embrace have anything to do with his infamous personality? When he was Foreign Secretary he was not at all bashful in letting everyone know how lucky we were to have so brilliant a man in charge of British capitalism's diplomacy. Not only enemies are uneasy about his vanity over that handsome face. His former ally David Steel has given an insider's story in his book Against Goliath (geddit?) that Owen was not only arrogant, overbearing and difficult but also inconsistent: “What Owenites think on Monday may be different from what they think on Thursday".

This would be more convincing were it not that when Steel and Owen were in partnership during the last General Election Steel was doing his best to persuade us to vote for this arrogant and inconsistent man and was always being photographed or televised in a state of exultant celebration with him. As things have turned out, Steel has retired from the SLD leadership in good standing, an inconvenient shadow behind Ashdown, while Owen and his party are in tatters. So which of these two Davids wields the scalpel more artfully? Which can cover his inconsistency more cleverly—which the smoother operator? And when will the patient come out of the anaesthetic and wake up to what is being done to them?

Ivan

Obituary for the phoney alliance (1988)

From the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much water has flowed under the bridge in the decade since the Dimbleby Lecture was delivered on BBC TV by Roy Jenkins, the archetypal Labour opportunist with an expensive taste for wine and an undisguised contempt for socialism. Jenkins had been Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Wilson government which had dragged the idea of socialism through the mud as it pursued some of the most cynically anti-working-class policies in British political history. Now Jenkins had become a convert to a new, even more opportunist, more cynical, vision: the belief in what became known as the political "centre ground". No longer should politics be stained with the extremities of ideological fervour. In moderate, comfy, common sense, men of good reason (capitalist timeservers like Jenkins and George Brown and assorted other careerists) would unite in the political "middle ground". As the 1970s turned into a new decade with a new Thatcher-led government a growing campaign emerged to realise the Jenkins dream of a new Centre Party — a dream which, if history is to be written accurately, Jenkins pinched from the 1960s' Liberal leader Grimond who in turn stole from the post-war Butskellite tradition in which all three major electoral parties co-habited within the intellectual slum of vaguely comprehended Keynesian reformism.

By the early Eighties the cry for a Centre Party was motivated by impatience at the dogmatic obsessions of the Tory monetarists and the tired rhetoric of the pro-state-capitalist Labour Left, then passing through one of its illusory moments of ascendancy. The cry for the new party was deafening. But wherefrom came the cry? Not from the factories or offices or pubs or dole offices or anywhere that you or I are likely to be found. It came instead from the media and from the academics who had run out of ideas, from the Liberals who had lost all hope of power and the Labourites who were tired of having to go to the bother of singing the Red Flag once a year so that the troops would fight for them.

The new party would "take the politics out of politics", while offering the workers what they believed we had always been used to: smiling leaders and capitalism without the ideological wrapping paper of the Left or Right. The rest is history. In 1981 a bunch of squalid Tories in drag walked out of the Labour Party (which had been very happy to have them) and took up residence in TV studios. There they spent the early 1980s looking through the camera into the living rooms of workers who were told repeatedly that what we all really want is "moderation" — a term which, like decency and apple pie, is uttered with an appearance of great meaningfulness by politicians and which means absolutely nothing.

After the Labour split of 1981 came the Gang of Four: a gang of bores who told us that they were old-fashioned, "moderate" socialists who would stand for Social Democracy. This meant, in fact, that they stood for a combination of sterile Labour reformism and half-baked Tory management of the profit system and that they would do this in unison with the Liberal Party which had been suffering from a serious illness, probably terminal, for about sixty years. The Alliance was born. In Warrington Roy Jenkins won a spectacular by-election success when he lost the election and came second. The TV pundits did brief interviews with the candidate who had the audacity to win and then spent weeks celebrating the victory for moderation which Warrington apparently signified.

In 1983 the "social democrats" (by now the SDP) went into the general election with the Liberals as an Alliance. They lost, enjoying the dubious success of sometimes damaging the Labour vote and providing the Tories with the best election victory of any British party since 1945. Jenkins was removed as SDP leader within weeks of the result. He was to make way for the man who had always personified the real face of moderation: David Owen. What did this real moderate face look like? Well, as a face it looked pretty good — the sort of face which would not have been out of place on one of those TV hospital dramas where the surgeons are always handsome and arrogant. So much for the man himself. The face of moderation politically could not have been better portrayed than by David Owen: a smug, supercilious man for whom pragmatism was all, principles of no account and capitalism as inevitable as socialism was instantly dismissable. At the Labour Conference in Wembley in 1981 (the one where Owen quit) our late comrade, Jim Glitz, approached Owen and offered to sell him a Socialist Standard "This is the only paper which puts the case for the abolition of the wages system" said the ever-optimistic Glitz, the sort of bloke who would have tried telling Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams to stop wasting time on trivialities and unite for world socialism. "When are we going to have this socialism, then — next weekend?" retorted Owen, whose definition of an ideal is embodied in his devout support for the obscene power of the NATO murder machine. Owen epitomises most of what stinks in capitalist politics; the bits which he does not yet epitomise he is ambitious to descend to.

In 1987 the Alliance went into the general election as two parties in fundamental coalition. Steel and Owen presented themselves as the inseparable dream ticket. Seven million workers were conned into voting for them. Of course, the worst of it was that they voted for capitalism which can never be run in the interest of the workers. But that was not all that constituted the Alliance confidence trick. The campaign of Liberal-SDP coalition within the mysterious "middle ground" which was presented to the voters last year was erected on the basis of the most cynical and contemptible fraud. While Steel and Owen posed as friends they were in reality bitter rivals for power; they appeared as advocates of an unstated Centre vision but it now turns out that they were both looking in different directions, both hoping that those scrutinising their case were too stupid to see the transparent sham of their phoney alliance. Even within the usual context of capitalist political trickery the Alliance politicians played a dirty trick; they deserve everything that has happened to them in the days since the election as their tacky Alliance has fallen to pieces before the public gaze. They deserve the contempt which millions of workers will show them.

What pleasure we have all had — we who were not taken in by them — to watch the Alliance committing public suicide in the months since their defeat in the last election. How pleasing it has been to see that, despite all the advertising hype for which they could afford to pay thanks to their millionaire backers like David Sainsbury, despite all the media support which has none too subtly been offered to them, despite all the phoney rhetoric about "middle ground" and "the Centre" and "breaking the mould", they have ended up in a squalid battle over a merged party which thousands are planning to leave and nobody looks very anxious to join.

The Alliance has shown that a party without principles or ideas descends to a level which is truly laughable. Look at the Liberal merger debate in Blackpool where for many of the speakers the main objection to merger was that Social would come before Liberal in the new party's name (the SLDP). Then, on the eve of the SDP merger conference in Sheffield, an internal war broke out over which faction could use the conference hall on the Saturday night. The SDP leaders (the pro-mergerites) threatened to take their opponents to court to stop them using the hall. Meanwhile, the non-merger SDPers (irritatingly referred to as the Owenites: a profound insult to the memory of the ideas of Robert Owen, a political thinker whose boots David Owen would not be fit to polish) are offering the chance of a free fortnight in Portugal to SDPers who resist the yawn-inducing temptation of going into the SLDP and stay in the SDP rump. Such people might as well go away for good, for their political futures will be doomed after the SDP minority has had its nose bloodied in a few by-election defeats by the SLDP. How long will it be before Owen, and perhaps some of his fellow SDP hacks, swallow what pride they have left and accept the offers which are certainly made to them to enter their natural home in the Tory party?

Whatever happens to Owen, Maclennan and the rest of the SDP timewasters, one thing is certain: after one hundred and ten years as an oflicial party (and rather longer as a political tradition) the Liberal Party is now dead. Like jolly decent Liberals they booked a hall in Blackpool and voted with tears in their eyes to shoot themselves through the head. Some Liberals will be too “progressive'' to be allowed into the new party — which will be the only party in Britain to impose a constitutional obligation on its members that they support NATO. Others will join reluctantly, mourning the days in which they at least had a reason to be in oblivion which they could justify to themselves. Others will join the new set-up willingly, pursuing the sordid struggle for a lick of power. Paddy Ashdown will be leading the Give Us A Lick tendency, followed not far behind by those nonentities in search of greater nonentities to worship them, Alan Beith and Malcolm Bruce.

Some people may be surprised that we regard the Liberal Party with such hostility. After all. are they not a basically "radical'' force? Indeed, in its years of decline the Liberals have won to their ranks many workers who oppose the worn-out policies of both left-wing and right-wing and they have been responsible for raising within the Liberal Party many issues which would be ignored in more pragmatic circles. But no, the Liberals are not radical in any meaningful sense of the term. The Liberals have never addressed themselves to the root cause of the problems which they sometimes sound concerned about: they do not get to the root because the root is the capitalist system and it would not do for a capitalist party to have to pull up that root, would it? So for years now, the Liberals have plodded away in a smug world of thinking themselves rather radical and nonconformist but in reality being wedded irremovably to the futile old politics of capitalist reform. Ian Aitken of the Guardian was on the ball when he described them as being "cocooned in a comfy mood of self-esteem" (25 January 1988).

The Liberal Party 's delusion of radicalism is based, like so many of the other great myths of capitalist politics, on very selective memory. To be sure, the Liberals have made progressive-sounding noises when they have been out of power, but what have they done when they have been in? Are we to forget that they were the government which grossly intensified the arms budget to prepare the way for the monstrous slaughter of the First World War? Liberals supported that waste of millions of workers' lives because as supporters of capitalism they cannot extricate themselves from the system's inevitable by-product: war. They did it then and now again they have merged into a new movement which sees preparation for war as a priority.

The Liberals now make much noise about the wickedness of the Tories' so-called free market dogma. But this was not an invention of Thatcher's or one of her crazy advisors. The essence of Liberal economics was free trade and the unregulated market. And let it not be forgotten that the Liberal Party in power was the last government in Britain to fire on and kill striking workers. In 1910, when Winston Churchill was Liberal Home Secretary. 7.000 troops were sent to Liverpool to coerce the dockers who were on strike. Tom Mann, the chairman of the transport workers' Joint Strike Committee, told the Liberal tyrant. "Let Churchill . . . order ten times more military to Liverpool and let every street be paraded by them, not all the king's forces with all the king's men can take the vessels out of the docks to sea". In fact. Mann was right: the might of organised labour was greater than the Liberal government and their armed thugs and the dock authorities gave in to the dockers' demands.

Liverpool was only part of a general strike wave to which the Liberal oppressors had to respond in 1910: in Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley massed police attacked defenceless strikers, and in Llanelly they fired on a peaceful demonstration, killing two workers. So much for the radical record of Liberalism. The history of the Liberal Party is one of failure to tame the beast of capitalism and success in accommodating itself to the anti-social ferocity of the beast. If that is the legacy which they take with them into the SLDP, workers should keep clear of the new party like the plague.

Many Alliance supporters will be disappointed that their hopes which had been raised by Owen and Steel have been so suddenly dashed. It was inevitable for there is no such place in politics as the middle ground. The concept of the centre is an illusion. To those tired of the boring old left-right struggle the illusion is a seductive one, offering the chance of capitalism without having to think about ideology. The hard fact is that there are only two camps which serious political parties may join. One can either stand in open defence of capitalism — as the Tories and the Owen faction and many Liberals do — or one stands against capitalism. The reason for the lack of credibility of the Labour Party and the other lefty "moderates" is that they pay occasional lip service to opposition to capitalism but are in fact supporters of running the system. Kinnock and the vast majority of Labourites are as much victims of the illusion of the political soft centre — of capitalism in moderate doses — as was the Alliance.

There is no room for fence-sitting in the class war. You are either for the millionaires or for the workers who are robbed. You either favour bombs, of whatever kind they might be, or you refuse uncompromisingly to fight their bloody wars. You either stand for production for sale and profit or for production for use and free access. Either revolution or reform. There is no middle way. Let those who are licking their wounds in the obscurity of political disgrace remember that the creation of a sane society is always going to be more important than the miserable dealings for power in which they have all just been the losers. The workers have a world to win and that is just a little more important than whether Paddy Ashdown is to become leader of the party with no name and fewer principles.

Steve Coleman

Problems of partnership (1987)

From the August 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Almost all successful politicians are, to some extent, opportunists. Some may seek to maintain a core of non-negotiable principles — a bottom line which they will not compromise in the interests of short term political gain — but that still leaves considerable room for opportunism. Many more change their "principles" in accordance with their assessment of which way the political wind is blowing.

The current breaking of the Alliance mould illustrates precisely this. It was opportunism that persuaded the SDP and Liberals of the necessity for, first, local electoral agreements so that their respective candidates did not compete against each other, and later for joint policy statements and parliamentary spokespersons. Clearly, until the general election, both parties saw partnership as their best chance for making an impact and achieving electoral success.

Now, in the wake of the failure of this strategy to bring the desired result — a share in political power — new tactical calculations have had to be made. The split between those who favour merger of the two parties and those who oppose it is not, in the main, about disagreements over principle but about differing assessments of what will be in the best interests of the respective parties and of certain individuals within them. Not surprisingly it is those who have most to lose or gain by the adoption of the "wrong" strategy — the leadership — who have been the most impassioned contributors to the debate. Few of the Alliance leaders have emerged from the current row with much credit although it is perhaps David Owen who, more than anyone else, has been exposed as the arch political opportunist.

In the past Owen has cultivated an image as a man of principle standing aloof from the sordid business of political skulduggery. In reality any "principles" he may adhere to have consistently taken second place to consideration of his own political standing. Since leaving the Labour Party he has travelled at a considerable speed through the political "centre" so that he currently sounds as if he could quite easily be eligible for a place in Thatcher s cabinet (which illustrates also that the difference between the main political parties is not so great as political rhetoric would have us believe). It is little wonder then that Douglas Hurd felt moved to appeal to "constructive and forward-looking" SDP members to join the Conservatives.

Owen's opposition to a merger with the Liberals is, he claims, because the SDP stands for something different from the Liberals. (We weren't told that during the election campaign!) Instead of a merger he advocates a federal structure in which both parties would retain their own distinctive identities. But no doubt he also recognises that the SDP. which polled one million fewer votes than the Liberals and has fewer than a third as many MPs. would be overwhelmed in a new merged party and Owen himself would have a considerably weaker claim to be its leader.

However, Owen has this time clearly not seen which way the wind is blowing: it seems that a majority of SDP and Liberal members do want a merged party and Owen's intransigent opposition to it will leave him out in the political wilderness, unless of course he decides to make a new bid for power from inside the Tory camp.

By contrast David Steel appears to be the less egocentric and power-hungry of the two Alliance leaders. But this image may also conceal a shrewd calculation of where his best interests lie. Steel has certainly read the mood of the grassroots of the two parties better than Owen — in many areas SDP and Liberal activists are already working to all intents and purposes as a single party; and the issue of the dual leadership does provide a plausible excuse for the poor showing of the Alliance at the.polls. But it may also be true that Steel, aware of the way in which the leadership role during the election campaign was hijacked by Owen, has decided to take a calculated risk to improve his own political standing by putting forward the merger option. After all it is highly likely that he knew that Owen would not agree to it and so by proposing a merger he would effectively be ousting Owen and leaving the way clear for himself to become the leader of the new party. If this was his thinking — and such cynical political manoeuvring is not without precedent — then he has demonstrated himself to be at least Owen's equal in the opportunism stakes.

What are the implications of the Alliance's angst for ordinary workers? Firstly it gives their campaigning rhetoric a hollow tone. After all this is the political outfit which, throughout the election campaign, extolled the virtues of "partnership", "cooperation" and "consensus" as the universal panacea and held up their own organisation as a shining example of how society as a whole could be organised. And just as they denied the existence of conflict or division within their own ranks, so too they denied the existence of conflict or division — notably that of class — within society at large. Recent events have shown that their description of the relationship between their two parties was incomplete if not false. (Their description of social relationships has been equally misleading.) Now we are told that Owen doesn't think much of the Liberals at all and never did; that they have been wrong on numerous policy issues including the Falklands war, the sale of council houses, social security changes and defence. In other words he has used the Liberals as a convenient partner in his attempt to achieve his own political ambitions.

Secondly, Owen, who put himself and his party forward as the defenders of democracy, the advocates of a fairer electoral system and who left the Labour Party in part because of what he regarded as a the anti-democratic tendencies of the extra-parliamentary left, is now revealed as a man who tried to rig the ballot on merger by posing what the Electoral Reform Society deemed was an unfairly loaded question, and who has stated that he will not accept the democratic decision of SDP members — unless the vote goes the way he wants it to.

Now that the election glitter has been stripped away the Alliance leadership has been left looking rather tawdry. It wasn't after all a partnership of equals, rather a marriage of convenience between two leaders with conflicting egos and political ambitions. The lesson is clear: don't trust leaders — they're usually in it for their own selfish ends — and trust their rhetoric even less — it's likely to conceal an extremely seedy reality.

Janie Percy-Smith

Who Governs Britain? (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time you read this Socialist Standard the Election will be over. On 10th February The Observer listed slogans used by the Conservative and Labour Parties in General Elections since the war. A collection of phrases of such fatuousness and irrelevance would be hard to find: questions which should never be asked, appeals which might as well be in Linear B for all the meaning to be found in them.

The latest addition, in this election, is the Tory call “Who governs Britain ?” That is, of course, the question of every election, but its implication on this occasion has been of a vital conflict between representative government and attempts by agitators in trade unions to supplant it. In his first speech of the election campaign, Heath said:

Are moderates going to sound a call loud and clear that we have had enough of the extremists in our society and the danger and disruption they cause, these few who put so much at risk by their abuse of power? . . .  The future of Britain depends on this election.

Wilson has kept out of this argument for the tactical reason that he cannot accept at election-time that there is any alternative to Tory government except Labour government. But, in office, he has sounded the same cry that Communists and other “extremists” have been disrupting the work of running the country — notably, in the seamen’s strike of 1966.

Apparent awareness of the vacuity of election appeals did not stop the Observer a week earlier, on 3rd February, publishing grist for Heath’s mill in an article on the insidious scheming of left-wingers in the trade unions. Two things need to be pointed out at once on this subject. First, the complete failure of the “extremists” — the Communists for fifty years — to achieve what they set out to do with the unions. And second, that discontent with wages and poor living standards is not an agitators’ invention. As the satirical columnist “Yaffle” wrote in 1947 (in the Labour Reynolds’ News, under a Labour government):

No working man ever knows his wage is too small until some professional Fomenter strolls up with a microscope and tells him to look at it.
   No working-class mother ever knows that her children are under-fed until some salaried discontent-monger calls round with a pair of scales and a tape measure and asks her to examine her offspring closely.
   . . . Take warning from the past. Remember the last war and recall how easily a “hero” becomes a “work-shy” and a public nuisance.
    All he had to do was to discover he hadn’t enough to eat, and say so.

Head Against Brick Wall

Does the possibility exist that industrial action on a large enough scale could damage capitalism and governments’ ability to govern? Undoubtedly this is the dream of several left-wing groups. In the speech quoted above, Heath “reminded” the miners’ union that its action “threatened the whole country”, and went on: “That is why we called this election.” Such a statement is likely to give delusions of grandeur to anyone who believes he can “threaten the country”, but it is absurdly untrue. A General Election had to be called before long, and the question for Heath was finding an advantageous time.

The fact is that capitalism and its means of rule, the state, cannot be overthrown by industrial action. Of course changes of government can and do take place — but only at the behest of electoral majorities. Since 1970 (but by no means for the first time) a lot has been heard of “political action” by the trade unions. It should be known that no strike has ever succeeded in unseating a government or even getting one to change its mind about legislation. Certainly from time to time militants are gratified by seeing a change, though it has resulted not from their actions but from a General Election. And what does it amount to? The new administration is committed to run capitalism as the old one was, and by the same means.

Capitalism is not the government but the social system. It means the class ownership of the means of production and distribution, in the modern world. Whether industries are in private hands or under state control makes no difference (as the miners and railwaymen should know). In one case ownership is vested in private individuals, in the other in the capitalist class as a whole. Both ways, the sole purpose of production is profit, and the economic pressures and consequences of capitalism are there. The immediate concomitant of class ownership is the non-ownership of the rest, who are thereby condemned to wage-labour.

The function of the state is to upkeep this system. Before anything else, it is capitalism’s self-provided sanction. It gives class ownership its fortification, through law supported by police and prisons and, in the end, armed force. This is the simple fact which makes the idea of confrontation between militants and the state ridiculous. Before the modem state arrived, mediaeval kings could be overthrown by whatever barons raised stronger armies. It is that world, romanticized, that the confrontationists and Heath both seem to be invoking; the good knight topples the evil one, and the peasantry applaud. Twentieth- century politics is nothing like that.

Seat of Power

What has to be understood also is that this function of the state rests on the support of the electorate. The truth against which militants shut their eyes is that the majority of the working class remain, to date, in favour of capitalism; that is, they have been led to believe it is the natural order or can be brought round on their behalf. (Indeed, it is impossible to grasp how left-wing organizations dc see the working class. Their publications show the workers on one hand duped and doped by the big parties and hypnotized by the Spectacle; on the other hand, permanently seething with revolt. Which is it ?)

Obviously there are rival versions of how to run capitalism. There have also been — not any more, however — groups and individuals who have gone to Parliament believing the system could be reformed out of existence; in these cases, foreseeably, the man was oblivious to the bite and the dog it was that died. The main factor in administering capitalism is finance. Discussing aspects of government in an article in The Guardian on 6th February, Dr. David Owen wrote:

The democratic process as it is represented through our parliamentary system has traditionally focussed on the control of expenditure and this remains the central control mechanism whether the policy issue is related to the EEC or is purely domestic.

The position is that the state is provided with money by the capitalist class through taxation. The differences between the major parties are therefore largely differences over how this money shall be collected and spent. Two important points immediately arise. The first is that taxation, so often used to inflame or allure the electorate, is not a working-class issue at all. The second is that these differences all stand on the assumption that capitalism must be kept in good running order. It is tempting to believe that Labour measures for “soaking the rich” are steps to equality, and to blame their failure on mismanagement; but their basic futility is that they are conceived within the taken-for-granted frame work of capitalism. 

How to use Parliament

There is no hope, then, for reform to undermine or confrontation to overthrow the established order of who governs Britain and every other country. The strength of capitalism’s legality has been demonstrated again and again. Recently there has been the case of the local council which refused to implement an Act of Parliament, and had its powers removed and its members penalized; the same thing happened in the nineteen-fifties in attempted local rebellions against Civil Defence. In 1972 there were the ineffectual demonstrations against the government’s Industrial Relations Act and, later in the year, the disposal of the Angry Brigade group who claimed they could change society with bombs.

“Who governs Britain?” is a non-question. But Socialists have been putting forward for seventy years the means to get rid of the problems over which some workers fume and others think they must be resigned. The capitalist system continues because the majority support it. The day that support ceases, the situation will alter completely. What the majority have to understand is the nature of capitalism, including that a change of government is no change at all, and that only Socialism will be different.

The course of action then is easy. Delegates will be elected to Parliament with a mandate — which no industrial militant or reformist politician has ever had — not to administer capitalism but to abolish it. This is the state put to its final, and for the first time fruitful, use; instead of confronting the coercive machinery, the Socialists’ representatives take possession of it. Class ownership then falls to the ground, and the new world of common ownership can begin.

Robert Barltrop