Why the Greens are wrong (1994)

From the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

People are right to be concerned about what is happening to the environment. Materials taken from nature are being transformed by human activity into substances which nature either can’t decompose or can’t decompose fast enough. The result is pollution and global threats such as the hole in the ozone layer and global warming.

There really is a serious environmental crisis. The issue is not whether it exists but what to do about it. The Green Party has one view. We have another.

The Green Party sees itself as the political arm of the wider environmental movement, arguing that it is not enough to be a pressure group, however militant, like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Greens, it says, should organise as well to contest elections with the eventual aim of forming a Green government that could pass laws and impose taxes to protect the environment.

We say that no government can protect the environment. Governments exist to run the political side of the profit system. And the profit system can only work by giving priority to making profits over all other considerations. So to protect the environment we must end production for profit.

Pollution and environmental degradation result from the inappropriate ways in which materials from nature are transformed into products for human use. But what causes inappropriate productive methods to be used? Is it ignorance or greed, as some Greens claim? No, it is the way production is organised today and the forces to which it responds.

Production today is in the hands of business enterprises, all competing to sell their products at a profit. All of them — and it doesn’t matter whether they are privately-owned or state-owned — aim to maximise their profits. This is an economic necessity imposed by the forces of the market. If a business does not make a profit it goes out of business. "Make a profit or die" is the jungle economics that prevails today.

Under the competitive pressures of the market, businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interest, ignoring wider social or ecological considerations. All they look to is their own balance sheet and in particular the bottom line which shows whether or not they are making a profit.

The whole of production, from the materials used to the methods employed to transform them, is distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits. The result is an economic system governed by uncontrollable market forces which compel decision makers, however selected and whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pollute and waste.

Governments do not have a free hand to do what is sensible or desirable. They can only act within the narrow limits imposed by the profit-driven market system whose rules are "profits first" and "you can’t buck the market".

The Green Party is not against the market and is not against profit-making. It imagines that, by firm government action, these can be tamed and prevented from harming the environment. This is an illusion. You can’t impose other priorities on the profit system than making profits. That’s why a Green government would fail.

Some Greens have already begun to realise this. Here is what Derek Wall, who was a national speaker for the Green Party in the last European elections in 1989, has gone on record as saying:

"A Green government will be controlled by the economy rather than being in control. On coming to office through coalition or more absolute success, it would be met by an instant collapse of sterling as "hot money" and entrepreneurial capital went elsewhere. The exchange rate would fall and industrialists would move their factories to countries with more relaxed environmental controls and workplace regulations. Sources of finance would dry up as unemployment rocketed, slashing the revenue from taxation and pushing up the social security bills. The money for ecological reconstruction — the building of railways, the closing of motorways, the construction of a proper sewage system — would run out" (Getting There: Steps to a Green Society).

The Green Party is right on one point though, when it says that pressure group activity is not enough. Where they go wrong is not in proposing political action, but in proposing political action to elect a Green government.

They fail to realise that what those who want a clear and safe environmental are up against is a well-entrenched economic and social system based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding economic law of profits first.

If the environmental crisis is to be solved, this system must go. What is required is political action, yes, but political action aimed at replacing this system by a new and different one which will allow us to meet our needs in an environmentally-friendly way.

To do this we must control production — the way we interact with the rest of nature — but to be able to control production we must own the means of production. So we are talking about a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources.

That’s the only basis on which we can meet our needs whilst respecting the laws of nature. And it’s the only basis on which we can begin to successfully reverse the degradation of the environment already caused by the profit system.

What Greens should be struggling for is not a change of government but a change of society.

Adam Buick

Myths of race and nation: the case for world socialism - Part 2 (1994)

From the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is bitterly ironical how Yugoslavia which was itself carved out of the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the grounds of South Slav nationals self-determination, is now in the throes of bloody dismemberment to achieve the national self-determination of the Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims who all speak the same language. Like in Northern Ireland an essential ingredient for the solution of internecine strife will be the throwing-off of religious beliefs which stand in the way of workers recognising their common class interests and adopting rational ways of thinking and Socialist principles. The building of the necessary consciousness would not call for the relinquishment of valid cultural differences, although once rid of the divisive factor of imposed dogma it is remarkable how similar is the traditional dress, folk-music and dance, cuisine and life-style of all the Balkan lands.

At the time when the victors of the First World War were putting an end to empires which had built up extensive economic infrastructures we Socialists pointed out the danger of the nationalistic illusions so passionately espoused by Czech, Austrian and other workers whose Social Democratic parties were rejecting the vestiges of class solidarity which had survived from the days when Marxian ideas held greater sway. Current Balkan war victims are not only paying the price of their nineteenth century nationalist assumptions which they still largely uphold but also of Lenin’s pernicious reversal of Marx's contention that proletarians have no country to the view that workers are the only true patriots and that nation-states had a rightful place in "socialism".

In south-eastern Europe the map is still being redrawn to conform to notions of religious and linguistic homogeneity which ill accord with social reality. Meanwhile in post-imperial Africa the former colonial borders remain sacrosanct however arbitrarily they had been established by the former imperial powers in their scramble for territory. South Africa, which comprises a multiplicity of ethnic, language and religious groups, is being lauded in its present more democratic phase as the model of possible future pluralistic societies. Zulu and Afrikaaner separatists who threaten the Republic as it exists would be given the same treatment as the Biafrans when they tried to break away from Nigeria or the Southern Sudanese who challenge the state the Khartoum government inherited from the Colonial Office in London.

A working class, united in its determination to establish a Socialist World undefiled by national frontiers, will bequeath to future generations a democratic global village in which cultural variations will be a stimulus to creativity rather than pretexts for those seeking to become a new ruling class.

Edmund Grant

Myths of race and nation: the case for world socialism - Part 1 (1994)

From the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I drive a French car, drink German beer, enjoy eating spaghetti bolognese and used to listen to Radio Luxembourg. Does this qualify me as a fully paid-up member of the Common Market? Or will the fact that my Euro-election ballot paper is marked Yes (oui, ja, si) for World Socialism enough to convince the Brussels bureaucrats that I no more want to be ruled by them than by my British capitalist masters?

Let’s look at what unites rather than divides workers. The French fisherman, the Italian car worker, the German farmhand belong with the vast majority of us in a class which is economically exploited by a small minority of capitalists who use "love of country" and cultural differences to persuade us that we must continue to engage in economic battle with each other simply to preserve the privilege of the few. Little Englanders use this to whip workers up against European workers and pro-Europeans use it to engender competition against the rest of the world. All this nonsense is about their interests, not ours.

"Fog in English Channel - Continent Isolated." This Island is now physically joined to the continent by a tunnel. Those of us who view with dread the claustrophobic effect of travelling abroad under the sea should ponder the daily claustrophobia induced into our everyday lives by a social system which continues to isolate and alienate us all from the possibility of living full human lives as free men and women in a community of equals.

Dave Coggan

Socialists against racism! (1994)

From the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

More than three million people in Britain are currently living under the threat of racial attacks because of the colour of their skin. According to the 1991 Census, 3,015,014 out of Britain’s population of 54,888,844 are from the ethnic minorities: 94.5 percent of the population is white, while 5.5 percent is black.

Racism and prejudice are not new to Britain. In recent years racial abuse and attacks have mainly been aimed at non-whites. But over the centuries foreign workers have been invited and initially welcomed to Britain to provide skills and labour power which would enrich the lives of the British capitalists. But when the newcomers settled here they were made to feel unwelcome, especially when boom turns to slump.

This racial intolerance and prejudice is perpetrated by many politicians who have played a key role in stirring up racial hatred. The 1979 General Election was won by the Conservative Party partly as a result of its success in attracting the vote that had gone to the neo-fascist National Front in the course of the 1970s. The leader of the Conservative Party made a carefully timed intervention in which she claimed that "British people" had a legitimate reason to fear that their culture might be swamped by immigrants.

The following argument is familiar to most people in Britain: "Of course, I don't mind them coloureds personally. I even work with some of them. It's just that there's too many of them."

These people should look at the statistics stated above. All of the capitalist political parties are tainted with racist pasts, including the Labour Party which passed the first racist immigration legislation. The only way to stop racism and fascism is to understand its cause — the competition between workers engendered by the capitalist system — and, instead of wasting time fighting the effects, remove the cause once and for all.

Michael Ghebre

Between the Lines: Chasing the dragon (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chasing the dragon

Aaah! Just when you thought it was safe to come out in the dark, she’s hack . . . and Nicholas Broomfield was out to make a documentary about her whether she wanted him there or not. (C4, 9.30pm, Thursday, 19 May.) The subject in question is Margaret Thatcher, a one-time Prime Minister who said that there was no such thing as society. See the Postcards from Hell on other pages for a more vivid guide to her preferred habitat. Broomfield, who is used to following around confirmed fruit and nutcases (it was he who made that superb documentary about the mad Boer, Terre Blanche), was as welcomed by the Thatcher groupies as a cockroach at a cocktail party. It Is good to see just how small and foolish "the mighty" really are.

In the same week the BBC was chasing the story of the Chinese political prisons where countless detainees are locked up for speaking out against the government. Down at the BBC they have no need to lock up the journalists who are vetted by MI5 before they can have a job and then only allowed to interview those whose words have not been banned by government edict. That’s what they call capitalist democracy, that is. On Newsnight (BBC2, 10.30pm, Wednesday, 18 May) Jeremy Paxman interviewed a smarmy businessman who insisted that human rights abuses should not interfere in commerce. Paxman put it to him that to trade with a state that can do this makes him and his fellow capitalists collaborators. Quite so. And what’s new about that? When have a few camps filled with tortured victims ever stood in the way of a healthy profit? Perhaps next time Paxman interviews Douglas Hurd he would care to ask him whether as a major arms-seller to Indonesia his government feels just a tiny bit like collaborators in the slaughter of the people of East Timor.

What’s all this then, Arfur?

ARFUR: 'Ang on Phil, I’m reading this ’ere election manifesto.

PHIL: Reading? You goin’ soft or something Arfur?

GRANT: You want me to sort him, bruv. That’s how we do things in the East End see. We put the boot in first and ask questions later. Right?

ARFUR: It says ’ere in this ’ere Socialist Party manifesto that all politicians are out to take us for a ride. Now, I’m only a simple bloke, as you well know, but 1 can’t ’elp thinking that they might have a point. What you think Michelle . . . I mean, you’ve been to that there university, ’avn’t you?

MICHELLE: Well, according to what I’ve been reading this totally leaves out of account the post-modernist critique of metatheoretical discourse. I mean, haven’t these socialists ever read Lyotard? Anyway, I’m off to tell my daughter that’s she’s really my cousin.

GRANT: Yeah, and I’m off down the Arches to sort out some geezer with a shooter who reckons Minder was just a comedy.

[Enter an old drunk with a blue suit and a political rosette who looks a cross between that dodgy lawyer used by the Mitchell Bruvvers to get them off at their last court appearance and at least half the members of the House of Commons]

SWINDLER: Hello there, jolly working folk. I’m your candidate . . . 

ARFUR: Ah, perhaps you can ’elp us. I was just reading this Socialist stuff about the likes of you being a lot of useless leaders. They reckons ’ere that the emancipation of the working class can only be the . . . 

SWINDLER: Put it away, my good friend. Subversive nonsense. Pure idealism. You can’t run your lives without us. Any chance of a G and T?

PHIL: You saying we can’t run the world without being led by a load of old duffers like you?

GRANT: Want me to sort him, bruv?

SWINDLER: No . . . what I’m saying is that the likes of you — decent working chaps that you are — need the likes of me — educated at Jesus and the bar, you know — to do a few things to improve life for you. A couple of new beds in the local hospital, for example. And free chiropody for all those of ninety-five and over. Jobs for everyone . . . 

ARFUR: Well thank you very much indeed. I’ll put this socialist stuff away right now. And buy this man a large G and T on me.

DOT: Did somebody mention Jesus?

BIG RON: Did somebody mention a late bar?

MICHELLE: Oh, hasn’t anyone ever told them that they’re just pathetic caricatures of workers invented by people who drink in wine bars. No wonder they’re stupid enough to be taken in by another bloody politician.

Steve Coleman

Seven steps to becoming a Socialist (1994)

From the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

(1) Become aware of how capitalism works

Can't pay — can't eat.

No profit? — no production and no work. 

These are the laws of capitalism's economics.

Profit comes from paying back workers only a fraction of the value they produce. 

Those who own the capital and employ wage and salary workers to make the profit are the ruling capitalist class.

Once you have understood this there is no going back.

It cannot be unlearned.

(2) Understand that the profit system won't last forever

Capitalism is only about three centuries old.

Before that there was feudalism. Before that, slavery.

All were — and are — class forms of society. Capitalism is no more inevitable and permanent today than feudalism was three centuries ago.

(3) Realise that reforms don't solve the problems that face us

Most workers still support the system which exploits and oppresses them.

They think there is no alternative.

They hope capitalism can be reformed to prevent the slumps and wars it causes. They believe it is possible for workers to get a better deal.

Three hundred years proves otherwise

(4) Come into contact with socialist ideas

Understanding and criticising capitalism are not enough.

Rejecting capitalism, "dropping out" or joining the Moonies, solves nothing. 

Realising that a radical change in society is the only solution is part of the change itself.

Become aware of the other Socialist parties around the world devoted to the same objective.

Become aware of the overwhelming power of the world's working class once they make up their minds to act in their own interest.

(5) Don't be afraid to question the socialist case

Socialists (unlike some "Left Wingers") are not fanatics.

We think a careful scientific approach is essential.

The capitalist media and the churches have a vested interest in telling us all that "you can’t change the world".

They insist that society is like it is because of "human nature".

They claim that socialist society could not work.

Such unscientific rubbish can easily be disproved.

But is does need careful thought and discussion.

(6) Resolve those doubts

Realise that there is no such thing as "human nature".

There is human behaviour — and it changes according to circumstances.

Pygmies in the Congo jungle don't behave like London office workers.

Modern factory workers don’t behave like Roman slaves.

When we have established socialism we shall behave differently because the basis of society will be different.

When we all own society’s means of living we shall have a different attitude to each other.

When we each have democratic power to influence conditions we shall behave differently.

(7) Join the socialist movement

When you realise that capitalism cannot be patched up, or cured by a "change of heart" -

When you can see that the immense changes in technology will force society to change in some way — Then — even though it’s an enormous task you’re taking on — You will decide that joining the world socialist movement for the abolition of capitalism is the only practical step.

My Country (1994)

From the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is it that gives us that sense of belonging that allows us to refer to a particular part of the Globe as "my country"?

Only the obsessive would believe that our place of birth is anything more than pure chance. To be born in England, France or Estonia owes nothing to the desire of the newly-born baby, and rarely to the intent of the mother.

So if it's got no intrinsic link to the process of birth, then it must have something to do with what starts to happen after that. In this respect, most of us have probably had pretty much the same experience.

The process of "naturalisation" starts passively enough in the early years at home. It may just be that there are certain things which have the word MY, in front of them. This is easy enough to associate when it’s "my rattle" or "my sweets", but then the association starts to become a little more obscure. "My house" is a big concept for a three-year-old to deal with, particularly as the house represents the greater part of their entire life.

Already, the "my" concept becomes so entrenched it becomes second nature to the impressionable young mind and begins to influence its relationship with others, normally children. "Mine" is good enough reason not to share the sweets or let another have a turn on the swing or to put up with the company of a boorish neighbouring child in the garden.

With the property concept of "My" now firmly established, the child trundles off to school for the real damage to be done. Over the next eleven years a series of key learning experiences will confirm the importance of "My" culture. The school uniform, often the school song and mascot, the school teams all help to form the sense of being part of something difference, something better.

The next bit is easy. It’s taught in the way we learn languages, the way we learn geography and the way we learn history. It tells us that we’re part of something called our country and our country is different from and better than all those other countries. This is confirmed by our history which is taught as a series of wars, battles and great men all which served to defend our country against the envious and predatory desires of other countries.

Given all this indoctrination can we really be surprised when the general nationalism of the majority becomes the vicious nationalism of their fellow travellers in organisations like the British National Party.

Judy Reid

Editorial: The future — we owe them one (1994)

Editorial from the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why should one in four children in Britain be forced to live below the official poverty line?

Why are vast numbers of young people so deprived of hope that they turn to anti-social crime, the escapism of drugs and video games designed to divert them from reality?

Why is the number of teenage suicides rising steeply?

Why must school-kids go without books and adequate teaching resources while the uniformed killers in the armed forces never face shortages when it comes to resources of destruction?

Why must parents worry about buying the best treatment for their sick children?

Why do tens of thousands of children across the world go blind as a result of Vitamin A deficiency caused by lack of sufficient milk in their diets while milk is being destroyed because it is being "overproduced" for market demand?

Why are countless millions of young people world-wide driven to prostitution, begging, sweated labour and scavenging on filthy scrapheaps?

Why are kids sleeping in the doorways of our local streets?

Why, in a world which can produce more food than the entire population needs, are the grotesque screams of starving babies and dying, malnourished children a routine sound effect of "business as usual"?

A system of society that can do this to its most innocent and vulnerable members is badly out of order. Why is this happening in a society which claims to be civilised? The heartless conservatives wish us to ignore these facts of contemporary society. Close your eyes and it will go away. After all, the sons and daughters of the very rich will not sleep on the pavements, join the dole culture or be forced to sell sex for a few lousy quid.

The reformers, including the politicians of the left with their endless schemes to sanitise the present system, have told us for over a hundred wasted years that all we need to do is elect them to parliament and a decent future for our children will be possible?

Do not believe those who tell you that there is any worthwhile future under capitalism. The capitalist system means production for sale with a view to profit. No profit, then to hell with needs.

The role of the vast majority of us under capitalism is to make profits for the rich and privileged few. We are the raw material of their success. Our poverty is the basis for their luxury.

Socialists say that the world should belong to all of us.

Only when it does will all of us benefit from the rich abundance of the earth’s resources.

For too long we have lived cramped existences so that a minority can live life to the full.

We have sacrificed our lives to the profit system and now they ask us to sacrifice the future of our children.

Look at a group of children playing happily.

They do not think about banks, mortgages, bailiffs or ethnic cleansing.

These hateful ideas are fed to them, like poison, as they are conditioned to live under capitalism.

Contrary to capitalism’s defenders, these children are not infected by some disease-like human nature which determines that they will grow up to be beasts of the capitalist jungle.

Human beings are social animals.

That’s why children love to play together.

That’s why, freed from the burdens of employment, we like to work together.

And given a society of cooperation to live in rather than a rat-race, we will be free to live like humans.

There is no more worthwhile cause to stand up for.

What does progress mean? (1994)

From June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scientific breakthrough!

American scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington have recently found a way of attaching living embrionic brain cells to computer silicon chips.

In a race with Japanese researchers, they are trying to create living computers. Biological engineering and micro-electronics - two of the most rapidly-advancing branches of technology - have been brought together to begin an entirely new line of development. It is a brilliant piece of work.

Rapid progress

But news like this makes most people a bit uneasy. Not only does it seem slightly sinister - like Frankenstein - but similar developments are coming thick and fast these days. Genetic engineering, satellite communications, smart bombs, tissue culture, laser surgery . . .  The speed of change is high - and rising.

Granny is lost

The older you are, the more difficult it is to adjust to accelerating change. Thousands of old people born into a world without cars or electric lighting are bewildered by the disappearance of old things and the welter of new ones. They regard young people as bizarre, unpredictable and dangerous.

To the 18-year-old, 80-year-old people are not just older and slower. They can seem quite alien. This (as well as easy robbery) is one of the reasons for attacks on old people.

We are different

We have become a different sort of people from our parents and very different from our grandparents. The family structure which used to keep children in prolonged contact with their grandparents has almost gone. And so the generations have ceased to feel they have anything in common. This is one of they ways our attitudes have changed. The religion-backed taboos against sex outside lifelong marriage have collapsed in what has really been a very short period of time. Many people have still not come to terms with it. And we are still changing.

No-one is in control

To call for a "return to Victorian values" (Margaret Thatcher) or "Back to basics" (John Major) is therefore to show just how little you understand the society you live in.

It shows, also, how worried our politicians - who represent the interests of the wealthy employers - how worried they are about the way society is developing. And it shows they don’t control it.

Capitalism perverts progress

Computer-controlled production systems may well increase profits, but they also impose pressure for social change because they confirm the possibility of producing plenty for everyone with less and less work.

The capitalists want the profit, but they don’t want to lose their ownership and control of society’s livelihood. So their politicians try desperately to hold back any idea of radical social change.

As a result, we still get changes, but they are distorted. Divorce, child abuse, rape, vandalism, violent crime, drug abuse, resurgent nationalism, terrorism - are all reactions to a society which is changing rapidly but still bottled up inside the class oppression of capitalism. The majority of the population are deliberately kept poor or insecure by the money system so that we have to work all our lives for them.

The industrial and agricultural - and military - potential of society is advancing all the time. But the power structure - the economic and political organisation of society - is stuck back in the 18th century. We are inventing the most terrifying weapons so that they can continue to defend their wealth against their foreign competitors - and ourselves - at the cost of our lives.

Redirecting progress

This is not progress for us. The change we desperately need now is a change in the structure of society itself. A change which will give us freedom from their domination and exploitation. So that we shall have control of the technology and science we develop. Control of the production and distribution we need to live on. Control of change itself.

Only we can make this sort of change. We are in the immense majority all over the world. We produce and manage everything already. The capitalist class and their power structure contribute nothing. But they consume over half the wealth we produce.

This sort of change cannot be gradual. Their governments are spending billions a year holding back social change, limiting democracy, preventing freedom. They have got the world - all of us - by the throat. What are we going to do about it?

Ron Cook

Sting in the tail: Tory caring (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the June 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory caring

Sir Louis Blom-Cooper and Professor Elaine Murphy have been sacked.

They used to work for the government-funded Mental Health Act Commission. This is a body set up to protect the rights of patients compulsorily detained in hospital under the Mental Health Act.

Louis and Elaine were experts in the field of Mental Health. They were chairman and vice-chairman of the committee. They worked their socks off in their endeavours to protect the mentally disabled.

They were sacked because they warned the government that inner-city mental services were "in crisis". They claimed that seriously disturbed patients were being discharged too early to make way for even more disturbed people. They said:

"Psychiatric wards were so overcrowded that patients had to share beds and sleep in corridors." (Observer, 24 April)

In order to protect the "care in the community" policy of the Tory market-mad ministers they had to be given their cards. They will be replaced by someone more amenable to market forces. 'Nuff said.

Having a good war

This was Lord Marshall, chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board during the miners' strike of 1984-5, reflecting on the strike in The Men Who Kept The Lights On (BBC2, 23 April):

"It was absolutely thrilling. A wonderful, wonderful year. I mean it's like being in a war. Wa, of course, is bad because people get killed, but if you're in a just war, a proper war, I mean war in inverted commas, it was just very, very exciting. Much more exciting than normal, everyday life, and after it was over there was a terrible sense of loss because there was nothing exciting for us to talk about any more." 

What a pity that the miners and their families couldn't have borne their hardships for just a while longer and so delayed this noble Lord's "terrible sense of loss"?

A horror story

Ever since the end of World War Two there has been a stream of "Now it can be told" stories. They always deal with episodes from that conflict which had hitherto been suppressed.

Another such story surfaced in an American TV programme about the Holocaust and was reported in the Jewish Chronicle on 15 April:

"Countless thousands of Jews died in the Holocaust because of a conspiracy between the US State Department and the British government not to rescue them . . . "

The US and British governments sabotaged a plan whereby American Jews would "put up the funds necessary to 'buy' 70,000 Romanian Jews" because both feared that the Germans mights actually agree to it! A British Foreign Office document complained about "the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy-occupied territory".

So the Jews were left to their fate. Were all those politicians and officials inhuman monsters? The thing to remember here is that anyone who is involved in the administration of capitalism's affairs may find themselves having to make such gruesome decisions "in the national interest". 

Labour and the CIA

The notion that international capitalism fears a Labour government in Britain has always been one of the favourite illusions of what is called the Left.

Under the "freedom of information" legislation in the United States documents have been released that show how silly that idea is:

"Ironically, a CIA report sent to President Truman in February 1950, headed The British General Election and US Security, concluded that 'US interests might be slightly better served by the return of Labour.'"

The CIA observed that advantages of a Labour victory included "greater domestic stability in Britain, especially of the standard of living falls", and "greater loyalty of British workers to the policies of the British government." (Guardian, 11 April).

Far from fearing a Labour government, certain sections of the capitalist class welcome it.