News in Review: Hurrah for the NCB (1962)

The News in Review column from the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hurrah for the NCB

Who was it who once prayed to be protected from his friends?

When he was plain Mr. Oliver Lyttelton, Lord Chandos was a prominent member of the Conservative opposition which duelled with the Attlee government over its nationalisation bills. They fought in the House of Commons all day and. sometimes, all night as well. So effective was their propaganda that to many voters nationalisation became a very-dirty word.

But what is Lord Chandos saying about nationalisation now that he is a big industrial boss, chief of the mighty Associated Electrical Industries combine and of the Institute of Directors?

“Nationalisation of a fairly substantial sector of industry has come to stay. Whatever I may have thought in the first place about the wisdom of this policy, it is quite clear that every loyal citizen must try to make our nationalised industries work efficiently … As an industrialist I want cheap fuel and reliable supplies and I believe that with a little more working together that is what you [Lord Robens, chairman of the National Coal Board] will secure for us.”

Lord Robens need not feel embarrassed at this new friendship. Nationalisation was designed to give just what Lord Chandos wants — cheap and reliable supplies of vital commodities.

The only pity now is that Lord Chandos did not tell us this some years ago, when he was spreading the fairy tale that nationalisation had something to do with Socialism.

New Hospitals

One of the things which have missed out on the post war boom is the hospital. Over a fifth of those taken over by the National Health Service in 1948 were built before the American Civil War. Nearly half of them were built before the beginning of this century.

What has been done to put this to rights? Since the last war only one large general hospital has gone up—in Northern Ireland.

To the reformers who have been worried about this, the recent government White Paper must have come as a ray of hope. For plans are being laid to spend nearly £800 million during the next ten years to give us, in the words of the White Paper.” . . . the physical equipment and the pattern and the setting which will everywhere place the most modern treatment at the service of patients.”

This sounds fine. Who can disapprove of bigger and better hospitals? But we have heard this sort of promise before.

We heard it about the roads and the railways and about the Health Service itself. For Capitalism is full of problems which are left to fester until a government decides to tackle them with heavy expenditure.

Many of these grandiose plans have been axed out of recognition in successive economic crises, when, the government has been looking for ways of reducing its expenditure.

There will be more economic crises. Which means that there will be more cuts in expenditure. Which means that Health Minister Powell’s beautiful hospitals may never see the light of day.

Expensive Royalty

Many tongues were clucked at the news that the Royal Family is to have some more money spent on them.

It must cost around £400 a year in fees alone to send the Prince of Wales to Gordonstoun School. The fees, says the school, vary with the parents’ financial circumstances; which does not mean, of course, that the school is full of clever, deserving boys whose parents pay no fees because they cannot afford them.

It will cost about £85,000 to renovate the wing of Kensington Palace where Princess Margaret and her husband are living—£15,000 more than the original estimate.

Some critics say that Prince Charles should be sent to a comprehensive school, like a sizeable part of his subjects. Others think that the Princess should be content to live in a council semi-detached, which to them seems roomy enough for a couple with only one child.

These views are way off the mark. The Royal Family stand for the possessions, rights and privileges of the British ruling class. It is, therefore, only appropriate that they themselves should live in lavish privilege.

And nobody has yet explained how sending a prince to a council school, or sticking a princess in a small house, would help the working class parents who struggle to keep their children at school past the age of fifteen and who have to renovate their house during their summer holiday.

These problems are typical of what faces workers all over the world, under monarchies and in republics.

While the tongue-cluckers do their measly, pointless sums, Capitalism grinds merrily on, providing a fat living for a few of its people and condemning the rest to dull poverty.

Tory Unrest

The Government took on a slight list last month, under the blast of criticism from many quarters.

The strikes of railwaymen and engineers encouraged The Guardian to sigh that, although they reproved the strikers, industrial unrest was the inevitable result of the Government’s policy on wages. Other critics thought that the trouble was caused because the Government had not explained the pay pause properly to the workers.

Some standard bearers for free enterprise were disappointed at the Government’s refusal to interfere with the free enterprise take-over bid from ICI for Courtaulds. Labour had a go on Lord Home’s criticism of UNO. To cap it all Tory M.P. Sir Harry Legge-Bourke suggested that fellow Old Etonian Macmillan is getting past it and should hand over to a younger man.

It would be interesting to hear how a government could explain a wage freeze so that the frozen workers accepted it. Workers sell their energies to their employers, which means that they are bound to resist any effort to keep down the price of those energies, whatever tricky name it goes under.

Such problems are typical of the confusion of Capitalism and are bound to cause unrest as the Government—any government—grapples with them. Critics and rebels may flex their muscles impressively, but when it is their turn to do the grappling they never shape any better than the men they have criticised.

The fact is that the individuals who say they are in charge of the affairs of British Capitalism really have little control over events. And that goes for their critics as well.

So it does not really matter whether or not Macmillan manages to ride this latest storm. We shall still all be in the same boat together.

Sting in the Tail: The Numbers Game (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Numbers Game

Listen, John, I've just been reading the November / December issue of Labour Party News. It's full of Neil Kinnock and his pals on about the wonderful future they offer "our country" if they get in.

And they've got their own Premier Savings Account at "competitive rates of interest", a competition with a £10,000 tax-free prize, a Visa card, a lottery, and organic wines! Couldn't find a mention of socialism, but you can't have everything, can you?

They’ve got a lot of new members too; 140 here, 35 there, but the official "Recruiter of the Year" is a Nottingham youngster who roped in 200! It's easy, John, there's a membership form inside if you want to join: no conditions, no questions asked.

All this recruitment looks good — what's that you say? Labour's membership has dropped from 350,000 in 1980 to 288,000 now! Christ, that Nottingham youngster had better get his finger out, hadn't he?

Open Secrets

For fifty years groups of Leninists have been boring-from-within the Labour Party.

Because their own ideas have very little electoral support, they hope to gain influence in the Labour Party which they see as "the mass organisation of the working class".

There have been many such hopefuls down through the years of which "Militant" is only the best known. As would-be Bolsheviks they exist as "secret" groups but always there are the inevitable defectors to reveal all.

The latest group to be shopped is "Socialist Organiser" which, according to an ex-member, is:

. . . completely committed to remaining within the Labour Party, and will jump through each and every hoop the (Labour) NEC places before them to save themselves.

The Guardian (24 December)

These groups are an obstacle to Labour's chances of running British capitalism and are being rooted-out, but doubtless there will in the future be others willing to jump through endless hoops in pursuit of Lenin's useless and discredited ideas.

Princely Piffle

Prince Charles, authority on ecology and architecture, has been airing his views on

politics and economics.

Speaking on French TV he

. . . called for a balance between the ideals of capitalism and communism.

The Guardian (24 December)

What he meant by "communism" is, of course, what existed in Eastern Europe and which he described only last year as "one vast prison". What "ideals"of this system does he admire?

The Prince continued:

We need capitalism, but perhaps with a more human face. We need a system in which big capital becomes more and more Interested in local communities. . . and the developing countries.

As if capitalism will do this as an act of altruism and without taking profits into account!

This ignorance of capitalism's priorities is further revealed by his call for banks to lend to "gifted" young people to start their own businesses. Alas, the banks

. . . weren't in the slightest bit interested because young people had nothing to offer as guarantees.

We doubt if bank depositors would share the Prince's desire to see their savings lent without collateral.

Let's hope that HRH knows more about ecology and architecture than he does about politics and economics.

Keen as Mustard

During World War II over one thousand Australian servicemen were used as human guinea-pigs in experiments with mustard gas. Many of them had up to 95% of their skins burned and a top-secret film recorded the horrific details in glorious technicolor.

Were these men prisoners of the Japanese and the victims of a bestial atrocity? No, it was the Australian and British governments who conducted the experiments on them.

All this emerged in a BBC2 Horizon programme on January 14. The experiments were supposed to provide information for "defensive" purposes should Japan use mustard gas, but Horizon revealed that the Allies intended to use the gas on the Japanese: they decided on the atom bomb instead.

Probably the most shocking revelation for many who saw the programme was that the human guinea-pigs were all volunteers. One of the scientists involved in the experiments said that the men "knew what they were in for". This was only partly true because the call for volunteers made no mention of mustard gas, and the men certainly didn’t know there would be such long-term after-effects as leukemia and damage to internal organs.

There is nothing new in workers volunteering to perform capitalism's dangerous tasks. They are forever risking their health and lives in the service of their masters, and it is nothing new for them to be rewarded in cruel and inhuman fashion.

Gulf Reality

While TV commentators move toy tanks over sandy table tops and gush on about "pincer movements" like demented schoolboys: the realities of war are much more soberly summed up by one of the participants of the real war.

Here, for example, are the unexpurgated thoughts of Captain Ronald Thomas, from Stoke-on-Trent and A Squadron of the 16th /5th, as he watched his soldiers load their missiles for what might be the last hours of peace. "Yes, I'm frightened of dying. Everyone's thinking about it now." (A pause here.) "But you know, I'll be really pissed off if I didn't see my family again. I've got four kids. I’d be fucking angry if I was killed."

The Independent (15 January)

Anger is, of course, understandable but it is only anger based on knowledge of how capitalism leads to armed hostility that is of any use in combating the threat of war.

Reality Gulf

Now that hostilities have broken out in the Gulf, it is reassuring to learn that those with a hot line to the deity are showing a touching compassion.

Although Dr Robert Runcie and Cardinal Basil Hume acknowledge that It was sometimes necessary to resort to war, they said in a joint statement that they had emphasised to John Major "our concern that only the minimum force necessary to secure the UN objectives should be used, without inflicting indiscriminate damage on Iraq and its citizens."

They also urged the Prime Minister to safeguard sacred Muslim sites from attack in Iraq.

The Independent 15 January

When the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Roman Catholic Cardinal unite on joint statements, you can be sure you will get a dose of arrant nonsense. "Indiscriminate damage" is the nature of war. There are no rockets or bombs that select the guilty and spare the innocent.

However it is touching to that they are concerned about fellow divines in Iraq — no hiding out in the sacred sites!

Running Commentary: More royal drivel (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

More royal drivel

The Police Federation is a strange body, dedicated as it is to improving relationships between the police and the people the police coerce through in-depth research into social problems. This learned lot were recently addressed by one of the world's great experts on psychology, youth delinquency and social pressures — which can only mean the Prince of Wales.

This typically unproductive member of the ruling class thinks that young "offenders'' — youths who break the laws which protect useless parasites in their privilege — have “icy and unfeeling’’ attitudes towards the elderly and would benefit from a spell of Army discipline. (The Army is another strange body, whose profession is to destroy things and kill people).

Of course the Prince is no fool and he had ready some evidence to back up his theories — after all, his audience consisted largely of Chief Constables who are famous for their persistent hunger for dispassionate, scientific research.

The “evidence” consisted of what the Prince saw — or thought he saw — when he visited some courses run by the Army last year, when about 2,000 youngsters put themselves through some risks and exertions. The Prince decided that they had "benefitted immeasurably” from it all.

Jolly good. But as a contribution to research it was useless because those young people were not delinquents, they did not come from slums and they had volunteered to go on the courses as a possible way of getting a job. It would have been a very different matter, if the courses had been filled with restless young offenders from places like Toxteth and Lambeth, sentenced by some pompous magistrate to find their true character dangling at the end of a rope on a rock face.

There is in fact some evidence, which the Prince did not use, about the effects of this kind of regime, in the “short, sharp shock” Detention Centres (now Youth Custody Centres), where youngsters are pushed by a variety of nasty methods beyond what they think are their physical and emotional limits. This evidence does not support the theory that such harsh discipline breeds humane responses. The “success” rate (the proportion of inmates who are frightened out of further offences) of this type of “treatment” is notably low. Perhaps this is because nothing a Detention Centre can do can be worse than living in the slums of Liverpool, Manchester or London.

It is to be expected that parasites like the Prince should be keen that the people whose work keeps him in privilege should be disciplined into accepting their inferior social standing. It is to be expected that the forces of coercion, in the persons of Chief Constables, should applaud his vacuous drooling on the matter. But the subjects of it all — the working class — should react with anger and contempt and a resolve to end such a miserable, decadent society.

Bad connection

The trade unions and the Labour Party are in high fever about the looming menace of Norman Tebbit and his threat to place a garrotte on the unions and in particular to make it more difficult for them to pump money into the Labour Party.

No one who has a concern for working class interests and for a healthy, effective trade union movement will object to plans to sever the ties between the unions and the Labour Party. By such standards — not to mention those of democracy within the unions — there is much to be said for substituting the “contracting in” procedure, by which any union member who wants to contribute to Labour Party funds must declare so, for “contracting out”, by which the contribution is taken from the member unless they say otherwise.

The present excitement springs from the popular fallacy that it is only Tory governments who wage war on the unions while Labour governments live in unbroken peace with them. The 1945-51 Labour government was constantly in conflict with trade unionists, especially with "unofficial” strikers — strikers who couldn't get their Labour-Party-dominated union to support them.

The Wilson government also fought the unions, in one famous strike denouncing the seamen as misled by a group of “politically motivated” wreckers. That government, after years of struggle over pay and conditions, tried to draw up legislation with which Tebbit would have found no fault, but Barbara Castle's anti-union proposals in In Place of Strife were too much for even the most obsequious of union leaders and they had to be shelved. The Callaghan government made their name by breaking the firemen's strike with troops in their Green Goddesses, for the battles with the pickets in the Winter of Discontent and for its ministers urging workers to break through picket lines.

Unions must clash with any government, whether Labour or Tory, because they stand — at least when the unions are doing their job — on opposite sides of the class struggle. The unions should represent the interests of the workers, and the government the interests of the capitalists, in the struggles on the industrial field.

The Labour Party have always cynically exploited their trade union connection to help them get into power. If, after all that recent history has taught them, the unions still go along with this they will find again, and to their cost, how mistaken they are. With friends like the Labour Party they hardly need enemies like Norman Tebbit.

Sick note

Poor David Steel, meaning well but so grievously misunderstood.

Some sections of the Alliance had serious doubts about him during the election, with people like Cyril Smith grumbling that he was hogging too much of the limelight and Steel expressing some rattiness with his supporters for their lack of involvement. It seemed to be coming to a head when the leader announced abruptly that he was taking himself off for a long rest. How could a capitalist party survive, asked bewildered Liberals, without a leader to sort out its knotty problems of compromise and deceit, to hand down decisions on policy and action for the mass of the party to obediently carry out?

But then relief for them. Steel was not mad or disintegrating but only struck down by the sort of virus which lurks about waiting to infect politicians who are exhausted by the effort of battling for the votes of the deluded supporters of capitalism.

Steel's illness was said to be making him tired and depressed so that his problems seemed insurmountable. At which point it is reasonable to question the nature of this illness, which has the effect of stimulating such an insight into reality. For the Liberal leader’s problems, like those of Thatcher and whoever replaces Foot, are insurmountable.

All leaders confront the difficulty of first persuading enough workers that theirs is the likeliest method of running British capitalism, that they have a unique ability to bring in an age of unprecedented peace and plenty. If that propaganda succeeds, and the leader passes through the door of Number Ten, they are faced with the further problem of hoping and praying that they will be lucky enough for their term of office to coincide with one of capitalism’s upswings, which they can claim credit for and so appear to keep their election promises.

Some leaders — like Harold Macmillan — have quite a long run of luck before they are exposed to a downswing. None of them are able to control the cycle of boom and slump, or notably to mitigate the effects; such basic elements of the capitalist system are out of their control. Capitalism works through its own laws and takes little account of the electoral needs of politicians.

That is reality. Perhaps Steel, at some blinding moment, glimpsed it and saw what was in store for him if he ever made the top. Enough to make him sick as a politician.

Editorial: Coronation chickens (2023)

Editorial from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

As of 2023 there are still 43 countries in the world with a monarch as head of state. Most of those pampered parasites seem content to stay away from the media and enjoy their exalted status in relative obscurity. Not so in Britain, where the royals are a glitzy public circus act, and this month are staging a huge event that will no doubt grab headlines around the world. Britain seems weirdly addicted to silly medieval ritual. There has never not been a monarchy here, apart from a strange 11-year hiatus following the beheading of one king in 1649. While politicians regularly rise and fall on their swords due to fluctuating polls or appalling performances, it seems that no scandal, internecine row or public disgrace ever dents the popularity of this archaic and anachronistic state institution. It’s not that there’s no anti-monarchy sentiment. YouGov surveys of 18-24 yr olds since 2020 have shown 53 to 67 percent opposition. But politicians are too chicken-shit to come out against the monarchy. The so-called democrats of the Labour Party are as sycophantically gung-ho for the royal freeloaders as the Tories, while the supposedly radical tax-the-rich brigade didn’t utter a squeak over Chas’s £650 million tax-free inheritance. And now the whole country is expected to lose its collective mind as the nobs and toffs convene at Westminster Abbey to plonk a metal party hat on the old plant-botherer.

Socialists will take the free bank holiday hand-out, but otherwise treat the fancy-dress pomp and pomposity of the king’s coronation with the contempt it deserves. We’re no advocates of a capitalist republic – they exploit their workers every bit as much – but having your nose rubbed in class privilege and entitlement is a bit more than we can stand. In republican countries like the US, disingenuous efforts are sometimes made to background, de-emphasise and disguise class divisions. In the UK they are flaunted in our faces. It would be nice to think that British workers, sick of the cost of living crisis, of war in Europe, of lying politicians, of global warming, would at least treat the royals with disgust, if not turf them out of their palaces as a prelude to general socialist revolution. But the truth is that many workers lap up the royals like a dog laps up its own sick.

The Republic website is asking people to use the coronation event to protest, on the grounds that ‘there is a positive, exciting, democratic alternative’ to paying court to yet another gilded idler. They’re right, there is, but it’s not the alternative they’ve got in mind. The real alternative to a king is not some other ruling class finger puppet, whether elected or not. It’s the abolition of inequality and class privilege through the democratic common ownership of the world’s resources, and the collective and responsible stewardship of the planet and everything on it and in it. Not our king? Not our capitalism!

A Very British Hit Job (2022)

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

This June saw a very British hit job. Charles, the heir to the throne, reportedly made comments that indicated that he considered the British government’s policy of off-shoring irregular migrants to Rwanda as ‘appalling’. The Times reported this, indicating that the remarks were made in private. Nonetheless, this led to banner headlines in many papers. Unnamed government ministers were quoted as saying ‘He is in danger of over-reaching himself. He cannot make pronouncements on government policy when he is king. Even in private there is always a chance those remarks will get out and put him in a difficult position’.

Undoubtedly, the government had initiated this policy to get a strong reaction so they could have a storm about taking a strong stance over their handling of irregular migration across the Channel. They probably didn’t expect the flak to come from the prince, much less the Archbishop of Canterbury: they wanted to be able to point to soft liberals who ‘hate their country’ rather than the absolute pillars of the very Establishment itself.

This must have hit home, because, just a week or so later, we saw more banner headlines about Mr Windsor. The Sunday Times led with a splash about him receiving large charitable donations from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former Prime Minister of Qatar. The issue being that the €3 million was received in €1 million cash instalments, personally handed to the aristocrat in Fortnum & Mason carrier bags.

These reports noted that ‘Each payment was deposited into the accounts of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF), a low-profile grant-making entity which bankrolls the prince’s pet projects and his country estate in Scotland. There is no suggestion the payments were illegal.’

So, if the donation was not illegal, was not given personally to Mr Windsor, why did it merit a front page splash? The journalists provided weak gruel with questions of ‘judgement’: it simply looked shady to accept large donations of cash (though, apparently, trustees later said due diligence on accepting the donation was done). Presumably, if the donation had been done by bank transfer, there’d have been no issue.

They also drew in other allegations of courtiers offering cash for honours, which, while shady, were themselves not relevant to the princeling accepting charitable donations.

In his final novel, Numero Zero the Italian scholar of communication and meaning Umberto Eco presented an examination of the fictional establishment of a new newspaper: the issue-zero proofs of concept that are a prelude to releasing a newspaper proper. The idea being that an Italian millionaire wanted to ‘enter the inner sanctum of finance, banking and perhaps also the quality press. His way of getting there is the promise of a new newspaper ready to tell the truth about everything,’ a newspaper that could be stopped, for such rewards.

Eco has the fictional editor of this pseudo-newspaper say: ‘It’s not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news. And if you know how to put four different news items together, then you can offer the reader a fifth.’ The simple act of contextualising a story on the page makes the story. Of course, Charles Windsor consorts with rich people, and gifts and favours are swapped all the time, and his simple unearned privilege is an affront to humanity. But, putting a small example on a front page gives it an appearance of impropriety, even when in fact none exists.

It is also an excellent example of ‘swiftboating’, an act named after the campaign of Swiftboat veterans for truth, a move by Republican Party strategists in the United States to neutralise a natural strength of then Presidential candidate John Kerry. He was a decorated Vietnam war veteran, something that is normally an advantage in elections, however, merely raising a question mark about this turned his greatest strength into a liability.

The Royal Firm uses its charitable work as a shield to protect it from criticism of its undemocratic power and unearned opulence and luxury. By turning charitable collection into a point of concern, and even possible malfeasance by the princeling (especially by reference to his Scottish estate which the charity supports), the media ‘swiftboated’ him.

The message sent was loud and clear: the press could manufacture a story any time they want. And, given how long ago these transactions are supposed to have happened, it also sent the message that they are sitting on an arsenal of stories that they could pull out at any time to trash Windsor in the public imagination – much like the infamous list of ‘handsy’ Tory MPs that was leaked from the Whips’ office in 2017 and contained details of 40 MPs’ sexual and other misconducts, including Chris Pincher – the revelation of whose behaviour was just the trigger for the downfall of Boris Johnson.

We have just witnessed the punishment beating of a Royal, with the clear implication that the mass media can destroy the monarchy if it wished, and that if it hinders the agenda that parts of the press want to have the government follow, it will not hesitate to do so.

If that happens, we would not shed a single tear: indeed, given how some members of the Royal firm whine about the unfairness of press intrusion, we’d heartily encourage them to save themselves the bother, and leave the business, and take the whole stinking operation with them.

Pik Smeet

Cooking the Books: Feudal Relic (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee issued a report on the finances of the Duchy of Cornwall which, since feudal times, has provided a private income for the heir to the throne. A reminder that the “royal family” not only supply heads of state for UK Capitalism Inc but are also aristocrats in their own right, with their own landed estates.

The thrust of the committee’s report – dominated as the committee is by New Labour MPs who favour a “modernised” capitalism – was that Prince Charles was not running the Duchy as a proper capitalist enterprise. But the Duchy is a landed estate rather than a capitalist corporation. The aim is still of course to end up with a surplus, but Charles’ income comes mainly from the rents paid to his estate by tenant farmers and, increasingly it seems, commercial firms for the use of the land he has inherited from previous heirs to the throne. According to the report, the Duchy’s assets at the end of 2004 were valued at £428 million, most of it land.

England was the classic country of a landowning class of this type, and Marx’s mid-19th century analysis of the operation of capitalism which then still had a large agricultural sector, like that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo before him, was based on a three class system: a landowning class renting out its land to capitalist tenant farmers who employ wage workers. These latter produce surplus value which is then shared between the capitalist employer as profit and the landowner as rent.

Ground-rent is a pure monopoly income which accrues to people who, for accidental historical reasons, happen to be owners of a portion of the globe; which allows them to say, even to capitalists, “you can’t use my land for your farm or your factory or whatever unless you hand over to me a share of the proceeds”. So landowners are parasites on parasites. In the 19th century this was a big issue with capitalist politicians continually raising the “land question”, but it eventually ended in compromise and intermarriage between members of the two classes. We can now talk of an essentially two class system – capitalists and workers – even though ground-rent remains money for nothing.

Actually, Charles is also a bit of a capitalist in his own right. He markets organic food under the label “Duchy Originals” but which, according to the Times (22 July), “made a profit of £1 million on a turnover of £40 million, which most commercial enterprises would regard as an inefficient return”. But then, if you’ve got an income from your private estate of £11.9 million in the tax year 2003-4 (Committee Report) you don’t have to be so ruthless in your pursuit of any commercial profit as you would be if this was your only source of income.

But the New Labour MPs are right. If all capitalist firms took the same aristocratic attitude to profit-making as Charles, then British capitalism would be in trouble on world markets. The typical capitalist firm has to try to maximise its profits, not just to please its shareholders, but to keep in a fit state to continue to compete by having funds to invest in means to reduce its costs.

In the 1860s when Marx was writing Capital the typical capitalist was still an individual owner who ran his own business or a partnership of such owners, though this was beginning to change with the coming of the limited liability company. Marx described the individual capitalist as “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will” (Volume I, chapter 4). Thus, the individual capitalist’s greed was not a personal failing but a reflection of the fact that he personified capital’s need to expand continuously.

Limited companies (which Marx did discuss in Volume III of Capital) are now the dominant form and maximising profits is no longer a mere personal motivation; it is a legal obligation on those who run companies. The same applies to pension funds and other so-called “institutional investors”; the managers and trustees of such funds are under a legal obligation to maximise the fund’s income or face a breach of trust charge. Which makes them as ruthless profit-seekers as any capitalist corporation or 19th century Gradgrind.

Prince Charles is just not in this league, but then he’s more of a personification of landed property.

Press Exposure: Private parts (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What would you do. if your home was suddenly besieged by a mob of complete strangers with cameras and tape recorders and notebooks, who were trampling up to your front door, shouting at you through the letterbox, trying to get in through the windows and the backdoor, offering you loads of money just to talk to them or be photographed by them?

Well the first thing you ought to do is find out whether you were a notorious sex criminal or having an affair with a member of the royal family or had won the national lottery. Because those raucous strangers would be newspaper reporters desperate for an exclusive story from you. And to get it they are perfectly willing to do something called Invading Your Privacy.

Which has caused a lot of fuss lately—so much that Tory MPs who have been caught out in some extramarital adventures or financial jiggery-pokery have defended themselves by saying that the evidence against them was accumulated only by the media intruding on their private business. That is why so many of them are suddenly so strongly in favour of a law to protect their privacy. Of course their panic is understandable when we remember how many reputations have recently suffered by exposure of the facts which privacy was supposed to hide—the "cash for questions" MPs. junior ministers like Tim Yeo, Lord Caithness and Michael Mates and—most prized, most exposed, of all—David Mellor.

Hospital and royalty

But none of this is new. One member of the Calcutt Committee, set up in 1989 to look into the media and privacy and related matters, commented that "Many of the most appalling cases that were sent to us . . . came from way back in the 1930s and even earlier than that. . ." In June 1988. as Russell Harty was dying in hospital, reporters working on the well-tried principle that there’s nothing money won’t do, bribed a window cleaner to take pictures of him. They posed as doctors, in white coats, and tried to persuade a nurse to hand over Harty’s medical records. In January 1990, when the TV actor Gorden Kaye was in intensive care, seriously injured and not expected to live, two reporters got to his bedside, took photographs of him and tried to interview him.

In all this it would be unnatural if the privacy of the greatest media stars of them all were left unviolated. Prince Charles in August 1990 was photographed by a long-range camera seemingly canoodling with a woman. This apparent triumph of the papparazzi's art turned out to be a massive embarrassment because Charles was comforting the woman, in the presence of her husband, when they told him their child had cancer. The People lost its abhorrent editor—Wendy Henry— when it published a picture of Prince William urinating in a park with the headline (a typical Wendy Henry one) "The Royal Wee". When the Press Complaints Commission, set up on the recommendation of the Calcutt Committee. opened for business in January 1991 one of its first calls was from Sandringham—a complaint about press harassment from the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Double standards

This was in fact an example of hypocrisy such as the sleazier tabloids would be proud of. One thing which has been clear about the current turmoil in the lives of the royals—their affairs, their crumbling marriages, their nervous disorders—is the eagerness of some of them to use the media to publicise their side of the story. Apart from specific episodes like Charles’s selective television soul-baring in interview with Jonathan Dimbleby there has been a steady leak of carefully constructed information to favoured journalists. People who manipulate the media in this way can’t be taken seriously when they also complain about it invading their privacy.

Neither can those MPs. who scream about the unfair violation of their personal privacy when the press spotlights one of their sleazier activities. To begin with, as upholders of capitalism's morality about the sanctity of property they shouldn’t do the things which lay them open to such exposure. And when they are exposed they should remember that it’s all in the day’s work to a social system where what is profitable is good and what is unprofitable is bad. Newspapers make profits by being bold and those which produce the scoop-stories about scandalous politicians, or hypocritical royals or whatever, are likely to sell more.

Humiliation

The politicians tell us that this system is the most effective way of running human affairs. In fact they say there really is no other way. Of course there is the matter of what capitalism and its profit motive does to us—its prisons, weapons, pollution, the indignities which people like journalists will endure in order to obey the law about the production of goods for sale. Under that law the working class—who clamorously vote for those politicians—suffer massive humiliation and abuse, so that they don’t ever have what might properly be called any privacy to be intruded upon. 

Ivan

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his first speech as president of the Worldwide Wildlife Fund UK, Prince Charles has warned that he is an “endangered species” and that so is the rest of mankind:

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YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things. Good. Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action:

[Link]

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He [John Bird] sums himself up: “I am a self appointed grandee of the poor. I am one of them who got out and got into a position to help, so I will mollycoddle Lord Mandleson, Cameron, Blair, and Brown, anyone if it helps.” He remains refreshingly critical about the magazine: “I don’t want to read The Big Issue and read how miserable it is living under capitalism. I want to know what you’re going to do about it, how you going to dismantle it:

[Link]

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Michael Gove slackens rules on use of physical force in schools. Education secretary seeks to stem ‘erosion of adult authority’ by recruiting former male soldiers to the classroom:

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It will take another 98 years for women executives to reach equal pay with men at the current rate, the Chartered Management Institute reports. Men are paid on average an extra £10,546, although women saw pay rises of 2.8 per cent this year compared to men’s 2.3 per cent, and women are now securing equal or higher starting salaries:

[Broken Link]

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When we decided to keep Hirohito on his Japanese throne, we winnowed down the number of Japanese war criminals to be hanged. Oddly, it was Churchill who wanted the worst of the Nazis to be executed on the spot; it was Stalin who wanted a trial. It all depends, I think, on whether criminals are our friends (Stalin at the time) or our enemies (Hitler and his fellow Nazis), whether they have their future uses (the Japanese emperor) or whether we’ll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way (Saddam and Gaddafi ). The last two were or are wanted for killing “their own people” – in itself a strange expression since it suggests that killing people other than Iraqis or Libyans might not be so bad:

[Link]

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Three hundred and fifty thousand: That’s a conservative estimate for the number of offenders with mental illness confined in America’s prisons and jails. More Americans receive mental health treatment in prisons and jails than in hospitals or treatment centers.

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Ester Abeja has experienced both physical and emotional atrocities. She was captured by Uganda’s feared rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and was forced to join them. But not before the soldiers made her kill her one-year old baby girl, by smashing her skull in, and then gang raped her:

[Broken Link]

Brief Reports (2012)

The Brief Reports Column from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

After news that a man managed to survive for two months in a frozen car by hibernating, there has been a flurry of unconfirmed reports that some old people in parts of Scotland are managing to survive the winter on a state pension. “I can’t believe it’s true,” said Pensions minister Ian Duncan Smith, “but if it is, we will certainly be looking at making cuts.” A leading clinician explained that in certain unusual circumstances it may be possible for the elderly poor to stay alive when the state doesn’t want them to: “They might be doing it by setting fire to all their furniture and eating their slippers. And we shouldn’t rule out cannibalism. We would love to research this phenomenon more closely, but of course there’s no money.”

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Jeremy Clarkson’s remark that the 30 November public sector strikers should be executed in front of their families was not in breach of broadcasting rules, Ofcom has ruled. The remarks sparked 31,000 complaints to the BBC. “It’s a disgrace,” said one licence holder, “everybody knows that strikers’ families should be executed too. It’s the only language these Bolsheviks understand.” Mr Clarkson commented, “I’m sorry I used the word ‘executed’. What I meant to say was ‘hanged, disembowelled and boiled in lard’. Now everyone will think I’m a gay liberal.”

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The US commander in Afghanistan has apologised over reports that Nato troops had “improperly disposed” of copies of the Koran. In a statement he said, “We wish to reassure Moslems everywhere that it is our policy to murder them while showing their storybooks the utmost respect. We regret any offence caused. Normal toilet paper has now been restored to the latrines.”

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The Prince of Wales has admitted he was a failure as a schoolboy football captain at an event for his Prince’s Trust Football Initiative. Speaking to a group of famous footballers, the Prince told them his school team never won a game with him in charge. “It’s nice that he’s honest about it,” said Tottenham’s Jermain Tothepoint, “and it explains why he’s never been much cop as a prince either.” A spray of mixed wallflowers and antirrhinum sprang to the Prince’s defence: “He might not know much about architecture, but he knows how to water a plant, and he keeps us amused.”

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Firms and charities are to be invited to bid for a payment-by-results scheme to try to get MPs into work or training, in a project launched by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. “Many MPs are not in employment, education or training, and do nothing all day but sit in front of a computer looking at stock figures. Many of them have complex problems, including truancy, idleness, a lack of motivation and disengagement from the electorate. It’s crucial to help these people now before the next election and unemployment hits us all.”

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Many large retail stores have expressed concerns over another government work experience scheme which has been derided as “slave labour”. One chief executive blasted critics of the scheme: “It’s ridiculous to imply these trainees are worse off than our regular staff. This is making us look bad to our shareholders. Let’s get this straight, all our employees work in slave conditions, not just a few miserable trainees.”

The Monarchy: feudal relic, democratic deficit (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prince Charles’s “spider letters” show that the monarchy is not just a feudal relic but part of the “democratic deficit”.

We live in a free and democratic society, with a fearless free media who hold the possessors of power to account, bringing the spotlight of truth to bear upon their activities. Yet, what’s this? The BBC apologising and cowering like a whipped dog because one of its journalists revealed that the reigning Monarch had queried with Ministers why Abu Hamza had not been deported. That is, a BBC reporter reporting on the functions of government and the institutions of state. Precisely what a reporter should be doing in an open and democratic society. Except, what the reporter had revealed was precisely the absence of democracy at the heart of government.

This comes alongside the twin running battles the Guardian is having with the government through the information commissioner. They want the government to reveal the rules by which Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles are given the right to veto parts of acts of parliament that concern their interests. They also want the government to reveal details of letters sent by Prince Charles, lobbying government ministers and trying to influence policy. The government, apparently with palace backing, are fighting tooth and claw to stop these documents being revealed.

What is at stake is effectively monarchical interference in both executive and legislative functions of state: promoting policies to ministers and then editing bills going before parliament. These are permanent, unremovable, unelected people having key and decisive influence over the laws that we have to live under. Importantly, their veto extends to commercial matters, involving the vast holdings of the Crown and the Duchy of Cornwall. That is, they have the personal right to write the laws that give them an advantage over commercial rivals.

As the Guardian notes: “In the past two parliamentary sessions Charles has been asked to consent to at least 12 draft bills on everything from wreck removals to co-operative societies. Between 2007 and 2009 he was consulted on bills relating to coroners, economic development and construction, marine and coastal access, housing and regeneration, energy and planning. In Charles’s case, the little-known power stems from his role as the head of the £700m Duchy of Cornwall estate, which provides his £17m-a-year private income.” (LINK)

Such legislative power also extends to changing employment law with regards to the Royal households. So it is not just the principle of Royal interference in the law, it is also the practice that can have dramatic real-world effects for those finding themselves employed by the sovereign.

As the judges ruling in the case of the release of Prince Charles’ letters, such matters are covered by constitutional convention. That is, there is no law covering them (and so they are not directly subject to judicial oversight). In the case of Charles’ ‘Black Spider Memos’ (so-called because of his handwriting), the government was claiming they were subject to immunity from freedom of information laws because they were part of his training to be a future Monarch, and so he must be able to correspond with ministers and learn how government works (and presumably, have access to privileged information unavailable to mere voters).

This is an extension of the constitutional convention of confidentiality surrounding the relationship of the Monarch to their ministers. As the judges explained, by convention the Monarch is entitled “to be consulted, to encourage and to warn.” (LINK) (This is accompanied by its twin convention that the Monarch must act on the advice of their ministers. So, in the weekly meetings between Queen Elizabeth and her Prime Minister, we can infer that she is not merely apprised of current events, but consulted and asked for her opinion (and given an opportunity to freely give her encouragement and warnings). The principle of confidentiality surrounding these conventions is that the Monarchy is supposed to defer to parliamentary sovereignty, and be politically neutral. If, though, Elizabeth is giving opinions and warnings (and vetoes) then, practically, she is not being neutral. The cloak of silence merely covers up her political positions and actions. She is merely seen to be neutral. Convention protects her from controversy.

So, when Frank Gardner revealed on the Today Programme that Elizabeth Windsor had been asking her Home Secretary why Abu Hamza could not be arrested, he was revealing a dark secret at the heart of government, the secret of the reality of royal interference. The BBC apology was instant, abject and craven. It was so important to swiftly redraw the curtains because the cornerstone of this arrangement is what in international affairs is called ‘soft-power’.

One constitutional scholar defines conventions as existing:“if (i) there are precedents underpinning it, (ii) the parties to the relevant practice consider themselves to be bound by it and (iii) there is a reason for the existence of the convention” (LINK).Whilst either side of the convention may breech it, an act which is technically unconstitutional, there is no way to enforce such rules through the courts. Note that this applies to both sides. The Monarch retains the implicit capacity to cause governmental mayhem by beginning to more vigorously exert or stretch their veto capacity. Further, the Royal Family continue to retain considerable public sympathy, and it would be a hard battle for any government to publicly fall out with the Crown. A wise politician avoids unnecessary battles, and so both sides negotiate around the existence of the nuclear option (and possible mutual destruction). Through such means the Monarch, being able to excise clauses of bills affecting them, exercises a power US presidents can only dream of: the line item veto. It effectively makes Elizabeth a legislator.

In his play, The Apple Cart, Bernard Shaw explored this residual Royal power (the play’s title suggests the precarious balance of power between Crown and executive). Although his King Magnus, has been seen as in line with Shaw’s attraction to the idea of the strong leader, the play does explore this mutual relationship between the power of the elected state and the aesthetic appeal of Monarchy (what some constitutional scholars call the ‘dignified part’ of the state). He notes that for the professional politicians, the Monarchy provides an alibi and a distraction, belying their inability to compete with the real, effective power of capital. The centre of that play is the long dormant general right of Monarchs to withhold Royal Assent to Acts of Parliament. This power has not actually been used since Queen Anne, but it remains like a constitutional shark lurking beneath the waters. No Monarch could use it without bringing the whole constitutional house of cards down, but what Prime Minister would want to be in the position of facing that crisis?

Real politicians like to promote and thus bask in (and share) the popularity of the Royal Family as well as some of their unaccountable prerogative powers. The continued existence, influence and organised light-fingeredness of Elizabeth and Charles Windsor is their small price to pay. The rich pageant of the dignified parts of state provide depth and meaning to their tiny roles in a pitiless bureaucracy hemmed in by the real power of property.

The good news is for conspiracy theorists: there really is a vast, organised conspiracy at the heart of the state. The sad reality, though, is its name is government. Secrecy is the essence of warfare, and the government is an ongoing armed campaign against the vast majority of people. Should the professional politicians ever need a large-scale distraction to mobilise support, there is no doubt they would happily throw the Windsors under a bus.

**Stop Press**

On 16th October Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General used his veto under the Freedom of Information Act to block publication of Charles Windsor’s letters. He said: “Much of the correspondence does indeed reflect the Prince of Wales’s most deeply held personal views and beliefs. The letters in this case are in many cases particularly frank. They also contain remarks about public affairs which would in my view, if revealed, have had a material effect upon the willingness of the government to engage in correspondence with the Prince of Wales, and would potentially have undermined his position of political neutrality.” The Guardian is understood to be considering taking the case to the High Court. His decision speaks volumes.

Pik Smeet

Voice From the Back: Empty Rhetoric (2013)

The  Voice From The Back column from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Empty Rhetoric

Politicians always emphasise the importance of new legislation and of course their own importance. 'The Child Poverty Act of 2010 holds the government accountable for reducing child poverty. On Wednesday, new figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that not only are they failing to do so, the numbers of children living in poverty will actually rise, from 2.4 million to 3.4 million by 2020 – the date that was set for the elimination of child poverty in the UK' (Guardian, 8 May). So after all that pompous talk and so-called erudition what is the result? More kids are living in poverty than before the brilliant legislation.

It's A Mad, Mad World

Many opponents of the world socialist movement think we are a little mad. A world based on production for use? No profits? No Money? Crazy! But what of present day society? 'A racing pigeon named Bolt officially became the most expensive pigeon in the world earlier this week when a Chinese businessman bought him at auction for $400,000' (Business Insider, 22 May). We live in a society wherein millions of people try to exist on less than $2 a day and yet a member of the capitalist class can spend $400,000 on a pigeon. Who are the mad people?

A Greek Tragedy

David Smith in an otherwise critical review of the book The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills praises the authors for this piece of information. 'Take Greece, the worst-hit of Europe's crisis economies, which is now in its sixth year of recession. With unemployment at 27 per cent, the suicide rate has soared. Deep cuts in health spending have led to not only to a severe rationing of basic treatments and medicines, but also to an increase in suicides, malaria and HIV' (Sunday Times, 26 May). An increase in suicides, malaria and HIV – isn't capitalism wonderful.

The Killer Society

There are many reasons to abolish capitalism. War, poverty, racialism and nationalism, to mention but a few, but here’s another powerful reason. 'Malnutrition is responsible for 45 per cent of the global deaths of children under the age of five, research published in the Lancet medical journal suggests. Poor nutrition leads to the death of about 3.1 million under-fives, annually, it says' (BBC News, 6 June). Capitalism is a baby killer – we must get rid of it.

Cause for Celebration?

We can understand workers celebrating joyous occasions like a birthday or a wedding but this commemoration astounds us. 'Britain is to mark the centenary of the First World War with cultural events and an act of reconciliation with Germany on the battlefield. Maria Miller, the culture secretary, will announce the appointment of one of the leaders of the £20m programme tomorrow' (Sunday Times, 9 June). They are spending £20 million to commemorate a war that annihilated 16 million lives. Truly capitalism is a sick society.

Progressing Backwards

The illusion nurtured by supporters of capitalism that workers are constantly improving their financial position is shattered by another study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Wages have fallen more in real terms in the current economic downturn than ever before, according to their recent report. 'On top of rising cost of living, one third of workers who stayed in the same job saw a wage cut or freeze between 2010 and 2011, said the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). ……. In 2009, the average public sector worker earned about £16.60 per hour, which dropped to about £15.80 in 2011, the IFS said. Meanwhile, hourly pay for private sector workers in 2009 was just over £15.10 and dropped to £13.60 in 2011' (BBC News, 12 June). Even the capitalist class institutions like the IFS know that the worker’s position is getting worse off.

A Prince And A Pauper

Prince Charles as a future king of England is forced to attend all sorts of press shows and say all sorts of nonsense to all sorts of cringing, sycophantic journalists but even he must have felt a little sick at this utterance. 'The Prince, known in Scotland as the Duke of Rothesay, met recovering servicemen and women at the Edinburgh House personnel recovery centre. …. Among those he met was Paul Lambert, 32, who lost both legs in Afghanistan in 2009. The Prince praised him as a "great example"' (Times, 14 June). You own absolutely nothing. You go into a conflict that has nothing to do with you. You have both your legs blown off. Your life is ruined. A ‘great example’ of working class stupidity is what we would call it.

Defending the indefensible (2015)

The Halo Halo! column from the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

HRH Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles, etc. etc. is obviously a man with a liking for job titles, and his collection so far is only overshadowed by the collection of military medals and uniforms he wears to go with them. And, despite his less than impressive record of any actual employment so far he’s looking forward to getting a new one.

‘Defender of faith’ he wants to be known as rather than ‘Defender of the faith’ when the family business, consisting of travelling around the world waving at the natives, is finally handed to him. And this makes perfect sense. The current title seems to imply that there’s only one faith that needs defending, whereas of course, they’re all at each other’s throats, and so need defending from each other. There’s also the fact that he and his chums who collectively own the planet don’t give a sod which faith the proles go for, as long as they can be kept in a state of obedient, religious stupor by believing in one of them.

In the good old days, of course, the gods were omnipotent and could easily defend themselves. Thor had a ruddy great hammer to show who was boss and Zeus was known for hurling thunderbolts at anyone who crossed his path. But now, it seems, they need a mortal to consult with and advise them on the defence of their various faiths. And Charlie, the man who has devoted so much of his life to talking to plants and studying quack herbal remedies is apparently uniquely qualified to do it.

And now someone is taking his wish to become ‘defender of faith’ to all the gods seriously. Lord Harries, a former Bishop of Oxford, and a ‘leading CofE liberal thinker’ according to the Daily Mail (28 November) suggests that Charles’s coronation service should be opened with a reading from the Koran. Unsurprisingly, many of his colleagues strongly disagree.

In any event, one passage it may be wise to avoid will be Surah 5 verse 51: ‘O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for friends. They are friends one to another. He among you who taketh them for friends is one of them. Lo! Allah guideth not wrongdoing folk’.

Lord Harries is sure, however, that it would be ‘a creative act of accommodation’ and make Muslims feel ‘embraced’ by the nation. Whether some of the more extreme Islamists of Isis, for example, who want an Islamic state and prefer to deal with those of a different persuasion by beheading them feel the need to be ‘embraced’ or have their faith ‘defended’ by the new King Charlie of the UK is another matter.

A report on the World Bulletin website (11 November) suggests that in Egypt, at least, panicking Moslems and Christians are being forced to join forces to fight what they see as a new danger: a ‘growing trend of atheism’ which has ‘alarmed the country’s religious institutions’. It seems that since the 2011 uprising many young Egyptians have begun to openly declare their atheist views.

Strange, isn’t it, that after being divided for centuries by their religions it’s the rejection of religion that’s getting them together? Funny old world isn’t it? Perhaps now that they’ve found this new understanding they can tell us which god is the real one, and which the imposter.

NW

Pathfinders: The Ladybird Book of Revolution (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Older readers will recall with fondness their salad days learning to read in the company of nice and respectable middle-class kids Peter and Jane, and Pat the dog. Ladybird has lately achieved renewed prominence with their amusing self-spoofing series for adults covering hangovers, red tape, mid-life crises, throwing a sickie, the people next door and surviving a zombie apocalypse. Having successfully re-established themselves as nostalgia comedy they’ve now done a very odd thing. They’ve let Prince Charles co-write a Ladybird book on climate change.

It’s a bit hard to see the thinking here. Ladybird books won’t mean anything to today’s children, and the retro look surely can’t be aimed at them, so Ladybird seem to be suggesting that some adults are too stupid to understand the case for climate action unless it’s written by a doddering royal in large type and words of one syllable, and with circa-1960 hand-drawn pictures. Condescending or what, your royal haughtiness?

Of course you can certainly argue that none of us really understand the science, because we’re not climatologists. But at the political level the argument is much simpler. Barring a few loony deniers, the entire scientific community is united and unequivocal. There is a problem. The question is what to do about it. There now, that wasn’t difficult, was it?

There is something of an elephant lumbering around the environmental debate which some will be painfully aware of while others may be studiously ignoring it – the lack of participation by what is called the ‘traditional working class’ (TWC) and the consequent domination of the subject by the cultural middle class (CMC).

These terms require a short digression. Socialists identify two economic classes in society which are perpetually at war with each other, the ruling or parasitical class which owns and controls everything but does no real work, and the working class or 99 percent, who control nothing and are economic slaves. One could picture these two classes as opposing trenches on a battlefield. For us there can be no middle class. If there was, it would be standing in No Man’s Land getting shot at by both sides.

However most people use the word ‘class’ in a vaguer cultural sense, with all sorts of prejudices and preconceptions attached. It is this world of cultural categories that is at issue here.

Go to any Green party or environmentalist meeting and count the number of people there with university degrees and CMC manners, voices, clothes and social connections. Very often there will be nobody at the meeting who does not fit that description, be they TWC, immigrants or other ethnic minorities.

There are three possible explanations for this lack of participation. The first is the one put forward by HRH, in collaboration with Ladybird. The message isn’t simple enough.

The second explanation is the one put forward by many sympathetic Greens themselves, as well as politicians and media pundits, and ably expressed by a British climatologist recently: ‘For too long the climate change discussion has been about things that will happen in 100 years time. For economically insecure people, statements about what might happen in 100 years time they just don’t care about, because they know these kind of predictions have been proved wrong in the past and will be in the future’ LINK).

One could go further and suggest that people facing a desperate struggle to survive today won’t care about anything that’s a hundred years away whether the predictions are correct or not. But while there’s obviously some truth in this, it is not the case that concern over the environment is always associated with personal financial well-being, i.e. that having an environmental conscience is somehow a luxury item that the poor can’t afford. Many TWC people are not especially poor, have foreign holidays every year and spend a fortune at Christmas, while some people with university backgrounds have no job or money yet still shop ethically, eat tofu and recycle religiously. It’s not simply about the money.

The third explanation is that the TWC are not only not interested in environmental concerns, but actually put off them because of their CMC image. If you live on a council estate, don’t have a degree and speak with a local accent, you might very well decide that environmentalism is not for you. You’re pretty sure you wouldn’t like or relate to anyone, and they wouldn’t like you. Your face, voice, clothes, hair and make-up just wouldn’t fit. You talk yourself out of being involved.

And are you entirely wrong to do so? Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that some CMC environmentalists are quite happy in their cosy little clique and would be secretly horrified if it was suddenly invaded by working-class types wearing hoodies and bling and reeking of skunk, or hard-boiled council estate veterans with tattoos on their knuckles. Environmentalism is Frasier and Friends and Have I Got News For You?, not Eastenders and Shameless.

The problem is the nature of environmentalist politics, which tends to ignore class politics as essentially irrelevant to the debate. We all live on the same planet, runs the thinking, so we should be able to rise above our petty class divisions in order to save it. But that of course is a lot easier to say when you’re not the one getting the worst of those divisions and you’re not even aware what the worst involves. This is how environmentalism slips into the genteel world of Ladybird, and away from the real and bruising world of class war.

Would it make much difference if environmentalists incorporated class into their world view, given that power resides not with them but with state elites? Well, it would give socialist revolutionaries and environmentalists something in common, and it would make the debate more inclusive, something which needs to happen if anything is ever going to change. You can’t wish away class war by ignoring it, but you can wish away a lot of potential support.

Paddy Shannon

Sting in the Tail: Winter blues (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column from the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Winter blues

Every worker in Britain will shortly have a series of beautifully produced, full colour and glossy pieces of nonsense thrust through their doors.

Your husband can buy you a super collossal new washing machine. Whoopee! Your wife can buy you a new chainsaw. (Well, the kids have become a bit uppity recently.)

In December we are in the month when sellers of commodities wring their hands at the prospects of giant sales. It is Christmas, when alienated workers try to make up for their anti-social behaviour by buying their friends commodities that will never make up for that behaviour.

Inside a socialist system of society women and men will probably celebrate the winter solstice, but it will be without recourse to the nonsense of spending money as a substitute for community and love.

Not in the script

All over the world in every industry the cry is that costs must be cut because of competition. Besides low wages and more unemployment, this also means the lowering of safety standards at work and nowhere is this more apparent than in Britain's mines

The Cost of Coal (BBC2, 29 October) revealed how pressure to cheapen production is leading British Coal to fake the monitoring of dust levels, and the American system of "Extended Cut" is being introduced. This allows coal-cutting machines to cut further without additional roof support and the accident rate in American mines is much greater than in British mines.

Most people used to expect that life in capitalism would inevitably get better: incomes would grow, jobs be more secure and safety at work improve, yet the opposite is happening. Those expectations simply didn’t take into account capitalism’s built-in drive for profit and the competition it brings in its wake.

Fair Trading?

Sainsbury, Tesco and Safeway; the names ring out like a litany of praise to the benefits of competition. Or at least so they would have you believe. The facts are somewhat different.

They were all objectors to Costco, a US warehouse-style club, and its plans to open its first UK store. However a high court judge ruled against them and Costco opened its first store on 30 November.

The reason for the big three being so concerned is not difficult to deduce.

"In the US, although this may not he the same in the UK, food trades off a gross margin of around 10 percent, significantly loner than the 26 percent or so currently achieved by the operators of UK superstores" (Herald, 2S October).

It is that old capitalist story again. 
Competition is good — for other people!

Pads for proles

Prince Charles's visit to Glasgow provided the opportunity for yet another lecture on how to patch up capitalism.

HRH blamed modern tower block housing for creating feelings of "hopelessness and alienation" among youngsters and praised the traditional Scottish tenement which he thought "could, perhaps, solve many of our current problems".

The idea that tenements were full of happy, neighbourly people is an old one. Apparently, you could leave your door unlocked with safety and everybody looked after one another. After a lifetime spent in tenements, and not just in Glasgow, Scorpion’s experience hasn’t been quite like that.

The Prince urged developers to ask themselves before schemes went ahead — "Would I want to live here myself?". That’s the question he should ask himself before singing the praises of tenements, but then he was talking about homes for proles, not parasites.

Cancerous growth

Every year breast cancer kills 13,000 women in Britain, so when the breast cancer gene was discovered somewhere in Chromosome 17 there was universal excitement. It seemed that a breakthrough was on the way to understanding the disease.

Scientific teams world-wide exchanged information regularly in an effort to identify regions of the chromosome that could be eliminated. A wonderful picture of selfless white-coated devotees peering through microscopes and co-operating internationally to cure this scourge emerges. Well, it’s not quite like that. This is capitalism after all:

  "But as the groups edged closer to identifying the gene they began to split apart", said Simon Smith, head of Cambridge University research team funded by the Cancer Research Campaign. "Things have now gone quiet because none of us wants to give information to the other", he saul.
  "In an ideal world we'd be talking to each other and not holding back information. But our work is judged on what is published. If we are always second it's no good. " (Independent on Sunday, 31 October)

So the winner gets the kudos, the big financial rewards and the biggest grants. Isn’t competition a wonderful thing? Tell that to the 13,000 women and their grieving families.

Taken for granted

Towards the end of World War Two the British government set in motion plans to regain control of Britain’s Asian colonies, particularly Hong Kong, from the local politicians who would initially take over from the Japanese.

To this end SOE, part of Britain’s spy network, organized "subversive activities". Lists were drawn up of "who to bribe", plans made for "fabricating the semblance of pro-British demonstrations" and to spread dark rumours that displaying the British flag "was the best guarantee for the safety of one’s person and one’s goods" when British forces returned.

All this and more is contained in the lastest batch of secret documents to be released as part of the "open government" initiative. What is remarkable about these revelations is not so much the greed, cynicism and corruption of our rulers, but their absolute confidence that they can tell us all about it and still retain our trust in them.