Pathfinders: Hot Air Emissions (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases… is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable”, writes Tony Blair in the preface to the UK government report which concludes that “there is only a small chance of greenhouse gas emissions being kept below dangerous levels.” When questioned about this report on Radio 4 Margaret Beckett, environment minister, states “we could come to a tipping point where change could be irreversible.”

This is not the much-publicised Stern Report of October, but an earlier report, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, published by the UK government in January of this year, based on research presented by speakers at a conference held by the UK Meteorological Office in February 2005. (BBC Online, 30 January).

Since then the heat and emissions released by politicians of all persuasions has increased to dangerous and unsustainable proportions. A summit in Monterrey in Mexico in October was hailed by the 20 biggest global polluters as ‘very positive’, then more noise over the Stern report later that month, which tended to be taken more seriously by politicians since they listen to economists with infinitely greater attention than they ever listen to scientists. But then in November the politicians were complaining that the politicians weren’t doing anything, as Kofi Annan despaired at the UN climate summit in Nairobi that global warming was as “grave a threat as conflict, poverty and the spread of weapons.” Sceptics, he added, with a politician’s ear for the ringing soundbite, were “out of step, out of arguments and out of time”.

The only politician in Britain in recent weeks to actually do anything, as opposed to making speeches and going to junkets in Mexico for Important High-Level Talks, has been dear old Red Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, who has infuriated the Kensington and Mayfair set by announcing a punishing £25 per day congestion charge for Band G motor vehicles, which is effectively the SUV-class 4×4 ‘Chelsea tractor’, emitters of carbon roughly double that of any other car. Many of these can be seen outside school gates during the school run, and are apparently second family cars used for kids, shopping and round-town errands, themselves the most carbon-inefficient types of journey. Ken observes,correctly, that people who can afford these monsters can afford any mainstream car so their decision to buy these heavy polluters and stick two fingers up at the world is clearly deliberate.

Most people who have even the mildest concern over capitalism’s damage to the planet must surely have the most searing contempt for anti-social yahoos in bull-bar Mitsubishi tankettes, so it was not surprising that this measure was greeted with ecstatic cheers, even though it won’t come in until 2009.

What a pity Ken went and spoiled it all immediately by getting himself into trouble over a freebie junket (by carbon reckless air travel, of course) to Venezuela to visit his soulmate Chavez, at the council taxpayer’s expense. Never mind, the thought is what counts.

And the thought, in government circles, is all about counting at the moment, carbon counting. The UK government has announced, through the annual speech made by its velvet glove puppet the Queen, that its target of reducing carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050 will now be enshrined in law, with a Carbon Committee set up to make sure it happens (BBC Online, 15 November).

They’ll check every five years or so and make a speech, or an excuse, depending on where they’re up to. So, lots of noise again for now, and leisure enough not to worry for the next five years, until everybody’s forgotten about the targets. And what if the targets haven’t been met then? Well, they can just hold over publishing the report until a useful ‘bad news day’ comes along.

Everyone’s showing willing, and that’s nice. The Nairobi conference was held, not to do anything, but to agree a timetable to discuss globally binding emissions targets in time for the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. Nobody stuck to the Kyoto Protocol in the first place, but nevertheless it is very important to hold talks to establish agreement over the next generation of agreements that nobody will stick to either.

The European Union has set itself the pious goal, not of reducing total carbon emissions, but of containing the increase to levels which will push the average temperature up by ‘only’ 2 degrees. An increase of 2 degrees centigrade is enough to melt all the ice in Greenland, but this is considered acceptable considering the dire consequences if they go even higher than that.

To keep to this target, atmospheric carbon – originally 227 parts per million (ppm) at pre-industrial levels and now at 380 ppm – needs to be stabilised at around 450 ppm. Speaking on the same programme as Margaret Beckett in January, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, called this ‘unlikely’. “We’re going to be at 400 ppm in 10 years’ time”, he said. “To aim for 450 would, I am afraid, seem unfeasible.” So why set such a target then? Well, they’ve got to say something, haven’t they?

It’s all a question of motivation.The ugly truth is probably that Europe is hoping to trade its problem away with the new carbon emissions trading system, whereby they get to smoke and Africa gets the cancer. Russia didn’t even turn up to Monterrey, presumably because global warming doesn’t seem so bad when you’ve got frostbite in Irkutsk, and it’s a very chill wind that blows nobody any good. The Chinese, meanwhile, on being invited to join in huge emissions reductions at a time when they are the fastest industrialising nation on Earth, smile politely at this blatant imperialist attempt to clip their dragon’s wings, and carry on about their filthy business, supremely confident that the greedy foreign investment will continue unabated in the free-for-all of their boomtown economy.

The people who are most worried are not the Europeans or the Americans or the Russians or the Chinese, it is the so-called developing countries who in fact are never allowed to develop and who occupy the equatorial belt which is soon likely to become an incineration zone. That they are less guilty of pollution than anyone, but are going to more punished than everyone, is yet another example of the sort of ‘justice’ meted out by an economic system in which nice guys finish last and rich guys fix all the races. Their coastal infrastructures are going to be flooded out, their wetlands will dry out, their crops will die, and wars and migrations will escalate. The Nairobi conference, the first climate change conference to be held in that continent, aimed to bring another dimension to the debate,that of human rights. It was, said Kofi Annan and other delegates, a human right not to be killed by the callous self-serving vandalism of other people’s behaviour. Perhaps this is true in some moral sense. But capitalism is a blind process of profit accumulation. It doesn’t understand morals. The administrators of capitalism serve a supremely ignorant master.

For all their hot air, they are never going to challenge the thing they most believe in. They will still be making speeches while the world burns.

Paddy Shannon

Party News (2000)

Party News from the June 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Annual Conference

The Annual Conference of the Socialist Party took place in London over Easter. A resolution was carried denouncing the Labour government’s Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill currently going through Parliament as it “introduces state regulation of the finances of political parties and bans donations from those it labels ‘foreigners’. As a democratic working class organisation we assert our right to manage our internal affairs, including our finances, free from state interference, and to accept donations from our fellow workers and socialists in any part of the world". Other resolutions were carried in favour of taking steps towards putting the World Socialist Movement on to a more structured basis, helping to establish a journal for Socialists in Africa, choosing by lot the person required by the Registration of Political Parties Act to be registered as “leader", and to reply to the question on “race” in the 2001 Census by answering “member of the human race”. A resolution to abstain from contesting national elections for the time being was defeated by 52 votes to 64.

Elections

The Socialist Party stood no candidates for the London Mayor and assembly elections in May. Members did, however, distribute 10,000 leaflets pointing out that those who wanted socialism could register this by writing “World Socialism” across their ballot paper. A Trotskyists United list, dominated by the SWP and calling itself the "London Socialist Alliance", obtained 1.6 percent of the party list votes but did better (2.9 per cent) in the individual constituencies, where it didn’t face opposition from the Scarglll Labour Party. Both the LSA and SLP were standing on a vote-catching reform programme. One incident worth recording is that when an SP member pointed out in a letter to the Guardian (1 May) that the LSA wasn’t standing for socialism as its progmmme implied the continued existence of the wages system, a leading SWP member (Derek Howl) replied the next day stating that “only a tiny proportion of the world’s workers are yet ready to subscribe to the abolition of wages. For most, the abolition of wages would mean starvation". Comment is superfluous.

The Socialist Party did stand a candidate for the Primrose ward of South Tyneside Council. The result was: Labour 998, Conservative 438, Socialist 184.

Mayday

Socialist Party members distributed leaflets at the various trade union and “anti-capitalist" events on Mayday in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle and Bristol. In London, before the violence broke out, a Party speaker was able to make use of a loudspeaker system, set up by the organisers to allow people to express their views, to put over the case for a classless, stateless, moneyless world of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit. This confirmed a front page article in a spoof edition of the free paper Metro called Maybe which imagined street meetings taking place all over Britain at which “some even proposed a stateless, moneyless society where goods were produced not to make profits but simply because people needed them".

Summer School 2000

The Socialism of William Morris. Birmingham: Fircroft College, Selly Oak July 7-9. Six lectures followed by discussion: 

Friday, 7pm-9pm. Who was William Morris? Edwin Walters.

Saturday, 10am-12 noon. The Utopian Tradition. Steve Coleman

Saturday 2pm-4pm Morris and the Romantic Movement. Ron Cook.

Saturday 7pm-9pm The Stateless Society. Richard Headicar.

Sunday 10am-12 noon ‘A Dream of John Ball’ Adam Buick.

Sunday July 2pm-4pm From ‘Nowhere’ to Somewhere. Stan Parker and Paddy Shannon.

Attendance at all lectures is free. Accommodation and all meals £85. Programme and full details from Ron Cook, 11 Dagger Lane, West Bromwich B71 4BT. Ini: 0121 553 1712.

Greasy Pole: Some Thoughts of Chairman Clive (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair cannot be a happy daddy, as he contemplates the public opinion polls and the local election results, which tell a grim story for the Labour government. Whatever gloss may be put on the figures, the reality is that nearly 600 local council seats were lost, that the Labour candidate in the Romsey by-election lost his deposit as he was pushed into third place and Frank Dobson was not just beaten but humiliated in the election for Mayor of London. The awful possibility begins to dawn, especially on Labour MPs who cling to marginal—and some not so marginal—seats, that their huge 1997 majority may be about to melt away, to let us in for another spell of Conservative government. And, just as it was with Margaret Thatcher, the question is beginning to be asked—is Tony Blair still an electoral asset or a liability who should be disposed of as soon as possible?

This is time for the spin doctors of Millbank (or “prats” as Frank Dobson unhappily but accurately described them) to come up with some reassuring message to inspire the party activists and persuade the voters not to defect to the other side. This was not easy for them; there is some evidence that many people are angry and bewildered to find that a government they elected in order to be radically, refreshingly different from the Tories has turned out to be almost exactly the same. There is evidence that votes were cast at the local elections in order to punish the government for failing to live up to the promises the Labour Party so confidently made in their 1997 manifesto.

Analysis

The elections, they said, “. . . show that William Hague is dead in the water. The Romsey by-election was “a disastrous result for Hague . . .” “The Tories have made no progress in London since the general election…have made no comeback from the disastrous result they got in the 1997 election”. It is fair to ask how this garbage was received by those hundreds of defeated candidates. One of them, Gurcharan Singh, had every reason to expect, on the basis of the 1997 election result, that he would be safely elected as the Greater London Assembly member for Ealing and Hillingdon. When the result was announced he was, according to the local press, “visibly upset” to have been beaten by the Tory. There must be quite a few Labour MPs who, whatever they are told by their party headquarters, are desperately hoping that they too will not be “visibly upset” when the votes are counted at the next election.

When Gurcharan Singh had recovered enough from being upset to make the customary speech of thanks and congratulation he offered his own ideas about the reasons for the failure to capture this apparently safe seat. “When they (the Tories) play the race card on people’s emotions,” he said, “This is what happens”. This was a reference to the Tory scare tactic about the local Labour council being supposedly soft on asylum seekers, whose presence is said to be partly to blame for a rise in the council tax.

Opportunism

This propaganda was designed by the Tories as a way of exploiting the fact that most workers are under the false impression that their interests are affected by the level of taxes. Gurcharan Singh may have had cause to complain about being upstaged on the issue but even so his comment was, to say the least, audacious when we remember the blatant opportunism of this government, spear-headed by Home Secretary Jack Straw, in nurturing and milking popular prejudices about asylum seekers in the sacred cause of appeasing voters. A casual listener may have gained the impression from Gurcharan Singh’s sour comments that Labour is a party of principle, which defiantly stands up for the policy of welcoming people who have fled from a repressive regime abroad. They would have been misled.

The attitude of the Labour Party towards political principles was recently illustrated by none other than Clive Soley, who is MP for Ealing Acton and Shepherds Bush and Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Soley had been steadily climbing the greasy pole when Labour were in opposition, shadowing Housing, Local Government, Home Affairs and Northern Ireland. Whatever ambitions he may have had then about getting to the higher reaches of power have been disappointed so he has to be content with being in the chair for the MPs. In an earlier life he was a probation officer, accustomed to making all the predictable noises about crime being rooted in poverty and the futility of simply punishing criminals rather than trying to deal with what drove them to offending.

Pensioners

If someone had asked him then—as they are bound to have done—about Labour’s policy on old age pensioners he would probably have held forth with the accepted Labour Party line about looking after those who have put in a lifetime’s useful work, making sure they share in the nation’s rising prosperity and so on. In his Newsletter on his website, Soley trills ecstatically that in Labour’s first two years in power they have established a “New pensioners’ minimum income: guaranteeing £78 a week for single pensioners and £121 for pensioner couples”. Praising the 1999 Budget, he assures us that “Other benefits on tax will mean that pensioners with a small income over the basic pension will now gain and that was the group who needed it most”.

Unhappily for Soley, pensioners in the mass do not seem to share his euphoric view of the situation. For some unsustainable reason they usually expect a Labour government to do well by them. In reality they are another of those groups who have had to learn that Labour’s promises were no more than—well, promises. They are outraged at the 75p. increase in the basic pension and some of them are rather imaginative with advice about what the Chancellor can do with the money. Labour Party members and supporters have been uneasy at what they have seen as the betrayal of an important part of the working class.

However Soley has not been impressed. He has put his own analysis on the situation by informing us that pensioners’ protests should not concern a modern, dynamic (and vote-hungry) political party because old people are little more than a bunch of Tory racists. He did not say whether being such a sad case was unavoidable for old people, like going grey and not being able to run for buses any more. Nor did he share with us, which piece of research was responsible for his remarkable conclusion. Perhaps his reticence was something to do with the fact that he is not exactly in the first flush of youth himself, having only four years before he gets his bus pass and moves into the ranks of Senior Citizens for Conservative Xenophobia.

Another way of putting what Soley was saying is that a capitalist political party should concern itself with only those policies which bring in the votes. There is no need to try to appeal to anyone who is unable or unlikely to vote for them. That is the principle on which all governments—and, especially blatantly, this one—operate. It is the driving force behind the presentation of Gordon Brown’s budgets, behind Jack Straw’s posturing as a hard line guardian of law and order, behind the cynical stimulation of racism over the asylum seekers.

Ivan.

Greasy Pole: Let’s Be Frank About Dobson (2000)

Our Frank.

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If it was a victory it could only be called a Pyrrhic one, for whichever way anyone looked at it the selection of Frank Dobson as Labour’s candidate for mayor of London promises to be vastly damaging to the party. To begin with there are all those party members who voted for Livingstone. Will they willingly accept a defeat for their man based on gerrymandering so blatant that it almost takes the breath away? What will they do, then, after their experience of the party which they trusted to administer the emergence of a new, vibrant, caring Britain as really a cynical manipulator of power? Then there are the voters outside the party. What will they think of Labour promising in its 1997 manifesto to introduce an elected mayor for London but not then going on to say something like “and we promise to make sure, through some outrageous fiddling of the votes, that our candidate will be someone who will always give unquestioning obedience to our great leader Tony Blair”? Then there is poor old Frank Dobson himself, who did not want the job in the first place, who was eventually forced into publicly distancing himself from the slick operators of Millbank and who is likely to be a shamefaced bearer of Labour’s standard.

It was not so long ago that an important part of the drive to “modernise” the Labour Party was the introduction of the principle of One Member One Vote (OMOV). This was aimed at undermining the power wielded by the unions through their block vote at conferences and in the election of leaders. Labour had not always experienced such ambivalence about their relationship with the unions. During the Attlee government the unions could be relied on to support any government policy, no matter how damaging to their members. This meant that if any trade unionists wanted to offer any serious resistance to the depression of their living standards which the Labour government were demanding they had to do this as unofficial strikers, without the support of, or even at times in the face of opposition from, their union. There was no doubt then about the value which the Labour leadership placed on the block vote. This changed when the unions began to elect leaders like Frank Cousins, Hugh Scanlon and Mick McGahey, who were expected to give a higher priority to protecting their members’ interests than to mindlessly obeying the government.

Electoral College

And so it came to pass, that the policy of OMOV was considered to be essential if the Labour Party was ever to get back into power. Neil Kinnock thought so and so did John Smith. And among the most ardent supporters of the idea was a young, thrusting MP called Tony Blair.

But that was then and this is now and it quickly became clear, when it was time to select who would be the Labour candidate in the mayoral election in London, that if the OMOV principle was left to operate without interference there was a good chance that Labour’s candidate would not be from among the ranks of those who are dazzled by the charisma of Tony Blair—or who are so desperate for advancement that they would never dream of opposing the leadership line on any issue. So OMOV had to go, until it becomes convenient for the leadership to again represent it as essential to any political party with pretensions to being democratic. In its place the party erected a complex system of voting for an electoral college in which the votes of London MPs and MEPs and of unions which supported Blair’s favoured candidate carried a disproportionate weight. An article in the Observer on 20 February calculated the percentage value of each vote in the electoral college. The vote of a member of the union GMB, which largely supported Livingstone, was worth 0.000427 percent of the total. The vote of a member of the AEEU, which refused to ballot its members and supported Dobson, was worth 0.065 percent. The vote of an individual party member came to 0.001 percent while that of a London MP was worth about 0.45 percent.

It was an effective, if transparent, scam but it needed some fine tuning. Like allowing someone who is no longer an MEP and who does not live in London to vote. Like disallowing the votes of unions which supported Livingstone but were late with their affiliation fees. And from this discreditable fraud emerged Frank Dobson. Stout, bearded, genial Frank. Everyone’s favourite uncle. The man you can trust to run London as if it isn’t one of the great centres of world capitalism. A bit dishevelled after all that infighting and vote rigging but apparently as game as ever.

Tamed dog

Until recently not a lot was known about Frank Dobson. He was becoming more and more famous as the Health Secretary who could not keep Labour’s election promise to reduce hospital waiting lists (one hospital chief executive may have been trying to cheer Frank up when he cut his waiting lists by the simple expedient of pretending that a lot of patients were no longer on it). By the time he had reached the exalted heights of Westminster Dobson may well have been hoping for an uninterrupted climb up the greasy pole, untroubled by an embarrassing past. During the Sixties and Seventies the Tory press had a lot of fun with the antics of the so-called loony left councils. With a little journalistic licence it was easy to characterise these councils as wildly unrealistic, pumping extravagant sums of money into all manner of exotically useless causes and organisations. The truth was rather less lurid but those councils were a serious embarrassment to the Labour Party. One of the most publicised and derided was Camden. Its leader was Frank Dobson, then beardless, dark-haired and less avuncular. His left-wing credentials were impressive enough for Ken Livingstone to award him some warmly fraternal mentions in his book If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It:

“At the same time as we were rebelling at the GLC, the Camden Council Labour Group, led by Frank Dobson . . . decided to convene a London-wide meeting to oppose the new housing expenditure controls which had been imposed on all councils by the Labour Government . . . Between 1971 and 1975 First Millie Miller and then Frank Dobson had provided strong leadership with a clear sense of direction.”

Of course Dobson is not the only left-winger to be brought to heel by the prospect of a powerful job in the romance of running capitalism’s chaos while telling the rest of us that they have the system under control. This government is thick with such people: Stephen Byers, Margaret Hodge, Paul Boateng, Blair himself. Their changes in attitude are bound to expose flaws in the theories and practice of their party, to show how futile it is. Capitalism can’t be run other than in the interest of its ruling class. The system’s politics, in other words, are a ruthless trickery and in the case of the London mayoral election the trickery has been transparently frenzied. Tony Blair runs this government, and shows his contempt for the working class who voted for his party, on the principle that lies, false promises and U-turns can be as blatant as necessary because the votes are influenced by other factors. Harold Wilson once said that in politics seven days is a long time. In Blair’s timing seven hours seems more than enough.

The whole sordid story has discredited Labour’s claim to be a democratic party, let alone one which will have a significantly positive effect on the lives of the working class. That is something for the voters in London to remember when they go to vote for the Mayor in the near future.

Ivan

Party News (1998)

Party News from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The results in the three wards in which the Socialist Party stood in the May local elections were:

South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council—Primrose ward

Scorer (Lab) 1155, Smith (LD) 220, Armstrong (Con) 181, Bissett (Soc) 104.

Manchester City Council—Levenshulme ward

Whitemore (LD) 1550, McGregor (Lab) 771, Davies (Con) 148, Garratt (SLP) 104, Chislett (Green) 81, Pitts (Soc) 32 .

London Borough of Camden—Brunswick ward

Weekes (Lab) 653, Cousins (Lab) 601, Avery (Con) 443, Norman (Con) 376, Jones (LD) 286, Whitley (Green) 258, Parker (Soc) 58.

London Referendum

The Labour government has claimed public endorsement of their undemocratic proposal to have a directly-elected mayor for London who will have all the power, reducing an elected assembly to the status of a chat show. The actual results were:

Non-voters: 327,897 (65.4%), Yes: 1,230,715 (24.6%), No: 478,413 (9.5%), Rejected (spoiled and invalid papers): 26,188 (0.5%)

It would be nice to think that the unusually high number of rejected votes was due to people writing “Socialism” across the ballot paper, but most were probably blank votes.

 

No, thank you.

Last year two Labour MEPs, Hugh Kerr and Ken Coates, were expelled from the Labour Party for being too reformist. They are seeking support to get re-elected in opposition to Labour and feel that they may have a good chance since these elections will be held under a proportional representation system. In January a group calling itself the Green left issued a statement calling on “all radical and environmentally minded people-organisations to consult on the possibility of a green, democratic and pluralist alternative for the 1999 European elections and beyond. We ask the Green Parties of England, Wales & Scotland, the English Socialist Alliances, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party and all other Green Left Affiliates to respond positively to our consultation.”

At its meeting in May our Executive Committee adopted the following reply:

“The Socialist Party’s only aim is socialism as a society of common ownership and democratic control with production for use not profit. Because we hold that the best way to further the cause of socialism is to campaign for socialism and socialism alone—’to make Socialists’, as William Morris put it—we have always refused to ally ourselves with organisations which campaign for reforms to be achieved within the context of capitalism. We do not see that the introduction of proportional representation is a valid reason for abandoning this principled stance.

On these grounds, therefore, we decline your invitation to talks with a view to presenting joint candidates in the next European elections.

We shall, in all probability, be standing our own candidates in these elections, in opposition both to candidates who openly support capitalism and to those who are standing on a platform of reforms to be achieved within capitalism.”

Party News (1998)

Party News from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Annual Conference

The 94th Annual Conference of the Socialist Party will take place over Easter weekend on Friday and Saturday, 10 and 11 April from 10.15 to 18.00 on both days.

As with all our meetings, there are no closed sessions and visitors are welcome to sit in and listen to the delegates and to meet and discuss with members in the canteen or afterwards.

Local elections

Socialist Party candidates will be standing in Manchester, London, Tyneside and Bournemouth in this year’s local elections on 7 May. Further details and offers of help: South East Manchester, Central London, North East and Bournemouth branches and group respectively (see Directory on this page).

London Referendum

Also on 7 May electors in London will be voting on a government proposal for an elected mayor and an elected assembly to replace the GLC abolished by the Tories in 1988.

The Socialist Party has produced a leaflet explaining that real democracy is not possible under capitalism where some are more equal than others because they have more money and where the economic laws of the profit system work to frustrate improvements people vote for from being carried out.

London branches and members will be distributing this leaflet in April and early May. Copies for distribution can be obtained from: Election Dept, The Socialist Party. 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.

Apologies

Due to problems at our printers a couple of passages in the May Socialist Standard became incomprehensible.

The second paragraph of the editorial reply to the letter from Kimberley Ellis should have read:

“In short, we think that given the development of productive capacity since Marx made the distinction in 1875 between a 'first' (when full free access according to needs would not be possible) and a 'higher’ phase of 'communist society' (when it would), the so called higher phase con be established more or less immediately" 

Similarly, part of the third paragraph of the review of the play Junk was just that. Our apologies to both the writer and our readers.

Ken Livingstone/Paul Foot – Dream Ticket? (2000)

Editorial from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ken Livingstone has taken on the Labour machine. He wants to be mayor instead of Blair’s poodle, Dobson. Journalist and SWPer Paul Foot is heading a list of candidates for the assembly calling itself the “London Socialist Alliance” which is supporting Livingstone. “Vote Livingstone, Vote LSA” is their slogan.

Well, should we? That depends on what you want. If you want to elect an old-fashioned Labourite politician to run the administrative side of capitalism in London—or if you want the mayor of London to speak with a London accent—or if you want to protest at Blair’s control-freakery—go ahead. But if you want Socialism, stop and think it through. Livingstone as mayor with Foot as leader of the assembly is an intriguing prospect, but how would this advance the cause of Socialism?

Livingstone has been a lifelong member of the Labour Party and still regards himself as a Labour man temporarily separated from the fold. He is not a socialist unless you think that nationalisation under a Labour government is an example of Socialism (in fact, it’s state capitalism).

In any event, he is not standing as a “Socialist”, but as a politician promising to make things better for London people under capitalism—”Vote London” is his campaign slogan. But anyone who knows how the profit system works knows this can’t be done. It doesn’t matter how sincere or competent or determined a politician is they can’t make capitalism work other than as a system that gives priority to profit-making. All governments that have spoken about putting needs before profits have failed. So will Livingstone. This is not a reflection on him personally but on capitalism as a system.

Paul Foot and his “London Socialist Alliance” aren’t standing on a socialist programme either. They are not standing for the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production for use not profit. All they are doing is offering a collection of attractive-sounding reforms to be achieved within capitalism: “a £7 billion increase in NHS spending”, “a 35 hour week without loss of pay”, “a minimum wage of at least £7 an hour”.

Nice if you could get them, but you can’t. They’re just empty promises. Vote-catching bait. These days capitalism can’t deliver reforms. Nor can Foot and his friends any more than Livingstone or Blair or anyone else.

So what to do? Leave Livingstone to fight it out with the other professional politicians. And if you want to vote for Socialism, do this by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across your ballot paper.

Greasy Pole: Timer for a change? (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

“There is nothing to hope for from a clutch of privileged Tories”

When they woke up on 2 May, did the electorate realise what they had done with their votes on the day before? Were they alert to the fact that they had encouraged David Cameron’s party to an excited optimism that, after all those agonised years of Blair’s Britain, they had been brought to the threshold of again being accepted as The Natural Party Of Government? (The capital letters are used in acknowledgement of how vital such concepts are to the well-being of the Conservative mind). The experience of Labour government, particularly since their last election victory in 2005, went a long way to persuade many of their previous supporters that, apart from anything else, it was time for a change even if the only other choice was a Conservative government. Gordon Brown has not helped his party by being such a tormented gift to the slick operators of the Tory propaganda machine. So it came to pass that people whose daily life is continually threatened with being little short of a wretched struggle to balance their income against what they need to get by were narcotised into opting to be ruled by a government led by an Old Etonian whose great achievement has been to re-fashion his party’s image by blanketing its disreputable past.

 History

Panic-stricken Labour MPs, as they contemplate an approaching electoral massacre, may take some misguided comfort from their history. In the 1968 local elections, when the standing of the Wilson government was at rock-bottom after the devaluation climb-down and the imposition of “necessary austerity measures” (for which read “wage cutting” and “reduction in working class living standards”) they managed only a 30 per cent share of the vote – a little more than their 26 per cent this year. However they staged something of a recovery so that when Wilson called the 1970 general election they were the pollsters’ favourite. The snag, however, was that they still could not avoid defeat by Ted Heath’s Conservatives. This might have taught their successors something about the volatility of voting intentions which are not based on an understanding of capitalism and its destructive machinations. But in the 2005 general election, when Labour’s majority was slashed from 161 to 67, the response of MPs was predictably chaotic, as they queued up to lay the blame at the door of their then leader. “You can’t beat about the bush” said one of them “Blair was a negative factor on the doorstep, time and time again”. Another plunged hastily (too much so, in view of recent events but in any case he has announced that he will not be standing again and the local Labour Party have selected his successor) into: “It would be nice to see Brown crowned as early as the next party conference”. In a moving display of grief at losing her seat, a former Blair Babe speedily adapted her alleged principles and applied to join the Conservative Party. We are witnessing a similar reaction, as the promised post-Blair revival fails to materialise and the Tory threat gets ever more menacing. Brown’s response was as exhausted and as unhelpful as ever:

 “Of course we can recover from this position…by sorting out the immediate problem of the economy and showing people we can come through, as we have in the past..,.by showing people that we have the vision of the future that will carry this country…into its next phase.”

Once again, Labour have no more to offer by way of explaining their defeat than to blame the shortcomings of their leader. Only hours after the results had been declared on May 2, the calls for Brown to go began, with a desperate search for an acceptable alternative. Should it be ex-postman Alan Johnson? Cadaverous John Hutton? Already discredited Jack Straw? Head Prefect David Miliband? Risibly callow James Purnell? There is no cause to believe that any of these would, in the face of capitalism’s anarchy, succeed where Blair and Brown failed. And while Labour commences yet another civil war the Tories have time to wallow in their victory and plan the campaign to take the greater prize whenever the government dares to take their chance in another general election.

London

In this it could not have turned out better for the Tories than for Boris Johnson to be elected Mayor of London, even if they had to bring in some expensive manipulators to persuade this irritatingly professional buffoon to look a little more credible as someone to be trusted to manage a city with a budget of £12 billion and to throttle off his more oafishly empty attempts at humour. There will now be a period during which Johnson’s mayoralty is taken as a measure of the likely success or failure of a Cameron government. It is not only on his avowed intention to replace the lumbering bendy buses with Routemasters with conductors and to ban alcohol on public transport that Johnson will be judged. He has also promised that all Londoners will actually be able to live in homes which they can afford (while accepting that what he can afford is rather better than anything available to most Londoners). There will be special attention given to the problem of youth crime and particularly to the fearful procession of youngsters being murdered in the capital. To this end Johnson has appointed as his Deputy Mayor an admirer of his – Ray Lewis, who was once governor of a Young Offenders Institution and who now runs something gloriously called a Young Leaders Academy in London. Lewis advises the parents of the boys attending his Academy that they should remove the TV from their bedroom and stop any listening to “dirty music”. His boys are taught to march and to salute: “When we go out, they walk in line, they walk in time, they catch the eye”.

Johnson’s approval of the “boot camp” style of dealing with young delinquents conveniently overlooks his history of (suspiciously unrecorded) offences. He did not report to the police an approach from his Old Etonian friend Darius Guppy, asking him to arrange to have a journalist beaten up who was investigating Guppy’s record as a fraudster too closely. During his time at Oxford Johnson (with Cameron and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne) was a member of the Bullingdon Club which, although it claimed to be a sporting and dining club, devoted itself to serious vandalism. One of their achievements was to hire a string band to play at a garden party and then to destroy all the instruments, including a Stradivarius. In a recent outing involving Johnson they wasted a beautiful cellar in a 15th Century Oxfordshire pub. The pub owner called the police – which the club members dismissed as due to his lacking “a sense of humour” – and Johnson remembered their arrest:

  “The party ended with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens and trying to escape police dogs. And once we were in the police cells we became pathetic namby-pambies.”

To the fury of the pub owner, the police did nothing more than impose a few on the spot penalties – rather different to how they would have reacted if the damage had been caused by youngsters from Oxford’s Blackbird Leys estate. But the Bullingdon is rather more exclusive – to begin with the traditional dining suit costs three thousand pounds and there is a need for a rich relative to smooth things over and avoid calling the police by paying generously for the damage. This is the background of the man elected by the people to rule the heaving, tempestuous city of London.

So is it time for a change? Ten years of Labour rule have shown that party quite unable to prevent, or even interfere with, the crises and malfunctions of capitalism. There is nothing more to hope for from a clutch of privileged Tories. But rather than dither in a futile panic between one bunch of hopeless careerists and another, why not use the vote properly and effectively and opt for a real alternative?

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Red benches and Red Ken (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

If anyone needs any odd jobs doing – mowing the lawn, walking the dog, putting up some shelves – they might bear in mind those well-preserved people who now have time on their hands because they are no longer allowed to spend their days snoozing on the red leather benches of the House of Lords.

The Commons vote to abolish the rights of hereditary peers – or at least for most of them – was hailed as a great victory for democracy and proof that New Labour is a government which keeps its promises. This, we were told, was the will of the people. The people had read Labour’s manifesto and liked what they read and gave the government a clear mandate to get on with the job (actually only 44 per cent voted for it but never mind). And everyone knows that there are no stauncher defenders of the people’s democratically expresed will than Tony Blair and his New Labour enforcers.

In the past Blair has always been quite clear about the urgent need to do something about those people who had the right through birth to interfere with the processes of running British capitalism. “Ancient and indefensible practice” he called it in 1984. “In principle wrong and absurd . . . a drinking and dining club” was his view in 1996. And in Labour’s 1997 manifesto “The right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute”.

A Deal 

No two ways about that, you might think. What was not promised in the manifesto was to abolish the rights of only some of the peers, leaving the rest of them to carry on while everyone gives the matter further thought. That was the result of a covert deal between the government and one of the bluest-blooded of the peers (which cost him his place in the Shadow Cabinet). Why Blair, with his huge majority, should have accepted this compromise is not entirely clear, unless it was that it was just another manifesto commitment to be mangled, enfeebled, delayed . . . It has not been so with all that the government has done. When thinking up new ways of punishing criminals, or reducing legal rights, or attacking the poorest and most vulnerable people, they have acted with memorable urgency. But of course in those cases they were not dealing with people of wealth and influence.

It could hardly have been, that the government were impressed with the Lords’ own defence of their privileges. One of them – Lord Campbell – had the nerve to describe the abolition of their undemocratic rights as “a great denial of democracy”. Lord Strathclyde claimed to be in touch with public opinion on the issue in this country and beyond: “We do not want it. The public does not. The outside world does not”. In this deluded state the noble Lords were capable of believing that the people were about to take to the barricades to preserve their rights, in gratitude for the days when they occasionally gave Margaret Thatcher some grief and so were able to pose as defenders of the democratic rights of the common people. At that time there were signs that some peers were appalled at the crudeness of all those car sellers and estate agents braying on the Tory benches in the Commons, none of whom were ever likely to touch their forelocks to anyone.

One example of how the Lords behaved then was when they debated – if that is the right word – a final vital amendment to the Bill which was to abolish the Greater London Council. On that day there was no open rebellion because there was simply not enough of them in the chamber. The Daily Telegraph reported that “Lord Denham’s (leader of the Lords) face froze with horror…(He) gazed over the thinned out ranks of unsocial Tories behind”. The reason for the unpopulated benches on that day was rather less romantic than any last ditch stand in favour of Ken Livingstone and his Council. Many of the noble heads were at Ascot, where it was a big event – Ladies’ Day. It was an appropriate comment on how seriously the self-styled champions of democracy took the obligations implied by their privileged position. The Tory whips rushed around frantically, rounding up peers of a lesser pedigree while the “debate” was kept alive through a lordly filibuster. When they had enough votes the amendment was voted on and lost, the GLC was on the way out and the peers could congratulate themselves over their port and nuts on their value to the machinery of democratic government.

Livingstone 

There is, then, a certain ironic symmetry in the fact that the House of Lords and Ken Livingstone should be in the news at the same time and that in both cases there is an issue of whether democratic procedures are under abuse. In their 1997 manifesto the Labour Party promised that London would have its own elected strategic authority headed by an elected mayor. What they did not promise was that, whatever popular opinion was on the matter, the Labour candidate would be someone who was guaranteed not to upset Blair and his Millbank cronies in the same way that the House of Lords and Ken Livingstone once upset Thatcher.

In September 1993 Blair told Brian Walden, on London Weekend TV, that the block vote was “the brake on the enthusiasms” of Party members. “We are going to have One Member One Vote coming into many, many of the decisions of the Labour Party” he assured the viewers. That may have persuaded many members of the Labour Party that OMOV would be used to select their candidate for London’s mayor. The snag was that, had that been allowed to happen, Ken Livingstone was well fancied to win the nomination hands down – which would have been something akin to a nightmare to Blair. Since Livingstone could not be persuaded to stand down the system had to be changed along with the candidates to oppose him. So out went the likes of Trevor Phillips and in came Frank Dobson, who was the leader of Camden Council when it was prominent among those local authorities damned as loony lefties and who is renowned as a talented reciter of shockingly dirty jokes but who would do what Blair wanted. Out, too, went OMOV and in came the electoral college with the block vote, now no longer a brake on enthusiasms but the way forward to the kind of democratic decision making which Blair approves.

Tinkering 

But Livingstone’s popularity would not go away so there had to be more tinkering; this time so that more time was allowed between the settling of the short list and the final selection of the candidate, with the object of giving Dobson an opportunity to organise a more effective campaign. You may call all this moving the goal posts or gerrymandering or fiddling the system. What you may not call it is allowing a democratic vote on an important issue.

In these irrelevant squabbles about who should be in charge of the organs which run, and try to control, British capitalism nobody should be deceived by Labour’s claim that their reform of the House of Lords and the establishment of an authority to run London is driven by any democratic principle. When they need to the government treat democratic procedures as irritants and obstacles. Democracy for them is what pleases their leader and what pleases their leader is the imposition of policies which are based on Labour’s need to protect and prosper the interests of the British ruling class. That is why, when the voters of London go to choose their mayor, they may well find that they can vote for anyone they like as long as it’s Frank Dobson.

Ivan

Crime and the causes of crime (2008)

From the October issue of the Socialist Standard

Even the government accepts that crime will rise as economic conditions worsen, but is this the only reason for rising crime?

It’s a wonder any of us gets any sleep. It must be terrifying in the world today. Whenever Private Eye puts a spoof Daily Mail headline it its pages, such as “Criminal Yobbo Thugs give you Falling House Price CANCER!” no one laughs. It isn’t funny because it’s too similar to real Daily Mail headlines written for the terminally terrified. Where they are believed, it seems, the world is crawling with criminals with no more desire than to rip people’s hearts out and tear their corpse into indigestible shreds. After all, it is the fear of crime that politicians have sought for so many years to tackle, not the creature itself.

According to the statistics, crime in the UK has been rising steadilly since the mid-1950’s, although it certainly accelerated in the early 1980’s. It should be borne in mind, though, that the rate of reporting crimes has risen in that time, as has the number of crimes it is possible to commit, thanks to the governments (particularly the current one) creating endless new offences year in year out. Real crime, though, has certainly risen. The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1. In 1965 6.8 per million people were murdered. By 1997 this had risen to 14.1 per million. Over the last century, the number of police in the UK has risen by over 120,000 to stand at around 150,000.

Yet crime continues to grow, despite all the police. The former Mayor of London, before he was kicked out, Ken Livingstone, made great play over how his increase in the number of the police in the capital, from 25,000 to 31,000 police officers, had reduced crime. He was right that the Tories, for all their talk on being tough on crime, had held back spending on policing levels. In fact, that’s no surprise: policing accounts for around 52 percent of the criminal justice budget, and the Tories are first and foremost cheapskates. Plus, how can you be tough on crime if there isn’t any? For them it is a virtuous political circle: let crime run free, then be tough on it, on the cheap, and then ask for plaudits for being tough on yobbos. That is by the by, though. Despite Ken’s protestations, it wasn’t his police force that cut crime. It was economic conditions.

The “tough on crime” brigade are easy to refute. Some commentators blame the 60’s permissive society and its aftermath of sexual liberation for rising crime. They point to the end of the death penalty and penal reform measures. Yet, the number of prisoners in British cells were growing from the mid-forties onwards, before crime rates themselves began to rise. Now they stand at around 94,000 – and all the prisons are full. They’ve even had to start releasing prisoners early – in the back half of 2007 18,583 prisoners were given early release to relieve overcrowding. A staggering number, that has been replaced. All early release means is more people going through the prison system and being disciplined by it. After all, a great number of released prisoners re-offend and are convicted within two years.

This is all part of the trend. In 1941 there were only around 10,000 prisoners. Even as late as 1991 there were only about 40,000. If prison “worked” surely crime would have been around halved by doubling the prison population? Or at least, more drastically cut than by the modest falls we’ve seen over recent years. Now, the government wants to build extra capacity, three so called Titan Prisons each with a capacity of 7,500, which means they only see the rate of incarceration going up and up.

They have reason to believe that. A leaked draft letter this month told us that Home Office officials were warning ministers that the economic slow down would almost certinly lead to a rise in crime. The letter predicted property crime would rise by 7 percent in 2008 and a further 2 percent in 2009, if the current economic conditions continued. Home Office minister Tony McNulty said the letter was a “statement of the blindingly obvious”, which considering, to their credit, Labour actually formally linked crime rates to economic conditions in their analysis when they first came to power, isn’t a surprising view.

The BBC’s Economics Editor Mark Easton takes issue with whether it is so blindingly obvious that economic downturns promote the increase in crime. As part of this he proposes a different source of crime, citing a report that shows that for every rise of 1 percent in inflation, property crime rises by 0.026 percent; but that is just another name for poverty – when inflation lowers people’s incomes those who can’t easily compensate (for instance through pay rises) will be hard hit.

He is right, though, to note that while the rise in crime generally does not map directly onto the graph of economic up and downs, it does bear a resemblance to the growth in relative poverty. According to the report Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968-2005 from the Joseph Rowntree Foundtion so-called bread line poor, i.e. those who are excluded from normal participation in society due to their lack of wealth, grew to around 27 percent of households in 2005, up from 17 percent in 1980. More strikingly, the non-wealthy/non-poor fell by a dramatic 16 percent in the same period. The proportion of society in the very rich catageory also fell.

This ties in with a graph Easton produces:

The two scales are inverted, the left scale (consumer spending) ascends while the right scale (theft and burglary rates) descends. The match is pretty precise. Whilst it may not be enough to say that one causes another, it is enough to suggest that they are heavily linked. Poverty doesn’t make criminals, it just gives people more chances and incentives to be criminals. Put another way, the decline in social bonds caused by consumerism and rising inequality fuels a dog-eat- dog world which can turn nasty.

Of the 302,000 people sentenced for indictable offences in 2006, 160,100 of them were for property related crimes (theft, criminal damage, etc.). That is, over half of crimes. In 2006/7 some 75 percent of reported crimes were crimes relating to property. Poverty does not just push the creation of crime. It’s well known that the poor are much more likely to be the victims of crime, with the bottom 40 percent of society being way ahead of the top on every measure of crime victimhood. Lone parent and unemployed households are twice as likely to be burgled than the average household; and burglary rates are greater in densely populated and often poor London than in the rest of the south east.

Women in the sex industry are particularly prone to being victims of crime. A report by the Poppy Project, called The Big Brothel found staggering quantities of women working in the sex trade and being treated as little more than shoddy goods by their exploiters. They state that during ‘120 hours of telephone calls, we established the following: at least 1,933 women are currently at work in London’s brothels; ages range from 18 to 55 (with a number of premises offering “very, very young girls”); prices for full sex start at £15, and go up to £250’ The pimps offered two for one deals, discount vouchers, happy hours – the whole marketing gamut as they made between £86 million to £205 million per year with a brothel. This isn’t a normal business transaction though – the women are often beaten and raped. Turned into a commodity themselves, all social bonds utterly severed between them and their clients. In it’s own way, another form of property crime.

There is other evidence for alienation being the motor of crime. A recent report on the BBC revealed that 1 in 11 prisoners in a British gaol is a former member of the armed services, that is, approximately 8,500. The probation officers association NAPO recounts stories of strung out soldiers turning violent after returning from war. That is, those whose social bonds have been deliberately shorn in order to make them into fit killing machines, or whose bonds have been shattered by the experience of killing and conflict, are highly like to fall into crime, and find themselves on the prison scrap heap.

The Home Office report also deals with the rise of policital extremism, another form of expressing alienation. It warns of attacks on immigrants and the growth of racist parties, should Britain slide into recession. Of course, the terrorism obsessed government also considers how this rise in the far-right might lead to more terrorism in retaliation. This should serve as a warning to those who figure that simple economic catastrophism will lead mechanically to socialist revolution. The growth of socialism can only come from the working class consciously deciding that changing the economic system will save them from the woes of crime and violence extremism bred by the current one, and acting on that decision.

Pik Smeet

The London Referendum (1998)

Editorial from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The referendum in London on 7 May is a farce. For a start, full details of what is involved were only made public in March, so there has not been enough time for a proper debate. Second, there is no provision for equal time to be given to both the “yes” and the “no” sides. So the media will be free to give an unfair advantage to the government case for voting “yes”, as they shamelessly did during the referendums in Scotland and Wales. Third, the question is rigged. If you want an elected assembly for London (as most people do since this is an elementary democratic measure) you can’t vote for this without at the same time voting for an elected mayor who will have more power than the assembly. So you don’t have the choice of saying “yes” to an elected assembly but “no” to an elected mayor.

This neo-Tory Labour government talks a lot about democracy and democratic reform but in practice resorts to the same underhand tactics to get its way as do governments everywhere. It has linked the two questions so as to be sure to get its dubious proposal for a London City Boss through on the back of popular support for the restoration of an elected London council.

We in the Socialist Party are well aware that in the end whatever arrangements are adopted for local government in London won’t make much difference. This is because such arrangements are to be implemented within the context of the profit system, whose economic mechanisms require all levels of government, however structured, to trim their spending so as not to endanger profit levels whatever people may want–or vote for.

Even so, an elected mayor is not a good idea. As the title of the government’s Green Paper–New Leadership for London—proclaims, this is a proposal to elect a Leader for London. This Leader will not just have more power than the elected assembly but will be paid a fat cat salary (so as to remove, it is said, the temptation to be corrupt) and have the remit of managing London as if it were a capitalist enterprise. The whole proposal is a travesty of democracy.

Democracy means participating in the running of affairs, not following leaders. The proposal for an elected mayor is a proposal to endorse what passes for democracy under capitalism: a choice not of alternative social systems or even policies but of rival leaders who are all packaging and no substance. Tony Banks, David Mellor, Chris Patten, who has the best smile? Who cares? But worse, it encourages people to think that some Leader can solve society’s problems for them, whereas these problems can only be solved by people refusing to follow leaders and acting for themselves. The only kind of politics that is going to work is a do-it-yourself politics aimed at abolishing the profit system.

Greasy Pole: Goldsmith versus Khan (2016)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare a thought for Zac Goldsmith. For Frank Zacharias Robin ‘Zac’ Goldsmith.  For the son of a proliferous billionaire who left him to struggle through life on an inheritance of between two hundred and three hundred million pounds, which represented a monthly income of about £5 million. For the pupil at Eton –-  until they found forbidden drugs in his room. For one so convincing  as a self-promoted defender of the natural world that his uncle gave him the magazine The Ecologist to do with what he liked, even to appoint himself as its editor. For the triumphantly victorious MP for Richmond Park against the industrious Lib Dem Susan Kramer. But one whose smooth rise up the Greasy Pole was obstructed when he devoted his talents and his riches to a campaign for election as Mayor of London – in which he was thwarted by the distinctly non-legatee Labour candidate Sadiq Khan. Thus Goldsmith’s case for election was not as elegantly appealing as those Richmond Tories must have assumed it would be and his copious ambitions were reduced to a state of baffled suspension. So spare a thought for him.

Argumentative

And for Sadiq Khan who stood as the underdog against the handsome, elegant Goldsmith.  He could hardly have been more different for he is the youngest of five children whose grandparents came from Pakistan to take root in council housing in one of the rougher parts of London. His father was a bus driver and his mother a seamstress. Working his way through university Khan qualified as a solicitor, specialising in cases concerning human rights – which often brought him into conflict with the police (a teacher at his comprehensive school had advised him that his ‘argumentative personality’ made him a natural to study law instead of dentistry as he intended). In 2005, after a spell as a councillor in Wandsworth, he became the MP for Tooting and in 2009, when he was made Minister of State for Transport under Gordon Brown, he was the first Muslim to attend the Cabinet. He then held a succession of shadow ministerial posts under Ed Miliband. In this process he was establishing a number of records, often related to being a Muslim but including such as regularly being placed by the Evening Standard among the Top 100 London politicians and, in 2005, awarded the ‘Newcomer Of The Year’ by the Spectator for ‘…the tough-mindedness and clarity with which he has spoken out about the very difficult issues of Islamic terror’. But none of these counted as crucial in the battle against Zac Goldsmith for the London Mayoralty. No matter that Kahn could offer the usual promises: against this was the slickness of Goldsmith’s office and his experienced media advisers with their well-honed voting strategies.

Terrorists

But this was a case when those experts in the dog-whistle style of voter-manipulation placed themselves in a position which was evidently ill-advised. For they seemed to have decided that as Sadiq Khan is a Muslim there were votes to be won by associating him with the terrorist operations which are among  the current problems across the world. One example of this appeared when theGuardian of 30 April publicised a letter written by David Cameron to Anita Vasisht who is a lawyer specialising in immigration problems. Cameron warned that any policy resulting from the united efforts of Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan would bring about a situation in which ‘Londoners will become lab rats in a giant political experiment’. The implication of this was more obvious in a letter from David Cameron to another lawyer which stated that only Goldsmith could be relied on to ‘…keep our streets safe from terrorist attacks’. At the same time, and on the same theme, there was Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph accusing Sadiq Khan of ‘…pandering to the extremists. I don’t want him running our capital’. And Teresa May, whose earliest claim to fame was when she denounced the Tories as ‘the nasty party’, warning their spring conference that Khan would be ‘unsafe’ to run London when it faced ‘…a significant threat of terrorism’. These attacks on Khan as a Muslim terrorist were not entirely welcome in the Tory party. Their ex-chair Baroness Warsi later referred to the election loss as a result as an ‘appalling dog-whistle campaign’ which ‘lost us the election, our reputation and credibility on issues of race and religion’. Steve Hilton, previously infamous as the party’s election master mind, regretted that it had brought back that ‘nasty party label to the Conservatives’.

Milkman

The overall effect of this, with the ominous survey ratings which gave Khan a solid lead, may have persuaded those Tory strategists to try another style of deceit, by sending Goldsmith out in the early morning disguised as a milkman on his rounds. However Goldsmith was not travelling in one of those snuffling battery floats but in a posh black limousine. We were supposed to believe that he was delivering that milk to what looked like some posh mews in a place like Kensington. But of course one effect of this was to arouse those well-used, long-ago slogans about Thatcher The Milk Snatcher.

 Sadiq Khan became the new Mayor of London by defeating Zac Goldsmith by 14 percentage points.  From the piracy that is now the Labour Party he may emerge as their new leader. Meanwhile he must make his mark through some particular policies which he claims will adjust, or even eliminate, the merciless realities which distort the lives and the wellbeing of what are called ordinary hard-working citizens.  At present there are few surprises in these; for example an intention to build genuinely affordable homes; to ensure that the streets of London are cleaner, safer. There is one novelty in the introduction of a new public transport ticket known as the Hopper which at first threatens to require harassed commuters to become mathematically agile as they are about to board the bus or the train. London is a great example of capitalism in sordid operation with its proliferation of social dislocation and hopeless responses.  The election struggle between Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith was no more than another rejected opportunity for the people in this part of the world to begin the historical change for the better.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Tessa Fails To Make It (2015)

The Greasy Pole Column from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Denis Healey, who was the last surviving member of Harold Wilson's 1964 Labour Cabinet, revived a clutch of memorable catch-phrases but also some unflattering comparisons with the uninspiring bunch who now occupy the Labour benches. For example Jeremy Corbyn's recent opponents Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. Will any of these go down in history as 'the best prime Minister we never had'? Will they construct a description of attacks from one of their opponents as 'like being savaged by a dead sheep'? Or scorn the House of Lords (even while they are a member) as 'the home of the living dead' ? How do they measure up to the likes of Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins, James Callaghan, in their bygone struggles to organise the economy of British capitalism into some kind of election-winning discipline? And would they, like Healey, churn out this stuff as a diversion to their day-time job?

Casinos

One of the casualties of this situation has been the Right Honourable Dame Tessa Jowell who was recently giving herself a higher chance of being adopted as the Labour Party candidate in the coming election to succeed Boris Johnson as Mayor of London but was defeated by Sadiq Khan. Jowell came into Parliament as the MP for Dulwich, a seat which she won in the 1992 election after a couple of attempts in Ilford North. That was a barren time for Labour and in opposition Jowell was appointed to a succession of Shadow jobs including one which named her as Labour's Spokesperson for Women. Blair's runaway victory in 1997 brought her bigger responsibility until after the 2001 election she replaced Chris Smith, who had been sacked, as Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport. Controversially, she proposed the establishment of a number of 'super-casinos', raising the temperature of the predictable row over her plans when she described her opponents as 'snobs' who were motivated by a resolve to deny 'ordinary people' the opportunity to gamble – a response dismissed by her fellow MP Frank Field as 'crass'.

Iraq

In this acrimonious stand-off it could not have diverted her opponents to hear that her devotion to Blair was such that she would 'jump under a bus' for him. In fact at the time – February 2006 – it was not unlikely that a substantial number of people would not have demurred if Jowell had taken Blair with her beneath the bus; for one thing there was the shock and outrage after the exposure of the 'dodgy dossier' with its blatant lies about the war in Iraq. Shortly before then a couple of Jowell's constituents, driven to despair by her eager compliance in that war with its deception, its destruction and casualties, had written to Chris Mullin who was an MP for Sunderland, to complain that, among other matters, Jowell was 'just a rubber stamp with “Tony Blair" incised on its bottom'. But it seems that Blair was not impressed by Jowell's worshipful meanderings; she would have been dismayed by his opinion that she was merely 'lukewarm' towards New Labour. All these events were being observed by the smoulderingly impatient Gordon Brown who, when he eventually made it to Labour leader, subjected Jowell to a succession of humiliatingly minor governmental posts until 2009 when he condescended to bring her back as Minister for the Cabinet Office. The entire process of events among those Labour leaders was a succession of cynical manoeuvres presented to us as examples of loyal consultancy and co-operation.

Corruption

In conflict with the reassuringly comforting titles of the ministries she was involved in, Jowell's domestic life was not notable for its enduring bliss. Her first marriage, to another Camden councillor, was dissolved in 1976 but she kept the marital surname. In 1979 she married David Mills, described as an international corporate solicitor in the shadows of which he represented none other than Silvio Berlusconi who was then the Italian Prime Minister and who was liable to be entertained by Mills at posh London Clubs. Mills was investigated by the Italian authorities on suspicion of involvement in money laundering and tax fraud; inevitably Jowell was also of interest in these matters, which moved Mills to describe himself as 'an idiot'. In March 2006, to protect her political standing, they separated and in 2009 a court in Italy sentenced Mills to four and a half years imprisonment for accepting a bribe from Berlusconi after giving false evidence in a trial for corruption. He appealed against this sentence and in 2010, after a series of applications, a Cassation Court dissolved the case under the Statute of Limitations and ordered Mills to pay €250,000 for damaging the reputation of the office of the Italian prime Minister. Meanwhile Blair predictably cleared Jowell of having any conflict of interest over the case. By 2012 Jowell and Mills were effectively back together again but the case, in one shape or another, rumbles on.

Mayor

In 2013, after announcing that she was to stand for London mayor (and being popularly tipped as the favourite) Jowell unleashed an asterisk-laden verbal barrage to an interviewing Guardian reporter: 'Those a******es are so f****** rancid' … and she recalled being harassed by a cameraman with his 'f******, you know, penis-like lens… and I said You f**** off out of here ...' On a similar theme there is an old photograph of Tessa Jowell with Denis Healey. They are at a public meeting during an election, with the posters at the walls bellowing ‘Vote Jowell Labour’. They have serious faces, composed to encourage the audience to vote for their style of government to run British capitalism with its repression and violence and its deceit. Perhaps the photograph was taken when the voters were grateful for Jowell's support for their campaign to stop the closure of the local post offices, which would have affected any of them who had problems getting to another one a distance away. If so, they would have ignored the fact that she was a member of the government which was planning to impose those closures. There was a time when the word ‘promising’ might have been resorted to in any discussion of Jowell’s chances of eventually making it to the heights of the Greasy Pole. Parents in the medical profession, a good degree at Edinburgh, working as a psychiatric social worker then assistant director of the charity Mind. But her failure to persuade enough of the voters in London to make her their mayor consigns her to a place in history rather like those others who long ago orbited around Denis Healey and his caustic humour.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Dobson Drops Out? (2014)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine you have to allow extra time for your morning dash to the newsagent because of the people who want to shake your hand and engage you in gossip. Imagine you once saw yourself as the ideal choice for the most prestigious and demanding job in the capital except that nobody of any influence agreed with you. Imagine you held a series of ministerial jobs but were demoted and retired to the back benches to attract attention by your beard and heavy-handed jokes. Imagine you are Frank Dobson, who recently announced that after 35 years he will not stand again to be the MP for Holborn and St. Pancras – which stimulated the appetites of some powerful and hungry hopefuls to succeed him.

Bruiser

Appropriately for someone born in York, Dobson came from what is often called up there a railway family. He then switched to the more fertile environs of the capital. Along the way, in 1971 he was elected as a councillor for the London Borough of Camden with its reputation as a hotbed of the wildest leftwing delusions, asserted by their flying the Red Flag above the Town Hall. Dobson's experience as a councillor locally made him the obvious choice as the parliamentary Labour candidate for Holborn and St. Pancras, where he won in the 1979 general election and which he has held since. His reputation as a bit of a bruiser – and perhaps also for re-circulating 'dirty' jokes along with the equally unremarkable clean ones – marked him down as promotion material for a future Blair government. In this he was helped when in 1994 he led the Labour Party response to the infamous 'homes for votes' policy of Westminster Council, driven by the Tesco heiress Lady Shirley Porter who evaded an Order from the Law Lords to repay ￡27 million of the ill-gotten gains by staying for a while in Israel (eventually coughing up ￡12 million).

NHS

As a rapturous Tony Blair swirled through Number Ten, his first job was to organise a team of ministers who could deal with the changes imposed by the previous Tory government. In this the NHS was a priority so that his appointment of Dobson as the minister responsible was particularly significant. But he was not completely satisfied with his choice: 'At the helm of the NHS, I had put Frank Dobson. This, in itself, indicates how little I understood when first in office... He was one of many who considered New Labour a clever wheeze to win'. Yet there was evidence that Dobson's problems were deeper seated. In the 1981 election of Labour party officers he voted for Tony Benn until the pressures of reality disillusioned him so that he said he preferred 'sane left' leaders; examples were Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and Blair himself ('who else was there?' Dobson helplessly asked).

London Mayor

Late in 1999 Dobson was lined up to be wangled out of the Commons and was internally selected by Labour to stand as their candidate in the inaugural election for Mayor of London (a choice which stank, according to then MP Chris Mullin). A small problem for him was that in the election itself he would be up against the seasoned, subtle Ken Livingstone standing as an independent (which was a breach of his solemn assurance that he would not be a candidate, but never mind – we are talking politics here). Blair assessed Dobson's chances 'about as much as ... Steptoe and Son's horse had of winning the Grand National'. Livingstone beat Dobson humiliatingly into third place, which left him bitterly to reflect on the fact that his successor in charge of the nation's health was Alan Milburn, once a left-wing bibliophile who ran the 'Days Of Hope' radical bookshop but then built himself into a millionaire consultant for massive private companies such as Lloyds Pharmacy and Pepsi; apart from those he set up his own very lucrative media company.

Bribery

In the general election of 2001 Dobson was re-elected and quickly confronted with the realities of matching what he might have called his conscience with what the Whips would have been aware of as his ambitions. In 2003 there were some votes in the Commons on the issue of the war in Iraq. The Attorney General Goldsmith had done the work needed to enable Blair to claim that an invasion of that country would be legal. As if that would have made any real difference. Dobson was treated as a possible rebel in the intended Commons debates and he was offered the job of High Commissioner to the Republic of South Africa as a bribe for supporting the government. But that was not effective enough to deter him. The war went ahead and we are now reminded, day after day, of the merciless futility of it all, in the fighting and the desperate plight of the people there.

Starmer

In June 2011 Dobson was the focus of media attention because he was a tenant in a flat owned by Camden Council; he said he did not know how much rent he paid, which triggered some lurid speculation (one guess was £160 a week when other flats in the same luxurious building went for ￡1000). This, with the fact that he and his wife have a comfortable joint income and own a large property in Yorkshire, did not help him keep his image of a lovable eccentric. Tessa Jowell, who was one of his junior ministers, recalls him padding about the ministry office without his shoes on, at times with a bare toe peeping through a hole in his sock: 'We all absolutely adored him. I love him – he's a person of incredible generosity and loyalty'.

Among Dobson's other fans, one of the more likely successors for Holborn and St. Pancras, is Sir Keir Starmer who as a KCB and a QC and ex-Director of the Crown Prosecution Service is unlikely to unbalance his staff by showing them his bare toes. Unless he were to have the same effect by his view of the political situation: 'It would be an honour for anyone to succeed Frank Dobson . . . Our constituency needs an MP who will be able to influence a future Labour government’ – something which the tempestuous, unachieving life and times of Frank Dobson exposed as impossible.

Ivan