John Prescott: a Labour man through and through (2025)

John Prescott in 1966.

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of the obituarists of the late Lord Prescott quoted him as saying that despite all his achievements, he’d be known for that one punch on a protestor on the campaign trail in Rhyl. The more serious obituaries covered his career as a politician, achieving the high office of Deputy Prime Minister, and alluding to the Jaguars and the affair. Tony Blair himself came out and was full of praise for Prescott, and acknowledged how much his premiership needed its deputy. Corbynites remembered the time he defended their man on Question Time. Above all, though, his Lordship was a man of the Labour Party through and through, and it is worth going back behind the Punch and Judy of high office to the thing that first brought him to prominence: the 1966 seamen’s strike.

The seamen’s strike

Prescott was one of the co-authors of a pamphlet Not Wanted on Voyage: The Seaman’s Reply published by the National Union of Seamen, Hull Dispute Committee, in June 1966. It was written because ‘owing to the biased nature of the Pearson Inquiry Report recently published it is vitally necessary that a counter-balance is put out to put the seamen’s fight into perspective’. They alleged that ‘so biased is the Pearson Report against the seamen’s case that one cannot but feel that it was simply set up to capture public opinion, including trade union and Labour Party opinion – which so far has supported the seamen – and marshal it against us’.

Much of the pamphlet deals with the minutiae of overtime and pay rates, but the core claim for the seamen was for a 40-hour week at £14. As the historian EP Thompson described the strike: ‘The British seamen, after decades of near company unionism had accomplished that most difficult of industrial actions (in an industry whose members may at any point be scattered across the seven seas), a national strike with high morale and solidarity’ (Writings by Candelight, p. 53). The Wilson government infamously alleged that the strike was prompted by Communist Party agitators, claiming ‘The moderate members of the seamen’s executive were terrorized by a small professional group of Communists or near Communists.’ As Thompson notes, there were no Communists on the seamen’s executive.

The authors alleged ‘Our case has not been treated on its merits. Social justice has been overridden by political expediency.’ They claimed that ‘the Government’s obsession with the incomes policy has been evident throughout the strike. We had to be beaten, because our claim was a “breach in the dyke of the incomes policy”’. Hence, although the powers were never used, the Wilson government declared a state of emergency over the strike. ‘There is a wealth of evidence we could produce to show that behind the Government, in its resistance to our just demands, stand the International Banks, the financial powers that really direct the Government’s anti-wage policy.’

Prescott and his co-author went into detail as to how the make-up of the Pearson Commission indicated that the fix was on, in particular, how the appointment of Joe O’Hagan (General Secretary of the furnace maker’s union) to the commission was intended to neutralise any opposition in the TUC, as he held the chair of the General Purposes committee. This is indicative of their approach of looking at the personnel involved in the structures of power. They went into great detail over the personal connexions between shipping owners and the press barons.

They noted of the shipping industry:

‘In the past, British shipping contributed on a major scale to the earning of foreign exchange, but in this field too, its recent record is one of consistent decline. Between 1952 and 1962 shipping’s contribution to Britain’s earnings abroad fell by over £111 million, or by an average of 3½% per year.’

Likewise: ‘Most of our major competitors developed the bulk container transport method during the 1950’s, whilst our shipowners […] did nothing’. This, they alleged, was down to the ‘shipowners’ incompetence’. Their complaint, essentially, was that the wrong people were in charge.

‘This backward, selfish group of owners, through their spokesman, arrogantly claim (ignoring the whole miserable record we have described) that “the national interest” so often thrown at the seamen by Press, TV and Government, IS THE SAME THING AS THE SHIP OWNERS’ INTERESTS’ [emphasis in original].

They urged the nationalisation of the industry but clearly envisaged that as being a mere change in the personnel at the top, and still cast the question of how shipping serves ‘the national interest’ in a world of competing states.

Poacher turns gamekeeper

Prescott and his co-author also alluded to Labour’s previous record, stating:

‘The goodwill of the bankers, the ill-will of the working class. How familiar a story that is of Labour Governments, when we cast our minds back to Ramsay MacDonald and the 1929-31 government.’

Nowadays, we could add a few more Labour governments to that list.

Prescott had first stood for Parliament the same year as the strike. In 1970 he got elected MP for Hull East. By the 1990s, he was the shadow transport spokesman, extolling ‘public private partnerships’ as an alternative to nationalisation and a way of getting the industry to serve the national interest. He would later be part of the Blair government that institutionalised PFI as the default way of funding government projects.

By 2002 he was standing in the House of Commons, updating MPs on the situation with regard to the firefighters’ strike:

‘This Government cannot be asked to find additional money outside the agreed Government spending limits. To do so would risk fundamental and lasting damage to the economy. An inflationary pay rise for the firefighters would lead to inflationary pay rises elsewhere in the public sector, and that in turn would lead to job losses, inflation and mortgage rises.’ (tinyurl.com/PrescottHOC20022226)

He affirmed that ‘The Bain review has proposed a way forward. That is the basis for discussion.’ He clearly learned the lessons of the Wilson government. ‘The goodwill of the bankers. The ill-will of the workers’. An epitaph for Prescott and the Labour Party.

Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: All at Sea (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was 20 June 1966 and Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister extraordinaire, was addressing the House of Commons. It was not a good time for him. His government were in panic after the discrediting of their beguiling prospectus about the effortless erection of an all-embracing, sustainable prosperity. (What, you may ask, is new?) But Wilson was a past master at wriggling out of such situations, often by diverting attention onto scapegoats. For example there were the gnomes of Zurich – financiers operating in Switzerland where, apart from boringly making clocks, they concerned themselves with manipulating the currency markets so as to do something which Wilson called “selling sterling short”. Then there were people who had to keep their eye on the clocks so as to be in work on time, who did not have enough sterling to worry about whether it was sold short or long but who, because they were putting up a fight against the government’s attempts to depress their living standards, were called “wreckers”. In fact they were motivated by a constructive desire to stop the government wrecking their modest expectations of life under Labour’s capitalism – in employment, wages, housing and medical care.

When he got to his feet that day Wilson had another scapegoat to brandish. This was a vision as scary as any currency gnome for it was one of a “tightly-knit group of politically motivated men” who were bent on undermining all the government’s efforts to realise their prospectus. Anyone hearing those words might have been excused for thinking that Wilson was warning people about himself because it would have been difficult to think of anyone more politically motivated – a more passionate and artful exponent of the underhand arts of political manipulation – than himself. And while it would not have been true to describe his Cabinet colleagues as “tightly knit” (because, typically, they were in persistent intrigue against each other) they included quite a few – Jim Callaghan, Richard Crossman, Denis Healey – who were sharply talented in playing the political game.

Strike

But of course politicians do not make a habit of criticising themselves, or apologising for their mistakes and broken promises. When Wilson talked about politically motivated men he was not denouncing his fellow tricksters in the Cabinet; he was talking about the executive of the National Union of Seamen, who were in the throes of a strike which had lasted a month and which was seen by the government as a fundamental challenge to one of their most important policies. Soon after they came to power the Wilson government had changed their line about introducing prosperity for everyone; it was now necessary to postpone the great day when all our problems would be solved. Meanwhile it was necessary for us to go through a time of austerity, which included voluntary restrictions on pay (used in this way the word “voluntary” means that unless a policy is accepted readily it will be imposed). This was a common policy of governments at that time, whether Tory or Labour and the degree of austerity varied. When the seamen were on strike the norm for rises had been fixed at 3.5 percent. The seamen were struggling for a reduction in their working week which would have amounted to a 17 percent pay rise. Crossman thought that the shipowners would have settled for that but the government – notably prominent ex-trade unionists like George Brown and Ray Gunter – considered the pay policy too important to be compromised. (Crossman also thought that, for a time, Wilson wanted to smash the seamen’s union). It was a bitter dispute, which at any rate clarified beyond doubt for even the blindest and most ardent Labour supporter where their government stood and what its purpose was in power.

Among the tightly-knit politically motivated men in the gallery of the Commons listening to Wilson that day was a young man by the name of John Prescott. A few years before he had been a steward on a posh liner – something which the corpulent and sterile Tory MP Nicholas Soames relentlessly enjoys reminding him of by calling at him across the floor of the House: “A whisky and soda for me, Giovanni and a gin and tonic for my friend”; (this is an example of what passes for humour in the Mother of Parliaments). In 1966 Prescott had recently come ashore to work as an official of the NUS. He was a union militant, who had been blacklisted by three shipping lines and had once been sacked by the captain of the Mauretania, who was forced to re-employ him when the rest of the crew walked out. Prescott was particularly active in the strike; “We fight a good fight,” he declared, “and we are proud to ask for the solidarity and support of the labour movement at this critical time”. And he offered the kind of analysis of the background to the strike which would not find favour with a Labour minister:

“. . . behind the Government, in its resistance to our just demands, stand the International Banks, the financial powers which really direct the Government’s anti-wages policy . . .”

Those were the days when he was building the reputation which still persuades desperate, disgruntled Labour supporters to look to him as the true conscience of their party. He still manages to excite and console them, in spite of his two Jaguars and his concern for the integrity of his wife’s hairdo on a windy conference sea front, for he is the minister who raged about Tony Blair thinking he was “fucking Jesus Christ” and who had a punch-up with a man who threw an egg at him during an election campaign.

Flags of Convenience

The seamen’s strike was about pay and conditions in an industry which, because of its peculiar nature, can make many of its workers vulnerable to a harsher degree of exploitation. There is, to begin with, the danger. There is the lack of security of employment. There is the separation from home, for long periods. There is the close, confined living conditions on board. There is the discipline, which can at times be almost military. These are some of the factors which have worked against effective trade unions and allowed the owners to boost their profits by employing the ruse of Flags of Convenience – registering their ships in countries which offer low or no taxes, where there may be a laxer attitude towards environmental issues as well as those of health and safety on board and where it is possible to recruit lower paid and more compliant crews by tapping into a supply of cheap labour abroad. Under Flags of Convenience it has been known for a ship to be taken through a process of registration and leasing in several countries, so complex that in the end it is difficult to tell who owns it and is responsible for paying the crew’s wages. This set-up may be very lucrative for the maritime lawyers and the accountants but not so welcome for the crew.

In his former life as a trade unionist Prescott was always clear about what needed to be done, and what he intended to do, about protecting the welfare of his fellow workers. He declared the same kind of concerns when he began to climb the greasy pole. In his party’s published maritime policy he assured sailors that a Labour government would “ensure that seafarers are protected by all relevant UK employment law” and in 1996 he told the Seafarers Conference of the RMT: “We want to ensure that this trade uses British ships with British crews, working in good conditions . . . we must not allow exemptions to deny seafarers their rights as in the past.” But it has turned out that Prescott was just as ready to go back on promises as the Labour ministers he had so emphatically denounced during the 1966 strike. In June this year the government introduced new regulations which encouraged British ship owners to take on sailors from abroad at pay rates much lower than the national wage – sometimes at rates as low as two pounds an hour. About 60 percent of the workforce on British ships are from abroad; a union spokesman said the present situation on recruitment is such that “John Prescott would be very lucky to get a job as a bar steward on any ship based in Hull. Certainly all the catering jobs are being taken by Poles or Portuguese”. The minister responsible for piloting the regulations through Parliament excused the policy of encouraging the ship owners to search out cheaper labour by assuring us that low pay was alright for workers from countries like the Philippines, Bangladesh, Poland or Portugal because they were “well off” by wage standards in their home country. It sounded almost as attractive for the employers as the Flags of Convenience.

MPs Angry

Naturally the proposed regulations brought forth a spasm of protest from Labour MPs, as if we are not accustomed by now to such futile posturing while the government carries on the day to day organisation of British capitalism, looking after the profits of the ruling class in whatever industry. Since 1929 every Labour government has come into office or power promising to learn from, and to avoid, the mistakes of their predecessors but in practice they have operated in roughly the same way. Prescott once put it like this :

“The goodwill of the bankers, the ill-will of the working class. How familiar a story that is of Labour Governments, when we cast our minds back to Ramsay MacDonald and the 1929-31 government”(Not Wanted On Voyage;The Seamen’s Reply, with Charlie Hodgins, June 1966).

But now he is a member of a government which is performing just like those who were discredited in the past. Blair’s government are as ruthless in running the capitalist system, under which workers are exploited for the enrichment of the employing class and to solidify the ruling status of that class. And one of its most ardent defenders is the man who came up from being a ship’s steward to trade union militant to Labour MP to Deputy Prime Minister. There may be sailors who were naïve enough to believe that to have people like Prescott in the seats of power would improve their life prospects. They should have learned a bitter lesson.

Ivan

Letters: Russia & China (1966)

Letters to the Editors from the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia & China

Dear Sir,

You state in your journals that China and Russia are state capitalist countries but this is different to what Engels had to say on capitalist countries:—

Active social forces work exactly like natural forces, blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with them . . . and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders . . . With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community, and of each individual (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific).

With Russian and Chinese plans for production this would surely mean that they are in no way capitalist.

Harold Brown, 

Carshalton, Surrey.

Reply:

It is true that we deny that Russia and China are socialist and describe them as state capitalist. We say this because we see in these places the basic features of capitalism, namely, class rule, production for sale and the wages system.

We don't of course believe that a quotation from Engels can settle anything. Even so we can't see how Mr. Brown's quotation helps this case at all. In the passages he quotes Engels is saying what socialists have always said: under capitalism where production is for sale anarchy reigns as it is the market and not society that controls production. As soon as the means of production are commonly owned production for sale is abolished and replaced by production for use. Production for use, by its very nature, involves planning for the various needs of people, both as individuals and as a community.

Mr. Brown implies that in Russia and China "social anarchy of production” has been replaced by the "social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual". We must ask him to prove this since what socialists mean by anarchy of production is the results of production for sale. And production for sale has most certainly not been abolished in Russia and China.

In fact in the passage following where Mr. Brown ends his quotation, Engels, discussing distribution in a socialist society, makes it quite clear that he is talking about the abolition of production for sale:

Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products based upon the nature of the modern means of production: upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production—on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment.

Direct appropriation means what it says: people (and society) get what they need not by buying them but by taking them directly.

Is this so in Russia and China?

In a later passage Engels is just as explicit:

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization.

Has commodity production (that is, production for sale) been done away with in Russia and China?

We think we have shown that the passage Mr. Brown quotes from Engels does not mean what he takes it to mean. We can only suggest that he reads the excellent socialist pamphlet that Socialism, Utopian and Scientific is once again, this time more carefully.

Editorial Committee.

Religion

Dear Sir,

I believe Socialists who attack religion are acting against the interests of the people and against the establishment of Socialism.

I am referring specifically to your article "Catholics In Confusion" in the April Socialist Standard. Of course there was much in that article which is true—where it describes the evil doings of some clergy— but evil doings are not religion they are just evil doings.

The point is that true religion is pro-Socialism and anti-capitalism. The Bible is very anti-usury which is the corner stone of capitalism.

Did not Jesus knock the rich money-lenders? He was in fact a Socialist as every decent religionist must be.

By all means knock bad religionists but praise the Socialist principles in true religion—such as brotherly love and compassion. There are many good Socialists who believe in God—for example the Rev. Hewlett Johnson, the Red Dean. Indeed I would go so far as to say that to be a sincere believer in God one has to be a Socialist.

To be an out-and-out materialist is getting a bit old-fashioned. Universities (even in Russia) are devoting part of their efforts to research into such things as telepathy and prediction and even survival of the human soul after bodily death. 1 have had cast iron proof of such things as telepathy, prediction, yes and even survival.

There is no irreconcilable conflict between Socialism and religion.

H. Horwood,

London, N.W.9.

Reply:

Mr. Horwood claims that his is the true religion but so do the clergy whose "evil doings’' he condemns.

Usury is not the cornerstone of capitalism; it is only one branch of capitalism's structure which derives its unearned income from the surplus value produced by the working class. The basis of the workers' exploitation is not usury; it is private ownership of the means of wealth production.

Even if we accept the Bible story of Jesus turning the money-lenders out of the temple it does not alter the fact that the basis of religion belief in the supernatural and a life after death is directly opposed to Socialism.

The religious person accepts the conditions in this life because he thinks that there is a better life coming. His philosophy explains society in terms of "good" and “evil"; the Socialist explains it in means of society's economic development.

Dr. Hewlett Johnson is a well-known supporter of capitalism in Russia, China and Eastern Europe. These countries are run by dictatorships which show little brotherly love and compassion to their political opponents.

Universities have been studying telepathy, life after death and so on for a very long time. Up to the present, despite all the investigations, there is no scientific proof whatever to support the claim that such things exist.

There is no reason to believe in the existence of a supernatural. This is the only life which we know of and Socialists work to make it the best possible, by establishing a humane world: In this, one of the barriers we meet is religion.

Editorial Committee.

Then and now

Recently I was presented with a bound volume of the Socialist Standard for 1911/1917. Reading of the events of those far-off days gives one a weird feeling of having been here before.

Of particular interest is the leading article of July 1911, which stated the attitude of the SPGB to the strike of the British Seamen's Union. The tangible and known enemies of the seamen were clearly the Shipmasters (the owners), the Liberal government and all their agencies. But their intangible, unknown enemies were their own leaders, officials. Labour M.P.s who were knifing them from behind.

Now the 1966 strike of the National Union of Seamen was certainly not premature—the last one, 55 years ago, seemed to have dispirited them thoroughly and laid them under a spell which lasted right through two major wars, through two “Brave New Worlds" and through all the intervening years of "good" and bad times.

From Australia it appears the seamen again had the usual open enemies to face as well as the Labour government and the TUC. Yet it must be conceded that this is the very set-up the seamen in particular, and the working class in general, so vigorously support.

Peter Furey, 

Melbourne, Australia.

Review: February 1972 (1972)

The Review of the Month column from the March 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

As the miners ended their strike in victory, it became clear that there had been a widespread miscalculation. The strength of the strikers — their solidarity, the effectiveness of their picketing — was underestimated by the government, by the press and, incidentally, also by the Socialist Standard. This strike was an example of effective trade union action; it was solid and well directed so that it demanded a rapid settlement. For the government, this defeat of their wages policy may be a chance for them to regroup and consider their next field of battle. The high level of unemployment is not the only similarity between the present and the twenties, when an apparently victorious miners’ strike preceded the General Strike and a victory for the capitalist class over the workers.

One of the most cynical statements on the strike came from Labour leader Harold Wilson, who supported the miners because they are a special case. It is not so long ago that Wilson was Prime Minister in a government which fought bitterly against strikers, whether their case was “special’’ (whatever that may mean) or not. In perhaps the most famous strike of Wilson’s time as Premier, the seamen were also said to be “special”. Their wages were comparatively low, they worked long hours often in unpleasant and dangerous conditions. And, like the miners, there was a large fund of goodwill for them, in memory of their particular suffering during the war. Wilson’s reaction to all of this was to oppose the seamen and, in one of his most wretched speeches, condemn them as misled by a small band of politically motivated wreckers. There is no reason to think that he is sincere now in his support for the miners; he is simply hoping to drive another nail into Heath’s well-studded coffin.

Abroad

President Nixon took off for his visit to China, which will probably do him no harm in this election year, declaring that he went with the object of talking about peace. The fact that the admittedly capitalist America can find common ground with the allegedly socialist China is proof that both countries have the same social system. In fact, what Nixon went to talk about was war. The subjects the leaders will discuss will be the clashing interests of their two capitalist powers in the Far East, how to carve up that piece of the world, how to establish more contact between the two states so that the processes of capitalist diplomacy can be more smoothly carried on. These are the superficial issues which spring from the conflicts of capitalism which are the cause of modern war. Whatever settlements Nixon may negotiate it is safe to say that other conflicts will emerge, if not between China and America then perhaps between the two in alliance and some other line-up. The plain fact, which is often overlooked amid all the emotion and the lies at such times, is that capitalism is a society of conflict and that war is its normality.

In Rhodesia the Smith government showed its racist teeth again in the imprisonment and ill-treatment of the Todds. The Smith government imprisons people without even the right of a trial, which most capitalist governments allow and which is a valuable safeguard, because it is a racist and therefore an openly repressive regime. But this type of imprisonment is a common method under capitalism. In the dictatorships of Eastern Europe it happens all the time and over this side of the world, the British government has of course used the same method in Northern Ireland. What this means is that a capitalist state will fight ruthlessly when it is threatened and that none are above using such methods.

Politics

The government’s narrow majority on the Common Market caused a tremendous uproar, mainly from Labour M.P.s who were screaming with fury like the baby whose bottle is stolen; they saw themselves robbed of a chance of power over British capitalism by the votes of a few Liberals who had done no more than vote in the way they had always said they would vote. This puts the vote, and the so-called debate which preceded it, into its proper perspective — another piece of the great, boring, futile game of capitalist politics.

One who always played that game in an especially petulant style finally chucked it in. Ray Gunter, ex-Minister of Labour, left the Labour benches with a characteristically illiterate letter. Gunter used his position as a Minister to fight working class wage claims tooth and nail. He was a strong advocate of tougher controls on immigration and a supporter of the racist laws passed under the Wilson government. He sent his resignation at a time when he was staying at a posh hotel in Durban, as a guest of the racist government of South Africa. All of this, from a man who calls himself a socialist— and who got away with it because he was in a party which also takes that name while standing for capitalism with every inhumanity that implies.

The Seamen’s Struggle (1966)

Editorial from the July 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain supports the strike of the members of the National Union of Seamen for higher wages and improved working conditions. As workers ourselves we know that under capitalism we get nothing save through organisation and struggle. The social conditions of capitalism, where a tiny minority own the means of life, inevitably give rise to a struggle over the division of wealth. The class struggle will last as long as capitalism because the interests of workers and owners are irreconcilable. The seamen’s strike is an expression of this class struggle though it is fair to say that very few seamen fully understand this. They do not recognise that there is an irreconcilable conflict between workers and owners everywhere. They do not recognise that workers have no country and that patriotism is a delusion and a snare. They do not recognise that the wages system shows up the dependence of the workers on the owners for a living.

The strike has a wider significance than the wages and working conditions of seamen. The Labour Government, as caretakers for capitalism, have decided at last to stand up to organised workers in Britain. Wilson has said so on TV:

  What is at issue here is our national prices and incomes policy. To accept this demand would breach the dykes of our prices and incomes policy . . . There will be those who say that to insist on the basic principles of prices and incomes policy will be costly for the nation. What is at issue is this. Our determination to insist on these principles when the cost is so great will be taken by everyone, here and abroad, as a proof of our determination to make that policy effective.

The Government hope to make an example of the seamen and so deter others from opposing their policy. This means that if the seamen lose then the wages and working conditions of the rest of us will be adversely affected over the next few years. This has happened before. In May, 1958, a Tory Government stood up to the London busmen and won and for the next year or so their wages policy was “effective”.

Even if the seamen win and the dykes of Labour’s wages policy are breached the Socialist Party points out that this is not enough. All the cards are stacked against workers under capitalism. Being propertyless they depend on the owners for a living. On top of this there is a further disadvantage. The Government represents the interests of the owning class. Any Government in Britain has at its disposal a vast arsenal of political weapons to oppose any economic action by workers, not least the strike-breaking Emergency Powers Act invoked by the Government (and agreed to unanimously by Parliament, left-wingers and all) after a week of the strike.

But it was the working class, not excluding the N.U.S. which is affiliated to the Labour Party, who handed over these weapons to the owners only three months ago in voting by the millions for the parties of capitalism, Labour, Tory and Liberal. Giving political power to the owners one moment and the next trying to beat them by economic action is inconsistent to say the least. Workers must come to realise the importance of political power and that they must control it before they can free themselves from wage-slavery. When workers do realise this then they will see the need for an independent workers’ party opposed to all other parties to carry the class struggle from the economic to the political field; a party whose sole aim is to win political power to end capitalism and set up socialism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain is such a party in this country.

News in Review: A case of courage (1966)

The  News in Review from the July 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A case of courage

If the reports about James Meredith are true, he deserves to go down in history as a very brave man, who did something of which he was deadly afraid because he believed it to be right.

He went into Mississippi University, the first Negro to do so, because he believed that the colour of his skin should not stop him doing so.

He started to march from Memphis to Jackson because he believed that Negroes should overcome the fears which prevented them registering to vote.

The fact that he was shot down on the road shows the extent to which racism still festers in Mississippi, and the violence which it inspires.

Meredith’s courage should not, however, blind us to facts.

If he was demonstrating that the colour of a person’s skin does not affect his abilities, does not make him inferior or superior as a person, all well and good.

But having demonstrated this, there is something else which should be made clear.

Workers of all colours are united by a common economic interest under capitalism, to stand together against the ruling class who are also, of course, of all colours.

Beyond that all workers should cooperate to get rid of capitalism, with its privileges and its denials and with the prejudices which help to divide the working class into so called races, nations and so on.
The nature of the Civil Rights movement prevents it asking for more than that the Negro in America should be the same sort of worker as a white man.

James Meredith, and the other members of the Civil Rights movement who have suffered and been murdered, have made a courageous sacrifice. It is a sacrifice worth a lot more than the result it will almost certainly have.


Seamen's strike

The big question to be asked about the seamen’s strike is—what will the strikers learn from it?

One thing which a strike should teach the strikers is that capitalist society is divided into two classes, who are continually in dispute over the division of wealth.

Another is that there is no permanent way of dealing with the effects of a class divided society other than getting rid of it.

It was obvious from the beginning that the seamen would be up against the government. Mr. Hogarth, the General Secretary of the National Union of Seamen, said at the union’s conference at Worthing on 2nd May.

  We know . . . that the government will do its damnedest to work the prices and incomes policy of 3½ per cent. We have got a fight on our hands, not just against the owners but against the government as well.

This seems to be a flash of enlightenment that a government stands for the interests of the capitalist class, whether ship owners or anything else, and that they will stand up for those interests in a fight.

But Mr. Hogarth destroys this impression by demanding in the same speech, that “. . . certain sections of the shipping industry should come into public ownership” (Daily Telegraph, 3/5/66).

This is not the first time a union’s leader’s sympathy with the Labour Party has clashed with his obligation to his members. The matter is not to be resolved by making a contradictory speech.

Neither is it the first time that striking workers, after the true nature of capitalism has been exposed to them, have kept faith in discredited remedies for their problems.


Man’s best friend

“LEFT BARES ITS TEETH ON VIETNAM” states a recent Daily Telegraph headline. One was tempted to add the word “again”. The “Left”, thus referred to, was of course the left wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the occasion was a censure amendment on Government policy towards Vietnam.

It was headed by such dear old favourites as Michael Foot, J. Mendelson, and Ian Mikardo, and signed by many of the new Labour M.P.’s—who have obviously not yet learned that this kind of thing is not the way to the Prime Minister’s heart. We doubt if anybody was really worried by all this, least of all the Government. If however they were, their fears were soon put to rest as this turned out to be yet another in a long succession of damp squibs.

The Labour left has proved to be one of the most overrated movements of this century. Its docility during the last Parliament, with its slender Labour majority, was a source of amused comment in the political columns; while during the recent election they wholeheartedly supported a policy quite contrary to their expressed beliefs. Nobody during the election campaign had any doubts as to where Wilson and company stood on such subjects as Vietnam.

Now that Labour is safely returned, with a good majority, the left-wingers can caper about at will. But one thing they have never done is to push the Government to defeat, and one does not have to be a prophet to suggest that they never will. Left-wing M P.’s hold their seats in spite of their views, and not because of them. The Labour Party is pledged to run Capitalism, and has no other purpose; nobody can remain a member and not accept this fact. Our left wing M.P.’s have no desire to exist in the political wilderness in some small organisation.

The canine inference of the headline is rather apt; like all well-trained dogs the Labour Left will always jump to heel when called.


Peace in space?

Every time a space ship goes up to perform some hitherto impossible task it leaves behind on Earth a cloud of hypocrisy.

The latest American achievements in Moon flights and space meetings were no exception.

Among the politicians’ nonsense about human progress which these achievements inspired were the usual assurances that the knowledge gained by the programme would never be used in a war.

But at the same time there were uneasy suggestions that perhaps it would be a good idea if space were made international territory and the Moon declared a neutral zone, just in case . . .

The big, inconvenient fact which all the assurances ignore is that this is capitalism, a system which has never been able to act peaceably about something which is vital to its economic interests.

Capitalism may be able to keep a place like the Antarctic a peaceful, internationalised area, but only because it has no discovered mineral wealth and is of no strategic or commercial value.

Space is already a different matter. It is the highway along which will pass the weapons held in constant state of alert by many nations.

Space is an important laboratory, where missile guidance systems and rockets can be tested as they can be tested nowhere else.

It is a pipeline of communication and an observation point from which one state can spy on the industrial and military activities of another.

Space is important to capitalism. That is why the big powers are constantly probing it, and why they have numerous observation and experimental satellites aloft, after significantly unpublicised launchings.

And what will happen if other powers grow interested in space? There is already a European space syndicate, although its future is uncertain. What if there grew up an Afro-Asian project, a Chinese Moon probe ?

Then the space race will be on in earnest, in addition to the arms race. Not an enticing prospect.

The Passing Show: Not So Different Now (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not So Different Now
There is a romantic concept of Ancient Rome, which no doubt the Hollywood spectaculars have helped to keep going. It is a concept of universal grace, space, cleanliness and light. And like so many popular notions, it is wrong.

Oh yes, there were those sumptuous mansions of which we've heard so much, but they were for the rich. In Trajan’s time these Domus, as they were called, numbered about 1,800 only, compared with more than 46,000 Insulae — the tenements and apartment blocks of the period. Needless to say the insulae were the homes of the poor, who clung to a crowded precarious existence in their miserable rooms heaped floor upon floor.

Precarious indeed! For these slums were simply flung up by speculative jerry builders (yes, they had them even then) and had a tiresome habit of falling down; or because of their construction, overcrowding and lack of a proper water supply they would often burst into flames and burn to the ground in next to no time.

If you want to read more about this there are plenty of books about, of course, and one particularly fascinating little work, Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino (Penguin Books 12/6d.). But for the time being let’s come up to date and consider a report in The Times of June 2. From their Rome correspondent comes the news that “about half the porters in Rome apartment buildings are unhappy about their own living accommodation on the grounds that their rooms are dark, damp, cold, too small, or lacking a properly equipped bathroom.”

The report goes on to tell of the porters and their families living “uncomfortably” (a masterpiece of snobbish understatement) in rooms which in many cases are literally holes in the ground. Apparently about a third of them live in this way, even in many of the newer blocks, and more than 80 per cent have no bathroom. Half the places checked were damp; about 40 per cent had no heating and little light.

Now this report does not deal with the general housing picture in Rome, but it is well known that there are plenty of slums there, just like big towns in other parts of the world. And to read it one is tempted to make a brief comparison with the days of Claudius, Nero and Trajan, and ask whether we’ve really any cause for satisfaction. Indeed we have not! Unlike those, days, the modem means of wealth production make it possible to build homes of quality and beauty with an ease that the ancient Romans could not have contemplated in their wildest dreams—though they did some pretty amazing things themselves at times. Yet still we have to put up with third-rate shoddy dwellings and worse, in Rome and elsewhere. Slums fell down in Trajan’s time and they do so today; the estimated average rate of collapse is one every day in Manchester, for example.

Private property society has always meant a housing problem for the majority, but the contradiction of it has never been so blatant as in 20th century capitalism. It stares you in the face—open your eyes and see it.


Titbits on the seamen’s strike 
Labour M.P. Woodrow Wyatt is nothing if not rich, and inconsistent. A few months ago in the Daily Mirror he attacked the railmen who were about to strike and told them that their average, earnings of about £17 a week (including quite a bit of overtime) were “not bad, not bad at all.” But something has happened since .then, because here we have Mr. Wyatt supporting the striking seamen as a “special case” and using such language as “monstrously underpaid” too (Guardian, 23.5.66).

Now there may be a number of reasons for Mr. Wyatt’s apparent change of attitude. Perhaps, like most politicians, he keeps his ear to the ground and is aware of the fair amount of public sympathy which the seamen have for their stand (not so the railmen, though). Then again, despite severe competition, shipping is still vital to the capitalist class in its daily trading, and perhaps here is a glimpse of the reason for Mr. Wyatt’s seeming about-face. He thinks that to grant the seamen’s claim would force the ship-owners to be more efficient. No particular love for the seamen. Just good solid concern for British capitalism’s interests at home and abroad.

Shortly after that the Government declared a State of Emergency and put the necessary measures before Parliament. Did you read how wholeheartedly they were supported by the Conservative Opposition? “Chivalrously, generously, and not in any carping spirit,” as Mr. Quintin Hogg said? Astounding, isn’t it, how readily both sides drop their masks of enmity, close ranks and present a solid front when the crises of capitalism demand.

And, of course, the smug, priggish, condescending Guardian of May 19 wagged its snobbish editorial finger at the strikers and called their claim “simply inadmissable”. The usual nonsense was talked about “harm to the country” and a sly attempt made to isolate the seamen from the rest of the T.U. movement by suggesting that they would not “want to see the country suffer so that the seamen can get a rise of 17 per cent.”

In its attitude to this strike The Guardian has run true to form. Even if it concedes that the strikers have a grievance it always opposes their militancy, just like the rest of the Press. What a good job workers don’t always take the newspapers loo seriously.


Education—Words and Deeds
Just how pathetically naive can a rank-and-file Labourite get? On May 22 the annual conference of Labour Women at Blackpool heard Mrs. Anne Gibson attack Labour M.P’s for sending their children to private schools when comprehensive schools were advocated by their party. She accused them of “extending class distinction” in this way and added that:—

  . . . they were not only helping to maintain class distinction but also buying better jobs for their children. How could those in the Labour Party expect others to support the State education scheme if Labour supporters sent their children to private schools? (Guardian, 23.5.66).

Now there has been a bit of a rumpus in the past year or two about comprehensive schooling, and in her outburst Mrs. Gibson has hit a very interesting nail on the head. Her Party has extolled the system as “equal opportunity for every child,” but most of those M.P's who can afford it make sure their children don’t get within a mile of a comprehensive school. They are under no illusions about the comparative standards and advantages, and they know that if they want the best for their children they have got to pay for it.

It’s all part of the general hypocrisy of capitalism in which the Labour Party wallows, and on a par with an incomes policy side by side with nice fat increases in M.P’s salaries and a £15,000 a year Prices and Incomes Board chairman. But dare we think that perhaps Mrs. Gibson is not so sure herself of the “advantages” of comprehensive education? Otherwise why so much fuss just because a few of her Party’s M.P’s decide to try something else for their own kids?


Gaspers

• "The Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 . . . is . . . a thoroughly useful Act providing for the maintenance of order and discipline in merchant ships” (Guardian, 12.8.60. On the unofficial seamen's strike).
• “Who, anyway, could object if the enquiry (into seamen's conditions) ended with the replacement, by something better and more realistic, of the Merchant Shipping ’ Act of 1894?” (Guardian, 16.5.66. On the official seamen's strike).
• “Unfair and unwelcome though death duties may be, it could be hundreds of years at the present rate before the average peer actually has to work for a living" (René Lecler on The Peers, Weekend Telegraph, 13.5.66).
• "Peers just want to make money like everyone else . . (Lord Bath, interviewed in Weekend Telegraph, 13.5.66).
• "One man in 14 and one woman in nine can expect admission to a mental hospital at least once in a lifetime" (London Borough of Hounslow recent health survey).
• "There is real poverty, real deprivation at present among low wage earners; Ministry figures show there are 300,000 men in full-time work bringing home less than the National Assistance Board scale at the end of the week" (Minister of Pensions and National Insurance, Margaret Herbison, to the annual conference of Labour Women, 22.5.66).
• "Economic reforms do not immediately make life easier for the workers. Sometimes they may do the opposite" (Times editorial on Eastern Europe, 31.5.66).

Eddie Critchfield

50 Years Ago: The Seamen’s Struggle (2016)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Great Britain supports the strike of the members of the National Union of Seamen for higher wages and improved working conditions. As workers ourselves we know that under capitalism we get nothing save through organisation and struggle. The social conditions of capitalism, where a tiny minority own the means of life, inevitably give rise to a struggle over the division of wealth. The class struggle will last as long as capitalism because the interests of workers and owners are irreconcilable. The seamen’s strike is an expression of this class struggle though it is fair to say that very few seamen fully understand this. They do not recognise that there is an irreconcilable conflict between workers and owners everywhere. They do not recognise that workers have no country and that patriotism is a delusion and a snare. They do not recognise that the wages system shows up the dependence of the workers on the owners for a living.

The strike has a wider significance than the wages and working conditions of seamen. The Labour Government, as caretakers for capitalism, have decided at last to stand up to organised workers in Britain.  (….)

The Government hope to make an example of the seamen and so deter others from opposing their policy. This means that if the seamen lose then the wages and working conditions of the rest of us will be adversely affected over the next few years. This has happened before. In May, 1958, a Tory Government stood up to the London busmen and won and for the next year or so their wages policy was “effective”.

Even if the seamen win and the dykes of Labour’s wages policy are breached the Socialist Party points out that this is not enough. All the cards are stacked against workers under capitalism. Being propertyless they depend on the owners for a living. On top of this there is a further disadvantage. The Government represents the interests of the owning class. Any Government in Britain has at its disposal a vast arsenal of political weapons to oppose any economic action by workers, not least the strike-breaking Emergency Powers Act invoked by the Government (and agreed to unanimously by Parliament, left-wingers and all) after a week of the strike.

(Editorial, Socialist Standard, July 1966)

Don't say you weren't warned (1966)

From the July 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many who voted the Labour Government into power in 1964 and with a much increased majority earlier this year are wondering if they did the right thing. They knew what they wanted: steady or lower prices; higher wages, shorter hours and longer holidays; more houses, lower rents and mortgage charges; bigger pensions and sick benefits, and, of course, no unemployment. Obviously not extravagant demands because all the leaders, Labour, Tory and Liberal, promised much the same things. How could the voters lose, whichever way they voted? But in the event the majority decided that Wilson was the man to do it.

Now the voters are not so sure. They read the Labour Party election manifesto promising a 25 per cent rise in living standards in the next five years and many of them (including, of course, the seamen) cannot understand why the glowing promise turns into a Government refusal to concede more pay and shorter hours in the merchant ships and the threatened use of Emergency Powers against the strikers. They also see that most of the other promises have gone into oblivion. Almost the only favourable sign is that unemployment has so far continued at a low level.

But perhaps the present troubled state of affairs is just a passing phase and before the end of the year all will be well? ,

There are indeed signs of change before the year is out, but according to a report in the Observer on June 5 it is likely to be a freeze on prices and wages.

In the previous week a story was leaked to the Press (put out by the Chancellor of the Exchequer according to one view, though it is denied) that if the seamen’s strike continued the Government intended to take drastic action in the form of a “freeze”.

The leading article in the Observer added its own interpretation of Government tactics.

  The Government seems almost deliberately to be encouraging the Machiavellian explanation of its attitude to the seamen’s strike: that it half-welcomed this dispute as a pretext for tough and unpleasant economic measures which the Labour Party would otherwise find difficult to swallow. Already private hints are being dropped—accompanied by public denials—that as a result of the strike, and particularly if it ends in a messy compromise, the Government may have to introduce a wage freeze.

That fact is that the Government’s “incomes policy by persuasion” is in ruins. The increase of production in the still-born National Plan has not taken place, exports and imports have not adjusted themselves and foreigners holding pounds sterling are as jumpy as ever about the prospects of devaluation. So what will the Government do? Impose a freeze? Or let things take their course and rely on a few hundred thousand unemployed to help to keep wages down?

We can be quite sure of one thing. The Labour Government which took office to “put things right” will blame the workers for the failure. The magician who can’t produce the rabbits out of the hat will lay the blame on the audience!

It is an old story, repeated in every Labour Government here and elsewhere. It was told first when the Labour Government came into office in 1929. One Minister, J. H. Thomas, addressing the National Union of Railwaymen, of which he had been General Secretary, told them: “We ask you not to expect too much, nor attempt to force from us, because we are a Labour Government, what you would not force from a capitalist government.”

By “Capitalist government” Thomas meant Liberal or Tory, but from the working class point of view it is a distinction without a difference. We live under capitalism whether administered by Tory, Liberal or Labour, and capitalism operates through profit. It is therefore the function of all governments to enable profit to be made. With enough unemployment to put a brake on wages the government need take no special steps, but when unemployment is too low attention turns to an “incomes policy” to do the trick.

Has something gone wrong that the workers should be faced with this dilemma? Would another government be any better?

Nothing has gone wrong. This is capitalism running true to form. This is the way capitalism works.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain, at and between every general election, points to the way out by replacing capitalism with Socialism. All those who chose capitalism by voting Labour, Tory, Liberal (or Communist) have only themselves to thank. They have got what they voted for.

Edgar Hardcastle