Cheap at the price (1952)

From the September 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

The shooting season which commences on the “Glorious Twelfth” sees high society wending its way northward to the Yorkshire moors or the Scottish Highlands so that they may enjoy the manly pleasures of shooting birds and then eating them to the skirl of the pipes. Accommodation is somewhat limited and in order to meet the demand and render some service for the cause of sport, a Scottish Laird has placed his 150-roomed castle at the disposal of all able to afford £120 per week inclusive. In an interview with the wife of this public-spirited Laird, Reynolds News (10.8.52) reports that “American millionaires, wealthy Hungarians and Danes, a few English noblemen ... and a Chinese . . . have booked at the . . . castle.”

Before the war a member of the aristocracy once delivered himself of the observation that if Hitler and Goering had learned in their youth how to play cricket there would not have been any international tension. Now, Mrs. Farquharson, wife of the Scottish Laird, suggests another remedy. She tells us: "I only wish 1 could get some of the world's politicians up here for a shooting party. Perhaps we could then get some international problems straightened out.” It is good to know that there are still aristocratic minds pondering on the ills which beset our troubled world. But the solution is not so drastic as one might think on first reading. The lady does not mean to get the politicians up to her castle and then shoot them off—a solution which might have some effect. She is merely suggesting that they get together and under the mellowing influence of shooting grouse, drinking whisky, and lunching off cold salmon, settle all their differences. We hope this explanation will settle the idea that the Scottish aristocracy have become direct-actionists. Not only politicians would benefit but everybody else who visits the castle, for she tells us that going out on the moors shooting birds and fishing for salmon gives “them a broader outlook. They can discuss things affecting their countries with perfect ease.” Here is an idea worth following up. Those of us who are interested in discussing the problems of present-day society should hire a castle and "at perfect ease” discuss our problems; perhaps that is the short cut to Socialism we have all been looking for.

Asked by the reporter why she was doing all this, Mrs. Farquharson replied, “We only want people to get the right idea of Scotland.” We sympathise with the lady’s ambition. Let us assume that this and other similar establishments were not available for the sportsmen of all nations, and that the host of “American millionaires, wealthy Hungarians and Danes, a Chinese, etc.,” all arrived in Scotland without any castle to go to. They might then have to find accommodation in an Edinburgh slum or a crofter’s cottage without any electric light or the latest mod. con. They would then get the wrong idea about Scotland. They would return to their native lands thinking that there are slums in Scotland or that there are homes where they themselves would not keep their pet poodles. The lady is absolutely right The only way to get the “right idea of Scotland” is to visit a castle and pay £120 per week. Nobody can be expected to shoot straight after a night in a cottage lit by oil lamps, with outside sanitation, and no Scotch whisky. But starting out from a castle with the skirl of pipes in their ears a real day’s sport is obtainable. It mellows the outlook and enables one to see the world as it really is instead of the pessimistic, soured and distorted view of those who won’t pay £120 per week. Thus when the sportsmen see beaters and servants they will understand that they are working for the love of sport and not because they have to act as flunkeys in order to live. If the children of the servants run bare footed it is because it is healthier for them to do so. If the sportsmen see people eating baked beans on toast, or adulterated turned fish it is because they prefer it to the Scotch salmon, and the chilled wine of the Castle. You see how living in the proper atmosphere gives you the "right idea ”?

"We don’t want it to be thought that we are going to make huge profits,” said the lady. "That would be cheapening the whole thing.” At one hundred and twenty pounds a week we would have thought it would be difficult to achieve that. It all goes to show that essentials are grasped in the Scotch Highlands.

Are working-class people allowed to stay, if they have suddenly come into money, was the next question asked of Mrs. Farquharson, by the reporter. Quick as a flash came the assurance. "We did this sort of thing on a smaller scale last year and all types of people came.” (Italics ours.) Could such thoughtfulness be improved on. Out of consideration for the smaller bank accounts of the "working-class people,” it was all done on a "smaller” scale. That is the final argument that should serve to give her visitors the "right idea,” for she goes on to say "they were people like big manufacturers doing all kinds of interesting work.” In this way she again shows that her present visitors will get the “right idea,” for they will surely think that all workers are “doing all kinds of interesting work,” instead of soul-destroying monotonous labour at the factory bench.

In a recent debate in the House of Lords, on the economic situation. Lord Balfour stated that he was in favour of removing food subsidies so that the increase in prices would teach the workers the “facts of life.” Perhaps the noble lord will take a trip to the castle (he is a banker and can well afford it) and compare notes with Mrs. Farquharson. The results may well be interesting, if not instructive.

One further point must be mentioned before we leave this lady to her castle and her millionaires. We note that there is a Chinese among the guests. Our hearts rejoice that there is no colour bar. Here is another solution to the much discussed and very vexed question of racial prejudice. The ability to pay £120 per week will throw down all barriers just like the trumpets of Joshua broke the walls of Jericho. Let this be a rallying cry for all the coloured races. Use your initiative and enterprise and make a lot of money and all else shall be given unto you.

A. S.

Letters: Dawkins wars (1999)

Letters to the Editors from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dawkins wars (1)

Dear Editors,

“(Dawkins) is wrong in so far as he lets it be suggested that human social behaviour is genetically determined”. Just not true! In fact in the endnotes to The Selfish Gene (Oxford UP, 1989) his sub-headings reads: We, Alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. He continues, in the text that follows, ” . . . genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour while the same time . . . this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences”. He illustrates his point by pointing out that our sexual desires originate in our genes, but that we, most of the time (?!), have no difficulty curbing our natural desires within the social situation (pp. 331-2). Much more recently, he makes the same point in his introduction to Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (Oxford UP, 1999): “Every gene in a gene pool constitutes part of the environmental background against which the other genes are naturally selected, so it’s no wonder natural selection favours genes that “co-operate” in building those highly integrated and unified machines called organisms” (p. xv). Dawkins tells us that genes are instructions for building proteins and the results of this protein synthesis are influenced at every state by the available raw materials and the nature of the environment. Nothing is purely genetically determined and nothing is purely environmentally determined. We, humans beings, like all other creatures, are a complex product of both—this is true of our behaviour as well as the shape of our legs!

The argument with Gould on “progress” is, I think, to do with definition of the term. He is correct rule out progress towards anything. This is where we would differ with the god-believers—and is the whole point of Darwin’s inspiration—there is not master-plan, no “objective”, no designer. But there is progress in the sense that we live in a world full of complex creatures of all kinds, when a few billion years ago there was only a primeval soup . . . and perhaps some pre-cellular replicators.

You are free to “take sides” in the “dispute” between Gould and Dawkins. But your writer might do himself a favour and read Dawkins with more care before launching into an assault on his ideas.

Bob Potter, 

Hove, Sussex

Reply:

We never launched an assault on Dawkins’s ideas. In fact his book The Blind Watchmaker, in which he brilliantly refutes the Creationist argument for God that nature must have had a designer, has been highly regarded by Socialists. What we criticised was his choice of title of The Selfish Gene for his most well-known book on the grounds that this could be misunderstood as suggesting that there was a human gene for selfishness which “as a biologist Dawkins knew to be nonsense but he nevertheless let the title stand”.

The endnotes from which you quote were added by Dawkins to the second edition of 1989 precisely to try to dissipate the impression he had created, partly by the title he had chosen, of being some sort of genetic determinist as far as human behaviour was concerned. Incidentally, the second quote is about “co-operation” between genes within an organism not about co-operation between organisms.

Of course our genetic make-up plays a part in human behaviour. We are “genetically programmed” for flexible, adaptive behaviour, which means we can adapt to living in all sort of cultures and societies. It also means that in our behaviour we are far, far less the prisoner of our genes than any other organism.—Editors.

Dawkins wars (2)

Dear Editors,

The article on the Gould/Dawkins controversy in your October issue raises a fundamental point. The Dawkins view that individual genes, like people, compete and struggle to survive is not just misleading. Genetic structures “evolve” and the real danger is that the greed, selfishness and aggression endemic in money systems, particularly in capitalism, will become genetically imprinted, making it impossible for societies to advance and eventually for the human species to adapt and survive.

M.B.A. Chapman, 

Bath

Reply:

Fortunately, you’re wrong. Acquired characteristics aren’t incorporated into our genetic make-up. Lamarck thought that and Darwin proved him wrong. Even less can acquired behaviour patterns such as “greed, selfishness and aggression” be inherited. They are transmitted culturally through being taught and learned. So, don t give up, humans can equally learn to live in a non-competitive, non-monetary system as they have learned to live in capitalism and in the past in feudalism and tribal communism.-Editors.

Good news, bad news

Dear Editors,

Two events recently have given me some hope:

(I) John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ was voted as having the best song lyrics of all time, This appears to confirm to me that despite the 24-hours a day propaganda of capitalism, people still aspire to a better world and instinctively recognise that true socialism would provide it.

(2) The decision by Callnet to introduce a free internet access service in Europe—no telephone charges. no monthly fee. Providing near-universal access to the internet—at least in Europe—provides a great opportunity for ordinary people to communicate and organise across national boundaries. An essential requirement for the growth of world socialism.

Two events recently have caused me to despair:

(I) Tony Blair’s decision to back away once again from banning hunting. This is clearly against the wishes of the majority of the people, but more importantly it underlines once again just how remote the existing government is from the aspirations of the people who elected it. Of course we all knew that a Labour government would disappoint us but can even you—the editors of Socialist Standard—have truly anticipated just how right-wing the current government would turn out to be, following joyously in the footsteps of Thatcherism.

(2) Emphasising the above, Gordon Brown’s decision to create tax breaks of up to £100,000 each for the top ten directors in any company as part of the Enterprise Management Scheme. This is so grossly elitist that it leaves me speechless.

Andrew Stephenson

(by email)

Greasy Pole: Hoey Hoo-Hah (2006)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why does she stay in a party which, she says, imposes policies it was not elected on?

Say what you like about rebel Labour MPs, in most cases they are consistent – or should that be boringly predictable? Foundation Hospitals? Against. War on Iraq? Against. Ban Hunting? In favour. All tediously predictable. Then along comes Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall, to upset the pattern. The big issue for Hoey – the one which has earned her the most publicity – has been her support for hunting which she demonstrated, on the day the “sport” was banned by Parliament, by riding out with the Beaufort Hunt. She says the ban is unenforceable, that it has actually made hunting more popular than ever: “It’s part of the British rebellious streak that as soon as something is banned it becomes more attractive”. Which raises the question of what she is doing in Parliament, where they lay down laws which ban all kinds of behaviour as a way of making them unattractive to even the most rebellious person. She has also said of the Labour Party : “They don’t understand the countryside” – as if there is a lot more to “understand” than that the countryside is basically the same as the towns and cities, with a class structure which condemns one class to work for their living in varying degrees of poverty and insecurity.

Vauxhall

It is also fair to ask what drives her to be the MP for Vauxhall which, in the London Borough of Lambeth and including Kennington, Stockwell and parts of Clapham and Brixton, is as far from what most people see as the “countryside” as it is possible to be. It is, in fact, one of the toughest and most disrupted parts of London. To ensure that everyone, including the long-suffering voters of Vauxhall, knew where she stood on hunting, Hoey took on the job of chairing the Countryside Alliance – an organisation which tells us it campaigns about rural poverty and the decline of the villages but which was mysteriously silent on these issues until the 1997 Labour victory brought the first ever real threat to hunting. It was unfortunate timing that Hoey announced her new, additional job on the day the police shot John Charles de Menezes – at Stockwell station, in her constituency. This ghastly event did not dampen the Countryside Alliance’s joy at her elevation to lead them, which they said they were “delighted” about. Not all the voters of Vauxhall felt the same: many of them, worried about the living conditions there and the shooting at Stockwell, expressed their angry surprise that their MP had the time to take on so much extra work when she manages to attend only 55 percent of votes in the Commons.

But Hoey’s record of rebellion extends beyond hunting. She is against foundation hospitals (although she was once in favour of hospitals trusts, which many traditional Labour people feared would be a first step in betrayal of the NHS), against student top-up fees, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, compulsory ID cards, the war on Iraq… She protests that it the others who are out of step, that the measures she opposes were not in Labour’s manifesto – as if it would have made any difference if they had been. And why does she stay in a party which, she says, imposes policies it was not elected on? Even the Tories are confused about her. In October 1996 the mischievous MP Giles Brandreth recorded in his diary that he plotted about her with Sebastian Coe:

“Why don’t we find someone to defect to us? We decided Kate Hoey was our prime target. We like her, she seems sensible, she isn’t valued by New Labour.”

And more recently a Tory MP in the Daily Telegraph showed that little has changed with her: “She spends more time in our division lobby than on the other side.”

Jowell

Quite what the fatigued electorate of Vauxhall think of the fact that they have elected a Labour MP who votes like a Tory will be apparent at the next election. Meanwhile they may take some kind of hint from Hoey’s assessment of Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and her husband David Mills with their labyrinthine mortgages and offshore financial manoeuvres. Perhaps she is jealous of a more durable female rival but Hoey refused to acquiesce in the orchestrated campaign from Number Ten designed to discredit the exposure of Jowell as motivated by gender prejudice. She was one of those who wanted Jowell sacked from leading Labour’s campaign in the local elections, for; she “…grew up in a Labour Party that thought that talking money out of the country wasn’t a very loyal thing to do”. In fact the vast majority of the people of Vauxhall are not rich enough to practice that kind of “disloyalty”; as Hoey put it: “Most people have enough trouble just getting one mortgage”.

Before she joined the Labour Party Hoey was a member of an obscure Trotskyist organisation, which she later explained by confessing that “I didn’t have much contact with ordinary people. So I didn’t understand their concerns” (Brian Deer interview, Sunday Times Magazine 8 August 1993). After that embarrassing spasm she sat as a councillor in Hackney and Southwark waiting, with other hopeful future Labour stars, for the offer of a winnable seat. Hoey’s chance came when the sitting MP for Vauxhall, Stuart Holland, resigned from the Commons to take an academic job. Holland, who was a disciple of Tony Benn , was described by a fellow member of the Lambeth Labour Party as “…pitifully eager to acquiesce in whatever absurdities Lambeth Labour cared to expound”. Holland’s departure came as a relief to Neil Kinnock, tempered by the fact that the constituency party intended to replace him with Martha Osamor who, with her similar ideas, seemed to be no less of an embarrassment to the Labour leadership. So Hoey was imposed on a resistant local party as a “moderniser” – a word with a meaning we are all aware of now. She won the by-election with a majority of over 15000.

Sports Minister

Realising her ambition to be the first woman Sports Minister (she had a qualification in Physical Education, she had been Ulster high jump champion and Educational Adviser to a number of football clubs including Arsenal and Chelsea) brought Hooey up against the spin doctors of Downing Street. Against instructions from Alastair Campell she criticised the decision of Alex Ferguson (a special favourite of Blair’s) to withdraw Manchester United from the 1999 FA Cup, saying that the club’s supporters had been treated in “a quite shabby way”. She officially complained about the MBE awarded to Arsenal striker Ian Wright, because his behaviour on the field – shouting and swearing at other players and the referee – made him a poor role example. She lasted only a couple of years in the job.

And now, on the back benches there seems little more by way of a political career left for her. There is still her writing for the Daily Telegraph, there is chairing the Countryside Alliance and doing her abrasive best to upset her party as she goes into the opposing voting lobby. And of course there may be her memoirs, which should have the words Tally Hoey in the title. If she hangs on to Vauxhall there will be the job of ministering to the people there who, in their poverty, bad housing, crime and pollution, can be expected to be feeling distinctly unministered to. Like most rebels, Hooey will need to work at living up to her own image. Recently in the Daily Telegraph, she was described as wearing a Gucci watch and a jacket trimmed with fake fur. She did not miss this chance to boost her reputation for reckless confession: “The fur” she responded“was real. The Gucci watch was fake”, provoking a spokesman for the Trading Standards Institute to remind her of the realities of commodity society: “We deplore any public figure who seems to be celebrating the purchase of counterfeit items” he sniffed (which probably gained Hoey a few more votes in Vauxhall).

It was Oscar Wilde who once described Hoey’s favourite pastime as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. We may wonder what enduring, scathing epigram he would have fashioned about a Labour Minister indulging in such “sport” after her party had made all those promises about building a sustainably better society. Like all other “rebels” Hoey relies on the deception that she offers something so fresh and different that it has not been thought of before. In Wilde’s absence let us sum up the futility of it all: the unmemorable in pursuit of the unpracticable.

Ivan

'The Right To Hunt Landowners'

From an undated 1990s issue of the Socialist Standard (and also used as a text for a leaflet for a Countryside Alliance march)

The good old English sport of sending hungry hunting hounds to chase aristocrats through the woods, catch them and rip them to pieces, has been slow to take off as a popular pastime. Despite claims that these predatory parasites are a foul rural presence, serving only to infect the countryside with their conceited greed and indolence, it has been hard to find dogs with sufficient brutality to enjoy the so-called sport. Those who favour such hunts claim that it is nothing more than a healthy rural tradition, misunderstood by town dwellers, and that ripping duchesses and viscounts to shreds is the most human way to rid nature of those who have only survived historically by plundering and murdering others. The Royal Society for the Protection of Useless Aristocrats has been long split on the issue, with one section accepting that such blood sport is "just a bit of harmless fun", while others prefer the idea of culling – or permanent quarantine in the House of Lords.

This laboured account would be funnier were it not for the harsh reality that rich, privileged, barbaric bullies, most of whom are brutalised at birth by hereditary right and public-school conditioning, do indeed defend their right to chase around the countryside with packs of hounds in order to savage and tear apart defenceless animals. Their callous defence is mounted in the name of sport. And because it is traditional for these parasitical killers to dress up in the costumes of their class and indulge their pleasure in watching deer, foxes and other animals being ripped apart, they respond with well-rehearsed cries of arrogant immunity to human behaviour when their ritualised sadism is opposed.

These depraved beings, who rejoice in their right to inflict pain on animals, are in the same class and historic tradition as those who proclaim the inviolable right to cast the peasant off their land and into destitution and starvation. The same haters of freedom who smashed down the communal utopia of the Diggers when those early communists sought to hold the land in common as a store of wealth for all; the same bullies who until a century ago enjoyed the propertied right to flog peasants and rape their daughters, and still today treat those who work on the land as if they are indebted to the landowners who steal the fruits of their labour. Looking at this savage minority of ruthless parasites, bleating their message of outrage against those reformists (destined to parliamentary defeat) who dare question their freedom to kill for pleasure, it is hard not to wish on them the fate of a frightened cornered fox, surrounded by a pack of dogs trained for the kill.

That, however, is not the socialist way. Why should we lower ourselves to their brutal customs? As Shelley reminded us: "We are many, they are few." They are not worth the bullets which it would take to shoot them. Nor are they important enough to lead us from our hostility to the cause of violence, however guilty the victim has been conditioned to become. No the aristocrats need not fear our blood sports; the victory of our consciousness of human solidarity over theirs of class oppression will be reward enough for us.

But look what these parasites are doing to the land. They spray it with chemical pesticides, killing off whole species of birds, butterflies and plant life in their quest for profits. They have fed cattle upon cheap and lousy diets, creating the BSE crisis and whole varieties of food adulteration which makes us and our children all the potential victims of their profit-lust. They have dumped millions of tons of soil into the rivers which pollute the water which we are charged to drink. They have pursued, in the name of efficient "factory farming", the most obscene practices of cruelty to animals which are tortured for the sake of making a few more pounds for their avaricious owners. They have contracted out farm management to City firms which seek to push down agricultural wages, casualised skilled farm work, thrown wage-slave-farm-workers onto the scrap-heap of the unemployed, and destroyed whole rural areas in the name of agribusiness.

The landowners, who protest for their freedom to enjoy themselves in exhibitions of collective brutality, remain free to rape and vandalise the countryside. As Graham Harvey observed in his book The Killing of the Countryside, "they [the landowners] favour a countryside devoted entirely to industrial-scale food production, with the products traded on world commodity markets in exactly the same way as coffee and copper…Since this 'progressive' view of farming is supported by big business and the City, it is the one most likely to prevail. If so, the current losses of birds and flowers from our landscape will turn out to be merely the first casualties in a long process of attrition."

The beneficiaries of this rural plunder are the very few. One percent of the population owns half the land in Britain and two percent owns three-quarters of it. A mere 600 landowners own half the land in Scotland. These capitalist-farmers are subsidised by huge grants to support their manipulation of the market. They receive millions of pounds and euros in return for taking land out of cultivation so as to keep profits up. Their protest for the right to hunt and murder animals for fun is no more worthy of support than a campaign to reintroduce slavery or to bring back the deportation of criminals. What is a worthy campaign is the one to rid the world of the parasites we have described above and their counterparts the world over, who will stop at nothing to make a profit, whether through our toil and sweat or the plunder of the natural environment. This same campaign envisages the workers of the world uniting to take control of the planet on behalf of its rightful owners, to free production from the artificial constraints of profit and to establish a global system of society in which each person has free access to the benefits of production. If you agree with us, even only slightly, then please get in touch.

Steve Coleman