Passing the parcel (1995)

TV Review from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Election nights are almost exciting, and Local Elections ‘95 on BBC 1 last month proved to be no exception. There was David Dimbleby with a twinkle in his eye and a Mars bar in his pocket. Peter Kellner looking studiously professorial next to a bank of computers. Anthony King thumbing through his mental book of historical precedents and the ubiquitous Peter Snow arms flailing like a whirling dervish in conversation with Magnus Pike. "Just a bit of fun” is Snow’s catchphrase. and of course it all is just that, at least for him.

For the politicians it is different—election night is akin to a life-or-death prognosis. John Selwyn Gummer had seldom looked glummer as the news trickled in of the most humiliating Conservative defeat in local elections on record. Frank Dobson chortled like a Father Christmas on Prozac and the Liberal Democrats' spokesman was there as well, popping up like Chad over a wall occasionally in the hope that nobody would forget he was there too. But it was Labour's night, and if all Frank Dobson's Christmases had come at once. John Prescott beamed as if his political marriage to Tony Blair had just been consummated in spectacular style. He opened a bottle of champagne at Labour Party headquarters and thrust the spray orgasmically at the cameras, adjectives tumbling over one another just as the Moet tumbled out of the bottle.

It was indeed touching that the working class could have had such an effect on their fellow human beings. Touching, though not altogether surprising, as it is the workers who put the politicians in their exalted position to start with.

If local election night demonstrated anything it was that the Labour Party . . . pardon me. New Labour, is on a roll of gigantic proportions and that the Tories are digging themselves further into a hole and not out of it. Labour, on this performance seems set to win a General Election and they will be aware at this time like at no other that dangerous talk costs political lives. During the election campaign itself they showed themselves cognisant of this fact, fighting the battle on presentation, managerial abilities, sharp suits and white teeth. "Policies" has become the most dangerous word in their vocabulary. When tackled about this by Dimbleby. Frank Dobson shrugged his shoulders and gave a "what can we do" look. Local government, he said, is hamstrung by government subsidies and capping, and so even if Labour wanted to spend more on education or local services, it couldn't.

At this point John Gummer intervened to claim that you could not blame the Conservative government for the belt-tightening consequences of the world recession and that in any case things were getting steadily better under the foresighted stewardship of John Major. But then came the pièce de résistance—Sir Teddy Taylor. Tory rebel, beamed in via satellite or some such device to tell the panel that they were all wrong as the real problem was Europe. "I know I'm being a bore . . ." he said, and of course he was right. And right about something else too. He went on to say that just as it didn't matter which of the parties controlled the councils, neither did it matter much which party controlled Westminster, as they were all prisoners of the system, the headquarters of which he identified as being somewhere in Belgium. Now he might have been misplaced about the importance of the last bit. but his substantive point, of course, has a lot going for it.

Travel with Teddy

Travel round Britain and can you tell where a Conservative council ends and a Labour one begins? Travel around Europe or any other part of the world and try doing the same with governments. It is very difficult indeed, and Sir Teddy has obviously noticed. Given all this, quite what his function is as a politician must be in some doubt, his obsession with Brussels notwithstanding. If he thinks politicians are as impotent as this (and they generally are) then it cannot be long before he packs it all in forever and takes to the stage.

But have some sympathy for him. Sir Teddy showed that he had grasped, in his own hamfisted way, a fundamental truth of capitalist politics, even if he lacks the full explanation for it. And this is that, in reality, election nights at present are momentary interludes in a mind-numbingly tedious and pointless exercise. They are the time when the two rival but otherwise identical brands of cola release their sales figures, when two bluebottles climb up a wall to see who can reach the ceiling first. Pointless, though at the same time mesmerising if your life is empty enough. And if the phrase "get a life" should be directed anywhere, the BBC studios on election nights are as good a place as any to aim. 

Dave Perrin

Socialists and the coming election (1991)

Party News from the December 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is currently considering putting up two candidates in next year’s Genera) Election, one in London and possibly one in the Greater Manchester area. A meeting is being held in London on Wednesday 11 December to finalise plans to contest the Holborn and St Pancras constituency, at present held by Labour frontbencher Frank Dobson: all members and sympathisers who can help are invited to attend (for details see Meetings Page).

To pay for the deposit and mount a credible campaign, including making full use of the postal distribution of the candidate's address, we need at least £2000. At the moment the amount standing in our Election fund is £697. Readers wishing to help us reach the targetted amount are invited to send their contributions (made payable to "the Socialist Party of Great Britain”) to: Election Fund, the Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7 UN.

Blogger's Note:

The Party didn't end up contesting a seat in the Greater Manchester area at the 1992 General Election but they did contest the Holborn & St Pancras seat in London. A write up of that election campaign appeared in the May 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Greasy Pole: Let’s Be Frank About Dobson (2000)

Our Frank.

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If it was a victory it could only be called a Pyrrhic one, for whichever way anyone looked at it the selection of Frank Dobson as Labour’s candidate for mayor of London promises to be vastly damaging to the party. To begin with there are all those party members who voted for Livingstone. Will they willingly accept a defeat for their man based on gerrymandering so blatant that it almost takes the breath away? What will they do, then, after their experience of the party which they trusted to administer the emergence of a new, vibrant, caring Britain as really a cynical manipulator of power? Then there are the voters outside the party. What will they think of Labour promising in its 1997 manifesto to introduce an elected mayor for London but not then going on to say something like “and we promise to make sure, through some outrageous fiddling of the votes, that our candidate will be someone who will always give unquestioning obedience to our great leader Tony Blair”? Then there is poor old Frank Dobson himself, who did not want the job in the first place, who was eventually forced into publicly distancing himself from the slick operators of Millbank and who is likely to be a shamefaced bearer of Labour’s standard.

It was not so long ago that an important part of the drive to “modernise” the Labour Party was the introduction of the principle of One Member One Vote (OMOV). This was aimed at undermining the power wielded by the unions through their block vote at conferences and in the election of leaders. Labour had not always experienced such ambivalence about their relationship with the unions. During the Attlee government the unions could be relied on to support any government policy, no matter how damaging to their members. This meant that if any trade unionists wanted to offer any serious resistance to the depression of their living standards which the Labour government were demanding they had to do this as unofficial strikers, without the support of, or even at times in the face of opposition from, their union. There was no doubt then about the value which the Labour leadership placed on the block vote. This changed when the unions began to elect leaders like Frank Cousins, Hugh Scanlon and Mick McGahey, who were expected to give a higher priority to protecting their members’ interests than to mindlessly obeying the government.

Electoral College

And so it came to pass, that the policy of OMOV was considered to be essential if the Labour Party was ever to get back into power. Neil Kinnock thought so and so did John Smith. And among the most ardent supporters of the idea was a young, thrusting MP called Tony Blair.

But that was then and this is now and it quickly became clear, when it was time to select who would be the Labour candidate in the mayoral election in London, that if the OMOV principle was left to operate without interference there was a good chance that Labour’s candidate would not be from among the ranks of those who are dazzled by the charisma of Tony Blair—or who are so desperate for advancement that they would never dream of opposing the leadership line on any issue. So OMOV had to go, until it becomes convenient for the leadership to again represent it as essential to any political party with pretensions to being democratic. In its place the party erected a complex system of voting for an electoral college in which the votes of London MPs and MEPs and of unions which supported Blair’s favoured candidate carried a disproportionate weight. An article in the Observer on 20 February calculated the percentage value of each vote in the electoral college. The vote of a member of the union GMB, which largely supported Livingstone, was worth 0.000427 percent of the total. The vote of a member of the AEEU, which refused to ballot its members and supported Dobson, was worth 0.065 percent. The vote of an individual party member came to 0.001 percent while that of a London MP was worth about 0.45 percent.

It was an effective, if transparent, scam but it needed some fine tuning. Like allowing someone who is no longer an MEP and who does not live in London to vote. Like disallowing the votes of unions which supported Livingstone but were late with their affiliation fees. And from this discreditable fraud emerged Frank Dobson. Stout, bearded, genial Frank. Everyone’s favourite uncle. The man you can trust to run London as if it isn’t one of the great centres of world capitalism. A bit dishevelled after all that infighting and vote rigging but apparently as game as ever.

Tamed dog

Until recently not a lot was known about Frank Dobson. He was becoming more and more famous as the Health Secretary who could not keep Labour’s election promise to reduce hospital waiting lists (one hospital chief executive may have been trying to cheer Frank up when he cut his waiting lists by the simple expedient of pretending that a lot of patients were no longer on it). By the time he had reached the exalted heights of Westminster Dobson may well have been hoping for an uninterrupted climb up the greasy pole, untroubled by an embarrassing past. During the Sixties and Seventies the Tory press had a lot of fun with the antics of the so-called loony left councils. With a little journalistic licence it was easy to characterise these councils as wildly unrealistic, pumping extravagant sums of money into all manner of exotically useless causes and organisations. The truth was rather less lurid but those councils were a serious embarrassment to the Labour Party. One of the most publicised and derided was Camden. Its leader was Frank Dobson, then beardless, dark-haired and less avuncular. His left-wing credentials were impressive enough for Ken Livingstone to award him some warmly fraternal mentions in his book If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It:

“At the same time as we were rebelling at the GLC, the Camden Council Labour Group, led by Frank Dobson . . . decided to convene a London-wide meeting to oppose the new housing expenditure controls which had been imposed on all councils by the Labour Government . . . Between 1971 and 1975 First Millie Miller and then Frank Dobson had provided strong leadership with a clear sense of direction.”

Of course Dobson is not the only left-winger to be brought to heel by the prospect of a powerful job in the romance of running capitalism’s chaos while telling the rest of us that they have the system under control. This government is thick with such people: Stephen Byers, Margaret Hodge, Paul Boateng, Blair himself. Their changes in attitude are bound to expose flaws in the theories and practice of their party, to show how futile it is. Capitalism can’t be run other than in the interest of its ruling class. The system’s politics, in other words, are a ruthless trickery and in the case of the London mayoral election the trickery has been transparently frenzied. Tony Blair runs this government, and shows his contempt for the working class who voted for his party, on the principle that lies, false promises and U-turns can be as blatant as necessary because the votes are influenced by other factors. Harold Wilson once said that in politics seven days is a long time. In Blair’s timing seven hours seems more than enough.

The whole sordid story has discredited Labour’s claim to be a democratic party, let alone one which will have a significantly positive effect on the lives of the working class. That is something for the voters in London to remember when they go to vote for the Mayor in the near future.

Ivan

Transplant organs for sale? (1999)

From the August 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even Margaret Thatcher balked at the sale of kidneys but now it is being discussed as a serious possibility.

When BBC2’s Newsnight programme broke the story about Northern General Hospital in Sheffield accepting a stipulation from a donor’s relatives that his organs could only be used if they “didn’t go to a coloured”, the debate that raged afterwards concentrated on whether racist pre-conditions should be tolerated given the severe shortage of transplant organs. And whether medical staff accepting such ifs and buts might be breaching the Race Discrimination Act. Did anyone in the media realise this issue was not fundamentally about ethics or legality, but class?

What is it that suppresses natural altruism in people to the point that this may necessitate compelling organ donations through a new involuntary arrangement? What causes next of kin to see donor organs as exclusive property to grant or withhold, rather than collective property from which anyone may benefit? And what makes those who do behave unselfishly towards others get called “losers” and “saddos”? Might it be a materialistic, dog-eat-dog, I’m-all-right-Jack mentality necessary for survival and “success” under capitalism?

The source of people developing a hatred for other human beings with merely a darker skin colour is also found in the competitive market. Those desperate to find a reason for, and an escape from its poverty, unemployment, housing problems, inadequate welfare benefits etc, can readily blame any group that they are led to think of as being different and outsiders. Such thinking will generally be toned down or encouraged—depending on whether the economy is doing well or badly—to fit in with the capitalist class’s needs to increase available labour and boost workforce competitiveness or to divide society and divert blame. But sometimes as in this case racist thoughts can rebound on the ruling class.

A kidney transplant costs around £10,000 just once, whereas haemodialysis costs the state (funded by businesses) £25,000 every year per patient. If “different” ethnic groups start attaching conditions to donations, other non-racial provisos will creep in; administration will become more difficult and expensive; would-be donors will be put off, and fewer transplant operations will result. And with organs already in increasingly short supply, both the pressure on government to act and the financial burden on capital could only get worse. But any New Labour solution is bound to involve hypocrisy.

Already, Frank Dobson has blustered “I haven’t been an opponent of apartheid all my adult life to see it being introduced in the NHS. It never occurred to me that a rule would be necessary to keep racism out of blood transfusions and donations.” Maybe the Health secretary will explain later why his new rule, while not allowing people to choose who gets hearts, lungs and kidneys according to colour, will allow any capitalist to choose the best food, goods and services according to money. Preventing discrimination against the differently coloured with desperate clinical needs, but permitting discrimination against the poor with desperate social needs exposes the iniquity of a private property society and its requisite two-faced laws. Dobson won’t have costly racism in health care, but “apartheid” in access to enjoyable work, the best food, decent housing, utility services . . . That, too, has “never occurred” to him—and probably never will.

Class ownership of vital assets is behind divisions in society, but because those who govern capitalism have no intention of tackling this root cause of racism, its political servants now instead merely put on a concerned act, conduct sham enquiries and plan to tinker with its laws to avoid the controlled majority behaving too much like the dominant asset-owning minority.

But why are so many people in dire need of organ transplants in the first place? How much smaller would be their number if those in various industries (chemicals, oil, tobacco, pharmaceuticals etc) had not poisoned and polluted our bodies for profit for decades?

Some media writers actually suggested that if the poor were encouraged by payments to sell organs to hospitals while still alive, then both they and those in desperate need of transplants would benefit.

The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee asked:

Why shouldn’t the NHS buy organs for its patients? . . . ask the tough question—if it’s OK for us to let millions of people die around the world with hardly a thought about it, why isn’t it OK for some of those people to choose to sell a kidney in order to improve their families’ chances of survival? The medical risk of donating a kidney is relatively low while the cash reward would be enough to change a family’s condition beyond all recognition . . . If the world cannot give them the means to survive, why should they be denied the right to sell the only thing they have of great value? (9 July).

In Toynbee’s mind, the “means to survive” is money, while in reality such means are industries, utilities, natural resources etc which, if directly and collectively owned by us all—and not a privileged ruling minority—would bring about an end to all those millions of deaths from deprivation.

And if she thought harder, Toynbee would realise that poor people selling bits of themselves would not escape the gutter, as the capitalist market that she tolerates—and regularly cashes in on with reformist let’s-tinker-with-it-this-way and that-way articles—will always find buyers at the most competitive prices. And with billions world-wide possessing sod all, that’s what organ purchasers will be able to pay then as the going rate.

Legally, we don’t even own our bodies. According to the Medical Ethics and Law Department at Imperial College (Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4, 11 July), the seventeenth century philosopher John Locke established the principle on which the law still operates. They pointed out “we don’t own our bodies because didn’t create our bodies. Locke said God did”. Consequently, “we can own things that we have created through our labour . . . that we have property in our person, but definitely not in our bodies”. This is doubly daft, since not only did some supreme being never make us, but we manifestly do not have full property rights in what we create through our labour, otherwise exploitation by employers for profit would be impossible.

However, such exploitation will end—together with all today’s others social miseries—when we perform a transplant operation on capitalists at the ballot box, and shift organs of production from their persons to ours.

Max Hess

The health divide (1987)

From the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March the Health Education Council brought out its latest — and final — report. The Health Divide: Inequalities in Health in the 1980s. It was released amid a storm of controversy and accusations of an attempted government cover-up. The Council's chairman. Brian Bailey, cancelled a press conference to announce the report, at short notice, saying that the full council had not had time to consider it. He said that its findings could be political dynamite in an election year.

The report illustrates how the poor, especially the unemployed, are more likely to suffer from bad health. The death rate for unemployed men is 36 per cent higher and their wives also die earlier. They are more likely to suffer from deteriorating mental health and lung cancer and suicides are more frequent. There is a substantially higher death rate for children among the poorest 25 per cent of the population. The rate of stillbirths among the top 25 per cent is four per thousand while it is nearly twice that for children in the bottom quarter.

Although people's lifestyles — for instance smoking and drinking — do influence the figures, by far the biggest impact is caused by material deprivation. Bad housing, "low and inadequate income", overcrowded conditions. pollution and high-rise living are among the main factors which affect people's health. Areas of high unemployment coincide with areas with the worst health records. There are more areas in the north with severe poverty. But there are pockets of prosperity in the north, as well as areas of severe poverty in the south where the health statistics are just as bad. Clearly it is class, not geographical location, which determines people's health.

These figures certainly should be political dynamite in an election year or indeed in any other year. But predictably the response from concerned reformers was as pathetic as the government's claims to be tackling the problem. Douglas Black, the former president of the Royal College of Surgeons, was involved in compiling the report. He advocated more help for mothers-to-be, better child benefit, good school meals, better housing and improved employment. These suggestions fail to confront the cause of the problem and the last one in particular fails to recognise the findings of other reports which show the detrimental effects that employment can have on workers. To suggest that people should kill themselves at work rather than on the dole is not a sensible solution, although it's one the capitalist class and their apologists would welcome.

The most hypocritical response to the report came from Labour's spokesperson on health, Frank Dobson. He said, "The report shows bluntly that poverty kills. Thousands of people would still be alive today if the Tories pursued policies to tackle poverty rather than worsen it”. He concluded. "Our ultimate slogan for the next election will be 'Vote Labour, Live Longer'". But Labour's cries of anguish and horror should be seen in the light of the fact that the gap between the health of the rich and that of the poor also widened during the period of the last Labour government. Poverty was not invented by Thatcher although since the Tories have been in power, and with the increase in unemployment, the gap between rich and poor has widened still further.

The report, and those who commented on it, all stressed that being poor, or as they put it, being part of a "lower social class", was the main factor in bad health. Yet the solutions they offered were various reforms which ignore the cause of this problem and which have failed in the past. The obvious answer would be to put an end to class-divided society in which a small minority live in ease and luxury while many of the rest of us have to endanger our health to make them rich. Capitalism is the real cause of poverty and the poor health that goes with it. It is a diseased, cancerous system that needs revolutionary surgery, not useless elasto-plast reforms.

Ian Ratcliffe

Ken Livingstone/Paul Foot – Dream Ticket? (2000)

Editorial from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ken Livingstone has taken on the Labour machine. He wants to be mayor instead of Blair’s poodle, Dobson. Journalist and SWPer Paul Foot is heading a list of candidates for the assembly calling itself the “London Socialist Alliance” which is supporting Livingstone. “Vote Livingstone, Vote LSA” is their slogan.

Well, should we? That depends on what you want. If you want to elect an old-fashioned Labourite politician to run the administrative side of capitalism in London—or if you want the mayor of London to speak with a London accent—or if you want to protest at Blair’s control-freakery—go ahead. But if you want Socialism, stop and think it through. Livingstone as mayor with Foot as leader of the assembly is an intriguing prospect, but how would this advance the cause of Socialism?

Livingstone has been a lifelong member of the Labour Party and still regards himself as a Labour man temporarily separated from the fold. He is not a socialist unless you think that nationalisation under a Labour government is an example of Socialism (in fact, it’s state capitalism).

In any event, he is not standing as a “Socialist”, but as a politician promising to make things better for London people under capitalism—”Vote London” is his campaign slogan. But anyone who knows how the profit system works knows this can’t be done. It doesn’t matter how sincere or competent or determined a politician is they can’t make capitalism work other than as a system that gives priority to profit-making. All governments that have spoken about putting needs before profits have failed. So will Livingstone. This is not a reflection on him personally but on capitalism as a system.

Paul Foot and his “London Socialist Alliance” aren’t standing on a socialist programme either. They are not standing for the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production for use not profit. All they are doing is offering a collection of attractive-sounding reforms to be achieved within capitalism: “a £7 billion increase in NHS spending”, “a 35 hour week without loss of pay”, “a minimum wage of at least £7 an hour”.

Nice if you could get them, but you can’t. They’re just empty promises. Vote-catching bait. These days capitalism can’t deliver reforms. Nor can Foot and his friends any more than Livingstone or Blair or anyone else.

So what to do? Leave Livingstone to fight it out with the other professional politicians. And if you want to vote for Socialism, do this by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across your ballot paper.

Greasy Pole: Red benches and Red Ken (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

If anyone needs any odd jobs doing – mowing the lawn, walking the dog, putting up some shelves – they might bear in mind those well-preserved people who now have time on their hands because they are no longer allowed to spend their days snoozing on the red leather benches of the House of Lords.

The Commons vote to abolish the rights of hereditary peers – or at least for most of them – was hailed as a great victory for democracy and proof that New Labour is a government which keeps its promises. This, we were told, was the will of the people. The people had read Labour’s manifesto and liked what they read and gave the government a clear mandate to get on with the job (actually only 44 per cent voted for it but never mind). And everyone knows that there are no stauncher defenders of the people’s democratically expresed will than Tony Blair and his New Labour enforcers.

In the past Blair has always been quite clear about the urgent need to do something about those people who had the right through birth to interfere with the processes of running British capitalism. “Ancient and indefensible practice” he called it in 1984. “In principle wrong and absurd . . . a drinking and dining club” was his view in 1996. And in Labour’s 1997 manifesto “The right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute”.

A Deal 

No two ways about that, you might think. What was not promised in the manifesto was to abolish the rights of only some of the peers, leaving the rest of them to carry on while everyone gives the matter further thought. That was the result of a covert deal between the government and one of the bluest-blooded of the peers (which cost him his place in the Shadow Cabinet). Why Blair, with his huge majority, should have accepted this compromise is not entirely clear, unless it was that it was just another manifesto commitment to be mangled, enfeebled, delayed . . . It has not been so with all that the government has done. When thinking up new ways of punishing criminals, or reducing legal rights, or attacking the poorest and most vulnerable people, they have acted with memorable urgency. But of course in those cases they were not dealing with people of wealth and influence.

It could hardly have been, that the government were impressed with the Lords’ own defence of their privileges. One of them – Lord Campbell – had the nerve to describe the abolition of their undemocratic rights as “a great denial of democracy”. Lord Strathclyde claimed to be in touch with public opinion on the issue in this country and beyond: “We do not want it. The public does not. The outside world does not”. In this deluded state the noble Lords were capable of believing that the people were about to take to the barricades to preserve their rights, in gratitude for the days when they occasionally gave Margaret Thatcher some grief and so were able to pose as defenders of the democratic rights of the common people. At that time there were signs that some peers were appalled at the crudeness of all those car sellers and estate agents braying on the Tory benches in the Commons, none of whom were ever likely to touch their forelocks to anyone.

One example of how the Lords behaved then was when they debated – if that is the right word – a final vital amendment to the Bill which was to abolish the Greater London Council. On that day there was no open rebellion because there was simply not enough of them in the chamber. The Daily Telegraph reported that “Lord Denham’s (leader of the Lords) face froze with horror…(He) gazed over the thinned out ranks of unsocial Tories behind”. The reason for the unpopulated benches on that day was rather less romantic than any last ditch stand in favour of Ken Livingstone and his Council. Many of the noble heads were at Ascot, where it was a big event – Ladies’ Day. It was an appropriate comment on how seriously the self-styled champions of democracy took the obligations implied by their privileged position. The Tory whips rushed around frantically, rounding up peers of a lesser pedigree while the “debate” was kept alive through a lordly filibuster. When they had enough votes the amendment was voted on and lost, the GLC was on the way out and the peers could congratulate themselves over their port and nuts on their value to the machinery of democratic government.

Livingstone 

There is, then, a certain ironic symmetry in the fact that the House of Lords and Ken Livingstone should be in the news at the same time and that in both cases there is an issue of whether democratic procedures are under abuse. In their 1997 manifesto the Labour Party promised that London would have its own elected strategic authority headed by an elected mayor. What they did not promise was that, whatever popular opinion was on the matter, the Labour candidate would be someone who was guaranteed not to upset Blair and his Millbank cronies in the same way that the House of Lords and Ken Livingstone once upset Thatcher.

In September 1993 Blair told Brian Walden, on London Weekend TV, that the block vote was “the brake on the enthusiasms” of Party members. “We are going to have One Member One Vote coming into many, many of the decisions of the Labour Party” he assured the viewers. That may have persuaded many members of the Labour Party that OMOV would be used to select their candidate for London’s mayor. The snag was that, had that been allowed to happen, Ken Livingstone was well fancied to win the nomination hands down – which would have been something akin to a nightmare to Blair. Since Livingstone could not be persuaded to stand down the system had to be changed along with the candidates to oppose him. So out went the likes of Trevor Phillips and in came Frank Dobson, who was the leader of Camden Council when it was prominent among those local authorities damned as loony lefties and who is renowned as a talented reciter of shockingly dirty jokes but who would do what Blair wanted. Out, too, went OMOV and in came the electoral college with the block vote, now no longer a brake on enthusiasms but the way forward to the kind of democratic decision making which Blair approves.

Tinkering 

But Livingstone’s popularity would not go away so there had to be more tinkering; this time so that more time was allowed between the settling of the short list and the final selection of the candidate, with the object of giving Dobson an opportunity to organise a more effective campaign. You may call all this moving the goal posts or gerrymandering or fiddling the system. What you may not call it is allowing a democratic vote on an important issue.

In these irrelevant squabbles about who should be in charge of the organs which run, and try to control, British capitalism nobody should be deceived by Labour’s claim that their reform of the House of Lords and the establishment of an authority to run London is driven by any democratic principle. When they need to the government treat democratic procedures as irritants and obstacles. Democracy for them is what pleases their leader and what pleases their leader is the imposition of policies which are based on Labour’s need to protect and prosper the interests of the British ruling class. That is why, when the voters of London go to choose their mayor, they may well find that they can vote for anyone they like as long as it’s Frank Dobson.

Ivan

Story of an election (1992)

From the May 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the end the workers voted for the devil they knew. Kinnock, whose readiness to sell his soul and any physical parts of his anatomy to the devil as the price for power, finished with neither principles nor power. Ashdown, the shady middle man, ended the day firmly in the middle of the wilderness. dealing cards in a game which nobody needed to play with him.

The Greens suffered what future historians may decide to call The Fate of Kinnock: after a heated Conference debate as to whether they should be pragmatic and voter-friendly or say what they meant, the opportunist majority won, but the workers refused to offer the Green politicians the remotest lick of power. The Natural Law Party, created in 1992 with the backing of hippy millionaires and the ability to buy their way on to TV stations which have refused electoral broadcasts to socialists since TV started, proved that you can buy a few hundred votes in a few hundred constituencies if you have enough money and enough voters with enough madness.

It was a dull election which was dominated by media rambling and boring polls which proved to be wrong. It is too unkind to wish that the pollsters, together with the now obsolete kremlinologists, enjoy a short while on the dole queue followed by a long while doing something useful with their lives?

The essence of the election was negativity. The Tories did not win; indeed, most voters opted for parties other than Major’s. The Tory election campaign, backed by nearly every newspaper, was designed to scare workers against voting Labour. The Labour Party, wedded to the market and virtually the same in policy terms as the Conservatives, used most of its fire attacking the wicked Tories and presenting slick, sick ads with film stars and no ideas. As ever, the Liberals played it dirty. The most interesting poll of the election showed that negative motivation amongst younger voters outnumbered positive reasons for voting choice by three to one (Guardian, 12 March).

The socialist campaign

The Socialist Party decided to contest the London seat of Holborn and St Pancras. The campaign, organised by Camden branch, owed its success to enthusiastic support from many people, both members and supporters of the party. Manifestoes were printed by the party printers on our own presses and delivered free by the Post Office. Thousands of posters and stickers were printed and displayed. Open-air meetings were held in Camden Town. Kentish Town. Brunswick Square and Lincoln’s Inn. A loudspeaker car toured the constituency blasting out somewhat different messages from the other parties. Three different types of leaflets, in addition to the manifesto, were printed and delivered across the constituency. One thousand extra copies of the election issue of the Socialist Standard were distributed and so were many more back-issues. An eve-of-poll rally in Conway Hall had standing room only and was followed by a less formal gathering in a nearby bar where those interested met and talked with us. It was hard not to notice us in the area: the campaign is but a beginning of our serious work in Camden where we are determined to make the Socialist Party a force that the defenders of capitalism will be unable to ignore.

It was not all cheer and beer. The campaign had its down points and these told us a thing or two about how the capitalist system works. This party, which is hostile to both the market and to the rule of bureaucrats, was more than once the victim of both.

First, the market and the election. For the days after the election was called we roamed the constituency looking for an election office to rent. There was no shortage of empty shops in prime sites, but a combination of ridiculously high rents and lousy premises kept us out in the cold.

Finally, we found a shop which was affordable and more than half decent. The price was fixed with the agent and we arrived on the first Friday of the campaign (three weeks from the election day) ready to set up for action. A complication had arisen, said the agent: a well-known property company was the owner of the shop and was uncertain about letting us use it for “political reasons”. No Socialists Wanted Here. This is called democracy. We were told to wait for the directors to think further on the matter, but gently suggested that they jump somewhere where the water is less than fresh, and by that same Friday evening we moved into a shop in the less convenient area of Chalton Street, off Euston Road. The election office was transformed from a slum into a pleasant environment and was used efficiently for the three-week campaign.

Bureaucratic interference in our campaign came from the Post Office who told us that our manifesto, which had been stamped and approved by them, could not be delivered because it advertised our election rally. We pointed out to them that our last manifestoes had advertised meetings, and that the Post Office stamp of approval was placed right next to the rally announcement. They accepted that they were in the wrong, but not before wasting two days when the manifestoes could have been distributed by them. We are now in dispute with the same bureaucrats concerning several thousand manifestoes which they failed to arrange to distribute in the Kentish Town area.

Honest Politics

As ever, we made it clear to our fellow workers that while it is in their interest to vote for our candidate, we did not want their votes unless they were socialists. We asked the workers not to vote for us unless they agreed and they obliged: we won 175 votes.

Little can be said about our vote, but, for the psephologically-minded, here are a few points worth thinking about—“just for fun”, as the man with the silly swingometer might put it. Firstly, 175 votes equals 0.4 percent of those who voted, or four voters out of every thousand. It is a higher percentage of the vote than any national election we have contested for over twenty years, and since we were up against the Greens, the Natural Law Party and a Leninist outfit, as well as the big three parties, we may presume that our votes were not all mere protest votes but represented genuine support for our unequivocal socialist manifesto.

Secondly, even if we assume that not all the votes were as sound as we would like them to be, even if we halved the number of votes and then projected it across the country (assuming that socialist consciousness is not innately higher in Camden than elsewhere) we would have had 50,000 genuine socialist votes. If such a calculation is reasonable, it is amusing to think that there are already twice as many socialists in Britain as there arc millionaires!

Thirdly, the tactic of Leninist opportunism has been discredited by our result. Standing against us was the Revolutionary Communist Party, a disreputable Leninist sect. Being opportunist tricksters, they employed the old tactic of standing under the name of a front organisation: “Workers Against Racism". Yet, despite their reformist campaign and their efforts to appeal to populist single issues, the Socialist Party’s undisguised principles won more votes than them. This was not only the case in our constituency: the Socialist Party won more votes than any of the Leninist candidates standing in London constituencies. In times past parties like the Communist Party told us that appealing to the workers on the basis of tactical reformism was the only way to win votes. It is gratifying to note that honesty was respected more than tactics.

As for the other Leninist sects, their position in the election was just as disgraceful. Their call was to vote Labour. Workers News, the paper of the “Workers International League (Leninist-Trotskyist Ten- dency/Britain)” had as its election headline: “Kick Out The Tories! Vote Labour . . . But Reject Kinnock's Cowardly Policies”. The election headline of Workers Power stated “Vote Labour—But Organise To Fight!”. Rather like telling workers to jog on the M1, but remember to take some bandages.

As ever, the barmiest Leninist nonsense came from the SWP whose 4 April issue of Socialist Worker (the paper for those students who can only achieve a Leninist level of consciousness) had the following headline: “Major Out. Vote Labour. But Build A Socialist Alternative". Of the Labour Party, which they urge workers to waste their votes on, the same issue states that:

  the word socialism is not used once in labour’s election manifesto. Labour leaders have hardly uttered it throughout the campaign. Labour's priority in recent years and in its manifesto has been to appease big business and the bankers. (Our emphasis)

So, here is a so-called socialist organisation bemoaning the fact that Labour never speaks about or stands for socialism and instead supports the interest of the class enemy and therefore workers should vote for them.

In order to diagnose the symptoms of this political insanity (as well as put socialist leaflets into the hands of workers attracted to it by the pseudo-socialist title of the SWP), we attended their rally in our constituency where they were urging workers to vote for the party of “big business and the bankers” against the Socialist Party. Their speaker, one Alex Callinicos, a politics lecturer from York University, declared how delighted he was that Labour was ahead in the polls and how workers must be persuaded to vote Labour in order to learn that a Labour government will attack them just like the Tories!

SWP meetings are stage-managed and most of the “questions" from the audience take the form of pre-arranged harangues from members of the cult. The SWP is a party of confused capitalist reformism and urges workers to vote Labour "without illusions”. Interestingly, the rather less confused. but equally non-socialist Financial Times came out on election day with exactly the same recommendation to vote Labour but without illusions.

In place of leaders

Our candidate did not stand as a leader or potential leader. What he called for was a democratic socialist mandate. All of the other parties called on the workers to follow rather than think.

The manifesto of the Natural Law Party informed its readers that "our candidates have demonstrated greater orderliness of brain functioning, indicated by EEG coherence; and greater command of Natural Law, indicated by improved mind-body co-ordination—Yogic Flying”. On the basis that these self-styled superbrains can fly through the air in ways that would have left Lamont and Smith standing in silent awe, it behoves the floating voter to examine the economic section of the manifesto of their local floating candidate: "The Natural Law Party upholds the principle of free-markct economy".

Not to be outdone by such spectacular activities, Frank Dobson, the elected Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras, performed the much-admired circus feat of The Disappearing Man: he ran no meeting in the constituency throughout the campaign and appeared on BBCTV on election night saying that he had spent the best part of the campaign touring Britain.

Should he ever extend his tour into the constituency which political ignorance has made his, he might like to consider that there are two as yet unacknowledged challenges to debate awaiting him from the Socialist Party and there are 175 local voters who would like to see him respond to the genuine case for a socialist transformation.

Steve Coleman

Election Result

Abstentionists 23.863: Dobson (Lab) 22,243; McHallam (Con) 11,419: Horne- Roberts (Lib-Dem) 5.476 Wolf-Light (Green) 959: Hersey (NLP) 212; Headicar (Socialist Party) 175; Lewis (Trot) 133.

Between the Lines: Debate of the Decayed (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the April 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Debate of the Decayed 

On a recent visit to the House of Commons, collecting policies for his long-term research into the fossil record, your TV columnist happened to stumble upon three familiar-looking party leaders, each rehearsing speeches which mass TV audiences were never to hear. In the absence of the TV show-down which would have been as politically illuminating as One Man And His Dog (without the Man, and with ballot papers issued to the sheep), we here publish the texts of the speeches which were never made.

Honest John

"Let me say at the outset that my government has nothing to offer you except more of the same. As you can see, this leads to enormous prosperity for everyone. If elected, I shall produce a Charter, to be placed on all bus shelters and town-hall lavatory doors, which will be signed by me so that nobody will dare to ignore it. It will promise that trains will run on time and

Prime Ministers will be honest — or else they will face a £200 fine, or a knighthood in the case of the Prime Minister. Above all, my worshipful followers, I remind you of my motto: If it isn't hurting it isn't working (based on an original idea by Harvey Proctor). I shall see to it that all NHS doctors be issued with framed parchments containing these comforting words. So, vote Conservative and don't be deceived by our opponents’ lies about poverty, unemployment, homelessness or beggars on the street, all of which are caricatures created by Channel Four documentary-makers".

The Future Lord Neil 

"Your Majesty, Lords, Ladies, Very Rich People, moderate trade unionists and little old ladies — I appeal to you to vote for the party which you can feel safe with. You see, there are mud-spreaders around who want you to believe that capitalism will be unsafe in our hands. Just because it has been the case that we have been in government eight times and been clueless how to make the profit system run in the interest of the working class. Now we have the answer: we intend, without reservation or hesitation, to make the profit system run in the interest of the capitalist class.

We believe — and we ask you to believe — and furthermore, we ask that you believe that we believe — that only by bleeding the workers dry will this great country of ours be even greater.

To this end, we shall continue the policies of the Thatcher government (selling off council houses, building nuclear missiles, breaking the unions), but we promise that, unlike the wicked, woeful Tories, we shall sing The Red Flag at our conference each year while we are administering the legalised robbery of our dear brothers and sisters in the trade unions."

Paddy Pointless

"I think . . .  I think I think that my party is different from the others. We are different because . . . And secondly, we are in favour of a system of voting which will get more Liberals into the Commons bar. Moreover, I am an extremely butch commando and can speak Chinese. So vote for the Alliance . . . .  I mean  . . . "

Open Debate

Democracy is not served by sound-bite exchanges between Presidentially-styled leaders who are looking for sheep to fleece. TV debates are not the answer. If you are convinced of your case you will stand up on a public platform and put it before an audience that can answer back.

The Socialist Party wrote to the sitting MP for Holbom and St Pancras, Frank Dobson, weeks before the election was called, inviting him to debate in public. At the time of writing he has not even replied. He knows that there is a big difference between the TV election soap opera and the glare of a large audience who want to hear answers to their problems — and then want to answer the answers.

That we have been spared the Major-Kinnock-Ashdown slogan exchange is a small mercy; that they have been spared the harsh judgment of workers who regard them as being as inspiring as a repeat series of Crossroads is a delay which must be rectified.

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Like no tomorrow (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like no tomorrow

For some reason it was offered as a criticism of The Day After that it told us something we already knew — that a nuclear war would bring unprecedented destruction and suffering. In fact, as many commentators pointed out, the reality will be far worse. One estimate is that in a 220 megaton attack on Britain 80 per cent of the population will die. Everywhere it will become frighteningly cold and dark, as the nuclear dust blots out the sun and brings a new Ice Age in which people in the mass will starve or freeze to death.

Perhaps the most chilling part of the Film was in the build up to the holocaust — the palpably heightening tension, the strained faces listening to the news, the first announcement of the use of “tactical" nuclear weapons, the missiles blasting out of the silos, trailing smoke across the sky behind a washing line, released when servicemen opened a red box marked “Gently”. It was too close to experience for our comfort — too close to Berlin 'in 1948, Korea in 1951, Cuba in 1962 and to the numerous other international crises when the world might have been under threat of having no tomorrow.

Was The Day After an argument for unilateral nuclear disarmament or for the Heseltine policy of eventual disarmament through eventual agreement while the powers meanwhile build up their nuclear arsenals? Of course, CND claimed that the film made their case for them, forgetting that it portrayed the culmination of the international rivalry which is endemic to the capitalist system. CND have no concept of what is needed to end that system, although to end it is the only way in which the world will be rid of war and all weapons of war.

Heseltine is a different case. He and his party make no bones about their support for the social system of division and conflict, the system which makes a priority of killing and destruction. No nonsense from the Defence Minister about the urgency to avoid the ultimate, overwhelming catastrophe; he stands unashamedly for capitalism and for the interests of the British ruling class, at whatever the cost to the rest of us.

But beneath their superficial differences, at their core CND and Heseltine stand for the same thing. They all support capitalism although in varying degrees they may seek to evade some of the effects of the system. By confusing the issue, by pretending that capitalism can be controlled and reformed into benignity, they each in their own way aggravate problems such as war.

If The Day After told us anything it was of the desperate urgency of the work to overthrow capitalism and to replace it with a society which will not know war. That is not one of the facts which can be devalued as something everyone knows already. If it were more widely accepted, the future of the world would be more secure and tomorrow would be a matter of happy anticipation instead of fear.


One for the rich . . . 

In court seven teenagers admitted that over fifteen months they made 28 raids on local restaurants, breaking in to steal drinks, food and cigarettes; they also asked for 30 other offences to be taken into consideration. The value of their hauls totalled £1,435; they were ordered to pay £1,527 in fines, compensation and costs (Guardian, 30 November 1983).

The culprits were pupils at the exclusive Darlington School in Devon, where parents pay £8.000 a year each for their keep and “education”. The payments ordered by the court must have made quite a dent in the pocket money of the accused. No doubt this will be made up by doting parents who, not long ago, howled for the dismissal of the then headmaster of the school who had warned them of under-age sex, burglary, vandalism and drug taking among the pupils, and they had objectcd to some “unsuitable” pictures of his wife which had appeared some years ago in a magazine.

No prize is offered to the first reader sending in the most likely punishment which the court would have doled out if, rather than being the pampered offspring of the rich, the offenders had come from the streets of Brixton.


Glasses and classes

How is a member of the working class to be recognised? Lord Curzon, the archetypal High Tory of his day, thought that it was by the colour of our bodies; he had no idea, he remarked as he watched some soldiers bathing in an Indian river, that the lower orders had such white skins.

Ridiculous Labour MP Frank Dobson has recently suggested another method. He fears that it might be possible to spy out a worker — or at least one of the more impoverished among us — by the style of their glasses. In the House of Commons debate last November on the government proposals to end the opticians' monopoly on the sale of glasses (which Labour MPs might have been expected to welcome) Dobson expressed the reservation that making glasses available outside the National Health Service might mark out anyone who is unable to afford other than the NHS article.

This is gradualism gone made. Will Labour MPs now fight to eliminate variety in spectacle styles, arguing that this new equality would be a step on the road to the revolution? More to the point, are there not other ways in which a worker can be distinguished?

There are. first, the places where we live. None of them is ever likely to be featured in those advertisements by the posher estate agents in Country Life. Then there are the clothes we wear; mass produced articles such as would chill the blood of the discreet tailors patronised by our masters. What about the food we eat? Whatever Robert Carrier is paid to say on TV, there are more than subtle differences between the fare on sale in Tesco and what can be ordered, by those who can afford to. from Harrods.

But above all there is the way we get our living. The fundamental, ineradicable distinguishing mark of the workers is the fact that they live through selling their abilities to an employer for a wage. The size of that wage does not vary significantly from the point of being enough to reproduce the worker in terms of renewing mental and physical energies and in the sense of bearing future wage slaves. This is the root of our poverty, the hall-mark which identifies a member of the working class and which is expressed in sub-standards in what we can afford to consume.

This hall-mark cannot effectively be obscured or concealed, no matter how some workers may try by pretending to a life style which is not actually available to them. Indeed it is futile and reactionary to make such efforts, for if workers faced the reality of their poverty they would thereby be taking one of the first steps to its abolition.

And then there would be another way in which a worker could be recognised — by their class-consciousness and their activity in the struggle to establish a classless, povertyless society.


Keep off the beach

When the bombs went off over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and tens of thousands of people died, we were consoled that there was a positive side to this unprecedented event. Nuclear power is a source of energy which could be used to produce electricity, endless and safe and cheap. It could be an age of new prosperity. Nuclear power, said the authorities, was good for us.

There were some doubters who muttered inconveniently about the dangers, that there was such a thing as radioactivity which could leak and that an accident at a nuclear power station could lead to frightful consequences. The authorities were reassuring. There would be no accidents; the designers would see to that. Radioactivity was easily controllable. Nuclear power was good for us.

Well, since those innocent days there have been incidents like the Three Mile Island melt-down and the leaks at Windscale, which have blighted the surrounding land. Now the sea too is under threat, as the nuclear waste discharged from Windscale comes ashore as a menacing oily slick, polluting the fish and the seaweed and the beach itself. Nuclear power, the authorities still tell us. is good for us. Meanwhile we must stay off the beaches while they try to expunge the memory of the incidents by renaming the power station which will henceforth be known as Sellafield.

The history of nuclear power is one of the search for a source of cheap energy. This search did not happen in the interests of human beings but for the sole reason that the owning class are concerned that commodities should be produced as cheaply and reliably as possible. Cheap, reliable production means more competitive goods; it means a better chance of capturing markets, of more assured profits for the owners of the means of life.

In this process the welfare of human beings is of lesser consequence. The search for profit and capital accumulation has a sordid history of pollution, to the point of killing people and destroying elements of the environment. Nuclear power stations are a typical phase in that history. In a sane society, based on human interests, nuclear power would be of vast benefit to the world; free of the restraints of production for profit, it would be safe in its method and its design. It is capitalism which makes of it a polluter and destroyer, so that at places it is unsafe to walk on the beach, to pick up a pebble, to touch the seaweed.

Nuclear power may well be good for us. It is capitalism which is bad for us.

Greasy Pole: Dobson Drops Out? (2014)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine you have to allow extra time for your morning dash to the newsagent because of the people who want to shake your hand and engage you in gossip. Imagine you once saw yourself as the ideal choice for the most prestigious and demanding job in the capital except that nobody of any influence agreed with you. Imagine you held a series of ministerial jobs but were demoted and retired to the back benches to attract attention by your beard and heavy-handed jokes. Imagine you are Frank Dobson, who recently announced that after 35 years he will not stand again to be the MP for Holborn and St. Pancras – which stimulated the appetites of some powerful and hungry hopefuls to succeed him.

Bruiser

Appropriately for someone born in York, Dobson came from what is often called up there a railway family. He then switched to the more fertile environs of the capital. Along the way, in 1971 he was elected as a councillor for the London Borough of Camden with its reputation as a hotbed of the wildest leftwing delusions, asserted by their flying the Red Flag above the Town Hall. Dobson's experience as a councillor locally made him the obvious choice as the parliamentary Labour candidate for Holborn and St. Pancras, where he won in the 1979 general election and which he has held since. His reputation as a bit of a bruiser – and perhaps also for re-circulating 'dirty' jokes along with the equally unremarkable clean ones – marked him down as promotion material for a future Blair government. In this he was helped when in 1994 he led the Labour Party response to the infamous 'homes for votes' policy of Westminster Council, driven by the Tesco heiress Lady Shirley Porter who evaded an Order from the Law Lords to repay ￡27 million of the ill-gotten gains by staying for a while in Israel (eventually coughing up ￡12 million).

NHS

As a rapturous Tony Blair swirled through Number Ten, his first job was to organise a team of ministers who could deal with the changes imposed by the previous Tory government. In this the NHS was a priority so that his appointment of Dobson as the minister responsible was particularly significant. But he was not completely satisfied with his choice: 'At the helm of the NHS, I had put Frank Dobson. This, in itself, indicates how little I understood when first in office... He was one of many who considered New Labour a clever wheeze to win'. Yet there was evidence that Dobson's problems were deeper seated. In the 1981 election of Labour party officers he voted for Tony Benn until the pressures of reality disillusioned him so that he said he preferred 'sane left' leaders; examples were Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and Blair himself ('who else was there?' Dobson helplessly asked).

London Mayor

Late in 1999 Dobson was lined up to be wangled out of the Commons and was internally selected by Labour to stand as their candidate in the inaugural election for Mayor of London (a choice which stank, according to then MP Chris Mullin). A small problem for him was that in the election itself he would be up against the seasoned, subtle Ken Livingstone standing as an independent (which was a breach of his solemn assurance that he would not be a candidate, but never mind – we are talking politics here). Blair assessed Dobson's chances 'about as much as ... Steptoe and Son's horse had of winning the Grand National'. Livingstone beat Dobson humiliatingly into third place, which left him bitterly to reflect on the fact that his successor in charge of the nation's health was Alan Milburn, once a left-wing bibliophile who ran the 'Days Of Hope' radical bookshop but then built himself into a millionaire consultant for massive private companies such as Lloyds Pharmacy and Pepsi; apart from those he set up his own very lucrative media company.

Bribery

In the general election of 2001 Dobson was re-elected and quickly confronted with the realities of matching what he might have called his conscience with what the Whips would have been aware of as his ambitions. In 2003 there were some votes in the Commons on the issue of the war in Iraq. The Attorney General Goldsmith had done the work needed to enable Blair to claim that an invasion of that country would be legal. As if that would have made any real difference. Dobson was treated as a possible rebel in the intended Commons debates and he was offered the job of High Commissioner to the Republic of South Africa as a bribe for supporting the government. But that was not effective enough to deter him. The war went ahead and we are now reminded, day after day, of the merciless futility of it all, in the fighting and the desperate plight of the people there.

Starmer

In June 2011 Dobson was the focus of media attention because he was a tenant in a flat owned by Camden Council; he said he did not know how much rent he paid, which triggered some lurid speculation (one guess was £160 a week when other flats in the same luxurious building went for ￡1000). This, with the fact that he and his wife have a comfortable joint income and own a large property in Yorkshire, did not help him keep his image of a lovable eccentric. Tessa Jowell, who was one of his junior ministers, recalls him padding about the ministry office without his shoes on, at times with a bare toe peeping through a hole in his sock: 'We all absolutely adored him. I love him – he's a person of incredible generosity and loyalty'.

Among Dobson's other fans, one of the more likely successors for Holborn and St. Pancras, is Sir Keir Starmer who as a KCB and a QC and ex-Director of the Crown Prosecution Service is unlikely to unbalance his staff by showing them his bare toes. Unless he were to have the same effect by his view of the political situation: 'It would be an honour for anyone to succeed Frank Dobson . . . Our constituency needs an MP who will be able to influence a future Labour government’ – something which the tempestuous, unachieving life and times of Frank Dobson exposed as impossible.

Ivan