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

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

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

   

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

Cran

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

   

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

Moffatt

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

   

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

   

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

Ivan

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

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

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

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

Intimidation

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

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

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

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

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

Backlash

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

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

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

Ivan

Greasy Pole: The Respect That Makes Calamity (2005)

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

When was it that Tony Blair decided that Respect would be an attractive, vote-catching election theme? Was it a long time ago, before he had felt the first stirrings of political ambition and was merely a rebellious, disrespectful schoolboy? Or later, when he was safely ensconced in Downing Street and his son was collected from a West End gutter after disrespectfully celebrating the end of his exams? Whatever the truth of this, the theme now looks about to become another New Labour obsession. Here is Blair, speaking on the steps of Number Ten after his victory in the 2005 election, vowing to bring back “A proper sense of respect in our schools, in our communities, in our towns and villages”. And here is Charles Clarke, a Labour Home Secretary doing his best to forget his past as a stroppy left winger: “Tackling disrespect in our society is an absolute priority for the government”.

Blair has made it clear where he thinks the blame lies for any shortcomings in this matter: “it is in the family that we have to come to terms with the idea of give and take and respect for other people”. And what if the family does not come up to these expectations? Well, “People need to understand that if their kids are out of control and they are causing a nuisance to the local community, there is something that is going to happen”. And that “something” is to apply Parenting Orders, now to be extended and strengthened, which force parents to be instructed in how to bring up their children – teaching them to respect others, give up their bus seat to an old lady, stand up when the national anthem is played, always wear their full school uniform and obey the general laws and orders of capitalist society. If the parents succeed in this and their kids behave in an orderly, respectful way, Blair will be a happier man and, the argument runs, New Labour will win yet another election.

Straw

This is all very well, but as a spokesperson for the children’s charity Barnado’s pointed out, it is not only children who are the cause of nuisance behaviour and it is not only in family homes and schools that the problem reveals itself. There was the recent example of Labour Party member Walter Wolfgang, who was so lacking in respect for figures of power and authority that he recklessly called out, slumped in his seat at Labour’s conference, that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was a liar. At the time Straw was only doing his job, giving the conference (which was very sparsely attended at the time) the Labour Party line, perhaps flavoured by a Foreign Office brief, that Iraq was attacked in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein and establish a modern democracy there, whatever the Iraqi people thought about it. Now, the Foreign Secretary holds one of the great offices of state, is a person of considerable influence and standing in society (although in the unusual case of Jack Straw his standing, for reasons connected with the ruthless game of politics, is rather lower than is the custom) who should command respectful silence when he is telling lies. It is no excuse for Wolfgang to argue that he was carried away by the contrast between Straw’s original doubts about the invasion of Iraq and his passionate support of it now. It is an essential of being respectful to keep extremes of emotion – like outrage at a blatant, cynical betrayal – strictly under control.

It was especially unwise of Wolfgang to interrupt Jack Straw who, when he was Home Secretary, was liable to become excited in discussing the symptoms of social disturbance. It was Straw who first publicly condemned the “squeegee bandits” – people who, without the driver asking, cleaned the windscreens of cars which were halted at traffic lights. We never did hear what happened to all those dangerous criminals who went about their nefarious business with wet sponges in their hands – and Straw forgot about them as well. Then he complained about his evening drive home from the office being marred by the spectacle of young people out on the streets later than a respectable Home Secretary thought they should be. That particular neurosis lingers on, in the ASBOs and the campaign about respect. And it was Straw who had to take his son to a police station after he had been exposed by a tabloid newspaper for offering controlled drugs for sale. Not, in other words, someone for Wolfgang to tangle with. It is just as well that Straw was so effectively protected from him.

Casey

Unfortunately, when Wolfgang embarked on his one-man campaign to wreck Labour’s conference there was not enough time to refer him to his local branch of the new anti-social behaviour units (of which more later), with a view to cracking down on his parents who, as Blair has told us, must be held responsible for raising so disruptive a character. This was clearly considered an unrealistic option when Labour’s spin doctors were told about Wolfgang’s age. So it was entirely appropriate – indeed there was no other way – for a couple of impressively beefy, enthusiastically respectful, Labour Party members who had volunteered to police the conference, to eject him from the hall. Along with another member who was disrespectful enough to protest at an 82-year-old man having his collar felt in that way. Perhaps now Wolfgang, like other offenders against the law, will be taught to keep his place by being deprived of his state benefits under the rules dreamed up by David Blunkett, who used to be Home Secretary but is now in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions.

Meanwhile the new task force with the job of teaching respect to people who heckle government ministers is getting down to its vital work. At its head is Louise Casey, who was already in charge of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit. Her new job requires her to “focus” (a word much loved by New Labour hopefuls) on “working together on the neighbourhood renewal and anti-social behaviour agendas, highlighting respect for others and respect for the community.” Whatever talents Casey can bring to this task, sensitive public relations is not among them. A few weeks before her new appointment, when she was merely the ASBO tsarina, she informed an audience of Home Office staff and senior police officers that

“Doing things sober is no way to get things done…I suppose you can’t binge drink any more. I don’t know who bloody made that up. It’s nonsense…There is an obsession with evidence-based policy. If Number Ten says bloody evidence-based policy to me one more time I’ll deck them and probably get unemployed.”

Questions

All over the country breath will be bated while we learn what kind of “respect” Casey will introduce us to. Wolfgang will probably be particularly apprehensive. Meanwhile Labour has been most generous in its response to his deplorable lack of respect for one of their senior politicians. One minister after another queued up to offer their humblest apology to him. Party chairman Ian McCartney went so far as to promise to take him out for a meal – a traditionally pacifying treat for stroppy pensioners – although whether eating in company with the myopically loyal Labourite McCartney would be nutritious and mollifying, or further punishment, was not clear. As the dust settled it had to be asked whether the apologies and the threatened dinner with McCartney were motivated by the fact that the Labour stewards had so clumsily committed their assault on Wolfgang in full view of the TV cameras. For some viewers it was reminiscent of Mosley’s infamous fascist rally at Olympia in 1934. If there had not been the same damning TV exposure, would all those ministers have been so eager to grovel?

There are other questions which need to be asked in the whole matter of “respect”. What kind of “respect” was shown by Jack Straw when he changed his mind over something as important as the war in Iraq? What sort of “respect” is shown by the Blair government’s drive to undermine the established legal rights of people who are arrested by the police? And on the other side, what degree of “respect” do we find in the attitude of someone like the heckling Wolfgang, who undisturbedly keeps his membership of both CND and the Labour Party, although he must know that there is no prospect of this government, or any future Labour government, agreeing to throw away their nuclear weapons? Let it be clear. Having respect for people and our environment – acknowledging and caring for each other’s strengths, needs, weaknesses, ambitions – is not compatible with capitalism’s essentially competitive, repressive nature. Capitalism makes heroes of those who rise to the top, no matter how ruthlessly they achieve that. Tony Blair, for example, did not get where he is by allowing himself to be diverted through any respect for truth and human interests. And then what about the people – the working class – who in their millions support capitalism’s political parties through thick and thin, disaster and triumph, contempt and respect? They need to understand that in the mouth of a politician “respect” is a fine but meaningless word. Unhappy and disillusioned people like Wolfgang should know this because they have experienced “respect” at the sharp end.

Ivan

Quiz – Ten questions to answer (2003)

From the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

All these quotations are genuine comments, made by the people named – except that we have put in a single sentence in each interview what the person did not say. See if you can guess which is the made-up sentence we have put in.

1. Jack Straw, British Foreign Minister, speaking after a suicide bomb attack in Haifa which killed fifteen people (Times, 6 March): “There is no justification for attacks on innocent civilians. Except, of course, if we carry out the American generals’ plan to send 800 cruise missiles in to Baghdad in the first 48 hours of the planned war.”

2. Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s spokesman, speaking after the same attack in Haifa (Times, 6 March): “We will continue to pursue the path of peace in the Middle East. Except, that is, when we pursue the path of war against Iraq.”

3. Prince Philip (Observer, 29 December): “If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate how much more comfortable aircraft have become; that is, unless you travel on something called economy class, which sounds ghastly. Of course, most things about the lives of poorer people are ghastly, which is why it is so surprising that so many of them turn out at each election and vote for capitalism.”

4. Senior Vatican official (Observer, 29 December): “Illness is a consequence of sin. So the Pope is going to live for ever.”

5. Tony Blair (Times, 1 March): “At some point, you have a duty if you are to offer any leadership to your country in saying why it is we believe there is a real threat from terrorism and these appalling weapons to the security of our countries and to the wider world. Unless, of course, we had Socialism, when neither Iraq nor America nor Britain would have any appalling weapons, and there wouldn’t be any ‘leadership’ either, since people would be able to think and act for themselves.”

6. The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of Westminster, head of the Catholic Church in Britain (Times, 20 February): “It is vital, therefore, that all sides in this crisis engage through the United Nations fully and urgently in a process, including continued weapons inspections, that could and should render the trauma and tragedy of war unnecessary. An even better way to render not only this planned war but all future wars unnecessary – in fact, impossible – is to establish Socialism.”

7. President Bush (Eastern Daily Press, 19 February): “The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security – in this case, security of the people. And if you don’t like leaders, taking decisions which may kill thousands of innocent people, you could always get rid of them by having Socialism.”

8. In an opinion poll, 65 percent of people questioned in the UK (Times, 12 February) said that “although it is right in principle to accept genuine asylum-seekers, we have now accepted our fair share, and cannot accept any more. It is not as if any British people have ever gone to live in other countries, like Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on.”

9. The Pope (Times, 10 February): “One cannot do nothing in the face of terrorist attacks, but equally we cannot be idle in the face of the threats now on the horizon. War is not inevitable. But even if we avoid this war, there are plenty of violent conflicts round the world now as I speak, and there will be a lot of wars in the years to come – you will have to establish Socialism if you really want to make war impossible.”

10. Rezan Fakhraden, a woman badly gassed at the age of five, when Saddam Hussein dropped poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing over 5,000 civilians and injuring many more (Times, 22 February): “I cannot climb more than ten stairs. I cannot run. Sometimes my lungs bleed. I cannot stop coughing and I am often sick. I don’t trust Britain or America at all. They have said nothing about our plight due to the gases for fifteen years. They even supported Saddam then. We have received no medicines from Britain or America in all that time to help us, and now we have no more protection against chemical attack than we had then. Yet we may be the first to get struck. But, of course, hypocrisy is an essential characteristic of all capitalist politicians, including those now using the Halabja gassing to justify attacking Iraq.”

Answers: We have made up the last sentence, and only the last sentence, in each of these statements. All the other quotations on this page are genuine.

Score: 1 – 9: Keep trying. 10. You must have read the Socialist Standard before.

Alwyn Edgar

One (capitalist) world (2004)

From the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Globalisation - the increased integration of the world economy — reveals itself in various ways. One is the prominence of multinational companies, with goods being produced in various parts of the world, often by companies mainly based in Europe or the US. Supra-national organisations such as the World Trade Organisation and the North American Free Trade Association are other reflections of these developments.

Jobs being switched to other countries, where labour is cheaper and/or more pliant, is a further aspect. One result is a world where a few obscenely rich individuals are wealthier than the poorest countries. Along with all this, though not necessarily an intrinsic part of it, are extensions of privatisation and the undermining of state welfare, both part of what is often referred to as the neo-liberal or Washington consensus.

Improvements in transport and communications are sometimes seen as the driving force behind these changes. Clearly, if contact with another country implies time-consuming travel, expensive phone calls and use of an unreliable postal service, then it will be difficult for a multinational company to function. But faster plane travel, e-mail and faxes make it all so much easier. Such factors, though, are best seen as facilitating globalisation rather than causing it. For the simple fact is that capitalism has always looked for markets, materials and cheap labour wherever it can find them. When the Korean company Samsung decides, as it did recently, to transfer a factory making microwave ovens and computer monitors from Teesside to Slovakia, it is motivated by the prospects of lower wages (£1 an hour, compared to the princely £5.70 paid in Billingham). And many ready meals sold in UK supermarkets contain chicken from Thailand or Brazil, where intensive factory farming has driven costs down (but has greatly increased the problems of controlling disease).

The spread of global products and brands is sometimes summarised by the term “McWorld” - a world built on the model of McDonalds, with bland goods, poorly-paid jobs and big profits for a favoured few. Multinational companies often rely on sweatshops, with child labour, temporary jobs, dangerous working conditions and no trade unions but massive profits. At the Formosa factory in El Salvador, for instance, workers have reported how they slaved for twelve hours a day on backless wooden benches, with only one daily visit to the toilet allowed, making clothes for Nike and Adidas. The biggest corporations can dictate to governments and other organisations: for example, the World Health Organisation has been blocked from taking action on obesity because of lobbying from American sugar

producers. But again, there is nothing new about governments and other world bodies doing what capitalists want. Backed up by the threat or reality of US armed force, Western capitalism can usually dictate its own terms for access to oil, cheap labour and so on.

The extension of the cash nexus to practically every aspect of life is a further instance - what Naomi Klein calls the loss of “unmarketed space”. In Bolivia the municipal water supply was privatised, and the new owners ever made it illegal to collect rainwater in roof tanks! In this case, mass protests were able to reverse the privatisation with its drastic increase in costs. When even prisons are run for a profit, it seems that nothing is beyond the evil embrace of capitalism.

World trade came into existence with capitalism, bringing products such as cotton and tobacco to Europe. But the growth of industrial capitalism led to an enormous increase in connections between different parts of the planet as raw materials were sourced from every direction and wars were fought to open up markets in places like China and Korea. Yet companies remained primarily nationally-oriented. Perhaps the first multinational appeared when the US company Singer set up a sewing-machine factory in Glasgow in 1867. By 1914, only 12,000 people in Britain were employed by US companies. So it was the 20th century that was the true era of globalisation, as expansion abroad revealed itself as the best option for companies that had difficulty in increasing their domestic market share.

There had previously been plenty of investment by individuals and institutions in overseas companies, known as foreign portfolio investment (FPI). But the 20th century saw this largely displaced by foreign direct investment (FDI), whereby a company based in one country owner and controlled factories and subsidiaries in another. FDI implies a far greater impact on the economy and population of the “receiving” country, with decisions being taken by people beyond the influence of that country's government.The last couple of decades, though, have seen a comeback of FPI, but this time with a bigger influence given the emphasis on short-term profits and on switching production from one country to another as wage levels and other production costs rise and fall. FPI is often driven by mergers and takeovers, which are designed to cut cost: and have no relation to the needs of workers or consumers.

Some people are wholly in favour of globalisation, Jack Straw for one:

“Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there is no longer a coherent alternative ideology on offer. We could take the advice of the Stop the World campaigners, retreat into our national economies and close our markets. But this would put at risk the real benefits that globalisation, and global capitalism, have brought to millions.” (Guardian, 10 September 2001)

(No doubt the workers of El Salvador could enlighten Straw on the "benefits” of global capitalism.) Even most supporters of globalisation agree that some changes need to be made in global governance, though they accept the general idea. Ranged against them is the world-wide anti-globalisation movement, or "movement of movements". It is common, and not just among socialists, to complain that it is clearer what this movement is against than what it is for.This is sometimes seen as a good thing, on the grounds that it prevents too early a consensus on one single solution when so many are in the air. But in fact this movement has many incompatible goals.

For instance. Walden Bello, of the group Focus on the Global South, advocates deglobalisation (probably the kind of thing Straw was opposing above):

"We are not talking about withdrawing from the international economy. We are speaking about reorienting our economies away from the emphasis on production for export and towards production for the local market."

But production for the local market is still production for profit, and what Bello is suggesting is just a less-centralised verslon of capitalism.

The World Social Forum or WSF (recently held in Mumbai) has become one of the main meeting points of the anti-globalisation protesters. A record of the discussions at the 2002 gathering in Brazil has been published as Another World is Possible, edited by William Fisher and Thomas Ponniah (the above passage from Bello is taken from this source).The editors present one of the poles of disagreement as being revolution vs. reform, with the revolutionaries wanting to do away with organisations like the International Monetary Fund and the reformers wanting to negotiate with them and transform them. But. as this example suggests, all that is really involved here is different versions of reforming capitalism, with nothing revolutionary at stake at all.

However. Another World is Possible should not be simply dismissed. It is free of any nonsense about the USSR or “national liberation movements", which might have disfigured such a collection not so long ago. More positively, there is an emphasis on democracy and on rejecting leaders, and many references to putting people before profit. For instance, a summary of one strand of the discussions in Brazil states:

“The Utopians point out the necessity of understanding that society can no longer be founded on profit and competition, but should be based on the values of equality, equity and social justice.The desired globalization is a human one: profit can no longer be prioritized over human needs.”

It is not clear how widely supported such sentiments are within the WSF. or how many dismiss them as "utopian”. But as a vision of the future this is far more encouraging and inspiring than the blinkered view of Jack Straw.

Socialism will also be a world system, but this does not mean it will involve gigantic centralised organisations. Production will no doubt involve both locally- and remotely-sourced materials, as appropriate, but there will be no incentive to go for the “cheapest" option. Putting the bottom line at the top of priorities is not the way to a healthy and happy world. 

Paul Bennett

Voice From The Back: The Third Way (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Third Way 

The government deplores the forces of conservatism. It detests Old Labour. And now the Home Secretary Jack Straw is a ferocious critic of “woolly-minded” liberals. The only constituency and philosophy that draws its uncritical admiration is business. It was the fact that businesses in Manchester might make losses with the cancellation of the Tyson fight, explained Mr Straw last week, that had decisively influenced his decision to alter the law of the land and admit a convicted rapist. Thus the Labour Party enters its centennial year: as the declared enemy of liberalism and of the use of the state to redistribute wealth; an uncertain custodian of public services, and the firm friend in every circumstance of business, entrepreneurship and profit. Observer, 16 January.

Cause and effect 

The rich got richer last week. City bonuses went through the roof, with 2,500 staff at investment bankers, Goldman Sachs sharing £100m in salary top-ups . . . Elsewhere in Britain, 2 million children are living in homes where no one has a job. According to a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study published last Thursday, the first years of a Labour government have done little to close the gap between rich and poor. There are 14 million people living below the poverty line—a line which defines “poor” as having an income of £132 a week. That’s half the national average income. Independent on Sunday, 12 December.

African capitalism 

Close to 60 families were left homeless yesterday at Farm No. 1270, Malkerns, owned by Matsapha businessman, Tom Kirk , after their homes were demolished in their presence . . . A strong force of 85 fully armed police officers from Hhohho, Manzini and Operational Support (OSSU) was in full guard to make sure the squatters’ houses were brought down and to counter any resistance . . . A number of grieving families interviewed were very angry with the exercise as they had thought the king was going to save them, after his speech over the weekend when he arrived from the trip to Malaysia and Singapore. The king made a general statement that the evictions of squatters in farms should not be encouraged. From a Swaziland newspaper, 5 August 1999.

The childhood of capitalism 

Last week the national security adviser to India’s Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on a goodwill visit to London met Trade and Industry Secretary Stephen Byers and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. He warned them privately of India’s fear of being locked out of vital Western markets because of the country’s heavy dependence on child workers. India is likely to raise the issue with Tony Blair during next weekend’s gathering of heads of Commonwealth governments in South Africa. A few years ago, India’s fireworks industry calculated that employing children saved around 32 million rupees a year in labour costs. A survey of children employed to stitch footballs in Sialkot, Pakistan, revealed that they provided nearly a quarter of their families’ annual earnings. Almost all worked to pay for basic items such as food and clothing. Observer, 7 November.

Giving up 

The Samaritans, the organisation which has helped save the lives of thousands of desperate people, has seen an alarming slump in its number of volunteers . . . While fewer people are willing to listen and assist, suicides among young males have increased sharply during the Nineties, claiming the lives of 17 out of every 100,000 young men in 1997. Independent on Sunday, 12 December.

The Utopians 

[Amory] Lovins is visiting England to promote his new book, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution. The product of an intense two-year collaboration with his wife, Hunter, and US green business guru Paul Hawken, it attempts to set an agenda for “the next industrial revolution”, based on “capitalism as if living systems mattered”. Earth Matters, Winter 99.

Bleak Christmas 

An estimated 4500 children without a permanent roof over their heads face a bleak Christmas, Shelter Scotland claimed yesterday . . . The study reveals between 16,000 and 24,000 children become homeless in Scotland every year, with between 4000 and 4500 living in temporary accommodation at any one time. Domestic violence is the root cause of homelessness for nearly 4000 families every year. The Herald, 16 December.

Religion still pays 

He was the mastermind behind the cynical marketing ploy that gave the world Death brand cigarettes. Now BJ Cunningtham is lighting up the soul of business. He is among the young entrepreneurs bringing back religion to the boardrooms, with executives keen to prove that profit and principle can mix. The trend has taken root in the US and there are signs that a wave of spirituality is spreading to the UK . . . Californian hippie Walter Cruttenden, who runs E*Offering, an internet business that brings ethical companies to the stock market is one example of the new spiritual entrepreneur. A follower of mystic Paramahansa Yogananda, he gets up at 4.30am each day for meditational yoga . . .”I come out of meditation with a clear idea of how to solve a business problem.” Financial Mail on Sunday, 9 January.

Living in a Free Society – a recent experience (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is offered without comment. It tries as honestly and comprehensively as possible to offer an objective account of the events surrounding an invitation to appear on a television discussion programme earlier this year.

A couple of months ago I was invited to take part as a representative of the Socialist Party in a Kilroy programme about Jack Straw’s “three strikes and you’re out” policy for burglars.

Two days before the programme was due to be recorded I was telephoned by a research assistant who wanted to know what kind of thing I would like to say. I offered two thoughts. One, a tactical objection to dispensing with juries, and thus with the whole idea of tying justice to particular circumstances—not least the personal circumstances of the criminal. And two, an objection to a discussion about burglary which failed to acknowledge that society was based on the legalised exploitation of one class by another.

The researcher wanted to know more about the latter point, so I offered a brief summary of the Socialist Party’s position. “Oh,” she said, “I’m not sure about that. You have to remember that our viewers are very ordinary people. I think they would find that very difficult. I certainly do.” I suggested that the ideas were not so much difficult as novel, and offered the opinion that having been invited onto the programme as a representative of the Socialist Party, I would expect to have an opportunity of putting our case. The researcher was unhappy and suggested that I come as an individual and make only the first point. I observed that I thought it ironic that the programme would be discussing the automatic imprisonment of individuals and here she was telling me that I was also to be imprisoned: I wouldn’t be allowed to say what I wanted, only what she wanted me to say. I wondered whether when members of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties were invited to appear on the programme they, too, were told that they wouldn’t be given an opportunity of putting their parties’ cases? The researcher didn’t answer, but withdrew her invitation to me to attend.

Michael Gill

Between the Lines: A Simpler Truth (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Simpler Truth

In the month that has seen the parasitical pigs fighting round the ITV trough to see who can win the fattest franchises, the state-funded BBC announced that it will lay off 104 workers in its News and Current Affairs section so that it can slash its budget by £2 million. The BBC's new Funding The Future policy statement states that there will be a £75 million cut in BBC expenditure by 1993. This will be paid for by laying off workers, making cheaper programmes and selling off the big-audience productions to commercial companies who can pump them for profit. (For example, BBC's Question Time is to be sold off — just as all the leftists who appear on it have sold out.) The future of British TV, dominated by big-money outfits who are to buy up the deregulated commercial channels and a cut-price, game-show dominated BBC, will consist of more televised Ratners for the proles while the bosses entertain themselves in the casinos and opera houses on money they have acquired by robbing us.

Speaking of robbery, The Simple Truth concert (BBC2, 12 May, 8pm - 1 am) is worthy of comment. The concert, to raise money for the Kurds and other victims of "disasters" (for which read "every day occurrences of the profit system), was the brainchild (to refer to the parentage loosely) of top Tory, Jeffrey Archer. Young Jeff, it will be recalled, is a pretty generous sort of guy: prostitutes who have never met him before have only to drop him a line requesting £200 and it's in the next post. Archer hoped that the concert would raise £10 million. Viewers were urged to phone in with £5 donations. £10 million — a lot of money, eh? Until you start to think that

• The daily cost of the bombs dropped on the Kurds in Iraq during the recent Gulf war, which Archer proudly supported, was far greater than the amount collected by the concert.
• The daily rate of interest required from African states, where millions are dying, is greater than the money collected by the concert.
• The proportion of weekly income of an average British worker which £5 constitutes is a thousand times greater than £5 out of the weekly profits obtained on the basis of working-class robbery by Archer, the multi-millionaire creep.

Their Music

Another thing about The Simple Truth timewasting was the chronic irrelevance of nearly all of the music to any kind of real social change. The five hours of the concerts were filled with melodies to make us moronic. From the talentless drivel of super-hyped New Kids on the Block to the sub-Sinatra tripe of Whitney Houston, the whole show had nothing to say about what is actually going on in the world. The following Sunday your reviewer was at the Levellers' Day commemoration in Burford and heard the superb Peggy Seeger singing songs of real class awareness. She is not the only one writing and singing such material; there is a huge growth of singers, writers and bands coming out of and reflecting the experiences of the working class. What they have to sing about relates to the profit-caused problems of the Kurds, the starving Africans and Bangladeshis. But you don’t find the likes of Archer or the state-run BBC giving exposure to them. They might make the wage slaves think too much.

The Worst Show on Earth

Neighbours (BBC1, whenever you switch on) is in no danger of making the wage slaves think too much. A prerequisite for following the events of this implausible load of old tosh is that you do not think at all. Last month junior Education Minister, Michael Fallon, called for the programme to be banned, saying that it dulls peoples's senses. His Labour opposite number. Jack Straw, said that it was "a pretty trashy programme". Quite why a Tory Minister should object to workers’ minds being dulled (how else could they win an election?) or a Labour leader should object to trash (who but a collector of such would read the lie-a-minute Labour manifesto?) we do not know. We do know that the BBC, representing the true voice of the ruling class, put out a statement saying that Neighbours was a good programme because it offers moral education to its audience. Funny that: when this column exposed the predecessor of Neighbours, Crossroads for being a vehicle for just such moralistic propaganda we were atttacked by an article in The People newspaper suggesting that our claim was the loony delusion of deranged Marxists

Steve Coleman

The Moral Craze (1998)

From the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A miserable moral anxiety is in the air. The self-righteous are on the march. Wrong. Right. Good. Evil. Simplistic moral certainties blast from the megaphones of the media, as the high priests of Capital cast their judgements upon everything but the lousy system of class exploitation that keeps the vicars, the rabbis, the mullahs and assorted other bullies in business.

From presidential blow jobs to ex-murderers signing book deals, an obsession with the trivia of individual transgressions serves as a soap opera distraction from the pervasive atrocities of the system. How much easier it is to incite crowds of under-educated, aimless, embittered kids to riot in Bristol because a sex offender released from prison is sitting in a police cell thinking deranged thoughts than to attend to the malignant rationality of a social system which condemns millions of children to the fatal abuse of starving in a world of plenty.

We know what the Moors’ murderers did. We know where they are. We know that Evil is getting its due reward. And how easy it is to sit in perpetual anger, demonising their villainy. We are told their names and their crimes are repeated with regularity in a frenzy of tabloid outrage, as if these were the sole disrupters of an otherwise tranquil society. We do not see published the names of those decision-makers in the World Bank whose determination to cut aid here and finance dictators there has led to millions dwelling in poverty and perishing needlessly. There are no scowling mugshots of those men in suits from the IMF who enrich themselves upon the corpses of those who cannot be milked for profit. Where are the lurid tabloid accounts of the sordid merchants of death who jet from nation to nation attending arms fairs, exchanging millions of dollars for the latest weapons of murder, the most sophisticated torture equipment, the means of creating hell on earth? For such callous inhumanity they will be medalled, given knighthoods, made richer than the most violent of gangsters could hope to become. It is a highly selective morality that capitalism embraces.

Jack Straw, the man who shopped his own son to the police for possessing dope, appears in front of every camera that will recognise him. He is in a denouncing mood. He has been taking lessons from Michael Howard. He is Disgusted of New Labour, ready to write to his MP and demand that something is done when it occurs to him–I am an MP, so I can pursue my philistine rage in the name of justice. So the tabloid rags, with their naked models and naked lies, provide space for the Straw man to denounce the child killer who was paid money for helping to write a book about what, as a deranged child, had made her kill. Thatcher demands $25,000 a time to appear before worshipping Americans with her kiss-and-tell Falklands memories. The murdered conscript crew of the Belgrano is conveniently unmentioned either by Thatcher or the tabloid bog rolls. But Straw is not denouncing Thatcher. Neither is Blair. They are out to pick on an old woman who has written a book regretting that she had once committed a hideous offence. Is it the money that they begrudge her? Or the fact that she has dared to confuse the simplicity of witch-hunting by expressing remorse?

Sickening hypocrisy

How convenient these moral distractions are for those with an indefensible system to sustain. So, Robin Cook insists that he did not know–or forgot–or wasn’t as bad as the Tories had been if he did indeed know–that arms were being sold to mercenaries in Sierra Leone, even though international law forbade it. Call in the broadsheet detectives who will piece by piece, in the manner of a bad Agatha Christie novel, seek to unravel the story. There is a rather bigger story they will ignore, of course. Who are the regimes to which Mr Cook is quite happy and legally free to sell weapons of mass destruction? When last did the Foreign Office publish a list of those companies in Britain which make profits from selling torture equipment to dictators? And how big are those profits? And what precisely has happened to those upon whom they have been used? Can we expect a statement about that, Mr Cook? Perhaps the tortured and the bombed should be informed that these

British weapons have been sold in the name of an “ethical foreign policy”. A further twist of the knife. But Cook can rest easy in his bed, for the journalists are much more concerned about who he shares it with than how many lives he helps to ruin as head of one of the biggest arms-exporting nations in the world. Now, that’s what the public need to know: Was Robin Cook unfaithful to his wife? Will he be unfaithful to his new wife? And was Bill Clinton the innocent victim of a crazed young girl’s fantasy or was she the victim of a dirty old man’s fantasy? And what about OJ Simpson–and George Michael–and Michael Jackson–and on and on until a frenzy or moral anxiety scares everyone into trusting no-one, particularly themselves. Because when the majority are frightened and unconfident they trust the nearest bully who will tell them that his mob can keep the streets safe.

Law and Order.

We have always known that Labour and Tories support the same system. The current fashion for shocked or amused realisation that Blair is to Major what Major was to Blair is no postmodern irony–just what socialists have been saying for decades. But can even the most hardened of scientific socialists be permitted just the merest morsel of surprise at the ease with which New Labour has taken to its very heart–or, more probably, its Christian soul–the indecently unforgiving, excessively punitive, uncouthly scapegoating rhetoric which seeks to monopolise virtue as a state asset while condoning every crime of capitalism as if it has nothing at all to do with them? The fine-tuned skills of sickening hypocrisy have exceeded all negative expectations.

The worst of this obsession with personal moral transgressions is its failure to see anti-social behaviour as anything but inner weakness: an inherent flaw. So the fault must be purged–isolated–tormented–anything but understood. And this is the right way for capitalism to respond. Because the alternative would be to go beyond the tabloid simplicities of crime and punishment and seek the cause of what makes killers kill and sex offenders offend and muggers mug. There is the Saudi Arabian response–of which New Labour’s toughness is a cowardly imitation–which refuses to ask questions. And if you cut off the hands of enough shoplifters and whip enough adulterers it will not be too long before the message is driven home and only the most persistent offenders need to be tortured, killed or incarcerated. Elegantly simple. The more complicated alternative of seeking causes is not that difficult. Most child sex abusers were themselves victims of child sex abuse. Most muggers are from families that are poor and uneducated rather than affluent and privileged. Many rapists have immersed themselves in commercially packaged porn, appealing to their disempowered craving for respect and power, before they rape women. In short, the behaviour of those we least like arises from specific social relationships. We cannot ignore or approve of the relationships and then indulge in orgies of moral indignation because they produce inevitable social effects.

Steve Coleman

Greasy Pole: Tories lying low? (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Tory Party moves in a mysterious way, its wonders to perform. Well that bit about performing wonders may explain how they are moving at the present—which is mysterious indeed. We refer to the fact that, just over a year since Tony Blair moved into Number Ten, the Conservative Party seems bent on convincing everyone that they are in a condition rather like those persistent comas which often affect the victims of serious accidents. They are almost immobile. They make hardly a sound. Anxious friends gather round, wondering whether it is true yet to switch off the beeping life-support machine.

While it is true that William Hague is active and noisy, often outsmarting Blair in the puerile exchanges of Prime Minister’s Questions (which sends the sparsely occupied benches behind him into raptures) the same cannot be said for the rest of the Tory Shadow ministers. For example the career of Robin Cook at the Foreign Office has so far been a succession of crises—without counting those on his domestic scene. A most recent of these has been the arms-to-Sierra Leone affair, which threatened to implicate him over the breaches of a United Nations embargo on sending weapons to that unhappy country. But through all his difficulties it seems that Cook has been able to rely on his opposite number not to make things more difficulty by behaving like—well, his opposite number.

For those who don’t know it—and there must be many—Cook is shadowed by Michael Howard, who used to be a Home Secretary who would bring the House down at Tory Conferences with his promises to have half the population in prison and the other half keeping them there. Howard made a name for himself as a political bruiser (as Jack Straw once found out, to his obvious discomfort) and he was expected to give Cook a very, very rough ride. When he did speak on the issue it was not with his customary ruthlessness.

Mary Bell

Then there is the case of the man Howard savaged in the Commons. Jack Straw looks and sounds like a person oppressed by visions of marauding teenagers out late at night, washing the windscreens of strangers’ cars when they should be at home doing their homework. Straw’s quick-fire populist responses to every vote-worthy incident in the lad-and-order filed makes the knee-jerk reactions for which Thatcher’s Home Secretaries were notorious look positively elephantine. Consider, for example, his desperate attempts to cash in on the tabloid frenzy over the Gita Sereny book about Mary Bell. There is no question that Mary Bell did an awful thing—although how awful it was in comparison to the mass murder in wars which the Labour Party so eagerly supports is another question. It was probably an unwise move by the author, to pay Mary Bell for being interviewed for the book—although how this should be worse than the arms industry making profits by supplying dictatorships in places like Indonesia is something to ponder on.

But these were side issues. The gutter press, ignoring the fact that some of them had made large offers to Mary Bell for her story, saw a wonderful opportunity to create the kind of self-righteous panic which helps them sell so many copies. Faced with a surge of mob hysteria demanding all manner of irrelevant, illegal or impractical things, Straw might have taken a stand, instead he acted in what we suppose must be called his character and posed as the mob’s friend in High Places.

After 1945

The Shadow Home Secretary is Brian Mawhinney, who during his time as Tory Party chairman had plenty of practice in the business of reconstructing reality and seizing every opportunity to make a party point. Naively, it might have been expected that Mawhinney would have wanted to expose Straw’s disgraceful behaviour, if only to make a few people wonder whether there was more to him than a dishonest party hack. But from Mawhinney there was no comment worth so much as a mention in the media. Perhaps he was submissively contemplating his own boredom, which is rumoured to be responsible for Hague’s intention to ditch him at the coming reshuffle.

Stephen Dorrell, who was a minister in the last government and who may yet become Conservative leader, had recently said that his party is deliberately keeping silent because the voters simply don’t want to hear from them for a couple of years. Dorrell says that was how the Tories behaved after their defeat in 1945 but that hardly fits the facts. As in 1997, in 1945 the Conservative were damaged by a reputation for cynicism and complacency. They were held responsible for the inter-war slumps and for collusion with Nazi Germany, which led to the outbreak of war. But their reaction to electoral defeat was anything but despairing. Under the chairmanship of Woolton they at once set about reorganising their party.

One effect of this was to turf out many of the vacuous buffoons who rarely spoke in, or even attended, the Commons but who had won the nomination for a safe Tory seat by contributing handsomely to the local party’s funds. It was among these Honourable members that the Nazis had their most enthusiastic supporters. Another effect was the production of a series of policy statements—like the Industrial Charter, which was approved at the 1947 Tory Conference, described by its originator R. A. Butler in his memoirs as

” . . . an assurance that, in the interests of efficiency, full employment and social security, modern Conservatism would maintain strong central guidance over the operation of the economy.”

Election winners

And there was the emergence of the Tory Party, out from the genteel exchanges of coffee mornings and whist drives into the crude robustness of the outdoor meeting. This was quite a shock to them, not to mention to their audiences but it was all intended to prove that the party had changed; it had taken the lesson of the defeat to heart and it was now a party which cared and listened and acted. A people’s party in fact—and where have we heard that before?

Whatever the reason for the Conservatives being now so quiescent it would be very unwise to write them off as an electoral force, as so many did in 1945. They are among the world’s most expert election winners, which was why Blair and his acolytes decided that Labour’s best chance of being elected was to become as much like the Tories as possible. For the Conservatives there is an obvious danger in keeping so far below the parapet: stay there too long and the voters will grow up believing that Tony Blair has always ruled over us and always will—which will be neither mysterious nor wonderful.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Howard’s End? (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

A collective shiver must have run down a few thousand spines at the news that Michael Howard, all ambition apparently spent, intends to retire from the Conservative Front Bench (or perhaps had been pushed off it by William Hague). For a lot of people his time as Home Secretary is remembered now like a nasty operation or a serious accident on the motorway—for Howard was among the grisliest of that gruesome lot who, until May 1997, were the government of British capitalism.

Behind a condescending manner and voice and an immovable smile, reminiscent of an oil slick, there lurked, in Howard’s misunderstood breast, a steely ambition. When the Tories, reeling from their drubbing in 1997, were electing a leader to replace John Major, Howard proposed to Hague that they stood as a twosome—with Howard for leader and Hague for deputy. Of course Hague, not being of a suicidal turn of mind, turned the offer down. At the time Howard’s chances were rated highly; he seemed to love being Home Secretary with all the opportunities it gave to boost his popularity by playing up to the prejudices of the party conference. “Prison works,” he told them and they clapped until their wrists ached. “I have 27 points in a plan to fight crime,” he announced and they proved they were not entirely comatose with roars of approval. “If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime,” he shrieked and they rose as one person in an ecstatic standing ovation.

Criminal statistics

One problem with all this is that it did not seem to impress the criminal to any significant extent. The crime statistics—for what they are worth—went up and down (when they went down Howard was hysterically quick to claim this as proof of how effective he was) with little or no regard for what went on in the Home Office. That, to the despair of the reformers, is the way with crime. Meanwhile Howard was busily upsetting almost everyone who, unlike his mindless fans at Tory conferences, are actually in contact with the problem and so have some knowledge of the background to crime. Howard, it seemed, was just about the most unpopular Home Secretary there could be.

Until, that is, the arrival of Jack Straw, who seems bent on outdoing Howard in his zeal to go down in history as the Home Secretary who locked up so many people that there simply weren’t enough left outside the prison gates to commit crimes. Consider, for example, the manner in which asylum seekers are treated when they arrive in this country. When Howard was Home Secretary the Tory government introduced regulations which stipulated that unless an asylum seeker declared their status immediately on arrival they would not be eligible for any state benefits until their application for asylum had been approved by the Home Office. This was the kind of crackdown which Tory activists at their conferences love so much, colluding as it does with one of their grosser prejudices—that most of the people who arrive in Britain saying they have escaped from a brutal dictatorship are not genuinely in need of asylum but come here in search of an easy living on the dole.

One problem with the new regulations was in the time it took—and still takes—for the Home Office to deal with the applications. One recent report said that there are over 76,000 cases gathering dust somewhere there. This can go on for months on end, with no acknowledged reason for the delay. While this is happening the asylum seekers are marooned here with nothing to live on. As a concession local authorities are empowered to provide the very minimum of maintenance, which could mean vouchers exchangeable for basic food and clothing or an arrangement which allowed the applicant to eat at local hospitals or hostels. Another problem was the expectation that an asylum seeker would be in a fit state to pick their way through the bureaucracy of making a claim for benefit immediately they arrived in Britain. When we consider what they had been through in their country of origin, this had to be unlikely but the basis of the new arrangements was that they had not experienced anything unusual and were here to try to sponge on the state.

Cases we could cite are not of people who have come here for an easy life on the dole. Given the choice, they would prefer to be in their country of origin; they have fled to Britain in fear of their lives. This was, it seemed, well understood by the Labour Party when they opposed the Tory government’s restrictions on the refugees. One Labour MP remembers those restrictions as “…an act of spite and vengeance against refugees”.

Crackdown 

Labour’s recently published Asylum and Immigration Bill provides wider powers, such as in finger-printing, for the immigration officials, who are already not famous for a commitedly anti-racist stance in dealing with people coming into this country. Registrars will be able to demand evidence of personal details from couples applying to get married and to stop marriages on suspicion. The “cashless” system of subsistence through vouchers will continue, except that even this level of support will be used to discipline the asylum seekers who do not toe the line. Under a new arrangement, they will be directed to live in certain parts of the country and if they leave that area for more than the occasional night their subsistence will cease. So far we have not heard about how it is proposed to find out whether the asylum seekers have stayed where they have been placed nor what powers will be given, for example to the police, to enforce the arrangement. And just to make sure that the message gets across, the government will stop all state support for any asylum seeker who tries to challenge their treatment by the immigration authorities in the courts.

These proposals will be justified by the government on the spurious grounds that this country is being submerged by a flood of illegal immigrants who are undermining all civilised life here with excessive claims for state benefit. We are hearing hints about the menace of “economic immigrants” as if people who come here in the hope of getting a better life are some kind of criminal and as if this has not been an established incentive for millions of people all over the world to set up home abroad. Britain teems with “economic immigrants” from the past, as does the USA, France, Germany . . . and all these countries have had people leave for “economic” reasons. In any case when we look at the figures for people applying for refugee status in 1997 we see that the UK, with 41,000, comes below Germany (135,700) and the USA (103,700) and just a little above the Netherlands (34,400).

In fact the proposals have nothing to do with any alleged problem of resources and bogus claims but a lot to do with the Labour Party’s need to pander to every popular prejudice if they are to have a hope of staying in power for any length of time. This is what informs their every policy and action. This is the explanation for the string of broken promises and the hoards of disappointed supporters who are questioning whether this was what they voted Labour for. The behaviour of Labour in government is not a matter of accident or incompetence. Labour asked for power to govern British capitalism and that was what those voters opted for. The system has to be run like this—the assurances given in opposition have to be exposed as cruel fantasies. In his time Jack Straw was a prominent left-winger; in his mouth it was all a simple matter of changing one set of leaders, one manifesto of deception, for another. Now he shows the reality of it all: Howard may be at an end but his policies live on.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Caning the teachers (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Blunkett is Secretary of State for Education and the author of a crushingly boring autobiography (On A Clear Day). Unless, of course, you like long, trivial stories about his dog upsetting the dignity of some eminent person (“We all enjoyed a good laugh . . .”). Or dollops of self-admiration garnished in mock modesty (“I believe that, at the time, Neil Kinnock thought I had let him down . . . whereas, as he later generously ackowledged . . .”). And the poetry—too embarrassing to repeat in a journal meant for a placid socialist readership. Any teacher who addressed their class as Blunkett does his readers would very soon lose control of the kids.

This is not to say that Blunkett does not sometimes let slip some arousing comment. A recent example was his statement that poverty is not an excuse for a school failing to meet the GCSE pass targets set by the government. “Cynics out there” was how he described anyone who accepts what seem to many people a self-evident fact, namely that “. . . school performance is all about socio-economics and the areas that these schools are located in”. That is another way of saying that only cynics would question whether a school in, say, a run-down part of Hackney should be expected to produce the same level of achievement as Eton or Harrow. It is another way of saying that if a school does fail to meet its targets that must be due to the teachers, who in Hackney are lazy and stodgy while at Eton and Harrow they are industrious and charismatic.

Jack Straw 

We have heard this kind of criticism of workers before. We hear it when companies go broke, or when governments are swamped by an economic crisis. Then we are told that all the problems are due to greedy, short-sighted workers. When the crime statistics are published we are informed that offending is not the blindly despairing act of people who are trapped in the dirt and decay of inner cities or rural slumdom but the behaviour of people who are intrinsically anti-social. When pensioners die of hypothermia they are chided because they have not learned how to keep warm in an unheated home.

Blunkett should have a word with his fellow minister Jack Straw, who was once Labour’s Shadow for Education. In those days Straw did not seem to have any doubts about the cause of struggling schools. At the 1987 Labour conference he told the delegates that ” . . . there is only one culprit responsible for falling standards (in education)—the government which has been in power since 1979″. Two years later he returned to the theme, denouncing “a government that blames teachers for the ills of Thatcherite society” and promising that, far from harrassing them, Labour would “…train teachers better, support them better and, yes, reward teachers better”.

Of course in those days it was safe to make that kind of a speech. Like Straw’s 1987 complaint that “. . . the weakness of the Cabinet’s commitment to public education is shown by the fact that all its ministers have sent their children to private schools” and that as a result of the Tory government’s cuts in spending on education “the morale of the teaching profession has been destroyed”. Well this government’s persistent attacks on teachers have not exactly resuscitated their morale and one reason is that so many Labour leaders, like the Tories before them, have placed their children in private schools.

Results Culture 

For his part, Blunkett has never been been among the wilder animals in the swamps of left-wingery. In July 1987, for example, in an article in the Independent, he claimed that the Thatcher government were stealing Labour policies when they declared war on the “dependency culture”—which did not mean the system which allows the ruling class to live off the exploitation of the workers but the few people whose means were so reduced they relied on state hand outs to survive. The repressive attitudes implied in that article have been all too evident in Blunkett since he was put in charge of the schools, for he has been pre-occupied with the results culture, the obsession with exam results which has millions of neurotic parents scanning the league tables to see how their childrens’ school has done—knowing that head master Blunkett will wreak a terrible revenge if the results are not good enough. There have been other Blunkett policies which have given offence—for example his sturdy championing of the odious Chris Woodhead, the boss of the dreaded OFSTED, when it was revealed that Woodhead’s, er, private life did not live up to the standards his inspectors demand of teachers and pupils.

So it is hardly surprising that Blunkett should feel the need to attack the notion that bad social conditions have an effect on schools just as they do on health, crime, families . . . His evidence for saying that poverty is not an excuse for a failing school is, not surprisingly, supplied by his own Department, who say that schools with low exam results exist in areas other than run down inner cities. So what? The results may be due to a number of factors which are conveniently left unilluminated but Blunkett, in an exercise in logic which would be unacceptable coming from a ten year old pupil, chooses to draw the conclusion which suits his already formed opinion—that teachers are to blame and must be punished, sacked, driven out in revenge.

Watch My Lips . . . 

In any case nobody, least of all the teachers, would argue that the skill and sensitivity with which a subject is taught does not make a difference. The skills of teachers vary, just like the skills of people in other jobs—for example politicians, who can be very clever in the lies they tell and the manner in which they cover up their failures. And then again they can be embarrassingly clumsy. As was Blunkett, when he was on the spot about his policy on schools selection, which is now in such sharp contrast to the statement he made to the Labour Party conference in 1995: “Watch my lips, no selection, either by examination or interview, under a Labour government”. When he was faced with this, Blunkett chose to defend himself with the feeble protest that his 1995 statement was a joke. This may have been more convincing if, as he was receiving the delegates’ rapturous applause, he had said something like “Well wait a second. You know me, always ready for a laugh. That was a joke. When I get into office there will be selection because we’ll be a government which is too scared of the Daily Mail to do otherwise”. This shabby episode brings up the question of what sort of a role model Blunkett is to the teachers he so persistently harasses about their professional standards.

The evidence that conditions outside the schools have a more powerful, eventually decisive, influence is overwhelming. The Guardian of 6 March described a school in Brighton where 45 percent of the pupils conform to the generally accepted measurement of poverty—they have free school meals. Many of them come from families struggling to survive under the stress of long term unemployment, on an estate where life has always been that bit harder. What kind of material do the teachers there have to work with? Unsurprisingly, some of the pupils are on drugs—the police suspect they are working for a drugs syndicate from Scotland. One boy was a male prostitute on the sea-front. A former pupil, 17 years old, was murdered on a rubbish tip next to the school. A pupil was accused of helping in the murder of another pupil’s brother.

The Real World

Of course exceptionally brave, talented teachers might hope to have some effect in that kind of situation. What actually happened , as is to be expected in the real world away from Blunkett’s cruel fantasies, was that the teachers simply collapsed under the strain—like politicians often do, when their failure to control capitalism becomes too obvious. One teacher died, it was thought through a stress related illness; another disappeared. Several developed serious illnesses including two cancers. Others had nervous breakdowns. Because that is how poverty deals with people who are trying to make sense of this society—in their homes, their jobs, their schools. Peter Mortimore, director of London University Institute of Education, put it that “All the work of school improvement professionals shows that schools can make a difference, but they cannot completely overcome the effects of disadvantage.”

And what if we applied the standards which Blunkett imposes on the teachers to people like him—to the political leaders? What if they were to be judged on their failures, their impotence and the deceptions they use to conceal this reality? Should we punish them? Or wouldn’t it be better to close down their organs of power and make them redundant?

Ivan