Greasy Pole: Straw man at Howard's end? (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who is concerned about the human condition must be getting worried about Jack Straw. As he goes about the business of being the man who hopes to be Labour’s next Home Secretary, Straw is finding life more and more stressful and threatening. In this situation, what do politicians do? They make a speech—or perhaps, depending on how strongly they feel, several speeches. And so it has come about that Straw, who obviously feels strongly about his chances of getting to sit on the govemment Front Bench in the near future, has spoken out.

Among the first to feel the lash of Straw's tongue were beggars and alcoholics. Or rather aggressive beggars and alcoholics; so it could be that addicts and vagrants, who accept their position cheerfully, will avoid the worst consequences of any laws designed to sweep them away which a future Labour government may introduce. Until then, the streets will continue to be littered with the open, human evidence of the fate which awaits anyone who does not fit into capitalism’s presumptive pattern of wage-slavery. The rich will still have to avert their eyes to this spectacle, as they make their way from the opera to an expensive supper, or to their club, or to the discreet shops of Knightsbridge.

Intimidation

Then there are the squeegee merchants—the people who wait, with bucket and sponge, at busy traffic lights and insist on cleaning car windscreens, with an implied promise that provided the driver pays them for this service, they won’t hold on the aerial as the car is driven way. Now this can be intimidating, especially to drivers who take a pride in keeping their own windscreen sparkling clean and their aerial stiff and straight. Not nearly so intimidating, though, as the pressure a lot of the motorists are likely to be under from their employers, who now wield all the power associated with widespread unemployment. Of the adult population, 60 percent are now either unemployed or in jobs which can be defined as insecure. Three-quarters of full time jobs are on short-term contracts. Sitting in the petrol fumes at the lights, the motorists are harassed all right—but not only by the squeegee merchants.

Perhaps encouraged by the response to his campaign to clear the streets and the busy junctions of all offenders against good order and wage-slaves' discipline, Straw then turned his attention to children. Not just any children; at the moment he is concerned only with those who are out on the streets at a time when Straw thinks they should be at home, watching party political broadcasts on television or tucked up in bed with a copy of the Labour Party’s latest policy document. Driving home from the Commons, says Straw, he sees children who he judges to be under ten years old and he wonders where their parents are. He didn’t actually say that these children are a threat to anyone, or had committed any crime but he clearly feels they are another threat to Labour's ideal society and something must be done about them.

Straw’s proposal of a curfew for all ten-year-old children was, he said, a “sensible" way of dealing with a problem. In fact the police already have the power to pick up any child who seems to be at any kind of risk and take them home, or to hospital, or to a social worker. Where Straw’s curfew would break fresh ground is in the fact that it would not be necessary for the children to be at risk; merely being out of doors after a certain hour would be enough for the police to act.

There was a predictably mixed response, on the one hand from people who are concerned at the apparent increase in violence and offences by young children and on the other from people who are worried about civil liberties and the presumption of innocence and why kids should be out by themselves at night and how the curfew would fall heaviest on families who are already the most disadvantaged among the working class.

Straw was unperturbed, probably convinced that his ideas would strike a sympathetic chord with enough people to be a vote winner. He did not seem to be concerned to ask why the adults who are supposed to be caring for children are apparently so careless. He did not refer to the fact that, however it is measured, poverty in this country gets worse and more distressing year-by-year. According [to] the Child Poverty Action Group, about a quarter of the population live at or below the poverty line; in 1979 about ten percent were at that level. Straw did not dwell on the fact that as poverty deepens all sorts of human factors go with it, like self-esteem, like confidence in the future, like care for the family . . . 

Backlash

There was a time when it was hardly necessary to argue this case, as one White Paper after another promoted the policies which eventually sprouted the great social work boom of the Sixties and Seventies. Many members of the Labour Party could delude themselves that they were in the forefront of this movement in ideas, that in future problems like crime, homelessness, addiction would be treated in their social context instead of being explained away as the poisonous fruit of evil personalities.

Well that was along time ago and now we live, as socialists said we would, in a period of reaction—of backlash. The present Home Secretary, Michael Howard, has single-mindedly exploited this, presumably on the assumption that in this way he advances his political career. He has not bothered to respond to Straw’s odious attempts to outbid him in the contest for the get-tough-on-crime vote. Perhaps he agrees with the Labour voter who said Straw is “. . . the only man on earth who can make Michael Howard look left-wing’’.

From the politicians' point-of-view the advantage with the policies of Straw and Howard is that they blank out the need to properly investigate social problems and come up with a considered response to them. They suffocate debate under panic and hysteria. They perpetuate the social system which impoverishes, brutalises and represses us—mortgages and homeless, addicts and athletes, adults and children.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Pornography and Politics (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kenneth Clarke was a Front Bench star in the Thatcher and Major governments – Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and all that – but he has now decided that he does not like the members of his own party. A lot of them, he complains, are elderly people who never attend meetings and vote after reading the Daily Telegraph – as if that kind of political self-instruction had not always been worth a hat full of Tory votes. One of Clarke’s aides – Nick Kent – has been more explicit in his dislike of the Tory grass roots: “nasty old people” was his description of the party faithful (who) “cannot be reasoned with”. These outbursts are not accidents; they have been provoked by those nasty geriatrics electing Iain Duncan Smith to the Tory leadership in preference to Clarke and to the fact that Clarke now senses the time has come for him to make another bid for the top job – which cannot be unconnected with a dawning awareness in the party that by choosing Duncan Smith they made a mistake of historic stupidity.

The reasons for Duncan Smith’s victory will be a field for endless analysis, which is probably only waiting for the Tories to lose the next election as decisively as they lost the last one. Perhaps it was in reaction against William Hague, who was notable for what Nick Kent called “a teenage cocktail of tabloid populism and raving anti-Europeanism”. Perhaps it was because, although Duncan Smith had upset quite a few people (like John Major) in the party he had done so for what they considered the right reasons, in contrast to Clarke and Portillo. Perhaps they simply took to Duncan Smith’s soldierly stiff upper lip, his smart suits, his background as an officer in the Guards. They must have forgotten that political leaders are not elected to be well-mannered and expensively dressed. What leaders must be good at is telling lies, twisting arms, blackmailing their supporters, convincing the electorate that a calamitous past was not their fault.

Retreat 

Some months after he got the job, Duncan Smith is plainly failing to turn his party round. He is in deep trouble, with political correspondents openly musing on the likelihood that at the next election the Tories will be reduced the third ranking party, behind the Lib Dems. So Duncan Smith should be looking over his shoulder, organising his retreat, setting up his rearguard or whatever it is they do in the Guards at such times. And to make things a little more difficult there is Clarke in pursuit, declaring that he is reconsidering his refusal to accept a shadow post under Duncan Smith: “Never say never in politics” he said, ” It depends what job and depends on what he (Duncan Smith) expects me to say about the policy of the party”. It might be asked, how Clarke reconciles this with his previous assessment of Duncan Smith as a “status quo” politician, one of the “headbangers” on the issue of Europe, who would send the party into a “lurch to the right”. Politicians are of course skilled at forgetting their former declarations of immutable principle if it will help them get into power. Clarke is not offering to support his leader but to line himself up for the leadership if, with a little help from Clarke, Duncan Smith should be ousted.

Clarke will have learned from history that it will not be that simple, that there will be other hopefuls sharpening their knives, a few of them – like the oily, odious Michael Howard – already well known. Other possible candidates will have to work a bit harder to get themselves known but so did Margaret Thatcher when she beat Ted Heath in 1975, when few people expected a woman to come through to lead the Tory Party, especially one who had been jeered at in the media as the minister who snatched away the schoolkids’ free milk. So step forward, as they say in the gutter press, Theresa May, who sits for the lush Thames-side seat of Maidenhead. It is apparent that she is being groomed for stardom, if that is how to describe being leader of this political rabble. Her publicity drive may or may not be assisted by her having a name very close to that of a celebrated queen of porn. Get onto the internet and search for Teresa (no h) May and you will be viewing some lurid, unreal images of a female who does not appear to be taking part in a dreary Commons debate. As a result Theresa (with the h) May has been invited to participate in some raunchy TV programmes and has received some pretty forthright correspondence meant for her near-namesake. A typical letter ” . . . asked (her) to expose herself in public, to do things with men that most of us wouldn’t consider in the privacy of our own homes, and to force herself into weird, unnatural positions for the camera”.

Porn Queen 

This raises a few questions. How justified is the outrage at being confused with a porn queen and at Teresa May’s way of earning her living? One thing which can be said is that she is perfectly open about what she does, which is some way better than politicians who, if they are at all interested in hanging on to their job, cannot be honest about their work. If they were honest they would have to own up to a persistent catalogue of deception and failure and in the end to their own inability to control, or even affect, the social system which they claim to be able to fashion to our benefit. And what, after all, can we name as pornography and who are the pornographers?

Theresa May is the daughter of a clergyman. She went to Oxford (like Thatcher) then worked in a bank. Her ambitions were clear early on; she was a councillor in Merton, had to go through the mill of contesting some hopelessly solid Labour seats, like North West Durham in 1992 and Barking in a 1994 by-election before, against some strong opponents, she won the nomination for the rock-solid Tory seat of Maidenhead. “Very bright, hyperactive and witty” was how Andrew Roth described her in the Guardian. “Sloane with City flash” was another’s less kind assessment. The parallels between her and Thatcher have been noted; a Eurosceptic, she may see her road to power in carrying on where the mad handbagger left off. In the Tory leadership fight in 2001 she was careful not to be too prominent about her support for Portillo. In any case Duncan Smith did not hold this against her and gave her the shadow job of Transport and Local Government, belabouring the hapless, floundering Stephen Byers.

Bearing in mind that one function of the pornographer is the selling of talents for questionable purpose, how do we assess Theresa May? What does this supposedly vibrant and capable woman have to offer about this society and what it does to people? So far her comments have been preoccupied with blaming the Labour government for policies which are simply a continuation of what the Tories did when they were in power. On 7 November she spoke out about the government’s suggestion that people might be encouraged to vote if it was made easier for them, by having polling booths in places like supermarkets. Her comments were less than original. The way to get people to vote was not, she said, by “inventing new electoral systems or new types of politicians . . .The underlying cause of voter apathy is growing cynicism with the political process . . .” This banality does not even approach the question of why voters should be cynical. One obvious reason is that experience of a Labour government has made it clear to thousands of people that there is no difference worth influencing a vote between the big parties. People who voted Labour in 1997 under the impression that they were opting for social change are now realising that they were wrong but they have no idea of any other way. That is the root of their cynicism.

Bombs and Poverty 

There is a kind of pornography in this social system, which has nothing to do with a few women being paid to perform a variety of sexual acts for the entertainment of others. The kind of socially organised, premeditated state violence that has devastated the wretched country of Afghanistan in the interests of the oil industry is a kind of pornography; it excites all manner of morbid responses which are stimulated and exploited by political pornographers like Blair and Bush. It is a kind of pornography that in this country, which our leaders assure us is a model of civilised advancement, a third of the children live below the official poverty line. It is a kind of pornography that voters should be cynical about the political system when they have the power to use it to transform society, to liberate the human race into a society based on human needs.

Meanwhile we are left with the same dreary procession of impotent leaders who tell us, one after the other, that the way forward is to hand over to them our power to change society so that they can keep it as it is. Major for Thatcher; Hague for Major; Duncan Smith for Hague; perhaps one day May for Duncan Smith. And that is just the Tory Party. The other Teresa May, and those who do the same work, do far less damage.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Howard’s Beginning (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among what is politely called the cut and thrust of politics the Tory Party has always taken comfort from the notion that, when all is said and done, they have the priceless asset of loyalty as their secret weapon. Anyway that is the kind of nonsense they dish out to the grass roots party members, presumably because they alone are crazy enough to believe it. Consider, for a start, the case of Iain Duncan Smith. As it became more and more obvious that the Quiet Man of Chingford could not survive much longer in the hot seat into which those same grass roots had thrust him, he tried again and again to put off the inevitable by appeals to party loyalty. In this he was supported by the majority of MPs, including some of the more prominent in the Shadow Cabinet. At that stage only a few were ready to put their heads above the parapet. And among those most loudly protesting their unswerving loyalty to their doomed boss were Oliver Letwin – and Michael Howard.

So strongly were these two driven by the passion of their loyalty that shortly before IDS was shown the door by the parliamentary party they allowed themselves to be photographed standing in support of him outside Conservative headquarters. The question is, was anyone really impressed by this? The body language and facial composure of both men did not suggest that loyalty was in the forefront of their minds. And that was how it really was because directly IDS had been deposed Howard announced that he was ready to offer himself, with all due modesty, as a candidate for the leadership. But he did this with a speed not to be expected in someone still grieving loyally for the lost leader. At the same time Letwin was busily negotiating a deal between Howard and his only real rival – David Davis – to ensure that Howard would be the only candidate. It was, as you might say, political business as usual.

Guilt

If either of these men was troubled by feelings of guilt at their double standards (and there is no evidence whatsoever that politicians are ever vulnerable to such distractions) they could have consoled themselves with the memory that in his day IDS himself was not famous for being loyal to his leader. He was, in fact, one of John Major’s “bastards” – a group of swivel-eyed Tories who plotted relentlessly against Major and his policies. In fact there is a case that when the leadership was being contested in 2001 it was the very fact that IDS had been one of the “bastards” which persuaded the grass roots to vote for him. Then there is the fact that, in the previous leadership election in 1997, Howard was outmaneuvered (a rare occurrence for him) by William Hague going back on an agreement between them not to stand. And what about the disloyalty of the parliamentary party towards the grass roots membership – all those patient, unfulfilled blockheads who stuff envelopes and organise coffee mornings but who were denied their chance to vote for a new leader? It seems clear that the underhand operations to get Howard as the only candidate were designed to avoid giving the membership a chance to elect another IDS. So much for party unity. So much for trusting the party members. So much for democratic elections. Well, we did say it was cut and thrust.

One reason the Tories were so keen on Howard was that he was about the only one with a public image; the others, like Letwin, Fox and Davis, are hardly known outside the party rubber chicken circuit. Howard was different; after all he had been a Home Secretary. Which was part of the problem because if anything he was rather too well known in an undesirable way. If he is remembered for anything it is for the cruelty with which he pursued anyone caught breaking the laws which protect capitalism’s right to legalized theft. This made him hugely popular with the grass roots in their conferences but it had the opposite effect on anyone at the sharp end of crime and the legal system. “Michael, stand and deliver” was how Jeffrey Archer (before he began his personal experience of the punishment which Howard was responsible for) introduced him at one conference. In response to which Howard brought the faithful to their feet with a rousing stimulation of their most hardened prejudices and delusions on the theme of “Prison works… I know what causes crime: criminals”. And in case there was any doubt about his opinions he chose as his minister for prisons that strange woman Anne Widdecombe, who justified his confidence in her by overseeing the shackling of women prisoners while they were giving birth.

Smirk

Whatever protest was aroused by incidents like these left Howard unmoved, his oily smirk undisturbed. In the view of a fellow minister he was a Home Secretary whose policies were “largely determined by the Conservative Party Conference…may have been the worst Home Secretary in the two centuries the office has been in existence”. (Since then we have had experience of Jack Straw and David Blunkett, who have put in a strong bid for that distinction). The fact that Howard’s family came to England in 1939 as refugees from the intensifying repression of Jews in Romania did not persuade him to speak out against the anti-immigration policies of the Thatcher government; nor did it make him protest against Thatcher’s raging about the country being “swamped” by immigrants. In the 1997 Conservative leader election Campaign he said that “Tories should not believe in ‘one nation’ policies but in ‘one British nation’ policies. All of this was in the cause of helping his bid to be leader of his party, eventually Prime Minister.

Then came the New Beginning. The prospect of leading the Tories, with the golden dream of upsetting precedent and winning power at the next election, wonderfully concentrated Howard’s mind. Something drastic was needed to get rid of that unfortunate image as the slippery darling of the Tory grassroots. The first priority was to embrace the concept of renewal: “Of course we have got to change” he announced, “The world has changed, the country has changed and we have to change”. A few days later he was giving his party the bad news of what that change entailed: henceforth they “…must be a party broad in appeal and generous in outlook”. He might have put it more simply: “Trust me, elect me”. This all provoked unhappy memories of Thatcher and her reference to St Francis: “Where there is discord may we bring harmony” and John Major drooling about presenting us with “a nation at ease with itself”. History will record that Thatcher’s government did not set out to introduce us to social harmony, or any other kind of it and Major became infamous for presiding over a nation so disturbed with itself that they blamed him enough to eject him emphatically from office at the first opportunity so that his party could then eject him from the leadership.

Charm Offensive

A lot of work, some of it in unexpected quarters, is being put into recasting Howard, to persuade us to forget the memorable description of him by Anne Widdecombe – who should have known – that there was “ something of the night” about him. We are being informed that we have cruelly misjudged the poor man. We thought he was a slimy, manipulative conspirator – just the kind of person to survive in the adversarial world of barristers which he inhabited – when all along he was, as one of his admirers put it, “Warm, charming and witty”. Even worse, in the Daily Telegraph of 1 November Anne Robinson took time out from being – well, Anne Robinson – to reassure us that when he was at Cambridge Howard was “a very fine lover” and that he has now grown up into someone who is “shy, witty and clever”.

The Labour Party are banking on the voters being resistant to this charm offensive and preferring to live with, and to vote on, their memories of the Michael Howard of old. But this may not be the wisest tactics for them. Every capitalist party has a murky past, populated by leaders whose responsibility for asserting the primacy of the ruling class has made them widely hated. If the workers had voted in the 1997 election with proper recall of the experience of previous Labour governments they would never have put Tony Blair into Number Ten. In 1979, if they had remembered what their life had been like under past Tory governments they would not have put themselves up for another dose of it. The leaders of capitalism personify the fact that it is a vicious, murderous, repressive way of organising human affairs. And capitalism relies for its continued existence on the defective memories and responses of the very people who suffer under it. There is no reason for Michael Howard not to benefit from this; we might yet see him realising his all-consuming dream of going through the front door at Downing Street.

Ivan

Editorial: An Honest Election Broadcast (2004)

Editorial from the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

If his speech to the Tory Conference last month is anything to go by, Michael Howard has realised that politicians generally are perceived as people who make promises they can’t deliver on just to get elected.

This is indeed the prevalent perception but it needs to be pointed out that, even if every politician were honest and genuinely interested in improving the lives of ordinary people rather than in furthering their careers, this would not make any difference. The problems we face don’t arise from governments being composed of dishonest or self-serving politicians. What a government can do depends, not on the honesty or determination or competence of its members, but on the way the capitalist system works and on what, as a profit-making system, it requires any government – even one composed of selfless saints – to do. Capitalism just cannot be made to work in our interest.

Howard has evidently been advised by his spin-doctors that, by tapping into this perception of politicians as lying self-seekers and presenting his party’s candidates as honest and trust-worthy, he could be on to a vote-winner. We doubt if this ploy will work but we offer below an election address that can be used, without our permission or need to acknowledge its source, by any aspiring politician, of whatever party, who really wants to be honest.

“Dear Electors,

I come before you as a candidate of a party which stands for keeping the present basis of society as the ownership of productive resources by a tiny minority of the population and where goods and services are produced, not to directly satisfy people’s needs, but for sale with a view to profit.

If my party wins a majority of seats we will form a government that will manage the political side of this capitalist system, hopefully more efficiently than one formed by the other parties. Honesty compels me, however, to point out that, despite what my party has claimed in all previous elections, what governments can do within the framework of capitalism is severely limited.

No government, not even one formed by my party, can control the way the profit-driven capitalist economy works. Experience of governments formed by my party and by other parties has demonstrated that capitalism is governed by the economic law of “no profit, no production” and is periodically subject to ups and downs of economic activity which no government can prevent and which all governments have to ride out at best they can.

As capitalism can operate only as a profit-making system in the interests of the tiny profit-taking minority who own and control the means of production, any government formed by my party will be obliged to give priority to the interests of this minority. I am therefore not in a position to make any promises to improve conditions in any field for ordinary men and women like yourselves. I can promise, on the other hand that, whenever making profits comes into conflict with meeting your needs, priority will be given to profit-making. I pledge myself, if elected, to support any such austerity measures in the full knowledge of the misery and distress this will bring to many of you and without trying to pass them off as essential if you are to have jam tomorrow.

My opponents in this election also support the present capitalist system and if their party formed the government it would act in the same way. So, if you want to keep the capitalist system and are prepared to put up with its consequences, it does not matter which one of us you vote for or, for that matter, whether you vote at all.

I would however request that you do vote for me since, unless I am elected an MP, I won’t be able to pursue my chosen career of professional politician.”

Greasy Pole: Promises or Threats? (2004)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that the party conference season is over we can spend the long dark evenings digesting what we learned from all those speeches and votes and, most importantly, all those standing ovations. To begin with we are now aware that all politicians break their promises. We know this because we were told so by Michael Howard, a very important politician who intends to be prime minister after the next election, which can be a promise or a threat and anyway is of absolutely no significance. We have Howard’s word that when he is prime minister all promises will be kept because he will sack any minister who does not keep their word. This is itself a promise which leaves open the question of who will sack Howard if, as was the case with Tory governments in the past, he prefers to cover up for a failing minister instead of getting rid of them.

    

And then there was Tony Blair, telling us why he should not admit to anything over the war in Iraq and promising that he will be prime minister for years and years to come – which was most definitely a threat to all those impatient hopefuls in the lower ranks of the Labour Party. In case anyone has any doubts about Blair’s time scale we learned that he has just paid £3.6 million for a house in London, where he can retire to and write his memoirs which should go a long way to paying for the house. Perhaps this is what he had in mind when he said he wants to stay in power for a third term to “give everyone a chance to make the most of themselves”.

Milburn

As the Labour Party conference opened and before Blair had revealed his intention to stay on and on, there was a lot of speculation that the appointment of Alan Milburn to oversee Labour’s election campaign amounted to nominating him as Blair’s eventual successor. Milburn is one of those tiresome Labour leaders who in a former life as a restless firebrand – others were John Reid, Charles Clarke – encouraged party members to believe that “left wing” policies were the simple and effective way of running capitalism; for some reason this blindingly obvious fact had eluded previous Labour governments. If only there were MPs like Milburn, Reid and Clarke all would be well. There is no need to dwell on how these grisly tricksters have turned out when they had the power to make the kind of changes to society which they once said would be so easy. Before he resigned from the government Milburn’s fire had been effectively doused by the cold waters of his ambition.

    

However the matter of the succession may not be as straightforward as Milburn would like it to be. For one thing, Blair’s announcement will have been like a starting pistol to all those other aspirants on the Labour benches. It is safe to assume that there are only a very, very few of them who do not see themselves as prime minister material and who will, therefore, be already planning their campaign to fill Blair’s shoes. None of them will be pleased to accept Milburn, or anyone else, as the anointed heir to Number Ten. Their reaction will be to do their best, to form any alliance, to pull any trick, to compose the most damaging briefings, to undermine Milburn’s standing.

    

There have been precedents for this. One of the more recent was John Moore. Does anyone now remember him? In fact in the early days of the Thatcher governments he was clearly Thatcher’s favourite to take over from her when she chose to go. Remorselessly he climbed up the ranks until, in mid 1987, he was in charge of the big spending, publicly spotlighted, Department of Health and Social Security, whose spread of authority was as large as the title implied. For Moore all things seemed possible. Then his rivals got to work on him; he lasted about a year in the job, until he got sick under the stress of it all. Humiliatingly, he lost his voice and fainted in the Cabinet. Thatcher treated him with contempt, splitting his ministry in two and giving responsibility for Health to Ken Clarke. Moore now had no future in politics; he left the Commons in 1992, took a life peerage and descended into an appropriate obscurity.

Morrison 

When the Labour Party won the 1945 general election it was presumed that their leader, Clement Attlee, would be the one going to Buckingham Palace to take part in the ritual of the king pretending to ask him to form a government to run British capitalism in the style to which is was accustomed . But snapping at Attlee’s heels was his deputy leader, Herbert Morrison. Attlee came over as a mousy, unassuming man, the sort whose wife would run him around the country in a little Austin Seven car. Morrison was the more dynamic, he made much of his Cockney origins and he “lived politics, ate politics, dreamed politics”. He was responsible for the manifesto on which Labour had won the 1945 election and he was skilled at composing the phrases which were so useful in reconciling the working class to the fact that their lives under a Labour government were as hard as they would have been under the Tories. A certain amount of smart money was on Morrison, who was so sure he should be prime minister that before Attlee had a chance to go to the Palace he told him to wait until the Parliamentary Labour Party had re-elected him (or not, as Morrison hoped) as leader. Attlee ignored this advice, climbed into the Austin Seven and came back as prime minister (the PLP re-elected him on the following day). This was a considerable blow to Morrison, who throughout those governments continued to nurse his ambition. Year after year, through one crisis after another, Attlee frustrated him by simply staying in the job himself. Finally, in December 1955 when Morrison was 67, Attlee resigned in the knowledge that Morrison would not win a leadership election. He was easily beaten by Hugh Gaitskell, which persuaded him to stop living, eating and breathing politics and to retire sulkily to the House of Lords.

    

There was a similar situation in the post-war Tory party, where R.A. Butler nursed his ambition to be prime minister over many years before  reality compelled him to accept that he would never make it. His first chance came in early 1957, when Anthony Eden resigned, sick and worn out by the collapse of his Suez policy. At a Cabinet meeting in January that year Eden was in tears; after all his years in the dirty trade of diplomacy he had problems in facing the fact that British capitalism was no longer a mighty imperial force. The obvious successor – after all he had been Minister of Education, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Leader of the Commons – was Butler. Only one national newspaper had doubts about this. In the event the Tory party – as unwilling as Eden had been to face historical reality – made Butler something of a scapegoat for the debacle of Suez. Harold Macmillan was preferred as a better prospect for digging the party out of the hole it was in; at a meeting of the 1922 Committee he had made all the right noises about Britain still being a world power. It was Ted Heath’s job to convey the news to Butler, who was “dumbfounded”; he could never bring himself to accept being upstaged in that way.

Home

He was no better prepared for his second chance in 1963, when Macmillan retired after a serious operation. This happened during that year’s Tory conference, which took on a particularly frenzied flavour as a result of the leadership contest going on before the members’ unaccustomed eyes. From this great surge of hysteria a dark horse, in the shape of Earl Home, emerged. Home was, wrote Macmillan, “a man who represents the old governing class at its best” – which from someone other than Macmillan might have damaged him. But this was the Tory party and Home slipped into the leadership between the other candidates, finishing Butler off in the process.

    

There is no reason for Blair to be at all complacent over his plan to hang on to power for some years to come. He above all should know that politics is too dirty and ruthless a game for that. In spite of all that has happened during the past two years, which has left his credibility in tatters, he may nurse the idea that he is invulnerable. But that was how Thatcher saw herself, in 1990 when she informed the assembled TV crews in Paris that she would “fight on” – just a few days before she was told, unmistakenly, that she had to go. If this kind of event is a crisis, it is not one for the working class. Our crises are in the fact that whoever takes over a government has no effect on how we get by under capitalism. Thatcher’s demise brought in John Major and then Tony Blair and we are now at a stage when a politician as soiled and as disreputable as Michael Howard can tell us, in a rare acquaintance with a truth, that all of them break their promises. As if we didn’t know.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

For more on John Moore - and his fall from grace - see Caught In The Act: The Greasy Pole (1989).

Greasy Pole: Two brains? (2000)

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

When a prime minister takes over after winning an election victory, what are the jobs awaiting attention? There is the triumphant waving to the crowd, there is the speech saying how humbly proud they are to be given this sacred trust which they will keep by running a government of all the people. There are the ministerial jobs to be dished out, to award faithful acolytes on the one hand and to pay off old scores on the other. Then, very soon, there is the business of planning the next election. Because that must never be far from their mind. Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor supremo of this government, recently told the magazine Vanity Fair that every morning he and Tony Blair get up thinking “Right, how can we lose the election”. That may not be exactly true but it does illustrate the fact that any government must be persistently pre-occupied with pulling off at the next election the same kind of confidence trick which succeeded before.

As the election gets nearer the matter takes on a greater urgency. We are subjected to a kind of electoral auction, in which Tories and Labour make bids to buy off votes with extravagant promises to solve economic and social problems, as if it was all suddenly blindingly obvious and simple.

Criminals and Immigrants

An ever-popular subject of the electoral auction is crime, with each party bidding to outdo the other with schemes which are presented as the final, all-consuming remedy. No more drug addicts mugging old ladies for their pension. No more burglaries while we sleep in our beds at the dead of night. No more stolen cars. The inhabitants of inner city slums, of high rise housing estates, will learn to live with their misery without taking it all out in offending. The last Tory Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was a past master at thinking up such schemes and his Labour successor has carried on where he left off and beyond.

Since the Fifties immigration has been another item at the auction. From the first Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 both parties have rolled out laws to cut immigration which have had the effect of pandering to, or stimulating, some of the ugliest of racist prejudice. In the Nineties the immigrants have become asylum seekers, who are often characterised as “bogus” or “economic”. Ace auctioneer Jack Straw has been most active here, restricting the income of the asylum seekers and forcibly dispersing them around the country, often to places where they have no family or friends. Straw’s Tory rival, Ann Widdecombe, has tried to outbid him with her call to slap all asylum seekers into detention centres—a sort of “lock up first and ask questions afterwards” policy.

Pensioners

At one time it seemed that this government had written pensioners off as a significant source of votes so it didn’t really matter if they upset them, for example by upping the basic pension by the staggering sum of 75p a week. There had to be a re-assessment when it became clear that this miserly rise had provoked a lot of anger and then when the Tories saw that there were votes in the issue. Pensions, like most state benefits, are not simple. A pension starts at a basic sum which can be increased or reduced according to the pensioner’s circumstances. In addition there is an extra £10 a week at Christmas, which would not even buy a bottle of whisky and each winter £150 to pay for extra fuel. Anyone over 75 gets their TV free of a licence fee. Taking everything into account, it needs a mathematically alert brain and a calculator to work out exactly how much a pensioner should get.

The Tories put the matter into the auction with William Hague’s bid to raise the basic pension by between £5 and £10 a week—at once, if the Tories win the next election, which could mean next April. This may have sounded pretty tempting to anyone eking out a spartan existence on their pension but when Labour ministers had got their breath back they were able to show that Hague was not really offering a rise because his offer was intended to replace the £10 Christmas pay-out, the fuel payment, the free TV licence and a few other things. The Tory scheme was based on the argument that pensioners don’t like being forced to accept a bonus for Christmas, for winter fuel and so on and would prefer a straightforward increase to spend how they like. Anyone who thinks that people who struggle to get by on a state pension are able to spend their money how they like—blow it all on a luxury cruise instead of on food, perhaps—is seriously out of touch with reality.

How Many Brains Have You Got?

The person responsible for the Tory bid was not William Hague but his social security spokesman David Willetts, who is known as “Two Brains” Willetts because he is so much cleverer than normal people.

He went to Oxford, where they know when they are in the presence of a great mind so they gave him a first class degree. After Oxford he became one of John Major’s earliest gurus, which would mean a lot more were it not that Major was famous for making disastrous choices in the people he promoted. In the 1992 election Willetts was elected as MP for the safe Tory seat of Havant. His progress in penetrating into the world of the brash and brilliant was illustrated when he became a regular at Peregrine Worsthorne’s lunches at the Sunday Telegraph, where they may well have discussed clever ideas like raising pensions with one hand and lowering them with the other. Willetts was welcome at these exercises in pretentious futility until his overbearing conceit got on everyone’s nerves—which, since none of those present were short of self-esteem, is saying quite a lot. The crunch came when he put his feet on the lunch table and began lecturing Michael Howard on how to run his ministry—something which Howard, who was hated by his civil servants and a few million other people, did not need. “No further invitations,” recorded Worsthorne, “were forthcoming for Mr. Willetts.”

Dissembling

It took Willetts rather longer to reach serious fame when, as a junior Tory whip, he earned the severe displeasure of the House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee. This committee, as its name implies, is supposed to watch over the standards of conduct of those people quaintly called Honourable Members, which means that anyone who deals with them is supposed to tell the truth. In October 1994 the committee were expecting to get a complaint about the conduct of Neil “Cash for Questions” Hamilton. It was an embarrassing episode for the government. It is at such times that whips, especially if they got a first at Oxford, come into their own. Putting both his brains to work at the same time, Willetts came up with a brilliant idea designed to obstruct the work of the committee and so get the government off the hook.

In a note to the Tory Chief Whip, he suggested that the committee should either set aside the complaint against Hamilton until the MP’s libel action against the Guardian had been settled—by which time much of the embarrassment should have subsided—or investigate the complaint as quickly as possible “…exploiting the good Tory majority at present”. Referring to the Tory chairman of the committee, Willetts wrote “He wants our advice”—in other words the chairman wanted to be told the best way of stopping the committee doing the job it had been set up to do.

Unluckily for Willetts the note was leaked and he was hauled up before the committee to explain himself, when he was stupid enough, instead of making a clean breast of the matter, to try to get away with the feeble excuse that his phrase “he wants our advice” really meant “he is in want of advice”. With the media hot on the trail, this attempt to wriggle out of the problem had no chance of succeeding. The chairman sensibly wanted none of it; he described Willetts version of the affair as “astonishing”. Left hanging in the wind, Willetts had to absorb the committee’s censure: “. . . very concerned . . . dissemble on his account . . . substantially aggravate the original offence”.

Comeback

For anyone with fewer brains—or with less arrogance—that might have been a crushing blow. But not so for Willetts, who came bouncing back and is now shadow spokesman for social security—which cannot be reassuring for anyone who depends on state benefits for their survival. But that is the reality of life under capitalism, for the millions of people who do all the useful work in society and whose lot is to be exploited in the interests of sustaining the system responsible for it all—and to be patronised by arrogant, conceited cynics into what might be called the bargain.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Tories In Trouble (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was once a young Conservative MP who, when he arrived to take his seat, was taken aside by an elder statesman and advised never to forget that the party had a secret weapon, which was loyalty. For a very long time the Tories have traded on that impression—that they are a party which prizes loyalty and unity above all else. There is very little evidence to support this. Even when that new Member was being given that advice the Tory record on the issue was anything but unblemished. In fact their history is studded with examples of splits, intrigues, back-stabbing and manoeuvring to unseat the leader.

For example the 1922 Committee got its name from a rebellious meeting in that year at the Carlton Club which was responsible for toppling Austen Chamberlain from the leadership and thereby bringing down the coalition government under Lloyd George. In 1958 a huge rift opened up in the Macmillan government when all the Treasury Ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned—an event which Macmillan famously brushed aside as “a little local difficulty”. A few years later Macmillan showed what he thought about loyalty and unity when, in a panic about a little local difficulty at some by-elections he sacked a chunk of his Cabinet including his ever loyal, never complaining Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd who had always made it clear that he was ready and willing to any job, no matter how distasteful, required of him by the government of British capitalism. In more recent times there was the ruthless business of Michael Heseltine and the men in grey suits toppling Margaret Thatcher.

This fractious tradition is still going strong. It is arguable that the Conservative Party has never experienced such disunity and disarray as it does today. What is more it has had no compunction about revealing its splits to the voters at large.

Memoirs

Consider the matter of the ex-ministers’ memoirs. These are very often a welcome source of income and consolation for those who are no longer in the seats of power and who pine for their chauffeur-driven cars, the media attention and the other trappings of office. One difficulty is that the higher sales usually go to the more revealing—the more bitter, scurrilous and bilious—memoirs. If there was ever such a thing as a united government it would be unlikely that its ministers could write their account of life in the Cabinet with the desirable degree of titillation. Of course this is not a problem for the people who so gruesomely ran the government when Thatcher and Major were in Number Ten.

John Major has had his say about Margaret Thatcher, writing her off as a bossy, overbearing and stubborn obstacle to proper government. This is not an example of what is meant by Tory loyalty because Major was Thatcher’s favourite son—the man she wanted to succeed her in 1990. The same might be said about his criticisms of Norman Lamont, who managed Major’s 1990 campaign to succeed Thatcher as Tory leader. Lamont’s reward for this was the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer but unluckily for him this coincided with the kind of financial crisis which Chancellors are supposed to be able to cure but which are beyond them. The so-called Black Wednesday in September 1992 when the Bank Rate went soaring and Sterling was removed from the Exchange Rate Mechanism illuminated how powerless are the experts and the politicians in the face of capitalism’s crises. The decision to take sterling out of the ERM was in stark contrast to Major’s assurance that this would not happen because the solution to British capitalism’s problems was to be a member of it. So Lamont had good cause to be aggrieved, and even more after Major sacked him and now that Major is largely putting the blame for the crisis on his shoulders.

Black Wednesday

Lamont clearly thought that his efforts to get Major into the premiership deserved a more grateful response. Of course had he been practising that Tory loyalty he should have held his tongue, accepted his downfall and given his all in supporting the government, even if that did mean rewriting history a bit. In fact he has been busily engaged ever since in attacks on Major, of varying degrees of subtlety. The version of Black Wednesday in his memoirs differs from that of Major and, as might be expected, does not take the blame for it on himself. Cynical and bitter, Lamont is now a pathetic figure—exiled to the Lords, penning the odd newspaper article, trying to persuade us that Pinochet saved Chile for civilisation and that all those people who disappeared there at the time have gone missing of their own accord.

A lot of this disunity came bubbling sulphurously to the surface at this year’s Tory conference. Naturally they gave William Hague the customary standing ovation but this did not obscure the fact that his grasp on the party leadership is as precarious as ever. Almost as soon as he got the job Hague was under fire, as if the MPs who had voted for him suddenly woke up to the fact that they had made a terrible mistake. Hague has done all kinds of things to win a few friends—married a pretty blonde who smiles nicely for the cameras, eaten spicy Caribbean food in the street at the Notting Hill Carnival, been seen in public wearing a baseball cap, had a skinhead hair cut. No man could do more. But none of this has done him any good.

While attention has been diverted by these distasteful antics Hague has silkily got rid of most of the leading Tories from the days of Thatcher and Major. Clarke and Heseltine more or less deselected themselves and are now standing critics on the issue of Europe. Lilley was sacked after a typically clumsy attempt to discard his past reputation as the scourge of single mothers and benefit claimants. Michael Howard was persuaded that he should spend more time with his prejudices. The only remnants of those former days of power are Redwood and Widdecombe, neither of them completely in touch with the reality of vote winning.

Shadows

No doubt there are some fascinating reminiscences now burgeoning in the embryo memoirs of the likes of Lilley and Howard. Meanwhile Hague has a Shadow Cabinet whose public presence is—well, shadowy. They are unrecognised, almost anonymous. Hague will have a hard job to convince the working class that these are the leaders who should be trusted to run British capitalism, swamp world markets with British made goods, progressively enrich the British capitalist class while bludgeoning the workers into a docile acceptance of their role as the exploited wealth-producers. In this he will endure for as long as he may be seen as a vote winner. If that changes he will be ruthlessly discarded by this party which likes to boast of its unity and loyalty. If—or perhaps when—that happens it will be his turn to write his memoirs, to complain about an ungrateful party and of how he was, in effect, hoisted with his own petard.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Tories lying low? (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Tory Party moves in a mysterious way, its wonders to perform. Well that bit about performing wonders may explain how they are moving at the present—which is mysterious indeed. We refer to the fact that, just over a year since Tony Blair moved into Number Ten, the Conservative Party seems bent on convincing everyone that they are in a condition rather like those persistent comas which often affect the victims of serious accidents. They are almost immobile. They make hardly a sound. Anxious friends gather round, wondering whether it is true yet to switch off the beeping life-support machine.

While it is true that William Hague is active and noisy, often outsmarting Blair in the puerile exchanges of Prime Minister’s Questions (which sends the sparsely occupied benches behind him into raptures) the same cannot be said for the rest of the Tory Shadow ministers. For example the career of Robin Cook at the Foreign Office has so far been a succession of crises—without counting those on his domestic scene. A most recent of these has been the arms-to-Sierra Leone affair, which threatened to implicate him over the breaches of a United Nations embargo on sending weapons to that unhappy country. But through all his difficulties it seems that Cook has been able to rely on his opposite number not to make things more difficulty by behaving like—well, his opposite number.

For those who don’t know it—and there must be many—Cook is shadowed by Michael Howard, who used to be a Home Secretary who would bring the House down at Tory Conferences with his promises to have half the population in prison and the other half keeping them there. Howard made a name for himself as a political bruiser (as Jack Straw once found out, to his obvious discomfort) and he was expected to give Cook a very, very rough ride. When he did speak on the issue it was not with his customary ruthlessness.

Mary Bell

Then there is the case of the man Howard savaged in the Commons. Jack Straw looks and sounds like a person oppressed by visions of marauding teenagers out late at night, washing the windscreens of strangers’ cars when they should be at home doing their homework. Straw’s quick-fire populist responses to every vote-worthy incident in the lad-and-order filed makes the knee-jerk reactions for which Thatcher’s Home Secretaries were notorious look positively elephantine. Consider, for example, his desperate attempts to cash in on the tabloid frenzy over the Gita Sereny book about Mary Bell. There is no question that Mary Bell did an awful thing—although how awful it was in comparison to the mass murder in wars which the Labour Party so eagerly supports is another question. It was probably an unwise move by the author, to pay Mary Bell for being interviewed for the book—although how this should be worse than the arms industry making profits by supplying dictatorships in places like Indonesia is something to ponder on.

But these were side issues. The gutter press, ignoring the fact that some of them had made large offers to Mary Bell for her story, saw a wonderful opportunity to create the kind of self-righteous panic which helps them sell so many copies. Faced with a surge of mob hysteria demanding all manner of irrelevant, illegal or impractical things, Straw might have taken a stand, instead he acted in what we suppose must be called his character and posed as the mob’s friend in High Places.

After 1945

The Shadow Home Secretary is Brian Mawhinney, who during his time as Tory Party chairman had plenty of practice in the business of reconstructing reality and seizing every opportunity to make a party point. Naively, it might have been expected that Mawhinney would have wanted to expose Straw’s disgraceful behaviour, if only to make a few people wonder whether there was more to him than a dishonest party hack. But from Mawhinney there was no comment worth so much as a mention in the media. Perhaps he was submissively contemplating his own boredom, which is rumoured to be responsible for Hague’s intention to ditch him at the coming reshuffle.

Stephen Dorrell, who was a minister in the last government and who may yet become Conservative leader, had recently said that his party is deliberately keeping silent because the voters simply don’t want to hear from them for a couple of years. Dorrell says that was how the Tories behaved after their defeat in 1945 but that hardly fits the facts. As in 1997, in 1945 the Conservative were damaged by a reputation for cynicism and complacency. They were held responsible for the inter-war slumps and for collusion with Nazi Germany, which led to the outbreak of war. But their reaction to electoral defeat was anything but despairing. Under the chairmanship of Woolton they at once set about reorganising their party.

One effect of this was to turf out many of the vacuous buffoons who rarely spoke in, or even attended, the Commons but who had won the nomination for a safe Tory seat by contributing handsomely to the local party’s funds. It was among these Honourable members that the Nazis had their most enthusiastic supporters. Another effect was the production of a series of policy statements—like the Industrial Charter, which was approved at the 1947 Tory Conference, described by its originator R. A. Butler in his memoirs as

” . . . an assurance that, in the interests of efficiency, full employment and social security, modern Conservatism would maintain strong central guidance over the operation of the economy.”

Election winners

And there was the emergence of the Tory Party, out from the genteel exchanges of coffee mornings and whist drives into the crude robustness of the outdoor meeting. This was quite a shock to them, not to mention to their audiences but it was all intended to prove that the party had changed; it had taken the lesson of the defeat to heart and it was now a party which cared and listened and acted. A people’s party in fact—and where have we heard that before?

Whatever the reason for the Conservatives being now so quiescent it would be very unwise to write them off as an electoral force, as so many did in 1945. They are among the world’s most expert election winners, which was why Blair and his acolytes decided that Labour’s best chance of being elected was to become as much like the Tories as possible. For the Conservatives there is an obvious danger in keeping so far below the parapet: stay there too long and the voters will grow up believing that Tony Blair has always ruled over us and always will—which will be neither mysterious nor wonderful.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Hard work, decency and politicians (2005)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you decent? Are you hard-working? Do you always play by the rules? If you can tick the “Yes” box in answer to these questions you should be aware that our politicians have it in mind to look after you. Both Blair and Howard are agreed that you are a specially deserving case. In a recent speech Michael Howard told us that the Britain he believes in 

“will give hard-working families the support they deserve. Those people who play by the rules, pay their taxes, respect others …”

and he complained in the Tory election manifesto that 

“instead of rewarding families who do the right thing, work hard and pay their taxes, Mr. Blair’s government takes them for granted.”

This in spite of the fact that Blair has already told the 2004 Labour conference that his government planned to change Britain for better, into a country 

 “where hard working families who play by the rules are not going to see their opportunities blighted by those who don’t.”

And he followed this up in Labour’s manifesto, which he said was 

“a plan to improve the lives of hard-working families…(and) building communities strong and safe for those who play by the rules.” 

But plans to celebrate would be premature. From past experience any promise by a politician to improve your prospects needs to be received warily.

Abbey Bank

When Blair and Howard talk about their ambitions to improve the lot of hard working families they are overlooking the people – there are thousands of them – whose dearest wish is to work hard for an employer but who are denied this on the grounds of profitability. That was the case with MG Rover and with a more recent, less publicised, example of the Abbey Bank. This bank was once the Abbey National Building Society, whose business was locking workers into a lifetime of debt in order to have somewhere to live. They advertised themselves with a catchy jingle about getting the habit for being an Abbey debtor, a slogan about Abbey making life simpler and a comforting logo of a cheery family striding confidently into the future protected by an umbrella in the form of the roof of a house. That was when working for a building society gave someone a job for life, which encouraged them to work that bit harder for their employer.

Then the Abbey National became a bank, which plunged them into a savagely competitive industry where they found it hard to survive, let alone prosper. The hoped-for remedy was to be taken over by the Spanish bank Santander, who took a more robust view of the processes of employment and the reasons for people working for them – and presumably of the complacent delusions fostered by that advertising jingle and the company logo.

A principal concern for Santander was their new acquisition’s cost/income ratio, which persuaded them that there had to be some economies. These involved getting rid of a few thousand employees, which must have dissolved a lot of ideas about the bank being a kind of charity. Originally Santander intended to cut about 3,000 jobs but recently their boss, Francisco Gomez-Roldan, announced that another 1,000 would have to go, which may not be the end of the redundancies.

The finance services union Amicus angrily described the sacking as “an example of worst practice” but of course right – the right of an employer in the class relationships of capitalism – was on Santander’s side. Gomez-Roldan was unmoved. “We want to be a strong competitor” he argued, “We have to manage the cost/income ratio”. So a few thousand hard working people, who would like to be allowed to continue in that way, are joining the dole queues.

Meanwhile, Santanders’ profits rose by 38 percent, to £820 million, in the first quarter of this year. And that logo? It too has been made redundant and is being replaced with another – of red flames -which will soon be on all the country’s High Streets.

Deception

Decency is another human characteristic which Blair and Howard promise to see appropriately rewarded. How do they match up in this? Howard was one of the more prominent figures in the Tory governments of the 1980s and 1990s and during that time he did not amass a reputation for fastidious devotion to the truth. After the defeat of the Major government in 1997 he languished in comparative obscurity until the final months of Iain Duncan Smith’s disastrous leadership. As desperate Tory MPs began to manoeuvre to get rid of Duncan Smith, Howard was asked whether he would be willing to stand for the leadership. His reply was an emphatic “no,” saying that he could not imagine any circumstances, even if Duncan Smith resigned, in which he would be a candidate. Soon after that Howard was engaged in a conspiracy with other Tory leaders to nominate him and, circumventing the rule which laid down that the leader must be elected by the party membership, ensure that he got the job because he was the only candidate. This gave the Tories in Parliament the leader they wanted and avoided another Duncan Smith experience but it was an example of dishonest political manipulation.

Lies and inconsistency were an important issue in the last election, largely centred on Tony Blair and his deceptions over Iraq, tuition fees and the like. At a post-election meeting of Labour MPs Glenda Jackson recounted a common experience: “I was told on the doorstep time and again that they cannot vote for me while Tony Blair remains leader”. But this kind of attack on the leadership concealed the fact that among the doubters in the Labour Party there was considerable inconsistency, not to say deceit. Let us take the example of Tony Benn, who for a long time has claimed to be the passionate, undying defender of true Labour Party values. Last December he was, as expected of him, complaining that the Iraq war was based on “a blatant lie about Saddam’s possession of WMD” and he described the war as “deeply immoral and unwinnable”. Again as expected of him, he has consistently attacked Labour’s “shift, by stealth, towards privatisation in health, housing and education”. These doubts should be enough to persuade anyone to leave the party and go into opposition against it.

But when the election came Benn proved how adaptable his principles are, by telephoning wavering Labour voters to forgive and forget and get down to the polling station and vote for another period of Blair government, with its wars, its privatisation, its lies. “I am supporting Labour candidates up and down the country” was how he airily put it.

Coercion

In February 2002 Transport Secretary Stephen Byers had to apologise for telling a lie on TV about his responsibility for sacking his press chief Martin Sixsmith. Byers’ indefensible deception was justified by the then Education Secretary Estelle Morris by a peculiar, but convenient to Blair’s Labour Party, definition of a lie:

“It (Byers’ lie) wasn’t an attempt to deceive – he couldn’t possibly have thought that people wouldn’t have known…What I call a lie is when you say something to somebody and hope to get away with it because they won’t find you out.”

That feeble and transparent attempt at propping up the unsupportable was all the more remarkable because of Morris’ reputation as an unusually honest politician, the woman who later resigned from her Cabinet job admitting that “I just don’t think I am as good at it as I was at my last job” and who did not stand at the last election because she could not endure the high profile media scrutiny. In that sense she was an exceptional presence in the political jungle but in another – her readiness to excuse and encourage blatant deception – she was completely typical.

The “hard work” and “decency” we are supposed to conform to and the “rules” we are riven to keep are fashioned by the needs of this class society in which privilege exists by virtue of minority ownership of the means of life. That system of property rights is supported by its “rules” – a huge complex of coercive laws and punishment – which defines concepts such as “hard work” and “decency”. Political leaders like Blair and Howard work to justify that coercion and to encourage the working class – the voters – to acquiesce in its continuation. But they could not do that through any clear and consistent statement of reality; to justify the capitalist system relies on a repetition of false arguments. So the politicians who manage capitalism impose on the workers their own flexible interpretation of the rules. They need to lie, to evade, to conceal, to manipulate, because they could not do their job, at which they are notably hard-working, in any other way.

Ivan

2005 General Election: Vote Effective – Vote Alternative (2005)

From the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In May 2005, this is the most important general election ever. Or was that in 2001? Or in 1997? Or 1987? The big political parties want to convince us about this because we may then be persuaded to vote for one or other of them, under the impression that by choosing between them we are making a difference to this social system. Vote for this party and our future is secure; vote for the other party and we put everything at risk. Here, for example, is Neil Kinnock in 1987:

  “Every election is a time of decision. But this General Election … faces the British people with choices more sharp than at any time in the past fifty years”. 

To which the “British people” sharply responded by emphatically rejecting Kinnock and his party.

Here is John Major in 1997: 

  “British people now have the opportunity of a prosperous future. But that prosperity cannot be taken for granted…  If we relax for one moment, our hard won success will slip away again”. 

By “relaxing” Major meant voting for the Labour Party, which was what the “British people” did, ensuring that Major himself slipped away into well-merited obscurity. Finally, here is Blair in 2001:

  “This general election is in many ways even more important than the last…Now is the chance to build the future properly…”

Blair did not say why, after four years of Labour government, the future had still not been built “properly” but he obviously did not need to elaborate in that way because the electorate returned his party to power by a hefty margin. So how are things now, after the threats and the promises? Whether in gratitude or fear, the workers will vote for capitalism again with the only uncertainty the pattern of their voting.

Blair and Howard

One factor which is likely to affect that pattern is the developing awareness that there is no significant difference between the Labour Party and the Tories. Because of this, solid Labour supporters who helped elect Blair in 1997 and 2001 now feel themselves disfranchised. Another factor is that, like so many of his predecessors, Blair has been exposed as a trickster and a liar, so that he is no longer the easeful vote harvester he once was.

On the other side, Michael Howard is looking more and more like a man who is desperately trying to throw off his past; for example wearing his customary oily smirk he urged us on TV to “Let the sunshine break through the clouds of disappointment we all feel”. The problem for Howard is that his time as a Tory minister is not remembered for being at all sunny.  As Home Secretary he was in the habit of using his time at the rostrum in Tory conferences to excite the ugliest of prejudices – and not just about crime. In this election, as Tory leader he has tried to exploit racist neuroses about immigration by promising to establish a Border Control Police, forgetting the time in the 1990s when, according to the Public and Commercial Services Union, he actually hampered immigration controls by slapping on a recruitment freeze. Howard has told a heart-wrenching story about his mother-in-law dying of an infection she picked up as a hospital patient but during the last Conservative governments all was not well with hospitals for there was a shortage of nurses and doctors and waiting lists – for anyone unable to afford anything better – were a problem then as they are now. Schools also suffered, being cut back on their teachers, books and other equipment. The last Tory government, under John Major, descended into such chaos that  when they were defeated in 1997 it was almost an act of mercy by the voters.

The economy

However those who voted in the Blair governments have no more cause for satisfaction. There have been Labour Home Secretaries who have exceeded Howard in their punitive response to those crimes which capitalism places outside the law. A succession of Criminal Justice Acts has tightened the screw on offenders while nourishing the ambition of those Home Secretaries to become party leader.

Detention – imprisonment – without trial, or even being told the reasons for being in prison, has become established. Blair’s sound bite about being tough on crime and on the causes of crime has been discredited as the causes of crime – poverty, stress, alienation, social disability – remain. Blair’s claims that under his government the British economy has been in controlled health have been exposed by the collapse of the Rover car company. The company was losing millions of pounds and cars are not manufactured in order to provide the workers with a wage stable enough for them to make assumptions about their future. The bottom line – to use an irritating, although apposite, phrase – is that if there is no profit there is no employment, even if that mean thousands of workers being transferred from a just tolerable level of poverty to one of abject degradation. That is the basis on which capitalism organises its wealth production and no government can affect it.

Alternative

Blair’s popularity has been seriously eroded by the exposure of his lies over the causes of the war in Iraq. But this was by no means the only example of a politician lying because none of them could readily admit to their impotence to control the events of capitalism. For them the only way out is through deception, at times to the extent that they begin to believe their own lies – as, it is rumoured, is the case with Blair. What this amounts to is that there is a basic unity among the parties which stand for the continuance of capitalism, which can only be solidified by every vote for those parties. But there is no need to waste the vote in that way for we have the means of basically changing society so as to eliminate the problems which now disfigure it.

The Socialist Party is standing alone as a party which aims at the capture of political power by the  working class, to abolish capitalism and replace it with a society based on common ownership of wealth production and distribution and making that wealth freely available to everyone. That is Socialism – the only alternative to capitalism and its political parties.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Howard’s End? (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

A collective shiver must have run down a few thousand spines at the news that Michael Howard, all ambition apparently spent, intends to retire from the Conservative Front Bench (or perhaps had been pushed off it by William Hague). For a lot of people his time as Home Secretary is remembered now like a nasty operation or a serious accident on the motorway—for Howard was among the grisliest of that gruesome lot who, until May 1997, were the government of British capitalism.

Behind a condescending manner and voice and an immovable smile, reminiscent of an oil slick, there lurked, in Howard’s misunderstood breast, a steely ambition. When the Tories, reeling from their drubbing in 1997, were electing a leader to replace John Major, Howard proposed to Hague that they stood as a twosome—with Howard for leader and Hague for deputy. Of course Hague, not being of a suicidal turn of mind, turned the offer down. At the time Howard’s chances were rated highly; he seemed to love being Home Secretary with all the opportunities it gave to boost his popularity by playing up to the prejudices of the party conference. “Prison works,” he told them and they clapped until their wrists ached. “I have 27 points in a plan to fight crime,” he announced and they proved they were not entirely comatose with roars of approval. “If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime,” he shrieked and they rose as one person in an ecstatic standing ovation.

Criminal statistics

One problem with all this is that it did not seem to impress the criminal to any significant extent. The crime statistics—for what they are worth—went up and down (when they went down Howard was hysterically quick to claim this as proof of how effective he was) with little or no regard for what went on in the Home Office. That, to the despair of the reformers, is the way with crime. Meanwhile Howard was busily upsetting almost everyone who, unlike his mindless fans at Tory conferences, are actually in contact with the problem and so have some knowledge of the background to crime. Howard, it seemed, was just about the most unpopular Home Secretary there could be.

Until, that is, the arrival of Jack Straw, who seems bent on outdoing Howard in his zeal to go down in history as the Home Secretary who locked up so many people that there simply weren’t enough left outside the prison gates to commit crimes. Consider, for example, the manner in which asylum seekers are treated when they arrive in this country. When Howard was Home Secretary the Tory government introduced regulations which stipulated that unless an asylum seeker declared their status immediately on arrival they would not be eligible for any state benefits until their application for asylum had been approved by the Home Office. This was the kind of crackdown which Tory activists at their conferences love so much, colluding as it does with one of their grosser prejudices—that most of the people who arrive in Britain saying they have escaped from a brutal dictatorship are not genuinely in need of asylum but come here in search of an easy living on the dole.

One problem with the new regulations was in the time it took—and still takes—for the Home Office to deal with the applications. One recent report said that there are over 76,000 cases gathering dust somewhere there. This can go on for months on end, with no acknowledged reason for the delay. While this is happening the asylum seekers are marooned here with nothing to live on. As a concession local authorities are empowered to provide the very minimum of maintenance, which could mean vouchers exchangeable for basic food and clothing or an arrangement which allowed the applicant to eat at local hospitals or hostels. Another problem was the expectation that an asylum seeker would be in a fit state to pick their way through the bureaucracy of making a claim for benefit immediately they arrived in Britain. When we consider what they had been through in their country of origin, this had to be unlikely but the basis of the new arrangements was that they had not experienced anything unusual and were here to try to sponge on the state.

Cases we could cite are not of people who have come here for an easy life on the dole. Given the choice, they would prefer to be in their country of origin; they have fled to Britain in fear of their lives. This was, it seemed, well understood by the Labour Party when they opposed the Tory government’s restrictions on the refugees. One Labour MP remembers those restrictions as “…an act of spite and vengeance against refugees”.

Crackdown 

Labour’s recently published Asylum and Immigration Bill provides wider powers, such as in finger-printing, for the immigration officials, who are already not famous for a commitedly anti-racist stance in dealing with people coming into this country. Registrars will be able to demand evidence of personal details from couples applying to get married and to stop marriages on suspicion. The “cashless” system of subsistence through vouchers will continue, except that even this level of support will be used to discipline the asylum seekers who do not toe the line. Under a new arrangement, they will be directed to live in certain parts of the country and if they leave that area for more than the occasional night their subsistence will cease. So far we have not heard about how it is proposed to find out whether the asylum seekers have stayed where they have been placed nor what powers will be given, for example to the police, to enforce the arrangement. And just to make sure that the message gets across, the government will stop all state support for any asylum seeker who tries to challenge their treatment by the immigration authorities in the courts.

These proposals will be justified by the government on the spurious grounds that this country is being submerged by a flood of illegal immigrants who are undermining all civilised life here with excessive claims for state benefit. We are hearing hints about the menace of “economic immigrants” as if people who come here in the hope of getting a better life are some kind of criminal and as if this has not been an established incentive for millions of people all over the world to set up home abroad. Britain teems with “economic immigrants” from the past, as does the USA, France, Germany . . . and all these countries have had people leave for “economic” reasons. In any case when we look at the figures for people applying for refugee status in 1997 we see that the UK, with 41,000, comes below Germany (135,700) and the USA (103,700) and just a little above the Netherlands (34,400).

In fact the proposals have nothing to do with any alleged problem of resources and bogus claims but a lot to do with the Labour Party’s need to pander to every popular prejudice if they are to have a hope of staying in power for any length of time. This is what informs their every policy and action. This is the explanation for the string of broken promises and the hoards of disappointed supporters who are questioning whether this was what they voted Labour for. The behaviour of Labour in government is not a matter of accident or incompetence. Labour asked for power to govern British capitalism and that was what those voters opted for. The system has to be run like this—the assurances given in opposition have to be exposed as cruel fantasies. In his time Jack Straw was a prominent left-winger; in his mouth it was all a simple matter of changing one set of leaders, one manifesto of deception, for another. Now he shows the reality of it all: Howard may be at an end but his policies live on.

Ivan

Red Snapper: Sound bites and unsound nibbles (2005)

The Red Snapper column from the April 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I don’t think we should be battering this subject to death.”

Martin McGuinness to John Humphries, on IRA members who murdered Robert McCartney by, er, battering him to death. BBC Radio 4, March 9, 8.00am.

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“It will be scrapped. I am determined to ensure that the rights of those who play by the rules are respected.“

Michael Howard on the Human Rights Act, The Guardian, March 19.

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“People who have been arrested say they’ve been brutalised – the tactics used are beyond belief.“

Dr Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, on the

treatment of detainess by the US in Afghanistan. Guardian, March 19.

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 “Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail.“

Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission. Guardian, March 19.

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 “One might have expected a little humility from the Bush administration after its destruction and occupation of Iraq.“

Lindsey German, convenor of March 19th’s anti-war protest in London. Independent, March 19.

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“I’ve not seen anything like this since the Julius Streicher Nazi campaign against Jews.“

Mike Jempson, Mediawise, on The Sun’s recent campaign against Travellers. bbc.co.uk, March 11.

 War on gipsy free-for-all”. The Sun, March 9

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“The man who gave us the dodgy dossier is now giving us The Big Lie…. The man is rattled.“

Liam Fox, co-chairman of the Tory party, Independent, March 19