Retired Hurt (1985)

From the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism old workers, like the old machinery they may have been operating, or the old car they may have been driving, lose their commodity value as they wear out — or, more accurately, as their masters insist they wear out. The machinery, having some small value as scrap, ends up in a foundry, no doubt. The old workers find themselves suddenly and ignominiously translated from "useful” members of society into what are euphemistically termed the “senior citizenry". From this moment on they are free, as was Voltaire’s Candide, to cultivate their gardens if they have one. The bitter truth is that the majority of such workers end up as crushed as that elderly car they could only barely afford to keep on the road when they were working. Having sold their labour and brain-power for the smallest sums their employers could get away with; having tolerated for the best part of a lifetime a system which all too few ever bother seriously to question or examine; is it any wonder that when we are unceremoniously cast aside we experience an isolation which can have devastating — even fatal — consequences. Only now are we able to see how insulting are the euphemisms with which capitalist society hardly bothers to cushion this final rejection. Not that the relinquishing of a life of wage-slavery should in itself constitute any great sacrifice. Indeed, it should rather be a matter for rejoicing. So why isn’t it?

It is estimated that of a UK population of around 56 million some 18 per cent, or something of the order of 10 million, are of retirement age (60 for women. 65 for men). In addition we have now to include growing numbers of workers who are accepting early retirement — a euphemism for disguised redundancy resulting from the continuing economic depression. Whatever the exact figure may be. the accumulated experience and wisdom embodied in so vast a number — and this in just one country — is enormous. For it is not to be supposed that, because so many workers are thrown on the scrap-heaps of the labour market they have nothing left to offer. And in a world which is so manifestly in need of all manner of skills it is as obscene to waste such expertise as it is to allow grain or fruit to rot; to pay farmers not to grow foodstuffs, while millions starve. However, as we have already stated, labour-power is a commodity bought by a capitalist with a view to the realisation of surplus value, a proportion of which constitutes profit. But during a depression labour power may find itself without a market in a world which is over-producing — not in terms of need, but in terms of price-maintenance, which alone ensures profitability. So what hope for older workers, whatever their skills, when millions of younger workers are tossed aside to join the dole-queues? What it all boils down to is that we do not live in a society in which men and women may elect to do useful work (or not, as the case may be). What we actually see is something quite different.

The penny-pinching meanness of the standard old-age pension denies many millions of elderly people, who spent their lives producing surplus value for our capitalist masters (not to mention cannon-fodder for their generals) any chance of dignity in what is left of their lives. Quite apart from simple domestic hardship (sometimes lethal in its consequences) there is the inability of the old to play a full part in the life around them. Suddenly the salient feature of the capitalist system — that everything, but everything, seems to cost money you are no longer in any position to afford — dominates your every waking moment. However, since money paid out to old-age pensioners constitutes a tax on the surplus value which would otherwise accrue to the ruling class it is easy to see that no major increases would easily be tolerated. The domestic and social deprivation of ten million units of what, stripped of all cant, is seen by the ruling class as clapped-out labour power is an integral feature of capitalist society. (How long before we are offered voluntary euthanasia along with the barometer and the plastic garden gnome?)

From the cradle to the grave we are subjected. in one form or another, to the depredations and exploitation of the capitalist system. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that there are rich pickings to be had out of the old and infirm despite their own evident penury. The reason for this paradox lies with the arrangements under which numbers of old people are boarded out in private nursing homes. Phil Cohen (Hiving off the Elderly, New Statesman, 7th December 1984) has described how, as a result of "privatising" what have hitherto been the responsibilities of the state, the DHSS has been pouring money into the coffers of the "privateers''. Old people, often ill and bewildered. are being bundled out of NHS hospital wards and dumped, usually against their will, in private nursing homes away from their own communities. The wards are then closed down in an attempt to accommodate the government's financial impositions. In the meantime the capitalist sharks, having smelt blood, are homing in for the kill on the property market ("large country houses, educational establishments, hotels, etc") in order to exploit their new and evidently lucrative opportunities.

The cold steppes of society at large for the retired are one matter (a subject by no means exhausted in the foregoing). But what about that closer, warmer relationship which is supposed to exist within the circle of the family? The harsh truth is, that in the molecular society which is so essential to the survival of capitalism, it rarely exists. We live in a jungle, the laws of which allow for precious little distinction between the familiar and the foreign. Workers who struggle to feed, clothe and shelter a family of their own are bound to find the additional responsibilities of caring for ageing parents an almost intolerable burden. Of course, the same pressures are visited on all those unmarried women who sacrifice their own lives to the needs of their parents. Coupled with such embarrassment is the — understandable — independence of outlook which the old workers bring to their new, and as often as not unwelcome, circumstances. A woman who has brought up her own children. cooked in her own kitchen, managed her own domestic finances, finds it difficult to relinquish such hard-won sovereignty, however threadbare it might have proved. Of course the sparks must fly (and given the cramped living space which most of us are obliged to occupy it is a miracle if they don't). Of course workers, of whatever age, provided they are not reduced by illness — senile dementia, for example — to absolute dependence, would ideally prefer to live their own lives. That this is so rarely possible has to do, not with any omission on their part, or that of their families. It is just another seemingly intractable contradiction of the social and economic system which thrusts so many of the more vulnerable of us into this impasse.

Some might argue that little better should be expected from the heartless bunch that governs us at present. And isn't it true that Labour — or whatever — is stamping impatiently in the stalls only waiting for the chance to put matters right? This is a dangerously naive illusion which can have no reference to events, past or present. Where, for example, were no fewer than seven former Labour governments on being reminded — as indeed they were, plaintively and often — that millions of workers, lifelong wealth producers for their respective masters, have been, and are being, plunged into a thankless and degrading poverty? The answer is, that Labour administrations have found themselves no better placed to deal fundamentally with this problem than have any others. It is an ineradicable feature of the capitalist system. As such it is pointless and diversionary to draw attention to, or attack, this or that personality. The deep and abiding love and affection felt for Thatcher within the Socialist Party is as profound as anything to be discovered within the pulsating breast of her Denis. However, we delude ourselves if we begin to think that any transference of these sentiments to the unlikely Neil Kinnock can make the slightest difference. Indeed, we would deserve our inevitable disappointment. So, what must be done?

The only answer to this and our many other problems is the democratic overthrow of the capitalist system itself — nothing less will do. For it is capitalism alone which is responsible for them. And this historic work is a task for all members of our class — including the "retired".

Richard Cooper

Decisions (1985)

A Short Story from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The race is on for the Labour nomination at Northloft, a safe seat where the present MP, Fred Parcel, stands down at the next election. Northloft lies athwart a main line railway which in the nineteenth century changed it into a blackened industrial suburb. Some famous Victorian capitalists set down factories there, with terraced streets with workers' homes in red brick and grey slate. Between the wars council estates were laid out and then came wedges of speculatively-built, cherry-blossomed semis whence clerks set out each day to ride on the railway to the office.

Another effect of the railway was to bring a continuous stream of immigrants — the Welsh and Irish before the war, the Asians and West Indians afterwards. Always they went through the same ritual, living at first in the terraces and then, as they became more established, moving out to the semis, provoking panic about "falling property values" among the "owner-occupiers". The constituency joined the Labour landslide of 1945. then the Tories won it back again until 1964 when Fred Parcel, feverish with Wilson’s campaign about the white-hot technological revolution, was elected. Fred was always sure that this result came about through his own brilliance.

But brilliant is by no means the first adjective to spring to the lips when describing Fred. A child when his father was out during the General Strike, his political notions were thenceforth based on his comprehensive Theory of the Betrayal of the True Soul of the Labour Movement. Just before the war, this theory led him to join the Communist Party, under the impression that the secret police, labour camps and political massacres of Stalinist Russia offered democracy's doughtiest defenders against Nazism. Agilely, he followed the party line over the war, the Russo-German Pact and all other inconvenient issues.

Naively, he looked forward to a great Communist triumph in the 1945 election. The arithmetic of the actual result filled Fred with panic; he joined the Labour Party and eventually, through union sponsorship (he was a shunter on the railway) and a local councillorship, he got into parliament as the Honourable Member for Northloft.

His original policy was to transform the House with his brilliance into a humming workshop of revolution. What actually happened was that he found he enjoyed an MP's life — the congratulatory back-slaps from Tories after a speech, the saluting policeman, the photographs on the Terrace with Miss World contestants, entertaining (his word for what was really a painfully boring experience for them) constituents to tea in the Members' Common Room.

He became, in a word, doddery and more recently he has been plagued with the guilt-protective hallucinations of senility. He was a sitting target for the reselection zealots and when they became active Fred quickly and meekly surrendered. After months of lobbying, intriguing and personality assassination which have enlivened Northlofts ward meetings to an unprecedented degree, the short list has shaken down to just four hopefuls: 

Roosevelt Bustamente Alexander calls himself the Token Black, which is intended to shame people into supporting him; "positive discrimination" is a phrase never far from his lips. If that fails he will probably rely on packing the membership and for some time his supporters have been energetically recruiting blacks into the party regardless of their political ideas, on the offer of a cut-price subscription. Roosevelt's tactics have won him support among the more confused lefties, who refuse to recognise a black racist when they see one; in the rest of the party he is called a black bastard. He refers to socialism as "black and white living in harmony together", which may some day force him to ask himself why he is a member of the Labour Party.

Julian Chatwynd-Speke is a barrister, the effectiveness of whose advocacy may be measured by his numerous clients who. to the surprise of the police, have spent much time behind bars. On the proceeds of his family’s interests in the East Anglian retail trade Julian went to public school and then to Oxford. After a brief undergraduate dalliance with the Liberals, when "community politics" seemed to be the way to power, he chose the Labour Party. While industriously taking himself around many constituency selection meetings he was liable to make speeches in which he slowly enunciated the sacred names of dead Labour heroes — Cripps, Bevan, Gaitskell — but this won him neither the hoped-for rapturous applause nor the candidature. He lives in an expensively refurbished Regency house in Islington, where the word socialism is occasionally mentioned over the sherry glass.

Les Horn, because he is the trade union man, considers himself the favourite for the nomination. Les prides himself on his humble origins and the self-education which taught him negotiating phrases like "let us draw back from the edge of the precipice and see whether there is light at the end of the tunnel" (trade union code for "I am about to sell the workers down the river") but which did not prevent him becoming the crudest kind of racist. His great hero is Ernie Bevin, in whose memory he pedantically drops his aitches. Les toadies endlessly to anyone he considers his betters (mostly outside the Labour Party) and has been rewarded by appointment as a local magistrate, with a reputation as the harshest sentencer on the bench. His dearest, secret ambition is to become Earl Horn of Northloft; meanwhile his version of socialism is a sort of national factory where the state takes care of you (which, in Les' mouth, has more than one meaning) whether you like it or not.

Fiona Strang represents what she calls the Wimmin's Voice of Northloft. After two marriages and divorces, four children and countless affairs she is now a committed, castrating female. No protest, no demonstration, is safe from her presence; creches, nurseries, abortion clinics, are fertilised by the energy in which she seeks to hide her shameful (to her) past as a Roedean schoolgirl. She surges around Northloft s bewildered streets dressed in enormous tents of expensively tatty clothes and her poor children are kept deliberately scruffy and sticky-faced. Her socialism, whenever she has time to think about it, she describes as chipping away at capitalism when in fact she is only the smoother type of sandpaper to the system. Fred Parcel is openly terrified of her and so, when she verbally bludgeons them on their doorsteps, are the defenceless voters of Northloft.

The choice between these candidates will involve the output of much physical and mental energy, which will be gladly given by their supporters in the conviction that the end result is vital. Constituency activists would, however, do well to consider one curious fact. During the 1979 election a team of earnest sociology students descended on Northloft, as a typical English constituency, to assess the voters' attitudes. They asked questions about strikes, nationalisation, immigration and the like and concluded that, on the basis of their replies, Labour supporters should more logically have voted Tory and vice versa. Northloft. in other words, should have sent a Conservative, and not Fred Parcel, to Westminster. The students were puzzled by their findings and even now, after many learned papers and lengthy seminars back at the university, they have not been able to explain it all.

But they know only the half of it. After all, they are mere commentators on the great, deceiving game of politics; theirs is not to reason why nor to ask who really wins and who, most importantly, always loses.

Ivan

Best years of your life (1985)

From the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

No wonder it's called the silly season. While the scenes at the party conferences purported to be "serious politics", the media events outside the conference halls were what were really meant for public consumption. to show that our leaders are really human.

You know the sort of thing — Neil Kinnock finds a beach to fall over, or maybe Margaret Thatcher chances on the birth of a calf in Scarborough. All in front of the TV cameras. But that's not the end of it. In this, the International Youth Year, youth has suddenly become important to the politicians and their PR officers. This is not because of any particular concern for the health or hopes of the young, but something of far greater importance — their votes.

According to the Observer (1 September 1985). between now and the next general election two and a half million new votes will join the electoral register, bringing the total number of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four up to a decisive five million. That's not all because, as the Observer quotes a leading psephologist, the young are "trendy and more malleable than other voters" and they no longer give automatic support to the Labour Party. The evidence of previous governments has shown that despite the repeated promises from Labour politicians on jobs, peace and poverty, the Labour Party is as powerless to deal with these problems as are the other parties of the profit system.

Many of the young suffer particularly from these problems; from the prospect of a life that capitalism — through the dole queue — dictates will be useless; from nuclear war, the mere threat of which claims some psychological victims among those least used to the brutal truths of the property society; or from the artificial escape of an empty crisp bag and a tube of glue. As if this were not all, from every hoarding and magazine the young are offered Clearasil for their spots, pop stars for their emotions and carefully packaged leaders (in many flavours) to do their thinking for them.

So it's open season on the political field. The hunt is on for that prized species, the gullible young voter. Reared on mindless and unquestioning fodder from the pulpit, the press, or the classroom, they are fair game for any opportunist with a nice smile. The first shot in this massacre was fired by the SDP in the form of their "Youthblitz". According to the Observer, David Owen, who is worried at the effect of his Gang of One style of leadership, has devised a series of speeches and high profile media stunts due to start soon. From the party that delights in meaningless slogans (remember "Caring about the People, Caring about the Costs". "Compassion and Competition", and "Toughness and Tenderness"?) they now plan all this publicity under the title "Have You Got The Guts - To Take Up The SDP Challenge?", which is presumably like the Pepsi Challenge TV advert, except less honest.

On the other side of the Alliance. David Steel is keeping a lower profile, presumably because, with his style of leadership he does not need to worry so much about his image with the youth of the Liberal Party. He listens intently and earnestly to the Young Liberals every year before overruling their annually-successful conference resolutions on "defence". The leader of the Liberal Party, though, is already a pastmaster at the sordid business of capitalist politics, that of getting votes regardless of the basis on which they are given. Not for him the blatant publicity tricks of Owen, nor the degrading scraping after votes on any flimsy pretext. No, when David Steel seeks votes he's artistic — a couple of years ago he rapped on a truly unforgettable disco-funk record called "I Feel Liberal, OK”. But it had about as much chance of getting to number one as he has of getting to Number Ten.

The leader of the Labour Party must have learned something from that, for when he recently entered the pop world (appearing on a video for a Tracey Ullman single), he for once kept his mouth firmly shut. It seemed to work. His popularity rating improved immediately. Tracey Ullman, however, hasn't had a hit since. Another artist prepared to align himself with the Kinnock camp is the rock poet Billy Bragg, who appeared with Neil Kinnock as part of the Labour Party's Jobs and Industry campaign. The task of the Labour leader was to explain how it is that this time the Labour Party in office will create jobs when, in their last term of office, unemployment in fact doubled. Billy Bragg's function was to entertain a few thousand people with just himself and his guitar a relatively easy task, as it turns out, compared with that of Neil Kinnock.

The SDP, for their part, have decided on principle that they don't want to stoop to the depths of the Labour Party and use pop stars in their campaigning. This decision, however, may also have something to do with the fact that no pop group (that would like to continue selling records) is prepared to align themselves with the SDP. For the Tories, who had their bluff called in 1983 and are now vainly trying to fulfil their promises, the best policy is silence; the best argument is no argument. Their efforts will be directed towards keeping the FCS (which spells electoral liability) well out of sight.

Add to all that lot the more mature activities all other parties go in for to attract the vote of adults —such as kissing their babies — and it should be clear that only the Socialist Party is concerned with the workers' vote to the extent of what it represents. In the hands of gullible, misled workers the vote is a waste or worse. But in the hands of politically aware workers who refuse to be diverted by the rhetoric, the promises, or the pop songs of politicians, it is a potent weapon for peaceful, democratic, revolutionary change. To paraphrase Engels, the vote is like a razor-blade in that you can use it for its real function, to shave, or you can cut your throat with it.

The point then is clear. The problems that plague young and old under capitalism, as well as the insulting attempts to trick them out of the power of their votes, will continue only as long as we let it. So next time you turn on the TV to be faced with the sight of Neil Kinnock looking out of place in a Madonna video, or maybe Nigel Lawson breakdancing in the city streets for the benefit of the cameras, don't just think "What pillocks!", but rather. "What's the alternative?"

Brian Gardner

Ultra Right (1985)

From the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year, a Bengali family in need of re-housing went to look at a council house on the Lincoln Estate in Tower Hamlets. They were greeted by a pair of pig's trotters hanging over the door, inscribed with the initials NF. This type of racially motivated incident. like excrement shoved through the letter box, stone-throwing and verbal abuse, constitutes "low grade" harassment. The more serious incidents involve arson attacks and physical assaults. Over the past few months there has been a wave of arson attacks in Ilford, Leyton and Bow. resulting in the death of a young Asian mother and her three small children. Tower Hamlets in East London is one of the worst affected areas with local police figures showing that the number of "reported" racial incidents has increased from 230 in 1983, to 370 in 1984. What is going on?

One of the most popular explanations for the rising number of racial attacks is that they are being organised by the Ultra Right. David Shannon, writing in the Guardian (30 July 1985) comments:

Racist attacks continue to be the most vicious expression of right wing violence and arson is a favourite weapon.

The Commission for Racial Equality believe that the most sustained and organised racial attacks in recent history are being carried out against Asian families in the East End of London. Similarly, CAPA, the Tower Hamlets police monitoring group, argues that there has been a qualitative change for the worse in these attacks and that they may have been organised by fascist groups. Who are the Ultra Right and what are their tactics?

There are about thirty Ultra Right groups operating in Britain today, ranging from the obscure Hounslow SS. to the more familiar and rapidly declining National Front. Many of the larger groups have their origins in the time when Commonwealth immigration became an important political issue. The NF was formed in 1967 out of a coalition of tiny parties, with the aim of unifying the Ultra Right and presenting a respectable image to the electorate. On the surface, the appeal of the NF was simple as its slogan. "If they are black, send them back". In other words, the NF was the organised expression of anti-black prejudice in Britain. Martin Walker, in his book The National Front (1977) put it:

Today, as when it began, the NF's issue is race. The NF's role has been to act as a particularly effective and unprincipled pressure group in the development of British immigration policies.

This view was criticised for ignoring the way in which the NF grew, both organisationally and ideologically, out of the unambiguously fascist parties of the past. This was put right in the Guardian of 11 October 1983, when Walker wrote:

. . . the NF was designed from the beginning to use racism against the blacks as a kind of Trojan horse that carried neo-Nazi and anti- semitic doctrines secreted in its belly.

The NF was relatively successful in adopting an electoral strategy to obtain support for its ideas, winning the greatest electoral support that any Ultra Right wing party has ever achieved in Britain. The ninety NF candidates who stood in the October 1974 General Election polled 114,000 votes. In the County Sections of 1977, the NF polled 200,000 and membership stood at 20,000. High levels of unemployment, the entry of Ugandan and Malawian Asians and the skillful manipulation of publicity produced a favourable climate for the NF's obnoxious ideas. In the 1979 General Election they confidently entered 303 candidates. What followed was an electoral disaster in which all the NF candidates lost their deposits and the party's vote fell in every constituency where they had stood in 1974.

This failure was partly explained by the success of the Conservative Party in capturing the race issue with a new hard-line policy on immigration. In January 1978, Margaret Thatcher had appeared on World in Action explaining that people were really afraid that Britain "might be rather swamped by people with a different culture". Also, the media coverage of the NF has succeeded in exposing the leadership's Nazi past and identifying the party with thugs and hooliganism. The electoral defeat of 1979 led to splits within the NF and a change of political strategy. There were two main options open to the NF. Firstly, it could try to change its image and become more "respectable" to the electorate. This was the option chosen by the National Front Constitutional Movement and the British Democratic Party. Secondly, it could accept the difficulties of trying to appear respectable in order to win votes, and become more militant and confrontational in its activity. From a NF members' newsletter. Our Plans for the 1980s, we learn:

If it is true that the National Front has no hope of gaining power under conditions that are stable, economically, socially and politically, we should not be preoccupied with making ourselves more "respectable" under present conditions. We must appreciate that the "image" that we have been given by the media and which may well lose us some potential support today, will be a positive asset when the streets are beset by riots, when unemployment soars, and when inflation gets even beyond the present degree of minimal control.

This was the option chosen by both the National Front and the New National Front. The former, led by Martin Webster, wanted to pursue a more populist strategy of mass recruitment which would include skinhead gangs. The latter, led by John Tyndall and now called the British National Party, wanted to be more selective and elitist in its approach to recruitment. Webster has subsequently been expelled from the NF and has recently founded yet another organisation. Our Nation, which is partly financed by the French perfume heiress Françoise Dior, who was imprisoned in 1968 for conspiring to bum down synagogues. Webster has ditched the skinheads and is now trying to recruit university students. Today, the NF is controlled by Ian Anderson, Joe Pearce and Nick Griffin. Membership is young and inexperienced and down to around 3,000. In an effort to make inroads into the white working class the NF is attempting to put the “socialism" back into "National Socialism". The National Front News and the journal Nationalism Today, talk of "wage slaves” and the "propertyless workforce '. "Tories', we are told, "put profit before people". while the NF is determined to make sure that "production is geared to need, as opposed to profit".

A number of other popular issues have also been taken up. including ecology, ritual slaughter, nuclear power, and the "national heritage". Of course the NF is still dedicated to what it calls "British Racial Nationalism" and we call racism. In the recently published Statement of Policy, (April 1985) they state:

   The National Front is committed to the ending of all non-White immigration and to the phased and financially assisted repatriation of all non-Whites, together with their dependents and descendants . . .
   We propose a truly positive policy of putting Britons first in jobs, housing, education and welfare and of providing separate facilities for Afro-Asians while they await repatriation.

The demise of the NF as an electoral force and its fragmentation into competing groups does not mean that the Ultra Right is a spent political force. In Paul Wilkinson"s book. The New Fascists (1981) he argues:

. . .  electoral showing is by no means the only significant indication of contemporary fascist activity. In Britain much of this has been channelled into street corner violence and racial attacks by skinhead gangs often incited by neo-Nazi supporters of the British Movement

The British Movement was one of the groups which temporarily benefited from the collapse of the NF. It was formed in 1968 by Colin Jordan, as a revolutionary Nazi party to replace the National Socialist Movement of 1962. In 1975 Michael McLaughlin took over the leadership and pursued a policy of recruiting young skinheads at football matches and rock concerts. The British Movement saw its role as the vanguard in the coming "White Revolution", one which would involve wholesale repatriation of blacks and the assertion of total White power. The British Movement lived up to its ugly and violent reputation, engaging in organised attacks on Blacks. Asians and Jews. According to the anti-fascist journal Searchlight (November 1984) McLaughlin has decided to fold up the British Movement and concentrate on his business. selling authentic Nazi memorabilia. Colin Jordan told Searchlight:

I deplore the fact that the organisation I started many years ago has been run down to such a state by McLaughlin, that it really isn't worth saving from going under.

Other Ultra Right groups active in Britain today include the National Socialist Action Party, the League of Saint George, the White Defence Force, The Rising, SS Wotan, Column 88, SONAR (the secret organisation for national recovery) and The Exterminators Although the last two groups are new, Searchlight has revealed that many of the above groups are organised and trained in paramilitary activities and have links within the Territorial Army and Army Cadet Force.

The evidence would seem to suggest that the Ultra Right has become disillusioned with the ballot box and turned towards the more traditional methods associated with fascist activity — street violence, intimidation and terrorism. The capitalist system, by generating social problems like unemployment. poverty, bad housing, and inner city decay, produces the fear and the racial hatred that the Ultra Right breeds on. Frightened people in need of someone to blame for the social insanity pick on an identifiable minority group, who become the target of racial hatred and racial attacks. Immigrants. like all other workers, are not the cause of social problems but the victims.

Brian Rubin

Iron Fist (1985)

Book Review from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jim Coulter, Susan Miller, Martin Walker, State of Siege — Miners' Strike 1984: Politics and Policing in the Coal Fields (1984). Canary Press.

Moira Abdel-Rahim, Strike Breaking in Essex: The policing of Wivenhoe and the Essex ports during the 1984 miners' strike. Canary Press

The 1984/85 coal strike met with a massive response from the state, most notably the drafting into the coalfields of thousands of policemen from other areas under the mutual aid arrangements. But this was not the only part of the state machinery mobilised against the striking miners: the criminal justice system was used to restrict the activities of trade unionists through the imposition of bail conditions and bind over orders; the civil courts used injunctions to sequestrate union funds; other nationalised industries took action that severely limited the effects of the miners' action (for example the CEGB burned oil instead of coal in power stations); and the DHSS tried to starve miners back to work by withholding benefit from their families. But it was the police who were the state's front line in its attack on striking miners. Their activities caused widespread outcry among those concerned about civil liberties and led to a number of instant books commenting on the policing of the dispute, some published before the strike had ended.

State of Siege originally appeared in the form of three pamphlets, the first appearing just weeks after the start of the dispute. This book is a compilation of those earlier publications and it documents, in essentially anecdotal form, the most outrageous activities of the police over the period of the first five months of the strike. Because it was written as the events happened, the material is often unsystematic and lacking in coherence (which the authors themselves admit). This type of approach means that their arguments are frequently unpersuasive since they lack hard evidence to back them up. Anecdotal accounts of ill treatment by the police, for example, can be too easily dismissed as isolated occurrences not representative of the policing operation as a whole.

Similarly the authors' allegations that the police are being turned into a "paramilitary Third Force", although they carry some weight in view of the widespread use of riot trained police during the strike, can begin to sound like an hysterical over-reaction. One of the central problems with the book's approach is that the authors seem to want to argue that the growth of the "strong state" is both a feature of Thatcher's Britain and also nothing new. So although they place the events of this dispute in the broader context of a long history of brutal state reactions to working-class militancy, at times they also imply that there was something unique about this particular struggle. They write:

The miners' strike has come about because of the brutal economic policies of a Conservative government (p. 3).

This is not true: the events leading up to the strike were the result of the internal logic of capitalism—that production takes place only for the purpose of making a profit, and any industry that is not deemed sufficiently profitable will be closed—and this is the case no matter what shade of capitalist political party happens to be in government.

The authors' admiration for the efforts of miners to organise themselves during the strike and their justifiable sense of outrage at the treatment repeatedly meted out to them is tinged with the tendency to depict miners as proto-revolutionaries, which they clearly were not. While the strike may have challenged the employers inevitably it was on their own ground, namely that of capitalism; no strike can attempt to move the struggle to different ground — a political struggle for socialism. Despite the rhetoric this was, after all, yet another manifestation of the daily class struggle between worker and capitalists, albeit a particularly long and bitter one.

Despite its shortcomings, State of Siege does graphically illustrate a whole range of state activities during the strike: the use of the National Reporting centre to centralise control of the police and co-ordinate their operations; the use of the criminal rather than the civil law against pickets in an attempt to criminalise and discredit them; the setting up of police road blocks that made a nonsense of the notion of "freedom of movement"; the collecting by police and the Special Branch of political intelligence on strikers and trade union leaders; and physical and verbal abuse by police to harass and intimidate miners and their families.

Looking to the future the authors identify the following causes for concern: the inadequacy of the police complaints system; the extension of police powers under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984 and the proposed changes in the law relating to Public Order. Underlying their recommendations and observations seems to be the idea that humanitarian policing is possible—"policing by consent" as it is usually called. This misses the point about the role of the police, and the coercive state machinery in general, in upholding and protecting the interests of the capitalist class; the idea of impartial policing or "policing by consent" is absurd. The consent of the workers is obtained while the system twists one of their arms up behind them; it is the consent of people who believe that they have no option but to consent.

Strike Breaking in Essex is written in a somewhat similar style to State of Siege although its particular focus is the picketing of the five small ports in Essex which were used to import coal. Because its subject is narrower it offers a more detailed and comprehensive account than State of Siege and is more systematic in approach. It deals firstly with the background to the events that occurred at the five Essex ports, then goes on to give a detailed account of the policing operation in the Essex area and finally discusses the wider implications of the way in which the dispute was policed for the Essex community. But despite this more systematic approach again there is evidence of a lack of political understanding, as for example when the author writes:

The miners have been fighting for their jobs, their communities and a voice in their future. They are now the vanguard of the British working class. If they are to be crushed, trade unionism and the labour movement will have suffered a serious blow.

Again, the author is confusing a trade union struggle over industrial and economic issues with revolutionary political action.

Both of these books draw attention in graphic style to the use of state power by the capitalist class to protect its own interests in the face of a perceived threat from the working class. The coercive nature of state power is generally kept reasonably well hidden — it is far more effective for workers to believe that they are "consenting" to a given situation rather than being coerced into accepting it. But it should nevertheless be remembered that coercive power — the "iron fist" — can and will be used if necessary. Both books rightly draw attention to this use of coercion, apparently understand its function in protecting class interests, and yet still persist in the naive and mistaken view that policing can be reformed in such a way as to make it in some way less coercive. State of Siege at the end of the first section (p. 59) recommends the setting up of committees of enquiry to look into the use of the criminal law; the role of the Association of Chief Police Officers; and covert employment of paramilitary strategies during the strike. After the catalogue of abuses by the state which they present us with, are we really supposed to believe that a series of committees of enquiry (themselves a part of the state machinery) are going to recommend reforming the police in such a way that such abuses will never occur again? This is precisely the sort of recommendation that one expects from politicians who wish to avoid capitalism's realities and is at best naive and at worst politically dangerous.

Janie Percy-Smith

Confessions of a Dorking housewife (1985)

From the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

I was born and brought up in the South of England, in an area where the wealth and privilege of the minority of people are fairly easy to see. Like the majority in the area, however, my background was working-class. Unusually, my father was an avid Labour Party supporter and, as a child, I heard many of the arguments against the capitalist system. I was led to believe that the only answer to the basic injuries of capitalism lay in the hands of a Labour government.

In the years of the Wilson governments in the 1960s it became clear to me that Labour was basically no different from the Conservatives, but I had no idea where to find a real alternative to obviously bankrupt ideas. Then I went to Tower Hill one weekday lunchtime in 1967 to listen to the speakers. There, beside Lord Soper and at a greater distance from a man who swallowed fire and swung a long cain around his head at great speed, stood a speaker from the SPGB. It could hardly be called the still small voice as he was highly voluble, attacking fiercely the hecklers who shouted at him.

I found his arguments cogent and the party case was, in my view, based on sound commonsense. His words were particularly interesting to someone who had been waiting in vain for the Labour Party to tackle the multifarious problems thrown up by capitalist society: poverty, war, racism, famine, industrial relations, unemployment, drug-taking, disease — the list is endless. It is a widely held view that young people are often "left wing" but as they grow older (and by implication, more sensible) they move inevitably towards the "centre" then often on to the "right wing" of the political spectrum. However, if you understand the arguments of the SPGB you are unlikely to move anywhere else.

My experience of work and motherhood has taught me more about a woman's place in capitalism and its intrinsic conflicts and difficulties. So as my life goes on I want to work just as urgently for a socialist world where we can all share the better life. Why don't you join the struggle with us?

Juliet Jeffreys 

Obituary: Frances Ambridge (1985)

Obituary from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Frances Ambridge

Frances De Metz was born in Amsterdam in 1898, the youngest of a dozen children of an orthodox Jewish family. Her father, a marine merchant, brought his family to Britain when Frances was tiny and they settled in London's East End. He was, as Frances would recount, severe with his children, but he was also severe with himself and, when she was barely a teenager, he took his own life out of shame at being prosecuted for a minor trading offence. Such stories of the past Frances would tell me and other friends. She told of how she threw off religious ideas at an early age even though this mean diminishing contact with her family, of how she worked actively as a trade unionist, and of how after much searching among political groups and organisations she finally came across the Socialist Party. As soon as she heard an SPGB speaker in Hyde Park in about 1936, she knew she was on to something different. She started going to Party meetings and before long she decided she must join.

Once in the Party she met another member, Bob Ambridge, who was to become her life-long partner. As individuals and together they made a formidable mark on the Party over the years. In London their energy and enthusiasm were an example and an encouragement to other members and when they retired to Swansea in the mid-60s they did not let up. They revived a flagging branch and laid the basis for the active unit it now is. Bob died tragically in a road accident five years ago, but Frances carried on going to meetings, selling the Socialist Standard and talking to people about socialism. She carried on coming to meetings right up to her sudden death on 30 July at the age of 87.

What most heartened her about the Party in recent times was the growing number of new young members she saw around her. It gave her great pleasure that the myth of the Party membership as old or ageing was now definitely laid. To older Party members who seemed to her unduly critical of the efforts and enthusiasm of the younger ones she would say: "We shouldn't criticise them. It's their world. Let them get on with it".

She leaves no known relatives but many friends who will sorely miss her undemanding company and her sense of humour but who will continue to be inspired by her lucid and unswerving commitment to the cause of establishing a society fit for human beings to live in.

Howard Moss