So They Say: Same the Whole World Over (1974)

The So They Say Column from the February 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Same the Whole World Over

The Paris paper Le Monde on 27th December published tables of French workers’ earnings in 1973. The information comes from employers’ official returns, and covers a working population of 13 millions.

The headline tells the story: 60% of earnings are less than 1750 francs a month. 1750 francs is in fact the approximate upper limit of the largest group of wage earners, 34.2 per cent., who receive between 1165f. and 1745f. On 27th December the exchange rate was 10.85f. to the £, giving an English equivalent for this group of about £27.10 to about £40.60 a week.

13.9 per cent. of French workers receive between 935f. a month, or £21.35 a week, and 1165f., and 14.2 per cent. less than 935f. When these figures are seen in relation to substantially higher costs for food and clothing, the position in France is the same as that of workers in Britain and other countries. To round off the similarity, a lucky 1.5 per cent, receive above 7000f. a month. Work it out for yourself.

An Incomes Policy at Last? 

A country where working-class living standards are lower than elsewhere is Russia. A report by Edmund Stevens in The Times on 2nd January described the satisfaction of the Russian press at “comparing the conditions in the Soviet Union with the turmoil and violence in much of the world”, and went on:

Nor is there a threat of petrol shortage, or an energy crisis, or runaway inflation.

However, the article went on to say that petrol prices are expected shortly to go up by 60 per cent., and that many prices have risen recently: sturgeon and other choice fish by nearly 300 per cent., while the cost of caviar doubled in December. How then does the Soviet government avoid monetary and petrol troubles? The answer is supplied:

None of this affected the vast majority of people, who have no need for petrol and could not afford such delicacies as caviar and sturgeon at previous prices, which were raised repeatedly during the past decade.

What a good way of avoiding problems — simply by not letting people have enough money to buy things ! Heath must be envious. But it should be noted that only “runaway” inflation is absent from Russia. The report tells us:

A kind of selective creeping inflation has been going on ever since 1961, when the old roubles were converted to new ones at a 10-1 rate.

So they seem to have problems after all.

Gold Mine Turns Out to be Mirage

A favourite argument of those who tell us the capitalist system is different now is to point to the number of small investors who allegedly represent the working class getting a stake in the ownership of the means of production. Under the heading “Relying on a little help from friends” a Guardian investment writer on 5th January gave a different picture (and, incidentally, showed the futility of much of the advice given by investment writers). He said:

The small investor must beware of tips in newspapers, because when he reads of them a few hundred thousand others will have read them also . . . Stockbrokers don’t want the small man. Indeed anyone with funds of less than £10,000, unless he has investment knowledge, should, if he wants equities, buy investment trusts or unit trusts.

Realistic words. They mean the capitalist class do not mind letting you have interest on small savings, but will not encourage big ideas of sharing with them. And which of us has not got “funds of less than £10,000”?

Trouble in Blue Heaven

The Socialist Party has always opposed every form of censorship. We often meet well-meaning advocates of it who say they agree generally, but believe there is some special evil to which its application will be justified. Part of the answer to them is that once censorship is instituted its use is not limited, and becomes an additional instrument for the suppression of opinion.

An interesting demonstration was given in two letters to The Guardian on 10th January. Both were concerned with the Cinematograph and Indecent Displays Bill now going through Parliament; one was from the chairman of a group of Greater London Young Conservatives, the other from the secretary of an Arts Co-operative. The first fears that the Bill will allow pornography still to be sold under the counter while restricting the availability of Men Only, Mayfair and Penthouse. The second fears that it will be used to suppress Picasso nudes.

Their juxtaposition makes our point, handsomely.

Oiling the Works

Commentators have been getting good mileage out of North Sea oil. Not only will it, in a few years, be replenishing the petrol-pumps and generators of Britain. It will bring “prosperity”. The suggestion is of a good time coming, when the working class will be more than compensated for the hardships of the three-day week and wage restraint.

Whoever believes this should read the financial pages. The good time is being had already — but not by the workers. On 4th January the Guardian's “City Comment” reported the “windfall” which has come to the merchant bank group Edward Bates.

The principal part of the $12 millions deals announced by Bates for the acquisition of working interests and royalties, was negotiated when oil was selling at $4.20 a barrel in the U.S. It is currently being sold at $8.30. As a result, the Bates projection of oil and gas income for 1974 jumps from $2.6 millions to $4.8 millions, not to mention the substantial capital gains which will result in property values.

The next day the Technology Correspondent told of the prosperity resulting from the latest North Sea find: “£180 millions added to the values of BP and Burmah Oil”. The Guardian writer calls the Bates acquisition “an example of the pickings to be had in the American market” over North Sea oil. Incorrect. The "pickings” are had out of the exploitation of the workers — for whom windfalls from capitalism remain elusive.

Where We Came In

Can you place this quotation?

You can’t conceive what existence is like without trains or tubes . . . and probably no electric light tomorrow. We in Richmond can still get to Waterloo; but Hampstead is entirely cut off . . . Then the experts say that the working classes have behaved with such incredible stupidity that the Government will beat them; and this strike is only the beginning of others far worse to follow. They say we are in for such a year as has never been known.

It comes in fact from a letter written by Virginia Woolf in 1919, quoted in her biography. What should be noted, apart from its contemporary ring, is that Mrs. Woolf was associated with groups who were going to end the inefficiency and inequity of capitalism. And fifty-five years later it is still the same.

Robert Barltrop

Caught in the Act: Missing a stroke (1990)

The Caught in the Act column from the April 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Missing a stroke

Forty years is a long time and anyone who hangs on in a job that long can expect to get a gold watch which they think is a reward but which is actually a stark reminder that in a commodity-producing society our lives are tyrannised by time, not least by the need to give our employers full value for our wages by never being late for work. A recent, rather different recruit to the ranks of the long-serving is Edward Heath, whose 40 years as an MP were celebrated, a touch ghoulishly. by a lunch at London's Savoy Hotel.

The 500-odd guests were presided over by Lord Home, whose brief and disastrous premiership more or less paved the way for someone with Heath's background to become Tory leader. But Home is not one to bear grudges; after all he is an aristocratic Scottish landowner who went to Eton and played cricket for Cambridge University. Perhaps because he had to claw his way up from his origins as the son of a humble shopkeeper in the tumbling Kentish seaside town of Broadstairs, Heath does bear grudges, which means that Margaret Thatcher's presence at his celebratory lunch could hardly have added to its warmth and gaiety.

Heath has never tried to hide his pique at Thatcher's victory over him in the Tory leadership election in 1975. From his regular seat in the Commons he glowers and simmers, a persistent critic of a government which in theory he should support. This causes much resentment among Tories who are more loyal— or more ambitious. Says Teddy Taylor, the MP for Southend who has upset quite a few people in his time, "he is just enjoying himself because the government is in trouble" Well Heath doesn't look as if he's enjoying himself; after all it must be pretty stressful for a politician to try to resurrect themselves in a form which history would hardly recognise. But yes. the Edward Heath of 1990 who mutters rebelliously about our poverty, the current economic crisis and Thatcher's head-on style of politics is the same man who was Prime Minister for over three years of muddle and conflict during the early 1970s.

Selsdon Man

In fact Heath was never really secure in the leadership for he was dogged by persistent doubts about whether he was sufficiently cunning to survive in the political jungle and to keep his party in the same state. His unexpected victory in the 1970 General Election meant that he was suddenly dominant in the Tory party—the more so because coming through all that internal enmity relieved him of the usual debts to supporters. Clearly, in his old age—he is 73—Heath has forgotten the policies he was pledged to when he came to power. The 1970 election had been preceded by the notorious mini-conference of Tory leaders at the Seldson Park Hotel, which marked the beginning of the end of 'liberal'' economics and the planning of an open assault on the trade unions' power. This was called the emergence of Selsdon Man. an atavistic being who would soon be swept into extinction by progressive votes. While the Labour Party chuckled Heath replaced "liberal" Edward Boyle as shadow Education Minister with Margaret Thatcher.

But the voters found Selsdon Man rather attractive and for a while after the Tory victory in 1970 he ruled with his theories about the market economy and worker/employer confrontation. It was the government's intention that there should be no more support for ailing industry; companies which were “lame ducks"—in other words, unprofitable—should not be kept going simply because they made something useful or because a locality depended on them for employment. They should be abandoned to die. The abolition of the Prices and Incomes Board set up by the Wilson government signalled that in future both sides in industrial disputes would be left to slug it out without any interference from the government (the Industrial Relations Act which became law in August 1970 did not count as government interference). The idea was that if the employers were thrown on to their own resources they would more keenly resist wage claims and this would eventually make British industry more efficient and competitive and profitable.

U-Turns

To some people this all sounded gloriously simple and intelligent—the kind of policy some Tories had been waiting for for a very long time. But as a rehearsal of Thatcherite politics it was a disaster, at times farcical. Heath's ambition to take on the unions foundered when the Industrial Relations Court did what Parliament had told them to do and imprisoned five dockers who refused to appear before them. Quite apart from the dock strike and other protests which this provoked, this was extremely embarrassing for the government who escaped from their predicament by discovering an obscure functionary called the Official Solicitor to challenge the court's decision. Having succeeded in this, an equally obscure person called a Tipstaff went along to Pentonville prison and knocked three times on the door—or whatever Tipstaffs do when they want a door to open to relieve a government of an embarrassing blunder—and got the dockers released. Whereupon the Industrial Relations Court subsided into death.

Even more farcical were the government's attempts at controlling the economy—at one time tightening the screw, at another time loosening it only to frantically tighten it again. A recession came rumbling in. unemployment rose towards the million mark and prices—which Heath had said could be reduced "at a stroke" continued to rise The panic at Westminster became obvious for all to see when the government performed its U-turn, implementing policies which it had so recently opposed on the argument that they were destructive of the economy of British capitalism. Huge sums of money were made available to industry in investment grants with two world- class lame ducks—Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders—being especially grateful to be allowed to walk again. A statutory restriction on prices and incomes was introduced and a Price Commission and a Pay Board were set up to ensure the government intervention in pay negotiations which Heath had said had been so damaging.

Three Day Week

The curtain began to come down on this rollicking farce with the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil states making hay while their skies were unclouded by competition from the North Sea, restricting production and hiking up the price of what exports they allowed. For British industry the crisis was aggravated by their deliberate policy of relying on oil rather than coal, which was always under threat from those nasty disruptive miners . . .  At the end of 1973 the government were in conflict with, apart from the miners, the electricity supply workers and the train drivers. Their response was the measure for which Heath will always be remembered: the Three Day Week and its restrictions on power consumption. As a way out, Heath chose to fight a General Election on the theme of Who Runs Britain—the Unions or the Elected Government? His defeat was by the narrowest of margins but. more importantly, his most cherished policies, through which he was to go down in history as the Saviour of the Nation, had been ignominiously abandoned.

No one can argue with Heath about the waste of the past ten years except that there is nothing better to say about his own time in power, which exposed his claim to be able, not only to control capitalism but to do it At A Stroke.

Ivan