Socialist Election results (1997)

Party News from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 5 Socialist Party candidates polled a total of 1359 votes.

The individual results were:

• Easington 503
• Glasgow Kelvin 102
• Jarrow 444
• Livingston 213
• Vauxhall 97

The Coming General Election (1995)

Party News from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are considering contesting 5 seats in the coming general election, which has to take place before April 1997. These will be in Glasgow, Edinburgh. Newcastle, Manchester and London.

This will be the first time that the Socialist Party will have contested more than two seats in a general election and will be preceded by a campaign of leafleting and contesting any local elections in the areas concerned, beginning now.

All this will of course cost money. We have estimated that we need £15,000 to mount a credible campaign in the five constituencies. At the moment we have £1,854 in our election fund. So we need another £13,000 or so.

If you want to help make the voice of socialism heard in the next election please send any contribution to: The Election Fund, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4.7UN. (Cheques and postal orders should be made payable to "The Socialist Party of Great Britain".)

Greasy Pole: New wives’ tales (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare a thought, if you will, for the spin doctors. These shadowy figures labour without pause, shovelling up their platitudes, evasions and lies to divert our attention from the truth about the politicians they spin for. On one side they tell us that John Major is doing a marvellous job of running British capitalism and making us all healthier, richer and happier. Those who are enough in touch with reality to doubt that this is true may be unimpressed by the spin doctors on the other side, who want to convince us that Tony Blair is the man we can trust to clean up the mess which John Major is making— except that anyone who believes that is obviously not as much in touch with reality as they should be.

But spare a thought for the spin doctors, whose work is so often exposed and despised. For example, at the moment the Tones' campaign to convince us that Tony Blair, who was once derided as Bambi, is not a wimpish fawn but an evil-eyed devil, is not having the effect they hoped. Labour’s spin doctors are struggling with the confusion over the party's plans for devolution in Scotland. These things, they may reflect, are sent to try them. It never seems to occur to them to give it all up and begin dealing in facts and the real experience of an inhuman social system. Instead they go on shovelling, in the hope that they will throw up a positive nugget of deception.

Wives

An example of this may be the current contest over Norma Major and Cherie Blair, and its connection with Hilary Clinton. The American President’s wife is not known as the First Lady for nothing because she is a very powerful person who knows how to mix it politically. The Republicans have seized on this to promote the suspicion that Hilary Clinton is really the President, the person who actually decides all sorts of important issues like whether to press the button and blow the world to pieces. In making this propaganda the Republicans are obviously hoping that the American voters have forgotten all about Nancy Reagan and how she interfered in her husband’s presidency.

The wives of British prime ministers are not supposed to behave like Hilary Clinton and Nancy Reagan; their profile is supposed to be kept much lower. They can be their husband’s long-suffering and openly disapproving chauffeur, like Attlee’s wife. They can be background supports like Clemendine Churchill and Dorothy Macmillan. They can write insomnia-curing poetry like Mary Wilson. They can tell all to the women’s magazines about the prime minister’s dietary preferences. That is as far as they have been expected to go.

But none of that fits in with Cherie Blair, who overcame whatever problems may have stemmed from a wayward father who was famously the Liverpudlian butt of Alf Garnett’s abuse in Till Death Us Do Part to become a highly-paid barrister and a QC. Now she is starting to practice as a judge, overpowering the lives of people who transgress against capitalism’s laws. She once had ambitions to be a parliamentary candidate.

Cherie and Norma 

The sort of woman, in other words, to make her parents proud. And it may have stayed like that had the man she married not had ambitions to be prime minister. A clever and ruthless election- winning machine like the Conservative Party could not have overlooked the obvious comparison with Hilary Clinton. What if, their spin doctors asked themselves, the voters of both sexes were uneasy about powerful women? What if they had doubts about a female with Cherie Blair’s abilities and qualifications being so near the seat of power? Of course a campaign to undermine Cherie Blair would rely on the voters forgetting all about Margaret Thatcher, who was also a barrister and a lawyer as well as female, but no self-respecting spin doctor would allow so minor a detail to put them off.

So the work began—like the appeal by a Daily Express journalist for details of any embarrassingly radical political stances in Cherie Blair’s past. At the same time there has been an effort to put a little colour into the image of Major’s wife, Norma, who so far has been shoved into the background as an everyday housewife and mother who just happens to be married to the man in Number Ten and who may even have been happier if he had not failed, long ago. that test to be a bus conductor.

We have been allowed to know such fascinating details about Norma as to make any discerning voter desperate to get out and vote for her husband. She got A-levels in English and needlework. She prudently grates and freezes odd bits of cheese and uses tea bags more than once. She wears clothes that are comfy, perhaps because she does not think of herself as attractive. Anyone who thinks this is boring enough to be voter unfriendly is missing the point. Norma’s " . . . very ordinariness", said the Daily Telegraph, “makes her a huge electoral asset".

Fatuous

We don’t know what Cherie Blair thinks about all this except that she has made some sort of an effort at imitation. While Norma has been completing a book on Chequers, which may or may not include chapters on frozen cheese and second-hand tea bags, Cherie has been invited to the more glamorous job of guest editor for an edition of the magazine Prima. She took this opportunity to, apart from anything else, reassure us that she is almost as ordinary as Norma, whose A-level in needlework she can match by being keen on knitting. Norma and her tea bags? Cherie concerns herself with the techniques of producing interesting and nutritious meals in a short time.

Fatuous guff though this is it should be taken seriously because it reveals how the political parties regard the people who vote them into power. It illustrates the parties' contemptuous confidence that no matter how badly capitalism treats us, no matter how obvious their failure to control the system, they will be supported by millions of people on election day, with votes based on nothing more considerable than Norma Major's tea bags and Cherie Blair's knitting. That kind of propaganda may be sickening but it is no more fatuous and meaningless than the other kind, which is supposed to be weightier. Like Tony Blair, spouting his platitudes in Southwark Cathedral last January:

"To recover national purpose we need to start thinking and acting as one nation, one community again . . . Above all, we must create a society based on a notion of mutual rights and responsibilities."

And so on. And so on.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Naming the day (2000)

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

It will not be long now before Downing Street goes onto Red Alert. All leave will be cancelled for the focus groupies, the pollsters and the spin doctors, as it is for the police when some great public disorder is in the offing. Come the First of May next year Labour will have been in power for four of the allotted five years, which means that Blair and his hangers-on must soon give serious attention to the date of the next election.

Whichever day they settle on and whatever anguish they go through in the process it will all be considered to have been worthwhile because there is general agreement that the timing of an election is vital to the eventual outcome. Since the party which is in power chooses the date they seem to have an overwhelming advantage; but if it were that simple no ruling party would ever lose an election. In fact the choice of date is sometimes given such importance that a prime minister who apparently loses power because they chose wrongly can expect that their days as leader are numbered.

Callaghan 

This is what happened to Jim Callaghan and John Major. Callaghan was under a lot of pressure to call an election in the Autumn of 1978 (he teased the Labour conference that year by singing a song about not being able to make up your mind) but he chose to wait until the following Spring and these few months turned out to be the Winter of Discontent. This was probably the final nail in Labour’s coffin but it is debatable whether their experience of government at that time was so happy and fulfilling that they should want to prolong it by a crafty choice of election day. They could hardly have claimed to be enjoying themselves, after episodes like the exposure of Wilson as a shoddy manipulator, Denis Healey’s persistent battle to hold down wages, the internal mumblings which eventually threw up the Gang of Four and the Social Democratic Party . . . Callaghan himself, who was a canny political operator, took the view that there had been what he called a “sea change” and there was nothing the Labour could do—including a clever selection of election day—about it. The voters had tried Labour government again, they had seen all too clearly that it could not live up to its promises so they felt like a change. In the usual sclerotic process of political preference, the voters decided that if they didn’t like Labour the only other possible course was to vote for a Conservative government.

Foot

It is unlikely that when Callaghan talked about a sea change he expected it to last for almost twenty years. Even worse for the Labour Party—during all that time there was only one election—in 1992—when they might seriously have dared to hope that their day was about to dawn again. In the first election after the defeat of the Callaghan government they presented a manifesto condemned by one of their leaders as “the longest suicide note in history”. And in case anyone thought they were serious about winning the election they chose Michael Foot, who as a vote-loser was in a class of his own, as their leader. In 1987, having elected Neil Kinnock as leader, in the hope that he would appeal to voters as the antithesis of Michael Foot, they lost again because it would have taken more than a clumsy windbag to overcome the entrenched Tory advantage. But in 1992 they seemed to think they had a real chance. They remembered the recent by-election results, they looked at the public opinion polls, they sighed with relief that the public opinion polls, they sighed with relief that the seemingly invincible Thatcher had been replaced by grey, whining John Major. They overlooked the fact that there was still too much ground to make up from the battering they had received in 1983. When he notched up his second successive defeat Kinnock knew it was time to go, to adopt failed the failed politicians’ guise of a wise, benign statesman and look around for one of those lucrative jobs they so easily drop into.

1997

By 1997 Labour had made up all that ground, and quite a but more, with not a little help from the Tories. There was, of course, the rampant sleaze among their MPs (or rather, as sleaze seems a way of life in the Palace of Westminster, the exotic exposure of it by Mohammed Al Fayed, who knows a thing or two about it himself). There was the open war over Europe, driven by the kind of bitterness which had John Major calling some of his most prominent ministers “bastards” and was so unnerving to any Tory who still thought that loyalty was their party’s secret weapon. There was the madness of John Redwood, Michael Portillo and his SAS speech, Ann Widdecombe justifying the shackling of women prisoners when they were in labour . . . Like 1979, it was a time of sea change. It was the Tories who were unelectable and Labour the party trusted to make all the voters’ dreams come true.

The fact that the years since 1997 have had the usual nightmare episodes will be weighing heavily with Blair as he ponders the date when he allows the working class to show how they judge his government. So far the government have not been hit by a recession, which allows them to claim to be controlling the economy through the stringent application of unusually perceptive policies. Blair must also be hoping that Jack Straw’s ambition to go down in history as a more grotesque version of Michael Howard will somehow stop people breaking the law. He will pray that there will be no more media-exciting scandals like Bernie Ecclestone and Formula One tobacco advertising, Lord Irvine and his expensive taste in furniture and wallpaper, Peter Mandelson and his fastidious needs in housing.

Power 

In all the excitement and speculation there will be very little attention given to the calculated cynicism implicit in the assumption that the date of an election will significantly affect its outcome. What does it say about how the working class regard their power to bring about the necessary basic, radical change in society, that they may vote Labour in December and Tory in May? That votes are cast, not in the actual experience of what capitalism does to people and how its political parties are unable to change things, but on how and when those parties pitch their appeal? What does it say about the parties who devote so much effort to this whole sordid process? Well, come next May, or whenever, it will be true to answer those questions in the only way the pollsters, spin doctors and focus groupies understand.

Ivan.

Correction (1998)

From the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Due to a computer error a whole passage was omitted from the third paragraph of the review of Butler and Kavanagh's The British General Election of 1997 in the May Socialist Standard, leaving the impression that the authors argued that the fact that most of the press supported Labour "helped Nicholas Budgen in Wolverhampton". This is of course a contradiction since Budgen was a Tory and lost.

The passage should have read: "Possibly its most interesting chapter is the one on the press and how Labour managed to win over the affections of Wapping and Fleet Street (which helped avoid the press's anti-Labour excesses of the previous election). Another feature highlighted was the lack of success of those candidates who played the race card (such as Nicholas Budgen in Wolverhampton) and the relative lack of hostility to ethnic minority candidates generally."

Promising the moon (1997)

From the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you ever wondered what we mean when we use the word "reformist" in these columns?

The recent election provided a striking illustration of the difference between our approach and the reformist approach in the contrast between our programme and campaigning and that of the various other parties calling themselves socialist. We advocated a fundamental change in the basis of society. They merely offered reforms.

We stood for socialism and nothing else. We made no promises as to what “we” would do to make things better under capitalism. We simply said that capitalism can't be reformed to work in the interests of the majority and that the way-out was to get rid of the profit system and replace it by a system based on common ownership and democratic control and geared to meeting needs not making profits.

The SLP, Militant, the Scottish Socialist Alliance and the others took a different approach. In a bid to get as many votes as possible they promised the moon. In other words, they played the game of conventional electioneering politics to the full. However all their promises were pie-in-the-sky in the sense that capitalism could not afford them. This didn't stop these parties entering into great detail about what they would do if elected.

Wonderful wages

Pat Sikorski, SLP candidate for Hornsey and Wood Green, had worked out to the nearest penny what the minimum wage should be: “£6.22 per hour or £250 per week is everyone’s entitlement”. That works out as for a 40 hour week. But he hadn’t thought this through as in the previous paragraph he had promised “a 35-hour week for all. Speedily followed by a 32 hour-4 day week”. £6.22 per hour for a 35 hour week is £216.60. only 87 percent of "everyone’s entitlement”.

To be coherent he should have advocated a minimum wage of £7.14p per hour, but perhaps that would have seemed a bit too unreasonable. Not to another SLP candidate though. Councillor Ian Driver of Southwark, standing in Vauxhall (where he faced opposition from a real socialist), promised “we will introduce a minimum wage of £8 per hour”. Perhaps he was anticipating the coming of the 32-hour week.

Militant—using, to our great anger and embarrassment, our name of Socialist Party—was more modest. They promised “a minimum wage of £6 an hour for all workers” coupled with “the introduction of a maximum 35-hour week". That gives £210 a week as the minimum wage, but also the maximum wage for those concerned. This, they said, was “the European Decency Threshold. That’s the rate necessary to take the low paid out of the poverty trap”.

An example of the crude electioneering engaged in by these groups over this issue is the following report from Militants Hitchin branch: 

"The fight against low pay has been our main campaign. At a town centre stall a single mother was asked to sign our petition. “Would your party pay me more than £50 a week?’

‘Yes, we campaign for a minimum wage of £6 an hour, £210 a week.’

‘You’ve got my vote then!’”

Unfortunately for Militant, her vote wasn’t enough to stop their candidate in Hitchin being beaten by the Natural Law Party. It appears that more people in Hitchin believe in yogic flying than in the possibility of a £6 an hour minimum wage. After the election, with the vote-catching over, Militant revealed that it too considered £6 an hour impracticable when the front page of its paper said that “top of the workers’ demands from a Labour government will be a minimum wage of over £4 an hour” (The Socialist, 9 May). Not that there’s much chance of getting that either, at least not until inflation has reduced £4 to the value of £3 today.

But, in Militant’s utopia, some people are still going to get less than the “European Decency Threshold’’. They say that “pensions and benefits should be immediately increased by 50 percent”. But why only 50 percent? With the pension for a single person at £62.45 and the jobseekers Allowance at £49.15 that’s not enough, even with housing benefit, to bring many up to £210.

“We would introduce,” said Militant pompously as if they really had the chance of forming the government, ”a wealth tax—no one should earn more than £100,000. VAT should be abolished and there should be no tax on wages below £10,000 a year.” But if there’s a minimum wage of £210 a week, then there’s not supposed to be any full-time workers earning less than £ 10,000 a year.

These people are jokers, insulting people’s intelligence. They just pluck figures out of the air to make what they consider attractive promises—but which most people consider ridiculous—without even checking that their various promises are compatible with each other.

It is interesting, though, that Militant is prepared to have a 10:1 differential between the highest paid and the lowest paid. Who will be the £100K earners anyway—the new Trotskyist nomenklatura?

Another Trotskyist group calling itself the "Socialist Equality Party” had a more radical tax policy: ”all personal incomes over £80,000 should be taxed 100%, whilst those under £12,000 should be tax-free.” It also advocated a higher minimum wage—£8 an hour—and an even shorter working week, of 30 hours.This gives a maximum minimum wage of £240 a week, still below the level of what the SLP said was “everyone’s entitlement”.

It might have been thought that a party calling itself the "Socialist Equality Party" would have refused a 7:1 differential between the highest and lowest pay and advocated an equal income for all of, say, £80,000. Why not? If you are in the business of making unrealistic promises you might as well go the whole way.

Plentiful pensions

The fantastic promises—and the contradictions—continued over pensions."People should be able to retire at 55 on a full pension linked to earnings,” said Pat Sikorski (SLP). That wasn’t good enough for Ian Driver (SLP). He promised “voluntary retirement at 55 on full pay”. In a later leaflet, perhaps in an attempt to outbid Driver, Sikorski promised “an immediate doubling of pensions”. But to no avail. Retirement on full pay is still better for most people than retirement on a double State pension. You should have promised to triple the State pension or supported the SEP proposal "pensions must be increased to the level of the average wage”, Pat, but perhaps you ruled these options out as appearing too unreasonable.

Perhaps this explains why Driver got more votes (983) than Sikorski (586). Or perhaps not. People are not stupid and clearly do not take these promises seriously. At a meeting in Brixton on 24 April attended by the candidates (including ours) Driver’s list of fantastic promises—£8 minimum wage, 32 hour week with no loss of pay, retirement at 55 on full pay—were greeted with laughter. He might have got a better reception if he had advocated, as our candidate did. the abolition of the whole system of working for an employer with the wages you get determining your level of access to consumer goods and services. After all, didn’t Karl Marx once say to workers: "Instead of the conservative motto, 'A £6-£8 minimum wage’, they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wages system’ “(or something like that)?

As all these fantastic [proposals] would cost millions, no billions, to implement, the inevitable question arises: Where is the money to come from? Who is going to pay for them?

Julia Leonard, Militant candidate in Uxbridge had the answer:

“I say use the profits of big business and tax the super rich to provide well-paid jobs and a decent standard of living for all.” 

Simple. But this assumes that Big Business and the Super Rich are to continue so that they can be milked, i.e. that capitalism is to continue.

The SLP made the same assumption, their candidates declaring that “the policies outlined in this election address can only ameliorate the destructiveness of the present system”. This of course is to imply that their policies could be implemented under capitalism. (We don’t want to be too cruel, but they used the wrong word: they meant “mitigate” not "ameliorate". To ameliorate the destructiveness of capitalism would be to make it more destructive. On the other hand, perhaps it was the right word since any attempt to put their fanciful promises into practice under capitalism would make it more destructive by provoking a massive economic crisis.)

To suggest that capitalism could afford all these things—and many more, a free health service, "the immediate injection of £5 billion into our schools” (Militant), "build a million new homes every year for five years" (SLP), "a multi-billion pound programme of public works” (SEP)—is just ridiculous, not to say dishonest.

Do they take us for fools? The answer is, yes, they do. As Leninists they believe that ordinary workers are only capable of acquiring what they call a "trade union consciousness" by which they mean wanting more under capitalism. So that’s what they offer to provide for workers, knowing full well that capitalism will be unable to deliver, in the hope that they can get the workers with themselves as the leaders to overthrow capitalism because it won’t pay them a full-pay pension at 55. Only the Workers’ Revolutionary Party however had the honesty to come out and say that it was standing in the election "to build the revolutionary leadership”.

It’s an insulting theory and has never worked. It didn’t even get them many votes, not even much more than us. In fact one of our candidates, making no promises and saying that capitalism couldn’t make these reforms, got more votes than 15 of the 19 Militant candidates and 23 of the 64 SLP candidates, as well as all nine WRP and all four SEP candidates.

People are quite capable of understanding the idea of socialism. What could be easier to understand than a society where productive resources belong to no-one but are democratically controlled and used to produce goods and services directly to meet people’s needs and not for profit? People certainly understand very well when someone is just dangling bait before them.

Adam Buick

The Last Word: Praise the Fraud (1997)

The Last Word column from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Christians have been waiting for two thousand years for The Second Coming of their messiah whose legendary previous appearance ended in tears and an alleged promise to return before too long. More circumspect in matters of messianic madness, the Jews are still waiting for their saviour to descend for the first time. Others have succumbed more recently to self-deluding sightings, ranging from the tragic to the pathetic. In America a group of nutters, combined communally in a house with a fast-talker who convinced them that he was the messianic presence, committed collective Christian kamikaze, each taking with them a five-dollar bill to spend in heaven. The idea of heaven as a cross between a school tuck shop and the box office to Disneyland would be almost sweet in its infantile innocence were its consequences not so awful. Less dramatic in his barminess, a certain Mr B. Creme in this country has pursued a persistent campaign via the classified ad columns of various newspapers, intermittently informing the gullible that the messiah is on earth (currently residing in Brick Lane, east London, at the last announcement) and is soon to be interviewed on daytime TV.

Messianic delusions: the sigh of the oppressed in a heartless world. Hans Toch’s unequalled account of the social resilience of such aberrations remains, after several decades, the best book on the subject; for a less academic treatment, Monty Python's Life of Brian is as good a treatment as any of the meeting of despair with ignorance and the ensuing farcical-fatal divine comedy. With the fast-approaching millennium we might as well sit back and prepare for lots more of these fraudulent and fantastic heavenly portents, for they will come as sure as New Years eve lager turns to piss.

For the Independent, a newspaper not commonly associated with moments of messianic excitement (or excitement at all), the day after the election produced a moment of such embarrassing messiah-spotting that we can only hope that copies of its 3 May edition will be pulped to save the future blushes of writers and readers alike. (If you have a copy, keep it, and make the buggers blush in the days to come.) It began with a modest half-page colour photo of the saviour surrounded by wildly-enthusiastic crowds (supplied by the Archangel Mandelson) and a headline stating BRITAIN MEETS ITS FUTURE. For the future to be embodied in one disembodied smile seems a rather anticlimactic culmination to several thousand years of history. Nonetheless, the Independent had spotted "the future”, and, like the Webbs’ encounter with Stalin, who are mere people of reason to argue with them?

This was but the beginning of the messianic account. Polly Toynbee, a former candidate for the SDP, wrote a front-page story which owed unacknowledged inspiration to the North Korean press on the day that the latest dictator was appointed. Here are the quotes from the crowd with which she peppers her outstandingly stupid piece:"If I live to be 1200 there’ll never be another day like it! . . .”, "I know it’ll take a long time. It’ll be hard. He can’t do everything now. It may take years, but he'll look after the poor and the working class. I trust him ... ”, "I love him, oh I love him. I want to give him a big kiss!" (Toynbee attributes names and occupations to these deluded wretches, but we will not publish them here for the sake of their future embarrassment.) Quite what Polly would have written had David Owen won in 1987 defies the imagination. Next to this piece of propagandist garbage appeared another by Yvette Cooper, one of those elected for New Labour to assist the messiah in his earthly works. Her contribution informs us that "As I sit and try to write, on the morning after the election, I keep jumping out of my seat and hopping round the room. I keep grinning." Could this be the first possible defector to the Natural Law Party? In the presence of such joy surely nothing less than a few hours of yogic flying would be appropriate.

"The world has really changed" ends the piece by Ms Cooper. The world did not change. Just like every messianic moment in the sad history of such events, the world remains brutally indifferent to the cries of mass delusion. At the time of writing the new Prime Minister has just appointed as his "Minister of European Competitiveness” the chairman of BP. This man was not elected: he is to be offered a place in government via a seat in the House of Lords. He happens to head a company which stands condemned for contributing tens of millions of pounds to Colombian death squads paid to murder and rape indigenous peasants who are in the way of BP’s oil explorations in the land which they and their ancestors have inhabited for centuries. Even the Colombian government, whose soldiers are paid for this murderous service by BP, had admitted that its troops are out of control. But oil is oil, and profit is profit and capitalism is capitalism and . . . what was that about the world changing?

Steve Coleman

Greasy Pole: These You have Loved (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the Tories who were forced by the voters to spend more time with their families was the egregious David Evans, once the MP for Welwyn Hatfield. Evans made himself famous for his robust views on crime, race, gender and other such issues. This did not seem to damage him until, shortly before the election, what he had thought was a cosy private chat to some sixth-formers was recorded and publicised. This showed Evans in his true colours; a crass denunciation of his Labour opponent as a single mother with a "bastard" child was mixed with some bigoted nonsense about crime and skin colour and an insistence that the Birmingham Six were not only guilty of the offences they had been jailed for but had also probably killed a great many more people while they were about it. Then, for good measure. Evans sneered at fellow Tory MP—a minister no less—as "dead from the neck up”.

The bigotry and arrogance of this speech illustrated pretty accurately what a lot of voters had begun to dislike and fear about the Tories and about the prospect of giving them a fifth term in power. What would people like Evans get up to if they ever got the idea in their heads that, no matter how they behaved, they would never lose their seats? It was all put into words by—as you might expect—Richard Littlejohn, who prides himself as being the voice the man-in-the-saloon-bar where, apparently, the true heart of Britain is supposed to beat. According to Littlejohn there was no need for anyone, apart from a few feeble trendies in places like Islington, to get upset at what Evans had said because the man had merely spoken the truth—like the good, solid, staunch Englishman he is he had said a few things which most other people thought but were afraid to put into words.

Reunion

Of course if Littlejohn had got it right it would be advisable to keep clear of all saloon bars in future because they are obviously crawling with the most appalling bores and half-wits imaginable. But what are we to make of the reaction to Evans of his then colleagues in the Commons, typified by Edwina Currie, who coyly told us that while she may disagree with this views she—and other MPs—loved Evans to bits? (Currie is another ex-MP, although in her case she will be spending more time with her pens and paper or her word processor or whatever she uses to churn out those trashy novels.) The voters in Welwyn Hatfield gave the answer, when they replaced Evans with the woman whose unmarried motherhood was such a worry to him in an 11-percent swing. We can only hope that Evans will now be too busy running his cleaning company to bother us with any more of his insane, pernicious drivel.

If he has time he may be able to arrange the occasional reunion with other ex-MPs whose views are so similar to his. If so. at the top of his list should be Terry Dicks, who was not actually defeated at the general election because he did not give the voters the chance. Dicks won Hayes and Harlington in 1983, when the Labour Party was riven by the defection of their MP to the SDP. In 1987 Dicks increased his majority but in 1992 he held on by the skin of his teeth, with only 53 votes keeping him in Parliament. Over the years Dicks clearly took a realistic view of his chances of re-election if of very little else—and decided to look for a constituency with a safer majority. Perhaps he hoped to find one with larger, noisier, saloon bars because some of his stated views made David Evans look like a wet. But it was not to be; Dicks hawked his candidature around but he was too unsavoury for even the Tories and he had to observe the election from the sidelines—while his old seat at Hayes and Harlington showed how shrewd he had been to look elsewhere by putting up a Labour majority of over 14.000.

Eccentrics

What was is that had made Dicks so unattractive, not just to the voters of Hayes and Harlington but to selection committees in his own party? Could it have been those opinions which he perhaps assumed would be so welcome in the saloon bars with the approval spreading out. like ripples in the water? There was everything to be said, he thought, for flogging or hanging people convicted of appropriate crimes. Anyone travelling from Scotland to support the Scottish team in an international at Wembley was a "pig". Homosexual people were perverts who could be deterred by sprays (of what?) or red-hot pokers (we shall not elaborate on that particular proposed penal reform). Having heard all that no-one would be surprised that Dicks viewed black people as generally bone idle and so was not in favour of the relaxation of immigration controls.

It’s not on record whether Dicks was also "loved to bits" by his fellow legislators. He is not. however, the only worrying eccentric who no longer has a voice in the details of applying the demands of British capitalism to the working class. Olga Maitland, who bit the dust at Sutton and Cheam. was once considered the doyenne of gossip columnists; she was unwise enough to debate with the Socialist Party and unintentionally had the audience rolling in the aisles by ranting about something called “Tommy grit”. Marcus Fox lorded it as chairman of the 1922 Committee and did his best to convince us that he was not a real person but a character from one of J. B. Priestley's more mordant accounts of past life in small Yorkshire towns. William Waldegrave, ex-Etonian and Fellow of All Souls, was deeply involved in the Arms-to-Iraq scandal and the question of whether lies had been told to Parliament about it and whether the prosecution of the Churchill Matrix management quite fitted in with what brainy, wealthy aristocrats should regard as unwavering British justice. And Waldegrave never really answered the questions, except with carefully crafted evasions.

Carnival

On 2 May there was a strange, almost carnival atmosphere about. People were actually celebrating the election of a Labour government, as if getting rid of people like Evans and Dicks was going to make capitalism an easier, more humane society. There is no evidence in the records of past Labour governments to encourage such optimism. There have been corrupt, eccentric and extremist politicians in the past as well as more rational and so-called moderate ones. It is no time to hate our leaders nor to love them but to hate capitalism and all it does to human beings and to trust ourselves to do what is needed to end it all. 

Ivan

Letter: Should we have voted Labour? (1997)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I was highly disappointed, when reading April's issue of the Socialist Standard, to find that you seemed to be supporting an apathetic view towards voting in the forthcoming election.

While it is painfully clear that none of the major parties offer any policies which could be remotely linked to Socialism, not voting would be highly damaging to the left-wing cause.

What readers of your publication must surely understand is that only a tiny minority in Britain actually supports "true" socialism.The word “socialism” is viewed, by the majority of people, to have evil, backwards and foreign connotations to it. and is bandied around by Tory MPs in a (successful) attempt to scare voters of parties who dare to stand for equality. We must accept that we are ruled by a right-wing government, and by and large are a right-wing nation. It was indeed the (Sun-reading) working classes, that your journal idealises, that kept the Tories in power in the last election.

Britain is not going to become socialist overnight, it will be a long and slow process.This process will not be helped by allowing a right-wing government to be returned to power at every election. Should we vote the Conservatives in for another two decades we might just as well have lost World War II. To surrender a left-wing sympathiser's vote by abstaining, is to offer the country to the Conservatives on a silver platter. You can rest assured that members of the BNP or directors of companies eager to maintain the lack of workers' rights in this country will use theirs. I for one would rather see a centre-right government (as New Labour will be) working with the centre-left liberals, than a radical "ultra conservative" government (as John Major has pledged his will be).

New Labour has swung right to appease voters. Should the voters’ opinions be changed they would swing left again. If there is to be another Tory government left-wing politics will all but disappear (with New Labour continuing to swing right until they are voted in). Britain may well be a divided society but, under a government that cannot even recognise this, or even accept the term "society", what hope have we got?

So excuse me if I exercise my right to vote but I would rather take my chances with Blair than a government which openly promotes inequality.

Dominic Linley, 

Leeds

Reply:

Well, you have got your way. The Tories are out and New Labour is in. So we’ll be able to see if it makes any difference.

To a certain extent we can understand why you wanted the Tories out. They’re an arrogant lot who think they’ve got some divine right to rule while grinding down the poor and lining their own pockets. But it is better to act on the basis of reason rather than such a gut reaction.

The question to ask is: will their replacement by another group of politicians make any difference to our lives? Your argument that it will is based on the illusion that governments have a power to improve economic and social conditions which they don’t actually possess and that all that is needed is to replace one set of politicians who accept inequality by another set who claim that they don’t. Our argument is that what happens on the economic and social field is determined not by what governments want but by the blind workings of the economic laws of the profit system. In other words, it is not governments that control the way the economy works but the way the economy works that places limits on what governments can do and indeed, in the end, virtually dictates what they do. Governments exist to run the political side of the profit system but the profit system can only be run as a system in which priority has to be given to the profit-making. "Profits first” is a basic economic law that all governments must respect.

So any government, whatever its political colour or the promises and aspirations of its members, has to do this. This is why a Blair government will be no different in practice from the Tory government that has just been voted out, not that the Labour Party is against the profit system even in words.

Maybe you are too young to remember the last Labour government but we can assure you that, if there is a need to maintain or increase profit levels, the new Blair government will cut back spending on education and the NHS and will discourage trade-union action—just as the Callaghan government did and before that the Wilson government (which even imposed a statutory wage freeze which no Tory government has ever done). If you don’t believe us, just wait and see. — Editors.

Opportunity knocks (1996)

Claire Short and Peter Mandelson

TV Review from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the next General Election on us within a year or so the bourgeois political parties and the TV companies are already preparing themselves for what might be a nasty campaign. Nasty, that is, and bitterly contested, but totally meaningless. The news teams at the BBC and ITN know what is in store for an angry and bewildered working class and so do the current affairs programme-makers. The two primary features of the last campaign will almost certainly be present in the next one—muckraking peppered with vacuous political assertions with little or no basis in fact. While the last election was bad the next one will be closer still—and therefore worse still.

Peter Horrocks, editor of BBC2's Newsnight, has confessed to his exasperation and disgust at the main parties for their increasingly authoritarian and devious handling of the news media. The Tories have, of course been masters at this for years, but writing in the Parliamentary Review, Horrocks claims that the Labour Party has become even worse:

  "Labour's internal machine has an iron grip. As a broadcaster and believer in open political discussion, one deplores such authoritarianism. Faced with polls we can't rely on and politicians who are prepared to be controlled like puppets, what do we provide for our audiences?"

What indeed? As an example of Labour ‘'fixing" Horrocks cited the Harriet Harman school-opt-out affair when the Labour leadership strongly advised its MPs to stay away from the studios. Many who initially agreed to appear on Newsnight and other programmes to criticise Harman changed their minds after being warned off by the leadership and Labour spin doctors. If this is the case—as it almost certainly is—then the MPs in question are just as culpable as those who now direct their media appearances. The only reason they can have for their behaviour is that of hanging on to their jobs and of a desire to win an election by default.

On the ball

Luckily, the television news media—for once—do not seem prepared to take this lying down. After taking political beatings from both Labour and the Tories previously with numerous accusations of bias and collusion, there are signs of a fight-back. Horrocks in particular has warned that the media will turn its attention away from the spin doctors and their puppets towards "genuine free spirits” out of their grasp as the election draws near. Most interestingly of all for those who offer a genuine alternative to the bogus socialism of New Labour, Horrocks writes:

  "Expect to see alternative politics covered. Tony Blair will attempt to portray himself as candid and realistic, but it will, be carefully controlled, designed to give nothing away."

If Horrocks really means this and is not just making idle threats, this is encouraging, particularly so for groups like the Socialist Party. In fact, if Horrocks and others like him are looking for a genuine alternative to the sterile politics of the capitalist parties, they need look no further than in our direction. Who else offers a serious alternative to the market economy and can provide the democratic debate and argument on which news programmes thrive? The Socialist Party will be standing candidates at the next General Election and we are willing and able to provide representatives to comment on a wide range of issues, all of whom will take the opportunity to expose the trickery and shallowness of capitalist politicians. Lively, democratic debate is assured—what more can Peter Horrocks want than that?

In the meantime we have lots of other suggestions to make. In particular we can offer a line of questioning guaranteed to expose the Tory twits and Labour fakers which still dominate the news media and which is to be particularly recommended to those interviewers with a reputation for integrity and tenacity:

• Which problems that beset the market economy e.g. unemployment, crime, poverty, war are capable of solution within the system?
• Why are previously tried policies on all these fronts being put forward when they failed in the past?
• Which policies offered by any of the parties now haven’t been offered in some shape or form in the past, both here and abroad?
• If there are any, did they solve the problems they intended to solve?
• If so, give examples. If not, why not?

We should no doubt be prepared for a long period of silence when politicians are asked of their successes in solving the problems of capitalism for we all already know the answer—there haven’t been any, as the problems are still there. Once their egos have been pricked and their policies exposed, the real opportunity for sustained and informed TV debate on the issues will then be upon us. But paradoxically, silence, as far as the tepid professional politicians go at least, would still—as likely as not—be golden. And not just for socialists, for it is clear that the “service’’ they give to supporters of the market economy is an increasingly embarrassing one and is recognised as such.

Dave Perrin

Spot the balls (1997)

TV Review from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

If the election campaign proved anything it was that slick, well-produced TV is not necessarily the most interesting. Most of the election coverage was well done if not flawless in its use of presentational techniques, graphics and virtually seamless continuity. And yet much of it was still deathly boring and irrelevant. Indeed, despite its slickness, the specially extended BBC1 Nine O’clock Election News lost a whole tranche of viewers as the campaign progressed.

One of the few programmes to eschew such modern TV professionalism didn’t attract a terrifically large number of viewers either — mainly because it was up against soap operas and football — but Spot The Difference (Channel 4. 8pm, April 9) was almost unique in that it informed its viewers about things worth knowing. To that extent, it was more informative and watchable than almost anything else.

The presence of a small, insipid audience, poor programme structure and horrendous editing simply did not matter as the message was all. And the important message was this — that without forewarning it is virtually impossible to tell the difference between randomly selected passages on policy from any of the main parties of capitalism that dominate the political agenda. Even the most dedicated political anoraks, who have spent hour after hour poring over the party manifestos and policy statements, cannot do it with any degree of certitude.When the presenters plucked out a sound-bite or policy goal from the literature of the Tories. Labour or Liberal Democrats the most common reaction from the panellists was ’’well . . . it could be any of them really!"

Really saying something 

Although there is now an unprecedented emptiness about capitalist politics, it is not that the main parties are saying nothing at all. A lot of their pronouncements are just froth and bubble — but quite a bit of the time they are saying something. It is just that on most issues they are basically saying the same thing.

They all believe that the capitalist class (usually referred to simply as "business") creates wealth rather than legally steals it from those who do actually create it — the wage and salary earning working class.

They all believe that the free market and competition offers the most efficient and viable method of producing wealth ever conceived by humankind, despite the untold misery it has caused but can't do anything about.

They all believe in state repression of those who try to "buck" the system or who are denied access to wealth on the grounds that they are not part of "the business community", and who commit terrible crimes like joining trade unions to defend their meagre interests in the market place.

They all believe in the 
necessity of a "strong defence capability” to safeguard the interests of Britain and the British — a Britain where one person owns more wealth than nineteen of the rest of us put together on average and where the majority's stake in "the national interest" is little more than a huge mortgage and a second-hand car.

And they all believe that they — the guides and beneficent manipulators of our economic and moral interests are capable of bringing wealth and success to the mass of the population.

It is because of all this that a programme like Spot The Difference has its uses. Few but the most bigoted or ideologically brainwashed can now believe that there is any meaningful difference between the parties of the market economy. The downside is that such programmes do nothing to offer real hope, real encouragement or a real sense that things can be different. In the present political climate they merely reinforce the spread of cynicism and apathy among an already downhearted and dispirited working class.

It is precisely for this reason that journals like this — and those who read it — are so important. We do not constitute a huge political force and are not as yet a political pressure to be truly reckoned with — but we do offer one thing. A scientific and logically-arrived at view that is able to account for society as it is. and has a clear, exciting and practical vision of how it really could be. Without us it would indeed be a cynical, cold and miserable outlook for humanity. With us — and more importantly with you — organising for genuine change, there could yet be a ray of hope. As a well-known children's TV programme used to put it a few years back — get up. turn off the TV set, and go and do something less boring instead.

Dave Perrin

The Negative Midas Touch (1997)

TV Review from the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

BBC1's Panorama (8pm, 9 June) on the night before the first round of the Conservative leadership election went a good deal of the way towards explaining the Conservative Party’s historic and horrendous defeat a month or so earlier. Nick Robinson spent 40 minutes charting the Tory decline over the last five years examining Major's weak leadership, the ERM debacle, the tax rises, splits over Europe, sleaze and the challenge represented by a revitalised Labour Party under Blair.

What he didn't examine was quite how suspicious the majority of voters have demonstrated they are about the great political "project” of the last twenty years, ushered forward in Britain by the Tory right. This is the political project built on the premise that the market knows best, and its application by the Conservatives was one of the key and deciding factors in the huge Tory defeat.

This may, at first sight, seem paradoxical because self-evidently the Blairite Labour Party is in love with the free market too, with small caveats. This is what bamboozled Panorama into ignoring this popular rejection of the free market, but a closer look at the election and the years leading up to it would have demonstrated the truth of this proposition. This is because although New Labour did not campaign on an open programme of state capitalism like in 1983, neither did it campaign for the free market. Beyond the soundbites the Labour Party campaigned on very little at all and its most popular policies were little more than heavily dressed-up anti-free market rhetoric devoid of spending commitments.

It is quite possible that the Labour leadership does not particularly find the schools voucher system. GP fundholding, the NHS internal market and so on to be quite the idiocies they painted them as but they were crucially aware that these market reforms were deeply unpopular among the working class both as workers in those fields and as consumers of services.

Sighting the target

In fact, the Labour Party's position on the free market as conveyed by its leaders and campaigners was a superb example of audience targeting. Its most obvious free-market rhetoric and pro-big business stance was reserved for its growing number of admirers in the capitalist class, the people it is now having to "do business” with now it is in government. For the consumption of the working class, there was a rather different fare—pledges to curb the alleged excesses of the free market Tory years and to build a community of interests, a “one nation" vision of inclusion rather than exclusion. In this way the Labour Party distanced itself from the unfettered free market just enough to convince its target voters to switch to them without at the same time frightening them off with grandiose revenue-raising proposals or suchlike.

The more discerning on 1 May were not seduced by this two-faced posture and turnout was the lowest for years, but then again so was the vote for the unashamed party of the free market.

Of course there are those in the Tory Party who believe (rather like the Bennites did some years ago about their project) that the only problem has been that their medicine for capitalism’s ills has not been administered in great enough quantity. As the Tory leadership contest has shown hardly anybody with brain cells still functioning believes this nonsense.

Instead politics has reached a situation (and Britain is only one example of it) whereby the free market is generally viewed by most people with suspicion bordering on hostility while the overt interventionism and state ownership of the past is distrusted and feared in equal measure. In this scenario there appears to be only one short-term solution and the Labour Party found it just as Clinton's Democrats did—attack everything that has gone before and failed, whether state capitalism or private capitalism and hope that something more substantial than rhetoric will come along to fill the resultant void. In other words, a “new" capitalism where the old private/state and left/right divisions have been left behind. A capitalism where persistent old problems require bright new solutions which must be there in the minds of the great and the good . . .  somewhere.

But these ideas about superseding the old divisions seem remarkably sparse and those that are around tend to cost big money. While the Tory Party fights over the spoils of its defeat everything Blair touches turns to gold at present. But at an ideological level, deep beneath the political spin. Prime Minister Blair has been dealt the hand that capitalism deals all its leaders blessed with momentary popularity out of the popular distaste for the effects of the market, including Thatcher and Major before him, is the negative Midas touch, where sooner or alter, everything the market touches, including its political "masters", turns to shit, no matter what the rhetoric or political dressing.

Dave Perrin

Happy Birthday? (1998)

Book Reviews from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British General Election of 1997 by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh (MacMillan, 1997) and Labour’s Landslide edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge (Manchester University Press, 1997).

One year on from 1 May last year, the hullabaloo has subsided and something more like boo-hoo has started. These two books, however, chronicle New Labour’s climax, not the messy post-coital depression we have been living with since. They are useful in that the demonstrate the fickleness of the British working class’s love affair with the Labour Party, and amply demonstrate its underlying worries about Labour’s suitability for the marital home.

Both expand on their findings that the main reason the working class decided to embark on an affair with Labour was the regular beatings it had been taking from its previous paramour. Labour was wanted primarily for what it wasn’t, not what it was. Most significantly, less than 31 percent of the electorate voted Labour into power last May, despite its “landslide” victory, this being largely because of the extremely low turnout. This, historically, is a low winning share of the vote and actually lower than that managed by the Conservatives under John Major in 1992.

Butler and Kavanagh’s study—Butler has been producing such analyses of General Elections for decades—is typically rigorous and thorough, well researched and with few mistakes. Possibly its most interesting chapter is the one on the press and how Labour managed to win over the affections of Wapping and Fleet Street (which helped avoid the press's anti-Labour excesses of the previous election). Another feature highlighted was the lack of success of those candidates who played the race card (such as Nicholas Budgen in Wolverhampton) and the relative lack of hostility to ethnic minority candidates generally.

Fascinatingly, some of the most bizarre constituency results last year were produced in fights between ethnic minority candidates themselves, such as in Bradford West and in Bethnal Green and Bow, the latter being where the local Bengali community put its traditional pro-Labour loyalties behind it to produce a six-percent swing to the Conservative Bengali candidate and against Labour’s Oona King, a “mixed-race” Afro-Caribbean Jew.

Where the white population has previously elevated the importance of “race” beyond considerations of class politics (or anything else), it is now the ethnic minority population that seems to be doing it. Though in some ways understandable, it is still no more justified for that. For if the 1997 election demonstrated anything it was that a confused and ideologically rootless working class is one that is most prone to the slick blandishments of handsome young spin doctors and their pet vultures.

Dave Perrin

Blogger's Note:

See here for an explanation for the above corrected version.

Before you vote — what we ask you to consider (1997)

From the April 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all the concessions from capitalism that workers have fought for and won over the years the right to vote is potentially the most important. But simply being able to vote isn’t enough, it’s what we do with it that really counts.

We are told that we live in a democracy. In 1914 and 1939 we were told that that democracy was threatened and that it was necessary for working class people from this country to take up arms against workers from other countries to preserve our freedom and our democratic way of life. In between, of course, there have been numerous other lesser occasions when the people who run the country told us it was in our interests to go out and kill workers from some other place. So we are free people enjoying a democratic way of life that ensures freedom for all?

Does this mean that the parent(s) of the nearly four million children enduring life on Income Support are simply exercising their democratic right to see their children forced to live mean, pinched lives?

Are the unemployed just not interested in availing of their democratic right to take up the available jobs that will offer them the financial ability to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives? Are the homeless and the slum dwellers not interested in their democratic right, their freedom, to live in decent homes?

Are the 60% of the population of Britain reflected in recent opinion polls who think the world their children will have to live in will be even worse than at present, intent on using their freedom and their democratic right to fabricate such a world for their children?

These are really silly questions. Obviously the impoverished, the unemployed, the homeless, and the millions of workers performing degrading and low-paid work along with the millions of elderly people and the sick and infirm, in fact all whose lives are demeaned because of denial or the frustration of their reasonable expectations would prefer things to be different.

If our vaunted democracy is an effective instrument for the solution of our problems then those we cited, the people whose lives are blighted by one or more aspects of poverty, can rejoice that following the 1st of May of this year, at latest, their problems are over! Surely no one who has the the right and the democratic means to abolish the conditions which restrict and degrade them, which distracts in every possible way from their full enjoyment of life, will deliberately vote for the continuation of their misery!

Unfortunately, what is called freedom and democracy in the present form of society does not empower the overwhelming majority of people to resolve their poverty problems. The freedom and democracy that men and women killed and died for has always been an illusion conjured up by the political agents of capitalism and the hired hacks of the media. The fact is that our democratic rights’ are largely limited to our right to vote in elections.

Potentially this is an invaluable right and one that is denied to people is some countries. However, while we have this most important democratic right we are at present just as impotent when it comes to resolving our social problems as are workers in countries that do not enjoy our 'democratic rights’.

The freedom to vote of itself is not democracy; real democracy includes the right of every human being to the material basis of a full and happy life. What we currently have is only part of the democratic equation but it is vital insofar as we can use it to complete that equation.

What you are being offered

Let us put the question directly to you, the reader: assuming that like most people your life is restricted by one or more social problems — which are essentially poverty problems originating in your position as a member of the working class — do you really believe that you can change your condition by voting for any of the three parties that, realistically, have any chance of wielding political influence in the next parliament?

If you think so then you have not been listening to the politicians. Tories, New Labour and Liberal Democrats are in agreement with regard to what is needed to tackle the grim social problems facing Britain today: more investment in the public services. This, of course, is an oversimplification but it is true that in capitalist society money is the essential mechanism for movement. The source of public funding is, of course, taxation which, however it is presented, is ultimately a charge on capital and in today’s world of multi-national capitalism high taxation can result in job losses and the need for even more money to be paid out to increased numbers of unemployed.

With the exception of the Lib-Dems, whose poor electoral fortunes can allow them to be extravagant to the tune of an extra penny in the pound on income tax, specifically designed to improve the educational quality of ‘British’ wage-slaves, both New Labour and the Tories claim that it is not their intention to impose tax increases on a loot-satiated British capitalism. The intention of the three main political parties is to encourage investment in jobs primarily as the means of lowering public costs by reducing the bill for unemployment benefit and increasing workers’ national insurance contributions to the Exchequer.

The down-side of such a policy is that it is being universally pursued throughout all the nations of world capitalism, indeed, the viciously competitive ‘job creation’ market now requires the expenditure of vast sums of public money (which off-sets economies elsewhere in the system). More relevant to the working class is the fact that wage labour is a commodity and, like any other component of the profit system, is most attractive when it is cheap!

World conditions

Government ministers, like Major and his cabinet colleagues today, are quick to accept credit for perceived economic improvements. The implications of this claim, which is never questioned by the media ‘experts’, is that governments can exercise control over economic affairs — which, of course is the basis of a political party’s claim on the voter.

But if governments can control the economy, if they can effect improvement, then, conversely, they must be accountable for the endless economic problems that bedevil capitalism! But when capitalism is in crisis, when poverty is aggravated by mass unemployment and its chain reaction throughout the economy, governments of all political hues are quick to disclaim responsibility and argue that the problems arise from ‘world conditions’!

Effectively, then, when you vote for a political party that accepts capitalism you are placing your trust in capitalism which, in turn, means that your hopes for the future are dependent on the vicissitudes of a system of economic anarchy that is patently outside the control even of the capitalist class.

The bad news is that, with the exception of the Socialist Party who are running candidates only in five constituencies, every other party contesting the forthcoming elections stand for capitalism. The almost identical policies of New Labour and the Tories is a reflection of the fact that, while New Labour ar favourites, either may have to face up to the reality of government within the restraints of capitalism. Among the others are a selection of ‘socialists’, from the various Trotskyist factions to Scargill’s re-incarnation of the Labour Party. None of these latter parties or organisations will offer a real alternative to capitalism ; what they will present are various re-hashes of the old, failed reformist policies which take no account whatsoever of the realities of the present economic system.

For the present, our role in the elections is that of making more people aware that there is an alternative to capitalism; aware that they can use the limited democracy available to bring about a democratic revolution that will sweep away capitalism and introduce a system in which the resources of society will be owned in common and used solely to provide the goods and services that people require.

That is what we mean by Socialism: the institution of a society that will not be inhibited by the stupendous waste associated with the extraction of profit for a few from the productive and distributive process. The concept of cost will be a thing of the past and the idea that people should endure poverty in any shape or form simply to ensure that a relatively small minority of parasites can amass wealth far beyond what they could consume in a hundred lifetimes, will become an incredulous legend.

Socialism requires thinking about; it is a pre-eminently logical approach to the organisation of our affairs. But from within the madhouse of capitalism, where it is reasonable for people to starve to death while food is destroyed to preserve prices and profits, the idea of the world's resources being used in the service of humanity as a whole may, initially, be hard to comprehend.

The impending election does offer us real choice we can, by voting for any of the parties that favour capitalism, continue to endorse the lunacy of a system that demeans and degrades most people or we can consider if Socialism offers a credible alternative. If you have had enough of capitalism, if you want a change to real democracy, then you must join us to ensure that next time you have a democratic choice.

Richard Montague

Greasy Pole: Naming the Day (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Will he, or won’t he? Should he, or shouldn’t he? Can he or can’t he? All over the country millions of people will be asking these questions, agonising in sympathy with John Major as he grapples with a historically vital dilemma. Should he call a general election in the near future—this summer, for example—or should he wait until his government has run its full term in 1997?

Advice for him will come thick and fast, to Downing Street, Chequers, Huntingdon or wherever he may be. Some of it will doubtlessly come from Tory MPs who sit nervously on vulnerable majorities. There will be much reference to precedent—to Wilson’s misplaced confidence in 1970, Heath’s misreading of the political situation in 1974, Callaghan leaving it late in 1979 . . .  All of this will have a common theme. The timing of an election is all-important, in fact it can make the difference between winning and losing. People who vote are so fragile in their political knowledge, have such puny memories, are so pliant in their intentions, that they can be easily induced by promises and deceptions into changing their minds about which way they vote. So with a bit of clever calculation, some well-crafted bribes and a canny sense of timing, any government can win its way back to power—again and again and again. Even a government like John Major’s, which day-after-day is exposed for its impotence and cynicism and contempt for the workers.

Interest rates
For example the Chancellor of the Exchequer has recently announced some reductions in the base rate—the last one on 1 January. This is seen as good news, as a promise that soon the economy will boom, unemployment will reduce, everyone will be happier and more prosperous. There is no factual reason for workers to think like that; reality is that whether interest rates are high or low has no significant effect on our living standards.

But reducing base rates is seen as good news for the economy and so for people's welfare and so for the Tory Party. As the Guardian put it: "the intense political pressure on the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, to boost the government’s fortunes was underlined yesterday when he brushed aside Bank of England misgivings and cut interest rates for the second successive month.” Bank of England governor Eddie George is, said the Guardian, ". . .  plainly wary that it is the political timetable, of an election in the next 15 months, which is governing the Chancellor's monetary stance . . ." Another one to be wary was Labour's shadow chancellor Gordon Brown, who sulkily tried to play down the change in the rate. In fact, whichever side of this bogus argument they took, both Labour and Conservative were agreed that there are votes in the matter of interest rates and they both want to grab as many of them as they can.

Falkland factor
What is important about this bogus argument is what it tells us about how the parties of capitalism regard elections and the people who vote in them and how to manipulate the whole timing to their own advantage. The government of the day treats an election as a time to try to divert attention away from its obvious failure to do anything about the problems characteristic of capitalist society and towards what it represents as its successes That is why the government tries so hard to convince us that people who are suffering the more extreme poverty do so because of some intrinsic personal fallibility while at the same time they tell us about how many fraudulent claimants of state benefits their investigators have uncovered. That is why in 1983 the Thatcher government submerged the memories of the problems they met in 1981 in a neurotic, reactionary hysteria as Thatcher handbagging the Argentinians. (Of course at the time she did get some help from the Labour Party with its splits and its election of Michael Foot as leader . . .)

By the same token whenever Tory ministers review conditions in Britain in 1996 they do so on the assumption that all reasonable people know things are getting better and better, everyone getting more prosperous, more healthy, more secure. Crime is falling day-by-day. If we believe enough of this often enough the Tories will be encouraged to give us a chance to show how grateful we are for all they have done for us by voting for them in an election.

Stress
Except that it is not quite like that. For one thing Britain is fast gaining a reputation as the sweatshop of Europe, as workers are forced to put in longer hours under the stress of unemployment. This kind of pressure produces its own problems. apart from physical illness such as cancer and heart disease (according to the Health and Safety Executive, stress-related sickness results in 90 million days absence from work annually). There is also a human cost, in mental breakdown, broken families and. in some cases, suicide.

None of this will be highlighted by Major, when he finally tells us the date of the election. Neither will he address the question of why, if his government had been so successful, he has to worry about the timing of the election. Why can’t he just leave the success to speak for itself and let his government stay in power for its full term, confident that the success will bring in the votes?

Perhaps he knows how impotent his government—like any other—really is to affect the course of capitalism and it does to the lives of human beings. Perhaps he knows that the timing of elections is a massive exercise in cynicism, which reveals the contempt which capitalism’s parties have for the workers and the support they regularly give to this social system. There is an effective response this. The voters—the working class—can realise the power they hold to radically change society, to make parties like Labour and Conservative a sordid irrelevance. If that happens John Major will be relieved of the stress of choosing a date for polling, like a gambler hoping he’s on a lucky streak.

Ivan 

Activity and news from the constituencies (1997)

Party News from the April 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jarrow and Easington

North East Branch is to contest two seats at the coming General Election—Jarrow and Easington, where the socialist candidates are, respectively, John Bissett and Steve Colborn. In recent months members have held public meetings, set up literature stalls, carried out mail drops and embarked upon an intensive letter-writing campaign to the local press.

On the streets we have had much verbal support and many we have spoken to agree with our ideas. One thing is certain—when the Socialist Party contests the Jarrow and Easington seats, few serious voters will be unfamiliar with our name or our standpoint.

All said, there is much work to be done in both parliamentary constituencies as both are traditional Labour Party strongholds with large majorities. Furthermore, both constituencies have suffered much in recent years through Tory cut-backs and many voters will be looking forward to the election in the hope that a Labour victory will mean life improvement.

Socialists, however, are aware that no matter which of the mainstream parties wins, it will not alter the fact that we live in a world racked by poverty and insecurity and subject always to the worst exigencies of the profit system. The establishment of world socialism remains the only secure future for humanity.

If you would like us to hammer this message home to the electorates of Jarrow and Easington and can offer your help or support, no matter how small the contribution we d be delighted to hear from you.

Offers of help to:John Bissett,Phone: 0191 4890253,Tim Kilgallon,Phone: 0191 2528704Harland Wears,Phone: 0191 5170470.

Livingston

The Socialist standard-bearer in this constituency, to the west of Edinburgh, is Matt Culbert. He is standing against the Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, and other supporters of the profit system such as the Tories, the Liberals and the Tartan reformists of the SNP.

In a sense this is a follow-up to Edinburgh Branch’s activity during the 1994 Euro-election campaign when the Socialist Party contested the Lothians constituency which includes Livingston as well as Edinburgh itself.

Preparatory activity has involved making contacts and leafleting in Livingston itself which is the biggest town in the constituency whose shopping centre attracts people from the whole of the surrounding area. Local members have also distributed leaflets in West Calder and other ex-mining villages.

Offers of help to:Matt Culbert,53 Falcon Brae, Ladywell,West Lothian, EH54 6UWPhone: 01506 462 359.

Vauxhall

The Vauxhall constituency in Lambeth was chosen as the parliamentary seat that the Socialist Party should contest in the London area, where our candidate is Richard Headicar. The Party's Head Office is based in Lambeth and members can easily gather there to contribute to the campaign.

The election activity was organised by representatives from all the London branches to co-ordinate the work of socialists across the capital. A barbecue was held last summer to help to raise funds, and in the autumn we had two debates; first with Tory Euro-sceptic Sir Teddy Taylor on the European issue, and then against a local Liberal Democrat councillor. Whilst all this was going on we leafleted as much of the constituency as possible to publicise the campaign.

Last November we had the opportunity to contest a local council by-election in the constituency. The Clapham Town ward was vacated and it was our good fortune that Head Office came within its boundaries. It was therefore an excellent chance to gain experience in contesting elections and to introduce ourselves to the Lambeth Returning Officer. Head Office was turned into an attractive base where people could wander in and see our election activity for themselves. Lessons learned from the experience have prepared us well for the General Election.

In the final run-up to the General Election date we plan to have more public meetings and in particular point out the shallowness of Labour’s position—the party that appears most likely to win power. We intend to try to publicise our campaign in the London media as much as possible and to have a regular literature stall in the constituency. Postering, canvassing, and more leafleting are also all on our agenda.

Offers of help to:Gareth Thomas,Phone 0171-622 3811.

Glasgow Kelvin

Our election campaign began last year with thousands of leaflets being delivered to households in parts of this very spread-out constituency. We set up our literature stand on Saturday afternoons during the summer and autumn in the heart of the constituency and displayed posters announcing our intention to contest the General Election.

This year, the campaign resumed with a public meeting entitled “The Challenge of Socialism", and another one to which we will invite the other candidates to state their case is being held this month (see meetings page for details).

Our literature stand will be visiting different parts of the constituency throughout the campaign and hundreds of posters will be displayed. Fortunately, Militant in Scotland will be contesting the election as the “Scottish Socialist Alliance”, so voters in Kelvin (and Livingston) will be spared the sight of ballot papers listing two “Socialist Party” candidates! The Socialist candidate is Vic Vanni.

For further details and offers of help:Tel: 0141 649 9338.

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NOT THE SOCIALIST PARTY

Readers in a number of places outside Scotland may find that there is someone standing in their constituency calling themselves a “Socialist Party” candidate.

As will immediately become clear from reading their election manifesto with its long-list of reform demands, such candidates have nothing to do with us. They have in fact been put up by Militant, a Trotskyist group which has been in decline since being expelled from the Labour Party by Neil Kinnock and which is trying to relaunch itself under our name.

They don’t even stand for Socialism, but for nationalising everything and all of us becoming employed by the state, i.e. state capitalism.

Those in these constituencies who want socialism should not (of course) vote for these false “Socialist Party” candidates but should, as usual, write the word “SOCIALISM” across their ballot paper.