So They Say: Labour's guidelines for Capitalism (1975)

The So They Say Column from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour's guidelines for Capitalism

Following his meeting with the Chairman of the Confederation of British Industry in January, the well- known non-Socialist, Mr. Denis Healey, has been increasingly forcing some of the facts about capitalism and how the Labour Party proposes to run it down the throats of the working class. Speaking at the Electrical Contractors’ Association in London on 11th February, he said:

If we price ourselves out of jobs by excessive wage increases, there will also be even greater cut-backs in new plant and machinery. That too means more men and women out of work, both now and in the future. None of this need happen. It will not happen if workers, not just in the union headquarters but on the shop floor too, stick strictly to the guidelines for wage negotiation laid down by their own leaders in the TUC last year.

We recall the uproar in the House of Commons not long ago when Labour MPs were clamouring for remedial action to be taken after British companies were found to be paying black South African workers below “officially recognized” levels. The Labour Party has consistently subscribed to the utopian view that wages can be fixed at some “fair” level which will be mutually beneficial to both capitalist and worker. Such a view has nothing to do with Socialism and we advise members of the working class to examine and reject the concept that a system of exploitation can be run “fairly.”

Closing his eyes and opening his mouth

Before Mr. Heath reluctantly vacated his position as leader of the Conservative Party in February, he put forward as neat a piece of mumbo-jumbo as one might expect. In a desperate attempt to appeal to all men everywhere, he undertook a dazzling rebuttal of the view that capitalist society is divided into two classes. Speaking on his ability to lead the Conservative Party he said:

It is not just a question of looking after the middle class, which of course has very great problems particularly under this Government, and we should do our utmost to help it. But it is not just a question of class at all. I loathe the word class. I do not believe in class. It is a question of ensuring the prosperity of the nation in which everyone can share.

(Financial Times, 31st Jan. 75)

Well, Mr. Heath may not believe in it, although after almost ten years as leader of the Conservative Party he has had as good an opportunity as most to realize that the interests of the workers and capitalists are opposed, but his beliefs are neither here nor there. The class position of the individual is not determined by the beliefs of anyone, but by the relationship between that individual and the means of production. Whatever aspirations some individuals may hold to the contrary, those members of society who do not own any of the means of production or distribution form the working class. This is the vast majority of the population and it is through their efforts alone that the “prosperity” Mr. Heath refers to is created, not for the benefit of “everyone” as he would have it, but for the benefit of those individuals who do own the means of production and distribution, the capitalist class.

A Goodly Wizard

One of the inevitable reactions to the continuing barrage of propaganda from the capitalists that Britain is going bankrupt, that this crisis must be surmounted, that we must all make sacrifices — ad nauseam, is that the heavenly thoughts of the Christian sorcerers get another outing. They are always at hand to tell us that “God moves in mysterious ways”, but the reality is that whichever way he moves, it always seems to serve the need of the capitalist class. This is no accident, there being a clear link between the scriptural injunction “Servants obey your masters” and its application to the working class.

The Very Rev. Horace Dammers, the Dean of Bristol, has recently launched a movement entitled “Life Style” which apparently already has several hundred members. The Dean underlined the Christian ethic of frugality (for the workers) so much beloved by the ruling class through the ages:

I think we have found a realistic way for ordinary people to make a positive contribution to the good of mankind.

Apart from monthly meetings where the members get together in order to “analyze each other’s incomes” or discuss ways of “using their money in ways which they consider to be less socially harmful”, some members are

planning to share cars and lawnmowers, and to cut down on food and insurance, and are thinking twice before buying new clothes, and even pets.

(Sunday Telegraph, 2nd Feb. 75)

If the Dean genuinely wishes to make a “positive contribution to the good of mankind” he should exorcise this bogus brotherhood, and start to study Socialism.

Honest Profit

It is usually advantageous for capitalists and the politicians representing their interests to refer as little as possible (in public) to the mainspring of capitalist production — Profit. Some appear to view its mention with a hurt concern, preferring to talk about the “creation of prosperity,” or “economic growth.” Others are more brazen:

No-one now believes that profit is a dirty word, if profit is honestly earned and put to proper use.

(Mr. Denis Healey speaking at the CBI’s annual dinner at the Hilton Hotel on 14th May 74.)

However, according to a report in the Financial Times on 11th February, ICI is one company which is afflicted with a certain "self-consciousness” in this regard. The fact that the company had produced a profit of £375m. over nine months caused the Public Relations Dept, of ICI to commission a survey from Documentary Research of Bristol, in order to gauge possible public hostility toward profit announcements. The survey team interviewed 1437 people and one of its findings was:

There appeared to be no understanding of the fact that a very high percentage of profit was paid out by companies in tax; only 6 per cent acknowledged that tax was paid at all.

As a result of these findings ICI laid new emphasis on tax in its financial advertising both internally in the company newspapers, and in the National Press.

All good stuff for the Public Relations men to play up at every opportunity. We can imagine the copy now — "Yes the profits may look big, but you want to see the size of our tax demand.” Nevertheless we place no importance on the amount of tax a company pays. The report went on to say:

There is no great antipathy towards profits. ‘We might not have put profits at the top of our advertisements before,’ said ICI. But the survey has shown up some other areas of misunderstanding and mistrust which will take more than simplified advertising campaigns to overcome. There are strong suspicions that results are not presented honestly.

The newspaper report concludes:

One wonders, would the results (of the survey) have been different if the respondents had been less ill- informed about the ultimate destination of profits?

Its ultimate destination is irrelevant to the working class who have created this surplus-value. By the time Profit is counted, the worker has been paid. What workers should usually do is not concern themselves where Profit goes, but to examine where it originated.

Specialist Purposes

An explanatory note on the Times report of 6th February regarding the Ingram 9mm. sub-machine guns recently purchased from the USA by the Ministry of Defence is required:

The Ingram is said to be well suited to undercover operations. But the ministry is emphatic that the guns, bought for “specialist purposes” have not been used in Northern Ireland. The silencer differs from the conventional kind. Instead of slowing the bullet as it leaves the muzzle it allows it to reach full supersonic speed. The enemy would hear a crack as the bullet passed him, but it would be impossible to tell where it came from.

We can reveal that the “specialist purposes” to which the Ministry vaguely refers are that the guns will be issued to those members of the working class within the British armed forces so that they may fire them at other members of the international working class when the interests of two groups of capitalists collide. The report is misleading in suggesting that “the enemy would hear a crack as the bullet passed him”. This defeats the purpose of the bullet — the truth is that the “enemy” would hear nothing as the bullet passed through him.

Alan D'Arcy

50 Years Ago: Who likes facing Labour’s future? (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A generation of workers have placed their trust and wasted their lives on the pie-crust promises of ambitious politicians. More than thirty years have passed since the Labour Party issued its post-war election manifesto: Let us Face the Future. People like Barbara Castle, who were rising ‘stars’ of the left, when Aneurin Bevan was chief demagogue, have lived to stand in the crumbling ruins of all the misguided hopes which they themselves helped to build. Once again the ludicrous spectacle is one where the reformers proposed and capitalism disposed. We are now living in their future.

Every group of workers in the NHS has been (and will continue to be) ruthlessly exploited by their Labour government overlords. (Yes, we know and by the Tories.)

The nurses, whose devotion to their patients has been mercilessly used by successive governments, were forced to organize, demonstrate and threaten strike action. Then the ambulance crews were pushed into the same position. The ward orderlies and laundry workers caved in under the weight of increasing drudgery and near starvation wages. The extreme reluctance of any of these workers to add to the suffering of the sick and aged, has been cynically played on by the Tory and Labour governments.

The latest miserable episode is that of the junior doctors. Driven by being on duty or on stand-by for as much as one hundred hours per week and working for as many as eighty hours with virtually unpaid overtime, they banned overtime. This brought about the closing down of wards, casualty departments and even entire hospitals. If this reads like a nightmare, that is what capitalism does to dreams of reformers. (…)

Aneurin Bevan once said the Tories were ‘lower than vermin’. What does that make the Wilson, Castle and Foot mob? Regretfully, calling names however well deserved, does little to raise the level of class-consciousness. When the working class wake up, they will contemptuously brush aside these petty upstarts and, in fact, dismiss all leaders. Ultimately the responsibility rests with the workers. Their political maturity (or lack of it) is reflected in how they vote. The power to continue the agony of capitalism derives from the votes of the workers. The power to end it will come from the same source.

[From the article, 'Who likes facing Labour’s future?' by Harry Baldwin, Socialist Standard, February 1976.]

The "Free Health Scheme" Myth (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard 

It was all worked out so that sick people in Britain could be looked after and seek treatment undeterred by the financial disaster it previously entailed. So they were told — but it didn’t work out that way. In capitalist society you get nothing for nothing and the politicians (outright callous Tory or two-faced hypocritical Labour) make no bones about their ‘need’ to modify workers’ wages for (and limit the benefits of) a health scheme which fails to satisfy the “cheap healthy work force” expedient of those who planned it.

For let there be no mistake about the motive of those who devised the idea of a National Health Service, telling the world it was to ensure unfettered medical attention for all who needed it. It was (as many publications inadvertently disclose) to cut the cost to British capitalism in working hours lost to their businesses through workers’ sickness.

Now, these Capitalist interests are not happy with their own deal. They feel that British doctors are not doing their bit in the cheap maintenance of healthy wage slaves, but are spending too much capitalist money in the process by “overprescribing” for the sick who turn to them for help. A “free” health scheme (in fact it costs 20p per item on each prescription and there’s a lot of Parliamentary agitation to make it more) is all very well in the interests of the country’s employers — but if general practitioners take the thing too far they will have to be pulled into line. Thus Mr. Mike Thomas, Labour MP for Newcastle, has introduced a Bill demanding that registered medical practitioners be limited in the drugs they may prescribe to a small list and that their surgery treatment notes be made available to a panel who may have to “discuss” with them the treatment they arc making available to patients on the “National Health”.

Quote, from the doctors’ periodical Pulse 10.7.76: —

‘‘The Government may be forced into taking more radical action to reduce the level of prescribing, both within general practice and the hospital service in order to peg the rising drugs bill. Minister of State for Health, Dr. David Owen has called for ‘better prescribing overall’ and has reminded the profession, yet again, that it is now having to make economic decisions within the context of tightly reined resources. Unfortunately both Dr. Owen and Social Services Minister, Mr. David Ennals have reached that stage where they are issuing repeated warnings on the need for constraint in each sector of the Health Service, but no one knows precisely how the Government intends to cut back costs or what level of toughness it is prepared to use. The Department of Health circular issued last week, for example, was supposed to represent ‘Guidelines’ on the much-vaunted review of NHS management costs . . . Dodging the perfectly justifiable suggestions from one Tory questioner that there was need for a realistic uprating of prescription charges which still remain at their pre-inflation rate, Dr. Owen replied: “What is needed is better prescribing overall and a recognition by patients that not every ailment is cured by pills . . . The medical profession must recognize that it has to make economic decisions. At present the prescription Bill has no cash limit and is open-ended . . . But if the medical profession is not able to show some form of economic restraint in its budget, any Government would be forced to look at other measures ... At the moment we prefer to rely on education and we hope to keep the drugs bill within reasonable bounds by that method.’ ”

The article in Pulse continues:

The drugs bill to which Dr. Owen was referring amounted to £379 million during the last financial year in England. At £7.00 a year per person, was that not good value for money? Dr. Owen took this opportunity, replying to Labour back-bencher Dr. Maurice Miller, to confirm that the pharmaceutical industry was not guilty of drawing any excess profits — and that any blame for the escalating drugs bill lay with an over-demanding public and over-generous profession.

In other words, Dr. Owen has the gall to represent himself as unaware of how notorious drug firms are for their enormous profits, and upset by patient’s demands for adequate treatment and doctor’s desires to provide it!

Health at a Price

Quoting from the doctors’ periodical General Practitioner, 16.7.76, on page 8 we read:

A blunt warning that the National Health Service must ‘live within its means’ was given by the Prime Minister last week. Only 24 hours after the Cabinet began a series of meetings to prepare for public spending cuts totalling about £1,000 million next year, Mr. Callaghan made it clear that the NHS would not escape the treasury act. He told members of the Royal College of Surgeons at a dinner in London that ‘difficult choices and unwelcome decisions’ lay ahead in many areas of public expenditure. Doctors would be faced in their everyday work with a difficult period of adjustment from a fairly rapid rise in the amount of resources available in recent years to more stringent conditions.

This, of course, is a typical politician’s mealy-mouthed way of avoiding saying that National Health Service patients will have to suffer neglect by being denied benefits once promised by the British capitalist class. But to add insult to injury, listen to the sheer two-faced double-talk the Labour Leader follows it up with. Quote: “At a time when the ordinary wage earner is voluntarily cutting his own standards, the health service too must live within its means.”

In other words, Mr. Callaghan feels that if workers are being deprived in one way it is only fair that they also be deprived in another! This is the depth to which opportunist politicians will sink and a measure of the contempt they have for their wage slaves’ discernment.

This is but one of the many degrading aspects of life under capitalism, where men can dictate how much medical attention and care their fellows are “entitled to.” In a Socialist society such inhuman parsimony would be impossible. There would be no leaders able to hoodwink anyone, and not just  health care but all goods and services would be free to every one.

R. B. Gill

Chrysler and the Cabinet: How the Deal was Done (1976)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Chrysler and the Cabinet: How the Deal was Done. Granada Television, 35p.

This is the transcript of a TV programme shown on 9th February 1976, in which the Cabinet discussions of the Chrysler UK motor company were simulated. The parts of Wilson, Healey, other Ministers and the Chrysler officials were played by political and financial journalists, and the programme was generally thought to have come close to the reality.

The Chrysler Corporation of USA proposed closing down its British subsidiary which had made losses in six of the last nine years, amounting to £60 millions, and was expected to lose another £40 millions in the next year. The Government’s concern was with the unemployment — 25,000 jobs or more — which would be created by the close-down. However, the Government’s newly agreed “industrial strategy” prohibited financing obviously unprofitable companies; at the outset of these discussions the only voice in favour of giving help is that of the Secretary of State for Scotland, where Chrysler is a major employer.

A report from the Central Policy Review Staff (the “Think Tank”) had said the British car industry had already 25 per cent, over-capacity. From the viewpoint of the British Leyland company, which the Government had recently bought for £1,300 millions, Chrysler was an undesired rival; nor, for the same commercial reasons, was there any case for merging Chrysler with Leyland. The loss of jobs was agreed to be a regrettable necessity, summed up thus by Healey’s impersonator: “There’s nothing socialist about preserving existing jobs for their own sake.”

The conclusion was foregone — and yet the Government did undertake to support Chrysler, to the extent of about £145 millions. Why, with everything apparently against it? First, political fear of losing votes, in Scotland particularly. Second, the existence of a Chrysler contract to export to Iran (Healey: “Persia is becoming an increasingly important trading partner with us and the Shah is a touchy fellow.”).

The third reason was not stated explicitly in the TV programme but emerges implicitly from it. This is the inability of governments to manage capitalism even on its own terms. The sapient Ministers talked of “the long term” and “the future”, meaning “if we can keep out of trouble this afternoon perhaps tomorrow’s mail will bring an unforeseen lucky break”. While the discussions with Chrysler went on, attempts were made (fruitlessly) to attract Japanese car manufacturers to Scotland. If unemployment was prevented by the Chrysler deal, how will its transfer to other companies be prevented? What sort of “strategy” is firmly agreed, then has to be abandoned at the first engagement?

This is an interesting booklet, more relevant to what goes on in capitalism than some expensive volumes of retired Ministers’ memoirs.

That Party and its Promises! (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

By “that party” we mean of course the Labour Party, sometimes called the Socialist Party, but which does not stand for Socialism.

In the opinion of Ron Hayward — and he should know — the Labour Party stands for “equality in education”. At least that’s what he told the writer on an LBC phone-in. Whether “equality in education” is feasible or not, desirable or not, is hardly worth investigating. The dole queues are full of graduates, and millions of well-educated women find themselves reluctantly at the kitchen sink. Let us, however, take a good look at what the Labour Party in office has done about education and compare its record with its promises.

The Labour Government has been proposing cuts in local authority spending, and as the biggest share of local authority spending goes on education, the schools are going to take the brunt. Surrey County Council is reported (Guardian, 5th July) as planning to cease all nursery education, to increase class sizes in the schools and to raise the fees for higher education courses. This is a pattern which we can expect to see followed by most other education authorities.

Let us compare this situation with the picture presented in Labour’s 1959 manifesto — The Future Labour Offers You. Under the heading “Our Children”. Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan and Co. told us:

The worst handicap a child can face at school is the oversize class. Overcrowding in the schools is a nightmare to teachers and to parents. That is why our first task must be to cut classes in primary as well as secondary schools to a maximum of thirty.” (our emphasis.)

Contrast this “first task” brainwave with the actual reality. Many children going through what the state calls “education” have done so, even in the good years and “good” areas, in classes of 35, some rising to 40 or more. Now the size of classes is likely to rise again, not from a real shortage of qualified teachers, but because there is not enough money forthcoming from the Treasury to pay the teachers.

In 1959, Labour also told us: “Most important of all, our plans will require many more teachers. We shall launch a big drive to recruit and train them as swiftly as possible.” Well, at least one of our recent governments has done that. And the result is that with the present Labour Government saying “less money for education”, a large proportion of these expensively-trained teachers are experiencing the frustration of joblessness. While the classes get bigger and bigger. Talk about waste!

Returning to 1959 we find the Labour Party declaring : “The main fault with our present State education is that there is not enough of it. In order to give every child a fair chance to choose a career and to train for it, we must be prepared to spend more.”

Exactly the opposite of what they are doing now. The fact is that the political parties’ manifestoes are like the apples the greengrocer puts in his front window. They look mouthwatering! So you go inside on the promise of all that lovely, glossy, sound-looking fruit, only to get sold wrinkled, bruised, unsound fruit that the greengrocer dredges up from under the counter or some dark corner that you can’t quite see.

The professional reformist politician is like the most unscrupulous greengrocer you could ever have the misfortune to meet! You even become so carried away in your enthusiasm that you don’t stop to ask the vital question “Can he produce the goods?”

If you did ask, you’d get no meaningful answers out of him, but only specious assurances. Here’s a sample from that 1959 Labour manifesto: “A programme for one Parliament is not a blueprint for Utopia. What we have summarised here can be done in that limited time. We can make such great social advances as bringing real security into old age through our National Superannuation scheme. We can cut down the size of school classes. We can turn shabby old houses into modern homes. So this is a practical assessment of the jobs to be done, and a realistic account of the way we propose to do it.”

Which means that they want to do these things and hope we’ll take their word for it that they can. To which we reply: if it could be done, why wasn’t it? And conversely, if it was not possible except when the economic climate was right, why claim so confidently that it could be done? This charge of making promises that cannot be carried out is one that can equally be levelled at the Tories, the Liberals, and other assorted reformists, including the Nationalists among those who have swindled the electorate.

The moral of the story is this. A political party without principles is merely a vote-catching machine, governed by expediency. Its soup-kitchen philosophy of being kind to the kiddies is easily ditched whenever it should appear to be in conflict with the short-term economic interests of capitalism.

Capitalism just does not work for our benefit: it’s the bosses’ benefit show, not ours. There is only one way we can use our votes in line with our economic and social interests as workers. And that is by voting and working for Socialism and the end of this wages, waste and want system.

Charmian Skelton

50 Years Ago: Doubletalk (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

An accomplished variation of the three-card trick was performed by Mr. Paul Foot — the International Socialist — in The Times of 14th August. After quoting the words of a dispirited shop steward at Norton Villiers Triumph where the Labour government has failed to provide further financial backing, Foot draws the following conclusion:

“These are dreadful times for socialists who put their trust in Labour Governments.”

This is coy stuff of course, one of the very last places a Socialist would put his trust is in the Labour Party. But there is method in the madness. He attacks the government in its attempts to run capitalism at a time, as he puts it, of “unprecedented capitalist collapse” for the following reasons:

“Labour’s elected representatives become isolated from their power base, impotent to resist the demands of the system which they try to manage. They mouth the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.”

All unsparing language of course, but we fail to recollect when this “power base” ie, the Labour Party supporters, expected or desired other than the continuance of capitalism. In thus discrediting the leaders specifically, the illusion could be created that they alone are deliberately perverting the desires of their supporters. He accuses the “helpless puppet” (the Labour Government) of recently being forced by economic conditions to “tear up two manifestos” but fails to note that each one of those manifestos was filled from cover to cover with “the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.”

Having pointed out that such an unlikely vehicle as the Labour Party has failed to introduce Socialism, he uses some loose logic to reject the whole parliamentary method:

“The parliamentary road to socialism has turned into another blind alley. The revolutionary road is beginning to open up.”

The “revolutionary” road to Worker’s Control is what he refers to. However we recall that Foot’s paper, the Socialist Worker, had little doubt, on 16th February 1974 when advising before the oncoming election that “The working class has to respond with a massive anti-Tory vote. And that means a Labour vote…” exactly which “helpless puppet” they favoured.

[From the So They Say column, Socialist Standard, September 1975.]

The Crisis: Capitalism’s Stranglehold on the Labour Government (1975)

From the August 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is of course nothing new in governments breaking pledges and turning policy somersaults, but latterly the occasions have become more frequent and more farcical. At every election since the second world war the Labour and Tory parties have undertaken to deal with inflation: to so little effect that prices have risen continuously for thirty years, with the rate of increase getting faster and faster.

It is not at all surprising that this should have happened because the governments have been running a policy of inflation in the belief that this was a way to prevent unemployment from increasing. A vain hope, because at each of the half-dozen recessions since 1950 unemployment has risen to a new higher peak—over a million in 1972 and now forecasts of a possible 1½ millions by early 1976. Instead of stopping inflation, it has been government policy first to promote it and then to try to suppress its symptoms by means of a “Prices and Incomes Policy”.

It started in 1947 under Attlee’s government and has been re-enacted half a dozen times. A long succession of failures as far as stopping inflation is concerned, but it would be churlish not to acknowledge its one happy achievement—the enrichment in the use of our vocabulary. We have had wage restraints, wage freezes, wage thaws, plateaus, pauses, ceilings, guiding lights, norms, standstills, early warnings, guide-lines, slow-downs, explosions, wage-stops, thresholds, curbs, social contracts, and a lot more.

The latest from Mr Wilson “the £6 limit on wage increases”, which he admits means a lower standard of living, has a novel refinement. For years the centrepiece of the Labour programme was the “national minimum”. The law was to be used to force “bad employers” to become “good employers” by making them put wages up. Now Mr Wilson threatens to use the law to prosecute employers who put wages up too much. They are, he says, “rogue employers”. The recipients, of course, could be workers whose wages are only a small fraction of Wilson’s own income.

Don't they understand capitalism?

Is it really possible for government ministers not to understand how capitalism operates? And to be unaware of the inevitable consequences of their own policies? Indeed it is possible. During the nineteenth century, although capitalism regularly went through the recurring cycle of expansion, boom, crisis and depression outlined by Marx as the economic law of the system, governments, capitalists and many economists were forever expecting booms to be permanent and being amazed as each crisis blew up. There are plenty of similar examples in our own times.

Any serious student of capitalism knows that the capitalist is in business to make a profit and therefore will not invest more to expand production at those times when there is no prospect of selling the product profitably. Yet in the last recession, in 1971-2, Heath and Barber complained bitterly that though for months on end they pleaded and threatened and offered inducements for increased investment, “nobody would listen”. Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the present government, confesses to having been equally ignorant of the facts of economic life. “One thing I have learnt from my experience in the past seven months [as Chancellor]: there is no chance of investment if business expects a general and prolonged recession, however generous the tax incentives” (Report of speech, The Times, 5th October 1974).

Later in the same month he was again airing his ignorance, this time as guest speaker at the Lord Mayor’s banquet for bankers and merchants of the City of London:

I simply cannot understand how it can make economic sense . . . to keep a million active men and women idle when the nation needs the goods they could produce (Times, 18th October 1974).

Since when has capitalism been interested in meeting people’s needs? And, in a depression, who needs additional production of unsaleable cars, motor-cycles, supertankers, steel and so on?

In one respect nineteenth-century British governments were better informed than governments since 1945. They knew how to prevent inflation and decided that it was in the interest of capitalism to prevent it. There was no inflation for the hundred years before 1914. Prices rose and fell by moderate amounts in booms and depressions, but the level was lower in 1914 than in 1814. Now the price level is more than seven times the 1938 level and rising fast, by far the biggest cause being the depreciation of the currency consequent on government policy.

There were always some uninfluential groups advocating inflation to cure the ills of capitalism. One was dealt with in the Socialist Standard in August 1906. Using the Marxist analysis the writer of the article showed that it would cure nothing and would simply raise prices: “the workers, as is usual, being the first to suffer”. Another example is mentioned in The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, by Alan Bullock (p. 17). Bevin, trade union leader and later a minister in the Attlee government, was present in 1908 at a conference to discuss remedies for unemployment. One proposal was “the issue of paper pounds”. A Liberal politician who was there thought that it was “very sensible” but politically impracticable.

After 1945 it was quite different. Influenced by Keynes (or by crude distortions of Keynes) the Labour and Tory Parties and the TUC adopted the doctrine that the government could “manage” the economy in a way that would prevent crises and depressions occurring again. By “maintaining demand” they believed they could always prevent unemployment. Maintaining demand meant in practice printing more money and putting up prices. Keynes, whether he intended it or not, had made inflation respectable.

Marx and others on inflation

A number of economists in the past have understood that if an inconvertible paper currency is issued in excess amounts it will correspondingly put up prices. Marx’s special contribution was to anchor it to his theory of value. In given circumstances a certain amount of currency will be required. If the currency consisted solely of gold coin it would represent a certain total weight of gold and therefore a certain total mass of value. If the gold is replaced by inconvertible paper money (not convertible into a fixed weight of gold) and is then issued in amounts exceeding the gold it represents, it will simply put up prices. This is the present situation. Currency in Britain in 1938 was under £500 millions. It is now over £6,000 millions. It went up £825 millions in the year to July 1975.

Those who reject this explanation of inflation can apply a test. Let them show when such excess issue took place without raising prices; or when such excess issue was halted and prices did not fall.

In December 1919, after a very fast rise in prices, a ceiling was placed on the note issue and within a year prices were falling fast and wages with them. Lord Rothschild (Times, 30th June 1975) recalls that German inflation was halted in 1923 by applying the recommendations of a Committee (two members of which were the banker Brand and the economist Keynes) which included the Reichsbank being “forbidden to print more notes”.

Some modern “monetarists” have confused the issue by trying to relate price movements to the total of currency plus some or all of bank deposits. Why should the act of lending by depositors to banks affect the price level? Historically there is no justification for the theory. The enormous growth of bank deposits in the last decades of the 19th century was accompanied by a fall of the price level, not a rise.

Harold Wilson used to be quite confident about how he would prevent inflation. In 1957 some of his articles in The Guardian were published as a pamphlet, Remedies for Inflation. In Section III “What Labour Would Do” he wrote:

Ever since the Coalition Government’s White Paper (Employment Policy, 1944) all major parties have been committed, on Keynesian lines, to using the Budget as a means of avoiding undue inflation or deflation. In inflationary times, therefore, all are agreed in theory on the need for public saving through a large Budget surplus, though we have felt that a number of Conservative Budgets have sacrificed financial stability to a desire for fiscal popularity.

In practice Wilson’s government in 1974-5, instead of running a Budget surplus, has shown the biggest deficit in British peace-time history. Wilson says that the Government’s latest measures have been forced on it by the threatened drastic fall of the pound under pressure from foreign holders of sterling, just like Labour Premier Ramsay MacDonald in 1931.

There is no sign that the bulk of the Labour ministers and the TUC have given up their delusion that unemployment can be prevented or reduced by a further round of “reflation” (their name for inflation). But at the moment Wilson, after years of promoting inflation because he thought it would prevent unemployment, is now declaring that inflation causes unemployment.

Some of his critics in the Labour Party and trade unions (including apparently Mr Scanlon, leaders of the engineers), think they have Marx’s backing for their view that the way to deal with crises is to raise wages further. They are quite wrong. Of course Marx favoured the attitude of workers getting as high wages as they can at any time, but he did not hold that crises could be averted by raising wages. He dealt with the higher wages argument in Capital (Vol II, p. 475) and showed how absurd it is. Depressions end when the capitalists see prospects of profit improving. Putting wages up further would reduce profit margins not increase them.

No Cure for Capitalism

Because Socialists view the thirty-year Labour-Tory experiment with Keynesian fallacies as a complete fiasco for the working class it must not be concluded that we are enamoured with the prospect of returning to capitalism without inflation. With or without inflation capitalism will go on producing unemployment, crises and depressions. With Labour government, or any other government, “managed” or left to market forces, with or without more nationalisation, capitalism has nothing to offer to the working class. The only course for the workers is to replace capitalism with Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: The Crisis: Capitalism’s stranglehold (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is it really possible for government ministers not to understand how capitalism operates? And to be unaware of the inevitable consequences of their own policies? Indeed it is possible. During the nineteenth century, although capitalism regularly went through the recurring cycle of expansion, boom, crisis and depression outlined by Marx as the economic law of the system, governments, capitalists and many economists were forever expecting booms to be permanent and being amazed as each crisis blew up. There are plenty of similar examples in our own times.

Any serious student of capitalism knows that the capitalist is in business to make a profit and therefore will not invest more to expand production at those times when there is no prospect of selling the product profitably. Yet in the last recession, in 1971-2, Heath and Barber complained bitterly that though for months on end they pleaded and threatened and offered inducements for increased investment, “nobody would listen”. Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the present government, confesses to having been equally ignorant of the facts of economic life. “One thing I have learnt from my experience in the past seven months [as Chancellor]: there is no chance of investment if business expects a general and prolonged recession, however generous the tax incentives” (Report of speech, The Times, 5th October 1974).

Later in the same month he was again airing his ignorance, this time as guest speaker at the Lord Mayor’s banquet for bankers and merchants of the City of London:

“I simply cannot understand how it can make economic sense . . . to keep a million active men and women idle when the nation needs the goods they could produce“ (Times, 18th October 1974).

Since when has capitalism been interested in meeting people’s needs? And, in a depression, who needs additional production of unsaleable cars, motor-cycles, supertankers, steel and so on?

[From The Crisis: Capitalism’s Stranglehold on the Labour Government by Edgar Hardcastle, Socialist Standard, August 1974]

To Sir, Without Love (1976)

The Lavender List

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

There has been a lot of noise about your choice of peers for your last Honours List but before we deal with this vital subject perhaps we can ask you a question which I think has not been put to you: Sir, Oh Sir, wherefore art thou Sir? After all, you have so often proclaimed yourself an “egalitarian socialist” (whatever that is supposed to mean) who didn’t believe in titles. (We know you believed in other things. Like money. And translated your sincere belief into practice.) So what on earth has your hand been doing on the royal garter? It makes one doubt your honesty!

Of course, we Socialists understand the noble reason you have always given for creating nobles. You had to put “socialists” in the House of Lords so as to smooth the way for the introduction of “socialism”. Couldn’t expect those Tory backwoodsmen to bring in “socialism,” could we? And if you had to make Lords for the sake of the cause, what more natural than that you should choose your friends? So you created Lord Jumbojet, your solicitor. He was already President of everything in sight so he was well suited to Lord it (or to lard the lean earth, like the original Falstaff). True, he jumbojetted to the villainous Smithie for Sir Alec Whom? who does not claim to be a socialist (about the only one who doesn’t, I think). But it would be ignoble to quibble. He did it all for “socialism”. Noblesse oblige.

Then you made a Lady of your chef de cabinet (and about time too, I’m sure). Lady Marcia, the Virgin of the Slagheaps. Such a pity that your kitchenmaid had to have a flutter in the property sewers when you had been going out of your way to denounce such ways of making money under capitalism — though why the acquisition of wealth from slagheaps is any worse than from any other heaps — e.g. memoirs — is a bit puzzling. It’s all coming from the same source, the exploitation of the working class, isn’t it? Or did you find your five houses in a slagheap, perhaps? Still, we won’t be unkind to the Lady; as she explained, she only did it to have something put by for her old age. True, some villainous Socialist in the Socialist Standard was a bit caustic about this excuse, saying something about you having used your power to arrange pittances for the old age of real workers and why isn’t that good enough for my Lady? No satisfying these Socialists, is there?

In the light of all that sort of thing, the furore over your parting gift to a bunch of rather obvious capitalists, is really unfair to you. But now your hard stint at the coalface is over, what did you achieve for the workers? They did plenty for you didn’t they? And where is the socialism you got the power for? Somehow, I don’t think you’ll answer that one.

L. E. Weidberg

50 Years Ago: The fat of the land (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even a newspaper like The Sun should be asked to explain itself at times. On 22nd November its editorial said: ‘Britain’s future is bleak, sombre and perilous . . . the British are fat, lazy, complacent — and deeply in debt’.

Who are ‘Britain’ and ‘the British’ in this statement? Clearly, The Sun does not mean everyone. Harold Wilson and Edward Heath are both fat, but they are not deeply in debt with bleak futures. Denis Healey is fat. So is Reginald Maudling. The Houses of Parliament are full of fat people, and they are only outweighed by the Institute of Directors. Nobody supposes, however, that these are the target of The Sun’s unkind words and its sombre warning.

What it means is the working class, and it’s a funny thing how the idea of a working man being fat is equated with national disaster. (…) The Sun was in fact commenting on, and supporting, a report on ‘Britain’s plight’ by the Hudson Institute of America: experts say poverty is on the way. (…)

On 5th December similar forecasts and warnings were given in a review by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. According to this, in 1975 prices will rise still higher and unemployment will grow. Both teams of ‘experts’ had plans to urge. The National Institute thought import controls would prove necessary; the Hudson Institute would remedy things by ‘a new national six-year economic policy’ run by ‘Britain’s best economists and administrators’.

The latter scheme is presumably to ensure that, whatever happens, the fat and the thin remain distinguishable. How little use it would be otherwise is shown by one of The Sun’s remarks:

‘Leadership—or lack of it—is one element, of course. We are all of us unfortunate to live in an age of political pygmies. But perhaps we are already beyond the stage where we could be rescued by inspired leadership.’

Which is saying that things have come to a crisis under unimpressive dolts, but would be no better under geniuses.

The fallacy of all this is treating the impending crisis as an abnormality. Words like ‘doomsday’, ‘peril’, ‘saving Britain’ and ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ imply it to be a millennial catastrophe; but that is only a way of calling for more sacrifices from the workers. The reality is that the crisis is a normal phenomenon of capitalism.

[From the article, 'The fat of the land', by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, January 1975.]

The real Michael Foot (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could it be that in Michael Foot the Labour Party have elected someone who will never rise any higher than Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition? As Foot fumbles on, questions are beginning to be asked about him, and hopeful contenders for his job are making careful speeches. One version of Foot is the sick, half blind, scabrous, dishevelled bookworm, accident-prone in more senses than one — the sort of person who would wear a donkey jacket at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Another is the former left wing firebrand who has come to betray his principles and his friends and now hunts the Militants out of his party like mediaeval witches. Another, more despairing, is that he is a tousled intellectual, so unsuited to the political rough and tumble that he is quite unable to put the Tories, three million unemployed, Norman Tebbit and all, out of their misery.

Foot comes from a a well-heeled family with famously liberal traditions. Until he was upstaged by his tempestuous nephew Paul he was the wayward son, the brainy darling of the Labour Party rank and file who was greeted at the conference rostrum with rapturous applause before he had so much as uttered a single word. Of course he went to Oxford and of course he occupied there that position, so coveted by all aspiring politicians among the dreaming spires, of President of the Union.

Of course he was involved with Tribune and with the old TUC/Labour Party newspaper the Daily Herald. His brilliance so impressed the crusty imperialist Lord Beaverbrook that, in spite of his reputation, Foot was given the job of editing Beaverbrook’s paper the Evening Standard. Just after Dunkirk Foot, with Peter Howard (who later joined Moral Rearmament) and Frank Owen (who later joined the Liberal Party) wrote the book Guilty Men. This cleverly caught the mood of the time; it argued that many of the problems in pre-war Britain, and the war itself, were the responsibility of a bunch of complacent, arrogant Conservative politicians. Guilty Men, with other similar books published by Victor Gollancz, quickly became fashionable reading among people who were looking for an explanation — or more accurately a scapegoat — for the dreadful things that had happened since 1918.

In the 1945 election, Foot was a notable boulder in the landslide to Labour, capturing Plymouth Devonport which had been the seat of Lady Astor. This was indeed a symbolic victory — the dazzling young intellectual sitting where once sat a Tory who personified much about pre-war Britain that had become despised — and had been denounced in Guilty Men. Foot had no intention of allowing the glamour of his victory grow dim. He quickly busied himself in the appropriate causes, in particular the Keep Left Group, whose manifesto attacked the basis of the Attlee government’s foreign policy, which was the alliance with America and the cold war antagonism towards Russia.

To a government which was fighting the cause of British capitalism on several fronts at once. Foot was something of a nuisance and there was small prospect then of him ever joining the Front Bench. He came to represent much of the frustrations of Labour supporters who wondered why their government was failing so signally to introduce the Promised Land into Britain; he was the evidence that cleverer, more sincere, more radical ministers would do a more effective job of transforming society. The working class in Devonport did not see it quite like that however; in the 1955 election Foot lost his seat and remained out of Parliament until 1960, when Aneurin Bevan's death left a vacancy at the mining seat of Ebbw Vale. Foot was Bevan’s worshipping biographer; he seemed the obvious choice as Labour candidate which, in a place like Ebbw Vale where Tories were as rare as fumbling fly-halves, was tantamount to being the MP.

No eyebrows were raised when he was passed over by Wilson during the 1964/70 governments but when Labour came back to power in February 1974 Foot was given charge of the Department of Employment. His first brief was to settle the miners’ strike. In her diaries. Barbara Castle describes this as a brilliant appointment; Foot would use his standing among the miners to get them back to work and Wilson would defuse a potential critic. Foot's start was not all that promising because when he went to get his seal of office and to kiss the queen he was dressed as if he had been camping. But the queen need not have worried; her new Minister of Employment soon showed that it is not necessary to wear formal clothes in order to protect the interests of the class she represents.

Labour’s programme in the first 1974 election was very embarrassing because it talked about “socialist aims” and declared an intention to “. . . eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain . . .” Just in case they did not manage to get rid of all poverty, the Labour programme had as a fail-safe a rather less ambitious aim, which was to “. . . achieve far greater economic equality in income, wealth and living standards . . . bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families . . .” Denis Healey, their Chancellor of the Exchequer, showed that he meant business, and that he was not to be easily embarrassed by little considerations like election promises, by threatening to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked. What with all that, and with the tearaway lefty Foot at the Department of Employment, workers who thought that any shift in the balance of wealth might begin with a rise in their wages could well have concluded that their day had come.

Illustration by George Meddemmen

But the first message of that government was that there must be some delay. World capitalism was fast sliding into recession and the Labour government’s response, to which they were by then well conditioned, was an assault on working class living standards. The conflict was sharpened by the fact that after Labour had abolished the statutory wage restraint of the Heath government there was a flood of wage claims. It was then that Foot showed the true mettle of a left winger in power; with some gusto he bent to the task of holding back the flood. The coal strike settled, he quickly decided that further miners' wage claims were “excessive", although by what standards he did not make clear. In January 1975 he told the TUC that there should be no argument about the official “guidelines” on pay (the Labour government's new name for wage restraint) but that they should ". . . merely apply them as they stand". Barbara Castle thought that “He is taking his role as guardian of the Pay Code so seriously that he is becoming more rigid than Jim Callaghan was in his Chancellor days” (she was commenting about an argument over a rise for the nurses) and she later explained “Mike is obsessed with the need to win the next election”.

The record of that government, whose return was Foot's obsession, is set down now in a disreputable history. They quickly abandoned the professed aims of their manifesto and concentrated on organising a more efficient and intense exploitation of the working class — or of those of them that remained in employment as the dole queues grew longer. Public expenditure, which many Labour supporters saw as the key to any change in the balance of wealth, was cut in absolute and relative terms and Chancellor Healey, trying to hold wage rises below those in prices, turned his attention to squeezing the poor. There were some bitterly contested strikes, in which Prime Minister Callaghan encouraged workers to break through picket lines and urged the police to immediately arrest any picket they thought was making threats against blacklegs. Meanwhile, the pips of the rich remained conspicuously unsqueezed; the signs were that their share of national wealth, which had actually fallen under the Heath government, increased under Labour.

Disgruntled Labour supporters now describe those years as a time of mistakes and missed opportunities. They assert nostalgically that the aims of the 1974 manifesto are still relevant, which is another way of saying that the problems Labour claimed to be able to deal with then are still here today — that, in other words, the manifesto was worthless.

Any sense of betrayal in their ranks, as Labour recovered from the shock of their defeat in 1979, can only have helped Foot beat Healey for the leadership in 1980. In spite of the responsibility he bore, Foot seemed to be considered somehow blameless while Healey acquired the reputation of a beetle-browed political thug. Since then Foot has continued to play the double game. The conference rhetoric is as readily available as ever, to excite the delegates who have come all that way to the seaside to be cheered up: “I am a peacemonger!” Foot raved to thunderous applause at Brighton last year. “An inveterate, incurable peacemonger." The value of those rousing words could be assessed a few months later, as the Task Force was being prepared for the assault on the Falklands: “I believe the government is right. . . I support the despatch of the Task Force” were the words with which Foot urged the government on to quicker and more brutal bellicosity.

The man who once marched in support of CND’s demand for immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament now craftily fudges the issue: “I agree with the programme . . . for trying to get a non-nuclear defence programme for this country as speedily as we possibly can. . . (Weekend World, 3 October 1982). “The greatest task which this Labour Party will have to take is . . . securing nuclear disarmament in this country and throughout the world" (Labour Conference, 28 September 1982). In more direct words. Foot was saying that he favours nuclear disarmament eventually. when all the other nuclear powers have also disarmed — the sort of noncommittal policy to attract Tories, Liberals. SDP members and all floating voters everywhere.

These developments are not accidental; they are exactly consistent with Foot's record in government and out of it. Neither is he himself exceptional; he is only the latest example of the processes of capitalist leadership, which passes through stages of extravaganza, reality and disintegration. This unavoidable process reflects the fact that capitalism's problems — like poverty which Labour promises to abolish, like weapons of war which Foot once wished to abolish — do not respond to the dramatic speeches of political leaders. Foot is typical in that his followers invest him with a power which he does not have, nor can have; their political ignorance and his impotence are components in the basic fallacy of the entire principle of leadership and the theory that leaders are indispensable.

So will the real Michael Foot stand up? To show us that, after all the learning, the speeches and the writing he has at last come into his own? And then would some of his followers also stand up. to show that they understand that it is all a noxious mockery of their human interests.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Whatever happened to ‘full employment’? (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In The ‘Queen’s Speech’ on 29th October Mr. Wilson included a pledge about unemployment. ‘My government’, it read, ‘in view of the gravity of the economic situation, will as its most urgent task seek the fulfilment of the social contract as an essential element in its strategy for curbing inflation, reducing the balance of payments deficit, encouraging industrial investment, maintaining employment, particularly in the older industrial areas, and promoting economic and social justice.’

Maybe Labour Party supporters are reassured by this mumbo-jumbo, but they ought to examine the small print very carefully. If they do they will notice how the form of the pledge about dealing with unemployment has been discreetly watered down. Now it is part of a ‘strategy’, along with other aims, all of them dependent on the nebulous ‘social contract’, and the word ‘full’ has been dropped. And all of it stems from the grave economic situation — their euphemistic way of describing a normal crisis of capitalism, aggravated by the inflation that Tory and Labour governments alike have brought about and are still promoting.

When the first post-war Labour government came into office in 1945, buoyed up with the fatuous belief that they had mastered capitalism and abolished crises for ever, their committal to deal with unemployment was in very different words. Then it was ‘Jobs for All’ and ‘Full Employment’. In the early post-war years (due among other things to making good wartime destruction) unemployment was exceptionally low. In several years average unemployment then was under 300,000, about 1.2 per cent., and of course the Labour and Tory governments claimed credit for it.

Since the mid-fifties unemployment has been moving to higher levels, but as late as 1966 in the Wilson Labour Government John Diamond MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, boasted that they had got unemployment down from 1.6 per cent, to 1.2 per cent, and ‘that is how we propose to continue doing it’ (Hansard, 6th March 1966). Capitalism, however, was not listening to Mr. Diamond and by the time they went out of office in June 1970 unemployment had gone up by about a quarter of a million to 579,000 (2.5 per cent.). In October 1974 it was 643,000 (2.8 per cent.), and with unemployment rising in most parts of the world the Government’s advisers are fearful that next year it may pass the million mark, as it did in 1972.

(Socialist Standard, December 1974)

So They Say: Faint Headed (1975)

The So They Say Column from the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Faint Headed

The hot weather of the past few weeks has been having “subtle psychological and physical effects” on us all claimed the Sunday Times of 10th August. Most particularly they note that heat relaxes the nervous system and warms the blood — causing drowsiness. Perhaps this factor should be taken into account when considering the jaded statements put forward recently by Mrs. Thatcher and masquerading as ‘policy’ for the Conservative Party.

Conservatives detested unemployment as much as anyone else . . . We believe in the creation of wealth, in flourishing business and commerce because that means prosperity for all and good prospects in the years ahead.

(Guardian, 31st July ’75)

It may have escaped her attention that to become unemployed, a worker loses a job — or, as in the case of school-leavers, fails to find a job at all. It is currently estimated that the latter already number over 55,000 and that this figure will increase considerably after the holiday period.

The “flourishing business and commerce” organisations Mrs. Thatcher speaks of, simply do not have room to entertain what she may or may not say she “detests.”

London Brick has sold much of the huge stock it was left with when building ground to a halt last year, and because it fears the boom will be short-lived, it is reluctant to replace the workers it laid off last year and re-open the works it shut.

(Sunday Times, 10th August ’75)

The Conservative leader appears oblivious to a basic law of the social system which her party wishes to continue — Under Conservatives or Labour; No production without profit.

Ghastly Problem

She continued her weary way by extolling the virtues of the “entrepreneur” who “in creating wealth for himself, creates incomparably more wealth for other people” although we are not clear if “other people” refers to other members of the board — they could hardly be unemployed workers. Concluding she remarked with ambiguity

The greatest conservative Prime Minister of this century, Winston Churchill once had as his slogan ‘Set the people free,’ it is time we revived it.

(Guardian, 31st July ’75)

One who fits into this category of “entrepreneur” is Sir Jules Thorn, and he is just about to set his people free, although not in the way that Mrs. Thatcher would approve. His company, Thorn Colour Tubes is considering the imminent closure of their Skelmersdale plant. 1,500 workers will become unemployed as a result. The reason behind this is that the bottom has dropped out of the colour television market, coupled with the fact that cheaper Japanese products are mopping up a good deal of what remains. The voice of the virile and generous capitalist who seems to haunt Mrs. Thatcher’s dreams was clearly put by Mr. Harold Mourgue, the Finance Director at Thorns:

Closure was inevitable unless firm action was taken with Government help to end a brutal price cutting war in the British colour tube market . . . with the Japanese there is a ghastly problem.

(Guardian, 13th August 1975)

But isn’t competition for markets and “brutal price- cutting wars” what it’s all about? Well, yes it is — Thorn do not want the government to take the obvious step of introducing tariff restrictions against their Japanese competitors. Their concern on this point is heartfelt: “Thorn is against a tariff war, however.

This might eventually harm its own export markets.” 

They estimate that if their plant remains open it would run at well under half its capacity next year on the demands of the British market, so it would be reasonable to assume that when they enter the export market, no doubt with the gentlemanly policy of fair shares for all, they may be surprised to find that their own conception of what is fair, will inevitably be viewed by others as “brutal” competition.

Doubletalk

An accomplished variation of the three-card trick was performed by Mr. Paul Foot — the International Socialist — in The Times of 14th August. After quoting the words of a dispirited shop steward at Norton Villiers Triumph where the Labour government has failed to provide further financial backing, Foot draws the following conclusion

These are dreadful times for socialists who put their trust in Labour Governments.

This is coy stuff of course, one of the very last places a Socialist would put his trust is in the Labour Party. But there is method in the madness. He attacks the government in its attempts to run capitalism at a time, as he puts it, of “unprecedented capitalist collapse” for the following reasons:

Labours elected representatives become isolated from their power base, impotent to resist the demands of the system which they try to manage. They mouth the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.

All unsparing language of course, but we fail to recollect when this “power base” i.e. the Labour Party supporters, expected or desired other than the continuance of capitalism. In this discrediting the leaders specifically, the illusion could be created that they alone are deliberately perverting the desires of their supporters. He accuses the “helpless puppet” (the Labour Government) of recently being forced by economic conditions to “tear up two manifestos” but fails to note that each one of those manifestos was filled from cover to cover with “the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.”

Having pointed out that such an unlikely vehicle as the Labour Party has failed to introduce Socialism, he uses some loose logic to reject the whole parliamentary method

The parliamentary road to socialism has turned into another blind alley. The revolutionary road is beginning to open up.

The “revolutionary” road to Worker’s Control is what he refers to. However we recall that Foot’s paper, the Socialist Worker had little doubt on 16th February 1974 when advising before the oncoming election that “The working class has to respond with a massive anti-Tory vote. And that means a Labour vote . . .” exactly which “helpless puppet” they favoured.

High Life and Times

The chairman of the Labour Party’s Scottish Council had some savage truths to bring home to Glasgow’s working class recently. Times appeared to be exceptionally high for action.

It is high time we did something to woo the working class mothers away from the bingo halls, clubs and casinos . . . It is high time we were doing something about getting the men away from betting shops . . . I think it is high time the educational processes were directed towards encouraging them into better ways of using their leisure time and to carry on their wider education.

We will not dwell on the degree of reserve which these proposals might reasonably expect to encounter from an average man within a Glasgow betting shop, but draw attention to the useful life which Mrs. Roberta Jacqueline Trieze Kimberly leads. No bingo halls for her!

She makes three parachute jumps a day, five days a week: Takes daily tennis and shooting lessons, and also flying lessons seven days a week. It runs into money of course — somewhere in the region of £17,000 a year, but she still has time and money for others, her dog for instance, which costs about £500 a year to keep in food and toys. The figures have emerged because Mrs. Kimberly is to divorce, and has been obliged to file a claim for expenses ‘in order to continue living in her present style’. She is claiming £96,000 a year for this purpose.

The costs include . . . £20,000 a year for entertainment; £850 a month for clothing: and £290 a month for flowers . . . A claim of medical and dental fees covers over £1,000 a month.

(Daily Mail, 25th July ’75)

Her husband, Mr. James Kimberly, is heir to the Kleenex empire, and should any reader feel overcome by the sad news of their break-up, reach for the tissues — both of them will be delighted.

Alan D'Arcy

In other words (1975)

From the September 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Guardian is by and large (we are not saying they are consistent or that any capitalist rag can have such profitless burdens as principles) a paper that supports Labour. It is therefore the more significant to read the following passage in their leading article on the economy of July 17: "Whatever Mr. Healey may say in public, he is relying on rising unemployment to give a real bite to his anti-inflationary policy.” This is no doubt clear enough but perhaps we can put it into even simpler terms: “What the Labour government says to the working class who are stupid enough to follow their leadership is a pack of lies. What the government want is not cure unemployment, as they always say in their election addresses. They actually want to worsen unemployment as they find this necessary and desirable for the running of British capitalism (which is their job). And they want it for the purpose of giving a real bite. Out of what? Out of the living standards, of the working class.

We do not suggest The Guardian is aware of the force of what they write. But that only proves their own stupidity. What they said was true enough. Which makes a nice change.

Time for a change ! (1977)

From the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

No member of the working class needs to wade through the press or listen to television and radio to realize that living standards have taken a sharp plunge over the last four years.

A reading of Labour’s two manifestos issued for the elections of 1974 shows what has happened to Labour’s attempt to make capitalism work for the benefit of the majority of the people.

Remember how the slogan “Back to Work with Labour” was used as a piece of propaganda against the three-day week, which large sections of industry were working under the Tories prior to the election. The one-and-a-half million unemployed, and thousands of other workers whose jobs are threatened, know that the alternative slogan “Out of Work with Labour” would be far more accurate. In both manifestos there was the inevitable electioneering talk about the need for “social justice.” The Labour Party claimed that this could be achieved under capitalism. It talked of the “need to tackle rising prices”, “to strike at the roots of the worst poverty” and “to make the country demonstrably a much fairer place to live in”.

In the February 1974 Manifesto, Labour pledged itself to “introduce strict PRICE CONTROL on key services and commodities”. Efforts were to be made to stabilize food prices and the use of subsidies was proposed. Significantly, these promises were dropped from the October 1974 Manifesto.

The result of Labour’s attempt to control inflation has of course been an annual inflation rate rising to 26.9 per cent, at its height. At present it is 17.6 per cent. The Labour government has misled some people into believing that it can control rising prices. A Government White Paper issued in July 1975 declared: “By the end of 1976 price increases will be down to less than ten pence in the pound”. However, prices were rising by fifteen pence in the pound at the end of 1976.

What of the Labour Party’s talk of “social justice’ when Lady Beaverbrook can spend £8,000 to charter a special plane to take her two poodles to New York? According to a report published in December 1976 by the Child Poverty Action Group, thirteen million people in this country alone are living close to the Supplementary Benefit level which the government officially recognizes as being a state of poverty.

But the working class will be making a great mistake if they believe that the Tories can do any better. In April 1972, under the Heath government, unemployment passed the one million mark for the first time since 1940. Under the Tories, workers had to put up with wage restraint and rising prices just as under Labour.

The present economic crisis shows that capitalism cannot be controlled. During the boom period of the 1950s, all the major parties, Labour, Conservative, Liberal and “Communist,” were under the illusion that it would be possible for governments to “spend their way out of trouble”. The Socialist Party of Great Britain said at the time that this Keynesian solution to economic and social problems would be doomed to failure because capitalism is an anarchic system which repeatedly passes through boom and slump periods. The history of capitalism over the last two hundred years makes this abundantly clear.

The leading politicians with all their talk of “national unity”, “increasing productivity” and everyone tightening their belts, are bankrupt of ideas. None of them can offer anything to the working class.

It is possible to say that capitalism was once a revolutionizing system which expanded the machinery of wealth creation. However, the twentieth century has shown that capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It is in many cases destroying wealth, and constantly prevents wealth being produced. Fruit and vegetables are regularly ploughed into the ground, factories are closed down with machinery left idle, while millions of workers are unemployed. Privilege continues while there is worldwide poverty. All this for the sake of the great capitalist god, profit, which benefits only a small minority of the population.

What is the alternative to this madness? The case put forward by the Socialist Party of Great Britain is clear and concise. The alternative is Socialism. It involves the democratic ownership and control of the factories, agriculture and wealth-producing and distributing agents by the whole community. Socialism will be a truly worldwide system.

Vincent Otter

So They Say: Imaginary Differences (1976)

The So They Say Column from the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imaginary Differences

Cartoons have been appearing in the press suggesting that the policies of the Conservative Party have become a mystery—that they offer no alternative to the Labour Party. In an attempt to dispel this view, cartoon characters in the shape of Conservative MPs and their attendants have been hurriedly pounding tables proclaiming that there is a clear distinction between “Conservative philosophy with Socialist [Labour Party] dogma” (letter to the Daily Telegraph, 12th May 1976).

What the Conservatives had to do was point out to the country that the Labour Party was under the control of the left wing and the Michael Foots of the world and then point out that the Tories were a party who took a different view and line for the future.

Daily Telegraph, 28th April 76

If that was not a tall enough order to begin with, the Labour Party is not making things any easier for them. Maurice MacMillan (Conservative MP), attempting to “make clear our own constructive alternatives”, pointed to the basic problem as he saw it:

Conservatives must be bold enough to say that businesses and investors must be given a real incentive by allowing them additional profits from their investments.

Times, 10th May 76

While MacMillan and his fellow drones have been plucking up their courage to say such a thing, they appear to have missed Callaghan who found his nerve some days earlier:

The first thing to concentrate on is to ensure that there is sufficient incentive to provide a proper level of investment in these firms so that productive jobs can be created. That is what I would like to focus on. But I don’t believe you can force a large private sector to invest. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, and you have to apply the incentives necessary which compel it to drink.

Guardian, 5th May 76

Conservative philosophy or Labour Party dogma— after the froth, they bow to the profit motive.

An Acceptable Face

We have heard of the blind leading the blind. Now we have William Whitelaw, deputy leader of the Conservative Party, lecturing his cohorts on public relations. At a meeting held in a pub on 27th April he informed members of the Reform Group that at the next election Conservatives would “break from the party political tradition of making manifesto promises.” Other things were to change too—“we have to be scrupulously honest.” Good grief! What are they going to put in it? Whitelaw had an answer for that as well; they would announce “decreased public spending.” But before his audience could choke on their beer and sandwiches, he quickly pointed out that appearances could be deceptive: The Tories must not

turn into a hard-faced party. We must not be seen as the party looking all the time on the money side and not being interested in the various social problems that are certain to come up, and certain to be increased as our country is short of money. We must act with an economic head but also be seen to have a heart at the same time.

Daily Telegraph, 28th April 76

There goes the “scrupulously honest” facade. If this body politic of fair face, economic head, bulging pockets and kindly heart requires soft brain-matter, Whitelaw will no doubt become a donor.

You'll Never Walk Alone

It was hard to imagine that the announcements had not been made to the accompaniment of tambourines, the Joystrings and the Hallelujah Chorus: “We’re next for the economic miracle, says Healey” read the headline in the Daily Telegraph of 11th May.

Providing we can make this incomes policy stick to the end of the next wage round, I believe we have got the inflation problem under control. Now we must concentrate on the problem of unemployment. We want to get back to full employment within three years from now.

But "full employment” has become a loosely interpreted phrase, and before the “believers” acclaim the “miracle worker” too hastily, we draw attention to the specific statements made by Healey in the previous week.

The best we can hope for is to reduce unemployment to 3 per cent. or about 700,000 in 1979 . . . The TUC have expressed the hope that unemployment can be reduced to 600,000 in 1978. But I have already explained to them that this is too ambitious.

Guardian, 5th May 76

So the “miracle” becomes a mirage, and not a particularly distinguished one at that. The working class can take cold comfort from what Healey described as:

The tributes [which] are pouring in to the patriotism, the far-sightedness, common sense and maturity of our trade union movement as the full magnitude of this achievement sinks in.

The “achievement” of course, being the incomes policy agreement, not the aforementioned “miracle" which is only “hoped for.” Surely the TUC, who could by no stretch of the imagination be described either as far-sighted, or of mature judgement, must have noted the incongruity when Healey gushed forth:

Even the central bankers of the United States and Germany have added their tribute to the British trade union movement in the last few days — and believe me that is something.

Praise indeed, when the capitalists give tribute to the workers. Such praise is normally reserved for those occasions when members of the working class are encouraged to kill and maim one another on the battlefields.

What a Lovely Miracle

The chancellor expanded elsewhere on what he described as “the full magnitude of this achievement” —there were to be many sides to the miracle. Not only would there be the (hoped-for) 700,000 unemployed, but “The deal guaranteed that from August, wage rises in Britain would be the lowest in the world.” But how low an increase does he mean? Again we find some rather loose interpretation. An increase can usually be taken to mean an addition, but not apparently to Healey:

In fact wages will be coming down while our competitors will be going up . . . That is the best possible news for exports and employment.

Times, 11th May 76

In the light of the foregoing, and as the Chancellor is calling for “an 8.5 per cent annual increase in manufacturing output” and claims that “If we could get as much output out of our existing equipment as most of our competitors, we could increase our national income even without new investment by anything up to 50 per cent”, members of the working class would do well to consider their rôle in the “miracle.” It will be what it has always been—that of the wealth-producing class which owns nothing but the chance to work (literally) for the benefit of the owners. When workers see this division, they will have recognized exactly those whom the Labour Party represents.

Buy Me and Stop One

The ruthless examination of all aspects of social requirement from the point of view Can money be made from meeting such requirements? is one of the hallmarks of capitalist society. Marx put the view that when Socialism is established man will look back on his previous forms of society, including present-day society, and will describe them as pre-historic. We take a clipping from the London Evening Standard of 13th May which serves to underline the extent of our “civilisation.”

A price war is raging among private abortion clinics, it was claimed today. Mrs. Helene Grahame, of the Pregnancy Advisory Service, a London based charity, said the days of the get-rich quick abortionist look to be fading fast . . . Advertised prices of £50 and £60 are now quite common, against £70 to £80 a year or so ago . . . Clinics are advertising much more widely and extravagantly, and a free pregnancy-testing is being used as a come-on. All the indications are that they arc getting pretty desperate for patients — which is why they are getting into this kind of price war.

The Daily Express of 14th May reported the phenomenon in an even more matter-of-fact manner. The first line of their piece told us: “Women can now shop around for an abortion at the right price.” Hats off to capitalism: If the thing runs true to form we can next expect the equivalent of supermarkets giving special offers and Green Shield stamps.

Alan D'Arcy