John Prescott: a Labour man through and through (2025)

John Prescott in 1966.

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of the obituarists of the late Lord Prescott quoted him as saying that despite all his achievements, he’d be known for that one punch on a protestor on the campaign trail in Rhyl. The more serious obituaries covered his career as a politician, achieving the high office of Deputy Prime Minister, and alluding to the Jaguars and the affair. Tony Blair himself came out and was full of praise for Prescott, and acknowledged how much his premiership needed its deputy. Corbynites remembered the time he defended their man on Question Time. Above all, though, his Lordship was a man of the Labour Party through and through, and it is worth going back behind the Punch and Judy of high office to the thing that first brought him to prominence: the 1966 seamen’s strike.

The seamen’s strike

Prescott was one of the co-authors of a pamphlet Not Wanted on Voyage: The Seaman’s Reply published by the National Union of Seamen, Hull Dispute Committee, in June 1966. It was written because ‘owing to the biased nature of the Pearson Inquiry Report recently published it is vitally necessary that a counter-balance is put out to put the seamen’s fight into perspective’. They alleged that ‘so biased is the Pearson Report against the seamen’s case that one cannot but feel that it was simply set up to capture public opinion, including trade union and Labour Party opinion – which so far has supported the seamen – and marshal it against us’.

Much of the pamphlet deals with the minutiae of overtime and pay rates, but the core claim for the seamen was for a 40-hour week at £14. As the historian EP Thompson described the strike: ‘The British seamen, after decades of near company unionism had accomplished that most difficult of industrial actions (in an industry whose members may at any point be scattered across the seven seas), a national strike with high morale and solidarity’ (Writings by Candelight, p. 53). The Wilson government infamously alleged that the strike was prompted by Communist Party agitators, claiming ‘The moderate members of the seamen’s executive were terrorized by a small professional group of Communists or near Communists.’ As Thompson notes, there were no Communists on the seamen’s executive.

The authors alleged ‘Our case has not been treated on its merits. Social justice has been overridden by political expediency.’ They claimed that ‘the Government’s obsession with the incomes policy has been evident throughout the strike. We had to be beaten, because our claim was a “breach in the dyke of the incomes policy”’. Hence, although the powers were never used, the Wilson government declared a state of emergency over the strike. ‘There is a wealth of evidence we could produce to show that behind the Government, in its resistance to our just demands, stand the International Banks, the financial powers that really direct the Government’s anti-wage policy.’

Prescott and his co-author went into detail as to how the make-up of the Pearson Commission indicated that the fix was on, in particular, how the appointment of Joe O’Hagan (General Secretary of the furnace maker’s union) to the commission was intended to neutralise any opposition in the TUC, as he held the chair of the General Purposes committee. This is indicative of their approach of looking at the personnel involved in the structures of power. They went into great detail over the personal connexions between shipping owners and the press barons.

They noted of the shipping industry:

‘In the past, British shipping contributed on a major scale to the earning of foreign exchange, but in this field too, its recent record is one of consistent decline. Between 1952 and 1962 shipping’s contribution to Britain’s earnings abroad fell by over £111 million, or by an average of 3½% per year.’

Likewise: ‘Most of our major competitors developed the bulk container transport method during the 1950’s, whilst our shipowners […] did nothing’. This, they alleged, was down to the ‘shipowners’ incompetence’. Their complaint, essentially, was that the wrong people were in charge.

‘This backward, selfish group of owners, through their spokesman, arrogantly claim (ignoring the whole miserable record we have described) that “the national interest” so often thrown at the seamen by Press, TV and Government, IS THE SAME THING AS THE SHIP OWNERS’ INTERESTS’ [emphasis in original].

They urged the nationalisation of the industry but clearly envisaged that as being a mere change in the personnel at the top, and still cast the question of how shipping serves ‘the national interest’ in a world of competing states.

Poacher turns gamekeeper

Prescott and his co-author also alluded to Labour’s previous record, stating:

‘The goodwill of the bankers, the ill-will of the working class. How familiar a story that is of Labour Governments, when we cast our minds back to Ramsay MacDonald and the 1929-31 government.’

Nowadays, we could add a few more Labour governments to that list.

Prescott had first stood for Parliament the same year as the strike. In 1970 he got elected MP for Hull East. By the 1990s, he was the shadow transport spokesman, extolling ‘public private partnerships’ as an alternative to nationalisation and a way of getting the industry to serve the national interest. He would later be part of the Blair government that institutionalised PFI as the default way of funding government projects.

By 2002 he was standing in the House of Commons, updating MPs on the situation with regard to the firefighters’ strike:

‘This Government cannot be asked to find additional money outside the agreed Government spending limits. To do so would risk fundamental and lasting damage to the economy. An inflationary pay rise for the firefighters would lead to inflationary pay rises elsewhere in the public sector, and that in turn would lead to job losses, inflation and mortgage rises.’ (tinyurl.com/PrescottHOC20022226)

He affirmed that ‘The Bain review has proposed a way forward. That is the basis for discussion.’ He clearly learned the lessons of the Wilson government. ‘The goodwill of the bankers. The ill-will of the workers’. An epitaph for Prescott and the Labour Party.

Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: Plain Words (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody in their right mind – that is to say nobody who has an inkling of how this social system operates –would have been impressed by the assurances that the Bain enquiry into the firefighters’ pay claim was really “independent”. (There are a number of words in this article in inverted commas. This may irritate some readers, much as it does the writer. The purpose is to encourage scepticism about the use of such words.) As a start, let us assert that the whole concept of “independence” is false, just as the popular idea of a “fair” wage, a “deserved” pay rise are false. These are delusions resting on the assumption that wages are fixed by how useful the wage earners’ work is and that somewhere and somehow out there there is a wage which is “fair” because it exactly reflects that usefulness, or how strenuous someone’s work is and how it compares to other, similar, jobs. There is no way that any enquiry, no matter how “independent”, could make any sense of this, no way it could untangle such a mish-mash of delusions.

So they don’t try. Enquiries into wage claims have a number of other uses. Firstly they are often a ruse by which employers and governments representing the employing class to postpone the time for a decision, allowing them to strengthen their defences. When the firefighters called their first, two-day, strike they were denounced by ministers from Tony Blair downwards for acting with unreasonable haste when they should have waited for the Bain report in the confidence that it would be “fair” to them because it was “independent”. The firefighters were right to be sceptical because what Bain had been set to do was to lay down the case for a lower pay rise while the Fire Service was “modernised” – in other words while it co-operated in cutting its work force.

Firefighters and Bankers

There was much anger during the strike because of the feeling that the firefighters’ pay did not properly reflect their “worth”. In fact this anger, although it was supportive of the strikers, was misplaced. Wages do not rely on the worth of what a person does. If they were measured in that way firefighters and nurses and sewage workers, instead of bankers, currency dealers and royals, would be turning up for work in Rolls Royces. The only way to make sense of this apparent anomaly is to recognise that all wages are essentially determined, at any one time, by the relationship between the forces of supply of, and demand for, the labour power of the workers concerned. If the demand for nurses’ working ability outstrips the supply of it (always providing that the nurses assert their bargaining power) their wages will rise. If the opposite applies there will be a downward influence on their wages.

This reality is often used to justify companies offering big money to their higher management. “We have to do this,” runs the argument, “in order to attract people of the right calibre to run this great company of ours.” And it is used when MPs are debating whether to accept a proposal (from another, but rather different, “fair” and “independent” enquiry) to give themselves the kind of rise firefighters can only dream about, to attract highly qualified and capable people away from industry, commerce or the law or wherever to govern this great country of ours. This was how it was put by Robin Cook, Leader of the Commons, on 5 July 2002 when the Members were discussing (it was hardly a debate) the suggestion that they award themselves a 42 per cent rise:

“I do not think we impress the public if we set too low a value on our own worth . . . if we believe our work here is important we should not shrink from putting a proper value on it.”

This was not the kind of argument which the government would allow for the firefighters. And it was not how Bain saw the situation:

“Even allowing for the risks and dangers of the service, firefighters compare well with similar jobs in the public and private sectors . . .When holidays, pension arrangements and job security are taken into account, they are even better placed. This is borne out by the recruitment and retention figures, which show large numbers of applicants for each Fire service vacancy, even during a period of steady economic growth.”

In other words, the firefighters’ claim was undermined because the supply of their labour power outstrips the demand for it.

Candidates

There is, however, a contradiction here, which goes some way to illustrate the implacable way in which the wage labour economy of capitalism works and the cynicism of the system’s rulers. Because if there is one job in which there is a surplus of supply over demand, it is that of an MP. To begin with there is the matter of the number of candidates standing for each seat; lots of competition there. In the 2001 general election it was a rare constituency which had less than five on the list. Seven or eight was not unusual. There is no record of any heckler suggesting that, as there was such competition in the matter of aspirant MPs, whoever won the seat should take a cut in wages. Then there is the fact that, at least in the bigger parties, there had often been a fierce struggle to get the nomination in the first place, with a large number of runners whittled down to a short list.

This process was illustrated in the case of Ted Heath, who after the 1945 election scratched around from one seat to another in Kent before he was adopted for Bexley. The Tories in Ashford rejected him because he would not agree to give up his command of a Territorial Army regiment and to refuse the offer of a ministerial job in a future government. (The successful candidate later told him that he lost the vote because he turned up for his crucial interview on a Saturday morning improperly dressed, in a dark blue suit and a stiff collar. Heath grumpily recalled that he did not then possess either article.) At Rochester and Chatham they said they wanted an MP who would make it into the Cabinet and “I am afraid,” said the Tory chairman, “that we do not think that you will ever hold an office of any kind.” At Sevenoaks it was rather simpler; Heath turned up late and made a bad speech.

Heseltine and Clark

Michael Heseltine had to show willing by contesting some safe Labour seats – Gower and Coventry North – before he got the chance of a safe seat at Tavistock. Even then the decision hung in the balance because he upset the straighter-laced Tavistock Tories when a men’s fashion magazine he owned – Town – featured that month an Ursula Andress lookalike on its cover. After he had won the nomination he heard from some women that they had voted for him because they liked his wife’s hat. When Tavistock disappeared under the knife of the Boundary Commission in 1970 he failed to get the nod at Mid Oxfordshire, where he was not even short–listed and then Mid Sussex before the Tories of Henley took him – and perhaps his wife’s hats – to their bosoms.

The odious Alan Clark tried to get himself selected from the late 1960s, trawling through what he called “a Litany of constituency names” in his notebook before he succeeded in Plymouth Sutton. This success required his attendance at a cocktail party with his wife – sorely tried, ever supportive as Tory wives are supposed to be. Let us hope they let him off lightly in the subsequent question-and-answer session for it must have been a grave affront to the conceit of that callous, arrogant man who seemed to despise and hate a considerable mass of the human race including – especially including – those in his own party. “That shower” was how he described the Tories at Ashchurch. “Imprisoned . . . by their own guilt” was how he saw the local party executive at Langstone. For the Tories in Plymouth Sutton he reserved some special venom: “Total shits . . . no purpose in life other than to bicker and back bite – degrade everything above a certain level of mediocrity.”

Modernising

It is not only in the matter of failing to accept that their wages should be set by the forces of supply and demand that MPs fail to keep to the standards they try to set down for the rest of us. Nick Raynsford, the minister responsible for the Fire Service, is a man who has outraged some of his former admirers who never thought him capable of the breathtaking cynicism he displayed in his transformation into an ardent Blairite. He was notably brutal and overbearing in his verbal assaults on the firefighters. A recurring theme of his comments was what he saw as the FBU’s refusal to move to “more streamlined, focussed and flexible” working arrangements. Coming from an MP, that was a bit rich. The House of Commons cannot move to its business, which is supposed to be so vital to the interests of us all, without the security of a load of archaic symbolism and rituals – like bowing to the Speaker, going in procession to the House of Lords after someone in knee britches called Black Rod has knocked three times on the door of the chamber – or perhaps he is called Black Door and knocks on three rods – unable to do anything unless the Mace is in its place on the table, never using each other’s names because they must address people they know to be ruthless scoundrels as “Honourable Members”, never calling anyone a liar because they can only refer to “misleading the House”. For outdated practises the FBU has nothing on Parliament.

We can stumble around this maze of apparent contradictions, blind alleys and deceit (which is what wage negotiations often do) for a long time when the matter is essentially simple. This social system depends on wage labour – on the exploitation of one class by the other. The “worth” of what we work at, what we produce or organise, is simply not in the equation of how much we are paid. Neither are “justice” or “fairness”. These are concepts introduced to cloud over the basic fact that capitalism exists in the interests of only the ruling class and that obscure language is too often used to that end.

Ivan

Briefing: What is Capitalism? (1984)

The Briefing Column from the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money trick

All wealth is the product of labour. Every house, car, loaf of bread, everything that we use is brought into being by men and women applying their energies to the resources that other men and women have extracted from the environment. It is one of the contradictions of the class system, though, that the great majority of people — the wealth-producing class — consume and enjoy only the crumbs of the wealth they produce. The construction workers who build the palaces and the mansions return at the end of a hard day’s work to live in council hovels or at best an up-market suburban slum. The wealth producers are trapped in poverty because of the wages- system of legalised robbery. The factories, farms, mines, offices, communications systems — in fact, the means of life — are owned and controlled by a small minority of the world's population. The wages or salaries with which the wealth producers are fobbed off are worth less than the value of what has been produced, so that the boss receives a value from the efforts of the worker over and above what is paid for. The surplus value kept by the owners of industry becomes profit when the goods are sold on the market.

When the social system is looked at from this point of view, a couple of important points become apparent: first, that whether wages are “high” or "low" the people working for them are being exploited; and second, that it is the system of producing goods and services for a profit which condemns the majority to live lives of unnecessary poverty. Occasionally, the absurdity of the class system exhibits itself in stark madness. A couple of years ago the workers who produced the engines for the Concorde aeroplane were given a special concession by their bosses. The workers who, although they were responsible for making the plane would never be able to afford to travel in it. were permitted to take their families on a tour of their work for a price of 50p. The tours would need to be brisk as they could not keep the wealthy ticket holders hanging about drinking champagne in the departure lounges for too long.

Rolls Royce is now trying the same sort of thing:

A big pools win would be the only way most workers could get to own a Rolls Royce. but 3.800 employees at the firm's works in Crewe. Cheshire, now get a 90-minute taste of high life. (Daily Telegraph, 8 August 1984)

The scheme will operate for about 18 months while all the workers whose efforts actually produce the cars will be able to cruise about the countryside for an hour in a £56,000 ice-green Silver Spirit. The chief executive of Rolls Royce, Richard Perry, observed that: "People have worked here for forty years and have said afterwards that this had been their first chance to sit in one of the cars".

Capitalism commits a continuing con-trick on the working class every moment that it is allowed to carry on. It is only fallacy and prejudice that obstruct the path to a classless society.

False Images

From the time when we are first shown an atlas or a globe we are given a false image of the world. The map is divided into over 150 separate countries and we are indoctrinated with the idea that is is only right and proper to develop an allegiance to "our" country. We are taught that we should use possessive vocabulary in relation to the country although we own nothing of it. We are taught to have respect and admiration for a sterile, stately-home culture of which we have no part and most importantly we are taught to accept the possibility that one day we might be called on to fight and kill strangers (who will have been similarly misled) in furthering the cause of our bosses if economic rivalry is extended from the conference table to the battlefield.

There is one working class comprised of men and women all over the globe who share an economic condition: we own nothing except our mental and physical energies and we need to try to sell these on a weekly or monthly basis, to a boss, in order to make a living. We may have different languages and different cultures but what we have in common is much greater and more significant than how we differ. A print worker in England will share more experiences and problems with a French print worker than he will with an English Press tycoon. There are other illusions flowing from an image of the world as lots of independent nations. The world now has a highly integrated industry. The labour which goes into producing most articles is divided among many men and women performing specialised jobs. This fact, taken with the restriction of certain products to particular global regions and climates, means that the energies which go to produce a particular item can come from all over the world.

Take the example of a typewriter and consider what was needed to make it: the different types of metal, the plastic, the rubber and the technology of its design. Each of these could trace its origins to a different place and then the same analysis could be applied to the ships and aeroplanes which were used to transport the various materials and components around the world. Because of the way commerce and world trade operate, countries with apparently opposed political ideologies in fact are engaged in trade. American farm owners sell wheat to the Russian ruling class; the Russian ruling class colludes with its counterpart in South Africa to fix the price of diamonds on the world market and the Russian Empire even helps to arm American missiles by playing a part in manufacturing plutonium which is later used for American warheads. Western governments. including Britain, have been shipping uranium to Russia for enrichment (of the government as well as the uranium) knowing it was for nuclear warheads.

The Left Wing of Capitalism

"Yes. I agree that a classless society is a good idea but the reason I support the Labour Party is that while we have got capitalism things are marginally better if there is a Labour government.”

Socialists firmly reject this sort of argument. The profit system is a way of running society which is against the interests of the working class, the majority of people. It works on the basis of producing wealth only if there is the prospect of selling it for a profit on the market, not simply because there is a need for it. So if you have a need which you cannot afford to have satisfied then your need will continue. In this system there is a constant antagonism of interest between master and servant, or to use the more decorous expression for the same relationship, between employer and employee. The bosses strive to get as much as possible from the workers while paying them as little as they can get away with whereas the workers seek to reduce the extent to which they are exploited.

The Labour Party has never sought to do anything but run capitalism and consequently when it has formed the government (as has happened seven times) it has found itself doing all the anti-working-class things which it vehemently opposes when they are carried out by Conservative governments. Apart from supporting wars, introducing the atomic bomb in Britain and establishing the Special Patrol Group (SPG), the Labour Party does not enjoy a proud record on the industrial front. Labour supporters who are rightly sickened by the sort of problems being faced by the miners and the dockers would do well to look at their party’s record on these issues. The National Coal Board has plans to shut unprofitable or “uneconomic” pits for the same reasons that pits were shut before 1945 by private capitalist owners and for the same reasons that 48 Welsh pits were closed and 50,000 miners made redundant under the Labour government between 1964 and 1970.

Then consider the struggle of the dockers. The last time troops were used to break a dockers' strike anil unload ships was under a labour government during a spate of dock strikes in 1949-50. In May 1949, after an outbreak of unofficial strikes in support of Canadian dockers, the Labour government invoked Defence Regulation 1304 and used troops to unload fruit and refrigerated food at Avonmouth. The use of troops caused the strikes to spread. By July 8 10,000 men were on strike and the government announced that unless wage-slavery was resumed a state of emergency would be declared. The Labour government invited the King to sign such a declaration three days later.

Despite this, the number of men on strike rose to 15,000. Prime Minister Attlee became angry. Who did these workers think they were, telling the bosses they were not satisfied! Attlee proclaimed that he was prepared to send 35,000 troops into the docks and the strike collapsed within two weeks. Troops were used again by the Labour government in April 1950 when another strike was thwarted in the Port of London. Troops have been used by governments since then during strikes, for instance in the emergency services, but never for wholesale strike breaking. During the firemen's strike 1977-78 the Labour government again sent in the troops with the Green Goddess fire engines to undermine the industrial action of members of the working class struggling to stop their standard of poverty becoming even worse. The economic hardships of this society have not been personally engineered by Margaret Thatcher and cannot be talked away by Neil Kinnock. These problems are an intrinsic part of a class-divided society.

Inhuman priorities

As this social system grinds on the contradiction between a society potentially geared to abundant production and a society poised on self-destruction becomes more stark. We could produce so much. We could meet all the needs of the population of the world. But we continue in artificial scarcity and to add further horror to the nightmare we continue to amass the means of destruction.

According to Oxfam. (Guardian, 5 August 1981) over 30,000,000 people die of hunger every year, more than half of them children under five. Every year 780.000.000 people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. At the current rate these figures will have doubled by the end of this decade. In the last hour about 1,700 children have died unnecessarily, victims of malnutrition, disease and war. Figures are often formulated to express the grotesque priorities of the profit system by contrasting the expenditures on the industry of health and the industry of death: the Defence Research and Development programme of £1.8 billion is 16 times greater than that given to the Medical Research Council; one Army General is paid more than five State Enrolled Nurses; the upkeep of one nuclear submarine is greater than the annual cost of local authority libraries and UNICEF working in 112 countries has a total income of under £200 million which is the equivalent of what the world spends on military ventures every four hours.

These facts exemplify the priorities of capitalism. What should be done about this? Socialists do not advocate that more money be spent on welfare as a solution to the problem. Capitalism, based on producing for profit not need, creates these tragic disasters as a matter of course. Trying to solve them with charity or adjustments in spending cannot work, despite all the energy and drive which has been contributed by the people who work for the various voluntary and charity organisations. The way to solve these problems is to establish a society which will work on the principle of “from each according to ability to each according to need", a society in which our productive forces will be used directly to satisfy our needs.

Gary Jay

A letter to the Fire Brigades’ Union (2004)

From the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear General Secretary,

At its meeting of 3rd July 2004 our Executive Committee asked me to write to you to express our welcome of your union’s recent decision to reverse your historic mistake of affiliating to the Labour Party.

For nearly 100 years the Socialist Party has held a clear and consistent position that trade unions and political parties need to remain separate. We have considered it bizarre that trade unionists in public sector unions should hand over their dues money to their, effective, political employers. Feeding the hand that beat them.

We have observed that trade unions need freedom to manoeuvre and represent the interests of the membership – distinct groups within the working class.  This freedom of manoeuvre means getting the best deal for their members within capitalism, often as against the general policy of a political party, which has to at least attempt to represent the general interest of its constituency. Political parties and trade unions only harm each other by shackling themselves to one another.

In the case of the Labour Party in Britain, it is clear that there have been numerous clashes between themselves and the Unions. The Attlee government used troops to smash a dock-workers strike. Wilson’s government floundered over the refusal of the unions to accept the ‘In Place of Strife’ income controls policy. Your own union members were branded traitors and threatened with legislation to deprive them of their freedom to strike in your recent dispute.

This is not caused by individual wickedness of Labour ministers, but by the hard logic of administering capitalism.  The same hard logic that saw Labour governments tear up railways and close down more pits than the Tories ever did. Capitalism is founded on the principle of no profit no production, and if a government is to keep capitalism running, it must obey this hard and fast law.

We thus wish to express our hope that your union will not seek to affiliate with any other political party, and most specifically, not try to recreate the Old Labour disaster that has blighted the workers movement for more than a hundred years. We hope you will use all your union’s resources and funds to defend your members’ interests, rather than those of your political employers.

We further hope that your members will come to understand that any resolution of a pay-deal within capitalism means their continued exploitation by the tiny capitalist class, and that their best interest lies in joining their fellow workers in a movement with the express and single aim of “the abolition of the wages system” and its replacement with common ownership and the free association of producers.

Yours for the World Socialism,

Bill Martin (Acting General Secretary).

Running Commentary: Cause for alarm (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the January 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cause for alarm

A recent report by the Greater London Council makes quite clear that those who control London’s fire brigade have more than one eye upon their balance sheets!

  The cost of running the Brigade has risen considerably in recent years — from the net revenue estimate of £53.2 million in 1978-9 to nearly £65.3 million in 1979-80. Of the £65.3 million estimate for 1979-80 staff costs account for almost £54.2 million, emphasising the labour-intensive nature of the Brigade. (The Future Development of the London Fire Brigade -Discussion Document).

The GLC has responded to the government’s concern to cut public expenditure by reducing the number of operational appliances, reducing the level of manning (from that settled between the FBU and the GLC in 1974) and proposing to shut down the River Station at Greenwich. All this is bound to result in inferior fire services. The reduced number of firemen and fire appliances will affect the speed with which emergency calls can be dealt with. And emergency fire calls in London are increasing: in 1965 there were 39,566, by 1974 the figure had increased to 87,307, it was 111,520 in the drought year of 1976 and the London Fire Brigade Management Study Group have projected that by 1985 the number of emergency calls per year will reach 168,000. Is this the time to start cutting services?

Lord Denning, speaking in the Court of Appeal in 1971, stated that: “The snatching of a fellow human’s life from a terrifying death may easily turn on a quarter of a minute—a matter of seconds”.

In the same case, Joseph Milner, then Chief Fire Officer of London, pointed out that: “It is well known in the Fire Service that the speed of attack is crucial to the control and extinguishment of a fire, and that the driver of a fire appliance knows that the risk to life and property is increased by any delay in getting to a fire.”

Workers in the fire service will freely tell you that cuts spell delays. In London there are extra reasons why services will be deficient. Firstly, the fire cover for the new Docklands Industrial complex has been reduced, meaning that less money has been allocated to protecting the massive industrial area than was advised by fire experts. Secondly, the expanding tourist industry involves the existence of thousands of hotels and these are notoriously prone to catch fire. Faced with the need to send fire appliances to a burning warehouse containing millions of pounds worth of commodities and to attend a small fire in a council flat, if there are reduced services, priorities will have to be made.

If readers are in any doubt about the callousness of the capitalist administrators towards human life they need only think back to the 1977 Firemen’s strike. Remember how they brought in inexperienced blacklegs from the army to break the strike? Remember how the Labour Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, refused to meet the wishes of the FBU? Remember how the media tried to portray striking firemen —who only the week before were shown as dedicated, brave men-as irresponsible, anti-social militants? It is quite possible that declining conditions in the fire brigade will cause the FBU to call another strike. If they do, and if lives are lost as a result, workers should not condemn the firemen for their necessary participation in the class struggle. They should blame the social system which leads to strikes and other events which result in public suffering.

What next in Poland

Socialists welcome the heroic efforts of the working class in Poland to achieve trade union and other rights. Freedom of speech and freedom to organise politically are essential for the existence of a socialist party. But the chief essential must be a working class which understands and wants socialism. Sadly, that is not yet present in Poland (any more than in Britain).

In an interview in the Guardian (3.11.80) “Eva, a leading dissident intellectual, was asked what sort of society does Solidarity really want?” Eva hesitated. “I suppose people differ, but very few of us could be called socialists at all. We would even welcome multi-nationals and big combines. In theory we would not mind having capitalism back —not on the American pattern but like Sweden or Denmark.”

It has to be admitted that while people like Eva imagine that they could have capitalism “back” —as though Poland has ever had anything other than a society of wage slaves producing goods not for use but for sale on a market —the idea of socialism hasn’t yet got off the ground.

Jesus Napoleon Brezhnev

Those readers old enough to remember the days of Stalin will readily recall the sycophancy which surrounded the Great Leader. After his death, the Bolshevik gang went through the motions of deploring the Cult of Personality — of which they had all been the leading exponents. They are now building, at a place called Malaya Zemlya —the scene of a battle which nobody has heard of — a vast monument which will show the great martial deeds of the present Stalin, Brezhnev, who indeed has been created a Marshall.

The battle was of minor consequence but is now being upgraded to the rank of a Stalingrad as a turning point in the war. Brezhnev’s part was unknown at the time but his heroism is now the subject of a book which won the top literary prize in Russia. Real authentic stuff, that was. Brezhnev wrote it himself.

A song about the battle is now frequently played on Moscow Radio. It is not made clear if Brezhnev also wrote the words and music and performs it at the Bolshoi in person. According to a newspaper called Babinsky Rabochy (which no doubt exists even if you’ve never heard of it), Brezhnev is “the outstanding Marxist-Leninist political figure and statesman of the modern age”. No, he didn’t write that himself, there being no shortage of Communist hacks (this one was called Geidar Alieyv) to do the jobs for this latter day Stalin.

Inflation again

One charge that cannot be laid against Enoch Powell, with regard to his views on inflation, is that he is not ruthlessly logical. Despite being no supporter of trade unions, he is quite prepared to admit, even proclaim from the rooftops, that you cannot blame inflation on workers’ demanding higher wages. Speaking at a conference in London on 14 November he denounced the new 6 per cent limit on pay rises in the local government sector as “folly”. After saying that governments alone cause inflation by increasing the money supply (a view the present Tory government is supposed to accept), he went on:

  On that view, pay rises generally, like other price increases generally, are not the cause but the inevitable consequence of inflation, and you might as well try to stop the rain by screaming at people not to get wet as to try to combat inflation by telling pay and prices not to respond to it. (The Times, 15 November)

If the rate of price rises has been falling in recent months, this is partly because the government has been inflating the currency less (for the government is, despite what it says, still inflating the currency) but also partly because in a slump such as capitalism is now going through the general price level tends to fall.

Editorial: Another Winter of Discontent? (2003)

Editorial from the January 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently the news media has been dominated by one story – the wave of strikes that have occurred across Britain, and more particularly, the firefighters’ strike. Most newspapers have been supportive of the government in their attempt to hold down pay increases, especially in the state sector – and that includes some newspapers that traditionally claim to be part of the “liberal press” and therefore generally on the side of the workers, such as the Observer. The justifications given by the supporters of the government for this are varied – though the notion that giving in to the firefighters would be “setting a dangerous precedent” is a common one, this being allied with the idea that pay increases for wage and salary earners are somehow “inflationary” and will wreck the economy.

The way in which the government and their friends in the press have set up convoluted arguments designed to frighten people into turning against “militants” and “troublemakers” in the trade unions is an example of history repeating itself. The last Labour government under Jim Callaghan in the late 1970s did exactly the same thing, when the bogeymen of the press were the workers at Ford, striking state sector workers in local government and the hospitals and – interestingly – the firefighters. They were all, so it was said at the time, out to pursue their own petty interests without consideration to the impact they would have on others. Margaret Thatcher went further still in railing against these supposedly inconsiderate wreckers in the unions, famously calling the striking miners in 1984-5 “the enemy within”.

Given this, if one thing should be crystal clear from the recent history of British industrial relations, it is that whichever government is in power – Labour or Conservative, Left or Right – their observable tendency is to resist attempts by the organised working class to increase wages and salaries and improve conditions. No matter what they may say at other times, governments are there primarily to defend the interests of the owners and controllers of wealth in society – the people they call the “wealth creators” but who in actual fact merely accumulate the wealth and riches that are created by others, namely the working class.

When governments talk about safeguarding the economy, they are really talking about safeguarding the people who own the economy. In a way, this is all perfectly sensible, as the capitalism system can only run on the basis of a minority owning the bulk of the wealth and getting the rest of the population to work for them: in the market economy there is no other way. When the profits of the owning class are hit, the system ceases to function efficiently.

This is the problem with big pay claims. The government (or at least some members of it) might ordinarily claim to be on the side of the workers, but when it comes down to it, they have to protect the interests of the owners and controllers of wealth, as that is one of the inherent functions of government. Their entire language is skewed that way too.

When the firefighters make their pay claim, we are told that is going to be “inflationary”. And that will mean higher interest rates and then falling property prices, apparently. But, funnily enough, when share prices go up and dividends go up, the government breathes a sigh of relief all round. In distinction to wage and salary rises, they are apparently good news and a sign of a buoyant economy. In other words, not inflationary at all. It is a peculiar function indeed of the wages and salaries of the working class that they – and they alone – appear to be the only form of income received by people in society that have the peculiar and harmful effect of pushing up prices. That, in itself, is something which rather gives the game away.

As we explore in our main feature article this month, governments actually cause inflation, not workers. From the point of view of the working class, there is no reason to shy away from supporting other workers struggling to improve their conditions and pay (or in some cases, just struggling to make sure things don’t get worse). We are all in the same position regarding pay increases and towards the end of a boom – when profits have been high – is historically the best time to force the issue.

Forget all Blair’s guff about a harmonious, classless society in Britain – recent weeks have been vivid demonstration of the fact that there is a class war going on, and there comes a time in all our lives when we have to make a decision about whose side we are on, ours or theirs.

Whose side are you on?

Going underground (1988)

From the March 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing, the "public" inquiry into the King's Cross fire in which 31 people were killed is in progress. Already there have been astonishing revelations about poor safety standards, and the hazards created by limited cleaning and maintenance budgets. The inquiry is likely to generate reams of waffle, with much soul-searching and mutual recriminations. There will be weighty statements about neglect, responsibility and human failings.

What the final report is unlikely to admit, however, is that these deaths, like so many others, were caused by money, or rather the lack of it. In the case of the Zeebrugge disaster and many other recent "accidents", we have been able to show using the publicly available evidence, that the cause was economic. King's Cross was no exception. The profit system constantly channels resources away from real human needs and into speculative investment and capital accumulation. It is only after a disaster has happened and an "unacceptable" number of lives have been lost, that the possibility of allocating slightly more resources to public safety is considered.

We have already pointed out, in a previous issue, how some time ago, money intended for replacing the wooden escalator at the heart of the fire had been diverted into funding murals and other decorations intended to improve the image and profitability of London Regional Transport as a trading enterprise. That wooden escalator, which those who know King's Cross will be only too familiar with, was about fifty years old. It dated from an entirely different period in technological terms. Was there an automatic fire sprinkler system throughout the station? No. Was there a special alarm system, which might respond to smoke? No. The fact is. even some of the modest household devices which the moderately well-off might be able to afford are absent when they have to be funded by the state.

Why is this? Because the capitalist employers who ultimately finance the state have, as their priority, the accumulation of capital. Despite recent claims in a Conservative Party Political Broadcast that "we" pay £700 to the NHS every second, we know that PAYE is just another con to make us feel we have a stake in government. In fact, with or without tax. as workers our living standards are constantly forced to the minimum by the profit priority. Public safety is also often of low priority. We don't need a "public inquiry" to tell us that King’s Cross station, like so many others, is dirty and dangerous, with only meagre safety procedures.

LRT is in the process of putting cleaning and other maintenance duties out to tender by private companies, whose budgets and treatment of their workers are even more penny-pinching than LRT was. And some of the recent priority areas of expenditure on the Underground and Buses (which are continuing as priorities, despite the fire) show an utter contempt for human life which should earn the LRT management a medal as upholders of the capitalist mentality. Expensive video cameras are being installed on London buses to prevent vandalism. Nearly one million pounds is being spent every year on cleaning "graffiti" from tube trains, much of which in recent years has been based on New York "street art" and is quite eye-catching. But such spontaneous marks on the environment are seen as offensive, and are wiped out in favour of the imposed corporate design. It is also an example of the warped priorities we are referring to: the moral guardians who are so offended by rude words (no, they don't mean "war" or "poverty") are served by teams of special cleaners, whilst the ancient debris which fuelled the fire under the escalator was left to rot. And perhaps most dramatically of all, millions of pounds are currently being spent installing new high-tech ticket machines at every station. which are said to be more cost-effective. This will allow a massive redundancy programme of 900 ticket office staff, which is already under way. In addition new barriers (which we will have more to say about below) are being installed which also cause ticket collectors to be made redundant. Together with the recent introduction of "one-man" trains on almost every line, this is all part of the cost-cutting exercise which is the inevitable obsession of the capitalist system. The inquiry might touch on the possibility that if trains had still had a second operator the death-toll might have been reduced, but will it explore the reasons behind the cost-cutting obsession?

Leaving to one side these overwhelmingly economic factors, what about the supposed problem of callous neglect? It is true that early reports of smoke appear to have been neglected by staff, and no doubt the actions of these LRT workers will be held up to public scrutiny. Those who prefer not to see social problems for what they are will find here the perfect victims for individual blame. But it is hardly surprising that workers under pressure will sometimes act "negligently". Quite apart from the long hours, low pay and dirty conditions which all but destroy any enthusiasm or job satisfaction, the hierarchical system of management within such an institution teaches those within it that they must not step out of their assigned area, or act with creative initiative. And in addition to the weighty bureaucracy (which has always been associated with the railways in particular), there is the ethic of self-interest, the idea of the competitive rat-race which the government does so much to promote. Even without their propaganda efforts, an economic system exists throughout the world today which teaches people from birth that in order to fit in with things as they are, they must avoid too much humane caring for others, too much soppy sentimental sensitivity, otherwise they will be "done down". And then the same hypocrites who applaud the vicious self-interest of the "business world" of enterprise will try to pin the blame on the "uncaring" workers at King's Cross station that fateful day.

This brings us finally to one or two of the more bizarre escapades which have also emerged lately from the enterprising young whizz-kids in charge of London Underground. On 31 January the Observer exposed plans being urgently pursued by Chris Bennett, London Underground's industrial relations manager, to sell off the less profitable underground stations which will be run instead by commercial interests or even voluntary groups. By franchising off sections of the network to commercial operators, they will cut staff still further and approach their target of becoming a profitable enterprise with no government support whatsoever. Where private buyers cannot be found, "responsibility for stations may be offloaded to voluntary groups, such as Neighbourhood Watch schemes, or Underground enthusiasts". Let us hope that these Underground enthusiasts are also handy with a fire extinguisher. It is thought that young people on YTS schemes could also "be pressed into service". As a possible pilot area for the scheme, they have identified the line from Epping to Ongar. which has been kept open recently only because of pressure from residents (how cheeky they are to expect to have stations where they live!).

The most vivid example of profit's tyranny comes in the shape of the new barriers referred to above. They are ugly, shoulder-high constructions, designed as the ultimate obstacle to the dreaded fare-dodgers, those people who dare to go on "our” public railways without paying. The installation of these barriers will cause 1,200 ticket collector redundancies. LRT hope. The Fire Brigades Union has strongly opposed the barriers, with Mike Fordham. FBU Deputy General Secretary stating that "People will die somewhere at some point because of these barriers" (London Evening Standard, 11 December 1987). The NUR has also pointed out that if such barriers had been at King s Cross on the night of the fire, "they would undoubtedly have produced more deaths that night". But LRT push on regardless. A spokesman was quoted as saying that the King's Cross inquiry was "irrelevant and peripheral" to the installation programme. "We see no reason to delay". It seems, moreover, that these prize idiots are aspiring to comedy and farce as well as tragedy. Special panic buttons are to be fitted to the hideous barriers, to allow passengers to unlock the gates in an emergency. But London Underground has admitted that, to deter vandals and fare-dodgers. their location would be "kept secret for security reasons"! (London Evening Standard, 11 December 1987).

The FBU are right: there will be more deaths. And the sickest thing of all is that we all know there will be more deaths, more "disasters" and more theatrical "inquiries". And they will continue until we alter the basis of society, and therefore its priorities.

Clifford Slapper