Getting off Scott Free (1996)

From the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

  To Socialists, the publication of the 1800 page Scott Report ranks as one of the great non-events of recent times. All the Report really revealed is that British government ministers, notably Alan Clark, were doing what they're in office for — looking after the economic interests of the British capitalist class.

Certain Tory government ministers, even the whole Tory government, have, it seems, been both caught out and let off the hook—though perhaps temporarily. Amid reports in, for example, the Independent (17 February) and the Observer (18 February), suggesting that Lord Justice Richard Scott has been somehow “nobbled” by government ministers, “persuaded” to be gentle with them, the facts remain in the public domain; whatever insipid conclusions Scott has come to, everybody else can judge for themselves. It is even almost as though Scott might have intended that they should do so. Having apparently bowed to pressure, induced perhaps by invocations of old school ties or past favours, or even favours to come, it is as though he has washed his hands of the matter but, unable to square his conscience with letting corrupt liars and dissimulators off scot-free, he has left it to a vague and amorphous “public opinion” to sit in judgment in his place.

That government ministers lied to parliament, lied to “the public”, tried to keep important information out of the law courts, was all down to their fear of “public opinion”, fear of being found out and forced to resign or, worse, being voted out of office. That this should be the case brings out an interesting conjunction of the personal and the political—which the ministers concerned, along with their colleagues and supporters, have tried to erase. They have tried to hide the personal dimension under the political, claiming that they felt secrecy was necessary' to safeguard jobs in the armaments industry, while in fact they were more concerned with safeguarding their own careers and their own power, which brings us nicely to the crux of the issue at hand.

Ministerial responsibility
The whole issue of ministerial responsibility and ministerial deceit is one of personal ethics dressed up as politics. Like most contemporary' mainstream “politics” it is really soap opera, drawing everybody’s attention to particular characters and focusing on issues of individual hypocrisy or corruption (it’s not entirely fortuitous that Scott’s investigations have twice during February been dramatised on television). There's little doubt that many of the characters involved in this little drama were (and are) hypocritical and corrupt, or at least incompetent, but that’s not the point, it’s only the point focused on by both the Opposition parties and by the media. Politicians are by definition incapable of mastering events whatever their personal attributes may be; they have always been so to some extent under capitalism, forced to react to the markets and the requirements of profit and capital. These days they are even less able to control the system they support than they have been in the past, due to modern information technologies and the speed at which information can travel, allowing capital and the markets to evade and pre-empt their every' attempt at control. Politicians are, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has put it, “structurally incompetent”; to paraphrase Derrida, while they present themselves as political actors they are no more than TV actors. And they know it; they are, therefore, not only structurally incompetent, they are also structurally hypocritical. This is not to say that those involved are not responsible; they support capitalism after all, quite apart from the fact that they are, in any case, personally corrupt liars and arrogant hypocrites. The point is that this should only be of marginal interest, instead of being, as it is, the main focus of attention.

There is a very serious political dimension here which actually sheds some light on the complex but indissoluble links between war and armaments and the very existence of capitalism itself. The concentration by the media on ministerial ethics specifically marginalises the fact that this issue is about the sale of armaments, about, by extension, war and death. Even when this is considered, media concern, as well as the concern of the Opposition parties, is focused on the fact that the armaments were being sold to Iraq. The demonisation of a particular national leader by the Western ruling class could, ironically, lead to the downfall of some of the very people who have encouraged this demonisation. This concern with Iraq, though, is still without any really serious point. Saddam Hussein is undoubtedly a tyrant; but so was Somoza of Nicaragua and Pinochet of Chile, to name only two, who were supported by the Western so-called “liberal democracies”. All this selective support and demonisation is itself simply a smokescreen for the way in which war and capitalism feed off each other, the fact that the gulf war was fought for economic reasons, the fact that all the major industrialised states produce and sell arms; that the arms trade is the height of modern capitalism.

Scarce material resources

War is largely a result of scarcity; however the causes of war are dressed up ideologically, war is a more-or-less direct result of the struggles of particular peoples for a greater share of scarce material resources, though down through history this has had less and less actual effect on the lives of ordinary people as the minority ruling classes have taken more of those resources for themselves. In pre-capitalist societies, though, there was at least a true scarcity which led inevitably to conflict. Under the capitalist mode of production on the other hand, scarcity is artificially created by the system itself even as it develops the productive potential for its eradication. Capitalism requires competition for its existence and competition requires scarcity ; and it should be noted that war itself is simply a form of competition on a particularly large and deadly scale. Scarcity and competition are vital to capitalism, and scarcity and competition are also the necessary pre-conditions for inevitable war.

War itself, in its turn, creates further massive conditions of scarcity through the damage it inflicts and the consequent need to rebuild. The arms themselves are also obviously a paradigm of material scarcity; they can only be used once and require immediate replacement. The armaments market is highly competitive and there is an enormous amount of money to be made; whichever way you look at it, there is always a lot of money to be made from war, which is why, beneath all the moral platitudes, capitalism loves it. It has nothing to do with which party is in office; Labour supported the Americans in Vietnam and the recent Australian Labor government supplied and supported the raping, torturing aggressors in East Timor. Particular governments, in the final analysis, are neither here nor there. Capitalism itself produces greed, corruption and war through the artificial production of scarcity and the exploitation for its own ends of the absurd quasi-mystical ideologies of nationalism. The only way to end war and the manufacture of arms is to end capitalism, world-wide; to abolish the profit system and abolish states and borders. The only really worthwhile use of parliaments is to bring a democratic end, once-and-for-all, to the system that makes them otherwise no more then TV studios for tedious and absurdly repetitive “dramas”.

Jonathan Clay

Greasy Pole: The truth can keep you in shackles (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that we have got the Arms to Iraq business out of the way, Sir Richard Scott can get down to what may turn out to be his real life’s work. This will be a new dictionary of English usage in which words can change their meaning by the addition of a nervous qualifying phrase or can have their meaning obscured by burying them beneath layers of double—perhaps treble or even quadruple—negatives.

For example, if someone thinks an Attorney General is personally at fault in dealing with evidence which might help to acquit people who are in danger of going to prison they don’t have to say so directly; the proper way is to say “I do not accept that he was not personally at fault.” For example, if a minister is caught out in a piece of double-dealing he or she can be described as making a claim of a “duplicitous nature", which softens the criticism quite a bit, and then can be got off the hook almost entirely by saying that of course they had "no duplicitous intention". For example, if a government has avoided what it claims to be its clear obligation always to conform to the constitutional principle of ministers’ accountability, there is no need to denounce this in clear terms; any criticism you make can be qualified with the words "in my opinion". And as by this time more people will be completely fed-up with such wimpish evasions it is a fair bet that your opinion will not be given much more than a contemptuous laugh.

Anyway, if Sir Richard Scott will send The Greasy Pole a free, autographed copy of his dictionary when it is complete we will respond by sending him a copy of the dictionary occasionally referred to by this column—a dictionary which defines duplicity as "deceit, double-dealing", and which he can use the next time he is called on to tackle the question of whether politicians ever mislead the rest of us and if they do whether this is deliberate or by accident. Whether, in words which may well make Sir Richard shudder, they ever tell lies.

The relevance of this issue is rooted in the fact that politicians base their appeal for votes on a clear, copper-bottomed guarantee that they are people of honour, people who hold to principles, which they will never betray. On the basis of those principles they make promises to us about how they will re-arrange society in any number of superficial ways so that many of its problems won’t worry us any more. Vote for them. You know you can trust them. Don’t you?

And so it has come about that among its many quaint, tourist-attracting rituals like Black Rod knocking three times on the door, like MPs addressing each other as honourable and gallant and learned or whatever and never saying anything controversial in their maiden speech, there is also the tradition that they never lie in the House of Commons. This causes certain difficulties because not a few MPs and ministers have been caught out making statements in the House which were not true. Indeed over the past few years there has been a succession of cases in which Members have at first defended themselves against allegations but have then had more-or-less to own up and resign

Shackled women
But whatever happens none has ever admitted to telling a lie and, perhaps more to the point, no other MP has ever accused them of doing so. Because that is another of those quaint customs. What it gets down to is this: it is permissible to tell a lie but if you are caught out you must not call it a lie; it is permissible to say that a Member is lying but you must not actually use the word. Other words must be used. Like mislead.

Because that was the word used by Ann Widdecombe, the Home Secretary’s deputy who is in charge of prisons, in the infamous case of the Shackled Women. Under the rule of Howard and Widdecombe, the prisons of Britain have had to develop internal regimes which have left the more anxious reformers wondering how long it will be before the crank and the treadmill will return. The duo in charge at the Home Office have notoriously thick skins, but even they were rattled when it was revealed that women prisoners who were about to give birth were being transferred to the nearby Whittington Hospital in chains which were not removed until the final stage of the confinement.

In the subsequent uproar Widdecombe—who was left by Howard to take the criticism—defended the policy with her customary obduracy and seemed to think she had clinched the argument by saying that the medical staff at the Whittington had not complained about the barbaric practice. But for Widdecombe this was a claim too far because the hospital had complained—indeed it would have been astounding if any doctor or nurse would happily treat patients in shackles— and had done so some time before. And of course the hospital were not slow to put the record straight, to expose Widdecombe in giving false information to parliament.

Telling the truth
Now this could have been a serious matter. Had Widdecombe told a lie about so sensitive an issue? Well we have already mentioned how durable are her dermal defences. So when she explained the matter to the House, when she apologised, it was not for lying, but for “misleading" them. So that’s alright then. Except, perhaps, for the women in Holloway and their children.

Except, perhaps, for the millions of people who live in the wider confinement of working-class life, who are so impressed with the promises and the declarations of honour that they elect politicians to sit in places where they make laws and mislead each other but never, never tell lies. Of course there is a desperate need in all this ritual of deception. What would happen, if politicians suddenly began to tell the truth? If they suddenly exposed their own impotence to make a world free of war. poverty, famine, fear. . . ? If they suddenly admitted that all those promises were really bribes to persuade us to vote for them? If the politicians’ sophistry fell into disuse and words always meant—well, what we know they mean?

Ivan

Sting in the Tail: Class contempt (1997)

The Sting in the Tail Column from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class contempt

Nigel Dempster’s column in the Daily Mail (23 October) carried an uplifting little item that shows the owning class are not all money mad. It was feared that there would be a dispute in the family of Lord White of Hull when it was discovered that he had left an additional £2.6 million without a will.

Everyone behaved beautifully and there was no undignified squabbling. The lack of litigation over the £2.6 million could be explained by the earlier settlements:

“Widow Victoria, who celebrated her 34th birthday last week, inherited around £17 million, his daughters Caroline and Sita were left £3.5 million each after being given homes in Los Angeles valued at £700,000 and son Lucas, 22, who is heading for tax exile in Bermuda, is the main beneficiary of the £70 million estate. ”

Readers will be relieved to know that the additional cash will go to his son. He’ll need it too, as he apparently spends around £500,000 per year on his polo expenses.

That the capitalist press can print such obscenities, shows in what contempt they hold the working class, who of course produce all these immense fortunes.

The golden years?

Last month we reported the shocking treatment of elderly workers, but the situation is even worse than we thought.

In the Observer (3 November) Ginny Jenkins, director of the charity, Action on Elderly Abuse, says:

“This month and every month at least 100,000 old people will be physically abused. And these will be people living in their own homes. Patients, visitors and staff can be reluctant to report abuse. Patients may feel that complaining will make matters worse, or be too confused to complain. Relatives might fear being handed back the complainant. And staff may think they could lose their jobs. ”

The report details a catalogue of horror stories—rape, sexual abuse and neglect at home and in nursing homes.

When you are young and fit you produce surplus value for your master. When you are old and infirm you are the subject of neglect and abuse. In the treatment of the elderly, capitalism must be the worst system ever devised.

His master’s voice

James McKillop writing on the arms trade in the Herald (19 November) both illustrated his awareness of the horrors of capitalism and his misunderstanding about the government’s role in the arms trade:

“They are the merchants of death. Like vultures they hover around the world’s trouble spots, intent on making a quick buck out of human misery and genocide. They have no ethics other than those of the market force that decrees wherever there is a demand, a ready supply can be guaranteed. ”

We could not have put it better, but his indignation is somewhat marred by this naive statement:

“In the wake of the Scott report into the arms to Iraq scandal, the government has tried to get its act together. In preparing for fresh legislation it has issued a consultative document in which it has asked the advice of (would you believe it?) those involved in the arms trade. ”

Yes, we believe it. The arms trade is worth £5 billion per year to the British capitalist class. Why shouldn’t their spokesmen and legislators in government consult their masters?

The blind wordspinner

In the Independent on Sunday (27 October) the journalist Colin Tudge wrote a long article called “If the Pope can find Darwin why can’t Dawkins find God?” It was a typical piece of ill- informed journalism; long on rhetoric and short on sense.

After discussing the stupidities and horrors of religion from the Inquisition to the role of Islam in present-day Afghanistan, he makes the following ludicrous claim:

“But despite its past enormities and its present absurdities, religion is necessary, and the task is not to obliterate religion but to devise one appropriate to our age. ”

Tudge is really annoyed at Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, for his attacks on religious beliefs. He accuses him of “the Goebbels-esque response of some scientists who reach for their revolvers when they hear the word ‘religion’”.

In fact, Dawkins in his books and lectures when discussing religious notions contrasts them with verifiable, logical data. When it comes to “reaching for revolvers” the religious of this world have a much more trigger-happy record than professors of zoology.

Magic moments

Sometimes the capitalist class get really desperate. But we doubt if any British company has yet plumbed the depth of one Chinese factory. According to the Independent (4 July) and quoted in the December issue of Fortean Times things must have got really desperate in Guandong:

“The Longwan cement factory in Guandong province, China, ordered the entire workforce to attend a ceremony where a witch and a sorcerer sacrificed a dog in an attempt to restore profitability to the plant which lost 8m yuan (over £600,000) last year. ” 

Alas, the magicians had little more success than the teams of management consultants called in to work their voodoo for British firms in similar circumstances:

“Workers and management went down on their bended knees to ask for divine assistance, but shortly after the ceremony a power generator at the factory burnt out. ”

No doubt the witch and the sorcerer deservedly got their marching orders. Pity about the dog though.