Local histories (2008)

Pamphlet Reviews from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Class War Radical History Tour of Notting Hill by Tom Vague, Psychogeography, 2007.

Camden History Review 31, Camden History Society, 2007

The Class War pamphlet, the ‘souvenir programme’ of a recent London march maturely entitled “Bash The Rich”, is a rambling and rather unfocussed (as the doubtlessly pseudonymous author’s name would suggest) example of the local radical history writing which is currently fashionable. In this case it also is an unintended comment on the Class War organisation, which has itself become historic. Nonetheless the pamphlet might help locals gain “the sense of place in time” necessary to overcome the crazy disconnectedness of London living which makes political action in the capital so difficult to achieve nowadays.

In contrast the politics (and arts) issue of the Camden History Review is, as one might expect coming from the premier local history organisation of the capital, immaculately produced and finely focussed. The piece on Camden’s MPs is a rather old-fashioned biographical exercise, useful mainly for reference; however, the articles on the fight for a free library in Highgate and the St Pancras Civil Defence revolt of 1957-58 are prime examples of how on-the-ground-floor writing can help illuminate the real processes of history. The particular lesson to be learned from these two cases is that within capitalism every advance in the freedom of knowledge or the search for peace has to fought for tooth and nail. And how fruitless such actions, whether achieved via constitutional reform or direct action, ultimately are. The Socialist Party gets a mention fourth political essay, on the radical history of Grays Inn Road, as a radical organisation which once had its head office in the area and which pushes the solution – production for use not profit – to all capitalist problems from attacks on libraries to warmongering.

Kaz.

Past Tense Publications (2009)

Book Review from the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rare doings at Camberwell and Muzak to my ears, Past Tense £1.50 and £1 respectively (p&p 50p for one item, 80p for two) from Past Tense, c/o 56a infoshop, 56 Crampton Street, London SE17 (cheques to A. Hodson)

Muzak to my ears, the history of canned music, as well as a commentary on its present use, is a welcome reminder of how capitalism penetrates every facet of our lives, perverting and twisting human behaviour to its own sick requirements. Like all Past Tense publications, it is exceptionally reasonably priced and well-presented, as well being informative and novel. The author is fortunately by no means trite enough to suggest a “solution”, merely stating the facts and leaving the reader to reach their own conclusions. I think you know ours. Rare doings in Camberwell is a local radical history production. It is very wide ranging in its scope, and if there is no mention of the real radicals – social revolutionaries – that is because such are rare birds anywhere.

Kaz.

The morality of slums (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has become fashionable of late to look back with a certain nostalgia to an age of "Victorian values". In fact, it was an age of often heartless cruelty and indifference. When it did not patronise the poor with a sickly sentimentality, it abandoned them to the cold calculus of market forces.

Underlying these attitudes there is a recurring theme: the sense of apprehension at the prospect of social disorder. Indeed, change was. to a great extent, induced by the need to evolve more effective strategies to defuse that threat as old solutions proved increasingly ineffective.

Before 1850 the threat of social disorder appeared to centre on the industrial north, not metropolitan London. The Industrial Revolution had given rise to large-scale factory production and the very methods of combination that industrialisation had promoted served in a sense to make the working class more amenable to control. It created disciplined structures through which conflict could be mediated at the same time as it enabled workers to mitigate some of the harsher consequences of industrialisation by means of mutual aid.

But just as the industrialised north seemed to project a more subdued image, so the Metropolis itself began to take on a more threatening prospect. The concern to which this gave rise needs to be set in the context of mid-Victorian optimism about the inexorable march of progress which coloured contemporary perceptions of poverty. It came to be seen as a residual feature of a bygone age. The poor, it was believed, owed their poverty to the subjective defects in their personality, rather than the structural inadequacies of the market economy. The solution to poverty, therefore, was to socialise the poor into an appropriate morality that emphasised thrift and hard work.

It was. therefore, with mounting alarm that the Victorian ruling class viewed what appeared to be a large and growing number of the underprivileged — especially the "casual poor" — slipping beyond its control. How had this situation come about?

Prior to the Industrial Revolution London contained a wide range of handicraft industries producing high value consumer goods. In addition, there was a significant semi-processing and capital goods sector. Relatively crude and costly methods of transportation ensured that proximity to the market was a vital factor and London was favoured precisely because it was such a sizeable market. As well as that it was a major port and seat of government.

The Industrial Revolution significantly altered the economic base of London. Firstly, it greatly reduced its attraction as a centre for semi-processing and capital goods production. Its distance from sources of coal and iron put it at a competitive disadvantage because of the cost of transporting these materials. In addition, London suffered from an acute shortage of space — and thus, high land values — which inhibited the growth of large-scale steam-powered factory production.

Secondly, London's role as an administrative. commercial and trading centre was considerably enhanced by the Industrial Revolution. The construction of an elaborate railway network radiating outward from the city sucked in people and products in ever greater quantities, magnifying London's importance as a market at the same time as it facilitated the relocation of low-value bulk production industries away from the city. The acquisition of colonies abroad emphasised the role of London as a port through which manufactures were exported and raw materials were imported.

Casual labour

It is against this background that the problem of casual labour in London emerged. Casual labour is closely associated with irregularity of production, with seasonality.

One way in which seasonality is manifested is in variation in demand for certain products and demand for consumer goods is inherently more volatile than that for capital goods. This poses a dilemma for the manufacturers. Production can be maintained at a steady pace but this would entail some stockpiling. Alternatively, production can be closely tailored to meet demand by reducing capital costs to a minimum and organising output on the basis of shorter production runs.

By and large, it was this latter option that London manufacturers were forced to accept. Consumer goods industries that were able to remain in London, despite intensive competition for space, were nevertheless prevented by that very competition from introducing large-scale factory-based methods of production, and the result was a particular method of production known as "sweating".

The substitution of skilled labour by sweated labour had the advantage for manufacturers of reducing labour costs. Moreover, the invention of relatively cheap hand-driven technology such as the sewing machine removed the need to employ skilled labour. Production could be concentrated in small workshops employing casual labour, thus reducing rental overheads as well. In the case of some industries, namely the clothing industry, this process was taken a stage further with work being carried out on a contract basis from the homes of the casually employed.

Another way in which seasonality manifested itself was in variation in supply. This was mainly a climatic phenomenon. Harsh winters, for example, could severely disrupt the activities of the port and the delivery of such commodities as grain and Baltic timber. This problem was largely overcome by the construction of steamships from the 1880s onwards. The building trade was also affected. By slowing down or bringing to a complete standstill all building work, bad weather not only aggravated the housing problem but caused extra distress in the form of unemployment.

The general increase in unemployment during the winter months, in conjunction with the inevitable rise in the price of fuel and foodstuffs, sharply intensified the plight of the poor. Moreover, superimposed on these annual variations was the more long-term cyclical pattern of trade itself affecting the wider economy. When a trade slump coincided with a bad winter the consequences could be catastrophic. Such a coincidence usually occasioned serious unrest, the most dramatic example of this being the 1886 Riot.

To sum up. the proportion of the workforce casually employed in Victorian London was substantial and this can be largely attributed to the fact that so much of London's economic base was subject to seasonal factors. Seasonality necessitated a large reserve army of workers which greatly undermined the bargaining position of the casually employed. Though poverty was by no means confined to casual labour, casual labour, without doubt, represented the sharp edge of poverty.

Most mid-Victorian social commentators, however, would not have concurred with such an analysis. Conventional belief affirmed, as has been stated, that poverty was simply the outward manifestation of certain moral failings. Yet such failings were themselves seen as the product of a bad environment. Above all. it was the environment of the slum that insidiously sapped the moral strength of an individual.

Victorian slums

Slum conditions existed in many parts of Victorian London. Some were reputedly the haunts of the "dangerous classes", the criminal elements in society. Law enforcement in most of these areas was minimal. To a large extent they existed as isolated islands beyond the reach of the authorities, seedbeds of vice that affronted the stern display of public morality. It was for these reasons that they were regarded as a social threat, symbolically reinforced by the festering, insanitary conditions that encouraged the spread of disease. That threat invited resolute action in the form of street clearances. Yet no sooner had a slum been pulled down than another seemed to materialise in the vicinity. It was obvious that the problem was not being solved but merely displaced from one area to another.

Casual labour did not encourage geographical mobility. Workers had to be constantly on the look-out for work which, in turn, depended on an intimate knowledge of the vicinity. Also, low and irregular wages ensured that the only mode of transport available to the casual poor was walking. This in itself removed the possibility of commuting from the suburbs. Home work, mainly by married women, put them at the mercy of contractors and compelled them to remain in the locality at the same time as it denied them the opportunity to search for work elsewhere. The system of credit used also restricted geographical mobility. It was common practice for goods to be purchased on credit during the winter and the arrears to be paid off in the more prosperous summer months. However, this arrangement depended on a degree of personal trust which meant being known in the area. Moreover, in such areas there was to be found a strong working-class culture that made for a sense of cohesion in the face of otherwise unendurable surroundings. This met with the strong disapproval of the Victorian authorities: the mores of the working class often clashed with the need for a disciplined workforce.

Working class education

This conflict was particularly apparent in the area of education. There was, before the advent of state schools and co-existing with state-aided church schools, an extensive underground network of tiny cottage schools autonomously run by the working class for the education of children. Even a kitchen might serve as a classroom and instruction was highly informal. Victorian commentators, however, were appalled by this apparent laxity. They were also utterly bemused by the fact that parents preferred by and large to send their children to such schools rather than to the local church school which charged a comparable fee.

Yet this incomprehension stemmed from an ideological perspective that refused to acknowledge the realities the working class had to contend with. Thus one of the reasons working people chose to send their children to a cottage school was the flexibility it offered. It was attuned to the rhythm of life among the casual poor.

At the beginning of the Victorian era. central London was still largely residential in character. Suburbanisation had begun in the previous century but was confined to a wealthy elite, the "carriage folk". The growth of London in the course of the nineteenth century. created and sharply intensified a central contradiction.

On the one hand, that growth both stimulated. and was stimulated by. the outward expansion of certain activities that necessitated the conversion of residential land for other purposes. On the other, the nature of their employment and the lack of access to affordable and reliable transport from the suburbs, exerted a centripetal force on casual workers — and even most skilled workers at the time — compelling them to remain within the central area. The result was a dramatic rise in levels of overcrowding right up to and beyond the 1880s when cheaper forms of mass transport became available, facilitating a spurt of working class suburbanisation.

Several factors were responsible for the demolition of housing and the resultant overcrowding. in the central area. One of these were street clearances. Another was the construction of the railway network. Likewise, the extension of the docks, particularly before 1850, was responsible for the displacement of many thousands of workers. So too was the construction of offices and workshops.

Class divisions

All these factors — street clearances, the development of the docks and the railways and the construction of offices and workshops — indicative of London's changing economic base, profoundly altered the physical structure of the city. The pattern that emerged was an increasingly polarised one. Unlike the Georgian period when rich and poor often lived in the same locality, even the same building, class divisions to an ever greater extent coincided with geographical divisions. By the mid-Victorian period this process was virtually complete. Rich and poor lived in largely separate worlds cut off from one another by a no-man's land of commercial development.

This gave rise to growing disquiet among certain sections of the Victorian elite for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was felt that the quality of administration in the poorer districts was bound to deteriorate on account of the departure of the "professional classes" to the suburbs. This would result in a more lax application of the law particularly relating to the eradication of insanitary conditions.

Secondly, the segregation of the classes completely unsettled the delicate balance between Poor Law relief and charity. Under the Poor Law. each district had its own Poor Law union responsible for the relief of the poor in that district. But the displacement of the poor from the richer vestries lightened the rate burden there as it added to the burden on poorer vestries. Indeed, this provided a further incentive for vestries to embark on a programme of slum clearance. But such a state of affairs was effectively terminated by the Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867 which spread the burden of poor relief across the metropolis as a whole. Meanwhile there was a great increase in the flow of charity to the poorer districts to compensate for the additional rate burden they had to bear.

This in fact provided a third reason for the sense of disquiet. Such charity was distributed in a wholly haphazard fashion. This, according to its critics, made the system extremely vulnerable to abuse. The vast wealth of London exerted an irresistible attraction to vagrants from far and wide. The vagrant was seen as a social parasite, corrupted by a life on charity and able to manipulate. with the practised ease of a professional. the gullible giver of alms. He set a bad example to the "honest poor" and they would find it difficult not to follow that example. Whatever other motives there may have been for charity it is clear that a major consideration was to defuse unrest. The segregation of the rich and poor was perceived by the former as a loss of control over the latter. Indiscriminate charity failed to restore this control because it depersonalised the act of giving.

Philanthropy of 5 per cent

It was precisely in order to systematise charitable relief, to circumvent the alleged machinations of the "clever pauper", that the Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity was founded in 1869 — otherwise known as the Charity Organisation Society (COS). Together with the new Metropolitan-wide Poor Law Board these bodies represented a much more centralised approach to the relief of the poor, an approach foisted on social reformers by the geographical separation of the classes. By putting charity on a "sound basis", it was hoped that the poor would come to gratefully accept their "dependence" on the rich. It was a hope that hardly squared with another Victorian ideology entertained — that workers should raise themselves up by their own bootstraps, become as bourgeois as the bourgeoisie itself.

Alongside such efforts to halt the "demoralisation of the poor", various attempts were made to improve the housing conditions they suffered.The "philanthropy at five per cent" movement represented by organisations such as the Peabody Trust was one such attempt. It led to the construction of "Model Dwellings" which were intended to house a substantial number of the poor. In fact, it failed miserably in this. By 1873. a mere 27,000 had been housed in these Model Dwellings. More importantly those who were housed were not the casual poor but the better off sections of the working class. Construction costs and the need to maintain a margin of profit, determined the level of rent which proved way beyond what the casual poor could afford.

Moreover, regulations laid down by the Peabody Trust such as an obligation on tenants to keep up with their payments or face eviction, made no allowance for the economic circumstances of the casual poor. In addition, at a time when occupancy rates were steadily rising throughout the poorer districts of London, residents were not permitted to take in lodgers — a traditional working class method of supplementing income.

Another method by which it was hoped to ameliorate the housing conditions of the poor was sanitary legislation. One example of this was the 1868 Torrens Act which enabled a vestry, on the advice of a medical officer. to declare a house unfit and order its owner to carry out the necessary repairs or have it demolished. In fact many vestries preferred by and large not to exercise such powers. Indeed, had they done so this would have aggravated housing conditions considerably by increasing local overcrowding in the remaining households.

Another piece of legislation, the 1875 Cross Act, also attempted to tackle the problem of housing. However the Act was based on the assumption that skilled workers would vacate the inner areas and move to the suburbs while the casual poor would take their place — the "levelling up theory". In the event the hopes of the reformers proved premature. Commuting from the periphery was still beyond the reach of most artisans. Of those who did relocate, many encountered intractable difficulties that forced them to return: the lack of work for spouses, unreliable trains and higher food prices. This highlighted another and much more disturbing development in the eyes of the Victorian ruling class: the gradual blurring of distinctions between skilled artisans and the casual poor.

Henry Mayhew, writing in the 1850s. observed that "in passing from the skilled operative of the West-end to the unskilled workman of the Eastern quarter of London, the moral and intellectual change is so great that it seems as if we were in a new land and among another race". It was the perception of such differences that helped to ease the passing of the 1867 Reform Bill amid the tensions of the 1860s whereby the franchise was extended to skilled workers in the towns. This was seen to provide a bulwark against social chaos. And in the 1870s it seemed as if the problem of the casual poor had been lessened by the beneficial influences of philanthropy and private enterprise.

By the 1880s. however, it was becoming apparent that something had gone badly wrong. The problem of the casual poor had not disappeared. On the contrary, as a Royal Commission on Housing revealed, it was much larger than most had expected and was steadily getting worse. Charles Booth, sceptical at first of the claims of Hyndman, the SDF leader, of widespread poverty, accepted his challenge to investigate the matter for himself and found that this was indeed the case.

Even more alarmingly, the artisans were being increasingly subjected to the same insanitary overcrowded conditions with which the casual poor had to contend, which had had such a "demoralising effect upon their character". Moreover, with the onset of a trade slump, artisans too were being made unemployed in increasing numbers, were being pushed downwards into the ranks of the casual poor. As an employer remarked to a COS Committee on Exceptional Distress: "We have always found as to the artisan, that if he happens to be out of work for three months, he is never the same man again. He becomes demoralised".

Changing perceptions

The 1880s. however, was more than just a decade scarred by economic crisis. It was a period of structural readjustment in ruling class ideology driven by the need to avert "revolution". It was a period when the increasing challenge of "collectivist" ideas could only be met by evolving a more collectivist approach to social problems, by moving away from the free market doctrines of the mid-Victorian period towards state welfare. The economic crisis of the 1880s passed and in the 1890s the tempo of working class suburbanisation began to quicken. Improved methods of mass transportation and subsidised travel began to have an effect, gradually relieving the population pressures on the inner areas.

But the perception of the casual poor also changed. Urban existence had long been seen as inimical to health and morals while the enfeeblement of the urban poor was contrasted with the robustness of the agricultural labourer. Now agricultural depression threatened to depopulate the countryside and flood the towns with yet more of the nation's poor. The theory of the "survival of the fittest" which seemed to legitimise the weeding out of the less fortunate, was now suspended by the advances in medical science and even more importantly by the improvement in sanitary conditions about which the "privileged classes" had professed such concern. The fear of national “degeneration" to which this gave rise increasingly informed the thoughts of politicians and economists against a background of Britain's declining industrial supremacy. Such a fear came to provide a rationalisation for a more statist approach to the solution of social problems, an approach that the very development of capitalism had made functionally imperative.

In Victorian London the perception of the casual poor was systematically distorted by an ideology that took little account of their needs in order to justify the need for them as cheap labour. In modern London, the "casual poor" may not be as proportionately significant as a century ago. But poverty is relative and it takes different forms. Its reality cannot be adequately encompassed by statistics or sanitised by the rhetorical claim that we have never had it so good.

Robin Cox

Speaking Out (2023)

Book Review from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speakers’ Corner Anthology. Edited by Jim Huggon. Union of Egoists. 2022.

This is a republication (with a new, additional Foreword) of an anthology first published in 1977. It is a collection of excerpts and other written material connected to Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner and there are several references to the SPGB scattered throughout. Jim Huggon is an anarchist who spoke regularly there from 1965 to 1983. He refers to a review by the Socialist Standard of the original version which has slightly puzzled us as it appears that no such review was ever published.

The collection also includes a knockabout piece by Harry Young (Horatio) called ‘On the Platform’ and originally published in the Seventieth Anniversary edition of the Standard in June 1974. There are excerpts too from famous Speakers’ Corner regular Bonar Thompson’s book, Hyde Park Orator, which has also recently been republished with added illustrations.

In addition, there is an interesting if rather pious excerpt from a piece by Lord Donald Soper about his time as an outdoor orator (more focused on Tower Hill than Hyde Park). This is interesting as he tells of encounters with a variety of other regular speakers and his relationship with them, without actually naming them. In particular, he writes of his conversations with a well-known Tower Hill personality and that this man was a scientific socialist, ‘breathing fire and slaughter against all religion, sneering at morality [and] despising the consolations of faith’ who turned out to be much warmer privately than his public persona had initially indicated. Given Soper’s detailed description of him it is highly likely that this was Harry Martin, a regular speaker at Tower Hill and who had left the SPGB in 1911 to found the Socialist Propaganda League (see ‘Getting Splinters’, in the June 2004 Centenary Edition of the Socialist Standard).

Tower Hill no longer exists as a speaking station and Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park is a shadow of its former self, these days a veritable bear garden aimed at tourists with very few serious speakers. This anthology helps capture the spirit of an earlier age.

DAP.

Blogger's Note:

There's a wee mistake in the review. The original edition of this book was reviewed by Robert Barltrop in the June 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard.

London's Government (1967)

From the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1888 Parliament created the ‘new’ County of London out of the existing counties of Middlesex, Essex, Kent and Surrey. At the same time it also created administrative counties throughout the rest of the country. The old Board of Works which had been set up in 1855 was abolished and a new London County Council, with increased powers, took its place. This has been heralded as the beginning of effective London Government, but this is not so. London Government goes back to a time before the Roman invasion of Britain. The Romans used the Thames as their access route in their penetration of southern Britain; the geographical site of London was the farthest inland point at which the Thames was easily navigable by sea-going vessels. With their flair for organisation and engineering, the Romans developed the community they found on this site into a port, and made this the focal centre for their fine network of roads from the Kent coast into eastern and northern areas beyond. They were to occupy London for the next four centuries.

At the time the Romans evacuated, London had become a walled and fortified town—something the Romans did after the disastrous raids by the Iceni under the leadership of Queen Boadicea, during the latter part of the Roman occupation. The area of this walled community was to remain almost static down the years until the great Fire in 1666.

The Romans gave London its name and its status as a port and a centre of communications. The Anglo-Saxons provided many of London's present day governmental institutions, that were not to acquire their full importance until more than a thousand years had passed, and the 1888 Act became law.

London, in common with the other Roman communities, was not reoccupied immediately by the Germanic invaders who, being accustomed to building only with timber, were unable to repair the crumbling stone buildings that were left behind. But London’s geographical site was too attractive to lie idle for any significant period, so that during the latter Saxon era the small fortified town began once again to come alive and re-assert itself as the leading community in Southern Britain, in time enjoying a high degree of autonomy in the administration of two key aspects of local affairs—markets and money.

Threatened by continued raids by Danish invaders, the several Saxon 'kings' established a “burghal” system of fortified communities in an effort to continue an ordered life. London, by virtue of its position, became one of the key centres of fortification when Alfred the Great established his chain of protected towns throughout Southern England. London was further strengthened, during the Saxon period, by the creation and establishment of eight mints, as against six in Winchester (the capital of Wessex) and four in Canterbury.

The burghal system served to shape the development of English local government, setting into motion at this very early date the basis for the semi-autonomous boroughs and fusing into English political thought a strong "localist" tradition which served as a potent force throughout the feudalist period. The early Saxon precedents established the concept of the "Royal Charter" as the machinery to be used in conferring a degree of administrative autonomy upon local communities.

After their conquest in 1066, the Norman French were reluctant to permit the newly conquered English communities to continue to exercise any great degree of local self-government. Instead the new rulers, fearful of potential revolt by a restive population, set about the creation of a strong centralised system of government under the direct control of the crown. But the Norman rulers needed money to administer the affairs of their newly conquered island, so they accepted the practice of selling off Royal Charters to the wealthier cities, and London took full advantage of William’s offer. Sometime between 1068-1075 London received its full charter which, while not conferring any new powers, did ratify the citizens' rights and privileges already in existence, which they had enjoyed under Saxon rule. By a long succession of Charters, purchased and renewed, London maintained its importance, so much so that at the time of Magna Carta, a clause was inserted which assured the City of all its ancient rights, privileges and free customs and granted the practice of the annual election of a Mayor and other local officials.

As the population of London grew, so also did its economic importance. During the Middle Ages societies and guilds began to grow up, organised at first on a friendly basis, to assist the aged, sick and needy. But these organisations soon were to take on a greater importance, as they became amalgamated with various craft and merchant groups. In time they became the powerful City guilds, controlling not only their particular interests in trade, but controlling the City's administration. The guilds had learnt the lesson of the City, the power that could be attained with the purchase of Royal Charters of incorporation, which gave them the right to elect their own Wardens and their members onto the Common Council of the City, which in turn elected the Mayor—plus the Members of Parliament for London. The guilds continued to exercise a complete stranglehold over London Government right up to the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832. Today remnants of the original London guilds remain in the form of 82 livery companies.

The exodus from the City into the surrounding countryside had begun in the Elizabethan period, when groups of tradesmen and workers in several crafts sought to escape the stranglehold of the guilds. But the great exodus took place in the mid-seventeenth century, as a direct result of two tragic events which followed each other —the Plague and the Fire.

Upwards of eighty thousand people fled from the fire, and six years later fewer than one in four were to return. The significance of this was not immediately noticed, because large numbers of workers came into the City and its surrounding areas, attracted by the developing industrial communities springing up along the line of the Thames. This growth and urban sprawl continued for the next two hundred years, determining which people moved in which direction. Eastwards the drift continued with the settlement of vast armies of labouring poor, attracted to the growing port extensions that were now under construction. Thousands of rows of humble dwellings were hastily run up by speculative builders to house the growing numbers that were now settling in what was to become the East End and later to develop into terrible slums, heavily overcrowded. Westward from the City drifted the wealthier. Vast ornate estates of fine houses and villas were provided at great cost and skill, so that today, in Belgravia and adjacent areas, we can see and admire the skill and taste which the wealthy enjoyed and still enjoy. In east, south and parts of north London, there still remain areas of slum property run up to house the poor.

The development of railways, tubes, tramways and other forms of transportation throughout the Victorian period extended the further sprawl of urban communities. The slums of the East now extended onto the South bank and continued to spread.

During the whole of this growth, the City still continued its dominance over its one square mile, and attempted to control some of the administrative functions of its neighbours. But the City Corporation had no interest in extending its historic boundaries. So instead, within the several and varied communities outside the City's control, there grew up a patchwork system of local administration, which was neither powerful enough nor comprehensive in its geographical scale to provide order in the government of the growing suburbia.

As the nineteenth century dawned, a greater degree of restlessness began to manifest itself; the chaos and confusion at attempts to localise and control administration became legion. Strong movements began to organise for local political, economic and electoral reform, ugly riots broke out and for a time London came under the control of the mobs. This all goaded Parliament into facing the vast problem of municipal reform. As a result of the mob riots, they passed in 1829 the London Police Act, which represented the first coherent attempt to deal with Greater London as a geographical unity, by establishing a Metropolitan Police district extending in a 15 mile radius from Charing Cross. But the City received special treatment, being allowed to establish and administer its own police force, which is still in existence.

By 1834-35, Parliament began to tackle some of the broader issues of local reform, commencing with the Poor Law Amendment Act, designed to break the power of privileged property classes over local government control by substituting elected local Boards of Guardians to administer relief for the poor. The Municipal Reform Act in 1835 went a step further by creating conditions for elective councils to govern the affairs of all boroughs in England. But the City was again singled out, and excluded entirely from the provisions of the 1835 Act. It was not until 1855 that Greater London's needs were finally considered with the setting up by Parliament of a special body to be known as the Metropolitan Board of Works, thus abolishing all the little local bodies and creating instead larger bodies under the title of "administrative vestry” elected by local inhabitants. The smaller parishes were grouped into districts and given an elected District Board. In all 41 vestries and boards were set up under the control of the Board of Works.

The Metropolitan Board of Works set into motion the construction of 82 miles of sewers, it controlled the construction of the Victoria and Albert embankments, created several parks and open spaces, constructed several major road improvements and developed a centralised London Fire Brigade. But it was not careful with its accounts, and much scandal became attached to its handling of its funds. Moreover its members were appointed by each other—which put the Board outside the control of any administrative authority.

After the passing of the 1888 Act and the creation of the London County Council the Board became defunct. In 1889 the London parishes and districts were re-grouped and formed into 28 Metropolitan Boroughs. They continued like this until with the passing of the London Government Act in 1963 they were re-grouped and the administrative areas enlarged, this time encompassing the whole of the County of Middlesex, large sections of metropolitan Essex, Kent and Surrey. This re-organisation made 32 larger boroughs with control vested in the Greater London Council, which replaced the L.C.C.

Some disagreement exists over the question of when the national political parties made their first inroads into local governments, and who was responsible for this development. The Labour Party claim that the Conservatives and the Liberals bear the responsibility, and point to the history of the Whigs and Tories during the reform era to back up this assertion. Certainly the London County Council was intensely political from its inception in 1888, with two opposing groups calling themselves ‘Progressives’ and ‘Moderates’. In 1907 it became a clear battle between the Liberals (Progressives) and the Conservatives then calling themselves Municipal Reformers, who retained political control for 27 years, until in 1934 the long reign of the Labour Party began, ending last month with the election of the Conservatives.

V. W. Phillips

And not a drop to drink (1989)

From the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

It takes a remarkable degree of disorganisation to create a problem of clean water supply in a country like Britain where it rains at least one day in three. The problem is not entirely new of course. Ever since the Tudors and increasingly since the industrial revolution the rivers and inshore waters have been used as open sewers.

In seventeenth century London the paths of disease could be traced on a map along the rivers of the capital — the Fleet, the Brent, the Lea. The rich were smart enough to live on the high ground — Hampstead, Stamford Hill. Dulwich, so that their sewage flowed down toward the poor at the bottom in Camden. Tottenham, Walworth and the streams that drained the valleys.

The problem had begun with the depopulation of the countryside by Enclosures. The dispossessed peasants flocked to the cities as they are now doing in the Third World, and the Plague of London of 1665-6 was an early consequence. The city's population exploded from the few tens of thousands it had been in the Middle Ages. It was no longer a real city with a corporate existence but just a huge aggregation of people without clean water or sewage. The cry of Gardee Loo! as the chamber pot was emptied out of the bedroom window into the street below was a commentary in sound of the sanitary arrangements. The peasant on the other hand would have had his thunderbox well away from the house, an earth or pit closet, placed downhill and as far away from the well as possible.

London in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resembled Calcutta today (if they could be said to differ, London would come off worse). The situation got so bad that, after continual outbreaks of cholera and typhoid which infected Gladstone and Queen Victoria and killed Prince Albert, the government in 1858 ordered the piping of London for sewage and clean water supply. Waste was simply conveyed downstream and put into the river beyond the sniff of the capital.

Elsewhere in the country, rivers like the Clyde and the Mersey, the Humber and the Taff. which had teemed with fish and water-fowl, otters and crayfish, became stinking black ditches.

Market economy to blame

The reason for all this was identified by the economist A.C. Pigou as "externalities", that is, businesses shrugging off overheads in the form of unwanted waste products onto the rest of the population. It gives you a business edge to throw your rubbish over the fence, to let your filth run into the nearest stream rather than build a treatment plant. The same economic mechanism which rewards the drive for profit also rewards the drive to cut costs — at other people's expense. It is an inescapable consequence of the market economy.

There is no way the problems can be dealt with while goods and services are produced with a view to sale and profit. Tinkering with the problem will only shift the burden somewhere else.

Power stations and car exhausts produce acid rain which leaches out aluminium in the soil and into the streams and rivers from which it is piped into our taps and is strongly suspected as a major factor in Alzheimer's Disease. It is little comfort to discover that much of the power produced goes to provide us with junk mail, computers in banks, tanks and aircraft carriers for the next war.

Trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene, which are used for degreasing metal in Vauxhalls at Luton among other places, have got into the water table at levels high enough to disturb the experts because they are regarded by the World Health Organisation as a major cause of cancer. Many of these cars are destined for reps who will be sent out to sell soap powder, Mars bars and life insurance.

In the summer of 1988 a boy canoeing on the Warwickshire Avon found two dead herons on the river bank. He mentioned the fact casually to a young man who was a biologist interested in environmental matters. Examination showed that the birds had died of dieldrin poisoning (remember Seveso?), an insecticide banned everywhere in the developed world. The source was traced to a company in Coventry which cleaned drums for an American multinational in Avonmouth which manufactured the poison for export to the Third World (they are not allowed to produce it in the US). Dieldrin has since been found in Severn eels, up to eight hundred tons of which were annually exported to Holland and Germany. The Ministry of Agriculture found this out in the spring of 1988 but kept the finding secret. The facts were leaked to the Continentals and the imports were cancelled. More recently still the Gloucester Citizen carried the headline “Probe As Fish Quit Severn".

The only exception to the falling quality of water in the rivers was the much publicised cleaning-up of the Thames by improving the sewage works at Thurrock in recent years. Within a very short while some thirty species of fish were reported to have returned to the river and one wealthy optimist seeded the headwaters above Oxford with thousands of salmon fingerlings in the hope that when mature they would return to the river to spawn. There were reports three or four years later that salmon had been taken by anglers but since then trouble with sewage works along the river has brought the quality of the water down again.

The cleaning up of the Thames was little more than a public relations exercise and a bit of charity beginning at home for members of the ruling class obliged to spend time at Westminster. Elsewhere water quality continued to fall with nitrate pollution in East Anglia, cryptosporidium in Oxfordshire, and massive aluminium-sulphate poisoning of people in Cornwall.

Obsession with privatisation

In the middle of all this the Thatcher government is pressing on with privatising the water undertakings. How irrelevant this is can be seen from the fact that 20 per cent of the industry has always been in the hands of private firms. Neither they nor the majority of firms that are government owned have shown the slightest urge or ability to come to grips with pollution, but as we have tried to show above, they can't anyway. Like the rest of the economy, it is really out of control. Polluting the environment is profitable for Conservative investors and Left Wing bureaucrats can do little about it.

The vile water we have to drink will inevitably become even more expensive. At present only half of the fifty odd thousand employed in the industry actually do the productive work. Putting a meter on everybody's house will cost £1.5 billions in the aggregate and will require a new tier of non-productives to read the meters, send out bills, chase non-payers, prosecute those who make imaginative use of a piece of pipe and two hoseclips to bypass the meter . . .

In addition, the £7 billion it will cost to transfer the businesses from local bureaucrats to independent companies will have to be met by the consumers, plus the interest on same, which is set to increase from 5 per cent to 8 per cent annual return on capital on the whole package to make it attractive to owners of capital. Even then, it will only be a percentage point or two above the rate of inflation.

The latest news is that the EEC has turned down a request by Nicholas Ridley. Minister of the Environment (No kidding!) that his government be exempted from having to observe Commission standards for water purity. His argument was that when the new companies are set up, their being responsible for policing themselves will be our guarantee of pure water in the future. After all, if they don't come up with the goods we can all exercise the customer's prerogative and go without, can't we?

Ken Smith

Radical London History (2007)

Book Reviews from the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keith Scholey: ‘The Communist Club’, (Past Tense (c/o 56a Info Shop, 56 Crampton St., London SE17 0AE), October 2006. £1. 

Stefan Szczelkun: Kennington Park, (Past Tense, June 2006. £1)

The Communist Club was the informal name under which German Workers Educational Association came to be known. Established in London in February 1840, as the name implies, the Association functioned mainly as an educational and social club for German workers in London. Usually meeting in rooms above pubs, the Association’s first venue was the Red Lion pub in Great Windmill Street.

Some of the same members were also involved with the Communist League, the organisation which commissioned Karl Marx to write the Communist Manifesto in 1847. The reading and adoption of the Manifesto probably happened at the Club’s new premises in Drury Lane.

The Club went on to play important roles in the Chartist movement, the First International, anarchism and socialism in Britain. In 1903 the Association now at Charlotte Street played host, in part, to the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The main outcome of this Congress was the emergence of Lenin’s Bolshevik faction within the RSDLP.

The Socialist Party had its first headquarters at the Communist Club (June 1904 to September 1905) and often held its Annual Conferences and Quarterly Delegate Meetings there up to 1919. The Club was closed a few years later and the building was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. In view of its importance in the history of the British working class and the Socialist Party, it is to be hoped that a more detailed version of this short pamphlet will be forthcoming.

The subtitle of Szczelkun’s pamphlet, “The Birthplace of People’s Democracy,” is something of an misnomer. The allusion is to Chartism. But the Chartist rally of April 1848, held at Kennington Park, marked the end of working class agitation for democracy in nineteenth century Britain. And this pamphlet contains other contentious statements. We are told, for example, that “History is not objective truth.” Undoubtedly much history is written from a ruling class point of view, but this does not mean that an objectively true account of the past is unattainable.

Presumably Stefan Szczelkun intends this work to be more than merely his point of view, particularly if he wants to persuade others about what really happened in the past. We are also told that “Socialist parties” (apparently including us) either considered working class culture to be a distraction or were active in encouraging our members to follow “middle class” forms of recreation (p. 14). Of course, the author provides no evidence for this preposterous assertion insofar as it refers to the Socialist Party. Apart from that, this work tells you all you could reasonably want to know about the history of London’s Kennington Park. There is much that is valuable in this short pamphlet and works like it.

Both publications are produced in conjunction with the South London Radical History Group. It is part of the process of rediscovering the truth about what happened in the past in our localities, and forms an indispensable part of the struggle for our socialist future. Where is your equivalent?

Lew Higgins

The commons of South London (2005)

Book Review from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down With The Fences: Battles for the Commons in South London. 36 pages, ú2; Past Tense Publications, c/o 56 Crampton St, London SE14, November 2004.

“The law condemns the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But lets the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.”

Most of the text of Down With The Fences was the basis of a talk given to the South London Radical History Group. Many of the open spaces in London – commons, woods, greens and parks – exist because they were preserved from development by collective action: by rioting, tearing down .

According to the pamphlet, between the 16th and 19th centuries, much of the open land, commons or woods south of the River Thames in London was enclosed for development, usually by rich landowners, or sold off for house building. Despite its name, the common land was rarely if ever actually land held in common. It was almost always land owned by the Lord of the Manor, on which over time local people had come to exercise some rights. But these rights often had no legal weight; they were just part of an unwritten social contract.

Of the “commoners”, the pamphlet notes that some of them “could become wealthy individuals themselves. Thus later struggles sometimes developed into struggles between different local rich persons. Gradually as capitalism developed, slowly replacing a society of complex vertical social obligations and customs with one based entirely on profit, the impetus was on for landowners to replace traditional land use with intensive agriculture. This demanded the clearing of woodland and the exclusion of the poor from the commons.”

This process did not take place without massive upheavals. The enclosures increased resistance. The pamphlet describes the wave of rebellion for Sydenham Common, and the conflict on Westward Common in Barnes. Richmond Park, Streatham Common, Woolwich Common and South Lambeth Common are also mentioned. As late as the 1860s, there were struggles over access to Wimbledon Common.

By the l850s, reformers were articulating the need for urban parks, to “relieve the stress and overcrowding of the city for the millions (of workers) packed into built-up areas”. It was also hoped that by converting some open spaces and commons into landscaped parks, they would be made respectable “for the aspiring working classes”. For example, “In South London, Battersea Fields, until the 19th century a place of bawdy working class recreation, including animal fairs, stalls, drinking, etc. became Battersea Park. Local vicar Reverend Fallon proposed building of the modern park to encourage the poor to reform and ‘become orderly’. As part of the process in 1852 all persons ‘trespassing’ on the park with animals or barrows were ordered to be nicked.”

Stockwell Green was used for local recreation, often rowdy, until a local toff bought it and built railings round it. Wandsworth Common, as part of the wastes of the Manor of Battersea and Wandsworth, was largely enclosed and reduced in size, and split in three by the new railway lines the 1840s. The pamphlet mentions numerous other open spaces, commons and parks in southern London, and the various battles and conflicts over their ownership and access. It notes, however, that the struggles described in South London were not unique. Through the 16th to the 19th centuries there were thousands of local battles against the enclosure and development of open spaces. And although not mentioned in the pamphlet, it should be noted here that in a socialist society all the land, and not just commons or parks, would be the common possession of society as a whole.

Peter E. Newell

From proletarian to prat (2013)

Book Review from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood by Alan Johnson. Bantham Press, 2013.

When former Home Secretary Alan Johnson told Prime Minister Tony Blair that he was married with three children before he was twenty years old, Blair replied ‘You really are working class’. Alan Johnson is one of those rare things, a member of the proletariat who climbed the greasy pole to reach high political office.

This Boy tells of his childhood in the 1950s and 60s, growing up in North Kensington in London W10 in ‘a street whose buildings had been condemned in the 1930s’. The Johnson family were abandoned by their father, and their lives were filled with a ‘grinding poverty’ which comprised second hand clothes from ‘the Lane’ (Petticoat Lane market), debts, outside lavatories, no television or labour-saving devices, buying groceries ‘on the tick’, hiding from the ‘tally man’, and free school meals. In 1959 Macmillan said the working class had ‘never had it so good’.

1950s North Kensington was captured in the photographs of Roger Mayne who portrayed the ‘squalor and vibrancy of life there’ and also the arrival of immigrants from the West Indies who would be exploited by Rachman landlordism. Johnson recalls the ‘Teddy Boy’ riots in Notting Hill, the unsolved murder (Johnson says he knows the culprit) of West Indian Kelso Cochrane in 1959, and Oswald Mosley as Fascist candidate for North Kensington at the 1959 General Election.

Johnson’s book features a portrait of his mother who died when he was thirteen. She was a Liverpudlian who admired Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Liberal leader Jo Grimond, disliked Churchill, and worked as a ‘charlady in the posh houses of South Kensington’. His mother and elder sister kept the family going in a period of the Welfare State when benefit entitlements were administered through the head of a family (ie. the man).

Johnson describes his passion for Queens Park Rangers who had a golden era in the 1960s which culminated in winning the football League Cup in 1967. Music was a passion from the skiffle of Lonnie Donegan to the Beatles and Stones and discovering Chicago blues. Johnson details the influential books and authors in his life which included Shane by Jack Schaefer, Mark Twain, HG Wells, Arnold Bennett and George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Johnson passed his 11-plus and went to grammar school in Chelsea but left school at 15 eventually becoming a postman. He joined the Labour Party in 1971 although he considered himself a ‘Marxist in the CPGB style’. He also joined his trade union becoming the CWU General Secretary in 1992. He was the only senior trade unionist to support the New Labour abolition of Clause IV, and a safe parliamentary seat was found for him in 1997. He held various cabinet posts under Blair and then Brown. As Education Minister he introduced differential university tuition fees, and as Home Secretary he sacked Professor David Nutt, Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs who had accused the government of ‘distorting’ and ‘devaluing’ research evidence in the debates about Ecstasy and cannabis.

Steve Clayton

Party News: Marx’s London Walk (2015)

Dean Street, London.

Party News from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 7 January, a short walk was made by socialists around Soho and Fitzrovia. Despite the midday, mid-week timing, necessary to coincide with the visit of visitors from Sweden, there was a good turnout. We viewed the old Red Lion pub, where the iconic Communist Manifesto was presented to the Communist Workers’ Education Society, Marx’s house in Dean Street, scene of the dire poverty which killed off three of his children, and the home of the First International in Greek Street, which, as one comrade reminded us, was the venue for the first reading of the socialist classic Value, Price and Profit. We then proceeded across Soho Square and Oxford Street to the vicinity of Fitzroy Square, for nigh forty years around the turn of the last century, stomping ground of the Communist Club. The latter, the guide explained, was the successor to the Communist Worker’s Education Society, habituated by friends of Marx, as well as other late nineteenth century notables, such as William Morris. The club was also the first headquarters of our own Party, thus forming a neat link between past and present.

The Festival of Britain (1951)

Exhibition Review from the July 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1947 the British Government decided to inaugurate a series of celebrations and displays to commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The various entertainments and exhibitions spread over Great Britain all through the centre months of this year are the result. The centrepiece of this festival is the exhibition now staged on the south bank of the River Thames at Waterloo, London. The guide book to The South Bank Exhibition, issued by H.M. Stationery Office, claims that this exhibition is “neither a museum of British culture nor a trade show of British wares." It would be more true to say that it is not an ordinary museum and not apparently a trade show. Actually this exhibition is a super museum, systematically arranged in a pleasant setting. Its main attraction is that it presents, in a very interesting form, the story of man's evolution, both biological and social. Notices informing visitors that they can obtain information about the goods exhibited, belie the statement that it is not a trade show.

In the centre of the exhibition ground is a building aptly named “The Dome of Discovery." Here is laid out a massive collection of instruments, tools, charts, pictures, models, products, reconstructions, etc., depicting man's discoveries, not only in the remote corners of the earth, but under the sea, in the stratosphere, in the bowels of the earth and in the many fields of scientific investigation. Embryology, physics, chemistry, biology, polar exploration, cartography, plastics, water engineering, pest control, genetics—all have their place.

Many of the displays should be of extreme interest to workers who visit the exhibition. For instance, the section of the “Dome of Discovery" labelled “The Living World." Here are diagrams and models illustrating the work of early British naturalists such as John Ray, Robert Brown and Gilbert White who made classifications of plants and animals, mostly based on incorrect notions, but which were of immense help to their successors. The work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace is illustrated and Darwin's evolutionary theories simply and interestingly portrayed. Johann Mendel although not a Briton, is mentioned, together with his work on plant hybridisation from which have developed most of the ideas of the modern geneticists, examples of whose researches are also shown.

In other buildings under names like, “Power and Production,” “Transport,” “Minerals of the Island” and “Sea and Ships” are exhibitions of modern tools, instruments and machinery. In these, the visitor who can for a moment cease to wonder at all the marvels of man’s ingenuity, may give thought to the social consequences of this mass of modern invention. No longer does the miner need his pick nor the farmer his pitchfork. There are mechanically operated machines for almost every job. Not only a machine for each separate job, but machines that do a whole series of jobs converting raw materials to finished products. One is struck by the fact that the workers in attendance on these machines do little, if anything at all, in the productive process that is afoot. Their time and effort is devoted to caring for the machine, removing dust and waste, and tidying up around and about. There are machines for testing the accuracy of other machines and the qualities of the goods produced by them. There are machines to switch-on, drive and switch-off and the whole process of production tends to become automatic. One can realise that with the further development of the study of electronics and its application to industry, there will be less and less for the worker to do.

The architecture of some of the exhibition buildings conforms to the modern factory style. No longer the grim and solid brick built factory made to house many workers working in rows at their respective taste, now a light utilitarian structure designed as a shell to protect the delicate and costly machine from the elements.

If only all the wonders displayed at this exhibition could be put into operation for the service of mankind and not for the purpose of profit making for the owners of industry, what delightful changes could be made in the world. Not only could all people have more of the wealth that they produce but the hours spent in its production could be so much shortened. Not only could the tasks be so much easier but the conditions under which they are performed could be made enjoyable. There need be no “dirty work," much less industrial disease, and so much more time for leisure to enjoy the arts, amusements and entertainments that are displayed throughout the length and breadth of Britain during this festival period.

The thoughtful worker will wonder why, when there is such machinery to use, that men in huge areas of the world still use primitive tools and transport; why, when wealth can be produced so plentifully, that so many people are in need of the absolute necessities of life; why, when there is so much labour-saving machinery, that multitudes of people are overworked.

A lot of these machines are not the result of recent inventions but are refinements and improvements of inventions of generations post. It cannot be that the principles applied in these machines are of such recent discovery that there has been no time to produce sufficient numbers of them to solve many of the social problems that exist today. In 1939 H.M. Stationery Office published a book by H. T. Pledge, B.A., entitled “Science Since 1500." This book, with minor corrections was reprinted in 1947, and it shows that many of the inventions that are thought to be of recent origin are really derived from the researches of men over a hundred years ago.

There are a number of reasons why new inventions do not get taken up and utilised immediately they are made. One reason, probably the most effective, is that a new invention will cut across the interests of existing capitalist companies. We can remember the opposition that the turnpike and stagecoach companies put up against the early railways. The whale-oil companies fought against the use of gas for lighting, and later the gas companies fought against the use of electric light. The telegraph companies put up bitter opposition to the telephone and to radio telegraphy and the telegraph, telephone and radio telegraph companies fought against the radio telephone. All these instances are of opposition that may have delayed the application of new inventions but failed to prevent it. There must be many, many cases where the opposition was successful and we have never heard of the invention at all.

One of the American New Deal publications, “Technological Trends," states on page 53,

   "Changes within the electric industry have been retarded by the buying and suppressing of patents by the large corporations which dominate the field . . . A superior electric lamp, which it is estimated will save electric light users $10,000,000 a year, has been invented but has not been put on the market.” 

and on page 353,

   “The author knows of one metallurgist who made his own safety-razor blade, sharpened it, and nitrided it. It has been used daily, without re-sharpening, for 2 years. Naturally the razor-blade manufacturers are not interested"

Sir Alexander Oibb in his presidential address to the Engineering Section of the British Association in 1937, said,

      " . . .  the greater the success of research the more immediate and drastic the effect on existing plant and equipment. That is where the rub sometimes lies . . . and many valuable inventions have been bought up by vested interests and suppressed. . . . " (Report of the British Association 1937, pp. 158-159.)

Two other factors that retard development are, first, the difficulty of finding a profitable market for goods that are in plentiful supply. We quote again from “ Technological Trends ” page 58.

   “Fear of overproduction with consequent shattering of price levels, and a dramatic displacement of cotton pickers, is deterring the introduction of the automatic cotton picker invented by the Rust brothers . . . ."

This automatic cotton picker can pick as much cotton in hours as a first rate hand picker can pick in weeks. The labourers required for cotton picking could be reduced by 75 per cent, if this machine was brought into use. Furthermore, the first patent for a mechanical cotton picker dates from 1850. Secondly, by depressing wages to a low level it is often cheaper to use a number of workers to do a task than to install an expensive machine that will displace them.

All this adds up to the fact that the existing system of production is now a fetter on social progress. No matter how fine a display the festival designers can create,

   “. . .  so that this country and the world could pause to review British contributions to world civilisation in the arts of peace.” (South Bank Exhibition Guide, page 6)

there are still greater contributions that could be displayed were it not for the retarding effect of capitalism.

One thing we failed to find in the South Bank Exhibition was any display or even reference to the work of those Britons who have spent much of their time in research into the causes of social change. Such a display would have shown that the changes in the tools of production, so well depicted, were the cause of the changes in the social structure that is splendidly illustrated. It would also have shown that this mass of wonder-inspiring machinery and all these mechanical marvels must, in their turn, cause yet other social changes.

If the full force of the benefits of all these things displayed, is to accrue to mankind, then the capitalist mode of production must be abolished. “The Land" depicted at the exhibition with its wealth of resources together with all these labour and time saving machines must be commonly owned so that the wealth produced may be available to all. The production of goods for a market in order to make a profit must end. It is clogging the wheels of social progress, it is causing suffering and misery, poverty and unhappiness, ill-health and insecurity, all of which can end when the workers take the means of production from the existing owners and use them for the common good.

The exhibition at South Bank is not the Festival, but it is the core. There are other exhibitions, there are pageants, Eisteddfods, festivals of art and music, pleasure gardens, gatherings of the clans and other attractions throughout Great Britain. Towns and villages are having their own little “do’s" to celebrate the occasion. But all these pleasures and entertainments are subject to the system of production. The means that man employs to get the necessities of life will be reflected in his arts, his entertainments and his amusements. So the exhibitions are not only the core of the festival, they are the key to the understanding of it.

W. Waters

Pro-Labour History (2017)

Book Review from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Rebel Footprints'. By David Rosenberg, (Pluto Press)

Labour history, like all history, is seen through various lenses, distorting and magnifying certain aspects of reality, filtering out unwanted intrusions. Its resulting narratives reflect fundamental assumptions and serve to boost and consolidate those convictions. Here, David Rosenberg, presents us with a particular view of Radical London designed with a particular aim in mind. One which, since it already carries ‘likes’ from Corbyn and the TUC, ought to be pretty obvious.

Such it is not to the uncritical eye. For the best propaganda does not look like propaganda. Ostensibly, this book really does tell the story of ‘how defiant grassroots Londoners responded to their circumstances from the beginning of the 1830s until the end of the 1930s’ in relation to localities in which they occurred. Here, indeed, are the strikes, the campaigns, the events which any historian of the subject would be bound to include.

Already, however, our vision is limited time-wise. Why 1939? Did history magically end, Fukuyama style, with the invasion of Poland? Of course, this is not Year Zero at all. For the Left Labourite, the Golden Age began and history ended with the general election of July 1945. Hurrah for the use of troops to smash the dockers! Hurrah for the Indian massacres! Hurrah for the atom bomb! Go Clement go! And since that time, the Labour Party has been a most integral part of the political ruling class, so any account of strikes, campaigns, would inevitably be a Jeremiad (!) against that very Labour Party, which Rosenberg has come to praise. And not, like us, to bury.

What then, is the point of these campaigns, these strikes, that Rosenberg (to give him credit) accurately (bar a few niggles) and with an attractive liveliness (if with also butterfly flitting) describes? Whereto is the admirable sense of solidarity generated by the action of working together for a common cause directed? And how are the questions inevitably posed by such campaigns answered? Why, sir, need you ask! Instead of directing such justifiable anger, such togetherness, such criticism, against the system, the Labourite, consciously or unconsciously, co-opts these sentiments for their own ends.

And these are made clear: A change of political masters; Government charity – ‘free’ wigs, a council flat, and a nice job on the bins – for the worker; and a comfy seat on the board for ‘his’ rep. Apart from capitalism as normal, its wars, its poverty, its misery, this is all we can expect from the resurrection of Corbynite Old Labour. That this alternative to the Blairite New Labour holds any sort of appeal shows the depth to which we have sunk, propelled thence by the twin millstones of Leninist ‘Communism’ and Labour’s ‘Socialism’ – both in reality one and the same state capitalist nightmare.

As to the alternative, the world turned upside down, the lowly made high and the masters downtrodden, of this, to which a good half of those name-dropped herein subscribed, nominally or genuinely, there is no mention. We, and those like us, do not want ‘justice and equality’, our path is not mere protest, defensive and backward looking, but the revolutionary road to the world made anew.

Kaz.

Radical London (2006)

Book Review from the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reds on the Green: A Short Tour of Clerkenwell Radicalism. by "Fagin" Past Tense Publications, £2.00.

It was water that named Clerkenwell; a village with several wells, one of which, the Clerk’s Well, that gave its name to the area. The River Fleet ran through, from its sources on Hampstead Heath to where it enters the River Thames near Blackfriars Bridge.

First mentioned in this brief account of Clerkenwell, is the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, where Wat Tyler and the rebel peasants ransacked the Savoy Palace in the Strand, home of John of Gaunt, then the Fleet Prison, crossed into Clerkenwell and set fire to the Priory of the Order of Saint John. In 1665 refugees from the Plague, and in 1666, from the Great Fire of London, moved northwards from the City to Clerkenwell. By the late 17th century, there had been an influx of craftsmen into the area, including many watchmakers and locksmiths. Clerkenwell soon became a slum in which thousands of poverty-stricken workers scraped an existence. Parts of the area were notorious for beggars, casual labourers and prostitutes. In the 1800s, the police rarely went into the part of Clerkenwell known as the Rookeries.

Clerkenwell Green became famous, or maybe infamous, for meetings and demonstrations. In 1838, when the Tolpuddle Martyrs returned from their transportation to Australia after being pardoned, some of them were welcomed by a large demonstration on the Green. Indeed, it was the heart of the radical political scene in Victorian London, and was the central venue for public meetings, demonstrations and clashes between Chartists and the recently formed Metropolitan Police Force. In November 1867, there were two demonstrations to protest against the death sentence on three Irish Fenians in Manchester, who were later hanged at Strangeways Prison. In 1882, a large cache of Fenian arms were discovered at St John Street, nearby.

The pamphlet Reds on the Green notes that in 1871, there were meetings supporting the Paris Commune, and for the Commune’s duration, a red flag hung from the lamp-post on the Green. In 1884, the Social Democratic Federation held meetings there. By the end of the Victorian era, it was a major centre for regular soap-box speakers, as well as a venue for open-air radical meetings and demonstrations.

The author gives a brief account of a number of radical mavericks, such as Dan Chatterton and the anarchist-communist Guy Aldred, who were born and grew up in Clerkenwell. Mention is made of The House (no. 37 Clerkenwell Green), built in 1738, where William Morris and Eleanor Marx addressed crowds from the balconies of the building, and which, since 1933, has housed the Marx Memorial Library. Mention is also made of. a certain V Lenin and his wife, Krupskaya, who used the offices of SDF’s Twentieth Century Press to edit the paper Iskra in 1902. (It is noted that Lenin established a state-capitalist dictatorship.)

The pamphlet concludes with an Appendix of recommended pubs to visit in Clerkenwell. It is well illustrated and is obtainable from: Past Tense Publications, c/o 56A Info Shop, 56 Crampton Street, London, SE17.

Peter E. Newell

How the Liberals Lost London (1968)

Book Review from the March 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London 1885-1914 By Paul Thompson, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 63s.

From the passing of the Third Reform Act to the First World War the Liberals in London depended for funds and local organisation on Nonconformist tradesmen and for votes on the working class.

As Thompson puts it:

The Liberal Party . . . was based on a working class majority and a middle class religious minority interest. Its difficulty was to rouse the enthusiasm of the one without alienating the funds of the latter.

This book is the story of their failure to do this. They came to be replaced by the Labour Party, a thoroughly opportunist outfit which stood for much the same as them but insisted that "Labour" be represented in parliament and on the local councils by people independent of both Tories and Liberals. The best hope for the Liberals lay in the development of the "Lib-Labs", drawing trade unionists into their local organisations. Their greatest success in this was in Battersea where former Social Democrat John Burns, of the engineers, became the Liberal MP and later the first member of the working class to enter the Cabinet. There were also those who called themselves Socialists—the Social Democratic Federation, the ILP and the Fabians. So there was a chance that the Liberals might have been replaced by a working class party openly claiming (as Labour did not till 1918) "Socialism" as its aim. The Fabians, as Thompson shows, have been able, thanks to loudmouths like Shaw, to inflate their own significance in this period both on the Liberals (for at first they stood for "permeation") and on Labour.

The working class in London was largely indifferent to religion. It had no nonconformist background. Quite the contrary, for there was a long tradition of secularism amongst politically minded London workers. It was this, argues Thompson, that opened the way for the SDF with its crude Marxism as the most successful "socialist" party in London rather than for the ILP with its moralizing that went down so well in the North. The working class in London at least saw through that and the ILP found their nonconformist vocabulary out of place. The SDF was a peculiar organisation. It was set up in 1884 with Hyndman as leader; it accepted the class struggle and pioneered the spread of Marxist ideas amongst the working class in Britain. It had two great drawbacks from the Socialist point of view: Hyndman and its programme of "stepping stones" to Socialism. These immediate demands differed little from those of radical Liberals. When the Labour Representation Committee (to become the Labour Party in 1906) was set up in 1900 the SDF was affiliated to it but withdrew the next year. The SDF then tried its luck at becoming an independent force. This was not unrealistic since it was clear that Labour really depended on the Liberals for seats in parliament (We now know that for the 1906 election there was a secret pact between Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone to let some Labourites in if they would stand down in other places). However, the SDF attacks on Labourism were a little disingenuous since on the local level they too made deals with Labour and the Progressives (as the Liberals called themselves for municipal politics).

In 1904 some former SDF members set up the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain which rejected such opportunism, had no "reform programme and declared that the party seeking working-class emancipation must be hostile to every other party". When it contested local elections there were no deals or compromises (Incidentally Thompson is wrong when he says that the Socialist Party scorned trade unions: we have always considered the economic side of the class struggle necessary though limited).

Off the Labour bandwagon the SDF failed to make headway. In 1907 it changed its name to Social Democratic Party and in 1911 became, with a few ILP branches and others the British Socialist Party. By 1914 it was back in the fold but by now it was clear that the Liberals were to be replaced by the non-Liberal, non-Marxist Labour Party.

When the war came the BSP split, with a majority against. These later disappeared into the so-called Communist Party. The others formed their own National Socialist Party and later became the SDF again, lingering on till 1939. The Socialist Party of course opposed the war and is still an independent party.

Thompson's book discusses the subject in great detail, perhaps in too great detail for the ordinary reader. Nevertheless it will be useful to all students of working class history. Interesting is his argument that "London with its lack of working class nonconformity and its secularist traditions offered no strong resistance to Marxist theory". For, for good or ill, our Party is in this London working class tradition with our complete opposition to anything that smacks of religion, our emphasis on understanding, education and rational argument, our leaderless democratic organisation, our opposition to all censorship and our open meetings.

Adam Buick