Labour, Tory . . . Same Old Story (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can you spot the difference? Which is the party of Law and Order, Family Values, Prudent Public Spending, the Market Economy: Labour or the Tories? Such is the public confusion over this that even the Tories have thought of exploiting it:

“Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor, and other key members of the Cabinet favoured attacking Mr Blair as a pale copy of the Tory party. This is called ‘the Coke option’ by researchers who say the Tories represent ‘the real thing'” (Independent, 26 July).

Since Blair became Leader in July Labour’s strategy has been to criticise the Tories on their terms –as incompetent managers of the economy and unable to implement tough policies against criminals, single mothers and other scroungers. Guided by their marketing advisers, Labour politicians don’t attack the Tories’ policies but only the incompetent and ineffective way in which they are carried out. Vote for us, Blair is saying, and we’ll carry out these policies better than the Tories. The aim is to attract enough ex-Tory voters for him to be able to enter Number Ten as Britain’s next prime minister.

Labour being the vote-catching party it always has been, it had to come to this sooner or later: the end of Labour as a party of radical reform of capitalism. Labour never was a socialist party but it did once see its role as trying to shift the balance of power and wealth under capitalism in favour of working people. They never did do this of course nor, given the nature of capitalism, could they have done so. But this was what they said and this at least showed that they thought capitalism was far from being the acceptable economic system they now think it is.

Incredible as it might seem today, Denis (now Lord, of course) Healey told a cheering Labour Conference in 1973 that he was going to squeeze the rich till the pips squeaked:

“Our job is to get power, and we join battle armed with the most radical and comprehensive programme we have had since 1945. Its aim is honestly stated, to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families . . . We are going to introduce a tax on wealth. We are going to turn the estate duty into a real tax… I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the 80,000 rich people. “

Labour got to power, but it was working people who ended up getting squeezed till the pips squeaked. The result was a massive wave of strikes in the public sector over the winter of 1978/9 – and the election of the Tories under Thatcher pledged, as she openly boasted, to undo everything Labour claimed to champion. Which, as demanded by capitalism’s worsened economic conditions, she did and, spiteful woman that she was, with glee. State industries were privatised, council houses sold off, local services axed, welfare payments slashed and the health service subjected to market forces.

Power for what?

Today all that Labour has retained of Healey’s rhetoric are the first six words: “our job is to get power”. Since radical phrases, indeed any definite policies, are now perceived to be a drag on this drive to get power they have been ruthlessly abandoned. Just attack the Tories as incompetent and clapped out, the marketing team advise, and, anxious for power, the Labour politicians oblige.

But power for what? In the end, since they are only projecting themselves as better and more competent managers of the status quo, it amounts to power for its own sake. The Labour leaders want power because they are professional politicians and the ambition of every professional politician is to become a government minister.

Is this being too cynical? Can they be that bad? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t really matter since even if they were sincere (and, on the law of averages, some of them must be) they still wouldn’t be able to make the capitalist market economy work other than as a system that puts profits first and so as a problem-ridden system incapable of meeting human needs properly.

In so far as they might have a theory of what they would do if they get power it will be no different from that behind the failed policies of ail previous Labour governments : trying to redistribute profits towards socially desirable projects such as a better health service, better education and better housing.

This involves accepting the profit system – not a problem of course for Blair and company – and allowing firms to make the maximum profits, justified on the grounds that this also supposedly maximises the resources available for social spending.

The trouble is this makes what a reformist government can do depend on the profitability of capitalist industry. As Richard Crossman, a Labour politician who was to become a senior Cabinet Minister in the 1964 Wilson Labour government, wrote following Labour’s defeat in the 1959 election on such a classic reformist programme:

“A Socialist Government, it is often argued, would be able to finance the huge extension of welfare, education and other pubic services by encouraging a much faster rate of development in the private sector of industry and then taxing away a sufficient amount of the profits. This was the policy put forward by the Labour Party at the last election and in the short run any Labour Government would to attempt it. But experience should have taught us that the run might be very short indeed. In the Affluent Society no Government is able to give orders to Big Business. After one budget a Labour Chancellor who tried to squeeze private industry too hard would soon discover that he was not master in his own house and that there is a relatively low level above which taxation rates, whether on the individual or the company, are only raised at the cost of provoking tax evasion and avoidance so widespread that revenue is actually reduced. If the motive of your economy is the profit-making of large-scale modem private enterprise, a Labour Government must be prepared to allow very large profits indeed and to admit that the number of golden eggs he can remove is extremely limited. ” (Labour in the Affluent Society, 1960)

His answer was that Labour should therefore seek to establish an enlarged state sector so as to give a Labour government more room to manoeuvre. The present Labour leaders would recoil in horror at such as suggestion, not that anyway it would have worked to protect a Labour government from the economic pressures of capitalism to keep costs down and profits up. Nor that the Labour governments of which Crossman was subsequently a member made any real attempt to do it.

Profits first

In fact Labour ministers ended up making speeches accepting that profits should be encouraged. Here is how one of them (Harold Lever who, like Healey was later ennobled) put it:

“Labour’s economic plans are not in any way geared to more nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of the profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership know as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel.” (Observer, 3 April 1966).

This could be Blair or Gordon Brown or any of the other Labour leaders speaking and well sums up what will be the only economic policy that a future Labour government will be able to pursue. Profits First, that’s the economic law of the capitalist system, which all governments of capitalism have to accept and apply.

If you accept the profit system, then you have to accept that profits have to be made and all that this implies, including opposing strikes, restraining wages and keeping taxes on Big Business low. Labour does accept the profit system, much more openly than they have done in the past, to the extent that today they are even prepared to advocate these things while still in opposition.

Nobody who is against the profit system has any place in Tony Blair’s bland new Labour Party. If you want more Law and Order, more Family Values, more blurred nothingness you might as well join Labour as the Tories or Liberals. But if you are a Socialist and want to get rid of the profit system you should be in a democratically-organised socialist party campaigning for socialism and nothing else.

Adam Buick

The Rise and Fall of Clause Four (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1918 the Labour Party transformed itself into a national organisation. At the same time it adopted a list of Party Objects, the fourth of which read: ‘To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.”

This was the nearest the Labour Party ever came to committing itself on paper to Socialism, since this could be interpreted as a somewhat wordy definition of real Socialism not all that different from the Object we in the Socialist Party adopted when we were founded in 1904: ‘The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.”

However, since it was drawn up by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and since the Fabians stood for a state capitalism run by an educated elite, it was meant to be understood as a reference to state ownership, or nationalisation, i.e. state capitalism.

This was confirmed when in 1929, as a result of left-wing pressure to commit the Labour Party to the nationalisation of the banks, the words “distribution and exchange” were added after “the common ownership of the means of production”. This made it absolutely clear that what was envisaged was not real socialism but state capitalism.

To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.

After Labour lost the 1959 election the then leader Gaitskill tried to get rid of Clause 4 on the grounds that it was an electoral liability, but had to back down in face of the opposition. Now Tony Blair is going to try again, with more chance of success it appears.

In a sense he his right: Labour does not stand for state capitalism – it stands for working within the present profit-driven market system dominated privately-owned companies. It stands for capitalism pure and simple. The dropping of Clause 4 will merely make this absolutely clear.

A touch of Blaired vision (1994)

TV Review from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Watching last month’s Labour Party Conference on BBC was a heady experience. The splendour of the Winter Gardens ballroom. Blackpool, the green-blue space-age set, the forward looking slogan “New Labour, New Britain" boldly outlined for all to see. the pinstripe suits, the floral ties and the presence of that nice young man Mr Blair, all combined to give the effect that was intended by the media men and spin doctors — Labour is back, but this time with a difference. Today it is a Labour Party that you could take home to meet your mother without the worry of it doing anything to embarrass you. This time round father can safely talk to it about how the plants in the greenhouse are coming along. Gone are the bad old days when it wore a donkey-jacket and was the political party from hell spitting on the pavement and farting in public. Labour is back, they say. and it has brought a bunch of chrysanths round and a box of Terry's Old Gold.

Not that Labour hasn’t tried to impress before. In 1992 it tried to sneak its way in the backdoor with claims that it had presents for granny and the young children, but father said he didn't trust it being in same room as his wallet. And father should know — he bitterly remembers being mugged by Labour back in the 1970s. It may all have happened on a dark night but he vividly recalls the bushy eyebrows. Father is not fooled by the new image and won't have Labour in the house again, let alone near his precious greenhouse.

But mother and the kids are not so sure. After all, Labour looks so attractive these days, and says some awfully nice things. It really is a charmer. And it's so boring having the same people round time and again — the bloke from number ten is always popping in with tales of woe. Nobody likes him and even the woman who did the catering for him doesn’t want to see him any more. The chap in the hush puppies from number eleven is no better and father suspects him of siphoning petrol out of the car. Compared to them, Labour seems like a breath of fresh air, but you can never tell can you?

Telling it like it isn’t

Labour is now busy convincing everyone that it is a bad egg that has reformed. Its conference was, in reality, not a conference at all, but an extended Party Political Broadcast aimed at Mr and Mrs Viewer with this end in mind. Its only discernible message was "you have nothing to fear from us — we are on your side”. Capitalists and workers, bosses and unions. Labour loves you all. Co-ordinated by the image-men for the benefit of TV, it was a stream of tepid speeches and meaningless assertions designed to connect with the hopes and, to some extent, prejudices of its potential voting fodder, generally workers whose views are moulded by the self-same media and advertising gurus.

And how the politicians tried to please. TV loves the soundbite, and there were plenty of them to be going on with "Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime", “traditional values in a modern setting", “a strong economy and a just society" rang out like a mantra, and all to demonstrate that Labour has a new user-friendly identity. Pity the poor TV interviewers, bombarded by a stream of verbal diarrhoea for five days. Sheena MacDonald, the anchor presenter, gritted her teeth every time she was forced to interview one of the front-bench robots, while on other occasions, such as when she had to interview John Prescott, she had to visibly stifle laughter at what are now vainglorious attempts at sobriety.

Tony Blair = I’m Tory Plan B

The Chief Robot’s speech was the ultimate triumph of form over content. Expertly delivered with the help of idiot boards, it was 62 minutes of a vision of a capitalist utopia that has never existed and which, with all certainty, will never exist. He even had the cheek to call it socialism, claiming that socialism was based on the understanding that “the individual does best in a strong and decent community of people with principles and standards. and common aims and values". How many in capitalist politics are going to disagree with that? Answer that question and you are well on the way to understanding what Blair and "new Labour" are all about.

But despite the hours of prolonged tedium, the TV coverage of the Conference did provide a few minutes of welcome relief just before Blair's speech. It is then that the Labour Party “Merit Awards" are handed out to long-serving Party members. The first up was an 86-year-old gent who had worked to help the strikers in the General Strike of 1926. To the palpable embarrassment of those around him, he delivered a speech which denounced the market economy and the world capitalist system and then singled out the drug religion as one of the greatest evils in modern society. Quite what he had been doing in the Labour Party for seventy years wasn’t clear, but it certainly took the cheesy grin off Blair’s face. If only Sheena MacDonald had done us all a favour and interviewed the old guy afterwards she would have found herself confronted by a critical intelligence for the first time all week. 

Dave Perrin

Voice From The Back: Prisoners of want (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prisoners of want

“One hundred thousand pensioners in old people’s homes are living on allowances of as little as £10 a week. Most are not even receiving the £16 weekly payment to which they are entitled, according to new research. The revelation that legions of old people live on less than many prison inmates will greatly embarrass Ministers, who have boasted of tackling pensioners’ poverty. “We were shocked when we discovered this,” said Lorna Easterbrook, who carried out the study for Help The Aged. “There’s a huge sense of humiliation among these old people. Some are getting £10 of their due allowances, but others are getting just £3 or £4 a week after relatives or homes make deductions.” Observer, 20 January.

The Observer journalist’s view that the Labour government ministers will be “greatly embarrassed” is probably wide of the mark. Nothing could embarrass these vile supporters of capitalism. Fellow workers, this could be your future inside capitalism. If you live beyond your ability to produce surplus value for the blood-sucking capitalist class. A bed pan and a tenner a week.

No cause for celebration

Twenty years ago a British Prime Minister told the Sun, and other slimy tabloid newspapers to “Rejoice” at the victory of the British capitalist class against the Argentine capitalist class. No mention was made at that time about the loss of working class life. We have no figures about the deaths of Argentine workers, but twenty years on, we have some about British workers. 255 British servicemen were killed, but even more awful since that madness, 264 British servicemen, who were involved have committed suicide. (Figures from the Guardian, 19 January.) Excuse us if we don’t rejoice, Thatcher, at the deaths of members of our class in the defence of your system. There are many orphans and widows of the working class today in both Argentine and Britain whose tears make joy impossible.

They like it, My Lord

“A Trade Union Congress report out today estimates that four million people, 16 percent of the workforce, work more than 48 hours a week, the limit set by the 1998 (European Union) directive. Men work the longest weeks with one in four clocking up more than 48 hours; one in ten working 55 hours; and one in 25 working more than 60 hours . . . John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, said: “Britain’s long-hour culture is a national disgrace. It leads to stress, ill-health and family strains.” Times, 4 February. Not everybody would agree with the TUC, though. John Crickland, Deputy Director-General of the CBI offers a defence of the long hours. “Workers want the right to make their own decisions about extra working hours. Managerial workers often work longer hours because they want to.” This defence is rather similar to the Fox Hunting Lobby’s – “The fox enjoys the hunt.”

Science and the profit motive

Inside socialist society the pursuit of knowledge will be free to all. There will be no restrictions on scientific investigation. This is impossible inside capitalism, with its copyright laws and its profit motive. Sir John Sulston, one of the leading researchers in the Human Genome Project has shown how powerful the profit motive is in science-based commerce. “We can’t possibly prohibit discovery. But on the other hand to imagine that we should always exploit, especially if it makes extra money, is insane. I think most reasonable people, including those who run companies, would agree. The trouble is, once people get into a company boardroom, they have no other choice. They have shareholders. I am afraid you have to leave your principles at the door of the boardroom”, he says.” Guardian, 2 February.

Blair, bombast and bombs

At the Labour Party conference last year Tony Blair said: “The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world”. Poverty, corruption, famine and war, he thundered like an Old Testament prophet, must be tackled. It went down big with the delegates. It is the sort of thing the Labour Party adore – talking about social problems in sanctimonious moral tones, and then doing nothing about it. But this time they were doing something about it – they were making it worse! “The government was facing condemnation from protesters against the arms trade last night after new figures revealed that the value of arms sales to Africa will more than quadruple by next year . . . High levels of spending on arms are seen as one of the main causes of poverty in Africa. A report by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) reveals that in 1999 African nations received £52 million worth of arms in deals with British firms. That figure rose to £125.5m in 2000 and is set to top £200m next year.” Observer, 3 February.

Post-combat syndrome

A report in the British Medical Journal claimed that post-conflict symptoms had been suffered long before the Gulf War and stretched back as far as the 1889 Boer War. “They concluded: “Post-combat syndromes have arisen in all major wars over the past century, and we can predict that will continue to appear after future conflicts” . . . The researchers said the best way to tackle the illnesses, which have cost subsequent governments considerable sums in financial assistance, was to better understand their characteristics.” Herald, 8 February. Surely, a much better way to deal with the problem is to abolish capitalism, the cause of modern warfare. No conflict = no post-conflict syndrome. You don’t need to be a trained medical researcher to work that one out.

 

World View: Strange values, denials and a few truths (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The proverbial line has been drawn in the sand and President George W Bush has told the world “either you’re with us or you’re against us.” It’s a catch-all sentiment that is taking hold. Indeed, one writer asked me through the letters page of the Shields Gazette: “A simple message to John Bissett. Which side are you on, ours or the terrorists?” “It’s that simple”, I’ve been told on the streets!

The mainstream view is that the forces of barbarism have declared war on the bastion of democracy. George Bush boldly declared: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another”, yet wonders not why, if this were so, the Statue of Liberty, the White House or the Lincoln memorial was not attacked on 11 September. Why the Pentagon and the WTC – one a symbol of America’s global military reach, the other a symbol of US economic prowess?

Of course there is much missing from Bush’s assertion that Islamic terrorists are simply jealous as hell of the democratic freedoms “enjoyed” in the US. The simple truth is that throughout the Middle East, indeed the world, the US has, despite its alleged support for movements towards democracy and greater freedoms for all, generally hampered provisional steps in the direction of democratisation whilst it has increased its support for despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco.

Israel, for instance, gets 40 percent of all US overseas aid. Meanwhile Israel is in breach of six UN resolutions and continues oppressing people in Palestine. During Jordan’s despotic and repressive rule in the 1970s and 80s, US aid for the Amman regime was enormous. Then when Jordan decided to oil the cogs of its political machine in the 1990s, that aid was vastly reduced and for a while suspended. Similarly, aid to Yemen was cut off within months of that unified country’s first “democratic” election. In recent weeks, when it was discovered that Qatar’s satellite channel Al-Jazeera was beginning to sound a little “pro-democracy”, upsetting regional dictators, broadcasting images of the US bombings and airing bin Laden’s now famous video, it was Colin Powell who demanded the channel be closed down, insisting it fostered “anti-Americanism”.

When it comes to Middle Eastern peace, the US’s actions have ensured that the region is as unstable as ever, cocking a snook at UN Resolution 687 which calls for region-wide disarmament – which would also mean an end to Israel’s nuclear capability – and at the same time selling $60 billion worth of arms to Middle Eastern country in 10 years (80 percent of all world arms exports to the Middle East). Israel, by the way, receives $3 billion in US military aid on the pretext that it is defending itself from its Arab neighbours – those same neighbours the US has armed to the teeth.

Writing in the Guardian (29 September), Artundhati Roy goes a little further. “Could it be”, she asks, “that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support of exactly the opposite things, to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorships, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocides?”

Blair’s double-speak

This side of the Atlantic, in his finest Orwellian double-speak, Tony Blair could announce: “The values we believe in should shine through in Afghanistan”. Could this be the same Blair whose government armed the Indonesian military machine that not so long ago ran rampage through East Timor? Whose government has signed 91 military export licences for Israel in the last eight months of the current Intifada? Such instances fly in the face of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office claim that “we will not issue export licences where there is clearly identifiable risk that the equipment might be used for internal repression or adversely effect regional stability”. Are these the same “values” which, on the same day as the attacks on the US, allowed the DSEi arms fair to go ahead in London and to continue for another two days? And are these same “values” informing a Labour government who, without any mandate from the UN, has helped notch up 15,000 RAF/USAF bombing raids on Iraq since the second Gulf War?

These same values are now behind the decision that Britain and the US should support a proxy army, the Northern Alliance, an outfit with an impressive record of widespread rape, pillage and murder in Kabul, in its confrontation with the Taliban. One of the key figures in the Northern Alliance is Abdul Rashid Dostom, and ally of Uzbekistan’s President Karimov, who has made huge profits from exporting drugs via Uzbekistan, and who allegedly was all to keen to secure Russian weapons and military supplies in exchange for keeping the gas flowing north.

Just as Blair’s values can enable him to curry favour with Israel’s Ariel Sharon, architect of the slaughter in Qibya in 1953 and the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila, so can these same ideals prompt him into friendly dialogue with President Karimov, whose airfields are suddenly strategically important now the bombing of Afghanistan has commenced. Karimov, incidentally, holds 7,000 political prisoners, allows no free press and no political opposition. And Karimov, of course, has other reasons for supporting the anti-Taliban alliance. His corrupt police state is facing bankruptcy and to prop it up he is intent on having a pipeline through Uzbekistan and Afghanistan to a Pakistani port.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was castigated by his boss for making a link between Palestine and the recent terrorist attacks in the US when he said that Middle Eastern terrorism was bred “by the anger many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.” Tony Blair was to spend 15 minutes on the phone to Ariel Sharon, trying to calm him down and get him to agree to meet Straw.

US foreign policy aims

Neither will Washington acknowledge its complicity in other areas which have a direct bearing on the present. Whilst Bush is mouthing off about the importance of curbing the funding of terrorist groups and keen to see the Taliban’s overseas assets frozen, it was his own administration, May gone, that scuttled international efforts to clamp down on tax havens, withdrawing support for an OECD initiative that called for more transparency in tax and banking procedures.

Moreover, it was again in May of this year that the Bush administration was giving the Taliban $43 million as an incentive to reduce the cultivation of poppies, knowing full well the Taliban were notorious abusers of human rights and that they harboured terrorists from all over the Islamic world. And there was no criticism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who for years gave the Taliban military and financial aid.

For quite some time now, US, German and Russian intelligence services have been alerting Washington to the fact that Osama bin Laden has been trying to acquire weapon’s grade nuclear material, indeed as early as 1993 from Russian outlets with poor controls. What was the response of the Bush administration to this? They proposed cutting funds for a programme aimed at preserving nuclear materials in the former USSR.

Of course all the cant and clever rhetoric and soldier speak of the last few weeks have helped mask what are now becoming the true intentions of the US. The attacks on the US on 11 September are now being used to serve US foreign and domestic policy.

The oil reserves of Central Asia are perhaps second to those of the Middle East and as Afghanistan is geographically located between the Caspian basin and the markets of Japan, China and the Indian sub-continent, we can well see the country’s strategic importance to foreign policy planners wishing to dictate the way in which the region’s oil and gas reserves are utilised to the benefit of the US dollar.

The “war on terrorism” is clearly being used to induce fear and mistrust in the US, and through this fear a justification will be found to curb all manner of civil liberties, increase police powers and military spending.

Furthermore, the current crisis serves to extend US power around the globe and perhaps set a definite agenda for the coming century, the ‘war on terrorism’ serving as a replacement for the Cold War, now that the US has had its anti-communist passport stamped null and void and is desperate to maintain a pretext to assert its hegemonic credentials.

None of which surprises socialists. We are well attuned to the machinations of the elites of powerful countries as they seek to promote the interests of their corporate backers. Though it is no easy task for the uninitiated, we urge our fellow workers to be as vigilant as ever. To believe the arguments of the likes of Bush and Blair is to disarm yourself intellectually – for it is at times like the present, when the media is dancing to the tunes of governments, when the trumpets of jingoism, patriotism and reaction are sounding, that we need to be fighting the war of ideas.

John Bissett

Capitalism is mental (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair emerged from his coffin recently to declare ‘We’ve got to get the younger generation back to work’ and ominously warned against ‘medicalising the ups and downs of life. You’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life’.

Anyone who’s been through a challenging period knows that of course it can impact your mental health. Yet Blair insists that too many young people are ‘choosing not to work,’ and calls for benefits reform. Now, Labour wants to cut Personal Independence Payments and has signalled it’ll tighten eligibility rules, with shadow ministers suggesting PIP ‘is not working as it should.’

Starmer’s proposed reforms to cut disability benefits provoked a rebellion by well over 100 Labour MPs who argued the plan would strip support from up to 800,000 people, deepen poverty for 300,000–700,000 more (including 50,000 children), and create a two-tier welfare system that abandons the most vulnerable. Critics, including grassroots movements like Disabled People Against Cuts and disabled constituents, warn this is a continuation of austerity, with MPs likening it to ‘the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne’. Charities insisted cuts wouldn’t boost employment and demanded a pause, transparency, and genuine consultation with disabled people. Labour MPs were pledging to vote against and calling for alternative reforms like taxing the super rich instead of penalising those in need.

Since then, following public backlash and intervention by the UN, Parliament voted on 1 July to remove the clauses tightening PIP (formerly Disability Living Allowance) eligibility. These measures are now to be deferred pending a review led by ‘Sir’ Stephen Timms, expected in autumn 2026. Existing PIP claimants are said not to be affected by the current legislation. However, changes to Universal Credit remain in place: from April 2026, new claimants of the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity element will receive reduced support. Existing recipients will continue receiving full payments, adjusted for inflation through 2029.

The Rosenhan experiment

The Rosenhan experiment (1973) exposed flaws in psychiatric diagnosis. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven others feigned auditory hallucinations to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, they acted normally, but doctors still diagnosed them with serious mental illnesses and kept them institutionalised for weeks.

The study highlighted the subjectivity and unreliability of psychiatric labels, showing that once someone was labelled as mentally ill, even ‘normal’ behaviour was interpreted as pathological. In a follow-up challenge, a hospital claimed it could spot fake patients and identified several, only for Rosenhan to reveal he had sent none.

Colonisation of the mind

This is not just about a few misguided doctors. The Western medical model has long been, in part, a tool of oppression. Colonisers have always arrived with missionaries, medics, mercenaries, and merchants. Psychiatry was part of that arsenal, often pathologising indigenous cultures, crushing resistance, and justifying forced assimilation. Traditional beliefs and ways of life were conveniently labelled as madness.

Psychiatry helped run residential schools, enforced sterilisation, and packed institutions, all aimed at breaking indigenous communities. On occasion, psychiatric diagnosis was used to pathologise cultural difference, frame indigenous resistance as insanity and justify colonial policies of confinement and re-education. The same logic still operates today. Psychiatric labels are often used to control people rather than help them.

‘Mad bints’

Women have always been prime targets for psychiatry’s controlling hand. Those who refused to fit into patriarchal roles were labelled hysterical or locked away in asylums. Psychiatry became a handy tool to silence women who challenged capitalism, patriarchy, or both.

Colonisation made this worse for indigenous women who were branded insane for practising traditional healing or resisting colonial authority. Today, women—especially those who are neurodivergent or marginalised—are still dismissed, misdiagnosed, and overmedicated. Psychiatry continues to treat women’s distress as personal pathology rather than a response to social and economic oppression.

A true alternative would focus on community care, autonomy, and dismantling the structures that create suffering in the first place. But when the profit motive comes into play it stops being about helping and about making people useful.

Adaptive response to capitalism?

Humans are nothing if not adaptive; that’s how we’ve survived this long. Under capitalism’s relentless pressure, people, especially those who are marginalised, develop ways of thinking and acting that do not fit into narrow boxes labelled normal.

Neurodivergence is not purely created by capitalism; it has always existed and would exist under other systems. But the way it manifests today is shaped by the demands and pressures of this system.

Traits like hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and creative thinking can help people resist the nonsense of capitalism. Yet capitalism only values these traits when they increase productivity. Difficulties with executive function or sensory processing become disabling because of rigid, noisy, and punishing environments.

If we lived in a society structured differently—one that prioritised people instead of profit—neurodivergence might look very different, both in how common it is and how it is understood.

Class war in our minds

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.

The pushback against capitalism is in many ways also a neurodivergent pushback—one that questions authority, re-imagines community, and refuses the dehumanisation that capitalism enforces.

Capitalism will always find new ways to divide us, control us and blame us for the suffering it creates. The only real cure is to get rid of the system making us sick in the first place.

The fight against capitalism must also be a fight for neurodivergent liberation. We need to see the links between capitalism, trauma, and neurodivergence if we want a world where all minds are valued, not just those that keep the profit machine running.

A.T.

Lies, half-truths and weapons of mass destruction (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, September 4, 2002

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” George Bush, March 18, 2003

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.” Kenneth Adelman, US Defense Policy Board , March 23, 2003

“Saddam’s removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction.” Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003

In the months leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Blair regimes produced reams of documents to prove Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam could realistically fire them within 45 minutes. As they geared up for war they reiterated time and again that their intention was solely to rid Iraq of its WMD and make the world a more stable place for decent and god-fearing people to live in. They campaigned long and hard for their war – for the support of their peers in governments and for the backing of the US and British electorates and, convinced they had the mandate for war, invaded Iraq in March. Two months after the end of the fighting no “illegal” weapons have been found and the odds of finding any diminish greatly as the days go by.

The recent admission from a British security chief that the 50-page “intelligence” report on Iraq’s WMD presented by Tony Blair to Parliament on 24 September last year – and used as the Labour government’s evidence for Iraq’s illicit weapons inventory – was spiced up on the government’s instructions came as no real surprise for those who have scrutinised the unfolding of the US-UK war with Iraq and the Labour government’s desperation to be part of it. Since the transatlantic plan to invade Iraq was hatched it was apparent that Truth would again be the First Casualty of War.

For their part, the CIA and their British counterparts have tried to distance themselves from their respective governments these past few weeks, with unprecedented briefings and leaks to the press, desperate to avoid the backlash that has lead to some serious questioning in London and Washington.

On a visit to Poland on 30 May, Tony Blair told a press conference that finding the weapons in Iraq was “not the most urgent priority”. And yet, according to the claims of the dossier that he defends, Saddam Hussein “has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability” and that his “current military planning specifically envisages the use” of these weapons. For months we had the Blair government ramming the WMD issue down our throats, pleading for our support for his war with Saddam, who threatened the civilisation we cherished. Yet as Saddam and his military top brass, who presumably know about these WMD, which are yet to be found, are still on the run we are told that finding the weapons is not an urgent priority!

Also now discredited by the CIA is the evidence US Secretary of State Colin Powell eagerly displayed to the UN Security Council at the beginning of February. Powell provided explicit particulars of the key players in Iraq’s WMD programme as well as the sites that are now under US military control. Nevertheless, the biologically-armed “missile brigade”, which he claimed was situated outside Baghdad has proved to be a figment of his imagination and the weapons scientists he informed the world were afraid of talking because of Saddam’s reach have not yet disclosed any secrets. As with the alleged “poison camp” near Khurmal, its labyrinth of tunnels and complex chemical communication network, so too with the photos of twenty or so Baghdad-based al-Qa’ida members the UN was presented with. No evidence whatsoever.

In spite of every quality newspaper demanding answers from him in the wake of the secret services admission, Blair, it seemed, was learning nothing. Rather than running for cover he began blurting more lies, claiming that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the African state of Niger. The documentary evidence this fresh allegation was based on has since been confirmed as forgery by the International Atomic Energy Authority. Indeed, the Bush administration was aware that this evidence was bogus a year earlier – something Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have since admitted. Moreover, early last year Vice President Dick Cheney sent a former US ambassador in Africa to Niger look into the story. Although the latter brought back word that the documents were not genuine, this was not sufficient to prevent the use of these documents as part of Bush’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

The sorry situation becomes more pathetic. US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld has lately offered that the reason Saddam’s WMD can’t be found is because they were destroyed before the war started. In other words the US-Britain invaded Iraq to rid the region of weapons Saddam never had and indeed that Saddam claimed he never had and which the UN weapons inspectors suggested he never had. If this was the case, then Saddam could never have been in breach of the famous resolution 1441, which was the justification for war.

Critics might consider that in light of recent revelations Blair should resign and that Bush should be impeached. Surely politicians should not be allowed to lie like this! But hold on.

Lying is the trade of politicians under capitalism.

Back in 1925, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “This broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Blair and Bush are fully aware of the power of the big lie, so little wonder they thought they could get away with it. Moreover they are fully aware their support base swallows lies every living moment of the day. For the workers’ part they are lied to from the cradle to the grave: at school with distortions of history and the myth about a God up above; in the workplace, as producers, lied to by their bosses and at home as consumers bombarded with the myths perpetuated by the advertising industry.

To be sure, the entire capitalist edifice depends for its continued survival on the promotion of lies, half truths and the distortion of facts. So powerful is the capitalist distortion machine that it takes all our powers of concentration, memory recall and skills of research just to separate the simplest of lies from fantasy. This constant digest of misinformation perhaps explains the amnesia the majority of workers appear to suffer from. And what is exasperating is that in spite of all the evidence revealing the architects of war to be the conniving and scheming rapscallions we always knew them to be, it is a fair bet that many workers will again be ready to believe their lies when Iran is found to be stockpiling WMD and harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists.

It may well be that WMD will be found in Iraq – but the assumption now will be that will have been planted there by corrupt Western regimes desperate to justify their invasion. And this evidence will likely be used not only to prop up the discredited Messrs Bush and Blair but also to malign the anti-war movement – which claimed this was a war for oil – and to further strengthen their case for a continuation of the “war on terror”.

In the months ahead be careful what you swallow.

John Bissett

Greasy Pole: The Importance of Being Irvine (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

It sounds like the kind of question which might have come in a sticky passage a few weeks ago in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Who was the most senior and the highest paid member of the government? You want to ask the audience: most of them think it had to be the Prime Minister. So you want to phone a friend; they think it’s a trick question and it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer because he’s responsible for taxes. Bad luck; you’ve just lost a few thousand pounds because the correct answer was the Lord Chancellor, who technically – and traditionally – outranked the Prime Minister and earned a lot more because his pay was linked to what the judges got while common or garden ministers and MPs had to rub along on pay linked to that of senior civil servants. After a rise of £22,691 – a lot more than the basic pay of many people in a year – the Lord Chancellor trousered £202,736, compared to the Prime Minister’s £175,414 and other Cabinet ministers £127,791. For the Lord Chancellor it got even better: his pay was protected by what used to be called a differential – a whopping one, which ensured that he always gets a lot more than that other legal bigwig the Lord Chief Justice.

Of course some of the lucky recipients of that kind of money might be expected to be a bit bashful, especially as they earn some of it by telling the rest of the people to be satisfied with much, much less to get by on. But politicians are not famous for being bashful about their double, or treble, or quadruple, standards. One who went to great lengths to avoid a reputation for bashfulness or restraint in his self-indulgences is the man who was Lord Chancellor until Blair’s recent re-shuffle which not only got rid of him but abolished his job. An event which must have brought back memories for workers who were similarly treated in the steel industry, the coal mines, the shipyards . . . He answers to the title of Lord Irvine of Lairg – or Derry as he is known to any friends he has or to those who are trying to help their careers along by being seen as his friend. Early in the life of the new Blair government Irvine put down his marker when he made it plain that he had no intention of agreeing to forego the £16,000 rise which ministers were awarding themselves but which Chancellor Gordon Brown thought they should not have. Then there was the matter of the £650,000 spent on the refurbishment of his official residence, including the famous hand-blocked wallpaper, which at 300 pounds a roll pounds cannot be bought at the local B&Q, and the gothic beds at £16,000 each and the works of art which were “donated” by museums and the like.

Humble Origins

Clearly, Irvine regarded himself as something special. In fact he came from beginnings which were very much run of the mill of the working class. His father was a tiler and his mother a waitress. Young Derry looked beyond such a life: he won a scholarship to a posh school then took degrees at Glasgow and Cambridge Universities. He became a barrister and set up chambers where he employed a future Prime Minister, who met his future wife among the dusty law books and beribboned briefs in the Irvine chambers. Whatever favours Irvine may be thought to have done for the man he continued to call “young Blair” were amply repaid when the first Labour Prime Minister for almost twenty years signalled the end of the times of privilege and nepotism by appointing his old mate to be the highest judge in the land. Which suited Irvine to the tips of his elegant footwear because he was by then notorious for his arrogance and his bullying, a man who had to have a flunky peel his oranges for him, a man of whom a fellow peer could say “You have to think through carefully what you are going to say to him for fear of getting your balls burned off”.

The job of Lord Chancellor involved being both judge and politician, which was well suited to Irvine. Apart from his passion for the finer things in life he had a reputation for being swollen with his own importance. In October 1997, not long in the job, in a speech to the Reform Club he compared himself to Cardinal Wolsey, who basked in the favours of Henry VIII and who was also fond of a lavish life style, which was why he had Hampton Court built for himself. It was not an entirely happy comparison because Wolsey fell out of Henry’s good books and ended his days ducking and diving to avoid being tried (and almost certainly executed) for treason. Irvine’s pomposity may have been punctured when his son Alistair got 16 months in a Los Angeles prison for stalking and threatening the boyfriend of a woman who had dumped him. In any case young Blair has now decided that the solution to a number of questions is to move Irvine over and make room for another old chum in Lord Falconer, who is said to be as clever as Irvine but by no means as arrogant. There was the usual exchange of letters, which were unusually frosty in tone.

Irvine’s retirement had been copiously leaked; it was whispered that Blair was losing patience with his old boss because he was not living up to his promise to reform the legal systems. Perhaps more to the point, the tabloids were after Irvine – and if there thing which concerns Blair it is to appease the gutter press. In some ways the Lord Chancellorship was an open target for the tabloids, for of all the grand jobs in the government it was about the grandest. Apart from the mediaeval clothes and sitting on something called the Woolsack (which is in fact a sack of wool) he had more than one job. He was head of the judiciary, with the last say in the appointment (and the sacking) of the judges and the magistrates. He was Speaker of the House of Lords (where a previous man in the job, Lord Hailsham, would sit on the Woolsack muttering “bollocks” in response to the speeches of some of the noble lords). And he was a member of the Cabinet, in the chair of several committees. His style of running those committees was not universally popular because he was in the habit of acting like a prosecutor with ministers as the criminals in the dock.

Judges and Politics

Of course ministers often have multiple responsibilities. The unusual thing about the Lord Chancellorship was the apparent clash between being head judge and a member of the Cabinet, which at the least questioned whether the Courts were as insulated from political pressure as they were supposed to be. One of the problems with Irvine was that he used the combined roles to avoid disciplining judges. Hailsham, applying the kind of logic which is beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals, argued that the very unity of the roles was an insurance that they would be kept separate. The Council of Europe took a different view, saying that the dual responsibility is a contravention of human rights; in February eleven members of the Council signed a resolution which said the arrangement called the independence of the judges “seriously into question”. This was widely welcomed and not necessarily in the tabloids, which are not expected to concern themselves with such arcane questions. Roger Smith, the Director of Justice, said “the political powers of the Lord Chancellor can no longer be combined with a role as a judge”.

But who says they can’t? Does anyone seriously believe that judges do their job, running a court case, summing up evidence, passing sentences, in ignorance of political influences? Consider the case of Lord Denning, once one of the most eminent judges in the land, who once bemoaned the fact that the Guildford Four had not been executed because it would have prevented all that fuss about their being innocent. Denning gave his opinion in another notorious case, when the Birmingham Six applied to sue the police. In refusing the application, which was based on evidence of brutality and falsification of evidence by the police, Denning said that the mere suggestion of police corruption was “. . . such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’”. And when it had to be admitted, even by the most stubbornly blind, politically motivated, judge that the police had been violent and had lied, Denning made a nauseatingly lame and partial apology: “As I look back I am very sorry, because I always thought that our police were splendid and am very sorry that in this case it appears the contrary.” By then the Six had spent another eleven years in prison.

Retirement

Denning’s doomed defence of the police was based on his assumption that they must be immune from such criticism because of the part they play under capitalism. This system is based on a minority class owning the means of life, which is another way of saying that the majority are denied access to those means and can get it only with the consent of the owning class – by being employed by them. Of course the majority could help themselves but this would be a basic assault on the system so there is a vast and complex structure, called the law and the legal system, which prevents them doing this. At the sharp end of that structure are the police. To challenge this is to take on the very weaponry with which capitalism asserts its essentially coercive nature. Irvine’s lucrative and self-ennobling career demonstrated the grim reality of this. His going and replacement will not change things. In any case he will be getting a pension package worth £2.6 million, he will continue to sit as a judge, and then there is always the chance of the odd directorship or consultancy, writing his memoirs, or joining the after-dinner speaking circuit. He will not want. It will be even better for him than if he had won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Ivan

News from the madhouse (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair and God

Tony Blair is expecting an interview – in due course – with God: he told a journalist (as the Times, of 3 May, phrased it) that “I’m ready to meet my Maker and answer for those who have died or who have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions”. This, of course, is the get-out of rulers down the ages. Rulers have always told the ruled, we will judge you here and now, and execute sentence upon you; if you ask who will judge us, it will be an old boy with a long beard in the sky after we’ve died. But if you’ve been charged with failing to pay your council tax, or parking on a double yellow line, don’t tell the judge you will answer for your actions in a few years’ time, when you have popped your clogs: he won’t wear it. Only rulers get away with that line.

Line of least resistance

People criticise Blair for his new slogan in foreign affairs: “find what George Bush wants, and do the same”. But Blair has his reasons. To start with, it simplifies matters; but also, since Blair has to do his best for the British ruling class, it may work out best for them as things stand in the year 2003. Kids at school sometimes do the same: find the biggest bully in the playground, and suck up to him.

Mortgages

“Mortgages should come with a public health warning because the struggle to keep up with payments is making millions of people sick, said the British Medical Association yesterday” (Times, 7 May). “Many who fall behind with their mortgage payments become so fearful of losing their home that they drink and smoke too much, their relationships break down and they even have more car crashes because they are so preoccupied, one contributor to the BMA report, Housing and Health, said.” While repossession is at its lowest level for years – “only” about a hundred people a week are still losing their homes – any slump in the housing market could trigger “a return to the traumas of the 1990s, when more than a million people had their homes repossessed”.

A sad commentary on what was sold to us as a “home-owning democracy”. But in every way, the present organization of society inevitably involves money worries for millions. Capitalism means the wages system, and that means that those who have to work for their living are dependent on their next pay-packet to buy in the necessary supplies – or sometimes, just to pay the interest on their credit cards, overdrafts, mortgages and all the other borrowings that capitalism imposes on its workers. The “struggle to keep up with payments”, which makes “millions of people sick”, will continue until capitalism makes enough of us sick to bring about a different system. It isn’t only mortgages that need a public health warning: it’s capitalism.

Property is death

People aren’t only made sick by capitalism, they die from it, as you can see in all the many conflicts going on at this moment round the world. But private property kills on a small scale, as well as a large. At a pawnbroker’s shop in north London, a Securitas cash box was being delivered recently. To keep this instalment of private property sacrosanct, the box was fitted with “a small explosive device”, which “released smoke and dye” if anyone tampered with the box (Times, 7 May). As a further protection, the box was handed over through an airlock. Two women assistants were in the staff-only part of the shop, where the valuables were protected “by barred windows and a locked fire exit which needed four keys to open it”. The explosive device malfunctioned, setting fire to the premises, but the women could not get through the locks and bars which surrounded them, and they both died. Firefighters couldn’t get in soon enough. The brother of one of the women called her on his mobile phone, and had to listen helplessly as she choked to death. The inquest jury were told how one of the women put her hand through the bars of the customer’s window, and a fireman held her hand until she died.

Why do people go on supporting capitalism?

Letter: WOMD (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

WOMD

Dear Editors

The two big lies which Blair and Bush used to “justify” the destruction of Iraq’s civilisation and infrastructure and the slaughter of thousands of its citizens are now for all to see.

Lie number one was possession of weapons of mass destruction (WOMD) by Iraq.  Before the war, the regime couldn’t win.  Complying with demands to destroy stocks of WOMD would “prove” it had been in breach of UN resolution since 1991.  Non destruction of alleged stocks would “prove” it continued to be in defiance.

Now it is Blair’s and Bush’s turn to be hanged by their logic.  If after invading and occupying Iraq, there still cannot find WOMD, then what shocking, disgusting deceit have they spun.  If they do find any evidence of WOMD, then lie number two is also torn to shreds, that Saddam’s regime was a dangerous threat to its neighbours and even to Britain and America.  If ever they were going to be used, it was when the life of the regime itself and the  capital Baghdad were under threat from the new crusaders.  They were not.

However, I would not at all be surprised to learn of a little “gardening” activity by the occupation forces in the next few days or weeks and the “discovery” of suspicious munitions, workshops and documents.  Watch out too for the next big lies that most of the evidence was slipped out to Syria, alongwith much of the Iraqi leadership, as part of the softening up process for preparing the public for the next stage of this permanent murderous war.

The real possessors of WOMD are the ruling elites of Britain and America.  They not only have them, they are using them to inflict agonising pain and suffering and carnage on ordinary working people.  We too need to declare a war on such people and their weapons, but a class war, a real war of liberation, a war for emancipation, a war for socialism.

Andrew Northall,

 Isham, Northants

Euro, Euro on the Wall (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair has used that pathetic excuse for accountability, the television interview (in which two powerful men get to spar verbally before the massed ranks of passive spectating viewers) to float the possibility that he might support a referendum over the Euro soon. It was on Newsnight’s series of interviews where Blair told Jeremy Paxman that he was willing to be remembered as the Prime Minister that took Britain into the single currency. This slight admission, couched in Blairean caveats and obfuscations, was immediately spun by the loyal sheep in the press as a serious indicator of the state of Downing Street thinking on the Euro, a move in the cabinet chess game.

The reason for Blair’s caution is the deep indecision over the Euro issue, not only among politicians, but also among their paymasters in the capitalist class. His position of stating that he will only ever act in the “national interest” (i.e. in the interests of those as own Britain) is merely re-iterating the obvious, until our masters can actually work out what actually is in their interest. Socialists are able to point this out with ease, as we have done several times in the pages of this journal. What we need to do, as well, is observe quite why the capitalist class is itself undecided.

 

In socialism, Europe will be fully unified by having no money

 

One of the basic premises of the materialist method of examining society is that ideas simply do not just fall from the sky, but instead develop over time through the actions of people within a particular set of circumstances. That is, human beings make society and its values/ideas, but within the constraints imposed by the actions of other human beings, and the relations between those people. This accounts for the clash of ideas and political opinions not only between classes, but within classes as well. It is the constraints and actions of people within the capitalist system that has produced the running arguments over the Euro.

Contrary to what some groups believe, the capitalist class is not an eternally cohesive, Machiavellian cabal perfectly capable of imposing its will and interest on wider society. It is riven by differences as each capitalist strives to pursue their own economic interest and seize as much a share of the surplus value produced by social production as they are able, by every means at their disposal: legal, political, economic or criminal. The means by which each capitalist secures their share of surplus value determines their economic interest, and each capitalist will do everything within their (considerable) power to secure and enhance that interest. Capitalists who export will want to see an army capable of defending their interests, manufacturers want stability and low wages, transporters want to see low oil prices, etc.

The relations of these economic interests of British capitalists to the EU can be seen by looking at the trade statistics; in 1999 the UK exported £84 billion worth of goods to EU destinations, as compared with £55 billion to elsewhere. Overall, then, 61 percent of trade was to EU purchasers. Further, the UK receives 52 percent of imports from EU member states. Taken on their own, these statistics – other considerations aside – indicate that the capitalist class should favour the Euro in facilitating trade with its major partners. If we look, however, behind the national abstraction of the UK capitalists’ interest, and look instead to the more specific details, then a different picture emerges.

For instance, each statistical region of the UK, bar one, exports the majority of their goods to the EU, some, such as Scotland, send 70 percent of their produce to an EU state. The exceptional region is London. London exports 55 percent of its produce to non-EU destinations. Of course, under capitalism, it is not the size or population of a region that determines its say, but its wealth, and London’s non-EU exports represents 8.15 percent of all UK exports, and 20.7 percent of all extra-EU trade: a total of £11.3 billion worth of exports. Likewise, London imports £21 billion worth of goods from outside the EU, representing 11 percent of import value, and 58 percent of the capital’s import trade. This represents an enormous share of UK trade, and much more than any other single region can lay claim to. (All Stats ‘Regional Trends 2000’, ONS)

This regional disparity is significant for one main reason: when looking at the distribution of national types of industry, it’s clear that over 80% of London’s businesses are in the service sector. Whilst this includes retail firms, it also includes insurance companies and stock brokers, etc. The presence of the City of London region, and the financial and stock exchanges is a big factor in this preponderance of the service sector in the region and many of its exports and imports are a product of international financial transactions, the shuffling of electronic claims to riches from one side of the world to the other, and trading in currencies.

A great many of these London firms, then, will be dependent on being able to extract economic rent from exploiting the restrictions on capital investment caused by currency blocs, whether from pounds to dollars or pounds to Euros. They thus not only have an interest in trading with economic partners other than the EU, but also retaining the pound to protect their income from transaction costs. It is this combination of interests which leads to economic nationalism being prioritised over joining a trading currency zone.

Given the historic and continuing cultural, administrative, and ideological importance of London, the national capitalist class would be unwilling, to say the least, to go directly against the interests of this important sector of British capital. Specifically, a great many of those service firms in London depend upon its centrality to the British state for their business, an interest they would be willing to defend. Add to all this that the minority of exporters to outside the EU still add up to a substantial number who will be willing to side with those who derive their interest from London, and then we begin to unravel some of the reasons why the capitalist class is at a seeming impasse about its potential future economic interests due to its divided internal composition.

This situation accounts, at least in part, for the political situation with regards to the Euro. The Tory Party has traditionally had a strong faction of ideological nationalists whose attachment to the idea of Britain is not contradicted by any personal interest in pursuing the Euro project (indeed, many, as small business folk, will have to bear much of the implementation cost of the Euro). Likewise, the Tories established themselves as a party close to the financiers in the City of London during the Thatcher period and, just as importantly, as being closer to the political, cultural and economic interests of the United States and Wall Street than the EU. These attachments currently enable Labour leaders to try to depict the debate as being about unregulated international finance capital versus domestic industrial/manufacturing capital, playing on old prejudices of ‘wealth producers against bankers’ and attracting support from their allies in trade unions associated with manufacturing.

It is not a question, though, of the ineluctable differences between two essentially different models of capitalism, as Labour hacks will kid themselves, but personal competition between capitalists and the political fallout from this. Furthermore, the consequences of this situation are already beginning to be played out. A week prior to Blair’s statement, Prescott and Byers announced plans for English regional devolution: that is, greater political autonomy being removed from London and spread to regional assemblies as want it. Aside from tapping into the same liberal seam of thought as inspired national devolution to Scotland and Wales, it also provides a means for capitalists in regions outside London to be able to have more control in order to be able to direct their affairs without the interferences by capitalist interests in London. This is in line with the concept of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ by which the supporters of the Europe project hope, among other things, to bypass the influence of those interested in British ‘national’ capital and its historic ties with US finance.

Of course it all goes to show that the nation, and nationalism, are not an eternal and essential characteristic of human beings as some would have it, but are solely a tool for pursuing the further interests of sections of the master class at given points in history. Indeed, the current situation of market interpenetration between British capital and that of its EU partners is itself the result of over forty years of state policy (a fact that some capitalists will be aware of), and if they finally decide against pursuing economic union with the EU, they could equally look around the world for other options.

As such, the working class has no interest in this passing show of inter-capitalist squabbling over the Euro, except to note the spectacle and prepare for the day when there are no more nations to be interested in and money to squabble over.

Pik Smeet

Capitalist Values in the Modern World (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The long stated aim of the Labour Party is to run the market economy better than the Tories. What they really mean is that they want to try and run capitalism better — though, as yet, they haven't mustered the courage to use that word. To most people now, the Labour Party is an alternative to the Conservative Party only in the same way that Pepsi is an alternative to Coca Cola

There is a profound dishonesty about the Labour Party’s discussion document, Labour's Objects: Socialist values in the modern world, which is the basis for discussion throughout that party and for its special conference abandonment of Clause Four next month. We use the term dishonesty advisedly, for, the document is a work of confidence trickery, designed to convince Labour’s rank-and-file that it is about “strengthening socialist values”, when in fact it is a total capitulation to the ideology of capitalism.

Of course, Labour has always been a capitalist party in the sense that it has never sought to abolish production for profit and establish production for use. Even veteran left-winger, Tony Benn, whose knowledge of the Labour Party is rather longer and broader than that of Tony Blair, has repeated persistently that "the Labour Party is not — and probably never was — a socialist party” (Independent, 17 May 1989) and that "Socialism has been explicitly repudiated. Capitalism is hardly ever mentioned. The only political choice seems to be between two management teams, both committed to . . . the status quo. " (Tribune, 8 April 1994). Most Labour activists know that Benn is right, so the current talk of “socialist values” is nothing more than fraudulence.

Neither democratic nor socialist

Never in recent times has the term “socialist” and“socialism”appeared so often in a Labour Party document as in this latest one. It is there as a sop to the party's members. It is an insult to their political intelligence, treating them as mugs who will be won over by empty words. Sadly, in many cases it will succeed. But the mugs will pay their price, for once the leaders have their new constitution you can be sure that the term “socialism” will be as absent from future speeches and literature as it has been from every recent Labour Party manifesto. The truth is that these power-seeking politicians are embarrassed by those of their “comrades” who joined the party thinking (mistakenly) that it was socialist.

Not only is it dishonest, but also undemocratic. Blair announced that he wanted to change the objective of his party. Having stated this and called for debate, when the first response to his view came in a Guardian ad placed by a number of Labour MEPs who totally repudiated his position he admonished them for daring to criticise him in public, declaring such action to be “immature”. Is that Blair’s idea of a democratic discussion? According to polls, the overwhelming majority of constituency Labour parties are opposed to scrapping Clause Four. Blair’s response is to move the goalposts and insist that all book-members of his party have a vote, ensuring that the constituency activists will be outvoted. When the current document was circulated there was no invitation to opponents of the leader to circulate their points of view' in the same mail-out. Such democracy would not even occur to a fundamentally undemocratic party like Labour. Indeed, worse than that, on the green “Response Sheet” within the bogus consultation document, incredibly, there exists no place to state any support for Clause Four.

Contrast this with the Socialist Party where all policy is made by conference, which is mandated by all members, or by a party poll of each and every. member. Any move to change our Object or Declaration of Principles would be thoroughly debated, undoubtedly the subject of a party poll in which all sides would have their views published and circulated at the party’s expense, and then decided by a vote of members after full discussion without any priority being given to leaders (we have none) or officials That is the only way to conduct socialist debate and those who stray from the ways of democracy have absolutely no right to call themselves socialists.

Capitulation to capitalism

On page two we are told that “The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party” which is a lie: it is neither democratic nor socialist. But you have only to read on to page eight to see just what that means to them: "We believe in an economy that works in the public interest. A competitive market economy, with a strong industrial and wealth generating base is in the public interest. ”

Now, you are either in favour of production "in the public interest” (i.e. for need) or within “a competitive market” (i.e. for sale and profit). The two aims are mutually exclusive. The market cannot be run in the public interest because it is a market in which most of the public are themselves on sale, as items of labour power to be bought for less than the cost of what they produce. Profit arises out of the difference between what workers produce and what we are paid. So, in supporting the market Labour is necessarily opposing the workers’ interests. We are prepared to accept that Blair and his co-leaders are quite ignorant of this point and really believe that you can run a socialist society on the basis of market competition. They are theoretically shallow people whose sole political experience has been gained in vote-trading and devising policies for capitalism. But surely many of their followers, some at least of whom will have joined Labour in revulsion against the market and profits, will see the absurdity of the position they are being asked to vote for.

Again dishonestly, the document explains that talk of “common ownership” only came about because "there was a genuine revulsion at the sheer anarchy and exploitation associated with the free market of Victorian capitalism”. The reference to “Victorian capitalism” is a clever piece of trickery, leading readers to assume that of course 1990s’ capitalism is free from economic anarchy, the exploitation of wage labour and the vandalism of “the free market”. Many Labour members and supporters will know just how much this applies to capitalism in 1995, especially when looked at as a global system.

We offer no advice to Labour's membership as to whether they vote for or against Clause Four. If it is retained the party’s leaders, including Blair, have already declared it to be meaningless and to have meant nothing to them for years. (So much for what is written on every' Labour Party membership card!) If it is scrapped the process of turning Labour into a more successful version of Owen’s SDP will be completed No self-respecting worker seeking the end of the market-capitalist economy will remain in the Labour Party.

Power at any cost

But there is one reason for supporting anything that Blair proposes, however dishonest, undemocratic, confused and at odds with what you actually believe it might be, and that is spelt out in the second paragraph of the document:

"There are those who will ask why it is necessary to have this debate. The answer is simple. We will not win an election unless we win the trust of the people. ”

But what precisely is winning “the trust of the people”? Is it really the case that millions of workers (who, oddly enough, have put Labour in a massive poll lead because they are so desperate to get rid of the Tories) are saying “Well, we would vote Labour, but not until they can convince us that they support a competitive market economy”? We think not. But you can be quite sure that the Murdoch Empire and the Stock Exchange are after a firm assurance. Remember, in the last election the crook’s own daily, the Financial Times, urged its readers to vote Labour. Blair’s job is to convince as many of these people as possible that his government can provide a low-taxed, low-waged, highly-policed competitive market economy in Britain. The increasingly obnoxious Daily Mirror on 30 January carried an editorial entitled “There's No Clause for Concern” in which readers are urged to "be cheered by (Blair’s) determination to create a just and equal society”. This is fraud, not that different from the tradition of the Mirror's unlamented old crook of a proprietor (himself an ex-Labour MP).

There will be those workers within the Labour Party who will reluctantly bow to their leaders and do simply anything to get a Labour government elected. Anything, they will tell themselves, must be better than the Tories. Must it? What about a party of Blair-led Labour-Tories, funded by union money and acting like recent Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand which, according to workers there, are worse, if anything, than their conservative rivals? Power at any cost is a very foolish course to adopt.

It is not as if there is no choice. There is a Socialist Party. Our Object is what any self-respecting and principled socialist would support. Tony Benn says that he will stick with the Labour Party until he dies: an act of dogmatic commitment worthy of religious zealotry. But what about workers who are young enough to want something more than loyalty to a dishonest capitalist party for their future? You owe it to yourselves to find out more about what genuine socialists are saying and doing.

Steve Coleman