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 At best he has been denounced as ‘out of date’.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

{ "content": "The period from 1849 to 1883 when he died was a period of low class struggle. The Chartists, who had brought the country to the brink of revolution, had been defeated and the working class movement was, for the moment, cowed. Marx’s tiny organisation, the Socialist League, split and split again. In the end, when there were really only two members left, Marx and Engels, Marx decided to concentrate on his journalism and on expanding the ideas that he and Engels had set out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In 20 years he wrote the three great theoretical works that set out his communist theory – the Critique of Political Economy, the Grundrisse and the greatest of them, Capital. There may be some of you, like me, who find these works difficult, and so they are. But Capital in particular is well worth persevering with. It is illustrated throughout with examples of human struggle, from the British workers fighting for the ten-hour day to black Americans fighting against slavery.Yet even when he was composing these huge works, even though all the time he was trying to fend off abject poverty and considerable pain from skin disease, again and again he involved himself in the working class struggles of the time. I pick out three examples. The First InternationalThe first was the formation of the First International – the International Working Men’s Association – in 1864. The idea for the International came from trade union leaders who were fed up with the constant importation of scab labour to break strikes and weaken trade unionism. The International needed a written introduction to set out its aims. None of the trade union leaders could write anything comprehensible. When the various factions from foreign countries had a go, they made an even greater mess of it. Marx was asked for help. He suggested a subcommittee of one, and elected himself to it. The resulting articles of the International, clear and concise, start with the ringing dedication that the self emancipation of the working class is ‘the act of the working class themselves’. The articles went on all the membership cards of the International.The second issue was universal male suffrage. This had been the demand of the Chartists, but since their defeat it had faded into the background. In 1866 a new organisation called the Reform League was formed to resurrect the demand. Marx organised a small group of socialists to try to take control of the Reform League and commit it to universal suffrage. He was so pleased with his efforts that he described the league as ‘all our work’. This claim was an example of another characteristic of Marx that often gets him criticised – his impatient optimism. He was inclined to put the best spin on any socialist initiative. The Reform League quickly deteriorated. It was not ‘all our work’ or anything like it. It attracted all sorts of reactionaries and compromisers who eventually won the day. Marx had got it wrong, but only in his intense enthusiasm to push the struggle forward – a sin, incidentally, that we ourselves commit more often than not, and are none the worse for.The final example of his involvement that I’ve picked out is undoubtedly the greatest.People sometimes ask me what work of Marx they should read first, and the obvious answer is the Communist Manifesto. Second to that in my opinion is a pamphlet he wrote in 1871 called The Civil War in France. This was about the Paris Commune, formed by the working people of Paris in revolutionary circumstances in March 1871. It lasted for two months until it was suppressed by murderous military terror of the most revolting proportions. Marx followed the commune through almost every hour of its existence, demanding from friends, family and acquaintances any fragment of information from Paris. When the commune was suppressed, he sat down, boiling with rage, and in five days wrote his pamphlet which he read out loud to the council of the International. As a description of the commune, it has never been bettered before or since. It sets out, above all, the democratic nature of the commune; how it not only made laws but carried them out, how it replaced the machinery of the capitalist state with an entirely new democracy that could never be tolerated by capitalism and its armies, and, incidentally, has nothing whatever to do with the societies presided over by Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. The Civil War in France magnificently combines Marx’s terse journalism and his fighting spirit:‘When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural superiors”, and under circumstances of unexampled difficulty performed their work modestly, conscientiously and efficiently – performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one fifth of what, according to high scientific authority, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school board – the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over the Hotel de Ville.’" }

{ "content": "That passage (and indeed the whole pamphlet) takes us closer to the reason why Marx has been hated and calumnied for so long. It is not his ideas alone which important people detest – it is the drive to put them into practice. It is not simply that his ideas have not lost their relevance over all this time – there is still a class society after all, that is every bit as foully exploitative as it ever was – it is the fact that there are people inspired by Marx who still want to change the world in the direction to which he pointed. So people are still ridiculed and abused by the professors of the profiteers because we want to fight, as he did, to rid the world of riches altogether and to get rid of poverty at the same time. Such people, such Marxists, are prepared moreover to organise to do so. This is an edited version of a talk given at a Karl Marx day school on 10 January 2004, held to mark the republication of Alex Callinicos’s The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootWhy Labour lost(May 1992)From Socialist Review, No.153, May 1992, pp-9-11.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Last month’s Tory election victory marked a further sharp defeat for Labour. Now, argues Paul Foot, we have to look beyond electoral politics to the prospects for real change in society.After the gloom, the reckoning. Just how many sacrifices have been made for this miserable election result? When the votes for Mid-Staffs came in at about 3 a.m., I noticed that Sylvia Heal had lost the seat for Labour. She had triumphed there only two years earlier in one of die most amazing by-elections this century. A safe Tory seat seemed to have been turned into a safe Labour one. Sylvia’s triumph then seemed to vindicate her remarkable speech at the 1988 Labour Party conference in which she confessed that she was dropping her lifelong commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.The reason, she explained, was simple. Someone had calculated that Labour could not win with a policy of unilateral disarmament, which apparently lost it the elections of 1983 and 1987. Drop the commitment, then, she argued, and the chances of a Labour government would immeasurably increase. Thus Labour was left with a policy of support for nuclear weapons at precisely the time when the ‘enemy’ whom those nuclear weapons were meant to deter had disappeared.Lots of other radical policies were chucked into the bin on the same basis. Commitments to get rid of most of the Tory trade union laws were watered down. So were the promises to take back into public ownership all those utilities and public services which the Tories had privatised. In a Gadarene stampede to appease floating voters in the middle of the road, anything which smacked of socialist anger against the Stock Exchange or any other citadel of modern capitalism was wiped out of Labour’s language.Bryan Gould declared in 1987 how he loved to see workers buying and selling shares. John Smith. Margaret Beckett and Co entered a long dialogue with charming hosts in the City of London, in a ceaseless effort to persuade them that Labour’s policies were good for business. In one sense, they succeeded. On polling day the Financial Times agreed with Labour that its readers agreed can be measured by the fantastic celebrations which went on throughout election night and the whole of the following day across die length and breadth of the Ciry of London.We lost socialist policies by the score. We also lost countless opportunities to organise and fight even for the policies which were left. The miners’ great struggle in 1984-5 was left high and dry by the Labour and trade union leaders. Why? Because, it was argued, ‘this was not the way to get Labour returned.’ Exactly the same argument was used when hospital workers exploded in rage in early 1988, or when the ambulance workers went on strike soon afterwards, or indeed in every dispute since the last general election. ‘Don’t rock the boat’, was the cry. ‘Labour will make things better for everyone.’ How does that argument look now? We went to bed in those early hours of 10 April reflecting that the boat had hardly been rocked at all. There’d been hardly a strike or a major demonstration for more than a year. Yet the unrocked boat was lying in ruins at the bottom of the sea.Some have taken comfort from Labour’s 40 gains, and pretended that the new Tory government, with a much smaller majority than its predecessor, will be comparatively tame. Nothing could be more ridiculous. Major and Co never expected anything like the luxury of an overall majority of 21. Their supporters among the wealthy are beside themselves with joy. They are confident they can hang on to the enormous gains made under Thatcher, the booming private hospitals and private schools, the whole disgusting paraphernalia of a greedy and confident ruling class.For all his tinny rhetoric about ‘a nation at ease with itself’ Major’s new cabinet shows exactly where he is going. Peter Lilley, a man who has devoted his whole life to picking the pockets of the poor and the disadvantaged, is in charge of social security. Poll Tax Portillo, who hates all government spending, is Chief Secretary at the Treasury in charge of public spending. The only Orangeman to sit for an English seat in the House of Commons is the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and the new Solicitor General is a neanderthal from Brighton who can’t contain his enthusiasm for the hangman’s rope. These men are completely at case with themselves about another five years of squeezing still more wealth from the working people and passing it across to their friends and paymasters.What is to be done? At once, in the wake of defeat, a great howl of misery goes up on all sides of the official left. The argument is that, because all this surrender has achieved precisely nothing, we should surrender more. Trade unions (who were completely silent through the entire election campaign) are told that they are to blame and that they must cut links with the Labour Party. The very name ‘Labour’, apparently, is a hindrance. The Liberal Party, a deeply right wing organisation which fought more than half its campaign against Labour’s central proposals for taxing the rich and restoring some freedom to trade unions, is named as the saviour of the future." }

{ "content": "Like a Greek Chorus renting their clothes, the psephologists and former Social Democrats, the New Statesman and the Guardian, almost anyone who can be found who was once a member of the Communist Party, shout for constitutional reform, electoral reform, Lib-Lab election pacts, and, if such a person can possibly be found, an even more right wing leader for the Labour Party than Neil Kinnock. Forget for a moment that none of these things (except a new leader who is being catapulted into office before anyone can catch their breath) can be achieved while the Tories have a majority in parliament. The point about all of them is that they seek to shift Labour still further down the road which has taken it so inexorably to its fourth defeat in a row.There is another common feature to all these demands – passivity. People are told that the priority is to change the voting system or to rely on backroom deals between the leaders of the trade unions, the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. No one outside these backrooms, the argument concludes, can do anything much except, as before, wait and see how well their leaders perform. The prospect held out by all these ‘new realist’ reformers is one of utter despondency, amounting to total surrender to the Tories.It is time to restate a few simple facts about the world we live in. Its fundamental characteristic is that it is divided by class. The means whereby the people at the top of society grow rich and powerful by exploiting the majority is much more obvious now than it was a decade ago. The contradictions and horrors of such a society – unemployment, mass starvation, disease for thousands of millions of people while a small group wallow in unimaginable luxury – are more striking and more devastating. The cry for change is as loud and anguished as it has ever been.So where does change come from? The central point about a society dominated by the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited is that it relies for its success on passivity from below. The engine of change is the activity and confidence of the people who are being exploited, most effectively where they are exploited directly, at the point of production. These sound like slogans. But they explain the changes which have taken place in modern Britain.Looking back over the last quarter of a century I pick out three decisive changes to the left which profoundly improved the living standards of working people and decisively changed the balance of confidence in the struggle between the classes. The first was in 1969, when the Labour government proposed drastic new laws to control the trade unions. A few months later the proposals were withdrawn – not because the government had changed its mind or because civil servants at the Department of Employment were suddenly sympathetic to trade unions – but because of a short sharp campaign in the trade union movement which included unofficial strikes.Much more remarkable was the change which came over the Tory government in 1972. At the beginning of that year it looked rather like the Tory government now: confident, aggressive, privatising, anti-union and anti-poor. At the end of the year it was pumping public money into industry and building up the public services more energetically than any government before or since. Its whole strategy and philosophy had changed. There had been no general election, no constitutional reform, no Lib-Lab pacts, pretty well no change in parliament at all. But there had been a victorious miners’ strike, a building workers’ strike, a hospital workers’ strike, a dockers’ strike and even a threatened general strike which not only smashed the Tories’ anti-union laws but also changed the whole face of politics.Thirdly, in 1987 the Tories were re-elected on a manifesto based on their ‘flagship’ – the poll tax. Four years later the same government, which made no new pacts and still had a parliamentary majority of nearly 100, withdrew the poll tax. Had they been terrified by the parliamentary opposition? Not at all – they were contemptuous of it. What changed their minds and abolished the poll tax was a mass campaign of civil disobedience, whose climax was probably the biggest demonstration since the war, which turned into a full scale riot. These huge political shifts in our direction were all set in motion from below. They were almost unaffected by what was going on in parliament, or even by which government was in office. The pace of events was determined by the ebb and flow of the struggle between the classes – when they win, we lose, and vice versa.The same test – who is winning between the classes – can be applied to elections. Elections are the most passive of all political activities, but they do concentrate people’s minds on politics. A common cliché from pundits and pollsters after the election was that Labour should have won because Britain was in recession. In fact, Labour has never won an election in a recession. Even in 1929, when Labour was elected as the largest party, the real depth of recession did not come for two years (and parliamentary Labour was reduced to a rump). The big Labour victories of 1945 and 1966 were won when the unions were strong, when nobody was out of work and when the workers were full of confidence and hope. The same point comes from a comparison of the recent election with that of February 1974. In 1974 a Tory government seeking re-election was buoyed throughout the campaign by polls which gave it big leads. Then, as the crunch came, floating voters were suddenly worried that a Tory government would lead to instability and chaos. So the Tories lost the election. In 1992 the polls showed people veering to Labour. But when it came to the crunch, the floaters shied away. This time it was Labour which seemed to hold out the prospect of chaos." }

{ "content": "What was the real difference? In 1974 the miners were on strike, less than a million people were out of work, and the unions still felt strong and confident from their victories in 1972. In 1992 no one was on strike, nor had been for years. The balance of class confidence favoured Labour in 1974 and the Tories in 1992.Marx argued that the prevailing ideas will always be those of the ruling class. Labour has to challenge these ideas to win elections, and is far more likely to do so when its supporters are strong, confident, acting together, than weak, uncertain, fragmented and left to think things out on their own, at the mercy of these prevailing ideas.But this is not a hard and fast rule, an ‘objective circumstance’ which condemns us to Tory victories whenever they can engineer a recession. People make their own history, and their anger and discontent can be reflected in elections. However, especially in times of recession, that anger needs to be awakened, prodded, inflamed in ceaseless agitation. After the election, though not before it, the former heroes of the SDP (RIP) Peter Jenkins (Independent) and Malcolm Dean (Guardian) suddenly discovered that Labour was ‘unelectable.’ There was not a word of this before polling day when all the signs pointed in the opposite direction. Opinion polls are not conspiracies. They are measurements. The near unanimity of all the polls before the election that Labour was in the lead, often handsomely, was probably accurate. The tide of hatred against the government was so strong that it looked as though it would carry the floaters with it.The crucial task for Labour was to sustain the anger against the government until the last moment. Class anger had played a large part in the early stages of the campaign. Even John Smith, one of the least angry men ever to grace a front bench, introduced his alternative budget with the claim that the ‘1 percent at the top has had its way for 12 years – now it’s the turn of the rest of us.’ The broadcast about Jennifer’s ear operation struck a chord of rage. This was not just moaning about a bad health service. It was comparing the bad (for the poor and the workers) with the good (for those who can pay). There wasn’t a street in the land where some such story had not been told, and people were indignant about it. Kinnock’s speech at Sheffield comparing Major’s soapbox with the cardboard boxes of the homeless touched an angry nerve.But then suddenly the campaign faltered. The second NHS broadcast was cancelled. Suddenly the talk was not of private health care and snob schools, but of consensual and responsible government. Major clung onto his soapbox, but Kinnock was always in limousines, or on battleships releasing balloons. Edwina Currie said that Kinnock looked more like a prime minister than Major, and that was suddenly a problem. The Tories organised their fear and hate campaign to coincide with polling day. On the eve of poll the Sun had nine pages on ‘The Nightmare on Kinnock Street.’ The City staged a run on the pound and announced that Labour would bring higher interest rates. The Labour leaders, as though worn down by endless City lunches, did not respond. There was no attack on the undemocratic power of financial barons seeking to influence the election.Labour was not unelectable. The results themselves prove it. It required only two or three extra people in every hundred to vote Labour (as they were probably intending to do until the last moment) for the Tories to have been kicked out. It was these vital floaters who, at the last moment, as the Tories pounced and Labour dithered, swung round from their anger to their fear.Like all the guesses about why the election was lost, this may just be speculation. What is not speculation is that the Labour leadership now has absolutely nothing to offer us. Before we have time to catch our breath, the Tory government will be on the attack again, hacking away at the schools and hospitals they promised were safe, raising the taxes they promised to cut. Labour can do nothing to stop them. Schools, hospitals and jobs can only be protected by action outside parliament, by demonstrations, petitions and strikes. All these will be a thousand times more successful if they are sustained and led by socialists, people who make no concessions to capitalist society because they want to replace it, root and branch, with an entirely different society: a socialist society which can plan its production to fit people’s needs, and distribute its wealth on the principle that human beings, whatever their different abilities, have the same right to benefit from what is commonly produced.Tens of thousands of socialists have held their breath and bitten their lips rather than speak out in protest as the Labour leaders continued on their promised march to parliamentary power. After Black Friday, 10 April, every one of them is disappointed and indignant. Their disappointment is useless. But their indignation can still stop the Tories – if it is channelled into real resistance, and into a socialist organisation which bases itself on that resistance, and can therefore hold out the prospect of real change. Top of the pageLast updated on 17.1.2005" }

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

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

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootThe Old Firm(July 1972)From Reviews, International Socialism (1st series), No.52, July-September 1972, pp.41-2.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Competition and the Corporate Society. British Conservatives, the State and Industry: 1945-1964by Nigel HarrisMethuen, £3.75On the day this review is written (May 18) the front page of the Times reports ‘deep restiveness here and there inside the Cabinet and on the Conservative back benches about the Government’s volte face on industrial intervention policies.’ According to the report, the estate agents, stockbrokers, supermarket proprietors and used car salesmen on the Tory back benches are not a little perplexed about the Government’s Industry Bill, which contemplates even wider state powers over and subsidies for private industry than even the previous Labour Government had contemplated. Questions are being asked, in the polite way in which these things are done on Tory back bench committees, about the total somersault which the Government has turned on almost all its economic policies.Quotations from leading Tories in the run-up to the last general election about ‘the efficiency of private enterprise’ about ‘standing on your own two feet’, about ‘disengagement from the State’ are nostalgically recited at meetings of the 1922 Committee. The Upper Clyde Shipyards, the Government is reminded, was to be dosed because the Government would not pay an estimated £6m to keep it solvent, but a few months later the same Government shelled out £35m in state aid to the same firm. Harland and Wolff in Belfast have been paid by the Tory Government in state aid some four times what the whole company is worth at current stock exchange prices. Sir Keith Joseph, chief shouter of pre-election ‘abrasive’, neo-Liberal slogans, has been kept well away from industry, and Mr Nicholas Ridley, one of the few Government Ministers who tried to practise what he preached, has been unceremoniously sacked.No sooner are ‘abrasive Bills’ passed than the Government must try to retreat from them. In the week that the Industrial Relations Court looked like sending a Hull dockers’ leader to jail. Heath, the CBI and the TUC talk about ‘new conciliation procedures’. At the eleventh hour of the Housing Finance Bill, the Government watered down its most penal provision. Even the Government’s original determination to come to terms at any price with white racist Rhodesia seems to be wavering.Back-bench Tories need principles to sustain them through the long Parliamentary winters. It is difficult to believe in profits and minority wealth, and the importance of both has to be explained in terms of principle. Chopping and changing from neo-Liberalism’ to ‘corporatism’ can, argue the backwoodsmen, do the Party and the class nothing but harm.In fact, as Nigel Harris argues in this fine book, the party has survived and expanded because it has changed tack and emphasis to suit the changing needs of national capitalism. Disraeli’s strength was that he heaved the party into line with the demands of the new industrial bourgeoisie; Baldwin’s that he convinced the Tories of the 1930s that they had always been protectionists; Macmillan’s that he isolated his Suez backwoodsmen, avoided confrontation with the trade unions, instituted ‘planning’, and steered a wayward course to the corporate state.There is no symmetry, no logic, no pattern to the capitalist system. Its logicians and its prophets are almost always wrong. ‘It is a contradiction in terms’ said Enoch Powell, prophet backbencher in 1955, (not to be confused with Enoch Powell, realist Minister 1960-1963) ‘to say that the railways cannot pay in an economy which is paying. It is a contradiction in terms to say that we can produce a profit, that we can export at a profit, but that we cannot, at a profit, transport the factors of production or the finished goods.’Seventeen years previously, Harold Macmillan, who was better at Greek than Enoch Powell, but better also at preserving the interests of his class, had written in The Middle Way:‘The coal industry ought now to be absorbed into the sphere of socialised concerns conducted in the light of wider national considerations-not making its first objective the securing of a profit on its own operations but seeking to serve other industries and assist them to become profitable.’Macmillan saw what Powell, except in his brief period of high office, has never seen: that the only law of any importance in capitalism is the law of class preservation. The delicate private enterprise mechanism imagined by Powell (and, in less intelligible terms, by Winston Churchill), are fine for opposition or for the hustings, but useless for Tories in power. The best statement ever on Tory attitudes towards the State was made by Major Gwillim Lloyd George in 1946.‘My idea is that when things are not going so well, the State should come in, but when things are going well, the State should keep out. In other words, it is a policy determined by the state of trade in the country.’Who better to tell the Tories whether ‘things’ were going well or not than Paul Chambers when he was chairman of ICI? In 1958, when ‘things’ were going well and a pre-election boom was in the offing, Sir Paul wrote a pamphlet for the Conservative Party attacking the Government’s controls over business, which, he wrote, ‘are inconsistent with a free society’. ‘There are many ways in which the spirit of enterprise can be killed’, he went on, ‘One is the continuation of controls by a Conservative Government.’Four years later, after the Selwyn Lloyd pay pause, when ‘things’ were going badly, Sir Paul told a lunch for the American Chamber of Commerce that legislation against concentration of economic power was out of date. What was needed, he said, was ‘industrial planning to eliminate surplus capacity.’This class pragmatism determined the Conservatives’ approach to their greatest permanent problem: organised labour. Here is Iain Macleod, then Minister of Labour, speaking to Tory backwoodsmen at the 1956 Party Conference who were demanding a compulsory ballot before a national strike:" }

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

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootHarold Wilson and the Labour Left(Summer 1968)FFrom International Socialism (1st series), No. 33, Summer 1968, pp.&nbsdp;18–26.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Bevanite fury at the Rightward drift of official Party policy after the 1955 election did not last. The Suez crisis of late 1956 and the economic recession which followed exposed the fallibility of Tory economic policy and forged the Labour Party into a new unity. Even Aneurin Bevan agreed to co-operate with a leadership with which he fundamentally disagreed. Bevan’s public disavowal of the ‘unilateralists’ at the Brighton Conference of 1957 and his acceptance of the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary encouraged his followers grudgingly to fall into line with Party policy for the 1959 election. At the Scarborough Conference of 1958, controversy was sacrificed to unity. Only the public schools provoked a genuine revolt against the leadership. ‘Unilateralist’ motions on defence were defeated by votes of 6 to 1 and the Executive statement on economic policy, Plan for Progress, moved by Wilson, summed up by Gaitskell and supported by Frank Cousins was carried unanimously. It was only after the election had been lost that the Left wing re-grouped and fought again.By now, Aneurin Bevan was dying and it was by no means certain who should take his place as the Left’s candidate for the Party leadership. Harold Wilson was still an enigma. His association with Bevan in the early 1950s had not been forgotten and most of the Left-wing still regarded him as their man in the Shadow Cabinet. Others remembered his sponsorship of Industry and Society and his tacit support for the Executive on nuclear weapons. In 1958, Wilson came fourth in the elections for the constituency section of the Executive – the lowest place he had occupied since 1955.His decision to stand against Gaitskell for the leadership in 1960, and against Brown for the deputy leadership in 1962 rallied the Left to him. He received the declared support of all Parliamentary Left-wingers and from Tribune, around which the Parliamentary Left rallied. Other journals of the Labour Left, however, were not so enthusiastic. The New Left Review, for instance, whose circulation had risen sharply with the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament attacked him sharply: ‘If the Labour Party ends this week facing two directions’ it declared before the 1960 Party Conference, ‘it is certain that the figure of Mr Wilson will be there – at the end of both of them.’On Gaitskell’s death in 1963, the Left rallied without hesitation to Wilson’s candidature for the leadership. After his election as leader, they abandoned their accustomed role as critics of the leadership, and became instead its most enthusiastic supporters. Michael Foot, who, with four other MPs, had had the Labour Whip withdrawn for opposing the Tory defence estimates in 1961, wrote a long article on Tribune’s front page, listing Wilson’s qualifications for the job:‘... (He has) not only qualities of political acumen, political skill and survival power which no one denies him. Other considerable qualities too for a Labour leader – a coherence of ideas, a readiness to follow unorthodox courses, a respect for democracy ... above all a deep and genuine love of the Labour movement.‘We are told he is tricky, untrustworthy, an addict of political in-fighting. Of course he is canny, ambitious, often cautious, always cool, usually calculating. And why not? They say that he does not make up his mind, that he sits on the fence. It was not true when he resigned in 1951. It was not true when he opposed German re-armament.’ [1]Walter Padley, the ‘centre-Left’ general secretary of the shopworkers’ union (USDAW), and MP for Glamorganshire, Ogmore, told his union conference: ‘In Harold Wilson we have a leader fully worthy of the tradition of Clem Attlee and Keir Hardie.’ This sentiment commended itself to Frank Allaun, a hardy warrior of the Left, who wrote an article for the Labour Press Service which was circulated to all trade-union journals. ‘Harold Wilson,’ the article started in what was intended to be a compliment, ‘is the best Labour leader since Keir Hardie.’ Shortly before the Scarborough Conference of 1963, Frank Cousins called a Press Conference to assure the nation that any suggestion of a quarrel between himself and Wilson was totally unfounded. ‘There is’ he said ‘no difference, nor can anyone manufacture a difference between us.’ The New Statesman, which had assaulted Gaitskell in the most decisive language during the 1960 controversies, stated in their leader of 10 March 1964:‘Mr Wilson has set his party a fine example. Like Gladstone he believes in appealing to the highest instincts of the public, and his speeches have a cogency and authority unrivalled in recent years.’Even James Cameron, the idealist journalist, who had bitterly opposed the Gaitskell leadership, exclaimed in the Daily Herald after Wilson’s speech at the 1963 Scarborough Conference:‘Harold Wilson will not be just a good Prime Minister. He will be a great one... Harold Wilson’s startling essay into political science-fiction may well be held by experts to be the most vital speech he has ever made. Here at least was the 20th century.’ [2]In the following months Tribune confined itself to praising Wilson and publishing his speeches. Anxiously it assured its readers that despite outward appearances, Wilson’s intentions were all for the good:‘Mr Harold Wilson’s remarks to the T&GWU conference have been widely misinterpreted. He did not, as the Daily Worker headline suggested, advocate a wage freeze. “When we say incomes” he said “we mean all incomes – not only wages and salaries but profits, especially monopoly profits, distributed dividends and, yes, rents.”’ [3]And Mr Clive Jenkins, militant general secretary of ASSET, wrote after the 1963 Trades Union Congress: ‘Mr Harold Wilson is opposed to wage restraint.’ After the 1963 Labour Conference, Jenkins complained‘A circumstantial story that a Wilson Cabinet will hold back wages for the first 18 months of his Government is, incredibly, being peddled. It is a lie. The Scarborough decision is a real gain over the re-drafted paragraph on wages finally approved by the TUC.’ [4]" }

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

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

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

{ "content": "In his Sunday Times article, in fact, John Morgan argued that the pound should have been devalued in 1964. Along with many others on the Left and Right who argued along the same lines, Morgan had advanced no such argument hi 1964. Tribune opposed devaluation in 1964, 1965 and in July 1966; only in 1967 did the majority of the paper’s economic correspondents support a floating rate for the pound. And even then the Labour Left argued, quite dishonestly, that devaluation need not involve deflation. [19]The July measures of 1966 forced the hard core Labour Left into almost permanent opposition to their Government. The Prices and Incomes Act (on which some 30 Labour MPs abstained in August and October), the Vietnam war, the Common Market (for entry to which the Government applied in November), rising unemployment and a continuing squeeze on the social services all provoked more and more protest. Fortunately for the Left-wing MPs, the policy of the Whips, laid down by Richard Grossman and John Silkin, was to run the Parliamentary party on a light reign, and abstentions were permitted against angry protests from the more ‘loyalist’ backbenchers and from the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Emmanuel Shinwell, who eventually resigned. All the Left assumed that Harold Wilson strongly approved this ‘liberal’ policy. In May 1966, for instance, Hugh Jenkins, the MP for Putney, had argued:‘Years of hostility and repression have bred in the old Parliamentarians (who are still the most courageous and resolute of the lot of us) conspiratorial habits which are no longer necessary under the tolerant regime of Harold Wilson.’ [20]Yet in March 1967, after 60 MPs had abstained after the defence debate, in protest against the refusal to make further defence cuts, Wilson rounded on the Left at a Parliamentary Party meeting, warning them that ‘a dog is only allowed one bite’ and threatening them with a General Election unless they came to heel. Though the discipline issue faded for several months after this outburst, it arose even more seriously in early 1968 as the hard core of the Parliamentary Left voted against every one of the Government proposals for cuts in social services announced in January, and against the Immigration Act, 1968. Once again, the Parliamentary Party, with Wilson’s approval, turned the discipline screw.Yet throughout the entire period of disillusionment and near-despair, there was one threat which never failed to ensure the loyalty of the Labour Left: a threat to the personal leadership of Harold Wilson. In the aftermath of the 1966 July deflation, a rumour gained ground in Labour circles, which was substantially true, that a meeting of back-benchers and some Ministers had been held to discuss the possibility and the means of replacing Harold Wilson with James Callaghan. As soon as Tribune caught hold of this rumour, it exploded with rage.Similarly, after the 1967 devaluation, during the controversy on arms for South Africa, when a bid was made to replace Wilson with Callaghan, the Left rallied to Wilson. Three months later, when further moves were made to promote Roy Jenkins or Anthony Crosland to the Treasury, a group of 91 MPs wrote a letter to The Times.The letter was headed ‘Comfort for Mr Wilson’ and it took issue with The Times political correspondent, David Wood, who had reported the previous day that ‘his (Wilson’s) own rank and file have no confidence in him.’‘We do not know,’ ran the letter, ‘how Mr Wood came to this conclusion, but it certainly was not in speaking to any of the undersigned, proof enough that his sweeping generalisation has no basis in fact.’ [21]The signatures had, reported the letter, been ‘gathered in a very short time,’ and they included familiar loyalists and former ‘young eagles.’ Yet they also included such bastions of the Parliamentary Labour Left as Russell Kerr, John Mendel-son, James Dickens, Eric Heffer, Peter Jackson, Norman Atkinson, Michael Foot, Andrew Faulds, and Ben Whitaker. The official argument for the letter was that the Left’s quarrel with the Government was about policies, not personalities, and that any attempt to introduce personalities into the argument should be immediately scotched.The Left however had not scrupled in the past to attack personalities responsible for reactionary policies, and to call for their removal if only as a gesture of disapproval of those policies. In 1959 and 1960, Tribune and its followers had consistently attacked Gaitskell and had called again and again for his removal from the leadership. Again, on 6 January 1967 Tribune had demanded, in a front page headline: ‘CALLAGHAN MUST GO!’ and had claimed that although the removal of the Chancellor would not of itself right the wrongs of his policies, it was necessary as an indication that policy changes were intended.The obsession of political correspondents with personalities is infuriating for all politicians who seek to discuss the policy issues. Yet the MPs’ letters to The Times of 12 March 1968, did not diminish the personality aspect; it increased it. If the Left-wing MPs who signed the letter had genuinely not cared about personalities, they would have written to The Times not to declare their confidence in their leader but to disavow all interest in the leadership issue. The truth was, as it had been for several years, that, deep down, the Labour Left felt that Harold Wilson was ‘one of them.’ This myth had outlived the apparently endless list of anti-socialist measures enacted by Harold Wilson’s administration." }

{ "content": "Old ghosts still jibbered in the theoretical graveyard. ‘Gaitskellism,’ wrote Michael Foot in March 1967, ‘like Stalinism, cannot easily be restored.’ Yet what, in the reality of March 1967, did Gaitskellism mean? What further horrors could it wreak? Would Gaitskell, perhaps, have introduced a wage freeze for a year or permanently brought wage negotiations under the control of the law courts? Would he have imposed prescription charges, postponed raising the school leaving age, cancelled free school milk in secondary schools? Would he have based his industrial policy on mergers and monopolies supported by Government finance and Government orders? Would he have supported the Vietnam war? No doubt, Gaitskell would have pursued all these courses, as would Callaghan, Jenkins or Crosland. But Wilson had done all these things – and more. Where was the evidence – save only in the quarrel on South African arms – that ‘the Gaitskellites’ would have proved better Tories than Harold Wilson? Essentially, their policies would have been the same. The direction of the Labour Government, under Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Jenkins or Crosland or any of the other alternatives would have been equally disastrous. The leadership issue, in short, compared with the political issues in which the Government was involved was almost if not completely irrelevant.The tenacious hold which Harold Wilson exercised on his former friends and supporters in the Left had a deeper, more political root than the fear of a mythical Gaitskellism. The reaction of Tribune and the Parliamentary Left to Wilson’s Government was based throughout on the political theory of another era. Where the Government took action which offended against the old traditions and the old theory of the Labour Left, the Left responded immediately and courageously with clear and untrammeled opposition. The reaction to the seaman’s strike of 1966 in Tribune was unconditional ‘SUPPORT THE SEAMEN!’ When unemployment was created, the Government was sharply censured. When the health charges were reimposed, Tribune shouted ‘THE SHAME OF IT ALL!’ Certainly no one could blame the Labour Left for a lack of resolution, courage and determination in their efforts to swing the Government away from these old evils. Yet at the same time, the Wilson Government was pursuing policies of a more subtle and sinister nature which seem to have escaped the attention and the criticism of the Labour Left.These policies can be listed under the heading of Corporatism. The encouragement of vast mergers and monopolies under the aegis of the Government-financed Industrial Reorganisation Corporation; the complex planning machinery of the little Neddies and of the geographic planning councils; the incorporation of the trade-union leadership into the network of planning on the bogus pretext of ‘Incomes Policy;’ the interference of the State with almost every major wage dispute through the Prices and Incomes Board – these new, drastically dangerous corporatist developments were not identified by the Labour Left – and therefore not opposed. When Alan Dawe had resigned from the Labour Party in 1965 he had complained in Tribune about that paper’s obsession with State ownership and State control:‘There is nothing socialist about the commanding heights now. For this Government is trying to create a power elite, more cohesive and omnipotent than any we have seen in recent British history ... this is the ultimate significance of the attempt to forge a consensus of opinion and action between the leaders of Government, industry and the unions ...’Yet the Left around Tribune overlooked this problem. They rejoiced when, in the autumn of 1967, the Queen’s Speech included references to an Industrial Expansion Bill, whereby the State would take minority shareholdings in crucial industries and appoint minority directors to the Boards .The measure was marginally less drastic than the proposals in Industry and Society which the Left had so violently opposed ten years previously. Nevertheless, at the suggestion that the Industrial Expansion Bill should be dropped or postponed, Tribune frothed with fury. Harold Wilson’s knowledge of ‘public ownership’ rhetoric, gleaned with such care during his period as a Bevanite, served him in good stead as Prime Minister, and continued to bamboozle many of his former Left-wing colleagues into the belief that the vast, undemocratic corporatist machinery which he was setting up was in some sense a move towards socialism. In fact, of course, the ‘planning’ of Selwyn Lloyd and Maudling was taken over and speeded up by Harold Wilson – even to the extent of nationalising the steel industry and appointing the steel bosses to run a new, dynamic, streamlined single unit called the National Steel Corporation. The Government’s decision to include provisions in the steel legislation for the election of trade unionists and rank-and-file workers to the local steel boards was hailed by the Labour Left as a victory. [22] In fact, it was nothing of the kind. As became clear at once, the ‘concession’ served merely to incorporate some of the more politically conscious workers into the labyrinthine apparatus of the Corporation machine. The steel corporation rapidly became the most transparently corporatist, or State capitalist industrial unit in the country." }

{ "content": "The grand illusions which, both before and after 1964, rallied the Labour Left to the Wilsonian recipes of State ownership and automation were not entirely due to the skill of the illusionist. Rhetorical sleight-of-hand, however brilliant, could never of its own have brought about so great a conversion. The truth was that Harold Wilson’s pragmatism burst on the Labour movement at a moment of theoretical impasse. The violent changes in capitalism, in the relationship between the State and private industry, had thrown the Labour Movement into theoretical disarray. The Labour Right had responded by abandoning ‘the means’ of public ownership and fixing their sights on a more humane capitalism, prodded and pushed by a Labour Government. The Left, in fury, responded by re-stating ‘the end’ – socialism – while becoming increasingly vague as to what it meant, and increasingly unable, therefore, to propose any comprehensible means. The argument, symbolised by two 1960 Fabian pamphlets, Socialism in the Affluent Society, by Richard Crossman, and Can Labour Win? by Anthony Crosland, dragged on for several years, with both sides hopelessly missing the mark. In the event, both sides were exhausted by irrelevance, and Harold Wilson’s ‘dynamic,’ essentially capitalist terminology filled the vacuum. [23]The new corporatism which Wilson had consistently proclaimed for so many years led to a development which was even more significant for the Labour Left: a decline in the power and importance of Parliament. Classical capitalism of the Adam Smith variety, with its warring factions and devotion to competition between individual firms, allowed considerable scope for debate, discussion and even power in Parliament. Similarly in the early days of universal suffrage, and, particularly in the post-1945 era when private, pre-war capitalism was in jeopardy, the power of Parliament was, relatively, considerable. With the closing of the capitalist ranks in national, corporate monopoly, and, more importantly, with the increasing power and confidence of the monopolies, the power of Parliament declined. The big decisions left to Government became increasingly secret, increasingly the preserve of the Executive which did not always mean the Cabinet. The big decisions were taken by Cabinet committees, sometimes even by individuals, and, even then, many of these decisions depended on expert advice from the men who wielded economic power. The decision to devalue the pound in 1949 was taken by four or five men, and the Cabinet were not told until six weeks after the decision had been taken. The choice open to Cabinet members at that stage was to accept a fait accompli or to resign. Similarly, in 1967, the devaluation decision was taken several weeks before the Cabinet knew anything about it. In 1965, the National Plan, which was intended to shape the nation’s economic future for five years, was released in the Parliamentary recess, without recourse to Parliament or even to the Parliamentary Labour Party (still less to the Labour Conference). These were all decisions which were still formally the province of Parliament. In the meantime, the big decisions in the nation’s economic and industrial life moved away even from the Executive. The almost laughable antics of the Monopolies Commission indicated, if proof were needed, the full extent of the impotence of Parliament over the nation’s industrial affairs. The more the mergers, the bigger the monopolies, the greater the power of industrial and economic bureaucracies. The absorption of trade-union leaders and the official trade-union machinery into these bureaucracies shifted the centres of resistance into small pockets of revolt: into isolated unofficial strikes, tenants’ committees, students’ demonstrations. Even inside the Party, however, the real shift to the Left was to be seen not in Parliament but in the trade unions. The election of Hugh Scanlon as President of the AEU in 1967, the growth in membership and militancy of the small white-collar unions, notably the Draughtsmen and Allied Technicians’ Union and the Association of Scientific and Managerial Staffs, indicated a sharp shift away from the Labour establishment in the area in which thereto it had been most firmly entrenched; the trade-union leadership.In the meantime the Parliamentary Left and Tribune seemed to focus even more closely and intently on traditional, Parliamentary forms of political activity. There was no attempt to reform the Victory for Socialism Group or the Appeal for Unity which had been formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in an effort (which was not very successful) to organise the rank and file for a campaign against the Labour Right. In 1967, an effort was made to re-start the Tribune Brains Trusts of the early 1950s. By April 1968, about twenty of these Brains Trusts had been held, their success depending on the strength and militancy of the sponsoring constituency parties. The Left-wing MPs were forced by the logic of their position, to concentrate on Parliamentary tactics. In August 1966, John Horner, Left-wing MP for Oldbury and Halesowen, wrote an article in Tribune attacking the new wage freeze and incomes policy and calling for rejection of the policy at the forthcoming Trades Union Congress. When Francis Flavius, Tribune’s columnist referred the following week to Horner’s ‘campaign,’ John Horner replied with some urgency:‘I should hate Francis Flavius to give anyone the idea that I am now calling for mass action from the trade union movement against it (the incomes policy).’ [24]" }

{ "content": "Moreover, as Ralph Miliband has shown in his comprehensive analysis, Parliamentary Socialism, the Parliamentary road to socialism is fraught with dangers – not least the danger of personal absorption into the machinery of Government. From the very beginning of the Labour Government in 1964 the Left was split between on the one hand the resolute older Parliamentarians and the new trade-union MPs who were prepared to fight decisions with which they disagreed through the established Parliamentary machinery, and on the other, a group of younger men who hoped, in some unspecific way, to find ‘new ways’ of proclaiming their opposition. One idea was to establish a ‘Parliamentary Forum,’ a permanent debating chamber at which the Left could thrash out a new strategy and a new theory. [25] Allegations were made by these younger men of ‘pussyfooting’ – a disparaging reference to Mr Michael Foot and the older Parliamentarians.Harold Wilson, who had so much experience of such splits and divisions, watched with considerable interest, and, as soon as an able young Left MP fell out with his colleagues, he was duly swept into the Government. As early as 19 February 1965 a group of young back-benchers joined with two Labour veterans, Philip Noel-Baker and Arthur Henderson in writing a letter to The Times urging the Government ‘to take an immediate initiative to achieve a cease-fire (in Vietnam) and a conference in which the principled participants can search for a political solution.’ They were Peter Shore, David Ennals, Shirley Williams and Dr Jeremy Bray. The following August, the latter three of the four signed a letter from back-bench MPs calling on the Government to ‘scrap the immigration white paper.’ Jeremy Bray spoke at the 1965 Labour Party Conference on behalf of his union, the Transport and General Workers, whose million votes he pledged against the White Paper. The most anxious and dedicated opponent of the immigration White Paper was Reginald Freeson, MP for Willesden East, whose constituency housed one of the largest immigrant populations in the country (and who subsequently tripled his majority in the 1966 election). Another signature on the letter was that of the young barrister MP for Lincoln, Mr Dick Taverne. The immigration policy was also attacked in a brilliant and bitter speech late at night in the House of Commons by the MP for Renfrew West, Mr Norman Buchan, perhaps the ablest of all the Left-wing intake in 1964.Two years later, Shore (Minister of Economic Affairs), Bray (Technology), Mrs Williams (Education), Freeson (Power), Taverne (Home Office), Ennals (Home Office) and Buchan (Scottish Office) had been absorbed into the Government. Mr Neil Carmichael and Mr Ioan Evans who had associated themselves with the Left, notably on Vietnam and defence, had also accepted jobs in the Ministries of Transport and the Whips Office respectively. The ‘pussy-footers’ had been left to carry on the fight against their accusers.The offer of such a job places a Left-wing MP in an intolerable dilemma. In the first place, the logic of his place in Parliament tells him that he must accept a place in the Government. How, he argues, can he press for more left-wing policies from a Government, and then refuse to join the Government when offered a place in it? Moreover, particularly in offices like the Scottish Office and the Ministry of Transport the political complexion of an Under Secretary can make a difference to a host of administrative decisions. As against that, the Minister is silenced on the broad issues. He has no voice in the Government, which never meets. And, whenever necessary, he can be hauled out to vote for the Cabinet’s policy. The spectacle, for instance, of Norman Buchan and Reginald Freeson failing to oppose the frankly racialist Immigration Act of 1968 was as nauseating for their supporters as it must have been galling for themselves. Yet only once, in the case of Eric Heffer, who was offered a Government post in 1967, was the offer of such a job turned down by a Left-wing MP. Yet, in the final analysis, the central criticism of the Labour Left under Harold Wilson’s leadership does not concern their Parliamentary tactics nor the difficult decisions as to whether or not to vote against the Government, or to accept a post within it. In the 1930s Sir Stafford Cripps had posed to his followers in the Socialist League, many of whom were prominent in the Labour Left in the 1950s and 1960s, central questions about power in modern capitalist society, based on his view that the ‘idea that the wielders of economic power will co-operate with a Labour Government is quite fantastic.’‘Can socialism come by constitutional means?’ he had asked, and had replied in the affirmative, only on the condition that the most dramatic measures to control private economic interests were undertaken immediately by a Labour Government. The power of Parliament, argued Cripps, had to be exerted to the full against private economic and industrial interests if that power was to survive. The slightest wavering in the face of those economic interests would mean the inevitable bondage of Parliament.Had Cripps’ case been eroded by the thirty years between 1933 and 1963? Had capitalism become less powerful, more subservient to the whims of Parliament than in the 1930s? Were the great corporations of the 1960s more democratic and more easily controlled than the demoralised industries of the 1930s? Had the conflict between economic interests and socialist aims diminished, so that the powers necessary to fulfil the latter and control the former were in some sense less crucial? These questions had been raised to some extent, though in less specific and more diluted language, in the big arguments of the late 1950s. At the 1958 Labour Party Conference, for instance, Mr Trevor Park, the delegate from Darwen, later MP for South East Derbyshire, had declared:‘I am not interested merely in a better organised society; I am not interested merely in working capitalism more efficiently than the capitalists themselves. I am interested in a society which is based upon co-operation and not upon competition ...‘There is a fundamental conflict here." }

{ "content": "‘The aims of those who evolve the plans – Government and the public authorities – are very different from the aims of the private capitalists who control industry. No matter how many social controls and regulations we create, there will still be attempts to evade them and discover ways and means by which the instruments of social interest can be evaded ...‘Sooner or later we shall be brought back to this fundamental issue: are we interested only in making capitalism more efficient; are we trying to out-do the Tory Party in what is their own territory; or are we preparing for the next stage in the march forward to socialism?’ [26]Under the leadership of Harold Wilson, these questions, despite their increasing relevance, were not asked. Instead the Left concentrated on the mechanics of Parliamentary victory rather than the policies by which the ‘fundamental conflict’ between Labour’s aims and private economic interests could be resolved. The hysteria about the importance of electoral victories reached a climax at the General Election in 1966, which quickly emerged as the unhappiest paper victory in Labour history. Under the hypnosis of Wilsonian rhetoric about public ownership, peace and technology, in the vacuum created by the irrelevance of old slogans and old analyses, and in the Gadarenian Stampede to Party Unity at election time, the Labour Left forgot about or ignored the ’fundamental conflict’ and were therefore theoretically and practically unprepared for defeat in it.Harold Wilson’s uncanny knowledge of the Labour Party and its Left wing, most of it gained from his association with the Bevanites in the early 1950s was consistently applied to obtaining the support of Left-wing MPs, though his policies only very rarely leant Leftwards. Ruthlessly he played on the Left’s most fatal weakness: its sentimentality. Wilson knows that the Labour Left responds more enthusiastically than the Right to calls for party unity at times of crisis (especially at elections), to vague phrases about public ownership and moral crusades and helping the starving millions. In the generalised sloganising of the Labour Left Harold Wilson has always been an expert, and he never scrupled to wrap it in the shroud of Aneurin Bevan. Both before and after his accession, Wilson deployed a familiar, but highly successful rhetorical technique, attaching the name of Aneurin Bevan to the most banal cliches.‘Why, Aneurin Bevan asked, look into the crystal ball when you can read the book.’ [27]‘We know, as Nye Bevan said, that politics are about power.’ [28]‘Nye had a word for it, as always: why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book?’ [29]‘If I may quote Nye again, we are not gigolos.’ [30]‘As Nye Bevan reminded us in the last speech to the House of Commons, one of the defects of our postwar democracy has been that it has not yet proved that it can voluntarily save itself from drift, decline and disaster by imposing the necessary discipline in time.’ [31]Howard and West tell us that after the first ballot for the Labour leadership election in January 1963, in which Wilson had fallen only eight votes short of an overall majority over his two rivals, Callaghan and Brown, he repaired with his two campaign managers, Richard Crossman and George Wigg, to Crossman’s house in Vincent Square. There Wigg assured them that at least twelve of Callaghan’s votes were committed to Wilson, who had, in effect, won the election. At this, Wilson ‘raised his glass and proposed a toast to Nye Bevan’s memory.’ [32]Wilson, supported by Crossman, had taken Bevan’s place on the Shadow Cabinet in 1954, when the latter had resigned on a principle held by both of them. Wilson had actively supported Gaitskell for the Party leadership against Bevan in 1955 and 1956. Wigg had resigned from the Keep Left Group in 1951 out of loyalty to Emmanuel Shinwell and the latter’s defence budget, which Bevan opposed. Yet, in a sense, the toast was justified. For without the mantle of Nye, and the deep attachment to Bevan’s memory (and to those who had supported him in the past) among the Labour Left, Harold Wilson would never have been able to appeal to the Left as one of their own. The appeal to the sentimentality of the Left was to serve Harold Wilson even more handsomely in the future. At the 1966 Labour Party Conference, for instance, at which he tried to explain away the collapse of all his policies, Wilson turned, at the end of a long, pedantic speech to a quote from a living hero, from Lord, formerly the Rev Donald Soper, personally ennobled by the Prime Minister himself as a mark of Wilson’s respect for the ‘non-conformist conscience’ of the Labour Left. At a ‘service of dedication’ in the crypt chapel of St Stephen’s Church, Mary Undercroft, in the Palace of Westminster, Wilson recalled Soper pronouncing a prayer:‘Oh, God, grant us a vision of our land, fair as it might be:A land of righteousness where none shall wrong his neighbour;A land of plenty where evil and poverty shall be done away;A land of brotherhood where all success shall be founded on service, and honour shall be given to excellence alone;A land of peace where order shall not rest on force, but on the love of all for the common life and weal;Bless our efforts to make the vision a living reality;Inspire and strengthen each one of us that we may give time, thought and sacrifice to speed the day of its coming.’‘When the time comes,’ Wilson went on, ‘I would want this Government, this Movement, to be judged by not only the British Nation, but by history, by our success or failure in turning this prayer into a reality.’No one was sick.The Conference, whose Left-wing element had been distinctly restive throughout Wilson’s speech (one incorrigible sectarian had even been moved to heckle) was silenced. And, to a man, the delegates rose for the solemn ritual of the standing ovation. Top of the page Footnotes1. Tribune, 22 February 1963.2. Daily Herald, 2 October 1963.3. Tribune, 12 June 1963.4. Tribune, 11 October 1963.5. Ibid., 11 September 1964.6. Ibid., 6 November 1964." }

{ "content": "7. Tribune editorial after the 1966 election, 8 April 1966.8. Tribune, 20 November 1964.9. Ibid., 8 January 1965.10. Ibid., 29 January 1965.11. Ibid., 17 September 1965.12. Ibid., 24 September 1965.13. Michael Foot in Tribune, 6 August 1965.14. 7 January 1966.15. 11 March 1966.16. Tribune, 25 March 1966.17. Ibid., 8 April 1966.18. The Sunday Times, 24 July 1966.19. See Tribune pamphlet, Never Again, published in July 1967.20. Tribune, 29 May 1966.21. The Times, 12 March 1968.22. See Ian Mikardo, The Left in 1967, Tribune, 23 December 196623. Needless to say, the few socialists who recognised the real situation were ‘incorrigible sectarians.’ Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, had written, in the aftermath of Wilson’s Scarborough speech, an article which was vindicated by subsequent events in every particular:‘From Togliatti to Wilson the cry goes up across Western Europe that socialism is now State-sponsored planning plus automation. It is sad that neither Wilson nor Togliatti is a keen student of Hegel’s dialectic, for it would have been a great comfort to those who believe that opposites become one in a higher synthesis to realise that oddly enough capitalism is now State-sponsored planning plus automation.‘To accept Wilsonism is to have moved over to the Right at least for the moment, no matter what other professions of socialism are made ...’ Labour Policy and Capitalist Planning, International Socialism, Winter 1963, pp. 5 9.24. Tribune, 2 September 1966.25. One Labour wag named the proposed organisation the Parliamentary Institute for Socialist Studies, PISS.26. Labour Party Conference Report, 1958, pp. 163–4.27. Swansea, 25 January 1964.28. London, Speech to Society of Labour Lawyers, 20 April 1964.29. Labour Party Conference, Blackpool, 29 September 1965.30. Ibid.31. TUC, 5 September 1966.32. Anthony Howard and Richard West, The Making of the Prime Mlnliter, Cape, 1965, p. 30. Top of the pageLast updated on 22 October 2020" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootThe Woman who Built Barricades:Louise Michel and the Paris Commune(1979)From Socialist Worker, No. 2670, 9 October 2004.This is an edited version of Paul Foot’s speech in 1979 on Louise Michel and the Paris Commune.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.ONE OF the greatest dates in our history was 18 March 1871. Thestory starts at the heights of Montemartre, Paris, at about 3 a.m.The whole square is dominated by 250 cannon. The guns had just beenused in a war between France and Germany in which Paris had beenbesieged for the whole winter.The war ended in what most Parisians saw as a total sell out.Immediately after the armistice was signed an election in Parisreturned a hard right government. It was headed by Adolphe Thiers,described by Karl Marx as a “monstrous gnome”.Thiers’s immediate problem was Paris. Most of the people ofParis were workers, and they were angry – angry at the government,angry at the backdating of rents suspended during the siege, andangry at their working conditions.And Thiers was very worried about the cannon on Montemartre. Thecannon had got to Montemartre by a very simple process – theworking men, women and children of Paris had seized them and takenthem there.The orders for this tricky operation had been given by theNational Guard, the force of volunteers set up in Paris to fight thePrussians. The central committee of the National Guard was a genuinedemocracy.Government soldiers were sent to seize the cannon back, and wereleft guarding them. Rows broke out in the streets around Montemarteas the people gathered to defend the cannon.Then up the road to Montemartre a woman came running. Her name wasLouise Michel. She was 41 years old. She was a member of a committeeset up to look after the guns.While she tended a wounded man, she overheard a general say theFrench army was now in charge of Paris, “and the filthy, disgustingrabble that had taken his guns out of the place where they shouldhave been were going to get taught a lesson.”Louise Michel understood what was said extremely well. She was thedaughter of a serving maid. She became a teacher, but was kicked outof several schools because she insisted on teaching her way. Shebecame very active in the radical movement in Paris, quickly becominga prominent speaker.There was a tremendous hostility toward any woman who hadindependent ideas. Louise Michel had to put up with the sillysniggering and banter which greeted any intervention by a woman, yetshe managed to establish credibility in the movement.She joined the International Working Men’s Association, whichwas set up by Karl Marx and others. It was very difficult for a womanto join, as the name implies.Louise Michel also managed to join the National Guard, which waspretty remarkable because the National Guard was entirely composed ofmen.Anyway, she heard the general’s comments and ran off down thehill shouting that treachery was afoot, that their place was beingtaken over by the army, that their guns were being taken back, thatthey had to come out and stop this thing happening. She ordered thatall the church bells be rung.The wretched soldiers were still guarding the cannon. Peoplegathered and the generals tried to keep control.Then suddenly they saw a crowd of people coming, led by LouiseMichel. She had collected about 200 women, most of them with rifles,and came charging up the hill towards 3,000 armed soldiers.Later she wrote, “We ran up at the double, knowing that at thetop was an army in battle formation. We expected to die for liberty.All womankind was at our side – I don’t know how.”Three times the general told his troops to fire. Three times theyrefused. Suddenly a sergeant shouted, “We’ll have to mutiny.”It was a glorious scene as the crowd embraced the soldiers andbottles of wine were shared.But Adolph Thiers was not at all happy. He took the entiremachinery of the government to Versailles, 40 or 50 miles down theroad. And Thiers swore that there would be revenge for what had beendone in Paris.On the evening of 18 March the central committee of the NationalGuard was declared the government of Paris.Immediately there was an argument in the central committee. Somewanted to march immediately on the army at Versailles. They said, “Ifwe go now to Versailles, by smashing the government there we canraise the workers in all French cities.”And Louise Michel, who was not on the committee, was outside,grabbing anyone she knew and insisting, “We have to march uponVersailles – now is the time.”But the majority on the committee went for the legal option. Theydecided to hand over to an elected body who would then be able togovern properly.The elections were held on 26 March. The National Guard issuedthis proclamation:“Do not lose sight of the fact that the men who willserve you best are those you choose from among yourselves, livingyour life, suffering your ills. Distrust the ambitious as much as theupstart. Distrust also talkers, who are incapable of translatingwords into action. Avoid those fortune has too highly favoured, foronly rarely is he who possesses fortune disposed to see the workingman as his brother.”The elections were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm. And thepeople elected by and large represented what one writer called theRed Republicans.The elections were different from all other elections. Thedecision makers weren’t just workers in government. They wereworkers carrying out the decisions of government. When have we seenworkers at the head of the police forces, worker judges, workernewspaper proprietors? The Paris Commune achieved this.The Paris Commune was only allowed to exist for two months, duringmost of which it was under constant siege from the Versailles army.Two months is the time it takes between a bill in parliament goingbetween its first and second reading today.But the Commune managed to revoke the backdated rents and banevictions. Pawn shops were ordered to hand back all the goods theyhad had from workers. Night work in bakeries was banned. The Communestarted a process of accident insurance for workers, the first suchscheme in France.Education in Paris was taken out of the hands of the nuns and themonks and put into the hands of people, who were instructed in a" }

{ "content": "wonderful decree from the Commune to concentrate on facts rather thanfantasies, and to apply themselves to putting right “the greatestmalady of children – boredom”.The cultural atmosphere was absolutely fantastic – all thechurches were taken over for debates.But the Commune was not perfect. Unlike the National Guard, theCommune was elected by geography. The people who were elected wereinclined to be isolated from the people who elected them.One result of this weakness was seen in how the Commune conductedthe war. Thiers launched his counter-attack from Versailles.Bombardment after bombardment came right to the gates of Paris.But the conduct of the war was handed over to former army officers.They had no idea how to tap into the democracy the Communerepresented.The Versailles army got into the city because nobody was guardingthe gates. The cannon at Montemartre, the symbol of the socialrevolution, was left untended, and at the crucial point couldn’t beused.Marx wrote that the Paris Commune was elected by universalsuffrage but women didn’t have the vote. Despite this, the actiontaken by the women during the Commune was magnificent.Women fought for the Commune from a sense that their class hadtaken power, and must be defended. Louise Michel led a battalion of120 women in defence of the Commune.Now you come to the end of this story. In the whole period of thewar, from 2 April to 25 May, 887 men from the Versailles army werekilled in combat. In the ten days following 25 May, after theVersailles army took complete control of Paris, 25,000 people weretaken out of the city and shot.Anyone in any way associated with the National Guard – men,women, children – were put to death. Louise Michel escaped thesedeaths, but she was not lucky to escape them. She was transported tothe colonies and later imprisoned again when she returned to France.She never lost her defiant spirit. As she lay dying she was toldof the Russian Revolution of 1905. She got out of bed, danced aroundthe room, then lay back and said, “Right – now I am ready todie.” Top of the pageLast updated on 19 August 2016" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootThe Postal Workers and the Tory Offensive(1971)A Socialist Worker Pamphlet.First published 1971 by SW (Litho) Printers Ltd, 8 Cotton Gardens, London.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Derek Howl.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IntroductionThe postal strike of 1971 was by a long way the biggest industrialdispute in Britain since the war. It lasted exactly the same numberof days as the next biggest – the seamen’s strike of 1966 – butthere were more than four times as many workers on strike. In termsof days lost and numbers of strikers, no other dispute can comparewith it.The strike lasted for 44 days, during all of which more than 90%of the members of the Union of Post Office Workers remained on strikewithout strike pay. Yet, at the end, they went back to work withouteven the promise that they would receive any greater pay increasethan they were offered at the outset. Despite desperate attempts tocheer his members up, the union’s general secretary made it plainthat he would have preferred, if possible, to continue with thestrike. The Press, the employers and the employers’ Governmentcould scarcely contain their glee at the humiliation of 200,000postal workers. Gutter cartoonists and gutter politicians joined inthe triumphal dance over what they imagined was the corpse of thepostal union.This pamphlet is written within a fortnight of the end of thestrike. It is written for the tens of thousands of postal workers whoare still suffering from shock at the calling-off of the strike.Why did the strike take place? Why did the union collapse? Aboveall, how can workers everywhere who seek to improve their wages andconditions insure against a similar disaster? These are the questionswhich this pamphlet tries to answer. Part 1. The Post OfficeThe Post Office is the oldest nationalised industry in thecountry, and the biggest. It employs more than 400,000 people (morethan any other single concern), and ever since letters circulated hasbeen responsible to the Government for the “carriage of mails”.From the outset, it developed a tradition of “public service”.Every citizen has the statutory right to delivery at his address ofletters correctly addressed and posted to him, and in promptness,regularity and efficiency the British postal service is the best inthe world. Similarly, the telephone service, which was incorporatedinto the Post Office, is incomparably more efficient in Britain thanin countries like America where the telephones are in the hands ofprivate enterprise.Yet the Post Office, like other alleged “public services”,operates inside a society where the powerful men are the rich men.The way in which the Post Office works, therefore, is biased infavour of industry, commerce, banking and the civil service – anywhere, that is, where the interests of rich and powerful men areimmediately identifiable.Revenue from the postal services, for instance, comes to the PostOffice by way of stamps. Firms and industries which post largequantities of letters do not buy stamps. They can buy frankingmachines which are regulated by the Post Office. If they post morethan 5,000 units at a time, they can get the local post office to dothe franking for them free of charge. One Post Office unionsecretary told me that four men out of 25 at his sorting office haveto be detailed off on overtime every day to deal with this job, forwhich the customer does not pay a penny.Even more interesting is the system whereby the Post Office offersa rebate to firms which post in bulk.The amount of the rebate, laid down in the Post Office Guide, isas follows:Units Posted    Rebate4,501–4,999all free over 4,5005,000–22,22210% rebate22,223–24,999all free over 20,00025,000–234,37520% rebate234,376–249,999all free over 187,500250,00025% rebateThe Post Office Guide goes on to list conditions for the rebate.The packets, it says, must be identical, and they must be sorted intotowns and counties “as required by the local Postmaster”.The words “as required by the local Postmaster” are crucial,for the collection and sorting of rebated post is settled in local“deals” between local postmasters and firms. Most firms which dobig postal business will make sure that they get on excellent termswith the local postmaster, and end up with handsome bargains on theirpostal costs.One UPW union official told me:“Not 1% of the rebated post is sorted, and even if itis sorted it makes very little difference to our work. We still haveto break open the parcels of post and check every address. Sometimesthe sorting is more difficult when it is sorted by firmsbeforehand.”Before 1968, these rebates applied only to “printed paper andsamples”, which, of course, included a mass of business post. Butafter 1968, when the two-tier post was introduced, the old “printedpaper and samples” category was dispensed with. The rebates thenapplied to all second class post sent in bulk. This meant ahuge increase in the rebate (or subsidy, to use a better word) withwhich the Post Office “helped out” the growing army of firmswhich were posting in bulk. Many firms found it extremely fruitful tosave up their less urgent post for one day a week, and thus claim amuch larger rebate from the Post Office.What is the extent of the rebate? Unhappily, but not surprisingly,rebate statistics are “not available” to the public, even if theyare ever collated (which is doubtful). The long annual report andaccounts of the Post Office carries no facts or figures about theextent to which industry and commerce are subsidised by the rebatesystem. Similarly, the Prices and Incomes Board which looked at PostOffice charges in 1968 made no inquiry into how the Post Office getsits revenue, or how it might increase its revenue by stopping agratuitous and unnecessary subsidy to firms. All the Post Office willsay is that “about a third” of its postal traffic is metered, andthat the bulk of the metered traffic is subsidised. From a bigsub-post office in North London, I got rather different figures fordeliveries in a typical week last year:  Metered Ordinary stampedLetters194,111188,819Packages  36,716  18,131Total           230,827(53%)           206,950(47%)Thirty-five million letters are posted in Britain every day. Sincethere are less than 35 million adults in Britain today, it is clearthat most letters are not sent by sweethearts, or soldiers onoverseas duty, or even by grannies on the kiddies’ birthday. Theyare sent by Littlewoods, Barclays, the Daily Telegraph, ICI,and so on." }

{ "content": "The complete lack of official statistics forces us to guess at theextent of the subsidy which the Post Office hands out to pools firms,mail order firms and big business year by year. If a third of theletters posted are subsidised to the tune of some 20%, the extent ofthe subsidy is in the region of £18m a year – rather more in factthan the Post Office estimate of the cost of the full Union of PostOffice Workers claim for its members on the postal side. If thefigure is even remotely right, it means that the “losses”sustained by the postal side of the Post Office in any one of thelast 10 years could have been wiped out if the rich men’s subsidyhad been abolished. And this does not take into account thetremendous losses to the Post Office from not charging so many firmsfor franking their mail.There is another area of subsidy which is also impossible tomeasure because of the refusal of the Post Office authorities tocollate (or publish) statistics. When the Post Office was part of thecivil service, the civil service mail was heavily subsidised. Thissubsidy was carried on after the Post Office Corporation was set upoutside the civil service! It is impossible to tell how great is thesubsidy on the millions of letters, cards and parcels sent out by thecivil service, but it would be enough to pay a few thousand postmen adecent wage!The change-over from a civil service department to a“fully-fledged public Corporation” started soon after theelection of a Labour Government in 1966 and was completed in October1969. During this period, “business standards” were applied tothe Post Office, and this meant, inevitably, a fantastic increase inbosses and bosses’ underlings.In 1966, 11,300 million letters were handled by the Post Office.In 1969 the figure was almost exactly the same. In a series ofvicious productivity agreements, the number of postmen had been cutfrom 101,063 to 100,991, postmen higher grade from 21,250 to 20,809and counter-men in the post offices from 22,183 to 21,584.In 1966 there had been 9,889 Post Office administrators. In 1969there were 12,300. Supervisors increased in the same period from9,974 to 11,295. The richer the gravy, the more people there were tolap it up. There were 31 Post Office directors in 1966 – and 51 in1969. All of them are getting a minimum of £6,600 a year. As abranch secretary wrote to his union magazine The Post (March29, 1969):“In my own area since Modified Postal Services we haveacquired a further two assistant district postmasters, two chiefinspectors, two assistant superintendents, and have lost onesuperintendent. We have been concentrated, de-concentrated,satellited, de-satellited. We have been two-tiered andsemi-two-tiered and all this time the top brass have been increasinglike sex-mad rabbits.”Postal workers, and others who use the Post Office, were a littlebemused as to the value of this burgeoning of bosses. The bosses’financial forecast in 1970 (after the union’s last wage increase}resulted in a shortfall of £52m. Third-rate public relations andmanagerial incompetence led to early failure both of the “two-tier” postal system and of the Giro. As for “mechanisation”(the main excuse given for the increase in management), there isstill only one fully mechanised office – at Croydon. Even atCroydon, the new machines have led to dreadful difficulties, notleast the increase in damage to mail. “The machines tear up theletters something terrible”, a Croydon postman told me. “We usedto have one man to repair damaged mail. Now, with the machines, thereare three, working overtime patching and sticking up ripped-upletters and cheques.” Mechanisation elsewhere is being held upbecause many of the special codes sent out to the public by the PostOffice contain seven digits, while the machines to deal with them aremade to deal with six digits. Fifty-one directors have since beenpuzzling over an awkward dilemma. Should new codes be sent out orshould the machines be changed? Either expense, of course, will beblamed on the postal workers. The directors don’t get £6,600 ayear for nothing!Yet the postal side has long since ceased to interest the mass ofPost Office Board directors. They are increasingly fascinated withthe telecommunications division, where profits have been rising toastonishing proportions:  £m66/67 67/68 68/69 69/70Postal Service Profits (loss)  7  6−12−6Telecommunications profits3833  26  61The increasing army of bosses in the telecommunications divisionare drawn almost exclusively from private enterprise. Jobs areswapped year by year between the Division’s Equipment Departmentand the boardroom of Plessey (which supplies most of the equipment).When the Post Office left the civil service and became a Corporation,there was some pressure from his supporters on Mr. John Stonehouse,the Labour Government’s Postmaster-General, to sweep away the“time-honoured” restrictions which prevented the Post Officemanufacturing its own equipment. Stonehouse withstood the pressure.“Render unto Plessey the things that are Plessey’s” was hisargument. Although the Bill contained the “ultimate” power forthe Post Office to manufacture its own equipment, this would only beused, Mr. Stonehouse explained, “where it became obvious thatsupplies would not otherwise be available”.The new big businessmen in the Post Office telecommunicationsdivision and their friends in industry outside are goggling at thefantastic increases in telephone profits. Unlike postal services, 74%of whose costs are in paying wages and salaries, telephones need lessand less labour (only 47% of their costs are labour costs). What atragedy it is, moan the businessmen in the Post Office, that theseenormous profits are wasted in a Public Board – are ploughed backinto telephone machinery or used to prop up a loss-making postalservice. If only, oh, if only these highly profitable services couldbe put in the hands of private enterprise!These sentiments were voiced enthusiastically by the ConservativeOpposition during the passing of the Post Office Bill throughParliament early in 1969. Mr. Kenneth Baker, one of the brighteststars in the Conservative firmament and a personal protégé of Mr.Edward Heath, moved an amendment to Clause 7 of the Bill:“to give the Corporation authority to offer for sale tothe public either by way of equity shares or loan stock any part ofits telecommunications services.”“The Party of which I am a member”, said Mr. Baker,“believes that the role of the public sector should be limited andreduced wherever possible.”What Mr. Baker meant, of course, was as follows:“The Party of which I am a member is run for the sake" }

{ "content": "of rich and greedy businessmen who are longing to get their fingerson the telephone loot.”Mr. Baker’s amendment was pressed to a division (and lost), butwhen the Conservative Party was returned to office in June 1970 (Mr.Baker was thrown out at Acton, but returned a few months later insafe Marylebone) the robbers came out of their caves and demanded thehand-over of the telephones. At the Conservative Party conference inBlackpool in October 1970, Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg, new Tory MP forHampstead and a prominent member of the Telephone Users ConsultativeCouncil (an organisation run almost entirely by and for businessmen),made a rousing speech pointing out the “opportunities forenterprise and initiative” in the telephone service. His speech wasgreeted with a roar of applause, and Mr. Finsberg has since beennamed as a possible chairman of the Post Office Board.The Board, meanwhile, whose public relations staff, needless tosay, had increased by some 20% in four years, remained silent.Nothing was said in defence of the “public interest” of theBoard’s operations against the “private interest” of Finsberg &Co. Ltd. For the truth is that most of the men on the Board in chargeof telecommunications have no objection to the wholesale transfer ofthe telephone service to private enterprise. They would be assuredplum jobs and substantial shareholdings in the new private telephonecompanies. The attitude of the Post Office Board towards Tory demandsfor private enterprise telephones had nothing to do with the “publicservice” tradition of the Post Office. Public service to them meantan unprofitable postal service, especially cheap for businessmen, runby a nationalised industry, and profitable telephones run bythemselves. Such priorities, needless to say, ignored one ratherimportant group of people – the 400,000 who worked in both sectorsof the Post Office. These people had for more than 100 years beentreated by the Post Office with consistent cruelty and contempt. Part 2. The UnionThe UK Postmen’s Association was formed in the wake of thelegislation of 1871 and 1875 legalising trade unions, it was swiftlypulverised by the “impartial” Post Office administration. Theleaders of the executive were arbitrarily sacked. Tom Dredge, themost militant of the founding executive members, was only allowedback to work on condition he apologised for past activities andpromised to do nothing so horrible in the future as to “incite”his colleagues with evil talk about better wages and conditions.Dredge finally agreed to the conditions, and the Associationcollapsed.The Postmen’s Union was then formed in 1889 under the militantleadership of engineers and dockers drafted in from the “newunionism” movement. At once, the union demanded a withdrawal of thedepartmental rule that postmen were not allowed to meet outsideoffice hours to discuss their grievances. The department replied witha direct negative, and prepared to fight. Union leaders were harassedwith petty charges of indiscipline, and a reserve force of unemployedwere carefully rehearsed as blacklegs. The department was also ableto split the postmen by carefully fostering and bribing members ofdifferent, splinter associations, especially the Fawcett Associationof sorters. When blacklegs were forcibly removed by union members onJuly 10 from Mount Pleasant, 100 unionists were instantly dismissedby the Post Office and the attempt to get the rest of London postmento come out in their support was bungled. Most of the men publiclywashed their hands of the union, and the department consolidated itsvictory with widespread victimisation.It was not until after the First World War that the varioussplinter unions in the Post Office were amalgamated into the Union ofPost Office Workers. In the militant atmosphere of their amalgamatingconference in 1919, the delegates to the new union declared theirfaith in trade union principles and voted overwhelmingly for thesetting up of a strike fund. They were reckoning without thedeep-seated anti-trade union feelings among postmen, especially amongthe better-paid grades. The strike fund was put to ballot, and wascarried by only 48,157 to 35,411 (with 23,400 abstentions).The Post Office administration responded by cherishing thefederations of smaller unions which had refused to join the UPW.Hysterical anti-trade union propaganda was openly circulated amongtheir workers by the Post Office management. The strike fund was heldup as proof of the evil intentions of “anarchist agitators” whowere intent on destroying the “impartial” traditions of the PostOffice.The campaign was successful. By 1921, the 100,000 membership atthe amalgamation conference had shrunk to 72,000. In September 1921the union executive decided to suspend the strike levy fundindefinitely. As a result, there was no strike fund in the union formore than 40 years. And then it was too late.Throughout, the union was plagued by the ambiguous status of itsmembers. Many members still regarded themselves as uniformed civilservants – “a cut above” the proletariat. The Post Officebosses did everything they could to foster this image. In 1927, theConservative Government passed a Trades Dispute Act whichbanned the postmen’s union from affiliation to the Labour Party orto the Trades Union Congress. The union was therefore forced intoisolation for 20 years until the Act was repealed by the post-warLabour Government (the 1929–31 Labour Government left the Act onthe statute book). In the same year, the bosses arbitrarily increasedthe staff side of the Whitley Council covering the industry by two – both members representing tiny “secessionist” associations. As aresult, the UPW walked out of the Whitley Council, only to returnfive years later on the Post Office terms.Despite consistent growth, consistent absorption of smallerorganisations and acceptance back into the TUC and Labour Party afterthe war, the union continued to be dogged by the myth of“respectability”. Many of its older members had been recruitedfrom the Services and had been taught to obey commands. In ruralareas, district postmasters liked to play soldiers with their troopsand in many places postmen had actually to parade for morninginspection!As a result, the union leadership remained firmly committed to“moderation”. Ron Smith, its general secretary for most of thepost-war period, could always be relied upon to cast his union’svotes in favour of Labour’s “safe” right-wing leadership. Thebranch rules and structure, many of which were written in thepost-war period, paid scant regard to the rights of the members toparticipate in the union affairs. The Croydon branch rules, forinstance, allow for only two meetings a year! Although the structureof the union was formally democratic (the executive is dominated bylay members elected every year, though about a third of it consists" }

{ "content": "of full-time officials: all officials are elected on a branchblock-vote system, but, once elected, they are there for life). Theactivity in the union was left in the main to a few local activists,who often ended up in the union leadership.Meanwhile, wages and conditions were gently discussed, and asgently agreed under the paternalist aegis of the Civil Service PayResearch Unit.The cosy atmosphere was abruptly broken by the Selwyn Lloyd paypause of 1961. The Tory Government, desperate to control their ownpre-election boom, decided to wield the hatchet on their own workers.Meetings were delayed, established negotiation procedures altered andpromises broken. For 18 months, postmen watched in despair as thewages of industrial workers and white-collar workers in privateindustry soared above theirs, and the official machinery which hadgiven them pittances year by year was ignored by the Government. Bythe summer of 1964, Ron Smith had lost control of his union. Inprotest against the Government’s refusal to allow them substantialincreases, the Post Office workers started an unofficial work-to-ruleand guerrilla strikes up and down the country.Ron Smith and his executive were forced to call a one-day officialstrike. A mass rally was held in Trafalgar Square, and, on July 26,the Government caved in. A wage increase reckoned much later by thePrices and Incomes Board as 15% was granted.The postmen had learned a simple lesson. Their biggest increase inpost-war history had been won because some of them took theinitiative and hit the Post Office and its customers where it hurtmost – in the pocket.Soon afterwards a Labour Government, trumpeting slogans about“fairness for the workers” and “Incomes Policy”, was elected.The Post Office workers loyally responded to the Government’sappeals for “voluntary restraint”. Pay awards for postal andtelephonist grades in 1965 and 1966 were held strictly below therequired norms. In both years the UPW “won” 3.5% increases (PIBReport, p. 20). Their award in 1967 had to be delayed due tothe 1966 wage freeze, and when it was paid it was much lower than theworkers had expected – 7%., The situation was little less thandrastic, as even the Post Office recognised. The Prices and IncomesBoard Report on postal charges, published in March 1968, had this tosay:“In the view of the Post Office, the pattern ofsettlements has inhibited its efforts to recruit and retain labour onthe postal side by ensuring that Post Office wages have always laggedbehind those in other occupations.”With the cheek which characterised so many PIB reports, the Boardthen recommended annual increases of 3.5%!This must have been a joke, for even on the Board’s skimpyinformation the Post Office workers were having it very rough indeed.The Board found severe labour shortages in London and the Midlandsbrought on by the disgracefully low wages and poor conditions.“During the last three years”, it reported (p. 23), “overtimehas accounted for about 20% of the Post Office’s expenditure on payfor main postal grades. The Post Office estimate that about one-sixthof the overtime is worked at double rates. To qualify for doublerates, postmen have to work more than 60 hours a week, indicatingthat considerable numbers are working this amount”. (Sixty hours iseight and a half hours a day every day in the week.) The PIB’Sremedy for this appalling situation was to increase the hiring ofpart-time women workers!Added to all this, and not apparently noticed by the PIB or theGovernment, was the system of” incremental scales” whereby youngtelephonists and postmen joining “the service” were used aslittle more than cheap labour. At that time the rates of pay underthese scales were as follows:Basic Pay for a 43 hour weekAge Postmen Telephonists  £   s.  d. £   s.  d.15  6 10 0  5 16 016  6 17 0  6   5 017  7 11 6  7   0 018  9 15 0  9   1 01910 11 6  9 17 62012   4 010 15 02114 14 612   4 02215 17 012 14 6The Union of Post Office Workers’ leadership, meanwhile, hadtaken a turn to the left with the election of Tom Jackson to thegeneral secretaryship in place of Ron Smith, who had inevitablyjoined the Board of the British Steel Corporation as labour director.Jackson and his executive hoped to push on with much bigger increasesfor their members than had been suggested by the PIB, but veryquickly they were entangled in the “voluntary incomes policy”which was being enforced by the Labour Government in a far fromvoluntary manner. Jackson’s annual report to his union’s JubileeAnnual Conference at Bournemouth apologised gloomily:“To say that the year under review [ending December 31,1968] has been a difficult one would be an understatement, either inrelation to members’ difficulties, or in relation to those ofobtaining increases against the background of Government criteriawhich provide substantially less than a modicum of flexibility.”A claim for postmen had been lodged in the late summer of 1968 anddeliberately delayed at Ministerial level until late in November.Eventually, the UPW accepted a 4% increase, 1% of which was “inrespect of measures already introduced”.Tough productivity strings were bound around this unwelcomepackage, which, as Jackson admitted in his report, “occasioned someresentment and dissatisfaction”. Telephonists, still lagging evenbehind postmen in pay, had been forced to accept a miserable 5.5%plus heavy productivity concessions.Neither was the following year, ended December 31, 1969, asJackson wrote for the union’s 1970 Conference, “one ofspectacular increases”. Under the Central Pay Claim, covering mostgrades in the union, telephonists had picked up a further 7.75% inseparate negotiations, but the postmen (representing half the union)were kept to the minimum 3.5%. Jackson and his negotiators hadaccepted this further humiliation only on condition that they wouldreturn and ask for more as soon as the Post Office became aCorporation in October.With the constitution of the Corporation, the last semblance ofcivil service “paternalism” and “respectability” vanishedfrom the Post Office. The Board was a tough, bureaucratic businessmanagement. The new chairman was a former merchant seaman, miner,doctor, steelmaster and tycoon called Viscount Hall. Other Boardmembers included a deputy chairman of Rolls-Royce and, inevitably, aformer general secretary of the Union of Post Office Workers (duly)knighted. The union found Lord Hall susceptible to demands for asubstantial increase to make up the ground lost over previous years.Hall was warned that the workers were in militant mood, and demandsfor industrial action to back the claim were pouring in from branches" }

{ "content": "all over the country. “Viscount Hall”, reported the Daily Mailon December 23, 1969, “wants to avoid a strike at all costs.”Hall duly told the Government that he had no intention of outfacinghis workers so early in the life of the Board.The Labour Government, by the time they came to adjudicate on theUPW claim in February 1970, were in a more friendly mood than theyhad been for four years. The struggle against the unions, highlightedby the White Paper In Place of Strife the previous summer, hadbeen dropped in favour of conciliation. A General Election was in theoffing. Workers’ votes had to be ensured. On February 12, theCabinet approved the entire UPW claim, which averaged increases ofsome 12%. “We got all we asked for”, said Jackson, triumphant.(Guardian, February 13, 1970)He was, however, in for a shock. On the ballot vote of the union’sbranches, acceptance of the offer was approved by the slenderest ofmajorities. Among postmen, there was probably a majority forrejection. If there had been any doubt in the minds of the unionleadership about the militancy of their members, it was now laid torest: The postmen, after nearly 50 years of apathy, were spoiling fora fight to improve their wages and conditions. The increases of early1970 had, they made it clear, compensated only marginally for thelosses in 1968 and 1969. The basic pay of the postmen was stilllittle more than £16 a week. Overtime was still monstrouslydemanding. The incremental scales were still a scandal. A 21-year-oldtelephonist outside London was still working a 41-hour, six-day weekfor £10 10s. For 20 years or more postal workers had trodwater. Now they were determined to surge forward. Part 3. The StrikeOn October 29, 1970, the Union of Post Office Workers, underinstructions from their annual conference the previous spring, lodgeda claim for a wage increase of 15% or £3 a week, whichever was thegreater. The claim was only one of a number of substantial claimssubmitted by unions still smarting from the long years of squeeze andfreeze, and from several months of runaway inflation which had pushedprices up at an annual rate of 8%. Very soon, the claim was shown tobe in line with what other workers were getting. A Committee ofInquiry under the “hard-line” negotiator Sir Jack Scamprecommended straight increases of 15% for local government employeeswho had been on strike for several weeks. The local governmentworkers had conducted a skilful campaign of guerrilla strikes, andthe Scamp Committee considered their claim sympathetically. Soonafterwards, the miners, under some protest, and after only marginallyfailing to give a two-thirds majority to sanction a national strike,accepted a “no strings” offer of 12%.These two increases in the public sector infuriated theConservative Government, not one member of whose Cabinet had lessthan two former directorships or less than two houses to live in. TheGovernment determined to fight their own workers if necessary to thedeath to bring down the general level of wage increases. To this end,they found a useful ally in the joint-deputy chairman of the PostOffice Board, Mr. A.W.C. Ryland.Ryland had worked his way up through the Post Office bureaucracywith assiduous zeal. By 1953, he had risen to the heights of DeputyPublic Relations Officer. For 10 years he had worked exclusively onthe telecommunications side, and had learned a lot about theprofitability of telephones. In 1963, for instance, he headed thePost Office study team to the profitable Bell Telephone System ofCanada. Ryland knew more than any other member of the Board that thesuccess of the Board would be assessed by one criterion:profitability.Ryland started to prepare for a possible strike in the Post Officelong before Lord Hall, or even the UPW leaders, had given it seriousconsideration. In the summer of 1970, for instance, he addressed aconference of telephone managers in Windermere in the Lake District.He announced that the Prices and Incomes Board target for “returnon capital” in the telecommunications division of 84% had not beenreached. He had, he said, without explaining in detail why,arbitrarily raised this target to 104%. There was, he went on, a needfor a thoroughgoing “drive to profitability”, and, accordingly,there was “very little left in the kitty for wages.”Soon afterwards, the attention of Post Office managers andsupervisors was drawn by Head Office to a thereto unheard-of documententitled: Post Office Civil Emergency Manual. The document setout detailed proposals as to how the Post Office should work inconditions of flood, famine, pestilence ... and industrial action.Instructions were issued that the “drill” laid down in thedocument, involving the setting up of “control centres” and “emergency stations”, should be followed to the letter during thepower workers’ work-to-rule which started on December 8 – notbecause that action disrupted postal services, but “as a rehearsalfor later on”.All this met with some opposition, notably from Viscount Hall.Hall, who was enjoying himself hugely travelling round the world onexpensive “surveys” of telecommunications and postal problems,was not at all happy about a confrontation with his workers. He tookthe old-fashioned view that well-paid workers provided the bestservice, and he was bold enough to tell his Minister, Mr. ChristopherChataway, what he thought.Lord Hall was intensely unpopular with the Government. Publicboards, they considered, should be chaired by obsequious Tory toadieslike Mr. Ryland. On November 24, after some intense argument aboutthe Board’s attitude to the UPW claim, Hall was summarily sacked bythe Government, and Ryland became “acting chairman”.The sacking of Lord Hall was not lost on the postal workers. Theyhad no brief for Labour tycoons, but they realised the real reasonfor this dismissal. To the astonishment of the Government and theunion, lightning protest strikes broke out in many large postoffices, especially in London.The power workers started their work-to-rule on December 8. Theaction caused instant chaos. A week later, the power men’s unionscalled off the action after a promise from the Government that theirclaim would be investigated by an independent court of inquiry. Theunions insisted, and the Government agreed, that the workers need notbe bound by the inquiry’s findings.Watching the situation, Ryland decided to delay his reply to theUPW claim as long as possible. If he could hold things until theWilberforce Commission reported on the power workers’ claim, publicopinion, he reckoned, would swing towards him. But the UPW, wise to" }

{ "content": "this ruse, insisted on a reply. On January 8, the Board offered 7% – less than half the claim. The offer was rejected with contempt. OnJanuary 14, the offer was increased by a wretched 1%. Once again, theunion rejected it. On January 20, the entire membership was calledout on strike.Everyone, including the union leaders, was astonished at theenthusiasm of the workers’ response to the strike call. There wasno question of strike pay. The union had started a small strike fundonly three years previously. At the beginning of the strike, the fundtotalled £334,000. The most this money could finance was a “hardshipfund” for those strikers (such as single men) who had no incomewhile on strike. Even so, the fund could only last for a maximum ofthree weeks. Yet the response among postmen was almost unanimous. ThePress, notably the Daily Express and Daily Mail,immediately ordered all its reporters to “Hunt the Blackleg”, butwere hard put to it to find a chink in the strike. Of 100,000postmen, less than 700 reported for work. Among telephonists, theresponse was less enthusiastic. In big industrial areas, they cameout. In rural areas, where many of them were the part-time “pinmoney” workers advocated by the Prices and Incomes Board, theytended to stay at work. The Daily Bulletin run by the UPWHeadquarters reported that in cities like Dundee and Newcastle alltelephonists were on strike. The Post Office claimed from the outsetthat more than a third of the total number stayed at work throughoutthe strike.On Day 4 of the strike, the UPW Strike Bulletin warned:“Monday may be a crucial day in our campaign”, and urged theirmembers to stay out on strike. The warning was unnecessary.Astonishingly, as the days and then the weeks went by, the strikersbecame more determined and more solid. The mass meetings and ralliesthroughout the country, led by a rally in Hyde Park every Thursday,became progressively better attended and more militant.On Day 9 (January 28), the Strike Bulletin sent a message from theexecutive: “WE ARE PRIVILEGED TO BE YOUR ELECTED LEADERS. YOU AREMAGNIFICENT! KEEP IT UP! ” Each bulletin recorded hundreds ofdonations, most of them tiny. At this stage, the only donations fromtrade unions were from individual branches. It was not until the 21stday of the strike that the bulletin could record a donation front theTransport and General Workers Union headquarters – of a puny £7,500 – to the hardship fund, and not until the 31st day that SOGATDivision “A” coughed up £10,000. Many other unions affiliated tothe TUC did not contribute at all.There were other even more serious signs that the solidarity ofthe leaderships of other unions was not all it was made out to be. OnFriday, February 12 (the 24th day of the strike), Mr. Johnny Nuttall,a member of the Transport and General Workers Union in Clay Cross,Derbyshire, reported as usual for work as a lorry-driver for a smallfirm of Sheffield road hauliers called J.A. Flendersons. He wasdetailed for a run to Hull and to Beverley, and he noticed thatattached to the delivery notes were two envelopes, addressed to thefirms he was to visit.Such envelopes had never been part of his load before, and Mr.Nuttall complained to the management, explaining that he could notpossibly be expected to carry letters for anyone while the postmenwere on strike. He was instantly suspended, pending negotiations. Hethen contacted Mr. Ray Thorpe, the T&GWU area organiser inNottingham. Mr. Thorpe listened to his case, spoke to the employersand was very sympathetic to Mr. Nuttall. He was, he explained, notconvinced that this delivery was not genuinely connected with thejob. Nuttall replied that never in two and a half years had he had todeliver such an envelope, but still Brother Thorpe was not convinced.From his vantage point in his Nottingham office, he decided that hewas unwilling to instruct the other drivers not to work while theemployers insisted on their carrying mail. He intended, he explained,to do nothing about it.Then Tom Swain, MP, intervened. Nuttall was reinstated. Returningto work, he found three more letters attached to the delivery notes.Once more he refused to drive. At least nine of the 15 driversindicated their willingness, if instructed by the union, not to workunder such blackleg conditions. But Thorpe refused to move. Nuttallwas sacked, and the other drivers carried the mail.“I rang our regional organiser, Brother Mather, inBirmingham”, Johnny Nuttall told me. “He took the same lukewarmattitude as Thorpe. He kept saying that our union cared most for ourmembers, and that our members would be in trouble if they all didwhat I did.”Johnny Nuttall has been out of work for five weeks since theepisode and his opinion of his union leadership, including Jack Jones(his general secretary), who knew all about the incident, is notprintable.What happened to Johnny Nuttall happened all over the country,although in most places were were few lorry-drivers (or railwayworkers) with Johnny Nuttall’s courage. BRS drivers carried mailall over the country without any real effort by the T&GWU to stopthe practice, in spite of all sorts of commitments by brave unionleaders at meetings in central London.Nevertheless, the solidarity of the postmen caused no littleconsternation at the Post Office Headquarters at St.Martin’s-le-Grand, where Ryland and his henchmen had imagined thatthe trickle of postmen returning to work would rapidly turn into aflood. Not that the Post Office itself was suffering. On thecontrary, despite the daily reports of massive Post Office losses inthe Press, the Post Office was minting huge profits during thestrike. The loss-making postal services were closed down. Only a tinyamount was being paid out in wages. At the same time, there was ahuge increase in the highly profitable use of automatic telephones(86% of the telephone system is on STD, which uses very littlelabour). The Minister for Posts pooh-poohed suggestions that the PostOffice was making profits during the strike, but when the strike wasover the figures proved him wrong. The Post Office had lost £24.8min revenue, and had saved £26m in unpaid wages (Daily Telegraph,March 5, 1971).Encouraged by such figures, Ryland decided on the 18th day of thestrike to announce his plans for even bigger profits in the future.He issued a Press statement (on February 6) indicating that, as a" }

{ "content": "result of the strike, future Post Office services would have to bepruned. The parcel post, he warned, would have to be abolished. Sowould many rural deliveries. So would the practice of delivering mailtwice a day.Five months previously, Mr. Ryland had opened a new parcel sortingoffice at Peterborough. He spoke in glowing terms about two newparcel centres at Cardiff and Southampton. “We are building,” hetrumpeted, “Britain’s parcel network of the future”.Now, however, he was using a strike into which he had provoked hisworkers as an excuse for cutting out the parcel service altogether!Needless to say, the bitter and devastating UPW reply to Ryland’sannouncement released to the Press the next day was totally ignoredby the “objective ” national newspapers.Yet, for all Mr. Rvland’s dreams of still more profits (and lessservice) to come, by late February the strike began to bite deep intothe pockets of industry and commerce. As the UPW Strike Bulletincomplained day by day, the real effects of the strike were blanketedby a “conspiracy of silence”.The damage was not only to banks, newspapers and mail order firms(whose turnover had doubled in 10 years to £560m a year, and hadexpanded by 10% a year compared with 3% for the rest of the retailtrade). Industry itself, and particularly industry with connectionsoverseas, was hard hit by the strike, and worse hit as chances of asettlement receded. For the first two weeks, correspondence could beput off, on the understanding that some day it would move again. Butas the strike was increasingly solid, industry became increasinglydisturbed. The Association for Small Businessmen reported that “thestrike has become a major threat to thousands of small businessmen.Many of them are being propped up by lenient bank managers who haveextended credit to cover the strike” (Financial Times, March3, 1971).Not only small businesses but some of the bigger ones started towarn the Government that the losses caused by the strike could not besustained for ever.None of this appeared in the Press or on television. The myth wasbruited around that the strike was having “little effect” onindustry. The internal bulletins of the City of London (the BusinessNews supplements and the Financial Times) announcedblandly:“No Problem.”The reason was that the men who run big industries and banks havebeen properly brought up. One major principle has been drummed intotheir heads from early childhood: Never discuss familyproblems in front of the servants.In this instance a group of cheeky servants (Post Office workers)were refusing to work. They had to learn that such insubordinationwould do them no good, and that no one cared. Total silence aboutreal problems had to be scrupulously observed.The union, however, was not concerned by these tricks of thecapitalist trade. The solidarity of their members was ensured. Thedamage caused by the strike was indisputable. Contemptible offersfrom the Post Office (such as Ryland’s suggestion that an extra 1%in “productivity” money could be added to the 8%) could berejected summarily.The real problem was the survival of those strikers who had nomoney at all. Members covered by social security payments were likelyto stay out as long as necessary. The rent was paid, and there wassomething to eat. For the others, however, the hardship fund wascrucial. And the hardship fund was running out. The hundreds of smalldonations made little or no difference. The union’s own money, bythe third week in February (the fifth of the strike), had long sincebeen spent, as had the bankers’ overdraft. The hardship fund (about£100,000 a week) had to be sustained, or the strike would begin tocrumble. This was the union’s Achilles heel, which was promptlypierced not by the employers or by blacklegs but by the Trades UnionCongress General Council. Part 4. The Sell-outOn Day 30 of the strike (Thursday, February 18), the union’sStrike Bulletin reported:“FLASH! Tom Jackson and his team have gone to the TUCto speak to the TUC’s Finance and General Purposes Committee.\"The result of the meeting was reported in The Times thefollowing day:“The UPW, in deep financial difficulties as its strikeenters the fifth week, yesterday collected £250,000 in loans fromother unions. It has been promised a similar sum by the TUCnext week to keep the strike alive.”And the Guardian of February 20 carried a huge headline:TUC WILL NOT LET POSTAL UNION BE CRUSHED“The Government is deeply concerned about theapparently growing support among trade unions for the Post Officeworkers.“... TUC leaders, who met Mr. Carr for talks about thedispute, took a courteous but firm line and left him in no doubt thatthey were not going to abandon the postal workers.“They are understood to have emphasised that they wouldnot stand by and see the Union of Post Office Workers crushed byfinancial pressures and reminded the Minister of the loans which theTUC was gathering from other unions on behalf of the UPW.“The amounts have totalled £250,000 this week, andthe same amount is likely to be forthcoming next week.”The following day, Sunday, February 21, 140,000 trade unionistsrallied to the call of the TUC to demonstrate against the IndustrialRelations Bill. Eight years previously, TUC general secretary GeorgeWoodcock had told the Congress proudly that they had “long ago leftTrafalgar Square” for the committee rooms in the corridors ofpower. Now the movement was back in Trafalgar Square fighting for itsvery life.The most popular man on the demonstration was Tom Jackson, themost popular delegation that of the UPW. TUC general secretary VicFeather sought out Jackson and pulled him to the front of the plinthto shake him by the hand. Chairman Sid Greene, the best-dressed manin the movement, told the crowd:“The whole trade union movement is backing the UPW.”When Jackson spoke, however, there was an element of scepticism inhis response:“If we are defeated, it will not be for lack ofresolve. It will not be for lack of guts and determination. It willbe for lack of funds.“Sympathy we can get by the bucketful. We have thegenerous wholehearted support of the public. What we need now ismoney – and fast!“The TUC has supported the idea of workshopcollections. This is your fight. Our defeat will be your defeat. Ourvictory, your victory.“We have been forced by circumstances into the van ofthe trade union movement. We did not ask for this honour, but we willnot let you down. Don’t let us down.”" }

{ "content": "This was the first sign that the TUC had supported the idea ofworkshop collections. There was no sign, however, that thecollections were being enthusiastically organised by the leadership.At any rate, such collections could not be substituted for the biggrants the union needed to keep its hardship fund going. Workshopcollections could never provide enough money fast enough.A further problem dogged the UPW executive. The money collected bythe TUC the previous week had been paid in interest-free loans.To some extent, this was a fiction. Many unions have rulesrestraining them from making large payments outside the union. And inmany instances (though by no means in all) repayment would not inpractice be demanded. Formally, however, the money was on loan, andthe UPW’s bankers, already demanding the title deeds of the union’sheadquarters as security for its huge overdraft, were beginning tocomplain about further commitments.The crucial meeting of the strike was that of the General Councilof the TUC on Wednesday, February 24. All that week, the newspapershad been full of the TUC support for Jackson and the TUC’sdetermination not to allow a defeat of the postmen.At the meeting, Tom Jackson spelt out his dilemma. The TUC mustback their pledges of support and their rhetoric with cash, or thestrike would crumble. There were, he said, hopeful signs. EmploymentSecretary Robert Carr had been visited by the mail order firms, theAssociation of Small Businesses and by the Confederation of BritishIndustry, all of whom were pressing for an end to the strike, whichwas rapidly becoming intolerable.To Jackson’s horror and astonishment, his colleagues on theGeneral Council started to mumble about “problems anddifficulties”. There was, they said, no money available by way ofgrant. They might be able to rustle up another £100,000 ininterest-free loans. Jackson told them again that further loans wouldnot be allowed by his bankers, and reminded them again of theircommitment the previous week to a further £250,000. Even £100,000grant could keep him going another crucial week. The heroes ofTrafalgar Square the previous Sunday fell silent. The mightymilitants had turned into mice. A hundred thousand pounds in loansout of the millions of union funds and tens of millions in unioninvestments was all they could afford.When Jackson left the TUC that morning, he must have known thatthe game was up. He could not continue the hardship fund thefollowing week without selling his union headquarters. The followingday, the UPW rally in Hyde Park was the biggest yet, swelled by tensof thousands of Post Office Engineering Workers who had staged atoken strike in solidarity with the UPW. Jackson kept a brave face,as though nothing serious had happened. And the demonstrators wenthome confident that their struggle would continue.The axe, however, fell fast. On Monday, as news of the end of thehardship money filtered through, the numbers returning to workincreased sharply (though still only a tiny minority of the total).By Tuesday, Jackson was outlining his line of retreat to theexecutive. On Wednesday (March 3) the entire executive, having agreedto surrender by 27 votes to four (with the Communists on theexecutive supporting Jackson), travelled to the Department ofEmployment and concocted a formula for calling off the strike. A“committee of inquiry”, they agreed, would look into the PostOffice claims. The three-man committee would consist of one nomineefrom the union, one from the management and a chairman agreeable toboth. The chairman would have the right, in the event ofdisagreement, to impose a settlement. In sharp contrast to thesetting up of the Scamp Committee of Inquiry into the “dirty jobs”strike, the union would recommend an immediate return to work beforethe committee was even constituted. Unlike those of the WilberforceCommittee, this committee’s findings would be binding. This wasmarginally different from the arbitration which Jackson had beenrefusing for 10 weeks. But no one had any doubt that the Post Officewould have settled for such an inquiry in the first week of thestrike.The rally on Thursday, March 4, was a very different affair fromits predecessors. Many postal workers could not believe their ears,and shouted their disillusionment at their leaders. As the executiverecommendations went to the ballot, branch after branch recorded thedismay and militancy of the rank and file. In almost every urbanbranch, there was a substantial vote against the executive proposals,and in some branches the majority voted to stay out. A mass meetingof more than 2,500 UPW members in Liverpool, for instance, voted twoto one against going back to work.The real blame for the collapse of the strike must be placed onthe TUC General Council, first for not providing the funds when theywere needed, and secondly for not organising the other unions indispute with the Government to co-ordinate their efforts with thepostmen. The railwaymen’s and the teachers’ union leaders knewwell enough that the defeat of the postmen would lead tosubstantially smaller settlements for their members. Why then didthey not hasten their negotiations, and join the fray? Why at leastdid they not press for the necessary funds to be made available? Whydid not the more militant trade union leaders, notably Jack Jones ofthe T&GWU or Hugh Scanlon of the AUEW, openly break from theGeneral Council line and make available the funds which they could sowell afford?Above all, why did the General Council retreat from a positionwhich it seemed to have occupied in some strength?The answer was half-available to readers of the South Walesmorning paper, the Western Mail, on Friday, March 5,headed:POST PACT KEY FOR TORY UNIONS DEAL“The virtual collapse of the postmen’s strike”,wrote George Gardiner, that paper’s Lobby Correspondent, “hasopened the way for a new deal between the Government and the unions.“If the TUC is willing to support the principle that infuture all unions in dispute should go to arbitration, beforeconsidering strike action, I understand the Government is prepared toamend its Industrial Relations Bill when it comes back to the Commonson Monday week.”The parts of the Industrial Relations Bill which most offended thebureaucrats on the General Council were not those which penalisedunofficial strikers, nor those which outlawed sympathy strikes, butthose which restricted the closed shop. These restrictions, theleaders feared, would cut off important funds to the unions. Theweaker unions like USDAW and the G&MWU would lose tens ofthousands of members presently kept in union membership by closed" }

{ "content": "shop provisions, often with the agreement of employers. At all costs,the General Council wanted Clause 5 (about closed shops) altered. TheGovernment had made it plain that they might make concessions onClause 5 if the TUC would restrain its members from going on strike.For some time, Vic Feather had been seeking a meeting with thePrime Minister to discuss such a deal as well as other matters likeunemployment. The Daily Mirror on March 2 ran a front-pagearticle entitled End This Angry Silence, in which it attackedthe Prime Minister and the unions for not “getting together”.The Tory Government was dangling possible changes in theIndustrial Relations Bill as a carrot to prompt the TUC to immediateaction on the postal workers’ strike. What was the point, Heath’srepresentatives asked Feather, in talking about the TUC restrainingstrikes at a time when one of the biggest unions in the country was“paralysing the nation” by refusing arbitration? Only if the poststrike was stopped on terms of arbitration would the Government talkto the TUC.These arguments carried much weight with the “committee room”bureaucrats in the TUC who had resented not being asked to DowningStreet since the Tory Government was elected. Here at last was achance to get into a committee room with the Government again. Withsuch a prize, who cared about Tom Jackson and his Post Officeworkers?Indeed, the more crusted of the General Council reactionarieswelcomed an excuse to sell the postmen down the river. They wereterrified by the prospect not of the postmen’s defeat, but of theirvictory. For if the postmen’s strike had forced the Government toconcede substantial wage claims, what fantastic class forces would beunleashed in all the other unions? How would the diehards in theGeneral Council hope in such circumstances to exert the “control”over their members to which they had become accustomed? How wouldthey be able to stop them from engaging in open conflict with theGovernment, the employers – who knows, the whole structure ofsociety? Such thoughts struck terror into the kind hearts andcoronets who make up the TUC General Council. And when the Governmentissued its ultimatum: No talks while the postal strike is on,the mind of the General Council was rapidly made up. Tom Jackson andhis 200,000 postal workers would have to go to the wall.They could rely on Jackson not to expose their double-dealing. Atno time after the fateful meeting on February 24 did Jackson openlyattack the General Council or any member of it for knifing his unionin the back. An open appeal to the rank and file of the unions, withthe real facts of the sell-out thoroughly exposed, would have won forJackson, if not the necessary funds, at any rate the continuedsupport of his rank and file. Yet Jackson chose to keep mum, to takethe blame for the decision, and to retain his seat and his friends onthe General Council. The despair and disillusionment of his membersis so much the worse for his failure properly to explain to them thereal reasons for the strike’s collapse.On the evening of March 3, several hours after the UPW executivehad gone to the Department of Employment to lick the boots of Mr.Ryland and Mr. Carr, Mr. Victor Feather blandly called a pressconference at Congress House. He had, he said, sent a letter fordelivery to 10 Downing Street asking Mr. Heath for “early talksbetween the Government and the TUC on the worsening economicsituation”.“Previously”, wrote the Daily TelegraphIndustrial Correspondent the next day (March 4), “the TUC hasoffered to discuss wage restraint if the Government would firstundertake to drop the Industrial Relations Bill. Now, althoughkilling the Bill remains the TUC’s hope, it is no longer adoptingsuch a rigid approach which would make fruitful discussions virtuallyimpossible.”The reply from Downing Street was almost instantaneous. Mr. Heathpaused only to discover from his Minister of Employment that the poststrike was all but over. He then picked up the telephone, got throughto Congress House and courteously assured Mr. Feather that he wasonly too willing to talk to the General Council.The following morning the front page of the Daily Mirrorcarried two headlines. “POST STRIKE IS OVER”, it shouted, andthen, next door, in smaller type: “HEATH BREAKS THE ANGRY SILENCE”.Peter Jenkins of the Guardian is by no stretch of theimagination a revolutionary socialist. He is, however, in close touchwith Tom Jackson, and he knew what had gone on at the GeneralCouncil.“The trade union movement”, he wrote on March 4,“made warlike noises. It edged towards a confrontation with theGovernment; but when it came to the point, it at once thought betterof it and quickly drew back. The trade union movement was shown to belacking not only in will but also totally in strategic sense. Thelessons of that unedifying spectacle will not be lost on other tradeunions, on public opinion or on the Government.” Part 5. The LessonsThe immediate effects of the collapse of the post strike will befelt by other workers in the public sector, such as railwaymen andteachers. Union leaders who allowed the Government to take on thepostal workers in an isolated struggle are now using the defeat as anexcuse to lumber their own members with wage increases that will notkeep up with rises in the cost of living. The rank and file in theseunions must make sure that the postal workers’ strike is the lastin which the Government divides and rules in this way. They shoulddemand the building up of a “Public Sector Alliance” of differentunions to wage a unified fight back.For postmen, the immediate results of the collapse will be evenmore serious. Whatever is gained or lost at the committee of inquiry,Ryland (who must surely be promoted as Post Office chairman) willseek to use the strike’s aftermath to cut down on postal services(and workers). His eyes are fixed on Sweden, allegedly the home of“progress” and the “Welfare State”, where postal serviceshave been progressively slashed over the past decade. There is onlyone postal delivery outside the commercial centre of Stockholm. Ruraldeliveries and collections have been cut back to almost nothing. Noparcels are delivered. Meanwhile, the telephone service is expandingat a rapid rate and making huge profits for the firms which feed offit.All Ryland’s statement’s during and after the strike commithim to a Swedish policy which could mean massive redundancies among" }

{ "content": "postmen, quite apart from the slashing of the “public service”,especially to those (the majority) who cannot afford telephones.For the trade union movement in general, the Post Office disputeis a major setback. An arrogant and offensive Government, composedentirely of wealthy businessmen, will now attempt to ride roughshodover the demands of workers elsewhere.They will not find it easy. The TUC General Council sell-out ofthe postmen can be compared in its cynicism to their sell-out of theminers in 1926, but the General Strike of that year was the last gaspof a working class locked out and bullied for half a decade. Today,the strength of the workers’ anger is much more powerful. Therefusal among workers to be pushed around by the wealthy is strongernow than ever before in history. The Government, in spite of itsvictory over the Post Office workers, will not find the workerssubmissive to a class assault of the type which they arecontemplating. The spirit of postmen, and of workers everywhere, isfar from broken.How can that spirit be preserved, and expanded? Certainly not, asthe post strike shows, by “leaving it to the executive” or, evenless, “leaving it to the General Council”. Rank-and-file postmenhave learned the hard way how trade union leaders, when it comes tothe crunch, are prepared to make squalid deals even with reactionaryGovernments in order to “pacify” their own members. The Union ofPost Office Workers’ Conference at Bournemouth this spring will bea lively affair, and already branch rules throughout the country arebeing re-written to allow more participation and control by the rankand file.There is a more attractive doctrine, however, which has also beenexposed by the post strike. In the four years from 1966 – 70 duringwhich a Labour Government carried out policies of which any ToryGovernment would have been proud, many workers lost hope in politics,or political solutions. They have imagined since that militancy andsolidarity in their unions will be enough to win their battles. Anyattempt to link their strike with the struggles of workers elsewhere,in Britain or in the world, has been suspected as politics, which hasbecome in many workers’ minds another word for opportunism orcareerism.Unfortunately, however, the assault on the workers, as the poststrike so clearly proves, is becoming more and more political. Thetiny group of rich and powerful men who control industry and propertyare determined to defend their class superiority from incessantdemands by the workers. They have organised politically,through their representatives in the Conservative Party, to pick offeach group of workers, isolate them, humiliate them and break theirspirit. Their struggle is not isolated in individualindustries or factories. They operate as a tightly-knit groupof politically motivated men. And the fight against their operationscannot be won by isolated acts of militancy, however prolonged andhowever heroic.The reaction from workers, if it is ever to succeed, must also bepolitical. That does not mean voting every five years for a Labourcandidate. It means linking different struggles, and pointing out thecommon enemy in each of them. It means binding the fight in thiscountry with similar fights abroad. It means mobilising people into apermanent political counter-offensive against the Tories and theclass they represent.For more than 25 years workers have been told by their politicalrepresentatives that the capitalist system works and that all thatmatters is to work it efficiently. Now, after 25 years of fullemployment and capitalist expansion, the system is as decadent, ascorrupt, as unfair, as violent, as ridiculous and contemptible as itever was. The humiliation of the postmen and the part played in it bythe TUC General Council is only a start. Things will get worse forthe workers unless they can build for themselves a new politicalinstrument capable of breaking through the thin crust of contemporarycapitalism and creating a society where the wealth which workersproduce is used for them, not against them. Top of the pageLast updated on 19 August 2016" }

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

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

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

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

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

{ "content": "In his 1987 book Corruption in British Politics 1895-1930, G.R. Searle notices how the natural tendency to corruption of the British political system in the 19th century, under Liberals and Tories, began to wane after 1918 with the advent of the labour movement and universal suffrage. This was because the power and thrust of Labour came not from above, from the big corporations or mega-rich individuals, but from below, from individuals hostile to great wealth, and from trade unions. The more democratic the trade unions, the less vulnerable they were to corruption. As long as Labour relied for its finance on its own constituent organisations, notably the unions, corruption was held at bay. It was the removal of that ballast by Blair, Mandelson and Co in the New Labour offensive of the 1990s that floated Labour so dramatically into the same sort of corruption that had swamped the Tories – and even worse. The challenge thrown out to British labour by the great wave of sleaze that now swamps its leaders is not to seek to wriggle out of the allegations by lies and prevarication, but to return to the democratic principles and organisations that brought the party into being in the first place, to public ownership and public accountability. Capitalism will always be corrupt, but socialism and its modern champions need not be. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004" }

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootState of terror(October 1995)From Socialist Review, No. 190, October 1995, pp. 12–13.Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review.Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal served to highlight the plight of over 3,000 Death Row prisoners in the US. Paul Foot looks at the history and injustice of capital punishment in BritainAs we contemplate the horrors of Death Row we’re inclined to write off capital punishment as a peculiarly American barbarism, a throwback to the distant reactionary past, unthinkable in civilised social democratic Britain. In fact, between 1900 and 1949 some 632 people were murdered by the British state because they had allegedly committed murder.In 1949 there was a Labour government in office. In the (Tory) Federal Republic of Germany capital punishment had just been abolished. In Holland and Scandinavia there had been no capital punishment for more than 50 years. British Labour, true to its radical traditions, could not make up its mind. It ducked the question by appointing a Royal Commission, which took four years to report. In the interim, with Labour still in office, Timothy Evans, a young Welsh worker, was brutally done to death by the hangman for murdering his beloved baby daughter – a murder to which Reginald Christie confessed several years later.The Royal Commission report in 1953 saw arguments on both sides, and its recommendations were equivocal. The (Tory) government happily decided to do nothing. But the argument would not go away. It was taken up enthusiastically by reformers of every description. Influential books by the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz and by Arthur Koestler put the case against. In 1957 capital punishment was abolished for most murders and retained only for murders of policemen or with firearms. Under this law James Hanratty, a young worker from north London, was hanged for a murder near Bedford on the A6 when (as later evidence proved) he was 200 miles away in Rhyl at the time.The argument for abolition got angrier. In 1965 the new Labour government allowed time for a private member’s bill which finally abolished it.Through all those years the argument on both sides of the Atlantic was rational.The case for capital punishment was based almost exclusively on its effectiveness as a deterrent. It was widely agreed by people on both sides of the argument that capital punishment was wholly indefensible unless it prevented murder on a substantial scale.The more the argument for capital punishment depended on a rational case for deterrence, the more it was lost. The Royal Commission found no conclusive evidence of deterrence. Especially impressive were the statistics from the United States where capital punishment had been abolished in some states, not in others. In North Dakota, for instance, where capital punishment was abolished in 1915, the murder rate was slightly lower than in South Dakota where the social composition was very similar and where capital punishment was still in force. In Maine capital punishment had been abolished in 1876 and reintroduced after a right wing hullabaloo following an especially nasty murder. The murder rate, however, went up even faster, so capital punishment was abolished again in 1887 – after which the rate subsided.The truth was that there was no correlation at all between the incidence of capital punishment and the incidence of murder. Murders were mainly personal or domestic crimes, immune from deterrence. Moreover, there were plenty of American ‘mistakes’ similar to the tragedies of Timothy Evans and James Hanratty. Capital punishment did not deter murders, and if a ‘mistake’ was made, there was no way of putting it right.In the 1950s and 1960s the possibility of such a mistake was widely dismissed in polite society. Lord Chancellor Lord Kilmuir, discussing the Evans case, told parliament that the idea that a judge, jury and the court of appeal could convict the wrong person was ‘in the realms of fantasy’. Those realms of fantasy have been visited again and again in recent years as an enormous stream of prisoners wrongly convicted for murder have emerged from the high court after years of wholly unjustified, and not at all fantastical, imprisonment.As long as the argument remains on a rational level – does hanging deter? – capital punishment doesn’t stand a chance. The most remarkable feature of the recent enthusiasm for the rope and the electric chair, however, is that it casts all reason aside. It is founded almost entirely on medieval incantations about ‘retribution’ (‘an eye for an eye’) and on a belief in violent punishment as a means of keeping the ‘criminal classes’ (that is, the lower classes) in order.The loonies who swept into the US Congress and Senate in last year’s right wing backlash couldn’t care less whether capital punishment deters or not. They are like the lynch mobs in those westerns where justice for a (usually white) victim of crime is the instant murder of someone who might (or might not) be responsible. Guilt and deterrence are not really relevant provided the anger of the mob is assuaged in blood.There is a grim logic behind this abandonment of logic. It was summed up for me when I was asked recently to take part in an episode of the BBC’s Moral Maze. The issue was the state murder of some poor British man who had been on Death Row for as long as anyone could remember. I came armed with the legal statistics about deterrence and mistakes by the legal system. They were brushed aside. An American professor in London declared, ‘I am with Thomas Hobbes. I want people to live in permanent fear of the laws.’" }

{ "content": "This assertion, which I dare say is a bit hard on Hobbes, explains what is happening. As the lunacies and unfairnesses of the market system become more and more obvious, as the precious market fails more and more ostentatiously to deliver the even-handed, civilised, rational society it promises, so the people who benefit from it seek to escape from rational thought altogether. Unable any longer even to pretend that their system can erode the poverty and inequality which create crime, they search for slogans which will satisfy the rage of the victims of crime and keep them in order at the same time. ‘Kill the murderers!’ is a fine slogan for both purposes, especially as almost all the alleged murderers due to be killed are poor or black or both.It matters not an iota that killing murderers does nothing to stop killing or murder, or that the people being executed may not be murderers at all. What matters is the immediate satisfaction of blood lust. The feeling that something is being done is far better than the reality of doing something, especially when doing something means dismantling the inequalities on which class society depends. It follows that the politicians and businessmen who clamour for these state murders are far, far more guilty of violence and social chaos than any of the victims of their society whom they want to murder. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019" }

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

{ "content": "Its recent takeover by the millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson and the appointment of the former SDP stalwart Ian Hargreaves as editor heralded a complete break with all these traditions and a lurch to the right so shameless and so sudden that socialists everywhere have been throwing it away in disbelief. What was left of the challenge of the New Statesman has now been totally engulfed in the Blair menace, which instead of exposing and defying the hideous priorities of modern capitalism, sings its praises. Tories queue up to be interviewed in it. It has much more money behind it than had Marxism Today. It may last longer on the Robinson millions. But its future, I guess, will be much the same. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootNo sects please(February 1986)From Socialist Worker, 15 February 1986.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, p. 227.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.FOR MOST of my life I’ve been putting up with being called a ‘sectarian’. This means, I think, that I’m more interested in the fortunes of a small group of socialists than in the future of society or the working class.The accusation normally comes from those who protest that they are part of the ‘broad movement’, or the ‘wider Labour movement’ or some such phrase, and that therefore the interests of the entire working class are far more important to them than the squabbles between groupuscules of the left.It’s a charge which, I confess, often puts me on the defensive, because we all know quite well that there is a fanatical and sectarian streak in the Marxism of small groups. Their very smallness, their apparent isolation from society at large tends to turn them inwards and to attract them to mumbo-jumbo and theology.There’s a temptation always to attack other socialists (who can occasionally even be defeated) rather than the real powers that be (who can’t).The Socialist Workers Party has been lectured over the years on such sectarianism by broad movement papers on the left such the New Statesman and the Tribune.I’m a faithful reader of both. Last week, the Diary in the New Statesman was written by Ian Williams, a Labour Party member in Liverpool who has written some perfectly good stuff in the past.His Diary this week has seven paragraphs. The second paragraph is an attack on Derek Hatton. It is a pretty nasty attack, by the way, but Ian Williams is a known opponent of Militant in Merseyside, so I suppose it was predictable.Then, in paragraph six, Ian Williams attacks (wait for it) Militant in a paragraph reeking of sectarianism. In paragraph seven he starts off by attacking Militant for saying he writes for the ‘right wing’ New Statesman. In three out of seven paragraphs he attacks Militant and not a word about the Labour leadership or even about the Tory government.For relief from this, I turned to Tribune and the star column of David Blunkett. David devotes pretty well all his column this week to the ‘Lunatics on the Left who test out socialist purity by whether it matches the high-pitched squeal of their own tuning fork rather than a commitment to policy.’David is very cross with a lot of lunatics on the left who keep raising ‘points on the agenda’ at meetings and not allowing party leaders like himself to get on with explaining the policy which will bring Labour to office. He doesn’t deal with the difficulties encountered by socialists in the Labour Party who take the old fashioned view that people should not be kicked out of the party because they are committed to socialist policies.Everywhere I meet Labour Party members the talk is the same. Very left wing people tell me they are ‘shocked’ by the ‘corruption’ in the Liverpool Labour Party. Almost everyone has a new joke about Derek Hatton. Everyone is against witch hunts. Witches are all very well, and they don’t stop Labour winning elections. But really, you know, when all is said and done, these Militant people are beyond the pale.Well, it was a relief, I can tell you, to turn to Socialist Worker where there is not a single attack on Militant in the entire paper. Indeed, I can’t find any attack on any socialist grouping.There are some heavy bashes at Rupert Murdoch, and at Tony Dubbins and Brenda Dean for letting him smash their unions, and then there are some attacks on people called Botha and Duvalier, who as far as I know, are not members of any Trotskyist tendency. But there isn’t even a spare inch anywhere for a single nasty joke about Derek Hatton. Who are the sectarians? Top of the pageLast updated on 27 October 2019" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootIn the colonial style(July 1996)From Reviews, Socialist Review, No. 199, July–August 1996, p. 28.Transcribed & marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.A Struggle for PowerTheodore DraperLittle, Brown £25This book opens with a sentence of breathtaking banality. Justifying ‘another book on the American Revolution’, Theodore Draper writes:‘In my view, the Revolution was basically a struggle for power between Great Britain and its American colonies.’Er, yes. But 330 pages later Draper explains what he means and why the sentence is not so banal after all.‘The raison d’etre of the American colonies for the British was economic. The colonists knew that the weak link in the British colonial chain was the need to hold on to the American market for British manufactures.’What he meant by this early statement of the obvious was that there are hundreds of interpretations of the American Revolution, most of them connecting old fashioned American jingoism with modern American imperialism. But there are very few books on the subject which start at the real beginning: economics.Draper’s book starts with a fascinating account of a pamphlet war in Britain which started in 1759, in the middle of what was really the first world war, the Seven Years War between Britain and France. The question for debate in these pamphlets sounds bizarre. In the event of a peace settlement, which of two territories should Britain insist on seizing from the French: Canada or Guadeloupe? The argument for getting exclusive control of the big one – Canada – seemed irresistible; and so, eventually, the French were chucked out. But several perspicacious commentators argued instead for Guadeloupe. First, it was stunningly rich. Secondly, it was easier to defend. Thirdly, most important, the confidence and ambitions of the Americans would be enormously increased if the French threat was removed from Canada. Fifteen years before the first shots were fired in the American War of Independence, there were people on both sides of the ocean who foresaw a widening breach between the economic interests of Britain and those of her American colonies.For at least a decade after 1759, though, the old colonial arguments held out. British industry and commerce desperately needed the huge, burgeoning and captive market in the American colonies. The colonies were not expensive to run – they ran themselves through their own assemblies. Of course, the elections to those assemblies cut out the vast majority of the population. But they were home grown, and paid scant regard to the British-appointed governors who spent most of their time whining for their expenses. For more than 100 years the relationship had survived uneasily as a sort of stand off. Draper describes it as ‘dual power’. Sovereign Britain laid down the ground rules while the day to day administration was carried out by the local American assemblies. Because the relationship was essentially exploitative, however, dual power could not last forever. As time went on, the British government demanded more, and the American colonists conceded less. What finally started to blow the whole imperial edifice to pieces was a familiar little word: tax.The British had won the Seven Years War, but they still had to pay for it. As soon as the war was over, in 1763, the faction in the British parliament which demanded more money from the colonies grew in stature and influence. These gentlemen could not see why the colonies should not pay more tax to help defray the expenses of keeping their country secure for British trade. So in quick succession the British parliament passed laws demanding new taxes from the Americans – first a sugar tax, then a stamp tax, then a series of other measures designed to bring the colonies to heel. These were known (after a particularly brainless and bullying chancellor of the exchequer) as the Townshend Acts. One by one the taxes were passed into law, and one by one they were repealed as the Americans united against them. ‘No taxation without representation!’ was the cry. What infuriated and united the people in all 13 colonies was not so much the economic burden of the new taxes, which Draper shows was relatively light. Americans united behind the principle that Americans should decide what taxes they should pay; and that taxation was not a matter which could in any way be trusted to a distant parliament for which no American had a single vote.Opposition to the new taxes could be disturbingly uncivilised. In the Boston riots against the stamp tax in 1765, for instance, the ‘mob’ broke into the prisons and freed everyone who had been sent there for riot or any other political offence. Though the British had by this time installed troops, they were nothing like strong enough to cope with these mighty demonstrations, and the people were repeatedly triumphant. Their triumphs stoked up the fury of the new British chancellor soon to be prime minister, Edward North, an even denser bigot than Townshend. The implacability of the colonists and the stubbornness of the British government continued up to the Boston Tea Party (brilliantly explained by Draper) and on to the hot war which eventually broke out in 1775." }

{ "content": "I had hoped when I opened the book that it would deal with the armed struggle for independence, and the extraordinary, revolutionary experiments in democracy which took place during the war, especially in Philadelphia. Instead, the book stops at the start of the war, so in a way the really exciting events are yet to come. But Draper’s book is grittily attractive nevertheless. It never abandons its roots in the economics which, Draper insists, set the war going in the first place. This insistence on the essentially colonial nature of the war answers a lot of questions. The enforced, uneasy unity between the classes during the war explains why the Americans could defeat what was then the biggest and proudest military machine on earth – but it also explains why the American Revolution did not go half so far as its French successor in extirpating the dark forces of feudalism. It took another 100 years or so, for instance, for bourgeois America to rid itself of the vile barbarism of slavery. (The French Revolution, by contrast, abolished slavery in a single decree early in 1794.) The class war kept breaking out in the American Revolution, but it was continually fudged at the edges by the colonial war. What Governor Shirley of Boston called ‘working artificers, seafaring men and the low sort of people’ were called up to do their bit to get rid of the English. They were put back in their place rather more meekly than in France a decade later, and this long but easy to read history book goes a long way to explaining why. Top of the pageLast updated on 8 November 2019" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootThe Case for SocialismWhat the Socialist Workers Party Stands For(1990)First published in London in July 1990 by the Socialist Workers Party (GB).Copyright © 1990 Socialist Workers Party and Paul Foot.Published here with permission.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Preface1. The Foaming Wave2. The Full Tide3. The Tottering Thrones4. The Growing Wrath5. The New Eminence6. A World to Win Top of the pageLast updated on 5.2.2005" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootStop the Cuts(1976)A Rank and File pamphlet published by the Rank & File Organising Committee, 1976.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.A letter from Maureen RobertsonDeath by a thousand cutsHousingEducationThe Health ServicePersonal servicesThe end of the subsides: You’re on your on nowYes, we can afford it!Mr Healey’s pipe dreamIn conclusionWhy can’t Labour help us?The challenge of the Rank and FileWhat to fight for:No Redundancies No Cuts!Insist on full establishmentNo unfilled vacanciesHow to fightWhat to fight for:A Programme for Struggle Top of the pageLast updated on 24 July 2018" }

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

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootHarry McShane(April 1988)From Socialist Worker, April 1988.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 162–165.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The commonest jibe of reactionaries against revolution is that it is an infatuation of youth. When people get old, we are constantly told, they drop the silly idealisms of their youth. They become ‘old realists’.I contemplated this jibe last Saturday as I stood (it was standing room only) in Craigton Crematorium with some 300 other people, many of them elderly Glasgow workers. We were paying our last respects to Harry McShane.Harry died last week. He was ninety-six. He became a revolutionary Marxist in 1908, and he died a revolutionary Marxist in 1988. Can anyone show me one other person in the whole history of the world who was a revolutionary Marxist for eighty years?It would be wonderful enough if it were just that Harry managed to sustain these ideas all that time. But ideas like his are not ‘just’ sustained. They can only be sustained in the heat of the struggle between the classes.All his life Harry was an agitator in that struggle, a fighter. He made up his mind very early on (somewhere round 1910) that the socialist society he wanted was not going to be made by anyone for the workers; it was going to be made by the workers or not at all – and therefore their battles against employers and government were central to the whole process of political change.The workers needed to use their muscle (‘We never realize how strong we are,’ he used to say again and again) but their muscle alone was not enough without politics.Ever since he broke with the church at the age of sixteen and became a lifelong incurable atheist, Harry read books – books about British imperialism in Ireland and in Africa; about women’s liberation; about the Russian Revolution; about religion. He read these books, and encouraged others to read them, not in the interests of some arid scholarship but in order to improve his understanding of the world so that it could more speedily be changed.Harry was an engineering worker. He was a close ally of the Scottish Marxist John Maclean, and campaigned with him on Clydeside against the imperialist war of 1914–18. He joined the Communist Party almost as soon as it was founded and was a member for thirty years.He was the Scottish correspondent of the Daily Worker and Scottish organizer of the National Unemployed Workers Movement. Like pretty well all other Communists of the time, he was unwilling to accept the collapse of the workers’ state in Russia. He once told me of his excitement when he visited Russia in 1931. ‘It was so easy to believe the workers were in charge,’ he said.After the war though, his doubts grew. They sprang from his faith in the rank and file of the working class. What was happening to that rank and file in Czechoslovakia in 1948, or East Berlin in 1953?In Britain the rank and file of the Communist Party were treated increasingly as a stage army, always expected to agree with the leadership. When he was disciplined for not taking part in a standing ovation for a party official, Harry had had enough – if he’d been disciplined because he had given a standing ovation, perhaps he would have understood.There is a picture in the Glasgow Daily Record sometime in 1953 of Harry walking across Queens Park with his hat in his hand. It was the day he left the Communist Party. ‘I couldn’t stop them taking the picture,’ he explained.But when the same paper (and the Daily Express) offered him £500 – more than a year’s salary – to ‘tell all’ about the Communist Party, he swore at both of them (he seldom swore, but he did on that occasion). Instead, he went back (at the age of sixty-two) to the yards as a labourer, and worked until he was sixty-nine to pay the stamps to qualify for a pension.When I met him first in 1961, he was supported politically only by two outstanding socialist workers, Hugh Savage and Les Foster, who had broken from the Communist Party with him. He was seventy – but full of the joys of life, and of the hopes of a better world. He was still a revolutionary socialist through and through. He was quite determined that a socialist world could and should be won.He was scarred from his bitter experience with the Communist Party, and wary of joining another political organization. But when, in 1963, we set up the first fledgling organization of the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party) in the Horseshoe Bar near Glasgow’s Central Station, Harry never missed a meeting. When in the same year the TUC called for a demonstration against unemployment, Harry helped to organize the buses.In the great debates which took place in the Glasgow trades council at that time (and they were great debates; greater by far than anything you hear in parliament) Harry relentlessly attacked his former Communist Party colleagues for selling out simple class solidarity in exchange for a ship order from Russia, or to send another cosy delegation to Warsaw or Budapest.He identified Russia as state-capitalist, and the Communists as unwitting stooges of another imperial power. Yet when he was approached by the organizer for Catholic Action in the trades council, and asked to form a loose anti-Communist alliance, he swore again.‘At least these people believe they are socialists – you don’t believe in anything except your god,’ he spat at the frightened delegate, who (literally) ran away.The Right to Work marches of the late 1970s were meat and drink to Harry. He sent off the first march from Manchester with a truly magnificent speech, bettered only when he spoke to 6,000 people at the final rally in the Albert Hall." }

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

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootLewis Grassic GibbonPoet of the Granite City(December 2001)From Socialist Review, No.258, December 2001, p.24-25.Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The great Scots writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born 100 years ago this year. Paul Foot looks at the work of this champion of changeMany, many years ago, way back in 1975, I was working full time as a reporter on Socialist Worker. That was the best job I ever had because I could integrate what I wrote with what I thought. Another advantage was a close friendship with the other full time reporter on the paper – Laurie Flynn. Laurie spent a lot of time encouraging me to read an obscure Scottish writer with the ludicrous name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Partly to shut him up and partly to while away the 14-hour journey, I set off on a speaking tour of Scotland, armed only with a copy of A Scots Quair, a trilogy of Grassic Gibbon novels.On the way to Inverness, my first stop, I read the whole of the opening novel, Sunset Song, and on the way back, through Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh, I read the other two, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. I never stopped reading throughout the entire journey, except perhaps to gaze out of the window south of Aberdeen, drinking in the scenery Grassic Gibbon so gloriously described. The experience was a conversion, a rapture only once previously encountered – when I first read the poems of Shelley. And this was not a coincidence, since Grassic Gibbon was an unreconstructed Shelleyan and had even named one of his novels Stained Radiance, a quote from Adonais, Shelley’s mournful obituary to John Keats.Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s background could not have been more different to that of Shelley. He was born James Leslie Mitchell 100 years ago in Aberdeenshire. His father was an impoverished crofter, Danes Mitchell, and that weird pen name came from his mother, Lellias Grassic Gibbon. He was brought up on the land, and all his life retained a healthy contempt for the reactionary seduction of agricultural work and rural life. He was educated at a school where the teachers were instructed not to educate the children of crofters, and his father was bitterly hostile to the notion that children should learn anything that might interfere with adult work. Somehow the precocious youngster defied his father and his teachers, and read everything he could lay his hands on.In 1917, at the age of 16, he ran away to Aberdeen and got a job as a cub reporter on a local paper. In Aberdeen he joined the trades council, which had a fine history and had welcomed many famous socialist speakers at its meetings. The official history of the trades council recalls with special pleasure the visit of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor and the magnificent rendering of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind by her friend Edward Aveling. Like many other British cities in 1917, Aberdeen had a new soviet, formed in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. The soviet’s most enthusiastic founder was the 16 year old Lewis Grassic Gibbon.Not much later the young socialist moved to Glasgow where he got a job on Farmers Weekly. He was sacked after a few months for fiddling his expenses so that he could make donations to the British Socialist Party, one of the three organisations that merged to form the Communist Party in 1920. He was promptly blacklisted by the newspaper employers in the west of Scotland, and could not get a job anywhere as a journalist. So he joined the army and travelled round the world as a not altogether loyal member of the Royal Army Service Corps. In nine years in the army (1919-28) he developed a taste and a talent for travel writing. His descriptions of faraway places have stood the test of time, and many of them have been reprinted.He came out of the army in 1928 determined to devote his life to writing, and settled down with his wife Rhea in Welwyn Garden City. Few newspaper or magazine publishers would take his stuff, though one of his first published short stories was read and acclaimed by H.G. Wells. A Scots QuairMost great writers have purple passages in their lives. Shelley’s was in the months following the Peterloo massacre in 1819. Grassic Gibbon’s was from 1928, when he left the army, till his shockingly early death from peritonitis in February 1935. He was only 33. He had one novel published in 1928 and another in 1929. He wrote the trilogy, A Scots Quair, from 1932 to 1934. In between he wrote another novel, Spartacus, about the Thracian slave leader of a revolution in Roman times. His attitude to Spartacus was similar to that of Karl Marx who, asked by his daughter Eleanor who was his favourite character in all history, replied at once ‘Spartacus’, even though any well read Marxist could have told him that Spartacus lived many hundreds of years before the proletariat even existed. Marx (and Grassic Gibbon) were electrified not by Spartacus’s deep understanding of the slave economy, but by his fighting spirit. In between all these novels there is a mountain of journalism and travel writing that defies belief, even though Grassic Gibbon revealed that he consistently wrote on average 4,000 words a day (you try it)." }

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

{ "content": "‘That was the best deliverance of all, as she saw it, sitting there, quiet. That change will rule the earth and the sky and the waters underneath the earth. Change, whose face she once feared to see, whose right hand was Death and whose left hand Life might be stayed by none of the dreams of men, love, hate, compassion, anger or pity, gods or devils or wild crying to the sky. He passed and re-passed in the ways of the wind, Deliverer, Destroyer and Friend in one.’This belief in and understanding of change, materialistic irreligious change, inspired Grassic Gibbon every bit as it inspired Shelley when he wrote his Ode to the West Wind – the ‘destroyer and preserver’ the ‘trumpet of a prophecy’, the ‘tempestuous’ revolution. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 Mai 2014" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul Foot‘A groundswell of anger and dismay’(July 1998)From Racism, incompetence, collusion or corruption?, Socialist Review, No.221, July 1998, pp.2-3.Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Paul Foot writes about the Stephen Lawrence caseEveryone knows that the rich and powerful, through the newspapers and television channels they own and control, normally succeed in keeping their reins on public consciousness. The ‘stories’ that interest and excite people are, as a result, safely marooned in palaces or sports stadia. Every now and then, however, a story circulates which defies these rules, and which engages the public attention in spite of every effort from on high to suppress it. Such a story is the 1993 murder in Eltham, south east London, of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and its aftermath.Five months after the murder, one of Scotland Yard’s senior detectives, Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Osland, now a Tory councillor in Croydon, circulated a memorandum announcing that he was ‘losing patience’ with Neville and Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s parents, and suggesting that the police officers engaged in the murder inquiry should sue the couple for libel. The irony in the notion that police officers who had not brought Stephen’s murderers to justice should secure damages from his parents was plainly lost on Mr Osland. He felt he and his force had been entirely justified by a ‘review’ conducted by a senior detective in London, Detective Chief Superintendent Roderick John Barker. Mr Barker’s ‘review’ which flowed from a secret inquiry and was of course not published, had discovered that the police investigation following the Lawrence murder was almost entirely flawless.This remained the official police view as the long saga of the hunt for Stephen’s murderers unfolded. Weeks after the murder, five men were arrested. Two were identified by a witness to the murder, Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brookes. But Duwayne’s evidence was tainted – by a police officer who was appointed to drive him home and whose account of the conversation he had with Duwayne (which Duwayne hotly contested) persuaded the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the charges.Angry and disillusioned, the Lawrence family took out a private prosecution against three of the men. The prosecution failed – largely because of the ‘tainting’ of Duwayne Brookes’s evidence by his police escort. An inquest jury proclaimed unequivocally that Stephen had been murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. The Daily Mail (in a sudden fit of conscience brought on by the fact that Neville Lawrence had once painted the house of the Mail editor) named the five original suspects and denounced them as the murderers. In spite of all this, the position five years on is that the murderers of Stephen Lawrence are still at large.The early and prolonged confidence of the Metropolitan Police in their handling of the case began to wilt with the publication last year of part of the report by Kent police into the Lawrence investigation. The report was highly critical of the Metropolitan Police in charge of the murder inquiry. It concentrated on their failure to respond to information which flowed in to them immediately after the murder. On the day after the murder, a reliable informant, known as James Grant (a pseudonym) gave the inquiry team the names of the five suspects, who, he disclosed, had been carrying out racist attacks systematically in the area, who carried knives and boasted about using them on black people they met in the street, and who were out on the rampage in the area of the murder on the night it happened. Other reliable information followed. Most extraordinary was a witness who said she had visited the suspects’ home on the day after the murder and had seen them washing clothes and wiping blood off a knife. The senior officers in charge of the inquiry, however, decided not to arrest the suspects. They adopted a policy of delay’ which in the view of the Kent police hopelessly hampered the investigation and made it much more difficult to procure vital evidence. Despite its critical tone, however, the Kent police report concluded only that the officers in charge of the Lawrence investigation had been either mistaken or incompetent. The report effectively acquitted the investigating police of racism or corruption.The report was the nominal reason behind Jack Straw’s decision to set up a full public inquiry into the events before and after Stephen’s death. The nominal reason was bolstered by the continued campaign of Neville and Doreen Lawrence, who refused to be fobbed off or patronised. Their long battle had swung huge sections of the British public behind them. When the public inquiry into the events opened almost exactly five years after Stephen’s death, the large room at the Elephant and Castle designated for the public hearings was packed with supporters of the family. The enthusiasm for the campaign was not confined to south London or to black people. As sellers of Socialist Worker all over Britain were to discover, a groundswell of anger and dismay about the Lawrence case was building up all over the country, among people of all colours and of all and no political persuasions.This groundswell grew and grew as the inquiry proceeded in its quaint and sedate way. It overflowed into the hearings themselves, not just in applause and tears for the Lawrences and for Duwayne Brookes but also in mocking laughter at the police.Leaflets were issued from ‘the public gallery’ which consistently denounced the apparent reluctance of the police to disclose documents. This unexpected and entirely admirable expression of public outrage shifted the inquiry itself to such an extent that a grim story is beginning to emerge which is entirely different from anything originally contemplated." }

{ "content": "The early intention of the inquiry, it seemed, had been to contain criticism of the police within the boundaries of the Kent report: to blame the investigating officers for incompetence and mistakes, but nothing more. In the early days, this damage limitation exercise was conducted uneasily but reasonably effectively. It changed only with the rising clamour outside and the determination of the Lawrences and Duwayne Brookes’s lawyer to get answers to the questions which Kent police had not even asked. Why had the suspects not been arrested immediately? Why had the information from the informers been allowed to fester for so long? Gradually, a name started to be floated in cross-examination: Norris. David Norris was one of the five suspects. His father was Clifford Norris, a well known gangland racketeer, and arms smuggler, who is now in prison. Clifford Norris, h emerged, had paid an important witness not to give evidence against his boy. Could Norris have in any way influenced the police to ‘go easy’ on the lad?At first the lawyers for the police and the inquiry mocked any such suggestion and dismissed it. But then it emerged that Clifford Norris had been seen in pubs on several occasions with a flying squad officer called Coles. Customs officers had mounted a surveillance operation on Coles, and were surprised to see him handing over plastic bags to their suspect. They reported Coles to the police who investigated him and, remarkably, cleared him.So what, was the initial reply? What had Coles to do with Stephen Lawrence? Quite a lot, it then emerged. First, the officer in charge of the murder investigation, DCS Iain Crampton, who took the decision not to arrest the five suspects, has worked with Coles at Bexleyheath police station. When Coles was in trouble for the Customs business over Norris, Crampton had written him a glowing reference. Secondly, Coles had been selected as an escort officer for the key witness, Duwayne Brookes, when the latter gave evidence in the private prosecution at the Old Bailey.Such revelations hugely shifted the axis of the inquiry. Increasingly, the police seemed on the run. The cross-examination of former DCS Barker, whose report had given such comfort to the police in 1993, was so embarrassing that the inquiry chairman, Sir William Macpherson, denounced him as ‘not credible’ and his report as ‘indefensible’. The feeling of even the most servile journalist at the inquiry (and most of them are not servile at all) is that there is more, much more to come out yet; and whether it does or not depends at least to some extent on the persistence and growth of the justice for Stephen Lawrence campaign.The inquiry continues. For the moment, however, the story of the campaign is powerful evidence against those who moan that the British people are ‘intrinsically racist’ or that it is ‘impossible to interest anyone in individual justice campaigns’. The campaign has carved the name of Stephen Lawrence deep into the consciousness of the working masses, the enormous majority of whom detest the racist gangs who pour blood onto the streets, and admire the strength and courage of those who campaign to put a stop to them once and for all. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004" }

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

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

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

{ "content": "How can we encourage such a challenge? Revolutions cannot be created out of thin air. They can only arise in an atmosphere of confidence. So the only way to work for a revolution and a more democratic society is to relate to the day to day struggles that always absorb the exploited lives of the working people.Every strike, every demonstration, every manifestation of revolt carries with it the seed of revolution. The pompous and self absorbed activities of the representatives of parliamentary democracy work against such a revolution because they constantly dampen down, mock and humiliate live protest.They pretend they are democrats, but by their actions prove the opposite. The seeds of a new more democratic society can only be sown in struggle against the old one. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010" }

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

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

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

{ "content": "Almost as soon as Lloyd George had proposed his partition plan, he dropped it. Redmond never recovered from the rejection of his treachery and died soon afterwards. FOLLOWING the elections of 1918 a predominantly Conservative coalition government was returned, headed by the Liberal Lloyd George. Seventy-six Sinn Feiners were elected as Irish MPs, 36 of whom were in prison. The Nationalists were effectively annihilated. The prospect of long term British rule in all Ireland was no longer credible.Once again the British rulers went back to their old plan. Once more they played the Orange card. The plot was simple – to hold Ireland by force while establishing the six north eastern counties as a “safe” British enclave.The Government of Ireland Bill proposed two parliaments, one in the 26 counties, the other in the six. While the parliaments were set up, some sort of law and order had to be maintained by the time honoured methods recognised by Marx fifty years earlier: “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”.On 23 June 1921 the Ulster parliament (composed, needless to say, of a majority of Protestants determined to maintain “a Protestant state for a Protestant people”) was opened by the King. At once the British rulers breathed a sigh of relief. Ulster was safe, the sectarian enclave was assured – and now it was no longer necessary to fight the rebels in the South. Instead they could be called to London for a conference.On 8 July, only two weeks after the Ulster parliament was opened, Eamonn De Valera, the leader of Sinn Fein, was called to London for a secret meeting with Lloyd George. Three months later a full scale Sinn Fein delegation was ushered into Downing Street for talks with British ministers.These rebels were represented by two journalists (Arthur Griffiths and Erskine Childers), two solicitors (Gavin Duffy and Eamonn Duggan), a landowner (Robert Barton) and a bank clerk (Michael Collins).They were, in the purest meaning of the word, petty bourgeois leaders. They represented a stronger strain of nationalism than had Redmond and Devlin – but nationalism nevertheless. There was not a single voice of labour at the conference table, not a word to harken back to the magnificent and prophetic writings of Connolly eight years earlier.The British ministers had a plan which was well summed up by Bonar Law. “I would give the South anything,” he said “or almost anything, but I would not enforce anything on Ulster.”A great diplomatic game was then played out, according to this plan. Hours, and then days were spent discussing matters such as the Oath of Allegiance which future Irish MPs should or should not take to the Crown, the possible Dominion status of the new independent state, the access to Irish ports by the British navy in time of war and the question of tariff barriers.In all these matters the British ministers had only a passing interest, but they kept the Irishmen talking over them interminably. Every now and then, with much grunting and bad temper, the British ministers would make a concession.In all these matters Griffiths, Collins and Co (Childers, by far the most uncompromising of the original six, was swiftly removed from the negotiating table) felt, quite rightly, that they were making progress.They agreed that the question of Ulster should be left to last. When it came, at last, the treaty was almost complete. It seemed churlish to quibble about the last question on the agenda.Each one of the five restated their opposition to partition. Ireland was indivisible. Partition of their country could not be contemplated. When Lloyd George, in a “final” offer, suggested a Boundary Commission which would look into the fairness or otherwise of the six county state, one by one the Sinn Feiners started to think about the unthinkable, and finally signed the unsignable.All five, including Michael Collins, the most implacable of the Sinn Fein fighters in the war against the Black and Tans, signed the treaty which cut their country in half. STILL THE MATTER was not yet finally decided, however. The treaty had to be ratified by the Irish parliament, the Dáil. There was angry opposition to what was seen as a “sell-out”. Day after day the debate raged. Astonishingly, however, the argument mirrored the treaty discussions in London. There was opposition from the militant Republicans. But what worried them was the oath of allegiance to the Crown, the accessibility of Irish ports to the British navy and the status of the new independence.Three hundred and thirty eight pages recorded the great Dáil debate; yet of these only nine were devoted to partition.For nearly a year Ireland was plunged into another war – between the new government representing the Sinn Fein majority for the treaty and the anti-treaty militants. The best elements of Sinn Fein were systematically destroyed not by the British against whom they had fought so bravely, but by their own government, armed by the British.Since Lloyd George’s diplomatic triumph of 1922 every single one of James Connolly’s worst predictions have come true.The carnival of reaction has swung on, North and South. In the North the Orange Ascendancy has held onto its power by means of (I repeat the phrase yet again) “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”. Special police forces, gerrymandered voting systems, discriminatory employment and housing policies – all these and many more have served to create one of the most reactionary societies in the world.In the South all movements for progress have been frustrated or patronised by the Roman Catholic Church. It is not simply that medieval superstitions still pass for government policy in matters of state intervention in people’s sex lives, but also that the reaction in the South has held back social reform movements. HOW DOES the argument used by Carson and his colleagues for partition in 1912 to 1922 stand up today? The financial reasons they gave then have vanished. The old industries of the North are in decay." }

{ "content": "If profits were all they were interested in the British ruling class would have abandoned Northern Ireland long ago. But the second reason for partition – the emasculation of the working class – is as powerful now as it ever was. A united Ireland, especially if the unity was achieved through what would appear to Northern Protestants as British treachery, would lead to a united working class movement in circumstances of great political unrest. It is a frightening prospect for important people in London and in Dublin.It is worth almost endless expenditure on troops and intelligence services to keep the lid on the kettle.While Dublin governments, which are swapped from time to time between the two conservative parties, are much more interested in doing deals with London to make sure there is no real change in the line of partition.Even the supposedly Republican Fianna Fail party much prefers the devil it knows (a divided island and a sectarian statelet) to the devil it doesn’t know, which could turn into the most frightening devil of all, a conscious, united and fighting working class. I’ll leave the final word to Connolly:“A real socialist movement cannot be built by temporising in front of a dying cause such as that of the Orange Ascendancy, even although in the paroxysms of its death struggle it assumes the appearance of energy like unto that of health. A real socialist movement can only be born of struggle, of uncompromising affirmation of the faith that is in us. Such a movement infallibly gathers to it every element of rebellion and of progress, and in the midst of the storm and stress of the struggle solidifies into a real revolutionary force.” Top of the pageLast updated on 26.1.2005" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootChallenging for Hackney mayorShaking up New Labour(14 September 2002)From Socialist Worker, No.1817, 14 September 2002.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.AWARD-WINNING campaigning journalist Paul Foot has been selected as the Socialist Alliance candidate in October’s election for mayor of Hackney in east London. Voting begins on Monday 7 October, in three weeks time. His campaign has already attracted national media attention. Socialist Worker spoke to Paul Foot.Why are you standing for mayor?“WHAT HAS prompted me to stand is New Labour’s decision to have elected mayors. I actually voted against the proposal that there should be an elected mayor in Hackney, and the Socialist Alliance was against it. The whole purpose of elected mayors, which was introduced in the Local Government Act 2000, was to make local government even less representative.“Labour’s whole idea is that society should be controlled by ‘clever and gifted’ people at the top, who decide about the distribution of resources. There is an obstacle for the government in this whole strategy – it has to get its crony elected.“One of the main reasons the Socialist Alliance in Hackney decided to stand for mayor is because the very democratic process that Labour wants to curb can be used to stand the whole thing on its head.”What issues are central to your campaign?“HACKNEY IS one of the poorest areas in the whole of Europe. There is a tremendous amount of poverty and destitution. Hackney has some of the worst records in Britain on health, infant mortality, and education provision.“We urgently need two new non-religious mixed secondary schools in Hackney. It is an incredible fact that in this borough there will soon be only one mixed secular secondary school. Hackney has faced diabolical cuts.“We face the privatisation of the school meals service. I will be arguing to stop the privatisation and to campaign on the issue with the trade unions. There are a whole series of cuts the council is making to save little bits of money. These can appear to be very small issues, but they affect people’s lives. They are stopping passes for the disabled. They are going to concrete in children’s swimming pools.“On one local estate, the Pembury, there have been police raids in an operation called ‘Thumbs Up’. This really means the police will be arresting a lot of young black kids, who will be stopped and searched because they are black. We should have a full inquiry into that.“I don’t see how anyone who claims to be a representative of the people of Hackney can escape saying that they are absolutely opposed to any war on Iraq. I’m absolutely opposed to the war. It is going to be at the front of my campaign, and in all my leaflets. I’m also opposed to the government’s treatment of asylum seekers and I am for welcoming asylum seekers to this country.”Your campaign has already got New Labour worried with reports that it approached Mo Mowlam to stand against you.“I WAS delighted to hear they had approached Mo Mowlam. I’m pretty sure they approached her after the first announcement that I had decided to stand. I do think they are a little bit nervous. If a man in a monkey suit or a robo-cop is elected, as has been the case in two previous mayoral elections, the government can handle it. It can deal with a maverick or reactionary candidate.“But if a socialist is elected then that sets all sort of difficulties. A socialist like myself will argue that there are not limited resources for services and the things people need. On the contrary, the resources available in society are enormous. I’m not going to be curbed.“The government have made sure there are all sorts of restrictions on the mayor’s powers. The mayor’s policies will be funded from the council budget. Everything will have to be approved by a cabinet which includes two existing councillors. But I will keep demanding that we need proper resources in Hackney. We need a tube in Hackney. We need to stop the sell-off of council housing. We need to change course dramatically towards public enterprise, not private enterprise, and towards comprehensive education and away from all the talk of faith schools and city technology colleges.“I can’t promise that if I’m mayor two new secondary schools will definitely be built. At least there would be someone who has a mandate from the people to say ‘this is what I believe in and this is what I intend to campaign for’. The slogan I’ve developed is that I’ve been all my life a campaigning and investigative journalist and I intend to be a campaigning and investigative mayor.“I’m going to go and find out and expose what is going on and campaign to change it.”Two thirds of the electorate in Hackney did not vote in the council elections this year. What would you say to people who say it’s not worth voting?“I can understand people’s attitude to politicians. This is part of a process which has been happening over the last 100 years.“There has been a consistent surrender of the power of elected representatives to the power of the non-elected people who run society – the big businessmen, the policemen, the judges, those who run the media. The effect of the first Blair government was to make Labour indistinguishable from the Tories.“So I’m absolutely sympathetic with those who don’t vote. On the other hand, the end product of such thought means there is the danger of unrepresentative government.“There is the danger of dictatorship or ceding all the power to the businessmen and the High Court. And this is something we should try to stop. I would say to people, do you really want to give up your rights to be represented?“We are offering representation for working class people that is very different to the consensus of the main parties.”What sort of campaign are you going to have?" }

{ "content": "“WE ARE going to leaflet every house in Hackney. And on top of that we are producing an eight-page Foot for Mayor supplement. We’ve got a very loyal and a very hardworking core of people in the Socialist Alliance. The campaign will depend on pulling people in who aren’t normally associated with political activity.“To help do this we are also organising local meetings. Today I’m going to a meeting with the people who campaigned against the scrapping of disabled passes in Hackney.“In the next week or so I’m hoping to speak to people in tenants associations, to local trade unionists, and to people in the Turkish community. If we achieve nothing else in the election, we will have guaranteed an increase in the socialist propaganda in this area, and hopefully also engaged new people in political activity.”London Borough of HackneySome 85 percent of households have an income of below £20,000, compared to 66 percent in the rest of London. 21 percent of men and 11 percent of women are unemployed – the highest rate in London. 112 of the most deprived estates in England are in Hackney. Infant mortality and stillbirth rates are 50 percent higher than the national average. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootLearning from experience?(June 1989)From Socialist Worker, 10 June 1989.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I spent a lively hour or so the other morning at Tony Benn’s house.The official subject for discussion was rather boring (I don’t remember what it was).What we talked about was a very interesting question indeed: why is it that the parliamentary politician I most detested 20 years ago is the parliamentary politician I most admire today.Anyone leafing through the pages of Socialist Worker in the months after it first became a weekly paper in 1968 would come across a great many references to The Hon. Anthony Wedgewood Benn, the ‘supremo’ Minister for Technology. VacuousAmong the subjects dealt with were the same minister’s vacuous enthusiasm for the European Common Market, his creating of a specially nasty private monopoly in ship-building, his sponsoring of a uranium mine in racist South West Africa to the delight of the mines owners, Rio Tinto Zinc, his support for In Place of Strife, an openly anti-union bill, his pretending all the time that he was a socialist and a democrat.When Labour went into opposition, and Tony Benn (as he now insisted he was called) went into opposition, he became, as far as I was concerned, even more detestable. When he called at a Labour Party conference for a standing ovation for the Upper Clyde Shipyard workers, who were fighting the very employers Benn had created, I was almost literally sick.As he assumed the mantle of Supreme Socialist in the Labour Party, I (and Socialist Worker) attacked him with ever increasing vigour as a monstrous hypocrite who could not be trusted an inch.When Labour resumed office in the mid-1970s, it soon turned out that all our attacked on Benn were utterly justified.After a year fiddling about with a couple of co-ops, he allowed himself to be sacked as industry minister, and moved over to energy where he made some pathetic speeches about the wonders of North Sea oil. If he was fighting against the Labour government, not many people in the movement knew it.What they got was rising unemployment and cuts in services, and Benn (who never resigned) took his share of the responsibility.Soon after Labour lost in 1979, we had The Debate of the Decade in the Central Hall, in which we argued the toss on reform or revolution (Benn and others for reform; myself and others for revolution).During that debate I recall Tony passionately supporting many of the measures of the Labour government. He also declared that he was not in favour of troops coming out of Ireland.He then entered what I can only describe as a Crippsian stage. Sir Stafford Cripps suddenly became a very left wing socialist in the 1930s, and called for the next Labour government to take the most drastic steps to curtail capitalism, including the creation of enough peers to outvote the entire House of Lords.This was the theme of Tony Benn’s speeches in 1981 and 1982.During the miners’ strike he had a long flirtation with a shameless Stalinism. He talked a lot about the war and how wonderful Russia was.Through all this time there was no doubt in my mind that at some stage or other the ‘true’ Tony Benn would revert to his old reformist and careerist self, throw away – as Cripps did – the baggage of revolutionary rhetoric, shed his momentary Stalinism and prepare once more for parliamentary power. MovingNone of these things happened. Instead, as the ‘downturn’ continued, as defeat led to defeat, as more and more socialists became demoralised to the point of declaring that the working class of the world had vanished, Tony Benn moved relentlessly to the left.His attacks on Kinnock over the latest policy reviews (sell outs) were savage, witty and implacable. His speech on the first big China demonstration called unequivocally for action from below.Tony Benn is, I think, the only Labour politician this century who has moved so sharply in that direction, so that he is now, at his ripe age, a socialist who is quite unrecognisable from the fatuous, trend setting babbler of his youth.Unlike Cripps, Tony Benn does not have a career in front of him. He will not be a minister in Kinnock’s government. He would not want to be.It is, I suppose, wise in the view of all that past to be sceptical, but I prefer to see in the steady progression of Tony Benn the most unpredictable proof that some people, however few, can and do move to the left according to what they find out in their experience, and according to what they read and learn.It is not inevitable that people slide to the right as they get older. People do not always remain fixed in a reformist (or for that matter revolutionary) mould. Tony Benn has proved both. And he has not stopped moving. Top of the pageLast updated on 25 April 2015" }

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul FootWorkers’ movementThe party’s just begun(January 2002)From Socialist Review, No.259, January 2002, pp.16-18.Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Paul Foot argues that spontaneous activity is not enough – we need collective organisation‘We are many – they are few.’ With that historic reminder, the poet Shelley ended his furious poem about the massacre of trade unionists at Peterloo. The line has been quoted (well, misquoted really, since Shelley, in self imposed exile in Italy, wrote, ‘Ye are many – they are few’) a million times since. It reminds the world’s exploited masses of their numerical superiority over their exploiters. The line was written nearly 200 years ago, and its simple truth grows more obvious every day. There is still a vast – and growing – gap between the few, the secure and comfortable minority ruling the world, and the many, the hungry and insecure masses. There are still much more of the many than the few. Why hasn’t that numerical superiority led automatically to the overthrow of the minority?One answer is that the rich minority have used much of their wealth to arm themselves with mighty weaponry to protect their ill-gotten gains. But their continuing power does not depend only on force of arms. The chief reason for their ability to continue in power is their control over ideas. They control not only where and for what rewards people work, but how people think. People are not born with a set of ideas and thoughts. They grow into them. They are taught in schools and colleges, and through the mass media, such as newspapers and television. All of these are controlled in different ways, and reflect the will and purpose of the capitalist few.These reactionary ideas continually clash with people’s experience. The clash of most human beings’ experience with the ideas handed down to them led to the formation of an independent labour movement, with independent labour parties, organised to challenge capitalism. This in turn led to a further ideological offensive by the ruling class on the exploitation of ideas, with the unhappy result in the western democracies that the official labour movements were shackled to the exploiters they set out to tame. The chief reason for the demise of these labour organisations is their own passivity. The instinct of labour leaders, especially at, times of crisis, is to compromise, to back off from any challenge. Terrified that they will lose their own positions as important people in society, they prefer to compromise and vacillate. They prefer the existing state of things to the unknown. They prefer passivity to activity.One result of this approach is an ideological surrender. There was a time, for instance, when the leaders of the British Labour Party were committed to their own independent educational organisations – the Plebs League, the Workers’ Educational Association, and so on. A hundred years of Labour passivity have reduced these organisations to ruins. Now the Labour leaders spend their time organising focus groups and opinion polls. The focus group organisers and the pollsters are expressly forbidden to challenge any one of the views they record. The point is to find out what people think so that policies can be devised to win their votes. This process pretends to be democratic – ’it’s only finding out what people think’. In fact it is the exact opposite of any genuine democracy. That depends entirely on the process of argument, of challenge and counter-challenge. Without such argument and challenge the most disgusting prejudices fester in what Marx called ‘the muck of ages’, and, as they fester, multiply. So the vital business of confronting capitalist and racist arguments has to be conducted outside the educational institutions and media of capitalist society. How best to ensure that?In his last great poem, Samson Agonistes, John Milton, who played an active part in the English Revolution of the 1640s, asked:‘But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,And by their vices brought to servitudeThan to love bondage more than liberty –Bondage in ease, than strenuous liberty?’In the triumph of Royalist counter-revolution Milton saw the dangers of political passivity, of ideological sloth. The reactionaries took advantage of that passivity and sloth to restore their tyranny. The alternative to bondage in passivity was strenuous liberty. In plain terms, this meant that if you want to change the world for the better you have to do something about it. And, as the Levellers proved in the English Revolution, you are much more likely to do something effective if you act in concert with others. A history of strikesIn the centuries after Milton died exploitation increased, but so did the forces that can defeat exploitation. Capitalism brought the horrors of factory work, but also produced a new class, the working class, whose predominant characteristic was its power to stop exploitation by stopping working. Strikes and work-ins, however, did not come about by some magical process. They required the active and conscious participation of rebellious workers. There are times in British working class history where that spontaneous activity flowered so tempestuously that many workers became convinced that their activity on its own was enough to change the social order. In Britain these times were the Great Unrest of 1911-14, the massive wave of industrial struggle after the First World War, the General Strike of 1926, and the seemingly unstoppable wave of strikes from 1969 to 1974. In all these times there were socialists who believed that the strikes themselves would stamp out capitalism and usher in a new democratic social order controlled from below. Yet all these tidal waves of workers’ protest were quite easily surfed by the capitalist rulers, who, as soon as the strikes were over, embarked on a sustained and highly organised counter-offensive. At the start of 2002 that counter-offensive is still winning." }

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

{ "content": "One reaction to this sad story is to proclaim the invulnerability of capitalism, and to limit politics and political action to the reactionary vistas of Tony Blair. This is the reaction of people who believe either a) that there is no working class with common wants and common interests or b) that the working class has no power to make its presence and its interests felt in high society. Coincidentally, this sort of pessimism was rife in Britain 100 years ago when a Tory government was in apparently unshakeable control and the voters were about to be seduced by a juicy war in South Africa. That pessimism was soon shattered in the great burst of agitation by workers, women and Irish republicans in the years leading up the First World War. It was shattered still further in the Russian Revolution and the burst of workers’ confidence which it inspired all over the world. The plain fact is that as long as society is split into classes, as long as the rich try to get richer by bashing the poor, there will inevitably be periods of mass protest as the workers and the poor organise to hit back.The class struggle, in short, is not over. It will show itself again and again. As it does so, another temptation will distract workers. So sick will so many of them be of the long periods of passivity, or of the hideous betrayal of socialist principles by the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, that they will urge their followers to abandon politics to professional politicians and do their best to batter down the ramparts of capitalism armed only with strikes and demonstrations. Such a strategy leaves the rich class with their strongest weapon intact. They know, as they did in 1911 and 1921 and 1972, that workers’ militancy can fall as fast as it can rise, and that great explosions of militancy can dissolve like fireworks in the night. They know that as long as militancy can be confined to its own borders it can be contained and eventually defeated.Socialist politics, based on the aspirations of rank and file workers, can bind that militancy together and arm it with answers to the inevitable questions. Why should better off workers go on strike – why not redistribute the wealth of richer workers among the starving millions? Is it really true that one man’s wage rise is another man’s price rise? Above all, what is this socialism and why should it be any better than what we have at present? The very questions themselves are unanswerable by those who support a society ruled by a bureaucratic state capitalist tyranny or by a grasping ruling class. The answers can only come from a militant working class movement in revolt against capitalism.The case emerges clearly for socialist organisation whose strength and potential come from its links to workers’ militancy and their readiness to use their power to fight. The enduring political lesson of the 20th century is that socialism and social democracy through the ballot box have failed on both counts, and that there is no short cut to socialism from the rulers of class society, however enlightened or socialistic those rulers claim to be. There is no socialism, and because of that no true democracy. Those who believed that either or both could be achieved through the ballot box alone have been confounded. Roll on the next century, not only of the great democratic hope but also of the greatest possible democratic achievement: the emancipation of labour. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004" }

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

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

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

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

{ "content": "MIA  >  Archive  >  P. Foot Paul Foot‘Parliamentary socialism’:Labour’s road to disaster(1 May 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 120, 1 May 1969, p. 3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.SOON AFTER the armistice of 1918, Dame Margot Asquith, wife of the wartime Prime Minister, wrote a letter to J.H.Thomas, the former railwaymen’s leader, then an MP. The letter read:‘Dear Mr Thomas, As you are such a friend of ours I thought you would like this fine telegram from the King to my husband on the great day. I am not writing to you about politics, but to tell you from my heart how brave and good I think you have been and how much my husband thinks of you. We told the King at lunch exactly what we thought of you and he was very nice about you. Be careful of your health and keep tight hold of your men – and God Bless You. Margot Asquith.’ (J.H. Thomas: My Story, p. 29)The letter according to Thomas ‘seemed to lift itself out of a mass of cherished correspondence’, and diligently he devoted himself to the Dame’s instructions and ‘kept tight hold of his men’. EmpireSix years later, Thomas became the first Labour Colonial Secretary and introduced himself to the heads of his department with the words: ‘I am here to see that there is no mucking about with the British Empire’Five years later still he was the ‘troubleshooter’ in the 1929 Labour government, appointed to solve the problem of unemployment. He solved it by increasing it threefold and cutting the unemployment benefit.Then he left the Labour Party to serve in the National Government and his career ended in a court case involving fraud.Conventional Labour historians prefer to dismiss the careers of men like Thomas, Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald as examples of personal aberration or original sin. But the Thomas road from working-class origins through parliament to betrayal symbolises the futility of 50 years of parliamentary activity and aspirations on the part of British Labour.Even today, after the unimaginable collapse in the last four and a half years, conventional ‘left-wing’ demonstrations move, as if pulled by a magnet, to parliament, there to conduct ‘a lobby’, and so-called revolutionaries pin their politics to the idiotic slogan: Make the Left MPs fight.The history of the British Labour Party is a history of parliamentary disaster. In 1924, a Labour government supported by the Liberals did nothing at all.This was a considerable achievement compared with the record of the 1929–1931 government which did everything in its power to protect the gold standard and the interests of industrialists against the clamour of the unemployed.The Labour government of 1945 and 1951 is remembered with sentimental nostalgia by the official Labour left, who recall the nationalisation of coal, railways, gas, electricity – and the National Health Service.The real achievement of the 1945–51 Labour government has been less widely-publicised. As two commentators, one of whom is a Cabinet Minister in the present administration, put it:‘In 1948–1950. when the economy appeared to be gaining both internal and external balance, there was a substantial shift away from planning in the direction of a free market system.’ (The Labour Government and British Industry by A.Rogow and Peter Shore, p. 71)Under the smokescreen of nationalisation and welfare reforms the post-war Labour government concentrated its main efforts on the re-establishment of a capitalism seriously weakened by the war. Weak, plaintive industrialists grew, under Labour’s careful succour into implacable monopolists who wanted no more of ‘socialism’.The inevitable irony was that Labour, because of the working-class support which it had ignored, was hounded from office by the very industrialists whom it had nourished.By 1964, the Labour programme had been considerably diluted by the pressure of those who sought office. The reformist scraps offered to the masses have now been withheld and in their place the Labour government is now set on a course which is further to the right even than MacDonald’s in 1930.The MacDonald government did at least repeal the Tory 1927 Trade Union Act which sought in some circumstances to make trade unionists liable for damage from disputes. Similarly. Wilson’s government passed an act in its first year of office overturning theHouse of Lords’ Rookes v. Barnard decision, making a trade union official liable for strike damage.It took a real election triumph, like 1966, to propel the government on a collision course with the unions and to enable them to propose legislation which shackles the unions more than the 1927 Act – and more than anything else since the first Labour parliamentarian entered Westminster.Parliamentarians and reformists seek to explain all this as an unhappy accident. Unfortunately, they explain, the Labour governments were always dominated by right-wingers, who took the wrong course. Left-wingers, they proclaim, would have moved in a socialist direction. DarlingsBut would they? Were not Wilson, Castle, Crossman, Greenwood darlings of the left? Was it an accident that every one of the promoted left-wingers, with the single exception of Frank Cousins, who had a good job to go back to and has now found an even better one, not only were ‘converted’ to the anti-working class politics of the government, but also became their most enthusiastic supporters?History suggests otherwise. Keir Hardie, father of the ‘Labour Left’, called on his countrymen to rally to the flag in 1914 when he said, ‘the boom of guns can be heard’.And Robert Blatchford, theoretical inspirer of the Left, made his teenage daughter play Rule Britannia every day throughout the First World War.In 1925 a group of left-wingers drew up a Manifesto, headed the Socialist Club and printed in Lansbury’s Weekly. ‘A Labour government’ it declared at the outset ‘would be pledged to establish a socialist state.’It proposed several acts of immediate legislation including the abolition of the House of Lords (‘no fraternisation with the enemy’), the abolition of the police and the handing over of police duties to a ‘citizens’ army’ with elected officers." }

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