train
dict |
|---|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootArms dealingWill they get off Scott free?(May 1995)From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 186, May 1995, pp. 4–5.Transcribed & marked upby Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Two extreme opinions circulate on the left about the inquiry by Lord Justice Scott into the export of defence related equipment to Iraq. The first is that the report has been a shining example of how a liberal parliamentary democracy can check itself when it slides into pusillanimity and sleaze. For such people, the noble Lord Justice has behaved like a knight in shining armour, wielding, to coin a popular phrase, the shining sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play against lying politicians and deceitful civil servants. No doubt, such people hope, the Scott Report will tear aside the veil behind which government pledges and arms embargoes are broken, and lambast the entire corrupt system.Such people are in for a shock. The first section of the Scott Report, which has been widely leaked, deals with the history of arms export control. The judge, who gleefully sequestrated the funds of the South Wales NUM during the miners’ strike, is no socialist or rebel. His attitude to government control of arms exports is that it has been far too strict.He is disgusted that the government has used a short draconian measure passed during the wartime emergency of 1939, which effectively gave ministers complete power over all arms exports. This, the Lord Justice thinks, is an appalling interference with the inalienable right of businessmen to export what they want, including the means of slaughter. He believes that, if the government wants to control such commendable free enterprise, it must move cautiously with carefully constructed statutes which allow enormous leeway for free marketeers.Those who believe that the Scott Report will be an ideologically challenging document which might finally bring down the government are whistling in the wind.There is, however, the second extreme view, even more absurd. This is that the Scott Report is of no significance to the course of modern capitalism, and can be safely ignored by all socialists.This view is a profound misunderstanding of the crisis which brought the Scott inquiry into being. As Britain’s economic role has declined, as Britain has sailed down the world league of manufacturers, shipbuilders and vehicle builders, so its exports have increasingly come to rely on the arms industry.The advantages of arms exports are obvious. They produce a high return, and can be kept utterly secret from the public. They are in constant demand all over the world. Yet their disadvantages lead to equally obvious problems. Arms are needed most where wars are being waged – wars which ‘responsible’ democratic governments such as the British government are usually trying (at any rate in public statements at the United Nations) to stop.The big conflicts which are the real honeypot for the arms exporting industries are almost always subject to embargoes. The Iran-Iraq war was no exception. To keep up its wholly unjustified reputation as a peacekeeper, the British government had to be seen to be discouraging arms exports to either side.Hence the notorious ‘guidelines’ to industry, announced in parliament in 1985, which banned the export of any ‘lethal equipment’ to the warring countries. Against the guidelines were ranged all those who wanted to make money by killing Iranians or Iraqis. These exporters had considerable support in the ministry of defence and the department of trade. Alan Clark, a wild Thatcherite eccentric, served in both ministries from 1986 to 1992, and went on record as denouncing the guidelines. If there was a war between two sets of foreigners a long way away, he argued, why not make some decent foreign exchange by selling both sides as many arms as they wanted?The clash between these two views – the official respectable view represented by the then junior foreign office minister William Waldegrave and the gung-ho view of Clark and co. – constantly tore at the fabric of government. For most of the Iran-Iraq war there was an uneasy truce between the two sides. But when the war ended and the embargo remained, the hawks lost patience and insisted on busting the embargo.Their greed was accommodated by a typical British compromise. Waldegrave and Clark agreed that the guidelines would be changed to allow a flood of defence related equipment especially to booming Iraq – but no one, not even the prime minister and certainly not the public, would know about it. Thus embargoed exports flooded to Iraq while everyone who asked about it was told that the embargo was still in force.This compromise would have continued forever had it not been for another contradiction. Britain is a military power and may have to fight wars itself. Its government must therefore be careful not to allow the export of arms which might be used against it. One of the great tragicomic figures of the whole story is one Lt Col Richard Glazebrook whose job it was to keep warning his colleagues in the ministry of defence that they should not so recklessly agree to the selling of military equipment against which, if it were turned on British troops, Britain would have no answer.Glazebrook was mocked and outvoted, but when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, he had the last laugh. He greatly enjoyed listing the exports which he had warned against but which now were in the hands of an army ranged against British troops.The Gulf War quickly tore the uneasy compromise apart. The embargo had to be imposed more fiercely than ever. All sorts of curious characters were caught up in the process. Three British directors of Matrix Churchill, a Midlands firm owned by Iraqi government supporters which had been happily exporting machine tools for use in Saddam’s artillery factories, suddenly found themselves prosecuted."
} |
{
"content": "Their defence was that the government and MI6 had supported them throughout. When their defence was proved by documents wrung from a reactant civil service, the case collapsed – and the government nearly collapsed too. Major survived only by setting up the Scott inquiry and giving it more powers to wrest the facts from the government machine than had ever been given to any public inquiry in British history.As a result, Scott found himself beavering away in the cracks of the system. Since the whole ‘solution’ to the arms for Iran-Iraq problem had been based on lying to parliament and the public, Scott was horrified to discover an enormous network of deceit. There can be no doubt that his report will be a hideous embarrassment to government ministers, law officers and the civil service.Even if, as seems likely, he lets the merchants of death off lightly, he cannot excuse, for instance, serial deception of parliament and blatant contempt for the most basic rules of fair play to defendants. The shortcomings of the whole saga quickly fade beside the altogether exhilarating prospect of at least some official confirmation of what socialists have always propounded: that lying, cheating and double talk are not just incidental to the system. They are essential to it. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootPowell’s poison platform(December 1986)From Socialist Worker Review, No. 93, December 1986, p. 13.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.WHY SHOULD anyone want to victimise a 74 year old gentleman who wants to speak to small university audiences on constitutional reform? His set speech, by all accounts, is very boring and not even very reactionary.The gentleman is a former Tory MP (now an Ulster Unionist), but he has a reputation as a bit of a rebel in the Tory ranks. He was one of the first Tories to vote against capital punishment. He has always been sceptical about Britain’s independent nuclear weapons.In 1974, in the middle of an election campaign, he suddenly resigned his Tory candidature and urged people to vote Labour because he was opposed to the Common Market!With such a record, as I say, why should anyone want to discriminate against the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell MP?No one suggests that people should be stopped from speaking just because they are Tories. Surely, socialist students should leave this old gentleman alone.Such is the argument being voiced by the Federation of Conservative Students, whose leadership has just been disbanded by Norman Tebbit because it is too right wing!The FCS are hawking old Enoch round the universities, demanding for him free speech, and playing on his “fine record” as a “distinguished parliamentarian”.In truth, however, there is only one reason why Enoch Powell is popular with the FCS leaders. They like him not for his “maverick” views on capital punishment, Europe or defence. Indeed, they try to stop him mentioning any of these matters.Quite accurately they have singled out the one issue which has made Enoch Powell famous – the issue which he himself has pushed to the fore unceasingly for the last 18 years – the issue of race.At the start of his political career, in times when it seemed that the system he loves, capitalism, appeared to be working, Powell never expressed any interest in race or immigration.During the big boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s when there seemed no end to permanent economic growth, and when black people poured into the country, free of all immigration control, to staff the lower reaches of the burgeoning industries and services, Powell, who represented Wolverhampton, a town of heavy immigration, uttered not a single racialist murmur.When the Tory government finally imposed some controls on citizens of the Commonwealth, Powell supported them. But as minister of health (1960-1963), he sponsored schemes for recruiting black nurses and ancillary hospital workers in the West Indies, especially in Barbados.It was the decline of the capitalist boom which sparked off Powell’s innate racialism. In 1968, spurred by the then Labour government’s capitulation to racialist pressure to introduce special and entirely unnecessary immigration controls on East African Asians, Powell went to Birmingham to deliver a speech which reeked of racialist hate against the black minority. He used the foulest racialist language, referring to black children as “grinning picaninnies”.He gave full vent to all the crudest racialist stereotypes, linking people’s propensity to crime, fecklessness and disorder to the colour of their skins and their countries of origin. He predicted in the most colourful phrases a race war unless the numbers of blacks were cut down.The response was devastating. Powell touched a deep racialist nerve, not just in his own class but in the working class as well. London dockers went on strike and marched to parliament calling for “Enoch for Prime Minister”. All over the country racialists, who until then had felt something shameful about abusing immigrants, shed their inhibitions.Although Powell was promptly sacked by Tory leader Heath from the shadow cabinet, his speech led to a great wave of suddenly respectable racialist propaganda. Much of this found its way, through the post, to Powell’s house. He boasted of “sackfuls of mail” which filled his basement. His boast was soon to turn against him. When the Sunday Times (then a newspaper of some repute) branded his speeches racialist, Powell sued for libel.The Sunday Times won a court order demanding that all the letters sent to Powell be handed over to them. They argued that these letters might prove the real, racialist nature of the support which Powell had stirred up. Almost at once, before handing over the letters, Powell dropped the action.Since then, he has never objected to the word racialist. Indeed, he has seemed to revel in his racialist reputation. Again and again over the last 18 years, every time the relationship between the black and white communities was rocked by some crisis, Powell has intervened to stoke up the flames.None of his monstrous predictions in 1968 have come true. Yet he has persisted with the same racist demagogy, hurling insult after insult at black people.His demands have been unclear, but consistent. First, he demanded more effective immigration control. When he got some more controls (as in the infamous British Nationality Act of 1971) he demanded more. He would not rest, he said, until all black people (including families of people already here) were banned from entry.Gradually, this was conceded. In the 1970s, black immigration into this country was virtually stopped. When there was no more juice in that campaign, Powell turned his attention to the people already here, arguing with greater and greater force that they must be got out of the country if the apocalypse was to be avoided.This logic drove him on, inevitably, to a call for compulsory repatriation. In a speech and a series of articles in 1985, he outlined his plan for a “repatriation programme” which must cut down the black population by a huge percentage.Since Powell’s own figures show that the black population is growing by about a hundred thousand a year (at the least) this means that every ten years, under his programme, a million black people must be “got back” to the so-called “countries of origin” (though of course many were born here, and know no other country)."
} |
{
"content": "There is no other way in which this could be carried out except by the cattle truck. Mass expulsions of people because of their race harks directly back to Fascist Germany, Fascist Austria, Fascist Poland, Fascist France, shortly before and during the last world war. “Expel them to save us from the holocaust of racial violence!” was the cry. The result was a racial holocaust on an unimaginable scale – the greatest atrocity in world history.This is the reality behind the apparently friendly face which is being introduced on the campuses by your friendly new storm-troopers from the FCS. It is because of his record on the race issue that the National Union of Students have included Enoch Powell on their list of speakers who should not be invited on any campus anywhere.This list is small. Apart from openly fascist organisations, for instance (who would be the first to put a stop to any free speech at all), it includes only Powell and a couple of spokesmen for the racist dictatorship in South Africa.The argument is simple. Most speech leads to action. Speech which does not lead to action is usually futile and irrelevant. Racialist speech leads to racialist action. Permitting racialist speech, therefore, is permitting racialist action – encouraging the hounding and victimisation of people because of the colour of their skin and the country of their birth, neither of which is a matter of choice for anyone.Thus there are occasions where tolerance of free speech can be tolerance of the very opposite.This is certainly the case with the Rt. Hon. Member for South Down – and the Federation of Conservative Students know that very well indeed. Top of the pageLast updated on 29 October 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootShirley, Shirley, quite contrary,how will your garden grow?(May 1981)From Socialist Review, 1981 : 5, May–June 1981, pp. 18–20.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The ‘old politics’ are dead, according to Shirley Williams. Meanwhile the new Social Democratic Party have attracted 40,000 members in less than six weeks. Paul Foot explores their politics and their appeal.No matter how often we blink our eyes in disbelief, the ridiculous reality is still there. A gang of four former Labour cabinet ministers, each one of them with deeply reactionary records both in government and outside, have broken from the Labour Party to present themselves as ‘a new force’ in British politics.Without spelling out a single policy, they have attracted 40,000 dues-paying members, a seventh of the total Labour Party membership. The public opinion polls put this party without a policy ahead of all others and come to the preposterous conclusion that if there were a general election tomorrow the new ‘social democratic party’ would be able to form a government!The mass appeal of this new party is not, I think, a mirage. It is here with us to stay for some time yet. This has nothing to do with the SDP’s policies, for it has none. As Dr David Owen blurted out to a questioner on the day of the SDP’s birth: ‘Look, love, if you want a manifesto, go and join one of the other parties’.No. The appeal is based, first, and most solidly, on freshness. The ‘old politics’, Shirley Williams ceaselessly tells us in her book, Politics is for People, are dead. By ‘old politics’ she means in particular the politics of Labour.In this, she is on strong ground. Three bouts of post-war Labour governments, two of them with huge majorities, (and two of them with Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins as senior ministers) are remembered without a trace of nostalgia. Who wants to go back to Wilson or Callaghan? They were backward, stale administrations whose few achievements in the field of social reform in the first blush of office were largely rubbed out by the slide into conformity.Yet there is another side to the new party’s appeal which appears to contradict this freshness. It is that the new partly appears ‘safe’. It will not do any thing drastic or revolutionary. It will not upset the balance of the ‘market’ or ‘the mixed economy’, about both of which Shirley Williams writes almost lyrically.‘The market’ she tells us (p46) ‘matches demand and supply better than the planners do. It responds more easily to changing fashions and needs. It is rather good at getting rid of unsuccessful enterprises.’There will be no nationalising or intervening from her, we can be sure!The limits for all Shirley Williams’ ‘new, radical policies’ are set by the forecasts of economists and the ebb and flow of booms and the slumps. In Chapter 4, How the World Has Changed, she abandons any responsibility for changing the rules which have brought about the recession. The ‘low or negative growth rate’ is there. It is inevitable. Anything that Shirley Williams can do must he within those boundaries.She toys for a moment with the possibility that the priorities of modern capitalism could be altered by tough economic controls. ‘The only initiative that could radically alter the world’s economic prospects’ she tells us (p. 65). ‘would be the recycling of the oil exporters’ surpluses as well as some of the currency reserves of the industrial countries, in effect the Brandt Commission’s proposals in their most radical form’.Yes, in its most radical moments, the Brandt Commission, which included such well-known revolutionary figures as Edward Heath, former Tory prime minister, and Willy Brandt, former German chancellor, argued that the only way to deal with the huge surpluses (OK word for profits) of the oil companies and the sheikdoms had amassed from the rise in oil prices was to ‘recycle’ (OK word for ‘direct’ or ‘force’) them to where they are really needed, to the starving millions for example.What does Mrs Williams think of this policy?‘Simply to state such proposals’ she goes on, ‘is to emphasise how improbable their adoption is, despite growing public understanding and support’.It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if we could get control of the economic resources and plan them so that the needy benefit and the rich were squeezed a little?But that is ‘improbable’ because it means mucking about with the market, and the profits which are its mainspring. So we have to accept a shrinking capitalism, the end of economic growth, huge oil profits, starving millions – we have to accept all these things and find political solutions in spite of them. From Chapter 4 onwards, these matters are referred to constantly as ‘external circumstances outlined in Chapter 4’ (p. 171) or ‘the changes described in Chapter 4’. (p. 178)What follows in terms of practical ‘radical’ politics, not surprisingly, is thin, if not pathetic. The only coherent philosophy is: ‘small is beautiful’.Shirley Williams argues that industry and trade unions have become obsessed by size, and that smaller units and smaller businesses might prove more successful. She has discovered that there have been more jobs created in America in small business than in large business, and concludes that it’s the job of a new radical government to give more help and encouragement to small businesses. The type of help and encouragement she advocates is rather similar to the proposals in Sir Geoffrey Howe’s last (‘radical’? ‘reforming’? ‘new’?) budget, which scooped Mrs Williams’ book by a few weeks.Sometimes. the proposals she advocates for smaller units are plain reactionary. For instance, she advocates greater use of labour rather than machines, in itself, quite regardless of the type of work which is to be done."
} |
{
"content": "She completely forsakes the traditional socialist attitude that, for the vast majority of work, which is dreary, soul-destroying work, machines which do the job are in themselves a blessing and are only a curse when they are used for profit to create unemployment and poverty. Control of the machines by people, instead of the other way round as demanded by capitalism, could result in a better life for everyone. Instead, Shirley Williams seriously proposes scrapping machines in favour of masses of people. And because she has also found out that smaller businesses use more labour per machine than do large businesses (usually because small businesses are less efficient, by the way, not more so) she concludes (again) that small are better than big.This is the main philosophical conclusion of her book. And of course it is quite fatuous. It is not the size of the enterprise which determines whether or not it is efficient or even quite pleasant to work for. It is its ownership, its dynamic, its organisation, its purpose. About all these things Shirley Williams has nothing to say, save to echo the conventional Liberal Party call for ‘more participation’ and ‘more democracy’.She lumps industry and finance, where no one in control is ever elected, together with the trade unions, whose control is based on election and choice, however slack and infrequent the elections are. She is for workers and management sharing in the control of their firms, and she seems to favour the basic proposals of the Bullock Report for power-sharing. Yet to the question: how to get even that degree of power-sharing in the teeth of the most hysterical and bitter opposition from the unelected and irresponsible employers? – she has no reply whatever. ‘Governments, corporate powers of industry and trade unions,’ she argues simply, ‘should devolve some of their power downwards.’ (my italics).No doubt they should. But what if they don’t? No reply. Once again, any question which might lead to confrontation is quickly side-stepped.The obsession with ‘safety’ dogs all Shirley Williams’ book, which is, by the way, a series of essays. Most of the essays were written at different times either for American university students or for the shadowy Policy Studies Institute which stepped in fast to sponsor Shirley Williams when she lost her seat in the 1979 general election.Her specific proposals are intended to span the gap between what Dr Owen has called the ‘caring tradition’ of the Labour Party, and the ‘market tradition’ of the Conservative Party. The ‘caring’ side includes a commitment to a wealth tax (which is more than Shirley Williams and the last Labour government could manage in five years) some very useful ideas about employing masses of people to improve older housing; and even a clear statement against all fee-paying education (which prospered so hugely during the last Labour government and Shirley Williams’ three years as education minister).To balance the ‘caring’, there is the usual call to sacrifice. She warns:‘The industrial countries have been wildly profligate in the booming post-war decades. Their governments and their peoples have enjoyed a material spree never paralleled before. Now, as the late Anthony Crosland said to Britain’s local authorities in 1977 [well, actually, he was dead in 1977, but Shirley Williams is as untidy with her facts as she is with her philosophy], the party is over.’There we have it. Shirley Williams and her new party represent radicalism and newness on the one hand, safety and caution on the other; the ‘caring’ of the Labour Party and the spirit of sacrifice usually associated with the Tories.The appeal is to all decent people who are fed up with the stick-in-the-mud approach of former Labour governments, who dislike the Thatcher Government’s meanness and class loyalty, but who are also nervous of anything drastic or immediate by way of reform. This, in the period of industrial quiescence in which we now live, is a very powerful appeal indeed.It is easy enough to scoff at the Gang of Four themselves, their own political heritage, their middle class origins, their careerism and their cant. But the appeal remains, and will not be shifted by ridicule.What can shift it is the argument which mounts up relentlessly against the likelihood of the SDP delivering even the most minor reforms. It is not just that their radicalism conflicts with their safeness; nor that their caring conflicts with their dedication to market forces. It is that such is the nature of the society we live in that when the two sets of opposites conflict, the former always loses; the latter always win.Shirley Williams knows all about the inherent inequalities in our society. She cites the figures, and she wants them changed. There is at least one reference in her book to the need for equality.But the figures of inequality describe more than something which is just ‘wrong’. They describe a power structure, in which a class of people control society’s wealth and therefore control society’s political power.We know this happens. We have all those Labour governments and all the efforts of Shirley Williams and her colleagues to prove it. They became ministers of the Crown. They cared about private education, but they did not move to end it. They cared about unemployment, but they presided over the doubling of it.Roy Jenkins cared about racialism, but he was in government when it increased beyond anything he could ever have expected. William Rogers was not in favour of juggernaut lorries, but while Minister of Transport he fought desperately to remove the few controls on them. The power of the people with properly lays down the law about what happens to all of us. And parliamentary democracy is too slender a connection with the masses seriously to disturb that power."
} |
{
"content": "When caring people get to government in the way Shirley Williams intends to do, they find their caring conflicts with the economic reality and their caring is always shelved. A government headed by the Gang of Four would no doubt include most of the ideas in this book in its manifesto. But because there is not the slightest sign of how they are to be carried out, not the slightest moment of doubt about the capacity of parliamentary government to turn back the tide of corporate power, we will not even get Mrs Williams’ wealth tax, her abolition of fee-paying schools, her full employment or her increased social services. We will not get her house improvements or her small power stations. But we will get her bombs, her incomes policy, her stronger Common Market, her increasingly hysterical calls for sacrifice. In other words, all her freshness, and radicalism will take us straight back to the fudged stale capitalism of the last Callaghan government: exactly in the opposite direction, that is, to the one where Shirley Williams is now pointing.There is an alternative; there is a new way of looking at politics. Shirley Williams knows it, and quite deliberately and shamefully refuses even to argue with it. After disposing quite easily with Russia and Russian-style Communists, she devotes a single sentence to ‘revolutionary romantics and Trotskyites’ who are‘Wedded to an idea of politics which has never been attained anywhere but which in theory might one day be achieved if only revolution could in some way be harnessed to the perfectibility of human beings’.Human nature will not have revolution! It will only put up with the continued stumbling of ‘caring’ politicians who serve the interests of property! ‘Human nature’ offers us the only hope for political advance, a mixture of half-hearted contradictions of the type voiced by Shirley Williams. Human nature demands sacrifice instead of growth; poverty instead of plenty. Human nature presents a social democratic party, peddling the failed dogmas of the Callaghan government as a ‘new radical alternative’.Shirley Williams makes much of a quotation from Immanuel Kant: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made’.She should make that the central slogan of her dynamic and radical appeal at the next general election. Top of the pageLast updated on 21 September 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWithout a paddle(March 1987)From Socialist Worker Review, No. 96, March 1987, pp. 15–17.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.What will the next Labour government (if elected) be like? What ideas will guide it and will they have any effect on its practice? Roy Hattersley’s new book entitled Choose Freedom is an attempt to explain his view of socialism and the future under Labour. Here Paul Foot reviews the book.*THE Sunday Times organised a Round The World Yacht Race in 1969. An unlikely entrant was one Donald Crowhurst, who left late and ill-equipped.Before he crossed the Atlantic, he realised that he was not going to make it round the world. He had neither the equipment nor the navigational skill. He was reluctant to return to jeering reporters, disappointed family and friends – so he hit on a compromise. He said he was going round the world when he wasn’t.He did in speech what he could not do in fact. For several weeks his brilliant reports of record-breaking sailing through the South Pacific hoodwinked the Sunday Times and everyone else. But as he realised he could never maintain the hoax once he got home, Crowhurst started to go mad. Eventually he walked off the end of his boat and drowned.There is something of the tragic story of Donald Crowhurst in this latest and much reviewed book [1] by the deputy leader of the Labour Party. Not long ago Labour leaders did not even bother to set out their basic socialist philosophy. The very idea was rather vulgar, and likely to put off voters. There was no question of beckoning people to socialism, or even to a new social order. All that was necessary was to show people that Labour had plans for a better, more prosperous Britain than had the Tories. Labour would usher in “a new Britain” or “get Britain back to work”. Ideological niceties were luxuries for cloisters or for sectarians.Then along came the SDP and Alliance to swipe 26 percent of the vote. The Alliance was very pragmatic – full of phrases about a prosperous new Britain and getting Britain back to work. It had hosts of top administrators and economists making detailed plans for every area of social policy.Roy Hattersley and many others like him found it was necessary to remind people of “the ideological foundation” on which Labour stood. Labour, he insists, is not a pragmatic party which just weaves a lot of policies together at election times. It is founded on ideas, and above all on one very simple idea: equality.To explain what he means Roy Hattersley goes back to the hero of his youth. He quotes again and again from the books of Professor R.H. Tawney. And well he might, for Tawney was a wonderful writer, who explained simple socialist ideas perhaps better than anyone else who ever wrote in the English language. Tawney’s great classic, Equality (1931), demolished the protests of capitalist supporters that private enterprise was a guarantor of freedom. “Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows,” he said.Equality of reward was the only real guarantee of freedom, since it ensured that all could equally develop their own characteristics and abilities. Those who wanted the grotesque inequalities of capitalism to continue really wanted the freedom to continue to exploit others, and therefore to limit the freedom of the vast majority.Roy Hattersley, who writes pretty well himself, rehearses these arguments (usually by quoting Tawney). He draws the line down from Tawney through the other theorists loosely described as right-wing Labour who have followed him.He singles out Hugh Gaitskell and Evan Durbin, friends and contemporaries who went into parliament in 1945; and Anthony Crosland, who wrote The Future of Socialism in the year (1956) that Gaitskell became leader of the Labour Party. All three, like Tawney, were intellectuals of outstanding ability. All urged the creation of a new social order founded on equality. None of them belonged to the left in the Labour Party, and for most of their lives engaged in furious argument with the left. They were ideological in that they believed in equality, but they never allowed their ideology to outrun what to them was practical. What was practical was tied to one firm mooring point: the election to parliament of a majority Labour government.Because their ideas were always firmly fixed on this reality, they were easier to read and more credible than their contemporaries on the left of the Labour Party, who drifted in the wide seas of rhetoric and Christian socialism where there was no mooring point. COMMON to all Roy Hattersley’s heroes was the notion of government control of the economy. They were impatient with shibboleths about nationalisation of all industry since it seemed to them irrelevant to the central issue: control.Thus Tawney, writing in 1931, took as his central theme the conversion of a political democracy in which the elected parliament of that democracy had control over the economy.Gaitskell, writing before the 1945 election, put this bluntly:“In a democratic country, the public must be the master of industry.”Durbin, who is normally thought of as very right wing indeed, went even further:“To the centralised control of a democratic community our livelihood and security must be submitted.”Crosland, writing in 1956, based his whole book on the necessity of elected Labour being in control of the economy.All this, for all those 25 years, was persuasive. The ideas struck a chord among millions of people for one basic reason. It seemed quite possible that a future Labour government would be able to seize economic control from the capitalists and create a more equal society. It seemed possible if only because it had not been tried. A road to socialism had been opened up by the franchise: the parliamentary road. Before a majority Labour government was elected (first in 1945) there was no proof of what it could or could not do."
} |
{
"content": "Thus Tawney, Gaitskell and Durbin, who wrote mainly before 1945, and, to a lesser extent (because he wrote after 1945) Crosland all seemed credible figures with something important to say. The credibility of their ideas depended on the possibility that they might be carried out.In the 30 years since Crosland’s book there have been two long periods of Labour government, which spanned most of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1966 a Labour government was elected with the highest percentage of the poll ever won by the Labour Party, and with a majority of nearly 100 seats over all other parties in the House of Commons in peacetime, full-employment conditions. Again in 1974 Labour came back to office with a majority, again in peacetime, and again when. there were comparatively (with today) few people out of work.There is no need for me to recite what happened to these governments. Roy Hattersley does it well enough.“On the elimination of poverty and the promotion of equality the evidence is categorical ... we have not become a more equal society. In the ten years since 1976 the number of families below the DHSS poverty line has steadily increased.”Quite true. And in the first three years of that ugly process Roy Hattersley was in the cabinet. This applies to all forms of equality, not just economic equality, as Hattersley again concedes:“The PSI study of 1984 showed that racial discrimination in employment was just as great as it had been before the Racial Discrimination Act was passed ten years earlier.”The same goes for the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act and all the efforts of Labour governments to pass equality through parliament. ROY HATTERSLEY is surprised by this.“If, as socialists believe, equality and liberty are indivisible, it first seems extraordinary that the extension of democracy has not produced a simultaneous increase in both conditions.”Extraordinary indeed. But why? The question must be answered. Hattersley has a shot at it from time to time in his book. For instance:“Society remains unequal and unfree largely because the privileged have held on to their privileges by exploiting their entrenched position.”But that is just a tautology. The rich remain rich because they have hung onto their riches. Later on he tries again:“The status of the City within our society demonstrates the ability of the rich and powerful to subvert even governments.”Here he gives a modest example, citing the commitment given by Tate and Lyle to the Labour government in 1976 that if it was allowed to take over Manbre and Garton (another sugar firm) it would not make any workers redundant. When the sackings followed hard on the commitment, complains Hattersley, who was in charge of these matters in the cabinet of the time, “the government did not possess the power to insist that the promise must be kept.”These are not, as they appear in this book, minor matters to be shrugged off in a sentence or two and left unexplained and undigested. For if it is true that the “rich and powerful” can “subvert” a Labour government and reverse that government’s intentions to make a more equal society, if it is true that such a government “does not possess the power” to bring the monopolists to heel, then the central mooring point on which the whole theory is based is kicked away.Everything Tawney, Crosland or Gaitskell wrote was credible only in so far as it could be put into effect by a Labour government. If a Labour government can’t put any of it into effect, the whole argument, including even the argument for equality, loses its force.In order to maintain the argument, therefore, the upholders of equality have to discover why the Labour governments have failed in the past, and seek a remedy for the future. If Hattersley is to convince people of the case for equality, he must also convince people that measures for a more equal society can be carried out by the next Labour government.His own line of argument demands that he analyse in depth why Labour (at least in 1974-9 and also, arguably, in 1964-70) ended up with a less equal, more unemployed and divided society than when it started. It demands that he explain how the “subversion” of past governments by the rich is going to be stopped next time; how a Labour government in the tradition which he claims to represent – Tawney, Gaitskell, Crosland, no more than that – will take control of the economy and rule supreme over the dark forces which subverted Labour governments in the past.That he will not and cannot do. If he was logical he would conclude from the past failures of Labour governments that the measures required next time must be stronger, more ruthless, more draconian. But he cannot proceed with that logic for two reasons. FIRST there is his immediate problem: to win the next general election. In an atmosphere created by the capitalist counterattack which he so effectively derides, in the stench of defeat and retreat, when labour at every level is paralysed by its enemies’ successes and by its own lack of confidence, Labour voters look less and less for drastic or draconian solutions. The rage is all for “safe” Labour, for “MPs in suits” who are deferential to their leader, their country and their Queen. So to win the next election the solutions must be soft, easy and nice to everyone.The second reason is more fundamental. It is that Hattersley himself is infected, as all his colleagues are, by the long years of defeat in government and humiliation in opposition. He does not really believe that any of the old remedies can work again, because he knows they did not work last time.An incident at the last Labour conference perfectly illustrates this mood. The old left wing warhorse Ian Mikardo made a speech in which he argued that as soon as Labour is elected it must impose rigid exchange controls, as it did in the past. He argued that if the Labour government lost control of the money in the country, it would lose control altogether."
} |
{
"content": "Roy Hattersley replied for the executive. He pooh-poohed the idea of exchange controls. “We all know they wouldn’t work, Mik,” he said. “After all, they didn’t last time.” His solution, therefore, was to abandon all controls and leave the money to the monetarists.In his political solutions he takes a huge step back from the very limited aspirations of the tradition from which he comes. He is far more reactionary even than Gaitskell and Crosland, let alone Tawney. In a key sentence, which is really the conclusion of the entire book, Hattersley writes:“In a more realistic age we have to limit our aspirations to curbing the City’s power and to directing its enthusiasms in a socially desirable direction.”This is the sentence which must be pitted against all the high-flown Tawneyite stuff about equality and a new social order at the beginning of the book. “In a more realistic age” – he means by that an age of consistent victories of British capital over British labour. “We have to limit our aspirations to curbing the City’s power” – how much lower can aspirations fall? And finally, magnificently, he pledges himself “to directing the City’s enthusiasms in a socially desirable direction”.What is the City’s main, indeed its only, enthusiasm? It is, as Roy Hattersley knows perfectly well, to make money for a handful of people. And how does it do that? By gambling in other people’s robbed labour. The very notion “socially desirable” is hostile to everything for which the City of London stands. Yet Roy Hattersley limits his aspirations for the next five years to “directing its enthusiasms” in the direction to which all its enthusiasms are, by its very nature, utterly opposed.This policy is flanked by little else: a murmur about slightly higher taxes for the rich; another National Investment Bank with far less powers even than the ones which were so humiliated in the past; a slightly tougher mergers and monopolies policy which would put the state of the law on such matters rather to the right of where Roy Hattersley, Consumer Affairs Minister, left it in the late 1970s.He has cast away the very central plank of the political platform which he says he represents. When Tawney, Gaitskell, Durbin and Crosland wrote about equality, their words had some meaning because they all believed they would, as Labour ministers, get control of the economy. Their arguments, therefore, had some strength and resonance. Roy Hattersley does not believe he can get control of the economy. He still believes in the egalitarian ideas of his youth. He wants a more equal society.Like Donald Crowhurst he knows he must get round the world. But also, like Crowhurst, he knows he cannot. He has not got the equipment. He is at the mercy of the wind and the tides. So, like Crowhurst, he solves his problem by saying he will do it when he knows he cannot. Crowhurst managed to delude a lot of experts for quite a long time. Perhaps that was because no one had ever tried the trick before.Hattersley is entirely unconvincing. His long passages about equality, coupled with a rhetorical appeal at the end of the book to “recapture the spirit of 1945” are just so much Utopian waffle. He is exposed even before he embarks on what he knows is an impossible journey.At least Crowhurst had the decency to commit suicide rather than be publicly rumbled. I doubt whether Roy Hattersley will go that far. Note1. Roy Hattersley, Choose Freedom, Michael Joseph £12.95 Top of the pageLast updated on 30 October 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootChristmas Crackers(December 1993)From Socialist Review, No.170, December 1993, p.20.Copyright © 1993 Socialist ReviewDownloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Easily my number one favourite book this year was Christopher Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution which I found in Chicago the previous summer. The beauty of the book is not just that it illuminates Milton’s great poems with his enthusiasm for the revolution, but that it brings to life the poet’s political commitment before he even became a poet. His Defence of the People of England is as powerful a defence of what went on in the 1640s as anything ever said or written. ‘You offer an additional reason for your opposition,’ he scoffed at an opponent, ‘things would seem turned upside down. This would be a welcome change, for it would be the end of mankind if the worst situations were unalterable.’ Number two was Tom Bower’s Tiny Rowland, a meticulous detailed, tremendously readable account of quite incredible skulduggery in high places and the third, if I’m honest, was Alan Clark’s Diaries, if only because these Tories so rarely tell the truth about what they feel for each other. Clark’s best story tells how he and Jonathan Aitken reacted when Michael Mates (a fellow back bencher) supported Heseltine against Thatcher. They leaked Mates’s defence business interests to Labour MP Tam Dalyell. Mates was exposed and humbled and the two naughty boys sniggered all the way home to Mother. These are the people who boast all the time of their loyalty. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWhy the world is eating less(21 July 1990)From Socialist Worker, 21 July 1990.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 274–276.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.In the Independent newspaper I read the following headline: World Appetite For Grain Still Fading. I expected the article under it to be about diet; about the shifting food fads of the kind of people who read the Independent.Perhaps some homeopathic doctor has been working on the consciences of the rich and persuading them to eat less grain so that there can be more for the poor.Indeed, I recall as a child in a rich home being persuaded by a stern nurse to eat everything on my plate. ‘Think of the starving millions,’ she would say, as though they benefited from my full stomach, or were insulted in some way by my leaving bits of gristle on the side of the plate.But no, this is not an article about diet. This is written by Lisa Vaughan, the Independent’s financial correspondent. Her main point is that ‘growth in world grain consumption may continue to slow this decade’.She produces figures from the International Wheat Council to show that the amount of bread consumed by the world’s population has hardly grown at all during the Glorious Eighties. Indeed, wheat consumption since 1982 has gone up by only 2.4 percent a year, while world population in the same period has gone up by just under 2 percent. BreadConsumption of coarse grain (maize, barley, rye, oats, etc.) has risen even slower than population – 1.3 percent to 1.9 percent.Now let’s go back to that headline, World Appetite For Grain Still Fading. Can it be that all over the world people are sick and tired of eating bread and are turning to a more tasty substitute?In the tortured language of the financial correspondent, Lisa Vaughan gives us the answer: ‘Instead of being driven by demographics, grain use is now primarily determined by financial restraints facing governments.’She quotes directly from the report of the International Wheat Council:Financial and economic factors are likely to remain the chief influence on grain usage for many years to come. Because of debt repayment or foreign exchange obstacles, many countries have been obliged to restrain grain imports even when prices are low.In plain English, what does this mean? It means that people are eating less because they are poor. It is not, as the Independent so coyly puts it, people’s appetite which is fading – on the contrary their appetite is growing.More and more people, especially children under the age of five, are dying of starvation. Their appetite is growing as rapidly as the capacity of the rich farmers of the world to produce the food they need to keep them alive. It is not their appetite but their ability to pay for the grain which is fading. FloodTheir governments, even when food prices are low, are so stuffed up with debt imposed on them by multinational companies and bankers that they cannot buy the food to feed their people. And if they have the good fortune to produce any home-grown food, for the same reason, they must sell that to the rich!Over the last few weeks there has been a flood of reports and statistics about the widening gap between rich and poor. Like Lisa Vaughan, the authors all seem surprised; as though they have come across something which is clearly wrong and must instantly be put right. They dare not draw the conclusion which stares them in the face, namely that the cause of all this totally unnecessary distress and absurdity is their beloved market system.If ‘money talks’, as all these commentators insist it must, then the logic of a society cut into classes will drive all production towards the rich and away from the ever multiplying poor.It used to be fashionable to describe the result of all this as Doomsday. But when we discover the results already – when we discover, for instance, that 72 percent of the babies born in Peru last year are stunted or deformed because of the malnutrition of their parents – we realise that, for four fifths of the world’s population, Doomsday came long ago. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootClay Cross double-crossed(April 1974)From Socialist Worker, 13 April 1974.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.120-1.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.ELEVEN WORKERS at Clay Cross, Derbyshire, who risked their freedom and their livelihood in the fight against Heath’s Tory government, have been snubbed by the Labour government’s first month of office.They are the councillors who refused to implement the Tory Housing Finance Act. They saved the council tenants of their town thousands of pounds in unpaid rents. As a result, they were fined more than £7,000 by the Tories’ Housing Commissioner.The Labour Party Conference rallied to their support. Last October it passed the following amendment:‘Conference further agrees that upon the election of a Labour government, all penalties, financial and otherwise, should be removed retrospectively from councillors who have courageously refused to implement the Housing Finance Act, 1972.’The amendment was accepted by the national executive of the party, in the shape of Edward Short, deputy leader.Now Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister, tells the House of Commons that the fine must be paid! He says there will be no retrospective legislation to remove the penalties from the councillors.The Tories, who have been harassing the government on the Clay Cross issue for the past three weeks, are triumphant. They have won a notable victory over their hated enemies in Clay Cross.Why is it that Wilson, Short and the seven other members of Labour’s national executive who are in the government have so blatantly ignored their party’s democratic decisions?One answer can be found in a recent book, Socialism Now, by Anthony Crosland, now Environment Minister, who first insisted that the Clay Cross surcharge would not be paid out of public funds.Crosland wrote:‘Even the rule of law is challenged by some Labour councillors and trade unionists, though historically, and let no socialist ever forget this, the law has been the means by which the weak obtained redress against the strong.’The law, Crosland argues, is neutral. Labour governments achieve reforms through neutral laws. So they must respect the law above all else.But the law is not neutral. The history of the working class movement over the last 150 years shows the opposite. From the hanging of the Luddites to the persecution of the Chartists to the imprisonment and execution of militants and trade unionists all the way down to the Shrewsbury pickets trial in 1973, the story is one of the law being used to protect the people who own property from the people who produce it.The class which controls property controls the law. 86 percent of the judges, who are not elected, were educated at public school.The entire legal profession is drawn almost exclusively from one class. That class uses its laws for its own purposes. If necessary, as with the recent House of Lords decision on the Immigration Act, it will make law retrospective. In that case, it referred the law back to ‘catch’ illegal immigrants who came in legally before the Act was passed.The Tories make laws, reverse laws, ignore laws, make laws retrospective to protect their property and increase it at the expense of the workers.Labour, on the other hand, respects the law above all other considerations. Its own supporters, its fighters and its martyrs must suffer in the interests of a ‘neutral’ law which imposed the suffering in the first place.Labour behaves in this ridiculous way because its leaders hate the idea of class struggle.Crosland likes to imagine that capitalist society can be checked and changed by well educated Labour ministers giving orders to well-educated civil servants and laying down laws to be carried out by well educated judges.So he and those who think like him have to order their supporters to obey those judges and those civil servants. Any revolt against the law or the civil servants has to be suppressed.As each revolt is suppressed, so the class power of the institutions grow greater until it snuffs out the Labour politicians themselves.In the interests of gradual, legal, constitutional reform, Crosland and his henchmen are digging graves for reform and for themselves.The stand of the 11 councillors at Clay Cross represented the last embers of organised resistance to capitalism within the British Labour Party. The embers have now been doused – by the Labour leaders. We must build a new fire with entirely different fuel. Top of the pageLast updated on 17.1.2005"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootBirth of our power(November 1992)From Socialist Review, No.158, November 1992, pp.6-8.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The pit closures demonstrate the madness of a market driven by profit, while millions go cold and hungry. Paul Foot argues that the only solution to the chaos lies in a different sort of societyAll through the summer, so he tells us, The Rt Hon Michael Heseltine PC MP ‘agonised’ about a problem. He could identify the problem in three monosyllables; too much coal. There was too much coal at the pitheads and too much coal at the power stations. It was beginning to encroach like a vile black plague into the delightful countryside of the type where Mrs Heseltine is inclined to hunt. Obviously this was wasteful and something should be done about it.After a final few days climactic agonising Mr Heseltine came to his lonely decision. Coal mining should cease, preferably altogether. That, he calculated, was the only realistic way to stop the surplus coal menace.Heseltine’s ancestors were South Wales coal merchants, so he knows a bit about the industry. But his thinking on the subject is dominated not so much by his experience as by his belief in the ‘market’. The ‘market’, he believes, is the best way to match what people make to what they need. If nobody needs coal, he calculates, they will not buy it. And if they don’t buy it what on earth is the point of producing it?Let us test that argument against the facts about power supply. With one exception (Drax) every one of the coal fired power stations in Britain is producing less electricity than a year ago. Even Drax is producing at only 75 percent capacity. Every electricity company is distributing less electricity than a year ago.Are people turning to an alternative? No, they are not. Less gas is being distributed too. Are people saturated with heat and light? Are old people, for instance, sweating so much in their homes at the start of winter that they are turning off the heat? Are factories and offices going at such full blast that they are switching off the lights and the machinery? Exactly the opposite. At a time when there is a glut of power capacity, the need for heat and light has never been greater. Miners and power workers are sacked while the old and poor freeze in their homes and yearn for jobs which would drive the factories and light the offices.There is a very simple solution to the problem which tortures Mr Heseltine so. Coal could be given away to the pensioners. Power prices could be brought down especially for the unemployed. Hey presto! Cold people would be warm again and the black threat to Mrs Heseltine’s hunting grounds would be removed in a trice!But no. The market insists that before anyone can get hold of any of these surplus services they must pay the market price. That puts flight at once to the notion that the market matches production with need. For in a society like ours where there are a few rich people, many poor people and some others in the middle, the ‘symmetry’ of the market is twisted and corrupted into the opposite of symmetry. Things are made which are not needed; things that are needed are not made; and even when things are produced which are needed, like coal and power, they go to waste because by the laws of the market there are not enough people with enough money to whom those goods can be sold.Thus the market system which pretends to balance what is produced with what is needed becomes just a mechanism to further extend the imbalances and inequalities which led to its corruption in the first place. NOTHING demonstrates the crude class nature of the market more sharply than the recent developments in the power industry. For 40 years after the war Tories everywhere were infuriated whenever they turned on a light. The light came on, it worked, it served its purpose, and the electricity industry everywhere made a handsome surplus. What enraged the Tories was that no one in their class made a direct profit from it. The profit went back into the industry, which was publicly owned. The same applied to electricity’s main competitor, gas, and to water. The ultimate achievement of the Thatcher experiment in pure free enterprise – the crock of gold at the end of rainbow for innumerable Thatcherite yuppies – was the privatisation of all three utilities.Aeons of parliamentary time were taken up with complicated bills to restore these industries to private enterprise. Millionaire accountants like Cecil Parkinson and John Wakeham, both since ennobled, wallowed in the rhetoric of ‘setting the utilities free’. Nearly half a billion pounds was doled out to stockbrokers, merchant bankers, city solicitors, estate agents and public relations mandarins to ‘advise’ the ministers and the new private companies.What was the result? The old public gas monopoly was turned into a new private gas monopoly. Electricity generation was carefully parcelled out to two huge monopolies, Power-Gen and National Power. The 12 public electricity distribution companies were transformed into 12 private electricity distribution companies, run by exactly the same people and in exactly the same way as before. The regional public water companies with monopoly franchises to supply water in their areas have been changed completely into private regional water companies with monopoly franchises to supply water in their areas. Prices of all these commodities have risen almost exactly at the same pace as in the past."
} |
{
"content": "The only difference is that the new monopolies are not answerable to any elected authority and provide the most lavish largesse for their top executives and shareholders. John Baker, a bureaucrat who ran the CEGB at £76,000 a year is now an ‘entrepreneur’ who runs National Power for £347,911 a year, plus share options. In the first full year of trading the electricity companies paid out more than £300 million in dividends to private individuals, funds, trusts and banks. Almost at once the market went into another spasm of greed. The new companies, using special powers given to them by Parkinson and Wake-ham (powers which had been specifically denied to the old nationalised companies) started to fund new gas fired power stations. The chief effect of this ‘dash for gas’ was to increase the overcapacity of power supply by a fantastic 25 percent.Was the purpose to make electricity cheaper? All the evidence suggests that the new gas fired electricity will be more expensive than the coal fired kind in the short term and much more expensive in the long term. How, in this disciplined and consumer conscious market, can billions of pounds be spent on increasing power, when there is apparently too much of it already, and into the bargain make it more expensive?First, because the investors in private electricity want to collect a dividend from their share in the new gas stations, there is no dividend from nationalised coal. Secondly, the gas fired stations provide the new power vampires with a source of power supply where the unions are not half as strong as in the pits. So the market works against its own logic, increasing overcapacity and raising prices, solely in order to shift the balance of the fight against the workers.This is also the only explanation for the greatest absurdity of all in the privatised power market; the subsidy for the nuclear industry. If the coal industry had the £1.3 billion subsidy dished out by the government for its unprofitable and dangerous nuclear power stations, coal could be given away free, delivered free and in abundance to every power station and every home, and still make a profit.Why does a free market government dish out such huge handouts to an industry which produces higher prices and which will, as the US developers of nuclear power have discovered, never make a profit for everyone? The answer is that it provides a source of power where the unions are weak and the workers regimented by secrecy laws and an internal police force. All the realities of the ‘market’ contradict the claims made for it. All expose its only purpose; to enrich the rich and to ensure where possible that that enrichment is not spoiled by organised trade unions. IN THE LAST FEW months the last of the claims for the free market has also been exposed. In 1989 Nicholas Ridley, the Tory who dreamed up Thatcher’s highly successful plans to break the unions in steel and coal, boasted that during his time in office throughout the 1980s the free market had worked. The average family in Britain had increased its standard of living. This was due, he said, to free enterprise as promoted by the Tories.Now Ridley says exactly the opposite. ‘Poor people are losing their jobs,’ he moans on television. The great free marketeer casts around desperately for an alternative economic strategy – low interest rates, perhaps even a little government investment. Ridley’s lament is taken up with much more enthusiasm by the forgotten Keynesians of the 1980s.Keynes had a brilliant solution to the free market. He identified the market’s problem as the gap between what people get in wages and the prices they pay. Why not, urged Keynes, employ a lot of people making things they couldn’t buy – like schools and hospitals and weapons? Why not, he asked satirically, pay people to dig holes and fill them in again? The wages they were paid would fill the crucial gap! Capitalism’s problems could be solved by a lot of well meaning and intelligent economists (like John Maynard Keynes) in high office!These views electrified the Labour Party. The three Labour governments after the war based their policies on Keynesian ideas. Each of them ran up against the same problem; rich people were not prepared to pay the taxes for the necessary public works. A mighty class revolt stopped the policy in its tracks. Each successive Labour government achieved less than its predecessor and Keynesianism was discredited.In the Thatcher years the Keynesians were out of fashion. Now they are staggering into the light again; William Kegan of the Observer, Wynne Godley, the Cambridge economist, even Governor Bill Clinton. Spend on public services, they all say. Build up the infrastructure. In the wake of the terrible disaster that was Thatcherite free enterprise some of them get a hearing. In general they are met with the same despair which greets the free marketeers, the same political hunger for an alternative which has not so obviously failed. LISTENING on the evening of Black Wednesday to Labour Party leaders stammering their replies to That Awful Question – what would you do instead? – I couldn’t help remembering the famous Sidney Webb phrase which still, as far as I know, appears on Labour Party cards. ‘The common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.’ The problem with the free market and the Keynesian solution to it is that all economic activity is owned and controlled by a small class whose only purpose is to enrich itself at the expense of everyone else. There is absolutely no ‘solution’ as long as that control continues.There can be no social solution to the anti-social problems of an anti-social system unless die economy is owned and controlled by society. How can an economy be planned? How can a government even decide on priorities of production unless it owns and controls that production?"
} |
{
"content": "These were the ideas which convinced so many people in the first half of this century about the case for socialism. In the second half of the century that case has taken some hard knocks. The Labour governments in which so many socialist hopes were invested strengthened capitalism. In Russia a society calling itself socialist was increasingly exposed as a monstrous tyranny, where the workers were exploited every bit as cruelly as anywhere else.Socialism got a bad name. Labourites and Stalinists defined their socialism only in terms of state control and a planned economy. They cut from socialism its essence, its control from below and its accountability to working class democracy. The liberating and revolutionary element of socialism is its ability to unleash and mobilise all the human energies which a class society cramps and corrupts. Without that element ‘socialism’ was no better than what George Orwell called ‘a mean state capitalism with the grab motive left intact.’The only socialists who survived the collapse of Stalinism and the cretinism of Labour were those of us who opposed and exposed both and linked our socialism inextricably to the struggle for it. For us socialism was not some paradise or Utopia, distant and unimaginable. The seeds of the new society were being sown all the time before our eyes, in the struggle against the old one.When that struggle is weak and low, so is the appeal of socialism. But when, as so miraculously in the last few weeks, the apathy and despondency of the people at the rough end of society are suddenly dispelled, when masses of workers start talking of their anger, their hopes and dreams, then That Awful Question comes again; what would you do instead? Our answer is the same as ever; the same workers’ power which can win a strike or stop a law can seize control of the means of production, distribution and exchange and, by planning them, run society to the advantage of the many, not the few.What seemed idealistic and preposterous only a few weeks ago suddenly doesn’t seem so unlikely. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootFor law, read class(April 1978)From Socialist Review, No. 1, April 1978, pp. 23–24.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The Politics of the JudiciaryJ.A.G. GriffithFontana £1.25‘DENNING HITS AT STRIKERS LEGAL BACKING’ shouts the main headline on page 2 of my Daily Telegraph this morning (March 3). Lord Denning (who told a reporter the other day that he normally buys the Sunday Telegraph rather than the Sunday Times ‘because it is cheaper’) is Master of the Rolls, the second most important judge in the country. He is long past the age when most working people retire, but he still gets £22,000 from the taxpayer. He is widely regarded in the legal profession as a ‘bit of a boy’ for some of his ‘unconventional judgements’. But when it comes to the important things in life, Lord Denning is not at all unconventional.He hates strikes, he regards the legal immunity for strikers which has existed on and off since 1906 as a scandal. He would love to be able to put strikers where he believes they ought to be – in prison. And he is not afraid to say so – on this occasion on his inauguration as President of the Holdsworth Club, which is the law society of Birmingham University. As is usual on such occasions Lord Denning made it clear that his views as President of the Holdsworth Society would never, in any circumstances, influence him as a judge from faithfully administering the law which with he so passionately disagreed.Lord Denning has been President of a lot of other things in his time. In 1972, he was chairman of the Marriage Guidance Council. He chose his chairman’s address that year to make a scurrilous attack on Bernadette Devlin, then MP for Mid-Ulster. The noble Lord has nothing against Bernadette’s politics, of course, (judges don’t have political views). What annoyed him about Miss Devlin was that she was about to give birth to a child which had been conceived out of wedlock! The ‘fabric of society’ was being ‘ripped apart’, Lord Denning mused, when elected representatives started getting themselves in the family way, and then openly admitting it right out loud, like an usher farting in court!The judges are not automatons or neuters as they sometimes like to pretend. They are men; men with ideas and prejudices just like anyone else. What sort of men are they? Lord Justice Lawton, who started his career at the bar by joining the politically neutral British Union of Fascists, said in the Riddell lecture in 1975: ‘Judges are drawn from all ranks of society’.By this the Lord Justice meant, of course, that you will find judges who went to many different schools: not just Eton, that is, but Harrow, Winchester and even Repton. Not all went to Oxford or Cambridge either. A few even went to Leeds University, or Birmingham or Manchester. There’s a sprinkling of the nouveaux riches on the bench along with the aristocrats. And that, as far as Lord Justice Lawton is concerned, makes up ‘all ranks of society’. ‘Society’ as far as he is concerned, can’t possibly be said to include the offal and dregs some of whom appear before him from time to time in the courts.All judges, even the ten per cent who didn’t go to public school, are lawyers. That means that they have all passed through the peculiarly constipated education which law affords. They have all been barristers, that is they have ‘done their time’ in chambers, which is still impossible for anyone without substantial private means. They have all ‘eaten their dinners’ and solemnly performed (until it seems almost natural) in the bizarre ceremonial of the Inns of Court. Their class origins and ideas have been nurtured in the sealed hothouse of the British legal system. They are stronger-rooted and more ostentatious than in any other section of the British oligarchy.If there is anyone left who still believes that the judges are ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’, John Griffith’s book will open their eyes. He has collected together a body of case law which proves beyond any shadow of doubt the heavy bias of the judiciary in every part of the law. When the government passes laws which threaten property-owners, the judges go to every length to fight for ‘the right of the individual’. When the government pass laws to keep out immigrants, the illegal immigrant has to prove he is not guilty before he can be released. When squatters claim that their eviction means homelessness and despair for their children, the judges (Lord Denning in particular) declare that that has ‘nothing to do with law’. Yet when prostitutes or editors of radical papers come before the courts on a non-existent charge (’conspiracy to public morals’), the judges make up the charge, and find the defendants guilty on it, in order, as one Law Lord put it, ‘to uphold the moral welfare of the state’. In perhaps the most impressive section of book, John Griffith compares the treatment of expelled students and expelled union members. In both cases, he points out, people have, been expelled or dismissed in a way which could threaten their livelihood.Yet the existing laws, and the judges’ conception of ‘natural justice’ is stained out of all recognition in order both to uphold the dismissal of students and to annul the dismissal of trade unionists by their union. ‘Why’ asks John Griffith ‘is the expulsion of the union member almost always set aside, and that of the student almost always upheld? The answer lies in the general attitude of the judiciary ...’ Yes, the ‘general attitude’, which supports the discipline of the headmaster or the board of governors, who curb the spirit of protest or rebellion or rule-breaking, but detests the discipline of the trade union, which threatens the property of employers and shareholders."
} |
{
"content": "The bias of the judiciary is not changing for the better. John Griffith has not selected a lot of cases from the ‘bad old days’ when judges were monsters, and everyone knew it. Almost all his cases, including some very recent ones indeed, come from the ‘bad new days’ when the judges are monsters, but very few people realise it.The trend, he points out almost incidentally, is for judges to allow more power to the police, a wider use of conspiracy laws, a sharper interference with any progressive legislation by a Labour government, and a more overtly racialist oppression with black defendants or deportees.His little book all points in an obvious direction until its conclusion, which doesn’t point anywhere at all. He makes a desperate effort to free himself from the stigma of Marxism by asserting that the Marxist view of the law ‘takes us only some way along the road’.‘The function’ he explains ‘performed, by the judiciary in our society is not a peculiarly capitalist function. Some of its manifestations – such as its tenderness towards private property and its dislike of trade unions – may be traced to such a source. But its strong adherence to the maintenance of law and order, its distaste for minority opinions, demonstrations and protests, its indifference to the promotion of better race relations, its support of governmental secrecy and its concern for the preservation of the moral and social behaviour to which ills accustomed, these attitudes seem to derive from a different ideology.’This is the familiar, unedifying spectacle of the powerful left-wing academic, at the end of a painstaking work, seeking to wriggle off the Marxist hook by inventing a narrow view of Marxism, and dissociating himself from it. All ruling classes have survived by disguising their robbery with a way of thinking which extends far outside the field or the factory. Discipline in the streets and in the home, conformity of ideas, racialism, government secrecy and the ‘preservation of a moral and social order to which it is accustomed’. All these are not incidental but fundamental to the maintenance of capitalist robbery (as they were to the maintenance of any other system of robbery). That is all very clearly explained by Marx and Engels, and John Griffith’s characterisation of Marxism does no one any credit. He will (and has been) denounced as a Marxist anyway by the supporters of the judiciary. And rightly so. For his facts and research lead inexorably in that direction.His second major argument that the judiciary is not pursuing a capitalist role is that the judiciary in Russia and Eastern Europe are equally repressive and reactionary! There is another conclusion to that, which is that the systems of society in Britain and Western Europe have more in common with those in Eastern Europe in Russia than they have in conflict.The wriggling and squirming at the end of the book however has a more serious consequence. ‘Our freedoms’ writes John Griffith ‘depend on the willingness of the press, politicians and others to publicise the breach of those freedoms‘The Press, politicians and others’. These are the people to whom John Griffith would have us turn for the protection of our freedoms. Yet the Press, by and large, is wound into the same web as are the judges. So are most politicians. If our freedoms depended only on these, there would be less of them even then there are.The people who established the freedom of the press were the people who sold the Poor Man’s Guardian on the streets in the 1830s and established by sheer organisation and weight of numbers the right of papers to be published without the penal ‘stamp’. The people who broke the Combination laws were the weavers and stockingers who went on strike in spite of them. The people who established the right of procession were the hundreds of thousands of working people who marched with the Chartists. The people who wiped the Industrial Relations Act off the Statute book were the dockers and the printworkers who went on indefinite strike and forced the Industrial Relations Court to tree the five dockers arrested for contempt of the legislation. Yet this episode, because it ridiculed the ‘rule of law’, is described by John Griffith as a ‘calamity’. It wasn’t a calamity. It was a victory. The rule of law is the rule of the capitalist class, and the more it is ridiculed, the better.I mustn’t give the wrong impression, John Griffith’s book is first class. It is an unanswerable exposé of judicial hypocrisy and prejudice and it has made him a lot of powerful enemies. All socialists should read it. The waverings and wrigglings at the end are easy to spot, and easier to straighten. Top of the pageLast updated on 13 September 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootTUC’s own official part of plotsagainst left leaders(19 January 2002)From Socialist Worker, No.1783, 19 January 2002.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.SOCIALIST WORKER has seen vital documents about the involvement of the Trades Union Congress in the current elections to high office of the RMT rail union. They make it clear that at least one official at the TUC has been plotting with a right wing official of the RMT to improve the vote of right wing candidates and smear rivals from the left. The main documents are:A memo from Mike Power, campaigns officer at the TUC, to Mick Cash, the RMT officer at Watford. Cash is organising the campaign of Phil Bialyk, the centre-right candidate for general secretary of the RMT. The memo says, “Herewith my initial thoughts on why the Western Mail should interview Phil. As you will see there are many points to add and I’m far from an expert on the industry. But I think it is a useful outline from our conversation.” There follows a long screed on the experience and suitability for high office of Phil Bialyk.The Western Mail, which has a long ultra-reactionary tradition, is the only local daily paper that circulates in Bialyk’s area, South Wales. A summary of “notes from discussion on writing Phil’s election address, Monday 12 November”. This includes the passage: “We are talking about a massive potential threat from a fanatic who already holds a key post as AGS. He is therefore on the inside and the attack on him has to be more oblique.”This is followed by a series of demands, such as “we have to prevent a take-over of the union by extreme left-wing fundamentalists”. The phrase “left-wing fundamentalists” is repeated four more times in the document. The AGS referred to is RMT assistant general secretary Bob Crow, the left candidate for general secretary. A document headed Briefing, November 2001 leadership elections in the RMT.This is a classical witch-hunting document directed at Bob Crow and other left candidates. It lists in dreary detail Bob’s political associations, including his former membership of the Communist Party and the Socialist Labour Party.It even cites his appearance at Marxism, an annual event organised by the Socialist Workers Party and repeatedly addressed by many socialists outside the SWP. The final paragraph reads,“The main source of industrial unrest in Britain over recent years has been on the railways and in the post office.“Already the left have made gains in the main post office union. In addition, an unreconstructed Communist – Mark Serwotka – has become general secretary elect of the main civil service union, the PCS ... the direction of unions in these industries could spell trouble for the government.”These documents are similar to efforts in the past, including the work of organised right wing factions in the unions, with their supporters in big business and in mainstream newspapers like the Daily Mirror. Their purpose is not to enquire why the left is so strong in the unions or to argue the political case against them.It is simply to brand them as “extremists” and call for a vote against them. Some of the material in these documents was published last week in the Guardian Diary and London’s Evening Standard. The articles drew an immediate denial from TUC general secretary John Monks. He said the TUC was not in any way responsible for any of this material, and said it does not get involved in the elections of individual unions.Like Bob Crow, Mike Power is a former member of the Communist Party. Last Friday I put a call in to him at TUC headquarters, explained that I was ringing on behalf of Socialist Worker and asked for an explanation of the documents.He rang back immediately and explained that Mick Cash of the RMT was “an old mate of mine”. Cash, he said, had approached him for help and advice about the RMT elections, and he had readily offered both. He denied that he had written any of the main documents, but agreed that he had advised on tone and content. His story was that he, a junior TUC official, had been acting entirely on his own.He said he was “under the cosh” and facing disciplinary proceedings for his involvement with Cash, and was very sorry for the embarrassment he had caused John Monks. This meek explanation clashes sharply with the professionalism and firmness of the documents. If indeed Mike Power was acting entirely on own initiative, he was behaving in a truly reckless manner.A more probable explanation is that he was acting on a “need to know” basis. It is likely that he had a nod and a wink to go ahead on the understanding that, if any of his activities were exposed, the mandarins of the TUC would dive for cover and offer him up for sacrifice. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootNo time to make up(December 1998)From Socialist Review, No.225, December 1998, p.9.Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The call to forget the past may seem attractive, argues Paul Foot, but it means accepting that tyrants escape their crimes.From two parts of the world whose people have suffered horribly under recent tyrannies comes a plea for reconciliation, for ‘letting bygones be bygones’. In Chile, some workers protest about the arrest in London of the former dictator Pinochet. ‘We were just getting used to freedom and democracy after the long night of tyranny,’ runs their argument. ‘We don’t want to go back to confrontation in the streets. Pinochet is an old, sick man now. He can’t do any harm. Why can’t you let him go, and leave us in our new found social peace?’Similarly, there are black people in South Africa who plead to be allowed to forget the nightmare of apartheid and to bask in the new atmosphere of racial tolerance. This was the spirit behind Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose basic theme is that although the apartheid regime constantly resorted to the most ruthless racist oppression of the majority, it has been deposed; and now is the time to forgive, forget and build a new society founded on multiracialism and democracy.This approach appeals to many working class people, who have little or no property, are accustomed to combination and cooperation, and detest harassment. It seems both humane and sensible not to copy the oppressors by hounding and prosecuting them. The argument, however, is founded on a flaw. Essential to it is the notion that oppression is an ugly accident of history, a vile carbuncle on the smooth skin of democratic progress. The norm, runs the argument, is liberal democracy and human progress. Fascism or apartheid occur only occasionally, almost by mistake. It follows that to pick away at the ruins of such an unlikely sore is obsessive and sectarian behaviour which can only revive the sore and make it worse.The history of these tyrannies, however, tells us something very different. There is a pattern to them which reflects the central characteristic of the world we live in: that it is run by a small class for profit; and the source of that profit is the workers who produce the wealth. The class on top much prefers to make its profits without any nastiness from the masses it exploits. The rulers prefer to operate where the people choose their governments, and where everyone in society is subject to the rule of law. If people vote for their government, and are protected by the rule of law, they are much less likely to complain about their exploitation. Hence the ‘norm’ which seems to emerge from the history of the western democracies – a norm of elected governments and a set of laws which at any rate pretend to apply equally to everyone.The problem with this exploitative system, however, is that it does not proceed smoothly. It is subject to crises and slumps, which invariably lead to protests, riots and strikes from the workers. Much of this can be absorbed and tolerated, but every now and then, with surprising frequency, the class which runs the system decides it can no longer tolerate the freedoms it previously sponsored. The crisis grows too intense, the workers grow too strong, sometimes even the entire system is threatened with revolution. In such circumstances, the ruling class reaches for rulers ruthless enough to crush the democracy, and in doing so shatter to smithereens the very rule of law of which they boasted. Such rulers include Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany – and Pinochet in Chile.We now know that Pinochet’s 1973 coup, which overthrew an elected government, rounded up 70,000 of its supporters, burnt their books, raped the women, tortured and murdered at least 10,000 people, was planned in the dear old democratic US by an intelligence agency which was set up ostensibly to protect democracy. The reason for the coup was that investors in Chile had become sick and tired of laws which tried, usually unsuccessfully, to keep prices down. Low prices meant low profits, and low profits for any length of time were intolerable. In South Africa there never was a democracy. The only people who ever voted there were white. Black people had no vote and no civil rights, and could therefore be exploited in an atmosphere of the most revolting oppression.Such a pattern to the oppression exposes the absurdity of the ‘forgive and forget’ brigade. For if the savages who are called up to preside over the destruction of democracy, the mockery of the rule of law, and racist terror can get away with it, if they are never made to answer for their barbarism, let alone be punished for it, then the consequence is absolutely plain. They will do so again, and again and again, confident in the knowledge that if and when their tyrannies run out of steam or are overthrown, their successors will cover them in the milk of kindness, make them senators, put them up in the London Clinic and even allow them to delete their names from the catalogue of their atrocities.The mildest conciliators get trapped in their own argument. In Shelley’s Revolt of Islam the revolutionary forces finally corner the hated tyrant Othman. ‘Blood for blood!’ shout the angry crowd as they prepare to do him in. Laon, the beautiful young revolutionary leader (as Shelley imagined himself), eloquently persuades them, in the interests of human decency and fair play, to let the tyrant go. Off he goes, rallies new forces and returns to wipe out the revolution and burn Laon at the stake."
} |
{
"content": "Even more dramatically, the best scene in Bertolt Brecht’s play about the Paris Commune is an argument about whether the revolutionary Communards should march on Versailles and smash the remnants of the reactionary government there. No, no, say the idealist Communards. Why should we spill blood as the tyrants do? Yes, yes, says Brecht’s hero, for we are faced with a simple alternative – the bloody hand now or the severed hand later. In the counter-revolution led from Versailles 20,000 Communards were murdered. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootLibel Fund‘Please contribute toBookmarks appeal’(23 October 2003)From Socialist Worker, No.1874, 25 October 2003.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I AM asking all socialists and freethinkers to contribute to a libel appeal on behalf of the socialist bookshop Bookmarks. Bookmarks was sued by Quintin Hoare and Branca Magas, well known figures on the British left. They complained about an article written in 1993 and published in 1999 in the book The Balkans, Nationalism and Imperialism.Through the well known libel lawyers Carter-Ruck and Partners, Hoare and Magas complained about a passage in the book. No attempt was made by the defendants to justify what they had published. They pointed out that in the year before the writ was issued, the book sold less than 50 copies.They made a statement in open court apologising, and agreeing to pay the plaintiffs £1,500 damages each. It is a long tradition in our movement that political differences should not be subjected to libel actions, if only because such actions are likely to cost more in lawyers’ fees than any damage caused.In this case, the £3,000 paid in damages will certainly be dwarfed when Carter-Ruck ask for their costs – likely to be in the region of £10,000. Bookmarks of course have no access to that kind of money, so we are trying to raise as much as we can from well-wishers.Most Socialist Worker readers have gained a lot from Bookmarks, and I appeal to them to contribute to this appeal. Cheques should be made out to Bookmarks Libel Fund. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootUnited in battle for the class(26 May 1984)From Socialist Worker, 26 May 1984.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.One of the most exhilarating and exciting things about the miners’ strike (and there are plenty of those, as well as the holes in it) is the mobilisation of women.By all accounts, the march and rally of 10,000 women from mining communities all over Britain last Saturday was a most fantastic event.The women from the miners’ communities have not been confined to passive support, or to servicing the strike – they have been out on the picket lines.There was, as far as I can remember, none of this in 1972 or 1974. Then the movement for women’s liberation, which flowered in the 1970s, was in its infancy. As that movement grew, so two arguments sprung up on either side of it to blunt its influence and its growth.The first was that women’s place was in the home, looking after their men.This argument was not confined to the Daily Mail – it penetrated deep into the working class where solid, socialist men argued that the relationship between men and women in modern society was about right, that there was no oppression in it, and that any concern with women’s liberation was ‘bourgeois deviationism’. PoisonedThis attitude was quite strong in the National Union of Mineworkers. Arthur Scargill publicly defended the publishing of ‘pin-up’ women in his union journal, and in the process managed to get through a fair amount of sexist drivel.Arguments like the ones he used in that debate served to separate the struggle for the emancipation of women from the struggle for the emancipation of labour. Indeed they poisoned the labour movement at its very roots, by pretending that anyone can free themselves while they are condoning discrimination against others.The other argument seemed to be the opposite, but was in fact the reverse side of the same coin. This was that the central problem in society was the liberation of women, that all woes of modern life stemmed from the oppression of women by men, and that therefore the fundamental battle, far more important than any other, was for women to break the masculine chains which bound them.Obviously, they could only achieve this without men. Obviously, therefore, this cut out any class struggle, since there were even more men at work than there were women. So this argument too served to separate the struggle for women’s liberation from the struggle for workers’ liberation, to set one set of freedom-fighters in bitter battle against the other, and to weaken both.There was, throughout that time, a third argument. This was that the treatment of women in capitalist society was one of the most powerful indictments of it; that women were, plainly, worse off than men in society, and that this discrimination, whether in the workplace or the home, greatly assisted the class in power. RougherDiscrimination and sexism was widespread, even in the working class movement, and had unconditionally to be resisted.But the power to change society could not escape its fundamental economics, its class divisions. The power to change was rooted in the ability of workers to take their own decisions about the work they did, and the wealth they produced, and to act together.It followed from this that the most effective way to change not just wages and conditions, but also discrimination against women, was working class action.Much of this is being worked out before our eyes. The ‘keep women in the home’ brigade have been out in force, especially among the scabs. They have had a rougher time than ever before.The ‘ultras’ who believed only in women’s action, and who denounced the miners’ strike as ‘macho’, have been routed. The combination of the power of working class action and the organisation of women who are part of that struggle, has been electric.It has changed sexism and prejudice everywhere. I haven’t read everything Arthur Scargill said at the women’s rally in Barnsley, but I’m damned sure he didn’t speak up for pin-ups in his union magazine. Top of the pageLast updated on 5 October 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootOffensive to the bullies(5 April 1977)From Socialist Worker, No.1539, 5 April 1977, 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.“BLAIR GOES on offensive over trade unions”. The headline in the Times on Monday shouted out from the newsagent’s and I seized the papers eagerly.“Blair goes on offensive” seemed amazing enough, but on the trade union issue – well, at last, thank heavens, what a relief.Two days previously the Tories had let loose a great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over Labour’s promise to bring in a law to enforce trade union representation in any workplace where the majority of workers vote for it. This was a clear unequivocal pledge made by Blair himself at the 1995 Labour Party conference and repeated, a little shamefacedly, at the start of this election campaign.The pledge in no way makes up for the eight anti-union laws passed by the Tories since 1979. In no way does it provide the unions with legal backing for the sort of strength they have used in the past. But neither is it meaningless.The menace of derecognition which has swept through so much of industry leaves workers utterly defenceless.Where there is no union the Thatcherite chargehand who believes that by some divine right he is empowered to lord it over the workers reigns supreme.A trade union with proper negotiating rights enables the workers to collect together in places and at meetings from which the boss is excluded, and makes it far easier for them to discuss and take action to preserve not only their pay and conditions but their basic dignities as human beings. Come squawkingBlair’s 1995 pledge promised the force of law to such union organisation at the point of production. Passed into law, the proposal would enormously increase the confidence of workers and cut down the arrogance of the employers.When Thatcher shrieked that the “bully boys” would now be let off the leash, she was talking about shop stewards and convenors. But to every worker in the country the expression “bully boys” means only one thing: the new management autocrats.Why had Blair stuck to his pledge? Why had he not abandoned it with all the other pledges? No doubt because this one was the absolute minimum condition for the continued support of the trade unions. If Blair had dropped this small promise, he would have lost the union support he so badly needs.So now, as the right wing press sniffed an “issue” with which they could attack the Labour Party, as Thatcher had come squawking with anti-union hysteria into the election campaign, now precisely was the time for an “offensive” from the Labour leader in which he would stand up for the right to organise.Then I read Blair’s Times article. As the sentences unfolded, the headline seemed to stand on its head. Blair’s “offensive” was not against the Tory union bashers – it was against the unions.Blair pledges himself not to roll back Thatcher’s anti-union laws but to continue to uphold them. His government, he promised, would be the “most restrictive government against the unions in Europe”.Not a clause of Thatcher’s anti-union laws would be repealed. The “scenes” at Grunwick, Wapping and the miners’ strike – scenes in which workers fought against overwhelming odds for their unions and their jobs – would, he promised, “never be seen again in this country”.He did not (quite) renege on his promise, though he sought to water it down to zero. This is by far the most serious matter of the election campaign, and the whole trade union movement should unite to ensure that Blair sticks to what he said and introduces legal backing for workplace unionisation. Top of the pageLast updated on 12.2.2005"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootVision of a new world(May 1993)Review Article, Socialist Review, No.164, May 1993, p.20.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Frederick Engels’ revolutionary pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific has recently been reprinted. It can inspire a new generation of socialists, says Paul FootSocialism; Utopian and Scientific, price £2.95, is available from Bookmarks.When I first read this little book 32 years ago, the strongest force on the Marxist left was the Communist Party. I expect I read it very much as the Communists presented it. Its main message, I gathered, was that the French writers St Simon and Fourier and the British philanthropist Robert Owen were a lot of footling dreamers who just didn’t understand the basic point about socialism – that it was a science.Utopians were illusionists who dreamed of a better world. Marxists understood politics like chemists or biologists understood science. And the most wonderful thing about understanding the science of socialism was that it was bound to come.It was a bit of a shock to read the book again all those years later and find out that it says just about the opposite of what I remembered. All three ‘Utopians’, especially Fourier, are so brilliantly and enthusiastically presented that I longed to read more of them. None of the three turned out to be the vacuous dreamers I’d imagined. Engels, one of the least sectarian writers in all history, praises them to the skies for their powerful and forceful indictments of the divided societies of their time, and, in Owen’s case at any rate, for the communist alternative he proposed.If ‘Utopian’ just means dreamer or visionary, then no one was more Utopian than Frederick Engels. What about this for instance?‘The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now conies under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation.’That’s a vision of a new world, a better world, a world worth fighting for, a world to win. Engels’ socialist conviction didn’t just emerge, like a scientific discovery emerges, from observation and experiment. It arose from a deep sense of outrage at the miseries and exploitations of a society ‘where workers are in want of subsistence because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence.’But does ‘Utopia’ just mean a better society? No, it means what it says: ‘ou’ (Greek for not) ‘topia’ (Greek for place) – no place. The point about Utopia is that it doesn’t exist. It is a world of fantasy. Engels’ complaint about the Utopian socialists was that they were driven by ‘an “idea” existing somehow in eternity before the world was’. They compared their eternal idea of how society might be to what it is. Engels, by contrast, showed how society could be changed by understanding what it is.For the Utopians, then, ‘socialism conquers the world by virtue of its own power.’ This could happen at any time in history. The history of the Utopians circled around their idea. They had no conception of any historical development.All this changed with the ‘discovery’ of Karl Marx that the motive force of history was the clash between the class which had the property and those who hadn’t.Capitalism, the most modern class society, had for the first time developed productive forces so hugely that everyone in the world could share out what was produced. There was now no longer any need of class society. There could be a better society. That socialist society is not Utopian precisely because it is possible – it can be brought about.How did Marx discover this? Was it just because he was one of the most brilliant intellectuals who ever lived? Not at all. If he had lived at the time of St Simon or Fourier he could have been ten times the genius he was but he would not and could not have put forward his theory of class struggle. What enabled him to do so was the movement of the class struggle itself, from the first general strike, in Lyons in 1831, to the great uprisings of the British Chartists in 1839. These outbreaks of mass working class resistance ushered Marx’s theories onto the intellectual stage – not the other way round.What is the main point about socialism, therefore?‘Its task is no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism have of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.’The road to a new society passes straight through the old one. The seeds of the new society are sown in the struggle against the old one. This is essentially what ‘scientific’ socialism means. Engels talks later about the ‘inevitable downfall’ of capitalism. I find that a most unscientific conclusion. If socialism is scientifically inevitable, why fight for it?Engels’ main argument was with the idealists, the socialists who thought their ideas were more important than the real conditions and struggles of the less educated mob. His book concentrates so hard on showing that we cannot get to socialism through having an eternal idea that he devotes only a line or two of generalities on how we do get there.There are plenty of other books (most of them by Lenin) on that point. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a lively and quite beautifully written summary of Marx’s main economic ideas and where they come from. It is far more passionate than the most fanatical Utopian and far easier to understand than the simplest scientist. It’s also, perhaps most importantly, a powerful antidote to despair. If this best-selling expression of revolutionary confidence could be written in 1877, right in the middle of a downturn which lasted 40 years, who are we to complain of a miserable little blip which hasn’t lasted half as long? Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootReaching across the centuries(7 January 1989)From Socialist Worker, 7 January 1989.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 19–21.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The best thing about Christmas was Janet Suzman’s Othello on Channel 4. I have been a Shakespeare freak from a very young age, largely because I never did a Shakespeare play for any examination, and so could read the stuff (and speak it) for pleasure.For years and years I puzzled over Othello. I couldn’t understand why Iago was so keen to do him down. I read the conventional criticism, including a man called Bradley, who wailed on about a ‘tragic flaw’ in Othello’s character, which was mirrored by a ‘tragic flaw’ in Iago’s character. The whole play, said Bradley, was about jealousy. Othello was jealous of Desdemona, and Iago of Othello. Not very convincing. I always thought the play more haunting and overpowering than any other.One cold night about twelve years ago I spoke to a socialist meeting in Nottingham and stayed with a comrade who was interested in drama. The next day, as I was about to leave, he pressed into my hands a Pelican book called Shakespeare in a Changing World. I flicked through it as the train pulled out. It was written by people who were once Marxists or who might (at that time) admit to be Marxists, but on the whole were trying to avoid letting their readers know they were Marxists.I was about to put it down when I came across a chapter entitled Othello and the Dignity of Man by G.M. Matthews. PassionI got to know Geoffrey Matthews later. He was, for all too short a time, a friend and a teacher. I shared his passion for the revolutionary poet Shelley. Geoffrey read Shelley not as a dead poet but a living revolutionary, and so he understood him. He also read and enjoyed Shakespeare, not just as the greatest poet and dramatist of them all, but also as a creature of revolutionary times who took a deep interest in the world about him.Suddenly, I read two sentences which laid Othello bare.Iago hates Othello because he is a Moor. This irrational but powerful motive, underlying the obsessive intensity of his feeling and the improvised reasons with which he justifies it, continually presses up towards the surface of his language.Yes, but what of the ‘tragic flaw’ in Othello? Geoffrey explains:The theory is a nuisance because the potentialities of men are infinite and any number of potential ‘flaws’ can be found or invented to account for his downfall. Yet in all Shakespeare’s tragedies, except perhaps Macbeth, the determining ‘flaw’ is in society rather than in the hero’s supposed distance from perfection. AdulteryTragedy does not occur in Hamlet because the hero has a bad habit of not killing at once, but because the power of the Danish Court is founded on violence and adultery ...The ‘tragic flaw’ theory means that it is a punishable offence to be any particular kind of a man. Moreover it shifts the emphasis from men in conflict to the private mind.Othello all becomes very, very clear in this magnificent essay—but where to see it on stage? Othello is usually played by some fruity-voiced RADA graduate, rather apologetically blacked up. Extracts about racism, ‘human nature’ and prejudice are quietly shoved into the background.I don’t know if Janet Suzman ever read Geoffrey Matthews, but the two seemed to come together most miraculously in her production – which was devised especially for the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, and greeted with sustained delight there by packed audiences of every colour, night after night.Othello here is ‘rude of speech’ (though his language is magnificent). He is a South African black warrior marrying the daughter of a prominent white businessman. And Iago, though he recognises the Moor for a decent, generous, brave, open-hearted and friendly man, hates him with a consuming, irrational and all-devouring passion because he is a Moor.The play throws its passions and its problems through 400 years, and means something at last. It is also triumphant. Geoffrey Matthews wrote:All that Iago’s poison has achieved is an object that ‘poisons sight’: a bed on which a black man and a white woman, though they are dead, are embracing. Human dignity, the play says, is indivisible. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootPressPrivate parts(October 1992)From Socialist Review, No.157, October 1992, p.14.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.David Mellor’s resignation marks the latest in a line of scandals that have spurred the government to take measures to curb the press. Everyone hates the tabloids, says Paul Foot, but a law to stop them won’t workHorrified by disclosures in the newspapers about David Mellor and an actress, not to mention pictures of a near-naked Duchess of York, the government has resolved to ‘do something’ about the excesses of the press. The job itself has been farmed out to the Ministry of Heritage where the Secretary of State (and the man who masterminded John Major’s campaign for the Tory leadership) was the aforesaid David Mellor.This has caused some embarrassment so the new ‘Privacy Bill’ (or whatever else it is called) has been passed over to Mellor’s junior, an apparently ‘safe’ gentleman from the shires called Robert Key. As Key drafts his bill, he gets plenty of helpful advice from the Labour Party, whose front-bencher on these matters, Clive Soley, is writing his own bill to protect the general public from the ravages of the gutter press. Soley makes it clear that his aim is not the same as that of the government. Their bill will protect only the rich and famous; his bill will concentrate on protecting ordinary folk who are treated by the media like dirt.All these efforts are widely supported almost everywhere. Everyone hates the tabloid newspapers, especially the 12 million people who buy them every day. The capitalist press is rotten and corrupt. It breeds a specially nasty type of human rotweiler whose peculiar quality is to be as offensive as possible to anyone at all who might in some way assist towards ‘a good story’.It is this offensive behaviour – bursting into peoples’ houses to seize photographs of dead relatives; making up quotations; tapping phones, half-kidnapping children and generally trampling over people, that earns for editors and journalists such universal contempt. It seems obvious that the media do have too much power and that the more preposterous manifestations of that power need to be cut down by law.But what law? As soon as detailed proposals start to be spelt out, the doubts arise. Consider a law to protect privacy. Would it ban any photograph which had not been taken by permission? How would that apply to some of the great pictures – action pictures such as the man defying the tank in Tiananmen Square, or (from the sublime to the ridiculous) pictures of Fergie prancing with her financial adviser in a rich man’s garden? If no photographs are to be published unless they are taken with permission, the whole world would be a duller place. Certainly, the high and mighty (especially royalty) would much easier be able to maintain the consistency of their family values. If such a law is accompanied by a rider insisting that any without permission pictures be ‘in the public interest’, the question arises at once ‘what is in the public interest?’In a class society, privacy is likely to be defined as important peoples’ privacy; public interest as rich peoples’ interest. Even if the law states specifically that that must not be so, the law will be enforced, as it always is, on class lines. Such a law, then, leaves most of us worse informed and certainly less amused even than we are now.What about the other demand of the press reformers – a right of reply? Isn’t it obviously fair that anyone attacked in the press should have a right to put their own point of view in return? A law like that sounds simple. In fact it would be extraordinarily complex. How much has to be written about a person before he or she has a right to reply? Who decides in each instance whether the right stands or not? How should the reply be framed; how long should it be, what prominence should it have and is there a right of reply to the reply?Once again, the only certainty about the world we live in is that the answers will favour the people who least need a right of reply. The right of reply, whatever the wording of the law, would be used in practise further to shield the big businessmen, civil servants, bankers, bishops, lawyers, peers and spies whose activities are already kept almost secret from the world they rob. The rare instances where the media probe into the dirty work of the rich would be cut down still further by ruthless and prodigious use of the ‘right to reply’.Too often, well meaning busybody politicians (Charter 88 is a glorious example) seek to solve the problems of society by promulgating a law to curb the transgressors. The evidence, however, is overwhelming that the law itself is every bit as corrupted by class as are the media it would be seeking to correct. This is not to say that no reforming laws should be supported. A law designed wholly against the ruling class (like a bill to curb working hours, or a health and safety law) may indeed in practise be reduced to a shadow of what it was in theory, but it is still worth supporting, since it can do no harm and may do some good.But a law to curb the press will not work just one way, just against the moguls and the proprietors. It will work far more savagely against openly challenging and revolutionary papers like this one, and will even further restrict the few independent journalists who attempt to rip the veil away from the secret state and its paymasters.Can anything, therefore, be done about the vile standards and offensive behaviour of the media? Of course. These matters should be the permanent concern of the workers who work in the media and of those who read and watch the media. They should be discussed and acted on where discussion and action can have some effect."
} |
{
"content": "The trade unions in the media have always given far too low a priority to the content of what they produce. The ridiculously named Ethics Committee of the National Union of Journalists makes itself a permanent laughing stock by sitting in moral judgement over individual journalists, and castigating them for their transgressions. The unions in the media should combine to set up their own standards committee. They should appoint to it people whose judgements would have a wide measure of respect. Where they find against the media they should direct their fire on the people responsible – the proprietors – and punish them where they hurt most, in the pocket. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootStop press(February 1993)From Socialist Review, No.161, February 1993, pp.20-21.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Nothing can be more discordant than the noise of editors and proprietors of British newspapers howling in unison about their dedication to the freedom of the press. A group of people more dedicated than any other in the country to the distortion and corruption of the truth cover themselves with glory for their truth telling. Loaded down with bias and deceit they proclaim the values of fairness and veracity. Ignoring a million lies, they unearth a rare expose and pretend that it is the norm. From Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun to Andreas Whittam-Smith of the Independent, the editors and their masters stuff their newspapers with frenzied diatribes in support of their right to do just as they please.A perfect example of this hypocrisy was the Daily Mirror leading article of 11 January. It started:‘The freedom of the press is no more no less – and must never be more or less than the inalienable right of every citizen to speak his mind in public without fear of penalty, prosecution or persecution.’Five days later Tim Minogue, a subeditor on the Sunday Mirror, who had written a marvellous defence in a letter to the UK Press Gazette of those like him who had been summarily sacked without a word of explanation a few weeks earlier, was told he must swear in writing that he will never again denounce his employers in public – or be sacked. Thus did the Mirror management practise the ‘freedom from persecution’ which it preached.The full horror of the mass hypocrisy of the capitalist press in recent weeks has converted many socialists to the notion of some form of state control of the press. By far the least offensive of the various proposals for such control has come from Labour MP Clive Soley, whose Freedom and Responsibility of the Press Bill has got wide support in parliament.Soley, of course, is not after protecting rich people’s privacy or the royals’ nakedness as other people are. What sickens him, he says, is the inaccuracy of reports which so often damage the humble and meek. He proposes a Press Authority which can force the bumptious editors to correct mistakes with the same sort of prominence with which the mistakes were made.It seems fair and reasonable. But like so many things which seem fair and reasonable in our society, the proposal does not take account of the fact that the state itself, which enforces every law and would certainly enforce this one, is unfair and unreasonable. A fair and reasonable law will be enforced unfairly and unreasonably. One result would certainly be a restriction on the few miserable advantages which a press unfettered by the state can bring to the dispossessed and to labour.Competition between newspapers and the desire to bring readers new and fresh material occasionally allows a bold spirit or an inquiring mind to break free from the mould. A whole host of exposes even in the last 10 wretched years, even in some of the most Tory newspapers, are evidence that the rich do not always get everything their own way. For all their reaction and corruption, the newspapers do publish a good deal of information which is hostile and embarrassing to ruling class interests.It is this material which is constantly threatened by the oppressive measures with which the ruling class protects its privacy and its purse. The law of libel, more vicious in Britain than in any other industrial democracy, and the associated laws of confidence and even copyright, are a constant menace to anyone who threatens the rich (the poor are not protected, since actions under these heads are not eligible for legal aid).Yes, say Clive Soley and his supporters, we agree – but what has this to do with our idea for a law to force the press to correct their mistakes? The answer is that such a law will simply take its stand alongside the others – and become a threat not to lying editors but to the already shrinking area of challenging and revealing journalism.For what is a ‘mistake’ and what is the meaning of the word ‘inaccurate’? Is it a mistake or inaccurate to repeat the drivelling of generals during a Gulf War? Certainly not. Is it a mistake to devote a front page to a picture of an innocent black defendant in a murder trial? Not at all. The defendant no doubt is black – the trial is taking place. Is it a mistake to hound a gay vicar or a left wing child abuse counsellor or an Irish republican? Not at all.But if a mistake of the slightest degree is made in an article attacking, say, the Kuwaiti royal family or the medicine industry or (worst of all) their lawyers, an enormous pack of lawyers and PR men will descend on Clive Soley’s statutory authority and demand that the mistake be put right.It was instructive that when Clive Soley introduced his bill to a press conference he brought with him a very rich woman called Mona Shabajee. She assured the press that if Clive’s bill had been law, she could not have been hounded as she was. But wait. How was she hounded? She paid for a freebie holiday for a secretary of state, David Mellor. If Mrs Shabajee had not been ‘hounded’, perhaps the freebie holiday would not have been exposed, and David Mellor would still be lecturing us on sexual morality and high principles in office. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that Mrs Shabajee was hounded. But certainly she is right. She, and probably the whole Mellor scandal, would have been well protected by Clive Soley’s bill."
} |
{
"content": "Mistakes and inaccuracies are defined by our class society like everything else. A mistake which helps the people who own property is not really a mistake. An inaccurate defence of the fine qualities of British millionaires would not really be considered inaccurate. The right to reply would hardly be relevant. But if there is one mistake in an otherwise accurate expose of those millionaires, then whoever is responsible would, thanks to Clive Soley, have to apologise in the most abject terms.The liberal objection comes at once: surely some control of press inaccuracies is better than none. No it is not, because that control will direct itself not to the great mass of press distortion and corruption but to the very few areas where printed journalism tried to run against the stream. Rotten as the press is, it is better without a law which would still further boost the people responsible for its rottenness. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootBusiness as usualon the BarbicanWorkers versus management(July 1968)From Socialist Worker, No. 85, July 1968, p. 3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.ON THE MASS DEMONSTRATION last November called to declare solidarity with the pickets at Mytons site on the Barbican in the City of London after a strike of more than a year, Lou Lewis, the federation steward on the site, declared: “This strike will not soon be forgotten in the building industry, and it will, I hope, give confidence to building workers everywhere.”Lewis’s hopes have been fulfilled more than he could have imagined. For now, only eight months later, the workers on the Mytons site have come out on strike again.The employers and the union officials hoped to use the defeat of the workers last year as a permanent weapon against their future labour force. They have been confounded not merely by their own arrogance but also by the continuing refusal of the workers to be used as profit-fodder.Last November, after the pickets were withdrawn, the employers blacklisted all the militants formerly employed there. Some of the workers who had worked on the site before the dispute were encouraged back by letters which vilified Lou Lewis and his colleagues.The 15 scabs, who had been brought up from Mytons site at Brighton under heavy Securicor guard and had passed the pickets in police vans, formed the nucleus of the new labour force which was built up to its full complement of 200 men last Christmas. These workers were not allowed to elect their own shop stewards. Instead, the Brighton scabs (or “royalists” as they are known on the site) were appointed to all the shop stewards positions. AllowanceFrom the onset the employers made their position plain. The scabs were “ loyal ” workers, and would be paid accordingly. They were given a £5 a week travel allowance to bring them up from Brighton, and a further scabs. Peter Treacy, the federation steward, for instance, reckons that he will lose a few quid by the new scheme. “But at least we’d be solid when we advance again,” he told me.The demand was rejected outright by the management who realised that the new scheme would vitiate their “ divide and rule” tactics. Accordingly, on Monday June 16, all the 90 carpenters except the six Brighton scabs walked out on strike. They were still out, angry and militant, when I spoke to them on June 20.On that day, each striker received a familiar letter from the management, informing them that their action was “contrary to the site procedure agreement and to the Working Rule [line of text missing] them up from Brighton, and a further unearned “bonus” of 25 hours paid work to compensate for the “long journey.” In addition the Brighton scabs were given the jobs with the best bonus rates, and lowest targets.The bonus rate in the early months was fixed at a standard 4s. per hour for craftsmen, 3s. for labourers. In February, the unions and employers, acting outside the Working Rule Agreement and without even consulting the workers, agreed a bonus scheme which operated on a gang basis. Different gangs got different bonuses and different targets.No sooner had the agreement been reached than the employers made it clear how they were going to operate it. The gang containing the Brighton scabs got all the good jobs and the low targets. The other gangs were given targets which made it almost impossible for any of them to make more than the “ fall-back ” rate of 4s. Bill Jones, the Brighton “Federation steward” appointed by the management, admitted to a meeting of the workers that if he lived in the area he couldn’t afford to work at the new rates.Not surprisingly, the workers soon slung out the Brighton scabs and elected their own stewards.The management replied by threatening to withdraw the “fall-back” bonus, thus rendering most of the workers worse off after the agreement than before. The new, elected stewards threatened the management with a riot if the fall-back rate was withdrawn, and the fall-back rate stayed. FailureThe gross favouritism shown to the Brighton scabs, and the continued failure of the management to lower targets or pay more bonus irritated the workers more and more. They pointed out that many of the carpenters’ gangs were working at targets of 15ft. super, while the Brighton scabs were working at 8 ft. super. In Turriffs and many other building sites, the standard target is 8 ft. super, and the stewards argued, quite rightly, that the management were using the Brighton scabs shamelessly to exploit the majority of the workers.Throughout April and May the stewards were constantly arguing with, the management over bonus pay. After several weeks, the various demands in different parts of the site hardened into one : that the bonus rate should be the same for all gangs.This demand did not mean that the management would pay out more money. In fact, on present bonus levels, less money would probably be paid out than under the present scheme. But the “all-in” bonus rate would iron out the arguments between gangs, and enable all the carpenters to argue for rises in a united front, without any chance of being diverted into arguments against the Brighton [line of text missing] agreement, and to the Working Rule Agreement ... Therefore any of these men who fail to resume normal working will be liable to disciplinary action.”It seems that very little has changed on the Barbican pickets from last year. There was the same arrogant management, the same militant workforce, utterly undivided by racial differences (more than half the strikers are West Indian or Indian). Even if. as seems likely, they return to work following the Local Disputes Commission, I do not imagine that the management will be able to push these workers around for much longer.*Hallo to The Hustler"
} |
{
"content": "WHAT WITH ALL THE FUSS about Black Dwarf, very few people seem to have noticed The Hustler, produced in Notting Hill, which is very much better and more valuable. It’s the first paper produced in the main by coloured people which is militant, un-self-conscious and informative. It costs 1s. a copy and is available from 194 Westbourne Park Road, London, W.11. Top of the pageLast updated on 22 October 2020"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootStocking Thriller(December 2002)From Stocking Thrillers, Socialist Review, No.269, December 2002, p.25.Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.Downloaded from the new Socialist Review ArchiveMarked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The novel I enjoyed most in 2002 was The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe. I read his hilarious assault on the Thatcher years – What a Carve-Up! – some time ago, and laughed a lot without really believing the author knew or cared much about the reasons for the Thatcher victories. The Rotters’ Club is based on Coe’s native city, Birmingham, in the mid-1970s, and the main characters are connected at different levels to the huge British Leyland factories at the centre of teh industrial disputes of the time. Very slowly and subtly the novel unveils the collapse of the workers’ militancy and confidence, ending in the sacking of ‘Red Robbo’, the Communist shop steward convenor at the Longbridge complex. Apparently incidental, though in essence quite central, is an account of the pickets at Grunwick’s, so brutally beaten back by the police. This was a time when I was working full time for Socialist Worker, and when I stood for parliament for a Birmingham constituency. I never imagined that the loves and hates of ordinary working people during that time would make such rich material for a powerful novel but, in spite of going a bit over the top at the end, Jonathan Coe has certainly produced one. the good news is that there is at least one sequel to come. Top of the pageLast updated on 18.1.2005"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootMoonshot moonshine(7 October 1995)From Socialist Worker, No. 1463, 7 October 1963, 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.I WENT to see Apollo 13. The confession over, I now pretend that I did so not for the real reason – a fascination with thrillers – but to draw serious political conclusions.Chief among these is the extraordinary fact that the top American movie blockbuster of the moment, complete with the necessary Tom Hanks, is about an unmitigated disaster – a mission to the moon which never made it.There have been some excellent American disaster movies. The Towering Inferno, complete with the necessary Paul Newman, was about a new tower block in Los Angeles, taller than anything else, which caught fire while a cross section of the city’s great and good were junketing on the top floor.There was an identifiable baddie, a rogue building contractor who had cut corners with the wiring.Then there was The China Syndrome, another very exciting film – complete with the necessary Jane Fonda – about the near meltdown of a nuclear power station.There were baddies here too. Contractors had cut corners on the pipework in the station, and the pipes had started to crack and collapse. Identifiable baddiesNeither film is a call to overthrow the capitalist system, of course, but both gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure ana a tot to think about.The mission of Apollo 13 to the Moon in the spring of 1970 was rushed forward to take some of the intense political pressure off the Nixon administration, in desperate trouble with its war in Vietnam and Cambodia.A futile gesture was urgently required to remind Americans of the greatness of their country. The landing of Neil Armstrong on the Moon the previous year had been greeted with wonder across the world.Apollo 13 was a desperate attempt to repeat the glory. No one showed much interest in the mission, however, until it went wrong.The idea that three brave white Americans might die in space gripped the public imagination. In the true story there were, moreover, plenty of identifiable baddies.First there were the political baddies (Nixon and Co) who ordered the mission to go ahead before everything was ready.Then there were the usual bungling contractors. Someone had cut corners with the wiring to the oxygen tanks – a bungle which very nearly blew the entire spaceship to pieces.If the excitement of the battle between life and death had been blended, as it was in the other two films, with the revelation of greed and political opportunism, this film could have been another great.Instead, quite incredibly, all the questions which immediately come to mind as the film unfolds are carefully ignored. The only mention of the crook Nixon is a flattering one. The only mention of the political background is the need to “beat the Russians”.As a result the film is a tremendous flop, a pathetic cliche about decent white American males being brave and brilliant and tense, while their adoring and anxious women and children weep for them at home.It is as though new right wing America, rather like new right wing Labour, has so lost confidence in the system it represents that any possible blemish in it has to be eradicated before it is exposed.The proverbial rotten apple can no longer be plucked out, in case it exposes the whole rotten barrel. Even in disaster movies everything about white America has to be seen to be perfect.That is still happening today. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootJonathan AitkenWeaving a tangled web(July/August 1997)From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.210, July/August 1997, p.6.Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.As the celebrations die down for the wonderful victory scored by the Guardian and World in Action over Jonathan Aitken, the question still lingers: why? Why did such a high flying politician, a man named even as a future prime minister, gamble his entire future on a ridiculous lie? So what if he did go to the Ritz in Paris to meet rich Arabs? So what if one of the Arabs did pay his bill for one night? So what if he forgot to tell the cabinet secretary about his visit as he was, by ministerial rules, obliged to do? Wasn’t the incident itself really rather trivial? Could not Aitken, with even half the charm and poise for which he is accustomed, have owned up, apologised, explained that he was always going off to rich hotels with rich friends, some of them Arabs, and that on this occasion, damn it, he just forgot to obey the rules?If he had adopted that approach, how long would the storm have lasted? A day, perhaps two. Anyone who objected would soon find themselves being attacked as a muckraker by the Daily Mail. Aitken would have recovered quickly. So why on earth would he go to such fantastic lengths to weave such an intricate story, and then persuade not just his wife but also his 17 year old daughter to come to court and perjure themselves too?The answer is that the men Aitken met in that Paris hotel were no ordinary Arab friends together for a jovial weekend. They were some of the most powerful men on earth, whose power derives directly from the wealth they have swiped from the cheap oil of Saudi Arabia. The dictators in Riyadh are constantly building up their already enormous armed forces in such a way that they themselves personally benefit. They pay themselves ‘commissions’ over and on top of the cost of the military equipment they purchase.Thus the cost of producing and supplying an average Tornado jet fighter is £20 million and the average price paid to Britain by the Saudi government for a Tornado is £35 million. The difference goes directly into the voluminous bank accounts of the Saudi royals not only in Switzerland but in tax havens all over the world.The chief sellers of arms to the Saudis, the British and French governments, know perfectly well that the whole trade in arms between the two countries is founded on corruption. They are most anxious to keep the details quiet. This explains the curious case of Mr Robert Sheldon, a right wing Labour politician who has represented Ashton-Under-Lyne in parliament for as long as anyone can remember and has for years been chairman of the top ‘watchdog’ House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.Sheldon has a reputation for publishing the awkward reports of his committee, and his persistent if mild reformism has won him many admirers. But in the early spring of 1992 he came across something he couldn’t publish. The National Audit Office had produced for the committee a report on arms sales to the Saudi government, and had even dared, mildly enough of course, to open the taboo question of the size of commissions. At once Sheldon agreed that these matters were too sensitive for public consumption and the report was consigned to the rubbish heap of government secrecy. The Saudi government had made it clear that they did not want precise figures and transactions exposed to the British public. So the NAO report was suddenly and inexplicably censored, confiscated and removed where no one could possibly see it.At almost exactly the same time, Jonathan Aitken, for years a paid ‘adviser’ to the arms industry, became Minister for Defence Procurement. At long last, he told his Saudi friends, you have a friend in the place you want him most. At once earnest negotiations started to supply the Saudi government with a heavy consignment of 48 Tornados.The most earnest part of the negotiations was about commissions. This was the debate which took Jonathan Aitken to the Ritz in Paris in 1988 to meet no less than the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. If there is anything which must be kept quiet more than any other it is the paying of commissions on the Al Yamamah arms deal between the British and Saudi governments. For a moment the entire deal was in peril. Aitken felt it was time for him to intervene. He went to Paris to meet his friends to talk about another round of unforgivable commissions.The secrecy of those talks was crucial. Literally nothing mattered more. If word got out about the extent of the commissions or even that a minister was discussing the extent of the commissions in open conversation the result would have been catastrophic. The arms trade cannot be expected to flourish except in circumstances of the utmost secrecy. Aitken had been found out, but it was his bounden duty not to talk to anyone about his hidden fortune. Lie followed lie, hypocrisy followed hypocrisy; and so they always will do as long as the world is competing to buy the best value in the instruments of mass destruction. Top of the pageLast updated on 12.2.2005"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootIt’s been a long time coming(May 1997)From Election special, Socialist Review, No.208, May 1997, p.5.Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The sheer extent of the Labour landslide shocked everyone in authority, not least the new prime minister. Addressing the cheering crowds which collected outside the Festival Hall in the early morning of his victory, Tony Blair reacted to the astonishing and unprecedented size of his majority with a word which comes easily to him, ‘responsibility’.He had hoped to win a working majority. He had ‘targeted’ key seats like Gloucester to ensure that majority. He had expected a strong Tory opposition and had anticipated working on key matters with the Liberal Democrats. All this had suddenly and dramatically changed. Seats which no one had ever imagined as Labour had swung to the left in swings far greater even than in the ‘targeted’ areas. Scarborough, Lowestoft, Wimbledon, Harrow, Hastings, Edgbaston nowhere was safe from the relentless nationwide swing to Labour. The Tories were a ridiculous and squabbling rump and the Liberals a profound irrelevance.At once, almost in self protection, the victorious Labour leader sought to explain their triumph. It was, first, a victory for ‘New Labour’, with the emphasis on ‘New’. It was the ‘unshackling’ of the Labour Party from the bonds of Clause Four and the trade unions which had rescued it from the political wilderness. The magical leadership of Tony Blair and the spin skills of his ubiquitous lieutenant Peter Mandelson had created the earthquake in popular opinion which set off the landslide.The analysis led inevitably to the warning about ‘responsibility’. Since the huge majority was the exclusive work of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, nothing should be said or done to threaten their hegemony.This ‘follow the leader’ analysis, the suggestion that the masses who supported Labour in such extraordinary numbers voted for the man rather than the politics of the party, is not just insulting. It is also, by any available measure, entirely wrong. Blair’s high ratings in the polls are no higher than those of his predecessor, John Smith. Indeed, there is no convincing evidence to suggest that Blair has ever been more personally popular than Smith.The huge shift in popular opinion against the Tories does not date from Blair’s election as leader in the summer of 1994. The decisive shift came much earlier. It began with the crises of the pit closures and ERM and continued with the breaking of the Tory tax pledges and the imposition of VAT on fuel. The wipe out of the Tories in the county council elections and in London came before the emasculation of Clause Four or the attack on the unions inside the Labour Party.Every single pointer in the polls suggests that the majority of British electors quickly woke up to the awful mistake they made in 1992 and resolved, whatever the changes in personnel in whatever party, that they would rid themselves of the Tory menace at the earliest possible opportunity. All this happened when Blair was a relatively unknown front bench spokesperson on home affairs, and when Mandelson had been cast into outer darkness.For reasons which are easy to understand, John Smith detested Mandelson. He saw Mandelson’s obsession with media manipulation as corrosive of any social democratic politics, even the right wing social democratic politics which Smith represented. Indeed, Smith held Mandelson partly responsible for the loss of the 1992 election, during which Smith tried to promote the arguments for more egalitarian tax policies and was stopped in his tracks by Kinnock and Mandelson.Nor can it be argued for a single moment that the tone and style of Labour’s election campaign contributed seriously to the result. The real swings to Labour took place in areas untouched by the campaign. Moreover, these swings were positive moves to Labour – not just protest votes. The point about the ‘tactical voting’ which has so absorbed the pundits was not just that voters ganged up against the government. If the fashionable view that the vote was a triumph for right wing Labour were true, then the swing to the Liberals would have been just as great, if not greater. In fact the swing to the Liberals was much less pronounced than the swing to Labour.It is as though the shocked pundits are seeking any explanation for the landslide save the most obvious, repeated over and over again in Socialist Worker and Socialist Review, that there has been a marked and substantial shift to the left in popular political attitudes. The shift has moved most Labour voters, indeed most people, to the left of Blair and Mandelson.All the indicators show that the majority think that the Tory union laws should be repealed, that the utilities and especially the railways should be taken back into public ownership, that there should be more socialist planning.The shift has been accompanied by a popular determination and confidence which pushed the Labour vote to landslide proportions almost in defiance of the Labour leader’s caution and moderation.Blair says interminably that he will act for ‘all the people, not just the privileged few’. But the hallmark of the society bequeathed by Thatcher and Major is the exploitation by the privileged few of the rest of the people. To act for both sides is impossible. To try to do so will result inevitably in acting only at the behest of the rich.If Blair and Co. carry on where the Tories left off they will be ignoring the message from the majority of the electorate, and kicking their own supporters in the teeth. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Margaret Renn & Paul FootPoor on pioneers(February 1988)From Letters, Socialist Worker Review, No.106, February 1988, p.35.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.WE WERE disappointed with Julie Waterson’s article (Jan. SWR) about the history of the fight for abortion rights. Julie describes the “socialist tradition” on this issue as “studded with flaws, inconsistencies and one which often drew reactionary conclusions”.No one could argue with that, but Julie concentrates so single-mindedly on those flaws and inconsistencies that she overlooks the fighting spirit and the revolutionary significance of the pioneers she describes.Writing about the Men and Women’s Club in the 1880s, for instance, Julie tells us:“It had 20 members but many associate members and held open meetings. All were ‘free thinkers’ – middle class and Oxbridge educated. Included among them were Olive Schreiner and Annie Besant.”What an introduction to these two women! Olive Schreiner came from a poor missionary family in South Africa. She only just went to school, certainly not to university. She was active in the anti-imperialist movement in South Africa, though she was constantly unpopular with Afrikaner leaders because she refused to compromise with racialism. Her books were an inspiration to many thousands of women, including working class women.Annie Besant never went to Oxbridge either (no women could take degrees at any university until the 1880s). Not only did she go to prison for publishing material about birth control, as Julie reports, she also had her child taken away, because a judge thought her views made her unfit for motherhood. She is often remembered as an organiser and inspirer of the match girls’ strike at Bryant and May in East London in 1889.Of course no modern revolutionary socialist with the benefit of hindsight can agree with everything these two women wrote or said. But it is odd for any socialist to dismiss them with a peremptory sneer.Again, Julie writes about Stella Browne:“She was a eugenicist ... she professed that individuals’ characteristics were genetically determined, while Marxism argues that society and its individuals are materially determined”.Stella Browne was affected by eugenicist ideas – though she consistently denounced any “racial or class bias” which might arise from them. But surely the main point about Stella is that she campaigned over a very long reactionary period for birth control and abortion as a means towards women’s liberation.Julie quotes, apparently sympathetically, some men in Glasgow who were “ready to fight the ancient battle of Marx against Malthus”.Malthus argued that the human condition depended on the numbers of people in the world and that the population should therefore be kept down. Marx denounced this quite rightly, as “a libel on the human race”.Many Marxists, however, took refuge in this controversy to oppose (or at least to patronise) the movement for birth control and abortion. In fact, the revolutionary argument for both has nothing at all to do with Malthus – it is founded on the case for sexual emancipation.Julie’s method has been to describe the pioneers for abortion and birth control and then to knock them out one by one as anti-Marxist or “middle class”. This seems to us a negative approach. Margaret RennPaul FootLondon EC1 Top of the pageLast updated on 26.1.2005"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootW. Indies:20 years of pirates, profits and blood(19 April 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 118, 19 April, pp. 2–3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IN JANUARY 1935 there were what the Governor of the Leeward Islands, Sir R. St. Johnston, called in his report ‘some troubles’ on the island of St.Kitts. Leaders of the newly-formed Sugar Workers’ League, protesting at the rate of pay (one shilling a day), marched around the plantations calling a strike.The Governor found this especially annoying, because he was having a garden party at the time. He summoned up a frigate and a few platoons of infantry were sent out on the streets.Three strike leaders were shot and 50 strikers injured.‘I also intimated,’ wrote the Governor, ‘without unnecessarily alarming people, that the garden party had better be concluded while there was still daylight for people to get to their homes.’ SlaveryGunboats and infantry platoons have been the stock in trade of the sugar planters in the smaller West Indian islands ever since the first robbers and pirates (most of whose descendants are now sitting in the House of Lords) went to the West Indies.They drove out the indigenous Caribs, introduced African slaves, turned the slaves into wage slaves when slavery became unprofitable, and devoted themselves for nearly 200 years to reaping sugar and profit from the blood of the labourers.The plantocracy of the smaller ‘sugar islands’ – notably Barbados, Antigua and St. Kitts – are one of the most ruthlessly reactionary ruling classes in world history. As sugar has declined in value, as industrial countries have relied increasingly upon beet, and as prices have fallen, so the planters have clung even more tenaciously to their privileges.The full force of their venom was turned on the rising trade unions and their leaders. They forced the British Governors to pass laws dividing the constituencies into seats which they could rig, and, when the rigging failed, passed a ‘law’ banning trade union leaders from sitting in the island parliaments.The law was championed by Moody Stuart, managing director of the Antigua Syndicate Estates, which owned most of the island, and who at the same time was a leading member of both Legislative and Executive Councils.Trade union leaders were bullied, threatened, even murdered. But nothing could stop the unions, and, gradually they formed themselves into political parties.Manley in Jamaica, Adams in Barbados, Bird in Antigua, Bradshaw in St. Kitts, Joshua in St. Vincent, Gary in Grenada – all these men who later became prime ministers started as union leaders in the fight against the planters.This is the background to the situation in Anguilla. For 120 years Anguilla has been ruled as part of a federation - first of the Leeward Islands and then of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla.Nowhere in the West Indies were the planters more resistant to change than in St. Kitts. Consequently perhaps, nowhere were the sugar workers more courageous in their support for their trade union and labour leaders.It was the planters who first sowed the seeds of hatred and jealousy between one island and the other – dividing themselves into small island castes, angry and suspicious at any sign of co-operation with anyone else. The hatred between the planters on St. Kitts for their brothers and cousins in Nevis was outstanding.The leader of the St. Kitts Sugar Workers’ Union, Robert Bradshaw, became prime minister of St. Kitts in 1966, winning all seven of the seats in the island.The planters, who had tolerated him under British rule, decided to fight him when Britain pulled out. To procure a base, they financed and organised an ‘independence movement’ in Anguilla, and organised a military coup in St. Kitts on June 10, 1967. EnticeThe coup failed. But the planters have continued by every means they know to attempt to unseat Bradshaw.All this merely demonstrated the planters’ stupidity, for Bradshaw and his party in power were not committed to an overthrow of the class system, not of the plantocracy. They sought means to pacify the planters, and to entice British and American industry to assist tourist development in Frigate Bay and in Nevis.Despite the victories of the Sugar Workers’ union in the late 1940s, Bradshaw quickly discovered that in his isolated island there was little room even for ordinary trade union reforms. He passed a Minimum Wage Act and an Industrial Injuries Act but in terms of any real encroachment on the plantocracy or the new, ‘dynamic’ tourist-orientated upper class, he made no gains.He could rely upon almost endless electoral support – but the enthusiasm of that support could only be maintained as long as the planters continued playing cops and robbers from Anguilla.Despite heavy subsidies from the St. Kitts government (amounting to twice the island’s revenue) in 1966, the self-styled Anguillan ‘leaders’ declared UDI in May 1967.Bradshaw insisted on some form of federal structure and a series of conferences were held, mainly in Barbados. As the conferences continued it became clear that the men in charge in Anguilla did not want to agree to anything.They wanted an island without government or elections or taxes, a gambler’s and hotelier’s paradise. They wanted another Nassau (Sir Stafford Sands, former Prime Minister of the Bahamas was paid several million dollars in ‘consultancy fees’ by Meyer Lansky of the Florida Mafia).The British government was perplexed. What to do next? As always, they got their answer from America.The policy of the Central Intelligence Agency is not, as sometimes imagined, to support arch reactionaries in every cause. It is concerned primarily to ensure a ‘peaceful environment’ for profit-making.For the CIA, better a helpless majority government than a racialist and reactionary minority one.The CIA gave their orders – smash the Anguillan ‘revolt’. Take sides with Bradshaw against the planters. Seek to settle a dangerously explosive situation with gunboats and diplomats.But the Anguilla operation was ham-fisted. And in spite of appeals by the Antiguan Labour prime minister, Bird, to ‘keep calm’, 8,000 Antiguans marched through the streets to protest at the interference of British troops. Recipe"
} |
{
"content": "The arrival of British troops in Anguilla replaced one set of gangsters with another. Anguillan nationalism is an abstraction, invented by New York and Florida businessmen, but equally the ‘peaceful environment’ sought by the intervention of the British troops, is a recipe for another 100 years of exploitation.The demand for the removal of British troops must be unequivocal and unconditional – not because ‘Anguilla wants independence’ as sugar-owning Tory MPs would have it, but in the hope that the West Indian working people – one of the most potentially revolutionary forces in the third world – will themselves shake off the shackles of plantocracies and CIA-inspired ‘peaceful environments’ and run all their islands in their own interests. Top of the pageLast updated on 13 January 2021"
} |
{
"content": "ISJ 2 Index | Main Newspaper IndexEncyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet ArchiveInternational Socialism, Spring 1991 Alex Callinicos, Paul Foot, Mike Gonzalez,Chris Harman, John MolyneuxAn open letter to New Left Review From International Socialism 2 : 50, Spring 1991, pp. 101–103.Transcribed by Camilla Royle.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL. We write as socialists who have read NLR regularly for the last 20 years or more. We have reacted to individual articles sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with strong criticism. We may have disagreed with the stance of some articles – especially those which presented the regimes of Russia and China as somehow left wing-but we always felt that the magazine was produced by people who could be relied to be in the trenches alongside us in the battle against Western imperialism. They had, after all, taken an unequivocal stand against the wars waged by France in Algeria, the US in Vietnam, the British in Aden and Oman.For this reason we have been horrified by your most recent issue (184). As it came out the American government of George Bush was preparing a massive military onslaught in the Gulf – an onslaught which the great mass of the left on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Third World see as a defence of oil interests and an attempt to reassert the US’s global hegemony in a way not possible since the Vietnam defeat.Yet the major article on the Gulf in New Left Review is by Fred Halliday, a supporter of American military action in the Gulf. Readers in Britain will know that in the autumn of 1990 he repeatedly appeared on radio and television to urge the sending of British and American forces to the Gulf. He told Marxism Today (October 1990): ‘I would not think that at a future juncture, if sanctions fail, that military action to oust Iraq from Kuwait would be unjustified.’The appearance of an article by such an apologist for the American and British action might be tolerable if it were countered by a powerful polemic opposing imperialism. Unfortonate1y, it was not. Instead, there was a rather mild editorial statement which contained not one word of criticism of Halliday and itself went halfway with the American-British position.It began by telling us, correctly, that ‘It is the West’s thirst for cheap oil ... which renders it suddenly sensitive to the viciously repressive regime that yesterday it was arming against Iran.’ But it then went on to argue:The initial UN resolutions against Iraq offered an appropriate and justified response to the occupation of Kuwait-though they would have been better if they had included a clear commitment to democracy in Kuwait. There should also have been UN sanctions against Israel as strong as this, instead of the lavish US aid that has been forthcoming.This is either naivety or a conscious desire to cover up the acquiescence of some of those around NLR in the plans of US imperialism. Everyone knows the original UN resolutions were drawn up mainly by the US, which used arm twisting and bribery (such as promising to help finance perestroika and to restore to China aid cut off after the Tiananmen Square butchery) to push it through the Security Council. Everyone should also know – if only because Fred Halliday often made the point on British radio – that sanctions could only work if enforced by a military blockade.The sanctions resolution was, in fact, used by America and Britain to build up the bandwagon for war. And the same security council states which voted for one went along with the other. The task of socialists was to speak out against the whole manoeuvre. Unfortunately, your editorial statement did not.NLR justified its stance by referring to the fate of Kuwait. But Kuwait only came into existence as a state because of Western oil interests. Only 4 percent of the population ever had a vote, for a parliament which the ruling Sabah family arbitrarily dissolved, and the majority of its population were denied any citizenship rights at all. No wonder Halliday himself, in his better days, subtitled the Kuwaiti section of his book Arabia without Sultans The New Slavery, telling that ‘its internal reliance on a class of imported helots is mirrored by its international role as a steward of capital’.Now he claims socialists should support military action by the Western powers to restore such a state because the enemy is Iraqi ‘fascism’. But the US sustains dictatorships every bit as bad as the Iraqi one elsewhere in the world – just think of Zaire, Guatemala, El Salvador, Paraguay, Somalia, or, in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Its coalition allies include the Turkish hangmen and the Syrian symmetrical twin of Iraq.Anyone should be able to see that an American victory would give the Bush team – veterans all of the Contra terror campaign against Nicaragua and the invasions of Grenada and Panama – the confidence to impose such dictatorships elsewhere in the world.Of course, there should be no question of socialists giving any political support to Saddam Hussein. His Ba’ath party willingly collaborated with the CIA in the 1963 coup against Qassim, tried to ingratiate itself with the US through its attack on Iran in 1980 and, using Western supplied poison gas, collaborated with NATO member Turkey in a murderous campaign against the Kurds.Socialists should see that a successful struggle against imperialism will require the revolutionary overthrow of such a regime.But that is not the same as supporting Bush’s coalition, as Halliday does, or even as saying, as your editorial statement does, ‘the left should not support the military ambitions of any of the predators now confronting one another in the desert’. This equates the little bully, Saddam Hussein, with the much greater bully, US imperialism, as if a victory for one would be as bad for the peoples of the world as a victory for the other."
} |
{
"content": "There is more than a whiff of August 1914 in Fred Halliday’s sudden conversion to the belief that an American led coalition should enjoy support from the left. And there is more than a hint of compromise with such views in NLR’s own present position. All those who have campaigned against Western imperialism in the past should insist the main enemy is in Washington, and act accordingly. Top of pageISJ 2 Index | Main Newspaper IndexEncyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet ArchiveLast updated on 1 April 2016"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootCorruptionWho Said Crime Doesn’t Pay?(June 2003)From News Review, Socialist Review, No.275, June 2003, p.5-6.Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.Downloaded from the new Socialist Review ArchiveMarked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The last time there was a crisis in the international stockmarket they made a film about it. It was called Wall Street. Michael Douglas played Gekko, the intended villain of the piece, a greedy gambler who had made a fortune on the stockmarket chiefly by buying and bribing inside information, and then betting on it, knowing it to be true. The film was such a realistic indictment of the market and its values that it quickly became a cult movie for thousands of yuppies swarming like bees round the honey of the stock exchange. When Gekko is finally captured by the regulators of the Securities Exchange Commission, most of his admirers felt sorry for him. The film was a close portrayal of the rise and fall of the stock market gangsters and insider dealers of the time. Those critics who saw it as a fair rendering of what really went on in Wall Street were told that the scandal it revealed was exceptional, the old story of the rotten apple in the otherwise unblemished barrel of Wall Street and the City of London.It took a decade for the market to start falling again, and for the same sort of scum to rise to the surface of the barrel. In 2001 came the Enron scandal, in which a massively hyped international trading company duped the wealthy world by the time-honoured process of fiddling its accounts. Huge profits recorded in the accounts simply did not exist. The company went bust and the accountants who fiddled the accounts and shredded the evidence – New Labour’s close friends Arthur Andersen – were disgraced, bankrupted and quickly absorbed by other big accountants such as KPMG, which has a similarly questionable record. Apologists for capitalism argued that Enron was a ‘one-off’ – an unfortunate slip of the regulators that was unlikely to happen again.Now, less than two years after Enron, comes a scandal every bit as shocking. For years the US regulators have been investigating the role of the country’s top investment banks, the very core of the capitalist system. Of special concern was the method used by the banks to prise investment out of the US bourgeoisie. Their technique was to hire ‘analysts’ who circulated ‘research studies’ on the value of various stocks, recommending whether or not they were worth buying. The regulators soon discovered that the ‘analysts’ were not at all interested in the value of the stocks they were ‘researching’. All they were interested in was getting more money for the banks who hired them. So thousands of gullible investors were conned out of many billions of pounds by bogus research that the analysts knew to be bogus, solely in order to drum up more business for the banks who paid them. In one of the hundreds of incriminating e-mails unearthed by the regulators, an analyst from the big US bank Lehman summed up the whole scam: ‘Yes. The little guy who is not smart about the nuances, may get misled. Such is the nature of my business.’ Like Gekko, like the millionaires who played the market in derivatives, hedge funds, split capital investment trusts, it was the ‘nature of his business’ to lie and cheat in the interests of his paymasters.The names of the liars and cheats in this area are the household names of modern finance capital: Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Salomon, Piper Jaffray, UBS Warburg (a special favourite of the New Labour government in Britain), Lehman, Bear Stearns, etc, etc. The total fines against these banks comes just short of a billion pounds, but the banks coughed up in huge relief. They will not be prosecuted and even when disgruntled investors sue for compensation, the banks can unleash their unimaginably expensive lawyers to defend every suit. Gekko went to prison, but none of these professional liars and cheats need lose a night’s sleep.Socialists who study this story (and that in itself is difficult – the newspapers and commentators of the ruling class are reluctant to expose the fraud of those who feed them) are inclined to pass by on the other side, their noses in the air. The whole sty stinks, they argue, so why worry about the smell of any particular pig? Who cares about the swindling of the petit bourgeoisie by the big bourgeois? That approach is easy to understand, but it misses the point. The point attacks the root of the argument that capitalism is the best available system to sort out the problems of supply and demand, to ensure that the right things are made to fit people’s needs and aspirations, and that the proceeds are fairly distributed. The fantastic scandal of the investment banks (like all the other similar scandals of modern capitalism) proves exactly the opposite. It proves that the people who run the system couldn’t care less about the real value of anything, but will take any course, twist any figures, tell any lies and engage in any amount of cheating so long as their already comfortable nests are further feathered. Gekko rides again, and this time he rides free. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootLabourMillionaires’ welfare(January 1998)From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.215, January 1998, p.5.Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The vocabulary of New Labour, which before and during the election seemed so benign, is being translated into real language faster than anyone could have dreaded. ‘Compassion with a hard edge’ was the phrase of the hour. Compassion was taken to mean a feeling of concern from government for the growing ranks of the desperately poor, especially the low paid, the single parents, the disabled. The hard edge would presumably be reserved for those who had helped themselves to the bounty of the Thatcher/Major years, the share option guzzlers, the pension swindlers, the growing army of arrogant billionaires.It took only a few months for the real picture to emerge. There was compassion all right, but it was reserved exclusively for the rich. The manifesto promise not to raise a penny extra in tax on the rich was scrupulously observed. But the new ministers were not satisfied with mere compassion for the rich. They were appalled at how few of them were rich enough to make the big decisions of the hour.There was only one millionaire among them – a fourth rate MP for Coventry whom no former Labour prime minister had even considered for office. There was nothing in the political career of Geoffrey Robinson which was even remotely impressive. But he was enormously rich. He had been left a fortune by a Belgian tax exile whose name inevitably was Madame Bourgeois. The very thought of a real millionaire with a real fortune evading tax in the Channel Islands was enough to shoot Robinson into the government as minister in charge of tax evasion.One millionaire, however, was not enough. Into the highways and byways of the City of London went the new Labour leaders searching for Tories and union busters to take part in the new government: Lord Simon from Shell, Peter Davies from the Pru, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, even the crusted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Amstrad and Tottenham Hotspur – all these and many more like them were ushered into Whitehall to help the new government with its social and economic policies.The policies flowed quite naturally. The few election promises which were unpalatable to the rich were quickly jettisoned. To the manifesto pledge, ‘We shall ban tobacco advertising’, was added a proviso: ‘except for millionaires who donate to the Labour Party’. From Blair’s election promise, ‘We have no plans to introduce tuition fees’, the word ‘no’ was deleted. The real social problem quickly emerged. Too much was being spent by the ‘feckless poor’, and, it was claimed, people sat at home looking after children or pretended that their disablement prevented them from working. These people could be driven off the dole registers by denying them the pittance they got in extra benefit. The ‘Welfare to Work’ programme was launched with a sharp attack on the poorest people of all, the people who because of their poverty were the least organised and the least able to defend themselves.Many, if not most, Labour voters were astonished at the speed with which the Labour Party cast off its old commitments to the dispossessed. This sense of shock was palely reflected in the House of Commons where 47 of Labour’s 411 MPs voted against proposed cuts in benefits for lone mothers. The 47 came mainly from the old left. Not a single one of ‘Blair’s babes’, the new women Labour MPs who preened themselves for the media on 2 May, managed to vote against the cuts or even to abstain.But the vote against the government is the first real sign of dissent from New Labour capitalism, the first indication that even in parliament there are people who recognise the true course of their government: a course plotted for them by their hated predecessors, the Lilleys, the Redwoods and the Howards. The only recognisable difference between this government and the Tories is in its support. New Labour came to office on the votes of people, many of them poor, who wanted a change in political direction and had grown to detest the Tory priorities which now commend themselves to Labour ministers. A revolt is smouldering. It should be fanned into flames. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootObituaryRoss Pritchard – dedicated socialist(20 January 2001)From Socialist Worker, No.1731, 20 January 2001.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Socialist Worker and all its readers owe a tremendous debt to Ross Pritchard, who died of cancer last week at the age of 62. Ross joined the socialist movement in Glasgow at almost exactly the same time as I did. Ross had just come out of the armed forces (he was one of the last to be caught in the conscription net, as I was), and was trying to find a decent job in Glasgow. He came to the socialist movement as though he had been waiting for it all his life.Ross and Anna, whom he married not much later and with whom he spent the rest of his life, were permanent fixtures at all the Young Socialists meetings, including the periodic excursions to CND demos and other protests. He rapidly became a part of the growing band of young worker-intellectuals who led the Young Socialists at that time. Like many others he was drawn to London by the prospect of decently paid employment.He got a job in the print trade and, at a time when our organisation hardly existed, kept up his association with the International Socialists. In 1968 we yearned for a weekly paper, which was to become Socialist Worker. Roger Protz was to be the editor and Jim Nichol the business editor, but what we really needed was an expert in the print who would dedicate his life to the project.Ross agreed to fill this post at once, though the move meant a huge increase in work and a drop in salary of at least 50 percent. Somehow this tiny crew managed to get the paper out. Ross was utterly irreplaceable.He was the opposite of the token manual worker, and from the outset he was an essential part of the political process. He took a keen and critical interest in what the paper was saying, and how the organisation was growing. Ross became more and more central to the entire project, a learner turned teacher.None of those who worked on the paper at that time will forget his dedication and encouragement. When Ross finally left the printshop in the mid-1970s, he became a militant in the merged NGA print union, and very soon was elected to the executive. He stayed a rank and file militant all the way through to the awful defeat of the print unions by Murdoch at Wapping.Like many other militants after Wapping, he drifted away from active involvement in the socialist movement, but remained on the union executive. Without the sacrifice, determination and spirit of Ross Pritchard, the weekly Socialist Worker could not have come out when it did, and the enthusiasm around the paper could not have been sustained at such a high level. He has no finer epitaph. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThe Rotherham lads are here!(February 1980)From Socialist Worker, 2 February 1980.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.186-7.Transcribed & marked up by marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Paul Foot reports from the strike committee in Rotherham‘BEFORE THE strike, when you came in here, you felt you were coming to see God. Now the place belongs to all of us.’Bob Bartholomew, crane driver at the Templeborough steel plant, Rotherham, was talking at the Rotherham headquarters of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, the steelworkers’ union.You could hardly hear him above the hubbub of voices. Voices organising; voices arguing; voices telling the story of yesterday’s picket.The prim building with its thick carpets was built for tidy and genteel officials with tidy and genteel routines. It has suddenly become the central powerhouse of the steel strike. As with the miners’ strike exactly eight years ago, the motivating power behind the action has shifted to South Yorkshire.John Ratcliffe, a branch secretary and strike committee member, spelt out the details. There are 50 ‘cells’ each of 50 steelworkers, each of them based on a steel plant or a stockholder in the Rotherham area.These cells mount pickets 24 hours a day. They also provide volunteers for the flying pickets. John says that the strike organisers have the names of 7,000 workers, all of whom can be mobilised at very short notice indeed.The very energy of the strike activity from the Rotherham centre has brought workers into the action.‘We forgot about the women workers,’ says John. ‘We hadn’t allocated them for any action. But yesterday they were in here demanding to know why they weren’t in the cells, and flooding out onto the pickets with the others.’As the plants and stockholders shut down in Rotherham and the surrounding towns, so the pickets began to move further afield. News came in of possible steel movements into the ports.Pickets visited Hull where the dockers, without even asking their union leaders, have stopped moving anything which could even remotely be used by the steel industry. The same has happened at Grimsby, Immingham and Boston.Last week the steelworkers started to move off for long stays in places they had hardly ever heard of: the smaller ports of East Anglia and Kent.John said that by last weekend there were South Yorkshire steel pickets guarding every port in Kent.The money and accommodation for that huge operation had been supplied without a moment’s hesitation by the Kent miners. The miners have contacted dockers and other transport workers. The information is accurate and it moves fast.And the steel, or most of it anyway, is stopped.Before their very eyes the workers feel themselves changing. ‘What do we talk about in the plant?’ asks Tom Bartholomew. ‘Every day it’s the same: sex, booze and sport. On the picket line, and in the cars and vans, it’s all different. People start talking about the government, about the Labour Party, about the union; about how we’re going to change the world.‘You see blokes on the picket line you’d never have dreamed would be there. And often they’re the ones who have the best ideas about what to do next.‘I suppose most of the blokes still feel that this is just part of ordinary life. But I must admit for me it’s like living history. I feel that one day I’ll be telling those children’s children what it was like being in the Great Steel Strike of 1980.’By activating almost the whole rank and file in the area, by holding regular weekly mass branch meetings to report on and supplement all the picketing activity, the organisers have taken away from the Tories their one hope for outright victory over the steelworkers: an apathetic and uninformed rank and file.If only it were so all through the industry! The South Yorkshire men know that it is not. They can see how in other areas, even in Scunthorpe which is only a few miles away, the strike is still held firmly by the old leadership, with picketing limited and the rank and file told to stay at home and watch the telly until they are told to go back to work.A great tussle is already joined between the powerhouses at places like Rotherham and Stocksbridge and the slow-witted pessimism in many other steel areas. Top of the pageLast updated on 20.12.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootSocialism and democracy(April 1997)From Election special, Socialist Review, No.207, April 1997, pp.11-14.Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Roll on 1 May. Nothing could have been more gloriously crass of John Major than his decision to call the general election on May Day, the festival day for socialists all over the world. The date adds a sweetness to the excitement which accompanies all general elections and especially this one – an excitement which springs from the ability of all of us to take part in removing our government, in this case the most despised, mocked and corrupt administration of modern times. Anyone who says the election ‘makes no difference’ should remember their despondency on 9 April 1992 and compare it with the joyful anticipation with which we expect to greet the departure from public life of David Evans and William Waldegrave, and, who knows, perhaps even Ann Widdecombe, Peter Lilley and Michael Howard into the bargain. Even the vision of the removal vans outside Downing Street and the loading into them of the possessions of John Major and Kenneth Clarke is delicious beyond description.Yet all these happy thoughts are marred by a more pervasive unease. In 1997, after almost a century of the Labour Party, our power to kick the Tories out seems absurdly limited to just that. We can kick the Tories out, but what then? Will the Blair government which comes to office take a single step to solve the problems which led to his victory? Will there be even the softest remedy for the horrors of the rampant free market? We have it on the firmest authority from Blair himself that everything will go on much the same as before. The man who uses the word ‘new’ as though he had invented it is now assuring us in almost every speech that his government will have nothing new to offer, and that the ‘change’ which he has advocated with such earnest passion will be no change at all. How to explain this contradiction between the thrill of our power to topple the Tories and our disgust at the Labour alternative? How has this apparently massive democratic power in which we can all participate shrunk to this little measure?One answer, perhaps the most important one, lies in the relationship between parliamentary democracy and socialism. The idea of representative government – that the people should regularly elect their rulers – was popular before anyone even thought of socialism. The American and French revolutions at the end of the 18th century established forms of representative government for which most men could vote. In Britain there was a long and bitter fight to extend the vote from the small minority of wealthy men who’d had it from the Middle Ages, and whose numbers were only marginally increased by the absurdly named ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832. Frustration with the results of that Reform Act built up into something truly great – the Chartist revolt which lasted from 1839 to 1848. In that final year, though the Chartists were beaten, revolutions broke out all over Europe and established new forms of parliamentary government. At the same time, the idea of socialism began for the first time to be widely circulated, most notably through the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.Before Marx and Engels, socialism had been seen mainly as an ideal, to be imposed from on high by idealists. It was an almost ethereal concept of an equal society in which everybody shared – far too beautiful to be achieved or administered by the rather selfish and ignorant masses. Such idealists were inclined to dismiss the rising clamour for the vote as irrelevant to the socialist cause, at best a diversion, at worst an obstacle. Marx and Engels took an entirely different view. As Hal Draper puts it, ‘Marx was the first socialist figure to come to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the consistent extension of democratic control from below.’ The young Marx first came to politics as what Draper calls ‘a democratic extremist’. One of his earliest essays was a hymn to the freedom of the press – a hymn, incidentally, which never embarrassed him in later life and which he happily reprinted. The young democratic extremist was inspired by a loathing of censorship, of torture and imprisonment without trial, of arbitrary power of every kind. His outrage led him away from utopias and schemes in the heads of people at the top and towards retaliatory action by the people at the bottom. His socialism developed out of this democratic extremism. He identified the mainspring of the hierarchical undemocratic society he hated as the hierarchy of property. The most profoundly undemocratic aspect of capitalist society was precisely capitalism, the control over all the things of life by a handful of people who owned the means of production. Socialism, the social control of the means of production, could not, therefore, be counterposed to democracy. Democracy, control from below, was an essential ingredient of socialism, its very essence.So Marx’s attitude to the rising tide of demands for universal suffrage was very different to that of most of his socialist contemporaries. He did not turn his back on the suffrage movement. On the contrary he consistently supported any demand which shifted power from the top to the bottom. He demanded the maximum suffrage, universal suffrage. He unconditionally supported the Chartists’ six points for extending the vote by secret ballot to all men. These demands (except one, for annual parliaments) have all been conceded. They seem today unremarkable – an integral part of capitalist society. Yet in 1839-48 they were the rallying standard for a vast working class army which linked their political demands – for votes and ballots – with economic demands to put an end to the exploitation of the poor by the rich."
} |
{
"content": "On the other hand, Marx noticed that the new ‘democratic’ constitutions proclaimed by the revolutions in France and Germany were no threat at all to the rich. In a detailed analysis of those constitutions, he demonstrated how, in the name of universal suffrage, the freedom of the press and assembly, they reserved for the rulers the power to smash the freedom of the press and assembly and even to limit or abolish the suffrage. The thread which ran through all his discussions of these problems started in his democratic extremism. His criterion was, as Draper explained, ‘What will maximise the influence exercised from below, by the masses in movement, on the political forces above?’ If whatever was proposed did maximise that influence, if the masses were in movement, he supported it. If it cut down that influence and encouraged the passivity of the masses, he opposed it. An example in Britain was Marx’s approach to the Reform League which was formed in the 1860s to keep up the pressure for universal suffrage. Marx claimed, rather excessively, that he and his supporters in the International Working Men’s Association had effectively founded the League, and he supported it throughout. But when someone moved that the League’s founder and chairman, Edward Beales, should join the Committee of the International, Marx bristled with indignation. Beales, he grumbled, had parliamentary ambitions in Marylebone. As a campaigner for universal suffrage, he should be supported. As a parliamentary careerist, he should be shunned.During most of Marx’s life the word ‘democracy’ had a revolutionary significance, which it does not have today. To most people it conjured up not just a representative parliament but a democratic share out of the economy as well. There seemed to be no difference between the power to vote for a government and the power which that vote would confer on the people’s representatives to redistribute society’s wealth. It seemed obvious on both sides of the class divide that if the majority, the workers and the poor, had the vote, the economic balance of society would shift towards them. Most of the Chartist leaders assumed that if they won their demand for universal suffrage, they would also win their demands for a fairer economic system. Universal suffrage meant working class power.True, there were lurking doubts, especially from the United States where a wide franchise seemed to have made little difference to the ever expanding gap between rich and poor. This puzzled the London Working Men’s Association, where the People’s Charter was first drafted. In 1837 the Association, controlled by what later became the right wing of the Chartist movement under William Lovett, sent an address to the working classes of America, which asked:‘Why, after 60 years of freedom have you not progressed further ... Why has so much of your fertile country been parcelled out between swindling bankers and grinding capitalists ... Why have so many of your cities, towns, railways, canals and manufactories become the monopolised property of those who “toil not neither do they spin”?’No credible answer came to the question. But after the Chartists were defeated and the British economy glided into a period of unprecedented growth, the question came back with force on both sides of the class divide. Was it possible to concede political democracy without conceding economic democracy? Was it possible for the rich to tolerate a representative parliament without giving away a penny of their wealth to the workers? Could ‘democracy’ be defined to mean a parliament elected over long periods whose boundaries of power stopped well short of the domain of the swindling bankers and grinding capitalists?Gradually, gingerly, as the nightmare of the Chartist revolt faded into the historical background, the newly confident British ruling class put these questions to the test. In 1867 a Tory government widened the franchise to skilled working men in the cities. In 1884 a Liberal government did the same for the better off workers in the countryside. In 1918 a Tory-Liberal coalition gave the vote to all men and to women over 30. In 1928 a Tory government extended this to all women. Thus the vote was conceded in four measures over 61 years. In general, the rulers found to their delight that the new democracy, restricted to politics and kept well away from economics, not only worked more smoothly than previously but encouraged large sections of the growing workers’ movement to join or support the Liberal Party and seek redress not through their own activity, as Marx had urged, but through ‘friendly’ Liberal members of parliament.The consensus between a political democracy and an economic hierarchy was jolted by the formation in 1900 of the Labour Party whose purpose was to represent organised labour in parliament. The founders of the Labour Party clearly intended to use any political power they might win through the vote for economic purposes. When he wrote the Labour Party constitution in 1918 Sidney Webb borrowed an old phrase from the Chartists, ‘the fruits of industry’. Clause Four of the constitution, which appeared on every Labour Party card for more than 70 years, was the classic definition of the Labour founders’ intention to use the new political democracy to pursue economic democracy, ‘to secure for the workers the full fruits of their industry’ by passing into law ‘the best available system of the common ownership of the means of production and distribution and exchange’. The intention was clear. Gradually, but persistently, elected Labour governments would use the power conferred on them by the vote to encroach on the power of the rich and transfer the ownership of the means of production from the rich to the people. This was not simply an intention. It was also used as a powerful argument to those who clung to the old ideas of democratic revolution. The argument ran like this. Why countenance revolution, with all its violence and unpleasantness, when the same ends – the common ownership of the means of production – can be achieved by peaceful means, through voting Labour to office in parliament?"
} |
{
"content": "The argument, which swept like wildfire through the rapidly growing labour parties in Europe, was contested by a revolutionary minority boosted by two enormously powerful pamphlets – Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1900) and Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the revolutionary summer of 1917. Both pamphlets continued in the tradition set out by Marx in the 1840s. Far from contrasting socialism with democracy, they started from the principle of a democratic society controlled from below. Lenin specifically hailed the ‘elective principle’ as indispensable to a socialist society. Rosa Luxemburg’s passionate identification with the spontaneous movements of the masses shines out of every sentence she wrote. Her whole approach was democratic from start to finish.Like Marx’s, their argument was not at all that there is some choice to be made between socialism and democracy but that the two are indivisible. The problem, they argued, with the ‘democratic’ approach proposed by the main European workers’ parties was that their democracy was not strong enough to contest the hierarchies of the rich. It locked democracy up in a small parliamentary island, while control over the ocean – industry, finance, law, armed forces, police, media – stayed in the hands of the unelected rich. The contest between the new confined democracy in parliament and the boundless undemocratic hierarchies of the rich would be, they warned, no contest. The rich would win; and in the process the workers would lose confidence in themselves and lower their guard still further. For the essence of the parliamentary argument was that ordinary people could and should do nothing to emancipate themselves. They should leave the sophisticated business of emancipation to their betters, to the educated elite within the movement who would make their way to parliament. If and when, as was inevitable, this elite failed to achieve even a small part of the emancipation they promised, the workers would be left high and dry, rudderless and hopeless. If the educated elite couldn’t do the job, they would ask, who could? Passivity would lead to despair, to the triumph of the right, with disastrous consequences for democracy.The experience of parliamentary democracy this century grimly vindicates what Lenin and Luxemburg predicted. This is not to pretend that no advances have been made for the workers by parliamentary endeavour. In Britain majority Labour governments in 1945-51, 1964-70 and 1974-79 all attempted to intervene in the world of the capitalist hierarchy, and reverse the priorities of the rich. The rate of their success has followed a consistent downward curve – each majority Labour government achieved less intervention and redistribution than the one before. But in general the overwhelming triumph in the continuing tussle between political (parliamentary) democracy and capitalist hierarchy has gone to the capitalists. Again and again Labour’s plans for intervening, for nationalising, for switching resources from profit to people, have been sidetracked, shelved or reversed. At the end of each period of Labour government, even the relatively confident one of 1945-51, the general impression conveyed by the defeated Labour ministers was of puzzlement, weariness, above all of impotence. The very idea of Labour ‘in power’ has shifted over the century to one of Labour in impotent office, not very different from the Tories in office. The resulting disillusionment has made it easy for the Tories and their media to turn the elections to their own advantage, and then to claim their ‘democratic’ victories at the polls as justifications for enlarging and reinforcing their hierarchical and entirely undemocratic monopolies.The disillusionment has entered into the very soul of the Labour leaders themselves. The failure of their predecessors to keep their promises, and the Tory majorities at the polls from 1979 seem to have convinced Blair and his colleagues that capitalism is all powerful. The aspirations of their predecessors to intervene in the capitalist economy to protect and assist the people who vote Labour have been abandoned. In the past, they say, Labour made promises to their supporters which they broke. Their shock remedy has been not to make any promises to Labour supporters, and to talk instead of ‘newness’ and ‘change’ not in policy but in style and personnel. The process of 100 years of conflict between a political democracy and a capitalist hierarchy has left us with a choice between a bemused bespectacled grinning prime minister in his fifties, and a grinning prime minister in his forties who for the moment is neither bespectacled nor bemused. No wonder so many rich and powerful union bashers and exploiters are flocking to Blair.A common New Labour justification for this process is that, although they no longer regard themselves as socialists, they still remain fervent democrats. They perpetuate the divide between socialism and democracy which was initiated by the sectarians of the 1840s. In truth, however, the experience of a century of failure has detached them from democracy as well. Perhaps the most depressing feature of the whole New Labour retreat has been its leaders’ willingness to jettison the most elementary democratic freedoms. The enthusiasm with which Jack Straw joined up with possibly the most odious Tory minister of the century, Michael Howard, to propose sweeping new powers for police and special agents to enter and bug people’s homes was the most ominous sign of New Labour’s threat to civil liberties. The commitment to ‘socialism from above’ has now been replaced by a new exciting concept, ‘democracy from above’, personified by Detective Inspector Straw and his merry men bugging the homes of dissidents, rounding them up, shoving them in prison, and shackling them to their hospital beds as they fall ill. Straw stands in the long lugubrious tradition of social democratic ministers who set out to change the world but decide before long to continue to administer it by repression."
} |
{
"content": "In their desperate enthusiasm to run the corrupt capitalism of the age, Labour leaders have moved far to the right of their supporters. The course which they have plotted never mind the degrees to which they will be blown even off that course by a militant capitalist class – will place them almost at once in conflict with large groups of their supporters who will be boosted by the electoral victory and even less tolerant than in the old days of Labour prevarication. There are tumultuous times ahead in which the need for a new mass socialist organisation will be at once obvious and desperate. In building such a new organisation, the history of the century spells out two vital lessons. The first is not to dissipate our energies once again in seeking to regulate or alter capitalist society from the top, but to mobilise and coordinate the enormous forces at the disposal of the workers and their movement. The second, and even more important, is to avoid the sanctuary of the ivory tower, and the temptation in hard times to retreat into a sectarian dugout, where the floundering of what is left of democracy can be observed with grim and irrelevant delight. The sidelining of socialism has led to the sidelining of democracy, and socialists will have to fight for both with renewed determination. One of the oldest tricks of Labour ministers in office who propose to legislate against democratic freedoms is to pretend that these ‘bourgeois issues’ are the preoccupation of the ‘chattering classes’, and have nothing to do with good old salty proletarians like Jack Straw or Harriet Harman. This is bilge. Socialists are going to have to lead the battle for elementary democratic rights – for trial by jury, for legal aid, for the freedom of the minority press, against media witch hunts and baton happy policemen.Marx’s rule of thumb is just as vital as a century and a half ago. Anything, however remote or small, which builds and sustains control from below is part of the overall struggle to change the social order, and worth fighting for. When he was repeatedly asked what socialism would be like, he grew irritable and impatient. The nearest he ever came to a blueprint was when he told his idealist correspondents that if they wanted a glimpse of the new society they should join the fight against capitalism. The seeds of the new society are sown in the struggle against the old one. Top of the pageLast updated on 12.2.2005"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHow history comes alive(9 September 1993)From Socialist Worker, 9 September 1993.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 58–59.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I met the historian Christopher Hill once, last summer. I went with BBC producer Fiona Maclean to interview him in his Warwickshire home for a programme about poetry and revolution.He took us into his garden on a bright summer afternoon and questioned us closely on how much time he had on air. He ascertained that he had a quarter of an hour. He then vanished upstairs and re-emerged staggering under a huge pile of books.The tape recorder was switched on and he spoke, uninterrupted except by an infernal bee, referring to and quoting freely from his books for an hour. He spoke about Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell and above all John Milton, and their relationship to the English Revolution.He spoke with such power and persuasive passion that we wondered, as we made our dazed way home, whether we should devote our whole 50 minutes to him alone.After the interview I told him I had been searching everywhere for his Milton and the English Revolution, first published in 1978. Did he have a spare copy? No, he said nervously, he had none left.So the search went on. It ended a year later on the top rung of a ladder in a second hand bookshop in Chicago. Quaint and absurdA book like this cannot be absorbed in snatched moments – it has to wait for a holiday. And so my summer holiday has been enriched beyond description by this wonderful book – the best, in my judgement, of all Christopher Hill’s long lifetime’s work on the English Revolution.‘I am arguing a case’, he writes in his introduction. That was a dangerous enough confession from the Master of Balliol College, but far more subversive when the ‘case’ was that John Milton, the academics’ darling, the source of endless textual nitpicking from A level students to classical English Literature scholars, ‘got his ideas not only from books but also from talking to his contemporaries’.In other words a lot of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and especially Samson Agonistes has more to do with the ‘loony left’ – known in the mid-17th century as Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians etc – than with any classical text or Latin scholarship.Christopher Hill’s great genius as a historian is not just that he can think himself back 300 years, and translate what often seem quaint and absurd religious discussions into the politics of the time. The relationship of the Son to the Father, the Trinity, the destination of the soul after death, the Serpent and the Apple, Adam and Eve – all these dead notions come alive in the revolutionary forces of the time.Some of this is hard to follow but, thanks to Christopher Hill’s dry humour and unbending commitment, never difficult to read. For example:When a modern theologian writes ‘it would no longer seem appropriate to speak of a God existing apart from man, or a human self existing apart from God’, we may dismiss this as an attempt to adapt Christianity to the modern world, to preserve a God who is in fact dead.But we should not let our scepticism about trendy modern theologians reflect back upon the fantastic daring of the 17th century thinkers, who expressed their hard won belief in the importance of human beings through the medium of theology.For them it was not a trick, not a last hope of drawing a congregation: it was a tremendous and tremendously new concept, won through spiritual torment and exaltation. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootDead ringer(November 1989)From Socialist Worker Review, No. 125 (November 1989).Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2013.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Dead Poets SocietyDirector: Peter WeirTHE MAIN characteristic of the school I went to was barbarism. It was a “top flight” public school – Shrewsbury – and it was run on the standard lines of British public schools throughout the ages.It cost a lot of money to go to Shrewsbury, and what the parents got in return was children well equipped to be rulers.“You are the leaders of the future,” a general bellowed at us every year as we dressed up in uniform and paraded around like toy soldiers. “See that you live up to it!”To be leaders of the future it was necessary to know what it was like to be bullied in order to turn out a good bully yourself. Almost every relationship at school was founded on discipline, violence and hierarchy.Looking back on all this now, I wonder how it was that, at least in the last two years of my schooldays, I enjoyed them so much. The answer lies in the character and style of two teachers whose very presence at the school seemed to flout its essence.One of these men was small, bald, and on first acquaintance, almost certainly off his rocker. He taught English to boys who were learning other subjects for exams, and was therefore not expected to help anyone pass anything. On my first appearance in his classroom he made one of my friends stand on a chair and recite two lines which he had written on the blackboard. I recall them exactly:anyone lived in a pretty howtownwith up so floating manybells down.The teacher – we called him Kek – told us that these lines were by a man called ee cummings (who spelt his name like that, without capital letters, and the whole of the rest of the poem was like those first two lines – gibberish, and badly punctuated gibberish at that).We learnt his “spells”, as he called his gobbets of prose and poetry in endless different languages, were hypnotised by them, learnt the bits around them and became quite literally spellbound. All the guff learnt for exams has long since been forgotten but Kek’s spells still roll around in my head today.They are still part of a new world, something completely different to the world I can see and feel day to day.The only other teacher I remember at Shrewsbury was also an eccentric. I think he was a Liberal, or even perhaps a “moderate” Tory, but he was constantly provoking dissent.He introduced us – in 1956 – to the New Statesman, which was quite shockingly subversive of everything the school seemed to be telling us. He pushed us to write in the school magazine all kinds of subversive and satirical material.So far did he push me down the road to radical ideas that I even started (just before I left) wondering what he, and Kek for that matter, were doing at Shrewsbury at all. Were they not contradicting everything the school stood for? Were they not subverting the very values which inspired people to go out and form an empire?The answer was, in part, yes. The Kek spells and the New Statesman did open up closed minds.Nevertheless, there was even at Shrewsbury in the 1950s, as in every public school, the eccentric oddball teacher. It was perhaps important for boys to learn to think for themselves, if only to come to the correct conclusion about their role in life as rulers. The question which dogged the authorities was – how far can we let these eccentrics go?I do realise that not everybody who goes to see Dead Poets Society was likely to have been at Shrewsbury (or any public school) in the 1950s.Some may have gone to the film simply because they read a disgustingly philistine and reactionary review in City Limits (once a principled magazine, now a worthless rag).But as the film went on, I felt it could hardly be a coincidence that so many experiences of mine at a British public school in the 1950s should be reproduced in a film about an American school founded on all that’s worst in the British school tradition in 1959.The hero of the film is a teacher who wants to break the walls of convention which hem his pupils in. He wants them to see things differently, which is one reason he makes them stand on their desks to recite poetry.Just as Kek was hooked on Auden and Eliot and ee cummings because they used words which sounded like what they should mean, so Mr Keating in the film is turned on by the great idealists of the American tradition: Thoreau, who was forever writing of Utopias where people behaved decently to one another; Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, who spent their lives urging people to take the unlikely and unusual paths of life rather than perish in conformity.The question for Keating is the same as it was for Kek. How would the authorities react? Would they patronise him? Or would he stray too far beyond the bounds of orthodoxy?As always in such matters, the dividing line is crossed when talk turns to action: when cosy theory about an ideal society turns into practice which changes the very lifestyles and aspirations of the leaders of the future.Many who see the film and did not go to a school of this kind will find it incredible if not a little contemptible, that a man of Keating’s idealism and visions could find himself in a barbaric place like that in the first place.They underestimate the ability of the public school system to patronise eccentricity and, where possible, to make a virtue out of it. When one of his pupils revolts against the headmaster in a quite wonderful prank, Keating himself quite genuinely intervenes on the side of authority."
} |
{
"content": "He is happy to flout the authority of the world outside, provided he does not flout the authority of the school. In the end the logic of revolt takes its course, and he is seen, wrongly as it turns out, to go too far.This is a glorious film with a gloriously subversive ending, and any reader of the Review who does not see it should suffer the worst possible penalty – a life subscription to City Limits. Top of the pageLast updated on 12.8.2013"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootBig Business and GovernmentTony Blair’s well oiled machine(October 2000)From News Review, Socialist Review, No.245, October 2000, p.5.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The reports of the ‘crisis meetings’ between Blair and Co and the oil company chiefs have been greeted with profound merriment in the corridors of oil power. The prime minister and his ruthless home secretary, Jack Straw – were widely reported to have issued ‘stern warnings’ to the executives about their duty to the public, and even threats that unless they got the oil moving they could all be in serious trouble.The merriment arises from the fact that no section of British industry has provided more of New Labour’s business initiatives than oil. The best example is Nick Butler, who is so senior in BP that he can’t afford to be a cabinet minister. Butler has been an ideological pillar of New Labour ever since he wrote a book with Neil Kinnock in 1987 trying to persuade people to vote Labour because the party had changed its attitude to shareholders and had been converted to the case for making money for nothing. Butler was not available for comment after that first tense meeting with the prime minister – indeed, in the interests of a free press, no oil executive would appear in any media until the dispute was almost over.Butler’s squeamishness about taking a ministerial post was not shared by Lord Simon, former chairman of BP, who was Blair’s choice as his first minister for Europe. Somehow Simon managed to take his new post without sacrificing a penny of his vast shareholding in BP, and without batting an eyelid when his company’s association with the drug barons of Colombia was exposed.The Simon connection did not last long, but there are plenty of other associations between oil industry bosses and the Labour government many of which are set out in the 22 September issue of Private Eye. In 1998, during his brief career as trade secretary (before he was sacked for borrowing nearly £400,000 from the government’s paymaster general to buy an appropriate London mansion), Peter Mandelson set up an oil price ‘task force’. Its task was to keep the price of oil up in defiance of the market, and its force included the managing directors of Shell, Texaco and BP Exploration.Other bizarre appointments of the same kind include: Shell chairman Mark Moody-Stuart to chair the renewable energy task force; Jyoti Munsiff, Shell’s company secretary, as a member of the government’s sustainable development education panel; Bryan Sanderson, BP’s managing director, as chairman of the Learning and Skills Council; Stella Earnshaw, former regional finance chief for Shell, as a member of the Funding Agency for Schools; John Harte (Shell) and John Morgan (BP} to the Oil and Pipelines Agency which oversees bulk transportation for the Ministry of Defence, (These appointments could be embarrassing if the government sends in the army to sort out the oil crisis.) As for the NHS – which health secretary Milburn put on ‘red alert’ during the crisis – did anyone hear a word of protest from Bryan Grote, an influential member of the government’s public services productivity council, set up by new Labour 1998 to deliver improvements in productivity and efficiency’? Mr Grote is executive vice-president of BP. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot“This bright day of Summer”:The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381(June 1981)First published June 1981. Produced and distributed for the SWP by Socialists Unlimited, London.The text of this pamphlet was first given as a talk in celebration of the 600th Anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt at the Socialist Workers Party Rally in Skegness, Easter 1981.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Matthew Caygill.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.1381‘Matters cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all things shall be held in common, when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.’For this ideal, 140,000 peasants marched on London under the elected leadership of Wat Tyler in June 1381, camping at Blackheath in the south and Barnet in the north in an attempt to force from the king charters abolishing their serfdom and repealing oppressive laws.It was perhaps the first time the standard of socialism was raised in Britain.TO START with a couple of announcements. The first comes from Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop will not be attending this year any of the celebrations which are being held to commemorate the Peasants’ Revolt.He won’t be going to Canterbury where a lot of respectable people have arranged a commemoration of the Peasants Revolt. He won’t be going to Blackheath, or Mile End, or St Albans where there are other celebrations in June.And it’s not because he’s busy. A spokesman for the archbishop was quoted a fortnight ago as saying: ‘This is not a celebration with which Dr Runcie would want to be associated’. And that’s not altogether surprising, because the first thing that the rebels did when they got into the Tower of London on June 16th 1381 was to search out the Archbishop of Canterbury, to tell him what they thought of him, and to chop off his head.Now the second announcement comes from Buckingham Palace. Her Majesty the Queen will not be attending any celebrations this year to commemorate the Peasants’ Revolt – and that is rather surprising really, because, if there’s one thing that can explain the immediate failure of the Peasants’ Revolt, it is that the people had faith in their monarch. I think it’s a bit churlish of her majesty not to commemorate that fact – but perhaps she feels that people won’t make the same mistake again.Many socialists will be gathering in a whole lot of places where there are to be celebrations this June, and it is worth remembering why. To do that we’ve got to go back a long way, six hundred years, to an England where there were only two and a half million people living and all of them bound in one way or another to the land they were working, and to the lord who owned that land. ‘The serf works the land, and the lord works the serf’ – that’s the explanation of the feudal system in a single sentence. The lords owned everything, lacking only the right to buy and sell people, which was something that happened under the Roman Empire, and would happen again in Africa and America. Everything that the serf or the villein did, everything they produced on the land was the property of the lord – everything. Even their daughters were subject to the sexual pleasures of the lord. The relationship between the lord and the people who produced their wealth was like the relationship between the lord and the beast of burden, except that probably the beast of burden was more generously treated.What the lord on earth didn’t take, the lord in heaven did. The church, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, had found a quotation from the story of Jacob’s Ladder in Genesis: ‘Of all that thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto thee’. They’d rewritten it to: ‘Of all that thou shalt make, thou shalt surely give a tenth to me.’ That’s how they saw it, and that was what the tithe barns were built for, and that was what the tithes meant: that a tenth of what you made, on top of what you gave to the lord, went to the church.And if you died, it was extremely expensive. If you died under the age of sixty, the lord took your best beast – to compensate for the amount of military service that you would have given if only you had lived to be sixty – and the church then took your second beast, to compensate for the tithes you would have paid if only you’d had the decency to live to the proper age. Since no working families at all had more than two beasts, you can see the poverty that system caused.The feudal system, which is described so often as though it was part of the natural order, as something tidy and well parcelled up, was in fact utterly brutal and utterly horrible. And at the time we are discussing it was beginning to crack up, or at any rate to fray at the edges.Rich people were beginning to understand that they didn’t have to produce one-for-one in each manor, but that they could trade across the board, produce a lot of things cheaper, and make a lot of money that way. Money flowed into a feudal system that had largely depended on barter, and new merchants ran the system of buying and selling. And some working people discovered that, if they worked really hard, they could produce a little bit of surplus even on top of what they were giving to their lord and the church."
} |
{
"content": "But the break-up of feudalism was hardly felt at all by the serf at the bottom of society. Only tiny particles of freedom came to him. Even at the top of society it wasn’t making any substantial difference. The previous rulers of England had been the king, the barons, the landed gentry and the clergy. Now they were, by way of a change, the king, the barons, the landed gentry, the clergy – and the monopolists, the merchants who dominated the new trade.Now who were the rulers of England at this time?Most of the time up to the Peasants’ Revolt, though not actually during it, there was a fine -old tyrant called Edward III – usually described in school history books as ‘a good king’. Always be suspicious when that is written about a king. The thing that Edward liked to do most was to go to war. That was because he didn’t have to do any of the fighting – and because it was the quickest way to make booty. He couldn’t get loot out of the barons or the monopolists very easily, but he found that if he could win (or somebody else could win for him) a battle in France, such as Crecy or Poitiers, then the riches flowed in. So he was always off to war. In fact he was one of the inspirers of what’s known as the Hundred Years War.One of the things he did in the process, which is relevant to this story, was that he insisted that the people should be armed, or at any rate instructed in the processes of arms, and he was very adamant that there shouldn’t be any pastimes undertaken by anyone that would take time away from archery practice. There’s a statute in 1341 which decrees that anyone caught playing football, handball, hockey or racing dogs was liable to imprisonment.King Edward had a gang. They were known as a gang. The central figure was his brother, John of Gaunt. In Shakespeare John O’Gaunt appears as a benevolent old man, usually dying. At this time he was very much not dying: he was always fighting. He had an obsession that he wanted to become the King of Castille. He was determined to become the King of Castille, and he didn’t see why there should be a King of Castille if it wasn’t him. This drove him to all kinds of ridiculous and relentless adventures. If he couldn’t fight in Castille he would get in some practice by fighting the Scots.He laid claim, with every justification to being the most hated man in England. He was strongly challenged for the title, though, by Sir Robert Hales, who was the Treasurer of England, what’s known today as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was widely known even by his friends as ‘Hob the Robber’, because of his habit of stealing other people’s estates.Simon of Sudbury, was another member of the gang, Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor – just in case there should be any doubt that the church laid down the laws, he made sure he was head of the church and head of the law at the same time.The fifth member of the gang, the monopolist who joined them, was a man called Richard Lyons. He had discovered (mathematics was very in vogue at the time) that if he paid for the king’s wars, he could get the monopoly over the buying and selling of wool, and that there would be a big profit in it. I’ll explain it, because these things are complicated, He bought the wool for six pounds by order of the king, and he sold it for fourteen pounds by order of the king, and therefore made a profit. Only a few people in society could understand that sort of subtlety, but Lyons made himself extremely rich by this process.Now this was the gang that ruled England. They represented different powers, and as different powers do, they were constantly quarrelling with one another about who was to pay for the wars, where were the taxes going to come from, who was to collect the taxes? All the time arguments were going on between the king, the clergy, the barons and the monopolists.But as they were arguing – and as the wars went badly the arguments got fiercer – so the single point on which they could unite also became more solid. Namely their hatred and contempt for all the people who produced the wealth over which they were quarrelling. IN 1348, THERE CAME something which increased that hatred and contempt enormously: the Black Death, a great bubonic plague coming up from Europe and sweeping through the country, killing people at a rate it’s almost impossible to imagine.Perhaps 15 per cent of the population were killed as a result of this plague. Three hundred thousand people out of about two million. And of course the numbers killed among the serfage and the villeinage, among the people at the bottom of society, were far, far greater in proportion to those at the top.The immediate economic effect of this, however, was that there were fewer serfs and fewer villeins, but more work to do. So for the first time since the Norman Conquest the people at the bottom of society began to feel a growing confidence about their economic condition in society. They began to feel that they were in demand. Instead of the demand all the time being made of them, they could make demands of someone else because they were scarce. Their labour was scarce, and their labour was vital to the society, and so out of the scarcity they could benefit."
} |
{
"content": "And just as soon as they did start to make some advancement, and to press for higher wages if they were wage-earners, or for more freedom if they were serfs or villeins, so the government started to move in repression against them. In 1351 was passed the first known statutory incomes policy in Britain. People think that incomes policy is a modern thing. Not at all. The Statute of Labourers – you’re taught that at school, but no one teaches you that it was an incomes policy. It’s a perfect precursor for all the people who have recently been conducting incomes policies, all the Barbara Castles, Ted Heaths, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlons. Listen to this:‘Because a great part of the people, and especially workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many, seeing the necessity of masters and the great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they receive excessive wages and some willing to beg in idlesness rather than by labour to get their living. We, considering the grievious incommodities which of the lack, especially of ploughmen and such labourers as may hereafter come, have upon deliberation and treaty of the prelates and nobles and learned men assisting us, ordained:‘One: Every able-bodied person under sixty shall be bound to serve when required at no higher wage than in the twentieth year of the reign or else be committed to prison.’That’s the way to do it. You don’t muck around with ‘guidelines’ and all that sort of thing. Three simple rules: one, you’ve got to work; two: you’ve got to work for what you had ten years ago; and three: if you don’t, you’ll go to prison.Now that was passed, and when you passed laws in those days that was the end of the matter, except that this time the gang found things went rather differently: they had passed a law which was promptly broken, and broken, and broken. And not only by the people underneath, but also by some of the employers, who decided that they would rather produce things than not produce things, and would rather pay higher wages to the wandering workers than obey the Statute of Labourers.So, for thirty years following that Statute, from 1351 to 1381, there was a relentless class campaign with the people at the top, who were trying to hold on to their property, passing law after law in order to try to keep themselves in control and their property at the level to which they were accustomed.Here are some of those laws:1360: Punishment of labourers who depart from their service to another town or county. ‘If he cannot be found, he is to be outlawed and a writ issued to every sheriff in England to take and bring him back to the county where the writ was issued and there to have the letter F, for falsity, branded on his forehead.’ 1361: ‘The sheriff shall have power to restrain all evil-doers, rioters and barrators’ – whatever they are – ‘and to pursue, arrest, take and chastise them according to their trespass.’It’s awfully old language, isn’t it? Sounds an awfully long time ago, that 1361 Statute. But in December 1932 Tom Mann, the Communist agitator and unemployed workers’ organiser, was arrested under the Statute of 1361 and held for three days without charge while the unemployed demonstration that he’d organised took place. Before, they passed the Criminal Trespass Act in parliament recently, this statute of 1361 was the one they used to procure criminal charges against people who were engaged in trespass.1363: Petition in parliament to prevent women wearing clothes that ought to belong to a higher rank.In 1377 King Edward died and was replaced by his grandson Richard, who was only ten years old. But the statutes went on.1378: ‘No bondswoman may put her children to school.’ Why should she put her children to school when they could well be put to work? 1379: (This is one I like particularly) ‘For punishment of devisers of false news and reporters of horrible and false lies concerning prelates, dukes, earls, barons and other nobles and great men of the realm, whereof great peril and mischief might come to all the realm and quick subversion and destruction of the said realm if due remedy be not provided.’Due remedy was of course provided. Brandings, and burnings, and imprisonments.This last law was directed, not at the investigative reporters of that time, for there were none, but against the people who carried the news by word of mouth to meeting places in village after village. These were religious people, working within the framework of religion but attacking the way in which religion was being carried out. Excommunicated monks and priests were beginning to challenge the power of the church over people’s minds, over how people thought.John Wycliff started off the process – he wasn’t a wandering priest at all, he was the Master of Balliol. He said for instance that there could be such a thing, there could be such a thing as a corrupt priest. Unheard of! Unimaginable! That there should be such a thing said! But he said it, and he also said that if there is a corrupt priest, that priest should not be obeyed.And from challenging the church, the wandering preachers, excommunicated and imprisoned and constantly harassed by these statutes, started to take ‘false rumours’ about prelates and earls to the village meetings. From 1360 to 1381, for those twenty years before the revolt, these people moved around carrying these simple messages.Most famous of them, the one we know most about, was John Ball, who was the parish priest at St James Church in Colchester.John Ball applied himself to the arguments used by the church to justify the division of human society by property. What was the justification for that? People seemed to have the same physical characteristics, they seemed to be the same, what was the justification for this great division?"
} |
{
"content": "The church came up with an answer. Read the bible, they said. Adam and Eve had three sons: Cain and Abel and Seth. Cain did a terrible thing. He killed his brother, Abel. Cain therefore represented the evil, the barbarous, the people who were ineducable, the people at the bottom of society. If you are at the bottom of society you’re descended from Cain, and that’s why you’re there.Then there were the people who were descended from Seth, who was quite a different character. Very respectable gentleman, never slaughtered his brother in public anyway, and eventually begat Noah. Noah, you know, was the absolute pinnacle of respectability, who behaved with great foresight and vision. When there was a natural disaster he packed an ark with all the important people, namely his own family, and even all the important animals. His example shines down to the people who are arranging the guest lists for the nuclear shelters today.If you were descended from Seth – and there were very few people descended from Seth – then you were civilised, educated, fit to be on top of society. Thus did the Bible ‘explain’ the division of the human race.John Ball came to this argument and wiped it clean with a wonderful rhyming couplet which was the theme of all his speeches.‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’It means two things. In the beginning, when people first existed, when human beings were first able to use their brain power to conquer the animal kingdom and to conquer nature, then where could you say that one person was more important than the other? Where could you see the class origins then?It also means something else. In those same circumstances, where was the evidence that the man was superior to the woman?We don’t have reports of John Balls’s speeches unfortunately. There were no scribes taking down in shorthand what John Ball and all the others were saying at that time. Occasionally a chronicler in a monastery would note one down, just to show how terrible these revolutionaries were! Here’s one such fragment which shows the inspiration and the ideal which John Ball held out to his audiences.‘My good friends, matters cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all things shall be held in common, when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.’Simple, elementary equality, preached there within the framework of religion. Not just the idea of equality, not just the inspiration, but most important and central to this entire story, the organisation that went with that idea. The belief that the idea could be put into effect if people took action. The John Balls weren’t just going around the villages saying nice things about how all .things could be held in common. They were agitators, engaged in thirty years of organisation, of inspiration to action, of the appointment of representatives, of linking the experience between town and country. AGAIN AND AGAIN the authorities tried to suppress them. In 1379, in forty-five ‘hundreds’, which is not a very big area, around and about Essex, £10,000 was taken in fines on the peasantry in a single year.That sounds quite a lot even today, but then the average monthly wage paid to ploughmen and reapers was one shilling, that is a twentieth of a pound.The enormous numbers of people in prison, the large numbers of brandings, and the tremendous amount of money taken in fines, all these are indications of what was going on. But all to no avail.John Gower was a landlord and a lawyer (you really had to be one in order to be the other). Shortly before the Peasants’ Revolt broke out, he wrote, with all the prejudices of the class he represented, the most extraordinary prophecy:‘Three things, all of the same sort, are merciless when they get the upper hand, a water flood, a wasting fire, and the common multitude of small folk. For these will never be checked by reason or discipline and therefore, to speak in brief, the present world is so troubled by them that it is well to set a remedy thereunto. Ha! Age of ours, whither turnest thou? For the poor and small folk who should cleeve to their labour demand to be better fed than their masters. Moreover, they bedeck themselves in fine colours and fine attire whereas were it not for their pride and their privy conspiracies they could be clad in sackcloth as of old.’That shows just how worried they were about the rise in the peasants’ standard of living. In spite of all that repression, of all those law courts, of all the religious preaching in the churches, the villeins and the serfs and the wage-earners were beginning to encroach upon the wealth of the rulers.The king’s gang were in great difficulty, because the wars were going badly in France. They needed more money to maintain their own standard of living. In December 1380 John of Gaunt took his parliament to Northampton, where they decided they were going to have a poll tax, which is a sort of VAT, except that you didn’t have to buy anything to pay it, you just paid the tax. Every person over the age of fourteen had to pay at least a shilling, that is at least a monthly wage – every person.Now the problem with a poll tax was how to collect it. The standard procedure for tax collection was useless. People had found out how to escape from one village to another, how to get off the tax roll on this village and off it on that, how to dodge the bailiffs when they came – and many of the bailiffs were themselves dissatisfied about the taxes they had to collect."
} |
{
"content": "So John of Gaunt’s parliament enrolled a special squad of tax collectors under a particularly revolting specimen called John Leg. John Leg was conceivably the nastiest person in the whole of this very nasty story. He was a sort of mixture of a Black’n’Tan corporal and a racist immigration officer at London Airport. Those were the sort of people he engaged around him to collect these poll taxes.I mentioned the immigration officers at London Airport deliberately. One of the tasks of John Leg’s gang was to discover whether people were fourteen or not. John Legg devised what he called the ‘puberty test’, which has its echo, doesn’t it, in the ‘virginity test’ that has been forced on immigrants coming to Britain today. For to decide whether sons and daughters were over 14, and so liable to the tax, they would measure the pubic hairs. That, as you can imagine, was not particularly popular.Through January, February and March 1381 they collected their forces, a new, drilled gang of tax collectors. They started collecting in April, and as though to mark the date, on April 26th John Ball was arrested and locked up in Maidstone Prison. The counter-offensive, the gang’s attempt to crack down once and for all on this insubordination of the last thirty years, had started.Instead it was the spark to the flame, and unlike peasants’ revolts in other parts of Europe at the time, it was spark to fuel and tinder that had been carefully piled up over a whole number of years.On May 30th a man called Thomas Bampton, a very, very important man indeed, rode into Brentwood in Essex at the head of a group of five or six armed people to complain about the low taxation of the Essex village of Fobbing. The men of Fobbing said they had paid the taxes and they didn’t intend to pay any more, and so of course Bampton ordered their arrest. And then something fantastic happened. The Fobbing men refused to be arrested! Then something more fantastic happened: twenty men with longbows were suddenly standing outside the court. And they politely asked Mr Bampton if he would mind getting on his horse and going out of Brentwood – which he did with amazing alacrity.He went to see the authorities, to see a man called Sir Robert Belnap. Thomas Bampton was a very important person, but Sir Robert Belnap was the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. I can’t describe how important he was.He came to Brentwood with fifteen men – fifteen, that’s a lot you know. You don’t need fifteen men to carry out a puberty test on a fifteen-year-old child. He came to Brentwood and commanded a jury to charge the rebels. ‘These men have revolted against the crown, let’s have a jury,’ he declared. Well, two people in Brentwood agreed to form a jury – that was enough for Sir Robert. Two good men and true. So he started to hold his court ... and suddenly there were a hundred men outside with longbows. They took hold of Sir Robert Belnap and they put him the wrong way round on his horse, tied him to it, and sent him out of the town. He’d gone a long way before someone got him down. Then he saw another horse coming towards him, and on the horse were the severed heads of the jurors who had agreed to indict the rebels of Brentwood.Now on the same day, on the same day – you see, people say the thing wasn’t planned, that it was sporadic outburst – but on the same day, June 2nd, in Dartford in Kent, which is some way away, one of John Leg’s gangs went to the house of John Tyler.Here is a description of what happened:‘Some of Leg’s fellow criminals ... (this is actually quite a moderate historian, not a socialist at all, a man called Edmund Maurice, a liberal, and even he refers to ‘Leg’s fellow criminals’)‘Some of Let’s fellow criminals had already arrived, and had gone to the house of one John Tyler and commanded of his wife the payment of the poll tax on behalf of herself, her husband and her daughter. She refused to pay for her daughter, as not being of age, and the collector thereupon seized the daughter, declaring he would discover if this were true.’Maurice then quotes from Stowe’s chronicle:‘Neighbours came running in, and John Tyler, being at work in the same town tiling of an house when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand and ran reeking home, where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words and strake at the tiler. Whereupon the tiler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with the lathing staff that the brains flew out of his head, wherethrough great noise arose in the streets and the poor people, being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler.’That’s the original chronicler, not the modern historian. Just as Brentwood had provided the spark in Essex, so Dartford set fire to Kent. TROOPS OF ARMED PEASANTS suddenly started arriving at the main townships of Essex and Kent within 24 hours. On June 3rd the monastery at Erith had fallen. On June 5th the castle at Rochester fell to the peasants – never had it been taken since the Norman Conquest.On June 6th John Ball was set free from Maidstone Prison – and it was there, as he was set free, that rebel forces representing twenty, thirty, perhaps forty thousand men, elected as their leader a man called Wat Tyler. Not the John Tyler we have met before, but Wat Tyler, about whom, to his enormous credit, we know absolutely nothing. We don’t know what he looked like, we don’t know what he did for a living, we don’t know anything about him save that he led the biggest rising of ordinary people in Britain before Oliver Cromwell."
} |
{
"content": "I know there are lots of academic people who like to hear from sensible, university professors about Wat Tyler, so here is Professor Sir Charles Oman – you couldn’t get better than that could you? He writes in The Great Revolt, published by Oxford University Press 1906: ‘it is probable that Tyler was an adventurer of unknown antecedents, and we may well believe the Kentishman who declared that he was a well-known rogue and highwayman.’That’s the way professors write, when they’ve really done the research, who accept only facts ... ‘we may well believe’, he writes! ‘it is probably ...!’At any rate, this ‘rogue and highwayman’ was leading an army of seventy thousand people through Kent. At the same time Jack Straw was leading another army of seventy thousand through Essex. Every day the army was growing. Through Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, even Lincolnshire, there were peasants meeting together in the villages. Representatives had been previously appointed and marked down. We know that because when John Ball was released from prison in Maidstone he wrote and sent a series of letters. Only two or three have come down to us, but the letters are direct, like Party circulars mobilising the membership. They are to Jack So-and-so, get out there and get the people out. You there, John this or Wat that, go for this particular landlord, or for that particular set of manorial rolls.The peasants didn’t sack the monasteries, they didn’t even burn them down. They didn’t burn or loot anywhere at random. Everything was done by pre-arranged plan. They went for the manorial rolls which listed the crimes that people had committed, their liability for tax, and what tax had been paid. Those rolls were specially feared and hated, and were systematically destroyed.On June 11th these two big armies from Kent and from Essex (incidentally representing two different levels of exploitation, the men of Kent much more advanced and aware, but the men of Essex much more exploited and therefore more ferocious) camped outside London. Tyler’s army came to Blackheath and Straw’s to Barnet.You can imagine then the feelings of the King’s gang inside the Tower of London. The only decision that was taken, by the way, was to shut the gates. You can imagine it in there: 70,000 men at Black-heath, and probably another 70,000 at Barnet, and the situation is really rather serious because Sir David McNee is not here, we don’t have any police, we don’t have any riot shields, we don’t know what we’re going to do about this situation. The people are in motion – we can’t even trust the people of London not to join these vagabonds.The only hope they had was the faith that the people had in their king, Richard, then a boy of fourteen. For this faith was at the root of the demands of the peasants. Their slogan was ‘For King Richard and the true commons.’ They believed in the king – and it’s a strange thing that you hear the echo even today – saying that the fault was in the courtiers, the hangers-on, the family, the John of Gaunt, Hob the Robber, the Archbishop. But the king himself came from God. The king could do no wrong. The king believed in the people over whom he ruled and had an indissoluble link with the people over whom he ruled and the king would see them straight.The king’s council realised that their only hope was to use the people’s faith in the king. They made a desperate attempt to stop the armies going into London. The king and his closest advisers took a barge and went down the Thames to Rotherhithe, a village south east of London, and called upon Wat Tyler and the people to come and meet them there with their demands.Froissart, the most descriptive of the chroniclers, tells the story:‘Accordingly, attended by the earls of Salisbury, Warwick and Suffolk and other knights, Richard rowed down the Thames towards Rotherhithe’ (that doesn’t of course mean that he rowed, you understand. He was rowed down the Thames towards Rotherhithe) ‘where were upwards often thousand men who had come from Blackheath to see the king and to speak with him. When the king and his lords saw this crowd of people and the wildness of their manner, there was not one among them so bold and determined but felt alarmed.‘The king was advised by his barons not to land, but to have his barge rowed up and down the river. “What do you wish for?” demanded the king. “I have come hither to hear what ye have to say.” Those near him cried out with one voice: “We wish thee to land, when we will remonstrate with thee and tell thee more at our ease what our wants are.” The Earl of Salisbury then replied for the king and said: “Gentlemen, you are not properly dressed, nor in a fit condition for the king to talk with you.” Nothing more was said, for the king was desired to return to the Tower of London from whence he had set out.’The earls and marquesses of Salisbury have been saying it for 600 years: ‘You’re improperly dressed’."
} |
{
"content": "Naturally enough, the rebels were undismayed by this performance. They moved at once into the City of London, from both-sides, and once again they acted swiftly and with great restraint. They went for two areas, two areas that were particularly hated. They went for the Temple, representing all the lawyers – all respectable lawyers operated from the Temple, still do as a matter of fact – and they burnt it down. Then they went to the Savoy, which was the palace of John of Gaunt, and they burnt that down with the most systematic savagery. Every single thing in it was burnt and burnt and burnt again. Only one person died in all this, and he was a looter who was seen taking something out of the Savoy, which wouldn’t then have been burnt. The crowd were so angry that anything connected with John of Gaunt should not be burnt that they killed the looter and burnt the thing that he had taken.The next day, June 14th, the king admitted defeat and opened the gates of the Tower of London and went to Mile End to meet Tyler’s army and agreed to all the rebels’ demands, all of them; repeal of the Statue of Labourers and all the repressive statutes of the last thirty years, an end to bondage and villeinage. Worst of all for the landed gentry was that he decreed: ‘all game and fish to be open to the commons and all the common land which had prevously been taken by the monasteries to be returned to the commons.’The king didn’t give just his word. He sat all day at Mile End in his tent signing charters for the people of this village, the people of that village, all over the home counties.Meanwhile in the city, the rebel army moved on the Tower. No looting, no destruction, no burning of the Tower. The peasants knew what they wanted, and they got them. They got the Archbishop Sudbury. They got Hales. They got the detested Leg. They got Lyons. All of them lost their heads. The gang, except for the king, and John of Gaunt, who was fighting one of his pet wars in Scotland, had gone forever. BUT OF COURSE there was another gang to replace that gang, and they understood the central weakness of the peasant armies: that they could not last forever, that they couldn’t be supplied, and so would be forced to disband and return to their fields. Above all, they trusted the king. So after waiting a week, in which gradually they built up their own forces, the lords and the barons set up a new and this time very successful intrigue. I don’t want to go into it in detail because if there’s any part of the story that’s known well it’s this part.Pretending that they wanted new talks with Tyler’s army, the king and a large gang of courtiers went to Srnithfield. They insisted that Tyler come alone at least a mile from his army and talk to the king’s men about his demands and whether the army would disband. Tyler, still, trusting the king, came, alone, on his horse, and engaged in absurd negotiaions for a few moments. It’s not exactly known what happened. Somebody shouted out some insulting remark. Tyler drew his dagger. Five people jumped on him, stabbed him, and he fell dying to the ground.Then the king, alone, went to the peasant army and explained that there had been an accident, a mistake. We don’t know exactly what he said to them, but he managed to persuade them that their demands would be met full, indeed had been met in full, and that it was a terrible thing that their leader had been killed. He led them out of the city.That moment is the climax of the revolt, which begins to falter from there. The confidence of those peasant armies depended on their success, and now the success has stopped.It’s difficult even to imagine, in those circumstances, how they could have conceded to King Richard as they did. The only explanation lies in the tremendous power which the royal presence had at that time over the common people.I don’t want to deal too long on the period that followed the rebellion. It was only too familiar. Every home in London was visited by the forces of the king and asked to swear an oath of allegiance on pain of death. John Ball was half-hanged, disembowelled while still alive, hanged again and drawn at St Albans. John Rawe, Jack Straw, John Sherwin of Sussex, William Grindcobbe in St Albans, all of them were executed in one way or another after varying forms of resistance in different towns.William Grindcobbe from St Albans was arrested, imprisoned, and told that he would be killed unless he went back and told the insurgents to lay down their arms. He agreed to go back, and spoke to some 100-150 armed men at St Albans. He told them on no account to lay down their arms, to continue the struggle – and he was taken from behind while he was speaking and executed. Such was the spirit of the Peasants’ Revolt.In Billericay five hundred were put to death by a particularly revolting lawyer who ran a competition to see how many could be hanged on the branch of one tree. The record was nineteen.The proportions of the deaths during the rising and afterwards are familiar for all the revolts and rebellions and risings before and since. In the rising itself, perhaps a hundred dead, most of them people guilty of the most terrible extortion and exploitation over a long period of time. In the putting down of the rising, perhaps three thousand dead. That’s roughly the proportion that has been followed in similar events all the way through history. The rulers, in their retribution, are always far more savage than those who oppose them."
} |
{
"content": "The men of Essex, finally beaten and broken down by this force of arms, got through three messengers to the court of King Richard with the charter that he had signed at Mile End, reminding him of his commitment to do away with bondage and villeinage. The reply of this boy king, this hero of the hour, is really what sums him up better than anything you’ll ever read in Shakespeare or anywhere else:‘Serfs you have been and serfs you shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so long as we live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom we shall use our strength, sense and property to treat you that your slavery may be an example to posterity and that those who live now and hereafter, who may be like you, may always have before their eyes, as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you and the fear of doing things like those which you have done.’That’s the real spokesman of class war in victory. Promising his people a measure of freedom at Mile End signing the charters, and only nine day later tearing up the promises with all the contempt and hatred of a king who has felt the breath of his people in revolt.But the truth of the matter is not, as historians always tell you, that the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 left the peasants worse off than they were before, that the rising would have been better for the peasants not to have happened. For Richard, as he spoke those words, was whistling in the dark and he knew he was whistling in the dark, because he and his nobles had seen the strength and the potential of the risen people, and he wasn’t going to risk that in any circumstances again.In 1382 a new poll tax was ordered by John of Gaunt’s parliament, but this time for landowners only. In 1390 the attempt to hold down wages by law was formally abandoned and the Statute of Labourers effectively repealed. By 1430, only fifty years from the end of the Peasants’ Revolt bondage and villeinage had been abolished, in England before anywhere else in Europe.When you ask: why was England first in the fight against feudalism? Why was it first in England in the revolution of the 1640s that feudalism was crushed? One of the best answers is precisely in the success of the Peasants’ Revolt, more successful than all the peasants’ revolts in Europe – such as Jacquerie in France – because it was organised.Here is the conclusion of Reg Groves’ and Philip Lindsay’s marvellous book on this subject. And that’s by far the best book, by the way, about the Peasants’ Revolt:‘All that we know about the commoners of fourteenth century England suggests that they had long awaited and prepared for extensive and radical revolution.’That’s the most important thing about it: the organisation and the propaganda, the linking of the organisation and propaganda, the appointment of representatives, the linking from the town to the country, from county to county. By these means, by planning and organisation, men like Ball, Tyler, Rawe, Grindcobbe and Straw, from the darkest depths of feudal England, were able to raise two mighty armies which scared the living daylights out of the rulers of the time.The scaring has gone on for 600 years. Nothing concentrates the minds of the hereditary landlords and capitalists quite like the memory of Wat Tyler.Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, has a wonderful character in it called Sir Lester Dedlock – the names in Dickens always sum the person up. He was always worried about the ‘floodgates’ of society, whether they might open and sweep the social order away.There is a passage about a case in the Court of Chancery:‘He, Sir Lester, regards the Court of Chancery, even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a trifling amount of confusion, as a “something” devised in conjunction with a variety of other “somethings”, by the perfection of human wisdom for the external settlement of everything. And he is upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his countenance to any complaints respecting the Court of Chancery would be to encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere ... like Wat Tyler.’Throughout the whole book, Sir Lester Dedlock, when someone says something wrong at a party, or eats with the wrong knife, or doesn’t come home at the time that they ought to, Sir Lester is reminded of Wat Tyler and of people who meet by torchlight with grim and swarthy expressions. THERE’S A TENDENCY among people who think about history, even, perhaps especially, among Marxists who think about history, to divide it into sealed compartments. They say that the peasant comes from a different age, is separate from us, has nothing to do with us, and that history moves by stages, scientific stages, and the peasant is one stage, and the workers are in another.It’s nothing therefore to do with us what happened six hundred years ago, in a quite different sort of economy. We can leave it on one side. We’re not peasants, we’re very advanced people, we’ve been an industrial working class burrowing away for years and we’ve got pretty well nowhere, but we’re terribly important and we’re much more important than any peasant.I think that that is not only reactionary and wrong but paralysing – because the whole idea that history determines things and that everything’s inevitable paralyses us, leaves out the activity which is at the centre of the Peasants’ Revolt. It is also insulting to the people who carried those standards for us all through those years before. What’s most extraordinary about the Peasants’ Revolt is not the differences between us and them, which are obvious and expected, but the similarities. We’re bound together by this relentless struggle between the classes, which persists all the way through their story and all the way through ours."
} |
{
"content": "In 1881, one hundred years ago, inspired by the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt, William Morris, a great socialist writer, grappled with this same idea. We do have something in common with what John Ball and Wat Tyler were doing in 1381. How could William Morris, with his enormous writing powers, try to bridge the gap for the socialists of his time? He did it in a really very brilliant piece of writing. It took him a long time to do it, and didn’t in fact appear until 1885.He imagined himself or somebody like himself, a socialist in 1881, being plunged back into the villages of Kent in 1381, beating off the barons and the nobles. He describes John Ball coming to a village – probably the best description there is, better than the chronicles themselves because William Morris really went into it and found out about it.At the end of the piece, which is called The Dream of John Ball, this man, who has all this experience of 500 years after 1381, has a long discussion with John Ball about what will happen. John Ball says, in effect, that he knows the revolt is going to fail, but asks what is going to happen after that? When, he asks, is his dream of all people living in common and sharing everything and there not being any vassals or lords going to come about?Morris replies sadly that it won’t come for 500 years at least.Not surprisingly, John Ball gets a bit depressed about that. He reminds his guest that he is marching to certain defeat and execution, and asks: For what? Is it worth it?Here is the reply:‘John Ball, be of good cheer, for once more thou knowest as I know that the fellowship of man shall endure, however many tribulations it may have to wear through. It may well be that this bright day of summer, which is now dawning upon us, is no image of the beginning of the day that shall be – but rather shall that day dawn be cold and grey and surly, and yet, by its light shall men see things as they verily are, and, no longer enchanted by the gleam of the moon and the glamour of the dream-tide, by such grey light shall wise men and valiant souls see the remedy and deal with it, a real thing that may be touched and handled and no glory of the heavens to be worshipped from afar off.‘And what shall it be, as I told thee before, save that men shall be determined to be free, yea free as thou wouldst have them, when thine hope rises the highest and thou arte thinking, not of the king’s uncles and poll-grote bailiffs and the villeinage of Essex, but of the end of it all, when men shall have the fruits of the earth and the fruits of the earth and the fruits of their toil thereon without money and without price. That time shall come, John Ball, when that dream of thine shall this one day be, shall be a thing that man shall talk of soberly, and as a thing soon to come about as even with thee they talk of the villeins becoming tenants paying their lord quit-rent.‘Therefore hast thou done well to hope it, and thy name shall abide by thy hope in those days to come, and thou shalt not be forgotten.’ Top of the pageLast updated on 24.11.2013"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootBeyond the Powell(March 1998)Obituary of Enoch Powell, Socialist Review, No.217, March 1998, p.12.Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Everyone who wrote about him was certain of one thing: Enoch Powell was not a racist. He ‘said things we didn’t agree with’ (Tony Blair). He was ‘an extreme nationalist, but not a racialist’ (Denis Healey). He inspired racialists ‘but was not a racialist himself’ (Tony Benn). The Tory papers which revered him and called for parliament to be prorogued in his memory would not contemplate the possibility that he was a racialist. The unanimity was complete. Which is all very odd because the most important thing by far about Enoch Powell was that he was a racist pig of the most despicable variety.The point is easily proved. In a private speech to lobby correspondents some years before he started speaking in public on immigration, he said, ‘Often when I am kneeling down in church I think to myself how much we should thank god, the holy ghost, for the gift of capitalism.’ Powell believed in capitalism just as a religious nut believes in the holy ghost. When fighting elections in Wolverhampton he would spell out the ‘simple choice’ between ‘free enterprise and a planned society’. He gloried in what he called the symmetry of capitalism. Ponderously, with a deliberate form of speech which many mistook for careful thought, he explained how the market drove and inspired the capitalist economy to ever higher summits of perfection. There was only one condition: that capital should be left to find its own place and its own direction.It followed naturally that if free moving capital were to be allowed the full thrust of its energy, labour must be free to follow. The free movement of labour was therefore as vital a plank of capitalism as was the free movement of capital. ‘Pettifogging bureaucracy’ must be cleared out of the way of rampant capitalism – and of the docile and happy labourers who were pleased to follow. Thus in Powell’s early speeches in the House of Commons in the 1950s, his talk was all of free enterprise. In his first 11 years as an MP there was no control on empire or commonwealth immigration into Britain. Theoretically 600 million people could come to the ‘mother country’ and settle here without restraint. Powell could see nothing wrong in that, in theory. When someone raised the matter with him at a meeting in Wolverhampton in 1956, he spoke out against imposing controls on immigration. During the arguments about the first Commonwealth Immigration Control Act in 1960 and 1961 Powell was minister of health. His department sent emissaries to the West Indies to recruit nurses and ancillary workers for the National Health Service. When he fought the 1964 general election, and loyally supported his government’s immigration control acts, he concentrated still on a ‘pure’ capitalist argument which saw no difference in workers with different coloured skins. ‘I have set and always will set my face like flint’, he said in a sudden rush of the portentous rhetoric for which he was famous, ‘against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin.’All this was theory, pure theory which needed to be tested by practice. And the first big test for Powell was the undoubted fact, which he could see with his own eyes, that an increasing number of people in the two places he knew well – London and Wolverhampton – were black. They were not just black visitors to goggle at nor black maharajahs to remind him of his time in the Indian army, but black workers and their families, spreading all over what Powell continually called ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. If he had been true to his ideology, Powell might have glossed over this fact, perhaps even welcomed it. But he could not be true to his ideology. It conflicted with a passion stronger even than his belief in pure capitalism: a passion for empire, and with it an incontrovertible belief that the white man was ordained by god to conquer and control the world which was populated mainly by inferior black people. Enoch Powell was, in short, a racist to his bones.It was, he concluded, utterly shocking that these black people should have been allowed into the country at all. As he started, slowly at first, to articulate this conclusion, he noticed something else. Large numbers of people shared his prejudices and rejoiced to hear them legitimised by a front-ranking politician. In 1965 Powell stood for the leadership of the Tory Party against Edward Heath and Reginald Maudling and was humiliated with only 15 votes. He was out of office and out in the cold. From 1967, when he first made a racist speech in Walsall, he realised he could get endless publicity and undreamt of popularity by mouthing his racist prejudices. He launched himself on a racist campaign culminating in his notorious speech in Birmingham in April 1968.The speech pretended to deal with reality but in fact dealt only in myth. Racist myths were common at the time. Stories passed from area to area about the crime, filth and sexual licence of black people. Politicians steered clear of these myths which were kept away from the public arena. Powell devoted his entire speech to them. A woman in his constituency, so he had heard, had excreta pushed through her letter box and was then hounded by ‘grinning piccaninnies’ who shouted, ‘Racialist!’ at her. The blacks were preparing for power and within 20 years would have ‘the whip hand in this country’. Almost licking his lips, he looked forward to race riots."
} |
{
"content": "The effect of his speech was to unblock a racist sewer and send it swirling freely through public life. The word went round – if Enoch Powell MP said these things, they must be true! Dockers marched in his support (though the racist campaign in the docks soon died out). Floods of letters poured into Powell at the House of Commons. When the Sunday Times denounced him as a racialist, he sued for libel. The paper demanded discovery of all the letters he got after his speech. He promptly dropped the case. The letters proved that the effect of his speech was to whip up the vilest racism.Powell went on with this racism all his life. There was no satisfying his racist appetite. When immigration slowed to nothing, he demanded repatriation. He extended his colour prejudice to anti-European racism and then to Catholics in Northern Ireland. Whatever else he ever said is drowned out for posterity by the grim cacophony of his racism.‘The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’ Mark Anthony’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar gets it exactly wrong. Quite the opposite is usually true. The evil that Powell did was interred with his bones by almost all his obituaries. But it is important for us to remember the awful damage caused by his disgusting campaign, if only to prepare for the next racist demagogue to come along, and to shut him up. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootElectionIs this what democracy looks like?(June 2001)Editorial, Socialist Review, No.253, June 2001, p.7.Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Paul Foot examines why New Labour is increasingly becoming old ToryShaun Woodward was the driving force behind John Major’s election victory in 1992. He personally supervised the campaign of John Major’s friend Jeffrey Archer to become mayor of London. No one took more pride in the success of the Tory campaign in 1992, a success which landed us with five more years of Tory rule studded with jewels such as the privatisation of the railways. He defended the Tories against allegations of sleaze while championing Archer, the most contemptible sleazeball of them all.Now Woodward is the prospective Labour candidate for one of the largest working class areas in Britain, St Helens. Woodward is very rich. He shot to his huge fortune by the time-honoured method of marrying an heiress. No more than a handful of people in St Helens could ever dream of eating in the same restaurant or driving the same sort of car as Shaun Woodward. Yet somehow, after a series of backstage deals that would have brought cheers in Tammany Hall, this Tory political fixer has been selected to stand for Labour in St Helens.A shiver of disgust runs through what’s left of the Labour movement in that part of the world. It seems almost incredible that the fixers of Millbank can achieve such a monstrous perversion of Labour representation. Yet there is nothing new about it. Ever since Blair became party leader the word has gone out from his apparatchiks to dump anything to do with Old Labour and, if possible, use the mass working class vote to enrich the House of Commons with the rich.Mark Fisher, Labour MP for Stoke Central, was rung up recently by a senior official at Millbank and asked two bizarre questions: did he not think it admirable that Tory MPs should desert their party and cross the floor to Labour and, if so, did he not think that MPs with big majorities (like him) should sacrifice their seat to a Tory apostate? It was sometime before Mark realised exactly that the bureaucrat was proposing that he, Mark Fisher, should give up his seat to someone like Woodward and make his way without fuss to the new House of Lords, where seats are apparently as available as they were to any corrupt businessman who lavished part of his wealth on the Tories or former Liberal leader David Lloyd George. Perhaps, as he furiously abused the man from Millbank, Mark Fisher recalled that after 18 months as arts minister he was suddenly and arbitrarily sacked by Blair to make way for another Blair favourite, Major’s former social services minister, the Tory Alan Howarth. Howarth was imposed on the Labour voters of Newport in exactly the same scurrilous way in which Woodward has been imposed on St Helens.Fisher’s indignation was immediate and glorious – the Millbank courtier was sent packing. But the same trick was then tried more successfully on the MP for St Helens, Gerry Bermingham. Bermingham denies that he is going to the House of Lords. But he has vacated his seat and abandoned his constituents so that yet another millionaire can take his place in the House of Commons. It is truly hard to imagine a more ridiculous way to end a mediocre parliamentary career, nor a worse fate to bestow on his unfortunate constituents of St Helens. Tory millionaireWhat does it prove? It proves that Tony Blair and his timeservers at Millbank have nothing but contempt, not just for the Labour movement – that has been obvious for some time – but for the whole system of representation and selection in that movement. He much prefers to have an ex-Tory millionaire in parliament than to allow the ordinary process of Labour local selection to take its course. Blair believes, moreover, that the Parliamentary Labour Party is his own fiefdom and that he can and must choose the right sort of people to sit under him in parliament. It is not simply that he wants an MP for St Helens who will vote for him in the lobbies. He wants an MP for St Helens who by his past record, his wealth, his photogenic wife and children, his stately home and everything else about him, will fit the image of New Labour – the image of the smooth talking plutocrat who represents patronage, privilege and undemocratic power.He wants the Labour benches in the House of Commons (and the House of Lords, which he has revived) stuffed with people like Lord Sainsbury, who deserted Labour for the SDP, and Geoffrey Robinson, a beneficiary of that famous Labour millionaire Robert Maxwell. Both have been generous hosts to Blair. He would like to be surrounded by an even more generous coterie consisting of millionaires like Bernie Ecclestone and the Hinduja brothers. The mark of a good MP or minister in his eyes is to do what Tony says in public life and, in private, to make as much money as possible in the free market.These figures are not just symbols. They are the reality of what is happening to British Labour. For if the Tory millionaire is to be marked out for advancement in the movement, it follows that the politics and priorities of the millionaire will become the policies and priorities of the Labour Party. Many people find it hard to understand, for instance, why Blair and Brown are so determined not to raise the higher rate of tax, or why they beg rich businessmen to take their slice of what used to be public enterprise. But when the high income tax payers and the rich businessmen are personally preferred to the people who do the work, then the mystery vanishes. New Labour is not new Labour at all. It is becoming, not just in rhetoric but in reality, Old Tory. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootTribune of the PeopleAn interview(May 2000)From Socialist Review, No.241, May 2000, pp.10-11.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Paul Foot has been voted What the Papers Say Journalist of the Decade. He spoke to Judy Cox about what the award means to him, and about his experiences as a socialist journalist during the 1990s.The award was especially encouraging because Paul has been so ill: ‘When I knew I had won something I couldn’t work out what it was. I spent nine months of 1999 very ill, so I knew I couldn’t have won anything for last year. Instead it was for the whole decade, the first time they have ever given such an award.’ Winning high profile awards helps his campaigns: ‘Recently I was asking about the case of Sarah Friday, the sacked rail worker from Waterloo. I rang the press office at South West Trains and the representative knew that the issue had to be taken seriously.’But Paul thinks his best writing was inspired by workers’ struggles: ‘I never won an award during the six years I worked on Socialist Worker, yet that was the best work I ever did. It was the only time I was able to report what I saw and what I felt, and put general arguments against the way society worked. I am sure that the reports I did in the early 1970s, in concert with workers’ struggles, were the best things I have done.’For 14 years Paul Foot wrote a weekly column in the Mirror, which had a unique relationship with its readers: ‘I was appointed to the Mirror in autumn 1979 as a reaction to Thatcher’s election. I still regard it as a complete miracle that I ever got onto the Mirror. They asked me to be an investigative journalist, but I had only just stopped working for Socialist Worker and I was a very keen member of the SWP. I didn’t want to become part of a big capitalist machine. I insisted on having a regular space under my control, and I was astonished when the paper agreed to my terms. I had to allow those I was attacking space to defend themselves, which is a rule I have always followed because the writing has more impact if you are seen to be fair. The first five years on the Mirror were brilliant, because I depended on people sending lots of stories to me.‘Then one day in 1984 the awful figure of Robert Maxwell wrote out a cheque for £100 million and bought the whole enterprise. He called me and John Pilger up. We thought we were going to be sacked. Maxwell promised that he wouldn’t interfere with anything we wrote. I replied that was an academic question, because if he did, I wouldn’t go on. He called me a “space imperialist”; he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone controlling anything he owned. I wasn’t afraid of being sacked – I didn’t have much to lose. I put up a list of his friends in the office, which was an invitation to other journalists to attack them, though we had to be sure of the facts because they always phoned Maxwell to complain.’ Halcyon days‘I held onto the column for seven years under Maxwell, with the backing of the editors. Maxwell died in 1991, and from November 1991 to October 1992 we had real halcyon days without any management or proprietor. For the first time we gained in circulation on the Sun. Everything worked very well, but it was in contradiction to the rules of capitalist society, so they had to smash it up. Significantly, on the day of the big march against pit closures they moved. Most unions in the print industry were wiped out in 1986, but an active NUJ chapel at the Mirror had survived, even managing to avert threatened redundancies through a sit-in. They brought David Montgomery in from Murdoch’s stable with the sole intention of smashing the unions and the whole culture we had built up. The editors were sacked and replaced with clones. We hung on for six months because they didn’t dare sack me, but it became impossible. I left by publishing a column exposing what was going on, called Look in the Mirror, which got some publicity.’Paul was at the forefront of exposing Tory sleaze: ‘Max Hastings, who became the editor of the Evening Standard in the mid-1990s, developed a great hostility to Jeffrey Archer. I wrote a piece for him in 1997 called, Do You Want This Man As Mayor Of London? which brought together all the stories about Archer, including how I had gone to Canada to investigate his alleged theft of some suits. Journalistically I recovered quickly, but politically it was much harder to recover from the defeat at the Mirror.’In the mid-1990s many of Paul’s investigations began to take on new momentum: ‘When I left the Mirror all the big campaigns I had been involved in had apparently failed. I used to tell people, “Don’t come to me – I always lose.” Then, one by one, the major cases were reopened and reversed These included the release of Eddie Browning, who was falsely accused of the murder of Marie Wilkes, in 1994, the quashing of Colin Wallace’s conviction in 1996 and the release of the Bridgewater Four in 1997. So when I was back at Private Eye there was a series of victories in old campaigns, and new campaigns starting. As early as 1994 we raised doubts about the Stephen Lawrence case. In three articles called Sergeants’ Mess we pointed out that Stephen’s murderers were not prosecuted because Duwayne Brooks’s identification of two suspects was rubbished by a police officer who had absolutely no justification in rubbishing him. We also covered the Aitken story and the arms to Iraq affair."
} |
{
"content": "‘Recently I went to a course for investigative journalists where everyone agreed that if journalists are politically committed their integrity is compromised. I am completely at odds with everyone on that question, because I am openly committed to the SWP. I have never felt that life would be easier if I was not in the SWP – the advantages are so enormous. Firstly you have access to other people so you can pool your resources and demonstrate, and raise voices of protest On the intellectual side, people say joining an organisation stops you thinking for yourself. I have always found the exact opposite to be true – my judgements are much better when they are arrived at through discussion and debate with others. So practically and intellectually it is much better to be in a party.’ Labour damages democracyFor the last ten years Paul has been working on a book about voting and power in British history, ‘about how workers used their power to win the vote, and the history of Labour governments which have damaged the democracy which put them in office. It has meant taking many of my idols and putting them in their historical context. Figures as diverse as Tom Paine, Shelley, the Chartist leaders, the great revolutionaries of the 20th century, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Harry McShane all come to life in their historical perspective.’Paul is very optimistic about the possibilities raised by the London Socialist Alliance: ‘The Scottish Socialist Party got 4.2 percent of the vote in the Ayr by-election, a very good result for a socialist to the left of Labour in a non working class town. If we get 4.2 percent in London, there is a possibility that we could get someone elected to the assembly – I am top of the list so it would probably be me. We are very lucky because what Labour is doing is so monstrous that thousands and thousands of people inside and outside the Labour Party are very annoyed. The Livingstone split in the Labour Party has opened a massive space for us. People will vote in large numbers for Ken, but then have to decide who to vote for in the assembly. Those who have any inkling to the left, who care about the underground or privatisation generally, will be looking for left wing candidates. Having an alliance of socialists is great I stood in the Stetchford by-election in Birmingham in 1977 against another left wing group. The left got a respectable 1,000 votes but they were split, which was disastrous. That is behind us now, and we are working alongside socialists from many organisations.‘Now is definitely the time to break from Labour. Break with Labour over these elections and then take it from there. The best thing is to get active and involved in some issue or campaign, such as opposing Clause 28, and make choices based on that experience.‘The idea that in the labour movement power corrupts is wrong – what corrupts us is impotence. Absolute impotence corrupts absolutely, and the greatest example of this is the government’s impotence over the Rover crisis. Even in 1977 when British Leyland, Rover’s predecessor, was going to the wall the government nationalised it, almost by instinct. Now, even when there are tens of thousands of people on the streets of Birmingham, angry and asking, “What shall we do?”: the answer comes, “Absolutely nothing.”‘Tony Woodley says whatever we do it is going to be worse, so people think there is no alternative. An occupation now could set off another Upper Clyde Shipbuilders [the Glasgow occupation in 1971], and the union leaders and MPs are all afraid of it We have to build up the feeling of confidence.’Paul has been a spokesperson for the revolutionary left for many years: ‘I am now 62. Many of my contemporaries have gone on the same dreary path to the right, but I have never had even the slightest temptation to go in that direction. That is partly because of meeting people like Tony Cliff when I was young. It was very important when things were difficult for socialists that I was in touch with people who identified the situation and worked out what to do about it.‘Central to the idea of socialism is understanding that things will change – one day the people at the top who are now doing the bashing will be bashed by people at the bottom. I am greatly helped by the fact that I lived through the 1970s when we believed revolution was imminent. When I joined Socialist Worker in October 1972 I was confident that a revolution was coming. Events seemed to confirm it, and even right wingers said the same. If you have lived through that, it is easier to see it happening again. Everything in our history points to the fact that things will swing around, and all kinds of hopes and optimisms flourish again. Although the 1990s were depressing in some respects, not a single thing has happened to make me doubt that things will change in our direction. It will happen very unexpectedly and catch us by surprise, so we must be prepared, be bigger and win more influence inside the working class. We must plug into those areas where things are happening now, and the LSA is definitely one of those areas.’ Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootAmbushing the news(3 July 1993)From Socialist Worker, 3 July 1993.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 235–236.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.When Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television bid successfully for the right to screen First Division football matches live, the chief executive of London Weekend Television, Greg Dyke, put on a grand display of righteous indignation. It was, he said, shocking that commercial interests should deprive people of the programmes they wanted to watch.He was right, of course. But is he consistent?Now he appears in secret conference with other TV bosses, in particular Paul Jackson, the managing director of Carlton TV, which purveys television programmes in London on weekdays. Jackson, Dyke and all the other commercial TV bosses met recently to discuss the future of the most successful and popular regular television shows ever – News at Ten.News at Ten started in 1967. It lasted for half an hour. From the outset it proved just as popular as the BBC’s news. It has lasted for 26 years, has an enormous and loyal following, and the two minutes of advertising which split it in two bring in nearly £100 million – by far the most profitable regular two minutes for the ITV companies.The success of television news on BBC and ITV gave the lie to all those who said that the masses were not interested in news.While the tabloid press published less and less news – and gave more and more space to sport and nudes – the television news, presented on the whole without nudes and without even much sport, proved hugely popular.Millions of people were gluttons for the news. When Channel 4 introduced its own extended 50 minute ITN news (called Channel 4 News) at 7 p.m., millions tuned in.Together the two ITN programmes were watched by something like half the adult population. They established minimal standards of fairness and accuracy, which compared favourably with the bias and hysteria of the tabloid press. The only people who refuse to recognise the astonishing popularity and success of News at Ten are the television proprietors.They don’t like news at any time, but they specially don’t like it at 10 o’clock at night when it interrupts much more juicy profit-making with cheap movies or rotten sitcom shows.For years now the heads of the ITV companies have been plotting a coup on News at Ten. Last week they finally ambushed it and started to leak plans for putting on a new news programme at 6.30 p.m.Everyone agrees that most of the standards of News at Ten would be lost in a 6.30 programme – it is too early to develop the day’s news it will compete absurdly with Channel 4 News. It will be seen as a demotion, a device to get the news out of the way before getting on with the trivia.But years of ‘deregulation’, in television, as in everything else, have made it impossible for the ‘watchdogs’ to intervene. Profit-hungry bosses like Greg Dyke, who, with his fellow directors at LWT, has just helped himself to millions of pounds in a scandalous share scheme, are left free to plunder the networks.Even though she had her own friends on the ITV companies, Thatcher grew to loathe them for their power and their lack of right wing bias. She waged war to the death with Thames Television over Death on the Rock, the expose of the Gibraltar murders by the SAS.Her hatred spilled over into News at Ten.The ideological imperative from the right to sweep away anything which can for a moment present the public with some of the facts about the world we live in has engulfed the creations even of the right’s own children. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootLondon, 27 February 1900(February 1999)From Red Letter Days, Socialist Review, No.227, February 1999, p.35.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Anyone who has been around the London left for any length of time will be familiar with smallish meetings, usually in the Conway Hall, which set up some committee or other to fight or defend something or other, which to everyone’s fury is then completely ignored by the capitalist press.The meeting in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on 27 February 1900 was, to all appearances, another of these. There were only 120 people there, all of them saying they were ‘delegates’. The mood was not exuberant. The arguments were long, dull and apparently of little significance outside the hall. No one in the press or in the organised labour movement seemed to show the slightest interest.Yet the meeting of what called itself the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party, was historic. Its aim, which it achieved, was for the first time to break the umbilical cord which bound the leaders of organised labour to the Liberal Party; and to form a new political party to represent the interests of the working masses in parliament.Three distinct groups were represented at the Memorial Hall. By far the largest was the trade union leaders. At almost every annual conference since the Trades Union Congress first met in 1867, a prominent subject for debate had been the need for wider parliamentary representation for labour.In the general election of 1874, two working men, Thomas Hurt and Alexander Macdonald, both miners, had been elected. They were joined by Henry Broadhurst in 1880 and, briefly, by a handful of other workers, mostly miners, in the 1885 general election after the extension of the franchise.Throughout all this time, the TUC’s political strategy was to act as a pressure group on the Liberal Party. The TUC’s influential parliamentary committee, dominated for years by Henry Broadhurst, never even questioned its allegiance to the Liberal Party under its revered leader, the ‘phrasemaker’, William Gladstone. The Labour Representation League, which was formed soon after the TUC came into being, was a talking shop in which the union leaders bowed and scraped to their Liberal heroes. One result was that socialist ideas were not just ignored but positively opposed. Even parliamentary measures to improve workers’ conditions were frowned on by these union leaders who accepted Liberal arguments about the beautiful symmetry of the free market and the dangers of interfering in it.These arguments began to wilt in the 1880s. The severe depression which started in 1879, and which was heralded by Engels as the beginning of the end for British monopolistic domination of world markets, led to widespread closures and bankruptcies and a steep decline in the already marginal influence of the unions. In the late 1880s the great victories of the match girls, the gas workers and the London dockers further threatened the old Liberal union leaders with a ‘new unionism’ extending far beyond the fixed boundaries of the labour aristocracy.These old leaders hurriedly set up the Labour Electoral Association, whose second annual meeting marvelled at the relative representative interests of different groups in society. Landlords and landowners had 209 MPs, armed service officers 128, lawyers 136, manufacturing bosses and commercial services 136, railway bosses 62, bankers 33, brewers 24 – and labour (even at its widest definition) just nine. Some 650,000 miners had five MPs – a few hundred coal-owners had 20. Yet even when confronted by these figures, the Labour Electoral Association leaders continued to stick with the Liberals and to denounce the growing demands for independent Labour representation.Through the 1890s, in a series of debates at the TUC and elsewhere, the argument slipped away from the old leaders. Gladstone died, and the new Liberal leaders grew even more indifferent to the demands of labour. Broadhurst and Co often won the votes at Congress, but lost the argument. In 1899 Congress instructed its leaders to take part in a conference to sponsor independent Labour MPs. Hence the meeting at the Memorial Hall.Two much smaller groups attended the conference, both of them socialist. The first was the Independent Labour Party (ILP), whose leader Keir Hardie had clashed repeatedly with Broadhurst. The second was the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), a small organisation led by the former stockbroker H.M. Hyndman. Some of the leaders of the great strikes of the 1880s, notably Will Thorne of the transport workers and Ben Tillett, the dockers’ union leader, were in the hall, but such men were much influenced by syndicalist anti-parliamentary arguments and played little part in the proceedings.When the SDF moved that the new Labour Party should be openly socialist ‘based upon the recognition of the class war’ their motion was overwhelmingly rejected. But the old Liberal union leaders did not get everything their own way. Keir Hardie moved and carried a motion committing the conference to a ‘distinct Labour Group in Parliament’, with its own whips and its own policy.The resolution was full of holes, which were relentlessly exploited by the growing Labour Group in the Commons. But for all the weaknesses and hesitancy of the LRC, the decisive break with the old bourgeois parties had been made, and would continue for 100 years until now, when Tony Blair is trying to get in bed with the Liberals once again. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThe dream of Tony Blair(26 August 1995)From Socialist Worker, No. 1457, 26 August 1995, p. 11.Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.DOES TONY Blair dream? Does he have a vision of what could be? The answer is yes, and I can prove it.I’ve been reading an article in the London Evening Standard of 8 January 1993. It was not written by the teenage son of a Tory cabinet minister, though it could have been.The author was Tony Blair, then Labour’s front bench spokesman for home affairs. He was glowing with enthusiasm and delight after a glimpse of the New World.He had just come back from Washington, which was excitedly preparing for the inauguration of the new president of the United States of America, Bill Clinton. What struck the impressionable Blair was the democratic, even proletarian, spirit of the new presidential order.“Bill Clinton will arrive in Washington,” Blair reported, “not on the presidential plane or in a bulletproof limousine or even, a specially chartered train. He will come by bus ...”Blair explained that this unlikely form of transport (Clinton has probably never travelled in a bus since) was symbolic of a “people’s inauguration ceremony designed to reflect both the populism of the anti-establishment campaign that won him his presidency and the new dynamism of an administration pledged to the theme of national renewal”. Too specificEverywhere, Blair reported, there was change – the new faces of the new government included a woman attorney general, a former civil rights lawyer devoted to law reform, a vice-president who for the first time for years sat down for talks with trade union leaders from the motor car industry, and a “British educated” Labour secretary with “ideas for transforming education and training”.Comparing the “energy and drive” of the new Democrats in America with the “fatigue of our Conservative government” left Tony Blair feeling, he admitted, a “little envious”.But even in his excitement and enthusiasm, Blair did not forget his most consistent political characteristic: caution. Clinton’s policy for the election, he thought, was “over detailed”, too specific about promises which might not be kept.“Great expectations”, he warned, “are never wholly fulfilled.” Moreover, “much can go wrong as the new administration is buffeted by events”. And it was therefore loo early to tell” whether Clinton will “ring in the changes he has promised”.Clinton’s promises, Blair conceded, might not be fulfilled – but so what? The real aim of the campaign – victory at the polls – had been achieved. That was far more important than what might follow. Blind blunderingThe process of a form of politics which starts and ends at elections had come to its logical conclusion. The election victory was a dream far more vital than any nightmare which might follow.How does Tony Blair feel, therefore, as he contemplates the wreckage of the Clinton administration, the surrender of every economic and social reform, the hesitation and blind blundering which have been followed inevitably by one of the nastiest reactionary backlashes ever seen in the reactionary history of United States policies?Does he flinch as the reforming welfare advisers he celebrated cut the pittances of dole and benefits which even George Bush tolerated; as those reforming civil rights lawyers he praised preside over the mass executions of prisoners on Death Row; as the new talks with the union leaders develop into a new burst of anti-union legislation and official strikebreaking? Does any of this make him flinch from his 1993 hero worship of the Clinton-Gore gang?Not at all. They won the election, didn’t they, and what else matters? Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootPassports and PoliticsA beautiful symmetry(February 2001)From News Review, Socialist Review, No.249, February 2001, p.5.Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.At some time during his stay in Northern Ireland a strange thing happened to Peter Mandelson. He lost what was left of his conscience.When he resigned two years ago after his vast loan from former Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson was revealed, he was subdued, almost contrite. He applied what became known as the Hartlepool test – what would the ordinary Labour voter in poor old Hartlepool make of their MP borrowing £400,000 from a rich pal so that he could buy himself a decent house? The answer was pretty obvious. Mandelson accepted it, and left the stage.Apply the same test to the recent hullabaloo about the Hinduja brothers, and it goes something like this. What would a manual worker in Hartlepool make of his MP intervening on behalf of a billionaire who had been a generous supporter of Margaret Thatcher and who was being investigated by the Indian authorities for his part in a notorious arms scandal? The answer, if anything, would be even more unprintable than the answer over the Robinson loan scandal.But Peter Mandelson has been so long in office that he has lost sight of his own simple test. So, it seems, have the entire media. So the questions which are being asked – by the newspapers, television, and mainly by the Tories, who are as deep in the Hinduja mire as anyone else – are about which ministers rang which colleagues, exactly what they said and whether their behaviour contradicted some legalistic code drawn up by MPs with the purpose of shielding them from public criticism. On this level it seems to be important whether it was Mandelson himself or his private secretary who rang the Home Office to ask about the Hindujas’ passport. This is an entirely trivial matter. No one suggests that the private secretary would have made such an inquiry without her boss’s instruction.The point is that at a time when the Hindujas were offering vast sums to bolster the ghastly Dome, for which Mandelson was the responsible minister, Mandelson, or someone on his behalf, tried to secure for the billionaire the British citizenship which is craved by millions of desperately poor people all over the world. That is not a question of detail – who rang whom and when. That is a simple question of principle – of attempting to secure for a very rich donor a deeply-prized privilege.The Tories, of course, are having a field day at Labour’s expense. Their jubilation will last as long as it takes to find out and publish what is already widely suspected – that the Hindujas were generous contributors to Tory Party coffers, were profound admirers of Margaret Thatcher, and were supported in all sorts of ways by senior Tory politicians and functionaries. The charge against Mandelson is the same sort of charge as that traditionally levelled against the Tories – of preferential treatment for the rich, and of seeking for the rich privileges and passports which are denied to impoverished masses of the same colour and culture.The beautiful symmetry of the whole affair can best be appreciated by recalling that the original guru of New Labour, the man who dedicated himself to the re-writing of Clause Four of Labour’s constitution, and who devoted his entire life as a minister to sucking up to the rich and expecting them constantly to come to the rescue of the Labour government, is, you’ve got it in one, Peter Mandelson. And look where it all got him. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot‘Seeds of new society are sown in battle with the old’(23 November 2002)From Socialist Worker, No.1827, 23 November 2002.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Campaigning journalist Paul Foot writes on why strikes are key to radical changeTHE FIREFIGHTERS’ strike dominates the headlines and causes something approaching panic in New Labour leaders and hysteria in the right wing press. Two arguments in particular are launched against the strikers from inside the labour movement. From the right comes the view of New Labour’s favourite (and knighted) professor, George Bain.This is that the 11 percent offer over two years with strong strings is more than any other group of workers has been offered, and that the firefighters’ jobs are secure and sought after. To quote the prime minister, “no sensible government on earth” could meet the firefighters’ full claim.From the left comes the querulous complaint that we should be concentrating on “the big issues” such as the threat of war in Iraq or the permanent menace of globalisation so majestically opposed by the recent demonstration in Florence. Why should we be diverted from such worldwide matters by a strike of a single small union in Britain?Are not the firefighters, like all such strikers, just after lining their own individual pockets and using their disproportionate industrial muscle to achieve for themselves what other workers with less muscle, such as nurses, can never hope for?Should not these matters of the distribution of resources to different sets of workers be decided by elected governments and not by the wholly arbitrary use of industrial power? All such arguments focus so intensely on the trees of the argument that they don’t even catch sight of the wood. The central characteristic of the society we live in is that it is divided by class.The class in control – mean, greedy and above all hierarchical – owes its power, its wealth and its prestige to the exploitation and humiliation of the people who do the work. It therefore encourages a system in which workers are encouraged to heed and obey their masters.Obedience and respect for the high, the mighty and the rich is a central principle of capitalist society. Anything that challenges any of these things is a threat, but as long as the threat can be contained within the accepted structure of the society, it can easily be contained.So, for instance, some workers are so outraged by the way they are treated that they “blow the whistle” on their employers. Others vote against parties which appear to represent their employers. But all such activity, however annoying it may be to particular employers, is contained firmly within a system of exploitation and class control. As long as revolt can be confined to a ballot box or an individual act of resistance, the culture of deference, and the insecurity and distress on which it depends, is unruffled.This is one of the reasons, though by no means the only one, why the prospect of radically changing society simply by voting every so often is such a gloomy one. Governments come and governments go but the bosses seem to go on forever. A strike is a quite different weapon. First, it challenges exploitation directly. It sends a message to employers that they are no longer in control. Their businesses cannot run without workers. The paraphernalia of exploitation – dividends, share options and all the rest of that claptrap – suddenly vanishes.All the little side-effects of exploitation, the petty day to day commanding and bullying, are stopped in their tracks. At once the striking worker gets a sense of liberation from the tedious dictatorship of everyday working life. No one who has ever been in a strike fails to notice that sense of liberation. It inspires and exalts workers into emancipated human beings they often find difficult to recognise as their old selves.Sense of liberationIn a lifetime reporting industrial disputes I cannot remember a single one where the strikers have not commented on the astonishing change in their characters and their own approach to life. This sense of liberation does not spring only from the fact that they no longer have to work for a boss.It arises in the main from the sense that they themselves are collectively in control, that they depend on one another and need to organise their own working lives together and democratically. The result is a democracy far richer than anything that comes out of local councils or parliament.I remember during the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 how the miners who came to stay with me in London insisted each night on turning on any TV current affairs programme that happened to be on. These programmes were watched by only a tiny percentage of the population and normally would have bored the miners rigid. But now they understood the issues – not just the miners’ issues but all the political and industrial issues of the time – and they wanted to discuss them.Secondly, strikes challenge and upset the accepted rules of control. If, for instance, a council closes libraries, its decision may infuriate whole sections of the population. In Hackney, for instance, such a decision by the council has led to widespread protest from people who use the libraries. But the only time the council even thought about reconsidering its decision was when the library workers started to strike.Without the workers, of course there could be no libraries, and at last some kind of real pressure was put on the council – pressure a million times more powerful than individual protest from citizens. This power, the feeling that the status quo can be changed or altered, enthuses the strikers with a sense that they can do much more than protest. They can change the world they live and work in – a sense they seldom get in the ordinary business of living and working."
} |
{
"content": "Thirdly, strikes more often than not involve workers who are organised in trade unions and have a history of confronting their employers. If they win their strike, they pull other less organised workers up the ladder after them. If they never went on strike, no one, certainly not the unorganised or the completely dispossessed, would get anything.‘Muck of ages’What has all this got to do with socialism? Of course a strike, even if it is successful, is no guarantee of socialism. Of course most strikes are about improving the wages and conditions of one group of workers, not all of them.The point about strikes is not that they lead automatically to socialism, but that a socialist society – a society owned and controlled from below – will never come about unless the majority of workers have shaken off what Marx called the “muck of ages” – decades, if not centuries, of instinctive deference. There is no more certain method of shaking off that muck than taking part in a strike. Some proof of that is the history of the working class movement over the last 50 years.For the early part of that period there were a lot of strikes, most of them won by the workers. The climax of that period came in the “glorious summer”, 1972 to 1974. Two victorious miners’ strikes, a victorious building workers’ strike and countless victorious smaller disputes changed the whole shape and pattern of class society. This was a period of fantastic advance across the whole of the movement.Those of us socialists lucky enough to remember those times recall as though it were yesterday the enthusiasm with which the socialist message and socialist papers like Socialist Worker were greeted. Pick up any old book over the last half-century that proclaims a socialist or even a radical message and you can be pretty sure it will be dated in the early 1970s.There followed, as a direct result of the victorious strikes, a great flowering of radical and socialist ideas, from the liberation of women to the isolation of apartheid and racism, to a healthy contempt for posturing parliamentary politicians of all parties.The seeds of a new socialist society were sown in the struggle against the old capitalist one. The agitation of those years led among other things to the toppling of the Tories and the election of two Labour governments.Two sides of struggleThose governments and their allies among the trade union leaders, using precisely the arguments that are used today against the firefighters, discouraged strikes, including a firefighters’ strike, and reined in the militants.The result was a slackening in workers’ confidence and, as a direct consequence, a reactionary shift in the political mood that led to Margaret Thatcher and a series of outright employers’ victories from which we have never recovered. Now we have to put up with Blair and Prescott mouthing Thatcherite slogans and preparing to break an official strike of people who are claiming even less of a rise than the arrogant ministers have paid themselves.So what exactly is the relationship between strikes and socialist progress? Almost 100 years ago, the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, perhaps the most eloquent socialist agitator of all time, confronted the question in an exhilarating pamphlet inspired by the 1905 revolution in Russia.It was called The Mass Strike, and it mercilessly mocked the notion that political progress could be divorced from industrial action:“After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth.“And vice versa. The ceaseless state of economic war of the worker with capital keeps the fighting energy alive at every political pause.“It forms, so to speak, the ever-fresh reservoir of the strength of the working class, out of which the political struggle continually renews its strength.“And at the same time it always leads the untiring economic boring action of the working class, now here, now there, to individual sharp conflicts out of which, unexpectedly, political conflicts on a large scale explode.”The two sides of the struggle, the strikes and the political activity, are essential to one another, and you can’t have one without the other. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootLate Developer(February 1985)From London Review of Books, February 1990.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 125–131.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Review of Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–1976 by Tony Benn.For nearly a century, Labour MPs have been going to parliament to change the world, but have ended up changing only themselves. Tony Benn is unique. He went to parliament to change himself, but has ended up determined only to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the impotence of socialists in high office to change it.The unique journey from right to left adds enormously to the value of Tony Benn’s Diaries. His contemporaries Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle have also published diaries. Others have written autobiographies. All are full of evidence of the impotence of office. Even Denis Healey in his recent popular autobiography admits that the notorious ‘IMF cuts’ in 1976 were probably based on a false prospectus presented to him by international bankers who knew they were deceiving him. But in all these cases the former Secretaries of State have a basic belief in what they were doing. ‘We tried to change the world’ is their theme. ‘We had a little bit of success, and would have done more if it hadn’t been for bankers or, as Harold Wilson used to call his hidden enemies, “speculators”.’ Only Tony Benn, even as he was signing papers in the red dispatch boxes, travelling round in chauffeur-driven limousines and dining at Lockets, began to realize that he was playing a lead part in a grim charade whose chief effect was to hypnotize and paralyse the people who voted Labour.In his foreword, Benn says he has included whole passages which embarrass him today. We have to trust him and his editors when they say that the editing of what he read into the tape evening after evening has not been influenced by what has happened since 1976. It does not seem as if it has. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this volume is the open and apparently unembarrassed way in which Tony Benn’s conversion – from career politician to committed socialist – lumbers from contradiction to contradiction: here leaning backwards to his careerist past, here leaning forwards to his campaigning future, and here stuck in between, not knowing what to think or which way to turn. The volume starts rather curiously with the final year of Labour in opposition, during which Tony Benn’s ideas were increasingly winning the votes at Labour Party conferences and among the rank and file. There runs through all the diary entries of this period a tremendous confidence. At a CBI dinner in October 1973, he rounded on the gloomy industrialists, telling them: ‘You’re licked, pessimistic. There is more vitality on the union side than there is on the management side. We have got to have redistribution of power and establish a new social contract.’ None of the guests, it seems, could manage a reply. Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony Benn, his planning agreements and his Social Contract were in the ascendant.The Tories lost the election of February 1974, and Tony Benn went straight to the Department of Industry as Secretary of State. In April, his diary glowed with confidence:Sunday April 28. As I look at it, I can see my way through now in breaking industry’s resistance to my policies. I shall win over the managers and the small businessmen, and I shall get the nationalized industries to welcome the planning agreements; I shall isolate the big Tory companies, then show how much money they have been getting from the government, and if they don’t want it, they don’t have to have it.Very quickly, however, he began to find that he and his government depended on quite a different kind of confidence. At another dinner with bankers and Stock Exchange officials the same April, he was told, sternly: ‘We must restore confidence.’ ‘What is the price of restoring confidence?’ countered Benn. ‘Well,’ replied the Stock Exchange chieftain, ‘You have got to have better dividend distribution, otherwise equities will collapse.’ The confidence which mattered could be measured only by the flow of dividends. Benn replied with some heat, but as the months went on, the same argument started to be used by his own colleagues in the Labour cabinet."
} |
{
"content": "He reports Denis Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, saying at a meeting of top ministers which had been called to water down the already weak proposals of his Industry Bill: ‘The whole of our future depends on the confidence of businessmen.’ Healey’s policies were bent in every particular to building up that confidence. The climax comes at the end of the book, when, at a cabinet meeting on 7 December 1976, Healey proposed yet more cuts in public spending – he had already cut savagely, in 1975 and in the 1976 Budget. Benn reports: ‘Denis had a new paper to present and he was now asking for £1,199.25 million in 1977, which was nearly £200m over the billion proposed by the IMF. Crosland pointed this out but Denis said that confidence had been undermined by leaks and therefore we’d have to make more cuts in public expenditure to prevent further loss of confidence.’ Hospitals, schools, social security benefits, parks, swimming pools, public transport – all the things which had been at the centre of Labour’s programme – now had to be cut, not even because the IMF said it made sense (which, it later appeared, it didn’t), but because there were inaccurate leaks of what the IMF might have said.All Tony Benn’s own confidence had vanished by the end of 1974 – even though in October Labour won another general election with an overall majority. He mused, to his top civil servant, just after the election: ‘I’ve been in the Department for seven months and I’m not aware of having done anything, made any progress at all.’ The steady chip, chop at his precious Industry Bill, and the Prime Minister’s continued insistence that he stop making public speeches which annoyed the City of London, drove him to reflect, as early as November 1975: ‘I am afraid that somehow, without quite knowing how it happens, I will slip into the position that I occupied between 1964 and 1970 when I went along with a lot of policies which I knew to be wrong.’ He could see perfectly well what was happening. His diary for the first few months of 1975 -the end of the honeymoon period between the Labour government and what Prime Minister Wilson called their ‘bailiffs’ – is far more perceptive than Barbara Castle’s (or even Denis Healey’s – though he had the advantage of hindsight): ‘The Tories now think that Wilson, Healey and Callaghan are doing their work so well that they don’t want a coalition government. Better to let the Labour Party do their work for them.’ This analysis led him to a startling prediction. On 11 May 1975, he wrote: ‘A coalition has been born without being formally declared: it is broadly the Tories and Liberals throwing their weight behind Callaghan, I think. They won’t touch Wilson. They’ll get rid of him just as they got rid of Heath ... I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Callaghan government formed within the next couple of months.’He was out by only eight months. Wilson resigned in mysterious circumstances in March 1976. Callaghan was elected leader of the Labour Party and formed a government. From then on, the retreat which Benn had identified continued, through the grovelling to the IMF in 1976 to the coalition with the Liberals in 1977, and the long weary stumble to defeat. Before the end of 1976, he identified what he called ‘Thatcher’s Private Argument’:That the Labour government are doing to the trade union movement what the Tories could never do: that in doing it the government are getting profits up and holding prices down and therefore restoring the vitality of the capitalist mechanism; and that by doing so they will disillusion their own supporters and make it possible for the Tories to return.He could see what was happening all right, but what was he doing about it? From early on, he started to think about resigning from the government in protest. All his most reliable political friends – Dennis Skinner, Audrey Wise, Ken Coates, most of the activists in his Bristol constituency, even his son Stephen – advised him to do so. Benn’s own belief, often expressed here, that the power and influence that mattered came from below, from the shop stewards and socialist trade unionists, led logically to a resignation and a return to the rank and file. But he did not resign. In the summer of 1975, as the Labour government collapsed under the biggest run on sterling ever, he humbly accepted his demotion to Secretary of State for Energy. He sat through the cuts of 1976, opposing them in cabinet, but necessarily keeping his mouth shut outside it. His reasons for this – chiefly that resignation would be seen as disloyal to the government – are unconvincing, even apologetic. Doubt, hesitation and pain replaced the glad confident morning. On one page, for instance, he reveals his ambition: ‘If I want to do anything other than frolic around on the margins of politics, I must be leader and prime minister.’ On the very next page, he is not so sure: ‘If you set yourself that target, it is bound to begin the process of corruption.’ As the book goes on, the balance seems to tip against his ambition, but he still remains in office, and there is another volume to come which must somehow explain how he stuck it out right until the bitter end – until the Tory victory over a punch-drunk Labour movement which he had so accurately predicted. But even in 1975 his clinging to office was disturbing his sleep."
} |
{
"content": "Friday, 10 October: I had a dream that Harold called me in and said: ‘I want you to be Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household with a seat in the House of Lords in charge of boxing under the Minister of Sport.’ He told me this in the great Cabinet room, which was full of people. ‘I’m afraid this doesn’t mean a place in the Cabinet for you,’ he said. I replied, ‘Harold, I must think about it,’ and Sir John Hunt said: ‘Boxing is very important. We must preserve the quality and excellence of the Lonsdale Belt.’The book is full of political treasures. There is a host of stories, for instance, to prove what is now established fact: that MI5 or sections of it were using their vast and secret powers against the government they were meant to be serving. Benn was constantly at the sharp end of this. He proved on more than one occasion that his home telephone was tapped – but he, a senior secretary of state in the cabinet, could do nothing about it. When he complained to the general secretary of the telephone engineers’ union, Brian Stanley, Stanley said he thought his own phone was tapped too – by his own members. Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, the ‘terrible twins’ of the trade unions in the period which toppled the Heath government, became the leading spokesmen for wage restraint and cuts during the Labour government, and were rewarded by being blacklisted by MI5. Benn confirms that he wanted Jones on the National Enterprise Board but Jones was banned after hostile MI5 reports, which also, initially, knocked Hugh Scanlon off the Gas Council.Tony Benn’s household was the subject of repeated press inquiries, mostly at the dead of night, about his son Joshua being in hospital. At least five times in two years, the Benn family was shattered by this dreadful news, conveyed usually by a concerned reporter from the Daily Mail. Each time, the information was entirely false. Joshua was not in hospital. When, after one specially unnerving inquiry, Benn rang David English, Daily Mail editor and Thatcher knight, to protest, he was told that the editor was at home, and could not be disturbed. Such double standards are the stuff of national newspaper editors. But where did the rumour originate? Perhaps from the same intelligence source which replied to Tony Benn when he complained about the sacking of a chiropodist in the civil service. The woman, said the reply, ‘may be a fairly regular reader of the Morning Star, the newspaper of the Communist Party’. Of course, she may not have been, but even if not, ‘she is known to have been interested in holidays arranged by the Young Communist League and in a sea trip to the Soviet Union’. To compound this scandal, ‘there was a reliable report in 1974 that her father also reads the Morning Star’. The intelligence officer’s report explained that ‘we would prefer to err on the side of caution in this case.’ The chiropodist remained sacked and there was nothing a secretary of state could do to reinstate her.Benn has a sense of mischief which keeps his story rolling along. His sharp comments on his colleagues have stood the test of time. Of Tony Crosland: ‘For him informality is a sort of substitute for radicalism.’ Of Shirley Williams: ‘the most reactionary politician I know’. Of Neil Kinnock: ‘not a substantial person. He is a media figure really.’The central fascination of these diaries is the gradual transformation of the bright young dynamic dinner-party careerist of the early sixties into the powerful and committed campaigner of the eighties. It emerges in fits and starts, but its progress is persistent, almost dogged. It shines most clearly on the rare occasions when Benn discusses what he has read. One of the insidious ways in which reformers are broken when they become ministers is by the denial of time to read. Reading anything outside red boxes or blue books is frowned on by literary civil servants, who encourage their minister to concentrate on the job in hand. Benn’s Diaries suggest that he started to read real books for the first time when he was a minister in the 1974–79 Labour government. As he declares his childlike zeal, say, for the Levellers or the Diggers in the English revolution, he gives the strong impression that he had never heard of any of these people before he met and quarrelled with Sir Anthony Part at the Department of Industry. The civil service mandarins seem to have driven him back to a glorious time when the King had his head chopped off and all his civil service supporters fled for their lives. Even more remarkable is his sudden discovery at the age of fifty of the socialist theory which inspired the movement which put him in parliament in the first place. The whole book bears warm testimony to the closeness and affection of the Benn family, and it is, apparently, to Caroline Benn that we owe the most gratitude for her husband’s conversion. At Christmas 1976, the Secretary of State hung out his Christmas stocking (as he had done for the previous fifty years or so). In it the next morning he found a copy of the Communist Manifesto. He read it on Christmas Day, and it led him to this remarkable, and moving confession – the real key, I suspect, to his extraordinary political development:"
} |
{
"content": "There is no doubt that in the years up to 1968 I was just a career politician and in 1968 I began thinking about technology and participation and all that; it wasn’t particularly socialist and my Fabian tract of 1970 was almost anti-socialist, corporatist in character. Up to 1973 I shifted to the left and analysed the Left. Then in 1974, at the Department of Industry I learned it all again by struggle and by seeing it and thinking about it, and I have been driven further and further towards a real socialist position. I record this now while I am reading all the basic texts in order to try to understand what is going on.I don’t really care whether it is Sir Anthony Part or Caroline Benn or Marx that we have to thank for that, but British politics of the last ten years has been the richer for it. Top of the pageLast updated on 27 October 2019"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWhy You ShouldVote Socialist(2001)First published 2001. Bookmarks Publications Ltd, c/o 1 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3 QE, England.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.AcknowledgementsThanks to Louise Christian, Neil Davidson, Shaun Doherty, Lindsey German, Matt Gordon, Charlie Hore, Judith Orr, Allyson Pollack, John Rees and Tommy Sheridan, who read the draft and made invaluable corrections and suggestions, and special thanks to Emma Bircham, who did most of the research.A glorious May DayThe grim legacy of ThatcherThe great train robberyThe return of the WhigsSleazy does itIt takes two to quangoPFI: Perfidious Financial IdiocySchools: ‘B’ is for Blair, Brown ... bog-standardFill ’em up: a new policy for prisonsCouncil houses, pensions: all up for grabsUniversities: only the rich need applyThe great train robbery continuedThe last Straw: the attack on civil libertiesTThe fat cats directoryThe politics of Polly PrudenceYour chance to vote socialist A glorious May DayLegendary and stupefying was the crassness of John Major, but his supreme achievement was to select May Day, the traditional day of celebration for the international labour movement, as the time when the British people, after five more grim years of Tory rule, were finally allowed to go to the polls.Only the most joyless socialist will pretend that he or she was not moved by what happened that May Day election night. Seat after seat, including some that had been Tory ever since people started voting, fell to Labour, and the final overall Labour majority of 179 was higher by far than had ever before been achieved.The huge majority was described at once by the new victors as a vindication of New Labour, the ‘project’ set out by Tony Blair, who had been elected party leader in 1994 and, with the help of his faithful spin-doctor Peter Mandelson, ‘refurbished’ the Labour Party with new ‘accessible’ policies and a new constitution which replaced the historic commitment to common ownership with a series of illiterate soundbites no one remembers.One stark fact emerged from the election results to confound that view. The Liberal Democrats, successors of the old ‘moderate’ Alliance that so comprehensively wrecked Labour in the general elections of 1983 and 1987, won more seats in 1997 than in either of those years, but everywhere the swing to the Liberals was half the swing to Labour. This suggests that the results were not just an expression of fatigue and disgust at the long years of Tory rule – a reaction that could just as easily have favoured the Liberal Democrats. The results were proof of a swing to the left throughout the country.The swing had very little to do with Blair, Mandelson or New Labour. The opinion polls showed a huge Labour lead – always more than 20 percent – long before Blair became leader. This lead dated back to the Tories’ enforced closure of coal mines in October 1992, and the imposition, in defiance of the Tory election pledge, of VAT on fuel.The acclaim for the new government was an expression of relief and hope: relief that the long years of reaction shaped by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and continued under John Major in the 1990s were at last at an end; hope that the balance of power and wealth in Britain would be shifted away from the rich to the workers and the poor.Labour councillors and their supporters assumed that Thatcher’s relentless campaign against local democracy, especially in Labour’s heartlands, would be reversed. Socialists everywhere assumed that the Thatcherite obsession with irresponsible greed and wealth would at last be replaced by a government committed to fairer distribution and more democratic control of the country’s wealth.As we approach another general election four years later, all those hopes have been dashed to pieces. Slowly at first, but with gathering conviction, the New Labour government has stubbornly enforced the anti-union laws promulgated by Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, continued to dismantle local democracy, and privatised everything in sight.This pamphlet sets out the record of that drift into reaction, and offers socialists a chance to use their vote to help stop it. The grim legacy of ThatcherUnion-bashingMargaret Thatcher’s strategy during all the 11 years she held office was founded on her determination to reduce the trade unions to phantoms of their former selves. She knew that this could not be achieved simply by passing laws, and that the real power of trade unions lies not in their legal strength but in their willingness to use it. She was haunted by the great trade union victories of the 1970s: the miners’ flying pickets which reduced the government of Edward Heath, in whose cabinet she served, to ruins; the legendary militancy of the print unions which was always a threat to what she regarded and still regards as the freedom of the press (but in reality is the freedom of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and Lord Rothermere to print what they please); and the shocking insubordination of trade unionists in the docks who greeted the Tory government’s Industrial Relations Act with such defiance that the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress was forced to call a general strike to free them from prison.The fundamental problem confronting Thatcher and her new ministers was that the unions had grown too strong on the ground. They had to be broken not just by new laws but in open struggle. The Tory campaign against them was drawn up by Thatcher’s adviser, the seasoned class warrior Nicholas Ridley, and leaked to the Economist.The Ridley plan, as it became known, was based on open class war. It envisaged, first, the provocation of a series of strikes in the nationalised industries where the unions were weakest. Government victory in such strikes would be followed, the plan went on, by mass sackings in the defeated industries. Then, and only then, the plan envisaged long and careful preparation for a battle against the old enemy, the miners. Once the miners were beaten, the focus of battle could shift to the other two main areas of trade union strength, the print workers and the dockers."
} |
{
"content": "The Ridley plan was followed with disciplined precision. Among Thatcher’s first appointments was that of the hard-bitten American banker Ian MacGregor as chairman and chief executive of British Steel. He provoked a strike almost at once, challenging the weak and inexperienced steel trade unions to a war they did not savour, and winning easily. Thousands of steel workers were sacked.In 1983 MacGregor was made chairman of British Coal. Two years earlier the miners, under their new leader Arthur Scargill, had reacted spontaneously to a chance announcement by the energy secretary David Howell that 50 pits might have to close. An unofficial protest strike ripped through the coalfields and for a moment threatened the entire strategy of the Ridley plan. In some panic, Thatcher announced that there were, after all, no plans to close 50 pits, indeed no plans to close any pits at all. The wretched David Howell was pitchforked into the House of Lords. The miners went back to work, and Thatcher, Ridley and MacGregor went back to their plan.Three years later, when they were ready, at the end of the 1983–84 winter, they announced a series of arbitrary pit closures. The closures challenged the miners’ union to a fight to the finish. The miners responded with guts and vigour. For a moment at the beginning of the strike it looked as though the railway workers and dockers might join in – a haunting reminder of the ‘Triple Alliance’ that had terrified previous Tory governments in 1921 and 1925. But after some skilful concessions the railway workers and dockers were appeased.Assisted by new laws passed by the Tories in 1981 and 1983, the government went to court to demand control of the mine workers’ union’s assets. Oil-fired and nuclear power stations were utilised to the full to supplement already large coal stocks, and the rules that had divided the responsibilities of separate county police forces were swept aside. A new national police force was thrown with full force against the miners. Coal production continued in what for the union was the historically weak area of Nottinghamshire.The Trades Union Congress stood timidly aside, and in March 1985, after nearly a year on strike, the miners were finally broken. They had been broken before, in 1921 and 1926, but this time the Tories were determined that they would never again be humiliated by the miners’ union. It was, ironically, Michael Heseltine, later to become Thatcher’s sworn enemy, who put the finishing touches to her campaign against the miners by effectively closing down the coal mining industry in 1992.The miners’ defeat was followed by the breaking of the print workers at Wapping by Murdoch in 1986, and wholesale privatisation and union-busting in the docks in 1989. By the time Thatcher left office in 1990, pushed out not so much by unions as by organised resistance to her flagship social policy, the poll tax, the Ridley plan was triumphantly completed. The unions had been broken in a class battle in which the employers and the government had been enormously assisted by seven different laws restricting the right to strike.As Thatcher proceeded to further election victories in 1983 and 1987, the new Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, dropped Labour’s objections to the Tories’ anti-union laws. He emphasised that Labour would not repeal the laws banning sympathy strikes. He was effectively agreeing with the Tory argument that while people could legally strike for themselves, for their own pay and conditions, they should on no account be allowed to strike for anyone else. Thus the central principle of trade unionism – ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ – was subtly rewritten to read ‘an injury to one is an injury to one’, and Labour agreed.Kinnock’s argument was that he could not win an election if he clung to old laws allowing sympathy strikes. He was therefore prepared, as on the issue of unilateral British nuclear disarmament, to jettison a vital policy in exchange for office, which anyway he never achieved. PrivatisationThatcher’s strategy did not stop at emasculating the trade unions. Her theory was that strong trade unionism was the other side of the coin to public ownership. Breaking the unions was the first essential stage in her and her successors’ campaign to wrest control of industry and services from public hands, and give them back to capitalists and speculators. Thus the humiliation of the unions in steel and coal was followed by the privatisation of both industries. British Telecom was privatised in three instalments from 1984 to 1986; Cable and Wireless in 1985; British Gas in three instalments from 1986 to 1988; British Airways and the British Airports Authority in 1987; British Steel in 1988; the publicly-owned water companies in England and Wales in 1988–90; and electricity in 1990–91. By 1990, the end of the Thatcher decade, after a slow and nervous start, she and her ministers had succeeded in privatising pretty well all the major industries brought into public ownership by successive Labour governments from 1945 to 1979.All these privatisations were vigorously opposed by the Labour Party in opposition. This opposition was based on principles dating back to the formation of the Labour Party at the start of the century. The reasoning behind it was admirably summarised in a composite motion to the Labour Party conference in the year of the miners’ strike, 1984. The motion was proposed by Moss Evans, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. The Tories’ privatisation policies, he argued, were designed: (a) to undermine wages, jobs and union organisation; (b) to take the benefits of public services and assets away from democratic control and into the hands of profiteers and speculators; and (c) to dismantle the welfare state by reducing public services to a minimum which totally failed to meet the needs and aspirations of those depending on them."
} |
{
"content": "In his speech Moss Evans referred to the Ridley plan, and predicted with devastating accuracy that the breaking of the trade unions would be followed, if the Tories got their way, by a dismantling of the entire network of public ownership set up by Labour. He showed how, even as early as 1984, many of his predictions were being realised.Huge speculative gains had been made on the stock exchange on the early privatisations. Far more grotesque windfalls were to follow with the massive privatisations of the utilities. A prime example was electricity, nationalised by the Labour government after the war and run with some efficiency ever since.The privatisation of electricity was greeted with howls of fury from the young opposition energy spokesman, Tony Blair. At the Labour Party conference in 1989 Blair brought the delegates cheering to their feet with a furious summary of the case against the Tory plans:At the outset we said that privatisation would mean higher prices, and it has done. We warned that the government would introduce a special nuclear tax for private nuclear power, and it has. We said that the government would be forced to admit there was no choice for consumers, and now they have. Born out of dogma, reared on deceit, this privatisation is now exposed for what it is and always has been, private prejudice masquerading as public policy. Let us send this message to the government. We do not want it postponed, we do not want it delayed, we do not want it put off – we want it abandoned here, now and forever.Similar arguments were deployed by Labour leaders as they opposed all the other privatisations of that grim decade. The nightmares expressed by Labour politicians all became true.The bureaucrats who had run the public industries on substantial but not exorbitant salaries suddenly took off into the orbit of the mega-rich. Iain Vallance, for instance, who had helped to run the Post Office on a reasonable salary suddenly found himself running British Telecom on £226,000 a year. He went from making 11 times the average salary of a BT worker in 1987 to making 38 times the average salary in 1990. By 1996 his salary was over £700,000, and it has grown considerably since. There was no recognisable increase in the efficiency or the performance of British Telecom following privatisation. The chief changes were that the unions were weakened, thousands of workers sacked and the new executives enrolled in the ranks of millionaires.’Share options’ were introduced by the Tories to sweeten the new executives’ perks. When water was privatised a river of unearned slush flowed into the pockets of the new water bosses, most of whom were the same people who had run the old state industries. The monopolies remained monopolies, with no difference in the product as far as the consumers were concerned, but huge differences in the ‘remuneration’ which the new bosses heaped upon themselves, and in the strength and influence of the trade unions in their ability to protect jobs.In every case a huge area of influence and power that had been, however distantly, accountable to elected politicians was transferred to wholly irresponsible boardrooms. The new utilities stopped being public utilities and became private commodities to be bought and sold, re-bought and re-sold in the international marketplace. The balance of democracy in Britain was tilted heavily away from the people and towards the new monopolists.To their horror, the Labour politicians noticed that the craze for privatisation was extending to the very sanctuaries of public service of which Labour was most proud. There were cries from Tory ideologues to introduce fees for tuition in universities and colleges, and for schools to ‘opt out’ of local education authorities. Whole new organisations were set up by the Tories to campaign for state schools to ‘opt out’. These Tory plans were bitterly opposed by Labour.Jack Straw, spokesman on education, told the Labour conference in 1991, ‘Opting out and privatisation of education will be stopped dead by a Labour government.’ He was utterly opposed, he said, to tuition fees for students. He told conference in 1989:This government says that it wants an expansion of higher education, but by the introduction of student loans and the end of free tuition will make entry into higher education dependent more than ever on the size of a parent’s bank balance. It is the private schools today – it will be the private universities tomorrow.Straw was a key backer of Blair for the Labour leadership in 1994, and was rewarded with the post of shadow home secretary. In that position he discovered a new Tory horror – the privatisation of prisons. This outrage, he argued, not only offended against efficiency as with the industrial privatisations. It was, he told the Prison Officers Association as late as 1996, an offence against morality as well. Prison privatisation was, he said, ‘wholly wrong in principle’.Even worse for the Labour leaders was the suggestion that the Tories were threatening the inner sanctum of Labour’s post-war achievements, the National Health Service. The Tories, warned Labour spokesman Robin Cook in 1990, ‘are taking us down the road to the NHS run as a commercial business for commercial motives’. The great train robberyBy 1990, the year Thatcher was finally pushed out by the irreversible popular tide against her flagship poll tax, the Tory government had achieved most of her central aim – a fundamental shift of wealth and power towards the rich. On the industrial front, however, there remained one area where a combination of workers and consumers had obstinately beaten off all attempts at privatisation – the railways."
} |
{
"content": "In 1989 Cecil Parkinson, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite minister, excited an otherwise dispirited Tory party conference with a proposal to privatise the railways. The proposal was taken up eagerly by his successor as minister of transport, John Mac-Gregor, who was advised by Sir Christopher Foster, a partner of the top accountants Coopers & Lybrand. Sir Christopher set his accounting genius to devising a scheme for splitting up the railways into several separate pockets, each of which could be made profitable provided the public subsidy continued. So brilliant was Sir Christopher’s advice that on the very day the railways were privatised in 1995 he became deputy chairman of Railtrack, the private company controlling the network.Though the ideology of rail privatisation had delighted the Tory party conference, the new scheme proved even less popular with the public than any of the previous privatisations. By 1996 only 11 percent of the British people (and only a minority of Tories) supported it.The whole scheme was rottenly devised and riddled with contradictions. A strong attack from Labour, coupled with an unequivocal assurance that a new Labour government would instantly renationalise the railways without a penny of speculative gain to the new owners, would have killed off the whole crazy enterprise before it started.Leading Labour politicians quickly proved that they understood the importance of what they said about rail privatisation, and were not afraid to say it. As early as 1993, John Prescott, Labour’s shadow transport minister, did not mince his words to the party conference. He boomed:Let me make it crystal clear that any privatisation of the railway system that does take place will, on the arrival of a Labour government, be quickly and effectively dealt with ... and be returned to public ownership.By the following year (1994) it was time for crystal clarity once more – this time from the new shadow transport minister, Frank Dobson:Let me give this pledge not just to this conference but to the people of Britain – the next Labour government will bring the railway system back into public ownership.Another member of the crystal clear faction was Michael Meacher, shadow transport secretary in 1995. He understood the real problem – that there were private investors lining up to squeeze some profit out of the railways. He issued the clearest possible warning to such investors:The railways depend on public subsidies to the tune of £1.8 billion a year. There is no guarantee that the subsidy will continue.If the railways were privatised, he asked, could they depend on government subsidy, and what profit could they make if that subsidy was not forthcoming?Such statements worried the City vultures lining up for a feast on the railways. When the three rail operating stock companies (roscos) came up for sale in January 1996, no big investor showed any interest, and the roscos were flogged off at bargain basement prices. The combination of half-baked Tory plans for privatisation and the clearest possible pledges that a new Labour government would renationalise the railways had put the privatisers off.Then, sometime in the first few months of 1996, the whole Labour campaign collapsed. Two new shadow transport ministers, Clare Short and Andrew Smith, backed away from the ‘crystal clear’ pledges of their predecessors. By the time the conference came round again in 1996, there were no further promises to renationalise the railways – only a few bromide sentences about the need for a fully integrated railway. Confidence flowed back into the privatisers, and the roscos were sold on again at enormous profit for the former bureaucrats who had paid so little for them in the first place. One such, Sandy Anderson, made a personal profit of £38 million.Brian Souter, whose company Stagecoach made a fortune from the privatisation of buses and railways, told a House of Commons committee that in 1995 no one would touch railway privatisation ‘with a bargepole’. It was not until Labour fudged the issue that it suddenly seemed possible that a Labour government would renege on its pledges to renationalise, and the big boys with the big wallets started to creep out of the cupboard.When the party manifestos were published before the 1997 election many people noticed that all Labour’s past renationalisation pledges were left out. Even the pledge to bring the railways back into public ownership had been shelved. Even the ringing declaration of shadow transport minister Andrew Smith at the 1996 conference, replying to a Tory threat to privatise air traffic control – ‘our air is not for sale’ – did not develop into a manifesto commitment.On the other hand, there were no plans in Labour’s manifesto to privatise anything, no specific promises not to nationalise or municipalise. Many optimists hoped that Labour politicians had shelved their real aspirations for public ownership just for the election period. There was a strong feeling that Labour, once elected, would rediscover its century-long commitment to public ownership and public control, and would reassert both. Labour was elected in a landslide victory in 1997, and what happened? The return of the WhigsHow the Liberals, with 17 percent of the vote, got into governmentThe first thing that happened was a curious shift of power and influence at the heart of the new Labour government – in 10 Downing Street. Two new advisers were appointed to prime minister Blair – Roger Liddle on defence and Europe, and Derek Scott on economics. Both had been founders of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), whose leaders had split from the Labour Party in 1981 and had run against the Labour Party in various elections since until the party’s absorption into the Liberal Democrats, formerly the Liberal Party from which Labour broke away on its formation in 1900."
} |
{
"content": "Scott had stood against Labour in Swindon in 1983 and 1987, splitting the vote and letting in a Tory. Liddle had also been a founder member of the SDP and had been an SDP candidate, standing against Labour in Lambeth in 1983 and in the Fulham by-election in 1986. The SDP, with its new allies the Liberals, achieved 26 percent of the poll in the 1983 election, only 2 percent less than Labour. It could fairly be said that the formation of the SDP and its standing against Labour in 1983 and 1987 was the main electoral reason for Thatcher’s landslide victories in both elections.The key policies put forward by the SDP differed only marginally from those of the Liberal Party. The SDP was for instance 100 percent opposed to more public ownership in any sector, and sought an accommodation with the rich and business executives, who welcomed them with open arms.One of Liddle’s closest companions who stayed in the Labour Party was Peter Mandelson, a former television producer who had been rapidly promoted by Neil Kinnock to be campaigns director for the Labour Party for the 1992 election. Before Liddle split with Labour to form the SDP, Mandelson and Liddle had been Labour councillors at Lambeth in south London. In 1994 the two men co-authored an embarrassing hagiography of Tony Blair entitled The Blair Revolution. On close inspection, the policies and programme outlined by the book bore a striking resemblance to the not very challenging policies and programme of the defunct SDP.Mandelson employed a young researcher called Derek Draper, who had been a director of a lobbying organisation called Prima Europe/GPC Market Access. The chairman of Prima Europe was Sir Ian Wrigglesworth, a former SDP founder member who later joined the Liberal Democrats. His predecessor as Prima Europe chairman was Lord Holme, a Liberal Democrat peer.Further links between this magic circle and the SDP could be found in the home of Matthew Oakeshott, a founder member of the SDP who lived next door to Roger Liddle and was chairman of the ‘blind trust’ which invested Liddle’s shareholding in Prima Europe. In 1998, a year after the Blair government took office, another adviser took up residence in Downing Street. He was a journalist called Andrew Adonis – a former candidate for the Liberal Democrats. A founder director of Prima Europe was Lord Taverne of Pimlico, a former Labour minister who after leaving the party knocked Labour out of its seat in the Lincoln by-election in 1973. As for Prima Europe, the firm of lobbyists at the centre of this cabal, its clients included Unilever, Glaxo Wellcome, Abbey National, British Nuclear Fuels, Rio Tinto Zinc, and the privatised energy companies Powergen and British Gas. Sleazy does itAlmost as soon as it took office the New Labour government, which prided itself on its freedom from sleaze, was caught up in sleaze. The government decided to renege on its manifesto commitment to ban tobacco advertisements, and allowed tobacco ads in their most lucrative area – on Formula One racing cars. This decision was promptly linked to a £1 million donation to the Labour Party by an established Tory, Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One racing billionaire. In some panic, Blair ordered the party to give Ecclestone back his million and explained to a sceptical public that he, Blair, was, after all, ‘a straight guy’.Exactly how straight became a little clearer in the ‘cash for access’ scandal of 1998. Amazed by the new lobbyists who swarmed like locusts over the New Labour government and its ministers, the Observer journalist Gregory Palast interviewed Roger Liddle and Derek Draper. Liddle was quoted as saying:... there is a circle and Derek is part of the circle. Anyone who says he isn’t is an enemy. Just tell me who you want to meet, and Derek and I will make the call for you.Draper was even more direct:There are 17 people in this country who count, and to say that I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century.This novel approach to power and politics was based on the suggestion that rich clients using New Labour lobbyists could get close to New Labour ministers. Draper was sacked by Mandelson when this ‘cash for access’ scandal broke.Mandelson himself was sacked from the cabinet at the end of 1998 when it was revealed that he had, without declaring it, borrowed some £400,000 from his cabinet colleague the Paymaster General, Geoffrey Robinson, to help buy himself a suitable house in fashionable Notting Hill. Geoffrey Robinson, whose only crime at the time seemed to have been that he lent Mandelson the money, was sacked too, never to return. But Mandelson, who got the loan, was taken back into the cabinet in 1999, only to be sacked again in February 2001 for intervening on behalf of the Indian billionaire Hinduja family.The Hindujas, despite their involvement in a massive Indian arms scandal, applied for and got British passports in record time. Mandelson was ‘cleared’ of impropriety by an investigation, though there was no doubt that either he or his office asked questions about passports for the Hindujas.As this pamphlet is written, yet another sleaze scandal breaks over Downing Street, this time about questions from leading Downing Street officials, including Blair’s chief of staff, about planning permission for an Oxford business school financed by the millionaire speculator Wafic Said. The same Said had hit the headlines all through the 1980s for his role in the brokering of the Al Yamamah arms deal between the British and Saudi Arabian governments – the biggest arms deal ever negotiated in the whole history of the world. Perhaps because of his role in that deal, Wafic Said became a close confidant of Margaret Thatcher and her sleazy son, Mark. The government changed its name but not its allies in big business. Wafic Said’s plans in Oxford had the eager support of Blair’s chief of staff, whose brother Charles had been a top aide to Margaret Thatcher."
} |
{
"content": "Commenting on all these developments, and on the influence of so many millionaires on the highest echelons of the New Labour government, former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley referred to the way in which Blair, Mandelson and Co had been systematically ‘dazzled’ by people of vast wealth.This was not itself a new phenomenon for a Labour government. Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour leader, was almost permanently clinched in what Beatrice Webb called ‘the aristocratic embrace’. He took shares and a posh car from a biscuit king in exchange for a baronetcy. Harold Wilson, Labour leader in the 1960s and 1970s, was entranced by a new breed of businessmen who specialised in import/export deals with dictatorships in Eastern Europe.But neither MacDonald’s aristocratic embrace nor Wilson’s close relationship with entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe, nor even James Callaghan’s relationship with the Welsh financier Julian Hodge, could rival the sheer scale with which the New Labour government under Blair flung itself at the feet of any billionaire who asked its ministers to a party, or attended one of the Labour Party’s interminable fundraising dinners. Blair’s close friend Mandelson played a crucial part in delivering the leadership of the New Labour government into the hands of his business friends – and its former electoral enemies in the SDP and Liberal Democrats. It takes two to quangoNew Labour’s hankering for the plaudits of the rich swept through all ranks of the new government. On the afternoon after polling day in May 1997 an exhausted John Prescott, confirmed as the new deputy prime minister and head of one of the biggest departments of state ever constituted, met the board members of BAA, the privatised monopoly that runs several British airports. BAA wanted an early commitment that the new government was friendly to its bid to build a fifth terminal at Heathrow airport. A public inquiry was still sitting, but BAA wanted to make its peace with the new administration. Prescott, who pretended to represent the old traditions of Labour, was pleased and proud to greet such important businessmen. He was the first of the new ministers to experience the advantages of the new partnership with big business that the new government was so anxious to promote.Very soon the nature of that partnership began to take shape. Prescott himself became a keen supporter of the government’s plans to privatise air traffic control. Andrew Smith’s proud declaration – ‘our air is not for sale’ – was subtly changed to ‘our air is for sale’. And Andrew Smith became chief secretary at Gordon Brown’s Treasury.At the last Labour Party conference before the election Gordon Brown had attacked ‘the quangocracy which threatens democracy’ and ‘the quango state’. ‘Quango’ stands for quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation. In the bad old days of Tory government these cliques were made up of the great, the good and above all the rich. They were appointed by the Tories to take charge of key sections of society, separate from and unaccountable to parliament or elected local authorities.The most blatant examples of the Tory quangos were the development corporations set up by the Tories in 14 areas with the ostensible aim of improving the standard of life in the inner cities. These new development corporations were packed with local businessmen, lawyers and accountants, with a couple of elected councillors ‘co-opted’ to add a democratic veneer. The new corporations swiped all planning powers from the elected local authorities in vast tracts of turban territory. They infuriated the more responsible Labour councillors and achieved next to nothing. They were opposed by Labour and finally collapsed in ignominy and a strong stink of corruption.No sooner did the New Labour ministers take office, however, than they started to appoint a new set of ‘taskforces’ even more wide-ranging and unaccountable than the Tory quangos. In the first few months of the New Labour government nearly 300 of these quangos had been set up to cover almost every aspect of national life. The degree of ‘partnership’ involved in the new quangos could be detected in the background of the 3,013 people who made them up, and who were catalogued in a booklet produced by Democratic Audit. Only 73 (2 percent) of these new quangocrats were trade unionists. More than a third (1,107) were from private business or trade associations. Gordon Brown’s Treasury set up the most exclusive of the task-forces, burrowing deep in the warrens of the City of London for appropriate bankers and investment analysts to supervise the new dawn. PFI: Perfidious Financial IdiocyHospitalsGeoffrey Robinson, Paymaster General in the new government, had an office in Gordon Brown’s Treasury from which he proclaimed the Tory idea for public-private partnership known as PFI. Robinson brought in Malcolm Bates from the big construction company BICC to mastermind the government’s new plans for PFI. Bates was well used to the job – he had done the same thing under the Tories. PFI rapidly became the lynchpin of all the government’s construction policies. The theory was simple, if crude. Private business provided funds for the project up front, and the government paid back the money at substantial rates of interest over 30 years.The first training ground for PFI was the National Health Service. Labour in opposition was not at all keen on PFI in the NHS. In 1996, when she spoke from the Labour front bench, Harriet Harman was horrified by the Tories’ obsession with PFI. ‘When the private sector is building, owning, managing and running a hospital,’ she declared, ‘that hospital has been privatised.’ Labour backbenchers cheered her attacks on creeping privatisation, but almost as soon as Harriet Harman became Secretary of State for Social Security, the new government rushed through the NHS (Private Finance) Act 1997, removing at a stroke all the barriers to the Private Finance Initiative in the NHS. Very soon a number of hospitals started to be built under PFI in circumstances exactly fitting Harriet Harman’s definition of hospital privatisation."
} |
{
"content": "A typical example was the plan to close down the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and associated lucrative premises in the middle of Edinburgh, and replace them with a new hospital built by a private enterprise consortium on the outskirts the city. The area got a new hospital, the consortium got the business, but the people of Edinburgh got a hospital with 300 fewer beds than originally planned and substantial cuts in staff.Any scepticism about these new schemes was initially drowned in popular relief and pleasure that, at last, a new hospital was being built. But detailed investigations of the schemes exposed their fatal flaw – a yawning gap between the cost of the new PFI hospital and the cost of a similar hospital built under the old scheme of straight public funding. The extra cost of borrowing on the open market plus the costs of dividends and bank charges, and clauses in the contracts which gave the consortia the right to vary the prices – all built up to a final cost of the hospital project far higher than the equivalent cost under the old public enterprise scheme. These extra costs had to be met by raiding other budgets in the NHS – by cutting beds or staff or both.In papers written for the British Medical Journal as early as 1999, Professor Allyson Pollock and her team at the School of Public Policy at University College London investigated the ‘first wave’ of 14 hospitals built under PFI. They found, on average, a 30 percent reduction in beds and a 25–30 percent reduction in staff. All these cuts and sackings were caused by the shortfall in the PFI schemes when compared with the old public enterprise system. Some of the figures were quite astonishing. The new University College Hospital in London for instance would have cost £140 million under the old scheme. By July 2000 when the new scheme was signed, the cost had escalated to £430 million.In Durham in the north east of England, the new Dryburn Hospital, built by a consortium headed inevitably by Balfour Beatty, was subjected to the PFI process. What was needed to replace the crumbling NHS in the area was a new hospital of 750 beds. PFI meant that the only way to make the new hospital ‘affordable’ to Balfour Beatty and Co was to cut the number of beds to 458, and staff by 25 percent. In Chepstow in Wales, if the surplus land round the new PFI hospital was sold, it would have provided 80 percent of the money for the new hospital without having to pay anything to the construction consortium which got the contract. These new hospital projects were handed over to PFI, even though in both cases the local Labour MPs had been bitter opponents of the original Tory PFI proposals. In Carlisle a new PFI hospital could only be built by cutting beds and staff to such a degree that the local hospital doctors denounced it as reverting to ‘Third World standards’. Much of the land owned by the NHS hospital was used for building a private hospital.When the facts started to emerge about the costs and the cuts implied in the new schemes, public resentment grew. When a PFI plan to build a hospital at Worcester led to the closing of all acute services at Kidderminster Hospital, a local revolt led to the formation of a new organisation called Health Concern. By the beginning of 2001 Health Concern had 19 councillors at Wyre Forest – by far the biggest party in the area. When Tony Blair oozed up to Worcester to fraternise with the waterlogged population during the winter floods of January 2001, he was astonished to be surrounded and heckled by pensioners denouncing PFI.As early as July 1999 Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote a leading article entitled PFI: Perfidious Financial Idiocy. This editorial, which has effectively become British Medical Association policy ever since, argued that the increased costs of PFI for hospitals drives down the number of beds and cuts clinical services in other schemes. In Hereford, for instance, a proposal for a PFI hospital with 351 beds had to lose 100 beds before it became ‘viable’ (profitable) for the contracting company.There were other even more serious problems: ‘Private Finance Initiatives may inevitably lead to an increase in the private sector and user charges, providing one way for the NHS to shrink to a rump service for the poor.’ Smith went on:A second factor that infuriates many of those working within the NHS is the complete absence of any evidence in favour of the Private Finance Initiative. In fact all the evidence we have suggests it is a very bad idea.Richard Smith’s warning about the gradual privatisation of the NHS seemed at first to be a trifle extreme. It conflicted, for instance, with the constant attacks by Blair and his health secretary Alan Milburn on Tory health policies as ‘creeping privatisation’. At a conference in 2001 Chancellor Gordon Brown told the general secretary of the TUC that under the next Labour government ‘only the NHS and the police’ would escape Labour’s plans for privatisation. A closer look at recent government initiatives on health suggest that Brown’s prognosis may have been optimistic, and that health too is in line for creeping privatisation under New Labour."
} |
{
"content": "In November 2000 Professor Allyson Pollock of the University College London School of Public Policy and David Price of the University of Northumbria wrote a paper entitled How the World Trade Organisation Threatens Public Healthcare Services – Where Does New Labour Stand? The article examined the wording of the recent World Trade Organisation (WTO) treaty, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The treaty, the article suggests, ‘provides the WTO with crucial powers to promote what it calls ‘pro-competitive domestic policies’. The article traced what these policies had meant in India and sub-Saharan Africa, where ‘access care has suffered and infectious disease control programmes have been disrupted’. In Latin America, ‘privatised services have proved lucrative business propositions and attracted healthier patients, while sicker patients have gravitated to a reduced public sector’. In Brazil, such privatisation has led to an expanded private sector with 120,000 doctors, while the public sector which serves three quarters of the population has only 70,000 doctors.What about Britain, the land of the universal health service, which prides itself on treating people according to their health, not their wallets? The authors note that the health secretary, Alan Milburn, faced with a shortfall of beds in the acute hospital sector under PFI, ‘has chosen not a full restoration of public provision or abandonment of PFI but a new concordat with the private hospital sector to make up the shortfall’. Milburn explains that spending NHS money on using up spare capacity in private hospitals is ‘common sense’.It is certainly common sense to Norwich Union and the other big private healthcare providers whose health service cannot make as big a profit without the huge injection of public funds Milburn has provided. It is the opposite of common sense to those who believe that the more profitable private health becomes, the more damage is done to the principle and practice of a National Health Service. The plain fact is that under New Labour 4,000 NHS hospital beds have been lost every year in the PFI process, and ‘cost overruns’ in PFI projects have been three times as high as they were in the old NHS hospital projects.This creeping privatisation of the NHS got another boost from Blair and Milburn in the crucial area of long term personal care. Soon after taking office the government set up a Royal Commission, which recommended to ministers’ horror that long term personal care should, in the best tradition of the NHS, be ‘free at the point of delivery’. The government rejected this recommendation, preferring the minority report signed by journalist David Lipsey, and Joel Joffe, founder of Allied Dunbar, a health insurance firm. Both men are now in the House of Lords. In the last session of the 2000–01 parliament the government introduced a Health and Social Care Bill. Clause 4 of the bill, entitled ‘Public-Private Partnerships’, allows the secretary of state to set up private companies ‘to provide facilities or services’. The clause opens the door to huge new areas of privatised healthcare, and flies in the face of the principles of the NHS laid down more than 50 years ago by Lord Beveridge and Aneurin Bevan. Schools; ‘B’ is for Blair, Brown ...... Blunkett, Byers and bog-standardWhat’s bad for the National Health Service is probably bad for everything else, and at the end of four years in office the New Labour government is committed to PFI in every area of government construction. It is almost impossible for government, local or central, to build a shed in a park nowadays without attracting the cloying attention of PFI enthusiasts. If there is indeed no evidence that any member of the public benefits from any of these schemes, why does the government proceed with them? One answer has come from Carillion, formerly Tarmac, which revealed in January 2001 that it was boosting the strength of its Private Finance Initiative team as part of efforts to reduce its dependence ‘on low-margin competitive contracting’. In plain English this meant that Carillion could make more profit more quickly from PFI than from ordinary contracts in the commercial market.What about education, always rated so highly by Blair and his ministers? Great has been the hype for the government’s alleged triumphs in education, but most of it was exposed by a brilliant piece of investigative journalism by the Guardian’s Nick Davies in March 2000. He wrote:The truth is that for his first two years in power Mr Blunkett [Labour’s education secretary] actually invested less in education than the Tories had, and by the end of this parliament he will still be only marginally ahead of the Tory level of spending, a level which he used to describe as ‘miserable’.The sum of Blunkett’s achievement is that he has managed, on an annual average while he has been secretary of state, to spend 4.6 percent of gross domestic product on education, compared to the shocking average under the Tories – 5 percent. The chief reason for these figures was the government’s determination to stick to the Tories’ spending limits for 1997 and 1998.Anyone with kids at state schools (and of course the kids themselves) can see the result – a tremendous increase in pressure and red tape for teachers, and a higher level of boredom for the children. The grand plans announced by Jack Straw for a ‘new partnership with teachers’ were effectively torn up when Blair and Blunkett agreed to reappoint for a fresh term of office as chief inspector of schools the man most hated by teachers in the whole history of state education.Chris Woodhead was brought in by the Tory government to attack elected local authority education committees and to denounce teachers. When reappointed by New Labour, he continued with his former priorities as though nothing had happened. Votes of no confidence in him were passed regularly at all teachers’ union conferences, even those of headteachers. Doctrinaire and disciplinarian inspections intimidated teachers and cowed them."
} |
{
"content": "When Blunkett and Blair announced that they intended to make it a criminal offence for a teacher to have sex with his or her pupils, they were embarrassed to discover that their own chief inspector of schools had engaged in a sexual affair with one of his pupils while he was teaching her at a school in Bristol. So loyal were Blair and Blunkett to Woodhead that they publicly defended him even when it became clear that his defence – that the affair had started only after the pupil had left school – was economical with the truth.Finally, before even his term of office was complete, Woodhead resigned from his post and joined the Daily Telegraph, where his Tory anti-teacher prejudices could by fully arrayed, and where he could for a fee continue to bite the hands of the New Labour leaders who had reappointed him.Meanwhile, what remedy did Blunkett and his minister of schools Estelle Morris have for the failing state school system? The chief problem, they discovered, was that it was a state system controlled by elected authorities. So with the help of Woodhead, who was never happier than when he was denouncing elected education authorities, they developed a scheme in which education would be taken out of the control of elected councillors and handed over to their blessed private enterprise. Slowly at first but with gathering speed, the two Tory solutions so comprehensively denounced by Labour politicians in opposition – privatisation and selection – were ushered in, with inevitably catastrophic results. The ritual would be as follows. Ofsted under Woodhead would denounce a school or an authority. The school or the authority would be written off as ‘failing’, and a new privatised authority would be introduced to save the children.In Southwark in south London the new authority will be supervised by Andrew Turner, a Tory candidate previously employed by the Tory party to campaign for the opting out of state schools – a policy savaged at the time by all the New Labour leaders, including Tony Blair. In Leeds the new privatised education authority will employ the services of Capita, a private company that has already made millions for its shareholders by taking over failed public services and continuing to fail with them. In Haringey, north London, schools minister Estelle Morris announced a ‘radical new venture’ to introduce the profit motive into state education. The bids from the three companies pitching for the contract, including Group 4, which had become a joke for its failure to keep control of prisoners, were all presented by former or present local authority education chiefs. The bids were all so hopelessly incompetent that they were rejected.But by now ministers are so committed to privatisation in education they cannot, even if they want to, concentrate their attention on improving the service provided by government.They are steeped so far in blood that going back is worse than going on. So they must grovel still deeper for what goes on eluding them – the private profit solution to public education.In Glasgow, a city with a proud tradition of public education, the Labour-controlled authority has privatised the services of all its 29 secondary schools in a complicated lease-back arrangement which means public council spending over 30 years of £1.2 billion so that a private consortium can own and control those schools for all that time in exchange for its own investment of £420 million. Even then it is still not clear who will own the schools.Another brilliant idea for dealing with what ministers regard as ‘failing’ schools (which usually means that most of the children are poor or black or both) was the notion of the ‘fresh start’. Schools failed by Ofsted were closed down altogether, their staff sacked, new headteachers and staff appointed, and the whole process started over again. Despite heavy public spending, and much media hype, these fresh starts proved in almost every case to be a dismal failure. This is because most of the children in the schools were still poor, and their exam results did not improve just because the headmaster changed and the staff were sacked.At the last Labour Party conference before the 1997 election David Blunkett, rattled by a passionate defence of comprehensive education from Roy Hattersley and others, asked the conference to read his lips and promised that during the next Labour government there would be ‘no selection by examination or by interview’. This pledge has become a standing joke in schools, as selection either by exam or by interview, or usually by some less obvious but no less pernicious method, has become the norm.This process was blessed by prime minister Blair in his last major speech on education, in which he proposed that 46 percent of schools should be turned into ‘specialist’ schools. He did not explain what would happen to the remaining 54 percent, nor what the difference was between the old barbaric system in which children were divided up at the age of 11, with the cleverer children sent to grammar schools and the less clever herded into secondary moderns. This was the system that Labour replaced with comprehensive schools.Teachers reading Blair’s remarks started to think that Labour must be planning to put an end to comprehensive schools altogether and divide them up, half and half, between ‘specialist’ and ‘non-specialist’ schools. Then, as if to justify their fears, Blair’s press secretary Alistair Campbell delicately explained what the new proposals meant – ’no more bog-standard comprehensives’. Fill ’em up: a new policy for prisonsThe same obsession with dismantling public accountability has seeped into every area of government policy. Home secretary Jack Straw became so concerned about the warning from shadow home secretary Jack Straw – that prison privatisation was immoral – that he set about privatising prisons almost as soon as he took office. Within days he had sanctioned two new private finance prison deals."
} |
{
"content": "In the last four years the number of private-run adult and young offenders prisons has doubled. This trend looks set to continue, with the government now considering semi-privatisation of prisons along the lines of the extremely unpopular Treasury plans for the London Underground. This would involve the facilities and buildings being taken over by the private sector and split from the custodial operations – a variation on the model of division of ownership and responsibility which has proven so disastrous for the railways.Under New Labour the number of people in prison rose from 60,000 in 1997 to 66,000 in 2001. Official statistics show that more people are imprisoned in England and Wales per head of the population than in Sudan, Saudi Arabia or China, and across Western Europe only Portugal has a greater proportion of its population behind bars.’Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ had been the most quoted slogan of New Labour in opposition. In office, the New Labour ministers could remember only the first three words. They were tough on crime all right. The prisons were accurately described by the director of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, as ‘hellholes’. Some 36 jails in the UK have more than 100 inmates ‘doubled-up’ sharing cells.Sir David Ramsbotham, a retired general brought in by the Tories as chief inspector of prisons to bend the stick away from his progressive predecessor, was almost physically sick at the conditions of the men and women confined to the prisons he inspected. He told the Guardian in February of this year that ‘20,000 inmates – women, boys, elderly, mentally ill, petty offenders – should never have been sent to jail.’ The more stridently his reports resorted to strong language to express his disgust, the more they were ignored by New Labour ministers in the Home Office.Paul Boateng, the new prisons minister, had told his constituents when they returned him for the first time by a small majority in 1987, ‘Today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto.’ Few who heard this rhetoric can have imagined that the smooth young radical would one day, as prisons minister, seek to refashion British prisons along lines laid down in Soweto. Boateng rapidly became a regular spokesman for every reactionary initiative from the Home Office. The nadir was reached under his regime when an Asian boy, Zahid Mubarek, on remand in Feltham young offenders centre, where some 600 prisoners get no education at all, was forced to share a cell with a psychotic racist thug who battered him to death. Council houses, pensionsAll up for grabsThe very core of Labour’s historic municipal advance – the public ownership and control of council housing – has been systematically attacked by New Labour. The government’s own spending plans for housing depend on the ‘transfer’ (sell-off) of 200,000 council homes a year. Since the government came to office in 1997 no less than 342,000 council homes have been sold off to organisations that are not elected, and that find it much easier to evict tenants. This policy is pursued by Labour councils with increasing vigour despite that fact that ballot after ballot of the tenants affected shows deep hostility to privatisation. In many cases, especially in London, the sell-offs have been backed and subsidised by large property companies whose intention is to evict working class families from their council homes and rebuild in their place homes fit for City parasites who have second homes in the country.Pensions is another issue where the New Labour ministers have abandoned their previous commitments to old people in preference for their love affair with big insurance companies. In 1986, when Thatcher and her henchmen Norman Fowler and John Major started privatising pensions by using tax concessions to bribe people in perfectly workable pension schemes to take out private pensions, the Labour front bench, led by Margaret Beckett, exploded in rage. Year after year, Labour’s pensions spokespeople clung courageously to SERPS, the relatively decent pensions schemes relating pensions to earning established by Barbara Castle, a Labour left winger, in the 1970s.By contrast, New Labour social security secretary Alistair Darling has scrapped SERPS, which was run entirely by the government, and replaced it with a scheme for ‘stakeholder pensions’ run by the private company which achieved the record for the most swindling under the mis-selling pensions scandal of the late 1980s and early 1990s – the good old reliable Prudential.As more and more private companies try to ‘adapt’ their pension schemes to the disadvantage of their pensioners – British Airways, Barclays Bank, IBM, etc. – the government stands by and nods them through. When the chief culprit in this regard, British Airways chairman Colin (Lord) Marshall, was honoured by fellow millionaires with a dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel in 1998, the guest of honour was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.As for the state pension itself, the cornerstone of former Labour governments’ reforms, it has been allowed to slide into obsolescence. Endless pledges by Labour’s social security spokespeople that they would restore the link, established by past Labour governments and abolished under Thatcher, between the state pension and the rise in earnings have been cynically junked. UniversitiesOnly the rich need applyTessa Blackstone was one of the New Labour peers who had most vitriolically attacked the concept of private privilege in all forms of education. As a former ‘master’ of Birkbeck College in London and a member of the last Labour government’s cabinet think tank, no one was better qualified to go to the House of Lords and to become New Labour’s Minister of State for Education. There, almost at once, she found herself defending yet another New Labour U-turn – the decision to impose tuition fees on university students."
} |
{
"content": "Did she remember Neil Kinnock’s famous speech to the Labour Party conference in which he boasted that he had been the first member of his family to be able to go to university because for the first time a young man from the working class could afford it? Or had she read the stinging speeches of Jack Straw when he was opposition spokesman (quoted above) in which he said that tuition fees would mean a slowdown in working class recruitment to universities, and in the end a system in which universities were almost entirely exclusive to the rich?According to the National Union of Students, university students in England and Wales now pay £1.5 billion more than they did before Labour was elected in 1997. At the same time funding per student has declined by almost 40 percent in the last 12 years.The culmination of old Tory cuts in the student grant, the old Tory provision of student loans and New Labour tuition fees has had a catastrophic effect on university students. Many of them live entirely on their loans without any real idea of how they can repay them. Others either drop out or (more usually) do not even bother to enrol in courses for which they are qualified. Enrolment in many universities has fallen, with over 50 universities reporting that they were more than 2 percent below their student recruitment targets in the current academic year.Tuition fees were too much for Labour, and even the Liberals, in Scotland where they were abolished. In England and Wales they continue to cast a shadow over one of the areas of life which, thanks to Labour governments in the past, had held out some hope for the young. The great train robbery continuedLooming over this entire privatisation process has been the greatest scandal of them all – the railways. We have seen how fiercely Labour front benchers spoke out against privatisation in all the years the Tories proposed it, and how the same ministers took flight from their opposition when it might have made a difference. This abject surrender continued apace as Labour took office.The railways were not renationalised. The hideous mess constructed by the Tories, the different competing railway organisations and the speculative millionaires they created, continued with hardly any change. The reason was trumpeted proudly by Blair, Prescott and Co whenever they were asked about it, usually by the transport unions which had contributed so many millions to Labour. They explained that they could not possibly afford the £4 billion it would have cost to create what Blair had promised – a ‘publicly owned, publicly accountable railway’. They had so many other priorities, they bleated, that they could not possibly waste public money on paying railway shareholders for their assets. Then came the great triumphs of railway privatisation, the disasters at Southall, Paddington and Hatfield.At Hatfield, it was revealed, a train had come off the track because of a broken rail. Railtrack, the privatised company which owned and controlled the network, had known perfectly well of the dangers of broken rails. They had been spelled out to the company in great detail a year before the Hatfield crash by the new rail regulator, Tom Winsor, whose militant approach to the railway monopolies was held out by the government as proof of its continuing concern for and control over the railway. Winsor’s memorandum about the dangers of broken rails was scrupulously ignored in the interests of keeping trains moving and profits flowing.After Hatfield, Railtrack panicked and subjected millions of long-suffering passengers to months of chaos and delays as some of the track was renewed. The militant Winsor decided that what was most important was that he should have a private company to regulate, so he announced that another £4 billion of taxpayers’ money would be released to keep the privatised railways running. By coincidence, £4 billion was the exact sum that Blair, Prescott and Co had estimated as the likely cost of renationalising the railways. The money they had ‘saved’ the taxpayer by leaving the railways in private hands was now being passed into those same private hands without any public accountability for it.The sheer extravagance of the decision not to renationalise the railways was set out in an article early in 2001 in the journal Public Finance. The author, Jean Shaoul, calculated the cost of public subsidies in the four years before privatisation and the four years after. Adjusted for inflation, the figures were: 1991–94 £2,556 million; 1997–2000 £6,848 million. The cost to the taxpayer of subsidising the privately-owned railway had grown to three times the cost of subsidising the publicly-owned railway. The last StrawThe attack on civil libertiesMany liberal-minded people were inclined to turn away from arguments about the unions and public ownership, believing or hoping that New Labour would address issues involving simple civil liberties, so many of which had been trampled on by past Tory governments. These optimists were the successors of those civil libertarians who measured their criticism of the 1964–70 Labour governments under Harold Wilson by recalling ‘at least’ that government had supported private member’s bills to ensure major social reforms – the abolition of capital punishment, the reform of the abortion law, and for the first time a major relaxation in the draconian laws which persecuted gay men and women."
} |
{
"content": "Many believed that the huge majority for Labour in May 1997 would at least ensure a clutch of measures of that kind. At last, for instance, it was believed that here was a chance for a robust freedom of information act to expose future governments to the scrutiny of their electorates; a curb on the powers of the police that had so shocked and infuriated black people in the inner cities; a reform of the drugs laws to legalise at least some of the more harmless drugs which wasted so much of the time of the police and other legal authorities; a shift in the balance away from the judiciary and towards juries; an expansion of a legal aid scheme which in the past had left so many people deprived even of a hearing, let alone justice; repeal of the hated Section 28 which discriminated against gays; above all, at last, a government which showed a genuine respect for foreigners and people fleeing to Britain from persecution and terror.Not one of these things happened. Most of them were the responsibility of the new home secretary, Jack Straw, who had come into politics as a campaigner for the National Union of Students and had been a protege of his predecessor as MP for Blackburn, the left winger Barbara Castle. We have come across Straw before as the man who maintained his moral objections to the privatisation of prisons in opposition by privatising them once in government. On all these matters of civil liberty he swiftly emerged as a dyed in the wool reactionary who might as well have donned a helmet from one of me more reckless policemen in his charge.Straw was not originally responsible for the government’s new measure on freedom of information, but he rapidly ensured that he seized control of it from David Clark, the unassuming MP for South Shields. When Straw objected to Clark’s moderate proposals, Clark was sacked and replaced by Straw. Mark Fisher, minister for the arts, who spoke up in committee for a strong freedom of information act, was sacked too, and replaced as arts minister by Alan Howarth, former Tory MP for Stratford-on-Avon, who was catapulted into the safe Labour seat of Newport by diktat of New Labour headquarters in Millbank without anyone in Newport having the chance to select a proper Labour candidate. Straw took charge of the new freedom of information bill, and produced a measure so flimsy mat campaigners for freedom of information concluded that it is now, under New Labour, even more difficult to get information from the government than it was under the Tories.The rest of New Labour’s record on civil liberties is no better than that of its Tory predecessors. Ministers boasted that they had adopted European law on human rights, but most of the proposals of the government in that area appeared to take away human rights. One of the oldest and most valuable human rights in the legal system, for instance – the right to be tried by jury – has been assailed again and again by Straw and his colleagues in the Home Office. Straw has proposed, at the moment without too much success, that in many instances the jury should be done away with altogether. Every reactionary notion that floats down to Straw from the Neanderthals on the Law Commission he adopts as quickly as he rejects any genuine reform.The involvement of his own son in an embarrassing tangle with the police after he was found in possession of cannabis hardened Straw’s heart to any suggestion of relaxation of the laws on drugs, provided of course that the drugs in question, unlike alcohol and tobacco, are not sold by big corporations for profit.Straw has publicly accepted the Law Commission’s recommendation to do away with the rule banning the trial of any defendant for a crime for which he or she has been acquitted. This proposal was heralded as a progressive measure since it had been proposed after the public inquiry into the racist killing of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. A new band of ‘progressives’ in the police argued that the young men acquitted of murdering Stephen were protected by the double jeopardy rule from being charged again for the same offence. A more likely reason for the rule, and for the chorus in its favour, is that it allows police to re-charge some of the countless people who, usually because of police prejudice and incompetence, have been found not guilty of crimes for which they were wrongly convicted. Section 28, moreover, is still on the statute book in England and Wales.Looming large over all the other of New Labour’s backward measures in the civil liberties field is the proposal for a replacement of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 1974. This act, which had to be renewed every year, was introduced in response to a series of IRA bombings in Britain that killed many innocent civilians. There was no such background to New Labour’s proposal for its replacement, the Terrorism Act. One purpose of this act was for the first time to make it illegal for anyone in Britain to take part in what the act describes as terrorist activities abroad. On the day the act came into force on 1 March 2001, the government banned 21 groups, most of them Islamic. The ban was extended to the PKK, or Kurdish Workers Party, which has a substantial following in Britain but which is hated by the Turkish government for its campaigns on behalf of the persecuted Kurdish minority. No evidence was produced by Jack Straw or anyone else to prove any terrorist act in Britain by any of me banned groups, but Straw told the Commons he was ‘entirely satisfied’ that all the groups were ‘concerned with terrorism’."
} |
{
"content": "Close reading of the new bill by civil liberties groups, and by the campaigning magazine the Big Issue, revealed clauses which could be used against groups in Britain engaged in protests and campaigns. Anyone, for instance, supporting a revolution against the hated dictatorship in Iraq would be caught by the act, even though their aims might be shared by government ministers. The same applies to anyone advocating or supporting any uprising in the illegally occupied West Bank of Jordan, Gaza or Jerusalem.As far as activity in Britain is concerned, the act actually defines terrorist activity as any violent activity designed ‘to influence the government or intimidate the public’, and includes any act which results in damage to property. The Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs, Simon Hughes, told the Commons, ‘If you are a trade union leader calling for a strike at a hospital you would effectively be caught by this legislation.’ Just about the only organisation outside New Labour wholeheartedly to support the new act was the Conservative Party, whose spokesman complained that similar legislation proposed by the previous Tory government had been blocked by Labour.Asylum seekers coming to Britain found themselves under sharp attack not just from racists and right wing fanatics but also from the New Labour government and its minister at the Home Office, Barbara Roche. She accused asylum seekers of ‘milking the system’ and then set about organising the system to ensure that there was nothing for asylum seekers to milk. Under her regime asylum seekers are deprived of social security benefits and provided instead with £36.54 a week in vouchers to buy food and clothes plus £10 a week in cash (there is no change from the vouchers). Asylum seekers are treated with the most disgusting contempt, housed in conditions unfit for human habitation and dispersed continually from refuge to refuge without discussion or consultation. Their vouchers and cash benefits are conditional on obeying orders to move.When the Tory leader William Hague suggested locking up all asylum seekers, New Labour reacted with horror at such a gross breach of civil liberty, and promptly started building more detention centres for asylum seekers. The numbers of asylum seekers detained by New Labour have gone up from 800 to 1,200, and two new detention centres just built will take many more. More and more asylum seekers’ applications to stay in Britain are being turned down, including all such applications from Iraqi Kurds. A high point for New Labour policy was the refusal of an application to stay from a 24 year old Iraqi Kurd Ramin Khadeji. When he got his refusal he killed himself. Refusals have gone up from 35 percent of applications when New Labour took over to 60 percent.Similarly, the proposals of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, on legal aid were intended to cut out of the legal system any lawyer who seeks diligently to represent a client who has no money. Most of the legal aid work under New Labour’s proposals will go to big firms who ‘process’ their clients through the courts with maximum speed and minimum consideration.The Lord Chancellor himself, incidentally, is probably the only head of the legal profession in history to have lost a case in his own courts. In keeping with the cronyism of his government he appointed his mate Garry Hart from top City solicitors Herbert Smith as his chief adviser, paid by the taxpayer, even though no previous Lord Chancellor had ever had such an adviser. He was promptly sued by Jane Coker, a prominent immigration solicitor. She alleged that she had been discriminated against since there had been no public notice that the post was vacant. Lord Irvine treated the writ with casual disdain but was shocked when he lost the case in front of a unanimous tribunal. He appealed and, with the help of some of the most distinguished barristers in the land, managed to win by a margin of two to one at the Employment Appeals Tribunal. That decision has now gone to the House of Lords in a further appeal, but the case showed in the brightest possible colours how the arrogant appointment to high office of the government’s closest cronies in big business can even conflict with their own legislation.A speciality of New Labour’s touch on crime policy has been a creation of a whole new range of offences under the broad heading of anti-social behaviour. The new Criminal Justice Act promulgates a series of new powers to arrest young people on what the police think is anti-social behaviour, and gives the police powers to impose on the spot fines and curfews. The new act comes at a time when the powers of the police are already considered far too wide by a larger and larger proportion of the young population, especially if they are black. The fat cats directoryGeorge Monbiot’s recent book Captive State tells the story of how the big corporations took over the elected government. He started his book in the month Labour was elected, and plainly, like almost everyone else of the same opinion, hoped that the new government would at least put up a fight to take back some of the democratic power and control that had been surrendered by successive Tory governments. As his book proceeds, it becomes, almost reluctantly, a devastating attack on the New Labour government for continuing, and even heralding that surrender. Some 26 pages in the middle of the book are devoted to a comprehensive Fat Cats Directory. Under the enticing headings Fat Cat, Previous Gluttony and Subsequent Creamery, he lists the big businessmen, speculators, landlords and exploiters promoted by New Labour to positions of power and influence."
} |
{
"content": "Almost every month since his book came out, new appointments have been made which can be added to his directory. In January 2001 Dr Ian Hudson, former top executive of the gargantuan pharmaceutical monopoly Smith Kline Beecham, was appointed head of the Medicines Control Agency, regulator of the British pharmaceutical industry. The following month Anne Parker, a director of private nursing agency and private healthcare firm Nestor, took charge of the government’s new National Care Standards Commission, the regulator of private care homes. Almost as an aside to this directory, Monbiot exposes the New Labour ministers who once promised so much, and are now no more than office boys and girls for the bosses they pretend to control. Here is Brian Wilson, once a socialist campaigner in the Scottish Highlands, as a Scottish Office minister justifying the monstrous toll charges levied by a US bank on the bridge to the island of Skye, and the cancellation of formerly government-owned ferries to Skye which might have offered dangerous competition to the profit-laden bridge.Here is Nick Raynsford, once a resolute campaigner for the homeless, breezing round the world acting as salesman for British construction companies, chief among them Balfour Beatty, the construction company with the highest ever fine for a blatant breach of health and safety laws, and which was chiefly responsible for the broken rail at Hatfield. In January 2001 Raynsford introduced a new Homes Bill to the House of Commons. He started by rejecting what he called the ‘lie’ that homelessness had increased under New Labour. Not so, he insisted. In the last six months of the Tory government local authorities had accepted 110,000 homeless households, while four years of New Labour policies later the figure had been reduced – to 108,000. Other speakers in the debate complained that priority homelessness had actually increased during Mr Raynsford’s regime, and that the numbers of people in bed and breakfast accommodation had gone up under New Labour by 51 percent.Here is Stephen Byers, a champion of public state education when he was chairman of the education committee in North Tyneside, now Secretary of State for Trade and Industry with not a word to say about the wholesale privatisation of education. Here is the new minister of science and supporter of genetically modified foods, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, whose exalted position has, we are assured, absolutely nothing to do with the millions he has pumped over the years into the coffers of the Labour Party. To these names many others should be added.Patricia Hewitt, a senior Treasury minister, represents the growing links between the government’s privatisation policies and the sprawling consultancies of the big accounting monopolies. Before talking office Hewitt was director of research at Andersen Consulting, a firm which was one of the first to spot the growing fortunes of New Labour, and which laid out the fares of the entire Labour front bench – about 100 MPs – to go to Oxford in the summer of 1996 where they were instructed on how to be efficient ministers.Andersen Consulting, which in 2001 changed its name fashionably and incomprehensibly to Accenture, became one of the new government’s favourite companies, being let off most of the full cost of the delays and disasters in the computer system it had constructed to store National Insurance data. A few months after taking office the government ended a long battle with Andersen Consulting’s sister company, the accountants Arthur Andersen, a battle that dated back more than a decade to the auditing of the accounts of the old crook John DeLorean. Infuriated by what it regarded as the accountants’ deceit, the Tory government banned Arthur Andersen from all government work, but New Labour quickly ended the ban on terms highly favourable to the company.As for Patricia Hewitt, she leaped up the government hierarchy with increasing agility, reaching her peak in 2000 as minister for e-business with a sterling defence in parliament of the government’s support for the Ilusu dam, a scheme by the Turkish government with the help of big British contractors (including, inevitably, Balfour Beatty) to flood whole tracts of land occupied by Kurds. Ms Hewitt was the only speaker in the Commons debate to support the project.Other honourable additions to Monbiot’s list should include Peter Hain, the former anti-apartheid and CND campaigner, who became the government’s chief spokesman for economic sanctions against Iraq which have killed thousands of innocent civilians, most of them children; Alan Milburn, former organiser of the Days of Hope left wing bookshop in Newcastle, who as Secretary of State for Health decided quite suddenly that one way to protect the National Health Service was to pay private hospitals for beds and services they provided for NHS patients; Clare Short, the former champion of the dispossessed whose Department for International Development became a stout supporter of the neo-liberal orthodoxy which has abandoned so many millions in the underdeveloped world to hope less poverty; and the former firebrand Robin Cook, foreign secretary, whose ‘ethical’ foreign policy was absolutely indistinguishable from its not so ethical Tory predecessor. The list I could go on forever.The distinguishing features are a former commitment to a more egalitarian, fairer society, and a current exclusive commitment to the opposite priorities of big business. The politics of Polly PrudenceAs this pamphlet is written, the Murdoch press and even the Daily Mail is loudly congratulating Gordon Brown on his election budget. They praise him not as he praises himself, for his alleged commitment to the poor, and to women and children, but for his prudence. Their prevailing fear is that a Labour chancellor might use the powers at his disposal to pump money into the pockets of the people who voted for him. They need not worry. The chancellor was far more concerned to impress his arbiters in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank than with the people with little or no money at his disposal."
} |
{
"content": "He himself admits that his record over his five budgets has been exactly neutral. He has given almost exactly what he has taken away. Not surprisingly, his measures have had little or no effect on the distribution of wealth in Britain. Four years of New Labour in extremely favourable economic circumstances have left the Tory balance between rich and poor almost exactly what it was when the Tories left it. Millions are still plunged in hopeless poverty. The gap between rich and poor has actually widened under New Labour.One way in which this grim fact has been disguised has been by publicising and heralding marginal changes to the plight of the poor and workers while maintaining discretionary secrecy about the rich. Everyone knows to the last detail what happens to the incomes of workers and the poor. No one knows in anything like the same detail what is happening to the rich. The grotesque advances in the incomes of the rich in the Labour years are literally incalculable. Income tax has come down, capital gains tax has been cut from 33 percent to 30 percent. Gordon Brown has continued his predecessor’s habit of extending tax breaks on share options and other perks for the rich without calculating their overall impact. A survey conducted by stockbrokers JP Morgan and published down the page in the Observer in February 2001 revealed that the UK has more households with an income of more than half a million dollars than any other country in Europe; and in the New Labour years the wealth of those with between half a million and $1 million rose by 8.1 percent, those with between $1 and $5 million by 10.5 percent; and those with over $5 million by 11.8 percent. Unto him that hath has been given, prudently, by New Labour, in great abundance.Prudence Brown boasts that under his careful stewardship unemployment and inflation have come down. Modestly he ascribes this miracle to his own genius. Yet from the first moment he took office and handed the level of interest rates (previously set by elected government) to unelected bankers who benefit from high interest rates, he in effect admitted what he knows to be true – that elected governments of whatever colour cannot and do not determine what happens to the international capitalist economy unless they embark on the most determined and ruthless economic intervention.Under capitalism, unemployment, inflation, the rise and fall of booms and slumps, are not brought about by governments, but by economic forces beyond government control. No one knows, for instance, why there was a recession in the so-called Tiger economies of Asia in 1998. Those economies were previously heralded as evidence that capitalism worked better when it was unfettered by trade unions or government regulation. The impact of that illusion is still being felt by the working people and the poor of those economies, notably in Indonesia where one corrupt and dictatorial government has been toppled, and its successor teeters on the brink of revolution on the one side and unspeakable racial violence on the other.The most predictable feature of any capitalist economy is its unpredictability. Gordon Brown knows that perfectly well, which is probably why he prefers capitalist caution to socialist advance. He also knows that the more his government loosens its democratic grip on the engines of the economy, the less control he will have in the event of any future slump, and the more he consigns the future to a private enterprise chaos out of which he knows no road. Against the background of chaos and unpredictability, his refusal to spend his ‘war chest’ on the people and services who need it most is all the more reprehensible.This, then, is the central charge against the New Labour government. All through the 20th century the Labour Party sought at least to some extent to use the power conferred on it by the votes of working people to shift the balance of wealth and power in their direction. Often the party failed miserably in that endeavour. Again and again elected governments bowed to what they regarded as superior forces in unelected private capital. They were, in Harold Wilson’s famous phrase, ‘blown off course’ by runs on sterling, investment strikes, judicial arrogance, media blitzes and other forces they did not understand, and did not dare to counter. But at least some effort was made in the right direction. At least some commitment was made to public ownership, to civil liberties, and to the building of strong trade unions. New Labour in the late 1990s and early 21st century has shifted so far to the right mat almost all its policies and achievements have converged with those of its Tory predecessors.In a book published in September 1998 entitled The Political Economy of New Labour, Colin Hay devoted a whole chapter to this convergence. The results, even by 1998, are as follows. On trade union reform, five out of six policies converge (with the other almost completely converged). On employment law, two out of four policies converge, one (access to tribunals for unfair dismissal) is subject to qualified convergence, and only one (the pledge to sign the Maastricht treaty on employment) can be said to differ from that of the Tories. In six major areas of education policy, only one policy (the assisted places scheme) is not shared by the Tories. As for training, all four major policies are the same for both parties. Labour and Tory pension policy is exactly the same. So they are in all seven major areas of economic policy, and in three out of four areas of industrial policy (the fourth is the commitment to regional development agencies which are very similar to the wholly undemocratic Tory development corporations). On the four areas under the heading privatisation, the only (qualified) divergence is on Labour’s windfall tax on the privatised utilities, a tax which, though opposed by the Tories, has been borne by the new utility shareholders with a patient shrug, and on media regulation there is not a sliver of difference between the two parties."
} |
{
"content": "Hay concludes, ‘Labour now accepts that there is simply no alternative to neo-liberalism in an era of heightened capital mobility and financial mobilisation’, and that ‘social democratic parties such as Labour must effectively abandon their social democratic credentials’. This is one answer to those optimistic social democratic commentators who have resigned themselves, often against their better judgement, to voting Labour. Polly Toynbee and David Walker of the Guardian have written a whole book to argue (a) that things didn’t get better quickly enough under New Labour, but (b) that another Labour government with a fresh mandate would surely rediscover its radical heritage and improve on every policy front to the satisfaction of the vast majority of its supporters.One answer to Polly Toynbee is that she, as she recognises, was one of the prominent defectors from Labour to the SDP in 1981, and thus can be held at least partly responsible for all the Tory excesses that followed. But another has more resonance. It is that she and all her fellow ‘Vote Labour for real change’ enthusiasts are not listening to their leaders.Tony Blair’s speeches about his next term of office carry not a whisper of trade union reform, or of a new era of public ownership and democratic responsibility, or of a widening of the comprehensive element in schools, or of a new assault on the grotesque bonanzas of the rich. Everything Blair says about the future points in exactly the opposite direction, towards more privatisation, more inequality, more chaos on road and rail, less planning, less intervention, and a fiercer attack on what his press officer calls bog-standard comprehensives, bog-standard council housing, bog-standard anything which derives from the traditional cooperation and solidarity of working class people.The Toynbee-Walker thesis, that a new New Labour government would put the errors, omissions and mistakes of the last one behind it and engage on a new road to reform, is to ignore completely the triumphalism of Labour ministers and their single minded devotion to office whatever the price that has to be paid by the people who vote for them. They have abandoned their social democratic credentials without a word of regret, but with the singular jubilation of bog-standard politicians who have suddenly discovered the full fruits of high office and intend above all else to go on enjoying them.There is another reaction to all these developments which is even more corrosive than Toynbee’s and Walker’s. This is Colin Hay’s assertion that there is ‘no alternative to neo-liberalism and globalisation’. He appears to argue that because Labour governments have now been corralled by capitalism, and forced to abandon their social democratic credentials, there is now no alternative to their policies. This is the policy of resignation and despair. There is no democratic alternative to Tory policies, argue the New Pessimists, so we had better accept them even when they are carried out by ministers calling themselves Labour. The inevitability of corporate power and corporate control commends itself most sweetly to the directors of corporations. But there is no reason why any of the rest of us should bow before them.There is plenty of evidence in the past and even now that these policies can be resisted and reversed. Corporations do not always get their own way. The establishment of the British National Health Service, the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the toppling of post-war dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal – all these were accomplished against the corporate stream. Even today, while capitalism boasts its omnipotence, it is stopped in its tracks by mass protests in Seattle, Prague and Nice. Resistance can be as international, as globalised, as capitalism is, and, unlike capitalism, it offers hope and life to the exploited millions. There is nothing mystical or superhuman about capitalist power. It is managed and controlled by human beings and can also be changed by human beings. It can and must be resisted with all the power at our disposal.On the eve of a general election, the abject performance of New Labour in office has a grim implication for all those who have believed in the past that their future depends at least to some extent on voting and maintaining a Labour government, but now no longer think the same. All such socialists, trade unionists, civil libertarians, environmentalists, National Health Service campaigners, are effectively disfranchised. With Labour’s link to the unions so weak and its commitment to public ownership and civil liberties reduced to the Private Finance Initiative and vouchers for asylum seekers, the choice before the voters is increasingly similar to the choice in the United States of America between the Republican Party (conservative) and the Democratic Party (conservative).No sane person wants a return to Conservative government, led by Hague and Widdecombe, but more and more voters realise that Hague and Widdecombe have been pushed rightwards by a Labour government far more right wing than any of its predecessors – and they do not want to vote Labour again. Your chance to vote socialistIs there an alternative? The answer in at least a third of the country is yes."
} |
{
"content": "The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) is standing candidates in all 72 seats in Scotland. Each of them is committed to renationalising the railways, ending PFI, and restoring the rights and liberties of trade unionists, asylum seekers and the poor. The SSP has to fight not only against New Labour and the Tories, who have almost vanished north of the border, but also against the Scottish National Party. In the past the SNP was not averse to mouthing socialist policies, but instead of developing and expanding such policies, the SNP has backed away from them. No longer do we hear the SNP calling for renationalising the utilities, for a minimum pension of £90 a week, or for 50,000 new council houses. All these pledges have been dropped. The SNP’s pensions policy has even been trumped by Gordon Brown. The SNP has moved relentlessly to the right. Alex Salmond was more right wing than his predecessor, Jim Sillars, and the new leader, John Sweeney, is more right wing than Alex Salmond. The SNP has retreated into the narrow bourgeois nationalism from which it came.In England and Wales the Socialist Alliance has already selected 80 candidates. The first major elections contested by the Socialist Alliance were for the Greater London Assembly (GLA) in 2000. The Socialist Alliance drew together several organisations and formed a united front proclaiming basic socialist policies. Since the GLA elections, Socialist Alliance and SSP candidates have performed creditably in national and council by-elections, and all of them are determined to present a socialist alternative to a wide spectrum of the general electorate. If you are unhappy with the convergence of Labour policies with Tory ones, if you want to see the railways and other privatised industries renationalised, and the Post Office and London Underground left in public hands, if you want an end to PFI and other schemes for backdoor privatisation, if you want to stop the creeping privatisation of the health service, if you are disgusted by the illiberal drift of New Labour on questions of civil liberties, then you should vote for your socialist candidate. If there is no such candidate in your constituency, find out where there is one in your town or city or county, and go to work on his or her behalf. If there is no Socialist Alliance or SSP candidate in your area, you may prefer to vote for a Labour candidate because he or she is a socialist, or even just to keep the Tories out, or you may want to vote for an independent candidate who represents working class resistance – such as Arthur Scargill in Hartlepool or Health Concern in Wyre Forest. The difference between this election and the last one is that on a nationwide scale there will be candidates in many areas who can represent some of your aspirations.The Scottish Socialist Party and the Socialist Alliance offer more than a shift in politics. They offer a new style of campaigning – a clean break with the suffocating careerism that throttles so much reforming zeal. They realise that real change and progress in a class society cannot be brought about just by voting. They realise that the real threat to the power of the rich comes not from voting but from organised resistance from our side. All the real advances of the past century were rooted in the confidence of working people and their willingness not just to vote but to use their industrial power against their employers, or to organise in collective protest, or both.The great social leap forward after the Second World War was accomplished not just by the enormous Labour vote, but also by the rising confidence among trade unionists of both sexes that had grown far beyond what anyone had imagined before the war. The further leaps forward in the 1970s depended almost entirely on the mighty strength of the organised working class and their willingness to use it.Ideas and the votes they represent cannot be isolated from the real battles in society. Socialist ideas take root and grow in circumstances where people decide to organise and do something to change their circumstances. In the past few months we have seen the first faint stirrings of a revival of working class revolt. The sustained resistance to mass sackings under PFI at Dudley, the continued refusal of communication workers to accept the privatisation of the Post Office, the massive votes for industrial action in protest against the splitting up and privatisation of London Underground – all these are signs of a new mood of resistance and a new impatience with the clichés of New Labour. They come at least partly as a reaction to great international demonstrations of anti-capitalist protest.Voting is only one infrequent and often emasculated form of protest. But voting is still a crucial opportunity to make use of our democratic rights. Our votes are important in proportion to their links to the real powers at our disposal. Every vote for the Socialist Alliance, every decent performance of the Socialist Alliance and SSP, will put new heart and spirit into the growing ranks of people prepared to fight.Socialist candidates are standing not to further their own careers, still less to secure a parliamentary salary (they will only take an average wage if they get elected), but because they are horrified by what has happened to the labour movement and are determined to set it back on track. In a recent pamphlet, The Captive Party, the veteran socialist Michael Barratt Brown appealed to socialists to recall the alternative society that socialism promises:"
} |
{
"content": "All forms of health and childcare and the care of the disabled would be free. Education would be free at every age right through to lifelong learning. Housing would be available at reasonable rents with access by foot to shops and parks and gardens, and to many workplaces. There would be a wide range of opportunities for work in production and services with appropriate training built in. There would be no discrimination at work on grounds of gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Pensions for the aged and invalid, and payments during sickness and unemployment would be provided on a universal scheme based on contributions related to income. Planning of land use, road and rail transport, industrial location, and the balance of urban and rural activities would be subject to the most open examination and discussion. In all walks of life, at work and at home, in all workplaces and public institutions, management would be subject to agreed forms of consumers’ and workers’ controls. We have the resources for all this. We just have to find how to change the system from one of private greed to that of public gain.As a start, just a start, you should vote socialist. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 May 2014"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHow capitalism corruptsLabour politicians(2004)Extract from Their Democracy and Ours, The Vote: How it was won and how it was undermined, London 2004.© Copyright Estate of Paul FootReprinted in Socialist Worker, No.2153, 30 May 2009.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Award winning investigative journalist and leading socialist campaigner Paul Foot was the bane of corrupt politicians and the champion of those who fell victim to miscarriages of justice. He completed his final book shortly before he died in 2004. The Vote: How It Was Won And How It Was Undermined, traces the history of the struggle for democracy, sets out the limits of parliament and attacks the breed of Labour politicians who use parliament to enrich themselves.Socialist Worker reprints this extract from the chapter, Their Democracy and Ours.The history of the twentieth century in Britain has shown that whenever a Labour government in parliamentary office has found itself in conflict with the class wielding economic and industrial power, the government has been resisted, humiliated or defeated, usually all three.On all sides, the elected government is at a disadvantage. Its members are elected by geographic constituency and are constrained by the necessity to represent all their constituents whatever class they come from or support.Elected governments move at a snail’s pace, from Bill to Bill, formality to formality. Their ministries are cluttered with the most ridiculous pomp and tradition. They are obliged to submit their proposed laws to the Crown and to the House of Lords, which is dominated by the “great and good” (not elected). They are permanently subject to laws made by judges (not elected), enforced by police and army chiefs (not elected), and drawn up and supervised by civil servants (not elected).The ruling-class chieftains have at their disposal whole armies of their own advisers and intellectuals, none of them elected. They take daily decisions affecting hundreds of thousands of people, sacking them, disciplining them, cutting their wages, sending them off to war, without any real threat of obstruction from the elected Parliament.British representative democracy is founded on the notion of one person one vote. An industrial magnate has one vote, and so does each worker he can sack or impoverish. A millionaire landlord has one vote, and so does every person he evicts. A banker has one vote, so does every person impoverished by a rise in the bank rate or a financial takeover. A newspaper proprietor has one vote, so does each of the readers he deceives or seduces every day of the week. Are all these people really equally represented? Or does not the mighty, unrepresentative economic power of the wealthy minority consistently and completely overwhelm the representative power of Parliament?Corruption in all its forms has always been a consistent companion of class rule. One of the promises of the early social democrats was that they would put a stop to corruption. In fact, corruption has prospered mightily in the age of social democracy. Again and again, social democratic representatives have found themselves at the mercy of the capitalist bribe.The ministerial career of Jimmy Thomas, the trade-union leader who played so heroic a role in the betrayal of the [1926] general strike, ended with a whimper when he was caught leaking budget secrets to his wealthy golfing mates who speedily converted the information into a ripe profit on the stock exchange.The notorious Poulson scandal of the 1960s [a property developer who bribed politicians] engulfed whole Labour councils who were bewitched by the Methodist architect and his Methodist largesse. T. Dan Smith [leader of Newcastle upon Tyne City Council], a Labour hero of the early 1960s, felt it was time he turned his considerable talent into making money for himself and ended up in prison with Poulson.New Labour in the mid-1990s made a lot of political capital out of “sleaze”, a new word coined to describe the rather minor Tory Party corruption of that period. Yet when Labour ministers took office in 1997, and flung themselves headlong at the feet of the rich, they felt, like Dan Smith, that their time had come. Very soon their dependence on consultants and lobbyists from industry and finance landed the new government in further heaps of sleaze, as we have seen.Another example was when the great sleaze slagheap of Enron finally collapsed in bankruptcy in 2000. Labour ministers scurried to cover the tracks of Enron’s consultants at Labour Party dinners and the close contacts the Labour leaders had established with Enron’s corrupt accountants.Corruption is a natural ally of capitalism, and British Labour, as it made peace with capitalism, increasingly fell victim to corruption. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The BudgetNot very taxing on the bosses(May 2002)From News Review, Socialist Review, No.263, May 2002, p.7-8.Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.A terrible squealing and squawking has been set up by the ruling class and their experts as they pretend to be ‘shocked’ by Gordon Brown’s Budget. Stephen Radley, chief economist at the Engineering Employers Federation, set the tone when he told the Financial Times on 19 April of ‘widespread anger’ among his members. ‘Some of them feel they have been shafted by the government,’ he whined. Ian Fletcher, head of policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, was equally furious. He complained that the rises in National Insurance contributions for the poor and the workers were to some extent ‘cushioned’ by tax credits for families with children, while tax cuts for ‘business’ had been ‘overshadowed by the scale of the tax rises’. On all sides comes the awful din of wealthy outrage that a Labour government has dared to tax the employers and the rich to pay, of all things, for something the employers and the rich don’t even use – the National Health Service!What is the truth behind the squealing? Well, this year (2002-03) the total extra charge in National Insurance and tax on the ruling class is nil. Tax relief for the rich and the employers (including fantastic handouts to big companies for their ‘research and development’) comes to nearly £500 million. Even next year (2003-04), when the full extent of Brown’s increases in National Insurance charges comes into effect, the cost to employers (£3.9 billion) will be heavily ‘cushioned’ by yet more tax relief for business and shareholdings amounting to £1.4 billion, and the year after that (2004-05) there is still £1 billion of tax relief for the rich and the employers. Some big companies, especially the big drug companies like GlaxoSmithKline, will actually benefit from the budget package.Even the experts hired to speak up for the rich know that public services have been so dreadfully run down by the Tory government and its New Labour successor that much more money needs to be raised in tax to keep them up to the miserable standard to which they have sunk. The question for socialists is not whether more money needs to be raised, but how.The obvious answer is that most of the money should be raised in income tax. The more people make, the more tax they should pay. But the chancellor and the prime minister made such an obvious remedy impossible when they recklessly included a pledge in the Labour manifesto not to increase income tax in the entire period of this parliament – all the way (at least) to 2005. That way they knocked out the fairest way of raising tax, and were forced back onto the alternative of increases in National Insurance.Unlike income tax, National Insurance contributions are not ‘progressive’. They do not do more damage to the rich than the poor. They are flat rate increases, payable by all workers. Pensioners, even billionaire pensioners, don’t pay a penny towards National Insurance. Income from rent and dividends does not count when National Insurance contributions are assessed. But the worst aspect of National Insurance contributions is that the mega-rich are actually excluded from paying them.While the poor under a certain level of poverty don’t pay income tax , the very rich over a certain level of wealth are ‘cut off’ from paying any more National Insurance contributions. Gordon Brown’s budget makes a pathetic attempt to cover up this grossly regressive aspect of National Insurance contributions by, for the first time, insisting that rich people who earn more than the ‘cut-off’ rate (£31,000 a year) now have to pay 1 percent of their earnings in National Insurance contributions. This has set off the predictable howl of indignation from the rich. But deep down the rich are thanking their lucky stars that the demon Brown has accepted the basic principle that the rich and very rich should be sheltered from National Insurance contributions.Their real feelings were revealed two days after the budget, and buried deep in a Financial Times supplement that only the very rich were expected to read. ‘Top rate earners’, revealed Financial Times writer Kate Burgess, ‘will breathe a sigh of relief. Many were expecting Brown to abolish the upper earnings limit and levy a flat rate of National Insurance contributions on all earnings above £4,615 at, say, 10 percent. That would have meant those earning, for example, £100,000 a year would have had to stump up an extra £7,000 a year.’ How terrible! The article went on, ‘If this limit had been abolished individuals might have had to pay 11 percent on all earnings. That would have hit wealthy consumers’ discretionary spending.’ I think she means luxury spending. In the same article Eleanor Dowling, senior tax consultant at something called Mercer Human Resources Consulting, makes the same point in a different way. ‘This is the first rise in direct taxes since Labour came to power,’ she says, ‘and it isn’t that onerous.’So the National Insurance rises are nothing like as bad as the rich feared or pretended. But that isn’t the only objection to Brown’s budget. He has bet everything on improving the National Health Service. Though education has been helped slightly, the other public services, most notably transport, have been left to rot. Everyone can rejoice at more money for the NHS, but there could have been much much more if it had been raised not by a payroll tax that falls on NHS workers as much as anyone else, but by income tax and especially by the long-forsaken supertax which would scoop more and more money from the burgeoning menagerie of fat cats."
} |
{
"content": "It is as though Blair and Brown decided they must raise much more money for the NHS, but resolved in the process not to do too much damage to their friends and benefactors among the very rich. From now on, moreover, they will be straining every muscle further to ingratiate themselves with the rich and to ‘mend the fences’ they never erected in the first place. Top of the pageLast updated on 18.1.2005"
} |
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootSaints and devils(February 1992)From Reviews, Socialist Review, No.150, February 1992. p.29.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The Russian Revolution 1899-1919Richard PipesCollins Harvill £20The Russian Revolution, Professor Pipes tells us in his very first sentence, was ‘arguably the most important event of the century’. He then spends 845 pages proving that it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, after that first flourish, he can hardly bring himself to call it a revolution at all. It was instead, he insists, a coup d’etat, led by a bunch of psychopaths and fanatics, whose consequence has brought nothing but pain and despair to the people of the world.‘The historian’s problem,’ the professor’s introduction goes on, ‘is that the Russian Revolution being part of our own time, is difficult to deal with dispassionately.’ He does not, however, err on the side of objectivity. On the subject of Russia, socialism and communism he has all the neutrality of a man who served as an adviser on Russia and Eastern Europe in the US President’s own National Security Council. As he freely admits, one of his contemporary heroes is the ultra right wing free enterprise fanatic Milton Friedman.Curiously for a man who makes his living and his reputation among intellectuals, Professor Pipes nurses a deep contempt for what he calls the ‘intelligentsia’. A good deal of the trouble in Russia which culminated in the revolution (whoops, sorry, coup d’etat), he argues, can be traced back to this intelligentsia which, he discloses, is a Russian word. The crux of his argument runs like this:‘A life ruled by reason is a life ruled by intellectuals: it is not surprising, therefore, that intellectuals want to change the world in accord with the requirement of “rationality”. A market economy, with its wasteful competition and swings between overproduction and shortage, is not “rational” and hence it does not find favour with intellectuals.’It is hard to understand why the professor puts the words rational and rationality in inverted commas. It is quite clear from his book that he is highly suspicious of people who argue by way of reason. He finds irrationality far more reliable. He is disgusted, for instance, by the ‘preoccupation ... with legislation as a device for human betterment’. That to him is silly liberal nonsense, which explains why liberals so often ‘throw their lot in with revolutionaries’. Thus his psychotic hatred for the Russian revolutionaries extends to pretty well everyone to the left of General Kornilov.The Russian Revolution was indeed arguably the most important event of the century – for one reason only: that for the first time since the French Revolution the working masses became active participants in their own political destiny. Professor Pipes duly devotes pretty well his entire book to proving that this was not the case.This requires a great deal of misquotation and misunderstanding. For instance, after quoting Lenin’s view that the working class will not spontaneously take the path to revolution, but will only do so if led by a revolutionary party. Pipes caricatures it as follows:‘Unless the workers were led by a socialist party external to it and independent of it, they would betray their class interests. Only non-workers – that is, the intelligentsia – knew what these interests were.’That is the precise opposite of Lenin’s view that only a party built as an integral part of the working class could possible ever lead it anywhere, let alone to revolution.Pipes crude error infects his whole book. One of the most extraordinary aspects of what happened in Russia in 1917 was the way in which the new Soviets switched their allegiance from Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to Bolsheviks during the summer and autumn. The shift was so dramatic that Professor Pipes cannot bring himself to publish the figures. He does disclose that in June, at the First Congress of Soviets, the Social Revolutionaries had 285 delegates, the Mensheviks 248 and the Bolsheviks a mere 105. He does not disclose that at the next Congress – in October – the Social Revolutionaries had 160 delegates, the Mensheviks 72 and the Bolsheviks 390. The Bolshevik Party, the nasty, fanatical caucus of Professor Pipes’s imagination, had become the majority party inside the working class. As such, it had fulfilled what for Lenin was an unalterable precondition for a working class revolution.Because he refuses to accept the deep penetration of revolutionary ideas and enthusiasms in the Russian working class at the time, Pipes cannot help us at all on how the revolution was sustained against all the odds. He allows into his record not a single word of the huge literature of enthusiasm about the revolution: the motor of its survival in its early years.Professor Pipes ignores Lenin’s central passion – his view that the exploited people of the world could run it better than their exploiters – and so he can conclude predictably that ‘Stalin’s course had been charted by Lenin’. The evidence is mostly the other way however. Lenin’s view, as Pipes concedes, was that ‘unless the revolution spread to other countries, it was doomed’. Stalin’s regime was based on pursuing ‘socialism in one country’, often to the point of destroying revolutionary movements in other countries.As the book bulldozes on, Pipes’s hatred for the Russian revolutionaries becomes more hysterical. At times he cannot contain his rage at their impertinence:‘That such rank amateurs would undertake to turn upside down the fifth-largest economy in the world, subjecting it to innovations never attempted anywhere even on a small scale, says something of the judgement of the people who in October 1917 seized power in Russia.’Pipes the professional on the other hand can write this: ‘One can credit the Bolsheviks with having invented terror.’The Bolsheviks invented terror! Pause for a moment’s reflection. Indeed, turn back to page 81 of Pipes’s own book where you can read this:‘In 1903, one third of the infantry and two-thirds of the cavalry stationed in European Russia engaged in repressive action.’"
} |
{
"content": "Some might conclude from that that the forces of the Tsar, not to mention the Black Hundreds of later years, were engaging in terror. They would be wrong, according to Professor Pipes, for terror was invented by the Bolsheviks.The blurb for the book makes the horrifying prediction that it will ‘stand as the definitive history’ of the Russian Revolution. Nothing could be less deserved. I still recall my fury thirty years ago when reading Bertram Wolfe’s exposé of the Stalin School for Rewriting History in his Three Who Made A Revolution. Here was Orwell’s Ministry of Truth writ large. There was, it seemed clear, no stronger argument against Stalin’s Russia than its invention of its own history.Professor Pipes’s book rewrites history the other way round. While Stalin lionised and mummified Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries. Pipes has turned them into devils. The result of both is that the Russian Revolution is either patronised or abused into something entirely unrecognisable from what it was. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004"
} |