Power pact (1981)

From the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The political alliance between the Liberals and the ‘Social Democrats' pales into insignificance in comparison with the more sinister alliance between the SDP and the BBC. The media in recent months has outdone many of its previous efforts in paving the path of ‘moderation' as the TV, radio and newspaper journalists invent stories to prove that there is now a popular burst of opinion in favour of ‘centre politics'. What began as a Gang of Four has become a rabble of many: ex-Labour cabinet ministers, sixteen members of the ruling group on Islington council, some Liberals who look like they have just won the jackpot at Bingo, and even an inoffensive looking Tory from Norfolk. Names that once sent us searching for a copy of Who's Who (Had you heard of Bill Rodgers when he was a member of ‘our great movement’?) are paraded across our screens as the speakers of Truth; Liberals who used to write manifestos about saving whales and giving power to Wales (or was it the other way round?) are now adopting pompous airs and talking about ‘preparing for government'; even that undying enemy of labour and friend of Labour, The Daily Mirror, has opted for the alliance, with full-page photographs of semi-nude women saying The middle way is the best'.

In order to establish the mythical middle, mythical extremes are needed. One can imagine the editor of The Guardian issuing the order: ‘Go out and create us a couple of really awful extremes so that we can sell this new centre.' And so the caricatures came to be. First, there is the caricature of the wicked, thoughtless Thatcherite Tories who plan to increase unemployment and blow up the world with American weapons once they have succeeded in getting the whole working class standing in one long dole queue. Like the witch in a children’s book, Thatcher is painted as being wickedness personified. The other side of the caricature is the Marxist- dominated Benno-Trotyskyist Labour Party. Benn is portrayed as a modern Stalin, waiting patiently for his chance to grab power and destroy Western Civilisation (coming soon).

Like all myths, there are elements of truth. Thatcher and the Tories are viciously anti-working class. When have Tories not been? Their ignorant and unhistorical monetarist policies do fail to provide any solution whatsoever to the social problems of our time. They are impotent in the face of disaster and arrogant in the face of criticism. With increasing unemployment, increasing cuts in social services, increasing armaments production and increasing poverty, workers are right to regard the promises of Thatcher and her team as an insult to human intelligence. The memories of Labourites are as short as their alternative policies for getting society out of the mess it is in.

They attack the problems as if Thatcher caused them. As if unemployment did not double under the last Labour government; as if Labour Ministers were not in the forefront of cutting social services in order to balance the books; as if the last Labour government did not place armaments production as a top priority; as if the rich did not get richer during the period of the last Labour government. Who are these people trying to kid? But now they have an ‘alternative economic policy’ and the story goes that if we give Benn another chance (‘another' because he was in the last Labour government) he will run capitalism in the interests of the working class. This claim is a foolish and cruel con-trick. The next Labour government (if there is one) will not run capitalism; capitalism will run it. The portrait of Benn and Co. as a socialist alternative may attract a few people to the Labour party, it may scare some off, but in the long-run it will be seen as a waste of political energy.

And there they are, standing in the middle between the Wicked Witch and the Bogus Marxist Threat: the Liberal-SDP Alliance. Dead centre, dead honest, in fact they claim to be so innocuous that they might as well actually be dead. There is that nice young David Steel and that dear old Roy Jenkins . . . all terribly nice chaps with whom any self-respecting media hack would enjoy sharing a bottle of claret, but there is just one little thing: What the hell do they stand for? So far they have left the electorate in the dark about this minor aspect of their alliance. Like a well-rehearsed play for which there is not yet a script, the Alliance are selling plenty of tickets, but what will they do when their followers demand to see the performance? Not long ago a successful SDP candidate for a local council in the North East was interviewed on the local radio: “Now that people have voted for you, could you tell us exactly what policies you stand for?" asked the man from the media; “Well, we’ll be deciding our policy later this year and as soon as we have, the electors will be the first to know", replied the man from the media. So, there you have it; vote for the Alliance and ask what you are voting for later. History being made? It’s more like a mystery being made.

On one point the allies are definitely in agreement. Both are one hundred per cent committed to the maintenance of the capitalist social order. No need for a policy statement about that. Both the Liberals (who claim to stand for capitalism) and the SDP (who call themselves ‘democratic Socialists’) accept a way of running society in which goods are only produced if there is a prospect of selling them on the market for a profit. Both are opposed to any challenge to the class ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. In this vital respect the alliance is broader than it thinks, for it includes the Conservative and Labour parties. All of the Lefties with their ‘alternative economic strategies’ (for which read, ‘previously tried and failed Keynesian policies’ are as committed to the buying and selling system as any Liberal or SDPer.

As reported in a previous issue of the Socialist Standard, the SDP has refused a challenge from the SPGB to debate its views in public. Its leaders prefer to state their case from the secure distance of a BBC Any Questions studio rather than face real working class people with real problems arising from a real cause which the SDP will do nothing to remove. As the media continues to persuade us of the moderation and reasonableness of the new messiahs; as David Steel prepares to resume where Lloyd George left off; as political careerists from all parties point the accusing finger at one another and say that everyone is an extremist but themselves; as the word ‘socialism’ is tossed about the political arena like a football which changes shape each time it arrives at another team; as a Gang of Bores awaits its call to do for the working class what has never been done before and what can never be done, it is high time that we, the working class, took a good, hard look at those who want us to follow them, and when we have seen them for what they are we can tell them precisely where to go.

Steve Coleman

Editorial: Did you waste your vote? (1983)

Editorial from the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The stunned aftermath of the Tory election victory was a time for the defeated parties to be composing their excuses. The Labour Party are not yet sure who, or what, they should blame for their collapse but the Liberal/SDP Alliance are quite clear on the matter. They were, they protest, robbed; the electoral system in this country is such that it allowed a party to win power on a minority of votes while a smaller party has only a handful of seats in Parliament to show for the millions of people who supported it. This anomaly, says the Alliance, calls into question the very nature of parliamentary democracy in Britain — it is. they hope to persuade us, time for a change.

In fact this is a long-established argument, which we have been hearing from the Liberal Party ever since they were swept from the position of being the alternative government. It has now been taken up by the SDP. although none of the prominent ex-Labour ministers in the SDP complained about the electoral system when it was working to their advantage. It does not need a mathematical genius to work out, or to understand, the statistics of it. Over the country millions of votes go to unsuccessful candidates, so that when the votes cast for each party are divided by the number of their MPs it emerges that vastly fewer votes are needed overall to elect a Tory or a Labour MP than for one from the Alliance. Put another way, this means that millions of votes are virtually unrepresented in Parliament, which causes much anguish among the self-styled democrats of the Alliance.

This was the argument used by the Liberal Party to support their persistent campaign for proportional representation which, by one method or another, was supposed to produce a Parliament more in line with the votes as they are cast in the election. The Labour and Tory parties always evaded the issue of democracy and attacked the Liberal proposals on the grounds that proportional representation made for a fragmented, and therefore unstable. government. There is no evidence (except to the contrary) that working class interests are bound up with the stability or otherwise of the government, which has the role of protecting the interests of the exploiting class in society. It is important to observe that both sides in this debate are motivated, not by any objective concern for democratic representation but by a concern for their own political advantage. For example the extent of the Liberal concern for democracy can be gauged by the fact that they grant dictatorial powers to their leader on the composition of their election manifesto.

None of this should obscure the fact that democracy is important to the working class. It enables them to organise more freely in trade unions and thereby better protect themselves in the struggles of the industrial field. It makes the existence of a socialist party easier, which means that the case for a new society can be stated more effectively. And there is also the fact that life for workers under capitalism is less stressful in the absence of the type of repression associated with a dictatorship such as Nazi Germany. What is unimportant is which party holds power in a capitalist society; apart from a reshuffling of their programmes and their personalities, they are at core identical. None of them can lay claim to be able to solve the problems typical of this social system, including that of political repression. Votes for all of them — Labour, Conservative, Alliance and the rest — are votes for impotence and those millions of workers who opted for them at the election were wasting their votes.

Democracy matters to the working class because it is not impotent; it is strength. It is more than a five-yearly chance to choose between the competing political clones of capitalism; democracy is a matter of knowledge, consciousness and participation. It is, in other words, an essential part of the case for a socialist society and it is as a means to establish and organise that society that democracy achieves the true measure of its importance.

Socialism will come into existence when the world’s working class, in a conscious political act, have overthrown the class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and replaced it with communal ownership. It will be a classless, moneyless society in which human beings will co-operate to produce wealth which will be freely available to all to satisfy their needs. It will be a system which makes all information openly available to enable a full participation in decision-taking. Just as the socialist movement today is made up of conscious socialists, so will socialism be populated by people who are aware of the basic nature of their society and of how it must be operated to the common benefit.

Socialists have good cause to be aware of the defects of the present system of parliamentary elections. We also know that to attempt to change it, while leaving capitalism to continue, will have little effect — certainly not enough to justify a diversion of working class efforts from the struggle for socialism. The capitalist parties are concerned with the issue through an expedient preoccupation with their own fortunes; the paramount issue is not whether there should be fewer Tory MPs. or more Alliance MPs, to run capitalism perhaps slightly differently, but whether the world will continue to suffer a social system which cannot answer to its people’s needs or whether we shall have socialism.

Whatever its faults, the limited democracy in force in places like Britain at present allows a socialist movement to exist and to propagate its ideas. What hampers our progress is a persisting lack of working class consciousness and understanding. When that is remedied — and socialists everywhere work to that end — we shall have the new society of co-operation, abundance and security — the society of true democracy.

Running Commentary: Patriots at work (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Patriots at work

In the whole of the world there are probably no more fervent patriots than Peter Wright and Oliver North.

To prove it, they were prepared to go to unusual lengths. North arranged to supply arms to the Contras in defiance of a Congressional decision against it and then made elaborate arrangements to hide the evidence in the memory holes and the shredding machines of Washington. One senator described it as a military junta established to circumvent the checks and balances of the American Constitution.

Wright, in his own words, "bugged and burgled" his way wherever and whenever it suited his purpose. He knew of other officers in M15 who tried to organise a romantic covert operation to undermine the democratically-elected Wilson government — on the grounds that, in the view of these officers. Wilson was a "menace". And he kept quiet about all this until he went into an embittered retirement.

Both of these men justify what they did on the grounds that they were acting in the "national interest"; both deny that they would ever contemplate doing anything likely to harm "their" country. Peter Wright is now rather too old and sick to look like an example of tragic heroism; but Oliver North — well, we all know about the adulation his confessions provoked among his fellow patriots in America.

But one thing patriots are supposed to worship and to protect is the way of life in "their" country — which must include its system of government and its laws. Obeying the law is not a matter of convenience or expediency — something to be done at one time and not at another, something for others to do but not for yourself. If a country's governmental system and its laws are "good” — as Wright and North, as staunch patriots, must think — then to obey them and to conform to them should be a matter of pride and pleasure rather than of anguish and hardship.

So what are we to make of these patriots, who claim the right to choose when and how they accept what "their" country represents? Of course they cannot claim to be consistent or sincere in their beliefs. But that is only the beginning. Patriotism — which, as we have said, is no more than a belief — is not consistent or logical. We are justified in being proud only about our achievements but the place where we are born, our parents, the nationality label which is stuck on us, are accidents and not achievements. So the basis of patriotism — pride in country — is false.

Patriotism claims that the artificial national state boundaries of capitalism divide the human race not just in terms of territory but of ability and temperament: but there is no evidence to sustain this. Across all the boundaries — of race and sex as well as of nation — the class divide of capitalism operates and it is the only one which is of any significance when we consider human interests and progress to a better society.

So if Wright and North are confused — or deceitful, cynical, ruthless, whichever is preferred -— they are really only behaving as patriots must. And that should be enough to convince anyone of the case for international working class unity.

Gorbachev’s gift

We all know how Mikhail Gorbachev is seen as a "liberalising reformist" leading the Russian people to "communism". He urges people to work harder and improve productivity and factories to become more independent in pursuit of greater profit.

Gorbachev, however, is not just good at telling others what to do. He is himself participating in the process of glasnost and perestroika (openess and restructuring). With this aim in mind the state capitalist boss has donated 50,000 roubles (£50,000) to the Soviet Cultural Fund for a statue of Vasili Tyorkin to be built in Smolensk (Central Russia). Vasili Tyorkin is the soldier hero in a poem by Alexander Tvardovsky.

This money, we are told by Soviet Weekly (11 July 1987) came out of the foreign royalties for Gorbachev's books and other writings. As a member of the Russian ruling class, with a few roubles to spare, Gorbachev is quite happy to use his pin money like this for two reasons.

Any new monument which is not another tribute to Lenin will be welcome by most people and will enhance the popularity of the present leader.

A statue which helps to spread absurd patriotic notions that Russia is worth dying for is likely to be welcomed by the whole Russian capitalist class since it is their way of life that the working class might one day be called on to defend in war.

Mike Tavener

Dictatorial democrats

This is a good time to remember that the Gang of Four broke with the Labour Party partly because of their anger and dismay at that party's persistent internal feuding. Break the mould of these outworn, traditional parties, they argued, and instead fashion a new one in which reason and moderation would prevail. Then all disputes would be settled simply because nobody would be adopting preformed, dogmatic stances. Sounded good, thought a lot of people who were also fed up with Labour's apparent will for its own destruction.

Trouble — serious trouble — started when the Alliance, having kidded themselves that they were about to become a serious prospect to have an influence in the government, were so badly mauled in the last election. The response of the mould-breakers to this was anything but innovative. They resorted to the excuse which Labour and Conservative Parties regularly use when they lose an election. There is nothing wrong, they asserted, with our principles or our policies; the problem lies with our failure to present them effectively enough.

In the case of the Alliance, they decided that they had suffered precisely because they were an alliance — that the regular appearance of two Davids on our TV screens cost them crucial support among workers who like consistency, strength and single-mindedness in their leaders. It was thus that the Alliance came up with the idea of a formal merger between the Liberals and the SDP — one party, one leader.

Now moderation and reasonableness should have welcomed such an idea — or at least been prepared to discuss it in an objective. constructive frame of mind. In fact, the campaign leading up to the referendum on the merger was notable for its lack of these very things. Abuse and mud-slinging would be moderate terms to describe what was said by some Alliance members about others.

If that were not enough many members of the SDP. including some of its leaders, made it quite clear that if the vote went against their wishes they would not accept it. David Owen adopted this attitude. Rosie Barnes was another: "If merger takes place." she said. "There will be a Social Democratic Party which remains behind. Four of the MPs will remain Social Democrats and David Owen will be our leader

So this is a good time to ask: What sort of democrat is it (and what sort of democracy do they envisage) who contests an issue leading to a vote but has no intention of being influenced if the majority is against them.

The merger debate in the Alliance has revealed, if it were still needed, the true nature of that organisation — as another party of capitalism with all the cynicism and trickery of those they claim to despise.

Voices in the wilderness (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

More than half of the workers we canvassed in last month’s election campaign were cynical about the promises of all the main parties standing. For three weeks every five years, the British ruling class expects us to think about “politics”, that is, about which band of professional liars will administer our poverty for the next period. We attended all of the main parties’ meetings in order to sell socialist literature, as part of our campaign in Islington, and at each meeting we saw the same few faces, sadly devoted to the empty rhetoric of their indistinguishable leaders.

In Islington South and Finsbury, where the only genuinely socialist candidate was standing, the Tories kept quite a low profile. Thatcher’s talk of Victorian Values had been dropped for the duration of the campaign, since for most workers, the only way in which hard work and thrift prove profitable is when our bosses profit from our hard work and thrift. The Tory leaflet spoke of “the quality of our armed forces”, “controlling secondary picketing” and “larger export markets”; all matters only of interest to those who own and control the wealth of Britain, not the millions who produce it.

The two favourites in the race for power in Islington South were the Labour and SDP candidates. The Labour Party relied almost entirely on the “lesser evil" myth. Realising that capitalism under the Labour varnish is quite unsavoury to many of the workers it exploits, they told us that we had to vote Labour, to avoid the greater horror of capitalism tarnished by the leadership of Thatcher. The idea that to get rid of Thatcher’s capitalism the only possibility is to support Foot’s capitalism is as stupidly dogmatic as the Tory claim that there is no alternative to their policies. Tactical voting is based on the assumption that sheep must follow one another on to a limited number of bandwagons, then shuffle around until the least obnoxious compromise can be found. It denies any kind of clear principle or aim, and any possibility of real social change through democratic persuasion.

The election was taken over, especially in Islington, by the most cynical slander and manipulation on all sides. The social system represented by all the major parties has become bankrupt of ideas. They have almost run out of ways to secure workers’ loyalty to the system which exploits us. Consequently, more time was spent attacking their opponents than claiming any positive merits for their own policies. Many people we canvassed said they agreed with the revolutionary alternative we were standing for, but would vote Labour through an almost religious, irrational attachment to traditional loyalties. When they start to act more in accordance with their real disgust at the Labour Party’s cynical running of the profit system, what is regarded as possible and impossible will rapidly change. Perhaps the most ludicrous example of this contradictory attitude came from the misnamed Socialist Workers Party. Some of their members passionately attacked the Labour candidate at a public rally, shouting out that Labour had always inevitably betrayed the workers because it was running the capitalist system. Finally, they were told from the platform, “No, no. You should be campaigning for a Labour victory”. They replied, to the audience’s bewilderment, “We are" and, sure enough, their paper told people to Vote Labour, even though the Socialist Party of Great Britain was posing the revolutionary socialist alternative.

We were faced with three well-oiled machines, prepared to stop at nothing in their desperate vote-catching. The Labour candidate even referred at a public meeting to the SPGB campaign slogan, "Vote for Yourself for a Change”, and claimed that the Labour Party embodied this no-leaders democracy! Their confidential instructions (from above, of course) tell a different story:

DO NOT ASK: "Will you be voting Labour?" That is bad canvassing. Voters say yes to get rid of you/make you happy/ deliberately confuse you . . . If person says "I never vote”, mark on card. We do not wish to antagonise by calling again. Sometimes people tell the truth!

One of the most infamous careerists in the constituency was the sitting MP, George Cunningham. He was elected through the Labour Party in 1979 and then transferred to their Old Boys’ Club, the SDP. In some circles he is known as George Conning’em, since that’s what he’s been doing for the past five years. Most people wouldn’t mind a pound for every baby he’s kissed. When we challenged him to a public debate, he arrogantly replied that we would have to find someone to give us publicity elsewhere, he was too busy proclaiming his commitment to democracy and free speech to mess about with petty things like public debates. Now that he has lost his job at Westminster, we plan to offer him the publicity he once denied us, by repeating our challenge to debate.

One leaflet contained compliments about Cunningham from the Daily Mail, The Times, Observer, Guardian, BBC and Punch. In other words, he is a model capitalist politician, expert at persuading people to leave control in the hands of a minority. Another shows a cartoon of him with a big, tightly-clenched fist, and another with a foot stamping on the neck of an alligator marked Creeping Extremism. The local SDP campaign was based on the "left extremist" scare, traditionally popular with the fascists. SDP Agent Chris Pryce was quoted in the Islington Gazette as saying:

Make no mistake, Chris Smith is one of the most extreme Labour candidates in the country. His constant harping on gay rights, his open support for punks and squatters and other fringe groups is now common knowledge.

Of course, at the time Pryce was not aware that the SDP were soon to join the fringe groups in Islington; on the other hand. Smith is now at Westminster, and there has been no revolution in the conditions of the workers in Islington or anywhere else.

One day, while leafletting in Chapel Market alongside the SDP, one of their members explained to us that they only had short leaflets there, since the people wouldn't understand a more detailed manifesto. It was claimed that Labour posters were displayed in the windows of empty flats by the Labour Council because there was so little genuine support for them on many of the estates. Some Labour canvassers were reported to have resorted to telling people that Cunningham was ill or not standing, and that it was illegal to display his posters. All of this vicious in-fighting among politicians standing for the profit system took the place of real debate over policies. It was not just Cunningham who refused to debate with us; we had also been refused by the Labour candidate Smith, and by both the SDP and Labour candidates in the Islington North constituency.

Islington CND planned and advertised a public debate between the candidates on the question of nuclear weapons, but this had to be abandoned since they refused to comply with the regulations which demand that all candidates be invited to such meetings; they did not want to give a platform to the candidates from the National Front and the British National Party. They even tried to use a legal loophole by asking if we would formally put the costs of running the meeting on our election expenses, which would have allowed them to leave out the fascists. We refused, pointing out the illogicality of opposing somebody because they are against free speech, and then denying them the chance to air their ideas. If the NF and BNP had to explain themselves on a public platform, most workers would be quite capable of rejecting their vicious and divisive racism, without having CND to censor it for them. Moreover, the NF, like CND. is against the American nuclear bases and missiles because they are nationalists. Indeed, the manifesto of the NF, with its support for import controls and getting out of the Common Market, shares with much of the Left the nationalist, anti-working-class policy of British state capitalism.

The real local issues were hardly dealt with at all by the six parties who stood against the SPGB and world socialism. One in five workers in Islington are unemployed. Over ten thousand are on the housing waiting list, despite there being many empty homes. An increasing number of young people there are turning to heroin, despite having friends who have died on it. On certain housing estates, violent racist attacks constantly threaten thousands of people. Since 1975, under Labour and Tory governments, the number of hospitals in Islington has been reduced from five to two. The Labour Party has failed again and again to live up to the expectations of its supporters, because it operates within the confines of the anti-human system which lies at the root of all these problems. When challenged about the possibility of a genuine socialist alternative, the Labour candidate told us, as would any Tory, about the need for “realism”. In other words, keep a system of war, poverty and institutionalised misery, rather than end the sacred rights of property.

The contradictions of the present social system cannot be reformed away by the rhetoric of individual politicians. In health, housing and so on. profit comes before need, accumulation before consumption. In the week of the election, houses in Islington (Barnsbury and Canonbury Square) were advertised costing £130,000, £154,950, £197,500 . . . The people buying these properties do not suffer the housing problems for which the area is notorious. As long as this class division remains, the majority will be in an inferior, insecure position. The Labour Party’s Plan for Jobs was just a policy to retain profits for a minority and wage-slavery for the rest. As the local community paper, the Islington Gutter Press explained:

None of these (Labour) objectives will be possible without the co-operation of the trade unions . . . Yes. the trade unions will have to show restraint and they will have to abide by the National Economic Assessment. But we believe in them and we believe in the future of this country.

As long as capitalism has lasted, not a single day has gone by without discontent and dissent burning on somewhere. But the enormous potential for revolutionary change has, for the past century, been channelled into fruitless reformism. Workers won the vote in the late nineteenth century but instead of using it to end the profit system, they have used it to give capitalism a longer lease, sometimes through Labour governments which have understandings with the unions. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stood in the election on a uniquely different basis, of working-class unity and democratic revolution. The solution to the chaos of the market system is. like the problem it solves, world-wide despite the nonsense spoken about the Socialist Republic of Islington and despite the fact that one of the local candidates was the Islington and Finsbury Party.

85 more nails . . .

In our manifesto, we asked people not to vote for us unless they were fully in agreement with what we stand for. After all, socialism could only be established if a majority were prepared to take the necessary action democratically, and with responsibility. True democracy cannot be enforced or introduced by methods of secret infiltration. The little media coverage we received during the campaign thought this was quite a joke, since to them democratic elections must involve not open persuasion and consistency but slander, vote-catching and opportunism. The electorate of Islington South and Finsbury were happy to oblige with our request not to vote for us if they were still suffering from capitalist conditioning and prejudice: we polled 85 votes, against 13,460 for the Labour Party, 13,097 for the SDP, 9,894 for the Tories, 341 for the National Front, 94 for the British National Party and 102 for the Islington and Finsbury Party. But as many as two in five voters in Islington abstained, sick of the failed promises of these political leaders.

Abstention, however, is in its effect little different from acceptance of the status quo. We are gradually building a separate political force which will be able to use the vote in a revolutionary way. The local Socialist Party branch in Islington has multiplied its membership more than five times over since its formation about five years ago, without admitting to membership anyone who is not a socialist, fully aware of the nature of the change we propose. Unlike the politicians who have been elected to run the system of class division, we will not vanish from the scene or suspend canvassing for five years. The debate between production for the profit of a few and production for the use of all is now more pressing than ever. We will be stepping up our activities of street-selling, canvassing and running meetings in Islington in the months ahead. Each worker declaring a practical commitment to a classless, world society of democratic control and common ownership represents another nail in the coffin of capitalism.

Clifford Slapper

Bye-Elections (1987)

Rosie Barnes

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Greenwich groan

There is one way in which the SDP/Liberal Alliance, self-proclaimed mould breakers of British politics, are set rigidly in tradition. Whenever they win an election they elevate the result into an historic event which will change the face of politics.

So it was in Greenwich where Rosie Barnes, ex-Labour Party and straight out of the Posy Simmonds mould of a Blackheath liberal, won a by-election famous for making an issue over whether the Labour candidate's father had been a drunken wife-basher. Another enduring tradition ensures that elections should concern themselves with such irrelevant nonsense.

The Alliance claimed their victory was evidence that the working class are fed up with the established two party system and are looking for another way, a third party. This does not square up with another well used Alliance ploy, to encourage people to vote "tactically" to keep one party out rather than let another one in. Tactical voting — if it ever happens — could be used to the benefit of the Labour and Tory Parties; it does not indicate any disillusion with the two party set-up but a strong revulsion against one or other of those parties. And there is nothing new, or mould-breaking, in that.

In any case it is the depth of negative thinking to argue that workers should vote for a party they don't really support rather than another which they like even less. That is a cynical misuse of workers' political power to change society. The Alliance, which is a re-arrangement of the failed leaders and policies of other capitalist parties, is bound to feed off the cynicism and disillusion which those failures have nurtured.

The two Davids, then, offer nothing that is new or hopeful. On economic policy they deal in the same sterile ruses of trying to make British capitalism more profitable by holding back wages. On war weapons they concern themselves with trivial debates about which method of mass annihilation they favour.

The authentic mould breakers of politics aim for a fundamental change — for a different social system with none of the desperate social ailments which are the stuff of capitalist politics and of the parties, like the Alliance, which seek power to run the system.

. . . Truro Tremble

In Truro, "tactical voting" had a different meaning for the Alliance. There they urged voters to support the candidate of their choice — because they always assumed they had victory in their pockets. The big issue was the "Cornishness" of the candidates with the Labour man. who comes from decidedly un-Cornwall-like Hillingdon in West London, upstaging the rest by speaking Cornish. A famous victory for the Liberals, they say; a typically cynical and irrelevant contest, we say.

Alright, John? (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Alright?'’ Every day, millions of people are greeting each other with this friendly enquiry. "Ça va?" "Wie geht's?". And every day, millions of people are giving a dishonest answer. Think how unpopular you would become if every time someone asked "how are you?'' you pointed out that your position as a wage or salary worker is insecure and degrading. "I'm alright, but what's going on around me isn't. Even if we survive the decade without a nuclear war (which is by no means certain) we're still living in a ridiculously outdated system of poverty for the productive and prosperity for the parasites . . ." Think what trouble you could cause, and what thoughts you could provoke, by interrupting the flow of small talk in this way.

In actual fact, if an individual person suffered from the same in-built contradictions and insanity as our present social system, they would be far from "alright". The present social system is based not on satisfying people's needs, but on producing a profit and capital accumulation. This increases the power of those who possess capital. As part of this process, the whole of human society has become enslaved by the world market. Every item, every service, even every human emotion and activity becomes turned into a commodity, an object of commerce to be bought and sold. In the September 1986 issue of International Management Alan Sugar, who owns the Amstrad computer company, stated: "If there was a market in mass-produced portable nuclear weapons, we'd market them too". A man who understands capitalism.

Within this world wide capitalist system of society nothing is ever produced or distributed unless it can be sold at a profit. And this means that if people s needs are not backed up by sufficient buying power  — "cash demand" — then the system dictates that those needs must go unmet. As a result, many thousands of human beings are starving to death daily, according to sources such as Oxfam. the United Nations and even the World Bank. When food is produced which is surplus to market requirements, it is stored or destroyed rather than being freely distributed, as free distribution would lower price levels and reduce profit margins. So we get the revolting spectacle of people starving to death on the one hand and on the other, so-called food surpluses being referred to as a “problem" to be disposed of and avoided in future:

  There are more than 20 million tonnes of unwanted food in the community's bulging stores, including 15 million tonnes of grain, around 1.5 million tonnes of butter and about 600,000 tonnes of frozen beef. . . The parliamentary inquiry was first mooted in September . . . The brief would be not only how to get rid of the food mountains, but also how to ensure, through price policy and production controls, that they never reappeared.

(Guardian, 1 November 1986).

This conflict between human needs and the needs of the buying and selling system can be seen throughout society today, together with the universal insanity which it breeds. There was a period of human history when time was just time: the fourth dimension. Now, it has become not only the means of measuring the "exchange value" of goods by the amount of labour-time embodied in them, it has even become a commodity itself. If you dial the talking clock ("Tim", as it used to be so affectionately named) you will hear the startling statement that: "The time, according to Accurist. is . . ."

Over the past few years, one of the few boom industries in Britain has been the service offered by personal telegrams. Again, there was a time when the communication of feelings between human beings was regarded as a personal and sensitive matter, to be approached delicately by the people involved. But the capitalist social system, in its fanatical drive for profit, continues to wipe away all discrimination or subtlety of feeling. Sentiment is made uniform, just like fashion clothes or indistinguishable pop records, in order to exploit a mass market more cheaply. So in the 19 May 1986 issue of Ms London magazine there is one page which contains adverts for as many as seventeen different "Kissagram" companies. For a cash fee ranging from £16 to £45. a message or greeting can be sent to a friend by one of these professional intermediaries, dressed up (or undressed) in the most bizarre range of supposedly shocking outfits. Those on offer include Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan or Prince Charles lookalikes (nice birthday surprise), as well as various sexual stereotypes. "Quasimodo", nuns and frogs. This kind of gimmick might be regarded as a piece of harmless fun but it is in fact another instance of the corruption of basic human relationships by the money god.

We are encouraged from an early age to have priorities which will enable us to put up with the insane social system we live under. At Northwood, in Middlesex, there is one of the biggest NATO bases in the country which, in the event of a nuclear war. would be a prime target. The local residents' association. whose members are kept awake at night by their deep but secret fears that Thatcher might really be a "wet", started campaigning a year or so ago on this issue. Had they finally decided to question the symbolic siting on their doorstep of one of the world's two biggest machines of mass murder? Had they felt compelled to discuss how we might rid the world of all war and all of its weapons? Not quite. The campaign was to oppose the building of a helicopter landing pad on top of the local NATO base, as the noise from the helicopters might cause some disturbance. And nowhere in any of the literature generated by this campaign was there any acknowledgement of the terrible danger and threat, the ultimate disturbance, represented by any large military base of that kind.

Workers in every country are being employed to build the weapons of their own destruction. Instead, technology could be adapted for useful purposes, to satisfy human needs in health, housing and food. The real choice in the world today is not between one power bloc and another, or one type of government and another, or one kind of weapon and another. International conflict is not like a football match in which the crowds of spectators must choose which side to support. People who want peace should not concern themselves with the question of whether nuclear destruction is worse than conventional destruction, or chemical warfare more palatable than biological warfare. The real question which faces us is how we can abolish all warfare.

The only way this can be done is by abolishing its cause. You cannot remove an effect permanently without getting rid of its cause. Religion spreads the fatal myth that the problem lies in the in-built wickedness of human beings. Because Adam, presumably bored to tears by the perfect paradise of the garden of Eden, took a bite out of the apple of knowledge, they say, we are on the verge of the most horrific destruction imaginable. Most people who talk about the innate aggression and violence of humanity are themselves servile wimps. The real cause of war, regardless of which weapons are used to fight it, is social. War is generated by the conflicts which exist in property based systems of society. But the property which is at stake does not belong to the millions whose lives are sacrificed on its altar. Wars are fought over the material interests of the powerful and parasitical elite which dominates in every country, including those like Russia where instead of shareholders, they are called Party officials.

Within the next eighteen months, there will be a general election in Britain. The Labour, Conservative and Alliance campaigns will each be at great pains to show how different they are from the others, and that only they possess the magic formula to solve the problems which continue to plague us. In reality, though, none of them even begins to confront the major issues of class and poverty, hunger and health, housing, energy, war and so on. They never will be able to, because they are all founded on a false assumption: that the profit system, in one form or another, must drag on forever. This belief is based on ignorance: the present social system has only lasted for a few hundred, out of the many thousands, of years of human existence. It will end. just like all previous social systems have ended, when they became outdated.

The other political parties all stand for the perpetuation of capitalism. The bankruptcy of their ideas is obvious from the basing of their campaigns on negative attacks on each other. They say they will, if elected, be not quite as terrible as their evil opponents. Not quite. They even seem to have realised that there is some limit, nowadays, to the number of lies that workers will let politicians get away with. For example, in the past, every Labour government came to power promising to solve the unemployment problem and every Labour government since 1924 left office with unemployment higher than when they went in. So now Neil Kinnock is making the half-hearted offer that if he is elected and if their plans all work, they might be able to make some reduction in unemployment, after some years. And even this tentative promise rests on Keynesian policies of increased state spending, which were tried and failed miserably during the seventies, when government spending increased from about £20 billion to £80 billion but unemployment virtually quadrupled as a result of the inevitable periodic recession in the trade cycle of the world capitalist system.

At election time, we are presented with the spectacle of stale and sterile ideas being sold to us by slick, hi-tech advertising agencies like Saatchi and Saatchi on the one hand and trendy bandwagons like Red Wedge on the other, with Neil Kinnock having made his pop debut some time ago with his appearance (only a cameo role) in a Tracey Ullman video of a song originally done by Madness (pure coincidence). Now. it appears, never far behind when there is a chance of some opportunist vote-catching, the SDP have decided to ditch their stuffy image and get hip. They have recently formed a youth campaign called "Sound and Vision" and the organiser has been quoted as saying that the reason for the name is that the SDP is "sound" in not making false promises, and has "vision" because "we reject the bitterness of confrontation between management and unions" (National Student, November 1986).

It may be true that SDP politicians make fewer false promises. Their way of achieving this is very clever: by making fewer promises, true or false. They must know the secret of how you tell when a politician is lying: because you can see his lips move. As for rejecting the bitterness of class struggle, that is simply a very old trick of persuading the exploited to link arms with their exploiters — very good for business. More entertaining, however, is the "Sound and Vision" promo video, which apparently features David Owen as "Max Headroom" (wonder if you could pay him to do it as a kissagram), complete with vocal distortion and trendy computer graphics in the background. Making some of those false promises which the SDP never make, he claims they will "improve" jobs, "help" the Health Service and oppose nuclear energy "unless it's safe" (better just drop a line to the CEGB then, and ask them). It seems that the script, as well as the pop image, was taken from the "zany" Max Headroom show.

These politicians are the jesters of modern society, the jokers and clowns. The last laugh will be on them, though, when a majority decide to reject their rotten social system, which has planted a policeman and a cash-register in every head and which sours all human relationships and productive activities. So next time your mate asks you, "Alright?", why not give a straight answer? We need to change the world; produce wealth to satisfy human needs, not for the market. We need socialism —now.

Clifford Slapper

Caught in the Act: Cutting Up (1989)

The Caught in the Act Column from the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cutting Up
A left-winger's medical nightmare might be to look up, drowsing into anaesthesia on the operating table, to recognise that the gowned and masked figure wielding the scalpel above them was none other than Dr David Owen.

Nightmares of the political kind have been induced in many of those treated by Owen since the days when, surprisingly elevated to the job of Foreign Secretary, he was spoken of by adoring hacks as the Anthony Eden of the 1970s. After that, who knew? With his good looks he could have been Labour's next Prime Minister. But it all went wrong when the voters decided they didn't want another Labour Prime Minister. Owen decided that this mortal blow to his ambition was the fault of all those left-wingers and their delusion that a Labour government is supposed to be something other than an imitation of a Tory one. Since then Owen has been in and out of the operating theatre, amputating one political member after another until now only three lonely MPs represent his drive to change the face of British politics forever.

How you regard this must depend on your overall attitude to politics. If you are aware that all the parties which want to reform some aspects of the present social system, rather than do away with it, must put winning votes before sticking to principles you will have the basis of an understanding of what motivates David Owen and the other reformists. You will also be aware that what they offer as new and radical policies are really a re-arrangement and a dressing-up of old ones which have been tried and have failed.

For example, Owen's latest ruse is to tout around the prospect of an alliance. It does not especially matter which party or parties join the alliance—Labour and the SLD would be most welcome—as long as the end result is seen as a presentable opposition to the Thatcher government. According to Owen, when he made his outdoor speech to the SDP delegates after the bomb scare at their Conference (which was widely praised as a brilliant example of extempore oratory but which—if we may say so—was not a patch on the style and delivery always practised by Socialist Party speakers) the worst possible fate confronting us is another spell of Thatcher at Number Ten. So we must all unite to kick her out.

Stitching Up
The first thing to be said about this is that it is by no means a new policy. Formal political alliances are not common in Britain as in some other countries but the informal kind often operate. For example, Denis Healey when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer always worked closely and amicably with his Tory shadow Geoffrey Howe, even if he did once say that being attacked by Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. The Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929 were kept in office through Liberal support and although these experiences caused what was left of the Labour Party in 1931 to swear that never again would they form an alliance with the Liberals that was just what the Callaghan government did. Between 1931 and 1935 Britain was governed by a ‘National” government of Labour. Tory and Liberal politicians and in 1940 there was the wartime coalition under Churchill, who had swapped sides often enough to be an alliance all by himself. All these alliances were justified on the grounds that the priority was to defeat or frustrate a common enemy; the Lib/Lab pacts were aimed against the Tories, the “National" government was supposed to organise the chaos of British capitalism during the slump of the 1930s. and the 1940-45 Coalition was formed when the enormity of the effort needed to defeat Germany became not just apparent but inescapable.

The second thing to be said about Owen's desperate fishing for friends is that it is out of step with what he once offered as a political principle. One of the more emphatic reasons given for the founding of the SDP was the urgency of getting away from “Two Party" politics, in which power bounced to and fro between Labour and the Tories. A third political force, it was argued, was essential to counteract the extremism (for that was how some of the Labour and Tory policies for running British capitalism were described by the SDP) of the two big parties. Of course, with the SLD and the SDP we now have four political forces but let that pass. The point is that if the SDP succeed in forming an anti-Thatcher alliance we shall be back with the “Two Party" politics which the Gang of Four once said was so damaging and frustrating.

Waking Up
But could the other parties' reluctance to rush into Owen's embrace have anything to do with his infamous personality? When he was Foreign Secretary he was not at all bashful in letting everyone know how lucky we were to have so brilliant a man in charge of British capitalism's diplomacy. Not only enemies are uneasy about his vanity over that handsome face. His former ally David Steel has given an insider's story in his book Against Goliath (geddit?) that Owen was not only arrogant, overbearing and difficult but also inconsistent: “What Owenites think on Monday may be different from what they think on Thursday".

This would be more convincing were it not that when Steel and Owen were in partnership during the last General Election Steel was doing his best to persuade us to vote for this arrogant and inconsistent man and was always being photographed or televised in a state of exultant celebration with him. As things have turned out, Steel has retired from the SLD leadership in good standing, an inconvenient shadow behind Ashdown, while Owen and his party are in tatters. So which of these two Davids wields the scalpel more artfully? Which can cover his inconsistency more cleverly—which the smoother operator? And when will the patient come out of the anaesthetic and wake up to what is being done to them?

Ivan

Obituary for the phoney alliance (1988)

From the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much water has flowed under the bridge in the decade since the Dimbleby Lecture was delivered on BBC TV by Roy Jenkins, the archetypal Labour opportunist with an expensive taste for wine and an undisguised contempt for socialism. Jenkins had been Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Wilson government which had dragged the idea of socialism through the mud as it pursued some of the most cynically anti-working-class policies in British political history. Now Jenkins had become a convert to a new, even more opportunist, more cynical, vision: the belief in what became known as the political "centre ground". No longer should politics be stained with the extremities of ideological fervour. In moderate, comfy, common sense, men of good reason (capitalist timeservers like Jenkins and George Brown and assorted other careerists) would unite in the political "middle ground". As the 1970s turned into a new decade with a new Thatcher-led government a growing campaign emerged to realise the Jenkins dream of a new Centre Party — a dream which, if history is to be written accurately, Jenkins pinched from the 1960s' Liberal leader Grimond who in turn stole from the post-war Butskellite tradition in which all three major electoral parties co-habited within the intellectual slum of vaguely comprehended Keynesian reformism.

By the early Eighties the cry for a Centre Party was motivated by impatience at the dogmatic obsessions of the Tory monetarists and the tired rhetoric of the pro-state-capitalist Labour Left, then passing through one of its illusory moments of ascendancy. The cry for the new party was deafening. But wherefrom came the cry? Not from the factories or offices or pubs or dole offices or anywhere that you or I are likely to be found. It came instead from the media and from the academics who had run out of ideas, from the Liberals who had lost all hope of power and the Labourites who were tired of having to go to the bother of singing the Red Flag once a year so that the troops would fight for them.

The new party would "take the politics out of politics", while offering the workers what they believed we had always been used to: smiling leaders and capitalism without the ideological wrapping paper of the Left or Right. The rest is history. In 1981 a bunch of squalid Tories in drag walked out of the Labour Party (which had been very happy to have them) and took up residence in TV studios. There they spent the early 1980s looking through the camera into the living rooms of workers who were told repeatedly that what we all really want is "moderation" — a term which, like decency and apple pie, is uttered with an appearance of great meaningfulness by politicians and which means absolutely nothing.

After the Labour split of 1981 came the Gang of Four: a gang of bores who told us that they were old-fashioned, "moderate" socialists who would stand for Social Democracy. This meant, in fact, that they stood for a combination of sterile Labour reformism and half-baked Tory management of the profit system and that they would do this in unison with the Liberal Party which had been suffering from a serious illness, probably terminal, for about sixty years. The Alliance was born. In Warrington Roy Jenkins won a spectacular by-election success when he lost the election and came second. The TV pundits did brief interviews with the candidate who had the audacity to win and then spent weeks celebrating the victory for moderation which Warrington apparently signified.

In 1983 the "social democrats" (by now the SDP) went into the general election with the Liberals as an Alliance. They lost, enjoying the dubious success of sometimes damaging the Labour vote and providing the Tories with the best election victory of any British party since 1945. Jenkins was removed as SDP leader within weeks of the result. He was to make way for the man who had always personified the real face of moderation: David Owen. What did this real moderate face look like? Well, as a face it looked pretty good — the sort of face which would not have been out of place on one of those TV hospital dramas where the surgeons are always handsome and arrogant. So much for the man himself. The face of moderation politically could not have been better portrayed than by David Owen: a smug, supercilious man for whom pragmatism was all, principles of no account and capitalism as inevitable as socialism was instantly dismissable. At the Labour Conference in Wembley in 1981 (the one where Owen quit) our late comrade, Jim Glitz, approached Owen and offered to sell him a Socialist Standard "This is the only paper which puts the case for the abolition of the wages system" said the ever-optimistic Glitz, the sort of bloke who would have tried telling Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams to stop wasting time on trivialities and unite for world socialism. "When are we going to have this socialism, then — next weekend?" retorted Owen, whose definition of an ideal is embodied in his devout support for the obscene power of the NATO murder machine. Owen epitomises most of what stinks in capitalist politics; the bits which he does not yet epitomise he is ambitious to descend to.

In 1987 the Alliance went into the general election as two parties in fundamental coalition. Steel and Owen presented themselves as the inseparable dream ticket. Seven million workers were conned into voting for them. Of course, the worst of it was that they voted for capitalism which can never be run in the interest of the workers. But that was not all that constituted the Alliance confidence trick. The campaign of Liberal-SDP coalition within the mysterious "middle ground" which was presented to the voters last year was erected on the basis of the most cynical and contemptible fraud. While Steel and Owen posed as friends they were in reality bitter rivals for power; they appeared as advocates of an unstated Centre vision but it now turns out that they were both looking in different directions, both hoping that those scrutinising their case were too stupid to see the transparent sham of their phoney alliance. Even within the usual context of capitalist political trickery the Alliance politicians played a dirty trick; they deserve everything that has happened to them in the days since the election as their tacky Alliance has fallen to pieces before the public gaze. They deserve the contempt which millions of workers will show them.

What pleasure we have all had — we who were not taken in by them — to watch the Alliance committing public suicide in the months since their defeat in the last election. How pleasing it has been to see that, despite all the advertising hype for which they could afford to pay thanks to their millionaire backers like David Sainsbury, despite all the media support which has none too subtly been offered to them, despite all the phoney rhetoric about "middle ground" and "the Centre" and "breaking the mould", they have ended up in a squalid battle over a merged party which thousands are planning to leave and nobody looks very anxious to join.

The Alliance has shown that a party without principles or ideas descends to a level which is truly laughable. Look at the Liberal merger debate in Blackpool where for many of the speakers the main objection to merger was that Social would come before Liberal in the new party's name (the SLDP). Then, on the eve of the SDP merger conference in Sheffield, an internal war broke out over which faction could use the conference hall on the Saturday night. The SDP leaders (the pro-mergerites) threatened to take their opponents to court to stop them using the hall. Meanwhile, the non-merger SDPers (irritatingly referred to as the Owenites: a profound insult to the memory of the ideas of Robert Owen, a political thinker whose boots David Owen would not be fit to polish) are offering the chance of a free fortnight in Portugal to SDPers who resist the yawn-inducing temptation of going into the SLDP and stay in the SDP rump. Such people might as well go away for good, for their political futures will be doomed after the SDP minority has had its nose bloodied in a few by-election defeats by the SLDP. How long will it be before Owen, and perhaps some of his fellow SDP hacks, swallow what pride they have left and accept the offers which are certainly made to them to enter their natural home in the Tory party?

Whatever happens to Owen, Maclennan and the rest of the SDP timewasters, one thing is certain: after one hundred and ten years as an oflicial party (and rather longer as a political tradition) the Liberal Party is now dead. Like jolly decent Liberals they booked a hall in Blackpool and voted with tears in their eyes to shoot themselves through the head. Some Liberals will be too “progressive'' to be allowed into the new party — which will be the only party in Britain to impose a constitutional obligation on its members that they support NATO. Others will join reluctantly, mourning the days in which they at least had a reason to be in oblivion which they could justify to themselves. Others will join the new set-up willingly, pursuing the sordid struggle for a lick of power. Paddy Ashdown will be leading the Give Us A Lick tendency, followed not far behind by those nonentities in search of greater nonentities to worship them, Alan Beith and Malcolm Bruce.

Some people may be surprised that we regard the Liberal Party with such hostility. After all. are they not a basically "radical'' force? Indeed, in its years of decline the Liberals have won to their ranks many workers who oppose the worn-out policies of both left-wing and right-wing and they have been responsible for raising within the Liberal Party many issues which would be ignored in more pragmatic circles. But no, the Liberals are not radical in any meaningful sense of the term. The Liberals have never addressed themselves to the root cause of the problems which they sometimes sound concerned about: they do not get to the root because the root is the capitalist system and it would not do for a capitalist party to have to pull up that root, would it? So for years now, the Liberals have plodded away in a smug world of thinking themselves rather radical and nonconformist but in reality being wedded irremovably to the futile old politics of capitalist reform. Ian Aitken of the Guardian was on the ball when he described them as being "cocooned in a comfy mood of self-esteem" (25 January 1988).

The Liberal Party 's delusion of radicalism is based, like so many of the other great myths of capitalist politics, on very selective memory. To be sure, the Liberals have made progressive-sounding noises when they have been out of power, but what have they done when they have been in? Are we to forget that they were the government which grossly intensified the arms budget to prepare the way for the monstrous slaughter of the First World War? Liberals supported that waste of millions of workers' lives because as supporters of capitalism they cannot extricate themselves from the system's inevitable by-product: war. They did it then and now again they have merged into a new movement which sees preparation for war as a priority.

The Liberals now make much noise about the wickedness of the Tories' so-called free market dogma. But this was not an invention of Thatcher's or one of her crazy advisors. The essence of Liberal economics was free trade and the unregulated market. And let it not be forgotten that the Liberal Party in power was the last government in Britain to fire on and kill striking workers. In 1910, when Winston Churchill was Liberal Home Secretary. 7.000 troops were sent to Liverpool to coerce the dockers who were on strike. Tom Mann, the chairman of the transport workers' Joint Strike Committee, told the Liberal tyrant. "Let Churchill . . . order ten times more military to Liverpool and let every street be paraded by them, not all the king's forces with all the king's men can take the vessels out of the docks to sea". In fact. Mann was right: the might of organised labour was greater than the Liberal government and their armed thugs and the dock authorities gave in to the dockers' demands.

Liverpool was only part of a general strike wave to which the Liberal oppressors had to respond in 1910: in Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley massed police attacked defenceless strikers, and in Llanelly they fired on a peaceful demonstration, killing two workers. So much for the radical record of Liberalism. The history of the Liberal Party is one of failure to tame the beast of capitalism and success in accommodating itself to the anti-social ferocity of the beast. If that is the legacy which they take with them into the SLDP, workers should keep clear of the new party like the plague.

Many Alliance supporters will be disappointed that their hopes which had been raised by Owen and Steel have been so suddenly dashed. It was inevitable for there is no such place in politics as the middle ground. The concept of the centre is an illusion. To those tired of the boring old left-right struggle the illusion is a seductive one, offering the chance of capitalism without having to think about ideology. The hard fact is that there are only two camps which serious political parties may join. One can either stand in open defence of capitalism — as the Tories and the Owen faction and many Liberals do — or one stands against capitalism. The reason for the lack of credibility of the Labour Party and the other lefty "moderates" is that they pay occasional lip service to opposition to capitalism but are in fact supporters of running the system. Kinnock and the vast majority of Labourites are as much victims of the illusion of the political soft centre — of capitalism in moderate doses — as was the Alliance.

There is no room for fence-sitting in the class war. You are either for the millionaires or for the workers who are robbed. You either favour bombs, of whatever kind they might be, or you refuse uncompromisingly to fight their bloody wars. You either stand for production for sale and profit or for production for use and free access. Either revolution or reform. There is no middle way. Let those who are licking their wounds in the obscurity of political disgrace remember that the creation of a sane society is always going to be more important than the miserable dealings for power in which they have all just been the losers. The workers have a world to win and that is just a little more important than whether Paddy Ashdown is to become leader of the party with no name and fewer principles.

Steve Coleman

Problems of partnership (1987)

From the August 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Almost all successful politicians are, to some extent, opportunists. Some may seek to maintain a core of non-negotiable principles — a bottom line which they will not compromise in the interests of short term political gain — but that still leaves considerable room for opportunism. Many more change their "principles" in accordance with their assessment of which way the political wind is blowing.

The current breaking of the Alliance mould illustrates precisely this. It was opportunism that persuaded the SDP and Liberals of the necessity for, first, local electoral agreements so that their respective candidates did not compete against each other, and later for joint policy statements and parliamentary spokespersons. Clearly, until the general election, both parties saw partnership as their best chance for making an impact and achieving electoral success.

Now, in the wake of the failure of this strategy to bring the desired result — a share in political power — new tactical calculations have had to be made. The split between those who favour merger of the two parties and those who oppose it is not, in the main, about disagreements over principle but about differing assessments of what will be in the best interests of the respective parties and of certain individuals within them. Not surprisingly it is those who have most to lose or gain by the adoption of the "wrong" strategy — the leadership — who have been the most impassioned contributors to the debate. Few of the Alliance leaders have emerged from the current row with much credit although it is perhaps David Owen who, more than anyone else, has been exposed as the arch political opportunist.

In the past Owen has cultivated an image as a man of principle standing aloof from the sordid business of political skulduggery. In reality any "principles" he may adhere to have consistently taken second place to consideration of his own political standing. Since leaving the Labour Party he has travelled at a considerable speed through the political "centre" so that he currently sounds as if he could quite easily be eligible for a place in Thatcher s cabinet (which illustrates also that the difference between the main political parties is not so great as political rhetoric would have us believe). It is little wonder then that Douglas Hurd felt moved to appeal to "constructive and forward-looking" SDP members to join the Conservatives.

Owen's opposition to a merger with the Liberals is, he claims, because the SDP stands for something different from the Liberals. (We weren't told that during the election campaign!) Instead of a merger he advocates a federal structure in which both parties would retain their own distinctive identities. But no doubt he also recognises that the SDP. which polled one million fewer votes than the Liberals and has fewer than a third as many MPs. would be overwhelmed in a new merged party and Owen himself would have a considerably weaker claim to be its leader.

However, Owen has this time clearly not seen which way the wind is blowing: it seems that a majority of SDP and Liberal members do want a merged party and Owen's intransigent opposition to it will leave him out in the political wilderness, unless of course he decides to make a new bid for power from inside the Tory camp.

By contrast David Steel appears to be the less egocentric and power-hungry of the two Alliance leaders. But this image may also conceal a shrewd calculation of where his best interests lie. Steel has certainly read the mood of the grassroots of the two parties better than Owen — in many areas SDP and Liberal activists are already working to all intents and purposes as a single party; and the issue of the dual leadership does provide a plausible excuse for the poor showing of the Alliance at the.polls. But it may also be true that Steel, aware of the way in which the leadership role during the election campaign was hijacked by Owen, has decided to take a calculated risk to improve his own political standing by putting forward the merger option. After all it is highly likely that he knew that Owen would not agree to it and so by proposing a merger he would effectively be ousting Owen and leaving the way clear for himself to become the leader of the new party. If this was his thinking — and such cynical political manoeuvring is not without precedent — then he has demonstrated himself to be at least Owen's equal in the opportunism stakes.

What are the implications of the Alliance's angst for ordinary workers? Firstly it gives their campaigning rhetoric a hollow tone. After all this is the political outfit which, throughout the election campaign, extolled the virtues of "partnership", "cooperation" and "consensus" as the universal panacea and held up their own organisation as a shining example of how society as a whole could be organised. And just as they denied the existence of conflict or division within their own ranks, so too they denied the existence of conflict or division — notably that of class — within society at large. Recent events have shown that their description of the relationship between their two parties was incomplete if not false. (Their description of social relationships has been equally misleading.) Now we are told that Owen doesn't think much of the Liberals at all and never did; that they have been wrong on numerous policy issues including the Falklands war, the sale of council houses, social security changes and defence. In other words he has used the Liberals as a convenient partner in his attempt to achieve his own political ambitions.

Secondly, Owen, who put himself and his party forward as the defenders of democracy, the advocates of a fairer electoral system and who left the Labour Party in part because of what he regarded as a the anti-democratic tendencies of the extra-parliamentary left, is now revealed as a man who tried to rig the ballot on merger by posing what the Electoral Reform Society deemed was an unfairly loaded question, and who has stated that he will not accept the democratic decision of SDP members — unless the vote goes the way he wants it to.

Now that the election glitter has been stripped away the Alliance leadership has been left looking rather tawdry. It wasn't after all a partnership of equals, rather a marriage of convenience between two leaders with conflicting egos and political ambitions. The lesson is clear: don't trust leaders — they're usually in it for their own selfish ends — and trust their rhetoric even less — it's likely to conceal an extremely seedy reality.

Janie Percy-Smith