News in Review: Los Angeles erupts (1965)

The News in Review column from the October 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Los Angeles erupts

For a few days the spotlight was switched from the ever present horror of Vietnam and focussed on the United States itself.

Los Angeles, that most modern of cities—if such an outdated word as city can be used to describe a sprawl of over 452 square miles—erupted into violence. In an orgy of looting, arson and killing the Negro population, so often the victims of mob violence, themselves became the mob. The savage details were too well reported to need repeating, but many thousands of troops were needed to crush what amounted to a rebellion. When it was over, needless to say the Negroes were the worst-hit victims.

The suppression of the Negro, lasting for a hundred years after their “liberation,” ranging from murder to petty discrimination, and running through all strata of society, has produced a distrust and hatred that will take a very long time to overcome. At every moment and in every possible way, the Negro is made to feel inferior.

Such a situation, and the fact that it could be changed, must lead to an explosion. Los Angeles has been a modern legend, that personifies the so-called affluent society, the world of mass-produced commodities in profusion. Brash and ugly, a mass of sprawling suburbs and six-lane freeways where public transport has practically disappeared, the Watts-Willowbrook area where the explosion occurred is known as the Black Ghetto. Can anything illustrate the plight of the American Negro more than the use of this medieval word to describe the conditions of workers in an ultra-modern city?

The riot was crushed, but as long as hatred between workers remains on such a scale and is added to the normal tensions and frustrations of capitalism, such eruptions will continue.

Priorities in Kashmir

How cruelly does capitalism itself expose the innocent delusions of its own supporters !

Consider the case of the host of organisations which collect charity with the professed object of lightening the enormous burden of hunger and destitution in the world.

These charities have an extensive library of photographs of pitiful children, swollen-bellied near skeletons. They campaign with pictures of refugees and victims of natural disasters. Many people find this appeal irresistible, and the money flows in.

India and Pakistan are among the favourite subjects for this sort of charity; both countries have literally millions of starving people, and the problem is periodically intensified by famine and calamities like floods and cyclones.

Yet among the indescribable suffering of their peoples, India and Pakistan can afford to go to war. What does this make of the appeal of the charities?

A few months ago these same two countries were fighting over the Rann of Kutch. While this was going on a cyclone hit East Pakistan, killing thousands of people and making millions homeless. The Pakistani Forces could have been used for rescue and recovery work; they had the manpower and much of the needed equipment. But they could not be spared from the fighting.

This sort of inconsistency does not prevent the charity-mongers appealing for aid for India and Pakistan. What they overlook is that over the past few years aid has been pumped into those countries on a scale which mocks the charities’ wildest dreams.

According to India’s Information Minister, Mrs. Gandhi, Pakistan has received one and a half billion dollars worth of aid from the United States. Mrs. Gandhi also admitted to India having received “only” two million dollars’ worth, but, of course, she did not mention the other aid, open and disguised, which her country has had from the other side in the Cold War.

The point is that the aid was not meant to feed starving people. It went into the two countries’ military machines; Mrs. Gandhi has complained—and she may be right — that American equipment which was supposed to be directed against the Russians was in action in Kashmir.

The Indo-Pakistani conflict has highlighted one of capitalist’s most blatant scandals. It defies all reason, all sense, all humanity, for the world to pour its resources into a massive destructive effort when there is so much to do in the way of feeding and protecting the human race.

This will not be altered as long as capitalism lasts. The war in Kashmir was only the latest example of capitalism’s priorities, which have always counted human interests and comforts as of little importance.

To capitalism it is in the natural order of things that millions should starve and that a battle should rage all about them.

TUC through the hoop

What were trade unionists expected to make of this year’s TUC, when its General Secretary one day argues in favour of a certain policy and the very next day describes that same policy as a “shabby compromise”?

Confusion is inevitable. The connections between the unions and the Labour Party were once supposed to benefit the unions, but they are being used against them.

It is now possible, for example, for a Minister of Labour to use his speech as a fraternal delegate to declare that the time has come for the unions to accept legal restrictions on their freedom to negotiate. It is possible for General Secretary George Woodcock disconsolately to argue in favour of his “shabby compromise,” of forcing individual unions to refer their wage claims to the TUC for vetting, because this was their only hope of avoiding legislation to force them to refer their claims to a Government board.

The unions still seem determined to support the Labour Government, although its professed policy is, as Woodcock put it, to “. . . put some restraint on the growth of incomes”—a policy which Minister of Labour Gunter justified because without it “We shall fail to hold our place in a fiercely competitive world.”

The Labour Government is, in other words, rallying the TUC in support of its efforts to salvage the international trade of the British capitalist class. This was also the aim of past Conservative Governments, but they were never able to persuade the unions to jump through the hoop so easily. It is worthwhile to ponder how the TUC, and the Labour Party, would have reacted had it been a Tory Government which was threatening to take legal powers to restrain wage claims.

How Mr. Wilson would have thundered his denunciations of dictatorship from the grouse moors! What depths of cliché-ridden oratory Mr. Gunter would have reached! What a riotous assembly this year’s TUC would have been!

But it is a Labour Government which is now moving towards a clash with the unions. These regular, hysterical denunciations of strikes and wage claims are coming from the mouths of Labour Ministers. And this policy—much tougher than the Tories ever tried—is justified with the last-ditch argument that whatever a Labour Government may do they are better than the Conservatives. This argument, which, in fact, allows the Government to get away with anything, is of course quite unsupported by any evidence.

But it is an argument which we are probably going to hear a lot more of Woodcock himself said that prices and incomes have actually gone up more since the Labour Government started trying to keep them down than they did before.

The unions may be like David Low’s famous carthorse—slow, patient, even a little stupid. But they have thrown a few riders in the past and they will do so again.

Recession ?

The Labour Government are going one better than keeping their election promises by claiming that they are giving us something which was not in their programme last October.

They did not promise that within a year of their winning the election we would be in an economic recession, with many industries on short time and the prospect of more to come.

Some of the firms on short time—for example, Ford and Hoover—as well as many City Editors, blamed the recession on to Government policy. While this may be a convenient explanation, it ignores certain facts of capitalist life.

Slumps, like booms, happen when conditions are ripe for them. A big boom overrides any attempt at official control and a slump does not respond to Governmental efforts at revival.

Juggling with interest rates and restricting credit are not policies which fashion events, but largely reactions to those events. British capitalism is not alone in its present difficulties; many other countries are also experiencing them, which indicates that the recession may get deeper yet.

But if we accept the Government’s claim that the closing down of the economy is all their own work, there is a massively awkward question for them to answer.

What happens, in a slump, to their vision of an automated Britain? They came to power on a promise to build a British industry humming with the very latest and most expensive computers and automatic production equipment.

They spoke (in fact they still speak) of a Britain in the forefront of the technological age, driving for its markets under the impetus of massive investment and a fearless determination to innovate.

But in a time of recession industry is definitely not interested in investing in expensive equipment designed to make more of the very things which, because of the slump, cannot be sold. At such times industry is not inclined to innovate; it tends to pull in its horns and to wait for the danger to pass.

Wilson’s Britain of scientists and technologists was, in fact, one of Labour’s more horrible ideas. There need be no regrets that it has joined the long list of pledges, given solemnly but now forgotten, knowing no grave but their own inconsistency.

Things to come

Time, as they never tire of telling us, marches on.

The first men to fly were famous for their daring; the aeroplane was a glamorous marvel of the Edwardian age.

But the First World War showed that the sky was a battlefield, into which each side sent its balloons and aircraft to observe the enemy and to direct artillery fire.

It was not long before other aircraft were developed, to shoot down the observers. Then others were sent up to protect the balloons from attack and later came the fighters and the bombing ‘plane to improve on the artillery shell.

This was the birth of the military aeroplane. The sky is now becoming outdated as a battlefield; the daring young men of the future will probably fight it out in space.

The two Cosmic powers—Russia and the United States—now make no secret of the uses to which their space ventures are being put. Both countries admit that they have observer satellites aloft and America plans to send up a space laboratory to carry out experiments in what they call defence.

The nature of these experiments is not, of course, known but it seems that we are witnessing the opening of another battlefield.

The next step could be a space ship designed to knock out the observer satellites, then another to prevent them being attacked—and then perhaps dog-fights in space.

There is nothing fanciful in this. The military possibilities of space flights have always been obvious and there was never any cause to believe that they would be ignored in capitalism’s constant arms race.

This may rub some of the glamour off the astronauts, which will not be recovered by blatant propaganda dodges like President Johnson’s proposal to send them on world-wide goodwill tours. There is no goodwill in planning to destroy millions of people.

Space war adds another dimension to capitalism’s terrors. It is not a pleasant prospect, but nobody should be surprised that once again society’s resources, and the courage and skill of its people, are being perverted.

A marriage of convenience (1965)

From the October 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since they slipped into power last October the Labour Government have been pursued by speculations on whether they would come to an arrangement with the Liberals which would have the effect of keeping them in power. This speculation has, of course, become more intense as the Government’s majority has been slowly whittled down.

The idea of a Lib/Lab alliance, as the newspapers are fond of calling it, is not new. The Guardian, which is running a campaign in favour of it, recently published a series of extracts from editorials of 1912, 1924, 1926 and 1929 which advocated such an alliance (although it is difficult to appreciate what this was supposed to prove).

The whole thing is, in fact, one of the most grisly of all the spectres which haunt the Labour Party from their uncomfortable past. Their first attempt at Government, in 1924, was brought about only because the Liberals supported them, but the same Party turned Labour out of office as quickly as they had put them in. When they came back in 1929, Labour’s leader, Ramsay MacDonald, left us in no doubt about where he thought the blame for his previous defeat lay. “I am,” he told the press, “Going to stand no monkeying.”

This sounded very grand, Yet if anyone was doing any monkeying it was MacDonald himself, because despite his experience in 1924 he was once more relying on Liberal votes in the House to keep a minority Labour Government in power. This showed that Mr. MacDonald possessed the one essential quality of an “intellectual,” which is the ability to ignore inconvenient facts.

As it turned out, MacDonald went further than a mere voting pact with the Liberals. When the crunch came a couple of years later, when the unemployment figures were around the three million mark, when the finances of British capitalism were in turmoil, and when the Government were imposing panic cuts in expenditure, MacDonald did not wait for the Liberals or anyone else to defeat him in the Commons. He led the way into a coalition with the Liberals and the Tories. He joined hands with the men regarded by generations of Labour workers as representatives of the hated mine owners and steel masters, of the hard-faced men who had ground the working class down into unforgettable destitution.

There is no need to recall here the shattering effect which this had on the Labour Party. It is enough to say that the debacles of 1924 and 1931 made coalition a forbidden word in respectable Labour circles.

Of course, these same circles saw nothing wrong in their Party joining the wartime coalition, even if this was under the man who was a lifelong enemy of the working class, who had been openly contemptuous of starving miners and who had so zestfully edited the official British Gazette during the General Strike, when the workers were desperately defending what remained of their livelihoods. The war coalition was, apparently, different. Churchill was no longer cur enemy. He was our friend and protector. This coalition, said the Labour Party, was in what they called (but which they were not rash enough to attempt to define) the National Interest.

We should all be aware by now that when the bugles are blowing to rally us all to defend the National Interest a certain amusement can be had by observing countless politicians, men who swear by their own honesty and consistency, going back on a lot of what they ever said. Thus it was with the Labour Party, when they embraced their bitterest foe and joined the Churchill coalition in 1940. This gave them the experience of running capitalism which stood them in good stead when they took over in 1945 and had to tell the working class that the promises made during the war could not (naturally) be kept.

But no bugles are blowing now. The Labour Party cannot pretend that a pact with the Liberals would have anything to do with their precious National Interest. It would have only one object and that would be to keep the Labour Party in power. Ten regular Liberal votes in the House would enable Mr. Wilson to luxuriate in unaccustomed security of tenure at Number Ten. There is no secret about the price of these votes—a tailoring of the Government’s programme, to drop steel nationalisation and to push ahead with schemes like the Ombudsman.

Or the Labour Party could go into whole-hog coalition with the Liberals, and Mr. Wilson preside over a Government containing one or two Liberal ministers. Or again—another favourite dream of political wanderers—a new party could be formed, a so-called radical party with a programme consisting of bits and pieces from both Parties, mashed up and blended into something which, it is hoped, would attract massive electoral support.

Any of these is possible. It is evident that the Liberals, as distant from power as ever, are awaiting their chance. Mr. Grimond’s famous interview with the Guardian some months ago could not have been entirely a coincidence. It is more likely that the ground had been prepared in advance. This interview might have been Mr. Wilson’s chance to inspire his disconsolate supporters with a valorous, defiant refusal, to goad them forward on their devious, never-ending journey to the Promised Land. Instead, the Liberal offer was met with a heavy silence which, when we consider the business of coalition government, and of government itself, assumes a certain significance.

Governments are there to run capitalism, which means in the general National Interest of the capitalist class. Governments look after the economic affairs of that class, they keep up the machinery by which the capitalists assert their dominance in society. Governments concern themselves with customs laws, trading pacts, the police, prisons and armed forces. They look after capitalism’s finances and they do their best to weaken what bargaining power the working class may have in matters of wages, hours and so on.

Whether they are dictatorships or so-called democracies, governments always face a certain amount of opposition. This means that to stay in power politicians must exercise a deal of cunning and ruthlessness. The manner and the field in which these qualities—if that is the word for them—are applied varies with the type of government. In this country, where governments are elected by popular (if not very enlightened) vote, political skill often expresses itself in a politician’s ability to do one thing and persuade the mass of people that he is doing the exact opposite. This skill sometimes reaches a very high level, as, for example, when it was being practised by Baldwin and later Macmillan. It seems that Harold Wilson has also won his way into this distinguished company.

This is the perspective in which we should view Wilson’s silence at Grimond’s offer of an alliance. The Labour Party are supposed to be opposed to the Liberals, but in fact they have done little, in major policy, to displease them. True, they have pushed through a declaration that they intend to nationalise steel, but so far this remains no more than a declaration. On most other issues, as the Guardian never tires of bleating (“It will be a tragedy if the Government is brought down needlessly. Much of what it wants to do is common to the Liberal and Labour Parties.” 6/9/65), the two Parties are in harmony.

This means, in effect, that Mr. Wilson has the votes of the Liberal members. In other words, he has all the advantages of a Lib/Lab coalition without any of the disadvantages. He is doing one thing while convincing everyone that he is doing the opposite. In addition, he does not have the tiresome necessity of allocating jobs to the Liberals, he is not exciting the emotions of Labour Party workers who remember 1924 and he is left with the tactical asset of being able to fix the date of the next election.

This is by no means a surprising situation. The only thing to prevent an alliance between political parties is a difference of principle and the capitalist parties showed in 1931, and again during the war, that they are all united on the basic principle of protecting the National Interest of the British ruling class. Compared to this, whatever differences they may have are trivial. The Labour Party have always claimed they were basically different from the others, but experience shows us that in fact they are merely another administration for British capitalism.. Even more, they have claimed that their close connections with the unions would enable them to hold wages in check—in other words, to do capitalism’s dirty work—much more efficiently than the Tories could do it. Recent events at the T.U.C., and in Mr. Brown’s Department of Economic Affairs, shows that this is one claim Labour have made good.

The Wilson Government’s policies have upset many of their supporters; in the Guardian of 6th September last, for example, Mr. Reginald Paget, Labour M.P. for Northampton, was asking: “Ought a Labour Government, committed to Tory expediency, be permitted to continue in office? . . . should they be allowed another session?” The obvious answer to these questions is that it all depends upon Mr. Paget—only one vote, after all, is needed to turn the Government out. But who is really to blame for all these broken hopes? Mr. Paget is disillusioned simply because he had illusions to lose. He actually believed, in the face of all evidence, that a Labour Government would be different from a Conservative. Now that Labour have once again shown how similar they are, they have not only confused their friends; they have also confounded their enemies. Even Mr. Heath, strain as he might, can pick no specific quarrel with them—only vaguely accuse them of not doing the “right sort of deeds.”

The whole point is that, whether they formally admit it or not, all the capitalist parties are constantly in coalition to support the private property system of society. In many ways they actually need each other. But even more they need the votes of the millions of workers who are misled into thinking that capitalism is in their interests and who, if Mr. Grimond ever succeeds in getting Mr. Wilson to the church on time, will be lining the aisles to give the uneasy couple their blessing.

Ivan

After Leyton, What? (1965)

From the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Leyton by-election has passed into political history, and for a long time to come will be one of the psephologists’ favourite test-tubes.

It was also the psephologists’ nightmare, disproving all their predictions and setting the opinion polls to searching for what went wrong. This is all strongly reminiscent of the Truman victory in the United States in 1948. None of the pollsters cared to recall, after Leyton, that in 1948 they said they had found a hidden defect in their systems, that they had eliminated it and that such mistakes would not happen again.

In fact, there were signs before the votes were cast that things were not going too well for Mr. Gordon Walker. The Wilson government had not produced the promised rabbits out of the expected hats. The pensioners were annoyed about having to wait for their rise, the mortgagees were furious that their rise—in the interest rates—came upon them so quickly. On 20th. January, The Guardian’s reporter noticed “… a remarkably consistent switch away from Labour. It would not be sufficient to upset the Foreign Secretary’s anticipated election . . . but (it) would reduce his majority considerably.”

As it turned out, that was an understatement. Leyton confirmed a trend which has been developing for some time now —the trend towards an electoral mood more volatile than that which, for years after the war, stolidly returned “no change” verdicts in by-election after by-election. Orpington Man, now old and well established, has been followed by the perhaps more menacing figure of Leyton Man.

Along with the psephologists, the Labour Party are also looking for what went wrong. In a letter to The Observer, Lord Sorensen made it clear that he thought the defeat was caused by what he called “unworthy abstentions.” Having been kicked upstairs so that Mr. Gordon Walker could lose his seat, Lord Sorensen obviously feels the defeat especially strongly. But during the election, the Labour Party were content to accept what they presumed would be a favourable result: “I will consider the result a verdict on the Government and on the Opposition’s performance to date.” (Mr. Gordon Walker, at Leyton, 14th. January.) Well, the verdict is plain; even the verdict of those who voted by staying away from the polling booths. The Labour government has not been able to inspire its supporters to turn out to vote for it, which says very little for their talk, during the general election, of action and progress and urgency.

Lord Sorensen did not confine his strictures to abstainers: “. . . the deliberate denigration of Gordon Walker . . . demonstrates how far we have to go to ensure that electors vote on principles and policies rather than being swayed by extraneous secondary matters.”

Two things are apparent from this statement. The first is that Lord Sorensen is complaining about votes which lost his party a seat; if the election had gone the other way, he would have been full of praise for the voters’ sanity and principles. The second point, which follows from the first, is that what Lord Sorensen means by “voting on principles” is, in fact, voting blindly for the Labour Party, whatever their record, whatever hardships they impose upon the working class and however many promises they break.

It will be interesting to ask, now, what the Labour Party does to realise Sorensen’s dream of people voting on principles and policies. The first step in this should be, of course, for the Labour Party themselves to have some principles for the electors to vote on. But a look at the programmes which they have offered shows that principles are the last things the Labour Party has, or indeed wants.

What has happened, for example, to the “principle” of the nationalisation of land? To the “principle” of abolition of the House of Lords? (Lord Sorensen himself should be able to answer that one.) What has happened to the “principles” put forward by the Labour Party at the more recent elections —nationalisation of “sections of the chemical and machine tools industries” (1955) and the renationalisation of road haulage (1959)?

There was no mention of either of these in Labour’s 1964 programme, which means that any elector who was anxious to vote for them, innocently thinking them to be part of Labour’s principles, was disappointed.

Even more to the point, what has happened to the Labour Party’s opposition to the Commonwealth Immigration Act? When the Conservative government introduced the measure, Labour fought bitterly against it, and perhaps convinced some voters that they did so on grounds of principle. But since then their “principles” have, apparently, changed; the tears of defeat were hardly dry on Gordon Walker’s face when Labour’s Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice was telling the House of Commons that, far from abolishing the restrictions on immigrants, the government intends to ” … make stricter use of the existing powers of control . . .” This must have been very confusing to anyone at Leyton who wanted to vote, as Lord Sorensen advises, on the principle of the thing.

This confusion is cleared up only by realising that the Labour Party has no principle other than their basic support of capitalism. Within that, they will support any policy, temporary or otherwise, which seems expedient. To get into power, they will promise all sorts of things—Gaitskell’s tax cuts in 1959, George Brown’s three per cent mortgage last October—which they think will attract votes. They do not particularly care who joins their ranks, recruiting freely anyone who will pay their dues. (Some prominent men they have actually invited to join.) Labour’s preoccupation with collecting votes means that they do not bother about the intention and knowledge behind the votes. They anxiously solicit the support of people who are politically ignorant. The very last thing they intend to do is to encourage the electors to vote on principles, because that would be the death of them and of the parties like them.

This is not to say that the Labour Party does not offer a substitute for principles. Their leaders are constantly making what seem to be brave statements of conviction and intent, which probably impress people who do not care to look behind the empty phrase. Wilson, for example, told the T.U.C. last September that this is “… a time for choice, for action, for decision, for exciting change …” Gordon Walker told the voters at Leyton that he stood for “… the abolition of all weapons, both nuclear and conventional, except those needed for internal security and international peacekeeping,” which is the same as saying, that he stands for the abolition of all weapons except those that he wants to keep. It is this sort of mishmash of nonsense that the Labour Party offer as their principles, and which Lord Sorensen wants us to vote on.

The inevitable result of this is that the vote which elects a Labour MP is unstable. It is not a vote for any political principle, let alone a vote for Socialism, with all that implies. Sometimes it is a vote for a set of capitalist reforms like the National Health Service or an alteration in the Pensions Scheme. More often, it is a vote for a vague and ill-informed idea of what the Labour Party stands for—a vague idea that they stand for the interests of people who live on council estates, for closer relations with Russia and so on.

Perhaps it was this which caused Leyton to pass its scathing verdict on the Labour government before it had even had time to bring in the reforms which it had promised—an apt comment on the instability of a vote which is based on a lack of political consciousness. Perhaps it also brought about the defeat of Gordon Walker at Smethwick; the voters there apparently wanted immigration control yet they rejected a man who, as he himself pointed out, stood for just that.

But an unstable vote which switches from Labour to Tory in one election will as quickly change back to Labour again. It is reasonable to assume that anything which the Labour Party may have lost on the swings of electoral instability they have gained on the roundabouts. There are probably plenty of voters who support the Labour Party because they are convinced that they stand for higher wages, or that they would pursue a different policy from the Tories in disputes like those in Malaysia and Arabia. Now if the Labour Party was as interested in political principles as Lord Sorensen would have us believe, they would discourage such votes by pointing out, firmly and clearly, that on these issues their policy is as imperialist as that of the Tories. But this, of course, is something they never do.

No capitalist party can try to destroy the mutually supporting circle of ignorance and futility which keeps one or other of them in power. Any examination of the policies of these parties, in terms of principles and effectiveness, would compel the admission that practically every one of them was useless and that many of them were inspired by vote-catching expediency. It would compel the admission that, after all the speeches and the programmes and the promises, the problems which afflicted the working class when the Labour Party was born are still, in one way or another, troubling them today.

The Labour Party would have to admit something else besides. After nearly sixty years of their propaganda, after the position of great power which they have held and still hold, there are still enough workers who harbour racial prejudices to hound a Labour Minister from one Parliamentary seat to another. Racial theories cannot be separated from the rest of the false political ideas which the working class hold, and which the Labour Party have done nothing to dispel. If it is true that racism is among the more primitive and vicious of working class delusions, that is a bitter comment upon the confusion and ignorance which the Labour Party has helped to spread.

They can have no complaint if this confusion, which may help them at one time, harms them at another. From some aspects, elections are depressing affairs, because it is never very inspiring to witness the working class opting for another dose of capitalist suppression. But even more depressing the 1964 election saw the emergence of race as an issue, strongly in some constituencies, and underlying the campaign as a whole.

Douglas-Home has now indicated that the Conservatives intend to bring immigration more and more into the forefront of political controversy. It is not comforting to reflect upon the history of similar situations, and upon the possible outcome of this one. The alarming thing about racial theories is that, unlike most other working class delusions, they are so often asserted in the most extreme and relentless violence. Leyton at the moment is a psephologist’s test tube, but who dare say that one day it will not be remembered as the start of the experiment which blew up the laboratory?

Ivan

Indignity of the old age pension (1965)

From the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let there be no delusions about the purpose of old age pensions. They are not designed primarily to benefit the pensioners. A case in point is the first national pension scheme ever, in this country. The motive behind that scheme, whatever nonsense the politicians talked about it, was to find a cheaper way of keeping the old geezers going than sending them to the workhouse. Since then, the pension has been increased many times, but it is still inadequate to keep an old person in any sort of comfort. Hence the fact that millions of pensioners have to resort to National Assistance.

The basic pension for a single person is £3.7.6. a week. In London a furnished room costs a minimum of about £2.10.0. a week, which leaves very little for heating, cooking, beer, tobacco, clothes and food. Perhaps economies are possible; very little heat would be needed to cook the paltry amount of food which could be bought on that budget. Yet this is what Sir Alec Douglas Home referred to as “sharing in prosperity.” Truly, someone is prosperous, but it is not the worn out workers who make up the army of old age pensioners.

But, say the defenders of the Welfare State, there is always National Assistance. The N.A.B. considers that a single person needs £3.16.0. a week for needs other than rent. It is of course difficult to find out what allowance the Board makes for a pensioner’s rent, but so far as one can judge from published correspondence, is has been about £2.10.0. for a single person and £4.10.0. for a married couple. This, obviously, is acceptable to a pensioner, but it represents something far from prosperity, or even moderate security.

The scheme is bedevilled by complications and anomalies. For example, if pensioners live in a council house or flat, they are deemed to be paying a reduced rent, and their National Assistance reduced accordingly. They are investigated by the council and by the N.A.B.—the council want their rent, the Board want to keep their payments as low as they can. However delicately the investigations are carried out, the pensioners’ dignity is bruised; many of them, indeed, refuse to apply to the N.A.B. for that reason.

After a lot of cogitation the late Tory government introduced a “graduated” pension scheme. This was supposed to be a wonderful improvement. When the fanfares died away, it was apparent that the new scheme meant that a slightly higher pension would be paid, after higher contributions from workers and employers.

One thing which came to light later on, when the Labour government were proposing to increase pensions, was that, under certain conditions, the pensioners stood to lose under the graduated scheme. When the Labour government’s Bill was being debated, the Conservatives introduced an amendment to increase the weekly payments to those who worked after they were sixty-five. Referring to the existing scales,

“Lt. Cdr. Maydon (C. Wells) former parliamentary secretary, Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, said that if a single man deferred his retirement for the full five years, the State would be better off by £1,385. The man would have to live until he was 95 years old before he broke even” (Daily Telegraph, 4.12.64).

It is, we need hardly say, not curious that the Tories did not draw attention to this point when they originally introduced the Graduated scheme.

The amendment which Lt. Cdr. Maydon was supporting was rejected by the Labour government, in their familiar pose of the Pensioners’ Friend, on the grounds that they are engaged in a general review of all social security provisions. They now propose to increase the basic pension to £4.0.0. for a single person and £6.10.0. for a married couple. These new scales will come into force at the end of March. The Assistance payments are also increased, by 12.6d. and £1.1.0. respectively.

These modest rises amount to the Labour Government’s redemption of their election promises. The postponement of the higher payments until March 19th., while the rise in MP’s pay was backdated, aroused some misgivings among Labour MP’s, but the official answer at the time was that the amount of extra clerical work involved prevented any earlier increases. Then Mr. George Brown, Minister of Economic Affairs, let one of his many cats out of one of his many bags. Speaking at the Labour Conference at Brighton, he admitted that it was the economic ministers, Mr. Callaghan and himself, who had advised against earlier payment. “We simply” he said, “in this situation, could not do more than we have done.”

At this stage, we cannot foresee what will result from the present Review. But one thing is certain. The pensioners have nothing to hope for from the Labour Party, which upheld the Means Test when they were in office in the Thirties and which kept the pensioners worse off, when they were in power after the war, than did the subsequent Conservative governments.

As long as capitalism lasts, old people are going to suffer the indignities and deprivations which are inseparable from them today. Capitalism is interested in its workers only so long as they are a source of profit when they grow old they become just another Social Problem. But somehow they must be kept, so the State levies a contribution, from both the workers and their employers, to finance the payment of pensions later on. The basic concern is to keep capitalism running. Pensions are a side issue, full of the anomalies of what were the Ten Shilling widows, the disabled hanging on to life with their feeble fingertips, the embarrassments of National Assistance.

Yet the pensioners have a hope. They cannot, like their younger fellow workers, strike to improve their conditions. But there are six million of them and that is an awful lot of votes. That is why they are wooed and promised the Earth, by Labour and Tory Parties alike. At the moment, young and old are deceived by the promises. But they could use their vote, in unity, to set up the world of freedom and dignity, for human beings throughout their lives.

RAMO

Wasting time at the seaside (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is very considerate of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties to hold their annual conferences in the autumn.

At any rate, the seaside hotel keepers must think so, because the conferences bring them some welcome business just as the season is dying; and so must all those seaside landladies, who can keep the secret machines which put lumps into the porridge and burn the toast in profitable operation for another week or so. There is even the sea, which everyone expects to be cold in the autumn, allowing politicians to prove what lovable eccentrics they are by having themselves photographed taking a dip.

It is all good fun, although since the object of it is to win the game of power politics it can hardly be described as clean. But more than other any other reason for feeling grateful for the autumn conferences is that they provide us with something to chuckle over in the long, dark evenings ahead.

There are two types of annual conferences. One sort is run by the parties which are out of power; a certain amount of freedom is allowed here. In most cases—although there have been some famous exceptions, of which more later critics can be treated indulgently, as living proof of ruthless self-criticism, a restless drive for new ideas and a young, zestful heart.

When, for example, Edward Heath was asked on television what he thought about the prospects of receiving a lot of criticism of his leadership at this year’s Tory conference he replied, with a huge grin, that he enjoyed conferences and would be there all the time. Jo Grimond, far from being upset at the noisy activities of the Young Liberals at their conference, went out of his way to praise them and was photographed having an amiable drink with some of them.

There is no such carefree goodwill towards the rebels in a party which is in power. At their conferences the leaders on the platform, are trying to justify broken promises, to explain away diametrical changes in policy and, above all, to convince everyone that, although the present times are hard, with patience and support and unity all will be well. In this situation, critics are not welcomed as a stimulus; they are condemned—sometimes outlawed—as traitors to their party and to what politicians like to call the country.

There are many weary hours to be spent in the conference hall, and it is common for the newspaper men to try to brighten these up a little by fastening their attention upon some so-called personality of the conference. This usually means a lot of publicity for someone who, although he does no more than repeat the same weary platitudes and misconceptions which have been heard so many times before, wakes everybody up by sounding as if he actually believed what he says.

So it was this year with the Young Liberals, who came storming down to Brighton to demand all sorts of reckless things like “workers control” in industry (the inverted commas are intended, and necessary). These young people laid about them and one of them went so far as to shatter the peace of the conference by swearing—or at any rate he said “bloody” and “damn”, which in this age of Kenneth Tynan probably no longer rate as swear words.

The newspapers loved it and decided that no title would be appropriate for the Young Liberals short of Jo Grimond’s Red Guards. It is interesting to wonder what the fanatical young hooligans in Peking would think about being compared with a few hysterical students daring to say “bloody” to an assembly of Liberals on an autumn afternoon at an English seaside resort.

Such, however, are the ways of the press, which also has a liking for putting the finger on what they consider to be political stars of the future who enter the limelight at a conference. This is what the papers did some years back to Ray Gunter, who has now risen so far and so fast that he has the important job of implementing the very policy on wages which his party once scorned. This year, at the TUC, some reporters decided that Leslie Cannon, President of the Electrical Trade Union, showed by his speech that he is a future MP, perhaps even a Minister.

It is hardly necessary to point out that to win this nomination for future stardom a man has to agree with official policy. No member of the Labour Party has ever been selected as a rising leader after making an attack, no matter how capable, on his party’s line on wages or nuclear armaments; Frank Cousins, the most prominent of the critics on those issues, has always been regarded as something of a joke. Still less would a person be noticed for attacking the fundamentals of the Labour Party—its capitalist policies, its obsession with leadership, its unavoidable failure. The newspapers have their own standards of success and they are sticking by them.

Behind all the ballyhoo and the alleged drama and excitement what are conferences for? Every man in the street knows that they are supposed to lay down their party's policy and to take decisions based on that policy. A simple man in a backward street may even think that, because the capitalist parties profess to be democratic, the decisions taken by their conference delegates are binding.

The first thing to say about this is that some of the delegates’ votes are cast in ways which are anything but an expression of their members’ opinions. At this year’s Labour conference the voting policy of the Amalgamated Engineering Union changed suddenly from support of the government to opposition. This was not because the AEU delegates had received different instructions from their members. It simply happened that their leader, Bank of England director Sir William Carron, who is an unmovable supporter of the government, left Brighton for a meeting of the board of the Fairfield shipyard.

This apparently left the AEU delegation floundering, until a series of other absences gave the leadership to Hugh Scanlon, who is generally critical of the government. The result of this was that the AEU, voting as whoever was their leader at the time wished, was one day for the government and another against it.

Yet even without this sort of maneouvering, the votes of a conference are anything but decisive. Labour this year declared several times in favour of the government—on wage freezing, Rhodesia, foreign policy. But when the conference went the other way on other issues—redundancy, Germany and support for America over Vietnam—Ministers made it plain that they would take no notice. It was all summed up by Harold Wilson himself, in one word, when he asked what he intended to do about the famous Cousins victory over work sharing—“Govern”.

This has of course happened before. In 1959, when Labour was licking its wounds after Macmillan had thrashed them at the polls, they decided at one of their rowdiest conferences not to follow Hugh Gaitskell’s advice to delete Clause Four from their constitution. So in theory, and by conference decision, the Labour. Party stands for the sort of capitalism where all the means of production, distribution and exchange are nationalised. But of course they have not the slightest intention of doing anything about it.

Poor Gaitskell had a knack of infuriating his party’s conferences. Another example of a refusal to accept inconvenient decisions was when, after the 1960 vote in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, he declared his intention to “fight, fight and fight again” and, because on that occasion some of the big unions had voted against him, questioned the morality of the block vote which had always been accepted as long as it docilely accepted the policy of the platform:

I sometimes think, firmly, that the system we have by which great unions decide their policy before even their conference can consider their executive's recommendation is not really a wise one or a good one.

It is clear that when a conference agrees with its leaders it is the authentic voice of democracy, rich in wisdom. When it disagrees it is irresponsible and treacherous. The peculiar thing is that, although the members of the capitalist parties must know this very well, they are still prepared to be delegates to their conferences, they still work for their party, they still welcome its taking power.

The plain fact is that whatever a conference may decide, a party’s policy is already fixed. No matter how bloodthirstily the Tory hangers and floggers pursued their prey at conference, Conservative Home Secretaries stuck out for penal reform. No matter what support the Rhodesia lobby gathers, the Conservative leadership must agree that the Smith regime should be brought to an end.

Similarly, even if the 1960 vote on nuclear weapons had not been reversed, no Labour government would have surrendered the British Bomb simply because their conference had told them to. Whichever way the vote went on this year’s battle over incomes, the government's mind was made up and the more coercive Part IV of the Prices and Incomes Bill was ready to be brought into operation.

And while we are on the subject, there is something which we should notice about the Prices and Incomes Bill. It is the first openly anti-trade union legislation for something like 40 years—and it is the work of a party which came into existence as a result of a conference decision of February, 1900, to establish

a distinct labour group in Parliament . . . which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour and . . . with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency.

What, we asked, are conferences for? Even if their decisions can be, and are, ignored they are often an opportunity for a party to pronounce on its policy. Perhaps some people may prefer to describe this as warning the working class what to expect, or as making the promises the breaking of which later conferences will have to explain away. In 1963, for example, Labour was hypnotised by the Wilson vision of a technological Britain, with a wise government guiding massive investment into the “science based” industries, with technicians enthusiastically at work in their laboratories and at their drawing boards and with everyone’s wages going up in a nice, steady, organised curve. It was all very good for the headlines, for the electoral image and all the other political public relations man's obsessions.

It usually happens that at such times there is so much concern with a party’s public image that nobody notices the policies which are being expounded from the platform do not amount to much. Consider George Brown’s unoriginal idea of settling the Vietnam war by recalling the Geneva conference—the very conference which first set up the division of the country and so played its part in bringing about the present war there.

At other times the publicity a conference receives can be disastrous for the party, like the 1960 Labour uproar over CND and the public spectacle of Tory leaders savaging each other as they clawed for the place left vacant by Macmillan’s retirement during the 1963 Blackpool conference.

Or a conference can be an outlet for a party's donkey workers. It can give them a break from the hard slog of committee work, canvassing, addressing. They can come to express their doubts and disappointments, to wonder what happened to the visions they once had, Then they can stifle their doubts, admire their leaders and finally submerge themselves in what they call loyalty, but for which there is an unkinder if more accurate name, at a mass rally. Then they can go back to the donkey work with renewed energy.

No conference ever probes, or even discusses the facts. No resolution ever says that the parties of capitalism exist to run the social system which oppresses and degrades millions of human beings, that this system can only be run in the interests of a minority and to the detriment of the majority. Labour’s “left wing” come to their conferences convinced that they are looking for the lost soul of their party—none of them points out, perhaps none of them realises, that a capitalist party is bound to deceive, to override its members’ wishes and to disappoint its followers by pushing through unpleasant and inhuman measures.

Conferences make a lot of noise, exhale a lot of hot air, attract a lot of publicity. But when it is all over, when the delegates have gone home and the hall has been cleared and the seaside has sunk back into its out-of-season doze, one thing is abundantly clear.

It was all a waste of time.

Ivan

News in Review: Verwoerd—hypocrites at work (1966)

The News in Review column from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Verwoerd—hypocrites at work

Anyone who had been able to forecast the assassination of Dr. Verwoerd would also have had no difficulty in imagining the comments of world statesmen.

These comments, in their many tones, were all determined by the international interests of the countries whose leaders were making them.

It was also predictable that there would be widespread condemnation of the use of violence, and that many world leaders would say the use of force can solve no problems.

President Johnson, for example, said the assassination was “a stroke of violence that shakes the sensibilities of men who believe in law and order”. It was clear that the President was grimly forgetting some inconvenient facts.

During the last war the Allied leaders did not condemn the violence of the attempts on Hitler's life; they did not say then that assassination is a primitive and savage act.

The United States is now keeping hundreds of thousands of troops in Vietnam—much to the outrage of the sensibilities of many Americans who also believe in law and order—in an attempt to prove that their kind of violence works.

This is typical. Cyprus and Algeria are only two recent examples of the results of politicians stubbornly believing that violence can be useful.

Capitalism, in fact, is a social system which uses force constantly and which can never attempt to solve its disputes in any other way.

Hypocrisy is an art which politicians must learn to master. There is no more apt occasion to employ what they have learned than when one of their number dies.

Perhaps, when Verwoerd died, they were all secretly agreeing with Malta's Borg Olivier. “Let us hope,” he said, “That it does not happen to us”.

U Thant exposes UNO

Few things have more cruelly exposed the futility of that international white elephant, the United Nations Organisation, than the possible standing down of its Secretary-General U Thant.

UNO was once supposed to be the answer to war, because the major world powers would all be members, because every country would bring its disputes to be settled at the Assembly and because the Organisation would have at its disposal an international armed force which would police any trouble spots.

It did not take long to break down this image.

U Thant complained that UNO has not yet ". . . achieved universality of membership”—meaning that the United States, as part of its struggle with China, vetoes that country’s attempts to join.

He condemned the fact that the Vietnam war is an example of ". . . relying on force and military means. . .” as if there has ever been any sign of a capitalist power carrying on a struggle in any other way.

Over Vietnam, the United States pretends that UNO does not exist. This is not the first time this has happened. In many cases when a country’s interests have been threatened, and it has not been sure of the formality of UNO support, is has simply ignored the so-called peace-keeping Organisation.

Russia has done this several times. Britain did it over Suez and the Americans went into Korea before UNO had had a chance to consider the matter. (There was never any pretence that, if UNO had voted against America over Korea, the troops would have been withdrawn.)

UNO was founded on the idea that capitalism’s problems can be settled around a table and that the trouble in the past was that the big powers had not tried hard enough to do this.

A fatuous notion, which has been exposed again and again. Now UNO’s secretary has himself spoken up, and revealed that he too realises the Organisation is trying to do the impossible.

Confusion on the left

It is obvious that those trade union leaders who back the wages freeze are not acting in the interests of their members. But even those who oppose the freeze are hopelessly confused when it comes to politics. This was well shown at a meeting on September 1 organised by five of the unions opposing the freeze.

Not seeing Socialism as a practical alternative, the five general secretaries who spoke offered their own solution to the present financial problems of the British capitalist class: cut military spending overseas; impose import controls; launch a productivity campaign and end the status of sterling as a reserve currency. On this last point, loud applause followed a statement of the general secretary of the Association of Scientific Workers in which he said that they did not want “our” currency being a commodity traded in by foreign bankers! Again, Clive Jenkins of ASSET commended De Gaulle’s policy of erecting a fence round France to prevent Americans buying up French industries. “I’d like to see the same here”, he said amidst applause.

This petty patriotism expressing itself as a dislike of international bankers (and America) is a characteristic of the Left, one which clearly distinguishes them from Socialists. Socialists know that patriotism is a delusion as workers have no country.

Jenkins' main charge against the Labour government was that it was incompetent. Wilson was wrong, he said, in claiming to have been blown off course; he had steered right into the eye of a hurricane. “Had the government not heard of Keynes?” he asked, suggesting that since Keynes any government that allowed unemployment to grow must be incompetent

This is another myth of the Left. Governments fail to solve our troubles not because they are incompetent or insincere or irresolute but because they are trying to do the impossible. Our problems just cannot be solved within capitalism. The Left, with their so-called solutions, merely serve to keep alive the myth that capitalism can be made to work in our interests. That is why Socialists oppose them.

Retreat to the Thirties

In some mysterious way, the Labour Party have been able to establish themselves as the party which can control capitalism’s economy.

Perhaps this idea can be traced to the pre-war years, when Labour embraced the Keynesian doctrine which was supposed to have the solution to the sort of slumps which persisted during the Twenties and Thirties.

It was all supposed to be very simple. A slump meant low purchasing power, investment in the doldrums, reduced demand for workers.

The solution was to increase purchasing power by cutting taxation, step up investment with tax incentives and promote a demand for labour by launching out on public works schemes: roads, hospitals and so on.

These so-called remedies are, in fact, quite useless. And perhaps the Labour government have realised it.

At last month’s TUC, Harold Wilson threw out the warning which is an especial favourite with him lately: “. . . one false, careless, regardless step . . . could push the world into conditions not unlike those of the early Thirties”.

If this were true, and the Labour Party were keeping faith in the Keynesian economics they have propounded for so long, the government would now be stimulating investment, cutting taxes, building hospitals and schools as fast as they can.

But, in fact, as we all know, they are doing exactly the opposite.

Does Wilson now think that Keynes' theories are bunk? Has he forgotten all his party ever said about slumps? Does he realise that capitalism is out of control and always has been?

Or does he ponder on another event of the early Thirties? Some people would say there is no need for Wilson actually to leave the Labour Party to imitate Ramsay MacDonald. Others would reserve their judgment.

History repeats itself

The oft repeated phrase “History repeats itself’ is a half truth. It derives from the desire.to put into fewer words the idea that like situations produce like results.

In the latter half of the 18th century the proposal was made that, as wages were so miserably low, they should be supplemented by poor relief.

Eighteen Berkshire justices, including seven clergymen, met at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland near Newbury and set down a minimum scale for workers and their families. This scale was adopted throughout the country and where wages did not provide the minimum it. was built up by payments from the rates.

Historians have not failed to point out that this could only, and did, resultin employers paying the lowest wage possible in the knowledge that their workers would get by on the combined wage and poor relief.

Compare this with the following from the Teddington and Hampton and The Richmond and Twickenham Times of Saturday, August 13, 1966.

This paper quotes from the parish newsletter of the Reverend Emrys Evans, vicar of All Saints’ Church. The Rev. Evans urges

the elderly to take advantage of a part-time employment scheme organised by the Richmond upon Thames Council for Social Service, in which they may work either on a casual basis or a 24-hour week at an hourly rate of l/3d.

He adds that those who have already applied for work have a wide variety of skills, ranging from former book-keepers to shop assistants and that they may still be of real service to the community,

“and at the same time augment your pension”.

Words and deeds

On April 29 the Hampstead Labour Party passed the following resolution by 26 votes to 6:

This Hampstead Labour Party views with alarm the Government’s increasing and continuing support of the American war in Vietnam. It is aware also of the pressure on the Government to make a token military commitment in this war, perhaps in the form of British ‘‘observers” or “advisers".

We therefore wish to state in advance that should the Government yield to such pressure, the Hampstead Labour Party will re-examine its relationship with the national Labour Party and invite other constituency parties to do the same.

On July 25 a Foreign Office spokesman stated that there were four hundred British military engineers in Thailand helping to build a military airport at Loeng Nok Tha (see Financial Times, 26 July). Loeng Nok Tha is in north-east Thailand and it is from this area that three-quarters of the air raids against North Vietnam are launched (see Economist, 3 September). So troops, under the control of the Labour Party government are helping the war effort in Vietnam. They are in fact helping to build an airfield which American planes can use for bombing raids on North Vietnam. If this is not "a token military commitment in this war” what is?

Yet, to date, there has been no news of any breakaway move by the Hampstead Labour Party.

The Government’s confidence trick (1966)

From the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Switch selling on wages

In the commercial fringe where firms concentrate on a quick turnover before the police catch up with them, switch selling is an accepted method of breaking down a customer’s sales resistance.

It is very simple. A firm advertises—or a shop displays— something at a bargain price. When the customers start pouring in they are told that naturally there was a terrific rush for such a snip and that unfortunately the cut-price stuff has all been sold. But there is another model, a little dearer but still a fantastic bargain . . . Surprisingly, they fall for it.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, they have also fallen for the latest example of political switch selling—which is not confined to any dubious fringe but is openly practised by the most respectable parties. The Labour Party got the voters into their shop by advertising a dynamic, expanding British economy in which everything was nicely under the control of Harold Wilson and his university economics wizards and where wages and production would rise in a planned, consistent curve.

In their 1966 election manifesto, Time For Decision, Labour claimed that under its leadership this country had “. . . fashioned the new instruments of policy with which, under the guidance of the National Plan, a new and better Britain can be built”. This was such an attractive bargain that millions of the electors paid out with their votes to get it.

Now they have had the switch. The government are, of course, very sorry; the National Plan, and all the other alluring things they said they could organise into existence, are not in stock. They forgot to mention in their election brochure that it all depended on the goodwill and the profits of overseas financiers. In the meantime all those expectant Labour voters who came in to buy the latest Wilson bargain will have to be content with something else—the wage freeze, the credit squeeze, government plans for recession and unemployment.

Switch selling succeeds because the customers, whatever their disappointment, still believe that they have got a bargain. The Labour Party’s confidence trick depends on a similar misconception; the voters have to be convinced that the switch is actually, in their interests. They have to be persuaded that we are all together in a desperate struggle for survival and that in this there are no sectional interests, that we are all responsible for our own little bit of what is called the National Interests.

This is a favourite subject of the Prime Minister. At this year’s TUC, after laying about him on all the old bogies of restrictive practices, wage claims and so on, he went on to talk about ‘‘our country” and to ask for “. . . assent to what the national interest requires”. Most of the delegates were too busy applauding the Prime Minister to notice that there has been a change of the Labour Party line. During those famous 13 years of Tory rule Wilson was always sure that the British population was divided into classes, so that some people were privileged to own a lot, receive a high income, live in sumptuous homes, send their children to the best schools, while the rest were condemned to inadequate wages, poor houses, obsolete and restricted schooling.

Now even Harold Wilson does not pretend that his government have done anything to alter the basis of society. In a speech on April 29 last to the AEU national committee, he declared that he had called for local factory committees ". . where each side will put pressure on the other side to get maximum production. . .” which was by any standards an admission that there are still two sides.

But at the same time the Prime Minister wants us to accept that there has been a miraculous transformation and that the strife-racked, divided, class-ridden Britain of Macmillan and Douglas-Home has suddenly disappeared and been replaced by a country where the interests of every clerk, bus driver, miner and scientist are the same as the landlords and the shareholders. This is a remarkable variation on the technique of switch selling, an innovation for which Wilson deserves to be remembered. For his switch results in the customers being offered the goods they are supposed to have rejected in the shop next door.

The best way to beat the switch sellers is to show them up for what they are. The first, basic fact about Britain is that the vast majority of its people depend for their living on getting a job. Even though they may have saved up a bit of money, or even bought some shares in a building society or even on the Stock Exchange; even though they labour with a pen or in a laboratory or at a drawing board; even though they travel to work each day in a dark suit with creases you could cut yourself on; when it comes down to it they have to go out to work for a wage.

There is a very simple, and very accurate, name for these people. They are the working class. We can get a rough idea of their numbers from the Report of the Board of Inland Revenue for 1963/4, which estimated that there were 20½ million people getting an income, before tax, of £1,000 a year or under.

We can get more than a rough idea of the lives of these people—because we are ourselves members of this class. It is members of the working class who live in the 1½ million houses which the 1961 Census revealed as being without an indoor or an attached lavatory, and in the nearly half a million London households which, according to the Milner Holland Report, do not even have a share in a bathroom. Of course not all working class homes are like that; a lot of them are monotonous semis in the suburbs and they have bathrooms and lavatories and fresh painted doors and misty curtains behind which the poverty is a steady ache instead of the short, sharp agony of the slums.

We know what working class life means. The budgeted holidays, clothes, food. The council schools where kids are trained to become future wage slaves. The hire purchase structure of our lives, which only needs the sack—or redeploymcnt, as Harold Wilson called it at the TUC—to destroy it.

What do we know of the other people in society? It may have escaped attention, while the Prime Minister has been thundering and threatening at the TUC “. . . we have the right to ask that each hour worked must be filled with 60 minutes’ worth of work well done”, that there are people who do not need to work yet who live lives which are fuller and more secure than the working class could ever dream of.

There is a simple and an accurate name for these people, too. They are the capitalist class. They own the land, the factories, shipping companies and airlines and so on. They also own, in a rather more involved way, the nationalised industries; because of their ownership they receive the sort of incomes which enable them to live without having to go out to work. The capitalists are a minority of the population; the same Inland Revenue Report estimated that there are about 12,000 people owning wealth worth £200,000 and over.

The capitalists’ wealth, and their incomes, take many forms. The Labour Party promised that their Land Commission Bill would give the land to the people (although surely nobody was expected to believe that). But so far there has been no disturbance of Britain’s massive landholdings—the Duke of Westminster’s 138,000 acres, the Duke of Northumberland’s 80,000, the Duke of Devonshire’s 72.000.

A capitalist can get a lot of money from buying and selling companies; Mr. Wilfred Harvey, once chairman of the British Printing Corporation, was estimated in December last year to have made over £1 million in this way. Or perhaps a shareholder prefers to sit back and simply let his dividends roll in—dividends which, whether they arc held steady under the government squeeze or whether they go up or down, can still provide a capitalist with a very comfortable life.

However the wealth of a capitalist comes to him, there is only one point of origin: the exploitation of those millions of workers. Capitalism lives on exploitation and a firm which cannot produce its profits will quickly die. That is why capitalism concerns itself with the continual refinement of the techniques of exploitation—why it has enslaved man to the methods of mass production, why it has spawned machines like computers to devour costly and repetitive operations, why it sends young men to universities to study the psychology, the mathematics and the logistics of exploitation.

From the proceeds of exploitation the capitalists can live very well. Some of them let us look over their homes at week-ends and, for half-a-crown a head, we can drool over the opulence and ponder upon the startling fact that some human beings actually do have the chance to live a full life. They do not rely on credit accounts on hire purchase debts for their clothes and their domestic equipment. They get the chance to develop their abilities and their talents; their children go to the schools which exist on the comfortable assumption that they are training the future dominant privileged class.

This is Britain today, after two years of Labour rule. When we consider these facts, the panderings and the manoeuvres of the TUC fall into their correct perspective of irrelevance.

Perhaps the trade unionists at Blackpool really thought their decisions were significant; perhaps they really thought they were helping to build the new society. At any rate, it is better to assume they did; unless we grant them sincerity most of the speeches and the decisions of the TUC would be too awful. Yet trade unionists, of all people, are always being brought face to face with the realities of capitalism and now they have once again been shown the futility and impotence of the party most of them helped into power.

Is it too much to expect that such hard-hearted people should realise they have had the switch worked on them, and should stop waiting about for the next fast operator to come along?

Ivan

The Trade Unions (1966)

From the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Webbs’ wrote their History of Trade Unionism in 1894 they defined a Trade Union as “. . . a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining and improving their conditions of employment”.

A modern historian could be excused for amending that definition to read, “A continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of seeking plausible arguments why they should refrain from making wage demands”.

We have been browsing through Trade Union Congress reports of the past 20 years to try to find a year when there was no debate on wage restraint. We had no success.

During the years immediately following the last World War we find the TUC urging support for the Attlee government’s policy of a 10 per cent increase in productivity with austerity in wage demands. A few years later, with the 10 per cent allegedly achieved, there come demands for greater increases in productivity coupled with wage restraint to reduce export prices and undersell competitors in foreign markets.

At the 1951 TUC the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, told the delegates that, although world prices were stable, they must avoid making substantial wage demands during 1952.

Yearly, after that, the same tune is played with a slight change in the lyrics. For “wage restraint” we read “pay pause”, “deferment of wage claims” or “restricting wage demands”. These are argued as necessary because of the dollar gap, the adverse trade balance, the Suez Crisis or whatever threat was prominent during a particular year.

When the Labour Party is out of office the tune at the TUC is in a different key. The bulldozing bass of Arthur Deakin, the Transport and General Workers’ Union’s arch priest of wage restraint, gives place to the applauded baritone of Mr. Campbell of the National Union of Railwaymen and Frank Cousins of the Transport Workers. In 1956 these two took the limelight by opposing wage restraint under a Tory government and advocating a return to policies of the previous Labour government.

So, year after year, we find one government or another demanding that wages be held in check in the interest of national economy and the trade unions agreeing with the need for the economy but differing with the measures to be taken.

No previous government has gone to the limits of the present Labour government in attempting to force a wage freeze on the workers. Pleas for restraint are now giving place to legal measures to pare wages down. During recent weeks many Unions have announced their intention to support the government’s policy and the 1966 TUC has endorsed that policy, “reluctantly”.

The opposition, with a few exceptions, did not condemn the sacrifice of workers’ wages at the altar of capitalist crisis. The objection was to the government’s proposal to legislate to enforce a wage standstill because the law could be used by a future Tory government. How quaint! Prison punishment must be more pleasant under a Labour regime. Perhaps the cells will be padded.

The need to stabilise the £ was accepted. A lovely phrase that, “stabilising the £”. We wonder how many workers know what it means. Mr. Carron does. He knows it means that there is a need to show foreign financiers that the interest on their loans to this country is safe, that the wage slaves are frugal, docile and hard working and if they should get a bit rebellious, Mr. Wilson’s government is going to govern.

Trade Unions do not oppose capitalism and at their TUC forum they have never done more than debate the weight and size of the shackles that bind the working class. To them there is no alternative to capitalism with its production for profit and competition for world markets. They see no class struggle, only a struggle between nations. They create a picture of a good old trade ship “Great Britain” worked by an amicable crew of workers and employers with the Labour Party at the helm, steering towards the horizon of prosperity. There may be injustices in the share-out of the ship’s rations but, when the waters are troubled or the winds adverse, the whole ship’s complement must pull together to keep it on its course. It’s a pretty picture, a lovely illusion, a mirage.

This is not a new trade union outlook. They have, at times, been rebellious but, fundamentally, their thinking has not changed since their birth. In its early days delegates submitted and read papers to the Trade Union Congress. A few illustrations taken at random will demonstrate the continuity of ideas and policies.

The secretary of the Bookbinder’s Society in 1860 wrote:

. . . that the true state of employer and employed is amity, and that they are the truest friends.

A paper to the 1887 TUC:

It is the boast of most Trade Union secretaries that they have prevented more strikes than they have originated.

J. Kane, secretary of the Amalgamated Ironworkers in 1869:

I am determined to give no encouragement to men who refuse to obey and to abide by the written laws of our association . . . encourage me to labour on in the cause of justice and truth.

Through the years TUC debates have centred around class collaboration, suppression of strikes and the disciplining of unruly members.

There is a story of an old trade union leader who used to poke his head round the employer’s office door and ask, “Owt?” When he received the reply, “Nowt”, he would turn to his members and say, “Out”.

The story is, of course, an exaggeration but it is indicative of an attitude in days before trade unions gained their much sought after recognition. Recognition once achieved the old style leader was doomed, ridiculed and elbowed out by men more skilled in the rhetoric of negotiation.

The new men sat round the negotiating table with the employers and argued, often skilfully, not on the basis of class interest but of “justice” and “fair play”. They made agreements on behalf of their members and, when signed, the agreements were deemed to be binding on the employers and the trade union members alike. If conditions changed and agreements became unsatisfactory causing workers to rebel, the union officials had the job of bringing the rebels to heel.

When labour power was plentiful and when all industry was in the hands of private enterprise the employers could restrain wage demands without recourse to government help. But with the state extending its control over industry and labour power finding a sellers’ market, governments find themselves forced to take a more interfering hand.

Within capitalism much of the argument advanced by trade unionists is sound. Some years ago a newspaper columnist illustrated this with a tale of a benevolent employer who paid his workers a high wage for short hours. When he went out into the market to sell his goods he found himself outpriced by his competitors. He returned to his workers and told them that either he must reduce production costs, including their wages, or he would go out of business. To keep their jobs they accepted lower wages and longer hours.

What this story omits to tell is that in every country of the world the same state exists. Workers everywhere are urged or forced to moderate their wage demands in the interest of their own nation’s economy and to keep their jobs.

That is why Socialists say that there is no solution to the workers’ problems within capitalism. While there is capital and labour they will be perpetually antagonistic. While wealth is produced for a competitive market the capitalists will strive to keep the workers’ portion at a minimum. While profit is the stimulant to production the workers will be a subject class. While there is a wages system wages will be under continuous pressure. While workers continue to elect governments to run capitalism they will be urged, cajoled, commanded and compelled to moderate their wage demands.

While trade union policy is hidebound by capitalist notions the unions will 'be feeble instruments—“for the purpose of maintaining and improving their conditions of employment”.

W. Waters

Labour's failure (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party assert that what makes them different from the Tories is their belief in government-directed planning for all aspects of production — which industries shall be encouraged to expand and which to contract and how much all of them shall produce. The aim of such planning is to secure maximum total production; wages as high as possible and. of course, "full employment". On the other hand, the Tories would leave it all to market forces with the managers of industries making their own decisions about how to react to market changes in demand. For the Tories, government intervention would be restricted to promoting competition, as the way to reduce costs and prices and enable British industry to be competitive in world markets.

The Labour Party's ideas were embodied in The National Plan, a volume of nearly 500 pages, adopted as official policy by the Wilson Labour government in 1965. The ineffectiveness of Tory policy has been shown by, for example, the increase from 1⅓ million when they entered office in 1979 to 3½ million seven years later. One of the factors in the increase in unemployment has been the long-term decline of British manufacturing industry. Some of present unemployment is due to world recession, the rest is due to the shrinkage of manufacture. In 1900 British exports of manufactured goods represented 33 per cent of the world total of such exports. In 1965 it was down to 14 per cent and is now about seven per cent. On balance Britain is now an importer of manufactures. It was noted in the 1965 National Plan that the British share which was a quarter of the world total in 1950. had declined by 1962 to less than one sixth. The extent of the decline can be seen in a comparison between Britain. Germany and France. In 1951 British total production was equal to that of Germany and France combined. In 1985 German production was three times what it was in Britain and French production nearly double that in Britain.

The problem had been considered in 1931 by the MacMillan Committee on Finance and Industry. The committee accepted that the decline had taken place but took comfort in the fact that British exports of manufactures were still the largest of any country in the world and that British wage levels were the highest in the world except the USA. British wage levels are now the lowest in Europe except for Italy and are far below those in the USA. Japan and many other countries. The MacMillan Committee also pointed out that. "The USA is unable to compete with us in world markets in our principal staple exports such as coal or textiles and many iron and steel products".

There are now many countries which can undersell British products in all these fields. Textile exports have been drastically reduced, coal can now be imported at prices below those of British coal and the exports of British coal, once enormous, have reduced almost to vanishing point. The MacMillan Committee were complacent about the future. They took the view that "the shortcomings in this country in technical efficiency" were exaggerated, though they also recognised that the high level of unemployment in Britain (1,290,000 in 1928, compared with 432,000 in 1913) had already come into existence before the depression which began in 1929. In the depression itself it rose to 23 per cent. not far short of double what it is in 1986.

The Labour Party's justification for the 1965 plan was that 13 years of Tory rule had made the problems of British industry much worse. A Labour Party pamphlet summarising the plan had this:

In 1964 the crisis was reached: the Balance of Payments deficit was about £756 million — the largest in Britain's peace-time history. Years of stagnation had taken their toll. Once more an emergency squeeze was needed; but this could not be the final remedy. This time we could not be content with the old "stop-go" cycle. A new plan of action was needed

(Target 1970)

The plan was drawn up after consultation with the trade unions, employers' organisations and big employers, who were asked what expansion of production was possible in the five years to 1970. The plan itself settled on a 25 per cent increase in total output, with a 20 per cent increase in wages. It planned to avoid inflation: prices were to remain stable. It included particular forecasts such as raising the annual rate of housebuilding to 500,000 a year. A remarkable feature of the plan was its assumption that unemployment was not a problem but that there was an absolute shortage of workers. The plan foresaw that 800,000 additional workers would be needed by 1970, 400,000 of which would come from the increase of population. The remaining deficiency of 400,000 workers would have to be met, as much as possible, by increasing the output of the workforce.

This showed an astonishing, but typical, failure of the Labour Party to understand capitalism. In effect it assumed that all that had to be done was to increase output and that the real problem, of selling the increased output at a profit, would look after itself. In particular it showed no awareness that unemployment in this country, after the abnormally low rates of early post-war years, was already on a long-term upward trend. In the event production increased between 1965 and 1970. by about half the planned 25 per cent forecast and the actual increase was less than the increase that had taken place in the previous five years under the Tories. Only half the 500,000 houses a year were built. The plan failed entirely to keep prices stable. They went up by 31 per cent and wages, after discounting the rise of prices, rose by about two-thirds of the planned 20 per cent. And contrary to the belief of the planners that there would still be a 200,000 shortage of workers, it was unemployment which went up by 200,000. from 376,000 to 579,000.

The plan accepted that there would be some industries in which more workers would find jobs and others in which the number of jobs would fall. They were right about an increase in the number of jobs in the Health Service, education and insurance, banking and finance but they got it badly wrong about manufacturing industries. Halting the decline of manufacture was one of their main concerns and they planned an increase in the number of jobs by 292,000. Instead the number of jobs in manufacture fell by 260,000. The plan had no effect at all in increasing total production but some boards of directors of companies, including some in the manufacturing industries, were encouraged by it to step up their output. What happened in manufacture was that profits, which had been steadily failing since 1951, fell further during the five years of the plan.

The method of preparing the plan had been to ask companies to forecast what types and designs of products they would be turning out in five years' time and in what quantities. Some companies regarded the whole thing as being unrealistic to the point of farce. What types and what quantities will be produced in five years' time depends on what demand there will be in the market, something no company can possibly know in the inherently unstable world of capitalism. How many of the many tens of thousands of companies which have gone bankrupt in the depression since 1979 could see it five years in advance?

The plan accepted that some industries were in decline and would need fewer workers. Among the industries in which jobs would decline were agriculture, coal mining and transport, the planned number of redundancies being 142,000, 179,000 and 99,000 respectively. Based on their assumption that there was an overall shortage of workers, the plan described redundancies as "releasing” workers for employment elsewhere. No doubt many of the redundant workers did find other jobs for a time at least. To ease the transfer, the Labour government passed the 1965 Redundancy Payments Act. Of particular interest is the coal industry One of the factors expected to reduce the number of coal miners' jobs was the expansion of nuclear power. Dungeness "B" nuclear plant was expected to "produce base load electricity more cheaply than a contemporary coal fired station. The number of coal miners who lost their jobs under the Labour government was 199,000, twenty thousand more than the government had planned. They lost their jobs because the pits in which they worked were running at a loss.

Here is the statement about loss making , pits made in the National Plan.

The aim of the industry will be to eliminate inefficient capacity, rather than to under-utilise efficient capacity, in order to keep costs down as far as possible and to match the falling level of demand. Pits where proceeds of sales fall short of mere running expenditure are being closed down as quickly as possible, unless there is a prospect of their moving out of this category, e.g. after a reconstruction is complete. These measures should lead to a compact and competitive industry still supplying more than half the nation's energy and offering attractive jobs.

It will be observed that this is almost identical with Ian MacGregor's pit closing formula for getting rid of 40,000 miners which led to the year long strike in 1985.

There was no strike against pit closures in 1965. Indeed the minister in charge of the plan, the late George Brown, when introducing it at the Labour Party Conference received a standing ovation. Evidently the Labour Party and trade union delegates, and the workers they represented, all shared the illusion of their leaders, that "full employment" was a reality and that they would never have to fear the dole queue.

Edgar Hardcastle