Voice From The Back: The rat race (2003)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rat race

Inside a socialist society we could all engage in useful, productive work with much shorter hours. What a contrast to the rat race of today. “A report by the Mental Health Foundation (MHF) released this week, will say that despite much talk about “work-life balance”, many people are still working 50-60 hours a week and feel their lives are out of control. Work follows us home. The MHF’s study found a correlation between the number of hours worked and the number of hours spent thinking or worrying about work outside working hours. The more you work, the less free time you have and the more of your free time you spend worrying about work” Sunday Times (20 April).

Refugee hypocrisy

According to the Glaswegian (1 May) more than 100 refugees in Glasgow are being forced to return to Afghanistan in line with the government’s policy to slash the number of refugees in the UK by 50 percent. “Sally Daghlian of the Scottish Refugee Council said the Foreign Office was still advising against all non-essential travel to Kabul and against travel to other parts of Afghanistan.” On the one hand the FO is telling refugees it is safe to go back but warning its own citizens to avoid it because it is still war-torn and subject to the ravages of various warlords. Another piece of political vote-catching with no regard for the safety of the workers who are being deported under armed guard.

A double tragedy

A correspondent to the letters page in the Herald (7 May) tells of a terrible personal tragedy. “The cynically named National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) was set up by the Labour Government to ration healthcare. Its guidelines are stringent in the extreme and are binding on all medical practitioners . . . The availability of NHS drugs was the final straw for me in terms of my allegiance to the Labour Party. My 32 years’ link was severed on the death of my wife last year. She was denied the drug Temodal on grounds of cost. This drug could have extended her life and would have most assuredly have lessened her distress in the final three months of it.” If the writer of that letter had been a member of the owning class his wife would have had a less awful existence. It is tragic that this woman died but it is even more tragic that millions of humans are doomed to die because of their lack of money.

Political porkies

Politicians lie; and that is official according to a recent government-funded report. “Politics should be regarded as less like an exercise in producing truthful statements and more like a poker game,” said author Glen Newey, reader in politics at the University of Strathclyde. “And there is an expectation by a poker player that you try to deceive them as part of the game.” . . . “Newey’s report – published by by the government-funded Economic and Social Research Council – adds that not only is lying ‘sometimes justifiable’ where there is a public interest, for instance where national security is at risk, but voters even have a ‘right to be lied to’ about things where they would rather not know what had happened, such as what was done during a war” Observer (18 May).

A leader speaks

Here is one of your leaders speaking. Speaking in the usual doublespeak of political waffle. In this case it is the leader of the Conservative Party, Ian Smith revealing his deep intellectual abilities. “Britain needs a government that understands that more people are left behind when more people are held back. It needs a government that stands back in order for its people to step forward” Times (14 May). Eh?

Another market triumph

Socialists are always being told how wonderful the market system of capitalism is by its supporters, but how do they defend the following? “The catastrophic collapse of the coffee prices – at a 100 year low in real terms – is forcing Latin American farmers to grow coca, the plant from which cocaine is made. Mounting evidence that Peruvian farmers in particular are turning to cocaine to escape from poverty will be presented by Oxfam tomorrow in a crisis meeting of World Bank and European Union officials together with banks, traders and representatives from the 25 million people who depend on coffee production for their livelihood” Observer (18 May).

Proper Gander: Temu’s temerity (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the market of online marketplaces, Amazon and eBay’s dominance has recently been challenged by young upstart Temu. Like its competitors, Temu offers a dizzyingly wide range of commodities such as clothing, household items and jewellery which can be delivered to your door in just a few clicks. Since its launch in September 2022, Temu has rapidly expanded to having half a billion users worldwide. A quarter of the British population has downloaded its app, encouraged by social media advertising and influencer recommendations.

Temu’s business model is to be a platform for thousands of other companies to sell their products direct from China to customers worldwide. It doesn’t have enormous depots like Amazon does, and therefore avoids associated costs, allowing it to charge less for its wares. Of course, this cheapness has come at a price. Complaints about the quality and safety of Temu’s products attracted the attention of Channel 4’s Dispatches, whose documentary aimed to tell The Truth About Temu. Predictably, the programme was too brief to give more than an outline of each problem, nor explain the wider context of how such companies fit with capitalism.

Reporter Ellie Flynn buys some items through Temu to check how they compare with the way they’re advertised. Some products come with false claims that they have been certified as safe by recognised organisations, and a baby walker harness purchased for £2.68 snaps within seconds when tested with a bag of sand. Flynn looks at news reports of people who have lived through tragedies after ordering items from Temu: a woman whose house burnt down due to a faulty Tablet and a girl who suffered burns from glue when applying fake fingernails. Flynn arranges for toxicology tests on some items she has bought, including a ‘gold’ necklace priced at £2.97 which is revealed to have twice the legal amount of lead and 27 times more cadmium than permitted. She also orders saw blades and BB guns without the website checking her age. Temu replies to these concerns with corporate-speak statements that it has withdrawn some products pending checks and that it maintains ‘rigorous quality controls’, although insufficient safeguards appear to be in place.

Hoping that low prices are enough of a distraction from risks isn’t the only approach used by Temu to manipulate us into buying. Its app is designed to entice us into spending more time, and therefore more money on the site. Flash sales, mini games, prizes and deals are jazzed up with colourful, cartoonish graphics. Emerging technology consultant Nina Jane Patel says that the app is ‘gamifying the shopping experience, but on steroids’. The aim is to make buying entertaining in a way closer to playing games and gambling than just swiping through a catalogue. Flynn arranges for her brain activity to be measured while using Temu’s app, and compares these results with what’s recorded while shopping from Amazon and playing a casino app. When using Temu, there were spikes of pleasure-related stimulation recorded, presumably when a particularly alluring bargain was found, a pattern with similarities to when the gambling app was being played.

This experiment shows how the capitalist system conditions our attitude to our possessions. In a society of scarcity and rationing through money, we’re likely to react with a buzz of satisfaction, even if it’s near-subliminal, when we acquire something, whether by shopping or gambling. Temu has exploited this learned response with lucrative results, but in a way which pushes at the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable practice, at least in the UK. Iain Duncan Smith, in his role as Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling Related Harm has been investigating the implications of Temu being based on a gambling-like system, such as how this can lead to addictive behaviour.

In the documentary, Smith says that the personal data gathered when people buy through Temu has to be shared with the Chinese government under its National Security Law. This data would then be passed on to the state’s intelligence service to sift through for anything nefariously useful. Temu denies sending information to the Chinese government and says that its data policy is on its website, which Flynn can’t find.

How much notice will the Chinese state take of the UK’s regulations about the use of data? Similarly, the UK’s health and safety laws are difficult to enforce when products are coming in from overseas. While this demonstrates how national barriers add a layer of complications to how goods are distributed in capitalism, the issue isn’t only in China’s awkward relationship with Western countries. Although all the vendors selling through Temu are based in China, Temu itself isn’t wholly a Chinese business. Its parent company, PDD Holdings has its headquarters in South Korea and its ‘legal domicile’ is in Ireland. Despite any links to the Chinese state, Temu is not rooted in only one country, reminding us that its owners in the capitalist class sit above national borders.

And it’s the profit-hungry motives of the capitalist class which really drive Temu’s approach. Its products are sold as cheaply as possible to maximise the potential number of customers, lured in by marketing and held onto using gambling’s techniques. A profit margin can be maintained if costs are kept low by cutting corners during manufacturing and distribution. The quality or suitability of the end product isn’t an important consideration, nor is the waste of resources in shipping goods across continents, nor is the wellbeing of the staff involved. Temu represents some of the worst aspects of capitalist society, but this is what has made it a success, in capitalist terms: PDD Holdings is worth an estimated £170 billion to its owners and shareholders. To the rest of us, it’s an example of how capitalism turns what we need and want into shoddy commodities made to enrich the elite.

Mike Foster

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

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

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

Carlton

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

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

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

1922

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

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

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

Whites

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

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

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Pornography and Politics (2002)

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

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

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

Retreat 

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

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

Porn Queen 

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

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

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

Bombs and Poverty 

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

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

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Howard’s Beginning (2003)

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

Among what is politely called the cut and thrust of politics the Tory Party has always taken comfort from the notion that, when all is said and done, they have the priceless asset of loyalty as their secret weapon. Anyway that is the kind of nonsense they dish out to the grass roots party members, presumably because they alone are crazy enough to believe it. Consider, for a start, the case of Iain Duncan Smith. As it became more and more obvious that the Quiet Man of Chingford could not survive much longer in the hot seat into which those same grass roots had thrust him, he tried again and again to put off the inevitable by appeals to party loyalty. In this he was supported by the majority of MPs, including some of the more prominent in the Shadow Cabinet. At that stage only a few were ready to put their heads above the parapet. And among those most loudly protesting their unswerving loyalty to their doomed boss were Oliver Letwin – and Michael Howard.

So strongly were these two driven by the passion of their loyalty that shortly before IDS was shown the door by the parliamentary party they allowed themselves to be photographed standing in support of him outside Conservative headquarters. The question is, was anyone really impressed by this? The body language and facial composure of both men did not suggest that loyalty was in the forefront of their minds. And that was how it really was because directly IDS had been deposed Howard announced that he was ready to offer himself, with all due modesty, as a candidate for the leadership. But he did this with a speed not to be expected in someone still grieving loyally for the lost leader. At the same time Letwin was busily negotiating a deal between Howard and his only real rival – David Davis – to ensure that Howard would be the only candidate. It was, as you might say, political business as usual.

Guilt

If either of these men was troubled by feelings of guilt at their double standards (and there is no evidence whatsoever that politicians are ever vulnerable to such distractions) they could have consoled themselves with the memory that in his day IDS himself was not famous for being loyal to his leader. He was, in fact, one of John Major’s “bastards” – a group of swivel-eyed Tories who plotted relentlessly against Major and his policies. In fact there is a case that when the leadership was being contested in 2001 it was the very fact that IDS had been one of the “bastards” which persuaded the grass roots to vote for him. Then there is the fact that, in the previous leadership election in 1997, Howard was outmaneuvered (a rare occurrence for him) by William Hague going back on an agreement between them not to stand. And what about the disloyalty of the parliamentary party towards the grass roots membership – all those patient, unfulfilled blockheads who stuff envelopes and organise coffee mornings but who were denied their chance to vote for a new leader? It seems clear that the underhand operations to get Howard as the only candidate were designed to avoid giving the membership a chance to elect another IDS. So much for party unity. So much for trusting the party members. So much for democratic elections. Well, we did say it was cut and thrust.

One reason the Tories were so keen on Howard was that he was about the only one with a public image; the others, like Letwin, Fox and Davis, are hardly known outside the party rubber chicken circuit. Howard was different; after all he had been a Home Secretary. Which was part of the problem because if anything he was rather too well known in an undesirable way. If he is remembered for anything it is for the cruelty with which he pursued anyone caught breaking the laws which protect capitalism’s right to legalized theft. This made him hugely popular with the grass roots in their conferences but it had the opposite effect on anyone at the sharp end of crime and the legal system. “Michael, stand and deliver” was how Jeffrey Archer (before he began his personal experience of the punishment which Howard was responsible for) introduced him at one conference. In response to which Howard brought the faithful to their feet with a rousing stimulation of their most hardened prejudices and delusions on the theme of “Prison works… I know what causes crime: criminals”. And in case there was any doubt about his opinions he chose as his minister for prisons that strange woman Anne Widdecombe, who justified his confidence in her by overseeing the shackling of women prisoners while they were giving birth.

Smirk

Whatever protest was aroused by incidents like these left Howard unmoved, his oily smirk undisturbed. In the view of a fellow minister he was a Home Secretary whose policies were “largely determined by the Conservative Party Conference…may have been the worst Home Secretary in the two centuries the office has been in existence”. (Since then we have had experience of Jack Straw and David Blunkett, who have put in a strong bid for that distinction). The fact that Howard’s family came to England in 1939 as refugees from the intensifying repression of Jews in Romania did not persuade him to speak out against the anti-immigration policies of the Thatcher government; nor did it make him protest against Thatcher’s raging about the country being “swamped” by immigrants. In the 1997 Conservative leader election Campaign he said that “Tories should not believe in ‘one nation’ policies but in ‘one British nation’ policies. All of this was in the cause of helping his bid to be leader of his party, eventually Prime Minister.

Then came the New Beginning. The prospect of leading the Tories, with the golden dream of upsetting precedent and winning power at the next election, wonderfully concentrated Howard’s mind. Something drastic was needed to get rid of that unfortunate image as the slippery darling of the Tory grassroots. The first priority was to embrace the concept of renewal: “Of course we have got to change” he announced, “The world has changed, the country has changed and we have to change”. A few days later he was giving his party the bad news of what that change entailed: henceforth they “…must be a party broad in appeal and generous in outlook”. He might have put it more simply: “Trust me, elect me”. This all provoked unhappy memories of Thatcher and her reference to St Francis: “Where there is discord may we bring harmony” and John Major drooling about presenting us with “a nation at ease with itself”. History will record that Thatcher’s government did not set out to introduce us to social harmony, or any other kind of it and Major became infamous for presiding over a nation so disturbed with itself that they blamed him enough to eject him emphatically from office at the first opportunity so that his party could then eject him from the leadership.

Charm Offensive

A lot of work, some of it in unexpected quarters, is being put into recasting Howard, to persuade us to forget the memorable description of him by Anne Widdecombe – who should have known – that there was “ something of the night” about him. We are being informed that we have cruelly misjudged the poor man. We thought he was a slimy, manipulative conspirator – just the kind of person to survive in the adversarial world of barristers which he inhabited – when all along he was, as one of his admirers put it, “Warm, charming and witty”. Even worse, in the Daily Telegraph of 1 November Anne Robinson took time out from being – well, Anne Robinson – to reassure us that when he was at Cambridge Howard was “a very fine lover” and that he has now grown up into someone who is “shy, witty and clever”.

The Labour Party are banking on the voters being resistant to this charm offensive and preferring to live with, and to vote on, their memories of the Michael Howard of old. But this may not be the wisest tactics for them. Every capitalist party has a murky past, populated by leaders whose responsibility for asserting the primacy of the ruling class has made them widely hated. If the workers had voted in the 1997 election with proper recall of the experience of previous Labour governments they would never have put Tony Blair into Number Ten. In 1979, if they had remembered what their life had been like under past Tory governments they would not have put themselves up for another dose of it. The leaders of capitalism personify the fact that it is a vicious, murderous, repressive way of organising human affairs. And capitalism relies for its continued existence on the defective memories and responses of the very people who suffer under it. There is no reason for Michael Howard not to benefit from this; we might yet see him realising his all-consuming dream of going through the front door at Downing Street.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Good News For The Tories (2002)

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

Here is some good news for the Tories. All is not lost for them. It is true that, as their conference this year abundantly showed, they are at a very low ebb. Nowadays few people take them seriously – and they themselves are having a struggle doing just that. The term shadow ministers is particularly apt for their front bench because in the shadows is where they stay. Their leader, Iain Duncan Smith, shows every sign of growing more desperate by the day; as a climax to their conference he actually made a virtue of being a quiet man – a reputation a politician will usually try hard to avoid. They have rummaged out 25 policies to offer the voters but these are little more than tardy admissions that when they were last in power they were indeed the “nasty party” (as if there are any “nice” ones). An example of a party being nasty was in a letter written in 1996 by Ted Heath’s election agent, which warned him about the benefits we were all enjoying during those years of Tory rule:

“Younger, traditionally Conservative supporters have mostly had a very difficult time over the last 6 or 7 years . . . having had to face, in worse cases, redundancy, negative equity, failing businesses or even bankruptcy.”

A man with much to be quiet about

At this year’s conference we had the nauseating spectacle of David “Two Brains” Willetts, the shadow Work and Pensions Minister, declaring that “. . . the Tory war on lone parents is over”. It would, of course, have been better for those lone parents if he had said this at the time the war was being waged so enthusiastically by his party. One speaker after another rushed to the microphone to confess to past “mistakes” and to promise a brighter, more caring future as if the days had never been, when Tory conferences cheered and stamped their feet at Thatcher defiantly telling them that she -her policies – were “not for turning” and when she insisted, in the face of powerful opposition, that “there is no alternative”.

Then there is the matter of sleaze, which cost the Tories so many votes in 1997 and which they had fervently hoped had died the death. Any ideas they had on that score were brutally suppressed by Edwina Currie spilling the beans about her relationship with John Major. In this scandalous soil were nourished a thousand saloon bar jokes – it was David Mellor all over again but much worse. Smutty humour does not contribute to a political party being taken seriously.

Nineteen Forty Five

It has always been very difficult for the Tories to reconcile themselves to the fact that they are occasionally out of power; they regard such episodes as brief, insane interludes in the natural order of things. There was a time when this was perhaps a more valid attitude because, as in the Thatcher years, they seemed to be there for all time, to be the natural party of power. The difference now is that Labour’s majority has endured, and looks like continuing that way for some time. Voting Conservative is simply not fashionable at present, as if the natural order of things political has undergone a change. It means that Blair’s majority, founded on Labour’s success in making themselves almost indistinguishable from the Tories, must be chipped at because it is unlikely to quickly crumble away.

In some respects there was a parallel to this before 1945. The previous election to that, in November 1935, had produced a House of Commons with 425 Tories and allies against 180 opposition MPs, of which 154 were Labour. Had an election been possible in 1940, the Conservative majority may have been reduced but, on the evidence of past elections, it would have been very unlikely for it to have been overturned for some time. The crucial element in bringing about the change which produced the massive Labour majority in 1945 was, of course, the war. The working class had been promised that if they buckled down to the war effort – worked hard, coped with all the hardship, fear and grief, if they fought and died – they would be rewarded with a better world free of the mistakes of the past. It was seductive stuff, which benefited the Labour Party – and the working class were vulnerable to it, electing the Attlee government by an emphatic margin. Ted Heath, who had to rethink his plans to start a career in politics because of the size of that Labour majority, described the mood in a letter:

“. . . the average man who had been fully employed during the war thought of the unemployment he suffered before the war and decided he would not have the Tories again”.

Even so, for some people the result was a shock. “They have elected a Labour government” wailed a bejewelled woman in an exclusive London club, “ and the people will not stand for it”. The Tory MP Henry Channon – a rich, pampered, useless heir to a fortune who married into the Guinness family thus making himself even richer and enabling him to inherit the safe Tory seat of Southend which had been “represented” by one or other member of the family since 1918 – and which passed on to his son who was equally rich and useless – moaned that he was “. . . too ill and angry to reflect seriously on the disastrous Election results. I am stunned and shocked by the country’s treachery”. Within a fortnight there was some relief for his shock and anger because “the Stock Market has recovered and is actually soaring. Evidently it does not fear the Socialist [sic] Government”. With all this going on it was not entirely surprising that about a month later he came away from a meeting of the 1922 Committee “fearing that the Tory party was definitely dead”.

Pessimism

But that was too pessimistic from the Tory point of view because the party quickly got down to the arduous process of recasting itself in policies and attitudes designed to answer the doubts of Heath’s “average man”. In this they had some political talent to call on – like Heath himself, Enoch Powell, Iain Macleod – whose abilities in the murky world of politics helped them later to become high profile leaders of the party. These people, along with those who had been hardened by their time as ministers in the wartime government, were skilled at touching on the most sensitive nerves of the Attlee government, who were themselves exhausted by the stress of being in that government and then re-building British capitalism after the war. And all that Tory effort bore fruit when, at the next election in 1950, they came within a whisker of success.

In the aftermath of 1945 and later during the late 1960s, the Tories showed great ability in asserting themselves as the supremely natural party of government over British capitalism. So they can take comfort from the memory of that recovery, in the knowledge that although they have been out of power before they have not lost their talent to dupe the working class and can do it again. This opens the all important question of whether it matters. Capitalism is too vast, too powerful, too intrusive, to be affected to any significant degree by which party holds the job of trying to control it. Whoever sits in power over it capitalism continues to impoverish and repress most of its people. There are many symptoms of poverty – none of which ever troubled the likes of Henry Channon. For example the Institute for Public Policy Research recently found that children living in the more deprived neighbourhoods are three times more likely to be knocked down in a road accident than those who live in richer areas. This is not because poorer children don’t understand how to cross the road safely but because they lack access to safe playing areas like good gardens or playgrounds. Their playground is the street, where they socialise without safe adult supervision and sometimes – too often – get knocked down. So poverty – capitalism – is unsafe, it frightens and it injures and it kills. That is what being vulnerable – to use one of the Tories’ favourite buzz words – really means.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: The way they tell ’em (2002)

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

One year into his leadership of the Conservative Party, how is Iain Duncan Smith to be assessed? There is unlikely to be any point in asking people at large because so few have noticed him. But what about his own party? They may well feel that the traditional “could do better” does not apply because, no matter how pathetic his showing in the jungle world of politics it is clear that Duncan Smith could not improve on it. And if the leader is so little known what can be said about his team of shadow ministers? David Davis, the man he appointed party chairman, gained some transient prominence as a week-end member of the SAS, which means that on Saturdays and Sundays he can kill with his bare hands. In spite of such spasmodic power he showed some unsoldierly sentiments – like envy. Somewhat peeved at being passed over for the leadership Davis turned his back on all those comfortable theories about loyalty being the Tories’ secret weapon and conspired to unseat Duncan Smith. Unluckily for him he did this without a soldier’s due regard for camouflage; Duncan Smith observed it all from his bunker and promptly reduced Davis to the ranks.

The humiliation of Davis is not the only sign that Duncan Smith is getting desperate. Is there no policy, no day-to-day issue, he could exploit to get some favourable publicity? In one ill-advised venture he suddenly claimed that the Tory Party would stand up for vulnerable people. The names at Lloyds, currency dealers and property speculators, all anxious about the remorseless daily slide on the Stock Exchange, may have thought Duncan Smith had some good news in store for them. In fact the poor man was only trying to steal a few votes by promising to take special care of anyone struggling to get by on the lower slopes of poverty – the sick, the benefit claimants, the elderly – who qualify in the Tory lexicon as vulnerable (but who have learned to be wary of Tory politicians bearing gifts). So of course nobody with any sense took any notice of what Duncan Smith said, except to apply it as a measure of his desperation.

Platform

Another attempt to convince us that he has radically changed his party was the decision to keep party leaders off the platform at this year’s annual conference, banishing them to a place among the lower orders in the body of the hall. Now this was serious. A seat on the conference platform is not just a privilege. It is an assertion of rank, of being one of the elite. It means exposure to the blissful publicity of the TV cameras, being beamed into a million homes leading the applause in the obligatory standing ovations. For the very privileged few it means dosing the audience with great dollops of platitudes, half-truths and tantrums which in combination are called a great speech.

An example of the power of a presence on the platform was at the conference in 1991. On the Tuesday of the conference Margaret Thatcher fumed and smouldered in her hotel room, still smarting from the men in grey suits wheedling her out of the job of prime minister. Watching the proceedings on TV she muttered and moaned about the treachery and impotence of the new leaders; none of them were any good, John Major, for one, was all vanity. On the following day she took her revenge. Dressed to the nines in true Tory blue and displaying her finest jewellery she left for the conference. “I’m not going to make a speech,” she promised, to widespread relief, “I’ll just go there.” And “go there” was what she did, taking her place on the platform, which was enough to provoke an ovation from the floor which the leaders she despised had difficulty in bringing to a halt.

Well she was accustomed to holding a favoured place on the platform, to making the kind of speeches so loved by the Tory grass roots that they were a kind of punctuation in her reign over the party. She was accustomed to politically challenged Tories hanging adoringly on her every word, cheering themselves hoarse at every jingoistic allusion and roaring with laughter at every joke, no matter how feeble. They loved it in 1983 when she told them, revelling in her Falklands triumph, that “the spirit of the South Atlantic is the spirit that made Great Britain great”. They brayed with laughter in 1980, when she was under enormous pressure from people who were misled into a belief that governments are able to control the economy, and defied them with these words:

To those watching with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase “the U-turn”, I have only one thing to say. “You turn if you want to. The lady is not for turning.”

Speeches

That leaden-footed attempt at humour was not Thatcher’s work but that of Ronnie Millar, one of her speech-writers. In fact none of her conference speeches were hers; putting them together was a long, tortuous process and not the spontaneous, heartfelt declaration the conference members assumed it to be. To begin with Thatcher and her staff would spend several months collecting a file of ideas and reports of the speeches of other people. During the summer, as the conference drew near, she asked for contributions from her ministers, sympathetic journalists, advisers and the like. All of this was drawn together at Chequers on the weekend before the conference; draft sections of the proposed speech – sometimes as many as twelve – and big files of background material were laid out on a table and put together. With pieces written to link up the sections she at last had a speech to send the members into raptures. (Not that that had anything to do with the content of the speech; they would have cheered almost anything she said.) Spontaneous it was not – and in any case it was finally read from an autocue.

An essential of Tory conferences (although it is not always achieved) is a show of loyalty. Behind the scenes it is rather different. The leaders usually get only one chance in the limelight and they must use it to assert and defend their standing in the party; otherwise there are always plenty of hopefuls eager to challenge for a place at the top. So every speaker needs at some time to attack the Labour Party and the LibDems, with painfully heavy-handed jokes intended to stay in the members’ minds for when the next leadership election comes along. Naturally this can lead to some outrageous clowning. At Brighton in 1957 Lord Hailsham, who was then party chairman, attracted the kind of publicity most politicians would shun by appearing on the beach in the early morning wearing a gruesomely baggy pair of swimming trunks and skipping across the pebbles for a swim. By coincidence this juvenile behaviour was witnessed by a number of newspaper hacks – not people usually known for standing on a cold beach in the first light of day – who kindly arranged for Hailsham’s photograph to appear in the press the next day. On the following morning, perhaps stimulated by the media attention, Hailsham seized the chairman’s bell and began to shake it violently into a crescendo of sound while he boomed out a warning about the impending doom of the Labour Party. It was buffoonery of the highest order and the members obediently leapt to their feet, stamping and cheering.

Heseltine and Hamilton

A similar rapture greeted Michael Heseltine’s 1975 attack on the Labour Party, suitably acted out on stage, as “. . .a one-legged army limping away from the storm they have created. Left, left-left, left . . .” Even opponents of the Labour Party might have regarded such clowning as an excuse for a convincing argument but it did Heseltine’s career no harm and to the end of his days as a leader he was a favourite of the conference. And then there was Neil “Cash For Questions” Hamilton, whose conference speech celebrated the fact that Heseltine, who was his boss at the Department of Trade and Industry, had given him the job of overseeing the drive for deregulation. Hamilton’s climax had the audience applauding wildly as he symbolically ripped up piles of paper (none of it, it is to be hoped, brown envelopes from Harrods). Heseltine, in blissful ignorance of the future, described this episode as Hamilton’s “greatest political triumph”. Well there weren’t many others, were there?

An appropriate end to these examples of the unpleasant, if typical, episodes in the history of the mindless jamborees which are Tory conferences is Portillo’s raving about the SAS in 1995. Even by the abysmal standards of capitalist politics Portillo must have been extremely stupid, or desperate for attention, to have so much as considered such a speech, which caused enduring damage to his prospects. Ted Heath rumblingly denounced it as a speech which “. . . hit new heights of offensiveness”. But then Heath was by no means a darling of the conference. In 1988, after he had attacked the Tory Eurosceptics, he was a victim of a blatant piece of manipulation by the party officials, who changed the order of speaking so that Jonathan “Sword Of Truth” Aitken was put up to reply, contemptuously adapting Heath’s own phrase to describe him as “the unacceptable face of Conservatism”. It was not long before Aitken himself became unacceptable as a minister, as an MP, as a bearer of truth.

A Passing Drunk

In 1984 at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the top Tory brass were staying for the conference, a bomb came close to wiping out much of the government, including Thatcher herself. Among the injured taken to hospital was a man who was clearly not of their class – he had none of the arrogance and the cynicism which are so essential to survival in the world of capitalist politics. So it was assumed that he was the hotel porter and the great and the good of the party came to patronisingly shake his hand and graciously thank and congratulate him for his courage. It is to be hoped that he made a speedy recovery from whatever he was in hospital for because he was in fact a nameless drunk who happened to be passing the hotel when the bomb went off and could not remember why he had been there. The episode was an appropriate comment on the party conferences, for their separation from the real world of analysing and solving society’s problems, for their ignorance of what they actually are or how they came to be there or where they are supposed to be going, driven by the intoxication of power. And making the most of it, before the rest catch on.

Ivan

The labour army wants YOU! (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

An 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, Tommy, (from the slang for a soldier, Tommy Atkins), tells of the contempt held toward the working class member of the Army by the civilian population. Until that is, they were required to go off and fight some war on behalf of British capitalism. It’s reasonable to assume that economic circumstances drove a lot of Tommies into the armed forces.

Herbert Kitchener was the Secretary of State for War during the 1914-1918 one (he drowned in 1916). Initially, the armed forces were able to swell their numbers with volunteers, but as time passed and large numbers of young working-class men were being led like lambs to the slaughter on the battlefields of France and beyond it was necessary to introduce conscription in 1916. Probably Kitchener is most well known for the recruiting poster in which he stares out whilst pointing at the viewer: Kitchener Wants You!

The present Conservative Member of Parliament for Chingford and Woodford Green appears to fancy himself as another Kitchener. Iain Duncan Smith’s not exhorting the working class via a poster. He’s aiming at the industrial reserve army of labour, more specifically, those who through disabilities and sickness of various kinds are physically unable to be waged/salaried wage slaves. Smith used an Op-ed in The Sun headlined, ‘We must get thousands of people on long term sickness back into work for the sake of the economy – here’s how’.

Data from the Department of Work and Pensions analysed by the Centre for Social Justice suggests there are some 1.6 million more claimants since 2020, costing the state around £13 billion more in welfare benefits. Reducing this number by getting more people back into work will help the government find the room it needs to invest in public services and reduce the tax burden (tinyurl.com/3etumu43). What Smith wants is to lessen the tax burden for capitalists.

Smith’s predecessor in that constituency, also a Conservative, was a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Norman Tebbit was, in a similar vein, fond of bashing the unemployed. Tebbit said the unemployed should get on their bikes and go look for work and get a job as his father had in the thirties.

Writing in Liverpool’s favourite tabloid, and in a very similar vein, Piers Morgan targeted ‘work-shy wastrels’: ‘Official UK unemployment numbers are at a near-record low of just under 4%. Yet staggeringly, a quarter of the people of working age – that’s over 10 million – don’t currently have a paid job. That includes students and carers, but it also includes vast numbers of people claiming to be sick and disabled and living off government handouts, or who’ve just taken early retirement. Add the enormous number of people on some form of benefits – estimated at over 5 million, many of whom are clearly gaming the easy life system – and Britain’s become a nation of shamefully unhealthy, entitled, couch potatoes. No wonder a recent poll had the UK being No1 in the world for having citizens who would most want to quit their jobs and do nothing if money was no issue.’

Note the ‘gaming’ and its inference that they are perpetuating a fraud of some kind. Has Morgan ever tried living off unemployment pay, or a basic state pension?

‘How the hell has it come to this? We’ve always been a country of ambitious and industrious grafters who’ve taken pride in putting a shift in’ (tinyurl.com/bdwdxsfu). Ha, the delusions of the well-heeled!

And there’s more! In a Bloomberg podcast, on 19 May, with Guy Hands, the billionaire chairman of a large private equity company, said, ‘I look at the UK and see that, in 2030, Poland will be wealthier than we are. In 2040, we will be the poor man in Europe’.

He opines, ‘the UK should not have left the EU, as the country needs rule of law and consistency, but not a single politician is talking about going back.’ He lamented that ‘Brexit has essentially thrown the country back 50 years, to the 1970s, a decade that is widely remembered as a time of crisis, with skyrocketing inflation, high unemployment, strikes and power cuts.’

‘Since the UK left the European Union, it has been competing on the world stage, but the country’s current laws are not suitable for the new environment.’

Now that the UK is out of the EU, the British government could take a radical approach and change some of its laws, Hands said, citing the country’s ‘extraordinarily complex’ labour laws that are a ‘nightmare’ compared to other European countries.

Nightmare labour laws! Perhaps capitalists would prefer a throwback to nineteenth century industrial relations?

We, the majority, would prefer socialism.

Dave Coggan

Greasy Pole: Politicians on probation (2001)

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

Tony Blair and his government are on probation. They spent the years between 1997 and 2001 in hardened delinquency – telling us that things were changing, getting better, when all the evidence said that they were as bad as ever. It was not surprising that so many Labour voters stayed away from the polling booths in June – not because of what Blair denounced as apathy but to assert their disappointment in Britain under New Labour. So it came about that after the election the government could spend little time congratulating themselves on their historic win but had to consider the fact that they had not delivered what they had promised.

Thousands of sick people still have to wait for admission to hospitals for treatement by under-resourced, overworked staff in conditions which can often be described as appalling. Poverty is as deep and as damaging as ever. Many children go each day to schools in crumbling, overcrowded buildings. University graduates are qualifying with huge debts through having to pay tuition fees.The “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” policy has not proved to be the magic formula for reducing it ; in fact violent crime continues to rise. For these reasons – and for many others – the voters’ assessment of the government was – “Could do better. Must do better. After all, you’ve got to come back asking us to vote for you again in another few years". And like any subdued delinquent on probation, the government has had to promise to do better.

But of course the Tories – for different reasons – also made a dismal showing at the election. For them, it is even more urgent to do better in their appeal to the voters. First of all there was the matter of their leader but they were spared the embarrassment of pushing William Hague over the cliff by his obligingly jumping before a hand could be laid on him. At this time of his humiliation there were few people cruel enough to recall all the glorious promises that were made about him when he became leader – promises about how this young, vigorous judo hobbyist was destined to lead his party out of the gloom and divisions of the Major years. After Hague’s resignation there was some doubt about whether anyone would be mad enough to want to lead a party which is unlikely to get a sniff of power for the next ten years. But in the end there were five MPs so devoted to their duty to their party and country that they were prepared to make the necessary sacrifice to serve the rest of us – or, to be more accurate, in order to fulfill an ambition which has dominated their political lives.

Portillo

All these candidates agreed that the Tories were also on probation. In 1997 they had failed to convince enough voters that the previous 18 years had been notable for their achievement in building a prosperous, secure, healthy, crime-free country. Now, they had to do better. Portillo thought they had been too hard line in their policies; Davis thought they had not been hard enough. Ancram thought they had been too divided. Duncan-Smith said the leadership election was about “. . . how we renew, how we change, about how we stay Conservative” – which was muddled enough to appeal to just about every Tory in the country. They got plenty of advice from psephologists and media hacks about the need to occupy what they called the Middle Ground – a kind of unstable political swampland – except that Blair and his New Labour people are there before them. Covered in that kind of mud, the two parties look exactly alike.

The most gruesome personification of this approach was Michael Portillo, who has spent the four years since he was rejected by the electors of Enfield Southgate trying to expunge the memory of a number of unwisely hysterical speeches – like the one when he had a Tory conference swooning with his reference to the SAS and their “Who Dares Wins” motto (Ted Heath snarled that the reaction to this speech “hit new heights of offensiveness”). Portillo came into Parliament with the reputation of a fast rising star and as soon as he had changed his hair style from the gawky schoolby fringe to a proudly sweeping quiff he began to make his mark as an unrepentant, straight-down-the-line Thatcherite. The Iron Lady herself knew him as “beyond any questioning a passionate supporter of everything we (stand) for” – which should have been enough to finish him off. In another provocative speech he informed an audience of students that had they been studying in some other countries they would have been able to buy their degrees. He took on the job of pushing through the hated Poll Tax, on the grounds that it was one of the most beneficial pieces of legislation dreamed up by any government. The embodiment of Tory arrogance, he seemed to glory in being one of the most hated politicians in the country.

Rumours

Portillo’s apparent personality change, his efforts to get people to love – and to vote for – him has only made him look more ridiculous and gruesome than ever. He is no longer the arch-privatiser; now he promises that a Tory government would match any money Blair’s government spends on the NHS. He has accepted the minimum wage, although he once said this would lead to mass unemployment (perhaps even more people out of work than there were under the Tories?). In fact he has committed a future Tory government to “full employment” – as if that can be brought about through government policies. He no longer regards the Labour Party as a mortal enemy; now he praises Blair’s lot for how they are running the economy (as if governments have anything to do with how the economy runs). And, most crucially, he revealed that all those rumours over all those years about him being homosexual were true. He could hardly have bared his soul more dramatically – which is a measure of the effect on him of that defeat in 1997.

Portillo’s best-known opponent for the leadership, Kenneth Clarke, is very different. He has been called “blokey”, which means he has no time for soul-searching, he wears rumpled clothes and suede shoes, carries a large beer gut, smokes cigars. “Sod my image” he once said to a journalist who was worried about what he looked like as he sat munching a mammoth sandwich at a boxing match. The late Alan Clark, a rather different Tory MP because he was wealthy and disdainful, sneered at him as a “pudgy puff ball . . . lazy, flawed . . . wanker . . . not worth 25 votes”. Thatcher, Clark wrote, “cannot stand him” “which may have had something to do with the fact that Clarke was not afraid to stand up to her (in fact she thought him a “persuasive bruiser, very useful in a brawl or an election”). Kenneth Clarke showed what he thought of his rich antagonist by suing the manufacturers of Trivial Pursuit when one of their questions got the two men muddled up.

Ambulances

But being the sort of guy who would stand his mates a drink at the club bar does not mean that Clarke is at all relaxed in his attitude towards the working class and the priorities of British capitalism. As Education Secretary he had a running battle with the teachers in his drive to impose teaching standards on them while he squeezed more and more work out of them. When he was Health Secretary he was more concerned to scorn striking ambulance crews as “taxi drivers” than to settle a dispute which put many lives at risk- which made not a few people hope that one day he would himself need the kind of emergency attention which ambulance crews provide every working day. His imposition of budgets on GPs met with opposition from the doctors, who Clarke dismissed as motivated by their wallets before the needs of their patients. These budgets are now suspected of discouraging some GPs from spending money on treating their more elderly patients – perhaps because worn out workers are not economically fruitful to keep alive.

It says a lot about the politics of capitalism that one of these men could be the next leader of the Conservative Party. The other candidates have no more to recommend them. Scary Iain Duncan-Smith is an unrepentant Thatcherite who was once described by Norman Tebbit as “normal”, which should have been enough to finish him off politically but as he sits for Tebbit’s old seat at Chingford may have done him some good. David Davis is a hard man, admired by Alan Clark because he is a very good skier – which may have a limited appeal to anyone who is not to be seen on the ski slopes. He is another who thinks the Tories lost the election because they were ideologically too soft. Davis was in the SAS although whether this has impresed Portillo is not known. And trying to unite them all and the rest of the Tory rag-bag, and to show that the ghost of Macmillan still walks,was the amiable toff Michael Ancram.

No one should be impressed by the attention we are getting from apparently remorseful politicians. We should treat them as delinquents on probation; if they don’t improve they will have to answer for it. There is no need to punish them, as delinquents are punished by the courts. It will be enough, to trust ourselves to run human society without them.

Ivan

Get rid of politicians? (2023)

From the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Taxpayers fund radical anti-election lobby group’ read the shock horror headline in the Times (12 April). It was an article by two journalists about the Sortition Foundation that campaigns (as you might have guessed if you were familiar with the meaning of the word ‘sortition’) for political decisions to be made by people chosen by lot rather than by elections. This is something that is accepted by governments for at least advising them on some matters. Such ‘citizens’ assemblies’ are chosen by lot in the same sort of way that juries are in court cases. It was also practised in Ancient Athens. As such, it has as much democratic legitimacy as elections, despite what the article suggests.

The Sortition Foundation wants MPs to be chosen in this way. Which would of course eliminate the professional politician. A book by one of the Foundation’s founders, Brett Hennig, is called The End of Politicians. Naturally this wouldn’t be welcomed by the politicians. The journalists pointed out to one of the stupidest MPs, failed Tory leader Sir Ian Duncan Smith, that the foundation had been paid by the government to organise some citizens’ assemblies and got him to protest:

‘How could they award contracts and pay money over to such an organisation that wants to get rid of politicians?’

Getting rid of politicians might be considered a good idea by many. Being a career politician is a particularly unsavoury profession — trading on problems that people face and making a career out of making pie-crust promises to solve them. However, getting rid of them won’t solve those problems.

The Sortition Foundation argues that getting rid of politicians would make for better decision-making. ‘By removing elections’, one of its researchers is quoted as writing, ‘we remove the need for our representatives to court those with wealth and resources’. It wouldn’t, however, remove those with wealth and resources or their need to court political decision-makers.

The Foundation is assuming that in present-day society there is a common interest that a national citizens’ assembly — a ‘House of Citizens’ — would be better able to identify. But, under capitalism, there is no common social interest. Capitalism is a society divided into two basic classes — those who own the places where the wealth of society is produced and the rest who can only get a living by selling their ability to work for a wage or salary— with antagonistic and irreconcilable interests. In addition, different sections of the owning class have different and conflicting interests. MPs chosen by lot would still be subject to lobbying and influence by these sections and would not be able to overcome the antagonism of interests between the owners and the wage-working majority. Capitalist economic reality would give them no choice but to take decisions that gave priority to profit making and taking.

Choosing MPs by election is a better system for capitalism. It enables the support for differing sections of the owning class to be measured and for the section with the most support to have its way. As long as capitalism is in existence, it is also better from the socialist point of view since it enables the socialist movement to send its delegates to the law-making assembly that is the key to controlling political power. Sortition would get in the way of this as there is no guarantee that a Parliament chosen by lot would reflect the degree of support for socialism amongst the population or a majority for socialism.

This said, in socialism, where there would be a common social interest, there would be a wide opportunity to fill some posts by lot, maybe entire local councils, as one aspect of the participatory democracy that will be an essential part of socialism. But under capitalism it wouldn’t, and couldn’t, work as intended.

Greasy Pole: Hard work, decency and politicians (2005)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you decent? Are you hard-working? Do you always play by the rules? If you can tick the “Yes” box in answer to these questions you should be aware that our politicians have it in mind to look after you. Both Blair and Howard are agreed that you are a specially deserving case. In a recent speech Michael Howard told us that the Britain he believes in 

“will give hard-working families the support they deserve. Those people who play by the rules, pay their taxes, respect others …”

and he complained in the Tory election manifesto that 

“instead of rewarding families who do the right thing, work hard and pay their taxes, Mr. Blair’s government takes them for granted.”

This in spite of the fact that Blair has already told the 2004 Labour conference that his government planned to change Britain for better, into a country 

 “where hard working families who play by the rules are not going to see their opportunities blighted by those who don’t.”

And he followed this up in Labour’s manifesto, which he said was 

“a plan to improve the lives of hard-working families…(and) building communities strong and safe for those who play by the rules.” 

But plans to celebrate would be premature. From past experience any promise by a politician to improve your prospects needs to be received warily.

Abbey Bank

When Blair and Howard talk about their ambitions to improve the lot of hard working families they are overlooking the people – there are thousands of them – whose dearest wish is to work hard for an employer but who are denied this on the grounds of profitability. That was the case with MG Rover and with a more recent, less publicised, example of the Abbey Bank. This bank was once the Abbey National Building Society, whose business was locking workers into a lifetime of debt in order to have somewhere to live. They advertised themselves with a catchy jingle about getting the habit for being an Abbey debtor, a slogan about Abbey making life simpler and a comforting logo of a cheery family striding confidently into the future protected by an umbrella in the form of the roof of a house. That was when working for a building society gave someone a job for life, which encouraged them to work that bit harder for their employer.

Then the Abbey National became a bank, which plunged them into a savagely competitive industry where they found it hard to survive, let alone prosper. The hoped-for remedy was to be taken over by the Spanish bank Santander, who took a more robust view of the processes of employment and the reasons for people working for them – and presumably of the complacent delusions fostered by that advertising jingle and the company logo.

A principal concern for Santander was their new acquisition’s cost/income ratio, which persuaded them that there had to be some economies. These involved getting rid of a few thousand employees, which must have dissolved a lot of ideas about the bank being a kind of charity. Originally Santander intended to cut about 3,000 jobs but recently their boss, Francisco Gomez-Roldan, announced that another 1,000 would have to go, which may not be the end of the redundancies.

The finance services union Amicus angrily described the sacking as “an example of worst practice” but of course right – the right of an employer in the class relationships of capitalism – was on Santander’s side. Gomez-Roldan was unmoved. “We want to be a strong competitor” he argued, “We have to manage the cost/income ratio”. So a few thousand hard working people, who would like to be allowed to continue in that way, are joining the dole queues.

Meanwhile, Santanders’ profits rose by 38 percent, to £820 million, in the first quarter of this year. And that logo? It too has been made redundant and is being replaced with another – of red flames -which will soon be on all the country’s High Streets.

Deception

Decency is another human characteristic which Blair and Howard promise to see appropriately rewarded. How do they match up in this? Howard was one of the more prominent figures in the Tory governments of the 1980s and 1990s and during that time he did not amass a reputation for fastidious devotion to the truth. After the defeat of the Major government in 1997 he languished in comparative obscurity until the final months of Iain Duncan Smith’s disastrous leadership. As desperate Tory MPs began to manoeuvre to get rid of Duncan Smith, Howard was asked whether he would be willing to stand for the leadership. His reply was an emphatic “no,” saying that he could not imagine any circumstances, even if Duncan Smith resigned, in which he would be a candidate. Soon after that Howard was engaged in a conspiracy with other Tory leaders to nominate him and, circumventing the rule which laid down that the leader must be elected by the party membership, ensure that he got the job because he was the only candidate. This gave the Tories in Parliament the leader they wanted and avoided another Duncan Smith experience but it was an example of dishonest political manipulation.

Lies and inconsistency were an important issue in the last election, largely centred on Tony Blair and his deceptions over Iraq, tuition fees and the like. At a post-election meeting of Labour MPs Glenda Jackson recounted a common experience: “I was told on the doorstep time and again that they cannot vote for me while Tony Blair remains leader”. But this kind of attack on the leadership concealed the fact that among the doubters in the Labour Party there was considerable inconsistency, not to say deceit. Let us take the example of Tony Benn, who for a long time has claimed to be the passionate, undying defender of true Labour Party values. Last December he was, as expected of him, complaining that the Iraq war was based on “a blatant lie about Saddam’s possession of WMD” and he described the war as “deeply immoral and unwinnable”. Again as expected of him, he has consistently attacked Labour’s “shift, by stealth, towards privatisation in health, housing and education”. These doubts should be enough to persuade anyone to leave the party and go into opposition against it.

But when the election came Benn proved how adaptable his principles are, by telephoning wavering Labour voters to forgive and forget and get down to the polling station and vote for another period of Blair government, with its wars, its privatisation, its lies. “I am supporting Labour candidates up and down the country” was how he airily put it.

Coercion

In February 2002 Transport Secretary Stephen Byers had to apologise for telling a lie on TV about his responsibility for sacking his press chief Martin Sixsmith. Byers’ indefensible deception was justified by the then Education Secretary Estelle Morris by a peculiar, but convenient to Blair’s Labour Party, definition of a lie:

“It (Byers’ lie) wasn’t an attempt to deceive – he couldn’t possibly have thought that people wouldn’t have known…What I call a lie is when you say something to somebody and hope to get away with it because they won’t find you out.”

That feeble and transparent attempt at propping up the unsupportable was all the more remarkable because of Morris’ reputation as an unusually honest politician, the woman who later resigned from her Cabinet job admitting that “I just don’t think I am as good at it as I was at my last job” and who did not stand at the last election because she could not endure the high profile media scrutiny. In that sense she was an exceptional presence in the political jungle but in another – her readiness to excuse and encourage blatant deception – she was completely typical.

The “hard work” and “decency” we are supposed to conform to and the “rules” we are riven to keep are fashioned by the needs of this class society in which privilege exists by virtue of minority ownership of the means of life. That system of property rights is supported by its “rules” – a huge complex of coercive laws and punishment – which defines concepts such as “hard work” and “decency”. Political leaders like Blair and Howard work to justify that coercion and to encourage the working class – the voters – to acquiesce in its continuation. But they could not do that through any clear and consistent statement of reality; to justify the capitalist system relies on a repetition of false arguments. So the politicians who manage capitalism impose on the workers their own flexible interpretation of the rules. They need to lie, to evade, to conceal, to manipulate, because they could not do their job, at which they are notably hard-working, in any other way.

Ivan