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MIA > Archive > Harman Chris Harman Paul Foot 1937–2004 (24 July 2004) Obituary, Socialist Worker, No.1911, 24 July 2004. Copied with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Socialists across Britain are mourning Paul Foot, who died on Sunday. Chris Harman looks at his extraordinary life Paul was a brilliant socialist writer, a speaker more able than any other to make people see what was wrong with capitalism, a tireless campaigner against injustice, and an investigative journalist whose revelations caused the resignation of a Tory cabinet minister and exposed the corruption of businessmen, big and small. He became a revolutionary socialist when he was a young journalist working on Scotland’s Daily Record. He came from a privileged background. His father was governor of British-run Palestine and then British-run Cyprus, and Paul attended Shrewsbury public school, joining the Liberals when he was at Oxford University. It was contact with the realities of working class life and the working class movement in Glasgow in the early 1960s that transformed his ideas. He was never to look back. Within a couple of years he was editing the precursor of Socialist Worker, Labour Worker, and then went on to write three devastating books. Immigration and Race in British Politics detailed the scapegoating of successive generations of immigrants, from East European Jews in the 1890s to Afro-Caribbeans and Asians in the early 1960s. The Politics of Harold Wilson tore apart the record of the Labour government elected in 1964. And The Rise of Enoch Powell showed how the political establishment – including Labour – capitulated to the racism of the far right. Meanwhile Paul was also exposing the faulty evidence that had led to the hanging of James Hanratty for murder in 1961. In his fortnightly column in Private Eye he began an investigation into the network of corruption around the systems-building of high rise flats. This led to the jailing of Labour’s Newcastle supremo T. Dan Smith, and the resignation of Tory home secretary Reginald Maudling. He was at the heart of the wave of struggle of the 1970s, from the occupation of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971 through the miners’ strike of 1974. It was then that he began a six-year spell working full time on Socialist Worker. He used his journalistic skills to bring the spirit of the struggle into the paper, to show the machinations of the upper classes, and to convey socialist ideas in a language that was accessible to people who had never come across them before. His book Why You Should Be a Socialist took the message to thousands of people. His energy did not flag with the downturn of the struggle in the late 1970s. He was with the miners when they were driven down to defeat in 1984-5 just as much as he had been with them when they were victorious ten years earlier. His weekly page in the Daily Mirror of the 1980s became a beacon of light in the dark Thatcher years. It ensured that the meetings he did in all parts of the country, often two or three times a week, always got an enthusiastic audience. When a new management purged left wing journalists from the Daily Mirror in 1992, Paul was in the forefront of those putting up resistance and lost his job as a result. His journalism in these years exposed one of the great miscarriages of justice – the case of four men convicted of “the murder on the farm” of Carl Bridgewater. It also brought to light the amazing story of how Colin Wallace was used by British intelligence in Northern Ireland to smear the 1974 Labour government and then framed for a killing in a south coast town. Paul was first taken ill five years ago, and that reduced his capacity to speak at meetings. But his commitment continued, with a fortnightly political column in the Guardian and a fortnightly page in Private Eye. He ran for mayor of Hackney as the Socialist Alliance candidate 18 months ago, and stood on the list for the London Assembly as a Respect candidate last month. Just a fortnight ago he was promising to resume his regular column in Socialist Worker, and just a week ago he had an audience spellbound at the Marxism festival of socialist ideas as he laid into New Labour. He will be missed by everyone on the left, by every active trade unionist, by every opponent of racism, and by everyone who simply wants a better society. Top of the page Last updated on 13 December 2009

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot State of terror (October 1995) From Socialist Review, No. 190, October 1995, pp. 12–13. Copyright © 1995 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. The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal served to highlight the plight of over 3,000 Death Row prisoners in the US. Paul Foot looks at the history and injustice of capital punishment in Britain As we contemplate the horrors of Death Row we’re inclined to write off capital punishment as a peculiarly American barbarism, a throwback to the distant reactionary past, unthinkable in civilised social democratic Britain. In fact, between 1900 and 1949 some 632 people were murdered by the British state because they had allegedly committed murder. In 1949 there was a Labour government in office. In the (Tory) Federal Republic of Germany capital punishment had just been abolished. In Holland and Scandinavia there had been no capital punishment for more than 50 years. British Labour, true to its radical traditions, could not make up its mind. It ducked the question by appointing a Royal Commission, which took four years to report. In the interim, with Labour still in office, Timothy Evans, a young Welsh worker, was brutally done to death by the hangman for murdering his beloved baby daughter – a murder to which Reginald Christie confessed several years later. The Royal Commission report in 1953 saw arguments on both sides, and its recommendations were equivocal. The (Tory) government happily decided to do nothing. But the argument would not go away. It was taken up enthusiastically by reformers of every description. Influential books by the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz and by Arthur Koestler put the case against. In 1957 capital punishment was abolished for most murders and retained only for murders of policemen or with firearms. Under this law James Hanratty, a young worker from north London, was hanged for a murder near Bedford on the A6 when (as later evidence proved) he was 200 miles away in Rhyl at the time. The argument for abolition got angrier. In 1965 the new Labour government allowed time for a private member’s bill which finally abolished it. Through all those years the argument on both sides of the Atlantic was rational. The case for capital punishment was based almost exclusively on its effectiveness as a deterrent. It was widely agreed by people on both sides of the argument that capital punishment was wholly indefensible unless it prevented murder on a substantial scale. The more the argument for capital punishment depended on a rational case for deterrence, the more it was lost. The Royal Commission found no conclusive evidence of deterrence. Especially impressive were the statistics from the United States where capital punishment had been abolished in some states, not in others. In North Dakota, for instance, where capital punishment was abolished in 1915, the murder rate was slightly lower than in South Dakota where the social composition was very similar and where capital punishment was still in force. In Maine capital punishment had been abolished in 1876 and reintroduced after a right wing hullabaloo following an especially nasty murder. The murder rate, however, went up even faster, so capital punishment was abolished again in 1887 – after which the rate subsided. The truth was that there was no correlation at all between the incidence of capital punishment and the incidence of murder. Murders were mainly personal or domestic crimes, immune from deterrence. Moreover, there were plenty of American ‘mistakes’ similar to the tragedies of Timothy Evans and James Hanratty. Capital punishment did not deter murders, and if a ‘mistake’ was made, there was no way of putting it right. In the 1950s and 1960s the possibility of such a mistake was widely dismissed in polite society. Lord Chancellor Lord Kilmuir, discussing the Evans case, told parliament that the idea that a judge, jury and the court of appeal could convict the wrong person was ‘in the realms of fantasy’. Those realms of fantasy have been visited again and again in recent years as an enormous stream of prisoners wrongly convicted for murder have emerged from the high court after years of wholly unjustified, and not at all fantastical, imprisonment. As long as the argument remains on a rational level – does hanging deter? – capital punishment doesn’t stand a chance. The most remarkable feature of the recent enthusiasm for the rope and the electric chair, however, is that it casts all reason aside. It is founded almost entirely on medieval incantations about ‘retribution’ (‘an eye for an eye’) and on a belief in violent punishment as a means of keeping the ‘criminal classes’ (that is, the lower classes) in order. The loonies who swept into the US Congress and Senate in last year’s right wing backlash couldn’t care less whether capital punishment deters or not. They are like the lynch mobs in those westerns where justice for a (usually white) victim of crime is the instant murder of someone who might (or might not) be responsible. Guilt and deterrence are not really relevant provided the anger of the mob is assuaged in blood. There is a grim logic behind this abandonment of logic. It was summed up for me when I was asked recently to take part in an episode of the BBC’s Moral Maze. The issue was the state murder of some poor British man who had been on Death Row for as long as anyone could remember. I came armed with the legal statistics about deterrence and mistakes by the legal system. They were brushed aside. An American professor in London declared, ‘I am with Thomas Hobbes. I want people to live in permanent fear of the laws.’ This assertion, which I dare say is a bit hard on Hobbes, explains what is happening. As the lunacies and unfairnesses of the market system become more and more obvious, as the precious market fails more and more ostentatiously to deliver the even-handed, civilised, rational society it promises, so the people who benefit from it seek to escape from rational thought altogether. Unable any longer even to pretend that their system can erode the poverty and inequality which create crime, they search for slogans which will satisfy the rage of the victims of crime and keep them in order at the same time. ‘Kill the murderers!’ is a fine slogan for both purposes, especially as almost all the alleged murderers due to be killed are poor or black or both. It matters not an iota that killing murderers does nothing to stop killing or murder, or that the people being executed may not be murderers at all. What matters is the immediate satisfaction of blood lust. The feeling that something is being done is far better than the reality of doing something, especially when doing something means dismantling the inequalities on which class society depends. It follows that the politicians and businessmen who clamour for these state murders are far, far more guilty of violence and social chaos than any of the victims of their society whom they want to murder. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Red verse in Horsham (30 November 1996) From Socialist Worker, 30 November 1996. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 81–82. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. In 1892 the playwright and critic Bernard Shaw was invited to Horsham to take part in a lunch to celebrate the first centenary of the birth of the poet Shelley. Unhappily for important people in this market town, Shelley is probably the only famous person ever to have been born in Horsham, so they had to make the best of it. In 1892 they had their lunch and opened a public library. Shaw mocked them mercilessly. On all sides there went up the cry: ‘We want our great Shelley, our darling Shelley, our best noblest highest of poets. We will not have it said that he was a Leveller, an atheist, a foe to marriage, an advocate of incest.’ Shaw got the 5.19 back to London and went to another Shelley celebration meeting in the East End, composed almost entirely of working people which, he reported, ‘beat Horsham hollow’. A hundred and four years later the chief executive of Horsham District Council (controlled by the Liberals, with a Tory opposition and no Labour representation at all) rings me up. Would I come and speak at the opening of a huge sculpture commissioned by the council and paid for by Sainsbury’s to celebrate the second centenary of Shelley’s birth? I went through the usual preliminaries – was he sure he had the right member of the Foot family? Did he realise (a) Shelley’s politics, and (b) mine? Yes, yes, yes, he said – my name had been put forward by someone from the Workers Educational Association. Huge sculpture OK, so I went. It was a cold November evening. The magnificent sculpture of a fountain is by Angela Connor, who said enough to me to make it clear she and I were the only socialists on the platform. I and the secretary of the Fountain Society were the only speakers and were both very glad (because of the cold) to stick to our five minute limit. On the train down I wondered whether the district council had taken leave of its senses, and reckoned that there would be (at most) half a dozen people shivering in misery. In fact there were more than 1,000 people crowded round the fountain. After the short ceremony, as the huge fountain started rather falteringly to spurt its jets into the air, most of them stayed, cheerfully chatting and shuffling their feet to keep out the cold. I simply could not, cannot understand it, unless it is that people are interested in the place where they live, and especially in the giants of history who have lived there in the past, and on whose shoulders we try to light up the present. Egalitarian democracy Anyway, I said that Shelley was by any reckoning among the five greatest poets who had ever written in English; that his control of language, rhyme and rhythm was as unsurpassed as his intellect was all-embracing. Why had so little of what he wrote been published in his lifetime? Because he was a Leveller, an atheist, a feminist and a republican – but above all a revolutionary who wanted the whole social order overturned and replaced by an egalitarian democracy. When I said that Shelley had to contend all his short life with a Tory government, three times re-elected, which finally drowned in its own sleaze, I thought I heard people laughing. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Plague of the market (29 June 1996) From Socialist Worker, 29 June 1996. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 166–167. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The argument about BSE continues to be conducted at such a kindergarten level – ‘If you ban my beef, I won’t play ball with you’ – that everyone in high places ignores the question: how did we get into the mess in the first place? There are lots of experts on European politics who can tell you how the balance of power is tipping in the commission, but haven’t got a clue what caused BSE in Britain in the mid-1980s or how to put a stop to it. The discussions in parliament are particularly ill-informed and irrelevant. MPs ‘represent’ their constituencies by chauvinistic clamour about jobs lost in closed abattoirs, redundant butchers, desolated dairy farms, etc. It seems there is no one there to represent the fears of a population threatened by a terrifying, mystifying and murderous epidemic. The Southwood Commission, which was set up soon after BSE started raging through British farms, concluded that it was all the fault of feeding meat to herbivorous cattle. Real culprit Though this process was introduced without a whisper of protest from Labour or Liberal parties, everyone now agrees it was disgraceful. Yet no one has been brought to book for it. The Southwood Commission, and the huge parliamentary select committee inquiry which followed it, concluded that, once the new regulations about animal feed and removing the spines and heads of cattle were introduced, BSE would quickly vanish. Not so. Seven years after the regulations, BSE continues to rage through British herds. It follows either that the cause had nothing to do with the feed, or that the regulations have not been properly enforced, or that BSE can be passed on from one generation of cattle to the next. Once again, everyone accepts that in the first few years of the regulations they were scrupulously ignored at every stage. The regulations have now been tightened up. But still the BSE plague rushes on. If the disease is inherited, or if its cause lies somewhere else in the food chain – in the rendering industry for instance, whose monopoly producer, Prosper Mulder, contributed so generously to the Tory party – the grim fact remains that no one knows whether even a mass slaughter of cattle will stop the disease. Tory mafia At the end of the 20th century, in the oldest industrial country in the world, where scientists can devise rockets to hit others travelling many times faster than the speed of sound, no one has a clue about the extent of or solution to a relatively straightforward cattle disease. All the proposed answers to the BSE crisis avoid the real culprit: free enterprise. Whatever the scientific cause of BSE, the political and economic cause was the grotesque notion that regulations and restrictions in the public interest, even when that public interest protects people’s lives, are ‘bad for business’ and should therefore be curtailed. This is the culture which led to the ‘freeing’ of wholly inappropriate and probably contaminated animal feed, to the lowering of temperatures and monopolisation in the rendering industry, and to the increasing confidence among the Tory mafia which runs farms, slaughterhouses and butchers that it can do what it likes. If these farms and industries had been publicly owned and publicly controlled in the interests of the people who eat meat rather than the people who profit from it, the awful ravages of the BSE plague would have been impossible. Top of the page Last updated on 8 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Judges rule against a free press (12 July 1997) From Socialist Worker, No.1553, 12 July 1993, p.11. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. EVERYONE BELIEVES in a free press – but very few people in high places believe in the free circulation of information to that press. Workers know what is going on in their workplaces. Many are shocked at what they know. Many would like to pass it on to other people, via the free press or the free television. Increasingly, however, employers everywhere are ganging up to protect themselves against the revelation of even the most trivial “inside” information. Not long ago a young journalist called Richard Goodwin who worked for an engineering trade paper was rung up by a source in a company with some fairly horrific information about the company’s internal finances. Goodwin, as he had been trained to do, rang the company to check the information. His answer was a high court injunction stopping him and his paper from publishing the information and demanding to know who leaked it. At the time we in the National Union of Journalists regarded this as a bit of a joke. Certainly, we believed, the injunction could not possibly be sustained in the courts. The Contempt of Court Act passed in the early years of the Thatcher government had a specific clause which allowed journalists not to disclose their sources. Grotesque bonuses There were very few exceptions to this rule. One of them was national security. Another was “the interests of justice”. Neither category seemed remotely relevant to the Goodwin case. But the courts, in ascending authority, solemnly declared that it was in the interests of justice for employers to be able to identify any “disloyal” member of their staff and to sack them. So decreed Lord Bridge (the judge who first jailed the Birmingham Six) in the key judgement, The injunction stood. Goodwin bravely refused to name his source and was fined £5,000. The National Union of Journalists took his case to Europe, citing the Declaration of Human Rights, and won the case. The fine was annulled, Goodwin cleared, and the company which took the case had to pay a lot of costs. A considerable victory, and a good day for the freedom of the press. But did it mean that this sort of nonsense wouldn’t happen again? Consider what has happened this month, only a year after the Goodwin judgement. On 28 May, Marketing Week, a magazine not unlike the one which employed Richard Goodwin, published leaked accounts of Camelot, the lottery company. The accounts showed grotesque bonuses for the lottery monopolists. They were due to be published anyway five days later. Camelot directors demanded an injunction to force the magazine to deliver the leaked documents. Once again the magazine pleaded Section Ten of the Contempt of Court Act. The source of the information, they declared, would be revealed if the documents were returned. Aha, replied Camelot, that is the whole point of disclosing it. Ignoring any talk about the public interest, their lawyers had the cheek to argue that the “interests of justice” demanded that their mole be identified and sacked. And Mr Justice Martin Kay agreed! The freedom of the press sounds nice in after dinner speeches at the Inns of Court. But for judges on the bench the security of profit and the virtual enslavement of employees which it demands is far more important. Top of the page Last updated on 12.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The question lingers on [CLR James] (July 1989) From Socialist Worker, 1 July 1989. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2007. Transcribed by Christian Hogsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I watched the Channel Four tribute last week to CLR James. It was presented by my friend Tariq Ali (he is a friend of mine but I, unhappily, am not a friend of his. He will not talk to me, ever since I wrote a review of his book which he said was patronising). It was typical of Tariq’s flair and push that he should have got so much time at such short notice on television for the great man. Ever since I met the long, frail and trembling CLR James at Glasgow Central Station in 1963, and took him to a tiny meeting of Young Socialists where he spoke about the African National Revolution, he has been a special hero of mine. He was one of the very few people who understood the dialectical significance of the game of cricket in general and of West Indian cricket in particular. It would be insulting to CLR’s memory however not to challenge one part of the discussion. All five participants agreed, there can be no doubt about it, that CLR James’s chief hero in history was Lenin. All at once agreed, and there can be no doubt about this either, that for the last 20 years of his life (at least) CLR James ‘rejected the theory of the vanguard party.’ At once the discussion moved off into other areas. How? I wished the programme had been on video and I, like some celestial controller, had been able to stop it and redirect it. For the crucial question here is surely this: why and how could such an inspired supporter of Lenin have rejected what was beyond dispute the central inspiration of Lenin’s political existence? All his life, even when he was shipwrecked with a handful of bickering émigrés, Lenin disciplined his whole being to the forging of socialist organisation. Ever since capitalist society was first challenged, its challengers have recognised the importance of such organisation. The very earliest groups of working people in Britain who met together to oppose emerging capitalism called themselves Corresponding Societies, combinations, associations, all words which highlighted the joining together of people in common cause against their oppressors. Nothing could be more obvious than that the strength and power of class society requires an equivalent strength and power to change it, and that on our side that strength and power depends upon socialists joining together and acting in common purpose. The more centrally controlled and disciplined the ruling class, the more centrally controlled and disciplined must be its opponents. In recent years it has been fashionable to criticise the notion of the ‘vanguard party’ as (here is that word again) ‘patronising.’ Yet everyone who expresses an opinion about political matters is engaging in a form of leadership. ‘I think this’ surely means ‘And you should think this too’ or it is quite useless. Unless people express an opinion as a standard which they hope and want other people to follow, the opinion itself is frivolous. It has no relation to what should be the purpose of the opinion in the first place – to change the world. Those who express opinions and hold views on their own, trusting to their own individualism and independence, are often more patronising than those who organise with others. Their ‘freedom of expression’ is entirely untempered by the opinions and activities of others who agree with them, and they are therefore more (not less) likely to patronise the people for whom they speak. It has always been a mystery to me that such an unequivocal and eloquent supporter of the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins as CLR James could, at the latter end of his life, be such an opponent of those who sought to organise themselves as the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks did. On the few occasions I had the chance to argue with him I tried to get an answer to this conundrum. I never got one that even started to satisfy me. Top of the page Last updated on 24.7.2007

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Voting for our class (June 1987) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 99, June 1987, pp. 14–15. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Does voting make any difference? Should socialists vote at all? If so, which way should we vote? And what about tactical voting? Paul Foot looks at the arguments. A NEW political epidemic is striking down political commentators on the left. It is called tactical voting. From Marxism Today to the New Statesman, all of which were healthy Labour supporters in 1983, a feeble cry has gone up that the only way to save us from ruin is to vote tactically. Former Labour voters are urged in the day before polling day to study the opinion polls (many of which will be commissioned by the same people who are asking us to read them), look which party is most likely to beat the Tories in your constituency, and vote accordingly. If the party is SDP, vote for it. If Liberal, vote Liberal. Eric Hobsbawm, the former Marxist, tells us that the differences between voting Labour and Liberal are very slight. The most urgent need of all decent people, he says, is the removal of the Thatcher government from office. In the face of this need, why pay attention to old loyalties? What use is a Labour vote in a constituency where Labour cannot win, but where a decent-minded SDP candidate can? Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that these new realists win the day, and that the Thatcher government is toppled by a combination of Labour and the Alliance. In what way will the new government improve the lot of the working class? Will they, for instance, cut down unemployment? They will try to do so. But every single example over the last ninety years of political history shows that they will not succeed. In 1924, 1929 and 1977 Labour ruled with the tacit consent of the Liberals. In all three cases unemployment was higher at the end of the period than it was at the beginning: in spite of the sincere promises of both parties that it would be reduced. Will the new parliament build more houses, more schools, more hospitals? Will it rescue the National Health Service? Will it do such things when, in 1967 and again in 1971, a Labour government, not dependent on Liberals and utterly committed to doing all these things, was thrown into reverse on all these issues and was forced to cut the housing programme, cut the schools programme and even levy charges on the sacrosanct National Health Service? These are the “issues” which, the Hobsbawms of this world tell us, should guide our judgement and our advice on polling day. Yet in their heart of hearts they must know that a Liberal-SDP-Labour government is even less likely to improve the conditions of the working class than have previous Labour governments. BUT wait, they might reply. Readers of Socialist Worker Review have been told over the years that electing Labour governments makes little or no difference to what happens in the economic and political field. That is quite right. Anyone reading this paper or Socialist Worker will be fed to the brim with the argument that the elected governments in capitalist society are not in control of that society. However much they may wish to reform, however much they legislate for reform their wishes and their legislation are swept aside by economic tides which they do not control or even understand. So although Labour may pass plenty of laws which look good for the workers, the economic movements which they do not control leave these laws like signposts in the wilderness, better than no signposts at all, but no use for anyone’s improvements. What use an Employment Protection Act, shoring up the trade unions’ role in the machinery of the state, if the whole of that machinery is flung into a campaign to restrict workers’ power on the shop floor and to restrain their wages? What use Equal Pay Acts and Race Relations Acts if the tides of sexism and racialism are flowing because of an economic recession? Of course the laws passed by Labour governments are likely to be better than those passed by Tory governments, but if the economic conditions which govern people’s lives are worse nevertheless, what use the new laws? All these arguments apply, of course, a hundred times more to a Lib-Lab government than they do to a Labour government. But do they lead, as our critics so often suggest, to an electoral abstentionism? If we mean it when we say that the colour of the governments in office makes precious little difference to the lives of the workers, why bother to take part in the vote at all? Why not shout a plague on both your houses, burn your ballot paper or write “socialism” on it, or put up socialist revolutionary candidates who argue not for crumbs but for the whole bakery? The first answer is that we live in the real world, not one we would like to live in. In this real world almost every worker who thinks like a socialist supports the Labour Party. The enormous majority of such people, including pretty well every militant trade unionist, believes that change can come through the Labour Party in office. The second one is that the Labour Party came into existence to represent the working class (and no other class) in parliament. It was founded, and still is founded, on the trade unions. Trade unions in turn came into existence to improve the lot of working class people.

Trade unions in turn came into existence to improve the lot of working class people. They devised democratic constitutions which made their leaders and executives subject to some form of rank and file control. Discussion and debate would be sheltered from the capitalist class and its media. Just as that ruling class resented the granting of the vote in the first place, so they doubly resented the formation and the survival of working class-based parties which brought the organised working class into the elections. However much the ruling class were able to contain and corrupt such Labour Parties when they got to office, they never let up in their resentment of these parties’ existence, and have used all their mighty powers to replace them with “alternatives” which will not be subject in any way to the decisions or the debates of the organised working class movement. Thus in 1931, although the power of the ruling class was able to humble a Labour government, split off its leaders, reverse all its policies and replace that government with fourteen years of Tory rule, they never forgot that the organised trade union movement could not stomach further cuts in the dole, and refused its consent to a Labour government to carry them through. Even such entirely negative control is enough to unite the ruling class against the Labour Party. SO the issue of what to do in that split second in the ballot box every four or five years is not a difficult one for socialists who see the world clearly through its class divisions. It is a class issue. The Labour Party is founded on the working class. The Liberal Party is not. The SDP is not. If the Alliance replaces the Labour Party as the main anti-Tory Party the organised working class will be removed from its electoral politics, and that-will demoralise every class conscious worker in the land. On election night, while the Hobsbawms and the Kellners are cheering every time Labour comes bottom of the poll and the Alliance candidate is elected on tactical votes, the militant worker who thinks a bit about politics will feel, from the same news, confused and disorientated. In his marvellous pamphlet, What Next?, Leon Trotsky denounced those who dismissed all the institutions of bourgeois democracy as though they were all part of some gigantic capitalist plot. He wrote: “In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilising it, fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sports clubs, the co-operatives etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of the bourgeois democracy, but can do so only by taking the road to revolution; this has been proved both by theory and by experience. And these bulwarks of workers’ democracy within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for the taking of the revolutionary road.” Trotsky probably overstated the case a little. He was talking, after all, about the urgent menace of fascism, and the need to unite all elements of the workers’ movement against it. And the educational, sports clubs, and co-ops have long since gone. But the basic point is as important now as it was in 1931. The revolution he spoke of is impossible if the bulwarks built by the workers – including the trade unions and their political parties – are torn down by the rulers; and every defeat for the unions, every defeat for Labour at the polls, pushes the revolution back. In the polling booths, vote Labour. The day after, keep up the effort to build a socialist organisation in the struggle at the point of production, where the working class has power, and not in parliament, where it hasn’t. Top of the page Last updated on 30 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot If only Harold had got the date right (July 1970) From Socialist Worker, 11 July 1970. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.186-7. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. In THE offices of Tribune in Smithfield, London, a myth has been born. Like many similar myths before it, it is likely to be believed following the shock and disillusionment of the election. The theme is a simple one: that Harold Wilson and his advisers in the leadership handed the election on a plate to the Tories and that the decision to go to the country in June with a low-pitched election campaign were the real reasons for the Tory victory. The alternative is equally simple. With an election later in the year, fought with a high-pitched campaign, the Tory disaster would never have come about and Harold Wilson would be back in Downing Street for most of the seventies. One question, however, remains unanswered. What evidence is there that if the Labour leadership had held on till October any more of the ‘wounds’ inflicted by the government would have been ‘healed’? Was it not just as likely that with an Irish crisis, a worsening balance of payments situation, and roaring inflation, a few more ‘wounds’ would have been inflicted in the intervening months and the ‘fighting spirit of 1964 and 1966’ (whatever that was) would have been further dampened? Harold Wilson’s basic theme throughout the last six months had been that Labour must run the capitalist system as efficiently and profitably as possible and must engineer an election victory every four or five years. Although Tribune is free in its criticism of the government’s record over the past six years, it singles out the 1970 Budget for special attention. It complains that when Jenkins had money to give away he should have given it away to the Labour movement. Tribune argues that if the Chancellor had done this in the 1970 Budget, the workers would have voted Labour with greater enthusiasm and in greater numbers. No doubt this is true. But the point is that big business works under the same laws whether there’s a boom or not. No self-respecting capitalist will waste money on higher wages just because he has higher profits. He needs to invest his profits to make sure they increase even more. He may feel that directors and shareholders deserve a little reward. But wages are too large a part of the costs to permit substantial increases. The Labour government accepted these priorities from the start. They accepted them in their manifesto before the 1964 election, which Tribune approved. And, cheered on by Tribune, they accepted them in 17 stumbling months before March 1966 when Tribune called for an early general election. They accepted them in four cruel and wavering years after 1966, in which time the Parliamentary Labour Party became a play-thing of the increasingly vicious machine of big business. Workers and students outside parliament reacted in the most powerful outburst of militancy since the war. None of this was reflected in parliament or in the Labour Party, which, as the tide of militancy rose, lost supporters and influence in the trade union movement. The Labour Left and Tribune reacted by bitching and sneering at revolutionaries (see Francis Flavius on the International Socialists and Socialist Labour League in Tribune of 5 June). It isolated the struggle for socialism within parliamentary boundaries and by mouthing old slogans and old responses, it must take a share of the blame for the isolation of politics from militancy. The election result is a bad blow for the British working class movement. But it will have even worse consequences if socialists now believe that the violence and barbarism of capitalist society can be ended or even altered by tinkering around with election dates and framing different policies for Budget Day. Top of the page Last updated on 20.12.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Left Alternative Beyond the Crossroads (December 2003) From Socialist Review, No.280, December 2003, p.16-17. Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot puts the case for a unity coalition of the left. The vast demonstration against Bush on 20 November once again opened wide the increasingly intolerable contradiction on the British left. These demonstrations in 2003 were far greater than anything in the 1960s or indeed at any other time before or since, yet when the crowds have dispersed, there is so little sign of any political result. The huge Labour majority cannot even prevent parliament from moving yet another step closer to the privatisation of the health service. The Tory opposition moves further to the right, flirting with a return to capital punishment, and the Liberal Democrats, though they pretend to be suspicious of the warmongers, are, as always, extremely nervous of any forthright opposition to the capitalist and imperialist establishment. It is futile to stand back and jeer at the fact that there is no representation of the biggest political movement in modern times. The question is: what can be done about it? There are plenty of signs that the mass mobilisation against the war reflects a deep hostility to the government on many other issues. Wherever it is possible to raise socialist alternatives – public ownership and comprehensive education – people respond enthusiastically. How can we combine these attitudes effectively enough to make a real impact on the Blairite Labour/Tory/Liberal consensus? And how can we do that without stumbling once again on the obstacle that has held up the socialist left for so long – sectarianism? When a collection of socialist organisations formed the Socialist Alliance in 1999, the main object was to present a united front of organisations whose members were no longer prepared to devote their time and energy to attacking one another. The alliance has had a lot of success in quite a short time. But it has failed to make the breakthrough many of us hoped for. Indeed, some of the founding organisations have left the alliance and struck out once again into glorious, and useless, isolation. The alliance’s outstanding success in England and Wales – Michael Lavalette’s election in Preston – was achieved by a genuine attempt to seek out and represent large numbers of people in Preston who were against the war and against racism. Elsewhere, the alliance has been less successful, even in Brent East where, against a background of profound disillusionment with the government and an excellent alliance candidate, we only just managed to get clear of the ruck of independent candidates who cluttered up and divided the left opposition. If we are to make any headway in the vital business of transforming the mass opposition into a fighting socialist force we need to look again at the organisation and structure of the British left. The building blocks for a new structure are plain for everyone to see. The expulsion of George Galloway from the Labour Party for his opposition to the war in Iraq; the hostility to Blair and co among large numbers of trade unionists, including trade union leaders like Bob Crow, Mark Serwotka and Dave Ward, and the growing disgust with capitalism that emerges from organisations like Globalise Resistance, the European Social Forum and large elements of the green movement. In all these areas, there is a common cry for new organisations, broadly-based in the community, that go deeper into the popular consciousness than the alliance has done so far. Such an argument can easily be taken too far. A coalition calling itself something like ‘Peace and Justice’ for instance, seems to me undesirable – not only because it means all things to all people but chiefly because it seems to reject the socialist alternative at a time when the argument for socialist solutions is stronger and more popular than ever. On the other hand, both the name and the intentions of any new coalition need to engage as many people as possible, even if they do not regard themselves primarily as socialists. The principles should be as simple as possible – for public ownership and comprehensive education, and against privatisation, imperialism, the war in Iraq, the New Labour government and its Tory/Liberal allies. The simple aim of the new coalition should be to recapture some of the loyalty to socialist ideas and principles that used to inspire people to campaign for and vote for Labour. Candidates who run in elections for the new coalition should explain how they will speak and vote on all the relevant issues. In London, for instance, as Blair, Prescott and Clarke proceed to tear up the comprehensive system of education, coalition candidates, locally and nationally, should set out precisely how they intend – as elected councillors, assembly members and MPs – to fight for, restore and improve comprehensive schools. The coalition’s approach to organisations that join it should be both tolerant and impatient: tolerant of the right of individual parties to proceed with their own agenda, impatient of any attempt to make sectarian capital out of the coalition. I would hope that my own party, the Socialist Workers Party, would enter such a new coalition with all the enthusiasm with which we joined the Socialist Alliance, and would work as powerfully as we can for the new coalition in the hope, but not the condition, that its success would be our success. The huge British Politics at the Crossroads meeting in London on 29 October laid the basis for such a new coalition. I hope it proceeds quickly. We have no time to lose. Top of the page Last updated on 18.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot New Statesman, Decline and Fall (October 1996) From Socialist Review, No.201, October 1996, p.21. Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Not long ago a group of earnest young members of the Communist Party produced a theoretical magazine. Since they assumed they were Marxists, they called it Marxism Today. As Thatcher rolled from triumph to triumph, they decided that Marxism was pretty well irrelevant. They started to use the magazine’s awkward title not as a description of the journal’s content but as a kind of joke. The best part of the joke was to give substantial space to interviews with Tories. ‘The Tories are in power,’ they would explain. ‘They have a right to be heard.’ Thus month after month Marxism Today appeared with Tory ministers and their supporters on the cover. Right wing politicians and ideologues were quoted in the newspapers as having said this or that – ‘to Marxism Today’. The circulation rose quite quickly. But soon the new readers realised that they could read what Tories are saying more accurately and more persuasively in, say, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Express, the Star, etc., etc., etc. Marxism Today sank swiftly into oblivion. Its fate came back to me the other day as I was reading the New Statesman. A prominent feature was by Steven Norris MP. Norris had just resigned as a junior minister of transport in the Tory government, a post which he had occupied with studied mediocrity. He had just announced, in the style of so many of his Tory heroes of recent years, that he was leaving politics to spend more time with his wallet. Appropriately, he had taken a couple of directorships with the bus companies his ministry had been ‘liberating’. What was he doing writing in the New Statesman? He was defending the privatisation of the railways, the most monstrous and corrupt of all the Tory privatisations. At the last count only 11 percent of the British population said they supported it. In a desperate effort to buck the popular view, the massed ranks of the right wing press pulled out all the stops to ‘put the case’ for railway privatisation. Now, to their astonishment and joy, they were joined by one of the very few influential journals on the left. Is this an exception? Any socialist who with gritted teeth fights their way through a copy of the New Statesman today is struck again and again not just by the awful blandness of tone, or even by the supercilious sneers which professional parliamentary pundits substitute for ideas, but by its shamelessly reactionary politics. Under the banner of ‘letting everyone have their say’, the New Statesman has recently given tracts of space to the bigots of the anti-abortion campaign, to old style union bashing and to the most frightful reactionary economics. The strident support for free enterprise and the market takes its tune from the ideological heroes of the present editorial team, most of whom were in the late Social Democratic Party. These articles are worth reading for one reason only: to remind us that the SDP had no distinctive economic policy at all save to back the market; and that its only purpose was to keep the Tories in office by splitting the Labour Party. The fact that the splitters are now back in the Labour saddle is the clearest proof of Labour’s collapse into Tory ideology and Tory policies. But for the New Statesman Roger Liddle, Peter Mandelson and co., Tories in all but name, are the ‘radicals’ of the hour. The New Statesman was started in 1912 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There was nothing revolutionary about their intentions. From the outset the New Statesman was directed exclusively to the middle class left. Although the New Statesman did not exclude Tories, its general thrust was to challenge received capitalist notions in politics and economics and to give some intellectual reinforcement to the burgeoning Labour Party. In 1931, after the disaster of the 1929-31 Labour government, the New Statesman was bumping along with a circulation of 7,000. A new editor was appointed: Kingsley Martin, a man of great charisma and editorial skill. Martin was a maverick with no clear ideas, but he was permanently at war with the establishment, and gave acres of space not just to Fabian socialists like G.D.H. Cole but to more fiery types such as H.N. Brailsford, perhaps the best socialist writer in Britain at the time. Martin had the knack of picking out the best people to put the argument against the received notions of the time, and, as capitalism slumped into a deeper and deeper pit, more and more people bought his paper. He lasted 30 years. By the time he handed over to John Freeman in 1961, the New Statesman was selling 70,000. There is no case for any nostalgia here. Again and again, the New Statesman got it wrong, usually through ideological cowardice. Martin, for instance, recognised George Orwell’s despatches from Spain as probably the finest British journalism of his time, but he refused to publish them for fear of falling out with Stalinist orthodoxy. But there was never any doubt of the paper’s hostility to the rich and powerful. Into the bargain, and for the same reasons, under a series of inspired literary editors, the ‘back half’ of the New Statesman became the best review section in all the British press. These priorities continued under John Freeman and even under his successor, Paul Johnson (yes, the same Neanderthal reactionary who now infests the Daily Mail). Though the circulation started steadily to go down, there was no doubt that the magazine continued with its left wing priorities. After a period in which it seemed to be knocked senseless by the new victorious Thatcherism, the New Statesman regained some of its tradition of resistance and challenge under the now much reviled Steve Platt. Its recent takeover by the millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson and the appointment of the former SDP stalwart Ian Hargreaves as editor heralded a complete break with all these traditions and a lurch to the right so shameless and so sudden that socialists everywhere have been throwing it away in disbelief. What was left of the challenge of the New Statesman has now been totally engulfed in the Blair menace, which instead of exposing and defying the hideous priorities of modern capitalism, sings its praises. Tories queue up to be interviewed in it. It has much more money behind it than had Marxism Today. It may last longer on the Robinson millions. But its future, I guess, will be much the same. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot No sects please (February 1986) From Socialist Worker, 15 February 1986. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, p. 227. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. FOR MOST of my life I’ve been putting up with being called a ‘sectarian’. This means, I think, that I’m more interested in the fortunes of a small group of socialists than in the future of society or the working class. The accusation normally comes from those who protest that they are part of the ‘broad movement’, or the ‘wider Labour movement’ or some such phrase, and that therefore the interests of the entire working class are far more important to them than the squabbles between groupuscules of the left. It’s a charge which, I confess, often puts me on the defensive, because we all know quite well that there is a fanatical and sectarian streak in the Marxism of small groups. Their very smallness, their apparent isolation from society at large tends to turn them inwards and to attract them to mumbo-jumbo and theology. There’s a temptation always to attack other socialists (who can occasionally even be defeated) rather than the real powers that be (who can’t). The Socialist Workers Party has been lectured over the years on such sectarianism by broad movement papers on the left such the New Statesman and the Tribune. I’m a faithful reader of both. Last week, the Diary in the New Statesman was written by Ian Williams, a Labour Party member in Liverpool who has written some perfectly good stuff in the past. His Diary this week has seven paragraphs. The second paragraph is an attack on Derek Hatton. It is a pretty nasty attack, by the way, but Ian Williams is a known opponent of Militant in Merseyside, so I suppose it was predictable. Then, in paragraph six, Ian Williams attacks (wait for it) Militant in a paragraph reeking of sectarianism. In paragraph seven he starts off by attacking Militant for saying he writes for the ‘right wing’ New Statesman. In three out of seven paragraphs he attacks Militant and not a word about the Labour leadership or even about the Tory government. For relief from this, I turned to Tribune and the star column of David Blunkett. David devotes pretty well all his column this week to the ‘Lunatics on the Left who test out socialist purity by whether it matches the high-pitched squeal of their own tuning fork rather than a commitment to policy.’ David is very cross with a lot of lunatics on the left who keep raising ‘points on the agenda’ at meetings and not allowing party leaders like himself to get on with explaining the policy which will bring Labour to office. He doesn’t deal with the difficulties encountered by socialists in the Labour Party who take the old fashioned view that people should not be kicked out of the party because they are committed to socialist policies. Everywhere I meet Labour Party members the talk is the same. Very left wing people tell me they are ‘shocked’ by the ‘corruption’ in the Liverpool Labour Party. Almost everyone has a new joke about Derek Hatton. Everyone is against witch hunts. Witches are all very well, and they don’t stop Labour winning elections. But really, you know, when all is said and done, these Militant people are beyond the pale. Well, it was a relief, I can tell you, to turn to Socialist Worker where there is not a single attack on Militant in the entire paper. Indeed, I can’t find any attack on any socialist grouping. There are some heavy bashes at Rupert Murdoch, and at Tony Dubbins and Brenda Dean for letting him smash their unions, and then there are some attacks on people called Botha and Duvalier, who as far as I know, are not members of any Trotskyist tendency. But there isn’t even a spare inch anywhere for a single nasty joke about Derek Hatton. Who are the sectarians? Top of the page Last updated on 27 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot In the colonial style (July 1996) From Reviews, Socialist Review, No. 199, July–August 1996, p. 28. Transcribed & marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. A Struggle for Power Theodore Draper Little, Brown £25 This book opens with a sentence of breathtaking banality. Justifying ‘another book on the American Revolution’, Theodore Draper writes: ‘In my view, the Revolution was basically a struggle for power between Great Britain and its American colonies.’ Er, yes. But 330 pages later Draper explains what he means and why the sentence is not so banal after all. ‘The raison d’etre of the American colonies for the British was economic. The colonists knew that the weak link in the British colonial chain was the need to hold on to the American market for British manufactures.’ What he meant by this early statement of the obvious was that there are hundreds of interpretations of the American Revolution, most of them connecting old fashioned American jingoism with modern American imperialism. But there are very few books on the subject which start at the real beginning: economics. Draper’s book starts with a fascinating account of a pamphlet war in Britain which started in 1759, in the middle of what was really the first world war, the Seven Years War between Britain and France. The question for debate in these pamphlets sounds bizarre. In the event of a peace settlement, which of two territories should Britain insist on seizing from the French: Canada or Guadeloupe? The argument for getting exclusive control of the big one – Canada – seemed irresistible; and so, eventually, the French were chucked out. But several perspicacious commentators argued instead for Guadeloupe. First, it was stunningly rich. Secondly, it was easier to defend. Thirdly, most important, the confidence and ambitions of the Americans would be enormously increased if the French threat was removed from Canada. Fifteen years before the first shots were fired in the American War of Independence, there were people on both sides of the ocean who foresaw a widening breach between the economic interests of Britain and those of her American colonies. For at least a decade after 1759, though, the old colonial arguments held out. British industry and commerce desperately needed the huge, burgeoning and captive market in the American colonies. The colonies were not expensive to run – they ran themselves through their own assemblies. Of course, the elections to those assemblies cut out the vast majority of the population. But they were home grown, and paid scant regard to the British-appointed governors who spent most of their time whining for their expenses. For more than 100 years the relationship had survived uneasily as a sort of stand off. Draper describes it as ‘dual power’. Sovereign Britain laid down the ground rules while the day to day administration was carried out by the local American assemblies. Because the relationship was essentially exploitative, however, dual power could not last forever. As time went on, the British government demanded more, and the American colonists conceded less. What finally started to blow the whole imperial edifice to pieces was a familiar little word: tax. The British had won the Seven Years War, but they still had to pay for it. As soon as the war was over, in 1763, the faction in the British parliament which demanded more money from the colonies grew in stature and influence. These gentlemen could not see why the colonies should not pay more tax to help defray the expenses of keeping their country secure for British trade. So in quick succession the British parliament passed laws demanding new taxes from the Americans – first a sugar tax, then a stamp tax, then a series of other measures designed to bring the colonies to heel. These were known (after a particularly brainless and bullying chancellor of the exchequer) as the Townshend Acts. One by one the taxes were passed into law, and one by one they were repealed as the Americans united against them. ‘No taxation without representation!’ was the cry. What infuriated and united the people in all 13 colonies was not so much the economic burden of the new taxes, which Draper shows was relatively light. Americans united behind the principle that Americans should decide what taxes they should pay; and that taxation was not a matter which could in any way be trusted to a distant parliament for which no American had a single vote. Opposition to the new taxes could be disturbingly uncivilised. In the Boston riots against the stamp tax in 1765, for instance, the ‘mob’ broke into the prisons and freed everyone who had been sent there for riot or any other political offence. Though the British had by this time installed troops, they were nothing like strong enough to cope with these mighty demonstrations, and the people were repeatedly triumphant. Their triumphs stoked up the fury of the new British chancellor soon to be prime minister, Edward North, an even denser bigot than Townshend. The implacability of the colonists and the stubbornness of the British government continued up to the Boston Tea Party (brilliantly explained by Draper) and on to the hot war which eventually broke out in 1775. I had hoped when I opened the book that it would deal with the armed struggle for independence, and the extraordinary, revolutionary experiments in democracy which took place during the war, especially in Philadelphia. Instead, the book stops at the start of the war, so in a way the really exciting events are yet to come. But Draper’s book is grittily attractive nevertheless. It never abandons its roots in the economics which, Draper insists, set the war going in the first place. This insistence on the essentially colonial nature of the war answers a lot of questions. The enforced, uneasy unity between the classes during the war explains why the Americans could defeat what was then the biggest and proudest military machine on earth – but it also explains why the American Revolution did not go half so far as its French successor in extirpating the dark forces of feudalism. It took another 100 years or so, for instance, for bourgeois America to rid itself of the vile barbarism of slavery. (The French Revolution, by contrast, abolished slavery in a single decree early in 1794.) The class war kept breaking out in the American Revolution, but it was continually fudged at the edges by the colonial war. What Governor Shirley of Boston called ‘working artificers, seafaring men and the low sort of people’ were called up to do their bit to get rid of the English. They were put back in their place rather more meekly than in France a decade later, and this long but easy to read history book goes a long way to explaining why. Top of the page Last updated on 8 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The Case for Socialism What the Socialist Workers Party Stands For (1990) First published in London in July 1990 by the Socialist Workers Party (GB). Copyright © 1990 Socialist Workers Party and Paul Foot. Published here with permission. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Preface 1. The Foaming Wave 2. The Full Tide 3. The Tottering Thrones 4. The Growing Wrath 5. The New Eminence 6. A World to Win Top of the page Last updated on 5.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Stop the Cuts (1976) A Rank and File pamphlet published by the Rank & File Organising Committee, 1976. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. A letter from Maureen Robertson Death by a thousand cuts Housing Education The Health Service Personal services The end of the subsides: You’re on your on now Yes, we can afford it! Mr Healey’s pipe dream In conclusion Why can’t Labour help us? The challenge of the Rank and File What to fight for: No Redundancies No Cuts! Insist on full establishment No unfilled vacancies How to fight What to fight for: A Programme for Struggle Top of the page Last updated on 24 July 2018

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Corruption Members declare an unhealthy interest (November 1996) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.202, November 1996, p.8. Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. John Major decided many months ago to cling to office right up to the deadline (1 May 1997). Nothing seems more likely to interfere with this carefully constructed timetable than the government’s corruption. When the Guardian revealed two years ago that the mendacious Harrods store boss, Mohamed Al Fayed, had been spraying money round politicians in exchange for questions and influence in parliament, the government responded in the usual way: by passing the buck to a committee. Lord Nolan, a former tax barrister, was the man chosen for the chair of this committee and he promptly proposed the appointment of the former auditor general, Sir Gordon Downey, as a new Parliamentary Commissioner of Standards. Sir Gordon’s embarrassing job was to supervise the behaviour of MPs to see if they lived up to the rules set down in their register of interests. These rules derive from the old fashioned view that an MP’s main job is to represent constituents. Instead of banning all MPs’ pay except their parliamentary salaries, the rules allow ‘outside interests’ provided (a) they are declared and (b) they don’t lead to conflict with the MP’s representative role. All this is entirely fanciful. Pretty well every Tory MP has some ‘outside interest’ which pays better than the parliamentary salary, and this leads to constant corruption. Neil Hamilton, perhaps the nastiest of all the extreme right wingers who went to parliament in the 1980s, enjoyed a standard of life far beyond anything which could be bought with his parliamentary salary. He was apparently quite prepared to distribute ‘favours’ to people who would pay him (or set up an account at John Lewis for his wife) even when he was a minister. When Hamilton was fingered, the government reacted exactly as it had done during the Scott inquiry. It concentrated not on rooting out the rotten apple but on protecting it. The importance of the leaked memo from Thatcherite whip David Willetts is that it shows how the Tory whips’ office works: ignoring the corruption and seeking to limit its exposure. The main reason for this approach is that there is not one rotten apple but a whole barrel of them. So arrogant is the government in its death agonies, and so recklessly does it proceed, that it is constantly being found out. In the process, it irritates many of its own supporters. The glorious spectacle of the awful ‘Two Brains’ Willetts being gored by a Tory backbencher on the standards select committee was a sign of the nervousness and vulnerability of the government. Nor can ministers shake off the Hamilton sleaze. It will loom large over them in constant committees and inquiries until the election. The other point about the Willetts scandal, however, is less exhilarating. It is that the key questioner was Tory, not Labour. The parliamentary Labour Party is far less corrupt than the Tories. Very few Labour MPs have highly paid ‘outside interests’. The whole sleaze story presents a marvellous opportunity to hound and bully the government to the polls, and so disrupt its timetable. The fact that Labour can attack without fear of counter-attack makes their performance even more pathetic than usual. The silence of New Labour’s frontbencher on the committee, Ann Taylor, and Labour’s determination not to resign wholesale from a committee which is so obviously rigged, is proof that they prefer the medieval conventions of the House of Commons to driving the Tories out. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Harry McShane (April 1988) From Socialist Worker, April 1988. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 162–165. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The commonest jibe of reactionaries against revolution is that it is an infatuation of youth. When people get old, we are constantly told, they drop the silly idealisms of their youth. They become ‘old realists’. I contemplated this jibe last Saturday as I stood (it was standing room only) in Craigton Crematorium with some 300 other people, many of them elderly Glasgow workers. We were paying our last respects to Harry McShane. Harry died last week. He was ninety-six. He became a revolutionary Marxist in 1908, and he died a revolutionary Marxist in 1988. Can anyone show me one other person in the whole history of the world who was a revolutionary Marxist for eighty years? It would be wonderful enough if it were just that Harry managed to sustain these ideas all that time. But ideas like his are not ‘just’ sustained. They can only be sustained in the heat of the struggle between the classes. All his life Harry was an agitator in that struggle, a fighter. He made up his mind very early on (somewhere round 1910) that the socialist society he wanted was not going to be made by anyone for the workers; it was going to be made by the workers or not at all – and therefore their battles against employers and government were central to the whole process of political change. The workers needed to use their muscle (‘We never realize how strong we are,’ he used to say again and again) but their muscle alone was not enough without politics. Ever since he broke with the church at the age of sixteen and became a lifelong incurable atheist, Harry read books – books about British imperialism in Ireland and in Africa; about women’s liberation; about the Russian Revolution; about religion. He read these books, and encouraged others to read them, not in the interests of some arid scholarship but in order to improve his understanding of the world so that it could more speedily be changed. Harry was an engineering worker. He was a close ally of the Scottish Marxist John Maclean, and campaigned with him on Clydeside against the imperialist war of 1914–18. He joined the Communist Party almost as soon as it was founded and was a member for thirty years. He was the Scottish correspondent of the Daily Worker and Scottish organizer of the National Unemployed Workers Movement. Like pretty well all other Communists of the time, he was unwilling to accept the collapse of the workers’ state in Russia. He once told me of his excitement when he visited Russia in 1931. ‘It was so easy to believe the workers were in charge,’ he said. After the war though, his doubts grew. They sprang from his faith in the rank and file of the working class. What was happening to that rank and file in Czechoslovakia in 1948, or East Berlin in 1953? In Britain the rank and file of the Communist Party were treated increasingly as a stage army, always expected to agree with the leadership. When he was disciplined for not taking part in a standing ovation for a party official, Harry had had enough – if he’d been disciplined because he had given a standing ovation, perhaps he would have understood. There is a picture in the Glasgow Daily Record sometime in 1953 of Harry walking across Queens Park with his hat in his hand. It was the day he left the Communist Party. ‘I couldn’t stop them taking the picture,’ he explained. But when the same paper (and the Daily Express) offered him £500 – more than a year’s salary – to ‘tell all’ about the Communist Party, he swore at both of them (he seldom swore, but he did on that occasion). Instead, he went back (at the age of sixty-two) to the yards as a labourer, and worked until he was sixty-nine to pay the stamps to qualify for a pension. When I met him first in 1961, he was supported politically only by two outstanding socialist workers, Hugh Savage and Les Foster, who had broken from the Communist Party with him. He was seventy – but full of the joys of life, and of the hopes of a better world. He was still a revolutionary socialist through and through. He was quite determined that a socialist world could and should be won. He was scarred from his bitter experience with the Communist Party, and wary of joining another political organization. But when, in 1963, we set up the first fledgling organization of the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party) in the Horseshoe Bar near Glasgow’s Central Station, Harry never missed a meeting. When in the same year the TUC called for a demonstration against unemployment, Harry helped to organize the buses. In the great debates which took place in the Glasgow trades council at that time (and they were great debates; greater by far than anything you hear in parliament) Harry relentlessly attacked his former Communist Party colleagues for selling out simple class solidarity in exchange for a ship order from Russia, or to send another cosy delegation to Warsaw or Budapest. He identified Russia as state-capitalist, and the Communists as unwitting stooges of another imperial power. Yet when he was approached by the organizer for Catholic Action in the trades council, and asked to form a loose anti-Communist alliance, he swore again. ‘At least these people believe they are socialists – you don’t believe in anything except your god,’ he spat at the frightened delegate, who (literally) ran away.

‘At least these people believe they are socialists – you don’t believe in anything except your god,’ he spat at the frightened delegate, who (literally) ran away. The Right to Work marches of the late 1970s were meat and drink to Harry. He sent off the first march from Manchester with a truly magnificent speech, bettered only when he spoke to 6,000 people at the final rally in the Albert Hall. His theme in these speeches was a simple one. With his sly humour he would outline the government’s ‘plans for unemployment’. ‘Plans for this, plans for that, they’ve always got plans,’ he would say. Then he would show how no government ever had the slightest effect on unemployment. The ebb and flow of the capitalist tide swept over all governments and all plans. Only the workers in action could do anything to roll it back. We all know that great men and women don’t make history, but we also know that working-class history would be a mean thing if it were not enriched by great men and women. Great revolutionaries cast aside the temptations and pressures of the capitalist world in a single-minded commitment to change it. Harry McShane did all that with a cheerfulness and comradeship which charmed and enthused any socialist (or any potential socialist) who ever met him. He died in an old people’s home. He left a few books to his friends. He had survived on his pension, almost without supplement, for the last twenty-eight years of his life. He never had any property, yet he was perhaps the most contented man I have ever met; utterly happy as long as he was fighting for his class. He kept up that fight with undiminished enthusiasm through good times and through bad. Because his politics were based on the working class, he had a sharp instinct for the shifts in the class mood. One afternoon as he sat in the back of an old van which was carrying a party of us to speak on disarmament at the Mound in Edinburgh he remarked, just as a matter of interest: ‘Last time I was here there were 20,000 people at the meeting.’ That day he spoke to twenty. These desperate turns in the mood of his class never deflected him from his purpose, or even from his speaking skills. On the days when he spoke to very few people (I once held the platform when he spoke outside John Browns shipyard in Clydebank to no one at all!) he was as persuasive and passionate as ever I heard. ‘Things will come up again, Paul,’ he reassured me as we trooped home that day. ‘When they are not listening, then it’s even more important that we keep the ideas alive.’ Anyone who knew Harry knows their good fortune. Anyone who didn’t know him can reflect on his extraordinary life whenever they feel worn down by the old realism or the new. He was, is and will be an inspiration and example to us all. Top of the page Last updated on 2 September 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Lewis Grassic Gibbon Poet of the Granite City (December 2001) From Socialist Review, No.258, December 2001, p.24-25. Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The great Scots writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born 100 years ago this year. Paul Foot looks at the work of this champion of change Many, many years ago, way back in 1975, I was working full time as a reporter on Socialist Worker. That was the best job I ever had because I could integrate what I wrote with what I thought. Another advantage was a close friendship with the other full time reporter on the paper – Laurie Flynn. Laurie spent a lot of time encouraging me to read an obscure Scottish writer with the ludicrous name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Partly to shut him up and partly to while away the 14-hour journey, I set off on a speaking tour of Scotland, armed only with a copy of A Scots Quair, a trilogy of Grassic Gibbon novels. On the way to Inverness, my first stop, I read the whole of the opening novel, Sunset Song, and on the way back, through Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh, I read the other two, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. I never stopped reading throughout the entire journey, except perhaps to gaze out of the window south of Aberdeen, drinking in the scenery Grassic Gibbon so gloriously described. The experience was a conversion, a rapture only once previously encountered – when I first read the poems of Shelley. And this was not a coincidence, since Grassic Gibbon was an unreconstructed Shelleyan and had even named one of his novels Stained Radiance, a quote from Adonais, Shelley’s mournful obituary to John Keats. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s background could not have been more different to that of Shelley. He was born James Leslie Mitchell 100 years ago in Aberdeenshire. His father was an impoverished crofter, Danes Mitchell, and that weird pen name came from his mother, Lellias Grassic Gibbon. He was brought up on the land, and all his life retained a healthy contempt for the reactionary seduction of agricultural work and rural life. He was educated at a school where the teachers were instructed not to educate the children of crofters, and his father was bitterly hostile to the notion that children should learn anything that might interfere with adult work. Somehow the precocious youngster defied his father and his teachers, and read everything he could lay his hands on. In 1917, at the age of 16, he ran away to Aberdeen and got a job as a cub reporter on a local paper. In Aberdeen he joined the trades council, which had a fine history and had welcomed many famous socialist speakers at its meetings. The official history of the trades council recalls with special pleasure the visit of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor and the magnificent rendering of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind by her friend Edward Aveling. Like many other British cities in 1917, Aberdeen had a new soviet, formed in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. The soviet’s most enthusiastic founder was the 16 year old Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Not much later the young socialist moved to Glasgow where he got a job on Farmers Weekly. He was sacked after a few months for fiddling his expenses so that he could make donations to the British Socialist Party, one of the three organisations that merged to form the Communist Party in 1920. He was promptly blacklisted by the newspaper employers in the west of Scotland, and could not get a job anywhere as a journalist. So he joined the army and travelled round the world as a not altogether loyal member of the Royal Army Service Corps. In nine years in the army (1919-28) he developed a taste and a talent for travel writing. His descriptions of faraway places have stood the test of time, and many of them have been reprinted. He came out of the army in 1928 determined to devote his life to writing, and settled down with his wife Rhea in Welwyn Garden City. Few newspaper or magazine publishers would take his stuff, though one of his first published short stories was read and acclaimed by H.G. Wells. A Scots Quair Most great writers have purple passages in their lives. Shelley’s was in the months following the Peterloo massacre in 1819. Grassic Gibbon’s was from 1928, when he left the army, till his shockingly early death from peritonitis in February 1935. He was only 33.

He was only 33. He had one novel published in 1928 and another in 1929. He wrote the trilogy, A Scots Quair, from 1932 to 1934. In between he wrote another novel, Spartacus, about the Thracian slave leader of a revolution in Roman times. His attitude to Spartacus was similar to that of Karl Marx who, asked by his daughter Eleanor who was his favourite character in all history, replied at once ‘Spartacus’, even though any well read Marxist could have told him that Spartacus lived many hundreds of years before the proletariat even existed. Marx (and Grassic Gibbon) were electrified not by Spartacus’s deep understanding of the slave economy, but by his fighting spirit. In between all these novels there is a mountain of journalism and travel writing that defies belief, even though Grassic Gibbon revealed that he consistently wrote on average 4,000 words a day (you try it). The trilogy, A Scots Quair (nothing queer about it, by the way, it is derived from the word quire – a literary work of any length), is by far the best of Grassic Gibbon’s novels. The other novels are written mainly in plain English while the trilogy is in the vernacular, the Scottish language as perfected by the common people of Aberdeenshire. English people, especially those who pride themselves on their ‘mainstream’ literary heritage, are inclined to jib at the language in the trilogy. In fact it represents Grassic Gibbon’s ability to reflect the ordinary language of ordinary Scottish people that makes the trilogy so much superior to the comparatively flat narrative of his other novels. He captures the music and the irony of the language, conveying his political message not by dreary (or even subtle) propaganda, but chiefly by means of a gentle, searing mockery. He manages without humiliating his characters to detect and untie the knots in their thinking. His characters are so subtly blended and balanced, their thoughts and expressions so riddled with dialectic and larded with humour that the reader cannot help being absorbed in them. Examples? All three books are examples, but since this is mainly a political publication I’ll just pick this out from Sunset Song, when a new and rather strange minister called Colquohoun first comes to Kinraddie. As so often, the paragraph starts with a reactionary theme and slowly changes until the whole theme is destroyed in mirth: ‘You couldn’t well call him pro-German, like, for he’d been a plain soldier all through the war. Folk felt clean lost without a bit of name to hit at him with, till Ellison said he was a Bolshevik, one of those awful creatures, coarse tinks, that made such a spleiter in Russia. They’d shot their King-creature, the Tsar they called him, and they bedded all over the place, folk said, a man would go home and find his wife commandeered any bit night and Lenin and Trotsky lying with her. And Ellison said the same would come in Kinraddie if Mr Colquohoun had his way; maybe he was feared for his mistress, was Ellison though God knows there’d be little danger of her being commandeered, even Lenin and Trotsky would fair be desperate before they would go to that length.’ A remarkable character Presiding over all three books and over three epochs of peasantry, bourgeoisie and rising working class, is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable characters in all literature, more remarkable than any female character in Jane Austen, George Eliot or even the Brontes. Her common sense and good nature survive the most appalling tragedies and triumphs. She can tell an opportunist from a long way off, but is keen that her husband and son should detect hypocrisy for themselves. The period in which Grassic Gibbon wrote the trilogy was the aftermath of the betrayal of British Labour by Ramsay MacDonald and the other apostates of the second labour government: ‘But sign news came that fair raised a stir – a Labour government thrown out at last. And Ramsay MacDonald was in with the Tories, and they were fine. And then the wireless sets listened in and Ramsay came on with his holy voice and maa’hd like a sheep, but a holy like sheep, that the country needed to be saved and he would do it, aye he was a fine chap now that he had jumped onto the gentry side.’ In an essay on MacDonald in 1932, Grassic Gibbon got down to the roots to topple the old poseur, remarking that he ‘never penetrated words with the process of thought’. I want to deal briefly with a common criticism on the left of Grassic Gibbon’s work. Dealing mainly with the third book in the trilogy, Grey Granite, it suggests that the novel falls victim to what became known as ‘third period Stalinism’, the short period when the Communist Parties, on orders from Moscow, denounced the rest of the left as ‘social fascists’ and clung to lunatic sectarianism that they alone on the left could possibly be right. Alleged proof of this theory is the role of Chris’s son, Euan, who becomes a revolutionary Communist and organises exclusively for the revolution, laying about the rest of the left with sectarian abandon. Well, I read the story of Euan as the story of a young man who wants to put an end to capitalism, and wants above all else to organise for that end. And anyway, Euan’s story is only half the picture. The other half is provided by Euan’s girlfriend Ellen, and above all by his mother Chris, both of whom have their say in criticising the young firebrand. The relationships between Euan and Ellen, and between Euan and Chris, are portrayed with such delicacy and sensitivity that Grassic Gibbon himself must have had some personal experience of both. Was he even a member of the Communist Party? In her biography of Grassic Gibbon, Betty Reid, a stalwart party member and membership secretary for many years, thought he was a member for only a short time. Grassic Gibbon himself in a letter to a friend in November 1934, shortly before he died, wrote, ‘I’m not an official Communist as they won’t let me in’.

That sounds right, and anyway Grassic Gibbon’s early death spared him from making up his mind about the real horrors of Stalinism. Unlike his friend and collaborator Hugh Macdiarmid, he would not have withstood the Stalinist tirade for long without subjecting it to the same merciless mockery he aimed at capitalism. We leave Euan putting on his boots to go on an unemployed march, and his mother returning to Kinraddie, where she started her life, and reflecting above all on its changes: ‘That was the best deliverance of all, as she saw it, sitting there, quiet. That change will rule the earth and the sky and the waters underneath the earth. Change, whose face she once feared to see, whose right hand was Death and whose left hand Life might be stayed by none of the dreams of men, love, hate, compassion, anger or pity, gods or devils or wild crying to the sky. He passed and re-passed in the ways of the wind, Deliverer, Destroyer and Friend in one.’ This belief in and understanding of change, materialistic irreligious change, inspired Grassic Gibbon every bit as it inspired Shelley when he wrote his Ode to the West Wind – the ‘destroyer and preserver’ the ‘trumpet of a prophecy’, the ‘tempestuous’ revolution. Top of the page Last updated on 2 Mai 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot ‘A groundswell of anger and dismay’ (July 1998) From Racism, incompetence, collusion or corruption?, Socialist Review, No.221, July 1998, pp.2-3. Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot writes about the Stephen Lawrence case Everyone knows that the rich and powerful, through the newspapers and television channels they own and control, normally succeed in keeping their reins on public consciousness. The ‘stories’ that interest and excite people are, as a result, safely marooned in palaces or sports stadia. Every now and then, however, a story circulates which defies these rules, and which engages the public attention in spite of every effort from on high to suppress it. Such a story is the 1993 murder in Eltham, south east London, of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and its aftermath. Five months after the murder, one of Scotland Yard’s senior detectives, Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Osland, now a Tory councillor in Croydon, circulated a memorandum announcing that he was ‘losing patience’ with Neville and Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s parents, and suggesting that the police officers engaged in the murder inquiry should sue the couple for libel. The irony in the notion that police officers who had not brought Stephen’s murderers to justice should secure damages from his parents was plainly lost on Mr Osland. He felt he and his force had been entirely justified by a ‘review’ conducted by a senior detective in London, Detective Chief Superintendent Roderick John Barker. Mr Barker’s ‘review’ which flowed from a secret inquiry and was of course not published, had discovered that the police investigation following the Lawrence murder was almost entirely flawless. This remained the official police view as the long saga of the hunt for Stephen’s murderers unfolded. Weeks after the murder, five men were arrested. Two were identified by a witness to the murder, Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brookes. But Duwayne’s evidence was tainted – by a police officer who was appointed to drive him home and whose account of the conversation he had with Duwayne (which Duwayne hotly contested) persuaded the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the charges. Angry and disillusioned, the Lawrence family took out a private prosecution against three of the men. The prosecution failed – largely because of the ‘tainting’ of Duwayne Brookes’s evidence by his police escort. An inquest jury proclaimed unequivocally that Stephen had been murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. The Daily Mail (in a sudden fit of conscience brought on by the fact that Neville Lawrence had once painted the house of the Mail editor) named the five original suspects and denounced them as the murderers. In spite of all this, the position five years on is that the murderers of Stephen Lawrence are still at large. The early and prolonged confidence of the Metropolitan Police in their handling of the case began to wilt with the publication last year of part of the report by Kent police into the Lawrence investigation. The report was highly critical of the Metropolitan Police in charge of the murder inquiry. It concentrated on their failure to respond to information which flowed in to them immediately after the murder. On the day after the murder, a reliable informant, known as James Grant (a pseudonym) gave the inquiry team the names of the five suspects, who, he disclosed, had been carrying out racist attacks systematically in the area, who carried knives and boasted about using them on black people they met in the street, and who were out on the rampage in the area of the murder on the night it happened. Other reliable information followed. Most extraordinary was a witness who said she had visited the suspects’ home on the day after the murder and had seen them washing clothes and wiping blood off a knife. The senior officers in charge of the inquiry, however, decided not to arrest the suspects. They adopted a policy of delay’ which in the view of the Kent police hopelessly hampered the investigation and made it much more difficult to procure vital evidence. Despite its critical tone, however, the Kent police report concluded only that the officers in charge of the Lawrence investigation had been either mistaken or incompetent. The report effectively acquitted the investigating police of racism or corruption. The report was the nominal reason behind Jack Straw’s decision to set up a full public inquiry into the events before and after Stephen’s death. The nominal reason was bolstered by the continued campaign of Neville and Doreen Lawrence, who refused to be fobbed off or patronised. Their long battle had swung huge sections of the British public behind them. When the public inquiry into the events opened almost exactly five years after Stephen’s death, the large room at the Elephant and Castle designated for the public hearings was packed with supporters of the family. The enthusiasm for the campaign was not confined to south London or to black people. As sellers of Socialist Worker all over Britain were to discover, a groundswell of anger and dismay about the Lawrence case was building up all over the country, among people of all colours and of all and no political persuasions. This groundswell grew and grew as the inquiry proceeded in its quaint and sedate way. It overflowed into the hearings themselves, not just in applause and tears for the Lawrences and for Duwayne Brookes but also in mocking laughter at the police. Leaflets were issued from ‘the public gallery’ which consistently denounced the apparent reluctance of the police to disclose documents. This unexpected and entirely admirable expression of public outrage shifted the inquiry itself to such an extent that a grim story is beginning to emerge which is entirely different from anything originally contemplated. The early intention of the inquiry, it seemed, had been to contain criticism of the police within the boundaries of the Kent report: to blame the investigating officers for incompetence and mistakes, but nothing more. In the early days, this damage limitation exercise was conducted uneasily but reasonably effectively. It changed only with the rising clamour outside and the determination of the Lawrences and Duwayne Brookes’s lawyer to get answers to the questions which Kent police had not even asked.

Why had the suspects not been arrested immediately? Why had the information from the informers been allowed to fester for so long? Gradually, a name started to be floated in cross-examination: Norris. David Norris was one of the five suspects. His father was Clifford Norris, a well known gangland racketeer, and arms smuggler, who is now in prison. Clifford Norris, h emerged, had paid an important witness not to give evidence against his boy. Could Norris have in any way influenced the police to ‘go easy’ on the lad? At first the lawyers for the police and the inquiry mocked any such suggestion and dismissed it. But then it emerged that Clifford Norris had been seen in pubs on several occasions with a flying squad officer called Coles. Customs officers had mounted a surveillance operation on Coles, and were surprised to see him handing over plastic bags to their suspect. They reported Coles to the police who investigated him and, remarkably, cleared him. So what, was the initial reply? What had Coles to do with Stephen Lawrence? Quite a lot, it then emerged. First, the officer in charge of the murder investigation, DCS Iain Crampton, who took the decision not to arrest the five suspects, has worked with Coles at Bexleyheath police station. When Coles was in trouble for the Customs business over Norris, Crampton had written him a glowing reference. Secondly, Coles had been selected as an escort officer for the key witness, Duwayne Brookes, when the latter gave evidence in the private prosecution at the Old Bailey. Such revelations hugely shifted the axis of the inquiry. Increasingly, the police seemed on the run. The cross-examination of former DCS Barker, whose report had given such comfort to the police in 1993, was so embarrassing that the inquiry chairman, Sir William Macpherson, denounced him as ‘not credible’ and his report as ‘indefensible’. The feeling of even the most servile journalist at the inquiry (and most of them are not servile at all) is that there is more, much more to come out yet; and whether it does or not depends at least to some extent on the persistence and growth of the justice for Stephen Lawrence campaign. The inquiry continues. For the moment, however, the story of the campaign is powerful evidence against those who moan that the British people are ‘intrinsically racist’ or that it is ‘impossible to interest anyone in individual justice campaigns’. The campaign has carved the name of Stephen Lawrence deep into the consciousness of the working masses, the enormous majority of whom detest the racist gangs who pour blood onto the streets, and admire the strength and courage of those who campaign to put a stop to them once and for all. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot ‘We need socialist newspapers like never before’ (10 April 1993) From Socialist Worker, 10 April 1993. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 232–234. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Friends and comrades have been commiserating with me for losing my job on the Mirror, and indeed I am sad about it. But my main reaction, looking back on 13 years of Thatcher, Maxwell and Co, is that I have had it pretty good. For a known and declared member of the Socialist Workers Party to be given a page in a mass circulation tabloid was remarkable. To hang on to it for all that time was pretty well incredible. The surprise is not so much that I was pushed out, but that it took so long for it to happen. Ever since 1945 there has been a radical tradition in the Daily Mirror. Most of the paper of course wasn’t political at all, and the political part of it was pretty firmly controlled by right wing Labour. George Brown, the very right wing deputy leader of the Labour Party in the 1960s was paid a retainer with the Mirror. He was a close friend and political ally of the Mirror columnist Jack Connor, who wrote under the pseudonym Cassandra. Cecil King, chairman of the Mirror in the 1960s, was an MI5 agent who tried to lead a coup against the elected Labour government in 1968 and was sacked for his pains. Still, there was a radical tradition symbolised by an Australian sub-editor who joined the paper in the early 1960s – John Pilger. When John turned his hand to reporting he quickly revealed an astonishingly evocative writing power. His skill as a writer was entwined with a strong socialist consciousness. He was outraged by the divisions between rich and poor, and incensed by the violent means by which imperialism, especially US imperialism, sought to preserve those divisions. John wrote reams of magnificent reports for the Mirror which continued all through the 1970s and halfway through the 1980s until Maxwell summarily sacked him. John turned his skills to television. His contacts with the working class, who followed his reports in the Mirror with such enthusiasm, became less frequent. As Maxwell no doubt anticipated, his sacking was a triumph for the rich. Chinks of light in the capitalist media were a feature of the 1960s and 1970s. Almost every paper, even the most foul reactionary ones, employed socialists who, with varying frequency, could get their ideas across. The Sunday Times, it is worth recalling, was a marvellous paper of record in those days. The very first act of Andrew Neil when he took over the Sunday Times editorship in 1983 was to sack the editor of the investigative Insight column, Christopher Hird, and disband his team. Other chinks have been shut out as the ruling class has gained in confidence in the last decade. Even the liberal press has become almost exclusively preoccupied with its own gloom and hatred of people, which drive it to more and more reactionary conclusions. The bitter turmoil at the Mirror over the last few months has been portrayed in the financial media as a desperate attempt to ‘restore to profitability’ a dying old carcass of a newspaper. In fact the Mirror was making good profits. At every twist and turn in the struggle I got the overriding impression that there was more to this than a greedy management determined to smash the unions. They were out, at the same time, to extinguish the tiniest flicker of any genuine radical information which might inflame the masses. When Harold Lind, a media consultant, wrote in the Times last October that there were too many good journalists on the Mirror and that they should be dispensed with, he meant that, for the masses, any old trash will do. This was the Wapping school of journalism in full attack, and the new Mirror boss Montgomery and his acolytes took up the challenge with a ruthless zeal. When I started work as a journalist 32 years ago it was possible to imagine some areas where my socialist ideas would be published in the mass media in some form. Now I am not so sure. The control of the British media has always been in the hands of five or six men, but in the past they have deferred to some semblance of variety and democracy. Now they seem united in their desire to silence every whisper of dissent. One conclusion for socialists is to hold our heads in despair. Another is more positive: to proclaim the case for socialist papers, openly declaring their socialist ideas. Such papers by definition cannot circulate in the same market as the capitalist papers. They cannot depend on the same support from capitalist advertisers and distributors. Their economics and their circulation depend on the sacrifice and time of socialists themselves. This is not just flag-waving for Socialist Worker. The uniformity of the capitalist press should not provide anyone with an excuse to make our socialist papers more sectarian and hysterical. On the contrary. The more uniform the capitalist papers become, the more socialist editors should ensure their papers are open, democratic and varied. But the developments in the capitalist press, including the union-busting and censorship at the Mirror which led to my departure, make a strong case even stronger. We need socialist newspapers like never before. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot I urge you to join the socialists (17 November 2001) From Socialist Worker, No.1775, 17 November 2001. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. “Are you a socialist?” I asked a fellow speaker at an anti-war rally the other day. I knew the answer was yes. The speaker had taken the whole of his time exposing the dreadful gap between the world’s rich and poor, between the handful of billionaires on the one hand and the “world pining in pain” on the other. He had said more than enough to convince me that he didn’t believe these frightful facts were caused by accident or sent by god. On the contrary-they were connected. The poor are poor because the rich are rich, and vice versa. The explanation for this, the most frightful fact about our civilisation, is exploitation. That is the control of the means of production by a small minority who organise the wealth they control to their own advantage, and to the disadvantage of the people who work for them. This exploitation explains the horrors we see around us, including the horror of 11 September, and drives our rulers to “settle” such horrors with more horrors and more killings. Capitalism, the rule of the rich minority, is the enemy. The antidote to capitalism is socialism, a democratic system of society where the wealth is owned and controlled by the people who produce it. It is easy to set out these simple principles, and easy to answer yes to the question I asked. But other questions flow directly from that answer. The easiest, it seems to me, is, “Can I be a socialist on my own?” The whole point about socialism is that it is a society run by collective effort. Instead of splitting people one from another, socialism encourages cooperation. None of us individuals know more than a little or can contribute more than a little. In a cooperative society we can pool our abilities and resources to create more for everyone, and to share it out fairly. The same principle applies to changing from capitalism to socialism. Though it is corrupt and decadent to the core, capitalism is an extremely powerful system, bolstered all the time by class solidarity. The rich and mighty combine to confuse and humiliate workers and the poor. The only answer is for workers and the poor to combine to fight back. The weakest organisation on the left, therefore, is the NANAS – the National Association of Non-Aligned Socialists, the people who profess to know everything and do nothing. They cause no problem at all to capitalists and militarists. Not much better are the socialists who believe that the best road to socialism is to wait for it to be ushered in by parliament. These prevaricators always seem to have a reason to do nothing themselves and leave the campaigning, and the challenge, to someone else. Those few socialists who have joined the Labour Party have found themselves sidelined, patronised and vilified. As a result many of them have left, and many more are thinking of leaving. If they are to make any real impact on capitalist society, socialists have to come together in an organisation committed to campaigning against capitalist society in whatever guise it appears. In any area or workplace the ceaseless struggle between exploited and exploiters shows itself in countless different ways. Workers may go on strike, tenants may combine to fight the threat of eviction, black people may be victimised or attacked because of the colour of their skin, women and gays may be discriminated against. There may be – indeed there is right now – a monstrous war in which the forces of the rich have combined their military might to pulverise the poor. In all these struggles the crying need is for socialist organisation, in which socialists can combine to produce their own newspapers, magazines and propaganda, and organise solidarity for those who have had the guts to take their bosses on. Socialists are no better, cleverer or sharper than anyone else. But if and when they act together they have far more influence on society than they had when they were isolated individuals. I have been a member of the Socialist Workers Party since its formation in 1977, and of its predecessor for many years before that. I have watched while other socialist organisations disintegrated and collapsed under pressure from outside, or from their own insistence that the best way to proceed is, like capitalists, from the top down. The SWP has survived the rise and fall of Stalinism and the lure of office in the Labour Party. It continues to campaign and fight alongside anyone who challenges capitalism and all its works. The SWP remains today by far the strongest of the socialist organisations to the left of the Labour Party. I urge anyone marching against the war who answers yes to my original question to join with us, fight with us and help us to organise. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Socialist Worker Stop the war demonstration special Real democracy (15 February 2003) From Socialist Worker, No.1838, 15 February 2003. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Parliament is not nearly democratic enough. We need a revolution to get genuine control, writes Paul Foot IF YOU asked George Bush what he thinks he is fighting for in Iraq he would reply, if he is capable of an answer, that he is striking a blow for democracy. The people of the US, Britain, Spain and other European countries elect their governments. The people of Iraq do not. So the war against Iraq is a battle for democracy against tyranny. What is it, this representative democracy that apparently drives our government to war? It is an idea that only took hold in Britain in the 20th century. The first election when most people could vote for their government was in 1918. In the same year the chief beneficiary, the new Labour Party, formed itself into a proper organisation with a set of liberating aims. In the course of the century several Labour governments with parliamentary majorities have been elected. Until 1997, all of them were in almost permanent strife with a set of people who had an enormous amount of power but precious few votes. Industrialists, for instance, only had one vote each. But they could arbitrarily sack or cut the pay of hundreds of thousands of people who also had one vote each. Bankers and financiers had one vote each, but they could affect the lives of millions with a flick on the tiller of the exchange rate. The tussle between elected Labour governments and the small, tightly knit group of politically motivated men who controlled the wealth, armed forces and media was never much of a contest. Though the extent of their victory varied, the rich won every time. One result was the decline of aspirations of Labour governments. They became indistinguishable from Tory governments. The Blair government has handed more and more power and influence to capitalists, landlords and moneylenders. The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. Fewer and fewer people bother to vote. In 2001 far fewer people voted than in any election since 1918. The experience of Labour governments has exposed the weakness of democracy both to maintain the enthusiasm of the voters and to represent the people who need it most – the poorest and the weakest. Tony Benn is one of the few politicians of the period to recognise what was happening, and to act accordingly. In an introduction to a volume of his diaries published in 1987, he wrote that the lessons of his long experience in parliament “led me to the conclusion that Britain is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system which is in essence intact”. When he finally decided not to stand for parliament he said he was leaving to play a more active part in politics. One response to this gloomy history is to reject the very notion of representative democracy. This is a profound error. Parliamentary democracy, and things like free speech, a free press and free association, are invaluable to any campaign for a more egalitarian society. The fact that this article, and Socialist Worker, can be published is a precious part of a democratic heritage, won in years gone by much braver people than we are. The objection to parliamentary democracy is not that it is democratic or representative, but that it is nothing like democratic or representative enough. The revolutionary writer and fighter Karl Marx wrote 140 years ago about the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1871. He noted three central features. First, it was freely elected by a majority. Second, its representatives got the same wages as the people who elected them. And third, the elected government formed the executive as well as the legislative power. That means that it not only passed the laws, usually in the form of decrees, but also carried them out. The forms of the new power made it possible to convert political promises into political action. Similar alternatives to ordinary parliamentary institutions have occurred again and again through the 20th century – in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Germany and Hungary in 1919 and the ensuing years, in Spain in 1936, in Hungary in 1956, and in Portugal in 1974. In the best cases workers threw up organisations based on elected councils, with their representatives paid the same and subject to instant recall. These councils were more efficient and effective representatives than their parliamentary equivalents because they were more democratic. They formed themselves quite naturally in the struggle for emancipation by the exploited masses. And they all emerged at times of revolution. The reason for that is very simple. The existing power structure, including parliamentary democracy, is tolerated by the controllers of wealth only as long as that control is not threatened. It follows that the only real democratic alternatives to parliamentary democracy can emerge when the minority control of the capitalists is challenged. In each of these cases of revolution, the pendulum swung back to different points of reaction-either to terrible tyrannies or to parliamentary democracies every bit as feeble as before. The chief reason for this decline was the failure of the revolutionary forces to organise their new strength, to unite their forces powerfully enough to stave off the reaction and move forward to a new social order. It is a grim irony of history that on the one occasion where the revolutionaries were led by a party – Russia in October 1917 – the working class base of that party was destroyed in civil war before it could consolidate its advances. The lessons are plain. There are democratic alternatives to parliament, but they are only likely to emerge when there is a challenge from below to the economic rule of the minority. How can we encourage such a challenge? Revolutions cannot be created out of thin air. They can only arise in an atmosphere of confidence. So the only way to work for a revolution and a more democratic society is to relate to the day to day struggles that always absorb the exploited lives of the working people. Every strike, every demonstration, every manifestation of revolt carries with it the seed of revolution. The pompous and self absorbed activities of the representatives of parliamentary democracy work against such a revolution because they constantly dampen down, mock and humiliate live protest. They pretend they are democrats, but by their actions prove the opposite. The seeds of a new more democratic society can only be sown in struggle against the old one. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot AEF Leaders Give Up the Fight (30 November 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 99, 30 November 1968, p. 4. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. WITH HARDLY, a discussion the majority of the National Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers’ Union voted on Friday November 22 to accept the employers proposals for the engineering workers over the next three years. The AEF President, Hugh Scanlon, argued that a national engineering strike should still be called. He was outvoted by 31 to 23. This was a bigger majority against militant action than at any other time during the long drawn-out dispute. By their cowardly vote, the committee’s majority have condemned the men and women they represent to three years’ work study, three years’ ’measured day work’, three years’ flexibility – above all to three years in which the shop stewards, the only representatives of the workers on the shop floor, will be hamstrung and obstructed by continued interference from union officials. ‘Wage drift’, through which shop floor workers could force their wages up by up to £1 a week every year, will now be a matter, not for the steward but the union official and the boss. No wonder that Mr. Martin Jukes, director general of the Engineering Employers’ Federation, told the Financial Times: ‘I am very glad they have accepted and we hope the Confederation will adopt the same attitude.’ Mr. Jukes’ hopes were fulfilled. On Monday November 25, the Confederation Engineering Committee humbly fell into line with the AEF. Only the Transport and General Workers representatives opposed the deal. Now, however, come reports that the government, who strongly supported the employer’s proposals during the agreement, is threatening to refer the agreement to the Prices and Incomes Board. What will the AEF National Committee, do then? How can they create any militancy and opposition to the PIB from a rank and file whose declared militancy and willingness to fight they have blatantly ignored? Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Dividing Ireland (July-August 1988) From Socialist Worker Review, No.111, July-August 1988, pp.21-24. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Why are Catholics fighting Protestants in Northern Ireland? Why indeed is it the only place in the world where Catholics are fighting Protestants? Paul Foot looks back to the root of the problem – the partition of Ireland and the role Britain played in the creation of Northern Ireland. THE REALITY of human existence in Ireland over the last few centuries has been dominated by the British Empire. Ireland is the oldest colony in that empire. Marx summed up the nature of that long imperial rule in a single sentence: “England has never ruled Ireland in any other way, and cannot rule it in any other way, except by the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption.” Four hundred years ago Ireland was “planted” with colonists loyal to the British crown. Under the cover of the Protestant religion, armed and equipped by the most powerful force on earth, these colonists made Ireland safe for British landlords. The Irish population was kept in order by consistent and ruthless violence. The fervour of the colonists’ Protestantism rose and fell according to the rise and fall of the Irish resistance. The Orange Order was set up in 1795. Its founding declaration described it as “a barrier to revolution and an obstacle to compromise”. It was formed to meet the growing Irish resistance of the 1790s, which included many dissident Protestants. The Orange Order was a powerful force in the smashing by Britain of the Great Rebellion of 1798. As the counter-revolution succeeded, so the Orange Order lost its purpose. It was wound up in 1836 and lay dormant for nearly fifty years. When it was revived again, in 1885, a new threat to British rule had emerged – the battle for Home Rule. The notion of an independent Ireland horrified whole sections of the British landed aristocracy and the Tory Party. Lord Randolph Churchill summed up the tactics of his class in Ireland with his famous decision to “play the Orange card. Let us hope it turns out the ace and not the two.” By whipping up Protestants’ belief in their superiority because of their religion, the unity of the Irish people could be dealt a death blow, and the landlords and capitalists would continue to hold the reins. The Home Rule Bills introduced by the Liberals in the 1880s were defeated by a combination of the Tory Party and the old “Whig” landowning section of the Liberals. But in 1910 there were two elections with almost exactly the same result. They left the Irish Nationalists holding the balance in parliament and able to demand of the Liberals a Home Rule Bill which would grant Ireland independence. In exchange they offered Irish votes for other parts of the Liberal programme. UNEASILY the Liberals published their Home Rule Bill. It promulgated Home Rule for all Ireland. No one had ever thought that Home Rule could mean anything else. In 1912, however, the imperialists, landlords and capitalists played the Orange card once more. An obscure Liberal MP called Agar-Roberts put down an amendment to exclude from the Home Rule Bill the whole of Ulster, the northernmost of the four ancient provinces of Ireland. Effectively this meant that Home Rule could be achieved by Catholics in three quarters of Ireland, while Protestants would stay part of Britain in the other quarter. The standard of Ulster was raised by Edward Carson, a Liberal and Southern Irish Protestant who had made a name for himself at the bar (not least in the persecution of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality). He understood that the division of Ireland, with one half in Britain, the other out, would immeasurably weaken the whole impact of Home Rule. He argued on two lines. The first was financial. The figures about the development of capitalism in the two parts of Ireland at that time spoke for themselves. In 1907, for instance, the value of all manufactured goods exported from Ireland was £20.9 million. Nearly 95 percent of manufacturing industry was concentrated in and around the burgeoning city of Belfast. With this area safe in the Imperial Free Trade area, the only substantial profits of British capitalists in Ireland would be secure. The second argument, which sprang from the first, dealt with what Carson called “the labour problem”. The years 1911 to 1913 in Britain were marked by great labour agitations, huge strikes on railways, on the docks and in the pits. Carson showed that in the areas of Ireland where Protestants felt themselves to be in the ascendant, labour agitation was curbed. If workers could be persuaded to look for their salvation to their religion and not to their class, the prospects for employers were immeasurably improved. Protestants had to feel better, superior, but if they lived in a statelet where everyone was a Protestant, how could they feel themselves better than anyone else? The new state, therefore, had not only to be predominantly Protestant, it had to include numbers of Catholics who could play the pan of the underdogs; the permanent victims of discrimination. This led to some argument among the new Ulster movement. How many counties should be in the new British enclave they all wanted? The nine counties envisaged by the Agar-Roberts amendment had too brittle a Protestant majority (only 100,000 or so out of nearly one and three quarter million).

The nine counties envisaged by the Agar-Roberts amendment had too brittle a Protestant majority (only 100,000 or so out of nearly one and three quarter million). It was obviously unsafe. A slight change in the birth rate could destroy the Protestant majority. On the other hand the four counties of the north east (Derry, Armagh, Down and Antrim), though their Protestant majority was unshakeable, were too small in size and in its Catholic population to look viable as a separate state. A compromise between the two was needed. Carson favoured a new “Ulster” of six counties in which the predominantly Catholic counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone were added to the four’ ‘safe’’ Protestant ones. This still left a vast Protestant majority (about three to two). It ensured a decent land area and a sizeable population of about 600,000 Catholics who could permanantly play second fiddle to the million Protestants. AFTER SETTLING their differences on the size of the new British statelet they wanted in Ireland, Carson and the Tories started a furious campaign which lasted through most of 1912, all of 1913 and 1914 until the outbreak of the First World War. The most extraordinary feature of this campaign was its utter contempt for parliament and the law. Grand old parliamentarians though Carson and the Tory leaders were, they were quick to scoff at the supremacy of parliament when the integrity of their empire and the size of their profits were at stake. Bonar Law, the Tory leader, told a massive meeting at Blenheim Palace: “There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities ... I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I would not be prepared to support them...” These words soon turned into guns as Ulster Volunteers were armed in huge numbers to fight against the will of parliament. The army was openly incited by the Tories and the Carsonites to refuse to intervene. Fifty eight officers at the Curragh signed a statement effectively refusing to take up arms against Protestant Ulster. They were supported by their general and chief of operations. They were immediately promised by the Liberal Secretary of State for War that the government had “no intention to crush political opposition to the Home Rule Bill”. The gun running went on and the Volunteers enormously increased in fire power and in confidence. The Liberals, however, still depended for their office on the Irish Nationalists. In 1912 and even in 1913 the Nationalists were absolutely adamant that they would not concede a single county in their demand for Home Rule. John Redmond, the Nationalist leader, made his position quite plain in a speech on 11 April 1912: “The idea of two nations in Ireland is revolting and hateful. The idea of our agreeing to the partition of our nation is unthinkable.” BY THE BEGINNING of 1914, however, Redmond and the Nationalist leadership were agreeing to the unthinkable nullificiation of all their hopes and aspirations. They were negotiating partition of their homeland. How could that be? They had the votes to throttle the Liberal government. They had the support for Home Rule for all Ireland from the vast majority of the Irish people. Yet they were in essence nervous and “practical” politicians. They did not want a war before they could take up their seats of government in their own country. After all, they argued, surely half a loaf is better than no loaf at all. Against this “common sense”, “practical” approach was raised in Ireland another voice which argued in terms of class, the voice of Irish Marxist James Connolly. Connolly watched the scheming of Redmond and Devlin with a mixture of contempt and horror. He knew enough about the poison of religious discrimination to realise that the partition of Ireland would write that discrimination permanently into the constitution of both halves of Ireland, and that the damage to the working class movement throughout the island would be incalculable. He wrote: “Such a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and Devlin, the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster, would mean a carnival of reaction North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured. To it Labour should give the bitterest opposition, against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death, if necessary ...” Just as Carson and Bonar Law for their class had seen the exclusion of North East Ulster as crucial to the continued robbery of the Irish people, so James Connolly from his side saw straight through to the real purpose and consequence of the plot. Half a loaf was not better than no loaf at all if the half loaf had poison in it. CONNOLLY’S campaign and the partition plot were held up. War broke out in Europe and the nation states hurled their working classes at one another in a desperate battle for markets. The Home Rule Bill was left “on the table”. Redmond and Devlin at once agreed to become recruiting sergeants for the mass slaughter on behalf of the Empire they were trying to get their country to leave. James Connolly was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916. The rising was quickly crushed and Connolly, who had been injured in the fighting, was dragged from prison, strapped to a chair and shot. On 29 May, not much more than a month after the rising was crushed, the new British prime minister, Lloyd George, in an effort to persuade the United States of America to join in the war on Britain’s side, made a sudden attempt to “solve” the Irish question once again. He proposed immediate Home Rule for the 26 counties, with the six counties of the north east excluded as a British enclave. For this plan he got the instant agreement of John Redmond. But the proposal, and Redmond’s acquiescence, was quickly doused in a great wave of protest which engulfed all Ireland. The lead was taken by the emerging Irish working class movement, whose growing representative bodies – there was for instance a great rash of newly formed trades councils – denounced partition and Redmond with unanimous ferocity.

The old Nationalist Party seemed almost overnight to vanish, to be replaced by a militantly republican organisation called Sinn Fein. Within months the whole of British authority in Ireland was in jeopardy. Almost as soon as Lloyd George had proposed his partition plan, he dropped it. Redmond never recovered from the rejection of his treachery and died soon afterwards. FOLLOWING the elections of 1918 a predominantly Conservative coalition government was returned, headed by the Liberal Lloyd George. Seventy-six Sinn Feiners were elected as Irish MPs, 36 of whom were in prison. The Nationalists were effectively annihilated. The prospect of long term British rule in all Ireland was no longer credible. Once again the British rulers went back to their old plan. Once more they played the Orange card. The plot was simple – to hold Ireland by force while establishing the six north eastern counties as a “safe” British enclave. The Government of Ireland Bill proposed two parliaments, one in the 26 counties, the other in the six. While the parliaments were set up, some sort of law and order had to be maintained by the time honoured methods recognised by Marx fifty years earlier: “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”. On 23 June 1921 the Ulster parliament (composed, needless to say, of a majority of Protestants determined to maintain “a Protestant state for a Protestant people”) was opened by the King. At once the British rulers breathed a sigh of relief. Ulster was safe, the sectarian enclave was assured – and now it was no longer necessary to fight the rebels in the South. Instead they could be called to London for a conference. On 8 July, only two weeks after the Ulster parliament was opened, Eamonn De Valera, the leader of Sinn Fein, was called to London for a secret meeting with Lloyd George. Three months later a full scale Sinn Fein delegation was ushered into Downing Street for talks with British ministers. These rebels were represented by two journalists (Arthur Griffiths and Erskine Childers), two solicitors (Gavin Duffy and Eamonn Duggan), a landowner (Robert Barton) and a bank clerk (Michael Collins). They were, in the purest meaning of the word, petty bourgeois leaders. They represented a stronger strain of nationalism than had Redmond and Devlin – but nationalism nevertheless. There was not a single voice of labour at the conference table, not a word to harken back to the magnificent and prophetic writings of Connolly eight years earlier. The British ministers had a plan which was well summed up by Bonar Law. “I would give the South anything,” he said “or almost anything, but I would not enforce anything on Ulster.” A great diplomatic game was then played out, according to this plan. Hours, and then days were spent discussing matters such as the Oath of Allegiance which future Irish MPs should or should not take to the Crown, the possible Dominion status of the new independent state, the access to Irish ports by the British navy in time of war and the question of tariff barriers. In all these matters the British ministers had only a passing interest, but they kept the Irishmen talking over them interminably. Every now and then, with much grunting and bad temper, the British ministers would make a concession. In all these matters Griffiths, Collins and Co (Childers, by far the most uncompromising of the original six, was swiftly removed from the negotiating table) felt, quite rightly, that they were making progress. They agreed that the question of Ulster should be left to last. When it came, at last, the treaty was almost complete. It seemed churlish to quibble about the last question on the agenda. Each one of the five restated their opposition to partition. Ireland was indivisible. Partition of their country could not be contemplated. When Lloyd George, in a “final” offer, suggested a Boundary Commission which would look into the fairness or otherwise of the six county state, one by one the Sinn Feiners started to think about the unthinkable, and finally signed the unsignable. All five, including Michael Collins, the most implacable of the Sinn Fein fighters in the war against the Black and Tans, signed the treaty which cut their country in half. STILL THE MATTER was not yet finally decided, however. The treaty had to be ratified by the Irish parliament, the Dáil. There was angry opposition to what was seen as a “sell-out”. Day after day the debate raged. Astonishingly, however, the argument mirrored the treaty discussions in London. There was opposition from the militant Republicans. But what worried them was the oath of allegiance to the Crown, the accessibility of Irish ports to the British navy and the status of the new independence. Three hundred and thirty eight pages recorded the great Dáil debate; yet of these only nine were devoted to partition. For nearly a year Ireland was plunged into another war – between the new government representing the Sinn Fein majority for the treaty and the anti-treaty militants. The best elements of Sinn Fein were systematically destroyed not by the British against whom they had fought so bravely, but by their own government, armed by the British. Since Lloyd George’s diplomatic triumph of 1922 every single one of James Connolly’s worst predictions have come true. The carnival of reaction has swung on, North and South.

The carnival of reaction has swung on, North and South. In the North the Orange Ascendancy has held onto its power by means of (I repeat the phrase yet again) “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”. Special police forces, gerrymandered voting systems, discriminatory employment and housing policies – all these and many more have served to create one of the most reactionary societies in the world. In the South all movements for progress have been frustrated or patronised by the Roman Catholic Church. It is not simply that medieval superstitions still pass for government policy in matters of state intervention in people’s sex lives, but also that the reaction in the South has held back social reform movements. HOW DOES the argument used by Carson and his colleagues for partition in 1912 to 1922 stand up today? The financial reasons they gave then have vanished. The old industries of the North are in decay. If profits were all they were interested in the British ruling class would have abandoned Northern Ireland long ago. But the second reason for partition – the emasculation of the working class – is as powerful now as it ever was. A united Ireland, especially if the unity was achieved through what would appear to Northern Protestants as British treachery, would lead to a united working class movement in circumstances of great political unrest. It is a frightening prospect for important people in London and in Dublin. It is worth almost endless expenditure on troops and intelligence services to keep the lid on the kettle. While Dublin governments, which are swapped from time to time between the two conservative parties, are much more interested in doing deals with London to make sure there is no real change in the line of partition. Even the supposedly Republican Fianna Fail party much prefers the devil it knows (a divided island and a sectarian statelet) to the devil it doesn’t know, which could turn into the most frightening devil of all, a conscious, united and fighting working class. I’ll leave the final word to Connolly: “A real socialist movement cannot be built by temporising in front of a dying cause such as that of the Orange Ascendancy, even although in the paroxysms of its death struggle it assumes the appearance of energy like unto that of health. A real socialist movement can only be born of struggle, of uncompromising affirmation of the faith that is in us. Such a movement infallibly gathers to it every element of rebellion and of progress, and in the midst of the storm and stress of the struggle solidifies into a real revolutionary force.” Top of the page Last updated on 26.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Challenging for Hackney mayor Shaking up New Labour (14 September 2002) From Socialist Worker, No.1817, 14 September 2002. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. AWARD-WINNING campaigning journalist Paul Foot has been selected as the Socialist Alliance candidate in October’s election for mayor of Hackney in east London. Voting begins on Monday 7 October, in three weeks time. His campaign has already attracted national media attention. Socialist Worker spoke to Paul Foot. Why are you standing for mayor? “WHAT HAS prompted me to stand is New Labour’s decision to have elected mayors. I actually voted against the proposal that there should be an elected mayor in Hackney, and the Socialist Alliance was against it. The whole purpose of elected mayors, which was introduced in the Local Government Act 2000, was to make local government even less representative. “Labour’s whole idea is that society should be controlled by ‘clever and gifted’ people at the top, who decide about the distribution of resources. There is an obstacle for the government in this whole strategy – it has to get its crony elected. “One of the main reasons the Socialist Alliance in Hackney decided to stand for mayor is because the very democratic process that Labour wants to curb can be used to stand the whole thing on its head.” What issues are central to your campaign? “HACKNEY IS one of the poorest areas in the whole of Europe. There is a tremendous amount of poverty and destitution. Hackney has some of the worst records in Britain on health, infant mortality, and education provision. “We urgently need two new non-religious mixed secondary schools in Hackney. It is an incredible fact that in this borough there will soon be only one mixed secular secondary school. Hackney has faced diabolical cuts. “We face the privatisation of the school meals service. I will be arguing to stop the privatisation and to campaign on the issue with the trade unions. There are a whole series of cuts the council is making to save little bits of money. These can appear to be very small issues, but they affect people’s lives. They are stopping passes for the disabled. They are going to concrete in children’s swimming pools. “On one local estate, the Pembury, there have been police raids in an operation called ‘Thumbs Up’. This really means the police will be arresting a lot of young black kids, who will be stopped and searched because they are black. We should have a full inquiry into that. “I don’t see how anyone who claims to be a representative of the people of Hackney can escape saying that they are absolutely opposed to any war on Iraq. I’m absolutely opposed to the war. It is going to be at the front of my campaign, and in all my leaflets. I’m also opposed to the government’s treatment of asylum seekers and I am for welcoming asylum seekers to this country.” Your campaign has already got New Labour worried with reports that it approached Mo Mowlam to stand against you. “I WAS delighted to hear they had approached Mo Mowlam. I’m pretty sure they approached her after the first announcement that I had decided to stand. I do think they are a little bit nervous. If a man in a monkey suit or a robo-cop is elected, as has been the case in two previous mayoral elections, the government can handle it. It can deal with a maverick or reactionary candidate. “But if a socialist is elected then that sets all sort of difficulties. A socialist like myself will argue that there are not limited resources for services and the things people need. On the contrary, the resources available in society are enormous. I’m not going to be curbed. “The government have made sure there are all sorts of restrictions on the mayor’s powers. The mayor’s policies will be funded from the council budget. Everything will have to be approved by a cabinet which includes two existing councillors. But I will keep demanding that we need proper resources in Hackney. We need a tube in Hackney. We need to stop the sell-off of council housing. We need to change course dramatically towards public enterprise, not private enterprise, and towards comprehensive education and away from all the talk of faith schools and city technology colleges. “I can’t promise that if I’m mayor two new secondary schools will definitely be built. At least there would be someone who has a mandate from the people to say ‘this is what I believe in and this is what I intend to campaign for’. The slogan I’ve developed is that I’ve been all my life a campaigning and investigative journalist and I intend to be a campaigning and investigative mayor. “I’m going to go and find out and expose what is going on and campaign to change it.” Two thirds of the electorate in Hackney did not vote in the council elections this year. What would you say to people who say it’s not worth voting? “I can understand people’s attitude to politicians. This is part of a process which has been happening over the last 100 years. “There has been a consistent surrender of the power of elected representatives to the power of the non-elected people who run society – the big businessmen, the policemen, the judges, those who run the media. The effect of the first Blair government was to make Labour indistinguishable from the Tories. “So I’m absolutely sympathetic with those who don’t vote. On the other hand, the end product of such thought means there is the danger of unrepresentative government. “There is the danger of dictatorship or ceding all the power to the businessmen and the High Court. And this is something we should try to stop. I would say to people, do you really want to give up your rights to be represented? “We are offering representation for working class people that is very different to the consensus of the main parties.” What sort of campaign are you going to have? “WE ARE going to leaflet every house in Hackney. And on top of that we are producing an eight-page Foot for Mayor supplement. We’ve got a very loyal and a very hardworking core of people in the Socialist Alliance. The campaign will depend on pulling people in who aren’t normally associated with political activity. “To help do this we are also organising local meetings. Today I’m going to a meeting with the people who campaigned against the scrapping of disabled passes in Hackney. “In the next week or so I’m hoping to speak to people in tenants associations, to local trade unionists, and to people in the Turkish community. If we achieve nothing else in the election, we will have guaranteed an increase in the socialist propaganda in this area, and hopefully also engaged new people in political activity.” London Borough of Hackney Some 85 percent of households have an income of below £20,000, compared to 66 percent in the rest of London. 21 percent of men and 11 percent of women are unemployed – the highest rate in London. 112 of the most deprived estates in England are in Hackney. Infant mortality and stillbirth rates are 50 percent higher than the national average. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Learning from experience? (June 1989) From Socialist Worker, 10 June 1989. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I spent a lively hour or so the other morning at Tony Benn’s house. The official subject for discussion was rather boring (I don’t remember what it was). What we talked about was a very interesting question indeed: why is it that the parliamentary politician I most detested 20 years ago is the parliamentary politician I most admire today. Anyone leafing through the pages of Socialist Worker in the months after it first became a weekly paper in 1968 would come across a great many references to The Hon. Anthony Wedgewood Benn, the ‘supremo’ Minister for Technology. Vacuous Among the subjects dealt with were the same minister’s vacuous enthusiasm for the European Common Market, his creating of a specially nasty private monopoly in ship-building, his sponsoring of a uranium mine in racist South West Africa to the delight of the mines owners, Rio Tinto Zinc, his support for In Place of Strife, an openly anti-union bill, his pretending all the time that he was a socialist and a democrat. When Labour went into opposition, and Tony Benn (as he now insisted he was called) went into opposition, he became, as far as I was concerned, even more detestable. When he called at a Labour Party conference for a standing ovation for the Upper Clyde Shipyard workers, who were fighting the very employers Benn had created, I was almost literally sick. As he assumed the mantle of Supreme Socialist in the Labour Party, I (and Socialist Worker) attacked him with ever increasing vigour as a monstrous hypocrite who could not be trusted an inch. When Labour resumed office in the mid-1970s, it soon turned out that all our attacked on Benn were utterly justified. After a year fiddling about with a couple of co-ops, he allowed himself to be sacked as industry minister, and moved over to energy where he made some pathetic speeches about the wonders of North Sea oil. If he was fighting against the Labour government, not many people in the movement knew it. What they got was rising unemployment and cuts in services, and Benn (who never resigned) took his share of the responsibility. Soon after Labour lost in 1979, we had The Debate of the Decade in the Central Hall, in which we argued the toss on reform or revolution (Benn and others for reform; myself and others for revolution). During that debate I recall Tony passionately supporting many of the measures of the Labour government. He also declared that he was not in favour of troops coming out of Ireland. He then entered what I can only describe as a Crippsian stage. Sir Stafford Cripps suddenly became a very left wing socialist in the 1930s, and called for the next Labour government to take the most drastic steps to curtail capitalism, including the creation of enough peers to outvote the entire House of Lords. This was the theme of Tony Benn’s speeches in 1981 and 1982. During the miners’ strike he had a long flirtation with a shameless Stalinism. He talked a lot about the war and how wonderful Russia was. Through all this time there was no doubt in my mind that at some stage or other the ‘true’ Tony Benn would revert to his old reformist and careerist self, throw away – as Cripps did – the baggage of revolutionary rhetoric, shed his momentary Stalinism and prepare once more for parliamentary power. Moving None of these things happened. Instead, as the ‘downturn’ continued, as defeat led to defeat, as more and more socialists became demoralised to the point of declaring that the working class of the world had vanished, Tony Benn moved relentlessly to the left. His attacks on Kinnock over the latest policy reviews (sell outs) were savage, witty and implacable. His speech on the first big China demonstration called unequivocally for action from below. Tony Benn is, I think, the only Labour politician this century who has moved so sharply in that direction, so that he is now, at his ripe age, a socialist who is quite unrecognisable from the fatuous, trend setting babbler of his youth. Unlike Cripps, Tony Benn does not have a career in front of him. He will not be a minister in Kinnock’s government. He would not want to be. It is, I suppose, wise in the view of all that past to be sceptical, but I prefer to see in the steady progression of Tony Benn the most unpredictable proof that some people, however few, can and do move to the left according to what they find out in their experience, and according to what they read and learn. It is not inevitable that people slide to the right as they get older. People do not always remain fixed in a reformist (or for that matter revolutionary) mould. Tony Benn has proved both. And he has not stopped moving. Top of the page Last updated on 25 April 2015

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Workers’ movement The party’s just begun (January 2002) From Socialist Review, No.259, January 2002, pp.16-18. Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot argues that spontaneous activity is not enough – we need collective organisation ‘We are many – they are few.’ With that historic reminder, the poet Shelley ended his furious poem about the massacre of trade unionists at Peterloo. The line has been quoted (well, misquoted really, since Shelley, in self imposed exile in Italy, wrote, ‘Ye are many – they are few’) a million times since. It reminds the world’s exploited masses of their numerical superiority over their exploiters. The line was written nearly 200 years ago, and its simple truth grows more obvious every day. There is still a vast – and growing – gap between the few, the secure and comfortable minority ruling the world, and the many, the hungry and insecure masses. There are still much more of the many than the few. Why hasn’t that numerical superiority led automatically to the overthrow of the minority? One answer is that the rich minority have used much of their wealth to arm themselves with mighty weaponry to protect their ill-gotten gains. But their continuing power does not depend only on force of arms. The chief reason for their ability to continue in power is their control over ideas. They control not only where and for what rewards people work, but how people think. People are not born with a set of ideas and thoughts. They grow into them. They are taught in schools and colleges, and through the mass media, such as newspapers and television. All of these are controlled in different ways, and reflect the will and purpose of the capitalist few. These reactionary ideas continually clash with people’s experience. The clash of most human beings’ experience with the ideas handed down to them led to the formation of an independent labour movement, with independent labour parties, organised to challenge capitalism. This in turn led to a further ideological offensive by the ruling class on the exploitation of ideas, with the unhappy result in the western democracies that the official labour movements were shackled to the exploiters they set out to tame. The chief reason for the demise of these labour organisations is their own passivity. The instinct of labour leaders, especially at, times of crisis, is to compromise, to back off from any challenge. Terrified that they will lose their own positions as important people in society, they prefer to compromise and vacillate. They prefer the existing state of things to the unknown. They prefer passivity to activity. One result of this approach is an ideological surrender. There was a time, for instance, when the leaders of the British Labour Party were committed to their own independent educational organisations – the Plebs League, the Workers’ Educational Association, and so on. A hundred years of Labour passivity have reduced these organisations to ruins. Now the Labour leaders spend their time organising focus groups and opinion polls. The focus group organisers and the pollsters are expressly forbidden to challenge any one of the views they record. The point is to find out what people think so that policies can be devised to win their votes. This process pretends to be democratic – ’it’s only finding out what people think’. In fact it is the exact opposite of any genuine democracy. That depends entirely on the process of argument, of challenge and counter-challenge. Without such argument and challenge the most disgusting prejudices fester in what Marx called ‘the muck of ages’, and, as they fester, multiply. So the vital business of confronting capitalist and racist arguments has to be conducted outside the educational institutions and media of capitalist society. How best to ensure that? In his last great poem, Samson Agonistes, John Milton, who played an active part in the English Revolution of the 1640s, asked: ‘But what more oft in nations grown corrupt, And by their vices brought to servitude Than to love bondage more than liberty – Bondage in ease, than strenuous liberty?’ In the triumph of Royalist counter-revolution Milton saw the dangers of political passivity, of ideological sloth. The reactionaries took advantage of that passivity and sloth to restore their tyranny. The alternative to bondage in passivity was strenuous liberty. In plain terms, this meant that if you want to change the world for the better you have to do something about it. And, as the Levellers proved in the English Revolution, you are much more likely to do something effective if you act in concert with others. A history of strikes In the centuries after Milton died exploitation increased, but so did the forces that can defeat exploitation. Capitalism brought the horrors of factory work, but also produced a new class, the working class, whose predominant characteristic was its power to stop exploitation by stopping working. Strikes and work-ins, however, did not come about by some magical process. They required the active and conscious participation of rebellious workers.

They required the active and conscious participation of rebellious workers. There are times in British working class history where that spontaneous activity flowered so tempestuously that many workers became convinced that their activity on its own was enough to change the social order. In Britain these times were the Great Unrest of 1911-14, the massive wave of industrial struggle after the First World War, the General Strike of 1926, and the seemingly unstoppable wave of strikes from 1969 to 1974. In all these times there were socialists who believed that the strikes themselves would stamp out capitalism and usher in a new democratic social order controlled from below. Yet all these tidal waves of workers’ protest were quite easily surfed by the capitalist rulers, who, as soon as the strikes were over, embarked on a sustained and highly organised counter-offensive. At the start of 2002 that counter-offensive is still winning. The way the capitalists organised and coordinated their counter-offensive teaches us another lesson. Just as activity is the necessary antidote to passivity, so that activity needs to be organised on our side every bit as effectively as it is on theirs. Capitalists know that they need constantly to coordinate their efforts to achieve their ends. The way in which, for instance, Margaret Thatcher and Nicholas Ridley organised the industrial counter-attack in the 1980s, the way they picked off the weaker, less democratic unions before launching themselves, their police and their newspapers against the miners, printers and dockers, proved that for all their verbal hostility to class struggle they fight it with the most ruthless and coordinated determination. Coordination and activity So the second lesson we can learn from the other side is the need for coordination, for linking the different and disparate struggles of the dispossessed. This is not just a matter of strikes and solidarity with strikes. It involves coordination on every issue that constricts working people – housing, social services, discrimination of every kind, Third World debt, constant wars waged by the rich and strong against the poor and weak, and countless other issues that are all part of the grotesque fabric of capitalist society. It involves, too, linking current struggles with those that have been waged in the past. Our rulers constantly revel in their history – glorifying the ‘grand old figures’ of the past, pompous bores like Gladstone and imperialist fanatics like Churchill. We have a history too, a much more heroic history than theirs, and one that needs to be learned, studied and blended into the struggles of today. How to combine activity and coordination? The question leads to the third crucial ingredient of a successful fight for a different world order – party organisation. It is a platitude, so obvious that it is embarrassing to write it down, that you can’t be an effective socialist on your own. The most brilliant socialist theoretician, the most scintillating writer, the most eloquent orator, cannot achieve any real change in capitalist society unless they cooperate with others. Just as the idea of socialism envisages a society where individuals pool and share their resources, so pooling and sharing resources and abilities is crucial to the achievement of socialism. We are up against a class of enormous wealth that understands only too well how to pool its resources in the fight against anyone who threatens it. The idea that we can defeat that class by shrieking on our own, however stout our hearts of oak and steely our determination, is either absurd fantasy or hideous arrogance. If socialists are to achieve anything, they have to come together in a party. Over the last century hundreds of thousands of socialists responded to that obvious conclusion by joining the Labour Party. A hundred years of passivity and vacillation have reached their miserable climax with the four B’s – Blair, Brown, Blunkett and Byers. An effective socialist party today has to break with that tradition. The party we need cannot any longer pin its faith in reform through parliament. It has to be a revolutionary party. What does that mean? Well, we can learn a lot from the Russian Revolution, from Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party, but that was a long time ago, and most people equate Russian socialism with the horrors of Stalinism. The truth is that none of us knows exactly how a revolution is to be conducted or what it will achieve. All we know is that any socialist society thrown up by a convulsion from below is bound to be incomparably superior to the wars, poverty and exploitation handed down to us by capitalism, and that therefore as we organise against capitalism on every front we show it no quarter. People recoil from the notion of such a party for many different reasons. Some protest about the idea of a vanguard, a party offering leadership to the working class, a notion they denounce as ‘elitist’. But anyone who suggests a course of action, indeed anyone who offers an analysis of what is going on and what should go on, is by that definition elitist. Moreover, the more isolated those suggestions and analyses, the less they are debated and backed by a collective, the more elitist they become. Others protest at party discipline – ’I’m not going to be pushed around by any central committee,’ they proudly proclaim. This has always seemed to be the most ridiculous claim, since discipline wielded by an elected committee is what gives a socialist party its greatest strength – its ability to act together, to produce newspapers and propaganda, to organise demonstrations, combine and coordinate lots of socialists where, without the party, only a few might take part. It is precisely that discipline and that ability to act together that provides the party with its greatest asset, the self confidence of its members, a self confidence that flows from the knowledge that when we think, debate and act we do so with others inspired by the same ideas and the same objective. In recent years, when anti-capitalist campaigning has suddenly and thrillingly become fashionable all over the world, I detect a new objection to the building of a socialist party: ‘Why do I have to join a party? Why can’t I just take part in campaigns, such as Globalise Resistance or the campaign against the war in Afghanistan?’ To these I ask other questions. Where did those campaigns come from? How can they be sustained? For all their mass support, these campaigns and others like them did not emerge out of thin air. They required organisation – yes, leadership. And almost all the recent campaigns have at some stage or other sought out and recruited organisations and organised parties. Of the socialist parties in Britain today by far the largest, by far the most disciplined, by far the party most likely to organise wider campaigns in a non-sectarian manner, is the Socialist Workers Party, whose main (though not its only) fault is that it is not big enough. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot No challenge, no change (July 1989) From Socialist Worker Review 121, July/August 1989, pp. 10–11. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The two year wait for Labour’s Policy Review is over. Labour now claims it is ready to “make the change”, ready to “meet the challenge” of the 1990s. Paul Foot here argues that any change has been towards the right and unity around Kinnock – change that offers neither a trace of socialism nor a hope for socialists. A LONG time ago people joined the Labour Party to make the world a better place. The early Labour Party policy statements and manifestos held out the prospect of changing the world by replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system. The ideas were put down in writing so that they could persuade other people of the socialist case. Some modern idealists imagine that that is the task of Labour policy statements today. They should take time off (it will have to be a lot of time I’m afraid because the document is written in the most turgid style I have ever had the misfortune to come across) to read Meet the Challenge, Make the Change the climax of Labour’s long policy review. The document is fantastically described in a sub-head, A new agenda for Britain. It is not about a new Britain at all, nor does it include a single political argument which its authors want to win. Its purpose is to fit in with what people already think, or want, or imagine they think they want. It is a product of the polls hysteria which has overpowered all modern Labour leaders. For them political propaganda, policy statements, manifestos are exclusively designed to win elections by telling people what they want to hear. The section on nuclear weapons, which is understandably kept to last, is a sublime example of that. It starts with a scathing attack on Britain’s nuclear deterrent. “It is inaccurate to describe Britain’s nuclear capability as a deterrent. If the Soviet Union were not deterred by the immense nuclear arsenal of the United States, it certainly will not be deterred by Britain’s nuclear capability, constituting 4 percent of the total.” This common-sense demolition of the nuclear deterrent theory for Britain must surely lead the document to propose the cancellation of British nuclear weapons projects. It leads to exactly the opposite. Britain, it concludes, will keep its Polarises and its Tridents under a Labour Government, not because they deter anyone, still less because they might ever be used (the document promises “no first strike” and if you don’t strike first with these things you don’t strike at all), but because they are there. “Labour will immediately seek to place all of Britain’s nuclear capability”, promises the document, “into international disarmament negotiations”. The weapons will be useful only in so far as they can play a part in getting rid of themselves and other weapons in international negotiations. But wait a minute. If the weapons don’t deter the Russians, or anyone else, who is going to take the blindest bit of notice of them in international negotiations? No one but a fool would be persuaded by that argument. But the section has nothing to do with argument or persuasion. The whole point is that unilateral nuclear disarmament is deemed by the polls to be unpopular at election times. An argument therefore has to be found for keeping nuclear weapons. It does not matter a scrap whether or not the authors or even the Labour leaders are convinced by the argument. The same sort of approach infects the section of the policy review about economic policy. Twenty five years ago (1964) Labour’s manifesto said this: “None of these aims (full employment, industrial expansion, a sensible distribution of industry, an end to traffic chaos, lower prices or a solution of the balance of payments problem) will be achieved by leaving the economy to look after itself. They will only be achieved by socialist planning.” There then followed a long passage on a proposed National Plan which, it was hoped, would take the economy by the throat and push and pull it in a socialist direction. Now listen to this new policy review: “The Japanese realise, as we do, that in very many areas of the economy the market and competition are essential in meeting the demands of consumers, promoting efficiency and stimulating innovation, and often the best means of securing all the myriad, incremental changes which are needed to take the economy forward; but they also realised that the market had to be directed and managed within an industrial strategy developed in consultation with government.” The National Plan has turned into “consultation” with government, or what the document in one of its more alluring subheadings proclaims is “a new partnership with business’’. Most of the argument in this section attacks the failure of market forces – the unemployment, the lack of training, the abuse of the environment etc. etc. But the conclusion is almost exactly the opposite: that the market works well enough, and needs only to be seduced or chivvied a little by government. Although the argument is against private enterprise and the free market, the policy is very much in favour of both because that is what the polls say the people want and they must have what they want through a new Labour government. Another example is the “strategy for the private sector” in health. “We are”, the document proudly announces, “opposed to the private practice. It is inefficient and wasteful of resources, provides a very limited range of services, and is heavily concentrated in a few areas in the country.” Quite. On and on run the arguments leading inexorably to a “strategy” which would abolish private practice. But no. “We intend to make the NHS so good that the need for private practice will disappear.” And in the meantime? The private sector stays. Why? Not because anyone who writes the document or speaks up for the Labour Party wants it to – but because, it is argued, the majority think people have a “right” to privileged health treatment, and therefore it is better not to propose what pretty well everyone in the Labour Party knows is the right and proper policy.

When it comes to specific policies about big questions, the manifesto is strangely silent. It excels, as did all its predecessors, in flowery pledges which no one knows how to fulfil and no one has the slightest intention of fulfilling. Among these I cite two famous old favourites: “We shall get interest rates down” (p. 13). “We made explicit our commitment to rid Britain of the scourge of unemployment” (p. 9). Mark these two beauties down, and wait. The Labour manifesto of 1964 promised to bring down interest rates, and the Labour government raised them from 5 to 7 percent in its fifth week of office. The Labour manifesto of 1974 promised to rid Britain of the scourge of unemployment, but doubled unemployment within two years of getting into office. This fundamental objection applies to the whole document. Of course there are several small and specific reforms in it which will improve life a little for some people. However, the ghost which has dogged all other Labour programmes dogs this one too. Howare such things to be carried out if me ruling class turns hostile (as it always does)? Is there really a snowball in hell’s chance of even the most modest of these proposals being passed through parliament by a government which is, in effect, being governed by hostile forces more powerful than itself? On this question the document is entirely silent. Years have been spent putting together all these hundreds of detailed proposals, yet not a moment’s thought has been spared for the question, how are they going to be carried out? In one astonishing passage the document promises: “We will present our manifesto to the British people and, when elected, will carry out the mandate we have been given.” That is extraordinary. It will, if it happens, be the first time in the whole history of the world that any such thing has been achieved by a social democratic or working class party in parliamentary office. It won’t happen. The challenge will not be met. The change will not be made. And this document, like so many others in the past, with all its rotten language and treachery to its own argument, will take its place in the pantheon of forgotten aspirations and lost illusions. Top of the page Last updated on 26.9.2013

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ever since Malthus (10 September 1994) From Socialist Worker, 10 September 1994. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 277–278. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Once there lived a man called Malthus who was worried that so many people in the world didn’t have enough to eat. He came up with a very simple answer. There were too many people in the world. The whole calculation could be reduced to the level of a New Testament parable. There were two loaves of bread and there were 5,000 people. If you were Jesus Christ you could divide up the loaves between the 5,000. But if you weren’t Jesus Christ all you could do was ensure that somehow 4,994 people weren’t there any more – leaving six people for two loaves, which is about right. Ever since Malthus had this brilliant idea he has been followed by all sorts of earnest people who want to solve the problems of world poverty. The same argument keeps cropping up in different guises. For instance, you often hear, ‘There are too many people in this country for the jobs available.’ Formula works Get rid of some of the people, or stop allowing so many in, and then we can share out the jobs. If the formula works for jobs, what’s more, it can work for hospital beds and houses and every social facility. These are the ‘rational arguments’ with which racists spread their prejudices. And isn’t it funny how often ‘too many people’ means too many black people? This week – 200 years of so after Malthus – there’s a big conference in Cairo. Various governments are gathering with United Nations experts to discuss ways of keeping the population down. Some of the governments have had a good shot at population control already. For instance, the government of Indonesia, which is heavily represented at Cairo, tried out a fascinating new method population control in East Timor. It wiped out a third of the population by shooting and burning them to death. But why, if starvation and poverty are the result of too many people are people starving even more horrifically in East Timor than they were before President Suharto engaged in his own special brand of the Final Solution? In the industrial countries of the West the most prosperous years in all history were the years when large numbers of people flooded in from other countries. Malthusian monstrosity Mass immigration coincided with a better standard of living not just for the people previously living in the country but for the immigrants as well. Mass immigration coincided with full employment. There were more people and more jobs. The whole Malthusian monstrosity was turned on its head. People are not just consumers, empty vessels waiting to be filled from finite quantities of food and drink. They produce food. The more they come together and pool their resources, the more they can produce. Five thousand can make many more loaves per head than six. The problem is not too many people. If people could decide what they produce, there would be more than enough food and accommodation for three times the world’s population. The problem is that only a minority decide – a minority who want to organise production for their own benefit and for no one else’s. That’s why they promote people like Malthus – to prove that hunger and poverty are not the fault of the rich for deciding not to produce what people need, but the fault of the poor and hungry for being too many. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Morse code (23 January 1993) From Socialist Worker, No.1326, 23 January 1993, p.11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IT IS the last episode of Morse this week, and that is a cause of profound mourning all across the country. The estimate is that more than 20 million households will have the telly on for Morse. I started watching Morse too late – I used to scoff at friends who hurried home to catch it. “Just another police soap,” I thought. “What’s all the fuss about?” In fact of course the appeal of the series has been that it is not a police soap at all. Morse is not real. He is most people’s role model of what a policeman/detective ought to be like. He ought to be ruminative, gentle, rather highbrow in his tastes and radical in his politics. He ought to think his way to his solution. Above all, if he does his job properly, there’s no need for him to show his power. If detectives were really like that, they’d be popular. They are not like that. Talking about Morse, John Stalker said there are “plenty of eccentrics” in the CID but he had to agree that very few of those “eccentrics” (“oddballs” or just plain “nutters” might be a better description) are like Morse. I rather doubt if you could find a chief inspector anywhere in the country who remotely corresponds to him. The macho culture in the police force is now almost entirely dominant. This is not just reflected in the racism and sexism which are so often written about and so permanently obvious, especially in London. Its effect on detection is to make a mockery of the very word. Crimes are “solved” not by any process which can be called detection but by “information” bribed from the underworld, the pampering of supergrasses, confessions extracted by threats, blackmail or (in extreme cases) good old fashioned torture. Sophisticated inspector No doubt it is the yearning for the good old days (which probably never existed anyway) of the sophisticated inspector and his happily married, jocular, hard working but always respectful sergeant which accounts for some of Morse’s popularity. But that Is not all, not by any means. The success of the characters is that they have been blended into a series of extraordinary stories, some much better than others but all rooted in the real world and sensitive and responsive to it. Last week’s episode, the best I’ve seen, was a quite outstanding, gripping and unpredictable story about rape and women’s reaction to it. It was enriched by a brilliant performance from Harriet Walker who fooled, I suspect, all her audience with her caricature of the slightly scatty and helpless psychiatrist. Her steel ran deep, and it was reinforced by an astonishing (and gloriously impossible) outburst of uncompromising feminism from a policewoman. This was high drama, superbly acted and brilliantly filmed. It was not easy to follow – I doubt whether more than a handful of people guessed the shocking ending. Its remarkable popularity is a great slap in the face to the highbrows on the Independent Television Commission who believe that the telly watching public are a load of morons who have been led by the nose for far too long by lefties. It was this “thinking” which led to the London independent television franchise being taken from Thames and handed to Carlton, a company which, to judge from its early offerings, can’t tell whether it has more contempt for itself or for its public. Morse shows that if you give people good drama, well written and full of sophisticated humour and suspense, they will like it, and like it much more than all the safe sentimental pap served up to them to keep them quiet. Top of the page Last updated on 7.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Democracy and socialism Century of the great hope (January 2000) From Socialist Review, No.237, January 2000, pp.14-16. Copyright © 2000 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Prospects for peaceful social change seemed inevitable 100 years ago. But, the fight for the vote did not challenge economic power, argues Paul Foot, and so we still have to achieve real democracy Margarethe von Trotta’s fabulous film about Rosa Luxemburg opens on New Year’s Eve 1899 with a huge centenary party ball organised by the German Social Democratic Party. The scene throbs with gaiety, ribaldry, and above all hope. All the great leaders of the rising new movement were there to celebrate the dawn of a new era, the start of another hundred years, which everyone assumed would be incomparably better than the century of wars and dictators which was drawing to a close. What was the chief cause of this great hope? It was not just that the German Social Democratic Party was increasing its influence throughout the country, but that everyone expected that before too long the mass of the German people would win the vote, and that vote would lead inevitably to a prolonged period of democratic government. The essence of that new democracy was conveyed by the word ‘social’ in the party’s name. Of democratic bourgeois parties, ever since 1848, the workers had had their fill. Now at last their place was to be taken by a socialist party whose democratic qualifications were millions of workers’ votes. Now at last the travesty of democracy would give way to a government committed to measures which would be passed through parliament and at last put a stop to the rulers’ interminable exploitation of the working class. Two characters dominated that tumultuous celebration: Karl Kautsky, the doyen of German Social Democracy, unbending in his insistence on Marxist politics in the party, and Rosa herself, fresh from a furious argument with Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein had argued against the idea that social change could only come about through social revolution. This was understandable in an age of tyranny, Bernstein argued, but plain silly when the workers, without risking either the violence or the unknown future course of revolution, could change society by electing deputies to parliament and therefore, through the majority they were certain to win in those parliaments, change the country’s laws, customs and inequalities. Rosa replied that capitalism would never consent to being reformed into another system, and would certainly resist every measure that threatened to take the country and its industry towards socialism. Those who worked from the top of society to change it from the top wanted, she argued, merely to reform the capitalist system, while she and her comrades wanted to abolish the system altogether and replace it by socialism. It was quite wrong, she concluded, to pretend that this was an argument about ends and means. Those who wanted to reform capitalism rather than replace it were seeking ‘a different goal’. The argument was still raging when the SPD luminaries gathered for their New Year Ball in 1899. Many guests, including Karl Kautsky, responded to the Marxist language favoured by Rosa Luxemburg, though the more practical politicians among them, again including Karl Kautsky, were secretly impressed and even excited by Bernstein’s parliamentary perspective. In the film the argument hovers lightly, almost frivolously, over the celebrations without spoiling them. Whatever happened, all the guests assumed and rejoiced that under the auspices of the mighty new party life would get better. Two decades later the SPD was elected to national office after the defeat of the German Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of that revolution, was fished out of a river after being murdered by troops under the orders of the new SPD government. Karl Kautsky and most of the other SPD leaders had voted for the unspeakably murderous First World War, and the intellectual heirs of Bernstein were all in high office. In 1933 the right to vote, the very basis of their power and the essence of the celebrations at the centennial ball, was abruptly usurped. No sooner was Adolf Hitler elected chancellor than he banned all future elections, wiped out trade unions and opposition parties, and installed himself as fascist dictator. The century of the great hope became the century of the Holocaust. The British experience was similar, if slower and less dramatic. British Labour leaders were far more reluctant than their German counterparts to form an independent party. They did so gingerly, and still glancing nostalgically back to the days when they were welcome in the Liberal Party. The clinching argument was the need for an independent party which would represent the working masses and fight for those masses against the rich and powerful. The new Labour Party ushered in a new era of democracy. Until then the choice for British electors was between Tories and Liberals, two parties which drew their leaders and policies from the propertied minority. The notion that by voting Labour the British people could elect a government which would then pass laws in the interests of labour and the working class was a million times more democratic than anything which had gone before. For the first time democracy meant something more tangible for the workers: a chance to choose a friendly government which could reverse the oppressive balance of class forces and immeasurably improve the lives of working people. In a speech in 1923 the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, explained that these changes would come through elected Labour governments which would, by persistently passing reforming laws, bring about a ‘gradual supercession’ of capitalism. Almost at once MacDonald got his chance.

Almost at once MacDonald got his chance. The general election of 1929 returned Labour as the largest party. Less than two years later, in conditions of mass unemployment and economic crisis, neither of which had been expected, let alone predicted, MacDonald and his close colleagues proposed a plan to cut the dole for millions of unemployed workers. The plan was intolerable to the rank and file of the Labour Party and to the TUC. Rather than accept the majority view of the party they had built and led, MacDonald, chancellor Philip Snowden, and Jimmy Thomas, whose special ministerial responsibility was unemployment and under whose term of office unemployment had tripled, crossed the floor of the House of Commons and joined the Tories in what they called a national government. At the subsequent general election Labour lost 3 million votes and all but 50 of its MPs. Shocked and angry, Labour Party members rallied to calls from the left never again to allow such a betrayal. The newly formed Socialist League argued that the only effective antidote to such a betrayal was a thoroughgoing socialist policy and a ruthless determination by the next socialist government to pass that policy into law. The League’s policies were designed to breathe some life into the democracy so humiliated by the MacDonald betrayal. But by the time Labour was re-elected in 1945, on the crest of precisely the wave of popular socialist conviction which the League had anticipated, the Labour leaders had lost any enthusiasm they may have had for replacing the power of capital. Despite its nationalisations and the National Health Service, the postwar Labour government stuck firmly to the old rules of parliamentary government, and before three years were out had become, for all to see, the servant of capital, not the master of it. The same wretched process, greatly exaggerated, dogged the two other periods of majority Labour government after the war – under Harold Wilson from 1964 to 1970, and Wilson and James Callaghan from 1974 to 1979. Both succumbed to the ‘continuity of policy’ which Stafford Cripps of the Socialist League had castigated as the harbinger of compromise and betrayal. Both accepted the dictation of reactionary foreign policy priorities from the United States and blatantly anti-union decisions from the judiciary. Above all, both governments trailed helplessly behind the economic priorities of capitalism: if the market called for high unemployment, the government conceded it; if the market called for low investment, the government conceded it; if the market called for cuts in public services, the government conceded them. Yet no one elected the market, and each time the elected government conceded to the market another slice of democracy was lost. Nor was the power of capital to dictate policy restricted to periods of Labour government. In the autumn of 1992 the newly elected Tory government was proceeding happily along its carefully chosen path with Britain as a member of the ERM, which set the European rate for the currency. Massive speculation by wealthy gamblers, none of whom were elected or had any concern about public policy except to make the swiftest buck for themselves, forced the government, against its declared will, to abandon the policy and leave the ERM. Interviewed about this six years later, Kenneth Clarke, who was home secretary at the time, said the ERM debacle proved the fantastic political power of market forces. ‘We as a government were totally out of control,’ he revealed. Nor was the Tory government alone in that humiliation. Membership of the ERM was the declared policy of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. The combined effect of this relentless drain of democracy has been to convince the professional politicians that there is no real scope for any substantial change in the social order. For formerly bourgeois politicians, Liberal and Tory, this new mood represented no change. They always stood for capitalism, and are quite content to continue to do so. For Labour, which stood for at least a gradual supercession of the capitalist order and a slow, gradual march to socialism, the new pessimism required a sharp change in direction. The election in 1994 of the openly Liberal politician Tony Blair to replace the social democrat John Smith as Labour leader was the first sign of this change. Then in quick succession came the removal from the party constitution of Clause Four, which had committed it to public ownership, and a string of watered-down commitments whose combined effect was to ensure that under a Labour government the rich get richer while the workers and their unions are held firmly in the judicial grip which Margaret Thatcher had fashioned for them. As the coup de grace in this slaughter of former commitments, Blair, almost as soon as he was elected, held meetings with the Liberal Democrats to offer them seats in the cabinet. He yearned for the day when British democracy would once again hold out a glorious choice between a Tory Party committed to capitalism and an anti-Tory party committed to capitalism. Labour’s huge 1997 majority in the Commons – itself a sign of the growing wrath against years of Thatcherism – made it impossible for Blair to clinch his cherished Lib-Lab dream, but he is determined to keep trying. The conclusion at the end of the century of the great hope is that the highest aspirations of the modern Labour Party reach no further than those of the Democratic Party in the United States: that social democracy can now be dispensed with, and that any true meaning of the word ‘democracy’ will vanish with the ‘social’. One reaction to this sad story is to proclaim the invulnerability of capitalism, and to limit politics and political action to the reactionary vistas of Tony Blair. This is the reaction of people who believe either a) that there is no working class with common wants and common interests or b) that the working class has no power to make its presence and its interests felt in high society. Coincidentally, this sort of pessimism was rife in Britain 100 years ago when a Tory government was in apparently unshakeable control and the voters were about to be seduced by a juicy war in South Africa. That pessimism was soon shattered in the great burst of agitation by workers, women and Irish republicans in the years leading up the First World War.

It was shattered still further in the Russian Revolution and the burst of workers’ confidence which it inspired all over the world. The plain fact is that as long as society is split into classes, as long as the rich try to get richer by bashing the poor, there will inevitably be periods of mass protest as the workers and the poor organise to hit back. The class struggle, in short, is not over. It will show itself again and again. As it does so, another temptation will distract workers. So sick will so many of them be of the long periods of passivity, or of the hideous betrayal of socialist principles by the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, that they will urge their followers to abandon politics to professional politicians and do their best to batter down the ramparts of capitalism armed only with strikes and demonstrations. Such a strategy leaves the rich class with their strongest weapon intact. They know, as they did in 1911 and 1921 and 1972, that workers’ militancy can fall as fast as it can rise, and that great explosions of militancy can dissolve like fireworks in the night. They know that as long as militancy can be confined to its own borders it can be contained and eventually defeated. Socialist politics, based on the aspirations of rank and file workers, can bind that militancy together and arm it with answers to the inevitable questions. Why should better off workers go on strike – why not redistribute the wealth of richer workers among the starving millions? Is it really true that one man’s wage rise is another man’s price rise? Above all, what is this socialism and why should it be any better than what we have at present? The very questions themselves are unanswerable by those who support a society ruled by a bureaucratic state capitalist tyranny or by a grasping ruling class. The answers can only come from a militant working class movement in revolt against capitalism. The case emerges clearly for socialist organisation whose strength and potential come from its links to workers’ militancy and their readiness to use their power to fight. The enduring political lesson of the 20th century is that socialism and social democracy through the ballot box have failed on both counts, and that there is no short cut to socialism from the rulers of class society, however enlightened or socialistic those rulers claim to be. There is no socialism, and because of that no true democracy. Those who believed that either or both could be achieved through the ballot box alone have been confounded. Roll on the next century, not only of the great democratic hope but also of the greatest possible democratic achievement: the emancipation of labour. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Labour’s Crisis Ghost of a chance (November 2000) From News Review, Socialist Review, No.246, November 2000, p.5 Copyright © 2000 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Suddenly, totally unexpectedly, a strange and ghastly creature from the past flutters across the political stage – a Tory government. A what? Not a past Tory government, nor even a Labour government pretending to be a Tory government. But for a fleeting moment, and in at least three proper opinion polls, a majority of British people answered the question, ‘How would you vote at the next election?’ with the preposterous reply, ‘Conservative.’ Convert these polls into a general election and the phantasma, the spectre, is converted into reality – a Tory government with William Hague as prime minister. Not for eight years, not since Heseltine closed the pits and Lamont ran up the interest rates to 15 percent, have the Tories led in the opinion polls. What was the cause of this sudden shift? Was there a spectacular disaster for the government? On the contrary. Many pundits, myself included, were predicting that the Labour lead in the polls was so huge and the prospect – not the reality, but the prospect – of Brown’s budget so alluring that Blair might call an October election and have done with the Tories for another five years at least. Was it perhaps the emergence of William Hague as a charismatic leader, or of his Tory team as thrusting dynamos with even a glimmer of an answer to people’s problems? To ask the question is to answer it. The Tories are a hopeless bunch, even more anonymous and lacklustre than they were under John Major, split all ends up over Europe and careering to the right in a maniacal frenzy. The real answer is much more serious. It is that the fuel crisis, and the government’s dithering over it, left people uneasy and uncertain. The violent fluctuations of the opinion polls showed that old party loyalties are unreliable. New Labour’s ministers are unpopular not so much for what they say and do, but for what they don’t say and don’t do. The hallmark of the government is paralysis. It doesn’t say yes and it doesn’t say no. It doesn’t say stop and it doesn’t say go. Too nervous to climb, too frightened to fall, it bides its time and clings to the wall. In a society cut into classes, paralysis is not even neutrality. It leaves things as they are – in the exclusive hands of the rich who grow more and more confident that they will be able to hang on to their wealth and power. The reason for the sudden rise in the polls for the Tories has nothing to do with them and even less to do with the ‘apathy of the masses’. The blame lies squarely on New Labour. Three and a half years after the biggest election victory of all time, three and a half years of uninterrupted economic stability, three and a half years of the most hopeless opposition anyone could imagine, leave us with opinion polls showing Labour neck and neck with the Tories. It is small comfort that the Tories immediately threw away their advantage by wheeling on the awful Widdecombe to make a hash (if she will pardon the expression without reaching for her manacles) of even a Tory conference speech on law and order. It is not much comfort if the polls just for a moment swing away from the Tories again. The point is that New Labour with its Tory privatisations, Tory tax breaks, Tory dinner parties for the rich and Tory chief inspector of schools has so confused its supporters that they can’t any longer tell the difference between this government and its predecessor. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot A hero of Labour (1 May 1993) From Socialist Worker, 1 May 1993. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 51–52. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Good political biography is rare enough, and even rarer in the labour movement, so I gleefully report my enjoyment of Caroline Benn’s book on Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party. This is not in any way a hagiography. Indeed, by constantly sizing up Hardie from the vantage point of the women he knew and loved – his wife and daughter whom he expected to live on a pittance of a pound a week, and his numerous lovers, including Sylvia Pankhurst – Caroline Benn draws a picture of a vain, self regarding and slightly unpleasant man. This is most definitely not the saintly hero painted by so many sentimental socialists. Nor, however, is this Hardie the villain of conventional revolutionary historians, who indicate that he was politically indistinguishable from his notorious successor as leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald. As the book proves beyond doubt, Hardie was at every twist and turn in the story preferable to MacDonald. He was contemptuous of and uneasy in high society, which MacDonald loved. He was suspicious of Liberals, whom MacDonald constantly cuddled. Above all, Hardie kept his working class roots, while MacDonald was always trying to tear them up. As so often emerges from biographies of the central figures of British labour history, Keir Hardie seems a mass of contradictions. Olive branches On the one hand, he is accommodating, seeking to make alliances, holding out olive branches to the other side. On the other, he is trumpeting his deep hostility to all things Liberal, insisting on the purest of pure Labour and denouncing Liberal ministers, especially Winston Churchill, whom he called a charlatan and a liar. On the one hand he is telling his colleagues that parliament is all that matters. On the other hand, he is the consummate campaigner, never stopping his endless, lifelong stomp round the country, speaking at more meetings in a month than most of us active socialists would expect to address in a year. How to resolve these contradictions? Caroline Benn has a go with this: As so often happened in Hardie’s life when he found himself drifting towards Liberalism (as he had been since 1908) it was events in the industrial field which re-radicalised him. The astonishing and quite unexpected strike wave of 1911, which awoke the railwaymen and the miners and the Irish countryside from which so many of them had come, brought Hardie quickly back to the politics of his youth. He toured the mining areas, speaking with great passion about the hardship and courage of the strikers and their families. He denounced the bosses and Churchill with the most ferocious passion. He was all his life an internationalist, an anti-militarist, a supporter of women’s liberation and an opponent of British rule in Ireland. Of course, it is easy over all these years to pick out juicy examples of Hardie’s reformism: his pettifogging parliamentarianism, his sentimentality, his endless appeals to higher values. But he emerges from this marvellous biography as a proletarian socialist who believed in his class, who wanted to improve it through parliament. But he realised that, whatever the possibilities of parliament, little or nothing would be achieved unless the workers acted for themselves. From young trade union organiser to veteran agitator, he was always aware that strikes make trade unions, not vice versa. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Inspiring memory (12 December 1992) From Socialist Worker, 12 December 1992. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 49–50. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I doubt if the Socialist Workers Party will ever put on a better memorial meeting than the one held last Friday in celebration of the restless, bustling and inspiring life of Dave Widgery. The chief problem for the organisers was the enormous range of Dave’s interests, friends, heroes and admirers. There was no problem about his commitment to the Socialist Workers Party. I first met Dave in the middle of the 1968 ‘revolution’ on York station. He had come from speaking at the university which he denounced, his eyes shining, as a ‘great middle class fun palace’. He glowered at me. ‘They don’t need you there at all. They need the proletariat.’ Even when he used an old fashioned word like proletariat he had a way of making it sound ultra-modern, like something from the lyrics of a popular rock band. And in his last book (and his best, by the way, in case anyone thinks that revolutionaries get stale as they get older), Some Lives!, he used the word ‘proletarian’ quite naturally again and again. Knew better Dave was a party man. He loved and admired Peter Sedgwick, and had a lot in common with him. But when Peter finally dropped out of the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP) some time in the mid-1970s, Dave would not let him go without a ferocious argument. Dave knew better than most of his friends and contemporaries that you cannot be a socialist on your own. Dave was all those things which so many of his 1968 generation ended up denouncing. He was a Leninist and a vanguardist. He was not in the SWP because it was the ‘best of the bunch’ or because he ‘had to be in something’ (two explanations I’ve heard for his commitment). Nor even was his reason for membership his agreement with the basic policies which distinguished the SWP from other left organisations. The chief reason was that he agreed with the sort of party the SWP was trying to build. Socialist Worker editor Chris Harman’s speech last Friday ended with a sharp attack on the left paper Tribune for a sectarian assault on an obituary in Socialist Review. ‘He didn’t sell enough papers,’ scoffed Tribune. In fact there are few people alive today who have sold more copies of Socialist Worker (over 25 years, remember—Dave was at the very first Socialist Worker editorial board meeting in 1967). He knew that if socialist papers are not sold directly, hand to hand, they do not sell at all (Tribune I cite as an example). The majority of the speakers last Friday were not members of the SWP. Sheila Rowbotham spoke of Dave’s abiding solidarity with the women’s and gay liberation movements. Anna Livingstone, a fellow doctor in the East End, enthused us with her stories of Dave’s battle for the health of the working class. In particular After a moving and quite brilliant speech which reminded me of his, my, and Dave’s hero C.L.R. James, Darcus Howe ended by saying he had fathered five children in Britain. Four, he said, had grown up black and angry, battling all the time against the awful racism around them. The fifth, he said, grew up ‘black at ease’. She had ‘space’ to develop her own personality. Darcus ascribed this ‘space’ to the work of the Anti Nazi League in general and Rock Against Racism and Dave Widgery in particular. There could not have been a more powerful tribute to this firecracker of a revolutionary whom we have lost far too soon. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Falling flats ruin Labour’s building boast (23 November 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 98, 23 November 1968, p. 1. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. HOUSING MINISTER Anthony Greenwood refused to go on television to discuss the collapse of flats at Ronan Point, but he was happy to appear on BBC-2 and drool on about Christianity and Cathy Come Home. In the course of his appearance, Mr. Greenwood reminded his audience approximately seven times that Labour had built more houses in the last three years than at any other time in British history. In fact, although Greenwood himself specifically abandoned his pledge for 500,000 houses by 1970 last January, it is still the proud boast of Transport House that despite squeezes and recession and high interest rates, marginally more houses have been built under Labour than under the Tories. The truth is that Greenwood and his henchmen are absolutely terrified by what happened at Ronan Point – not because they fear another block might fall down but because the clamour for repairs and strengthening could damage their aims to build more houses. A glance at the statistics shows that it is in high flats that Labour has managed to increase the number of dwellings most substantially. The fantastic speed with which these gerry-built blocks can be erected, and the large number of dwellings they incorporate is bound to give a great boost to house-building figures. Evacuation of all the GLC’s unsafe system-built blocks, however, may be followed in other parts of the country. Building resources previously devoted to housebuilding will have to be diverted to complicated, lengthy repair-work. Moreover, the new blocks that are erected will take longer – because of the new safety requirements. In other words the ‘new technology’ which the government pioneered in housebuilding lies in ruins. It was based on a craze for numbers – regardless of safety or size. Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot ‘Parliamentary socialism’: Labour’s road to disaster (1 May 1969) From Socialist Worker, No. 120, 1 May 1969, p. 3. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. SOON AFTER the armistice of 1918, Dame Margot Asquith, wife of the wartime Prime Minister, wrote a letter to J.H.Thomas, the former railwaymen’s leader, then an MP. The letter read: ‘Dear Mr Thomas, As you are such a friend of ours I thought you would like this fine telegram from the King to my husband on the great day. I am not writing to you about politics, but to tell you from my heart how brave and good I think you have been and how much my husband thinks of you. We told the King at lunch exactly what we thought of you and he was very nice about you. Be careful of your health and keep tight hold of your men – and God Bless You. Margot Asquith.’ (J.H. Thomas: My Story, p. 29) The letter according to Thomas ‘seemed to lift itself out of a mass of cherished correspondence’, and diligently he devoted himself to the Dame’s instructions and ‘kept tight hold of his men’. Empire Six years later, Thomas became the first Labour Colonial Secretary and introduced himself to the heads of his department with the words: ‘I am here to see that there is no mucking about with the British Empire’ Five years later still he was the ‘troubleshooter’ in the 1929 Labour government, appointed to solve the problem of unemployment. He solved it by increasing it threefold and cutting the unemployment benefit. Then he left the Labour Party to serve in the National Government and his career ended in a court case involving fraud. Conventional Labour historians prefer to dismiss the careers of men like Thomas, Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald as examples of personal aberration or original sin. But the Thomas road from working-class origins through parliament to betrayal symbolises the futility of 50 years of parliamentary activity and aspirations on the part of British Labour. Even today, after the unimaginable collapse in the last four and a half years, conventional ‘left-wing’ demonstrations move, as if pulled by a magnet, to parliament, there to conduct ‘a lobby’, and so-called revolutionaries pin their politics to the idiotic slogan: Make the Left MPs fight. The history of the British Labour Party is a history of parliamentary disaster. In 1924, a Labour government supported by the Liberals did nothing at all. This was a considerable achievement compared with the record of the 1929–1931 government which did everything in its power to protect the gold standard and the interests of industrialists against the clamour of the unemployed. The Labour government of 1945 and 1951 is remembered with sentimental nostalgia by the official Labour left, who recall the nationalisation of coal, railways, gas, electricity – and the National Health Service. The real achievement of the 1945–51 Labour government has been less widely-publicised. As two commentators, one of whom is a Cabinet Minister in the present administration, put it: ‘In 1948–1950. when the economy appeared to be gaining both internal and external balance, there was a substantial shift away from planning in the direction of a free market system.’ (The Labour Government and British Industry by A.Rogow and Peter Shore, p. 71) Under the smokescreen of nationalisation and welfare reforms the post-war Labour government concentrated its main efforts on the re-establishment of a capitalism seriously weakened by the war. Weak, plaintive industrialists grew, under Labour’s careful succour into implacable monopolists who wanted no more of ‘socialism’. The inevitable irony was that Labour, because of the working-class support which it had ignored, was hounded from office by the very industrialists whom it had nourished. By 1964, the Labour programme had been considerably diluted by the pressure of those who sought office. The reformist scraps offered to the masses have now been withheld and in their place the Labour government is now set on a course which is further to the right even than MacDonald’s in 1930. The MacDonald government did at least repeal the Tory 1927 Trade Union Act which sought in some circumstances to make trade unionists liable for damage from disputes. Similarly. Wilson’s government passed an act in its first year of office overturning the House of Lords’ Rookes v. Barnard decision, making a trade union official liable for strike damage. It took a real election triumph, like 1966, to propel the government on a collision course with the unions and to enable them to propose legislation which shackles the unions more than the 1927 Act – and more than anything else since the first Labour parliamentarian entered Westminster. Parliamentarians and reformists seek to explain all this as an unhappy accident. Unfortunately, they explain, the Labour governments were always dominated by right-wingers, who took the wrong course. Left-wingers, they proclaim, would have moved in a socialist direction. Darlings But would they? Were not Wilson, Castle, Crossman, Greenwood darlings of the left? Was it an accident that every one of the promoted left-wingers, with the single exception of Frank Cousins, who had a good job to go back to and has now found an even better one, not only were ‘converted’ to the anti-working class politics of the government, but also became their most enthusiastic supporters?

Was it an accident that every one of the promoted left-wingers, with the single exception of Frank Cousins, who had a good job to go back to and has now found an even better one, not only were ‘converted’ to the anti-working class politics of the government, but also became their most enthusiastic supporters? History suggests otherwise. Keir Hardie, father of the ‘Labour Left’, called on his countrymen to rally to the flag in 1914 when he said, ‘the boom of guns can be heard’. And Robert Blatchford, theoretical inspirer of the Left, made his teenage daughter play Rule Britannia every day throughout the First World War. In 1925 a group of left-wingers drew up a Manifesto, headed the Socialist Club and printed in Lansbury’s Weekly. ‘A Labour government’ it declared at the outset ‘would be pledged to establish a socialist state.’ It proposed several acts of immediate legislation including the abolition of the House of Lords (‘no fraternisation with the enemy’), the abolition of the police and the handing over of police duties to a ‘citizens’ army’ with elected officers. The manifesto was signed by Marion Phillips, Susan Lawrence, George Lansbury, Ernest Thurtle and John Scurr. By 1929, Marion Phillips, then an MP, was the staunchest defender of the proposed cut in unemployment benefit. Miss Lawrence was an Under Secretary of State, and sharply attacked John Wheatley for daring to attack the government. George Lansbury was in the Cabinet and was a member of the Labour Party executive which framed the rules for the expulsion of James Maxton. The rules under which the expulsion was based were drawn up by John Scurr, chairman of the Consultative Committee. And Mr Thurtle, who was Lansbury’s private secretary, resigned from the ILP because it would not support the policies of the MacDonald government. Exactly the same process followed the 1931 debacle. The left-wing, under Stafford Cripps, joined the Socialist League. ‘Continuity of policy,’ wrote Cripps, ‘can find no place in a socialist programme. It is this complete severance with all traditional theories of government, this determination to seize power from the ruling class and transfer it to the people as a whole, that differentiates the present political struggle from all those that have gone before’. ‘This determination’ was amply demonstrated by Cripps himself as President of the Board of Trade and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1945–51 government, in which posts he fought heroically to protect British capitalism from competitors abroad and militants at home. The reason for all this is not to be found in personal weakness or betrayal nor in the predominance of ‘right-wingers’, whatever that may mean. The personal betrayals are the reflection of something much deeper: the fundamental relief of Labour parliamentarians that the road to socialism can be paved in parliament: that universal suffrage to five-yearly parliaments is a sufficient precondition for the change from capitalism to socialism. This view, held incidentally by Karl Marx, grossly underestimates the power and flexibility of the capitalist system. It underestimates the ability of the men who control industry and commerce to absorb democratic processes through parliaments every five years, while retaining undemocratic control of the power that matters: economic power. The geographic basis of the parliamentary democracy (with its assumption that MPs must represent all: their constituents whatever their class) and the long gap between elections puts parliamentary representatives at an enormous distance from the people they represent, and by whom they cannot be recalled for five years. The gap is further exaggerated by the cretinism and pomp of parliament itself for whose ‘charms’ and ‘glory’ no one, not even Maxton or Bevan, has failed to succumb. With very little difficulty, the capitalist class has been able to ensure that the British labour movement, blinkered by its desire for parliamentary power, becomes separated from its representatives, and accordingly corrupted and deformed by the lack of democracy in its own ranks. Dilemma Faced with continued destruction and bribery from the ruling class, the Labour parliamentarian is confronted with a dilemma. Either he mobilises outside parliament confronts capitalism and calls in question his parliamentary illusions. Or he must try to run capitalism better than his opponents. Without exception, he prefers to foster his illusions and pursue the latter course. With parliamentary obsessions run insistence on ‘law and order’, the ‘good of the nation’ and so on, with which slogans the ruling class has persuaded Labour governments to discipline and humiliate the people who voted for them. Finally, there is the certainty that in the extreme event of a Labour government moving seriously to tip the class balance in favour of the workers by parliamentary action, the capitalist class will abandon its parliamentary pretensions and move to a more direct struggle outside. The idea that the ruling class will stand aside muttering about a ‘fair fight’ as the Workers’ Control Act,1969 is passed through the Commons (and the Lords?) is the fantasy of those who have not read about Vienna in 1934, or of Barcelona in 1936, or Athens in 1967, or (a prediction) Rome in 1969. The slightest possibility that a social democratic government will move firmly against the capitalists will be greeted not with formal protests from Her Majesty’s Opposition but with flights of capital, military coups and mercenary invasions. Ruling class power cannot be legislated out of existence. It has to be seized. Office has nothing to do with power. Parliament does not offer the ‘road to socialism’. It offers a cul-de-sac. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in Reform and Revolution: ‘In the history of classes, Revolution is the act of political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. ‘In each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of, and in contradistinction to, the conquest of political power and social revolution do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.’ Top of the page Last updated on 13 January 2021

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot A question of principle (15 July 1995) From Socialist Worker, No. 1451, 15 July 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. FOR NEARLY 30 years Robert Maclennan has been the MP for Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland. In 1966, to everyone’s astonishment, he seized for the Labour Party a seat which had always been a Liberal or Tory fiefdom. The idea that they should be represented in parliament by a Labour MP obviously appealed to the increasingly abandoned landless labourers of Caithness, not to mention the new workers at the Dounreay nuclear site at Thurso. Against the tide Maclennan increased his majority for Labour in 1970 and held the seat in the other three elections of the 1970s. In 1981, without having the chance to vote about it, the people of Caithness suddenly found themselves represented by another party: the Social Democratic Party. Maclennan had coolly switched to the SDP while remaining in the parliament to which he had been elected for Labour. In 1983 and 1987 he won the seat for the SDP, of which he later became leader. Under the influence of his lacklustre and backward leadership, the SDP finally evaporated. Unabashed, Maclennan joined yet another party, the Liberal Democrat Party, under whose colours he fought and won the election of 1992. Thus the great stride forward which had wrested Caithness and Sutherland from its reactionary Liberal tradition turned into a great stride back. Thanks to Maclennan Caithness was Liberal again. Maclennan is a crushingly boring politician, whose collected speeches would do wonders for an insomniac. In the past, however, he had given the impression of worthiness. The winds Now even that rather dubious reputation has been thrown to the winds. As an “elder statesman” Maclennan was entrusted with the Liberal slot on the special committee set up by Tory MPs to protect themselves from the attack on them by Lord Nolan. Nolan and his commissioners, who were set up by Major to rid the Commons of sleaze, recommended that MPs should declare how much money they get from outside sources: directorships, consultancies and so on. This modest proposal has the almost unanimous support of the electorate – even Tory voters support it strongly. Indeed most voters – 78 percent in fact – take the obvious view that MPs should not get a penny more than their salary. Horror of horrors! The massed ranks of Tory MPs, who have got so used to consultancies that one of them recently advertised for one, combined at once to oppose Nolan’s proposal. Here were Quentin Davies from rural Lincolnshire with at least four plum consultancies, Sir Archie Hamilton, former armed forces minister, with six directorships mostly connected with the armed forces, Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith with three directorships and a consultancy. Labour members of the committee unanimously supported disclosure. A lot hinged on the solitary Liberal member, the former red from Caithness, Robert Maclennan. He voted with the Tories to “postpone” (ie do nothing about) the problem of disclosure. He is a director of Atlantic Telenetwork and a consultant to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but thanks to his own sturdy support for the Tories on the committee, no one can know how much he gets from either. MPs get about £70,000 a year in pay and allowances. They have stupendously long holidays and a generous pension scheme. Of course we expect the Tories to defend their slush. The vote of Robert Maclennan clears up any doubt as to the principled position of the Liberal Democrats. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot ‘Positive’ surrender (11 July 1992) From Socialist Worker, 11 July 1992. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 188–189. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The National Union of Mineworkers was polite enough to invite Labour’s energy spokesman, Mr Frank Dobson, to speak at its conference in Scarborough last week. The union, not surprisingly, is opposed to the government’s plans to take the coal industry back to the dark days of the filthiest representatives of the ruling class, the coal owners. The proposals are so hideous, the delegates must have mused, that even Mr Dobson, a man not best known for his amazing rhetoric might be moved to some indignation. Perhaps he would read up a little on the history of the coal owners. A reference to the mass evictions in Durham in the 1840s by the Marquess of Londonderry would have gone down well. So might a study of the comparative safety statistics in British mines under private and public ownership. The very least the rank and file can have expected was a ferocious attack on the Tories and a declaration of unswerving support for the NUM’s campaign against privatisation from the Labour Party, inside and outside parliament. Well, here is the Financial Times report of what happened: ‘Mr Dobson said he believed “the cards are stacked heavily against keeping coal in the public sector” and the NUM should draw up plans to protect the most vulnerable pits and maintain safety standards.’ This speech was not greeted with rapturous applause. Perhaps the sceptical miners imagined themselves following Mr Dobson’s advice. The first part of the Dobson plan had them ‘drawing up plans to protect the most vulnerable pits’. Here is a possible plan for protecting a vulnerable pit. (1) Try to ensure that the pit does not close. (2) If it does close, try to ensure jobs for all the miners thrown out of work. (3) If that doesn’t work, try to get decent redundancy pay. (4) If that doesn’t work, burst into tears. This would be a positive Dobson plan as opposed to a negative plan to try to stop privatisation and closures by refusing to dig coal until public ownership is guaranteed. According to Dobson, the ‘cards’ ‘stacked against’ the success of any such plan, so the miners should settle for failure. Rough guide Dobson Plan 2 calls on miners to ‘protect safety standards’. Here is a rough guide to such a plan. (1) Ask the new private management, which has taken over without a struggle or even a complaint, because the cards are stacked against struggles and complaints, to maintain safety standards. (2) If they don’t, lower the standards a little. (3) If that doesn’t work, lower the standards a lot. (4) If management still insist on cutting safety corners, burst into tears. So desperate are the Labour leaders to surrender that it is becoming almost impossible for socialists to read or listen to them any longer. I doubt whether there has been a time in the entire century when British Labour has been so abject, so obsequious to Tories, to employers, to the City, to the newspaper barons – to everyone in authority. Before the election they were at least afraid to lose. Now it seems they positively want to lose. They take on the mantle of defeat with a cheerful enthusiasm which would astonish the most dedicated masochist. Their only hint of eloquence is in their pleas to their followers to play their part in the disaster. Their slogan is written in scarlet across the flag they sing about every year: ‘We lost. We’re certain to lose again. So make sure you all lose as well’. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot How the TUC killed workers’ paper (September 1973) From Socialist Worker, 15 September 1973. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.96-7. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IN JANUARY 1911 there was a printworkers’ strike and lock-out in London. Sir Joseph Causton, boss of the Daily News, swore he would never give in to the printers’ demand for a 50-hour week and the rest of the press responded with a cataract of lies and abuse against the locked-out men. The printers decided they had had enough. They produced a daily eight-page sheet which put the workers’ side in the dispute. They called it the Daily Herald. Helped by the Herald, the strikers won their demands. By the time the strike sheet folded on 28 April that year, large numbers of men and women were demanding a permanent, mass circulation paper for labour. There were urgent discussions all over the country. Ben Tillett, who had led the great dockers’ strike of 1889, George Lansbury, Labour leader from East London, and a host of other workers’ representatives finally raised enough money to start the Daily Herald a year later. The paper played a crucial role in the upsurge of working class activity before the start of the First World War. Through the Daily Herald League it organised support for strike after strike – especially among London transport workers, dockers and Midlands iron workers. When the South Wales miners came out on strike in 1914 the Herald proclaimed, in a front page headline: SOUTH WALES MINERS FIND A BETTER WAY THAN THE BALLOT. Lansbury, then editor of the Herald wrote, in his book, The Miracle of Fleet Street: ‘All this time the dominant note of the Daily Herald was its fierce attack on the leaders of the Labour Party ... The leaders of the trade unions were also attacked. The most reactionary of all the trade union leaders, Jimmy Thomas, sued the Herald for libel and took £200 damages.’ To continued cluck-clucking from Labour and trade union leaders, the Daily Herald and its League took up the struggles of Irish workers against imperialist bosses, of women in their fight for emancipation, and against British invasion of Russia after the 1917 revolution. When Jim Larkin, Irish workers’ leader, was released from prison in 1913, he wrote first to the Daily Herald, thanking the paper for its support. When one 1918 anti-war Herald rally was banned by the Albert Hall Council, the electricians’ union threatened to pull out the plugs for the following week’s Victory Ball. The council, under pressure from the government, rapidly changed its mind. By 1920 the Herald had built a circulation of more than 250,000 copies a day. For all its faults it was founded on the fighting spirit of working people. ‘We were to all intents and purposes a rank and file paper,’ wrote Lansbury. But under capitalism the Herald was in difficulty. Its circulation, though large did not bring in enough revenue in sales alone to enable it to compete with the other popular dailies. Its working class readership was unattractive to advertisers and because Lansbury was hostile to any form of revolutionary organisation, the paper had around it no organisation which would sell or subsidise it from rank and file contributions. The only source of heavy subsidy was the trade unions and so, reluctantly, in September 1922 Lansbury handed over the Herald to the TUC and the Labour Party. Almost at once, the fire went out of it. Strikes were only supported after they had been declared official, ‘Dangerous subjects’, notably Ireland, were carefully avoided. Circulation was maintained and even increased slightly, but the problems of the paper redoubled. They were solved, in capitalist terms, by an arch-capitalist, Julius Elias. Elias, later Viscount Southwood, was a printing boss who had previously teamed up with the crooked and reactionary Horatio Bottomley in the printing and publication of the crooked and reactionary magazine John Bull. Elias agreed to print and publish the Herald with the support of the trade union movement. Ernest Bevin, a young dockers’ leader, stomped the country to build up its circulation. Bevin and other trade union leaders used their influence to drum up more than 100,000 extra readers, and when the Daily Herald was first printed under its new management – 51 percent of the shares owned by Elias’ Odhams press and 49 percent by the TUC – it had reached a circulation of more than two million. All through the 1930s, Elias concentrated on building the paper’s circulation by means of all kinds of free gifts and competitions, while the TUC and Labour leaders drummed up readership from their rank and file. Although the Herald won the race to two million readers, the paper steadily deteriorated. Politics were relegated as far as possible, and the TUC directors ensured that what politics were published safely reflected the views of the TUC leaders. The process continued after the war. As the Labour leaders became less and less interested in their rank and file, so they lost interest in their daily paper. In 1961, the TUC sold out. When IPC took over Odhams, it also took over the Herald completely. The paper continued to decline. In 1964 it was re-named the Sun and rejigged to get rid of its ‘cloth cap’ image. It lost its working class readers too. Finally, in 1969, the Sun was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who has turned it into mass-circulation pornography. At last week’s TUC Richard Briginshaw, general secretary of the print union NATSOPA, moved the ritual TUC motion complaining at the anti-trade union bias of the capitalist press. Vague demands were made in the debate as they will be at the Labour Party conference next month, for a new TUC/Labour Party paper. The wretched history of the Daily Herald since its take-over by the TUC 50 years ago proves how self-destructive is reformist, social democratic propaganda. A workers’ paper is useless unless its propaganda is backed and enriched by organisation and agitation. Unless workers see their paper as a guide to action and organisation as well as arguments against the Tories and their system, the paper is bound to lose out to the big battalions. The crucial characteristic of Labour reformism is its distaste for working class organisation and independent action. Its papers can only argue and state. They cannot agitate. So they cannot rely on the people who read the paper to subsidise and sell it. They need the ‘business genius’ of the Viscount Southwoods and the advertising of great capitalist corporations. And in the hunt for such genius and such advertising they defeat their own propaganda. We must rebuild a mass socialist press in Britain – but not by making the same mistakes as made by the Daily Herald. The driving force of our socialist press must be the belief in independent working class action, and the need for socialist papers to organise and co-ordinate that action. We cannot build a socialist paper without socialist organisation – or vice versa. That simple fact is written in the ashes of 50 years’ copies of the Daily Herald, burnt and buried by the Trades Union Congress. Top of the page Last updated on 20.12.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot They all knew he was a crook (December 1991) From Socialist Worker, 14 December 1991. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.272-3. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IF I had not already been a socialist, the astonishing events at the Daily Mirror in the last few days would have quickly made me one. They are calling the Maxwell Robbery the greatest financial scandal of all time. He robbed some £300 million from the workers at the Mirror, either from their company or from their pension fund. All around there is a great tut-tutting. Newspapers which only weeks ago were describing Maxwell as a ‘swashbuckling buccaneer’ now fall over one another to denounce him for what he was – a revolting crook. Nowhere is the embarrassment greater than in the City. In 1971 a distinguished lawyer and a distinguished accountant declared after a careful examination of Maxwell’s relations with a company called Leasco that Maxwell was not fit to chair a public company. In the early 1980s Maxwell became chairman of one of the biggest public companies in the country, the British Printing Corporation. In July 1984, on what we on the Mirror called Black Friday, he became chairman of the Mirror Group of Newspapers – which ran five national newspapers with a combined circulation of four million copies every weekday and six million every Sunday. How could this happen? Every reason has been thought of except the right one – that Maxwell was a valuable standard bearer for his class when it was on the offensive in the 1980s. His brash, old fashioned style fitted the needs of the bosses of the Thatcher decade. In an aggressive cowboy manner much admired by the bankers he had smashed the unions at BPCC and turned the company into profit. Could he not do the same at the Mirror? Yes, he could. From the moment he came into the building, Maxwell set himself the single task of breaking the trade unions. Maxwell’s fall, like his rise, was symbolic of the Tory government’s fortunes. Like them he believed the capitalist boom of the 1980s would last forever. In a sort of frenzy he started buying up everything which came up for sale in the United States, Portugal, Argentine and Israel. He borrowed and borrowed from his most faithful supporter, the National Westminster Bank, which could never forget the way he smashed the unions at BPCC and saved the bank an embarrassing insolvency. Up and up went the takeovers and the loans in an endless spiral of megalomania and greed. No one stopped him – not a banker, not an adviser, not a regulator, not a government minister, not a policeman. What did stop him was the fatal flaw in the market system which promoted him. Suddenly the boom evaporated. The ‘impossible’ recession swept over him. Interest rates climbed and the revenue from his new companies slumped. Squeezed more and more tightly, he turned for final salvation to the huge sums piled up in the Mirror workers’ pension fund. Long ago Tories and capitalists used to argue that pension funds were proof of the burgeoning economic power of the workers. ‘With so much money in pension funds’, it was said, ‘millions of workers have a stake in the system.’ The argument overlooked the reality of control of the pension funds. The money was paid in by workers, but controlled by a handful of capitalists and accountants who used it to lubricate the Stock Exchange. Maxwell adored Margaret Thatcher, and Thatcher repaid the compliment. When Julia Langdon joined the Mirror political staff from the Guardian, Thatcher applauded her decision. ‘A dose of Maxwell will do you good,’ she trumpeted. But Maxwell was not a Tory – he supported the Labour Party. Into his plush inner circle came a clutch of right wing Labour Party supporters, most of them ennobled as Maxwell hoped to be. There was Lord Donoghue, the biographer of Herbert Morrison, Lord Williams – a city slicker and deputy leader of the Labour peers – former Attorney General Sam Silkin and former Solicitor General Peter Archer. While Maxwell behaved like a Tory, while he broke the unions like a Tory, while he stalked the Mirror and other enterprises he owned with all the arrogance of a Tory grandee, he said he was a supporter of the Labour Party and the Labour leadership glowed with delight. Now, instead of revelling in his disgrace, instead of exposing it as a disgrace of capitalism like all the other disgraces of recent years – Polly Peck, Ferranti and BCCI – the Labour leaders can only fret and fume and hope the whole thing will go away. They too are stuck deep in mud of capitalist corruption. Socialists need not be mealy mouthed. Maxwell was a great fat capitalist. His rise and fall reflected the rise and fall of British capitalism in the 1980s. He went up on backs of workers and down in the crisis of the market system. This grotesque and apparently immovable statue to modern capitalism has come crashing down and no one wants to put an another remotely like it in its place. Top of the page Last updated on 17.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Slaughterhouse Six (July 2002) From Theatre Reviews, Socialist Review, No.265, July 2002, p.24. Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Review of Rose Rage, adapted from Willliam Shakespeare by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London Readers of Socialist Review, you have about three weeks to book for a truly exhilarating dramatic experience. At the Haymarket theatre, 12 young men (well, they all looked young to me, which may not be the same thing) under the direction of Edward Hall smash, slash, slither and shriek their way through a tremendous performance of Rose Rage, an adaptation in two parts of William Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. These were the first of Shakespeare’s plays. They were written in 1591 or 1592, at the end of the Elizabethan age, when friends of the queen were worried what would happen when she died. She had no children, and her supporters feared a return to the chaos and wars of the past, in particular the Wars of the Roses that divided English rulers and killed hundreds of thousands of English citizens in the second half of the 15th century. William Shakespeare was not a revolutionary. He owed his brilliance as a playwright not to sympathy with the revolutionaries, but to an understanding and insight into all human beings, including revolutionaries. A familiar theme of all his history plays may well have been to warn his audiences of the dangers of the breakdown of law and order, and a consequent collapse into anarchy. But he was far too sensitive a writer to allow his plays to degenerate into crude declarations of loyalty to god and king. His plays are about the arguments of the time, so skilfully portrayed that, if properly directed, they reflect the arguments of Shakespeare’s time and of our time too. As the nobles’ factions form after the death of Henry V, it suddenly becomes clear that in the civil wars that follow, every king, every queen, every prince, every priest, every duke and every titled ninny is concerned exclusively with their own power and their own wealth, and will fight for both by any murderous means available to them. The bloodbath that follows turns the country into an abattoir. The scenes in this production open with all 12 actors sharpening knives for the slaughter. Each murder is accompanied by a butcher with a platter of red, freshly carved meat in front of him. And the whole reckless orgy of killing is hailed throughout by incantations of hypocrisy in honour of god, of England’s green and pleasant land, and of peace in our time. The futility of the civil wars between lords who raise armies in different parts of England and France is grimly illustrated by a famous battle scene watched over by the anguished, vacillating king. A father kills a son, and then a son kills his father. The son records how this frightful tragedy was all the fault of the warring lords: ‘From London by the King was I pressed forth; My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s man Came on the part of York, pressed by his master.’ In the middle of these ghastly battles (St Albans (twice), Northampton, Wakefield, Towton Moor, Hedgeley Moor, Hexham, Shrewsbury, Tewkesbury) comes suddenly another one, which meant something to the people who promoted it. In 1450 the enraged and starving agricultural labourers of Kent rose up in revolt under the leadership of Jack Cade. Like the rebellion of the starving mob in Rome in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Cade’s army gets handsome treatment in the play. And Edward Hall’s production makes the rebellion seem and sound like an angry anti-capitalist demonstration in contemporary Britain. As Cade’s comrade Dick the Butcher demands, ‘The first thing that we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ The ferocious crowd moves among the audience demanding the bodies of lawyers. I confess I was greatly relieved that I and my companion (the editor of this magazine) could claim we were not lawyers. Shakespeare’s excuse for so much sympathetic emphasis on the revolutionary mob is that the Cade rebellion was part of a plot by the Duke of York to overthrow the king. But again, the playwright’s eye and ear can’t really permit such an unlikely story. When a nobleman accuses Cade of being a dupe of the Duke of York, Cade mutters, aside to the audience: ‘He lies, for I invented it myself.’ These plays were written on the eve of the English Revolution, a real mass uprising of the lower classes of which Queen Elizabeth and her supporters were far more frightened than of yet another internecine war between titled members of her class. Shakespeare knew that his job was to warn of anarchy to come, yet he could not help seeing and understanding the desperate craving of the masses. The original Henry VI plays are difficult to follow. New characters keep coming on stage, and are difficult to distinguish or identify. Edward Hall’s tremendously exciting production cuts out the crap, and leaves the essence clear and pure without once disturbing Shakespeare’s narrative or his poetry. There are outstanding performances by Robert Hands as the French-born Queen Margaret and Tony Bell as Jack Cade – and many others. Though the audience was ecstatic, there were far too many empty seats. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot All fall down (November 1990) From Socialist Worker Review, No.136, November 1990, pp.13-14. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. WHEN SOMEONE comes to write a history of the Great Thatcher Decade (the 1980s), one of their basic texts should be a little book by a former City Editor of the Times, William Kay. Mr Kay called his book Tycoons, and based it on thirteen interviews with men who made millions in the early 1980s. One of the self-made men was Gerald Ronson, whose Heron Corporation was unheard of when he launched his first ‘brilliant, daring’ take over bid in 1981. Ronson told Kay that Heron was a ‘very conservative business.’ He said he didn’t take risks, he just bet on certainties. What’s more, he kept strictly within the law. ‘There are plenty of crooks in the petrol business,’ he told Kay, ‘but they don’t come to work for us.’ This was surprising because perhaps the biggest crook of them all was Gerald Ronson. He made his fortune not so much by ‘daring’ bids but by gambling on the stock exchange. His greatest gamble was in 1986 when his friend, the super-swindler Sir Jack Lyons, asked him to buy some shares in Guinness to boost the share price in the firm’s takeover of Distillers. Ronson obliged with a cool £25 million. He lost not a penny on this investment of course, but as a reward for stumping up so much at an awkward time Guinness slipped him a personal donation of £7 million. Ronson and Lyons were only caught when the biggest swindler of them all, the American stock exchange gangster Boesky, grassed on them to save his skin. The crooked transactions by which Ronson and Lyons rigged the institutions they loved could not possibly have been exposed by ordinary journalists since there was no public record of them whatsoever. Ronson and Lyons were not ‘rotten apples’ in the capitalist barrel, as has been pretended. On the contrary they were both very close to the grandest apple of them all, the prime minister. Lyons was a personal friend, and Thatcher’s two closest advisers, Tim Bell and Gordon Reece, both in their own right entrepeneurs of the kind she admires, were paid advisers to Guinness at the time. The ruthlessness with which Thatcher and her cronies pursued the values of free enterprise did not extend to obeying the rules laid down by that free enterprise. Indeed, in a way, one of the central tenets of that free enterprise was that its devotees should feel free to make up their own rules. What can be called the Guinness syndrome haunts the whole of the rest of Mr Kay’s book. One rotten apple has gone to prison, but all over the industrial and financial scene other apples are falling off the tree. One such was Mr John Gunn. Here is what he told William Kay in 1985: ‘I am a free market socialist, in that I like lots of people to do well. The only way I can do that is to make sure the company makes a lot of money and the exchequer makes a lot of money. I am as capitalistic as you can get, but I do not think the trappings are important. Creation of wealth is almost a duty, because of the widespread benefits that flow from it.’ The only real wealth created by Mr Gunn, however, ended up in his own bank account. His business was ‘money-broking’, speculating, taking companies over and gambling on the outcome in the stock exchange. It can safely be said that he and his companies created not a single penny’s worth of real wealth. What they did was roll about in the mud of wealth created by others. So successful was John Gunn with his money-broking that an old shipping family, the Cayzers of British and Commonwealth, appointed him chief executive in 1986. The Cayzers, crusted Tories every one of them, had made their huge wealth from a shipping line which mainly serviced South Africa. John Gunn moved at once to sell anything which could possibly be of any real use to anyone. Away went the shipping line and onto the dole went thousands of people who worked for it. Instead, British and Commonwealth concentrated on ‘financial services.’ The Cayzers saw the danger, cashed in their millions, and ran. The new British and Commonwealth, based on financial services, was applauded at every turn by the newspapers’ business editorials. Gunn and B&C moved from one glorious City takeover to another until earlier this year the whole ramshackle edifice collapsed into bankruptcy. Until the end, John Gunn kept up the enormous payments £100,000 a year) which British and Commonwealth have traditionally paid to the Conservative Party. Another enthusiastic get-rich-quick Tory in the same mould was John Ashcroft, chairman of Coloroll, a group based on home furnishings, but which, under the impetuous Ashcroft, went into the stock market in grand style, taking over a whole series of harmless, old fashioned and often paternalistic old companies in the business. Like Gunn, Ashcroft enjoyed the special applause of the liberal press. While Gunn’s main backer had been the Observer, Ashcroft’s was the Guardian.

While Gunn’s main backer had been the Observer, Ashcroft’s was the Guardian. Indeed in 1987, at the height of the ‘Thatcher miracle’, Ashcroft was named Guardian Young Businessman of the Year. That paper wrote of him in March that year: ‘He is shrewd, personable, witty, unashamedly materialistic and fired by an almost boyish enthusiasm for stealing a market from under a competitor’s nose – “the idea of selling Japanese ceramics in Japan is quite amusing,” he says.’ Shrewdly, personably, wittily and materialistically Ashcroft went on stealing markets from competitors’ noses (and managed to treble his own salary in the process.) In the summer of this year Coloroll called in the receiver. It owed £300 million. Hundreds of workers (the lucky ones who had not been sacked while the boyish Mr Ashcroft pursued his fantastic ambitions) were thrown onto the dole. The stories of Ronson, Gunn and Ashcroft have been repeated over and over again in the last twelve months. Celebrated Thatcherite entrepreneurs like Sophie Mirman of Sock Shop, George Davies of Next, Azil Nadir of Polly Peck, have all come crashing down. Harris Queensway, the brainchild of another Thatcher knight, the carpet king Sir Phil Harris, is now bust (though Harris himself sold out well before the disaster, for a little matter of £60 million). Even the two top spokesmen for the Thatcher miracle – Murdoch and Maxwell – are in desperate trouble. Scandal after scandal has rocked the City: Barlow Clowes, Dunsdale, Fer-ranti. What does it all mean? Four years ago the doomed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, first uttered the phrase which identified the greatest glory of the Thatcher years: ‘virtuous cycle.’ The theory was that the slumps and booms of capitalism, the endless cycle of recession followed by boomlet were all in the past. Miraculously, the modern Tory government had found a formula which would ensure perennial growth, the gradual lowering of balance of payments deficits, inflation, taxes, interest rates all at the same time. A new virtuous world opened up, in which the capitalist economy went on growing and growing forever, and in which everyone had a chance to make themselves into millionaires as the Thatcher millionaires had done. In this atmosphere, there was no problem at all about borrowing more and more money to expand the already vast new empires of the self-made men who typified the Thatcher era. The feature which is common to all the cases above (and all the others not mentioned) is overconfidence. There was overconfidence to borrow endlessly in the certainty that interest rates would never rise again; overconfidence to break laws and regulations at will; over-confidence that the very fact of having a fortune ensured a fortune forever. What motivates these people? Is it all personal gain? In one of the more glorious passages in Capital, Marx traces the history of avarice in the development of capitalism. To begin with individual capitalists showed the most rigorous self-sacrifice in their personal lives. ‘But the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment ... Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation.’ But however great the avarice or enjoyment of luxury by these creatures of speculation and the credit system, the real driving force in their lives is ‘the passion for accumulation’: ‘The capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes labour power out of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments.’ The drive is always to go on accumulating and exploiting long after the individual capitalist has stashed away a million times more cash than he can hope to spend on himself in ten lifetimes. His motto is (in Marx’s words): ‘accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets!’ These grand accumulators, half-crazed with their own self-importance and their invulnerability, acted as stalking horses for more cautious capitalists who held back, urging, like the gallant second lieutenant: ‘through that gap, sergeant, I’m close behind.’ Into the gap, sweetened by New Years Honours and egged on by sycophants in the press, plunged Thatcher’s New Entrepreneurs sacking and borrowing, sacking and borrowing in a virtuous crusade to usher in the capitalist millennium. The game has been up since the great stock exchange crash of October 1987, which, like the great gales of the same month, was predicted by absolutely no one. Suddenly the cycle is not virtuous any more, but vicious. We are back with the same old stop and go, boom and slump. The decade of the Thatcher knights has come to an end at almost exactly the same time as has their own glory. They borrowed too much. They sacked too many skilled workers, and trained no one in their place. They are suddenly an embarrassment, to be disposed of as quickly as possible, in prison or in bankruptcy, while the real rulers try grimly to hang on to their credibility and their profits. The demise of the great bounty hunters of the 1980s is a symbol of the demise of the crude confidence which sustained their class ten years ago. The brash assurance with which, for instance, Sir Keith Joseph told his chauffeur in 1980, ‘we need four million out of work’ has gone. They have played their cards, and found them useless. Rather like the Labour leaders at the end of their last term of office in the late 1970s, the Tory leaders are stumbling from one crisis to another, uncertain what will happen next, no longer confident they can win. They are falling back more and more on what was beyond doubt their most remarkable achievement in the 1980s: their bludgeoning of the Labour opposition into a pale and pathetic shadow of their own self-serving capitalistic selves. Top of the page Last updated on 17.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Thatcher: class warrior (February 1985) From Socialist Worker, February 1985. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 3–4. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Thatcher-worship, which goes on all the time in a continuous Mass in T, will rise to a crescendo in the next few weeks. A new excuse to sing the praises of the Prime Minister in otherwise difficult times comes with the tenth anniversary of her becoming leader of the Conservative Party. A suitable prelude is an article in the Mail on Sunday’s colour magazine by the reactionary critic, Anthony Burgess. His piece, gloriously entitled The Sexuality of Power, ends by comparing Margaret Thatcher to Venus de Milo. He makes the subtle point that whereas Venus had no arms, Mrs Thatcher has plenty. Grateful and sycophantic press barons will be eager to impress on their readers that Mrs Thatcher is a wonder woman, her political intelligence and grasp far greater than anything else seen in Britain (or any other country) in the postwar period. Above all, she will be heralded for her convictions and her passions, which, it will be argued, contrast magnificently with the dull pragmatism of her two predecessors, Heath and Macmillan. When I try to read all this, I remember an evening in Plymouth some sixteen years ago when I first appeared on the BBC radio programme Any Questions. A Labour government was in office with a majority of 100. A Labour MP and I were ’balanced’ on the right by Malcolm Muggeridge and Margaret Thatcher MP. When, after the programme, I said that I thought the Labour government was behaving rather like a Tory one, she blithely agreed. But, she insisted, in a very maternal way, there was a crucial difference between the two parties: in the people they represent. When I next came across her, she was speaking as minister for education at the Tory Party conference in 1970, declaring with tremendous passion that the school-leaving age would be raised to sixteen, and that much more money would be spent on the state sector. She is not someone who fights when she thinks she may be beaten. The miners’ strike of the winter 1980–81 is a very good example of that. She withdrew a pit closure programme at once. Mrs Thatcher’s real skill comes from her deep sensitivity to the ebbs and flows in the fortunes of her class. She is a class general, who knows no sentiment in the struggle. The old aristocratic leaders of the Tory Party believed they were superior to the lower orders chiefly through divine intervention or God’s will. They were therefore inclined to dilute their class passions with occasional bouts of compassion, doubt or hesitation. Margaret Thatcher and her arrivistes, people whose parents had to hang on by their fingertips to stay in the ruling class at all, believe that they are superior because they are superior. There is, therefore, in their class war strategy not a hint of doubt or guilt. They have a better sense of the state of the battle, and a stronger will to win it. Unlike Macmillan, Thatcher was deeply suspicious of the Keynesian economics and full employment of the postwar years. She sensed that although these things could not be reversed at the height of the boom, they were fundamentally corrosive of her class. Long before most Tory leaders she sensed an ebb in that confidence, and she seized the time. She knew that mass unemployment breeds despair in workers, and that that despair would breed its own confidence among her people. She knew that trade union leaders were only powerful as long as they were allowed to seem so. She sensed the union leaders’ special weakness, their suspension between the two classes, and their unwillingness to side with either. She reckoned that if the union leaders were expelled from the corridors of power, they would be reduced to pleading to be allowed in again. Mrs Thatcher is not an intellectual giant, nor has she risen to such heights through her beauty or her oratorical skills. She is a new-fashioned two-nation Tory who understands the simple truth, which evades far too many of us: that class confidence comes out of class strength, and that her class can win only if the other class loses. Top of the page Last updated on 27 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Obituary We owe him a huge debt (28 September 2002) From Socialist Worker, No.1819, 28 September 2002. Copied with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. MUSING MISERABLY on the death of Duncan Hallas, three pictures come into my mind. I first heard him speak in public at a conference of the International Socialists way back in the late 1960s. An argument was raging, inspired by something called the “micro-faction”, whose line was that the coming of socialism could be left to the spontaneous movement of the working class. At the time, dominated by continuous trade union victories and enormous demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the argument seemed persuasive. Duncan swept down to the front. “Lots and lots of workers vote Tory,” he started, and I groaned. But in a few powerful sentences he utterly demolished the “spontaneists”. Political development in the working class, he insisted, was uneven. The most conscious and socialist elements had to come together as a potential leadership. As he swept on, my groan developed into a cheer. I got to know Duncan more intimately some years later when I was working on Socialist Worker and Duncan would appear on Monday mornings to write the leaders. He would grab himself a disgusting coffee, light up an infernal cigarette, bark out testy comments about the state of the world, and then, grabbing a biro, would scribble out in longhand an impeccable editorial. He was the most coherent socialist I ever knew, whether he was writing or speaking. My third memory of him comes from a park in Leicester where we had gathered to confront the fascists. As always, Duncan started by addressing the strength in the opposing argument. Was it really permissible for democrats and socialists to deny free speech to the fascists? In powerful language Duncan recalled the violent intimidatory marches of Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s. By the time he’d finished he’d proved beyond doubt that free speech for fascists leads to the crushing of freedom of those they harassed. Duncan Hallas was a great man, and our debt to him is immeasurable. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot et al. Army reign of terror (August 1971) From Socialist Worker, 21 August 1971. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.50-1. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Special analysis by Paul Foot, Brian Trench, Jimmy Grealy and Chris Harman THE most savage terrorism of all, that of the British army, is on the loose in Belfast. All pretence that Northern Ireland is a democracy has been cast aside. Men have been imprisoned without charge or trial. Many will be held there for years. The few who have been released tell of torture practised by the British army and the Northern Ireland police. In the streets a score or more of people have been killed, most of them from the nationalist section of the population. Already, thousands of people are streaming in terror out of Belfast into primitive refugee camps in Southern Ireland. The British government claims that it has had to introduce internment – imprisonment without trial – in order to ‘clear out the murderers’. The British press has backed up Heath and Maudling by continual talk of ‘terrorists’. Most of the killing, however, has been carried out not by the IRA but by the British army and the bigoted thugs in the Orange Order. Two years ago, the homes of working-class people in the Falls Road, Belfast, and other areas, were attacked by crazed mobs of police and armed Orangemen. A dozen or more people were killed. Government ministers and newspaper owners in Belfast knew full well who was responsible for those murders. Official government inquiries admitted that the police were to blame. No one was put on trial, let alone interned, for this indiscriminate murder. The present arrests have nothing to do with stopping violence. Leaders of both wings of the IRA have repeatedly made it clear that they are opposed to attacks on the Protestant section of the population Their ‘crime’ in the eyes of the British government is that they have armed themselves to defend the lives of Catholic workers from attacks by armed Orangemen and that they want the British troops out of Ireland. In the name of ‘peace’, violence has been deliberately provoked by Northern Ireland and Westminster governments. The 20 deaths and all which follow are directly the responsibility of Messrs Heath, Maudling and Faulkner. The basis of the Northern Ireland state for 50 years has been religious hatred. By deliberately fostering a loathing for Catholics among the Protestant working class, the big landowners, industrialists and their British backers have clung to popular support. Protestants have been given marginal privileges to distract them from unemployment and slum housing. They have been organised into bodies like the Orange Order, which every few years launches murderous attacks upon Catholic areas. Two years ago the British government was forced to introduce reforms designed, it was claimed, to end discrimination against Catholics. In doing so, it undermined the foundation of rule through the Stormont regime. The British government, however, is not prepared to see Stormont collapse without a struggle. Every gesture of opposition to reform from the right wing of the Unionist Party and the supporters of Ian Paisley, has been greeted with concessions from the British government. The decision to intern was taken to appease the Unionist right wing, which for more than a year has placed internment top of the list of its demands upon the government. What has been the reaction of British liberalism and the British Labour Party to this flagrant breach of the ‘traditional civil liberties’ for which, laughably, the United Kingdom is meant to stand? Unanimously, the British press has approved the decision to intern. Little or nothing has been allowed in their pages to disturb the solidarity between the press and the British troops. The facts about internment have not been sought. In the rare instances where journalists have discovered some of the truth about the internment camps, the editors have consigned their reports to the waste paper basket. The reaction of the Labour Party has been in direct violation of everything for which the labour movement stands. Mr Harold Wilson is in the Scillies, apparendy out of contact with the worst breach of civil liberties in the UK for a hundred years. Mr. Callaghan, Labour’s Home Affairs spokesman, has described the internment as ‘a gamble’. He obviously hopes it will succeed. He has uttered not one word about the brutality, let alone the principle, of internment. But Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and all the editors in the world cannot stop the resistance. In Northern Ireland, the resistance rules in the beleaguered areas. From five o’clock in the morning the streets are full of people determined to ensure that the ‘snatch squads’ will not surprise them again. Irish people, socialists and republicans in Britain must rally to support their countrymen and comrades in the North of Ireland. Top of the page Last updated on 20.12.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Can Labour bring jobs? (18 June 1994) From Socialist Worker, No.1397, 18 June 1994, p.11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. A FEW of the more learned political commentators have discovered a “crucial difference” between the candidates standing for the Labour Party leadership. One candidate, John Prescott, “puts full employment at the centre of the agenda”. He wants the party to “make a commitment” to full employment, which he defines by an old 1944 standard as at least 97 percent of the workforce at work. The other two candidates are more cautious about the figures. This should make the choice pretty easy. In all my life I have never heard a politician (or anyone else, for that matter) say that they are in favour of unemployment. Everyone agrees that unemployment is a bad thing and should be banned. All governments would like to ban it, but it has an irritating quality of not being susceptible to bans. Indeed there is a pattern in the politics of this century which suggests that the more anxious politicians say they are about unemployment the more it flourishes when they are in office. This is especially true of the Labour Party. The Labour Party, since it gets its votes from the working class, has an obvious interest in preferring work and wages to dole and poverty. In the election of 1929 every other policy was subordinated to the single specific aim of reducing unemployment. Jimmy Thomas MP, the railway union leader, was adamant that all socialistic nonsense should be rejected in favour of the practical business of getting the one million unemployed back to work. Moonshine A Labour government was elected and Thomas became Lord Privy Seal with special responsibility for the unemployed. The unemployment figures tripled in two years and Thomas, perhaps logically, joined the Tories. John Prescott cites the post-war majority Labour government as the model of how unemployment can be wiped out. It was wiped out during that government but so it was for the next 13 years or so – under a Tory government. The first substantial rise in unemployment after the war happened under a Labour government – in 1967. Then in 1972 unemployment reached a million under the Tories. Labour was furious. It patented a slogan: “Back to work with Labour.” Under the Labour government which followed, unemployment soared to one and a half million. The new Tory leader, Thatcher, became a champion of full employment. Then she got into office and we were back to four million unemployed. The level of unemployment has never this century been set by the government. It has been set by the level of industrial activity, which in turn has been decided by the unelected people who own and control the means of production. The “free market” has been left free to rise and fall as it suits its controllers. If government wants to insist on full employment, therefore, it must nationalise, control and interfere with the free market in a manner which John Prescott is not prepared even to contemplate. Unless accompanied by a warning about the need to fight the priorities of capitalism all talk of a “commitment to full employment” is so much old fashioned moonshine. P.S. If I had a vote, by the way, I would vote for John Prescott in preference to Blair and Beckett, certainly not for his worthless pledges on unemployment, but because as far as I know he’s the only candidate who’s ever been on strike and fought hard against an employer. He will not refer to it, but I will. He was an excellent militant in his native Hull in the seamen’s strike of 1966. Top of the page Last updated on 6.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ireland Come all you young rebels (January 2001) From Socialist Review, No.248, January 2001, p.26. Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. History is a battleground says Paul Foot – especially in Ireland Get out your diaries for January and, if you find a lot of meetings there already, prepare your video recorders. A four part series, each part one hour long, is coming up on BBC1 and must not be missed by any socialist or Republican on either side of the Irish Sea. Called Rebel Heart and written by Ronan Bennett, its absorbing subject is the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and its aftermath all the way up to the partition of Ireland in 1922 and the civil war that followed. The series doesn’t need a recommendation from me or from Socialist Review. An irresistible accolade has already been showered on it by the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble, and his acolyte the editor of the Daily Telegraph in London, Charles Moore. David Trimble officially complained to the BBC about the series before he had even seen it. On the day of its press showing the Daily Telegraph, still masquerading as the ‘paper you can trust’, published a whole page of strident propaganda against the series and its author. In order to distinguish between what it regards as ‘fact’ (sacred) and ‘comment’ (free), Mr Moore added a leading article in which he lambasted the BBC for even contemplating a series based on what he regards as biased history. Nowhere in either piece was it disclosed that Mr Moore is himself a dedicated Ulster Unionist and a consistent campaigner for Unionist candidates in Northern Ireland. His position is absolutely clear. He is for free speech for Ulster Unionists, but utterly opposed to free speech for Republicans or indeed anyone who dares expose the ghastly history of Ulster Unionism over the whole of the 20th century. Moore and his dwindling band of supporters can’t abide any record of what happened in Ireland in the years immediately following the Easter Rising. They like to imagine that the flame lit by Connolly, Pearse and the other leaders of that doomed but heroic revolt was extinguished forever with the British soldiers’ bullets that murdered most of them in the prison yards. Moore, Trimble and Co still go pale with fury at any mention of what happened next – the spread, like wildfire, of the spirit of revolt across the whole of Ireland culminating in 1918 in the election of Sinn Fein candidates in 73 of the 105 constituencies in all Ireland. Ronan Bennett’s story, based on a young and fictional middle class participant in the rising, his love affair with a young sharpshooter whom he met on the Dublin barricades, and his subsequent heroics in the awakening of the west of Ireland, brings to the story a new and vital dimension: the impact of these events on Republicans in the six counties of the North. The hero’s girlfriend lives in Belfast, which at the time was still an integral part of Ireland. So the story moves between the open revolution in the south and west to the North, where Michael Collins came to be seen by most of his instinctive supporters as more of a renegade than a hero. The series does not deal in detail with the London negotiations in which Collins and the other Irish delegates were easily persuaded by the British prime minister, Lloyd George, and his advisers to divide the island and leave the Northern six counties in the hands of the British and the Orange Order. When Collins returned from London, he ordered his best recruits in the North back to the South to help him fight for the treaty against its furious Republican opponents. The result was a civil war in which the best and toughest fighters against the British turned their guns on each other, with frightful consequences. Rebel Heart ends ironically in a fatal shootout between the hero and a Collins supporter he had recently sprung from a death sentence in a British jail. As the two comrades lie dying from their wounds, they can’t help giggling. ‘At least’, says one, ‘we died for Ireland.’ As in all the great moments of revolutionary history there is a persuasive argument on both sides, and in the personal tragedy of Ronan Bennett’s series it is hard not to sympathise with both. On the one hand are the 26 counties, two thirds of all Ireland, free at last from imperialist rule, with their own army and their own parliament. On the other hand is the beleaguered minority in the North, defenceless against the sectarian savagery of legitimised Orange rule. The horror of the latter is revealed in a dramatisation of the murders in their home of the adult male members of a Belfast Republican family by a deranged and detested police chief. These murders, despite the hysterical protests of the Daily Telegraph, are not invented by Ronan Bennett. They really happened in the way the film describes. The argument is left in some doubt, though the script’s sympathy with the rebels against the treaty is pretty clear. It’s a pity no space could be found for the definitive answer to the problem of the North as set out in a series of scorching articles by the executed hero of the rising, James Connolly. Two years before the rising, as nationalist leaders started to flirt with partition, Connolly wrote a series of articles in whatever paper would publish him. In the Irish Worker of 14 March 1914 he denounced partition as ‘the depth of betrayal’. His famous conclusion was that partition ‘would mean a carnival of reaction North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements while it endured’. James Connolly could reach such devastatingly prophetic conclusions because, unlike Collins, Pearse, de Valera and all the other leaders of the rising, he was a socialist who directed his attention first and foremost to the working class. He was driven into a paroxysm of fury by the mere suggestion that the future of industrial Ulster would be handed over to the likes of David Trimble and Charles Moore. Rebel Heart is on BBC1 Sundays 9 p.m. from 14 January Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Unemployment – The Socialist Answer (1963) A Labour Worker Pamphlet. First published 1963 by the Labour Worker, 10 Kersland Street, Glasgow, W2. Transcribed by Christian Høsbjerg, with thanks to Derek Howl. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. INTRODUCTION The Myths The Realities WHY UNEMPLOYMENT The Excuses ‘Demand’ and Overproduction The Cold War Cure The Pressure on Wages UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE TORIES The Three Dilemmas of Mr. Maudling 1. Tory ‘Expansion’ and Unemployment 2. Arms Expenditure 3. Depressed Areas UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT Labour’s Remedy Wooing Big Business ‘Work at any Price’ The Limits of Reform HOW TO FIGHT UNEMPLOYMENT ‘Do-it-yourself’ Demands Five Days’ Work or Five Days’ Pay No Sackings – Share the Work Workers’ Control Introduction The Myths “A new situation has arisen which shows certain similarities with what happened in the early 1930’s. I do not intend to convey the idea that we must repeat the sad experiences of those years, but I do think we shall have to take definite measures to see that they are not repeated.” Mr. Per Jacobssen, director of the International Monetary Fund, 20. 2. 1963 The director of the International Monetary Fund is not employed to instruct workers as to their prospects in the future, nor is it his job to comment on the best action for the world’s unemployed. He is concerned to report to the international employing class on the nature and progress of world capitalism. The “sad experiences” of the 1930’s for Mr. Jacobssen were not the experiences of millions of workers cut off from their only source of livelihood, but the experiences of capitalists, whose profits, on the whole, were small and whose productive capacity was seriously underemployed. Mr Jacobssen knows quite well that the employing class will act out of sheer desperation to avoid those experiences, and it is to desperate action, no doubt, that he urges it to act. The capitalist, wherever he operates, listens and understands. He knows only too well what Mr. Jacobssen is talking about. He himself is able to observe the accounts of his business, and to study them in the light of past experience. And he knows that the next few years will be a period of difficulty and distress. He makes no effort to question this forecast nor to examine the causes of it. In fact, he knows very well that investigation and question of that kind can only do him harm. His job, then, is to hush everything up ... to get out the old, old platitudes, dust them up a little, and present them to a cynical apathetic public. We have been asked in the past few months ‘to put our shoulders to the belts’, ‘to tighten our wheels’, ‘to get our nose to the wall’ and ‘our backs stuck into the grindstone’. References have been made to Dunkirk. For the religious among us, there is the story of the seven lean years and seven fat years, and, if that is not enough, there is always the attraction of forty days (or months) in the wilderness without food or drink. All this nonsense will be spewed out during the next few months. Newspaper columnists, television commentators, politicians from all parties, businessmen – all will carry to the country the same unmistakeable message: “All right. We’ve had our good times. Now’s the time for a bit of ‘consolidation’ and ‘self-sacrifice’.” The Realities The worker on the other hand has no interest in this mythology. He is concerned rather with the reasons for all this sacrifice. The shipyard in Glasgow, whose yard closed overnight; the girl bank employee in London who got her notice because of “necessary review of staff owing to serious difficulties in the banking business”; the Birmingham builder whose job, once safe, now depends on the local authority’s plans for new houses, which get less and less ambitious every year ... these people will want to know why. Machines, computers, and building techniques improve and increase every day. The productive capacity of society stretching from the Rockies to the Urals has doubled and re-doubled over and over again since the beginning of the century. The worker himself produces more every year, in less time, and yet his own condition is suddenly infinitely worse. His weekly income is slashed five times. Furniture on hire purchase has to be given up. Housekeeping money has to be halved. Luxuries of any kind have ruthlessly to be abandoned. What used to be a careful but comfortable way of life is changed overnight into a grim struggle to keep the family alive. Why? Why Unemployment? The Excuses A small factory closes. A shipyard is merged. Twenty or thirty office workers are told that they can go elsewhere. Stories like this are commonplace to-day. And just as commonplace are the official reasons given by the bosses for the sackings. These have a depressing sameness about them. Take some examples. On the 9th January 1963, the bosses of Rolls Royce decided to put 16,000 men on short time. The reason? “There has”, said the official statement, “been a decline in orders in the company’s aero-engine division”.

“There has”, said the official statement, “been a decline in orders in the company’s aero-engine division”. Or take the statement of Mr. J.M. Wotherspoon, plant manager of Remington Rand typewriter factory at Hillington Glasgow. On 8th February the company coolly announced that 1,100 men would lose their jobs the following week. Mr. Wotherspoon’s statement of explanation must have brought great comfort to the workers. “For months” he said “we have been overproducing, hoping the typewriter market would improve. It hasn’t. In fact, there has been a slump in overseas orders for typewriters and sets of parts. We had to do this to protect the continued operation of the factory”. The same reasons had been put before 1,200 French workers at Lyons a month earlier when Remington closed a large typewriter factory there. What a relief such statement must be to the redundant workers! Those long, drab mornings at the Labour Exchange will no doubt be cheered by the thought that the reasons for the sackings were good ones, that, after all, demand had slumped; that, after all, the Rolls Royce bosses and Mr. Wotherspoon are still in work. ‘Demand’ and Overproduction Let us look a little closer at these excuses: “fall in orders”, “slackening demand”, “overproduction”. Perhaps it means that no one wants any more aeroplanes or typewriters. Perhaps the world is so saturated with these (and other) commodities that mankind can now do without for a period. Possibly there are enough aeroplanes for everyone to travel wherever they wish, enough typewriters to supply everyone who wants one. To find out, we could ask the 15,000 aero-workers at Rolls Royce how often they have travelled on an aeroplane. We could ask the 1,100 Remington workers whether they are all perfectly satisfied with their typewriters. The fact is, of course, that there is still a desperate need for both these commodities. Only a tiny percentage of the world population have travelled on an aircraft, and very very few own typewriters. The simple fact is that the average worker can’t afford a typewriter or a trip in an aeroplane. His wages are simply not enough for him to contemplate either. The “markets” and the “orders” which the bosses talk about have nothing whatever to do with what people want. They refer only to what people can afford. “Afford” – what does this mean? To millions and millions of workers it means the size of the wage packet – the small brown package he gets each week in return for producing the aeroplane or the typewriter or whatever else he does. The value of that packet is not the same as the value of what he has produced. For the boss has snaffled a proportion of it – as surplus value – as profit. When we think of the fact that the vast majority of people are workers, and that they only get paid a proportion of the wealth they produce, we can immediately see the problem which the boss class must face: “who is to buy the goods”? Of course the boss class themselves can buy a certain amount of goods. Mr. Roy Thompson can charter an aeroplane to go and see Mr. Khruschev one weekend. Lord Robens in fact can actually buy an aeroplane. But the bosses cannot possibly absorb more than a tiny proportion of the mass of goods produced. There is only one alternative. To sell the goods to the worker. But the profit which the boss must make is not realised until he sells his goods at a price. The price must be enough to allow him to pay his workers and get the profit. In other words, the workers’ wages are too low to buy back the goods which they produce. That is an essential characteristic of the capitalist system. It means that from time to time the capitalist cannot sell his goods. Like Mr. Wotherspoon and Mr. Rolls Royce he shuts up shop, pays his workers off or puts them on short time. But why from time to time? If the system was as shaky as that, you might expect it to be in a state of permanent crisis – as it was in the thirties. The point is that he crisis would only be permanent if all workers were employed on “consumer” goods, which they would be expected to buy. Of course, that is not the case. Workers are employed on making heavy machinery, which they do not buy. Others waste their time in advertising or in journalism or in dead-end office work which contributes precisely nothing to the production of things which are necessary or desirable. As investment in machinery and factory-building goes up, more and more workers are employed in this field. More and more wages which they can spend on consumer goods, thus for a time alleviating the problem of overproduction. But one fine day the factory is completed. The workers who built it and installed the machinery are then laid off.

The workers who built it and installed the machinery are then laid off. As there is a tendency for many employers to invest and start building at about the same time - the beginning of a boom –the completion of the jobs also occur at about the same time and large numbers of workers are thus made redundant – the beginning of a slump. Then there is more productive capacity for a smaller market. The problem starts over again. The Cold War Cure Why then has there not been mass unemployment, no slump, since 1939? The answer is that the ruling class has resorted in desperation to the panacea which has solved so many of its problem the past ... war. War means the employment of vast numbers of workers on producing absolutely nothing for personal consumption. They produce for destruction and savagery. Tanks, guns, warships and so on are turned out by the million. Workers are paid for doing it, and the problem of overproduction simply does not arise. The fact that millions of workers are slaughtering each other under phoney and meaningless banners is, of course, of no consequence to the capitalist class. Since the Korean war, the ruling classes of the world have worked a new system – war in peacetime. This is sometimes known as ‘The Cold War’, or ‘Peaceful Co-Existence’ or ‘The Balance of Power’. One thing is clear. It has nothing whatever to do with the workers. The bosses on one side of the Iron Curtain call down threats and counter-threats on the heads of the bosses on the other side. Workers may be impressed by the nature of the calumnies. But whether in Russia or in America they are being exploited just the same. War in peacetime means that an enormous hunk of what we produce every year – 7% in Britain; 10% in America; even more in Russia – is diverted into armaments – some of them so hideous that no one even dares to contemplate what would happen if they were used. Hundreds of thousands of workers are paid to produce these weapons, or to join the army etc. etc. The money they are paid opens up new markets in which the consumer goods industries can sell their produce. International capitalism has – for the time being – solved its problems by using its productive capacity, which could produce a better and more satisfying life for thousands upon thousands of us, to manufacture the ugliest, most disgusting and most utterly useless products in the whole of human history. But wait! Why is it necessary for them to produce armaments? The Pressure on Wages Why can they not use some of their profits to raise wages? This would create the markets in which to sell their consumer goods, and all capacity would be used on things which people need. Certainly it would. But one of the most charming characteristics of the capitalist class is that they are always at each other’s throats. One boss’s success is another’s failure. The forces of capitalism are concentrating into huge monopoly blocks (sometimes, as in Russia, a whole nation’s enterprise is one single state capitalist bloc), but the competition intensifies. It becomes more and more vicious, more and more regardless of workers’ interests. This competition forces the boss to accumulate the surplus wealth he extracts from the worker. The greatest problem for every boss – the one which keeps him awake at nights – is the question: “Have I enough capital accumulated?’’ For if the answer is “no”, then the competitor down the road or across the seas will invest more, produce cheaper goods, and undersell him in the markets. It is his instinct of self-preservation which forces him to accumulate as a top priority. If he is to survive, nothing else matters but accumulation of wealth from the exploited workers. That is why Anthony Wotherspoon expresses “sadness” at having to sack workers, he does it nevertheless – because the loss of orders is damaging the level of accumulation in Remington Rand. The slogan of capitalism is now the same as it always has been. “We must accumulate. The workers, their needs, their wants, their families and their aspirations can go to hell (or heaven) provided we accumulate.” And, of course, there is only one major item in his accounts which the individual capitalist can alter – his wage bill. The never-ending drive to accumulate forces him for ever to keep his wages in check. And as the rate of profit (that is, the amount of profit made for the amount invested) goes down and down so there have to be ‘wage pauses’ and ‘guiding lights’ and the National Incomes Commission. This, then, is the terrible dilemma of the capitalist class. If wages are low generally, then there is no market for the goods he produces. If wages are high, he cannot accumulate enough. Whatever “solution” he finds for one problem, in some degree, he lands himself in the other. Either way, it means unemployment, misery among thousands of workers ... and the most terrible waste of human endeavour and productive forces. Unemployment and the Tories: The Three Dilemmas of Mr. Maudling Lord Hailsham: “I offer you faith and courage. What more do you want?” A voice: “A f... job.” Public meeting of workers in Hartlepoole, Durham, Jan 29th. 1. Tory ‘Expansion’ Capitalist “expansion” involves a whole series of petty fiscal measures. A fall in bank rate here, a cut in purchase tax there, a release of credits, and other gimmicks. The net result is to increase demand for a period until capitalists from other nations cash in on the expanding market, imports rise, and the national capitalist class has to shut down again or be beaten on its home ground.

The net result is to increase demand for a period until capitalists from other nations cash in on the expanding market, imports rise, and the national capitalist class has to shut down again or be beaten on its home ground. The pattern of unemployment in post-war Britain has been one of regular cycles, with the graph rising and failing within narrow limits and corresponding roughly to the “expansion” measures. Another feature about the figures is the regular decline in the summer as construction work and catering trades get into full swing. Over the years the tendency has been for unemployment to drop less and less as the “squeeze” is lifted. The “peaks” of the graph have climbed higher and higher. The number of wholly unemployed, in February 1963, was slightly more than 600,000 which is easily the highest since the war. The previous highest, just before the last election “boom” in 1959, was 530,000. Similarly, and this really frightens the Tories, the fall in unemployment figures as the brakes are taken off has become more and more negligible. It looks as though the process has now reached its logical conclusion ... that the normal methods of Tory “expansion” do not any longer have any noticeable effect on the unemployment figures. “The economy” and “production” can “grow” and “grow”, but unemployment remains at the same rate, and even increases! Thus the National Institute of Economic and Social Research predict that a growth rate of 3% will see the same number of unemployed at the end of the year. And the Financial Times – the Internal Bulletin of the British capitalist class – of February 11th, 1963, went even further: “When an economy starts to expand from a position of over-capacity, is can achieve impressive increases in production without making any substantial dent in unemployment ... it is quite possible that a more efficient use of manpower can lead to unemployment and production rising simultaneously”. As more and more plant is manufactured, and more and more goods pour onto the market (witness the new car factories at Halewood, Liverpool, and Linwood, Paisley), there is greater productive capacity for the same market. The capitalist dog-fight becomes more and more vicious... and the boss’s natural reaction is to turn to his labour force and trim it of all unnecessary and unsavoury elements. He throws out the old and the unskilled. And he throws out the militants. The two serious labour disputes at Dunlop, Coventry, and Fords, Dagenham, both involved the arbitrary sacking of militant shop stewards. This is the process described so politely as “a more efficient use of manpower” which leads “unemployment and production to rise simultaneously”. But it puts the wretched Tory Chancellor in a terrible dilemma. If he leaves “expansion” at the normal rate, the unemployment figure will rise nevertheless. If he expands further than the limit, his class will lose out to the rest of the world capitalists who will rush in to exploit the new huge markets. Thus inflation: thus balance of payments troubles. Mr. Maudling, who understand the capitalist system as well as anyone else, put his position in a brutal moment of frankness in the Commons Debate on unemployment, December 17th, 1962. Maudling: “A level of unemployment of 550,000 to 600,000 is too high. On the other hand, a level of unemployment half that would lead us back into the difficulties of inflation and balance of payments which we have seen in the past.” Hon. Members: “Oh”. Maudling: “I do not say that these problems are insoluble, but it is unreal to try to pretend that we can bring the unemployment rate down to half what it is at the moment without running into problems”. The honourable members who shouted “Oh” simply did not understand the nature of the capitalist system. 2. Arms Expenditure The Tories are saved from sudden, drastic slump by the continued expenditure of huge resources upon armaments. But even this is no permanent stabiliser. The technical demands of the “deterrent” rise every year, and so, out of all proportion to what the ruling class can afford, do the costs. Different sections of the class are already complaining bitterly about the heavy burden of the arms bill. Why, after all, could they not exploit the consumer boom with the extra profits? Keeping the “deterrent”, then, means not only infuriating many of the bosses who produce consumer goods, but also spending so much of the national product on armaments that huge gaps are left in investment in consumer goods industries, which can be promptly filled by competitors from abroad. Cutting the arms bill, on the other hand, may mean the end of the “deterrent”, but also thins out the extra markets of the armaments workers. Poor Mr. Maudling is trapped again. 3. Depressed Areas President Kennedy in his “state of the nation” speech last year referred to heavy unemployment in some regions as the second most important problem facing the administration. In Britain, where capitalism is oldest, the problem is intense. Northern Ireland at present has 11.2% unemployed, while productivity in that hard-hit area has been rising for the past two years twice as fast as anywhere else in the United Kingdom! In Scotland the figure is 6.2%, the North of England 7%, Wales 6%. The average for Britain as a whole is 3.2%, and in the largest area, London and the South East, the figure is a mere 2.3% (the highest for years). Ever since the Local Employment Act, 1960, the Tories have strained British capitalism almost to the limit in an attempt to heal these economic deformities. They have spent more than £75,000,000 in inducements to individual capitalists who have set up shop in development districts. Here and there they have succeeded. But the general picture is one of total failure. Scotland has received the lion’s share of the money (£43,000,000).

Yet unemployment in Scotland has risen steadily since the act was passed, as has the steady stream of unemployed Scots crossing the Border to find work elsewhere. Here, then, is Mr. Maudling’s third dilemma. For the economies in the depressed areas are so dependent on heavy, declining industry that the degree of “reflation” needed to get them growing again is about twice or even three times that which the already expanding areas like London can stand. To “stimulate” in an attempt to revive Scotland would mean chaotic inflation in the South, and serious balance of payments problems. To keep the South in check is to suffocate the depressed areas still further. The Tories take the latter course, but they do not enjoy either. These then are the problems faced by capitalism in an era of ever-expanding machinery and automation. All of them point inevitably down the road of slow and steady increases in unemployment, to the “boom” periods coming less and less often, to the “depression” periods becoming more and more disastrous. The Tories will pin their faith in keeping enough workers in “prosperity” to win the elections. This optimistic notion, as well as the entire tragicomedy of dilemmas, could be laughed to scorn by the workers ... if, and only if, the Labour movement had something better to offer them. But has it? Unemployment and the Labour Movement “The Government has therefore decided to express the full employment standard of the United Kingdom at a level of 3% at the seasonal peak.” Hugh Gaitskell, Chancellor of Exchequer, March 22nd 1951. “I beg to move: “That this House expresses its deep concern at the rise in unemployment figures to 814,000 (3.2%) ... “It is both a tragedy and a scandal that this House, in 1963, should again have to debate heavy unemployment ...” Douglas Jay, Opposition front Bench, February 4th 1963. Labour’s Remedy Hans Christian Andersen has an excellent fairy story about a King who bought a “magic” suit of clothes from a couple of fraudulent tailors. The suit of clothes did not in fact exist, but the “magic” about it was that it was invisible to fools. The King, the Queen and all the courtiers and hangers-on agreed that the suit of clothes was the most magnificent thing that they had ever seen. It was unanimously decided that it should be worn on the next royal parade. The masses, too, had been informed about the magic suit, and they did not want to appear fools either. So they all cheered and cheered as the King, surrounded by artillery, cavalry and infantry, was carried through the centre of the town in shining, innocent nudity. Just so do Mr. Wilson, Mr. Callaghan, Mr. Woodcock and Mr. Cousins, flanked by the armoury of 13 million votes, sport themselves before an ever-increasing body of apathetic supporters clothed in “magic” remedies for unemployment. The central panacea of the Labour leadership is the direction of industry to the depressed areas. All past experience proves how futile such policies are. Way back in 1935 the Government introduced a lukewarm and totally ineffective Special Areas Act to try to “channel” industry from the South to Scotland and other “depressed” areas. In 1938 the Barlow Commission recommended stringent Government control of industrial development in the South. In 1945 the Coalition Government introduced the Distribution of Industry Act – which was to become the foundation of Labour’s policy toward location of industry. The Act granted special powers to the Government and local authorities to develop land and industry in certain specified areas (which included huge chunks of Scotland) in order to entice private industry to expand in these areas. There were also other inducements – such as low rents, and building grants, and lump sums to cover the loss suffered by the move North. The Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, gave the Government powers to control industrial development by refusing industrial development certificates to firms wishing to set up shop or expand in the congested area. Wooing Big Business How well did the two Governments – Labour and Tory – succeed with these powers at their command? If we take the amount of industrial building it looks at first sight as if the Labour Government succeeded in channelling industry to the development areas. Between 1945 and 1951 30% of all British industrial building took place in the development areas. Between 1952 and 1958 the figure slumped to 18.8%. But a closer look shows a different picture. Between 1945 and 1948 44% of all building was in the development areas (20% in Scotland). In the three years 1949 to 1951 the figure went down to 18.9% – almost exactly the same figure as was maintained in the following seven years under the Tories! The point was that immediately after the war, when a great many firms were starting again from scratch (this is particularly true of a large number of firms from the USA) – private enterprise was relatively susceptible to “steering” under the Distribution of Industry Act, and a “tough” industrial development certificate policy. But from 1948 – with capitalism gaining confidence and building more extensions to existing plant, resistance to Government powers increased, and private firms began their accustomed conglomeration near their big markets – in the South. Between 1948 and 1962 both Labour and the Tories failed to shift private enterprise from its firm resolve to stay and expand in the South. Yet Labour’s case remains today the same as it has been for the last ten years – Labour would use the existing powers with greater effect than did the Tories. Against this background of legislation to solve the problem of unemployment (all of which has failed dismally) we can take a better look at the solutions at present offered by the various parties and trade union bodies. First there is a policy of “negative direction” of industry – or the refusing of industrial development certificates, where possible, to firms wishing to develop in the South.

This policy is backed by generous -“inducements” to firms to move into the development areas (low rents, building grants etc.). This is the broad policy of the Tory Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. There are three main reasons why it is totally inadequate and worthless. The first, as I have shown, is that it has failed. If industrialists are refused permission to expand where they want to, they will not expand at all (cf. Mr. R. Maudling, then President of the Board of Trade, November 9th 1959: “There is always the possibility that firms prevented from setting up in areas of their own choice will decide not to expand at all – but to do nothing”). The second is that where it does succeed, there is no permanancy in the industry which develops in the areas. The factories which have gone to Scotland are branch factories and “bits and pieces”. The branch factories are always the first to close in times of recession, always the first to pay off workers, or put them on short time. They are always the last in the queue for heavy investment and modernisation. The “bits and pieces” are wholly unstable, and provide not even a semblance of a basis for industrial prosperity. Thirdly, there is the trend of British capitalism towards Europe. The industrialist who is refused permission to build in Birmingham, Coventry or London will not turn to Liverpool or Glasgow. He will turn to Hamburg, Rotterdam and Paris. It’s important to remember in this era of European “internationalism” that our Government’s control of private industry is strictly limited by national boundaries. Capitalism is as international as ever. But lastly, and most important, this policy leaves the initiative to private enterprise. It is a policy of wait and see. The idea behind it is that the Government should not act until private enterprise acts. Then, of course, it is to act “toughly” with a few expensive bribes thrown in. There is no real plan behind the policy. No one is to sit down and decide what type of industry is best in Scotland. The initiative lies, as always in the hands of Big Business and Profit. That is why the policy has been, and always will be, utterly futile. Why not admit right away that private enterprise – because of the historical development in Britain – cannot successfully move to the North. Why not admit right away that the only answer is public enterprise under workers’ control? Not public enterprise alone – as the sacking of miners and railwaymen by nationalised industries bears witness to, but public enterprise under worker’s control. ‘Work at Any Price’ The policy of the Labour Party leaders aims to tinker with capitalism, not abolish it. Petty tinkering with administrative details is always the prerogative of fashionable Labour economists. But they do not even start to provide an answer to the essential contradictions of the capitalist system. Nor do they anywhere threaten the continued existence of class society in all its most ruthless forms. In fact, the official Labour Party policy statement has some interesting things to say about class rule in industry: “With certain honourable exceptions, our finance and industry need a major shake-up at the top. Too many directors owe their position to family, school or political connections. If the dead wood were cut out of Britain’s boardrooms and replaced by the keen young executives, production engineers and scientists who are at present denied their legitimate prospects of promotion, our production and export problems would be more manageable.” (Signposts for the Sixties, p. 10) The important struggle, in other words, is for better and brighter bosses. Our boardrooms will be plastered with the new slogan of the Left: “Etonians keep out! Only Winchester and Manchester Grammar School can give the correct training these days!” Nor is the perspective of the Trade Union movement any clearer. Most of the “solutions” from that quarter have been for “expansion” along conventional capitalist lines. In some instances the leadership has resorted to the most appalling remedies. “Jobs For Scotland” – a “campaign” conducted by the Scottish TUC to attract more jobs to Scotland was divorced completely from the rank and file. “Direction of industry” to Scotland, with all its narrow chauvinistic implications, was the central theme. This sort of zany nationalism, which has nothing to do with socialism, reached its logical conclusion in a frantic letter written by Mr. John McWillian, Labour convener of Fife County Council, to Sir Patrick Henessey, managing director of Fords in Britain. “Why not bring your Liverpool factory to Fife” was the theme of the letter. “We won’t go on strike up here”. This deliberate class-collaboration merely delights the capitalists and serves to prolong the insecurity of the workers. To solve the problem of unemployment in the shipyards the STUC propose a “scrap and build” policy for Britain’s navy. In the 1930’s the unemployed Fenians in the South Side of Glasgow discussed an idea to blow up the power station to create more work. The idea was dismissed when someone pointed out that the ruling class would simply leave them in darkness! No less stupid is the idea of the STUC. Unnecessary, futile and extremely pernicious work, like the building of a Polaris submarine, should be boycotted completely by the workers and their representatives. The Limits of Reform And so the miserable story goes on and on. Demands for petty, administrative reform. Demands for the restoration of national prestige. Demands for “work for work’s sake”, for the construction of the most horrible weapons of war... irrelevant, idiotic demands made without thought or consideration and intermingled with all the flatulent pomposity, petty wit and sterile academics which are the peculiar characteristics of the latter-day working class representative. Creeping unemployment is not the result of “evil” men in power, or of “the tired, old men on the Tory benches”.

Creeping unemployment is not the result of “evil” men in power, or of “the tired, old men on the Tory benches”. The young, active and no doubt super-virile President Kennedy with all the best intensions in the world can do nothing to stop it. Nor is it the result of administrative muddles in Whitehall, or of an overdose of Anglophilia at the expense of the Scots. The reason is that we live in a class society, in which the productive forces cannot be used to satisfy the needs and desires of the workers. The competitive rat-race of capitalism meant, in the thirties, that huge numbers of men and machinery were redundant, useless, to be thrown aside. To-day it means that hundreds of thousands of men and millions of pounds worth of machinery are employed in creating worthless weapons, which can only be used for the destruction of mankind. And even with the drastic measures, unemployment is beginning to grow again. This is the system which the fashionable Labour intellectuals would have us accept, and reform. But unemployment rises relentlessly, the prophets of permanent affluence are paying the penalty for ten years of class collaboration, ten years without theory, without propaganda, without thought. The cold wind from the North whips away the scanty tatters of reformism, exposing the awe-inspiring nakedness of the entire Labour leadership. Capitalism cannot be reformed out of overproduction and a falling rate of profit. It cannot use the productive force which it has so ingeniously developed to produce what people need and want. As long as capitalism continues, the threat of unemployment hangs over the head of every worker. It is the job of the Labour movement, while fighting the day to day struggle with all the militancy at its command, to expose the flaws and frauds of capitalism and call for its replacement. How to Fight Unemployment ‘Do It Yourself’ Demands How to fight unemployment? But, first of all, who is to do the fighting? The capitalist class will never give way before an elite of bureaucrats or professional revolutionaries. It will convert them or smash them. Nor can the workers look to the capitalist State to solve their problems for them. The State is only an instrument of the ruling class. It simply serves as a convenient instrument to pool the resources of individual capitalist, and do their dirty work for them. Transport is run for the business man by the State; so is coal, electricity, gas, water and so on. Recently the Tories have all but “nationalised” the ports, to the hysterical cheers of the Labour Party. Nor did the Tories object to the nationalisation of coal and railways by Labour. It’s perfectly possible that there won’t be any serious objection to the nationalisation of steel (except of course by the steel bosses). Nationalisation by the State has nothing to do with the workers. It simply means that the enterprise is run more efficiently, the workers exploited more clinically in the interests of the ruling class. Nor can the worker expect to sit in his house and leave it to his representatives. The more he sits at home, the less are they his representatives. If there is no pressure from below, the trade union official, the Member of Parliament, the local councillor become absorbed and fascinated with bureaucracy, charmed and delighted with petty power. Very soon he will put away all thought of the people he represents and continue on his irrelevant road to nowhere. The slogan for the workers must be “Do it Yourself”. At every twist and turn in the industrial struggle, challenge the bosses’ right to hire and fire, challenge his right to run the workers’ lives. But, through the Labour Party, through the trade unions, and on the factory floor do it yourself. What to do? To oppose the bosses at the points where their case is weakest, and to expose the absurdity of class society with every demand and complaint. Five Days Work or Five Days Pay The most immediate and obvious effect of unemployment is the fall in living standards of the unemployed. Suddenly, through no fault of his own, although he is prepared to work five days a week, he is told: “You are no longer any use. Go away.” And his living standards are cut by five times. Workers, both employed and unemployed, should demand that the boss who sacks his workers would continue to pay them full rates of pay until he can offer them work again. A sacked worker is much more important than a shareholder. Let him be entitled to at least the same sort of benefits. Side by side with this demand, it is vital continually to oppose all unnecessary work. If the unemployed get full maintenance, it is easier for miners in Fife to oppose a coal-fired power station, when an oil-fired station is cheaper and easier for all concerned; it is easier, too, for shipyard and chemical workers to refuse to waste their time in the construction of weapons of war. No Sackings – Share the Work When the boss finds that through a drop in orders or a new machine, he wants to cut his labour force, the workers should demand that not a single sacking takes place. Instead the available works should be shared out between the existing labour force, without loss of pay. If ten men can do the work in four days, why not twenty men in two days? The work is done just the same, and all the men are happier. However, the strength of trade union organisation varies tremendously from industry to industry, and from factory to factory. Probably, at present, in most industries such demands cannot be won. What then? If the fight for 5 days’ work or 5 days’ pay is lost, we must fight for demands on a sliding scale: Shorter working week (i.e., four days) with loss of pay. Retraining of personnel to take other jobs within the establishment. In the event of redundancy having to be accepted, an attempt to keep redundant workers on the payroll of the firm until suitable alternative work has been found outside. In the event of failure compensation payments whilst looking for alternative work, plus severance pay. Severance pay should come as a last resort when all else fails, and on terms dictated by the workers not the boss;

and not accepted at the first opportunity as a sort of leaving present from the boss, which has been the attitude of many union leaders. To the demand for a 35-hour week or a 7-hour day the bosses always have some reason for saying it is impossible. In those balmy days of “full” employment the answer was “No, there’s a shortage of labour.” Today, they say “No, we can’t afford it – increased labour costs,” etc. Both ways the workers lose out. Our answer must be clear. “We, the workers ‘can’t afford’ unemployment!!! It is your profits and your capitalist system which prevents a 35-hour, 30-hour or an even shorter week.” At the same time we must stand firm on the question of overtime. We must say: “Whilst our fellow-workers are on the dole will not work overtime for you.” By banning overtime we force the boss to take on more workers from the dole queue. Workers’ Control These demands raise the question of workers’ status. They assume that the worker can run his own life, can indeed run his own industry, and that he is much more entitled to benefits from industry than the shareholder of the boss himself. When put to the boss they do not allow him to bluff with statistics or Parliamentary manoeuvre. They force him openly to defend his system. These demands clear away the debris of clichés about “faith and courage”, about “two world wars” about “national prestige” and “making Britain great”. They expose the hard core of capitalist society ... the struggle between the classes. All the time this struggle is going on. And wherever the issue is boss against worker, the worker must be supported. Every wage claim, every strike in workers’ interests must be supported, every sacking bitterly opposed. Yet all this is useless unless, somewhere, the idea of socialism begins to take root among the workers. For socialism, workers’ control of all industry, agriculture and services, is the only real hope for the end of unemployment. Top of the page Last updated on 19 August 2016

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot T. Cliff and Zionism (January 1988) From Socialist Worker, January 1988. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 159–161. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Pondering the critical comments of the representatives of American Jewry on the Christmas upheavals in Gaza and on the West Bank, I go to Central Books to buy myself a Christmas present. I know there is one there for me because Dave, who runs the shop and is a crafty fellow, has informed me that for £10 I can get a copy of Red Russia. This is a marvellous pamphlet by John Reed, published in this country in 1919. Dave has something else up his sleeve, however, which brings me back to Gaza. This is another pamphlet, completed on 12 November 1945, called Middle East at the Cross Roads. It was written in Jerusalem by someone called T. Cliff. I rush through the pamphlet and find one or two clues in it which help a lot in understanding the Christmas crisis in the occupied territories. For instance: Zionism occupies a special place in imperialist fortifications. It plays a double role, firstly, directly as an important pillar of imperialism, giving it active support and opposing the liberatory struggle of the Arab nation, and second as a passive servant behind which imperialism can hide and towards which it can direct the ire of the Arab masses. The same point is made in a rather different way a couple of pages later, under the heading: Can Zionism be Anti-Imperialist? Zionism and imperialism have both common and antagonistic interests. Zionism wants to build a strong Jewish capitalist state. Imperialism is indeed interested in the existence of a capitalist Jewish society enveloped by the hatred of colonial masses, but not that Zionism should become too strong a factor. As far as this is concerned, it is ready to prove its fairness to the Arabs. This ‘double role’ and these ‘common and antagonistic interests’ are likely to lie fallow for many years of unchallenged exploitation, but when the volcano erupts, the contradiction is stretched to breaking point. On the one hand the instinct of the American State Department and its business backers is to support the brutality of the Israeli army; on the other they know they must somehow keep up the fiction of their ‘fairness to the Arabs’ to maintain their robbers’ conspiracy with the reactionary regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The dilemma solves itself for the moment in the cautious criticism by American Jewish organizations and in the US abstention in the United Nations Security Council. Such matters are seized on by all those people who call themselves socialists and supporters of Labour, but who line up with the Israeli state. They point to the criticisms of the American Jews, and to the UN abstention as examples of the ‘moderate approach’ to Zionism. ‘How much better’, they exclaim, ‘is this kind of fraternal criticism to the nasty hostility to Zionism which so often spills over into anti-semitism!’ Of all the many prevarications of what is known as the ‘soft left’ I find this line on Zionism the most distasteful. Otherwise humane and intelligent socialists seem able to discuss these matters without even for a moment considering the unimaginable horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people by Zionist aggression and imperialism. This is an old and quite appalling story of lands seized, a people expelled, starved, brutalized and robbed of their own country by naked military force. Whatever the double role which Zionism performs for imperialism, the fact is that Zionism from first to last has never wavered in its support for imperialism and capitalism in the Middle East. If it once unleashed terrorist forces against the British mandate, it did so solely to embarrass British imperialism in the eyes of American imperialism and to shift its allegiance from one to the other. The explanation of the ‘softness’ stems from the feeling that the Jews are a persecuted race, and suffered horribly at the hands of Hitler. Yet how on earth can one set of concentration camps justify another? Concentration camps are precisely what are being built in Gaza and the West Bank this very moment. The pamphlet puts it well: It is a tragedy that the sons of the very people which has been persecuted and massacred in such a bestial fashion ... should itself be driven into a chauvinistic militaristic fervour and become the blind tool of imperialism in subjugating the Arab masses. That sounds pretty good today. To write it in 1945 took the most extraordinary courage and clarity of Marxist thought. Who was this chap T. Cliff anyway? Top of the page Last updated on 2 September 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Rogues and ‘scroungers’ (29 July 1995) From Socialist Worker, No. 1453, 29 July 1994, 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) 2018. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. “NEW ATTACK On Dole Cheats” – the recent headline in the Daily Mail could have come any week since the very beginning of what is now loosely known as “social security”. The government and its supporters are obsessed by the notion that hundreds of millions are flowing down the drain from social security fraud. To deal with that obsession, a vast network of snoopers and spies has been set up by government to catch the cheats. They spend every hour of every day working out new ways of ensuring, for instance, that people on disability allowance can’t walk properly, or that people on carers’ allowance aren’t inventing the people they care for. Control of poor people’s lives is the essence of this operation, and the control is increasingly invasive and intolerable. Big bankers This month the Benefit Agency reckons that the controls and the crackdowns on the 20 million people on benefit “saved the taxpayer” £717 million. Now pass on to the amazing story of Barings Bank. The most quoted sentence in the recent report of the Board of Banking Supervision states that the Barings collapse was “due to the unauthorised and ultimately catastrophic activities of, it appears, one individual”. This was Nick Leeson who lost hundreds of millions on the international stock markets. What a happy conclusion for the big bankers! The fraud could be blamed entirely on a single rogue crook who went to a grammar school and therefore probably shouldn’t have been allowed into a decent bank in the first place. But wait. The sentence goes straight on as follows, “... that went undetected as a consequence of a failure of management and other controls of the most basic kind”. The main control which Barings escaped was the Bank of England’s iron rule that no British bank can expose itself to (i.e. gamble) more than 25 percent of its capital. A simple point, you might think – easy to understand and easy to enforce. Yet in its last few months Barings managed to expose 73 percent of its capital. How? By an “informal concession” granted by a relatively junior Bank of England official. Apparently he told the blue bloods who run Barings in London that they really didn’t have to worry about the rules. For this “informal concession” there was no precedent, no regulation, no need to refer to anyone in authority. It was not so much a failure of controls as a case of no controls at all. Barings shipped out £827 million under this concession. Remember Barings was one smallish merchant bank, and remember that figure (£717 million) for the total recovery from controls on the alleged social security fraud on benefit paid to 20 million people. The few City gents who feel they owe society an explanation shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, no one really lost anything from the Barings collapse.” If that is true, and it nearly is, the economic system we live under is revealed as all the more grotesque. If £827 million can be shipped out from Britain and used for stock exchange gambling without anyone really noticing or losing anything, then what more proof is needed to establish that losses for the rich can easily and instantly be made up? Losses for the poor, on the other hand, caused by cuts, stricter controls and witch hunts over benefits, are irrecoverable, devastating and in more and more cases even lethal. Top of the page Last updated on 2 Novem9ber 2018

REDS – Die Roten > IS Tendency | IS Tendenz Paul Foot Tony Cliff Revolutionary political theorist and organiser who fired the Socialist Workers Party with his charisma, charm and vision (11 April 2000) Originally published in The Guardian, 11 April 2000 © Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the REDS – Die Roten. The first I heard of Tony Cliff, who has died aged 82, was from Gus Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, Minister of Transport. Forty years ago, Gus was a charismatic leader of the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists and had an awesome reputation from a Clydeside apprentices’ strike. In late 1961, he reckoned it was time the Young Socialists took some serious lessons in Marxist theory, and arranged a weekend school to be addressed by two leaders of an obscure Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists. Gus and I met the couple in an airport lounge. I can still see them coming in: Mikhael Kidron, smart, suave, urbane, and Tony Cliff, short and scruffy, looking and sounding like a rag doll. As we mumbled through the niceties of introductions, the rag doll looked irritated and shy. We climbed into a taxi. As we did so, I saw a newspaper poster about events in the Congo, and remarked, partly to break the silence, that I’d never really understood the Congo. Quick as a flash, the rag doll came to life, and started jabbering with amazing speed and energy. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I do remember my clouds of doubt and misunderstanding suddenly disappearing and the role of the contestants in the Congo, including the United Nations, becoming brutally clear. I met Cliff many hundreds of times subsequently, sometimes for private conversations, more often on shared platforms, from which we urged our audiences to join IS and its successor, the Socialist Workers Party, and to organise for socialism. Though he often made exactly the same speech and cracked the same jokes, I never failed to be astonished and enthused. His death is shocking. Very few of us who knew him well believed that such an essentially youthful figure could ever pass away. Tony Cliff was born Ygael Gluckstein, the son of a Zionist building contractor, in Palestine, in May 1917, in between the great Russian revolutions. He was speedily converted out of Zionism by observing the treatment of Arab children. Aged 13, he wrote in a school essay: “It is so sad that there are no Arab kids in the school.” The teacher scrawled across the page the single word: “Communist”. She was right, and Cliff was always grateful for her perception. He fought vigorously against the exclusion of Arabs from the closed Zionist economy. When a speaker from the Haifa trades council spoke glowingly of the anti-fascist uprising in Vienna in 1934, and ended his speech with a tribute to the Paris Commune and workers’ unity, Cliff, aged 17, heckling from the back of the hall, added the one word “international”. In this context, “international” meant Arab, and the stewards responded by twisting his finger till it broke. Cliff joined the Communist party, but was quickly disillusioned by the party’s nationalism. He became a Trotskyist before he was 20 and devoted the rest of his life to building revolutionary socialist organisations. He came to Britain with his newly-married South African wife, Chanie, and was promptly expelled from the country on the advice of the Special Branch; he spent five years in poverty in Ireland until allowed to return. In the 1950s, he formed the Socialist Review Group, which grew into IS in the early 1960s and the SWP in 1977. For a long time, these groups remained tiny. But when the Communist party, with its (comparatively) huge roots in the organised working class, collapsed in 1989, the SWP became by far the largest and most confident of the socialist organisations to the left of the Labour party. This achievement was due largely to Cliff’s most striking qualities; his immense intellectual power and his ability to explain his libertarian Marxism in simple language. His unique intellectual contribution was to describe, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union as state capitalist, and therefore imperialist – a proposition as shocking to most socialists of the time as it was inspiring to those of us who were convinced by it. With the theory of state capitalism came a number of associated ideas, all of them based on Marx’s message that the emancipation of labour must be the work of labour itself; that capitalism is far too strong and sophisticated a system to be brought down or replaced from on high; and that the workers alone, through their union organisations and instinctive solidarity, have the power to bring about that vital change. This power, moreover, cannot be effectively mobilised without political organisation in the working class rank and file. These themes emerged from Cliff’s early books about Russia, China and eastern Europe, and his later four-volume biographies of Lenin (in the 1970s) and Trotsky (in the 1980s). They emerged even more clearly from Cliff’s tireless public speaking. His wild accent often startled his audiences, but they were soon giggling at his folksy jokes, like the parable in which a flea boasts to the ox on whose back he is riding: “Look how far we have ploughed today.” My favourite featured an Arabian sultan, who went to Manchester to buy a cooling system for his palace. As he was chatting to the managing director in his office, the sultan heard a blast on a hooter. Out of the window he saw, to his horror, thousands of workers walking out of the factory. In a hysterical panic, he shrieked at the managing director, who told him not to worry. Half an hour later the hooter went again, and the workers returned from their break. “Don’t worry about the cooling system,” concluded the sultan. “Just give me the hooter.” Cliff died without a penny in his pocket or any property to speak of. He was always bored stiff by property or talk of property. He left a far richer inheritance: thousands of us socialists, who, without him, would have degenerated into apathy, opportunism or careerism; a wife, who lived and fought by his side for 55 years, and two sons and two daughters, all of whom, in their different ways, are inspiring socialists and engaging companions. “Don’t mourn, organise!” was one of Cliff’s most consistent slogans, and somehow we must try to live up to it. Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), socialist activist, born May 20 1917; died April 9 2000 Top of the page Last updated on 21.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot What Really Took Place on the QE2 (8 February 1969) From Socialist Worker, No. 108, 8 February 1969, pp. 2–3. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. THE SHIPPING correspondents of the national press have paid for their free cruise from Las Palmas on the new Queen Elizabeth II by saying unanimously that the cruise liner ‘will be a great [word missing]’. Now it is the turn of the labour correspondents to blame the delays on the QE2 on the workers. One by one, the stories of ‘mass theft’ and ‘inexcusable delay’ are finding their way into print. From Clydeside workers comes a rather different story. They do not deny that a certain amount was taken from the ship, or that, wherever possible, jobs were ‘made to last’. Working-class Clydeside has grim memories of unemployment, and a healthy contempt for the frivolous waste of the luxury liner. The difference between the glitter of the liner and the squalor in which the men who build it are forced to live is one of the crudest contradictions in capitalism and the workers do not hold back from snaffling whatever they can. The story of delay and incompetence which surrounds the QE2, however, has little to do with the workers. Three points in particular emerged from a long conversation with joiners who worked on the ship, none of which are likely to be brought to our attention by the national press. To start with, this was the first ship built on the Clyde which was ‘all maronite’. Insisted Ever since two Greek hulks caught fire in New York harbour some years ago, the American government has insisted that all new ships should be lined with fire-proof maronite. Their insistence on this brittle material is not entirely unrelated to the huge American investment in Cape Asbestos, who produce it. The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders therefore decided that the QE2 should be lined throughout with maronite. They had not reckoned on the fact that soon after work started, asbestosis, a fatal cancer caused by dust from asbestos materials like maronite was classified as an industrial disease. The TUC doctor at once insisted that maronite should not be cut unless by a covered saw or with a vacuum cleaner to remove the dust. The employers were forced to abide by this ruling, but neither they nor their subcontractors were prepared to pay for more than a very few cleaners and saws. John Browns (one of the firms in UCS) had two saws, which, because of their own needs, they banned from the contractors. Tom Goldie, a joiners’ steward explained what this situation meant: ‘About five times a day, we’d have to cut maronite, and this meant carrying a big slab of the stuff about four decks up to the saw. ‘There was always a long queue waiting to use it, and invariably while you were standing there a gaffer would say "Get lost and come back in half an hour". ‘Often, you’d come back to find exactly the same situation all day. You could waste about three hours a day just waiting to cut a bit of maronite.’ Wasted Vacuum cleaners, too, were in constant demand, and there were no more than 30 for the use of 550 joiners on the ship. Hundreds of hours were wasted in queues for cleaners. A second big delaying factor was the need constantly to have things ‘looking smart’ for the ‘walk-rounds’ of the ship by the UCS bosses, or, worse still, for the directors of Cunard. Lord Mancroft, who has been complaining about the ship’s delay recently, was a regular visitor, with his wife and family, of course. Before such visits, the foremen all over the ship would blurt out orders to put up panels with only two screws and clear passages by any stop-gap method that came to hand. Invariably, after such walk-rounds, the piecemeal work would have to be dismantled and the work done all over again, with the loss of countless hours. One of the most sinister, and unexplained, reasons for the chaos in the management’s labour planning towards the end of the QE2 building was an agreement signed with the finishing trade unions on September 2, 1968. This agreement stated that any worker employed for a continuous period of nine months by UCS would be entitled to a minimum of two years’ redundancy pay. Many of the finishing trade workers started on the boat last March and April and would have been entitled to substantial redundancy pay if they were still working by last December. Accordingly, from November 19 a series of panic sackings took place – noticeably of 500 joiners. About 100 of the joiners were re-employed a week later, and more still before the ship left Greenock. Some of the men were working on the ship all the way to Las Palmas and back, and are still on her now at Southampton. Blame Had these men been allowed to work uninterrupted, without the sackings, the finishing work would have been completed weeks ago. As it is, however, the management were able to save about £[figure missing] ½m in redundancy pay, then turn round and and blame the workers for the delay! Top of the page Last updated on 26 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Tony Blurs the past (30 July 1994) From Socialist Worker, 30 July 1994. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 190–191. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Hark to Tony Blair, in a radio interview on 17 July: The trade unions will have no special and privileged place in the next Labour government. They will have the same access to it as the other side of industry. This is heralded in every single newspaper as an example of the ‘new fairness’ of the new Labour leadership. Out go ‘special privileges’ for the unions. In comes a new approach: everyone, whatever side they are on, will be treated equally. This sounds unanswerable. Why should someone be discriminated against according to ‘which side’ of industry they are on? At last this ancient discrimination has been put to flight by the charming and equable Mr Blair. Harold Wilson once likened government in Britain to a driver of a motor car whose job is to steer a difficult path along a road covered with hazards. Blair’s new formula presents government as a football referee, carefully enforcing the rules of a game where 22 players of roughly equal strength and ability fight for supremacy on the field. From now on the referee will play fair between ‘one side of industry’ and ‘the other’. A rather different argument won the day 94 years ago when a handful of trade union delegates, socialists and former Liberals came together to form the Labour Party. Their problem was this: one side of industry owned all the means of production, one side of industry determined the level of wages and of prices, and one side of industry decided whether people were hired or fired. The level of investment in industry, what was made, how it was made and by whom, foreign policy, whether or not there should be wars with millions killed – all these matters were determined by a small wealthy minority. This minority had been represented in parliament for more than 200 years by two parties, Liberals (or Whigs) and Tories. It was time, the delegates decided, to seek parliamentary representation for their side of industry – the people who did the work. Blair and Co argue that a lot of water has flown under the bridge since those bad old days and that society has changed so much that the central principle behind the foundation of the Labour Party – parliamentary representation for trade unionists in particular and the working class in general – can now be chucked overboard. But a small wealthy handful still own all the capital wealth and a grossly disproportionate slice of the income. Their economic decisions still shut out the enormous majority of people affected by them. All the statistics show the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor and of trade unionists whose organisations have been crippled and humiliated by a series of laws and open class offensives. There are not 50 million people of roughly similar strength and ability running around the British field of life, demanding a fair referee. There are a tiny handful – no more than one and a half million – who are economic and political giants determined to exploit the majority. The need for parliamentary representation of the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, trade unionists against employers, has never been more dramatically exposed by the statistics of society. Those politicians who argue that the millionaires with their police forces, their judges and their armies, who vote Tory, should have ‘equal access’ to Labour ministers as the working people who vote Labour, are not just making an error of judgement. They are preparing the ground for an assault on Labour voters more outrageous and contemptible than even Ramsay MacDonald ever imagined. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Do-It-Yourself Politics Threaten N. Ireland’s Police Regime (26 October 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 94, 26 October 1968, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. All the signs are that the exploited people of Northern Ireland, denied even the semblance of parliamentary democracy available to the rest of the United Kingdom, are beginning to ‘do it themselves’, to act to seize the basic rights and services denied them by an intolerant and reactionary government, Eamonn Melaugh, secretary of the Derry Housing Action Committee, formed last March with the express purpose of encouraging and stimulating rent strikes and other forms of direct action to improve some of the worst housing conditions in Europe, told me: ‘We’ve had 50 years of talk, 50 years of pacifism and 50 years of failure to end discrimination, poverty and exploitation in this city.’ Bludgeoned It was the Derry Housing Action Committee which inspired the weak, liberal Civil Rights Association to hold a march in Londonderry – a march, which, as we reported two weeks ago, was bludgeoned out of the streets by police fanatics. During the weekend following the march, in one street in the Catholic heart of the city, all the ground-floor windows were broken by a posse of police yelling ‘Come out, you fenian bastards!’ The police, like the government, rely upon religious prejudice to maintain their squalid regime. The Ulster Unionist Party gets the support of masses of Protestant workers because it has fanned the flames of religious intolerance for half a century, setting one section of the workers against another with the inevitable lurid tales of Catholic horror. Such men are frightened now. The movement started by the Derry Housing Action Committee is not founded, as was the Irish Republican Army, on religious sectarianism. John White, secretary of the Derry Republican Club, one of the most active organisations affiliated to. the DHAC, told me: ‘We are socialists. We want an Irish workers’ republic, and we will work with anyone who works in a militant way toward that aim.’ The movement, started in Derry, has now taken root in Queens University, Belfast, which used to be the most reactionary university in Britain. During the last three weeks it has been transformed by scenes which bear comparison with the Sorbonne University in Paris last May. Hardly an evening has gone by without the massive McMurdie Hall being filled with some 600–700 students meeting spontaneously to discuss the next form of action for ‘civil rights’. As a result of these meetings, the students have marched twice into the centre of Belfast. On the first occasion the police would not let them through to City Hall, because, they argued, there would be a fight with the supporters of the extremist Protestant Unionist, the Rev. Ian Paisley. The second time, however, last Wednesday (October 16) the students called in support from Young Socialists and workers, doubled their numbers and marched unimpeded to the City Hall where they held a meeting. In the enthusiasm and spontaneity of the meetings the students have moved from a vacuous liberalism to harder, more militant demands. On the morning of the first march, for instance, they agreed unanimously to support their Vice-Chancellor and ban all non-student elements from the march. That same evening, after the sit-down, the vast majority voted to invite young workers and Young Socialist organisations to the next demonstration. The terror of the authorities at the prospect of workers and students acting for themselves can be measured by the reactions of William Craig, known variously as the Papadopoulos or the Lardner-Burke of Ulster. First, Craig tried to justify the brutality of his riot squads in Derry by claiming that the march was organised by communists. This was greeted with wild laughter. Betty Sinclair, Communist Secretary of the Belfast Trades Council and secretary of the Civil Rights movement, had originally been opposed to marching in the face of a police ban, and, on the students’ first sit-down had rushed up and down the line of sitting students begging the demonstrators to ‘go home now you have made your point’. Then Craig said that the IRA was behind it all – an allegation which was laughed at equally loudly. Finally, on October 16, Craig made a statement in the Stormont parliament ‘naming names’ of conspirators in the Irish Workers’ Group, who, he said, wanted to end the bourgeois state in Northern Ireland. He named Gery Lawless, who lives in London, Eammon McCann of the Derry Labour Party and Rory McShane, next year’s President of Queens Students Representative Council. Resentment The reply to Craig is simple. YES, the men he named do wish to end the bourgeois state in Ireland. YES, they do intend to campaign for an Irish workers’ republic. But, unhappily for Craig and his fanatical friends, they do not intend to do it with sectarian slogans and adventurist violence. They intend to do it by helping to direct the resentment and frustration of the Irish workers away from Catholicism or Protestantism – away, in short, from themselves and towards their real oppressors whom Mr. Craig represents. Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > Cliff > Paul Foot > A World to Win Tony Cliff A World to Win Introduction by Paul Foot When I went to Glasgow as a young reporter in the autumn of 1961 I carried the good wishes of the socialists who were grouped around the New Left Review. ‘Be careful,’ warned Stuart Hall, NLR editor of the time, ‘there are a lot of Trots in the Glasgow Young Socialists.’ I replied that I was quite confident I could deal with the Trots, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea what a Trot was. I conjured up a vision of social misfits, slightly deranged and hysterical, against whom the masses could easily be convened by a dose of standard Oxford Union rhetoric. I had been President of the Union that previous golden summer at Oxford, and had only recently come into contact with socialists of any description. As predicted, I met the Glasgow Trots very quickly. Most of them were in the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists on the south of the River Clyde. Their mentor at that time was a lively barber called Harry Selby, who toured Young Socialist branches in the city. If he thought you were remotely interested in his ideas, he would reach for his bag and produce tracts from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky which he would lend you on payment of a small deposit. Selby was a member of the Labour Party. He believed passionately that revolutionary socialists should be members of workers’ political organisations until those organisations became revolutionary. So steadfastly did Harry believe in this concept of ‘deep entrism’ that he eventually became a rather ineffectual Labour Member of Parliament for Govan. He was treated with suspicion by the Labour Party, and with something approaching hatred by the Communist Party which in these days controlled the Glasgow Trades Council To the young workers who flocked to join the newly-established Young Socialists – the youth organisation of the Labour Party – he brought enthusiasm, humour and some electrifying ideas about how the ugly and cruel capitalist society could swiftly be changed by a revolution. When asked about Russia, he would reply that Russia was a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ whose socialism had been corrupted by a Stalinist clique. The clique could quite easily be removed by a political revolution, though not a social revolution. The distinction was a little difficult to understand but, it seemed to me, would have to be accepted for the time being. My general approach was that the Oxford Union had little or nothing to contribute to these young firebrands, and my most sensible course was to keep quiet. Thus did I fulfil my promise to ‘deal with the Trots’ by effectively accepting everything they said. If I had any doubts, I quickly relegated them. The building of the Berlin Wall, I explained at one Young Socialist open air meeting just off Sauchiehall Street, had a clear purpose: to stop ‘bourgeois elements’ so vital to economic growth from leaving the country. When a rude fellow shouted, ‘Nonsense, man – it’s to keep the workers in,’ I conveniently (and accurately) wrote him off as a drunk. Some time during the winter of 1961-62 Gus MacDonald, the most able and engaging of the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists, decided that the movement needed a theoretical shot in the arm somewhat stronger than that provided by Harry Selby. He told me he had heard of a Trotskyist sect based in London called the Socialist Review Group, and that its two leaders, Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron, were outstanding speakers. He duly set up a weekend school addressed by the two men. Their subjects covered the entire face of the earth, including Russia. I went down with Gus to the British European Airways terminal in St Enoch Square to meet the mysterious duo. They arrived late on a flight from London. As they walked into the terminal I was struck by the differences between them. Mike Kidron was impeccably dressed, urbane and charming. His companion Cliff, short and scruffy, was plainly terrified of being bored. The usual chatter about the times of the plane and the journey to the place where they were staying noticeably irritated and embarrassed him. As we climbed into a taxi I spotted a newspaper poster about the war in the Congo. ‘The Congo,’ I sighed. ‘I just haven’t a clue what I think about that.’ Quick as a flash, the dishevelled mess in the corner of the taxi sprang into life and, without pausing for even a moment’s dialogue, let loose a volley of sentences impossible to decipher but equally impossible not to understand. I can’t remember exactly what he said over the next ten minutes or so, but I do know that I never again had any doubts about the role of European and US imperialism in the Congo, and the subservience to that imperialism of the United Nations. I found to my surprise that I was laughing, not because anything said had been especially funny but just because the political explanation was so obvious. Over and over again in the 40 years or so since that first conversation I have had to stop myself bursting out laughing at something Cliff said. This is not only because he was a public speaker of natural and exceptional wit, but chiefly because of his ability to explain an issue with such clarity and force that I could not help laughing at my own inability previously to understand it. Another point struck me during that momentous weekend. The contributions from the platform seemed to be completely free of the self regard or self interest which I had come to expect as standard qualities in political speakers. There were no votes to be won, no careers at stake. There was only one driving force, one reason for what was being said: conviction. The first bombshell dropped by Cliff was that Russia was not a degenerated workers’ state, indeed not a workers’ state at all. The forms of political organisation in Russia – no stock exchange or private profit – might appear socialistic but the content of that organisation, exploitation of the working class by a new ruling class, was capitalist. If Russia was state capitalist, moreover, so were the Russian satellites in Eastern Europe, so was China, so (this was far too much for me to take at the time, so soon after the Cuban Revolution) was Cuba. In this little life story Cliff reveals how he puzzled over this issue for years before bouncing out of bed one morning and declaring to his long-suffering wife, Chanie, ‘Russia is state capitalist.’ This issue may seem arcane, almost irrelevant in the 1990s, but to a young socialist at the beginning of the 1960s it was utterly crucial.

In this little life story Cliff reveals how he puzzled over this issue for years before bouncing out of bed one morning and declaring to his long-suffering wife, Chanie, ‘Russia is state capitalist.’ This issue may seem arcane, almost irrelevant in the 1990s, but to a young socialist at the beginning of the 1960s it was utterly crucial. The entire politics of the left were dominated by Russia and its supporters in the British Communist Party. My very first recollection of a difficult political argument was the alleged difference between the British and French invasion of Egypt in 1956 and the Russian invasion of Hungary a few weeks later. The first was plainly an act of blatant imperialism; the second (since Russia was a degenerated workers’ state) a skilful device to protect the workers’ states from reactionaries elsewhere, including the right wing fifth column in Budapest, Another consequence of supporting Russia against the West was a scepticism about democracy. Indeed, the very word ‘democracy’ was suspect, since it appeared to exist only in the capitalist West and hardly at all in the workers’ states in the East. Cliff laid waste to all this. Russia was state capitalist, he asserted, and therefore imperialist. The Russian invasion of Hungary was every bit as outrageous as that of Britain and France at Suez. The essence of socialism was the social control of society from below; and there was none of that in Russia, even less in any of what he called Stalin’s satellites in Eastern Europe. Indeed, he observed, although he was down to speak about the Soviet Union, he could not even begin to do so since ‘soviet’ was die Russian word for workers’ council and there were no proper Soviets in any of the Russian Empire. It is hard, after so long a period, to convey the effect of such opinions in the political atmosphere of the early 1960s. In this book Cliff tells the story of his conversion to the theory that Russia was state capitalist almost in passing. For those of us young socialists of the time to whom the theory was entirely new, the effect was the very opposite of transitory. It was devastating. It threatened not only a residual sympathy for what seemed at least like state planning in Russia, but also a whole view of politics, including, crucially, the notion that socialist change could come from the top of society, planned and executed by enlightened people, educated ministers and bureaucrats. The whole purpose of the Oxford Union was threatened by this message. For if Russia was state capitalist, what was the point of working politically with other enlightened people, for instance for more state control of British industry? I resolved on no account to be hijacked by this new heresy. I got hold of a moth-eaten paperback edition of Cliff’s book on the subject, then entitled Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis, and read it so carefully that it fell to pieces. The broad brush of the theory fascinated me almost as much as it horrified me. But the broad brush did not matter. Cliff’s writing style was hopeless – he had not the slightest idea how to use the English language to make his point. What finally convinced me was the relentless detail of the argument. It was in the chapter on the separation of the Russian Communist Party from the rank and file of the Russian walking class, in the pages in which Cliff traced the removal from all political office of any trace either of the Russian Revolution or of the working class rank and file, that my resistance finally snapped. There was no way in which such a rigid and brutal bureaucratic society could be described either as socialist or as a workers’ state, or indeed as even marginally democratic. ‘State capitalist’ exactly fitted the bill. Not much later, when I was still in Glasgow in 1963, the third volume of Isaac Deutscher’s majestic biography ofTrotsky was published. I read all three volumes in quick succession, utterly overcome by the depth of analysis and the grandeur of the language. When I exulted over the book to Cliff, he was not at all impressed. In an article in the 1963 winter edition of the quarterly magazine International Socialism, each issue of which, incidentally, I looked forward to with my first-ever intellectual passion, he wrote a ferocious attack on Deutscher, entitled The End of the Road: Deutscher’s Capitulation to Stalinism. With hardly a word of appreciation for the magnificent biography,. Cliff honed in on a passage in a separate Deutscher article in a collection of essays entitled Heretics and Renegades in which the sage set out this advice to an ‘ex-Communist man of letters’ like himself. ‘He cannot join the Stalinist camp or the anti-Stalinist holy alliance without doing violence to his better self. So let him overcome the cheap ambition to have a finger in the political pie. He may withdraw into the watchtower instead – to watch with detachment and alertness this heaving chaos of a world.’ This conclusion sent Cliff into paroxysms of rage. Anyone who ever said a word in support of Isaac Deutscher was screeched at interminably: ‘To die watchtower! To the watchtower!’ Of all the awful crimes of the left, none infuriated Cliff like passivity. For people who knew the world was rotten, to sit back and do nothing about it was for him the ultimate aberration. So it was for Trotsky. Many years later Cliff himself wrote a four-volume biography of Trotsky. I would still recommend the Deutscher but, like his equally long biography of Lenin, Cliff’s Trotsky is indispensable to modern socialists. Throughout all his books the theme is action. The key question surpassing all others is Lenin’s – what is to be done?

The key question surpassing all others is Lenin’s – what is to be done? At every twist and turn in the tussle between the classes, some action needs to be taken by the exploited majority. This is why the most fundamental issue of all is the building of a socialist organisation which takes its cue from the workers’ battles against their rulers, and can unite in disciplined action the resources not just of those who want to change the world but of those prepared to do something about it. This story starts in Cliff’s childhood in Palestine. He often said that the case for socialism takes less than two minutes to understand – a mere glance at the world and the way it is divided into rich and poor makes that case immediately. A mere glance at the way Arab children were treated in Palestine in the 1930s was enough to make Cliff a socialist. Disillusionment with the compromising Communist Party soon followed. And so Cliff’s youth was devoted unswervingly to a most fantastic aim: the building of a Trotskyist organisation in poor old impoverished, looted and divided Palestine. When he had little or no success at that, he duly devoted almost all the rest of his life to an even more fantastic aim: building a revolutionary socialist organisation in comfortable bourgeois post-war Britain. Everything round him militated against his objective. A Labour government was in office with a huge majority, supported by the vast mass of the working class. Any activity to the left of Labour was entirely monopolised by the Communist Party. For good measure, Cliff’s early efforts were frustrated by his expulsion from Britain and five years enforced, isolated and utterly impoverished exile in Dublin. Reading this book’s breezy account, you can’t help wondering – where did he get the resolve to continue? Even when he was allowed to return to his wife and family in London, membership of his Socialist Review Group seldom exceeded 20. This book tells the rather fitful story of how, against impossible odds, the Socialist Review Group grew into the International Socialists which in turn (for reasons which are still not entirely clear) became the Socialist Workers Party. Since the comparatively huge edifice of the Communist Party vanished in a puff of smoke in 1989, the (still tiny) SWP became by far the largest socialist grouping in the country. Indeed, the only socialists who have survived the fall of Stalinism of 1989 with some confidence are those who consistently denounced it. Tony Cliff was not a humble man and his account (which he started only because he was afraid he was about to die under the surgeon’s knife) seldom errs on the side of modesty. Nor should it. For the characteristic which emerges from his life more than any other is single-mindedness. In spite of his wide-ranging intellect, his mastery of at least four languages and his extensive reading, he never allowed himself for a single moment of his 82 years to be deflected from his purpose. Such indomitable resolve is rare indeed among people who set out to change the world. When Cliff was accused, as he often was, of lionising the greats in socialist history – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg – he replied that, if we want to see what is happening beyond the crowd, we have to stand on the shoulders of giants. He would have been embarrassed, though I think quite happy, to be bracketed with the greats, but there are quite a few of us socialists in Britain over the past 40 years or so who thank our lucky stars that we had the chance to stand on his shoulders. Top of the page Last updated on 30.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot May Days and heydays (May 1985) From Socialist Worker, May 1985. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–222. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I went with a light heart to Newcastle on May Day on what I assumed would be a great workers’ rally. Twelve years ago I was in Newcastle on or around May Day for a hundredth anniversary meeting of the Trades Council. Jimmy Reid was the main speaker, but he didn’t turn up. The meeting was chaired by an AUEW official, who told me blithely as he looked round the hall that there were, he thought, ‘about 350 shop stewards here’. It was 1973, the year between the two great miners’ strikes. Everyone was confident and proud of their movement in one of its strongest areas. The meeting was terrific. I was in Newcastle last year too, for perhaps the best meeting of my life. It was a glorious June day and the Northumberland miners were holding a strike rally. Some 5,000 miners and their families marched into the park with their banners. They were full of confidence and pride. It was marvellous. Last week’s meeting had been carefully organized over many weeks. Derek Hatton, deputy leader of beleaguered Liverpool City Council, was the main speaker – but he didn’t turn up. When I got to the station there was no one to meet me, and I had forgotten the name of the hall. I wandered round the streets by the station searching for posters. There weren’t any. I took a taxi to the university, to the poly, to every place in Newcastle I could remember ever speaking at. I rang the local paper. No one anywhere had heard of any Trades Council May Day meeting. I went back to the station where, at last, someone had come to meet me. When I got to the hall I was shocked to find (at most) 120–130 people there. The composition of the meeting was completely different to that of 1973. There were a handful of miners’ wives there – friends I think of Ann Lilburn, one of the speakers – but pretty well nobody from the great rally the previous June. The mood of the meeting was sad, low, rudderless. If it hadn’t been for the Socialist Workers Party which supplied half the audience (at least) and five out of seven questions, it would have been the most gigantic flop. Sitting there on the platform, I felt myself nibbled at by all kinds of heresies. Was it not true that the working-class movement was in decline? Was it not true that the shop stewards of 1973 represented yards and factories which had since closed, with nothing to replace them? How could anything be built in a place like this, where getting on for 20 per cent of the workforce is unemployed, without the slightest hope of the kind of jobs which workers could expect in the 1960s and 1970s? Then I got another shock. It came from a contribution from the floor. May Day, we were reminded, was a celebration of international working-class solidarity, and perhaps we ought to be talking not so much about the defeat of the miners in Britain, but about the great strike and lock-out of miners in South Africa. I realized I had spoken on May Day for three quarters of an hour without a single reference to any workers anywhere else in the world! No wonder I had been so depressed. The insularity which infects us all when we feel low concentrates our minds on what we see around us – on the British working-class movement, whose traditional organizations and methods have been turned over and depleted in the last twenty years. At the same time, however, in other countries huge working classes are being created almost every year. Countries and even continents where there was no working class fifty years ago are now teeming with a huge proletariat, much of it unorganized, but all of it exploited beyond belief, and showing strong signs of organizing and fighting back. On the way back from Newcastle I picked up the International Herald Tribune, and read of two vast strikes in South Korea; of the lock-out in the South African goldfields; of the stirring of workers’ unrest in the shanty towns around construction sites in Saudi Arabia. Across the world, the working class is vastly bigger and more recognizable than it was in what seems to us to have been the ‘heyday’ of 1973. If we lose sight of that, if we think for one moment of the working class as white, male shop stewards representing shipyard workers in Newcastle, then we are certain victims of gloom, introspection and, worse of all, inertia. Top of the page Last updated on 27 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Capitalism is stripped bare (12 August 1995) From Socialist Worker, 12 August 1995. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 279–280. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Here is the capitalist argument in all its bare beauty. Private enterprise breeds competition. Competition forces firms to cut prices, and this leads to an endless spiral of cheaper goods and services. It also leads to variety, since capitalists are always looking for ways of doing something new. Born again Christians Brian Souter and his sister Ann Gloag believe in capitalism. They are a dream – Dick Whittington capitalists who started off in Dundee with a couple of old buses and now run the second biggest bus company in the country. The very name of the company, Stagecoach, has a romantic ring about it. It follows, of course, that they got where they are today by dint of hard work and competitive free enterprise. Well, no, actually. They got where they are today chiefly because of the government’s obsession with flogging off the old publicly-owned bus companies. Predatory The Monopolies and Mergers Commission is a very sedate and moderate body composed almost exclusively of Tories and entrepreneurs. In its report just out on the activities of Stagecoach in Darlington, however, the commission has resorted to regrettably extreme language. ‘Predatory, deplorable and against the public interest’ were the exact words used. What happened in Darlington? After studying the Tory bus laws, the Labour council decided to privatise the municipal bus company and called for bids. By far the lowest bid came from a firm called Yorkshire Transit, which employed a lot of the bus drivers from the old publicly-owned company. The council made it quite clear that Yorkshire Transit, according to the basic rules of free competition and tendering, had won the contract. At once Stagecoach recruited the best and most hard working of the council drivers on fantastic bonus rates of up to £1,000 and guarantee of three years work. For the first few weeks in which Yorkshire Transit struggled to meet its new obligations, Darlington was flooded out with Stagecoach buses from all over the country. The drivers had instructions to watch out for the scheduled buses and to nip in front of them at the bus stops and nick their custom. If the drivers weren’t quick enough it didn’t really matter – because the Stagecoach services were entirely free. Even the most principled supporter of public ownership in Darlington was reluctant to pay for a bus ride when another was offered along the same route with no conductor and no fare. In five weeks flat Yorkshire Transit was smashed and Stagecoach, which had lost the tender on the first call, was awarded it. Ever since it has hardened and toughened its monopoly in Darlington – and of course now (since there are no competitors) Stagecoach charges high fares. This is the eighth time either the MMC or the Office of Trading has slammed Stagecoach. From northern Scotland to eastern Kent, its companies have gobbled up the former public bus undertakings, driven the competition off the road, cut wages, smashed the unions and sacked loyal drivers. None of its fantastic growth is due to competition or free enterprise. On the contrary, Stagecoach used its strength in numbers of buses and in cash in the bank to knock out the competition. The privatisation of the bus industry has had exactly the opposite effect to that promised by the Thatcherite think tanks in the 1980s. There are now less people travelling by bus – because the fares are higher, there are less bus routes in the unpopulated areas and much less accountability. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot ‘An Agitator of the Worst Type’ A portrait of miners’ leader A.J. Cook (January 1986) Originally published as a pamphlet in January 1986 by the Socialist Workers party. Based on a talk given at the Socialist Workers Party Easter Rally, Skegness, April 1985. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IT WAS a sunny morning in June 1924, and the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Fred Bramley, had had a good breakfast. He settled down comfortably at his desk to read the Daily Herald, which, in a sort of way, he owned. On the front page he read something which propelled him out of his chair and down the passage to the office of his assistant general secretary, Walter Citrine. ‘Have you seen who’s been elected secretary of the Miners’ Federation,’ he bawled. ‘Cook! A raving tearing Communist. Now the miners are in for a bad time.’ [1] Who was this raving, tearing Communist who had caused such consternation in the upper echelons of the TUC, and whose election at 39 as leader of one of the largest and most powerful trade unions on earth had shocked the press and the government? Arthur James Cook was born at Wookey in Somerset in 1885, the son of a soldier. He had worked for a short time on a farm but before long had moved with thousands of other farmworkers into the pits of South Wales. From his earliest youth, he had taken a keen interest in what went on about him, and cared about it. Perhaps, he concluded, God would put it all right. He became a teacher in the Baptist Youth, and by the age of eighteen had reached the rank of deacon. On his first day in the pits, a fall of rock killed the man working next to him, and young Arthur had to drag the body to the surface. The conditions in the pits soon persuaded him that heaven would have to wait. What mattered immediately was a better life on earth, and under it. In 1905 he joined the Independent Labour Party, and campaigned vigorously for Labour candidates in the 1906 election. Soon he was moving fast to the left. The newly-elected Liberal government did little to curb the greed of the coal-owners. The gap between the hard and dangerous work of the miners and the huge surplus wealth of the owners did not seem to play a part in the official politics which he encountered. The socialism of the ILP seemed to have no contact with the hard and bitter struggle fought by the men around him. A new political creed was sweeping the South Wales coalfield at the time. It was called syndicalism. Its advocates argued that the power of the workers to organise or disrupt their own production – their power to strike – was the only power which the owners were likely to recognise: the only power which might change the miners’ conditions and the only power which could eventually change society. The new power was anathema to the new Labour leaders, who called for voting instead of striking. Ramsay Macdonald, who later became leader of the Labour Party, wrote a furious attack on syndicalism. He grudgingly admitted that its roots, though weak in the rest of the country, were strong and deep in the South Wales coalfield. Macdonald noted that when ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, the American socialist leader, came to Britain to preach his brand of anarcho-syndicalism, the only place he got a really good reception was South Wales. His ideas had already been sown by another foreign influence: by the Spanish immigrant workers brought into the Merthyr area by the ironmasters in 1907. They were brought in as blacklegs, but they proved a constant menace to the coal-owners and the ironmasters with their sharply-defined anarcho-syndicalist ideas and their enthusiasm for strikes. In 1911, the young Cook went to the Central Labour College in London, where his half-formed ideas were given new force by books and lectures. He had to cut short his time there by a year – chiefly because the owners threatened to evict his family unless he paid the rent – but by the time he left, he was a convinced Marxist, and a lifelong supporter of independent working-class education. At college he read the brilliant pamphlet The Miners’ Next Step, written by his fellow rank-and-file miners in South Wales. The pamphlet – one of the landmarks in our trade union literature – exposed the treacherous role which the union leaders had played in the struggle with the coal-owners. Its answer was to reform the Miners’ Federation, to bring the power of officials much more firmly to heel, and to place the union and the people who ran it under the control of the rank and file. The pamphlet had a profound effect on the young Arthur Cook. In 1913 he resigned from the ILP, and joined instead the South Wales Socialist Society, which talked a militant working-class politics far more to his liking. When the First World War began the following year, most miners didn’t go to the slaughter in the trenches, since coal was vital to the war effort. Cook was against the war – and, after 1917, for the Russian Revolution. As the war ended, he was arrested for sedition, apparently for advocating revolution in connection with the food shortages of early 1918. The highest tribute to him came from John Williams, deputy chief constable of Glamorgan, who had been following him about like a sniffer dog. ‘Cook,’ Williams declared in one of his frequent letters to the Home Office, ‘is an agitator of the worst type and has been the cause of the major portion of labour unrest in this district since 1913.’ The agitator spent three months in prison for that offence, which didn’t spoil his chances in the various elections he fought for officials’ places in the union after the war. He fought on the ideas and principles of The Miners’ Next Step. If he won an election, he promised, he would seek to make his office part of the rank-and-file struggle for better conditions and a better society.

This strategy fitted the mood of the South Wales miners after the war. In 1919 Cook was elected secretary of the Rhondda No.1 Lodge by 18,230 votes to 17,531. It was a narrow victory, but until then Cook had been virtually unknown in official union circles. The position in the Rhondda gave him a platform – and a springboard into neighbouring areas, where he started to use his powers as a preacher to the full. ‘With uplifted arms,’ a contemporary account records in 1920, ‘he warned his hearers of the coming revolution.’ In 1921 he played a vigorous role during the Great Lock-out imposed by the coal-owners, which the miners lost on ‘Black Friday’. In losing the battle, Cook seemed for a moment to lose his confidence, and started to prevaricate about workers’ power. This upset the small Communist Party, which had been formed from the various revolutionary socialist parties in 1920. Cook joined the Communist Party at the beginning of the lock-out, but left a few months later after being called to the militant Maerdy lodge to answer for his apparent ‘vacillations’ at the end of the lock-out. In its obituary of Cook ten years later, the Communist Party paper The Daily Worker claimed that Cook had been expelled. He was not. It was far more likely that he left the party with the party’s explicit permission. For A.J. Cook was already a considerable figure in the South Wales coalfields, and his progress would certainly have been hindered by formal party membership. Certainly, everything he did in the next two years had the full approval of the Communist Party. He campaigned for the Miners’ Federation to break with the British Trades Union Congress and join the Red International of Labour Unions, a revolutionary breakaway organised from Russia. The South Wales miners voted to join the RILU, though the proposal was lost in the Federation at large. Soon afterwards, the Communist Party took the lead in forming the Miners Minority Movement, a rank-and-file movement among miners devoted to clearing out the federation’s traditional leadership and building unity with workers in other industries. The Minority Movement was tested in fire almost before it was fully formed. Frank Hodges, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, was elected an MP in the 1924 General Election. To his surprise and disgust, he was told he could no longer be secretary of the Federation if he insisted on taking his seat. He went to parliament, and resigned the secretaryship. The succession was keenly fought. A.J. Cook was almost unheard of outside South Wales, and in South Wales itself he had the keenest fight of all, winning the nomination there by only a handful of votes out of 150,000. The Minority Movement campaigned hard for Cook all over the coalfields. When he won, again by a small majority, there were many, including Fred Bramley at the TUC, who were amazed. Men like Bramley, not for the first time, had misjudged the mood in the coalfields. It was hardening with every month. As soon as A.J. Cook got into the MFGB offices at Russell Square he announced that expenses and perks for the secretary were forthwith abolished. He made it clear that he would not accept fees for any speech made anywhere because of his position. Then he set about the most striking innovation of all. Every weekend, he announced, he would speak in the coalfields about the miners and the working-class movement. These decisions were shocking enough to the stout-hearted and stout-bellied gentlemen at the TUC, but worse was to follow. Wherever he went, Cook made it clear that he stood uncompromisingly for class war. The Daily Mail of 21 June 1924, a few days after his election, reported: ‘Mr A.J. Cook, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation, was the guest of a social evening held by the Holborn Labour Party at 16 Harpur Street, Theobalds Road, WC, last night. Mr Cook said that Mr J.H. Thomas and Mr Tom Shaw had no political class consciousness, and that the Labour leaders and trade union leaders were square pegs in round holes. He was glad to find some Red Socialists in London. He hoped he would find more later. Mr Cook added: “I believe solely and absolutely in Communism. If there is no place for the Communists in the Labour Party, there is no place for the Right Wingers. I believe in strikes. They are the only weapon”.’ With quotations like that ringing in the ears of the Labour leaders, Arthur Cook set off for the series of weekend meetings in the coalfields which went on all the way to the General Strike and beyond. This was one of the most extraordinary agitations in the history of the British working class movement. Old miners today still remember the impact of these huge meetings, to which Cook would often speak two or three times over, so that all could hear. What was it about the man which made him so electric and compelling a speaker? Middle-class commentators of the time could not understand it. Beatrice Webb, who met him during the General Strike, was not impressed. She wrote in her diaries: ‘He is obviously overwrought, but, even allowing for this, it is clear he has no intellect and not much intelligence. He is a quivering mass of emotions, a mediumistic magnetic son of creature not without personal attractiveness – an inspired idiot, drunk with his own words, dominated by his own slogans.’ I read that quotation during the 1984-5 miners’ strike in The Guardian, whose industrial correspondent, as though to appease the intellectual snobbery of that paper’s readers, applied it freely to Arthur Scargill. Its tone and purpose was aptly satirised by John Scanlon, who published a book in 1930 called, rather prematurely, The Decline and Fall of the Labour Party. ‘It was noticed, too,’ wrote Scanlon, ‘that when Mr Cook addressed meetings, he did not hold the lapels of his jacket as all good statesmen do.

‘It was noticed, too,’ wrote Scanlon, ‘that when Mr Cook addressed meetings, he did not hold the lapels of his jacket as all good statesmen do. Mr Cook took his jacket off.’ A better description of the ‘mediumistic magnetic sort of person’ came from someone who was much closer to him: Arthur Horner. Horner’s response to the declaration of war in 1914 was to leave his pit – Maerdy in South Wales – and cross the sea to Ireland to fight in the Irish Citizens’ Army against the British. This won him two years in prison on his return, but the miners of Maerdy never lost their respect for him. While he was in prison, he was elected checkweighman for the No.1 pit and thus ensured of employment there on his release. Arthur Horner was a founder member of the Communist Party, and an enthusiastic agitator for the Miners Minority Movement. He knew Cook from his earliest youth. ‘I never lost my admiration for him,’ wrote Horner in his autobiography. ‘In the months before the 1926 strike, and during the strike, we spoke together at meetings all over the country. We had audiences, mostly of miners, running into many thousands. Usually I was put on first. I would make a good logical speech, and the audience would listen quietly but without any wild enthusiasm. ‘Then Cook would take the platform. Often he was tired, hoarse and sometimes almost inarticulate. But he would electrify the meetings. They would applaud and nod their heads when he said the most obvious things. For a long time I was puzzled, and then one night I realised why it was. I was speaking to the meeting. Cook was speaking for the meeting. He was expressing the thoughts of his audience, I was trying to persuade them. He was the burning expression of their anger at the iniquities they were suffering.’ [2] What was the consistent theme of Cook’s speeches in that year from the summer of 1924 to the summer of 1925? He warned that coal exports were falling and that the coal-owners would try once again to make the miners pay. The owners wanted longer hours and shorter pay. Another 1921 was coming, he predicted. It would be much tougher and more brutal than last time. The workers must prepare their forces for it. They must learn the lessons of 1921, chief among which was the failure of the ‘Triple Alliance’ – or ‘Cripple Alliance’, as it had proved itself – between coal, steel and transport unions. Next time, there must be unity. Transport workers, especially those on the railways who moved coal, needed to be alerted now, and prepared for struggle. Though Horner had said that the meetings were mainly of miners, other workers, especially railwaymen, started to flock to them. There’s no doubt at all that Cook’s campaign in the coalfields for those twelve months had a lot to do with the trade union’s answer to the coal-owners, when, as Cook predicted, they posted their lockout notices and their demands for lower pay and longer hours. ON 31 JULY 1925, the unions announced that if the owners persisted with their lock-out in the pits, not a cobble of coal would be moved by road or rail. So determined was the answer that the Tory government stepped into the breach, offering the coal-owners a nine-month subsidy, pending a public inquiry (which would of course be packed with friends of the owners). Red Friday! Arthur Cook was jubilant. He called it ‘the greatest day for the British working class for thirty years’. But he warned that this was an ‘armistice’, not a victory. He urged the workers to prepare for the counter-attack of the employers and the government. Off he went once more on another round of meetings, this time armed with another weapon. In the autumn of 1925, the Communist Party had launched a new paper whose purpose was to attract and organise left-wing socialists who were not in the party and were unlikely to join it. They called it the Sunday Worker. It was edited by a Communist Party member, but its tone and orientation were quite different to that of the Workers’ Weekly, the party’s official paper. For at least three years it became almost synonymous with A.J. Cook, and hardly an issue was published without a long interview with him or article by him. Week after week, he called on the workers to prepare. But the TUC leaders – notably J.H. Thomas, Ernest Bevin and Arthur Pugh – were terrified of what would happen if the whole trade union movement got engaged in open class war with an elected government. As the coal-owners and government prepared for class battle, and as A.J. Cook urged the workers towards it, the other trade union leaders got ready to fly the field. Alone on the left, Cook suspected his colleagues. When the coal-owners again posted their lock-out notices and a General Strike was called in support of the miners by a conference of trade-union executives on 30 April 1926, the other miners’ leaders left for the coalfields to prepare. But Cook stayed behind in Russell Square. He was suspicious. Late that night he tried to get hold of the TUC leaders.

Late that night he tried to get hold of the TUC leaders. He found, not altogether to his surprise, that they were in Downing Street – without the miners’ representatives – seeking to call the General Strike off before it was started. He rushed to Downing Street, cornered the leaders in a waiting room, and denounced them. As the argument raged, a messenger came in from the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. The government was not prepared even to discuss a sell-out. They did not believe a General Strike could be called. They had all gone home to bed. So the General Strike started. The workers responded with a solidarity and an enthusiasm which amazed the government and terrified the TUC. After nine days, the government called the union leaders back – again without the miners – and suggested to them that the time had come for them to call the strike off. They agreed at once. Not a single concession was granted. The miners would still have to work longer hours for less pay, and conform to district agreements. By now, however, the TUC leaders were not concerned with the issue. They were horrified at the threat to the very powers which gave them credibility and self-importance. As J.H. Thomas put it, in a famous phrase: ‘If it came to a fight between the strike and the constitution, heaven help us unless the government won.’ The miners, of course, could have nothing to do with the settlement. They were forced to stay on strike – locked out on impossible terms – after the rest of the movement had collapsed. Cook’s worst fears that the unity and solidarity between miners and other workers might be broken had been realised. His first task, then, was to set the record straight about the General Strike. He did so in a magnificent pamphlet, The Nine Days. The pamphlet is comparable in many ways with Karl Marx’s famous pamphlet on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France. More scholarly works have been written, of course, on the Commune and on the General Strike. But the two pamphlets are hot with the struggle of the times. They are written at the time and for it. The Nine Days’ opening paragraph goes straight to the point: ‘Ever since last July when “Red Friday” wiped out the stain of “Black Friday” and brought joy to the heart of every worker, the capitalist class of Britain, backed by a strong Tory government, has been preparing to retrieve its position; while many of the Labour leaders, almost afraid of the growing power of Labour industrially, knowing the activities of the government and their preparations, remained inactive.’ Cook argued that the entire capitalist system was paralysed by the General Strike. ‘A few days longer’ and the coal-owners would have been forced to concede. The victory would have given a magnificent boost to British Labour and to Labour throughout the world. But the victory had been thrown away by people whose only desire seemed to be to call off the strike. All profits from The Nine Days went to the Miners’ Wives and Children Fund, for the miners were now entrenched in a life-and-death struggle for the whole future of their union. During the 1984-5 miners’ strike we were used to saying that this was the biggest struggle in all European and American history. In terms of time, of course, that is true. But in terms of the numbers of people involved, the lock-out of 1926 beats everything else hollow. In 1984-5, 150,000 miners were on strike (at most) for a year. But in 1926 there were nearly a million miners. There were more miners in South Wales then than there are now in the entire country. Coal was more important to the running of the country then: there were no nuclear power stations, and no power generated from the use of oil. Little has been written of those ferocious seven months from the end of the General Strike to the end of the lock-out. Most history books – even those which support the workers – devote pages and pages to the General Strike, and then announce that ‘the miners struggled on for seven months to inevitable defeat.’ Perhaps they will write that way about 1984 and 1985. At the time, though, it didn’t feel like that. Nor did it in 1926. Reading the Sunday Worker for those months of 1926, in fact, it is uncanny how often the echo calls down the years. So many features were the same: the early confidence and enthusiasm; the importance of the communal kitchens; the emancipation of the women. Again and again, the paper pays tribute to the ‘astonishment’ of the miners’ leaders and supporters at the role of the women in the pit communities. ‘Half my meetings are women,’ said Herbert Smith, the miners’ president. ‘They are always the toughest half.’ Arthur Cook found himself, to his surprise, giving interviews to the Sunday Worker about birth control and women’s suffrage, subjects in which he had not shown the slightest interest before the strike. Then there were the bad things: the flooding of the coalfields with police from outside forces; the mass arrests; the discrimination against miners’ families by the Board of Poor Law Guardians (the equivalent of the DHSS); the revenge of judges and magistrates – and of course the press, which Cook described as ‘the most lying in the world’. The press had hated Cook ever since he was first elected.

The press had hated Cook ever since he was first elected. Now, in the full flow of the lock-out, they brought out all the tricks of the trade to damage him. Their tactic was familiar to us. By use of demonology – the study of the devil – they sought to detach the miners’ leader from the miners. All Cook’s qualities were described as characteristics of the devil. His passionate oratory became demagogy; his unswerving principles became fanaticism; his short, stooping stature became the deformity of some gnome or imp. In particular, Cook’s independence of mind and thought was turned into its opposite . He was the tool of others, the plaything of a foreign power – for Cook himself had provided his tormentors with the identity of his ‘controllers’. Typical of the ruling-class agitation at the time was a London meeting held on 9 June 1926, only a month into the lock-out. The speaker was Sir Henry Page Croft, a right-wing Tory MP who had confessed himself ‘greatly interested’ in the ‘new experiments’ in power in Italy under the aegis of that country’s new leader, Benito Mussolini. Sir Henry summed up the campaign against Cook in a fiery speech, fully reported (with all the reactions to it) in the Morning Post. ‘I want to warn you most seriously that the government of Russia is making war on this country daily,’ Sir Henry said. ‘Mr Cook,’ he went on (cries of ‘Shoot Him!’, ‘Lynch Him!’) ‘has declared that he is a Bolshevik and is proud to be a humble disciple of Lenin. He is treating the miners of this country whom we all respect and honour (Cheers!) as cannon fodder in order to achieve his vainglorious ambitions.’ [3] Those cries of ‘Shoot Him!’, ‘Lynch Him!’ were not just extravagances shouted out in the heat of the moment. The Home Secretary, a specially nasty specimen called Sir William Joynson-Hicks, had let it be known that although of course he was firmly in favour of law and order and was absolutely against any form of violence, he would not take it too hard if someone gave Mr Cook a taste of his own medicine. Patriots and leaders of the master race therefore came together and plotted violence against the miners’ leaders. Wherever Cook went, he was under threat from some bold band of ex-officers or fascist oafs. At one meeting such a group did corner him at the foot of a platform and smashed his leg against it. The injury was a source of constant pain for the rest of his life. Yet the press campaign was a complete failure. Throughout the seven months, the loyalty and admiration for Cook among the miners and supporters grew. Ellen Wilkinson, then a young left-wing Labour MP, wrote: ‘In thousands of homes all over the country, and particularly miners’ homes, there is hanging today, in the place of honour, the picture of A.J. Cook. He is without a shadow of a doubt the hero of the working women.’ [4] A woman signing herself Mrs Adamson went even further: ‘Cook is trusted implicitly. The malicious attacks of the capitalist Press only serve to strengthen the loyalty the miners and their wives feel for him.’ [5] There was dramatic proof of this in South Wales. ‘The Western Mail, published in Cardiff, put the coalowners’ case more blatantly than any other newspaper in the country, and Bevan was particularly affronted when it made a vicious, and, as he believed, obscene attack on A.J. Cook. He therefore organised a huge procession to Waumpound, the mountain between Ebbw Vale and Tredegar, where copies of the Western Mail were solemnly burned and buried, Bevan delivering the funeral oration. He also had the paper banned from the Tredegar library.’ [6] IN SPITE of all this loyalty, in spite of the women, in spite of the tremendous solidarity among workers all over the country symbolised by the miniature miners’ lamps dangling from peoples’ lapels, the owners had the whip in their hand, and they used it. An ominous phrase creeps into the Sunday Worker as early as 22 August: ‘Reports of a drift back to work are greatly exaggerated’. They were exaggerated, but still there was a drift back to work. By the end of August, 80,000 miners were back – less than 10 per cent of the total. 60,000 of those men were in two areas, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. A Notts Labour MP sponsored by the miners, George Spencer, was trying to organise a separate return to work, and, eventually, a separate union. Spencer followed the press by appealing to the Notts miners about Cook’s political views. At the Miners’ Federation conference in September he demanded to know whether the ‘views of revolution’ spoken by A.J. Cook were the views of the Federation. Cook replied: ‘I am in Mansfield next week. Come and ask me there.’ Spencer was thrown out of the conference as a blackleg. Yet the situation in Nottinghamshire was desperate. A.J. Cook set up a special headquarters there and rushed from meeting to meeting. He was like a beaver desperately trying to dam the flood. When he spoke, in, say, Hucknall, thousands of miners who had gone back to work would openly pledge to rejoin the strike. They would do so, perhaps for two or three days, and then, bowed down by shame and hunger, would drift back to work. As Cook felt the tide ebbing away from him (as he had always expected it would do) he redoubled his efforts to win the key to victory: solidarity from other trade unionists, especially transport workers. He wrote anxious letters to Bromley, the engine drivers’ leader, and to Cramp and Thomas of the National Union of Railway-men. Some industrial production was being maintained, he pointed out, because foreign coal and scab coal was being shifted round the country by rail. An embargo on ‘black coal’ (as he called it, rather absurdly) would stop the owners.

The replies were as blunt as ever. The railwaymen had ‘done their bit’ during the General Strike. The General Strike had now been called off, and the union leaders could not see their way to protecting their own members if they were victimised for helping the miners. Thus throughout the seven months there was not a single gesture of strike solidarity for the miners from transport trade unionists. Cook never stopped making the point. He enrolled the Labour Research Department, newly-formed under the influence of the Communist Party, to provide the figures for the workers to show just how huge a dent the miners had made in the side of British capital. In October, the LRD published The Coal Shortage: Why the Miners Will Win, with a foreword by A.J. Cook. The effect of the strike on the economy, the pamphlet showed, was catastrophic. Pig iron production, which had averaged 538,000 tons a month from January to April, was down to 14,000 tons in August. Steel production, 697,000 tons a month from January to April, had slumped to 52,000 tons. The president of the Federation of British Industries, Sir Max Muspratt, had estimated the total cost of the strike to the beginning of October at an incredible £541 million (enormously greater in real terms than even the most exaggerated estimate for the cost of the 1984ndash;5 strike). ‘By the end of the year,’ the pamphlet concluded, ‘the loss would amount to between £1,000 and £1,500 million.’ This was followed in November by The Miners Struggle and the Big Five Banks, again with a foreword by A.J. Cook, in which he wrote: ‘The miners are not broken – they continue to fight; their destiny is in your hands. An embargo on blackleg coal and a levy on all workers must be adopted to save the miners from defeat. ‘And to the miners who are fighting I say: Every honest worker in the world admires your courage and loyalty in the fight which was forced upon you by the rapacious mine-owners, who have at their service the banks, the press and the resources of the press.’ This was not whistling in the dark. Even in November, as the Miners’ Federation delegate conference met to discuss the drift back to work under pressure of unspeakable hunger and poverty in the coalfields and the intransigence of the owners and the government, the solidarity of the majority astonished owners and ministers. But the shock steeled their determination to grind the miners down. Defeat stared the union in the face, yet the loyalty of the miners, especially in the ‘hard areas’ such as South Wales and Durham, was apparently unshakeable. Militants like Arthur Horner urged a ‘stepping up’ of the strike and more pressure for solidarity action. Others, like Aneurin Bevan, called for an orderly return. Cook knew that an end of the strike meant defeat – not just on hours and wages but on district agreements which would, effectively, break the union for a long period, perhaps for ever. He wanted the strike to go on, but he knew it could not do so without new sources of funds. He staked all on a levy of trade unionists, and was prepared to compromise to get it. Here is the first sign of the waverings which he had shown as the struggle faded in 1921. In July 1926, a clutch of bishops, wringing their hands and washing them on alternate days, ‘came forward’ with proposals to settle the dispute. The proposals were no more than a request for another government subsidy, another ‘moratorium’, this time for four months, and ‘independent compulsory arbitration’ at the end of it. The coal-owners, of course, would have no truck with these suggestions. They were for an outright victory in the wake of the General Strike, and when their Christian consciences clashed with their dividend payment, God was asked to wait. The government agreed with the owners (as they always did). The miners’ response was therefore irrelevant. Perhaps because it was irrelevant, the executive of the Federation accepted the proposals, and Cook recommended them in the Sunday Worker. A ballot was held on the bishops’ proposals. The miners rejected them, against the advice of their own executive. The ‘tactic’ therefore boomeranged, and although Cook’s personal stock did not fall, there were some militants who wondered aloud why he had wavered. In September, at the TUC Congress in Bournemouth, he wavered again, more crucially. The General Council had promised him a voluntary levy of all trade union members. But they wanted something in exchange. Cook had to agree to speak against any full-scale public debate on the union leaders’ sell-out of the General Strike. Jack Tanner of the Engineers Union refused to accept the General Council’s report on the General Strike. He moved that the conference ‘refer it back’, and hold a full debate on the behaviour of the General Council during the Nine Days. The conference responded warmly to his appeal, and there were plenty of wet trousers on the platform. If the vote went against them, Thomas and Co. would have to justify themselves in public! Their saviour was A.J. Cook. He intervened, to thunderous applause, just after Tanner had spoken. ‘We have a million miners locked out,’ he said. ‘We are more concerned just now to get an honourable settlement for these million men than we are in washing dirty linin in this Congress.’ The motion was defeated. For this, Cook earned himself a thoroughly deserved rebuke in the Sunday Worker, from George Hardy, secretary of the National Minority Movement. ‘What did he gain?’ asked Hardy. ‘A pious resolution, and a false sense of security because the leaders were not with him.’ They were not. They did not even deliver the levy until they knew it was far too late.

They did not even deliver the levy until they knew it was far too late. By the time the levy funds started to trickle in, the miners were broken. The drift back to work had turned into a flood, especially in the Midlands. While the ‘hard areas’ still remained solid (Durham miners balloted to stay out even after a delegate conference had ordered a return), there was nothing for it but to go back on the owners’ terms. ARTHUR COOK had anticipated the full extent of the defeat, but the immediate impact of it was lost on him. As soon as the miners went back to work, he accepted a long-standing invitation to Moscow. Throughout the strike, he had faced down the red-baiters by assuring them that he did support revolutionary Russia. Russian workers, he pointed out, in spite of the most terrible hardships, contributed more to the strike fund than the combined contributions of unions affiliated to the TUC. In Moscow, where he spent several weeks, Cook was lionised. The visit acted as a kind of cushion against the fearful reality of the British coalfields. But when he returned in late January 1927 there was no hiding place. Up and down the coalfields, there was unrelieved gloom. There had been mass sackings of lodge and branch officials. Those that were allowed back to work were browbeaten from the first hour. The wages and hours ‘negotiated’ in the new ‘district agreements’ (a euphemism for the owners’ terms) were horrific. Ancient union privileges, such as the rights of the men to elect their own checkweighmen, were torn up. Down the mine, there was harassment and speed-up, with the inevitable fatal results. In March 1927, for instance, 66 miners were killed in an explosion and fall at Cwm colliery. Everyone except the owner agreed it was due to speed-up following the lock-out. The union was lucky to survive at all. In many places, it didn’t. At Maerdy pit, in South Wales, the proud flagship of the Federation for a quarter of a century, the owners wreaked terrible revenge. They refused to recognise the union, and victimised anyone known to be a member. In 1927 there were 377 employed members of the lodge at Maerdy; in 1928, only eight; in 1929, 25. In 1927, the lodge had 1,366 unemployed members; in 1928, 724; and in 1929, 325. This was not because the overall unemployment figures were falling – quite the reverse. It was just that to stand any chance of getting work, men were forced to leave the union (or the area). The Great Depression is usually placed in the 1930s, when unemployment climbed to over three million. The Great Depression in the South Wales coalfield started immediately after, and as a direct result of, the Miners’ Lock-out. The poverty of the mining families, especially those in the more militant pits where the sackings and victimisations were the hardest, is, literally, unimaginable. Those that could afford the journey left the area. Other miners simply drifted away from their families to seek some sort of work during the week in or around London, or to beg in the London streets. Almost as soon as he got back to his office in Russell Square, Cook found himself besieged by South Wales miners who came to the offices day by day to beg for money or a crust of bread. Arthur Horner has a lovely story of how he and a couple of tough Communists took Cook to task for giving away most of his salary to such beggars. He told Cook that if he gave away everything he had it would make precious little difference to the problem, and reminded him that his own family had a right to live. One afternoon, Horner and two comrades went themselves to the miners’ headquarters to protest. While they were with Cook, the doorman came in to say an unemployed miner had asked to see Cook. ‘I will deal with him,’ said Horner, gruffly, and stormed out to berate the wretched fellow for begging from his union secretary. The man told Horner his story. Horner gave him half the money he had saved to keep him in London for a week. He returned to Cook and the others, intending to bluff it out. He found them giggling. They had been listening at the keyhole to find out, as Cook put it, how a ‘really hard man’ deals with a ‘really hard problem’. What could be done for these desperate members? Cook’s instinct was to mobilise them. At a huge anti-government meeting on Penrhys Mountain, South Wales, on 13 September 1927, Cook proposed, almost by accident, that the ‘starving masses’ in the miners’ area should march to London, to what he called ‘the fountain head of the trouble’. Wal Hannington, the Communist Party agitator who followed Cook, took up the idea. He had already run hunger marches of the unemployed in the depression of 1921, and was to organise many others in the 1930s. He proposed a miners’ hunger march from South Wales to London. The proposal was acclaimed with a mighty roar.

The proposal was acclaimed with a mighty roar. The march, which took place that November, was a tremendous success. It is fully chronicled in Wal Hannington’s book, Unemployed Struggles. Though the book was written in 1936, long after Hannington had fallen out with Cook, he pays generous tribute to the miners’ leader for his role. Cook spoke to enormous meetings on the road: of 3,000 in Swindon; 5,000 in Reading and more than 100,000 in Trafalgar Square. You often meet old socialists who will tell you proudly of the hunger marches of the old days. What they don’t tell you is that these marches were hated and denounced by the leaders of the TUC and of the Labour Party. The organisers were variously described as rabble-rousers, agitators, Communists and incendiaries, and the union mandarins seized every opportunity to smear the marchers – sometimes even by ridiculing their shabby clothes! A.J. Cook’s part in the 1927 Hunger March endeared him still further to the rank-and-file miners, but infuriated his colleagues in the TUC, who were developing a new policy to shield themselves from their self-inflicted impotence. They called it ‘conciliation’. The time had come, they argued, to stop talking about class war and to start talking with the employers. A.J. Cook didn’t call it conciliation. He called it collaboration. He took over a regular column in the Sunday Worker. Week after week he savaged J.H. Thomas and the other trade union leaders. He started, as always, from the condition of the workers, especially of the miners. He asked whether there was the slightest sign that the capitalist system had relented, or was treating workers better than previously. On the contrary, the workers were worse off, the rich better off. Exploitation, the engine of the system, was working at a tremendous pace, but it did not solve the basic problems of society; it made them worse. Unemployment and poverty were on the rise. Why should the working-class movement collaborate? What would they get out of it? The questions were not answered. They were ignored. At the 1927 TUC Congress in Edinburgh in September, George Hicks, the building workers’ leader, once a Marxist and a man of the left, devoted his presidential address to the new concept of ‘conciliation’. The reward for this initiative came on 23 November, when a group of employers under Sir Alfred Mond, a South Wales industrialist, called for a conference to discuss the ‘common interests’ of trade unionists and employers. The new TUC president, Ben Turner of the wool workers, readily accepted. He started talking to Mond regularly, and on 12 January 1928 a delegation from the TUC met a delegation of employers headed by Mond. Cook protested furiously. The TUC, he said, had no mandate to enter such discussions with employers. No such idea had been put to the movement, or decided at any democratic conference. He attended the Mond-Turner conference at Burlington House in January 1928 and scathingly attacked both sides for congratulating each other when workers he represented had not enough to eat. He rushed out a pamphlet, The Mond Moonshine, whose preface by the old ILP member Joseph Southall is worth quoting in full: HOW THE WOLVES MADE PEACE WITH THE SHEPHERDS AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SHEEP Mundus the Wolf said to the shepherds: ‘Why should there not be peace between you and us, seeing that we both depend on the sheep for a living so that our interests are the same?’ Then Bender, Diggitt and Lemon, three of the Shepherds, said: ‘Let there be peace and cooperation’ and with this most of the shepherds agreed for they thought: ‘Why should we have the danger and trouble of fighting the wolves who speak so pleasantly?’ But Cocus, sturdy shepherd, who had fought hard for the sheep when other shepherds fled, did not trust the Wolves, and especially old Mundus whose origin was doubtful ... And Cocus answered: ‘Are not the jaws of the wolves red even now with the blood of the sheep?’ To which Lemon replied loftily: ‘Cocus speaks only for himself – the Council of Shepherds will deal with him.’ And Bender (who had charge of the shearing, and was naturally woolly in consequence) said to the Wolves: ‘Let us get round a table and explore every avenue, without prejudice, to hammer out ways and means to get out of the present chaos on to the highway of comfort and prosperity like that of Rome, which was not built in a day.’ Now what he meant by all this nobody knows, but while he was speaking the Wolves made off with a number of lambs and many valuable fleeces. Then did the Wolves rejoice for they knew the value of sheep’s clothing. Mundus was Mond of course, and Cocus, Cook. Bender was Ben Turner; Diggitt was Ben Tillett and Lemon was Walter Citrine. This was the theme of Cook’s pamphlet, which was published in March 1928, and was followed in the late summer by another entitled Mond’s Manacles. ‘There can be no peace with poverty or unemployment,’ it ended. ‘There can be no peace with capitalism.’ These attacks on his colleagues goaded them to reply in the only way they knew. The cry went up: Cook must be expelled! Under the heading TUC TIRED OF MR COOK’, the Daily Express of 16 January 1928 had this to say: ‘Relations between Mr A.J. Cook, the miners’ secretary, and his colleagues on the General Council of the Trade Union Congress have almost reached breaking point. ‘So much indignation has been roused among his colleagues by his behaviour that the council may not be content to pass a mere vote of censure, and more drastic measures may be taken.

The possibility of excluding Mr Cook from further meetings is being discussed. It is an open secret that since he joined the General Council last September [1927] Mr Cook has provoked angry scenes at every meeting. Matters have reached the stage at which he has been threatened more than once with physical violence by several of his colleagues.’ These attacks, which were widely publicised in the press, led to Cook getting an offer of help from an unexpected area. The ‘Mond Moonshine’ had been having its effect on the Labour Party too. Hypnotised by the prospect of a General Election in which it might once more gain office, the Labour Party leadership were rapidly cutting out of speeches, policies and documents any reference to class war or to socialism. There policies spoke about ‘one nation’ and ‘pulling together in both sides of industry’. This appalled those members of the ILP who were still committed to socialist ideas. In particular, John Wheatley, perhaps the most dedicated socialist ever to get to parliament for the Labour Party, publicly declared his view that defeat at the polls was better than a victory under Ramsay Macdonald and the then Labour leaders. Wheatley’s secretary and assistant at the time, John Scanlon, called Cook to a meeting in the House of Commons attended by some of the more left-wing MPs of the ILP. The meeting spawned the idea of a ‘public campaign’ to win back both the Labour Party and the trade unions to class struggle and socialist solutions to capitalist crises. Thus was born the ‘Cook-Maxton’ manifesto. The idea was simple. The two most popular orators of the labour movement at the time – Arthur Cook of the miners and James Maxton, the fiery ILP MP for Bridgeton in Glasgow – would travel the country speaking to a ‘manifesto’ which sought to put the blame for the country’s ills on capitalism, and urged the Labour Party to commit itself to socialist policies if ever it formed a government. The campaign was launched at a monster meeting in St Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow in July. So many people turned up that the speakers had to speak again at an overflow meeting outside. But at once, the campaign ran into trouble. John Wheatley wanted it to encourage dissident Labour Party members to refuse to support Mondist right-wing candidates at the election. Maxton disagreed, arguing that it was not the job of the campaign to split the Labour Party. Maxton’s view prevailed. Because no one trusted Cook to curtail his revolutionary ardour, he was asked to write out his Glasgow speech and submit it for approval before making it. Although the speech reads well enough, it lost its originality and fervour; and the meeting was a bit of a flop. This difficulty continued throughout the campaign. Lots of people agreed with Maxton and Cook. The basic arguments seemed unanswerable. It was pointless making friends with enemies such as theirs. It was clear that the interests of the classes were opposed to one another, and that any policy based on collaboration was bound to shackle a future Labour government, and drive it into the arms of capitalism, but what could people who agreed do about it? If the argument was not a guide to some sort of action, then it quickly lost its initial attractiveness. It was the analysis without the remedy – the prerogative of the quack throughout the ages. So the Cook-Maxton campaign livened up left-wing politics for a brief summer, and then everyone settled down to what seemed the only practicable task on offer: the return of a Labour government. On and on went Cook, however. He seemed indomitable. At the TUC in Swansea in September 1928 he faced his tormentors once more. He spoke powerfully against Mondism, and against any further meetings between the employers and the General Council. ‘You cannot under the capitalist structure avoid unemployment,’ he said. ‘Do not have alliances with the enemy. That is breaking a vital principle and is going to bind us with shackles to capitalism.’ He was followed to the rostrum (this Congress was the first to introduce the rostrum) by Herbert Smith, the miners’ president and Cook’s staunchest ally in the lock-out of 1926. Smith was brutal. He savaged Cook from his first sentence. ‘I do not speak for Arthur Cook and I do not speak for Herbert Smith. I speak for the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, which supports the General Council.’ Smith was correct. The Miners’ Federation itself had moved to the right under the pressure of the employers’ offensive. Cook was isolated not only on the General Council; he was in a minority among his fellow miners. At the MFGB conference that summer of 1928, a resolution approving Mondism had met with fierce resistance, but had been passed. Smith’s blunt attack exposed the weakness of Arthur Cook’s position. Cook was on the General Council and was able to speak at the TUC because he was secretary of the Miners’ Federation. Yet bhis own ideas about the political and economic situation were now opposed by his own union. From all sides, both in the Congress proceedings and outside the conference hall, the questions rained down on him. Who did Cook think he was? Was he not abusing his position both as miners’ secretary and as member of the General Council in expressing his extremist views? Were not the miners Mondists now? Why should the miners’ union and the TUC be used as a sounding board for Communist ideas by someone who was elected to represent an organisation which thought and voted quite differently? What right had Cook to expect to hold either position if he continued to abuse both?

What right had Cook to expect to hold either position if he continued to abuse both? Cook had an answer. He had been elected on the programme of the Minority Movement in 1924 – a programme which was absolutely opposite to that now promulgated by his union. He would stick to that, whatever happened. He rose at the TUC to give his accustomed reply. As he spoke, he collapsed, and was rushed to hospital. IT WAS a bleak autumn for Arthur Cook. He had never been a fit man. He suffered from many of the familiar miners’ illnesses, bronchitis, emphyzema and so on. The pain in his leg from the fight in 1926 had never gone away. Now, worse news was to come. The doctors confirmed what he had dreaded: that he was being eaten up by cancer and would be lucky to live another five years. In hospital, he mused on the contradictions of his position. The truth was that his central argument did not stand up. True, he had been elected on the platform of the Minority Movement in 1924. But there had been enormous changes since then, all for the worse. Strong, confident lodges had been destroyed. People’s faith in the union was immeasurably weakened. In slump and poverty, working people did not turn in the mass to ideas of revolutionary change. They withdrew, sought immediate ways out of their difficulties, and geared for compromise, however hopeless or ridiculous it appeared. The mood had changed completely. Cook knew that in spite of all his popularity among the miners, if he stood and fought again on the same platform he would almost certainly be defeated. The support of the rank-and-file miners – the rock on which he had built his reputation and his confidence – had slipped away from him. In these circumstances what use was his old and famous slogan: ‘You can only take what you are strong enough to take and only hold what you are strong enough to hold’? This slogan – the core of the syndicalist ideas of his youth – was fine as long as the curve of workers’ militancy and confidence pointed upwards. But what happened when it turned down – what if you could take nothing, and hold precious little? What role was there for the syndicalist then – especially the syndicalist who had reached high office through expression of his militant views? Was he to pretend that the mood was different and continue to campaign against his colleagues on the basis of a militancy which did not exist? Or was he to retreat to compromise, to hold what he could even if it meant rejecting some of the ideas with which his closest followers associated him? No doubt his illness, and the short span of life in pain which loomed in front of him, played a part in his decision. No doubt the tough and wily Walter Citrine, who visited him in his hospital bed, had some influence on him. Whatever the cause, by October that same year, 1928, he was writing in the Sunday Worker advocating caution, compromise, walking before you can run, and the importance of a Labour government as a first step to socialism. At once, one of his staunchest supporters wrote and urged him not to slide. Harry Pollitt, a Manchester engineer who had devoted his life to the Communist Party, wrote on 25 October: ‘Dear Arthur, ‘Glad to hear of your recovery, but amazed at the sharp turn of events so far as your policy is concerned. I believe that your present line is the most dangerous to yourself that you have ever taken. Unless you are more than careful, you will find that more dirty actions will be taken by the MFGB in your name and over your signature, against the militant miners, than have ever been taken before. ‘Your notes in last week’s Sunday Worker are appalling. I wouldn’t presume to write you, only for our close friendship, and no one knows better than I do all you have gone through. But you know you have had our backing and help as well. For the last two weeks I have been speaking all over Lancashire on the Swansea TUC stating the fight you put up there, getting support for you, making your position clear, and then you throw it all away in the misguided conception you are doing the right thing. You are not. You could sweep all the coalfields on the one union issue, but unless you break with them, you’ll find it too late.’ Pollitt’s letter ended: ‘I beg of you, for the sake of the miners’ best interests and your own, resume your open fight. It will rally to you all that is best in the movement. When you have been fighting the hardest, you have had the greatest mass support. On your present lines, you’ll not only lose it, you’ll knock the heart out of thousands of the MFGB’s best lads. Is it worth it? Of course it isn’t. They believe they have got you down. They’ll wipe their feet on you. They won’t forget all they have to pay you back.’ It was a moving and prophetic appeal. But the crucial problem disturbing Cook – should he resign as secretary or should he continue and compromise – was not touched on. There was something fundamentally dishonest about using the prestige of elected office to preach policies which were not acceptable to the majority of the electorate – the union membership. This dishonesty, however, probably didn’t even occur to Harry Pollitt. So his letter was of little help.

So his letter was of little help. Cook replied, sadly and pathetically: ‘Dear Harry, ‘Regret delay in answering your letter. Am much better now, but not yet A1. Now don’t worry; shall not go over to the reactionaries. They wait for my body. Tactics may be wrong, but I am up against difficult proposition – when to force issue. Cannot explain by letter but should like to see you as they are out for a smash. Future must be thought out. ‘Do not blame rank and file but b— machinery which keeps rank and file at bay. Their power in machine – when and how to test it ... I am firm in one national union and want to swap coalfields, but when and how. See me soon. I have nought to fear in a fight. Yours ever for the workers, AJC.’ This letter – one of the very few which survive from Cook – shows that in late October he was still thinking of a tactical withdrawal, while keeping friends and counsel among the Communists. As with so many tactical withdrawals, it soon turned into a rout. Before long Cook was making peace with the TUC leadership, and even the Labour leadership which he had denounced so mercilessly for the previous five years. In February, he attended a meeting with the Labour leaders in which he agreed that the next Labour government could postpone the nationalisation of the mines beyond the first session of parliament. He spoke more and more enthusiastically for the Labour Party on public platforms in the run-up to the 1929 election. In March, for instance, he said: ‘I have fought for and will continue to fight for a Labour government as a step to socialism; to repeal the pernicious 8-hours Act; to secure a Minimum Wage, adequate pensions at 60, nationalisation of the mines, minerals and by-products. A Labour government would bring new life and hope to the workers; it would increase faith in trade unionism and would lead us nearer to socialism.’ In the election campaign, he was persuaded, as an ultimate humiliation, to speak for Ramsay Macdonald at Seaham Harbour, where his friend Harry Pollitt was standing as a Communist. Pollitt records with some relish that he waited outside a hall until Cook arrived in a big car, and deliberately turned away when Cook ‘waved a cheery greeting’ across the street. Making peace with Ramsay Macdonald and Co. meant making peace with the establishment in general. In April 1929, Cook found himself at the Mansion House in the City of London at a luncheon for the chief helpers of the Miners’ Distress Fund, a charity sponsored by the Prince of Wales. The Prince made a pretty speech, and then, to everyone’s surprise, Cook was on his feet congratulating the Prince on his ‘whole-hearted enthusiasm’ for the miners’ fund, and especially for his appeal the previous Christmas on the radio. Only eleven months previously, Cook had mercilessly scoffed at wealthy city slickers and royalty who sought to solve their consciences with charity for the miners. Now in a burst of warm-hearted impetuousness he appeared in public as yet another groveller before royalty. He never had the time or health to taste the bitter fruits of the 1929-31 Labour government to the full. He watched aghast as the Eight Hours Bill was not repealed, how there were no provisions for adequate pensions at 60 or a minimum wage for miners. He saw very quickly that the Labour government was not bringing new life and hope to the workers. Instead, it brought more unemployment, more sickness and more despair. He noticed that in two years the government had decreased faith in trade unionism and had postponed any socialism by as long as anyone could see into the future. He noticed (indeed he even remarked, once, in public) that while Macdonald had regretted he could not nationalise the mines in the first session of parliament, he did not nationalise them in the second session either. By the third session, Macdonald (and Thomas, and Snowden) had joined the Tory Party in a government which postponed nationalisation for another sixteen years. In January 1931 his right leg was amputated above the knee. He bore the pain and disability with his usual cheerfulness and good spirits. Visitors from across the political spectrum came to see him in hospital. One of the more persistent of them was Sir Oswald Mosley, Labour MP for Smethwick, who was outraged by the spinelessness of the Labour government. He demanded more public spending to cut unemployment, and a programme of public works which heralded what later became known as Keynesianism. Mosley wrote a manifesto along these lines, and persuaded Arthur Cook to sign it. A few months later, Mosley and John Strachey, Cook’s former editor and aide, broke with the Labour Party to form the New Party. Both men pleaded with Cook to be a founder member of the party, but Cook refused. He would not leave the Labour Party, he said, but he promised he would vote for the New Party at the next election. He never got the chance. He now hardly ever left the trade union hospital at Manor House, Golders Green, in North London. On a bitterly cold night, 2 November 1931, a nursing sister approached him to prepare him for sleep. ‘Sister, it’s cold tonight,’ smiled Cook. ‘Go make yourself a cup of tea before you attend to me.’ She did. When she returned the miners’ secretary was dead. He was 47 years old.

He was 47 years old. THE OBITUARIES in the Press gushed with relief for a dead enemy. They rejoiced in Cook’s death-bed conversion. ‘Miners’ leader who turned against the Communists: Extremist views which became considerably modified’ was the Daily Mirror’s verdict. Harry Pollitt’s warning had been cruelly vindicated. The reactionaries ‘wiped their feet on him’. Cook had become, by the end, a victim not just of appalling illness but of the syndicalism which inspired him. A union leader carried to office by militant policies and workers’ confidence is like a marker buoy. As long as the seas are high, it guides, leads and moves with the current. When the tide goes out, the buoy is left on the sand, without purpose, marking nothing. The position of such a leader is his greatest obstacle. To renounce it, to return to the rank and file, seems to be throwing away enormous advantage. Yet to stay in a position which is not properly representative leaves no option but to compromise or to cheat. Cook was not a cheat, so he compromised. The first and most obvious lesson is the importance of socialist organisation, rooted and committed to the rank and file. In such an organisation we can keep our socialist commitment not just in the flow of the tide – which is easy – but in its ebb as well. When the workers’ confidence turns down, when employers and rulers win the day, the only way to keep high the aspirations for a new social order is through association with other socialists, learning from and teaching one another, extending our understanding of how the revolutionary tide has ebbed and flowed in the past. But, above all, we need to relate to whatever active struggle, however tiny, there is going on. Perhaps the worst aspect of A.J. Cook’s compromise in 1929 was his turning away from the unofficial miners’ strikes at Dawdon in County Durham, and Binley in Warwickshire. However great the victory of the ruling class, it can never escape the continuing class struggle. Since the society it governs is founded on exploitation, there will always be people resisting it, sometimes aggressively, confidently and successfully; more often defensively, and unsuccessfully. This resistance is the only real hope for lasting change. Association with it by organised socialists is the best guarantee that the socialist ideas which inspire us can be kept alive and relevant in the bad times as easily as they can in the good. Tactical demands and practical slogans are cut down to size at such a time – but this way they never lose contact with socialist aspirations or the living battles of real people on which they depend. So is that the end of the story? Can we dump A.J. Cook in the dustbin of history along with all the other trade union leaders who took office to change the world and ended up changing only themselves? No, most emphatically, we cannot, for there is another vital ingredient to the end of this story. The Communist Party, which moved A.J. Cook for high office, which championed him through his great campaign of 1924-5, which ordered him to cede ‘all power to the General Council’ in the 1926 General Strike (even to the extent of surrendering the newsprint for the Sunday Worker to the TUC) was embarked at the time of Cook’s greatest doubt and illness on a campaign of the most hideous sectarianism and insularity. This was the notorious ‘Third Period’, ordered from Stalin’s Moscow and adopted by those Party members who were more susceptible to the ‘line’ from Russia than they were to the real experiences of the working people they pretended to represent. In the ‘Third Period’, the line went, capitalism was in complete disarray, and socialist revolution was on the agenda. In such a period, the greatest obstacles to revolution were not the bankers or the industrialists, but the ‘fakers’ on the left who pretended they had a way forward and therefore deliberately obstructed the revolution. The crucial task in such an ‘epoch’ (a favourite revolutionary word) was to ‘break with’ the old order in the working-class movement. Unions which flirted with Mond had to be abandoned and new revolutionary unions set up in their place. Strikes had to be called in opposition to the union leadership – even if they were hopeless – with the specific aim of challenging that leadership. The full force of the rhetoric which Communists used to turn on the ruling class was now turned on the elected leaders of the working class. Workers’ Life, the weekly party paper, trumpeted – on 13 December 1929: ‘In an era in which the prospect of revolutionary mass struggle looms ahead, our tactics should be based on the assumption that the purpose of the Left Social-Democratic manoeuvres is only a counterrevolutionary one.’ Every single sentiment in that sentence was the exact opposite of the truth. December 1929 was not ‘an era in which the prospect of revolutionary mass struggle looms ahead’. The purpose of the ‘Left Social-Democratic manoeuvres’ (meaning those on the left of the Labour Party) were to shift the party to the left or hold it where it was, but without moving too quickly or jeopardising election chances – nothing whatsoever to do with counter-revolution. The false conclusion, however, flowed freely from the false facts: here’s Workers’ Life again, on 30 August 1929, just before Cook collapsed during his speech at the Swansea TUC: ‘The Communist Party must energetically fight the Left Social-Democrats as the most dangerous enemies of the working class.’ The most dangerous enemies. Worse than bankers or employers or Tories or spies! The fight against these ‘most dangerous enemies’ gathered force through 1929. The Communist Party press and the party faithful whipped themselves into a lather of self-righteous fury against them. Poor Arthur Cook got it worst. At the moment his doubts were first expressed, the Communist Party jumped on him from a vast height. ‘A.J. Cook joins the Old Gang’, announced the Sunday Worker on 15 March 1929, and every issue of the Party press from that date until his death sought some new form of malicious gossip about him.

‘Cook the Renegade!’ became an almost obligatory headline. The paper reported that Cook had been, without a break, a member of the ILP since 1905 (which was nonsense); that he had called in the police at the TUC Congress (which was not true) and that he was as bad a ‘social fascist’ as you could find anywhere – worse even than Jimmy Maxton. (‘Social fascist’ was a phrase coined by the Communist Party to describe people who called themselves socialist but supported policies which took the unions into the same organisations as the employers – because this was also a crucial industrial policy in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. It was grotesque, even as a description of the right-wing union leaders, let alone people like Cook and Maxton, and utter political nonsense – as the Communist Party was to discover later and at appalling cost when the real fascists turned on Communists and ‘social fascists’ alike.) Meanwhile Cook’s accolade for the Prince of Wales gave Workers’ Life a marvellous opportunity, and the paper scarcely referred to the miners’ leader without adding the tag ‘that notorious friend of the smiling Prince’. Cook was immediately stung to reply. His answer in Workers’ Life took the form of an open letter to his old friend and comradeArthur Horner, who was himself soon to run foul of his party’s domineering sectarianism. ‘I am constrained to reply,’ wrote Cook, ‘hoping yet that we can reconcile our differences and still continue our comradeship which was forged in class struggle. ‘You know that you were wrong when you stated that I have joined the enemies of the revolutionary struggle – neither has what you term the trade union and Labour Party bureaucracy got hold of me ... I have and shall continue to oppose Mondism because I am working and fighting for socialism. ‘You know as well as I do the terrible conditions in the coalfields, and the suffering of the women and children. I have been compelled to do the most unpleasant tasks of begging for food, money, boots, and cast-off clothing. Practically every day young men, stranded, call for food, clothing and shelter at my office. I have done my best for them. Every day the post brings letters to me and Mrs Cook begging for help, especially from expectant mothers, terrible epistles of agony and despair. ‘I have heard their cry for help, and have done all I can to give assistance. I have helped all I can, begged all I can, till I have been almost demented and in despair, because I hate charity and reliefs which make us all beggars ... ‘I now want remedies instead of relief. The more poverty increases, the more our people sink into despair and become the hopeless prey of all the most reactionary influences and movements.’ The remedy, he went on, lay in industrial and political power. Industrial power had to be built up in the trade unions, political power sought through the Labour Party. ‘This cannot be done,’ he wrote, ‘by forming new unions, thus dividing the workers and intensifying the struggle between workers and leaders in our present weakened state.’ Nor could it be done, he concluded, by standing Communist Party candidates against Labour candidates in a ‘first past the post’ electoral system, where Communist candidates who did well would only split the workers’ vote and let the Tories in. The letter, published on 29 April 1929, bore tragic testimony to the awful dilemma which Cook faced. It exposed his weakness as a militant leader of a demoralised and passive workforce. But it was not the letter of someone who had abandoned the ideas and principles of his life and youth; and, on the subject of breakaway unions at least, it undoubtedly won the argument. The Communist Party, however, was not in a mood to argue. Denunciation was more appropriate to their line, which was being dictated with more and more urgency from Moscow. The same party which, a few years later, would fling itself at the feet of any opportunist trade union leader who offered a cliché on behalf of the Popular Front, now drowned the most powerful and principled union leader their movement had ever known in stale sectarian polemic. Cook persevered. He wrote again to Labour Monthly, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, which published his letter in June. He started by complaining that he had been misquoted, which he had been. On the policy of breakaway unions, he wrote: ‘The Communist Party are trying to destroy the only means for protection now, and the only means to create and construct a new social order. They are out to smash the MFGB, the TUC and the Labour Party – quite an ambitious proposal. No more insane object could ever have been formulated outside a lunatic asylum.’ His article ended with a desperate plea for comradely argument and assessment: ‘Comradeship means something higher and nobler than the example set by the Communist Party in their campaign of personalities, hate, vilification and destruction. We must fight capitalism with all the weapons at our disposal in an organised fashion. This needs power, which only trade unions can create by industrial and political argument.’ For this appeal, Arthur Cook got the usual kick in the teeth. A note at the end of the article declared: ‘The Labour Monthly says farewell to him without regret and with the contempt that he deserves.’ The Labour Monthly and its party were saying farewell to a lot of other Communists during 1929. In the eighteen months after the General Strike, 5,000 people had joined the Communist Party, doubling its membership. They joined in disgust at the sell-outs of the General Council and the rightward drift to Mondism following the defeat of the miners. These 5,000 people were overwhelmingly working-class militants, many of them victimised, who were looking for a new lead to strengthen the working-class movement. But in place of policies which would expose the false ideas put forward by the trade union leaders and strengthen the rank and file, the party simply denounced those leaders and trumpeted crazy notions for new revolutionary trade unions. The Communist Party literature and press reeked of stale jargon.

Life in the party became monkish and fanatical. All those who argued with Communists were seen to be against them. All those persuaded by the weakness of the workers to seek salvation in the Labour Party were denounced as reformist and revisionist trash. The 5,000 left almost as soon as they had joined. Party membership dropped from 10,730 in October 1926 to 5,500 in March 1928, and to 3,200 in December 1929. Soon after this the party took its great leap forward to a daily paper (made possible only by a generous subsidy from Russia), but membership in December 1930 was down to 2,555. For Arthur Cook, the sectarianism of the Communist Party was first a shock; secondly an excuse. As the abuse mounted, so he no longer felt it necessary to argue his position with his former comrades. If they really were intent on forming new unions, what need was there to debate with them his own awkward and embarrassing position? His only way out of his impasse was to resign the secretaryship, and perhaps fight for it again with a militant programme. If he’d won again, he could easily have seen off his adversaries in the TUC. If he’d lost, he would be a rank-and-file miner again, no doubt unemployed, and too ill to work, but at least clear and confident in his politics. There never was at any time in Arthur Cook’s life the slightest suggestion that he kept his position because he needed the money or liked the life-style. He was giving a huge proportion of his small income away anyway. Resignation, forcing another election, was a powerful and practicable alternative. Any friend or comrade could have advised him down that road. But the know-alls of the Communist Party were so eager to denounce a precious new ‘social fascist’ that they could not even open a dialogue with him. Thereby hangs a moral. The only point in remembering our past is so that it can guide us in the present. In spite of all the obvious differences in scale and detail, the period which followed the defeat of the miners in 1926 is grimly similar to the times we live in now. As we try to steer our tiny socialist craft through the same sort of stormy waters, what dangers loom up ahead? On the one side is the huge Rock of Reformism, to which we are lured by the prospect of defeating a vicious and victorious Tory government. Sink your differences, sing the sirens on this rock. Submerge your strikes and demonstrations, put all your energies into knocking out the Tories at the next election, and replacing them with a Labour government pledged at least to improve the lot of working people at the expense of the rich and powerful. We can see that rock more clearly now than socialists could see it after 1926. Then, there had never been a majority Labour government. Now, we have had years and years of majority Labour governments, most of them in peacetime conditions. We have watched all those governments turn against the people who elected them, and savage them. As they do so, thousands of their supporters turn away. The ideas which inspired generations of socialists are polluted because, it seems, they cannot be put into practice. Nevertheless, as after 1926, the current pulls us still towards that rock, and we must steer hard against it; hard for independent socialist organisation rooted in the self-activity of workers, which alone holds out the prospect of real change. But as we pull the tiller over, we had better beware other sirens on rocks which are perhaps less obvious and where the warnings are less shrill. Theirs are the voices which beckon us away altogether from the real, living working-class movement, which becalm us in eddies and pools where other socialists are sailing around in smaller and smaller circles, amusing and abusing one another with great gusto, but having no effect whatever on what workers say and do, and so no effect whatever on the world outside. Sectarianism is the philosophy of socialists who have ‘discovered the truth’ about revolution and consider it to be so obvious that everybody else must have discovered it too. ‘Everybody else’, therefore, must be ‘selling out’. Sectarianism is the creed of those who cannot see that most workers – by far the great majority of them – will stay ‘reformist’ either because they do not see an alternative, or because they fear the alternative, until all other roads are shut to them. Sectarianism is the hiding place for socialists who refuse to accept that they must be part of the working-class movement or they are finished. What then, in 1985, is a fitting epitaph for Arthur James Cook? There are some who might prefer the obituary in the Daily Worker of 3 November 1931, which could hardly contain its pleasure that another ‘social fascist’ had died in agony. ‘Throughout his whole career,’ it concluded, ‘Cook wavered from side to side, finally ending up in the camp of the workers’ enemies, but still trying to cover up his treachery with high-sounding phrases and gaudy promises.’ Some might prefer that, as I say, if only because it is safe. It is, however, wrong, offensive and arrogant, and will cut off whoever says it from any miner who ever heard A.J. Cook speak, or talked to others who heard him. I prefer the epitaph written by Robin Page Arnot, who was, I think, on the staff of the Daily Worker at the time, and who later wrote a series of marvellous histories of the British miners and their struggles. ‘There never had been a British miners’ leader like Arthur James Cook; never one so hated by the government, so obnoxious to the mine-owners, so much a thorn in the flesh of other general secretaries of unions; never one who during his three years’ mission from 1924 to 1926 had so much unfeigned reverence and enthusiastic support from his fellow-miners. Neither to Tommy Hepburn nor Tom Halliday, neither to Alexander McDonald or Ben Pickard, neither to the socialists Keir Hardie nor Robert Smillie did the miners of Britain accord the same unbounded trust and admiration as they reposed for those three years and more in A.J.

Cook. That support was his strength, and it was his only strength. When he lost it, he lost the ground on which he lived and moved and had his being. Today his faults are forgotten or forgiven amongst the older miners who tell the younger men their recollections of past days; and still in every colliery village there abides the memory of a great name.’ [7] I prefer that epitaph because it seems to me that one of the important tests of socialists’ behaviour is how we relate to, and how we criticise, great working-class leaders who can lead their class in the heat of the struggle, impervious to the most awful onslaught from the other side. Of such leaders Arthur Cook was undoubtedly one. Footnotes 1. Walter Citrine, Men and Work, p.77. 2. Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (London 1960), p.72. 3. Morning Post, 10 June 1926. 4. Sunday Worker, 6 June 1926. 5. Sunday Worker, 18 July 1926. 6. Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan (London 1962), vol.1, pp.70-71. 7. Robin Page Arnot, The Miners: Years of Struggle (London 1953), p.541. Top of the page Last updated on 27 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The great times they could have had (September 1988) From London Review of Books, Vol. 10 No. 16, 15 September 1988, pp. 12–13. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor by Charles Higham Sidgwick, 419 pp, £17.95 The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor by Michael Bloch Bantam, 326 pp, £14.95 A great many books and articles have been published recently about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr Higham’s book has been greeted with a tremendous shout of fury. ‘Universally slated’ was how Sidgwick and Jackson described its reception to me. It has been passed over for serialisation. Film rights, once assured, are now in jeopardy. Writing in the Spectator, Frances Donaldson, modestly omitting to refer to her own worthy, if rather pedestrian biography of Edward VIII, could not contain her indignation. ‘Nor am I alone in thinking it rather shocking,’ she boomed, ‘that Mr Higham was able to find a reputable British publisher for his book.’ Lady Donaldson doesn’t believe for a moment that either the Duke or Duchess of Windsor were even pro-Nazi. She follows in a long line of biographers, historians and journalists who concede, since it is plainly on the record, that the Duke and Duchess were both opposed to war with Germany, but who dismiss the idea that they were sympathetic to Fascism as a ‘mistaken notion’ (Brian Inglis’s conclusion in his 1966 account, Abdication). Lady Donaldson denounces Charles Higham for retailing tittle-tattle, and concludes that if you leave out the gossip and the speculation there is nothing left in his biography which we didn’t know before. What is the picture so gaudily painted by Mr Higham? Wallis Warfield was born (out of wedlock) into a rich and comfortable middle-class family in Baltimore. She went to high-society schools, where she read Kipling to her boyfriends. She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive and powerful propagandist for Mussolini. While still friendly with Caetani, Wallis forged even closer bonds with Felipe Espil, First Secretary at the Argentinian Embassy in Washington, an ardent Fascist and a representative of the savage Irigoyen dictatorship in Buenos Aires. Mr Higham, who has certainly done his homework in the American state files, produces clear evidence that Wallis Spencer, as she then was, was hired as an agent for Naval Intelligence. The purpose of her visit to China in the mid-Twenties, where she accompanied her husband, who also worked for Intelligence, was to carry secret papers between the American Government and the warlords they supported against the Communists. In Peking her consort for a time was Alberto de Zara, Naval Attaché at the Italian Embassy, whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was often expressed in verse. When she moved to Shanghai, she made another close friend in another dashing young Fascist, Count Galeazzo Ciano, later Mussolini’s Foreign Secretary. Wallis’s enthusiasm for the Italian dictatorship was, by this time, the only thing she had in common with her husband, Winfield Spencer. In 1936, ten years after the couple were divorced, Spencer was awarded the Order of the Crown of Italy, one of the highest decorations of the Mussolini regime. Ernest Simpson, the dull partner in a shipping firm whom Wallis married in 1928, had close business ties with Fascist Italy. But her feeling for Fascism cannot be attributed only to her men friends. On the contrary, the ‘new social order’ brayed around the world by the Italian dictator and his representatives fitted precisely with Wallis’s own upbringing, character and disposition. She was all her life an intensely greedy woman, obsessed with her own property and how she could make more of it. She was a racist through and through: anti-semitic, except when she hoped to benefit from rich Jewish friends; and anti-black (‘Government House with only a coloured staff would put me in my grave,’ she moaned when, many years later, her husband was the Governor of the Bahamas). She was offensive to her servants, and hated the class they came from. Her Fascist sympathies stayed with her all her life. When she needed a lawyer to start a libel action in 1937, she chose the Parisian Nazi Armand Grégoire.

When she needed a lawyer to start a libel action in 1937, she chose the Parisian Nazi Armand Grégoire. Even when the war was on, she fraternised with the pro-Nazi French businessman, Charles Bedaux. Perhaps her most consistent British confidante and friend was Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald’s wife. As the Windsors and the Mosleys grew old in exile, they took regular solace together, meeting and dining twice a week and musing about the great times they could have had if only the British had seen sense and sided with Hitler and Mussolini against the Reds. Of all the bonds which united this dreadful woman to the glamorous Prince of Wales in the late-Twenties, none was so strong as their shared politics. Charles Higham’s biography sets out the facts about the Prince’s Fascist leanings and sympathy with the Nazi cause and the corporate state in Italy. The Prince was proud of his German origins, spoke German fluently, and felt an emotional, racial and intellectual solidarity with the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re Jews or anything else, and added that the dictators are very popular these days, and that we might want one in England before long.’ Not long afterwards the Prince confided in a former Austrian ambassador, Count Mensdorff, who wrote: ‘It is remarkable how he expressed his sympathies for the Nazis ...’ Such sympathies were of course common, at least for a while, in London society, but when others began to waver, the Prince of Wales remained steadfast. He asked the Germans to fix up a special dinner for him at the German Embassy, as a special mark of his solidarity with their government. The Germans, on instructions from Berlin, invited Mrs Simpson, who was then his paramour. The company he kept in London burgeoned with keen young supporters of the Nazi ‘experiment’. Edward (‘Fruity’) Metcalfe, one of his closest friends, and the best man at his wedding to Wallis, appeared in the Tatler dressed up in Fascist regalia at a ‘Blackshirt’ dinner. When the Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare fixed up a deal with Pierre Laval, the French Foreign Secretary and a Nazi fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was completed. In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, could not stomach the idea of a monarch marrying a twice-divorced woman. The objections, it is said, were moral and religious. The truth is, however, that throughout the centuries archbishops and prime ministers have miraculously overcome their moral objections to royal idiosyncrasies in the bedchamber. The real objection to the liaison between the King and Mrs Simpson was that both were Nazi sympathisers at a time when the more far-sighted civil servants, politicians and businessmen were beginning, sometimes reluctantly, to realise that British interests and German interests were on a collision course. As the biographers of Baldwin, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, observed, ‘the government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.’ Charles Higham quotes an FBI file in Washington: ‘Certain would-be state secrets were passed on to Edward, and when it was found that Ribbentrop’ – the German Ambassador in London – ‘actually received the same information, immediately Baldwin was forced to accept that the leakage had been located.’ Higham then asserts (without quoting the relevant passage): ‘The same report categorically states that Wallis was responsible for this breach of security.’ Of Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and head of British Intelligence, Higham writes (and here he does provide the evidence): he ‘was Wallis’s implacable enemy from the day he was convinced she was a Nazi collaborator’. It is this, far more than any moral consideration, which explains the determination and the ruthlessness with which Baldwin and his administration dealt with the King before his abdication. They were prepared to put up with him, as long as he was acting on his own. They bypassed him. By midsummer 1936, Higham writes, ‘all confidential documents were withheld from the King.’ The prospect of a Nazi King backed up by an infinitely more able and resourceful Wallis Simpson was intolerable. If the King wanted Mrs Simpson, he would have to get out. If he wanted to stay as King, she would have to be banished. The King’s choice (the ‘woman I love’, and exile) came as a great relief to the Government. Yet Edward remained a menace as he continued, in his exile, to offer the Nazis solidarity. When war broke out, he was summoned back to England and sent to France on military duty with the rank of Major-General. His lack of interest and enthusiasm for the job, which he showed by coolly abandoning his duties to attend some parties in the South of France with Wallis, would, in normal circumstances, have led to a court-martial. The Duke of Windsor was not court-martialled. He was made Governor of the Bahamas. Wherever he went, people noted his Nazi sympathies, which were fanned to fury by the Duchess. As early as 1937, Sir Ronald Lindsay, British Ambassador to Washington, wrote to his wife that the Duke of Windsor was ‘trying to stage a comeback, and his friends and advisers were semi-Nazis.’ A month or two later, Lindsay wrote, officially: ‘The active supporters of the Duke of Windsor within England are those elements known to have inclinations towards Fascist dictatorships, and the recent tour of Germany by the Duke of Windsor and his ostentatious reception by Hitler and his regime can only be construed as a willingness on the part of the Duke of Windsor to lend himself to these tendencies.’ On that tour, the Duke seemed to take special pleasure in greeting the enthusiastic crowds with the Nazi salute.

Years afterwards, he would proudly show his guests the pictures of him and Wallis being greeted by the Führer. David Eccles, then a young civil servant, met the Duke and Duchess in Spain and reported ‘The Duke is pretty fifth column.’ In Portugal, the Geman Ambassador Oswald Baron von Hoyningen-Heune, relayed to his superiors in Berlin the Duke’s conviction that ‘had he remained on the throne, war could have been avoided.’ ‘He describes himself,’ von Hoyningen-Heune continued, ‘as a firm supporter of a compromise peace with Germany. The Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.’ Many opponents of the view that the Duke and Duchess were active supporters of the Nazis throughout these times point to his interest in workers’ conditions and to his visit to South Wales in 1936, when he made the famous (and fatuous) statement that ‘something should be done’ about unemployment. Yet the provision of good facilities for hardworking people was crucial to the Nazi idea of a ‘new social order’ and a key to its popularity. Once they were exiled to the Bahamas, and closely watched by both British and American Intelligence, the royal couple’s Nazi sympathies were kept in check. Even there, however, they associated with Fascist businessmen, in particular the corrupt Harold Christie, with whom the Duke, with the help of the Bahamian taxpayer, went into partnership. As the war swung towards the Allies, the couple’s enthusiasm for the Nazis began to lose its fervour, and in their autobiographies, written much later, both Duke and Duchess would take refuge in the familiar excuse that they had underestimated the horror of the Fascist regimes. Their former adversaries in the British Government and Civil Service were among the many people who assisted them in their rewriting of their past. The Duke’s brother, George VI, made every effort to ensure that the fact that the King of England had been a Hitler supporter before the war was kept under wraps. Armand Grégoire, the Duchess’s Nazi lawyer, was tried for collusion with the enemy and sent to prison for life, without being asked for (or volunteering) information about his role as intermediary between the royal couple and his Nazi masters. Charles Bedaux, who might have been persuaded to trade some such information in exchange for lenient treatment, committed suicide while under arrest for treason. Coco Chanel, an intimate friend of the Duchess, was arrested and charged with treason against the French state. The evidence against her was prodigious. She had worked directly for Nazi Intelligence against her own government. After a 24-hour interrogation by American Intelligence, however, she was released. ‘Had she been forced to stand trial, with the threat of execution as an employee of an enemy government,’ Higham writes, ‘she could easily have exposed as Nazi collaborators the Windsors and dozens of others highly placed in society. Despite the hatred of the Windsors at Buckingham Palace, the royal family would not willingly tolerate an exposé of a member of the family.’ This sense of solidarity prompted the King to send the Keeper of the Royal Pictures on a secret mission to Germany soon after the war to collect from the Schloss Kronberg, family home of the Princes of Hesse, a bundle of documents which exposed the connection between the Windsors and the Nazis. The Keeper of the Royal Pictures and an associate went to great lengths to retrieve these papers, which have never been seen since. The Keeper of the Royal Pictures was Anthony Blunt, who for nearly ten years had been an active agent of the Russian Government. By 1945 Blunt’s loyalty to his king had superseded his loyalty to Communism, and he kept quiet about his secret mission. In 1964, when he finally confessed to his KGB past, his interrogator was a middle-ranking MI5 man called Peter Wright. Wright was summoned to the Palace. On the one hand, he was told by Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary, that the Palace would do all they could to help, and, on the other, warned that Blunt might mention his trip to Germany after the war, and ordered abruptly not to pursue this particular matter. In the event, despite hundreds of hours’ interrogation, Blunt never told Wright (or anyone else) about what he found in Germany. Possibly, like Coco Chanel, he knew that a promise to keep quiet about the papers would ensure his own immunity from prosecution. Whether intended or not, the refusal to accept that the Windsors were Fascists has gone on and on. The ‘Great Love Story’ has appeared on television, and in numerous books. Experts argue about the psychology of the King, the ambition of Wallis Warfield, the hypocrisy of the British Establishment, the size of Edward’s penis, and whether or not he was a foot-fetishist. All these matters are marvellous for serialisation in the Daily Mail, which itself enthusiastically supported the Fascists in the Thirties. Michael Bloch’s Secret File of the Duke of Windsor, the latest in this genre (inevitably serialised in the Daily Mail), has but four references to Hitler and continues in the traditional view that the Duke was naive. He thought, Bloch suggests, that the Nazis were ‘rough but reasonable men’, and underestimated their barbarism. Charles Higham has an answer to this: ‘The repeated absurdity of journalists that the couple’s commitment to Fascism and a negotiated peace in World War Two was based upon a transcendent foolishness stood exposed the moment one entered a conversation with the Windsors. Whatever one might think of their views, those views were not entered into lightly or from a position of blind ignorance.’ Wallis did not want to be the Duchess of Windsor. In personal terms, she preferred her tedious and undemanding husband Ernest Simpson to the ever-whining, introspective and hypochondriacal Duke. She wanted to be mistress to the King, not the wife of an exiled duke. She begged the King to stand by his throne, seeing herself as a modern Mrs Fitzherbert, in charge of the court but not of the court, enjoying all the pomp and influence of a queen without being the Queen.

This desire was not inspired by straightforward social ambition: it came from her anxiety to influence the course of political events. The story, in short, is not just soppy sexist trash, as portrayed in the Daily Mail. It is a political melodrama of the highest consequence. One of the weaknesses of modern republican theory is that it tends to concentrate on the personal weaknesses of the Royals. How could anyone, it is asked, support a system which raises on a pedestal people like Edward VIII or George IV or Andy and Fergie? Are they not absurd, ridiculous figures, unfit for anything but a jewellery auction or a hunt ball? This argument always falls flat. The influence of a monarchy which has long ago been stripped of real political power lies precisely in its absorption of people’s aspirations, griefs, ambitions and endeavours. Weaknesses, therefore, are as adorable as strengths. Princess Diana has no O levels – so what? Nor have most other people. Fergie is a mindless Sloane with nothing but a cheerful grin – so what? A cheerful grin is no bad thing when most people aren’t feeling at all cheerful. Royal idiocies, divorces, selfishnesses, as detailed in the popular press, are not destructive of modern monarchy. On the contrary, they provide a vital link between the monarchs and their subjects. So it was with the Windsors. The King of England fell for a divorced woman and beastly old Baldwin wouldn’t let him have her. How rotten of him! How many others have fallen for unsuitable partners, but have not had their jobs taken away from them because of it? So it was that the people maintained their sympathy for the ‘gallant young Prince’. The one quality of the Duke of Windsor which might have broken the spell of the British monarchy – his Fascist leanings – was discreetly buried. Charles Higham’s is an important book. But there is a great deal wrong with it. He has provided his critics with plenty of hostages. Again and again, he quotes the most scurrilous and unlikely gossip, without proving it. It is no good quoting one contemporary hazarding a guess that Wallis was the lover of Count Ciano, and that she even had an abortion as a result. There is not the slightest proof of this, and anyway it is beside the point. It is no good inventing (or guessing at) Wallis’s sexual education in the brothels of Shanghai or for that matter entering the royal bedchamber to speculate about what exactly went on there. There are times – far too many of them – when bald assertions are not backed by the evidence they need; the notes and the index are a disgrace; and Higham’s biographical method, piling incident on incident and referring only to the day and the month, continually loses the thread of the narrative. But these are really niggles. Gossip is a dangerous commodity, but no biography worth its salt could survive without it. The plain fact is that for all its weaknesses the book is enthralling from first to last and for one central reason. It exposes both its main subject and her royal catch, not as the dim-witted, self-obsessed lovers who have been pickled for posterity, but as nasty, determined Fascists who wanted to preside over a ‘new social order’ which would do away for ever with all pretence at democracy and consign all opposition to the holocaust. Letters LRB, Vol. 10 No. 19, 27 October 1988 From Diana Mosley: Among many strange assertions made about the Windsors by your reviewer of Wallis: The Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor (LRB, 15 September) he says that my husband and I dined with them twice a week. Twice a year would be nearer the mark. We always accepted their invitations because dining with them was invariably enjoyable and sometimes interesting, but we were not asked twice a week. This could easily have been checked, because they kept a book in which visitors signed their names.

This could easily have been checked, because they kept a book in which visitors signed their names. I first met the Duchess nearly ten years after the end of the war, and was not her ‘confidante’. The Windsors were hospitable neighbours, no more. Diana Mosley Orsay, France LRB, Vol. 10 No. 20, 10 November 1988 From Paul Foot: In answer to Diana Mosley’s letter (Letters, 27 October), I quote from Charles Higham’s Wallis, pages 343 and 344: ‘Much of 1952 and 1953 was absorbed in work on the two houses. During this period the Duke resumed and the Duchess acquired a warm friendship … The Mosleys dined at the Mill twice a week, and the Windsors almost as frequently at the Temple de la Gloire.’ Mr Higham quotes (on page 402) as a source for this statement ‘one of the most memorable interviews of his life’ – afforded him in her home by Lady Mosley. This information was difficult to check since, most unhappily, I do not have direct access to the Duchess of Windsor’s visitors’ book. Paul Foot London N16 Top of the page Last updated on 7.3.2012

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Doing the Deed of Death (March 2002) From Arts Review, Socialist Review, No.261, March 2002, p.29. Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare Barbican, London ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves that we are underlings.’ Very early on in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar one senior senator, Cassius, engages another, Brutus, in one of the most eloquent and effective agitations in all literature. Rome is threatened by a dictatorship under Caesar, the military conqueror, and the more democratically minded senators are moved to revolt. Cassius stirs Brutus with Caesar’s overriding ambition, and above all by his claim to be greater and more ‘constant’ than other men. If Rome is to prove true to its democratic traditions, he argues, Caesar must go. Popular revolt is out of the question since it might threaten the senators themselves. So when he considers the options to himself, Brutus concludes that ‘it must be by his death’. The seeds of the patrician conspiracy are sown and put into practice. William Shakespeare was not a revolutionary – quite the reverse. His own sympathies would have rested, almost certainly, with the dictator and his fawning successor, Mark Anthony. The playwright’s supreme artistry, however, did not depend on his views, but on his powers of observation of human behaviour, and transmitting what he observed into drama. Thus Cassius’s argument is as accurately conveyed as is Caesar’s determination not to give an inch to reform or the reformers, or Brutus’s insistence that the assassination must be carried out as decently as possible. Moreover, as I realised for the first time watching the Royal Shakespeare Company production, Cassius is always right. He is right about refusing permission to Mark Anthony to speak at Caesar’s funeral, and right to seek to avoid the disastrous battle at Philippi. Mark Anthony is a great orator, and makes a famous speech over Caesar’s body, but once he successfully turns the mob in his favour he reveals himself as no less ruthless a tyrant than his hero. The ebb and flow of the argument in the first part of the play is irresistible, whatever side you take. In this production, Tim Piggot-Smith reveals Cassius’s agitation eloquently enough without really conveying the anger and passion that Shakespeare intended. Though the production clearly favours the conspirators by dressing Caesar’s supporters in fascist uniforms and ridiculing Caesar (Ian Hogg) as a ranting buffoon (which he wasn’t), and although Greg Hicks sensitively identifies Brutus’s dilemmas, it’s still hard to come away from the production with the feeling that the conspirators get as fair a hearing as they should. Partly this is the fault of the play itself, which disintegrates horribly after the assassination. I’ve never been able to understand the row between Cassius and Brutus as they prepare for the final battle, and nor is the play helped by the ghost of Caesar staggering round the stage in his underpants. But the early arguments, the excitement of the conspiracy and its aftermath, are as powerful as ever, and not to be missed. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004