World Socialist Radio - Peter Mandelson: Arch Labour Party Careerist (2026)

Adapted from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peter Mandelson: Arch Labour Party Careerist byThe Socialist Party of Great Britain

Peter Mandelson exemplifies a lifelong “careerist” within the Labour Party. His political trajectory was driven more by personal advancement than by principled commitment to socialism. He rose through the party not from grassroots activism but via roles in communications and media management, becoming a key architect of “New Labour.”

This episode uses Mandelson as a case study to criticise Labour, arguing that figures like him demonstrate how the party is dominated by professional politicians focused on power and status, rather than pursuing genuine socialist change.

Taken from the March 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

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Peter Mandelson: arch Labour Party careerist (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A friend and former Labour councillor reported to me how Peter Mandelson spoke at an online seminar. He had been impressed by one comment, summed up as: ‘If you have a good idea, don’t bother asking everybody, just go ahead and do it’. This seems to sum up all that was wrong with the New Labour project, even if you are achieving good results, not asking people makes them feel divorced from the outcomes. Even worse, it can lead to disastrous and unintended consequences, as those who know more could warn you about in advance.

Mr. Starmer thought appointing Mr. Mandelson as ambassador to Washington was a good idea, and he just went ahead and did it. The consequences have been disastrous for him.

Mandelson’s biography is well known. Grandson of wartime Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, he had a natural ‘in’ into the Labour Party and movement, beginning his career (much like many Labour figures, including Jeremy Corbyn) as an employee of the trade union movement, working for the TUC.

It’s not necessary here to reprise his whole biography: it is widely available. Suffice to say that, apart from a short stint working in television, he worked as a Labour movement staff member, specifically in charge of communications. Once in parliament and then in government, he twice stepped down as a cabinet minister: once for taking an unsecured loan from a cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Robinson, for a house worth (at the time) £475,000. The second scandal was around him intervening in the passport application of billionaire businessman Srichand Hinduja. Although in both instances formal inquiries cleared him of any wrongdoing, the perception was that he was into palling around with – and getting favours from and doing favours for – very wealthy people.

It’s notable, now, that he lives in a £12 million house. This was paid for by the infamous revolving door of government ministers going into private lobbying and well-remunerated directorships after leaving office. While a well-known phenomenon, thanks to the publication of all of the notorious paedophile Jeffery Epstein’s correspondence, we now get a glimpse of the process working in practice.

Epstein advised Mandelson on how to apply for directorships, including with Deutsche Bank, that could have been worth $4-10 million per year. In the end, Mandelson didn’t want to work full time, and so got a job with a firm called Lazard for one day a week, worth a mere $1 million per year. He also set up his own lobbying firm, Global Counsel, which, as Mandelson said in one email to Epstein, paid his expensive mortgage. Epstein advised him on how to find clients for that firm. Global Counsel has had firms such as JPMorgan, Palantir and Anglo-American as clients.

These roles sought were, in part, to avoid regulation around former ministers taking jobs that relied on their former political roles or were intrinsically linked with them: and it is clear that what was for sale was general political, not financial advice, how to get things done, including introductions and network access. This is clearly not an uncommon situation. Epstein, it seems, also gave similar advice to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. After all, as we have written in these pages before, this was Epstein’s business, helping manage other people’s wealth, for a cut.

Itch to live like them

It is, perhaps, not surprising that people who find themselves rubbing shoulders with the fabulously wealthy should not feel the itch to be able to live like them, especially as, when entering the room as government officials they are functionally treated as peers of the wealthy: individuals of power and respect. It is equally understandable that the wealthy should want to encourage such feelings and throw a few crumbs to the politicians to win their loyalty.

As the case of Mandelson demonstrates, it does not have to be the naked bribery of plain brown envelopes. Continued loyalty (in his case as Business Secretary in the UK, and Trade Commissioner of the EU) can be generally rewarded by these advisor roles, directorships or other supposed jobs where the ultra-wealthy can name the price. We’ve noted before that the book-publishing and speaking-tour game is a simple way to transfer substantial sums to former politicians in ways which no set of rules could ever stop. Any attempt to ban such channelling of funds will always simply be circumvented, as Mandelson and Epstein managed to do.

Epstein gives us a great example, in one of his emails, where he leadenly says ‘supporting [Gordon Brown] will be seen as bad form commercially’: Mandelson’s own interests in the subsequent selling price of his skills and contacts depended on him being seen as helpful to commercial interests. That he had the lack of sense to forward secret and commercially sensitive government documents to Epstein will certainly come to be seen as bad form commercially. It is inconceivable that other ministers through the ages have not, in private conversations and communications, given wealthy friends and acquaintances tips and winks about what was coming up, but that would never be provable. There have just never been email dumps like this one before to let the cat out of the bag. And even if, again, Mandelson is formally cleared, his misjudgement in leaving evidence behind will be remembered.

What should also be remembered is that all of this flows, not just from personal cupidity, but structurally, from a society of immense inequality. A society in which a handful live in luxury, and can spare some of their wealth to tempt and buy whomsoever they please. Journalists have come out, after Mandelson’s fall, with stories of how he would threaten their jobs because he knew their boss (shades of the Savile playbook). Where people depend for their livelihood on their job, such threats have power.

His wealth of money and connections fed back into his ability to influence the machinery of the Labour Party, and restore it as a party safe for capital. But, again, it is not him alone as some sort of cuckoo in the nest – any party that seeks to manage an unequal society will inevitably end up being run for the benefit of the people who benefit from that inequality.

Pik Smeet

Socialist Sonnet No. 226: Spectacular Stories (2026)

   From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Spectacular Stories

Headlines were about a sex marketeer,

Spiced with possible royal relations,

The media was alive with sensations.

Until the tale changed and it became clear

The Commander in Chief had his eagle eye

On Greenland; cue a sharp change to the script.

How easily sovereignty can be stripped

Away, without a by your leave or why.

But, then on to the next cause, the next plan,

Kidnap an inconvenient head of state.

Yet hardly had he succumbed to his fate

When the world’s focus was moved to Iran.

Not letting news settle on a topic,

Spectacles might make people myopic.

 

D. A.

Cooking The Books: What Epstein reveals (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Epstein was not just a pimp for the more dissolute members of the global elite. As Gerard Baker wrote in his column in the Times (6 February), headed ‘Epstein saga is a fable of modern capitalism’, ‘sexual scandal aside, the attraction of the financier was that he ran a global network of the rich and powerful’.

Epstein’s email contacts, Baker suggested, would be a representative sample of those in top positions in government, finance, law, media, academia and big tech, ‘the most advantaged individuals [who] moved around a borderless world’ and ‘who have wielded the controlling influence over our lives, our culture, our jobs and much else for most of the last quarter century’:

‘Thanks to Epstein’s crimes, we have been given a glimpse into the way the liberal capitalist global order has worked. And in the process, perhaps, we can see even more clearly why so many people want to sweep it away.’

There is a temptation, amongst those who want this, to see a network like Epstein’s as part of some set-up whereby some global elite make decisions about what happens in the world. Some have not resisted this temptation and have concluded that the world actually is run by a global elite who plan what to do at their meetings in Davos or at the Bilderberg group or on Epstein’s island. Baker adds some credence to this when he wrote of them ‘wielding the controlling influence over our lives’.

In reality, they are not fundamentally in control of what happens under capitalism. They don’t plan booms and slumps or wars or revolutions. Some of them, in their role as the government of a state, do secretly organise — conspire, if you like — to bring about political changes in other countries in the interest of their particular state or group of states. Stock exchange speculators conspire to influence share prices. But nobody controls, or could control, the way the capitalist economic system works; that depends on impersonal market forces which impose themselves, even on the members of the global elite. That’s ‘the controlling influence over our lives’.

Baker corrected himself when he went to write that ‘Epstein enticed them into his web not with his harem of adolescent girls but … the chance for a few words in the ear of someone who could make you even richer, even more powerful; a little inside info, a potential deal…’ That is the limit of what goes on, not some grand conspiracy.

To some extent the situation resembles that described by Marx on the eve of the overthrow of French monarchy in 1848 when under the dominance of the ‘finance aristocracy’:

‘the same prostitution, the same blatant swindling, the same mania for self-enrichment – not from production but by sleight-of-hand with other people’s wealth – was to be found in all spheres of society, from the Court to the Café Borgne. The same unbridled assertion of unhealthy and vicious appetites broke forth, appetites which were in permanent conflict with the bourgeois law itself, and which were to be found particularly in the upper reaches of society, appetites in which the wealth created by financial gambles seeks its natural fulfilment, in which pleasure becomes debauched, in which money, filth and blood commingle. In the way it acquires wealth and enjoys it the financial aristocracy is nothing but the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society’ (The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850).

But even if people like them were swept away (as they were in 1848) there would still be capitalism, the real problem and controlling influence.

Sting in the Tail: Their Problems . . . (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Problems . . .

David Mellor's little lapse certainly hogged the headlines, but another story concerning more serious lapses by political leaders was tucked away inside The Guardian (25 July).

Professor Hugh Freeman, a prominent psychiatrist, told a meeting of fellow shrinks In Dublin that world statesmen have often been:

Incapable of exercising normal decision-making powers through abnormalities of brain functioning.

According to the Prof., Prime Minister Anthony Eden was heavily into booze and drugs during the 1956 Suez crisis and "was not fit to be In charge of national affairs at that time”: US President Woodrow Wilson was "severely mentally handicapped" for the last year of his term: Stalin ended up "so irrational" that he could have started World War 3, while JFK was almost certainly taking steroids and amphetamines during the Cuban missile crisis. The Profs case is made and he didn’t even mention Hitler!

As the poet wisely put it:

Great men are great In our eyes -

While we kneel.

Let us rise!

. . . Our Solution

Is it any wonder that 'World Statesmen" go barmy? Consider the hassle George Bush faces over the proposed sale of 5 billion dollars worth of US fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

If the deal goes through he risks outraging the Israelis and, in this election year, the Jewish American vote, if it doesn’t go through then 30,000 defence industry jobs will be lost along with who knows how many votes.

Of course, he could buy-off the Israelis and their supporters by granting Israel the 10 billion dollar loan guarantees he has been holding out on, but this will not pacify the American arms control groups: how, they ask, can Bush claim to be promoting Middle East peace and sell arms there at the same time?

All heads of government constantly face such mind-bending problems: let's save the poor souls from their mental anquish by relieving them of all that decision-making and simply re-organise society for the benefit of humanity.

Footloose Faldo

Most days that Scorpion gets up he is quite pleased to find a pair of boots to wear. Sometimes he feels lucky just finding his feet.

That is not the case with Nick Faldo, recent winner of the British Open Golf Championship. Mr. Faldo has been paid £100,000 a year since 1989 to wear Stylo Matchmaker shoes during televised tournaments. Turns out that the naughty Faldo wore Footjoys shoes In his recent triumph. Stylo are not best pleased.

There is talk of-some action being taken which is understandable considering Stylo's holding company lost £9 million last year.

It says a lot about capitalism when even an enjoyable pursuit like an afternoon on a golf course has been turned into just another business opportunity for the money grubbers. Everything capitalism touches It spoils.

That's History

Are you baffled by the complexity of the ethnic mix of Eastern Europe and how it got that way? Then Malcolm Bradbury's description of an imaginary Eastern European country in his satirical novel "Rates of Exchange" could give you a clue:

It is a land that has . . . been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cassocks, Mortars and Turds, Indeed almost every tribe or race specialist In pillage and rape, have been here . . . and left behind their imprint, their customs, their faiths, their architecture, their genes . . . And so its culture Is a melting pot, Its language a pot-pourri, Its people a salad.

So how do those "ethnic-cleansers" square all that with their racial nonsense?

All In The Game

Labour and Conservatives are fond of pretending that they are radically different from each other. Really, of course, it is all a bit of a game.

John Biffen, Tory MP writing in The Guardian (21 July) and discussing John Smith's future prospects had this to say:

He will have to provide a convincing policy alternative . . . He will be under great constraint to do this particularly as Labour's public spending and interest rates policies broadly reflect those of the Conservatives.

It Never Fails

Recently we saw a poster for an SWP meeting entitled "Will The Economy Ever Recover?" We saw it too late to hear what the speaker had to say, but our answer to that question is, yes, the economy will recover.

This will happen for several reasons: One is that the present slump will eventually bring down interest rates to the point where companies find it attractive enough to borrow in order to invest: another is that growing unemployment exerts downward pressure on wages and this will also attract employers.

Then the property crash means that factory, warehouse and office space can be had cheaply, and because of production cut-backs stocks will become depleted and need replacing, while companies will be able to buy the plant and machinery of bankrupt competitors at knock-down prices.

Factors like these will encourage capital to invest again in production because of the prospects for bigger profits and the economy will have recovered. Every slump contains the seed of the next boom and vice-versa.

They said it . . . (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We had women on every platform daring the election, hat the party used them like decorative potted plants—Labour MP Ann Clwyd on women and the Labour Party.

#    #    #    #

I did it because they were going to repossess my Sky dish—David Kernaghan, explaining the armed robbery which brought him a seven-year gaol sentence.

#    #    #    #

You should not believe everything you read in the newspapers—Robert Clark, chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers. 

#    #    #    #

It is quite a work to dredge out of the English language pejoratives strong enough to describe their vulgarity, brutishness and maladroitness—Former Tory Minister Alan Clark on the royal family.

#    #    #    #

Nobody was going to throw the first brick because there were too many people living in glass houses—Norman Tebbit on the Mellor scandal.

#    #    #    #

With low coffee prices a symptom of stocks rather than supply, a stock destruction plan by producers would have a greater effect on the world market price than anything else— Lawrence Eagles, commodity analyst.

Gerry-built (2025)

Book Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Party is Always Right. By Aidan Beatty. Pluto Press. 2024.

This is sub-titled the ‘Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism’ though in truth most of it has been told before. The interesting addition is the number of interviews that have helped to add colour and richness to a grim story of political failure and an even grimmer tale of internal strife and abuse.

Alongside Ted Grant of the Militant Tendency and Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party, Gerry Healy was one of the three gurus of the British Trotskyist movement. While all three led organisations that had authoritarian tendencies, Healy’s outfit was by far the worst. Called the Socialist Labour League until it changed its name to the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1973, it became a byword for cult-like sectarianism and was infused with a rancid, hierarchical political culture which was framed and dominated by the leader himself. Healy was a tyrannical bully who often directed and oversaw violence against his political opponents (both inside and outside the party) and who was an expert manipulator. Indeed, that was arguably his main ‘talent’ such as it was and what kept him at the top of the organisation for so long.

Unlike Grant or Cliff, Healy was no theoretician with a knowledge of Marx, even though he liked to paint himself as such. Most of his attempts at establishing this sort of reputation for himself only served to expose his limitations, which were considerable. He was obsessed with Marxist dialectics, but his forays into this were generally just nonsense (Beatty quotes a few examples in case anyone was in any doubt).

Healy also seemed to possess relatively little knowledge of Marxist economics. He was the perennial catastrophist, constantly predicting that capitalism was in its final death agony and that the revolution was imminent. He was effectively saying the same thing in the 1970s and 80s as he had been in the 1950s. Yet the collapse never came.

Some argue that he had a certain charisma, which is why he was able to keep his hold on the party for so long. It was certainly enough to woo a number of high-profile celebrities into the orbit of the organisation, starting with the actor Corin Redgrave and then his more famous sister Vanessa, but including many others from Frances De La Tour to former Spurs football player Chris Hughton.

But this charisma – if that is what it was – was ultimately to prove the downfall of both Healy and the WRP. In 1985, Healy’s secretary Aileen Jennings wrote to the Political Committee of the WRP alleging that Healy was a serial manipulator and sexual abuser of women, naming 26 female victims, mainly party members. This eventually led to a predictable slew of lurid tabloid headlines and was a proverbial ‘hand grenade’ against its supreme leader from which the WRP never recovered. It split into myriad warring factions over the following years.

Healy himself then founded the Marxist Party with loyalists Vanessa and Corin Redgrave but died aged 76 in 1989 and this party – never more than about 50 or so – dwindled away to nothing. The surviving WRP led by Sheila Torrance is also now tiny (estimated at around 120 members at most) though still stands General Election candidates, as periodically does another small surviving faction, now called the Socialist Equality Party and linked to a US organisation of the same name led by David North (a Healy protégé).

At its peak the WRP may have had 3,000 members but when the split happened the party’s finances became one of the biggest bones of contention as it emerged that many of its assets were not actually registered in the name of the party itself, but through other byzantine and opaque structures – allegedly for security reasons. There was a Head Office (with no signage) on Clapham High Street in a building now occupied by Caffé Nero, eight apartments around the corner in Clapham Old Town (Healy himself lived in one of them), a ‘College of Marxist Education’ in rural Derbyshire, and a state-of-the-art printing works in Runcorn that had enabled the WRP to produce the first colour daily newspaper in Britain, News Line. There were also several ‘Youth Training Centres’ it had set up, at one stage several bookshops, and also fleets of vehicles including Healy’s BMW.

The party’s finances were actually another Achilles Heel, as it over-extended itself in a way that couldn’t be sustained through membership income and paper sales alone, however hard the leadership pushed the members and gave them impossible targets to meet. Hence Healy’s well-known soliciting of money from Iraq and – in particular – Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime (which also gave the WRP printing works considerable contracts, including for mass copies of the Green Book). Beatty is sceptical of some of the wilder claims that have been made about links with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the PLO as well, but there is little doubt that money came from both Iraq and Libya and was not unconnected with the virulently pro-Arab nationalist tone of much WRP literature.

This then leads us on to another theme – the paranoia and secrecy at the heart of the organisation. Healy was obsessed with the security services, spies and moles, and saw them everywhere. Anyone who crossed him was lucky to be called a ‘subjectivist idealist’ or similar, the alternative was that they were really a spy. Anecdotes about speakers at WRP meetings being asked to speak with their backs to the window (in case MI5 listening devices could pick up sensitive vibrations from the glass) were not entirely unfounded. In fact, the British state did show an interest in the WRP (especially in the 70s and 80s) though this was more because of its links to industrial disruption in the early 70s and then later links to foreign governments and their money, than any assessment of them being a credible domestic revolutionary threat.

Beatty says that the standard description of the WRP as a cult has something going for it, but is, of itself, inadequate because its internal practices were directly a product of its elitist political outlook:

‘Dismissing the WRP as a cult means ignoring the connection between the WRP’s authoritarian culture and the party’s Leninist structure. The WRP can and should be understood also as an extreme manifestation of Leninist vanguardism and its anti-democratic praxis’ (p. xvii).

We could not have put it better ourselves.

Dave Perrin

Editorial: What a show of pretence and hypocrisy (1963)

Editorial from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yet another political scandal has hit the headlines. Mr. Profumo’s indiscretions are only the latest in a long line of such extra-curricular activities on the part of our elected representatives but, unlike most of the others, he failed to keep his indiscretions discreet.

His confession and resignation have left the Conservative Party in confusion and the Labour Party cock-a-hoop. The latter, of course, can hardly go wrong as long as they don’t overplay their hand and show their glee too openly. It is enough for them, whilst fervently protesting that they are not in the least concerned with Mr. Profumo’s sexual behaviour, to keep the pot quietly simmering with expressions of deep and distressed concern for the country’s security.

As for the Conservative Party, they are quite demoralised, in spite of all Mr. Macmillan’s efforts to pull them together. Following upon all the other distasteful events of recent months, the new bombshell has shattered forever the sacred relic they have so carefully carried in their political baggage for so long — the idea that they alone are the Party who should rule because they are gentlemen, the personifications of all the noble traditions of high principle, strict morality, implicit honesty, and overwhelming trustworthiness.

The sensation-mongering Press, after taking a bad beating over the Vassall case, are back in full cry. Miss Keeler got what is reported to be £15,000 from the News of the World for her confessions, and was also well paid by the Sunday Mirror for her letter from Mr. Profumo. No doubt more large sums are in the offing for her and others in the case. At the same time, it is disclosed that the actual facts were known to many sections of the Press even when Mr. Profumo was making his denials last March, but that they all chose to keep quiet about them. Not, be it added, because of scruples about Mr. Profumo, but because they were afraid of losing some money in libel damages. So much for the boasts they periodically give us about telling the truth at any price.

Large sections of the public, of course, put on their usual show of shocked protest whilst fervently perusing every hard-bought detail the newspapers provided for them. One of the choicer blooms of the British cultural scene, the weekly ration of spice, scandal, and snigger, flowered brighter than ever.

What a show of pretence and hypocrisy it all is. The capitalist political parties all play the game of setting up their leaders as men apart—as people of greater intelligence, higher principles, stricter morals, than the common herd. The working class accept all this, and even grow to believe it, in return for lots of nice, fat promises to have things done for them and the relief of not having to think for themselves.

All sorts of people are drawing all sorts of implications from the Profumo a case. But for Socialists, its chief importance lies in the way it reflects, yet again. the cynicism and hypocrisy of the capitalist parties and their system, and the political laziness and ignorance of the working class who support it all and refuse to take action to get rid of it.

News in Review: The Profumo affair (1963)

The News in Review column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Profumo affair

It was in the May Socialist Standard, at a time when Mr. Profumo’s strenuous protestations of the innocence of his relationships with Christine Keeler still held public water, that we pointed out how unimportant are the personal morals of the administrators of capitalism.

Now that Profumo has come clean, and now that we have been treated to the squalid detail of the Argyll divorce case, what we said in May still stands. With something to be added.

The rather nasty stories have lifted a corner of the curtain on a life which is completely foreign to most workers.

The life of rich houses, glamorous holidays, expensive women and powerful men. Of easy luxury and sophistication. The life, in fact, of people who can dedicate their lives to what they conceive as living.

Which is something very foreign to most members of the working class, who are only the people who make possible the lives of luxury and glamour.

Profumo was a member of a capitalist government and capitalism teaches us, when we are children in school and when we are grown up enough to read its journalism, that the basis of morality is monogamy.

Many workers absorb this teaching and, no matter what it costs them in terms of personal strain, conform to it. Others conform because they cannot afford to do anything else. Promiscuity can be a costly business.

It can also be a tragic business, for workers. Only recently The Observer ran a series on illegitimate children in this country, which showed up the sadness of many unmarried mothers who are forced by their circumstances to give up their babies when they desperately want to keep them.

This sort of tragedy need never happen to rich people who are also promiscuous. They have no trouble in taking care of any number of children, 'legitimate" or no.

In more ways than one, capitalism is a sordid, inhuman social system in which only the ruling class are free.

War in the air

The early railways fought each other tooth and nail for freight and passengers, often taking enormous physical and economic risks in the process. In the same way, the great airlines are currently coming to grips over the pickings to be had on the world’s busy airlanes.

For some time, the American transatlantic carriers have been fighting the rest —and particularly Britain—over fares and cargo rates. This provoked the recent crisis in which British airports were on the point of being closed to Pan American and Trans World aircraft; something which was averted only when the American Civil Aviation Board made a temporary climb down. The situation remains threatening.

And now the war is hotting up in the freight carriers.

BOAC has been happily operating piston engined freighters across the Atlantic and had no immediate intention of spending any more millions on jets to speed up this service.

This intention has been upset by Pan American’s opening of the first all jet freight service, over both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Fast and capacious, the Boeing freighters have started an air cargo sales war which may, as in the case of passenger traffic, develop into a rate war.

If this happens, we shall probably see every airline which aspires to a place in the sun on the transatlantic run being forced to buy aircraft which they cannot afford, do not want, and which they often have to send off only half full of cargo. We may see countless aircraft which have plenty of useful life in them being scrapped or sold off for a song. And perhaps we shall see the airlines taking the same sort of physical risks which the primitive, battling railways took.

Competition, we are often being told, is one of capitalism’s health-giving substances. In fact, just like the other features of the all-wasteful society, it is a ludicrous way of running human affairs.

Advertising for votes

Do you vote for capitalism? You do?

Well, how does it feel like to be in somebody’s sights? You should know —both the big parties are now drawing a bead on you.

You have probably seen the big spread ads. which the Tories have been taking in the papers. You have probably heard that the Labour Party is indignant about where the money comes from, and you may have reflected that this argument has lost a lot of its point since Labour started putting out its own big ads.

These are part of a very expensive 
campaign. And it is all aimed at you.

The Tory ads. are punchy, with facts and figures about the roads they will lay down, the hospitals they will put up, and so on. If only, that is, you will give them the chance. Has it struck you as strange that after twelve years of Conservative paradise there are still no new hospitals in this country and the roads are still in a mess?

The Labour ads. are perhaps rather more airy, with some distant ideals of justice and equality—and Mr. Wilson just caught in the act of almost giving the new Labour thumbs-up sign. Labour has to go easy on the facts and figures. Their own record is pretty awful and to say too emphatically that there is anything wrong with Britain today leaves them open to the countercharge of running down the old country, dammit. That wouldn’t go down with a patriotic voter like you, would it? So Labour puts in the plea that everything could be all right. If only you give them the chance.

And will you? The big parties are lashing out the thousands in an effort to persuade you to put them in charge of British capitalism. But whoever gets that job will make no difference; the black spots which capitalism makes will remain unerased.

The tragedy is that the ballyhoo, the big splash, is what so often counts.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain cannot afford expensive publicity campaigns and indeed has to bleed itself merely to run one or two candidates in an election. Yet only Socialism can give us the sane world which most people, somehow, are looking for.

Remember that, when you read the next big ad. Remember it when you vote. They’ve got you in their sights but, in a way, you are the one who pulls the trigger.

The Pope is dead

Pope John died when, just before the Profumo scandal burst, news was in short supply. Especially the juicy "human interest” sort of news on which the popular press thrives. On thin rations, the papers made the most of the drawn out death agonies. Some of the headlines were almost ghoulish.

This gave us a peep at one of the nastiest sides of capitalism—the side which works for a profit out of human suffering, even when it is the suffering of one of the great upholders of property society.

Not only reporters rushed to say nice things about John XXIII. Bertrand Russell, a professed non-believer, echoed the popular estimation of the dead Pontiff as a man of peace:

The Pope used his office and his energy to bring peace and to oppose policies which lead to war and mass murder. His encyclical is a magnificent statement of the deepest wishes and hopes of all men of decency. . . I mourn his death.

There is, indeed, some rather tenuous evidence that the dead Pope was prepared to act as some sort of a go-between in a new world carve-up by the United States and Russia. This is the sort of diplomatic dabbling which often qualifies all sorts of people for the description of "peace loving.”

But this holds good only in peacetime. We know that, just like his predecessors, the Pope would have done nothing to oppose a future war and that in such a war there could well be Catholics on both sides, killing each other.

Thus does capitalism make warriors of them all.

In any case, modern war has nothing to do with a supposed lack of men of peace among the world’s leaders. Capitalism itself causes war and the leaders always go along on the tide of destruction.

And let all peace lovers remember that capitalism has always done well out of the servile ignorance of the religious, and especially of the Church of which John XXIII was so briefly the Vicar Supreme.

Postscript on housing

Of all the people to write a postscript to the special issue of the Socialist Standard on housing last May, it had to be the Minister of Housing himself, Sir Keith Joseph.

The last few days of that month gave birth to yet another White Paper which is supposed to be going to solve the housing problem. (“. . . promises,” commented The Observer, “borne on fairly insubstantial wings.”)

The new plan is to give housing subsidies only where the government thinks they are needed. Thus is quietly killed off the old policy (which was also going to solve the problem) of giving subsidies virtually indiscriminately. How long before the latest plan is pronounced to have failed?

There will be a bit more entertainment from the government’s financial jugglers; £100 million is intended to be available to encourage the building of houses for rent. From the merry shouts of welcome which greeted this announcement, nobody would have thought that these were the very policies which, in one form or another, have failed so blatantly in the past.

And, of course, the government will be speeding up slum clearance and will build more houses. The happy day when everyone will be living in what Housing Ministers think is a decent home has had to be postponed for a bit more, what with all this planning. Actually, it has been put off for another ten years. Said Sir Keith:

This programme will within 10 years transform the country's housing position, and will bring within reach of nearly every citizen in the land either a modern or a modernised house.

Presumably the Tories are hoping to win a few votes on this programme. Perhaps they will. It would not be the first time the working class have been hopelessly deceived about one of the ways in which capitalism blights their lives.

The Importance of Mr. Profumo (1963)

From the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

it was the Daily Express which pointed out, quickly, cruelly, that profumo is the Italian word meaning perfume. But the famous scandal sticks in a way undreamt of in the philosophies of big newspapers.

Now Profumo’s “sin,” for the Tories, was not just that he was running a mistress. That was bad enough, but there have been some famous precedents who have got away with the same thing. It was not even that the girl was being shared with a Russian intelligence agent and at least a couple of others, although that was enough to wilt the flowers on the starchiest of hats at a Conservative women’s fete. What really put Profumo beyond the pale was that he admitted to telling a lie. Not a lie to just anyone, but to the House of Commons, which is supposed to be an assembly of gentlemen and where it is the tradition not to question nor debate personal statements like Profumo’s original assertion of his innocence, this was what Robert McKenzie called a kick in the stomach for the Tories, who have always liked to think of themselves as the party of better people, of Christian gentlemen.

It was the lie which gave Lord Hailsham the excuse for his fireworks in his TV interview with McKenzie, when he blasted Profumo as a man who has “ lied and lied and lied ” and insisted that the whole affair was a moral issue. Hailsham is well known as a Tory moralist, a strict Christian who professes unshakeable principles. So is another central figure in the drama surrounding the government crisis—Enoch Powell. The hullabaloo over Profumo has served to make these men— and others like them—heroes of integrity. The inference we are invited to draw is that generally capitalism administered by the sort of men who would never tell a lie and that Profumo was just the inevitable bad apple.

Alright. Let us have a look at this business of lies. And if we do, the first thing to hit us is that political history is crammed with examples of men who, as a matter of course, have told enormous lies yet have never been accused of being liars. Some of them, in fact, have died as respected pillars of capitalist society. Stafford Cripps, for example, was the very caricature of an ascetic moralist. Strict vegetarian. Fervent Christian. Like Enoch Powell, he was supposed to be a man who stood for principle before everything. Did Cripps, then, never tell a lie? We need nudge our memories only a little to recall that in 1949 he protested for weeks that he had no intention of devaluing sterling, while all the time his plans for devaluation were cut and dried. There are plenty of other examples of Cripps’ flexible reverence for the truth.

The Tories are not, of course, untarred by this brush. Hailsham and Powell are only two of those who were unprotesting members of the Eden government which embarked on the Suez fiasco. They apparently held their consciences in check when their government broke its word to the United Nations and justified the invasion by what were quickly revealed as blatant lies. More recently the same, government has been what we can politely call less than frank over, the deportation of Doctor Soblen and of Chief Eriahoro. In fact, in a more subtle way, Christine Keeler is not the only matter on which Profumo has been dishonest, although on these issues his ex-colleagues in the government would never dream of calling him rude names. As Minister of War, Profumo bore the ultimate responsibility for the big publicity campaign to persuade people to join the Army. The advertisements used in this campaign showed such a one-sided view of Army life that even some newspapers felt moved to protest. Profumo’s ads. showed clean-living young men playing rugby, climbing mountains, patrolling romantic deserts. They did not hint that military discipline, in its dreary stupidities, is designed to degrade and brutalise men. They did not mention the unpleasant places a soldier may be sent to, nor the dirty jobs he may have to do there. They ignored the fact that soldiers often die especially horrible deaths, looking not at all like clean living Soldiers of the Queen as they do so. The advertisements told lies, but nobody in the government got upset with Profumo because of that.

Neither have they been upset by the lies about, say, the effects of testing nuclear weapons. The government assure us that the danger from these exercises is negligible and that another little test will not do us any harm. Yet they know perfectly well that every test adds to the atmosphere’s load of radioactivity and that this means that a lot of people, especially children, will die who would otherwise have lived. Overseas, as well, lies are told on this matter. President Kennedy has recently announced that his government will suspend all tests, unless some other country starts them up again. This may well be followed, as it was in 1958, by a similar announcement from Moscow. Both sides will pose as the guardians of peace and human safety. Yet both sides know that a suspension of tests does not mean that the development of nuclear weapons has been suspended. They know that they are all working on -their bombs and that when they think it is to their advantage to do so they will think up some reason to start testing them again. Are Kennedy and Khruschev, then, champions of truth?

It would, indeed, be surprising if men in their position were, for they administer a social system which is full of lies, and not only those told by politicians. Were the makers of thalidomide telling the truth when they asserted that the drug could safely be taken by pregnant women? What sort of principle were they upholding, when they protested that the delay in the American Food and Drug Administration approving thalidomide was costing them their chance of exploiting a Christmas market? Do the mass-production tailors believe their own advertisements, which show aristocratic young men being admired by glamorous girls for the cheap off-the-peg outfit they are wearing? Are the estate agents who advertise a cramped, poky apology for a house as “ neat and compact ” and a garden with knee-high weeds as “mature” keen churchgoers who regularly say their prayers?

We know what grounds these lies are excused on. We know that capitalism claims that strategic and commercial reasons justify telling lies. As R. A. Butler said about the Cripps lie, “. . . I know that if you talked about devaluing the currency well ahead of time, you would do indefinite damage to your own currency. . . .” But they cannot have it both ways. Capitalism professes to work on a basis of morality; workers are taught from the very beginning that the road to Heaven is paved with honesty and high principles. Yet capitalism admits that its own interests force it to deny these principles. And since when have the sort of morals propounded so often by capitalism's leaders been relative, adaptable, matters of expediency? A lie, after all, is a lie under any circumstances. No, they cannot have it both ways, although over Profumo that is how they have tried to have it.

Imagine a politician who told the truth! A Minister of Housing who admitted that he could not solve the housing problem! A Foreign Secretary who blew the gaff on every double-crossing international carve up as soon as he had made it! A Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced his Budget with the admission that it was just a rehash of a lot of ideas which had flopped in the past! If that happened nobody would get involved in a scandal. There would be a dignified resignation, surrounded by sorrowful stories of tiredness, strain and mental breakdown.

Profumo told a rather foolish and, for him, a risky lie. But at least it was a lie about his personal life, a lie which involved only a very few people. In contrast, day after day capitalism goes on turning out lies which affect the welfare and in many cases the very lives of millions of people. What is more, those lies play their part in bolstering the social system which degrades and depresses the majority—the only socially useful people—the working class.

No minister gets worked up about that. There are no top level inquiries, no resignations, nothing on television. In cases like the Profumo scandal the working class are supposed to be content with a mixed diet of salacity and hypocritical moralising. The same newspapers which got indignant over Profumo's lie saw nothing wrong in paying thousands of pounds for Christine Keeler's story, nor in publishing photographs of her which we will describe—and not for want of a better word—as arresting.

It will be tragic if in among this smoke screen of hypocrisy and scandal the essential fact is lost sight of. Let us state it here, quickly and simply.

Lies are essential to capitalism and super moralists like Lord Hailsham know it. And capitalism itself is the biggest lie of all.

Ivan

The Passing Show: Social revolution in Japan (1963)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social revolution in Japan

Under the above heading The Times told us recently of changes in Japan brought about by the war. But if the reader expects to learn that the wealth producers, the Japanese workers, have taken over, he will be disappointed though he should not be surprised. What in fact the article deals with primarily is the rise of new propertied group and families in place of the old.

The richest man in Japan has an income of 440m. yen (£440,000) a year. He is Mr. Konosuke Matsusha, chairman of the Matsusha Electric Industrial Company. His declared income is nearly twice as large as that of anyone else in the country. According to figures based on tax returns for 1962. the 20 richest men in Japan have incomes ranging from £121,000 to £440,000. All but one are industrialists. Some of the names in the list are almost unknown to the general public and the famous pre-war names—Iwasaki (founders of the Mitsubishi combine), Okura, Mitsui and Sumito Mo—do not appear anywhere.

Of course, there has been no social revolution for the other Japanese, those whose names are always unknown. The latest figures published by the International Labour Office show average earnings in Japanese manufacturing industries, ’’including family allowances and end-of-year bonuses,” as 22,834 Yen, or about £22 16s. 8d. a month.

Bigger and Fewer Breweries

Official figures published in the April issue of Economic Trends showed how far take-overs have gone in industry as a whole. In eight years, 1954-1961, £1,600 million was spent on take-over bids, but of this total nearly half came from the 98 companies each with assets of £25 million or more, though they represent only a tiny proportion of the 2,600 companies whose shares are quoted on the Stock Exchanges of this century. Altogether 3,400 companies were taken over (most of them not quoted on the stock exchange).

One industry in which amalgamation has gone far, but with more to come, is the brewing industry.

In place of a multiplicity of breweries many of them small and local, a writer in the Financial Times (May 25) writes of the industry now being dominated by six major groups.

What the boards aimed to achieve by take-overs was to consolidate brewing and distribution in large regions and thus achieve big economies and larger profits. Local breweries are being closed down and a considerable number of the local ”milds, bitters and light ales” are disappearing, ”no longer worth producing in small quantities.” Standardisation of a smaller number of nationally advertised brews is the order of the day for capitalism in brewing. It is ironic to recall the old argument against Socialism that it would deprive us of the variety of choice that capitalism gave us. Maybe the local varieties were no better (or worse) than the TV advertised popular brands, but that is not what drinkers were told before the change took place.

Common Market under a Cloud

When the drive for British entry into the Common Market was in full and hopeful flood the line taken by its advocates was to say that all was well inside the Six and British industry must be in to share in the benefits.

It was equally to be expected that immediately entry was blackballed by De Gaulle, they should nearly all have a change of heart and say that it really did not matter after all.

Now a few months have passed and some of the earlier arguments have begun to look rather thin. In place of the supposed absence of labour disputes we have seen massive strikes in France and Germany. French farming interests which were partly responsible for the objection to British entry have now brought the French and German governments into conflict, and both of them into conflict with American farmers over the entry of their exports into Europe.

The bloom has gone off the German industrial and stock exchange boom, because of falling profit margins and stronger pressure for wage increases.

At the same time, helped by some industrial recovery and rising profits, many British capitalists and politicians are thinking that they can do better out of Europe, and British exports into the Common Market have increased, as also exports to Russia.

The fact is that both before and after, the arguments were based on wrong or too limited assumptions. The European Common Market carries no more guarantee of permanent rapid expansion than any other large or small region of capitalism, and no more able to escape wage disputes and fluctuating profit margins.

And what happens to one industry inside or outside the Market is not necessarily the experience of other industries. . While motor car exports to Europe have been rising, and the Ready Mix Concrete Company claims record sales on the Continent, one firm, Wilmot Breedon, producers of motors, aircraft engines and domestic appliances, reports that the profits made in Britain were overshadowed by the heavy losses of its French subsidiary.

So for the moment the Common Market is rather out of favour.

What Mr. Profumo did to the Stock Exchange.

One of the emptiest dreams of the capitalists is to imagine to themselves how happy they could all be if only they could go on making, profits without the constant interruption of “politics." One of a cloudless sky politics keeps blowing up. On Monday, June 10th according to the Evening Standard, the London Stock Exchange had its biggest slump since Cuba—not this time the work of one of the K’s, but of Mr. Profumo. “Dealers, nervous about the eventual outcome of the Profumo affair, marked share prices down all round."

The same issue of the Evening Standard had an article asking whether Mr. Profumo, out of politics, can hope to find an outlet for his talents in business. The argument raises diverting side issues:

A man in public office has to have a high moral character and appear totally incorruptible. . . In business, however, standards are not always that high . . . But the business world doesn’t think much of a liar, especially if he gets found out

The writer of the article, the City Editor of the Standard, asks: “If he came knocking at your door would you give him a job ? ” But there is no urgency about it:

The ex-Minister of War comes from a rich family. The Profumos have for many years controlled the £34,000,000 Provident Life Association of London.

Most of the shares are held by trusts in which Mr. Profumo has an important role. In 1961 the trusts sold some £1,000,000 worth of shares for cash in a public issue. But they still own around two-thirds of the company’s Ordinary share capital, Worth some £3,700,000 at current market prices.

Mr. Profumo, of course, is only one of the beneficiaries. But he must draw quite a useful income from the investment.

Last year Provident Life paid out £120,000 in Ordinary dividends, of which the trusts must have received a considerable share.

Edgar Hardcastle

Two leaflets from the Ukraine (2001)

Blogger's Note:

Blogger's Notes, as a rule, are usually appended to the bottom of an article or a review but unfortunately this is a special case where they have to be pinned to the top of the page.

A wee bit awkward this one, but as the blog is primarily concerned with ensuring that all of the Socialist Standard is online, this has to be included. To cut a long story short the International Young Workers was a fictitious organisation that was set up by members of the Ukrainian and Russian sections of the Committee for a Workers' International (the Militant Tendency's International) to scam political organisations in the West out of funds — and maybe also for their own personal amusement. (Hoodwinking supposedly arrogant Westerners who thought to throw their political nets eastwards to gather up groups under the umbrella of various Internationals.)

Posing as a small group sympathetic to our politics they put out feelers via email and it eventually led to a couple of SPGBers (Danny Lambert and Vincent Otter) visiting the Ukraine, with a return trip being organised in which a 'Semyon Shevchenko' visited Britain, addressing the SPGB's Annual Conference, and formally establishing the  IYW as the World Socialist Party of the Ukraine, a section of the World Socialist Movement. 

In the summer of 2003 we got wind of this being an elaborate scam perpetrated against ourselves and about 10 other political groups, and we took steps to expose the fraud. It turned out that 'Semyon Shevchenko' was in fact a political operator by the name of Oleg Vernyk and he was one of the main leaders of this group and its schemes. It was an embarrassment all round — including for the Committee for the Workers' International — who promptly expelled their Ukrainian and Russian sections. Vernyk's still around, still politicking, and if you search his name on the internet, you'll will find a greyer and older version of the man I met in the early 2000s.

This is just a brief and truncated version of events. There are copious documents online where all the groups scammed have their say, and where the revelation of the scam is played out in real time. (Just type in 'Ukrainian scam + SPGB' into your search engine of choice and fill your boots.) 

I can laugh at it now looking back but it was punch to the guts at the time. We dealt with the Ukrainian group in good faith — as I'm sure did the other groups scammed — and that good faith was taken advantage of.  It happens in life, political or otherwise. (Barltrop mentions similar type attempted political scams in The Monument.) 

I heard on the grapevine that Alexander Payne has bought the film rights to the story, and as long as Paul Giamatti isn't cast to play me — he's too tall — I'm fine with that. (Disregard this last line. Total bullshit.)

Party News from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below the English translation (by them from Ukrainian) of two leaflets distributed recently in Kiev, the first to coincide with the anti-IMF demonstrations in Prague in September and the second in November on the 83rd anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.

Your living conditions are extremely hard and become worse and worse. Average month wage of Kiev worker is $US30 and student scholarship is $US4. At the same time minimal level for live is $US120. Even in accordance with official data unemployment level amounts now about 40 percent amongst people with ages up to 30 years. The level of infant mortality increased in 3.4 times only during last 6 years. This list of disasters may be endlessly continued. From the other hand, bourgeoisie has extremely rich houses, cars, goods etc on the expense of your exploitation for receiving more surplus value. Undoubtedly, IMF/WTO is terrible fruit of capitalism. But we are opposite such methods of struggle. Why? Where is alternative? Why different strikes, pickets and other actions are always unsuccessful? Bourgeois class doesn’t give us even small concessions without a fight. It’s impossible to solve separate problems without solving the main problem. Capitalists are interested in receiving the most possible used value of your labour power, so they’ve never help us, on the contrary, exploitation under capitalism will only increase. It’s economical law of capitalism. So, the capitalism is cause of all our problems, not his separate institutions like IMF/WTO. Only system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole—the SOCIALISM, not reform of capitalism, which is impossible, is the solution of all our problems. So, our common task is consistent and resolute struggle for establish the socialism. If you want to know more about socialism—contact us. International Young Workers.

Workers!

Different kinds of “leftists” say to you that Russian “Revolution” in 1917 was socialist and proletarian, that it opened the road to real Socialism or even Communism. But is it true? Let’s see. Bolshevik minority declared that the policy of Marx and Engels is out of date. Lenin and Trotsky are worshipped as the pathfinders of a shorter and easier road to Communism. By this way they refused from democracy, socialist education of working masses, support of socialist-thinking workers, both Russian and all-world etc. These denunciations by the Bolshevik leaders are quite understandable if we realise that only the minority in Russia are Communists. In February 1917 party included only 40,000 members on the society of 180 million members. In this way Bolshevik’s rule was the rule of overwhelming minority, which with the help of violence and authoritarian dictatorship conducted their power over the people.

We state that because of a large anti-Socialist peasantry and vast untrained population, Russia was a long way from Socialism. Lenin admitted this by saying: “Reality says that State Capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State Capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us”. But if we are to copy Bolshevist policy in other countries we should have to demand State Capitalism, which is not a step to Socialism in advanced capitalist countries. All of us know how much disasters State Capitalism in USSR brought to workers. Therefore Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist etc. slogans like “back to USSR”, “Long live the proletarian revolution 1917”, “Lenin is always alive” etc. are not the socialist and have nothing common with tasks of socialist movement of Ukraine and the entire world.

So, we consider that the 83rd anniversary of Russian “Revolution” in 1917 is the serious cause to think about the experience, that workers class received during these years. Only system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole—the SOCIALISM is the solution of all our problems. Capitalism does not operate in the interest of the majority, and can never be reformed so that it does. Until we finally abolish wage labor, we workers will never be free. So, our common task is consistent and resolute struggle for establish the socialism.

If you want to know more about socialism–contact us.

International Young Workers

Proper Gander: Lights . . . Camera . . . Political Action? (2024)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The response to Mr Bates vs The Post Office was a surprise reminder that TV programmes can still have an impact, even with so much else on our screens competing for our attention. The four-part series shown on ITV dramatised the campaign by ex-Post Office staff against their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were prosecuted, with thousands more suspected of fiddling their accounts. Consequently, many lost their homes as well as their jobs, fell into debt and some ended their own lives because of the pressure. Their convictions were based on discrepancies and shortfalls recorded on their Post Office branch’s accounting software, Horizon. When some sub-postmasters realised there was a pattern of innocent people being convicted, they grouped together and formed The Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance to co-ordinate their campaign. In 2019, England’s High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty, acknowledging the real source of the accounting discrepancies. So far, only 93 sub-postmasters have had their convictions overturned. In 2020 the government established a public inquiry which was ongoing while Mr Bates vs The Post Office was being broadcast.

Toby Jones portrays Alan Bates, who founded the campaign group and persistently worked to persuade lawyers and MPs that the convictions were unjust. The story is one of ‘skint, little people’ as Alan says, who found themselves victimised by the rules, procedures and economic prerogatives of powerful institutions, and who are fighting back. The Post Office is represented and defended by then-Chief Executive Paula Vennells and Head of Partnerships Angela van den Bogerd, both played as shifty and conspiratorial. The IT company behind Horizon, Fujitsu, is depicted as a cold, shadowy institution, but perhaps with less emphasis than might be expected. While the drama ends with a call for the government to take more responsibility, it puts Conservatives such as James Arbuthnot and Nadhim Zahawi (who appears as himself) in a very good light. Blame is placed on the Post Office rather than the economic and legal framework which allowed for the whole situation.

While Mr Bates vs The Post Office has raised awareness of the scandal beyond its 10 million viewers, it has been reported extensively before. Problems with the Horizon system were first highlighted in 2009 by Computer Weekly magazine, which has since published hundreds more articles, alongside investigations by Private Eye, Panorama (see Proper Gander June 2022) and journalist Nick Wallis, whose 2021 book The Great Post Office Scandal was serialised in the Daily Mail. The issue has been in the background for years, but Mr Bates vs The Post Office has managed to give it unprecedented attention. After its episodes were first screened in early January, a different angle on the topic was reported on news media each day: the way that suspects were interrogated, the millions paid to Fujitsu, the petition to strip Paula Vennells of her CBE, new legislation to quash the convictions, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak supporting a knighthood for Alan Bates.

Why has it taken Mr Bates vs The Post Office, rather than any of the previous exposés, to galvanise this action? As Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’, and the docudrama format of Mr Bates vs The Post Office enables it to have more of an impact than a straightforward documentary or written article. All these formats are interpretations of research into what happened, with the difference between them being in how this research is presented. In re-enacting what happened, a docudrama can employ the techniques used in filmed drama to engage the viewer. Dialogue is carefully chosen by the writer and rehearsed by the actor, often working with the real people being portrayed. Scenes are lit, filmed, scored and edited in ways intended to draw in the viewer to how the producers want the story to be told. When this is done proficiently, the re-creation of an event can have more of an emotional impact than being told about those events or even watching real footage. This gives docudramas an advantage in making the viewer feel emotionally invested in an issue, which is needed to fuel any political action. Only knowing that something is wrong or needs changing isn’t enough.

Previous docudramas have succeeded in shaping prevailing attitudes to events. The most well-known remains 1966’s Cathy Come Home, which showed a family becoming homeless and then being further persecuted by the state machinery and lack of adequate support services. The script was based on thorough research and largely filmed on location (a rarity at the time) with hand-held cameras and improvisation, giving additional authenticity. While Cathy Come Home drew attention to homelessness and led to the formation of the charity Crisis, the only reform to legislation it prompted was to allow husbands to stay with their wives and children in homeless hostels. As for wider change, director Ken Loach said that the film hasn’t achieved this: ‘it all gets smothered in this bear-hug of approbation, so that the energy of it is dissipated’ (tinyurl.com/3uasacat). A docudrama which had a particular impact on policy was The Day After, broadcast in America during 1983. This prediction of what a third world war would be like convinced then-president Ronald Reagan to pull back on nuclear proliferation. Hillsborough, shown on ITV in 1996, took a different approach to these by portraying real people, as does Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Hillsborough dramatised the campaign by the families of those who died during the Sheffield Wednesday football disaster to overturn the official verdicts of accidental death. When the deaths were instead ruled unlawful in 2016, MP Steve Rotheram stated the docudrama was ‘massively influential’ in the outcome (tinyurl.com/yeyucap4).

The momentum generated for a couple of weeks in January by Mr Bates vs The Post Office looks like it will speed up a resolution for the sub-postmasters which will hopefully improve their situations. However, the government’s apparent enthusiasm for the convictions to be overturned is perhaps due more to them wanting to attract support in a general election year than to them being concerned that the campaign will develop further if they don’t take action. Still, Mr Bates vs The Post Office has reminded us that TV has some strength, especially in the format of a docudrama, and the programme also optimistically shows how people driven by a common cause can self-organise and co-operate.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Correction from the March 2024 Socialist Standard

February's Proper Gander (print version) stated that Shelter was founded as a result of Cathy Come Home. The programme in fact inspired the creation of the charity Crisis. Apologies.

Greasy Pole: Money, Money, Money . . . (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was a bit like an archaeological dig as enthusiastic excavators exposed, one layer after another, not the remains of some prehistoric wanderers but the identities of Labour leaders who had been offered and in some cases accepted, donations to help their campaigns in contravention of the rules of their party and, even more to the point, against the law which their own government had introduced. Day after day the incriminated names emerged from the soil of Westminster: Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn (who both refused): Harriet Harman and Peter Hain (who both accepted). Then there were the people outside the Commons but who, as party officials, must have known what was going on and how troublesome it could be but who apparently did nothing to stop it ; people like Labour’s funds organiser John Mendelsohn (who put up a defence so feeble as to be incredible) and Party Secretary  Peter Watt (who could find nobody to say how blameless he was and why he should not under any circumstances be required to leave his job over so insignificant a peccadillo so had to carry the can and resign). After the Honours for Loans affair, which so bitterly flavoured the final months of the Blair government, another such scandal was the last thing on Gordon Brown’s wish list.

Illegal

The law in this matter is clear; in the case of any donation over £200 the party must record the full name and address of the donor, who must be a registered voter in this country. If the amount is over £5000 these must be reported to the Electoral Commission. In view of this it is not advisable for a donation to be accepted unless the source of it is known to the party. What is not acceptable under the law is that the donor’s identity should be obscured by the money passing through the medium of another person. This was what happened with those generous gifts from David Abrahams, a man who has been variously described as one of the party’s strongest supporters and their third largest financial backer.  While there is no question about his support for Labour and the fortune he has given to the party, there are other aspects about Abrahams which are rather less clear.

To begin with there is his name; to the tenants of some properties he manages in Newcastle he is known as David Martin. Then there is his age, variously given as 53 and 63. When he was resisting being deselected as the Labour candidate in William Hague’s seat in Richmond Yorkshire he presented himself as a married man with a young son. Perhaps he did this under the impression that an image of domestic stability would help his case but there were serious doubt about this, aggravated by clashes between him and a divorced woman who asserted that he had more or less hired her and her 11 year old son to pose as his family. Not surprisingly, when he was re-adopted (by one vote) by the Labour Party in Richmond a group of party officials resigned in protest. Abrahams has explained the confusion over his identity by saying that he is a very private person, although a party activist thought him “the pushiest person I ever came across” and to an MP he was “The kind of person you sometimes see at conferences and such – hanging about and wanting to shake hands with everyone”.

The Builder

For all his cunning and survival skills Abrahams was less than totally discreet in his choice of people to conceal his identity by acting as channels for his gifts. One woman, who professed herself puzzled by the matter, said she was a lifelong Tory; another was his secretary. But the most exciting material for the scandal-excavating media was Ray Ruddick, said to be a director of Abrahams’ property company but who works as a builder, and leaves his ex-council house each day in a battered old Ford Transit.  Ruddick is reputed to have given £140,000 to the Labour Party during the five months since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister but what he said about it was: “I can’t stand Labour. I can’t stand any politicians…I’m off to the bingo to see if I can win that sort of money”. This penetrative comment dragged the matter down to the appropriate level of a farce – but one which seemed to have brought Labour’s spin machine almost to a standstill, unable to respond in the customary manner of diverting attention onto their opponents.

All political parties must be preoccupied with money and the bigger the party the more immediate and desperate their preoccupation. A lot of design, effort and organisation must be devoted to the task of, essentially, persuading millions of people that all the evidence available to prove the impotence of those parties must be disregarded so that they are willing to trust again policies which have been massively discredited. To convince voters of the usefulness of choosing between one hopeless way and another  requires a big effort and a lot of money and the parties, steeped as they are in capitalism’s obligingly acquisitive morality, do not need to be too choosy about how they come by it. For them, custom, rules and laws are there to be broken if by that they can win advantage over their rivals for power. What this means is that Labour are not alone in financial manipulation; the Tories and the Liberals have similarly disreputable histories.

Dodgy Tory Finances

The source of the funding of the Tory party is as prudently obscure as it needs to be –and it goes back a long way. Most infamously, in 1993 the businessman Asil Nadir fled to Northern Cyprus, out of the clutches of any extradition treaty, to escape prosecution arising from him defrauding  the Polly Peck company of some thirty four million pounds. Since then he has often told of his desire to return to England to face the music.  If he does so he may well be greeted by some old Tory friends, anxious that the years in exile have not stunted his generosity which, just before his hurried departure, ensured that he gave them £440,000. More recently a Berkshire company going under the name of Bearwood Corporate Services has been a generous, if selective, donor; it is owned by Bearwood Holdings which is itself 99 percent owned by an investment company entirely owned by Lord Ashcroft, previously Conservative Party treasurer and now Deputy Chairman of the party. The Bearwood contribution did not go to Conservative central office but to individual parties in marginal constituencies. But the effects were uneven; in the 2005 election of a sample of 15 seats six were held by Labour, six were won (2 of them gains) by the Tories and three  (one gained) by the LibDems. There are questions about Ashcroft’s legal status as a donor, connected to his complex financial affairs and whether he is disqualified from donating by really being domiciled in a tax haven.

Another large corporate donor was IIR Limited, a company dealing in conference and training facilities. This firm’s donations were registered with the Electoral Commission but they said that they were made personally by their chairman Lord Laidlaw. In fact Laidlaw is a tax exile, Scotland’s second richest person; he sold IIR Ltd, for £7 million, in 2005 and is one the four biggest donors to the Tory party. 

And so it goes on; what is abundantly clear is that the finances of the big players in the political game are anything but clear and open and accessible. The wealth of people like Abrahams and Ashcroft originates in the exploitation – the wage-slavery – of the working class, who are deceived by the political parties so generously financed into supporting the social system which keeps them in their inferior position. That is the motivation for the millions of pounds which, through a variety of labyrinthine accounting methods, finds its way into the coffers of the Labour and Tory parties and others like them. Through their exploitation and their votes  for these parties at the polls  workers are paying to keep themselves subjugated.  

Ivan

Caught In The Act: Politics and Sex (1992)

The Caught In The Act Column from the March 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and Sex

Where were you when you heard the earth-shattering news of Paddy Ashdown’s affair with his secretary? If you can't remember where you were, do you care that you can't? Do you care about Ashdown's affair? Or about all the others which politicians are said to be continually involving themselves in? Well, it's perfectly healthy, from the point of view of a rational attitude to politics, that you shouldn’t care, except that this should not blind you to some illuminating aspects of the matter.

To begin with, Ashdown's dramatic confession enabled him to pose as the kind of clean-cut, honourable person to be expected of an ex-officer in Her Majesty's Royal Marine Commandos who, as we all know, are a fine bunch of men who would never stoop to anything mean or underhand. The truth is rather less clear-cut. Ashdown owned up, after an unusually determined effort to stifle the news, only when he knew the game was up. If it could have been managed, he would probably have continued with the deception. What worried him was not the deception, or the effect of it on his family or his ex-secretary, but the possible damage to his political career.

Media

Then there was the indignation, so supportive of Ashdown, aroused by the activities of the media — in particular of the "popular" newspapers who rampaged on the ruthless intrusiveness which is almost instinctive to them. It was not a pretty sight but then neither is a politician exposed as a hypocrite. For news is what sells the papers and. however we look at it, Ashdown's private life — like that of any other political leader — is news. As a supporter of capitalism and its commodity economy he can hardly complain when he is inconvenienced because the sellers of one particular commodity jazz up their product with details of his sex life to make it more saleable, more competitive.

In any ease the media interest was that much more excited by the fact that they had uncovered a scandal involving the leader of a party which presents itself as morally superior to the others, as an alternative to the muck-raking, back-biting and blackmailing which is the very stuff of politics. A lot of Ashdown’s embarrassment was due to the exposure of him as really no different, no belter, than the others. Of course it would have been worse for him if the publicity had cost his party a lot of votes. But the anti-media campaign which instantly counter-attacked when the news broke seemed to have had the opposite effect and Ashdown's position as leader of the Lib Dems looks safe. At least, for the immediate future — which means until the general election results are in.

So how far should the media intrude into the private, family life of politicians? On this there is a large balloon of hypocrisy which needs to be pricked. Social attitudes being what they are — distorted by capitalism's property-based relationships — it is to the advantage of a politician to be married. Having a husband or a wife prevents awkward, vote-threatening, questions about any deviancy from what is defined as sexual normality. Constituency selection committees arc favourably impressed by a candidate who presents as someone with a stable marriage and two or three bright, well-groomed children. It is the image they are interested in, before the reality — the sort of image which can guarantee a sugary photograph of the candidate at home with the family which looks good on an election address. As often becomes apparent, reality can be rather less united. If politicians set themselves up in this way, using their family in order to win support, they cannot complain if the family — its stability and their loyalty to it — becomes an issue. So if there is a hint that all at home is less than idyllically happy it is not unfair for that to be used to expose the politician as a hypocrite who tries to persuade the voters to give their family the loyalty which they themselves don't give it.

Votes

What really concerns politicians in these situations — what really concerned Ashdown and his party — was what effect the news would have on the voters. For the Liberals, the memory of Jeremy Thorpe is too close and too damaging for them to take another scandal lightly. The effect of the exposure on the people concerned — in spite of the mock concern for Ashdown's wife takes a very low priority compared to the party’s preoccupation with what the voters may think. For capitalism's politics is not about consistent principles but about taking advantage, however and whenever it is on offer, and about stifling, as far as possible, any disadvantages. It is about ruthlessness before caring, about cynicism before sustainable standards.

To take this point a little further, it was reported that the exposure of Ashdown's affair brought a rush of support for the Lib/Dems. Could this mean that, as we approach a general election which threatens to be historically dirty and irrelevant. John Major and Neil Kinnock will try to attact the voters by bringing out some skeletons from their own cupboards — or, if none exist, manufacturing them? The mind, in an exceedingly unpleasant way, boggles.

Economy

More real than the Ashdown affair is the economy — or rather the current recession — which is likely to be a dominant issue in the election. Is the recession really the result of a deliberate policy by the Tory government? Could a Labour government cure it or should this be left to Major's crew, who say they are about to cure it anyway? In the Commons recently John Major, under pressure from Kinnock's argument that the recession is all the fault of the Tories, shouted that many other industrial countries are going through a slump at present. The Tories can hardly be blamed for that, can they?

Well no, they can't. But what they can be blamed for is the pretence, when it suits them, that there is something separate and unique about the recession in Britain so that it can be "cured" by some clever fiscal juggling by Norman Lamont or whoever happens to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. In fact Lamont has rapidly climbed to fame as a persistent exponent of false promises and quickly discredited economic forecasts. If the Tories refuse to accept the blame for the slump, on the grounds that it is a world wide problem, they can't claim the credit when, as world conditions change, the slump recedes to be followed by a boom.

But, of course, they will claim that credit; Lamont claims it now. even as all the economic indicators say there is no sign of an end to the slump. Because, as we said about Paddy Ashdown, politics is not about consistency of principles. And come to think of it, a few years back there was a flurry of scandal about Lamont and a disappointed woman . . .

Ivan