The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (2004)

Book Review from the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Penguin Books have published in their Modern Classics series a new edition of this working class classic by Robert Tressell. Price £8.99. Well worth reading if you’ve not got a copy already –  despite the odd choice, to write the introduction, of a one-time “ministerial adviser in the Labour government of 1997-2001”, odd because Tressell was a member of the SDF, whose members had some knowledge of Marxian ideas, enough anyway for them to see through Labourism.

Franchise Centenary: A Very Limited Democracy (2018)

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836 – 1917)

From the September 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Centenary of Votes for All Men and Some Women

The demonstrations in June to mark the centenary of the coming into force of the Representation of the People Act 1918 (which was obviously a good thing) didn’t tell the whole picture. It is quite well-established now that the Suffragists (constitutionalists) and the Suffragettes (direct actionists) were both campaigning not for votes for all women, but only for votes for women on the same terms as men, votes for ‘middle class property-owning women’ (see: LINK).

As about a third of men didn’t have the vote before 1918, this would have left an even higher proportion of women without the vote. Hence the criticism of both the Suffragists and Suffragettes for standing for ‘Votes for Ladies’ and ‘Votes for Rich Women’.

Actually, already before 1918, Ladies had the vote, but only for local elections. Bebel describes the position in the 1910 edition of his Women and Socialism:

    ‘In regard to municipal administration, woman suffrage in Great Britain is constantly expanding. In the parish councils tax-paying women have a voice and vote as well as men. Since 1899, women in England have the right to vote for town, district and county councils. In the rural districts all proprietors and lodgers – including the female ones – who reside in the parish or district are entitled to vote. All inhabitants who are of age may be elected to the above-named bodies, regardless of sex. Women vote for members of school boards, and, since 1870, are eligible to stand on the same terms as men. But in 1903 the reactionary English school law deprived women of the right of being elected to the school board in the county of London. Since 1869 independent and unmarried women have the right to vote for the privy councils.
   Two laws enacted in 1907 made unmarried women in England and Scotland eligible to district and county councils. But a woman who may be elected as chairman of such a council, shall thereby not hold the office of justice of peace that is connected with it. Women are also eligible to parish councils and as overseers of the poor. The first woman mayor was elected in Aldeburgh on November 9, 1908. In 1908 there were 1162 women on English boards of charity and 615 women on school boards. In Ireland, tax-paying women have had municipal suffrage since 1887, and since 1896 they may vote for members of boards of charity and be elected to same.’

The Mayor of Aldeburgh, a town on the Suffolk coast, was Elizabeth Garret Anderson, the first woman doctor and sister of Millicent Fawcett, the Leader of the Suffragist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, whose statue outside Parliament was unveiled in April.

Tristram Hunt in his (hostile) biography of Engels notes that in the 1876 elections to the London School Board Engels gave all his 7 votes to the woman candidate. This was Alice Westlake in the Marylebone ward, who topped the poll.

She was a Suffragist who was later a member of the central committee of the NUWSS. And like Fawcett a Liberal.

What, it might be asked, was Engels doing voting for a Liberal? Presumably he wanted to make the point that socialists stand for woman’s political and social equality. In which case, he was wrong for the right reason. Socialists do stand, and have always stood for women’s equality.

Greasy Pole: Farewell To Tristram (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are a number of personal qualities which need to be developed by anyone with ambitions to rise to the top through the pressured universe of politics. For one there is the motivation to refashion the meaning of certain words so that, for example, poverty can be described as security, ruthless calculation as an enduring concern for human fallibility, a ready resort to falsehood as an unshakeable devotion to truth. Also an energising requirement of a talent to face full up to the observant cameras. A recent example of this is Tristram Julian Hunt who, apart from being encouraged to prefix his names with the word Honourable as the son of Baron Hunt of Chesterton and who performed so satisfactorily at Cambridge to earn the title of a FRHistS, won his way into Parliament as the MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. Until, that is, he was offered the job of Director of the world-respected Victoria and Albert Museum. And apart from all that the 6ft 3 Hunt is a past-master at the photo pose, suitably arranged for someone on the climb – looking straight through to the adoring public beyond with a gently-smiling expression of combined strength and human concern. It also helps to have some relevant architectural masterpiece as a background – in Hunt’s case Westminster Bridge, Big Ben – and to offer a fringe of youthfully ruffled hair across a brain-stuffed forehead.

Stoke-On Trent

This pose was at one with the fact that Hunt had been more or less dumped on the Stoke constituency. Before that he had been rejected as an applicant for the candidature at two other seats. At some stage he had been noticed by Lord Mandelson, Labour’s master of dark manipulation (once described by Hunt, after he had been drinking, as ' . . . the most important ****ing minister in this ****ing government') as a rising star in the drive to turn the party away from the bad old days of attachment to Clause Four. Time was short then to prepare for the 2010 election so Hunt was selected as the Labour candidate (in some quarters said to have been ‘parachuted in’) for Stoke by the National Executive without any reference to the short list prepared by the local Party. This provoked the secretary Gary Elsby, who regarded himself as the obvious choice, to be angry enough to get himself nominated as an Independent candidate – with the full title of ‘Gary Labour Candidate Born In Stoke-On-Trent Elsby’ and to annoy the local party by using the red rose to decorate his election literature. But he received a total of 399 votes against the 12,605 which ushered Hunt into the Commons – which did not apparently instruct Elsby about the cynically determined methods so readily applied by the parties of capitalism when they are under pressure.

Education

In spite of his powerful backers, with the implied assumption that he would soon be among the leading political lights in Westminster, Hunt’s time there was not free of emergencies and doubt. His performance did not in general come up to expectations as he failed to deal with the theatrically loutish bullying. After a short spell as a Shadow Secretary of State for Education he progressed into the Shadow Cabinet in full charge of the Education portfolio, which the more envious of his colleagues described as him being ‘forced like a stick of rhubarb’. He did not come up to the demands of his new responsibilities, in particular those originating from his special rival Michael Gove who wallowed in overseeing Education where his own inadequacies did not prevent him sneering at Hunt for ‘. . . inconsistencies thy name is Tristram’. In February 2014 Hunt produced a book about Frederick Engels, praised by one reviewer for its ‘affectionate objectivity’, but he was not thereby persuaded against breaking a picket line of London University academics who were on strike over cuts in pay. Shortly after this it was revealed that he had received some £74,655 in payment for a research assistant by the financial adviser firm Price Waterhouse and Cooper, who deny having any political associations but agree that they ‘. . . provide limited and fully disclosed technical support to the main political parties in areas where our expertise and knowledge of the business environment can help them better understand technical matters and the consequences of their policy proposals.’

Victoria And Albert

But as his disenchantment with the prospects of a life in politics became more obvious Hunt told the Labour Club at Cambridge University: ‘You are the top one per cent. The Labour Party is in the shit’. Which was a forerunner to his decision in September 2015 to try to appease his ‘substantial political differences’ from the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by resigning from the Shadow Cabinet. When he was interviewed last September about the Labour conference, where he was said to have ‘injected some exuberance into the proceedings with a spirited speech that verged on stand-up comedy’, Hunt did not so much as hint at any doubts about continuing as the MP for Stoke: ‘It is a profound privilege being an MP but you want to have Labour in charge. That’s what we’re here for’. But three months later he announced that he would be resigning from the Commons to take that equally glamorous – and much better paid – job as the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. An especially pertinent comment on this came from ex-Chancellor George Osborne, who wondered if there will ever be another Labour MP by the name of Tristram (Osborne’s first name is Gideon). Hunt commented that he was ‘. . . sorry to put you, the party and the people of Stoke-on-Trent through a by-election. I have no desire to rock the boat’. But the stability of that boat is in doubt. The constituency has been damaged by the decline in the potteries and of the clay and coal extraction which historically provided its wealth. Unemployment has been well above the national average and it recently needed an intense, high profile charity campaign to ensure that the famous Wedgwood Collection should stay in Barlaston while on loan from the Victoria and Albert. The exhibition had been threatened by a debt of £144 million resulting from a subsidiary being broken up and sold – as ordered by rulings from the High Court and the Attorney General. Just another episode in the history of Tristram Hunt and his political ambitions, typical of the blundering politics of capitalism for inhuman cynicism and stress.

Ivan

Cooking the Books: This ‘Anti-business’ Business (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s quite amusing really. The Labour Party has long since given up any opposition to capitalism and its profit-making and merely offers itself as an alternative manager of the capitalist state and economy in Britain.

Yet some capitalists and their mouthpieces in the media don’t believe them – or feign not to – and accuse Labour of being ‘anti-business’. Labour politicians protest. And grovel, the worst example to date being the historian Tristram Hunt, their spokesperson on education, who wrote a rather disparaging biography of Engels. Under the headline ‘We’re furiously pro-business, Labour MP tells private sector’, the Times (9 February) reported him as saying.

‘I’m enormously enthusiastic about businessmen and women making money, delivering shareholder return, about making profit’ (Times, 9 January).

There is a certain logic in this position. If you accept capitalism and that productive activity under it is driven by the need for firms to make a profit, then you have to accept that they should, and not do anything that might discourage or endanger this. Otherwise you will provoke an economic downturn.

Writing on this issue in the Times (5 February) their financial editor, Patrick Hosking, claimed:

‘It has taken decades to establish an enterprise culture in Britain. There are now only small pockets in Britain that refuse to acknowledge that profits are a good thing.’

This may well be the case since most people, unfortunately, think there is no practicable alternative to capitalism and understand that if you have capitalism you have to have profits, otherwise the system won’t work. The opposite is true as well of course. If you are against profits you should be against capitalism. Not like some reformists who shout ‘tax the rich and their profits’ and then expect the capitalist system to function normally.

Not that anything Labour is saying or proposing to do is anti-business or anti-profit. Miliband might have been unable to disguise his boredom when meeting capitalists but the most Labour has done is to criticise and say that they will put a stop to the practices that some capitalists and capitalist firms have engaged in to boost their profits such as tax-dodging, customer-cheating, supplier-bullying and market-rigging. This is to go no further than Ted Heath, when as Tory Prime Minister in 1973 he labelled one action of the businessman Tiny Rowland as the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’.

Which of course is not a criticism of capitalism as such but merely of the way some capitalists behave, a criticism that can be shared by other capitalists such as that of tax-dodging capitalist firms by other firms which don’t have the chance to do this and so have to pay more tax. Though Hunt, with his enthusiasm for profits not just as the driving force of the capitalist economy but also as ‘delivering shareholder return,’ can’t logically complain about this because the various sharp practices that capitalist firms engage in do increase ‘shareholder return’, at least in the short run,  and are engaged in precisely to do this.

That the Labour Party is in any way anti-capitalist, anti-business or anti-profit is a joke as the capitalists who are raising this spectre must know full well.  Labour has thoroughly absorbed enterprise culture.

Engels defrocked (2010)

Book Review from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Frock-Coated Communist: the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. By Tristram Hunt

In February last year we reviewed John Green’s biography of Engels, and now along comes another. This one was launched with far more hype, coming as it does from a well-known publisher and being written by an up-and-coming academic and TV historian. Both contain ‘revolutionary life’ in their sub-titles, and even feature on their front covers versions of the same portrait of Engels at the age of twenty.

And of course both books tell essentially the same story. Engels was born to a capitalist family in Germany in 1820, and rebelled against his upbringing but was forced to spend twenty years working for the Manchester branch of the family firm. He supported Marx financially, till in 1869 he was able to retire, and the next year he moved to London. Besides helping Marx’s research into capitalism, he wrote classic works such as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Where Green saw Engels as something of a proto-Bolshevik, Hunt has a more balanced view in this respect. ‘Contrary to Lenin’s later assertions,’ he says, ‘Engels was no vanguardist.’ He appreciated, too, that workers could come to power using the ballot box. Nor was he a Fabian or a supporter of the reformism pursued by the German Social Democrats. Despite some claims to the contrary, he was not responsible for the horrors of Stalinism, and did not corrupt Marx’s ideas in any way.

But Engels was not perfect, by any means. He had some anti-Irish prejudices, but he later put these aside. He does not seem, though, to have modified his anti-Slav views, which led him to call for the disappearance of ‘entire reactionary peoples’. He was against homosexuality, and was not sympathetic to the women’s movement. In the 1840s he apparently slept with the wife of Moses Hess, a former associate with whom he and Marx had fallen out, and then boasted that she was in love with him. Yet ‘the womanising Engels ended up authoring the foundation text of socialist feminism’ (i.e. Origin).

As Francis Wheen did when writing about Marx, Hunt concludes by noting how contemporary Engels now seems, when read in the context of economic recession and globalisation.

Paul Bennett