Finance and Industry: Who are the share-owners (1962)

The Finance and Industry column from the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who are the share-owners

Last month we reported on the new campaign being organised to encourage British workers to buy more stocks and shares. We also quoted the estimates made by the organisers about the number of shareholders in the country.

The New York Stock Exchange has now provided details of the number of shareholders in the United States. These are estimated at about 17 million, an increase of over 10 million in the last ten years.

The U.S. correspondent of the Financial Times, giving these figures, comments that in happier times they might have been a cause for congratulation, but that recent events have given “people’s capitalism” a rather tarnished look. Judging by the panic and disillusionment that hit many of these small investors in the recent Wall Street shake-up, he is certainly right.

High pressure salesmen

One result of this shake-up has been the questioning of the methods that have apparently been used by many U.S. Stock Exchange firms to get business. They have been using a large army of part-time salesmen to go round getting people to buy stocks and shares just as they would soap or toothpaste. Some of them have even been selling extremely doubtful issues in such industries as electronics, automatic vending machines, etc., which have turned out to be virtually worthless. We wonder how many of the 17 million have been accounted for by this sort of dubious activity?

Beyond the curtain

In view of the way production and distribution are carried on in Russia and her satellites, Socialists would not suppose that the trading and financial problems there would differ essentially from what we have here.

It suits ill-informed writers in the Press to keep plugging the theme that it is quite astonishing that capitalist Russia should behave like a capitalist power—but what else would they expect?

In the early part of July, a two-week international summer school of bankers was held in Moscow to enable the foreigners to learn about the Russian banking system. (Last year they met in Oxford). The British visitors numbered 35 and represented the big five joint-stock banks as well as the Bank of England and the merchant banks. More than 50 countries were represented, including the U.S.A. and many of the newly formed African and Asian countries.

Innocents who suppose that things are really different in Russia may wonder why Russia needs to encourage such an affair. But Russian industry is engaged in producing goods for sale at a profit in home and foreign markets and has just as much need of a vast banking and finance apparatus as has the rest of the world. It has not at all been able to escape the necessity of finding markets for exports and has been no more successful than its Western rivals. If Britain has problems which lead some industrial groups to favour entry into the Common Market, Russia has her own difficulties in COMECON (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, established in 1949 by Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Albania).

An article by Norman MacKenzie in the New Statesman last month maintains that these countries have been unable to achieve the degree of common planning already attained by the six European countries in the Common Market—hence Krushchev’s apparent anxiety lest Britain’s entry into the Common Market and the further development of the Market may make great difficulties for the exports of the Comecom countries, including Russia. Mr. MacKenzie’s view is that each of the Comecom countries is concentrating on industrial self-sufficiency rather than on integration into the whole group. One outcome has been that “with the exception of Poland, these predominantly rural countries are now chronically short of food.”

One ironical accompaniment of the relationship between Russia and the other Comecom countries related by Mr. MacKenzie is that their internal price systems are so complex that when they enter into trade agreements between themselves they have to make use of world prices as a common basis of measurement, which “explains why the trade attaches of communist embassies in the West spend so much time collecting invoices and catalogues which are sent to Moscow for analysis.”

The mailed fist

It is the fashion these days for managing directors, Ministry of Labour officials and politicians to congratulate themselves and everyone else on the harmony and amity that is supposed to mark industrial relationships. To the extent that things have changed it is mostly the result of years of low unemployment and shortage of labour—employers have had to hide the mailed fist a little. But Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne, of the Sunday Telegraph, recently scented a wind of change. He noted that the Wall Street Stock Exchange collapse alarmed the workers at the Ford Motor Works at Dagenham with whom Mr. Worsthorne had been talking.

This is what he had to say about it:

“The men I talked to were frightened and malleable, as if they had been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep, and scarcely knew where they were. If the mood at Ford’s is any guide, now would seem to be the time to put industrial relations on a sounder footing. At the risk of being called all sorts of unpleasant names, I should like to suggest that this means, in blunt terms, putting the working man in his place, which is a very much lower one than he has been encouraged to enjoy for 15 years.”

Don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Going up or down?

On the whole economists and politicians claiming to understand the workings of the economic system have lived in a mood of sustained optimism for the past twenty years, based on the sanguine belief that things would never get really bad again because there is more knowledge and experience available than there used to be. Bernard Harris, writing recently in the Sunday Express, on prospects of a slump in America like that in the ‘thirties, dismissed it, not precisely because there aren’t danger signals, but because “the cause of business fluctuations is better understood. The techniques for dealing with them are better developed.”

But there are dissident voices. Mr. Enoch Powell, who has been “saving the country” by resisting the nurses’ demand for higher pay, went on record two years ago to the effect that the Government’s techniques for handling the crisis of 1958-9 had had no effect whatever. (As he had resigned from the Government he was exercising the right to be critical of what his ex-colleagues were doing). And Mr. George Schwartz has been wondering in the Sunday Times whether we aren’t “back to the old trade cycle” (Powell’s view appears to be that we never left it.)

Mr. Samuel Brittan in the Observer goes further than Powell, who thought the Government’s actions had no effect, because he (Brittan), thinks they make the problem worse:

“Government financial measures have in recent years actually accentuated the trade fluctuations that they were supposed to control.”

The Financial Times (June 15) pointed out another difficulty about prescribing cures for whatever ails the patient, namely, the difficulty of diagnosis. How do you prescribe for an unhealthy state of trade if you can’t decide what is its state?

“At present British industry is operating on a plateau, and one can make out an almost equally convincing case for saying that the plateau is sloping downwards as upwards.”

East-west trade

For many years after the war, and particularly when the Western governments rigidly prohibited the export to Russia and her allies of products and materials useful for armaments, never a trade union conference went by without resolutions being moved demanding more trade with Iron Curtain countries. Many workers who were enthusiastic about it had a somewhat mixed idea of what it meant: to them “more trade” meant more British goods being sold abroad without its counterpart of more foreign goods being marketed here. (Some supporters of joining the Common Market have the same blurred vision.)

In the last year or two, with more exports from Russia and Eastern Europe coming into world markets, zeal for East-West trade has cooled off considerably. British coal miners who had supported the idea had never anticipated that it might take the form of the large quantities of cheap Russian oil hastening still further the decline of coal as a fuel for manufacture and domestic lighting and heating. And workers in engineering concerns doing big business in exports were not counting on the steady increase in the amount of machinery and equipment that now figures in Russian exports. A recent, development has been the Russian invasion of the watch market. Soviet Weekly (June 28, 1962) tells how Russian exports of watches have increased from 12,000 in 1938, to 250,000 in 1955, 1,147,600 in 1957 and 4½ million in 1961. They go to 50 countries in all parts of the world and “in price and quality Soviet watches are challenging the long-standing pre-eminence of the Swiss watchmakers in this field.”

Edgar Hardcastle

The great education debate (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

To a socialist the name of that true-blue servant of capitalism, Peregrine Worsthorne, does nothing to inspire respect. However, the reactionary outpourings of such as Worsthorne are often quite revealing of what constitutes the true, if publicly unexpressed, thinking of our — and their — capitalist masters.

In the Times Educational Supplement of May 6th under the headline “Why not cut back when so few get anything from school”, we have laid before us the crude reality of education under capitalism. On Tuesday 3rd May Worsthorne addressed a conference at the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education. The following is a part of what he had to say:

It is extremely important that education be geared to ’the needs of society, but we need to be brutally realistic about what the needs of society are. It will always be a minority who take the decisions and the rest will have to accept them. You may jigger about with the means of choosing the élite as much as you like but now, as never before, society has to face the inescapable necessity for the development of a formidable élite.

As if this were not enough, Worsthorne proceeds to really rub our noses in it:

Industrialization meant that most people needed practical intelligence less than ever, and education aimed at encouraging personal development was of the wrong kind for an overcrowded world.

And later:

Most people are going to have to live in a subordinate role, however we dress it up.

And to crown it all:

It is difficult to admit that the great majority will not have satisfaction at work or in other parts of their lives. Politicians and journalists cannot do much about it. Teachers are asking for trouble if they think they can. To encourage children to believe it is all going to be different when they grow up is wrong and will cause a great deal of unhappiness.

Now, the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education represents only a relatively obscure élite in itself, a factor which may have contributed to the onset of Worsthorne’s attack. However, his honesty on this occasion is indeed refreshing.

He is stating what is true under capitalism. Independence of mind breeds thought and thinkers tend to ask awkward questions — too awkward, that is to say, for those who own the means of production and distribution. Their survival as capitalists depends upon the disciplined and acquiescent wage-labour of everybody else, including what that means in the deliberate restriction of working-class education.

Richard Cooper

Diary of a Capitalist (1978)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the August 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

I came to stay at Claridge’s recently, during the strike by some of its staff, to demonstrate my solidarity with the hotel’s owners. The rooms cost from £38.50 a night upwards (Times, 11.4.78 and 15.4.78), so it was not a cheap gesture. In contrast, a London waiter’s pay had just been increased to £30.27 for a forty-hour week. The take-home pay of a Claridge’s chambermaid on the picket line was, after various deductions, £23 a week. The strikers had come out for two things: recognition of their union, and the re-instatement of their shop steward, who had been sacked — victimized, according to the strikers.

As often happens in these affairs, the strikers went back empty-handed (Times, 25.4.78). The shop steward later accepted compensation from Claridge’s, but he stayed sacked, as the hotel had insisted he would. We capitalists get the best of both worlds. The hotel-workers, like the firemen, the Grunwick employees, and many more, were beaten into submission; and at the same time many workers remain entirely convinced (by the press and television) of the ungovernable power of the unions, which can therefore be blamed for the miseries of their lives.

Monday

It is absolutely essential for us that the working class do not discover what Socialism really is. In this we are much helped by the left-wing parties—the Labour Party, the Communist Party, the various Trotskyist groups—who allege that certain capitalist countries such as Britain, Russia, China, or others, are really Socialist, or could easily become so with a few more reforms. These allegations are naturally made much of by avowedly capitalist-supporting media-men. Peregrine Worsthorne had an article in the Sunday Telegraph (2.4.78) in which he commented sarcastically on James Callaghan’s stay at the British Embassy in Washington, being waited on by servants and taken round in chauffeur-driven cars. The article was called The Splendours of Socialism — in reality a completely irrelevant title, but an effective piece of propaganda — and the article went on with attacks on state capitalism (labelled “Socialism”), of which Russia and what he called the “Communist countries” were given as dreadful examples.

Worsthorne made another good propaganda point, alleging that Callaghan was living it up in a way that “no British capitalist, however successful, could hope to emulate” (who does he think stays at Claridge’s?) Thus the workers who read the paper are assured that the capitalists are not really very well off. Well done, Worsthorne!

Tuesday

With my business interests I need a pied-à-terre in town, and for the last couple of months I have been paying £500 a week rent for a furnished flat in central London—really luxurious ones bring up to £1000 a week (Times, 5.6.78 and Observer, 11.6.78). However, I have decided to get somewhere more permanent. I think 1 will go after a house in St. John’s Wood: it’s a nice size, with five bedrooms and two bathrooms, and is offered at £475,000 (Times, 9.6.78). At a modest price like that, not even half a million, of course it’s not freehold: the lease is fifty-seven years.

I’ve made a start on the furnishings. A pair of George III mahogany commodes was sold by Christie’s for £95,000 to a London dealer “on behalf of a private collector” Daily Telegraph, 16.5.78). They should look well in my new house.

Wednesday

A film starlet recently told a journalist (Sunday Express, 21.5.78) of a discovery she had made while filming The Greek Tycoon. They borrowed a luxury yacht, and she found that “there was a crew of twenty-seven to look after just eight guests. That’s all they can have on board; there are only four guest cabins. Now that’s ridiculous . .” All in all, “I realized for the first time that rich people do live lives quite different from the rest of us.”

Well, yes, my dear, we do. We have more money, you see. Some of us throw it away foolishly. Mrs. Kitty Milinaire, the Duchess of Bedford’s daughter-in-law (who was recently charged with taking away on approval from Cartiers’, the royal jewellers, a gem stone and a couple of rings worth £204,000 and not returning them, but was cleared of any blame after a court case) — Mrs. Milinaire admitted losing £3 million in five years by gambling (Daily Telegraph, 29.6.78).

Even she was slower than Sir Hugh Fraser, the millionaire industrialist, who confessed some time ago to losing one and a half million pounds on the roulette tables “in the last year or two” (Times, 8.12.76). That’s throwing away about £20,000 per week, taking the average week in, week out, for eighteen months. To get through that much he had to play several tables simultaneously, sometimes as many as five, and make his rounds continuously among them.

These, however, are exceptions. And even this money isn’t “lost”: it goes into the hands of other rich people, either fellow gamblers or casino owners.

Thursday

Poor results have been reported from one of the companies represented in my portfolio of shares. Dunbee, the toy manufacturers, didn’t do as well as expected in 1977, particularly in the last half of the year (Daily Telegraph, 16.5.78). As the joint managing director said, “Christmas didn’t happen last year". (The remark, incidentally, shows a refreshing candour as to what Christmas really amounts to in a commercial society, despite the annual dose of religious propaganda.)

The disappointing sales no doubt resulted from the fall in many people’s purchasing power owing to the failure of after-tax pay to keep pace with prices (City Comment, Daily Telegraph, 16.5.78). That is one of the many dilemmas of our society: we capitalists strain every nerve to keep our workers’ pay down, but at the same time we must bear in mind that they are our customers. It is these contradictions within capitalism which lead to struggles between political policies which take place in every capitalist country (that is, in every country in the world).

After reading the Dunbee report, I had to console myself by arranging a week’s salmon fishing—I took a week on a crack boat on the Tweed, one rod, £1000 a week (Times, 16.5.78).

Friday

My old friend Lord Lilford has triumphed in the Court of Appeal. Lord Lifford’s fourth wife, who is now married to her third husband, sued Lord Lilford (who is now married to his fifth wife) for extra provision for their two daughters. When the plaintiff and the defendant got married, Lord Lilford “made financial provision for her former husband and her two children by that marriage” (Sun, 13.5.78). When they were divorced, Lord Lilford gave his ex-wife at least £200,000 in money and properly and shares, and also handed over £30,000 for each girl’s education, plus £1812 a year each until they were eighteen. The girls’ mother thought that that was not enough, and sued the baron for another £25,000 for each girl. She won in the High Court, but Lord Lilford’s appeal has now been upheld. The former Lady Lilford said after the case: “I think he should feel very proud of himself over the trifling sum of £25,000 for each of the girls out of his untold millions.”

But it’s the principle of the thing that counts (or, as you might say, the principal—and the interest). £50,000 is neither here nor there to people like Lord Lilford and me, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

Saturday

Went shopping in the West End. Bought rather a nice little book about the various New Zealand Rugby touring teams, for my nephew, who is keen on the game. It cost £200 (Times, 12.4.78). I met my girl friend, and 1 bought her a straw hat for £68 (Times, 25.5.78), and a pair of silk pyjamas, £200 (Eastern Daily Press, 16.6.78).

Have just booked for a three-months’ cruise with the QE2 later this year. In April 900 passengers landed from a three-month Far Eastern cruise, for which they paid charges ranging from £5000 to £100,000 (and that’s apart from their spending money on the trip). They included 150 “well-heeled English gentlefolk” (Observer, 23.4.78).

Capitalism is run, naturally, for the benefit of the capitalists, but that fact must be concealed as far as possible. Thus, while some capitalists go on fantastically expensive holidays, their journalistic apologists like Worsthorne continue the task of persuading the rest of the population that no British capitalist could afford even a chauffeur- driven car.

If we members of the ruling class did not have such a vast propaganda organization working for us, how long, I wonder, would our system last?

Alwyn Edgar

Capitalism's Dilemma (1974)

From the January 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is in the nature of governments to promise to eradicate evils and make things better for the voters who elected them. It is also in the nature of capitalism to go on being an exploiting system and to be subject to periodical crises and depressions. In the life of any government therefore there is always an even chance that things will get worse instead of better. When this happens, the politicians who masterminded the policy and the economists who advised them look round for an excuse—the workers who didn’t work hard enough, the strikers who didn’t work at all, (even occasionally the workers who worked too hard and produced unsaleable surpluses), the speculators, the greedy bankers who pushed up interest rates, or the capitalists who didn’t invest enough (one of Heath’s excuses).

Now, and probably for several years, a lot of blame is going to be laid on the oil-producing countries which banded together to get a monopoly price for their oil, an action branded as “blackmail”—as if every government which controlled a much-needed commodity did not always get a monopoly price for it if possible.

This excuse is going to be used to obscure the fact that the Heath government’s policies were already in deep trouble before the latest blow from the oil capitalists, and that in many countries there had been for months growing signs of crisis and recession: notably the widespread falls in stock-exchange prices, latterly drastic falls but themselves from levels below those of recent years. What the Financial Times (28 November 1973) found particularly disturbing was that “there is a growing tendency in the market places of the world” to recall that the depression between the wars began with the great fall of share prices in 1929 on Wall Street:

  For the message is clear enough. It is that the pace-setting countries must demonstrate that they are planning meaningful measures to halt the long-term drift towards chaos in international economic and financial affairs which serves to give such new bugbears as the oil crisis an even more devastating impact. Indeed, unless this happens, we may soon be in even greater danger of travelling down the world recession path than we are already.

Professor Alan Day (Observer, 25 November) also fears that there may be a world depression, firstly because “the industrial world as a whole has enjoyed a boom in the last couple of years” and all may now move into depression together. His second reason is concerned with unemployment and inflation:

  Another reason to fear a world recession is the worldwide struggle against inflation. Our great and universal problem is to achieve reasonably full employment along with reasonable price stability. Indeed taking the world as a whole, this problem is further from a solution than it has ever been.

It is of some interest to note how his views have been modified since, in 1959, he wrote The Economics of Money. There he thought that the cycle of boom and depression “may now have been mastered as a result of the insight into economic processes which has been acquired in the last generation” (p. 66); though he still evidently half believes (against the evidence) that full employment can be achieved by accepting inflation as the price to be paid.

Here is one of the dilemmas of capitalism. In the past twenty-five years every election has been won by a party which promised full employment and no inflation and which then, without a mandate, futilely tried to enforce a “prices and incomes policy” to stop inflation. So where do they go from here. It seems highly unlikely that an election could be won on a policy of “more inflation and full employment” or on a policy of “no inflation and more unemployment”, though of course there is nothing more certain than that they will go on promising one thing and doing another until such time as the workers get wise to it.

Among the possibilities being canvassed is the formation of a coalition government, which, until in due course it falls apart, can ignore what the separate parties promised when elected. Peregrine Worsthorne (who recently scored a bull for silliness by attributing inflation to “the spirit of evil”) hopefully counts on the dissension in the Labour Party as a possible means of enabling the Tory Party to be elected with so large a majority that it can take "authoritative powers including presumably the power to direct labour” (Sunday Telegraph 2 December 1973).

In the meantime Enoch Powell has been gathering support for his policy of going back to nineteenth-century free-for-all, no government control of prices or wages but with the definite commitment to halt inflation. Those who are attracted by the notion that capitalism really would be all right if only inflation is halted should take note of what did happen when, in 1920, inflation was halted by stopping the issue of additional currency notes. Prices did come down with a run; so did wages notwithstanding a big increase in strikes, and unemployment jumped and remained at well over the million mark for years and jumped again when in 1929 a Labour government came into power pledged to reduce it.

Half a century has passed since then. It would seem that most of the non-Marxist economists have learned nothing and forgotten everything, and the trade unions and Labour Party (not to mention the so-called “left- wing” organizations) are still bemused with nationalisation and the other irrelevancies which make up their impossible schemes for improving capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

How Green Was My Peregrine (1971)

Book Review from the August 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Myth by Peregrine Worsthorne. (Cassell.)

This is a comical book which might still do some members of the Labour Party a bit of good by exposing some of their prejudices. Worsthorne has discovered that

If Labour’s last six years made anything clear, it was surely that a Labour Government . . .  is forced to do many things which actually increase rather than decrease working class suspicion.

But, says Worsthorne, this is what the success of “British democratic socialism” depends on. This sort of drivel is a fair sample of the book; for Worsthorne. democratic socialism is the Labour Party. But as he does not know what Socialism is, or what the state is, or democracy, it is natural for him to think of nationalisation as socialism. From that it is easy to point out that

In practice (the workers) no more feel they own the nationalised industries than sailors feel they own the Royal Navy.

With his main conclusion that Labour government does not and cannot work we agree; in fact we have been saying it for over sixty years. So far we have not come over enough; bad luck for Worsthorne that, although he thinks Labour's function is to be the opposition, the workers are returning to supporting them at elections, at least until they are disillusioned about Labour again.

The reason for this is clear. The vast majority of electors do not read clever books like Worsthorne’s. They tend to judge entirely on their limited personal experiences and at present their experience of the Heath government is such as to persuade them to try Wilson again. They vote for lesser evils and against what they dislike most — until they become socialists.

Horatio.

Whitewash and be damned (1979)

From the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is no more certain a betrayer of the truth about the condition of the working class under capitalism than the political journalist. And nowhere is this more true than of those writing for the ‘quality’ newspapers: The Guardian, The Observer; the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

This is not to suggest that journalists (or any others) who support the capitalist system should be denied a hearing. What is at issue is the exclusive nature of ‘editorial discretion’ and, consequently, the whole tone and content of the ‘serious’ newspapers — as contrasted with their loudly-trumpeted, clearly hypocritical posture as defenders of free speech.

The ‘heavies’, far from being the instruments of unfettered free speech their proprietors and editors would have us believe, are in no way different in their main aims and purposes from their bedfellows, the tabloids — blowzy tarts though they are. As with those publications, they must produce a profit; promote as assiduously as they can the political and economic interests of their owners; and fight off their increasingly carnivorous competitors. And to help readers swallow their capitalistic medicine, they must ensure that is is well sweetened. Hence the liberal supply of advertisements and features tailored to their ‘up-market’ requirements. (To go through The Observer's colour supplement is — for this ‘down-market’ contributor at least — a bit like window-shopping around Harrod’s with empty pockets on a wet Sunday afternoon.)

Long-standing familiarity with some of the ‘heavies’ has confirmed an unshakeable conviction that, considered as an exercise in democratic open-handedness, their political and economic ingredient constitutes a pitiful sham. It is the inevitable result of editorial policies as prohibitive as anything offered us by that other tightly controlled and highly effective filter of news and views, the BBC.

MERCENARY ART

To take just one well-known political columnist (who can serve as a typical example of all practitioners of that mercenary art): Peter Jenkins, of The Guardian. What he consistently offers us, however elaborately, is a hollow apology for all the crass inefficiencies of an outdated and corrupt system in decline, coupled with an ill-concealed attack on millions of ordinary wage-earners who are struggling to maintain a falling standard of living. In short, Jenkins’ efforts over the years have proved to be no more than a dismal and manifestly bankrupt attempt to convince us that the symptoms of capitalism can be cured while ignoring the disease the capitalist system itself.

Then we have capitalist politics as expressed through editorials. An amusing example was provided by The Observer during the recent general election campaign. Condescending to present us all with a breakdown on any and every issue relating to the struggle of British capitalism to survive its own inadequacies, The Observer had earlier pretended to coyness as to what it intended to exhort us to do at the polling booths. (We were expected, no doubt, to hold our breaths.) As if it made a scrap of difference to the working class what The Observer thought; or, come to that, which of capitalism's would-be executives formed the next government. As the election has once again demonstrated, capitalist politics has reduced itself to the level of a Whitehall farce in which the participants share the same bed.

VOYEURISTIC INCLINATIONS

Should you - knowing your place - consider yourself a member of the self-styled middle classes (you are a grocer’s daughter, perhaps), you will probably prefer to slum it with Peregrine Worsthorne and the Daily Telegraph. That organ’s correspondence columns can read like a page out of Mary Whitehouse’s diary. And should you feel like indulging your more voyeuristic inclinations, then its super gossip columnist, who displays his shoddy merchandise over the pseudonym of Peterborough, is very definitely your man. Never a one to deny himself an opportunity for sycophantic name-dropping or sly innuendo, this urban scribe will happily conduct you around the world of the well-heeled: the current ‘in’ people, the power-holders and seekers, Belgravian socialites, senior churchmen, royal personages, and other parasites having no visible means of support. (It is instructive to note how few of Peterborough’s subjects are without that instantly recognisable imprimatur of the capitalists and their hangers-on: the ability to live high-off-the-hog without the need to resort to so sordid and time-wasting an activity as work.)

From the foregoing it may correctly be deduced that we cast a jaundiced eye over the ‘serious’ press. This is born of many years of critical observation, years during which ‘responsible’ journalists have consistently demonstrated, through wordy outpourings, their servile conformity to the requirements of their owners and the capitalist system in which they operate. And all this in the name of democracy and free speech.

Of course, such dogged loyalty must not be allowed to go unrewarded. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. One of them springs immediately to mind. By the time this article appears in print the recent general election campaign will have become history. Capitalism’s executive committee will have settled into its pile carpets and its chauffered limousines — all ready to dispense the inevitable patronage in one form or another to its more effective and obliging friends. We may be confident that among the earliest recipients will figure not a few of the most diligent of them all: those drawn from the upper echelons of Fleet Street.

Richard Cooper