50 Years Ago: Sir Keith Joseph meets the SPGB (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Philippa Fawcett College 24th April 1975. The debate was held during the afternoon and was attended by about 250 people, mainly students.

Sir K. Joseph: The Market system is based on the proposition you only make a profit if you make and sell what people want. If you do not make what people want, you do not make a profit. This means widespread decision-making, decentralized control spread among thousands of small, medium and large firms. (…) How do we justify the vast profits of property? Somebody had to take the risk. The only justification for profit is risk. Civil servants’ decisions do not have to be right, they do not stand to lose. The Market system leaves decision-making to those who stand to gain if the decision is right and stand to lose if the decision is wrong. Look at Switzerland: we could be as prosperous and humane.

E. Hardy: Tories, Liberals and the Labour Party all believed in Keynes. Keynes said Marx was wrong. Capitalism can be controlled. You can have full employment, no more crises or wars. The Market economy is unregenerate capitalism given a new name. They have not got capitalism under control. They have not solved unemployment. We are now in a crisis. (…) We do not say civil servants can run capitalism better than the whiz-kids. Nothing can be done with capitalism; if you will not go in for Socialism, you will be stuck with capitalism. It will be the same in the future as it always has been in the past.

Summing up

Sir Keith Joseph: How simple it is to argue for a system that is purely emotional. Mr. Hardy is arguing for pie in the sky. You cannot get all people in the world to agree. Marx left no room for the owner, who is part of the productive mechanism, because of his willingness to take risks to ensure supply in the Market system. The investment occurs to give people what they need.

E. Hardy: Sir Keith Joseph has to defend the shocking system of capitalism. Capitalism was only a notion when it began. All the reformers have tried to be practical and improve capitalism. They have solved nothing. The utopians are the ones who think they can do something with capitalism. You can’t, you have to go in for Socialism.

This is an abridged report of the debate. You can hear the tape recording of the debate here.

[From the June 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard.]

News in Review: The Profumo affair (1963)

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

The Profumo affair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War in the air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising for votes

Do you vote for capitalism? You do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pope is dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus does capitalism make warriors of them all.

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

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

Postscript on housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tories Again Steal Labour’s Clothes (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1957 the Labour Party Conference adopted a new pensions policy to which they gave the grandiose title of “National Superannuation”. Under their proposals, said their policy statement.

“there would be two elements in the State pension, a flat-rate element and a graded element. Every insured worker, including those in approved private schemes, would be entitled to receive the flat-rate element, as they do now, whereas only those covered by National Superannuation would receive the new graded element. Thus everyone in the country, when they reach the approved age, would draw (1) a flat-rate pension and (2) a graded pension, due to him either from an occupational scheme or from National Superannuation.”

Employers were to contribute more towards the cost of National Superannuation than the workers and some of the money was to be invested in stocks and shares.

At that time, neither pensions nor contributions were related to earnings (or “graded”): everybody paid the same National Insurance stamp and got the same pension, while those who had no income apart from this pittance had to resort to National Assistance.

Labour had hoped that this vague but superficially attractive promise of “Half Pay on Retirement” (as Richard Crossman once unwisely put it) would win them the next election. Imagine their dismay when the Tories announced in the election year of 1959 that they were to introduce earnings-related pensions themselves. This State Graduated Pension Scheme was denounced by the Labour Party, with some justice, as the “Tory swindle”. It is still going and pays a man the princely pension of 2½p a week for every £7.50 he pays in! Even the Tories recognise that it has been an utter failure and now propose to abolish it (and swindle its victims even more by not protecting them against inflation).

Elected to power in 1964, Labour set to work on their National Superannuation Scheme. They didn’t exactly give this matter any priority as it was not until 1969 that the details—to apply from April 1972—were announced. Even then, what emerged was somewhat different from the original 1957 policy. Instead of two State pensions, one flat-rate and one earnings-related, there was to be only one earnings-related State pension; employers and workers were to pay the same; the money was not to be invested in stocks and shares; and only the lowest paid were to get half-pay on retirement (a big deal that would have been, seeing they could hardly live on full pay).

Grossman’s National Superannuation and Social Insurance Bill was still going through Parliament in June last year when the Labour government was kicked out. The Tories had criticised the Bill as too complicated, but had promised their own reform of pensions. Their alternative plan was published in September in the White Paper Strategy for Pensions. What is interesting about these proposals is their amazing similarity to Labour’s 1957 plan. The passage quoted earlier could well have been Sir Keith Joseph explaining the new Tory proposals.

The Tories propose a basic flat-rate pension from the State (like the present below-the-poverty-line £6 a week) which everybody will get and an earnings-related pension either from a private scheme or from the “State Reserve Scheme”. It is this Reserve Scheme that bears the resemblance to Labour’s original National Superannuation. For not only will employers pay more towards it than workers but its funds will be invested in stocks and shares. When Labour had proposed this in 1957 it was greeted by howls of “back-door nationalisation” by the Tories. Now, apparently, they have changed their minds and done what not even Crossman dared to do.

The Tory plan also involves another measure which might have been expected to come from a Labour government: there will be earnings-related contributions for the basic flat-rate pension. In other words, the higher paid will pay more than the lower paid but will only get the same pension.

Labour would have claimed that this was part of some plan to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. It is nothing of the sort since the fortunes of the wealthy are to be left untouched. It is really only redistributing income from the not-so-poor to the poor, a redistribution of poverty amongst the working class. Labour’s bill would have had a similar effect and this in fact is all most social reforms can amount to under capitalism.

That the Tories can introduce reforms originally proposed by Labour is a further proof that the two parties are basically the same. They are both committed to capitalism and are both trying to solve its problems without upsetting the profit motive. So it is hardly surprising that they both come up with similar reforms.

The present need to reform State pensions is the result of the failure of the previous Labour/Tory pensions policy. Nearly thirty years ago now, they were both agreed on another plan to “abolish want in old age” —the Beveridge Report. The recommendations of this Report were embodied in the National Insurance Scheme set up in 1948 and still extant. Today this Scheme provides on retirement a miserable pittance which, even the government’s own White Paper admits, is about £2 below the poverty line so that one in three pensioners are forced to apply for means-tested National Assistance or “supplementary benefit” as it is now cynically called.

Anyway, earnings-related pensions are only supposed to abolish—some time next century, according to the government’s own figures — destitution in old age. Poverty, in the sense of being deprived of control over the means of production and its products, is the normal condition of the class of wage and salary earners, during their working lives just as much as during retirement. It is only because they are poor that workers need doles to protect them from destitution in old age.

We doubt, however, if the new reforms will ensure that no old worker falls below the poverty line, especially since the Tory proposals, like Labour’s Bill, envisage the continuation of the modern Poor Law known as the Supplementary Benefits Commission. Poverty, and in some cases destitution, in old age will be the lot of the working class as long as capitalism lasts no matter how many social reforms are made.

Adam Buick

Running Commentary: End of a hero (1983)

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

End of a hero

Nobody could look less like it, but Menachem Begin is an adored national hero and Israel was swept with consternation and grief when he announced that, worn out in the service of its ruling class, he would throw in the job of prime minister.

The reaction showed that Jews are as susceptible to deception as workers elsewhere, in this case about the indispensable mystique of a political leader. For the emotions expressed at Begin’s retirement could not have been related to any of his achievements.

He leaves a deep mess of problems to his successor, as Israel is sunk in economic stagnation — like many other countries in the current slump — and bogged down in a long and expensive war.

Begin’s departure is a useful time to remember the kind of state Israel was supposed to become, when people like him were fighting a guerrilla war with the professed object of establishing it. It was claimed that, above all, Jewish people would have learned a unique lesson from their desperately sad history; the new state would be a haven of peace, equality and compassion.

It is not accidental that it has turned out to be very different from those noble, misconceived ideals. Israel is now the Middle East’s greatest military power (its arms industry is its biggest employer). It suppresses Arabs, hounds and terrifies Palestinians and, as in Beirut just over a year ago, it does not shrink from condoning genocide and massacre.

Far from opening the way to peace and compassion, Begin's time in office has prepared for the succession of Yitzhak Shamir, ex-member of the militant, murdering Stern gang and a hard-liner on matters political and military. If Shamir in time becomes a national hero like Begin it will mean that he too has kept to those noble ideals, that he has talked of humanity and peace while serving his ruling class through all necessary excesses of cruelty and destruction.

Fact

Some of the runners in the Labour Party leadership contest advocated a national minimum wage, with Roy Hattersley leading the way with assurances that it would bring . . a more equal society . . . narrow the gap between rich and poor . . and Michael Meacher claiming that it was “a price which can be paid”.

Fact. A national minimum wage of a sort has been in existence in this country ever since Tory loony Keith Joseph was in charge of the Department of Health and Social Security, at least that's what they called it. Joseph brought in Family Income Supplement, a state benefit designed to ensure that nobody in work — earning a wage — would fall below a certain defined level. It didn’t work.

Fact. The Labour candidates are discovering that poverty still exists in this country after most of them have been members of past Labour governments which got in power partly on an assurance that they had a simple solution to the problem. That didn't work either.

Eyeless in power

From Thatcher’s first complaints of grit in the eyes to the private surgery, there intervened only one week. Although the condition remained unnoticed by Thatcher's doctor until a few days before the operation, it had been spotted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain many years previously.

Socialists detected the presence of the Prime Minister’s infamous blind eye from the very start of her political career. It is a malady she shares with every MP who has ever taken a seat in Parliament; it is an affliction with both advantages and disadvantages.

While she and her fellow members maintain the capitalist system, it is a useful thing to be able to turn a blind eye to the human suffering this causes. Indeed, if it were not for this fortunate ailment how would our elected representatives subjugate any pangs of doubt they might feel?

How would they sleep if the glare of their own ambitions did not blind them to the degradation, pain and anxiety that capitalism pours on the exploited working class? If the visions of suffering that are better not seen could not be ignored by such a selective method of sight, would they not be campaigning for the end of such an inhumane system rather than paying homage to it?

When the working class cease to elect members with such imperfect sight and turn instead to men and women who have seen and analysed that which our contemporary MPs defensively refuse to acknowledge. then something will be done about its removal. The causes of working class suffering are known to all who have eyes to see.

NL

In the swamp

Colourful phrases do not spring easily to the lips of Len Murray so perhaps he did not describe the 1983 TUC's tendency to move away from the traditional connection with the Labour Party as “the last twitch of the dinosaurs”.

In any case there is no cause for excitement. for the TUC may at most abandon one outdated idea for another. To develop ties with the SDP/Liberal Alliance and to begin a dialogue with the dreaded Norman Tebbit instead of with the Labour Party hardly comes into the description of fresh, relevant and optimistic ideas.

Then there is the matter of the unions’ motivation. If they do break with Labour it will be because that party’s chances of power are so dismal that there is little to be gained from affiliation with them. Better to look for a likelier prospect, even to negotiate with the Tories if they are the people in power.

It would have been more encouraging if the delegates had discussed severing from the Labour Party through a recognition of the reasons for its futility. They might also have acknowledged the Labour Party’s miserable history of trying to force down workers’ living standards and of fighting against the unions. The fact that this was all done in the interests of the British ruling class provides a conclusive reason for the unions to break with Labour — indeed to oppose it with all their power.

A debate at the TUC which ranged around that sort of awareness would have been a sign of real evolution in the unions, perhaps the first stirrings of class-consciousness which would expose and discard all connections with all the parties of capitalism.

For the present that must be a dream; but the workers can make it come true. Meanwhile the present is less happy, as the unions remain in the primeaval intellectual swamps, a long way behind reality and a proper grasp of what must be done to solve society's problems.

Finance and Industry: Who creates wealth? (1967)

The Finance and Industry Column from the October 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people have a shrewd suspicion that the profits that find their way into the pockets of those who own stocks and shares come out of the wealth produced by those who work. For the capitalist class this is unfortunate since their system runs on profit. To pursue their profit-making in peace they must convince the rest of us that they are doing it for our benefit; they must brand those who link profit with exploitation as ignorant agitators. Sir Peter Runge, a joint vice-chairman of Tate and Lyle and a director of Vickers, in a speech last May, later published by millionaire Labour MP Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press under the title The Role of Profit, had a go at showing that profit does not come from the unpaid labour of those who are employed to work. Here is his specious argument:

Let us look at profit in its first role — as an incentive to create capital, without which economic growth is impossible. Capital can only be created by savings, that is to say by the postponement of consumption. Under a voluntary regime consumption is postponed if it is judged that in doing so there is a consequential advantage. Judgement normally rests on the prospects of having more to consume as a result of the postponement; and clearly the better the prospects the greater the incentive to postpone consumption and thus to save. The extra consumption made possible by having waited is the reward for having saved; it is the profit generated by the capital which has been created. Without the reward there would be no capital formation and therefore no growth and therefore no real increase in standard of living or in real wages. Looked at in this way, the reward of capital — I am not talking about usury — exploits no one; it is an essential part of growth in a free economy.

This seems plausible until you take it to pieces. Take the sentence “capital can only be created by savings, that is to say by the postponement of consumption”. What does Runge mean by capital? We doubt, somehow, that he is using it in the Marxian sense to mean wealth used to exploit wage-labour for profit. Nor does he seem to be using it in the more conventional sense of academic economists to mean wealth used to produce more wealth. He seems merely to mean wealth that is not consumed immediately. In which cases his sentence is not a statement of fact but a definition that capital is postponed consumption. He argues that profit is needed as an incentive to save. In fact, he’s not really talking about profit, properly so-called, at all but about interest, the price of money. To talk, as Runge does, about rewards is just to confuse the issue.

We can assume that Runge is not so stupid as to think that money automatically reproduces itself. Or can we? What are we to make of his claim that “the extra consumption . . . is the profit generated by the capital which has been created”? Perhaps he can explain just how capital (in his sense) produces profit. Since he has defined capital as what is saved, and thus talks interchangeably about the “reward for having saved” and the “reward of capital”, he would seem to be committed to the patently absurd view that profit is produced by waiting. But waiting produces, and can produce, nothing. Waiting, in fact, is doing nothing. If Runge doubts this, let him take a sum of money and lock it up in his safe and wait. We can assure him that he will be waiting a long time before his reward materialises. On the other hand, he could lend it to someone who would use it as productive capital. The factory-owner who borrows the money will use it in his business. In his factory people in his employ will work raw materials into finished goods; they will produce new wealth. Part of this will return to them as wages. The rest belongs to their employer, the factory-owner. This is the source of profit and its subsidiaries, rent and interest. It arises in production from the unpaid labour of those who work. Out of his profit the factory-owner can pay Runge interest for the loan of his money.

Significantly, Runge chooses to steer clear of the realm of production and to discuss instead how interest can be justified. And even here, instead of seeing interest as a price he speaks of rewards, substituting for an economic category, as Marx put it in another context, a sycophantic phrase.

Another capitalist who has an even more absurd view of how wealth is produced is Tory shadow Minister, Sir Keith Joseph. He thinks it is a few thousand top executives who are the “wealth-creators”. In a speech pleading for a reduction of taxes on the rich, as reported for their benefit in the Financial Times of June 26, he declared:

The Government that wants the standard of living to rise so that there is more for all … must start by allowing its wealth-creators to keep more of their earnings. . . . There are at any given time very few wealth-creators probably no more than a few thousand.

We know that capitalism develops social productivity but had not realised that it had gone quite this far. So only a few thousand people mine all the coal, operate the railways, run the factories, shops and offices! Who are they? Who are these super-men? According to Joseph this fantastic feat is performed by

the creative businessmen who detect new needs and new markets or new versions of old needs and old markets for products or services — and set about supplying them; or the managers who have the brains, character and drive to make an organisation more efficient.

Runge tries to confuse us with his illogical arguments. Joseph just insults our intelligence. Nobody would deny that top executives work, but what about the rest of us, who spend the greater part of our lives in producing wealth that belongs to a privileged and often idle few, do we not create wealth too?

Incidentally Joseph, a Lloyds underwriter and deputy chairman of Bovis Holdings Ltd., hit upon an idea to create wealth for himself (and, of course, for us as well) that never fails. He had the enterprise, brains, character and drive to be born the son of one of the original partners of a construction firm called Bovis.

Why many people look up to men like Sir Peter Runge and Sir Keith Joseph is difficult to understand. They are just human beings like the rest of us, only, perhaps, a little stupid. It is us, the working class, who by applying our energies to nature-given materials produce all new wealth; it is us who run industry and society from top to bottom. Is it not time we did so in our own interests for a change?

Adam Buick

Rod of iron (1979)

From the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three months after the Tories won power, it is becoming more and more obvious that we are being governed by a curious mixture of people. On the one hand there is Willie Whitelaw, who may be considered by a few ungrateful electors not to have the most agile intellect in politics. On the other there is Keith Joseph, whose legendary brilliance has the political correspondents searching through their Thesaurus for some fresh adulation. When he was last a minister, Joseph startled many of his admirers by suddenly discovering something he called the Cycle of Deprivation and by declaring that he intended to do away with it. This cycle which Joseph had come across was in fact the process by which poor people tend to raise deprived children, who in turn do the same. It may not have been the most original idea ever to come out of a Whitehall office, but it provided Joseph with the material for a lot of speeches, so we should all be grateful.

But any shortcomings in the new government are more than compensated for by the fact that they are presided over by one of the most remarkable women in the entire history of the human race. Margaret Thatcher, it will be remembered, was once castigated as the Iron Lady by the Russian press. Perhaps the Russians were really trying to bring about Labour’s defeat at the election; at all events, their sneer did Thatcher no harm. It has, however, had its repercussions; she now seems to feel the need to act out the role which has been thrust upon her. For example, in a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph, Graham Turner wrote:

. . . Mrs. Thatcher’s own impact has been explosive, both within the Cabinet and in Whitehall, part of which she has turned into a distressed area within the space of a few weeks . . .

Nor is it only civil servants who go in fear of Mrs. Thatcher. Some ministers, too, are distinctly nervous of her. It needs an especially arrogant and assertive personality (one who springs to mind is Michael Heseltine) to stand up to the Iron Lady and, if we are to believe the Sunday Express, this government is not overloaded with such people. Indeed, the Express recently sneered at the Tories as a bunch of vacillating weaklings, with Thatcher the only ‘man’ (sic) among them. No eyebrows will be raised at the sexism in this, typical of the Express, but what should be said about the paper’s abrupt change of favour? It is, after all, only a few months since they were advising us to vote for those same Tory weaklings.

Leader

Perhaps, in attacking the underlings while bolstering the leader, the Express is showing its sensitivity to the fact that the Tories have had some unhappy experiences with their leaders over the past fifteen years. At one time they could go about their business under the comfortable assumption that they were the natural governing party of British capitalism and that this would last for ever. This assurance did not lessen the ferocity of their infighting, in which not a few of their leaders perished, usually because they had failed to win an election. The process by which the leader of the Tories came to the front was once described by one of their MPs:

Great leaders of parties are not elected, they are evolved . . . I think it will be a bad day when we have solemnly to meet to elect a leader. The leader is there, and we all know it when he is there. (Ernest Pretyman, 21 March 1921)

In theory, a leader chosen by that process could hang on to the job for as long as he liked. In practice, his hold was not that secure; if he lost the support of the party in Parliament he was disposed of as effectively as in any formal ballot.

That was what happened when the Tories got rid of Douglas-Home and, to some extent, when Edward Heath was forced to put his leadership up for re-election — and lost to Thatcher. But in calmer times it is usual for the Conservative Party to present the image of a happy, united family, at one behind the leader. It is almost as if the leader had come down from some supernatural existence to harvest the votes; every word they utter is treated with reverence, and when they speak at a Tory Conference they must be rewarded with a prolonged standing ovation, no matter how banal and boring (which it usually is) their speech has been.

This is the treatment which is now being given to us over Margaret Thatcher. Here, for example, is how one Tory MP describes her:

. . .  She has the power of total concentration, an immense capacity for work, and great physical stamina. This is unusual in a woman. (Nigel Fisher, The Tory Leaders)

Nobody need be misled by Fisher’s confident assertions about women’s alleged lack of concentration, industriousness and stamina into thinking that he knows anything about biology. Perhaps his knowledge of politics is also suspect; why, for example, did this woman he praises so fulsomely have such a hard time of it being recognised by the Tories for the unique genius Fisher says she is?

When the campaign for the leadership opened, Thatcher was not among the front runners; likelier candidates were Whitelaw, Joseph and du Cann. Enoch Powell, not noted for his tact, said bluntly that Thatcher’s election was a matter of chance (and therefore, presumably, not of merit); earlier or later, it would not have happened. And it is almost certain that if the Tories had still been choosing their leader under the old system, they would not have ‘known she was there’. An important element in that system was that there should be some sort of consensus in a candidate’s favour among the more influential members of the party. As Fisher points out, Thatcher did not have this:

Before Neave assumed control, there was very little declared or positive support for Margaret Thatcher. Most members were reluctant to commit themselves, many thought she was unelectable and a few were openly anti-feminist.

But all that is past now, and Thatcher is at Number Ten. For the present (which probably means for as long as she wins elections) the ranks are closed behind her and the Tories bend their minds to a relentless campaign to convince us that we are the luckiest people ever to have such a person running British capitalism. Of course we are wearily familiar with this; the late John Davies, for example, could not have been described as a dazzling success as a politician, even by the standards which capitalism applies. Still less should the working class feel any warmth or sympathy towards a man who so openly represented the social system which degrades and exploits them. But when Davies died, the praise for him gushed uncontrolled:

. . . delightful, modest and very able... a person who believed in serving others. (Margaret Thatcher)

. . . a delightful colleague, who never spared himself . . . (Edward Heath)

. . . a genuinely nice man. (Ian Aitken, The Guardian)

This sort of nonsense is depressingly capable of convincing most workers not only that their leaders are an exceptionally able and self-sacrificing lot, but also that leaders of one sort or another are essential. How, without leaders, would capitalism go about its daily business of exploiting the working class, designing slums, regulating poverty, prosecuting war, protecting the privileges of a parasitic minority? How could it convince so many people that it is natural and progressive for the majority to work all their lives for nothing more than the achievement of keeping that minority in their parasitism?

For example, at a recent party of ‘high society guests’ at the Dorchester, the first prize in a raffle was a £1,000 facelift by a top Harley Street surgeon. What sort of person, one wonders, would buy a ticket in such a raffle? Or go to such a party? What sort of ‘doctor’ would agree to be the prize? And what sort of people doggedly, even happily, allow themselves to be exploited to support it, and at election time vote in favour of its continuing?

Perhaps the working class do not object to being robbed and insulted provided that it is done artistically. Thatcher’s success or failure as a politician will be judged by that standard. At the present she is largely an unknown quantity, but one thing is clear: no one will try harder.

Ivan

Capitalism, poverty and child abuse (1991)

From the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The allegations of satanic rituals involving children in Rochdale and the Orkneys, and the life sentence passed on David Hammond in November 1989 for the brutal murder of his five-year old daughter Sukina have provided the national newspapers with a lot of sensational material in the last two years.

The NSPCC estimates that between 50 and 100 children are killed by their parents each year and that a further 16,000 are abused. Child abuse cases reported to them have risen by 20 percent in the last year (Guardian, 19 March) and 7 of their 66 teams claimed to have evidence of Satanic rituals involving children (Daily Telegraph, 19 March).

The murder of children by their parents is not new. Infanticide was used to control the population and to prevent children born with defects becoming a burden on the community. In China even today baby girls are sometimes killed, where boys are preferred in families limited to one child.

In 19th century London 80 percent of illegitimate babies put out to nurse in the notorious "baby farms" died. Some died of childhood diseases associated with poverty. because their mothers could not afford to pay for their children to be looked after properly. Others were murdered for gain after the fees had been collected.

P. T. Resnick, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1969, listed various reasons why parents murder their children: altruistic killing to relieve the victim’s realistic or delusional suffering, whether or not followed by suicide; acute psychosis; elimination of an unwanted child (as when paternity is in doubt or the child would be a financial burden); accidental or unconscious motivation; and spouse revenge—the so-called Medea Syndrome (after Medea in Ancient Greek mythology who, following desertion by her husband, killed their two children, saying: "Thy sons are dead and gone, that will stab thy heart").

Children are frequently warned by parents, teachers and public information films not to talk to strangers. This deliberate inculcation of a suspicious and fearful attitude to strangers is probably more harmful than helpful as at least 88 percent of child murders are carried out by members of the victim’s own family. The same mistrust of strangers is instilled into children to "protect" them from sexual abuse. But children are far more likely to be abused by relatives.

Poor get the blame

Commenting on the strong link being being abused as a child and anti-social behaviour, including child abuse, later in life, Sir Keith Joseph when Minister of Health and Social Security coined the phrase “cycles of deprivation". His argument was that parents brought up in deprived circumstances were responsible for bringing up their children in similarly deprived circumstances.

The political right-wing favours this type of “victim-bashing" approach because it avoids the pressure for social change. To blame the poor for their poverty ignores the fact that capitalism creates the wretched conditions in which many workers live. Capitalism fosters inequality and workers brought up in deprived circumstances have great difficulty in making economic progress. The worst schools, the worst social amenities and the worst job opportunities are all the very poor have access to. Children from poor families are under greater pressure to leave school as soon as possible in order that they can work and contribute to the family income. In addition, some housing estates have such bad reputations that it is difficult for workers living on them to borrow money or obtain mortgages. This has more to do with the continued deprivation from one generation to the next than any moral deficiency or lack of ability on the part of the workers.

Internal stresses within a family, personality clashes, sibling rivalry, incompatibility, worries about health, and misunderstandings between the different generations are similar for rich and poor alike. But the external stresses caused by poverty, unemployment, bad housing, overcrowding or homelessness only affect those who have to work for wages. It is these external stresses, and the fact that workers will have faced many of these problems during their own childhood that makes physical abuse more likely to happen in poor homes.

Poverty is violence

Social workers have failed to protect children because under capitalism their function is social control:

We have seen that the ruling class cannot maintain its exploitive domination simply by the direct repressive apparatus of the army, police, courts and prisons. Its legitimation has to be engineered through a range of ideological mechanisms. Social work operates primarily as part of these mechanisms.

(P. Leonard, Poverty Consciousness and Action, 1975).

Capitalism distorts relationships. By putting a price on everything and subordinating all activities to the need to make a profit it has made us all rivals. It is no surprise that children have been regarded as their parents’ property, because capitalism prizes property above everything else.

Hypocritically, individual acts of cruelty are condemned by politicians while children are allowed to starve in underdeveloped countries to maintain profits. In the Phillipines children work long hours in what amounts to little more than slavery without much condemnation from European reformers, some of whom are happy to reap the profits that are made.

In the case of Sukina Hammond the Daily Star carried huge headlines “Whipped to Death" and gave lurid details of the child’s suffering. But only a handful of cases are reported in this way. The majority of children killed by their parents will not be mentioned because they are not newsworthy enough. Even in death Sukina Hammond was exploited for a headline.

Workers owe it to themselves, their children and to future generations to remove the profit motive, the property tag and all the rivalries and suspicions which are inherent in competitive societies. Perhaps then children like Sukina Hammond will not have died in vain.

Carl Pinel

Why the date is important (1964)

From the May 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Prime Minister has spoken. In the hope that the interests of the Conservative Party will be best served by an election in the Autumn, he has settled for that and the news which has been so anxiously awaited by the M.P.s who hang on to slim majorities, and not so anxiously by those who sit on a fat lead, is out.

Ever since the Profumo crisis, there has been any amount of speculation about the timing of the election. Only a short time ago, some political experts were assuring us, on information from “reliable sources,” that polling day would definitely be in March. Others were equally confident that it would be in late May or June.

But there has also been a persistent story that the Prime Minister himself favoured a later date, in the hope that by then his party’s tarnished image would be looking a little brighter. At the same time, it was whispered, Harold Wilson was hoping for a June election and was working on the assumption that that would happen.

Both Labour and Conservative parties attach great importance to the date of the election; for some time they have based their electoral strategy on their forecast of the date.

In passing, we may comment that the time which Douglas-Home has chosen has a certain interest. Previous Conservative Premiers have often been masters at the political game and have excelled in calling elections at a time of maximum inconvenience to their opponents, and then fighting on a craftily conceived vote-catching gimmick. Baldwin was like that and so was Macmillan. But Douglas-Home has so far done nothing to suggest that his choice of polling day has been handled any more adroitly than the other political matters which he has bungled since he took office.

This is a point of no more than academic interest. While the working class are blind enough to acquiesce in a social system in which they are governed by leaders in the interests of the capitalist class, it is of little consequence whether the leaders are politically skilful or not. Home, up to now, is one of the nots.

It is important to realise why the parties have been in such a dither over polling day. The English political constitution allows the date of an election to be flexible. This would not matter very much if the people who determine the outcome of an election were of different material. In other words, if the working class were politically more mature, the election date would be of much less significance—their votes would go the same way in March as in October, or any other month.

But the working class are not politically mature. They vote in ignorance and in docile acceptance of whatever capitalism likes to dish out to them. Some of them support the Labour Party, although they oppose Labour Party policy. (Aims of Industry claim that 32 per cent. of Labour Party supporters are opposed to more nationalisation). And the same sort of thing can be said for some of the supporters of the Tory government.

If the evidence of the Gallup Poll can be relied upon, the voting intentions of the working class change almost week by week, apparently influenced by all manner of incidents in the daily round of capitalist crisis and confusion. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the politicians attach such importance to the date of an election. If, for example, Macmillan’s government had collapsed last summer, they would probably have lost the election—for the same basically illogical reason that may win the election for Douglas-Home later this year.

In the United States, the pre determined date of an election means that the timing in itself does not have the same importance as over here. But this does not mean that there is any less posturing, any less dishonesty from the politicians, any less ignorance on the part of the working class. For some months before a Presidential election, some American government business almost comes to a standstill, as the two great parties concentrate their energies on the coming campaign — upon the careful statements, the devious attacks on their opponents, the loaded hand outs and promises to voters.

This sort of campaign is widely accepted by most of the people who have a vote to cast. In the same way, they expect a British Prime Minister to choose an election date to suit himself—the date on which, he thinks, the people who are foolish enough to vote for his party will outnumber those who are foolish enough to vote for the opposition.

This sort of cynicism does not damage the politician's image of a beneficent, honest man who would rather die than stoop to a low trick. It does not damage Home's image of a chivalrous aristocrat who longs to serve all of us slum dwellers and millstone mortgagees. It will not damage Wilson’s image of the blunt, sensible lad from Yorkshire who learnt all about life in the days when he could not afford to wear shoes. Yet these images should be damaged—indeed, should be destroyed by the evidence of the politician’s cynicism. That they are not destroyed is just another symptom of the political backwardness of the voters.

One of the most depressing facts about an election is that very few of the millions who cast their votes seem to ask what the politicians want power for. They are generally content to accept the cynicism and the vote hunting and the politician's own assessment of themselves as humane and clever men.

Both Labour and Conservative parties claim that they are opposed to each other. The Labour Party warn us that the Tories are hard headed, ruthless men of business who care not for the problems of the under-privileged nor now that Harold Wilson is in command —for the underpaid men of science. The Tories reply that the Labour Party is full of reckless dogmatists who will ruin the British economy for the sake of a theory and who will allow British capitalism to be bossed by flat capped trade unionists.

What truth is there in these claims? One of the issues on which Labour hopes to win votes is the rise in rents which followed the Rent Act. The figure of the rapacious landlord has always been a politically emotive one. Yet even at the time when the Act was first passed, it was apparent that a Labour government would have been compelled, to some extent, to free rents. Now from the other side, the Conservatives have stated that they are in favour of some measure of rent control. In the House of Commons on March 18th last Sir Keith Joseph, Minister of Housing, made this quite clear: 

. . . the Government do not intend, if returned to power, to propose, during the next Parliament, any further measure of block (rent) decontrol.

This shows how close the two parties are on this issue. There is nothing surprising about this. Housing is an essential part of working class expenditure and as such has a powerful effect upon wages. This means that rents are important enough to capitalism to ensure that the two big parties substantially agree on what should be done about them.

Then there is the favourite Tory bogey of a Labour party which will nationalise everything and drive all the employees out of business. This bogey has always been something of a laugh, especially when we recall what the last Labour government was prepared to do to keep British capitalism prosperous.

Now Sir John Hunter, chairman of the Central Training Council, has had his say on this, to the British Employers' Confederation;—

I do not subscribe to the view that a Labour Government will introduce legislation with little regard for the employers' views. On the contrary, I believe a Labour Government would listen attentively to the views expressed by employers’ organisations on one condition that those views are positive and expressed clearly, forcibly and without reservation. (Guardian, 19/3/64.)

Both the big parties, in fact, stand for capitalism—and so do other organisations like the “Liberals," “Communists” and “Independents,” who claim to be different. They stand for the social system in which war is established and persistent enough to be almost a way of life. They support the economic arrangement in which the mass of the people, who make and distribute the world’s wealth, live in a horror-land of plastic, prefabricated, powdered, poverty, while a few privileged people have an income which allows them the chance to live like human beings. (In the tax year 1961/62 there were just 92 people in this country with annual incomes over £100,000).

In face of their basic agreement over the continuance of this social system, the differences between the Labour Party and its Tory opponents arc quite insignificant. They are no more than differences over the details of administering a world so organised that it enables a few people to do very well indeed while the vast majority get hurt—sometimes literally so.

This is what puts the timing of the election into its perspective. What can we say about the voter who is subject to all the suppressions and frustrations of capitalism yet who will vote Labour in March, Tory in October, perhaps Labour again in January, and so on? Is there anything more foolish? More futile?

Whatever precise date the Prime Minister eventually settles for, he can rest assured that when the election is over and the next government is comfortably in the seat of power, when the newspapers are smugly congratulating everyone on what they call the exercise of democracy, he will still be Sir Alec Douglas-Home with all his property and investments. So will the rest of his class, up the top of the social tree. And somewhere down the bottom will be the people who, at any time and in all weathers, are content to keep them there.

Ivan

Past, Present, Future: Happy New Year! (1963)

From the January 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have all come across the old joke (and some of its more doubtful variations) about a Happy New Year To All Our Readers. Well, ask the Socialist Standard whether it joins in this wish and our answer is No—and then again, Yes.

Because “Happy New Year” has become for many workers something more than a wish—almost, in fact, a prayer. The turn of the year is for them something of a mystic moment, charged with superstitious undertones, when something wonderful happens which changes their fortunes for the next twelve months. They have a simple faith that the New Year will see the end of what they call their Bad Luck. (How many times is poor old Luck blamed for something which is nothing to do with him? It is Bad Luck when a worker is redundant or when he can't get a house or when he cops one in the army in the war.)

The New Year, many workers hope, will usher a new rhythm into their lives, will bring success, security, happiness—even riches, perhaps. So if they wish each other a Happy New Year—and silently reserve the same wish for themselves—it is as a supplication to the mystic moment.

We have no desire to be churlish. It is a pleasant enough thing that we should wish each other, at any time, happiness in the future. And perhaps we might as well do this at the arbitrary moment when one year changes to another as at any other time. But we should also think a little more deeply about the wish and ask ourselves one or two questions about it. Most of all we should ask what we are doing to give it some chance of becoming more than a wish, of becoming reality.

For most people, the answer to this question is: Nothing. Each January they trot out the same formal, meaningless sentiments which they coyly call the Compliments of the Season, with never a thought for what the compliments are worth. Wanly, confusedly, they hope that the wish will change something.

But nothing changes—nothing, at any rate, that matters. Year by year capitalism produces the same problems and continues to provide excuses for the wish-mongers to exercise their mysticism. Let us go back, for example, over the recent files of the Socialist Standard to see what we had to worry and to wish about in Januarys past.

Take 1958. We were urging our readers to Get It Straight and to realise that the reformists' schemes had failed miserably to improve our lot. “The Labour Party,” we said, “ is back where it started, looking for another cure for the housing problem within capitalism.” Housing! How many workers pin their hopes for a better 1963 upon getting out of the prefab, or the furnished room, or the accommodation centre, and moving into a house? How many hope that they will not still be living in a slum this time next year? Yet all the efforts of capitalism’s reformers, all the promises and all the wishes, have no effect on the problem of bad housing.

The slums increase faster than new housing—some of it the slums of the not so distant future—can be put up. The tragic figure of homeless families in London climbs higher month by month. The politicians talk on. The promises are heaped one upon the other, like a bricklayer laying his bricks. Last November 1st, Sir Keith Joseph, the latest Minister of Housing, was promising again to speed up slum clearance and to accelerate the progress of most elements of the housing programme and to keep the pace up until “the housing of the entire nation is decent.” (Sir Keith, of course, already lives in a pretty decent house himself, in the posher part of Chelsea.)

We have seen housing ministers come and go and we have heard many, many promises. We shall be hearing them this time next year and the year after that, and so on, until we have a world in which homes are built for humans to live in and not as a source of profit for somebody who would not want to be found dead in them.

Take 1961. Then, we were exposing the myth of high wages for the working class—the myth which is trumpeted almost every day from the capitalist press —and pointing out that the coming year, like many before it, was an uncertain one for capitalism's economy. For many industries uncertainty was in the air, as they anxiously asked themselves whether they would be able to sell as much of their products as they needed to during 1961. The Selwyn Lloyd budget in July of that year bore out some of the newspapers' predictions that such measures were on the way—at the same time as it showed up those who expected a bumper year for the British economy. The workers who had been earning the mythically high wages found them under attack in the wages pause. There is some reason to think that the government realised that the pause.could have only a limited usefulness—to hold down some wages for a comparatively short time—and that this object was achieved. This may or may not be true. What we should be concerned with here is the fact that wages never live up to the dreams which many workers have for them. They are never free of restriction.

Wage restraint

If we consider only the post-war history of this country, for example, we can see that whichever party has been in power has had a consistent policy of holding down wages. Sometimes this has been tried by exhortation, by appeals to the T.U.C., and so on. Sometimes it has been tried by measures like the Lloyd pause, with its deliberate going-back on the arbitration machinery which the government once said they held in such high regard. Sometimes it has been by a disguised cut in wages, as happened when the Labour government devalued the pound in 1949.

Wages are never all that workers wish them to be. They can never provide more than the wherewithal to recharge our energies so that we are ready for another bout of profit-making. If any of us look back on our lives and consider the wages which we have earned and spent, and if we look forward to the wages we expect to earn in the future, we shall know it is true that over a period of time the money we earn is generally just about enough to get us a living. This remains a fact as much for the times when there is not much chance of successful wage-pushing (such as before the war) as it does for the times when wage claims have a fair chance of success, such as we have had for most of the time since the war.

Yet how many workers' hopes for a brighter 1963 rest upon their expectations of a rise? And how many will be disappointed, by the inevitability of capitalism fighting rises, by the fact that their wages actually fall because they are on short time or are redundant, or because they get their rise and find that like so many which they have had before it is swallowed by rising prices?

Take now last January's Socialist Standard, which was largely devoted to the Common Market. To many people—including some of capitalism's economic experts—the Common Market is the key to many problems. If Britain goes in, they argue, her industries will have access to an immense market into

which they can pump their goods. Factories over here will have to go full out to satisfy the demand. Everybody wilt be working which means, to most workers, that everybody will be happy. To those who take this view the future, if British capitalism joins, is rosy.

Last January we pointed out the falseness of this rosy outlook. “. . . those who think that the Common Market will end the workers' troubles are equally in error,” we said, “. . . The European Common Market is not a different kind of capitalist entity—only a larger one." Perhaps some of our readers thought that we were crying sour grapes. Now read on.

Last December, Ministers of the twenty member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which covers North America and Western Europe, were meeting in Paris to discuss the prospects for the coming year. Were they absorbed in the problems of containing a great surge of prosperity during 1963? Did they find that they had to chew over the prospects of abundance and happiness flooding across Europe and America during the next twelve months? They did not. Reported The Guardian on 23rd November: "Experts agree that there may be a recession on both sides of the North Atlantic in 1963.” If the experts are right (which has been known) we may be sure that the Common Market countries will feel the force of the slump. For, as we wrote last January, the European Economic Community has not been able to solve the serious unemployment problem of at least one of its members. Italy then had 1,350,000 out of work—nearly seven per cent. of its working population, after having exported hundreds of thousands of its workers to other countries.

None of the economic organisations with which capitalism tries to sort out its muddles can have any effect upon the system's basic anarchies. The Common Market cannot stop slumps and unemployment. Neither can the other organisations like OECD, one of whose members—Canada—currently has seven per cent. of its labour force out of work. Yet how many hopes for a happier 1963 are based on the expectation of a secure job and the trust that capitalism can somehow provide this?

Prospects for 1963

Bluntly, the prospects for 1963 are no better than ever. We know that capitalism will give workers all over the world insecurity and unemployment. It will grind out poverty and restriction and condemn millions of people to live, drab, inadequate lives. It may even give us frights like Cuba. Whatever it brings, we know that when the next New Year comes around we shall still be hearing the same meaningless wishes. Perhaps, if we stretch a point, we can say that there is nothing so wrong in the wish in itself. The danger lies in its escapist implications, in the fact that although they may wish each other good fortune, the majority of workers solidly act all the time against their own interests—against, in fact, their own good wishes. It would be far better if they all began to work for what could be a really happier future.

Socialism will finish the insecurities and the anomalies which blight our lives from one end of the year to another. The best we can wish ourselves is that the world working class will get enough understanding of society to throw off the system which restricts and condemns them and replace it with one in which happiness and plenty are no longer an empty dream.

The inadequacies of capitalism will play their part in bringing them to this. So to our readers in the slums and the prefabs and in the other drab, poky working class homes; to the unemployed and to those who know that their living is insecure; to those who hate and fear war: to all those who wish and work for a world fit for humans to live in; and to those who will not misunderstand the wish; to all of these—a Happy New Year.

Ivan

Briefing: Sir Keith's education (1984)

The Briefing Column from the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Joseph clashes on ‘Marxist slant' in Open University" was the arresting headline which the Sunday Times (1 July) gave to an article by their Education Correspondent, Peter Wilby. What is happening at the OU? The net contribution of my school and “higher" education towards my socialist knowledge was nil, and that goes for most socialists, I guess. The article just had to be compulsive reading.

Apparently Sir Keith has been taking a close personal interest in the University’s foundation course in social science, coded D102. Earlier this year he asked for copies of the 20 course booklets and commissioned a secret 17-page report, written, we are told, by "a number of professional economists", alleging serious bias.

Just what was the "serious bias” about which Sir Keith is complaining? Wilby’s article quotes some detailed complaints:

1) "The (course) authors are preoccupied ‘with depicting production as essentially a struggle between capital and labour’.” Now in our present-day society—capitalism—the working class, the overwhelming majority, have no other way to scratch a living than to sell their physical and mental energies (labour power). Capital and labour thus face each other as buyers and sellers, those interests a priori must be antagonistic. Another angle on this conflict is to see it as a struggle over the division of the product of labour. The higher the share taken by the non-producing capitalists, the less is the portion left for the producers of the whole wealth of society, the working class.

2) “Profit is seen purely in terms of the expropriation of a surplus created by labour; no mention is made of its possible role as a reward for risk-taking or for the stress and burdens of entrepreneurship.” This concedes that surplus wealth (above the worker’s pay) accounts for capitalist profits. We can concede that a capitalist investor is sometimes taking a calculated risk, with heavy losses on occasions taking the place of spectacular profits. But what have the capitalists as a class contributed to the actual productive process? In both cases, nothing. As for the stresses and strains of entrepreneurship, where they represent a real contribution they are now almost exclusively performed by salaried employees, members of the working class.

3) “The booklets are ‘at great pains to conclude that Britain is basically a capitalist economy’. The report says that ‘most professional economists' would not agree." Very unprofessional judgement, professional economists! It should be obvious from the definition of capitalism which we gave in 1). that the only area of the world to which it does not apply are those still at earlier stages of development (for example. New Guinea). What confuses these "professionals" and others is the position of nationalised industries, where a state-run body acts as employer. However workers in these enterprises are selling their labour power in exactly the same way as workers in "private" industry are to their bosses.

4) “Capitalists are viewed as having a desire to keep wages as low as possible.” We saw under 1) that all things being equal, the smaller the share of the total wealth accruing to the workers the greater the profits of the capitalist class. In some cases, by paying somewhat higher wages an employer may attract better workmen or women and so increase profits. Also, although it is difficult to express this in figures, a happier workforce on pay somewhat above the going rate may perform better and again produce more profits. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be “a desire to maximise profits”, but this is pretty well the same as minimising wages relative to profits.

5) “The ‘overthrow of capitalism’ is mentioned three times in half a page." We know that Sir Keith and his friends don’t want to overthrow capitalism, but here we are given no clue on the context of these remarks and what the OU authors understand by the term.

6) “Monetarist theory is described as ‘silly’ and attributed to ‘class interest’.” Definitely a sensitive point with Sir Keith. Monetarist theory is a totally inadequate model to describe the workings of the capitalist system, which is a long-winded way of saying that it is silly. As such its advocacy can only benefit the class in whose interest the capitalist system operates.

At this point the professional economists might as well give up. From their complaints you would think that course D102 had been prepared by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Alas, this is very far from being the case. In answer to the criticism from Sir Keith’s department. Peter Wilby quotes a spokesman for the University as saying “The booklets also describe Britain as a ‘mixed economy’ and add that they refer to it as capitalist ‘not in order to dismiss the importance of the state sector but to continue reminding ourselves of its dependence on the rest of the economy’.” This quote is enough to show what line the authors of D102 have really adopted. State ownership is socialism. Russia is socialist. The conflict between capital and labour can be regulated within the framework of the present social system, or at least this has to be the implication as the authors have no concept of how it can be transcended.

Having said that, we can afford a chuckle at the extreme sensitivity shown by Joseph and his allies to what is taken to be criticism of their capitalist system of society. Their intervention to try to alter the contents of this course is being undertaken because they believe they are suppressing socialist propaganda. But the contents of course D102 appear similar to the misconceptions propagated for many years now by the so-called left wing parties. These have led many workers, who realised that something is seriously wrong with capitalist society, to expend their energies along futile paths which have divided the working class. In contrast the anaemic, 100 per cent pro-capitalist course which Sir Keith would no doubt like to see substituted for D102 could well be seen by some students as so far removed from real life that the result may be to enhance their efforts to work out things for themselves. That road took me and many others into the Socialist Party.

E. C. Edge

A badly crumpled man (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

A thick skin is necessary to all politicians and this government abounds in rhinoceros figures. Some of them revel in an acknowledgement of their popular caricature — Thatcher the quick-tempered autocrat, Tebbit the parliamentary bovver boy, Howe the dead sheep of Westminster. But there is an exception; a minister who functions rather like a problem child, plastering its family into a false unity through itself carrying the burdens of their fractious confusions. Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary for Education, is liable to flog himself publicly with statements like: “You can't possibly blame Geoffrey Howe, he’s been marvellous. And the prime minister too. It’s me. It’s people such as me who are to blame.” Demonstrators who are unable to impress ministers like Tebbit sense that with Joseph they are close to a kill and they do not spare his feelings. "Sir Keith," read a placard which greeted him in South Wales. "You are mad and we hate you."

So it should be remembered that Joseph emerged as a government minister to a mixture of wonder and gratitude that so clever a man should spare us the time to take over a ministry and solve all our problems. (One hack was so excited that he likened Joseph's carefully argued opinions to fine sherry.) He came into the world with his mouth crammed with silver cutlery. His family, owning the Bovis building firm, were rich enough to send him to Harrow and Oxford University, where he so impressed everyone that he became a Fellow of All Souls. In Oxford, this is very significant; there are no undergraduates in All Souls, which is inhabited by Fellows who are reputed to be very superior people, the highest authorities on law, history and the social sciences. After a short spell being superior as a barrister. Joseph got into Parliament and was eventually given some inferior jobs in the government until in 1959 Macmillan made him Minister of Housing. A few years ago he was regarded as at least a future Chancellor of the Exchequer, possibly the next Conservative Prime Minister — a man who had left the most cloistered environment to put to rights a few trivial matters like slums, war and poverty.

Joseph made a consciously impressive start at the Ministry of Housing by going to look at some slums and then making a speech about them, even mentioning one — London’s notorious Cable Street — by name to show how he had got to grips with the problem. Perhaps in an effort to expand his knowledge, some people who actually lived in slums called round to Joseph’s expensive Chelsea home to tell him what the dirt and the drains and the rats were like. To the sound of Fleet Street’s busily clicking cameras, a bravely smiling Lady Joseph admitted a few scruffy children. One result of Joseph's investigations, for which Cable Street should not be held responsible, was the encouragement of local authorities to build a lot of new slums in the form of tower blocks, although Joseph did not actually intend to avail himself of this remedy for the housing shortage. Councils who followed his policy soon regretted it; the economics did not work out as Joseph had assumed and they found they had erected concentrations of neurosis, disease, crime and drug misuse.

There were few mourners for Joseph, when his time at the Ministry of Housing was ended by the Labour Party victory in the 1964 election. So anguished were the Tories by that defeat that they decided not only to ditch their leader, the amiable, aristocratic buffoon Alec Douglas-Home, but to elect another by ballot. This was an historical change since up to then the Tory leader had been expected to emerge after a bout of vicious in-fighting which Harold Macmillan called "the customary processes of consultation". Joseph was a Heath supporter and was rewarded for this, when the Conservatives came back to power in 1970. Through another customary process Joseph, having failed to make any impression on the housing problem, was given the rather more demanding job of abolishing sickness and poverty. He was put in charge of the Department of Health and Social Security, where he soon got down to an investigation which was to lead him to a discovery even more startling than the slums in Cable Street.

In June 1972 Joseph announced his suspicion that children born into poor, deprived families stood a good chance of growing up into parents of their own poor, deprived family.

  Much deprivation and maladjustment persisted from generation to generation. Many of today’s deprived children were doomed not only to stunted lives themselves but to become, unless they could be helped, the parents of a further generation of doomed children. (The Times, 30 June 1972.)

Joseph called this “the cycle of deprivation" and social workers and teachers were excited at the prospect of lavish official research into a problem which they had been despairingly aware of for a very long time. But the excitement died, when Joseph decided the research showed the cycle of deprivation did not exist, that he had invented it and the whole thing was. in his words, "a pretty negative piece of analysis". It was difficult to decide whether it was more worrying to have a Minister for Social Security who was surprised to find that impoverished families produced impoverished children than one who thought this didn't happen. A year later a positive piece of analysis by the National Childrens' Bureau reported that one million children who were living in squalor and deprivation, educationally crippled from birth, were “doomed to failure".

Sir Keith

Joseph lost his job when the Heath government went down to defeat in the disarray of the Three Day Week. He had made some elegant speeches, as befits a former Fellow of All Souls, he had made some promises and, as is expected of government ministers, he had juggled the figures a bit — in his case by introducing reforms like the Family Income Supplement which are supposed to substantially reduce poverty. Lord Carrington was annoyed with him because he had “given away a lot of money” without securing any benefit for the Conservative Party and the poor might have been annoyed with him because there had not been much benefit for them either; as the Heath government left office there were nearly four million people depending on Supplementary Benefit and nearly one and a half million living at or below the official poverty line.

Nobody expected that Joseph’s inability to introduce social security to the people of Britain would harm him in the Tory Party and when, in their bout of anguish after their 1974 defeat they threw out the leader they had chosen in the last bout, he became a strong candidate for the leadership. He might be sitting in Number Ten now, except that he made yet another memorable speech. The occasion was at Birmingham in October 1974 and his audience of Conservatives received an early warning of what was to come. “Let us,” Joseph advised them, “take inspiration from that admirable woman. Mary Whitehouse . . .” He then moved relentlessly on, to the kernel of his speech:

  The balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened . . . a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5 . . . Some (of the mothers) are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment . . . They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters . . . Why do I talk about birth control for the unmarried girls in socio-economic groups four and five? Because . . . this group makes far less use of birth control than the other social classes. (Daily Telegraph, 21 October 1974.)

Whatever had once been expected of his theory of the cycle of deprivation, it was not that it would resurface in the form of a crude, class-biased blunder into the perilous field of amateur eugenics. His louder opponents compared Joseph to Hitler; perhaps more damaging was the sort of quieter dismay expressed in Cecil King’s Diaries: “. . . surprising that what was obviously meant to be a major affair was not more carefully considered”.

As he could no longer expect to be Tory leader himself, Joseph threw his support behind Margaret Thatcher, who gratefully foisted him on to the Department of Industry after the 1979 election. It was here that Joseph began to show the first clear signs of serious disintegration. The Tory defeat of 1974 had converted him to the conviction that the happiest way of running capitalism was to ensure that the market, shaped by the profit motive, should be allowed to operate in simple purity. If an industry or a company were not profitable then it should not survive, like a brainless human body on a life- support machine, through financial aid from the government:

  If the government were to put money into industries that are losing jobs, the result would simply be that an equal number of jobs would be lost in other industries. All we would do would be to wreck other industries that arc doing moderately well by overtaxing them or their workers.

Few people expected Joseph actually to believe this argument and any who did expect him to would have had problems explaining what he did as Secretary for Industry. He decided to double state support for companies like British Leyland; he sanctioned £1.5 billion a year in subsidies to industry and £3 billion a year to state industries. One example was in March 1981, when he announced a government guarantee for a £200 million loan facility for ICL. This state-backed computer company had just announced a three-month loss of £20 million, which qualified it to have Joseph switch off the life support machine. To the dismay of the Tory Dries, he kept it going; a home-based computer industry is too vital, for economic and military reasons, to British capitalism to allow it to be damaged by draughts of intellectual sherry from All Souls.

Joseph is now Secretary for Education, which he says he regards as the peak of his career but where he does not have a happy time. He has a reputation as the Mad Axeman of the schools and the universities and everywhere he is hounded by angry demonstrators, who perhaps thought his “cycle of deprivation" speech implied a commitment to step up investment in education. In a recent White Paper he declared his intention to turn the screw on the teachers, as the demand for them falls, by stiffening the qualifications required of them and to make it harder for the teacher who is not up to scratch to keep a job. Joseph’s plans were not well received; a failing teacher may be due to sickness or a weariness with decades of struggling with educational, personal and social problems and in any case Joseph himself does not rate high in the efficiency tables: a chairman of the National Enterprise Board once described him as “hopeless” and in May 1981 the Bow Group journal Crossbow condemned him as “. . . by universal consent the most dismal disappointment of this administration". At uproarious meetings Joseph hears what people think of him, standing as if on the gallows, unable to make himself heard, unable to understand why these clamorous tormentors obstinately refuse to accept the crystal logic of his policies.

But the fault is not in his personality (in private, he is said to be kindly and witty); if he has crumpled it is under the strain of trying to do the impossible. His famous brain has not protected Joseph from the delusion that this social system can be made to work to the benefit of us all. Other politicians, who wear better than Joseph, are under the same delusion and so are the demonstrators. They are all looking for a missing ingredient through which capitalism’s ailments can be put to rights — the demonstrators say this ingredient is human compassion while Joseph says it is cerebral power and purity. All are driven by a common madness which sets experienced reality at nought. The choice is not to bury the likes of Joseph or to praise them. If we are to defeat what he represents we must not only know him for what he is but why.

Ivan