Running Commentary: Plenty (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plenty

Just as the news came in of yet another desperate famine in Africa, it was reported that the EEC are about to try to reduce their 1,360,000 tonne butter mountain by selling the stuff, at 3p a pound, as food for calves. EEC officials argue that this is the best way to dispose of the butter — best because it is cheaper than stockpiling it.

You did not need to be exceptionally perceptive to work out that what is being suggested is that the butter, after being kept in store for some time, be fed back to the animals who produced it in the first place.

There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about this. It fits in perfectly well with the assumptions and needs of commodity production — the turning out of wealth for sale on the market so as to yield a profit for the class who own the means of life. In this system the market — not human needs — decides when there is a shortage or a surplus. That the EEC is grappling with the problem of mountains and lakes of stuff which could feed human beings does not mean that everyone in the world is properly fed. It simply means that the market has more than it can profitably deal with, which is a very different matter.

It is by no means uncommon for food to be stockpiled or, if the market demands it, destroyed while there is an urgent human need for it. Sometimes — like the butter — it is returned where it came from. Vegetables are ploughed into the earth or fish thrown back into the sea. A neat, circular solution you might think — just what all those highly trained experts and economists are paid to think up. Until you look at the pictures of those people starving; the children only hours away from death staring out from shrunken, fly-swarming eyes, the emaciated adults squatting in their final apathy.

Then you know that something is wrong, that somewhere there is an obvious answer which is being evaded. And you are right. But think about it a bit more and ask yourself, who is doing the evading?

Cut price ignorance

Anyone who is thinking about buying a few shares in newly privatised concerns like British Gas, Jaguar and the National Freight Corporation had better brace themselves to receive a letter from Norman Tebbit. The Tory Party chairman, presumably believing that the most impoverished of workers can be kidded that owning some shares makes them a capitalist, will be trying to scare them with bogeyman stories about Labour snatching their dividends to give to lazy dole-queue scroungers.

If you think this smacks of desperation, what about the other scheme at Tory HQ. to attract new recruits by offering them a clutch of cut-price offers? Sign on the blue dotted line and you'll be eligible for a cheap subscription rate to the Countdown discount organisation; the chance to buy gift hampers; membership of a wine society; copies of Jeffrey Archer's books, personally signed by the world's greatest living writer (it is not clear whether this is intended to persuade people into the Tory Party or the Workers' Revolutionary Party).

Of course Labour supporters are having a great time poking fun at all this, on the lines that the Tory Party which was once a marriage bureau is now a mail order company. Well, nobody can argue with that but they should remember that all capitalist parties use a variety of tricks and inducements to get workers to join them.

You can join the Labour Party, for example. by simply signing a form brandished at you by some canvasser on your doorstep. A few minutes later, if you were getting a lot of attention from canvassers, you could join the Conservative Party in the same way. Your opinions need not come into it; the capitalist parties are interested in your support — your vote, your money, your membership.

It is difficult to understand, or to empathise with, workers who fall for this, who allow their intelligence to be insulted in this way and who regard so lightly their political power to transform society.

Capitalism's problems can be solved only by a social revolution. That needs mass consciousness. leading to a deliberate act by the world working class. That is fundamentally different from the sordid grubbing for votes which absorbs so much of the energy of the likes of the Labour and Tory Parties. The question is — how long will the workers allow themselves to be seduced away from their historic role by tawdry offers of cheap wine, food and political thrills? How long will they abandon their revolutionary function for a mess of Jeffrey Archer?

Kick off

Every schoolchild brought up on Henry Newbolt's foolish poem about playing the game knows that the British are great ones for courtesy and sporting behaviour. It is something to do with character building on the playing fields of Eton, and the historic mission of the British Empire to bring civilisation to the lesser breeds without the law.

The snag is that most of the people of this country did not go to Eton, or to any school like it. Their character was built in the sort of neighbourhoods and schools which Newbolt did not care much to write about. They get their living in ways which essentially deprive them of the satisfaction of a sense of affinity with what they must devote most of their waking hours to.

This alienation extends beyond the workplace. into every part of our lives. In a world which is owned and controlled by "them", what does it matter if the saplings which were planted to give a little relief to the eyes amid a wasteland of concrete are tom up? Or if the street lamps which are there to make the pavements safer to walk along are smashed? Or if the ugly slabs of building which they call home are defaced with spray- can graffiti?

It also permeates what might be called their leisure time activities, when for a brief time they may forget their lowly status in society and the aridity of their social prospects. Where better to do this than on the terraces at some football game, with its excitement, glamour and its aura of quick riches?

British followers of the game are famous, not for their sporting attitudes but for such activities as running riot (although not as wildly as the media would have it) in one of the plushest of those floating duty-free supermarkets which ply between this country and the Continent.

This sort of behaviour has now reached the status of a ritual without which no self-respecting football (and soon, perhaps, cricket) match is complete The responses, too, are ritualistic, spurred on by headline-hungry journalists. The popular assumption, for which evidence is conspicuously lacking, is that sterner punishment and more vicious judicial violence are the only measures which can be trusted to bear in on the minds of the riotous football fans.

The people who call for hooligans to be beaten into servility forget those times when worse than yobbishness against foreign workers is officially encouraged — when, for example, the habit of Ghurka soldiers in the Falklands to kill any Argentinians who surrendered to them was gloatingly reported as good, clean, military fun.

It is capitalism which alienates us all — a social system of privilege and repression which is maintained with ritualistic support from the working class: "I vote Labour because my father always did '; "My husband's a Conservative and I can't go against him. can I?"

All this viciousness and self-destruction is protected in swathes of cynicism, from the beginning of our lives until the end. That is why schoolchildren are still being encouraged to absorb patriotic ravings like Newbolt's. Play up. and play the game? Ugh.

They said it . . . (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We had women on every platform daring the election, hat the party used them like decorative potted plants—Labour MP Ann Clwyd on women and the Labour Party.

#    #    #    #

I did it because they were going to repossess my Sky dish—David Kernaghan, explaining the armed robbery which brought him a seven-year gaol sentence.

#    #    #    #

You should not believe everything you read in the newspapers—Robert Clark, chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers. 

#    #    #    #

It is quite a work to dredge out of the English language pejoratives strong enough to describe their vulgarity, brutishness and maladroitness—Former Tory Minister Alan Clark on the royal family.

#    #    #    #

Nobody was going to throw the first brick because there were too many people living in glass houses—Norman Tebbit on the Mellor scandal.

#    #    #    #

With low coffee prices a symptom of stocks rather than supply, a stock destruction plan by producers would have a greater effect on the world market price than anything else— Lawrence Eagles, commodity analyst.

Editorial: Nineteen eighty-two . . . (1983)

Editorial from the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

However 1982 is remembered, it will not be as a time when the human race progressed towards a resolution of any of its problems. It opened, as does every year, to a fanfare of wishes and prayers that it might be a period of prosperity, peace and happiness. It closed, as does every year, leaving memories of only poverty, fear and misery.

It was the year when unemployment in Great Britain topped the three million mark. There are very few politicians now who are eager to offer the Norman Tebbit explanation for unemployment — that it is nourished by the workers’ lack of will to find an employer. In that total of three million are young people fresh out of school or college, trained and conditioned to take their place in the galleys of wage slavery. To them, viewing their prospects, life on the dole is now as natural as life in employment is to their parents. Unless, that is, their parents are also out of work. The three million include a significant and growing number who have abandoned all expectation of ever again finding a job. Many have accumulated an impressive library of letters of rejection. The conclusion they draw, along with those economists who, mistakenly, argue that high unemployment is structural to capitalism, is that they will spend the rest of their life scrimping a miserable existence on the dole.

It is however important not to lose sight of the reality of this sorry situation. Unemployment is not the scandal which so many ambitious politicians, for example in the Labour Party, would have us believe. It is not some unnatural curse, to be exorcised by the high priests in a future Labour government. It is in fact quite natural to capitalism, a part of the system’s anarchic-cycle of boom and slump. Labour’s record in this is no better than that of the Tories; they have been no more successful in ordering the chaos of capitalist society.

The Labour Party’s present campaign on the issue seeks to gain from the popular belief that plentiful employment means security and prosperity. This belief is a long way wide of reality. Workers suffer poverty of varying intensity throughout their lives; it is an inescapable feature of their social status as members of the class which needs to sell labour power in order to live. There are times when this is easier than at others — in the heyday of a boom, for example, workers can exert more effective pressure in wage negotiations. At other times wages may be forced down, as is happening in many cases now, under the pressure of unemployment in a recession. But all such variations, up or down, do not affect the basic standing of the working class.

1982 was the year of the Falklands war— the year when anyone who thought that the bigotries, the bombast and the phraseology of Victorian imperialism were dead, fit subjects only for the satirist, had to readjust their ideas. The mindless jingoism which the government, supported by the official spokespeople of the Labour Party in parliament, was able to stimulate was soberly instructive to anyone who looks for signs of a developing enlightenment among the working class. The Falklands war showed that the crasser notions which prop capitalism up are alive and well and at their noxious business.

And by crass we do not just refer to the jingoism of Thatcher and her crew. The bombers were at work in Great Britain again in 1982, provoking a response as nasty and illogical as the theories which energise the bombers. The Irish nationalists, in their outdated bigotry and historical redundancy, are a prime example of those who, ignoring all reality and reason, insist that capitalist society would be more tolerable if some slight adjustments were made to it. In their case, Irish workers are recruited to kill and terrorise other members of their class in order to persuade the British government to withdraw their troops and to help organise Ireland into a single capitalist state. No working class interests are involved in such conflicts, although it is workers who pay for them with their blood.

There was, lest we forget, one event in 1982 which, we were informed by the media, was positively joyous. While millions throughout the world starved, two famous members of the parasite class, having first got married, together produced yet another parasite. Expensive doctors were there to ease the parasite into life and the great organs of public opinion (for such they like to regard themselves) rolled out their carpets of words in frantic celebration of the event. Socialists stand aside from all this; the birth of this new prince emphasised the class divisions of capitalism, the superiority in riches of the one class and the humiliation in poverty of the other.

And how, in 1982, did those humiliated workers react to the poverty, the fear and the degradations of capitalism? When they gave their verdict, it was depressingly hopeless. At each by-election there was solid support for the system to continue. The votes may have been redistributed a little from one capitalist party to another — from Conservative to Labour or Scottish Nationalist with the SDP picking up a few thousand from people under the delusion that they were voting for a fresh, original approach to politics. But the votes never threatened the theory that the society of class ownership of the means of life is logical, essential, efficient and therefore eternal. The security of the ruling class remained untouched.

Disappointing though this is, it does not weaken the socialists’ resolve to struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a social system based on the communal ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. We work for this not because we are blind optimists nor because we are inspired with a religious faith in an Armageddon of the intellect. The case for socialism rests on the evidence of history, that people bring social systems to an end as they outlive their historical purpose. Typically, the events of 1982 gave much support to the socialist case that capitalism is no longer of use in the process of social evolution and is now a bar to human progress. It is time for the revolution to establish socialism and the need grows more urgent with each passing day.

Press Exposure: Oo dun it? (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It's The Sun Wot Won It" was how Rupert Murdoch’s finest, in a page one full-frontal, analysed John Major's victory in the 1992 general election. This was the latest in the Sun's history of brilliantly impactful headlines—cheeky, in words of one syllable, hitting you in the eye will a roll-your-own, crude concept of something which you might otherwise regards as serious.

That front page said a great deal about how vulnerable the working class are to inducements to grievously abuse their power to make urgent fundamental changes in society. It also contributed to the delusion.So persistent among the press, that it can influence—even decide—the outcome of elections. This delusion must profoundly boost the egos of the press barons and the editors and the cynical hacks who write up those items and compose those artistically misleading headlines. Perhaps that is what encourages people like Murdoch and Conrad Black, and before them Robert Maxwell, to shell out millions to buy the papers.

There are, however, obvious flaws in this concept. To begin with, the press in this country overwhelmingly supports the Conservative Party so if the voters always voted as the papers advised the Tories would never lose any by-elections and there would never have been any Labour governments to pick up where the Conservatives had left off and Winston Churchill may well still be prime minister. Not that it would matter if he were, except to the morticians, because the notion that the lives of people who have to work for their living are affected in any significant way by which party they elect to try to control capitalism is just another of those stories in the papers which should not be believed.

On your bike

The most recent example of the news papers kidding themselves that they control large political issues was in the fight for the leadership of the Tory Party though this time they were primarily attempting to influence the rather small electorate of Tory MPs. The greater— and certainly the more popular—part of the Tory press were firmly opposed to Major. The Sun, wot done it for Major in 1992, has now decided that he "has loser written all over him. He is damaged goods". A screaming page one headline drove home the point that Tebbit had come out against Major: "On Your Bike, John." The front page of the Daily Mail was devoted to a cartoon of a sinking liner—the Torytanic—and the advice: “Time To Ditch the Captain." In what preens itself as the quality press the Times and the Daily Telegraph were keen for a change, with the Telegraph condemning Major as unlikely to alter his policies so "as to give the Tories a realistic prospect of winning a general election". There is no equivalent in elections to the Trades Description Act, but if there were disgruntled voters would have had grounds of complaint about this apparent exposure as an incompetent wimp of the man the press were urging us to vote for so recently.

Only the Daily Star, the Daily Express ("the voice of reason in a cacophony of extremist nonsense") and the Financial Times supported Major but their combined circulation is little more than half that of the Sun by itself. So it turned out that the press campaign had little effect on what is surrealistically known as the most sophisticated electorate in the world. (Anyone who has observed Honourable members prancing and preening before the electoral hoi polloi in the lobby or behaving like empty-headed disruptives in the House must wonder why they call themselves sophisticated, but never mind.). Although the Tories voted to keep Major there were enough who did not support him to make a significant body of irritants which must be eager to exploit his problems in the future, with or without the approval of the press.

Losers

What decides how an MP votes in a leadership election is whether the leader is a vote-winner or a loser. That was why the Tories ditched Heath and then Thatcher. The voters did not reject Thatcher, she had led the Tories to victory in three successive elections but by 1990 enough MPs were convinced that the Iron Lady was corrosive of their majorities to overthrow her. She said it was a funny old world and she wept real tears as she left DowningStreet but someone should have told her that this was politics. If the Tory press had been asked they might well have wanted to keep Thatcher, who had seen off Callaghan and Foot and Kinnock not to mention General Galtieri and a few hundred Argentinean sailors on the Bclgrano. But reality—the Tory confidence that they are the great election winning machine—intruded in the persons of the men in grey suits and, whatever the papers said, her time had come.

However loud the Tory papers screamed, Major won because he was the safer bet while Redwood could not reassure enough Tory MPs that their majorities would endure and flourish with him as leader. It was, in other words, not the papers but the MPs—fearful, ambitious, calculating—wot done it. 

Ivan

The BNP advances – what does it mean? (2006)

From the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The BNP gained seats in the May local elections because it put together a better package of lies than the mainstream parties

Despite recent claims to the contrary, the vast majority of British voters find the policies of the BNP nauseating. In the run up to the 2004 local and European elections and again during the 2005 general election, all manner of people, organised in their respective groupings, mobilised against them, from Labour and Conservative Party activists and the myriad left-wing groups, to student bodies, church groups and trade unions. Back in 2004, Searchlight, the anti-Nazi organisation, produced 28 versions of a newspaper targeting the BNP election campaign and distributed 1.5 million copies in areas where the BNP were perceived as posing the biggest threat. Prior to this year’s elections, Searchlight handed out 400,00 copies of their newspaper in 16 versions as well as quarter of a million postcards and again the left and the unions campaigned where the BNP were felt to be most active.

This time round, by all accounts, the panic was just as big as an in 2004. In the wake of a huge election push by the BNP, the anti-racist group Searchlight identified 18 key “battlegrounds” where the neo-Nazis had to be confronted. Other anti-racists groups observed how the BNP, standing 364 candidates, were as strong now than at any time since 1982, when it displaced the National Front as Britain’s favourite bone-head magnet. Ever the pessimists, anti-racist organisations believed BNP pre-election claims could be an underestimate and suggested that a 5 percent swing to the BNP could see them increase their tally of councillors to 70.

A YouGov poll conducted by the Daily Telegraph, prior to the elections, suggested the BNP was set to make “significant gains” in the elections. The poll showed that 7 percent of voters were ready to back the BNP and that some 24 percent had considered voting BNP in the past or were thinking of doing so now.

Regardless of how much these smiley-faced fascists claim to have changed their image, supposedly booting out the bone-headed troublemakers of yesteryear, they still represent the politics of hate – and their writings and statements still contradict the respectable shirt-and-tie image they try so hard to project.

For over six months BNP literature had been portraying the coming elections as a “Referendum on Islam”, linking the threat of Islamist terrorism in Britain to the Labour Government’s asylum and immigration policies and the war in Iraq. One BNP leaflet, handed out in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London, declared: “If only they had listened to the BNP.”

Moreover, the BNP’s anti-Islam position has gained in prominence since Nick Griffin was acquitted of racial hatred charges at Leeds Crown Court back in February. It did not help that the judgment came at the same time as the hullabaloo over the anti-Muslim Danish cartoons and the consequent display by a handful of young Muslims dressed as suicide bombers and demonstrating in London, a coincidence that allowed the BNP to pass itself off as the champion of freedom of speech and all things British.

Overnight, the BNP moved further to the right in its anti-Moslem line of attack. Heartened by what they perceive as a lowering of tolerance for Islam, the BNP has become more obsessive. Speaking to the Observer, (24 April), Simon Darby, the man BNP leader Nick Griffin has appointed to take over should an appeal to re-convict him go ahead, said: “We are giving voice to the concerns of ordinary people, Yes, part of it is still about race.” Since 9/11 and 7/7, he says, “things have changed: the new issue is Islam”.

Two years ago the BNP were fortunate to ride a wave of patriotism – a tool they can use to great effect when it suits – in the run up to the election, with voters going to the polls as the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated and rammed down our throats every night on TV, and the English football team were gearing up to compete in Euro 2004 and when manufacturers were reporting sales of 4 million St George flags. This time round they could count on the nationalism whipped up by the World Cup taking place in Germany as well as the patriotism created by the Queen’s 80th birthday celebrations. And neither is their raw branch of nationalism that unique in today’s climate where the UKIP and the Conservative Party can make huge gains in the European elections on a “say no to Europe” platform, proclaiming the merits of British sovereignty, and where the Labour Party is all too ready to send British troops off to far away lands to protect the interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

Recent scandals within the mainstream reformist parties, particularly the Labour Party, and coming in election week, clearly helped boost the BNP vote and resulting in their tally of councillors leaping from 20 to 48. Not least of which was the Home Office fiasco involving the release of foreign prisoners from British prisons, many of whom went on to reoffend, and which played straight into BNP hands. The sleaze turned many would-be voters away from the polling stations too – something the BNP further capitalised on with their supporters making a point of going to the polls. For instance, the BNP claimed a surprising win from Labour in Solihull, when it won the Chelmsley Wood ward by 19 votes, taking its first fascist seat on the council there. But look closely and we see that in Chelmsley Wood 74 percent of the electorate never bothered turning up to vote.

In the borough of Dagenham and Barking, the sitting Labour Party MP, Margaret Hodge, clearly made the BNP look like the party of  the moment when she announced shortly before the election that she had discovered massive support for the BNP, offering that as many as 80 per cent of the electorate would vote for them. She commented: "That's something we have never seen before. They used to be ashamed to vote for the BNP. Now they are not." The media, of course, made much of this, with the BNP thriving on the oxygen of publicity.

Of course there were other factors at play in Dagenham and Barking, such as the government’s refusal to allow the council to build housing and the council’s allocation of housing on a points basis. The areas continuing deindustrialisation, marked by job losses in the docks and at the Ford plant in Dagenham, was also an issue the BNP could mobilise support around. Where the mainstream parties where seen as having let voters down, that was where the BNP found the greatest success.

Lord Tebbit, writing in the Daily Telegraph (21 April), had this to say about the BNP:

“I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies. On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to ‘use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality’, to institute worker ownership, to favour workers’ co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.”

It certainly does sound like left wing reformism – but not Socialist – with the assumption being made that capitalism can be managed for the good of all.

Stuart Jeffries, considering Lord Tebbit’s comments in the Guardian, (28th April), remarked that: “the notion that the BNP might be considered left-wing shows the political vacuum that Labour has created. Not that many of those who will vote BNP next week want to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy. Rather, alienated from their traditional party by its shameless plutocracy and neglect of its core support, some white working-class voters will opt for a party that offers easy lies about their plight.” Suggesting that BNP support is rooted in the failure of mainstream reformism, Jeffries continued: “Blair may not be responsible for populist racism, but he and his party are responsible for putting despair in place of hope from politics for many, and thus making the election of racists likely in several British towns.”

Considering the views of the Labour and Conservative parties on asylum and the former’s part in so overtly upsetting the Islamic world in recent years, their concern for the apparent rising support BNP does seem a mite misplaced. Labour and the Tories may well abhor the policies of the BNP, but have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made significant political gains because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system they champion and which gives rise to the politics of race and hate.

The BNP is more the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not really the fault of the mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating bullshit of fascists and the quick fix they offer?

The hundreds of thousands of misinformed workers who fell for the BNP spiel in May are the products of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking that neo-nazi solutions to social problems – which they have been led to believe are largely rooted in the colour of a person’s skin – would suddenly improve their miserable lives. In truth, a shortage of council housing and poorly maintained housing estates, low wages and pittance benefits are no more the fault of asylum seekers than, in fact, the mainstream parties who mistakenly believe capitalism can be run in the interests of the workers. At the end of the day the BNP simply put together a better package of lies and, just like the other reformist parties, promised voters little more than extra space at the trough of poverty – and tens of thousands, their minds numbed by the politics of reform fell for the scam.

John Bissett

Greasy Pole: The Moral Factor? (1996)

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

At last we know. After all the time and cerebral energy expended on looking for the reasons for problems like poverty, homelessness, and crime it has become clear. As we might have expected, the politicians had the answer. At last they have told us. We are suffering from a moral deficit which undermines all the efforts by masses of people of goodwill to build a secure and prosperous society. We should all be grateful about this because it means that morality is likely to be an issue at the general election, which cannot now be long delayed. In the excitement of the hustings we shall be able to debate this desperately important issue and then, it is to be hoped—most of all, by the politicians—we shall give our leaders an overwhelming mandate to lay the foundations for a new morality.

Immoral
Of course there will be some draw backs in this preoccupation with moral issues. One is that it will focus attention on individuals or groups of people who are open to be labelled as immoral. People like single mothers, who are a perpetual obsession of one prominent Cabinet minister who thinks the women deliberately arranged their pregnancy so that they would have a case for living on one of those nice estates where other immoral people sell drugs, burgle houses, steal cars . . .  People like those who fail to buy a TV licence so that they can legally watch morally sustaining shows like Blind Date. People who try to supplement their Income Support at the local Sainsbury, where Good Food Costs Nothing if you shoplift it.

And while attention is focused in these ways the real issues are overlooked. This is probably very reassuring to the politicians because it saves them from constructing those long, boring election manifestos in which they promise to eliminate all sorts of problems. Now they can narrow it down to one simple issue. It is rather like when they told us the most important thing was to win the war. Except that now the war is against immorality.

So why is there this moral deficit? We may well ask. Why, for example, is society supposed to be in such an uproar when the present government have had 17 years in which to control it? According to Norman Tebbit, the Thatcher government turned Britain from ". . . the sick country of Europe into one of the most successful and respected in the world . . . Our policies have become the standard against which others are measured" (Upwardly Mobile). But now we are told that there is something basically wrong with this successful and respected country. We are told this by Tebbit’s successors in the Tory government and by Labour leaders like Jack Straw and Tony Blair, who obviously fear the Tories have a vote-winning bandwagon, which they are desperate to clamber onto, in the morality issue.

Well the easiest resolution to this is to blame the parents and the teachers, who are now being criticised for not wearing suits (the male teachers) and not wearing shirts (the females). Parents are being condemned for an alleged preoccupation with the business of survival which cripples their influence over their children, who run riot as a consequence. If only they were all like our politicians, who are always so appropriately dressed and who never deceive or betray us.

Questions
There is, however, a question to be answered here. If the present generation of teachers and parents are so deficient in their morality that they have little of it to impart to the children, how did they get to be like that? Were their teachers and parents lacking? And if they were, what responsibility for this rests with those who taught and raised them? It does not take long for this line of questioning to bring us back to the times when, it is implied, society operated on a strong moral basis—when everyone knew their place and mostly asked for nothing more than a life in the slums and a death in the workhouse.

If this kind of question begins to make the whole issue of morality look distinctly dodgy, it can be because it is hardly the time for the Tories to produce it in the hope of winning votes. It is not necessary to go into the wearisome catalogue of sleaze for which this government is notable to conclude that we are ruled by one of the most disastrously exposed bunch of wanglers in recent history. Of course much of the exposure has been possible because of the inept way in which the sleaze has been operated—at times almost as bad as the bank robbers leaving their fingerprints on the safe door. Equally inept have been the attempts to protect the sleaze merchants which have so often had the effect of aggravating the government’s problem—and this does not say much for the supposed skill of those people who claim they can effectively run this social system.

Suez
The cover-ups and excuses are designed to protect the entire institution of governmentand political leadership. If there are too many examples of MPs and ministers breaking the rules to line their own pockets there may be a reluctance by the voters to trust them. In fact, voters trust their leaders in face of a mass of evidence which should dissuade them. For example, the recent release of government documents relatingto 1956 has finally confirmed what was obvious—but always vehemently denied—about the Suez war in that year. It has always been clear that the invasion of Egypt was justified by a series of official lies. At the time the excuse for the landings was the separation of the Israeli and Egyptian armies when in fact the Israeli attack was planned in conjunction with the British and French governments, to give them an excuse for landing in Egypt. At the time the House of Commons was assured by the British Prime Minister—elegant, handsome Old Etonian Anthony Eden—that no such collusion had taken place. Eden lied, which no MP, let alone an Old Etonian, let alone a Prime Minister, is supposed to do. So they fitted him up with a peerage and a nice house in the West Indies.

And what are we to say about the morality of the present bunch of political leaders? About John Major’s pose as the nice guy? About Tony Blair’s waffle about Britain’s future under a Labour government? About the morality of the whole, persistent deception that these people can organise capitalism so that it can exist without poverty, homelessness, crime. About the morality of them turning when they are exposed, on vulnerable groups in the hope of winning a few votes from the more bewildered and despairing among the electorate?

Ivan

Observations: Pop goes Norman (1986)

The Observations Column from the April 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pop goes Norman

The British Record industry Awards (BBC 1, 10 February) consisted of the usual vacuous ego-tripping and facetious speeches from such useful members of society as the pop group Tears for Fears. The recipients of the awards were the same kind of safe, tedious performers as last year, and the year before, and so on. Phil Collins, the Eurythmics, Huey Lewis and the News, Bruce Springsteen — the list of commercially successful and artistically irrelevant "stars" is endless. Of course, there was the patronising "special award" to Bob Geldof and Live Aid but in general these awards showed that Nothing Had Changed. (Although, in the spirit of tokenism for which the BBC is famous, we even had a Best Classical Recording award.)

However, this award ceremony was special, because the guest of honour was none other than our old friend Norman Tebbit. The emptiness of the speech he was to make was presaged by Noel Edmonds' blatant appeal to naked emotion when he introduced Tebbit as "a man who has recently returned to public life after a long spell in hospital" — or words to that effect: Tebbit began by saying that he didn't know much about pop music (neither does Noel Edmonds, so he was in good company) and then sallied forth into a series of facts and figures showing that pop music was an extremely high-earning export (and therefore ideologically sound as far as Norm was concerned). He praised its "competitiveness" and the fact that it gives pleasure to so many people and went on to praise Live Aid for "helping people less fortunate than ourselves". An analysis of why they are "less fortunate" was too much to hope for, but the hypocrisy of first praising competition and then shedding crocodile tears for the inevitable results of the competitive system was blatant even for Tebbit.

But the awards only served to confirm what Tebbit said — those who are most easily marketable take the awards. Of course, in this twisted society it makes more sense to waste time and effort marketing the garbled vocals of Bruce Springsteen than to ensure the free distribution of resources which would ensure that disasters like the Ethiopian famine can never be repeated.

Socialism will be a world wide society of free access, in which everyone's needs are met. Then there will be no need for faded pop stars to organise fund-raising concerts; no need for hypocritical politicians to congratulate them for doing so and no need for ceremonies in which the musically illiterate are presented with awards for selling more records than their equally illiterate competitors. Pop music will no longer be a commodity to be bought and sold — it will simply not matter whether or not a record is Number One. Maybe music will then give real pleasure rather than a temporary respite from the misery of life under capitalism.

God spot

"Gawd", you mutter, as our Brian, busily buttering up his latest Establishment worthy, rolls over invitingly to have his belly scratched. "What about some genuinely aggressive questioning for a change?" But Scargill's out in the cold these days; Brenda Dean's dangerously popular, and Hughie ("terrible twin") Scanlon s sleeping it off in the Lords alongside Joe (Lord) Gormley. We'll just have to wait until there's a nice juicy striking bus-driver for him to sink his teeth into.

But what's this? Thought for the Day. Aarrgh! Here it comes again! You'll know the sort of thing. Some vicar, attired in the gear of an archangel, arrives at the studio clutching a couple of frying-pans, a brace of walking-sticks. and a chalice of font-water. Like as not he'll be sporting six yards of striped woollen scarf (run up, hell confide unctuously. in celebration of advent) and a crash-helmet. In true evangelical style he's off to Killamey to skid down the Paps while singing the Greater Doxology to the tune of the well-known popular ditty, My Old Man's A Dustman.

“Heavens", observes Master Redhead. "Precisely", murmurs our impassioned divine. You haven't even a free hand to turn the damn thing off as you mop the blood from your lacerated face, or as you scrape the porridge from the kitchen floor. You may remind yourself that, after all, it's only three minutes. But then, it's three minutes every morning. There you are. struggling to interpret the customary BBC Newspeak, fuming, perhaps, at yet another gratuitous assault on yet another group of disaffected trade unionists when — Wham! — you're suffocating in yet another nebulous cloud of sanctimonious codswallop.

They've mugged you again. (This time it's a holy cook who manages to punctuate his pietistic diatribe with entirely disgusting recipes for goatsmeat stew.) But they won't catch you next time — will they?

The great and the good

"I have built many roads and sewers in my time"
(Employment Secretary. Lord Young, on BBC Radio 4. 20 February)

My, my! How about that, then? Of course, Lord Young is not exactly unique in his truly prodigious endeavours, is he? Take the Great Wall of China. You may have heard a broadcasting hack assert (Radio 2, 26 February) that this mighty rampart — all 1500 miles of it — was built by one Shih Hwang-ti. the first of the "universal emperors'. Swiftly on to 5th century Athens BC. Phidias builds the Parthenon. Admittedly, he enjoyed a little help from Ictinus and Callicrates, but it was a brave effort for all that. North-Westward to Rome and the Colosseum. The Emperor Vespasian rolled his sleeves up for this one. Unfortunately he was "summoned by the Gods" before he could complete it — overwork, no doubt — and his successor. Titus, to the cheers of his admiring people, finished the job — all on his own.

But what about the home scene? There have been many instances of selfless hard work and heroic devotion to duty. One in particular springs to mind: the example of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Brunei built anything and everything bridges, railways, ships, canals . . . One very fine example of his handiwork is his tunnel at Box. on the old Great Western line from London to Bristol. Imagine, if you will, all those spotless navvies and their wenches, sitting round their roaring fires, tankards of foaming porter clutched in their soft white hands, howling encouragement to Isambard as, shovel in one grimy fist, pick in the other, he hacks his way through miles of rock and clay. A heartening sight indeed!

Or — and here you rub your eyes — can it be possible that the nearest Lord Young of Graffham ever got to building sewers was when he presented his aristocratic backside to them?

Action Replay: Pass the Port (2012)

The Action Replay column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then international sport can be a form of politics too. National sports teams are often used to increase a country’s prestige and influence or to make some political point.

Probably the most notorious example was the ‘cricket test’ proposed by Norman Tebbit in 1990, and supposedly failed by many British people of Asian descent. So someone whose family was from Pakistan might support Pakistan against England (even if they supported England when they played, say, Australia). It was never quite clear what this was meant to show, apart from Tebbit’s own nastiness.

In fact, a closer look at the concept of a national team can tell us quite a bit about the notions of nationalism and patriotism. Bahrain, for instance, has acquired a set of Olympic-class athletes by granting citizenship (and plenty of money too, no doubt) to established stars from elsewhere (such as Morocco and Ethiopia). Switching national allegiance for sporting reasons is not exactly rare, and even the current England cricket team (strictly, England and Wales) contains a number of players who started out as South Africans.

Even when the country was split between East and West, a combined German team competed at some Olympic Games. Ireland is represented on a thirty-two county basis in hockey and rugby union, but Northern Ireland and the Republic go their separate ways in other sports. The North competes alongside England, Scotland and Wales in football, for instance, and at the Commonwealth Games, but not at the Olympics, where a combined Great Britain team takes part.  

So the concept of ‘nation’ in international sport is pretty fluid. Not that any of this stops nationalists claiming that sporting success for ‘their’ country shows how superior its people are.

Paul Bennett

Between the Lines: Prole Pop (1986)

The Between the Lines column from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prole pop

Why do TV producers assume that people who want to watch (and hear) pop/rock music on TV must be dummies who deserve no better than the incoherent idiocies and inanities offered by the likes of Paula Yates (presenter of The Tube. C4. Fridays. 5.30pm)? Since TV pop shows first began in the Sixties with The Six Five Special (including the awful Pete Murray — last seen campaigning for Thatcher in the 1979 election together with a bunch of other has-beens). Ready Steady Go and the atrocious Top Of The Pops, hosted by nauseating Jimmy Savile and Tony Blackburn, it has always been assumed that those who like "popular" music are fit only for condescension.

Pop. it is felt by those who run TV. is the music of the proles who are too intellectually limited to appreciate the likes of Beethoven. So if you want to see the latest musicians perform on TV the price you must pay is to be treated like a cultural inferior. The Radio One mentality is that if you like workers' music you can't expect serious presentation. If you are a Radio Three, opera on BBC2 type. TV is prepared to treat you with a little dignity. They get Richard Baker to whisper in pompous tones about what led Verdi to write his four-act Rigoletto. Meanwhile, for the proles who watch the bands which most workers buy (Madness sell more records than Verdi's four acts multiplied by twelve) the best we can expect is Steve Wright being patronising or Paula Yates giggling and plugging her old man (Geldof's) Christmas record.

Negative marketing

The US elections for Congress last month were marked by a new campaigning feature: negative advertising. Candidates for Congress can buy space on American TV in order to sell themselves and it has been this soap-powder approach to politics which has characterised US elections for years. In 1986 the advent of negative advertising — used as a tactic by both of the big parties — has meant that candidates' ads are increasingly based not on what a good guy Our Man is. but what a lying, hypocritical, uncaring ponce Their Man is. All over the USA workers have been appealed to on the basis of purely negative messages.

In one sense nothing could be more fitting for capitalism in the tired, intellectually bankrupt condition it has now reached. No more New Deals or Great Men of the People: the only way to persuade workers that Tweedledum is worthier than Tweedledee is by digging up the dirt on Tweedledee. The British need not feel superior; if Kinnock is to oust Thatcher his main hope rests on negative attitudes to her; if Thatcher is to keep Labour out she will need to play on fears of the Labour Left gaining power. Such is the level of capitalist politics that merchants with nothing to sell can only get your votes by claiming that the merchant at the next stall is selling shoddy products. The best to be said for it is that at least with negative advertising politicians tell fewer lies: after all. if they are buying space to explain what a bunch of crooks the others are workers have only to draw the obvious conclusion.

BBC bias

Yes, Norman Tebbit, the BBC is biased. That is why the oldest party in Britain claiming to stand for socialism, and the only one which does, has never been invited to appear on national BBC TV.

It is scandalous for Tebbit and the Tories to attack the BBC for showing viewers the results of the Libyan bombing of civilian workers, in which the British government colluded with the US government in an act of appalling state terrorism. If Tebbit wishes to blame the messenger for delivering the message that is the slippery slope to total state control of the media by the government.

In addition to criticisms over the Libyan reporting Tories have also been attacking the BBC over a Panorama programme (Maggie's Militant Tendency, broadcast on 30 January 1984) which showed the clear links between several known fascists and the Conservative Party. Two of the MPs named in the programme sued the BBC for libel and. after several months, the BBC caved in and dropped its defence. It is highly probable that the BBC was under government pressure to do so. Several points concerning the Panorama programme need to be made:

• It has been alleged that the two Tory MPs who sued for libel are now totally cleared of any fascist connections. That is false. The MPs concerned — Neil Hamilton and George Howarth — denied the Panorama claim that they were members of a neo-fascist group called Tory Action which has infiltrated the Tory Party. What they did not deny at any time were other claims made in the programme: that when Hamilton was at university he advocated "the abolition of parliament and the suppression of the lower classes” (this and all quotes are from a direct transcript obtained from the BBC); that in 1972 he went to the Youth Leaders Congress of the MSI. the Italian Fascist Party, and that when in August 1983 he was on an official parliamentary delegation to Berlin he shocked his hosts by appearing in public and giving a Nazi salute. In the case of Howarth. he hosted a Tory Action reception in the House of Commons in July 1983 — Tory Action is an explicitly racist group led by G.K. Young. ex-Tory candidate for Brent East of whom Young Conservative chairman Philip Pedley said in the programme: “He is a man who seems to see a Communist under every bed and usually a Jewish Communist. He seems to be convinced that unless you are racist you are some sort of traitor . . . ” Howarth's mother was an active NF member for four years, according to NF records.

• Quite aside from the fact that none of the above points were ever denied by Hamilton and Howarth in court, there is the fact that they were not the only Tory MPs said by Panorama to be backed by Tory Action and linked to fascists. The main MP attacked by the programme was Harvey Proctor, described as having "been involved in Tory Action since G.K. Young first set it up". Why did Proctor not sue for libel, considering that the programme explicitly connected him with the National Front and accused him of stirring up racism? Proctor is now under police investigation for homosexual vice crimes — beating male prostitutes — and again he has remained silent. Proctor was not the only MP apart from Hamilton and Howarth named in the programme If the legal victory of Hamilton and Howarth indicates that they were the victims of false allegations (which, in general, they do not seem to have been) the legal inaction of the other MPs might be taken to read that they had no defence to offer.

• The programme made several other highly damaging points, based on indisputable evidence, to show that fascists are operating in the Tory Party. For instance, the programme opened by interviewing Don Moody who had recently been leader of the paramilitary Nazi group. Column Eighty-eight. He had spent thirty years in neo-fascist parties in Britain. He made his office into a shrine to the memory of Adolf Hitler. In 1983 Moody was a Conservative candidate in Cleethorpes. No denial of this evidence has been offered — indeed. Moody was interviewed on the programme, saying that "I think that Adolf Hitler will go down in history with complete and total detachment as the saviour not only of the white man. if you like, but of humankind". Neither has there been any denial of the programme's damning evidence regarding the pressure group run by the neo-fascist historian. David Irving, who claims on the programme to have bought a copy of the membership list of the Federation of Conservative Students for use by his organisation.

The Panorama documentary provided an excellent exposure of clear links between Tories, some of them MPs, and fascists. As such it made public information which should be known. That efforts have been made to silence the programme-makers and intimidate the BBC is proof that capitalist politicians do not like the facts about themselves given to the workers.

Steve Coleman

Editorial: Unemployment and Socialism (1982)

Editorial from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tide-like, the total of unemployment rises remorselessly, perhaps eventually to wash the Tory government out to sea. Canute-like, ministers insist that although the waves are running higher and higher the land is actually becoming drier, safer, more fertile. They assure us that whatever impoverishment and distress is being endured is only temporary; their policies are beginning to work and, with success so close at hand, must not be abandoned now. There is no other way.

A devotee of this line is the Employment (sic) Minister Norman Tebbit, who is notorious as a political bovver boy. Tebbit’s determination to protect the interests of the British ruling class is unusually combative, even for a Tory. Discussing the latest 3 million unemployment figures he was reported:

Mr. Tebbit said that he could see signs of an economic revival. Apart from the improved vacancies, he highlighted higher industrial output, lower short time working and more overtime. (Guardian 2/1/82)

Part of Tebbit's usefulness to the Thatcher government is that, careless of common popularity, he is ready to be the fall guy, to absorb much of the anger generated by the statistics. This has a value beyond the Tory party; it promotes the myth that the problems of the capitalist system are in some way connected with the personalities of the people who try to run it. According to the myth, someone like Tebbit would cause unemployment even in the middle of a hectic boom, while the problem would easily disappear if a kindlier person (Gilmour?; Walker?) were in charge instead.

This is only one of the numerous false ideas about unemployment which are so popular. In truth, people are thrown out of work when commodities cannot be sold profitably. As capitalism is a system where wealth is produced with the object of profitable sale, if there is no profit there is no production. That is a simple, inexorable economic law. The difficulty—for Tebbit as for all his predecessors—is that that profit cannot be guaranteed. There can be no confidence that as wealth is turned out there will be a welcoming market for it. If there could be such confidence, the history of capitalism would be very different. There would have been no Great Crash of 1929, no recession of the 70s and 80s. Capitalism is anarchy. It cannot be controlled or regulated, whoever is said to be in charge.

An equally important fallacy is that employment is vital to the working class, to the extent that all would be well if only the dole queues could be made to disappear. Because of this fallacy governments are often assessed in terms of the presence of significant levels of unemployment. High unemployment is rated as failure (as the Thatcher government is finding out) while full employment is rated as success.

In one sense it is natural that the fallacy should be so popular. The vast majority of people under capitalism depend on being employed for their living. Having virtually no ownership in the means of wealth production and distribution they survive by working for a wage for an employer. That is why, concisely and accurately, they are called the working class.

Depending on employment for a living means that being out of work presents a special threat. But it does not therefore follow that being in work is particularly prosperous or even desirable. The working class sell their labour power (which is what employment actually is) for a wage. This represents in general terms—over a period, under varying conditions—the value of that labour power, which is the food, clothing, shelter, recreation which are needed to reproduce labour power. Workers’ wages are generally just about enough to keep them in existence. Their level of subsistence and consumption is restricted; they live at a sub standard. When they have bought what is needed to reproduce themselves there is little, if anything, over. The working class live in poverty.

It is clear from this that the workers’ concern should extend beyond the immediate intensification of their poverty which follows from unemployment. Their interests lie not just in alleviating their stresses but in abolishing them. They should not fret about changing a government minister like Tebbit but in establishing a society which will have no use for a government and state machine. Urgently, they should consider the case for a social system opposite in every way from capitalism.

The problems of capitalism stem from its basic nature as a system of commodity production. In contrast, wealth in socialist society will be made for human use. This will fundamentally change the social character of wealth and so will also change all social relationships. To begin with, there will be no social classes; no employers and employees. People will not depend for their living on being able to sell their labour power. Production will be a free process of co-operation for the common good and wealth will be freely available to all human beings.

Socialism can be reality now; in terms of its technical and productive capacity society can today support a system of common ownership and free access. All that is needed is for the majority—the world working class—to understand socialism and to opt for it. That is the only useful lesson to be drawn from the crises of capitalism. On whether, and on how effectively, it is absorbed depends the welfare and the prosperity—perhaps even the very continued existence—of human society.

Caught in the Act: Punishers and Moonlighters (1990)

The Caught in the Act column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

PUNISHERS AND MOONLIGHTERS

One thing to be said about the governments latest plans for the reform of what is still called Criminal Justice is that they are not designed around any nonsense about eliminating crime. This is something of a historical curiosity since all such reforms in the recent past have pretended to be moving towards a discovery of the key to the understanding, treatment and cure of crime. The White Paper Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public puts a simpler and perhaps more popular case: some criminals must be punished more severely while many of the rest can be punished more cheaply. Whatever effect these plans may have on the criminal statistics (where all progress or stagnation in the "fight against crime" is mistakenly measured) they are sure to give a thrill of satisfaction to the more seriously haunted sections of the Tory Party, whose appetite for savage vengeance would be sorely frustrated if crime were ever to disappear.

Although he came too recently to the job of Home Secretary to take any significant part in preparing the White Paper, David Waddington is likely to heartily approve of the main drift of what it proposes. Waddington is already in the tradition of Tory Home Secretaries—Leon Brittan was a recent example—who appear to be living in a different age. Brittan was like a Dickensian workhouse master while Waddington's looks, voice and arrogance are reminiscent of an eighteenth century magistrate reading the Riot Act to starving peasants before unleashing the dragoons to teach them that while it is permissable to be poor they are not allowed to protest about it. A QC who was a Crown Court Recorder, he is not abashed to parade his philosophy that anyone who goes outside capitalism's laws, with their plentiful licence for legal theft and disorder, to do a bit of the illegal sort, has got it coming to them. Waddington remains an obdurate supporter of the death penalty: he would have been in favour of hanging the Guildford Four and all the other people whose conviction for murder was later discredited. His proposals for reform of the criminal law display a similar disregard for evidence and logic.

SUN READERS

The White Paper originates in the fact that putting offenders in prison is ineffectual and—the most persuasive argument of all—very expensive. The answer to this problem is to legalise a new range of penalties to enable courts to deal with offenders in other ways whenever possible. It is then assumed that the courts will not be attracted to the new penalties unless they are not only tough but are seen to be tough by the average reader of the Sun. There is very little evidence to support this case.

But popular attitudes to crime, which help to determine how many people vote, are not normally based on uncomfortable reality. As anyone who has been burgled or assaulted will tell you, crime is an emotive business and if you are one of its victims you are likely to be interested in revenge before any criminological niceties. Except that in the case of the Tory hangers and floggers it is not necessary to be a victim to be motivated by vengeful lusts. That is why the proposals in the White Paper are likely to become written into law in the near future.

RUTHLESS TORIES

Whatever this does to the courts and the criminals it is not likely to harm the reputation of the likely author of the proposals, who has watched over them practically since their inception. John Patten is a Minister of State at the Home Office, a man whose ambition is as plain as his bouffant hair style. Viewers of the Commons proceedings may already have noticed him out of concern for the fact that, as he sits behind David Waddington. he seems to suffer from an uncontrollable tic. In fact it is even more serious. Patten is nodding vigorously at everything his boss says, uncaring that as Waddington has his back to him his displays of devotion go unnoticed.

Let us hope, for the sake of his friends and family (he lists his only recreation in Who's Who as "talking to my wife") that Patten realises, as he struggles up the rungs of power, that the Tory political machine can be excessively ruthless. There is no more instructive example of this than the sad case of Nigel Lawson who. as far as is known, was never caught out nodding in agreement with anyone apart from himself. For those with a defective memory and for the more dangerously sycophantic Thatcherites we should explain that Lawson was once Chancellor of the Exchequer. He held the job for a long time and was widely praised as the man responsible single-handedly for a miraculous revival of the British economy and so for enabling the Tones to win a couple of General Elections. Such was the reverence in which Lawson was held that he was said to be the one minister Thatcher dare not sack, so he helped her out by resigning.

MOONLIGHTING

And what has happened since then? In a propaganda feast of startling skill and audacity the Tories have undermined Lawson's reputation as the miracle man. They have been unstinting in their efforts to publicise the fact that British capitalism is not in miraculous ascendant but declining into one of its periodic crises—that prices are rising too fast; that the balance of payments is badly out of true (or what the British capitalist class regard as true): that the unions are beginning to flex their muscles again . . .  Let us give thanks, runs the message, that the Treasury is no longer in the hands of that overweight buffoon with the untidy hair and the ready sneer and is instead run by nice, trim Mr. Major who can be trusted to really work the economic miracle and who will at least not argue with Margaret Thatcher.

Those who so recently clamoured to praise Lawson now eagerly bury him. As he nurses his bruised reputation he may take consolation in the fact that, like so many other discarded Tory Ministers, he has got himself a couple of well-paid jobs on the side. In case Lawson's constituents in Blaby have forgotten, he already has a job which is supposed to demand all his time— he is their Member of Parliament. His new job with an off-shoot of Barclays Bank is a two- day-a-week commitment but that does not mean the ex-economic wizard will miraculously be putting in a nine-day week. He will, in words familiar to the Sun reader, be moonlighting except that it should be called sunlighting because he will be at the Bank during the day when he should be on the benches of the Commons nodding like John Patten at his leader s words.

HYPOCRITES

Moonlighting is something which Tory Ministers have been pretty scathing about in the past—at least when it involved the sort of extension of their working day when many workers have to resort to m order to bump up their wages. Norman Tebbit once got very annoyed about the alleged (not an inappropriate word since he regarded it as akin to a crime) moonlighting of a group of workers who were pressing for more pay a bit too effectively for Normans comfort. Tebbit argued that it was dishonest to pretend that the miserable pay they got for their basic job was all those workers had to exist on. This was a typical Tebbit blunder, in the class of his reminiscences about his cycling father, because the workers were nurses. When he left the government Tebbit was immediately moonlighting himself, accepting so many directorships that he couldn't possibly do a proper job in all of them let alone be a full-time MP as well. Of course he was only doing what other Tory ex-ministers had done, like John Nott, Jim Prior and Francis Pym for example. Like them, he was only being as hypocritical as he needed to be as an administrator of the capitalist system. 

Which brings us back to Nigel Lawson, John Patten and David Waddington. All of them claim to be reformers, to apply radical change to sweep away problems which have festered for too long. Lawson said he would bring about a fundamental change in the system of taxation and had been chipping away at it for some time, which impressed workers who mistakenly believe that taxation is a concern of theirs. Waddington and Patten are proposing changes in criminal law the like of which have not been contemplated for some forty years, which may impress workers who are deluded that they have something to gain from the states protection of property rights.

LOSERS

But effective, pre-designed reform is not possible unless the reformers have some control over what they are trying to change. As the Tory machine is now at pains to point out, Lawson had no real control of the economy of British capitalism. The history of crime and the laws made in response to it (if it should not be the other way round) indicate that this problem, typical of the social consequences of capitalism's class society, is also uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This might be seen as an amusing, trivial game except that it is always the same people who are the losers and who are punished by the law for being so.

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

Spy stories (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Does it matter whether or not Roger Hollis and Lord Rothschild were Russian spies? The fact that Hollis was the head of MI5 and Rothschild also worked for the security services makes no difference. In fact it only goes to prove what 1 had always thought anyway. Either MI5 and M16 are staffed by incompetents: after all if Hollis was a spy then he (not to mention Blunt, Maclean, Burgess and Philby) couldn’t have been very good since the information that he gave to the Russians doesn't appear to have done much to help them gain the upper hand. Also to have appointed one double agent might have been an oversight, to appoint two was certainly careless but to appoint five and then put one of them in charge is simply astounding. Or maybe the security services are only a form of job creation for the otherwise unemployed and, no doubt unemployable, members of the international ruling class. Some take up horse-breeding or art history, others do "good works" and some go to work for the security services.

Here they can play a game that has rules of etiquette as complicated as those of cricket, is more exciting than polo, and uses a language more cryptic than that in clues to The Times crossword. What’s more you can make up the rules as you go along, swap sides half way through the game or even be on both sides at the same time. And when you're too old to play any more then you can write a book about it all and take part in a new and even more exciting game which is played by lawyers and politicians for high stakes but again with rules that are made up as they go along, conducted in coded language and with rules of etiquette beyond the grasp of us in the lower classes.

So why is it that the British government is so anxious to stop the publication of one ex-MI5 agent's reminiscences? After all it can't be for reasons of "national security" (secret code for the interests of the British capitalist class) since Peter Wright worked for the security services at the very time when they had let a group of young wags from that other refuge for the unemployed ruling class — Cambridge University — join the club. They had thought that it might be a bit of a hoot, rather a jolly jape in fact, to play for the Russians while they were still in the British team. So if there was anything in Peter Wright's book worth knowing then someone would undoubtedly have told the Russians already.

So if it's not the Russians that they don't want to see the book what's the problem? Well of course there is the difficulty that Peter Wright's behaviour just isn't cricket. After all when a chap is allowed to join the club it simply isn't the done thing to go and spill the beans about the high jinks and pranks that some of the other chaps get up to just because he's financially embarrassed. And besides it might give some of the other chaps the idea that they can break the club oath that they took when they were allowed to join. After all signing the Official Secrets Act was meant to stop the members breathing a word to anyone, about anything that goes on inside the club no matter how trivial, cross your heart and hope to die.

But it's not just a case of the ruling class stamping their feet and getting petulant because someone's not playing the game properly. It's more serious than that. It's not because of the Russians that the government is trying to ban Wright's book. Neither is it acting in a fit of pique: no government would be prepared to put its most senior civil servant through the mill in the way that Robert Armstrong, the cabinet secretary, has been in the Australian court over the past few weeks just because of pique. No. the only plausible reason to explain why the government wants so badly to ban Wright's book is that it contains things that are politically embarrassing, that it doesn't want us—workers in Britain—to find out about. (However, if the source of the embarrassment is simply the revelations that the security services put Harold Wilson under surveillance while he was Prime Minister, then I will be forced to accept the "incompetent" theory rather than the "job creation" theory. Only a bunch of totally incompetent security agents could possibly think of Harold Wilson as a political subversive). After all this is supposed to be a liberal democratic country and plots hatched in secret by security agents don't quite fit the picture. Also it might get workers thinking about who else MI5 is watching: it was only last year that another ex-MI5 operative. Cathy Massiter, told how she had been instructed to spy on members of CND, the National Council for Civil Liberties and trade unionists. That didn't fit very well with the liberal democratic rhetoric either.

The truth is that knowledge is power, and control of information is an important source of that power. To talk about freedom of information or even a free press or freedom of expression in Britain gives a highly incomplete and partial picture of the way things really are. The government controls the information that we, the working class, have access to in a number of different ways. Firstly there is the Official Secrets Act that not only makes it an offence to give information to "the enemy" but also makes it a crime for any civil servant or contractor to disclose any information learned in the course of his or her job or for anyone to receive such unauthorised disclosures. In other words there is no right to know anything at all about the work of the government or civil service. It is entirely at the discretion of the government and senior civil servants whether or not to release information. Obviously they will try, wherever possible, to only release information that shows them in a good light. And they can do that through, for example, reports and government statistics selectively made public at the most opportune time and through timely briefings during which truths, half-truths and outright lies are fed to tame Lobby journalists and then regurgitated as "news" for our benefit. But newspapers collude with the state in other ways too. For example they have representatives on the "D-Notice" committee which designates certain areas—especially relating to defence and the security services—as no-go areas for the media and sends out guidelines to that effect to all newspaper editors.

Secondly, the government can influence the broadcasting media through its powers of patronage, which means that it decides who sits on the nominally independent Board of Governors of the BBC and its ultimate control of the airwaves which enables politicians to lean very heavily on broadcasters as was the case with the Real Lives programme, or more recently when Norman Tebbit, on behalf of the Tory party, accused the BBC of bias. In certain instances, as was the case during the Falklands War, it will use outright censorship in order to ensure that only approved information reaches us.

Thirdly, the content of newspapers and television programmes is affected by the fact that ownership of the press and broadcasting media is concentrated in the hands of a small number of media moguls, notorious for their reactionary views and often working hand in glove with politicians who periodically reward them with knighthoods and peerages for their loyalty.

So the antics of Robert Armstrong in court in Sydney may appear to be just another daft ruling class parlour game but the fact that the government is deadly serious about it suggests that we should also take it seriously. It is, to use Armstrong's own memorable euphemism, symptomatic of the way the ruling class is always "economical with the truth".

Janie Percy-Smith