Russian Prisons (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the more abhorrent features of capitalism is its need for a penal system. Workers who through one reason or another prefer a life of crime to one of so called honesty, when caught, are subjected to varying periods of preventive detention in the name of law and order.

It is interesting however to see that this system not only applies to countries which are avowedly capitalist, but is also a feature of Soviet Russia. Rather embarrassing for those who would have us believe that Russia is busy building the new socialist society.

In an attempt to outdo what is described as “western decadence’’ the Russian penal system has recently been streamlined in the interest of efficiency. According to Sir Leslie Scarman, chairman of the Law Commission and leader of a recent legal delegation to the Soviet Union, “Russia’s imaginative use of prisoners in labour camps was something Britain could incorporate into its legal system.”

This report, which was summarised in a recent edition of the Guardian, quoted Sir Leslie as saying that the labour camps, which he preferred to call colonies, “Were making a positive contribution to Russia’s productivity plan” and that the “Emphasis was on training them for a job.”

Gone apparently are the repressive dogmas of uncle Joe Stalin, famous for his treatment of political opponents most of whom ended up in one or other of Sir Leslie’s “colonies”. A new era of professionalism has been adopted. Why allow perfectly fit units of production to rot in the cells of labour camps, when according to Sir Leslie they could be making a “positive contribution to Russia’s productivity”?

In all capitalist countries, including Russia, the efficient use of labour is essential to survival in the competitive nature of World capitalism. Sound economics, not sentiment, demand that Russia’s prison population be allowed to play a “positive” role in the Russian productivity effort.

It has been estimated that 75 per cent of all crime has an economic basis. Prisons are the end result of private property. How often is heard the legal platitude that “This court must protect private property” or, “Private property — no trespassing”. What is required is a fundamental change in the structure of society. The conversion of private property into common ownership would make crime redundant. In a society of free access to the means of life food, clothing, shelter, etc., the need to steal these things would be removed, for why should anyone take the time and trouble to steal what can be freely obtained?

R. J.

They said it . . . in 1987 (1988)

From the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

January

• Britain is no more equal a society today than it was a hundred years ago. (Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party)
• The technical possibilities for increasing safety are almost limitless. But safety is normally expensive. (Guardian summary of the Layfield Report on the Sizewell B reactor)
• I have to accept that I may well be used by god in this way. (James Anderton, Greater Manchester Chief Constable)
• Civilisation is in peril of we do not tackle homelessness. (Lord Scarman, launching International Year of Shelter for the Homeless)

February

• I'm not upset by being tapped, but I don't like inept tapping. (John Golding, General Secretary of the National Communications Union, on his phone being tapped during the British Telecom engineers' strike)
• We have a higher standard of living now than this country has ever known. (Margaret Thatcher)

March

• I made a lot of money. (Michael Heseltine, in interview with Terry Coleman)
• A television interview is no place for original thought. (Alan Watson, Liberal candidate for Richmond on Thames)
• One third of the nation is ill-fed, ill clothed and ill-housed. (Ian Wrigglesworth, SDP MP)
• We are in business to make money. (Merrick Roocroft, British Rail Area Manager)
• As a market researcher, I've been trained to meet all arguments with a bland smile. (Rosie Barnes, SDP MP)

April

• I am amazingly tired. (Taunea Tagaki, Neiwado Trading Company, after paying nearly £2 million for a diamond ring once owned by the late Duchess of Windsor)
• I think I have spent some £2 million but if it is much more that's a problem for my bank manager. (Sam Moussaieff, who spent nearly £6 million at the Windsor auction)
• It's a marvellous way of getting to know people. (Prince Charles, on working on a building site)
• We are all capitalists. The only difference is that for you it's the state that invests, while for us it's private individuals. (Thatcher to Gorbachev)
• There is something in it for everybody. (Gary Hart, on his abortive election programme)

May

• You can't go too far to catch votes. (Denis Healey)
• Islington is like a walled city. The issues here are housing, housing and housing. (George Cunningham, SDP candidate, Islington South and Finsbury)
• I'm Labour. I'm just am. (Girl in a pub, talking to New Society)

June

• When we had a Labour government last time . . . they had to slash public expenditure left, right and centre. (Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer)
• In my lifetime your party had a go at it four times and made a fuck-up each time. (Willesden 'bus worker to Ken Livingstone, Labour candidate, Brent)
• There is no activity, no idea, superior to that of securing victory at the next election. (Neil Kinnock)

July

• Nearly everybody enjoys it. It's a pretty useful job. You get to work with nuclear missiles. You get to work with the most sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missile in the world. It's accurate and it works first time every time. I've been working with missiles for 12 years and I've enjoyed it. It's a lot of fun. (Major General Fisk, US Air Force at the Cheyenne nuclear missile base)
• I didn't trust the Liberal Party at all. (David Owen)
• I thought we had freedom of the press in this country. (Nicholas Browne-Wilkinson, judge at a Spycatcher hearing)
• A low profile is not my style. (Edwina Currie)

August

• Money is the cog that keeps the wheel of life turning. (Midland Bank brochure)
• If you can do this job and come out of it with your playing intact, your health intact and a little dignity - it's a minor miracle. (Michael Davis, leader of the London Symphony Orchestra)

September

• We are seeing in our cities, the growth of new slums which defy public health regulations, fire regulations, safety regulations. (Lord Scarman)
• Actually I felt as if I was dead. (Clement Freud, on losing his parliamentary seat at the general election)
• There is some opposition to thought in the Conservative Party. (Alfred Sherman, former political advisor to Thatcher)
• If we're not going down the yuppie path, I don't know where we are going. (Dennis Skinner, Labour MP on his party's "review" of policy after the election)
• The police service responds to situations. It doesn't create them. (Chief Superintendent David Ibbs, Wolverhampton police)

October

• It's a nice clean job. (Father of a fitter at Sellafield nuclear power plant)
• We're making so much money we don't give a damn what they are saying about us. (Director of a merchant bank)
• He does not talk to the press. (Aide to Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun newspaper)
• It's like Holloway prison. (Labour MP Dawn Primarolo on the House of Commons) 

November

• I like looking at gardens but I don't actually get down on my knees and plant things myself. (Lady Rothermere)
• They are using antiquated methods and putting safety at risk in the interest of profit. (Robert Adley, Tory MP on overloading on Sealink cross-Channel ferries)
• What does (Prince) Andrew actually do? (Tory MP)
• It's like working for an advertising agency but only promoting one product. (Country vicar, on his job)
• After all the money was given last time, after all the personnel and equipment that was put into Ethiopia, after the establishment of effective early-warning systems - after all this, why are things no better? (Bob Geldof on another outbreak of famine in Ethiopia)

December

• Some 90 per cent of the population should hear the sirens which will warn of an impending nuclear attack. (Written reply by Douglas Hogg, Home Office Minister)
• Unfortunately, the babies don't realise how important budgets are and they keep on being born. (ITV News At Ten, on the hospital cuts)
• Things are getting worse. People are suffering or dying while waiting for operations. (Consultant surgeon - Bristol Royal Infirmary)

Scarman—judicial oversight (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since, the riot in the St Pauls area of Bristol in April 1980, there have been disorders on a comparable scale in a number of British cities. The most violent took place over three days in April in the Brixton area of London, but there were also large- scale incidents in Southall, Toxteth (Liverpool) and Moss Side (Manchester), as well as smaller disturbance in other towns. The impact of such events is intensified by live television coverage, which reveals their similarity to civil war and apparently shows a near-total breakdown of law and order. The government were worried, both about what was already happening and about what might happen in the future if the causes of such upheavals went unidentified and unremedied. Two days after the Brixton disorders had ended, Home Secretary William Whitelaw appointed Lord Scarman to conduct an inquiry into the riots. His report was published at the end of November (Cmnd. 8427).

Scarman has a reputation, in staid circles, for being something of a “radical” judge, a supporter of a Bill of Rights, and he is well practised at holding inquiries into social disorders of one kind or another. He has clearly learned (though perhaps it came naturally) how to draw conclusions and make recommendations that will offend no one in authority and yet serve as evidence that not quite all is well and that “something” is being done. For example:

  I find that the direction and policies of the Metroplitan Police are not racist. But racial prejudice does manifest itself occasionally in the behaviour of a few officers on the streets (p. 127).
  There is scope for a more coherent and better directed response by the police to the challenge of policing modern, multi-racial society (p. 128).

His strongest criticism is describing as “a serious mistake” the operation known as Swamp 81, which involved flooding selected areas of Brixton with policemen who were expected to make widespread use of their powers to stop and search people in an attempt to detect and arrest robbers. This operation heightened the impression that it was difficult, especially for the young and black, to walk the streets of Brixton without being harassed by the police.

The report begins by considering the social conditions in which the riots took place. A picture of deprivation and discrimination, the fruits of capitalism, is visible even through Scarman’s studied understatement. In the Borough of Lambeth, which includes Brixton, some twelve thousand households live in overcrowded conditions, and one-fifth of all the housing stock is officially substandard. The unemployment rate in Brixton is thirteen per cent, but among young black males it is estimated to be a staggering fifty-five per cent. The other riot areas have similar environments. In Scarman’s words:

  The common strands in many of the major disorders . . .  are to be found in shared social conditions, in economic insecurity and perceived deprivation, in enforced idleness because of unemployment, and in the hostility of at least a section of young people to the police (p.14).

But these are merely “common strands”: 

  None of these features can perhaps usefully be described as a cause of the disorders, either in Brixton or elsewhere. Indeed, there are, undoubtedly, parts of the country which are equally deprived where disorder did not occur. But taken together, they provide a set of social conditions which create a predisposition towards violent protest (p. 16).

This is a comforting (for the ruling class and their government) piece of illogic.

Reaction to the report has been mixed. The Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality described it as “brilliant”, which is a sad reflection on his aspirations. Ted Knight, lefty leader of Lambeth Council, observed that anyone on the local streets could have said what the report does, and complained that Scarman had not pointed out the new restraints on council spending — as if the past history of Brixton had not included periods of more public spending. The strength of Lambeth Borough Council’s proposals can be seen from their suggestion that the Metropolitan Police would be more answerable for their actions if they were accountable not to the Home Secretary but to a local Police Authority — just as the police in Merseyside are!

Of course, it doesn't matter how the police are controlled. Whatever system is used, they will continue to be the defenders of capitalist order and capitalist property. Imagine that everything the reformers want of the police has been achieved: no racial prejudice among them, black policemen at all levels of the force, local accountability, true consultation, riot equipment surrendered. The essential role of the police will not have been altered. Many of those who see police harassment as the major cause of the disorders are quite content to see the police carry out their duties, so long as they do so in a less objectionable manner. In the words of the leader of one of Brixton’s black organisations: “We do not object to what they the police do so much as to the way they do it.”

What is this essential role of the police? Scarman provides an answer which is eloquent largely for what it leaves unsaid:

   the primary duty of the police is to maintain “the Queen’s Peace”, which has been described as the “normal state of society”, for in a civilised society, normality is a state of public tranquillity. Crime and public disorders are aberrations from “normality” which it is the duty of the police to endeavour first to prevent and then, if need be, to correct (p. 62).

In writing this, Scarman seems to have forgotten that part of his report which describes the “normal state of society" in Brixton, not an area noted for its public tranquillity. Slums, unemployment, insecurity, hopelessness form the Queen’s Peace in nineteen-eighties Britain, which we are supposed to believe is a civilised society! It is a topsy-turvy world in which penury and slums are accepted as normality, but that is the world and the logic of capitalism, and that is the world the police play a part in defending.

And that is the world at whose disposal Scarman has placed his services. The task of his inquiry was to alert the government so that it might tinker with a few things (such as longer training for police) in the hope that these will suffice to prevent such confrontations in the future. Socialists, having held our own inquiry into the nature of capitalist society, recommend that it be not tinkered with but replaced.

Paul Bennett

Year of shelter (1987)

From the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Scarman came on the air and told a harrowing story, of a baby being born to a teenage girl through incest with her father and the girl and father killing the baby as soon as it was born to try to avoid the shame and agony. He was speaking on BBC radio's World at One programme in early January and mentioned this as a case he'd had to judge in court. He was being interviewed about the launch that day of the United Nations International Year of Shelter for the Homeless of which he is UK president. He attributed the case he'd described to the housing conditions of the father and daughter. They lived in the same room, he said, constantly a few feet from one another and those conditions made incest a lot more likely.

Earlier in the day he'd launched the Year of Shelter by stating that Britain was in danger of becoming a "slum society". "Do people", he asked, "understand the misery, the squalor, the threat to health and even to life itself which homelessness inflicts upon millions of our fellow men?" Housing problems were, he said, "a critical element of the social conditions which provide the breeding ground for crime, mental breakdown, child abuse and neglect", destroying "man's chance of developing and maintaining stable human relationships".

The purpose of the UN campaign year is to increase public awareness and raise funds with a view to persuading governments to tackle homelessness and poor housing, in both the economically advanced countries and the Third World. "All that is needed", said Lord Scarman. "is the political and social will to make the necessary resources available". The extent of the problem is daunting however. Nearly one quarter of the world's population, over one billion people, live in what can be called unfit housing and up to 100 million have no home at all — they are literally without shelter. The problem is worst in Third World countries but in a typically developed country like Britain one million homes are officially classified as unfit for human habitation, 1¼  million people are on council waiting lists and 160,000 people upwards live in bed and breakfast hotels, described by the campaign's director. Leighton Andrews, as "squalid overcrowded substitutes for homes".

The UN is giving only a small amount of money to the campaign. But what it hopes to do is to encourage governments throughout the world to set up and fund projects to help deal with homelessness in their own countries. Will governments do this to any significant extent? The trouble is that houses, like everything else in today's world, are objects to be bought and sold on the market and in the final analysis they will go to those who have the money to pay for them. And there is only a limited degree to which governments can and will intervene to provide goods, whether food, housing or anything else, to people who can't afford them. This is both because governments' funds are limited by what they collect in taxes from their owning class and also because the job of governments isn't to provide decent lives for the people they rule over but to make sure that the accumulation of capital and the making of profit takes place as smoothly and efficiently as possible in the country they govern. This may at times mean intervening to help provide shelter for workers but at other times it may mean doing nothing at all and it never means solving the problem for the sake of human welfare.

This is why in Britain, after over a century of government reforms in housing, the problem is still as acute as Lord Scarman has depicted it. That is why, 40 years after a triumphant Labour minister declared "When the next election occurs there will be no housing problem in Great Britain for the British working class" (Aneurin Bevan. 14 July 1946), we are still haunted by the knowledge of bed and breakfast families, by the sight of the homeless roaming the streets by day and sleeping in care centres at night and by the threat, if we lose our job. of becoming one of the many thousands each year who can't meet their mortgage payments or pay the rent. That is why the present British government has only found £111,000 to put into the homeless campaign, a sum described by its director as 'disappointing'. and why the wild promises at present being made by the Labour Party that if returned at the next election it will house everyone are so much humbug.

In other words, despite Lord Scarman's plea, the "necessary resources" cannot be made available by "political and social will". Governments do not and cannot have that will and ordinary well-meaning people, no matter how hard they may work in campaigning and persuading, ultimately have no power to make the decisions that affect their lives and the lives of the community as a whole. They will only have that power when we all decide to take action to dispense with the present way of running society and organise our affairs on the basis of genuine democratic control and production for need.

If Lord Scarman is the humane understanding man he is said to be he should, despite being a High Court judge, give this idea some thought. For if. as he himself says "Shelter is a human need ranking in priority with food and water and a home as an essential condition of civilised life", he will only see truly civilised life in a social system quite different from the one he is at present a respected pillar of.

Howard Moss

Wage-labour and capital: The case of Grunwick (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year ago few people had heard of the dispute at the Grunwick film-processing laboratories; today, the effort of the strikers to win union recognition has become a national cause célèbre. The events surrounding the dispute have been obscured by the press, which would have us believe that Grunwick is some kind of elaborate game in which one side tries to drive a bus through a gateway and the other side tries to stop them. The principle involved is lost amid reports of how many policemen were injured and how many demonstrators arrested. It is also difficult because socialists, while seeing the trade-union struggle as necessary, also recognize its futility in terms of the revolutionary political action we call upon workers to take.

Members of the SPGB have attended the Grunwick demonstrations in order to sell literature and distribute a leaflet putting the Party’s view on the dispute. The first paragraph of that leaflet states:

The dispute at Grunwick will come to an end . . . but the class struggle will go on. The Socialist Party of Great Britain believes in the urgent need for workers to join together, not simply for the defensive right of union recognition, but for the purpose of organizing for social revolution—NOW. The need for class unity for Socialism is the pressing task of the age.

That, above all else, is the message of the SPGB. To abandon it would be to abandon our claim to be socialists.

So what’s Grunwick really all about? The strike began over a year ago when one of the employees at the firm walked out as a result of an argument about overtime. She persuaded fellow-workers to go out on strike with her. A majority of the workers from the mail-order section of the factory in Chapter Road, Willesden, walked out. They were disgusted by the conditions in the factory where managers shouted at and abused the workers, where they had to put their hands up before they could go to the toilet, and where employees were instantly dismissed for disobedience.

The owner of the factory, George Ward, dismissed them for going on strike. They took their case to Brent Trades Council (the representative body of local trade unions), which referred them to APEX. For months they picketed outside the factory, demanding higher pay and better working conditions and union recognition. Nobody listened to their case. In June this year the TUC was persuaded to take it up. Trade- unionists from all parts of the country came to support them. Mass picketing has now gone on for some months, so far without resolving the dispute.

What do the Grunwick strikers want? One thing they clearly do not want or even know about is Socialism. They want the opportunity to belong to a trade union, and for their employer to recognize it and reinstate the workers who were sacked for joining it. Without being organized in trade unions, the working class would be in an even poorer state than it is now. Trade unionism alone, however, will not solve the problems capitalism throws up for the working class. Union combination can improve wages and conditions only in accordance with the economic anarchy of the profit system. It cannot be stressed too much that if workers want an end to exploitation, it is political action to capture the state and establish Socialism they must be committed to.

Nevertheless, disputes like Grunwick demonstrate the inherent problems of capitalist society. First, it shows clearly the role and the immense power of the state. Why are thousands of police brought to guard the property of one man? Because the state is the executive committee of the ruling class and is bound to protect capital against wage-labour. In private, representatives of the state try to persuade Ward that he’s swimming against the tide and should recognize the union; but in public, the workers must be blamed.

Second, it is interesting to note who is in control of the state on this occasion. Not the Tories, the traditional representatives of private property and freedom to exploit, but the party of the trade unions and Clause Four: Labour. No doubt more Labour ministers are sentimentally attached to the unions than their Tory opponents, but when their commitment is put to the test they prove far more concerned with the right to exploit than with the right to strike.

Third, the fact that most of the workers at Grunwick are Asian immigrants means they are more easily intimidated, more desperate for work (immigrant unemployment is much higher than the average, especially in this area of London) and that they are less experienced in trade-union organization. The main reason for Ward’s employing them is that they will accept worse pay and conditions than other workers. Similarly many of those involved are women.

Socialists are not concerned with the “rights” and “wrongs” of the Grunwick dispute. We do not see the class struggle in terms of moral injustice. Under capitalism everything, including the prevailing morality, is loaded against those who are forced to sell their labour-power. To see George Ward as the root of all evil, as the Left has done, is to create the illusion that the defeat of Ward is more important than the defeat of capitalism.

What of Ward’s supporters? There is the National Association for Freedom which represents the more backward and reactionary section of the capitalist class. The Conservative Party is divided over Grunwick. The division is an index of the attitudes within the ruling class towards trade unions. The “right wing” of the Tories, represented by Sir Keith Joseph, stand for the traditional Tory attitude that the capitalist should be the sole master of his business, answerable only to the demands of profit and in no way to his employees. The other Conservative view, represented by James Prior, Shadow Minister for Employment, is based on the so-called “free market” in which trade unions are free to negotiate with employers and reach settlements without state interference.

That was the view taken by the Scarman enquiry which was set up to look into the Grunwick dispute:

The company by dismissing all the strikers, refusing to reconsider the reinstatement of any of them, refusing to seek a negotiated settlement to the strike and rejecting ACAS offers of conciliation, has acted within the letter but outside the spirit of the law. Further, such action on the part of the company was unreasonable when judged by the norms of good industrial relations practice. The company has thus added to the bitterness of the dispute, and contributed to its development into a threat of civil disorder. (Our emphasis.)

Clearly it is in the interest of the ruling class to strike a balance between excessive exploitation and threats to the smooth running of capitalism. That is why they reject open hostility to trade unions in favour of “enlightened capitalism”.

What of the Left at Grunwick? As usual, they have confused the issue. They have vastly overestimated the importance of it. It is not, as they claim, an attempt by the capitalist class to destroy trade unions. In fact, trade unions are of use to employers (especially when reformist hacks like Ray Grantham are in control of them). In our leaflet we told workers to reject leaders:

Whilst the organized labour movement accepts reformism they are happy—it is time to reject their leadership and organize independently. THE EMANCIPATION OF THE WORKING CLASS MUST BE THE WORK OF THE WORKING CLASS ITSELF.

The Left, far from telling people to reject leadership and organize democratically, naively call for yet stronger and more militant leaders. These are the people who see themselves as the vanguard of the working class, who are going to lead us to the barricades. They have been conspicuous by their silence when members of the SPGB have been arguing the socialist case to people at Grunwick. They have been seen standing in the background selling newspapers and muttering something about “traditional demands” and “the need for action”. Perhaps it is because these self-appointed leaders share Lenin’ belief that workers are too stupid to understand Socialism—far better have them shout slogans at a bus-full of confused workers. As our leaflet said:

The enemy is not those still working at Grunwick. We must unite to persuade them to the side of their own class interests. The enemy is not the police. They too are members of the working class. When the movement for Socialism grows they will stop doing the dirty work for the parasite class who give them their orders. THE REAL ENEMY IS THE SYSTEM OF SOCIETY WHICH PUTS PROFITS BEFORE PEOPLE AND PARASITES BEFORE WORKERS. We must unite to abolish the cause of the sickness of society, not just fight against the symptoms.

Marx argued the case for a future society without buying and selling, wage-labour or capital. That alone is the object of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. We urge all readers to involve themselves in the struggle for a world in which trade unions will be unnecessary because the buying and selling of useful things, including human energy, will be a thing of the past.

Steve Coleman

Brixton explodes (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the riots, the deluge. As the fires died in Brixton, the smouldering passions there were doused in words hosed out from all kinds of social and political analysts. Most of them claimed dolefully that they had been expecting just such a thing to happen for a long time; all of them were alert with theories about the causes, and thereby with suggestions to stop it happening again.

One who did not offer any analysis was the very man in the whole of Britain who might be expected to know more about civil disorder than anyone else—Home Secretary William Whitelaw. But apparently he had so little idea about what happened and why that he had to set up an enquiry to tell him. In charge of the enquiry is Lord Justice Scarman, who did similar jobs on the Red Lion Square confrontation in 1974 and Grunwick in 1977 and who, if he doesn't get a rest from it soon, may come to think that open air life in London is about as peaceful as the North Bank at Highbury when Spurs are playing there.

The analysis of the Brixton riots covered a pretty wide field. On the one hand there was the Labour leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, whose role in the affairs of London becomes daily more obscure as people begin to wonder whether he is a councillor or a comedian. Knight declared (Guardian, 16/4/81):

We went to see the commander of the police tonight to demand that he withdraw his men. He won't do it.

And he then went on to advise:

... a future Labour government must dismantle the Metropolitan Police and replace it with a new force "responsible and answerable to the working class people".

Knight is one of those "practical socialists" who, while not actually being delirious, suffer from these dreams in which the police don't have to be a coercive, property protective force but can assert the minority privileges of capitalism in the interests of the unprivileged majority , This is a common sort of delusion among "practical socialists", who deceive themselves that capitalism doesn't have to be capitalism—and Knight's problem is that when he talks like this he is not joking.

On the other hand there was the reaction of Margaret Thatcher—and nobody is in any doubt by now about her role in capitalism's affairs. There was no surprise when Thatcher resisted the invitation to agree that pressures like racial discrimination and unemployment could have influenced the riots. And in between Knight and Thatcher there were the senseless trendies and liberals, like the teachers who tried to get the NUT Annual Conference to debate an emergency motion which called for the restoration of government grants for housing, education and social services.

One thing all these analyses hold in common is the notion that basically there is nothing wrong with capitalism. They all agree that the priority is not to abolish the system but to patch it up; any conflict between them is over how much patching up is needed, and where, and whether it can be afforded right now. The most visionary among them misconstrue Brixton as the result of malignant government policies and harsh police methods; the least visionary misinterpret the riots as .the malignant response to a benevolent, natural order of things.

From this it is clear that capitalism is OK; Whitelaw would hardly have chosen anyone who was likely to say differently. The Home Secretary is a tirelessly courteous man who resembles a friendly sea lion but that should deceive nobody. His plump, fatherly demeanour hides an iron determination to do as capitalism requires, at whatever cost to an undoubtedly kindly disposition.

How then should an enquiry into Brixton proceed? Well first there is the character of the place and the question of whether this is unique or even unusual. Brixton is not one of the world's beauty spots. Arterial roads suck in heavy traffic; there is the prison of grim infamy and, near the Town Hall, there is Rushcroft Road, where the fascists once jammed the streets with their malignant prejudices. The area was largely an Edwardian development and it has streets of substantial villas of that period, now run down and multi-occupied by the more depressed strata of workers. A study of the southern part of Lambeth in 1976 found 18 per cent of the housing in poor condition and 42 per cent of the people there in shared accommodation. These statistics represent workers whose deprivation is such that they must concentrate where the rents are lowest, even if that also means where the walls are damp, where the rats run and the floors are rotten. For these workers, survival takes a desperate toll; they are capitalism's social misfits or its unemployable—single parent families, weary pensioners and, inevitably, immigrants.

Like many parts of London, Brixton has immigration written into its history and by no means all the immigrants have come from what is evasively called the New Commonwealth. But it did receive the first imported workers from the West Indies in the early fifties, and they have stayed, raised families and are easily identified by other, similarly desperate workers venting their frustrations on the most accessible scapegoat. 

So, Brixton has become famous for tension as well as for its seedy buildings and its street crime. The Metropolitan Police say that Lambeth ranks second in their entire area for violent crime: in 1980 they recorded 2859 cases. In 1975 a police report stated that 80 percent of muggings—quick, violent, usually small scale street robberies—were committed by young blacks and that 85 per of the victims were whites. These figures were triumphantly used by racist organisations like the National Front, would not be anxious to emphasise inherently subjective element involved in any criminal statistics. Workers who were already in a panic at the decline in the fabric of the area might have concluded that they were surrounded by black thugs, that 80 per cent of the black youngsters were muggers. But the same report said that only 4 per cent of youngsters were involved in street crime, suggesting that the overwhelming majority of them keep to the law. 

Brixton's street crime gave it a deserved reputation for being about the most intensively policed part of London. It regularly returned the highest figures, outside the West End; for arrests for Sus, the offence which ropes people in not for actually committing a crime but for a couple of policemen think that they are contemplating one. Brixton has also had unusually frequent attention from the Special Patrol Group, which stopped thousands of people in the streets for spot checks and arrested hundreds of them. The police justified these tactics by a sharp fall in reported street but in the process, to some extent, they replaced the muggers' violence with their own. Contact with the SPG is not a tranquilising experience. Brixton bubbled like a volcano; the police tried even harder to hold the top down but in the end it had to blow up.

The riots were seen by many workers as authentication of the doom laden prophecies which have emanated from Enoch Powell, beginning with his infamous 1968 Birmingham speech in which he foresaw "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". Perhaps Powell feels that his reputation for rigourously logical thinking has been sustained. But there were others who also foretold the trouble which can be expected from crowding a specially depressed population into a decayed area and subjecting it to pressures such as racial discrimination, chronic poverty and state violence. Powell's contribution—if it can be described as such—is to blame the riots, and indeed much of the conditions in which the riots happened, onto the skin colour of the rioters. The famous logician Powell is here indulging in the fallacy of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which may be comfortable for him and which may appeal to the more ignorant and prejudiced among the working class but which is not logical or reasonable .

Even Scarman will probably be aware that Brixton is not unique, either now or in the past. In 19th century Britain, for example, the appetite for labour stimulated by the Industrial Revolution drew masses of Irish workers to this country. They came mainly to escape from the appalling famines in Ireland; with only their working abilities to sell for their living they came looking for employment, cramming into towns like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. By 1851 they made up nearly 3 per cent of the population and, doing mainly unskilled work in textiles and building, they were in competition with equally desperate English workers for jobs and housing.

These were the roots of the discrimination which was practised against the immigrants, with "No Irish" signs up at .the windows and 'employers keeping English and Irish workers apart to avoid trouble at work. Even so there were riots and battles over many years, as one group of degraded workers fought with another over who should be exploited and repressed at one particular place and time. By the end of the century the Irish had become largely absorbed but they had been replaced as the butt of popular prejudice by the Jews, with an Enoch Powell—Tory MP Major Evans-Gordon—rousing mob ignorance for his own political advantage.

Then, as now, deluded workers were avoiding the reality that problems like slums, unemployment, poverty and competition for jobs cannot be laid at the door of an immigrant work force. Capitalism both creates the demand for that work force to be mobile and the urban concentrations in which it must try to survive. For capitalism works by the production of profit, which means by the exploitation of the majority of its people. For capitalism, profitable is beautiful: cheap is beautiful; so often slums are beautiful; conflict is beautiful; ugliness is beautiful. Brixton is beautiful.

And all of this, in 1981, can come into focus on the streets of some urban desert, when a black youngster is stopped by a policeman whose uniform gleams with the authority of one whose job is to protect the minority rights and privileges of the capitalist class which is responsible for the desert. If that same policeman also represents working class prejudices he may treat the youngster to some racist insults. If the focus becomes sharper, like the rays of the sun, there can be a conflagration in which those youngsters might feel that in some undefined way they are getting some of their own back as they riot and burn and loot.

And in that too there was an irony, in Brixton, because as a working class area, the shops specialise in the tawdry rubbish which is all that impoverished workers can afford. The looters were not getting their own back; in what they thought of as their freedom to take what they liked they were in fact affirming their own degradation. .

The conclusion of this enquiry then is that Brixton is not unique in either time or place. There have been many other, similar, riots in many parts of the world and there will be many more for as long as capitalism continues to exploit and repress the majority in the sordid interests of the minority. Here are the roots of Brixton's agony; they will not be approached by any official enquiry no matter how rigorous. The workers of Lambeth, of London and of the world are in a crisis which it is in their own power to end and they should need no judge to tell them what is wrong with society.

Ivan