All You Need Is Money (2004)

From the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Guardianistas and the Daily hate-Mail readers have been treated to a form of united front against the Blair government. Not over the continuation of homelessness, poverty, unemployment or the instability of the world; but over the Earth-shattering plans of the British government to permit larger casinos to be built as a part of their new Gambling Bill. The forces of British Puritanism, left and right, have shaken out their musty banners and unfurled them in righteous anger. The Mail even evoked the ghost of Old Labour in the same way as an aghast Lutheran would grasp a crucifix to ward off Dracula.

Their concerns are not all pious moralism about improvidence, nor solely anti-Americanist fears of Vegas firms muscling in on the British gambling scene. The redoubtable Polly Toynbee noted the possibility that the current 350,000 gambling addicts in the UK might rise to some 700,000; and that American research suggests that 6 percent of people living near casinos become addicts (Guardian, 20 October). Since many of the new casinos proposed would be part of regeneration schemes for run-down parts of the country this is likely to be rather counter-productive.

The government themselves are on the back foot over this. The Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, maintains fiercely that the bill will increase regulation of gambling – removing slot machines from small cafes and the like, creating an offence of encouraging children to gamble, etc. Ministers maintain that new regulations are needed to take account of new forms of betting, as via the internet, that weren't covered by the previous legislation from the 1960s, and that jobs will be created.

Sheen of gold

A clear indication of their thinking can be seen from the debate in Parliament, after which Jowell commented, regarding calls for tight regulation, that: “It's perfectly possible also that investors will find our regulatory regime just too tough because our over-riding concern will be protection of the public and protection of the vulnerable and children” (BBC interview). Quite how this can be squared with the possibility of more casinos being opened, more gambling happening and more profits being made is difficult to see, conceding as it does the profit motive behind the gambling industry.

The attraction for Ministers is that casinos, and their associated leisure facilities, attract money. They do not make money, since they cannot make it out of thin air, but it increases a form of circulation of money, drawing it into the areas where the casinos will be and, of course, when money circulates there is more opportunity for the Treasury to grab a slice. It would thus allow for new developments (more building of casinos and leisure parks), and more jobs – staff to work in the casinos and associated facilities. Tony Blair defended the Bill in the Commons on the grounds of new jobs – the traditional bribe politicians offer the working class to buy their support. It would provide the veneer of economic activity to run – down areas, without adding to the sum of wealth in the world.

That is, in short, that the Labour government has been taken in by the sheen of gold. Blinded by the bright lights of casinos and money both. Indeed, this is the very trick that the gambling industry lives by – the promise of infinite wealth. Money has no use in itself, save to buy other goods. The more money you have, the more it appears you can do with it.

As Marx noted in Capital :

[M]oney has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal representative of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and, therefore, as a means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy This antagonism between the quantitative limits of money and its qualitative boundlessness, continually acts as a spur [to acquire more] (Volume 1, Chapter 3, Section 3).

Of course, gambling concerns want to make it appear easy to get hold of vast sums of money – the archetypal get-rich-quick scam. Who can blame those hundreds of thousands of people who gamble, from taking up this modern secularisation of Pascal's wager – choosing between the certainty of a life of scrimping by in poverty, versus the finite chance of (effectively) infinite riches?

Hence why casino operators want to install slot-machines with unlimited pay-outs. They want to offer the promise of a shot at the big time, and thousands upon thousands will pour their coins into such machines, because, one day, their turn will come and they'll strike it rich.

Spendthrift lords

When capitalism was still young it set its face against such temptations. In his section on money Marx discusses how the urge to hoard produced an urge for thrift, spending as little as possible whilst selling as much as possible, living to acquire more money, rather than living to live.

The expanding capitalist class faced an obstacle in the increasingly redundant aristocracy. One of the features of the great lords was living off income from estates, simply having money fall into their laps from no effort (and a class structure that actively meant they couldn't go into business). They had nothing much else to do with their disposable income other than to consume and display their status – hence the ostentatious clothes of aristocrats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What they also did was gamble, tremendously, precisely because they had the means to do so, and because they were rapidly becoming economically redundant and had no useful outlet for such money.

It was this relationship that forged the stern-faced Puritanism that still informs the debate, the reflex reaction against the old class enemy – the feudal class. It is, of course, a feeling that comes despite the reality of modern day capitalism, and how much it has come to depend on gambling.

Some government supporters have accused the bill's opponents of being elitist kill-joys, for wanting to keep casinos as a preserve of the very rich, a luxury item. In reality, the vast majority are excluded from the main strands of gambling that go on, the gambling that is now at the heart of capitalism.

Financiers on the Stock Exchange regularly gamble on the price of stocks. For example, they will agree to buy stocks, bonds, etc. on a given date at a given price, in the hope/expectation that on that day the price agreed will be below the general market price, so they can immediately sell off for a vast profit. Millions of pounds are ‘won’ that way in rewards and bonuses, but no real wealth is produced. Increasingly, this is normal behaviour for financial companies, and on this sort of practise hang the pensions and benefits of millions of workers whose funds are in the gamblers' hands.

The likes of Nick Leeson, who borrowed and invested, inveigled and manipulated until (back in 1995) he bankrupted Barings bank – one of the oldest banking firms in the world – are the ones behind this system of gambling. Far from being a system of communicating vital market information, as some ideologues of capitalism maintain, it is a giant poker table where stock brokers bluff and counter bluff their way to fortune.

Gambling, though, is even a respectable business all of itself – the insurance industry. Every time someone buys insurance, what they are actually doing is placing a bet that their house will burn down, or their car explode, or that they die horribly of a heart attack soon, etc., and the insurance agency is betting against, and setting the odds. Of course, just as you never see a poor bookie, so too will you find insurance agents have ways of making sure they're not over exposed by their own gambling. When the going gets tough, insurance companies increase the premiums – that is, they shorten the odds they'll give.

Corporate gamblers

This industry too lives by the illusions of money – that property has an immortal soul in the form of monetary value, which can be protected. The reality is that losses due to natural risk and hazard can only be replaced out of current production anyway – all insurance firms exist to do is to keep the property system immune to such shocks.

Much like the misery and pain that gambling problems cause on an individual or family level, so too do these corporate gamblers on a national and world level. Their mistakes and misfortunes ripple in seismic shocks throughout the whole of society. We are all of us asked to carry the costs for the risks the gambling addicted capitalists find themselves wanting to take. Gain is privatised, risks are socialised.

This has political ramifications as well, because the tantalising prospect of a way out, of a chance to get up the ladder, that things will change, means a great many people accept the status quo, and don't begin to see that they are the ones who will actively make the change, rather than it falling into their laps. This goes not just for the less well-off but also for politicians looking for painless quick fixes to the more intractable problems of our society.

The idea that money is a cure-all, that if we can roll some dice and enough of it will land to change the landscape of our lives is inherently disempowering. It is a part of commodity fetishism, the handing of the control of our lives to the mysterious power of marketable things, rather than seeking to master our own goods. Socialism is about seeing beyond the money trick to look at and administer the real wealth, so that we may take charge of our own environment, rather than wait for a changed figure in an accounting column to fall our way.

Of course, risk will always be with us, and we need to find ways of dealing with it: what we don't need is people trying to take a profit from the risk, or trying to avoid helping people when the going gets rough. We don't need to balance imaginary account books, only the productive capacity to deal with people's needs as and when they arrive.

Without money, the false dreams of gamblers become impossible. So if the Guardian and Mail readers are interested in opposing gambling, they should look not to casinos, but to the economic system that profits so much from it.

Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: Tessa Fails To Make It (2015)

The Greasy Pole Column from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Denis Healey, who was the last surviving member of Harold Wilson's 1964 Labour Cabinet, revived a clutch of memorable catch-phrases but also some unflattering comparisons with the uninspiring bunch who now occupy the Labour benches. For example Jeremy Corbyn's recent opponents Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. Will any of these go down in history as 'the best prime Minister we never had'? Will they construct a description of attacks from one of their opponents as 'like being savaged by a dead sheep'? Or scorn the House of Lords (even while they are a member) as 'the home of the living dead' ? How do they measure up to the likes of Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins, James Callaghan, in their bygone struggles to organise the economy of British capitalism into some kind of election-winning discipline? And would they, like Healey, churn out this stuff as a diversion to their day-time job?

Casinos

One of the casualties of this situation has been the Right Honourable Dame Tessa Jowell who was recently giving herself a higher chance of being adopted as the Labour Party candidate in the coming election to succeed Boris Johnson as Mayor of London but was defeated by Sadiq Khan. Jowell came into Parliament as the MP for Dulwich, a seat which she won in the 1992 election after a couple of attempts in Ilford North. That was a barren time for Labour and in opposition Jowell was appointed to a succession of Shadow jobs including one which named her as Labour's Spokesperson for Women. Blair's runaway victory in 1997 brought her bigger responsibility until after the 2001 election she replaced Chris Smith, who had been sacked, as Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport. Controversially, she proposed the establishment of a number of 'super-casinos', raising the temperature of the predictable row over her plans when she described her opponents as 'snobs' who were motivated by a resolve to deny 'ordinary people' the opportunity to gamble – a response dismissed by her fellow MP Frank Field as 'crass'.

Iraq

In this acrimonious stand-off it could not have diverted her opponents to hear that her devotion to Blair was such that she would 'jump under a bus' for him. In fact at the time – February 2006 – it was not unlikely that a substantial number of people would not have demurred if Jowell had taken Blair with her beneath the bus; for one thing there was the shock and outrage after the exposure of the 'dodgy dossier' with its blatant lies about the war in Iraq. Shortly before then a couple of Jowell's constituents, driven to despair by her eager compliance in that war with its deception, its destruction and casualties, had written to Chris Mullin who was an MP for Sunderland, to complain that, among other matters, Jowell was 'just a rubber stamp with “Tony Blair" incised on its bottom'. But it seems that Blair was not impressed by Jowell's worshipful meanderings; she would have been dismayed by his opinion that she was merely 'lukewarm' towards New Labour. All these events were being observed by the smoulderingly impatient Gordon Brown who, when he eventually made it to Labour leader, subjected Jowell to a succession of humiliatingly minor governmental posts until 2009 when he condescended to bring her back as Minister for the Cabinet Office. The entire process of events among those Labour leaders was a succession of cynical manoeuvres presented to us as examples of loyal consultancy and co-operation.

Corruption

In conflict with the reassuringly comforting titles of the ministries she was involved in, Jowell's domestic life was not notable for its enduring bliss. Her first marriage, to another Camden councillor, was dissolved in 1976 but she kept the marital surname. In 1979 she married David Mills, described as an international corporate solicitor in the shadows of which he represented none other than Silvio Berlusconi who was then the Italian Prime Minister and who was liable to be entertained by Mills at posh London Clubs. Mills was investigated by the Italian authorities on suspicion of involvement in money laundering and tax fraud; inevitably Jowell was also of interest in these matters, which moved Mills to describe himself as 'an idiot'. In March 2006, to protect her political standing, they separated and in 2009 a court in Italy sentenced Mills to four and a half years imprisonment for accepting a bribe from Berlusconi after giving false evidence in a trial for corruption. He appealed against this sentence and in 2010, after a series of applications, a Cassation Court dissolved the case under the Statute of Limitations and ordered Mills to pay €250,000 for damaging the reputation of the office of the Italian prime Minister. Meanwhile Blair predictably cleared Jowell of having any conflict of interest over the case. By 2012 Jowell and Mills were effectively back together again but the case, in one shape or another, rumbles on.

Mayor

In 2013, after announcing that she was to stand for London mayor (and being popularly tipped as the favourite) Jowell unleashed an asterisk-laden verbal barrage to an interviewing Guardian reporter: 'Those a******es are so f****** rancid' … and she recalled being harassed by a cameraman with his 'f******, you know, penis-like lens… and I said You f**** off out of here ...' On a similar theme there is an old photograph of Tessa Jowell with Denis Healey. They are at a public meeting during an election, with the posters at the walls bellowing ‘Vote Jowell Labour’. They have serious faces, composed to encourage the audience to vote for their style of government to run British capitalism with its repression and violence and its deceit. Perhaps the photograph was taken when the voters were grateful for Jowell's support for their campaign to stop the closure of the local post offices, which would have affected any of them who had problems getting to another one a distance away. If so, they would have ignored the fact that she was a member of the government which was planning to impose those closures. There was a time when the word ‘promising’ might have been resorted to in any discussion of Jowell’s chances of eventually making it to the heights of the Greasy Pole. Parents in the medical profession, a good degree at Edinburgh, working as a psychiatric social worker then assistant director of the charity Mind. But her failure to persuade enough of the voters in London to make her their mayor consigns her to a place in history rather like those others who long ago orbited around Denis Healey and his caustic humour.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Hoey Hoo-Hah (2006)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why does she stay in a party which, she says, imposes policies it was not elected on?

Say what you like about rebel Labour MPs, in most cases they are consistent – or should that be boringly predictable? Foundation Hospitals? Against. War on Iraq? Against. Ban Hunting? In favour. All tediously predictable. Then along comes Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall, to upset the pattern. The big issue for Hoey – the one which has earned her the most publicity – has been her support for hunting which she demonstrated, on the day the “sport” was banned by Parliament, by riding out with the Beaufort Hunt. She says the ban is unenforceable, that it has actually made hunting more popular than ever: “It’s part of the British rebellious streak that as soon as something is banned it becomes more attractive”. Which raises the question of what she is doing in Parliament, where they lay down laws which ban all kinds of behaviour as a way of making them unattractive to even the most rebellious person. She has also said of the Labour Party : “They don’t understand the countryside” – as if there is a lot more to “understand” than that the countryside is basically the same as the towns and cities, with a class structure which condemns one class to work for their living in varying degrees of poverty and insecurity.

Vauxhall

It is also fair to ask what drives her to be the MP for Vauxhall which, in the London Borough of Lambeth and including Kennington, Stockwell and parts of Clapham and Brixton, is as far from what most people see as the “countryside” as it is possible to be. It is, in fact, one of the toughest and most disrupted parts of London. To ensure that everyone, including the long-suffering voters of Vauxhall, knew where she stood on hunting, Hoey took on the job of chairing the Countryside Alliance – an organisation which tells us it campaigns about rural poverty and the decline of the villages but which was mysteriously silent on these issues until the 1997 Labour victory brought the first ever real threat to hunting. It was unfortunate timing that Hoey announced her new, additional job on the day the police shot John Charles de Menezes – at Stockwell station, in her constituency. This ghastly event did not dampen the Countryside Alliance’s joy at her elevation to lead them, which they said they were “delighted” about. Not all the voters of Vauxhall felt the same: many of them, worried about the living conditions there and the shooting at Stockwell, expressed their angry surprise that their MP had the time to take on so much extra work when she manages to attend only 55 percent of votes in the Commons.

But Hoey’s record of rebellion extends beyond hunting. She is against foundation hospitals (although she was once in favour of hospitals trusts, which many traditional Labour people feared would be a first step in betrayal of the NHS), against student top-up fees, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, compulsory ID cards, the war on Iraq… She protests that it the others who are out of step, that the measures she opposes were not in Labour’s manifesto – as if it would have made any difference if they had been. And why does she stay in a party which, she says, imposes policies it was not elected on? Even the Tories are confused about her. In October 1996 the mischievous MP Giles Brandreth recorded in his diary that he plotted about her with Sebastian Coe:

“Why don’t we find someone to defect to us? We decided Kate Hoey was our prime target. We like her, she seems sensible, she isn’t valued by New Labour.”

And more recently a Tory MP in the Daily Telegraph showed that little has changed with her: “She spends more time in our division lobby than on the other side.”

Jowell

Quite what the fatigued electorate of Vauxhall think of the fact that they have elected a Labour MP who votes like a Tory will be apparent at the next election. Meanwhile they may take some kind of hint from Hoey’s assessment of Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and her husband David Mills with their labyrinthine mortgages and offshore financial manoeuvres. Perhaps she is jealous of a more durable female rival but Hoey refused to acquiesce in the orchestrated campaign from Number Ten designed to discredit the exposure of Jowell as motivated by gender prejudice. She was one of those who wanted Jowell sacked from leading Labour’s campaign in the local elections, for; she “…grew up in a Labour Party that thought that talking money out of the country wasn’t a very loyal thing to do”. In fact the vast majority of the people of Vauxhall are not rich enough to practice that kind of “disloyalty”; as Hoey put it: “Most people have enough trouble just getting one mortgage”.

Before she joined the Labour Party Hoey was a member of an obscure Trotskyist organisation, which she later explained by confessing that “I didn’t have much contact with ordinary people. So I didn’t understand their concerns” (Brian Deer interview, Sunday Times Magazine 8 August 1993). After that embarrassing spasm she sat as a councillor in Hackney and Southwark waiting, with other hopeful future Labour stars, for the offer of a winnable seat. Hoey’s chance came when the sitting MP for Vauxhall, Stuart Holland, resigned from the Commons to take an academic job. Holland, who was a disciple of Tony Benn , was described by a fellow member of the Lambeth Labour Party as “…pitifully eager to acquiesce in whatever absurdities Lambeth Labour cared to expound”. Holland’s departure came as a relief to Neil Kinnock, tempered by the fact that the constituency party intended to replace him with Martha Osamor who, with her similar ideas, seemed to be no less of an embarrassment to the Labour leadership. So Hoey was imposed on a resistant local party as a “moderniser” – a word with a meaning we are all aware of now. She won the by-election with a majority of over 15000.

Sports Minister

Realising her ambition to be the first woman Sports Minister (she had a qualification in Physical Education, she had been Ulster high jump champion and Educational Adviser to a number of football clubs including Arsenal and Chelsea) brought Hooey up against the spin doctors of Downing Street. Against instructions from Alastair Campell she criticised the decision of Alex Ferguson (a special favourite of Blair’s) to withdraw Manchester United from the 1999 FA Cup, saying that the club’s supporters had been treated in “a quite shabby way”. She officially complained about the MBE awarded to Arsenal striker Ian Wright, because his behaviour on the field – shouting and swearing at other players and the referee – made him a poor role example. She lasted only a couple of years in the job.

And now, on the back benches there seems little more by way of a political career left for her. There is still her writing for the Daily Telegraph, there is chairing the Countryside Alliance and doing her abrasive best to upset her party as she goes into the opposing voting lobby. And of course there may be her memoirs, which should have the words Tally Hoey in the title. If she hangs on to Vauxhall there will be the job of ministering to the people there who, in their poverty, bad housing, crime and pollution, can be expected to be feeling distinctly unministered to. Like most rebels, Hooey will need to work at living up to her own image. Recently in the Daily Telegraph, she was described as wearing a Gucci watch and a jacket trimmed with fake fur. She did not miss this chance to boost her reputation for reckless confession: “The fur” she responded“was real. The Gucci watch was fake”, provoking a spokesman for the Trading Standards Institute to remind her of the realities of commodity society: “We deplore any public figure who seems to be celebrating the purchase of counterfeit items” he sniffed (which probably gained Hoey a few more votes in Vauxhall).

It was Oscar Wilde who once described Hoey’s favourite pastime as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. We may wonder what enduring, scathing epigram he would have fashioned about a Labour Minister indulging in such “sport” after her party had made all those promises about building a sustainably better society. Like all other “rebels” Hoey relies on the deception that she offers something so fresh and different that it has not been thought of before. In Wilde’s absence let us sum up the futility of it all: the unmemorable in pursuit of the unpracticable.

Ivan