News in Review: Beeching’s rail cuts (1963)

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

Beeching’s rail cuts

Doctor Beeching’s casuality list was as long as anyone could have expected.

Nearly a third of the passenger route-miles to be withdrawn; almost a half of the stations to be shut down; seventy thousand railwaymen, by one means or another, to be got rid of.

The Tories have always claimed that they are the party of free competition, which is supposed to be something which will bring enormous benefits to us all. According to Conservative propagandists, the worst thing that can happen to us is to be left at the mercy of a monopoly, which will do dreadful things to our standards of living. Yet the Beeching Plan will give, over large areas of the country, a transport monopoly to the road interests. What if these interests act as the Tories have assured us monopolies always act?

This is not the only example of how flexible is the Tories’ regard for their own consistency. At one time the British capitalist class, with the support of the Labour and Conservative Parties, thought that nationalisation of certain industries was in their own overall interests and was, therefore, inevitable, desirable and morally sound.

But since 1945 the capitalist class have been taking a second look at State control. Slowly but definitely they have changed the internal structure of some of the State industries; nowhere is this so apparent as on the railways.

Which brings us to the question of whether nationalisation, apart from being a fraud upon the working class, has also disappointed the capitalists?

The Beeching Plan seems to be going out for an immediate profit from the railways, without providing the kind of facilities which the capitalist class as a whole must require from a railway system. That was exactly what nationalisation was supposed to avoid.

There will probably be a big row over the Beeching report, with both sides representing their case as the one which has everyones’ interests at heart. And inevitably the working class will be wasting their time in another fruitless controversy while the real problem—the private ownership of society’s means of life—is left to do its worst.

Minister’s morals

Macmillan's government, perhaps on its death bed, continues to provide the popular press with some juicy front page copy.

The Vassall case, as far as the TWTWTW set is concerned, is still going strong. Jokes about the Admiralty are still sound social currency.

The case of the junior minister who lent his car to a delinquent youth was deprived of its news value just in time by the minister’s quick resignation.

And on top of all this, the missing model—missing, at any rate, until the press ran her to ground in Spain. (The Guardian reported her discovery with a sober couple of inches; The Daily Express with a giant, predictably leggy picture of her.)

The ministers' denials that they were engaged in what are coyly known as “improper" relationships in any of these cases, are convincing enough. Yet however subtly it has been done, mud has been thrown; the kind of mud that sticks.

A capitalist government can do all manner of unpleasant things to the working class who put it in power. It can break strikes. It can try to hold down wages. It can take the working class into a war which they know a lot of them will not survive. The working class do not seem to object to this kind of treatment sufficiently to turn the government out.

But a government cannot for long get away with anything which smells of corruption or sexual licence. Perhaps the working class, whose teeth are cut on capitalism's morals, feel that their leaders should themselves be beyond reproach. And perhaps there is an element of envy, at the easy, glamorous lives of rich men and powerful politicians,, contrasted to the drab existence of most workers.

In fact, the personal morals of members of a government are quite unimportant. There is no evidence that impeccable family men administer capitalism any more humanely than those whose private life is rather more complicated.

While workers click their tongues over the front page stories, capitalist society—the real scandal—quietly continues.

The budget

The theme of this year's Budget, claimed the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expansion. Cheers, it seemed, all round. They are all Keynesians now and therefore believe that reducing taxes and increasing government spending will actually stimulate an industrial revival.

If this were so, then capitalism would have solved one of its big problems. There would never be any more recessions; no industry need ever collapse again.

But facts say, quite plainly, that economic setbacks are as much a part of capitalism as ever. In fact, the Chancellor's financial juggling, far from preceding and guiding economic trends, is the result of those trends and trails some way after them. Maudling's tax cuts, for example, were widely forecast to happen in some shape or form, because the economic and political situation indicated that the time was ripe for them.

In any case there is nothing new about “expansion" Budgets. Butler introduced one in 1953. So did Amory in 1959. A short time after these Budgets, both Chancellors forgot that they had been telling us that the way to prosperity was to expand by cutting taxes and increasing spending. The government brought in other measures which increased taxes and reduced spending. There is no reason to assume that Maudling's optimism will not be similarly forgotten.

This is the economic switchback of capitalism, which Budgets and the other measures try to control.

They never succeed; the problems of capitalism live on, long after the Chancellors who try to solve them are forgotten As each Budget Day draws near, the Chancellor is swamped with advice from all manner of reformist organisations. Some of these have recently come to the conclusion that the financial affairs of British capitalism are exceptionally complicated and need an enormous administrative effort to keep them going.

In The Guardian on April 2nd, Christopher Layton was hoping:

  Will tomorrow’s Budget be a milk and water affair, or will it at last demonstrate that the Government is seeking, to get to the roots of the country’s economic sickness?

And his question was partly answered by Samuel Brittan in The Observer on April 7th:

   . . . Mr. Maudling will need luck as well as skill if the gamble is to come off.

and

  Unfortunately the international financial system is full of weaknesses; the U.S. economy lost its zip several years ago and the European boom looks very old and tired. It is on these world uncertainties that we must keep our fingers crossed.  . . . 

Budgets, just like the rest of capitalism’s efforts to control its own anarchies, are a gamble. Maudling’s may be designed to allow Britain's ruling class to breathe more freely, but it is just as likely to fail in this as its predecessors.

Typhoid in Zermatt

One by one, some ugly facts have trickled out about the typhoid outbreak in Zermatt.

At first it may have seemed like a simple case of bad luck, the sort that could happen anywhere, any time.

Then an article in the Swiss paper Gazette de Lausanne suggested that the first case of the disease was diagnosed last September, that the village’s water supply had a doubtful origin and was not properly cleansed. A couple of letters in The Guardian of April 1st, written by people who had recently returned from Zermatt, offered additional evidence that all has not been well in the Swiss resort for several months. The lid was really blown off by a merciless TV programme. Later in the year, we shall probably know the full facts and it will not be a pleasant story.

In the height of the holiday season the population of Zermatt usually rose from its permanent 2,000 to about 15,000. Its prices were high, its hoteliers thriving. To keep up its attraction for winter sports enthusiasts, Zermatt installed a lot of machinery to take the visitors up to the top of the snow slopes. But behind this facade, it seems, the resort was neglecting essentials like a pure water supply.

Its own water resources were not sufficient to cater for the . influx of holidaymakers and so Zermatt has been tapping other, more risky, sources. Some of these were damaged by severe frost and that, possibly, is where the disease started.

In other words, Zermatt preferred to concentrate upon the gimmicks which it knew would bring in a quick profit and to take a chance on the safety of its public health facilities. Capitalism in general has come to realise that this is a short-sighted policy which can lead to serious loss of profits in the long run.

This is how it has worked for Zermatt, The typhoid outbreak has ruined the image of Switzerland as a hygienic country of sun and snow and healthy holidays.

And it has brought the unfortunate typhoid sufferers face to face with a principle which capitalism, in one way or another, always applies; profit first, the rest a long way after.

Nicky

- Who's Nicky ?

- You mean what's Nicky. It’s the National Incomes Commission.

- Who commissioned it?

- It was set up by the government.

- What for?

- To consider wage settlements which the government thinks are too generous to the workers.

- Has it got a chairman?

- Yes.

- Paid?

- Yes.

- How much?

- Er — £12,500 a year.

- But . . .

- No more questions, please.

Housing: Both Sides (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Both Sides (1)

  It’s a proper home for my kiddies I want—you can’t bring them up in a place like this. We'd go to Hong Kong if necessary to get one. (Mrs. Ford, London slumdweller—News Chronicle, 27.11.56.)

  

  Mr. Colin Tennant, 32, Princess Margaret's friend, is buying, on behalf of his family, an island in the West Indies. It is Mustique Island, in the Grenadines. Extending over 1,250 acres, it has eight magnificent beaches. I understand that the price to be paid will be in the region of £50,000. (Sunday Express, 5/4.59.)

Both Sides (2)

   It’s the rats are the worst. They even come out in the daytime when it‘s dry. I’ve never left the pram outside my door since one jumped out from under the blanket (Mrs. Doyle, Liverpool slumdweller — Observer, 27.11.60.)

  The Duke and Duchess of Norfolk moved from Arundel Castle to their new dower house in Arundel Great Park yesterday. The house has taken over two years to build and has cost £60,000 . . . The Duke and Duchess will hold a “housewarming" party tonight. (The Guardian, 7.11.61.)

Both Sides (3)

  Now they are seeking a house so desperately that they are prepared to offer their youngest child, nine-month-old Andrew, in exchange. He and the other children . . . have been in the care of Staffordshire County Council for the past 10 months. . . . (Andrew’s mother) said today: “You have to be pretty desperate to offer your child for a house." (Observer, 11.12.60.)

   

  He (Lord Snowdon) was very keen to tell me about the new house that people have been making such a fuss about. He told me he would be just as satisfied with a small cottage. (The Lord Mayor of Nottingham, talking about Princess Margaret's home in Kensington Palace, The Guardian, 20.6,62.)

Both Sides (4)

   ". . . a man in poor health who, with his wife and three young children, had for some time been living in one room. They had been living on National Assistance for more than a year, and after trouble with the landlord had to leave their room. The children had been taken into care because in the only alternative accommodation the couple could find, children were not wanted.” (From a Family Service Unit survey, The Guardian, 14.2.63.)

   After weeks of house-hunting, Princess Alexandra and Mr. Angus Ogilvy, who marry on April 24th, have found a home.

    It is Thatched House Lodge, Richmond Park, a house chiefly of the early Georgian period, standing in 2,200 acres of royal parklands and deer forest. It is on high ground with fine southern views over Petersham and Richmond . . . The house has twelve bedrooms, six bathrooms, six reception rooms, two cottages, a passenger lift, a squash court, a heated swimming pool, and stable block of five loose boxes. (Evening Standard, 12.3.63.)

50 Years Ago: Profits Before Life (1963)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The profits will not allow it.”

Rarely has the plain, tragic truth been so bluntly stated by a capitalist as on April 28th in the Westminster Coroner’s Court.

The Coroner was holding an inquiry into the “accident” that took place upon a building in course of erection in High Holborn.

Two and a half tons of iron was being hoisted by a crane “made to take three tons.” “Everything was brand new.”

Henry James Matthews a lad of 18, acting as a crane signalman, was killed as the result of the chain of the crane breaking.

After the poor lad's brother had given evidence, the Coroner called a member of the firm that made the chain.

After great difficulty the Coroner got the makers to give evidence. The secretary of the company that supplied it offered the Coroner some certificates, but said that he knew nothing about the chain itself.

The Coroner was forced to remark that “it seems a very casual way of doing things when a man's life is at stake.”

Finally a member of the manufacturing firm told the Coroner that he had been asked to attend “to listen to the evidence.” He was asked by the Coroner: “After testing do you go over the chain to see if there are any cracks?”

The answer was a remarkable indictment of this cursed system of society, for he said: 

“NO. THE PROFITS WILL NOT ALLOW OF IT”!

“ I am not talking about profits,” retorted the Coroner, “ I am talking about the safety of human life.”

After some further questions the Coroner was led to say: “You are perfectly well aware of what you are talking about. It is no use trying to befool me. You are trying to ride round the subject.”

A link of the chain was handed to the witness and he was asked why, although the link had snapped, it showed no signs of fracture. All he could say to the point was: “It shows no signs of fracture.”

The Coroner said that “looking at the surface of the link you can see it is not a fracture, and that the metal had never been properly welded.”

Frederick John Parkes, Factory Inspector, said that the quality of the workmanship of the link was very bad indeed and that the metal was defective. It had not been properly welded.

Even the representative of the building company had to confess that he “found the rest of the chain not perfect.”

(from the May 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard)

Branch News (1963)

Party News from the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Annual Conference is over and now is the time when outdoor propaganda really starts, and what better aid for success in this field is to have available a big and well-produced Socialist Standard to help spread the word of Socialism. This May issue has been prepared with this end in view and if everyone who normally takes one or two copies each month, at least doubled that quantity we should have sold the whole issue. A well worth achievement!

Glasgow Branch is contesting the Municipal Election in Woodside during May and the Branch members with their usual enthusiasm have been busy canvassing and holding many indoor and outdoor meetings. It is hoped that this issue of the Standard will help them in their task.

The Mid-Herts Group founded last year has been holding meetings at intervals in homes of members. A regular meeting place has been obtained and a programme of lectures and discussions is planned. This summer, some members of the Group intend to help Paddington Branch in the running of outdoor meetings at Stevenage. An “Any Questions” meeting was held by the Group at Welwyn on April 3rd. This was well attended and very successful. Good literature sales and collection resulted.

The third meeting of the three-branch effort (Paddington, Bloomsbury and Ealing) takes place at the small Conway Hall, Red Lion Square on Monday, May 13th at 7.30. There is ample room and again the meeting will be Any Questions. It is hoped that refreshments will be available. Bloomsbury Branch is organising this meeting.

Please note the May Day meetings (on May 1st and May 5th), good support by members will mean good meetings. Members please co-operate and support the speakers.

The severe winter curtailed Wembley Branch Socialist Standard canvassing efforts, but with the better weather, the recent sluggishness and inertia have given way to renewed activity. The May Socialist Standard will have special attention, and several evening canvasses have been planned in addition to the usual ones at weekends. Again, in support of the Special number we have arranged a public meeting at Barham Park on May 20th. Subject—of course— “Housing”. Every branch member is asked to support this very important meeting and see that it is well publicised. There will at least be leaflets, distributed well in advance, and the usual local press adverts.

Other events in the offing are two propaganda trips to Southsea in June and August, a film show, and the opening of outdoor meetings at Earls Court alternate Fridays, commencing June. Full details will be announced as they are known. Watch the Socialist Standard for these, also for the dates and titles of future branch discussions and lectures (suspended recently to make way for Annual Conference business). Finally, well designed posters advertising the branch's regular meetings are still displayed prominently on two of the Wembley Railway Stations and we shall try to keep them there for as long as we can. Who knows, perhaps some of our many visitors will in future be disgruntled victims of Dr. Beeching’s axe.

We are receiving a number of enquiries from readers in North East England, and have also received two applications for membership. It has been suggested by members of Central Branch, living in the Newcastle-on-Tyne vicinity that a Discussion Group might be established. Would readers and sympathisers, interested in forming such a Group, please submit their name and address to the Central Organiser at H.O. so that the matter can be considered.

Phyllis Howard

Finance and Industry: The Misleading Mortgage (1963)

The Finance and Industry Column from the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Housing

The Misleading Mortgage

A lot of fuss has been generated about the LCC's proposal to grant 100 per cent, mortgages. We really don’t know why. The people who could hardly wait to join the queues outside London’s County Hall are likely to find they are possessed of more hope than hard cash—and it is hard cash that will still be needed under this new scheme.

In the first place, the 100 per cent, mortgage is not to be related to the asking prices of enthusiastic estate agents, but to the LCC’s own, more realistic, valuations. This will mean in many cases that the prospective buyer will still need to find a fair amount of ready cash to bridge the gap. And he will still have to find the wherewithal to pay his legal expenses and other costs.

So far the LCC have allocated about £2¾ million to meet the cost of the scheme. This is sufficient to satisfy only a thousand applicants for houses costing about £2,750, and nobody can say he is going to get anything wonderful for this sum these days. The Council may increase the allocation in due course, but it is already obvious that whatever sum is finally allowed it will be no more than a drop in the bucket in the present housing situation.

There has been talk that pressure may additionally be brought to bear on the building societies to follow the LCC lead. If so, this is hardly likely to get very far. Building societies are of all capitalist financial institutions probably the most reluctant to stray from the safe and steady road of profitable investment. Not too much profit—but not too much worry—is their policy.

In short, we have an idea that the overwhelming majority of house-hungry members of the working class are going to find the LCC scheme yet another of capitalism’s disappointments, all the harder to bear because of the high hopes it has raised.

Commerce

Tourism and typhoid

The recent outbreak of typhoid fever in Zermatt has caused the deaths of several innocent tourists and the illness of many others. It has given the Swiss tourist industry a severe knock, and Zermatt itself will take years to recover as a popular holiday resort. In the meantime, its hoteliers and shopkeepers are going to have a very hard time of it financially and there are not many outsiders, judging the facts of the case, who would not say that it serves them damned well right.

Zermatt was an expanding resort, a boom town of the Swiss tourist industry. Every year the influx of tourists grew bigger, the hotels more plentiful, the profits more encouraging, and the water supplies more precarious. But the water supplies could wait; in any case they were expensive and expense was begrudged. The main thing was to build, build, build; attract more and more visitors; make more and more profit. Even when the dreadful fact became known that the water was contaminated with one of the most dangerous diseases known to man, nothing was done about it. Tourists still continued to be attracted to the town. The germs continued to spread until one day Zermatt woke to find it had encouraged an epidemic.

This sort of thing happens all the time under capitalism, but only now and again do events really catch up with the perpetrators—a cable break, an aeroplane with a defect, an over-congested aerodrome, a collapse of a jerry-built house, an accumulation of a lethal pesticide, a "wonder drug” that does not cure but kills, the drinking water of a boom town that contains typhoid.

Only when these dreadful events occur do we realise just how revolting, how utterly pernicious in its effects upon human beings, is the capitalist profit motive. The Zermatt case reveals this in all its baseness. It was the sordid lust for profit, and nothing else, that caused the deaths and illness of those trusting but unfortunate tourists.

Steel

Together again

When the Allies got to work on German industry after the war, they made a brave show of doing something about the Krupps, the Thyssens, and the other steel barons. Their huge empires were broken up as “politically dangerous concentrations of economic power”; never again were they to come together to help threaten the peace of Europe.

Alas, as usual, capitalism quickly disposes of such naive intentions. The news is announced that Thyssens and Phoenix Rheinrohr are to come together again, just as they did in 1926 when they formed themselves into Vereinigte Stahlwerke.

The new merger will result in a firm employing 80,000 workers and selling £400 million of steel and steel products a year, the biggest turnover of all West German industry except Volkswagen. It will become the biggest single steel producer in Europe and a formidable competitor for the others.

Yet another example of the intrinsic drive for capitalism's units to get bigger and bigger—and in spite of difficulties deliberately put in the way.

Motors

Ford prunes its plants

As firms get bigger and bigger, so do the smaller ones go to the wall. This also applies to movements within the firm itself.

The new assembly plant being rapidly developed at Liverpool, plus the existing factory at Dagenham, gives Ford's two modern large-scale car-producing units. They also have a plant at Doncaster, which they got when they acquired Briggs Motor Bodies.

This factory has been quite happy to produce about 75,000 cars a year. But 75,000 is nothing in the car industry nowadays and so Doncaster will have to go. About 2,600 workers will be affected and will either have to take work at Liverpool or Dagenham, or take a chance at getting a job locally. This won't be easy because Doncaster is also a rail town and is already beginning to feel the edge of the Beeching axe.

That's another thing that happens in these mergers and "rationalisations." They bring economies in workers as well. It’s an essential part of the whole idea, of course.

Stan Hampson

Property-owning democracy (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are always being told that more and more people are owning their own houses. This, we are assured, is a great step forward. We are now on the way towards a “property-owning democracy” —the Conservative Party takes great pride in the phrase.

To begin with, these houses which some workers are now coming to own are in fact usually owned not by the occupiers but by the building societies or the local councils, or whoever else advanced the money for the purchase. A worker who undertakes the ownership of a house which has had to be mortgaged to the hilt to make the purchase possible is simply adding yet another monthly repayment to those he is already probably making on his furniture, his car, perhaps even on his clothes and his holidays. Besides the mortgage repayments, he has to face the steeply-rising demands for rates from his council; and, unless he is going to allow the place to fall down round his ears, he has to foot the repair and redecoration bills, or give up his spare time to doing it himself—first buying the necessary paint and materials.

Leaving aside the question of the deposit which has to be found at the very outset, and adding up only the mortgage repayments, the rates and the repairs, a worker who embarks on house-ownership is likely to find his outgoings much higher than his old rent. If rates continue to soar as they have been doing, some house-buying workers fear that the rates and repairs alone will soon take nearly the same proportion of their income as the rent would have taken before the war.

The hard sell
Apart from these factors, the vote-catching phrase “property-owning democracy” is very misleading. It seems to have been dreamed up by the publicity departments and advertising agents who now advise the big political parties on their “image” and their approach to the electors: as if the all-too-serious questions of the future of mankind were on a par with marketing a new brand of detergent or smell-remover. The phrase appears intended to counter the critics of capitalism who say that (despite our regular phantom “social revolutions”) the ownership of property is just as firmly in the hands of a small ruling class as it ever was—if anything, indeed, it appears to be becoming more concentrated still.

The figures have not been at all affected by the undoubted fact that more people are having to buy their houses in order to keep a roof over their heads. And this is not surprising when one reflects that the property which the ruling class has in its grip comes mainly under the heading of “capital goods’—land, factories, dockyards, and so on: for it is the possessors of this kind of property who own also the results of production in the factories and mines, and who then sell the products to realize their surplus value.

Landlord democracy?
Now houses, in the context of the phrase “property-owning democracy,” are not capital goods at all. For those who talk about “property-owning democracy” encourage us to look forward to the days when every worker will own his own house. And if everyone owns his own house, there will be no one else to rent houses to. Of course, houses which are rented out to other people are the kind of property which, like factories and offices, brings in an income without work to the lucky owners. But the Tories, when they brought out this idea, can scarcely have meant us to look forward to an extension of house-ownership in this sense: otherwise “landlord democracy” would have been a more appropriate phrase. No: they simply meant that more people would own the houses they live in.

Potatoes
But in this sense, houses are merely consumer goods. It is quite true that the worker has property in his own consumer goods. It is quite true that he owns the pound of potatoes he gets at the greengrocer’s until he has boiled and eaten them, and that he owns the coat on his back until it goes to rags. In the same way, if he buys the house he lives in, he will own that too until it is pulled down under some future slum-clearance scheme. But, as we said earlier, if the “property-owning democracy ” theory becomes practice, and everyone owns his own house, then the house-owner will have no one else to rent his house to—even if he wished to do so. His house will be merely part of his consumer goods.

Docile
Who would get the advantage of such a scheme? The capitalists or the workers?

To take employers of labour first: there could certainly be advantages for some of them. For the workers would be much less mobile. If a wage-increase was refused (in time of boom) or if wages were cut (in time of slump), the worker who only rented his house might well hand in his notice and go to a better-paid job in another district if he heard of one. But a house-owning worker would not be able to move half so quickly. He would have to put his house up for sale, and wait till a buyer came along; then he would have to find a new house in the new district. He would have to pay the solicitors' fees and the estate agents’ fees on the sale of his old house, and the solicitors’ fees and the stamp duty on the purchase of his new one. Besides that, unless he had completed his repayments, there would be the trouble and expense of paying off one mortgage and taking out another. His removal would be a much more expensive undertaking, and he might well accept a lower wage than his house-renting fellow-worker, rather than go to all the trouble—in time and money—of selling his house and buying another. House-owning, in short, might well tend to make the worker more docile in his dealings with his employer.

Idyllic picture . . .
What would be the advantages to the worker?

Let us put the case at its highest. Let us assume that, unlike most politicians' plans, this one comes into full operation. Every worker in the country will own his own house: let us assume that there are no rates to pay, no repairs or redecorations bills. Every worker has his own dwelling, free from rent, rates, or any expense whatever. What then?

It seems harsh to shatter what must seem, to some workers, an idyllic picture. But it must be done. For this “property-owning democracy,” within capitalist society, would bring no benefit to the workers whatever.

. . .  and the reality

This is why. Wages arc the cost of producing and reproducing the labour-power which the capitalist must have to keep his mines and factories turning out goods for sale. And in wages, the rent the worker must pay—or his housing expenses of mortgage repayments, rates and repairs—forms an important item. This is recognized perfectly clearly by all the large political parties. When, in the last war, the ruling class felt that its very existence was at stake, and wage-increases had to be avoided at all costs, then rents were among the first-controlled, and among the most strictly-controlled, of all workers’ expenses. This strict rent-control was introduced by the Coalition Government, supported by the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties. For they knew that if rents went up, there would be such industrial unrest—strikes, go-slows, and so on—that wages would have to go up proportionately to cover the increases. Alternatively, if rents could be kept down, then wages could be kept down as well.

Workers’ wages have to cover their expenses of food, clothing, housing, and so on. And if every worker in the country owned his own house, and either had to pay nothing for his housing, or less than his present rent, then the “housing element” in his wages would be correspondingly reduced or eliminated entirely.

Inescapable

It is easy to say that if there was no rent to pay, the workers’ standard of living would be higher, and that he could enforce this higher standard by industrial action. But if the workers can obtain a higher standard of living simply by deciding to have it, and by resolving to support their demands by industrial action—well, in that case, they could have it straight away simply by striking for higher pay, without going to the trouble of buying houses. In fact, whether they pay rent or not, the workers will be in exactly the same position as before: their wages will be enough to cover on the average their necessary living expenses. By exceptional militancy, they might get the wage level somewhat above this standard; by exceptional lack of militancy, the wage-level might fall somewhat below it. But. taking the whole of the working class together, that is what the wage-level is. And the workers will not avoid that inescapable fact of life under capitalism by running after the latest reformist slogan.

In fact, the “property-owning democracy" is like all other reforms: the more capitalism is “changed,’’ the more it remains the same.

Alwyn Edgar

Canada—the Same Story (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is no shortage of housing in Toronto. There are apartment blocks in abundance, sub-divisions in profusion, and gimmicks to induce the unwary signing of leases. The radio roars the advantages of “graceful living” in this area and the beauties of countryside combined with easy transportation to downtown Toronto, with a dash thrown in from the real estate agents to sell “your home" through them, fast . . .  fast . . .  fast . . . 

Truly a paradise—empty houses, flats and apartments. Unbelievable to the British Worker. True, nevertheless. Just listen, inspect and you are “sold.” Then comes the snag. How much can you afford for a down payment? There is now a housing problem in Toronto . . .  or is it a poverty problem? If you haven’t got the cash then you can’t sign the lease, purchase the house on a heavy mortgage, or take that wonderful trip to New York which was promised to you, just for signing on the dotted line.

Yet the large sub-divisions on the outskirts of Toronto which have been developed could be a foretaste of what housing could be like under Socialism when the profit motive has been removed. The houses are designed to suit the needs of families, whether large or small, and are fitted with all the necessary up-to-date equipment, such as refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers. There are several architectural plans to choose from. Each tastefully designed house has a garage, a basement recreation room and is fronted by a large lawn. Within a short distance are the shopping plazas and supermarkets.

Owning their houses is an ambition of many workers, but many of those who through a lifetime of sacrifice attempt to accomplish this, find that when their mortgage is due for maturity there is a lump sum payment or a bonus to pay. They failed to read the small print in the contract and could not afford to employ a lawyer. Often they are forced to sell quickly at a loss before the mortgagor forecloses. Or a fresh mortgage can be obtained at considerably more than was originally owing. This bonus system sometimes prevents the worker ever being able to pay off the mortgage and he never “owns” his house. The mortgage set-up in Canada is big business and sometimes a worker who proudly persuades himself that he owns his house after making the down payment, loses his life savings. Legally, of course. Forty-nine per cent. of all mortgages in Canada are owned by lawyers.

In the downtown area called Cabbage Town are concentrated the slums of Toronto, although they also exist in other parts of the city. Here one sees the hovels that pass for human habitation, hovels without adequate heat, light or air, fetid, stinking and disease-creating. Houses that are terraced, without inside toilets, and with an outside toilet sometimes serving as many as a dozen houses. Houses that are tumbling down, with paper hanging off the walls, broken steps, crumbling walls, and some rat and termite infested. Hovels that are rented to the most depressed section of the working class, those on relief and those who are unemployed. Landlords are unwilling to repair even if repair would help the condition at all, but in most cases they are beyond any patching up. Exorbitant rents are charged; each time an increase in “welfare” payments is received, the landlord puts up the rent.

In Metropolitan Toronto in the year 1961 there were seven evictions taking place daily. Families are split up, children put into the care of the Children’s Aid Society, and mothers at their wits end what to do.

In Northern Ontario on the Indian Reservation at Red Lake (and other reservations, too) the housing conditions of the Indians are positively unbelievable. There are wooden shacks with a floor area of 18 ft. by 22 ft. housing as many as twenty-two human beings for eating, sleeping and living. Wood stoves heat the hovels, and wretched rags are used for covers. Sometimes these people have only the clothes in which they stand and hunger and starvation are permanent features of their miserable existence. The Indian’s income is approximately £49 a year to keep alive on, plus whatever can be obtained from trapping, which is generally very little.

In the rare instance where an Indian has been able to obtain a job for any period, he is not usually any better off because he shares whatever he possesses with any or all of his tribe who are in greater need than he. Consequently, when he gets a little better house to live in, he is willing to, and does, share it with others of his tribe. The result is overcrowding.

All this exists in a country where an old-fashioned but structurally sound and perfectly usable City Hall is to be pulled down and a new stream-lined one built at a cost of approximately $27 million. Is any comment needed?

Sid & Gladys Catt

It's The Same In The Sprawl (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

To many a Cockney, London is known, in mixed derision and affection, as the Smoke. It might also be called, less affectionately, the Sprawl. From Hounslow in the West to Enfield in the North, Erith in the East and Epsom in the South, London spreads itself on the map of Southern England. It leap-frogs even beyond these points, into places which were not so long ago the countryside and a hiker's day out. In the Chiltern Hills, for example, the landscape is altering beyond recognition as the trees come down and the houses of the post-war Metro-landers go up in their place.

In this Sprawl live all manner of workers, from the lowest of down-and-outs to white collar men who manage ulcers along with their expense accounts. Here, therefore, are all manner of working class problems, including that of housing.

London has its families whose housing difficulties could not be starker. They are the homeless ones. Usually unskilled, low-paid workers, they often have to start their married lives in the most dubious of lodgings, from which they are easily evicted. Then the problem snowballs, until their family may be forced to split up, with the children going into a Home or being taken by the mother to a local authority hostel while the father rubs along outside. The London County Council runs some of these hostels and they are not inviting places. During the past year the number of families in them reached a record peak; in November, 1962, it stood at 1,008. Since then it has fallen; last month it was just over 800, representing about 3,800 persons. But these figures in fact disguise the real size of the problem, which would be more accurately reflected in the turnover of families in the hostels as opposed to the number in them at any one time. A recent Family Service Unit survey into the housing prospects of low-paid workers was summed up in this way by The Guardian on February 14th last: “In all London there is virtually no accommodation for a family of limited means."

One step—but often only a short one—up from the homeless, are those who live in London's rented homes. Some of these homes are the famous London slums, which characterise areas like Stepney and Brixton and North Kensington. Some others are in more pretentious areas—South Kensington for example—which do not like to think of themselves as part of slumdom. But no other word so aptly fits the piled up, dingy acres of bed-sitters and what are euphemistically termed flatlets. London is full of this sort of place. The 1961 Census showed that a quarter of all households in the County of London occupied one or two rooms and that a half of them occupied three or four rooms.

The Census also revealed something about the condition of the County of London's homes. Over 400,000 are without exclusive access to a hot water tap and over 300,000 are without a bath. It does not take a very powerful imagination to picture what these hundreds of thousands of homes in the centre of the “affluent" South are like.

But the Sprawl is also, of course, the great exponent of the cult of suburbia, where they usually have a bathroom (even if it is a small one) and a hot water tap (even if they have to watch the cost of running it too often). Suburbia, where many workers are proudly buying their houses, is not usually associated with the housing problem. Who can think of slums, standing in Acacia Crescent, with the blossom out on the trees and neat hedges and roses as far as the eye can see?

Yet behind the clematis covered walls the housing problem sits as immovably as it does in Poplar or Deptford. Many workers now buy their houses because that is literally the only way they can get one. And when they have signed the contract for the sale they have committed themselves to a lifetime of paying off a massive loan, sometimes at a crippling rate of interest. This commitment forces them to depend even more than usual upon keeping their job. The suburban mortgagee knows what worry is; the suburbs, in fact, are centres of stress and strain which can almost be sensed behind the pretty curtains. Mortgagees usually have to sign a deed which is full of all sorts of restrictions, designed to keep up the value of the house so that, if they cannot keep up the payments and the property has to be sold the mortgagor stands to lose as little as possible. Living in this sort of home means that the worker has a bathroom and a garden and perhaps one or two other amenities which are pleasant enough in their way. But he has not lost his housing problem.

The thing which is common to all those who struggle in the housing difficulties of London, and elsewhere, is that they get their living by going out to work. This means that everything they need to live— their clothes, their food, their recreation, their homes—is tailored to take account of the limitations of their wage packets. This is what we call poverty and it is what all workers in London, and the rest of the world, have in common. It afflicts the homeless worker and it sits on the shoulder of him who smugly clips his privet in the suburbs.

Ivan

Wales — The Leasehold Racket (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every time the Minister of Housing visits South Wales he is met with demonstrators demanding reform of the leasehold system. All the capitalist parties in Wales have this reform, in one form or another, in their programme. This article looks at the situation from the Socialist point of view.

When it is said that housing shortages are caused by the sudden flow of people into the big towns it is not always remembered that the other side of this coin is rural depopulation. Traditionally Wales has been one of the areas from which people have moved to the cities of England, particularly Liverpool, Birmingham and London. It has, therefore, suffered from falling, as opposed to rising, land values and all that this means. Today this is no longer really a problem in South Wales, though it persists in the North and other rural areas.

But the aspect of housing which is causing the most anxiety at the moment is the prevalence of leasehold. There has been talk of finance corporations holding South Wales in an “octopus grip.” Nine-tenths of the area is supposed to belong to the big estates which were once the property of Tory landowning families, many of whom have now been replaced by capitalists interested in landowning solely as a business.

When urban development began in earnest in South Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century the principle of the 99 year lease was widely applied and now the effects are being felt. In addition there is at present a shortage of freehold land which is the result of the flow of industry and workers into the area since the war. The increased demand for “property” which this has caused has aggravated the problem by raising land values. When a leaseholder sees that his lease has only twenty to thirty years to run he begins to think about renewing it. The landlord knowing that there is a shortage of freehold land is able to demand what seems to the leaseholder a fantastic price for the freehold or a new lease. Thus the approaching end of many 99 year leases and the present shortage of freehold land has brought the problem of leasehold in South Wales to a head.

Some people object to leasehold on what they call principle. For the landlord lets the land and the lessee undertakes to erect a building on it, but at the end of the lease the land and the building revert to the landlord. At the turn of the century some of the more “ radical ” Liberals saw this as a gross injustice and as another example of the rapacity of landlords. As a solution they suggested leasehold enfranchisement which basically means that the tenant is given the right to buy out compulsorily the landlord. Significantly enough, in that it bears out our contention that the Labour Party is the political heir of some elements in the old Liberal Party (this is particularly evident in non-conformist Wales), the Labour Party is pledged to this policy of leasehold enfranchisement. And, of course, wherever there’s a petty reform to support we find the Communist Party—in Wales it has made itself conspicuous in the campaign against leasehold.

We must, however, see this problem in perspective. The usual leasehold arrangement is for the landlord to let the land to a speculative builder who erects houses on it for a profit. Two-thirds of leasehold property in South Wales is not occupied by the ground lessee but by tenants paying an ordinary house-rent. The Labour Party recognises this when it says it only wants enfranchisement for owner-occupiers. Although for historical reasons there is probably a higher proportion of homeowners in Wales than in most parts of Britain this question of leasehold is of little importance: its abolition would be at best another minor reform of capitalism.

Quite understandably people are upset when they are faced with the choice of quitting the house they have come to regard as their own or of paying an impossible price for the freehold. But this is capitalism. It brings insecurity to all workers, including those who happen to think they own their own homes. The whole problem shows that the home-owner is no more secure than the tenant and for the same reason—the poverty which capitalism brings to all its workers.

Labour M.P. George Thomas has said of the finance corporations: “They are cashing in on the labour of our community and stealing the reward of our labour.” They are, he said, “social parasites.” True enough, landowners are parasites. It is plain to all that they receive an income solely because they happen to own a certain part of the globe. They are among those who "possess but do not produce." But why stop here? These capitalists whose business is landowning are only a small section of the capitalist class. The rest, too, are social parasites.

Adam Buick

Midlands and the North, Slumdom (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you want a fair idea of the blight inflicted on men's lives by early industrial capitalism, travel through England to the Midlands and the North, and take a good look at the housing there. In this region are the towns which were the classic homes of slumdom, with their mean and narrow streets, row upon huddled row of wretched little back-to-back hovels, where dampness, rat infestation and tuberculosis were rife. Here it was that men, women, and children, lived out their pitifully short and broken lives, slept from sheer exhaustion in the few hours respite from the hell of the mills, mines and factories. The capitalists, the mine and mill owners, the iron masters and others, also had homes near to their property, but not among the slums, of course.

Take a good look we said. No need to hurry about it. Any time in the next twenty, thirty or forty years will do, or even longer. These slums have been there for many many years and if we read the signs aright, will still be there when our grandchildren are growing old. The government, local authorities, and various experts who have written on the subject at least agree on one thing, that the slums in this region are just about the worst in England. It is said that this part of the country plus South Wales, contains more than half the 850,000 houses declared unfit in England and Wales in 1955. Housing Minister Sir Keith Joseph has admitted that the North of England has a far greater concentration of slums than anywhere in London. Dr. Hill, his predecessor, was a bit more specific. A few months earlier, he had pinpointed Liverpool as about the worst case in the country.

Certainly, if we go by the last official figures declared by local authorities and published as a White Paper in 1955, Liverpool does qualify for Dr. Hill’s dishonourable distinction. Over 88,000 (about 43 per cent.) of its 204,000 dwellings were then unfit for habitation. Manchester came a very close second with some 68,000 unfit out of 208,000—about 32 per cent. But one thing to remember about these figures, indeed the whole of the 1955 estimates is that they are probably conservative. They were in fact based on what local councils thought they could clear in the next few years, not what they thought should be cleared. In any case, there was not (and still is not) any nationally agreed standards by which obsolescence is judged. It is said that Liverpool went the whole hog and reported all of her known slums whereas some towns did not even bother to make a return to the Minister.

So these estimates have come under fire many times since 1955 and it is generally agreed that they are unrealistic. The true position is probably much worse— perhaps we shall never really know just how bad. Even those incurable optimists and promise breakers, the government of the day, have had to admit that “ . . . in about fifty areas, chiefly in the North and Midlands, the task of slum clearance will be a long job ” (White Paper Housing in England and Wales, February, 1962). A long job indeed! By the end of 1960, Manchester had managed to clear 7,737 and Liverpool 5,331. Birmingham had cleared 6,950 out of 50,250. At this rate, it will take between 50 and 100 years just to remove the existing slums.

But there is another factor—a constantly recurring one—which is like a thorn in the flesh of the town councils of this and every other region. Dilapidation. If it were just a question of pulling down the hovels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it might be a long job, but with perseverance the end would at least be in sight eventually, though probably not in our lifetime. But, of course, capitalism simply does not work that way. It makes a mockery of the planners’ efforts. As Gavin Lyall pointed out in the Sunday Times of 23/4/61:

   Slums are not a static thing. Every year, an average of 150,000 houses in the country become 100 years old. Against this, about 60,000 are demolished every year. At the present rate of progress . . . there are children not yet born who will be bringing up their own children in some of the houses of the northern cities, which even today are recognised as slums. 

Of course, the thing to remember is that it is workers and their families who occupy these grim holes now, and who will do so in the far off future visualised by Mr. Lyall and others. Let Dr. E. Sigsworth, Economic History Lecturer at Leeds University, tell you the reason. Addressing a conference on slum clearance at Bradford this year he said that “most people living in slums could not afford to pay an economic rent, let alone buy a house through a building society ” (Guardian, 11/3/63). So there it is in a nutshell, and we are back to the problem behind the problem—the sheer inability of some workers to afford anywhere better to live than broken-down hovels.

This unpleasant fact will no doubt have been noted by the various planners and reformers groping for an answer to the muddle, but we can take a bet that its deeper implications will have escaped them. For them it is not just a question of pulling down slums, but their replacement with low cost houses for workers to rent. They miss the point that therein lies the foundation of future slumdom, for cutting costs means cutting standards. For example, the average floor area of new three bedroomed council houses in England and Wales declined from 1,050 sq. ft. in 1951 to 901 sq. ft. in 1958. Dr. Sigsworth advocates subsidised local authority housing but clearly this is no answer. Local authority housing has been subsidised to some extent or another for the best part of a century. According to the 1961 interim report of the Rowntree Trust Housing Study, about three million council houses have been built since the first world war, “with the aid of subsidies and sixty-year loans.” But the housing problem weighs as oppressively as ever.

An indication of the obsession with costs which affects building just like any other industry under capitalism, can be gained from the recent report that Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham are negotiating to form a consortium to make possible the mass production of building materials, the standardisation of fittings and equipment, and cheaper bulk buying (our italics).

One of the reasons that “overspill” development is preferred to high density town building is because the cost to the government is very much less. J. B. Cuillingworth estimated in 1960 that the subsidy cost of 500,000 high flats on a central site would be about £34 millions a year compared with £12 millions for the same number of dwellings in a new or expanded town (Housing Needs and Planning Policy, p. 173).

So the more we look at the problem of the Midlands and the North, the more we see that it is really the same problem as elsewhere, only more acute. The older industrial areas of this region are the worst off and even the most optimistic forecaster dares not hope for an improvement in his lifetime. There are the added complication of industrial decline, the slow but stubborn growth of unemployment, and the subsequent drift of population southwards in search of work.

It is in fact a familiar story of capitalism. There will be a familiar ring too, about the news that houses were much more difficult to sell in 1962 than for some years past, despite a freer supply of mortgages and average prices in the North being only about half those in London. This was certainly not because people’s housing needs were met—we know that is not true. But then capitalism does not exist for such purpose anyway. Its prime aim is the satisfaction of a market, whether in housing or anything else.

Eddie Critchfield

Scotland—Progressing Backwards (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow

Most of the working-class dwellings in Scotland are the product of the rash of building that took place at the beginning of the century. In Glasgow it is the tenement building with its single and two-roomed apartments, usually three-storied, that predominates.

They were built for the influx of workers from Ireland and other parts of Scotland who crowded into Glasgow during the halcyon days of British capitalism when shipbuilding and heavy engineering along the west coast were booming. Such towns as Port Glasgow, Greenock, Paisley, and all the environs of Glasgow were built on the same lines.

In Lanarkshire, at such places as Motherwell and Hamilton, the coalfields attracted workers not only from Scotland and Ireland, but also from such European countries as Poland and the Ukraine. There the houses were built mainly on the classical “miner's row” pattern, rows and rows of depressing squat little buildings, each one a replica of the other. They may have been a different model from the Glasgow tenement, but, in common with them, they were small, overcrowded, cheap, and utterly unsuitable for human habitation.

On the East coast the story was equally miserable. The housing of the working class in Dundee, Kirkcaldy, Leith, and Edinburgh is from the same sorry mould as Glasgow. Indeed, Edinburgh, which has some pretence of being a cultured city (the ‘‘Athens of the North” the locals boast) with its festival of arts and drama and its litter boxes with the legend “This city is beautiful, keep it that way,” has probably some of the most sordid slums in Europe.

Today, of course, there are changes taking place. A walk through Glasgow's back streets will show that gaps are beginning to appear in the previously unending sides of those asphalt valleys. The local authorities are being forced to demolish some of the worst properties, though sometimes they are saved the task by their helpmates, decay and ill repair. Sometimes the buildings collapse when they are empty, sometimes when still occupied. In Possilpark, in the north of Glasgow, a whole gable-end of a tenement collapsed in a high wind last January. In Anderston and Gorbals in recent years tenements crumbled away in the night while still occupied. In Balloch, Dumbartonshire, last April, an eleven year old boy was crushed to death when a condemned tenement collapsed on him and his playmates.

Of course, houses are not only falling down, some are being built. But how many? Despite the promises of local governments, the picture is far from rosy; in Glasgow last year there were only 2,000 built, the lowest since 1947. More significant than the paltry number that are going up, is the type of houses that are being built.

In those areas where the houses were of a decent standard, the authorities found that the rents were too high for the majority of workers. Indeed, Mr. D. Gibson, the convenor of the Housing Committee in Glasgow, confessed that they could not send workers from the condemned tenements to such areas as Mosspark because ‘‘They were high- minded men who put Mosspark out of the reach of the very men and women who are demanding higher standards, and people in this city in need of housing cannot face up to rents and rates of £130 per year.” (Glasgow Herald, 19/3/62.)

The same sad story of workers too poor to be able to afford anything approaching decent housing. But for an example of ‘‘progress” the next point could hardly be bettered.

“Many years ago Glasgow had taken a resolution never to build again the two-apartment houses which had been such a large part of Scotland's housing problems. Now they were faced with thousands of Glasgow's citizens, the salt of the earth, who wanted to stay in Anderston and Woodside—the places where they had been brought up—in room-and-kitchen houses with an inside toilet. They refused to go to the new housing estates of Castlemilk and Easterhouse, and Glasgow Corporation were now building 10,684 modern houses for two persons. . . . That's progress; that's the criterion of affluence in this affluent society, a room and kitchen with an inside toilet.”

But even this modest demand for a new two-room apartment is hardly likely to be met. Mr. Gibson considers it will be necessary to convert the old property in some cases—“Even if they built 100,000 new houses in the next twenty years, they still need to keep standing some 30,000 room-and-kitchen and two-room-and kitchen houses, but they must be improved. They must have an inside toilet and reasonable washing facilities, even if it was a hot shower instead of a bath. These improvements could be carried out inside the bed recess in the kitchen at an estimated cost of £750 per house which would make them habitable for another 20 years.”

What a dilemma! They are building 2,000 a year just now: even if they built 100,000 in 20 years they would still have to convert old property and this would only last another 20 years.

Twist and turn as they may, capitalisms’ reformers, whether the Labour Party brand like Mr. Gibson, or Tory, Liberal or Communist, are bereft of an answer. Like the system they support, they find in the housing situation that every time they patch up in one place, something falls down in another.

Richard Donnelly

The Whole Tragic Mess (1963)

Book Review from the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain in the Sixties—Housing, by Stanley Alderson (Penguin Special 3s. 6d.). 

Let us warn you right away. If you think that Mr. Alderson will provide you with a solution to this most pressing problem you are going to be very disappointed. This is quite a well written book, and informative, particularly when you remember that it spans only 174 pocket size pages. But having acknowledged the enormity of the housing scandal, Mr. Alderson gets bogged down in advocating the usual reformist measures to deal with it.

We are left with the awfully depressing feeling that if every one of his suggestions were put into action tomorrow, the housing problem would be just as bad the day after—and for many more days after that. Like all reformist writers, he cannot see that slums, overcrowding, homelessness—in fact, the whole tragic mess—is only part of a bigger general picture of private property society with its sordid profit motive. The emergence of council housing over the past few years does not invalidate this basic contention. Indeed, it is a clear illustration, if any were needed, of the essential indignity of being a member of the working class. The author gives us a hint of this when he tells us on page 94:

  The difficulty is in becoming a council tenant. The man who set about it efficiently would get an essential job, marry young, father a child a year, find himself a slum flat, share it with another family, and develop chronic ill-health. With all these qualifications, he could even expect to get a house before he was thirty.

Like many other writers on this subject, Mr. Alderson is in favour of “a national policy for housing." He has been groping his way towards it, he tells us in the last chapter; and stripped of verbiage, what is this policy? Why, spend more money on housing, of course. He forgets some of the snags mentioned earlier in the book, all of which arise from the profit motive. For instance, on page 11, we read:

   Some of the firms building houses in vast development schemes lose money. . . . Some of the biggest and most efficient firms in the industry refuse to touch housing at all.

And again on page 22:

   What do people want? What can they afford? These are the questions that have to be answered in determining future standards of houses, motor cars, washing powders, or anything else.

So whatever may be planned and intended (and housing is probably the biggest graveyard of scrapped plans that there is) the author admits that we shall get what we can afford, and we all know what that means as far as the working class is concerned. Here is the nub of it, the reason for the poor housing standards of the past, present and future, too, why ". . .  there are houses being erected now which will give dissatisfaction to their first occupants and in ten years will be regarded as sub-standard." It is the factor which plagues and hampers the slum clearance schemes, for as Mr. Alderson points out, lots of the poorer tenants cannot even afford to pay subsidised council rents. At the same time, “many of the old and decayed dwellings needing to be re-built are in areas where there is little or no profit in rebuilding."

It is no intention of ours to sneer at Mr. Alderson’s attempts to grapple with the vast and depressing housing problem. Perhaps it is to his credit that he has at least taken a look at it, for all too often it fosters an attitude of apathy and hopelessness. But when this has been said, there is nothing in his book to shake our conviction that bad housing is a product of private property society. The solution is no to tinker around with Schedule "A" tax reform and extensions of state power, but to institute a world of common ownership and production of goods for use. Houses will then be lived in not just out of necessity, but because they are worth living in, too.

Eddie Critichfield

Housing and Human Problems (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

One morning in the early 1920's, a young mother trudged up the front steps of a town hall in one of the London suburbs. She was confronted at the top by a portly commissionaire, pompous in his petty authority, but she pushed angrily past him and found her way to the Mayor’s parlour at last. There was certainly no respect for civic dignity about her as she barged through the door and demanded of the official there when he was going to get her and her family somewhere decent to live.

Her husband had been unemployed for two whole years after his return from the slaughter of the Great War, and their marriage was early feeling the strain of trying to live with their young ones in two small rooms. No wonder the poor woman was at her wits end. In desperation, she pleaded— and threatened (she would drown herself and her three children, she said), but it made no difference. The official was not impressed.

You had to have a “regular” job in those days even to get on the Council’s waiting list. Eventually they took over the whole of their pokey terraced house, but by then there were three more children, so they were not much better off anyway. The young wife did not solve her housing problem. Like many others, she lived, grew old and died in the same seedy place. And like so many others of her day and since, she never did grasp the real reason for her plight, and for the sordid conditions of her life which threw a barrier between her husband and herself, so that they really hardly knew each other, even after forty years of marriage.

Perhaps you could shrug this story off if it were just an isolated instance, but the sheer human tragedy of the housing problem will just not let you do that. The lives of those affected are soaked in misery and despair in the grim struggle to raise families sometimes under the most appalling conditions. It is hardly surprising that tempers fray, nerves suffer and couples who started married life full of love and high hopes, often end up barely tolerating each other. If you think this is far-fetched, remember that social workers in London’s East End, for example, find frequently that among those who consult them about their bad housing conditions are many who are under medical treatment for nervous disorders.

Ironically enough, there is a new brand of neurosis associated with the high blocks of flats in which workers are re-housed, and in fact there is growing suspicion that the very act of taking families from streets and separating them sometimes at great heights is having an adverse effect on their health. The working class mother may have had to cope with ghastly slum conditions before, but at least she did not have to keep her young children cooped up in a flat because the playground is too far below for her to keep an eye on them. Like most workers, she is kept busy, and there is always the nagging fear that one of her kiddies will somehow escape her attention and fall to his death from a balcony or landing.

But bad nerves are only one of the evil effects. It does not take a great deal of brains to realise that cramped and dilapidated dwellings are injurious to health in countless ways. In fact, so great has this become that some local authorities deal with it as a separate priority under “Medical re-housing.” In theory, of course, you are eligible for special consideration if you have some health defect which your doctor thinks has been caused or aggravated by your living conditions. It often carries little weight in practice, though, because the shortage of workers’ houses has become so acute that only a small fraction of those available is allocated to medical cases.

In London, the housing famine is acute, and the County Council have since 1958 been able to reserve only a miserable 250 flats a year for re-housing the seriously ill. Before then, it was a mere one hundred. In 1961, the whole allocation had been used up by the spring and there were still more than a thousand urgent cases outstanding. And even if you are lucky enough to be so ill that you are offered a flat, you may find that it is one of the older blocks, without a bathroom or lift, and with a shared W.C. So your troubles are by no means over and you could easily find yourself back on the waiting list before long.

Take a look at some of the other human tragedies of the housing scandal. Understandably, we are so preoccupied with the plight of families and the bad effects on youngsters that we tend to forget the pathetic conditions that many single people have to endure. Young, middle-aged, and old are all afflicted, but perhaps the last group suffer most because of their infirmities and inability to earn a living. Mostly you will find such people in private (as opposed to municipal) dwellings, such as the oldest tenement blocks of East London. The accommodation is generally cheap, which at once tells us a lot about it in terms of dilapidation and sheer misery for the occupants. Try living for twenty years, as one epileptic did, in a room 7 ft. by 6 ft. with plasterless walls and a leaking roof, and you will get our meaning. Often there is very bad overcrowding, and conditions in many of the houses are indescribable.

Struggling along on the very borderline of destitution, there is a loneliness and black despair which many times overtakes these people, and they seldom manage to get clear of their awful predicament. They are generally the ones with whom capitalism can deal particularly harshly, such as widows, divorcees, those in failing health and even mental cases. Their common misery is the product of their common identity as members of the working class.

But there is one other group who have given up the strain of trying even for the meagre respectability of a dingy furnished room. Ironically, in many cases they have lost what accommodation they had as their lodgings were closed to make way for slum clearance. They sleep anywhere they can—odd nooks and crannies, bombed sites and railway stations. During the day they do work of sorts, although clearly they do not earn much at it. For them, the hopelessness of the situation is just something they have accepted in blank apathy and each day of struggle is pretty much the same as the next. Their predicament gives us an insight into the horrible pressures which mount against single people living on their own in a place like London.

Rarely do they appear on the waiting lists of local councils. They probably realise the utter futility of trying this, because the queue is miles long as it is. As one observer has put it, they suddenly find themselves clinging to the very edges of society. Maybe some have been ill for a while, and without friends or relations to help them have found themselves on the streets. Others have drifted from one dingy room to another before succumbing and joining the rest of the destitutes.

Capitalism does things in a big way. It can produce huge quantities of goods and build enormous cities. And just as surely, in its usual contradictory way, the majority of its people have to put up with narrow, drab lives. And for the lonely ones the very bigness of capitalism's towns restrict their chances of ever belonging anywhere. This extremity illustrates perhaps most of all the underlying tragedy of the whole housing problem. To say that it is a problem of working class poverty is indeed a truism which runs like a thread through workers' whole lives. For poverty of ownership in the means of life begets poverty in so many other things— perhaps in human contact and friendship most of all.

Eddie Critchfield

Snakes and ladders (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is one game which has been going on too long and too fruitlessly for the people who have been forced to play it. The housing problem which we know today came in with capitalism and has defied over a century's efforts to reform it out of existence. The working class are still lost among the Snakes and Ladders, still bemused by the measures which, the politicians assure them, will improve the housing situation but which turn out to have no effect on the problem. The ladders are few and what there are of them are short and rickety. The snakes are many and they are long and slippery and venomous. The promised land—the square marked “Home" is as far away as ever.

That black thing which we now call the Housing Problem was born in the intense transformation of this country during the Industrial Revolution. The break up of the agricultural communities forced the farm workers into the towns, where the greedy factories were demanding human labour. These people had to have somewhere to live, even if this was a secondary consideration to their ability to produce a profit for their employers. As they were only workers, there was no especial need to provide them with adequate washing and sanitary facilities; no need either to give them an excess of living space and fresh air. So the men who had lately spent their days in the wind and the sun were stacked away, when their stint in the factories was done, into cellars, into the back-to-backs, and into the court houses. In their book The Bleak Age the Hammonds record this description of such homes in Manchester in the 1840’s:

They are built back to back; without ventilation or drainage; and, like a honeycomb, every particle of space is occupied. Double rows of these house form courts, with, perhaps, a pump at one end and a privy at the other, common to the occupants of about twenty houses.

For the capitalist class, the Industrial Revolution was no time for thinking about anything other than making money. Few of them were farseeing enough to realise that bad housing was a false economy, because it could spread disease the cost of which could wipe out a lot of the profit to be made from the pale, emaciated wretches who lived like vermin in the squalid homes of the expanding industrial towns.

A cholera epidemic in 1832 highlighted this fact and in 1851 came the first Public Acts dealing with housing—The Common Lodging Houses Act and The Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act. These were thus the first of the many ladders to be propped up for the working class and, typically, they turned out to be snakes after all. The Acts gave local authorities certain powers which were supposed to enable them to combat the housing problem, but these powers were hardly used—for the good, sound, capitalist reason that the cost of doing so was prohibitive. Since then there have been any number of other Acts dealing with housing. Sometimes the Statute Book has become so choked with legislation that another Act has been needed to clear up the mess and to consolidate the existing measures. Nowadays the term “The Housing Acts” is taken to refer to no less than thirteen separate Acts and to other closely related legislation such as the Town and Country Planning Acts.

Hardly a trick has been left untried. All manner of financial juggling has been authorised, many kinds of inducements have been offered to housing authorities to build. The ladders have all proved to be snakes. The 1923 Housing Act, which was Neville Chamberlain’s brainchild, was supposed to encourage private building for sale, so that the buyers would leave their “intermediate” houses to be hungrily occupied by people from the slums. Chamberlain and his experts forgot, however, that the majority of people under capitalism have to live within the limits of their wage. In 1923 there were so many unemployed, and wages were so low, that very few workers could afford the deposit on a house, even though it was only a few pounds. The whole idea of the Act quickly collapsed. In 1924 they had another go. The Housing (Financial Provisions) Act of that year provided for Exchequer grants for houses to let. The capitalist class themselves dismantled that ladder; in 1932 the Ray Committee on Local Expenditure recommended the abolition of all Exchequer aid for housing other than that for rehousing slum dwellers because the economics of the thing did not justify government aid. This recommendation was put into effect by the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act of 1933.

So it has gone on through the years. One government after another has produced its plausible schemes to tackle the problem once and for all, but every one has failed. In November, 1960, Mr. Henry Brooke, who was then Minister of Housing, apparently decided that the problem was not, after all, one of building houses so much as putting baths into the houses which did not have them. Admitting that in England and Wales there were three million houses which were “far from ideal,” he announced: “The battle for a bath in every home has begun.” But before Mr. Brooke could let off his first cannon he had lost his job as Minister of Housing to Dr. Charles Hill. Dr. Hill had the bright idea of going to have a look at the slums himself, but almost as soon as he had come back he, too, was removed from the job and replaced by yet somebody else who was going to clear up the mess—Sir Keith Joseph. Sir Keith also went to visit the slums, and the slums—in the shape of some homeless members of the working class—came to visit him, giving the press some fetching pictures of Sir Keith’s wife smiling bravely as she admitted several scruffy children to her posh home. Then the new Minister had an inspiration. He would speed up slum clearance! He even went so far as to mention Cable Street, Stepney, as one place which could do with some attention. Everybody was amazed; here was obviously a Minister of Housing who knew a slum when he saw one.

This is typical of the floundering which has accompanied this past century of reform, some of it administered by wordy politicians who have climbed to high office after notching up a dismal record on housing. And what has been the result of it all, up to the present? You can take your pick from the facts and figures which clamour for attention. In 1954 there were officially 850,000 houses in England and Wales which were condemned as unfit; this figure is a wild understatement, because it only took account of the slums which local authorities thought they could clear, instead of those which they thought should be cleared. And faster than any slums are pulled down, others take their place. In July last year Dr. Lichfield, an urban economist who had just left the Ministry of Housing, said that over twenty-three per cent. of our houses were built before 1875 and that even if the present rate of slum clearance were doubled there would still be a million of them left in 1982.

Capitalist politicians are fond of telling us that the housing problem springs from a physical difficulty of building enough homes for those who want them. It is nothing of the kind. Rich people simply do not have housing difficulties; these are reserved exclusively for the working class, who must budget for their housing, just like the other essentials of living, against a restricted wage packet. And that is something which no reform of capitalism can alter.

It is true that the majority of workers do not live in what are officially classified as slums. Even so, the poverty of their lives is reflected in their homes. We all know what an average three-up-two-down working class house, perhaps the pride of its occupant’s life, is like. We know how cramped are the rooms, how the doors don’t fit, how the draughts whistle around in the winter, how poor are the materials of which the place is built. Yet officially these people have no housing problem. They are off the list.

The fact is that, however many reforms batter themselves against it, the problem of housing will remain for the working class and all of them will be afflicted by it. As long as capitalism lasts none of them can escape it. After all, the first rule of Snakes and Ladders is that it is a game for any number of players.

Ivan