Greasy Pole: Death of a Buffoon (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quintin McGarel Hogg, Lord Hailsham of St. Marylebone in the City of London, who was “a sweet, dear man” (Woodrow Wyatt); a “political genius” (Harold Macmillan); a “cantankerous old man” (Margaret Thatcher); “a gentleman” (himself) died last month. He was 94 years old and his life was richly productive of the kind of material beloved of fawning obituarists, who did him full justice. By the time we had absorbed that he was a kind, effervescent, clever, intellectual giant we could only wonder how the world would survive without him. Could it really go on, with its wars and disease and poverty, untouched by the death of one of capitalism’s more arrogant and volatile politicians? Should we not reproach ourselves for failing to value this paragon more appropriately when he was alive? Except that Hailsham, was not quite like his admirers make him out to be.

He came of a family of lawyers and politicians and ended his career in politics seemingly welded to the Woolsack, holding the job of Lord Chancellor longer than anyone since the days of Lord Halsbury at the end of the 19th century: “. . . he couldn’t go on being that for ever” said an exasperated Margaret Thatcher when she was contemplating removing him from that office. His father held the same job in the 1920s and was the MP for St. Marylebone. His son Douglas is an MP and has held some minor ministerial jobs – although not to wide acclaim or without controversy. A daughter is a High Court judge. The Hogg family looks likely to carry on into infinity, producing volatile eccentrics who are willing to play their part in running British capitalism in the interests of the class they are born into.

Eton and All Souls

Hailsham was educated at Eton; where else could a boy like him have gone to school? He was said to be the cleverest pupil there, too clever for some of the masters and he was fully aware of it, being known as “. . . a disagreeable boy, academically clever, but emotionally arrogant and extremely self-centred”. Of course he was elected to Pop, that self-appointed aristocracy above the aristocrats of the school. Members of Pop wore fancy waistcoats and walked about arm in arm, they were fawned on by many of the masters and feared among the other boys for their arbitrary powers of flogging and the enforced servitude known as fagging. Clearly, Eton had little to teach the young Hailsham (or Hogg, as he was then, before succeeding to the title) about asserting himself as a member of the ruling class. He was notorious for the gusto and frequency with which he beat other boys (his half-brother, Edward Marjoribanks, was “passionate” about it and had a reputation for sadism). It was a useful education in guiltless suppression of anyone classified as socially inferior.

After collecting a succession of prizes at Eton which proved how clever he was Hailsham went to one of the more traditional of Oxford colleges, got a first class degree and was accepted as a Fellow of All Souls. This is a kind of Pope of the university, although more sober and industrious. It was founded in 1437 with the main purpose of praying for the dead (part of its landholdings include Willesden Junction, a grimy part of North West London where the inhabitants need rather more than prayers to give them some hope). Hailsham began his time among the brains of All Souls as a “Screw”, whose job was to decant the after dinner port which was drunk in such quantities. Places like All Souls, with their exclusivity and their rituals, play a part in informing the working class that they must accept their inferior status in society, the running of which should be left to their betters. How reliable a concept this is can be judged by the kind of politician to have passed through those privileged doors – recent examples were Keith Joseph and John Redwood, who have gone down in history as eccentric blunderers. We shall see how Hailsham measured up to the popular expectations of him.

Suez

He burst onto the political scene as Conservative candidate in a bye-election at Oxford City in 1938, supporting the Chamberlain policy of “appeasement” of Nazi Germany against an all-party candidate. This took some living down later, when appeasement became a nasty word and Chamberlain was universally unpopular. Hailsham survived the war with a slight wound and continued as an MP with a reputation as a kind of verbal blunderbuss in his attacks on the Labour government. Some time after the Tories won power he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, which pandered to his need to behave like an attention-seeking adolescent. But behind his posturing the fact was that, although he was one of the Service ministers he was kept in the dark about the secret negotiations between Britain, France and Israel which laid the plans to justify the Suez invasion. Hailsham denounced the Egyptian take-over of the Suez Canal as “wholly illegal” (as if such concepts are of the slightest consequence in capitalism’s wars) and never doubted that Britain and France were right to “intervene” (as he called it) in the war between Israel and Egypt. It was not the most penetrating analysis of that sordid affair.

Under Macmillan’s prime ministership Hailsham, who succeeded to the title when his father died in 1950, was given the kind of jobs which could have paved his way to the top. Appointed party chairman, he seized the opportunity to engage hysterically with the membership. In 1957 at the Tory conference in Brighton he made his first appearance in the early morning on the beach, wearing baggy trunks and plunging briskly into the sea for a swim. It was not coincidence that he was accompanied (although not into the water – there are limits to the call of duty) by a posse of newspaper hacks. At the end of that conference Hailsham grabbed the chairman’s bell and rang it in a frenzy, declaiming the poet’s words about who the bell tolls for – meaning the Labour Party. The party faithful loved it, stamping their feet and cheering but others – particularly his rivals in the party – were sourly uneasy at his vulgar publicity-seeking.

Flat Cap

This behaviour was rewarded in 1963 when Hailsham was given not one, but two, jobs involving responsibility for sport and for injecting some hope into the North East, where unemployment was at 4.5 percent compared to 2.4 percent nationally. The region’s most important industries – steel, shipbuilding, coal – were in decline. Hailsham was not a sportsman – he regarded the very idea of a minister of sport as akin to fascism – and he was not an economist. This did not disqualify him from holding the jobs but it did make the appointment look like a typical piece of Macmillan gimmickry. Hailsham did nothing to dispel this by touring the region wearing the kind of flat cap usually seen in working men’s clubs, or the dole queues. Later he tried to explain this away as a matter of chance; he had left his bowler hat in his car in London and was offered a choice of a pork pie hat or the cap. He chose the cap because it would be useful when he was out shooting. But the impression endured, that he was either making fun of the hard-pressed workers there or was clumsily trying to convince them that in spite of his Eton education and his large house in Sussex he was really one of them. “I do not pretend” he wrote later “that the plan (which he drew up after his visit) succeeded to the extent that my visit to the North East permanently solved the chronic difficulties of the region”. Well no, it didn’t but at least he got a nice new cap out of it, for his times on the grouse moors.

Later that year his big chance arrived, when Macmillan decided to resign and the Tory party descended into the kind of frenzied back-stabbing which should have had no place in what was called, in the days before Thatcher, the gentleman’s party. It all happened at their 1963 conference where, after Macmillan’s announcement, the atmosphere was, according to William Rees Mogg, “ugly”. Hailsham was Macmillan’s first preference as his successor but he had to get rid of his title and return to being plain Mr. Quintin McGarel Hogg. Without following the custom of first informing the rest of the cabinet he launched his bid for the top job in a carefully stage-managed announcement at the end of an otherwise dull meeting, which erupted into hysterical applause at the news. Randolph Churchill roamed the conference pinning large badges with the letter Q onto anyone unwise enough to stand still within arms reach. Hailsham got himself photographed spoon feeding his one year old child in the hotel foyer. All of this was not to Macmillan’s taste and so from the chaos of ugliness emerged the unlikely figure of Douglas-Home. Hailsham had blown it.

Relief

Which must have been a relief to the many people who had him correctly summed up, not as a genius but an arrogant buffoon, isolated by his conceit from the real world around him. Throughout his life he was buoyed up by the assumption that he and the rest of his class were superior, born to rule in the best of all possible worlds which is capitalism. The rest of us should only be grateful that there are people like Hailsham who are willing to exploit, degrade and ridicule us. To anyone concerned for society and its people Hailsham will not be missed.

Ivan

The Importance of Mr. Profumo (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

it was the Daily Express which pointed out, quickly, cruelly, that profumo is the Italian word meaning perfume. But the famous scandal sticks in a way undreamt of in the philosophies of big newspapers.

Now Profumo’s “sin,” for the Tories, was not just that he was running a mistress. That was bad enough, but there have been some famous precedents who have got away with the same thing. It was not even that the girl was being shared with a Russian intelligence agent and at least a couple of others, although that was enough to wilt the flowers on the starchiest of hats at a Conservative women’s fete. What really put Profumo beyond the pale was that he admitted to telling a lie. Not a lie to just anyone, but to the House of Commons, which is supposed to be an assembly of gentlemen and where it is the tradition not to question nor debate personal statements like Profumo’s original assertion of his innocence, this was what Robert McKenzie called a kick in the stomach for the Tories, who have always liked to think of themselves as the party of better people, of Christian gentlemen.

It was the lie which gave Lord Hailsham the excuse for his fireworks in his TV interview with McKenzie, when he blasted Profumo as a man who has “ lied and lied and lied ” and insisted that the whole affair was a moral issue. Hailsham is well known as a Tory moralist, a strict Christian who professes unshakeable principles. So is another central figure in the drama surrounding the government crisis—Enoch Powell. The hullabaloo over Profumo has served to make these men— and others like them—heroes of integrity. The inference we are invited to draw is that generally capitalism administered by the sort of men who would never tell a lie and that Profumo was just the inevitable bad apple.

Alright. Let us have a look at this business of lies. And if we do, the first thing to hit us is that political history is crammed with examples of men who, as a matter of course, have told enormous lies yet have never been accused of being liars. Some of them, in fact, have died as respected pillars of capitalist society. Stafford Cripps, for example, was the very caricature of an ascetic moralist. Strict vegetarian. Fervent Christian. Like Enoch Powell, he was supposed to be a man who stood for principle before everything. Did Cripps, then, never tell a lie? We need nudge our memories only a little to recall that in 1949 he protested for weeks that he had no intention of devaluing sterling, while all the time his plans for devaluation were cut and dried. There are plenty of other examples of Cripps’ flexible reverence for the truth.

The Tories are not, of course, untarred by this brush. Hailsham and Powell are only two of those who were unprotesting members of the Eden government which embarked on the Suez fiasco. They apparently held their consciences in check when their government broke its word to the United Nations and justified the invasion by what were quickly revealed as blatant lies. More recently the same, government has been what we can politely call less than frank over, the deportation of Doctor Soblen and of Chief Eriahoro. In fact, in a more subtle way, Christine Keeler is not the only matter on which Profumo has been dishonest, although on these issues his ex-colleagues in the government would never dream of calling him rude names. As Minister of War, Profumo bore the ultimate responsibility for the big publicity campaign to persuade people to join the Army. The advertisements used in this campaign showed such a one-sided view of Army life that even some newspapers felt moved to protest. Profumo’s ads. showed clean-living young men playing rugby, climbing mountains, patrolling romantic deserts. They did not hint that military discipline, in its dreary stupidities, is designed to degrade and brutalise men. They did not mention the unpleasant places a soldier may be sent to, nor the dirty jobs he may have to do there. They ignored the fact that soldiers often die especially horrible deaths, looking not at all like clean living Soldiers of the Queen as they do so. The advertisements told lies, but nobody in the government got upset with Profumo because of that.

Neither have they been upset by the lies about, say, the effects of testing nuclear weapons. The government assure us that the danger from these exercises is negligible and that another little test will not do us any harm. Yet they know perfectly well that every test adds to the atmosphere’s load of radioactivity and that this means that a lot of people, especially children, will die who would otherwise have lived. Overseas, as well, lies are told on this matter. President Kennedy has recently announced that his government will suspend all tests, unless some other country starts them up again. This may well be followed, as it was in 1958, by a similar announcement from Moscow. Both sides will pose as the guardians of peace and human safety. Yet both sides know that a suspension of tests does not mean that the development of nuclear weapons has been suspended. They know that they are all working on -their bombs and that when they think it is to their advantage to do so they will think up some reason to start testing them again. Are Kennedy and Khruschev, then, champions of truth?

It would, indeed, be surprising if men in their position were, for they administer a social system which is full of lies, and not only those told by politicians. Were the makers of thalidomide telling the truth when they asserted that the drug could safely be taken by pregnant women? What sort of principle were they upholding, when they protested that the delay in the American Food and Drug Administration approving thalidomide was costing them their chance of exploiting a Christmas market? Do the mass-production tailors believe their own advertisements, which show aristocratic young men being admired by glamorous girls for the cheap off-the-peg outfit they are wearing? Are the estate agents who advertise a cramped, poky apology for a house as “ neat and compact ” and a garden with knee-high weeds as “mature” keen churchgoers who regularly say their prayers?

We know what grounds these lies are excused on. We know that capitalism claims that strategic and commercial reasons justify telling lies. As R. A. Butler said about the Cripps lie, “. . . I know that if you talked about devaluing the currency well ahead of time, you would do indefinite damage to your own currency. . . .” But they cannot have it both ways. Capitalism professes to work on a basis of morality; workers are taught from the very beginning that the road to Heaven is paved with honesty and high principles. Yet capitalism admits that its own interests force it to deny these principles. And since when have the sort of morals propounded so often by capitalism's leaders been relative, adaptable, matters of expediency? A lie, after all, is a lie under any circumstances. No, they cannot have it both ways, although over Profumo that is how they have tried to have it.

Imagine a politician who told the truth! A Minister of Housing who admitted that he could not solve the housing problem! A Foreign Secretary who blew the gaff on every double-crossing international carve up as soon as he had made it! A Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced his Budget with the admission that it was just a rehash of a lot of ideas which had flopped in the past! If that happened nobody would get involved in a scandal. There would be a dignified resignation, surrounded by sorrowful stories of tiredness, strain and mental breakdown.

Profumo told a rather foolish and, for him, a risky lie. But at least it was a lie about his personal life, a lie which involved only a very few people. In contrast, day after day capitalism goes on turning out lies which affect the welfare and in many cases the very lives of millions of people. What is more, those lies play their part in bolstering the social system which degrades and depresses the majority—the only socially useful people—the working class.

No minister gets worked up about that. There are no top level inquiries, no resignations, nothing on television. In cases like the Profumo scandal the working class are supposed to be content with a mixed diet of salacity and hypocritical moralising. The same newspapers which got indignant over Profumo's lie saw nothing wrong in paying thousands of pounds for Christine Keeler's story, nor in publishing photographs of her which we will describe—and not for want of a better word—as arresting.

It will be tragic if in among this smoke screen of hypocrisy and scandal the essential fact is lost sight of. Let us state it here, quickly and simply.

Lies are essential to capitalism and super moralists like Lord Hailsham know it. And capitalism itself is the biggest lie of all.

Ivan

Promised Land: Arrival Postponed — Indefinitely (1963)

From the April 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Mormons who trekked across America to settle in what is now the State of Utah were driven and inspired by the visions of their leader, Brigham Young. Whatever setbacks they encountered, whatever hardships they endured, Young could always turn up the answer in a session with the Almighty. These were always enough to still the Mormons’ doubts so that the weary journey to the Promised Land could continue.

In some ways, this is what happens in capitalism. For as long as any of us can remember the leaders of the system have said that they are conducting us on a glorious pilgrimage to a Promised Land. Sometimes they tell us that we have almost come to the end of the road and that the lush, temperate valleys are only just over the next hill. Sometimes they tell us that we have run into trouble—hostile natives are about, or the undergrowth is too thick for penetration, or the weather is unco-operative. At such times they are not above trying to dream up a few visions themselves and although these are not usually like those of Brigham Young, it is true that capitalism’s leaders like us to think that God looks upon them with a kindly eye. Whatever the difficulties of our journey, though, they assure us that we must not despair. The Promised Land is never far away. Everybody is so busy listening to these soothing assurances that they do not seem to notice that we sometimes travel in the opposite direction to what was supposed to be, only a short time before, the quickest way to the Promised Land. They never notice that all the leaders’ visions turn out to be false. And most of all they never notice that, no matter how hard and how fast we travel, we never arrive.

All the capitalist political parties are in on this. The Tories try to comfort us with the promise that they alone know the way and have provided for every need of the trek. The Labour Party try to take over the head of the column and to tempt us with visions which they say are better and brighter than their opponents. The Liberals murmur that their way is the smoothest and safest of all. At election time this propaganda is particularly loud. But it goes on all the time, because the more noise the leaders kick up, the more officiously they shuffle their maps and peer into the horizon, the less chance there is of the rest of the travellers asking questions about the direction and length of the journey. Capitalism, in other words, can never be what its leaders promise for it. but it must always pretend to be doing something about its own shortcomings.

Recently, for example, Lord Hailsham had a vision about the Promised Land. This aristocrat, as we all know, is stuck with the task of explaining to hundreds of thousands of workers why their trek has come to a halt until they have settled the little difficulty of finding a job. Hailsham has had to visit one of the areas of high unemployment in this country; yet he can still radiate as much confidence as anyone about the Promised Land. But he has had to admit that the journey might be running a little behind schedule. Speaking in February last to a rally of Tory women, he said:

The recession has given us the power, possibly for the first time since the war, and the breakdown in the Common Market talks has given us the spur, of beginning the construction of the Britain we want to see in thirty years' time—the Britain we must see if in the twenty-first century, to which we must begin to look, we are to see Britain as a national community holding her head appropriately high among the peoples of the earth.

This is a rather strange vision, even from one of the Tories’ favourite visionaries. For if it only needed a recession to give us the spur to build a better world —postponed now, of course, for thirty years—why do governments always try to resist slumps? And if a slump is now the way to prosperity, what way was envisaged in the other, earlier, promises? What, for example, inspired Mr. Butler’s vision of a few years ago of doubling our standard of living in twenty-five years? And has this vision faded, now, in the glare of Hailsham’s revelations of the twenty-first century?

Eyewash

Hailsham was, of course, dishing out the purest eyewash. A recession does not provide the economic power for a new leap forward; it is not a sort of purifying fire. Not only old, inefficient companies go under in a slump; the new, smart outfits also die. Capitalism goes up and down as its markets dictate; there is no depth of a slump at which anyone can say that the economy has got its second wind and that things have got bad enough for them to start getting better. In previous slumps, no end of experts have had their forecasts of impending recovery upset by the depression inexorably getting worse. Does Hailsham realise this? He probably does. But to have said so would have spoiled the vision, so not a word was breathed of it. Ladies and gentlemen, the journey to the Promised Land drags on—at least for the next thirty years.

Not only the Tories have their visions. Mr. Harold Wilson is having one or two himself lately, as he tries to elbow his way to the front of the column. Mr. Wilson complains that the trek is being hindered by the lack of scientists in this country and that if only we could keep them all here it would not be long before we were standing on the brow of the last hill, with the fertile plains spread out at our feet. This is how The Guardian reported part of Mr. Wilson’s first political broadcast as leader of the Labour Party:

The steady drain of some of Britain's best scientists to jobs overseas, said Mr. Wilson, was something the country could not afford and was going on because Britain did not make enough use of scientists here. “Far too many of our scientists are frustrated. They don’t have the equipment they need. They are trying to do research on a shoestring. Private industry spends getting on for three times as much on advertising as it does on scientific research. Perhaps if the ratio were the other way round we would be forging ahead in the world.

He said that on February 27th last. But he ignored the fact that some of the eminent scientists now working in Britain originally came from abroad. He did not say whether his desire to keep British scientists in Britain also meant, for example, sending Sir Solly Zuckerman back to South Africa or Sir Howard Florey back to Australia, so that those countries could also do their bit of “forging ahead.’’ Inconvenient facts are no part of glorious visions of mythical capitalist prosperity.

They never were. The Promised Land has always been the sop with which working class unrest has been stifled, this is the Morning Post of April 5th, 1929, reporting a speech on unemployment by Mr. Baldwin:

If we have not conquered unemployment, we are in process of conquering it, and if there is no great disturbance shall complete its conquest. . . .

And this is the report of the Daily Mail of May 15th, 1929, of what Cabinet Minister Sir William Joynson Hicks had to say on the same subject:

There are now unmistakable signs of returning prosperity. Four years of wise and prudent administration are at last bringing their reward, and we are now definitely climbing out of the trough of industrial depression. . . .

We all know what these speeches were worth. We know that despite the fine words the unemployment figures kept climbing and the extreme hardship of the working class got deeper and harsher. We know that the vision of the Promised Land duped the workers in the ’Thirties and then faded in the flames of the 1939 War. The war was itseif an excuse for yet another vision of peace and prosperity which was to come out of the hardships endured in the defeating of German capitalism. Now the wartime visions have disappeared, to be replaced by others. And the working class are still being duped.

Perhaps one of the things which helps in this is the fact that many workers today have the things which, before the last war, were essential scenery in the Promised Land. Of all the households in this country, about 33 per cent. run a car; 46 per cent. have a washing machine; 82 per cent. have a television set. Only rich people had these things before the war; now they are wider spread. Does this mean, as the politicians claim, that the working class are prosperous? It is true that working class conditions change— they could hardly stand still — as productive techniques develop. But this is not to say that these conditions improve. The conditions and standards of the unemployed workers in the Thirties were different, and technically higher, than those of the Regency aristocrats; but who were the better off?

Needs

It is in this perspective that we must look at working class conditions today. The radio industry was bound to make a lot of television sets after the war and was equally bound to want to sell them as widely as possible. This means that the workers who once queued up to see poor films at their local cinema can now enjoy the same sort of drivel without leaving their own armchairs. People who once kept hiking and cycling clubs in a healthy condition can now jump into their cheap cars and drive straight to the nearest traffic jam, to pass the time breathing in the exhaust fumes of other cheap cars. Working class wives often need a washing machine because they have so little time to do the job the old way; a lot of their day is spent at work, earning the money to pay for the washing machine. If this is the Promised Land, was it worth the journey?

Let us spell it out simply. There are two types of people living under capitalism. One type owns land, factories, steamships, and so on, and gets enough-- and often very much more than enough- from these to live. The other type— there are a lot of people like this—do not own any of these things and to live they have to find somebody to employ them. This second type is the working class and it is they who take all the knocks which capitalism dishes out. They are the people who in the best of times must struggle to balance their budget and who in a slump can descend to a dreadfully low level. They are the people who suffer the strain of an insecure existence. So they are the people who may get impatient with capitalism; they are the people who must be distracted with the politicians’ visions of the Promised Land.

We all know the famous saying that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. But for the working class there is no arrival, because there is no end to their journey in capitalism, so they must travel without hope. Until, that is, they see through the whole shabby ruse and do something about it.

Ivan

Lord Hailsham, J. H. Thomas and King Canute (1963)

From the April 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

What connecting link is there between these three worthies, two dead and one living? The two first-named are easily bracketed. Lord Hailsham, Minister in a Tory Government is dealing with unemployment problems, thus re-enacting the role that J. H. Thomas took on for the Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald in June, 1929. As Lord Privy Seal and Minister of Unemployment he was aided by Sir Oswald Mosley, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and George Lansbury, First Commissioner of Works: both of whom seem to have held the opinion that J. H. Thomas and other members of the Government were problems as difficult as unemployment.

The story is told in the biography, The Right Honourable, by H. R. S. Phillpot, published in 1932, in a chapter suitably called “Beaten by Unemployment.”

Unemployment was already a serious problem before the Labour Government was formed. Thomas and other Labour Party leaders had been campaigning up and down the country denouncing the apathy and callousness of Prime Minister Baldwin and promising to put things right if returned at the election. Thomas concentrated on unemployment, “made it his speciality, worked at it, talked of it and helped to devise plans to arrest its dreadful progress”

He argued that it would be a good idea to pay 10s. or 15s. a week to workers over 65 to get them to retire and make room for younger workers. He attacked armaments. Europe, he said, was like an armed camp. The nations were spending millions on armaments which, if they spent on production, would help to solve the problem of unemployment.”

Can he really not have noticed that this would simultaneously create unemployment among armament workers and soldiers? There are plenty of people as muddled today, so perhaps it was beyond him.

He favoured building the Channel Tunnel, and raising the school-leaving age to get 400,000 teenagers off the labour market, and when he became Minister he went travelling in Canada to pick up markets for British exports—in Canada he can hardly have failed to notice that there were other gentlemen trying to solve their own unemployment problem. He discussed the problem with spokesmen of the employers and the trade unions.

Some of his oratorial efforts read remarkably like statements made today: "Curing unemployment, he argued, would cost money, but no cost could be too great if by incurring it the progress of demoralisation could be stopped.”

But two years later as a member of the National Government he was supporting government economy measures to cut down the spending of money.

He and the Labour Government rejected the rival schemes for curing unemployment put forward by Lloyd George and the Liberals. Lloyd George (advised by Keynes, among others) favoured the idea of the Government raising big loans and spending the money on the schemes which would create jobs.

Thomas argued that this could only be a temporary measure, whereas what was wanted was something lasting: a complete overhaul and modernisation of the depressed industries to make them competitive.

But he didn’t get any results either short-term or long-term.

His biographer wrote: “The special duty entrusted to Mr. Thomas was that of curing unemployment. It was, of course, an impossible duty. Whether he realised how impossible it was nobody knows, but he undertook the task which eventually proved too much for him.”

When Thomas took on the job of wiping out unemployment it stood at 1,164,000. Six months later it had jumped to 1,344,000 and in 12 months, to 1,911,000. Two years from the start it exceeded 2,700,000.

Which brings us to King Canute. The legend credits him with the modest desire to convince his courtiers that even a crowned head could not command the tide to recede. If he had been a modern politician he would have ordered things differently. He need only have taken up position at high tide, just before the turn, and he could have got away with it.

The story is that that is just what J. H. Thomas thought he was doing. He is said to have consulted a well-known economic expert before taking on the job. and only took it on being assured that the economic tide was about to turn and unemployment would fall.

Perhaps Lord Hailsham will he luckier in his timing.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: Kicked Upstairs (2011)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Anthony Wedgwood Benn has fought a furious fight against his transfer to the House of Lords. Despite his struggles, the government showed that they were determined to have him kicked upstairs.

Some lobby correspondents whispered that Mr. Macmillan personally gave the thumbs-down to Mr. Benn’s efforts to renounce his peerage. The P.M., said the rumour, is at odds with Lord Hailsham, and doesn’t want to set a precedent which might bring him back to the commons.

Mr. Benn’s predicament is not free of irony. The Labour Party, of course, once stood for the abolition of the House of Lords. And Mr. Benn’s constituency used to elect Sir Stafford Cripps, who was at one time an ardent opponent of royalty, titles and the rest.

By the time Labour achieved power in 1945, they had dropped their old pledge about the Lords. Now, in fact, they do their bit towards helping the Upper House alive by supplying their share of life peerages.

It is Mr. Benn’s bad luck to have been born the son of a peer. His membership of the Labour Party is a different matter. He may not be able to resign his title: but he can always leave the party which has supported the system of pomp and privilege.

(“News in Review”, Socialist Standard, May 1961)

Reflections On Argument (1951)

From the April 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early in the New Year the B.B.C. started a weekly series of half-hourly talks between opposing members of the House entitled "Argument." The first contestants in the ring were Dr. Chas. Hill (Lib. Cons.) and D. Houghton (Labour). The talks were originally scheduled to run three consecutive weeks but this was extended to four "owing to the wide range of interesting matters under discussion." Next came Barbara Castle (Labour) versus Lord Hailsham, followed by Tom Driberg (Labour) versus Randolph Churchill. At the time of going to press the last team have two more weeks to run so the Arguments continue. The B.B.C. announced the series as "discussions between two controversialists from opposing sides of the House on topics of interest." The whole thing boils down to a weekly half-hour of verbal skirmishing, the theme song of which should be "Anything you can do I can do better." The modus operandi consists of making derogatory remarks in varying degrees of intensity regarding the opposing Party’s misdeeds past and present Also digging up an incorrect or indiscreet statement made by a member of the opposing Party, thus setting him at a disadvantage and generally "taking the mickey."

The series have served one useful purpose, namely to emphasise how trivial are the points of divergence between the two Parties and how little these "topics of interest" need concern the workers. The second of the Hill-Houghton talks receive attention in the February issue of the Socialist Standard. In their fourth venture a rather subdued Dr. Hill addressed Houghton as "my dear boy" almost as if he were soothing a nervous and highly-strung patient in his surgery. He suggested incentives and rewards for work "well done," and bemoaned that overtime was sometimes cancelled out by Income Tax. He pointed out that before the war, miners only worked three days a week and now they cannot work long enough. The story of boom and depression was lobbed up and discussed, as if it were a new and startling discovery.

The subject matter of the first argument between Barbara Castle and Lord Hailsham was the branding of “Red" China as an aggressor, and the lady was in a terrible twitter because “it could do no good to stick a label on China." Lord Hailsham addressed her in the tone of one humoring a wayward and fractious child. His drawling repetition of "my dear Barbara" must have caused listeners to speculate as to whether he was endeavouring to gain time in order to muster his argument or waste time because he was experiencing difficulty in formulating one. Their second talk was on the "Shortages under Socialism." We must digress a moment to once again nail the lie, whether deliberate or due to ignorance that the present Government is or ever will be, Socialist. To continue, Hailsham sneered at the “Socialist Government” and said that present day shortages were due to their inefficiency and bungling. Barbara Castle not in the least discomposed nattered away and told us several times over in various ways that the shortages were due to more of the people having more under “Socialism.”

At their third meeting they discussed that “very important subject, should W. Germany be re-armed now?” Barbara Castle gave a decided negative and Hailsham dramatically posed the question, “How long will it be before you forgive them?” (The Germans.) He then got around to the necessity of arming against Russia, and sounding very blood thirsty he averred that we should "arm and arm and arm,” whilst having talks with Russia. The lady was of the opinion that we should have talks first. Their fourth and last argument was an inquest on the “Dark days of Tory misrule,” the period between the two wars. To do Barbara Castle justice, she said she would have preferred not to dig into the past but to argue on a topical subject. However the inquest went forward and unemployment figures were quoted for that period as 14 per cent., against 1 per cent, to 1½ per cent. present day, which according to Barbara Castle was entirely due to Labour planning. Lord Hailsham begged to differ and said the lee-way of the war has taken up the slack so no credit was due. He also attacked the Government as being responsible for the “steadily deteriorating international situation.”

The first foray between Tom Driberg and Randolph Churchill posed the burning question (which is keeping us all awake at night!), whether it was right that an American Admiral shall have supreme command over the Atlantic Fleet. Tom Driberg defended his Government's policy in this matter and agreed that it was of “ vital importance.” He pointed out that the Western operational part would be under a British Admiral, and recalled that Winston Churchill put “our” Pacific Fleet under an American Admiral during the last war. Randolph Churchill scrubbed round that one and instead sobbed over our present day small Fleet which he said was entirely due to the Labour Government's lack of planning. He also deprecated Attlee's leadership as “not good enough” with America, and Driberg pointed out that he (Attlee) had succeeded in moderating American policy regarding the branding of China as an aggressor. The Chairman called the controversialists to order for making it a duet and Driberg informed the world in general that he was not going to lose his temper. However all was calm and serene at their next meeting which posed the question, “Are we better fed under Labour Government than we were before the War”? This gave Randolph Churchill a chance to take a pot shot at that sitting target, the meat ration, which he said was due to the Government's mismanagement. He admitted hardship before the war, but said it was not due to any one Party. He attacked bulk buying and said that Webb had been “unlucky” but that he had also miscalculated. Driberg said that stock piling in America, due to the Korean War, caused the meat muddle and pointed out that the world population was increasing at the rate of 20 million a year and that food production was only just making up lee-way after the destruction due to the war. Randolph Churchill put in a plea for private traders, not bulk buying and sang Lord Woolton's praises as Minister of Food during the war. He also fired a final shot at the Government by pouring scorn on their payment of millions of pounds in compensation to butchers.

Taken by and large the arguments are becoming progressively more genteel. The slight differences in policy of the two Parties become more apparent with each broadcast and this must be obvious to Labour supporters. As their first uncritical enthusiasm has died down it must become increasingly clear that however much the Government may wish to consider the interests of the workers, Capitalism is too strong for them and in addition to Party differences they are drawn into international disharmony along the road that eventually leads to war. The worker who understands the socialist position is not distracted by the stew pot of Party politics or international rivalries. These fat red herrings across the trail of politically ignorant workers postpone the day of true understanding when all workers will tread the only road that leads to peace and security for all.

F. M. Robins

Toying with Soldiers (1967)

From the August 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the days when she was a member of the Opposition, Barbara Castle made something of a name for herself by launching a crusade for the abolition of the penny charge for ladies' lavatories. In the 1945/50 Parliament, Jimmy Hudson was famous for his passion for temperance reform. More lately, Leo Abse has become well known as an advocate of easier divorce. Thus do Labour Members, who call themselves Socialists, busy themselves with trivial, although newsworthy, adjustments to the capitalist system.

The latest in this undistinguished line is Mrs. Anne Kerr, the Member for Rochester and Chatham, who on July 4 last moved in the House that “. . . the sale, manufacture, import, export and advertisement of war toys in the press and magazines and on television should be banned.”

Now there was once a theory, well favoured among the Left Wing, that the cause of war was to be found in the conspiracies of the great armaments kings. Mrs. Kerr, of course, was only blaming the firms who make toy armaments. Perhaps it was safer that way; she was not, after all, pressing for the abolition of war itself, nor even of the weapons of war—only of plastic toys that go pop and sparkle and rat tat tat.

Predictably, the motion had the Parliamentary correspondents dipping their pens in laughing gas, and provided a golden chance for every amateur psychologist in the Commons. A thinly attended House heard some novel theories on the cause of war and of social violence. Then they threw out the motion and got down to more serious business.

The whole episode was fatuous enough and only deserves any attention because so many of the false ideas MPs proudly paraded are widely held also by the people who vote for them:

Destruction to many people is fun. At a church fete, for example, they will pay sixpence or a shilling to break crockery. (Mr. Tilney).
. . .  a dangerous motion because it opens a door to legislation to control the right of individuals and their children to think. (Mr. Onslow).

The best thing to do here is to begin at the beginning. It seems too obvious, but so many arguments about armaments ignore the fact that they exist only because war is an accepted way of settling society’s disputes. There has been a steady progression of the destructive power and efficiency of weapons; Mrs. Kerr complained about toy “guns, bombs, flame-throwers and booby traps” but these are among the gentler instruments at the disposal of the war makers.

Let us go on and ask why society tolerates the persistence of war. Here we can find a clue in the reply Mrs. Kerr received from Mr. Darling, Minister of State of the Board of Trade, who said that

. . . the United Kingdom toy industry was one of our most flourishing industries and last year exported £16 million worth of toys.
. . . Generally speaking, the Government wanted United Kingdom toys to be sold increasingly overseas . . .  (Daily Telegraph 4/7/67)

Now this does not apply only to toys, of course; there are all sorts of British industries which are exporting their products, and which the government would like to see increase their overseas trade. But the British government is not the only one with this idea, and British industry is not the only one engaged in an export trade. The capitalist world is, in fact, a mass of competing firms, states, combinations of states, all struggling for what in the end they hope will be some sort of economic supremacy. Sometimes this rivalry can be settled by a trade agreement or some other kind of pact. Sometimes it can be settled only by war.

Under capitalism, then, wars are unavoidable — which means that armed forces and weapons are necessary. But if it is all inevitable and necessary to capitalism, it is also extremely unpleasant — terrifying, dirty, obscene, brutalising. What is more natural, then, than that governments should try to hide the truth by embellishing the military man's life with false glamour?

Soldiers, sailors and airmen who do their grisly job efficiently are not simply successful men—capitalist society regards them as heroes. This line is pushed hard by the Services when they are advertising for recruits:

Don’t talk to Peter Cobb about hotted-up Minis. He drives this nuclear submarine. Wouldn’t you like to?

The glamour propaganda is aimed at young people and of course it has its effect on children. A child's life is full of dreams and expectations, most of them modelled on the adult world. If his parents regard a killer in uniform as a hero, the child will do the same-even more so. When a kid is playing soldiers, perhaps with the toys Mrs. Kerr thinks so odious, he is acting out what he hopes will be his heroic future.

But this is not the only aspect of life in which the kids imitate their elders and in which they prepare themselves for growing up under capitalism. The same shops which sell plastic machine guns probably also sell toy Post Offices and shops, Monopoly sets and so on. These games teach children some of the commercial facts of capitalism — that goods are made to be bought and sold, that survival is a matter of making money, that success goes to the man who can pull off the clever deal.

War toys teach children that organised killing and violence is an accepted part of society today. And since this has its roots in the economic basis of capitalism, there are as many objections to the sale of, say, toy money as there can be to the sale of toy flame throwers. Indeed, the fact that a child spends some happy hours picking off his mates with a plastic machine gun does not place him irretrievably on the path of being a military murderer, any more than winning at Monopoly will make him a future property tycoon.

As long as its people are content that it should be so, it is capitalism which maps out their future. The adults of capitalism fight its wars, and support the whole system which gives rise to them. They do this not because when they were children they played with toy soldiers, but because they are misled into believing that capitalism, with its property rights, its economic rivalries, its wars, is the best of all possible human societies.

No capitalist party—certainly not the Labour Party—ever does anything to end this massive and fundamental deception. Let us be kind to Mrs. Kerr and say that she is muddle-headed. But not every M.P. was so blind; the Member for St. Marylebone, for example, was almost caught out in approaching the heart of the problem:

You will not end wars by stopping children playing at soldiers, although you probably would stop children playing at soldiers if you prevented wars.

It is a rather unnerving experience, to be agreeing with Quintin Hogg. It probably won’t happen ever again — but strange things can go on, when fishes fly and forests walk, when there is blood on the moon or the House of Commons tries to put capitalism to rights.

Ivan

News in Review: In the swim (1966)

The News in Review from the September 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the swim

Quintin Hogg once tried to help his claims to the leadership of the Tory Party by taking a publicity-seeking dip in the autumn sea at Blackpool.

Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s swim in the Yangste River last month was also a publicity-conscious event, designed to prove, after some rumours of his bad health, that he is still in charge of the Chinese government.

And in case there were any doubts left after the swim, it coincided with another purge among high-up Chinese military and government circles.

The Chinese people were reported to be overjoyed at Mao’s swim, presumably they were also supposed to be glad about what they were allowed to hear of the purge, and to regard it as another protective act by their almighty, all-seeing, all good leader.

But, as Quintin Hogg showed in the gentler atmosphere of England, capitalist politics is a ruthless business. The same is true in China; at any level, capitalism is a hard world to survive in and where the stakes are high the struggle for survival is particularly desperate.

That is why capitalist politicians are such a cold, pitiless lot; why they can give an effortless display of public affection for a hated rival; or deny that they intend to do something which they are actually about to do; or try to attract attention by indulging in public comedy acts.

What is especially irritating about Mao’s swim, and the latest Chinese purge, is that in some quarters they are said to have something to do with Socialism when, in fact, they are part of the same old power struggle which goes on in every capitalist state.

The rules, such as they are, of this struggle are simple.

Every man for himself.

Sink or swim.

World cup willies

Somewhere in its distant past, football was known as a sport.

Even today the hack journalists, when it suits them, describe it in the same way.

They applauded the “sporting” gesture of the Portuguese player who congratulated Bobby Charlton on scoring one of the goals which knocked Portugal out of the World Cup.

They screamed blue murder at the “unsporting” play of men like the Argentinian Rattin and the Russian Chislenko.

Every now and again, though, these same journalists revealed something of what lay behind it all.

The Portuguese team would have received £500 a man if they had beaten England in the semi-final, as well as all sorts of bonuses.

The England World Cup squad—22 men—shared £22,000 for winning the Cup and apart from this there were the payments for playing in each round, bonuses for winning, the higher wages each player will now command from his club, the fees they can get by certifying that they wear particular makes of kit, use a certain hair cream, or do something else with some other commodity.

When we consider what fortunes, for the players, may have depended on a single foul, the behaviour of some of them appears to be not so much “sporting” as businesslike.

Because football is a business. The big wages reflect the fact that famous and skilful players can bring big money to a club. The World Cup contest brought a lot of money to the tourist industry in this country—and to the FA, which had the copyright on the World Cup Willie emblem which appeared on rosettes, plastic hats and bottles of beer.

Not, in other words, so much a sport —more a way of making money.

New Mr. Stop-Go

Some people were surprised by it. Others were shocked. Others amused.

In the latest financial panic of British capitalism, Harold Wilson applied measures which were a more extreme version of what Selwyn Lloyd, who was once Wilson’s favourite chopping-block, tried when he was Chancellor.

Thus Mr. Dynamic Expansion became the new Mr. Stop-Go.

But the surprising, shocking, amusing thing is that anyone should think it remarkable that a capitalist politician goes back on his word.

It is nothing new for a government to come to power pledged to reverse its predecessor’s policies—and to end up following those very policies through.

Indeed, any political party which has any chance of forming a government usually says at some time that it reserves the right to break its promises, if it judges the situation demands it.

This is what Labour meant when they proudly described themselves as a “pragmatic” government. Faced with a crisis in capitalism, they have reacted just as the Tories did.

It is too late now for Labour supporter to be indignant; they asked for this government and they have got it

But even Harold Wilson must come to an end sometime. The next General Election, when the Labour Party are once again claiming to be a Socialist organisation, will be the time for workers to remember that there is no difference in principle—and precious little in anything else—between the Labour and Conservative Parties.

It will also be a good time for them to consider the alternative to all the capitalist parties, to capitalism itself.

A Labourite confesses

You know Labour Government fails. You’ve seen their plans and promises smashed to pieces by the workings of capitalism. Now even Labour MP’s are beginning to see this. On July 26th Lena Jeger, MP for Holborn and St. Pancras South, did some heart-searching in her regular Guardian column.

George Bernard Shaw was once asked how long he thought it would take to get Socialism in working order. A fortnight, he replied. Writes Jeger:

   “Socialists must be either his ‘fortnighters’ or they become grave dullards, sifted and sobered into an army of underpinners, dedicated to making capitalism work, albeit slightly less brutally than is its nature . . .
  ‘‘Where have the economists got us? Under a Socialist Government one per cent of the people still owns 50 per cent of the wealth . . .
   “What sort of socialism is it that can coldly contemplate the deliberate creation of unemployment as a weapon of economic policy? If a Labour Government cannot make capitalism work without an army of unemployed, then perhaps it should start trying to make socialism work . . .
   “The Labour Party at the moment seems like a fly on a revolving wheel— it gets an experience of movement without controlling movement, a sensation of power without the motivating power . . .
  “Maybe the Labour Party needs a fortnight club, a brigade of ‘do-it-quick'. What have we gained slow respect for entrenched positions? Only, it seems, a prospect of unemployment, a vista of despair. Except for those well-off enough to escape. And what has that to do with socialism?”

What indeed! But what a confession of failure! After all Labour’s claim to be able to humanise capitalism was the fig leaf that hid its support for a brutal system. If Labour cannot make capitalism work “slightly less brutally than is its nature”, then it’s nothing.

Mind you, the Socialist Party of Great Britain never believed it could. We have said all along that capitalism can’t be made to serve rational, human ends.

Now a Labour MP all but admits our point. Remember her words next time her type come cadging for your vote. Labour—and all the other would-be reformers of capitalism—are and can only be flies on the revolving wheel of capitalism.

News in Review: Sir William (1963)

The News in Review column from the February 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir William

Nobody who has troubled to keep an eye on the trade union movement will have fainted with surprise at the news that the New Year Honours List brought a knighthood to William Carron.

Carron, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (motto, carved impressively on the presidential chair, “Be United And Industrious”), is the latest in a lengthening line of trade union knights, preceded by such as Tom O’Brien of NATKE and Tom Williamson (now a life peer) of NUGMW.

One thing these men have in common. They are all what is known as “moderate” trade union leaders. And “moderate” is another of the euphemisms beloved of the Capitalist press.

It means a trade union leader who can be relied upon to angrily denounce unofficial strikes. It means the sort of leader who suffers the wage restrictions of a Labour government and who co-operates in drives for greater efficiency and productivity. A man who thinks that it is a good idea for the unions to be represented on the National Economic Development Council and other such bodies, which are designed to promote co-operation between the workers and the employers. It means a man who does his best to ignore the fact that there is a class struggle in Capitalist society.

But this is not what trade unions are there for. The unions should concern themselves with protecting and advancing the interests of their members. They should be struggling for higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, and so on. But where do honours come into all this?

Honours are reserved for the people who have served Capitalism in some way or other; they are the establishment’s mark of appreciation.

It is a bitter commentary on the standing of the trade unions today, and on the standard of consciousness of their members, that the men at the top are so often coming to wear a coronet or some other bauble to show that Capitalism has looked upon them and found them good.

Hailsham and Unemployment 

Lord Hailsham, the government’s odd-job man, has won himself a reputation of being a showy, energetic politician. How, then, to describe his appointment as the man to look into the unemployment problem in the North-East?

Was this Action? Or just another odd job?

Certainly there was nothing new about the idea. The 1929 Labour government had not one but three ministers looking after their unemployment problem. At least one of these was showy and at least one other was energetic. But the unemployment figures still kept on going up.

Why only the North-East? True, unemployment is relatively high there; but so it is in Scotland and Wales. Whatever claims the government might make about the North-East being different, the fact is that, as a problem of Capitalism, unemployment is the same in one area as it is in another.

Does Mr. Macmillan have a soft spot for the North-East? He told the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce ". . . human needs are as great in the North-East, in Scotland or Merseyside, and even in Birmingham. They are the boys who fought and died and suffered and as long as I have anything to do with the conduct of affairs I shall regard them as of the highest priority . . .  I felt that the appointment of a senior active member of the government . . .  was needed and I believe it will be received with pleasure in that locality 1 know and love so well.” (Macmillan was M.P. for Stockton-on-Tees until 1945, when Stockton showed that it did not love him well enough to send him back to Westminster.)

But apart from Macmillan’s sob stuff, no government cures unemployment because it loves the workers. Indeed, no government cures unemployment at all, because it is something which wrapped up with the basic nature of Capitalism, coming and going as economic conditions dictate.

No politician has ever been able to control these conditions. That is why Hailsham must prove no better than the men who have tackled the problem before him. He can find out how much unemployment there is in the North-East. He can discover that unemployment hurts. He may even realise the basic reason for it. But as far as he is concerned that will not be for publication.


Escape from the Dole

Short of war itself, the best recruiting sergeant has always been poverty. In the thirties, the prospect of endless waiting in the dole queues drove thousands of workers into the armed forces. Even the army canteen seemed like a slap-up West End restaurant after months of bread and marge and tea.

Those were the days when for every man accepted there were half-a-dozen turned away. Years of poverty and malnutrition had left large numbers of youths unable to pass the medical, so much so that even the Tory government became alarmed that there might not be enough efficient cannon fodder for the next holocaust.

Things have been different since 1945. Capitalist “prosperity” has left the services begging for recruits. Pay has had to be raised and conditions improved, but even so the response has been poor. Until now.

Now British capitalism is not doing so well. There is pressure on wages, a harder line against the unions and, most threatening of all, the return of unemployment and the dole queues.

What a sudden change this has caused! Only a little while ago we were hearing tales of the sumptuous married quarters being provided to encourage wives to persuade their husbands to join up. Now we are told that there have been so many applications that the authorities have decided to refuse almost all married volunteers.

Recruiting on Tees-side is apparently up 33 per cent, in Manchester 32 per cent, in Preston 40 per cent. Northern Ireland has also had “a good year” and Western Command recruitment has increased by a fifth.

Yet another grim development to remind us of those “bad old days" that were supposed to have gone for ever.

Skybolt

The Tories care. Many of them have clung to an independent British nuclear force as a sign that this country is not quite finished as a world power. Skybolt was meant to keep this force going until 1970, which will be some years after the Soviet defences are expected to render useless the missiles currently in service with the R.A.F.

The backbench Defence Committee of Conservative M.P.s. were especially glum at this latest blow to their ancient illusions. Macmillan and Thorneycroft had to do a lot of explaining to them.

The Labour Party cares. Gleefully, their spokesmen leapt upon what they love to call the “Tory mess" over what they like to call “defence." (Who, or what, was Skybolt supposed to defend?) Labour should have been as glum as the Tories. They were the party which started the British nuclear force, including the bombs which they grumble about, when the Tory government tests them.

In fact, all the Capitalist parties care about Skybolt. They all had some sort of policy on it, which they coughed up m the shape of advice for the government.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not care about the Skybolt row. We do not care whether Capitalism fights its wars with missiles which come from the air and hit the ground or from the sea and hit the air or from anywhere to hit anywhere else.

We think it is quite horrible that intelligent men and women should spend their time, all over the world, in thinking up nightmares like nuclear bombs and missiles. We think it is ridiculous that other grown up people should solemnly argue about which missile is the cheapest or the fastest or the most destructive. We think it is even more ridiculous that these people should be admired by the majority of workers as wise, good men.

We know that the best thing that could happen would be for the world working class to abolish Capitalists, with all its weapons and leaders.

Who cares about that? We do.


Medical Research

The medical profession are having a tough time in cracking the problem of replacing a diseased kidney with one which has been taken from another person. Up to the present, they have had very little success with this operation, and what they have had has been mainly confined to grafts between identical twins or other very close relatives.

If the doctors could solve this one, it would mean that a lot of people who are now condemned to die would be saved, because a diseased kidney can be a killer.

Research into the problem is going on all the time, in particular at the Hammersmith Hospital in London, where the work has been supported by a government grant. Then last month there came the news that this grant would run out in April and. that it was not likely to be renewed.

Dr. David Spencer, who was involved some months ago in a dramatic and unsuccessful kidney operation, made a public appeal for funds and soon got the money he had asked for.

And how much was this? A hundred million? Well, no. One million, then? Wrong again. A measly thirty thousand pounds. But apparently the government had decided that they just could not afford this amount.

Is the Exchequer broke, then? How much, say, do they spend each year on armaments? Thirty thousand? Well, no. Hundred million, then? Wrong again. A whacking great £1,709,000,000.

There are plenty of people, all of them supporters of Capitalism, who can get indignant about this. But it is most illogical of them to do so.

Because it is typical of Capitalism's priorities that, when the queue forms for the allocation of society’s resources, death and destruction should be somewhere up front and human health and safety somewhere near the back.

Socialism could, and would, get things in their right order. That is something which should be driven home to anybody who would rather beat disease than build a hydrogen bomb.

Political Notes: Insults (1981)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

The Political Notes Column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Insults

“You’d better get up to the North East,” said the Prime Minister to Lord Hailsham. “The people up there are sound chaps really; their fathers stuck it out well at places like Passchendaele, but they’re getting restless. Something to do with bad housing, unemployment, sickness and poverty . . . Have a word with them—tell them we’re all in this together, you know the stuff. Oh yes, better get yourself a cloth cap; not the sort I wear on the grouse moors, your expenses won’t run to that. I believe there’s a shop called Montague Bolton or Marmaduke Burton or something who do them quite cheap. Good luck.”

"You’d better get up to the North West,” said the Prime Minister to Michael Heseltine. “The proles up there are misbehaving, rioting and helping themselves to property they don't own, even if they made it all. Perhaps they’re dissatisfied about slum housing, unemployment, poverty, heavy handed police . . .  Try not to say too much though—you’re inclined to make a fool of yourself sometimes, you know. Get a few businessmen up there who’ll pretend to be surprised that people live in such conditions. Wear your best clothes and get you hair cut. Good luck.”

Since Hailsham’s fatuous insults to the working class, twenty years ago, there has been little change in the problems he was supposed to be alleviating except that if anything they have got worse. And, as Heseltine has found out, the workers’ reaction has become more violent, desperate and futile.

Yet since Hailsham’s visit the working class have had six chances, at general elections, to attack the cause of their problems. They have used those chances to elect two Labour, and two Tory, governments. This persistent support for capitalism has meant that the problems continue and worsen, and that places like Toxteth and Brixton still fester.

Little wonder, then, that cynical politicians also persist in their security, to the extent that they can so freely offer insults to working class intelligence. With support like they get, who can blame them for feeling smug?


Wets

Margaret Thatcher is said to be angry at people like Lord Thorneycroft and Peter Walker and Francis Pym who have been publicly criticising her policies and she is said to be even angrier at the press reports that she was angry in the first place. At this rate, we must ask ourselves, how long will that hairdo survive?

As a result of all this, the idea is gaining ground, that these politicians called the Wets have lit on some secret about how to run capitalism which would make life a lot easier for the working class. Some Wets are harking back to the days when it was fashionable to think that the state could spend its way out of a recession, cutting unemployment at a stroke. Leaving aside the fact that workers who are in jobs still suffer poverty, even if less acute than when they are on the dole, and the historical fact that the policies of Keynes have themselves been discredited, it must be said that the idea of politicians like these standing for a more humane capitalism is positively laughable.

Thorneycroft resigned from the Macmillan government—with Enoch Powell—in 1961 on the argument that there was not a stern enough effort to cut working class living standards. Peter Walker grew rich out of the world of fringe banks, finance houses and investment trusts, in their heyday in the sixties. He personifies the capitalist ethic that what is good is profitable, from which all abundance and happiness must flow.

Nobody should be deceived that the Tory Wets have any more to offer, as solutions to capitalism's inability to satisfy the needs of its people, than the most arid Dry. Thatcher angry? It is the working class, who are exploited, degraded and deceived by capitalism and its spokesmen, who should be blowing their tops.


Police

We might have known it. While the smoke still rose from the riot-torn cities, a pall of parrot cries, slogans and “demands” also went up, from the left wing.

“Police accountability” was one of the these demands—on Merseyside and in Brixton where, it seems, the police are pretty good at rioting themselves—which is supposed to help prevent it all happening again.

As usual, the lefties were too frantic to stop and ask themselves some necessary questions. How far, for example, is this “accountability” to go? Is it to be taken to the extent of those American states where the top policemen are elected to their office? This theoretical safeguard has led, notoriously in the Deep South, to some notably corrupt police forces whose officers have murdered people but who did not arrest themselves because that was how the voters wanted it.

On what basis are the police supposed to be accountable to the working class? To the people they police, which means the people they repress, imprison and assault? They are employed by the other class in society—by the capitalists—to assert the privileged standing of that class and to separate the workers from the wealth they have produced.

The police are accountable to the minority who live in palaces, not to the majority who live in the slums and the semis. While the working class acquiesce in this system of deprivation, they will use any control they have over any agency in the interests of the minority, to keep that minority in their position of privilege.

All experience teaches us the folly of expecting the agencies of capitalist control to change their character, to deny their role in the class struggle, to become benign and non-repressive. The workers must aim for a basic change in society, which would make those agencies redundant.

But until that happens there are likely to be a lot more broken heads—and worse—in the cause of capitalist repression and in the left’s opportunism.

Rape Prejudice (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rape-inspired panic arising from a series of recent incidents has, to put it mildly, served to distort the true picture, which is bad enough as it is. There was the televised questioning, by incredulous Thames Valley policemen, of a woman who complained that she had been raped. There was the decision by the Scottish law authorities not to prosecute three young men suspected of raping and slashing a young woman in Glasgow. And there was the rapist who was “only" fined £2,000, rather than being sent to prison, because the judge thought his victim had contributed to the offence by her negligence (she accepted a lift in his car when there was no other way to get home which she could afford).

These incidents have been interpreted as proving that there is a lot wrong with the way the offence of rape is dealt with. The police won't believe the victim, or if they do the authorities won't prosecute the offender, and should the case come to court some doddering male chauvinist judge will let the man off lightly. One result of this is a dramatic increase in the interest being taken in rape; Spare Rib (February 1982) claimed: “Every accessible Women's Liberation group has been flooded with telephone calls from women wanting to do something". The London Rape Crisis Centre said their switchboard was jammed with calls, with a 100 per cent increase in the number of women alleging that they had been raped.

Naturally the press has rushed to exploit this panic, confident that nothing sells newspapers like sex. Acres of newsprint have been turned by this particular plough. Here for example are some headlines from the same page of the Daily Telegraph of 30 January: 2 Years For Sex Assault “Too Little". “Horrifying” Sex Attack By Railman; Jail For Raping Prostitute; Sex Attackers Bound Husband. And all this, mark you, from a “quality” newspaper; the hysteria among the other levels of Fleet Street, where soft porn is habitually dressed up as moral indignation,was of historic intensity.

One spin off of the decision not to prosecute the three Glasgow men was the sacking of Nicholas Fairbairn from the job of Solicitor General of Scotland. Fairbairn’s defence of the decision in the Commons was itself panic stricken and so earned the contempt of the House, where they will readily applaud all manner of deceit but cannot abide an incompetent performance at the Dispatch Box. The Baron of Fordell (to give Fairbairn his other name) is an Old Etonian who lives in a castle in Dunfermline—a comfortable, ruling class world away from the sordid working class slum where the girl was raped and knifed. He once informed the Commons that: “It is part of the business of men and women that they hunt and are hunted and say ‘Yes' and ‘No' and mean the opposite”. Any sympathy for this boorish aristocrat should be tempered by the knowledge that he still hopes to get into the government. Immediately after being sacked by Thatcher he described her as “. . . probably the warmest and kindest human being that those who have met her have ever had the privilege of encountering”, and a few days later as ". . . very loving, very kind and very compassionate”.

The Glasgow case provoked a great swell of outrage on the opposition benches. Relentless penal reformer Robert Kilroy-Silk denounced the government's decision to stand firm against the panic and not to change the law on dealing with, rapists as “. . . totally unsatisfactory . . . a grave disappointment to all women and those who want law. order and justice maintained”. Kilroy-Silk, normally among the loudest of those demanding more leniency for criminals, has tabled an amendment to the pending Criminal Justice Bill providing for harsher treatment-mandatory gaol sentences for convicted rapists. There is nothing remarkable in Labour reformers, who endlessly and boringly trumpet their progressiveness, demanding that the clock be put back. Standing out against a popular panic can lose votes.

In this country rape is the third most serious criminal offence, after murder and treason (like discharging blanks from an imitation pistol when the queen is nearby on a horse). The panic is obscuring the fact that it is notoriously difficult to judge the frequency of rape and whether it falls or rises, or even to compose a satisfactory legal definition of it. The statistics depend on highly subjective elements—on whether a woman decides she has been raped, whether she then reports it to the police and whether they believe her; whether the final conviction is for rape rather than for a lesser charge. To begin with, only about two-thirds of reported rape is recorded as such by the police.

For what they are worth, then, the figures show an increase of 39 per cent in cases of rape recorded by the police in England and Wales between 1970 and 1980—from 884 to 1225. During the same period, all recorded sexual offences fell by 13 per cent. Nearly a quarter of recorded rape now happens in the area of the Metropolitan Police, which might say something about the delights of life in one of capitalism's great urban concentrations.

The last great outcry about rape arose from a particularly nasty case in 1973, which brought stiff gaol sentences for four men in the RAF. Their appeal eventually reached the House of Lords, where Lord Hailsham spoke from beneath his wig in words which raised a storm. No man, said Hailsham, could be convicted of rape if he genuinely believed, however unreasonably, that the woman was actually consenting. Tediously vociferous Labour MP Jack Ashley quickly composed attacks from his dictionary of cliches, describing Hailsham's ruling as a “Charter for Rapists” and fulminating in the Sunday Mirror (where better?) that “The Scales of Justice have swung heavily in favour of rapists. . . “Amid all the fuss it went almost unnoticed that the four men remained in gaol. The result was a new Act in 1976 which, among other things, attempted a redefinition of rape.

This law was the latest in a very long line; as might be expected, rape has preoccupied legislators for a very long time. Four thousand years ago the Babylonian code of Hammurabi decreed death for any man who raped a betrothed virgin (married victims were classed as adultresses, were bound and thrown into the river). More recently the Second Statute of Westminster (1285) chillingly proclaimed that any man who . . ravishes a wife, maiden or other woman . . . shall have judgement of life and member" . . .  Rape remained punishable by death until 1840, although it was likely that the severity of the sentence had long disuaded juries from convicting.

Early rape law was concerned with the protection of women as men’s property; it now claims to provide for the restraint of the offender as well as for revenge for the rest of society. With a few exceptions, the sentence is assumed to match the nastiness of the act and to express a widespread abhorrence of it. This apparent symmetry is dented when we remember that this is a social system which legalises and rewards a great deal of activity which goes directly against human interests—a society in which sexuality is too often a neurosis, liable to relieve itself in horrific excesses.

Sexual behaviour—including misbehaviour such as rape—does not spring from nowhere; it is socially conditioned. In her book The Mountain Arrapesh Margaret Mead told of a primitive people living in harsh, remote mountains in New Guinea. The Arrapesh’s living conditions persuaded them that they depended on peaceful co-operation for their lives and this was the basis for their morals. They were neither aggressive nor even competitive; they did not engage in warfare. These attitudes extended into their sexual relationships:

Of rape the Arrapesh know nothing beyond the fact that it is the unpleasant custom of the Nugum people to the southwest of them. Nor do the Arrapesh have any conception of male nature that might make rape understandable to them.

In contrast were the Gusii people, studied by Robert Levine, who lived in the Highlands of Kenya, in seven tribes which were further split into clans and sub-clans, all traditionally hostile to each other. But each group imported wives from another group, which carried over the tribal hostility into their sexual activity in the marriage. The husband’s role was to hurt and subordinate—to rape—the wife, who resisted to the limits of her powers. At a conservative estimate, during 1955/6 rapes happened in the Gusii at the rate of 47.2 for each 100.000 of the population, while the rate in England and Wales was about 4 in each 100,000 (See The Facts of Rape, Barbara Toner).

Capitalism, a technically more advanced society, also fashions sexual conduct through a basic antagonism. It exists, first of all, on the antagonism of the commodity—wealth which is socially produced but privately appropriated. For the majority, access to that wealth is through the antagonistic relationship of wage labour. Capitalism conditions antagonism in sexual relationships. On the one hand it idealises the monogamous, nuclear family where sexual contact is as predictable, contained and as unsatisfying as an intravenous drip. On the other hand it sells promiscuity, in its popular press and in the sexually loaded inducements to buy cars, cigarettes, clothes . . ,

Capitalism is preoccupied with productive efficiency, with keeping the exploitative process pouring profits into the balance sheet. It can spare very little resources for the misfit, who cannot measure up to its expectations in social or sexual terms. Capitalism is a society populated with rejects, where deviance is more isolating than crime. Little wonder that sometimes the despair of the deviant misfit may explode into an act of intolerable aggression, with all the humiliation and suffering which it brings.

The true horror of rape is its deprivation. Sexual activity is necessary to human beings but it is no mechanical business; it is improved by some mutual respect between the participants. Rape substitutes anger and despair for affection; it makes a torture of a human essential.

Capitalism could never concede that its people are its victims, and must behave as such. So rapists will continue to be punished and after they are sentenced will experience a living hell in prison, at the hands of convicts anxious to reassure themselves that there are others more wretched than they are. This sordid mess is just one measure of the struggle before us, before we have an abuse-free society, of liberated relationships in humanity.

Ivan