These FoolishThings . . . (1996)

The Scavenger column from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pornography

W.H. Smith admitted it had inadvertently sent Mr Shaheen copies of a magazine called Lipstick, unaware of its adult content. The spokeswoman added: “We stock far fewer of these titles than others, and they are a small part of the market. There is a limit beyond which we will not go, but we have to balance commercial and moral obligations.” Sales of adult magazines have risen by 10 percent in the past year. Guardian, 11 April.

Why BSE?

The deep reason for BSE and CJD is that the modern world has lost sight of what agriculture is for . .  In the Western world agriculture is designed to make money . . . About half the grain and more than half the pulses grown in the Western world feed livestock . . .  We could just eat less meat. It is produced in such vast quantities only for profit . . . Meat is sold and sold again because it is more profitable to feed 10 kilos of wheat to cattle and pigs than sell one kilo for papadoms. Colin Tudge, Independent on Sunday, 24 March.

“He loved Big Brother”

Job hunters face a new hurdle in their search for work—the value test. Increasingly, employers are checking candidates values to see if they fit the organisation’s goals and way of working. A candidate’s technical expertise and key competencies are almost taken for granted. Values represent the spirit of the company and are increasingly seen as the key to rising profits and maintaining a motivated and cheerful workforce. Financial Mail on Sunday, 26 May.

We said we’re sorry!

Shell mounted a robust defence of its activities in Nigeria yesterday, ruling out withdrawal from the country, and calling for an atmosphere of “reconciliation”. Chairman John Jennings attempted to draw the sting from attacks on Shell’s policy in Nigeria at the group’s annual meeting, agreeing to shareholder calls for a moment’s “quiet reflection” in memory of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, a long-time critic of Shell who was hanged by Nigeria’s military government last November. Mr Jennings admitted publicly for the first time that Shell had bought around 100 handguns for police guarding the operations in Ogoniland, the Nigerian region where it had been accused of damaging the environment, and where Mr Saro-Wiwa’s campaign was based. He also admitted that Shell’s drilling standards in Nigeria were not as high as those applied elsewhere and that Shell had suffered more oil spills in Nigeria than elsewhere. Guardian, 16 May.

Fair shares

Share options and compensation pay-offs are set to earn West Midlands Travel bosses millions of pounds, it was revealed yesterday. The share options— agreed before the takeover of the Birmingham bus giant by National Express last year—entitled ex-chairman Don Colston to pay only £385 for shares in WMT’s new owner which are now worth almost £1.2 million. Former managing director Joe Duffy, who will receive almost £400,000 in compensation when he retires at the end of this month [April), paid about £562 for shares valued yesterday at £1.75 million. Evening Mail, 10 April.

Bleeding workers

Until now, employees at the Mechctronics plant in St. Helens Auckland, County Durham, have been allowed to donate blood at a nearby working men’s club every six months on the firm’s time .. . (Now) they have been told they can still go to give blood but must work an extra 45 minutes to make up for lost productivity. Evening Mail, 30 April.

The Scavenger

Food: why we don’t get the best (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food matters to everyone. People have been led to revolt if unable to obtain enough. But quality, rather than quantity, is just as important. Politicians, their profit-chasing overlords and the marketplace that unites them, are attracting unfavourable scrutiny after successive well-publicised poisonings, adulterations, scams and animal abuse cases. 

Following salmonella, E. coli, BSE and a spate of more recent food scandals, people are unsurprisingly alarmed over just what they are eating and just what can be done to ensure meals are safe. Here are just four disturbing news reports of late which emerged in less than one week: 

The [Pesticide Safety Directorate] working party on pesticide residues found that some of the largest retailers, including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Safeway, sold produce that had levels of pesticides above the maximum residues limit, including illegal growth regulators and known carcinogens (Guardian, 17 September). 

Food hygiene inspectors from the European Commission are to start an urgent investigation into standards in French rendering plants following allegations that untreated water, blood and discharges from animal carcasses, and sewage have been used in making poultry and pig feed. The Commission and the French government have been anxious to play down the accusation for fear of sparking a new European food crisis . . . The common factor in this summer’s crises has been manufacturers’ failure to maintain hygiene standards in the highly competitive food industry (Guardian, 18 August) 

Children who eat fishfingers are being fed ‘undesirable’ levels of two of the world’s most feared poisons, reveals an official report. Dioxins and PCBs—believed to cause cancer and have ‘gender bending’ effects—were found by Government researchers in all the samples of fishfingers bought in different supermarkets. Higher levels were found in the fresh fish on sale, particularly in oily fish such as herring which the Government has been urging people to eat for health reasons . . . Despite the fears, the Government has decided against issuing any warnings when the research—the first of its kind by the Agriculture Ministry—was published quietly in August on an official website (Daily Mail, 20 September). 

Belgium yesterday warned the EU that tests carried out on meat for export . . . show that livestock reared on farms near industrial plants carries higher levels of dioxin contamination . . . Belgium’s food crisis in May caused consumer panic after the revelation that animal feed had been contaminated by potentially cancer-causing dioxins at a food plant in Flanders which allegedly mixed motor oil with fats to bind the feed . . . the Belgian crisis of confidence in food safety worsened yesterday after revelations that sewerage sludge had been mixed into fodder, as in France . . . sludge from toilets and showers, water from slaughterhouses and cleaning products had got into the food chain (Guardian, 22 September). 

The September 18 “highly competitive food industry” reference says it all, and should enlighten concerned shoppers to the total incompatibility between access to continuously high-quality comestibles and competitive production for financial gain, due to market forces always tending to value profits ahead of excellence. 

There will never be a time when most people become wealthy enough to buy only the very best, since while competitive production exists so, too, will competitive employment. And with competing employers, driven by those same market forces to hold down wages and salaries (and taxes that provide welfare benefits) so as to favour profits and stay in businesses, there will always exist a great many working and non-working people with limited incomes who nevertheless must purchase sustenance. This section will vary in size according to the needs of capital. 

Official DSS figures released in February showed that, after deducting housing costs, no fewer than 14.1 million people had below half the average income. While food producers are going to be keen to obtain this poorly-paid group’s money, competition to grab a greater market share by supplying the least expensive food means there will be an ever-present pressure to minimise quality, because superior ingredients, more thorough procedures, better trained employees, etc all cost more. Include today’s international intensification of competitiveness through deregulation and the steady removal of tariffs, trade barriers and subsidies in pursuit of a correctly functioning global market, and the seemingly endless appalling procession of scandalous headlines becomes perfectly clear. 

Uncompetitive regulations 

The Blair Government knows that inferior and dangerous food means antagonistic voters; a situation to be earnestly avoided. Labour certainly doesn’t want to end up like the former Belgium government of Jean-Luc Dehaene—booted out of office largely due to carcinogenic dioxin at up to 700 times permitted “acceptable limits” being found in eggs, chickens and then pigs, just weeks before a general election. So what’s their approach? A proposed “independent” Food Standards Agency. 

The FSA proposal emerged not long after Blair came to power. Large retail firms and manufacturing interests were soon applying pressure, insisting the agency be made less regulatory. Then businesses caused the agency to remain on the drawing board longer by complaining that the FSA should not be funded through levies on their food outlets. And despite the BSE catastrophe under Tory rule, the Ministry of Agriculture—which former minister Edwina Currie said “had long ago set itself up as a trade union for producers”-was once again siding with the food industry. Yum, yum: prole food Yum, yum: prole food. 

There is to be publication of an annual report from the Working Party on Pesticide Residues, who will have a small number of food samples tested, and name retailers selling produce with residues above the “maximum residue limit”, and identify the goods concerned. However, this can be nothing more than a show to dispel the public crisis of confidence in food. 

Can consumers turn to organic foods? Perhaps some will be able to keep paying higher prices to reduce their contamination levels (except from equally dangerous airborne chemicals). But the majority can never have high quality organic food and freedom from various other sources of pollution, because of the international competition that is an integral feature of capitalism. Britain cannot go “green” alone. The additional financial burden on capital to establish and maintain a far safer and healthier environment would result in an economic crisis in no time. Britain simply cannot impose rigorous standards on producers without increasing their costs, and in a global market, that would spell disaster for UK firms. 

Everyone concerned about avoiding dangerous and inferior produce has to ask themselves this question: “What did I vote for at election time?” Since, whenever the electorate empower yet another bunch of politicians to—unavoidably—cater to the needs of business as the priority, the very conditions that give rise to food scandals will remain in place. If different competing groups retain ownership of productive resources, they must continue exploiting those assets in the most profitable manner in order to sell and prosper from what is produced. One result? BSE and 43 people dead (that we know of), and a renewed chilling warning this September from Professor Liam Donaldson, the government’s own chief medical officer: “What is absolutely certain is that the present relatively low number of cases [of nv-CJD] should not lead anyone to conclude that the worst is over. Levels of human exposure at the height of the BSE epidemic would have been high.” 

Misuse of GM technology; pesticide-induced cancers; animal maltreatment; cover-ups; no or inadequate labelling; abysmal hygiene standards. None of these need happen. We do not have to futilely hope profit-biased governments will impose uncompetitive regulations and strict enforcement. There is another option to capitalism’s inability to deliver continuously high-quality food for all. If we all own the means of producing food, then we all own the produce, which means never buying it or having any financial restraints on its quality.

Max Hess

Greasy Pole: Hogg’s ditch (2009)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

What with all the talk about reforming Parliament, antagonising MPs by restricting their ravenous appetite for expenses, it may not be long for the famous green benches to be swept clean of those venerable persons wallowing in titles like the Right Honourable Douglas Hogg, Old Etonian, Third Viscount Hailsham, Privy Councillor, Barrister at Law, Queen’s Counsel, Member of Parliament (for the present) for Sleaford and North Hykeham, brother of a High Court Judge, husband of a baroness and owner of Kettlethorpe Hall, a stately home in Lincolnshire. With a moat – about the only exterior relic of the original 13th  Century  house. It is some time now since Hogg was at his most active politically; he was Minister of Agriculture Fisheries and Food from July 1995 until Labour’s victory in 1997 since when he has stayed contentedly inconspicuous.

Whistle Blower

But that was before the Daily Telegraph, digging into the secrets of the MP’s claims as revealed by that whistle blower’s expensive aids to research, turned the spotlight away from the drab fiddlers on the Labour benches and onto the gloating Conservative manipulators opposite. This made sickeningly fascinating reading, for among the claims for money for a chandelier and a swimming pool was one for clearing the moat at Hogg’s home. The new Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy marked the occasion at a Manchester school: “What did he do with the trust of your vote?/Hired a flunky to flush out the moat”. A nation-wide rush to consult architectural reference books revealed that a moat is water surrounding somewhere – a castle, a fortified house – important enough to need such a defence against an invading  enemy or perhaps, in some cases, irate deprived Lincolnshire peasantry. A moat is expected to be, in scale with the place it defends, impressively large – wide and deep (Alan Clark, the late alcoholic and disreputable MP who owned the magnificent Saltwood Castle in Kent, was in the habit of taking a swim in the moat there) with a drawbridge to filter out unwanted visitors. The photographs of Hogg’s moat, however, showed it to be not much more than an above average sized ditch – although one which obviously needs regular, expensive cleaning paid for through parliamentary allowances. David Cameron was infuriated at the revival of the stereotypical image of the greedy Tory toff which he has worked so hard to eradicate.

Lord Chancellor 

As a lawyer Hogg is accustomed to defending the indefensible and his response to the Daily Telegraph’s exposure was desperately evasive: “That is not correct. It was in a letter which explained what expenses we had incurred, it wasn’t an expenses schedule…All the claims I made were agreed in advance”. Reinforcing this attempt to pass the blame for his behaviour elsewhere he conceded, when asked about his constituents’ anger at his claim for the moat, “It is true that the system is clearly flawed”. Hogg’s ancestors would have been proud of his lawyerly skills here; although he has remained a humble QC both his father and grandfather rose to the heights of Lord Chancellor, head of the country’s judges and in the House of Lords sitting, by ancient custom, on a large cushion called the Woolsack from where the noble lords were kept under control, speaking to the point and avoiding all challenge to the presumptions of property society. However humble, Hogg is a rich man, with shareholdings and property investments which protect him from the kind of penury familiar to some of his infuriated constituents.

BSE And CJD

Unlike his eminent forefathers Hogg did not make a name for himself in government. At his peak, in charge of Agriculture Fisheries and Food he was marked down as The Minister Without A Friend. Rivals on the lower reaches of the Greasy Pole happily fed the media with snide gossip about him, typically that he had been given the job when the first choice had turned it down because it was politically suicidal. When the BSE crisis broke in 1996 and the first cases of the human variant CJD were reported Hogg was cruelly exposed as lacking the sleight of word so essential to survival. Alan Clark, who could always be relied on to kick someone when they are down, recorded meeting “little Douglas Hogg” in 1983,when he was a Junior Whip: “I can’t decide whether he is likeable or not. (But I should say that many do not have this difficulty.) I don’t mind people being rude, provided that they are not uncouth with it. But he is colossally self-satisfied. Or is it a chip?…’Well,’ I said ‘how are you keeping all the new boys in  order?’…’By offering them your job’.

Sacked

Well very soon someone will be offered Hogg’s job. “I have decided” he said on 18 May “that now is the time to tell the Sleaford and North Hykeham Association that I will not be standing at the next election”. It was a polite way of saying that he had been sacked for failing to fit in with Cameron’s efforts to recast the Tory image into a youthful, classless, open party who can, by a process so far unattainable to all others, transform capitalism into a humane society. But euphemisms are essential to a  politician’s vocabulary; over the expenses scandal they have been extensively used to muddy the reality that while the amounts of money involved in the Lord’s and the MP’s wretched scams are mind-boggling to so many workers struggling to survive they are trivial compared to the cost, in every sense, of the damage capitalism does to the world and its people.  

Ivan

Caught In The Act: Mad Politicians Disease (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mad Politicians Disease

Followers of the parliamentary debate on BSE in cattle may well have wondered whether our legislators had themselves been eating too much diseased meat. Is there a danger of us all becoming infected with Mad Politicians Disease? Was it quite sane for the government to respond to the fears about infected cattle and the short-lived ban on imports by some European countries on such traditional lines? Is it certifiable to insist always that everything made in Britain, including agricultural produce, is the best—the purest, most beneficial, safest? Do rational people really believe that it is impossible for a Briton ever to do anything underhand, like knowingly selling stuff which is dangerous to human beings (there was some other explanation for the sudden doubling of BSE notifications when the government steeply increased the compensation)?

Agriculture Minister John Selwyn Gummer (the name was not thought up by Private Eye) was obviously suffering from something when he told the House of Commons that we have right and justice in the law on our side and in these circumstances other countries must obey EC law". Gummer had forgotten that the British government has had little hesitation in disobeying the law when it has suited its interests—for example it is about to be prosecuted by the EC over the sewage which garnishes many British beaches. Thatcher was clearly not completely well when she declared that "British beef is safe" and denounced the import bans for being inspired by commercial reasons and not by a concern for consumers' health. The Prime Minster had managed to blot out the fact that the whole thing began for "commercial reasons"—feeding herbivorous cattle on the remains of scrapie-infested sheep as a cheaper way of fattening them on their way to market.

A Christian humbug

Gummer's record as a defender of the profitability of British agriculture has at times been coloured with personal heroism. He it was who proclaimed, as the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl left its deadly dust on the sheep-rearing high lands of Wales and North West England, that there was no cause for alarm. To prove his confidence, he would that Sunday "enthusiastically' eat Welsh lamb for lunch. It is not known whether his enthusiasm holds out: four years later the animals are still so radioactive that their movements are restricted. Now he has other ways of showing his heroism, proving his disregard for personal danger by sinking his teeth, before the cameras, into a beefburger and then forcing his small daughter to bite the thing as well. We can only hope this innocent child will not fall prey to the ailment which so dramatically distorts the judgement and standards of people who get power over capitalism and who, confronted with the fact that everything is produced for "commercial reasons", will justify all sorts of risks being taken with our safety and our lives.

To put it bluntly, Gummer is what he looks and sounds—a Christian humbug. Along with his irritating claims to an immaculate moral rectitude he specialises in teeth-grating publicity stunts (perhaps influenced by his brother, who is chairman of a large public relations company). Yet he has shown that whatever principles he claims to have are flexible, for he switched effortlessly from being a passionate supporter of Edward Heath to a similarly intense devotee of Margaret Thatcher. One possibly embarrassing leftover from those far off days he could not so easily discard is his marriage to Heath's secretary, the morality and motivation of which is ponderable. Gummer's big chance came when Cecil Parkinson's behaviour towards the pregnant Sara Keays was not all that should be expected from a British gentleman; almost overnight Gummer found himself chairman of the Conservative Party. But his time at Tory headquarters was not notable for his unqualified success and popularity and his heady promotion was followed by a humbling exile to second-in-command at the Ministry of Agriculture. This allowed him to employ his boundless talent for hypocrisy in the defence of British farming, on the principle that capitalism's dominant morality is production for profit and not for human use and benefit. We can only hope Thatcher never puts him in charge of nuclear energy.

False tipsters

Apart from Gummer. one of the government's most pressing problems is the embarrassing exposure of its inability to control the British economy. For some reason there seems to be an unquestioning prejudice among workers that the Tories are always better at this than are the Labour Party. At one time this was expressed, to canvassers on the doorstep, in the phrase that the Labour Party "haven't got the money"—whatever that meant. A likelier basis now is that while Labour is the party of envy, hostile to profits and suspicious of business, the Tories are wise in the ways of the boardroom and the city and can therefore balance the Budget, hold prices stable, promote the competitiveness of British exports and so on. There was never any real evidence to support this view and the present situation, when things are quite plainly out of control, emphasises the fact. Like Nigel Lawson (whose "blip" in interest rates and rising prices has been swelling up now for something like two years) before him, the Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major can only promise that the official indices of success—lower interest rates, stable prices and so on—will begin to register in the near future.

However one thing which must be made clear is that the statistics which influence the calculations. promises and forecasts of ministers like Lawson and Major have a basis which is. to say the least, suspect. Labour's last Chancellor. Denis Healey, writes in his memoirs, The Time of My Life, some barbed criticism of the information supplied to him by the "experts' in the Treasury. For his first budget the official estimate of the crucial Public Sector Borrowing Requirement was too low by £4000 million. Two years later the estimate was £2000 million too high. In November 1976, when Healey was applying for help from the International Monetary Fund, the Treasury's estimate for PSBR turned out to be twice as high as it should have been: if it had been accurate, says Healey, he would not have needed to go to the IMF in the first place—a peevish memory, since a Chancellor who has to negotiate a loan from the IMF is not considered to be a successful manager of the finances of British capitalism.

Healey's reaction is to regard all economic prophets with a healthy scepticism: "None of the independent forecasting bodies had a better record" and, later, “Like long-term weather forecasts they are better than nothing". But is that good enough? All sorts of decisions are taken, and justified by governments on the basis of these kinds of forecasts—all sorts of verbal assaults are launched on the supposedly greedy and irresponsible workers, all sorts of cuts imposed in our living standards. At the time the forecasts are made we are encouraged to regard them with something like the reverence the awful John Gummer gives to Margaret Thatcher and the Bible. When it counts, none of the experts says anything like this: "Look, this is what we think the economic situation is and what it will be like in the future. It means you're going to have to tighten your belts again. But of course we've been wrong so many times in the past that what we're saying now isn't worth much. If we get it right we're in luck, you know, we can say we're in control of things. In any case, whether the figures say we're 'right' or 'wrong' makes no difference to anyone who has to work for a living".

Out of control

The fact that politicians and "experts" can't make capitalism do what they want means that the system can't be controlled or made to operate to the benefit of the majority. It would be in our interest to replace it with a society which we can democratically control. Meanwhile, being out of control is a feature of a lot of mental disorders—which brings us back to John Selwyn Gummer and the rest of our legislators and their present assurances that diseased food is good for us and that capitalism is good for us—even if it kills us in the process.

Ivan

The madness of John Bull (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The roast beef of Old England is a central component of the myths that go to build the image of John Bull, the phlegmatic, bulldog character, the epitome of British ‘virtues'.

This sturdy icon of strength and resilience owes it all to eating beef, unlike Pop-Eye who did it more economically on spinach. That these ideas were first promoted at a time when the average Englishman saw beef about once a year, and the penalty for poaching the lord's deer was hanging or transportation; that when meat did become accessible to the industrial working class on a regular basis it was more likely to be the frozen Argentinean variety, and that now the most popular meals for eating out are most likely to be an ‘Indian’ or a 'Chinese' is by the way. It is a myth that has done good service to the British ruling class in creating a nationalist consciousness.

British beef has now suffered a severe knock due to increased concerns about BSE. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or "Mad Cow Disease’.

This disease has been prevalent in Britain for a number of years, but not really endemic Not too much concern was shown by the authorities because it was not believed to be ‘species transferable', i.e. that humans could get it from eating cattle meat. It is similar to a disease present in sheep called "Scrapie", which has been known for some two hundred years but no-one has contracted dementia from eating sheep. Cattle have been grazed for years on grass infected with Scrapie and seemed unaffected.

All that changed when in the unceasing drive to reduce costs of production imposed by the economic laws of capitalism, someone came up with the bright idea of feeding animal protein to cattle for the purpose of fattening them more quickly. Scientists warned the government of the risks of transmitting disease—bearing pathogens to stock and thence to humans, but the Ministry of Agriculture chose to ignore these findings and rejecting a tight licensing scheme, allowed the meat industry to determine its own standards.

Some five years later there were alarming reports of cases of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans, attributed to eating beef. It was considered at that time that only the brain and spinal cord was suspect, but opinion is now coming round to the idea that other parts might be too. It now seems that the disease producing pathogens can cross the species barrier, and this raised horrific potentialities. CJD is an intense form of dementia invariably culminating in death in three months to a year.

This is a major crisis for British capitalism, striking on several levels—economic, credibility of Ministers and government, mythology, the soundness of British agriculture, and the future of McDonalds.

While the government at first under-reacted they are now probably over-reacting with the talk of killing of at least four million cattle. However, they see this as the only way to restore the most important item, confidence, so that they can go on selling British beef and continue to make profits. The immensity of the task of killing four million cattle in sheer logistic terms is horrendous, quite apart from the further pollution the incineration will cause. Since the infective agent now thought to be a prion— a form of protein—is highly resistant to destruction, including by heat it is by no means certain that incineration will be sufficiently effective.

Of course the principal reason why the government is taking drastic action is not because of fears for the health of the British public. It is because of their fears for the health of the British export trade and the huge sums of money involved. When Germany banned British beef two years ago it was condemned as arrogant German nationalism. When the whole of Europe joined in and the facts could hardly be denied, something had to be done or at least it had to look as though something was being done.

It will be instructive to see how long the present crisis lasts and whether they will be able to wriggle out of it. But don't think that contamination of food is confined to beef. Food has been contaminated, adulterated and manipulated since the early days of capitalism and the situation continues today.

The working class can draw two lessons from this sorry spectacle. First, that any trust given to either political leader or to business is totally misplaced. In the running of the capitalist system only one criterion can count the need to make a profit What other reason could there possibly be for feeding processed sheep meat and chicken droppings to vegetarian cows?

The other lesson is that capitalism in the midst of its seeming indestructibility is in fact very vulnerable. At any time a crisis of this nature, a Chernobyl, an oil slick, a stock market panic can cause big problems to the poor idiots who by to make it run smoothly. And whoever else suffers in the process, workers always suffer too.

Cyril Evans

Democracy and mad cows (2000)

From the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fact that a privileged few can make decisions in secret that potentially affect the lives of thousands gives the lie to the notion of democracy under capitalism

“In March 1996, the Conservative Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell told the House of Commons that, despite the government’s many previous assertions to the contrary, there probably was a link between ‘mad cow disease’ and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).” So, rather dramatically, begins an article in the Economist that goes on to puzzle over just how much information governments should share with the public. The fact that the question needs to be asked at all makes a laughing stock of the notion, propagated so tirelessly by the Economist, that we live in a democracy. There is a name for the sort of system where a privileged few can decide what information is fit for public consumption. It is, effectively, a dictatorship.

The head scratching of the leader writers of the bourgeois press began when Lord Phillips recently released his 16-volume report. A report which took him two and a half years to complete, cost £27 million to produce, and all of a few seconds to conclude that nothing and no one was to blame: it was all just an unfortunate quirk of the normal functioning of the system. We could be forgiven for thinking that the only reason for publishing reports like these in the first place is, as the American comedian Bill Hicks once claimed, to put the country back to sleep and convince them that their government is in control.

But in a sense Lord Phillips is quite right. The BSE crisis was just an unfortunate accident arising from the normal functioning of the system. And although one might think that it would therefore be natural to challenge the system that accepts this lunacy as an unfortunate accident, nothing could be further from the minds of the authors of the press coverage that followed.

Although the report draws no real satisfactory conclusions, it does draw attention to the unwillingness of politicians and civil servants to “alarm the public”. For example, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) withheld for six months the publication in the scientific literature of the first report into BSE. Many of the papers made much of this government fear of panic, as if the state was an overanxious parent, concerned that its favourite child wasn’t yet ready for the news of the death of a pet rabbit. But “panic”, of course, would have been a quite reasonable response for the public to make if made aware of the fact that their food was lethal. The government knew full well that this panic would not just lead to tears at bedtime, but falling sales. As the Western Daily Press of 17 October put it, the pressure on the farming industry to increase profits had been “relentless”. “It was productivity which counted, not product safety … The crash in beef prices, when it came, was devastating, particularly when the gates closed on the export trade, then worth £500 million a year.”

The 4 November New Scientist criticises this lack of transparency, saying that “information [should] be made freely available to everyone as fast as possible” and concluding that “real changes are needed. We must continue to call for free access to information on every issue where science and technology affect the public.” What New Scientist fails to see is what might be called the obvious: all science and technology affects the public, and science and technology can have no neutrality as long as its decisions are ruled by the interests of capital. Is it any wonder that science and technology presents itself to many in present-day society as a hostile force to be opposed, when it could so easily be turned to the task of satisfying human needs? These conflicting calls for secrecy and openness can reflect the conflicts of interest between different sections of the capitalist class (see box), as well as between the capitalist and working classes.

But technology and the products of our own hands do not just appear as a hostile force. Under capitalism, they are in fact a hostile force. Modern farming technology on the one hand provides us with the means to feed the world. On the other, it feeds cows with dead cows in order to cut costs, and views the resulting loss of human life as a mild irritant to be reported on, and quickly forgotten. According to Department of Health figures, more than 80 people have already died after prolonged suffering with vCJD. Some models have estimated that thousands more could die. This might sound like a cause for concern for those of us who eat food, but for the capitalist class the “major economic concern was the loss of export markets,” as the BSE inquiry admits. This is only natural, the report adds. It says that “economic concerns naturally had an influence on both government and industry in their response to BSE”.

Indeed, the Daily Telegraph goes further and dismisses the Phillips report as a “fruitless and pointless search for someone to blame” when it was “clear” that the evidence available at the time was not sufficient to risk restricting beef sales or jeopardising an industry. This is the familiar line, taken by the government throughout the early days of the crisis, that the absence of “hard evidence” meant that no threat existed. Yet it was clear that there was a potential hazard to human health, which was kept secret. Even when dangers became more and more apparent, these were deliberately downplayed to protect the profits of the beef industry.

This is not covered up in Phillips’s report. Indeed, the report does not even censure Professor Richard Kimberlin, who was at the time a member of the government regulatory committee on BSE and a paid consultant to the meat and livestock commission—-in fact it supports the right of scientists who sit on government committees to have relevant commercial interests.

New Scientist has some reassuring news, however. “Can we be sure that a similar food and health disaster won’t happen again? The simple answer is no,” they tell us. Private Eye had already drawn our attention to the fact that hundreds of thousands of children have been injected with vaccines produced from bovine material which it was known could have been infected with BSE. The BSE inquiry confirms that this was the case. France is also currently considering measures to “control panic” amid fears that contaminated feed “is still finding its way into cattle troughs” (Reuters) and the Daily Telegraph recently reported that MAFF has just cut its research budget . . . .

Commenting on the report, Health Secretary Alan Milburn tries to reassure us that the “era of bland reassurances has come to an end.” And should anyone be tempted to believe that bland reassurance, we should remember what the priorities of government are. Peter Mandelson, when he was Trade and Industry Secretary, told the Confederation of British Industry that his brief from Blair was “to act as a vocal and tenacious advocate of the needs of wealth creation and business”. His replacement, Stephen Byers, told the House of Commons in March 1999 that he was “putting the interests of business first”. So forget the hypocritical cant of the politicians when they tell us that things are changing. Everything will stay the same until we organise to change it.

When our own food threatens to destroy us and appears to us as a force beyond our control, then there is a danger—-reflected in religion and idealism—-of doubting the ability of our thinking to distinguish truth. In a period of social decline, such as that we are now in, men and women are faced with two options: accept that there is no way out and resign themselves to their fate, or confront reality and fight to change it. We in the Socialist Party have taken the latter course of action.

Scientists, such as Professor Richard Lacey, a leading microbiologist, were ridiculed by the media, farmers, the food industry and politicians when they said at the time of the first cases of BSE that it represented a major human health risk. They became objects for fun, crackpots. As members of the working class aiming to come to a materialist understanding of the society we live in so that we can begin to change it, we look forward to the day when our “crackpot” position is vindicated.

Stuart Watkins

Mad cows and Englishmen (1990)

From the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Angry noises from the House of Commons: how dare the French and German authorities ban "our" beef? Apparently the British cows have gone mad, largely as a result of being fed on the cheap from the rotten corpses of diseased animals.

Selwyn Gummer, the Agriculture Minister, has been force-feeding his children with beef burgers to demonstrate that British cows are to be trusted implicitly. If his children start to go soft in the head in ten years time nobody will know whether it was the mad cows or Gummer's influence which is to blame. Red-faced British farm-owners appear before TV cameras calling upon the government to tell the workers that British beef is safe to eat. The government obliges, and the mad-cow Prime Minister offers her most soothing of tones as she assures us that roast beef and yorkshire pudding will do us no harm—as long as the eggs used to make the pudding are not infected with salmonella of course.

What is it all about? Cheapness. It is about producing food for workers who cannot afford to pay high prices. So, how can profits be kept high while prices are brought to an affordable level? Simple answer: produce dodgy meat. You do not need to be a Marxist to see that this is what is going on. Jan Walsh, who was Consumer Journalist of the Year in 1986. states in her book, The Meat Machine—The Inside Story of the Meat Business, that:

   More than any other food, meat has been debased. Its finest points—flavour, texture and nutritional value—have been swept aside by an industry ever greedy for an extra penny profit. Price has been its downfall. We spend more on meat each week than on anything else in our shopping baskets. No other staple food costs so much a pound and yet is such a necessity for the vast majority of the population. Manufacturers, too, have to pay a lot for the meat they transform into such high-value products. So every scrap they can save, every corner they can cut, means money in the bank.

One corner which can be cut concerns the feeding of animals. By forcing cattle to eat sheep's offal farmers reduce the cost to them of producing marketable cows. If such feeding makes cows ill it is in the economic interest of the farm-owners to cover this up. Their purpose is not determined by the callousness of agricultural capitalists—many of them are decent folk who do not want to make people ill. But under capitalism profits must always come before care, health and human needs.

An old story
Mad cow disease is just the latest symptom of capitalism's drive to produce food on the cheap. Food adulteration is as old as the profit system. Writing of working-class life in the middle of the last century, Engels described how:

  The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle . . . The sellers are usually small hucksters who buy up inferior goods, and sell them cheaply by reason of their badness.

After nearly a century-and-a-half of capitalist reform and "progress", what is new? The wage slaves are still being sold second-rate food because they cannot afford the best. The only difference is that back in the last century the workers living on poverty rations were visibly poor; these days the consumers of cheap and rotten meat are often salaried workers who imagine that they can escape malnutrition because they have a few pounds in the bank.

It is unknown how many workers suffer needlessly and die prematurely because of being malnourished. We know that there are many millions world-wide who die each year due to the lack of proper nutrition and clean water to drink, including 15 million children under five But aside from these obscene images of pot-bellied victims of a system which lets humans starve while food is destroyed in order to keep prices and profits up, there are millions more who are ill not because of lack of food, but because the food which they can afford to live on is bad for them. It is easy enough for government Ministers to tell workers to eat healthier diets—grilled steaks and plenty of green vegetables are recommended—but when you are a parent living on income support the freedom to choose an alternative to a Big Mac—which is adulterated by twenty-seven different chemicals in each hamburger—is pretty limited.

Mad Economic System

It is quite obvious that capitalism can never feed everyone, or allow those who can only afford to buy cheap food to eat well. In terms of both adequate nutrition and quality taste, the diet of workers will always be inferior to that of capitalists who can afford to eat what they like. Capitalism is polluting the very soil in which food is grown, and profit can never be compatible with human wellbeing.

The real problem facing us is not just mad cow disease, but the Mad Economic Social System, otherwise known as MESS. To get rid of the capitalist mess we need to abolish production for profit and establish a global community of production solely for need. In such a new system of society cattle would not be reared on the cheap and killed for sale and profit. If people still chose to eat meat in a world socialist society they would free access to it. The production of meat would not be on the cheap, but would involve care for the health of the animal while it was living and concern for the best quality food for those who consume it.

There would be no need to pump hormones into pigs and cows to increase their market price by increasing their weight, and there would be no need for animals to be fed in ways that would make them diseased. In a socialist society the first priority will be that needs are satisfied, healthily and pleasurably. It is quite possible, once production is no longer under the control of a minority class, people will decide to evolve diets which will not involving the killing of animals at all.

Our society currently faces a major food problem. Millions starve and many millions more are malnourished. Each month brings news of a new foodstuff which is harming us so that some capitalist can make a profit. Only by taking into the common possession of humankind the means of producing food—and all other wealth—can we tackle the urgent task of feeding the starving, providing decent food for the ill-fed. and living in harmony with the other animals which inhabit the Earth.

Steve Coleman

Power, corruption and pies (1997)

From the October 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The science behind the BSE scandal

It is well known that the “mad cow disease" or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy appeared due to the feeding of sheep carcasses infected with the brain disease Scrapie to cattle as a protein supplement. This was done because it was a way of producing meat as cheaply as possible, thus yielding a higher profit margin. It was done with callous disregard for dangers to human health, which were predictable.

Since the resulting appearance of connected cases of Creutzfeld Jakob Disease (the human equivalent of BSE) a programme of government propaganda has been instituted, never hesitating to bring in the pronouncements of official "scientists" to keep a lid on the looming crisis, while marginalising those who have warned of the real danger to human health. In spite of this, a picture of what the profit system has unleashed has peeped through.

Some background may be useful. All healthy mammals have within their brains prions, an unusual type of protein in that it contains no DNA (the code that allows for cell reproduction). It is a bit of a mystery, but what has become less so is that they seem to exist to prevent wasting of the brain. Mice bred free of prions have quickly exhibited signs of coordination problems, inevitably leading to total loss of movement and death. In addition vital areas of the brain have shrunk to a third of their normal size. All of these signs are hallmarks of BSE and CJD and other prion-related illnesses. As the problem with BSE and CJD is not the absence of prions, but the presence of mutated or “bad" ones it can be presumed that, when mutated, the prions cease to function in the proper way and this leads to the damage to brain matter which eventually gives rise to the now ominously familiar sponge-like appearance of the brain the final stages of infection. Worth bearing in mind is that all methods of killing proteins have failed to rub out prions (perhaps because of lack of DNA). All very interesting, but so what?

Rogue prions

Well, these problems are often hereditary (perhaps genetic), but mutated prions can also act as rogue disease agents. When transmitted to a new host the "bad" prions can lock into healthy ones, turning them into diseased prions and then spreading the process throughout the brain.The final destruction of the brain can take up to 30 years or it can proceed much more rapidly. The crucial point is that this transmission isn’t restricted to members of the same species, but can occur from one species of mammal to another, as long as the prions are similar enough. Now for the heavy stuff: humans do not share key prion similarities with sheep, but we do with cattle. Therefore sheep prion disease like Scrapie cannot be passed on to humans, but this does not mean that humans can’t catch the brain diseases of cattle or other animals. Quite the opposite in fact.

In this light, the government and their "establishment scientists" longtime insistence that BSE was merely a form of Scrapie can be seen for what it was: a smokescreen to throw people from realising the true nature of BSE and its implication for human beings (Scrapie being no threat). In other words a lie—a lie sanctioned by the dubious “science” the state and food and agriculture capitalists rely on for their credibility. Credibility that is beginning to look as solid as, er ... cow shit.

So, although we are not vulnerable to the sheep-form of this prion disease, cattle evidently are and, as we will look at later, we are vulnerable to the form the disease/mutation takes in cattle. And if we were not then why have the official agencies been so eager to obscure the true nature of BSE with theories like the above? Could the fear of economic crisis, the peril to profit, the world-wide collapse of industrial meat production and the inevitable knock-on effect on the major northern political apparatuses be behind it?

The full implications of what has been unleashed are suggested by findings which show that 16 species of mammal, including primates and pigs (close genetic relations to ourselves) can pick up the prion disease causing BSE/CJD via eating infected material. Such tests carried out by the World Health Organisation early this decade led to the conclusion that risk to humans from infected matter entering the food chain was unacceptably high.

All the more alarming. 1994 saw over 146,000 official cases of BSE and up to last year the WHO suggests that up to 40 percent of cases were not even reported and out of those that were up to 40 percent were left out of the statistics. The latter point again raises the question: Why? In addition government guidelines on what constitutes "safe" meat may be wrong by up to 10,000 percent. All of which means the amount of infected carcasses that actually entered the human food chain can only be guessed at. especially over the period it was being treated as of no threat to "consumers”, i.e. working-class people.

However, a rough estimate is that by 2001 up to 1,800,000 infected cattle may have been consumed on the British market alone. And this may be a bit too much on the rough side as methods of transmission to cattle and incubation periods are not fully know. Further, the susceptibility of pigs for instance to mutated prions may also mean that other types of livestock are possible infected. Recent government measures affecting sheep and goats can perhaps be viewed in this worrying context, although once again these are being presented as "Scrapie" control.

Infected food

The consequences are already working their way through.The recent spate of tragic deaths in young people with no family history of CJD can’t be explained by the state’s cover-up agents, especially as it is usually a disease of old age. These heartbreakingly young deaths suggest that exposure has led to a galloping form of brain degeneration almost without precedence.Why some people should develop CJD to such an extent, so quickly, is worrying and indicative and raises questions about who may be most susceptible to what sort of level of exposure to infected food before rogue prions take hold.

Is this a new thing? In scale maybe, but in 1978 the US government stopped supplying their troops with beef from certain sources. They must have seen these as “suspect" and we can only wonder just how aware the authorities everywhere have been of the danger to humans from potentially diseased livestock in the industrial capitalist system of food production. Still stateside, there are suggestions that many people diagnosed as having certain forms of Alzheimer’s Disease are in fact suffering from a type of CJD. We should not be surprised.

The ethics of those with socio-economic power and the ethos of their system have been thrown into the spotlight through their handling of this affair. Not least by the fact that the little research now being done on the problem has come so late in the day. The truth has surfaced through a cloud of bogus findings by the government and the Ministry of Agriculture Farming and Fisheries and the rubbishing of independent findings detrimental to those with economic and political interests at stake.

Those scientists who are not willing prostitutes to capitalism’s official bodies are only now getting across the probability of cases of CJD being a result of exposure to BSE-infected beef and related products. The view of BSE being on a par with Scrapie has gone down the toilet and other official pronouncements are gradually going the same way, especially ideas about only certain cattle body-parts carrying a risk to people. It is becoming clear that it is not just brain matter that is a danger. Exposure to the brain and nervous system of infected animals is the most potent, but ingestion of any part of a BSE-positive carcass must be viewed as a danger. At the least the previous line about liver, kidneys and flesh being unlikely to carry a health risk has no grounding in scientific proof. The reverse seems more likely, as the recent proscription of certain cuts of lamb seems to reaffirm. And this, again, raises questions about wider livestock contamination: has the brain disease returned to its source?

That this danger could arise, that health disaster is in the offing and the official abuse of "science" to sanction effective cover-up jobs tells us more than enough about just where the needs of people for safe, healthy rood rank in the priorities of food production in capitalism.

George.