Political Notes: Labour love in (1982)

The Political Notes Column from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour love in

In November 1980 Michael Foot defeated Denis Healey in the parliamentary election for the leadership of the Labour Party. This victory was regarded by many people in the Labour Party as signalling an important change, as with a new, dynamic, “left-wing" politician as leader, the next Labour government would be able to begin, once again, the job of running the profit-system in ways it claims are beneficial to the working class.

As Foot's ascendancy was greeted from some quarters with great enthusiasm, we were not encouraged to remember that he had been Minister of Unemployment in the last Labour government when the number in the dole queues had doubled. The large membership of the Labour Party is not united in sharing a single political objective and Foot's inability to smooth out major disagreements between the fighting factions has led to speculation that he is about to be ousted from his position.

The names of Denis Healey, Tony Benn and Roy Hattersley have all been rumoured as possible successors. As the ideas of these heirs apparent are canvassed it is worth remembering that they all give general support to the profit system. The Institute of Directors in Scotland recently invited Healey to address them on “How any future Labour government would not be a bad thing for business, or for free enterprise" (Observer, 5 September 1982) to which Healey readily agreed. A twist to the episode came when Denis — engaging in some free enterprise himself — asked for a £500 fee on top of his expenses, and the Institute, unwilling to pay his free market rate, went elsewhere for a speaker.

Tony Benn, although often mistakenly associated with the word “Socialism", does not advocate revolution. By his own admission he believes that capitalism can be changed to work in our interests by a series of reform measures. In the 27 August edition of New Socialist, the Labour Party magazine, Benn urged certain reforms regarding the constitutional power of the cabinet to declare and end a war and the monarch's power to dissolve Parliament and invite someone to form a government. He does not urge the arrangement of society so that there will be no need or use for monarchs, governments or wars.

Wars fought over the interests of the ruling class — over markets, trade routes, raw materials and strategic areas — are not democratic occurrences. Soldiers are not, for instance, asked by their commanding officers whether they would care to engage in killing “the enemy". But this is what Benn would like to see: "The making of war and conclusion of peace should be subject to the consent of the Commons".

In an interview after his article had been published, he described his proposals as “modest". The scale on which our lives are impoverished and made insecure by capitalism is not “modest" and this social structure cannot be dismantled by piecemeal measures.

As Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley has been busy trying to cultivate an image of respectability, perhaps in order to be regarded as a person “responsible" enough to be trusted in higher office. Unveiling a proposed policy to be debated at this year’s Labour Party conference. Hattersley said that the next Labour government will adopt “a compassionate and moral attitude" towards immigration. He said the approach would be not to treat immigration issues as a numbers game about black people.

From the point of view of his vote-catching potential. Hattersley must have been pleased to have made his opinion clear, lest his support for the racially discriminatory 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act was remembered. For all his endearing “compassion”, he is still firmly in favour of the world being artificially divided into nations and of people's mobility being shackled by their "nationality". Being interviewed on News at Ten (ITV) last month, he was asked whether, by wishing to case the pressures on immigration, he was implicitly condoning the actions of some "illegal immigrants”? “Oh No", he replied, “I am very much against illegal immigration, and I favour catching illegal immigrants and sending them home.”

More love

In a pamphlet, The Labour Party — Myth and Reality, published by the Socialist Workers Party, the role which the Labour Party has played in supporting capitalism is described in some detail and many examples are given of its impotency to remove the problems we suffer in a class-divided society. It speaks correctly about the "myth that the Labour Party can be won to socialist politics". It concludes, however, with the ludicrously illogical statement, “We even support the Labour Party against the Tories, until we are in a position to replace it". If you continue to give support to something you will, of course, never be able to replace it. For, although it may have escaped the attention of the Leninist intelligentsia of the SWP. you cannot both support and oppose the same political party.

Racist repentant?

In his early days as governor of Alabama, George Wallace would get his audiences going in that Deep South fortress of racial persecution with a chant: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.

Well forever is a long time and it was a notably different Wallace who recently went on the campaign trail for another term (or rather to win the Democratic nomination, which amounts to the same thing). The old favourite of the Ku Klux Klan came out as a bold champion of equal rights between white and black.

No secret was made about the reason for this. Few black votes were allowed in Alabama in the old days but now about a quarter of the state’s registered voters are black. Wallace badly needed their support. Leaving nothing (he hoped) to chance he also declared himself a fervent friend of god (religious groups like the Born Again Christians have quite a political influence in the Deep South).

The old Wallace was a chilling politician; in face of his racist mob oratory, one did not know whether to laugh, cry, or run for cover. It was easy to forget, then, that he had not always spouted these vicious prejudices; he came out as a white racist only after his first attempt at being governor failed because he was too “liberal”. The lesson he learned is that, if there are votes in it, you must out-racist the racists—or, now, try to out-liberal the liberals.

If Wallace is to be taken seriously, it must be in a way he does not intend. His cynical, vote-grubbing changes of policy, careless as they are of the effect on the conditions — and in the case of Alabama it used to be on the very lives — of people, were always inspired by a single-minded ambition for power.

They may be represented now as caricatures but if so it is because, like caricatures, they have a basic validity, illustrating the nature of the features they emphasise.

Wallace’s campaigns, with all their swings, have one message. The politics of capitalism are cynical, corrupt and decadent, typical of the social system itself.

Sunshine

Geoffrey Howe has never been famous as the Conservatives’ little ray of sunshine but even at that his latest thoughts on the matter of unemployment were gloomy enough to depress the dole queues even further.

Interviewed on Radio Two by Jimmy Young (who tries to be famous as everyone’s little ray of etc., etc.), Howe said that the peak of unemployment has not yet been reached (in other words, things will get worse) and that “It’s bound to take a long time” before the jobless figures begin to fall.

Well if anyone is supposed to know about these things it is the Chancellor of the Exchequer but the unemployed can take comfort; Howe, like his predecessors, has a notable record for getting his prophecies about the economy wrong.

In May 1980, flushed after his first year in charge at the Treasury, he exulted “. . . inflation would start to move down after July, the economy would resume its growth from next year, interest rates would come down ‘in due course’ and there were still many opportunities for firms to expand” (Daily Telegraph, 29 May 1980).

Just over a year later, Howe was definite that he had done the trick, claiming that “there was an accumulation of evidence” which justified him in saying that “the recession was over” (The Times, 10 August 1981).

If Howe was wrong when he said that things were getting better for British capitalism, he can also be wrong when he groans that they are getting worse. Both prophecies are false for the same reason: no Chancellor, nor any of the hordes of “experts” who offer their advice (whether asked for or not) can predict the course of capitalism’s economy. If it were otherwise, they might be able to eliminate booms and slumps and instead organise an even progress to prosperity.

Their obvious impotence should of itself be enough to ensure that no worker anywhere will ever vote for them again. What will actually happen, at the next election, is that people will leave the dole queues to join those at the polling stations, lining up to opt for another spell of anarchy and poverty. And that is a little ray of sunshine for Howe.

Political Notes: Social Democrats so what (1982)

The Political Notes Column from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social Democrats so what

Who cares about the leadership of the Social Democrats?

Well Roy Jenkins cares. No banqueting table ever received so delighted a slaver from him as when, declared the winner of the leadership contest, he contemplated the new brilliance of his once-glimmering hopes of becoming Prime Minister. “Our aim is to . . . make a major breakthrough to government". he asserted. David Owen cares. Second in the two-man race, he did not actually say "I want an important job in any future SDP government". What he did gulp out of his chagrin was: "Roy Jenkins is a friend of mine and we will work very much together". The SDP membership cares. Nearly 76 per cent of them cast their votes in the election for the man who, they hope, will head the next government over British capitalism.

But should anyone care about the outcome of this supreme non-event? A little more than 47,000 members of the SDP expressed a preference for one or other of two politicians who are inseparably associated with one of the most dismal failures in recent history. Jenkins’ time as Chancellor of the Exchequer was marked by a savage assault on working class living standards and by a succession of economic crises, all of which were clearly beyond his control. Owen was Foreign Secretary through an average period of international tension and conflict (including early rumblings of the Falklands war). If he had any ability or knowledge of how to eliminate these problems, he successfully concealed it.

Politicians have to base their appeal on a veiled assurance that there is some sort of magic trick of competence, learning or skill which can be applied to make capitalism run in the interests of its peoples. So far, even the slickest of them have not been able to perform the promised miracle. It is depressing, if unsurprising, that there are 65,000 workers in the SDP who are naive enough to believe that a tedious rehash of the discredited tricks of the other parties of capitalism can have any effect on the system's ailments.

An authentic desire to break the political mould would lead to the discarding of all the parties who stand for capitalism. To the detriment of the human race, few workers care about that at present.

Polish capitalism

For several months now, Poland has been under martial law, and very little information has been forthcoming about developments there. But there are still thousands of trade unionists imprisoned for their activities. Solidarity is still operating underground. There have been several demonstrations against the regime which the armed thugs of the state have brutally put down with water-cannon and truncheons.

But why is independent trade-union activity and the wage rises it might gain such a horrible threat in the eyes of Jaruzelski and the other representatives of capital and profit in Poland? On July 7, Polish leaders met their Western bank creditors in Vienna to negotiate the further rescheduling of debts. The Polish rulers are still over 27 billion dollars in debt, having borrowed large amounts to finance the boom of the 'seventies.

With the onset of world recession in the 'eighties, they are finding it impossible to repay these debts, both because of the lack of resources internally and the decreased purchases in the West of Polish exports — the preferred method of repayment.

As the Financial Times put it: “Even if Polish productivity accelerated sharply, the world recession would prevent the West from buying as much as the generals in Warsaw would like” (26 January 1982). Previous rescheduling has meant that two billion dollars of capital, plus interest, are due to be repaid this year.

The Polish rulers say they can do neither, and although some of the Western governments have made hypocritically pious noises about the martial law regime, the bankers themselves are generally anxious to see their Polish counterparts do anything they can to screw more wealth out of the Polish workers, for the repayment at least of the interest. They complain that their capital has been invested without purpose since they have not seen a profit.

All of these developments prove beyond the slightest doubt that state-capitalist countries like Poland and Russia are giant corporations, which fit quite consistently into the overall framework of world capitalism, with its exploitation of wage labour by capital to accumulate profit.

Anyone for democracy?

Even for the House of Commons — where they are not unwaveringly in touch with reality — it was a remarkable day when David Owen got up to voice his concern for the welfare of the trade unions. Was this the man who was Foreign Secretary in the government which ruled during the infamous winter of discontent?

Worse was to come. Owen’s unoriginal opinion that the collapse of the NUR strike proved the need for an extension of democratic procedures in the unions was applauded by Margaret Thatcher. Was this the Prime Minister presiding over the present ruthless assault on the unions?

Thatcher foresaw the introduction of new laws to force the unions to hold secret ballots before calling a strike. It is popularly viewed that such laws would drastically reduce the number and incidence of strikes. The theory is that stolid, responsible trade unionists who want only to be left in peace to surrender up the maximum of surplus value to their employers are being harassed and misled into strikes they oppose by militant trade union leaders. Just let the silent majority have its voice, runs the theory, and there will be very, very few strikes.

It is not so long ago that the opposite theory was popular with the likes of Owen and Thatcher. In those days the union leadership (men like Arthur Deakin and Tom Williamson) were respected as bulwarks resisting the pressure for strikes from the union membership. The result was often that the pressure boiled over into "unofficial” strikes — which meant that the members were in favour of them but the leadership would not organise them. The House of Commons then did not hear calls from vain politicians for the majority of trade unionists to have its way. Instead, it heard thanks and praise for the undemocratic, resisting leaders.

In any case, Thatcher and Owen got it wrong. There is no evidence that ballots would reduce strikes; it is very possible that a strike called after a ballot would be that much stronger and determined and therefore difficult for the employers to break. Above it all is the fact that industrial disputes arise directly, unavoidably, from the class struggle. There is no doubt which side Owen and Thatcher are on. A more democratic, more powerful trade union movement will be built in spite of their opposition.

Political Notes: It’s an honour (1983)

The Political Notes Column from the August 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s an honour

There has never been any reason to believe that Harold Wilson had designs to abolish himself so there must be some other explanation for the fact that, although when he was prime minister he announced that no more hereditary peers would be created, now that he is out of parliament he is reported to have accepted — to have wanted — such an honour for himself.

Of course this may be yet another — if especially obscure — example of Labour Party gradualism, of the theory that capitalism will eventually find itself ended through a succession of near-imperceptible steps. It is something over fifty years since the Labour Party announced that one such step would be the abolition of the House of Lords and Wilson's stated preference for the creation of life, as opposed to hereditary, lords was greeted as a gradualist move in the process of abolition sometime.

This enthusiasm — Labour supporters starved of real progress, have had to learn to exist on such contemptible crumbs — must have been dented when the police began to take a deep interest in several of the eminences so recently ennobled by Wilson.

Capitalism can do very nicely — as it does in places like America, France and Russia — without the tradition of dressing people up in funny clothes, pinning bits of ribbon and metal on them and giving them funny titles. Which is not to say that the system does not have some picturesque rewards for those who have given it special service.

Harold Wilson was one of these. He came to power through a skilfully worded pledge that working class problems could easily be conjured away through something called the technological revolution; that the micro chip would alter the basic nature of capitalism. Predictably, he and his government were soon bogged down in crisis. Their fine promises were forgotten as they grappled to deplete workers’ living standards. When they lost power they were thoroughly exposed and discredited and since then no more is heard of the harvest to be reaped from the white hot technological revolution. By any standards, a notable achievement by Wilson. He fully deserves his honour; capitalism has looked on him and found him to be good.

Head count

The debate over the restoration of the death penalty was loaded with moral considerations and much talk about the ethics of the judicial taking of life and the right of society to respond to a murder by itself murdering the killer. Almost everyone who took part agreed that this was a very important issue because with human lives at stake a careful and informed discussion was necessary. When it was over and the votes had been counted everyone could go home congratulating themselves for playing their part in such a highly charged occasion with full regard to their grave responsibility.

But what sort of problem were they talking about? If the death penally is restored so that it applies as it did before the Homicide Act of 1957 — before the introduction of degrees of murder — there will be about one execution a week in Britain. If a Bill goes through in this form, something like 60 people will die who would otherwise survive to serve a life sentence.

Now there is no denying that the death penalty is a disfiguring barbarity. There is no denying that the vast majority of murders can be said to be some sort of response to the inhumanities which capitalism imposes on its people, and which it expects them to survive with patience and conformity. But in comparison to the tens of millions who die each year through the simple fact that capitalism can’t meet the needs of the human race, the numbers who might be despatched by the hangman in Britain are insignificant. If MPs. and others who were convinced that they were arguing about moral issues, about the sanctity of human life, were sincere why are they so consistently able to ignore this massively greater death toll?

The answer is simple. The apologists for capitalism can discuss an issue like the death penalty, with its strictly limited scope, without ever needing to consider the wider and deeper responsibility of this social system for the problem. The whole thing can be talked out in terms of ethics, religion, insignificant reforms; when it is over capitalism is left undisturbed.

This is a much more comfortable way of approaching an issue, than one which might call into question the basics of society, their effect on people and the fact that this social system must degrade the people who keep it in existence. As so often happens, the debate on the death penalty was really about granting capitalism yet another reprieve.

Up school

Margaret Thatcher has not made her name as a political tactician of historic subtlety so perhaps she was unaware that, by sacking Francis Pym, she was depriving some of her opponents of one of their most cherished illusions. Pym's departure from the government meant that, with the exception of the increasingly ridiculous Lord Hailsham, there is now not one Old Etonian in the Cabinet — to say the least, an unusual situation for a Tory government and one to cause consternation in London's clubland.

It has always been a favourite left-wing pastime to tot up the numbers of Tory ministers who spent their schooldays at Eton and Harrow and to produce the result as proof that a Conservative government is in the hands of a small, privileged, self-perpetuating clique. At times, there seemed to be something to be said for this theory. Harold Macmillan, for example, seemed to go out of his way to give some top jobs, not just to Old Etonians but to those who were related to him. The lesson we were invited by the left wing to draw from this was that a government full of such high born people could not possibly understand, and deal with, the problems of the “ordinary” people and that we should therefore vote for a party with a less exclusive background.

Unhappily for this theory, we had the experience of Labour governments, many of whose ministers had not only not been to public school but had sometimes had very little formal schooling at all. Some of them were fond of reminding us of this, by applying an eccentric pronunciation which removed aitches from where they should be and stuck them back on where they should not be.

Jimmy Thomas was one such eminence; another was Ernie Bevin. Their place in political history is assured; they were zealous workers for the interests of the British capitalist class at no matter what cost to the class of their origin, the class which can't send its children to Eton or Roedean and which suffers the effects of the social system which Thomas and Bevin helped to administer.

Thomas, after a spell drunkenly contemplating the deepening misery of British workers in the slump of the late twenties, saved his miserable skin by joining the National government with the Tories and the Liberals. His aristocratic friends were much amused by his comical terminology. Bevin, among his many other achievements, saw British workers committed to the slaughter of the Korean war and the start of the British nuclear weapon programme.

The familial and social beginnings of the people who run capitalism is of absolutely no account. It is working class acquiescence in the system which is important. Without that the leaders would be impotent and redundant and we would have a society free of conflict and privilege.

Blogger's Note:

On the subject of capital punishment, this issue of the Socialist Standard also had a longer article on the subject: British rope trick

Political Notes: They have been warned (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

They have been warned

It seems always to escape the attention of most of the people who vote for it, but every period of Labour rule in this country has been notable for a bitter fight with the working class over wages.

To add insult to injury, Labour ministers have the impudence to tell us that they are fighting us for our own good. The late Richard Crossman went so far as to describe a Labour incomes policy (which in plainer language means wage cuts) as “socialism”, on the argument that everyone (every worker, that is) was supposed to suffer equally under it.

Workers who resisted wage restraint have always been dubbed by Labour governments as saboteurs of their plans for abundance and security. Thus Attlee’s lot castigated “communist agitators” in the mines and the docks: Wilson huffed and puffed about “a small minority of politically motivated” seamen fomenting a strike in the merchant navy; Callaghan had his “winter of discontent”.

Well, they are still at it, even though they are out of power. Last month’s TUC spent some time discussing how they thought the issue of wages would be handled under a Labour government. Their clear decision against wage restraint was no comfort to Peter Shore, the man lined up to be Labour’s next Chancellor of the Exchequer and who, like all his predecessors, is hoping the unions will do a deal with him and so save all that unpleasantness about striking.

Shore’s disappointed response to the vote was to offer a euphemism fit to take its place among the countless others uttered by Labour leaders about pay. He talked about a “new economic consensus” in which pay would be an element. These menacing words promise battles to come, if the workers are foolish enough to think that another Labour government would handle the crises of capitalism any better than the Tories.

And that is something which the unions still, in spite of all that experience can teach them, seem determined to fight for. For example Postal Workers’ leader Tom Jackson advised the assembly to “pray for the return of a Labour government”.

Well, they have been warned.

Nothing new

The Social Democrats, as is clear to anyone who can swallow an outworn cliche, are a party with a new outlook; a fresh departure from the weary, discredited old gang who have made such a mess of running Britain. Well anyway that’s what they say.

It is, of course, impertinent for people like Roy Jenkins and David Owen to claim that they stand for anything new — and especially so when they are simply rehashing the elements of the mess they themselves managed when they were in office.

Of a type with this is the squabble which went on over the election of a SDP leader. In the course of this, the bonhomie which bonded the Four into a Gang, in those carefree days of the Limehouse Declaration, was seen to be melting fast in the heat of the battle for the top job in the party.

It is instructive to note the line up in the preliminary clash in this battle, over the method of electing the SDP chairman and their leader in Parliament. Jenkins and William Rodgers forgot all about this desire to get away from the old style and plumped for election of the leader by MPs only (and so did the majority of SDP MPs) which was the very method used by the Labour Party before they changed it at their Wembley Conference last year.

On the other hand Owen and Shirley Williams went for election by the entire membership and this is also interesting because it was when Labour changed their rules for electing their leader to something like this that the Gang of Four decided that they had had enough. Well at least none of them can be blamed for being hidebound by principle.

So even before they have an agreed constitution, or the necessary programme of promises with which to deceive the electors, the SDP is in the sort of mess we have grown accustomed to seeing from the Old Gang parties of capitalism. A mess of cynicism, backtracking and double dealing. And in that there is nothing new.

Long knives

It was not exactly a Night of the Long Knives, more like a month of them because, if the copious leaks to the press were any guide, Thatcher took some weeks in deciding on the reshaping of her government. It is said, for example, that Ian Gilmour wrote his resignation statement a month before he got the chop.

Significant beyond all the chit-chat about how many wives, children, neckties, pieces of toast for breakfast, the new ministers had, is the fact that so drastic a reshuffle indicates a serious crumbling of support among Thatcher’s higher ranks.

Now it would need a very naive person to believe that this is due to any concern for working class suffering. If Thatcher had been lucky enough to be in office during a boom, with belching chimneys blackening the sky and all the Job Centres empty of customers, there is little doubt that people like Gilmour and Prior would not have found much to quarrel with in her policies.

When Gilmour warned that the government is steering “full speed ahead for the rocks” he probably meant the rocks of electoral defeat. It is by that standard that the administrations of capitalism are judged. None of them can master the system; they blunder a while in the dark and how they are remembered by the working class is something largely out of their control.

Perhaps the Tories are beginning to think they are having bad luck with their leader, who can’t be helping their prospects with her pose of stubborn belief in her own rectitude and by her liking for giving the other side some wonderful propaganda chances.

Political Notes: Another wasted Irish martyr (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another wasted Irish martyr

It is usual for IRA activists to be condemned by their opponents as cowardly thugs but that description could hardly be applied to the hunger strikers so the media hacks had to search for other words. They were not very successful.

Their confidence may have got the boost it needed, as Bobby Sands lay dying, from the' appeal by Northern Ireland Secretary Humphrey Atkins for, people not to heed lies and rumours but to pay attention to local councillors and clergymen and to “monitor the media".

The idea that local politicians and priests can be relied on to tell the truth is simply ludicrous, since if they did so they would drop out of capitalist politics and stop peddling religious nonsense.

All of these deal, in either side of the conflict, in the basic absurdity that the troubles in Ireland stem from religious differences. Such bigotries may inspire some of the nastier violence, and give fuel to the more extreme incitement by self-seeking politicians. This may make the bigotries appear as the cause of the problems when in fact they are part of the symptoms.

For Ireland is split, like any other of the artificial divisions in capitalist society, on lines of clashing economic interests. The incidental political and religious-theories simply bedevil and aggravate the problem, which will not be permanently resolved short of abolishing its cause — the private properly basis of capitalist society.

The hunger strikers were undoubtedly brave and steadfast literally unto death. Their martyrdom—for such was the object of their fast—obscured the essential fact that they were also tragic men. For their courage and steadfastness were applied in the interests of one side in a struggle in which they, as members of the working class, had no interests.

So the tragedy was that, having so much to give, they were content to give it only to be wasted.

Pay out at the bank

Among the many betes noires which torment the repose of all crusading lefties one of the blackest and most beastly is Barclays Bank.

The reason, as is well known to all cheque book holders, is that Barclays have a lot of investments in South Africa, whose racist oppression rouses those same lefties to a frenzy of protest no less intense for being discriminatory in its target.

This has reached the point when Barclay's Annual General Meeting is a sort of day out for the protesters who, perhaps because it is after all one of the Big Five Banks, usually include some expensively trendy lefties.

This year, for example, there was ravishing actress Julie Christie, indignantly bobbing golden curls in attack on the policies of the South African government. Possibly she is the trendiest — certainly she is among the most attractive of the protesters so far. At all events something persuaded the Bank to stop stone walling for a change and guardedly agree with some of the criticisms.

Retiring Barclays chairman Anthony Tuke did this, however, with some spirit, pointing out that about 300 other British companies also operate in South Africa and that one of Barclay’s first objects is to promote the exports of British capitalism td that country.

Now this was pretty shrewd of him, because British exports are dear to the heart of all British lefties as they are supposed to provide jobs for British workers (even if at the cost of jobs to other workers abroad  — perhaps in South Africa).

Barclays invest in South Africa for the same reason as all other capitalist concerns invest anywhere — to promote the process of profit making, which means the process of working class exploitation. As long as the government takes care of that aspect, the concerns need not worry too much about its other policies, however brutal and repressive they may be.

That is a fact of capitalist life—and such facts are habitually not easily absorbed by lefties who prefer publicity worthy demonstrations to effective remedies.

French lesson

The victory of Mitterand in the French Presidential election was another self-inflicted defeat for the working class.

Anyone who doubts this need only consider some of the utterances, before and after the result, by the two candidates. First Giscard, speaking just before the vote at that infamous World War 1 charnel house Verdun, asserted that of all the candidates only he had been in the army when the war in Europe ended in May 1945. As if being a soldier in a war necessarily makes a person a more desirable president. As if patriotism is a tenable, useful principle instead of a baseless and anti social fallacy. In any case Giscard was telling less than the truth, since his time in the army (as if it mattered) was actually less than that of Mitterand, who spent much of the war as a prisoner.

Mitterand had his own lies to tell. "It was a victory for youth, labour, creativity and renewal and will set off an enormous national upsurge” he exulted, too carefree — like his jubilant supporters in the streets — to recall the innumerable similar claims made by other victors before him, all of them discredited.

This mixture of deception and empty promises is fairly representative of the standard of debate in capitalism’s elections. Its object is not to encourage knowledge and participation but to ensure ignorance and apathy. Tragically, the working class swallow this muck and cast their vote in accordance with it.

When will they weary of this insulting, degrading, self-destructive process? When will they grasp the fact that they are the people who conceive, design and produce everything in society but allow themselves to be conned out of taking possession of it?

This is the measure of the defeats the workers inflict on themselves when they wastc their votes at election time by giving them for the continuance of capitalism. At such times they could resolve that capitalism shall be brought to an immediate end. But in France, as elsewhere, the message is that the deceit is still regarded as palatable and so capitalism grinds on.

Political Notes: Rats and twisters (1985)

The Political Notes Column from the June 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rats and twisters

The Tory government looks set to clobber another vulnerable section of the working class — the elderly — by abolishing the State Earnings Related Pensions Scheme (SERPS). This is part of Norman Fowler's Review of Social Security which, he claims, is intended to ensure that expenditure on Social Security is "targeted" at the most needy groups in society. The truth is that the capitalist class is beginning to panic at the cost of providing for the increasing number of old age pensioners in the population and are looking for ways to cut public expenditure on social security including pensions. (The Tories are also planning to end the death grant and maternity grant and to cut housing benefit.)

The alternative to SERPS being offered to workers is that they top up their basic state pension (insufficient on its own to provide even the basic necessities of life) by paying into private pension schemes during their working lives. This of course assumes that we have jobs that pay enough that we can afford to do this.

When these changes were aired in the House of Commons recently the Labour Party leadership s criticisms of the new measures were largely confined to gripes about the Tories "ratting'' on an election pledge leading to the accusation by that model of political integrity, Neil Kinnock, that Thatcher was a "twister". Clearly this display was intended only to discredit the Tories in the eyes of the electorate. No one in the Labour Party or any other party present in the House of Commons during this exchange questioned the system of society in which elderly workers who have outlived their usefulness to capitalism are then forced to suffer the indignity of poverty in their old age.

Any capitalist government, whether Tory. Labour or Alliance, will only pay the minimum in social security benefits and pensions that it can get away with without their electoral fortunes being adversely affected. The Labour Party, that self-appointed champion of social justice, is clearly far more concerned to show up the Tories in the worst possible light and so damage their electoral chances than to ask fundamental and urgent questions about the nature of capitalist society.

Young, jobless, homeless . . .

At the beginning of May this year new rules governing payment of board and lodging allowances to young unemployed people came into force, which will make the plight of these particular victims of capitalism still worse. Under the new rules Supplementary Benefit claimants under the age of 25 and living in hostels, lodgings or bed and breakfast accommodation are likely to have their benefit cut unless they move to another area or return to their parents’ home.

These rule changes have come about as a result of revelations last year that seaside bed and breakfast establishments in the south of England were advertising in areas of high unemployment like Merseyside, in the belief that if they attracted claimants as residents they could charge high rents which would then be paid by social security. The impression given by the press was that large numbers of unemployed were living in luxury in hotels at the seaside at the expense of the state.

In fact most bed and breakfast establishments which cater for claimants are grossly overcrowded and of a very low standard — whether they are situated in Brighton or Toxteth, and no unemployed person would choose to live in them if they had an alternative. These owners are not acting altruistically by providing "free" holidays for claimants but are merely exploiting a lucrative loophole in Social Security rules.

The new rules mean that young unemployed people forced for whatever reason to live in this kind of accommodation. will only be able to claim the full cost of their lodgings for a limited period after which time they will be forced either to move or try to manage on still less money. (And these changes will not just affect those living at the seaside.) The intention is to force them to return to the "family home". Of course this assumes that not only is there a "family home” to return to but also that they are welcome there and that the family is in a position to support an additional adult member of the family. Most people living in hostel or bed and breakfast accommodation are there precisely because such an alternative does not exist for them.

These callous new rules for lodging allowance are likely to increase homelessness, vagrancy and poverty among a section of the working class that is surplus to capital's requirement and therefore particularly vulnerable.

Wasted, minister

The government, following the recommendations of the Commons Trade and Industry Committee's report The Wealth of Waste, has appointed David Trippier as minister with responsibility for recycling waste. It might have been thought that this job would fall within the jurisdiction of the Department of the Environment. However, the fact that the new "Waste" minister is to be located instead within the Department of Trade and Industry gives us some clue to the real purpose behind the new appointment (that is. besides the obviously political one of being seen by the increasing proportion of the electorate who are concerned about ecological issues to be "doing something about the environment").

Clearly it is believed that there might be some money to be made in the recycling of waste. All the evidence, however, suggests that in fact the opposite is true: ecologically sound production and recycling of waste products cost more, which is why there is so much resistance to them. Despite the fact that the value of materials "lost" to industry is estimated to be £750 million (The Times, 16 April 1985), the cost of reclaiming such valuable resources as paper, glass, aluminium and copper is prohibitively high. To produce recycled paper, for example, can cost more than producing new paper.

Given the nature of capitalist production for profit it is therefore simply idealistic for people like Jonathan Porritt (director of Friends of the Earth) to express the hope that the government will make "a substantial and unequivocal commitment on recycling” (The Times, 16 April 1985). So long as profit is the purpose of production even the most well-intentioned, ecologically minded government will encounter serious resistance to ecologically sound but expensive production methods.

Political Notes: Left-right to nowhere (1981)

The Political Notes Column from the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Left-right to nowhere

In China the Gang of Four have just been tried for being too extreme. At the Special Labour Party conference in Wembley the Gang of Three looked extremely moderate while Hattersley looked moderately moderate and Benn looked moderately extreme and most people felt extremely confused and moderately indifferent. Meanwhile we are told that Roy Jenkins is Left of Centre, James Prior is Right of Centre, David Steel is Dead Centre and the Socialist Workers’ Party and the National Front so extremely Left and Right that they meet at weekends to throw stones at each other. Is this really what politics is all about?

Moderate and extreme are adjectives and without a noun they have no more meaning than very or rather. The unmentioned map to which all of these descriptions refer is the capitalist social order. Those to the Right want to run capitalism a certain way and those to the Left support different policies. But both are policies for the same system. Sometimes one policy is adopted by a government to the virtual exclusion of alternative policies and then it is called Extremism. When various types of policy are mixed together in one general government policy, as is usually the case, it is called Moderation. But whether Left, Right, Centre, Moderate or Extreme, they are all policies which represent the social interest of a section, or sections, of the present ruling class who possess their power because of their ownership of the means of life.

Does it make any difference to the majority of us, who are not in the ruling class, whether one government policy or another is pursued? To a limited extent it does, insofar as some policies can be more disastrous than others, but ultimately the overriding principles of the capitalist system are greater than any policies for running it. No policy, of capitalism, can get rid of unemployment or bad housing or war or poverty. This is because the primary law of capitalism is that profits of the few must always come before the needs of the many. As long as the majority of people elect leaders to run this system it will not basically change, whatever the labels of the leaders.

Thatcher’s so-called extreme Right wing approach has clearly failed. So did Heath’s so-called moderate Right wingery. The so-called moderate Left with their objective of the mixed economy has invariably resulted in the same old mixed-up economy. The Communist Party, which some regard as the extreme Left, supports import controls and British withdrawal from the Common Market, as does the National Front, which is generally regarded as extreme Right.

The new rag-bag Centre Party is designed to provide a home for political misfits who have been less successful than they had hoped to be in the other capitalist parties. The new party will continue to churn out the same failed policies in a desperate bid to find an acceptable face for capitalism. Those left in the centre may do alright and be extremely moderate, but still, if they ever obtain power, they will administer the same old vicious, destructive, inhumane system.

Fall in

Restless, paranoid Labour MP Alex Lyon is convinced he has uncovered a government scheme to push unemployed youths into military training in uniform. Official assurances on the matter are airily unreassuring. An Unemployment Discipline Expert writes: Cadjoling unemployed people into uniform for a bit of square bashing, bayonet practice or strike breaking (or Coercus Bellicosus as we experts call it) is not generally harmful although it should only be used under the supervision of an expert. There are quite a few pitfalls which may trap the unwary.

To begin with, a few trouble makers may ask why we stop at unemployed youth. What is wrong with recruiting anyone who is not working—pensioners, hospital patients, even dead people (before they are buried, of course). The problem, as I often say to my clients, has to be one of recognition. Without getting bogged down in all that university professor’s jargon, we have to be careful about our definitions. Some descriptions of the unemployed might include the royal family, the Vesteys, Roddy Llewellyn . . .

Then what about your honest-to-goodness, backbone-of-Britain sergeant major? When I was in the mob (as we squaddies used to call it) they wouldn’t have wanted Roddy Llewellyn out on their Barrack Square. So you see we experts have to.be very careful.

Why only the other day one of my clients, who was in need of a bit of advice about discipline for his invalid grandmother, asked me whether I didn’t think the Army was unemployed in the sense that they never actually produce anything. Shouldn’t they, he asked, be pressed into a super Army for unemployed Army people?

Well being an expert it didn’t take me long to point out that with all their destructive power the armed forces create lots of jobs for the building trade, although they do a bit of no good for the demolition contractors. Then what about the help they give to the unemployed problem by killing off all those actual or potential dole-drawers?

We may not yet have all the answers but I’m sure our boys in the back room have something sensational cooking up in all those test tubes and pipettes; they’ll find a solution in no time.

Reagan’s new role

Ronald Reagan won the Presidency on promises, implied or explicit, that he, who was once one of the nice guys of Hollywood, was going to get pretty nasty with quite a few people like the Iranians and the Russians. This got a lot of American workers excited enough to vote for Reagan. The new President needed a few days to recover from his sumptuous inaugural junketings and since then the world has waited with, as they say. bated breath for him to loose off America’s nuclear arsenal in all directions.

The fear—or, for quite a few American voters, the hope—that he will do so is founded in the assumption that politicians fulfil the promises they were elected on. Sometimes this is a matter of saying they will conform to a political character- Reagan’s tough guy, Kennedy’s cultured “liberalism”, Johnson’s comprehensive efficiency. But Johnson ended his one full term in chaos, with the demonstrators baying in the streets in protest at the seemingly endless bloodletting of Vietnam and the other excesses of Johnson’s government.

And the humane, liberal Kennedy was responsible for the Bay of Pigs, and later the ultimatum to Russia over Cuba, which almost lossed off those missiles nearly twenty years before Reagan came into the White House. In practise politicians do not just fail to keep their promises. Often they pursue a course which is the very opposite of what they seemed to represent w'hen they were campaigning for votes.

Thus de Gaulle did not after all crush the FLN in Algeria but did a deal with them which allowed them to take over the country. Thus Macmillan did not batter down the independence movements in the old British colonies in Africa but lubricated the processes of their breaking away from British rule. And thus Reagan, the professed warmonger, faced with the immediate emergencies of capitalism, may yet disappoint his supporters.

Political Notes: The Poor and the Rich (1987)

The Political Notes Column from the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Poor and the Rich

Dismal news for the purveyors of the grand Tory concept of the share-owning democracy. Since the Trustee Savings Bank was privatised in October 1986. over 700,000 shareholders have sold their stake. The number of shareholders has fallen from 3.15 million to 2.45 million and there has been a sharp rise in the numbers of companies and institutions owning more than 10,000 shares; of these, 95 hold more than 500,000.

Two things are suggested by these figures. One is that a great many people who bought the shares did so in order to sell them again quickly, to bring in an immediate profit. They did this because they are members of the working class who went through with the deal on borrowed money to get a small, immediate gain. The other follows: TSB is substantially in the hands of the capitalist, investing class. Workers who were misled into thinking that sinking a few pounds into privatised concerns changed their class status should think again.

The capitalist class as a class do not invest capital in order to quickly relinquish their ownership. They accumulate capital, they exploit the workers and they live — very comfortably — off the proceeds of that. They do not depend on a wage for their living, jacked up with an occasional windfall like a pools win or cashing in a few shares.

Another piece of news illuminated how this class live, how they disburse some of the proceeds of worker exploitation and what standards of judgement they apply when they do this.

In Geneva a couple of weeks ago there was an auction of the jewellery which had been owned by the late Duchess of Windsor. Some readers will recall that she was married to the man who once declared that something must be done about the plight of unemployed miners in South Wales, although he never made it clear what he had in mind to be done. While he was expressing these newsworthy sentiments he was also filling up his future bride's jewel caskets with some impressive baubles — like a flamingo brooch of rubies, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires and a 31 carat diamond.

The sale was, said the Daily Telegraph, a High Society assault. Prominent among the moneyed storm troopers was Sam Moussaieff, who spent about £6 million. Asked how much he had spent, the amiable but forgetful Moussaieff replied that he thought it was £2 million ". . . but if it's much more that's a problem for my bank manager".

This rich and vulgar member of the ruling class might have some interesting things to say about workers who presume to count themselves among his class when the most they can afford is a brief but apparently heady fling into the TSB. And his bank manager would probably agree.

Making it Simple

There are plenty of people who believe it is a simple matter to pick off social problems, one after another, by projecting resources in their direction.

It certainly sounds simple. Hypothermia in the elderly? Increase pensions with a special Keeping Warm Grant. Penniless single parents? Introduce a new generous state benefit for unmarried mothers and fathers bringing up the kids on their own. Slums? Give massive government hand-outs to pay for the places to be renovated.

This would be more convincing were it not for the fact that these sorts of remedies have been tried before. Pressure groups who do a great job analysing particular aspects of poverty always come to the conclusion that the solution is for the government to spend the problem into oblivion. And of course in many cases the pressure groups made their point, so that the system of state benefits is a tangle of allowances and adjustments each one of which, when it was introduced, was supposed to mean the end of the difficulty.

However, the success or failure of these measures can be judged by the fact there is still seen to be a need for them. Hardly a week goes by without some organisation somewhere publishing a report which couples an analysis of some problem with a demand that extra resources should be allocated to solving it.

Among the most recent of these was the august British Medical Association, whose Board of Science concluded, according to the Guardian of 28 March, that unemployment, poverty and deprivation are all linked to ill- health. Just before that the Health Education Council had reached a similar conclusion.

Those who have been concerned about the effect of capitalism on human well-being will wonder why it needs an investigation, in 1987, to tell us about this. However, it is clear that in these reports there is at least the germ of enlightenment — the beginning of recognition that sickness is not an accident or a matter of individual failing but is influenced by which class a person belongs to. This can be developed and expanded; if sickness is class-related it follows that a lot of illness is preventable — but only by doing something about class society.

And what is involved in that? The only effective action is to abolish classes, to abolish the social system which gives rise to them. This is a radical, revolutionary measure which means fundamental social change to a completely different set of relationships, a completely different way of running the world. Its radical nature is probably the very thing which makes people wary of it; the majority prefer reform to revolution, opting for tinkering with social problems rather than abolishing them.

So we shall still, for a while, have to keep reading these reports. Until people decide to do it the simple, obvious way.

Excessive force

At the beginning of June last year a convoy of self-styled "travellers" attempted to get to Stonehenge with the intention of holding a pop festival. They were prevented from reaching their destination by a massive police operation involving police from a number of different forces and a series of road blocks. It resulted in vehicles belonging to the travellers being damaged and impounded, and 537 of them being arrested. There were many complaints about the violence of the police operation by the travellers themselves and from people who were appalled to see television pictures of police behaving violently to women and children, dragging people out of vehicles and smashing windows with their truncheons.

Nine months later the supposedly independent Police Complaints Authority has published its report in which they concede that some police officers did use excessive force against members of the travellers' convoy. But they conclude:

  In the act of making the arrests some officers clearly used excessive force, but it has not been possible to identify them amongst the 1.363 officers involved and therefore disciplinary proceedings which demand a clear identification of officers are impossible.

The difficulty of identifying police officers responsible for violent incidents is becoming a familiar story. It's strange how the police seem to have very little difficulty in identifying suspects from among crowds of rioters or football spectators or on a picket line? Of course, part of the problem might be that unlike their opponents, the police in the Stonehenge incident entered the fray wearing full riot gear including helmets with face visors which, it would seem, not only protect them from the sticks and stones which, it is always alleged, are thrown at them, but also from later identification when things get nasty.

But to focus on individuals responsible for using "excessive force" is to miss the point. For disciplinary action against a few "over-zealous" policemen would not stop the police from using violence. Because ultimately, despite all the rhetoric about "the rule of law" and "policing by consent", the police operate through the threat or actual use of force. The police are part of the coercive machinery of the capitalist state and as such have a right, given to them by the capitalist class, to use violence. The arguments can, therefore, only really be at the margins — about how much violence is reasonable in a given set of circumstances and what constitutes "excessive force". So long as the Police Complaints Authority are left to decide those questions nothing much is likely to change.

Be Unreasonable

Through the jungles of morality, the search goes on for the Reasonable Person. It is led by Tory MPs who want to bring back capital punishment for killings which a Reasonable Person would consider evil and to wipe out from broadcasting any matter which a Reasonable Person would find distasteful.

Many people might consider every person killed in a war, or who dies from hunger or avoidable disease, to have been subjected to an evil murder. Then again such people might think politicians and media operators who look for advantage in stirring up public hysteria to be extremely offensive and distasteful. But of course that sort of person is clearly unreasonable — not at all what the searchers are looking for.

As every Reasonable Person knows, a Reasonable Person believes that private property society has always existed and must therefore go on for ever. They think human beings are essentially greedy, deceitful and belligerent and can be kept under control only through savage punishment — which means that class society, in which a minority lives like parasites off the labours of the majority — is perfectly natural. They give obeisance to leaders, on the assumption that we are all so stupid that we need royalty, aristocrats and politicians to tell us how to run our lives — who must also tell us, because otherwise we wouldn't know, what is evil and what is virtuous. They are patriotic, with firm suspicions about the eccentric failings of all foreigners, who are fit only to be slaughtered in war. They believe that their bosses employ them as a favour and that they should in return do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.

Unreasonable persons question all of this. They are acutely aware that this social system which relies on the support of Reasonable Persons degrades, exploits, represses and murders millions of people. They know that almost every instance of human suffering in the modern world is not only unnecessary but could be substituted by freedom, security and happiness.

That is why they stand, unreasonably, for the free expression and exchange of ideas they know that in that way the case for a new society is most available for discussion. That is why they are in a movement which has no use for leaders to tell them what to do and what is good or bad for them — which applies especially to a bunch of pompous, dictatorial. self-righteous Tories.

A Look at China

The April issue of New Internationalist concentrated on China and the reforms there over the last ten years. For anyone wishing to learn some basic facts about China, it is well worth reading.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is the inclusion of a number of interviews with Chinese workers. An unemployed teenager rails at the posh hotels in his home town being barred to Chinese. He lives on his wits, selling jeans made in other parts of China at over twice their retail value by passing them off as foreign-made.

One article discusses the position of women. Though no longer confined to the home, they are still mostly subordinate to men, with household chores lumped on top of full-time jobs. Women's financial demands on would-be husbands show that the values of Chinese society are material rather than spiritual (as naive Maoists once claimed): a bicycle, TV, watch, sewing machine, and his own house. Prostitution and polygamy are also in evidence.

Another piece reveals graphically how the idealism of the "barefoot doctor" service has foundered on the realities of the Chinese economy. Not that the original idea, with barely-trained part-time doctors, was anywhere near a decent health service. Now state-run hospitals have increased their fees, and private doctors are becoming more numerous. Those who cannot afford to pay are left to suffer and preventive medicine loses all priority. The major cause of ill-health — poverty — remains, and explains why a majority of children in the countryside still suffer from rickets and worms.

As so often in New Internationalist, the weakest part is the editor's contribution, which contains the following remark:

  in a world where anything from Tito's Yugoslavia to Hawke's Australia. Hoxha's Albania to Wilson's Britain is routinely called "socialist", it is probably not very useful to argue over whether or not China merits the term.

But it is not so much useful as essential to realise that China bears no resemblance to a socialist society, and that the appropriate term for a class society based on wage labour and production for profit can only be capitalism.

Political Notes: A guerrilla calls (1982)

The Political Notes Column from the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

A guerrilla calls

What with the Falklands, the Pope’s visit and all, it was hardly noticed, but recently Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Robert Mugabe was in London.

At another time—say three years ago—, the visit of this ex-guerrilla leader would certainly have been noticed. Such was his reputation as a bloodthirsty terrorist that his presence on these shores would have roused the most somnolent armchairs of Clubland.

And Mugabe, who still calls himself a “socialist”, would probably have occupied himself in discussions with other left wing leaders. At the end there might well have been a statement on the international fraternity of freedom fighters. And so on.

What actually happened was that Mugabe spent his time with bankers and industrialists, at one time at a banquet arranged by the overweight, overthrown Tory Lord Soames who did so much to help Mugabe to power.

Mugabe’s problem is not to do with international brotherhood: it is a lack of investment in Zimbabwe. His Cabinet planned for 45 per cent to come from private funds and the rest to include pledges of credit from other states, given in 1981. But British capitalists are wary; they are pressing for a “code” which will safeguard invested capital and guarantee that profits will be allowed out of Zimbabwe. If this crisis sounds familiar, that is because it is typical of many a state attempting its first footholds on the greasy slopes of international capitalism. Mugabe, like many other nationalist leaders, vowed to build socialism in one country. His is the latest experience to prove this is impossible and that nationalist struggles merely overthrow one ruling class to substitute another.


Arms spending

Leading politicians from 157 governments recently convened in New York for the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Disarmament (UNGASSD). There, many solemn words were spoken on the urgent, nay imperative, need to disarm the world.

While cant was echoing around the conference chamber many politicians like Reagan, Brehznev and Thatcher were authorising bloodshed and destruction by armies, navies and air forces from their respective nations. The Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, Jan Martenson, announced that the annual global arms bill for all types of weapons and military equipment totals £353 BILLION—the highest it has ever been. Resolutions were carried with zeal at the UNGASSD, calling for all sorts of utopian disarmament measures, while the resolutions of the first Special Session on Disarmament, four years ago, are grotesquely mocked by the terrifying escalation in war apparatus since they were passed.

Ronald Reagan, fresh from arranging military finance for El Salvador and Guatemala, shaking hands with generals from military juntas like the one in Turkey and angling for the strategic positioning of American nuclear weapons half-way across the earth, strolled across Europe talking glibly about his “global campaign for peace and democracy”.

The totalitarian regimes of the Russian Empire prefer to remain more secretive about the magnitude of their military expenses, while in Britain on June 10 the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a report which indicated that between 1980 and 1981 the Ministry of Defence exceeded its defence expenditure limit by £64,000,000 and had Spent a total of £10,556,000,000 on military forces. That works out at about one and a half million pounds a minute.

At the enormous CND march in London on June 6 Major Koss van de Wetering of the Dutch army announced that 50 per cent of Dutch soldiers are opposed to nuclear weapons. Perhaps because they would have no one to kill if such weapons were used in a war. The indefatigably moderate Young Liberals called for “Action against US Missiles”, although you wouldn’t get good odds on the chances of the Young Liberals in the event of such a conflict.

Ken Livingstone declared London a Nuclear Free Zone and car stickers to this effect were distributed. If London is attacked with nuclear weapons, let’s hope that the bombs (i) are able to read and understand the stickers (ii) are prepared to abide by the decision of Ken Livingstone and his supporters in County Hall. Shocked astonishment greeted the discovery that the Argentine army was preparing to use the horrific non-nuclear weapon, napalm (a burning agent) and then it is reported that the reason for so many “light casualties” (gruesome maimings) after one British ship is attacked in the South Atlantic is that it may have been carrying . . . napalm ((Guardian, 12 June).

On the first day of the Disarmament Conference Cardinal Terence Cooke cast his eyes up to the conference chamber neon lights and prayed to God for “peace in the islands of the South Atlantic, in the land of Lebanon and other nations of the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, in Poland and in Afghanistan”. While he was hoping, there were probably padres attached to soldiers in all of these places telling the soldiers that their violence had been divinely condoned as god was on their side. It is idealistic to believe that capitalism could be operated without armies to protect the interests of the ruling class organised in nations.


Bench rule

The Common Sergeant is not necessarily an NCO who spits and wipes his nose on his sleeve. A Recorder is not always a musical instrument. Both are titles given to senior judges, who may find pleasure in such obscure anachronisms. One such who is about to retire is Lord Denning, who has been Master of the Rolls (not a man in charge of the bakery) for some twenty years and who, at 83, is in danger of becoming himself an obscure anachronism.

According to some legal journalists we shall be sorry to lose Denning because he is a judge who believes in justice rather than in what he calls “certainty”. This belief has persuaded him at times to interpret the law as he thought it ought to be rather than it is, to the embarrassment of his fellow judges and to the ire of the politicians.

Nobody has yet explained why this should make Denning a friend of the working class. Indeed, in his time he has been associated with some notably repressive judgements. He once launched a campaign to curb trade union power and was recently forced to withdraw a book in which he clearly indicated that he mistrusted black jurors to convict defendants of the same skin colour.

But Denning is not the first eccentric judge, nor will he be the last. The judiciary exists to administer “justice”, which means the private property morality of capitalist society. They deal out harsh punishments to anyone who offends against that morality by helping themselves to wealth outside the law: they order the eviction of homeless people from empty houses which they can’t afford to live in. Such power is positively an encouragement to eccentricity. Denning’s successor may show some superficial differences, but he will be doing the same dirty job and his hands will not be clean.

Political Notes: Union Bashing (1987)

The Political Notes Column from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Union Bashing

The government has recently published a green paper (discussion document) entitled Trade Unions and Their Members which outlines phase four of its union bashing programme. Having whittled away at the rights of trade unions to engage in industrial action, and dictated how they should constitute themselves and run their affairs, the latest proposals are primarily concerned with bolstering the rights of individual trade union members against their unions. The intention is to provide legal protection to trade union members who refuse to take strike action, even though that action has majority support as expressed through a ballot of the whole membership. The Green Paper states:

  Every union member should be free to decide for himself whether or not he wishes to break his contract of employment and run the risk of dismissal without compensation. No union member should be penalised by his trade union for exercising his right to cross a picket line and go to work.

And to ensure that the rights of individual union members are so protected, it is proposed that a special commissioner for trade union affairs be appointed by the government to provide advice to trade unionists wishing to take legal action against their union.

The language of the Green Paper is that of "rights" and "freedoms", but it is individual rights that are to be protected at the expense of the collective rights of the unions themselves. The only strength that unions have comes from their collective strength and ability to remain united when involved in industrial action in defence of wages and conditions of work. The rhetoric of "rights" and "freedoms" disguises the government’s real purpose which is to undermine trade unions by helping to create divisions within them. The fact that some of the proposals contained in the Green Paper are concerned with the democratisation of trade union organisation — such as the proposal for secret ballots for elections of union officials — should not blind us to the fact that this is not the real reason for this latest round of trade union laws. It is up to workers themselves to ensure that their unions are democratic and that governments do not interfere in the internal structure and constitution of trade unions.

Teaching Teachers a Lesson

Another blow was struck against the trade union movement with the passing of the Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act, which completely removes from teaching unions the right to negotiate with their employers (local education authorities) about pay and conditions of work. Instead the Act imposes a pay settlement and contains provision for the appointment of a committee which is to be responsible for advising the Minister for Education on teachers' salaries and conditions of employment. The minister will then decide whether or not to accept the recommendations of the committee.

The teaching unions will play no part in this process since the Act only states that the unions can be consulted on the Advisory Committee's recommendations. So in other words the government, acting on the advice of a body appointed by, and responsible to, itself will be able to decree what teachers should be paid, how long they must work and so on. And this from a government that claims to be committed to the "free market"!

Teachers have once again voted to take strike action in protest at this erosion of their union rights. However, in taking further industrial action they may well run up against other restrictions on the right to strike. The government and the media will undoubtedly try to present teachers as irresponsible, unprofessional and even in breach of the law. The fact that the government, in passing this Act. is itself in breach of the International Labour Conventions is likely to go unnoticed.

Unemployment Tactics

The government offers two tactics for dealing with unemployment: job training schemes and financial support for small businesses. Since the usefulness of the former depends on sufficient jobs being available when people are trained, even the most complacent of government supporters can have very little confidence in this remedy. The president of the Confederation of British Industries in his New Year message for 1987 was certainly not over-optimistic about future trends in employment: he "warned of fewer jobs in manufacturing in 1987" but thought that "demand for labour by service industries should more than offset the loss to bring about a slow but steady fall in unemployment of about 100.000 over the year".

However, the government has shown its determination to support small businesses by making David Trippier the "Minister of Small Firms”. One of his jobs is the encouragement of investment in small firms by insurance companies and the controllers of pension funds. Barely one per cent of their huge financial resources, he claims, are being used to back small companies.

  Given that their total funds were estimated at £170 billion in 1983, and taking account of the 100 per cent rise in the FT share index since 1983 this is a national disgrace. . . . I can't believe that they would be taking too big a risk by investing up to 2 per cent in the smaller companies which are not quoted on the Stock Exchange (The Times 2 February 1987).

Under the present economic system, capital flows to those areas of the economy where the prospect of profit is greatest, for maximising profit is the very basis of our economic system. David Trippier has been given a thankless task indeed, but it could be worth quite a few votes.

To Fit the Crime?

If anything excites the gutter press more than a horrific rape it is a horrific rape for which the rapist receives a comparatively light sentence.

So we should not be impressed when newspapers like the Sun report (they would probably prefer the word expose) sexual offences, in a mixture of relish and indignation. while at the same time they publish girlie pictures with captions like this:

  Sexy Sammy Fox simply shines — as she gets set to make you and your partner BULLIONAIRES.

This merchanting of distorted femininity — superficially inviting but actually unreal and unattainable — is good for sales but not for sexual harmony. Deliberately and cynically, it preys on the repressed and malformed sexuality which is ail too often evident in offences like rape.

The Ealing vicarage rape case — particularly brutal and horrifying — was all the gutter press could ask for. It also gave a few publicity-crazed MPs the opportunity to get themselves a bit more media exposure. Notable among these, seizing his chance like the pro he is, was the local Member Harry Greenway, who annually shows how he rates women by arranging to have himself photographed clutching some haplessly smiling contestants in the Miss World festival of female degradation.

Punishment freaks on the right wing like Peter Bruinvels — who wouldn't mind the job of hangman if capital punishment is ever brought back here — were in sympathy with feminists and left wingers in outrage at the Ealing sentences. It was, they agreed, a simple matter to reduce the incidence of rape — dish out harsher sentences to the rapists. Clearly, there is need for a few words from another point of view.

The Ealing sentences were short only by the standards of the English courts, which are notorious as among the most punitive in Europe. The sentenced men are likely to suffer grievously at the hands of their fellow prisoners. They are unlikely to learn anything about how capitalism with its poverty, its slums, its repression, its cynicism, discourages people from trusting or caring for each other. What sort of attitude does the Sun. for example, encourage men to adopt towards sexy Sammy Fox?

The mock horror in the press at a judge who seemed to set property at a value higher than human beings was particularly sickening for these same newspapers ardently support the capitalist system which operates on exactly that principle. What else was the Sun saying, when it gloated over the slaughter of hundreds of Argentinian workers when the Belgrano was sunk?

The outcry over "inadequate" or "lenient" sentences encourages workers who are afraid or disturbed about what they see of capitalism in the 1980s to think they can leave the remedy to politicians to introduce harsher laws and to the judiciary who will impose them. Crime springs from the roots of capitalism and. contrary to the hysteria of the gutter press and vote-obsessed MPs. it will not be eradicated through punishment.

Business as usual

The Tower Commission's report into the sale of arms to Iran by the United States has left the way open for things to continue pretty much as usual. The Commission concluded that the (unelected) National Security Council. from which the policy apparently emanated. on the whole does a good job; that the decision-making processes are basically sound; and the President, although incompetent. is a good guy at heart. Ronnie has gone on television to put things right with the "American people" by admitting that he goofed and his popularity ratings seem to have recovered as a result. Nancy gave Don Regan the boot and a new Mr Clean has been brought in as the White House Chief of Staff. No doubt, as a consequence of the continuing investigation by Senate and House of Representatives committees, a few other people will be asked to resign. There may even be a few prosecutions and the self-styled Rambo, Oliver North, may, with luck, be certified insane.

What is unlikely to happen is large numbers of people in America asking the question why, in a country where there is a long history of shady deals by politicians, covert activities by those responsible for "national security" and deliberate attempts to conceal what is really going on — and all this in a country which boasts of its democratic political system — why is it that the majority continue to grant power to the minority?