Greasy Pole: Promises or Threats? (2004)

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

Now that the party conference season is over we can spend the long dark evenings digesting what we learned from all those speeches and votes and, most importantly, all those standing ovations. To begin with we are now aware that all politicians break their promises. We know this because we were told so by Michael Howard, a very important politician who intends to be prime minister after the next election, which can be a promise or a threat and anyway is of absolutely no significance. We have Howard’s word that when he is prime minister all promises will be kept because he will sack any minister who does not keep their word. This is itself a promise which leaves open the question of who will sack Howard if, as was the case with Tory governments in the past, he prefers to cover up for a failing minister instead of getting rid of them.

    

And then there was Tony Blair, telling us why he should not admit to anything over the war in Iraq and promising that he will be prime minister for years and years to come – which was most definitely a threat to all those impatient hopefuls in the lower ranks of the Labour Party. In case anyone has any doubts about Blair’s time scale we learned that he has just paid £3.6 million for a house in London, where he can retire to and write his memoirs which should go a long way to paying for the house. Perhaps this is what he had in mind when he said he wants to stay in power for a third term to “give everyone a chance to make the most of themselves”.

Milburn

As the Labour Party conference opened and before Blair had revealed his intention to stay on and on, there was a lot of speculation that the appointment of Alan Milburn to oversee Labour’s election campaign amounted to nominating him as Blair’s eventual successor. Milburn is one of those tiresome Labour leaders who in a former life as a restless firebrand – others were John Reid, Charles Clarke – encouraged party members to believe that “left wing” policies were the simple and effective way of running capitalism; for some reason this blindingly obvious fact had eluded previous Labour governments. If only there were MPs like Milburn, Reid and Clarke all would be well. There is no need to dwell on how these grisly tricksters have turned out when they had the power to make the kind of changes to society which they once said would be so easy. Before he resigned from the government Milburn’s fire had been effectively doused by the cold waters of his ambition.

    

However the matter of the succession may not be as straightforward as Milburn would like it to be. For one thing, Blair’s announcement will have been like a starting pistol to all those other aspirants on the Labour benches. It is safe to assume that there are only a very, very few of them who do not see themselves as prime minister material and who will, therefore, be already planning their campaign to fill Blair’s shoes. None of them will be pleased to accept Milburn, or anyone else, as the anointed heir to Number Ten. Their reaction will be to do their best, to form any alliance, to pull any trick, to compose the most damaging briefings, to undermine Milburn’s standing.

    

There have been precedents for this. One of the more recent was John Moore. Does anyone now remember him? In fact in the early days of the Thatcher governments he was clearly Thatcher’s favourite to take over from her when she chose to go. Remorselessly he climbed up the ranks until, in mid 1987, he was in charge of the big spending, publicly spotlighted, Department of Health and Social Security, whose spread of authority was as large as the title implied. For Moore all things seemed possible. Then his rivals got to work on him; he lasted about a year in the job, until he got sick under the stress of it all. Humiliatingly, he lost his voice and fainted in the Cabinet. Thatcher treated him with contempt, splitting his ministry in two and giving responsibility for Health to Ken Clarke. Moore now had no future in politics; he left the Commons in 1992, took a life peerage and descended into an appropriate obscurity.

Morrison 

When the Labour Party won the 1945 general election it was presumed that their leader, Clement Attlee, would be the one going to Buckingham Palace to take part in the ritual of the king pretending to ask him to form a government to run British capitalism in the style to which is was accustomed . But snapping at Attlee’s heels was his deputy leader, Herbert Morrison. Attlee came over as a mousy, unassuming man, the sort whose wife would run him around the country in a little Austin Seven car. Morrison was the more dynamic, he made much of his Cockney origins and he “lived politics, ate politics, dreamed politics”. He was responsible for the manifesto on which Labour had won the 1945 election and he was skilled at composing the phrases which were so useful in reconciling the working class to the fact that their lives under a Labour government were as hard as they would have been under the Tories. A certain amount of smart money was on Morrison, who was so sure he should be prime minister that before Attlee had a chance to go to the Palace he told him to wait until the Parliamentary Labour Party had re-elected him (or not, as Morrison hoped) as leader. Attlee ignored this advice, climbed into the Austin Seven and came back as prime minister (the PLP re-elected him on the following day). This was a considerable blow to Morrison, who throughout those governments continued to nurse his ambition. Year after year, through one crisis after another, Attlee frustrated him by simply staying in the job himself. Finally, in December 1955 when Morrison was 67, Attlee resigned in the knowledge that Morrison would not win a leadership election. He was easily beaten by Hugh Gaitskell, which persuaded him to stop living, eating and breathing politics and to retire sulkily to the House of Lords.

    

There was a similar situation in the post-war Tory party, where R.A. Butler nursed his ambition to be prime minister over many years before  reality compelled him to accept that he would never make it. His first chance came in early 1957, when Anthony Eden resigned, sick and worn out by the collapse of his Suez policy. At a Cabinet meeting in January that year Eden was in tears; after all his years in the dirty trade of diplomacy he had problems in facing the fact that British capitalism was no longer a mighty imperial force. The obvious successor – after all he had been Minister of Education, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Leader of the Commons – was Butler. Only one national newspaper had doubts about this. In the event the Tory party – as unwilling as Eden had been to face historical reality – made Butler something of a scapegoat for the debacle of Suez. Harold Macmillan was preferred as a better prospect for digging the party out of the hole it was in; at a meeting of the 1922 Committee he had made all the right noises about Britain still being a world power. It was Ted Heath’s job to convey the news to Butler, who was “dumbfounded”; he could never bring himself to accept being upstaged in that way.

Home

He was no better prepared for his second chance in 1963, when Macmillan retired after a serious operation. This happened during that year’s Tory conference, which took on a particularly frenzied flavour as a result of the leadership contest going on before the members’ unaccustomed eyes. From this great surge of hysteria a dark horse, in the shape of Earl Home, emerged. Home was, wrote Macmillan, “a man who represents the old governing class at its best” – which from someone other than Macmillan might have damaged him. But this was the Tory party and Home slipped into the leadership between the other candidates, finishing Butler off in the process.

    

There is no reason for Blair to be at all complacent over his plan to hang on to power for some years to come. He above all should know that politics is too dirty and ruthless a game for that. In spite of all that has happened during the past two years, which has left his credibility in tatters, he may nurse the idea that he is invulnerable. But that was how Thatcher saw herself, in 1990 when she informed the assembled TV crews in Paris that she would “fight on” – just a few days before she was told, unmistakenly, that she had to go. If this kind of event is a crisis, it is not one for the working class. Our crises are in the fact that whoever takes over a government has no effect on how we get by under capitalism. Thatcher’s demise brought in John Major and then Tony Blair and we are now at a stage when a politician as soiled and as disreputable as Michael Howard can tell us, in a rare acquaintance with a truth, that all of them break their promises. As if we didn’t know.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

For more on John Moore - and his fall from grace - see Caught In The Act: The Greasy Pole (1989).

Sting in the Tail: Hobson's Choice (1989)

The Sting in the Tail column from the August 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hobson's Choice

Walk down your local High Street and marvel at the choice capitalism gives to the consumer.

Just look at all the different stores and shops there are competing for our custom. Take shoe shops for example. There's Dolcis, Freeman Hardy Willis, Lllley and Skinner, Saxone, Manfleld, Cable, Trueform, Curtess and Shoe City.

Plenty of healthy competition there, eh?

Well, no, because all of them are owned by Sears which describes itself as "Britain's foremost speciality retailer with 3,600 outlets".

Some competition. Some choice!

Good News, Bad News

First, the good news for the government The 60,000 drop in unemployment in April was double the expected figure (cheers). The bad news Is that this will add to the pressure for higher wages and salaries (groan).

But what's bad about that? tf demand for labour is high then its price will rise and surely this is in line with the government's free market philosophy?

Ah, but THAT'S different! Why? Norman Fowler, the Employment Secretary, explains that the current increase in average earnings of over nine per cent "puts at risk our ability to compete" (The Guardian, 19 May)

Those who choose to run capitalism never have their troubles to seek, with even good news bringing gloom in its wake. Don't you feel sorry for them?

Intellectual Poverty

John Moore's claim that poverty has been abolished was probably meant to rescue his sinking political career, but did he have to make such a fool of himself by arguing that poverty should only be measured by Victorian standards?

But how should poverty be measured? Here's how Owen, the socialist house painter, did it In Robert Tressed's novel 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists":

What I call poverty is when people are not able to secure for themselves all the benefits of civilisation . . . If a man is only able to provide himself and his family with the bare necessaries of existence, that man's family is living in poverty. Since he cannot enjoy the advantages of civilisation he might just as well be a savage; better, In fact, for a savage does not know what he is deprived of.

This was written by a working man and Moore's argument is, by comparison, a measure of his intellectual poverty.

Racial Nonsense

Jewish and Aslan groups in Glasgow were upset recently over an invitation to take part in a TV debate with Lady Jane Birdwood, a veteran racist loony.

A spokesman summed up why both these groups boycotted the debate:

We were concerned that the programme would publicise the views of the far right. Their opinion is rarely reported In Scotland and we wish that to remain the case.

(Observer Scotland 7th May)

Leaving aside the undemocratic idea expressed here, do these people think that racist organisations don't exist in Glasgow? Their literature is openly sold in the city and they cannot be ignored out of existence.

The best way to deal with racist ideas is to publicly expose them for the nonsense they are, and those who refused to participate in the debate, which took place anyway, missed an opportunity the Socialist Party would have jumped at.

The Baby Killers

The world has ten per cent more food than it needs, but human error, neglect and complacency have left at least half a billion people hungry, a UN conference was told yesterday. "It Is . . . a question of distribution and imbalances created by International trade, not of shortage”, a conference report said.

Participants were told malnutrition, coupled with diarrohoea and Infectious diseases, kill an estimated 14 million children every five years. The conference reported that most malnourished people live in Asia and Africa.

(The Guardian 23rd. May)

Could any evidence be more damning? Capitalism, the mass killer without parallel, stands convicted yet again and only awaits its deserved fate. Come on, workers, what are you waiting for?

Adspeak

That capitalism is a wasteful society is nowhere better illustrated than in the advertising industry. The latest piece of madness from there is reported in the advertising trade magazine Campaign (19th. May)

Lyons Tetley Is introducing round tea bags In a bid to grab a bigger slice of a £300 million market, while trying to halt the relentless decline in tea sales.

The company has spent £9 million developing what it claims is its biggest product innovation since tea bags appeared in Britain 36 years ago. And It Is putting £3 million behind a TV campaign through D'Arcy Masslus Benton and Bowles.

The new round bags have been launched, because, according to the company, they give the consumer ”emotional satisfaction”. Deputy marketing director Ian Prutton said: *The shape Is such a neat fit with a cup, mug or pot there’s an immediate practical, tangible benefit.”

£9 million spent on developing and £3 million in advertising round tea bags.

It does not take much imagination to think of £12 million being spent on something a little more socially useful.

Like perhaps helping to avoid the death of 14 million children in the next five years. That would certainly give us more "emotional satisfaction".

T.V. Drama

The studio lighting is turned down. The subject is seen in silhouette. The voice has been distorted, so that the subject cannot be identified.

What's going on? Is it a Mafia supergrass, a sex offender perhaps an IRA bomber? Let's listen to the disguised voice. "I've been working on the railway for 15 years. My take home pay with overtime and working my rest day is £150 per week".

It's nothing more sinister than a member of the National Union of Railwaymen in dispute with the British Railways Board. But why the elaborate precautions to disguise the identity of the striker? It is because the BRB have issued a directive that forbids railway workers talking to the Press unless what they say has been cleared by the BRB. This is industrial relations 1989 style.

The government also have a representative in the studio. He is bathed in the full glare of the studio lights. The only distortion to his voice is the arrogant upper class accent of a public school education.

He is Mr. Paul Channon, Minister of Transport and millionaire. He doesn't need to work his rest day. In fact after the Lockerbie air disaster he flew off to the West Indies on holiday.

He is indignant about the "selfishness" of railway workers. He speaks angrily about "duty to the public".

He is a hypocritical parasite defending a class divided exploitative system. It is time the working class turned the lights out on him and all his class!

Greasy Pole: Poverty – Blair Speaks (2000)

Moore is less.

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

Does anyone now remember John Moore, the cabinet minister who was once encouraged to see himself as the next Conservative Prime Minister? He started out as one of those people who enriched themselves by doing things like selling pounds for deutchsmarks for dollars back to pounds again. Having made his pile it seemed the natural thing to do, to find a nice safe Tory seat so that he could participate in arranging the system to ensure that people like him could get even richer.

It worked like a dream and after he got into Parliament his rise was meteoric (an appropriate word because he later burnt out and fell like a meteorite). With some cunningly obsequious interventions he locked himself into position as Thatcher’s favourite. He got to be a minister and then, when the two departments of Health and Social Security became merged into the huge, hugely spending, dreaded DHSS he was put in charge. There he introduced the Social Fund, a method of drastically reducing the money available for Special Needs grants. To emphasise how fit and dynamic he was we were regularly treated to repulsive photographs of him on his exercise bicycle or at work in his shirt sleeves. But this rich, energetic, ambitious man was really not tough enough. The stress of running the DHSS while scheming to take over the top job cracked him up so that at one cabinet meeting, to the open contempt of Thatcher and the discreet glee of his rivals, Moore practically collapsed. It was not long before he returned to the back benches. No one was sorry to see him go.

Speeches 

He would have been wise to leave it at that, to accept the cruel reality of politics and devote the rest of his life to his roses or his currency note collection. But he decided to have one last effort at climbing the greasy pole. He would make a controversial speech which, on the basis a bit of pre-determined research, would claim to challenge some accepted ideas about a social problem. It was natural that the problem should be poverty, about which he should have learned a little when he gave up playing the markets and took over the DHSS. He might have spoken about alleviating poverty but that would not have been controversial enough to attract attention. Instead he set out to prove that poverty virtually did not exist, that it was really not much more than the angle from which you viewed the statistics about slums, malnutrition, poverty-related diseases or whatever.

It was not a very clever speech and the attention it attracted was not the kind Moore had reckoned on. It was savaged by the poverty lobby and by his erstwhile rivals in the Tory Party. Deservedly, it sank into a swamp of contempt—like Moore himself, who was packed off to the House of Lords.

That nasty piece of history came to mind when Tony Blair, on a trip up north, used a recent government “analysis” of levels of poverty to cast doubt on the generally accepted notion that the problem is wider, sharper and more punishing in the north than in the south:

“I am determined to make all parts of Britain share in rising prosperity and that in all parts of Britain we tackle poverty.”

Of course we are accustomed to that phrase “rising prosperity”; we hear it a lot when ministers are doing their best to lower working-class living standards. It is intended to disguise the fact that millions of people are unfamiliar with any kind of prosperity and spend their lives trying to survive through various degrees of deprivation. The burden of Blair’s speech was that while there may be deep poverty in the north it also exists in the south; in both parts of the country there are patches where workers are relatively better off. The object, apart from asking us to accept an index which is self-evidently nonsense, was to persuade us that this government is, by some miracle, successfully grappling with the effects of the long term decline in heavy industries such as steel manufacture, mining, shipbuilding . . .

Objectors 

Blair’s speech was no better received than that made by Moore, all those years ago—which says something about the persistence of the problems of poverty whichever party is in power. Apart from the usual clutch of disappointed Labour MPs, whose concepts and principles are flexible enough to keep them in the party whatever their reservations about it, there were also other objectors who may be called more detached. Bill Midgley was one of them: this president of the North East Chamber of Commerce and one-time building society boss described the analysis used by Blair as a “whitewash” and accused ministers of being “highly selective . . . Anybody can play the selectivity game”.

Less selective is the material coming from places like Bristol University, where research undertaken before the last election showed that twice as many babies die before their first birthday in Glasgow and Manchester than in less impoverished areas. These are places where there are some four percent more children living below the official poverty line. One effect of this is that there are 1.5 percent more GCSE failures. A survey carried out jointly by the Office of National Statistics and the Institute of Psychiatry found that children from poorer families are three times more likely to suffer from some kind of mental disorder. And a little piece of what is sometimes dismissed as anecdotal evidence is that staff at a school in Sheffield have to keep a sharp watch on the weather because the building where they try to teach is so rotten that the roof could be ripped off by a strong breeze or collapsed by a heavy fall of snow.

These are symptoms of the poverty inseparable from the lives of all those who have to sell their working ability in order to live. In the scale of that social reality it does not matter whether poverty is more intense, more desolate, more degrading, in one part of the country than another. When Blair argues to the contrary he is simply trying to obscure a persistent fact of capitalist life. Wherever it exists, and to whatever degree, poverty is brutal and nasty; it wrecks peoples’ lives, it makes them ill, it drives them mad and it kills them. It was doing massive damage to working-class lives when John Moore was hoping to rebuild his career by concealing reality and it is the same now when Tony Blair is trying to strengthen his hold on power by the same cynical method.

Ivan

Cooking the Books: The Poverty Line (2007)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back in the days when the Tories were openly and deliberately the nasty party John Moore, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Social Security (so-called), declared that poverty no longer existed in Britain. That was in a speech in May 1988 (the same month that Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society), published the following year as a pamphlet, The End of the Line for Poverty.

What he meant was that destitution (people without enough to buy food, shelter and other necessities to survive) had disappeared thanks to handouts from the state. He rejected any definition of poverty as relative as an invention of those who wanted to “call Western capitalism a failure”.

Now the Tory Party has abandoned this approach and has embraced the view that poverty is a relative concept, measured in relation “to prevailing social norms which change over time” (Dead Link).

Poverty in the EU, and so in Britain, is officially measured in relation, not to changing views as to what are “necessities”, but to the living standards of the general population. The median take-home income including state benefits for each type of household (single, couples, couples with children, etc) is calculated on the basis that this is the income level at which there are just as many below as above it (about £330 a week, according to Daniel Finkelstein in the Times of 22 November, or about £17,000 a year for the average household). The poverty line is defined as 60 percent of this.

This is just one definition, and a rather arbitrary one (it used to be defined as 50 percent), and other countries such as the US have a different one, but it’s an attempt to measure how many have significantly less income than the other members of society.

It does lay itself open to Moore’s criticism that it means that poverty will never be abolished or, to be absolutely precise, would only be in the highly unlikely event that there would be no households with an income of more than 40 percent above the (moving) median, i.e., today, no more than about £24,000 a year for the average household.

To prepare their U-turn, the Tories got one of their MPs, Greg Clark, to analyse the statistics on poverty in Britain. He made an interesting discovery: that a large number of those classified as poor fell just below the 60 percent level; which meant that “poverty” could be reduced by increasing their income just enough to move them from 59 percent to 61 percent. He claimed that this was all the Labour government had done since 1997.

Socialists are not committed to an EU-type definition of poverty. We don’t need this to show capitalism’s failure to meet human needs adequately. While accepting that what are “necessities” is historically and socially determined and so varies over time and between (and even within) different countries, we define poverty, not in relation to people’s consumption (how much food, clothing, shelter and the like they can buy) but in relation to the means of production (whether or not they own any means for producing wealth).

The vast majority of people in the developed capitalist parts of the world are propertyless in the sense of not owning any means of production. The only productive resource they possess is their own ability to work, their working skills, their labour-power. They are thus poor in terms of ownership of the means of production, irrespective of how much they are paid and of how many personal possessions they may have. The line that divides the capitalist class from the working class, that’s the real poverty line.

Caught In The Act: The Greasy Pole (1989)

The Caught In The Act Column from the July 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Greasy Pole

Down in Westminster there has been a certain amount of scrambling and scratching a little way up what was once memorably described by a Tory ex-minister as the Greasy Pole.

Those who were saddened by the abrupt decline in the fortunes of John Moore, who now attempts to run the degradation factory called the Department of Social Security, probably had mixed feelings about his recent effort to resuscitate his political career in a speech which set out to challenge the poverty lobby at what is perhaps their strongest point—the statistics of indictment. Just after the last election Moore was widely publicised as the Man Most Likely To Succeed Thatcher. There was no evidence that Moore realised how dangerous it was to be written up in that way—how likely it was to encourage a coalition of rivals keen to put the skids under him. It was whispered that his outrageous obsequiences to Thatcher had left him practically without friends and when he found himself in trouble he did not possess the cunning or the resources needed to fend it off. By the simple, instant method of chopping his job in two and giving him the smaller bit he was demoted and since then has been waiting his chance to stage a comeback.

That is why he recently announced that the idea of deep, widespread poverty is an absurdity. Moore relied on the fact that people on low incomes have been known to drink booze and smoke fags, to watch TV and keep what little food they can afford in a fridge. Harking back to the Tory obsession with Victorian England, he compared how the poor lived then with how we get by today and invited us to agree that poverty had therefore ceased to exist in any meaningful way. Well he would, wouldn't he? According to the Daily Mirror Moore lives in a detached house with a swimming pool, in a posh London suburb which could be sold now for about £850.000. Meanwhile thousands of people in London sit and watch TV in homeless accommodation, or in slums or on bleak estates. Thousands more exist in wall-to-wall stress in mortgaged homes, worrying about redundancy and the bills and what they will have to pay the building society for "their" home, asking themselves whether they can afford to go on holiday when they should get the roof fixed.

It was apparent that Moore's object was to appeal to the more callous and cynical elements in the Tory party and to make himself the centre of a popular debate about living standards. So it is as well to get one or two things clear now. Possession of things like a fridge and a TV is no gauge of poverty: the rich in Victorian England did not have such things but that fact did not make them poor. Poverty existed then and it exists now; the elements of how it expresses itself may change with time, in the same way as how riches express themselves also changes, but poverty endures because it is a necessary product of capitalism. This society is one of class division. beginning with the ownership and control by a minority of the means of life which leaves the rest—the majority—in poverty. That does not necessarily mean destitution, which is a condition lying at one extreme of poverty while the kind of wealth which Moore has access to lies on the way towards the other extreme.

If Moore wins the debate (which would not mean that he has the strongest argument) he may succeed in talking out concern for a desperate social problem which causes an enormous amount of despair, sickness and sheer misery. He may well have safeguarded his place in the Tory hierarchy and perhaps have inched a little way up the Greasy Pole. On such cynical calculations political careers are so often founded. The fact least worthy of attention is that real human beings—their conditions. their welfare their lives—are also at stake.

Labour Pains

After their disastrous election in 1983 the Labour Party decided that one of their priorities must be to change their image Out went the shuffling, bookish image of Michael Foot, who in spite of everything still managed sometimes to look as if he could be discomforted by reminders about political principles. In came the ambitious, unstudious image of Neil Kinnock, who spoke of principles as inconvenient obstacles to the achievement of power.

Well, Kinnock was by no means an instant success: in fact his liking for long, rambling, multi-syllabic interventions in the Commons quickly won him the title of the Welsh Windbag. Of himself he seemed quite incapable of exploiting that part of working class ignorance which insists that leaders are needed to organise society, to plan our lives for us,tto take decisions and to tell us what to do.

At that time the Labour Party might have ditched Kinnock and gone back to looking for the kind of leader who would bring in the votes just as Wilson did in the 1960s. Instead they chose to publicise him as the ideal of leadership, in cunningly crafted TV material, in carefully protected exposure and in rallies of the party faithful which were staged managed in a manner not unlike those of the pre-war fascists. The idea was that, whatever kind of person he is, however great or small his abilities, Kinnock was to be presented to us as the all-wise, all-caring, all-knowing father of the nation who only had to be allowed into Number Ten in order to look after us all for all time.

There must, however, be more to it than coming across as an unrelenting Mr Nice Guy. Labour's publicity team know that it is also essential, if the votes are to be won. to be Mr Finger-on-the-Button-and-Willing-To-Push-lt-lf-The-Situation-Demands. This is, they tell us, because we need to be protected from rampaging hordes of foreign invaders who are so envious of the British Way Of Life that they want to move in and take it over complete. In fact the reason is a lot less romantic: the button will be pushed, by Kinnock if he is prime minister at the time, if the interests of the British ruling class demand it.

So Kinnock is now presented to us as a leader with a core of steel. The significant thing about all this—about all the policy changes which are clearly coming in the Labour Party and the accompanying publicity blitz—is that Kinnock's personal reputation is welded onto that of the policies. Labour's present tactics demand that the workers cannot have one without the other. But what if the voters—the working class of this country—take the attitude that if there is no obvious difference between the Tories and Labour there is no reason to change from one to the other and therefore elect Thatcher for yet another period in power? In that event Labour's new policies will disappear, along with their leader, into the chaos of recrimination and desperate searchings for other policies, other leaders.

While all this goes on. the capitalist social system continues its grisly life. That means that the class division, with a minority of parasites living sumptuous lives off the backs of the useful majority, will continue. It means that millions will die quite unnecessarily, in wars, of avoidable diseases or of hunger. It means that millions will suffer the unrelenting stress of the poverty which we have to call ordinary life. It means millions existing in slums. The list of the crimes which capitalism commits against the human race is very, very long and the indictment of the system is unanswerable. From that viewpoint—from the viewpoint of human interests—what is happening in the Labour Party is glaringly exposed for the cynical futility that it is.

Ivan

1844 not 1884

For some inexplicable reason each time we have wanted to say 1844 in the last two issues this has come out as 1884. The title of Engels book (April issue, p.60) was The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and the Tory Act authorising the nationalisation of the railways (May issue. p.77) was passed in 1844.

Editors.

Running Commentary: Moore or less? (1988)

The Running Commentary column from the March 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Moore or less?

Connoisseurs of the repellent in politicians will find much to absorb them in the career of the Right Honourable John Moore MP. Promoted after the last election to take charge of the Department of what is quaintly called Health and Social Security, Moore was soon marked down — or should it be up? — as a Rising Star.

Apart from the fact that he is a wealthy man, he combined good looks with a huge appetite for work, physical fitness and the most arid of Thatcherite policies. Basking in a bond of mutual admiration with the Prime Minister, Moore began to look like a future occupant of Number Ten himself and the political scribes raked through their stock of oleaginous adjectives to describe him, coming up with words like dashing, dynamic, ambitious . . . It would be most churlish of anyone, not to be grateful that so vastly talented a man should give himself to cherishing our health and welfare.

But things did not go as expected and now words like "lack-lustre", "feeble" or "indecisive" are more likely to be attached to him. This comes about partly through the gathering crisis in the National Health Service, highlighted by accounts of desperately sick babies having to wait for life-saving operations, of nurses at the end of their badly paid, hardworked tether and a procession of eminent doctors to Moore's office to demand that more money be allocated to the NHS.

Moore's response to this pressure — the current Tory orthodoxy — is that the government's policies are steadily building a strong economy, which is the best safeguard of an even higher investment in health care. Beside the pictures of those babies and those nurses, this came across as dogmatic, evasive and uncaring of anything other than the balance sheets. In any event he put the case ineptly; suddenly Moore is seen as a sickening political liability rather than the flavour of the month.

John Moore MP

He could expect little sympathy among his own party. His apparent position of Thatcher's blue-eyed boy, and the media nonsense about him. served to unite the competing ambitions of other leading Tories into one to undo him. There have been whispers about the fragility of his loyalty to Thatcherite policies — that he was a precinct captain for the Democratic Party during his time in America and once an ardent follower of the dreaded Ted Heath. His recent illness called into question his physical ability to cope with high office. The skids, in other words, have been placed under the once inexorable upward march of John Moore.

It all makes a diverting little story of the horrors of capitalist politics — not a profession for the squeamish. But however ruthlessly they compete against each other all politicians are agreed that the social system should continue and that they should employ themselves in trying to persuade us of this. Moore's job, as far as this goes, is to tell us that we must accept inferior health care in the "national interest". At present, this is an assignment too tricky for him. If, as so many of his colleagues hope, Thatcher decides he is not up to it, there will be no real change — someone else, similarly ambitious, similarly cynical, will take his place to try to convince the workers to carry on denying and betraying their own interests.

Heroic neurosis

If you think that men are naturally aggressive and that wars are fought, not to protect or enlarge capitalist interests but as an outlet for this "natural" aggression, a Dr Wilson has got news for you.

He is an army psychiatrist and does not agree with you (BBC Today programme, 20 January). His job is to alleviate psychoses and nervous breakdowns of soldiers who have been in battle.

Things have improved, he says, since World War I, when men returning — or running away — from battle, shaking and crying in shell shock, were branded cowards and deserters, dismissed the service with ignominy in the first case and shot in the latter. Nowadays he and his colleagues are employed to recondition and return them to service (which, of course, makes much more economical sense to those who employ them).

Everyone who goes into battle suffers, he says. Battle is the most terrible experience; it is the worst thing that can happen to anyone (not the most exciting adventure, as some would have us think. We all remember the advertisements "The Army Will Make a Man of You"). Men who have seen their mates blown to pieces don't go back to fight for causes but to avenge the dead and injured or because they see it as the only way to prevent the same fate befalling them. If you can't get them back for that, you'll never get them back.

So much for "natural aggression". Of course modem long-range conventional and nuclear weapons overcome this problem for those in whose interests wars are fought. Death at a distance — whether in battle or by starvation — does not have the same impact, even when shown on television. In those circumstances Dr Wilson could return to his earlier task of trying to recondition the civilian casualties of the system.

Get moving

How many people noticed that recently we went through seven days called National Motivation Week? National what? you may ask. Well it might have been better known as Behave Yourself and Get On In the World Week; its Director (the source of whose authority must be something of a mystery) expressed the essence of what the week hoped to achieve with the insightful assurance that "Inside many yobs is a yuppie trying to get out”.

So it was all a matter of a concentrated effort to rid society of the yob — which, as we all know, is a threat with which civilised life is at present confronted. Yobs are non-motivated; they are non-responders, non-achievers. Aimless cynicism is their distinguishing trait; they doubt their ability ever to improve their lives so they give up trying and divert their energies into loutish, disruptive behaviour.

National Motivation Week aimed to rescue these poor people from their yobdom and turn them from morally impoverished failures into yuppies, who are not aimless, who respond to the morality that people are esteemed according to how rich they are and whose motivation is as conspicuous as a Porsche on a council estate. Yuppies, in other words, are supreme examples of the benefits of motivation.

We are familiar now with campaigns which aim to concentrate reformative effort onto some problem during a defined period. We remember World Refugee Year, which ended with more refugees in the world than it began with; Children's Year, which did not stop children being abused, beaten and killed by their families; 1987 was Shelter for the Homeless Year, which could be bad news for anyone without a home.

But what if National Motivation Week, spearheaded by its dynamic if shadowy director, manages to do better? What if all the yobs and under-achievers are suddenly uplifted into starry-eyed, thrusting yuppies? Apart from those who may feel that as a cure this may turn out worse than the disease, we will see the end of one misled and distorted view of capitalism and its frustrations only to have it replaced with another, just as baseless and futile.

In spite of all the obstacles which capitalism places in the way, human beings are constantly giving evidence of their motivation to care for and co-operate with each other. These drives are misdirected and often stifled by a social system whose basis takes no account of human interests. Yobs and yuppies — and all the other caricatured derelicts of capitalist morality — are just people who have yet to understand their social origins.

Greasy Pole: Beware of Leaders (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

It can be a time for their widespread regret, if not mourning, when any of our political leaders reaches the end of their time of dominance and the exposure of their futile dishonesty, leaving them with little more than a badge signifying their removal from the scene. Like Neville Chamberlain in 1938 waving his little piece of paper from Hitler to the crowd at Heston Airport. Like Ted Heath and his Three-Day Week which would replace slump with prosperity. Like Theresa May and her snap general election which was going to sweep away the muddle of Nick Clegg and that Coalition along with hapless Ed Miliband. But also, less enduring, there was John Moore who ended his time as Baron Moore of Lower Marsh. Moore was once favoured by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with a rocket-like rise up the Greasy Pole to the heights of Secretary Of State for Health and Social Security, where he enforced such changes as to nominate him Mr Privatisation with all the implicit rewards.

Collapse

One response to this was from Ken Clarke, who during his time has occupied so many ministerial prominences – among them Health and Social Security – along with his preference for cigars, alcohol and jazz music. He assessed Moore as ‘bright and likeable…very popular with the press’ but someone who ‘…knew nothing about either health or social security and, as far as I could see, had no views on the subject. He was soon both overwhelmed and unnerved by the sheer scale of the problems he faced and the expectations he had to live up to’. Another Tory colleague compared him to ‘…a frightened rabbit mesmerised by oncoming headlights’. Except that Moore’s difficulties went rather deeper than that, for in November 1987 in the midst of the chaos of his life as a Cabinet Minister he was struck down by bacterial pneumonia. His desperation was such that his struggle to conceal his condition was undermined when he collapsed at a Cabinet meeting. He chose to be treated at a private hospital which at that time was charging thousands of pounds a day, but soon there was no alternative for Thatcher but to cut his Ministry in two and pass the portfolio for Health to Ken Clarke before, in 1989, sacking Moore from the Cabinet. In 1992 Moore gave it all up, standing down from Parliament to work his talents as Baron Moore of Lower Marsh in the House of Lords – which he attended only rarely – and to return to his former fields of profit gathering in banking and industry. 

Currie

Among the persistent critics of Moore in the Commons was Edwina Currie who at one time seemed to go out of her way to be one of Thatcher’s more unwise appointments. For example there was the occasion when, as a junior Minister for Health, she informed the nation that ‘…in the Winter it was the Northerners who, neglecting to keep warm, die of ignorance and chips’. In her younger days in Liverpool she had spent a lot of time adoring the Beatles in the Cavern Club before she became a rampant Tory through her time absorbing Economic History at the London School of Economics. She was elected to Parliament in 1983 for South Derbyshire, by which time she had amassed a reputation as a ‘virtually permanent fixture on the nation’s TV screen saying something outrageous about just anything… the most outspoken and sexually interested woman of her political generation’ – an assessment suitable to her affair with the future Prime Minister John Major, which lasted some four years when he was a Party Whip hoping to be promoted through the ranks. But then it was Major who, after reaching the heights of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, felt it necessary to end the affair, leaving her distressed but not so much that she could resist accusing him of ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ and describing him as ‘one of the less competent Prime Ministers’ and later as ‘…too small minded in character, too small in intellect in the end’. And she did not consider it was the end of all affairs, asking herself, as she picked over the memories: ‘I daydream about another affair. Now, who might be interested?’

Broadmoor

One of Currie’s responsibilities in the Ministry of Health was a Task Force involved in running the Broadmoor Hospital, that nervously guarded and controlled institution where the most dangerous and unpredictable of offenders are confined after being medically certified as in need of restraint as well as treatment. Currie appointed Jimmy Saville to the Task Force, allowing him keys which made him free to roam the hospital with access to every part of it and mingle with the patients including those who were severely disturbed and heavily medicated. That was before the full facts emerged of Saville being himself a highly unstable character, but there was still good reason to act with caution in so threatening an environment. Among the other disturbing events which Currie was active in was as Health Minister in 1988 when she provoked the fury of the dairy farmers and milk sellers by announcing that most British eggs were contaminated with salmonella. As a result some four million hens were slaughtered with a huge financial loss to the producers which brought about Currie’s resignation as a Minister. The panic and anger did not die down for some years; in 2001 it was revealed that at the crucial time there was a severe epidemic of salmonella in the hens but by then Currie was well into her alternative professions as a TV performer, writer of romantic fiction and the like.

In the ideal (for the politicians) world there is often an assumption that when a leader drops out they leave a swathe of affectionately wistful memories. But all our experience of examples of this – Moore, Major, Currie –  emphasises it is not so because their period in power followed the established interests of the higher, owning, exploiting class. It is our part to rebuild world society so that it is freer, safer and humane.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: A Gruesome Business (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

If, after all, the Labour Party does not win the election, spin doctors and opinion pollsters all over the country will be found falling on their swords or being dragged into a courtyard to be shot at dawn. It will be a gruesome business. Meanwhile the Tories will not be entirely untroubled. for suicidal thoughts may disturb the celebrations of some of their prominent members. These will be the people who had almost hoped the Tories would lose because this would have boosted their chances of replacing John Major in the leadership contest which had been expected to follow Labour’s victory.

We are discussing here what goes on at the higher and slimier reaches of the greasy pole of political advancement. This is where friends greet each other with a warm, firm grasp of the throat, where a supportive arm round the shoulder usually means a probing knife in the back, where the famous claim that loyalty to the Tories’ [is their] secret weapon is treated with contemptuous derision. This is where in the past more than one hopeful candidate, who seemed to be unstoppable, came to grief. Consider, for example, the moving case of John Moore. Does anyone now remember him? Has anyone ever heard of him?

Moore was the first of Thatcher’s favourite sons—the first to be anointed by her as her chosen successor. He was handsome and a fitness fanatic, bashing away for hours every day on his exercise bike. Just to prove how fit and good looking he was he liked to appear on Tory political broadcasts in his shirt sleeves.

What Moore overlooked was how dangerous it can be to be the heir apparent. To put it mildly his wilier colleagues had little difficulty in putting the skids under so vulnerably blind a man. To begin with Moore lost half his ministerial responsibilities— half his job—in a brutal amputation. Symbolically. his much vaunted fitness failed him and, to Thatcher’s intense irritation, he collapsed at the Cabinet table. Before he was finally despatched he made one last, feeble effort to rally support by publishing a pathetic attempt at proving that poverty was a myth. That only brought down more contempt onto his miserable head. He was probably relieved to escape to the House of Lords.

There are similarities between the case of John Moore and that of another of Thatcher's favourites. Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo was in fact Moore’s PPS in 1986 but this did not prove to be an insurmountable handicap. At his 40th birthday party in 1983 Thatcher had made her feelings clear: “We brought you up, we expect great things of you, you will not disappoint us.”

At school Portillo was a supporter of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party but he changed his politics at Cambridge and soon after leaving university he got a job as adviser to Cecil Parkinson—another of Thatcher's doomed favourites. Portillo got into Parliament when he won the seat held by Anthony Berry, who was killed in the Brighton hotel bomb and from then his rise was steady and predictable, through a succession of junior jobs to the Cabinet. He is now Minister of Defence.

Loyalty
It has not. however been a story without is blemishes. Portillo was foolish enough to champion the widely unpopular poll tax, assuring a Tory conference that it was a vote winner. He had become notorious for an eagerness to pander to the more extreme and stupid xenophobia in the Conservative Party, in silly speeches about students being able to buy qualifications in "any other country", about the SAS standing as a grim warning to the rest of the world: "Don’t mess with Britain". One Tory minister who once had Portillo work for him thought ". . . I’ve never heard him give a party conference speech which dignified the subject"—which was probably an understatement. Finally. Portillo showed what he thought about loyalty in the Tory party during the leadership contest between Major and Redwood. Portillo put it about that he supported Major and so was not in the running-—while he set up his own campaign headquarters.

None of this helped Portillo’s rampant ambitions. He is not now seen as one of the stronger candidates for the leadership if Major falls and has, perhaps, decided that a period of reticence would not come amiss. At all events he is keeping, at this time of stress for his party, his head well below the parapet. This can also be said for another one-time favourite (although this was more with the Tory faithful than with Thatcher or Major). Peter Lilley now seems marooned at Social Security, where he has zealously pursued his campaign against single mothers and where some of his notoriety rests on his designing the Child Support Agency which seems to have done very little to support children but a lot to stimulate their parents’ enmity and even in some cases—paternal suicide.

Spongers
Lilley is another hit at Tory conferences. In 1992 he launched into a parody of The Mikado:

"I've got a little list
Of benefit offenders who I'll soon be rooting out. . .
and councillors who draw the dole
To run left wing campaigns . . ."

The next year he had them rolling in the aisles with a spoof phrase book for Europeans sponging on Social Security:

"Wo ist das Hotel? Where is the Housing Department?
Où est le bureau de change? Where do I cash my benefit cheque?"

And so on. And this from a politician who not so long ago had a reputation as an “intellectual". He was among the rush to abandon Thatcher when she was under threat in 1990. showing openly what he thought of all that stuff about loyalty and the Tories when he told her bluntly that he would not support her because she was finished. Lilley is another of those who are now strangely hesitant about pushing themselves for the leadership. Do we have to endure yet more of those sickening speeches before he makes up his mind?

In this situation the man who is being strongly tipped as the leading contender begins with the possible handicap that he holds an office which has never led to being a Conservative prime minister. Michael Howard is the most hated Home Secretary for a very long time. Apart form offenders and prisoners—who don't usually expect to like a Home Secretary—Howard has managed to upset his own officials, lawyers, prison governors, prison officers, the judges . . .

Which of these odious men will come out on top? We can be sure the event will be given a significance wildly at odds with reality, with their statements treated as seriously as, for example, Major’s cant about a nation at ease with itself. Nobody climbs the greasy pole by being nice to other people or through an ambition to improve our lives.

Ivan.

Caught in the Act: Goodbye To All That (1991)

The Caught in the Act Column from the March 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory hopefuls will have felt their pulse quicken at the news that many of the parliamentary storm troopers of the Thatcher revolution will not be storming after the next general election. The list of ex-ministers who will not be standing again reads like a Thatcher cabinet - Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson, John Moore, Nicholas Ridley. It is even rumoured that Thatcher herself will soon announce her retreat from the battle for the triumph of market forces over soggy concepts such as social welfare. A tot of plum seats, with fat Tory majorities, will be looking for candidates.

This situation is given extra piquancy by the fact that many of the retiring ex-ministers were themselves once considered as future prime ministers. Howe’s claim to fame was that he spear-headed the drive to cut back government spending and establish the policy that any business which couldn't make a profit was thereby not worth saving with state money. Lawson was the yuppies' favourite Chancellor and in his heyday encouraged the illusion that through his budgets the British people were reaping the harvest of prosperity from the seed sown by the unglamourous, dogged Howe. Sadly for Lawson, he did not time his resignation so that his reputation remained intact. The chaos of capitalism was too much for even a smarty like him, reducing him to taking a few part time jobs in the City bringing in the odd £30,000 or so a year.

Morals

As recently as last November Tebbit was threatening to contest the premiership (and it would have taken some very brave men in grey suits to deter him) but in the end he deferred to Major. Perhaps he was hoping for a return to prime ministerial favour; in the event he showed what he thought of Major’s declared intention to fashion a more "caring" government by deciding that he needed to spend more time with his wife.

Cecil Parkinson paid the penalty for being one of Thatcher’s blue-eyed - at one time, indeed, the bluest of eyed-boys. Tory aspirants to the leadership must have watched, in impotent despair, Parkinson’s apparent inability to do anything wrong in Thatcher's eyes. He had, however, done wrong in the eyes of Sara Keays and no patronage could save him from the repercussions of this exposure of how Tory gentlemen behave when it suits them. After all, Tory moralists like to tell us that morals are, like Major's Britain, classless; they did not thank Parkinson for showing that they are supposed to apply only to the working class. When he eventually came back to office Parkinson seemed to have lost his touch; the past master of deception made a series of public relations blunders which were intended as shrewd, voter-attractive ruses - which did not amuse his anxious colleagues.

Another Thatcher favourite to plummet to obscurity was John Moore, who was once the subject of an enormous publicity exercise to convince us that he was an unusually capable administrator of capitalism's affairs. Moore basked happily in this praise and in Thatcher's admiration for his talents for assaulting working class living standards. It did not seem to occur to him, that so blatant a campaign carried its own menace. When events exposed him as a very ordinary sort of political blunderer there were no men in grey suits to save him from an especially humiliating demotion. He did make one last effort to claw his way back into favour by issuing what was supposed to be a serious analysis of the deeper levels of poverty in such a way as to suggest that it was all a product of over-excited imaginations. This latest blunder met with the contempt and derision it deserved and to no one’s regret - certainly not that of the very poor - Moore disappeared from the ministerial scene.

NIMBY

Nicholas Ridley for prime minister was a prospect supported by only a few of the stranger fanatics. Ridley has always conducted himself with all the arrogance and contempt of someone who has inherited a lot of money. As much of the wealth of this old Etonian’s family came from the exploitation of coal miners he was well qualified to help formulate the government's strategy against the miners during the early 1980s, which reached its ultimate triumph in the defeat of the 1984/5 strike and the subsequent run-down of the industry. On all this Ridley looked with a pitiless eye; this is, after all, capitalism under which wealth is produced, not so that people can hold jobs but for sale at a profit. He had a similar attitude to anyone who objected to what are politely called developments - factories, motorways, runways and the like which threaten to blight their living conditions - sneering at them as NIMBYS - one of those fashionable acronyms, for Not In My Back Yard.

It is not clear whether Ridley regarded himself as a NIMBY when he used his influence to obstruct the building of some houses which would have affected the view from his elegant, costly country home. The incident confirmed what was already known - that Ridley has an uncomplicated view of the world: capitalism is a class divided society in which he is in the right - the superior - class and he will take good care to assert his privileges and to defend them at whatever cost to others. It was a typical indiscretion about European unity which forced his reluctant resignation from the government; events had overtaken someone who did his best to live in the past.

So now we have a new set of politicians in charge, who claim they are inspired by fresh principles, new priorities and more humane ambitions. This change is personified by the greyer, lower-key manner of John Major. Perhaps there will be some minor and insignificant changes: Thatcher's stridency and obstinacy, and the sycophnacy of her cronies, were becoming so laughable that they were losing votes. And that is what it was - and is - all about.

Ivan