The real Michael Foot (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could it be that in Michael Foot the Labour Party have elected someone who will never rise any higher than Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition? As Foot fumbles on, questions are beginning to be asked about him, and hopeful contenders for his job are making careful speeches. One version of Foot is the sick, half blind, scabrous, dishevelled bookworm, accident-prone in more senses than one — the sort of person who would wear a donkey jacket at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Another is the former left wing firebrand who has come to betray his principles and his friends and now hunts the Militants out of his party like mediaeval witches. Another, more despairing, is that he is a tousled intellectual, so unsuited to the political rough and tumble that he is quite unable to put the Tories, three million unemployed, Norman Tebbit and all, out of their misery.

Foot comes from a a well-heeled family with famously liberal traditions. Until he was upstaged by his tempestuous nephew Paul he was the wayward son, the brainy darling of the Labour Party rank and file who was greeted at the conference rostrum with rapturous applause before he had so much as uttered a single word. Of course he went to Oxford and of course he occupied there that position, so coveted by all aspiring politicians among the dreaming spires, of President of the Union.

Of course he was involved with Tribune and with the old TUC/Labour Party newspaper the Daily Herald. His brilliance so impressed the crusty imperialist Lord Beaverbrook that, in spite of his reputation, Foot was given the job of editing Beaverbrook’s paper the Evening Standard. Just after Dunkirk Foot, with Peter Howard (who later joined Moral Rearmament) and Frank Owen (who later joined the Liberal Party) wrote the book Guilty Men. This cleverly caught the mood of the time; it argued that many of the problems in pre-war Britain, and the war itself, were the responsibility of a bunch of complacent, arrogant Conservative politicians. Guilty Men, with other similar books published by Victor Gollancz, quickly became fashionable reading among people who were looking for an explanation — or more accurately a scapegoat — for the dreadful things that had happened since 1918.

In the 1945 election, Foot was a notable boulder in the landslide to Labour, capturing Plymouth Devonport which had been the seat of Lady Astor. This was indeed a symbolic victory — the dazzling young intellectual sitting where once sat a Tory who personified much about pre-war Britain that had become despised — and had been denounced in Guilty Men. Foot had no intention of allowing the glamour of his victory grow dim. He quickly busied himself in the appropriate causes, in particular the Keep Left Group, whose manifesto attacked the basis of the Attlee government’s foreign policy, which was the alliance with America and the cold war antagonism towards Russia.

To a government which was fighting the cause of British capitalism on several fronts at once. Foot was something of a nuisance and there was small prospect then of him ever joining the Front Bench. He came to represent much of the frustrations of Labour supporters who wondered why their government was failing so signally to introduce the Promised Land into Britain; he was the evidence that cleverer, more sincere, more radical ministers would do a more effective job of transforming society. The working class in Devonport did not see it quite like that however; in the 1955 election Foot lost his seat and remained out of Parliament until 1960, when Aneurin Bevan's death left a vacancy at the mining seat of Ebbw Vale. Foot was Bevan’s worshipping biographer; he seemed the obvious choice as Labour candidate which, in a place like Ebbw Vale where Tories were as rare as fumbling fly-halves, was tantamount to being the MP.

No eyebrows were raised when he was passed over by Wilson during the 1964/70 governments but when Labour came back to power in February 1974 Foot was given charge of the Department of Employment. His first brief was to settle the miners’ strike. In her diaries. Barbara Castle describes this as a brilliant appointment; Foot would use his standing among the miners to get them back to work and Wilson would defuse a potential critic. Foot's start was not all that promising because when he went to get his seal of office and to kiss the queen he was dressed as if he had been camping. But the queen need not have worried; her new Minister of Employment soon showed that it is not necessary to wear formal clothes in order to protect the interests of the class she represents.

Labour’s programme in the first 1974 election was very embarrassing because it talked about “socialist aims” and declared an intention to “. . . eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain . . .” Just in case they did not manage to get rid of all poverty, the Labour programme had as a fail-safe a rather less ambitious aim, which was to “. . . achieve far greater economic equality in income, wealth and living standards . . . bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families . . .” Denis Healey, their Chancellor of the Exchequer, showed that he meant business, and that he was not to be easily embarrassed by little considerations like election promises, by threatening to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked. What with all that, and with the tearaway lefty Foot at the Department of Employment, workers who thought that any shift in the balance of wealth might begin with a rise in their wages could well have concluded that their day had come.

Illustration by George Meddemmen

But the first message of that government was that there must be some delay. World capitalism was fast sliding into recession and the Labour government’s response, to which they were by then well conditioned, was an assault on working class living standards. The conflict was sharpened by the fact that after Labour had abolished the statutory wage restraint of the Heath government there was a flood of wage claims. It was then that Foot showed the true mettle of a left winger in power; with some gusto he bent to the task of holding back the flood. The coal strike settled, he quickly decided that further miners' wage claims were “excessive", although by what standards he did not make clear. In January 1975 he told the TUC that there should be no argument about the official “guidelines” on pay (the Labour government's new name for wage restraint) but that they should ". . . merely apply them as they stand". Barbara Castle thought that “He is taking his role as guardian of the Pay Code so seriously that he is becoming more rigid than Jim Callaghan was in his Chancellor days” (she was commenting about an argument over a rise for the nurses) and she later explained “Mike is obsessed with the need to win the next election”.

The record of that government, whose return was Foot's obsession, is set down now in a disreputable history. They quickly abandoned the professed aims of their manifesto and concentrated on organising a more efficient and intense exploitation of the working class — or of those of them that remained in employment as the dole queues grew longer. Public expenditure, which many Labour supporters saw as the key to any change in the balance of wealth, was cut in absolute and relative terms and Chancellor Healey, trying to hold wage rises below those in prices, turned his attention to squeezing the poor. There were some bitterly contested strikes, in which Prime Minister Callaghan encouraged workers to break through picket lines and urged the police to immediately arrest any picket they thought was making threats against blacklegs. Meanwhile, the pips of the rich remained conspicuously unsqueezed; the signs were that their share of national wealth, which had actually fallen under the Heath government, increased under Labour.

Disgruntled Labour supporters now describe those years as a time of mistakes and missed opportunities. They assert nostalgically that the aims of the 1974 manifesto are still relevant, which is another way of saying that the problems Labour claimed to be able to deal with then are still here today — that, in other words, the manifesto was worthless.

Any sense of betrayal in their ranks, as Labour recovered from the shock of their defeat in 1979, can only have helped Foot beat Healey for the leadership in 1980. In spite of the responsibility he bore, Foot seemed to be considered somehow blameless while Healey acquired the reputation of a beetle-browed political thug. Since then Foot has continued to play the double game. The conference rhetoric is as readily available as ever, to excite the delegates who have come all that way to the seaside to be cheered up: “I am a peacemonger!” Foot raved to thunderous applause at Brighton last year. “An inveterate, incurable peacemonger." The value of those rousing words could be assessed a few months later, as the Task Force was being prepared for the assault on the Falklands: “I believe the government is right. . . I support the despatch of the Task Force” were the words with which Foot urged the government on to quicker and more brutal bellicosity.

The man who once marched in support of CND’s demand for immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament now craftily fudges the issue: “I agree with the programme . . . for trying to get a non-nuclear defence programme for this country as speedily as we possibly can. . . (Weekend World, 3 October 1982). “The greatest task which this Labour Party will have to take is . . . securing nuclear disarmament in this country and throughout the world" (Labour Conference, 28 September 1982). In more direct words. Foot was saying that he favours nuclear disarmament eventually. when all the other nuclear powers have also disarmed — the sort of noncommittal policy to attract Tories, Liberals. SDP members and all floating voters everywhere.

These developments are not accidental; they are exactly consistent with Foot's record in government and out of it. Neither is he himself exceptional; he is only the latest example of the processes of capitalist leadership, which passes through stages of extravaganza, reality and disintegration. This unavoidable process reflects the fact that capitalism's problems — like poverty which Labour promises to abolish, like weapons of war which Foot once wished to abolish — do not respond to the dramatic speeches of political leaders. Foot is typical in that his followers invest him with a power which he does not have, nor can have; their political ignorance and his impotence are components in the basic fallacy of the entire principle of leadership and the theory that leaders are indispensable.

So will the real Michael Foot stand up? To show us that, after all the learning, the speeches and the writing he has at last come into his own? And then would some of his followers also stand up. to show that they understand that it is all a noxious mockery of their human interests.

Ivan

Confusion on the left (1965)

From the November 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his time, Mr. Harold Wilson has been cast in many roles. One of the latest, as this year’s Labour Party Conference made clear, is that of the master surgeon who, by skilful use of anaesthetic and scalpel, has amputated the Party’s Left Wing.

The operation has left a stump, which will probably grow and once again become a seat of infection. But for the moment all is as Mr. Wilson intended; what there is of the stump is a feeble thing—indeed, some of the observers at the operation were not even sure of where to look for it— and the patient is just becoming to come round.

It is as well if, before we go any further, we try to be clear about what we mean by Left Wing. First, let us say that the term has no real validity, in the sense that it does not describe a particular, permanent political viewpoint. Some politicians are said to be “left wing” on some issues and “right wing” on others. Even the Conservative Party is supposed to have members who are “left wing”—for example. Sir Edward Boyle. It is apparent that, although it is an expression which is in constant use, nobody is very anxious to pin down the meaning of “Left Wing” in a definition.

At the same time, we all know that there is a section of the Labour Party which is always nagging about banning the Bomb, or raising pensions, or getting out of Vietnam, or getting into the Congo. At any and every time, this section is in a ferment of protest—demonstrating, marching, resolving, even resigning. Sometimes, under the lash of Labour’s Right Wingers, they are called rebels, or other less complimentary things. Usually, and conveniently, they are called the Left Wing, and for the purposes of this discussion we may as well accept the term, although we recognise its drawbacks.

The Left Wing claim that the Labour Party’s rank and file are behind them and, if we take the annual vote of the constituency parties for members of the National Executive as our only guide, this claim is true. In their eagerness to return Left Wingers to the Executive, the constituency parties have sometimes braised the ego of Labour’s famous leaders. The late Lord Morrison was one who was spurned in this way, and he neither forgot nor forgave.

It is not, however, true that the constituency vote always goes left. This year, for example, a majority of it apparently supported the Government's prices and incomes policy, when it was under fire from the Left. The constituency vote for the Left Wingers is a different matter; they vote for them because they regard them as men of honour and principle, who will keep what they think of as the ideals of the Labour Party unsullied.

Perhaps they never reflect upon what happened to the famous Left Wingers in the past. There was Stafford Cripps, once the hottest of firebrands, who switched so smartly from Left to Right when the call came. There have been others who have committed themselves behind the scenes to supporting the policies they once attacked, and who have announced this to their astounded followers, as Aneurin Bevan did over the Bomb at Brighton in 1957. And there have been others who have simply joined up and shut up—taken jobs in the Government and sat mute while their followers of yesterday have thundered their protests. This year, for example, the constituency parties elected Barbara Castle, Anthony Greenwood and Richard Crossman to the Executive—all of them Left Wing rebels of the past, all of them now members of a Government which infuriates the Left. 

It is clear that the Labour Party are still under the ether which was administered to them in October last year. Everything about the 1965 conference — the “composition” of hostile resolutions, the prominence given to Ministers, the hero-worship of the Government, the rough handling which the delegates got from chairman Mr. Gunter—showed how stupid the Labour Party has now become. What remains of the Left is leaderless. Even Michael Foot, once the busiest of rebels, was silent; “. . . no Left-winger,” wrote Anthony Howard of him in the Sunday Times, “Has defended the Government more loyally.” To this point we shall return.

The lack of leadership is a serious matter for the Left Wing, because if there is one thing they love it is a leader. The sort of man who can rouse the annual Tribune rally, with a speech of mixed hypocrisy and nostalgia is an absolute essential to them. They must have fiery speeches full of demands which the speakers (and perhaps a large part of the audience) know have not the faintest chance of becoming reality. Take away their leaders and the Left is lost. That is what Harold Wilson has done. Indeed, he has taken away the greatest hope the Left has had for a long time; himself. For he once encouraged the rebels in the Labour Party to regard him as their leader (at the same time, of course, as he did as little as possible to discourage the Right Wing from regarding him as their leader). Perhaps this is why the Left are in such a fury over Vietnam, the Bomb and the other issues on which the Labour Government have disappointed them.

It would be an interesting exercise were the Left to ask themselves why they are always being betrayed in this way. Much of what they demand sounds sensible enough. Who doesn’t want the war in Vietnam to end? Who doesn’t want to scrap nuclear weapons? Who doesn’t want better pay and working conditions? It is easy enough for a politician or a rebel to give voice to these demands. The big snag is that they are difficult, not to say impossible, to obtain under capitalism. That is why, if a Left Winger gets a job in the Government he always seems to be able to forget the heady days of rebellion and get down to the job of running the system. Conscientious objectors become Ministers of War (like Mr. Shinwell), trade unionists go to the Ministry of Labour (like Ernie Bevin). The Left Wing, betrayed again, has to look around for new leaders.

What do the realities of capitalism make of the Left Wing’s policies? What about Vietnam? The Americans are fighting there not in the interests of the Vietnamese people, but to protect the substantial military and economic interests which they have in the area. Ever since the defeat of Japan, Washington has been determined that only one power should control the Far East. Any challenge to American domination there must provoke the same result, as we saw in Korea and as we are seeing now in Vietnam. The results are unpleasant, but inevitable.

By the same token, nuclear weapons are essential to capitalism in the Sixties. The disputes which capitalism throws up require every competing nation to be in readiness for war, and the wider a country’s interests and its domination, the more frightening its preparation will be. It is thus no coincidence that the United States and the Soviet Union have the world's most advanced and destructive weapons. The results, again, are unpleasant—but nobody has yet been able to put a stop to capitalism’s arms race.

Nobody, either, has been able to put a stop to the persistent battle between workers and employers over wages and working conditions. The fact that the majority of capitalism’s people have to work for wages in order to live means that they will always have to struggle to get the highest wages possible, and to protect their other conditions. Governments may do their utmost to control the situation, with legislation and appeals, but the conflict will go on and the results of it, although not as spectacular as those of a war, are unpleasant enough.

The frictions and the malaises of capitalism are an unavoidable product of the system. The Left Wing does not recognise this—they live under the delusion that a Labour Government, suitably purged and reformed, could run capitalism without war, without strikes, without poverty. None of them has ever shown how this could be done, and the evidence says that it cannot be done. The evidence is there, in the records of the Labour Governments and it is there in the persons of people like Michael Foot and Barbara Castle, who loyally support a Government which on most issues is indistinguishable from the Tories they have castigated for so long.

We said we would return .to the matter of loyalty. Where, we may wonder, will the loyalty of the Foots and the Castles lead them? Labour is their Government, right or wrong, but how much wrong are they prepared to accept? Will trade unionists in the Government stomach all and every attempt at imposing the Early Warning system on wages? Will Ministers who in the past spoke out against racial intolerance stay silent while the colour bar on immigration gets stronger, and while Labour panders more and more to the racist vote? Will those, like Anthony Greenwood, who once marched from Aldermaston, be at Mr. Wilson’s side if he ever has to press the button? Loyalty to a government can cover a multitude of sins, and there is no reason to suppose that loyal Labour men will abandon their Party, no matter what it does. As Woodrow Wyatt (no Left Winger, of course) put it: “It is when we are wrong that we need the backing.” Perhaps this means that the louder the appeals for backing, the more the Labour Party realise they are wrong.

If the Left Wing are confused, and often hypocritical, they are only one group among many. Their faults are typical of all the other organisations which support the social system which breeds confusion and thrives on hypocrisy. In the so-called Age of Enlightenment the need for the facts to be stated clearly is as great as ever. Capitalism is a social system which by its very nature produces a host of antisocial problems such as war, poverty and clashes of interests. Any government trying to run capitalism will come up against these problems and in the end will have to run the system in the interests of its ruling class. No government can let wages run riot, or willingly surrender a position of power and influence in the world. These are the realities, distinct from the dreams of the Left. When the Labour Party come to power, they do so on a promise to reform capitalism, to be different, to be more humane and efficient. But they, too, have to run the system as it demands. As Labour forgets many of its promises, as it does many things which it once swore never to do, it disappoints and outrages its own supporters. For comfort, and as a way of assuring themselves that there is nothing basically wrong with the Labour Party and that somehow, somewhere, it can be changed, they cluster around the Left Wing.

But they will find no peace. In some ways they are useful to the Labour Party. Apart from the fact that Left Wingers are often among the most zealous of party workers, they also keep the Labour Party in touch with its past and the romance of its pioneers. It gives the active members the chance of having a good, old-fashioned demonstration once in a while, when they can almost hear again the cries of the victims of Peterloo. The Left Wing gives the Labour Party a certain standing among workers who sincerely want a better world to live in.

And perhaps—and this is its greatest condemnation—the Left helps to convince people that the Labour Party is not the cynical, vote-grabbing machine of capitalism that it actually is.

Ivan

Editorial: Heartbreak House: The Swindle of Nationalisation. (1945)

Editorial from the October 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leaders of the Labour Party, with the active support of the Communists, are putting over a monstrous deception on the workers in the mining and other industries.

If Conservatives were now in power they would be telling the workers that it is necessary for them to work harder in order to replace what has been destroyed by war and to produce articles needed owing to the present scarcity of coal, clothing, food, etc.

After the last war the same tale was told—and in due course the workers reaped the harvest of increased production in the shape of glutted markets, unemployment and wage cuts. Remembering what happened then many workers would now be sceptical about such propaganda if it came from Conservatives and the employers generally. They would suspect that they were again being tricked into sacrificing themselves for the benefit of capitalism and the profits of the capitalist class.

Now the propaganda campaign is in full swing again, but this time it comes from the Labour Party and Communists and it is baited with the pretence that under Nationalisation greater production will benefit the whole community and not the propertied class.

Mr. Michael Foot, Labour M.P., writing in the Labour organ, the Daily Herald (August 7th, 1945), puts the Labour Party case:—

“Partly owing to the war, there is a severe physical shortage of all the goods required to provide an abundant, life, and if that abundant life is to be assured in the future certain immediate privations will have to be endured in order to restock the capital industries. No Tory Government could make this appeal, for the worker would suspect that the summons to hard work, discipline and abstinence would result only in fortunes for the few and the later wastage of unemployment. The new Government is in a different situation. It also must appeal for hard work, discipline and, for a short period, continued abstinence. All these are needed to increase the total wealth for distribution, but a Labour Government at the same time can give concrete proof of its resolve to use this wealth for the benefit of the whole community. By its social insurance and health and housing plans it can show its determination to secure a greater equality in the distribution of wealth. By its nationalisation proposals it can show its resolve that the re-equipment of industry shall not merely bring greater profits to the few. By its financial measures it can prove that, when this period of shortage is over, no return will be allowed to wasteful unemployment.—(Daily Herald, August 7th, 1945). 

Mr. Foot in his article was answering criticisms made in the Economist, August 4th, the central point of the criticism being that if the owners of a nationalised industry receive as compensation the same income that they were drawing already there is no surplus from which the workers could receive higher wages unless (through more machinery, greater efficiency and harder work), the productivity of the industry is increased. Mr. Foot’s answer is that the Labour Government will get this greater productivity and it will benefit the workers and "not merely bring greater profits to the few.’’ (our italics).

The Labour Government having in the words of the Daily Herald, convinced the electorate "of its detachment from class interests '' (i.e., working class interests), and "of its devotion to the welfare of the whole community". (Daily Herald, August 1st, 1945), no longer adheres to its old propaganda in favour of drastically redistributing the national income in order to help the workers.

Instead it has taken over the familiar capitalist argument that the only way to improve the lot of the workers is to increase the total national income. Mr. Herbert Morrison clinched this in his speech to the National Conference of Labour Women on September 5th:—

“If we were to be able to provide better benefits under the social insurance measures, reduce taxation, and provide more of the goods of life for everybody, the only way was by increasing the total national income ... it could only be done by work, thought, drive and initiative."(Daily Telegraph, September 6th, 1945).

In the same speech Mr. Morrison justified himself by the plea that "there was a limit to what could be achieved merely by transferring money from one person's pocket to another’s,” and went on to explain why, in the interests of efficiency, the Labour Government holds it necessary to reduce taxation on the profits of the capitalists.

A few days later the Communist, Mr. Arthur Horner, National Production Officer of the National Union of Miners and President of the South Wales Miner’s Federation added his piece to the campaign. He told a Press Conference in London that he was asking the miners to increase output by 10 per cent. On the ground that The Mines are to be nationalised he

“asked the workers in the pits to adopt a new attitude . . . Hitherto the policy of the Union had been to get what they could out of the owners. Now they had taken on the responsibility of assisting in running the industry they must accept new methods. They must take a more active part in assisting greater technical efficiency and increasing output.”—(Daily Telegraph, September 7th, 1945).

This new emphasis on the capitalist doctrine that the workers can only get more by producing more, contrasts glaringly with what the Labour Party and the Communists were saying just before the war. Compare Mr. Morrison's statement now with the Labour Party pamphlet “The Nation's Wealth at the Nations Service.”—(Douglas Jay. Labour Party, 1938).

Mr. Jay wrote :—

“Labour's ultimate objective in economic policy is the removal of unjustifiable inequalities of wealth and opportunity by the transfer of private unearned income and capital into public hands. There exists something like £1,200,000,000 of annual unearned income in Britain to-day; and probably two-thirds of this is inherited income which the recipients have done nothing to earn or deserve.

Fortunes totalling nearly £600 million are left every year by private persons mainly to their own friend, and relatives, many of whom are already wealthy. Here is the available reserve and capital on which Labour must draw to supply the minimum human needs of the poorest . . . .”

He went on to say that “a far greater transfer of wealth can be achieved than any yet attempted, without any dislocation of the community's economic life.”

Another indication of the Labour Party's change of front is their present complete silence about, the “capital levy.” After the last war this device, which was offered as a means of transferring wealth from capitalists to workers, occupied first place in the Labour Party programme.

So much for the Labour Party since it has progressed from the pre-war political wilderness to the milk and honey of office.

Let us now consider what Socialists have to say about the whole problem of producing and distributing the articles needed by the community. Let it be emphasised once again that the Socialist case is poles apart from that of the Labour and Communist parties.

At present the means of production (land, factories, railways, etc.), are the private property of a small minority of the population, the capitalists. By virtue of their ownership they draw a large unearned income in the form of rent, interest and profit from the wealth produced by the working-class. The Labour Party's remedy for the poverty problem is (while leaving the greater part of capitalist, industry unchanged), to introduce a purely nominal change of ownership in certain industries that are to be “nationalised." Instead of receiving incomes in the form of dividend on shares in mining or railway companies the present owners will relinquish direct ownership and receive instead approximately the same capital and income in the form of Government stocks and the interest thereon, and the existing gross inequality of property and income will not be affected.

But there is a snag in this from the point of view of trying to run with the hare while hunting with the hounds. The Labour government have promised “fair compensation" to the owners in nationalised industries and are committed to enabling the capitalists in private industries to obtain a “reasonable return on the capital employed" (Sir Stafford Cripps, Daily Herald, August 13th); but they are in the dilemma of also having promised higher incomes to the workers which, under the conditions laid down, can only come from an increase in the workers' output.

The only real remedy is one the Labour Government cannot employ because they did not seek at the election a mandate to abolish capitalism. If capitalism were abolished and socialism introduced there would immediately be two big developments through which the poverty, problem of the working class could be solved by increasing the number of men and women actually engaged in production. One is that the members of the capitalist class, no longer able to live in leisure and luxury at the expense of the workers, would become useful members of the community helping to produce the articles needed by the community. The second is that all kinds of activities necessary to capitalism but unnecessary under Socialism would cease, and this would free millions of workers for production who are now engaged in banks, insurance companies, and advertising, or in the taxation and rating departments of the Central and Local Government; as well as those now required by the capitalists to serve in the armed forces for the competitive struggle with foreign capitalist groups. As is explained in our pamphlet "Socialism" the output of wealth could be at least doubled by these means.

This is the only way in which the poverty problem can be solved and the Labour Government, trying to run the capitalist system, cannot solve it. What they are doing is to act as Caretakers for the capitalist class, calling on the workers to increase output (just as a Conservative Government would have done), but using seductive arguments about “service to the community" which would only be justified if in fact the means of production had been transformed or were going to be transformed into the property of the whole community. While maintaining (with merely superficial changes), the system under which the capitalists exploit the working class, the Labour Government are pretending that exploitation has ended.

It is clever propaganda, but the realities of the class struggle between those who own, but do net produce and those who produce but do not own, will not for long be smoothed over by even the most plausible Labour-Communist orator. The working class faced with the same old ruthlessness of capitalist employers, of Government Departments and of the Boards of the Mining and Transport undertakings when “nationalisation" takes place, will find that they have no defence except the limited defence provided by their own trade unions. In strikes and lockouts the web of half-truths spun by the Labour leaders will be rent asunder, and the workers will have made an advance towards the necessary understanding of the fact that Socialism has nothing in common with Labourism.

Greasy Pole: Naming the day (2000)

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

It will not be long now before Downing Street goes onto Red Alert. All leave will be cancelled for the focus groupies, the pollsters and the spin doctors, as it is for the police when some great public disorder is in the offing. Come the First of May next year Labour will have been in power for four of the allotted five years, which means that Blair and his hangers-on must soon give serious attention to the date of the next election.

Whichever day they settle on and whatever anguish they go through in the process it will all be considered to have been worthwhile because there is general agreement that the timing of an election is vital to the eventual outcome. Since the party which is in power chooses the date they seem to have an overwhelming advantage; but if it were that simple no ruling party would ever lose an election. In fact the choice of date is sometimes given such importance that a prime minister who apparently loses power because they chose wrongly can expect that their days as leader are numbered.

Callaghan 

This is what happened to Jim Callaghan and John Major. Callaghan was under a lot of pressure to call an election in the Autumn of 1978 (he teased the Labour conference that year by singing a song about not being able to make up your mind) but he chose to wait until the following Spring and these few months turned out to be the Winter of Discontent. This was probably the final nail in Labour’s coffin but it is debatable whether their experience of government at that time was so happy and fulfilling that they should want to prolong it by a crafty choice of election day. They could hardly have claimed to be enjoying themselves, after episodes like the exposure of Wilson as a shoddy manipulator, Denis Healey’s persistent battle to hold down wages, the internal mumblings which eventually threw up the Gang of Four and the Social Democratic Party . . . Callaghan himself, who was a canny political operator, took the view that there had been what he called a “sea change” and there was nothing the Labour could do—including a clever selection of election day—about it. The voters had tried Labour government again, they had seen all too clearly that it could not live up to its promises so they felt like a change. In the usual sclerotic process of political preference, the voters decided that if they didn’t like Labour the only other possible course was to vote for a Conservative government.

Foot

It is unlikely that when Callaghan talked about a sea change he expected it to last for almost twenty years. Even worse for the Labour Party—during all that time there was only one election—in 1992—when they might seriously have dared to hope that their day was about to dawn again. In the first election after the defeat of the Callaghan government they presented a manifesto condemned by one of their leaders as “the longest suicide note in history”. And in case anyone thought they were serious about winning the election they chose Michael Foot, who as a vote-loser was in a class of his own, as their leader. In 1987, having elected Neil Kinnock as leader, in the hope that he would appeal to voters as the antithesis of Michael Foot, they lost again because it would have taken more than a clumsy windbag to overcome the entrenched Tory advantage. But in 1992 they seemed to think they had a real chance. They remembered the recent by-election results, they looked at the public opinion polls, they sighed with relief that the public opinion polls, they sighed with relief that the seemingly invincible Thatcher had been replaced by grey, whining John Major. They overlooked the fact that there was still too much ground to make up from the battering they had received in 1983. When he notched up his second successive defeat Kinnock knew it was time to go, to adopt failed the failed politicians’ guise of a wise, benign statesman and look around for one of those lucrative jobs they so easily drop into.

1997

By 1997 Labour had made up all that ground, and quite a but more, with not a little help from the Tories. There was, of course, the rampant sleaze among their MPs (or rather, as sleaze seems a way of life in the Palace of Westminster, the exotic exposure of it by Mohammed Al Fayed, who knows a thing or two about it himself). There was the open war over Europe, driven by the kind of bitterness which had John Major calling some of his most prominent ministers “bastards” and was so unnerving to any Tory who still thought that loyalty was their party’s secret weapon. There was the madness of John Redwood, Michael Portillo and his SAS speech, Ann Widdecombe justifying the shackling of women prisoners when they were in labour . . . Like 1979, it was a time of sea change. It was the Tories who were unelectable and Labour the party trusted to make all the voters’ dreams come true.

The fact that the years since 1997 have had the usual nightmare episodes will be weighing heavily with Blair as he ponders the date when he allows the working class to show how they judge his government. So far the government have not been hit by a recession, which allows them to claim to be controlling the economy through the stringent application of unusually perceptive policies. Blair must also be hoping that Jack Straw’s ambition to go down in history as a more grotesque version of Michael Howard will somehow stop people breaking the law. He will pray that there will be no more media-exciting scandals like Bernie Ecclestone and Formula One tobacco advertising, Lord Irvine and his expensive taste in furniture and wallpaper, Peter Mandelson and his fastidious needs in housing.

Power 

In all the excitement and speculation there will be very little attention given to the calculated cynicism implicit in the assumption that the date of an election will significantly affect its outcome. What does it say about how the working class regard their power to bring about the necessary basic, radical change in society, that they may vote Labour in December and Tory in May? That votes are cast, not in the actual experience of what capitalism does to people and how its political parties are unable to change things, but on how and when those parties pitch their appeal? What does it say about the parties who devote so much effort to this whole sordid process? Well, come next May, or whenever, it will be true to answer those questions in the only way the pollsters, spin doctors and focus groupies understand.

Ivan.

Something to think about (1981)

From the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing about 2½ million workers are officially registered as jobless. Accompanying the monthly tilt of a full Wembley Stadium of workers on to the scrap heap, has been a sharp rise in alcoholism, violent crime, family breakdowns and admission to mental hospitals. While millions of people over the world slowly die for want of food, resources lie untouched and men hankering for work walk past empty padlocked factories having been told their services are no longer required. Fierce blame for this madness is levelled at a variety of people, politicians and policies. The problem of unemployment is not peculiar to Britain, for there are presently about 30 million registered unemployed in America and Europe.

Mr. Slick is a company manager whose career is developing nicely, along with his ulcer. He blames unemployment on the British disease, laziness. “Most of them are too idle to get a job, there are plenty advertised in the papers and Job Centres. They should move to where the work is, any employment is better than scrounging..

Were workers falling to laziness at the rate of 3,000 a day during November 1980, for that was the rate of unemployment? Every week there is news of thousands more who are to be told that they will shortly not be used anymore. Although last December there were two and a quarter million out of work, government figures put the number of job vacancies at 83,517. When 2,900 men were made redundant from the steel works at Consett last year there were already over 2,000 jobless in that region and only 31 jobs available to any of the ousted steel workers.

Is a worker obliged to leave home and family and trek around the country, from one high unemployment area to the next in search of work? To move with your family you may need to sell your house and nowadays there isn’t exactly a queue to settle in an area like Consett. Incidentally, Mr. Slick, if you believe that any employment is better than being a parasite why not tell that to the Royals, the Aristocracy and the Company owners, for whom you “manage”?

One other thing Mr. Slick. In times of recession very often the first place a company will start to prune its costs is with its management. Cutting a few £10,000 a year labour-units is usually a good way for a large company to improve its cost-effectiveness. An article called “Confronting the Unthinkable” (Financial Times 22/10/80) deals with a “predicament that is increasingly being felt in industry as, on both sides of the Atlantic, executives fall victim to economic recession and face enforced redundancy or early retirement”. An American company has been set up to groom redundant executives to present themselves to maximum advantage to potential new employers. “You are the chief executive of a New York company which is suddenly taken over. Next thing your are an out-of-work chief executive. You have turned fifty and are not of an easily employable age. So what do you do?” 

Perhaps you have a serious think about the society in which you live. Redundancy can come as a painful illusion-shatterer to anyone who believes him or herself in the mythical middle-class. The grooming company, THinc Consulting Group, even panders to the snob terminology of the executive (where jobs are “appointments” and wages are “salaries”) by describing the job-finding service as “executive outplacement”, although trying to sell yourself to someone is humiliating whatever you’re calling the exercise. Executives made redundant from private and nationalised industries can buy similar services from British grooming companies, although the fees are high and many shame-faced salary-seekers have to make do with sidling to the Job Centre to sign on with the Professional and Executive Register. It’s goodbye to dreams of power, cocky business talk and the company car. Then there’s the small matter of the hefty mortgage commitment and the children’s school fees. If you are one of the 90 per cent who do not own industrial concerns, land or have control of financial capital then consider the degree of harsh reckoning over our lifestyle which is exercised by those who do own those sceptres and who operate them remorselessly to profit from our work, when they give it to us.

Terry Dolt is in the National Front — or has he joined the British Movement? He wants to protect his England which he claims is something more than his rooms in that high-rise council block, although what more he’s not sure. Perhaps it’s his English culture, you know, tea (from India or China), the monarchy (from Germany) and so on. Unemployment? That is caused by immigration. No, not immigration from Canada or South Africa, but black immigration and jewish conspiracies.

When unemployment reached the level of three million in Britain in 1932, so little black immigration had there been that a single asian or negro was regarded as a curiosity walking through a British city, and as for the jews being responsible, far from masterminding the mass redundancies of that racial conglomeration described as “British”, they were living in dreadful poverty-remember the condition of Cable Street? The locations of today’s highest unemployment levels — Scotland and Northern Ireland — are areas where there has been virtually no black immigration. It is a sad irony that in the recessions of capitalism it is immigrant labour which generally finds it most difficult to get employment. Racial discrimination has arisen, and been fomented by politicians, as a scapegoat for the problems produced by the real culprit — capitalism.

In the 18-month period up to May 1975 unemployment rose by 65 percent for the general population and 182 per cent for young West Indians (Department of Employment Statistics). There has been no NF or British Movement regime in Britain, but we can point to the racist Labour government of 1964-70 to show the failure of immigration control to solve unemployment. The Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962 was a piece of racist Tory legislation described by the contemporary Labour leader Gaitskell as a law which “. . . will be regarded very largely throughout the world as the imposition of a colour bar over here . . The retention of this law was part of the 1964 Labour manifesto but the non-colour-blind immigration controls operated throughout 1964-1970 did not stop the number of jobless from almost doubling.

Mr. Grimace is a Tory. The discipline of his public school and the army has made him the questioning, independent thinker he now is. His main concern with unemployment is not entirely to do with the enormity of working class suffering it leaves in its wake, but more to do with its damaging effect on the economy. By this he means withdrawal of investment, loss of profits, falling share prices — damage, in short, to the interests of the parasites. Mr. Grimace supports Thatcher.

If capitalism is left to run freely with minimum government intervention, says Grimace, the unemployment level will be greatly reduced if not solved altogether. We are told that if the government stops inflation and greatly reduces public expenditure it will be able to make big cuts in taxation which will allow employers to retain more of their profits. With this extra margin of profit, we’re told, further investment will be made in industry, creating more jobs. This is fallacious. Between 1820 and 1913 there was no inflation and yet government expenditure gauged against the total national income — of less than one quarter of what this government is spending. Yet these conditions for which Thatcher is striving did nothing to prevent continuous unemployment and the agonies of the Great Depression. The mistake is to believe that employers are motivated by a need to create jobs. Even given a larger margin of profit, by reduced taxation, capitalists will not re-invest it in industry to create more jobs if the goods, were they to be produced, would not be sold at a profit.

Keith Joseph’s latest gem is that unemployment could be alleviated if workers threatened with redundancy were to accept lower wages than the going rate in their particular line of work. This is called “pricing yourself into a job’’ and means that a company paying £70 to eight men could employ ten men for the same outlay if each was only paid £56. This cut in wages, reduced even more in real terms by inflation, would mean a severe retrenchment in the already base living conditions for most workers. Why? Simply to maintain the profit level of those who we allow to own industry. As a substantial shareholder in Premier Investment Trust, Drayton and the building company Bovis, Joseph must find his job of devising such profit-protecting policies quite engaging. His scheme however will not lower unemployment. The ten men in the example above might produce more than the eight men. If the company managed to capture more of the market it would be at the expense of a rival firm which would in turn be forced to lay off some of its workers. Do you remember all that moronic melodrama from Saatchi & Saatchi in Thatcher’s election campaign? The ever-lengthening dole queues were with us, we were told, not courtesy of capitalism, but because Labour wasn’t working. Since the Tories have been in office with all the power they asked for to solve the problems, the number out of work has soared by over a million.

Ms Policy is an ardent member of the Labour Party. She’s not proud of Labour’s six-government record of not met promises on Housing, Inflation, Unemployment and so on. In fact, she’s not proud of Labour’s record full stop. But at least, she’ll tell you, it’s better than the Tories. One more chance for a Labour regime with Foot as overlord is bound to reduce unemployment to a “tolerable level”, if not solve the problem. Not so. Another Labour government as a proposed answer to unemployment is a non-starter.

Today the production of wealth in all industrialised countries, including state-capitalist Russia, is chaotic. Regardless of human need things are only produced if sales are predicted. Rival national and international companies churn out goods to compete in the bedlam of bidding for markets. Periodically markets become flooded with goods. With disappearing prospects of profits, enterprises slacken or stop production and workers are thrown out of work. In the West the tiny minority who make these gravely consequential decisions are Boards of Directors, shareholders and the Boards of the nationalised industries. In the misnamed Communist Russia there are industrial managers. “They are promoted and given bonuses like their capitalist counterparts when they increase production and profits. They are dismissed and humiliated if they fail in this task. They differ from their counterparts in that they are fellow workers of the State with the lowliest worker in the plant they manage, but they are remote from him physically and spiritually. They live in more attractive, spacious and isolated quarters than the bench workmen and they do not share fully his concerns, in spite of numerous efforts to bring the two together.” (The Soviet Legal System 3rd Ed. Hazard, Butler and Maggs). These are the Mr. Slicks of the Eastern block.

Important industrial decisions, however, like whether production of a certain good is to be stopped are made by the top officials of the Communist Party (apparatchiks) — a ruling elite — who actually hire and fire the industrial managers. In times of slackened production, the Russians who would be in the dole queue in western style capitalism are “allocated” jobs in the police and armed forces. Hence we are told there is no unemployment in Russia.

Constant unemployment, periodically escalating when markets become glutted, is a characteristic of capitalism which no Labour government can remove. In November 1980 at an unemployment rally in Liverpool Michael Foot inveighed against Tory policies and bewailed the catastrophe of jobs being lost at the rate of one every 15 seconds. What was he offering as an alternative? During the 1974-79 Labour government, for part of which Michael Foot was actually Minister of Employment, jobs were lost at the rate of one every 3 minutes 35 seconds — something Foot forgot to brag about at the Liverpool rally.

The 1945 Labour government’s promise of “jobs for all” seemed to be almost kept as unemployment remained very low throughout its office but this was not because the Labour cabinet was controlling capitalism. There was a great deal of work to be done after 1945 reconstructing industry after the war and British industry’s potential rivals — the industries of Germany and Japan for instance — were not to be in full swing again, winning markets from British companies, until the seventies. And again, during Labour’s 1964-70 management of the economy, the dole queue nearly doubled its length.

The Keynesian formula is basically that governments can solve unemployment with an “expansionist” policy: as the Labour Party put it in 1945, “if bad trade and general unemployment threaten . . . we should give people more money and not less to spend”. But each note of the “more money” that the workers were receiving became worth less and less. In 1938 there were £500 million worth of notes in circulation but by 1976 the notes in circulation amounted to £6,000 million. The consequence was a vast increase in prices. Having used inflationary policy to reduce unemployment, the Labour Party found itself in the rather awkward position, in 1976, of attacking inflation as the cause of unemployment and trying to crack the problem with wage-restraints. In that year the government set itself the target of reducing unemployment to 700,000 by 1979, and yet by April 1979 the number of unemployed had risen to 1,340,595. It is not only Miss Policy and her friends who end up supporting the prolongation of the profit-system. The revolutionary proclamations of the SWP dwindle at election time when they urge us to “Vote Labour with no illusions” in the absence of a SWP candidate.

The places where we work — factories, farms, offices, trains, docks, mines — are the property of a small minority. We go to these places to be employed. When we are of no use to the owners we are shut out. If these places belonged to society at large they would be operated to provide goods and services for people to enjoy, not to be sold to those who could afford them. We would not subserviently have to seek employment. We would have free and equal access both to work, chosen in line with talent and interest, and to the results of our labour. The possibility of such a society is no more a fanciful daydream than the agonies of today’s society are an illusory nightmare. But the transformation of society from the profit-system to socialism is clearly not one of these on-a-plate remedies promised by politicians and left-wing leaders. The depriving money-system can only be wound up once a majority have thought seriously about the choice we have, and have decided to act co-operatively for fundamental change. The option is open and you know what decision the capitalists would like you to make. Consider the rest of your life under the yoke of wage-slavery. What do you think? 

Gary Jay

Running Commentary: Barbara’s response (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barbara’s response

In their widely used double whole-page advertisement the Conservative Party claimed that “putting a cross in the Labour box is the same as signing this piece of paper” and one of the items on the imaginary piece of paper was: “I waive my right to choose any form of private medicine for my family”.

This was of course completely untrue but, on the basis that if you are going to tell a lie you might as well tell a big one — in letters half an inch high — it might have frightened some readers into voting Conservative if they had not already decided to do so.

One response was an article in The Times (26 May 1983) by Barbara Castle who was at pains to point out that "What Labour’s manifesto actually says is: ‘We shall remove private practice from the NHS’.” In other words. Labour has no objection to people queue jumping (her expression) provided they do it in Harley Street but not under the noses of the workers who build and run the hospitals and who might feel that they are entitled to as good a health service as anyone else.

But then, it has always been Labour’s policy to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in the scramble for votes. Those workers who yet again voted for the Labour Party were voting for second class NHS treatment when they could receive of the best in a socialist society.

Exit with dignity

Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC, is like a lot of other people. He is keen that everyone should have a job because, he thinks, anyone who is unemployed is not just penniless and hopeless: “These marchers,” he cried at a People’s March for Jobs demonstration in June, “have been cheated of their dignity by not being given a job".

Christopher Smith, devoted husband and father, was dignified alright. He had had the same job since he left school fifteen years ago and had been raised to assistant manager at the supermarket where he worked. One drawback to being assistant manager was that, as the company cut back on the staff forcing a lot of people into the indignity of the dole queue, Christopher was left to run the shop on his own.

In what the company probably thought of as his leisure time Christopher took the paperwork home to wrestle with. The responsibility and pressures became so great that a judge later described them as an “overwhelming terror”.

One day Christopher left the shop early, went home and stabbed his wife and daughter to death. He tried five times to kill himself and then told the police what he had done. At the Old Bailey the judge, probably reasoning that even for capitalism this man had been punished enough, put Christopher on probation with a condition that he accept medical treatment.

Employment, which is the process of being exploited for the benefit of a class of social parasites, is an outrageous indignity. One measure of this is the fact that, if it is not profitable to employ workers, they are brusquely thrust away onto the scrap heap. Those who arc kept on have to cope with the pressures of a fiercer exploitation.

Some can manage this without too much damage to themselves. Others fall ill, sprout ulcers, suffer heart attacks and strokes. A few. like Christopher Smith, in one way or another destroy their lives. For them, there is often a final indignity — to be told that it is they, and not this wretched social system, who are sick.

Ah, yes: which firm was it, to do this to this man? They call themselves Your Sharing, Caring Co-op.

Target practice

Like someone at a fairground shooting gallery, Margaret Thatcher has now picked off two Labour leaders and is probably at present squinting along the barrel waiting for the next target to come into view.

The Labour and Conservative parties continually tell us that political processes are something of a shoot-out between two intellectual Titans. For example the 1983 election was reduced at times to a personal battle between Foot and Thatcher, which implied that they are two specially capable people and that there was some reason to make a choice between them.

This theory of the need for leadership is essentially exclusive. Running modern society is so difficult and complicated a matter that it can be understood by only a small minority of specially gifted men and women. The rest of us must leave it up to them and be satisfied with an occasional opportunity to express our gratitude and admiration at the polls.

Well there may well be a rare technique in running a social system in which millions of people are idle in spite of the fact that there is an urgent need for wealth to be produced and distributed. A system in which every week human beings die on the scale of Hiroshima but not from a nuclear assault — from starvation in spite of the fact that huge amounts of food arc stockpiled and destroyed. A system which gives priority, not to the production of useful and constructive things but to weapons of mass destruction.

But to understand this society is not a difficult or an exclusive business. The knowledge is easily available for the Marxian analysis of capitalism, exposing its foundations, its development and its workings, is as vital and relevant now as it was when it was first set down over a century ago.

There is every reason for workers to understand that capitalism cannot satisfy its people's needs and that it must exploit and debase the majority who do all its useful work. They can easily grasp the fact, because the evidence is all around them, that none of the political parties who appeal for their support to continue capitalism can effectively deal with the problems of the system.

From that understanding it is a simple, logical step to the conclusion that only a democratic revolution to establish a society with a different basis, and different social relationships, will be effective. And this revolution cannot come about through leaders; it must be the act of a conscious, participating majority of the world’s working class.

For most workers — which means for most of the world’s people — this is suspiciously simple. They prefer submission, keeping their place in society as surely and predictably as the targets moving across the fairground booth.

Keeping a promise

It took rather a long time but at last, it seemed, something happened as a politician had promised. When he was the minister responsible for housing in the 1945 Labour government, Aneurin Bevan one day pronounced that housing would not be an issue at a future election. And in 1983, sure enough, it was hardly mentioned.

Of course Bevan meant that his government would have been so successful in dealing with housing that there would no longer be any reason to discuss it. What happened in the election was that it was overlaid by other matters of current interest to the voters — would Thatcher or Foot be the more futile leader, how should British capitalism deploy its nuclear weapons, which party would most effectively get those three million unemployed back into active, full time exploitation? Such developments in political debate are sometimes known as the onward and upward march of the working class.

It was in the background, then, that Shelter announced its opinion that one of the urgent matters awaiting the new government is a “shortage" of 800,000 homes, which is another way of saying that millions of people are without a decent place to live.

Now this is not really a shortage. For a long time bricks and other building materials have been stockpiled and among the three million on the dole are many skilled building workers. This situation exists because, for one reason or another, it is not profitable to use the materials or to employ the workers. However desperate people’s needs may be, capitalism does not produce unless there is the prospect of profit.

Then there arc those people whose housing problem consists of difficult decisions about which one of their homes they should live in at any one time. These are the people in whose interests production is carried out, the people who accumulate the profits without which there is no production, the people who live parasitically on the workers who suffer in the housing problem.

Much water has flowed under Westminster Bridge since Bevan made that claim all those years ago, and much suffering has been endured by the homeless, the slum dwellers and by those who exist in the social deserts of the high rise and the council estates or in the pressured neurosis of suburbia. And the problem is still there, as troublesome as ever. It may have been ignored in the election but as long as capitalism lasts it will not go away.

Down the drain

Speaking in Bolton during his election campaign, Michael Foot was reported as promising that Labour would create 500,000 jobs during its first year in office. 

We are not setting impossible targets. When we reduce unemployment to the level we left it in 1979, it will save the government enough money to pay for the whole of Labour’s emergency programme (The Times, 28 May).

In other words, during a Labour Government’s first year half a million workers would be paid with money later to be saved by an imaginary reduction in unemployment of more than two millions.

Leaving aside the “spend now, pay later” aspect of this form of book-keeping, one is left wondering why, with this remedy for unemployment available, there was anybody at all out of work during the period of the last Labour government.

It is of course a fallacy to suggest that jobs can be created just by taking workers off the dole and paying them with the money saved in benefits.

The kind of work Labour politicians had in mind (such as new sewers) shows no financial return on expenditure. One might almost say it is “money down the drain” which will have to be found by increased taxation. But this proposal would not have attracted many votes.

Election nasties (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

When it got to the point of the politicians telling us that 1983 was to be one of the most important elections ever, we knew we were in for a campaign of stupefying bathos and irrelevance.

While there was much sympathy for the apparently doomed Labour Party (the Daily Telegraph, in a leader a couple of days before the poll, said "For a party that is supposed to be terrifying us . . . Labour looks oddly loveable”) it was really the Tories who began with the more testing task. As the outgoing government, they had to convince millions of people that several unpalatable things were actually good for them and that they should volunteer for another five years of the same. As indeed they did.

Things like class society with the profit motive rampant. Things like unemployment forcing workers out of their customary poverty and into deep hardship. Things like the sexual and personal repression which are often thought of, through a misreading of history, as Victorian moral values. Things like patriotism which is used to inspire ordinary, peaceable people to attack other ordinary, peaceable people they don’t know and have no quarrel with.

In order to get some advantage from persuading people that such things are good for them, the Conservatives needed also to claim that they came about through their deliberate policies. Unemployment, for example, had to be represented as something which could easily be abolished or diminished through high state spending but which is kept in being as the price of something else which is good for us called Beating Inflation. As everyone should know by now, because politicians of all parties have been telling us for many years, inflation is one of the few things a government does not claim to be able easily to control. It is, they say, an enemy which can be kept in check only through great skill (theirs) and hardship (ours). But what everyone should, but does not, know by now is that inflation is actually in the government’s control; it is a contrived policy which they choose not to reverse and actually has no overall significant effect on our living standards.

Perhaps it was the exertion of pretending that the Tory government had planned all these things for our especial benefit and had them under control, rather than having them foisted on them, which caused Margaret Thatcher to go mad during the campaign. The famous image of the Resolute Approach is not really an initiative but a cobbled up response to events. Ignoring this piece of reality had its effect on Thatcher and television watchers throughout the country, although not qualified in psychiatry, became worried at her obvious mania.

Foot’s problem was to paper over the wide and deep cracks in his party by relating almost every question and argument to the issue of unemployment, presumably because he thought that this was a vote winner for the Labour Party. There was small chance of his succeeding and it must also have been rather exhausting for him as it required him to forget that under the last Labour government, in which he served so fanatically, unemployment doubled and was on the upward path when they lost power. In this Foot showed he has the amnesic talents required by many a mental patient and by all serious politicians. Throughout the campaign Labour’s inconsistencies — on nuclear weapons, on what they call defence, on how they relate to the wilder fringes of loony reformism called the left wing — kept catching up with Foot. Under close questioning he tried to be nimble but was exposed as evasive, cynical and politically bankrupt.

The press — even so normally sympathetic a paper as the Observer — were notably cruel to him. Yet Foot could still pull in the crowds, large affectionate gatherings of devotees of the idea that he is a man of unswerving principle who, provided he does not disappear altogether through the personality change, will one day deliver us all to the Promised Land. As polling day drew nearer he seemed to lose heart. Perhaps he was reading the Sporting Life; the bookmakers, with a properly hard-nosed assessment of reality, began to discourage bets on the election result and started offering odds on who would replace Foot when the Labour Party lost.

Perhaps the SDP/Liberal Alliance claim to be the mould-breakers of British politics who will cast out the Old Gang would have appealed to someone in a natural despair at the alternating futility of the two parties which have shared power over British capitalism. But the SDP leaders themselves sprang from the Old Gang and were responsible, when they were ministers, for many of the policies they now so heartily denounce. Of course the other part of the Alliance, the Liberals, have a trump card; they can claim not to have recently had the chance to fail which is just as well for them in view of their record when, all those years ago, they were in power. In any case their policies now are no more than a variation on the same reformist hash as offered by the Labour and Conservative parties. It was when they were faced with an unexceptional political crisis that the mould breakers showed how similar they are to the despised Old Gang.

Worried at first by their poor showing at the opinion polls, they moved quickly to make Jenkins their scapegoat. A nasty, but revealing, clash was narrowly avoided when in the nick of time the Alliance poll ratings went up which allowed all SDP/ Liberals to go back to saying how much they admired and supported Jenkins.

This disreputable incident illustrated the ability of the opinion polls to inspire panic or complacency, according to their findings. It was poll ratings which caused the initial assumption that the Labour Party would lose the election, hardening into the certainty that Thatcher would have a majority comparable to Attlee's in 1945. Labour’s depression at their years of schism and confusion, their weak showing at by-elections, their failure to profit from the Thatcher government’s problems and to win some of the nauseous flag-waving glory from the Falklands war, seemed to blind them to the fact that the polls have a history of fallibility. In 1970 the Wilson government, at first confident of victory, lost the election although at one point the polls had them leading by over 12 per cent. In February 1974 the Tories, fighting among the black-outs of the Three Day Week on the theme of Who Governs the Country, were at one time ahead in the polls by 6.5 per cent but in the end they narrowly lost. In October 1974 and again in May 1979 the polls gave the winners a much larger percentage of support than they eventually notched up.

Perhaps more important for them, the Labour Party’s reliance on unemployment as a vote winner was also not supported by history. The only comparable period, in terms of numbers out of work and general elections on a popular franchise, was the twenties and thirties. Labour were in office, as a minority government, in 1929 partly on a pledge to cure unemployment and when their brief, wretched span was ended in 1931 they suffered the most crushing defeat in their history. The monthly average of unemployment during 1931 was 2,717,000 or 21.3 per cent of total employees. At the election the National government won a majority of 497 — a result caused, not by concern at unemployment but through patriotism and fear at the crass failure of the MacDonald government to control capitalism. When the next election came in 1935 unemployment had fallen to 2,027,000 but at 15.5 per cent it was still a serious problem: ". . after four years (of National government) unemployment, depression, misery still overshadowed the land” (Britain Between The Wars, Charles Loch Mowat). But the voters were still mainly satisfied with Conservative government; the best the Labour Party could do was to increase their MPs from the freak number of 51 to 158, leaving Baldwin with a majority of 247 over all other parties.

Whatever success might have attended Foot’s desperate efforts to conceal his party’s miserable disarray on other issues was effectively nuked by Jim Callaghan's headline-catching declaration in favour of British capitalism keeping its own nuclear armoury. Foot might well have been deeply hurt by this act of ingratitude for when Foot was one of Callaghan's ministers his standing as Labour's left-wing conscience was useful in reconciling the party's doubters to the policies of strikebreaking. holding down wages, cutting public spending, racist immigration laws and so on for which that government will always be remembered. After Callaghan’s intervention Labour spokespeople grew increasingly despondent while Thatcher, seeing an unexpectedly emphatic victory looming over the horizon, became ever more manic. At times she went too far even for seasoned media hacks, addressing the galactically great Robin Day without his title and upsetting the faithful Daily Telegraph, which may have been responsible for an element of objectivity creeping into their reporting, the crux of which was their giving some space to a reasonably accurate piece on the Socialist candidate in Islington South.

So yes, it was an election of familiar bathos. Labour supporters were excitedly convinced that at all costs the Tories must be thrown out without knowing why since Labour is fundamentally no different. The Conservatives treated it as a crusade against the threat of revolution although they could not explain why something they called a revolution was designed to keep the same capitalist social system in being.

For the unwary it might have been very confusing because in one sense all sides could take heart from the result. The election spelled out again that, whatever stress and degradation capitalism subjects them to. the working class have a large and enduring appetite for the system. The people in the advertising agencies could be excused for believing in a diabolical power to convince the workers that facts and experience go for nothing and that what counts is an ability to present those facts and that experience in a distorted and deceptive way. So yet there is hope for the Labour Party and the Alliance.

Amid all despair, only the Socialist candidate in Islington stood apart. There was no bathos in that campaign, only a rational, conclusive case for the new society. It was a small effort compared to that of the big parties, and solitary, but as significant as the oyster's grain of sand.

Ivan

CND at 30 (1988)

From the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

For their own sakes it is to be hoped that the marchers on CND's 30th anniversary trek this Easter did not think they had any reason for celebration. They were repeatedly urged not to be nostalgic, for as Pat Arrowsmith, who was on the first march in 1958 and has been on unnumbered protests since, put it. "The issues are still alive and the young people here today are fighting an even harder battle than the one we began 30 years ago". Wait a minute: issues still alive, after 30 years? Harder battles than ever? CND was formed, and launched its protests, on the theory that huge public demonstrations were the quickest and most effective method of persuading the government to get rid of nuclear weapons. This was, in 1958, an urgent matter, to be dealt with before we could turn our attention to any basic changes in society. If something was not done quickly things would get a lot worse; why, there could be submarines cruising the oceans capable of firing nuclear missiles while still submerged; or missiles which could slip through radar screens by a low-level flight to their target; or a galactic nuclear conflict as the super-powers strove to disable each other's missiles out in space.

Early optimism

Since 1958 we have had four changes of government and numerous CND marches. The governments have been unmoved; the situation has got worse. Not only have the disowners failed to remove the problem quickly but what effect they have had — or can now hope to have — can be assessed by the fact that they still feel a compelling reason to protest and that another of their veteran campaigners can say, in 1988:

 But although we know atomic weapons will never disappear, it is clear that their development is being intensified against all political claims of disarmament. (Liz Baker, Observer, 3 April)

In spite of that rueful admission that CND never had a hope of persuading the government to change its mind and, whatever the other powers did, throw away its nuclear weapons, it is true that the early CND marches encouraged a measure of optimism. In June 1960, after observing the march that year, a contributor to the Socialist Standard could write:

  Yet there is some comfort in this march. After the barren years of the delinquents, large numbers of people seem to be getting active in a movement of protest against a social problem.

That was a reaction, not so much to the promise of CND as to the frustration of confronting years of complacency among a working-class who seemed popularly to agree with Harold Macmillan that they had never had it so good. Especially galling was the fact that this cynicism was so apparent in young people, who excused it with the assertion that social problems were peculiar to, and the fault of, an earlier generation. CND was significant for puncturing that complacency and. by focussing the unease about nuclear destruction, encouraging young people to question what capitalist society was all about. A few youngsters even got the answer right, left CND and joined the movement for a socialist revolution. Many of the rest could not surmount the reformist obstacle of a preference for massaging symptoms rather than excising their cause.

Changing tactics

But misplaced enthusiasm can breed only confusion and CND was quickly blundering from one desperate expedient to another. There was a heavily publicised split over the emergence of the Committee of 100, much of whose appeal was that they had attracted Bertrand Russell to their ranks. Surely, someone who could write all those clever books on philosophy couldn't be wrong about the way to get rid of nuclear arms? The Committee's argument was that the government would take little account of orderly marches and rallies; what was needed to make them sit up and take notice was a lot of people sitting down in the middle of the road. The resultant disruption and publicity would soon bring the government to its knees, willing to throw away its nuclear armoury rather than subject the motorists of London to another moment's delay in a traffic jam. What actually happened was that the police were sent in to lug the demonstrators out of the way and to arrest those of them who particularly did not want to be removed. Meanwhile. far away from the scene of it all, the production of nuclear weapons continued its uncongested way.

Since then CND has changed its line often enough to satisfy the most erratic of reformist tacticians. At one time it was into direct action, by which it meant diverting a few of the more athletic demonstrators into attempts to storm Regional Seats of Government. If CND expected a great howl of outrage at their revealing the existence of these places they were badly mistaken; a more likely response from the working class was one of gratitude, that the government should so thoughtfully provide somewhere for what was left of British capitalism to be administered after the nuclear holocaust. There was another spell, when CND seemed likely to cease being a single-issue movement and join itself to the long list of organisations which campaign, day in and day out. about wages, housing, poverty, health and the rest. It has tried high-profile leaders like Joan Ruddock and Bruce Kent and low profile, like the present. One tactic it has not considered: a campaign against class society as the cause of war and all weapons, nuclear and conventional.

Courting Labour’s leaders

Much of CND's energy — its enthusiasm and its despair — has gone into its long battle to win over the Labour Party. To some extent this was understandable, since so many Labour leaders have been keen to be associated with them. The most prominent of these, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, have been at the head of many a march, and Foot told the rally at the start of this year's march:

  I came to the march in 1958 with a different dog but with the same wife. This march is a sign that the campaign will go on until nuclear weapons are wiped off the face of the galaxy. It has nothing to do with nostalgia.

A strong, ambitious way of imparting the same message of failure as Pat Arrowsmith and Liz Baker. But there is one very important difference. Not so long ago Foot, as Labour leader, was bidding to become prime minister, to lead a government whose party had in theory committed it to unilaterally getting rid of British nuclear weapons. How strong, how ambitious was he then? Well, at Labour's 1982 conference he was arguing for multilateral nuclear disarmament — for all the nuclear powers doing it at the same time — which was a long way from CND policy. Foot's words then might just as easily have been in the mouth of Reagan or Gorbachev or of any Tory claimant to a policy of peace and disarmanent:

  The greatest task which this Labour Party will have to take (sic) is to carry out our policy for securing nuclear disarmament in this country, and throughout the world.

During the 1983 general election, pushed into a comer by Tory propaganda that a Labour government would eagerly abolish the military power of British capitalism — a myth which won the Tories a lot of misinformed votes — Foot firmly pledged a "strong defence (his word for it) for Britain and Britain's allies" and a continuing adherence to the nuclear armed, American dominated, power bloc of NATO. Asked about Labour's commitment not to abolish British nuclear arms but only to get rid of one kind of them the Polaris missile — Foot was clumsily evasive: "Read the statement carefully and read the manifesto carefully and clarity will descend on all quarters".

CND’s “successes”

What did not descend on all quarters was the assurance that a Labour government would be be less resolved to keep a British bomb than would a Tory one. Foot was trying to juggle with his misled party activists on one hand and the voting British working class on the other. The activists were of course let fall. By 1983, with Kinnock in the leadership, the confusion was less; Labour's election manifesto was quite clear that a Labour government would keep the bomb while trying to start negotiations to remove some of the weapons from Europe as a step, they argued, towards them being abolished together, all over the world — much the same as the recent deal between Russia and America over the INF missiles.

Which brings us to what CND claims to have been its successes. The "success" of the 1963 Test Ban Treaty can be gauged against the subsequent developments in nuclear warheads and delivery systems, not to mention the increase in the number of weapons in the world since then. It is a strange sort of remedy, which is followed by the complaint getting worse. Last year's INF treaty should remove some of the less powerful weapons from some places but it was followed by the nuclear powers scrambling to plug the gaps which the treaty opened in their armouries. It is a peculiar type of success, which looks likely to leave us worse off — more threatened, less secure — than before. In any case CND had mixed feelings about each of these "successes", fearing to make too much of them in case they convinced too many people that the cause of nuclear disarmament had won the day and need not be supported any longer.

Foreseeable failure

In human beings the age of 30 is seen as an important threshold, when workers have a rough idea of how the rest of their lives will be spent — what type of exploitation they will get their living at, how long they will be chained to their mortgage, what they feel about the people they have agreed to spend the rest of their lives with. Personal horizons, over which we disappear when we die, can be described, albeit a long way off. Failures, mistakes and prospects can be evenly assessed. CND at thirty might try the same exercise, asking themselves why all that well-intentioned energy has been so sadly misplaced. Is their fear of nostalgia more a morbid suspicion that their failure must extend into the foreseeable future?

Ivan