Press Exposure: Bloody Awful (1995)

Beaverbrook by David Low.

The Press Exposure column from the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bloody Awful

It must have worked wonders for the sales of the Daily Express when, in the 1960s, no less an expert than the Duke of Edinburgh told some people in Latin America that it was "a bloody awful newspaper”. After all, any man on the promenade in Rhyl or in the back streets of Derby must have sensed that a newspaper which earns that sort of description from a massively boorish social parasite like the Duke must have something to be said for it.

In fact at that time Prince Philip seemed to be locked in unceasing conflict with much of die British press, who gleefully reported all his public relations blunders. For example there was the time he genially soaked an assembly of hacks on a lawn at the Chelsea Flower Show by turning on the sprinkler. The antagonism became so intense that, in the midst of the Profumo affair, the Sunday Express published a remarkable article which, after recounting some of the Duke’s more colourful criticisms of the press, warned that unless he held his tongue the Express newspapers might find it their unavoidable duty as a responsible newspaper serving the great British public to reveal some acutely embarrassing details of his private life.

Empathy

Those were heady days for the Express which, under the eccentric ownership of Lord Beaverbrook, could take comfort from a circulation of about 4¼ million and a reputation for employing some famous journalists. The paper's success was said to spring from their natural empathy with the sort of people to be found in Rhyl or Derby (other papers, of course, had a direct line with passengers on buses in Clapham; all of them seemed to suffer from identical bigotries and delusions). It is unlikely that the Duke would bother to criticise the Express now when its circulation hovers precariously on 1¼ million after a fall of about 6.5 percent over the past year.

Beaverbrook bought the Daily Express for £ 17,500 in 1916 and a couple of years later started up its stablemate on Sundays. To say that he stamped his—rather objectionable—personality on the paper would be an understatement, although he did not baulk [balk?] at employing journalists like Michael Foot and Tom Driberg who had political disagreements with him. He was not always frank about his motives. In 1927 he pretended to give up his interest in the papers by passing his controlling interest over to his son. In 1954 it was the Beaverbrook Foundation, supposedly too purely objective to be interested in any sordid political ambitions, which was said to have been given the ownership. He was more open when he gave his evidence to the Royal Commission on the Press in 1947: "I run the paper purely for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive."

Harlots

Of course other people saw Beaverbrook’s motives in a rather different light We have already mentioned how wounded were the delicate sensitivities of Prince Philip. He was only one of the more recent examples. In 1930 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, smarting under some particularly savage attacks in the papers, included Beaverbrook in the press barons who aimed at “. . . power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."

Well, whatever else may be said about this particular harlot no one can accuse her of having a knack for infallible forecasts. In May 1938 the Daily Express assured its readers that Germany would not seize Czechoslovakia. In September that year it declared on its front page that "Britain will not be involved in a European war this year, or next year either.” Staunchly supportive of the Tory Party, it ran a typically flamboyant selective and disastrous campaign in the 1945 general election. Time will tell whether it got it right when it supported Major in the recent Tory leadership election.

The long drawn out decline of the Daily Express set in after the death of Beaverbrook and has continued through several changes of ownership and management. After Beaverbrook there was his son Max Aitken whose talents as a fighter pilot and a playboy did not extend to running a newspaper. There was Jocelyn Stevens who was sacked by Lord Matthews who ran the great combine Trafalgar House. Stevens, who was a millionaire merchant banker, maintained the Express tradition for getting it wrong when he said in 1987 that the stock market fall should be ignored as it was only a computer blip. The present Managing Director, Andrew Cameron, recently announced an economy drive in which 220 workers would lose their jobs ". . . to put us into fighting shape. (The cuts) are about securing the future."

Poverty

There may be people—in Rhyl, in Derby—who will ask what shape, what future, what security? In other places too. In July the MP for Manchester Gorton, Gerald Kaufman, told the Commons about how some of the people in that city live. Taking the national mortality rate as 100, in Manchester it is 163 for men and 148 for women. The rate for stillbirths in England and Wales is 4.2 percent, in Manchester it is 6.4 percent. For infant mortality Manchester rates 8.4 percent against 6.5 percent for the rest of Britain. These are symptoms of the extremes of poverty, of the stresses of unemployment which force down the wages of whose who are in work; Kaufman mentioned one man who works 64 and 72 hours a week whose hourly rate of pay has been cut from £3.02 to £2.35.

The poverty endured by these people is extreme in comparison but not too exceptional in its nature. Rather, it is conventional to capitalism, part of the process which produces rich people like Lords Beaverbrook, Matthews and Stevens we are supposed to admire and poor people, in Rhyl, Derby. Manchester or wherever, we are encouraged to despise. The Express may be a bloody awful newspaper but there are no bloody good ones and it speaks for a bloody dreadful social system.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: New (?) Hope (?) For Labour (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

For any enduring Labour Party hopefuls the recent death of Gerald Kaufman summoned up some of the most painful memories. Because all the obituaries for the late MP for Manchester Gorton reminded us that one of his grandest, most memorable achievements was when he ridiculed the Labour manifesto for the 1983 general election, when they were led by Michael Foot and went down to Margaret Thatcher who was still in triumph over the Falklands war, as The Longest Suicide Note In History. The Party then was offering, as a cure-all for the historically typical chaos of militant capitalism, delusions about abolishing the House of Lords and renationalising the likes of British Aerospace and the Post Office. It was no longer suffering the particular conceits of the likes of Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams who were gathered into the Social Democratic Party which was virtually wiped out in that election.

Crises

Now the Labour Party has all that behind them but it still offers its persistently weary ideas on matters such as unemployment, poverty, an embattled National Health Service. And it has nurtured another, equally impotent, bunch of tricksters such as Hilary Benn, Owen Smith, and Yvette Cooper. It has to be expected that from this swamp of despair there should emerge the occasional personality who offers their version of those exhausted options for what are in effect the same obdurate crises as bedevilled the authors of that infamous suicide note. The most recent of these is Sir Keir Starmer who is the MP for Holborn and St. Pancras  – who does not welcome being reminded that his success at his former job of Director of Public Prosecutions was rewarded with a knighthood. Now he is being proffered as Labour’s new hope in spite of his lack of ministerial experience.

And does his name offer anything new? Keir is among the least likely to be used by newly-doting parents. Most famously it was the middle name for the first ever Labour Member of Parliament – none other than James Keir Hardie who, apart from being leader of some striking Ayrshire coal miners was also the MP for West Ham South, and prominent in the formation of the Independent Labour Party. His mother was a nurse and his father a ships carpenter; they eventually moved to Govan where they struggled to survive on his miserly wages. When he was seven, Keir started a life of exploited employment, as a messenger boy for a steamship line, which prevented him attending school. However his father taught him enough about the life of a worker struggling in capitalism to organise a pacifist strike at the start of the First World War. He died in 1915, at the age of 59. It was in tribute to Hardie that Starmer’s parents, keen members of the Labour Party, gave him that  name –although he says that he has never actually discussed the matter with them.

Mother

Starmer’s mother has suffered for some 50 years with Still’s disease, a condition which for the past five years has prevented her speaking and  caused her to have a leg amputated. ‘She has been a massive fighter all her life. She’s been in high dependency units for as long as I can remember. It was something I grew up with. I certainly have seen the NHS from the inside’ was how Starmer has described her suffering and its effect on him. In his legal career, in 1997 he advised Helen Steel and David Morris in the infamous McLibel case brought against them by McDonalds. He was made a Queens Counsel in 2002 and then, in 2008, reached the heights of Director of Public Prosecutions. In 2005 he won a case in the House of Lords which prevented torture being used to collect evidence presented in court. He later represented to the Privy Council a number of appellants who had been sentenced to death in states in the Caribbean and Africa, which led to the abolition of that mandatory penalty in those countries.

Holborn And St. Pancras

By 1 November 2013 there did not seem a lot more Starmer could do to impress himself on the work of Public Prosecutions so he left the job. ‘Well, I’m back in private practice’ he told the BBC News ‘I’m rather enjoying having some free time and I’m considering a number if options’. One of these was concerned with the chaos and back-stabbing in the Labour Party and all those hopefuls who had so briefly toyed with the idea of winning the Leadership. In particular there was the juicy prospect of the parliamentary constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras, where the long-standing, inveterately wise-cracking Frank Dobson intended to retire. Starmer had not been hesitant in revealing his ambition: ‘Being in opposition is pants …we achieve nothing other than minor changes to what the Conservatives are doing. The only way we can change things is by being in power’’. When Holborn and St. Pancras went to the polls in the 2015 election Starmer romped home with 52.9 per cent of the votes and a majority of 17,048. It was not long before he was raised to the Shadow Cabinet covering the Home Officer Minister and then, after a brief spell among the ever-seething group of Jeremy Corbyn’s enemies, come out as Labour’s participant in the in-fighting over Brexit with all that entailed: ‘I’m really glad to be in, to have the opportunity to hold the government to account on some of the biggest decisions for probably 50 years is an incredible privilege.’

Immigration

One response to this was from Harriet Harman: ‘It’s just as well we’ve got Keir (and his) wisdom, expertise and ability to solve insoluble problems’. But the reality of this did not entirely meet with Starmer’s admirers although it might have been comforting to some UKIP theorists licking their wounds after their recent by-election disasters. In September last year He told Politico that any new pact with the rest of the EU must include ‘ . . . some control over who comes to work in the U.K.’because immigration has been ‘too high’ and that the Labour Party must support ‘. . . some change to the way freedom of movement rules operate’. So we should not be impressed by Starmer and his ‘wisdom’ as a future manager of the ‘insoluble problems’ of this property society. As a politician he offers nothing we have not already experienced, leaving us bewildered and exasperated.

Ivan

The "Labour Movement" (1967)

Book Review from the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Left edited by Gerald Kaufman (Anthony Blond, 18s.)

This book is a collection of essays by supporters of the Labour Party, mainly journalists, on what is called "the labour movement": constituency Labour parties, trade unions, the co-ops, the left-wing press, the "fringe left" and so on. The essays are of varying quality and interest.

In recent years Labour has shed its old confused ideology (trade unionism, nationalism, anti-imperialism) and become "a classless, radical, pragmatic Party". Roy Hattersley, now a junior Minister, describes the changeover which was completed in the years after the 1959 defeat: the determination to get power at all costs; the jettisoning of old slogans because they didn't appeal to voters; the employment of public relations techniques to catch votes.

Efforts were concentrated on what came to be known as 'target voters', that tiny percentage of the electorate whose decision to vote for one party or the other (and whose decision to vote at all) can be changed by persuasion and propaganda. Their habits, their hopes, and their aspirations were projected as the keynotes of Labour's campaign.

Could Labour's opportunism be stated more frankly?

Over 70 per cent of Labour's money comes from the Unions which raise the money through a political levy. All members of affiliated trade unions pay this levy unless they can be bothered to contract out. Many don't bother. Many, perhaps most, don't know they are financing the Labour Party (and organisations like Anti-Apartheid and the British Committee for Peace in Vietnam). In other words, much of Labour's money is got by subterfuge. Yet one writer discussing this issue on connection with the co-ops, tries to contrast the Tory and Labour attitude to the matter:

Though the Tory Part has never shown qualms in accepting money from companies who give their individual shareholders no option in the matter, it would not be in accordance with the democratic principles of the Labour Party to act in the same cavalier manner.

This is hypocritical to say the least. If Labour is so concerned with democratic principle on this matter, why did they, so soon after getting power in 1945, replace contracting-in by contracting out? If they are so sure that no-one is giving money to their party through apathy, ignorance or fear, why don't they restore contracting-in? Or, are they afraid of what might happen to their funds?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain gets a brief mention in an essay on "the fringe left" by Llew Gardner. Gardner has the illusion, obviously inherited from his days as a member of the so-called Communist Party, that:

Involved in a strike, an SPGB member is likely to stand up to tell his fellow workers that their wage claim is pointless and that they must unite to destroy the capitalist system.

While it is true that Socialists always draw attention to the ownership of the means of production by a privileged class, the Socialist Party does not say that strikes are pointless. We have always urged workers to keep up the struggle for higher wages and better working conditions all the time, under Labour as well as Tory governments, in war-time as well as peace-time. In fact, no other party has given such unqualified and consistent support to this economic side of the class struggle. Gardner's lie is particularly insolent from a member of the strike-breaking Labour Party who now writes for the Daily Express.

And talking of insolence, how dare the publishers ask 18 shillings for a mere 180 pages?

Adam Buick