Greasy Pole: Howard’s Beginning (2003)

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

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

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

Guilt

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

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

Smirk

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

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

Charm Offensive

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

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

Ivan

Cooking the Books: Oliver in Blunderland (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a recent speech Tory MP and would-be intellectual Oliver Letwin – his last brilliant idea was the poll tax – ventured to discuss Marx and Marxism. After mocking Gordon Brown for mouthing sounds such as “post neo-classical endogamous growth theory” he himself offered an alternative set of sounds in “shift the locus of debate from an economo-centric paradigm to a socio-centric paradigm”, and continued:

“It all goes back to Marx. Before Marx, politics was multi-dimensional – constitutional, social, environmental as well as economic. But Marx changed all that. The real triumph of Marxism consisted in the way that it defined the preoccupations not only of its supporters but also of its opponents. After Marx, socialists defended socialism and free marketeers defended capitalism. For both sides, the centrepiece of the debate was the system of economic management” (Daily Telegraph, 10 May).

Marx did argue that the key issue in politics ought to be the ownership and control of the means of wealth-production, but unfortunately the actual debate in the 20th century was not between socialism (common ownership) and capitalism (sectional ownership). It was merely over the best way to manage capitalism: through state ownership and control or by leaving things to the free play of competing, profit-seeking private enterprises.

This debate, says Letwin, is now over:

“Since Thatcher, and despite recent recurrences of something like full-blooded socialism in some parts of Latin America, the capitalist/socialist debate has in general ceased to dominate modern politics. From Beijing to Brussels, the free market has won the battle of economic ideas”.

In other words, except for Chavez we’re all pro-capitalists now. We have, claims Letwin, “entered a post-Marxist era”.

He is assuming that socialism and government ownership are the same thing and that Marx favoured government ownership, and concluded that anyone favouring government ownership was a Marxist. Both premises and the conclusion are wrong.

That government ownership is socialism is a popular misconception and, to be honest, is how the word “socialism” has come to be used. But it has never been accepted by Marxian socialists, who have always drawn a distinction between state capitalism (nationalisation by a capitalist government) and socialism.

Nationalisation has been carried out by all sorts of governments, both in Britain and in other countries. The Post Office became a government monopoly in Britain in 1680. A Tory government nationalised the telegraph system while successive Liberal and Tory government nationalised the telephone network. An Act of 1844, piloted through by Gladstone, provided for the nationalisation of the railways if need be. In France cigarette production was a government monopoly and in Prussia the railways were government-owned. So, on Letwin’s logic, Napoleon, Gladstone and Bismarck must have been Marxists.

Marx was always clear that socialism as such had nothing to do with government ownership of capitalist industry. It was a new social system where the means of production would belong to the whole community – not the state, which as an instrument of minority class rule, would disappear – and where there would be production to satisfy people’s needs not for sale and profit, and so where there’d be no money, no banks, nor working for wages.

Socialism in this sense or capitalism should have been the burning issue of the 20th century but, as stated, unfortunately it wasn’t. Far from entering “a post-Marxist era” we are still in a “pre-Marxist era” where politics has yet to be what Marx wanted: a political struggle by the class of wage and salary workers to win control of political power with a view to establishing the common ownership of the means of production by the whole people.

Greasy Pole: Oliver Letwin – Eccentric or Fake? (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is more to West Dorset than the Jurassic Coastline. It is also a parliamentary constituency where, in the 2005 general election, they registered the highest turn-out in the United Kingdom. Effectively it is the Lib Dems who are now the opposition there – and this in a constituency which includes the tragic village of Tolpuddle. The Tory-comfortable loyalty of this corner of rural England is now represented by Oliver Letwin, consistently one of the party’s policy wonks, once Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shadow Home Secretary, author of a doctoral thesis Ethics, Emotion and the Unity of the Self, but also the originator of some of the most spectacular blunders even among Honourable Members. He refuses to read newspapers because they tell him “nothing I need to know” – but what they tell us about him suggests there are other reasons for his calamitous record.

Liberals and Fabians

Even before he came into Parliament, Letwin was displaying symptoms of what we might politely call a characteristic confusion. At Cambridge he was active in the university Liberal Club and later explained how this fitted in with his career aim to become the Conservative leader: “I was also a member of the Fabian Society…this was because I was interested in the thoughts of Liberals and Fabians (and still am) rather than because I was a Liberal Democrat or a Fabian”. It is probably kindest to assume that the famously brainy Letwin resolved this contradiction with a typically clever evasion – joining a party opposed to both the others – which, incidentally, offered him the best chance of reaching the top in politics. His first attempts to become a parliamentary candidate were for two London seats. West Dorset in 1997 was much gentler and more secure, offering shelter from Tony Blair’s landslide. But then came the blunders. In 2001 he was credited (Gordon Brown went so far as to thank him) with helping Labour to stay in power by proposing, as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, that a Tory government would reduce public expenditure to the tune of some £20 billion – a seriously unpopular suggestion. Many politicians would have responded to such pressure by simply bluffing it out, but Letwin chose to go underground, which provided yet more ammunition to his opponents, such as the Labour party member who dressed as Sherlock Holmes and, complete with bloodhound, pretended to sniff out the fugitive Shadow Minister.

Predators

Letwin’s stints as Shadow Home Secretary followed by the equally prestigious Shadow Chancellor, may have boosted his self-esteem to the point of seeing himself as a future party leader and then, after a little inter-reaction with the voters, Prime Minister. But it would also have made him vulnerable to the predatory tunnelling of his rivals. In 2003 he was leaked as saying that he would “rather go out on the streets and beg” than let his children go to an inner-city London comprehensive. In reply to the consequent storm of outrage the best he could do was to protest that the remark had been made in a private conversation – which failed to answer his critics and left untouched the central matter of Letwin’s acceptance that what is called education is, like all else in capitalism, class determined.

Schooled in these prejudices at Eton, Letwin is now a director of the Sherborne School for Girls, whose annual fees are as much as £26,700. A multimillionaire, he works for N.M.Rothschild, described as a finance house, where he “earns” £5020 for 35 hours work in a year – not enough to pay for a place at Sherborne but a useful sum to the parents of comprehensive kids. This secure lifestyle is in contrast to that of employees such as teachers and hospital staff, who were recently attacked by him for their supposed lack of application to their work. At a meeting at KPMG – another collection of financiers – he gave vent to what seemed to be a particular frustration to him: “You can’t,” he raved, “have room for innovation and the pressure for excellence without having some real discipline and some fear on the part of the providers that things may go wrong if they don’t live up to the aims that society as a whole is demanding of them”. However, he seemed to be ready to abandon his own guidelines for disciplining fear when in May 2005 he was moved from Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at his request for a less demanding job to follow his career among the bankers and the hedge traders in the City. After the Tory win in May 2010 he got even more free time when Cameron appointed him to the new, vaguely titled job of Minister of State for Policy.

Sheffield

Despite his reassuringly avuncular exterior, Letwin can give voice to some pretty scabrous opinions on those he regards as his social inferiors. In April, in a clash with his fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson over the expansion of airports, he sneered “We don’t want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays” – which united Johnson and several thousand others, including Sheffield Hallam MP Nick Clegg, in outrage. Undeterred, Letwin attracted further merciless exposure in the media when he was observed, while walking in a Westminster park, stuffing a lot of official correspondence into rubbish bins and giving some to a collector. His attempt to defuse the matter by explaining that “I…simply wanted to make sure the pieces of paper were not weighing me down” was less than helpful to him. It has been known for a politician who is in a tangle with the voters to try to divert attention from their confusion with a cloak of beguiling eccentricity. It is, however, unusual to be confronted by so blatant and unrepentant a practitioner as the Rt. Hon Oliver Letwin MP – one of the more extreme, exotic leaders to personify the system’s stagnant and wasteful character.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Throwaway Minister (2016)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Where’s fookin’ Menzies?... Come on, where is he?... just to let you know, I’m not fookin’ having’ it…’ was how Labour Deputy Leader John Prescott warned Tony Blair about the rumours that the Lib Dem Leader was to be included in the government. And some years after that… ‘the meeting was friendly enough. He ended up offering me just about every job that was going – including the Foreign Office – except the one that I held. I said no’ – which was not John Prescott but Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling discussing with Gordon Brown the Labour Leader’s plan to replace him with his favourite Ed Balls.

Eton And Cambridge

It is habitual for political leaders when they are imposing the disciplines of exploitation upon the rest of society to resort to an individual style of expressing themselves, in words as well as actions.  An example  is Oliver Letwin,  who is now the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with a history of episodes as Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Home Secretary, Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Politics has always been part of the Letwin family’s expectations; his father became Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and his mother has been described by a close friend as ‘humourless and energetic, argumentative and exceedingly right wing’. It was a family unlikely to place their child at a local state school so little Oliver had to learn about life and impoverishment at Eton. He then went to Cambridge where he joined both the Liberal Club and the Fabian Society – a conflict not made any more digestible by his apology: ‘I am sorry to have to tell you that this was because I was interested in the thoughts of Liberals and Fabians (and still am) rather than because I was ever a Liberal Democrat or a Fabian’.

Broadwater Farm 

Letwin’s first attempt to get into Parliament was at the essentially London Hackney North and Stoke Newington, against  Diane Abbott who was even then a rebel notorious enough for him to protect his ambitions by moving  in 1992 to Hampstead and Highgate, although that was where  another charismatic woman – Glenda Jackson – was entrenched. After all that effort he was probably due for a better prospect and he was given the chance at Dorset West but by the time of his first contest there, in 1997, he had a reputation for serial blundering so that his first majority was down to 1840. Among the earliest of his gaffes in 1985, when he was in Thatcher’s Policy Unit, was to support the vote-haemorrhaging Poll Tax. Although he was liable to be on the receiving end of a barrage of eggs if he spoke up for it in public, Letwin recommended that Scotland should be a ‘trail-blazer’ so that the tax could be used throughout the country if ‘the exemplifications prove… it is feasible’. Another disastrous piece of his work at that time was his part in commenting on the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985, when PC Keith Blakelock was killed. The riots were sparked off by the death of Cynthia Jarrett while the police were searching her home in Tottenham and were a predictable outcome of the particular poverty and despair of that area of London. But Letwin was joint author of an assessment that the cause was ‘solely by individual character and attitudes… new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade… refurbished council  blocks will decay through vandalism  combined with neglect…’ This report was at first restricted as private; when it was released in December 2015 Letwin admitted  that ‘some parts’ were ‘badly worded and wrong’ and he apologised for ‘any offence these comments have caused’– the impact of which must have been diminished by the thirty year gap since the riots .

Hapless

Another of his efforts at joint authorship was in 1988, with John Redwood, of a pamphlet which justified the subsequent privatisation of the NHS, by both Tory and Labour governments and preceded his proclaiming that ‘The NHS will not exist under the Tories’. But the results of his efforts as one of the key advisers to Tory governments have not always been as he wished. During the 2001 general election he advocated a £20 billion reduction of the proposed Labour government’s spending. This was regarded as regressive and socially harmful, to the extent that Letwin feared his standing was under threat. He went into a period which Alistair Darling recounts as ‘A hapless Tory shadow minister, subsequently a member of the Tory cabinet, had played into our hands in 2001 by suggesting that the Tories really wanted to cut £20 billion from public spending. He went into hiding. The whole election campaign was dominated by the media search for this man. Oliver Letwin was finally tracked down at a garden party dressed in a Roman toga. We could not have paid for such a boost to our campaign’. The incident was reflected during the election when Letwin’s majority was reduced to 1414, classifying  the seat as marginal to a threat from the Lib Dems. In April 2011 he blurted to Boris Johnson that ‘We don’t want people from Sheffield having cheap holidays’- which may, or may not, have referred to Sheffield MP Nick Clegg.

Sensible

Among  his posturing and threats about the behaviour of others (provided they are not from the ruling elite) in October 2011 Letwin dumped a batch of papers,  including personal and other security matters, in a waste bin in a public place, as exposed when he was photographed in a park close to Downing Street. This was at first excused on the grounds that he was in the habit of rising early, going to the park and dealing with some of his paperwork there. It did not take long for this defence to be shredded, when details of the contents of the documents, some of which were seriously sensitive, were revealed. A spokeswoman for David Cameron had to concede that ‘Clearly it’s not a sensible way to dispose of documents’. Except that it has not been just documents which Letwin has disposed of during his career in power.

Ivan