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MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Rotherham lads are here! (February 1980) From Socialist Worker, 2 February 1980. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.186-7. Transcribed & marked up by marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot reports from the strike committee in Rotherham ‘BEFORE THE strike, when you came in here, you felt you were coming to see God. Now the place belongs to all of us.’ Bob Bartholomew, crane driver at the Templeborough steel plant, Rotherham, was talking at the Rotherham headquarters of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, the steelworkers’ union. You could hardly hear him above the hubbub of voices. Voices organising; voices arguing; voices telling the story of yesterday’s picket. The prim building with its thick carpets was built for tidy and genteel officials with tidy and genteel routines. It has suddenly become the central powerhouse of the steel strike. As with the miners’ strike exactly eight years ago, the motivating power behind the action has shifted to South Yorkshire. John Ratcliffe, a branch secretary and strike committee member, spelt out the details. There are 50 ‘cells’ each of 50 steelworkers, each of them based on a steel plant or a stockholder in the Rotherham area. These cells mount pickets 24 hours a day. They also provide volunteers for the flying pickets. John says that the strike organisers have the names of 7,000 workers, all of whom can be mobilised at very short notice indeed. The very energy of the strike activity from the Rotherham centre has brought workers into the action. ‘We forgot about the women workers,’ says John. ‘We hadn’t allocated them for any action. But yesterday they were in here demanding to know why they weren’t in the cells, and flooding out onto the pickets with the others.’ As the plants and stockholders shut down in Rotherham and the surrounding towns, so the pickets began to move further afield. News came in of possible steel movements into the ports. Pickets visited Hull where the dockers, without even asking their union leaders, have stopped moving anything which could even remotely be used by the steel industry. The same has happened at Grimsby, Immingham and Boston. Last week the steelworkers started to move off for long stays in places they had hardly ever heard of: the smaller ports of East Anglia and Kent. John said that by last weekend there were South Yorkshire steel pickets guarding every port in Kent. The money and accommodation for that huge operation had been supplied without a moment’s hesitation by the Kent miners. The miners have contacted dockers and other transport workers. The information is accurate and it moves fast. And the steel, or most of it anyway, is stopped. Before their very eyes the workers feel themselves changing. ‘What do we talk about in the plant?’ asks Tom Bartholomew. ‘Every day it’s the same: sex, booze and sport. On the picket line, and in the cars and vans, it’s all different. People start talking about the government, about the Labour Party, about the union; about how we’re going to change the world. ‘You see blokes on the picket line you’d never have dreamed would be there. And often they’re the ones who have the best ideas about what to do next. ‘I suppose most of the blokes still feel that this is just part of ordinary life. But I must admit for me it’s like living history. I feel that one day I’ll be telling those children’s children what it was like being in the Great Steel Strike of 1980.’ By activating almost the whole rank and file in the area, by holding regular weekly mass branch meetings to report on and supplement all the picketing activity, the organisers have taken away from the Tories their one hope for outright victory over the steelworkers: an apathetic and uninformed rank and file. If only it were so all through the industry! The South Yorkshire men know that it is not. They can see how in other areas, even in Scunthorpe which is only a few miles away, the strike is still held firmly by the old leadership, with picketing limited and the rank and file told to stay at home and watch the telly until they are told to go back to work. A great tussle is already joined between the powerhouses at places like Rotherham and Stocksbridge and the slow-witted pessimism in many other steel areas. Top of the page Last updated on 20.12.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Socialism and democracy (April 1997) From Election special, Socialist Review, No.207, April 1997, pp.11-14. Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Roll on 1 May. Nothing could have been more gloriously crass of John Major than his decision to call the general election on May Day, the festival day for socialists all over the world. The date adds a sweetness to the excitement which accompanies all general elections and especially this one – an excitement which springs from the ability of all of us to take part in removing our government, in this case the most despised, mocked and corrupt administration of modern times. Anyone who says the election ‘makes no difference’ should remember their despondency on 9 April 1992 and compare it with the joyful anticipation with which we expect to greet the departure from public life of David Evans and William Waldegrave, and, who knows, perhaps even Ann Widdecombe, Peter Lilley and Michael Howard into the bargain. Even the vision of the removal vans outside Downing Street and the loading into them of the possessions of John Major and Kenneth Clarke is delicious beyond description. Yet all these happy thoughts are marred by a more pervasive unease. In 1997, after almost a century of the Labour Party, our power to kick the Tories out seems absurdly limited to just that. We can kick the Tories out, but what then? Will the Blair government which comes to office take a single step to solve the problems which led to his victory? Will there be even the softest remedy for the horrors of the rampant free market? We have it on the firmest authority from Blair himself that everything will go on much the same as before. The man who uses the word ‘new’ as though he had invented it is now assuring us in almost every speech that his government will have nothing new to offer, and that the ‘change’ which he has advocated with such earnest passion will be no change at all. How to explain this contradiction between the thrill of our power to topple the Tories and our disgust at the Labour alternative? How has this apparently massive democratic power in which we can all participate shrunk to this little measure? One answer, perhaps the most important one, lies in the relationship between parliamentary democracy and socialism. The idea of representative government – that the people should regularly elect their rulers – was popular before anyone even thought of socialism. The American and French revolutions at the end of the 18th century established forms of representative government for which most men could vote. In Britain there was a long and bitter fight to extend the vote from the small minority of wealthy men who’d had it from the Middle Ages, and whose numbers were only marginally increased by the absurdly named ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832. Frustration with the results of that Reform Act built up into something truly great – the Chartist revolt which lasted from 1839 to 1848. In that final year, though the Chartists were beaten, revolutions broke out all over Europe and established new forms of parliamentary government. At the same time, the idea of socialism began for the first time to be widely circulated, most notably through the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Before Marx and Engels, socialism had been seen mainly as an ideal, to be imposed from on high by idealists. It was an almost ethereal concept of an equal society in which everybody shared – far too beautiful to be achieved or administered by the rather selfish and ignorant masses. Such idealists were inclined to dismiss the rising clamour for the vote as irrelevant to the socialist cause, at best a diversion, at worst an obstacle. Marx and Engels took an entirely different view. As Hal Draper puts it, ‘Marx was the first socialist figure to come to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the consistent extension of democratic control from below.’ The young Marx first came to politics as what Draper calls ‘a democratic extremist’. One of his earliest essays was a hymn to the freedom of the press – a hymn, incidentally, which never embarrassed him in later life and which he happily reprinted. The young democratic extremist was inspired by a loathing of censorship, of torture and imprisonment without trial, of arbitrary power of every kind. His outrage led him away from utopias and schemes in the heads of people at the top and towards retaliatory action by the people at the bottom. His socialism developed out of this democratic extremism. He identified the mainspring of the hierarchical undemocratic society he hated as the hierarchy of property. The most profoundly undemocratic aspect of capitalist society was precisely capitalism, the control over all the things of life by a handful of people who owned the means of production. Socialism, the social control of the means of production, could not, therefore, be counterposed to democracy. Democracy, control from below, was an essential ingredient of socialism, its very essence. So Marx’s attitude to the rising tide of demands for universal suffrage was very different to that of most of his socialist contemporaries. He did not turn his back on the suffrage movement. On the contrary he consistently supported any demand which shifted power from the top to the bottom.

On the contrary he consistently supported any demand which shifted power from the top to the bottom. He demanded the maximum suffrage, universal suffrage. He unconditionally supported the Chartists’ six points for extending the vote by secret ballot to all men. These demands (except one, for annual parliaments) have all been conceded. They seem today unremarkable – an integral part of capitalist society. Yet in 1839-48 they were the rallying standard for a vast working class army which linked their political demands – for votes and ballots – with economic demands to put an end to the exploitation of the poor by the rich. On the other hand, Marx noticed that the new ‘democratic’ constitutions proclaimed by the revolutions in France and Germany were no threat at all to the rich. In a detailed analysis of those constitutions, he demonstrated how, in the name of universal suffrage, the freedom of the press and assembly, they reserved for the rulers the power to smash the freedom of the press and assembly and even to limit or abolish the suffrage. The thread which ran through all his discussions of these problems started in his democratic extremism. His criterion was, as Draper explained, ‘What will maximise the influence exercised from below, by the masses in movement, on the political forces above?’ If whatever was proposed did maximise that influence, if the masses were in movement, he supported it. If it cut down that influence and encouraged the passivity of the masses, he opposed it. An example in Britain was Marx’s approach to the Reform League which was formed in the 1860s to keep up the pressure for universal suffrage. Marx claimed, rather excessively, that he and his supporters in the International Working Men’s Association had effectively founded the League, and he supported it throughout. But when someone moved that the League’s founder and chairman, Edward Beales, should join the Committee of the International, Marx bristled with indignation. Beales, he grumbled, had parliamentary ambitions in Marylebone. As a campaigner for universal suffrage, he should be supported. As a parliamentary careerist, he should be shunned. During most of Marx’s life the word ‘democracy’ had a revolutionary significance, which it does not have today. To most people it conjured up not just a representative parliament but a democratic share out of the economy as well. There seemed to be no difference between the power to vote for a government and the power which that vote would confer on the people’s representatives to redistribute society’s wealth. It seemed obvious on both sides of the class divide that if the majority, the workers and the poor, had the vote, the economic balance of society would shift towards them. Most of the Chartist leaders assumed that if they won their demand for universal suffrage, they would also win their demands for a fairer economic system. Universal suffrage meant working class power. True, there were lurking doubts, especially from the United States where a wide franchise seemed to have made little difference to the ever expanding gap between rich and poor. This puzzled the London Working Men’s Association, where the People’s Charter was first drafted. In 1837 the Association, controlled by what later became the right wing of the Chartist movement under William Lovett, sent an address to the working classes of America, which asked: ‘Why, after 60 years of freedom have you not progressed further ... Why has so much of your fertile country been parcelled out between swindling bankers and grinding capitalists ... Why have so many of your cities, towns, railways, canals and manufactories become the monopolised property of those who “toil not neither do they spin”?’ No credible answer came to the question. But after the Chartists were defeated and the British economy glided into a period of unprecedented growth, the question came back with force on both sides of the class divide. Was it possible to concede political democracy without conceding economic democracy? Was it possible for the rich to tolerate a representative parliament without giving away a penny of their wealth to the workers? Could ‘democracy’ be defined to mean a parliament elected over long periods whose boundaries of power stopped well short of the domain of the swindling bankers and grinding capitalists? Gradually, gingerly, as the nightmare of the Chartist revolt faded into the historical background, the newly confident British ruling class put these questions to the test. In 1867 a Tory government widened the franchise to skilled working men in the cities. In 1884 a Liberal government did the same for the better off workers in the countryside. In 1918 a Tory-Liberal coalition gave the vote to all men and to women over 30. In 1928 a Tory government extended this to all women. Thus the vote was conceded in four measures over 61 years. In general, the rulers found to their delight that the new democracy, restricted to politics and kept well away from economics, not only worked more smoothly than previously but encouraged large sections of the growing workers’ movement to join or support the Liberal Party and seek redress not through their own activity, as Marx had urged, but through ‘friendly’ Liberal members of parliament. The consensus between a political democracy and an economic hierarchy was jolted by the formation in 1900 of the Labour Party whose purpose was to represent organised labour in parliament. The founders of the Labour Party clearly intended to use any political power they might win through the vote for economic purposes. When he wrote the Labour Party constitution in 1918 Sidney Webb borrowed an old phrase from the Chartists, ‘the fruits of industry’. Clause Four of the constitution, which appeared on every Labour Party card for more than 70 years, was the classic definition of the Labour founders’ intention to use the new political democracy to pursue economic democracy, ‘to secure for the workers the full fruits of their industry’ by passing into law ‘the best available system of the common ownership of the means of production and distribution and exchange’. The intention was clear.

The intention was clear. Gradually, but persistently, elected Labour governments would use the power conferred on them by the vote to encroach on the power of the rich and transfer the ownership of the means of production from the rich to the people. This was not simply an intention. It was also used as a powerful argument to those who clung to the old ideas of democratic revolution. The argument ran like this. Why countenance revolution, with all its violence and unpleasantness, when the same ends – the common ownership of the means of production – can be achieved by peaceful means, through voting Labour to office in parliament? The argument, which swept like wildfire through the rapidly growing labour parties in Europe, was contested by a revolutionary minority boosted by two enormously powerful pamphlets – Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1900) and Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the revolutionary summer of 1917. Both pamphlets continued in the tradition set out by Marx in the 1840s. Far from contrasting socialism with democracy, they started from the principle of a democratic society controlled from below. Lenin specifically hailed the ‘elective principle’ as indispensable to a socialist society. Rosa Luxemburg’s passionate identification with the spontaneous movements of the masses shines out of every sentence she wrote. Her whole approach was democratic from start to finish. Like Marx’s, their argument was not at all that there is some choice to be made between socialism and democracy but that the two are indivisible. The problem, they argued, with the ‘democratic’ approach proposed by the main European workers’ parties was that their democracy was not strong enough to contest the hierarchies of the rich. It locked democracy up in a small parliamentary island, while control over the ocean – industry, finance, law, armed forces, police, media – stayed in the hands of the unelected rich. The contest between the new confined democracy in parliament and the boundless undemocratic hierarchies of the rich would be, they warned, no contest. The rich would win; and in the process the workers would lose confidence in themselves and lower their guard still further. For the essence of the parliamentary argument was that ordinary people could and should do nothing to emancipate themselves. They should leave the sophisticated business of emancipation to their betters, to the educated elite within the movement who would make their way to parliament. If and when, as was inevitable, this elite failed to achieve even a small part of the emancipation they promised, the workers would be left high and dry, rudderless and hopeless. If the educated elite couldn’t do the job, they would ask, who could? Passivity would lead to despair, to the triumph of the right, with disastrous consequences for democracy. The experience of parliamentary democracy this century grimly vindicates what Lenin and Luxemburg predicted. This is not to pretend that no advances have been made for the workers by parliamentary endeavour. In Britain majority Labour governments in 1945-51, 1964-70 and 1974-79 all attempted to intervene in the world of the capitalist hierarchy, and reverse the priorities of the rich. The rate of their success has followed a consistent downward curve – each majority Labour government achieved less intervention and redistribution than the one before. But in general the overwhelming triumph in the continuing tussle between political (parliamentary) democracy and capitalist hierarchy has gone to the capitalists. Again and again Labour’s plans for intervening, for nationalising, for switching resources from profit to people, have been sidetracked, shelved or reversed. At the end of each period of Labour government, even the relatively confident one of 1945-51, the general impression conveyed by the defeated Labour ministers was of puzzlement, weariness, above all of impotence. The very idea of Labour ‘in power’ has shifted over the century to one of Labour in impotent office, not very different from the Tories in office. The resulting disillusionment has made it easy for the Tories and their media to turn the elections to their own advantage, and then to claim their ‘democratic’ victories at the polls as justifications for enlarging and reinforcing their hierarchical and entirely undemocratic monopolies. The disillusionment has entered into the very soul of the Labour leaders themselves. The failure of their predecessors to keep their promises, and the Tory majorities at the polls from 1979 seem to have convinced Blair and his colleagues that capitalism is all powerful. The aspirations of their predecessors to intervene in the capitalist economy to protect and assist the people who vote Labour have been abandoned. In the past, they say, Labour made promises to their supporters which they broke. Their shock remedy has been not to make any promises to Labour supporters, and to talk instead of ‘newness’ and ‘change’ not in policy but in style and personnel. The process of 100 years of conflict between a political democracy and a capitalist hierarchy has left us with a choice between a bemused bespectacled grinning prime minister in his fifties, and a grinning prime minister in his forties who for the moment is neither bespectacled nor bemused. No wonder so many rich and powerful union bashers and exploiters are flocking to Blair. A common New Labour justification for this process is that, although they no longer regard themselves as socialists, they still remain fervent democrats. They perpetuate the divide between socialism and democracy which was initiated by the sectarians of the 1840s. In truth, however, the experience of a century of failure has detached them from democracy as well. Perhaps the most depressing feature of the whole New Labour retreat has been its leaders’ willingness to jettison the most elementary democratic freedoms. The enthusiasm with which Jack Straw joined up with possibly the most odious Tory minister of the century, Michael Howard, to propose sweeping new powers for police and special agents to enter and bug people’s homes was the most ominous sign of New Labour’s threat to civil liberties.

The enthusiasm with which Jack Straw joined up with possibly the most odious Tory minister of the century, Michael Howard, to propose sweeping new powers for police and special agents to enter and bug people’s homes was the most ominous sign of New Labour’s threat to civil liberties. The commitment to ‘socialism from above’ has now been replaced by a new exciting concept, ‘democracy from above’, personified by Detective Inspector Straw and his merry men bugging the homes of dissidents, rounding them up, shoving them in prison, and shackling them to their hospital beds as they fall ill. Straw stands in the long lugubrious tradition of social democratic ministers who set out to change the world but decide before long to continue to administer it by repression. In their desperate enthusiasm to run the corrupt capitalism of the age, Labour leaders have moved far to the right of their supporters. The course which they have plotted ­ never mind the degrees to which they will be blown even off that course by a militant capitalist class – will place them almost at once in conflict with large groups of their supporters who will be boosted by the electoral victory and even less tolerant than in the old days of Labour prevarication. There are tumultuous times ahead in which the need for a new mass socialist organisation will be at once obvious and desperate. In building such a new organisation, the history of the century spells out two vital lessons. The first is not to dissipate our energies once again in seeking to regulate or alter capitalist society from the top, but to mobilise and coordinate the enormous forces at the disposal of the workers and their movement. The second, and even more important, is to avoid the sanctuary of the ivory tower, and the temptation in hard times to retreat into a sectarian dugout, where the floundering of what is left of democracy can be observed with grim and irrelevant delight. The sidelining of socialism has led to the sidelining of democracy, and socialists will have to fight for both with renewed determination. One of the oldest tricks of Labour ministers in office who propose to legislate against democratic freedoms is to pretend that these ‘bourgeois issues’ are the preoccupation of the ‘chattering classes’, and have nothing to do with good old salty proletarians like Jack Straw or Harriet Harman. This is bilge. Socialists are going to have to lead the battle for elementary democratic rights – for trial by jury, for legal aid, for the freedom of the minority press, against media witch hunts and baton happy policemen. Marx’s rule of thumb is just as vital as a century and a half ago. Anything, however remote or small, which builds and sustains control from below is part of the overall struggle to change the social order, and worth fighting for. When he was repeatedly asked what socialism would be like, he grew irritable and impatient. The nearest he ever came to a blueprint was when he told his idealist correspondents that if they wanted a glimpse of the new society they should join the fight against capitalism. The seeds of the new society are sown in the struggle against the old one. Top of the page Last updated on 12.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot How history comes alive (9 September 1993) From Socialist Worker, 9 September 1993. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 58–59. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I met the historian Christopher Hill once, last summer. I went with BBC producer Fiona Maclean to interview him in his Warwickshire home for a programme about poetry and revolution. He took us into his garden on a bright summer afternoon and questioned us closely on how much time he had on air. He ascertained that he had a quarter of an hour. He then vanished upstairs and re-emerged staggering under a huge pile of books. The tape recorder was switched on and he spoke, uninterrupted except by an infernal bee, referring to and quoting freely from his books for an hour. He spoke about Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell and above all John Milton, and their relationship to the English Revolution. He spoke with such power and persuasive passion that we wondered, as we made our dazed way home, whether we should devote our whole 50 minutes to him alone. After the interview I told him I had been searching everywhere for his Milton and the English Revolution, first published in 1978. Did he have a spare copy? No, he said nervously, he had none left. So the search went on. It ended a year later on the top rung of a ladder in a second hand bookshop in Chicago. Quaint and absurd A book like this cannot be absorbed in snatched moments – it has to wait for a holiday. And so my summer holiday has been enriched beyond description by this wonderful book – the best, in my judgement, of all Christopher Hill’s long lifetime’s work on the English Revolution. ‘I am arguing a case’, he writes in his introduction. That was a dangerous enough confession from the Master of Balliol College, but far more subversive when the ‘case’ was that John Milton, the academics’ darling, the source of endless textual nitpicking from A level students to classical English Literature scholars, ‘got his ideas not only from books but also from talking to his contemporaries’. In other words a lot of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and especially Samson Agonistes has more to do with the ‘loony left’ – known in the mid-17th century as Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians etc – than with any classical text or Latin scholarship. Christopher Hill’s great genius as a historian is not just that he can think himself back 300 years, and translate what often seem quaint and absurd religious discussions into the politics of the time. The relationship of the Son to the Father, the Trinity, the destination of the soul after death, the Serpent and the Apple, Adam and Eve – all these dead notions come alive in the revolutionary forces of the time. Some of this is hard to follow but, thanks to Christopher Hill’s dry humour and unbending commitment, never difficult to read. For example: When a modern theologian writes ‘it would no longer seem appropriate to speak of a God existing apart from man, or a human self existing apart from God’, we may dismiss this as an attempt to adapt Christianity to the modern world, to preserve a God who is in fact dead. But we should not let our scepticism about trendy modern theologians reflect back upon the fantastic daring of the 17th century thinkers, who expressed their hard won belief in the importance of human beings through the medium of theology. For them it was not a trick, not a last hope of drawing a congregation: it was a tremendous and tremendously new concept, won through spiritual torment and exaltation. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Dead ringer (November 1989) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 125 (November 1989). Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2013. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Dead Poets Society Director: Peter Weir THE MAIN characteristic of the school I went to was barbarism. It was a “top flight” public school – Shrewsbury – and it was run on the standard lines of British public schools throughout the ages. It cost a lot of money to go to Shrewsbury, and what the parents got in return was children well equipped to be rulers. “You are the leaders of the future,” a general bellowed at us every year as we dressed up in uniform and paraded around like toy soldiers. “See that you live up to it!” To be leaders of the future it was necessary to know what it was like to be bullied in order to turn out a good bully yourself. Almost every relationship at school was founded on discipline, violence and hierarchy. Looking back on all this now, I wonder how it was that, at least in the last two years of my schooldays, I enjoyed them so much. The answer lies in the character and style of two teachers whose very presence at the school seemed to flout its essence. One of these men was small, bald, and on first acquaintance, almost certainly off his rocker. He taught English to boys who were learning other subjects for exams, and was therefore not expected to help anyone pass anything. On my first appearance in his classroom he made one of my friends stand on a chair and recite two lines which he had written on the blackboard. I recall them exactly: anyone lived in a pretty how town with up so floating many bells down. The teacher – we called him Kek – told us that these lines were by a man called ee cummings (who spelt his name like that, without capital letters, and the whole of the rest of the poem was like those first two lines – gibberish, and badly punctuated gibberish at that). We learnt his “spells”, as he called his gobbets of prose and poetry in endless different languages, were hypnotised by them, learnt the bits around them and became quite literally spellbound. All the guff learnt for exams has long since been forgotten but Kek’s spells still roll around in my head today. They are still part of a new world, something completely different to the world I can see and feel day to day. The only other teacher I remember at Shrewsbury was also an eccentric. I think he was a Liberal, or even perhaps a “moderate” Tory, but he was constantly provoking dissent. He introduced us – in 1956 – to the New Statesman, which was quite shockingly subversive of everything the school seemed to be telling us. He pushed us to write in the school magazine all kinds of subversive and satirical material. So far did he push me down the road to radical ideas that I even started (just before I left) wondering what he, and Kek for that matter, were doing at Shrewsbury at all. Were they not contradicting everything the school stood for? Were they not subverting the very values which inspired people to go out and form an empire? The answer was, in part, yes. The Kek spells and the New Statesman did open up closed minds. Nevertheless, there was even at Shrewsbury in the 1950s, as in every public school, the eccentric oddball teacher. It was perhaps important for boys to learn to think for themselves, if only to come to the correct conclusion about their role in life as rulers. The question which dogged the authorities was – how far can we let these eccentrics go? I do realise that not everybody who goes to see Dead Poets Society was likely to have been at Shrewsbury (or any public school) in the 1950s. Some may have gone to the film simply because they read a disgustingly philistine and reactionary review in City Limits (once a principled magazine, now a worthless rag). But as the film went on, I felt it could hardly be a coincidence that so many experiences of mine at a British public school in the 1950s should be reproduced in a film about an American school founded on all that’s worst in the British school tradition in 1959. The hero of the film is a teacher who wants to break the walls of convention which hem his pupils in. He wants them to see things differently, which is one reason he makes them stand on their desks to recite poetry. Just as Kek was hooked on Auden and Eliot and ee cummings because they used words which sounded like what they should mean, so Mr Keating in the film is turned on by the great idealists of the American tradition: Thoreau, who was forever writing of Utopias where people behaved decently to one another; Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, who spent their lives urging people to take the unlikely and unusual paths of life rather than perish in conformity. The question for Keating is the same as it was for Kek. How would the authorities react? Would they patronise him? Or would he stray too far beyond the bounds of orthodoxy? As always in such matters, the dividing line is crossed when talk turns to action: when cosy theory about an ideal society turns into practice which changes the very lifestyles and aspirations of the leaders of the future. Many who see the film and did not go to a school of this kind will find it incredible if not a little contemptible, that a man of Keating’s idealism and visions could find himself in a barbaric place like that in the first place. They underestimate the ability of the public school system to patronise eccentricity and, where possible, to make a virtue out of it. When one of his pupils revolts against the headmaster in a quite wonderful prank, Keating himself quite genuinely intervenes on the side of authority. He is happy to flout the authority of the world outside, provided he does not flout the authority of the school. In the end the logic of revolt takes its course, and he is seen, wrongly as it turns out, to go too far. This is a glorious film with a gloriously subversive ending, and any reader of the Review who does not see it should suffer the worst possible penalty – a life subscription to City Limits. Top of the page Last updated on 12.8.2013

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Big Business and Government Tony Blair’s well oiled machine (October 2000) From News Review, Socialist Review, No.245, October 2000, p.5. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The reports of the ‘crisis meetings’ between Blair and Co and the oil company chiefs have been greeted with profound merriment in the corridors of oil power. The prime minister and his ruthless home secretary, Jack Straw – were widely reported to have issued ‘stern warnings’ to the executives about their duty to the public, and even threats that unless they got the oil moving they could all be in serious trouble. The merriment arises from the fact that no section of British industry has provided more of New Labour’s business initiatives than oil. The best example is Nick Butler, who is so senior in BP that he can’t afford to be a cabinet minister. Butler has been an ideological pillar of New Labour ever since he wrote a book with Neil Kinnock in 1987 trying to persuade people to vote Labour because the party had changed its attitude to shareholders and had been converted to the case for making money for nothing. Butler was not available for comment after that first tense meeting with the prime minister – indeed, in the interests of a free press, no oil executive would appear in any media until the dispute was almost over. Butler’s squeamishness about taking a ministerial post was not shared by Lord Simon, former chairman of BP, who was Blair’s choice as his first minister for Europe. Somehow Simon managed to take his new post without sacrificing a penny of his vast shareholding in BP, and without batting an eyelid when his company’s association with the drug barons of Colombia was exposed. The Simon connection did not last long, but there are plenty of other associations between oil industry bosses and the Labour government many of which are set out in the 22 September issue of Private Eye. In 1998, during his brief career as trade secretary (before he was sacked for borrowing nearly £400,000 from the government’s paymaster general to buy an appropriate London mansion), Peter Mandelson set up an oil price ‘task force’. Its task was to keep the price of oil up in defiance of the market, and its force included the managing directors of Shell, Texaco and BP Exploration. Other bizarre appointments of the same kind include: Shell chairman Mark Moody-Stuart to chair the renewable energy task force; Jyoti Munsiff, Shell’s company secretary, as a member of the government’s sustainable development education panel; Bryan Sanderson, BP’s managing director, as chairman of the Learning and Skills Council; Stella Earnshaw, former regional finance chief for Shell, as a member of the Funding Agency for Schools; John Harte (Shell) and John Morgan (BP} to the Oil and Pipelines Agency which oversees bulk transportation for the Ministry of Defence, (These appointments could be embarrassing if the government sends in the army to sort out the oil crisis.) As for the NHS – which health secretary Milburn put on ‘red alert’ during the crisis – did anyone hear a word of protest from Bryan Grote, an influential member of the government’s public services productivity council, set up by new Labour 1998 to deliver improvements in productivity and efficiency’? Mr Grote is executive vice-president of BP. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot “This bright day of Summer”: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (June 1981) First published June 1981. Produced and distributed for the SWP by Socialists Unlimited, London. The text of this pamphlet was first given as a talk in celebration of the 600th Anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt at the Socialist Workers Party Rally in Skegness, Easter 1981. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Matthew Caygill. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. 1381 ‘Matters cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all things shall be held in common, when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.’ For this ideal, 140,000 peasants marched on London under the elected leadership of Wat Tyler in June 1381, camping at Blackheath in the south and Barnet in the north in an attempt to force from the king charters abolishing their serfdom and repealing oppressive laws. It was perhaps the first time the standard of socialism was raised in Britain. TO START with a couple of announcements. The first comes from Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop will not be attending this year any of the celebrations which are being held to commemorate the Peasants’ Revolt. He won’t be going to Canterbury where a lot of respectable people have arranged a commemoration of the Peasants Revolt. He won’t be going to Blackheath, or Mile End, or St Albans where there are other celebrations in June. And it’s not because he’s busy. A spokesman for the archbishop was quoted a fortnight ago as saying: ‘This is not a celebration with which Dr Runcie would want to be associated’. And that’s not altogether surprising, because the first thing that the rebels did when they got into the Tower of London on June 16th 1381 was to search out the Archbishop of Canterbury, to tell him what they thought of him, and to chop off his head. Now the second announcement comes from Buckingham Palace. Her Majesty the Queen will not be attending any celebrations this year to commemorate the Peasants’ Revolt – and that is rather surprising really, because, if there’s one thing that can explain the immediate failure of the Peasants’ Revolt, it is that the people had faith in their monarch. I think it’s a bit churlish of her majesty not to commemorate that fact – but perhaps she feels that people won’t make the same mistake again. Many socialists will be gathering in a whole lot of places where there are to be celebrations this June, and it is worth remembering why. To do that we’ve got to go back a long way, six hundred years, to an England where there were only two and a half million people living and all of them bound in one way or another to the land they were working, and to the lord who owned that land. ‘The serf works the land, and the lord works the serf’ – that’s the explanation of the feudal system in a single sentence. The lords owned everything, lacking only the right to buy and sell people, which was something that happened under the Roman Empire, and would happen again in Africa and America. Everything that the serf or the villein did, everything they produced on the land was the property of the lord – everything. Even their daughters were subject to the sexual pleasures of the lord. The relationship between the lord and the people who produced their wealth was like the relationship between the lord and the beast of burden, except that probably the beast of burden was more generously treated. What the lord on earth didn’t take, the lord in heaven did. The church, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, had found a quotation from the story of Jacob’s Ladder in Genesis: ‘Of all that thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto thee’. They’d rewritten it to: ‘Of all that thou shalt make, thou shalt surely give a tenth to me.’ That’s how they saw it, and that was what the tithe barns were built for, and that was what the tithes meant: that a tenth of what you made, on top of what you gave to the lord, went to the church. And if you died, it was extremely expensive. If you died under the age of sixty, the lord took your best beast – to compensate for the amount of military service that you would have given if only you had lived to be sixty – and the church then took your second beast, to compensate for the tithes you would have paid if only you’d had the decency to live to the proper age. Since no working families at all had more than two beasts, you can see the poverty that system caused. The feudal system, which is described so often as though it was part of the natural order, as something tidy and well parcelled up, was in fact utterly brutal and utterly horrible. And at the time we are discussing it was beginning to crack up, or at any rate to fray at the edges. Rich people were beginning to understand that they didn’t have to produce one-for-one in each manor, but that they could trade across the board, produce a lot of things cheaper, and make a lot of money that way. Money flowed into a feudal system that had largely depended on barter, and new merchants ran the system of buying and selling. And some working people discovered that, if they worked really hard, they could produce a little bit of surplus even on top of what they were giving to their lord and the church. But the break-up of feudalism was hardly felt at all by the serf at the bottom of society. Only tiny particles of freedom came to him. Even at the top of society it wasn’t making any substantial difference. The previous rulers of England had been the king, the barons, the landed gentry and the clergy. Now they were, by way of a change, the king, the barons, the landed gentry, the clergy – and the monopolists, the merchants who dominated the new trade.

Now who were the rulers of England at this time? Most of the time up to the Peasants’ Revolt, though not actually during it, there was a fine -old tyrant called Edward III – usually described in school history books as ‘a good king’. Always be suspicious when that is written about a king. The thing that Edward liked to do most was to go to war. That was because he didn’t have to do any of the fighting – and because it was the quickest way to make booty. He couldn’t get loot out of the barons or the monopolists very easily, but he found that if he could win (or somebody else could win for him) a battle in France, such as Crecy or Poitiers, then the riches flowed in. So he was always off to war. In fact he was one of the inspirers of what’s known as the Hundred Years War. One of the things he did in the process, which is relevant to this story, was that he insisted that the people should be armed, or at any rate instructed in the processes of arms, and he was very adamant that there shouldn’t be any pastimes undertaken by anyone that would take time away from archery practice. There’s a statute in 1341 which decrees that anyone caught playing football, handball, hockey or racing dogs was liable to imprisonment. King Edward had a gang. They were known as a gang. The central figure was his brother, John of Gaunt. In Shakespeare John O’Gaunt appears as a benevolent old man, usually dying. At this time he was very much not dying: he was always fighting. He had an obsession that he wanted to become the King of Castille. He was determined to become the King of Castille, and he didn’t see why there should be a King of Castille if it wasn’t him. This drove him to all kinds of ridiculous and relentless adventures. If he couldn’t fight in Castille he would get in some practice by fighting the Scots. He laid claim, with every justification to being the most hated man in England. He was strongly challenged for the title, though, by Sir Robert Hales, who was the Treasurer of England, what’s known today as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was widely known even by his friends as ‘Hob the Robber’, because of his habit of stealing other people’s estates. Simon of Sudbury, was another member of the gang, Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor – just in case there should be any doubt that the church laid down the laws, he made sure he was head of the church and head of the law at the same time. The fifth member of the gang, the monopolist who joined them, was a man called Richard Lyons. He had discovered (mathematics was very in vogue at the time) that if he paid for the king’s wars, he could get the monopoly over the buying and selling of wool, and that there would be a big profit in it. I’ll explain it, because these things are complicated, He bought the wool for six pounds by order of the king, and he sold it for fourteen pounds by order of the king, and therefore made a profit. Only a few people in society could understand that sort of subtlety, but Lyons made himself extremely rich by this process. Now this was the gang that ruled England. They represented different powers, and as different powers do, they were constantly quarrelling with one another about who was to pay for the wars, where were the taxes going to come from, who was to collect the taxes? All the time arguments were going on between the king, the clergy, the barons and the monopolists. But as they were arguing – and as the wars went badly the arguments got fiercer – so the single point on which they could unite also became more solid. Namely their hatred and contempt for all the people who produced the wealth over which they were quarrelling. IN 1348, THERE CAME something which increased that hatred and contempt enormously: the Black Death, a great bubonic plague coming up from Europe and sweeping through the country, killing people at a rate it’s almost impossible to imagine. Perhaps 15 per cent of the population were killed as a result of this plague. Three hundred thousand people out of about two million. And of course the numbers killed among the serfage and the villeinage, among the people at the bottom of society, were far, far greater in proportion to those at the top. The immediate economic effect of this, however, was that there were fewer serfs and fewer villeins, but more work to do. So for the first time since the Norman Conquest the people at the bottom of society began to feel a growing confidence about their economic condition in society. They began to feel that they were in demand. Instead of the demand all the time being made of them, they could make demands of someone else because they were scarce. Their labour was scarce, and their labour was vital to the society, and so out of the scarcity they could benefit. And just as soon as they did start to make some advancement, and to press for higher wages if they were wage-earners, or for more freedom if they were serfs or villeins, so the government started to move in repression against them. In 1351 was passed the first known statutory incomes policy in Britain. People think that incomes policy is a modern thing. Not at all.

Not at all. The Statute of Labourers – you’re taught that at school, but no one teaches you that it was an incomes policy. It’s a perfect precursor for all the people who have recently been conducting incomes policies, all the Barbara Castles, Ted Heaths, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlons. Listen to this: ‘Because a great part of the people, and especially workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many, seeing the necessity of masters and the great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they receive excessive wages and some willing to beg in idlesness rather than by labour to get their living. We, considering the grievious incommodities which of the lack, especially of ploughmen and such labourers as may hereafter come, have upon deliberation and treaty of the prelates and nobles and learned men assisting us, ordained: ‘One: Every able-bodied person under sixty shall be bound to serve when required at no higher wage than in the twentieth year of the reign or else be committed to prison.’ That’s the way to do it. You don’t muck around with ‘guidelines’ and all that sort of thing. Three simple rules: one, you’ve got to work; two: you’ve got to work for what you had ten years ago; and three: if you don’t, you’ll go to prison. Now that was passed, and when you passed laws in those days that was the end of the matter, except that this time the gang found things went rather differently: they had passed a law which was promptly broken, and broken, and broken. And not only by the people underneath, but also by some of the employers, who decided that they would rather produce things than not produce things, and would rather pay higher wages to the wandering workers than obey the Statute of Labourers. So, for thirty years following that Statute, from 1351 to 1381, there was a relentless class campaign with the people at the top, who were trying to hold on to their property, passing law after law in order to try to keep themselves in control and their property at the level to which they were accustomed. Here are some of those laws: 1360: Punishment of labourers who depart from their service to another town or county. ‘If he cannot be found, he is to be outlawed and a writ issued to every sheriff in England to take and bring him back to the county where the writ was issued and there to have the letter F, for falsity, branded on his forehead.’ 1361: ‘The sheriff shall have power to restrain all evil-doers, rioters and barrators’ – whatever they are – ‘and to pursue, arrest, take and chastise them according to their trespass.’ It’s awfully old language, isn’t it? Sounds an awfully long time ago, that 1361 Statute. But in December 1932 Tom Mann, the Communist agitator and unemployed workers’ organiser, was arrested under the Statute of 1361 and held for three days without charge while the unemployed demonstration that he’d organised took place. Before, they passed the Criminal Trespass Act in parliament recently, this statute of 1361 was the one they used to procure criminal charges against people who were engaged in trespass. 1363: Petition in parliament to prevent women wearing clothes that ought to belong to a higher rank. In 1377 King Edward died and was replaced by his grandson Richard, who was only ten years old. But the statutes went on. 1378: ‘No bondswoman may put her children to school.’ Why should she put her children to school when they could well be put to work? 1379: (This is one I like particularly) ‘For punishment of devisers of false news and reporters of horrible and false lies concerning prelates, dukes, earls, barons and other nobles and great men of the realm, whereof great peril and mischief might come to all the realm and quick subversion and destruction of the said realm if due remedy be not provided.’ Due remedy was of course provided. Brandings, and burnings, and imprisonments. This last law was directed, not at the investigative reporters of that time, for there were none, but against the people who carried the news by word of mouth to meeting places in village after village. These were religious people, working within the framework of religion but attacking the way in which religion was being carried out. Excommunicated monks and priests were beginning to challenge the power of the church over people’s minds, over how people thought. John Wycliff started off the process – he wasn’t a wandering priest at all, he was the Master of Balliol. He said for instance that there could be such a thing, there could be such a thing as a corrupt priest. Unheard of! Unimaginable! That there should be such a thing said! But he said it, and he also said that if there is a corrupt priest, that priest should not be obeyed. And from challenging the church, the wandering preachers, excommunicated and imprisoned and constantly harassed by these statutes, started to take ‘false rumours’ about prelates and earls to the village meetings. From 1360 to 1381, for those twenty years before the revolt, these people moved around carrying these simple messages. Most famous of them, the one we know most about, was John Ball, who was the parish priest at St James Church in Colchester. John Ball applied himself to the arguments used by the church to justify the division of human society by property. What was the justification for that? People seemed to have the same physical characteristics, they seemed to be the same, what was the justification for this great division? The church came up with an answer. Read the bible, they said. Adam and Eve had three sons: Cain and Abel and Seth. Cain did a terrible thing. He killed his brother, Abel. Cain therefore represented the evil, the barbarous, the people who were ineducable, the people at the bottom of society.

Cain therefore represented the evil, the barbarous, the people who were ineducable, the people at the bottom of society. If you are at the bottom of society you’re descended from Cain, and that’s why you’re there. Then there were the people who were descended from Seth, who was quite a different character. Very respectable gentleman, never slaughtered his brother in public anyway, and eventually begat Noah. Noah, you know, was the absolute pinnacle of respectability, who behaved with great foresight and vision. When there was a natural disaster he packed an ark with all the important people, namely his own family, and even all the important animals. His example shines down to the people who are arranging the guest lists for the nuclear shelters today. If you were descended from Seth – and there were very few people descended from Seth – then you were civilised, educated, fit to be on top of society. Thus did the Bible ‘explain’ the division of the human race. John Ball came to this argument and wiped it clean with a wonderful rhyming couplet which was the theme of all his speeches. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ It means two things. In the beginning, when people first existed, when human beings were first able to use their brain power to conquer the animal kingdom and to conquer nature, then where could you say that one person was more important than the other? Where could you see the class origins then? It also means something else. In those same circumstances, where was the evidence that the man was superior to the woman? We don’t have reports of John Balls’s speeches unfortunately. There were no scribes taking down in shorthand what John Ball and all the others were saying at that time. Occasionally a chronicler in a monastery would note one down, just to show how terrible these revolutionaries were! Here’s one such fragment which shows the inspiration and the ideal which John Ball held out to his audiences. ‘My good friends, matters cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all things shall be held in common, when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.’ Simple, elementary equality, preached there within the framework of religion. Not just the idea of equality, not just the inspiration, but most important and central to this entire story, the organisation that went with that idea. The belief that the idea could be put into effect if people took action. The John Balls weren’t just going around the villages saying nice things about how all .things could be held in common. They were agitators, engaged in thirty years of organisation, of inspiration to action, of the appointment of representatives, of linking the experience between town and country. AGAIN AND AGAIN the authorities tried to suppress them. In 1379, in forty-five ‘hundreds’, which is not a very big area, around and about Essex, £10,000 was taken in fines on the peasantry in a single year. That sounds quite a lot even today, but then the average monthly wage paid to ploughmen and reapers was one shilling, that is a twentieth of a pound. The enormous numbers of people in prison, the large numbers of brandings, and the tremendous amount of money taken in fines, all these are indications of what was going on. But all to no avail. John Gower was a landlord and a lawyer (you really had to be one in order to be the other). Shortly before the Peasants’ Revolt broke out, he wrote, with all the prejudices of the class he represented, the most extraordinary prophecy: ‘Three things, all of the same sort, are merciless when they get the upper hand, a water flood, a wasting fire, and the common multitude of small folk. For these will never be checked by reason or discipline and therefore, to speak in brief, the present world is so troubled by them that it is well to set a remedy thereunto. Ha! Age of ours, whither turnest thou? For the poor and small folk who should cleeve to their labour demand to be better fed than their masters. Moreover, they bedeck themselves in fine colours and fine attire whereas were it not for their pride and their privy conspiracies they could be clad in sackcloth as of old.’ That shows just how worried they were about the rise in the peasants’ standard of living. In spite of all that repression, of all those law courts, of all the religious preaching in the churches, the villeins and the serfs and the wage-earners were beginning to encroach upon the wealth of the rulers. The king’s gang were in great difficulty, because the wars were going badly in France. They needed more money to maintain their own standard of living. In December 1380 John of Gaunt took his parliament to Northampton, where they decided they were going to have a poll tax, which is a sort of VAT, except that you didn’t have to buy anything to pay it, you just paid the tax. Every person over the age of fourteen had to pay at least a shilling, that is at least a monthly wage – every person. Now the problem with a poll tax was how to collect it. The standard procedure for tax collection was useless. People had found out how to escape from one village to another, how to get off the tax roll on this village and off it on that, how to dodge the bailiffs when they came – and many of the bailiffs were themselves dissatisfied about the taxes they had to collect.

People had found out how to escape from one village to another, how to get off the tax roll on this village and off it on that, how to dodge the bailiffs when they came – and many of the bailiffs were themselves dissatisfied about the taxes they had to collect. So John of Gaunt’s parliament enrolled a special squad of tax collectors under a particularly revolting specimen called John Leg. John Leg was conceivably the nastiest person in the whole of this very nasty story. He was a sort of mixture of a Black’n’Tan corporal and a racist immigration officer at London Airport. Those were the sort of people he engaged around him to collect these poll taxes. I mentioned the immigration officers at London Airport deliberately. One of the tasks of John Leg’s gang was to discover whether people were fourteen or not. John Legg devised what he called the ‘puberty test’, which has its echo, doesn’t it, in the ‘virginity test’ that has been forced on immigrants coming to Britain today. For to decide whether sons and daughters were over 14, and so liable to the tax, they would measure the pubic hairs. That, as you can imagine, was not particularly popular. Through January, February and March 1381 they collected their forces, a new, drilled gang of tax collectors. They started collecting in April, and as though to mark the date, on April 26th John Ball was arrested and locked up in Maidstone Prison. The counter-offensive, the gang’s attempt to crack down once and for all on this insubordination of the last thirty years, had started. Instead it was the spark to the flame, and unlike peasants’ revolts in other parts of Europe at the time, it was spark to fuel and tinder that had been carefully piled up over a whole number of years. On May 30th a man called Thomas Bampton, a very, very important man indeed, rode into Brentwood in Essex at the head of a group of five or six armed people to complain about the low taxation of the Essex village of Fobbing. The men of Fobbing said they had paid the taxes and they didn’t intend to pay any more, and so of course Bampton ordered their arrest. And then something fantastic happened. The Fobbing men refused to be arrested! Then something more fantastic happened: twenty men with longbows were suddenly standing outside the court. And they politely asked Mr Bampton if he would mind getting on his horse and going out of Brentwood – which he did with amazing alacrity. He went to see the authorities, to see a man called Sir Robert Belnap. Thomas Bampton was a very important person, but Sir Robert Belnap was the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. I can’t describe how important he was. He came to Brentwood with fifteen men – fifteen, that’s a lot you know. You don’t need fifteen men to carry out a puberty test on a fifteen-year-old child. He came to Brentwood and commanded a jury to charge the rebels. ‘These men have revolted against the crown, let’s have a jury,’ he declared. Well, two people in Brentwood agreed to form a jury – that was enough for Sir Robert. Two good men and true. So he started to hold his court ... and suddenly there were a hundred men outside with longbows. They took hold of Sir Robert Belnap and they put him the wrong way round on his horse, tied him to it, and sent him out of the town. He’d gone a long way before someone got him down. Then he saw another horse coming towards him, and on the horse were the severed heads of the jurors who had agreed to indict the rebels of Brentwood. Now on the same day, on the same day – you see, people say the thing wasn’t planned, that it was sporadic outburst – but on the same day, June 2nd, in Dartford in Kent, which is some way away, one of John Leg’s gangs went to the house of John Tyler. Here is a description of what happened: ‘Some of Leg’s fellow criminals ... (this is actually quite a moderate historian, not a socialist at all, a man called Edmund Maurice, a liberal, and even he refers to ‘Leg’s fellow criminals’) ‘Some of Let’s fellow criminals had already arrived, and had gone to the house of one John Tyler and commanded of his wife the payment of the poll tax on behalf of herself, her husband and her daughter. She refused to pay for her daughter, as not being of age, and the collector thereupon seized the daughter, declaring he would discover if this were true.’ Maurice then quotes from Stowe’s chronicle: ‘Neighbours came running in, and John Tyler, being at work in the same town tiling of an house when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand and ran reeking home, where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words and strake at the tiler. Whereupon the tiler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with the lathing staff that the brains flew out of his head, wherethrough great noise arose in the streets and the poor people, being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler.’ That’s the original chronicler, not the modern historian. Just as Brentwood had provided the spark in Essex, so Dartford set fire to Kent. TROOPS OF ARMED PEASANTS suddenly started arriving at the main townships of Essex and Kent within 24 hours. On June 3rd the monastery at Erith had fallen. On June 5th the castle at Rochester fell to the peasants – never had it been taken since the Norman Conquest. On June 6th John Ball was set free from Maidstone Prison – and it was there, as he was set free, that rebel forces representing twenty, thirty, perhaps forty thousand men, elected as their leader a man called Wat Tyler.

On June 6th John Ball was set free from Maidstone Prison – and it was there, as he was set free, that rebel forces representing twenty, thirty, perhaps forty thousand men, elected as their leader a man called Wat Tyler. Not the John Tyler we have met before, but Wat Tyler, about whom, to his enormous credit, we know absolutely nothing. We don’t know what he looked like, we don’t know what he did for a living, we don’t know anything about him save that he led the biggest rising of ordinary people in Britain before Oliver Cromwell. I know there are lots of academic people who like to hear from sensible, university professors about Wat Tyler, so here is Professor Sir Charles Oman – you couldn’t get better than that could you? He writes in The Great Revolt, published by Oxford University Press 1906: ‘it is probable that Tyler was an adventurer of unknown antecedents, and we may well believe the Kentishman who declared that he was a well-known rogue and highwayman.’ That’s the way professors write, when they’ve really done the research, who accept only facts ... ‘we may well believe’, he writes! ‘it is probably ...!’ At any rate, this ‘rogue and highwayman’ was leading an army of seventy thousand people through Kent. At the same time Jack Straw was leading another army of seventy thousand through Essex. Every day the army was growing. Through Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, even Lincolnshire, there were peasants meeting together in the villages. Representatives had been previously appointed and marked down. We know that because when John Ball was released from prison in Maidstone he wrote and sent a series of letters. Only two or three have come down to us, but the letters are direct, like Party circulars mobilising the membership. They are to Jack So-and-so, get out there and get the people out. You there, John this or Wat that, go for this particular landlord, or for that particular set of manorial rolls. The peasants didn’t sack the monasteries, they didn’t even burn them down. They didn’t burn or loot anywhere at random. Everything was done by pre-arranged plan. They went for the manorial rolls which listed the crimes that people had committed, their liability for tax, and what tax had been paid. Those rolls were specially feared and hated, and were systematically destroyed. On June 11th these two big armies from Kent and from Essex (incidentally representing two different levels of exploitation, the men of Kent much more advanced and aware, but the men of Essex much more exploited and therefore more ferocious) camped outside London. Tyler’s army came to Blackheath and Straw’s to Barnet. You can imagine then the feelings of the King’s gang inside the Tower of London. The only decision that was taken, by the way, was to shut the gates. You can imagine it in there: 70,000 men at Black-heath, and probably another 70,000 at Barnet, and the situation is really rather serious because Sir David McNee is not here, we don’t have any police, we don’t have any riot shields, we don’t know what we’re going to do about this situation. The people are in motion – we can’t even trust the people of London not to join these vagabonds. The only hope they had was the faith that the people had in their king, Richard, then a boy of fourteen. For this faith was at the root of the demands of the peasants. Their slogan was ‘For King Richard and the true commons.’ They believed in the king – and it’s a strange thing that you hear the echo even today – saying that the fault was in the courtiers, the hangers-on, the family, the John of Gaunt, Hob the Robber, the Archbishop. But the king himself came from God. The king could do no wrong. The king believed in the people over whom he ruled and had an indissoluble link with the people over whom he ruled and the king would see them straight. The king’s council realised that their only hope was to use the people’s faith in the king. They made a desperate attempt to stop the armies going into London. The king and his closest advisers took a barge and went down the Thames to Rotherhithe, a village south east of London, and called upon Wat Tyler and the people to come and meet them there with their demands. Froissart, the most descriptive of the chroniclers, tells the story: ‘Accordingly, attended by the earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Suffolk and other knights, Richard rowed down the Thames towards Rotherhithe’ (that doesn’t of course mean that he rowed, you understand. He was rowed down the Thames towards Rotherhithe) ‘where were upwards often thousand men who had come from Blackheath to see the king and to speak with him. When the king and his lords saw this crowd of people and the wildness of their manner, there was not one among them so bold and determined but felt alarmed. ‘The king was advised by his barons not to land, but to have his barge rowed up and down the river. “What do you wish for?” demanded the king. “I have come hither to hear what ye have to say.” Those near him cried out with one voice: “We wish thee to land, when we will remonstrate with thee and tell thee more at our ease what our wants are.” The Earl of Salisbury then replied for the king and said: “Gentlemen, you are not properly dressed, nor in a fit condition for the king to talk with you.” Nothing more was said, for the king was desired to return to the Tower of London from whence he had set out.’ The earls and marquesses of Salisbury have been saying it for 600 years: ‘You’re improperly dressed’. Naturally enough, the rebels were undismayed by this performance. They moved at once into the City of London, from both-sides, and once again they acted swiftly and with great restraint. They went for two areas, two areas that were particularly hated.

They went for two areas, two areas that were particularly hated. They went for the Temple, representing all the lawyers – all respectable lawyers operated from the Temple, still do as a matter of fact – and they burnt it down. Then they went to the Savoy, which was the palace of John of Gaunt, and they burnt that down with the most systematic savagery. Every single thing in it was burnt and burnt and burnt again. Only one person died in all this, and he was a looter who was seen taking something out of the Savoy, which wouldn’t then have been burnt. The crowd were so angry that anything connected with John of Gaunt should not be burnt that they killed the looter and burnt the thing that he had taken. The next day, June 14th, the king admitted defeat and opened the gates of the Tower of London and went to Mile End to meet Tyler’s army and agreed to all the rebels’ demands, all of them; repeal of the Statue of Labourers and all the repressive statutes of the last thirty years, an end to bondage and villeinage. Worst of all for the landed gentry was that he decreed: ‘all game and fish to be open to the commons and all the common land which had prevously been taken by the monasteries to be returned to the commons.’ The king didn’t give just his word. He sat all day at Mile End in his tent signing charters for the people of this village, the people of that village, all over the home counties. Meanwhile in the city, the rebel army moved on the Tower. No looting, no destruction, no burning of the Tower. The peasants knew what they wanted, and they got them. They got the Archbishop Sudbury. They got Hales. They got the detested Leg. They got Lyons. All of them lost their heads. The gang, except for the king, and John of Gaunt, who was fighting one of his pet wars in Scotland, had gone forever. BUT OF COURSE there was another gang to replace that gang, and they understood the central weakness of the peasant armies: that they could not last forever, that they couldn’t be supplied, and so would be forced to disband and return to their fields. Above all, they trusted the king. So after waiting a week, in which gradually they built up their own forces, the lords and the barons set up a new and this time very successful intrigue. I don’t want to go into it in detail because if there’s any part of the story that’s known well it’s this part. Pretending that they wanted new talks with Tyler’s army, the king and a large gang of courtiers went to Srnithfield. They insisted that Tyler come alone at least a mile from his army and talk to the king’s men about his demands and whether the army would disband. Tyler, still, trusting the king, came, alone, on his horse, and engaged in absurd negotiaions for a few moments. It’s not exactly known what happened. Somebody shouted out some insulting remark. Tyler drew his dagger. Five people jumped on him, stabbed him, and he fell dying to the ground. Then the king, alone, went to the peasant army and explained that there had been an accident, a mistake. We don’t know exactly what he said to them, but he managed to persuade them that their demands would be met full, indeed had been met in full, and that it was a terrible thing that their leader had been killed. He led them out of the city. That moment is the climax of the revolt, which begins to falter from there. The confidence of those peasant armies depended on their success, and now the success has stopped. It’s difficult even to imagine, in those circumstances, how they could have conceded to King Richard as they did. The only explanation lies in the tremendous power which the royal presence had at that time over the common people. I don’t want to deal too long on the period that followed the rebellion. It was only too familiar. Every home in London was visited by the forces of the king and asked to swear an oath of allegiance on pain of death. John Ball was half-hanged, disembowelled while still alive, hanged again and drawn at St Albans. John Rawe, Jack Straw, John Sherwin of Sussex, William Grindcobbe in St Albans, all of them were executed in one way or another after varying forms of resistance in different towns. William Grindcobbe from St Albans was arrested, imprisoned, and told that he would be killed unless he went back and told the insurgents to lay down their arms. He agreed to go back, and spoke to some 100-150 armed men at St Albans.

He agreed to go back, and spoke to some 100-150 armed men at St Albans. He told them on no account to lay down their arms, to continue the struggle – and he was taken from behind while he was speaking and executed. Such was the spirit of the Peasants’ Revolt. In Billericay five hundred were put to death by a particularly revolting lawyer who ran a competition to see how many could be hanged on the branch of one tree. The record was nineteen. The proportions of the deaths during the rising and afterwards are familiar for all the revolts and rebellions and risings before and since. In the rising itself, perhaps a hundred dead, most of them people guilty of the most terrible extortion and exploitation over a long period of time. In the putting down of the rising, perhaps three thousand dead. That’s roughly the proportion that has been followed in similar events all the way through history. The rulers, in their retribution, are always far more savage than those who oppose them. The men of Essex, finally beaten and broken down by this force of arms, got through three messengers to the court of King Richard with the charter that he had signed at Mile End, reminding him of his commitment to do away with bondage and villeinage. The reply of this boy king, this hero of the hour, is really what sums him up better than anything you’ll ever read in Shakespeare or anywhere else: ‘Serfs you have been and serfs you shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so long as we live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom we shall use our strength, sense and property to treat you that your slavery may be an example to posterity and that those who live now and hereafter, who may be like you, may always have before their eyes, as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you and the fear of doing things like those which you have done.’ That’s the real spokesman of class war in victory. Promising his people a measure of freedom at Mile End signing the charters, and only nine day later tearing up the promises with all the contempt and hatred of a king who has felt the breath of his people in revolt. But the truth of the matter is not, as historians always tell you, that the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 left the peasants worse off than they were before, that the rising would have been better for the peasants not to have happened. For Richard, as he spoke those words, was whistling in the dark and he knew he was whistling in the dark, because he and his nobles had seen the strength and the potential of the risen people, and he wasn’t going to risk that in any circumstances again. In 1382 a new poll tax was ordered by John of Gaunt’s parliament, but this time for landowners only. In 1390 the attempt to hold down wages by law was formally abandoned and the Statute of Labourers effectively repealed. By 1430, only fifty years from the end of the Peasants’ Revolt bondage and villeinage had been abolished, in England before anywhere else in Europe. When you ask: why was England first in the fight against feudalism? Why was it first in England in the revolution of the 1640s that feudalism was crushed? One of the best answers is precisely in the success of the Peasants’ Revolt, more successful than all the peasants’ revolts in Europe – such as Jacquerie in France – because it was organised. Here is the conclusion of Reg Groves’ and Philip Lindsay’s marvellous book on this subject. And that’s by far the best book, by the way, about the Peasants’ Revolt: ‘All that we know about the commoners of fourteenth century England suggests that they had long awaited and prepared for extensive and radical revolution.’ That’s the most important thing about it: the organisation and the propaganda, the linking of the organisation and propaganda, the appointment of representatives, the linking from the town to the country, from county to county. By these means, by planning and organisation, men like Ball, Tyler, Rawe, Grindcobbe and Straw, from the darkest depths of feudal England, were able to raise two mighty armies which scared the living daylights out of the rulers of the time. The scaring has gone on for 600 years. Nothing concentrates the minds of the hereditary landlords and capitalists quite like the memory of Wat Tyler. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, has a wonderful character in it called Sir Lester Dedlock – the names in Dickens always sum the person up. He was always worried about the ‘floodgates’ of society, whether they might open and sweep the social order away. There is a passage about a case in the Court of Chancery: ‘He, Sir Lester, regards the Court of Chancery, even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a trifling amount of confusion, as a “something” devised in conjunction with a variety of other “somethings”, by the perfection of human wisdom for the external settlement of everything. And he is upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his countenance to any complaints respecting the Court of Chancery would be to encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere ... like Wat Tyler.’ Throughout the whole book, Sir Lester Dedlock, when someone says something wrong at a party, or eats with the wrong knife, or doesn’t come home at the time that they ought to, Sir Lester is reminded of Wat Tyler and of people who meet by torchlight with grim and swarthy expressions. THERE’S A TENDENCY among people who think about history, even, perhaps especially, among Marxists who think about history, to divide it into sealed compartments. They say that the peasant comes from a different age, is separate from us, has nothing to do with us, and that history moves by stages, scientific stages, and the peasant is one stage, and the workers are in another. It’s nothing therefore to do with us what happened six hundred years ago, in a quite different sort of economy. We can leave it on one side.

We’re not peasants, we’re very advanced people, we’ve been an industrial working class burrowing away for years and we’ve got pretty well nowhere, but we’re terribly important and we’re much more important than any peasant. I think that that is not only reactionary and wrong but paralysing – because the whole idea that history determines things and that everything’s inevitable paralyses us, leaves out the activity which is at the centre of the Peasants’ Revolt. It is also insulting to the people who carried those standards for us all through those years before. What’s most extraordinary about the Peasants’ Revolt is not the differences between us and them, which are obvious and expected, but the similarities. We’re bound together by this relentless struggle between the classes, which persists all the way through their story and all the way through ours. In 1881, one hundred years ago, inspired by the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt, William Morris, a great socialist writer, grappled with this same idea. We do have something in common with what John Ball and Wat Tyler were doing in 1381. How could William Morris, with his enormous writing powers, try to bridge the gap for the socialists of his time? He did it in a really very brilliant piece of writing. It took him a long time to do it, and didn’t in fact appear until 1885. He imagined himself or somebody like himself, a socialist in 1881, being plunged back into the villages of Kent in 1381, beating off the barons and the nobles. He describes John Ball coming to a village – probably the best description there is, better than the chronicles themselves because William Morris really went into it and found out about it. At the end of the piece, which is called The Dream of John Ball, this man, who has all this experience of 500 years after 1381, has a long discussion with John Ball about what will happen. John Ball says, in effect, that he knows the revolt is going to fail, but asks what is going to happen after that? When, he asks, is his dream of all people living in common and sharing everything and there not being any vassals or lords going to come about? Morris replies sadly that it won’t come for 500 years at least. Not surprisingly, John Ball gets a bit depressed about that. He reminds his guest that he is marching to certain defeat and execution, and asks: For what? Is it worth it? Here is the reply: ‘John Ball, be of good cheer, for once more thou knowest as I know that the fellowship of man shall endure, however many tribulations it may have to wear through. It may well be that this bright day of summer, which is now dawning upon us, is no image of the beginning of the day that shall be – but rather shall that day dawn be cold and grey and surly, and yet, by its light shall men see things as they verily are, and, no longer enchanted by the gleam of the moon and the glamour of the dream-tide, by such grey light shall wise men and valiant souls see the remedy and deal with it, a real thing that may be touched and handled and no glory of the heavens to be worshipped from afar off. ‘And what shall it be, as I told thee before, save that men shall be determined to be free, yea free as thou wouldst have them, when thine hope rises the highest and thou arte thinking, not of the king’s uncles and poll-grote bailiffs and the villeinage of Essex, but of the end of it all, when men shall have the fruits of the earth and the fruits of the earth and the fruits of their toil thereon without money and without price. That time shall come, John Ball, when that dream of thine shall this one day be, shall be a thing that man shall talk of soberly, and as a thing soon to come about as even with thee they talk of the villeins becoming tenants paying their lord quit-rent. ‘Therefore hast thou done well to hope it, and thy name shall abide by thy hope in those days to come, and thou shalt not be forgotten.’ Top of the page Last updated on 24.11.2013

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Beyond the Powell (March 1998) Obituary of Enoch Powell, Socialist Review, No.217, March 1998, p.12. Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Everyone who wrote about him was certain of one thing: Enoch Powell was not a racist. He ‘said things we didn’t agree with’ (Tony Blair). He was ‘an extreme nationalist, but not a racialist’ (Denis Healey). He inspired racialists ‘but was not a racialist himself’ (Tony Benn). The Tory papers which revered him and called for parliament to be prorogued in his memory would not contemplate the possibility that he was a racialist. The unanimity was complete. Which is all very odd because the most important thing by far about Enoch Powell was that he was a racist pig of the most despicable variety. The point is easily proved. In a private speech to lobby correspondents some years before he started speaking in public on immigration, he said, ‘Often when I am kneeling down in church I think to myself how much we should thank god, the holy ghost, for the gift of capitalism.’ Powell believed in capitalism just as a religious nut believes in the holy ghost. When fighting elections in Wolverhampton he would spell out the ‘simple choice’ between ‘free enterprise and a planned society’. He gloried in what he called the symmetry of capitalism. Ponderously, with a deliberate form of speech which many mistook for careful thought, he explained how the market drove and inspired the capitalist economy to ever higher summits of perfection. There was only one condition: that capital should be left to find its own place and its own direction. It followed naturally that if free moving capital were to be allowed the full thrust of its energy, labour must be free to follow. The free movement of labour was therefore as vital a plank of capitalism as was the free movement of capital. ‘Pettifogging bureaucracy’ must be cleared out of the way of rampant capitalism – and of the docile and happy labourers who were pleased to follow. Thus in Powell’s early speeches in the House of Commons in the 1950s, his talk was all of free enterprise. In his first 11 years as an MP there was no control on empire or commonwealth immigration into Britain. Theoretically 600 million people could come to the ‘mother country’ and settle here without restraint. Powell could see nothing wrong in that, in theory. When someone raised the matter with him at a meeting in Wolverhampton in 1956, he spoke out against imposing controls on immigration. During the arguments about the first Commonwealth Immigration Control Act in 1960 and 1961 Powell was minister of health. His department sent emissaries to the West Indies to recruit nurses and ancillary workers for the National Health Service. When he fought the 1964 general election, and loyally supported his government’s immigration control acts, he concentrated still on a ‘pure’ capitalist argument which saw no difference in workers with different coloured skins. ‘I have set and always will set my face like flint’, he said in a sudden rush of the portentous rhetoric for which he was famous, ‘against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin.’ All this was theory, pure theory which needed to be tested by practice. And the first big test for Powell was the undoubted fact, which he could see with his own eyes, that an increasing number of people in the two places he knew well – London and Wolverhampton – were black. They were not just black visitors to goggle at nor black maharajahs to remind him of his time in the Indian army, but black workers and their families, spreading all over what Powell continually called ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. If he had been true to his ideology, Powell might have glossed over this fact, perhaps even welcomed it. But he could not be true to his ideology. It conflicted with a passion stronger even than his belief in pure capitalism: a passion for empire, and with it an incontrovertible belief that the white man was ordained by god to conquer and control the world which was populated mainly by inferior black people. Enoch Powell was, in short, a racist to his bones. It was, he concluded, utterly shocking that these black people should have been allowed into the country at all. As he started, slowly at first, to articulate this conclusion, he noticed something else. Large numbers of people shared his prejudices and rejoiced to hear them legitimised by a front-ranking politician. In 1965 Powell stood for the leadership of the Tory Party against Edward Heath and Reginald Maudling and was humiliated with only 15 votes. He was out of office and out in the cold. From 1967, when he first made a racist speech in Walsall, he realised he could get endless publicity and undreamt of popularity by mouthing his racist prejudices. He launched himself on a racist campaign culminating in his notorious speech in Birmingham in April 1968. The speech pretended to deal with reality but in fact dealt only in myth. Racist myths were common at the time. Stories passed from area to area about the crime, filth and sexual licence of black people. Politicians steered clear of these myths which were kept away from the public arena. Powell devoted his entire speech to them. A woman in his constituency, so he had heard, had excreta pushed through her letter box and was then hounded by ‘grinning piccaninnies’ who shouted, ‘Racialist!’ at her. The blacks were preparing for power and within 20 years would have ‘the whip hand in this country’. Almost licking his lips, he looked forward to race riots. The effect of his speech was to unblock a racist sewer and send it swirling freely through public life. The word went round – if Enoch Powell MP said these things, they must be true! Dockers marched in his support (though the racist campaign in the docks soon died out). Floods of letters poured into Powell at the House of Commons. When the Sunday Times denounced him as a racialist, he sued for libel. The paper demanded discovery of all the letters he got after his speech. He promptly dropped the case. The letters proved that the effect of his speech was to whip up the vilest racism. Powell went on with this racism all his life. There was no satisfying his racist appetite. When immigration slowed to nothing, he demanded repatriation. He extended his colour prejudice to anti-European racism and then to Catholics in Northern Ireland. Whatever else he ever said is drowned out for posterity by the grim cacophony of his racism. ‘The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’ Mark Anthony’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar gets it exactly wrong. Quite the opposite is usually true. The evil that Powell did was interred with his bones by almost all his obituaries. But it is important for us to remember the awful damage caused by his disgusting campaign, if only to prepare for the next racist demagogue to come along, and to shut him up. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Election Is this what democracy looks like? (June 2001) Editorial, Socialist Review, No.253, June 2001, p.7. Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot examines why New Labour is increasingly becoming old Tory Shaun Woodward was the driving force behind John Major’s election victory in 1992. He personally supervised the campaign of John Major’s friend Jeffrey Archer to become mayor of London. No one took more pride in the success of the Tory campaign in 1992, a success which landed us with five more years of Tory rule studded with jewels such as the privatisation of the railways. He defended the Tories against allegations of sleaze while championing Archer, the most contemptible sleazeball of them all. Now Woodward is the prospective Labour candidate for one of the largest working class areas in Britain, St Helens. Woodward is very rich. He shot to his huge fortune by the time-honoured method of marrying an heiress. No more than a handful of people in St Helens could ever dream of eating in the same restaurant or driving the same sort of car as Shaun Woodward. Yet somehow, after a series of backstage deals that would have brought cheers in Tammany Hall, this Tory political fixer has been selected to stand for Labour in St Helens. A shiver of disgust runs through what’s left of the Labour movement in that part of the world. It seems almost incredible that the fixers of Millbank can achieve such a monstrous perversion of Labour representation. Yet there is nothing new about it. Ever since Blair became party leader the word has gone out from his apparatchiks to dump anything to do with Old Labour and, if possible, use the mass working class vote to enrich the House of Commons with the rich. Mark Fisher, Labour MP for Stoke Central, was rung up recently by a senior official at Millbank and asked two bizarre questions: did he not think it admirable that Tory MPs should desert their party and cross the floor to Labour and, if so, did he not think that MPs with big majorities (like him) should sacrifice their seat to a Tory apostate? It was sometime before Mark realised exactly that the bureaucrat was proposing that he, Mark Fisher, should give up his seat to someone like Woodward and make his way without fuss to the new House of Lords, where seats are apparently as available as they were to any corrupt businessman who lavished part of his wealth on the Tories or former Liberal leader David Lloyd George. Perhaps, as he furiously abused the man from Millbank, Mark Fisher recalled that after 18 months as arts minister he was suddenly and arbitrarily sacked by Blair to make way for another Blair favourite, Major’s former social services minister, the Tory Alan Howarth. Howarth was imposed on the Labour voters of Newport in exactly the same scurrilous way in which Woodward has been imposed on St Helens. Fisher’s indignation was immediate and glorious – the Millbank courtier was sent packing. But the same trick was then tried more successfully on the MP for St Helens, Gerry Bermingham. Bermingham denies that he is going to the House of Lords. But he has vacated his seat and abandoned his constituents so that yet another millionaire can take his place in the House of Commons. It is truly hard to imagine a more ridiculous way to end a mediocre parliamentary career, nor a worse fate to bestow on his unfortunate constituents of St Helens. Tory millionaire What does it prove? It proves that Tony Blair and his timeservers at Millbank have nothing but contempt, not just for the Labour movement – that has been obvious for some time – but for the whole system of representation and selection in that movement. He much prefers to have an ex-Tory millionaire in parliament than to allow the ordinary process of Labour local selection to take its course. Blair believes, moreover, that the Parliamentary Labour Party is his own fiefdom and that he can and must choose the right sort of people to sit under him in parliament. It is not simply that he wants an MP for St Helens who will vote for him in the lobbies. He wants an MP for St Helens who by his past record, his wealth, his photogenic wife and children, his stately home and everything else about him, will fit the image of New Labour – the image of the smooth talking plutocrat who represents patronage, privilege and undemocratic power. He wants the Labour benches in the House of Commons (and the House of Lords, which he has revived) stuffed with people like Lord Sainsbury, who deserted Labour for the SDP, and Geoffrey Robinson, a beneficiary of that famous Labour millionaire Robert Maxwell. Both have been generous hosts to Blair. He would like to be surrounded by an even more generous coterie consisting of millionaires like Bernie Ecclestone and the Hinduja brothers. The mark of a good MP or minister in his eyes is to do what Tony says in public life and, in private, to make as much money as possible in the free market. These figures are not just symbols. They are the reality of what is happening to British Labour. For if the Tory millionaire is to be marked out for advancement in the movement, it follows that the politics and priorities of the millionaire will become the policies and priorities of the Labour Party. Many people find it hard to understand, for instance, why Blair and Brown are so determined not to raise the higher rate of tax, or why they beg rich businessmen to take their slice of what used to be public enterprise. But when the high income tax payers and the rich businessmen are personally preferred to the people who do the work, then the mystery vanishes. New Labour is not new Labour at all. It is becoming, not just in rhetoric but in reality, Old Tory. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Tribune of the People An interview (May 2000) From Socialist Review, No.241, May 2000, pp.10-11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot has been voted What the Papers Say Journalist of the Decade. He spoke to Judy Cox about what the award means to him, and about his experiences as a socialist journalist during the 1990s. The award was especially encouraging because Paul has been so ill: ‘When I knew I had won something I couldn’t work out what it was. I spent nine months of 1999 very ill, so I knew I couldn’t have won anything for last year. Instead it was for the whole decade, the first time they have ever given such an award.’ Winning high profile awards helps his campaigns: ‘Recently I was asking about the case of Sarah Friday, the sacked rail worker from Waterloo. I rang the press office at South West Trains and the representative knew that the issue had to be taken seriously.’ But Paul thinks his best writing was inspired by workers’ struggles: ‘I never won an award during the six years I worked on Socialist Worker, yet that was the best work I ever did. It was the only time I was able to report what I saw and what I felt, and put general arguments against the way society worked. I am sure that the reports I did in the early 1970s, in concert with workers’ struggles, were the best things I have done.’ For 14 years Paul Foot wrote a weekly column in the Mirror, which had a unique relationship with its readers: ‘I was appointed to the Mirror in autumn 1979 as a reaction to Thatcher’s election. I still regard it as a complete miracle that I ever got onto the Mirror. They asked me to be an investigative journalist, but I had only just stopped working for Socialist Worker and I was a very keen member of the SWP. I didn’t want to become part of a big capitalist machine. I insisted on having a regular space under my control, and I was astonished when the paper agreed to my terms. I had to allow those I was attacking space to defend themselves, which is a rule I have always followed because the writing has more impact if you are seen to be fair. The first five years on the Mirror were brilliant, because I depended on people sending lots of stories to me. ‘Then one day in 1984 the awful figure of Robert Maxwell wrote out a cheque for £100 million and bought the whole enterprise. He called me and John Pilger up. We thought we were going to be sacked. Maxwell promised that he wouldn’t interfere with anything we wrote. I replied that was an academic question, because if he did, I wouldn’t go on. He called me a “space imperialist”; he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone controlling anything he owned. I wasn’t afraid of being sacked – I didn’t have much to lose. I put up a list of his friends in the office, which was an invitation to other journalists to attack them, though we had to be sure of the facts because they always phoned Maxwell to complain.’ Halcyon days ‘I held onto the column for seven years under Maxwell, with the backing of the editors. Maxwell died in 1991, and from November 1991 to October 1992 we had real halcyon days without any management or proprietor. For the first time we gained in circulation on the Sun. Everything worked very well, but it was in contradiction to the rules of capitalist society, so they had to smash it up. Significantly, on the day of the big march against pit closures they moved. Most unions in the print industry were wiped out in 1986, but an active NUJ chapel at the Mirror had survived, even managing to avert threatened redundancies through a sit-in. They brought David Montgomery in from Murdoch’s stable with the sole intention of smashing the unions and the whole culture we had built up. The editors were sacked and replaced with clones. We hung on for six months because they didn’t dare sack me, but it became impossible. I left by publishing a column exposing what was going on, called Look in the Mirror, which got some publicity.’ Paul was at the forefront of exposing Tory sleaze: ‘Max Hastings, who became the editor of the Evening Standard in the mid-1990s, developed a great hostility to Jeffrey Archer. I wrote a piece for him in 1997 called, Do You Want This Man As Mayor Of London? which brought together all the stories about Archer, including how I had gone to Canada to investigate his alleged theft of some suits. Journalistically I recovered quickly, but politically it was much harder to recover from the defeat at the Mirror.’ In the mid-1990s many of Paul’s investigations began to take on new momentum: ‘When I left the Mirror all the big campaigns I had been involved in had apparently failed. I used to tell people, “Don’t come to me – I always lose.” Then, one by one, the major cases were reopened and reversed These included the release of Eddie Browning, who was falsely accused of the murder of Marie Wilkes, in 1994, the quashing of Colin Wallace’s conviction in 1996 and the release of the Bridgewater Four in 1997. So when I was back at Private Eye there was a series of victories in old campaigns, and new campaigns starting. As early as 1994 we raised doubts about the Stephen Lawrence case. In three articles called Sergeants’ Mess we pointed out that Stephen’s murderers were not prosecuted because Duwayne Brooks’s identification of two suspects was rubbished by a police officer who had absolutely no justification in rubbishing him. We also covered the Aitken story and the arms to Iraq affair.

We also covered the Aitken story and the arms to Iraq affair. ‘Recently I went to a course for investigative journalists where everyone agreed that if journalists are politically committed their integrity is compromised. I am completely at odds with everyone on that question, because I am openly committed to the SWP. I have never felt that life would be easier if I was not in the SWP – the advantages are so enormous. Firstly you have access to other people so you can pool your resources and demonstrate, and raise voices of protest On the intellectual side, people say joining an organisation stops you thinking for yourself. I have always found the exact opposite to be true – my judgements are much better when they are arrived at through discussion and debate with others. So practically and intellectually it is much better to be in a party.’ Labour damages democracy For the last ten years Paul has been working on a book about voting and power in British history, ‘about how workers used their power to win the vote, and the history of Labour governments which have damaged the democracy which put them in office. It has meant taking many of my idols and putting them in their historical context. Figures as diverse as Tom Paine, Shelley, the Chartist leaders, the great revolutionaries of the 20th century, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Harry McShane all come to life in their historical perspective.’ Paul is very optimistic about the possibilities raised by the London Socialist Alliance: ‘The Scottish Socialist Party got 4.2 percent of the vote in the Ayr by-election, a very good result for a socialist to the left of Labour in a non working class town. If we get 4.2 percent in London, there is a possibility that we could get someone elected to the assembly – I am top of the list so it would probably be me. We are very lucky because what Labour is doing is so monstrous that thousands and thousands of people inside and outside the Labour Party are very annoyed. The Livingstone split in the Labour Party has opened a massive space for us. People will vote in large numbers for Ken, but then have to decide who to vote for in the assembly. Those who have any inkling to the left, who care about the underground or privatisation generally, will be looking for left wing candidates. Having an alliance of socialists is great I stood in the Stetchford by-election in Birmingham in 1977 against another left wing group. The left got a respectable 1,000 votes but they were split, which was disastrous. That is behind us now, and we are working alongside socialists from many organisations. ‘Now is definitely the time to break from Labour. Break with Labour over these elections and then take it from there. The best thing is to get active and involved in some issue or campaign, such as opposing Clause 28, and make choices based on that experience. ‘The idea that in the labour movement power corrupts is wrong – what corrupts us is impotence. Absolute impotence corrupts absolutely, and the greatest example of this is the government’s impotence over the Rover crisis. Even in 1977 when British Leyland, Rover’s predecessor, was going to the wall the government nationalised it, almost by instinct. Now, even when there are tens of thousands of people on the streets of Birmingham, angry and asking, “What shall we do?”: the answer comes, “Absolutely nothing.” ‘Tony Woodley says whatever we do it is going to be worse, so people think there is no alternative. An occupation now could set off another Upper Clyde Shipbuilders [the Glasgow occupation in 1971], and the union leaders and MPs are all afraid of it We have to build up the feeling of confidence.’ Paul has been a spokesperson for the revolutionary left for many years: ‘I am now 62. Many of my contemporaries have gone on the same dreary path to the right, but I have never had even the slightest temptation to go in that direction. That is partly because of meeting people like Tony Cliff when I was young. It was very important when things were difficult for socialists that I was in touch with people who identified the situation and worked out what to do about it. ‘Central to the idea of socialism is understanding that things will change – one day the people at the top who are now doing the bashing will be bashed by people at the bottom. I am greatly helped by the fact that I lived through the 1970s when we believed revolution was imminent. When I joined Socialist Worker in October 1972 I was confident that a revolution was coming. Events seemed to confirm it, and even right wingers said the same. If you have lived through that, it is easier to see it happening again. Everything in our history points to the fact that things will swing around, and all kinds of hopes and optimisms flourish again. Although the 1990s were depressing in some respects, not a single thing has happened to make me doubt that things will change in our direction. It will happen very unexpectedly and catch us by surprise, so we must be prepared, be bigger and win more influence inside the working class. We must plug into those areas where things are happening now, and the LSA is definitely one of those areas.’ Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ambushing the news (3 July 1993) From Socialist Worker, 3 July 1993. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 235–236. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. When Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television bid successfully for the right to screen First Division football matches live, the chief executive of London Weekend Television, Greg Dyke, put on a grand display of righteous indignation. It was, he said, shocking that commercial interests should deprive people of the programmes they wanted to watch. He was right, of course. But is he consistent? Now he appears in secret conference with other TV bosses, in particular Paul Jackson, the managing director of Carlton TV, which purveys television programmes in London on weekdays. Jackson, Dyke and all the other commercial TV bosses met recently to discuss the future of the most successful and popular regular television shows ever – News at Ten. News at Ten started in 1967. It lasted for half an hour. From the outset it proved just as popular as the BBC’s news. It has lasted for 26 years, has an enormous and loyal following, and the two minutes of advertising which split it in two bring in nearly £100 million – by far the most profitable regular two minutes for the ITV companies. The success of television news on BBC and ITV gave the lie to all those who said that the masses were not interested in news. While the tabloid press published less and less news – and gave more and more space to sport and nudes – the television news, presented on the whole without nudes and without even much sport, proved hugely popular. Millions of people were gluttons for the news. When Channel 4 introduced its own extended 50 minute ITN news (called Channel 4 News) at 7 p.m., millions tuned in. Together the two ITN programmes were watched by something like half the adult population. They established minimal standards of fairness and accuracy, which compared favourably with the bias and hysteria of the tabloid press. The only people who refuse to recognise the astonishing popularity and success of News at Ten are the television proprietors. They don’t like news at any time, but they specially don’t like it at 10 o’clock at night when it interrupts much more juicy profit-making with cheap movies or rotten sitcom shows. For years now the heads of the ITV companies have been plotting a coup on News at Ten. Last week they finally ambushed it and started to leak plans for putting on a new news programme at 6.30 p.m. Everyone agrees that most of the standards of News at Ten would be lost in a 6.30 programme – it is too early to develop the day’s news it will compete absurdly with Channel 4 News. It will be seen as a demotion, a device to get the news out of the way before getting on with the trivia. But years of ‘deregulation’, in television, as in everything else, have made it impossible for the ‘watchdogs’ to intervene. Profit-hungry bosses like Greg Dyke, who, with his fellow directors at LWT, has just helped himself to millions of pounds in a scandalous share scheme, are left free to plunder the networks. Even though she had her own friends on the ITV companies, Thatcher grew to loathe them for their power and their lack of right wing bias. She waged war to the death with Thames Television over Death on the Rock, the expose of the Gibraltar murders by the SAS. Her hatred spilled over into News at Ten. The ideological imperative from the right to sweep away anything which can for a moment present the public with some of the facts about the world we live in has engulfed the creations even of the right’s own children. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot London, 27 February 1900 (February 1999) From Red Letter Days, Socialist Review, No.227, February 1999, p.35. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Anyone who has been around the London left for any length of time will be familiar with smallish meetings, usually in the Conway Hall, which set up some committee or other to fight or defend something or other, which to everyone’s fury is then completely ignored by the capitalist press. The meeting in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on 27 February 1900 was, to all appearances, another of these. There were only 120 people there, all of them saying they were ‘delegates’. The mood was not exuberant. The arguments were long, dull and apparently of little significance outside the hall. No one in the press or in the organised labour movement seemed to show the slightest interest. Yet the meeting of what called itself the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party, was historic. Its aim, which it achieved, was for the first time to break the umbilical cord which bound the leaders of organised labour to the Liberal Party; and to form a new political party to represent the interests of the working masses in parliament. Three distinct groups were represented at the Memorial Hall. By far the largest was the trade union leaders. At almost every annual conference since the Trades Union Congress first met in 1867, a prominent subject for debate had been the need for wider parliamentary representation for labour. In the general election of 1874, two working men, Thomas Hurt and Alexander Macdonald, both miners, had been elected. They were joined by Henry Broadhurst in 1880 and, briefly, by a handful of other workers, mostly miners, in the 1885 general election after the extension of the franchise. Throughout all this time, the TUC’s political strategy was to act as a pressure group on the Liberal Party. The TUC’s influential parliamentary committee, dominated for years by Henry Broadhurst, never even questioned its allegiance to the Liberal Party under its revered leader, the ‘phrasemaker’, William Gladstone. The Labour Representation League, which was formed soon after the TUC came into being, was a talking shop in which the union leaders bowed and scraped to their Liberal heroes. One result was that socialist ideas were not just ignored but positively opposed. Even parliamentary measures to improve workers’ conditions were frowned on by these union leaders who accepted Liberal arguments about the beautiful symmetry of the free market and the dangers of interfering in it. These arguments began to wilt in the 1880s. The severe depression which started in 1879, and which was heralded by Engels as the beginning of the end for British monopolistic domination of world markets, led to widespread closures and bankruptcies and a steep decline in the already marginal influence of the unions. In the late 1880s the great victories of the match girls, the gas workers and the London dockers further threatened the old Liberal union leaders with a ‘new unionism’ extending far beyond the fixed boundaries of the labour aristocracy. These old leaders hurriedly set up the Labour Electoral Association, whose second annual meeting marvelled at the relative representative interests of different groups in society. Landlords and landowners had 209 MPs, armed service officers 128, lawyers 136, manufacturing bosses and commercial services 136, railway bosses 62, bankers 33, brewers 24 – and labour (even at its widest definition) just nine. Some 650,000 miners had five MPs – a few hundred coal-owners had 20. Yet even when confronted by these figures, the Labour Electoral Association leaders continued to stick with the Liberals and to denounce the growing demands for independent Labour representation. Through the 1890s, in a series of debates at the TUC and elsewhere, the argument slipped away from the old leaders. Gladstone died, and the new Liberal leaders grew even more indifferent to the demands of labour. Broadhurst and Co often won the votes at Congress, but lost the argument. In 1899 Congress instructed its leaders to take part in a conference to sponsor independent Labour MPs. Hence the meeting at the Memorial Hall. Two much smaller groups attended the conference, both of them socialist. The first was the Independent Labour Party (ILP), whose leader Keir Hardie had clashed repeatedly with Broadhurst. The second was the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), a small organisation led by the former stockbroker H.M. Hyndman. Some of the leaders of the great strikes of the 1880s, notably Will Thorne of the transport workers and Ben Tillett, the dockers’ union leader, were in the hall, but such men were much influenced by syndicalist anti-parliamentary arguments and played little part in the proceedings. When the SDF moved that the new Labour Party should be openly socialist ‘based upon the recognition of the class war’ their motion was overwhelmingly rejected. But the old Liberal union leaders did not get everything their own way. Keir Hardie moved and carried a motion committing the conference to a ‘distinct Labour Group in Parliament’, with its own whips and its own policy. The resolution was full of holes, which were relentlessly exploited by the growing Labour Group in the Commons. But for all the weaknesses and hesitancy of the LRC, the decisive break with the old bourgeois parties had been made, and would continue for 100 years until now, when Tony Blair is trying to get in bed with the Liberals once again. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The dream of Tony Blair (26 August 1995) From Socialist Worker, No. 1457, 26 August 1995, p. 11. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. DOES TONY Blair dream? Does he have a vision of what could be? The answer is yes, and I can prove it. I’ve been reading an article in the London Evening Standard of 8 January 1993. It was not written by the teenage son of a Tory cabinet minister, though it could have been. The author was Tony Blair, then Labour’s front bench spokesman for home affairs. He was glowing with enthusiasm and delight after a glimpse of the New World. He had just come back from Washington, which was excitedly preparing for the inauguration of the new president of the United States of America, Bill Clinton. What struck the impressionable Blair was the democratic, even proletarian, spirit of the new presidential order. “Bill Clinton will arrive in Washington,” Blair reported, “not on the presidential plane or in a bulletproof limousine or even, a specially chartered train. He will come by bus ...” Blair explained that this unlikely form of transport (Clinton has probably never travelled in a bus since) was symbolic of a “people’s inauguration ceremony designed to reflect both the populism of the anti-establishment campaign that won him his presidency and the new dynamism of an administration pledged to the theme of national renewal”. Too specific Everywhere, Blair reported, there was change – the new faces of the new government included a woman attorney general, a former civil rights lawyer devoted to law reform, a vice-president who for the first time for years sat down for talks with trade union leaders from the motor car industry, and a “British educated” Labour secretary with “ideas for transforming education and training”. Comparing the “energy and drive” of the new Democrats in America with the “fatigue of our Conservative government” left Tony Blair feeling, he admitted, a “little envious”. But even in his excitement and enthusiasm, Blair did not forget his most consistent political characteristic: caution. Clinton’s policy for the election, he thought, was “over detailed”, too specific about promises which might not be kept. “Great expectations”, he warned, “are never wholly fulfilled.” Moreover, “much can go wrong as the new administration is buffeted by events”. And it was therefore loo early to tell” whether Clinton will “ring in the changes he has promised”. Clinton’s promises, Blair conceded, might not be fulfilled – but so what? The real aim of the campaign – victory at the polls – had been achieved. That was far more important than what might follow. Blind blundering The process of a form of politics which starts and ends at elections had come to its logical conclusion. The election victory was a dream far more vital than any nightmare which might follow. How does Tony Blair feel, therefore, as he contemplates the wreckage of the Clinton administration, the surrender of every economic and social reform, the hesitation and blind blundering which have been followed inevitably by one of the nastiest reactionary backlashes ever seen in the reactionary history of United States policies? Does he flinch as the reforming welfare advisers he celebrated cut the pittances of dole and benefits which even George Bush tolerated; as those reforming civil rights lawyers he praised preside over the mass executions of prisoners on Death Row; as the new talks with the union leaders develop into a new burst of anti-union legislation and official strikebreaking? Does any of this make him flinch from his 1993 hero worship of the Clinton-Gore gang? Not at all. They won the election, didn’t they, and what else matters? Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Passports and Politics A beautiful symmetry (February 2001) From News Review, Socialist Review, No.249, February 2001, p.5. Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. At some time during his stay in Northern Ireland a strange thing happened to Peter Mandelson. He lost what was left of his conscience. When he resigned two years ago after his vast loan from former Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson was revealed, he was subdued, almost contrite. He applied what became known as the Hartlepool test – what would the ordinary Labour voter in poor old Hartlepool make of their MP borrowing £400,000 from a rich pal so that he could buy himself a decent house? The answer was pretty obvious. Mandelson accepted it, and left the stage. Apply the same test to the recent hullabaloo about the Hinduja brothers, and it goes something like this. What would a manual worker in Hartlepool make of his MP intervening on behalf of a billionaire who had been a generous supporter of Margaret Thatcher and who was being investigated by the Indian authorities for his part in a notorious arms scandal? The answer, if anything, would be even more unprintable than the answer over the Robinson loan scandal. But Peter Mandelson has been so long in office that he has lost sight of his own simple test. So, it seems, have the entire media. So the questions which are being asked – by the newspapers, television, and mainly by the Tories, who are as deep in the Hinduja mire as anyone else – are about which ministers rang which colleagues, exactly what they said and whether their behaviour contradicted some legalistic code drawn up by MPs with the purpose of shielding them from public criticism. On this level it seems to be important whether it was Mandelson himself or his private secretary who rang the Home Office to ask about the Hindujas’ passport. This is an entirely trivial matter. No one suggests that the private secretary would have made such an inquiry without her boss’s instruction. The point is that at a time when the Hindujas were offering vast sums to bolster the ghastly Dome, for which Mandelson was the responsible minister, Mandelson, or someone on his behalf, tried to secure for the billionaire the British citizenship which is craved by millions of desperately poor people all over the world. That is not a question of detail – who rang whom and when. That is a simple question of principle – of attempting to secure for a very rich donor a deeply-prized privilege. The Tories, of course, are having a field day at Labour’s expense. Their jubilation will last as long as it takes to find out and publish what is already widely suspected – that the Hindujas were generous contributors to Tory Party coffers, were profound admirers of Margaret Thatcher, and were supported in all sorts of ways by senior Tory politicians and functionaries. The charge against Mandelson is the same sort of charge as that traditionally levelled against the Tories – of preferential treatment for the rich, and of seeking for the rich privileges and passports which are denied to impoverished masses of the same colour and culture. The beautiful symmetry of the whole affair can best be appreciated by recalling that the original guru of New Labour, the man who dedicated himself to the re-writing of Clause Four of Labour’s constitution, and who devoted his entire life as a minister to sucking up to the rich and expecting them constantly to come to the rescue of the Labour government, is, you’ve got it in one, Peter Mandelson. And look where it all got him. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot ‘Seeds of new society are sown in battle with the old’ (23 November 2002) From Socialist Worker, No.1827, 23 November 2002. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Campaigning journalist Paul Foot writes on why strikes are key to radical change THE FIREFIGHTERS’ strike dominates the headlines and causes something approaching panic in New Labour leaders and hysteria in the right wing press. Two arguments in particular are launched against the strikers from inside the labour movement. From the right comes the view of New Labour’s favourite (and knighted) professor, George Bain. This is that the 11 percent offer over two years with strong strings is more than any other group of workers has been offered, and that the firefighters’ jobs are secure and sought after. To quote the prime minister, “no sensible government on earth” could meet the firefighters’ full claim. From the left comes the querulous complaint that we should be concentrating on “the big issues” such as the threat of war in Iraq or the permanent menace of globalisation so majestically opposed by the recent demonstration in Florence. Why should we be diverted from such worldwide matters by a strike of a single small union in Britain? Are not the firefighters, like all such strikers, just after lining their own individual pockets and using their disproportionate industrial muscle to achieve for themselves what other workers with less muscle, such as nurses, can never hope for? Should not these matters of the distribution of resources to different sets of workers be decided by elected governments and not by the wholly arbitrary use of industrial power? All such arguments focus so intensely on the trees of the argument that they don’t even catch sight of the wood. The central characteristic of the society we live in is that it is divided by class. The class in control – mean, greedy and above all hierarchical – owes its power, its wealth and its prestige to the exploitation and humiliation of the people who do the work. It therefore encourages a system in which workers are encouraged to heed and obey their masters. Obedience and respect for the high, the mighty and the rich is a central principle of capitalist society. Anything that challenges any of these things is a threat, but as long as the threat can be contained within the accepted structure of the society, it can easily be contained. So, for instance, some workers are so outraged by the way they are treated that they “blow the whistle” on their employers. Others vote against parties which appear to represent their employers. But all such activity, however annoying it may be to particular employers, is contained firmly within a system of exploitation and class control. As long as revolt can be confined to a ballot box or an individual act of resistance, the culture of deference, and the insecurity and distress on which it depends, is unruffled. This is one of the reasons, though by no means the only one, why the prospect of radically changing society simply by voting every so often is such a gloomy one. Governments come and governments go but the bosses seem to go on forever. A strike is a quite different weapon. First, it challenges exploitation directly. It sends a message to employers that they are no longer in control. Their businesses cannot run without workers. The paraphernalia of exploitation – dividends, share options and all the rest of that claptrap – suddenly vanishes. All the little side-effects of exploitation, the petty day to day commanding and bullying, are stopped in their tracks. At once the striking worker gets a sense of liberation from the tedious dictatorship of everyday working life. No one who has ever been in a strike fails to notice that sense of liberation. It inspires and exalts workers into emancipated human beings they often find difficult to recognise as their old selves. Sense of liberation In a lifetime reporting industrial disputes I cannot remember a single one where the strikers have not commented on the astonishing change in their characters and their own approach to life. This sense of liberation does not spring only from the fact that they no longer have to work for a boss. It arises in the main from the sense that they themselves are collectively in control, that they depend on one another and need to organise their own working lives together and democratically. The result is a democracy far richer than anything that comes out of local councils or parliament. I remember during the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 how the miners who came to stay with me in London insisted each night on turning on any TV current affairs programme that happened to be on. These programmes were watched by only a tiny percentage of the population and normally would have bored the miners rigid. But now they understood the issues – not just the miners’ issues but all the political and industrial issues of the time – and they wanted to discuss them. Secondly, strikes challenge and upset the accepted rules of control. If, for instance, a council closes libraries, its decision may infuriate whole sections of the population. In Hackney, for instance, such a decision by the council has led to widespread protest from people who use the libraries. But the only time the council even thought about reconsidering its decision was when the library workers started to strike. Without the workers, of course there could be no libraries, and at last some kind of real pressure was put on the council – pressure a million times more powerful than individual protest from citizens. This power, the feeling that the status quo can be changed or altered, enthuses the strikers with a sense that they can do much more than protest.

This power, the feeling that the status quo can be changed or altered, enthuses the strikers with a sense that they can do much more than protest. They can change the world they live and work in – a sense they seldom get in the ordinary business of living and working. Thirdly, strikes more often than not involve workers who are organised in trade unions and have a history of confronting their employers. If they win their strike, they pull other less organised workers up the ladder after them. If they never went on strike, no one, certainly not the unorganised or the completely dispossessed, would get anything. ‘Muck of ages’ What has all this got to do with socialism? Of course a strike, even if it is successful, is no guarantee of socialism. Of course most strikes are about improving the wages and conditions of one group of workers, not all of them. The point about strikes is not that they lead automatically to socialism, but that a socialist society – a society owned and controlled from below – will never come about unless the majority of workers have shaken off what Marx called the “muck of ages” – decades, if not centuries, of instinctive deference. There is no more certain method of shaking off that muck than taking part in a strike. Some proof of that is the history of the working class movement over the last 50 years. For the early part of that period there were a lot of strikes, most of them won by the workers. The climax of that period came in the “glorious summer”, 1972 to 1974. Two victorious miners’ strikes, a victorious building workers’ strike and countless victorious smaller disputes changed the whole shape and pattern of class society. This was a period of fantastic advance across the whole of the movement. Those of us socialists lucky enough to remember those times recall as though it were yesterday the enthusiasm with which the socialist message and socialist papers like Socialist Worker were greeted. Pick up any old book over the last half-century that proclaims a socialist or even a radical message and you can be pretty sure it will be dated in the early 1970s. There followed, as a direct result of the victorious strikes, a great flowering of radical and socialist ideas, from the liberation of women to the isolation of apartheid and racism, to a healthy contempt for posturing parliamentary politicians of all parties. The seeds of a new socialist society were sown in the struggle against the old capitalist one. The agitation of those years led among other things to the toppling of the Tories and the election of two Labour governments. Two sides of struggle Those governments and their allies among the trade union leaders, using precisely the arguments that are used today against the firefighters, discouraged strikes, including a firefighters’ strike, and reined in the militants. The result was a slackening in workers’ confidence and, as a direct consequence, a reactionary shift in the political mood that led to Margaret Thatcher and a series of outright employers’ victories from which we have never recovered. Now we have to put up with Blair and Prescott mouthing Thatcherite slogans and preparing to break an official strike of people who are claiming even less of a rise than the arrogant ministers have paid themselves. So what exactly is the relationship between strikes and socialist progress? Almost 100 years ago, the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, perhaps the most eloquent socialist agitator of all time, confronted the question in an exhilarating pamphlet inspired by the 1905 revolution in Russia. It was called The Mass Strike, and it mercilessly mocked the notion that political progress could be divorced from industrial action: “After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. “And vice versa. The ceaseless state of economic war of the worker with capital keeps the fighting energy alive at every political pause. “It forms, so to speak, the ever-fresh reservoir of the strength of the working class, out of which the political struggle continually renews its strength. “And at the same time it always leads the untiring economic boring action of the working class, now here, now there, to individual sharp conflicts out of which, unexpectedly, political conflicts on a large scale explode.” The two sides of the struggle, the strikes and the political activity, are essential to one another, and you can’t have one without the other. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Late Developer (February 1985) From London Review of Books, February 1990. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 125–131. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Review of Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–1976 by Tony Benn. For nearly a century, Labour MPs have been going to parliament to change the world, but have ended up changing only themselves. Tony Benn is unique. He went to parliament to change himself, but has ended up determined only to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the impotence of socialists in high office to change it. The unique journey from right to left adds enormously to the value of Tony Benn’s Diaries. His contemporaries Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle have also published diaries. Others have written autobiographies. All are full of evidence of the impotence of office. Even Denis Healey in his recent popular autobiography admits that the notorious ‘IMF cuts’ in 1976 were probably based on a false prospectus presented to him by international bankers who knew they were deceiving him. But in all these cases the former Secretaries of State have a basic belief in what they were doing. ‘We tried to change the world’ is their theme. ‘We had a little bit of success, and would have done more if it hadn’t been for bankers or, as Harold Wilson used to call his hidden enemies, “speculators”.’ Only Tony Benn, even as he was signing papers in the red dispatch boxes, travelling round in chauffeur-driven limousines and dining at Lockets, began to realize that he was playing a lead part in a grim charade whose chief effect was to hypnotize and paralyse the people who voted Labour. In his foreword, Benn says he has included whole passages which embarrass him today. We have to trust him and his editors when they say that the editing of what he read into the tape evening after evening has not been influenced by what has happened since 1976. It does not seem as if it has. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this volume is the open and apparently unembarrassed way in which Tony Benn’s conversion – from career politician to committed socialist – lumbers from contradiction to contradiction: here leaning backwards to his careerist past, here leaning forwards to his campaigning future, and here stuck in between, not knowing what to think or which way to turn. The volume starts rather curiously with the final year of Labour in opposition, during which Tony Benn’s ideas were increasingly winning the votes at Labour Party conferences and among the rank and file. There runs through all the diary entries of this period a tremendous confidence. At a CBI dinner in October 1973, he rounded on the gloomy industrialists, telling them: ‘You’re licked, pessimistic. There is more vitality on the union side than there is on the management side. We have got to have redistribution of power and establish a new social contract.’ None of the guests, it seems, could manage a reply. Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony Benn, his planning agreements and his Social Contract were in the ascendant. The Tories lost the election of February 1974, and Tony Benn went straight to the Department of Industry as Secretary of State. In April, his diary glowed with confidence: Sunday April 28. As I look at it, I can see my way through now in breaking industry’s resistance to my policies. I shall win over the managers and the small businessmen, and I shall get the nationalized industries to welcome the planning agreements; I shall isolate the big Tory companies, then show how much money they have been getting from the government, and if they don’t want it, they don’t have to have it. Very quickly, however, he began to find that he and his government depended on quite a different kind of confidence. At another dinner with bankers and Stock Exchange officials the same April, he was told, sternly: ‘We must restore confidence.’ ‘What is the price of restoring confidence?’ countered Benn. ‘Well,’ replied the Stock Exchange chieftain, ‘You have got to have better dividend distribution, otherwise equities will collapse.’ The confidence which mattered could be measured only by the flow of dividends. Benn replied with some heat, but as the months went on, the same argument started to be used by his own colleagues in the Labour cabinet.

Benn replied with some heat, but as the months went on, the same argument started to be used by his own colleagues in the Labour cabinet. He reports Denis Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, saying at a meeting of top ministers which had been called to water down the already weak proposals of his Industry Bill: ‘The whole of our future depends on the confidence of businessmen.’ Healey’s policies were bent in every particular to building up that confidence. The climax comes at the end of the book, when, at a cabinet meeting on 7 December 1976, Healey proposed yet more cuts in public spending – he had already cut savagely, in 1975 and in the 1976 Budget. Benn reports: ‘Denis had a new paper to present and he was now asking for £1,199.25 million in 1977, which was nearly £200m over the billion proposed by the IMF. Crosland pointed this out but Denis said that confidence had been undermined by leaks and therefore we’d have to make more cuts in public expenditure to prevent further loss of confidence.’ Hospitals, schools, social security benefits, parks, swimming pools, public transport – all the things which had been at the centre of Labour’s programme – now had to be cut, not even because the IMF said it made sense (which, it later appeared, it didn’t), but because there were inaccurate leaks of what the IMF might have said. All Tony Benn’s own confidence had vanished by the end of 1974 – even though in October Labour won another general election with an overall majority. He mused, to his top civil servant, just after the election: ‘I’ve been in the Department for seven months and I’m not aware of having done anything, made any progress at all.’ The steady chip, chop at his precious Industry Bill, and the Prime Minister’s continued insistence that he stop making public speeches which annoyed the City of London, drove him to reflect, as early as November 1975: ‘I am afraid that somehow, without quite knowing how it happens, I will slip into the position that I occupied between 1964 and 1970 when I went along with a lot of policies which I knew to be wrong.’ He could see perfectly well what was happening. His diary for the first few months of 1975 -the end of the honeymoon period between the Labour government and what Prime Minister Wilson called their ‘bailiffs’ – is far more perceptive than Barbara Castle’s (or even Denis Healey’s – though he had the advantage of hindsight): ‘The Tories now think that Wilson, Healey and Callaghan are doing their work so well that they don’t want a coalition government. Better to let the Labour Party do their work for them.’ This analysis led him to a startling prediction. On 11 May 1975, he wrote: ‘A coalition has been born without being formally declared: it is broadly the Tories and Liberals throwing their weight behind Callaghan, I think. They won’t touch Wilson. They’ll get rid of him just as they got rid of Heath ... I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Callaghan government formed within the next couple of months.’ He was out by only eight months. Wilson resigned in mysterious circumstances in March 1976. Callaghan was elected leader of the Labour Party and formed a government. From then on, the retreat which Benn had identified continued, through the grovelling to the IMF in 1976 to the coalition with the Liberals in 1977, and the long weary stumble to defeat. Before the end of 1976, he identified what he called ‘Thatcher’s Private Argument’: That the Labour government are doing to the trade union movement what the Tories could never do: that in doing it the government are getting profits up and holding prices down and therefore restoring the vitality of the capitalist mechanism; and that by doing so they will disillusion their own supporters and make it possible for the Tories to return. He could see what was happening all right, but what was he doing about it? From early on, he started to think about resigning from the government in protest. All his most reliable political friends – Dennis Skinner, Audrey Wise, Ken Coates, most of the activists in his Bristol constituency, even his son Stephen – advised him to do so. Benn’s own belief, often expressed here, that the power and influence that mattered came from below, from the shop stewards and socialist trade unionists, led logically to a resignation and a return to the rank and file. But he did not resign. In the summer of 1975, as the Labour government collapsed under the biggest run on sterling ever, he humbly accepted his demotion to Secretary of State for Energy. He sat through the cuts of 1976, opposing them in cabinet, but necessarily keeping his mouth shut outside it. His reasons for this – chiefly that resignation would be seen as disloyal to the government – are unconvincing, even apologetic. Doubt, hesitation and pain replaced the glad confident morning. On one page, for instance, he reveals his ambition: ‘If I want to do anything other than frolic around on the margins of politics, I must be leader and prime minister.’ On the very next page, he is not so sure: ‘If you set yourself that target, it is bound to begin the process of corruption.’ As the book goes on, the balance seems to tip against his ambition, but he still remains in office, and there is another volume to come which must somehow explain how he stuck it out right until the bitter end – until the Tory victory over a punch-drunk Labour movement which he had so accurately predicted. But even in 1975 his clinging to office was disturbing his sleep. Friday, 10 October: I had a dream that Harold called me in and said: ‘I want you to be Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household with a seat in the House of Lords in charge of boxing under the Minister of Sport.’ He told me this in the great Cabinet room, which was full of people. ‘I’m afraid this doesn’t mean a place in the Cabinet for you,’ he said.

I replied, ‘Harold, I must think about it,’ and Sir John Hunt said: ‘Boxing is very important. We must preserve the quality and excellence of the Lonsdale Belt.’ The book is full of political treasures. There is a host of stories, for instance, to prove what is now established fact: that MI5 or sections of it were using their vast and secret powers against the government they were meant to be serving. Benn was constantly at the sharp end of this. He proved on more than one occasion that his home telephone was tapped – but he, a senior secretary of state in the cabinet, could do nothing about it. When he complained to the general secretary of the telephone engineers’ union, Brian Stanley, Stanley said he thought his own phone was tapped too – by his own members. Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, the ‘terrible twins’ of the trade unions in the period which toppled the Heath government, became the leading spokesmen for wage restraint and cuts during the Labour government, and were rewarded by being blacklisted by MI5. Benn confirms that he wanted Jones on the National Enterprise Board but Jones was banned after hostile MI5 reports, which also, initially, knocked Hugh Scanlon off the Gas Council. Tony Benn’s household was the subject of repeated press inquiries, mostly at the dead of night, about his son Joshua being in hospital. At least five times in two years, the Benn family was shattered by this dreadful news, conveyed usually by a concerned reporter from the Daily Mail. Each time, the information was entirely false. Joshua was not in hospital. When, after one specially unnerving inquiry, Benn rang David English, Daily Mail editor and Thatcher knight, to protest, he was told that the editor was at home, and could not be disturbed. Such double standards are the stuff of national newspaper editors. But where did the rumour originate? Perhaps from the same intelligence source which replied to Tony Benn when he complained about the sacking of a chiropodist in the civil service. The woman, said the reply, ‘may be a fairly regular reader of the Morning Star, the newspaper of the Communist Party’. Of course, she may not have been, but even if not, ‘she is known to have been interested in holidays arranged by the Young Communist League and in a sea trip to the Soviet Union’. To compound this scandal, ‘there was a reliable report in 1974 that her father also reads the Morning Star’. The intelligence officer’s report explained that ‘we would prefer to err on the side of caution in this case.’ The chiropodist remained sacked and there was nothing a secretary of state could do to reinstate her. Benn has a sense of mischief which keeps his story rolling along. His sharp comments on his colleagues have stood the test of time. Of Tony Crosland: ‘For him informality is a sort of substitute for radicalism.’ Of Shirley Williams: ‘the most reactionary politician I know’. Of Neil Kinnock: ‘not a substantial person. He is a media figure really.’ The central fascination of these diaries is the gradual transformation of the bright young dynamic dinner-party careerist of the early sixties into the powerful and committed campaigner of the eighties. It emerges in fits and starts, but its progress is persistent, almost dogged. It shines most clearly on the rare occasions when Benn discusses what he has read. One of the insidious ways in which reformers are broken when they become ministers is by the denial of time to read. Reading anything outside red boxes or blue books is frowned on by literary civil servants, who encourage their minister to concentrate on the job in hand. Benn’s Diaries suggest that he started to read real books for the first time when he was a minister in the 1974–79 Labour government. As he declares his childlike zeal, say, for the Levellers or the Diggers in the English revolution, he gives the strong impression that he had never heard of any of these people before he met and quarrelled with Sir Anthony Part at the Department of Industry. The civil service mandarins seem to have driven him back to a glorious time when the King had his head chopped off and all his civil service supporters fled for their lives. Even more remarkable is his sudden discovery at the age of fifty of the socialist theory which inspired the movement which put him in parliament in the first place. The whole book bears warm testimony to the closeness and affection of the Benn family, and it is, apparently, to Caroline Benn that we owe the most gratitude for her husband’s conversion. At Christmas 1976, the Secretary of State hung out his Christmas stocking (as he had done for the previous fifty years or so). In it the next morning he found a copy of the Communist Manifesto. He read it on Christmas Day, and it led him to this remarkable, and moving confession – the real key, I suspect, to his extraordinary political development: There is no doubt that in the years up to 1968 I was just a career politician and in 1968 I began thinking about technology and participation and all that; it wasn’t particularly socialist and my Fabian tract of 1970 was almost anti-socialist, corporatist in character. Up to 1973 I shifted to the left and analysed the Left. Then in 1974, at the Department of Industry I learned it all again by struggle and by seeing it and thinking about it, and I have been driven further and further towards a real socialist position. I record this now while I am reading all the basic texts in order to try to understand what is going on.

I record this now while I am reading all the basic texts in order to try to understand what is going on. I don’t really care whether it is Sir Anthony Part or Caroline Benn or Marx that we have to thank for that, but British politics of the last ten years has been the richer for it. Top of the page Last updated on 27 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Why You Should Vote Socialist (2001) First published 2001. Bookmarks Publications Ltd, c/o 1 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3 QE, England. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Acknowledgements Thanks to Louise Christian, Neil Davidson, Shaun Doherty, Lindsey German, Matt Gordon, Charlie Hore, Judith Orr, Allyson Pollack, John Rees and Tommy Sheridan, who read the draft and made invaluable corrections and suggestions, and special thanks to Emma Bircham, who did most of the research. A glorious May Day The grim legacy of Thatcher The great train robbery The return of the Whigs Sleazy does it It takes two to quango PFI: Perfidious Financial Idiocy Schools: ‘B’ is for Blair, Brown ... bog-standard Fill ’em up: a new policy for prisons Council houses, pensions: all up for grabs Universities: only the rich need apply The great train robbery continued The last Straw: the attack on civil libertiesT The fat cats directory The politics of Polly Prudence Your chance to vote socialist A glorious May Day Legendary and stupefying was the crassness of John Major, but his supreme achievement was to select May Day, the traditional day of celebration for the international labour movement, as the time when the British people, after five more grim years of Tory rule, were finally allowed to go to the polls. Only the most joyless socialist will pretend that he or she was not moved by what happened that May Day election night. Seat after seat, including some that had been Tory ever since people started voting, fell to Labour, and the final overall Labour majority of 179 was higher by far than had ever before been achieved. The huge majority was described at once by the new victors as a vindication of New Labour, the ‘project’ set out by Tony Blair, who had been elected party leader in 1994 and, with the help of his faithful spin-doctor Peter Mandelson, ‘refurbished’ the Labour Party with new ‘accessible’ policies and a new constitution which replaced the historic commitment to common ownership with a series of illiterate soundbites no one remembers. One stark fact emerged from the election results to confound that view. The Liberal Democrats, successors of the old ‘moderate’ Alliance that so comprehensively wrecked Labour in the general elections of 1983 and 1987, won more seats in 1997 than in either of those years, but everywhere the swing to the Liberals was half the swing to Labour. This suggests that the results were not just an expression of fatigue and disgust at the long years of Tory rule – a reaction that could just as easily have favoured the Liberal Democrats. The results were proof of a swing to the left throughout the country. The swing had very little to do with Blair, Mandelson or New Labour. The opinion polls showed a huge Labour lead – always more than 20 percent – long before Blair became leader. This lead dated back to the Tories’ enforced closure of coal mines in October 1992, and the imposition, in defiance of the Tory election pledge, of VAT on fuel. The acclaim for the new government was an expression of relief and hope: relief that the long years of reaction shaped by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and continued under John Major in the 1990s were at last at an end; hope that the balance of power and wealth in Britain would be shifted away from the rich to the workers and the poor. Labour councillors and their supporters assumed that Thatcher’s relentless campaign against local democracy, especially in Labour’s heartlands, would be reversed. Socialists everywhere assumed that the Thatcherite obsession with irresponsible greed and wealth would at last be replaced by a government committed to fairer distribution and more democratic control of the country’s wealth. As we approach another general election four years later, all those hopes have been dashed to pieces. Slowly at first, but with gathering conviction, the New Labour government has stubbornly enforced the anti-union laws promulgated by Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, continued to dismantle local democracy, and privatised everything in sight. This pamphlet sets out the record of that drift into reaction, and offers socialists a chance to use their vote to help stop it. The grim legacy of Thatcher Union-bashing Margaret Thatcher’s strategy during all the 11 years she held office was founded on her determination to reduce the trade unions to phantoms of their former selves. She knew that this could not be achieved simply by passing laws, and that the real power of trade unions lies not in their legal strength but in their willingness to use it. She was haunted by the great trade union victories of the 1970s: the miners’ flying pickets which reduced the government of Edward Heath, in whose cabinet she served, to ruins; the legendary militancy of the print unions which was always a threat to what she regarded and still regards as the freedom of the press (but in reality is the freedom of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and Lord Rothermere to print what they please); and the shocking insubordination of trade unionists in the docks who greeted the Tory government’s Industrial Relations Act with such defiance that the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress was forced to call a general strike to free them from prison. The fundamental problem confronting Thatcher and her new ministers was that the unions had grown too strong on the ground. They had to be broken not just by new laws but in open struggle. The Tory campaign against them was drawn up by Thatcher’s adviser, the seasoned class warrior Nicholas Ridley, and leaked to the Economist. The Ridley plan, as it became known, was based on open class war. It envisaged, first, the provocation of a series of strikes in the nationalised industries where the unions were weakest. Government victory in such strikes would be followed, the plan went on, by mass sackings in the defeated industries.

Then, and only then, the plan envisaged long and careful preparation for a battle against the old enemy, the miners. Once the miners were beaten, the focus of battle could shift to the other two main areas of trade union strength, the print workers and the dockers. The Ridley plan was followed with disciplined precision. Among Thatcher’s first appointments was that of the hard-bitten American banker Ian MacGregor as chairman and chief executive of British Steel. He provoked a strike almost at once, challenging the weak and inexperienced steel trade unions to a war they did not savour, and winning easily. Thousands of steel workers were sacked. In 1983 MacGregor was made chairman of British Coal. Two years earlier the miners, under their new leader Arthur Scargill, had reacted spontaneously to a chance announcement by the energy secretary David Howell that 50 pits might have to close. An unofficial protest strike ripped through the coalfields and for a moment threatened the entire strategy of the Ridley plan. In some panic, Thatcher announced that there were, after all, no plans to close 50 pits, indeed no plans to close any pits at all. The wretched David Howell was pitchforked into the House of Lords. The miners went back to work, and Thatcher, Ridley and MacGregor went back to their plan. Three years later, when they were ready, at the end of the 1983–84 winter, they announced a series of arbitrary pit closures. The closures challenged the miners’ union to a fight to the finish. The miners responded with guts and vigour. For a moment at the beginning of the strike it looked as though the railway workers and dockers might join in – a haunting reminder of the ‘Triple Alliance’ that had terrified previous Tory governments in 1921 and 1925. But after some skilful concessions the railway workers and dockers were appeased. Assisted by new laws passed by the Tories in 1981 and 1983, the government went to court to demand control of the mine workers’ union’s assets. Oil-fired and nuclear power stations were utilised to the full to supplement already large coal stocks, and the rules that had divided the responsibilities of separate county police forces were swept aside. A new national police force was thrown with full force against the miners. Coal production continued in what for the union was the historically weak area of Nottinghamshire. The Trades Union Congress stood timidly aside, and in March 1985, after nearly a year on strike, the miners were finally broken. They had been broken before, in 1921 and 1926, but this time the Tories were determined that they would never again be humiliated by the miners’ union. It was, ironically, Michael Heseltine, later to become Thatcher’s sworn enemy, who put the finishing touches to her campaign against the miners by effectively closing down the coal mining industry in 1992. The miners’ defeat was followed by the breaking of the print workers at Wapping by Murdoch in 1986, and wholesale privatisation and union-busting in the docks in 1989. By the time Thatcher left office in 1990, pushed out not so much by unions as by organised resistance to her flagship social policy, the poll tax, the Ridley plan was triumphantly completed. The unions had been broken in a class battle in which the employers and the government had been enormously assisted by seven different laws restricting the right to strike. As Thatcher proceeded to further election victories in 1983 and 1987, the new Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, dropped Labour’s objections to the Tories’ anti-union laws. He emphasised that Labour would not repeal the laws banning sympathy strikes. He was effectively agreeing with the Tory argument that while people could legally strike for themselves, for their own pay and conditions, they should on no account be allowed to strike for anyone else. Thus the central principle of trade unionism – ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ – was subtly rewritten to read ‘an injury to one is an injury to one’, and Labour agreed. Kinnock’s argument was that he could not win an election if he clung to old laws allowing sympathy strikes. He was therefore prepared, as on the issue of unilateral British nuclear disarmament, to jettison a vital policy in exchange for office, which anyway he never achieved. Privatisation Thatcher’s strategy did not stop at emasculating the trade unions. Her theory was that strong trade unionism was the other side of the coin to public ownership. Breaking the unions was the first essential stage in her and her successors’ campaign to wrest control of industry and services from public hands, and give them back to capitalists and speculators. Thus the humiliation of the unions in steel and coal was followed by the privatisation of both industries. British Telecom was privatised in three instalments from 1984 to 1986; Cable and Wireless in 1985;

Cable and Wireless in 1985; British Gas in three instalments from 1986 to 1988; British Airways and the British Airports Authority in 1987; British Steel in 1988; the publicly-owned water companies in England and Wales in 1988–90; and electricity in 1990–91. By 1990, the end of the Thatcher decade, after a slow and nervous start, she and her ministers had succeeded in privatising pretty well all the major industries brought into public ownership by successive Labour governments from 1945 to 1979. All these privatisations were vigorously opposed by the Labour Party in opposition. This opposition was based on principles dating back to the formation of the Labour Party at the start of the century. The reasoning behind it was admirably summarised in a composite motion to the Labour Party conference in the year of the miners’ strike, 1984. The motion was proposed by Moss Evans, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. The Tories’ privatisation policies, he argued, were designed: (a) to undermine wages, jobs and union organisation; (b) to take the benefits of public services and assets away from democratic control and into the hands of profiteers and speculators; and (c) to dismantle the welfare state by reducing public services to a minimum which totally failed to meet the needs and aspirations of those depending on them. In his speech Moss Evans referred to the Ridley plan, and predicted with devastating accuracy that the breaking of the trade unions would be followed, if the Tories got their way, by a dismantling of the entire network of public ownership set up by Labour. He showed how, even as early as 1984, many of his predictions were being realised. Huge speculative gains had been made on the stock exchange on the early privatisations. Far more grotesque windfalls were to follow with the massive privatisations of the utilities. A prime example was electricity, nationalised by the Labour government after the war and run with some efficiency ever since. The privatisation of electricity was greeted with howls of fury from the young opposition energy spokesman, Tony Blair. At the Labour Party conference in 1989 Blair brought the delegates cheering to their feet with a furious summary of the case against the Tory plans: At the outset we said that privatisation would mean higher prices, and it has done. We warned that the government would introduce a special nuclear tax for private nuclear power, and it has. We said that the government would be forced to admit there was no choice for consumers, and now they have. Born out of dogma, reared on deceit, this privatisation is now exposed for what it is and always has been, private prejudice masquerading as public policy. Let us send this message to the government. We do not want it postponed, we do not want it delayed, we do not want it put off – we want it abandoned here, now and forever. Similar arguments were deployed by Labour leaders as they opposed all the other privatisations of that grim decade. The nightmares expressed by Labour politicians all became true. The bureaucrats who had run the public industries on substantial but not exorbitant salaries suddenly took off into the orbit of the mega-rich. Iain Vallance, for instance, who had helped to run the Post Office on a reasonable salary suddenly found himself running British Telecom on £226,000 a year. He went from making 11 times the average salary of a BT worker in 1987 to making 38 times the average salary in 1990. By 1996 his salary was over £700,000, and it has grown considerably since. There was no recognisable increase in the efficiency or the performance of British Telecom following privatisation. The chief changes were that the unions were weakened, thousands of workers sacked and the new executives enrolled in the ranks of millionaires. ’Share options’ were introduced by the Tories to sweeten the new executives’ perks. When water was privatised a river of unearned slush flowed into the pockets of the new water bosses, most of whom were the same people who had run the old state industries. The monopolies remained monopolies, with no difference in the product as far as the consumers were concerned, but huge differences in the ‘remuneration’ which the new bosses heaped upon themselves, and in the strength and influence of the trade unions in their ability to protect jobs. In every case a huge area of influence and power that had been, however distantly, accountable to elected politicians was transferred to wholly irresponsible boardrooms. The new utilities stopped being public utilities and became private commodities to be bought and sold, re-bought and re-sold in the international marketplace.

The new utilities stopped being public utilities and became private commodities to be bought and sold, re-bought and re-sold in the international marketplace. The balance of democracy in Britain was tilted heavily away from the people and towards the new monopolists. To their horror, the Labour politicians noticed that the craze for privatisation was extending to the very sanctuaries of public service of which Labour was most proud. There were cries from Tory ideologues to introduce fees for tuition in universities and colleges, and for schools to ‘opt out’ of local education authorities. Whole new organisations were set up by the Tories to campaign for state schools to ‘opt out’. These Tory plans were bitterly opposed by Labour. Jack Straw, spokesman on education, told the Labour conference in 1991, ‘Opting out and privatisation of education will be stopped dead by a Labour government.’ He was utterly opposed, he said, to tuition fees for students. He told conference in 1989: This government says that it wants an expansion of higher education, but by the introduction of student loans and the end of free tuition will make entry into higher education dependent more than ever on the size of a parent’s bank balance. It is the private schools today – it will be the private universities tomorrow. Straw was a key backer of Blair for the Labour leadership in 1994, and was rewarded with the post of shadow home secretary. In that position he discovered a new Tory horror – the privatisation of prisons. This outrage, he argued, not only offended against efficiency as with the industrial privatisations. It was, he told the Prison Officers Association as late as 1996, an offence against morality as well. Prison privatisation was, he said, ‘wholly wrong in principle’. Even worse for the Labour leaders was the suggestion that the Tories were threatening the inner sanctum of Labour’s post-war achievements, the National Health Service. The Tories, warned Labour spokesman Robin Cook in 1990, ‘are taking us down the road to the NHS run as a commercial business for commercial motives’. The great train robbery By 1990, the year Thatcher was finally pushed out by the irreversible popular tide against her flagship poll tax, the Tory government had achieved most of her central aim – a fundamental shift of wealth and power towards the rich. On the industrial front, however, there remained one area where a combination of workers and consumers had obstinately beaten off all attempts at privatisation – the railways. In 1989 Cecil Parkinson, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite minister, excited an otherwise dispirited Tory party conference with a proposal to privatise the railways. The proposal was taken up eagerly by his successor as minister of transport, John Mac-Gregor, who was advised by Sir Christopher Foster, a partner of the top accountants Coopers & Lybrand. Sir Christopher set his accounting genius to devising a scheme for splitting up the railways into several separate pockets, each of which could be made profitable provided the public subsidy continued. So brilliant was Sir Christopher’s advice that on the very day the railways were privatised in 1995 he became deputy chairman of Railtrack, the private company controlling the network. Though the ideology of rail privatisation had delighted the Tory party conference, the new scheme proved even less popular with the public than any of the previous privatisations. By 1996 only 11 percent of the British people (and only a minority of Tories) supported it. The whole scheme was rottenly devised and riddled with contradictions. A strong attack from Labour, coupled with an unequivocal assurance that a new Labour government would instantly renationalise the railways without a penny of speculative gain to the new owners, would have killed off the whole crazy enterprise before it started. Leading Labour politicians quickly proved that they understood the importance of what they said about rail privatisation, and were not afraid to say it. As early as 1993, John Prescott, Labour’s shadow transport minister, did not mince his words to the party conference. He boomed: Let me make it crystal clear that any privatisation of the railway system that does take place will, on the arrival of a Labour government, be quickly and effectively dealt with ... and be returned to public ownership. By the following year (1994) it was time for crystal clarity once more – this time from the new shadow transport minister, Frank Dobson: Let me give this pledge not just to this conference but to the people of Britain – the next Labour government will bring the railway system back into public ownership. Another member of the crystal clear faction was Michael Meacher, shadow transport secretary in 1995. He understood the real problem – that there were private investors lining up to squeeze some profit out of the railways. He issued the clearest possible warning to such investors: The railways depend on public subsidies to the tune of £1.8 billion a year. There is no guarantee that the subsidy will continue. If the railways were privatised, he asked, could they depend on government subsidy, and what profit could they make if that subsidy was not forthcoming? Such statements worried the City vultures lining up for a feast on the railways. When the three rail operating stock companies (roscos) came up for sale in January 1996, no big investor showed any interest, and the roscos were flogged off at bargain basement prices. The combination of half-baked Tory plans for privatisation and the clearest possible pledges that a new Labour government would renationalise the railways had put the privatisers off.

The combination of half-baked Tory plans for privatisation and the clearest possible pledges that a new Labour government would renationalise the railways had put the privatisers off. Then, sometime in the first few months of 1996, the whole Labour campaign collapsed. Two new shadow transport ministers, Clare Short and Andrew Smith, backed away from the ‘crystal clear’ pledges of their predecessors. By the time the conference came round again in 1996, there were no further promises to renationalise the railways – only a few bromide sentences about the need for a fully integrated railway. Confidence flowed back into the privatisers, and the roscos were sold on again at enormous profit for the former bureaucrats who had paid so little for them in the first place. One such, Sandy Anderson, made a personal profit of £38 million. Brian Souter, whose company Stagecoach made a fortune from the privatisation of buses and railways, told a House of Commons committee that in 1995 no one would touch railway privatisation ‘with a bargepole’. It was not until Labour fudged the issue that it suddenly seemed possible that a Labour government would renege on its pledges to renationalise, and the big boys with the big wallets started to creep out of the cupboard. When the party manifestos were published before the 1997 election many people noticed that all Labour’s past renationalisation pledges were left out. Even the pledge to bring the railways back into public ownership had been shelved. Even the ringing declaration of shadow transport minister Andrew Smith at the 1996 conference, replying to a Tory threat to privatise air traffic control – ‘our air is not for sale’ – did not develop into a manifesto commitment. On the other hand, there were no plans in Labour’s manifesto to privatise anything, no specific promises not to nationalise or municipalise. Many optimists hoped that Labour politicians had shelved their real aspirations for public ownership just for the election period. There was a strong feeling that Labour, once elected, would rediscover its century-long commitment to public ownership and public control, and would reassert both. Labour was elected in a landslide victory in 1997, and what happened? The return of the Whigs How the Liberals, with 17 percent of the vote, got into government The first thing that happened was a curious shift of power and influence at the heart of the new Labour government – in 10 Downing Street. Two new advisers were appointed to prime minister Blair – Roger Liddle on defence and Europe, and Derek Scott on economics. Both had been founders of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), whose leaders had split from the Labour Party in 1981 and had run against the Labour Party in various elections since until the party’s absorption into the Liberal Democrats, formerly the Liberal Party from which Labour broke away on its formation in 1900. Scott had stood against Labour in Swindon in 1983 and 1987, splitting the vote and letting in a Tory. Liddle had also been a founder member of the SDP and had been an SDP candidate, standing against Labour in Lambeth in 1983 and in the Fulham by-election in 1986. The SDP, with its new allies the Liberals, achieved 26 percent of the poll in the 1983 election, only 2 percent less than Labour. It could fairly be said that the formation of the SDP and its standing against Labour in 1983 and 1987 was the main electoral reason for Thatcher’s landslide victories in both elections. The key policies put forward by the SDP differed only marginally from those of the Liberal Party. The SDP was for instance 100 percent opposed to more public ownership in any sector, and sought an accommodation with the rich and business executives, who welcomed them with open arms. One of Liddle’s closest companions who stayed in the Labour Party was Peter Mandelson, a former television producer who had been rapidly promoted by Neil Kinnock to be campaigns director for the Labour Party for the 1992 election. Before Liddle split with Labour to form the SDP, Mandelson and Liddle had been Labour councillors at Lambeth in south London. In 1994 the two men co-authored an embarrassing hagiography of Tony Blair entitled The Blair Revolution. On close inspection, the policies and programme outlined by the book bore a striking resemblance to the not very challenging policies and programme of the defunct SDP. Mandelson employed a young researcher called Derek Draper, who had been a director of a lobbying organisation called Prima Europe/GPC Market Access. The chairman of Prima Europe was Sir Ian Wrigglesworth, a former SDP founder member who later joined the Liberal Democrats. His predecessor as Prima Europe chairman was Lord Holme, a Liberal Democrat peer. Further links between this magic circle and the SDP could be found in the home of Matthew Oakeshott, a founder member of the SDP who lived next door to Roger Liddle and was chairman of the ‘blind trust’ which invested Liddle’s shareholding in Prima Europe. In 1998, a year after the Blair government took office, another adviser took up residence in Downing Street. He was a journalist called Andrew Adonis – a former candidate for the Liberal Democrats. A founder director of Prima Europe was Lord Taverne of Pimlico, a former Labour minister who after leaving the party knocked Labour out of its seat in the Lincoln by-election in 1973. As for Prima Europe, the firm of lobbyists at the centre of this cabal, its clients included Unilever, Glaxo Wellcome, Abbey National, British Nuclear Fuels, Rio Tinto Zinc, and the privatised energy companies Powergen and British Gas. Sleazy does it Almost as soon as it took office the New Labour government, which prided itself on its freedom from sleaze, was caught up in sleaze. The government decided to renege on its manifesto commitment to ban tobacco advertisements, and allowed tobacco ads in their most lucrative area – on Formula One racing cars. This decision was promptly linked to a £1 million donation to the Labour Party by an established Tory, Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One racing billionaire.

This decision was promptly linked to a £1 million donation to the Labour Party by an established Tory, Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One racing billionaire. In some panic, Blair ordered the party to give Ecclestone back his million and explained to a sceptical public that he, Blair, was, after all, ‘a straight guy’. Exactly how straight became a little clearer in the ‘cash for access’ scandal of 1998. Amazed by the new lobbyists who swarmed like locusts over the New Labour government and its ministers, the Observer journalist Gregory Palast interviewed Roger Liddle and Derek Draper. Liddle was quoted as saying: ... there is a circle and Derek is part of the circle. Anyone who says he isn’t is an enemy. Just tell me who you want to meet, and Derek and I will make the call for you. Draper was even more direct: There are 17 people in this country who count, and to say that I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century. This novel approach to power and politics was based on the suggestion that rich clients using New Labour lobbyists could get close to New Labour ministers. Draper was sacked by Mandelson when this ‘cash for access’ scandal broke. Mandelson himself was sacked from the cabinet at the end of 1998 when it was revealed that he had, without declaring it, borrowed some £400,000 from his cabinet colleague the Paymaster General, Geoffrey Robinson, to help buy himself a suitable house in fashionable Notting Hill. Geoffrey Robinson, whose only crime at the time seemed to have been that he lent Mandelson the money, was sacked too, never to return. But Mandelson, who got the loan, was taken back into the cabinet in 1999, only to be sacked again in February 2001 for intervening on behalf of the Indian billionaire Hinduja family. The Hindujas, despite their involvement in a massive Indian arms scandal, applied for and got British passports in record time. Mandelson was ‘cleared’ of impropriety by an investigation, though there was no doubt that either he or his office asked questions about passports for the Hindujas. As this pamphlet is written, yet another sleaze scandal breaks over Downing Street, this time about questions from leading Downing Street officials, including Blair’s chief of staff, about planning permission for an Oxford business school financed by the millionaire speculator Wafic Said. The same Said had hit the headlines all through the 1980s for his role in the brokering of the Al Yamamah arms deal between the British and Saudi Arabian governments – the biggest arms deal ever negotiated in the whole history of the world. Perhaps because of his role in that deal, Wafic Said became a close confidant of Margaret Thatcher and her sleazy son, Mark. The government changed its name but not its allies in big business. Wafic Said’s plans in Oxford had the eager support of Blair’s chief of staff, whose brother Charles had been a top aide to Margaret Thatcher. Commenting on all these developments, and on the influence of so many millionaires on the highest echelons of the New Labour government, former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley referred to the way in which Blair, Mandelson and Co had been systematically ‘dazzled’ by people of vast wealth. This was not itself a new phenomenon for a Labour government. Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour leader, was almost permanently clinched in what Beatrice Webb called ‘the aristocratic embrace’. He took shares and a posh car from a biscuit king in exchange for a baronetcy. Harold Wilson, Labour leader in the 1960s and 1970s, was entranced by a new breed of businessmen who specialised in import/export deals with dictatorships in Eastern Europe. But neither MacDonald’s aristocratic embrace nor Wilson’s close relationship with entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe, nor even James Callaghan’s relationship with the Welsh financier Julian Hodge, could rival the sheer scale with which the New Labour government under Blair flung itself at the feet of any billionaire who asked its ministers to a party, or attended one of the Labour Party’s interminable fundraising dinners. Blair’s close friend Mandelson played a crucial part in delivering the leadership of the New Labour government into the hands of his business friends – and its former electoral enemies in the SDP and Liberal Democrats. It takes two to quango New Labour’s hankering for the plaudits of the rich swept through all ranks of the new government. On the afternoon after polling day in May 1997 an exhausted John Prescott, confirmed as the new deputy prime minister and head of one of the biggest departments of state ever constituted, met the board members of BAA, the privatised monopoly that runs several British airports. BAA wanted an early commitment that the new government was friendly to its bid to build a fifth terminal at Heathrow airport. A public inquiry was still sitting, but BAA wanted to make its peace with the new administration. Prescott, who pretended to represent the old traditions of Labour, was pleased and proud to greet such important businessmen. He was the first of the new ministers to experience the advantages of the new partnership with big business that the new government was so anxious to promote. Very soon the nature of that partnership began to take shape. Prescott himself became a keen supporter of the government’s plans to privatise air traffic control. Andrew Smith’s proud declaration – ‘our air is not for sale’ – was subtly changed to ‘our air is for sale’. And Andrew Smith became chief secretary at Gordon Brown’s Treasury. At the last Labour Party conference before the election Gordon Brown had attacked ‘the quangocracy which threatens democracy’ and ‘the quango state’.

At the last Labour Party conference before the election Gordon Brown had attacked ‘the quangocracy which threatens democracy’ and ‘the quango state’. ‘Quango’ stands for quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation. In the bad old days of Tory government these cliques were made up of the great, the good and above all the rich. They were appointed by the Tories to take charge of key sections of society, separate from and unaccountable to parliament or elected local authorities. The most blatant examples of the Tory quangos were the development corporations set up by the Tories in 14 areas with the ostensible aim of improving the standard of life in the inner cities. These new development corporations were packed with local businessmen, lawyers and accountants, with a couple of elected councillors ‘co-opted’ to add a democratic veneer. The new corporations swiped all planning powers from the elected local authorities in vast tracts of turban territory. They infuriated the more responsible Labour councillors and achieved next to nothing. They were opposed by Labour and finally collapsed in ignominy and a strong stink of corruption. No sooner did the New Labour ministers take office, however, than they started to appoint a new set of ‘taskforces’ even more wide-ranging and unaccountable than the Tory quangos. In the first few months of the New Labour government nearly 300 of these quangos had been set up to cover almost every aspect of national life. The degree of ‘partnership’ involved in the new quangos could be detected in the background of the 3,013 people who made them up, and who were catalogued in a booklet produced by Democratic Audit. Only 73 (2 percent) of these new quangocrats were trade unionists. More than a third (1,107) were from private business or trade associations. Gordon Brown’s Treasury set up the most exclusive of the task-forces, burrowing deep in the warrens of the City of London for appropriate bankers and investment analysts to supervise the new dawn. PFI: Perfidious Financial Idiocy Hospitals Geoffrey Robinson, Paymaster General in the new government, had an office in Gordon Brown’s Treasury from which he proclaimed the Tory idea for public-private partnership known as PFI. Robinson brought in Malcolm Bates from the big construction company BICC to mastermind the government’s new plans for PFI. Bates was well used to the job – he had done the same thing under the Tories. PFI rapidly became the lynchpin of all the government’s construction policies. The theory was simple, if crude. Private business provided funds for the project up front, and the government paid back the money at substantial rates of interest over 30 years. The first training ground for PFI was the National Health Service. Labour in opposition was not at all keen on PFI in the NHS. In 1996, when she spoke from the Labour front bench, Harriet Harman was horrified by the Tories’ obsession with PFI. ‘When the private sector is building, owning, managing and running a hospital,’ she declared, ‘that hospital has been privatised.’ Labour backbenchers cheered her attacks on creeping privatisation, but almost as soon as Harriet Harman became Secretary of State for Social Security, the new government rushed through the NHS (Private Finance) Act 1997, removing at a stroke all the barriers to the Private Finance Initiative in the NHS. Very soon a number of hospitals started to be built under PFI in circumstances exactly fitting Harriet Harman’s definition of hospital privatisation. A typical example was the plan to close down the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and associated lucrative premises in the middle of Edinburgh, and replace them with a new hospital built by a private enterprise consortium on the outskirts the city. The area got a new hospital, the consortium got the business, but the people of Edinburgh got a hospital with 300 fewer beds than originally planned and substantial cuts in staff. Any scepticism about these new schemes was initially drowned in popular relief and pleasure that, at last, a new hospital was being built. But detailed investigations of the schemes exposed their fatal flaw – a yawning gap between the cost of the new PFI hospital and the cost of a similar hospital built under the old scheme of straight public funding. The extra cost of borrowing on the open market plus the costs of dividends and bank charges, and clauses in the contracts which gave the consortia the right to vary the prices – all built up to a final cost of the hospital project far higher than the equivalent cost under the old public enterprise scheme. These extra costs had to be met by raiding other budgets in the NHS – by cutting beds or staff or both. In papers written for the British Medical Journal as early as 1999, Professor Allyson Pollock and her team at the School of Public Policy at University College London investigated the ‘first wave’ of 14 hospitals built under PFI. They found, on average, a 30 percent reduction in beds and a 25–30 percent reduction in staff. All these cuts and sackings were caused by the shortfall in the PFI schemes when compared with the old public enterprise system. Some of the figures were quite astonishing. The new University College Hospital in London for instance would have cost £140 million under the old scheme. By July 2000 when the new scheme was signed, the cost had escalated to £430 million. In Durham in the north east of England, the new Dryburn Hospital, built by a consortium headed inevitably by Balfour Beatty, was subjected to the PFI process.

In Durham in the north east of England, the new Dryburn Hospital, built by a consortium headed inevitably by Balfour Beatty, was subjected to the PFI process. What was needed to replace the crumbling NHS in the area was a new hospital of 750 beds. PFI meant that the only way to make the new hospital ‘affordable’ to Balfour Beatty and Co was to cut the number of beds to 458, and staff by 25 percent. In Chepstow in Wales, if the surplus land round the new PFI hospital was sold, it would have provided 80 percent of the money for the new hospital without having to pay anything to the construction consortium which got the contract. These new hospital projects were handed over to PFI, even though in both cases the local Labour MPs had been bitter opponents of the original Tory PFI proposals. In Carlisle a new PFI hospital could only be built by cutting beds and staff to such a degree that the local hospital doctors denounced it as reverting to ‘Third World standards’. Much of the land owned by the NHS hospital was used for building a private hospital. When the facts started to emerge about the costs and the cuts implied in the new schemes, public resentment grew. When a PFI plan to build a hospital at Worcester led to the closing of all acute services at Kidderminster Hospital, a local revolt led to the formation of a new organisation called Health Concern. By the beginning of 2001 Health Concern had 19 councillors at Wyre Forest – by far the biggest party in the area. When Tony Blair oozed up to Worcester to fraternise with the waterlogged population during the winter floods of January 2001, he was astonished to be surrounded and heckled by pensioners denouncing PFI. As early as July 1999 Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote a leading article entitled PFI: Perfidious Financial Idiocy. This editorial, which has effectively become British Medical Association policy ever since, argued that the increased costs of PFI for hospitals drives down the number of beds and cuts clinical services in other schemes. In Hereford, for instance, a proposal for a PFI hospital with 351 beds had to lose 100 beds before it became ‘viable’ (profitable) for the contracting company. There were other even more serious problems: ‘Private Finance Initiatives may inevitably lead to an increase in the private sector and user charges, providing one way for the NHS to shrink to a rump service for the poor.’ Smith went on: A second factor that infuriates many of those working within the NHS is the complete absence of any evidence in favour of the Private Finance Initiative. In fact all the evidence we have suggests it is a very bad idea. Richard Smith’s warning about the gradual privatisation of the NHS seemed at first to be a trifle extreme. It conflicted, for instance, with the constant attacks by Blair and his health secretary Alan Milburn on Tory health policies as ‘creeping privatisation’. At a conference in 2001 Chancellor Gordon Brown told the general secretary of the TUC that under the next Labour government ‘only the NHS and the police’ would escape Labour’s plans for privatisation. A closer look at recent government initiatives on health suggest that Brown’s prognosis may have been optimistic, and that health too is in line for creeping privatisation under New Labour. In November 2000 Professor Allyson Pollock of the University College London School of Public Policy and David Price of the University of Northumbria wrote a paper entitled How the World Trade Organisation Threatens Public Healthcare Services – Where Does New Labour Stand? The article examined the wording of the recent World Trade Organisation (WTO) treaty, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The treaty, the article suggests, ‘provides the WTO with crucial powers to promote what it calls ‘pro-competitive domestic policies’. The article traced what these policies had meant in India and sub-Saharan Africa, where ‘access care has suffered and infectious disease control programmes have been disrupted’. In Latin America, ‘privatised services have proved lucrative business propositions and attracted healthier patients, while sicker patients have gravitated to a reduced public sector’. In Brazil, such privatisation has led to an expanded private sector with 120,000 doctors, while the public sector which serves three quarters of the population has only 70,000 doctors. What about Britain, the land of the universal health service, which prides itself on treating people according to their health, not their wallets? The authors note that the health secretary, Alan Milburn, faced with a shortfall of beds in the acute hospital sector under PFI, ‘has chosen not a full restoration of public provision or abandonment of PFI but a new concordat with the private hospital sector to make up the shortfall’. Milburn explains that spending NHS money on using up spare capacity in private hospitals is ‘common sense’. It is certainly common sense to Norwich Union and the other big private healthcare providers whose health service cannot make as big a profit without the huge injection of public funds Milburn has provided. It is the opposite of common sense to those who believe that the more profitable private health becomes, the more damage is done to the principle and practice of a National Health Service. The plain fact is that under New Labour 4,000 NHS hospital beds have been lost every year in the PFI process, and ‘cost overruns’ in PFI projects have been three times as high as they were in the old NHS hospital projects. This creeping privatisation of the NHS got another boost from Blair and Milburn in the crucial area of long term personal care. Soon after taking office the government set up a Royal Commission, which recommended to ministers’ horror that long term personal care should, in the best tradition of the NHS, be ‘free at the point of delivery’. The government rejected this recommendation, preferring the minority report signed by journalist David Lipsey, and Joel Joffe, founder of Allied Dunbar, a health insurance firm. Both men are now in the House of Lords.

In the last session of the 2000–01 parliament the government introduced a Health and Social Care Bill. Clause 4 of the bill, entitled ‘Public-Private Partnerships’, allows the secretary of state to set up private companies ‘to provide facilities or services’. The clause opens the door to huge new areas of privatised healthcare, and flies in the face of the principles of the NHS laid down more than 50 years ago by Lord Beveridge and Aneurin Bevan. Schools; ‘B’ is for Blair, Brown ... ... Blunkett, Byers and bog-standard What’s bad for the National Health Service is probably bad for everything else, and at the end of four years in office the New Labour government is committed to PFI in every area of government construction. It is almost impossible for government, local or central, to build a shed in a park nowadays without attracting the cloying attention of PFI enthusiasts. If there is indeed no evidence that any member of the public benefits from any of these schemes, why does the government proceed with them? One answer has come from Carillion, formerly Tarmac, which revealed in January 2001 that it was boosting the strength of its Private Finance Initiative team as part of efforts to reduce its dependence ‘on low-margin competitive contracting’. In plain English this meant that Carillion could make more profit more quickly from PFI than from ordinary contracts in the commercial market. What about education, always rated so highly by Blair and his ministers? Great has been the hype for the government’s alleged triumphs in education, but most of it was exposed by a brilliant piece of investigative journalism by the Guardian’s Nick Davies in March 2000. He wrote: The truth is that for his first two years in power Mr Blunkett [Labour’s education secretary] actually invested less in education than the Tories had, and by the end of this parliament he will still be only marginally ahead of the Tory level of spending, a level which he used to describe as ‘miserable’. The sum of Blunkett’s achievement is that he has managed, on an annual average while he has been secretary of state, to spend 4.6 percent of gross domestic product on education, compared to the shocking average under the Tories – 5 percent. The chief reason for these figures was the government’s determination to stick to the Tories’ spending limits for 1997 and 1998. Anyone with kids at state schools (and of course the kids themselves) can see the result – a tremendous increase in pressure and red tape for teachers, and a higher level of boredom for the children. The grand plans announced by Jack Straw for a ‘new partnership with teachers’ were effectively torn up when Blair and Blunkett agreed to reappoint for a fresh term of office as chief inspector of schools the man most hated by teachers in the whole history of state education. Chris Woodhead was brought in by the Tory government to attack elected local authority education committees and to denounce teachers. When reappointed by New Labour, he continued with his former priorities as though nothing had happened. Votes of no confidence in him were passed regularly at all teachers’ union conferences, even those of headteachers. Doctrinaire and disciplinarian inspections intimidated teachers and cowed them. When Blunkett and Blair announced that they intended to make it a criminal offence for a teacher to have sex with his or her pupils, they were embarrassed to discover that their own chief inspector of schools had engaged in a sexual affair with one of his pupils while he was teaching her at a school in Bristol. So loyal were Blair and Blunkett to Woodhead that they publicly defended him even when it became clear that his defence – that the affair had started only after the pupil had left school – was economical with the truth. Finally, before even his term of office was complete, Woodhead resigned from his post and joined the Daily Telegraph, where his Tory anti-teacher prejudices could by fully arrayed, and where he could for a fee continue to bite the hands of the New Labour leaders who had reappointed him. Meanwhile, what remedy did Blunkett and his minister of schools Estelle Morris have for the failing state school system? The chief problem, they discovered, was that it was a state system controlled by elected authorities. So with the help of Woodhead, who was never happier than when he was denouncing elected education authorities, they developed a scheme in which education would be taken out of the control of elected councillors and handed over to their blessed private enterprise. Slowly at first but with gathering speed, the two Tory solutions so comprehensively denounced by Labour politicians in opposition – privatisation and selection – were ushered in, with inevitably catastrophic results. The ritual would be as follows. Ofsted under Woodhead would denounce a school or an authority. The school or the authority would be written off as ‘failing’, and a new privatised authority would be introduced to save the children. In Southwark in south London the new authority will be supervised by Andrew Turner, a Tory candidate previously employed by the Tory party to campaign for the opting out of state schools – a policy savaged at the time by all the New Labour leaders, including Tony Blair. In Leeds the new privatised education authority will employ the services of Capita, a private company that has already made millions for its shareholders by taking over failed public services and continuing to fail with them. In Haringey, north London, schools minister Estelle Morris announced a ‘radical new venture’ to introduce the profit motive into state education. The bids from the three companies pitching for the contract, including Group 4, which had become a joke for its failure to keep control of prisoners, were all presented by former or present local authority education chiefs. The bids were all so hopelessly incompetent that they were rejected. But by now ministers are so committed to privatisation in education they cannot, even if they want to, concentrate their attention on improving the service provided by government. They are steeped so far in blood that going back is worse than going on.

They are steeped so far in blood that going back is worse than going on. So they must grovel still deeper for what goes on eluding them – the private profit solution to public education. In Glasgow, a city with a proud tradition of public education, the Labour-controlled authority has privatised the services of all its 29 secondary schools in a complicated lease-back arrangement which means public council spending over 30 years of £1.2 billion so that a private consortium can own and control those schools for all that time in exchange for its own investment of £420 million. Even then it is still not clear who will own the schools. Another brilliant idea for dealing with what ministers regard as ‘failing’ schools (which usually means that most of the children are poor or black or both) was the notion of the ‘fresh start’. Schools failed by Ofsted were closed down altogether, their staff sacked, new headteachers and staff appointed, and the whole process started over again. Despite heavy public spending, and much media hype, these fresh starts proved in almost every case to be a dismal failure. This is because most of the children in the schools were still poor, and their exam results did not improve just because the headmaster changed and the staff were sacked. At the last Labour Party conference before the 1997 election David Blunkett, rattled by a passionate defence of comprehensive education from Roy Hattersley and others, asked the conference to read his lips and promised that during the next Labour government there would be ‘no selection by examination or by interview’. This pledge has become a standing joke in schools, as selection either by exam or by interview, or usually by some less obvious but no less pernicious method, has become the norm. This process was blessed by prime minister Blair in his last major speech on education, in which he proposed that 46 percent of schools should be turned into ‘specialist’ schools. He did not explain what would happen to the remaining 54 percent, nor what the difference was between the old barbaric system in which children were divided up at the age of 11, with the cleverer children sent to grammar schools and the less clever herded into secondary moderns. This was the system that Labour replaced with comprehensive schools. Teachers reading Blair’s remarks started to think that Labour must be planning to put an end to comprehensive schools altogether and divide them up, half and half, between ‘specialist’ and ‘non-specialist’ schools. Then, as if to justify their fears, Blair’s press secretary Alistair Campbell delicately explained what the new proposals meant – ’no more bog-standard comprehensives’. Fill ’em up: a new policy for prisons The same obsession with dismantling public accountability has seeped into every area of government policy. Home secretary Jack Straw became so concerned about the warning from shadow home secretary Jack Straw – that prison privatisation was immoral – that he set about privatising prisons almost as soon as he took office. Within days he had sanctioned two new private finance prison deals. In the last four years the number of private-run adult and young offenders prisons has doubled. This trend looks set to continue, with the government now considering semi-privatisation of prisons along the lines of the extremely unpopular Treasury plans for the London Underground. This would involve the facilities and buildings being taken over by the private sector and split from the custodial operations – a variation on the model of division of ownership and responsibility which has proven so disastrous for the railways. Under New Labour the number of people in prison rose from 60,000 in 1997 to 66,000 in 2001. Official statistics show that more people are imprisoned in England and Wales per head of the population than in Sudan, Saudi Arabia or China, and across Western Europe only Portugal has a greater proportion of its population behind bars. ’Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ had been the most quoted slogan of New Labour in opposition. In office, the New Labour ministers could remember only the first three words. They were tough on crime all right. The prisons were accurately described by the director of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, as ‘hellholes’. Some 36 jails in the UK have more than 100 inmates ‘doubled-up’ sharing cells. Sir David Ramsbotham, a retired general brought in by the Tories as chief inspector of prisons to bend the stick away from his progressive predecessor, was almost physically sick at the conditions of the men and women confined to the prisons he inspected. He told the Guardian in February of this year that ‘20,000 inmates – women, boys, elderly, mentally ill, petty offenders – should never have been sent to jail.’ The more stridently his reports resorted to strong language to express his disgust, the more they were ignored by New Labour ministers in the Home Office. Paul Boateng, the new prisons minister, had told his constituents when they returned him for the first time by a small majority in 1987, ‘Today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto.’ Few who heard this rhetoric can have imagined that the smooth young radical would one day, as prisons minister, seek to refashion British prisons along lines laid down in Soweto. Boateng rapidly became a regular spokesman for every reactionary initiative from the Home Office. The nadir was reached under his regime when an Asian boy, Zahid Mubarek, on remand in Feltham young offenders centre, where some 600 prisoners get no education at all, was forced to share a cell with a psychotic racist thug who battered him to death. Council houses, pensions All up for grabs The very core of Labour’s historic municipal advance – the public ownership and control of council housing – has been systematically attacked by New Labour. The government’s own spending plans for housing depend on the ‘transfer’ (sell-off) of 200,000 council homes a year. Since the government came to office in 1997 no less than 342,000 council homes have been sold off to organisations that are not elected, and that find it much easier to evict tenants. This policy is pursued by Labour councils with increasing vigour despite that fact that ballot after ballot of the tenants affected shows deep hostility to privatisation.

In many cases, especially in London, the sell-offs have been backed and subsidised by large property companies whose intention is to evict working class families from their council homes and rebuild in their place homes fit for City parasites who have second homes in the country. Pensions is another issue where the New Labour ministers have abandoned their previous commitments to old people in preference for their love affair with big insurance companies. In 1986, when Thatcher and her henchmen Norman Fowler and John Major started privatising pensions by using tax concessions to bribe people in perfectly workable pension schemes to take out private pensions, the Labour front bench, led by Margaret Beckett, exploded in rage. Year after year, Labour’s pensions spokespeople clung courageously to SERPS, the relatively decent pensions schemes relating pensions to earning established by Barbara Castle, a Labour left winger, in the 1970s. By contrast, New Labour social security secretary Alistair Darling has scrapped SERPS, which was run entirely by the government, and replaced it with a scheme for ‘stakeholder pensions’ run by the private company which achieved the record for the most swindling under the mis-selling pensions scandal of the late 1980s and early 1990s – the good old reliable Prudential. As more and more private companies try to ‘adapt’ their pension schemes to the disadvantage of their pensioners – British Airways, Barclays Bank, IBM, etc. – the government stands by and nods them through. When the chief culprit in this regard, British Airways chairman Colin (Lord) Marshall, was honoured by fellow millionaires with a dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel in 1998, the guest of honour was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. As for the state pension itself, the cornerstone of former Labour governments’ reforms, it has been allowed to slide into obsolescence. Endless pledges by Labour’s social security spokespeople that they would restore the link, established by past Labour governments and abolished under Thatcher, between the state pension and the rise in earnings have been cynically junked. Universities Only the rich need apply Tessa Blackstone was one of the New Labour peers who had most vitriolically attacked the concept of private privilege in all forms of education. As a former ‘master’ of Birkbeck College in London and a member of the last Labour government’s cabinet think tank, no one was better qualified to go to the House of Lords and to become New Labour’s Minister of State for Education. There, almost at once, she found herself defending yet another New Labour U-turn – the decision to impose tuition fees on university students. Did she remember Neil Kinnock’s famous speech to the Labour Party conference in which he boasted that he had been the first member of his family to be able to go to university because for the first time a young man from the working class could afford it? Or had she read the stinging speeches of Jack Straw when he was opposition spokesman (quoted above) in which he said that tuition fees would mean a slowdown in working class recruitment to universities, and in the end a system in which universities were almost entirely exclusive to the rich? According to the National Union of Students, university students in England and Wales now pay £1.5 billion more than they did before Labour was elected in 1997. At the same time funding per student has declined by almost 40 percent in the last 12 years. The culmination of old Tory cuts in the student grant, the old Tory provision of student loans and New Labour tuition fees has had a catastrophic effect on university students. Many of them live entirely on their loans without any real idea of how they can repay them. Others either drop out or (more usually) do not even bother to enrol in courses for which they are qualified. Enrolment in many universities has fallen, with over 50 universities reporting that they were more than 2 percent below their student recruitment targets in the current academic year. Tuition fees were too much for Labour, and even the Liberals, in Scotland where they were abolished. In England and Wales they continue to cast a shadow over one of the areas of life which, thanks to Labour governments in the past, had held out some hope for the young. The great train robbery continued Looming over this entire privatisation process has been the greatest scandal of them all – the railways. We have seen how fiercely Labour front benchers spoke out against privatisation in all the years the Tories proposed it, and how the same ministers took flight from their opposition when it might have made a difference. This abject surrender continued apace as Labour took office. The railways were not renationalised. The hideous mess constructed by the Tories, the different competing railway organisations and the speculative millionaires they created, continued with hardly any change. The reason was trumpeted proudly by Blair, Prescott and Co whenever they were asked about it, usually by the transport unions which had contributed so many millions to Labour. They explained that they could not possibly afford the £4 billion it would have cost to create what Blair had promised – a ‘publicly owned, publicly accountable railway’. They had so many other priorities, they bleated, that they could not possibly waste public money on paying railway shareholders for their assets. Then came the great triumphs of railway privatisation, the disasters at Southall, Paddington and Hatfield. At Hatfield, it was revealed, a train had come off the track because of a broken rail. Railtrack, the privatised company which owned and controlled the network, had known perfectly well of the dangers of broken rails. They had been spelled out to the company in great detail a year before the Hatfield crash by the new rail regulator, Tom Winsor, whose militant approach to the railway monopolies was held out by the government as proof of its continuing concern for and control over the railway. Winsor’s memorandum about the dangers of broken rails was scrupulously ignored in the interests of keeping trains moving and profits flowing. After Hatfield, Railtrack panicked and subjected millions of long-suffering passengers to months of chaos and delays as some of the track was renewed.

The militant Winsor decided that what was most important was that he should have a private company to regulate, so he announced that another £4 billion of taxpayers’ money would be released to keep the privatised railways running. By coincidence, £4 billion was the exact sum that Blair, Prescott and Co had estimated as the likely cost of renationalising the railways. The money they had ‘saved’ the taxpayer by leaving the railways in private hands was now being passed into those same private hands without any public accountability for it. The sheer extravagance of the decision not to renationalise the railways was set out in an article early in 2001 in the journal Public Finance. The author, Jean Shaoul, calculated the cost of public subsidies in the four years before privatisation and the four years after. Adjusted for inflation, the figures were: 1991–94 £2,556 million; 1997–2000 £6,848 million. The cost to the taxpayer of subsidising the privately-owned railway had grown to three times the cost of subsidising the publicly-owned railway. The last Straw The attack on civil liberties Many liberal-minded people were inclined to turn away from arguments about the unions and public ownership, believing or hoping that New Labour would address issues involving simple civil liberties, so many of which had been trampled on by past Tory governments. These optimists were the successors of those civil libertarians who measured their criticism of the 1964–70 Labour governments under Harold Wilson by recalling ‘at least’ that government had supported private member’s bills to ensure major social reforms – the abolition of capital punishment, the reform of the abortion law, and for the first time a major relaxation in the draconian laws which persecuted gay men and women. Many believed that the huge majority for Labour in May 1997 would at least ensure a clutch of measures of that kind. At last, for instance, it was believed that here was a chance for a robust freedom of information act to expose future governments to the scrutiny of their electorates; a curb on the powers of the police that had so shocked and infuriated black people in the inner cities; a reform of the drugs laws to legalise at least some of the more harmless drugs which wasted so much of the time of the police and other legal authorities; a shift in the balance away from the judiciary and towards juries; an expansion of a legal aid scheme which in the past had left so many people deprived even of a hearing, let alone justice; repeal of the hated Section 28 which discriminated against gays; above all, at last, a government which showed a genuine respect for foreigners and people fleeing to Britain from persecution and terror. Not one of these things happened. Most of them were the responsibility of the new home secretary, Jack Straw, who had come into politics as a campaigner for the National Union of Students and had been a protege of his predecessor as MP for Blackburn, the left winger Barbara Castle. We have come across Straw before as the man who maintained his moral objections to the privatisation of prisons in opposition by privatising them once in government. On all these matters of civil liberty he swiftly emerged as a dyed in the wool reactionary who might as well have donned a helmet from one of me more reckless policemen in his charge. Straw was not originally responsible for the government’s new measure on freedom of information, but he rapidly ensured that he seized control of it from David Clark, the unassuming MP for South Shields. When Straw objected to Clark’s moderate proposals, Clark was sacked and replaced by Straw. Mark Fisher, minister for the arts, who spoke up in committee for a strong freedom of information act, was sacked too, and replaced as arts minister by Alan Howarth, former Tory MP for Stratford-on-Avon, who was catapulted into the safe Labour seat of Newport by diktat of New Labour headquarters in Millbank without anyone in Newport having the chance to select a proper Labour candidate. Straw took charge of the new freedom of information bill, and produced a measure so flimsy mat campaigners for freedom of information concluded that it is now, under New Labour, even more difficult to get information from the government than it was under the Tories. The rest of New Labour’s record on civil liberties is no better than that of its Tory predecessors. Ministers boasted that they had adopted European law on human rights, but most of the proposals of the government in that area appeared to take away human rights. One of the oldest and most valuable human rights in the legal system, for instance – the right to be tried by jury – has been assailed again and again by Straw and his colleagues in the Home Office. Straw has proposed, at the moment without too much success, that in many instances the jury should be done away with altogether. Every reactionary notion that floats down to Straw from the Neanderthals on the Law Commission he adopts as quickly as he rejects any genuine reform. The involvement of his own son in an embarrassing tangle with the police after he was found in possession of cannabis hardened Straw’s heart to any suggestion of relaxation of the laws on drugs, provided of course that the drugs in question, unlike alcohol and tobacco, are not sold by big corporations for profit. Straw has publicly accepted the Law Commission’s recommendation to do away with the rule banning the trial of any defendant for a crime for which he or she has been acquitted. This proposal was heralded as a progressive measure since it had been proposed after the public inquiry into the racist killing of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. A new band of ‘progressives’ in the police argued that the young men acquitted of murdering Stephen were protected by the double jeopardy rule from being charged again for the same offence. A more likely reason for the rule, and for the chorus in its favour, is that it allows police to re-charge some of the countless people who, usually because of police prejudice and incompetence, have been found not guilty of crimes for which they were wrongly convicted. Section 28, moreover, is still on the statute book in England and Wales.

Looming large over all the other of New Labour’s backward measures in the civil liberties field is the proposal for a replacement of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 1974. This act, which had to be renewed every year, was introduced in response to a series of IRA bombings in Britain that killed many innocent civilians. There was no such background to New Labour’s proposal for its replacement, the Terrorism Act. One purpose of this act was for the first time to make it illegal for anyone in Britain to take part in what the act describes as terrorist activities abroad. On the day the act came into force on 1 March 2001, the government banned 21 groups, most of them Islamic. The ban was extended to the PKK, or Kurdish Workers Party, which has a substantial following in Britain but which is hated by the Turkish government for its campaigns on behalf of the persecuted Kurdish minority. No evidence was produced by Jack Straw or anyone else to prove any terrorist act in Britain by any of me banned groups, but Straw told the Commons he was ‘entirely satisfied’ that all the groups were ‘concerned with terrorism’. Close reading of the new bill by civil liberties groups, and by the campaigning magazine the Big Issue, revealed clauses which could be used against groups in Britain engaged in protests and campaigns. Anyone, for instance, supporting a revolution against the hated dictatorship in Iraq would be caught by the act, even though their aims might be shared by government ministers. The same applies to anyone advocating or supporting any uprising in the illegally occupied West Bank of Jordan, Gaza or Jerusalem. As far as activity in Britain is concerned, the act actually defines terrorist activity as any violent activity designed ‘to influence the government or intimidate the public’, and includes any act which results in damage to property. The Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs, Simon Hughes, told the Commons, ‘If you are a trade union leader calling for a strike at a hospital you would effectively be caught by this legislation.’ Just about the only organisation outside New Labour wholeheartedly to support the new act was the Conservative Party, whose spokesman complained that similar legislation proposed by the previous Tory government had been blocked by Labour. Asylum seekers coming to Britain found themselves under sharp attack not just from racists and right wing fanatics but also from the New Labour government and its minister at the Home Office, Barbara Roche. She accused asylum seekers of ‘milking the system’ and then set about organising the system to ensure that there was nothing for asylum seekers to milk. Under her regime asylum seekers are deprived of social security benefits and provided instead with £36.54 a week in vouchers to buy food and clothes plus £10 a week in cash (there is no change from the vouchers). Asylum seekers are treated with the most disgusting contempt, housed in conditions unfit for human habitation and dispersed continually from refuge to refuge without discussion or consultation. Their vouchers and cash benefits are conditional on obeying orders to move. When the Tory leader William Hague suggested locking up all asylum seekers, New Labour reacted with horror at such a gross breach of civil liberty, and promptly started building more detention centres for asylum seekers. The numbers of asylum seekers detained by New Labour have gone up from 800 to 1,200, and two new detention centres just built will take many more. More and more asylum seekers’ applications to stay in Britain are being turned down, including all such applications from Iraqi Kurds. A high point for New Labour policy was the refusal of an application to stay from a 24 year old Iraqi Kurd Ramin Khadeji. When he got his refusal he killed himself. Refusals have gone up from 35 percent of applications when New Labour took over to 60 percent. Similarly, the proposals of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, on legal aid were intended to cut out of the legal system any lawyer who seeks diligently to represent a client who has no money. Most of the legal aid work under New Labour’s proposals will go to big firms who ‘process’ their clients through the courts with maximum speed and minimum consideration. The Lord Chancellor himself, incidentally, is probably the only head of the legal profession in history to have lost a case in his own courts. In keeping with the cronyism of his government he appointed his mate Garry Hart from top City solicitors Herbert Smith as his chief adviser, paid by the taxpayer, even though no previous Lord Chancellor had ever had such an adviser. He was promptly sued by Jane Coker, a prominent immigration solicitor. She alleged that she had been discriminated against since there had been no public notice that the post was vacant. Lord Irvine treated the writ with casual disdain but was shocked when he lost the case in front of a unanimous tribunal. He appealed and, with the help of some of the most distinguished barristers in the land, managed to win by a margin of two to one at the Employment Appeals Tribunal. That decision has now gone to the House of Lords in a further appeal, but the case showed in the brightest possible colours how the arrogant appointment to high office of the government’s closest cronies in big business can even conflict with their own legislation. A speciality of New Labour’s touch on crime policy has been a creation of a whole new range of offences under the broad heading of anti-social behaviour. The new Criminal Justice Act promulgates a series of new powers to arrest young people on what the police think is anti-social behaviour, and gives the police powers to impose on the spot fines and curfews. The new act comes at a time when the powers of the police are already considered far too wide by a larger and larger proportion of the young population, especially if they are black. The fat cats directory George Monbiot’s recent book Captive State tells the story of how the big corporations took over the elected government. He started his book in the month Labour was elected, and plainly, like almost everyone else of the same opinion, hoped that the new government would at least put up a fight to take back some of the democratic power and control that had been surrendered by successive Tory governments.

As his book proceeds, it becomes, almost reluctantly, a devastating attack on the New Labour government for continuing, and even heralding that surrender. Some 26 pages in the middle of the book are devoted to a comprehensive Fat Cats Directory. Under the enticing headings Fat Cat, Previous Gluttony and Subsequent Creamery, he lists the big businessmen, speculators, landlords and exploiters promoted by New Labour to positions of power and influence. Almost every month since his book came out, new appointments have been made which can be added to his directory. In January 2001 Dr Ian Hudson, former top executive of the gargantuan pharmaceutical monopoly Smith Kline Beecham, was appointed head of the Medicines Control Agency, regulator of the British pharmaceutical industry. The following month Anne Parker, a director of private nursing agency and private healthcare firm Nestor, took charge of the government’s new National Care Standards Commission, the regulator of private care homes. Almost as an aside to this directory, Monbiot exposes the New Labour ministers who once promised so much, and are now no more than office boys and girls for the bosses they pretend to control. Here is Brian Wilson, once a socialist campaigner in the Scottish Highlands, as a Scottish Office minister justifying the monstrous toll charges levied by a US bank on the bridge to the island of Skye, and the cancellation of formerly government-owned ferries to Skye which might have offered dangerous competition to the profit-laden bridge. Here is Nick Raynsford, once a resolute campaigner for the homeless, breezing round the world acting as salesman for British construction companies, chief among them Balfour Beatty, the construction company with the highest ever fine for a blatant breach of health and safety laws, and which was chiefly responsible for the broken rail at Hatfield. In January 2001 Raynsford introduced a new Homes Bill to the House of Commons. He started by rejecting what he called the ‘lie’ that homelessness had increased under New Labour. Not so, he insisted. In the last six months of the Tory government local authorities had accepted 110,000 homeless households, while four years of New Labour policies later the figure had been reduced – to 108,000. Other speakers in the debate complained that priority homelessness had actually increased during Mr Raynsford’s regime, and that the numbers of people in bed and breakfast accommodation had gone up under New Labour by 51 percent. Here is Stephen Byers, a champion of public state education when he was chairman of the education committee in North Tyneside, now Secretary of State for Trade and Industry with not a word to say about the wholesale privatisation of education. Here is the new minister of science and supporter of genetically modified foods, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, whose exalted position has, we are assured, absolutely nothing to do with the millions he has pumped over the years into the coffers of the Labour Party. To these names many others should be added. Patricia Hewitt, a senior Treasury minister, represents the growing links between the government’s privatisation policies and the sprawling consultancies of the big accounting monopolies. Before talking office Hewitt was director of research at Andersen Consulting, a firm which was one of the first to spot the growing fortunes of New Labour, and which laid out the fares of the entire Labour front bench – about 100 MPs – to go to Oxford in the summer of 1996 where they were instructed on how to be efficient ministers. Andersen Consulting, which in 2001 changed its name fashionably and incomprehensibly to Accenture, became one of the new government’s favourite companies, being let off most of the full cost of the delays and disasters in the computer system it had constructed to store National Insurance data. A few months after taking office the government ended a long battle with Andersen Consulting’s sister company, the accountants Arthur Andersen, a battle that dated back more than a decade to the auditing of the accounts of the old crook John DeLorean. Infuriated by what it regarded as the accountants’ deceit, the Tory government banned Arthur Andersen from all government work, but New Labour quickly ended the ban on terms highly favourable to the company. As for Patricia Hewitt, she leaped up the government hierarchy with increasing agility, reaching her peak in 2000 as minister for e-business with a sterling defence in parliament of the government’s support for the Ilusu dam, a scheme by the Turkish government with the help of big British contractors (including, inevitably, Balfour Beatty) to flood whole tracts of land occupied by Kurds. Ms Hewitt was the only speaker in the Commons debate to support the project. Other honourable additions to Monbiot’s list should include Peter Hain, the former anti-apartheid and CND campaigner, who became the government’s chief spokesman for economic sanctions against Iraq which have killed thousands of innocent civilians, most of them children; Alan Milburn, former organiser of the Days of Hope left wing bookshop in Newcastle, who as Secretary of State for Health decided quite suddenly that one way to protect the National Health Service was to pay private hospitals for beds and services they provided for NHS patients; Clare Short, the former champion of the dispossessed whose Department for International Development became a stout supporter of the neo-liberal orthodoxy which has abandoned so many millions in the underdeveloped world to hope less poverty; and the former firebrand Robin Cook, foreign secretary, whose ‘ethical’ foreign policy was absolutely indistinguishable from its not so ethical Tory predecessor. The list I could go on forever. The distinguishing features are a former commitment to a more egalitarian, fairer society, and a current exclusive commitment to the opposite priorities of big business. The politics of Polly Prudence As this pamphlet is written, the Murdoch press and even the Daily Mail is loudly congratulating Gordon Brown on his election budget. They praise him not as he praises himself, for his alleged commitment to the poor, and to women and children, but for his prudence.

Their prevailing fear is that a Labour chancellor might use the powers at his disposal to pump money into the pockets of the people who voted for him. They need not worry. The chancellor was far more concerned to impress his arbiters in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank than with the people with little or no money at his disposal. He himself admits that his record over his five budgets has been exactly neutral. He has given almost exactly what he has taken away. Not surprisingly, his measures have had little or no effect on the distribution of wealth in Britain. Four years of New Labour in extremely favourable economic circumstances have left the Tory balance between rich and poor almost exactly what it was when the Tories left it. Millions are still plunged in hopeless poverty. The gap between rich and poor has actually widened under New Labour. One way in which this grim fact has been disguised has been by publicising and heralding marginal changes to the plight of the poor and workers while maintaining discretionary secrecy about the rich. Everyone knows to the last detail what happens to the incomes of workers and the poor. No one knows in anything like the same detail what is happening to the rich. The grotesque advances in the incomes of the rich in the Labour years are literally incalculable. Income tax has come down, capital gains tax has been cut from 33 percent to 30 percent. Gordon Brown has continued his predecessor’s habit of extending tax breaks on share options and other perks for the rich without calculating their overall impact. A survey conducted by stockbrokers JP Morgan and published down the page in the Observer in February 2001 revealed that the UK has more households with an income of more than half a million dollars than any other country in Europe; and in the New Labour years the wealth of those with between half a million and $1 million rose by 8.1 percent, those with between $1 and $5 million by 10.5 percent; and those with over $5 million by 11.8 percent. Unto him that hath has been given, prudently, by New Labour, in great abundance. Prudence Brown boasts that under his careful stewardship unemployment and inflation have come down. Modestly he ascribes this miracle to his own genius. Yet from the first moment he took office and handed the level of interest rates (previously set by elected government) to unelected bankers who benefit from high interest rates, he in effect admitted what he knows to be true – that elected governments of whatever colour cannot and do not determine what happens to the international capitalist economy unless they embark on the most determined and ruthless economic intervention. Under capitalism, unemployment, inflation, the rise and fall of booms and slumps, are not brought about by governments, but by economic forces beyond government control. No one knows, for instance, why there was a recession in the so-called Tiger economies of Asia in 1998. Those economies were previously heralded as evidence that capitalism worked better when it was unfettered by trade unions or government regulation. The impact of that illusion is still being felt by the working people and the poor of those economies, notably in Indonesia where one corrupt and dictatorial government has been toppled, and its successor teeters on the brink of revolution on the one side and unspeakable racial violence on the other. The most predictable feature of any capitalist economy is its unpredictability. Gordon Brown knows that perfectly well, which is probably why he prefers capitalist caution to socialist advance. He also knows that the more his government loosens its democratic grip on the engines of the economy, the less control he will have in the event of any future slump, and the more he consigns the future to a private enterprise chaos out of which he knows no road. Against the background of chaos and unpredictability, his refusal to spend his ‘war chest’ on the people and services who need it most is all the more reprehensible. This, then, is the central charge against the New Labour government. All through the 20th century the Labour Party sought at least to some extent to use the power conferred on it by the votes of working people to shift the balance of wealth and power in their direction. Often the party failed miserably in that endeavour. Again and again elected governments bowed to what they regarded as superior forces in unelected private capital. They were, in Harold Wilson’s famous phrase, ‘blown off course’ by runs on sterling, investment strikes, judicial arrogance, media blitzes and other forces they did not understand, and did not dare to counter. But at least some effort was made in the right direction. At least some commitment was made to public ownership, to civil liberties, and to the building of strong trade unions. New Labour in the late 1990s and early 21st century has shifted so far to the right mat almost all its policies and achievements have converged with those of its Tory predecessors. In a book published in September 1998 entitled The Political Economy of New Labour, Colin Hay devoted a whole chapter to this convergence.

In a book published in September 1998 entitled The Political Economy of New Labour, Colin Hay devoted a whole chapter to this convergence. The results, even by 1998, are as follows. On trade union reform, five out of six policies converge (with the other almost completely converged). On employment law, two out of four policies converge, one (access to tribunals for unfair dismissal) is subject to qualified convergence, and only one (the pledge to sign the Maastricht treaty on employment) can be said to differ from that of the Tories. In six major areas of education policy, only one policy (the assisted places scheme) is not shared by the Tories. As for training, all four major policies are the same for both parties. Labour and Tory pension policy is exactly the same. So they are in all seven major areas of economic policy, and in three out of four areas of industrial policy (the fourth is the commitment to regional development agencies which are very similar to the wholly undemocratic Tory development corporations). On the four areas under the heading privatisation, the only (qualified) divergence is on Labour’s windfall tax on the privatised utilities, a tax which, though opposed by the Tories, has been borne by the new utility shareholders with a patient shrug, and on media regulation there is not a sliver of difference between the two parties. Hay concludes, ‘Labour now accepts that there is simply no alternative to neo-liberalism in an era of heightened capital mobility and financial mobilisation’, and that ‘social democratic parties such as Labour must effectively abandon their social democratic credentials’. This is one answer to those optimistic social democratic commentators who have resigned themselves, often against their better judgement, to voting Labour. Polly Toynbee and David Walker of the Guardian have written a whole book to argue (a) that things didn’t get better quickly enough under New Labour, but (b) that another Labour government with a fresh mandate would surely rediscover its radical heritage and improve on every policy front to the satisfaction of the vast majority of its supporters. One answer to Polly Toynbee is that she, as she recognises, was one of the prominent defectors from Labour to the SDP in 1981, and thus can be held at least partly responsible for all the Tory excesses that followed. But another has more resonance. It is that she and all her fellow ‘Vote Labour for real change’ enthusiasts are not listening to their leaders. Tony Blair’s speeches about his next term of office carry not a whisper of trade union reform, or of a new era of public ownership and democratic responsibility, or of a widening of the comprehensive element in schools, or of a new assault on the grotesque bonanzas of the rich. Everything Blair says about the future points in exactly the opposite direction, towards more privatisation, more inequality, more chaos on road and rail, less planning, less intervention, and a fiercer attack on what his press officer calls bog-standard comprehensives, bog-standard council housing, bog-standard anything which derives from the traditional cooperation and solidarity of working class people. The Toynbee-Walker thesis, that a new New Labour government would put the errors, omissions and mistakes of the last one behind it and engage on a new road to reform, is to ignore completely the triumphalism of Labour ministers and their single minded devotion to office whatever the price that has to be paid by the people who vote for them. They have abandoned their social democratic credentials without a word of regret, but with the singular jubilation of bog-standard politicians who have suddenly discovered the full fruits of high office and intend above all else to go on enjoying them. There is another reaction to all these developments which is even more corrosive than Toynbee’s and Walker’s. This is Colin Hay’s assertion that there is ‘no alternative to neo-liberalism and globalisation’. He appears to argue that because Labour governments have now been corralled by capitalism, and forced to abandon their social democratic credentials, there is now no alternative to their policies. This is the policy of resignation and despair. There is no democratic alternative to Tory policies, argue the New Pessimists, so we had better accept them even when they are carried out by ministers calling themselves Labour. The inevitability of corporate power and corporate control commends itself most sweetly to the directors of corporations. But there is no reason why any of the rest of us should bow before them. There is plenty of evidence in the past and even now that these policies can be resisted and reversed. Corporations do not always get their own way. The establishment of the British National Health Service, the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the toppling of post-war dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal – all these were accomplished against the corporate stream. Even today, while capitalism boasts its omnipotence, it is stopped in its tracks by mass protests in Seattle, Prague and Nice. Resistance can be as international, as globalised, as capitalism is, and, unlike capitalism, it offers hope and life to the exploited millions. There is nothing mystical or superhuman about capitalist power. It is managed and controlled by human beings and can also be changed by human beings. It can and must be resisted with all the power at our disposal. On the eve of a general election, the abject performance of New Labour in office has a grim implication for all those who have believed in the past that their future depends at least to some extent on voting and maintaining a Labour government, but now no longer think the same. All such socialists, trade unionists, civil libertarians, environmentalists, National Health Service campaigners, are effectively disfranchised. With Labour’s link to the unions so weak and its commitment to public ownership and civil liberties reduced to the Private Finance Initiative and vouchers for asylum seekers, the choice before the voters is increasingly similar to the choice in the United States of America between the Republican Party (conservative) and the Democratic Party (conservative). No sane person wants a return to Conservative government, led by Hague and Widdecombe, but more and more voters realise that Hague and Widdecombe have been pushed rightwards by a Labour government far more right wing than any of its predecessors – and they do not want to vote Labour again.

Your chance to vote socialist Is there an alternative? The answer in at least a third of the country is yes. The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) is standing candidates in all 72 seats in Scotland. Each of them is committed to renationalising the railways, ending PFI, and restoring the rights and liberties of trade unionists, asylum seekers and the poor. The SSP has to fight not only against New Labour and the Tories, who have almost vanished north of the border, but also against the Scottish National Party. In the past the SNP was not averse to mouthing socialist policies, but instead of developing and expanding such policies, the SNP has backed away from them. No longer do we hear the SNP calling for renationalising the utilities, for a minimum pension of £90 a week, or for 50,000 new council houses. All these pledges have been dropped. The SNP’s pensions policy has even been trumped by Gordon Brown. The SNP has moved relentlessly to the right. Alex Salmond was more right wing than his predecessor, Jim Sillars, and the new leader, John Sweeney, is more right wing than Alex Salmond. The SNP has retreated into the narrow bourgeois nationalism from which it came. In England and Wales the Socialist Alliance has already selected 80 candidates. The first major elections contested by the Socialist Alliance were for the Greater London Assembly (GLA) in 2000. The Socialist Alliance drew together several organisations and formed a united front proclaiming basic socialist policies. Since the GLA elections, Socialist Alliance and SSP candidates have performed creditably in national and council by-elections, and all of them are determined to present a socialist alternative to a wide spectrum of the general electorate. If you are unhappy with the convergence of Labour policies with Tory ones, if you want to see the railways and other privatised industries renationalised, and the Post Office and London Underground left in public hands, if you want an end to PFI and other schemes for backdoor privatisation, if you want to stop the creeping privatisation of the health service, if you are disgusted by the illiberal drift of New Labour on questions of civil liberties, then you should vote for your socialist candidate. If there is no such candidate in your constituency, find out where there is one in your town or city or county, and go to work on his or her behalf. If there is no Socialist Alliance or SSP candidate in your area, you may prefer to vote for a Labour candidate because he or she is a socialist, or even just to keep the Tories out, or you may want to vote for an independent candidate who represents working class resistance – such as Arthur Scargill in Hartlepool or Health Concern in Wyre Forest. The difference between this election and the last one is that on a nationwide scale there will be candidates in many areas who can represent some of your aspirations. The Scottish Socialist Party and the Socialist Alliance offer more than a shift in politics. They offer a new style of campaigning – a clean break with the suffocating careerism that throttles so much reforming zeal. They realise that real change and progress in a class society cannot be brought about just by voting. They realise that the real threat to the power of the rich comes not from voting but from organised resistance from our side. All the real advances of the past century were rooted in the confidence of working people and their willingness not just to vote but to use their industrial power against their employers, or to organise in collective protest, or both. The great social leap forward after the Second World War was accomplished not just by the enormous Labour vote, but also by the rising confidence among trade unionists of both sexes that had grown far beyond what anyone had imagined before the war. The further leaps forward in the 1970s depended almost entirely on the mighty strength of the organised working class and their willingness to use it. Ideas and the votes they represent cannot be isolated from the real battles in society. Socialist ideas take root and grow in circumstances where people decide to organise and do something to change their circumstances. In the past few months we have seen the first faint stirrings of a revival of working class revolt. The sustained resistance to mass sackings under PFI at Dudley, the continued refusal of communication workers to accept the privatisation of the Post Office, the massive votes for industrial action in protest against the splitting up and privatisation of London Underground – all these are signs of a new mood of resistance and a new impatience with the clichés of New Labour. They come at least partly as a reaction to great international demonstrations of anti-capitalist protest. Voting is only one infrequent and often emasculated form of protest. But voting is still a crucial opportunity to make use of our democratic rights. Our votes are important in proportion to their links to the real powers at our disposal. Every vote for the Socialist Alliance, every decent performance of the Socialist Alliance and SSP, will put new heart and spirit into the growing ranks of people prepared to fight. Socialist candidates are standing not to further their own careers, still less to secure a parliamentary salary (they will only take an average wage if they get elected), but because they are horrified by what has happened to the labour movement and are determined to set it back on track. In a recent pamphlet, The Captive Party, the veteran socialist Michael Barratt Brown appealed to socialists to recall the alternative society that socialism promises: All forms of health and childcare and the care of the disabled would be free. Education would be free at every age right through to lifelong learning.

Education would be free at every age right through to lifelong learning. Housing would be available at reasonable rents with access by foot to shops and parks and gardens, and to many workplaces. There would be a wide range of opportunities for work in production and services with appropriate training built in. There would be no discrimination at work on grounds of gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Pensions for the aged and invalid, and payments during sickness and unemployment would be provided on a universal scheme based on contributions related to income. Planning of land use, road and rail transport, industrial location, and the balance of urban and rural activities would be subject to the most open examination and discussion. In all walks of life, at work and at home, in all workplaces and public institutions, management would be subject to agreed forms of consumers’ and workers’ controls. We have the resources for all this. We just have to find how to change the system from one of private greed to that of public gain. As a start, just a start, you should vote socialist. Top of the page Last updated on 2 May 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot How capitalism corrupts Labour politicians (2004) Extract from Their Democracy and Ours, The Vote: How it was won and how it was undermined, London 2004. © Copyright Estate of Paul Foot Reprinted in Socialist Worker, No.2153, 30 May 2009. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Award winning investigative journalist and leading socialist campaigner Paul Foot was the bane of corrupt politicians and the champion of those who fell victim to miscarriages of justice. He completed his final book shortly before he died in 2004. The Vote: How It Was Won And How It Was Undermined, traces the history of the struggle for democracy, sets out the limits of parliament and attacks the breed of Labour politicians who use parliament to enrich themselves. Socialist Worker reprints this extract from the chapter, Their Democracy and Ours. The history of the twentieth century in Britain has shown that whenever a Labour government in parliamentary office has found itself in conflict with the class wielding economic and industrial power, the government has been resisted, humiliated or defeated, usually all three. On all sides, the elected government is at a disadvantage. Its members are elected by geographic constituency and are constrained by the necessity to represent all their constituents whatever class they come from or support. Elected governments move at a snail’s pace, from Bill to Bill, formality to formality. Their ministries are cluttered with the most ridiculous pomp and tradition. They are obliged to submit their proposed laws to the Crown and to the House of Lords, which is dominated by the “great and good” (not elected). They are permanently subject to laws made by judges (not elected), enforced by police and army chiefs (not elected), and drawn up and supervised by civil servants (not elected). The ruling-class chieftains have at their disposal whole armies of their own advisers and intellectuals, none of them elected. They take daily decisions affecting hundreds of thousands of people, sacking them, disciplining them, cutting their wages, sending them off to war, without any real threat of obstruction from the elected Parliament. British representative democracy is founded on the notion of one person one vote. An industrial magnate has one vote, and so does each worker he can sack or impoverish. A millionaire landlord has one vote, and so does every person he evicts. A banker has one vote, so does every person impoverished by a rise in the bank rate or a financial takeover. A newspaper proprietor has one vote, so does each of the readers he deceives or seduces every day of the week. Are all these people really equally represented? Or does not the mighty, unrepresentative economic power of the wealthy minority consistently and completely overwhelm the representative power of Parliament? Corruption in all its forms has always been a consistent companion of class rule. One of the promises of the early social democrats was that they would put a stop to corruption. In fact, corruption has prospered mightily in the age of social democracy. Again and again, social democratic representatives have found themselves at the mercy of the capitalist bribe. The ministerial career of Jimmy Thomas, the trade-union leader who played so heroic a role in the betrayal of the [1926] general strike, ended with a whimper when he was caught leaking budget secrets to his wealthy golfing mates who speedily converted the information into a ripe profit on the stock exchange. The notorious Poulson scandal of the 1960s [a property developer who bribed politicians] engulfed whole Labour councils who were bewitched by the Methodist architect and his Methodist largesse. T. Dan Smith [leader of Newcastle upon Tyne City Council], a Labour hero of the early 1960s, felt it was time he turned his considerable talent into making money for himself and ended up in prison with Poulson. New Labour in the mid-1990s made a lot of political capital out of “sleaze”, a new word coined to describe the rather minor Tory Party corruption of that period. Yet when Labour ministers took office in 1997, and flung themselves headlong at the feet of the rich, they felt, like Dan Smith, that their time had come. Very soon their dependence on consultants and lobbyists from industry and finance landed the new government in further heaps of sleaze, as we have seen. Another example was when the great sleaze slagheap of Enron finally collapsed in bankruptcy in 2000. Labour ministers scurried to cover the tracks of Enron’s consultants at Labour Party dinners and the close contacts the Labour leaders had established with Enron’s corrupt accountants. Corruption is a natural ally of capitalism, and British Labour, as it made peace with capitalism, increasingly fell victim to corruption. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Budget Not very taxing on the bosses (May 2002) From News Review, Socialist Review, No.263, May 2002, p.7-8. Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. A terrible squealing and squawking has been set up by the ruling class and their experts as they pretend to be ‘shocked’ by Gordon Brown’s Budget. Stephen Radley, chief economist at the Engineering Employers Federation, set the tone when he told the Financial Times on 19 April of ‘widespread anger’ among his members. ‘Some of them feel they have been shafted by the government,’ he whined. Ian Fletcher, head of policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, was equally furious. He complained that the rises in National Insurance contributions for the poor and the workers were to some extent ‘cushioned’ by tax credits for families with children, while tax cuts for ‘business’ had been ‘overshadowed by the scale of the tax rises’. On all sides comes the awful din of wealthy outrage that a Labour government has dared to tax the employers and the rich to pay, of all things, for something the employers and the rich don’t even use – the National Health Service! What is the truth behind the squealing? Well, this year (2002-03) the total extra charge in National Insurance and tax on the ruling class is nil. Tax relief for the rich and the employers (including fantastic handouts to big companies for their ‘research and development’) comes to nearly £500 million. Even next year (2003-04), when the full extent of Brown’s increases in National Insurance charges comes into effect, the cost to employers (£3.9 billion) will be heavily ‘cushioned’ by yet more tax relief for business and shareholdings amounting to £1.4 billion, and the year after that (2004-05) there is still £1 billion of tax relief for the rich and the employers. Some big companies, especially the big drug companies like GlaxoSmithKline, will actually benefit from the budget package. Even the experts hired to speak up for the rich know that public services have been so dreadfully run down by the Tory government and its New Labour successor that much more money needs to be raised in tax to keep them up to the miserable standard to which they have sunk. The question for socialists is not whether more money needs to be raised, but how. The obvious answer is that most of the money should be raised in income tax. The more people make, the more tax they should pay. But the chancellor and the prime minister made such an obvious remedy impossible when they recklessly included a pledge in the Labour manifesto not to increase income tax in the entire period of this parliament – all the way (at least) to 2005. That way they knocked out the fairest way of raising tax, and were forced back onto the alternative of increases in National Insurance. Unlike income tax, National Insurance contributions are not ‘progressive’. They do not do more damage to the rich than the poor. They are flat rate increases, payable by all workers. Pensioners, even billionaire pensioners, don’t pay a penny towards National Insurance. Income from rent and dividends does not count when National Insurance contributions are assessed. But the worst aspect of National Insurance contributions is that the mega-rich are actually excluded from paying them. While the poor under a certain level of poverty don’t pay income tax , the very rich over a certain level of wealth are ‘cut off’ from paying any more National Insurance contributions. Gordon Brown’s budget makes a pathetic attempt to cover up this grossly regressive aspect of National Insurance contributions by, for the first time, insisting that rich people who earn more than the ‘cut-off’ rate (£31,000 a year) now have to pay 1 percent of their earnings in National Insurance contributions. This has set off the predictable howl of indignation from the rich. But deep down the rich are thanking their lucky stars that the demon Brown has accepted the basic principle that the rich and very rich should be sheltered from National Insurance contributions. Their real feelings were revealed two days after the budget, and buried deep in a Financial Times supplement that only the very rich were expected to read. ‘Top rate earners’, revealed Financial Times writer Kate Burgess, ‘will breathe a sigh of relief. Many were expecting Brown to abolish the upper earnings limit and levy a flat rate of National Insurance contributions on all earnings above £4,615 at, say, 10 percent. That would have meant those earning, for example, £100,000 a year would have had to stump up an extra £7,000 a year.’ How terrible! The article went on, ‘If this limit had been abolished individuals might have had to pay 11 percent on all earnings. That would have hit wealthy consumers’ discretionary spending.’ I think she means luxury spending. In the same article Eleanor Dowling, senior tax consultant at something called Mercer Human Resources Consulting, makes the same point in a different way. ‘This is the first rise in direct taxes since Labour came to power,’ she says, ‘and it isn’t that onerous.’ So the National Insurance rises are nothing like as bad as the rich feared or pretended. But that isn’t the only objection to Brown’s budget. He has bet everything on improving the National Health Service. Though education has been helped slightly, the other public services, most notably transport, have been left to rot. Everyone can rejoice at more money for the NHS, but there could have been much much more if it had been raised not by a payroll tax that falls on NHS workers as much as anyone else, but by income tax and especially by the long-forsaken supertax which would scoop more and more money from the burgeoning menagerie of fat cats. It is as though Blair and Brown decided they must raise much more money for the NHS, but resolved in the process not to do too much damage to their friends and benefactors among the very rich. From now on, moreover, they will be straining every muscle further to ingratiate themselves with the rich and to ‘mend the fences’ they never erected in the first place. Top of the page Last updated on 18.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Saints and devils (February 1992) From Reviews, Socialist Review, No.150, February 1992. p.29. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 Richard Pipes Collins Harvill £20 The Russian Revolution, Professor Pipes tells us in his very first sentence, was ‘arguably the most important event of the century’. He then spends 845 pages proving that it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, after that first flourish, he can hardly bring himself to call it a revolution at all. It was instead, he insists, a coup d’etat, led by a bunch of psychopaths and fanatics, whose consequence has brought nothing but pain and despair to the people of the world. ‘The historian’s problem,’ the professor’s introduction goes on, ‘is that the Russian Revolution being part of our own time, is difficult to deal with dispassionately.’ He does not, however, err on the side of objectivity. On the subject of Russia, socialism and communism he has all the neutrality of a man who served as an adviser on Russia and Eastern Europe in the US President’s own National Security Council. As he freely admits, one of his contemporary heroes is the ultra right wing free enterprise fanatic Milton Friedman. Curiously for a man who makes his living and his reputation among intellectuals, Professor Pipes nurses a deep contempt for what he calls the ‘intelligentsia’. A good deal of the trouble in Russia which culminated in the revolution (whoops, sorry, coup d’etat), he argues, can be traced back to this intelligentsia which, he discloses, is a Russian word. The crux of his argument runs like this: ‘A life ruled by reason is a life ruled by intellectuals: it is not surprising, therefore, that intellectuals want to change the world in accord with the requirement of “rationality”. A market economy, with its wasteful competition and swings between overproduction and shortage, is not “rational” and hence it does not find favour with intellectuals.’ It is hard to understand why the professor puts the words rational and rationality in inverted commas. It is quite clear from his book that he is highly suspicious of people who argue by way of reason. He finds irrationality far more reliable. He is disgusted, for instance, by the ‘preoccupation ... with legislation as a device for human betterment’. That to him is silly liberal nonsense, which explains why liberals so often ‘throw their lot in with revolutionaries’. Thus his psychotic hatred for the Russian revolutionaries extends to pretty well everyone to the left of General Kornilov. The Russian Revolution was indeed arguably the most important event of the century – for one reason only: that for the first time since the French Revolution the working masses became active participants in their own political destiny. Professor Pipes duly devotes pretty well his entire book to proving that this was not the case. This requires a great deal of misquotation and misunderstanding. For instance, after quoting Lenin’s view that the working class will not spontaneously take the path to revolution, but will only do so if led by a revolutionary party. Pipes caricatures it as follows: ‘Unless the workers were led by a socialist party external to it and independent of it, they would betray their class interests. Only non-workers – that is, the intelligentsia – knew what these interests were.’ That is the precise opposite of Lenin’s view that only a party built as an integral part of the working class could possible ever lead it anywhere, let alone to revolution. Pipes crude error infects his whole book. One of the most extraordinary aspects of what happened in Russia in 1917 was the way in which the new Soviets switched their allegiance from Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to Bolsheviks during the summer and autumn. The shift was so dramatic that Professor Pipes cannot bring himself to publish the figures. He does disclose that in June, at the First Congress of Soviets, the Social Revolutionaries had 285 delegates, the Mensheviks 248 and the Bolsheviks a mere 105. He does not disclose that at the next Congress – in October – the Social Revolutionaries had 160 delegates, the Mensheviks 72 and the Bolsheviks 390. The Bolshevik Party, the nasty, fanatical caucus of Professor Pipes’s imagination, had become the majority party inside the working class. As such, it had fulfilled what for Lenin was an unalterable precondition for a working class revolution. Because he refuses to accept the deep penetration of revolutionary ideas and enthusiasms in the Russian working class at the time, Pipes cannot help us at all on how the revolution was sustained against all the odds. He allows into his record not a single word of the huge literature of enthusiasm about the revolution: the motor of its survival in its early years. Professor Pipes ignores Lenin’s central passion – his view that the exploited people of the world could run it better than their exploiters – and so he can conclude predictably that ‘Stalin’s course had been charted by Lenin’. The evidence is mostly the other way however. Lenin’s view, as Pipes concedes, was that ‘unless the revolution spread to other countries, it was doomed’. Stalin’s regime was based on pursuing ‘socialism in one country’, often to the point of destroying revolutionary movements in other countries. As the book bulldozes on, Pipes’s hatred for the Russian revolutionaries becomes more hysterical. At times he cannot contain his rage at their impertinence: ‘That such rank amateurs would undertake to turn upside down the fifth-largest economy in the world, subjecting it to innovations never attempted anywhere even on a small scale, says something of the judgement of the people who in October 1917 seized power in Russia.’ Pipes the professional on the other hand can write this: ‘One can credit the Bolsheviks with having invented terror.’ The Bolsheviks invented terror! Pause for a moment’s reflection. Indeed, turn back to page 81 of Pipes’s own book where you can read this: ‘In 1903, one third of the infantry and two-thirds of the cavalry stationed in European Russia engaged in repressive action.’ Some might conclude from that that the forces of the Tsar, not to mention the Black Hundreds of later years, were engaging in terror. They would be wrong, according to Professor Pipes, for terror was invented by the Bolsheviks. The blurb for the book makes the horrifying prediction that it will ‘stand as the definitive history’ of the Russian Revolution. Nothing could be less deserved. I still recall my fury thirty years ago when reading Bertram Wolfe’s exposé of the Stalin School for Rewriting History in his Three Who Made A Revolution. Here was Orwell’s Ministry of Truth writ large. There was, it seemed clear, no stronger argument against Stalin’s Russia than its invention of its own history. Professor Pipes’s book rewrites history the other way round. While Stalin lionised and mummified Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries. Pipes has turned them into devils. The result of both is that the Russian Revolution is either patronised or abused into something entirely unrecognisable from what it was. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Karl Marx: The Best Hated Man (February 2004) From Socialist Review, No.282, February 2004, p.14-16. Copyright © 2004 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Karl Marx continues to be damned because of the revolutionary power he identified, argues Paul Foot. Karl Marx was so famous when he died in March 1883 that eleven people went to his funeral at Highgate cemetery. The funeral oration given by his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels ended with the observation that Marx, though he was a delightful character, a loyal friend and a devoted father, was the ‘best hated and calumniated man of his times’. That may have been true at the time but it became even more true later. Most socialists and revolutionaries can expect some relief from the abuse of high society after they are dead. But Marx has gone on being attacked and insulted for the 120 years since he died. At best he has been denounced as ‘out of date’. He is also denounced as immoral and cruel to those around him – did he not sleep with his servant? And lastly and more shockingly, he has been held responsible for monstrous tyrannies of our time, in Russia, China, Cambodia and so on, that pretended to be socialist but were in fact the opposite. Leaders of every academic discipline – politics, philosophy, economics, history, science and mathematics – have united to attack Marx. They kill him again and again only to regroup and kill him again. What I want to do is to try to understand why. Ideas The first and most obvious answer is the power of his ideas. Engels’s oration summed them up like this: ‘Just as Darwin discovered the laws of evolution in organic nature so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc; and that therefore the means of life, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation on which the forms of government, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as has hitherto been the case.’ Central to these ideas was the fact that human society is cut into classes, based on the property they own and control, and that the history of human society is a history of a ceaseless struggle between those who have the wealth and those who don’t. In themselves, these ideas, however profound and accurate they may be, don’t really answer our question. If the ideas were simply the result of academic scientific discovery, as Darwin’s were, then the discoverer could surely be left alone, almost revered for his discovery, as Darwin, for all the bigoted attacks on him, has been. Surely there was another element of Marx’s life and thought which singled him out for such exceptional and long-lived vituperation? To find it, we return a third time to Engels’s speech in Highgate: ‘For Marx was, before all else, a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present day proletariat.’ There in a nutshell is the answer to our question. He was not only a man with revolutionary ideas. He wanted to put those ideas into practice. Nothing is more misunderstood about Marx than his own insistence that he was a ‘scientific socialist’. Did this mean, as the crudest of his supporters have sometimes claimed, that his classification of capitalist society meant that its overthrow could be accomplished by doing nothing? Quite the opposite. The science in Marx’s approach was in the analysis, not the prescription. He was irritated by philosophers who mused idealistically about the evils of capitalist society and did nothing about them. For centuries philosophers had sought to interpret the world, he observed in a famous passage, and concluded, ‘The point is to change it.’ The way to change it was the exact opposite of waiting to see if a scientific experiment would work out. It was for human beings to involve themselves in the struggle on the side of the oppressed. Marx’s life was a model of that involvement. In his youth, in quick succession, he was thrown out of Germany, Belgium and France, because he threw himself into the struggles of workers in all three countries. In France he associated closely with the fighting elements in the working class, and never forgot his admiration for them. Finally in 1849, aged 31, he came to England (where there was no immigration control) and settled here for the rest of his life. He spent a lot of that time as an investigative journalist of the highest quality. He buried himself in the information the reactionary governments of the time published about their activities. His aim was to find out relevant information and publish it to assist workers’ struggles. The period from 1849 to 1883 when he died was a period of low class struggle. The Chartists, who had brought the country to the brink of revolution, had been defeated and the working class movement was, for the moment, cowed. Marx’s tiny organisation, the Socialist League, split and split again. In the end, when there were really only two members left, Marx and Engels, Marx decided to concentrate on his journalism and on expanding the ideas that he and Engels had set out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In 20 years he wrote the three great theoretical works that set out his communist theory – the Critique of Political Economy, the Grundrisse and the greatest of them, Capital. There may be some of you, like me, who find these works difficult, and so they are. But Capital in particular is well worth persevering with.

But Capital in particular is well worth persevering with. It is illustrated throughout with examples of human struggle, from the British workers fighting for the ten-hour day to black Americans fighting against slavery. Yet even when he was composing these huge works, even though all the time he was trying to fend off abject poverty and considerable pain from skin disease, again and again he involved himself in the working class struggles of the time. I pick out three examples. The First International The first was the formation of the First International – the International Working Men’s Association – in 1864. The idea for the International came from trade union leaders who were fed up with the constant importation of scab labour to break strikes and weaken trade unionism. The International needed a written introduction to set out its aims. None of the trade union leaders could write anything comprehensible. When the various factions from foreign countries had a go, they made an even greater mess of it. Marx was asked for help. He suggested a subcommittee of one, and elected himself to it. The resulting articles of the International, clear and concise, start with the ringing dedication that the self emancipation of the working class is ‘the act of the working class themselves’. The articles went on all the membership cards of the International. The second issue was universal male suffrage. This had been the demand of the Chartists, but since their defeat it had faded into the background. In 1866 a new organisation called the Reform League was formed to resurrect the demand. Marx organised a small group of socialists to try to take control of the Reform League and commit it to universal suffrage. He was so pleased with his efforts that he described the league as ‘all our work’. This claim was an example of another characteristic of Marx that often gets him criticised – his impatient optimism. He was inclined to put the best spin on any socialist initiative. The Reform League quickly deteriorated. It was not ‘all our work’ or anything like it. It attracted all sorts of reactionaries and compromisers who eventually won the day. Marx had got it wrong, but only in his intense enthusiasm to push the struggle forward – a sin, incidentally, that we ourselves commit more often than not, and are none the worse for. The final example of his involvement that I’ve picked out is undoubtedly the greatest. People sometimes ask me what work of Marx they should read first, and the obvious answer is the Communist Manifesto. Second to that in my opinion is a pamphlet he wrote in 1871 called The Civil War in France. This was about the Paris Commune, formed by the working people of Paris in revolutionary circumstances in March 1871. It lasted for two months until it was suppressed by murderous military terror of the most revolting proportions. Marx followed the commune through almost every hour of its existence, demanding from friends, family and acquaintances any fragment of information from Paris. When the commune was suppressed, he sat down, boiling with rage, and in five days wrote his pamphlet which he read out loud to the council of the International. As a description of the commune, it has never been bettered before or since. It sets out, above all, the democratic nature of the commune; how it not only made laws but carried them out, how it replaced the machinery of the capitalist state with an entirely new democracy that could never be tolerated by capitalism and its armies, and, incidentally, has nothing whatever to do with the societies presided over by Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. The Civil War in France magnificently combines Marx’s terse journalism and his fighting spirit: ‘When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural superiors”, and under circumstances of unexampled difficulty performed their work modestly, conscientiously and efficiently – performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one fifth of what, according to high scientific authority, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school board – the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over the Hotel de Ville.’ That passage (and indeed the whole pamphlet) takes us closer to the reason why Marx has been hated and calumnied for so long. It is not his ideas alone which important people detest – it is the drive to put them into practice. It is not simply that his ideas have not lost their relevance over all this time – there is still a class society after all, that is every bit as foully exploitative as it ever was – it is the fact that there are people inspired by Marx who still want to change the world in the direction to which he pointed. So people are still ridiculed and abused by the professors of the profiteers because we want to fight, as he did, to rid the world of riches altogether and to get rid of poverty at the same time. Such people, such Marxists, are prepared moreover to organise to do so. This is an edited version of a talk given at a Karl Marx day school on 10 January 2004, held to mark the republication of Alex Callinicos’s The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Why Labour lost (May 1992) From Socialist Review, No.153, May 1992, pp-9-11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Last month’s Tory election victory marked a further sharp defeat for Labour. Now, argues Paul Foot, we have to look beyond electoral politics to the prospects for real change in society. After the gloom, the reckoning. Just how many sacrifices have been made for this miserable election result? When the votes for Mid-Staffs came in at about 3 a.m., I noticed that Sylvia Heal had lost the seat for Labour. She had triumphed there only two years earlier in one of die most amazing by-elections this century. A safe Tory seat seemed to have been turned into a safe Labour one. Sylvia’s triumph then seemed to vindicate her remarkable speech at the 1988 Labour Party conference in which she confessed that she was dropping her lifelong commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. The reason, she explained, was simple. Someone had calculated that Labour could not win with a policy of unilateral disarmament, which apparently lost it the elections of 1983 and 1987. Drop the commitment, then, she argued, and the chances of a Labour government would immeasurably increase. Thus Labour was left with a policy of support for nuclear weapons at precisely the time when the ‘enemy’ whom those nuclear weapons were meant to deter had disappeared. Lots of other radical policies were chucked into the bin on the same basis. Commitments to get rid of most of the Tory trade union laws were watered down. So were the promises to take back into public ownership all those utilities and public services which the Tories had privatised. In a Gadarene stampede to appease floating voters in the middle of the road, anything which smacked of socialist anger against the Stock Exchange or any other citadel of modern capitalism was wiped out of Labour’s language. Bryan Gould declared in 1987 how he loved to see workers buying and selling shares. John Smith. Margaret Beckett and Co entered a long dialogue with charming hosts in the City of London, in a ceaseless effort to persuade them that Labour’s policies were good for business. In one sense, they succeeded. On polling day the Financial Times agreed with Labour that its readers agreed can be measured by the fantastic celebrations which went on throughout election night and the whole of the following day across die length and breadth of the Ciry of London. We lost socialist policies by the score. We also lost countless opportunities to organise and fight even for the policies which were left. The miners’ great struggle in 1984-5 was left high and dry by the Labour and trade union leaders. Why? Because, it was argued, ‘this was not the way to get Labour returned.’ Exactly the same argument was used when hospital workers exploded in rage in early 1988, or when the ambulance workers went on strike soon afterwards, or indeed in every dispute since the last general election. ‘Don’t rock the boat’, was the cry. ‘Labour will make things better for everyone.’ How does that argument look now? We went to bed in those early hours of 10 April reflecting that the boat had hardly been rocked at all. There’d been hardly a strike or a major demonstration for more than a year. Yet the unrocked boat was lying in ruins at the bottom of the sea. Some have taken comfort from Labour’s 40 gains, and pretended that the new Tory government, with a much smaller majority than its predecessor, will be comparatively tame. Nothing could be more ridiculous. Major and Co never expected anything like the luxury of an overall majority of 21. Their supporters among the wealthy are beside themselves with joy. They are confident they can hang on to the enormous gains made under Thatcher, the booming private hospitals and private schools, the whole disgusting paraphernalia of a greedy and confident ruling class. For all his tinny rhetoric about ‘a nation at ease with itself’ Major’s new cabinet shows exactly where he is going. Peter Lilley, a man who has devoted his whole life to picking the pockets of the poor and the disadvantaged, is in charge of social security. Poll Tax Portillo, who hates all government spending, is Chief Secretary at the Treasury in charge of public spending. The only Orangeman to sit for an English seat in the House of Commons is the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and the new Solicitor General is a neanderthal from Brighton who can’t contain his enthusiasm for the hangman’s rope. These men are completely at case with themselves about another five years of squeezing still more wealth from the working people and passing it across to their friends and paymasters. What is to be done? At once, in the wake of defeat, a great howl of misery goes up on all sides of the official left. The argument is that, because all this surrender has achieved precisely nothing, we should surrender more. Trade unions (who were completely silent through the entire election campaign) are told that they are to blame and that they must cut links with the Labour Party. The very name ‘Labour’, apparently, is a hindrance. The Liberal Party, a deeply right wing organisation which fought more than half its campaign against Labour’s central proposals for taxing the rich and restoring some freedom to trade unions, is named as the saviour of the future. Like a Greek Chorus renting their clothes, the psephologists and former Social Democrats, the New Statesman and the Guardian, almost anyone who can be found who was once a member of the Communist Party, shout for constitutional reform, electoral reform, Lib-Lab election pacts, and, if such a person can possibly be found, an even more right wing leader for the Labour Party than Neil Kinnock. Forget for a moment that none of these things (except a new leader who is being catapulted into office before anyone can catch their breath) can be achieved while the Tories have a majority in parliament.

Forget for a moment that none of these things (except a new leader who is being catapulted into office before anyone can catch their breath) can be achieved while the Tories have a majority in parliament. The point about all of them is that they seek to shift Labour still further down the road which has taken it so inexorably to its fourth defeat in a row. There is another common feature to all these demands – passivity. People are told that the priority is to change the voting system or to rely on backroom deals between the leaders of the trade unions, the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. No one outside these backrooms, the argument concludes, can do anything much except, as before, wait and see how well their leaders perform. The prospect held out by all these ‘new realist’ reformers is one of utter despondency, amounting to total surrender to the Tories. It is time to restate a few simple facts about the world we live in. Its fundamental characteristic is that it is divided by class. The means whereby the people at the top of society grow rich and powerful by exploiting the majority is much more obvious now than it was a decade ago. The contradictions and horrors of such a society – unemployment, mass starvation, disease for thousands of millions of people while a small group wallow in unimaginable luxury – are more striking and more devastating. The cry for change is as loud and anguished as it has ever been. So where does change come from? The central point about a society dominated by the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited is that it relies for its success on passivity from below. The engine of change is the activity and confidence of the people who are being exploited, most effectively where they are exploited directly, at the point of production. These sound like slogans. But they explain the changes which have taken place in modern Britain. Looking back over the last quarter of a century I pick out three decisive changes to the left which profoundly improved the living standards of working people and decisively changed the balance of confidence in the struggle between the classes. The first was in 1969, when the Labour government proposed drastic new laws to control the trade unions. A few months later the proposals were withdrawn – not because the government had changed its mind or because civil servants at the Department of Employment were suddenly sympathetic to trade unions – but because of a short sharp campaign in the trade union movement which included unofficial strikes. Much more remarkable was the change which came over the Tory government in 1972. At the beginning of that year it looked rather like the Tory government now: confident, aggressive, privatising, anti-union and anti-poor. At the end of the year it was pumping public money into industry and building up the public services more energetically than any government before or since. Its whole strategy and philosophy had changed. There had been no general election, no constitutional reform, no Lib-Lab pacts, pretty well no change in parliament at all. But there had been a victorious miners’ strike, a building workers’ strike, a hospital workers’ strike, a dockers’ strike and even a threatened general strike which not only smashed the Tories’ anti-union laws but also changed the whole face of politics. Thirdly, in 1987 the Tories were re-elected on a manifesto based on their ‘flagship’ – the poll tax. Four years later the same government, which made no new pacts and still had a parliamentary majority of nearly 100, withdrew the poll tax. Had they been terrified by the parliamentary opposition? Not at all – they were contemptuous of it. What changed their minds and abolished the poll tax was a mass campaign of civil disobedience, whose climax was probably the biggest demonstration since the war, which turned into a full scale riot. These huge political shifts in our direction were all set in motion from below. They were almost unaffected by what was going on in parliament, or even by which government was in office. The pace of events was determined by the ebb and flow of the struggle between the classes – when they win, we lose, and vice versa. The same test – who is winning between the classes – can be applied to elections. Elections are the most passive of all political activities, but they do concentrate people’s minds on politics. A common cliché from pundits and pollsters after the election was that Labour should have won because Britain was in recession. In fact, Labour has never won an election in a recession. Even in 1929, when Labour was elected as the largest party, the real depth of recession did not come for two years (and parliamentary Labour was reduced to a rump). The big Labour victories of 1945 and 1966 were won when the unions were strong, when nobody was out of work and when the workers were full of confidence and hope. The same point comes from a comparison of the recent election with that of February 1974. In 1974 a Tory government seeking re-election was buoyed throughout the campaign by polls which gave it big leads. Then, as the crunch came, floating voters were suddenly worried that a Tory government would lead to instability and chaos. So the Tories lost the election. In 1992 the polls showed people veering to Labour. But when it came to the crunch, the floaters shied away. This time it was Labour which seemed to hold out the prospect of chaos. What was the real difference? In 1974 the miners were on strike, less than a million people were out of work, and the unions still felt strong and confident from their victories in 1972. In 1992 no one was on strike, nor had been for years. The balance of class confidence favoured Labour in 1974 and the Tories in 1992. Marx argued that the prevailing ideas will always be those of the ruling class. Labour has to challenge these ideas to win elections, and is far more likely to do so when its supporters are strong, confident, acting together, than weak, uncertain, fragmented and left to think things out on their own, at the mercy of these prevailing ideas.

Labour has to challenge these ideas to win elections, and is far more likely to do so when its supporters are strong, confident, acting together, than weak, uncertain, fragmented and left to think things out on their own, at the mercy of these prevailing ideas. But this is not a hard and fast rule, an ‘objective circumstance’ which condemns us to Tory victories whenever they can engineer a recession. People make their own history, and their anger and discontent can be reflected in elections. However, especially in times of recession, that anger needs to be awakened, prodded, inflamed in ceaseless agitation. After the election, though not before it, the former heroes of the SDP (RIP) Peter Jenkins (Independent) and Malcolm Dean (Guardian) suddenly discovered that Labour was ‘unelectable.’ There was not a word of this before polling day when all the signs pointed in the opposite direction. Opinion polls are not conspiracies. They are measurements. The near unanimity of all the polls before the election that Labour was in the lead, often handsomely, was probably accurate. The tide of hatred against the government was so strong that it looked as though it would carry the floaters with it. The crucial task for Labour was to sustain the anger against the government until the last moment. Class anger had played a large part in the early stages of the campaign. Even John Smith, one of the least angry men ever to grace a front bench, introduced his alternative budget with the claim that the ‘1 percent at the top has had its way for 12 years – now it’s the turn of the rest of us.’ The broadcast about Jennifer’s ear operation struck a chord of rage. This was not just moaning about a bad health service. It was comparing the bad (for the poor and the workers) with the good (for those who can pay). There wasn’t a street in the land where some such story had not been told, and people were indignant about it. Kinnock’s speech at Sheffield comparing Major’s soapbox with the cardboard boxes of the homeless touched an angry nerve. But then suddenly the campaign faltered. The second NHS broadcast was cancelled. Suddenly the talk was not of private health care and snob schools, but of consensual and responsible government. Major clung onto his soapbox, but Kinnock was always in limousines, or on battleships releasing balloons. Edwina Currie said that Kinnock looked more like a prime minister than Major, and that was suddenly a problem. The Tories organised their fear and hate campaign to coincide with polling day. On the eve of poll the Sun had nine pages on ‘The Nightmare on Kinnock Street.’ The City staged a run on the pound and announced that Labour would bring higher interest rates. The Labour leaders, as though worn down by endless City lunches, did not respond. There was no attack on the undemocratic power of financial barons seeking to influence the election. Labour was not unelectable. The results themselves prove it. It required only two or three extra people in every hundred to vote Labour (as they were probably intending to do until the last moment) for the Tories to have been kicked out. It was these vital floaters who, at the last moment, as the Tories pounced and Labour dithered, swung round from their anger to their fear. Like all the guesses about why the election was lost, this may just be speculation. What is not speculation is that the Labour leadership now has absolutely nothing to offer us. Before we have time to catch our breath, the Tory government will be on the attack again, hacking away at the schools and hospitals they promised were safe, raising the taxes they promised to cut. Labour can do nothing to stop them. Schools, hospitals and jobs can only be protected by action outside parliament, by demonstrations, petitions and strikes. All these will be a thousand times more successful if they are sustained and led by socialists, people who make no concessions to capitalist society because they want to replace it, root and branch, with an entirely different society: a socialist society which can plan its production to fit people’s needs, and distribute its wealth on the principle that human beings, whatever their different abilities, have the same right to benefit from what is commonly produced. Tens of thousands of socialists have held their breath and bitten their lips rather than speak out in protest as the Labour leaders continued on their promised march to parliamentary power. After Black Friday, 10 April, every one of them is disappointed and indignant. Their disappointment is useless. But their indignation can still stop the Tories – if it is channelled into real resistance, and into a socialist organisation which bases itself on that resistance, and can therefore hold out the prospect of real change. Top of the page Last updated on 17.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot ‘Argies’ with British guns (7 November 1996) From Socialist Worker, 7 November 1996. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 168–169. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Remember the Scott inquiry? It may seem like a long time ago, but the report of the Lord Justice (now promoted to Vice-Chancellor) was published only seven months ago. Many curious facts emerged from the Scott hearings about the way we are governed. But perhaps the strangest of all was that armaments which were ostensibly made to protect Britain and to defeat Britain’s enemies were being sold hand over fist to a country which became Britain’s enemy. The contradiction was brilliantly exposed in the role of a single person: a Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Glazebrook. Glazebrook’s job at the Ministry of Defence was to make sure that weapons and machinery were not sold to anyone who might use them against Britain. Glazebrook constantly found himself in a minority of one in the Ministry of Defence committees which decided what should be sold. These committees were entirely dominated by representatives of the arms companies ‘regional marketing directors’, as they were called – which used their majorities to call the tune. Scott’s recommendations were intended to make absolutely sure that this sort of thing never happened again. Well, here we are, seven months later, and what is happening? A couple of excellent Channel 4 Despatches programmes reveal the astonishing fact that Argentinian warships are powered by British made engines whose spare parts have recently been made readily available. Can this possibly be right? Is Britain equipping the hated navy or the ‘Argies’ – the same navy which surrounded the Falkland Islands in 1982, and whose General Belgrano was so heroically sunk with 300 dead more than 200 miles outside the ‘exclusion zone’? Total ban Margaret Thatcher regarded her victory over Argentina as the high peak of her time in Downing Street. Immediately afterwards she slapped a total ban on every export to Argentina which could be regarded as military. For years their ships had been bought from and powered by British shipbuilding and engineering. The nastier the Argentinian dictatorship, the more readily the British government, including the Labour government of 1974–79, sold it warships, equipped them and repaired them. Desperately, the Argentinian naval command set up factories across the Western hemisphere to make the spare parts required for the British engines – parts which were denied them by the patriotic fury of Mrs Thatcher and her acolytes. Then, suddenly, the picture changed. In 1995, Rolls Royce, whose engines still power many Argentinian warships, approached the British department of trade. The Argentinian navy, they whined, was begging for vital spare parts to keep the ancient engines going. Please, please could they break the rules and sell the parts? The DTI agreed almost at once. This was happening at the very time that Ian Lang, the President of the Board of Trade, was defending the government’s record during the Scott inquiry and, in the process, jeering at the last Labour government for selling arms to Argentina! As we sit back and enjoy what will certainly be another government embarrassment about this, we can reflect upon the real lesson: the extent of corporate power. From time to time, capitalist greed for profit will be reined back in the interests of ‘the country’ or ‘the military’ or even by parliament. But, in the end, the representatives of capitalism are more powerful than parliamentary democracy or patriotism, and will find a way to shrug off both so they can make profits. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Orwell and the proles (January 1984) From Socialist Worker, January 1984. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 272–273. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Everyone else seems to be doing it, so I did it too. I re-read 1984 by Geroge Orwell, and I marked this passage: The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when the time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality, there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would turn into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan – everywhere stood the same solid, unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body and passed on the secret doctrine that two and two make four. Poor George Orwell (and 1984 in particular) have been ground down almost to nothing in the awful mill of the Cold War. In the West, he has had to put up with the most revolting flattery from those who say that 1984 is all about Russia: that it is Russian horror alone which he had brilliantly exposed. From the East (and from official Communists everywhere) Orwell has had even worse service. He has been denounced as pessimistic, nihilistic and even anti-working class. He has been ridiculed as a Hampstead intellectual who sold out to the CIA. The Western flatterers forget that all three warring super-continents in 1984 have developed the same system, not through conquest, but through the choice of their rulers. Orwell’s prediction was that all the power blocs would grow increasingly similar in style and character – a prediction which every minute is being brilliantly fulfilled. The Eastern critics forget passages like the one above (and many others) when Orwell’s perennial optimism and good humour break out from behind his gloomy descriptions of what he saw as an extremely gloomy society. Both sets of critics forget, above all, the working class, which as this passage shows, Orwell did not forget, even at the end. Of course he did not know or care much about working-class organization, about the relationship between party or class. Of course, he was a loner, with all sorts of weird and often quite horrible ideas about nationalism and people’s instinctive ‘love of country’. Of course he was a male chauvinist of the most patronizing and often vulgar variety. But for all that you’ve really got to hand it to him. He was among the very first to see through Stalin’s Russia for the bureaucratic tyranny which it was: and to detect how such a tyranny necessarily took the path of counter-revolution when a revolution broke out anywhere, as in Spain in 1936 and 1937. While much ‘better trained’ and ‘conscious’ socialists were looking to Stalin’s Russia for salvation, Orwell was denouncing it and exposing it, not as a Cold War diatribe, but as part of a life’s devotion to the common people. He exposed Russia precisely because he saw things from the point of view of the proles. He and his books will survive attacks from Moscow and praise from Washington, because his basic message is stronger than either of them: A plague on both your houses. The future belongs to the proles. Top of the page Last updated on 5 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Old Firm (July 1972) From Reviews, International Socialism (1st series), No.52, July-September 1972, pp.41-2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Competition and the Corporate Society. British Conservatives, the State and Industry: 1945-1964 by Nigel Harris Methuen, £3.75 On the day this review is written (May 18) the front page of the Times reports ‘deep restiveness here and there inside the Cabinet and on the Conservative back benches about the Government’s volte face on industrial intervention policies.’ According to the report, the estate agents, stockbrokers, supermarket proprietors and used car salesmen on the Tory back benches are not a little perplexed about the Government’s Industry Bill, which contemplates even wider state powers over and subsidies for private industry than even the previous Labour Government had contemplated. Questions are being asked, in the polite way in which these things are done on Tory back bench committees, about the total somersault which the Government has turned on almost all its economic policies. Quotations from leading Tories in the run-up to the last general election about ‘the efficiency of private enterprise’ about ‘standing on your own two feet’, about ‘disengagement from the State’ are nostalgically recited at meetings of the 1922 Committee. The Upper Clyde Shipyards, the Government is reminded, was to be dosed because the Government would not pay an estimated £6m to keep it solvent, but a few months later the same Government shelled out £35m in state aid to the same firm. Harland and Wolff in Belfast have been paid by the Tory Government in state aid some four times what the whole company is worth at current stock exchange prices. Sir Keith Joseph, chief shouter of pre-election ‘abrasive’, neo-Liberal slogans, has been kept well away from industry, and Mr Nicholas Ridley, one of the few Government Ministers who tried to practise what he preached, has been unceremoniously sacked. No sooner are ‘abrasive Bills’ passed than the Government must try to retreat from them. In the week that the Industrial Relations Court looked like sending a Hull dockers’ leader to jail. Heath, the CBI and the TUC talk about ‘new conciliation procedures’. At the eleventh hour of the Housing Finance Bill, the Government watered down its most penal provision. Even the Government’s original determination to come to terms at any price with white racist Rhodesia seems to be wavering. Back-bench Tories need principles to sustain them through the long Parliamentary winters. It is difficult to believe in profits and minority wealth, and the importance of both has to be explained in terms of principle. Chopping and changing from neo-Liberalism’ to ‘corporatism’ can, argue the backwoodsmen, do the Party and the class nothing but harm. In fact, as Nigel Harris argues in this fine book, the party has survived and expanded because it has changed tack and emphasis to suit the changing needs of national capitalism. Disraeli’s strength was that he heaved the party into line with the demands of the new industrial bourgeoisie; Baldwin’s that he convinced the Tories of the 1930s that they had always been protectionists; Macmillan’s that he isolated his Suez backwoodsmen, avoided confrontation with the trade unions, instituted ‘planning’, and steered a wayward course to the corporate state. There is no symmetry, no logic, no pattern to the capitalist system. Its logicians and its prophets are almost always wrong. ‘It is a contradiction in terms’ said Enoch Powell, prophet backbencher in 1955, (not to be confused with Enoch Powell, realist Minister 1960-1963) ‘to say that the railways cannot pay in an economy which is paying. It is a contradiction in terms to say that we can produce a profit, that we can export at a profit, but that we cannot, at a profit, transport the factors of production or the finished goods.’ Seventeen years previously, Harold Macmillan, who was better at Greek than Enoch Powell, but better also at preserving the interests of his class, had written in The Middle Way: ‘The coal industry ought now to be absorbed into the sphere of socialised concerns conducted in the light of wider national considerations-not making its first objective the securing of a profit on its own operations but seeking to serve other industries and assist them to become profitable.’ Macmillan saw what Powell, except in his brief period of high office, has never seen: that the only law of any importance in capitalism is the law of class preservation. The delicate private enterprise mechanism imagined by Powell (and, in less intelligible terms, by Winston Churchill), are fine for opposition or for the hustings, but useless for Tories in power. The best statement ever on Tory attitudes towards the State was made by Major Gwillim Lloyd George in 1946. ‘My idea is that when things are not going so well, the State should come in, but when things are going well, the State should keep out. In other words, it is a policy determined by the state of trade in the country.’ Who better to tell the Tories whether ‘things’ were going well or not than Paul Chambers when he was chairman of ICI? In 1958, when ‘things’ were going well and a pre-election boom was in the offing, Sir Paul wrote a pamphlet for the Conservative Party attacking the Government’s controls over business, which, he wrote, ‘are inconsistent with a free society’. ‘There are many ways in which the spirit of enterprise can be killed’, he went on, ‘One is the continuation of controls by a Conservative Government.’ Four years later, after the Selwyn Lloyd pay pause, when ‘things’ were going badly, Sir Paul told a lunch for the American Chamber of Commerce that legislation against concentration of economic power was out of date.

What was needed, he said, was ‘industrial planning to eliminate surplus capacity.’ This class pragmatism determined the Conservatives’ approach to their greatest permanent problem: organised labour. Here is Iain Macleod, then Minister of Labour, speaking to Tory backwoodsmen at the 1956 Party Conference who were demanding a compulsory ballot before a national strike: ‘The idea, of course, is that the workers are less militant than the leaders. All I can tell you, speaking quite frankly, is that this is not my experience, nor is it the experience of any Minister of Labour.’ Macleod’s policy, and Monkton’s, was to co-operate with trade union leaders, to coax them into the corridors of power in exchange for worker apathy. The policy served the Tories well until 1964, and drew from TUC General Secretary Woodcock the famous remark that his movement had left Trafalgar Square for the committee rooms. But the policy, like the corporatist approach to industry, did not and could not provide a solution to the problems of capitalism. It did not create the post-war boom; it served only to carve for British capitalism the best possible proceeds from it. As the boom inevitably faded, neither neo-Liberalism nor corporatism could extract the ruling class from the chaos of their international system, nor from the struggle with the workers in which they were permanently and inevitably engaged. The bulk of Nigel Harris’ book deals with the postwar period from 1945 to 1964, and only once, briefly, does he hazard the guess that ‘the British establishment is girding its loins for war’, and that the Industrial Relations Act ‘proclaimed its ... return to open class warfare in order to secure the survival of British business’. That is probably right. For the moment, at any rate, the workers are back in Trafalgar Square. But no one should underestimate the ability of the British ruling class, perhaps with the help of Labour leaders rather than Tory ones, to shy away from drastic confrontation whenever the remotest possibility presents itself. Throughout these 288 pages of text (and another hundred of notes and references) Nigel Harris has stuck firmly (sometimes rather grimly) to exposing the myth that there is ideal, principle or consistency in the history of the British Conservative Party. In his final chapter, which has the same name as the book, and in which the slightly cramped style of earlier chapters seems to lift, he ridicules Tory ‘justifications’ of a class society as savagely as he chides social democrat leaders for assuming that the new corporatism has been brought around by the pressure of their workers’ armies. The central thesis, overlapping through all the chapters, is remorselessly proven. What is missing from the book is the stench of property. A neutral reader could conceivably find himself sympathising with the bumbling Tory corporatists as they try to stave off the demands of their ‘principled’ madmen and ‘keep society going’. The lunacy and savagery of the class system is implicit not explicit in Nigel Harris’ book. The enemy’s cynicism, his demagoguery and his ability to shift his principles are there for all to see. But there is no call to arms to rout him. Top of the page Last updated on 20.3.2008

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Harold Wilson and the Labour Left (Summer 1968) FFrom International Socialism (1st series), No. 33, Summer 1968, pp.&nbsdp;18–26. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Bevanite fury at the Rightward drift of official Party policy after the 1955 election did not last. The Suez crisis of late 1956 and the economic recession which followed exposed the fallibility of Tory economic policy and forged the Labour Party into a new unity. Even Aneurin Bevan agreed to co-operate with a leadership with which he fundamentally disagreed. Bevan’s public disavowal of the ‘unilateralists’ at the Brighton Conference of 1957 and his acceptance of the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary encouraged his followers grudgingly to fall into line with Party policy for the 1959 election. At the Scarborough Conference of 1958, controversy was sacrificed to unity. Only the public schools provoked a genuine revolt against the leadership. ‘Unilateralist’ motions on defence were defeated by votes of 6 to 1 and the Executive statement on economic policy, Plan for Progress, moved by Wilson, summed up by Gaitskell and supported by Frank Cousins was carried unanimously. It was only after the election had been lost that the Left wing re-grouped and fought again. By now, Aneurin Bevan was dying and it was by no means certain who should take his place as the Left’s candidate for the Party leadership. Harold Wilson was still an enigma. His association with Bevan in the early 1950s had not been forgotten and most of the Left-wing still regarded him as their man in the Shadow Cabinet. Others remembered his sponsorship of Industry and Society and his tacit support for the Executive on nuclear weapons. In 1958, Wilson came fourth in the elections for the constituency section of the Executive – the lowest place he had occupied since 1955. His decision to stand against Gaitskell for the leadership in 1960, and against Brown for the deputy leadership in 1962 rallied the Left to him. He received the declared support of all Parliamentary Left-wingers and from Tribune, around which the Parliamentary Left rallied. Other journals of the Labour Left, however, were not so enthusiastic. The New Left Review, for instance, whose circulation had risen sharply with the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament attacked him sharply: ‘If the Labour Party ends this week facing two directions’ it declared before the 1960 Party Conference, ‘it is certain that the figure of Mr Wilson will be there – at the end of both of them.’ On Gaitskell’s death in 1963, the Left rallied without hesitation to Wilson’s candidature for the leadership. After his election as leader, they abandoned their accustomed role as critics of the leadership, and became instead its most enthusiastic supporters. Michael Foot, who, with four other MPs, had had the Labour Whip withdrawn for opposing the Tory defence estimates in 1961, wrote a long article on Tribune’s front page, listing Wilson’s qualifications for the job: ‘... (He has) not only qualities of political acumen, political skill and survival power which no one denies him. Other considerable qualities too for a Labour leader – a coherence of ideas, a readiness to follow unorthodox courses, a respect for democracy ... above all a deep and genuine love of the Labour movement. ‘We are told he is tricky, untrustworthy, an addict of political in-fighting. Of course he is canny, ambitious, often cautious, always cool, usually calculating. And why not? They say that he does not make up his mind, that he sits on the fence. It was not true when he resigned in 1951. It was not true when he opposed German re-armament.’ [1] Walter Padley, the ‘centre-Left’ general secretary of the shopworkers’ union (USDAW), and MP for Glamorganshire, Ogmore, told his union conference: ‘In Harold Wilson we have a leader fully worthy of the tradition of Clem Attlee and Keir Hardie.’ This sentiment commended itself to Frank Allaun, a hardy warrior of the Left, who wrote an article for the Labour Press Service which was circulated to all trade-union journals. ‘Harold Wilson,’ the article started in what was intended to be a compliment, ‘is the best Labour leader since Keir Hardie.’ Shortly before the Scarborough Conference of 1963, Frank Cousins called a Press Conference to assure the nation that any suggestion of a quarrel between himself and Wilson was totally unfounded. ‘There is’ he said ‘no difference, nor can anyone manufacture a difference between us.’ The New Statesman, which had assaulted Gaitskell in the most decisive language during the 1960 controversies, stated in their leader of 10 March 1964: ‘Mr Wilson has set his party a fine example. Like Gladstone he believes in appealing to the highest instincts of the public, and his speeches have a cogency and authority unrivalled in recent years.’ Even James Cameron, the idealist journalist, who had bitterly opposed the Gaitskell leadership, exclaimed in the Daily Herald after Wilson’s speech at the 1963 Scarborough Conference: ‘Harold Wilson will not be just a good Prime Minister. He will be a great one... Harold Wilson’s startling essay into political science-fiction may well be held by experts to be the most vital speech he has ever made. Here at least was the 20th century.’ [2] In the following months Tribune confined itself to praising Wilson and publishing his speeches. Anxiously it assured its readers that despite outward appearances, Wilson’s intentions were all for the good: ‘Mr Harold Wilson’s remarks to the T&GWU conference have been widely misinterpreted.

Anxiously it assured its readers that despite outward appearances, Wilson’s intentions were all for the good: ‘Mr Harold Wilson’s remarks to the T&GWU conference have been widely misinterpreted. He did not, as the Daily Worker headline suggested, advocate a wage freeze. “When we say incomes” he said “we mean all incomes – not only wages and salaries but profits, especially monopoly profits, distributed dividends and, yes, rents.”’ [3] And Mr Clive Jenkins, militant general secretary of ASSET, wrote after the 1963 Trades Union Congress: ‘Mr Harold Wilson is opposed to wage restraint.’ After the 1963 Labour Conference, Jenkins complained ‘A circumstantial story that a Wilson Cabinet will hold back wages for the first 18 months of his Government is, incredibly, being peddled. It is a lie. The Scarborough decision is a real gain over the re-drafted paragraph on wages finally approved by the TUC.’ [4] Jenkins’ support increased during 1964. On Wilson’s speech to the TUC in Blackpool the following year, he wrote: ‘Harold Wilson’s well-keyed and emphatic speech on Monday was brilliantly expressive of the taut, yet flexible pregnant relationship between the unions and the Labour Party.’ [5] And, after Labour’s election, ‘Everything in the Queen’s speech is first-rate and demands, firstly, our support and our appreciation of the firm leadership being shown. The task of transforming our country has been very well begun indeed.’ [6] Plaudits for Harold Wilson in Tribune throughout those months can be found even from such devoted militants as Ian Mikardo and Fenner Brockway. In the nineteen months of Wilson’s Leadership of the Opposition, Tribune devoted only a few random sentences to criticism of Harold Wilson or his policies. When, for instance, Wilson called for more helicopters to assist the British troops fighting against nationalists in South Arabia and Aden, Tribune complained: ‘Hasty statements like Mr Wilson’s this week will not help.’ The compliments heaped on Harold Wilson by the Labour Left were not always returned. During the election campaign for the Labour leadership after Gaitskell’s death, the editor of Tribune, Richard Clements, decided to publish Commons speeches on defence policy by the two principal contenders, Harold Wilson and George Brown, to demonstrate the differences between them. Accordingly, Clements sent them both proofs of the edited versions of their speeches, and telephoned them to check that the editing met with their approval. Brown agreed instantly, as did Harold Wilson who was full of praise for the standard of the editing. As Clements was about to hang up, Wilson asked urgently, ‘You’re not supporting me, are you, by any chance?’ Not at all, replied Clements. The speeches would be published without editorial comment. In some relief, and with further effusive praise and thanks, the conversation ended. By the time Wilson became Prime Minister in October 1964 he had contrived to unite the Labour Party and its affiliates as it had never been united since 1945. Even before the 1945 and 1929 elections a substantial minority of critics continued to attack central aspects of official Labour Party policy, and the Labour leaders. Before the 1964 election the silence of the consensus was broken only by the thin wails of ‘satirists and sectarians.’ In normal circumstances such unanimous approval and praise from the Left would almost certainly provoke an opposite reaction from the Right. Yet during the same period the Labour Right was equally uncritical. This was not merely because an election approached and most of the Right-wing leaders were guaranteed a place in a Labour Cabinet. It was also because in the twenty months of Tory Government following Gaitskell’s death, Labour Party policy did not change in detail or in emphasis. The few policy changes which did take place, notably over immigration, Cyprus and Aden were clear moves to the Right. The Right-wing leaders may have disliked Wilson and distrusted him. But they could hardly forbear to support him when he contrived to unite the Party behind a policy which was slightly to the Right of that approved by Hugh Gaitskell. The Left, in the meantime, concocted a myth which was to sustain them for several years: ‘By the early 1960s the Labour Party had decided that revisionism was not on the agenda and the slow struggle back to power began. Under a new leadership and with a programme which made a clear challenge to the “You’ve never had it so good” society which had been created by the Tories, the party won the election of 1964.’ [7] In fact, of course, revisionism had in no sense, and not for a single moment, left the agenda. Gaitskell’s policy on the Bomb had triumphed and the parry’s policy on economic affairs was still based on the ultra-revisionist Industry and Society. In more ways than one the policy of the Party, as opposed to the electoral rhetoric of its leaders, had swung, if anything, Rightwards since 1959. The magical transformation in Party policy which accompanied the election of Harold Wilson to the leadership took place only in the minds of the Labour Left. The enthusiasm for this mythical revolution swept the Labour ranks even further Left than Tribune. Mr Tom Nairn, a prominent writer in the New Left Review wrote in the symposium Towards Socialism, written before the Labour victory of 1964, but coming out shortly after it: ‘There is no doubt that, relatively, with regard to the past annals of the Labour leadership, Wilson represents a kind of progress. Wilson constantly professes the habitual Labour contempt for theory – “theology” as he calls it – but has far more theoretical grasp than any previous leader. Unlike so many former Left-wing figures who have moved towards power, he has never actually renounced or broken with his past: he is likely to be much more open to Left-wing ideas and pressures than his predecessors. In contrast to Gaitskell and Attlee, Wilson seems singularly free from the bigoted anti-Communism which has been a surrogate for thought and action in many social-democratic movements.’ The almost unanimous inclination of the Labour Left to turn their attention from the written policy to abstract rhetoric about ‘commanding heights’ and ‘nationalisation of urban land’ enabled Harold Wilson during his twenty months as leader of the Opposition to fulfil his promise of remaining loyal to the policy of Hugh Gaitskell while at the same time convincing Gaitskell’s enemies that Gaitskellite revisionism ‘was not on the agenda.’ His ambition, as expressed to John Junor, to hold high the banner of nationalisation while leading the Labour Party away from it had been fulfilled.

This achievement was sustained in the immediate afterglow of the 1964 election victory. Only a few Labour MPs complained about the delay of six months in paying the proposed pensions increase, and even fewer objected to the decision to send Buccaneer aircraft to South Africa. Throughout November, Tribune re-published Harold Wilson’s main speeches, explaining that the differences between the paper and the leader were ‘of emphasis rather than of principle.’ [8] The paper’s clerical correspondent, Dr Donald Soper, who was shortly to receive a peerage from the Prime Minister, declared his New Year’s resolution on 1 January 1965: ‘to support the Government more fervently.’ And when George Brown had enticed the leaders of the trade unions and of industry to sign a declaration of intent to formulate an incomes policy, he received uncritical support from Tribune’s two economic correspondents from Sheffield, Mr Michael Barratt Brown and Mr Royden Harrison, who were not ashamed to cloak Mr Brown and his advisers in the mantle of Marxist orthodoxy: ‘The scene,’ they wrote, ‘is once again set for a decisive victory for the political economy of Labour.’ [9] Summarising Labour’s first hundred days, Tribune’s editor concluded: ‘It would be grossly unfair to turn upon the Government now and rend it.’ Any minor errors, he was sure, would soon be put right. After all, ‘Given the spirit which Harold Wilson has most notably displayed on many previous occasions, there is no reason why the Government could not and cannot recover all the ground lost in the past weeks, and capture much more territory in the months ahead.’ [10] And so it seemed, for a few months at any rate. The publication of ‘Dick Crossman’s brilliant housing Bill,’ the ‘welcome Race Relations Bill,’ the plans for steel nationalisation, the Budget, and the long Commons battle with Tory stockbrokers, all put heart into the Labour Left. Tribune proudly published interviews with leading Ministers, notably one with Anthony Greenwood, the new Colonial Secretary, who astonished the paper’s readers in British Guiana by his enthusiasm for the Duncan Sandys’ Guianese Constitution (described by Harold Wilson at the time of its publication as ‘fiddled’) and his description of the Guianese Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, as ‘a socialist.’ More important matters, however, soon arose to ruffle the solidarity of the Labour Left. First was the Government’s immediate and unequivocal support for the Americans in their war in Vietnam, particularly their support for the American bombing of North Vietnam, which started in February. Second was the Immigration White Paper in August. Third was the series of nibbling deflations, culminating in the big £100m bite at the end of July. Fourth was the Government’s decision, in the light of the abstention of Desmond Donnelly and Woodrow Wyatt in the House of Commons, to shelve the nationalisation of steel. And fifth, perhaps worst of all, was the National Plan, published in September. All these, in one form or another, were attacked by the Labour Left, though none of these attacks took the form of Parliamentary votes or abstentions. The National Plan particularly irritated those who had hoped for a genuine economic programme based on social justice, welfare and equality. The Plan, complained Tribune, ‘is a non-plan with its priorities badly wrong. George Brown should go away and think again.’ As for deflation, the Left’s alternatives did not (yet) include devaluation. John Mendelson, Left wing MP for Penistone argued both in Parliament and outside for import controls and overseas investment checks. On the issue of the incomes policy, the Left was split. Clive Jenkins, who had argued so furiously a year earlier that Harold Wilson was opposed to wage restraint, found that George Brown’s plan for an Incomes Bill was ‘fundamentally authoritarian and anti-trade union. It should be spurned as a hobble for free men – a device which perpetuates inequality in British society.’ [11] The academics of the Left, however, still believed that the Government would produce a ‘socialist incomes policy.’ The extent of the Left’s reaction to these measures differed sharply. Some were so shocked and horrified that they cried halt to all support for Labour. Malcolm Caldwell, a dedicated Labour campaigner, voiced the most extreme disillusionment in a letter to Tribune on 20 August: ‘Socialist principles have been tossed aside with almost indecent cynicism and casualness. Racial discrimination in Britain has been condoned and strengthened. American butchery in Vietnam has been actively supported and encouraged. Social welfare and economic development in Britain have been sacrificed to carry out a reactionary economic programme at the behest of international finance capital. What of the Left leaders in Parliament? Tell them off on your fingers, comrades, and think of their words and deeds in recent months while the Labour movement has been sold down the river. It is a sad picture and I can personally neither see nor offer any excuses. Are we finished, we of the Labour Left?’ And, the following month, Alan Dawe, Tribune’s education correspondent, announced his resignation from the Labour Party: ‘We are not right,’ he wrote ‘to view the Labour Party and its latter day works as having anything to do with socialism. They don’t, they won’t and it is time we faced up to it.’ [12] Such voices were, at the time, isolated heralds of the massive disillusionment that was to follow. The editor of Tribune received a great many more letters complaining about his attacks on the Labour Government and was forced to write an editorial explaining the need for dissent. And, even in that unhappy summer, the Left-wing Labour MPs could take solace in the wizardry of their leader: ‘He (Wilson) commands more widespread support within the Parliamentary Labour Party and in the country than any other leader the Labour Party has had. He fights the Tories and enjoys it ... The atmosphere (at the PLP meeting at the end of the summer Parliamentary session) was euphoric. Miraculously the gloom was banished ... Everything in the garden seemed to be looking, well, if not exactly lovely, at least a good deal greener than when Callaghan was wielding his axe six days before.’ [13] As the economic crisis was temporarily dispelled, and, as Parliament met again in the autumn, the atmosphere of euphoria drugged the Labour Left.

The total disarray of the Tories, under a new and indecisive leader; Harold Wilson’s two vast speeches at Party Conference and his apparently tough line on Rhodesia; the promotion of Barbara Castle and Anthony Greenwood; and a number of important welfare reforms, notably rating relief and local authority interest rate subsidy, combined to convince the Left that the Government was on the right road. When Richard Gott decided to stand as Radical Alliance candidate in the by-election in North Hull, he was severely rebuked by the Labour Left. ‘Do not destroy the Government!’ bellowed Tribune: ‘Every socialist has the right to criticise the design and performance of the Labour automobile – so long as he also helps to put some petrol in the tank.’ [14] Two months later, with the decision to hold another General Election, all criticism was thrown to the winds in a stampede to get as much petrol into the tank as possible. Even Clive Jenkins’ carping about the Incomes Policy was stayed. For the new Labour Manifesto, Time for Decision, Tribune had nothing but praise: ‘The Labour manifesto is not only an interesting and stimulating document. It is also, in essence, a socialist one. The answers are inescapably egalitarian. There is some self-congratulation, but is it not justified?’ [15] As election day approached the enthusiasm became feverish: ‘March 31st,’ wrote Michael Foot, ‘will mark one of the essential dates in the forward march. It is an opportunity which only incorrigible sectarians and nihilists, the best allies of the forces of reaction, will not wish to seize.’ [16] It is hard even for an incorrigible sectarian to read Tribune before and after the March 1966 General Election without a lump rising in his throat. On the day of the election, Tribune brought out a special front and back page which shouted in savage exultation at the impending destruction of the Left’s enemies: ‘... Who doesn’t want a landslide? We see you, Desmond Donnelly, with your Spectator pals – well, here it comes and you’ll be buried in steel ... ‘Pensions up, Rent Act Security, Unemployment Down, Prescription Charges off, who cares! We do ... and so do millions ... now, for bigger advances, VOTE LABOUR!’ It was the triumphant, almost incredulous shout of thousands of men and women in the Labour movement who had worked all their lives without compensation for the return of a Labour Government in prosperous peacetime. The quarrels, the arguments, the strikes and lock-outs, the bitter theoretical wrangles of the last thirteen years had been smoothed over and bypassed with the injunction: ‘Get the Tories Out.’ In the past 17 months of miniscule majorities, the injunction had been reiterated even more earnestly. For the 50,000 or so readers of Tribune, the hard core of Labour’s rank and file, a Parliamentary majority for Labour was the first solution and did promise a more libertarian, more egalitarian society. No wonder in the hour of victory, that Tribune bellowed: ‘SOCIALISM IS RIGHT BACK ON THE AGENDA,’ and that their columnist Francis Flavius could argue that the election results marked ‘a significant watershed in British politics.’ [17] The Labour Left and Tribune took the 1966 election result more seriously than anyone else in the land. The Press, who had whipped up a violent campaign against Labour in 1964, the industrialists, (even the steel masters who knew that a big majority would bring steel nationalisation) were silent. The flow of big money into Tory Party funds, even from the steel masters all but dried up. Political commentators reported ‘a boring election’ and predicted ‘no change.’ And, in the event, nothing changed. The course of British politics was not altered in the slightest degree by Labour’s landslide victory of 1966. After a brief moment of euphoria, Harold Wilson and his henchmen continued their propaganda about restrictive practises on both sides of industry, their paranoiac defence of the pound sterling and their attacks on the trade unions. Once the axe started to fall, it fell quickly. In May, the seamen went on strike to be met with fierce resistance, smears and abuse from the Labour Government. In early July, Frank Cousins, hero of the Labour Left, resigned from the Government over the publication of the Prices and Incomes Bill. In mid-July another sterling crisis pushed the Labour Government into a wage freeze and the most ruthless deflationary measures since the war. The Left reacted to all this in shocked astonishment. ‘There has been,’ complained Tribune in June, ‘no glimmer of a changed strategy, no enlarged vision since the General Election of March 1966.’ John Morgan, a devoted socialist with a strong Left-wing bias, greeted the July measures with a melancholy cry which must have touched the hearts of the Labour Left throughout the land: ‘It isn’t just emotion that moves the socialist to rage and sadness now – not that there would be anything wrong with emotion. Dismay springs from the knowledge that a good, coherent programme for modernisation existed, even exists, which has been abandoned without even being tried. When Harold Wilson began speaking on the stage of the Brangwen Hall, Swansea, on the afternoon of 25 January 1964, he was not only establishing himself as a national leader, he was winning the people to sensible ideas. It was an important moment in British politics ... The speech became the basis of the National Plan. It demonstrated how the recurring difficulties of the balance of payments could be defeated, how increased production could be the basis of a new society.’ [18] John Morgan represented the Labour Party members who had been won over to what he called ‘that series of great speeches in the early months of 1964.’ The dreary semi-Keynesian technocracy of Harold Wilson had inspired men like John Morgan just as John Kennedy’s preposterous New Frontier had inspired the soft American Left four years previously. Now with the Government’s collapse into Conservative remedies and Conservative reactions the Labour Left was utterly disillusioned without anything to offer as an half credible alternative.

Now with the Government’s collapse into Conservative remedies and Conservative reactions the Labour Left was utterly disillusioned without anything to offer as an half credible alternative. In his Sunday Times article, in fact, John Morgan argued that the pound should have been devalued in 1964. Along with many others on the Left and Right who argued along the same lines, Morgan had advanced no such argument hi 1964. Tribune opposed devaluation in 1964, 1965 and in July 1966; only in 1967 did the majority of the paper’s economic correspondents support a floating rate for the pound. And even then the Labour Left argued, quite dishonestly, that devaluation need not involve deflation. [19] The July measures of 1966 forced the hard core Labour Left into almost permanent opposition to their Government. The Prices and Incomes Act (on which some 30 Labour MPs abstained in August and October), the Vietnam war, the Common Market (for entry to which the Government applied in November), rising unemployment and a continuing squeeze on the social services all provoked more and more protest. Fortunately for the Left-wing MPs, the policy of the Whips, laid down by Richard Grossman and John Silkin, was to run the Parliamentary party on a light reign, and abstentions were permitted against angry protests from the more ‘loyalist’ backbenchers and from the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Emmanuel Shinwell, who eventually resigned. All the Left assumed that Harold Wilson strongly approved this ‘liberal’ policy. In May 1966, for instance, Hugh Jenkins, the MP for Putney, had argued: ‘Years of hostility and repression have bred in the old Parliamentarians (who are still the most courageous and resolute of the lot of us) conspiratorial habits which are no longer necessary under the tolerant regime of Harold Wilson.’ [20] Yet in March 1967, after 60 MPs had abstained after the defence debate, in protest against the refusal to make further defence cuts, Wilson rounded on the Left at a Parliamentary Party meeting, warning them that ‘a dog is only allowed one bite’ and threatening them with a General Election unless they came to heel. Though the discipline issue faded for several months after this outburst, it arose even more seriously in early 1968 as the hard core of the Parliamentary Left voted against every one of the Government proposals for cuts in social services announced in January, and against the Immigration Act, 1968. Once again, the Parliamentary Party, with Wilson’s approval, turned the discipline screw. Yet throughout the entire period of disillusionment and near-despair, there was one threat which never failed to ensure the loyalty of the Labour Left: a threat to the personal leadership of Harold Wilson. In the aftermath of the 1966 July deflation, a rumour gained ground in Labour circles, which was substantially true, that a meeting of back-benchers and some Ministers had been held to discuss the possibility and the means of replacing Harold Wilson with James Callaghan. As soon as Tribune caught hold of this rumour, it exploded with rage. Similarly, after the 1967 devaluation, during the controversy on arms for South Africa, when a bid was made to replace Wilson with Callaghan, the Left rallied to Wilson. Three months later, when further moves were made to promote Roy Jenkins or Anthony Crosland to the Treasury, a group of 91 MPs wrote a letter to The Times. The letter was headed ‘Comfort for Mr Wilson’ and it took issue with The Times political correspondent, David Wood, who had reported the previous day that ‘his (Wilson’s) own rank and file have no confidence in him.’ ‘We do not know,’ ran the letter, ‘how Mr Wood came to this conclusion, but it certainly was not in speaking to any of the undersigned, proof enough that his sweeping generalisation has no basis in fact.’ [21] The signatures had, reported the letter, been ‘gathered in a very short time,’ and they included familiar loyalists and former ‘young eagles.’ Yet they also included such bastions of the Parliamentary Labour Left as Russell Kerr, John Mendel-son, James Dickens, Eric Heffer, Peter Jackson, Norman Atkinson, Michael Foot, Andrew Faulds, and Ben Whitaker. The official argument for the letter was that the Left’s quarrel with the Government was about policies, not personalities, and that any attempt to introduce personalities into the argument should be immediately scotched. The Left however had not scrupled in the past to attack personalities responsible for reactionary policies, and to call for their removal if only as a gesture of disapproval of those policies. In 1959 and 1960, Tribune and its followers had consistently attacked Gaitskell and had called again and again for his removal from the leadership. Again, on 6 January 1967 Tribune had demanded, in a front page headline: ‘CALLAGHAN MUST GO!’ and had claimed that although the removal of the Chancellor would not of itself right the wrongs of his policies, it was necessary as an indication that policy changes were intended. The obsession of political correspondents with personalities is infuriating for all politicians who seek to discuss the policy issues. Yet the MPs’ letters to The Times of 12 March 1968, did not diminish the personality aspect; it increased it. If the Left-wing MPs who signed the letter had genuinely not cared about personalities, they would have written to The Times not to declare their confidence in their leader but to disavow all interest in the leadership issue. The truth was, as it had been for several years, that, deep down, the Labour Left felt that Harold Wilson was ‘one of them.’ This myth had outlived the apparently endless list of anti-socialist measures enacted by Harold Wilson’s administration. Old ghosts still jibbered in the theoretical graveyard. ‘Gaitskellism,’ wrote Michael Foot in March 1967, ‘like Stalinism, cannot easily be restored.’ Yet what, in the reality of March 1967, did Gaitskellism mean?

What further horrors could it wreak? Would Gaitskell, perhaps, have introduced a wage freeze for a year or permanently brought wage negotiations under the control of the law courts? Would he have imposed prescription charges, postponed raising the school leaving age, cancelled free school milk in secondary schools? Would he have based his industrial policy on mergers and monopolies supported by Government finance and Government orders? Would he have supported the Vietnam war? No doubt, Gaitskell would have pursued all these courses, as would Callaghan, Jenkins or Crosland. But Wilson had done all these things – and more. Where was the evidence – save only in the quarrel on South African arms – that ‘the Gaitskellites’ would have proved better Tories than Harold Wilson? Essentially, their policies would have been the same. The direction of the Labour Government, under Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Jenkins or Crosland or any of the other alternatives would have been equally disastrous. The leadership issue, in short, compared with the political issues in which the Government was involved was almost if not completely irrelevant. The tenacious hold which Harold Wilson exercised on his former friends and supporters in the Left had a deeper, more political root than the fear of a mythical Gaitskellism. The reaction of Tribune and the Parliamentary Left to Wilson’s Government was based throughout on the political theory of another era. Where the Government took action which offended against the old traditions and the old theory of the Labour Left, the Left responded immediately and courageously with clear and untrammeled opposition. The reaction to the seaman’s strike of 1966 in Tribune was unconditional ‘SUPPORT THE SEAMEN!’ When unemployment was created, the Government was sharply censured. When the health charges were reimposed, Tribune shouted ‘THE SHAME OF IT ALL!’ Certainly no one could blame the Labour Left for a lack of resolution, courage and determination in their efforts to swing the Government away from these old evils. Yet at the same time, the Wilson Government was pursuing policies of a more subtle and sinister nature which seem to have escaped the attention and the criticism of the Labour Left. These policies can be listed under the heading of Corporatism. The encouragement of vast mergers and monopolies under the aegis of the Government-financed Industrial Reorganisation Corporation; the complex planning machinery of the little Neddies and of the geographic planning councils; the incorporation of the trade-union leadership into the network of planning on the bogus pretext of ‘Incomes Policy;’ the interference of the State with almost every major wage dispute through the Prices and Incomes Board – these new, drastically dangerous corporatist developments were not identified by the Labour Left – and therefore not opposed. When Alan Dawe had resigned from the Labour Party in 1965 he had complained in Tribune about that paper’s obsession with State ownership and State control: ‘There is nothing socialist about the commanding heights now. For this Government is trying to create a power elite, more cohesive and omnipotent than any we have seen in recent British history ... this is the ultimate significance of the attempt to forge a consensus of opinion and action between the leaders of Government, industry and the unions ...’ Yet the Left around Tribune overlooked this problem. They rejoiced when, in the autumn of 1967, the Queen’s Speech included references to an Industrial Expansion Bill, whereby the State would take minority shareholdings in crucial industries and appoint minority directors to the Boards .The measure was marginally less drastic than the proposals in Industry and Society which the Left had so violently opposed ten years previously. Nevertheless, at the suggestion that the Industrial Expansion Bill should be dropped or postponed, Tribune frothed with fury. Harold Wilson’s knowledge of ‘public ownership’ rhetoric, gleaned with such care during his period as a Bevanite, served him in good stead as Prime Minister, and continued to bamboozle many of his former Left-wing colleagues into the belief that the vast, undemocratic corporatist machinery which he was setting up was in some sense a move towards socialism. In fact, of course, the ‘planning’ of Selwyn Lloyd and Maudling was taken over and speeded up by Harold Wilson – even to the extent of nationalising the steel industry and appointing the steel bosses to run a new, dynamic, streamlined single unit called the National Steel Corporation. The Government’s decision to include provisions in the steel legislation for the election of trade unionists and rank-and-file workers to the local steel boards was hailed by the Labour Left as a victory. [22] In fact, it was nothing of the kind. As became clear at once, the ‘concession’ served merely to incorporate some of the more politically conscious workers into the labyrinthine apparatus of the Corporation machine. The steel corporation rapidly became the most transparently corporatist, or State capitalist industrial unit in the country. The grand illusions which, both before and after 1964, rallied the Labour Left to the Wilsonian recipes of State ownership and automation were not entirely due to the skill of the illusionist. Rhetorical sleight-of-hand, however brilliant, could never of its own have brought about so great a conversion. The truth was that Harold Wilson’s pragmatism burst on the Labour movement at a moment of theoretical impasse. The violent changes in capitalism, in the relationship between the State and private industry, had thrown the Labour Movement into theoretical disarray. The Labour Right had responded by abandoning ‘the means’ of public ownership and fixing their sights on a more humane capitalism, prodded and pushed by a Labour Government. The Left, in fury, responded by re-stating ‘the end’ – socialism – while becoming increasingly vague as to what it meant, and increasingly unable, therefore, to propose any comprehensible means. The argument, symbolised by two 1960 Fabian pamphlets, Socialism in the Affluent Society, by Richard Crossman, and Can Labour Win?

The argument, symbolised by two 1960 Fabian pamphlets, Socialism in the Affluent Society, by Richard Crossman, and Can Labour Win? by Anthony Crosland, dragged on for several years, with both sides hopelessly missing the mark. In the event, both sides were exhausted by irrelevance, and Harold Wilson’s ‘dynamic,’ essentially capitalist terminology filled the vacuum. [23] The new corporatism which Wilson had consistently proclaimed for so many years led to a development which was even more significant for the Labour Left: a decline in the power and importance of Parliament. Classical capitalism of the Adam Smith variety, with its warring factions and devotion to competition between individual firms, allowed considerable scope for debate, discussion and even power in Parliament. Similarly in the early days of universal suffrage, and, particularly in the post-1945 era when private, pre-war capitalism was in jeopardy, the power of Parliament was, relatively, considerable. With the closing of the capitalist ranks in national, corporate monopoly, and, more importantly, with the increasing power and confidence of the monopolies, the power of Parliament declined. The big decisions left to Government became increasingly secret, increasingly the preserve of the Executive which did not always mean the Cabinet. The big decisions were taken by Cabinet committees, sometimes even by individuals, and, even then, many of these decisions depended on expert advice from the men who wielded economic power. The decision to devalue the pound in 1949 was taken by four or five men, and the Cabinet were not told until six weeks after the decision had been taken. The choice open to Cabinet members at that stage was to accept a fait accompli or to resign. Similarly, in 1967, the devaluation decision was taken several weeks before the Cabinet knew anything about it. In 1965, the National Plan, which was intended to shape the nation’s economic future for five years, was released in the Parliamentary recess, without recourse to Parliament or even to the Parliamentary Labour Party (still less to the Labour Conference). These were all decisions which were still formally the province of Parliament. In the meantime, the big decisions in the nation’s economic and industrial life moved away even from the Executive. The almost laughable antics of the Monopolies Commission indicated, if proof were needed, the full extent of the impotence of Parliament over the nation’s industrial affairs. The more the mergers, the bigger the monopolies, the greater the power of industrial and economic bureaucracies. The absorption of trade-union leaders and the official trade-union machinery into these bureaucracies shifted the centres of resistance into small pockets of revolt: into isolated unofficial strikes, tenants’ committees, students’ demonstrations. Even inside the Party, however, the real shift to the Left was to be seen not in Parliament but in the trade unions. The election of Hugh Scanlon as President of the AEU in 1967, the growth in membership and militancy of the small white-collar unions, notably the Draughtsmen and Allied Technicians’ Union and the Association of Scientific and Managerial Staffs, indicated a sharp shift away from the Labour establishment in the area in which thereto it had been most firmly entrenched; the trade-union leadership. In the meantime the Parliamentary Left and Tribune seemed to focus even more closely and intently on traditional, Parliamentary forms of political activity. There was no attempt to reform the Victory for Socialism Group or the Appeal for Unity which had been formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in an effort (which was not very successful) to organise the rank and file for a campaign against the Labour Right. In 1967, an effort was made to re-start the Tribune Brains Trusts of the early 1950s. By April 1968, about twenty of these Brains Trusts had been held, their success depending on the strength and militancy of the sponsoring constituency parties. The Left-wing MPs were forced by the logic of their position, to concentrate on Parliamentary tactics. In August 1966, John Horner, Left-wing MP for Oldbury and Halesowen, wrote an article in Tribune attacking the new wage freeze and incomes policy and calling for rejection of the policy at the forthcoming Trades Union Congress. When Francis Flavius, Tribune’s columnist referred the following week to Horner’s ‘campaign,’ John Horner replied with some urgency: ‘I should hate Francis Flavius to give anyone the idea that I am now calling for mass action from the trade union movement against it (the incomes policy).’ [24] Moreover, as Ralph Miliband has shown in his comprehensive analysis, Parliamentary Socialism, the Parliamentary road to socialism is fraught with dangers – not least the danger of personal absorption into the machinery of Government. From the very beginning of the Labour Government in 1964 the Left was split between on the one hand the resolute older Parliamentarians and the new trade-union MPs who were prepared to fight decisions with which they disagreed through the established Parliamentary machinery, and on the other, a group of younger men who hoped, in some unspecific way, to find ‘new ways’ of proclaiming their opposition. One idea was to establish a ‘Parliamentary Forum,’ a permanent debating chamber at which the Left could thrash out a new strategy and a new theory. [25] Allegations were made by these younger men of ‘pussyfooting’ – a disparaging reference to Mr Michael Foot and the older Parliamentarians. Harold Wilson, who had so much experience of such splits and divisions, watched with considerable interest, and, as soon as an able young Left MP fell out with his colleagues, he was duly swept into the Government. As early as 19 February 1965 a group of young back-benchers joined with two Labour veterans, Philip Noel-Baker and Arthur Henderson in writing a letter to The Times urging the Government ‘to take an immediate initiative to achieve a cease-fire (in Vietnam) and a conference in which the principled participants can search for a political solution.’ They were Peter Shore, David Ennals, Shirley Williams and Dr Jeremy Bray.

The following August, the latter three of the four signed a letter from back-bench MPs calling on the Government to ‘scrap the immigration white paper.’ Jeremy Bray spoke at the 1965 Labour Party Conference on behalf of his union, the Transport and General Workers, whose million votes he pledged against the White Paper. The most anxious and dedicated opponent of the immigration White Paper was Reginald Freeson, MP for Willesden East, whose constituency housed one of the largest immigrant populations in the country (and who subsequently tripled his majority in the 1966 election). Another signature on the letter was that of the young barrister MP for Lincoln, Mr Dick Taverne. The immigration policy was also attacked in a brilliant and bitter speech late at night in the House of Commons by the MP for Renfrew West, Mr Norman Buchan, perhaps the ablest of all the Left-wing intake in 1964. Two years later, Shore (Minister of Economic Affairs), Bray (Technology), Mrs Williams (Education), Freeson (Power), Taverne (Home Office), Ennals (Home Office) and Buchan (Scottish Office) had been absorbed into the Government. Mr Neil Carmichael and Mr Ioan Evans who had associated themselves with the Left, notably on Vietnam and defence, had also accepted jobs in the Ministries of Transport and the Whips Office respectively. The ‘pussy-footers’ had been left to carry on the fight against their accusers. The offer of such a job places a Left-wing MP in an intolerable dilemma. In the first place, the logic of his place in Parliament tells him that he must accept a place in the Government. How, he argues, can he press for more left-wing policies from a Government, and then refuse to join the Government when offered a place in it? Moreover, particularly in offices like the Scottish Office and the Ministry of Transport the political complexion of an Under Secretary can make a difference to a host of administrative decisions. As against that, the Minister is silenced on the broad issues. He has no voice in the Government, which never meets. And, whenever necessary, he can be hauled out to vote for the Cabinet’s policy. The spectacle, for instance, of Norman Buchan and Reginald Freeson failing to oppose the frankly racialist Immigration Act of 1968 was as nauseating for their supporters as it must have been galling for themselves. Yet only once, in the case of Eric Heffer, who was offered a Government post in 1967, was the offer of such a job turned down by a Left-wing MP. Yet, in the final analysis, the central criticism of the Labour Left under Harold Wilson’s leadership does not concern their Parliamentary tactics nor the difficult decisions as to whether or not to vote against the Government, or to accept a post within it. In the 1930s Sir Stafford Cripps had posed to his followers in the Socialist League, many of whom were prominent in the Labour Left in the 1950s and 1960s, central questions about power in modern capitalist society, based on his view that the ‘idea that the wielders of economic power will co-operate with a Labour Government is quite fantastic.’ ‘Can socialism come by constitutional means?’ he had asked, and had replied in the affirmative, only on the condition that the most dramatic measures to control private economic interests were undertaken immediately by a Labour Government. The power of Parliament, argued Cripps, had to be exerted to the full against private economic and industrial interests if that power was to survive. The slightest wavering in the face of those economic interests would mean the inevitable bondage of Parliament. Had Cripps’ case been eroded by the thirty years between 1933 and 1963? Had capitalism become less powerful, more subservient to the whims of Parliament than in the 1930s? Were the great corporations of the 1960s more democratic and more easily controlled than the demoralised industries of the 1930s? Had the conflict between economic interests and socialist aims diminished, so that the powers necessary to fulfil the latter and control the former were in some sense less crucial? These questions had been raised to some extent, though in less specific and more diluted language, in the big arguments of the late 1950s. At the 1958 Labour Party Conference, for instance, Mr Trevor Park, the delegate from Darwen, later MP for South East Derbyshire, had declared: ‘I am not interested merely in a better organised society; I am not interested merely in working capitalism more efficiently than the capitalists themselves. I am interested in a society which is based upon co-operation and not upon competition ... ‘There is a fundamental conflict here. ‘The aims of those who evolve the plans – Government and the public authorities – are very different from the aims of the private capitalists who control industry. No matter how many social controls and regulations we create, there will still be attempts to evade them and discover ways and means by which the instruments of social interest can be evaded ... ‘Sooner or later we shall be brought back to this fundamental issue: are we interested only in making capitalism more efficient; are we trying to out-do the Tory Party in what is their own territory; or are we preparing for the next stage in the march forward to socialism?’ [26] Under the leadership of Harold Wilson, these questions, despite their increasing relevance, were not asked. Instead the Left concentrated on the mechanics of Parliamentary victory rather than the policies by which the ‘fundamental conflict’ between Labour’s aims and private economic interests could be resolved. The hysteria about the importance of electoral victories reached a climax at the General Election in 1966, which quickly emerged as the unhappiest paper victory in Labour history. Under the hypnosis of Wilsonian rhetoric about public ownership, peace and technology, in the vacuum created by the irrelevance of old slogans and old analyses, and in the Gadarenian Stampede to Party Unity at election time, the Labour Left forgot about or ignored the ’fundamental conflict’ and were therefore theoretically and practically unprepared for defeat in it.

Harold Wilson’s uncanny knowledge of the Labour Party and its Left wing, most of it gained from his association with the Bevanites in the early 1950s was consistently applied to obtaining the support of Left-wing MPs, though his policies only very rarely leant Leftwards. Ruthlessly he played on the Left’s most fatal weakness: its sentimentality. Wilson knows that the Labour Left responds more enthusiastically than the Right to calls for party unity at times of crisis (especially at elections), to vague phrases about public ownership and moral crusades and helping the starving millions. In the generalised sloganising of the Labour Left Harold Wilson has always been an expert, and he never scrupled to wrap it in the shroud of Aneurin Bevan. Both before and after his accession, Wilson deployed a familiar, but highly successful rhetorical technique, attaching the name of Aneurin Bevan to the most banal cliches. ‘Why, Aneurin Bevan asked, look into the crystal ball when you can read the book.’ [27] ‘We know, as Nye Bevan said, that politics are about power.’ [28] ‘Nye had a word for it, as always: why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book?’ [29] ‘If I may quote Nye again, we are not gigolos.’ [30] ‘As Nye Bevan reminded us in the last speech to the House of Commons, one of the defects of our postwar democracy has been that it has not yet proved that it can voluntarily save itself from drift, decline and disaster by imposing the necessary discipline in time.’ [31] Howard and West tell us that after the first ballot for the Labour leadership election in January 1963, in which Wilson had fallen only eight votes short of an overall majority over his two rivals, Callaghan and Brown, he repaired with his two campaign managers, Richard Crossman and George Wigg, to Crossman’s house in Vincent Square. There Wigg assured them that at least twelve of Callaghan’s votes were committed to Wilson, who had, in effect, won the election. At this, Wilson ‘raised his glass and proposed a toast to Nye Bevan’s memory.’ [32] Wilson, supported by Crossman, had taken Bevan’s place on the Shadow Cabinet in 1954, when the latter had resigned on a principle held by both of them. Wilson had actively supported Gaitskell for the Party leadership against Bevan in 1955 and 1956. Wigg had resigned from the Keep Left Group in 1951 out of loyalty to Emmanuel Shinwell and the latter’s defence budget, which Bevan opposed. Yet, in a sense, the toast was justified. For without the mantle of Nye, and the deep attachment to Bevan’s memory (and to those who had supported him in the past) among the Labour Left, Harold Wilson would never have been able to appeal to the Left as one of their own. The appeal to the sentimentality of the Left was to serve Harold Wilson even more handsomely in the future. At the 1966 Labour Party Conference, for instance, at which he tried to explain away the collapse of all his policies, Wilson turned, at the end of a long, pedantic speech to a quote from a living hero, from Lord, formerly the Rev Donald Soper, personally ennobled by the Prime Minister himself as a mark of Wilson’s respect for the ‘non-conformist conscience’ of the Labour Left. At a ‘service of dedication’ in the crypt chapel of St Stephen’s Church, Mary Undercroft, in the Palace of Westminster, Wilson recalled Soper pronouncing a prayer: ‘Oh, God, grant us a vision of our land, fair as it might be: A land of righteousness where none shall wrong his neighbour; A land of plenty where evil and poverty shall be done away; A land of brotherhood where all success shall be founded on service, and honour shall be given to excellence alone; A land of peace where order shall not rest on force, but on the love of all for the common life and weal; Bless our efforts to make the vision a living reality; Inspire and strengthen each one of us that we may give time, thought and sacrifice to speed the day of its coming.’ ‘When the time comes,’ Wilson went on, ‘I would want this Government, this Movement, to be judged by not only the British Nation, but by history, by our success or failure in turning this prayer into a reality.’ No one was sick. The Conference, whose Left-wing element had been distinctly restive throughout Wilson’s speech (one incorrigible sectarian had even been moved to heckle) was silenced. And, to a man, the delegates rose for the solemn ritual of the standing ovation. Top of the page Footnotes 1. Tribune, 22 February 1963. 2. Daily Herald, 2 October 1963. 3. Tribune, 12 June 1963. 4. Tribune, 11 October 1963. 5. Ibid., 11 September 1964. 6. Ibid., 6 November 1964. 7. Tribune editorial after the 1966 election, 8 April 1966. 8. Tribune, 20 November 1964. 9.

9. Ibid., 8 January 1965. 10. Ibid., 29 January 1965. 11. Ibid., 17 September 1965. 12. Ibid., 24 September 1965. 13. Michael Foot in Tribune, 6 August 1965. 14. 7 January 1966. 15. 11 March 1966. 16. Tribune, 25 March 1966. 17. Ibid., 8 April 1966. 18. The Sunday Times, 24 July 1966. 19. See Tribune pamphlet, Never Again, published in July 1967. 20. Tribune, 29 May 1966. 21. The Times, 12 March 1968. 22. See Ian Mikardo, The Left in 1967, Tribune, 23 December 1966 23. Needless to say, the few socialists who recognised the real situation were ‘incorrigible sectarians.’ Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, had written, in the aftermath of Wilson’s Scarborough speech, an article which was vindicated by subsequent events in every particular: ‘From Togliatti to Wilson the cry goes up across Western Europe that socialism is now State-sponsored planning plus automation. It is sad that neither Wilson nor Togliatti is a keen student of Hegel’s dialectic, for it would have been a great comfort to those who believe that opposites become one in a higher synthesis to realise that oddly enough capitalism is now State-sponsored planning plus automation. ‘To accept Wilsonism is to have moved over to the Right at least for the moment, no matter what other professions of socialism are made ...’ Labour Policy and Capitalist Planning, International Socialism, Winter 1963, pp. 5 9. 24. Tribune, 2 September 1966. 25. One Labour wag named the proposed organisation the Parliamentary Institute for Socialist Studies, PISS. 26. Labour Party Conference Report, 1958, pp. 163–4.

163–4. 27. Swansea, 25 January 1964. 28. London, Speech to Society of Labour Lawyers, 20 April 1964. 29. Labour Party Conference, Blackpool, 29 September 1965. 30. Ibid. 31. TUC, 5 September 1966. 32. Anthony Howard and Richard West, The Making of the Prime Mlnliter, Cape, 1965, p. 30. Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Woman who Built Barricades: Louise Michel and the Paris Commune (1979) From Socialist Worker, No. 2670, 9 October 2004. This is an edited version of Paul Foot’s speech in 1979 on Louise Michel and the Paris Commune. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. ONE OF the greatest dates in our history was 18 March 1871. The story starts at the heights of Montemartre, Paris, at about 3 a.m. The whole square is dominated by 250 cannon. The guns had just been used in a war between France and Germany in which Paris had been besieged for the whole winter. The war ended in what most Parisians saw as a total sell out. Immediately after the armistice was signed an election in Paris returned a hard right government. It was headed by Adolphe Thiers, described by Karl Marx as a “monstrous gnome”. Thiers’s immediate problem was Paris. Most of the people of Paris were workers, and they were angry – angry at the government, angry at the backdating of rents suspended during the siege, and angry at their working conditions. And Thiers was very worried about the cannon on Montemartre. The cannon had got to Montemartre by a very simple process – the working men, women and children of Paris had seized them and taken them there. The orders for this tricky operation had been given by the National Guard, the force of volunteers set up in Paris to fight the Prussians. The central committee of the National Guard was a genuine democracy. Government soldiers were sent to seize the cannon back, and were left guarding them. Rows broke out in the streets around Montemarte as the people gathered to defend the cannon. Then up the road to Montemartre a woman came running. Her name was Louise Michel. She was 41 years old. She was a member of a committee set up to look after the guns. While she tended a wounded man, she overheard a general say the French army was now in charge of Paris, “and the filthy, disgusting rabble that had taken his guns out of the place where they should have been were going to get taught a lesson.” Louise Michel understood what was said extremely well. She was the daughter of a serving maid. She became a teacher, but was kicked out of several schools because she insisted on teaching her way. She became very active in the radical movement in Paris, quickly becoming a prominent speaker. There was a tremendous hostility toward any woman who had independent ideas. Louise Michel had to put up with the silly sniggering and banter which greeted any intervention by a woman, yet she managed to establish credibility in the movement. She joined the International Working Men’s Association, which was set up by Karl Marx and others. It was very difficult for a woman to join, as the name implies. Louise Michel also managed to join the National Guard, which was pretty remarkable because the National Guard was entirely composed of men. Anyway, she heard the general’s comments and ran off down the hill shouting that treachery was afoot, that their place was being taken over by the army, that their guns were being taken back, that they had to come out and stop this thing happening. She ordered that all the church bells be rung. The wretched soldiers were still guarding the cannon. People gathered and the generals tried to keep control. Then suddenly they saw a crowd of people coming, led by Louise Michel. She had collected about 200 women, most of them with rifles, and came charging up the hill towards 3,000 armed soldiers. Later she wrote, “We ran up at the double, knowing that at the top was an army in battle formation. We expected to die for liberty. All womankind was at our side – I don’t know how.” Three times the general told his troops to fire. Three times they refused. Suddenly a sergeant shouted, “We’ll have to mutiny.” It was a glorious scene as the crowd embraced the soldiers and bottles of wine were shared. But Adolph Thiers was not at all happy. He took the entire machinery of the government to Versailles, 40 or 50 miles down the road. And Thiers swore that there would be revenge for what had been done in Paris. On the evening of 18 March the central committee of the National Guard was declared the government of Paris. Immediately there was an argument in the central committee. Some wanted to march immediately on the army at Versailles. They said, “If we go now to Versailles, by smashing the government there we can raise the workers in all French cities.” And Louise Michel, who was not on the committee, was outside, grabbing anyone she knew and insisting, “We have to march upon Versailles – now is the time.” But the majority on the committee went for the legal option. They decided to hand over to an elected body who would then be able to govern properly. The elections were held on 26 March. The National Guard issued this proclamation: “Do not lose sight of the fact that the men who will serve you best are those you choose from among yourselves, living your life, suffering your ills. Distrust the ambitious as much as the upstart. Distrust also talkers, who are incapable of translating words into action. Avoid those fortune has too highly favoured, for only rarely is he who possesses fortune disposed to see the working man as his brother.” The elections were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm. And the people elected by and large represented what one writer called the Red Republicans. The elections were different from all other elections. The decision makers weren’t just workers in government. They were workers carrying out the decisions of government. When have we seen workers at the head of the police forces, worker judges, worker newspaper proprietors? The Paris Commune achieved this. The Paris Commune was only allowed to exist for two months, during most of which it was under constant siege from the Versailles army.

The Paris Commune was only allowed to exist for two months, during most of which it was under constant siege from the Versailles army. Two months is the time it takes between a bill in parliament going between its first and second reading today. But the Commune managed to revoke the backdated rents and ban evictions. Pawn shops were ordered to hand back all the goods they had had from workers. Night work in bakeries was banned. The Commune started a process of accident insurance for workers, the first such scheme in France. Education in Paris was taken out of the hands of the nuns and the monks and put into the hands of people, who were instructed in a wonderful decree from the Commune to concentrate on facts rather than fantasies, and to apply themselves to putting right “the greatest malady of children – boredom”. The cultural atmosphere was absolutely fantastic – all the churches were taken over for debates. But the Commune was not perfect. Unlike the National Guard, the Commune was elected by geography. The people who were elected were inclined to be isolated from the people who elected them. One result of this weakness was seen in how the Commune conducted the war. Thiers launched his counter-attack from Versailles. Bombardment after bombardment came right to the gates of Paris. But the conduct of the war was handed over to former army officers. They had no idea how to tap into the democracy the Commune represented. The Versailles army got into the city because nobody was guarding the gates. The cannon at Montemartre, the symbol of the social revolution, was left untended, and at the crucial point couldn’t be used. Marx wrote that the Paris Commune was elected by universal suffrage but women didn’t have the vote. Despite this, the action taken by the women during the Commune was magnificent. Women fought for the Commune from a sense that their class had taken power, and must be defended. Louise Michel led a battalion of 120 women in defence of the Commune. Now you come to the end of this story. In the whole period of the war, from 2 April to 25 May, 887 men from the Versailles army were killed in combat. In the ten days following 25 May, after the Versailles army took complete control of Paris, 25,000 people were taken out of the city and shot. Anyone in any way associated with the National Guard – men, women, children – were put to death. Louise Michel escaped these deaths, but she was not lucky to escape them. She was transported to the colonies and later imprisoned again when she returned to France. She never lost her defiant spirit. As she lay dying she was told of the Russian Revolution of 1905. She got out of bed, danced around the room, then lay back and said, “Right – now I am ready to die.” Top of the page Last updated on 19 August 2016

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Postal Workers and the Tory Offensive (1971) A Socialist Worker Pamphlet. First published 1971 by SW (Litho) Printers Ltd, 8 Cotton Gardens, London. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Derek Howl. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Introduction The postal strike of 1971 was by a long way the biggest industrial dispute in Britain since the war. It lasted exactly the same number of days as the next biggest – the seamen’s strike of 1966 – but there were more than four times as many workers on strike. In terms of days lost and numbers of strikers, no other dispute can compare with it. The strike lasted for 44 days, during all of which more than 90% of the members of the Union of Post Office Workers remained on strike without strike pay. Yet, at the end, they went back to work without even the promise that they would receive any greater pay increase than they were offered at the outset. Despite desperate attempts to cheer his members up, the union’s general secretary made it plain that he would have preferred, if possible, to continue with the strike. The Press, the employers and the employers’ Government could scarcely contain their glee at the humiliation of 200,000 postal workers. Gutter cartoonists and gutter politicians joined in the triumphal dance over what they imagined was the corpse of the postal union. This pamphlet is written within a fortnight of the end of the strike. It is written for the tens of thousands of postal workers who are still suffering from shock at the calling-off of the strike. Why did the strike take place? Why did the union collapse? Above all, how can workers everywhere who seek to improve their wages and conditions insure against a similar disaster? These are the questions which this pamphlet tries to answer. Part 1. The Post Office The Post Office is the oldest nationalised industry in the country, and the biggest. It employs more than 400,000 people (more than any other single concern), and ever since letters circulated has been responsible to the Government for the “carriage of mails”. From the outset, it developed a tradition of “public service”. Every citizen has the statutory right to delivery at his address of letters correctly addressed and posted to him, and in promptness, regularity and efficiency the British postal service is the best in the world. Similarly, the telephone service, which was incorporated into the Post Office, is incomparably more efficient in Britain than in countries like America where the telephones are in the hands of private enterprise. Yet the Post Office, like other alleged “public services”, operates inside a society where the powerful men are the rich men. The way in which the Post Office works, therefore, is biased in favour of industry, commerce, banking and the civil service – anywhere, that is, where the interests of rich and powerful men are immediately identifiable. Revenue from the postal services, for instance, comes to the Post Office by way of stamps. Firms and industries which post large quantities of letters do not buy stamps. They can buy franking machines which are regulated by the Post Office. If they post more than 5,000 units at a time, they can get the local post office to do the franking for them free of charge. One Post Office union secretary told me that four men out of 25 at his sorting office have to be detailed off on overtime every day to deal with this job, for which the customer does not pay a penny. Even more interesting is the system whereby the Post Office offers a rebate to firms which post in bulk. The amount of the rebate, laid down in the Post Office Guide, is as follows: Units Posted Rebate 4,501–4,999 all free over 4,500 5,000–22,222 10% rebate 22,223–24,999 all free over 20,000 25,000–234,375 20% rebate 234,376–249,999 all free over 187,500 250,000 25% rebate The Post Office Guide goes on to list conditions for the rebate. The packets, it says, must be identical, and they must be sorted into towns and counties “as required by the local Postmaster”. The words “as required by the local Postmaster” are crucial, for the collection and sorting of rebated post is settled in local “deals” between local postmasters and firms. Most firms which do big postal business will make sure that they get on excellent terms with the local postmaster, and end up with handsome bargains on their postal costs. One UPW union official told me: “Not 1% of the rebated post is sorted, and even if it is sorted it makes very little difference to our work. We still have to break open the parcels of post and check every address. Sometimes the sorting is more difficult when it is sorted by firms beforehand.” Before 1968, these rebates applied only to “printed paper and samples”, which, of course, included a mass of business post. But after 1968, when the two-tier post was introduced, the old “printed paper and samples” category was dispensed with. The rebates then applied to all second class post sent in bulk. This meant a huge increase in the rebate (or subsidy, to use a better word) with which the Post Office “helped out” the growing army of firms which were posting in bulk. Many firms found it extremely fruitful to save up their less urgent post for one day a week, and thus claim a much larger rebate from the Post Office. What is the extent of the rebate? Unhappily, but not surprisingly, rebate statistics are “not available” to the public, even if they are ever collated (which is doubtful). The long annual report and accounts of the Post Office carries no facts or figures about the extent to which industry and commerce are subsidised by the rebate system. Similarly, the Prices and Incomes Board which looked at Post Office charges in 1968 made no inquiry into how the Post Office gets its revenue, or how it might increase its revenue by stopping a gratuitous and unnecessary subsidy to firms.

All the Post Office will say is that “about a third” of its postal traffic is metered, and that the bulk of the metered traffic is subsidised. From a big sub-post office in North London, I got rather different figures for deliveries in a typical week last year: Metered Ordinary stamped Letters 194,111 188,819 Packages 36,716 18,131 Total 230,827 (53%) 206,950 (47%) Thirty-five million letters are posted in Britain every day. Since there are less than 35 million adults in Britain today, it is clear that most letters are not sent by sweethearts, or soldiers on overseas duty, or even by grannies on the kiddies’ birthday. They are sent by Littlewoods, Barclays, the Daily Telegraph, ICI, and so on. The complete lack of official statistics forces us to guess at the extent of the subsidy which the Post Office hands out to pools firms, mail order firms and big business year by year. If a third of the letters posted are subsidised to the tune of some 20%, the extent of the subsidy is in the region of £18m a year – rather more in fact than the Post Office estimate of the cost of the full Union of Post Office Workers claim for its members on the postal side. If the figure is even remotely right, it means that the “losses” sustained by the postal side of the Post Office in any one of the last 10 years could have been wiped out if the rich men’s subsidy had been abolished. And this does not take into account the tremendous losses to the Post Office from not charging so many firms for franking their mail. There is another area of subsidy which is also impossible to measure because of the refusal of the Post Office authorities to collate (or publish) statistics. When the Post Office was part of the civil service, the civil service mail was heavily subsidised. This subsidy was carried on after the Post Office Corporation was set up outside the civil service! It is impossible to tell how great is the subsidy on the millions of letters, cards and parcels sent out by the civil service, but it would be enough to pay a few thousand postmen a decent wage! The change-over from a civil service department to a “fully-fledged public Corporation” started soon after the election of a Labour Government in 1966 and was completed in October 1969. During this period, “business standards” were applied to the Post Office, and this meant, inevitably, a fantastic increase in bosses and bosses’ underlings. In 1966, 11,300 million letters were handled by the Post Office. In 1969 the figure was almost exactly the same. In a series of vicious productivity agreements, the number of postmen had been cut from 101,063 to 100,991, postmen higher grade from 21,250 to 20,809 and counter-men in the post offices from 22,183 to 21,584. In 1966 there had been 9,889 Post Office administrators. In 1969 there were 12,300. Supervisors increased in the same period from 9,974 to 11,295. The richer the gravy, the more people there were to lap it up. There were 31 Post Office directors in 1966 – and 51 in 1969. All of them are getting a minimum of £6,600 a year. As a branch secretary wrote to his union magazine The Post (March 29, 1969): “In my own area since Modified Postal Services we have acquired a further two assistant district postmasters, two chief inspectors, two assistant superintendents, and have lost one superintendent. We have been concentrated, de-concentrated, satellited, de-satellited. We have been two-tiered and semi-two-tiered and all this time the top brass have been increasing like sex-mad rabbits.” Postal workers, and others who use the Post Office, were a little bemused as to the value of this burgeoning of bosses. The bosses’ financial forecast in 1970 (after the union’s last wage increase} resulted in a shortfall of £52m. Third-rate public relations and managerial incompetence led to early failure both of the “two- tier” postal system and of the Giro. As for “mechanisation” (the main excuse given for the increase in management), there is still only one fully mechanised office – at Croydon. Even at Croydon, the new machines have led to dreadful difficulties, not least the increase in damage to mail. “The machines tear up the letters something terrible”, a Croydon postman told me. “We used to have one man to repair damaged mail. Now, with the machines, there are three, working overtime patching and sticking up ripped-up letters and cheques.” Mechanisation elsewhere is being held up because many of the special codes sent out to the public by the Post Office contain seven digits, while the machines to deal with them are made to deal with six digits. Fifty-one directors have since been puzzling over an awkward dilemma. Should new codes be sent out or should the machines be changed? Either expense, of course, will be blamed on the postal workers. The directors don’t get £6,600 a year for nothing! Yet the postal side has long since ceased to interest the mass of Post Office Board directors. They are increasingly fascinated with the telecommunications division, where profits have been rising to astonishing proportions: £m 66/67 67/68 68/69 69/70 Postal Service Profits (loss) 7 6 −12 −6 Telecommunications profits 38 33 26 61 The increasing army of bosses in the telecommunications division are drawn almost exclusively from private enterprise.

Jobs are swapped year by year between the Division’s Equipment Department and the boardroom of Plessey (which supplies most of the equipment). When the Post Office left the civil service and became a Corporation, there was some pressure from his supporters on Mr. John Stonehouse, the Labour Government’s Postmaster-General, to sweep away the “time-honoured” restrictions which prevented the Post Office manufacturing its own equipment. Stonehouse withstood the pressure. “Render unto Plessey the things that are Plessey’s” was his argument. Although the Bill contained the “ultimate” power for the Post Office to manufacture its own equipment, this would only be used, Mr. Stonehouse explained, “where it became obvious that supplies would not otherwise be available”. The new big businessmen in the Post Office telecommunications division and their friends in industry outside are goggling at the fantastic increases in telephone profits. Unlike postal services, 74% of whose costs are in paying wages and salaries, telephones need less and less labour (only 47% of their costs are labour costs). What a tragedy it is, moan the businessmen in the Post Office, that these enormous profits are wasted in a Public Board – are ploughed back into telephone machinery or used to prop up a loss-making postal service. If only, oh, if only these highly profitable services could be put in the hands of private enterprise! These sentiments were voiced enthusiastically by the Conservative Opposition during the passing of the Post Office Bill through Parliament early in 1969. Mr. Kenneth Baker, one of the brightest stars in the Conservative firmament and a personal protégé of Mr. Edward Heath, moved an amendment to Clause 7 of the Bill: “to give the Corporation authority to offer for sale to the public either by way of equity shares or loan stock any part of its telecommunications services.” “The Party of which I am a member”, said Mr. Baker, “believes that the role of the public sector should be limited and reduced wherever possible.” What Mr. Baker meant, of course, was as follows: “The Party of which I am a member is run for the sake of rich and greedy businessmen who are longing to get their fingers on the telephone loot.” Mr. Baker’s amendment was pressed to a division (and lost), but when the Conservative Party was returned to office in June 1970 (Mr. Baker was thrown out at Acton, but returned a few months later in safe Marylebone) the robbers came out of their caves and demanded the hand-over of the telephones. At the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool in October 1970, Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg, new Tory MP for Hampstead and a prominent member of the Telephone Users Consultative Council (an organisation run almost entirely by and for businessmen), made a rousing speech pointing out the “opportunities for enterprise and initiative” in the telephone service. His speech was greeted with a roar of applause, and Mr. Finsberg has since been named as a possible chairman of the Post Office Board. The Board, meanwhile, whose public relations staff, needless to say, had increased by some 20% in four years, remained silent. Nothing was said in defence of the “public interest” of the Board’s operations against the “private interest” of Finsberg & Co. Ltd. For the truth is that most of the men on the Board in charge of telecommunications have no objection to the wholesale transfer of the telephone service to private enterprise. They would be assured plum jobs and substantial shareholdings in the new private telephone companies. The attitude of the Post Office Board towards Tory demands for private enterprise telephones had nothing to do with the “public service” tradition of the Post Office. Public service to them meant an unprofitable postal service, especially cheap for businessmen, run by a nationalised industry, and profitable telephones run by themselves. Such priorities, needless to say, ignored one rather important group of people – the 400,000 who worked in both sectors of the Post Office. These people had for more than 100 years been treated by the Post Office with consistent cruelty and contempt. Part 2. The Union The UK Postmen’s Association was formed in the wake of the legislation of 1871 and 1875 legalising trade unions, it was swiftly pulverised by the “impartial” Post Office administration. The leaders of the executive were arbitrarily sacked. Tom Dredge, the most militant of the founding executive members, was only allowed back to work on condition he apologised for past activities and promised to do nothing so horrible in the future as to “incite” his colleagues with evil talk about better wages and conditions. Dredge finally agreed to the conditions, and the Association collapsed. The Postmen’s Union was then formed in 1889 under the militant leadership of engineers and dockers drafted in from the “new unionism” movement. At once, the union demanded a withdrawal of the departmental rule that postmen were not allowed to meet outside office hours to discuss their grievances. The department replied with a direct negative, and prepared to fight. Union leaders were harassed with petty charges of indiscipline, and a reserve force of unemployed were carefully rehearsed as blacklegs. The department was also able to split the postmen by carefully fostering and bribing members of different, splinter associations, especially the Fawcett Association of sorters. When blacklegs were forcibly removed by union members on July 10 from Mount Pleasant, 100 unionists were instantly dismissed by the Post Office and the attempt to get the rest of London postmen to come out in their support was bungled. Most of the men publicly washed their hands of the union, and the department consolidated its victory with widespread victimisation. It was not until after the First World War that the various splinter unions in the Post Office were amalgamated into the Union of Post Office Workers. In the militant atmosphere of their amalgamating conference in 1919, the delegates to the new union declared their faith in trade union principles and voted overwhelmingly for the setting up of a strike fund.

They were reckoning without the deep-seated anti-trade union feelings among postmen, especially among the better-paid grades. The strike fund was put to ballot, and was carried by only 48,157 to 35,411 (with 23,400 abstentions). The Post Office administration responded by cherishing the federations of smaller unions which had refused to join the UPW. Hysterical anti-trade union propaganda was openly circulated among their workers by the Post Office management. The strike fund was held up as proof of the evil intentions of “anarchist agitators” who were intent on destroying the “impartial” traditions of the Post Office. The campaign was successful. By 1921, the 100,000 membership at the amalgamation conference had shrunk to 72,000. In September 1921 the union executive decided to suspend the strike levy fund indefinitely. As a result, there was no strike fund in the union for more than 40 years. And then it was too late. Throughout, the union was plagued by the ambiguous status of its members. Many members still regarded themselves as uniformed civil servants – “a cut above” the proletariat. The Post Office bosses did everything they could to foster this image. In 1927, the Conservative Government passed a Trades Dispute Act which banned the postmen’s union from affiliation to the Labour Party or to the Trades Union Congress. The union was therefore forced into isolation for 20 years until the Act was repealed by the post-war Labour Government (the 1929–31 Labour Government left the Act on the statute book). In the same year, the bosses arbitrarily increased the staff side of the Whitley Council covering the industry by two – both members representing tiny “secessionist” associations. As a result, the UPW walked out of the Whitley Council, only to return five years later on the Post Office terms. Despite consistent growth, consistent absorption of smaller organisations and acceptance back into the TUC and Labour Party after the war, the union continued to be dogged by the myth of “respectability”. Many of its older members had been recruited from the Services and had been taught to obey commands. In rural areas, district postmasters liked to play soldiers with their troops and in many places postmen had actually to parade for morning inspection! As a result, the union leadership remained firmly committed to “moderation”. Ron Smith, its general secretary for most of the post-war period, could always be relied upon to cast his union’s votes in favour of Labour’s “safe” right-wing leadership. The branch rules and structure, many of which were written in the post-war period, paid scant regard to the rights of the members to participate in the union affairs. The Croydon branch rules, for instance, allow for only two meetings a year! Although the structure of the union was formally democratic (the executive is dominated by lay members elected every year, though about a third of it consists of full-time officials: all officials are elected on a branch block-vote system, but, once elected, they are there for life). The activity in the union was left in the main to a few local activists, who often ended up in the union leadership. Meanwhile, wages and conditions were gently discussed, and as gently agreed under the paternalist aegis of the Civil Service Pay Research Unit. The cosy atmosphere was abruptly broken by the Selwyn Lloyd pay pause of 1961. The Tory Government, desperate to control their own pre-election boom, decided to wield the hatchet on their own workers. Meetings were delayed, established negotiation procedures altered and promises broken. For 18 months, postmen watched in despair as the wages of industrial workers and white-collar workers in private industry soared above theirs, and the official machinery which had given them pittances year by year was ignored by the Government. By the summer of 1964, Ron Smith had lost control of his union. In protest against the Government’s refusal to allow them substantial increases, the Post Office workers started an unofficial work-to-rule and guerrilla strikes up and down the country. Ron Smith and his executive were forced to call a one-day official strike. A mass rally was held in Trafalgar Square, and, on July 26, the Government caved in. A wage increase reckoned much later by the Prices and Incomes Board as 15% was granted. The postmen had learned a simple lesson. Their biggest increase in post-war history had been won because some of them took the initiative and hit the Post Office and its customers where it hurt most – in the pocket. Soon afterwards a Labour Government, trumpeting slogans about “fairness for the workers” and “Incomes Policy”, was elected. The Post Office workers loyally responded to the Government’s appeals for “voluntary restraint”. Pay awards for postal and telephonist grades in 1965 and 1966 were held strictly below the required norms. In both years the UPW “won” 3.5% increases (PIB Report, p. 20). Their award in 1967 had to be delayed due to the 1966 wage freeze, and when it was paid it was much lower than the workers had expected – 7%., The situation was little less than drastic, as even the Post Office recognised. The Prices and Incomes Board Report on postal charges, published in March 1968, had this to say: “In the view of the Post Office, the pattern of settlements has inhibited its efforts to recruit and retain labour on the postal side by ensuring that Post Office wages have always lagged behind those in other occupations.” With the cheek which characterised so many PIB reports, the Board then recommended annual increases of 3.5%! This must have been a joke, for even on the Board’s skimpy information the Post Office workers were having it very rough indeed. The Board found severe labour shortages in London and the Midlands brought on by the disgracefully low wages and poor conditions. “During the last three years”, it reported (p.

23), “overtime has accounted for about 20% of the Post Office’s expenditure on pay for main postal grades. The Post Office estimate that about one-sixth of the overtime is worked at double rates. To qualify for double rates, postmen have to work more than 60 hours a week, indicating that considerable numbers are working this amount”. (Sixty hours is eight and a half hours a day every day in the week.) The PIB’S remedy for this appalling situation was to increase the hiring of part-time women workers! Added to all this, and not apparently noticed by the PIB or the Government, was the system of” incremental scales” whereby young telephonists and postmen joining “the service” were used as little more than cheap labour. At that time the rates of pay under these scales were as follows: Basic Pay for a 43 hour week Age Postmen Telephonists £ s. d. £ s. d. 15 6 10 0 5 16 0 16 6 17 0 6 5 0 17 7 11 6 7 0 0 18 9 15 0 9 1 0 19 10 11 6 9 17 6 20 12 4 0 10 15 0 21 14 14 6 12 4 0 22 15 17 0 12 14 6 The Union of Post Office Workers’ leadership, meanwhile, had taken a turn to the left with the election of Tom Jackson to the general secretaryship in place of Ron Smith, who had inevitably joined the Board of the British Steel Corporation as labour director. Jackson and his executive hoped to push on with much bigger increases for their members than had been suggested by the PIB, but very quickly they were entangled in the “voluntary incomes policy” which was being enforced by the Labour Government in a far from voluntary manner. Jackson’s annual report to his union’s Jubilee Annual Conference at Bournemouth apologised gloomily: “To say that the year under review [ending December 31, 1968] has been a difficult one would be an understatement, either in relation to members’ difficulties, or in relation to those of obtaining increases against the background of Government criteria which provide substantially less than a modicum of flexibility.” A claim for postmen had been lodged in the late summer of 1968 and deliberately delayed at Ministerial level until late in November. Eventually, the UPW accepted a 4% increase, 1% of which was “in respect of measures already introduced”. Tough productivity strings were bound around this unwelcome package, which, as Jackson admitted in his report, “occasioned some resentment and dissatisfaction”. Telephonists, still lagging even behind postmen in pay, had been forced to accept a miserable 5.5% plus heavy productivity concessions. Neither was the following year, ended December 31, 1969, as Jackson wrote for the union’s 1970 Conference, “one of spectacular increases”. Under the Central Pay Claim, covering most grades in the union, telephonists had picked up a further 7.75% in separate negotiations, but the postmen (representing half the union) were kept to the minimum 3.5%. Jackson and his negotiators had accepted this further humiliation only on condition that they would return and ask for more as soon as the Post Office became a Corporation in October. With the constitution of the Corporation, the last semblance of civil service “paternalism” and “respectability” vanished from the Post Office. The Board was a tough, bureaucratic business management. The new chairman was a former merchant seaman, miner, doctor, steelmaster and tycoon called Viscount Hall. Other Board members included a deputy chairman of Rolls-Royce and, inevitably, a former general secretary of the Union of Post Office Workers (duly) knighted. The union found Lord Hall susceptible to demands for a substantial increase to make up the ground lost over previous years. Hall was warned that the workers were in militant mood, and demands for industrial action to back the claim were pouring in from branches all over the country. “Viscount Hall”, reported the Daily Mail on December 23, 1969, “wants to avoid a strike at all costs.” Hall duly told the Government that he had no intention of outfacing his workers so early in the life of the Board. The Labour Government, by the time they came to adjudicate on the UPW claim in February 1970, were in a more friendly mood than they had been for four years. The struggle against the unions, highlighted by the White Paper In Place of Strife the previous summer, had been dropped in favour of conciliation. A General Election was in the offing. Workers’ votes had to be ensured. On February 12, the Cabinet approved the entire UPW claim, which averaged increases of some 12%. “We got all we asked for”, said Jackson, triumphant. (Guardian, February 13, 1970) He was, however, in for a shock. On the ballot vote of the union’s branches, acceptance of the offer was approved by the slenderest of majorities. Among postmen, there was probably a majority for rejection. If there had been any doubt in the minds of the union leadership about the militancy of their members, it was now laid to rest: The postmen, after nearly 50 years of apathy, were spoiling for a fight to improve their wages and conditions. The increases of early 1970 had, they made it clear, compensated only marginally for the losses in 1968 and 1969. The basic pay of the postmen was still little more than £16 a week. Overtime was still monstrously demanding. The incremental scales were still a scandal. A 21-year-old telephonist outside London was still working a 41-hour, six-day week for £10 10s. For 20 years or more postal workers had trod water.

Now they were determined to surge forward. Part 3. The Strike On October 29, 1970, the Union of Post Office Workers, under instructions from their annual conference the previous spring, lodged a claim for a wage increase of 15% or £3 a week, whichever was the greater. The claim was only one of a number of substantial claims submitted by unions still smarting from the long years of squeeze and freeze, and from several months of runaway inflation which had pushed prices up at an annual rate of 8%. Very soon, the claim was shown to be in line with what other workers were getting. A Committee of Inquiry under the “hard-line” negotiator Sir Jack Scamp recommended straight increases of 15% for local government employees who had been on strike for several weeks. The local government workers had conducted a skilful campaign of guerrilla strikes, and the Scamp Committee considered their claim sympathetically. Soon afterwards, the miners, under some protest, and after only marginally failing to give a two-thirds majority to sanction a national strike, accepted a “no strings” offer of 12%. These two increases in the public sector infuriated the Conservative Government, not one member of whose Cabinet had less than two former directorships or less than two houses to live in. The Government determined to fight their own workers if necessary to the death to bring down the general level of wage increases. To this end, they found a useful ally in the joint-deputy chairman of the Post Office Board, Mr. A.W.C. Ryland. Ryland had worked his way up through the Post Office bureaucracy with assiduous zeal. By 1953, he had risen to the heights of Deputy Public Relations Officer. For 10 years he had worked exclusively on the telecommunications side, and had learned a lot about the profitability of telephones. In 1963, for instance, he headed the Post Office study team to the profitable Bell Telephone System of Canada. Ryland knew more than any other member of the Board that the success of the Board would be assessed by one criterion: profitability. Ryland started to prepare for a possible strike in the Post Office long before Lord Hall, or even the UPW leaders, had given it serious consideration. In the summer of 1970, for instance, he addressed a conference of telephone managers in Windermere in the Lake District. He announced that the Prices and Incomes Board target for “return on capital” in the telecommunications division of 84% had not been reached. He had, he said, without explaining in detail why, arbitrarily raised this target to 104%. There was, he went on, a need for a thoroughgoing “drive to profitability”, and, accordingly, there was “very little left in the kitty for wages.” Soon afterwards, the attention of Post Office managers and supervisors was drawn by Head Office to a thereto unheard-of document entitled: Post Office Civil Emergency Manual. The document set out detailed proposals as to how the Post Office should work in conditions of flood, famine, pestilence ... and industrial action. Instructions were issued that the “drill” laid down in the document, involving the setting up of “control centres” and “ emergency stations”, should be followed to the letter during the power workers’ work-to-rule which started on December 8 – not because that action disrupted postal services, but “as a rehearsal for later on”. All this met with some opposition, notably from Viscount Hall. Hall, who was enjoying himself hugely travelling round the world on expensive “surveys” of telecommunications and postal problems, was not at all happy about a confrontation with his workers. He took the old-fashioned view that well-paid workers provided the best service, and he was bold enough to tell his Minister, Mr. Christopher Chataway, what he thought. Lord Hall was intensely unpopular with the Government. Public boards, they considered, should be chaired by obsequious Tory toadies like Mr. Ryland. On November 24, after some intense argument about the Board’s attitude to the UPW claim, Hall was summarily sacked by the Government, and Ryland became “acting chairman”. The sacking of Lord Hall was not lost on the postal workers. They had no brief for Labour tycoons, but they realised the real reason for this dismissal. To the astonishment of the Government and the union, lightning protest strikes broke out in many large post offices, especially in London. The power workers started their work-to-rule on December 8. The action caused instant chaos. A week later, the power men’s unions called off the action after a promise from the Government that their claim would be investigated by an independent court of inquiry. The unions insisted, and the Government agreed, that the workers need not be bound by the inquiry’s findings. Watching the situation, Ryland decided to delay his reply to the UPW claim as long as possible. If he could hold things until the Wilberforce Commission reported on the power workers’ claim, public opinion, he reckoned, would swing towards him. But the UPW, wise to this ruse, insisted on a reply. On January 8, the Board offered 7% – less than half the claim. The offer was rejected with contempt. On January 14, the offer was increased by a wretched 1%. Once again, the union rejected it. On January 20, the entire membership was called out on strike.

On January 20, the entire membership was called out on strike. Everyone, including the union leaders, was astonished at the enthusiasm of the workers’ response to the strike call. There was no question of strike pay. The union had started a small strike fund only three years previously. At the beginning of the strike, the fund totalled £334,000. The most this money could finance was a “hardship fund” for those strikers (such as single men) who had no income while on strike. Even so, the fund could only last for a maximum of three weeks. Yet the response among postmen was almost unanimous. The Press, notably the Daily Express and Daily Mail, immediately ordered all its reporters to “Hunt the Blackleg”, but were hard put to it to find a chink in the strike. Of 100,000 postmen, less than 700 reported for work. Among telephonists, the response was less enthusiastic. In big industrial areas, they came out. In rural areas, where many of them were the part-time “pin money” workers advocated by the Prices and Incomes Board, they tended to stay at work. The Daily Bulletin run by the UPW Headquarters reported that in cities like Dundee and Newcastle all telephonists were on strike. The Post Office claimed from the outset that more than a third of the total number stayed at work throughout the strike. On Day 4 of the strike, the UPW Strike Bulletin warned: “Monday may be a crucial day in our campaign”, and urged their members to stay out on strike. The warning was unnecessary. Astonishingly, as the days and then the weeks went by, the strikers became more determined and more solid. The mass meetings and rallies throughout the country, led by a rally in Hyde Park every Thursday, became progressively better attended and more militant. On Day 9 (January 28), the Strike Bulletin sent a message from the executive: “WE ARE PRIVILEGED TO BE YOUR ELECTED LEADERS. YOU ARE MAGNIFICENT! KEEP IT UP! ” Each bulletin recorded hundreds of donations, most of them tiny. At this stage, the only donations from trade unions were from individual branches. It was not until the 21st day of the strike that the bulletin could record a donation front the Transport and General Workers Union headquarters – of a puny £7,500 – to the hardship fund, and not until the 31st day that SOGAT Division “A” coughed up £10,000. Many other unions affiliated to the TUC did not contribute at all. There were other even more serious signs that the solidarity of the leaderships of other unions was not all it was made out to be. On Friday, February 12 (the 24th day of the strike), Mr. Johnny Nuttall, a member of the Transport and General Workers Union in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, reported as usual for work as a lorry-driver for a small firm of Sheffield road hauliers called J.A. Flendersons. He was detailed for a run to Hull and to Beverley, and he noticed that attached to the delivery notes were two envelopes, addressed to the firms he was to visit. Such envelopes had never been part of his load before, and Mr. Nuttall complained to the management, explaining that he could not possibly be expected to carry letters for anyone while the postmen were on strike. He was instantly suspended, pending negotiations. He then contacted Mr. Ray Thorpe, the T&GWU area organiser in Nottingham. Mr. Thorpe listened to his case, spoke to the employers and was very sympathetic to Mr. Nuttall. He was, he explained, not convinced that this delivery was not genuinely connected with the job. Nuttall replied that never in two and a half years had he had to deliver such an envelope, but still Brother Thorpe was not convinced. From his vantage point in his Nottingham office, he decided that he was unwilling to instruct the other drivers not to work while the employers insisted on their carrying mail. He intended, he explained, to do nothing about it. Then Tom Swain, MP, intervened. Nuttall was reinstated. Returning to work, he found three more letters attached to the delivery notes. Once more he refused to drive. At least nine of the 15 drivers indicated their willingness, if instructed by the union, not to work under such blackleg conditions. But Thorpe refused to move.

But Thorpe refused to move. Nuttall was sacked, and the other drivers carried the mail. “I rang our regional organiser, Brother Mather, in Birmingham”, Johnny Nuttall told me. “He took the same lukewarm attitude as Thorpe. He kept saying that our union cared most for our members, and that our members would be in trouble if they all did what I did.” Johnny Nuttall has been out of work for five weeks since the episode and his opinion of his union leadership, including Jack Jones (his general secretary), who knew all about the incident, is not printable. What happened to Johnny Nuttall happened all over the country, although in most places were were few lorry-drivers (or railway workers) with Johnny Nuttall’s courage. BRS drivers carried mail all over the country without any real effort by the T&GWU to stop the practice, in spite of all sorts of commitments by brave union leaders at meetings in central London. Nevertheless, the solidarity of the postmen caused no little consternation at the Post Office Headquarters at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, where Ryland and his henchmen had imagined that the trickle of postmen returning to work would rapidly turn into a flood. Not that the Post Office itself was suffering. On the contrary, despite the daily reports of massive Post Office losses in the Press, the Post Office was minting huge profits during the strike. The loss-making postal services were closed down. Only a tiny amount was being paid out in wages. At the same time, there was a huge increase in the highly profitable use of automatic telephones (86% of the telephone system is on STD, which uses very little labour). The Minister for Posts pooh-poohed suggestions that the Post Office was making profits during the strike, but when the strike was over the figures proved him wrong. The Post Office had lost £24.8m in revenue, and had saved £26m in unpaid wages (Daily Telegraph, March 5, 1971). Encouraged by such figures, Ryland decided on the 18th day of the strike to announce his plans for even bigger profits in the future. He issued a Press statement (on February 6) indicating that, as a result of the strike, future Post Office services would have to be pruned. The parcel post, he warned, would have to be abolished. So would many rural deliveries. So would the practice of delivering mail twice a day. Five months previously, Mr. Ryland had opened a new parcel sorting office at Peterborough. He spoke in glowing terms about two new parcel centres at Cardiff and Southampton. “We are building,” he trumpeted, “Britain’s parcel network of the future”. Now, however, he was using a strike into which he had provoked his workers as an excuse for cutting out the parcel service altogether! Needless to say, the bitter and devastating UPW reply to Ryland’s announcement released to the Press the next day was totally ignored by the “objective ” national newspapers. Yet, for all Mr. Rvland’s dreams of still more profits (and less service) to come, by late February the strike began to bite deep into the pockets of industry and commerce. As the UPW Strike Bulletin complained day by day, the real effects of the strike were blanketed by a “conspiracy of silence”. The damage was not only to banks, newspapers and mail order firms (whose turnover had doubled in 10 years to £560m a year, and had expanded by 10% a year compared with 3% for the rest of the retail trade). Industry itself, and particularly industry with connections overseas, was hard hit by the strike, and worse hit as chances of a settlement receded. For the first two weeks, correspondence could be put off, on the understanding that some day it would move again. But as the strike was increasingly solid, industry became increasingly disturbed. The Association for Small Businessmen reported that “the strike has become a major threat to thousands of small businessmen. Many of them are being propped up by lenient bank managers who have extended credit to cover the strike” (Financial Times, March 3, 1971). Not only small businesses but some of the bigger ones started to warn the Government that the losses caused by the strike could not be sustained for ever. None of this appeared in the Press or on television. The myth was bruited around that the strike was having “little effect” on industry. The internal bulletins of the City of London (the Business News supplements and the Financial Times) announced blandly: “No Problem.” The reason was that the men who run big industries and banks have been properly brought up. One major principle has been drummed into their heads from early childhood: Never discuss family problems in front of the servants. In this instance a group of cheeky servants (Post Office workers) were refusing to work. They had to learn that such insubordination would do them no good, and that no one cared. Total silence about real problems had to be scrupulously observed. The union, however, was not concerned by these tricks of the capitalist trade. The solidarity of their members was ensured. The damage caused by the strike was indisputable. Contemptible offers from the Post Office (such as Ryland’s suggestion that an extra 1% in “productivity” money could be added to the 8%) could be rejected summarily. The real problem was the survival of those strikers who had no money at all.

The real problem was the survival of those strikers who had no money at all. Members covered by social security payments were likely to stay out as long as necessary. The rent was paid, and there was something to eat. For the others, however, the hardship fund was crucial. And the hardship fund was running out. The hundreds of small donations made little or no difference. The union’s own money, by the third week in February (the fifth of the strike), had long since been spent, as had the bankers’ overdraft. The hardship fund (about £100,000 a week) had to be sustained, or the strike would begin to crumble. This was the union’s Achilles heel, which was promptly pierced not by the employers or by blacklegs but by the Trades Union Congress General Council. Part 4. The Sell-out On Day 30 of the strike (Thursday, February 18), the union’s Strike Bulletin reported: “FLASH! Tom Jackson and his team have gone to the TUC to speak to the TUC’s Finance and General Purposes Committee." The result of the meeting was reported in The Times the following day: “The UPW, in deep financial difficulties as its strike enters the fifth week, yesterday collected £250,000 in loans from other unions. It has been promised a similar sum by the TUC next week to keep the strike alive.” And the Guardian of February 20 carried a huge headline: TUC WILL NOT LET POSTAL UNION BE CRUSHED “The Government is deeply concerned about the apparently growing support among trade unions for the Post Office workers. “... TUC leaders, who met Mr. Carr for talks about the dispute, took a courteous but firm line and left him in no doubt that they were not going to abandon the postal workers. “They are understood to have emphasised that they would not stand by and see the Union of Post Office Workers crushed by financial pressures and reminded the Minister of the loans which the TUC was gathering from other unions on behalf of the UPW. “The amounts have totalled £250,000 this week, and the same amount is likely to be forthcoming next week.” The following day, Sunday, February 21, 140,000 trade unionists rallied to the call of the TUC to demonstrate against the Industrial Relations Bill. Eight years previously, TUC general secretary George Woodcock had told the Congress proudly that they had “long ago left Trafalgar Square” for the committee rooms in the corridors of power. Now the movement was back in Trafalgar Square fighting for its very life. The most popular man on the demonstration was Tom Jackson, the most popular delegation that of the UPW. TUC general secretary Vic Feather sought out Jackson and pulled him to the front of the plinth to shake him by the hand. Chairman Sid Greene, the best-dressed man in the movement, told the crowd: “The whole trade union movement is backing the UPW.” When Jackson spoke, however, there was an element of scepticism in his response: “If we are defeated, it will not be for lack of resolve. It will not be for lack of guts and determination. It will be for lack of funds. “Sympathy we can get by the bucketful. We have the generous wholehearted support of the public. What we need now is money – and fast! “The TUC has supported the idea of workshop collections. This is your fight. Our defeat will be your defeat. Our victory, your victory. “We have been forced by circumstances into the van of the trade union movement. We did not ask for this honour, but we will not let you down. Don’t let us down.” This was the first sign that the TUC had supported the idea of workshop collections. There was no sign, however, that the collections were being enthusiastically organised by the leadership. At any rate, such collections could not be substituted for the big grants the union needed to keep its hardship fund going. Workshop collections could never provide enough money fast enough. A further problem dogged the UPW executive. The money collected by the TUC the previous week had been paid in interest-free loans. To some extent, this was a fiction. Many unions have rules restraining them from making large payments outside the union. And in many instances (though by no means in all) repayment would not in practice be demanded. Formally, however, the money was on loan, and the UPW’s bankers, already demanding the title deeds of the union’s headquarters as security for its huge overdraft, were beginning to complain about further commitments. The crucial meeting of the strike was that of the General Council of the TUC on Wednesday, February 24. All that week, the newspapers had been full of the TUC support for Jackson and the TUC’s determination not to allow a defeat of the postmen. At the meeting, Tom Jackson spelt out his dilemma. The TUC must back their pledges of support and their rhetoric with cash, or the strike would crumble. There were, he said, hopeful signs.

There were, he said, hopeful signs. Employment Secretary Robert Carr had been visited by the mail order firms, the Association of Small Businesses and by the Confederation of British Industry, all of whom were pressing for an end to the strike, which was rapidly becoming intolerable. To Jackson’s horror and astonishment, his colleagues on the General Council started to mumble about “problems and difficulties”. There was, they said, no money available by way of grant. They might be able to rustle up another £100,000 in interest-free loans. Jackson told them again that further loans would not be allowed by his bankers, and reminded them again of their commitment the previous week to a further £250,000. Even £100,000 grant could keep him going another crucial week. The heroes of Trafalgar Square the previous Sunday fell silent. The mighty militants had turned into mice. A hundred thousand pounds in loans out of the millions of union funds and tens of millions in union investments was all they could afford. When Jackson left the TUC that morning, he must have known that the game was up. He could not continue the hardship fund the following week without selling his union headquarters. The following day, the UPW rally in Hyde Park was the biggest yet, swelled by tens of thousands of Post Office Engineering Workers who had staged a token strike in solidarity with the UPW. Jackson kept a brave face, as though nothing serious had happened. And the demonstrators went home confident that their struggle would continue. The axe, however, fell fast. On Monday, as news of the end of the hardship money filtered through, the numbers returning to work increased sharply (though still only a tiny minority of the total). By Tuesday, Jackson was outlining his line of retreat to the executive. On Wednesday (March 3) the entire executive, having agreed to surrender by 27 votes to four (with the Communists on the executive supporting Jackson), travelled to the Department of Employment and concocted a formula for calling off the strike. A “committee of inquiry”, they agreed, would look into the Post Office claims. The three-man committee would consist of one nominee from the union, one from the management and a chairman agreeable to both. The chairman would have the right, in the event of disagreement, to impose a settlement. In sharp contrast to the setting up of the Scamp Committee of Inquiry into the “dirty jobs” strike, the union would recommend an immediate return to work before the committee was even constituted. Unlike those of the Wilberforce Committee, this committee’s findings would be binding. This was marginally different from the arbitration which Jackson had been refusing for 10 weeks. But no one had any doubt that the Post Office would have settled for such an inquiry in the first week of the strike. The rally on Thursday, March 4, was a very different affair from its predecessors. Many postal workers could not believe their ears, and shouted their disillusionment at their leaders. As the executive recommendations went to the ballot, branch after branch recorded the dismay and militancy of the rank and file. In almost every urban branch, there was a substantial vote against the executive proposals, and in some branches the majority voted to stay out. A mass meeting of more than 2,500 UPW members in Liverpool, for instance, voted two to one against going back to work. The real blame for the collapse of the strike must be placed on the TUC General Council, first for not providing the funds when they were needed, and secondly for not organising the other unions in dispute with the Government to co-ordinate their efforts with the postmen. The railwaymen’s and the teachers’ union leaders knew well enough that the defeat of the postmen would lead to substantially smaller settlements for their members. Why then did they not hasten their negotiations, and join the fray? Why at least did they not press for the necessary funds to be made available? Why did not the more militant trade union leaders, notably Jack Jones of the T&GWU or Hugh Scanlon of the AUEW, openly break from the General Council line and make available the funds which they could so well afford? Above all, why did the General Council retreat from a position which it seemed to have occupied in some strength? The answer was half-available to readers of the South Wales morning paper, the Western Mail, on Friday, March 5, headed: POST PACT KEY FOR TORY UNIONS DEAL “The virtual collapse of the postmen’s strike”, wrote George Gardiner, that paper’s Lobby Correspondent, “has opened the way for a new deal between the Government and the unions. “If the TUC is willing to support the principle that in future all unions in dispute should go to arbitration, before considering strike action, I understand the Government is prepared to amend its Industrial Relations Bill when it comes back to the Commons on Monday week.” The parts of the Industrial Relations Bill which most offended the bureaucrats on the General Council were not those which penalised unofficial strikers, nor those which outlawed sympathy strikes, but those which restricted the closed shop. These restrictions, the leaders feared, would cut off important funds to the unions. The weaker unions like USDAW and the G&MWU would lose tens of thousands of members presently kept in union membership by closed shop provisions, often with the agreement of employers. At all costs, the General Council wanted Clause 5 (about closed shops) altered. The Government had made it plain that they might make concessions on Clause 5 if the TUC would restrain its members from going on strike. For some time, Vic Feather had been seeking a meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss such a deal as well as other matters like unemployment. The Daily Mirror on March 2 ran a front-page article entitled End This Angry Silence, in which it attacked the Prime Minister and the unions for not “getting together”. The Tory Government was dangling possible changes in the Industrial Relations Bill as a carrot to prompt the TUC to immediate action on the postal workers’ strike. What was the point, Heath’s representatives asked Feather, in talking about the TUC restraining strikes at a time when one of the biggest unions in the country was “paralysing the nation” by refusing arbitration?

Only if the post strike was stopped on terms of arbitration would the Government talk to the TUC. These arguments carried much weight with the “committee room” bureaucrats in the TUC who had resented not being asked to Downing Street since the Tory Government was elected. Here at last was a chance to get into a committee room with the Government again. With such a prize, who cared about Tom Jackson and his Post Office workers? Indeed, the more crusted of the General Council reactionaries welcomed an excuse to sell the postmen down the river. They were terrified by the prospect not of the postmen’s defeat, but of their victory. For if the postmen’s strike had forced the Government to concede substantial wage claims, what fantastic class forces would be unleashed in all the other unions? How would the diehards in the General Council hope in such circumstances to exert the “control” over their members to which they had become accustomed? How would they be able to stop them from engaging in open conflict with the Government, the employers – who knows, the whole structure of society? Such thoughts struck terror into the kind hearts and coronets who make up the TUC General Council. And when the Government issued its ultimatum: No talks while the postal strike is on, the mind of the General Council was rapidly made up. Tom Jackson and his 200,000 postal workers would have to go to the wall. They could rely on Jackson not to expose their double-dealing. At no time after the fateful meeting on February 24 did Jackson openly attack the General Council or any member of it for knifing his union in the back. An open appeal to the rank and file of the unions, with the real facts of the sell-out thoroughly exposed, would have won for Jackson, if not the necessary funds, at any rate the continued support of his rank and file. Yet Jackson chose to keep mum, to take the blame for the decision, and to retain his seat and his friends on the General Council. The despair and disillusionment of his members is so much the worse for his failure properly to explain to them the real reasons for the strike’s collapse. On the evening of March 3, several hours after the UPW executive had gone to the Department of Employment to lick the boots of Mr. Ryland and Mr. Carr, Mr. Victor Feather blandly called a press conference at Congress House. He had, he said, sent a letter for delivery to 10 Downing Street asking Mr. Heath for “early talks between the Government and the TUC on the worsening economic situation”. “Previously”, wrote the Daily Telegraph Industrial Correspondent the next day (March 4), “the TUC has offered to discuss wage restraint if the Government would first undertake to drop the Industrial Relations Bill. Now, although killing the Bill remains the TUC’s hope, it is no longer adopting such a rigid approach which would make fruitful discussions virtually impossible.” The reply from Downing Street was almost instantaneous. Mr. Heath paused only to discover from his Minister of Employment that the post strike was all but over. He then picked up the telephone, got through to Congress House and courteously assured Mr. Feather that he was only too willing to talk to the General Council. The following morning the front page of the Daily Mirror carried two headlines. “POST STRIKE IS OVER”, it shouted, and then, next door, in smaller type: “HEATH BREAKS THE ANGRY SILENCE”. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian is by no stretch of the imagination a revolutionary socialist. He is, however, in close touch with Tom Jackson, and he knew what had gone on at the General Council. “The trade union movement”, he wrote on March 4, “made warlike noises. It edged towards a confrontation with the Government; but when it came to the point, it at once thought better of it and quickly drew back. The trade union movement was shown to be lacking not only in will but also totally in strategic sense. The lessons of that unedifying spectacle will not be lost on other trade unions, on public opinion or on the Government.” Part 5. The Lessons The immediate effects of the collapse of the post strike will be felt by other workers in the public sector, such as railwaymen and teachers. Union leaders who allowed the Government to take on the postal workers in an isolated struggle are now using the defeat as an excuse to lumber their own members with wage increases that will not keep up with rises in the cost of living. The rank and file in these unions must make sure that the postal workers’ strike is the last in which the Government divides and rules in this way. They should demand the building up of a “Public Sector Alliance” of different unions to wage a unified fight back. For postmen, the immediate results of the collapse will be even more serious. Whatever is gained or lost at the committee of inquiry, Ryland (who must surely be promoted as Post Office chairman) will seek to use the strike’s aftermath to cut down on postal services (and workers). His eyes are fixed on Sweden, allegedly the home of “progress” and the “Welfare State”, where postal services have been progressively slashed over the past decade. There is only one postal delivery outside the commercial centre of Stockholm. Rural deliveries and collections have been cut back to almost nothing. No parcels are delivered. Meanwhile, the telephone service is expanding at a rapid rate and making huge profits for the firms which feed off it.

Meanwhile, the telephone service is expanding at a rapid rate and making huge profits for the firms which feed off it. All Ryland’s statement’s during and after the strike commit him to a Swedish policy which could mean massive redundancies among postmen, quite apart from the slashing of the “public service”, especially to those (the majority) who cannot afford telephones. For the trade union movement in general, the Post Office dispute is a major setback. An arrogant and offensive Government, composed entirely of wealthy businessmen, will now attempt to ride roughshod over the demands of workers elsewhere. They will not find it easy. The TUC General Council sell-out of the postmen can be compared in its cynicism to their sell-out of the miners in 1926, but the General Strike of that year was the last gasp of a working class locked out and bullied for half a decade. Today, the strength of the workers’ anger is much more powerful. The refusal among workers to be pushed around by the wealthy is stronger now than ever before in history. The Government, in spite of its victory over the Post Office workers, will not find the workers submissive to a class assault of the type which they are contemplating. The spirit of postmen, and of workers everywhere, is far from broken. How can that spirit be preserved, and expanded? Certainly not, as the post strike shows, by “leaving it to the executive” or, even less, “leaving it to the General Council”. Rank-and-file postmen have learned the hard way how trade union leaders, when it comes to the crunch, are prepared to make squalid deals even with reactionary Governments in order to “pacify” their own members. The Union of Post Office Workers’ Conference at Bournemouth this spring will be a lively affair, and already branch rules throughout the country are being re-written to allow more participation and control by the rank and file. There is a more attractive doctrine, however, which has also been exposed by the post strike. In the four years from 1966 – 70 during which a Labour Government carried out policies of which any Tory Government would have been proud, many workers lost hope in politics, or political solutions. They have imagined since that militancy and solidarity in their unions will be enough to win their battles. Any attempt to link their strike with the struggles of workers elsewhere, in Britain or in the world, has been suspected as politics, which has become in many workers’ minds another word for opportunism or careerism. Unfortunately, however, the assault on the workers, as the post strike so clearly proves, is becoming more and more political. The tiny group of rich and powerful men who control industry and property are determined to defend their class superiority from incessant demands by the workers. They have organised politically, through their representatives in the Conservative Party, to pick off each group of workers, isolate them, humiliate them and break their spirit. Their struggle is not isolated in individual industries or factories. They operate as a tightly-knit group of politically motivated men. And the fight against their operations cannot be won by isolated acts of militancy, however prolonged and however heroic. The reaction from workers, if it is ever to succeed, must also be political. That does not mean voting every five years for a Labour candidate. It means linking different struggles, and pointing out the common enemy in each of them. It means binding the fight in this country with similar fights abroad. It means mobilising people into a permanent political counter-offensive against the Tories and the class they represent. For more than 25 years workers have been told by their political representatives that the capitalist system works and that all that matters is to work it efficiently. Now, after 25 years of full employment and capitalist expansion, the system is as decadent, as corrupt, as unfair, as violent, as ridiculous and contemptible as it ever was. The humiliation of the postmen and the part played in it by the TUC General Council is only a start. Things will get worse for the workers unless they can build for themselves a new political instrument capable of breaking through the thin crust of contemporary capitalism and creating a society where the wealth which workers produce is used for them, not against them. Top of the page Last updated on 19 August 2016

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Will Labour make a difference? (November 1991) From Socialist Review, No.147, November 1991, pp.8-11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Electoral politics are set to dominate in the coming months. Labour’s fortunes once again seem to have revived since their dip in the summer. Here Paul Foot argues why a Labour vote is important but why we can expect very little from a Kinnock government THE WHEEL of party politics is turning. The Tory government is in the most dreadful mess. Every bound for freedom seems to land its baffled ministers deeper in the mire. Each attempt since Thatcher’s sacking to rush to the polls – January, June, November – has been thwarted by a dramatic by-election reversal or a sudden shift to Labour in the opinion polls. At the Tory conference the only real cheers were for Lady Macbeth herself, gloating and whimpering at the distress she was inflicting on her former colleagues. Labour had a good conference. Everyone agrees on that. Even the most reactionary political correspondents praised a ‘responsible’ speech from Neil Kinnock. Voices of dissent were effectively blurred by the architecture of the conference platform, specially designed to highlight the ‘new team,’ and the natural reluctance of delegates to rock this suddenly sturdy boat. Everywhere among socialists, there is a frisson of excitement that at last it looks as if the Tories are on the way out, and that for the first time in many peoples’ adult lives, the British people will elect a Labour government. Almost everywhere, however, that excitement is muted by a feeling of unease at the price Labour has paid to achieve this winning position. This unease is not confined to the increasing band of socialists who have been flung out of the Labour Party; nor to the hundreds of Labour Party socialists who have signed the open letter denouncing Labour’s retreats. Almost any socialist must be worried by the grim, determined effort of the leadership to wipe every vestige of socialism from the party’s programme. A former commitment to get rid of nuclear weapons, which were ostensibly there to deter an enemy, has been replaced by an almost maniacal determination to keep those weapons when there is no enemy to deter. Former commitments to repeal all anti-trade union laws and to take back into public ownership the monopolies Thatcher privatised have been replaced by half-promises to restore some union privileges, and to buy 2 percent in British Telecom (provided the Tories don’t sell off another batch, as they plan to do). AFTER RETREATS like this, isn’t it true, as one socialist said at a conference fringe meeting, ‘that there really isn’t any difference between Labour policies and Tory ones?’ The answer comes back at once: of course there is a difference. Just to take a handful at random from the Brighton conference: a pledge to introduce a Freedom of Information Act, a pledge to abolish the House of Lords, a pledge to wipe out the infamous NHS Hospital Trusts, a pledge to change the law which allows convictions on the basis of uncorroborated confessions. Nor is the difference only on specific policies. Anyone watching the two conferences can tell at once that one is pro-trade union, pro-poor, pro-reform while the other is reactionary to the core: anti-union, racialist, militaristic and sanctimonious. The differences in the conferences reflect the fundamental difference between the two organisations. The Tory Party is financed by banks and big business. Its economic strategy is to protect profits and its ideology is based therefore on the most relentless legal and moral disciplines for those who do the work. The Labour Party came into being to represent trade unions in parliament. The unions still have the decisive vote on policy, on the National Executive and on finance. The difference between the parties is in the class base of their origins and their support. Employers vote Tory; workers vote Labour. Of course individuals from each section cross over to the other side, but the class differential between the parties is plain for all to see. This is the background to the familiar cry which is raised at election times by principled socialists who are shocked at the betrayals of the Labour leadership. ‘There is no difference between them’ they cry. ‘Don’t Vote!’ The act of abstentionism, perhaps a little flurry of excitement as a ballot paper is spoiled or even burned, is held out as a grand gesture of principle. To most of the ten million people who always vote Labour, though, it comes across as an act of betrayal. For of all the obvious differences between the two parties, the most obvious is that if the Tories win, reactionaries and employers throughout the land rejoice – and celebrate their rejoicing in more wretchedness for the dispossessed. If Labour wins, the workers feel more confident. So the abstainers cut themselves from any further argument or discussion. Their principles are reserved only for themselves. SO SOCIALISTS, quite rightly, vote Labour. They do so out of instinctive solidarity with the party which draws its support from the dispossessed, and is founded on the organised working class. But what then? Does it follow from a Labour vote that society will change for the better? Surely, at the very least, a different political atmosphere will be created, a collective, trade union sort of atmosphere which will contrast very pleasantly with Thatcher’s grim decade? The answer to those questions have very little to do with who supports the Labour Party, who votes for it and what its leaders say to conferences. The answers go to the very root of the illusion which dominates politics in all the Western democracies. The illusion is that governments get elected on policies, which they are then at liberty to put into practice. The party writes the programme.

The party writes the programme. The people vote for it. The party then forms a government which turns those policies into the law of the land. This was the grand idea of the ‘representative democracy’ which first stirred in England in the revolution of the 17th century, and was taken up with much more force at the time of the French Revolution. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man denounced all governments which were not chosen by the people. To the government of the day, which was chosen by a handful of brigands and courtiers, this was dangerous subversion, and Paine was sentenced to death for it. Similarly, when the Chartists in the late 1830s and 1840s demanded the vote as part of an organised working class movement of strikes and physical force, the rulers set their faces firmly against the proposal. The idea of a representative democracy is essentially distasteful to a class of people who owe their wealth to the process of robbing the majority. Exploitation of the many by the few is the most hideously undemocratic process imaginable. How could the minority exploiters agree to a system where the majority can vote? After the Chartists were beaten in open class warfare, the British ruling class, then the strongest and most cunning in the world, applied itself to this question. It was obviously impossible forever to resist the popular demand for the vote. Was it not possible, however, to concede the vote bit by bit, making sure that the concessions coincided with relative industrial peace, and above all making sure that as each new concession led to new governments, those governments could be constrained against any action which would threaten the wealth and power of the ruling class? So, for a hundred years (1867-1970) the vote was conceded piecemeal. Governments were elected of many different colours; but the real power, especially the economic power, stayed exactly where it was. The result was that the representative system was deprived of the very essence of representation: the ability of the government to act in the interests of the people who voted for it. How was this done? By keeping tight in the clutches of the ruling class the areas in society where real decisions were made and acted upon. Industrialists who in a day could decide the real fate of thousands if not millions of workers were not affected by the elections. They remained in charge of their industries. So did the banks, which by a flick of the wrist could transfer billions of pounds and ‘bankrupt Britain.’ The media moguls were free after the election as well as before it to blabber on incessantly about the Red Menace. Judges and civil servants gloried in the fact that they were not elected. Army officers and police chiefs were rarely threatened by a change of government, even when they were openly hostile to that government. All these people came from the same class. They had real power, and were prepared to use it to protect their class against any elected government. Thus the parliaments (which were quickly set up all over the world as soon as the success of the British experiment became obvious to other rulers) became, in Lenin’s phrase, ‘mere talking shops.’ The British Labour Party is nearly a hundred years old. It has formed the government many times. The most consistent theme of all those governments has been their impotence to act on behalf of the people who elected them. The most obvious example is the biggest issue of all: unemployment. Every Labour leader promised to end ‘the scourge of unemployment’, as Labour’s first Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald put it. Under MacDonald’s government, unemployment tripled in two years. Why was that? His ministers did not want to increase unemployment. But they had absolutely no control over it. It rose on the high tide of capitalist recession, whose vicious consequences were quite outside the control of governments. Again, every Labour leader says he is a ‘peacemonger’, but a peacemonger Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee took the decision, without even consulting the Cabinet, to make the British atom bomb. Wars of all kinds – such as the US war in Vietnam – may be savaged by Labour in opposition, though recently, in the Falklands and the Gulf, even opposition Labour leaders have shown what good warmongers they can be. Without fail, the same wars are enthusiastically supported when the Labour peacemongers make it into Whitehall. Why? Not because they suddenly become vicious, but because the massed ranks of generals, civil servants, allies etc present the ministers with an option they can’t refuse. SO MUCH for the big issues – the ones which determine the course of governments. Most people nowadays don’t imagine any more that Labour can or will change things drastically. They hope instead for minor reforms, like the ones mentioned earlier – and for a ‘better political atmosphere.’ But if anything Labour’s record over minor reforms is even worse. In 1966, for instance, as soon as it took office for the second time, with a huge majority in peace-time full employment conditions, a Labour government under Harold Wilson abolished all prescription charges on National Health Service medicines. The charges they abolished were very low – only 15p each – and the amount of money ‘lost’ to the Exchequer by their abolition was a trifling £7 million. In 1967, Labour devalued the pound and negotiated a huge loan with the International Monetary Fund. The IMF insisted on replacing charges for health prescriptions. The amount of money, compared to the mega-millions at stake, was peanuts. But the IMF negotiators were not satisfied until they had crushed this last, tiny little egalitarian reform. The whole record of the two most recent Labour governments is littered with similar defeats. Back then to that optimistic argument that Labour will do some small things to make things better.

Back then to that optimistic argument that Labour will do some small things to make things better. What small things? Will the civil servants, so influential in the past, suddenly throw up their hands and allow a Freedom of Information Act to pry into their affairs? Will the forces able to smash the 1966 Labour government’s abolition of health charges bend over backwards to help Robin Cook restore National Health Service control over hospitals? Will the police and judges tolerate still more reforming legislation curbing their powers to convict? The evidence of the past suggests that in all these matters, and in many more besides, the new Labour government will be more at the mercy of the real, unelected rulers than any other Labour government since the war. For unlike the last two governments, which came to office in conditions of relative economic stability, this one will be confronted by the gravest international economic crisis since the 1930s. The circumstances in which Neil Kinnock takes office will be more like those faced by Ramsay Macdonald in 1929 than by Harold Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s. WILL THE ATMOSPHERE be ‘better’? Of course it may be for a short time. The very transfer of office gives rise to a certain euphoria, especially among the new ministers. But the lesson of 1976-1979 is that as Labour turned from one desperate ruling class remedy to another, the political atmosphere began to stink. Fascists became respectable, and won a lot of votes. My own sharpest memory of my parliamentary candidature for the newly-formed SWP in 1977 was canvassing a shop steward in a bus factory. He told me he was fed up with the government and had thought of voting for me. Instead, however, he said, rather shamefacedly he was voting for the fascists. I got 300 votes, the fascists got over 2000. This was the measure of the ‘better atmosphere’ created by a Labour government which is driven to a prolonged attack on the people who vote Labour. The grim truth is the next Labour government will make no real difference to the fearful chaos to which the Tories have reduced so much of working class Britain. It is a grim message – but it is hopeless only if, like our principled abstentionist, everything begins and ends at the ballot box. The ruling class controls industry, banks, the state machine. But is not omnipotent. It is constantly bemused by the unpredictability of its own economic system, blundering around in darkness, not knowing when next it will be hit by a recession or a Stock Exchange crash. Much worse than such bumps in the night is the constant threat from the organised workers: the nightmare of 1972, when the lights really did go out and the British ruling class trembled in terror of the new union power. When workers organise and fight, the rulers have to stand and fight as well. Often they lose, and concede, and then there is real change. The pattern of politics, the state of the political atmosphere, has very little connection with elections, or which government is in power. All these things are determined far more clearly by the rise and fall of class confidence. So the political atmosphere for Labour turned out to be ‘better’ under the Tory Prime Minister Heath when the organised workers were strong and confident than under his successor, the Labour Prime Minister Wilson, when the workers lost their fighting spirit. For a hundred years the eyes of most socialists have been fixed on parliament as the source of change. That parliament has a rotten record, not because it is a representative institution but because it isn’t. Those who continue to put their political faith and devote their political activity to the Labour Party are condemning the whole movement to still further evidence of the old adage that political impotence corrupts. The worst result of this is passivity. ‘Wait for the next election’ means ‘do nothing now.’ Don’t argue, don’t agitate, don’t go on strike – just wait until you can vote. That way the parliamentary illusionists disarm our side of its only real ability to change things. There is an overwhelming case for building a socialist organisation not where there isn’t any power, but where there is: a fighting organisation which organises all the time where people are prepared to hit back against the exploitation and degradation all around them. The nightmare of that shop steward, turning in wretchedness and disillusionment to the fascists after three years of Labour government, need never return. But its only antidote is a credible socialist organisation which holds out to such people a real alternative and a real hope. We used to say: ‘Vote Labour Without Illusions’, but in a time when most people don’t have many illusions left that doesn’t seem quite right. A better slogan for the next few months might be: ‘Kick out the Tories, and keep kicking.’ Top of the page Last updated on 30.12.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The great society (22 July 1989) From Socialist Worker, 22 July 1989. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 271–273. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The main point about the building societies when they started out was that no one should make a profit from them. They were ‘mutual societies’ into which people who wanted to save money to buy a house or on the security of a house they already owned could do so in the certain knowledge that no one would rip them off. The societies were patronised in the early years by better-off working class people (or worse-off middle class people, which is pretty well the same thing). They developed most strongly in northern cities like Halifax, Leeds, Bradford and Bingley, from which they took their names. Most of their patrons subscribed to what could be called the ‘liberal tradition’ of the last 25 years of the last century, the sort of ‘decent, sturdy’ folk much patronised by bourgeois social historians. The societies had nothing to do with socialism. On the contrary, the money they collected was assiduously invested in capitalist industry and services. As time went on, and more and more people built houses, so more and more people deposited their money in building societies. By the end of the 1960s, when the balance of surplus value from housing tipped away from rent (council housing) to interest (so called ‘home ownership’), the building societies’ vast funds were an important marker on the capitalist landscape. Hunger As the Thatcher administration released more and more of society to the unfettered control of capitalists, gentlemen at the top of society turned their eyes with ever increasing hunger on the building societies. If only the outdated restrictions which made it impossible to profit from the societies were removed! What endless riches this opened up! It wasn’t just a question of owning shares. Nor was it even a matter of raising top peoples’ salaries, though that of course was a crucial factor. The real treasure would be the release of the societies’ funds from the strict legal controls which had existed when the societies were mutual. It was, in short, a treasure hunt of unfathomable wonders for the ruling class. Slowly, surreptitiously, they started to woo the investors whose vote was required if the change was to be accomplished. The investors were bribed. They were promised the vast sum of £100 in free shares which they could convert, if they were lucky, into about £116 if they sold them on the first day. Sweetened by this bribe, the investors in the Abbey National voted by a huge majority in favour of the change. So now it is legal to make profits out of the Abbey National. All the old, decent, ‘sturdy’ restrictions have been swept away, and the free market reigns. It is hard in the whole grim history of Thatcherism to imagine a more cynical or foul development than this one, which was of course enthusiastically applauded all over the newspapers, including the sturdy liberal ones. Hitches There were, however, some hitches in the flotation. Because they had to send out millions of bribes, the managers boobed. Tens of thousands of people got two lots of bribes. Many more thousands didn’t get their bribes on time, and so couldn’t cash them in on the stock exchange casino. Such people were convulsed by fury. They felt they had ‘right’ to their little bribe. None of them even for a moment thought where their little bit ‘extra’ was coming from. Did privatisation suddenly open up a pot of money that wasn’t there before? Or wouldn’t it come, as it always does, from a worse service, a cut in office workers’ pay, an attack on the unions and all the rest of the reality of Thatcher’s dream? The managers were shocked by the stampede which their own bribes and bungling had caused. Sitting as they are on a fortune, they scoffed at the investors they had fooled as the latter rang up (burning out the switchboard), and shouted or swore their indignation. Mr John Fry, general manager of the Abbey National, told the press haughtily: ‘There is an enormous greed factor out there.’ I like the phrase ‘out there’. The ‘greed factor’ in the building societies is not ‘out there’ at all, but right ‘in there’, with Mr Fry and his shortly to be enriched colleagues. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Corruption Dirty Business (March 2002) From Socialist Review, No.261, March 2002, p.16-17. Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. With New Labour facing yet another cash for favours scandal it’s little wonder, says Paul Foot, that the public consider them even more sleazy than the Tories Oh dear, oh dear. The old Tory governments of Thatcher and Major, New Labour assured us, were ‘drowned in sleaze’. Corruption was their undoing, and the constant pledges of Labour’s new, young, clean politicians, led by Blair, Brown and Mandelson, were going to clean up the whole mess. Now New Labour is back for a second term with an impregnable majority, and what is this? An opinion poll finds that the public consider New Labour even more sleazy than the Tories ever were! Blair and Co regularly mock and contradict that finding. The high peak of their argument appears to be that two Tories, Aitken and Archer, went to prison for corruption, while New Labour champions are all out of jail. The public are unimpressed. Aitken and Archer went to prison not for corruption, but for perjury, to clear their name of allegations that were perfectly true. Long after he was known to be a corrupt liar, Archer was favoured and ennobled by Tory prime ministers and befriended by Labour leaders. Aitken was entirely cleared of corruption in his arms dealing by a unanimous vote of an all-party House of Commons select committee. On the other hand, almost the first act of the New Labour government was to erase from its programme one of the few outright commitments in it – to ban tobacco advertising. Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One motor racing billionaire, objected to the ban for the very good reason that by far the biggest beneficiary of tobacco advertising was Formula One motor racing. Ecclestone was a Tory. Why should such a brash tycoon have any influence on a Labour government? Answer – he had given £1 million to the Labour Party. A meeting was held in Downing Street and the outcome was obvious. It was plainly grotesque to continue with a policy that would damage so bountiful a benefactor. The policy was ‘revised’. Tobacco advertising on Formula One cars was permitted. Then someone accused the prime minister of corruption, so the Labour Party gave the money back to the millionaire. Its policy had changed for nothing. Now here come another trio of millionaires, called Hinduja. They were worried about their security because they were wanted in their home country, India, on corruption charges connected with the sale to the Indian government of guns from the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors. They gave extravagant parties in London, at which a perennial honoured guest was Peter Mandelson. Mandelson was worried about the Dome, a ludicrous white elephant on which his and New Labour’s reputation depended. The Dome was running out of money. The Hindujas sprang forward with another £1 million. Almost at once they got the precious British passports they wanted. Mandelson rang the Home Office to ensure their applications were treated with proper respect – and, would you believe it, they were. Mandelson forced to resign Meanwhile Mandelson himself was in a spot of bother. He had borrowed nearly half a million pounds from his cabinet colleague, Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson, in order to buy himself a luxury home in Notting Hill. He didn’t declare the loan, and when it was finally exposed Mandelson resigned. Quick as a flash, he was back in the cabinet, in good time for him to ring the Home Office about the Hindujas, and when that phone call was exposed he was sacked again. Now he is getting ready for a ‘comeback’. This is more than can be said for Geoffrey Robinson, Blair’s first Paymaster General, who has now been found to have been a beneficiary of the generous crook Robert Maxwell – to the tune of £200,000, no less, the cheque which Robinson just cannot find. Robinson’s connections with the accountants Arthur Andersen, which raised funds for New Labour, have been exposed in a recent book by Tom Bower, just in time for the Enron scandal. Enron went bust last year in a spectacular bankruptcy caused by various imaginative accounting devices dreamed up by Andersen. From 1994 to 1996 Andersen’s sister company employed Patricia Hewitt, a rising star in New Labour, and cooperated generously with New Labour before and after the 1997 election. Its main aim in life – to remove the ban on it imposed by the former Tory government because of its dishonesty over the DeLorean scandal – was achieved within seven months of New Labour coming to office. Now Blair is in trouble for writing a letter to the prime minister of Romania begging him to hand over his privatised steel industry to yet another Indian millionaire. This one gave £125,000 to the Labour Party, though Blair insists he never even knew it. So straight is he that he doesn’t even know who gives money to Labour – until he reads it in the Sunday Telegraph or gets denounced for it in the Commons by Iain Duncan Smith. This lot are drowning in sleaze, and their excuses are pathetic. It is easy to write off each allegation and each disaster as a sign of personal weakness or greed. The reason, however, is much less delicate. Corruption is not a by – product of capitalism-it is an integral part of it. A system that divides the people of the world into rich and poor, and then hands over all political, economic and military power to the rich, depends constantly on the ability of the rich to buy influence and power. In his 1987 book Corruption in British Politics 1895-1930, G.R. Searle notices how the natural tendency to corruption of the British political system in the 19th century, under Liberals and Tories, began to wane after 1918 with the advent of the labour movement and universal suffrage. This was because the power and thrust of Labour came not from above, from the big corporations or mega-rich individuals, but from below, from individuals hostile to great wealth, and from trade unions. The more democratic the trade unions, the less vulnerable they were to corruption. As long as Labour relied for its finance on its own constituent organisations, notably the unions, corruption was held at bay. It was the removal of that ballast by Blair, Mandelson and Co in the New Labour offensive of the 1990s that floated Labour so dramatically into the same sort of corruption that had swamped the Tories – and even worse. The challenge thrown out to British labour by the great wave of sleaze that now swamps its leaders is not to seek to wriggle out of the allegations by lies and prevarication, but to return to the democratic principles and organisations that brought the party into being in the first place, to public ownership and public accountability. Capitalism will always be corrupt, but socialism and its modern champions need not be. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Life Under Labour 1 Law and Order (April-May 1970) From Life Under Labour, International Socialism (1st series), No.43, April-May 1970, pp.13-14. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. As the general election approaches the fundamental dilemma of the Conservative Party intensifies: how, within the framework of a fully-employed economy, to make Conservative propaganda against a Government which has consistently carried out Conservative policies with a great deal more effect than the Conservative Party could have done. To ‘knock the unions’ is as unattractive to a future Tory Minister of Labour as it is inconsistent with 13 years’ Conservative co-operation with union leaders and six years’ Conservative opposition to Labour’s incomes policy on grounds of the need for ‘free collective bargaining’. To raise the question of increased immigration control is to remind the electorate that Labour has operated immigration control far more stringently than did the Conservatives, and is anyway to pave the way for further progress for Enoch Powell. On all other major areas of home and foreign policy the two Front Benches are agreed. ‘Law and Order’ – the unoriginal slogan which emerged from the Shadow Cabinet meeting at Selsden Park in January was devised primarily to solve this propaganda problem. It enabled men like Quintin Hogg, who had demonstrated scrupulous ‘responsibility’ on racial matters, to ring his bells once more and announce that ‘Mr Wilson is presiding over the biggest crime wave this century’. The slogan produced a quiver of joy in every Conservative committee room. If the Tories could not satisfy their supporters on getting rid of the blacks or cracking down on the reds, they would at least make sure that ‘suitable punishment’ was meted out to ‘thugs and agitators’. The new Tory slogans, of course, had nothing to do with the facts. An article in the Sunday Times (March 1) showed that in England and Wales, although the numbers of ‘indictable crimes known to the police’ is rising year by year, the percentage annual increase is a great deal lower now than it was in the years from 1957 to 1964. In 1967, for instance, the percentage increase was less than 1 per cent and in the two years since it has hovered at 6 per cent (compared with 13 per cent in 1957; nearly 15 per cent in 1958; 9.5 per cent in 1960; 8 per cent in 1961; 10 per cent in 1962). The figures themselves are also inaccurate as a gauge of the crime rate. Crimes known to the police tend to rise and fall according to the efficiency of police records, and the crash programme of merger and computerisation which has been carried out in the police force during the years of Labour Government has of itself given a boost to the reporting of crimes. An even more striking example of the fantasy of the law and order propaganda comes from Scotland. Fantastic frenzy was whipped up in the Scottish newspapers, notably the Scottish Daily Express and the Sunday Post, over the murder in January of two policemen by a former policeman turned bank robber. When the murderer was sentenced to 25 years in prison, the newspapers frothed with fury at the inadequacy of the sentence. Leading Conservative spokesmen in Glasgow, notably Baillie James Anderson, convenor of the city’s police committee, indicated that without stiffer sentences, capital punishment, and the arming of the police, the city could not cope with its crime wave. The wave, however, is ebbing fast. In 1969 all crime in Glasgow dropped by 4.3 per cent (it had dropped by 4.8 per cent in 1968). Violent crime dropped by 10 per cent. The figures for all Scotland showed an overall decrease of some 5 per cent. These figures were tucked away on inside pages while the frenzied campaign for stiffer sentences was continued. The statistical absurdities of the ‘law and order’ propaganda are, however, only part of a much wider authoritarian fallacy: that there is a direct relationship between deterrence and crime, and that the stricter the sentences the less the ‘unruly minority’ will break society’s ‘rules’. It is in underwriting this fallacy that the Labour Government has helped to pave the way for the Tories’ law and order campaign. Labour’s Criminal Justice Act, steered through Parliament by the liberal, reforming Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, contains a host of provisions which strengthen the power of the police and the courts. Police powers of search, for instance, are greatly increased under the Act. Majority verdicts considerably improve the . chances of conviction (Eamonn Smullen, former Federation steward, at the Shell Mex strike in 1956 and Gerry Docherty were convicted in Leeds in February on very dubious evidence of conspiring to obtain arms for Southern Ireland – by a 10 to 2 jury verdict). Most important of all, people accused of assault, or of assaulting a policeman can no longer opt for trial by jury, but must be tried by a magistrate. Since magistrates will always believe a policeman, this means certain conviction for assault – perhaps the most common of the variety of charges brought against demonstrators. Labour’s policy in the prisons has been even worse. All the Fabian pamphlets about the necessity of penal reform were torn up as soon as Lord Mountbatten wrote his report on prison security following the rash of highly-publicised prison escapes in 1965. Mountbatten’s recommendations were followed to the letter. Many of the smaller privileges and comforts so much looked forward to in prisons were instantly abolished. Instead were introduced the horrors of the maximum security wings and increased pounding by warders. The Parole Board, presided over by the ubiquitous Lord Hunt (who has failed to solve so many of Labour’s problems from Biafra to the B Specials) is a fraud and a farce.

Under Labour, even more than previously, the prisons have been regarded as institutions for turning recidivists into vegetables and vice versa. The welcome reform abolishing capital punishment has been the exception, not the rule. Everywhere else the Labour Government has blandly accepted one of the first rules of capitalist society that where people offend against the laws of property, the solution is to punish them into submission. As a result, the police have been encouraged by the granting of more arbitrary powers to behave in an increasingly arbitrary way. The full force of their venom has been directed, not so much against hardened criminals as against people whom they regard as ideologically unsound: blacks in Brixton; long-hairs in Folkestone; hippies in Piccadilly; the underground Press; and, of course, demonstrators. Already in 1970 a whole string of police prosecutions have been launched against these ‘elements’, almost all of them resulting in severe prison sentences. And with Labour attempting to drown Tory cries for Law and Order the situation is likely to deteriorate further. Persecution in the courts, as trade unionists, demonstrators and Leftish editors have discovered to their cost in recent months in Italy and in France, is one of the most difficult forms of persecution to combat. It isolates militants from the people they represent and wraps the process in a shroud of legal mumbo jumbo. The liberal Press, so full of ‘the rights of the individual’ and ‘equality before the law’ in the safe years of the last two decades, has scuttled for safer fields. It is up to the socialist organisations to mobilise the fight against the increasing authoritarianism in the police and in the courts, whether encouraged by Tories or Labour. Top of the page Last updated on 28.2.2008

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Great Take-Over Plot Reporter Paul Foot Becomes an ‘Interested Shareholder’ to Crack News of the World Revolution ... (16 November 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 97, 16 November 1968, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Two days ago, I set out to discover the faceless ones who threaten the British Press. I skulked for hours in the shady bars of Basle and Threadneedle Street, posing all the while as an ‘interested shareholder’,anxious to do business. Ten minutes in the City of London was enough for me to uncover the first, grim threads of the NEWS OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION, which threatens the calm of British society. Ten days that shook News of the World I CAN NOW REVEAL ... This Revolution is not just a myth or a pipe-dream concocted by harmless entrepreneurs. It is an extremist-indoctrinated FACT. The men behind the plot are not out for fun or a few bob (as many shareholders are) but are high-powered fanatics, interested only in achieving financial power through the devious mechanism of the stock market. Rubbish The story starts in a plush hotel in Geneva where Mr. Derek Jackson meets Mr. Robert Maxwell, Labour MP for Buckingham. Mr. Jackson owns 25 per cent of the voting shares in the News of the World. And for all the world, this looked to the observer like a harmless meeting between two jovial businessmen. The facts, as I discovered from behind my dark-glasses, is different. Despite his sweet-sounding name, Robert Maxwell is no Britisher. He was born in Czechoslovakia, and, since his arrival in this country, he has committed himself ruthlessly to build up a huge publishing Empire. His meeting with the gullible Jackson marks his first big bid for the News of the World. Maxwell, oozing bonhomie, and continuing to use his false name, bamboozled Jackson into selling out his holding. The stage was set for his dramatic bid, which shook the world. Working closely with his friend Mr. Kenneth Keith, executive director of the merchant bank, Hill Samuel, Maxwell launched his 35/- bid on a surprised and frightened stock market. Gibberish But he had not bargained for another gang of power-maniacs, lurking under the umbrella of the Carr family, owners of NoW. Maxwell’s bid gave them a chance to launch a counter-offensive. The story then switches to another foreign country – this time Australia, where Press King Robin Murdoch of News Ltd. picked up his morning paper over breakfast of bacon and eggs and jumped almost immediately to the telephone. In a flash, he had fixed up a partnership with the sinister Carrs to fight Maxwell on his own ground. In a moment, another party was on the scene – Mr. Jocelyn Hambro, who, for all his respectable connections, still bears a name, which, to say the least of it, is not noticeably British. The Carrs and Hambro worked out an ingenious scheme. They met me in a back-street lounge near the Mansion House after I had rung Hambro with the false information that I owned a million voting shares in the News of the World. ‘You see,’ one of the Carrs muttered to me, after I had disguised myself in a pinstripe suit and bowler, ‘we plan to buy out the big shareholders at a massive) price in secret, while we tell all the little shareholders to sit tight and wait. Then we can spring a fast one on Koch (the City underworld always refer to Maxwell by his proper name) at the minimum possible price.’ Nonsense In hundreds of similar meetings all over the City, Hambro’s men worked similar shady deals. Before long, they had a majority of voting shares and the wily Czech had been stymied. A revolution planned in Switzerland had been thwarted by a similar effort from Sydney. For the moment an uneasy peace hangs over the presses. The two factions lie deadlocked by their own fanatical conspiracies. Yet the decent citizens of Britain, the folk who depend on their News of the World with their Sunday breakfasts, have no cause for complacency. As long as Koch-Maxwell, Carr, Murdoch, Jackson, Hambro, Keith and their ilk are on the loose, no one can sleep easy in their beds. As one of the Hambro henchmen told me: ‘We will strike again.’ Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Lessing legend (February 1998 From Socialist Review, No.216, February 1998, pp.26-27. Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Walking In The Shade, Volume two of my autobiography 1949-1962 by Doris Lessing (Harper Collins £20) When they are dead, heroes and heroines cannot let you down. When they are contemporary, still writing and thinking, they can cause the most frightful disillusionment. I still remember my indignation when, more than 20 years ago, I read the last chapter of E.P. Thompson’s book on the Black Acts of the 18th century, Whigs and Hunters. The chapter, which subscribed to the idea of an eternal and consistent rule of law independent of economic circumstances, seemed to me an appalling betrayal of the Marxist clarity of Thompson’s great history book, The Making of the English Working Class. I recall something very similar much later when I started, but could not finish, Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Terrorist, published at the height of Thatcherism during the Great Miners’ Strike. This novel seemed to me nothing more nor less than reactionary propaganda. How could such a ferocious assault on left wing commitment have been mounted by such a committed left winger? Doris Lessing’s early Martha Quest novels are full of life and energy and a passion to change the world. She became a Communist in the most unlikely circumstances – in Rhodesia during the war – and, against all the odds, lived her life according to her principles. The Golden Notebook, which was started in the late 1950s and published in 1962, is one of the great novels of our time. Its central theme is the condescension of women, and the relationship of that condescension to the subordination of the majority of the human race. The Golden Notebook is often described as a ‘women’s book’ and so of course it is. But it is a man’s book too. The novel hardly ever pontificates, but more than anything else I have ever read it grapples with a secular sexual morality which makes it compulsive and compulsory reading for men. After taking part in a debate with Islamicists not long ago at a London college, I was rebuked by one of the women in the audience (they sat separately from the men, and wore veils). ‘If there is no God,’ she asked, ‘how would we know what was right and wrong?’ I was tempted to reply (but didn’t) that for a bit of an answer to this impossible question, The Golden Notebook is a million times better than any religious work. The novel throbs with a passion for liberation: liberation from masculine patronising, from puritanical commandments and enforced stereotypical nuclear families, from baptisms and weddings and all other superstitious ceremonial. Her demand for women’s liberation had nothing of the feminine exclusivity of the separatist women’s liberationists of the 1980s. When she wrote The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing’s socialist commitment, however damaged by the behaviour of male socialists or by Stalinism, was still strong. The point in exposing the absurd ways in which men, including socialist men, treated women was to move forward to a new society in which both sexes could freely take part. The sections in the book entitled the Red Notebook cover the central character’s membership of and disillusionment with the Communist Party before and after the 20th Congress of 1956 in which Nikita Khruschev denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin, his predecessor as general secretary of the Russian Communist Party. The Congress led to mass defection from Communist Parties all over the world. Among those who left the British CP were Edward Thompson and Doris Lessing who, at 37, was in her prime. Two passages from The Golden Notebook stand out in my memory. The first is a report by a member of a British teachers’ delegation to Russia in the early 1950s when Stalin was still alive. At the end of his stay, the teacher reports, he was summoned to meet the general secretary, a plain simple man in a plain simple office smoking a pipe, asking plain simple questions about the state of affairs in Britain, and nodding wisely as the earnest teacher spilled out his plain simple opinions. The story was the most ludicrous fantasy. But the fantasy was shared, The Golden Notebook argues, by almost every such delegate in those times. When I read the passage I remembered the great Clydeside revolutionary Harry McShane telling me in some embarrassment about his visit to Russia as part of a delegation in 1931. ‘I sat listening to the trams outside, and revelling in the fact that these were our trams, the people’s trams.’ It took Harry more than 20 years to discover that they had been ‘just trams after all, trams just like everywhere else’. The point about the fantasy was not simply that iconoclastic socialists demeaned themselves by dreaming up such fantasy and pretending it was true. There was another side to it – the great yearning among socialists for a place and time where rulers have no airs or graces and are, because of the democratic nature of the society they represent, quite normal, secular people whose only aim in government is to run the society as fairly as they can. This yearning comes out more clearly in another remarkable passage when the writer of the Red Notebook recalls her stint as a literary adviser to a Communist newspaper. She publishes an advertisement asking readers to send in their own fictional work. She is astounded by the flood of original material which pours into the offices and the accompanying letters in which the authors, almost all working class people, give vent to their literary ambitions, some political, some romantic, some crude, but all throbbing with desire for a world where such expression is natural and free.

She is astounded by the flood of original material which pours into the offices and the accompanying letters in which the authors, almost all working class people, give vent to their literary ambitions, some political, some romantic, some crude, but all throbbing with desire for a world where such expression is natural and free. The shock of the revelations at the 20th Congress runs through the novel. The Communists in it are angry and disillusioned at the way they have been hoaxed. But the rational arguments which inspired these people is there too. I did not read The Golden Notebook until 25 years after it was written, and for a time could not believe that its author was also responsible for The Good Terrorist. The shock of the comparison sent me scurrying back to find a book by Doris Lessing which corresponded as a turning point, as Edward Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters had done. I think I found it, at least to some extent, in her 1973 novel The Summer Before the Dark, where a liberated woman starts to revel in the sentimental domesticity which Doris Lessing rejected and mocked in her early novels and lifestyle. After that, I was inclined to assume that hers was yet another dreary example of older people abandoning the ideas and zest of their youth and settling for the safe, comfortable and reactionary condescension they once exposed. Such was the prejudice with which I embarked on her new autobiography, especially this second volume which covers the crucial period of her membership of the British Communist Party, the 20th Congress and the writing of The Golden Notebook. ‘And now,’ she writes on page 52, ‘I have to record what was probably the most neurotic act of my life. I decided to join the Communist Party. And this at a time when my "doubts" had become something like a steady, private torment ... To spell out the paradox. All over Europe, and to a much lesser extent the United States, it was the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people who became Communists ... These decent, kind people supported the worst, the most brutal tyranny of our time.’ Why? Her answer nowhere reflects that sympathy and concern for former Communists which is so central to The Golden Notebook. Her only answer is ‘belief’. She explains: ‘This (Communism) was a religious set of mind, identical with that of passionate religious True Believers ... we inherited the mental framework of Christianity.’ This is demonstrable drivel. Pretty well everyone who joined the Party at that time or any other were non-believers, secularists, humanists, people who rejected and argued passionately against religious superstition and a substitute for independent thought. No one joined the Party from ‘belief’. They joined because they were disgusted with the state of capitalist society, because they believed that capitalism had led the world into two world wars and would probably lead to a third, because they hated inequality and improverishment, because they were convinced that the world economy could and should be run on egalitarian lines, and above all because they realised that they could only win a new world by combining their resources with others to fight against the old one. They joined, in short, for rational reasons. The fact that they supported a regime every bit as murderous and tyrannous as anything thrown up by private capitalism must, therefore, be explicable in rational terms. Chief among these was the fact that Stalinist Russia pretended to be socialist, that its economy seemed to be based on planning, not free enterprise, and that its foreign policy appeared to be implacably opposed to that of the free market US. The facts, now accepted by almost everyone, that Russia was not socialist, that its planning was bureaucratic in the interests of its own ruling class, and that its foreign policy was as imperialist as that of the US, were stubbornly resisted by the Stalinists. The refusal to accept these facts, and a party structure founded on Stalin’s Russia where all ideas and inspiration came from the top down and not in the other direction, led to an intellectual tyranny, an abject acceptance of everything which emerged from the Kremlin and its Communist Parties, and an atmosphere of collective lying which understandably still shocks Doris Lessing even though (or perhaps because) she was part of it. ‘I have come to think,’ she concludes, ‘that there is something in the nature of Communism that breeds lies, makes people lie and twist facts.’ She does not, cannot even begin to, justify that sentence. Communism is about the democratic control of the economy, need before greed, public interest before private interest, the pooling and conserving rather than the atomisation and waste of human and natural resources. How can such a concept by its nature ‘make people lie’? It was not Communism nor socialism, but the betrayal of both, which led to people lying in and about Stalinist Russia. Once the essence of socialism, democratic control from below, was jettisoned, everything else, including straight talk and honest accounting, was jettisoned too. The crushing disillusionment which overwhelmed so many Communists in the mid-50s sent them scurrying in many different directions. Perhaps the most interesting part of this book are the letters which Doris Lessing wrote to Edward Thompson in 1956 when he, with John Saville, started the New Reasoner, a journal for former Communists who wanted to stay active socialists. Dorothy Thompson sent the letters to Doris after Edward’s recent death, so we know what she said to him, but not what he said to her. We can only guess from her responses that he was trying to persuade her to stay a committed and campaigning socialist. ‘I know I am a socialist, and I believe in the necessity for revolution when the moment is opportune,’ she replied on 21 February 1957, and then at once argued the exact opposite: ‘But I don’t want to make any more concepts. For myself, I mean. I want to let myself simmer into some sort of knowledge, but I don’t know what it is ... I haven’t got any moral fervour left. No one who feels responsible for the bloodbaths and cynicism of the last 30 years can feel morally indignant about the bloodymindedness of capitalism.

No one who feels responsible for the bloodbaths and cynicism of the last 30 years can feel morally indignant about the bloodymindedness of capitalism. I can’t anyway.’ Doris Lessing, of course, was not at all responsible for a single bloodbath. She had plenty of moral fervour left – she had not even started on The Golden Notebook, after all. Her acceptance of the blame for Stalin’s crimes in such absurd terms is the measure not just of the depth of her disillusionment, but of the abandonment of the socialist zeal which started her off in the first place. The socialist baby was thrown out with the Stalinist bathwater. Like thousands of other former Communists she placed the blame not on the intellectual and political failures of the actual party they joined, but on the very idea of joining a socialist party at all. She identified the chief cause of the failure of the Stalinist parties as the most essential element of socialist commitment, cooperating with others to establish a cooperative world. Once the principle of collective activity, discussion and thought is abandoned, there is nothing left but individual initiative and whim. These desperate letters in 1957 and 1958 contain more clues than anything else about the decline in the power of Doris Lessing’s writing. The abandonment of the ideas of her youth took a long time to complete. If anything, her initial doubts and disillusionment contributed to the wonders of The Golden Notebook. The real decline followed later, taking her, ‘simmering’ on her own, into all sorts of absurdities, weird cult religons, extra-sensory perception, even a campaign to install nuclear shelters at the bottom of every garden. Again and again in this autobiography she reproaches herself for her Communist past, denounces all organised socialists as ‘bigots and fanatics’, lumps Trotsky in with Stalin and rejoices grotesquely (and quite inaccurately) that ‘by the time I had finished The Golden Notebook, I had written my way out of the package’. Can her autobiography then be chucked aside as yet another apology for the existing order from a former socialist who has grown into a petulant reactionary? No, it most certainly cannot. As I look back on the marks I made on this book I am surprised not at all by the number of ‘Oh Nos’ and other exclamations of irritation, but by continuous surprised delight at the flashes of the old Lessing intuition and fury. It is almost as though, as she forces herself to remember her socialist youth, as she summons up what kept her active and militant for so long, her former commitment comes back to inspire her. I single out, just for tasters, a wonderful analysis of Brecht’s Mother Courage; a furious denunciation of the prevailing fashion for putting poor people in prison for not paying fines; a comparison of the mood at Thatcher’s Tory conference with the Nuremburg rallies; bitter and eloquent assaults on the McCarthyite witchhunts in the US, on means testing, on ‘academic polemical writing’; a warm memory of the camaraderie of CND’s Aldermaston marches; and even an expression that ‘somewhere out there is still an honesty and integrity – or so I believe – and a slight shift in our political fortunes would bring that (1945) face of Britain forward. At least, I hope so.’ She has been all round the houses but she has not gone down the drain. There is a lot of the old fire and passion left, and her story, as easy as ever to read, puts flesh and bones on the fictional characters in The Golden Notebook. We organised socialists may have a lot to say to her, but she has some advice for us too. In October 1956, at the height of the crisis of Stalinism, she wrote to Edward Thompson, ‘Unless a communist party is a body of individuals each jealously guarding his or her independence of judgement, it must degenerate into a body of yes men.’ And yes women too, of course, which Doris Lessing has never been. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot [The Devlin Report] (Spring 1966) From The Notebook, International Socialism (1st series), No.24, Spring 1966, pp.6-7. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The Devlin Report on ‘certain matters concerning the Port Transport Industry’, published last August brought few surprises for militants in the docks. Devlin has been called upon many times in the past to help the Government with ‘modernisation’ and ‘rationalisation.’ The Report proposed ‘decasualisation’ of Dock Labour. All dockers should be offered work with the employers. If work is not available the minimum wage rate will be paid by the Board. There was no stated condition for such decasualisation, but the report made it dear that the dockers would have to pay for their new scheme in the ‘ending of restrictive practices.’ It recommended that the National Association of Stevedores and Dockers – the ‘blue’ union – should be represented on the National Joint Council for wages and conditions and on a new subsidiary of the Council – a Modernisation Committee. This recommendation was the result not of any sympathy with the generally militant line of NASD, but with the desire to stamp out unofficial strikes. Devlin and his colleagues – none of whom had ever worked in the docks – felt that the officials even of the most militant union could be bribed into submission. The Committee of Inquiry, apparently, differed among themselves when they discussed the employers. The argument was a familiar one: between those inspired by an ideological faith in private ownership and those who realised that a single employer (if necessary the State) would be able to ‘rationalise’ and ‘modernise’ more easily. They ended up with a weak compromise whereby the 1,500 employers would be scaled down to about 16. This view has recently been severely criticisd by Mr Dudley Perkins, chairman of the Port of London Authority, who, not surprisingly, thinks that the PLA should be the sole employer in the London docks. That such discussions had very little to do with the best interests of the dockers themselves is proved by the near-hysterical language employed in the report when referring to dockers who are not imbued with what the Report describes as ‘a deeper sense of responsibility.’ ‘There is undoubtedly (says the Report in a poignant passage) a minority in the docks of men who are well aware of the damage that can be done to the national interest by disruption in the ports. The source of that power is the misconceived loyalty of the docker and that source must be removed ...’ (p.9) Spread at random throughout the Report are references to ‘wreckers’ and the assertions that all attempts of the dockers to run their own industry should be ruthlessly subordinated to ‘the national interest.’ There are, to sweeten the pill, a number of suggestions, which could well be taken up without conditions, for improving working conditions in the docks. The publication of the Report was followed almost immediately by a series of meetings between Ray Gunter, Minister of Labour, and the docks officials of the TGWU. Once again the dockers themselves were scrupulously barred from attendance. Late in August, following a description of ‘wreckers’ in the docks as ‘economic saboteurs’ from John Stonehouse, Ministry of Aviation Under-Secretary, a Modernisation Committee was set up to implement the main Devlin proposals. Lord Brown of Machrihanish – a Labour peer and former businessman who had done rather well in the export field – was appointed chairman. The TGWU immediately showed an unaccustomed interest in its members, and started to distribute 65,000 leaflets boosting the Devlin Report. On 4 September the general secretary of the NASD, Richard Barratt, accepted the invitation to sit on the Modernisation Committee, as well as the condition attached that he ‘accepted his responsibilities under the Devlin Report.’ The extraordinary collapse of the official NASD leadership as well as the TGWU’s co-operation with the employers and the Government has led to a rapid increase in the influence and effect of the unofficial dockers’ committees. The NASD officials in the North refused to accept the demands of their London leaders that they should stop recruiting members from the TGWU. The ‘unofficial’ Port of London Liaison Committee was greeted with considerable support throughout the country in its demand for a rejection of the Devlin Report and a minimum wage of £18 10s, 50 per cent pensions and sick pay and three weeks holiday. In Bristol, where the dockers were out on unofficial strike for 27 days in a dispute over payment for the loading of packaged timber, the dockers decided to keep their unofficial committee – formed during the strike – and agreed with the demands of the London Committee. The signs are that these unofficial committees may link up; and that their militancy may well exceed by a considerable margin the somewhat characteristic moderation of Jack Dash. The dockers will prove tough obstacles to the Government’s emasculation plans. No group of workers in Britain is less easily pushed around. Further, the dockers know only too well that ‘nationalisation’ through the Dock Labour Boards is a bitter farce. Nearly a third of all dock strikes in the last ten years have been prompted by the arbitrary decisions of the NDLB, which behaves in the tradition of classically arrogant employers. Despite the acceptance of a miserably small wage increase to ‘tide them over’ until Lord Brown’s committee comes forward with its proposals, the signs are that the dockers will respond with the same sort of contempt towards High Court Judges and Ministers of Labour. Top of the page Last updated on 19.10.2006

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot What Have They Got To Hide? Tories, arms and the Scott report (19 August 1995) From Socialist Worker, No. 1456, 19 August 1995, p. 10. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. THE TORIES have again delayed publication of the investigation into politicians involvement in arms deals. The Scott report will now not be published until next year. What will it reveal and why are the Tories so anxious to keep its findings hidden from us? We print extracts from PAUL FOOT’S recent speech at the Marxism 95 conference in London this summer on the scandals that have already emerged. PEOPLE ASK what is so important about the Scott report. Isn’t it a report by a high court judge who learnt law in white South Africa and helped to sequester the miners’ funds in the 1984–5 miners’ strike? I can sum up in the answer in a single word, “secrecy”. One of the reasons the ruling class in this society survive is because they keep from us what they do in spite of parliamentary institutions. The ruling class have to protect themselves against democracy and that’s what this story is about. The Scott inquiry is the most important public inquiry ever held in the history of British politics for this reason. It was set up in a tremendous panic. The government had their backs to the wall, and in order to convince people that it wasn’t just another whitewash they insisted all the old rules about previous inquiries would be dispensed with. There was a circular from Sir Robin Butler, the head of the civil service, saying the Scott inquiry is paramount. A large number of civil servants responded. THE STORY begins with Iraq declaring war on Iran in 1980. The foreign office immediately said it was absolutely opposed to war of every description. And in no circumstances should “lethal equipment” – that was the expression – be exported from Britain to either side in the conflict. But at the same time British businesses were determined to make money. So, while the foreign office was putting out that statement, John Nott, the secretary of state for defence, wrote to the Iraqi ambassador in London about a contract to build an entire munitions complex in Basra, Iraq, in which British firms played an enormous part. He said if anything goes wrong we will pay for it. This difference between selling them arms and saying they were not selling lethal equipment went on until three politicians – Sir Richard Loose, Sir Adam Butler and Paul Channon – decided that something ought to be done about it. These three had all – by complete coincidence – been at university together and they were the ministers of state at the foreign office, the defence ministry and the department of trade. They drew up a series of guidelines. The first was that we should maintain our consistent refusal to supply any lethal equipment to either side. The second was that, subject to that overriding consideration, we will attempt to fulfil existing contracts and obligations. Huge sighs of relief went through all the big companies which sell arms equipment. The third added we should not in future approve orders for defence equipment which in our view would significantly enhance the capability of either side to prolong the conflict. Then a curious thing happens. Having decided on these guidelines, the three decide they are not going to publish them. Why? The guidelines went to the prime minister – Margaret Thatcher – and she said, “Hold on a minute. I am negotiating the biggest arms deal in the history of the world with Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia are friendly with Iraq.” They didn’t publish the guidelines for a whole year until Thatcher and Michael Heseltine – who declares himself completely clean on all these matters – signed the £20 billion contract. They set up a working group at the Ministry of Defence to interpret the guidelines. It was controlled by an organisation called the Defence Export Sales Organisation (DESO). DESO was set up by a Labour government and was a part of the Ministry of Defence whose sole purpose was to flog weapons abroad. At one arms working group meeting – it has emerged in the Scott inquiry – there were seven people, of whom six were marketing directors for specific arms companies, deciding who gets an export licence. So how much – in terms of arms – went to Iraq from 1985 until the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988? The government always say very little – only £226 million of military equipment. But they left out of their calculation what I call “the plucky little king” syndrome. Every time you hear the “plucky little king” it only ever applies to one person – the King of Jordan, their oldest ally. Alan Clark – the nutter who lives in a castle – was a minister throughout all this period. Because he is mad he blurts out things. He told the inquiry half the stuff went through Jordan. All the trickier items – that was his expression. “Were they nuclear?” he was asked. But he didn’t know. AT THE end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 there was enthusiasm In the West because Saddam Hussein was building up a whole armoury in Iraq. There was a tremendous opportunity to make money. The problem was the guidelines. So in December 1988 three ministers of state – Waldegrave at the foreign office, Alan Clark at the Ministry of Defence and Trefgarne at the department of trade – held a secret meeting to devise new guidelines. They changed the rules so it was alright to send arms for defence. As a result the amount of equipment that went to Iraq grew by ten times in the first year and by 100 times by the time the scandal came to light. These three ministers decided not to publish the fact they had changed the guidelines. When anyone in parliament asked, “Have you changed your policy because the fighting is over?” the answer was no.

When anyone in parliament asked, “Have you changed your policy because the fighting is over?” the answer was no. There was systematic lying to parliament all through 1989 and 1990. It would have gone on forever if it hadn’t been for two terrible events in 1990. The first terrible event was encountered by Nicholas Ridley, then secretary for trade, when he was enjoying his Easter holiday. Someone told him that customs had seized some rather unpleasant goods – vast cases of what appeared to be the biggest gun ever built, for export to Iraq. This was lethal equipment even by Ridley’s definition. It had been made in two of the biggest engineering factories in Britain, who were in constant contact with the department of trade. Ridley congratulates customs in the Commons and says, “We knew nothing about it.” But very embarrassingly up jumps a Tory MP who says. “Oh yes, you did. I told you about it in 1988.” The second embarrassing event was that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Suddenly the whole public attitude is whipped up against Iraq. Everyone is in favour of prosecuting the merchants of death. Customs arrest the engineer in charge of the supergun project and the managing director. Guilty as hell of breaking the export law, a straightforward conviction is expected. Except that customs are called in by the attorney general, Sir Patrick Mayhew, who says it is not a good idea to prosecute. He told customs they were free to do it but he would stop them going ahead with the prosecution. Customs withdrew – but they proceeded against another company called Matrix Churchill. The directors were appalled. They said we did this in concert with the government and intelligence. One of the key intelligence agents in Iraq at that time was a man working for Matrix Churchill. Paul Henderson. He was managing director and a government intelligence agent. They started to leak documents. One document leaked to the Sunday Times said that Alan Clark, when he was minister of defence, held a meeting of all the machine tool manufacturers. He said from now on when you want to sell arms to Iraq put it under general engineering. It was leaked the first Sunday John Major was in Downing Street. Before he got into the office on Monday there had already been a meeting in the cabinet office to discuss the leak. There was not an elected person in sight. They decided that what Clark had said was true, but they were going to deny it. When they saw Major they said it’s quite untrue and Major says it’s quite untrue. All of this was revealed in Scott’s investigations. THE SITUATION staggers on until 1992 when there is tremendous panic growing in the ministries about the Matrix Churchill case. It is obviously going to come out that the defendants did what the government told them to do. They were guilty of selling arms to Saddam Hussein, but not half as guilty as the people who were cooperating with them in the government. When the defendants wanted to prove the government had known about their illegal exporting, the government issued a public immunity certificate. Most people think this certificate has something to do with security. It has nothing whatever to do with security. It defends the discussions between civil servants and ministers from any revelation or disclosure. But at the trial the lawyers forced the government documents out, the trial collapsed and the Scott inquiry was set up. There has been the most tremendous attack against the Scott inquiry from the establishment. The ruling class is trying to protect itself from the revelations. Many of the people named in the Scott report have been promoted. I will end with two quotations which sum up what I’ve said. The first is from the prime minister speaking to the Scott inquiry: “One of the charges at the time of course was that in some way I must have known because I had been the chancellor, because I had been the foreign secretary, because I had been the prime minister. And therefore I must have known what was going on, but I didn’t.” The second quote is from the Russian revolutionary Lenin: “Bourgeois democracy, although it is a historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical. A paradise for the rich and a snare and a deception for the exploited, for the poor. “The whole point is that a bourgeois state which is exercising the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through a democratic republic cannot confess to the people that it is serving the bourgeoisie. It cannot tell the truth and has to play the hypocrite.” That is still happening today. Top of the page Last updated on 2 No vember 2019