The Pillory. (1908)

From the November 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. John Burns at Tynemouth, 14.10.08 (Daily News report) said in reference to the Tariff Reformer’s allegation that under Free Trade England was a country of vanishing trades, “If that was true (which he denied) it was unpatriotic to allege it.” Burns’s conception of patriotism is, then, a readiness to lie with all the heart, and soul, and strength, when circumstances require it. Burns is a patriot—for £2,000 a year!

* * *

David Cummings, of the Boilermakers, has gone the way of Isaac Mitchell, of the General Federation. They both have jobs under the Board of Trade, and the capitalist class will doubtless find them eager to justify their salaries. It is better so. In the ranks of the workers they were worse than useless. The workers know now where they are—and why. George Barnes is said to be in the running for a similar job. He also will be better there—if he goes. At present he denies it. But these denials are generally to be taken cum grano salis. If George doesn’t go it will probably be due to the fact that he hasn’t a biblical name. Men with biblical names seem in much greater request, witness John, Isaac, and David. Now if George had been named Barrabas——

* * *

A. S. Headingly, of the S.D.P., is advertised in the St. Louis Labor (3.10.08) as open to speak in the large cities of America at 15 dollars a time. It is not stated whether his address will consist of exhortations to the workers to keep their finger-nails clean and see that the crease in their pants is always in perfect alignment, or whether he will take as his subject “the application of soap below the collar line and its relation to the Revolution.” These grave questions will doubtless be duly considered as usual, notwithstanding that the lecturer’s fee is so low.

* * *

We have been requested to announce that “on Oct. 12th the Rev. Ernest J. B. Kirtlan, B.A., B.D., late chaplain of H.M. Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, member of Fabian Society, and lecturer for the S.D.P., will speak in connection with the anniversary of the South London Wesleyan Mission. Subject: ‘Fag-Ends.'” The combination of qualifications and the occasion, not less than the importance of the subject, have impelled us to comply. We are sorry that the address will have been delivered some weeks before we can publish the news to the world, but we have done what we could.

* * *

Act 1. Mr. W. Thorne, M.P., introduces a Bill to provide for a citizen army.

Act 2. The S.D.P. issue a pamphlet explaining what Mr. Thorne means. (This was laudable and eminently necessary.)

Act 3. Has not yet been constructed. It might properly take the form of an explanatory pamphlet on the S.D.P. explanation of Mr. Thorne’s Bill.

* * *

Mr. A. E. Wachter is, I understand, a well-known Clarion Scout in his own neighbourhood. He writes to the Sunday Chronicle to enlighten a “middle-class father of eight,” who seems to have alleged that the working “classes” do not pay rates. Mr. Wachter says the working “classes” do pay rates. Mr. Wachter should read THE SOCIALIST STANDARD regularly. It would save him making exhibitions of ignorance. The working class does not pay rates; and there is only one working class. To refer to working classes is absurd.

* * *

“He did not care tuppence ior the abstract opinion of any man who did not come into his trade union and plant down his little bit of money and do his little bit of work.” (G. N. Barnes, M.P., Salford, 4.9.08.) The value of a man’s views is in proportion to the regularity with which he planks down his little bit of money in the union. Mr. Barnes is refreshingly frank.

* * *

At the Sanitary Inspectors’ Conference at Liverpool on the 9th, Sir J. Crichton-Browne said that if Mrs. Hemans were alive she would have to add another verse to her well-known poem in eulogy of tenement buildings. It would probably run, he said, thus—

The tenements of England, piled tier on tier on high.

Stand not by brooks, in verdant nooks, that rest and glad the eye,

But they rest fair, in sun and air, are clean and free from croup,

And safely there the weary sleep, and the sickly cease to droop.

If this is humour it is of the type that requires labelling. If it is not perhaps the least unkind remark one could make would be that Sir J. C. Browne’s poetry is at least as good as his facts; to which might be added that while the poet may properly claim licence for his fanciful figments, the scientist must make his appeal on more solid ground.

Sting in the Tail: Winter blues (1993)

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

Winter blues

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

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

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

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

Not in the script

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

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

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

Fair Trading?

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

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

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

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

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

Pads for proles

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

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

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

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

Cancerous growth

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

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

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

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

Taken for granted

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

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

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

Scotland—Progressing Backwards (1963)

From the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow

Most of the working-class dwellings in Scotland are the product of the rash of building that took place at the beginning of the century. In Glasgow it is the tenement building with its single and two-roomed apartments, usually three-storied, that predominates.

They were built for the influx of workers from Ireland and other parts of Scotland who crowded into Glasgow during the halcyon days of British capitalism when shipbuilding and heavy engineering along the west coast were booming. Such towns as Port Glasgow, Greenock, Paisley, and all the environs of Glasgow were built on the same lines.

In Lanarkshire, at such places as Motherwell and Hamilton, the coalfields attracted workers not only from Scotland and Ireland, but also from such European countries as Poland and the Ukraine. There the houses were built mainly on the classical “miner's row” pattern, rows and rows of depressing squat little buildings, each one a replica of the other. They may have been a different model from the Glasgow tenement, but, in common with them, they were small, overcrowded, cheap, and utterly unsuitable for human habitation.

On the East coast the story was equally miserable. The housing of the working class in Dundee, Kirkcaldy, Leith, and Edinburgh is from the same sorry mould as Glasgow. Indeed, Edinburgh, which has some pretence of being a cultured city (the ‘‘Athens of the North” the locals boast) with its festival of arts and drama and its litter boxes with the legend “This city is beautiful, keep it that way,” has probably some of the most sordid slums in Europe.

Today, of course, there are changes taking place. A walk through Glasgow's back streets will show that gaps are beginning to appear in the previously unending sides of those asphalt valleys. The local authorities are being forced to demolish some of the worst properties, though sometimes they are saved the task by their helpmates, decay and ill repair. Sometimes the buildings collapse when they are empty, sometimes when still occupied. In Possilpark, in the north of Glasgow, a whole gable-end of a tenement collapsed in a high wind last January. In Anderston and Gorbals in recent years tenements crumbled away in the night while still occupied. In Balloch, Dumbartonshire, last April, an eleven year old boy was crushed to death when a condemned tenement collapsed on him and his playmates.

Of course, houses are not only falling down, some are being built. But how many? Despite the promises of local governments, the picture is far from rosy; in Glasgow last year there were only 2,000 built, the lowest since 1947. More significant than the paltry number that are going up, is the type of houses that are being built.

In those areas where the houses were of a decent standard, the authorities found that the rents were too high for the majority of workers. Indeed, Mr. D. Gibson, the convenor of the Housing Committee in Glasgow, confessed that they could not send workers from the condemned tenements to such areas as Mosspark because ‘‘They were high- minded men who put Mosspark out of the reach of the very men and women who are demanding higher standards, and people in this city in need of housing cannot face up to rents and rates of £130 per year.” (Glasgow Herald, 19/3/62.)

The same sad story of workers too poor to be able to afford anything approaching decent housing. But for an example of ‘‘progress” the next point could hardly be bettered.

“Many years ago Glasgow had taken a resolution never to build again the two-apartment houses which had been such a large part of Scotland's housing problems. Now they were faced with thousands of Glasgow's citizens, the salt of the earth, who wanted to stay in Anderston and Woodside—the places where they had been brought up—in room-and-kitchen houses with an inside toilet. They refused to go to the new housing estates of Castlemilk and Easterhouse, and Glasgow Corporation were now building 10,684 modern houses for two persons. . . . That's progress; that's the criterion of affluence in this affluent society, a room and kitchen with an inside toilet.”

But even this modest demand for a new two-room apartment is hardly likely to be met. Mr. Gibson considers it will be necessary to convert the old property in some cases—“Even if they built 100,000 new houses in the next twenty years, they still need to keep standing some 30,000 room-and-kitchen and two-room-and kitchen houses, but they must be improved. They must have an inside toilet and reasonable washing facilities, even if it was a hot shower instead of a bath. These improvements could be carried out inside the bed recess in the kitchen at an estimated cost of £750 per house which would make them habitable for another 20 years.”

What a dilemma! They are building 2,000 a year just now: even if they built 100,000 in 20 years they would still have to convert old property and this would only last another 20 years.

Twist and turn as they may, capitalisms’ reformers, whether the Labour Party brand like Mr. Gibson, or Tory, Liberal or Communist, are bereft of an answer. Like the system they support, they find in the housing situation that every time they patch up in one place, something falls down in another.

Richard Donnelly