Greasy Pole: These You have Loved (1997)

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

Among the Tories who were forced by the voters to spend more time with their families was the egregious David Evans, once the MP for Welwyn Hatfield. Evans made himself famous for his robust views on crime, race, gender and other such issues. This did not seem to damage him until, shortly before the election, what he had thought was a cosy private chat to some sixth-formers was recorded and publicised. This showed Evans in his true colours; a crass denunciation of his Labour opponent as a single mother with a "bastard" child was mixed with some bigoted nonsense about crime and skin colour and an insistence that the Birmingham Six were not only guilty of the offences they had been jailed for but had also probably killed a great many more people while they were about it. Then, for good measure. Evans sneered at fellow Tory MP—a minister no less—as "dead from the neck up”.

The bigotry and arrogance of this speech illustrated pretty accurately what a lot of voters had begun to dislike and fear about the Tories and about the prospect of giving them a fifth term in power. What would people like Evans get up to if they ever got the idea in their heads that, no matter how they behaved, they would never lose their seats? It was all put into words by—as you might expect—Richard Littlejohn, who prides himself as being the voice the man-in-the-saloon-bar where, apparently, the true heart of Britain is supposed to beat. According to Littlejohn there was no need for anyone, apart from a few feeble trendies in places like Islington, to get upset at what Evans had said because the man had merely spoken the truth—like the good, solid, staunch Englishman he is he had said a few things which most other people thought but were afraid to put into words.

Reunion

Of course if Littlejohn had got it right it would be advisable to keep clear of all saloon bars in future because they are obviously crawling with the most appalling bores and half-wits imaginable. But what are we to make of the reaction to Evans of his then colleagues in the Commons, typified by Edwina Currie, who coyly told us that while she may disagree with this views she—and other MPs—loved Evans to bits? (Currie is another ex-MP, although in her case she will be spending more time with her pens and paper or her word processor or whatever she uses to churn out those trashy novels.) The voters in Welwyn Hatfield gave the answer, when they replaced Evans with the woman whose unmarried motherhood was such a worry to him in an 11-percent swing. We can only hope that Evans will now be too busy running his cleaning company to bother us with any more of his insane, pernicious drivel.

If he has time he may be able to arrange the occasional reunion with other ex-MPs whose views are so similar to his. If so. at the top of his list should be Terry Dicks, who was not actually defeated at the general election because he did not give the voters the chance. Dicks won Hayes and Harlington in 1983, when the Labour Party was riven by the defection of their MP to the SDP. In 1987 Dicks increased his majority but in 1992 he held on by the skin of his teeth, with only 53 votes keeping him in Parliament. Over the years Dicks clearly took a realistic view of his chances of re-election if of very little else—and decided to look for a constituency with a safer majority. Perhaps he hoped to find one with larger, noisier, saloon bars because some of his stated views made David Evans look like a wet. But it was not to be; Dicks hawked his candidature around but he was too unsavoury for even the Tories and he had to observe the election from the sidelines—while his old seat at Hayes and Harlington showed how shrewd he had been to look elsewhere by putting up a Labour majority of over 14.000.

Eccentrics

What was is that had made Dicks so unattractive, not just to the voters of Hayes and Harlington but to selection committees in his own party? Could it have been those opinions which he perhaps assumed would be so welcome in the saloon bars with the approval spreading out. like ripples in the water? There was everything to be said, he thought, for flogging or hanging people convicted of appropriate crimes. Anyone travelling from Scotland to support the Scottish team in an international at Wembley was a "pig". Homosexual people were perverts who could be deterred by sprays (of what?) or red-hot pokers (we shall not elaborate on that particular proposed penal reform). Having heard all that no-one would be surprised that Dicks viewed black people as generally bone idle and so was not in favour of the relaxation of immigration controls.

It’s not on record whether Dicks was also "loved to bits" by his fellow legislators. He is not. however, the only worrying eccentric who no longer has a voice in the details of applying the demands of British capitalism to the working class. Olga Maitland, who bit the dust at Sutton and Cheam. was once considered the doyenne of gossip columnists; she was unwise enough to debate with the Socialist Party and unintentionally had the audience rolling in the aisles by ranting about something called “Tommy grit”. Marcus Fox lorded it as chairman of the 1922 Committee and did his best to convince us that he was not a real person but a character from one of J. B. Priestley's more mordant accounts of past life in small Yorkshire towns. William Waldegrave, ex-Etonian and Fellow of All Souls, was deeply involved in the Arms-to-Iraq scandal and the question of whether lies had been told to Parliament about it and whether the prosecution of the Churchill Matrix management quite fitted in with what brainy, wealthy aristocrats should regard as unwavering British justice. And Waldegrave never really answered the questions, except with carefully crafted evasions.

Carnival

On 2 May there was a strange, almost carnival atmosphere about. People were actually celebrating the election of a Labour government, as if getting rid of people like Evans and Dicks was going to make capitalism an easier, more humane society. There is no evidence in the records of past Labour governments to encourage such optimism. There have been corrupt, eccentric and extremist politicians in the past as well as more rational and so-called moderate ones. It is no time to hate our leaders nor to love them but to hate capitalism and all it does to human beings and to trust ourselves to do what is needed to end it all. 

Ivan

Avoiding World War 3 (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in an epoch which will either be looked back on as a nightmare from which the human race had to escape, or will not be looked back on at all. Since the Second World War. not a single day has passed without there being a major war taking place somewhere in the world. Over twenty-five million people have died in these wars and each conflict has had its own individual history of human tragedy and suffering: Kenya, Vietnam, El Salvador, Sudan, Chad, Pakistan, Lebanon, Algeria, Nigeria, Ireland, the Falklands . . . the list seems endless. Most recently, in the Gulf War between Iraq and Iran, over a quarter of a million people have been slaughtered in four years.

We have witnessed the greatest increase in the forces of destruction ever: a single nuclear bomb can now release more explosive power in seconds than was released during the entire Second World War. World military spending has increased by twenty-seven per cent in real terms since 1972, to reach 620 billion dollars a year. This means that about one million dollars is being spent on the killing industry every minute. The amount spent on cancer research is less than one per cent of the 52 billion dollars spent annually on military research, while the British military research budget of £1.8 billion is sixteen times the budget of the Medical Research Council. The British government spends about £2 million an hour (£17 billion a year) on "defence" — in other words, the powers of destruction.

The mass suicide for which these weapons are designed has reared its ugly head several times in recent years. Take, for example, this report from the Observer (7 September 1980):

  Three times in less than a year NORAD (North American Air Defence Command) computers have detected a nuclear attack which was not actually taking place. On each occasion the crews of B52 nuclear bombers raced to their aircraft for take-off and the crews of intercontinental missiles began preliminary launch procedures.

For all of its talk about security through "deterrence", the government clearly does not trust its own propaganda; they have developed detailed plans about what will happen when, rather than if, war breaks out, Home Office Circular ES 1/81. quoted in Civil Defence Review 35/2.85/3. states that "for planning purposes, it should be assumed that there may be as little as seven days' warning of an attack and the basic essentials of plans should be capable of implementation in 48 hours". The East Anglia Regional Health Authority, meanwhile, have drawn up a plan for health services in time of war, including an 18-page appendix on herbal remedies for use in the absence of conventional drugs — juniper for cystitis, mistletoe for hypertension. The same report advises that for protection from fall-out we should wear home-made thick overalls or "heavy rubberised clothing" with "a plastic bag over the head with a hole for a medical or improvised gauze" to provide head protection (Guardian, 17 August 1981). This insulting rubbish is intended to give us some kind of reassurance about a future catastrophe which is on the cards.

On a less farcical note, we have the ominous tones of the government booklet, Protect and Survive:

 If a death occurs while you are confined in the fall-out room, place the body in another room and confine it as securely as possible. Attach an identification . . .

And, with the advice to end all advice, the Home Office Circular ES 8/1976. which was sent to the chief executives of Councils, but merits study by us all:

 When radiological conditions permitted movement, district and borough London controllers should assume that one of the priority tasks for their staff in areas where survivors were to continue residing, would be to collect and cremate or inter human remains in mass graves . . . once the initial clearance of corpses has been completed, there would be still a problem of several weeks, and perhaps months, of an above average rate of dying from disease and radiation effects. Nevertheless, a return to the pre-attack formalities should be the objective in the longer term.

(Quoted in E. P. Thompson, Protest and Survive, 1980)

The government, then, is anxious that, as soon as possible after an orgy of nuclear devastation. we should get back to the very formalities which would have led to such a tragedy in the first place. If we are going to avoid a Third World War, we must start by looking at the nature of those formalities. How is it that present-day society generates war as sure as night follows day?

There are many dubious theories held about what wars are fought for. Politicians of various kinds will tell us that wars are fought for freedom, justice, democracy and so on. For most of us. however, our conditions of life have to be defended in a struggle which is far from the battlefields or weapons silos. Wars are not fought over the level of our wages, rents or mortgages. They are not fought over high political or theological principles. Wars in the modern world have a basically economic cause, which relates to the power of a minority in each of the states of the world. Much window-dressing is used to convince the cannon-fodder that our lives are being laid down for something more noble than the commercial interests of our bosses, or the sordid privileges of the Kremlin bureaucrats. But there are occasional moments in which we hear, from the horse's mouth, just how the interests of the small, property-owning class drag us all into the nightmare of modem warfare.

We live in a society in which we are bombarded from an early age with the idea of the nation. We are said to be "British". And yet, for most people in Britain, this just happens to be the place in which we sell our ability to work in order to survive. The amount most of us truly own could be fitted into the barrel of one gun. A newspaper advert for army officers states that "Your part will be to prepare for a war everyone prays will never happen . . .  it will be difficult to remember that you are still protecting your country and all you love most". It will indeed be difficult to remember that it is "your" country: according to government figures, the richest 3.2 per cent of people in Britain today possess 84 per cent of listed shares, 91 per cent of private companies, and 88 per cent of land. So much for the property- owning democracy.

The flag-waving of nationalism is not just childish pomp and pride. The countries for which we are asked to kill are not ours. Those who do have a stake in the nation are those who own it: the class of employers, landlords and investors referred to politely as "the business community". And what are they in conflict over? They are quarreling — at the conference table where possible, over the battlefield and our dead bodies where necessary — about the dividing of the spoils which are derived from the productive work of the majority. There are four main bones of contention between the various national groupings of capitalists.

Markets

Employers only receive profit if they sell the goods we have produced for them. In trying to sell goods, they are in competition with one another. States look after their local capitalists in this respect, by organising import controls and other ways of turning trade to the advantage of some capitalists at the expense of others. These moves are always backed up by force. In March 1939, the Conservative Minister of Overseas Trade, speaking not about opposing dictatorship or defending democracy, said: "We are not going to give up any markets to anyone. Great Britain is strong enough to fight for markets abroad". Similarly, the United Nations US Ambassador Andrew Young was quoted in 1977 as saying:

  My approach to Africa is in some ways like the Japanese approach to Asia, and my approach is not necessarily humanitarian. It is in the long range interest of access to resources and the creation of markets for American goods and services.

Raw Materials

Just as important to capitalists, in their pursuit of profit, is the need to gain and defend sources of minerals and other raw materials. This applied in the nineteenth-century Franco-Prussian wars over the coal and steel of Alsace-Lorraine, and inspired the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1897 as well as the Russian repeat performance of this some eighty-three years later. It is also a factor in the war between Iran and Iraq: the Majnoon Islands contain about seven billion barrels of oil. Speaking on ITV's Weekend World on 8 March 1981 in defence of the Rapid Deployment Force, the then Minister of Defence, John Nott, stated: "we have crucial minerals and in fact our oil supplies to defend". Needless to say, the majority of viewers had no mineral wealth at all to defend. Even more revealing was the following admission, made in 1963 by Kennedy’s Undersecretary of State. U. Alexis Johnson:

  What is the attraction that South-East Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate. fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of South-East Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, tea, corn, tin, spices, oil and many others . . .

Territory

Thirdly, there is the constant struggle between the various states of the world, whether private- or state-capitalist, over the control of the earth itself, divided as it is into artificial fragments by national boundaries. Since the Second World War, for example, there has been an almost constant series of border disputes between India, China and Russia. This aspect of how the capitalist world system generates war was let slip in a speech made by Lady Olga Maitland of Women and Families for Defence when she was debating against the Socialist Party at Islington Central Library on 19 January 1984:

  Britain is a country which must show that we have the resolution to defend ourselves because we are a vital piece of real estate in Europe.

Trade Routes

Finally, in order to sell their goods and realise their profit, the capitalist class of the world have to be able to transport goods and materials freely. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 in which Egypt was in conflict with Britain, France and Israel, was a conflict over a vital trade route. Similarly, in 1981 when the US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was seeking to stress to the Japanese section of the ruling class the military obligations they owed to their American counterparts. he pointed out that "the USA helps to protect the vital sea lanes upon which Japan depends for its global trade" (Guardian, 29 April 1981).

What must we conclude from all of this evidence? These conflicts over the sources which yield profit are of no real concern to the working-class majority in society, to people who have to live on wages, salaries or the dole rather than on rent, interest or profit. It is the capitalist system of society, which exists throughout the world today, which causes war through its relentless and competitive drive for profit.

Of course, these economic factors leading to warfare have to operate through the agency of human consciousness, with all its complications. The many popular rationalisations of war suggest that religion or culture are leading us to the battlefield. These are often the concepts employed by governments to persuade individual workers to flock to a mass suicide, but they are not the root cause of the conflict. Having recognised that it is the system of production for profit which causes war. we have no option but to seek to replace it with a system of production for use. The capitalist class do not, in general, profit from war, but their system is beyond even their control. When the market dictates they invest in weapons to protect their investments, they have no choice but to follow where their share prices lead.

For this reason, movements like CND which hope to persuade governments of capitalism to operate this murderous system in a more gentle way, are doomed to failure. Indeed, the policy of gradual reduction of armaments has already degenerated into total compromise, as shown by the CND leaflet, Questions and Answers About Non-nuclear Defence. This advises a "non-provocative" conventional defence policy using "troops with interceptor aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles rather than long-range bombers" and giving "anti-tank missiles priority over tanks". So much for the "Peace" Movement. The Labour Defence Spokesman, Denzil Davies, has recently echoed this "peaceful" militarism, stating that the Labour Party is "totally committed to the defence of Britain" (Guardian, 7 August 1984).

Let those who have a material stake in British capital rise to its defence. For the rest of us — about ninety-five per cent of the population here — our interest lies in defending ourselves against the daily onslaught of capital, as represented by our bosses. The global time bomb we are sitting on can only be defused if it is put under the democratic control of the world community. The only true Peace Movement is one which stands for the abolition of all weapons, through the abolition of the social system which has made them necessary. We can talk seriously about the prospect of permanent world peace only on the basis of transforming social relationships. This is a practical proposition; to hope for the competition in the market place between rival gangs of robbers to be carried out without murder is an idle dream. At the moment we are human commodities, watching our lives being bought and sold on the labour market. But we can use the power of conscious co-operation to reverse the current trend towards a collective suicide. The only way to avoid war is to create a socialist society. Think about it. But not for too long.

Clifford Slapper

It's no joke (1993)

From the July 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Browsing through the local library recently—us “dole scroungers" really know how to live it up—I came across a coffee-table-sized book titled A History of Class. I offered up a silent thank you to whoever had had the foresight to order and stock a book which might allow the casual browser to discover something about the continuing class struggle both now and through the ages.

When I was much younger and had fallen off my bike for the umpteenth time and went into the house blarting my eyes out. my dad used to say to me. “you’ll have much worse than that before you’re finished". Admittedly, I don’t think he had in mind discovering that I had misread the title of a library book, A History of Class was. in fact, A History of Glass!

Peter Ashby, principal consultant for the research company, Full Employment UK, aired his version of making the jobless earn their dole in the Daily Telegraph of 21 January. There is no doubting which side of the class divide Mr Ashby belongs to. He said:

  We need to move away from the old Beveridge notion that you have an income-based safety net for the unemployed. Instead we need to create a work-based safety net. Society would say after this period of unemployment. it's no longer acceptable to us for people to be outside the process of work.

His company had, he said, done research which found that:

  Once people had been out of work for a year, quite a rapid process of psychological decline sets in. People’s self esteem begins to plummet and they talk themselves out of the ability to get back into employment. Then if they get an interview they will under-perform to such a degree that they are unlikely to get the job. Others burrow into the hidden economy accepting the risk that that entails.

As my dad used to say, “if you’ve made a mistake, be big enough to admit it". After all these years of despising the British ruling class—that’s the two percent of the population who own or control the factories, the transport industry, the construction industry, the food industry, the banks, the service industries and the farming industry—I now realize that most members of that class deserve sympathy for their low self-esteem and the psychological damage suffered by them for never having worked. The rest of us, the working class, should be grateful that we have no choice but to sell our labour power—our physical and mental skills—because, obviously, being economically exploited by a minority class is what keeps us sane in an insane world. Unless, of course, capitalism is going through one of its periodic crises of overproduction better known as a slump. The psychological, emotional and economic consequences of suddenly becoming an unpaid wage-slave as opposed to a paid one are well documented.

Many years ago when I was at school, April the First was always a day to be approached with caution. Although the sensitivity of an adolescent was likely to be wounded at times, on that day it was even more galling to fall foul of an April Fool’s trick. As I recall, the deadline for catching out the unsuspecting was midday.

Earlier this year, my local paper reported that Lady Cobham, wife of the local, titled. squire, had been appointed to the board of the London Docklands Development Corporation and to the board of British Waterways. She was given these jobs by Michael Howard, Secretary of State for the Environment. Her ladyship is also president of the Heart of England Tourist Board. A spokesperson said Lady Cobham was delighted with the appointments but did not wish to comment further. The reason for the reticence? The one "job" pays £6,140 a year for half-a-day’s “work" a week. The other “job” pays £8.000 a year for a day’s “work” a week. As my dad used to say, “Them as have got, will get”.

Are you filled with moral outrage? Does it seem grossly unjust to you that someone should receive that amount of money for doing so little when millions are on the dole and across the country workers are agreeing to pay cuts simply to keep their jobs? Or are you envious that opportunities to make such easy money don’t fall into your lap? Or are you simply indifferent because that’s the way thing are and they'll never change? The story was carried in February, not on April First, but the joke continues to be on the working class.

Fitted carpets

Worcester Park is a well-heeled Surrey suburb where John Major lived until he was twelve. Not much likelihood of “dole scroungers” inhabiting that part of the world surely? But in a capitalist world no-one is immune from the effects of market forces. The Telegraph Magazine carried a report on 7 November on the devastating effect of the recession there:

  Lady Olga Maitland, newly elected MP for Sutton and Cheam which includes most of Worcester Park, described her constituency as "a third world, neither town nor country, inhabited by secure, safe, clean, decent, honest people. Salaries range from £14,000 to £30,000. This is absolutely middle England. in income, lifestyle and ambitions, people are uncomplaining. They take pride in stability. They are house proud, with nice kitchens, fitted carpets, central heating, and go to a lot of trouble to make sure the curtains tone".

It is easy to sneer at such "middle-class” aspirations but there are, no doubt, thousands of fellow wage-slaves who would like nothing better than to exchange their poverty-stricken lifestyles for nice

kitchens. fitted carpets and central heating.They would be eager, given the opportunity, to sell their labour power for two hundred and fifty quid a week, let alone for one-and- a-half days. What’s wrong with wanting decent housing, decent education, decent health care and a crime-free society? Who could argue with that? Are the inhabitants of Worcester Park and elsewhere in this island asking yet whether a society based on the economic exploitation of the majority by a minority, a society based upon production for profit not need, a society subject to the demands and whims of market forces, can ever provide the not unreasonable needs of individuals and society as a whole? The joke has gone on long enough and if we don't utilize the power which we possess as a class we might all die crying.

Think of the number of fans at a Saturday Premier League football match. If they were all committed to the introduction of a society based upon free access could they be ignored? Think of the number of workers on the dole. If they understood the reasons why capitalism has to go, to be replaced by a society which no longer screws people in every aspect of their lives, could they be ignored? Strength lies not only in numbers but in an understanding and an overwhelming desire to exercise the political power which the working class possesses. The means to abolish for ever the psychological traumas which living in a capitalist society induces. The inequality, the unfairness, the pressure of the state to conform, and the economic exploitation of the majority by the minority, are waiting for the working-class majority to say, the unfunny joke is over—let’s create a world with real laughter in it.

Dave Coggan