News in Review: Respectable revolt (1965)

The News in Review column from the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Respectable revolt

Straws which are currently in the wind of British capitalism are rumblings of militancy in the so-called middle class, and the re-occurrence of the plea for more unemployed.

Some teachers and doctors have recently considered withdrawing their labour power, the former from schools and the latter from the National Health Scheme. Their reasons, basically, were concerned with their pay.

Doctors and teachers have long considered the strike as unprofessional, and in bad taste. But capitalism does not exempt any worker from the need to fight to maintain and increase his standard of living; and if doctors and teachers remain quiescent their standard of living must suffer.

Before the war when unemployment was widespread the “secure” teachers grumbled about their pay. Doctors got their patients in a free market, and many in the poorest working class districts were little better off than their patients.

Now both groups are complaining about their financial rewards; they are finding that a sense of vocation is no weapon in this competitive society. So they are considering the withdrawal of their labour power—in other words, using the weapon which marks them as members of the working class.

There is another way of losing your pay.

Lord Plowden, former Chief Planning Officer and Chairman of the Economic Planning Board, also chairman of Tube Investment Co. Ltd., and director of four other companies, was reported in the Daily Telegraph in January as wanting . . . ”better use of the labour force . . . this would lead to transitional unemployment . . . to do everything possible to mitigate the resulting hardship.”

“This is what we mean when we say that we want increased productivity, and why should we be mealy-mouthed about it?”

Capitalists are not opposed to unemployment if they think it necessary. Plowden wants to replace the carrot with the stick, on the theory that there is nothing like a dose of unemployment to increase productivity.

Is Lord Plowden himself prepared to live on the dole? Or is that a fate reserved for the workers on whom he so coldly theorises? These are questions which no highly paid servant of capitalism should want to duck.

Unless, that is, he is being mealy mouthed.

Everlasting Milk

The news which came out during the first week of last month, that British scientists had developed a method of treating milk which will make it last for months, was greeted in the newspapers with all the customary enthusiasm.

The chairman of the Express Dairy, Mr. W. E. D. Bell, helped the enthusiasm along a bit by proclaiming: “At last, we can feed milk to the two-thirds of the world that is starving.” He might as well have said that at last they could break into a market which up to now has been held by dried milk, which is easier to handle and transport than the liquid.

The Express are not, of course, about to throw in their hand with OXFAM and become a charitable institution. They quickly set up a new company to deal with the export of the new milk. Orders have been received from Central America and some shipping lines, and more may follow from the British and United States Navies.

It was not the desire to feed the hungry which was responsible for this haste. Mr. Bell made it clear: “We must,” he said, “Pull our fingers out and get this project going before the Swiss or anybody move in.”

At the time of writing, the new process has not been approved by the government for milk sold on the home market. Exported milk is not covered by the need for official approval. If the new milk is approved for home distribution, there will probably be considerable savings for the dairy industry whose bugbear, like other branches of agriculture, has always been the expensive business of rush distribution.

Agriculture is as much tied to the need to make profits as any other industry, and it is constantly looking for ways around its distribution problems. Hence the development of massive, mechanised farms, of the broiler hen and the beef factories. Hence the rise of the frozen food industry.

Some people, derided as crackpots, have questioned the effects which all this has on the food. But as long as there is a profit to be made, or increased, who cares about quality? Capitalism encourages the shoddy rush job in many of its industries, and there is no reason why agriculture should be an exception.

This is the motive behind the everlasting milk. The Sunday Times thought that, apart from anything the Express will get out of the new product, “. . . it offers a way of giving the dairy farmers more for their milk without raising the price to the public.”

The profit priorities of capitalism affect every aspect of our lives. Everywhere we go, everything we wear, the very air we breathe, everything we eat and drink, is polluted by it. And all the time there is the smokescreen of hypocrisy about human interests—about, for example, feeding the world’s hungry when the real motive is to make life more comfortable yet for the privileged few.

Vietnam

For some reason, it has suddenly become fashionable for journalists to use some peculiar words about the war which is currently being fought in Vietnam.

They have called it the “unnecessary” war, the “tragic” war, the “forgotten” war. As if all wars are not tragic, unnecessary affairs.

The Americans, deeply involved, have their own description of the war. It is, they say a vital war, because it is being fought to defend freedom. Every time the American jets go in, President Johnson claims that they fire their rockets in the cause of liberty.

We are, as usual, invited to accept the story that in Vietnam one side (the North —theirs) stands for brutal dictatorship and the other (the South—ours) stands for liberty and brotherhood.

But the South Vietnamese have shown what they mean by freedom and brotherhood by the manner in which they maltreat their prisoners. One of their recent tricks was to use a wounded prisoner (who later died) as a human mine detector—to send him wading across a river to detonate any mines on the bed.

This is only one piece of the surface evidence which shows up that it is barefaced nonsense to claim that the war in Vietnam is for freedom. In fact, the United States are involved in the war for familiar, classical reasons.

They are interested in the strategic position of Vietnam, and in the bases which they have set up there. They are desperately concerned that the expanding Chinese threat to the established powers in the Far East should be held in cheek.

The British capitalist class, who have their own troubles a little further south, are reluctant to become involved in Vietnam. British influence in the Far East was extensively diminished during the last war, and although there is still a lot of British capital invested out there, the protection of it is largely the concern of the U.S.A.

The Soviet Union is also reluctant to get involved, but is having its hand forced. They also fear Chinese ambitions; hence the belligerent words from Moscow —which remain no more than words.

The Economist’s prophesy of the outcome of Premier Kosygin’s visit to Hanoi was remarkably accurate:

“Mr. Kosygin is virtually certain to proclaim . . . that (American) attacks would involve the risk of nuclear escalation. In exchange, the Russians may well urge the North Vietnamese not to push their present military advantage in the south too far.”

Vietnam is a typical local struggle in the wider conflict of interests between the great blocs of capitalism with China, struggling for its place in the world power line up, an aggravation. China’s belligerency is customary for an upstart capitalist power; customary also are the efforts which the established powers are making to stifle her.

This could mean that the Vietnam battle will not escalate (ugly word) into a major nuclear war. But mistakes and miscalculations have been known before.

If Vietnam does prove to be the first spark in a world wide conflagration the result will be an unnecessary war, a tragic war but one which, if there is any-one left to remember it, will not be forgotten.

Gordon-Walker and immigration

The defeat of Patrick Gordon-Walker at the so-called safe seat of Leyton provided both press and politicians with a field day for comment and speculation. A number of reasons for the surprise result were suggested; in a survey just after the by-election, The Observer placed coloured immigration at the head of the list, with Labour voters the majority to voice dissatisfaction on this problem.

When the Conservative government introduced a bill curbing the flow of immigrants into this country, the Labour Opposition resisted it, creating the impression that they were in favour of unlimited free entry. Disastrously for a party seeking mass support, they overlooked the political climate. It is possible that their slender majority at the general election was caused partly by this. Gordon-Walker had the job of opposing the Tory bill in Parliament and this has made him an obvious whipping boy in what the press is fond of calling the white backlash.

At Smethwick, his Conservative opponent, by using an extremist minority as his supporters, played on the electorate’s prejudices, and their fears of the growth of a large coloured population in Britain. While the fascists ranted and raved and worked on a suppressed sore, the Tories got the benefit. At Leyton the racial question and immigration were smothered by the three main candidates, but Gordon-Walker was pestered by Nazi gadflies.

Most workers, irrespective of colour and race, fear a sudden mass influx of foreign workers because they see them as a threat to their jobs and as an aggravation of the housing shortage. On top of this is a fear that people coming from less developed areas may be willing to accept lower wages and social standards.

Immigrants have entered Britain before, but they have been mainly European and were therefore quickly assimilated. It would, for example, be difficult to trace the whereabouts of the Germans who came to Britain in Edwardian times. The recent wave of immigrants is vastly different. The colour of their skin makes it impossible for them to be quickly submerged and forgotten. They stimulate a multitude of primitive fears among the working class.

But what will happen if the coloured population of this country increases enormously? Most coloured people are just part of the working class, subject to the same rough end of the economic stick as their white brothers. In time the demands of industrialism will destroy their own customs and they will appear similar to the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Poles etc, that go to make up the British population.

Smethwick, Leyton and Gordon-Walker are examples of how it is impossible to operate vague humanitarian concepts in a capitalist society. The government has in fact already announced much stricter screening of coloured immigrants at the points of entry. Thus do capitalism and a non-socialist working class destroy the best laid plans of mice and men.

After Leyton, What? (1965)

From the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Leyton by-election has passed into political history, and for a long time to come will be one of the psephologists’ favourite test-tubes.

It was also the psephologists’ nightmare, disproving all their predictions and setting the opinion polls to searching for what went wrong. This is all strongly reminiscent of the Truman victory in the United States in 1948. None of the pollsters cared to recall, after Leyton, that in 1948 they said they had found a hidden defect in their systems, that they had eliminated it and that such mistakes would not happen again.

In fact, there were signs before the votes were cast that things were not going too well for Mr. Gordon Walker. The Wilson government had not produced the promised rabbits out of the expected hats. The pensioners were annoyed about having to wait for their rise, the mortgagees were furious that their rise—in the interest rates—came upon them so quickly. On 20th. January, The Guardian’s reporter noticed “… a remarkably consistent switch away from Labour. It would not be sufficient to upset the Foreign Secretary’s anticipated election . . . but (it) would reduce his majority considerably.”

As it turned out, that was an understatement. Leyton confirmed a trend which has been developing for some time now —the trend towards an electoral mood more volatile than that which, for years after the war, stolidly returned “no change” verdicts in by-election after by-election. Orpington Man, now old and well established, has been followed by the perhaps more menacing figure of Leyton Man.

Along with the psephologists, the Labour Party are also looking for what went wrong. In a letter to The Observer, Lord Sorensen made it clear that he thought the defeat was caused by what he called “unworthy abstentions.” Having been kicked upstairs so that Mr. Gordon Walker could lose his seat, Lord Sorensen obviously feels the defeat especially strongly. But during the election, the Labour Party were content to accept what they presumed would be a favourable result: “I will consider the result a verdict on the Government and on the Opposition’s performance to date.” (Mr. Gordon Walker, at Leyton, 14th. January.) Well, the verdict is plain; even the verdict of those who voted by staying away from the polling booths. The Labour government has not been able to inspire its supporters to turn out to vote for it, which says very little for their talk, during the general election, of action and progress and urgency.

Lord Sorensen did not confine his strictures to abstainers: “. . . the deliberate denigration of Gordon Walker . . . demonstrates how far we have to go to ensure that electors vote on principles and policies rather than being swayed by extraneous secondary matters.”

Two things are apparent from this statement. The first is that Lord Sorensen is complaining about votes which lost his party a seat; if the election had gone the other way, he would have been full of praise for the voters’ sanity and principles. The second point, which follows from the first, is that what Lord Sorensen means by “voting on principles” is, in fact, voting blindly for the Labour Party, whatever their record, whatever hardships they impose upon the working class and however many promises they break.

It will be interesting to ask, now, what the Labour Party does to realise Sorensen’s dream of people voting on principles and policies. The first step in this should be, of course, for the Labour Party themselves to have some principles for the electors to vote on. But a look at the programmes which they have offered shows that principles are the last things the Labour Party has, or indeed wants.

What has happened, for example, to the “principle” of the nationalisation of land? To the “principle” of abolition of the House of Lords? (Lord Sorensen himself should be able to answer that one.) What has happened to the “principles” put forward by the Labour Party at the more recent elections —nationalisation of “sections of the chemical and machine tools industries” (1955) and the renationalisation of road haulage (1959)?

There was no mention of either of these in Labour’s 1964 programme, which means that any elector who was anxious to vote for them, innocently thinking them to be part of Labour’s principles, was disappointed.

Even more to the point, what has happened to the Labour Party’s opposition to the Commonwealth Immigration Act? When the Conservative government introduced the measure, Labour fought bitterly against it, and perhaps convinced some voters that they did so on grounds of principle. But since then their “principles” have, apparently, changed; the tears of defeat were hardly dry on Gordon Walker’s face when Labour’s Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice was telling the House of Commons that, far from abolishing the restrictions on immigrants, the government intends to ” … make stricter use of the existing powers of control . . .” This must have been very confusing to anyone at Leyton who wanted to vote, as Lord Sorensen advises, on the principle of the thing.

This confusion is cleared up only by realising that the Labour Party has no principle other than their basic support of capitalism. Within that, they will support any policy, temporary or otherwise, which seems expedient. To get into power, they will promise all sorts of things—Gaitskell’s tax cuts in 1959, George Brown’s three per cent mortgage last October—which they think will attract votes. They do not particularly care who joins their ranks, recruiting freely anyone who will pay their dues. (Some prominent men they have actually invited to join.) Labour’s preoccupation with collecting votes means that they do not bother about the intention and knowledge behind the votes. They anxiously solicit the support of people who are politically ignorant. The very last thing they intend to do is to encourage the electors to vote on principles, because that would be the death of them and of the parties like them.

This is not to say that the Labour Party does not offer a substitute for principles. Their leaders are constantly making what seem to be brave statements of conviction and intent, which probably impress people who do not care to look behind the empty phrase. Wilson, for example, told the T.U.C. last September that this is “… a time for choice, for action, for decision, for exciting change …” Gordon Walker told the voters at Leyton that he stood for “… the abolition of all weapons, both nuclear and conventional, except those needed for internal security and international peacekeeping,” which is the same as saying, that he stands for the abolition of all weapons except those that he wants to keep. It is this sort of mishmash of nonsense that the Labour Party offer as their principles, and which Lord Sorensen wants us to vote on.

The inevitable result of this is that the vote which elects a Labour MP is unstable. It is not a vote for any political principle, let alone a vote for Socialism, with all that implies. Sometimes it is a vote for a set of capitalist reforms like the National Health Service or an alteration in the Pensions Scheme. More often, it is a vote for a vague and ill-informed idea of what the Labour Party stands for—a vague idea that they stand for the interests of people who live on council estates, for closer relations with Russia and so on.

Perhaps it was this which caused Leyton to pass its scathing verdict on the Labour government before it had even had time to bring in the reforms which it had promised—an apt comment on the instability of a vote which is based on a lack of political consciousness. Perhaps it also brought about the defeat of Gordon Walker at Smethwick; the voters there apparently wanted immigration control yet they rejected a man who, as he himself pointed out, stood for just that.

But an unstable vote which switches from Labour to Tory in one election will as quickly change back to Labour again. It is reasonable to assume that anything which the Labour Party may have lost on the swings of electoral instability they have gained on the roundabouts. There are probably plenty of voters who support the Labour Party because they are convinced that they stand for higher wages, or that they would pursue a different policy from the Tories in disputes like those in Malaysia and Arabia. Now if the Labour Party was as interested in political principles as Lord Sorensen would have us believe, they would discourage such votes by pointing out, firmly and clearly, that on these issues their policy is as imperialist as that of the Tories. But this, of course, is something they never do.

No capitalist party can try to destroy the mutually supporting circle of ignorance and futility which keeps one or other of them in power. Any examination of the policies of these parties, in terms of principles and effectiveness, would compel the admission that practically every one of them was useless and that many of them were inspired by vote-catching expediency. It would compel the admission that, after all the speeches and the programmes and the promises, the problems which afflicted the working class when the Labour Party was born are still, in one way or another, troubling them today.

The Labour Party would have to admit something else besides. After nearly sixty years of their propaganda, after the position of great power which they have held and still hold, there are still enough workers who harbour racial prejudices to hound a Labour Minister from one Parliamentary seat to another. Racial theories cannot be separated from the rest of the false political ideas which the working class hold, and which the Labour Party have done nothing to dispel. If it is true that racism is among the more primitive and vicious of working class delusions, that is a bitter comment upon the confusion and ignorance which the Labour Party has helped to spread.

They can have no complaint if this confusion, which may help them at one time, harms them at another. From some aspects, elections are depressing affairs, because it is never very inspiring to witness the working class opting for another dose of capitalist suppression. But even more depressing the 1964 election saw the emergence of race as an issue, strongly in some constituencies, and underlying the campaign as a whole.

Douglas-Home has now indicated that the Conservatives intend to bring immigration more and more into the forefront of political controversy. It is not comforting to reflect upon the history of similar situations, and upon the possible outcome of this one. The alarming thing about racial theories is that, unlike most other working class delusions, they are so often asserted in the most extreme and relentless violence. Leyton at the moment is a psephologist’s test tube, but who dare say that one day it will not be remembered as the start of the experiment which blew up the laboratory?

Ivan

Race in Smethwick (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last October the previously little known town of Smethwick, situated, ironically, on the edge of the Black Country, was suddenly shot into the headlines of every national newspaper. The town was described as “England’s Little Rock”, a “race-hate town”, were the electorate were “politically illiterate”. All of this because the controversial Councillor Peter Griffiths had unseated Mr. Patrick Gordon Walker at the General Election.

To what extent does racialism exist in Smethwick? What, if anything, gave rise to it? Does it have any basis in fact? To find the answers to these questions it is necessary to first know a little about the conditions in Smethwick which gave rise to the now notorious events of last October.

One of the first things to take attention in the town are the blocks of multi-storey council flats, towering over the slums they are replacing. Many people say that this is evidence of how much better off we are now; that this is progress. But these jerry-built dwellings, with their damp, paper-thin, warped walls and fierce draughts, are deteriorating into slums in about half the time it took for a back-to-back. The case of a man, reported in the local press recently, speaks for itself; he had had to spend the last ten months off work as a result of illness caused by the damp in his new council flat.

This one feature of the town typifies, as nearly as anything does, what sort of a place Smethwick is. Like thousands of other places, it has the thin veneer of the Affluent Society we are always being told about; but underneath there is the same old poverty.

Confronted with this, and other problems, the people of Smethwick looked for, and found, a scapegoat. Not for the first time, collective wrath fell upon a section of the community who are marked off by the colour of their skin. They overlooked the fact that racialism is no answer to inadequate housing, bad schools and social services.

It is unlikely that many Smethwick people are deep-rooted racialists. Undoubtedly, a lot of them trusted the panaceas of the politicians, in the hope that they would solve their problems. Yet with the records of inconsistency held both by Councillor Griffiths and Mr. Gordon Walker, one wonders if they themselves have any idea of how to go about it.

Griffiths has not always been so outspoken about immigration. For him, in the 1959 election the burning issue was that we should all vote in “a Smethwick man for Smethwick”, which conveniently ignored the fact that he himself is a Welsh immigrant. However, this did not cut much electoral ice and in 1964 he took advantage of the emotions aroused by the concentrations of immigrants by basing his platform on the immigrant question. In contradiction to the memorable photograph which once appeared in the local paper, showing his wife chatting over a cup of tea with a Pakistani woman, Griffiths declared that “Smethwick rejects the idea of a multi-racial society ”.

On the other side, Mr. Gordon Walker had spoken against the Immigration Bill when it was first introduced by the Tories and, although he had decided by 1964 that perhaps immigration control was not such a bad idea after all, he had already lost much support. However, the dissident Labour voters need not have worried. We all know that the Labour Party, now that they are in power, have not only retained the Act they attacked so strongly, but are actually enforcing stricter control than the Tories did.

Smethwick Labour Party are bitter about the whole affair. At their inquest on the election many speeches were made on the reasons for their defeat and on how they propose to win back the constituency. But next to nothing was said about the ways to solve the problems which face people, both white and coloured, in Smethwick and elsewhere.

United they stand (1978)

From the April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like the man who is going to be hanged in a fortnight, the politician finds that an approaching general election concentrates his mind wonderfully. All over the country, there is a buzz of activity, as envelopes are addressed, supporters canvassed, programmes drafted and speeches written. The great task is to convince the voters that your party is better than the other lot, that your leaders will keep their promises and that in general you possess a greater store of energy, dedication and mindpower which can all be at the service of the electors.

Or at least it was once as simple as that. In the days when the Labour Party was in apparently endless opposition it was possible for them to argue that they had some real differences from the Conservatives. They could put forward programmes which, because there was small chance of them ever being put to the test, could be suitably adventurous. They could even, in a controlled and qualified way, talk about something they liked to call socialism. A substantial number of workers were impressed by it and voted, for or against Labour, under the notion that they were making an active choice between two basically differing points of view.

But now that we have had a substantial experience of Labour government, under a selection of Prime Ministers who have been left wingers in their time and who have “changed” just at the moment when their panting followers were rejoicing that at last the Promised Land had been reached, the task of the propagandists is rather different. Now, it is not so much to convince people that it is worth making a choice between Labour and Tory as to get them to think that there are any differences to make the choice about.

So we might expect to witness, over the next few months (assuming, as many political observers are, that the Callaghan government will not be able to hang on much longer than this autumn) an intensifying effort to find, and then emphasise, the smallest of points of dispute between the two big parties.

Customary campaign

In fact this has started already; the direct attacks on Margaret Thatcher by Denis Healey, in the Ilford North by-election and by Callaghan soon after the Labour defeat there, are part of the customary campaign all capitalist parties wage, to convince us that their leaders are better than the others. In this case, though, there were pointers to a possible trend in Labour Party propaganda in the election.

Both Callaghan and Healey accused Thatcher of stirring up trouble on the issue of race (Healey said she was acting as a recruiting sergeant for the National Front). The inference we are invited to draw from this is that the Labour Party would never fish in such dangerously muddy waters, that they are unsullied by the slightest touch of racism and that on this issue—emotive, explosive, destructive as it is—there is a genuine difference between the two parties. And the inference we are invited to draw from this, again, is that the Tories stand for a compromise (or perhaps even agreement) with racism and the Labour Party stand against it.

But this would only deceive a Rip Van Winkle, someone who had been unconscious of the recent history of British politics. It was, of course, the Conservative government who introduced the first Immigration Act, in 1962, in an effort to assuage the racist ideas which were growing as the early immigrants came to this country, to settle in places like Brixton and Smethwick and Southall. At that time the Labour Party thought the Tories had delivered to them a golden opportunity to scoop up votes and Hugh Gaitskell, who was then the leader of the Labour Party, immediately launched into a fierce assault on the Act, on the grounds that whatever excuses were made for it, it was a piece of racist legislation.

Well Gaitskell did not live to see the results of his campaign but it was pretty clear that they were not at all what he had hoped for. In the next general election, in 1964, the name of Smethwick was written into British political history when the Tory candidate overthrew Wilson’s prospective Foreign Secretary—Patrick Gordon Walker—largely by playing on the prejudices of the workers in the constituency who objected to the inflow of immigrants.

Readjustment

This, and the even worse blow when Gordon Walker failed to get into Parliament at his second attempt at a staged by-election, was enough to persuade the Labour Party that a little readjustment was needed in their policies. Naturally they would still mention things like the brotherhood of man and equal rights for all whatever the colour of their skin and so on. But at the same time they worked to implement, and to tighten up on, the Immigration Act which they had previously condemned in such forthright terms.

It was predictable, that they would eventually come out in the open with their own racist laws and sure enough, in the panic over the Kenyan Asians in 1968, frightened for their miserable lives at the polls by the rabble rousing of Enoch Powell and Duncan Sandys and the hysteria of the moment, Labour gave birth to its own Immigration Act which, to all intents and purposes, finished the argument that they had differences with the Tories over the matter.

The situation, as the military are fond of reporting, has now stabilised. Both the big parties, in their concern to hang onto their votes, are now ready to introduce further discriminatory laws and, as the hysteria grows, to think up new variations on them. These laws have nothing to do with easing pressure on resources like housing, social services, available employment; there were problems in these fields long, long before the first West Indian walked the streets of Brixton or the first Asian gazed at the gasworked landscape of Southall. They have everything to do with a desperate attempt to stop the sliding away of votes to the more openly racist organisations like the National Front.

Both Labour and Conservative Parties are trying to pre-empt the National Front, to undermine its progress by appearing almost as discriminatory as the discriminators. At the very best this is a dangerous gamble, as the Nationalists found to their cost in Nazi Germany. And it leaves the all-important question: when Labour or Tory have got power by pandering to racist prejudices, what do they do with, how do they control, those prejudices?

The essential unity of Labour and Tory over immigration controls will not prevent them, when the time comes, pretending to the voters that they have differences in principle on the issue. This should deceive nobody with any kind of memory for recent history and there are plenty of other examples to remember. It has long been a point of Conservative propaganda, that the Labour Party is a revolutionary party which, knowingly or not, would be responsible for overturning capitalism and substituting something like the state organised society of privilege (in fact, a variety of capitalism) which exists in Russia.

Myth

Part of this myth is that the Labour Party is dominated by the trade unions and allows them to have a decisive say in the government of British capitalism. And runs the argument, capitalism run under the influence of the likes of Hugh Scanlon and Joe Gormley is almost like capitalism in the Kremlin.

The reality is a lot more sober. By a mixture of threats, force, determination and negotiation this Labour government have shown that, far from the unions running riot under them, they are the party with the most hope of controlling wage claims. And all this without a head-on confrontation like the pitched battle of 1973 and 1974, between Heath and the miners or even the clashes which have marked the history of previous Labour governments. Perhaps Labour has learnt, since the days when they prosecuted striking dockers, the facts of life and economic power under capitalism—and have done a deal with them.

One of the important facts of capitalist life is that it is a class divided system, in which two groups of people, between them making up the population of the developed world, face each other in conflict over the ownership of wealth. The parties of capitalism try to hide this fact, by talking about a unity of interests, about everyone working for the national good as if the interests of the coal miner are the same as those of the stock holder.

But while they are saying this those same parties are themselves fighting the class war, but on the other side of the line. They stand for the interests of the ruling class, for the propping up of a social system in which a minority own and control the means of living with all that follows from that in terms of poverty against privilege, freedom against repression.

Any differences they may have are over the tactics to be used in that propping up and in fighting that class war. At times, as in 1973, a government may decide on the tactics of confrontation; at others they may use the policy of conciliation, of trying to persuade the workers on the other side of the struggle not to use any power they may have, to negotiate rather than use force in the sense of a strike or something similar.

And when it comes to an election they are again united, in their respective appeal to the political naivety of the working class who are open to be convinced that minor differences on issues like immigration or trade unions are worth voting for or against. One result of this is that race is now in the forefront of British politics and promises to be a dominating factor in the next general election. This should be a lesson to anyone who thinks it possible to make progress towards Socialism with a policy of compromise with political ignorance or of winning support on day to day issues.

Labour or Tory, capitalism rules and that is not O.K.

Ivan

The life story of a labour careerist (1981)

Patrick Gordon Walker

From the January 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In every pouch and crease of his lugubrious face Patrick Gordon Walker — who died last month — was a flesh and blood discouragement of the idea that there is much joy in the life of a dogsbody of capitalist politics.

Much ponderous energy was invested in building his career, which at the end dissolved into catastrophe. He made a reputation in a number of unwanted ways —Foreign Secretary for only three months, and at that without a seat in Parliament; the loser of two safe Labour constituencies in rapid succession; an apparently helpless victim of an overtly racist election campaign. Wearily, his days were ended in the quiet obscurity of a life peer.

Child psychologists might look for an explanation of Gordon Walker’s career in his parentage; his father was both a Fabian and a High Court judge in India, which may have conditioned the young Gordon Walker into the reflexes of reconciliation so useful to anyone seeking to make their name in politics. Further conditioning came at public school and at Oxford, where he was a receptive student and later a history tutor.

After a wartime stint as a propagandist at the BBC Gordon Walker had learned enough to come into the House of Commons, at a by-election at the safe Labour seat of Smethwick. Almost at once he was made Parliamentary Private Secretary to Herbert Morrison, one of the dominant leaders in the Attlee government, and about a year later he was a junior minister at the Commonwealth Relations Office. That government was supposed to be leading a war-weary British working class to socialism and Gordon Walker came to the conclusion that this task would be better in the hands of Ernie Bevin. He joined with George Brown in a clumsy attempt at a putsch to replace Attlee with Bevin but when Brown, from his own account, cheerfully went off to tell Bevin to get ready to move into Number Ten, he was crushed by Bevin’s angry and contemptuous rejection. But the incident did not seem to injure Brown’s career, nor that of the more subtle Gordon Walker.

It was during Labour’s long years in the wilderness, while the working class were gratefully voting for one dose after another of Tory capitalism, that Gordon Walker established himself as shadow Foreign Secretary. George Brown was clearly hurt at this treachery by his fellow conspirator; he had wanted the job himself and did not take too kindly to the idea that anyone should double cross him:

  I had discussed with Gordon Walker what I was thinking of doing and had said that I was going to ask to be allowed to do Foreign Affairs. He gave me no indication that he was interested in the job himself. (In My Way.)

As it turned out, Brown might have had a narrow escape; Gordon Walker’s readiness to do anything led him into opposing the Conservative Commonwealth Immigration Bill of 1962. This was during a brief, bizarre period in which the Labour Party pretended that they were opposed to racism and were concerned for international unity. Gordon Walker seemed to be out of touch with his constituents, who at that time were actively seeking scapegoats for the stresses of Birmingham’s industrial and urban capitalism and who found them too readily in the coloured immigrants who had concentrated in some parts of the constituency. Their member’s pose as a man of principled opposition to racist laws was not popular where his votes came from.

By the time of the 1964 election the Tory campaign in Smethwick, orchestrated by their candidate Peter Griffiths, was well under way, playing upon baseless anxieties with slogans like “If You Want A Nigger For A Neighbour, Vote Labour”. Seemingly unaware of the full significance of what was .going on, Gordon Walker plodded stoically to defeat. After the result the TV men asked the unsavoury Griffiths what his maiden speech would be about. “Widows’ pensions”, nasally lisped the new member for Smethwick.

Of course, the workers of Smethwick were being quite unfair; Labour had stopped opposing immigration controls as early as January 1963, when they voted in the Commons for the continuation of the Commonwealth Immigration Act. In the election which cost Gordon Walker his seat their policy was clear: “. . . in view of the need to limit the number of immigrants entering Britain, immigration control will be retained.” (When Labour Wins, 1964.) And when they were in power, Labour were better than their word; they not only kept the controls but strengthened them. In this matter, as in most others, there was nothing to choose between Labour and the Tories.

Harold Wilson, however, was not to be deterred. He had appointed Gordon Walker as Foreign Secretary and, whatever the voters of Smethwick said, Foreign Secretary he would stay. In the House there was uproar as Wilson invited Tory leader Douglas-Home, famous for his bone-headed affability, to regard Peter Griffiths as a “Parliamentary leper”. Perhaps because he was so affable, Douglas- Home did not make the same suggestion to Wilson about some of his supporters — like Ray Gunter —who were pressing for tighter immigration control, nor about the Labour clubs where, as zealous sleuths from the press revealed, coloured people were either banned or frozen out. What would Hugh Gaitskell — who in a sense had started it all by suggesting that the Labour Party was on to a good thing by opposing the Immigration Bill —have made of it?

Doggedly, Wilson propelled his Foreign Secretary towards what was to be his great defeat. First, Wilson forced Labour MP Reg Sorensen out of his comfortably held seat at Leyton and into the House of Lords so that Gordon Walker could fight the by-election there. Sorensen, who had built up a strong personal following at Leyton, did not want to go. When the by-election came, the MPs had just put up their pay at the same time as the government were insisting that an increase in pensions would have to be delayed for some months — hardly the sort of propaganda a government of capitalism thrives on. There was a lot of anger at the railroading of Sorensen and the stigma of Smethwick was still perceptible about Gordon Walker. Less than 60 per cent of the electorate voted and Gordon Walker converted a Labour majority of nearly 8000 into a Tory one of 205.

George Brown, trying to reconstruct British capitalism at his Department of Economic Affairs, was annoyed at the reshuffle caused by the Leyton result: “If Patrick Gordon Walker”, he commented sniffily, “Had done us the favour of holding Leyton and thereby remained Foreign Secretary, there would have been no shuffle just then . . .” It was in effect the end of Gordon Walker’s career. Wilson gave him a few odd jobs, like going on a “fact finding” tour of the Far East with special emphasis on Vietnam. Whatever “facts” he found there did not persuade the Labour government to stop supporting the war; the best he could think of to say was that in Vietnam “. . . there could be neither victory nor defeat . . ." And when he wrote that he was not thinking about the workers and peasants on both sides who were dying and suffering in Vietnam, in the cause of their master classes. Although he came back to the Commons in 1966, and held some government posts, Gordon Walker’s ambitions were at an end. It might have been a relief to him, to be made a life peer in 1974 and to join all those other Labour lords whose leathery intellects provide a convenient, protective distortion of historical facts.

They must need it; there was nothing in the career of Gordon Walker, nor of the governments of which he was a member, to justify any pride or even satisfaction. The crises of capitalism swamped those governments just as they have all governments; Labour ministers contested with workers over wages and working conditions; they supported — and sometimes engaged in —the wars of capitalism and their immigration policy was as restrictive as it needed to be, to persuade racist workers to vote for them. It was a sordid story, summed up in a Fabian Society study of Labour in power (Labour And Equality, 1980) by Peter Townsend: “. . . people in all parts of the Labour movement . . . did not want to believe that their expectations had not been fulfilled because that would have threatened life long political beliefs.”

The lesson for the Labour Party from Gordon Walker at Smethwick and at Leyton was not to stand for political principle, not to struggle against anti-working class prejudices, not to campaign for an international unity of workers for a happier, saner world. The lesson they applied — for they had learned it a long time before —was to protect their votes by pandering to political ignorance and to prejudice, to fashion their policies not to help workers understand society but to accept a degraded position in it.

Workers who don’t understand capitalism are easy prey to any prejudices; it is, they think, simpler to turn upon a scapegoat rather than to examine their problems for their cause. Such people are the very stuff of Labour support; the Labour Party dare not encourage them to an awareness of their class interests because that would be suicidal for them as a party. So if that ignorance sometimes recoils upon them, as it did in the case of Gordon Walker, they have no grounds for complaint. Only the innocent can protest; and in the desperate history of capitalism none can bear more guilt than the Labour Party.

Ivan