The Unions ten years after the miners’ defeat (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 1984-85 miners’ strike baton-wielding police officers were a vivid warning of things to come as various anti-union laws promoted by the then Thatcher government have since stripped the unions in general of most of their powers — and a lot of their members.

It is now ten years since the miners marched back to work behind their banners following a 51-week strike that began in March 1984; sixteen years since the Tories began their overt assault on the working class; and seventeen years since the Economist leaked the “Ridley Plan” — an internal 'Tory Party document which was to be the blueprint for Thatcher’s assault on trade unions.

It is common now for trade unionists, assessing where they stand, to take their bearings from the 1984-5 strike and the defeat of the miners. When the strike ended, the NUM boasted 180,000 members. They now represent 8,000 miners at 17 pits. The impact of the miners’ defeat was phenomenal. “The wreckage of defeat,” wrote Steve Platt in a recent special trade union edition of the New Statesman and Society (18 November), “is still scattered around the national labour movement landscape like the relics of war on some recent battlefield”

For the Tories, the war didn’t end there. Since they came to power in 1979 they have implemented eight anti-union Acts, confining trade unions in a straitjacket of legislation and they have stooped to anti-union tactics not witnessed in Britain for ninety years.

Unions boast no victories these days, only the pyrrhic sort — that they still receive dues from 7 million members (12 million in 1979), that they still exist, surviving day-to-day like death-row inmates. They no longer call mass strikes and gain the support that the pickets at Saltley Gate Cokeworks secured when 10,000 Birmingham engineering workers downed tools and marched to their aid behind piper and banners in 1972. Their victories now are minuscule — fighting for individual rights, winning propitious tribunal hearings, and securing damages for members. Unions like the TGWIJ no longer call one-day strikes. Instead, they set up 24-hours legal advice helplines.

The roots of the present-day assault on trade unions go back two decades. Tories, like elephants, never forget. When they came to power in 1979 following the “Winter of Discontent”, it was with having endured two humiliating defeats at the hands of the miners in 1972 and 1974 that they placed the NUM so clearly in their sights. 'The Tories had long since accepted the fact that the miners, with their tradition of militancy, were the backbone of the trade-union movement — break the spine and the body crumbles, paralysed. Indeed, the Ridley Plan had carved the name on the bullet that killed miners’ solidarity five years before it was fired.

The Ridley Plan, like some Maoist strategy for guerrilla war, suggested where and when the Tories might win another show-down with the miners. It suggested the preparation of contingency plans - the building-up of coal stockpiles, the securing of overseas supplies, and it put on the agenda the recruitment of non-unionised haulage companies prepared to cross picket lines, the reduction of benefits to the families of striking miners and the rapid mobilisation of a huge paramilitary-like police force. When the Tories came to power, they only needed to bide their time and provoke a strike at a time favourable to themselves. They did this by announcing the closure of the Cortonwood Pit in March 1984. The rest is trade-union legend.

Anti-trade-union laws

Anti-trade-union legislation has been a major fetter on working-class unity over the last 16 years, and it is necessary to pin-point a few Acts before we can even take the temperature of the climate unions now operate in.

The 1980 Employment Act, for instance, made secondary picketing illegal and stole from unions the right to claim recognition from employers. It also made union members embroiled in sympathy strikes liable for damages should employers lose sufficient profits.

The 1982 Employment Act introduced periodic ballots on the closed shop, slimmed down the definition of an industrial dispute, outlawed industrial action against non-unionised firms and took away from striking workers the right to appeal should their action lead to their dismissal.

Such Acts were camouflaged as enhancing the freedom of the individual, of “improving the operation of the labour market by providing a balanced framework of industrial laws” as Norman Tebbitt went on record as saying in 1982.

David Coates sees the gulf between the “reality and rhetoric”, pointing out that:

“the freedom enhanced by those laws has been the freedom of capital, not labour. and the balance has been in reality the imbalance of class power ” (The Crisis of Labour, 1989, p. 123).

Under John Major the attack on unions has continued, keeping up the average since 1979 of one anti-union law every 20 months. The 1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act, for instance, permitted firms to entice their employees away from their unions with various inducements.

Files can be filled with examples of companies that have made use of such laws - laws aimed at pushing trade unions and collective bargaining arrangements out of the door.

In April 1993 over 120 workers at J.W. Arrowsmiths, a Bristol printing company, found themselves dismissed when they decided not to abandon a work-to-rule and overtime ban in support of their pay claim. They were eventually locked out and given two weeks to denounce the GPMU and to accept a two-year pay freeze with lower shift and overtime rates. Only three workers signed the new bond.

Eleven months later and Caterpillar UK de-recognised MSF and GMB (APEX). They then offered workers a two percent pay rise and a £500 lump sum, along with health/legal benefits, if they denounced their unions and signed individual employment contracts.

“Human Resource Management” is now taking over from unions in many workplaces. Legislative constraints have prevented unions from operating inside many companies and workers now find they have to take on their capitalist paymasters single-handedly, denied the support of collective strength, being forced by circumstances to accept individualised employment contracts, performance and profit-related pay schemes, de-skilliing and their induction into the “flexible workforce”.

Class collaboration

The future appears bleak for workers, with employers looking to have it all their own way. Robert Taylor in his TUC-commissioned book, The Future of the Trade Unions, believes:

“unions . . . need to encourage employee share-ownership schemes . . . they are becoming institutions invaluable to employers, because they provide the stability that companies need as they carry through necessary change ” (chapter 9).

If unions are invaluable to employers it is only because they pose no threat to capitalism and help provide stability for them to amass huge profits, rather than fighting to improve the lot of the workers they are supposed to represent.

Apathy and sixteen years of disillusionment at the hands of a Tory government has soured the outlook of trade unionists and the leadership has done little to boost morale. When Arthur Scargill said that the “unions have not been marginalised by the Tories but by our own unwillingness to fight back”, it was John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who retorted that Scargill's brand of defiance “was not a practical option” (Guardian, 7 September).

So long as leaders like Monks continue to rule the TUC, bowing to the whims and dictates of capitalism, the longer unions will remain a puppet of capitalism. Monks is all for reform. He promises a “mutually reinforcing package of reforms of the tax and benefit system”. He argues for “targeted public investment for rebuilding the industrial base” and believes “the conversion of individual unemployment benefits into a subsidy to the employer can benefit both employer, employee and the exchequer" (New Statesman and Society). Thus, capitalism prospers, becoming even more profitable at the expense of workers. Reform in reality becomes class collaboration.

Useless Labour Party

Neither can unions depend on the labour Party for support, if they ever could in the past. Indeed, the Labour Party has an outstanding historical record of betraying unions and deserting them in their hour of need. While Tony Blair had “considerable sympathy for the signal workers” during last year’s RMT strike, he argued that “this dispute is costing the country a great deal of money . . . people are entitled to take strike action, but it is not the function of politicians to start barging into industrial disputes” (Guardian, 7 September). Perhaps Blair is unaware that the Tories have been provoking strikes since they entered office and sending in their paramilitaries to crush resistance to their onslaught against working-class unity.

Conservative mentality

Blair later went further by saying that unions "do not want, nor will they get support from a Labour government", and declared that “at their best, unions represent in the workplace the values that Labour shares with the British people” (New Statesman and Society, 18 September). Certainly both Labour and the TUC have imbibed a conservative mentality, but what values labour shares with the working class is open to serious contention — certainly no commitment to end the profit system that ruins millions of lives every year.

For John Pilger, in the same trade union edition of the New Statesman and Society:

“Labour differs from the official conservatives only in tone . . . it would be hard to slip a cigarette paper between their views and those of the Tories . .  the trade unions have by default become the political opposition. ”

Insofar as Labour has acknowledged the inevitability of unemployment and refuses to support strikers, that would appear to be the case. As far back as 1984 the Labour Party was seeing trade unions as a hot potato and that supporting strikes would be an electoral liability. This is why the miners were given only tepid support and why RMT was ignored by Blair. Big union defeats would have reverberated through Walworth Road like the shock waves from an earthquake.

But the 1990s appear to have heralded the demise of trade unions as mobilisers of mass discontent born of workplace injustices. Just as Labour failed to harness the frustration and anger generated by the 1984-5 miners’ strike, so too have the unions failed to capitalise on sixteen years of Tory mayhem at the expense of their membership. In 1979, working days lost through strike action stood at 30 million. By 1993 it had dropped to 649,000 — a figure actually higher than the previous year — 528,000 — the lowest in 100 years!

There is indeed the potential for a real trade-union movement. Workers the length and breadth of the nation are crying out for representation. Some 800,000 workers every year take their employer-related grievances to the Citizens’ Advance Bureau. A recent survey found that only 6 percent of respondents felt secure at work. The 1992-3 pit closures brought more people out on the streets in protest that at any time during the 1984-5 strike. Research recently carried out by the Industrial Relations Unit of the University of Warwick, conducted with the co-operation of 12 unions, found that 72 percent of respondents joined a union for support. Some 31.2 percent sought out a union themselves.

There are many reasons why trade-union membership has fallen by 5 million in sixteen years — anti-union laws, Thatcher's premeditated attack on the traditionally strongly unionised manufacturing base, recession, unemployment, apathy and general disillusionment to name just a few.

Struggle for socialism

Trade unions have adopted a bunker mentality, afraid to pop their heads up in case they’re blown off. This is nothing new. Unions have always fought from a position of weakness. But it does not have to be this way. So long as unions continue to sec victories in securing crumbs from our masters’ tables, as long as they continue to acquiesce in and help perpetuate the capitalist system of production for profit, not use, and the exploitation of their members in the process, the longer and more futile will be their struggle.

Unions need broader objectives — long-term macro goals, not immediate micro victories. They need to harness their struggle to the movement for world socialism, to a system of society whose establishment will end the whole employer-employee relationship. Micro struggles can only be a rearguard action. In their efforts to coexist with capitalism unions will always fail, in theory and practice.

For Marx, they fail because they generally limit “themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system” (Value, Price and Profit).

John Bissett

Sting in the Tail: None So Blind (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

None So Blind

Whenever outbreaks of racial, ethnic or religious intolerance occurred in America or Western Europe, supporters of the "communist" dictatorships would claim that none of these evils could happen in "the socialist countries" because their governments, through education, had eradicated them.

These governments had, after all, exclusive use of the education system and the media for decades, so surely this, together with their avowed opposition to such evils, should have succeeded in at least reducing them.

Every day we can see the awful reality: anti-semitism, national, ethnic and religious hatreds are rife in all the so-called "socialist countries" and have even produced minor wars in some of them.

Of course the dictatorships had never even tried to remove the old divisions but had merely kept the lid on them. These divisions persist because the conditions which spawned them — ignorance, poverty and insecurity — remain, and this was something those supporters of the state capitalist dictatorships couldn't or wouldn't see.

Noble Toady

Lord Woodrow Wyatt has complained in the House of Lords about political bias by "left-wing" TV programme makers.

But what about Tory Was in the press? As was pointed out in the same debate, Rupert Murdoch owns 35% of the national press and no one can say his papers aren't biased.

Wyatt didn't complain about THAT because, you see, he is a columnist (The Voice of the People) in the News of the World which is owned by — Rupert Murdoch!

Ridiculous Ridley

The political demise of Nicholas Ridley, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, will leave all socialists dry eyed. He was the usual brand of arrogant Tory so beloved of the Prime Minister. His political departure, seen from the perspective of a socialist, is of no importance whatsoever to the working class.

What is of interest to socialists in the Ridley resignation is the background which led to it. Mr. Ridley, after what would appear to have been too good a lunch, spouted his ridiculous nonsense Into the tape recorder of the editor of The Spectator.

Even by arrogant Tory standards these were far from diplomatic musings:

This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted. This risked takeover by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, Is absolutely intolerable . . . I'm not against giving up sovereignty on principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give in to Adolf Hitler.

To the suggestion of The Spectator that if these were his views would he consider resignation he replied:

I've been in office for 14 years. I've been elected to parliament six times. I’m still at the top of the political tree, and I'm not done yet.

It was once said by another political trickster that "A week is a long time In politics." And it has been proved to be the case for Mr. Ridley. His political tree has been chopped down, and politically he is most definitely done.

Society in Conflict

Good news for some in capitalism is usually bad news for others and we are reminded of this by ICI's decision to close its loss-making fertiliser business.

For example, as fertilisers have lost £39 million in the last four years, then ICI's shareholders can hope for bigger dividends in future.

Against that are the 640 workers who will lose their jobs. The "greens" will be happy as ICI's inorganic fertilisers are a major source of water pollution. But if any "greens" are among the sacked workers then they will hardly know whether to laugh or cry.

Incidentally, one of ICI's reasons for the closure, that farmers are simply using less fertiliser, greatly pleased one newspaper:

There can be few things more nonsensical than one farmer ladling fertiliser onto a field while the farmer next door is being paid a set-aside grant by the EEC to grow nothing.

(The Guardian 26 July)

We can thank The Guardian for unwittingly revealing another feature of capitalism — its anarchy of production.

Roads to Ruin

Socialists are always showing that capitalism is a wasteful, inefficient social system. A recent report in The Independent 16 August Illustrates our point very well.

A committee of MPs reporting to the Department of Transport on the state of Britain's roads was scathing on the constant need for these roads to be repaired.

Robert Sheldon, Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and chairman of the committee, said: "The Romans built roads that lasted thousands of years. We build our roads and eight years later we have to start repairing them."

The construction of these roads goes out to tender and the cheapest quote gets the job. The construction companies all have shareholders who are only interested in one thing — profit. So it does not take a financial wizard to appreciate that like all profit-making businesses every effort will be made to cut costs.

The cheapest materials possible will be used. In order to cut labour costs all sorts of schemes will be devised to speed up the work, inevitably producing a sub-standard job.

The extent of this shoddy production is reflected in the staggering costs of repairs:

More than £1 billion a year is spent building new motorways, trunk roads and bridges. The report said the National Audit Office had identified 210 cases of premature defects, with total repair costs of £262 million.

In defending this waste of human effort Christopher Chope, Road and Transport Minister, inadvertently revealed the cause of the whole sorry mess.

You could build all the roads so that they would not need repairs for 60 years, but the cost would be so great it probably would not represent good value.

This type of reasoning is typical of the capitalist system. Motor cars are built that only last a few years, car ferries operate that turn turtle in the English Channel, aircraft are flying with fire hazardous fittings that could be replaced by safer materials. The catalogue is a long, depressing and often tragic one.

The Lively Corpse

Someone once wrote a blood-curling story about a murderer who couldn't get rid of the body. He burned it in a furnace, submerged it in acid, dumped it in a lake, cut it into pieces, but the corpse always returned. The murderer finally gave up and turned himself in after waking up one morning to find the thing in bed with him.

This tale reminds us of the exasperating resilience of something else that will not lie down — the class struggle.

Academics and politicians are forever assuring us that it is dead and yet it constantly turns up all over the world in the form of, for example, strikes and lock-outs.

Despite repressive laws and awesome state power ranged against them, workers have created trade unions in South Africa, Eastern Europe, South Korea, etc.

As long as capital and wage-labour exist then so must the class struggle and this is something which all those who would bury it cannot change.

Finance and Industry: Labour Hangs Itself (1967)

The Finance and Industry Column from the March 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour Hangs Itself

There was a time when the Labour Party used to promise that, if elected, they would use the power of the state to help the trade unions get higher wages. They used this one right up until 1945 but the wage freeze of 1948 reduced its effectiveness and they have not dared use it since. Indeed, many of the Labour leaders spent their years of opposition working out plans to control wages. Returned to power in 1964 they straightway tried their incomes policy which was soon exposed for what it was when it became a legal wage freeze last July.

Unlike some of Labour's other plans the wage freeze has worked. Since July wage rates have stayed the same, while prices have risen 1.5 per cent. So the working class became worse off, as the official Ministry of Labour figures show:

Further, between April and October the average weekly earnings of men in manufacturing (a figure, the misuse of which the Socialist Standard has often exposed) fell for the first time since 1945.

Labour speakers tried to create the impression that there was a price freeze too, arguing that in gratitude for this the working class ought to put up with the wage freeze. But this was just a lie to cover up their aim of cutting our standard of living. Aubrey Jones, boss of the Prices and Incomes Board, was a little more frank when he gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Trade Unions on October 4. As reported by the Financial Times (the official report is not out yet), he admitted

  What was annoying trade unionists and others responsible for wage claims was the apparent disparity between the freeze in pay while prices increased, mainly on account of the selective employment tax. The object of the tax was to cut back the country’s living standards because they were rising too fast. It was, therefore, the Government’s policy to some extent that prices should rise relative to wages, Mr. Jones said.

How otherwise could they cut our standard of living?

Earlier (on August 22 last) the Financial Times exposed the price freeze as a myth. “There is no price freeze", it declared and went on:

  It is quite true that the White Paper speaks of ‘a general standstill on prices and charges until the end of 1966’. But the qualifications —quite rightly introduced — are so many that most businesses will be able to find a good reason for putting up their charges. The biggest gateway is the reference to Government action ‘such as increased taxation’. On the very day of the squeeze announcement, indirect taxes, except on tobacco, were put up by 10 per cent by the use of the Regulator. The impact of the Selective Employment Tax is still to be felt . . . ‘Government action’, moreover, has not been confined to taxes. Higher interest rates will provide a potent excuse in many cases. There are other gateways, too: ‘market increases’ in imported material prices, changes in supply, and increased costs of components which cannot be absorbed.

Finally, the very resolution supporting the freeze, which the Labour Party Conference passed, mentioned “tax increases and import price rises" as exceptions.

So there’s no doubt about it. There was no price freeze; nor was one intended. But even if there had been, that would be no argument for the workers giving up the conscious and organised struggle for higher wages and salaries.

The Labour Dole

The wage freeze cannot have been too much of a shock to Labour supporters, since their party had tried one before. But take a look at the third column in our table—the number of unemployed. Surely after years of anti-unemployment propaganda a Labour government would never welcome and encourage the growth of unemployment? Surely this could not have been cynically used to cadge votes?

Whether the Labour leaders are sincere or not, it does not make much difference to the way they are forced to act. But we must speak out against the cynical exploitation of working class misery by vote-gathering politicians. And, with specific reference to unemployment, it is hard to acquit Wilson on this charge.

On March 26 last, a few days before the election, Wilson told a Labour Party meeting in Manchester (quoted in The Bad Package, a pamphlet put out by five technicians’ unions):

  The only method the Tories knew of fighting the crisis they brought on the country was deflation to unemployment and short-time working. These financial technocrats who dominate the Tory Party had no thought, no compassion, for the families driven to live on the Tory dole. Nor did they think of the large number of families whose standard of living fell because of the drop in their earnings caused by deliberate policies which could only lead, and did lead, to short-time working.

Note the skilful combination ’Tory dole". Yet, four months later Wilson was talking in the House of Commons of “a tolerable figure of unemployment" of “between 1½ and 2 per cent", that is, a little over 400,000. When Wilson spoke there were only some 264,000 on the dole. Thus, in effect, he was coolly declaring that he was prepared to see another 150,000 thrown out of work. But this is not all. When by October the numbers began to approach the “tolerable" level Minister of Labour Gunther rushed in to explain that Wilson regarded two per cent as the tolerable figure after so-called redeployment. In other words this was not the limit. Pressed in the House of Commons on October 27 to give “a categorical assurance that the Labour government will not stand for a level of 500,000 unemployed under any circumstances", Wilson refused. At the last count there were some 600,000 unemployed.

Unemployment is inevitable under capitalism and governments, despite Keynes, have very little control over it. Perhaps Labour’s failure to tame capitalism will lead people to see the futility of Labourism. Already many trade unionists are discussing breaking with the Labour Party and, for the first time for many years, there are resolutions down for their conferences calling for just this.

Tory Sense

In a recent speech to a branch of the National Union of Bank Employees Enoch Powell told them, according to the Financial Times of 13 January, that “unions were harmful not only to the community but also to their members: there was a net loss resulting from their existence”. A year ago, in an address to some Young Conservatives, another Tory MP, Nicholas Ridley, declared:

  I think we have got to look at the situation if there were no trade unions after the war. And if there weren't I believe wages today would be higher. The net effect of trade unions is that probably they tend to keep wages down, although their members don't know it. (Marylebone Mercury, 3.12.65.)

That unions keep wages down is surely something they ought to tell the Labour government; it opens new possibilities for their incomes policy after the period of severe restraint!

Seriously, though, this is an old one. Trade unions, the argument goes, keep wages down by' restricting production; if there were no unions with their restrictive practices production would go quicker and we would all be better off. The answer is simple: workers must combine in order to get the best price for their ability to work. Without any unions, without any organised means of resisting the ever-present pressure of employers to reduce their “labour costs”, workers would be at the mercy of their employers and soon reduced to a sorry state. Besides production does not go up in a steady line under capitalism, restrictions or no. It goes up and down and with it go employment and wage levels. At times, unions can push up wages at the expense of profits. This has tended to happen since the war. Which is what the Tories are really worried about.

Adam Buick

Running Commentary: Equality before the law (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Equality before the law

The "rule of law" is one of those phrases that is tossed around freely by those who seek to maintain the status quo. It sums up the idea of everyone being equal before the law while no-one should be above the law. So one might have assumed that someone, apparently guilty of the crime of giving away £70 billion of "public" money illegally, would find the wrath of the judiciary descending pretty quickly. Not so, or at least not if you are the Secretary of State for the Environment.

Towards the end of last year, Nicholas Ridley, the environment minister, was forced to admit to Parliament that he and his predecessors had, strictly speaking, been acting unlawfully since 1981 in distributing £70 billion in rate support grant to local authorities. Of course when a member of the government breaks the law there's no real problem you simply change the law. which is what the government now intends to do by rushing a bill through Parliament which will retrospectively legalise what they’ve been doing for the last five years. Or, as Ridley put it: "It is merely validating the past and putting right for the future the position which the whole House thought always obtained". So much for the "rule of law". Clearly some people are more equal than others if they can change the law to "validate" in retrospect what was previously illegal.


Constabulary duties

It is hugely reassuring to have it, from so reliable a source, that there is this direct vocal link between God and Greater Manchester’s Chief Constable. Apart from the advantages this will give him in the afterlife, it enables James Anderton to speak authoritatively on worrisome issues like sex, drug addiction and AIDS.

The fact that their Chief is divinely inspired and informed may go some way to explain the activities of the police in Manchester. Unless we knew that it was with God’s approval, we might have written them off, too hastily, as a uniformed rabble of incontinently violent and repressive thugs. But now we know better, don’t we?

The real drawback with men like Anderton is that they offer themselves as caricatures, larger than life, to absorb the indignation against police excesses which should rightly be directed at the root of the problem.

Hating — and fearing — the Andertons (and who could possibly be fond of, or at ease with, them?) can lead to the conclusion that we need a police force purged of such ogres. While it is advisable to be especially wary of anyone at his level of authority who is insulated from reality by dangerous delusions, the cool fact is that we do not eradicate the problem by substituting Chief Constables with rather different priorities and opinions about their terms of reference.

The police are not there to be kind, understanding or protective towards us. Their job is to sustain class society and its privileges. A police force can no more be democratic than can a gang of criminals; both must operate in subterfuge, neither can be meticulous about respecting the rules if they can get to their objective more quickly by breaking them.

Privilege, power and secrecy are components of corruption so it is little wonder that, as we are occasionally allowed to see by courtesy of something like Operation Countryman, the police should so often be corrupt and lawless.

It is bad enough to live in a social system which needs a police force; even worse when the police themselves operate outside the law they are supposed to uphold; worst of all when the motivation of the police management is open to question. Beyond these facts, and of greater importance, it remains true that the only solution is in a society which will not have police, because the property rights they guard will not exist.

You have that on the authority of The Socialist Party and of all socialists everywhere.

Swing to, swing fro

It must be hell, being Margaret Thatcher or Neil Kinnock, watching the opinion polls bob up and down, swing backwards and forwards. one day putting your party percentages ahead then a few days later changing it all around.

If the people of this country are really as fickle as the polls indicate, changing their minds almost from day to day on the question of which party should form the government, or which political leader is more reliable, what hope is there of them ever getting a useful insight into the workings of capitalism? Wouldn't life be a lot easier for Kinnock and Thatcher — and cheaper for their parties — if the decision about who takes power were left to a small, stable elite who are not easily influenced to change their minds? Several names spring at once to mind: Lord Hailsham. David Steel. Jim Callaghan . . .

Perhaps the polls have got it wrong? Maybe the voters are consistent but this is stifled by loaded questions, or gets lost in mistakes in sampling or processing?

There might even be another, more audacious. explanation. The polls may, within their limits, have got it right for the voters are giving deliberately inconsistent answers because they don't give a damn about the result, knowing that choosing between Tory, Labour and Alliance is really no choice at all.

This would be perfectly understandable and reasonable — encouraging, even — as it would indicate that some of the voters have at least begun to grasp the vital fact that all of these parties are equally impotent in face of capitalism's problems. They offer programmes which are basically the same and their appeals — for example that their leaders are cleverer, more sincere, more moral than the other lot — is also the same.

Faced with the offer of more of these failed, exhausted measures for persistent social ailments, the voters might resort to flippancy as an automatic emotional defence mechanism. If so, when they study the poll results, Thatcher and Kinnock might have bigger problems than they think.

There is, however, one uncomfortable fact that spoils that attractive prospect. Socialists are distinguished by our political awareness; we understand capitalism, how it works and why it must operate against the interests of the majority. We understand that the only way the capitalist parties can affect this situation is by fading away before a growing movement for socialism. We are clear about these issues, and consistent; we do not change from day to day, nor year to year.

Yet pollsters, because we don't fit into any of their categories of opinion, enter us as Don't Knows. Which is very, very frustrating. Never mind about Thatcher and Kinnock; it can be hell being a socialist.

A village in Yorkshire

"Work for no wages - you must be joking!" How often has this been put to us when talking about socialism? "Without money, what's the incentive? You'll never get people to do it". Our argument that in a sane world work satisfaction and the knowledge that we will be performing useful work will be the incentive brands us as impossibilists and Utopians.

The opening sentence was, in fact, spoken by one Bob Furness on his first visit to Botton — a village in Yorkshire founded in 1955 by Dr Karl Konig, an Austrian refugee who, since his arrival in Scotland in 1939, had opened and worked in schools for mentally handicapped children. His stated aim was to found a community where work

  should be voluntary, without wages or salaries, so that whatever a person could manage to contribute to the life in the way of work, whether emptying dustbins or doing accounts, would not be valued by money but would be accepted as their full contribution to the community life, and all their needs should be met from the community, irrespective of their work output.

This is what Bob Furness had to say after a year in the village:

  When I used to make roads with Wimpeys 1 did it for the money, the job was the way to the money. Now I make a road because it's needed. 1 know who I'm making the road for, it's my road and I care a lot about it. I want the people who use it to feel it was built with love and care.

Of course there isn't socialism in Botton. The place has religious overtones and, although "unwaged" in the best sense of the word inside the village, they have to trade with the outside world, selling dairy and farm products, bread, toys, engraved glassware and production from their Camphill Press. Socialism cannot exist in isolated pockets but Botton and similar villages which have been founded since does answer some of the points made to us. One of these is "You must have leaders". We quote from one of their leaflets:

  It's often a problem when a visitor asks to speak to the manager — a request that always leads to a look of total puzzlement . . . The village is run by groups rather than the conventional director and underlings. There are many groups dealing with, for example, finances, the cultural life, the land, the reception of people into the village, production, and so on. Almost everyone is involved in a group. . .

The villages are witness to another important fact. People who, through their handicap. are unable to cope and are considered a burden on society in a competitive environment are finding that, with these pressures removed, they are able to lead useful and fulfilling lives.

The accusation that a socialist society will stifle individuality and that everything will have a dull sameness is also refuted in Botton:

  The essential core of Botton is the family life in the houses . . . There are no separate staff quarters . . . Each house is individual, there is no centralisation so the character of a house often depends on the houseparents (who) are of many nationalities, so you can imagine the differences. With so many diverse houses of different character it always seems possible to find a lifestyle to suit a particular person's needs.

Botton and the other Camphill villages were founded as a worthwhile environment for mentally handicapped people in a hostile capitalist world. The establishment of socialism, by doing away with that environment which is hostile to all workers will bring about a world fit for all of us to live in.

(Quotations from Botton Village Life and Botton Village, a Special Story).

CP death throes

A post-script to the article in last month's Socialist Standard about the death throes of the Communist Party. It seems that yet another split is likely to take place, with the old guard of the CP threatening to break away to form a new party in protest at the present leadership which, they argue, are deserting traditional Leninist principles in favour of jumping on the trendy band-wagon of "rainbow coalition" politics — courting environmentalists, the peace movement and feminists instead of the industrial working class. The dissident Communist Campaign Group centred around the Morning Star newspaper, disowned by the present leadership. is planning a New Year campaign to try to win support from among workers involved in strike action, such as print workers at Wapping and teachers. This kind of political opportunism is matched only by that of the CP leadership, which rejects the arguments of the dissidents claiming that their approach fails to attract support, hence their own focus on more popular issues.

Another pointless bloodbath (1992)

From the April 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the ideas which was supposed to have been killed off—or rather laughed to death—by the satire boom of the 1960s was Boer War British jingoism. To some people this was a comforting idea because few theories are more disturbing than the blind-eyed, deaf-eared, empty-headed patriotism which insists “my country, right or wrong”. But ten years ago it was necessary to learn that jingoism was alive and kicking, cheering and waving Union Jacks as the task force sailed out to deal with the Argentinian capture of the Falklands.

This hysteria was in response to the government telling us that the war was fought so that the Falkland Islanders did not have to live under a regime they did not want. Now this was, to say the least, surprising since under this capitalist system—and most definitely under the Thatcher government—human rights and democratic self-determination were not high priorities. The war cost between £3 million and £5 million a day at 1982 prices and then to fortify the Falklands cost about £300 million and to maintain the base there cost some £120 million a year. Do governments—did the Thatcher government—really spend that kind of money so that a few thousand people in a small and desolate group of islands thousands of miles away can decide who rules over them?

Crisis

In fact by the time the war began ten years ago, in April 1982, the British government had spent quite a bit of time trying to hive off the Falklands in some way acceptable to Argentina. For example in 1980 Nicholas Ridley, who was then gracing the Foreign Office with his graceless arrogance, went to the Falklands to persuade the administration there to accept some kind of "leaseback" arrangement. This scheme had previously been floated by Callaghan’s Labour government. But on his return Ridley got so rough a reception from the House of Commons that for a time it seemed his position as a frontbencher was in jeopardy. Meanwhile trading links between Argentina and the Falklands were nurtured; Argentina had a near-monopoly in fuel supply and air travel and had built the first big runway at Port Stanley.

For centuries from the end of the 16th century the islands had been a source of minor friction between the colonising powers until, in 1833, a British force deposed the Argentinian governor and proclaimed British rule, that conquest had nothing to do with the wishes of the islanders because at that stage there were virtually no people of British origin there; it was only in 1833 that the British community was established. British rule has never been accepted by Argentina. At the least they have registered an annual protest to keep the dispute simmering and a basic teaching in their schools has been the perfidious colonisation of the British, just as British children are taught about the inherent uprightness of the British.

There were several reasons for the Argentinian move to heat up the crisis in 1982. The Falklands were one of a very few outposts remaining from the British Empire; it was doubted that there would be the resolve, or resources, to resist an Argentinian invasion. At the same time Argentina was in an internal crisis, with prices increasing at almost 150 percent a year and the unions becoming restless about wages and democratic rights.

Two days before the invasion a huge demonstration in Buenos Aires was fired on by troops, six protestors were wounded and about 2000 arrested. The prisoners were saved from what might politely be called an uncertain fate when the government released them as a gesture of national unity. A different kind of demonstration was sparked off by the Argentinian landing, as thousands came on to the streets to voice their support of General Galtieri, who assured them that he was ready to accept 40,000 dead as the cost of capturing the Falklands. It is, of course, not unknown for a member of the ruling class to courageously face the prospect of workers being killed to protect their interests. In Galtieri’s case it was even more obvious; he was a general who had never fought in a war.

Censorship

In Britain, the Thatcher government’s popularity had slumped after the recession in 1981, which was widely considered to be the worst since the war. Serious trouble was in prospect in the coal industry, after the miners had recently been dissuaded from action over pit closures by what amounted to a government subsidy—even if this directly contravened what was supposed to be the government’s most cherished principles. The Falklands dispute was a golden opportunity to divert workers’ attention from such problems; they could forget it all in a great splurge of jingoism about Britain’s rightful place in the world as the defender of human freedoms against a rabble of treacherous South Americans.

Thus it was that the Argentinians invaded and the British, in record time, prepared an expeditionary force to respond. The speed with which troops and materials were assembled and ships were modified to carry them was impressive—particularly at a time when workers were being so forcefully instructed on the need to tighten their belts because essential resources were in short supply. The Uganda was changed from a school educational cruiser into a hospital ship; the Canberra from a luxury liner into a troop transport; the QEII (where the carpets were protected from the working class boots of the Marines who would soon yomp across the Falklands allegedly to save democracy) into a troop ship.

The official propaganda machine moved into action, sifting the news to give people back home a distorted version of events. For example the landing of some Argentinian scrap merchants on the island of South Georgia was represented as a clumsy and transparent ruse to disguise a military invasion. In fact the Argentinians were there genuinely to dismantle an old whaling station and had documents to prove this. The official spokesman for the Ministry of Defence, Ian Macdonald, added his own flavour to the censorship by speaking at press briefings as if his audience was a collection of dullards instead of reporters from newspapers like the Sun and the Star. A typical reply of his to a question about a rumoured helicopter landing was:

 What I have said throughout to that kind of question is that interesting though it may be, I have throughout the whole of the last four weeks never made a comment on it but have always said that I hope no one will think my comment means more than simply no comment.

Irony did not seem to be in Macdonald’s character. If it had been he might have realised that, so bellicose in their jingoism was much of the British press, there was little need for any kind of censorship; papers like the Sun could be relied on to manufacture their own lies.

Business is business

The war illustrated the international scope of capitalism’s deadly trade in armaments, as British forces were attacked with weapons which Argentina had bought from allies of Britain or from Britain itself. Argentinian snipers used American night sights to devastating effect. The infamous Exocet missiles were supplied by a French company (“This is indeed a wonderful victory for French know-how” was how a spokesman for the company which made them greeted the crippling of the British warship Sheffield).

The Argentinian Navy’s Type 42 destroyers were sister ships of British destroyers in action in the war; they had been designed, and one had been built, by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness. When the war began the Argentinian government still owed Williams & Glynn Bank £3.8 million on the deal. The sale had been covered by the British government’s Export Credit Guarantee scheme, which would have paid up if the Argentinians had defaulted. Instead, the Argentinians quietly settled the debt a month after the end of the war. Business, after all, is business—after all the fighting and suffering and killing. Business is business.

And politics is politics. The Falklands war proved to be a vote-winner beyond Thatcher’s wildest dreams. At the general election in 1983 the Tories practically put the Labour Party to the sword. Labour might have complained about the injustice of the vote and the ingratitude of the voters; after all they had supported the war as well. Their leader, Michael Foot (who had recently pleased a party conference by describing himself as “an inveterate peace-monger”), had been among the more vociferous in the demand that the Task Force be despatched, and so the killing begin, with all possible speed.

So everyone was happy, except the families of the dead and those who had to live with their wounds and disfigurements (and who. because they were too disturbing to look upon, were kept out of sight of the subsequent victory parade). It is rather changed now in the Falklands. The islands are no longer in the grip of the Coalite company and some of the economy has been developed. Ten years on the war is being “re-assessed” by military historians and experts. Some are already saying that it was all unnecessary—as if, except to the capitalist social system, there could now be a war which was needed by the human race.

Ivan

Caught in the Act: Goodbye To All That (1991)

The Caught in the Act Column from the March 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory hopefuls will have felt their pulse quicken at the news that many of the parliamentary storm troopers of the Thatcher revolution will not be storming after the next general election. The list of ex-ministers who will not be standing again reads like a Thatcher cabinet - Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson, John Moore, Nicholas Ridley. It is even rumoured that Thatcher herself will soon announce her retreat from the battle for the triumph of market forces over soggy concepts such as social welfare. A tot of plum seats, with fat Tory majorities, will be looking for candidates.

This situation is given extra piquancy by the fact that many of the retiring ex-ministers were themselves once considered as future prime ministers. Howe’s claim to fame was that he spear-headed the drive to cut back government spending and establish the policy that any business which couldn't make a profit was thereby not worth saving with state money. Lawson was the yuppies' favourite Chancellor and in his heyday encouraged the illusion that through his budgets the British people were reaping the harvest of prosperity from the seed sown by the unglamourous, dogged Howe. Sadly for Lawson, he did not time his resignation so that his reputation remained intact. The chaos of capitalism was too much for even a smarty like him, reducing him to taking a few part time jobs in the City bringing in the odd £30,000 or so a year.

Morals

As recently as last November Tebbit was threatening to contest the premiership (and it would have taken some very brave men in grey suits to deter him) but in the end he deferred to Major. Perhaps he was hoping for a return to prime ministerial favour; in the event he showed what he thought of Major’s declared intention to fashion a more "caring" government by deciding that he needed to spend more time with his wife.

Cecil Parkinson paid the penalty for being one of Thatcher’s blue-eyed - at one time, indeed, the bluest of eyed-boys. Tory aspirants to the leadership must have watched, in impotent despair, Parkinson’s apparent inability to do anything wrong in Thatcher's eyes. He had, however, done wrong in the eyes of Sara Keays and no patronage could save him from the repercussions of this exposure of how Tory gentlemen behave when it suits them. After all, Tory moralists like to tell us that morals are, like Major's Britain, classless; they did not thank Parkinson for showing that they are supposed to apply only to the working class. When he eventually came back to office Parkinson seemed to have lost his touch; the past master of deception made a series of public relations blunders which were intended as shrewd, voter-attractive ruses - which did not amuse his anxious colleagues.

Another Thatcher favourite to plummet to obscurity was John Moore, who was once the subject of an enormous publicity exercise to convince us that he was an unusually capable administrator of capitalism's affairs. Moore basked happily in this praise and in Thatcher's admiration for his talents for assaulting working class living standards. It did not seem to occur to him, that so blatant a campaign carried its own menace. When events exposed him as a very ordinary sort of political blunderer there were no men in grey suits to save him from an especially humiliating demotion. He did make one last effort to claw his way back into favour by issuing what was supposed to be a serious analysis of the deeper levels of poverty in such a way as to suggest that it was all a product of over-excited imaginations. This latest blunder met with the contempt and derision it deserved and to no one’s regret - certainly not that of the very poor - Moore disappeared from the ministerial scene.

NIMBY

Nicholas Ridley for prime minister was a prospect supported by only a few of the stranger fanatics. Ridley has always conducted himself with all the arrogance and contempt of someone who has inherited a lot of money. As much of the wealth of this old Etonian’s family came from the exploitation of coal miners he was well qualified to help formulate the government's strategy against the miners during the early 1980s, which reached its ultimate triumph in the defeat of the 1984/5 strike and the subsequent run-down of the industry. On all this Ridley looked with a pitiless eye; this is, after all, capitalism under which wealth is produced, not so that people can hold jobs but for sale at a profit. He had a similar attitude to anyone who objected to what are politely called developments - factories, motorways, runways and the like which threaten to blight their living conditions - sneering at them as NIMBYS - one of those fashionable acronyms, for Not In My Back Yard.

It is not clear whether Ridley regarded himself as a NIMBY when he used his influence to obstruct the building of some houses which would have affected the view from his elegant, costly country home. The incident confirmed what was already known - that Ridley has an uncomplicated view of the world: capitalism is a class divided society in which he is in the right - the superior - class and he will take good care to assert his privileges and to defend them at whatever cost to others. It was a typical indiscretion about European unity which forced his reluctant resignation from the government; events had overtaken someone who did his best to live in the past.

So now we have a new set of politicians in charge, who claim they are inspired by fresh principles, new priorities and more humane ambitions. This change is personified by the greyer, lower-key manner of John Major. Perhaps there will be some minor and insignificant changes: Thatcher's stridency and obstinacy, and the sycophnacy of her cronies, were becoming so laughable that they were losing votes. And that is what it was - and is - all about.

Ivan