Editorial: The capitalist witches’ brew that led to Grenfell (2024)

Editorial from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The final report of the Inquiry into the Grenfell Fire makes devastating reading.

There was an active lack of interest in fire safety at the heart of central government:

‘In the years between the fire at Knowsley Heights in 1991 and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017 there were many opportunities for the government to identify the risks posed by the use of combustible cladding panels and insulation, particularly to high-rise buildings, and to take action in relation to them. Indeed, by 2016 the department was well aware of those risks, but failed to act on what it knew’ (Executive Summary (tinyurl.com/GrenfellExec), p. 7).

Then the most damning paragraph of the report:

‘One very significant reason why Grenfell Tower came to be clad in combustible materials was systematic dishonesty on the part of those who made and sold the rainscreen cladding panels and insulation products. They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market. In the case of the principal insulation product used on Grenfell Tower, Celotex RS5000, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) was complicit in that strategy’ (p. 10).

A regulatory body had been captured by the construction industry:

‘The National House Building Council (NHBC) […] failed to ensure that its building control function remained essentially regulatory and free of commercial pressures. It was unwilling to upset its own customers and the wider construction industry by revealing the scale of the use of combustible insulation in the external walls of high-rise buildings, contrary to the statutory guidance’ (p.14).

The local authority, Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), managed the property at arm’s length through a Tenants Management Organisation (TMO):

‘RBKC and the TMO were jointly responsible for the management of fire safety at Grenfell Tower. The years between 2009 and 2017 were marked by a persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people. […] RBKC was responsible for overseeing the TMO’s activities, not monitoring its operations on a day-to-day basis, but its oversight of the TMO’s performance was weak and fire safety was not subject to any key performance indicator’ (p. 16).

The TMO allowed an unqualified person to be the fire safety manager, who carried out substandard assessments:

‘The demands of managing fire safety were viewed by the TMO as an inconvenience rather than an essential aspect of its duty to manage its property carefully’ (p. 17).

The TMO ‘wanted to reduce the cost’ by using the specific type of cladding panel that failed so appallingly but were badly advised by an incompetent firm of architects. In fact:

‘[not] one of those involved in the design of the external wall or the choice of materials acted in accordance with the standards of a reasonably competent person in their position’ (p. 19).

Here, then, were the ingredients of the capitalist witches’ brew that caused Grenfell: a housing market largely geared towards the wealthy, with workers squeezed into as little land and living space as possible. Politicians driven by an ideological aversion to regulation and a desire to please the construction industry. A local authority holding its tenants (many of whom were vulnerable people on benefits) at arm’s length as an unwelcome cost not to be listened to. A regulator captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate. Builders concerned with growing their profits over the wellbeing of the people who will live in the buildings. Unscrupulous manufacturers willing to gamble with people’s lives to sell a few more units of their goods, knowing profit-hungry builders wouldn’t look too closely and would cut them in on the action.

Grenfell was not a mistake but the result of a combination of regular occurrences under capitalism.

Not—so—bon appetit (1989)

From the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

One thing is clear in all the fuss and confusion about salmonella in eggs, listeria in cheese and BSE in beef: the statements of, and advice from, ministers have not been fit for human consumption. There is nothing new in that: at the time when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl passed over Britain, letting fall its lethal chemicals with the rain onto the sheep of North Wales and Cumberland, the then Minister of Agriculture was self-sacrificially emphatic about how harmless it was. He declared that he was going to spend that week-end “enthusiastically" eating British lamb. So far he has not grown two heads, but evidence has emerged that the meat in those parts was dangerous to eat then and will remain so years after the fall-out.

Although the most recent row became public with Edwina Currie's famous remark about how widespread salmonella is in egg production, that was by no means the beginning of the affair. Currie's reputation for valuing career-sustaining self publicity over facts made her vulnerable to the kind of assault which the farming interests launched on her. When we saw TV pictures of adorably fluffy chicks on their way to being gassed because of her ill-considered words, her fate was sealed.

But anyone with the most cursory acquaintance with what passes for farming and methods of the food industry had known for a long time about the active threats to health which they represented. There has been no shortage of information, available to anyone who wanted it, about the effects on cattle and on the people who eat beef of pumping the poor beasts full of hormones, not to cure them of some disease but to make them more copious producers of milk and beef. Yet another hormone — bovine somatropin — is now under test, although an unusually sensitive National Farmers' Union seems to be opposed to its use, presumably because they are anxious to avoid more bad publicity for their members.

Battery hens — quite apart from the sickening conditions in which they spend their brief, wretched lives — have long been known to be a source of salmonella poisoning, made worse by the fact that they have commonly been fed on the already diseased remains of slaughtered hens. That is why there have been warnings, albeit muted, about the need to cook chickens thoroughly and to avoid re-heating them.

So why didn't the government simply publicise the whole issue, a long time ago? Why didn't they tell us not to touch any intensively reared meat, or eggs from battery hens, or soft cheese? Or, more effective, why didn't they rush through parliament some sort of legislation to outlaw the production methods which cause the illnesses?

We saw the answers to these questions in the Currie affair. Intensive food production was developed because it is more profitable than the old, slower, less certain methods. The big drugs companies have enormous investments tied up in the production of the chemicals which the farmers shove into their animals. If enough people become scared of buying the food, demand for it can collapse to the point at which it becomes unprofitable to produce it. That may save a few lives and prevent a lot of very distressing sickness but it would play havoc with the profits of the farmers and the drug companies and that is not what the government is there for. Governments exist, not to look after the wellbeing of what is called the consumer — workers who spend their wages on the things they need to re-produce their energies — but to protect the profits of the class who own the means of production, which in this case means the farming industry. the food production firms and the drug companies.

That is why the first official reaction to the slightest breath of truth about something like salmonella in eggs is to rush to conceal the facts. If public pressure becomes so fierce that some of the facts must be allowed out they will often be so mangled and restricted as to be unreconcilable with the truth. This stubborn rearguard action can go on for a very long time, while workers endure painful and possibly fatal illnesses because of their ignorance of the facts.

The great food scandal brings us once again up against the reality that capitalism puts profits before people. Currie's big mistake was that, while she so ardently supports this social system, she allowed herself to voice a passing doubt about the effects of this principle. The penalty she paid, was a lot less distressing than what was endured by those who experienced what it meant from the business end of a sick-bed.

Depleted Uranium? Depleted Minds! (2001)

From the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question of whether or not dropping radioactive bombs on people is dangerous is exercising the top minds in the bourgeois media

The recent and still ongoing debate about the effects of depleted uranium adds a whole new dimension to the time-honoured quote that truth is the first casualty of war. Recent evidence would suggest that dishonesty is not only a midwife to war, but very much its bastard offspring.

Depleted uranium (or U238) is what is left of natural or pure uranium after the isotope U235 has been removed for use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and in nuclear power plants. It contains up to 60 percent of the radioactivity found in its pure form and, because it is more concentrated, it is potentially more lethal.

A heavy and dense silvery metal, U238 is also highly incendiary which makes it an ideal core material in anti-tank projectiles and bunker-busting Tomahawk missiles (each one of these contains 3kg of DU). Upon impact, the core of the DU projectile ignites and oxidises at such high temperatures that it becomes glass or ceramic micro and nano particles, containing lethal alpha, beta and gamma rays. The ensuing conflagration other than burning to a cinder the inhabitants, smothers the target tank or bunker with a fine radioactive dust, contaminating a surrounding area for up to 50 metres of the impact sight with lesser contamination detectable many kilometres away. The extent to which British, European and American soldier’s health has been effected as a result of such contamination forms the basis of the debate.

The British and US governments, NATO and the medical experts they have hired to fight their corner insist there are no medical side-effects to the inhalation of DU dust particles. Just as John Spellar the Armed Forces Minister, could claim in December of last year that “we are unaware of anything that shows depleted uranium has caused any ill health or death of people who served in Kosovo or Bosnia,” so too could NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson, in a 10th January damage limitation press conference nonchalantly argue there was “no link of any kind” between depleted uranium and leukaemia, that there was “nothing to fear from this particular type of munitions”, and that “we act with the interests of our troops and civilians in mind” (Independent, 11 January).

So convinced were NATO of the rightness of its cause and its preparedness to continue using DU munitions, that their staff distributed dossiers of scientific evidence stifling claims that DU was harmful and even called upon the services of two Pentagon medical experts to refute the claim that DU was harmful.

The broadsheet press, however, wasted no time in revealing an army report entitled The Use and Hazards of DU Munitions, dated 8 March 1997 which stated that “All personnel . . . should be aware that uranium dust inhalation carries a long term risk to health.” This same MOD report warned that exposure to depleted uranium, as used in British and US tank shells, increased eight-fold the risk of lung, lymph and brain cancers.

At the same time it was revealed that the government’s own nuclear safety advisers at the Atomic Energy Agency had warned 10 years ago that depleted uranium shells fired during the Gulf War would pose a health risk. The 1991 AEA report says:

“Handling heavy metal munitions does pose some potential hazards as does the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination as a result of firing in battle . . . and can become a long-term problem . . . and pose a risk to both the military and civilian population” (Times, 15 January).

All of which cuts no ice with Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon who still maintained days after the revelation of the MoD report that “there is no scientific evidence to support that the use of radioactive material caused illness, including leukaemia . . . here are no risks associated with depleted uranium and certainly no proven link between its use and illness ” (Times, 15 January). If this was the case then why the MoD warning? What scientific evidence were they working from?

One wonders whether those defending the government and manufacturers of DU munitions are aware of the related facts. That of the 53,000 servicemen/women who were stationed in the Gulf, 5,000 are recorded as suffering illnesses including leukaemia and that there have since been 521 deaths.

Are they aware that British and US tank ammunition alone during the Gulf War contained 55,000 lbs of depleted uranium? That 300,000 rounds of depleted uranium rounds were fired during the Gulf War, or that levels of irradiated particles in the air above Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are 20 times higher than over Baghdad?

Researcher Dr Chris Busby found that urine samples taken from Gulf War vets showed that mass spectrometry tests revealed soldiers inhaling dust received doses of up to 778 millisieverts, not the 20-30 claimed by the MoD and suggested as being “of no cause for concern”.

Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland, revealed that DU particles stayed in the lungs for 10-20 years and that 10,500 of Britain’s Gulf War personnel could develop fatal cancers. He further warned that thousands of people living near the firing ranges in Britain and the factories producing the DU munitions were likewise at risk of contamination.

The present government position is that there is no case for an enquiry because they refuse to acknowledge any evidence of a significant risk to personnel. The Health and Safety Executive are supposedly monitoring of ranges in Britain, but as their findings are of ringing no alarm bells their level of monitoring can be seriously questioned.

The most the 19 NATO ambassadors will agree to is a working party to coordinate information on DU shells. Reluctant to conduct their own enquiry, they have passed the task over to the UN who they believe are better equipped to deal with the matter, not least because the UN is largely controlled by the US. However, better late than never, they have since demanded that 11 of the 112 sites NATO have pointed them at be cordoned off.

The underlying factor of course is costs. A clean-up operation in Bosnia and the Gulf would, it is estimated, run into $trillions, not to mention the cost in compensation to the military and civilian population involved.

Moreover, the DU shells are a relatively cheap and highly effective method of murder, bearing in mind the core material is a waste product, and indeed manufactured by an industry that governments do not wish to take contracts from; they exist as powerful lobbies. And which government would ever come clean and admit to error? That so much of the evidence emerging pertains to the Gulf War, when the Conservative Party were in power, helps explain why they, the Tories, have not sought to make political capital out of the issue, and hasn’t Tony Blair an election on the horizon?

So we can expect the issue to be no nearer a propitious outcome in the coming months than we can expect the causes of war itself to be abolished. The lies and disinformation will counter every new revelation proving the detrimental effects of DU. For the defenders of capitalism, there is too much at stake for them to concede just one inch that maybe, just maybe, their critics are right. When it comes to counting the casualties of war, we must still be prepared to list truth right up there with them.

John Bissett

Proper Gander: Gathering storm (2023)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Staying behind at work to get drunk and tunelessly sing karaoke with colleagues every few weeks isn’t in most people’s routine, and certainly wasn’t during the Covid pandemic. But that’s what happened then in 10 Downing Street, the place which issued the restrictions on gatherings for the rest of us. During the lockdowns which began in spring and winter 2020, at least 16 leaving dos, quiz nights and ‘Wine Time Fridays’ were held behind the shiny black door while the rest of the country was policed for illegal meet-ups. Channel 4’s docudrama Partygate was a sobering reminder of the Conservative Party’s not-so conservative parties. The programme’s dramatised scenes of government staff’s boozing, trips to the alcohol aisle in the supermarket and incriminating email exchanges were derived from findings in the inquiry headed by senior civil servant Sue Gray and the police’s investigation. Alongside these scenes were clips from past news broadcasts, often of Boris Johnson saying something crass.

The drama focuses on the party-animal team of ‘special advisers’ working in Number 10, particularly a newcomer to the Brexit Unit when the pandemic hit, Grace Greenwood, played by Georgie Henley. While she and many of the other characters aren’t specific real people, they plausibly represent a breed of young, posh graduates from the ‘right’ establishments who sycophantically support Boris Johnson. He’s only depicted in the dramatised sections from behind or at a distance. When he speaks, as voiced by Jon Culshaw, he comes out with embarrassing strings of half-formed quips which his fan club laps up. Other real people portrayed include Johnson’s special adviser and head of operations, Shelley Williams-Walker, who was made a Dame in his resignation honours list, perhaps for services to DJing during the parties. Another is Helen MacNamara who, as the government’s ethics chief at the time, presumably thought that providing a karaoke machine for a leaving bash was the morally right thing to do.

Cleaners and security guards are the only staff depicted as having any sense of responsibility, but too low down the pecking order for this to count, such as when a guard is given the brush-off after trying to object to one of the get-togethers. The police’s response to attending at least one Downing Street gathering hasn’t been revealed to the public, although details of some of the fines awarded have been. Boris Johnson and Helen MacNamara each paid £50 fixed penalty notices for attending parties, with MacNamara denying any partying. Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also issued with a £50 notice, along with 80 others, meaning that Downing Street was the address with the most Covid regulation penalties in the country. Between the dramatised scenes we hear from people fined larger amounts, like Xen Watts, the organiser of a snowball fight in Leeds who was issued with a £10,000 fine and Toriano Reed from London who was ordered to pay £14,300 for being held responsible for a gathering in his shed.

The programme also includes interviews with people who kept to the lockdown rules through their most difficult times. Alan Handley from Tamworth talks about his wife’s funeral, which only eight family members could attend, sitting two metres apart. Emma Jones from London speaks about how her daughter couldn’t meet with her friends or relatives before she died of cancer. While these, and others, aren’t likely to forget how Downing Street staff ignored the rules, after enough time passes, scandals like Partygate tend to get pushed away from most people’s attention, replaced by different criticisms of the government (such as debates around immigration or the HS2 railway line) and wider bad news. So, the programme was a useful reminder of how the Conservative Party has operated, with a smug assumption of superiority. The characters working in Number 10 featured in the programme consider themselves above the rest of us, and therefore not subject to the same rules, especially the lockdown laws they devised. They act like this not because they’re Tories as much as because of their distance from the populace created by the institution they work (and partied) in. The framework of government comes with a very limited type of democracy, but the special advisers are unelected. Instead, they’re selected from a small bubble of objectionable yuppies active in whichever political party is dominant. So, they’re even less accountable than voted-in politicians. The Partygate scandal drew attention to this aspect of government, behind the polished spin which it prefers to present.

Sue Gray’s report was published in May 2022, soon after the police completed their investigation, so Channel 4’s dramatisation of their findings has come late to the party, so to speak. Its broadcast was still timely, though, coinciding with October’s Conservative Party conference. This scheduling looks like a jibe by Channel 4 at a government which has wanted to review its broadcasting remit but probably won’t get the chance before the next general election. But the programme does more than reproach hypocritical Tories drunk on power as much as on red wine. It highlights how they acted as they did because the institution they are part of is so detached from the rest of us.

Mike Foster

Greasy Pole: Sexing it up (2003)

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

Sexing it up

If it should turn out that Andrew Gilligan gets the sack from the BBC as a result of the Hutton Inquiry he need not be unduly worried about spending the rest of his life on the dole being harassed by Job Centre clerks into taking jobs like packing airline meals or cleaning offices at about five pounds an hour without any relief from a generous expense account. For he is given credit as the originator of the phrase “sexing up” and that alone should ensure he had no problem in finding a job with an advertising agency. “Sexing up” has gone down into history now, to take its place in the dictionaries of the future. Gruesome, punchy – and a bit thrilling – it exactly expressed the embellishment of the propaganda material being used by the Blair government to justify attacking Iraq. As a phrase it is a lot more effective and expressive than “over-egging” – the other one used at the Hutton enquiry. So well done Andrew; let us hope you will never have to use such an extravagant talent writing similar slogans to help sell cornflakes or washing powder or whatever.

But why did we have to wait so long for some creative genius to come up with the phrase? Sexing up is a long established, long discredited technique in the places where there is a need to excite us at the same time as we are deceived. And there are many, many examples of it being used. Take the case of the Bountiful Age of Nuclear Power. At the time when the world was still getting its breath back after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there was encouragement to divert from the inevitable doubts and fear for the future by concentrating instead on the promised benefits of nuclear power. The motive was to replace the images of devastated cities and radiated people with those of modern, sanitary, fertile power stations. There was a need for some sexing up, to encourage the consolation that Britain had not been bled out of the top ranks of world capitalism by the war but was a vibrant, progressive power in the world.

Calder Hall

The first subject of this was the atomic power station at Calder Hall in Cumbria, which opened in 1956. It cost thirty five million pounds – at 1950s’ prices – to build and there had to be some justification for such a staggering amount of money. The first effort at sexing up came with the assurance that far from being a backwater Britain was entering the “new atomic age”. Then there was the claim that Calder Hall would produce electricity “too cheap to meter”. That was the time when the domestic appliance market was beginning to stir into life and manufacturers like Hoover would have found comfort in the prospect of workers being beguiled by the notion that if they bought a vacuum cleaner or a washing machine they could run it for next to nothing. But behind the sexing up there was a less entrancing reality for Calder Hall used most of the electricity it produced itself, with only about a quarter of it going out to the national grid. And far from the electricity being almost free, the new atomic station turned out to be the most expensive way of producing it. The real reason for building Calder Hall was to produce plutonium for weapons – for the Hiroshimas of the future. A fact which was rather more difficult to sex up.

But none of this was allowed to intrude on the hysteria about the supposed benefits of nuclear energy. By contemporary standards Calder Hall was primitive; newer developments were the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (a British design) and the Pressurised Water Reactor (an American design). By the time of the election of the 1964 Labour government under Harold Wilson there was no more talk about nuclear energy being cheaper than what was produced in conventional power stations. But Wilson had won an election on a promise that his government would swamp everyone with plenty in a new technological age – “moving forward in partnership and unity to a just society, to a dynamic, expanding, confident and above all, purposive Britain”. The government could hardly refuse to choose the British technology – the AGR. The Minister of Power Fred Lee was euphoric. By building the AGRs, he assured us, we had “really hit the jackpot”; it was “the greatest breakthrough of all time” and he would back his judgment by ordering a 60 percent increase in them. But after the sexing up came reality. The first AGR station, set down on the bleak cobbles of Dungeness, cost twice as much to build as the original promise and it was 20 years before it generated any power for the national grid.

Suez

At about the same time as Calder Hall began to grind into action a new Prime Minister was beginning to enjoy the sensation of having led his party into a historic election victory. Anthony Eden was an ideal English aristocrat – handsome, elegant, Old Etonian – not at all the type to be expected to get into anything as dishonourable as sexing up. Unhappily for him, however, Eden nurtured a few resentments about the decline of British capitalism as a world power, particularly in the Middle East. Eden was not your strong, silent type of English gentleman; an operation on him to remove gall stones had gone wrong, leaving him living on drugs and consequently inclined to be irascibly, blindly stubborn.

There was a new government too in Egypt, headed by ex-army officer Abdel Nasser who was sexed up by his supporters as “. . . a strong man . . . a practising Moslem and a proud nationalist”. This was not good news for British interests in the region, especially those centered on the Suez Canal, which carried 25 percent of all their exports and half the oil produced in the Middle East. In July 1956 the Egyptian government nationalised the Canal, declaring that the revenue from this would go towards financing the building of the Aswan Dam. After a certain amount of diplomatic skirmishing, which included a secret agreement to collude in an Israeli attack on Egypt so as to give them the excuse to intervene, the British and French governments sent their forces into Egypt.

Nasser

This was not an enterprise which commanded unanimous support, which meant that the case for it needed to be pushed with the customary disregard for the truth. First, there was Nasser himself, who had to be sexed up as a kind of Saddam Hussain of his day. Eden set his thoughts out to President Eisenhower:

“I have never thought of Nasser as a Hitler but the parallel with Mussolini is close. Neither of us can forget the lives and treasure he cost us before he was finally dealt with. Our people are grimly determined that Nasser shall not get away with it this time, because they are convinced that if he does their existence will be at his mercy.”

And a few days later he was on television, trying to scare the viewers by sexing up the style of the regime in Egypt:

“The pattern is familiar to many of us, my friends. We all know this is how fascist governments behave, as we all remember, only too well, what the cost can be in giving in to fascism.”

It did not take long for the whole tawdry episode to be brought to an end, for Washington to force the British and French to withdraw, for the agreement between Britain, France and Israel to be exposed, for Eden to collapse under the strain so that he abruptly resigned and took himself off to the West Indies to recover. Sexing it up had not worked.

That was all a long time ago and the conspirators, the big players and the people who sexed it up to frighten or cajole or deceive us are an embarrassing memory. After them, the social system lives on, relentlessly adding to its history of human disasters, of which Iraq is only the latest. And still there are the feeble, transparent attempts through conspiracy, spin or sexing up, to conceal reality.

Ivan

The Passing Show: The Truth about the Arandora Star (1960)

The Passing Show Column from the August 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Truth about the Arandora Star

What a low opinion our rulers have of us! As the Second World War recedes into history, they tell us openly of the lies they fed us on during the war. Yet, no doubt, they expect us to believe implicitly anything they tell us in any future war. To disbelieve what the ruling class says in time of war ranks, in fact, as sedition.

Sometimes it is the same organ of ruling class propaganda which helped to tell us the lie in the first place which now coolly lets us know what did really happen. For example, the case of the Arandora Star. This was a liner which had been converted into a prison ship to take German and Italian internees, prisoners-of-war, and anyone else who in ruling class terminology was “an alien” across to interment camps in Canada. On one of these voyages, in July, 1940, the Arandora Star was sunk by a U-boat. Of the 1,600 prisoners and crew, half were drowned. Many of us remember what we were told at that time—the high death-roll was due to panic among “the aliens,” the lifeboats were rushed, it was every man for himself, and so on. If you have forgotten, the Sunday Express (19/6/60) obligingly reprints the headlines which appeared at the time in its sister paper, the Daily Express of the 4th July, 1940. “ 1,500 aliens panic,” the Daily Express told its readers: “Germans torpedo Germans—mad rush for the lifeboats.”

Complete nonsense

Why does the Sunday Express remind us of these (in its own words) “officially-blessed reports that the heavy loss of life was due to the panic-stricken cowardice of Germans and Italians who fought madly for priority in the lifeboats ”? Why, in order to tell us that they were all lies! The article goes on: “All of a picked group of recently interviewed survivors are unanimous in dismissing this allegation as complete nonsense.”

The real reasons for the heavy loss of life among the great majority who survived the explosion, despite the fact that the sea was calm and the visibility excellent, were three. The ship was grossly overcrowded; some even of the inadequate number of lifeboats had had oars, emergency provisions and plugs removed; and, above all, barbed wire had been expertly erected on the decks, cutting off access to what seaworthy lifeboats there were.

Magnificent propaganda

The captain of the Arandora Star protested strongly to the Admiralty against the ship going to sea in this condition. He pointed out that the lives not only of the internees, but also of his crew, might depend on—for example— the barbed wire being removed. But such humanitarian considerations did not move the chiefs of the Admiralty. The captain's protests were rejected, and the ship sailed as it was. It sank with many of its passengers, who were prevented by the barbed wire from getting to the lifeboats or even from jumping over the side, still on board. And the resultant death by drowning of eight hundred human beings was ascribed by the British authorities (who knew the truth themselves) to “panic among aliens.”

But don't suppose that the Sunday Express disapproves of this lie told by the ruling class. On the contrary, it points out what “magnificent propaganda” the truth would have made for the Axis powers. So, clearly, one only tells the truth when it won't put one at a disadvantage. The lies about the Arandora Star were told by those who claim to uphold the current politico-moral beliefs of society, including the conception of Truth as an Absolute. One could at least credit the ruling class with sincerity if it acted or the beliefs it professed to hold.

Love, honour and obey

While some apologists for capitalism attempt to explain away what they consider the less justifiable parts of our political and social superstructure, there are always the fundamentalists who embarrass these good souls by taking up an extreme dogmatic position. The promise of the wife in the Church's marriage service to “love, honour and obey” her husband is a case in point. We are told in some quarters that this “obey” clause isn’t as brutally primitive as it sounds—it is merely figurative, metaphorical and so forth. But there are others, including the two clergymen who wrote to the Guardian on June 11th, who defend it to the hilt. According to these gentlemen, in a Christian marriage, if there is any disagreement the wife must obey her husband. As a commentary on Christian marriage, these contributions may be allowed to speak for themselves.

Congratulations

At the recent wedding of Mussolini’s daughter, a message of congratulations was received from the Pope. The Catholic Church has always tried to explain away its sympathy for Fascism in Italy—although this is particularly difficult in view of its present close relations with and support for Fascism in Spain. No doubt Catholics would say that this was simply a gesture made by the Pope towards a member of his Church, without any political or social significance. But how many Catholic girls, who are not the daughters of rich men or Fascist leaders, get a telegram of congratulations from the Pope when they marry?

Alwyn Edgar

Proper Gander: Getting over the horizon (2022)

The Proper Gander TV column from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The story of the many wrongful convictions of Post Office staff for theft, false accounting and fraud is like a checklist of the ways in which capitalism creates and then exacerbates problems for people. Apart from how the shameful saga could only happen in a money-based society, it also illustrates how minority ownership of organisations, employment contracts, commercial interests and the law all maintain a system which protects the rich at the expense of the workers. While some of the staff have finally had their convictions overturned, this can’t replace the years of worry, stigmatisation and financial ruin or time spent in prison.

For its recent documentary The Post Office Scandal (BBC One), Panorama uncovered new evidence about what led up to the prosecutions and interviewed Post Office staff, campaigners, lawyers and investigators caught up in what the programme’s website calls ‘the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history’.

While the Post Office is a private company owned by the state, nearly all its branches are run as franchises or businesses by sub-postmasters/mistresses. There is a clause in their contracts which stipulates that any money missing from their branch’s accounts is their responsibility. So, when their accounting IT system started telling them there should be more cash in the branch account, many terrified SPMs used their own money (often getting into debt) to fill the gaps, hoping the books would balance later. When discrepancies kept appearing, the accusations began.

Between 1999 and 2015 there were 706 convictions of Post Office staff with the common factor of the Horizon accounting system, used in every branch. The government contract to develop this system’s software was won by IT company Fujitsu, whose bid came bottom in seven out of 11 categories of criteria for a decent system, and was also the cheapest. Suspicions that Horizon wasn’t dependable began soon after it was installed, with complaints made by branch staff which didn’t lead to any action. It took many years for concerns to gain momentum, hampered by various tactics of senior Post Office and Fujitsu staff, such as denials to those accused that there were similar cases elsewhere, suppressing details of how Horizon was operating and turning down requests for it to be reviewed. A Post Office report from 2010 unearthed by Panorama said that ‘any perception that the Post Office doubts its own systems would mean that all criminal prosecutions would have to be stayed’, meaning that senior management knew there was a problem, but they still carried on making prosecutions.

Organisations which bring private prosecutions to court tend to use external firms to gather and present evidence. Because of its origins as a ‘public body’, the Post Office retains internal investigators and lawyers to conduct the prosecution of its workers, combining the roles of victim, detective and prosecutor. This means that those involved have a particular vested interest in aiming for an outcome which benefits the organisation. An email between Post Office lawyers regarding the 2010 trial of sub-postmistress Rubbina Shaneen accessed by Panorama said that ‘it is absolutely vital that we win, as a failure could bring down the whole Royal Mail system’. When shown a copy of this, Rubbina, who was sent to prison after being found guilty of false accounting, said ‘Just to save the Horizon computer they destroyed my reputation and my life’. The Post Office was happy to let people assume that there had been a wave of criminality among its staff rather than admit there were faults with its computer system.

Doubts about Horizon became more vocal with the publication of Computer Weekly magazine’s exposé of the scandal, the formation of the Justice For Sub-Postmasters Alliance campaign group, questions from MPs, and forensic accountants from independent firm Second Sight being brought in to investigate.

Senior managers at the Post Office were keen for Second Sight’s work to be stalled. Gina Griffiths, the widow of Martin, a postmaster who ended his life following accusations against him, agreed to a financial settlement from the Post Office with a requirement that she withdraw from Second Sight’s investigation. To limit the damage to itself, the Post Office also formed sub-committee Project Sparrow, which included an unnamed government representative. One of the MPs involved in challenging the Post Office, Lord Arbuthnot, admits that the government was probably complicit in the decision to sack Second Sight. Their investigations got as far as hearings, where the Post Office’s then-CEO Paula Vennells squirmed when challenged about why it wasn’t cooperating with requests for information. In 2015, the Post Office ended Second Sight’s investigation and ordered its work to be destroyed. One of the documents the Post Office wanted to keep to itself concerned legal advice warning that convictions may be unsound. New prosecutions ceased, but for hundreds of Post Office staff, the damage had been done.

In 2019, the Justice For Sub-Postmasters Alliance challenged the Post Office in the High Court. Two years later, the first convictions were quashed, with the Court of Appeal saying ‘that the failures of investigation and disclosure were so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the Horizon cases an affront to the conscience of the court’ (tinyurl.com/4s3uynvv). The conclusion to be drawn is that the Post Office knew that Horizon was unreliable, and in trying to cover this up it abused the criminal justice system to defend its brand. It’s issued a grovelling apology and compensation payments of up to £100,000 to the 73 people whose convictions have been overturned so far. Not mentioned in Panorama’s documentary is how the Court of Appeal has only quashed convictions when the Post Office hasn’t objected to this and has dismissed the cases which the Post Office has opposed (tinyurl.com/2p8ehe3s). For journalist Nick Wallis, this suggests that the Appeal Court hasn’t grasped the scale of Horizon’s unreliability, which the Post Office has downplayed all along. The Post Office’s unusual status of having internal prosecutors also contributed to the extent of the scandal, but there’s nothing unusual about its eagerness to protect itself as a money-maker over supporting its workers. This won’t change even if senior staff are held to account or the Post Office is eventually reformed as a result of the public enquiry which is now underway.

Mike Foster

Material World: Stolen Children (2021)

The Material World column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide to include: ‘…e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’

As early as Australia’s Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869, legislation allowed the removal of Aboriginal people of mixed descent to force them to assimilate into white society. Up to the 1970s, in Australia, thousands of ‘mixed-race’ children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour, and many were abused. Described as ‘breeding out the colour’, the policy was known as assimilation. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured ‘the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation… the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state’. The report called this ‘genocide’.

The violence against indigenous peoples around the world is truly shocking. It has been a story of stolen lands and of stolen children.

From the nineteenth century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society. And it was justified by the settler-colonialists as humanitarian and for the child’s own good. Far from being protected, indigenous children were regularly victims of abuse. Indigenous children were taken from their families, often by force. They were housed in crowded, state-funded, church-run facilities, where they were abused and forbidden from speaking their languages or participating in any form of cultural practice or activity, and forced to adopt new names and identities. Many of these children were informed that their families had either given them up or had died. To increase the success of removal policies, the authorities would often send the children vast distances from their families and friends.

The system’s purpose: ‘To kill the Indian in the child’. Children in native residential schools were wards of the federal government and consequently came under the responsibility of various religious communities. ‘The use of the word school is a misnomer,’ said Cindy Blackstock, a professor at Montreal’s McGill University and the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. ‘They were prison camps.’ (tinyurl.com/ychmpdxs)

Intimidation and fear were the teaching tools used to ensure children could not practise their customs and traditions, cutting off any bond to their history.

Conditions were consistently horrendous and distressing, leaving emotional scars on most. Thousands of children taken to the ’schools’ died of disease and other causes. We are only now discovering that many were buried in unmarked graves, to be forgotten as easily as they were neglected.

The Canadian Federal government formally apologised for the policy and abuses in 2008 which its Truth and Reconciliation Commission called ‘cultural genocide.’

The churches also apologised for their roles in the abuse. Nearly three-quarters of the 130 residential schools were run by churches. One, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate which ran the Kamloops Indian Residential School from 1890 until 1969, apologised for what it called the cultural and religious ‘imperialism’ that motivated residential schools, the disruption of families and communities that resulted, and instances of physical and sexual abuse that occurred. At the time, it made no mention of the 215 unmarked graves found at the site, and now admit that they are unable to explain their official records of only 50 deceased children. So it appears to any reasonable observer that the true death rates were being covered up.

Indian Boarding Schools had also been established in the United States with the objective of ‘civilising’ Native American children. The current US Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, has directed her department to ‘uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences’ of the ‘dark history’ of these institutions.

The Catholic Church, to hide its complicity in the abuse that took place in its institutions, approved of a state law in South Dakota designed to halt survivors from seeking legal retribution from the Catholic authorities, so shielding the Church from any responsibility or accountability (tinyurl.com/y3ccu5fw).

Today, similar policies very much reminiscent of the residential school systems persist but the language is couched in euphemisms. The children are still being ‘taken into care’ for their own ‘welfare’ and ‘protection’.

In 2016, 7 percent of children across Canada were aboriginal, but they accounted for nearly half of all the foster children in the country. In the province of Manitoba, 10,000 of the 11,000 children in care are indigenous and are taken from their homes for reasons such as poverty, bad housing or lack of wholesome food. Capitalist Christian ‘family values’ would rather break up families than fix the problem of deprivation and the underfunding of social services to the indigenous communities.

Even in the UK, we have witnessed the ‘abduction’ of kids due to the prejudice against those deemed different from ‘us’. From 2009 to 2018, the number of Roma children in care in England has risen by 933 percent, a figure disproportionate when compared with other ethnic groups.

Socialists have been accused of standing for uniformity but the advocate of assimilation, intent upon eradicating the lingering traces of pre-capitalist culture, has been and always will be the ruling class, striving for homogenous consumers with a few pockets of indigenous peoples retained as curiosities for the tourist trade. Socialism is not about one-size-fits-all. Communities and cultures will co-exist, in a global cooperative commonwealth that celebrates both diversity and unity

ALJO

Between the Lines: Freedom and finance (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Freedom and finance

The Financial Times (4 May) carried an article by its TV critic, all full of fury and libertarian sentiments. The FT's man imagines that he has spotted an anomaly. On the one hand, he observes, the Government is going mad trying to sell off as much of the media as can be flogged, all in the name of increased "economic freedom", while at the same time the same Government is, through its sickening attempts to out-Stalin Stalin, acting as a dangerous threat to whatever remnants of political freedom TV producers still have left. If the Government really believes in freedom, asks the FT innocent, why do they not extend this to political freedom? The FTs TV critic would be well advised to go away and play with his toys. Surely it does not require very much intelligence to see the intimate connection between so-called market freedom and actual political tyranny. After all, if the Government is really serious in its efforts to make TV a suitable area for capitalist investment, then it is only proper that it must ensure that TV will serve the class interest of those who are being invited to invest. The campaign of arrogant persecution has ranged from the appointment of Her Thatcherness's own poodle. Marmaduke Hussey, to run the BBC, to the raid by the police upon BBC Scotland when they planned to show a documentary which the Government considered to contain information unfit for the eyes of the witless proles, to the most recent threat by the Prime Minister to punish the Independent (sic) Broadcasting Authority for having the audacity to show a This Week documentary (ITV. 28 April. 8.30pm) exposing the shoot-to-kill tactics being employed by the louts of the SAS.

Journalists working within both BBC and ITN newsrooms will testify to the extreme political pressure which they are currently experiencing. This should come as no surprise to the FT. the relationship between freedom and finance has never a happy one. In the USA. where "economic freedom" has been dragged further down into the gutter of "free enterprise" than it has yet to be over here, TV studio discussions are shown in which it only becomes clear after you have been watching them for a while that they are paid adverts for particular commodities. You switch on your TV to watch an apparently free studio discussion on skin care, when all of a sudden the presenter pulls out from his pocket a tube of chemical garbage and, with the sort of smile that you thought went out of style with Japanese torture camps, says. "Well, I for one never come into the studio without my packet of Ripoff's Miracle Wart Remover". This opens up a whole range of possibilities for British TV. Perhaps we could have Rupert Murdoch sponsoring a new Sun-style News At Ten, the directors of Guinness sponsoring Crimewatch, and the SDP sponsoring One Man And His Dog. (The latter is assuming that The Two Davids could be reconciled for a suitable fee.)

Realspeak

Most political discussion on TV is as phoney as hell. It consists of people who know nothing making statements which mean nothing about subjects which amount to nothing. More often than not such emissions of unadulterated wind are presided over by that Know-Nothing-In-Chief, Sir Robin Day. On a recent Question Time programme a member of The Socialist Party who was in the audience managed to mention the party's name and indulge in 30 seconds of TV free speech. Sir Robin looked bemused, an expression which matches perfectly his level of political intelligence. Thirty seconds of permitted questioning from the audience is not enough for revolutionary socialists and if the BBC thinks that is. then we will have to convince them that they have made a mistake. Amidst the flow of incessant hot air and tripe which is presented in the name of TV debate, After Dark (C4. 11.30pm-4am on Saturday/Sundays) is a breath of fresh air. At last here is a studio discussion format which actually allows real talk to occur. There have been some very stimulating programmes in the recent series. The memorable debate on homelessness when "Spider", the homeless punk, told the Tory backbencher that he was talking out of his backside and that whoever is elected. Labour or Tory, they would all carry on running capitalism; the discussion on the Grand National — of all things — in which the obnoxious racing commentator for Channel Four declared that all the unemployed in Liverpool are indolent scroungers and all socialists are the scum of the earth and a local worker from Aintree tore the bigot's prejudices to pieces and exposed the capitalist constraints involved in modern sport; the discussion about fashion in which the designer, Bruce Oldfield, who apparently makes dresses for Di, the Royal Clothes Horse, was confronted most eloquently by an Asian trade unionist from the West Midlands who spoke about the sweatshops where the fancy clothes of the rich are produced; there was that beautiful moment when the General who was discussing terrorism explained that there was no war going on in Ireland, but British troops had a right to shoot Irish workers without asking questions first because there was a war on.

These are good discussions because they are unconstrained by time limits and interfering presenters. They are good — but only as far as they go. What has been desperately lacking from so many of the After Dark debates has been any hint of a solution. How necessary it was. when the subject of homelessness was discussed for over four hours! Just one studio guest could have explained how easy it would be to provide decent homes for all if only the barrier of production for rent, interest and profit was destroyed. When they discussed terrorism it was fundamentally important that at least one person should point out the need to examine the root cause of killing in the modern world, regardless of whether such barbarism is practised by thugs paid by the state or thugs who want to set up a new state. The programme on the war in Ireland on 7/8 May was an excellent example of the crying need for socialist comment on After Dark. Before the programme we had written in to the programme's producers telling them about a socialist from Belfast who is well qualified to offer a unique, non-sectarian, revolutionary analysis of the Irish situation. It seems that the producers at C4 did not want to let such comments infect the minds of the viewers. Our comrade was not invited to appear. Instead, the so-called socialist analysis was presented by Eamonn McCann of the Leninist SWP. Rarely has the socialist label been so miserably betrayed. McCann is an IRA fellow traveller, and a very eloquent one too. But he was asked several times during the discussion. "Okay, Eamonn, you are a socialist, you claim to have a solution to the Irish question, what is it?" McCann did not even offer half a solution. All that he did was repeat the worn out cliches of radical republicanism which will never take the workers of Ireland anywhere. After Dark is, without exaggeration, one of the most important developments in the format of TV discussion in the history of the medium. Thanks for the great format; now let's fill it with a bit of hard socialist talk.

Loadsamoney

Friday Night Live (C4. Fridays. 10.30pm. series now finished) is a show which I watched with a mixture of irritation and amusement. It was a showcase for so-called alternative comedy, and after a decade or so of The Benny Hill Show and Terry and June, even death by hanging would be a pleasant alternative. But . . . Ben Elton, the show's presenter, seems to think that he can make a career out of simply not being Jimmy Tarbuck or Jim Davidson. Most of us are not as unfunny as Tarby or as filthily racist as Davidson, but we do not expect to get paid for it. Alas, it is not enough to simply not be a bloody awful comedian to be a good comedian. The trouble with Elton is that, despite all of his pious and strained efforts to be different. he is just another comedian who wants us to laugh every fifteen seconds at his preconceived gags. Ben Elton is a Labour Party supporter who in the Labour election rally in Islington last year was seen waving his manifesto about and joining with the other reformists in the undignified effort to publicly crawl up Kinnock in the way that Tarby and Monkhouse and the other creeps crawled up Thatcher. If Elton thinks that he is radically funny because he can squeeze a few giggles out of a trendy left audience at the expense of Norman Tebbit or Edwina Currie, then he is wrong. He is not poking fun at the system — and humour is a great weapon for doing that but, like the prefects at the public school revue, making a few near-the-knuckle gags against the present exploiters. Maggie will not be shaking in her boots.

The character who has come out of the series as a quite brilliant comic talent — comparable, I would argue, with the Hancocks, the Alf Garnetts and the Cleeses who seem somehow to transcend comic conventions and make people laugh about things which we had not laughed at before — is Harry Enfield. His Stavros is a fine illustration of great comic observation. But, much more importantly from the perspective of those of us who seek the establishment of a moneyless world society, his "Loadsamoney'' character summed up so much of what capitalism is deforming many workers into becoming. A man who cares for no one and no principle, who is obsessed by the wad of thick banknotes which he waves in the air to affirm his identity, and whose humanity has been absorbed into a single phrase which expresses his fragile security. Also funny is Enfield's other creation. ''Buggerallmoney". the macho northern worker who is as hard as nails and as thick as a brick. The humourless SWP, which likes the image of hard-as-nails northern, macho workers, has attacked Enfield for depicting a character which is supposed to insult the Newcastle unemployed. In an interview in Melody Maker (30 April) Enfield rightly accuses the SWP of not knowing their Marxism. He goes on to make the important point about the capitalist system's failure to provide for "the human factor": "That doesn't just mean people on the dole; there are also the people in jobs who are being dehumanised by it all". Quite right. We look forward to Harry Enfield's next character. "Letsabolishmoney". Mind you, if we started doing that, what would Ben Elton's agent have to say, and what would the dummies at the FT have to write about?

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note:

With regards to Harry Enfield, from an obituary for John Crump:

  " . . . John [Crump] retired early and returned to live in York, where he had spent most of his academic life teaching politics and Japanese studies at the university there. Anecdotally, one of his students was the comedian Harry Enfield who, under his direction, wrote a dissertation on the SPGB."

Profitable pollution (1979)

From the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main factor involved in accidents to oil tankers and in creating oil pollution at sea is the profit motive. “Pollution is an economic phenomenon . . . Deliberate discharges of oil, and the main causes of accidents to ships and offshore installations can both be explained by economic considerations”, writes Dr Viktor Sebek (New Scientist, 1.3.79).

An “inexplicable tragedy”
                   - Premier Lynch.

The Betelgueuze exploded at midnight while unloading at Bantry Bay. Forty-three crew and seven terminal workers were killed, and sixty-one families fled in small boats from Whiddy Island to the mainland. This ‘accident' was avoidable. From 1968 to 1977 tanker explosions killed 291 people, besides representing enormous financial losses to their owners. An inert gas safety system is now fitted to new oil tankers, but four-fifths of the 3,500 tankers now operating still do not have this system, nearly ten years after the danger of explosive gases became known. “Because of its age the Betelgueuze was not fitted with the inert gas safety system.” That would have cut into profits.

Jetty firefighting equipment checked in December was faulty and not subsequently repaired. Life rafts — the only means of escape from the jetty — had never been tested. Gulf Oil’s first five years’ profits at Whiddy were about £40 million. “We had a terrible tragedy. But we have to face one fact of life — business is business”, said a Gulf executive, explaining why Gulf is now sueing Total Navigation over the £30 million compensation.

Accidental Pollution
The ‘accident’ at the Sullom Voe terminal, when the Esso Bernicia collided in harbour, spilling fuel oil and causing the deaths of sheep and otters as well as thousands of rare sea-birds, was foreseeable and need not have happened.

Delay in using equipment, inadequate maintenance of emergency equipment, inadequate supply of available equipment, the lack of a fourth tug on standby when the tanker berthed — all combined to produce a predictable ecological catastrophe. “The possibility of an oil spillage always exists because of failure or malfunction of mechanical equipment or as a result of human failure . . .” a report predicted in 1976.

Deliberate Pollution
‘Operational’ pollution occurs when a tanker captain illegally dumps ballast water at sea, knowing that the terminal he is approaching has no ballast water treatment plant. When Sullom Voe opened in November 1978, its ballast water treatment plant was not expected to be ready until May 1979: during those months, ballast water dumping created a serious ecological problem. Yet the Load On Top system used by many tankers and the segregated or clean ballast systems fitted into new tankers prevent such pollution.

With the ballast water treatment plant at Sullom Voe not yet in operation, there was, according to a director of BP Tanker Co., “a financial incentive for a tanker skipper on a voyage charter to dump ballast when approaching Shetland and thereby take on more oil” Captain Lucas of the Mercantile Marine Service Association alleged that “very few of the world’s ports are equipped to handle the waste products from any ships, let alone tankers.”

Accurate pollution-measuring techniques have been developed and are in use. But enforcing pollution control presents problems: “The economic implications of these pollution control regulations to the major shipping companies are large, and intense international maritime political lobbying is now under way.”

Cutting Corners
Navigational errors, such as caused the Christos Bitas disaster off Pembrokeshire, are common. Near Sullom Voe there have been “repeated reports of tankers cutting corners”. In January, February and March large tankers have been observed within one to one-and-a- half kilometres of the coast, which is at all times difficult but especially hazardous in winter.

To Shetlanders, a tanker is “a floating disaster waiting for somewhere to happen”. Scientist Ritchie Calder declared that Whitehall’s policy is “government by catastrophe”. “All measures to control pollution inevitably reduce profit margins” comments Dr. V. Sebek.

Nuclear Power—Very Hush-Hush

Nuclear technology risks are aggravated by political factors. Government-imposed secrecy shrouds everything nuclear: in the early fifties the Official Secrets Act silenced press reports of “gross negligence during construction work at Windscale”. All Windscale (British Nuclear Fuels Ltd.) and Dounreay (Atomic Energy Authority) staff are ‘positively vetted’ by security; such installations are cloaked by the Official Secrets Act. Though Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights lays down the ‘right’ to publish information and ideas, this is always subject to “the interest of national security”. The same principle governs public disclosure of accidents, risks and the like in the Soviet Union, where people live next to nuclear installations “without any protest or without any knowledge of them”.

Fears of terrorism — sabotage of installations or theft of plutonium — increase the secrecy surrounding all nuclear installations. The ability to cover up negligence and to conceal even serious ‘incidents’ presents a risk to the whole community.

Energy production is a dirty business. But accidents in coal mines and oilfields do not put at risk the health of the human species for generations to come. Under capitalism, the social — political, economic and military — hazards compound the risk inherent in nuclear technology. “When you build a plant, you look to see whether there are any earthquakes. But you don’t know about social earthquakes.” (Dr. Jungk).

Aldermaston

Staff at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment were last year found to be exposed to dangerous levels of plutonium contamination. Outdated monitoring methods were in use, the number of safety staff was inadequate, only a hundred personal air samplers were in use, with 250 still on order — although these were recommended in 1972. Levels of plutonium in the air were found to be over the International Commission for Radiological Protection limit in every building, sometimes four times the 1CRP maximum. The Ministry of Defence delayed introducing chest monitoring until ten years after this was in routine use elsewhere.

A 1976 Health and Safety Executive inspector raised only one minor safety point. But if the HSE had demanded improvements the AWRE enjoys Crown Immunity from prosecution. Unfortunately, workers do not have ‘Crown Immunity’ from lung cancer.

Livermore, USA

Livermore, like Aldermaston a nuclear weapons development centre, is sited near San Francisco, right on top of an active earthquake fault. Although a large earthquake is believed imminent in California, evacuation plans are “inadequate and unrehearsed”, claime Friends of the Earth. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission closed down a nearby reactor but cannot control Livermore.

Karen Silkwood

vs. Kerr McGee Corp, Oklahoma

The case of Karen Silkwood exposed the sloppy and dangerous practices at Kerr McGee in producing plutonium fuel rods for nuclear reactors. She provided evidence that faulty rods were habitually approved, and told how dirt was simply “swept up with a broom”.

Windscale’s Wastes

Windscale, where BNFL reprocess spent fuel rods from power stations, is constipated. Many fuel rods are corroding under water. Reprocessing machinery keeps breaking down. One hundred gallons a day of radioactive sludge has been leaking from silos since 1976. The site is “nasty". No sound method has yet been found of dealing safely with nuclear wastes.

Harrisburg: “Nuclear accident raises dividend fears” (Financial Times)

Human error causes scores of incidents at American nuclear power stations. At Harrisburg a valve was left open accidentally. It later emerged that there was not one operating engineer on the site.

Repercussions were widespread. A complete population health check has started. Plants in Canada, Japan, Belgium and the UK (Dungeness) have been reported closed for checks. In the USA, all ten Babcock and Wilcox reactors have been shut down.

Many questions remain unanswered. How much radiation was released? What is the risk? How safe is ‘safe’ — the ICRP and many scientists now think zero is the only ‘safe’ level of radiation exposure. Who is telling the truth?

The near-meltdown at Harrisburg was closely described in the film The China Syndrome: Newsweek dismissed this contemptuously as based “on fantasy rather than fact”. The cover-up industry has been hard at work persuading the media to ‘cool it’. The choice for American capitalism is between growing dependence on the hazards of nuclear power with growing costs and increasing public hostility, or a return to ever-costlier dependence on Arabian oil.

The USA’s soaring trade deficit leaves little choice. Nuclear generating costs are half those of oil, less than two-thirds those of coal-fired plant. In the balance-sheet. costs weigh against profits. People do not appear on boardroom balance-sheets. The board is answerable to shareholders, not to the community. A shareholder’s concern is his dividend, not the health of humanity.

We do not claim that there could be such a thing as zero-risk technology. But technical problems are small compared with political and economic factors. Capitalism’s disaster record is no accident.

Charmian Skelton

Postscript

Our first article discussed some air crashes. “The only thing that forces a Federal Aviation Authority ruling is when enough people get killed.” The FAA has now grounded all USA DC 10s. We also pointed to the appalling fire risks of polymeric materials used in furnishings. The Woolworths fire in Manchester gives us a reminder of how lethal these cheap materials are: ten people died.

References

Oil pollution — New Scientist. 1.3.79. (Dr. Sebek is secretary to the Advisory Committee on Oil Pollution of the Sea.)
‘Betelgueuze’ The Guardian, 9.1.79; The Observer. 14.1.79; New Statesman. 1.6.79.
‘Esso Bernicia - Sullom Voe Environmental Impact Assessment Report, June 1976, cf. New Scientist.

19.4.79 and 26.4.79.
Deliberate pollution — New Scientist. 29.3.79 and 19.4.79.
Cutting Corners — New Scientist. 1.3.79 and 26.4.79.
Nuclear power — Franks Report, 1972, quoted in Nuclear Prospects by Flood and Grove-White (FoE), 1976; Zhores Medvedev in New Scientist, 17.5.79; Jungk in New Scientist, 5.4.79. Aldermaston — New Scientist, 7.12.78.
Livermore — New Scientist, 26.4.79.
Karen Silkwood Panorama, BBC1. 5.3.79.
Windscale — The Listener (from Horizon), 26.4.79 and The Listener, 7.6.79.
Harrisburg — The Nugget File 1950-1976, cf. New Scientist, 1.2.79; John Lyons, general secretary. Electrical Power Engineers — The World This Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 27.5.79; The Economist. 5.5.79; Herald Tribune, 31.5.79; Newsweek, 19.2.79 and 2.4.79; New Scientist, from 5.4.79 to 31.5.79.

Nuclear near-miss (1986)

From the June 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is difficult to decide whether ignorance, complacency or callous cynicism best characterises the nuclear power industry. Since the accident at the Chernobyl power station in the Ukraine, most countries with a nuclear power programme have proclaimed that there is nothing to worry about, that their power stations are absolutely safe. In America the authorities claim that nothing similar could happen in the United States since western safety standards and reactor design are superior to those used in Russia. In West Germany official government statements have said that such an accident could not occur there because its nuclear reactors as "absolutely safe". Japan, because it has almost no fossil fuel deposits of its own, is committed to increasing nuclear power generation. Energy authorities there have rejected calls even to review their nuclear programme, let alone halt operations at its 32 nuclear plants as is demanded by trade unionists and environmentalists. A Japanese official said there would be no change in plans to increase nuclear power output from 26 per cent of total energy supply to 35 per cent by 1995. Ignorance, complacency or cynicism?

And what about these comments made before the accident by various "experts" in the field?

• In June 1983, B. A. Semenov. Russian Head of the Department of Nuclear Energy and Safety at the International Atomic Energy Authority said of Chernobyl: "A serious loss-of-coolant accident is practically impossible".
• In 1975 a study by the American Atomic Energy Commission concluded that an accident serious enough to kill 70 people would only happen once in a million years of a reactor's operation.
• The US edition of Soviet Life earlier this year published a feature on Chernobyl under the headline "Total Safety" which described the idea of a core melt-down as "incredible".

Such statements cannot be the product of ignorance of the risks involved in nuclear reactors. In Russia, apart from the Chernobyl accident, there has also been a core accident at an experimental fast reactor; in America there has been the accident at Three Mile Island and a fast reactor core melt-down at the Fermi reactor; and in the UK the Windscale plant suffered a serious accident in 1957. One international study has calculated that nuclear power plants in 14 countries have experienced 151 "significant nuclear-safety incidents" since 1971.

So if nuclear accidents can and do happen, why do governments world-wide seem intent on ignoring, or down playing, the risks? The example of Russia is instructive. Russia has considerable oil and gas resources and is, in fact, an oil-exporting nation. But both oil and gas fields are in Siberia in the east of the country, whereas the main industrial centres are in the west and the area of most rapidly expanding population in the south. European Russia consumes 60 per cent of the country's total electricity and yet produces less than 20 per cent. Much of that power must therefore be brought thousands of miles and it has been estimated that the cost of power doubles for every 1.000 miles that it has to be transported. Thus, nuclear power stations which can be built where they are needed represent a solution to the problem of providing cheap energy. So the Ukraine, far from the oil and gas fields of Siberia, gets 40 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power stations, the biggest of these being at Chernobyl.

At present nuclear power provides 10 per cent of electricity used in Russia and there are plans to increase output by 400-600 per cent over the next 15 years. If, as a result of the Chernobyl accident, the nuclear programme is slowed down Russia will have to continue to pay the much higher price for bringing power from Siberia and suffer the consequent loss in exports as oil and gas are diverted for domestic consumption. Nuclear power is, therefore, important to maintaining profits in Russia: cheap energy means lower unit costs and higher profit. And this is the motivation behind nuclear power in other countries too — a motivation that is sufficiently powerful to make it worthwhile to conceal or play down the considerable, often unknown, risks involved.

The ruling class in the western capitalist countries have been swift to try to make political capital out of the Chernobyl accident, alleging the inferior quality of Russian reactors and lamenting the lack of openness on the part of the Russian government. But on both issues their hypocrisy is breath-taking. The British reaction was typical. It was argued that a similar accident could not happen in Britain because the Chernobyl reactor was of a unique Russian design which is not found in this country and had no form of secondary containment (a strong, enclosing structure around the entire reactor and heat exchanger that would contain the radioactivity should there be any leak) and so would not meet British safety standards. It was further claimed that Russian reactors were built dangerously close to densely populated areas and. to reinforce the message. Peter Walker, the Energy Secretary, said that there had never been in the UK any "emergencies involving significant radiological hazards to the public at any civil nuclear installation".

These statements are a mixture of misinformation. half-truths and lies. Although it is true that the Chernobyl reactor was one of a unique Russian design (a graphite moderated boiling water system) it is also true that it is a "hybrid" comprising features commonly found in reactors throughout the world, including Britain. In fact the most serious nuclear accident so far in this country that at Windscale in 1957 — involved a graphite-uranium core which caught fire releasing large amounts of radioactive iodine over a wide area. Graphite moderators were also used in the early British and French Magnox reactors. Many of Britain's older nuclear power stations, including the Magnox reactors and the advanced gas-cooled reactors, do not have secondary containment. In the early years of the nuclear power programme it was boldly argued that reactors would not be built unless they were totally safe and so secondary containment was both unnecessary and would undermine public confidence since they implied the possibility of a leak. (Of course, secondary containment also increased the cost of the power station).

Britain is far more densely populated than Russia. A nuclear accident here is likely therefore to have far worse effects than a similar accident in Russia. At the time of the Windscale accident the Atomic Energy Authority said that the release of radioactivity presented no "hazard to the public". Nevertheless the sale of milk was banned within a radius of 200 square miles of the reactor. In fact the full extent of the Windscale accident was not made known until 1983. In that year the National Radiation Protection Board said that the accident may have caused up to 260 cases of thyroid cancer, 13 of which had proved fatal. So much for British freedom of information.

But why is it that the Russian authorities did not provide information which might help the Russian people avoid the effects of radiation? Like the West, the Russians have constantly told people that nuclear power stations are completely safe. Despite this there has been considerable opposition to the building of new reactors, especially in the Balkan republics — opposition which the Russians. given their commitment to nuclear power for economic reasons, would be unhappy to encourage by giving out information about a serious nuclear accident. The accident is, anyway, likely to have adverse economic effects on trade with East European countries, which the Russians will be anxious to minimise. As the Guardian (30 April 1986) reported:

  The whole thrust of the latest Comecon joint nuclear plans is that there should be more and bigger plants to save fuel and to facilitate the building of bigger and better manufacturing centres If these plans are now delayed, as seems highly likely, a whole series of capital investment projects will also have been thrown into disarray.

Many East European reactors are built along similar lines to the one at Chernobyl using Russian-built components. That market for Russian goods will be under threat unless the Russians can minimise the seriousness of the accident.

Most people don’t understand very much about nuclear power so when they read about the release into the atmosphere of radioactive substances like iodine and caesium (already detected in countries far away from the site of the Chernobyl accident), or about the possible release of strontium. ruthenium and plutonium-241, it really doesn’t mean very much to them. They have to rely on experts, who claim to have information and knowledge, to translate this into things that they do understand. And they do understand when Friends of the Earth in Sweden say that the total number of cancers from the radioactive cloud, if it travels over highly-populated areas, may exceed 10,000 over the next 20 years; that it is estimated that in order to de contaminate the affected area around the site of the Chernobyl reactor it will be necessary to remove at least four inches of top soil. They do under stand that in addition to the two people killed (according to the Russian figures) and the many more who were undoubtedly hurt as a direct result of the accident, numerous others face long-term health risks, and Russian workers — scientists and engineers — had to risk their lives by entering the highly radioactive Chernobyl site in order to make the three other reactors safe. (There are four reactors on the same site because this reduces costs although it compounds the risk). And they also understand that those people who are responsible for making decisions about whether to build nuclear reactors, and about safety standards, are not coming clean about the risks that are posed to ordinary workers throughout the world. People like Lord Marshall, Chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, with a vested interest in expanding the nuclear power programme, who said, in the week of the Chernobyl accident, that the radiation inside the exclusion zone was "no worse than smoking a couple of cigarettes a year" (Observer, 4 May 1986). Do you trust a man with such a complacent attitude to human health and safety to be making decisions about nuclear power on your behalf? Do you trust the social system which needs people like that to spread verbal smokescreens over situations of such peril to the human race?

Janie Percy-Smith

The State and Chernobyl (1990)

From the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now four years since the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on April 26, 1986. Information about its consequences is now becoming available in spite of attempts by the Russian government to prevent knowledge leaking out into the public domain. Glasnost may be Gorbachev’s policy in most things but not where Chernobyl was concerned. The scale of the disaster is far greater than has been supposed till now.

A significant feature of this disaster is that it was partly caused, and to a large extent made worse, by state secrecy. For instance, it was the state’s obsessional secrecy on all matters nuclear which meant that the reactor’s operators were not allowed to know that withdrawal of all the control rods could cause an explosion. All they were told was that this was “forbidden” (New Scientist, 11 November 1989).

Similarly, it was a military secret that a previous graphite fire had occurred, in 1958, at Kyshtym in the Urals. Not only did the Chernobyl management and engineers know nothing of this (except what had leaked back to them from the West), but again according to the New Scientist “those who had dealt with it were not called to Chernobyl until three weeks after the accident”. During those weeks a lot of harm was done. Fruitless attempts to dowse the fire were unsuccessful, only resulting in contamination of the watertable. Meanwhile radioactive material continued to escape into the atmosphere.

Political considerations led Gorbachev, in his TV statement about Chernobyl 18 days after the accident, to allege that the western media had lied and exaggerated the scale and nature of the disaster with their claims that there would be “thousands of casualties” (quoted in Frederick Polil’s novel, Chernobyl, 1987). This was part of the cover-up agreed to by the politbureau and recently exposed by Gorbachev’s opponent, Boris Yeltsin.

This cover-up involved misleading the people at risk so that many of these within Russia believed themselves to be safe. Chernobyl is in the north of the Ukraine, very close to the southern border of Byelorussia and not far from the border, to the east, with Russia proper. The plume of radioactive particles drifted north and east, and seriously contaminated a large part of Byelorussia and adjacent provinces of Russia.

“They were not told. They had to guess…”

The original disaster was bad enough. What made it worse was misinformation, the attempt to pretend that the only areas at risk were within a neat, circular, 18 mile (30 km) “exclusion zone”. The result of this official policy was that people have still not been evacuated from many seriously contaminated areas. In the week after the disaster, official policy decreed that “communities were left to rot in ignorance…”. Over the border, in Russia proper, people “were very frightened. They were not told. They had to guess …. Nobody knew what was happening. Burly peasants were collapsing in the fields” (Sunday Times, 29 April 1990).

The cover-up meant that the May Day parades were ordered to proceed, in Kiev and Minsk, as though everything was normal. Thousands of schoolchildren were thus exposed to radioactive open air. It also meant a delay even in evacuating Pripyat, the nearest town to Chernobyl. It is now thought that 4 million people are living with radiation, including 34,000 in areas very seriously contaminated. Yury Cherbak, a Ukrainian Green politician, claims that 85 villages in Byelorussia, 19 in the Ukraine and 14 in Russia should be urgently evacuated (The Independent on Sunday, 22 April 1990). In these unevacuated areas, where people are still growing food crops, not only are they eating the contaminated food they grow but, according to the Sunday Times again, “Soviet trade officials collected it and distributed it in Moscow, Kazakhstan and elsewhere”.

Now, four years later, the consequences of Chernobyl are becoming apparent. Children are suffering from leukaemia or cancer of the thyroid. There are a number of babies born with serious congenital abnormalities, a disaster similar to but worse than that caused by thalidomide in Britain or Agent Orange in Vietnam. In Byelorussia, over 2 million people are at risk, one-fifth of the population. Yet in the capital city, Minsk, there are no ultrasonic scanners (essential for diagnosis and treatment of leukaemia) or intensive care units. Medicines, even for pain relief, are in short supply. The authorities have decreed, harshly, that no treatment at all, not even for pain relief, be given to terminal cases. In the West, leukaemia cases have an 85 percent chance of survival. There, they only have a 15 percent chance.

Acute food shortages mean that children are not getting a proper diet. They die of quite common illnesses, with their immune system weakened by radiation. Experts claim that “it is not ‘Chernobyl Aids’ that kills them, it is the lack of proper food” (Sunday Times).

The state showed its “concern” in February 1988 by decreeing the sort of information which should be made available to the media. The increased incidence of anaemia, hypertension and hyperplasia of the thyroid was hushed up as a result of “official policy”, and there was to be no mention of any “loss of physical capacity for work or professional skills” (New Scientist, 28 October 1989). Who was the state trying to protect?

Delay and Disinformation

The role of the state in this disaster has been to make things worse: the delay in issuing warnings, the misinformation as to which areas were at risk, the suppression of information on the deaths and diseases related to or caused by Chernobyl, the refusal to allow scientists to do research, the publication of underestimates of the amount of radiation released, the refusal to arrange for evacuation from areas known to be contaminated, the despatch of contaminated foodstuff from these regions to uncontaminated regions, the lack of provision of decent medical facilities, the secrecy surrounding the lessons learnt earlier at Kyshtym – the state and its officials bear a heavy load of responsibility for this massive catastrophe and its (too-often avoidable) tragic consequences.

Probably this is the worst environmental disaster the world has yet seen. Large areas of land are uninhabitable yet in many of these people are still living – living a nightmare. In one village, in a single year, 30 babies were born with serious deformities.

The danger to humanity, and to the planet, of continuing to allow capitalist priorities – production of cheap, rather than safe, energy – and capitalist political structures – such as rule by a Party hierarchy, determined to control the information released to the population under its rule – this is the lesson of Chernobyl. The land is poisoned with pollution, the forest trees produce abnormal mutated growths, and the watertable is polluted. On the farms cows give birth to deformed calves, in the villages young women dread giving birth to monsters. Children are not allowed out of doors except to go to and from school.

Genetic mutation is a high price to pay for the government’s mistakes, for cheap electricity for export to Poland and Rumania, and for plutonium for the military, a by-product of the Chernobyl reactor. It is a price being paid partly because the world has trusted technical experts too much. There were experts in the Ukraine who claimed that Chernobyl’s four reactors were totally safe. After the accident Britain’s best-known expert on nuclear power, Lord Marshall, asserted that the risk from radiation inside the exclusion zone (less than 20 miles away from Chernobyl itself) was “no worse than smoking a couple of cigarettes a year” (Observer, 4 May 1986).

The likes of Lord Marshall have been making reassuring noises in the Soviet Union and doing their best to prevent doctors and scientists revealing the truth about Chernobyl’s legacy, Gorbachev’s glasnost did not apply in this special case. So long as society’s class divisions mean the necessity for the continued existence of states and national governments, and so long as production is for profit not for use, the danger of continuing to use such extremely risky technology will be too great – the victims are already too many.

Charmian Skelton