Greasy Pole: Who are you calling a cheat? (2004)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prince Harry is third in the line of royal succession so it would take only a couple of unforeseen events for this country to have a king better known for a fondness for partying on certain substances than for a monastic devotion to his studies. Perhaps that is why the general response to him being accused of cheating in an ‘A’ Level exam at Eton was some way below outraged disbelief that a member of the royal family could stoop so low. Luckily there was an independent enquiry available at short notice to decide in private that the prince had not cheated, so all that remained was independently to undermine the reputation of the teacher making the accusation and the matter could independently be closed. As usual there were a few stubborn curmudgeons wondering what all the fuss was about. After all, isn’t the monarchy as an institution a cheat, based on the assumption that a few people should unquestioningly have access to such excessive luxury simply because of a lucky accident in the wildly random process of their conception? 

   

There is a wider issue here, wider than a rather dim but heavily privileged royal taking advantage of his position. If Prince Harry did cheat he acted outside the rules. But he was able to do this only because we live in a society of privilege for a minority and of denial for the majority. Appropriately, this is called capitalism, which is not a naughty word or a figment of someone’s imagination but an actual, material and social phase in human history. Capitalism ensures that one class are in possession of the means of wealth production and distribution, which allows them to live off the labour of the other class, who are thereby cheated out of access to the wealth they have produced. It is a system fertile in human problems, to the extent that it is unable to satisfy the needs of most of its people, who suffer its wars, impoverishment, unnecessary diseases . . . And is it also fertile in defenders of the system, who advise us to have faith in illusions about their ability to construct a properly humane society. Are these people cheats?

Cran

James Cran, recently described by the Daily Telegraph as “a flinty Aberdonian law and order traditionalist”, is the Tory MP for Beverley and Holderness in Yorkshire (at least he is for the present – he will not be defending his 781 majority at the next election). He thinks highly enough of himself to announce that although he is standing down “. . . that does not stop him serving the people of the constituency with all the characteristic enthusiasm for which he is known”. However Mr Cran is rarely seen in the Commons, he has not spoken there for three years and last asked a (written) question on 4 November 2002. In 2003 he voted in only 36 percent of the divisions. For this unstinting labour on behalf of the voters of Bevereley and Holderness Mr. Cran is paid a wage of £57,485, supplemented by £88,524 in “expenses”.  Not surprisingly, he did not claim anything for stationery, postage or computer support but he did get £15,959 for accommodation and £10,558 for travel. A law and order traditionalist would have something to say on the matter of workers who did a below average amount of work for so generous a wage.

   

This flinty Aberdonian is uncharacteristically coy over any  discussion of his income from parliament and what he does to get it. He rebuffed a reporter from the Yorkshire Post with “I’m not interested: I really don’t care what’s in your newspaper”. It was not, of course,  a good time to approach MPs about their “expenses”, which had just been detailed in the press, provoking a tectonic shudder up and down the country as the voters learned of how much MPs can claim, and what they can claim for, in the job of legislating for British capitalism.  Honourable Members of the world’s most exclusive club can, unlike the workers they so often denounce as greedy and irresponsible, award themselves increases in pay and expenses. For example they recently voted for a rise of £8,000 a year in their “staff allowance” and some of them were reported to be enquiring about whether they could claim for the cost of a wreath for the Remembrance Day ceremonies. These are the people, let us remember, who are keen to hound down Social Security “scroungers”, who rant about “welfare dependency” and who feel an urgent need to legislate against “unnecessary” sick notes.

Moffatt

One who is not a flinty Aberdonian and who takes the job of being an MP rather more seriously is Laura Moffatt, who sits on a Labour majority of almost 7000 at Crawley in Sussex. Before getting into Parliament she was a staff nurse, avoiding promotion because it would have removed her from the hands-on work with patients which she adored. Moffatt has been active in the Commons, attending 81 percent of the votes there, speaking regularly, asking questions. In spite of her natural interest in health care she was given the job of Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Lord Chancellor, where she is not of a high profile. Moffatt is not one of the Labour rebels, preferring to help out the government with convenient interventions in the House. For example on 12 June, when Jack Straw was in difficulties over justifying the war in Iraq, she piped up that one of her constituents, a local doctor, had told her that his family in Iraq were “constantly telling him that life is much better for them, that they now enjoy a sense of freedom and a decent future at last . . . I believe that we need to listen to those quiet voices”. A relieved Straw responded “I absolutely agree with my Hon. Friend”. In July Moffat was asking a minister “What measures he has taken to eradicate pensioner poverty” – which implies that poverty can be eradicated and that Blair’s government have realistic plans which will reach even into the very depths of poverty such as pensioners endure.

   

So could it be that Moffatt, for all her apparently immaculate intentions, is a bit of a cheat?  An authentic motivation to improve human welfare cannot be reconciled with supporting a government which manages the capitalist system as best it can in the interests of the owning class in society – which must mean putting profits before people. Moffatt must be aware that in the Health Service where she was once so proud to be working, patient care too often comes a poor second to economy. This was the background to a dispute in her constituency over the closure (it went by the name of a “configuration”) of the Accident and Emergency Department at Crawley hospital. On 27 October she asked a question in the House which began by praising the “modernisation” of the A & E Services for “real improvements to patient experience and safety”. This sounded like another of those “questions” which ministers often plant with grovellingly ambitious MPs to suffocate criticism. But Moffatt continued her question with a mention of “local difficulties” in the Surrey and Sussex Trust, “. . . where most services have been transferred to another hospital, and ambulances are having to wait up to two hours”. She asked how the government could be sure this would not “undermine the fantastic work that is going on”. She might have put it another way – the service in this local hospital is breaking down but we must still say it is marvellous.

   

James Cran and Laura Moffatt do their job as MPs in different styles. But on the one issue of real importance – that under all circumstances and in the face of all reality they will insist that the capitalist system is the highest form of the management of human affairs – they agree. On the detail of which party does a more efficient job of running the system in this country they differ; Cran will state his opinions in the more robust manner while Moffatt prefers to wrap up her meaning. But both of them are keen to get away with however much deception the working class will allow. Both of them, and  their parties, are cheats.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Death of a Buffoon (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quintin McGarel Hogg, Lord Hailsham of St. Marylebone in the City of London, who was “a sweet, dear man” (Woodrow Wyatt); a “political genius” (Harold Macmillan); a “cantankerous old man” (Margaret Thatcher); “a gentleman” (himself) died last month. He was 94 years old and his life was richly productive of the kind of material beloved of fawning obituarists, who did him full justice. By the time we had absorbed that he was a kind, effervescent, clever, intellectual giant we could only wonder how the world would survive without him. Could it really go on, with its wars and disease and poverty, untouched by the death of one of capitalism’s more arrogant and volatile politicians? Should we not reproach ourselves for failing to value this paragon more appropriately when he was alive? Except that Hailsham, was not quite like his admirers make him out to be.

He came of a family of lawyers and politicians and ended his career in politics seemingly welded to the Woolsack, holding the job of Lord Chancellor longer than anyone since the days of Lord Halsbury at the end of the 19th century: “. . . he couldn’t go on being that for ever” said an exasperated Margaret Thatcher when she was contemplating removing him from that office. His father held the same job in the 1920s and was the MP for St. Marylebone. His son Douglas is an MP and has held some minor ministerial jobs – although not to wide acclaim or without controversy. A daughter is a High Court judge. The Hogg family looks likely to carry on into infinity, producing volatile eccentrics who are willing to play their part in running British capitalism in the interests of the class they are born into.

Eton and All Souls

Hailsham was educated at Eton; where else could a boy like him have gone to school? He was said to be the cleverest pupil there, too clever for some of the masters and he was fully aware of it, being known as “. . . a disagreeable boy, academically clever, but emotionally arrogant and extremely self-centred”. Of course he was elected to Pop, that self-appointed aristocracy above the aristocrats of the school. Members of Pop wore fancy waistcoats and walked about arm in arm, they were fawned on by many of the masters and feared among the other boys for their arbitrary powers of flogging and the enforced servitude known as fagging. Clearly, Eton had little to teach the young Hailsham (or Hogg, as he was then, before succeeding to the title) about asserting himself as a member of the ruling class. He was notorious for the gusto and frequency with which he beat other boys (his half-brother, Edward Marjoribanks, was “passionate” about it and had a reputation for sadism). It was a useful education in guiltless suppression of anyone classified as socially inferior.

After collecting a succession of prizes at Eton which proved how clever he was Hailsham went to one of the more traditional of Oxford colleges, got a first class degree and was accepted as a Fellow of All Souls. This is a kind of Pope of the university, although more sober and industrious. It was founded in 1437 with the main purpose of praying for the dead (part of its landholdings include Willesden Junction, a grimy part of North West London where the inhabitants need rather more than prayers to give them some hope). Hailsham began his time among the brains of All Souls as a “Screw”, whose job was to decant the after dinner port which was drunk in such quantities. Places like All Souls, with their exclusivity and their rituals, play a part in informing the working class that they must accept their inferior status in society, the running of which should be left to their betters. How reliable a concept this is can be judged by the kind of politician to have passed through those privileged doors – recent examples were Keith Joseph and John Redwood, who have gone down in history as eccentric blunderers. We shall see how Hailsham measured up to the popular expectations of him.

Suez

He burst onto the political scene as Conservative candidate in a bye-election at Oxford City in 1938, supporting the Chamberlain policy of “appeasement” of Nazi Germany against an all-party candidate. This took some living down later, when appeasement became a nasty word and Chamberlain was universally unpopular. Hailsham survived the war with a slight wound and continued as an MP with a reputation as a kind of verbal blunderbuss in his attacks on the Labour government. Some time after the Tories won power he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, which pandered to his need to behave like an attention-seeking adolescent. But behind his posturing the fact was that, although he was one of the Service ministers he was kept in the dark about the secret negotiations between Britain, France and Israel which laid the plans to justify the Suez invasion. Hailsham denounced the Egyptian take-over of the Suez Canal as “wholly illegal” (as if such concepts are of the slightest consequence in capitalism’s wars) and never doubted that Britain and France were right to “intervene” (as he called it) in the war between Israel and Egypt. It was not the most penetrating analysis of that sordid affair.

Under Macmillan’s prime ministership Hailsham, who succeeded to the title when his father died in 1950, was given the kind of jobs which could have paved his way to the top. Appointed party chairman, he seized the opportunity to engage hysterically with the membership. In 1957 at the Tory conference in Brighton he made his first appearance in the early morning on the beach, wearing baggy trunks and plunging briskly into the sea for a swim. It was not coincidence that he was accompanied (although not into the water – there are limits to the call of duty) by a posse of newspaper hacks. At the end of that conference Hailsham grabbed the chairman’s bell and rang it in a frenzy, declaiming the poet’s words about who the bell tolls for – meaning the Labour Party. The party faithful loved it, stamping their feet and cheering but others – particularly his rivals in the party – were sourly uneasy at his vulgar publicity-seeking.

Flat Cap

This behaviour was rewarded in 1963 when Hailsham was given not one, but two, jobs involving responsibility for sport and for injecting some hope into the North East, where unemployment was at 4.5 percent compared to 2.4 percent nationally. The region’s most important industries – steel, shipbuilding, coal – were in decline. Hailsham was not a sportsman – he regarded the very idea of a minister of sport as akin to fascism – and he was not an economist. This did not disqualify him from holding the jobs but it did make the appointment look like a typical piece of Macmillan gimmickry. Hailsham did nothing to dispel this by touring the region wearing the kind of flat cap usually seen in working men’s clubs, or the dole queues. Later he tried to explain this away as a matter of chance; he had left his bowler hat in his car in London and was offered a choice of a pork pie hat or the cap. He chose the cap because it would be useful when he was out shooting. But the impression endured, that he was either making fun of the hard-pressed workers there or was clumsily trying to convince them that in spite of his Eton education and his large house in Sussex he was really one of them. “I do not pretend” he wrote later “that the plan (which he drew up after his visit) succeeded to the extent that my visit to the North East permanently solved the chronic difficulties of the region”. Well no, it didn’t but at least he got a nice new cap out of it, for his times on the grouse moors.

Later that year his big chance arrived, when Macmillan decided to resign and the Tory party descended into the kind of frenzied back-stabbing which should have had no place in what was called, in the days before Thatcher, the gentleman’s party. It all happened at their 1963 conference where, after Macmillan’s announcement, the atmosphere was, according to William Rees Mogg, “ugly”. Hailsham was Macmillan’s first preference as his successor but he had to get rid of his title and return to being plain Mr. Quintin McGarel Hogg. Without following the custom of first informing the rest of the cabinet he launched his bid for the top job in a carefully stage-managed announcement at the end of an otherwise dull meeting, which erupted into hysterical applause at the news. Randolph Churchill roamed the conference pinning large badges with the letter Q onto anyone unwise enough to stand still within arms reach. Hailsham got himself photographed spoon feeding his one year old child in the hotel foyer. All of this was not to Macmillan’s taste and so from the chaos of ugliness emerged the unlikely figure of Douglas-Home. Hailsham had blown it.

Relief

Which must have been a relief to the many people who had him correctly summed up, not as a genius but an arrogant buffoon, isolated by his conceit from the real world around him. Throughout his life he was buoyed up by the assumption that he and the rest of his class were superior, born to rule in the best of all possible worlds which is capitalism. The rest of us should only be grateful that there are people like Hailsham who are willing to exploit, degrade and ridicule us. To anyone concerned for society and its people Hailsham will not be missed.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: The Importance of Being Irvine (2003)

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

It sounds like the kind of question which might have come in a sticky passage a few weeks ago in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Who was the most senior and the highest paid member of the government? You want to ask the audience: most of them think it had to be the Prime Minister. So you want to phone a friend; they think it’s a trick question and it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer because he’s responsible for taxes. Bad luck; you’ve just lost a few thousand pounds because the correct answer was the Lord Chancellor, who technically – and traditionally – outranked the Prime Minister and earned a lot more because his pay was linked to what the judges got while common or garden ministers and MPs had to rub along on pay linked to that of senior civil servants. After a rise of £22,691 – a lot more than the basic pay of many people in a year – the Lord Chancellor trousered £202,736, compared to the Prime Minister’s £175,414 and other Cabinet ministers £127,791. For the Lord Chancellor it got even better: his pay was protected by what used to be called a differential – a whopping one, which ensured that he always gets a lot more than that other legal bigwig the Lord Chief Justice.

Of course some of the lucky recipients of that kind of money might be expected to be a bit bashful, especially as they earn some of it by telling the rest of the people to be satisfied with much, much less to get by on. But politicians are not famous for being bashful about their double, or treble, or quadruple, standards. One who went to great lengths to avoid a reputation for bashfulness or restraint in his self-indulgences is the man who was Lord Chancellor until Blair’s recent re-shuffle which not only got rid of him but abolished his job. An event which must have brought back memories for workers who were similarly treated in the steel industry, the coal mines, the shipyards . . . He answers to the title of Lord Irvine of Lairg – or Derry as he is known to any friends he has or to those who are trying to help their careers along by being seen as his friend. Early in the life of the new Blair government Irvine put down his marker when he made it plain that he had no intention of agreeing to forego the £16,000 rise which ministers were awarding themselves but which Chancellor Gordon Brown thought they should not have. Then there was the matter of the £650,000 spent on the refurbishment of his official residence, including the famous hand-blocked wallpaper, which at 300 pounds a roll pounds cannot be bought at the local B&Q, and the gothic beds at £16,000 each and the works of art which were “donated” by museums and the like.

Humble Origins

Clearly, Irvine regarded himself as something special. In fact he came from beginnings which were very much run of the mill of the working class. His father was a tiler and his mother a waitress. Young Derry looked beyond such a life: he won a scholarship to a posh school then took degrees at Glasgow and Cambridge Universities. He became a barrister and set up chambers where he employed a future Prime Minister, who met his future wife among the dusty law books and beribboned briefs in the Irvine chambers. Whatever favours Irvine may be thought to have done for the man he continued to call “young Blair” were amply repaid when the first Labour Prime Minister for almost twenty years signalled the end of the times of privilege and nepotism by appointing his old mate to be the highest judge in the land. Which suited Irvine to the tips of his elegant footwear because he was by then notorious for his arrogance and his bullying, a man who had to have a flunky peel his oranges for him, a man of whom a fellow peer could say “You have to think through carefully what you are going to say to him for fear of getting your balls burned off”.

The job of Lord Chancellor involved being both judge and politician, which was well suited to Irvine. Apart from his passion for the finer things in life he had a reputation for being swollen with his own importance. In October 1997, not long in the job, in a speech to the Reform Club he compared himself to Cardinal Wolsey, who basked in the favours of Henry VIII and who was also fond of a lavish life style, which was why he had Hampton Court built for himself. It was not an entirely happy comparison because Wolsey fell out of Henry’s good books and ended his days ducking and diving to avoid being tried (and almost certainly executed) for treason. Irvine’s pomposity may have been punctured when his son Alistair got 16 months in a Los Angeles prison for stalking and threatening the boyfriend of a woman who had dumped him. In any case young Blair has now decided that the solution to a number of questions is to move Irvine over and make room for another old chum in Lord Falconer, who is said to be as clever as Irvine but by no means as arrogant. There was the usual exchange of letters, which were unusually frosty in tone.

Irvine’s retirement had been copiously leaked; it was whispered that Blair was losing patience with his old boss because he was not living up to his promise to reform the legal systems. Perhaps more to the point, the tabloids were after Irvine – and if there thing which concerns Blair it is to appease the gutter press. In some ways the Lord Chancellorship was an open target for the tabloids, for of all the grand jobs in the government it was about the grandest. Apart from the mediaeval clothes and sitting on something called the Woolsack (which is in fact a sack of wool) he had more than one job. He was head of the judiciary, with the last say in the appointment (and the sacking) of the judges and the magistrates. He was Speaker of the House of Lords (where a previous man in the job, Lord Hailsham, would sit on the Woolsack muttering “bollocks” in response to the speeches of some of the noble lords). And he was a member of the Cabinet, in the chair of several committees. His style of running those committees was not universally popular because he was in the habit of acting like a prosecutor with ministers as the criminals in the dock.

Judges and Politics

Of course ministers often have multiple responsibilities. The unusual thing about the Lord Chancellorship was the apparent clash between being head judge and a member of the Cabinet, which at the least questioned whether the Courts were as insulated from political pressure as they were supposed to be. One of the problems with Irvine was that he used the combined roles to avoid disciplining judges. Hailsham, applying the kind of logic which is beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals, argued that the very unity of the roles was an insurance that they would be kept separate. The Council of Europe took a different view, saying that the dual responsibility is a contravention of human rights; in February eleven members of the Council signed a resolution which said the arrangement called the independence of the judges “seriously into question”. This was widely welcomed and not necessarily in the tabloids, which are not expected to concern themselves with such arcane questions. Roger Smith, the Director of Justice, said “the political powers of the Lord Chancellor can no longer be combined with a role as a judge”.

But who says they can’t? Does anyone seriously believe that judges do their job, running a court case, summing up evidence, passing sentences, in ignorance of political influences? Consider the case of Lord Denning, once one of the most eminent judges in the land, who once bemoaned the fact that the Guildford Four had not been executed because it would have prevented all that fuss about their being innocent. Denning gave his opinion in another notorious case, when the Birmingham Six applied to sue the police. In refusing the application, which was based on evidence of brutality and falsification of evidence by the police, Denning said that the mere suggestion of police corruption was “. . . such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’”. And when it had to be admitted, even by the most stubbornly blind, politically motivated, judge that the police had been violent and had lied, Denning made a nauseatingly lame and partial apology: “As I look back I am very sorry, because I always thought that our police were splendid and am very sorry that in this case it appears the contrary.” By then the Six had spent another eleven years in prison.

Retirement

Denning’s doomed defence of the police was based on his assumption that they must be immune from such criticism because of the part they play under capitalism. This system is based on a minority class owning the means of life, which is another way of saying that the majority are denied access to those means and can get it only with the consent of the owning class – by being employed by them. Of course the majority could help themselves but this would be a basic assault on the system so there is a vast and complex structure, called the law and the legal system, which prevents them doing this. At the sharp end of that structure are the police. To challenge this is to take on the very weaponry with which capitalism asserts its essentially coercive nature. Irvine’s lucrative and self-ennobling career demonstrated the grim reality of this. His going and replacement will not change things. In any case he will be getting a pension package worth £2.6 million, he will continue to sit as a judge, and then there is always the chance of the odd directorship or consultancy, writing his memoirs, or joining the after-dinner speaking circuit. He will not want. It will be even better for him than if he had won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Straw man at Howard's end? (1996)

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

Anyone who is concerned about the human condition must be getting worried about Jack Straw. As he goes about the business of being the man who hopes to be Labour’s next Home Secretary, Straw is finding life more and more stressful and threatening. In this situation, what do politicians do? They make a speech—or perhaps, depending on how strongly they feel, several speeches. And so it has come about that Straw, who obviously feels strongly about his chances of getting to sit on the govemment Front Bench in the near future, has spoken out.

Among the first to feel the lash of Straw's tongue were beggars and alcoholics. Or rather aggressive beggars and alcoholics; so it could be that addicts and vagrants, who accept their position cheerfully, will avoid the worst consequences of any laws designed to sweep them away which a future Labour government may introduce. Until then, the streets will continue to be littered with the open, human evidence of the fate which awaits anyone who does not fit into capitalism’s presumptive pattern of wage-slavery. The rich will still have to avert their eyes to this spectacle, as they make their way from the opera to an expensive supper, or to their club, or to the discreet shops of Knightsbridge.

Intimidation

Then there are the squeegee merchants—the people who wait, with bucket and sponge, at busy traffic lights and insist on cleaning car windscreens, with an implied promise that provided the driver pays them for this service, they won’t hold on the aerial as the car is driven way. Now this can be intimidating, especially to drivers who take a pride in keeping their own windscreen sparkling clean and their aerial stiff and straight. Not nearly so intimidating, though, as the pressure a lot of the motorists are likely to be under from their employers, who now wield all the power associated with widespread unemployment. Of the adult population, 60 percent are now either unemployed or in jobs which can be defined as insecure. Three-quarters of full time jobs are on short-term contracts. Sitting in the petrol fumes at the lights, the motorists are harassed all right—but not only by the squeegee merchants.

Perhaps encouraged by the response to his campaign to clear the streets and the busy junctions of all offenders against good order and wage-slaves' discipline, Straw then turned his attention to children. Not just any children; at the moment he is concerned only with those who are out on the streets at a time when Straw thinks they should be at home, watching party political broadcasts on television or tucked up in bed with a copy of the Labour Party’s latest policy document. Driving home from the Commons, says Straw, he sees children who he judges to be under ten years old and he wonders where their parents are. He didn’t actually say that these children are a threat to anyone, or had committed any crime but he clearly feels they are another threat to Labour's ideal society and something must be done about them.

Straw’s proposal of a curfew for all ten-year-old children was, he said, a “sensible" way of dealing with a problem. In fact the police already have the power to pick up any child who seems to be at any kind of risk and take them home, or to hospital, or to a social worker. Where Straw’s curfew would break fresh ground is in the fact that it would not be necessary for the children to be at risk; merely being out of doors after a certain hour would be enough for the police to act.

There was a predictably mixed response, on the one hand from people who are concerned at the apparent increase in violence and offences by young children and on the other from people who are worried about civil liberties and the presumption of innocence and why kids should be out by themselves at night and how the curfew would fall heaviest on families who are already the most disadvantaged among the working class.

Straw was unperturbed, probably convinced that his ideas would strike a sympathetic chord with enough people to be a vote winner. He did not seem to be concerned to ask why the adults who are supposed to be caring for children are apparently so careless. He did not refer to the fact that, however it is measured, poverty in this country gets worse and more distressing year-by-year. According [to] the Child Poverty Action Group, about a quarter of the population live at or below the poverty line; in 1979 about ten percent were at that level. Straw did not dwell on the fact that as poverty deepens all sorts of human factors go with it, like self-esteem, like confidence in the future, like care for the family . . . 

Backlash

There was a time when it was hardly necessary to argue this case, as one White Paper after another promoted the policies which eventually sprouted the great social work boom of the Sixties and Seventies. Many members of the Labour Party could delude themselves that they were in the forefront of this movement in ideas, that in future problems like crime, homelessness, addiction would be treated in their social context instead of being explained away as the poisonous fruit of evil personalities.

Well that was along time ago and now we live, as socialists said we would, in a period of reaction—of backlash. The present Home Secretary, Michael Howard, has single-mindedly exploited this, presumably on the assumption that in this way he advances his political career. He has not bothered to respond to Straw’s odious attempts to outbid him in the contest for the get-tough-on-crime vote. Perhaps he agrees with the Labour voter who said Straw is “. . . the only man on earth who can make Michael Howard look left-wing’’.

From the politicians' point-of-view the advantage with the policies of Straw and Howard is that they blank out the need to properly investigate social problems and come up with a considered response to them. They suffocate debate under panic and hysteria. They perpetuate the social system which impoverishes, brutalises and represses us—mortgages and homeless, addicts and athletes, adults and children.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Short Cuts And Runs (2003)

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

Now that the fighting in Iraq is over – and perhaps before it starts somewhere else like Syria – it is time to remind ourselves of the adage that in war the first casualty is the truth. In fact a close runner up is what might be called the vocabulary – the way words are used and what results from their misuse. So during the war we heard, as we did in the Gulf War in 1991, of “friendly fire”, a phrase designed to conceal the embarrassing fact that British and American forces were at times liable to kill each other. We grew accustomed to the concept of “collateral damage” as a term which implied that civilians who were killed were part of a necessary accident. We had Geoff Hoon who, as Minister of Defence is another of those ex-left wingers trying to expunge an inconvenient past, informing us that cluster bombs, which are murderously indiscriminate in their effect, were not only “perfectly legal” but also “highly legitimate”. (It is whispered that when the time is ripe Hoon’s career might be another casualty).

And then we had Clare Short, who trumpeted it to the world on 9 March that if Britain went to war without first getting some kind of approval from the United Nations she would resign from the government. She left no room for doubt about her intentions and for good measure she laid into Blair for being “reckless with our government, reckless with his own future position and place in history, extraordinarily reckless”. But when the fighting started and the bombs fell and the bodies piled up it turned out that the words “I shall resign” did not mean that she would leave the government. Then, after the war was over, she finally did resign.

Perhaps Short decided to gamble on the fact that resignations in the past were not always harmful to the person who fell on their sword. Aneurin Bevan recovered from leaving the Attlee government in 1951 to become a close ally of Hugh Gaitskell and, had he lived, may well have succeeded as leader of the Labour Party. Harold Wilson, who left at the same time as Bevan, shrewdly kept all his boats unburned. Michael Heseltine’s resignation in the Westland affair did him no long term harm; after the Tory defeat in 1997 he might well have stood for the party leadership – and won – but an attack of angina prevented him. Of course there are examples of the opposite effect, like George Brown, whose regular bibulous nocturnal threats to resign eventually threw him off the greasy pole – and there is Robin Cook; has anyone seen him for a while?

Like some of those people, Clare Short has a rocky history, which has not exactly smoothed her path onto the lower slopes of power. During the 1980s, in her role as a militant feminist, she upset the Sun by trying to introduce a parliamentary bill to ban the publication of pictures of topless women. This was before Blair was desperate to keep the Sun’s support; nowadays, undermining so important an outpost of Rupert Murdoch’s press empire might be seen as a sackable offence. During Blair’s early days she was not one of his most ardent supporters; in fact she voted for Margaret Beckett in the leadership contest. She changed her tune when Blair got the big job. In August 1996 she raged against the “people in the dark” for portraying the new leader as an unprincipled “macho man” when he was actually “fresh, principled and decent”. This compliment, muted though it may have been, came too late because Blair had already demoted her from shadow Transport Secretary to shadow Minister for Overseas Aid.

Some leaders are highly skilled in navigating the political waters – avoiding the shallows and the rocks, cultivating the ability to make all their mistakes appear to be triumphs of ingenuity. Clare Short is not one of them. Perhaps she has been too eager to assure herself of a place in history as a kind of feisty feminist conscience of the Labour Party. If so, she has overlooked the fact that politics has no room or time for consciences. The wars of capitalism don’t happen by accident, because people without a conscience are in power or because the passages of diplomacy have not been thoroughly enough explored. They happen because they are an essential stage in the disputes between sections of the ruling class. They are not about the freedom of people but the competitive drive to capture marketing opportunities, or vital mineral wealth like oil.

There is a lot of profit to be made in exploiting the oil of Iraq and the people there. There is a lot of profit to be made in clearing up the mess left from the war and rebuilding the cities, the industries, the financial system and the infrastructure. The Bush administration have ensured that they have the dominant say in who gets the best chance to rake in the profits. The plans were already laid, before the first American soldiers so much as picked up their rifles. The giant American energy company Haliburton has been selected to work to revive the oil industry in Iraq; the deal could be worth about $7 billion dollars to them over the next two years. Bechtel is a company with close links to the Bush administration in Washington operating in big building contracts like the Channel Tunnel. Circling greedily are some British companies like Costain, Balfour Beatty, Rolls Royce. If all goes according to plan Iraq will be a country where in the immediate future economic growth yields mouth-watering profits to those who are in on the act.

Shock and Awe

One of these is the electronics giant Sony, which makes games for computer, video and broadband. Some of these games, played addictively by children of all ages, involve virtual combat with plenty of bloodshed. Sony have been quick off the mark; within hours of the war starting they had patented the phrase “Shock and Awe” which was used by American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he promised the people of Iraq what they would experience during the war. So a game called “Shock and Awe” will be coming soon to a computer games shop near you. If you can bear to play it it will say everything necessary about that war and about the cynicism of leaders who told us that it was about freedom when it was about exploitation and oil and profit.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: It’s Nice to Have Friends (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Saudi, helping the police with their enquiries can mean systematic torture in a room described by a British man roped in in 2001 as having “…years’ worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean”.

As a TV spectacle it was some way behind Coronation Street’s Sarah Platt and Jason Grimshaw navigating their way through a chaotic, unpromising wedding. The other soap opera, at Buckingham Palace, had a cast of hundreds, rather more expensively dressed than our Sarah and Jason and making their way to the banquet through a corridor of bowing flunkeys. At their head the Queen strode as grimly as if she was flouncing out of (or should that be into?) a session with a top society photographer. Prince Philip’s face hinted that he might have been reviewing his stock of undiplomatic racist quips. And there was the king of Saudi Arabia otherwise known as The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Abdullah Bin Abdul Azaz Al Saud, whose very presence reveals a lot about that country – for example the fact that he is one of his father’s 37 sons.

About Saudi Arabia more later. Of more pressing interest about the guests at that banquet to welcome the 82 year old dictator of that brutal, oil rich country was Gordon Brown parading rigidly encased in white tie and tails, perhaps trying to hide his embarrassment in submerged conversation with a wide-eyed, scuttling Lord Chancellor Jack Straw, similarly garbed. What did they find to talk about, so intently? Was it the fact that Brown always made a point of refusing to get himself up in the manner demanded by the etiquette of such occasions – like the London Lord Mayor’s Mansion House banquet? Brown’s stand on this matter – he once let it be known it was all to do with principle – would cause not a few crimson robes to rustle and not a few chains of office to jangle, in disapproval. His going back on what he called principle was an indication that this was an event far more important than any gathering of over-fed, over-rich City grandees slapping each others’ backs and their own comfortable stomachs.

Oil

Saudi Arabia means oil, which also means the attention, and wherever possible the intrusion, of capitalism’s great economic and military powers. Crucially, Saudi oil lies close to the surface, which enables it to be extracted faster and cheaper. The first concession to get at the black, vital stuff was granted to a British company in 1933; another, to the American firm Standard Oil Company, in 1934. Symbolically, the company’s name was changed in 1944 to ARAMCO – Arabian American Oil Company – and as larger reserves were found other companies came in with capital investment, effectively exerting a stranglehold on the country. Predictably, other American companies were commissioned by ARAMCO to develop the country’s infrastructure – the giant Bechtel imported their mammoth plant to lay down roads, ports, power plants and the schools and hospitals to support them. TWA provided a passenger air service, the Ford Foundation advised (which may not be exactly the correct word for what they provided) on administration; and the US Army Engineers set up a TV and broadcasting service and helped develop Saudi Arabia’s “defence” industry. The first great oil boom in the early 1950s dramatically altered the country from a bleak, infertile slab of the Middle East, enabling royals who, for all their exalted status, had been able to do little better than live on local dates and milk from camels, to swan around the flesh pots of the Mediterranean in their gleaming yachts and to practically take root in the casinos. This was a startlingly abrupt change, overwhelmingly to the benefit of the ruling families; at a recent air show in Dubai a billionaire Saudi prince ordered a personal luxury version of the Airbus 380 which, with a few essential extras, will set him back somewhere in the region of two hundred and thirty million pounds.

Common Values

At the banquet in Buckingham Palace the Queen took the opportunity to inform the Saudi royal about her esteem for his country and the comfort she takes from the close ties between Saudi and Britain: “It is a great pleasure to welcome King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, to London once more….We have shared values that stem from two great religious traditions…we must continue to work together to promote common values…” Harping on the same happy theme was Kim Howells, who during the 1960s was a left wing student firebrand, then official in the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984 strike and is now Labour MP for Pontypridd and Foreign Office Minister. Howells is famous for speaking his mind no matter what the consequences; for example as Minister of Culture he felt free to lash out at the Turner Prize candidates as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bull”. He is also on record as describing the royal family as “all a bit bonkers” but this did not prevent him agreeing with the Queen about Saudi Arabia as he rhapsodised about those same “shared values” .

We have not yet been told by either the Queen or Howells what they meant by the phrase .Was it the fact that Saudi Arabian women are treated as rather lower than second class, forbidden to go out unless with a male under pain of being beaten up by the uniformed thugs of the chillingly titled Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice? Perhaps they hope that Britain copies the penal system in Saudi, where helping the police with their enquiries can mean systematic torture in a room described by a British man roped in in 2001 as having “…years’ worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean”. Or the extravagant use of the death penalty for, among other offenders, actively gay people or anyone having extra-marital sex. According to Amnesty International there have been 124 executions so far this year. These have been mostly by beheading and sometimes in public; an official executioner has set the grisly scene by assuring everyone that he keeps his sword razor sharp and that his children learn to grow up into good Saudis by helping him clean it. “People” he tells us proudly “are amazed at how fast it can separate the head from the body”.

In fact it would probably be difficult to find anyone to take seriously that nonsense about “shared values”. What connects the ruling elites of Britain and Saudi Arabia is much harsher – the fact that so much of the world’s oil is under Saudi control (one estimate puts it as high as 25 percent] and the existence of a mouthwateringly massive export market, including one for billions of pounds worth of armaments, all nourished through an artery of bribery. This is yet another example of human debasement driven by capitalism’s profit motive justifying untold lies, cruelty, corruption, murder. It can also persuade Gordon Brown to dress up for an evening out with a pitiless international gangster.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Lucky Gordon? (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gordon Brown’s new Golden Age

Some things are helpful, if not actually essential, to top politicians or to those who are high enough up the greasy pole to feel threatened by a fall. There is, for example, what might loosely be termed luck – an unpredicted change of circumstances which so affects a situation that it puts the politician in an unexpectedly favourable light. But as a son of the manse Gordon Brown has to believe in something rather more ritualistic than luck. He would not dream of gambling, especially where his political fortunes are at stake. All through the nail-biting perils of the past year he has carried stolidly on, diverting criticism and the prospects of a catastrophic electoral defeat with ponderous recitations of what he insists are the historic, enduring achievements of New Labour, particularly of himself at the Treasury. While he did this his poll rating sank lower and lower, he was humiliated at one by-election after another and terrified, sullen rebellion simmered along the benches behind him.

Credit Crunch

And then came the credit crunch and Northern Rock and Lehman and, across the Atlantic, in the financial fortress of 21st century capitalism, the fall of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Suddenly all those precariously mortgaged homes and image-boosting loans ceased to be symbols of comfort; they disintegrated into menace.

There was talk of 21st Century South Seas Bubble. Gordon Brown would not, in public at any rate, have called it luck, and neither would anyone with so much as a glimmering about the chaotic workings of the property based system, but the timing of it for him was – well, lucky. Apparently transformed in personality, he coined the phrase, as the climax of his conference speech, which summed up his hope for survival: “Take it from me, this is no time for a novice”.

This was said in the knowledge that Brown would have no problem, in finding and naming the villains who have fed off the groundless dreams of unsuspecting wage earners until the whole diseased edifice of lies and fraud came crashing down. There were enough of them – the bankers, the financiers, the traders in the City whose ideas of a hard, constructive day’s work has been pushing other people’s money around on paper and betting on the movement, up or down, of share prices. Brown rubbed salt into their wounds when, as part of the package of state investment in the ailing banks, he ensured that certain City favourites were removed from the boardrooms. This was accompanied by Brown calling for “responsible” behaviour by the banks and then Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling calling in their top people to lean on them to pass on the 1.5 percent reduction in the Bank of England lending rate. More recently Brown has used that word again, demanding “a new, responsible approach”: by the credit card companies. “I think”, he said “we have got to bring the credit card industry (yes, they call it an ‘industry’) in to talk (yes, the call it ‘talk’) to them to join with us in establishing clear principles to apply to the costs people face on their existing debts”. And in case any bank should still not have understood Peter (sorry, Lord) Mandelson will be meeting them to draw up a “guide on behaviour” (yes, they call it ‘behaviour’).

There may be some questions about Mandelson’s suitability to instruct others in such a matter. He is, after all, the man who made himself famous by informing the City that New Labour are “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Then there was his cosying up to top Tory George Osborne on the yacht of the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who did not amass his fortune through considerate reticence towards his rivals. Lord Mayor’s Banquet Mandelson’s boss in Number Ten has a consistent record of sucking up to the overfed parasites of the City, when mellowed by a slap-up

Lord Mayor’s banquet.

There was a time when Brown would make some kind of obscure, ineffective point by refusing to wear the traditional evening suit at this event, turning up in a work-a-day lounge suit. Now that he is Prime Minister he does sartorially as he is told – although he looks far from comfortable in black tie and tails and in any case says roughly the same as before. Here he is in 1998: “London is a city that is creative and responds to change. It has excelled because of the hard work and skills of the workforce and these are the essential British qualities – creativity, adaptability, a belief in hard work, fair play and openness”. In recent times his sycophancy has been more open: in 2005 he blathered “For three centuries … your enterprise as businesses, your unique innovative skills, your courage and steadfastness and your outward looking internationalism have …helped Britain lead the rest of the world”. And last June, as the recession was stirring, quite obviously, into life: “Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate. Thanks to your remarkable achievements we have the huge privilege to live in an era that history will record as the beginning of a new Golden Age”. In fact Brown’s Golden Age was ushering in what is expected to be the widest deepest, most destructive slump since the 1930s. While Brown was bowing and scraping to the City it was at the centre of a veritable culture of mis-selling, over-mortgaging workers’ homes and tempting workers to take on loans which they simply could not afford to repay.

 When the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720 a number of the people who were considered responsible, including Chancellor of the Exchequer John Aisable, were sent to the Tower and part of their estate was taken to help the company back into business. There is no need to go quite so far; there would be no point in punishing Mandelson and Brown and the rest for capitalism’s brutal chaos.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Something in common (1996)

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

Here is a question. Can anyone think of anything in common between Asil Nadir and about half the voting population of Britain? For those of you who have forgotten. Nadir— a particularly apposite name considering what happened to him—was once a man who convinced a lot of people that capitalism does not have to work in the way in which it naturally, inexorably does work. He was what is known as a tycoon, who devoted a lot of this time to developing a business conglomerate called Polly Peck. This was such a profitable company that it was often mentioned as evidence that there is really no need for the economic cycle of boom and slump. There is no need for any business ever to be anything but profitable, no need for it ever to make a loss or go out of existence. All that is necessary to have at the head someone like Asil Nadir, who will ensure that the enterprise will be endlessly profitable. The City loved it. They loved Asil Nadir. They rushed to invest in his business empire.

For his part Asil Nadir loved the City and he must have pleased many of his admirers there, when he gave £400,000 to the Conservative Party, presumably in the hope that the money would help the Tories to foster this mutually attractive and remunerative relationship. However this cosy set-up began to look less comfortable when Asil Nadir’s methods came under the detailed scrutiny of the Serious Fraud Office. Not to put too fine a point on it, the glamorous tycoon was suspected of running a highly unstable operation, which was not improved by his alleged tendency to help himself from the till. The investors in Polly Peck were rudely awakened from their dream of an eternally prosperous capitalism by the reality of losing hundreds of millions of pounds in the company’s collapse.

Jumping bail

Facing trial on 13 charges of fraud and false accounting, Asil Nadir decided that he could no longer rely on a little help from his friends, whether in the City or the Tory Party. Discretion, he decided, was the better part of valour and he jumped bail, fleeing to Northern Cyprus to make sympathetic noises at the news that his former aide in Polly Peck, Elizabeth Forsyth, had collected a five-year prison sentence for helping to launder some of the money Nadir was said to have stolen.

Let us leave, for the moment, the disgraced and hunted tycoon in his Mediterranean hideaway and consider the other part of our question—the half of the voting population in Britain. We refer to the millions of people who support the Labour Party whose vote at elections, give or take a bit, usually amounts to about half of those cast. Now these people are not business tycoons, they are not popular in the City and they don't have readily available hideaways in the sun. If they appear in court it is not for helping themselves to large sums of somebody else's money but normally for shoplifting or burglary or stealing a mobile phone from a parked car.

These people can’t give hundreds of thousands of pounds away because after they’ve paid the rent or the mortgage and the cost of gas and water and electricity and they've bought some clothes and food there is very little left. They pass their lives in poverty, on the knife-edge of destitution so that if something disastrous happens, like losing their job or getting chronically sick, they slip down into a kind of sub-existence where malnutrition and fear are such everyday features of their lives that they become almost inured to them.

Coping with poverty

But this is achieved at considerable cost. The Observer, in a recent article about food and poverty, quoted parents who are struggling to survive, and to protect their children, on Income Support: ”. . . I don’t eat . . . I've walked about with holes in my shoes, no winter coat and haven’t eaten for three days to look after them . . . I won’t let my kids go without." A recent government survey found that among the unemployed 20 percent of men and 38 percent of women had suffered a neurotic disorder. And for those who are in work stress is still a potent factor, not least because of their fear of losing their job.

So let us return, now that we know who we’re talking about, to our original question about what is common to Asil Nadir and the Labour voters of Britain. Well Nadir has recently informed the world that while he does not regret giving all that money to the Tories ("I never regret anything that I have done in my life") he is no longer among their supporters. "No government is in power for ever," he says. "Thank God there is a certain amount of democratic election and we know the elections are approaching. I hope the British public will give their view of what they think of the British Government.” In fact, if the Labour Party win the next election. Nadir says, he will return to Britain (although it is not clear whether this is intended to attract support for Labour or drive it away).

The point about this is that both Asil Nadir the opulent wheeler-and-dealer and the stressed and exploited Labour voters are agreed that a different government here will bring some significant changes to capitalism in Britain.

Labour wheezes

Now this is very unkind to Tony Blair and all his spin doctors and hangers-on who are labouring night and day to convince us that a Labour government will be so similar to the Conservatives that we may hardly notice there has been an election. Gordon Brown will sit in the Treasury searching for new ways to disappoint his supporter's expectations by slashing government spending. His latest wheeze—to abolish Child Benefit for those aged between 16 and 19—has provoked even Peter Lilley to a kind of protest, describing Brown’s proposal as “. . . deeply unpopular in the country . . . a pernicious tax on learning". Jack Straw will occupy the Home Office and try to outdo Michael Howard’s reputation for bashing criminals, perhaps creating a new offence of washing someone's windscreen at traffic lights when they haven’t asked you to. Tony Blair will be in Number Ten thinking up new phrases like stakeholding society to convince us that it isn’t happening and if we are sure that it is then it’s not what we think it is.

So that’s what they have in common— misconceptions about what Labour will rule capitalism means. Of course there are differences between Asil Nadir and Labour voters. He has reason to think he may benefit from a Labour government. They may also think like that but have no reason to.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Plain Words (2003)

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

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

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

Firefighters and Bankers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Candidates

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

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

Heseltine and Clark

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

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

Modernising

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

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

Ivan

Greasy Pole: In the Club – or Out? (2002)

The Greasy Pole Column from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everyone laughed when Groucho Marx said he would not want to join any club which would accept him as a member. Nobody laughed when Iain Duncan Smith said he would not want to join the Carlton Club because that traditional bastion of the Conservative Party does not accept women as full members. Well you can’t blame Duncan Smith for trying but he will have to do better than that if he is to dispel his image as a man who is most at ease on a chilly, early morning parade ground. Perhaps he thought that by apparently standing up to so stubborn an example of establishment tradition he would seem modern, unstuffy, a man of principle. This would have been likelier of he was not a member of another club – the Beefsteak – which also excludes women from membership. Perhaps he dreamed that the nation would be gripped with excitement at his courage so that they forgot about Osama Bin Laden and the euro and the current crisis in Coronation Street. But instead there was a paralysing apathy. There were no restless debates in supermarket check-outs, no rival groups pelting each other on football terraces. The nation ignored it and went about its business of being exploited and repressed, as the nation always does, leaving Duncan Smith to go about his business of being tedious and irrelevant as he always does.

Carlton

In case anyone is thinking of applying, the Carlton restricts its membership to supporters of the Conservative Party and a lot of its activity is directed at raising money for the party (almost £1 million during the last Parliament). So it is only to be expected that the Club would invite each leader of the party to become a member ex-officio. Duncan Smith refused the offer on the grounds that the Tory Party does not have any no-go areas so it would be inconsistent of him as leader to be in a club which discriminates against women. (For his sake, let us hope he does not intend to act in this way over every example of inconsistency in his party). Officially the Club says “Ladies are welcome and may use the Club’s facilities with the exception of the public rooms on the ground floor designed for members and gentlemen guests”. There is some doubt about whether women would want to use at least one of these rooms, which a male visitor described as “the most vile room in the building, frequented almost exclusively by bores and drunks” and by a female ex-member as “swept by an unpleasant draught”. The chairman of the club’s political committee, Peter Emery (who is responsible for organising all that fund-raising) said he thinks many of the women members like the rules as they are although last year one prominent female member, Shadow Minister Theresa May, resigned because she objected at the way women were treated as “second class citizens” there.

The last Tory Prime Minister to cause a few problems over membership of the Carlton was Margaret Thatcher. To be party leader was one thing; to be offered full membership of this exclusive, all male club was another. The solution was to accept her as an “honorary” member – some might say an honorary man, which brought to mind how the Nazis dealt with finding that they were allies of the racially inferior Japanese in 1941; they decided that the Japanese were “honorary Aryans” – at least for the duration of the war.

Admitting Thatcher to the Club caused quite a few of the crustier members to splutter into their port before they fell asleep again. But they were being unreasonable because this was not the first time the Carlton had displayed a convenient flexibility of principle. In 1967 the late Julian Critchley, who was then an MP, upset the members by giving lunch there to Jo Grimond, Leader of the Liberal Party. Critchley was quietly advised not to use the Carlton to entertain anyone whom he could not nominate for membership – in other words any political opponent. But a week or so later Ted Heath, who was Leader of the Opposition, had the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, Alexei Kosygin, there to lunch. No effort was spared in making the Russian leader welcome; it was, according to Heath, a “sumptuous affair” at a “superb oval table” which introduced Kosygin to the gastronomic delights of oysters. It was rather different from the breakfast Kosygin had had earlier that day, with lorry drivers at a road side caff on the A1. It is not difficult to imagine which meal was given the more publicity in Kosygin’s home country. Whatever outrage club members may have felt about the head of a country they regarded as a deadly foe being entertained in their dining room was not publicised. Neither were we told what the long-suffering Russian people thought about their leader feasting so sumptuously among men who they were encouraged to believe were their class enemies—always supposing they were allowed to know about it.

1922

As an integral part of the Conservative leadership, it was appropriate that the Carlton should be the venue for one of the most crucial decisions in the party’s history. In 1922 a significant wedge of the party had grown restless with the wartime coalition which, with Lloyd George at its head, had rumbled on into peace-time. There was some anxiety, to say the least, that if this situation continued it would destroy the party and that this would become evident at the general election looming on the horizon. The leadership were clear that the coalition should carry on; among the rebels was the little known, self-effacing, Stanley Baldwin, who would never have admitted to being concerned about his chances of eventually leading the party and how these would be stifled under a coalition led by the Welsh wizard, who was not little known or self-effacing but popularly supposed to have won the war and so saved the world for civilisation.

The party leaders thought to settle the issue in their favour by challenging their critics with a vote of confidence and where better to arrange this than at the Carlton, suffused as it was with the party’s traditions, expressed in all those overlooking portraits of past Prime Ministers. On the day all the big guns – Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead, Balfour – were lined up against the rebels. Their victory was almost a foregone conclusion except that Baldwin had other plans; it was, he said, “time to ditch the goat” – an unkind reference to Lloyd George. And ditched he was. The Ministers had no choice but to leave the government and Lloyd George had no choice but to resign the Premiership. “He will be Prime Minister again” said George V. But he wasn’t. It was a crucial change for the Tories, in which they lost their parliamentary giants. A little more than a year later they also lost 107 seats in a general election which brought in the first, unpalatable, taste of Labour government.

Lloyd George, not amused by his defeat, snarled that the Coalition had been broken up by “a West End Club” – an opinion shared with quite a few others. In fact, however the manner of the decision and the reasons for it, the vote did seem to be in line with the majority wishes of the party. Out of the bitterness and confusion there emerged the 1922 Committee, designed to improve communication between backbenchers and the party leaders. Then there emerged Stanley Baldwin. Now, long after the times when the party leader was expected to materialise after what Harold Macmillan called “the customary processes of consultation”, the 1922 Committee is responsible for organising the election of the leader – an arrangement which is clearly not ideal for the Tories because it has thrown up people like William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.

Whites

In fact the Carllton’s policy of allowing women a limited access to membership is some way ahead of some of the other, traditional, posh London clubs. Whites is one example. It is the oldest and most exclusive of the clubs and has a grisly history of infestation by gambling addicts, where people who had grown fabulously rich on the pitiless exploitation of the workers spent money in betting on whatever took their fancy. In the 18th century a man dropped dead outside the club and was carried inside while members laid bets on whether he was actually dead. This was the ruling class at play, setting an example to the lower orders on how to behave. That the standards had not improved could have been judged when Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health in the post-war Attlee government, was kicked in the bottom by a member, who thought this was an effective argument against Bevan’s work in setting up the National Health Service. Other clubs who also exclude women are Pratts, Brooks and the Garrick.

But this is not to say that the Carlton leads the way to a more enlightened and hopeful age. Membership costs are £600 to join (free to women) and an annual subscription of £600 (£300 to women). And what you get for that is the right to share a rather splendid building with a clutch of political twisters or drunken, tedious supporters of a party which has consciously supervised a huge burden of human suffering. Beside that fact the issue of whether women can join on the same terms as men is seen in its true insignificance. The stand taken by Duncan Smith is motivated by nothing more than a characteristically feeble attempt to win a few votes and in the process to deny the importance of human relationships – including those between the sexes—to a sustainable society.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Pornography and Politics (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kenneth Clarke was a Front Bench star in the Thatcher and Major governments – Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and all that – but he has now decided that he does not like the members of his own party. A lot of them, he complains, are elderly people who never attend meetings and vote after reading the Daily Telegraph – as if that kind of political self-instruction had not always been worth a hat full of Tory votes. One of Clarke’s aides – Nick Kent – has been more explicit in his dislike of the Tory grass roots: “nasty old people” was his description of the party faithful (who) “cannot be reasoned with”. These outbursts are not accidents; they have been provoked by those nasty geriatrics electing Iain Duncan Smith to the Tory leadership in preference to Clarke and to the fact that Clarke now senses the time has come for him to make another bid for the top job – which cannot be unconnected with a dawning awareness in the party that by choosing Duncan Smith they made a mistake of historic stupidity.

The reasons for Duncan Smith’s victory will be a field for endless analysis, which is probably only waiting for the Tories to lose the next election as decisively as they lost the last one. Perhaps it was in reaction against William Hague, who was notable for what Nick Kent called “a teenage cocktail of tabloid populism and raving anti-Europeanism”. Perhaps it was because, although Duncan Smith had upset quite a few people (like John Major) in the party he had done so for what they considered the right reasons, in contrast to Clarke and Portillo. Perhaps they simply took to Duncan Smith’s soldierly stiff upper lip, his smart suits, his background as an officer in the Guards. They must have forgotten that political leaders are not elected to be well-mannered and expensively dressed. What leaders must be good at is telling lies, twisting arms, blackmailing their supporters, convincing the electorate that a calamitous past was not their fault.

Retreat 

Some months after he got the job, Duncan Smith is plainly failing to turn his party round. He is in deep trouble, with political correspondents openly musing on the likelihood that at the next election the Tories will be reduced the third ranking party, behind the Lib Dems. So Duncan Smith should be looking over his shoulder, organising his retreat, setting up his rearguard or whatever it is they do in the Guards at such times. And to make things a little more difficult there is Clarke in pursuit, declaring that he is reconsidering his refusal to accept a shadow post under Duncan Smith: “Never say never in politics” he said, ” It depends what job and depends on what he (Duncan Smith) expects me to say about the policy of the party”. It might be asked, how Clarke reconciles this with his previous assessment of Duncan Smith as a “status quo” politician, one of the “headbangers” on the issue of Europe, who would send the party into a “lurch to the right”. Politicians are of course skilled at forgetting their former declarations of immutable principle if it will help them get into power. Clarke is not offering to support his leader but to line himself up for the leadership if, with a little help from Clarke, Duncan Smith should be ousted.

Clarke will have learned from history that it will not be that simple, that there will be other hopefuls sharpening their knives, a few of them – like the oily, odious Michael Howard – already well known. Other possible candidates will have to work a bit harder to get themselves known but so did Margaret Thatcher when she beat Ted Heath in 1975, when few people expected a woman to come through to lead the Tory Party, especially one who had been jeered at in the media as the minister who snatched away the schoolkids’ free milk. So step forward, as they say in the gutter press, Theresa May, who sits for the lush Thames-side seat of Maidenhead. It is apparent that she is being groomed for stardom, if that is how to describe being leader of this political rabble. Her publicity drive may or may not be assisted by her having a name very close to that of a celebrated queen of porn. Get onto the internet and search for Teresa (no h) May and you will be viewing some lurid, unreal images of a female who does not appear to be taking part in a dreary Commons debate. As a result Theresa (with the h) May has been invited to participate in some raunchy TV programmes and has received some pretty forthright correspondence meant for her near-namesake. A typical letter ” . . . asked (her) to expose herself in public, to do things with men that most of us wouldn’t consider in the privacy of our own homes, and to force herself into weird, unnatural positions for the camera”.

Porn Queen 

This raises a few questions. How justified is the outrage at being confused with a porn queen and at Teresa May’s way of earning her living? One thing which can be said is that she is perfectly open about what she does, which is some way better than politicians who, if they are at all interested in hanging on to their job, cannot be honest about their work. If they were honest they would have to own up to a persistent catalogue of deception and failure and in the end to their own inability to control, or even affect, the social system which they claim to be able to fashion to our benefit. And what, after all, can we name as pornography and who are the pornographers?

Theresa May is the daughter of a clergyman. She went to Oxford (like Thatcher) then worked in a bank. Her ambitions were clear early on; she was a councillor in Merton, had to go through the mill of contesting some hopelessly solid Labour seats, like North West Durham in 1992 and Barking in a 1994 by-election before, against some strong opponents, she won the nomination for the rock-solid Tory seat of Maidenhead. “Very bright, hyperactive and witty” was how Andrew Roth described her in the Guardian. “Sloane with City flash” was another’s less kind assessment. The parallels between her and Thatcher have been noted; a Eurosceptic, she may see her road to power in carrying on where the mad handbagger left off. In the Tory leadership fight in 2001 she was careful not to be too prominent about her support for Portillo. In any case Duncan Smith did not hold this against her and gave her the shadow job of Transport and Local Government, belabouring the hapless, floundering Stephen Byers.

Bearing in mind that one function of the pornographer is the selling of talents for questionable purpose, how do we assess Theresa May? What does this supposedly vibrant and capable woman have to offer about this society and what it does to people? So far her comments have been preoccupied with blaming the Labour government for policies which are simply a continuation of what the Tories did when they were in power. On 7 November she spoke out about the government’s suggestion that people might be encouraged to vote if it was made easier for them, by having polling booths in places like supermarkets. Her comments were less than original. The way to get people to vote was not, she said, by “inventing new electoral systems or new types of politicians . . .The underlying cause of voter apathy is growing cynicism with the political process . . .” This banality does not even approach the question of why voters should be cynical. One obvious reason is that experience of a Labour government has made it clear to thousands of people that there is no difference worth influencing a vote between the big parties. People who voted Labour in 1997 under the impression that they were opting for social change are now realising that they were wrong but they have no idea of any other way. That is the root of their cynicism.

Bombs and Poverty 

There is a kind of pornography in this social system, which has nothing to do with a few women being paid to perform a variety of sexual acts for the entertainment of others. The kind of socially organised, premeditated state violence that has devastated the wretched country of Afghanistan in the interests of the oil industry is a kind of pornography; it excites all manner of morbid responses which are stimulated and exploited by political pornographers like Blair and Bush. It is a kind of pornography that in this country, which our leaders assure us is a model of civilised advancement, a third of the children live below the official poverty line. It is a kind of pornography that voters should be cynical about the political system when they have the power to use it to transform society, to liberate the human race into a society based on human needs.

Meanwhile we are left with the same dreary procession of impotent leaders who tell us, one after the other, that the way forward is to hand over to them our power to change society so that they can keep it as it is. Major for Thatcher; Hague for Major; Duncan Smith for Hague; perhaps one day May for Duncan Smith. And that is just the Tory Party. The other Teresa May, and those who do the same work, do far less damage.

Ivan