SPGB Snippets: Rough reality (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website 

July 26, 2026

Andy Burnham pledged ‘to finally end long-term rough sleeping across the UK’. He previously aimed to prevent rough sleeping in Manchester by 2020, and in 2019 the Conservative Party manifesto committed to ending ‘the blight of rough sleeping’. Instead, in 2025 the number of people estimated to sleep rough on a single night in England was the highest recorded, at nearly 4,800.

Rough sleeping is not just about housing. Rough sleepers are among the most marginalised and victimised in capitalist society. Support services, however ‘well-funded’, can only ever offer limited palliatives as they are working within a system that pushes people into homelessness – why previous attempts to end rough sleeping have failed, despite Burnham’s ambition.

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Global real worker pay fell 12 percent while real CEO pay surged 54 percent between 2019 and 2025. At least four CEOs of major corporations each pocketed over $100 million in pay and bonuses last year. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan led the pack at over $205 million. Billionaires were paid $2,500 per second in dividends in 2025. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Oxfam are calling for urgent action to rein in extreme wealth, including higher, fairer taxes on the richest and binding limits on CEO pay.

[Common Dreams]

In 2011, he spent 81 days detained in China for criticizing the government following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which 90,000 people died. Ai Weiwei worked with hundreds of anonymous volunteers to identify and publish the names of more than 5,000 children who died under the rubble of poorly constructed schools, information that the government sought to censor. 

[El Pais]

…. the Housing and Land Rights Network, have argued that the real numbers are significantly higher and estimate at 3 million…Shelters, where available, are frequently inadequate, overcrowded, unsanitary, unsafe for women, or located far from work opportunities. Instead of treating shelter as a right linked to dignity, many city administrations treat it as temporary charity. During mega-events such as the Commonwealth Games 2010 or the G20 Summit gatherings hosted in India, homeless people are often subjected to eviction drives in the name of beautification. Pavements are cleared, encampments removed, and poverty hidden so that cities may appear modern to visitors.

[Countercurrents]

The right to life in Kenya is often treated as if it begins at conception and ends at birth. As in much of the world, self-described ‘pro-lifers’ claim to defend life at all costs – yet too often stop short of defending the lives already being lived, and those cut short too early.

[openDemocracy]

…the central question of his book, which is built around a concept Marx called ‘disposable time’—the time left over after workers have completed the labor necessary to sustain themselves and their families. Marx traced this idea back to an obscure 1821 pamphlet he discovered in the British Museum, in which the author argued that a nation’s true wealth lies not in gold or goods but in free time: ‘Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more’.

[People’s World]

The communist revolution, if it arrives in the nick of time to prevent humankind’s suicide, is a seismic event that changes everything. It is difficult to imagine it but it will leave nothing untouched. People will change. In the heat of the struggle for survival, proletarians will come together and become the self-conscious collective worker, which he/she already was but didn’t know it. All human relationships (between producers, family members, men-women, young-old, teachers-students and more) change in the process. The entire way in which society reproduces itself changes. Work changes. It no longer means labor.

[Internationalist Perspective]

(These links are provided for information, Target sites don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

SPGB Snippets: Sleeping on the street (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

July 1, 2026

The government has just repealed the Vagrancy Act of 1824, which made rough sleeping a crime. There are about a million empty homes in England alone with more than a quarter of them empty for more than six months. So there is absolutely no need for anyone to sleep rough.

In London, there are over 47.000 homes that have been empty for more than six months, enough to house the estimated 13,000 people sleeping rough there each year, and the 200,000 living in temporary accommodation.

In this supposedly relatively wealthy country, the possibility of providing decent homes for everyone is perfectly feasible, but capitalism’s profit motive prevents it from happening.

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ukraine is being devastated… The threat of escalation to nuclear war intensifies. Perhaps worst of all, in terms of long-term consequences, the meager efforts to address global heating have been largely reversed. Some are doing fine. The US military and fossil fuel industries are drowning in profit, with great prospects for their missions of destruction many years ahead… Meanwhile, scarce resources that are desperately needed to salvage a livable world, and to create a much better one, are being wasted in destruction and slaughter, and planning for even greater catastrophes’.

[CounterPunch]

‘We really don’t have time for the Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Spartacists, Revolutionary Communists or whatever sect in Your Party to get their shit together in order to take on the challenges we face – they might never overcome their miniscule differences or the battle of the £1 newspapers,’ Mish Rahman, a former Labour politician-turned-Your-Party-insider who defected to the Greens last month, told Novara Media. Rahman said he doubts the differences between the two camps are as substantive as they’re made out: ‘[Sultana and Corbyn] are not far off each other [politically], it’s just a proxy war for control’. 

[NovaraMedia]

‘”They say they don’t have enough homes, but look at how many empty ones there are – [the council] just doesn’t want to fix and repair them,” says mother-of-one Vanessa. She lives on Central Hill estate in Lambeth but only in temporary accommodation and says she’s been left “in limbo”. Dozens of properties on the south London estate are unoccupied, one for eight years, and yet the borough has the third-highest housing waiting lists in the capital – something that Vanessa, who has been waiting for a social home for three years, describes as “outrageous”’. 

[BBC]

Los Angeles spent about $418 million on homelessness programs in 2025, yet only a small share went toward helping people leave the streets for good, according to the New York Post. A recent City Hall report suggests most of the money supports short-term services that manage homelessness rather than resolve it. 

[ZeroHedge]

In 2021, there were only two diagnosed silicosis cases in California. In 2025 there were 214. ‘The number of cases is rising rapidly’ Dr. Michaels wrote to me, ‘That’s the important point’. Here’s the more tearful description from Dr. Michaels..: The hallmarks of the disease: shortness of breath and diminished exercise capacity that progresses to an inability to climb even one flight of stairs. A short walk that should take just 20 minutes can take an hour. Working is difficult or impossible. People cough incessantly. They can’t sleep because it is difficult to breathe and they are kept awake coughing. Over time, people with more advanced silicosis require supplemental oxygen and can’t leave home without an oxygen tank. And they are at increased risk of dying from lung cancer. The crime behind this slaughter is that safer, profitable substitutes are available. 

[Common Dreams]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Housing, savage and civilised (1956)

From the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

“In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilisation especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live."  

Thoreau, Walden, page 25, World's Classics edition (written in 1854).

Slings and Arrows: “Be it ever to humble . . ." (1953)

The Slings and Arrows column from the July 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Be it ever to humble . . ."

Scoffers and cynics sneer when they hear Bishops and sanctimonious politicians talk about the sanctity of the home and the family as the foundation of Christian civilisation. But that they are sincere cannot be doubted even by the most disbelieving. Why else would they live in such comfortable circumstances? Obviously because they believe that if the foundation is right the rest of the edifice must follow suit. Thus, true to their principles and beliefs. Archbishops live in Palaces, politicians in mansions and Stately Homes, Queen in Castles (two), Palaces (three), and Stately Home (one), and dogs, as is fitting and proper, in kennels.

Since there are not sufficient mansions, palaces and castles to go round, we content ourselves with flats, Nissen huts and prefabs. “Mid pleasures and palaces,” wrote a Victorian songster, “though we may roam. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” Had he been alive to-day he might have added the words “even if it’s only a dog kennel.”

The New Statesman publishes each week a feature entitled “This England” consisting of extracts from newspapers submitted by readers, which show the lighter and more humorous and eccentric side of what is known as the “British character.” In its issue of the 13th June, 1953, the New Statesman published in this feature the following extract from the Times: 

“For a year a husband and wife have lived in a wooden dog kennel seven feet long by five feet wide at Ystradmynach, Glamorgan. The kennel is one of four in the corner of a disused allotment. Three are occupied by dogs and the fourth by Mrs. Dorothy May Norman and her husband, an engineer at a local power station.”

Reference to the Times showed that far from them being examples of British eccentricity this unfortunate couple lived in a kennel from sheer necessity, and not from choice. To journalists fond of writing about the glories of the welfare state and with comfortable homes in Hampstead or Bloomsbury and well appointed offices in High Holborn, the idea of people living in a dog kennel may be a joke. But each to his taste. Perhaps the juxtaposition of this item with articles by Mr. John Strachey showing where Marx was wrong, and that it was possible by legislation and “counterpressure ” to offset the evils that Marx denounced, may have given them cause for laughter which escape us.

According to the Times, notice to quit has been served on this couple and soon they will have nowhere to live, not even a dog kennel. But perhaps one of the Bishops or politicians may invite them to share their homes till further arrangements can be made, and thus keep the foundation of our Christian Civilisation in being.

* * *

Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue

Those, who since the last war have watched the manner in which British capitalism has become almost a colonial dependancy under the hegemony of the United States, might well expect that our foremost leaders would have objected and raised some form of protest. Instead, most of them have actually supported dependence on America. There was no one to demand the return of independence to this once mighty Power, until Coronation Day, when appropriately enough the following clarion call was issued:

“How the Yankees now parading London's streets must laugh when they see multitudes of Union Jacks. It is Britain’s national flag. Once it was meant to symbolise our power and independence. To-day the Yankees determine British policy.

"THEY dominate our Army, Navy and Air Force. 

"THEY tell us with whom we may trade and with whom we may not trade.

"THEY cause our lads to be killed in their war in Korea . . . If those in Westminster Abbey were real patriots they would help to send every Yankee back home. . . .”

Who is this leader who on Coronation day tried to imbue the nation with a sense of patriotism and national independence? None other than that staunch defender of the Union Jack, that heir to the traditions of Palmerston, Wellington, Drake and Raleigh, that paragon of patriotism, Mr. Harry Pollitt. There are of course several shortcomings in this appeal, but one cannot have everything. Suffice it that the clarion call has been made, and if Harry does not tell us what to do with “our” Army, Navy and Airforce, when the Americans are made to hand them back; well we must find out for ourselves. And as for being allowed to trade with whom we please, that would be wonderful, except that we can’t quite think of anything we have worth trading. The most interesting feature of Pollitt’s call to action, is, of course, the use of the collective pronoun. It serves to remind us of what “we” have lost by our dependence on the Americans.

In the first Elizabethan era, its most famous writer wrote a play in which a clarion call appears which has rallied Britons for three centuries, and has immortalised the hero who uttered it. Is it too much to ask that some playwright of the present Elizabethan era will do the same by Harry Pollitt? We hope not, and we feel sure that when that call is heard throughout our land there will be none who will not feel uplifted. "Cry, God for Harry, England and St. Joe!”

* * *

Anti-Americanism

There is a more sinister aspect to the grotesque posturings of Harry Pollitt and the Communist Party. Since the erstwhile Allies quarrelled over the postwar settlement, the Communist Party has indulged in stirring up anti-American prejudices. They refer to “Yank” in almost the same manner as Fascists refer to “Yids.” Should some unfortunate girl be assaulted by an American soldier, then it is headlined in the Daily Worker. But should Americans give large contributions to flood relief funds then one requires a microscope to find any reference to it. In their spoken propaganda they harp on this anti-yank theme with the same assiduity as Mosley once tried to work up prejudice against Jews.

There is no baseness from which the Communist Party will shrink in its effort to follow in the footsteps of their masters in the Kremlin. But they had better be careful. Not for the first time, Moscow might suddenly change policy, catching Harry Pollitt and his friends on the wrong foot, again not for the first time. Then, in their efforts to catch up with the change they might trip and break their political necks. An event which would be unmourned by all who know the Communist Party for what it is.

It was said of Shakespeare that “he touched nothing he did not adorn.” Of Mr. Pollitt and his Party it might truly be said that they touch nothing they do not degrade.

S.A.

Slings and Arrows: The Wages of Philanthropy (1953)

The Slings and Arrows column from the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Wages of Philanthropy

A poet of the eighteenth century commented that “Virtue is its own reward.” That thought is often quoted and applied, especially when workers want a rise in pay. It is nice to know, however; that occasionally virtue brings other and more tangible rewards than the mere satisfaction of knowing one has been virtuous.

When, in 1892, Lord Rowton built the first of his enormous lodging-houses, he did so because he believed (Daily Express, 30/4/53) “every man should have a room to himself—with a door—for 6d. a night.” Five such lodging houses were established and although every man was entitled to pay his sixpence and get his room—with a door—only the poor turned up. The rich, either ignorant of these facilities, or not wishing to stop the poor using them, continued to reside at the Ritz or Claridges. But time has a habit of evening things out and in due course the rich were duly rewarded for their consideration, as we shall see.

It is a far cry from the nineties of the last century to the present time but Rowton Houses still go on and although the price has increased to 2s. 3d. per night nevertheless there is a constant demand for accommodation. So much so that the dividends on the capital of Rowton Houses Ltd. has recently been increased. Its properties are reputed to be worth £2,000,000, and the shares, if the firm were sold, would have a break-up value of £10 each. The City Editor of the Daily Express tells us that although the share and property dealers are envious and would like to do a deal in Rowton House shares their chances are slender, for the shares are held by people “who put service to the not-so-wealthy before profit.” It is perhaps a coincidence that the shares of Rowton Houses are regarded as gilt-edged and that that institution of putting “service before profit,” the Britannic Assurance Co. hold 11,000 shares. When “service to the not-so-wealthy” is accompanied by an increased dividend then virtue gets more than its “own reward,” and when Ecclesiastes wrote “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return after many days ” he little dreamed that it would return buttered.

The Rest is Silence

Dr. Dalton, bright star in the Labour firmament, has published the first instalment of his three volume autobiography. Apart from a few admissions and statements, the book has no merit either as a work of literature or a study of political events. In the normal course of events this book would not be mentioned in these columns as it would be a waste of space to do so. But some of the disclosures are worthy of comment because they throw a significant light on the present Labour leaders who pretend to be more prescient, and more faithful to the cause than the idols of yesteryear.

Dr. Dalton tells us in 1953, that he knew in 1924 or 1925 that Ramsay MacDonald was vain, conceited, snobbish and untrustworthy. But between those years and 1931 Dalton was his supporter and indeed served under him in the second Labour Government. Never, until after the debacle of 1931, did Dalton and the rest of the gang who pretend to have known all along, say one word which would lead either the electorate or rank and file Labourites to believe that all was not well with the Party leadership. On the contrary their mouths dripped honeyed words of admiration.

Dalton quotes Tom Johnston as saying “If the party meeting only got to know of a few things like this, they’d all be climbing up the walls, not just the I.L.P. but the soberest trade unionists in the Party.” But if Dalton knew and Johnston knew how was it that the Party meeting did not know? The truth was concealed.

We are left then with two conclusions. If MacDonald betrayed the Labour Party and was suspect all the time then those who suspected him were culpable. If on the other hand, they did not know, but pretend to do so in order to appear wise, then what reliance can be placed on them? Here they were, working day by day with men whom they now call traitors and they remained blithely innocent of the fact. Are these the leaders who ask for support because of their qualifications?

We are also indebted to Dalton for telling us something of the quality of the Labour leadership. He tells us that when the Labour Government was being formed in 1929, would-be Ministers besieged MacDonald and some of them wept and fainted in their anxiety. What a disgusting spectacle.

That is the sort of thing that goes on when Leaders take refuge in secrecy and when they rely for support as they must do (or they wouldn’t be leaders), on the political ignorance of their followers.

Who knows but that in another twenty-five years we may be reading some future Dalton on some present day traitor or betrayer of the Labour Party. For judging on past experience we don’t know.what goes on in the hierarchical section of the Labour Party; the Party meeting does not know and the rank and file do not know. We can only guess. And we are on reasonably safe ground if we venture to predict that the present day Labour Leaders are as anxious as those of the past to remain leaders, and to take power in order to run capitalism.

Whose Mother isn’t using Persil?

Among the American prisoners released by the Koreans are a small group, who according to the Authorities have been infected with Communist propaganda. And, since the United States is a land of freedom, and the right to think as one pleases is upheld by the American Constitution, this small group has been sent to a hospital for treatment. The treatment will consist of reading books and seeing newsreels approved by the authorities, so that they may be cured of their infection. The State Department announces: “The privations, and dangers suffered by prisoners of the Communists, may have made them susceptible to the Communist brain-washing techniques.”

Here is some peculiar reasoning. Are we to understand that the way to make people agree with and become permeated by one’s ideas is to make them suffer privations and dangers? If it is true, as we have been told by sundry journalists, that American prisoners of war were badly treated by the Chinese and Koreans then how could a “small group” become infected with their oppressors ideas? No one has heard of any Jew who suffered in concentration camps at the hands of Hitler, having to be "brainwashed” because he had become convinced that the Germans were a "Master race.” How then could prisoners subjected to "privations and dangers ” by their captors become convinced of the benefits to be derived from their ideas?

If it is because of the ill-treatment, are these returned prisoners to be even worse-treated so that they may become imbued with the benefits and joys of the "American way of life ”?

As if these unfortunate prisoners have not had enough, psychiatrists have been turned loose on them in order to "brainwash” them back to a belief in free enterprise, democracy, and Americanism. It has not yet occurred to these psychiatrists and “brainwash” experts that men who have been held prisoners for many years and whose subsequent release is dependent upon their change of attitude, will "brainwash” themselves so fast as to outdo any claim made by the makers of Persil soap.

If it were not so tragic this whole episode would make a good subject for an Aldwych farce!

S.A.

Blogger's Note:

The February 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard carries an interesting article by 'Ivan' on Rowton Houses.

40 years of Red Nose Day (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month was a special celebration for the children’s charity Comic Relief. It marked 40 years since the start of Red Nose Day. In the days leading up to March 21st, you could hardly switch on the radio or TV without being reminded that famous people, mainly showbiz celebrities, were going to disguise their normal features with red noses of various shapes and sizes to remind us that they were collecting money to improve the lives of poor children.

Endemic

And it does seem difficult not to see this as a positive thing given the fact that, as we are told by the charity Shelter, 120,000 children in the UK wake up homeless every day and many thousands more who may not be homeless have to suffer housing and living conditions that make it impossible for them to live comfortable and fulfilling lives. The Labour government’s new Homelessness Minister, Rusharana Ali, has herself referred to this as ‘a national disgrace’, pointing out that last year ‘more than 117,000 households, including over 150,000 children, were living in temporary accommodation’. Shelter also calls this an ‘outrage’, and understandably so, given that when it was founded in 1966, its promise was to get rid of homelessness within 10 years. Since then, organisations dedicated to solving homelessness have proliferated and Shelter now runs its own weekly lottery – a sure sign that the problem it campaigns about is endemic.

A further recent report by the Barnardo’s charity states that ‘more than a million children in the UK either sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their family cannot afford the “luxury” of replacing broken frames and mouldy linen’ and that ‘the rise in “bed poverty” reflects growing levels of destitution in which low-income families already struggling with soaring food or gas bills often find they are also unable to afford a comfortable night’s sleep’. And in a recent article in the Big Issue, John Bird, founder of that magazine and now a member of the House of Lords, summed up the embedded nature of poverty and homelessness by stating that ‘three decades of the same conversation is exhausting’. Other sources have reiterated the same thing. The centre-right think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, found that ‘the most disadvantaged people in Britain were no better off than they were 15 years ago, with around 13.4 million people living lives marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. And Greg Hurst of the Centre for Homeless Impact has expressed the view that ‘we are condemned to repeat the cycle of ebbs and flows of homelessness’.

Realm of fantasy

But why? After all, according to official figures, over a quarter of a million homes in England are classed as ‘long-term empty’, meaning that they have been left vacant for more than six months. Yet we all know that the way things work is that parents and children who need homes cannot simply walk into empty properties and live there. The kind of society we live in does not cater for such needs, basic as they may be, of those who do not have the money to pay for them. In the same way, no matter how technologically efficient food production has become, no matter how much food we are capable of producing, only people with enough money in their pockets will have access to it. In the context of capitalism, John Bird got it right, in one of his Big Issue articles, by stating that ‘ideas of ending poverty are stuck in the realm of fantasy’.

Scratching the surface

So can anything be done at all? It’s clear that Red Nose Day, coming back time after time as it does, can help a little but in the end it can do no more than offer a small amount of temporary relief to the poor or disadvantaged children it is aimed at. No matter how much time and energy is put into it by those involved and no matter how well-meaning they may be, their efforts can do no more than scratch the surface of the poverty problem. They can get nowhere near offering any kind of long-term solution. The Oxfam food policy director, Hanna Saarinen, recognised this recently when she stated: ‘We need to reimagine a new global food system to really end hunger; one that works for everyone.’ But the trouble – and the truth – is that such a food system is simply not feasible in the framework of the world we live in, where, at the end of the day, profit must always come before need. That is why, even in a country like Britain where food is manifestly plentiful, many people are still forced to have recourse to food banks, and charities like Comic Relief are still considered necessary. Of course, millions of workers do manage to keep their heads above water, some living reasonably comfortable lives, but even this is usually at the cost of working hard for an entire lifetime, never being truly free of financial insecurity and often at great cost to the quality of their lives.

Need not profit

And so it will remain until we not only, in the word used by Hanna Saarinen, ‘reimagine’ but also implement a wholly different organisation of society, one that is fully cooperative and human-centred and dedicated to catering for the needs of everyone not producing profit for the tiny minority – in other words designed to take care of everyone in a sustainable, inclusive way. Adequate resources to provide a decent life for all are available, but that decent life cannot be realised under the profit system. It can only be possible in the kind of moneyless, marketless society that we stand for, and that will render regular recourse to charities like Comic Relief and events like Red Nose Day unnecessary and superfluous.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a rather jaundiced article on Comic Relief. "More cold water, comrades . . . "

So They Say: They Pretend Malnutrition, too (1974)

The So They Say Column from the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

They Pretend Malnutrition, too

A new addition to saloon-bar political mythology has arrived. It joins the Man Who Gets Twice as Much on Social Security as he does Working, the Black Man Who Buys Kit-E-Kat for his Sandwiches (yes, my grocer told me), the Eight Workmen Who Came and Lolled About Smoking When All I Wanted was a Screw Tightened on my Cooker, and so on.

This happy arrival is the Family Only Pretending to be Homeless. Its career was launched in the London Evening News on 18th January:

A housing chief has announced a clampdown on the “phoney homeless”. Some families are suspected of faking evictions to gain council homes. Only couples with children, facing complete family breakdown, are now likely to get official help in Hertfordshire.

Presumably you must spend a minimum of three nights on the pavement and get down to six stones per adult member of family; otherwise you’re only pretending. A family with a room to itself that wants a whole council house are sheer Epicureans, and we don’t stand for them in Hertfordshire. Take it from me, councillor, my nephew’s milkman knows this lot

No, it's Different Now

One trouble with the working class is its memory. How can you expect to get on and please the government if you forget the right things, like standing up for the Queen, and remember the wrong ones, like unemployment and politicians’ promises?

Thus, the masses have watching TV films about the war in which the Germans are shown as the hateful enemy. In the last week of January Die Welt published an article by its London correspondent Christian Ferber protesting about this. Sure enough, he was supported. A Reverend, among others, wrote to The Guardian suggesting “restoring the balance” with some programmes about good Germans in the war, specially POWS who “were permitted to visit churches and other organizations”,

People must really arrange their memories better. Saying they had to hate the Germans for six years is no excuse. If villains are shown today they should be Russians. But in the war weren’t they glorious allies or something? There you go again.

Please Spare a Copper . . .

Readers of the financial pages cannot fail to notice that profits and dividends show little sign of wilting because of the crisis. Some companies are doing well out of it. A typical example was shown in The Guardian's business section on 6th February. Under the heading blessing in disguise the buoyant position of Central Wagon, the steel stockholding and hydraulic equipment group, was described:

The company’s sales in January this year are 50 per cent up on the monthly average for the previous year . . . When the 1973 results are announced, the profit is more likely to be around the £900,000 mark—well beyond the company forecast of about £670,000 . . . Central Wagon is confident that it will produce still higher profit in 1974 —even after allowing for the miners’ strike.

But when times are bad, are they not bad for the owning class too? Were there not tales in the nineteen-thirties’ depression of ruined rich men queueing to throw themselves from high buildings? Untrue. Britain in the Nineteen Thirties by N. Branson and M. Heinemann (1972) says:

True, profits fell in the slump years (by 30 per cent at the lowest point, in 1932), but since a higher proportion of profits was paid out in dividends, shareholders’ incomes fell much less than this, while income from rent and fixed interest stocks remained more stable in spite of the fall in prices.

. . . Figures in the British Association’s Britain in Recovery, based on Colin Clark’s estimates, suggest a fall of 9-11 per cent in consumption expenditure of those with incomes over £250, from 1929 to 1933—which was almost certainly less than the fall in prices.

. . . for the Clerical Hat

Reach for your handkerchiefs. The Guardian of 8th February told the harrowing story of Britain’s underpaid vicars.

The [Church] commissioners, in a report to the General Synod, the parliament of the Church of England, say the average pay of the 9,000 vicars last November was about £35 a week. In addition, they are provided with a house free of rent and rates, but many have to meet the expenses of doing their job, which can be as high as £4 to £5 a week.

How sad for the clergy to have to put up with the austerity they urge on others. The world is too materialistic.

Taylor Swift, food banks and insecurity (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Taylor Swift gave substantial donations to food banks in each UK venue she played at during her 2024 UK tour, she was widely praised for her generosity. One of the effects, according to charities, was that it allowed them ‘breathing space’ as they struggled to keep up with demand. Another effect was to highlight the fact, often hidden from the wider gaze, that food banks are as widespread as they are. And it led some people at least to question the reasons why they are so necessary for so many.

Increasing hunger

To put some figures on their use, according to recently published figures by the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest food bank charity, Trussell is currently making around 3 million deliveries to food banks annually, while accepting that this figure represents a significant underestimate of actual demand. Nor does it include networks such as Independent Food Aid (IFAN), which supports around 550 food banks, or Food Bank Aid which supplies around 20,000 people a week at 32 food banks. And, of course, there are myriad other food banks organised locally and independently by charities, churches and volunteer community groups. IFAN has reported a 25-50 percent rise in supplies needed over the last year, while the Trussell Trust shows well over half a million new people using their food banks for the first time in 2023/24, with over a third of the recipients being children, of whom the number receiving food packages has doubled over the last five years. And given the well-known fact that many struggling families, especially those with children, do not turn to food banks but suffer in silence cutting back on food or skipping meals, campaigners have raised the issue of potential life-long risks to physical and cognitive growth for children who may suffer from malnutrition.

Increasing homelessness

The growth in the number of people struggling to feed themselves, therefore, seems exponential, driven, according to a recent IFAN survey, by such factors as cost-of-living increases, Universal Credit waiting times, low wages, insecure work, and disability costs. And of course none of this takes fully into account homeless people who may not be using food banks to survive. In London, for example, the most recent figures showed a 29 percent increase in rough sleepers compared to the previous year with over 4,000 people seen sleeping rough between April and June 2024, close to 2,000 of these ‘new’ to the experience. A spokesperson for the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has pledged to ‘eliminate’ the problem, said: ‘No one should have to sleep rough on our country’s streets, so it’s shameful that numbers are rising in London and across the country.’ Recent reports have shown that the increasing homelessness feeding this has a number of triggers, one of which is people’s inability to pay rising rents, even when in regular employment or in receipt of all available benefits. A recent case that garnered much publicity was that of a 75-year old woman, Susan Curtis, made homeless in Romford, East London, when the landlady of the home she had lived in for 13 years sold up and evicted her, and she found all other accommodation well beyond her means. A report on this on the BBC news website told us that she was now living in poor health in a small hotel room without proper cooking or other facilities. She said she felt ‘on the edge’ and ‘hopeless’, scared that things would get even worse and she would end up on the streets. She added that ‘it’s a brutal system and I feel ill-equipped to deal with it’, thus summing up the plight of the 100,000+ households (including around 130,000 children) in the UK living in hotels, B&Bs and other temporary accommodation.

The charity Shelter was founded in 1966 with the promise to get rid of homelessness in Britain within 10 years. Today, close to 60 years later, its aim of ‘a safe, secure, affordable home for everyone’ seems further away than ever. In a special debate in the House of Lords on 29 April last year, anti-poverty campaigner and founder of the Big Issue magazine, John Bird (now Lord John Bird) said that millions of children are ‘inheriting poverty’ and called for an ‘enormous mind shift in tackling destitution’. He called upon the government not to try and ameliorate or accommodate poverty by on-off emergency measures but to eradicate it by tackling the causes. Worthy and well-meaning words of course, and when, several months after, in November 2024, he perceived government lack of interest in this, he walked out in exasperation on a session of the parliamentary select committee on homelessness and rough sleeping, proclaiming it a farce.

Lord Bird’s Ministry of Poverty

The farce is to imagine that an end to homelessness, food banks and poverty is even feasible within the framework of the system we live in. It is of course not, since at the end of the day, profit based on ‘growth’ must always trump need and this is what those in government who oversee that system will always give priority to. The best they can ever do is provide band-aids to put over the sore of poverty rather than end its domination over so many lives. A prime example of this is the very latest solution suggested by Lord Bird. As co-chair of a new All-Parliamentary Group Business Responses to Social Crises, he is calling for a ‘Ministry of Poverty’, yet at the same time, he is quoted as saying that its purpose would be ‘to tackle issues such as poverty and the housing crisis through entrepreneurship’. The idea that ‘entrepreneurship’, a mainstay of the system of which poverty and insecurity are inevitable features, could actually solve such problems is nothing short of baffling, especially as at the same time he also seems to accept that the worst poverty is largely down to the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances of your birth and early existence, something that the statistician, David Spiegelhalter, has labelled ‘constitutive luck’.

The machinery of abundance

As is widely accepted, we live in an era where there exist adequate resources and the technology to make beneficial use of them which could provide a decent life for all. As far back as 2009, Tristram Stuart’s book, Waste, worked out that ‘farmers worldwide currently provide the daily equivalent of 2,800 calories of food per person – more than enough to go round’, and estimated that, if food were produced and distributed rationally (meaning for need rather than for profit), there could be enough to feed those going hungry 23 times over. Yet, while there are patently enough resources to feed and house everyone on the planet, large numbers continue to go hungry and homeless. And, even in countries such as the UK, where food is manifestly plentiful, many people, as we have seen, are still forced to have recourse to food banks. So why should it be that the machinery that could give abundance leaves so many people in want and forces them to live hopeless, fragmented lives which both waste their natural potential and make them unhappy?

Comfort and dignity

Pensioner Susan Curtis’s final word was that she would like to be living ‘a comfortable and dignified life’. Who wouldn’t? That is what everyone would want for themselves and for others. Yet we live under a system where very few can be sure of having that – at least for all of their lives. Even those who are not among the 16 million living in poverty in the UK and who have employment that allows them and their families to live with reasonable comfort, can never be fully secure. They can never know quite how long that will last, living as we do in a system which is inherently unstable and prone to crisis and where very quickly insecurity may loom. And this will always be the case until we get together democratically to establish a different social order, a moneyless, marketless society of free access to all goods and services, one in which the rule of the market and the coercion of paid employment are replaced by planned cooperation and democratic association, one in which every single person is able to develop their interests and abilities with full social support and without the gun of material insecurity to their heads.

Howard Moss

Sting in the Tail: A sick society (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sick society

Dr. Ian Burns is Glasgow’s public health director. He has recently been commenting on the relationship between health and poverty in Glasgow. What he has to say applies to all cities:

“If we are going to do something about Glasgow's ill-health you have to confront the poverty. The Government have acknowledged there is a link between ill-health and poverty but they have always said we don't know if the one is caused by the other, ” he said.

"We are saying it is, the link is empowerment. If you are unemployed, have no educational background, and don't know where your children‘s next meat is coming from, you have the sense of the system doing things to you" (The Herald, 21 December).

The sad truth is that medical care is a commodity. If you can afford it you can get the most modern treatment immediately, but if you are poor you can join the waiting list to get treatment from underfunded overworked NHS staff.

Hard core

The term “hard-core” is popular with the press. We have read of “hard-core pornography” and “hard-core criminality”. Now the Government have found “hard-core rough sleepers”:

“In a statement. Environment Minister Robert Jones said the Government's winter shelter programme, with up to 350 places in Central London, made it unnecessary for anyone . . . to have to sleep on the streets this winter'. ”

"It is clear, ” the Minister added, "that street level agencies are finding themselves trying to help a hard core of rough sleepers ” (Observer, 18 December)

However, Homeless Network, an umbrella group of 30 charities, report that 288 people were sleeping rough in late November, a seven percent increase compared with May and estimate that during the past year 3,000 spent part or all of their time sleeping in the streets in the survey area alone.

Government ministers climbing out of their chauffeur-driven cars for a night out at the Covent Garden Opera may console themselves that the street-sleepers strewn around are “hard-core rough sleepers”, but socialists know that not only has capitalism a hard-core but that it is an extremely bitter fruit for the poor, disabled and homeless.

What a wally!

The shallowness and double standards of politicians were epitomised by John Major’s insistence that schools should conduct daily “acts of worship” on a broadly Christian basis.

"Mr. Major said daily worship for all pupils allowed them to explore their own beliefs and helped build community spirit and shared values, and reinforced positive attitudes" (BBC2 Ceefax, 17 December).

What that bit about acts of worship (ugh) allowing pupils to “explore their own beliefs” really amounts to is the attempted indoctrination of young minds, or what was called “brainwashing” when Nazis and the so-called communists did it.

And just how do these acts of worship build “community spirit and shared values” in, say, Northern Ireland? Mind you. Major will hear plenty of “positive attitudes” being reinforced by the hangers, floggers, xenophobes and other Christian worshippers at Tory conferences.

Whether Major thought up such rubbish by himself or merely parroted what some Tory hack told him, doesn’t matter, because he is damned either way.

A sorry sight

On BBC News (22 December) an entire workforce marched arm-in-arm through Liverpool streets singing “Here We Go”. So full of patriotic fervour were they that they waved and even wore the Union Jack. This was obviously a big celebration.

And what was it all about? Only that Bryant and.May, Britain’s last match factory, had closed down and this was the workers' way of marking the occasion.

Perhaps these workers will reflect on what good their patriotism did them when they signed-on the following day.

The sporting life

According to the dictionary definition, sport is “pleasant pastime; amusement, diversion”. So what are we to make of newspaper headlines that scream “Doping Ban”, “Bribery allegations”, and “Football Manager Took Bungs”?

Just as the financial pages are concerned with Insider Dealing, Dirty Tricks Takeover Bids and all the other skulduggery' of the City, so athletics, cricket and football reporters are as much concerned with cheating, doping and bribery as with reporting sporting events.

The truth is that capitalism is a social system based on profit, greed and deceit. Sport inside capitalism is big business, so it is no wonder that it reflects the chicanery of the system.

In a socialist society human beings would be able to enjoy sport as a “pleasant pastime”; amusement; diversion". That is impossible inside the present production-for-profit system.

Canadian capers

Some Canadian students have invited Tommy Sheridan of Scottish Militant Labour to Canada to speak about socialism.

At the Euro-elections last June Sheridan’s manifesto, besides being full of pictures of himself and claims that he is “the people's champion”, “hammer of the Tories”, etc., carried an article entitled “What Is Socialism?”.

According to this, production will still be for sale on the market and money, banks and finance will remain. What it all added up to is capitalism’s buying and selling system along with the usual idealist’s illusion that it can be “planned and run for the benefit of everybody”.

If those Canadian students want to know about socialism then Sheridan is the last one to tell them.

Facing the facts (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

• Inequality - The rich are getting richer. The top 1% of adults — 440,000 people — own more than twice as much as the bottom 50%. We produce, they take
• Insecurity - Only 4 in 10 workers have jobs that are relatively secure. By the year 2000, full-time employment will be a minority form of work. No profit, no work.
• Poverty - In Britain 36% of children live below the poverty line and about 10 million people are dependent on Income Support. There is worse to come. Social Security spending is to be reduced by £5 billion by the year 2000.
• Stress - Office staff in Britain are working longer hours. About 500,000 workers suffer physically as a result of their working environment; stress is identified as a problem in 9 out of 10 workplaces.
• Pressure - 1 in 4 of the population will suffer some type of mental health problem in a year. Poverty and loneliness are increasingly important causes.
• Homelessness - In 1995 about 360,000 people were classified as homeless and repossessions increased to 49,410. 389,780 home owners were in mortgage arrears and 75,258 possession orders were made against home owners. Meanwhile at least 300,000 building workers are currently unemployed.
• Poverty - More than 1 billion people in developing countries live in absolute poverty, and about 13 million children die each year from easily preventable illnesses.
• Hunger - 550 million people suffer hunger and every 3 seconds a child dies of hunger even though the world produces enough grain to provide everyone with a minimum diet Meanwhile crops which can’t be sold at a profit are destroyed and farmers are paid not to grow food.
• War - 25 wars rage over the globe, world capitalism spends $1,000,000,000,000, on armed forces each year with 500,000 scientists in military research. A huge waste of human and natural resources.
• Environment - Globally, forests are being destroyed at the rate of 11 million hectares per year while 6 million hectares of land are lost to deserts and a further 21 million are ruined so badly that they can no longer grow food. 

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

While Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola was watching his team play Real Madrid in the first leg of the Champions League quarter-finals on Tuesday, his watch was making headlines around the world. Guardiola was wearing an extravagant Richard Mille watch worth £1 million ($1.26 million) on his wrist at Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabéu.

 (CNN)

Conspiracy theorists have for years now insisted that COVID-19 vaccines were the real killers, especially among young men — but a new study shows that there’s no data to back that up. 

(Futurism)

Actual science is the great accomplishment of mankind. The antidote to ignorance, superstition, religious zealotry, and nonsensical beliefs in general. An eclipse exemplifies, to even the lay-est of laypeople, just how advanced modern science is. We were informed by astronomers, years in advance, exactly when and exactly where the eclipse would occur — down to the second, down to the meter — and everyone in the path of totality could literally see how exactly right those predictive calculations were. We should be celebrating and emphasizing this to laypeople, because these same scientists are the same people who’ve been telling us for decades that we’re destroying our climate with carbon emissions. So here’s my “by the way” retort to Montúfar’s aside: how many astronomers today — not in “ancient” times — are also astrologers? Spoiler: the answer is fucking zero. 

(Daring Fireball)

… I am aware of the dishonesty and stupidity of choosing any side in any war, and I am aware that all wars are immoral exercises in folly and absurdity. The only real beneficiaries are politicians and weapons makers. The great masses of regular people on both sides of any conflict always have to pay the price. The unlucky individuals who get killed or come home from the pointless war with mangled bodies and fucked-up minds pay the biggest price. Furthermore, whatever outcomes result from a war, no matter which side “wins,” serve mainly to lay the groundwork for future conflicts and more wars. 

(International Clearing House)

South Africa has undergone a nutritional transition over the past 30 years characterized by the triple burden of malnutrition: households are simultaneously experiencing undernutrition, hidden hunger, and overweight or obesity due to nutrient-poor diets. The results of the first in-depth, nationwide study into food and nutrition since 1994, the National Food and Nutrition Security Survey, found that almost half of South Africa’s adult population was overweight or obese. While there was sufficient food to feed everyone through domestic production and imports, many families and individuals went to bed on empty stomachs.

 (Alliance for Science)

Thirty years after the former liberation movement won the first democratic elections, South Africa remains the world’s most unequal nation, suffering from high unemployment, rampant crime, widespread corruption and a stagnant economy. 

(AFP)

Rough sleeping increased in all regions of England between 2022 and 2023 despite a Conservative 2019 manifesto promise to end rough sleeping before the next general election. An estimated 3,898 people slept rough in 2023, an annual increase of 27% – the largest annual rise since 2015. The numbers are more than double (up 120%) those in 2010. 

(Guardian)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Life and Times: Poverty amid plenty (2024)

The Life and Times column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Some time ago, while visiting my son and his family in the London area, we called in to see Ollie, one of my son’s friends who he’s known since his schooldays. Ollie has done incredibly well in conventional terms, in fact he’s become a multi-millionaire, living in a penthouse overlooking Park Lane. I hadn’t been there before and it sort of took my breath away – the sumptuous décor, the maid, the children’s nanny, the original Bob Dylan sketches on the wall. It was my first brush with this kind of wealth. Ollie’s background had been pretty humble, but after his education he’d got into trading in oil pipes, the ones that send oil from the Middle East flowing in all directions to fuel cars, heating appliances and much else. He was immensely wealthy, but to me he was the same young lad I’d known as my son’s school friend. He didn’t behave any differently either and I couldn’t envy him or begrudge him his wealth.

But, when after a couple of hours we said our goodbyes and went down in the lift to the street below, the first thing I saw hit me like a sledgehammer. At distances of around 100 yards apart, there were three dishevelled young men sitting on the pavement with signs in front of them asking passers-by for money. One, I remember clearly, said ‘Lost job, lost home, need money for food’. Of course I already knew the absurdity of a society that was actually wealthy enough in terms of resources and productive capacity to feed, clothe and house everyone on the planet to a perfectly comfortable level, yet still divided its wealth up in an insanely unequal way. But that was sort of in the abstract. Here was the absolute concrete reality, immense wealth and absolute destitution in virtual plain sight of each other.

Trickle-down, my foot

Given that this happened a few years ago and the ‘growth’ imperative of the society we live in means that the amount of wealth and goods and services available has actually increased since then, one might have expected that at least a small part of that wealth might have ‘trickled down’ to the lower end. But far from that happening, it seems, from various recent sources, that the very opposite has taken place.

To start ‘from the bottom’, so to speak, that is with homelessness and ‘rough sleeping’, a BBC news website report entitled ‘Cardiff’s homeless community grieving death of friend’, revealed that Richard O’Brien, ‘nicknamed Paddy’, had been the third rough sleeper to die on the streets of Cardiff in 2023 and that the city’s hostels were full and housing waiting lists were ‘absolutely unprecedented’ – the latter caused mainly by people being subjected to so-called ‘no fault’ evictions by landlords wishing to sell their properties or to bring in new tenants with higher rents.

Then, as we climb up the chain to what might be called ‘lesser deprivation’, the numbers get much bigger. A report by the Barnardo’s charity stated that ‘more than a million children in the UK either sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their family cannot afford the “luxury” of replacing broken frames and mouldy linen’ and that ‘the rise in “bed poverty” reflects growing levels of destitution in which low-income families already struggling with soaring food or gas bills often find they are also unable to afford a comfortable night’s sleep’.

Slightly higher up the chain, a report by Ian Aikman of Which? Magazine, conducted at the end of 2023, showed a sharp increase in the number of households defaulting on ‘essential payments’ (eg, loans, credit cards, energy bills) and eight in ten being worried about energy prices, food prices and fuel costs. One in six had skipped meals due to high food costs and a quarter went without at least some food. And the 2023 Autumn statement from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported that two million households in Britain had in recent months turned off their fridge or freezer in order to save energy and money.

Can governments help?

Why is all this happening and why aren’t governments, who most people think should serve their populations, doing anything about it? Well, the simple fact is that, even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, since the economic system we live in, capitalism, distributes the means of living based on who owns the means of production and who has the most market power, rather than according to any principle of rationality, fairness or human need. The job of governments is just to oversee that system. So the recent suggestion by John Bird, founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue, that the government should tackle the issue by setting up a Ministry of Poverty, is just as doomed to failure as the pledge by the Shelter charity, when it was first set up in 1966, to end homelessness in Britain within 10 years. Shelter is of course still ‘going strong’ and, in 2023, it stated that ‘the number of people living in temporary accommodation has risen by an alarming 74% in the last 10 years’. The centre-right think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, confirmed something similar when it found that ‘the most disadvantaged people in Britain were no better off than they were 15 years ago’, with around 13.4 million people living lives ‘marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. Of course millions of workers do manage to keep their heads above water, some living reasonably comfortable lives, but even this is usually at the cost of working hard for an entire lifetime, never being truly free of financial insecurity and often at great cost to the quality of their lives.

Decent lives?

The complaint is not that the very rich, whose wealth comes from ownership or control of resources, have so much more than everyone else but that it comes at the expense of everyone and everything else. Without any personal condemnation of people such as Ollie, or even of those wealthy tourists who the Guardian recently reported as queuing up to book into ‘London’s £1,000-plus a night super-luxe hotels’ (some of them actually costing £10,000 or £20,000 a night), what the scenarios we have described above show is that we cannot trust the anarchic, irrational, market system we live under to fulfil even the most basic human needs such as clean, dry, warm, decent housing for everyone. That system, dedicated as it is to producing profit for the tiny minority of the population, is simply not designed to cater for the needs of the majority, let alone for the most deprived members of that majority.

Howard Moss

Poverty and the causes of wealth (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just before Christmas, the Herald columnist Lennie Pennie wrote a piece that looked at extremely rich people who hoard resources (heraldscotland.com, 23 December). She took particular aim at the royal family, who are apparently described by some as ‘thrifty’ and ‘down-to-earth’ because, for instance, they wear items of clothing more than once!

She wrote: 

‘We should never look at an unequal society within which devastating poverty and extreme affluence are allowed to co-exist as anything other than a structural, governmental and societal failure which demands our immediate attention to resolve.’

Homelessness and food banks exist, while ever more people just cannot meet their basic needs. The UK government spent in one year almost as much money providing temporary accommodation for homeless people as it would apparently take to eradicate homelessness completely.

Unfortunately, Pennie’s approach puts far too much emphasis on celebrities, and the royal family especially, for posing with homeless people rather than really doing something about the problem. Better, she says, to ‘use more of the excessive hereditary fortune to redress the balance.’

The article is entitled ‘Poverty: We need to tackle the causes of wealth’. But it says disappointingly little about the real causes of wealth and poverty. Clearly the two go hand in hand under capitalism. It is not just a matter of the rich hoarding their wealth, but of how they obtained it in the first place and how that implies poverty and destitution at the other end of the scale.

Pennie quotes Oscar Wilde about making poverty impossible, but says little about how to achieve this. The rich, she says, might distribute as much of their wealth as possible to those they wish to help. But that is really not the point: let’s do away with money and inequality and establish a system of society geared to meeting human need.

Paul Bennett

These Foolish Things: Poverty (1995)

The Scavenger column from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poverty

"Britain has the second lowest standard of living in western Europe after Portugal, according to a survey of incomes and living costs in Europe’s nine wealthiest countries . . . The wide variation in living standards is one reason why the governments of lower-income nations such as Britain are reluctant to embrace a single currency: it would throw a glaring spotlight on just how far Britain’s standard of living hits fallen behind those of Germany and France, say economists." 

(The Sunday Times, 17 September.)

Insecurity

"The Anglia Co-operative Society is being taken to an industrial tribunal by 110 of its staff alleging unfair dismissal and breach of contract. The action follows drastic changes in working practices imposed on staff at the company’s 20 East Anglian rainbow supermarkets. The shake-up hits their entitlement to pensions and maternity and sickness benefits. The 1,600 employees learned they faced a choice of having their hours cut or losing their jobs only after seeing them advertised in the local press earlier this year."

(Financial Mail on Sunday, 24 September.)

Destitution

"Homeless people in Camden are being urged to “adopt a doorway” in order to qualify to vote. Labour-controlled Camden council is advising them to find themselves a “regular pitch” so they can be placed on the electoral register. But the council’s campaign is being criticised by some residents, traders and Tory councillors who fear it is open to abuse and will act as a magnet for more “homeless and hungry” beggars, particularly in the King’s Cross area."

(Evening Standard, 20 September.)

A breath of competition

"Some British commentators gleefully predict that the infusion of American-style capitalism into the electricity industry will turn these stodgy “socialist” industries into sleek, low-cost operations. However, do not look to American managers for efficiency. Southern’s largest subsidiary, Georgia Power spent over $1.6 billion on plant now “stranded”—an industry euphemism for plant that would be worthless but for regulatory charges imposed by regulators to cover failed investments.

Despite its sordid record. Southern is not an especially poorly-managed utility by American standards. Atrocious overspending on plant is the American norm and questionable business practices arc all too common." 

(Gregory Palast, Guardian, 21 September.)

Sky's the limit

The Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association is pressing the Office of Fair Trading to investigate Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB charges for showing their satellite programmes in pubs. Publicans claim that, since 1992, the basic subscription has risen 1,152 percent— from £5.99 to £75 a month.

The Scavenger

Life and Times: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (2022)

The Life and Times column from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A group of us recently did some leafleting in my part of the world. We were putting a leaflet through people’s doors entitled ‘A Different Way of Looking at Things’. It suggested that, though the word ‘socialism’ might conjure up ideas the recipients did not share, if they took up the leaflet’s invitation to click on its QR code and look at the Socialist Party’s website, they might find the ideas we were putting across sensible and attractive.

At one house, just as I was about to put a leaflet through the letter box, an elderly man came out and took the leaflet from me. He glanced at it and said: ‘The trouble with you lot is that all you see is what’s bad, you just don’t see the good things. You don’t see how much things have improved since I was a kid. You don’t know how lucky you are’. I told him I understood what he was saying but thought it would still be useful for him to read the leaflet and, if he could, to look at the website. But going on to the next house, what he had said started to give me food for thought, since I couldn’t deny that at a very basic level he was right. Most people’s standard of living is definitely higher than it was, say, in the 1930s, 40s or 50s. Most people have a lot more of the everyday things that make life more comfortable now compared to then.

The Good

And there have been a lot of what might be called ‘social’ improvements too. I’d recently read, for example, that the Championship football team, Watford, had players of 10 different nationalities in their team. It’s surely a step forward for people from so many different backgrounds to be cooperating as a team and idolised by the team’s largely British supporters. I’d also just listened to an episode of ‘Desert Island Discs’ with ‘The Repair Shop’ man, Jay Blades, talking movingly about the open, unabated and taken-for-granted racism he suffered as a boy – something dramatically less in evidence now. Again a famous footballer has recently been on trial for allegedly exercising ‘coercive control’ over his partner, a trial that would have been unimaginable in the 40s, 50s or 60s. And, just recently too, ecclesiastical child abuse from the 1960s and 70s has been exposed rather than ignored as it would have been in the past. And there is today, as never in the early lives of many receiving our leaflet, widespread and open coverage of LGBT matters. Who could have imagined all these things?

And yet, and yet … Well, there are also so many things which are not right in the world around us and which could not exist in the world of common ownership and free access that socialists advocate and want to see.

The Bad

In Britain today, for example, according to a recent Money Advice Trust report, people are skipping meals ‘just to keep the lights on’, and around 20 percent of adults, or 10.8m people, are behind on one or more household bills. A survey by Opinium found that 5.6m people have gone without food in the last months as a result of the cost of living crisis, nearly 8m have ‘sold a personal or household item to help cover bills’, and there has been a massive increase in the number of people forced to use food banks.

In the USA, the most economically advanced country in the world, 3.5m people are homeless, while 18.6 million homes stand vacant, and the number of Americans dying while homeless has risen dramatically (by 77 percent) in recent years from a variety of causes, but many just succumbing to the cold. The situation is even worse in less ‘advanced’ parts of the world. In Nigeria, for example, 82m people live on less than a dollar a day, and in Lebanon electricity, clean water, medicine and fuel are in short supply and the currency has lost 90 percent of its value with inflation in triple digits and more than 80 percent of the country’s population living below the poverty line.

The Ugly

But small beer this compared with the suffering in Yemen, where, according to the UN, 8 years of civil war have killed over 150,000 people, with more than 227,000 others having died as a result of famine and lack of healthcare facilities. Then there’s the drought in Somalia where the BBC News website reported that ‘young children are dying in growing numbers’ and told harrowing stories of suffering in which almost two-thirds of young children and pregnant women were suffering from acute malnutrition with the food situation being aggravated by a complex war between the militant Islamist group, al-Shabab, and the government. A 32-year-old mother of four living in a camp is quoted as saying: ‘No water, no food, a hopeless life. Above all, my children are starving. They are on the verge of death. Unless they get some food, I’m afraid they will die.’

More broadly, as reported by a network of charities from 75 countries in an open letter to coincide with the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, in the world as a whole ‘1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused, a full third of the human population does not have reliable drinking water… and a staggering 345 million people are now experiencing acute hunger, a number that has more than doubled since 2019’. And all this without going into the ongoing and unpredictable effects of climate change, the persistence of deadly diseases such as Covid 19, and the untold terror and suffering caused by wars such as the one in Ukraine.

The Alternative

One of the signatories to the charities’ letter mentioned above, Mohanna Ahmed Ali Eljabaly of the Yemen Family Care Association, wrote: ‘It is abysmal that with all the technology in agriculture and harvesting techniques today we are still talking about famine in the 21st century.’ Though that is absolutely true, the charities’ proposed solution (‘Those with the power and money to change this must come together to better respond to current crises and prevent and prepare for future ones’), is a hopeless one. While the techniques and resources are indeed available to prevent famine and satisfy all reasonable needs, in the profit-driven society (capitalism) that exists throughout the world today, human welfare can never be a priority. In the socialist society of free access based on the principle of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ which we urgently need, any failure of crops, for example, through drought or any such natural calamity will be dealt with by food being made available to those who need it where they need it rather than people being left to die horrific deaths from starvation.

I could not of course say all this to my interlocutor on the doorstep, but I suppose I could hope that he clicked on the leaflet’s QR code and read all about it in the Socialist Standard.

Howard Moss

Rowton Houses (1957)

From the February 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here the soul finds poppy-juice to ease and glad her,

   And the radiant lotus-flower of royal slumber.

Surely this cemented stair's a golden ladder

    Angel-cohorts, bearing lilies, climb and cumber . . . 

     (Rowton House Rhymes.)

Dirty washing never flapped more disconsolately on a line than these men. They hang over the barrier at the Broadway’s edge watching the traffic pass, stamping their feet among muddy newspapers. The neon lights flick on and off, touching their flesh first red and then green. They stare at the bright shop windows and at the painted faces borne perilously past on stiletto heels. Spasmodically, they drift off home to bed. For them, and for a few thousand like them, that means to the local Rowton House.

To most people, the term “Rowton House” evokes an image of a verminous flop-house where dead-beats and desperadoes rub shoulders, paying a copper or two for a couple of feet of rope under the armpits (has anyone ever slept like that?) The Houses are the butt of many a music-hall joker and the subject of much prejudice; few employers would take on a cashier who gave the local Rowton House as his address and it has been known for a mother hearing that her son was living at a House, to storm hotfoot from the provinces to take her boy away from such supposedly evil surroundings. Yet it is a fact that if such impressions ever find their way into print, a sharp solicitor’s letter is enough to extract a public withdrawal; once the B.B.C. had to climb down and apologise after a comedian’s crack about Rowton Houses in the programme “Palace of Varieties.”

So it seems that Rowton Houses are not as bad as most people think them to be. What is the truth of the matter? What are they like, what type of person uses them and what goes on inside them? And how did they come about?

Light-hearted Aristocrat

The founding of Rowton Houses was the work of Montagu William Lowry-Corry, who was a light-hearted 19th Century aristocrat, a favourite of Disraeli, who caught the famous man’s attention by livening up a stodgy party at Raby Castle. Corry became Disraeli’s private secretary and served unflaggingly through all the years of his chief’s prominence as Chancellor of the Exchequer and later as Prime Minister. When in 1875 Disraeli persuaded the Cabinet to try for a loan from Rothschild to buy a substantial interest in the Suez Canal Company, it was Corry who ran the errand from Downing Street to get the banker’s approval. Later, when Disraeli had relinquished power and was a pitiful figure, it was usually Corry’s arm he was seen to be leaning on in public. Corry got his reward in 1880 when he became the first and last Baron Rowton. When Disraeli died (with Rowton; of course, at his bedside), he left all his papers and letters to his secretary’s discretion.

Rowton conceived the idea of his Houses in the early 1890’s after the investigations into common lodging houses which he undertook as a trustee of the Guinness Fund. At that time the lodging houses of London were little better than the sort of place which Dickens described in Bleak House. The Lodging House Bill of 1851 had been drafted to stamp out the kip-houses where, it was said, the bugs could be scraped up by the handful and the only sanitary arrangements were communal buckets placed one to a room; a room which could hold anything up to 60 people. But there were many convenient loopholes in the Bill and it is certain that 40 years on there were still some unsavoury establishments for Rowton’s investigations. The aristocrat also made it his business to approach the Embankment sleepers—one story tells of him leaving the House of Lords of an evening and spending the best part of the night talking with the Thames-side down and outs. It was then that Rowton decided on his scheme to build cheap working men's hotels, where at prices they could afford, the homeless of London would find a clean bed, food and somewhere to sit of an evening. At the same time, the venture had to yield a return on the money invested in it; Rowton’s slogan was said to be “ Philanthropy—at five per cent.”

First Night

Brushing aside the warnings of his friends, Rowton put £30,000 of his own money into the building of the first House at Vauxhall. This was opened on the very last day of 1892, when only 77 men paid their sixpence for a night's lodging. Over 400 beds were left empty and the first day's takings in the catering department came to about 15s. 10½d. The building had been designed so that in the event of failure it could easily be converted and sold as a warehouse and it seemed that this would have to be, but business became brisker; in the first month over 200 beds were taken nightly and soon the 400 mark was passed. In 1894, a company, Rowton Houses Ltd., was formed with a capital of £75,000, of which £30,000 was given to Rowton in return for the money he had invested in the Vauxhall experiment. At the company's first annual meeting it was reported that the House had been full to capacity on nearly every night and a comfortable dividend of four per cent. was declared. Other, ’Rowton Houses were subsequently built at King’s Cross, Elephant and Castle, Hammersmith, Whitechapel, and Camden Town, each in densely populated areas, within easy reach of the principal transport termini and centres of employment in the markets, docks and railway goods depots.

The Houses have always been an interesting barometer of the prevailing economic weather; for instance during the slump of the thirties, there was a decrease in the number of beds booked by the week and a striking increase in reservations on the days when the dole was paid at the local employment bureau. At that time at least five doctors and nine journalists were resident at Rowton Houses, touching elbows with men whose living depended on a charity ticket. When the 1931 dole was reduced to 15/3d., the Houses cut their prices so that a man could live there (just about) on the money. Their budget allowed for nothing apart from food and lodging; not surprisingly, many men took to a bench on the Embankment rather than face a tobacco-less existence. During the two World Wars the Houses were variously used as barracks, refugee centres and unofficial air-raid shelters.

Rowton Houses To-day

Rowton Houses Ltd. is to-day a solidly flourishing £505,000 capital company, with assets of some £650,000 and a dividend steadily at about 8 per cent. It is not a charitable institution or a trust and has no connection with any religious organisation; business, pure and simple, is its line. “Although we are undoubtedly doing a good work,” said a one-time director of the company, “there is nothing of patronage or philanthropy about it.” The Houses never spend money on public advertisements, yet something like 98 per cent, of the 5,000-odd available beds are filled each night; how many hoteliers would like to be able to make a similar claim? The company has its own laundry and maintenance staff and supplies a barbering and cobbling service in the Houses. Charges have recently been increased from 2/6d. to 3/- a night (in 1910 it was 9d.). It is here that the profit is made— although the catering department pulled in nearly £130,000 during 1955, there is little profit in this side of the business. Post-war full employment has made its mark, in the Houses which now offer special private rooms, instead of cubicles, at 35/- a week. A dinner of soup, steak pudding with potatoes, followed by plum tart and custard, costs 2/8d. (in 1910 again, it would have set you back by 7d.)—and the House dining rooms are open to non-residents.

What are the Houses like? From the outside they are imposing, barrack-like buildings with their smooth red-brick and small windows. Their impressive size—for example at Hammersmith—is often blanketed by the buildings which have sprung up around them. Inside, overwhelming impressions are of the white and chocolate glazed bricks which are everywhere in all the Houses, the smell of cheap tobacco, the men who are openly down on their luck and looking for something cheap and quick, men who are existing on their wits (on one afternoon visit, nearly every other lodger seemed to be studying a greyhound race card). Men stand aimlessly in the entrance hall, despite stern notices asking them not to. The floors are stone or wood and there are no soft §eats— all the furniture is in wood, mostly with iron standards. The dining rooms and kitchens are unfailingly clean, with much up-to-date equipment. There is a billiards room (always well full of an evening), writing room and lecture room—now, of course, with television installed—in each House. For some reason, draughts is a passion of Rowton House residents; regular demonstrations take place, which give men the chance to show off their considerable skill at the game; the 1948 English champion was a Rowton House regular. All the Houses have their permanent lodgers—some of them have been booking the same cubicle, week after week, for over a quarter of a century. 

Queer Types

Because Rowton Houses offer such cheap accommodation, we can expect them to attract some poor types. Sure enough, there are descriptions of wanted men in the reception desks, alongside the file of past residents who are now banned because they fought or stole or carried lice or made a mess in their rooms. No one is allowed to book in unless he produces some evidence of identification, which is checked against these files. Occasionally, gangs form and make a nuisance of themselves until the management can weed them out. The reception staff show all the signs of being case-hardened towards people who, after all, are their clients. And among the residents are the simply queer cases: the man who wore two jackets (and this on a stuffy evening).

Apart from these, the Houses are used a lot by young men who have left home to follow a job—the list of letters awaiting collection reveals the number of Irishmen and foreigners in residence. For these the Houses are not a bad proposition; they are usually earning a wage on which they can afford to get out in the evening, when the glazed bricks and old men’s pipes are by no means at their most attractive. It is a different matter for the old ones, who make up a good part of Rowton Houses’ customers. These are the men who have no family to care about them, whose life has been reduced to the tightrope act of living on a retirement pension. For them, apart from the cheapness, the Houses offer the attraction of living in the company of fellow human beings instead of eking out their last days in a lonely room. Here is one of the tragedies of post-war conditions; the lot of old people is to-day as precarious as it has ever been—indeed, some say that it is worse since the Welfare State boys took over the running of British Capitalism. Evidence of the tragedy can be seen in the Rowton Houses, in the old men sitting out the long evenings on the hard wooden seats, staring with patient eyes at the walls, waiting for the next meal, for bedtime, waiting in the end to die.

None is Secure

The Houses are fond of describing themselves as working men’s hotels—one of their officials actually went so far as to use the term “residential Club.” (A brochure says “Up to London? Stay at Rowton House”). Of course, all this is to rather stretch the meaning of words; no Rowton House lodger is ever called "sir” by the staff and nobody gets a hand with his luggage when he arrives. We can say that the Houses are not dirty or verminous, nor are they the stamping grounds of footpads and cut-purses. The most respectable among us could spend a night in them without fear. Because of this, a first inspection can give a strongly favourable impression; but that is only because one goes there expecting something much worse. In cold fact, they are places where men put up when they are too poor to have an independent home. The problem of not being able to afford the good—and some of the not so good—things in life is the bugbear of the great majority of us in the Capitalist world, where everything has its price and the amount we can buy is restricted by the narrowness of our wage packet. Some of us may live in a semi-detached in Accacia Avenue: but if some day we should be unable to work because there is a slump or because we have suffered an accident or have grown old then we could easily become clients of Rowton Houses. It is poverty which has been filling the places for over 50 years and will go on filling them as long as Capitalism lasts. Nobody is secure. The next time we see someone shuffling through the doorway of a Rowton House we may all reflect that there, but for the grace of something-or-other, go we.

Ivan.