Who needs leaders? (1993)

From the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Major looks like he’s in deep trouble with his party. But what difference does a change of leadership make to the operation of Capitalism?

Who would you like to be Prime Minister of Great Britain? Or leader of the Labour Party? Of the Liberal Democrats? And when you have made your choice ask yourself why — not why you chose that particular person but why you bothered to make a choice. Ask yourself what persuaded you that whoever is nominally in charge of things makes any noticeable difference to what happens to us.

We ask these questions in response to the present void in both Conservative and Labour parties, in which they are wracked with doubt over whether their recent choice of leader was advisable. In both parties the doubts have triggered off the usual frenzied but surreptitious campaigning by aspirants to the leadership, while they all deny any such ambitions and profess undying loyalty to the leader.

This is especially noticeable in the Tory Party because, as the government, their mistakes, disputes and obvious impotence to control capitalism are so clearly exposed. This is not good for John Major, who came to be Prime Minister on the assumption — which he encouraged — that his government's style would be different from Thatcher's and that this would ensure it would be more successful in tackling current problems like unemployment, housing, shortage of medical services and so on. His lack of success makes it embarrassing for Tories to remember his promise in November 1990, to lead "a nation at ease with itself.

After nearly three years of his government whatever the nation is at case with it is not John Major, whose popularity is at the point where it causes friction in his and a campaign lo replace him much as Thatcher was replaced. One seasoned MP tells of the day when a senior Tory minister advised him never to forget that loyalty was the party's secret weapon. Of an enquiring mind, this MP soon realized that the opposite is the ease — that the Tories are as disloyal and ruthless when they decide their leader is likely to lose them seats in parliament. When it gets down to it that is why Thatcher had to go and why Major’s job is in jeopardy.

The relentless and fruitless search for the perfect leader is, like so many of the delusions which bolster the capitalist system, clearly influenced by prejudice. For example, nothing in a leader appeals to British people so much as an apparent firmness of purpose. But when that same characteristic is shown by an "enemy" leader — like Saddam Hussein, it is a very different matter. Saddam, says the prejudice was not firm and consistent in his policies; he was mad, just like all the other bogeymen of the Sun and similar papers.

In any case, how valid are the memories of Thatcher single-handedly beating off all those mad, grasping foreigners and doing something called "putting the great back in Great Britain"? The decline of British capitalism since the First World War has done much to fashion the political history of this country. In one way or another every government has had to accept, and work with, that reality. Some have done this more readily than others; some have skilfully practised deceit on the issue, so that the voters were convinced they were not doing what they were.

Part of this deceit has been in the speeches of leaders who have suggested that the decline in British power was avoidable and that they could reverse the trend. This posture has not been confined to the Tories; Harold Wilson, especially during his first spell in power, consistently talked about British power and the British economy forcing their way to the top in the world. At times he was so absorbed in this crazy notion that his voice lost its Yorkshire twang and took on a Churchillian growl when he spoke about it.

The idea is to conceal reality so that all those voters who are deluded into thinking that if Britain is a super power they will become super-workers will gratefully vote for a Wilson or a Thatcher. For her entire period in Number Ten Thatcher was one of the cleverest at hiding the reality and persuading British workers that it could be avoided. That was why so many of them voted for her. But the deception is self-perpetuating because it reinforces the notion that the decline — or the rise — of a capitalist power is not a matter of history but of political policy. The assumption is then that the collapse of the British Empire would not have happened had it not been for feeble egalitarians such as Clement Attlee is mistakenly supposed to have been. It is a delusion which does not help to understand the place and the function of leaders nor what happens under capitalism.

And that brings us to the crucial question of how useful are leaders. Do they really change the course of events? One field in which they are confident they have control is the economy. When things are going badly — when British capitalism is in recession or a financial crisis — the Chancellor of the Exchequer assures us that they have the remedy; trust them and all will be well. And when things are going well — when there is a boom — they claim the credit, saying it is due to their skill and intelligence.

About a year ago British capitalism went through a crisis which has come to be known as Black Wednesday. It was a day when a panic-stricken Chancellor (who, as one of those clever political leaders, is supposed never to gel in a panic) ended a succession of juggling with interest rates by withdrawing sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. This was supposed to be yet another example of politicians’ skill but in fact it happened only a short while after the Chancellor — the hapless Norman Lamont — and John Major had lectured us on the theme that the only way to prosperity for us all was lo keep sterling in the ERM. They were in no doubt about this quite sure that sterling would not be taken out of the ERM. Now many Tory politicians are asserting that the withdrawal is an example of their cleverness and that things for British capitalism are better as a result. For example, Norman Lamont is now very clear on the issue, urging “the Prime Minister to stand up and say once and for all that Britain should never again have anything to do with a single currency. Then we could all sing in the bath" (Well he was writing in the Sun).

Parasitic minority

Different conclusions have been drawn from that muddle, as from all the other episodes of similar chaos which regularly burst on the scene, stimulating more speeches, lectures and promises from political leaders. But only one conclusion fits the facts. No matter how clever and learned leaders may be, they can have no significant effect on how capitalism works and how it affects us. This social system works to its own priorities, to the benefit of a small parasitic minority. It cannot be controlled or manipulated. The cleverer leaders may be able to conceal this for a time; the not so clever — like Lamont and Major — can’t conceal it and that is why they arouse such contempt. To choose one leader against another is to choose one style of futility before another. It would be better to abandon the whole sorry mess and opt instead for efficacy for our own ability to change society so that we operate it, trusting ourselves to run the world for ourselves.

Ivan

Sting in the Tail: A sick society (1995)

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

A sick society

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

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

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

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

Hard core

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

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

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

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

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

What a wally!

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

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

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

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

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

A sorry sight

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

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

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

The sporting life

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

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

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

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

Canadian capers

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

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

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

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

Greasy Pole: Farmyard Politics (2004)

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

Greg Dyke, ex-Director General of the BBC, has changed his mind. About Tony Blair, that is – although in the circumstances in which he was winkled out of a job which was supposed to make him one of the most powerful men in Britain, he has probably had second thoughts on quite a lot of other issues. Dyke first met Blair sometime around 1980 when Blair was a fresh faced, posh speaking young barrister who nevertheless wanted to ‘serve his country’ by being a Labour MP. “The Labour Party,” Dyke advised him, “needs another barrister like it needs a hole in the head” – which did not prevent Dyke helping Labour get another hole in the head by donating £5000 to Blair’s campaign for the party leadership.

   

That was then; this is now, when Dyke thinks Blair, in spite of his promise to introduce a new sort of politics, is really “just another politician and in some ways worse than those before him. He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn’t know what the 45 minute claim meant”. Regular readers of the Letters column in the Guardian, which seems to operate as a kind of counsellor’s couch for disappointed Labour voters, will know there are many who agree with Dyke. These are people who also supported Blair under the impression that Labour meant a different type of politics; instead they have got something which in many important respects is indistinguishable from the Tories. And Blair seems intent on supplying plenty of evidence to support the case against him.

1960s

For example on 19 July he made a speech grandly titled a Five Year Strategy for Crime, which purported to look back on the consequences of the 1960s and what the Blair government plans to do to repair the damage caused by that supposed time of “a huge breakthrough in terms of freedom of expression, of life style, of the individual’s right to live their own personal life in the way they chose”. Blair argued that law and order policy then focussed on the offender’s rights, protected the innocent and understood the social causes of criminality. But now:

“Today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus . . . they do want rules, order and proper behaviour . . .

They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge, where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don’t, get punished.”

That speech might have been made by John Major back in 1993 when, conveniently overlooking his affair with Edwina Currie, Major audaciously decided to lecture the rest of us on the need to get Back to Basics. He called for a revival of “the instinctive values of neighbourliness, decency and consideration for others”. He wanted the criminal justice system to “blame a little more and understand a little less”. Blair’s speech might also have been made by Michael Howard who, shortly after Blair shared his thoughts on crime and society with us, informed us that:

“Conservatives will stand up for the silent, law-abiding majority who  play by the rules and pay their dues. We will put their rights first.”

Among all this competition for votes Blair ignored the fact that during much of the alleged wild days of the 1960s when, he now thinks, the foundations of a seriously irresponsible society were being laid, his party were in power. They achieved that position not by respecting human decencies and behaving responsibly but by misleading the voters. Labour’s 1964 election appeal was based on the assurance that prosperity would come through an increase in productivity arising from technological development. The Tories had apparently overlooked this but Labour were led by the ravishingly clever Harold Wilson, who had graduated in economics at Oxford. After harnessing the technological revolution Wilson would put George Brown in charge of the economy at the Department of Economic Affairs and the rest was easy. The problem was that capitalism is not susceptible to being managed in that way. Wilson’s facile assurances were exposed and his government descended into chaos and crisis. One of Wilson’s senior ministers said “The trouble with Harold is one hasn’t the faintest idea whether the bastard means what he says even at the moment he speaks it”. Another agreed: “The tragedy of Wilson was that you couldn’t believe a word he said”. It was not a shining example of a government driven by a desire to play by the rules – unless it was those governing the methods used by political parties to get power over capitalism – and behave responsibly about their electoral promises.

Fettes

Meanwhile, how was the young Tony Blair surviving in those times of  moral peril?  From 1966 to 1971 he was a pupil at Fettes school, said to be the Eton of Scotland. It was the kind of educational establishment to have a strong appeal to the Blair of 2004 for the headmaster, a Dr. Iain McIntosh, was a disciplinarian and an ardent opponent of the “liberalising” influence of the 1960s. Fettes had a system of fagging, under which the younger boys had to be servants of the seniors. (Blair resented this but was praised by his senior for making “particularly good toast.”) Flogging by masters and senior boys was in force, with Blair the occasional victim (once at the unusually advanced age of 17). It must have been a proud moment for the headmaster when, after a game of hockey against a nearby borstal, the Fettes boys and the young prisoners compared their respective regimes; the borstal boys were sure they had the easier time.

   

Blair did not willingly submit to the Fettes regime as a valuable lesson in morality, which would stand him in good stead when he was later lecturing the rest of us from the eminence of Number Ten. He was in fact something of a disruptive influence in the school, persistently questioning and opposing the rules and procedures there. His housemaster assessed him as “the most difficult boy I ever had to deal with”. A fellow pupil remembered that “Masters were very worried about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and Blair looked like all three”. When he was 14 he ran away – simply walked off the train his parents had put him on to go back to school and made his way onto a plane at the airport – he said to fly “to somewhere like the Bahamas” – but the plan came to nothing because he did not have a boarding pass.

   

There were masters at Fettes who enjoyed Blair’s nagging and questioning as stimulating. Well there have been many others who have been bemused by his charm into accepting his flexible “principles”. Some of these people are ministers in his government. Others are just ordinarily deluded voters. This was the kind of tolerance – if that is the word – which helped him be accepted into Derry Irvine’s chambers when he was looking to become a barrister, a favour which has been repaid since. It slid him up the greasy pole, at first as a by-election candidate in the hopelessly Tory stronghold of Beaconsfield and then into the safe Labour seat at Sedgefield. It was not an obstacle to his climb that he joined CND, after he had been advised that the “more badges” he accumulated the better his chances of getting on in the Labour Party – advice he accepted with alacrity. It has seen him into Number Ten and keeps him there, in spite of the exposure of his deceits and the fact that in all important respects – in his policies, his speeches, his phraseology – he more and more resembles the Conservatives who are supposed to be his opponents.

Animal Farm

If it is impossible to discern any significant differences between the Labour Party and the Tories, that is because there aren’t any. On the basic issue of how to run the capitalist system they are thoroughly agreed that this must be done in the interests of the ruling class, which means that both of them in government must impose policies which are against the interests of the majority, while assuring us that they are doing something else. They must both define the problems of capitalism in terms of ruling class interests and offer “solutions” which at best are little other than palliatives. It is not a matter of chance that as they try to deceive the working class the party leaders use the same words, the same phrases. It is rather like the final passage in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when the animals outside the farmhouse observe the pigs who have taken control of the farm inside, enjoying a raucous get-together with neighbouring farmers. As the evening wears on “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”. That is what Greg Dyke and all those disgruntled Labour supporters are witnessing now; will they cling to Labour or will they consider the alternative to the cynical mess of capitalism’s politics?

Ivan

Press Exposure: Oo dun it? (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It's The Sun Wot Won It" was how Rupert Murdoch’s finest, in a page one full-frontal, analysed John Major's victory in the 1992 general election. This was the latest in the Sun's history of brilliantly impactful headlines—cheeky, in words of one syllable, hitting you in the eye will a roll-your-own, crude concept of something which you might otherwise regards as serious.

That front page said a great deal about how vulnerable the working class are to inducements to grievously abuse their power to make urgent fundamental changes in society. It also contributed to the delusion.So persistent among the press, that it can influence—even decide—the outcome of elections. This delusion must profoundly boost the egos of the press barons and the editors and the cynical hacks who write up those items and compose those artistically misleading headlines. Perhaps that is what encourages people like Murdoch and Conrad Black, and before them Robert Maxwell, to shell out millions to buy the papers.

There are, however, obvious flaws in this concept. To begin with, the press in this country overwhelmingly supports the Conservative Party so if the voters always voted as the papers advised the Tories would never lose any by-elections and there would never have been any Labour governments to pick up where the Conservatives had left off and Winston Churchill may well still be prime minister. Not that it would matter if he were, except to the morticians, because the notion that the lives of people who have to work for their living are affected in any significant way by which party they elect to try to control capitalism is just another of those stories in the papers which should not be believed.

On your bike

The most recent example of the news papers kidding themselves that they control large political issues was in the fight for the leadership of the Tory Party though this time they were primarily attempting to influence the rather small electorate of Tory MPs. The greater— and certainly the more popular—part of the Tory press were firmly opposed to Major. The Sun, wot done it for Major in 1992, has now decided that he "has loser written all over him. He is damaged goods". A screaming page one headline drove home the point that Tebbit had come out against Major: "On Your Bike, John." The front page of the Daily Mail was devoted to a cartoon of a sinking liner—the Torytanic—and the advice: “Time To Ditch the Captain." In what preens itself as the quality press the Times and the Daily Telegraph were keen for a change, with the Telegraph condemning Major as unlikely to alter his policies so "as to give the Tories a realistic prospect of winning a general election". There is no equivalent in elections to the Trades Description Act, but if there were disgruntled voters would have had grounds of complaint about this apparent exposure as an incompetent wimp of the man the press were urging us to vote for so recently.

Only the Daily Star, the Daily Express ("the voice of reason in a cacophony of extremist nonsense") and the Financial Times supported Major but their combined circulation is little more than half that of the Sun by itself. So it turned out that the press campaign had little effect on what is surrealistically known as the most sophisticated electorate in the world. (Anyone who has observed Honourable members prancing and preening before the electoral hoi polloi in the lobby or behaving like empty-headed disruptives in the House must wonder why they call themselves sophisticated, but never mind.). Although the Tories voted to keep Major there were enough who did not support him to make a significant body of irritants which must be eager to exploit his problems in the future, with or without the approval of the press.

Losers

What decides how an MP votes in a leadership election is whether the leader is a vote-winner or a loser. That was why the Tories ditched Heath and then Thatcher. The voters did not reject Thatcher, she had led the Tories to victory in three successive elections but by 1990 enough MPs were convinced that the Iron Lady was corrosive of their majorities to overthrow her. She said it was a funny old world and she wept real tears as she left DowningStreet but someone should have told her that this was politics. If the Tory press had been asked they might well have wanted to keep Thatcher, who had seen off Callaghan and Foot and Kinnock not to mention General Galtieri and a few hundred Argentinean sailors on the Bclgrano. But reality—the Tory confidence that they are the great election winning machine—intruded in the persons of the men in grey suits and, whatever the papers said, her time had come.

However loud the Tory papers screamed, Major won because he was the safer bet while Redwood could not reassure enough Tory MPs that their majorities would endure and flourish with him as leader. It was, in other words, not the papers but the MPs—fearful, ambitious, calculating—wot done it. 

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Money for stale words (2002)

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

Spare a thought for Michael Portillo. Hounded by an ungrateful electorate from his unassailable seat in Southgate, he was forced to spend years in the wilderness until the Tories of Kensington and Chelsea took him to their affluent bosoms. And even then it was not entirely easy for him because there were a few curmudgeons in the party muttering about being forced to accept, in contrast to Alan Clark and Nicholas Scott, so vulgar a standard bearer. Some of them were even mean enough to dwell on Portillos’s Iberian origins. In the event the Portillo won them over – or perhaps they hoped to share in the glory of having an MP who was so clearly the next leader of the Conservative Party and so, in the dim and distant future, Prime Minister. At the time it seemed as if Portillo had only to wait until the Tories got the inevitable thrashing at the next general election for him to win the leadership which destiny – not to mention a bit of back-stabbing and arm-twisting – had set out for him. Except that the Tory membership was as rejecting as the Southgate voters. Back in the wilderness, Portillo was devastated.

What next, he might have asked himself. A life as a run-of-the-mill, barely noticed, constituency MP, holding mind-numbing surgeries listening to the voters’ complaints about rubbish collection and nightmare neighbours, spending his evenings struggling to digest fibrous chicken and Black Forest gateau at ward party dinners? Hardly the stuff of an exciting destiny. Happily, the BBC have come to his rescue, encouraging the prime minister who never was and never will be to develop into a kind of mini Melvin Bragg (well at least they have similar hair styles) by presenting a programme on Wagner. This generated enough publicity to indicate that there may well be more opportunities to enjoy such nice little earners. And in case anyone in still feeling anxious about how Portillo will make ends meet, there is the little matter of his fees for making speeches.

Value For Money

Paying a politician to speak, when that is what they are supposed to do anyway, may seem a little odd. For his words of wisdom Portillo could demand £8,000. Even if he stayed for a while after speaking, pressing the flesh, graciously accepting congratulations, that is still an hourly rate several times what many workers bring home in an entire month (according to the Guardian, a special needs teaching assistant gets £13,800 a year, a refuse truck driver £12,500 a year). So what about that concept, so dear to Tory hearts when Portillo was in government, of Value for Money? He has changed his mind so often, turned his back on so many cherished “principles” , that it must be difficult, for even his most ardent admirers, to give any weight to what he says, let alone pay to hear him say it. This is the man who, when he was a minister, was notorious for being among the most arid of the Tory dries, described by Thatcher as “. . . beyond any questioning a passionate supporter of everything we stood for”, who abruptly became passionate in the opposite direction when he was looking to get back into parliament. This is the man who denied any intention of standing in the leadership election in 1997 while he was busily setting up a campaign office. This is the man who tried to win the gay vote by remembering past homosexual experiences but who did not stand out against the homophobic Clause 28 when his opposition might have counted. This is the man who championed the poll tax on the grounds that it would be a massive vote winner for the Tories.

There are of course other members giving similar value for money in this cosily lucrative way. Thatcher herself, before her doctors forbade her to speak in public, could ask for as much as £60,000 to instruct an audience in how to run capitalism her way, so that the rich stay like that while the poor keep their place. She was never famous for taking a tolerant, balanced view of things so in her speeches she probably made much of her success in hobbling the unions, in tightening the poverty screw so that being on the dole became as stigmatising as having a disease, in arousing the jingoist hysteria about the Falklands which, over the bodies of the dead, did so much to help her smashing win in 1983. She may then have moved on (because she seems quite unable to resist doing so, such is her enduring bitterness) to rail against those she left behind in the Tory Party – including Portillo – who faint-heartedly betrayed the one and only faith. She would not have dwelled on the deep misery of the unemployment which her government presided over, nor on the economic switchback which they were quite unable to control, which led her to describe her Chancellor Nigel Lawson as “. . . brilliant, brilliant” shortly before it all collapsed about him and she changed her opinion to say “ Nigel and I no longer had that broad identity of views or mutual trust which a Chancellor and prime minister should”. She would not have elaborated on the social despair which erupted into soaring crime and street riots in the 1980s. Nor would she have examined in any depth the fact that her party ditched her because she was seen, however inaccurately, as personally responsible for all that suffering and so had become an electoral liability who had to be got rid of, quickly.

Sleaze

There seemed little prospect that Thatcher’s successor would fare any better, which was a sure sign that he would not lack for invitations to earn a little extra by telling audiences about it. For one thing, John Major did not match up to the Iron Lady for a strident talent in blanketing over harsh reality. Faced with capitalism’s typical problems, Major would whinge and wriggle and blunder. It was predictable that his premiership should end in a swamp of sleaze, aggravated by his routine paralysis when confronted with clear evidence of what his ministers and MPs were getting up to. Towards the end he was a wretched man, patently out of control, harassed by members of his own party (including Portillo) who he described as “bastards”. He then led the Tories into historic defeat, leaving them as a party whose enduring grip on power had been transformed into a period of opposition likely to run into decades. None of this affected his reputation as a speaker; to give his doctored account of his catastrophic time at the helm and his advice on how the Tories might do better in future, he can trouser the sum of £28,000.

This racket – for that is what it is – is not confined to the Tories. On the Labour benches and a long way down the tariff is Peter Mandelson, who is one of the ex-ministers to have earned the right to have the prefix “disgraced” to their name. In fact Mandelson went one better than the others because, as distinct from most of the ministers who lose their jobs after being found out in some unparliamentary manipulations, he was twice disgraced. Even without those episodes he would have been forever notorious as one of the most ruthless of spin doctors – one whose financial re-arrangements were tailored to assuage his appetite for swanning around the salons of the rich and famous. Like the others who rake in the money from their speeches, Mandelson can use his freedom from governmental responsibilities to criticise those who are still in power – as if he were ever different, more effective, less blundering than they are. Like any other soiled goods, he goes at a knock-down price – to listen to one of his speeches costs a mere £5,000.

At a price

Nobody would bother to listen to a medical analysis by a surgeon with a reputation for having his patients die on the operating table. Nobody would want to fly in an aircraft where the pilot had a nice line in chat but was unable to keep the thing in the air. Yet politicians are allowed, when they have been exposed in all their impotence and in their attempts to conceal how useless they are, to turn their hand to self-justification – at a price. If this is a kind of madness it is because that is typical of what they represent – a social system which works against the interests of the mass of its people.

Ivan

Caught In The Act: Relief for the Rich (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Relief for the Rich

Uncaring dole queues did not riot in sympathy with the Names at Lloyd's, even though the media tore at our heart-strings with sad stories of some of them being down to their last Rolls Royce, yacht and country estate. The same stories revealed the existence of something called the Lloyd's Hardship Committee (yes, the word is hardship) of which the chair is Mary Archer — she who had some grovelling judge at her millionaire husband's libel case drooling gormlessly about her "fragrance". In fact Names are people; in the world of insurance they are where the buck stops. Their status is rather beyond Social Security claimants because a Name has to be able to get their hands on £250,000 without delay and their obligation to slump up for insurance claims is unlimited. In good times they rake in a lot of profit but in bad — like the present — they stand to make heavy losses.

This sounds pretty perilous except that nobody will invest in a business which continually makes losses. Lloyd's has been very profitable for the last twenty years; in 1983 they made £509 million. Recent times have not been so good; in 1988 they lost about £500 million and the figure for 1989 is expected to be double that, as the bills come in for pollution claims, oil spills, natural disasters and unnatural ones like the Piper Alpha fire. Some Names have suffered more severely because they specialised in the high profit but high risk business of reinsurance. Some people may call them adventurous, the spirit that built the British Empire and so on. Others — especially if they are on the dole queue — are more likely to think it greedy, an opinion confirmed when the Names squealed for government help in financing their failed gambles.

What the Names suggested was a sort of rich person's outdoor relief — tax concessions. But this had implications which were what might be called delicate because about 60 Tory MPs are Names; what would the dole queues have thought if MPs were caught in the act of giving themselves a handout?

A factor with a more direct political interest was the Labour Party's "broad sympathy" (according to The Guardian) towards Lloyds's long-term problems, which did more than hint that there would be support from the opposition for tax concessions. Well naturally, Labour's Treasury team have been chomping their way through numerous heavy meals with the City's bankers, merchants and insurers in the cause of assuring them that they have nothing to fear from a Labour government. But even the present cowed and grovelling Labour Party thought this would be going too far so the idea had to be disowned, blamed onto the indiscretions of a very junior shadow minister whose career is thereby now uninsurable.

In theory the Names, whose history is rooted in the romance of the coffee houses of 17th century London, should be the very essence of free market dare-devilry, contemptuous of state intervention. In theory, too, the Labour Party should be the sworn enemy of an exclusive club for rich people who produce nothing and who have the nerve to say that social parasites can only be found in places like the dole queues.

Caught out

Not many people expected the England cricket team to make a fight of it against the West Indies, let alone actually pull off a victory. So when England won the first test at Headingley there was naturally some excited analysis of how and why it had happened and whether it was likely to happen again.

All rational observers agreed that it had something to do with batting (like Gooch's century), bowling (like DeFreitas taking eight wickets) and fielding (like Ramprakash's catches and run out). But rational thinking does not always guide every contribution to the deliberations of the House of Commons so there was only mild amusement when the stubbornly Thatcherite MP Gerald Howarth suggested that the House gave their thanks for the victory to not only the England team but also to John Major and sports minister Robert Atkins for the "inspiration". This sort of speech is called Making Political Capital Out Of Sport (it can also be made out of Religion. Human Suffering. Dumb Animals and the Royal Family, which is not to suggest that there are any links between them) but even at that Howarth was going a bit too far. It is not unusual for creeps in the House to attempt to ingratiate themselves with their leaders through grovelling interventions, dummy questions and the like. But to comment on Major's "inspiration" just when he is under a continuous battering from the media, his own party and the last occupant of Number Ten over his grey personality, disastrous speeches and policy dithering is evidence of a remarkable talent for bad timing.

Of course no one should take seriously an ambitious buffoon like Howarth. except that his motion caricatured a fact of life about parliament and those who occupy its benches. Honourable members live under the delusion that when they are in session they are doing something worthwhile. It seems to escape them, that they are at most scratching at the inconsequential superficialities of this society when there is a crying need to decide how to organise a basically different system. Fun and games on the green benches are all very well but they deny parliament's potential role in a change of society. So capitalism grinds on with its misery and destruction and its legislators who can be less relevant to our lives than a game of cricket.

If you have tears . . .

Real wet tears were shed in Finchley — and probably Tunbridge Wells and Bournemouth and the like — when Margaret Thatcher let it be known that she will not again stand for parliament. There may well have been some weeping among the House of Lords too, when she announced that she expects to be practising her verbal bludgeoning on their lordships. There seemed to be widespread agreement that of the many qualities for which she will be missed the most prominent were her staunch principles. All the more puzzling then, that someone so confident of their own correctness should have been so reluctant to face any disagreement or to allow even free discussion. In her prime the word was that Thatcher Rules and if that’s not OK by you then you have a one way ticket to the back benches followed by a re-assessment of your ministerial career and feeble political talent by the Bernard Ingham School of Character Assassination.

But it seems that Thatcher, who never had to change her mind because she was always right, has had second thoughts. On her recent lecture tour of America she informed an audience of New York's business élite that she now believes in open debate, that a bit of healthy difference of opinion is good for you. Of course the fee she was getting for each appearance élite variously put at £18.000 or £30,000 élite may have induced her to be what she would once have regarded as wildly controversial. But did she have to make so radical a U-turn as this:

I think that the decisions which have to be made on Europe are of enormous moment to the British people, to the whole future of our parliament, and the more openly we discuss them and the more thoroughly we discuss them the better.

It will be remembered that when she was Prime Minister her view was that the more important a decision the less discussion there should be. No excessively analytical mind is needed to perceive that Thatcher applied one set of rules when she is in command and another when she is in the ranks. Nor does it require a hugely retentive memory to recall the many other politicians who behaved in the same way. So what does it need for the electors to draw the obvious conclusion from this — that leaders are not to be trusted and that we should therefore trust ourselves to take our own decisions, solve our own problems and re arrange society in our own interests.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Tories In Trouble (1999)

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

There was once a young Conservative MP who, when he arrived to take his seat, was taken aside by an elder statesman and advised never to forget that the party had a secret weapon, which was loyalty. For a very long time the Tories have traded on that impression—that they are a party which prizes loyalty and unity above all else. There is very little evidence to support this. Even when that new Member was being given that advice the Tory record on the issue was anything but unblemished. In fact their history is studded with examples of splits, intrigues, back-stabbing and manoeuvring to unseat the leader.

For example the 1922 Committee got its name from a rebellious meeting in that year at the Carlton Club which was responsible for toppling Austen Chamberlain from the leadership and thereby bringing down the coalition government under Lloyd George. In 1958 a huge rift opened up in the Macmillan government when all the Treasury Ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned—an event which Macmillan famously brushed aside as “a little local difficulty”. A few years later Macmillan showed what he thought about loyalty and unity when, in a panic about a little local difficulty at some by-elections he sacked a chunk of his Cabinet including his ever loyal, never complaining Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd who had always made it clear that he was ready and willing to any job, no matter how distasteful, required of him by the government of British capitalism. In more recent times there was the ruthless business of Michael Heseltine and the men in grey suits toppling Margaret Thatcher.

This fractious tradition is still going strong. It is arguable that the Conservative Party has never experienced such disunity and disarray as it does today. What is more it has had no compunction about revealing its splits to the voters at large.

Memoirs

Consider the matter of the ex-ministers’ memoirs. These are very often a welcome source of income and consolation for those who are no longer in the seats of power and who pine for their chauffeur-driven cars, the media attention and the other trappings of office. One difficulty is that the higher sales usually go to the more revealing—the more bitter, scurrilous and bilious—memoirs. If there was ever such a thing as a united government it would be unlikely that its ministers could write their account of life in the Cabinet with the desirable degree of titillation. Of course this is not a problem for the people who so gruesomely ran the government when Thatcher and Major were in Number Ten.

John Major has had his say about Margaret Thatcher, writing her off as a bossy, overbearing and stubborn obstacle to proper government. This is not an example of what is meant by Tory loyalty because Major was Thatcher’s favourite son—the man she wanted to succeed her in 1990. The same might be said about his criticisms of Norman Lamont, who managed Major’s 1990 campaign to succeed Thatcher as Tory leader. Lamont’s reward for this was the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer but unluckily for him this coincided with the kind of financial crisis which Chancellors are supposed to be able to cure but which are beyond them. The so-called Black Wednesday in September 1992 when the Bank Rate went soaring and Sterling was removed from the Exchange Rate Mechanism illuminated how powerless are the experts and the politicians in the face of capitalism’s crises. The decision to take sterling out of the ERM was in stark contrast to Major’s assurance that this would not happen because the solution to British capitalism’s problems was to be a member of it. So Lamont had good cause to be aggrieved, and even more after Major sacked him and now that Major is largely putting the blame for the crisis on his shoulders.

Black Wednesday

Lamont clearly thought that his efforts to get Major into the premiership deserved a more grateful response. Of course had he been practising that Tory loyalty he should have held his tongue, accepted his downfall and given his all in supporting the government, even if that did mean rewriting history a bit. In fact he has been busily engaged ever since in attacks on Major, of varying degrees of subtlety. The version of Black Wednesday in his memoirs differs from that of Major and, as might be expected, does not take the blame for it on himself. Cynical and bitter, Lamont is now a pathetic figure—exiled to the Lords, penning the odd newspaper article, trying to persuade us that Pinochet saved Chile for civilisation and that all those people who disappeared there at the time have gone missing of their own accord.

A lot of this disunity came bubbling sulphurously to the surface at this year’s Tory conference. Naturally they gave William Hague the customary standing ovation but this did not obscure the fact that his grasp on the party leadership is as precarious as ever. Almost as soon as he got the job Hague was under fire, as if the MPs who had voted for him suddenly woke up to the fact that they had made a terrible mistake. Hague has done all kinds of things to win a few friends—married a pretty blonde who smiles nicely for the cameras, eaten spicy Caribbean food in the street at the Notting Hill Carnival, been seen in public wearing a baseball cap, had a skinhead hair cut. No man could do more. But none of this has done him any good.

While attention has been diverted by these distasteful antics Hague has silkily got rid of most of the leading Tories from the days of Thatcher and Major. Clarke and Heseltine more or less deselected themselves and are now standing critics on the issue of Europe. Lilley was sacked after a typically clumsy attempt to discard his past reputation as the scourge of single mothers and benefit claimants. Michael Howard was persuaded that he should spend more time with his prejudices. The only remnants of those former days of power are Redwood and Widdecombe, neither of them completely in touch with the reality of vote winning.

Shadows

No doubt there are some fascinating reminiscences now burgeoning in the embryo memoirs of the likes of Lilley and Howard. Meanwhile Hague has a Shadow Cabinet whose public presence is—well, shadowy. They are unrecognised, almost anonymous. Hague will have a hard job to convince the working class that these are the leaders who should be trusted to run British capitalism, swamp world markets with British made goods, progressively enrich the British capitalist class while bludgeoning the workers into a docile acceptance of their role as the exploited wealth-producers. In this he will endure for as long as he may be seen as a vote winner. If that changes he will be ruthlessly discarded by this party which likes to boast of its unity and loyalty. If—or perhaps when—that happens it will be his turn to write his memoirs, to complain about an ungrateful party and of how he was, in effect, hoisted with his own petard.

Ivan

Caught In The Act: Monmouth and after (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Monmouth and after

Losing gracefully is supposed lo be something that all Britishers are supposed to be good at. It has something to do with being properly brought up, going to a good school, being keen on cricket — rather like John Major, who has the added advantage, when it comes to behaving chivaloursly, of being a Tory. So there was some surprise, notably in the newspapers which usually support the government, when Major’s response to the Tory defeat in the Monmouth by-election was to lead a verbal assault on the Labour Party on the lines of "we wuz robbed" — that Labour had won the seat by telling a lie about hospitals opting out of NHS administration.

In fact there was hardly any need for the Labour Party to lie about this or about anything else because the government is in such a mess at present that they don’t know whether to have an election this month, or October, or next May, or never again.

In Monmouth the Labour Party ran what is for them now a typical campaign, masterminded from headquarters with a candidate featureless enough to fade into the wallpaper. The new MP Huw Edwards set out his stall as a political puppet when, at a press conference during the campaign, he replied to a question about one aspect of Labour policy: it was still being worked out but as soon as he was told what it was he would support it. There was no sign, among the celebratory Labour supporters at Monmouth, that any of them were wondering whether their victory was more a case of cynical manipulation than political principles.

Desperate

Meanwhile the Tories have two choices: they can panic, as they did after Monmouth or they can silently grit their teeth and wait for things to get better. Their attempts to replace the ill-fated Poll Tax with what they hoped would be the voter-friendly Council Tax has flopped. Many votes are won and lost on the issue of the size of the bills sent out by local authorities, whether under the old rates system or Poll Tax or the promised Council Tax. In fact this is a non issue because whatever the level of these charges it is not of significance or permanent concern to workers. When they designed the Council Tax the Tories were hoping to exploit the widespread misconception that lower local authority charges are in our interests. But the memories live on how the Poll Tax was pushed through against so much sound advice and the Tories are branded now as a party of muddle needlessly caused by dogmatism.

This has also been their problem over the NHS which, after Monmouth, will almost certainly be a central issue in the next general election. In Monmouth the Labour Party shrewdly focussed on two local hospitals which are considering opting out while they publicised evidence that the recent changes in the NHS mean medical care is a matter of what people can afford. This was powerful stuff to voters who were raised on the fallacy that the NHS provides the best possible treatment, freely and equally to everyone. In fact medical service has rather more than the two tiers which Labour made so much of. At the bottom is the NHS with its straight-jacketed resources, its overworked staff, its wailing lists and its patients organised like tiresome cattle. At the top is the kind of attention provided in the world's exclusive clinics with their expensively discreet rooms, squads of doctors and nurses and their assumption that the customer is always right provided they can pay enough. The NHS was designed for the working class, as a co-ordinated and economical get-you-back-to-work service. At the other extreme is the medical care, far removed from the scope of organisations like BUPA, reserved for the ruling class — the class who can afford the best of everything.

Orthodoxy

In the past much has been forgiven the Tories because they were assumed to be the party who could be trusted to run the economy. It all went with playing cricket, behaving correctly to ladies and losing gracefully. This has meant that Tory Chancellors of the Exchequer, however muddled and panicky their responses to capitalism's upheavals, have had an easier ride than those in a Labour government. It made little difference, that Chancellors from both sides carried out roughly the same policies, failed to the same degree to solve the same problems, made similar speeches after similar budgets. But when the cosy assumption that all Tory Chancellors are in control of the economy comes under serious challenge the result can be a severe destabilising of support for the government.

For a long time it has been an orthodoxy of capitalist economics that a booming economy and low unemployment could stimulate inflations — rising prices. Another orthodoxy has been that "inflation" is the enemy of civilisation; John Major is on record as one who "hates" inflation rather as one might "hate" a disease or a vicious animal. In the House of Commons he proclaimed that reducing "inflation" is the ". . .only stable and sure way to create and keep jobs".

But on the same day the Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont was telling the Commons that lower inflation does not create and keep jobs but destroys them: "Rising unemployment is the price we have to pay to get inflation down, and it is a price well worth paying”. In fact both Major and Lamont have either misunderstood the situation or distorted it. And when all the speeches have been made and the votes counted it is clear that either way working class interests are not involved.

Arrogance

There are some striking resemblances between Lamont and Nigel Lawson of much cursed memory, not least in the arrogance with which he delivers his lectures on the economy. Like Lawson, he has the knack of spouting memorable phrases which he must instantly hope will be quickly forgotten. Not only the unemployed were outraged by this overfed buffoon telling them that their suffering was all in the good cause of keeping the Tories in power and advancing Lamont's career.

Monmouth was a typical episode in the politics of capitalism, a smokescreen to obscure the reality of the politicians' impotence to control a vicious and inhumane social system. It is all a grisly, farcical game in which the parties of capitalism make the rules, appoint the referees and change the scoreboard. When will we blow the whistle on it all?

Ivan

What community (1993)

From the June 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Community (dictionary definition): Hie people living in one locality; a group of people having cultural, religious, ethnic or other characteristics in common. Community (governmental definition): Anything that suits us, provided it gives the impression of a united co-operating and supportive social unit.

Of all the politicians’ buzz words “community” is one which has been in use for a long time and which shows no sign of dropping out of fashion. A month or so ago John Major was trying to enthuse the Carlton Club (which is its own community of a particular kind) with phrases like "an unbroken chain of community” and “little unions of communities”. A few days later John Smith ranted about “your communities . . . our communities . . . together in our communities”. This abuse of a very useful word has something of a pedigree. In the 1960s the Liberals won a lot of votes through a bit of electoral sleight-of-hand called community politics. In what they call the war on crime the police have named some insignificant rearrangement of their system community policing. The notorious Poll Tax was officially known as the Community Charge, as if it was something we all contributed to for the common benefit. We should all be on our guard whenever we hear the word: after all the Nazis’ name for the carriage of mentally ill people to the extermination camps was The Community Patients Transport Service.

Care

For some years now we have been hearing a lot about something called community care. What this has often meant in practice has been the closing of mental hospitals, which has released some very valuable sites for profit-hungry developers, and the ejection of the patients into—well, into the community. Often the result of this has been that a lot of people who are so damaged that they have disabling problems in coping with the everyday stresses of working-class life in this so-called community have been thrown on to their own, very inadequate, resources.

In many cases they don't make it, they don’t find a job or get somewhere manageable to live or settle down with a partner or with friends. They descend into vagrancy or alcoholism or psychosis. At the extreme they commit suicide or kill someone else—like the young woman in Yorkshire who randomly stabbed an 11-year-old girl to death in the street; or the Sussex mother who drowned her two small children in the bath. Whatever argument there is in favour of closing mental hospitals and substituting "community care” for the mentally ill it is not the motivation behind the policy. What has counted here—as usual—is cost; "community care” is cheaper and has the bonus of profitably developing the buildings and the grounds where the patients once lived and strolled about.

The latest episode in this saga has been the new Act which has transferred responsibility for community care from the Department of Social Security on to the local councils. This has serious implications for the most vulnerable and needy people. Smooth-tongued ministers justify the change on the grounds that local councils can deliver a better service because care and treatment which is locally-based can be tailored more suitably for each individual.

To the unfortunates on the receiving end this may sound reassuring until they come up against the fact that the responsibility which has been passed to local councils is not just a matter of provision but of finance as well. And there are strict limits on what councils can spend on it. For example, three London boroughs have pooled the funds available for the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction but they are still between £1 million and £1.5 million short of what they need. So in those boroughs about one-fifth of those who ask for treatment for their addiction won’t get it.

Local authorities as a whole are complaining that funding for community care is over £200 million short of what is needed for proper care to be provided. Of course, addicts do not rate too highly in public sympathy. But what about old people, who represent what one writer has called a "big financial mountain"? The outlook for them is not reassuring; as a TV programme recently pointed out, local authorities are already exerting a lot of pressure on relatives to pay for their care. In this pitiless game these are among the losers. The winner is the DSS. who stand to reduce its expenditure to the tune of millions of pounds.

Degrading

The new policies on community care mark another retreat from the promises which were so plentiful during the war, that the lessons of a miserable past had been taken to heart. Politicians who were anxious to get the greater commitments to the war effort from the working class were very free with their assurances that never again would poverty be left to chance. In future the state would make it its duly to look after all the most needy people—the old, the sick, the homeless, the children . . . To all those millions of people who did not understand how capitalism works, how it must condemn the majority to poverty, what is the nature of that poverty and the true function of political parties, it was seductive stuff. Out of that auction in electoral bribes the so-called welfare state emerged.

Since then one government after another—Labour as well as Conservative—has pledged to keep the “welfare state" in being while they have been busily considering and implementing plans to dismantle it. If this Tory government has been particularly active and more open about this it is because British capitalism is in slump, which means that the lowering of workers' living standards is that much worse for the most impoverished. What is happening to old people is especially bitter and poignant because these are people whose lives have been devoted to being exploited to make profits for the class whose interest is represented by the government. There could be no better example of how capitalisms class system operates, how it enriches a minority while it degrades the majority, and to call it community care illustrates how sickeningly capitalism degrades the very language we use.

Community is a mellifluous word. What is implies—social cohesion with mutual co-operation and support is not only desirable to human beings but vitally necessary to them. But it is a contradiction to use the word about a social system which essentially divides the human race on the basis of what they own. Capitalism adjusts to such contradictions by distorting the meaning of the word to the point at which it is unrecognizable. Anyone who looks beyond the superficial issues of capitalism to a saner and more competent social order should concern themselves to defend such words, as a start to building what will properly be called a human community.

Ivan.

In Rude Health? (1998)

TV Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain is a place of warm beer and sandwiches, lazy days on the village green watching cricket, a place of order and conformity. At least that s what John Major reckoned. But in doing so he reckoned without the stars of Rude Britannia (Channel 4,10pm, Thurs 15 October).These were some of Britain's rudest people who were counterposed to those who deplore the behaviour and openly hanker after a return to the rose-tinted past.

That Britain was ever the kind of place John Major thought it was is open to dispute — what is clearer is that whatever level standards of behaviour were in the past, there has been a serious decline since. When Major said he aimed to build a society “at ease with itself” he was stating a political intention he was never remotely going to be able to fulfil. And so it has turned out — if this programme is anything to go by Britain is a more competitive, selfish and inconsiderate society than it ever has been.

This was illustrated time after time via the filmed behaviour of those who just couldn't give a monkey’s about anybody but themselves. One or two of them were not only prepared to admit this when questioned, they were actually proud of it. One who showed no lack of remorse was the man who parked in the disabled parking spot at a supermarket when there were scores of other places free. When challenged about it by a disabled woman it turned out the gentleman in question was none other than an officer of Her Majesty's constabulary. His response was not to admit his culpability and mutter something about “being in a rush” as most probably would, but to insist that he had not violated any road traffic laws!

Happy days are here again

Then there was the guy in Accrington who went about his business with total disregard for everyone else, whether he was driving his car or just walking around the shopping precinct. His most revealing response to questions about his attitude was to comment that “I am too fast for Accrington”. In truth, here was a poor sap, convinced that he was among the movers and shakers of society, a child of Thatcher and son of Satan, who thought that the most effective way to exercise his muscle was to barge past old ladies in the high street and knock them over. Needless to say, the reality behind the image was revealing — a man in a poorly paid job with little self esteem who wanted to make himself appear bigger than he was. When asked by the interviewer “if you are too fast for Accrington, then why don’t you just leave?” he had no cocksure reply to utter, in fact no answer of any kind at all. To give an answer would have been to reveal that he did not live life to the Max. This was a man who, in reality, lived life in the bus lane.

While it would be wrong to assume that the kind of anti-social behaviour exhibited by individuals in this programme is already widespread as such, it is undoubtedly in the process of becoming so. That this should be the case is not surprising. John Major was doomed to failure in his attempt to halt the slide because he failed to recognise that, first and foremost, it is the market system itself which promotes such types of behaviour and engenders such anti-social attitudes. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that humans are born to be rude, aggressive and anti-social. On the contrary, it is human sociability which is the primary reason why our species has been the most successful on the planet—humans, unlike other animals, are generally able to plan and organise our affairs in a conscious manner, ensuring long-term stability. But the economic, social and political structures created by humans in various circumstances influence human behaviour in turn, and if social systems develop in a manner which promote competition and individualism (as say, a result of natural or artificial scarcity in relation to wants) then humans will adapt their behaviour and attitudes accordingly.

Any society — like the market system — which is based on division, competition and rampant individualism, and then sustained by the creation of generation gaps and the spread of atomised, isolated thinking and behaviour, is going to produce the sort of anti-social attitudes illustrated in Rude Britannia. So it is the ultimate irony for all the Colonel Blimps of this world that the system they admire so much — capitalism — is what has done so much to undermine many of the values they hold dear, values which arose in a different sort society to that which now exists.

But why should a rational thinker want to turn the clock back? The future could be far brighter than any rose-tinted view of the past could allow if the working class grasped the importance of collective action and the necessity of solidarity and class organisation. For the only way to overturn the “every man for himself” culture eating away at the heart of society is in the forging of a united struggle — a united struggle against the system which is currently pitting worker against worker in one of the shabbiest episodes it has yet conjured up in its extremely shabby history.

Dave Perrin

The case against kicking beggars (1994)

From the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The popular media wisdom that John Major is a nice fellow, but an incompetent idiot is wrong in one respect. Nice fellows do not kick you when you’re down in the gutter. Major, who as Minister of Social Security under Thatcher, passed the legislation which has forced so many young, unemployed workers to be homeless and sleeping in shop doorways, has now told a Bristol newspaper that beggars are "offensive" and an "eyesore".

But does it really matter that John Major’s alleged niceness is about as solid as his political future? According to the media, for whom John Smith as a living political leader was generally portrayed as something of a dull mediocrity whose main talent lay in drawing a standing ovation from the thieves of the CBI, the same politician once dead embodied almost every virtue required for canonisation. This depiction may well be deserved: the Labour leader may well have shared the compassion of Mother Theresa (he certainly seems to have shared her religious stupidity) and the desire for social change which would have made the unemployed employed, the impoverished well off and maybe even the blind to see and the lame to walk. Virtuous intent and sincerity are not the issues.

The fact is that when you support capitalism you find yourself having to do some very nasty things. Governing the capitalist system means accepting the position where a very small minority of millionaires and billionaires own and control the resources of society while the vast majority own nothing more than the ability to work. It means accepting and enforcing wage-slavery whereby the majority who produce must labour to make rich the minority who possess. It means accepting production for sale and profit rather than production solely for use. So that if profits are threatened food must be destroyed while the hungry starve and homes must be taken away from workers who cannot afford the rent or mortgage payments and work must be denied to those who cannot be milked for profit. Accepting capitalism means sending young workers to die pointlessly so that their masters’ profits, trade routes and resources can be protected or expanded. The moment you commit yourself to play any part whatsoever in the maintenance of the capitalist system you mast accept its priorities and, regardless of moral aspirations, will be dragged into the depravity of excusing its callous indifference to human needs.

And so back to Major and the beggars. We do not suppose that John Major, the lad with two O-levels who ran away from the circus for the bright lights of the bank, has ever sat down and decided to regard his fellow human beings with the callous contempt that he has exhibited. But as an errand boy for the profit system, which is all that any Prime Minister ever is, what else can he do but blame those who are the most obvious victims of capitalism? The only alternative would be to hold capitalism to account.

In 1945 the great hope of the welfare state was presented as a way out of the Dickensian darkness of early capitalism. We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of many of those reformers who promoted such hopes. They believed that a capitalist Labour government could achieve the impossible task of putting profits first whilst providing care for those in need as well. In the years of economic expansion following the destruction of the world war this seemed to be possible. Most workers had jobs and the state schemes to build cheap homes and basic hospitals and elementary social services seemed affordable.

Half a century later the futility of such reformism as an overall solution to the problem of capitalism is obvious to nearly everyone. John Prescott, in a pathetic attempt to cast himself as a fiery radical by calling for a return to 1945, is now in a minority even in the Labour Party. From the heir apparent, Tony Blair — a man with the mind of a Kinnock and the sincerity of a Clinton — there will be no talk of reforming capitalism out of existence. The capitalist parties do not even pretend any more that they are something else.

The welfare state promised an end to beggars on the streets. And for a time they were not there. For most of the present writer’s life it was rare to ever see a person begging on the streets of London. It was the sort of awful feature of capitalism that we knew went on in Delhi or Bangkok, but not here. Now it is impossible not to see beggars: in the cold wind and rain we see kids and the elderly shivering in blankets in doorways and cardboard boxes.

Some of them have been thrown out of psychiatric hospitals to save the government money. Some of them only ended up in these hospitals because of wretched home conditions which forced them to turn to the streets. Most have no hope for a future. A surprisingly large number are workers who used to have jobs, used to have homes, used to be across that thin line which separates wage-slaves like us from wage-slaves like them.

And in a nasty bid to boost his support amongst the mean-spirited and the vicious John Major kicks them when they're down. That it has backfired on him is proof that workers are not wholly gullible. Just like when government Ministers carved careers out of being insulting about the promiscuity of single mothers while they were creating single mothers as fast as they were closing down coal mines, most workers have taken the measure of their integrity. That is why politicians are more unpopular now than ever they were.

Politicians should not be allowed to get away with it. Beggars should not have to beg. Both curses call for one solution. Abolish capitalism. In a society of common ownership and democratic control of resources, where all will have access to the store of social wealth, who will need to lie to gain votes or beg to gain money?

Steve Coleman

Whose fault is it anyway? (1994)

From the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the day the Tories won the 1979 general election a group of trade unionists in the telecommunication industry gathered in their local and assured each other that within six months they would bring the Thatcher government down through a campaign of industrial sabotage. The rest, as they say, is history: but those boozy, disgruntled Labour supporters are not alone in a desire to forget the promise of fifteen years ago.

The Tory election manifesto then had recommended itself as based on "reason, on common sense, above all on the liberty of the people under the law". That was how things were going to be run — on reason, common sense, liberty — and Thatcher had emerged from Number Ten to tell us how her government would bring harmony and prosperity as well. It is all very different now as the government staggers from one crisis — economic, diplomatic, political, personal — to another. The Tories, who have always won votes from a popular prejudice that they are in control of events, are being seen as dramatically out of control and they have paid for this in their electoral losses. However brave the face they put on it the fact is that the Conservative Party is in a country-wide panic about what has gone wrong for them and how they might put it right.

Back to basics

So far they have not been very successful. Each diversionary ruse they have tried has failed - sometimes worse than failed. Back to Basics, for example, had hardly been launched before it suffocated beneath a blanket of sleaze, as Tory MPs seemed to be queueing up to expose its hypocrisy by revelation of their business activities and what they chose to call their private lives.

So until something better comes along the Tories will probably continue in their efforts to excuse their government’s failure in the simplest possible way: they will blame it onto someone else. This is not a new idea, nor one exclusive to Conservatives; Labour governments were always ready to explain their impotence and confusion onto currency speculators or Tory saboteurs in the civil service or greedy and irresponsible workers who wanted more wages than they "rightfully" earned.

Politicians who have to face up to their inability to produce profitable markets out of nothing, to control prices when economic forces are pushing them inexorably up or down, often ascribe it all to a lack of confidence, to industry "talking itself into a slump". They ignore the fact that if it is possible to create a slump by talking about it, it should be equally possible to create a boom by talking about that: in reality the economic problems which undermine confidence in that way are very real.

For example in September 1990 Thatcher was upbraiding a meeting of Welsh business leaders about the "voices of gloom . . . newspaper talk of recession . . . self-doubts assailing the business community — or perhaps more accurately the press". But it is simply not good enough to say it has all been got up by the press. Thatcher’s outburst was partly in reply to a CBI survey which reported some 10,000 jobs were being lost monthly as orders for goods, and consequently output, fell. At the same time NatWest Bank had been forced to write off £230 million in bad debts — which they would hardly have had to do in a boom — and reported 235 companies going into receivership during the first six months of 1990 — about twice as many as the previous year. The CBI had described British capitalism as "on the brink of recession" — they were not being pessimistic; they were facing facts.

Beggars and homeless

It is not only industrialists and bankers who have been talking themselves unnecessarily into difficulties. One of the most distressing symptoms of the so-called prosperity of Tory governments has been the re-emergence of beggars on the city streets. In the West End at night nameless bundles of misery huddle under whatever they can find to cover them. On the tubes frail youngsters listlessly display placards appealing for lose change. Some of these are mentally sick people who before the benefits of "community care" descended on us would probably have been in hospital. The minister responsible for housing, Sir George Young, an Old Etonian toff, once described such destitutes as the people you have to step around as you leave the opera. It was a chilling illustration of what one of the soggier Tory wets thinks about the homeless, whose number have doubled since 1979.

In rather different circumstances — Young never has to avoid them on the pavement after a night out — are those people who have become homeless because they could not afford to keep up their mortgage payments. In recent years numbers of such people increased to such an extent that even the banks and building societies — not to mention estate agents — became worried. By a typically grisly misnomer, this process is known as "repossession", as if the evicted people had ever owned the house in the first place. "Repossessions" climbed to a peak in 1991, when from October to December nearly 40,000 took place. This year they have fallen, presumably because the real possessors of property — the banks, building societies and so on — have worked their way through the defaulters. The people who have been turned out of their home may reflect bitterly on the Tory 1979 manifesto which informed us that "to most people ownership means first and foremost a home of their own".

As Lady Porter demonstrated in Westminster, there is an assumption that anyone who takes out a mortgage on a home is, for some reason, a Conservative voter. So those who have suffered "repossession" come in for a certain amount of cold sympathy from ministers. But the destitute are not believed to be Tories so they don’t get such sympathy; their hapless condition is all their own fault. As John Major said:

"They are not on the streets because they have to be on the streets. There are empty accommodation units across London and in other areas where people could go if they wished. But they choose not to stay there and that is a cultural point. It is a strange way of life that some of them choose to live."

And so it goes on. The government can have no responsibility for any of the problems they promised to solve because the fault really lies with the people who suffer the problems. Millions of people are unemployed because of some peculiar determination to endure the deeper poverty of being out of work, which has suddenly affected them all like a virus.

All our fault

The figures for recorded crime go up and up because indolent parents and mischievously trendy teachers have failed to instil into children the proper values and ability to discern right from wrong — which really means compliance with the demands of class society and with their degraded place in it. It is almost as if the Tories have not been in power for the past 15 years, as if they have not had time to deal with all these problems.

So whose fault is it? Well it doesn’t make sense to blame the politicians because they only make up the lies and excuses, they only urge us to forget their failures and to trust them again and again when all reason and experience tells us not to do this. So the responsibility lies with the people who allow themselves to be cheated out of their historical role, their power to make a basic change in society and prefer instead to hope for a few piddling adjustments which have no effect on capitalism’s continued existence and on its power to wreck our lives. To go back to those trade unionists — the task is not to bring down a government but to abolish the entire social system.

Ivan