Greasy Pole: In the Club – or Out? (2002)

The Greasy Pole Column from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everyone laughed when Groucho Marx said he would not want to join any club which would accept him as a member. Nobody laughed when Iain Duncan Smith said he would not want to join the Carlton Club because that traditional bastion of the Conservative Party does not accept women as full members. Well you can’t blame Duncan Smith for trying but he will have to do better than that if he is to dispel his image as a man who is most at ease on a chilly, early morning parade ground. Perhaps he thought that by apparently standing up to so stubborn an example of establishment tradition he would seem modern, unstuffy, a man of principle. This would have been likelier of he was not a member of another club – the Beefsteak – which also excludes women from membership. Perhaps he dreamed that the nation would be gripped with excitement at his courage so that they forgot about Osama Bin Laden and the euro and the current crisis in Coronation Street. But instead there was a paralysing apathy. There were no restless debates in supermarket check-outs, no rival groups pelting each other on football terraces. The nation ignored it and went about its business of being exploited and repressed, as the nation always does, leaving Duncan Smith to go about his business of being tedious and irrelevant as he always does.

Carlton

In case anyone is thinking of applying, the Carlton restricts its membership to supporters of the Conservative Party and a lot of its activity is directed at raising money for the party (almost £1 million during the last Parliament). So it is only to be expected that the Club would invite each leader of the party to become a member ex-officio. Duncan Smith refused the offer on the grounds that the Tory Party does not have any no-go areas so it would be inconsistent of him as leader to be in a club which discriminates against women. (For his sake, let us hope he does not intend to act in this way over every example of inconsistency in his party). Officially the Club says “Ladies are welcome and may use the Club’s facilities with the exception of the public rooms on the ground floor designed for members and gentlemen guests”. There is some doubt about whether women would want to use at least one of these rooms, which a male visitor described as “the most vile room in the building, frequented almost exclusively by bores and drunks” and by a female ex-member as “swept by an unpleasant draught”. The chairman of the club’s political committee, Peter Emery (who is responsible for organising all that fund-raising) said he thinks many of the women members like the rules as they are although last year one prominent female member, Shadow Minister Theresa May, resigned because she objected at the way women were treated as “second class citizens” there.

The last Tory Prime Minister to cause a few problems over membership of the Carlton was Margaret Thatcher. To be party leader was one thing; to be offered full membership of this exclusive, all male club was another. The solution was to accept her as an “honorary” member – some might say an honorary man, which brought to mind how the Nazis dealt with finding that they were allies of the racially inferior Japanese in 1941; they decided that the Japanese were “honorary Aryans” – at least for the duration of the war.

Admitting Thatcher to the Club caused quite a few of the crustier members to splutter into their port before they fell asleep again. But they were being unreasonable because this was not the first time the Carlton had displayed a convenient flexibility of principle. In 1967 the late Julian Critchley, who was then an MP, upset the members by giving lunch there to Jo Grimond, Leader of the Liberal Party. Critchley was quietly advised not to use the Carlton to entertain anyone whom he could not nominate for membership – in other words any political opponent. But a week or so later Ted Heath, who was Leader of the Opposition, had the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, Alexei Kosygin, there to lunch. No effort was spared in making the Russian leader welcome; it was, according to Heath, a “sumptuous affair” at a “superb oval table” which introduced Kosygin to the gastronomic delights of oysters. It was rather different from the breakfast Kosygin had had earlier that day, with lorry drivers at a road side caff on the A1. It is not difficult to imagine which meal was given the more publicity in Kosygin’s home country. Whatever outrage club members may have felt about the head of a country they regarded as a deadly foe being entertained in their dining room was not publicised. Neither were we told what the long-suffering Russian people thought about their leader feasting so sumptuously among men who they were encouraged to believe were their class enemies—always supposing they were allowed to know about it.

1922

As an integral part of the Conservative leadership, it was appropriate that the Carlton should be the venue for one of the most crucial decisions in the party’s history. In 1922 a significant wedge of the party had grown restless with the wartime coalition which, with Lloyd George at its head, had rumbled on into peace-time. There was some anxiety, to say the least, that if this situation continued it would destroy the party and that this would become evident at the general election looming on the horizon. The leadership were clear that the coalition should carry on; among the rebels was the little known, self-effacing, Stanley Baldwin, who would never have admitted to being concerned about his chances of eventually leading the party and how these would be stifled under a coalition led by the Welsh wizard, who was not little known or self-effacing but popularly supposed to have won the war and so saved the world for civilisation.

The party leaders thought to settle the issue in their favour by challenging their critics with a vote of confidence and where better to arrange this than at the Carlton, suffused as it was with the party’s traditions, expressed in all those overlooking portraits of past Prime Ministers. On the day all the big guns – Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead, Balfour – were lined up against the rebels. Their victory was almost a foregone conclusion except that Baldwin had other plans; it was, he said, “time to ditch the goat” – an unkind reference to Lloyd George. And ditched he was. The Ministers had no choice but to leave the government and Lloyd George had no choice but to resign the Premiership. “He will be Prime Minister again” said George V. But he wasn’t. It was a crucial change for the Tories, in which they lost their parliamentary giants. A little more than a year later they also lost 107 seats in a general election which brought in the first, unpalatable, taste of Labour government.

Lloyd George, not amused by his defeat, snarled that the Coalition had been broken up by “a West End Club” – an opinion shared with quite a few others. In fact, however the manner of the decision and the reasons for it, the vote did seem to be in line with the majority wishes of the party. Out of the bitterness and confusion there emerged the 1922 Committee, designed to improve communication between backbenchers and the party leaders. Then there emerged Stanley Baldwin. Now, long after the times when the party leader was expected to materialise after what Harold Macmillan called “the customary processes of consultation”, the 1922 Committee is responsible for organising the election of the leader – an arrangement which is clearly not ideal for the Tories because it has thrown up people like William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.

Whites

In fact the Carllton’s policy of allowing women a limited access to membership is some way ahead of some of the other, traditional, posh London clubs. Whites is one example. It is the oldest and most exclusive of the clubs and has a grisly history of infestation by gambling addicts, where people who had grown fabulously rich on the pitiless exploitation of the workers spent money in betting on whatever took their fancy. In the 18th century a man dropped dead outside the club and was carried inside while members laid bets on whether he was actually dead. This was the ruling class at play, setting an example to the lower orders on how to behave. That the standards had not improved could have been judged when Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health in the post-war Attlee government, was kicked in the bottom by a member, who thought this was an effective argument against Bevan’s work in setting up the National Health Service. Other clubs who also exclude women are Pratts, Brooks and the Garrick.

But this is not to say that the Carlton leads the way to a more enlightened and hopeful age. Membership costs are £600 to join (free to women) and an annual subscription of £600 (£300 to women). And what you get for that is the right to share a rather splendid building with a clutch of political twisters or drunken, tedious supporters of a party which has consciously supervised a huge burden of human suffering. Beside that fact the issue of whether women can join on the same terms as men is seen in its true insignificance. The stand taken by Duncan Smith is motivated by nothing more than a characteristically feeble attempt to win a few votes and in the process to deny the importance of human relationships – including those between the sexes—to a sustainable society.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Pornography and Politics (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kenneth Clarke was a Front Bench star in the Thatcher and Major governments – Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and all that – but he has now decided that he does not like the members of his own party. A lot of them, he complains, are elderly people who never attend meetings and vote after reading the Daily Telegraph – as if that kind of political self-instruction had not always been worth a hat full of Tory votes. One of Clarke’s aides – Nick Kent – has been more explicit in his dislike of the Tory grass roots: “nasty old people” was his description of the party faithful (who) “cannot be reasoned with”. These outbursts are not accidents; they have been provoked by those nasty geriatrics electing Iain Duncan Smith to the Tory leadership in preference to Clarke and to the fact that Clarke now senses the time has come for him to make another bid for the top job – which cannot be unconnected with a dawning awareness in the party that by choosing Duncan Smith they made a mistake of historic stupidity.

The reasons for Duncan Smith’s victory will be a field for endless analysis, which is probably only waiting for the Tories to lose the next election as decisively as they lost the last one. Perhaps it was in reaction against William Hague, who was notable for what Nick Kent called “a teenage cocktail of tabloid populism and raving anti-Europeanism”. Perhaps it was because, although Duncan Smith had upset quite a few people (like John Major) in the party he had done so for what they considered the right reasons, in contrast to Clarke and Portillo. Perhaps they simply took to Duncan Smith’s soldierly stiff upper lip, his smart suits, his background as an officer in the Guards. They must have forgotten that political leaders are not elected to be well-mannered and expensively dressed. What leaders must be good at is telling lies, twisting arms, blackmailing their supporters, convincing the electorate that a calamitous past was not their fault.

Retreat 

Some months after he got the job, Duncan Smith is plainly failing to turn his party round. He is in deep trouble, with political correspondents openly musing on the likelihood that at the next election the Tories will be reduced the third ranking party, behind the Lib Dems. So Duncan Smith should be looking over his shoulder, organising his retreat, setting up his rearguard or whatever it is they do in the Guards at such times. And to make things a little more difficult there is Clarke in pursuit, declaring that he is reconsidering his refusal to accept a shadow post under Duncan Smith: “Never say never in politics” he said, ” It depends what job and depends on what he (Duncan Smith) expects me to say about the policy of the party”. It might be asked, how Clarke reconciles this with his previous assessment of Duncan Smith as a “status quo” politician, one of the “headbangers” on the issue of Europe, who would send the party into a “lurch to the right”. Politicians are of course skilled at forgetting their former declarations of immutable principle if it will help them get into power. Clarke is not offering to support his leader but to line himself up for the leadership if, with a little help from Clarke, Duncan Smith should be ousted.

Clarke will have learned from history that it will not be that simple, that there will be other hopefuls sharpening their knives, a few of them – like the oily, odious Michael Howard – already well known. Other possible candidates will have to work a bit harder to get themselves known but so did Margaret Thatcher when she beat Ted Heath in 1975, when few people expected a woman to come through to lead the Tory Party, especially one who had been jeered at in the media as the minister who snatched away the schoolkids’ free milk. So step forward, as they say in the gutter press, Theresa May, who sits for the lush Thames-side seat of Maidenhead. It is apparent that she is being groomed for stardom, if that is how to describe being leader of this political rabble. Her publicity drive may or may not be assisted by her having a name very close to that of a celebrated queen of porn. Get onto the internet and search for Teresa (no h) May and you will be viewing some lurid, unreal images of a female who does not appear to be taking part in a dreary Commons debate. As a result Theresa (with the h) May has been invited to participate in some raunchy TV programmes and has received some pretty forthright correspondence meant for her near-namesake. A typical letter ” . . . asked (her) to expose herself in public, to do things with men that most of us wouldn’t consider in the privacy of our own homes, and to force herself into weird, unnatural positions for the camera”.

Porn Queen 

This raises a few questions. How justified is the outrage at being confused with a porn queen and at Teresa May’s way of earning her living? One thing which can be said is that she is perfectly open about what she does, which is some way better than politicians who, if they are at all interested in hanging on to their job, cannot be honest about their work. If they were honest they would have to own up to a persistent catalogue of deception and failure and in the end to their own inability to control, or even affect, the social system which they claim to be able to fashion to our benefit. And what, after all, can we name as pornography and who are the pornographers?

Theresa May is the daughter of a clergyman. She went to Oxford (like Thatcher) then worked in a bank. Her ambitions were clear early on; she was a councillor in Merton, had to go through the mill of contesting some hopelessly solid Labour seats, like North West Durham in 1992 and Barking in a 1994 by-election before, against some strong opponents, she won the nomination for the rock-solid Tory seat of Maidenhead. “Very bright, hyperactive and witty” was how Andrew Roth described her in the Guardian. “Sloane with City flash” was another’s less kind assessment. The parallels between her and Thatcher have been noted; a Eurosceptic, she may see her road to power in carrying on where the mad handbagger left off. In the Tory leadership fight in 2001 she was careful not to be too prominent about her support for Portillo. In any case Duncan Smith did not hold this against her and gave her the shadow job of Transport and Local Government, belabouring the hapless, floundering Stephen Byers.

Bearing in mind that one function of the pornographer is the selling of talents for questionable purpose, how do we assess Theresa May? What does this supposedly vibrant and capable woman have to offer about this society and what it does to people? So far her comments have been preoccupied with blaming the Labour government for policies which are simply a continuation of what the Tories did when they were in power. On 7 November she spoke out about the government’s suggestion that people might be encouraged to vote if it was made easier for them, by having polling booths in places like supermarkets. Her comments were less than original. The way to get people to vote was not, she said, by “inventing new electoral systems or new types of politicians . . .The underlying cause of voter apathy is growing cynicism with the political process . . .” This banality does not even approach the question of why voters should be cynical. One obvious reason is that experience of a Labour government has made it clear to thousands of people that there is no difference worth influencing a vote between the big parties. People who voted Labour in 1997 under the impression that they were opting for social change are now realising that they were wrong but they have no idea of any other way. That is the root of their cynicism.

Bombs and Poverty 

There is a kind of pornography in this social system, which has nothing to do with a few women being paid to perform a variety of sexual acts for the entertainment of others. The kind of socially organised, premeditated state violence that has devastated the wretched country of Afghanistan in the interests of the oil industry is a kind of pornography; it excites all manner of morbid responses which are stimulated and exploited by political pornographers like Blair and Bush. It is a kind of pornography that in this country, which our leaders assure us is a model of civilised advancement, a third of the children live below the official poverty line. It is a kind of pornography that voters should be cynical about the political system when they have the power to use it to transform society, to liberate the human race into a society based on human needs.

Meanwhile we are left with the same dreary procession of impotent leaders who tell us, one after the other, that the way forward is to hand over to them our power to change society so that they can keep it as it is. Major for Thatcher; Hague for Major; Duncan Smith for Hague; perhaps one day May for Duncan Smith. And that is just the Tory Party. The other Teresa May, and those who do the same work, do far less damage.

Ivan

Pathfinders: Doubleplusungood (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Orwell as can be expected…

The UK science community has been heaving a small sigh of relief lately having suffered less damage than expected from the spending cuts. True, the boffins are facing a funding freeze, keeping their £4.6bn budget at 2010 levels for the next 5 years, meaning a probable cut through inflation of around 10 percent in real terms, however this is as nothing compared to the mass cattle-trucking of scientific projects in the direction of the knacker’s yard that many had expected. But before the techies had even reached for a pipette of champers in celebration they were sobered by the further alarming news that the director general for science and research, the official in charge of that science budget and traditionally from respectable scientific stock, could soon be replaced by a – gasp – civil servant (‘UK research spending decisions set for a shake-up’, New Scientist online, 17 November).

It would be a mystery to anyone who has been following the Orwellian tactics of the Con-Dem Coalition lately why scientists should be shocked at this. Indeed, despite what they may think, they have still got off lightly. It could have been far worse.

A miasma of doublethink pervades the Con-Dem Coalition’s every political pronouncement as they manoeuvre to secure their grubby rich friends every concession while bamboozling their victims into believing that they are the ones getting more ‘freedoms’. Home Secretary Theresa May, for example, has been loudly ridiculing the Equality legislation planned by that silly Harriet Har-person, claiming that inequality somehow makes you free (‘Theresa May scraps equality in the name of fairness’, Guardian, 17 November). The Equality Duty was designed to end decades of legal confusion in which victims of discrimination had virtually no chance of redress against big corporations, and instead to place the responsibility on employers to demonstrate through good practice that they were not discriminating in the workplace, a kind of guilty-until-proved innocent reversal of emphasis. Instead, in a spin of doubletalk, May uses the very failures of the old legislation to argue against any new legislation that might potentially solve the problem. In the name of fairness, the bosses get themselves off the hook and discriminated groups can look forward to having to make all the running to get anyone to listen to them – just as it’s always been. They are free to complain, and the bosses are free to ignore them, which is what the Coalition means by freedom.

 

Similarly emancipated are workers everywhere on medication, as the Government cuts the cojones from the drug regulatory body the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and hands prescription powers entirely to GPs. No longer shall poor old Mrs Jones be denied the £30,000 treatment that might have kept her in miserable pain for an extra six weeks, because that demonic nest of Doctor Deaths at NICE considered it not worth the money – now any GP can prescribe anything! Anything, that is, that their budget can afford and that they can be badgered or bluffed or blackmailed into buying by the omni-present pharmaceutical salesmen. No more Mr NICE Guy, now it’s Mr Market and drugs for whoever can pay the most and shout the loudest.

 

 Best to stay healthy and away from doctors then, but in that case you’ll be taking advice on how to stay healthy from the very businesses which have always devoted so much of their time and your money in making you unhealthy in the first place. With a cynicism that could collapse lungs, the Health Secretary has given up the usual murky practice of consulting with big business behind closed doors before making health policy, and handed the power of policy-making entirely over to the businesses. In what is one of the most blatant displays of English Tea Partyism, and in a broadside designed to de-mast the dreaded Food Standards Agency, Andrew Lansley has set up new ‘responsibility deal’ networks to deal with obesity, alcoholism, exercise, behavioural problems and health and safety at work, in which key consultants are members of Unilever, the Wine and Spirit Trade Organisation, Mars, all big supermarkets and a raft of other commercial interests not famous for their health credentials. In the craven old days, a minister would at least formulate policy first and then run it past these moguls to see what he could get away with. In the galloping gutlessness of the new order, Lansley has simply invited the moguls to come up with their proposals and run them past him, in order to see what he can get past the media. An early casualty of this supine approach has been the abandonment of the simple and easy to understand ‘traffic light’ nutritional coding system in favour of a different system known through studies to be incomprehensible to customers, despite the fact that some supermarkets had already agreed to give the traffic light system a try (‘Good for the nation’s health – or big business?’ Guardian, 13 November).

What next, one wonders? The handing of UK defence policy to the arms industry perhaps. Meanwhile the doublethink redoubles as public sector workers are being liberated from their jobs and told that they have the freedom to take over their former workplaces and run them as ‘John Lewis co-operatives’, after the style of the mutualised department store. Taking the name of this column cruelly in vain Francis Maude, the minister in the Cabinet Office in charge of civil servants, has launched 12 ‘Pathfinder’ initiatives, fledgling public-service but employee-owned mutuals who are the supposed trailblazers for a new era in which all responsibilities formerly borne by the state will now be borne by social workers and health visitors running their own co-ops. As Thatcher gave us ‘right-to-buy’, Maude is giving us ‘right-to-run’, but not everyone is fooled by the spin. As some pundits point out, such co-ops will have a huge uphill struggle, and most will collapse and be eaten up by, yes, you guessed it, the big corporations. And what is so liberating about exposing public services to the free market anyway? wonders Unite General Secretary Tony Woodley: “You go to John Lewis to buy a sofa or a fridge, not to have chemotherapy” (Guardian, 17 November)

In view of these developments, the science community should think itself lucky it’s only getting a civil servant to administer its budget. In a year from now it could be a McDonalds executive. The proof that capitalism is fundamentally not good for healthy science or the science of health is made clearer by the fact that, although government regulation solves none of the basic problems facing science in a money age, the further the drift towards an unregulated free market, the worse it gets for science, as indeed for everyone else.

Paddy Shannon

Speaker’s Corner (2020)

Book Review from the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unspeakable. John Bercow. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2020. £20

It was always likely that recently retired House of Commons Speaker John Bercow would produce a memoir that settled a few scores, and he hasn’t disappointed. He clearly has an issue with the British establishment and those that personify it, and ‘snobbish’ David Cameron comes in for particularly vitriolic treatment. To give you a flavour of Bercow’s style: ‘In the pantheon of great leaders, the name of David Cameron will never feature. In a list of opportunist lightweights, it will be at the top’.

Then on to Theresa May: ‘Rudderless, without imagination, and with few real friends at the highest level, she stumbled on, day to day, lacking clarity, vision and the capacity to forge a better Britain. In a contest as to who has been the worst Prime Minister since 1945, it is hard to choose between Anthony Eden and Theresa May’.

And on Boris Johnson: ‘As a debater he is undistinguished and, as a public speaker, though humorous, he is often downright poor – hesitant, unable to string sentences together fluently and about as likely ever to warrant the description “captivating orator” as Bertie Wooster… Apart from those notable limitations in a man who has since become Prime Minister, he is, at his occasional best, a passably adequate politician in an age not replete with them’.

Bercow’s own story of course is an interesting one, the son of a Jewish cab driver who gravitated from a youthful dalliance with the right-wing, anti-immigration Monday Club to a barely disguised left-ish stance. This gained him much opprobrium during the Brexit debates, with allegations that he was a biased ‘remainer’, with an influential Labour-campaigning spouse, Sally.

In fairness, as political autobiographies go, it is more entertaining than most, despite the criticism it has received from many reviewers. Bercow likes to see himself in the mode of a parliamentary ‘reformer’ and the dominant thread is about the battles he fought with traditionalists and conservatives of every stripe, including those who took an ill view of his attempts to support the rights of backbench MPs against those of the executive.

There is a surprisingly interesting (and on occasion well-argued) Epilogue where he looks at the future of parliament and of the UK as a whole over the next decade and more. He picks out the key defining features of the UK well, including the influence of its island status (with a total coastline and sea exposure greater than that of either Brazil or India), and the overwhelming dominance of London, which skews the UK population and capital distribution to something more akin to countries in the Third World.

Interestingly, whatever insight and vitriol he has to muster, little if any of it is directed at Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. Indeed, one suspects he will no doubt become Lord Bercow soon enough (even if he is not – as is usual – nominated by the Prime Minister of the day, but by the outgoing Leader of the Opposition).

Dave Perrin

Pathfinders: The Parthian Torpedo (2019)

The Pathfinders column from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘I’ve never seen a politician that didn’t look better looking back,’ as Lee Marvin might have sung, and thus with the benefit of distance posterity may come to view former PM Theresa May more kindly than people do at present, especially if she is replaced by the unspeakable Boorish Johnson. May spent her last days in office frantically legacy-building, living up to her old Cabinet nickname of ‘the submarine’ by launching a few ticking torpedoes before retiring to dry dock in the back benches. One of these was a £27 billion cash boost for the education budget, which her successor will have to pay or else look bad by wriggling out of (Sunday Telegraph, 16 June).

But £27 billion is nothing compared with her Parthian shot par excellence, which will stuff not only her immediate successor, but several successors after that, as well as every political leader in virtually every country in the world for the next 30 years.

In short, she decided to adopt the desperately-ambitious recommendations of the UK Climate Change Committee and formally commit the UK to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Pause a moment to consider with amused schadenfreude the behind-the-scenes panic and pandemonium this announcement must have caused. The mandarins of the British state have no idea how to enforce this commitment, but they do know there is no chance whatever of doing so without resorting to extreme and probably unpopular measures. Somehow, for a start, they have to get the rich employers on side and persuade them to bear the extra costs of reducing industrial and commercial emissions to net zero, while still managing to remain competitive with players on the international market who are facing no such costs. Then there is the problem of upgrading the aged and inefficient housing stock with insulation and heat exchangers when neither state nor most private householders can afford it, while also telling the population to turn down their thermostats and wear extra jumpers in winter. The new runway at Heathrow will surely have to be cancelled, and people persuaded against foreign holidays in favour of camping or caravanning at home. Then there’s your filthy fossil car, your fat-making sugar and meat diet, your cheap fashionista clothes shipped over in containers from fire traps in Bangladesh – you name it, you’ll probably be told to stop doing it.

Good, you might be thinking. We can’t beat climate change without making a few personal sacrifices. But here’s the thing – who’s going to make the Duke of Westminster turn his damn thermostat down? Who’s going to legislate the rich into painful personal sacrifices equivalent to those being forced on workers? Who’s going to take their private golf courses off them, or cancel their champagne and truffle banquets or stop their Lear jet flights to exclusive private resorts? Nobody, that’s who, because governments don’t get to tell the rich what to do. If anything it’s the other way round. The rich are all for reducing emissions, as long as they’re somebody else’s emissions. Knowing this, just how cooperative are workers likely to be?

And personal privations aside, what is the likelihood of all the competing ruling elites of the world forming a grand environmental alliance and sharing the eye-watering costs of a shift to net-zero, without sooner or later one or more of them succumbing to the lure of the fast buck and reneging on the deal? Capitalism is about making money and the rich are more devoted to that objective than they ever are to cooperating with each other, even for the sake of the common good.

The brilliance of Theresa’s coup is that, unlike David Cameron, she gets to look heroic as she dumps this monumental task on the table and then runs off through a cornfield. Whoever succeeds her, even the Bullingdon Bozo, will probably not want to go down in history as the one who ‘did a Trump’ and backed out of the most ambitious climate commitment made anywhere to date. More likely now is that the other world leaders will be eyeing each other nervously, wondering who is going to be next to try to carve their name into the history books. Now the precedent has been set. Call it the Thunberg factor, but populations will be in riotous mood should politicians not be seen to answer the net-zero call, even if those same populations are not necessarily clear about the personal implications.

The only realistic way out for May’s successors, and for capitalism, is to sign up to the draconian commitment in principle and ignore it in practice. But will they keep getting away with that? People already don’t believe anything politicians say. A recent survey suggests that only 6 percent of the population believe that politicians understand their concerns (Guardian, 16 June). Back in 2010 a similar poll found that only 7 percent rated politicians’ honesty as high and 58 percent rated it low or very low, while a more recent survey in 2016 suggested that 25 percent of the population thought robots would make better politicians than humans. Socialists have a better idea. Abolish politicians along with the rich and manage the world democratically. Then you’d see an effective climate policy.

Change My View

Somebody who should lift your spirits a little is Kal Turnbull, the young man from the Scottish Highlands who at the age of 17 set out to combat all the ranting hate and abuse of polarised social media with one simple and ingenious idea. Aware of his own parochial background and limited knowledge, he set up a Reddit channel called Change My View, where users post genuinely-held ideas or beliefs on any subject and then invite other people to come forward with rational arguments for changing this view. What’s needed, he thinks, is to ‘reframe our relationship to being wrong. It’s not necessarily a negative thing. It doesn’t have to be a humiliating thing. It’s a chance to lose some ignorance, and perhaps gain some insight’.

Don’t you just love this guy? If only the rest of us workers had this kind of unprepossessing honesty and intellectual integrity, we’d sort out the world’s toxic obsession with capitalism in short order. Of course it’s slightly disappointing to learn that he’s now trying to monetise the whole idea, but hey ho, that’s capitalism for you.

Paddy Shannon

Greasy Pole: Theresa May . . . or May Not? (2012)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

When things are that desperate it is worth trying anything. Which is why the voters swing from one discredited party to another and back again and why they have at times experimented by trying women to lead the government instead of the wearily ineffective men. But then came the real experience of Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, and Maggie Thatcher.  And now, there is Theresa May, the first  female chair of the Conservative Party and, after holding other lesser roles,  Home Secretary – only the second woman to land in what one of its incumbents, Jack Straw, once called a “ministerial graveyard”. The first female to be there was Labour’s Jacqui Smith who will not wish to go down in history as a minister who claimed parliamentary expenses for the cost of her husband watching television pornography.

On that matter, a media-gratifying coincidence revealed that Theresa May’s name is close enough to that of a soft-porn actor, known as Teresa (without the h) May, to cause some embarrassment but Theresa (with the h) brushed it aside by allowing only that, “We do get telephone calls from time to time from people who want to book me to do programmes which are perhaps not about politics . . . She may think it slightly estranged that some people might like to earn their living as a politician”. Indeed. But Teresa (without the h) might think it more than slightly strange that politicians should adopt such a self-justifying attitude on an issue such as pornography when the living which they “earn” relies on established venality with no regard for the suffering of the people they are elected to represent. All this suggests that there is no significant difference between their way of getting a living and hers. Theresa (with the h) May is married to a banker, they live in the lush rural beauty of Berkshire and between them they own two houses worth £1.6 million. She signalled her moving up the Greasy Pole by changing her wear for designer products, notably her shoes; “She is,” rhapsodised her press officer, “the most glamorous woman in the House of Commons”.

“Rising star” was how one journalist assessed her as she emerged onto the Front Bench. Industrious self-publicist Boris Johnson recorded, as an MP, “ . . . the upcoming bête noire as I spotted some months ago … even John Bercow was fulsome”. But the Daily Telegraph was not ecstatic on her elevation to Shadow Secretary for Education and Employment: “…while she is clearly competent she has done little that obviously merits so swift an ascent”. And now there is some cause to question whether she and her pretty shoes and pricey dresses have not persuaded her to overreach her political safety zone. For since she attained the heights of the Home Office she has been linked – to put it mildly – to enough blunders, misjudgements and clumsy handling of delicate issues to suggest that she is a serious candidate as a victim of Cameron’s first reshuffle. If that happens there will be much referring back to her speech to the Tory conference in 2002 when she suggested to the constituency members that their electoral failure could be something to do with the fact that the voters saw them as “the nasty party”. That was a phrase which has become attached to her very name regardless of the fact that a party which tries to be “nice” will not survive very long its exposure as politically useless to the requirements of capitalism.

As Jack Straw and not a few others quickly found out, the Home Office is no place for impulsive, ill-informed decision-taking. In these terms, Theresa May has not succeeded where others have failed. Rather, there is some evidence that when in difficulty she tends to bend the truth and shovel responsibility onto others. Last October she spoke at the Conservative Party conference on one of her favourite obsessions – abolishing the Human Rights Act. What she said went down very well with her audience for she gave an example of an illegal immigrant who came from Bolivia in 2009 and recently won an appeal against a Home Office attempt to deport him “…because – and I am not making this up – he had a pet cat”. This was eagerly accepted by the assembled Tories, and the headline-writers got busy. There was, however, a drawback. The Royal Courts of Justice, which had allowed the appeal, stated that the grounds were that the man was in a stable, genuine family relationship with a British woman and the cat was not material in the case but only one of the pieces of evidence. To make it worse for May, the case did not involve the Human Rights Act; the appeal succeeded on the grounds that the attempt to deport the man contradicted an established Home Office policy. There was more embarrassment for May when Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke weighed in with his opinion that her speech was “laughable and childlike”. All in all, not a good day at the Home Office for her.

And that was not the end of it. Another crisis was the policy of temporarily suspending immigration checks at airports when they are under pressure. News about this was seen likely to encourage a vengeful neurosis among the voters who feared the country being invaded by welfare-seeking cat-owners from places like Bolivia and suicide bombers ready fitted up with their devices. On the hook over this, May tried to pass her responsibility in the Commons and at the Home Affairs Select Committee, onto unauthorised decisions by the man in charge, one Brodie Clark – who denied May’s accusation and, taking such pride in his 40-year record as a civil servant, resigned his job, had his say to that same committee and announced that he would be taking out an action for constructive dismissal. The matter has yet to be resolved.

The Home Office was once described by a Home Secretary as “not fit for purpose”. He got it partly right, except that it is not just a ministry or a government with that problem. The society outside the ministry’s doors is constructed and conditioned to operate against the interests of the majority of its people, while those who attain positions of power soon learn to develop the techniques of passing the buck – onto other people or onto details such as the gender of those rulers. If we are to deal with all aspects of social dislocation it is necessary to begin from a more sustainable basis.

Ivan

Dear Theresa . . . (2019)

From the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Theresa,

At last, you have a clear timetable for your exit! You’ll soon be off through the revolving door to pastures new, where your distinguished service to the capitalist class will no doubt be generously rewarded. But apart from a few lucrative board appointments what else? Maybe a memoir? Although I would wait a while in order to exploit the public’s short memory. Some of your predecessors have secured lucrative speaking engagements, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. After all, what would you talk about? I’m not sure Brexit will pull in the punters.

Another important matter to consider is your valedictory speech. I hope the fiction that you unfolded outside the doors of Number 10 on 24 May was just a prelude to something more realistic. Perhaps in the main event to come, you could dispense with such Alice in Wonderland utterances of: ‘having striven for a country that works not just for the privileged few but for everyone’ and introduce a little honesty. [Check Wikipedia if you are not sure of the meaning of this word].

Anyway, I thought I would provide you with a little help in this difficult endeavour by highlighting a few of your main achievements. You could add your own points to mine and turn it into a quiz, ranking them in order of how strongly they correlated with the upward movement of hubby’s investment fund.

You have been an incredible champion of austerity; a sleight of hand characterised by multi-billion pound cuts in wages and social provision for the poor and even bigger giveaways to the rich; at the last count resulting in 120,000 deaths which have been termed ‘economic murder’. You have privatised large swathes of public services to enrich your corporate cronies at the expense of working-class people who are left with a rump of degraded social provision. In partnership with the US regime, you have continued the imperialist rampage of war, torture and assorted violence against largely defenceless countries; the onslaught on Yemen being a perfect example which, amongst other dire consequences, has caused the death of 85,000 children through starvation.

You have played a key role in hastening the planet’s spiral into a death spin by systematically dismantling the modest protections put in place by the Climate Change Act 2008, whilst disingenuously crowing about the UK as the world leader on climate protection. You have rendered the notion of personal privacy meaningless by massively expanding surveillance. You have trampled over justice; epitomised recently by the ignominious exit of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean Embassy and his incarceration in Belmarsh maximum security prison. You have built mega-prisons for UK citizens and concentration camps for refugees, or else deported them back to the countries from which they have fled persecution. On the party political front, you have had staggering success in rehabilitating the reputation of David Cameron. It is no longer tenable for anyone to claim that he has been the worst Prime Minister in 200 years. And you will soon hand the baton to your bosom buddy Boris to lead a strong and stable Tory government.

Enjoy your quiz!

Yours sincerely,

P.S. I’ve enclosed a couple of packs of tissues as I thought you might be running low.

P.P.S. I think this is an opportune moment for us to make a clean break and cease this turgid correspondence. Less depressing for both of us!

Tim Hart

Dear Theresa . . . (2019)

From the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well, it’s all over bar the shouting! Except it’s not over and there seems to be even more shouting than usual. The Brexit circus bumbles along, aided and abetted by the media which hyperventilates over every twist and turn; including wheeling out obscure academics to paw over esoteric constitutional conundrums in a pathetic attempt to inject some Guardian-like discourse into the idiocy and thus further bamboozle the public. Do we even have a constitution?

I see that Boris chappy has re-entered the fray with a preposterous proposal that he will vote for your deal provided you resign; that is, your dead-as-a-Dodo-deal, which he has previously said is: ‘worse than no-deal, worse than staying in the EU and threatens the integrity of the UK.’ I think Boris needs to refresh his understanding of the meaning of integrity. When I heard about his offer I thought: there is no way in which Theresa is going to capitulate to such an insulting proposition. But then I heard that you have accepted it. You have even been wooing those your party has been denouncing as an ‘anti-Semite, terrorist apologist and all round Putin puppet’, Corbyn. Ah well, I suppose it’s no time for false pride or principles when political careers are at stake.

I’ve been rather flippant about Brexit up to now, but I’d like to acknowledge a substantial benefit of the Brexit process. The decision of the UK to leave the EU represents a momentous turning point in the fortunes of our country; where Great Britain can once more stand as a proud sovereign nation, ready to take its place in the world. ‘Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!’ Sorry, I got a bit carried away there for a moment. No, it is not this jingoistic twaddle that I have in mind as the Brexit dividend.

I don’t know whether you have read that little book by William Morris, ‘News from Nowhere’. It’s a romantic portrayal of a socialist world. In this idyllic future society the parliament buildings have been turned into a giant dung heap – the cynic would claim they have always had this characteristic. William Morris wrote his fable over a hundred years ago but, had he been around in these more cosmopolitan times, he would have portrayed the steaming bloated edifice of the European Union HQ in Brussels in similar terms. If there were any starry-eyed individuals who imagined that, by voting for Brexit, they would rid themselves of the shackles of a feckless European plutocratic elite, in order to take back control at Westminster, it must be crystal clear to them now that they were merely voting to swap one dung heap for another. The working class needs to focus on ridding itself of the shackles of capitalism rather than taking sides in this bun-fight between different imperialist factions.

In the enormous dung-producing enterprise of Brexit you, Theresa, have been wielding the biggest shovel. In so doing you have helped to realise William Morris’s ambitious vision of a world beyond capitalism.

Tim Hart

Dear Theresa . . . (2019)

From the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

How are things? How is Brexit going? Just teasing you! I daresay our inimitable BBC is still inflicting wall-to-wall coverage upon its hapless audience. I don’t get past the headlines myself, but they always seem to be proclaiming another lost vote in your pitiful attempt to cut a deal in Westminster – and you thought Barnier was a hard nut to crack! I wondered whether you were trying to get into The Guinness Book of Records as the prime minister who has suffered the most defeats in parliament. It might not be a bad idea. There won’t be much else of interest to your legacy. Have you packed yet? Remember to put enough food down for the cat.

What are your plans? Perhaps you could get a job with the BBC. It would be the least they could do for you given your generosity towards them in continuing to facilitate the expropriation of £4bn a year from the licence payer, under threat of fine and imprisonment. I don’t think you would be qualified as a political correspondent, even against the undemanding selection criteria of the BBC. I was thinking more of a TV licence enforcement person. If you were to dig out those iconic £1,000 leather trousers and signature black patent over-the-knee boots, and generally ham up your gothic look, you could do quite well. Whilst the terms of employment are a closely guarded commercial secret I would guess that there is a high element of commission in this door-stepping activity. I’m sure you would frighten a number of those miscreants into coughing up the licence fee. Others might respond favourably to the novelty of an ex-prime minister, in costume dress, banging on their door. There are worse jobs. You would be out in the fresh air, meeting new people and getting plenty of exercise. It would be much healthier for you than the putrid atmosphere of Westminster.

If you are doubtful about my suggestion then ponder this: of all the thousands of crimes by which your benign government contrives to bestow a criminal record upon its citizenry, the failure to hold a valid TV licence ranks as the sixth most prolific offence, with 163,000 convictions in 2017. Now that’s a wad-full of commission. Of course strictly speaking you wouldn’t be a BBC employee, but instead would be working for the private contractor, Capita, the provider of this essential public service, no doubt at an equally essential lucrative fee. I’m sure Capita owe you a favour or two. Don’t be coy about using the ‘revolving door.’ Everyone else does.

If socialism has come to pass by the time of your eviction then life will be altogether more straightforward for you. Our society will be based on the maxim: ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’. You won’t have to fret over the consequences of your shortcomings, or to prostrate yourself before an employer under duress of starvation or homelessness. All your basic needs will be catered for without the need for money. It would seem unlikely that the BBC would constitute a ‘basic need,’ but in socialism this – and other similar matters – will be decided democratically; dare I say it, by referendum, or similar device.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing about the adventures you are planning for yourself.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Hart

Dear Theresa . . . (2019)

From the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Theresa . . . 

Apparently, at exactly 11.00 pm on Friday 29 March 2019, Brexit will descend upon us. I am wondering whether I should stay up and watch it as I do when there is a total eclipse. If a deal is not struck by this time then hell-fire and damnation is forecast to rain down upon the people of the British Isles, as alluded to by the ignominious EU President, Donald Tusk. I suspect that, if I wake up on Saturday morning 30 March to total darkness, it is much more likely to be due to the onset of Nuclear Winter than a failure to renegotiate a variance of the Irish Backstop.

I was wondering if, in all the hoo-hah and razzmatazz of Brexit, you have had the chance to consider the latest development on our path to Nuclear Armageddon. In case you haven’t I’ll just remind you. Your partner in crime, The Donald, has given notice that the United States will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, claiming that Russia has violated the terms of the Treaty, whereas Russia claims that the United States violated the terms of the Treaty first. I love an adult conversation, don’t you, especially when the outcome may well determine the survival of our planet.

As a result of the dispute over the INF Treaty Russia has announced the reactivation of its Perimeter System which was de-commissioned following the end of the Cold War; that is the first Cold War ending in 1991, not the current one. The Perimeter System is a nifty little arrangement to counter the United States posture of First Use of nuclear weapons by anticipating that such a pre-emptive strike could destroy Russia’s command and control systems; in which case a cluster of SS17 ICBMs will launch automatically on detection of seismic activity, compatible with that caused by a nuclear explosion. As these Russian SS17 missiles fly over the nuclear armed ICBMs in their silos they will transmit a launch signal to them. If the United States doesn’t already have a similar defence system no doubt it will feel it prudent to build one and, hey presto, planetary annihilation without any need for fallible human intervention!

I find it strangely reassuring, in a psychotic sort of way, that MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – has been fully restored after faltering in recent decades and without even the need for a mad man or mad woman to press the button. Given that the UK is a major player in this ultimate game of chicken with its – soon to be dazzlingly new – Trident nuclear submarines I hope you will find time to give this matter a few minutes of your attention amid the Brexit fever. From our perspective we in the Socialist Party have a rather simple solution. We advocate a world devoid of imperialism, nationalism and all sabre-rattling murderous manifestations of warfare which emanate from such pathologies: a world where there are no nation states, no borders and no private property, where resources are held in common for the benefit of all; which will leave very few things to fight over.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Hart

Proper Gander: Views On The News (2017)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Gogglebox’s producers came up with the show’s format, they’d found the Holy Grail of television shows: cheap and straightforward to churn out, but still massively popular. Netting four million viewers is quite good going for a programme that any of us can make just by putting a mirror next to our own TV. It’s no surprise, then, that a production company with a dearth of original ideas has nicked Gogglebox’s format in the hope of also nicking some of its viewers. The result is BBC2’s Common Sense, which features ‘real people’ (as opposed to what? Surreal people? Androids? Holograms?) having contrived chats about the previous week’s news stories with a camera shoved in front of them while Ruth Jones narrates. And that’s it.

The participants have been picked for ‘their sharp wit and humorous take on life’, but also reflect the stereotypes of ‘real people’ which the media easily falls back on. So, we have Cockney wideboys, cuddly grannies, rosy-cheeked butchers and poshos in pin-striped suits, although others, thankfully, are less obviously chosen to represent a tick-box group, such as the male Mancunian / Vietnamese nail technicians. They’re all there, really, just to open their mouths and let the words fall out.

In the first episode, we hear their views on populism (mostly bewilderment, but defined by one of the pin-striped suited poshos as ‘a word used by people who hate democracies functioning effectively’), climate change (‘we’ve got icebergs floating all over the place now’), the Queen being briefly mistaken for an intruder in Buckingham Palace’s gardens (‘if he had shot her . . .  I bet they would have made a court case out of it’) and the Prime Minister taking yonks to say anything more substantial about Britain leaving the European Union than ‘Brexit means Brexit’ (‘people are calling her flippin’ Theresa Maybe’). There’s a healthy cynicism about Tony Blair attempting to ‘worm his way back into British politics to make up for Iraq’ alongside trying to ‘smarm his way’ into being the ‘President of the European Union, among other things. If not, he wants to be God’. Inevitably, Donald Trump’s tweets come up, and whether he’ll take notice of any of his advisers brave enough to ask him to tone his mad rants down (‘Otherwise they’ll shoot him’).

Most of the participants, having probably watched Gogglebox, know the score and realise that witty banter is the order of the day, even if they don’t always deliver. Their chats are edited down into short exchanges, with the assumption that us viewers have the attention span of a bluebottle. Random sentences are punctuated by annoying plinky-plonky music, which somehow sounds like the producers sneering. And rather insultingly, the characters are introduced in exactly the same way as those in Little Britain are – with them looking at the camera while it pans slowly across them as jingoistic music plays. As the reviewer in the Telegraph asked, are we supposed to be laughing with or at the participants?

Common Sense reminds us that television has a condescending, awkward way of presenting ‘real people’ – i.e. any of us – on screen. The smarmy title gives it away, with the snobbish connotations of the word ‘common’. It’s as if the producers are looking at ‘real people’ from outside, like they’re staring at goldfish in a tank and prodding the glass every now and then. An extreme example of this tendency is, of course, the odious The Jeremy Kyle Show, which turns desperation into a spectator sport. And when ‘real people’ dare to think they’ve got talent and try their luck on The X-Factor and its ilk, those that can’t get remoulded into what’s likely to sell gig tickets and downloads get their dreams chewed up and spat out in their faces. All these shows exploit as well as present the ‘real people’ who appear on them. Even though they ostensibly give us proles an opportunity to express ourselves, they also reveal bourgeois attitudes about the working class. It’s not that programme-makers are necessarily deliberately setting out to do this; they’re just making a living by producing what the market supposedly wants, like the rest of us. However, the patronising whiff around series which ‘showcase’ ‘real’ or ‘ordinary’ people does make you wonder if they’re produced by people who think they’re a cut above. At least the internet gives many of us the opportunity to broadcast ourselves if we want to, in whatever way we prefer, without television’s distorting lens. If we want to make a YouTube video giving our opinions on the link between earthquakes and fracking we can, and equally we can make one listing our favourite Harry Potter books. Or, if we really want to engage with ‘real people’s’ views, we could just as well switch off our screens and start a conversation ourselves.

Mike Foster

Dear Theresa . . . (2019)

From the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

15th January 2019

Dear Theresa

Thank you for your recent letter.  I’m sorry to hear that you are still being tormented by Brexit.  You can blame that nincompoop predecessor of yours for that!  I’m sorry, as well, to hear that you received short shrift following your overtures to Len McCluskey and the other trade union lads.  You should have asked me to make the approach for you.  It might have been better coming from a socialist than from someone who has participated in the wholesale destruction of trades union rights and of their members’ living standards in recent decades.  Not that I want to get involved in anything to do with Brexit.  In fact that’s why I’m taking the opportunity to write to you today – whilst the pantomime of the Brexit vote unfolds in the hallowed chambers of Westminster – to avoid even a glimpse of that dismal spectacle.

And while I remember, Happy New Year!  How are you generally?  All pigged out on the Christmas food and all maxed out on the credit cards?  You’ll be joining the growing number of poor if you’re not careful.  Ha, ha!  There seems to be a lot more poverty around nowadays.  It’s a burgeoning industry so to speak, with 120,000 social murders attributed to austerity since it began in 2010; including 3,000 deaths from hypothermia and 600 deaths of rough sleepers each year, with four million people resorting to food banks.  Given that the UK is one of the richest countries in the world and the fifth largest economy this is a staggering achievement by your government.

I suppose one shouldn’t underestimate the important contribution which poverty makes to our national economy.  Without those huge corporate charities our GDP would be significantly lower, unemployment would be up and the valuable opportunity to demonstrate our compassionate national character would be considerably diminished, as pointed out recently by the Keeper of the National Conscience, Jacob Rees-Mogg.  Some liberal-minded MPs are even calling for the appointment of a Minister for Hunger.  How progressive of them.

We in the Socialist Party have what some might regard as a rather quirky approach to poverty.  There won’t be any.  Under capitalism poverty is an inevitable, indeed an essential, component, arising out of the very essence of the way in which the wealth created by the working class is appropriated by a ruling elite, leaving the rest of us to scramble around for the crumbs.  Socialism would end this modern day form of chattel slavery by ensuring that wealth is shared according to need and would benefit everyone, not just the 1%;  thus rendering poverty an anachronism to be pondered over by bemused schoolchildren exploring the history of a bygone era.

Anyway, that’s all for now!  I’ll drop you a line again next month.  In the meantime, if you change your address please let me know . . .

Yours sincerely,

Tim Hart

Dear Theresa . . . (2019)

From the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Theresa,

Did you have a good Christmas?  Was it turkey or duck?  I hope that you didn’t succumb to any of that vegan nut roast nonsense!  Those green terrorists have got a lot to answer for.  The next thing you know they’ll be trying to cancel Christmas altogether on some flimsy excuse that it is an orgy of gluttonous over-consumption which is destroying the planet.

Did you get any time for Christmas shopping at all?  Hopefully you managed to grab a couple of hours in between yet another of those whistle-stop tours around the capitals of Europe to secure a few more crumbs from those stingy foreigners.

I was ready to settle down in front of the telly one Tuesday in December for the Brexit vote, only to find that the show had been cancelled.  Then, on the Wednesday, came the announcement of a vote of no confidence in your leadership, but that turned out to be a damp squib as well.  You are nothing if not tenacious – a characteristic for which you are often lauded by your dwindling band of supporters.  Although I’m not sure tenacity, of itself, is a desirable attribute without a qualifier.  Hitler was very tenacious, but most people would have preferred that he had been less so.

I dread to think what the corporate media will do with themselves when the curtain finally comes down on the Brexit circus.  They will need another good war.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria all seem to be losing their puff.  Even the War on Terror is getting jaded.  The media is rather churlish about covering the war in Yemen; probably because of the genocide, mass starvation, cholera, and such like raining down on those poor people; in large measure compliments of the UK Government.  Do you have any concerns about being hauled before the ICC for war crimes?  I shouldn’t worry.  They are a spineless bunch when it comes to prosecuting leaders from rich Western countries.  If you could conjure up a fresh war it would also have the advantage of distracting from your problems at home; a tried and tested device for political leaders to boost their flagging popularity.

But let’s get back to Brexit.  For us in the Socialist Party it is of no consequence whether we are ruled by a plutocratic feckless elite from Brussels, or a plutocratic feckless elite from Westminster.  As socialists we don’t believe in borders, in fact we don’t believe in nation states; without which there can be no immigration problem, nor any wars.  What a bummer!  We want to create a decentralised democratic society living in harmony with the rest of life on our planet; where everyone contributes according to their ability and takes according to their need.  Now there’s a novelty for you!

Anyway, time to get into the New Year spirit!  There’s nothing like the chance to gobble up what remains of our depleted planet to fend off the winter blues.  You’ve already been doing your bit by expanding the fossil fuel industry and reducing incentives for green energy.  Did you get an opportunity to read the latest IPCC report?  I wouldn’t bother.  It’s depressing stuff.  You’d think they could have brought out something more upbeat for Christmas.

And while I remember there’s just that little matter of the government’s contempt of parliament to put to bed.  I think you should go, cap in hand, to Speaker Bercow’s study and accept your punishment.  I always found that a magazine down the back of the trousers helps soften the blows.

Sincerely,

Tim Hart

Pathfinders: Capitalism’s Bond Villains (2018)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political theatre turned to Hollywood farce last month as PM Theresa “Mousey” May squared off against Vlad ‘The Impaler’ Putin over the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury. Called upon by the media to flex her non-existent muscles over Russia’s blatant attempts to murder one of the entries on its oversees shit-list, she immediately pressed the Maximum Response button by expelling a few token diplomats. Putin predictably expelled the same number of Brit Dips in retaliation, leaving the two leaders looking like kindergarten kids having a spat. Such was the damage to the Russian pin-up’s political reputation that he went straight on to win a fourth term as president by a landslide, helped no doubt by the fact that he’d banned his chief rival from contesting. May’s international standing didn’t suffer either, as it was already non-existent.

Russia’s overseas assassination programme has used increasingly baroque methods to supposedly hide its state involvement over the years, in marked contrast to its prosaic internal policy of shooting regime critics in the head in lifts (Anna Politkovskaya, 2006) or in drive-bys (former deputy prime minister Nemtsov, 2015). From ricin in the 1978 Markov hit they progressed to sarin for the 2002 take-down of Chechen leader Khattab, then a failed 2004 dioxin attack on pro-western Ukrainian lead Yushchenko, to polonium in the 2006 Litvinenko murder. Mercury was implicated in an attack on human rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko in 2008, while in 2012 exiled Russian businessman and police informant Alexander Perepilichny dropped dead in London with a dose of the rare toxic flower gelsemium. 2013 must have been an off-year, as Putin-critic Boris Berezovsky was found merely hanged in Berkshire.

So no big surprise that they’re at it again, but using a nerve agent invented and produced only in Russia seems like a downright giveaway, notwithstanding the Russian ambassador’s chutzpah in accusing the UK of trying to bump off its own spy by pointing out that ‘Porton Down is only 8 miles down the road’ from the crime scene. For once Boris ‘Ballsack’ Johnson seemed to have the measure of the situation: ‘The obvious Russian-ness of the weapon was designed to send a signal to anyone pondering dissent amid the intensifying repression of Mr Putin’s Russia. The message is clear: we will hunt you down, we will find you and we will kill you – and though we will scornfully deny our guilt, the world will know that Russia did it.’

The world seems increasingly controlled by cartoon Bond villains, as witness the toxic poisoning of already-unhealthy democratic systems by the manipulation and exploitation of big data to influence and perhaps swing popular votes. In the frame lately has been the British firm Cambridge Analytica, implicated in the shock Trump and Brexit votes. Perhaps more credence has been put on behind-the-scenes skulduggery because both these votes returned shock and unexpected results, but even so there’s little doubt that skulduggery is at work, and not just by Cambridge Analytica. Unless you live completely off-grid with no computer, phone or any other digital device, deal only in cash and wear a facemask when you go out, the capitalist data machine is constantly hoovering up information about you which private firms can then use to target you with profiled advertising or political messaging. Such brainwashing, as it’s also known, is likely most effective with right-wing voters and others whose brains probably don’t require that much detergent, however it’s an alarming sign for state regimes when the power of manipulation they used to call their own can now be hired out to the highest bidder. In an astounding display of vapid bravado the UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham demonstrated her complete failure to ‘get it’ by announcing to Channel 4 News she intended to seek a warrant to access Cambridge Analytica’s data files, a statement which has no doubt alerted the company to the need to delete anything incriminating. Or maybe it was a deliberate move to give them the heads-up today, prior to employing them tomorrow for the hapless May’s next desperate electoral attempt to stay in power.

North Korea / Trump talks not hot air, just gas

Mysteriously absent from most media reports about the surprise talks mooted between North Korea and the USA is the proposed Sakhalin gas pipeline running from Russia’s gas fields to South Korea and Japan via… North Korea. The pipeline has been on the drawing board for years, but the changing Asian energy market, with coal and nuclear out and gas in, has given the project a new lease of life. Russia is also keen to use South Korea’s shipbuilding capabilities to create a huge commercial fleet that can ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) and exploit the opening Arctic sea lanes. Russia has lately sweetened the deal by cancelling 90 percent of North Korea’s huge Cold War debts. But what’s in all this for Trump? Maybe nothing but face-saving. The US failed despite sanctions to stop Europe from buying Russian gas, so it has little chance of stopping a deal involving Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas. No daylight between South Korea and the US? Think again!

Thinking Outside the Boss

Prominently displayed on the Letters page of New Scientist recently (3 March) was an epistle, the authorship of which may be divined by regular readers of this column, which challenged the magazine to ask the following question: ‘has the capitalist system finally passed its sell-by date?’ This was in response to the magazine’s somewhat self-righteous justification of its own frequent forays into the world of political commentary, on the grounds that science doesn’t live in a political vacuum. Quite so, the letter pointed out, and politics doesn’t live in a science vacuum either, therefore since the evidence of capitalism’s many iniquities is overwhelming, shouldn’t the search for an evidence-based alternative social model be a legitimate line of scientific enquiry?

Not a bad question, you may agree, but questions of methodology aside, the likely answer running through the minds of any scientist or journalist reading the question will be: ‘Yes, but my boss won’t let me.’ This probably explains the loud silence that has ensued since the letter was published.

Paddy Shannon

Editorial: Ruling class split (2018)

Editorial from the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

By calling a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union in June 2016, David Cameron was counting on a victory for the Remain side to contain the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party and see off the challenge from UKIP. Far from overcoming the divisions within the Tory Party, the resulting victory for the Leave side has blown them wide apart.

David Cameron immediately cut his losses and ran, leaving his successor, Theresa May, to pick up the pieces. She attempted to gain the upper hand in her Party by calling a General Election a year later, but unfortunately for her, she lost her majority and is now more vulnerable to the Tory Party's warring factions.

The referendum result has had repercussions for Scotland and Northern Ireland, the two regions where most voters opted for Remain. The SNP government has used it as ammunition to press for a second Scottish Independence referendum. Leaving the EU could jeopardise the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement, as this was predicated on there being a common customs area between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Initially, partly to poach votes from UKIP and increase support in Brexit areas, Theresa May pursued a so-called hard Brexit, where the UK would leave both the customs union and the single market. However, facing up to the reality that most British businesses need to stay close to the EU and to avoid a hard border in Ireland, on the 6th July, the Government at Chequers produced plans which amounted to a "softer" Brexit. There would be a harmonisation with EU rules in trading with goods (but not with services). However, this was too much for some and there were howls of treachery and several ministers have resigned, including David Davis and Boris Johnson. Tory Brexiteers have threatened to mount a leadership challenge. May backed down and accepted amendments from a hardline Tory Brexit group to water down her Customs bill. This sparked a rebellion among furious Tory Remain MPs. May seems to be caught in a pincer movement between the Remain and Brexit factions of her Party and her authority is ebbing away. Some have argued that a Second Referendum on Brexit is needed to resolve this impasse. Others say that another General Election is required.

We are treated to the unusual spectacle of the Tory Party being unable to serve the interests of the majority of the British capitalist class, who favour staying in the Custom Union. Ironically, it is Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party that appears to better represent the interests of British capitalism on this issue.

This political crisis is really a matter for the capitalist class only, but the working class has been dragged into it. At the 2016 referendum, we argued that workers had no interest in supporting either the Leave or Remain campaigns, as either way they will still have to deal with the problems of capitalism, such as job insecurity, low wages and unemployment, and urged them to write ‘World Socialism’ over their ballot papers. Should there be a second referendum, we will again be advising workers to do the same.

Editorial: Trump - Will Trade Follow? (2018)

Editorial from the July 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The so-called "special relationship" between US and British capitalism seems at times to resemble, for those who are old enough to remember, the portrayal by the 1980s Spitting  Image show  of the relationship between David Steel and David Owen. The former  would fawn over the latter, who would in return deliver a withering put down.

During the Northern Irish "peace process" in the 1990s, John Major's government had to grin and bear it when President Bill Clinton courted Sinn Fein. When Tony Blair was prime minister, he backed President George Bush in the invasion of Iraq and accorded him a state visit. He didn't receive much in return other than a "Yo Blair" greeting at a 2006 G8 Summit. Shortly after he assumed the Presidency, Barack Obama, returned the bust of Winston Churchill from the White House.

Not long after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President, Theresa May wasted no time in visiting him in Washington in January 2017. Despite the controversial nature of his presidency, May invited him to a state visit. His scheduled visit to the UK on 13 July will be a working visit and the Big Man will meet the Queen. There promises to be large demonstrations against him when he arrives.

In the meantime, in November 2017, Theresa May earned a rebuke from President Trump when she criticised him for retweeting anti-Muslim videos by the far-right Britain First Group.  In May, Trump ignored Boris Johnson's pleading and pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran. Early in June Trump slapped tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from the EU, which also apply to the UK. Then there are the distressing scenes from the Texas border with Mexico where migrant children have been forcibly separated from their parents. In spite of all this, Theresa May will welcome Donald Trump on 13 July. As if to further ingratiate herself with Trump, May supported the US bombing of Syria in April.

This apparent toadying attitude originated after the Second War when the US emerged as a dominant global power and the British Empire was in decline. The British capitalist class, by and large, believed they could retain most of their former global influence by allying themselves to the United States, and it was hoped that this would give them advantageous access to world markets. They also exploited their links to Europe, enticing US banks and corporations to base their European operations in the UK. However, as the UK is leaving the EU, there is the urgent need for a trade deal. No doubt this is one of the major reasons for the 13 July visit.

Theresa May's strategy of staying close to Donald Trump has not been entirely successful, for the latter has struck up a friendly relationship with the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who seeks to position French capitalism as the new link to Europe for US businesses, thus encouraging them to relocate from Britain to France.

This forthcoming visit could not illustrate more clearly the cynicism of Capitalism. Capitalist leaders are compelled by the cutthroat nature of competing world markets to make alliances with regimes, however odious, if their economic interests demand it.