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{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootA question of principle(15 July 1995)From Socialist Worker, No. 1451, 15 July 1995, p. 11.Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.FOR NEARLY 30 years Robert Maclennan has been the MP for Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland.In 1966, to everyone’s astonishment, he seized for the Labour Party a seat which had always been a Liberal or Tory fiefdom. The idea that they should be represented in parliament by a Labour MP obviously appealed to the increasingly abandoned landless labourers of Caithness, not to mention the new workers at the Dounreay nuclear site at Thurso.Against the tide Maclennan increased his majority for Labour in 1970 and held the seat in the other three elections of the 1970s.In 1981, without having the chance to vote about it, the people of Caithness suddenly found themselves represented by another party: the Social Democratic Party. Maclennan had coolly switched to the SDP while remaining in the parliament to which he had been elected for Labour.In 1983 and 1987 he won the seat for the SDP, of which he later became leader. Under the influence of his lacklustre and backward leadership, the SDP finally evaporated. Unabashed, Maclennan joined yet another party, the Liberal Democrat Party, under whose colours he fought and won the election of 1992.Thus the great stride forward which had wrested Caithness and Sutherland from its reactionary Liberal tradition turned into a great stride back. Thanks to Maclennan Caithness was Liberal again.Maclennan is a crushingly boring politician, whose collected speeches would do wonders for an insomniac. In the past, however, he had given the impression of worthiness. The windsNow even that rather dubious reputation has been thrown to the winds. As an “elder statesman” Maclennan was entrusted with the Liberal slot on the special committee set up by Tory MPs to protect themselves from the attack on them by Lord Nolan.Nolan and his commissioners, who were set up by Major to rid the Commons of sleaze, recommended that MPs should declare how much money they get from outside sources: directorships, consultancies and so on.This modest proposal has the almost unanimous support of the electorate – even Tory voters support it strongly. Indeed most voters – 78 percent in fact – take the obvious view that MPs should not get a penny more than their salary.Horror of horrors! The massed ranks of Tory MPs, who have got so used to consultancies that one of them recently advertised for one, combined at once to oppose Nolan’s proposal.Here were Quentin Davies from rural Lincolnshire with at least four plum consultancies, Sir Archie Hamilton, former armed forces minister, with six directorships mostly connected with the armed forces, Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith with three directorships and a consultancy. Labour members of the committee unanimously supported disclosure.A lot hinged on the solitary Liberal member, the former red from Caithness, Robert Maclennan. He voted with the Tories to “postpone” (ie do nothing about) the problem of disclosure.He is a director of Atlantic Telenetwork and a consultant to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but thanks to his own sturdy support for the Tories on the committee, no one can know how much he gets from either.MPs get about £70,000 a year in pay and allowances. They have stupendously long holidays and a generous pension scheme.Of course we expect the Tories to defend their slush. The vote of Robert Maclennan clears up any doubt as to the principled position of the Liberal Democrats. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot‘Positive’ surrender(11 July 1992)From Socialist Worker, 11 July 1992.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 188–189.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The National Union of Mineworkers was polite enough to invite Labour’s energy spokesman, Mr Frank Dobson, to speak at its conference in Scarborough last week.The union, not surprisingly, is opposed to the government’s plans to take the coal industry back to the dark days of the filthiest representatives of the ruling class, the coal owners. The proposals are so hideous, the delegates must have mused, that even Mr Dobson, a man not best known for his amazing rhetoric might be moved to some indignation. Perhaps he would read up a little on the history of the coal owners.A reference to the mass evictions in Durham in the 1840s by the Marquess of Londonderry would have gone down well. So might a study of the comparative safety statistics in British mines under private and public ownership.The very least the rank and file can have expected was a ferocious attack on the Tories and a declaration of unswerving support for the NUM’s campaign against privatisation from the Labour Party, inside and outside parliament.Well, here is the Financial Times report of what happened: ‘Mr Dobson said he believed “the cards are stacked heavily against keeping coal in the public sector” and the NUM should draw up plans to protect the most vulnerable pits and maintain safety standards.’This speech was not greeted with rapturous applause.Perhaps the sceptical miners imagined themselves following Mr Dobson’s advice. The first part of the Dobson plan had them ‘drawing up plans to protect the most vulnerable pits’. Here is a possible plan for protecting a vulnerable pit. (1) Try to ensure that the pit does not close. (2) If it does close, try to ensure jobs for all the miners thrown out of work. (3) If that doesn’t work, try to get decent redundancy pay. (4) If that doesn’t work, burst into tears.This would be a positive Dobson plan as opposed to a negative plan to try to stop privatisation and closures by refusing to dig coal until public ownership is guaranteed. According to Dobson, the ‘cards’ ‘stacked against’ the success of any such plan, so the miners should settle for failure. Rough guideDobson Plan 2 calls on miners to ‘protect safety standards’. Here is a rough guide to such a plan. (1) Ask the new private management, which has taken over without a struggle or even a complaint, because the cards are stacked against struggles and complaints, to maintain safety standards. (2) If they don’t, lower the standards a little. (3) If that doesn’t work, lower the standards a lot. (4) If management still insist on cutting safety corners, burst into tears.So desperate are the Labour leaders to surrender that it is becoming almost impossible for socialists to read or listen to them any longer.I doubt whether there has been a time in the entire century when British Labour has been so abject, so obsequious to Tories, to employers, to the City, to the newspaper barons – to everyone in authority.Before the election they were at least afraid to lose. Now it seems they positively want to lose. They take on the mantle of defeat with a cheerful enthusiasm which would astonish the most dedicated masochist.Their only hint of eloquence is in their pleas to their followers to play their part in the disaster. Their slogan is written in scarlet across the flag they sing about every year: ‘We lost. We’re certain to lose again. So make sure you all lose as well’. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHow the TUC killed workers’ paper(September 1973)From Socialist Worker, 15 September 1973.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.96-7.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IN JANUARY 1911 there was a printworkers’ strike and lock-out in London. Sir Joseph Causton, boss of the Daily News, swore he would never give in to the printers’ demand for a 50-hour week and the rest of the press responded with a cataract of lies and abuse against the locked-out men.The printers decided they had had enough. They produced a daily eight-page sheet which put the workers’ side in the dispute. They called it the Daily Herald.Helped by the Herald, the strikers won their demands. By the time the strike sheet folded on 28 April that year, large numbers of men and women were demanding a permanent, mass circulation paper for labour.There were urgent discussions all over the country. Ben Tillett, who had led the great dockers’ strike of 1889, George Lansbury, Labour leader from East London, and a host of other workers’ representatives finally raised enough money to start the Daily Herald a year later.The paper played a crucial role in the upsurge of working class activity before the start of the First World War.Through the Daily Herald League it organised support for strike after strike – especially among London transport workers, dockers and Midlands iron workers. When the South Wales miners came out on strike in 1914 the Herald proclaimed, in a front page headline: SOUTH WALES MINERS FIND A BETTER WAY THAN THE BALLOT.Lansbury, then editor of the Herald wrote, in his book, The Miracle of Fleet Street: ‘All this time the dominant note of the Daily Herald was its fierce attack on the leaders of the Labour Party ... The leaders of the trade unions were also attacked. The most reactionary of all the trade union leaders, Jimmy Thomas, sued the Herald for libel and took £200 damages.’To continued cluck-clucking from Labour and trade union leaders, the Daily Herald and its League took up the struggles of Irish workers against imperialist bosses, of women in their fight for emancipation, and against British invasion of Russia after the 1917 revolution.When Jim Larkin, Irish workers’ leader, was released from prison in 1913, he wrote first to the Daily Herald, thanking the paper for its support.When one 1918 anti-war Herald rally was banned by the Albert Hall Council, the electricians’ union threatened to pull out the plugs for the following week’s Victory Ball. The council, under pressure from the government, rapidly changed its mind.By 1920 the Herald had built a circulation of more than 250,000 copies a day. For all its faults it was founded on the fighting spirit of working people. ‘We were to all intents and purposes a rank and file paper,’ wrote Lansbury.But under capitalism the Herald was in difficulty. Its circulation, though large did not bring in enough revenue in sales alone to enable it to compete with the other popular dailies.Its working class readership was unattractive to advertisers and because Lansbury was hostile to any form of revolutionary organisation, the paper had around it no organisation which would sell or subsidise it from rank and file contributions.The only source of heavy subsidy was the trade unions and so, reluctantly, in September 1922 Lansbury handed over the Herald to the TUC and the Labour Party.Almost at once, the fire went out of it. Strikes were only supported after they had been declared official, ‘Dangerous subjects’, notably Ireland, were carefully avoided.Circulation was maintained and even increased slightly, but the problems of the paper redoubled.They were solved, in capitalist terms, by an arch-capitalist, Julius Elias. Elias, later Viscount Southwood, was a printing boss who had previously teamed up with the crooked and reactionary Horatio Bottomley in the printing and publication of the crooked and reactionary magazine John Bull.Elias agreed to print and publish the Herald with the support of the trade union movement. Ernest Bevin, a young dockers’ leader, stomped the country to build up its circulation.Bevin and other trade union leaders used their influence to drum up more than 100,000 extra readers, and when the Daily Herald was first printed under its new management – 51 percent of the shares owned by Elias’ Odhams press and 49 percent by the TUC – it had reached a circulation of more than two million.All through the 1930s, Elias concentrated on building the paper’s circulation by means of all kinds of free gifts and competitions, while the TUC and Labour leaders drummed up readership from their rank and file. Although the Herald won the race to two million readers, the paper steadily deteriorated.Politics were relegated as far as possible, and the TUC directors ensured that what politics were published safely reflected the views of the TUC leaders.The process continued after the war. As the Labour leaders became less and less interested in their rank and file, so they lost interest in their daily paper.In 1961, the TUC sold out. When IPC took over Odhams, it also took over the Herald completely. The paper continued to decline.In 1964 it was re-named the Sun and rejigged to get rid of its ‘cloth cap’ image. It lost its working class readers too. Finally, in 1969, the Sun was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who has turned it into mass-circulation pornography.At last week’s TUC Richard Briginshaw, general secretary of the print union NATSOPA, moved the ritual TUC motion complaining at the anti-trade union bias of the capitalist press. Vague demands were made in the debate as they will be at the Labour Party conference next month, for a new TUC/Labour Party paper." }
{ "content": "The wretched history of the Daily Herald since its take-over by the TUC 50 years ago proves how self-destructive is reformist, social democratic propaganda. A workers’ paper is useless unless its propaganda is backed and enriched by organisation and agitation. Unless workers see their paper as a guide to action and organisation as well as arguments against the Tories and their system, the paper is bound to lose out to the big battalions.The crucial characteristic of Labour reformism is its distaste for working class organisation and independent action. Its papers can only argue and state. They cannot agitate. So they cannot rely on the people who read the paper to subsidise and sell it. They need the ‘business genius’ of the Viscount Southwoods and the advertising of great capitalist corporations. And in the hunt for such genius and such advertising they defeat their own propaganda.We must rebuild a mass socialist press in Britain – but not by making the same mistakes as made by the Daily Herald. The driving force of our socialist press must be the belief in independent working class action, and the need for socialist papers to organise and co-ordinate that action.We cannot build a socialist paper without socialist organisation – or vice versa. That simple fact is written in the ashes of 50 years’ copies of the Daily Herald, burnt and buried by the Trades Union Congress. Top of the pageLast updated on 20.12.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThey all knew he was a crook(December 1991)From Socialist Worker, 14 December 1991.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.272-3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IF I had not already been a socialist, the astonishing events at the Daily Mirror in the last few days would have quickly made me one. They are calling the Maxwell Robbery the greatest financial scandal of all time.He robbed some £300 million from the workers at the Mirror, either from their company or from their pension fund.All around there is a great tut-tutting. Newspapers which only weeks ago were describing Maxwell as a ‘swashbuckling buccaneer’ now fall over one another to denounce him for what he was – a revolting crook. Nowhere is the embarrassment greater than in the City.In 1971 a distinguished lawyer and a distinguished accountant declared after a careful examination of Maxwell’s relations with a company called Leasco that Maxwell was not fit to chair a public company.In the early 1980s Maxwell became chairman of one of the biggest public companies in the country, the British Printing Corporation.In July 1984, on what we on the Mirror called Black Friday, he became chairman of the Mirror Group of Newspapers – which ran five national newspapers with a combined circulation of four million copies every weekday and six million every Sunday. How could this happen?Every reason has been thought of except the right one – that Maxwell was a valuable standard bearer for his class when it was on the offensive in the 1980s. His brash, old fashioned style fitted the needs of the bosses of the Thatcher decade.In an aggressive cowboy manner much admired by the bankers he had smashed the unions at BPCC and turned the company into profit. Could he not do the same at the Mirror?Yes, he could. From the moment he came into the building, Maxwell set himself the single task of breaking the trade unions.Maxwell’s fall, like his rise, was symbolic of the Tory government’s fortunes. Like them he believed the capitalistboom of the 1980s would last forever.In a sort of frenzy he started buying up everything which came up for sale in the United States, Portugal, Argentine and Israel.He borrowed and borrowed from his most faithful supporter, the National Westminster Bank, which could never forget the way he smashed the unions at BPCC and saved the bank an embarrassing insolvency.Up and up went the takeovers and the loans in an endless spiral of megalomania and greed. No one stopped him – not a banker, not an adviser, not a regulator, not a government minister, not a policeman. What did stop him was the fatal flaw in the market system which promoted him.Suddenly the boom evaporated. The ‘impossible’ recession swept over him. Interest rates climbed and the revenue from his new companies slumped. Squeezed more and more tightly, he turned for final salvation to the huge sums piled up in the Mirror workers’ pension fund.Long ago Tories and capitalists used to argue that pension funds were proof of the burgeoning economic power of the workers. ‘With so much money in pension funds’, it was said, ‘millions of workers have a stake in the system.’The argument overlooked the reality of control of the pension funds. The money was paid in by workers, but controlled by a handful of capitalists and accountants who used it to lubricate the Stock Exchange.Maxwell adored Margaret Thatcher, and Thatcher repaid the compliment. When Julia Langdon joined the Mirror political staff from the Guardian, Thatcher applauded her decision. ‘A dose of Maxwell will do you good,’ she trumpeted.But Maxwell was not a Tory – he supported the Labour Party. Into his plush inner circle came a clutch of right wing Labour Party supporters, most of them ennobled as Maxwell hoped to be.There was Lord Donoghue, the biographer of Herbert Morrison, Lord Williams – a city slicker and deputy leader of the Labour peers – former Attorney General Sam Silkin and former Solicitor General Peter Archer. While Maxwell behaved like a Tory, while he broke the unions like a Tory, while he stalked the Mirror and other enterprises he owned with all the arrogance of a Tory grandee, he said he was a supporter of the Labour Party and the Labour leadership glowed with delight.Now, instead of revelling in his disgrace, instead of exposing it as a disgrace of capitalism like all the other disgraces of recent years – Polly Peck, Ferranti and BCCI – the Labour leaders can only fret and fume and hope the whole thing will go away.They too are stuck deep in mud of capitalist corruption.Socialists need not be mealy mouthed. Maxwell was a great fat capitalist. His rise and fall reflected the rise and fall of British capitalism in the 1980s. He went up on backs of workers and down in the crisis of the market system.This grotesque and apparently immovable statue to modern capitalism has come crashing down and no one wants to put an another remotely like it in its place. Top of the pageLast updated on 17.1.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootSlaughterhouse Six(July 2002)From Theatre Reviews, Socialist Review, No.265, July 2002, p.24.Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.Downloaded from the new Socialist Review ArchiveMarked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Review of Rose Rage, adapted from Willliam Shakespeare by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, LondonReaders of Socialist Review, you have about three weeks to book for a truly exhilarating dramatic experience. At the Haymarket theatre, 12 young men (well, they all looked young to me, which may not be the same thing) under the direction of Edward Hall smash, slash, slither and shriek their way through a tremendous performance of Rose Rage, an adaptation in two parts of William Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. These were the first of Shakespeare’s plays. They were written in 1591 or 1592, at the end of the Elizabethan age, when friends of the queen were worried what would happen when she died. She had no children, and her supporters feared a return to the chaos and wars of the past, in particular the Wars of the Roses that divided English rulers and killed hundreds of thousands of English citizens in the second half of the 15th century.William Shakespeare was not a revolutionary. He owed his brilliance as a playwright not to sympathy with the revolutionaries, but to an understanding and insight into all human beings, including revolutionaries. A familiar theme of all his history plays may well have been to warn his audiences of the dangers of the breakdown of law and order, and a consequent collapse into anarchy. But he was far too sensitive a writer to allow his plays to degenerate into crude declarations of loyalty to god and king.His plays are about the arguments of the time, so skilfully portrayed that, if properly directed, they reflect the arguments of Shakespeare’s time and of our time too. As the nobles’ factions form after the death of Henry V, it suddenly becomes clear that in the civil wars that follow, every king, every queen, every prince, every priest, every duke and every titled ninny is concerned exclusively with their own power and their own wealth, and will fight for both by any murderous means available to them. The bloodbath that follows turns the country into an abattoir. The scenes in this production open with all 12 actors sharpening knives for the slaughter. Each murder is accompanied by a butcher with a platter of red, freshly carved meat in front of him. And the whole reckless orgy of killing is hailed throughout by incantations of hypocrisy in honour of god, of England’s green and pleasant land, and of peace in our time.The futility of the civil wars between lords who raise armies in different parts of England and France is grimly illustrated by a famous battle scene watched over by the anguished, vacillating king. A father kills a son, and then a son kills his father. The son records how this frightful tragedy was all the fault of the warring lords:‘From London by the King was I pressed forth;My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s manCame on the part of York, pressed by his master.’In the middle of these ghastly battles (St Albans (twice), Northampton, Wakefield, Towton Moor, Hedgeley Moor, Hexham, Shrewsbury, Tewkesbury) comes suddenly another one, which meant something to the people who promoted it. In 1450 the enraged and starving agricultural labourers of Kent rose up in revolt under the leadership of Jack Cade. Like the rebellion of the starving mob in Rome in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Cade’s army gets handsome treatment in the play. And Edward Hall’s production makes the rebellion seem and sound like an angry anti-capitalist demonstration in contemporary Britain. As Cade’s comrade Dick the Butcher demands, ‘The first thing that we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ The ferocious crowd moves among the audience demanding the bodies of lawyers. I confess I was greatly relieved that I and my companion (the editor of this magazine) could claim we were not lawyers.Shakespeare’s excuse for so much sympathetic emphasis on the revolutionary mob is that the Cade rebellion was part of a plot by the Duke of York to overthrow the king. But again, the playwright’s eye and ear can’t really permit such an unlikely story. When a nobleman accuses Cade of being a dupe of the Duke of York, Cade mutters, aside to the audience: ‘He lies, for I invented it myself.’These plays were written on the eve of the English Revolution, a real mass uprising of the lower classes of which Queen Elizabeth and her supporters were far more frightened than of yet another internecine war between titled members of her class. Shakespeare knew that his job was to warn of anarchy to come, yet he could not help seeing and understanding the desperate craving of the masses.The original Henry VI plays are difficult to follow. New characters keep coming on stage, and are difficult to distinguish or identify. Edward Hall’s tremendously exciting production cuts out the crap, and leaves the essence clear and pure without once disturbing Shakespeare’s narrative or his poetry. There are outstanding performances by Robert Hands as the French-born Queen Margaret and Tony Bell as Jack Cade – and many others. Though the audience was ecstatic, there were far too many empty seats. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootAll fall down(November 1990)From Socialist Worker Review, No.136, November 1990, pp.13-14.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.WHEN SOMEONE comes to write a history of the Great Thatcher Decade (the 1980s), one of their basic texts should be a little book by a former City Editor of the Times, William Kay. Mr Kay called his book Tycoons, and based it on thirteen interviews with men who made millions in the early 1980s.One of the self-made men was Gerald Ronson, whose Heron Corporation was unheard of when he launched his first ‘brilliant, daring’ take over bid in 1981. Ronson told Kay that Heron was a ‘very conservative business.’ He said he didn’t take risks, he just bet on certainties. What’s more, he kept strictly within the law. ‘There are plenty of crooks in the petrol business,’ he told Kay, ‘but they don’t come to work for us.’This was surprising because perhaps the biggest crook of them all was Gerald Ronson. He made his fortune not so much by ‘daring’ bids but by gambling on the stock exchange. His greatest gamble was in 1986 when his friend, the super-swindler Sir Jack Lyons, asked him to buy some shares in Guinness to boost the share price in the firm’s takeover of Distillers. Ronson obliged with a cool £25 million. He lost not a penny on this investment of course, but as a reward for stumping up so much at an awkward time Guinness slipped him a personal donation of £7 million.Ronson and Lyons were only caught when the biggest swindler of them all, the American stock exchange gangster Boesky, grassed on them to save his skin. The crooked transactions by which Ronson and Lyons rigged the institutions they loved could not possibly have been exposed by ordinary journalists since there was no public record of them whatsoever.Ronson and Lyons were not ‘rotten apples’ in the capitalist barrel, as has been pretended. On the contrary they were both very close to the grandest apple of them all, the prime minister. Lyons was a personal friend, and Thatcher’s two closest advisers, Tim Bell and Gordon Reece, both in their own right entrepeneurs of the kind she admires, were paid advisers to Guinness at the time.The ruthlessness with which Thatcher and her cronies pursued the values of free enterprise did not extend to obeying the rules laid down by that free enterprise. Indeed, in a way, one of the central tenets of that free enterprise was that its devotees should feel free to make up their own rules.What can be called the Guinness syndrome haunts the whole of the rest of Mr Kay’s book. One rotten apple has gone to prison, but all over the industrial and financial scene other apples are falling off the tree. One such was Mr John Gunn. Here is what he told William Kay in 1985:‘I am a free market socialist, in that I like lots of people to do well. The only way I can do that is to make sure the company makes a lot of money and the exchequer makes a lot of money. I am as capitalistic as you can get, but I do not think the trappings are important. Creation of wealth is almost a duty, because of the widespread benefits that flow from it.’The only real wealth created by Mr Gunn, however, ended up in his own bank account. His business was ‘money-broking’, speculating, taking companies over and gambling on the outcome in the stock exchange. It can safely be said that he and his companies created not a single penny’s worth of real wealth. What they did was roll about in the mud of wealth created by others.So successful was John Gunn with his money-broking that an old shipping family, the Cayzers of British and Commonwealth, appointed him chief executive in 1986. The Cayzers, crusted Tories every one of them, had made their huge wealth from a shipping line which mainly serviced South Africa.John Gunn moved at once to sell anything which could possibly be of any real use to anyone. Away went the shipping line and onto the dole went thousands of people who worked for it. Instead, British and Commonwealth concentrated on ‘financial services.’ The Cayzers saw the danger, cashed in their millions, and ran.The new British and Commonwealth, based on financial services, was applauded at every turn by the newspapers’ business editorials. Gunn and B&C moved from one glorious City takeover to another until earlier this year the whole ramshackle edifice collapsed into bankruptcy.Until the end, John Gunn kept up the enormous payments £100,000 a year) which British and Commonwealth have traditionally paid to the Conservative Party. Another enthusiastic get-rich-quick Tory in the same mould was John Ashcroft, chairman of Coloroll, a group based on home furnishings, but which, under the impetuous Ashcroft, went into the stock market in grand style, taking over a whole series of harmless, old fashioned and often paternalistic old companies in the business.Like Gunn, Ashcroft enjoyed the special applause of the liberal press. While Gunn’s main backer had been the Observer, Ashcroft’s was the Guardian. Indeed in 1987, at the height of the ‘Thatcher miracle’, Ashcroft was named Guardian Young Businessman of the Year. That paper wrote of him in March that year:‘He is shrewd, personable, witty, unashamedly materialistic and fired by an almost boyish enthusiasm for stealing a market from under a competitor’s nose – “the idea of selling Japanese ceramics in Japan is quite amusing,” he says.’Shrewdly, personably, wittily and materialistically Ashcroft went on stealing markets from competitors’ noses (and managed to treble his own salary in the process.) In the summer of this year Coloroll called in the receiver. It owed £300 million. Hundreds of workers (the lucky ones who had not been sacked while the boyish Mr Ashcroft pursued his fantastic ambitions) were thrown onto the dole." }
{ "content": "The stories of Ronson, Gunn and Ashcroft have been repeated over and over again in the last twelve months. Celebrated Thatcherite entrepreneurs like Sophie Mirman of Sock Shop, George Davies of Next, Azil Nadir of Polly Peck, have all come crashing down. Harris Queensway, the brainchild of another Thatcher knight, the carpet king Sir Phil Harris, is now bust (though Harris himself sold out well before the disaster, for a little matter of £60 million).Even the two top spokesmen for the Thatcher miracle – Murdoch and Maxwell – are in desperate trouble. Scandal after scandal has rocked the City: Barlow Clowes, Dunsdale, Fer-ranti. What does it all mean?Four years ago the doomed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, first uttered the phrase which identified the greatest glory of the Thatcher years: ‘virtuous cycle.’ The theory was that the slumps and booms of capitalism, the endless cycle of recession followed by boomlet were all in the past.Miraculously, the modern Tory government had found a formula which would ensure perennial growth, the gradual lowering of balance of payments deficits, inflation, taxes, interest rates all at the same time. A new virtuous world opened up, in which the capitalist economy went on growing and growing forever, and in which everyone had a chance to make themselves into millionaires as the Thatcher millionaires had done. In this atmosphere, there was no problem at all about borrowing more and more money to expand the already vast new empires of the self-made men who typified the Thatcher era.The feature which is common to all the cases above (and all the others not mentioned) is overconfidence. There was overconfidence to borrow endlessly in the certainty that interest rates would never rise again; overconfidence to break laws and regulations at will; over-confidence that the very fact of having a fortune ensured a fortune forever. What motivates these people? Is it all personal gain? In one of the more glorious passages in Capital, Marx traces the history of avarice in the development of capitalism. To begin with individual capitalists showed the most rigorous self-sacrifice in their personal lives.‘But the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment ... Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation.’But however great the avarice or enjoyment of luxury by these creatures of speculation and the credit system, the real driving force in their lives is ‘the passion for accumulation’:‘The capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes labour power out of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments.’ The drive is always to go on accumulating and exploiting long after the individual capitalist has stashed away a million times more cash than he can hope to spend on himself in ten lifetimes. His motto is (in Marx’s words): ‘accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets!’These grand accumulators, half-crazed with their own self-importance and their invulnerability, acted as stalking horses for more cautious capitalists who held back, urging, like the gallant second lieutenant: ‘through that gap, sergeant, I’m close behind.’ Into the gap, sweetened by New Years Honours and egged on by sycophants in the press, plunged Thatcher’s New Entrepreneurs sacking and borrowing, sacking and borrowing in a virtuous crusade to usher in the capitalist millennium.The game has been up since the great stock exchange crash of October 1987, which, like the great gales of the same month, was predicted by absolutely no one. Suddenly the cycle is not virtuous any more, but vicious. We are back with the same old stop and go, boom and slump. The decade of the Thatcher knights has come to an end at almost exactly the same time as has their own glory. They borrowed too much. They sacked too many skilled workers, and trained no one in their place. They are suddenly an embarrassment, to be disposed of as quickly as possible, in prison or in bankruptcy, while the real rulers try grimly to hang on to their credibility and their profits.The demise of the great bounty hunters of the 1980s is a symbol of the demise of the crude confidence which sustained their class ten years ago. The brash assurance with which, for instance, Sir Keith Joseph told his chauffeur in 1980, ‘we need four million out of work’ has gone.They have played their cards, and found them useless. Rather like the Labour leaders at the end of their last term of office in the late 1970s, the Tory leaders are stumbling from one crisis to another, uncertain what will happen next, no longer confident they can win. They are falling back more and more on what was beyond doubt their most remarkable achievement in the 1980s: their bludgeoning of the Labour opposition into a pale and pathetic shadow of their own self-serving capitalistic selves. Top of the pageLast updated on 17.1.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThatcher: class warrior(February 1985)From Socialist Worker, February 1985.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 3–4.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Thatcher-worship, which goes on all the time in a continuous Mass in T, will rise to a crescendo in the next few weeks. A new excuse to sing the praises of the Prime Minister in otherwise difficult times comes with the tenth anniversary of her becoming leader of the Conservative Party.A suitable prelude is an article in the Mail on Sunday’s colour magazine by the reactionary critic, Anthony Burgess. His piece, gloriously entitled The Sexuality of Power, ends by comparing Margaret Thatcher to Venus de Milo. He makes the subtle point that whereas Venus had no arms, Mrs Thatcher has plenty.Grateful and sycophantic press barons will be eager to impress on their readers that Mrs Thatcher is a wonder woman, her political intelligence and grasp far greater than anything else seen in Britain (or any other country) in the postwar period. Above all, she will be heralded for her convictions and her passions, which, it will be argued, contrast magnificently with the dull pragmatism of her two predecessors, Heath and Macmillan.When I try to read all this, I remember an evening in Plymouth some sixteen years ago when I first appeared on the BBC radio programme Any Questions. A Labour government was in office with a majority of 100. A Labour MP and I were ’balanced’ on the right by Malcolm Muggeridge and Margaret Thatcher MP.When, after the programme, I said that I thought the Labour government was behaving rather like a Tory one, she blithely agreed. But, she insisted, in a very maternal way, there was a crucial difference between the two parties: in the people they represent.When I next came across her, she was speaking as minister for education at the Tory Party conference in 1970, declaring with tremendous passion that the school-leaving age would be raised to sixteen, and that much more money would be spent on the state sector.She is not someone who fights when she thinks she may be beaten. The miners’ strike of the winter 1980–81 is a very good example of that. She withdrew a pit closure programme at once.Mrs Thatcher’s real skill comes from her deep sensitivity to the ebbs and flows in the fortunes of her class. She is a class general, who knows no sentiment in the struggle.The old aristocratic leaders of the Tory Party believed they were superior to the lower orders chiefly through divine intervention or God’s will. They were therefore inclined to dilute their class passions with occasional bouts of compassion, doubt or hesitation.Margaret Thatcher and her arrivistes, people whose parents had to hang on by their fingertips to stay in the ruling class at all, believe that they are superior because they are superior. There is, therefore, in their class war strategy not a hint of doubt or guilt. They have a better sense of the state of the battle, and a stronger will to win it.Unlike Macmillan, Thatcher was deeply suspicious of the Keynesian economics and full employment of the postwar years. She sensed that although these things could not be reversed at the height of the boom, they were fundamentally corrosive of her class. Long before most Tory leaders she sensed an ebb in that confidence, and she seized the time.She knew that mass unemployment breeds despair in workers, and that that despair would breed its own confidence among her people. She knew that trade union leaders were only powerful as long as they were allowed to seem so. She sensed the union leaders’ special weakness, their suspension between the two classes, and their unwillingness to side with either. She reckoned that if the union leaders were expelled from the corridors of power, they would be reduced to pleading to be allowed in again.Mrs Thatcher is not an intellectual giant, nor has she risen to such heights through her beauty or her oratorical skills. She is a new-fashioned two-nation Tory who understands the simple truth, which evades far too many of us: that class confidence comes out of class strength, and that her class can win only if the other class loses. Top of the pageLast updated on 27 October 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootObituaryWe owe him a huge debt(28 September 2002)From Socialist Worker, No.1819, 28 September 2002.Copied with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.MUSING MISERABLY on the death of Duncan Hallas, three pictures come into my mind. I first heard him speak in public at a conference of the International Socialists way back in the late 1960s. An argument was raging, inspired by something called the “micro-faction”, whose line was that the coming of socialism could be left to the spontaneous movement of the working class.At the time, dominated by continuous trade union victories and enormous demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the argument seemed persuasive. Duncan swept down to the front. “Lots and lots of workers vote Tory,” he started, and I groaned. But in a few powerful sentences he utterly demolished the “spontaneists”.Political development in the working class, he insisted, was uneven. The most conscious and socialist elements had to come together as a potential leadership. As he swept on, my groan developed into a cheer. I got to know Duncan more intimately some years later when I was working on Socialist Worker and Duncan would appear on Monday mornings to write the leaders.He would grab himself a disgusting coffee, light up an infernal cigarette, bark out testy comments about the state of the world, and then, grabbing a biro, would scribble out in longhand an impeccable editorial. He was the most coherent socialist I ever knew, whether he was writing or speaking.My third memory of him comes from a park in Leicester where we had gathered to confront the fascists. As always, Duncan started by addressing the strength in the opposing argument. Was it really permissible for democrats and socialists to deny free speech to the fascists? In powerful language Duncan recalled the violent intimidatory marches of Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s.By the time he’d finished he’d proved beyond doubt that free speech for fascists leads to the crushing of freedom of those they harassed. Duncan Hallas was a great man, and our debt to him is immeasurable. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot et al.Army reign of terror(August 1971)From Socialist Worker, 21 August 1971.Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.50-1.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Special analysis by Paul Foot, Brian Trench, Jimmy Grealy and Chris HarmanTHE most savage terrorism of all, that of the British army, is on the loose in Belfast. All pretence that Northern Ireland is a democracy has been cast aside.Men have been imprisoned without charge or trial. Many will be held there for years. The few who have been released tell of torture practised by the British army and the Northern Ireland police.In the streets a score or more of people have been killed, most of them from the nationalist section of the population. Already, thousands of people are streaming in terror out of Belfast into primitive refugee camps in Southern Ireland.The British government claims that it has had to introduce internment – imprisonment without trial – in order to ‘clear out the murderers’. The British press has backed up Heath and Maudling by continual talk of ‘terrorists’.Most of the killing, however, has been carried out not by the IRA but by the British army and the bigoted thugs in the Orange Order.Two years ago, the homes of working-class people in the Falls Road, Belfast, and other areas, were attacked by crazed mobs of police and armed Orangemen. A dozen or more people were killed.Government ministers and newspaper owners in Belfast knew full well who was responsible for those murders. Official government inquiries admitted that the police were to blame.No one was put on trial, let alone interned, for this indiscriminate murder. The present arrests have nothing to do with stopping violence. Leaders of both wings of the IRA have repeatedly made it clear that they are opposed to attacks on the Protestant section of the populationTheir ‘crime’ in the eyes of the British government is that they have armed themselves to defend the lives of Catholic workers from attacks by armed Orangemen and that they want the British troops out of Ireland.In the name of ‘peace’, violence has been deliberately provoked by Northern Ireland and Westminster governments. The 20 deaths and all which follow are directly the responsibility of Messrs Heath, Maudling and Faulkner.The basis of the Northern Ireland state for 50 years has been religious hatred. By deliberately fostering a loathing for Catholics among the Protestant working class, the big landowners, industrialists and their British backers have clung to popular support.Protestants have been given marginal privileges to distract them from unemployment and slum housing. They have been organised into bodies like the Orange Order, which every few years launches murderous attacks upon Catholic areas.Two years ago the British government was forced to introduce reforms designed, it was claimed, to end discrimination against Catholics. In doing so, it undermined the foundation of rule through the Stormont regime.The British government, however, is not prepared to see Stormont collapse without a struggle. Every gesture of opposition to reform from the right wing of the Unionist Party and the supporters of Ian Paisley, has been greeted with concessions from the British government.The decision to intern was taken to appease the Unionist right wing, which for more than a year has placed internment top of the list of its demands upon the government.What has been the reaction of British liberalism and the British Labour Party to this flagrant breach of the ‘traditional civil liberties’ for which, laughably, the United Kingdom is meant to stand? Unanimously, the British press has approved the decision to intern. Little or nothing has been allowed in their pages to disturb the solidarity between the press and the British troops. The facts about internment have not been sought. In the rare instances where journalists have discovered some of the truth about the internment camps, the editors have consigned their reports to the waste paper basket.The reaction of the Labour Party has been in direct violation of everything for which the labour movement stands. Mr Harold Wilson is in the Scillies, apparendy out of contact with the worst breach of civil liberties in the UK for a hundred years. Mr. Callaghan, Labour’s Home Affairs spokesman, has described the internment as ‘a gamble’. He obviously hopes it will succeed. He has uttered not one word about the brutality, let alone the principle, of internment.But Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and all the editors in the world cannot stop the resistance. In Northern Ireland, the resistance rules in the beleaguered areas. From five o’clock in the morning the streets are full of people determined to ensure that the ‘snatch squads’ will not surprise them again.Irish people, socialists and republicans in Britain must rally to support their countrymen and comrades in the North of Ireland. Top of the pageLast updated on 20.12.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootCan Labour bring jobs?(18 June 1994)From Socialist Worker, No.1397, 18 June 1994, p.11.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.A FEW of the more learned political commentators have discovered a “crucial difference” between the candidates standing for the Labour Party leadership.One candidate, John Prescott, “puts full employment at the centre of the agenda”. He wants the party to “make a commitment” to full employment, which he defines by an old 1944 standard as at least 97 percent of the workforce at work.The other two candidates are more cautious about the figures. This should make the choice pretty easy. In all my life I have never heard a politician (or anyone else, for that matter) say that they are in favour of unemployment.Everyone agrees that unemployment is a bad thing and should be banned. All governments would like to ban it, but it has an irritating quality of not being susceptible to bans.Indeed there is a pattern in the politics of this century which suggests that the more anxious politicians say they are about unemployment the more it flourishes when they are in office.This is especially true of the Labour Party. The Labour Party, since it gets its votes from the working class, has an obvious interest in preferring work and wages to dole and poverty.In the election of 1929 every other policy was subordinated to the single specific aim of reducing unemployment. Jimmy Thomas MP, the railway union leader, was adamant that all socialistic nonsense should be rejected in favour of the practical business of getting the one million unemployed back to work. MoonshineA Labour government was elected and Thomas became Lord Privy Seal with special responsibility for the unemployed. The unemployment figures tripled in two years and Thomas, perhaps logically, joined the Tories.John Prescott cites the post-war majority Labour government as the model of how unemployment can be wiped out. It was wiped out during that government but so it was for the next 13 years or so – under a Tory government.The first substantial rise in unemployment after the war happened under a Labour government – in 1967. Then in 1972 unemployment reached a million under the Tories.Labour was furious. It patented a slogan: “Back to work with Labour.” Under the Labour government which followed, unemployment soared to one and a half million.The new Tory leader, Thatcher, became a champion of full employment. Then she got into office and we were back to four million unemployed.The level of unemployment has never this century been set by the government. It has been set by the level of industrial activity, which in turn has been decided by the unelected people who own and control the means of production.The “free market” has been left free to rise and fall as it suits its controllers. If government wants to insist on full employment, therefore, it must nationalise, control and interfere with the free market in a manner which John Prescott is not prepared even to contemplate.Unless accompanied by a warning about the need to fight the priorities of capitalism all talk of a “commitment to full employment” is so much old fashioned moonshine.P.S. If I had a vote, by the way, I would vote for John Prescott in preference to Blair and Beckett, certainly not for his worthless pledges on unemployment, but because as far as I know he’s the only candidate who’s ever been on strike and fought hard against an employer.He will not refer to it, but I will. He was an excellent militant in his native Hull in the seamen’s strike of 1966. Top of the pageLast updated on 6.2.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootIrelandCome all you young rebels(January 2001)From Socialist Review, No.248, January 2001, p.26.Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.History is a battleground says Paul Foot – especially in IrelandGet out your diaries for January and, if you find a lot of meetings there already, prepare your video recorders. A four part series, each part one hour long, is coming up on BBC1 and must not be missed by any socialist or Republican on either side of the Irish Sea. Called Rebel Heart and written by Ronan Bennett, its absorbing subject is the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and its aftermath all the way up to the partition of Ireland in 1922 and the civil war that followed.The series doesn’t need a recommendation from me or from Socialist Review. An irresistible accolade has already been showered on it by the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble, and his acolyte the editor of the Daily Telegraph in London, Charles Moore. David Trimble officially complained to the BBC about the series before he had even seen it. On the day of its press showing the Daily Telegraph, still masquerading as the ‘paper you can trust’, published a whole page of strident propaganda against the series and its author. In order to distinguish between what it regards as ‘fact’ (sacred) and ‘comment’ (free), Mr Moore added a leading article in which he lambasted the BBC for even contemplating a series based on what he regards as biased history. Nowhere in either piece was it disclosed that Mr Moore is himself a dedicated Ulster Unionist and a consistent campaigner for Unionist candidates in Northern Ireland. His position is absolutely clear. He is for free speech for Ulster Unionists, but utterly opposed to free speech for Republicans or indeed anyone who dares expose the ghastly history of Ulster Unionism over the whole of the 20th century.Moore and his dwindling band of supporters can’t abide any record of what happened in Ireland in the years immediately following the Easter Rising. They like to imagine that the flame lit by Connolly, Pearse and the other leaders of that doomed but heroic revolt was extinguished forever with the British soldiers’ bullets that murdered most of them in the prison yards. Moore, Trimble and Co still go pale with fury at any mention of what happened next – the spread, like wildfire, of the spirit of revolt across the whole of Ireland culminating in 1918 in the election of Sinn Fein candidates in 73 of the 105 constituencies in all Ireland.Ronan Bennett’s story, based on a young and fictional middle class participant in the rising, his love affair with a young sharpshooter whom he met on the Dublin barricades, and his subsequent heroics in the awakening of the west of Ireland, brings to the story a new and vital dimension: the impact of these events on Republicans in the six counties of the North. The hero’s girlfriend lives in Belfast, which at the time was still an integral part of Ireland. So the story moves between the open revolution in the south and west to the North, where Michael Collins came to be seen by most of his instinctive supporters as more of a renegade than a hero.The series does not deal in detail with the London negotiations in which Collins and the other Irish delegates were easily persuaded by the British prime minister, Lloyd George, and his advisers to divide the island and leave the Northern six counties in the hands of the British and the Orange Order. When Collins returned from London, he ordered his best recruits in the North back to the South to help him fight for the treaty against its furious Republican opponents. The result was a civil war in which the best and toughest fighters against the British turned their guns on each other, with frightful consequences. Rebel Heart ends ironically in a fatal shootout between the hero and a Collins supporter he had recently sprung from a death sentence in a British jail. As the two comrades lie dying from their wounds, they can’t help giggling. ‘At least’, says one, ‘we died for Ireland.’As in all the great moments of revolutionary history there is a persuasive argument on both sides, and in the personal tragedy of Ronan Bennett’s series it is hard not to sympathise with both. On the one hand are the 26 counties, two thirds of all Ireland, free at last from imperialist rule, with their own army and their own parliament. On the other hand is the beleaguered minority in the North, defenceless against the sectarian savagery of legitimised Orange rule. The horror of the latter is revealed in a dramatisation of the murders in their home of the adult male members of a Belfast Republican family by a deranged and detested police chief. These murders, despite the hysterical protests of the Daily Telegraph, are not invented by Ronan Bennett. They really happened in the way the film describes.The argument is left in some doubt, though the script’s sympathy with the rebels against the treaty is pretty clear. It’s a pity no space could be found for the definitive answer to the problem of the North as set out in a series of scorching articles by the executed hero of the rising, James Connolly. Two years before the rising, as nationalist leaders started to flirt with partition,Connolly wrote a series of articles in whatever paper would publish him. In the Irish Worker of 14 March 1914 he denounced partition as ‘the depth of betrayal’. His famous conclusion was that partition ‘would mean a carnival of reaction North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements while it endured’." }
{ "content": "James Connolly could reach such devastatingly prophetic conclusions because, unlike Collins, Pearse, de Valera and all the other leaders of the rising, he was a socialist who directed his attention first and foremost to the working class. He was driven into a paroxysm of fury by the mere suggestion that the future of industrial Ulster would be handed over to the likes of David Trimble and Charles Moore.Rebel Heart is on BBC1 Sundays 9 p.m. from 14 January Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootUnemployment – The Socialist Answer(1963)A Labour Worker Pamphlet.First published 1963 by the Labour Worker, 10 Kersland Street, Glasgow, W2.Transcribed by Christian Høsbjerg, with thanks to Derek Howl.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.INTRODUCTIONThe MythsThe RealitiesWHY UNEMPLOYMENTThe Excuses‘Demand’ and OverproductionThe Cold War CureThe Pressure on WagesUNEMPLOYMENT AND THE TORIESThe Three Dilemmas of Mr. Maudling1. Tory ‘Expansion’ and Unemployment2. Arms Expenditure3. Depressed AreasUNEMPLOYMENT AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENTLabour’s RemedyWooing Big Business‘Work at any Price’The Limits of ReformHOW TO FIGHT UNEMPLOYMENT‘Do-it-yourself’ DemandsFive Days’ Work or Five Days’ PayNo Sackings – Share the WorkWorkers’ ControlIntroductionThe Myths“A new situation has arisen which shows certainsimilarities with what happened in the early 1930’s. I do notintend to convey the idea that we must repeat the sad experiences ofthose years, but I do think we shall have to take definite measuresto see that they are not repeated.”Mr. Per Jacobssen, director of the International Monetary Fund, 20. 2. 1963The director of the International Monetary Fund is not employed toinstruct workers as to their prospects in the future, nor is it hisjob to comment on the best action for the world’s unemployed. He isconcerned to report to the international employing class on thenature and progress of world capitalism. The “sad experiences” ofthe 1930’s for Mr. Jacobssen were not the experiences of millionsof workers cut off from their only source of livelihood, but theexperiences of capitalists, whose profits, on the whole, were smalland whose productive capacity was seriously underemployed. MrJacobssen knows quite well that the employing class will act out ofsheer desperation to avoid those experiences, and it is to desperateaction, no doubt, that he urges it to act. The capitalist, whereverhe operates, listens and understands. He knows only too well what Mr.Jacobssen is talking about. He himself is able to observe theaccounts of his business, and to study them in the light of pastexperience. And he knows that the next few years will be aperiod of difficulty and distress. He makes no effort to questionthis forecast nor to examine the causes of it. In fact, he knows verywell that investigation and question of that kind can only do himharm. His job, then, is to hush everything up ... to get out the old,old platitudes, dust them up a little, and present them to a cynicalapathetic public.We have been asked in the past few months ‘to put our shouldersto the belts’, ‘to tighten our wheels’, ‘to get our nose tothe wall’ and ‘our backs stuck into the grindstone’. Referenceshave been made to Dunkirk. For the religious among us, there is thestory of the seven lean years and seven fat years, and, if that isnot enough, there is always the attraction of forty days (or months)in the wilderness without food or drink. All this nonsense will bespewed out during the next few months. Newspaper columnists,television commentators, politicians from all parties, businessmen – all will carry to the country the same unmistakeable message: “Allright. We’ve had our good times. Now’s the time for a bit of‘consolidation’ and ‘self-sacrifice’.” The RealitiesThe worker on the other hand has no interest in this mythology. Heis concerned rather with the reasons for all this sacrifice. Theshipyard in Glasgow, whose yard closed overnight; the girl bankemployee in London who got her notice because of “necessary reviewof staff owing to serious difficulties in the banking business”;the Birmingham builder whose job, once safe, now depends on the localauthority’s plans for new houses, which get less and less ambitiousevery year ... these people will want to know why. Machines,computers, and building techniques improve and increase every day.The productive capacity of society stretching from the Rockies to theUrals has doubled and re-doubled over and over again since thebeginning of the century. The worker himself produces more everyyear, in less time, and yet his own condition is suddenly infinitelyworse. His weekly income is slashed five times. Furniture on hirepurchase has to be given up. Housekeeping money has to be halved.Luxuries of any kind have ruthlessly to be abandoned. What used to bea careful but comfortable way of life is changed overnight into agrim struggle to keep the family alive. Why?Why Unemployment?The ExcusesA small factory closes. A shipyard is merged. Twenty or thirtyoffice workers are told that they can go elsewhere. Stories like thisare commonplace to-day. And just as commonplace are the officialreasons given by the bosses for the sackings. These have a depressingsameness about them. Take some examples. On the 9th January 1963, thebosses of Rolls Royce decided to put 16,000 men on short time. Thereason? “There has”, said the official statement, “been adecline in orders in the company’s aero-engine division”. Or takethe statement of Mr. J.M. Wotherspoon, plant manager of RemingtonRand typewriter factory at Hillington Glasgow. On 8th February thecompany coolly announced that 1,100 men would lose their jobs thefollowing week. Mr. Wotherspoon’s statement of explanation musthave brought great comfort to the workers. “For months” he said“we have been overproducing, hoping the typewriter market wouldimprove. It hasn’t. In fact, there has been a slump in overseasorders for typewriters and sets of parts. We had to do this toprotect the continued operation of the factory”. The same reasonshad been put before 1,200 French workers at Lyons a month earlierwhen Remington closed a large typewriter factory there.What a relief such statement must be to the redundant workers!Those long, drab mornings at the Labour Exchange will no doubt becheered by the thought that the reasons for the sackings were goodones, that, after all, demand had slumped; that, after all, the RollsRoyce bosses and Mr. Wotherspoon are still in work. ‘Demand’ and OverproductionLet us look a little closer at these excuses: “fall in orders”,“slackening demand”, “overproduction”. Perhaps it means thatno one wants any more aeroplanes or typewriters. Perhaps the world isso saturated with these (and other) commodities that mankind can nowdo without for a period. Possibly there are enough aeroplanes foreveryone to travel wherever they wish, enough typewriters to supplyeveryone who wants one. To find out, we could ask the 15,000aero-workers at Rolls Royce how often they have travelled on anaeroplane. We could ask the 1,100 Remington workers whether they areall perfectly satisfied with their typewriters." }
{ "content": "The fact is, of course, that there is still a desperate need forboth these commodities. Only a tiny percentage of the worldpopulation have travelled on an aircraft, and very very few owntypewriters. The simple fact is that the average worker can’tafford a typewriter or a trip in an aeroplane. His wages aresimply not enough for him to contemplate either. The “markets”and the “orders” which the bosses talk about have nothingwhatever to do with what people want. They refer only to what peoplecan afford.“Afford” – what does this mean? To millions and millions ofworkers it means the size of the wage packet – the small brownpackage he gets each week in return for producing the aeroplane orthe typewriter or whatever else he does. The value of that packet isnot the same as the value of what he has produced.For the boss has snaffled a proportion of it – as surplus value – as profit. When we think of the fact that the vast majority ofpeople are workers, and that they only get paid a proportion of thewealth they produce, we can immediately see the problem which theboss class must face: “who is to buy the goods”?Of course the boss class themselves can buy a certain amount ofgoods. Mr. Roy Thompson can charter an aeroplane to go and see Mr.Khruschev one weekend. Lord Robens in fact can actually buy anaeroplane. But the bosses cannot possibly absorb more than a tinyproportion of the mass of goods produced.There is only one alternative. To sell the goods to the worker.But the profit which the boss must make is not realised until hesells his goods at a price. The price must be enough to allow him topay his workers and get the profit. In other words, the workers’wages are too low to buy back the goods which they produce. That isan essential characteristic of the capitalist system. It means thatfrom time to time the capitalist cannot sell his goods. Like Mr.Wotherspoon and Mr. Rolls Royce he shuts up shop, pays his workersoff or puts them on short time.But why from time to time? If the system was as shaky as that, youmight expect it to be in a state of permanent crisis – as it was inthe thirties. The point is that he crisis would only be permanent ifall workers were employed on “consumer” goods, which they wouldbe expected to buy. Of course, that is not the case. Workers areemployed on making heavy machinery, which they do not buy. Otherswaste their time in advertising or in journalism or in dead-endoffice work which contributes precisely nothing to the production ofthings which are necessary or desirable. As investment in machineryand factory-building goes up, more and more workers are employed inthis field. More and more wages which they can spend on consumergoods, thus for a time alleviating the problem of overproduction. Butone fine day the factory is completed. The workers who built it andinstalled the machinery are then laid off. As there is a tendency formany employers to invest and start building at about the same time -the beginning of a boom –the completion of the jobs also occur atabout the same time and large numbers of workers are thus maderedundant – the beginning of a slump. Then there is more productivecapacity for a smaller market. The problem starts over again. The Cold War CureWhy then has there not been mass unemployment, no slump, since1939? The answer is that the ruling class has resorted in desperationto the panacea which has solved so many of its problem the past ... war.War means the employment of vast numbers of workers on producingabsolutely nothing for personal consumption. They produce fordestruction and savagery. Tanks, guns, warships and so on are turnedout by the million. Workers are paid for doing it, and the problem ofoverproduction simply does not arise. The fact that millions ofworkers are slaughtering each other under phoney and meaninglessbanners is, of course, of no consequence to the capitalist class.Since the Korean war, the ruling classes of the world have workeda new system – war in peacetime. This is sometimes known as‘The Cold War’, or ‘Peaceful Co-Existence’ or ‘The Balanceof Power’. One thing is clear. It has nothing whatever to do withthe workers. The bosses on one side of the Iron Curtain call downthreats and counter-threats on the heads of the bosses on the otherside. Workers may be impressed by the nature of the calumnies. Butwhether in Russia or in America they are being exploited just the same.War in peacetime means that an enormous hunk of what we produceevery year – 7% in Britain; 10% in America; even more in Russia – is diverted into armaments – some of them so hideous that no oneeven dares to contemplate what would happen if they were used.Hundreds of thousands of workers are paid to produce these weapons,or to join the army etc. etc. The money they are paid opens up newmarkets in which the consumer goods industries can sell their produce.International capitalism has – for the time being – solved itsproblems by using its productive capacity, which could produce abetter and more satisfying life for thousands upon thousands of us,to manufacture the ugliest, most disgusting and most utterly uselessproducts in the whole of human history.But wait! Why is it necessary for them to produce armaments? The Pressure on WagesWhy can they not use some of their profits to raise wages? Thiswould create the markets in which to sell their consumer goods, andall capacity would be used on things which people need. Certainlyit would. But one of the most charming characteristics of thecapitalist class is that they are always at each other’s throats.One boss’s success is another’s failure. The forces of capitalismare concentrating into huge monopoly blocks (sometimes, as in Russia,a whole nation’s enterprise is one single state capitalist bloc),but the competition intensifies. It becomes more and more vicious,more and more regardless of workers’ interests. This competitionforces the boss to accumulate the surplus wealth he extractsfrom the worker. The greatest problem for every boss – the onewhich keeps him awake at nights – is the question: “Have I enough" }
{ "content": "capital accumulated?’’ For if the answer is “no”, then thecompetitor down the road or across the seas will invest more, producecheaper goods, and undersell him in the markets. It is his instinctof self-preservation which forces him to accumulate as a toppriority. If he is to survive, nothing else matters butaccumulation of wealth from the exploited workers. That is whyAnthony Wotherspoon expresses “sadness” at having to sackworkers, he does it nevertheless – because the loss of orders isdamaging the level of accumulation in Remington Rand. The slogan ofcapitalism is now the same as it always has been. “We mustaccumulate. The workers, their needs, their wants, their families andtheir aspirations can go to hell (or heaven) provided we accumulate.”And, of course, there is only one major item in his accounts whichthe individual capitalist can alter – his wage bill. Thenever-ending drive to accumulate forces him for ever to keep hiswages in check. And as the rate of profit (that is, the amount ofprofit made for the amount invested) goes down and down so there haveto be ‘wage pauses’ and ‘guiding lights’ and the NationalIncomes Commission.This, then, is the terrible dilemma of the capitalist class. Ifwages are low generally, then there is no market for the goods heproduces. If wages are high, he cannot accumulate enough. Whatever“solution” he finds for one problem, in some degree, he landshimself in the other. Either way, it means unemployment, misery amongthousands of workers ... and the most terrible waste of humanendeavour and productive forces.Unemployment and the Tories:The Three Dilemmas of Mr. MaudlingLord Hailsham: “I offer you faith and courage. Whatmore do you want?”A voice: “A f... job.”Public meeting of workers in Hartlepoole, Durham, Jan 29th.1. Tory ‘Expansion’Capitalist “expansion” involves a whole series of petty fiscalmeasures. A fall in bank rate here, a cut in purchase tax there, arelease of credits, and other gimmicks. The net result is to increasedemand for a period until capitalists from other nations cash in onthe expanding market, imports rise, and the national capitalist classhas to shut down again or be beaten on its home ground.The pattern of unemployment in post-war Britain has been one ofregular cycles, with the graph rising and failing within narrowlimits and corresponding roughly to the “expansion” measures.Another feature about the figures is the regular decline in thesummer as construction work and catering trades get into full swing.Over the years the tendency has been for unemployment to drop lessand less as the “squeeze” is lifted. The “peaks” of the graphhave climbed higher and higher. The number of wholly unemployed, inFebruary 1963, was slightly more than 600,000 which is easily thehighest since the war. The previous highest, just before the lastelection “boom” in 1959, was 530,000.Similarly, and this really frightens the Tories, the fall inunemployment figures as the brakes are taken off has become more andmore negligible. It looks as though the process has now reached itslogical conclusion ... that the normal methods of Tory “expansion”do not any longer have any noticeable effect on the unemploymentfigures. “The economy” and “production” can “grow”and “grow”, but unemployment remains at the same rate, and evenincreases! Thus the National Institute of Economic and SocialResearch predict that a growth rate of 3% will see the same number ofunemployed at the end of the year. And the Financial Times – the Internal Bulletin of the British capitalist class – of February11th, 1963, went even further:“When an economy starts to expand from a position ofover-capacity, is can achieve impressive increases in productionwithout making any substantial dent in unemployment ... it is quitepossible that a more efficient use of manpower can lead tounemployment and production rising simultaneously”.As more and more plant is manufactured, and more and more goodspour onto the market (witness the new car factories at Halewood,Liverpool, and Linwood, Paisley), there is greater productivecapacity for the same market. The capitalist dog-fight becomesmore and more vicious... and the boss’s natural reaction is to turnto his labour force and trim it of all unnecessary and unsavouryelements. He throws out the old and the unskilled. And he throws outthe militants. The two serious labour disputes at Dunlop, Coventry,and Fords, Dagenham, both involved the arbitrary sacking of militantshop stewards.This is the process described so politely as “a more efficientuse of manpower” which leads “unemployment and production to risesimultaneously”. But it puts the wretched Tory Chancellor in aterrible dilemma. If he leaves “expansion” at the normal rate,the unemployment figure will rise nevertheless. If he expands furtherthan the limit, his class will lose out to the rest of the worldcapitalists who will rush in to exploit the new huge markets. Thusinflation: thus balance of payments troubles. Mr. Maudling, whounderstand the capitalist system as well as anyone else, put hisposition in a brutal moment of frankness in the Commons Debate onunemployment, December 17th, 1962.Maudling: “A level of unemployment of 550,000 to600,000 is too high. On the other hand, a level of unemployment halfthat would lead us back into the difficulties of inflation andbalance of payments which we have seen in the past.”Hon. Members: “Oh”.Maudling: “I do not say that these problems areinsoluble, but it is unreal to try to pretend that we can bring theunemployment rate down to half what it is at the moment withoutrunning into problems”.The honourable members who shouted “Oh” simply did notunderstand the nature of the capitalist system. 2. Arms ExpenditureThe Tories are saved from sudden, drastic slump by the continuedexpenditure of huge resources upon armaments. But even this is nopermanent stabiliser. The technical demands of the “deterrent”rise every year, and so, out of all proportion to what the rulingclass can afford, do the costs. Different sections of the class arealready complaining bitterly about the heavy burden of the arms bill.Why, after all, could they not exploit the consumer boom with theextra profits?Keeping the “deterrent”, then, means not only infuriating manyof the bosses who produce consumer goods, but also spending so muchof the national product on armaments that huge gaps are left ininvestment in consumer goods industries, which can be promptly filledby competitors from abroad. Cutting the arms bill, on the other hand,may mean the end of the “deterrent”, but also thins out the extra" }
{ "content": "markets of the armaments workers. Poor Mr. Maudling is trapped again. 3. Depressed AreasPresident Kennedy in his “state of the nation” speech lastyear referred to heavy unemployment in some regions as the secondmost important problem facing the administration. In Britain, wherecapitalism is oldest, the problem is intense. Northern Ireland atpresent has 11.2% unemployed, while productivity in that hard-hitarea has been rising for the past two years twice as fast as anywhereelse in the United Kingdom! In Scotland the figure is 6.2%, the Northof England 7%, Wales 6%. The average for Britain as a whole is 3.2%,and in the largest area, London and the South East, the figure is amere 2.3% (the highest for years). Ever since the Local EmploymentAct, 1960, the Tories have strained British capitalism almost to thelimit in an attempt to heal these economic deformities. They havespent more than £75,000,000 in inducements to individual capitalistswho have set up shop in development districts. Here and there theyhave succeeded. But the general picture is one of total failure.Scotland has received the lion’s share of the money (£43,000,000).Yet unemployment in Scotland has risen steadily since the act waspassed, as has the steady stream of unemployed Scots crossing theBorder to find work elsewhere.Here, then, is Mr. Maudling’s third dilemma. For the economiesin the depressed areas are so dependent on heavy, declining industrythat the degree of “reflation” needed to get them growing againis about twice or even three times that which the already expandingareas like London can stand. To “stimulate” in an attempt torevive Scotland would mean chaotic inflation in the South, andserious balance of payments problems. To keep the South in check isto suffocate the depressed areas still further. The Tories take thelatter course, but they do not enjoy either. These then are theproblems faced by capitalism in an era of ever-expanding machineryand automation. All of them point inevitably down the road of slowand steady increases in unemployment, to the “boom” periodscoming less and less often, to the “depression” periods becomingmore and more disastrous. The Tories will pin their faith in keepingenough workers in “prosperity” to win the elections. Thisoptimistic notion, as well as the entire tragicomedy of dilemmas,could be laughed to scorn by the workers ... if, and only if, theLabour movement had something better to offer them. But has it?Unemployment and the Labour Movement“The Government has therefore decided to express thefull employment standard of the United Kingdom at a level of 3% atthe seasonal peak.”Hugh Gaitskell, Chancellor of Exchequer, March 22nd 1951.“I beg to move: “That this House expresses itsdeep concern at the rise in unemployment figures to 814,000 (3.2%) ...“It is both a tragedy and a scandal that thisHouse, in 1963, should again have to debate heavy unemployment ...”Douglas Jay, Opposition front Bench, February 4th 1963.Labour’s RemedyHans Christian Andersen has an excellent fairy story about a Kingwho bought a “magic” suit of clothes from a couple of fraudulenttailors. The suit of clothes did not in fact exist, but the “magic”about it was that it was invisible to fools.The King, the Queen and all the courtiers and hangers-on agreedthat the suit of clothes was the most magnificent thing that they hadever seen. It was unanimously decided that it should be worn on thenext royal parade.The masses, too, had been informed about the magic suit, and theydid not want to appear fools either. So they all cheered and cheeredas the King, surrounded by artillery, cavalry and infantry, wascarried through the centre of the town in shining, innocent nudity.Just so do Mr. Wilson, Mr. Callaghan, Mr. Woodcock and Mr.Cousins, flanked by the armoury of 13 million votes, sport themselvesbefore an ever-increasing body of apathetic supporters clothed in“magic” remedies for unemployment.The central panacea of the Labour leadership is the direction ofindustry to the depressed areas.All past experience proves how futile such policies are.Way back in 1935 the Government introduced a lukewarm and totallyineffective Special Areas Act to try to “channel” industry fromthe South to Scotland and other “depressed” areas. In 1938 theBarlow Commission recommended stringent Government control ofindustrial development in the South. In 1945 the Coalition Governmentintroduced the Distribution of Industry Act – which was to becomethe foundation of Labour’s policy toward location of industry. TheAct granted special powers to the Government and local authorities todevelop land and industry in certain specified areas (which includedhuge chunks of Scotland) in order to entice private industry toexpand in these areas. There were also other inducements – such aslow rents, and building grants, and lump sums to cover the losssuffered by the move North.The Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, gave the Governmentpowers to control industrial development by refusing industrialdevelopment certificates to firms wishing to set up shop or expand inthe congested area. Wooing Big BusinessHow well did the two Governments – Labour and Tory – succeedwith these powers at their command? If we take the amount ofindustrial building it looks at first sight as if the LabourGovernment succeeded in channelling industry to the developmentareas. Between 1945 and 1951 30% of all British industrial buildingtook place in the development areas. Between 1952 and 1958 the figureslumped to 18.8%. But a closer look shows a different picture.Between 1945 and 1948 44% of all building was in the developmentareas (20% in Scotland). In the three years 1949 to 1951 the figurewent down to 18.9% – almost exactly the same figure as wasmaintained in the following seven years under the Tories!The point was that immediately after the war, when a great manyfirms were starting again from scratch (this is particularly true ofa large number of firms from the USA) – private enterprise wasrelatively susceptible to “steering” under the Distribution ofIndustry Act, and a “tough” industrial development certificatepolicy. But from 1948 – with capitalism gaining confidence andbuilding more extensions to existing plant, resistance to Governmentpowers increased, and private firms began their accustomedconglomeration near their big markets – in the South.Between 1948 and 1962 both Labour and the Tories failed to shiftprivate enterprise from its firm resolve to stay and expand in theSouth. Yet Labour’s case remains today the same as it has been forthe last ten years – Labour would use the existing powers withgreater effect than did the Tories." }
{ "content": "Against this background of legislation to solve the problem ofunemployment (all of which has failed dismally) we can take a betterlook at the solutions at present offered by the various parties andtrade union bodies. First there is a policy of “negative direction”of industry – or the refusing of industrial developmentcertificates, where possible, to firms wishing to develop in theSouth. This policy is backed by generous -“inducements” to firmsto move into the development areas (low rents, building grants etc.).This is the broad policy of the Tory Party, the Labour Party and theLiberal Party. There are three main reasons why it is totallyinadequate and worthless.The first, as I have shown, is that it has failed. Ifindustrialists are refused permission to expand where they want to,they will not expand at all (cf. Mr. R. Maudling, thenPresident of the Board of Trade, November 9th 1959: “There isalways the possibility that firms prevented from setting up in areasof their own choice will decide not to expand at all – but to donothing”).The second is that where it does succeed, there is no permanancyin the industry which develops in the areas. The factories which havegone to Scotland are branch factories and “bits and pieces”.The branch factories are always the first to close in times ofrecession, always the first to pay off workers, or put them on shorttime. They are always the last in the queue for heavy investment andmodernisation. The “bits and pieces” are wholly unstable, andprovide not even a semblance of a basis for industrial prosperity.Thirdly, there is the trend of British capitalism towards Europe.The industrialist who is refused permission to build in Birmingham,Coventry or London will not turn to Liverpool or Glasgow. He willturn to Hamburg, Rotterdam and Paris. It’s important to remember inthis era of European “internationalism” that our Government’scontrol of private industry is strictly limited by nationalboundaries. Capitalism is as international as ever.But lastly, and most important, this policy leaves the initiativeto private enterprise. It is a policy of wait and see. The ideabehind it is that the Government should not act until privateenterprise acts. Then, of course, it is to act “toughly” with afew expensive bribes thrown in. There is no real plan behind thepolicy. No one is to sit down and decide what type of industry isbest in Scotland. The initiative lies, as always in the hands of BigBusiness and Profit. That is why the policy has been, and always willbe, utterly futile.Why not admit right away that private enterprise – because ofthe historical development in Britain – cannot successfully move tothe North. Why not admit right away that the only answer is publicenterprise under workers’ control?Not public enterprise alone – as the sacking of miners andrailwaymen by nationalised industries bears witness to, but publicenterprise under worker’s control. ‘Work at Any Price’The policy of the Labour Party leaders aims to tinker withcapitalism, not abolish it. Petty tinkering with administrativedetails is always the prerogative of fashionable Labour economists.But they do not even start to provide an answer to the essentialcontradictions of the capitalist system. Nor do they anywherethreaten the continued existence of class society in all its mostruthless forms.In fact, the official Labour Party policy statement has someinteresting things to say about class rule in industry:“With certain honourable exceptions, our finance andindustry need a major shake-up at the top. Too many directors owetheir position to family, school or political connections. If thedead wood were cut out of Britain’s boardrooms and replaced by thekeen young executives, production engineers and scientists who are atpresent denied their legitimate prospects of promotion, ourproduction and export problems would be more manageable.”(Signposts for the Sixties, p. 10)The important struggle, in other words, is for better and brighterbosses. Our boardrooms will be plastered with the new slogan of theLeft: “Etonians keep out! Only Winchester and Manchester GrammarSchool can give the correct training these days!” Nor is theperspective of the Trade Union movement any clearer. Most of the“solutions” from that quarter have been for “expansion” alongconventional capitalist lines. In some instances the leadership hasresorted to the most appalling remedies. “Jobs For Scotland” – a “campaign” conducted by the Scottish TUC to attract more jobsto Scotland was divorced completely from the rank and file.“Direction of industry” to Scotland, with all its narrowchauvinistic implications, was the central theme. This sort of zanynationalism, which has nothing to do with socialism, reached itslogical conclusion in a frantic letter written by Mr. John McWillian,Labour convener of Fife County Council, to Sir Patrick Henessey,managing director of Fords in Britain. “Why not bring yourLiverpool factory to Fife” was the theme of the letter. “We won’tgo on strike up here”. This deliberate class-collaboration merelydelights the capitalists and serves to prolong the insecurity of theworkers.To solve the problem of unemployment in the shipyards the STUCpropose a “scrap and build” policy for Britain’s navy. In the1930’s the unemployed Fenians in the South Side of Glasgowdiscussed an idea to blow up the power station to create more work.The idea was dismissed when someone pointed out that the ruling classwould simply leave them in darkness! No less stupid is the idea ofthe STUC. Unnecessary, futile and extremely pernicious work, like thebuilding of a Polaris submarine, should be boycotted completely bythe workers and their representatives. The Limits of ReformAnd so the miserable story goes on and on. Demands for petty,administrative reform. Demands for the restoration of nationalprestige. Demands for “work for work’s sake”, for theconstruction of the most horrible weapons of war... irrelevant,idiotic demands made without thought or consideration andintermingled with all the flatulent pomposity, petty wit and sterileacademics which are the peculiar characteristics of the latter-dayworking class representative.Creeping unemployment is not the result of “evil” men inpower, or of “the tired, old men on the Tory benches”. The young,active and no doubt super-virile President Kennedy with all the bestintensions in the world can do nothing to stop it. Nor is it theresult of administrative muddles in Whitehall, or of an overdose ofAnglophilia at the expense of the Scots.The reason is that we live in a class society, in which theproductive forces cannot be used to satisfy the needs and desires ofthe workers. The competitive rat-race of capitalism meant, in the" }
{ "content": "thirties, that huge numbers of men and machinery were redundant,useless, to be thrown aside. To-day it means that hundreds ofthousands of men and millions of pounds worth of machinery areemployed in creating worthless weapons, which can only be used forthe destruction of mankind. And even with the drastic measures,unemployment is beginning to grow again.This is the system which the fashionable Labour intellectualswould have us accept, and reform. But unemployment risesrelentlessly, the prophets of permanent affluence are paying thepenalty for ten years of class collaboration, ten years withouttheory, without propaganda, without thought. The cold wind fromthe North whips away the scanty tatters of reformism, exposing theawe-inspiring nakedness of the entire Labour leadership.Capitalism cannot be reformed out of overproduction and afalling rate of profit. It cannot use the productive force whichit has so ingeniously developed to produce what people need andwant. As long as capitalism continues, the threat of unemploymenthangs over the head of every worker. It is the job of the Labourmovement, while fighting the day to day struggle with all themilitancy at its command, to expose the flaws and frauds ofcapitalism and call for its replacement.How to Fight Unemployment‘Do It Yourself’ DemandsHow to fight unemployment? But, first of all, who is to do thefighting? The capitalist class will never give way before an elite ofbureaucrats or professional revolutionaries. It will convert them orsmash them. Nor can the workers look to the capitalist State to solvetheir problems for them. The State is only an instrument of theruling class. It simply serves as a convenient instrument to pool theresources of individual capitalist, and do their dirty work for them.Transport is run for the business man by the State; so is coal,electricity, gas, water and so on. Recently the Tories have all but“nationalised” the ports, to the hysterical cheers of the LabourParty. Nor did the Tories object to the nationalisation of coal andrailways by Labour. It’s perfectly possible that there won’t beany serious objection to the nationalisation of steel (except ofcourse by the steel bosses). Nationalisation by the State has nothingto do with the workers. It simply means that the enterprise is runmore efficiently, the workers exploited more clinically in theinterests of the ruling class.Nor can the worker expect to sit in his house and leave it to hisrepresentatives. The more he sits at home, the less are they hisrepresentatives. If there is no pressure from below, the tradeunion official, the Member of Parliament, the local councillor becomeabsorbed and fascinated with bureaucracy, charmed and delighted withpetty power. Very soon he will put away all thought of the people herepresents and continue on his irrelevant road to nowhere.The slogan for the workers must be “Do it Yourself”. Atevery twist and turn in the industrial struggle, challenge thebosses’ right to hire and fire, challenge his right to run theworkers’ lives. But, through the Labour Party, through the tradeunions, and on the factory floor do it yourself.What to do? To oppose the bosses at the points where their case isweakest, and to expose the absurdity of class society with everydemand and complaint. Five Days Work or Five Days PayThe most immediate and obvious effect of unemployment is the fallin living standards of the unemployed. Suddenly, through no fault ofhis own, although he is prepared to work five days a week, he istold: “You are no longer any use. Go away.” And his livingstandards are cut by five times.Workers, both employed and unemployed, should demand that the bosswho sacks his workers would continue to pay them full rates of payuntil he can offer them work again. A sacked worker is much moreimportant than a shareholder. Let him be entitled to at least thesame sort of benefits.Side by side with this demand, it is vital continually to opposeall unnecessary work. If the unemployed get full maintenance, it iseasier for miners in Fife to oppose a coal-fired power station, whenan oil-fired station is cheaper and easier for all concerned; it iseasier, too, for shipyard and chemical workers to refuse to wastetheir time in the construction of weapons of war. No Sackings – Share the WorkWhen the boss finds that through a drop in orders or a newmachine, he wants to cut his labour force, the workers should demandthat not a single sacking takes place. Instead the available worksshould be shared out between the existing labour force, withoutloss of pay. If ten men can do the work in four days, why nottwenty men in two days? The work is done just the same, and all themen are happier.However, the strength of trade union organisation variestremendously from industry to industry, and from factory to factory.Probably, at present, in most industries such demands cannot bewon. What then?If the fight for 5 days’ work or 5 days’ pay is lost, we mustfight for demands on a sliding scale:Shorter working week (i.e., four days) with loss of pay.Retraining of personnel to take other jobs within theestablishment.In the event of redundancy having to be accepted, anattempt to keep redundant workers on the payroll of the firm untilsuitable alternative work has been found outside.In the event of failure compensation payments whilstlooking for alternative work, plus severance pay.Severance pay should come as a last resort when all else fails,and on terms dictated by the workers not the boss; and not acceptedat the first opportunity as a sort of leaving present from the boss,which has been the attitude of many union leaders.To the demand for a 35-hour week or a 7-hour day the bosses alwayshave some reason for saying it is impossible. In those balmy days of“full” employment the answer was “No, there’s a shortage oflabour.” Today, they say “No, we can’t afford it – increasedlabour costs,” etc. Both ways the workers lose out.Our answer must be clear. “We, the workers ‘can’t afford’unemployment!!! It is your profits and your capitalist system whichprevents a 35-hour, 30-hour or an even shorter week.”At the same time we must stand firm on the question of overtime.We must say: “Whilst our fellow-workers are on the dole will notwork overtime for you.” By banning overtime we force the boss totake on more workers from the dole queue. Workers’ Control" }
{ "content": "These demands raise the question of workers’ status. They assumethat the worker can run his own life, can indeed run his ownindustry, and that he is much more entitled to benefits from industrythan the shareholder of the boss himself. When put to the boss theydo not allow him to bluff with statistics or Parliamentary manoeuvre.They force him openly to defend his system. These demands clear awaythe debris of clichés about “faith and courage”, about “twoworld wars” about “national prestige” and “making Britaingreat”. They expose the hard core of capitalist society ... thestruggle between the classes.All the time this struggle is going on. And wherever the issue isboss against worker, the worker must be supported. Every wage claim,every strike in workers’ interests must be supported, every sackingbitterly opposed. Yet all this is useless unless, somewhere, the ideaof socialism begins to take root among the workers.For socialism, workers’ control of all industry, agriculture andservices, is the only real hope for the end of unemployment. Top of the pageLast updated on 19 August 2016" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootT. Cliff and Zionism(January 1988)From Socialist Worker, January 1988.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 159–161.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Pondering the critical comments of the representatives of American Jewry on the Christmas upheavals in Gaza and on the West Bank, I go to Central Books to buy myself a Christmas present.I know there is one there for me because Dave, who runs the shop and is a crafty fellow, has informed me that for £10 I can get a copy of Red Russia. This is a marvellous pamphlet by John Reed, published in this country in 1919.Dave has something else up his sleeve, however, which brings me back to Gaza. This is another pamphlet, completed on 12 November 1945, called Middle East at the Cross Roads. It was written in Jerusalem by someone called T. Cliff.I rush through the pamphlet and find one or two clues in it which help a lot in understanding the Christmas crisis in the occupied territories. For instance:Zionism occupies a special place in imperialist fortifications. It plays a double role, firstly, directly as an important pillar of imperialism, giving it active support and opposing the liberatory struggle of the Arab nation, and second as a passive servant behind which imperialism can hide and towards which it can direct the ire of the Arab masses.The same point is made in a rather different way a couple of pages later, under the heading: Can Zionism be Anti-Imperialist?Zionism and imperialism have both common and antagonistic interests. Zionism wants to build a strong Jewish capitalist state. Imperialism is indeed interested in the existence of a capitalist Jewish society enveloped by the hatred of colonial masses, but not that Zionism should become too strong a factor. As far as this is concerned, it is ready to prove its fairness to the Arabs.This ‘double role’ and these ‘common and antagonistic interests’ are likely to lie fallow for many years of unchallenged exploitation, but when the volcano erupts, the contradiction is stretched to breaking point.On the one hand the instinct of the American State Department and its business backers is to support the brutality of the Israeli army; on the other they know they must somehow keep up the fiction of their ‘fairness to the Arabs’ to maintain their robbers’ conspiracy with the reactionary regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.The dilemma solves itself for the moment in the cautious criticism by American Jewish organizations and in the US abstention in the United Nations Security Council.Such matters are seized on by all those people who call themselves socialists and supporters of Labour, but who line up with the Israeli state. They point to the criticisms of the American Jews, and to the UN abstention as examples of the ‘moderate approach’ to Zionism. ‘How much better’, they exclaim, ‘is this kind of fraternal criticism to the nasty hostility to Zionism which so often spills over into anti-semitism!’Of all the many prevarications of what is known as the ‘soft left’ I find this line on Zionism the most distasteful. Otherwise humane and intelligent socialists seem able to discuss these matters without even for a moment considering the unimaginable horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people by Zionist aggression and imperialism.This is an old and quite appalling story of lands seized, a people expelled, starved, brutalized and robbed of their own country by naked military force. Whatever the double role which Zionism performs for imperialism, the fact is that Zionism from first to last has never wavered in its support for imperialism and capitalism in the Middle East.If it once unleashed terrorist forces against the British mandate, it did so solely to embarrass British imperialism in the eyes of American imperialism and to shift its allegiance from one to the other.The explanation of the ‘softness’ stems from the feeling that the Jews are a persecuted race, and suffered horribly at the hands of Hitler. Yet how on earth can one set of concentration camps justify another? Concentration camps are precisely what are being built in Gaza and the West Bank this very moment.The pamphlet puts it well:It is a tragedy that the sons of the very people which has been persecuted and massacred in such a bestial fashion ... should itself be driven into a chauvinistic militaristic fervour and become the blind tool of imperialism in subjugating the Arab masses.That sounds pretty good today. To write it in 1945 took the most extraordinary courage and clarity of Marxist thought. Who was this chap T. Cliff anyway? Top of the pageLast updated on 2 September 2014" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootRogues and ‘scroungers’(29 July 1995)From Socialist Worker, No. 1453, 29 July 1994, p. 11.Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2018.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.“NEW ATTACK On Dole Cheats” – the recent headline in the Daily Mail could have come any week since the very beginning of what is now loosely known as “social security”.The government and its supporters are obsessed by the notion that hundreds of millions are flowing down the drain from social security fraud.To deal with that obsession, a vast network of snoopers and spies has been set up by government to catch the cheats. They spend every hour of every day working out new ways of ensuring, for instance, that people on disability allowance can’t walk properly, or that people on carers’ allowance aren’t inventing the people they care for.Control of poor people’s lives is the essence of this operation, and the control is increasingly invasive and intolerable. Big bankersThis month the Benefit Agency reckons that the controls and the crackdowns on the 20 million people on benefit “saved the taxpayer” £717 million.Now pass on to the amazing story of Barings Bank. The most quoted sentence in the recent report of the Board of Banking Supervision states that the Barings collapse was “due to the unauthorised and ultimately catastrophic activities of, it appears, one individual”.This was Nick Leeson who lost hundreds of millions on the international stock markets.What a happy conclusion for the big bankers!The fraud could be blamed entirely on a single rogue crook who went to a grammar school and therefore probably shouldn’t have been allowed into a decent bank in the first place.But wait. The sentence goes straight on as follows, “... that went undetected as a consequence of a failure of management and other controls of the most basic kind”.The main control which Barings escaped was the Bank of England’s iron rule that no British bank can expose itself to (i.e. gamble) more than 25 percent of its capital. A simple point, you might think – easy to understand and easy to enforce. Yet in its last few months Barings managed to expose 73 percent of its capital.How? By an “informal concession” granted by a relatively junior Bank of England official. Apparently he told the blue bloods who run Barings in London that they really didn’t have to worry about the rules. For this “informal concession” there was no precedent, no regulation, no need to refer to anyone in authority.It was not so much a failure of controls as a case of no controls at all.Barings shipped out £827 million under this concession. Remember Barings was one smallish merchant bank, and remember that figure (£717 million) for the total recovery from controls on the alleged social security fraud on benefit paid to 20 million people.The few City gents who feel they owe society an explanation shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, no one really lost anything from the Barings collapse.”If that is true, and it nearly is, the economic system we live under is revealed as all the more grotesque.If £827 million can be shipped out from Britain and used for stock exchange gambling without anyone really noticing or losing anything, then what more proof is needed to establish that losses for the rich can easily and instantly be made up?Losses for the poor, on the other hand, caused by cuts, stricter controls and witch hunts over benefits, are irrecoverable, devastating and in more and more cases even lethal. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 Novem9ber 2018" }
{ "content": "REDS – Die Roten > IS Tendency \| IS Tendenz Paul FootTony CliffRevolutionary political theorist and organiser who fired the Socialist Workers Party with his charisma, charm and vision(11 April 2000)Originally published in The Guardian, 11 April 2000© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the REDS – Die Roten.The first I heard of Tony Cliff, who has died aged 82, was from Gus Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, Minister of Transport. Forty years ago, Gus was a charismatic leader of the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists and had an awesome reputation from a Clydeside apprentices’ strike. In late 1961, he reckoned it was time the Young Socialists took some serious lessons in Marxist theory, and arranged a weekend school to be addressed by two leaders of an obscure Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists.Gus and I met the couple in an airport lounge. I can still see them coming in: Mikhael Kidron, smart, suave, urbane, and Tony Cliff, short and scruffy, looking and sounding like a rag doll. As we mumbled through the niceties of introductions, the rag doll looked irritated and shy. We climbed into a taxi.As we did so, I saw a newspaper poster about events in the Congo, and remarked, partly to break the silence, that I’d never really understood the Congo. Quick as a flash, the rag doll came to life, and started jabbering with amazing speed and energy. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I do remember my clouds of doubt and misunderstanding suddenly disappearing and the role of the contestants in the Congo, including the United Nations, becoming brutally clear.I met Cliff many hundreds of times subsequently, sometimes for private conversations, more often on shared platforms, from which we urged our audiences to join IS and its successor, the Socialist Workers Party, and to organise for socialism. Though he often made exactly the same speech and cracked the same jokes, I never failed to be astonished and enthused.His death is shocking. Very few of us who knew him well believed that such an essentially youthful figure could ever pass away.Tony Cliff was born Ygael Gluckstein, the son of a Zionist building contractor, in Palestine, in May 1917, in between the great Russian revolutions. He was speedily converted out of Zionism by observing the treatment of Arab children. Aged 13, he wrote in a school essay: “It is so sad that there are no Arab kids in the school.” The teacher scrawled across the page the single word: “Communist”.She was right, and Cliff was always grateful for her perception. He fought vigorously against the exclusion of Arabs from the closed Zionist economy. When a speaker from the Haifa trades council spoke glowingly of the anti-fascist uprising in Vienna in 1934, and ended his speech with a tribute to the Paris Commune and workers’ unity, Cliff, aged 17, heckling from the back of the hall, added the one word “international”. In this context, “international” meant Arab, and the stewards responded by twisting his finger till it broke.Cliff joined the Communist party, but was quickly disillusioned by the party’s nationalism. He became a Trotskyist before he was 20 and devoted the rest of his life to building revolutionary socialist organisations. He came to Britain with his newly-married South African wife, Chanie, and was promptly expelled from the country on the advice of the Special Branch; he spent five years in poverty in Ireland until allowed to return.In the 1950s, he formed the Socialist Review Group, which grew into IS in the early 1960s and the SWP in 1977. For a long time, these groups remained tiny. But when the Communist party, with its (comparatively) huge roots in the organised working class, collapsed in 1989, the SWP became by far the largest and most confident of the socialist organisations to the left of the Labour party.This achievement was due largely to Cliff’s most striking qualities; his immense intellectual power and his ability to explain his libertarian Marxism in simple language. His unique intellectual contribution was to describe, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union as state capitalist, and therefore imperialist – a proposition as shocking to most socialists of the time as it was inspiring to those of us who were convinced by it.With the theory of state capitalism came a number of associated ideas, all of them based on Marx’s message that the emancipation of labour must be the work of labour itself; that capitalism is far too strong and sophisticated a system to be brought down or replaced from on high; and that the workers alone, through their union organisations and instinctive solidarity, have the power to bring about that vital change. This power, moreover, cannot be effectively mobilised without political organisation in the working class rank and file.These themes emerged from Cliff’s early books about Russia, China and eastern Europe, and his later four-volume biographies of Lenin (in the 1970s) and Trotsky (in the 1980s).They emerged even more clearly from Cliff’s tireless public speaking. His wild accent often startled his audiences, but they were soon giggling at his folksy jokes, like the parable in which a flea boasts to the ox on whose back he is riding: “Look how far we have ploughed today.”My favourite featured an Arabian sultan, who went to Manchester to buy a cooling system for his palace. As he was chatting to the managing director in his office, the sultan heard a blast on a hooter. Out of the window he saw, to his horror, thousands of workers walking out of the factory. In a hysterical panic, he shrieked at the managing director, who told him not to worry. Half an hour later the hooter went again, and the workers returned from their break. “Don’t worry about the cooling system,” concluded the sultan. “Just give me the hooter.”" }
{ "content": "Cliff died without a penny in his pocket or any property to speak of. He was always bored stiff by property or talk of property. He left a far richer inheritance: thousands of us socialists, who, without him, would have degenerated into apathy, opportunism or careerism; a wife, who lived and fought by his side for 55 years, and two sons and two daughters, all of whom, in their different ways, are inspiring socialists and engaging companions.“Don’t mourn, organise!” was one of Cliff’s most consistent slogans, and somehow we must try to live up to it.Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), socialist activist, born May 20 1917; died April 9 2000 Top of the pageLast updated on 21.1.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWhat Really Took Place on the QE2(8 February 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 108, 8 February 1969, pp. 2–3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.THE SHIPPING correspondents of the national press have paid for their free cruise from Las Palmas on the new Queen Elizabeth II by saying unanimously that the cruise liner ‘will be a great [word missing]’.Now it is the turn of the labour correspondents to blame the delays on the QE2 on the workers.One by one, the stories of ‘mass theft’ and ‘inexcusable delay’ are finding their way into print.From Clydeside workers comes a rather different story. They do not deny that a certain amount was taken from the ship, or that, wherever possible, jobs were ‘made to last’.Working-class Clydeside has grim memories of unemployment, and a healthy contempt for the frivolous waste of the luxury liner.The difference between the glitter of the liner and the squalor in which the men who build it are forced to live is one of the crudest contradictions in capitalism and the workers do not hold back from snaffling whatever they can.The story of delay and incompetence which surrounds the QE2, however, has little to do with the workers. Three points in particular emerged from a long conversation with joiners who worked on the ship, none of which are likely to be brought to our attention by the national press.To start with, this was the first ship built on the Clyde which was ‘all maronite’. InsistedEver since two Greek hulks caught fire in New York harbour some years ago, the American government has insisted that all new ships should be lined with fire-proof maronite. Their insistence on this brittle material is not entirely unrelated to the huge American investment in Cape Asbestos, who produce it.The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders therefore decided that the QE2 should be lined throughout with maronite. They had not reckoned on the fact that soon after work started, asbestosis, a fatal cancer caused by dust from asbestos materials like maronite was classified as an industrial disease.The TUC doctor at once insisted that maronite should not be cut unless by a covered saw or with a vacuum cleaner to remove the dust.The employers were forced to abide by this ruling, but neither they nor their subcontractors were prepared to pay for more than a very few cleaners and saws.John Browns (one of the firms in UCS) had two saws, which, because of their own needs, they banned from the contractors.Tom Goldie, a joiners’ steward explained what this situation meant:‘About five times a day, we’d have to cut maronite, and this meant carrying a big slab of the stuff about four decks up to the saw.‘There was always a long queue waiting to use it, and invariably while you were standing there a gaffer would say \"Get lost and come back in half an hour\".‘Often, you’d come back to find exactly the same situation all day. You could waste about three hours a day just waiting to cut a bit of maronite.’ WastedVacuum cleaners, too, were in constant demand, and there were no more than 30 for the use of 550 joiners on the ship. Hundreds of hours were wasted in queues for cleaners.A second big delaying factor was the need constantly to have things ‘looking smart’ for the ‘walk-rounds’ of the ship by the UCS bosses, or, worse still, for the directors of Cunard. Lord Mancroft, who has been complaining about the ship’s delay recently, was a regular visitor, with his wife and family, of course.Before such visits, the foremen all over the ship would blurt out orders to put up panels with only two screws and clear passages by any stop-gap method that came to hand.Invariably, after such walk-rounds, the piecemeal work would have to be dismantled and the work done all over again, with the loss of countless hours.One of the most sinister, and unexplained, reasons for the chaos in the management’s labour planning towards the end of the QE2 building was an agreement signed with the finishing trade unions on September 2, 1968.This agreement stated that any worker employed for a continuous period of nine months by UCS would be entitled to a minimum of two years’ redundancy pay.Many of the finishing trade workers started on the boat last March and April and would have been entitled to substantial redundancy pay if they were still working by last December.Accordingly, from November 19 a series of panic sackings took place – noticeably of 500 joiners.About 100 of the joiners were re-employed a week later, and more still before the ship left Greenock. Some of the men were working on the ship all the way to Las Palmas and back, and are still on her now at Southampton. BlameHad these men been allowed to work uninterrupted, without the sackings, the finishing work would have been completed weeks ago.As it is, however, the management were able to save about £[figure missing] ½m in redundancy pay, then turn round and and blame the workers for the delay! Top of the pageLast updated on 26 October 2020" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootTony Blurs the past(30 July 1994)From Socialist Worker, 30 July 1994.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 190–191.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Hark to Tony Blair, in a radio interview on 17 July:The trade unions will have no special and privileged place in the next Labour government. They will have the same access to it as the other side of industry.This is heralded in every single newspaper as an example of the ‘new fairness’ of the new Labour leadership. Out go ‘special privileges’ for the unions. In comes a new approach: everyone, whatever side they are on, will be treated equally. This sounds unanswerable.Why should someone be discriminated against according to ‘which side’ of industry they are on? At last this ancient discrimination has been put to flight by the charming and equable Mr Blair.Harold Wilson once likened government in Britain to a driver of a motor car whose job is to steer a difficult path along a road covered with hazards. Blair’s new formula presents government as a football referee, carefully enforcing the rules of a game where 22 players of roughly equal strength and ability fight for supremacy on the field. From now on the referee will play fair between ‘one side of industry’ and ‘the other’.A rather different argument won the day 94 years ago when a handful of trade union delegates, socialists and former Liberals came together to form the Labour Party. Their problem was this: one side of industry owned all the means of production, one side of industry determined the level of wages and of prices, and one side of industry decided whether people were hired or fired. The level of investment in industry, what was made, how it was made and by whom, foreign policy, whether or not there should be wars with millions killed – all these matters were determined by a small wealthy minority.This minority had been represented in parliament for more than 200 years by two parties, Liberals (or Whigs) and Tories. It was time, the delegates decided, to seek parliamentary representation for their side of industry – the people who did the work.Blair and Co argue that a lot of water has flown under the bridge since those bad old days and that society has changed so much that the central principle behind the foundation of the Labour Party – parliamentary representation for trade unionists in particular and the working class in general – can now be chucked overboard.But a small wealthy handful still own all the capital wealth and a grossly disproportionate slice of the income. Their economic decisions still shut out the enormous majority of people affected by them. All the statistics show the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor and of trade unionists whose organisations have been crippled and humiliated by a series of laws and open class offensives.There are not 50 million people of roughly similar strength and ability running around the British field of life, demanding a fair referee. There are a tiny handful – no more than one and a half million – who are economic and political giants determined to exploit the majority.The need for parliamentary representation of the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, trade unionists against employers, has never been more dramatically exposed by the statistics of society.Those politicians who argue that the millionaires with their police forces, their judges and their armies, who vote Tory, should have ‘equal access’ to Labour ministers as the working people who vote Labour, are not just making an error of judgement.They are preparing the ground for an assault on Labour voters more outrageous and contemptible than even Ramsay MacDonald ever imagined. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootDo-It-Yourself Politics ThreatenN. Ireland’s Police Regime(26 October 1968)From Socialist Worker, No. 94, 26 October 1968, p. 2.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.All the signs are that the exploited people of Northern Ireland, denied even the semblance of parliamentary democracy available to the rest of the United Kingdom, are beginning to ‘do it themselves’, to act to seize the basic rights and services denied them by an intolerant and reactionary government,Eamonn Melaugh, secretary of the Derry Housing Action Committee, formed last March with the express purpose of encouraging and stimulating rent strikes and other forms of direct action to improve some of the worst housing conditions in Europe, told me:‘We’ve had 50 years of talk, 50 years of pacifism and 50 years of failure to end discrimination, poverty and exploitation in this city.’ BludgeonedIt was the Derry Housing Action Committee which inspired the weak, liberal Civil Rights Association to hold a march in Londonderry – a march, which, as we reported two weeks ago, was bludgeoned out of the streets by police fanatics.During the weekend following the march, in one street in the Catholic heart of the city, all the ground-floor windows were broken by a posse of police yelling ‘Come out, you fenian bastards!’The police, like the government, rely upon religious prejudice to maintain their squalid regime. The Ulster Unionist Party gets the support of masses of Protestant workers because it has fanned the flames of religious intolerance for half a century, setting one section of the workers against another with the inevitable lurid tales of Catholic horror.Such men are frightened now. The movement started by the Derry Housing Action Committee is not founded, as was the Irish Republican Army, on religious sectarianism.John White, secretary of the Derry Republican Club, one of the most active organisations affiliated to. the DHAC, told me:‘We are socialists. We want an Irish workers’ republic, and we will work with anyone who works in a militant way toward that aim.’The movement, started in Derry, has now taken root in Queens University, Belfast, which used to be the most reactionary university in Britain.During the last three weeks it has been transformed by scenes which bear comparison with the Sorbonne University in Paris last May. Hardly an evening has gone by without the massive McMurdie Hall being filled with some 600–700 students meeting spontaneously to discuss the next form of action for ‘civil rights’.As a result of these meetings, the students have marched twice into the centre of Belfast. On the first occasion the police would not let them through to City Hall, because, they argued, there would be a fight with the supporters of the extremist Protestant Unionist, the Rev. Ian Paisley.The second time, however, last Wednesday (October 16) the students called in support from Young Socialists and workers, doubled their numbers and marched unimpeded to the City Hall where they held a meeting.In the enthusiasm and spontaneity of the meetings the students have moved from a vacuous liberalism to harder, more militant demands.On the morning of the first march, for instance, they agreed unanimously to support their Vice-Chancellor and ban all non-student elements from the march. That same evening, after the sit-down, the vast majority voted to invite young workers and Young Socialist organisations to the next demonstration.The terror of the authorities at the prospect of workers and students acting for themselves can be measured by the reactions of William Craig, known variously as the Papadopoulos or the Lardner-Burke of Ulster.First, Craig tried to justify the brutality of his riot squads in Derry by claiming that the march was organised by communists. This was greeted with wild laughter.Betty Sinclair, Communist Secretary of the Belfast Trades Council and secretary of the Civil Rights movement, had originally been opposed to marching in the face of a police ban, and, on the students’ first sit-down had rushed up and down the line of sitting students begging the demonstrators to ‘go home now you have made your point’.Then Craig said that the IRA was behind it all – an allegation which was laughed at equally loudly.Finally, on October 16, Craig made a statement in the Stormont parliament ‘naming names’ of conspirators in the Irish Workers’ Group, who, he said, wanted to end the bourgeois state in Northern Ireland.He named Gery Lawless, who lives in London, Eammon McCann of the Derry Labour Party and Rory McShane, next year’s President of Queens Students Representative Council. ResentmentThe reply to Craig is simple.YES, the men he named do wish to end the bourgeois state in Ireland.YES, they do intend to campaign for an Irish workers’ republic.But, unhappily for Craig and his fanatical friends, they do not intend to do it with sectarian slogans and adventurist violence.They intend to do it by helping to direct the resentment and frustration of the Irish workers away from Catholicism or Protestantism – away, in short, from themselves and towards their real oppressors whom Mr. Craig represents. Top of the pageLast updated on 22 October 2020" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > Cliff > Paul Foot > A World to Win Tony CliffA World to WinIntroductionby Paul FootWhen I went to Glasgow as a young reporter in the autumn of 1961 I carried the good wishes of the socialists who were grouped around the New Left Review. ‘Be careful,’ warned Stuart Hall, NLR editor of the time, ‘there are a lot of Trots in the Glasgow Young Socialists.’ I replied that I was quite confident I could deal with the Trots, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea what a Trot was. I conjured up a vision of social misfits, slightly deranged and hysterical, against whom the masses could easily be convened by a dose of standard Oxford Union rhetoric. I had been President of the Union that previous golden summer at Oxford, and had only recently come into contact with socialists of any description.As predicted, I met the Glasgow Trots very quickly. Most of them were in the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists on the south of the River Clyde. Their mentor at that time was a lively barber called Harry Selby, who toured Young Socialist branches in the city. If he thought you were remotely interested in his ideas, he would reach for his bag and produce tracts from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky which he would lend you on payment of a small deposit. Selby was a member of the Labour Party. He believed passionately that revolutionary socialists should be members of workers’ political organisations until those organisations became revolutionary. So steadfastly did Harry believe in this concept of ‘deep entrism’ that he eventually became a rather ineffectual Labour Member of Parliament for Govan. He was treated with suspicion by the Labour Party, and with something approaching hatred by the Communist Party which in these days controlled the Glasgow Trades Council To the young workers who flocked to join the newly-established Young Socialists – the youth organisation of the Labour Party – he brought enthusiasm, humour and some electrifying ideas about how the ugly and cruel capitalist society could swiftly be changed by a revolution. When asked about Russia, he would reply that Russia was a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ whose socialism had been corrupted by a Stalinist clique. The clique could quite easily be removed by a political revolution, though not a social revolution. The distinction was a little difficult to understand but, it seemed to me, would have to be accepted for the time being. My general approach was that the Oxford Union had little or nothing to contribute to these young firebrands, and my most sensible course was to keep quiet. Thus did I fulfil my promise to ‘deal with the Trots’ by effectively accepting everything they said. If I had any doubts, I quickly relegated them. The building of the Berlin Wall, I explained at one Young Socialist open air meeting just off Sauchiehall Street, had a clear purpose: to stop ‘bourgeois elements’ so vital to economic growth from leaving the country. When a rude fellow shouted, ‘Nonsense, man – it’s to keep the workers in,’ I conveniently (and accurately) wrote him off as a drunk.Some time during the winter of 1961-62 Gus MacDonald, the most able and engaging of the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists, decided that the movement needed a theoretical shot in the arm somewhat stronger than that provided by Harry Selby. He told me he had heard of a Trotskyist sect based in London called the Socialist Review Group, and that its two leaders, Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron, were outstanding speakers. He duly set up a weekend school addressed by the two men. Their subjects covered the entire face of the earth, including Russia.I went down with Gus to the British European Airways terminal in St Enoch Square to meet the mysterious duo. They arrived late on a flight from London. As they walked into the terminal I was struck by the differences between them. Mike Kidron was impeccably dressed, urbane and charming. His companion Cliff, short and scruffy, was plainly terrified of being bored. The usual chatter about the times of the plane and the journey to the place where they were staying noticeably irritated and embarrassed him. As we climbed into a taxi I spotted a newspaper poster about the war in the Congo. ‘The Congo,’ I sighed. ‘I just haven’t a clue what I think about that.’ Quick as a flash, the dishevelled mess in the corner of the taxi sprang into life and, without pausing for even a moment’s dialogue, let loose a volley of sentences impossible to decipher but equally impossible not to understand. I can’t remember exactly what he said over the next ten minutes or so, but I do know that I never again had any doubts about the role of European and US imperialism in the Congo, and the subservience to that imperialism of the United Nations. I found to my surprise that I was laughing, not because anything said had been especially funny but just because the political explanation was so obvious.Over and over again in the 40 years or so since that first conversation I have had to stop myself bursting out laughing at something Cliff said. This is not only because he was a public speaker of natural and exceptional wit, but chiefly because of his ability to explain an issue with such clarity and force that I could not help laughing at my own inability previously to understand it. Another point struck me during that momentous weekend. The contributions from the platform seemed to be completely free of the self regard or self interest which I had come to expect as standard qualities in political speakers. There were no votes to be won, no careers at stake. There was only one driving force, one reason for what was being said: conviction." }
{ "content": "The first bombshell dropped by Cliff was that Russia was not a degenerated workers’ state, indeed not a workers’ state at all. The forms of political organisation in Russia – no stock exchange or private profit – might appear socialistic but the content of that organisation, exploitation of the working class by a new ruling class, was capitalist. If Russia was state capitalist, moreover, so were the Russian satellites in Eastern Europe, so was China, so (this was far too much for me to take at the time, so soon after the Cuban Revolution) was Cuba.In this little life story Cliff reveals how he puzzled over this issue for years before bouncing out of bed one morning and declaring to his long-suffering wife, Chanie, ‘Russia is state capitalist.’This issue may seem arcane, almost irrelevant in the 1990s, but to a young socialist at the beginning of the 1960s it was utterly crucial. The entire politics of the left were dominated by Russia and its supporters in the British Communist Party. My very first recollection of a difficult political argument was the alleged difference between the British and French invasion of Egypt in 1956 and the Russian invasion of Hungary a few weeks later. The first was plainly an act of blatant imperialism; the second (since Russia was a degenerated workers’ state) a skilful device to protect the workers’ states from reactionaries elsewhere, including the right wing fifth column in Budapest, Another consequence of supporting Russia against the West was a scepticism about democracy. Indeed, the very word ‘democracy’ was suspect, since it appeared to exist only in the capitalist West and hardly at all in the workers’ states in the East.Cliff laid waste to all this. Russia was state capitalist, he asserted, and therefore imperialist. The Russian invasion of Hungary was every bit as outrageous as that of Britain and France at Suez. The essence of socialism was the social control of society from below; and there was none of that in Russia, even less in any of what he called Stalin’s satellites in Eastern Europe. Indeed, he observed, although he was down to speak about the Soviet Union, he could not even begin to do so since ‘soviet’ was die Russian word for workers’ council and there were no proper Soviets in any of the Russian Empire.It is hard, after so long a period, to convey the effect of such opinions in the political atmosphere of the early 1960s. In this book Cliff tells the story of his conversion to the theory that Russia was state capitalist almost in passing. For those of us young socialists of the time to whom the theory was entirely new, the effect was the very opposite of transitory. It was devastating. It threatened not only a residual sympathy for what seemed at least like state planning in Russia, but also a whole view of politics, including, crucially, the notion that socialist change could come from the top of society, planned and executed by enlightened people, educated ministers and bureaucrats. The whole purpose of the Oxford Union was threatened by this message. For if Russia was state capitalist, what was the point of working politically with other enlightened people, for instance for more state control of British industry?I resolved on no account to be hijacked by this new heresy. I got hold of a moth-eaten paperback edition of Cliff’s book on the subject, then entitled Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis, and read it so carefully that it fell to pieces. The broad brush of the theory fascinated me almost as much as it horrified me. But the broad brush did not matter. Cliff’s writing style was hopeless – he had not the slightest idea how to use the English language to make his point. What finally convinced me was the relentless detail of the argument. It was in the chapter on the separation of the Russian Communist Party from the rank and file of the Russian walking class, in the pages in which Cliff traced the removal from all political office of any trace either of the Russian Revolution or of the working class rank and file, that my resistance finally snapped. There was no way in which such a rigid and brutal bureaucratic society could be described either as socialist or as a workers’ state, or indeed as even marginally democratic. ‘State capitalist’ exactly fitted the bill.Not much later, when I was still in Glasgow in 1963, the third volume of Isaac Deutscher’s majestic biography ofTrotsky was published. I read all three volumes in quick succession, utterly overcome by the depth of analysis and the grandeur of the language. When I exulted over the book to Cliff, he was not at all impressed. In an article in the 1963 winter edition of the quarterly magazine International Socialism, each issue of which, incidentally, I looked forward to with my first-ever intellectual passion, he wrote a ferocious attack on Deutscher, entitled The End of the Road: Deutscher’s Capitulation to Stalinism. With hardly a word of appreciation for the magnificent biography,. Cliff honed in on a passage in a separate Deutscher article in a collection of essays entitled Heretics and Renegades in which the sage set out this advice to an ‘ex-Communist man of letters’ like himself. ‘He cannot join the Stalinist camp or the anti-Stalinist holy alliance without doing violence to his better self. So let him overcome the cheap ambition to have a finger in the political pie. He may withdraw into the watchtower instead – to watch with detachment and alertness this heaving chaos of a world.’ This conclusion sent Cliff into paroxysms of rage. Anyone who ever said a word in support of Isaac Deutscher was screeched at interminably: ‘To die watchtower! To the watchtower!’ Of all the awful crimes of the left, none infuriated Cliff like passivity. For people who knew the world was rotten, to sit back and do nothing about it was for him the ultimate aberration." }
{ "content": "So it was for Trotsky. Many years later Cliff himself wrote a four-volume biography of Trotsky. I would still recommend the Deutscher but, like his equally long biography of Lenin, Cliff’s Trotsky is indispensable to modern socialists. Throughout all his books the theme is action. The key question surpassing all others is Lenin’s – what is to be done? At every twist and turn in the tussle between the classes, some action needs to be taken by the exploited majority. This is why the most fundamental issue of all is the building of a socialist organisation which takes its cue from the workers’ battles against their rulers, and can unite in disciplined action the resources not just of those who want to change the world but of those prepared to do something about it.This story starts in Cliff’s childhood in Palestine. He often said that the case for socialism takes less than two minutes to understand – a mere glance at the world and the way it is divided into rich and poor makes that case immediately. A mere glance at the way Arab children were treated in Palestine in the 1930s was enough to make Cliff a socialist. Disillusionment with the compromising Communist Party soon followed. And so Cliff’s youth was devoted unswervingly to a most fantastic aim: the building of a Trotskyist organisation in poor old impoverished, looted and divided Palestine. When he had little or no success at that, he duly devoted almost all the rest of his life to an even more fantastic aim: building a revolutionary socialist organisation in comfortable bourgeois post-war Britain. Everything round him militated against his objective. A Labour government was in office with a huge majority, supported by the vast mass of the working class. Any activity to the left of Labour was entirely monopolised by the Communist Party. For good measure, Cliff’s early efforts were frustrated by his expulsion from Britain and five years enforced, isolated and utterly impoverished exile in Dublin. Reading this book’s breezy account, you can’t help wondering – where did he get the resolve to continue? Even when he was allowed to return to his wife and family in London, membership of his Socialist Review Group seldom exceeded 20. This book tells the rather fitful story of how, against impossible odds, the Socialist Review Group grew into the International Socialists which in turn (for reasons which are still not entirely clear) became the Socialist Workers Party. Since the comparatively huge edifice of the Communist Party vanished in a puff of smoke in 1989, the (still tiny) SWP became by far the largest socialist grouping in the country. Indeed, the only socialists who have survived the fall of Stalinism of 1989 with some confidence are those who consistently denounced it.Tony Cliff was not a humble man and his account (which he started only because he was afraid he was about to die under the surgeon’s knife) seldom errs on the side of modesty. Nor should it. For the characteristic which emerges from his life more than any other is single-mindedness. In spite of his wide-ranging intellect, his mastery of at least four languages and his extensive reading, he never allowed himself for a single moment of his 82 years to be deflected from his purpose. Such indomitable resolve is rare indeed among people who set out to change the world. When Cliff was accused, as he often was, of lionising the greats in socialist history – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg – he replied that, if we want to see what is happening beyond the crowd, we have to stand on the shoulders of giants.He would have been embarrassed, though I think quite happy, to be bracketed with the greats, but there are quite a few of us socialists in Britain over the past 40 years or so who thank our lucky stars that we had the chance to stand on his shoulders. Top of the pageLast updated on 30.1.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootMay Days and heydays(May 1985)From Socialist Worker, May 1985.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–222.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I went with a light heart to Newcastle on May Day on what I assumed would be a great workers’ rally.Twelve years ago I was in Newcastle on or around May Day for a hundredth anniversary meeting of the Trades Council. Jimmy Reid was the main speaker, but he didn’t turn up. The meeting was chaired by an AUEW official, who told me blithely as he looked round the hall that there were, he thought, ‘about 350 shop stewards here’. It was 1973, the year between the two great miners’ strikes. Everyone was confident and proud of their movement in one of its strongest areas. The meeting was terrific.I was in Newcastle last year too, for perhaps the best meeting of my life. It was a glorious June day and the Northumberland miners were holding a strike rally. Some 5,000 miners and their families marched into the park with their banners. They were full of confidence and pride. It was marvellous.Last week’s meeting had been carefully organized over many weeks. Derek Hatton, deputy leader of beleaguered Liverpool City Council, was the main speaker – but he didn’t turn up.When I got to the station there was no one to meet me, and I had forgotten the name of the hall. I wandered round the streets by the station searching for posters. There weren’t any. I took a taxi to the university, to the poly, to every place in Newcastle I could remember ever speaking at. I rang the local paper. No one anywhere had heard of any Trades Council May Day meeting.I went back to the station where, at last, someone had come to meet me. When I got to the hall I was shocked to find (at most) 120–130 people there.The composition of the meeting was completely different to that of 1973. There were a handful of miners’ wives there – friends I think of Ann Lilburn, one of the speakers – but pretty well nobody from the great rally the previous June.The mood of the meeting was sad, low, rudderless. If it hadn’t been for the Socialist Workers Party which supplied half the audience (at least) and five out of seven questions, it would have been the most gigantic flop.Sitting there on the platform, I felt myself nibbled at by all kinds of heresies. Was it not true that the working-class movement was in decline?Was it not true that the shop stewards of 1973 represented yards and factories which had since closed, with nothing to replace them? How could anything be built in a place like this, where getting on for 20 per cent of the workforce is unemployed, without the slightest hope of the kind of jobs which workers could expect in the 1960s and 1970s?Then I got another shock. It came from a contribution from the floor. May Day, we were reminded, was a celebration of international working-class solidarity, and perhaps we ought to be talking not so much about the defeat of the miners in Britain, but about the great strike and lock-out of miners in South Africa. I realized I had spoken on May Day for three quarters of an hour without a single reference to any workers anywhere else in the world!No wonder I had been so depressed. The insularity which infects us all when we feel low concentrates our minds on what we see around us – on the British working-class movement, whose traditional organizations and methods have been turned over and depleted in the last twenty years.At the same time, however, in other countries huge working classes are being created almost every year. Countries and even continents where there was no working class fifty years ago are now teeming with a huge proletariat, much of it unorganized, but all of it exploited beyond belief, and showing strong signs of organizing and fighting back.On the way back from Newcastle I picked up the International Herald Tribune, and read of two vast strikes in South Korea; of the lock-out in the South African goldfields; of the stirring of workers’ unrest in the shanty towns around construction sites in Saudi Arabia.Across the world, the working class is vastly bigger and more recognizable than it was in what seems to us to have been the ‘heyday’ of 1973.If we lose sight of that, if we think for one moment of the working class as white, male shop stewards representing shipyard workers in Newcastle, then we are certain victims of gloom, introspection and, worse of all, inertia. Top of the pageLast updated on 27 October 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootCapitalism is stripped bare(12 August 1995)From Socialist Worker, 12 August 1995.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 279–280.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Here is the capitalist argument in all its bare beauty.Private enterprise breeds competition. Competition forces firms to cut prices, and this leads to an endless spiral of cheaper goods and services. It also leads to variety, since capitalists are always looking for ways of doing something new.Born again Christians Brian Souter and his sister Ann Gloag believe in capitalism. They are a dream – Dick Whittington capitalists who started off in Dundee with a couple of old buses and now run the second biggest bus company in the country.The very name of the company, Stagecoach, has a romantic ring about it. It follows, of course, that they got where they are today by dint of hard work and competitive free enterprise.Well, no, actually. They got where they are today chiefly because of the government’s obsession with flogging off the old publicly-owned bus companies. PredatoryThe Monopolies and Mergers Commission is a very sedate and moderate body composed almost exclusively of Tories and entrepreneurs.In its report just out on the activities of Stagecoach in Darlington, however, the commission has resorted to regrettably extreme language. ‘Predatory, deplorable and against the public interest’ were the exact words used.What happened in Darlington? After studying the Tory bus laws, the Labour council decided to privatise the municipal bus company and called for bids. By far the lowest bid came from a firm called Yorkshire Transit, which employed a lot of the bus drivers from the old publicly-owned company. The council made it quite clear that Yorkshire Transit, according to the basic rules of free competition and tendering, had won the contract.At once Stagecoach recruited the best and most hard working of the council drivers on fantastic bonus rates of up to £1,000 and guarantee of three years work.For the first few weeks in which Yorkshire Transit struggled to meet its new obligations, Darlington was flooded out with Stagecoach buses from all over the country.The drivers had instructions to watch out for the scheduled buses and to nip in front of them at the bus stops and nick their custom. If the drivers weren’t quick enough it didn’t really matter – because the Stagecoach services were entirely free. Even the most principled supporter of public ownership in Darlington was reluctant to pay for a bus ride when another was offered along the same route with no conductor and no fare.In five weeks flat Yorkshire Transit was smashed and Stagecoach, which had lost the tender on the first call, was awarded it. Ever since it has hardened and toughened its monopoly in Darlington – and of course now (since there are no competitors) Stagecoach charges high fares.This is the eighth time either the MMC or the Office of Trading has slammed Stagecoach. From northern Scotland to eastern Kent, its companies have gobbled up the former public bus undertakings, driven the competition off the road, cut wages, smashed the unions and sacked loyal drivers.None of its fantastic growth is due to competition or free enterprise. On the contrary, Stagecoach used its strength in numbers of buses and in cash in the bank to knock out the competition.The privatisation of the bus industry has had exactly the opposite effect to that promised by the Thatcherite think tanks in the 1980s. There are now less people travelling by bus – because the fares are higher, there are less bus routes in the unpopulated areas and much less accountability. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot‘An Agitator of the Worst Type’A portrait of miners’ leader A.J. Cook(January 1986)Originally published as a pamphlet in January 1986 by the Socialist Workers party.Based on a talk given at the Socialist Workers Party Easter Rally, Skegness, April 1985.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IT WAS a sunny morning in June 1924, and the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Fred Bramley, had had a good breakfast. He settled down comfortably at his desk to read the Daily Herald, which, in a sort of way, he owned. On the front page he read something which propelled him out of his chair and down the passage to the office of his assistant general secretary, Walter Citrine.‘Have you seen who’s been elected secretary of the Miners’ Federation,’ he bawled. ‘Cook! A raving tearing Communist. Now the miners are in for a bad time.’ [1]Who was this raving, tearing Communist who had caused such consternation in the upper echelons of the TUC, and whose election at 39 as leader of one of the largest and most powerful trade unions on earth had shocked the press and the government?Arthur James Cook was born at Wookey in Somerset in 1885, the son of a soldier. He had worked for a short time on a farm but before long had moved with thousands of other farmworkers into the pits of South Wales. From his earliest youth, he had taken a keen interest in what went on about him, and cared about it. Perhaps, he concluded, God would put it all right. He became a teacher in the Baptist Youth, and by the age of eighteen had reached the rank of deacon.On his first day in the pits, a fall of rock killed the man working next to him, and young Arthur had to drag the body to the surface. The conditions in the pits soon persuaded him that heaven would have to wait. What mattered immediately was a better life on earth, and under it. In 1905 he joined the Independent Labour Party, and campaigned vigorously for Labour candidates in the 1906 election.Soon he was moving fast to the left. The newly-elected Liberal government did little to curb the greed of the coal-owners. The gap between the hard and dangerous work of the miners and the huge surplus wealth of the owners did not seem to play a part in the official politics which he encountered. The socialism of the ILP seemed to have no contact with the hard and bitter struggle fought by the men around him. A new political creed was sweeping the South Wales coalfield at the time. It was called syndicalism. Its advocates argued that the power of the workers to organise or disrupt their own production – their power to strike – was the only power which the owners were likely to recognise: the only power which might change the miners’ conditions and the only power which could eventually change society.The new power was anathema to the new Labour leaders, who called for voting instead of striking. Ramsay Macdonald, who later became leader of the Labour Party, wrote a furious attack on syndicalism. He grudgingly admitted that its roots, though weak in the rest of the country, were strong and deep in the South Wales coalfield. Macdonald noted that when ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, the American socialist leader, came to Britain to preach his brand of anarcho-syndicalism, the only place he got a really good reception was South Wales. His ideas had already been sown by another foreign influence: by the Spanish immigrant workers brought into the Merthyr area by the ironmasters in 1907. They were brought in as blacklegs, but they proved a constant menace to the coal-owners and the ironmasters with their sharply-defined anarcho-syndicalist ideas and their enthusiasm for strikes.In 1911, the young Cook went to the Central Labour College in London, where his half-formed ideas were given new force by books and lectures. He had to cut short his time there by a year – chiefly because the owners threatened to evict his family unless he paid the rent – but by the time he left, he was a convinced Marxist, and a lifelong supporter of independent working-class education.At college he read the brilliant pamphlet The Miners’ Next Step, written by his fellow rank-and-file miners in South Wales. The pamphlet – one of the landmarks in our trade union literature – exposed the treacherous role which the union leaders had played in the struggle with the coal-owners. Its answer was to reform the Miners’ Federation, to bring the power of officials much more firmly to heel, and to place the union and the people who ran it under the control of the rank and file.The pamphlet had a profound effect on the young Arthur Cook. In 1913 he resigned from the ILP, and joined instead the South Wales Socialist Society, which talked a militant working-class politics far more to his liking. When the First World War began the following year, most miners didn’t go to the slaughter in the trenches, since coal was vital to the war effort. Cook was against the war – and, after 1917, for the Russian Revolution.As the war ended, he was arrested for sedition, apparently for advocating revolution in connection with the food shortages of early 1918. The highest tribute to him came from John Williams, deputy chief constable of Glamorgan, who had been following him about like a sniffer dog. ‘Cook,’ Williams declared in one of his frequent letters to the Home Office, ‘is an agitator of the worst type and has been the cause of the major portion of labour unrest in this district since 1913.’" }
{ "content": "The agitator spent three months in prison for that offence, which didn’t spoil his chances in the various elections he fought for officials’ places in the union after the war. He fought on the ideas and principles of The Miners’ Next Step. If he won an election, he promised, he would seek to make his office part of the rank-and-file struggle for better conditions and a better society.This strategy fitted the mood of the South Wales miners after the war. In 1919 Cook was elected secretary of the Rhondda No.1 Lodge by 18,230 votes to 17,531. It was a narrow victory, but until then Cook had been virtually unknown in official union circles. The position in the Rhondda gave him a platform – and a springboard into neighbouring areas, where he started to use his powers as a preacher to the full. ‘With uplifted arms,’ a contemporary account records in 1920, ‘he warned his hearers of the coming revolution.’In 1921 he played a vigorous role during the Great Lock-out imposed by the coal-owners, which the miners lost on ‘Black Friday’. In losing the battle, Cook seemed for a moment to lose his confidence, and started to prevaricate about workers’ power.This upset the small Communist Party, which had been formed from the various revolutionary socialist parties in 1920. Cook joined the Communist Party at the beginning of the lock-out, but left a few months later after being called to the militant Maerdy lodge to answer for his apparent ‘vacillations’ at the end of the lock-out.In its obituary of Cook ten years later, the Communist Party paper The Daily Worker claimed that Cook had been expelled. He was not. It was far more likely that he left the party with the party’s explicit permission. For A.J. Cook was already a considerable figure in the South Wales coalfields, and his progress would certainly have been hindered by formal party membership.Certainly, everything he did in the next two years had the full approval of the Communist Party. He campaigned for the Miners’ Federation to break with the British Trades Union Congress and join the Red International of Labour Unions, a revolutionary breakaway organised from Russia. The South Wales miners voted to join the RILU, though the proposal was lost in the Federation at large. Soon afterwards, the Communist Party took the lead in forming the Miners Minority Movement, a rank-and-file movement among miners devoted to clearing out the federation’s traditional leadership and building unity with workers in other industries.The Minority Movement was tested in fire almost before it was fully formed. Frank Hodges, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, was elected an MP in the 1924 General Election. To his surprise and disgust, he was told he could no longer be secretary of the Federation if he insisted on taking his seat. He went to parliament, and resigned the secretaryship.The succession was keenly fought. A.J. Cook was almost unheard of outside South Wales, and in South Wales itself he had the keenest fight of all, winning the nomination there by only a handful of votes out of 150,000. The Minority Movement campaigned hard for Cook all over the coalfields. When he won, again by a small majority, there were many, including Fred Bramley at the TUC, who were amazed. Men like Bramley, not for the first time, had misjudged the mood in the coalfields. It was hardening with every month.As soon as A.J. Cook got into the MFGB offices at Russell Square he announced that expenses and perks for the secretary were forthwith abolished. He made it clear that he would not accept fees for any speech made anywhere because of his position. Then he set about the most striking innovation of all. Every weekend, he announced, he would speak in the coalfields about the miners and the working-class movement.These decisions were shocking enough to the stout-hearted and stout-bellied gentlemen at the TUC, but worse was to follow. Wherever he went, Cook made it clear that he stood uncompromisingly for class war. The Daily Mail of 21 June 1924, a few days after his election, reported:‘Mr A.J. Cook, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation, was the guest of a social evening held by the Holborn Labour Party at 16 Harpur Street, Theobalds Road, WC, last night. Mr Cook said that Mr J.H. Thomas and Mr Tom Shaw had no political class consciousness, and that the Labour leaders and trade union leaders were square pegs in round holes. He was glad to find some Red Socialists in London. He hoped he would find more later. Mr Cook added: “I believe solely and absolutely in Communism. If there is no place for the Communists in the Labour Party, there is no place for the Right Wingers. I believe in strikes. They are the only weapon”.’With quotations like that ringing in the ears of the Labour leaders, Arthur Cook set off for the series of weekend meetings in the coalfields which went on all the way to the General Strike and beyond. This was one of the most extraordinary agitations in the history of the British working class movement. Old miners today still remember the impact of these huge meetings, to which Cook would often speak two or three times over, so that all could hear.What was it about the man which made him so electric and compelling a speaker? Middle-class commentators of the time could not understand it. Beatrice Webb, who met him during the General Strike, was not impressed. She wrote in her diaries:‘He is obviously overwrought, but, even allowing for this, it is clear he has no intellect and not much intelligence. He is a quivering mass of emotions, a mediumistic magnetic son of creature not without personal attractiveness – an inspired idiot, drunk with his own words, dominated by his own slogans.’" }
{ "content": "I read that quotation during the 1984-5 miners’ strike in The Guardian, whose industrial correspondent, as though to appease the intellectual snobbery of that paper’s readers, applied it freely to Arthur Scargill. Its tone and purpose was aptly satirised by John Scanlon, who published a book in 1930 called, rather prematurely, The Decline and Fall of the Labour Party. ‘It was noticed, too,’ wrote Scanlon, ‘that when Mr Cook addressed meetings, he did not hold the lapels of his jacket as all good statesmen do. Mr Cook took his jacket off.’A better description of the ‘mediumistic magnetic sort of person’ came from someone who was much closer to him: Arthur Horner. Horner’s response to the declaration of war in 1914 was to leave his pit – Maerdy in South Wales – and cross the sea to Ireland to fight in the Irish Citizens’ Army against the British. This won him two years in prison on his return, but the miners of Maerdy never lost their respect for him. While he was in prison, he was elected checkweighman for the No.1 pit and thus ensured of employment there on his release.Arthur Horner was a founder member of the Communist Party, and an enthusiastic agitator for the Miners Minority Movement. He knew Cook from his earliest youth.‘I never lost my admiration for him,’ wrote Horner in his autobiography. ‘In the months before the 1926 strike, and during the strike, we spoke together at meetings all over the country. We had audiences, mostly of miners, running into many thousands. Usually I was put on first. I would make a good logical speech, and the audience would listen quietly but without any wild enthusiasm.‘Then Cook would take the platform. Often he was tired, hoarse and sometimes almost inarticulate. But he would electrify the meetings. They would applaud and nod their heads when he said the most obvious things. For a long time I was puzzled, and then one night I realised why it was. I was speaking to the meeting. Cook was speaking for the meeting. He was expressing the thoughts of his audience, I was trying to persuade them. He was the burning expression of their anger at the iniquities they were suffering.’ [2]What was the consistent theme of Cook’s speeches in that year from the summer of 1924 to the summer of 1925? He warned that coal exports were falling and that the coal-owners would try once again to make the miners pay. The owners wanted longer hours and shorter pay.Another 1921 was coming, he predicted. It would be much tougher and more brutal than last time. The workers must prepare their forces for it. They must learn the lessons of 1921, chief among which was the failure of the ‘Triple Alliance’ – or ‘Cripple Alliance’, as it had proved itself – between coal, steel and transport unions. Next time, there must be unity. Transport workers, especially those on the railways who moved coal, needed to be alerted now, and prepared for struggle.Though Horner had said that the meetings were mainly of miners, other workers, especially railwaymen, started to flock to them. There’s no doubt at all that Cook’s campaign in the coalfields for those twelve months had a lot to do with the trade union’s answer to the coal-owners, when, as Cook predicted, they posted their lockout notices and their demands for lower pay and longer hours. ON 31 JULY 1925, the unions announced that if the owners persisted with their lock-out in the pits, not a cobble of coal would be moved by road or rail. So determined was the answer that the Tory government stepped into the breach, offering the coal-owners a nine-month subsidy, pending a public inquiry (which would of course be packed with friends of the owners).Red Friday! Arthur Cook was jubilant. He called it ‘the greatest day for the British working class for thirty years’. But he warned that this was an ‘armistice’, not a victory.He urged the workers to prepare for the counter-attack of the employers and the government. Off he went once more on another round of meetings, this time armed with another weapon. In the autumn of 1925, the Communist Party had launched a new paper whose purpose was to attract and organise left-wing socialists who were not in the party and were unlikely to join it. They called it the Sunday Worker. It was edited by a Communist Party member, but its tone and orientation were quite different to that of the Workers’ Weekly, the party’s official paper. For at least three years it became almost synonymous with A.J. Cook, and hardly an issue was published without a long interview with him or article by him.Week after week, he called on the workers to prepare. But the TUC leaders – notably J.H. Thomas, Ernest Bevin and Arthur Pugh – were terrified of what would happen if the whole trade union movement got engaged in open class war with an elected government. As the coal-owners and government prepared for class battle, and as A.J. Cook urged the workers towards it, the other trade union leaders got ready to fly the field.Alone on the left, Cook suspected his colleagues. When the coal-owners again posted their lock-out notices and a General Strike was called in support of the miners by a conference of trade-union executives on 30 April 1926, the other miners’ leaders left for the coalfields to prepare. But Cook stayed behind in Russell Square. He was suspicious.Late that night he tried to get hold of the TUC leaders. He found, not altogether to his surprise, that they were in Downing Street – without the miners’ representatives – seeking to call the General Strike off before it was started. He rushed to Downing Street, cornered the leaders in a waiting room, and denounced them. As the argument raged, a messenger came in from the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. The government was not prepared even to discuss a sell-out. They did not believe a General Strike could be called. They had all gone home to bed." }
{ "content": "So the General Strike started. The workers responded with a solidarity and an enthusiasm which amazed the government and terrified the TUC. After nine days, the government called the union leaders back – again without the miners – and suggested to them that the time had come for them to call the strike off. They agreed at once. Not a single concession was granted. The miners would still have to work longer hours for less pay, and conform to district agreements. By now, however, the TUC leaders were not concerned with the issue. They were horrified at the threat to the very powers which gave them credibility and self-importance. As J.H. Thomas put it, in a famous phrase: ‘If it came to a fight between the strike and the constitution, heaven help us unless the government won.’The miners, of course, could have nothing to do with the settlement. They were forced to stay on strike – locked out on impossible terms – after the rest of the movement had collapsed. Cook’s worst fears that the unity and solidarity between miners and other workers might be broken had been realised.His first task, then, was to set the record straight about the General Strike. He did so in a magnificent pamphlet, The Nine Days. The pamphlet is comparable in many ways with Karl Marx’s famous pamphlet on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France. More scholarly works have been written, of course, on the Commune and on the General Strike. But the two pamphlets are hot with the struggle of the times. They are written at the time and for it. The Nine Days’ opening paragraph goes straight to the point:‘Ever since last July when “Red Friday” wiped out the stain of “Black Friday” and brought joy to the heart of every worker, the capitalist class of Britain, backed by a strong Tory government, has been preparing to retrieve its position; while many of the Labour leaders, almost afraid of the growing power of Labour industrially, knowing the activities of the government and their preparations, remained inactive.’Cook argued that the entire capitalist system was paralysed by the General Strike. ‘A few days longer’ and the coal-owners would have been forced to concede. The victory would have given a magnificent boost to British Labour and to Labour throughout the world.But the victory had been thrown away by people whose only desire seemed to be to call off the strike.All profits from The Nine Days went to the Miners’ Wives and Children Fund, for the miners were now entrenched in a life-and-death struggle for the whole future of their union.During the 1984-5 miners’ strike we were used to saying that this was the biggest struggle in all European and American history. In terms of time, of course, that is true. But in terms of the numbers of people involved, the lock-out of 1926 beats everything else hollow. In 1984-5, 150,000 miners were on strike (at most) for a year. But in 1926 there were nearly a million miners. There were more miners in South Wales then than there are now in the entire country. Coal was more important to the running of the country then: there were no nuclear power stations, and no power generated from the use of oil.Little has been written of those ferocious seven months from the end of the General Strike to the end of the lock-out. Most history books – even those which support the workers – devote pages and pages to the General Strike, and then announce that ‘the miners struggled on for seven months to inevitable defeat.’Perhaps they will write that way about 1984 and 1985. At the time, though, it didn’t feel like that. Nor did it in 1926.Reading the Sunday Worker for those months of 1926, in fact, it is uncanny how often the echo calls down the years. So many features were the same: the early confidence and enthusiasm; the importance of the communal kitchens; the emancipation of the women. Again and again, the paper pays tribute to the ‘astonishment’ of the miners’ leaders and supporters at the role of the women in the pit communities. ‘Half my meetings are women,’ said Herbert Smith, the miners’ president. ‘They are always the toughest half.’ Arthur Cook found himself, to his surprise, giving interviews to the Sunday Worker about birth control and women’s suffrage, subjects in which he had not shown the slightest interest before the strike.Then there were the bad things: the flooding of the coalfields with police from outside forces; the mass arrests; the discrimination against miners’ families by the Board of Poor Law Guardians (the equivalent of the DHSS); the revenge of judges and magistrates – and of course the press, which Cook described as ‘the most lying in the world’.The press had hated Cook ever since he was first elected. Now, in the full flow of the lock-out, they brought out all the tricks of the trade to damage him. Their tactic was familiar to us. By use of demonology – the study of the devil – they sought to detach the miners’ leader from the miners. All Cook’s qualities were described as characteristics of the devil. His passionate oratory became demagogy; his unswerving principles became fanaticism; his short, stooping stature became the deformity of some gnome or imp. In particular, Cook’s independence of mind and thought was turned into its opposite . He was the tool of others, the plaything of a foreign power – for Cook himself had provided his tormentors with the identity of his ‘controllers’.Typical of the ruling-class agitation at the time was a London meeting held on 9 June 1926, only a month into the lock-out. The speaker was Sir Henry Page Croft, a right-wing Tory MP who had confessed himself ‘greatly interested’ in the ‘new experiments’ in power in Italy under the aegis of that country’s new leader, Benito Mussolini. Sir Henry summed up the campaign against Cook in a fiery speech, fully reported (with all the reactions to it) in the Morning Post." }
{ "content": "‘I want to warn you most seriously that the government of Russia is making war on this country daily,’ Sir Henry said. ‘Mr Cook,’ he went on (cries of ‘Shoot Him!’, ‘Lynch Him!’) ‘has declared that he is a Bolshevik and is proud to be a humble disciple of Lenin. He is treating the miners of this country whom we all respect and honour (Cheers!) as cannon fodder in order to achieve his vainglorious ambitions.’ [3]Those cries of ‘Shoot Him!’, ‘Lynch Him!’ were not just extravagances shouted out in the heat of the moment. The Home Secretary, a specially nasty specimen called Sir William Joynson-Hicks, had let it be known that although of course he was firmly in favour of law and order and was absolutely against any form of violence, he would not take it too hard if someone gave Mr Cook a taste of his own medicine.Patriots and leaders of the master race therefore came together and plotted violence against the miners’ leaders. Wherever Cook went, he was under threat from some bold band of ex-officers or fascist oafs. At one meeting such a group did corner him at the foot of a platform and smashed his leg against it. The injury was a source of constant pain for the rest of his life.Yet the press campaign was a complete failure. Throughout the seven months, the loyalty and admiration for Cook among the miners and supporters grew. Ellen Wilkinson, then a young left-wing Labour MP, wrote: ‘In thousands of homes all over the country, and particularly miners’ homes, there is hanging today, in the place of honour, the picture of A.J. Cook. He is without a shadow of a doubt the hero of the working women.’ [4]A woman signing herself Mrs Adamson went even further: ‘Cook is trusted implicitly. The malicious attacks of the capitalist Press only serve to strengthen the loyalty the miners and their wives feel for him.’ [5]There was dramatic proof of this in South Wales. ‘The Western Mail, published in Cardiff, put the coalowners’ case more blatantly than any other newspaper in the country, and Bevan was particularly affronted when it made a vicious, and, as he believed, obscene attack on A.J. Cook. He therefore organised a huge procession to Waumpound, the mountain between Ebbw Vale and Tredegar, where copies of the Western Mail were solemnly burned and buried, Bevan delivering the funeral oration. He also had the paper banned from the Tredegar library.’ [6] IN SPITE of all this loyalty, in spite of the women, in spite of the tremendous solidarity among workers all over the country symbolised by the miniature miners’ lamps dangling from peoples’ lapels, the owners had the whip in their hand, and they used it. An ominous phrase creeps into the Sunday Worker as early as 22 August: ‘Reports of a drift back to work are greatly exaggerated’.They were exaggerated, but still there was a drift back to work. By the end of August, 80,000 miners were back – less than 10 per cent of the total. 60,000 of those men were in two areas, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. A Notts Labour MP sponsored by the miners, George Spencer, was trying to organise a separate return to work, and, eventually, a separate union. Spencer followed the press by appealing to the Notts miners about Cook’s political views. At the Miners’ Federation conference in September he demanded to know whether the ‘views of revolution’ spoken by A.J. Cook were the views of the Federation. Cook replied: ‘I am in Mansfield next week. Come and ask me there.’ Spencer was thrown out of the conference as a blackleg.Yet the situation in Nottinghamshire was desperate. A.J. Cook set up a special headquarters there and rushed from meeting to meeting. He was like a beaver desperately trying to dam the flood. When he spoke, in, say, Hucknall, thousands of miners who had gone back to work would openly pledge to rejoin the strike. They would do so, perhaps for two or three days, and then, bowed down by shame and hunger, would drift back to work.As Cook felt the tide ebbing away from him (as he had always expected it would do) he redoubled his efforts to win the key to victory: solidarity from other trade unionists, especially transport workers. He wrote anxious letters to Bromley, the engine drivers’ leader, and to Cramp and Thomas of the National Union of Railway-men. Some industrial production was being maintained, he pointed out, because foreign coal and scab coal was being shifted round the country by rail. An embargo on ‘black coal’ (as he called it, rather absurdly) would stop the owners.The replies were as blunt as ever. The railwaymen had ‘done their bit’ during the General Strike. The General Strike had now been called off, and the union leaders could not see their way to protecting their own members if they were victimised for helping the miners. Thus throughout the seven months there was not a single gesture of strike solidarity for the miners from transport trade unionists.Cook never stopped making the point. He enrolled the Labour Research Department, newly-formed under the influence of the Communist Party, to provide the figures for the workers to show just how huge a dent the miners had made in the side of British capital. In October, the LRD published The Coal Shortage: Why the Miners Will Win, with a foreword by A.J. Cook.The effect of the strike on the economy, the pamphlet showed, was catastrophic. Pig iron production, which had averaged 538,000 tons a month from January to April, was down to 14,000 tons in August. Steel production, 697,000 tons a month from January to April, had slumped to 52,000 tons. The president of the Federation of British Industries, Sir Max Muspratt, had estimated the total cost of the strike to the beginning of October at an incredible £541 million (enormously greater in real terms than even the most exaggerated estimate for the cost of the 1984ndash;5 strike). ‘By the end of the year,’ the pamphlet concluded, ‘the loss would amount to between £1,000 and £1,500 million.’" }
{ "content": "This was followed in November by The Miners Struggle and the Big Five Banks, again with a foreword by A.J. Cook, in which he wrote: ‘The miners are not broken – they continue to fight; their destiny is in your hands. An embargo on blackleg coal and a levy on all workers must be adopted to save the miners from defeat.‘And to the miners who are fighting I say: Every honest worker in the world admires your courage and loyalty in the fight which was forced upon you by the rapacious mine-owners, who have at their service the banks, the press and the resources of the press.’This was not whistling in the dark. Even in November, as the Miners’ Federation delegate conference met to discuss the drift back to work under pressure of unspeakable hunger and poverty in the coalfields and the intransigence of the owners and the government, the solidarity of the majority astonished owners and ministers.But the shock steeled their determination to grind the miners down. Defeat stared the union in the face, yet the loyalty of the miners, especially in the ‘hard areas’ such as South Wales and Durham, was apparently unshakeable. Militants like Arthur Horner urged a ‘stepping up’ of the strike and more pressure for solidarity action. Others, like Aneurin Bevan, called for an orderly return.Cook knew that an end of the strike meant defeat – not just on hours and wages but on district agreements which would, effectively, break the union for a long period, perhaps for ever. He wanted the strike to go on, but he knew it could not do so without new sources of funds. He staked all on a levy of trade unionists, and was prepared to compromise to get it.Here is the first sign of the waverings which he had shown as the struggle faded in 1921. In July 1926, a clutch of bishops, wringing their hands and washing them on alternate days, ‘came forward’ with proposals to settle the dispute. The proposals were no more than a request for another government subsidy, another ‘moratorium’, this time for four months, and ‘independent compulsory arbitration’ at the end of it.The coal-owners, of course, would have no truck with these suggestions. They were for an outright victory in the wake of the General Strike, and when their Christian consciences clashed with their dividend payment, God was asked to wait. The government agreed with the owners (as they always did). The miners’ response was therefore irrelevant. Perhaps because it was irrelevant, the executive of the Federation accepted the proposals, and Cook recommended them in the Sunday Worker.A ballot was held on the bishops’ proposals. The miners rejected them, against the advice of their own executive. The ‘tactic’ therefore boomeranged, and although Cook’s personal stock did not fall, there were some militants who wondered aloud why he had wavered.In September, at the TUC Congress in Bournemouth, he wavered again, more crucially. The General Council had promised him a voluntary levy of all trade union members. But they wanted something in exchange. Cook had to agree to speak against any full-scale public debate on the union leaders’ sell-out of the General Strike.Jack Tanner of the Engineers Union refused to accept the General Council’s report on the General Strike. He moved that the conference ‘refer it back’, and hold a full debate on the behaviour of the General Council during the Nine Days. The conference responded warmly to his appeal, and there were plenty of wet trousers on the platform. If the vote went against them, Thomas and Co. would have to justify themselves in public!Their saviour was A.J. Cook. He intervened, to thunderous applause, just after Tanner had spoken. ‘We have a million miners locked out,’ he said. ‘We are more concerned just now to get an honourable settlement for these million men than we are in washing dirty linin in this Congress.’ The motion was defeated.For this, Cook earned himself a thoroughly deserved rebuke in the Sunday Worker, from George Hardy, secretary of the National Minority Movement. ‘What did he gain?’ asked Hardy. ‘A pious resolution, and a false sense of security because the leaders were not with him.’They were not. They did not even deliver the levy until they knew it was far too late. By the time the levy funds started to trickle in, the miners were broken. The drift back to work had turned into a flood, especially in the Midlands. While the ‘hard areas’ still remained solid (Durham miners balloted to stay out even after a delegate conference had ordered a return), there was nothing for it but to go back on the owners’ terms. ARTHUR COOK had anticipated the full extent of the defeat, but the immediate impact of it was lost on him. As soon as the miners went back to work, he accepted a long-standing invitation to Moscow. Throughout the strike, he had faced down the red-baiters by assuring them that he did support revolutionary Russia. Russian workers, he pointed out, in spite of the most terrible hardships, contributed more to the strike fund than the combined contributions of unions affiliated to the TUC.In Moscow, where he spent several weeks, Cook was lionised. The visit acted as a kind of cushion against the fearful reality of the British coalfields. But when he returned in late January 1927 there was no hiding place.Up and down the coalfields, there was unrelieved gloom. There had been mass sackings of lodge and branch officials. Those that were allowed back to work were browbeaten from the first hour. The wages and hours ‘negotiated’ in the new ‘district agreements’ (a euphemism for the owners’ terms) were horrific. Ancient union privileges, such as the rights of the men to elect their own checkweighmen, were torn up.Down the mine, there was harassment and speed-up, with the inevitable fatal results. In March 1927, for instance, 66 miners were killed in an explosion and fall at Cwm colliery. Everyone except the owner agreed it was due to speed-up following the lock-out." }
{ "content": "The union was lucky to survive at all. In many places, it didn’t. At Maerdy pit, in South Wales, the proud flagship of the Federation for a quarter of a century, the owners wreaked terrible revenge. They refused to recognise the union, and victimised anyone known to be a member. In 1927 there were 377 employed members of the lodge at Maerdy; in 1928, only eight; in 1929, 25. In 1927, the lodge had 1,366 unemployed members; in 1928, 724; and in 1929, 325. This was not because the overall unemployment figures were falling – quite the reverse. It was just that to stand any chance of getting work, men were forced to leave the union (or the area).The Great Depression is usually placed in the 1930s, when unemployment climbed to over three million. The Great Depression in the South Wales coalfield started immediately after, and as a direct result of, the Miners’ Lock-out. The poverty of the mining families, especially those in the more militant pits where the sackings and victimisations were the hardest, is, literally, unimaginable. Those that could afford the journey left the area. Other miners simply drifted away from their families to seek some sort of work during the week in or around London, or to beg in the London streets. Almost as soon as he got back to his office in Russell Square, Cook found himself besieged by South Wales miners who came to the offices day by day to beg for money or a crust of bread.Arthur Horner has a lovely story of how he and a couple of tough Communists took Cook to task for giving away most of his salary to such beggars. He told Cook that if he gave away everything he had it would make precious little difference to the problem, and reminded him that his own family had a right to live. One afternoon, Horner and two comrades went themselves to the miners’ headquarters to protest. While they were with Cook, the doorman came in to say an unemployed miner had asked to see Cook. ‘I will deal with him,’ said Horner, gruffly, and stormed out to berate the wretched fellow for begging from his union secretary.The man told Horner his story. Horner gave him half the money he had saved to keep him in London for a week. He returned to Cook and the others, intending to bluff it out. He found them giggling. They had been listening at the keyhole to find out, as Cook put it, how a ‘really hard man’ deals with a ‘really hard problem’.What could be done for these desperate members? Cook’s instinct was to mobilise them. At a huge anti-government meeting on Penrhys Mountain, South Wales, on 13 September 1927, Cook proposed, almost by accident, that the ‘starving masses’ in the miners’ area should march to London, to what he called ‘the fountain head of the trouble’. Wal Hannington, the Communist Party agitator who followed Cook, took up the idea. He had already run hunger marches of the unemployed in the depression of 1921, and was to organise many others in the 1930s. He proposed a miners’ hunger march from South Wales to London. The proposal was acclaimed with a mighty roar.The march, which took place that November, was a tremendous success. It is fully chronicled in Wal Hannington’s book, Unemployed Struggles. Though the book was written in 1936, long after Hannington had fallen out with Cook, he pays generous tribute to the miners’ leader for his role. Cook spoke to enormous meetings on the road: of 3,000 in Swindon; 5,000 in Reading and more than 100,000 in Trafalgar Square.You often meet old socialists who will tell you proudly of the hunger marches of the old days. What they don’t tell you is that these marches were hated and denounced by the leaders of the TUC and of the Labour Party. The organisers were variously described as rabble-rousers, agitators, Communists and incendiaries, and the union mandarins seized every opportunity to smear the marchers – sometimes even by ridiculing their shabby clothes! A.J. Cook’s part in the 1927 Hunger March endeared him still further to the rank-and-file miners, but infuriated his colleagues in the TUC, who were developing a new policy to shield themselves from their self-inflicted impotence.They called it ‘conciliation’. The time had come, they argued, to stop talking about class war and to start talking with the employers.A.J. Cook didn’t call it conciliation. He called it collaboration. He took over a regular column in the Sunday Worker. Week after week he savaged J.H. Thomas and the other trade union leaders. He started, as always, from the condition of the workers, especially of the miners. He asked whether there was the slightest sign that the capitalist system had relented, or was treating workers better than previously. On the contrary, the workers were worse off, the rich better off. Exploitation, the engine of the system, was working at a tremendous pace, but it did not solve the basic problems of society; it made them worse. Unemployment and poverty were on the rise. Why should the working-class movement collaborate? What would they get out of it?The questions were not answered. They were ignored. At the 1927 TUC Congress in Edinburgh in September, George Hicks, the building workers’ leader, once a Marxist and a man of the left, devoted his presidential address to the new concept of ‘conciliation’. The reward for this initiative came on 23 November, when a group of employers under Sir Alfred Mond, a South Wales industrialist, called for a conference to discuss the ‘common interests’ of trade unionists and employers. The new TUC president, Ben Turner of the wool workers, readily accepted. He started talking to Mond regularly, and on 12 January 1928 a delegation from the TUC met a delegation of employers headed by Mond." }
{ "content": "Cook protested furiously. The TUC, he said, had no mandate to enter such discussions with employers. No such idea had been put to the movement, or decided at any democratic conference. He attended the Mond-Turner conference at Burlington House in January 1928 and scathingly attacked both sides for congratulating each other when workers he represented had not enough to eat. He rushed out a pamphlet, The Mond Moonshine, whose preface by the old ILP member Joseph Southall is worth quoting in full:HOW THE WOLVES MADE PEACE WITH THE SHEPHERDSAND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SHEEPMundus the Wolf said to the shepherds: ‘Why should there not be peace between you and us, seeing that we both depend on the sheep for a living so that our interests are the same?’Then Bender, Diggitt and Lemon, three of the Shepherds, said: ‘Let there be peace and cooperation’ and with this most of the shepherds agreed for they thought: ‘Why should we have the danger and trouble of fighting the wolves who speak so pleasantly?’But Cocus, sturdy shepherd, who had fought hard for the sheep when other shepherds fled, did not trust the Wolves, and especially old Mundus whose origin was doubtful ...And Cocus answered: ‘Are not the jaws of the wolves red even now with the blood of the sheep?’To which Lemon replied loftily: ‘Cocus speaks only for himself – the Council of Shepherds will deal with him.’And Bender (who had charge of the shearing, and was naturally woolly in consequence) said to the Wolves:‘Let us get round a table and explore every avenue, without prejudice, to hammer out ways and means to get out of the present chaos on to the highway of comfort and prosperity like that of Rome, which was not built in a day.’Now what he meant by all this nobody knows, but while he was speaking the Wolves made off with a number of lambs and many valuable fleeces. Then did the Wolves rejoice for they knew the value of sheep’s clothing.Mundus was Mond of course, and Cocus, Cook. Bender was Ben Turner; Diggitt was Ben Tillett and Lemon was Walter Citrine. This was the theme of Cook’s pamphlet, which was published in March 1928, and was followed in the late summer by another entitled Mond’s Manacles.‘There can be no peace with poverty or unemployment,’ it ended. ‘There can be no peace with capitalism.’These attacks on his colleagues goaded them to reply in the only way they knew. The cry went up: Cook must be expelled! Under the heading TUC TIRED OF MR COOK’, the Daily Express of 16 January 1928 had this to say:‘Relations between Mr A.J. Cook, the miners’ secretary, and his colleagues on the General Council of the Trade Union Congress have almost reached breaking point.‘So much indignation has been roused among his colleagues by his behaviour that the council may not be content to pass a mere vote of censure, and more drastic measures may be taken. The possibility of excluding Mr Cook from further meetings is being discussed. It is an open secret that since he joined the General Council last September [1927] Mr Cook has provoked angry scenes at every meeting. Matters have reached the stage at which he has been threatened more than once with physical violence by several of his colleagues.’These attacks, which were widely publicised in the press, led to Cook getting an offer of help from an unexpected area.The ‘Mond Moonshine’ had been having its effect on the Labour Party too. Hypnotised by the prospect of a General Election in which it might once more gain office, the Labour Party leadership were rapidly cutting out of speeches, policies and documents any reference to class war or to socialism. There policies spoke about ‘one nation’ and ‘pulling together in both sides of industry’. This appalled those members of the ILP who were still committed to socialist ideas. In particular, John Wheatley, perhaps the most dedicated socialist ever to get to parliament for the Labour Party, publicly declared his view that defeat at the polls was better than a victory under Ramsay Macdonald and the then Labour leaders.Wheatley’s secretary and assistant at the time, John Scanlon, called Cook to a meeting in the House of Commons attended by some of the more left-wing MPs of the ILP. The meeting spawned the idea of a ‘public campaign’ to win back both the Labour Party and the trade unions to class struggle and socialist solutions to capitalist crises. Thus was born the ‘Cook-Maxton’ manifesto.The idea was simple. The two most popular orators of the labour movement at the time – Arthur Cook of the miners and James Maxton, the fiery ILP MP for Bridgeton in Glasgow – would travel the country speaking to a ‘manifesto’ which sought to put the blame for the country’s ills on capitalism, and urged the Labour Party to commit itself to socialist policies if ever it formed a government.The campaign was launched at a monster meeting in St Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow in July. So many people turned up that the speakers had to speak again at an overflow meeting outside. But at once, the campaign ran into trouble. John Wheatley wanted it to encourage dissident Labour Party members to refuse to support Mondist right-wing candidates at the election. Maxton disagreed, arguing that it was not the job of the campaign to split the Labour Party. Maxton’s view prevailed. Because no one trusted Cook to curtail his revolutionary ardour, he was asked to write out his Glasgow speech and submit it for approval before making it. Although the speech reads well enough, it lost its originality and fervour; and the meeting was a bit of a flop." }
{ "content": "This difficulty continued throughout the campaign. Lots of people agreed with Maxton and Cook. The basic arguments seemed unanswerable. It was pointless making friends with enemies such as theirs. It was clear that the interests of the classes were opposed to one another, and that any policy based on collaboration was bound to shackle a future Labour government, and drive it into the arms of capitalism, but what could people who agreed do about it? If the argument was not a guide to some sort of action, then it quickly lost its initial attractiveness. It was the analysis without the remedy – the prerogative of the quack throughout the ages.So the Cook-Maxton campaign livened up left-wing politics for a brief summer, and then everyone settled down to what seemed the only practicable task on offer: the return of a Labour government.On and on went Cook, however. He seemed indomitable. At the TUC in Swansea in September 1928 he faced his tormentors once more. He spoke powerfully against Mondism, and against any further meetings between the employers and the General Council.‘You cannot under the capitalist structure avoid unemployment,’ he said. ‘Do not have alliances with the enemy. That is breaking a vital principle and is going to bind us with shackles to capitalism.’He was followed to the rostrum (this Congress was the first to introduce the rostrum) by Herbert Smith, the miners’ president and Cook’s staunchest ally in the lock-out of 1926. Smith was brutal. He savaged Cook from his first sentence.‘I do not speak for Arthur Cook and I do not speak for Herbert Smith. I speak for the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, which supports the General Council.’Smith was correct. The Miners’ Federation itself had moved to the right under the pressure of the employers’ offensive. Cook was isolated not only on the General Council; he was in a minority among his fellow miners. At the MFGB conference that summer of 1928, a resolution approving Mondism had met with fierce resistance, but had been passed.Smith’s blunt attack exposed the weakness of Arthur Cook’s position. Cook was on the General Council and was able to speak at the TUC because he was secretary of the Miners’ Federation. Yet bhis own ideas about the political and economic situation were now opposed by his own union.From all sides, both in the Congress proceedings and outside the conference hall, the questions rained down on him. Who did Cook think he was? Was he not abusing his position both as miners’ secretary and as member of the General Council in expressing his extremist views? Were not the miners Mondists now? Why should the miners’ union and the TUC be used as a sounding board for Communist ideas by someone who was elected to represent an organisation which thought and voted quite differently? What right had Cook to expect to hold either position if he continued to abuse both?Cook had an answer. He had been elected on the programme of the Minority Movement in 1924 – a programme which was absolutely opposite to that now promulgated by his union. He would stick to that, whatever happened. He rose at the TUC to give his accustomed reply. As he spoke, he collapsed, and was rushed to hospital. IT WAS a bleak autumn for Arthur Cook. He had never been a fit man. He suffered from many of the familiar miners’ illnesses, bronchitis, emphyzema and so on. The pain in his leg from the fight in 1926 had never gone away. Now, worse news was to come. The doctors confirmed what he had dreaded: that he was being eaten up by cancer and would be lucky to live another five years.In hospital, he mused on the contradictions of his position. The truth was that his central argument did not stand up. True, he had been elected on the platform of the Minority Movement in 1924. But there had been enormous changes since then, all for the worse. Strong, confident lodges had been destroyed. People’s faith in the union was immeasurably weakened. In slump and poverty, working people did not turn in the mass to ideas of revolutionary change. They withdrew, sought immediate ways out of their difficulties, and geared for compromise, however hopeless or ridiculous it appeared.The mood had changed completely. Cook knew that in spite of all his popularity among the miners, if he stood and fought again on the same platform he would almost certainly be defeated. The support of the rank-and-file miners – the rock on which he had built his reputation and his confidence – had slipped away from him.In these circumstances what use was his old and famous slogan: ‘You can only take what you are strong enough to take and only hold what you are strong enough to hold’? This slogan – the core of the syndicalist ideas of his youth – was fine as long as the curve of workers’ militancy and confidence pointed upwards. But what happened when it turned down – what if you could take nothing, and hold precious little? What role was there for the syndicalist then – especially the syndicalist who had reached high office through expression of his militant views?Was he to pretend that the mood was different and continue to campaign against his colleagues on the basis of a militancy which did not exist? Or was he to retreat to compromise, to hold what he could even if it meant rejecting some of the ideas with which his closest followers associated him?No doubt his illness, and the short span of life in pain which loomed in front of him, played a part in his decision. No doubt the tough and wily Walter Citrine, who visited him in his hospital bed, had some influence on him. Whatever the cause, by October that same year, 1928, he was writing in the Sunday Worker advocating caution, compromise, walking before you can run, and the importance of a Labour government as a first step to socialism." }
{ "content": "At once, one of his staunchest supporters wrote and urged him not to slide. Harry Pollitt, a Manchester engineer who had devoted his life to the Communist Party, wrote on 25 October:‘Dear Arthur,‘Glad to hear of your recovery, but amazed at the sharp turn of events so far as your policy is concerned. I believe that your present line is the most dangerous to yourself that you have ever taken. Unless you are more than careful, you will find that more dirty actions will be taken by the MFGB in your name and over your signature, against the militant miners, than have ever been taken before.‘Your notes in last week’s Sunday Worker are appalling. I wouldn’t presume to write you, only for our close friendship, and no one knows better than I do all you have gone through. But you know you have had our backing and help as well. For the last two weeks I have been speaking all over Lancashire on the Swansea TUC stating the fight you put up there, getting support for you, making your position clear, and then you throw it all away in the misguided conception you are doing the right thing. You are not. You could sweep all the coalfields on the one union issue, but unless you break with them, you’ll find it too late.’Pollitt’s letter ended:‘I beg of you, for the sake of the miners’ best interests and your own, resume your open fight. It will rally to you all that is best in the movement. When you have been fighting the hardest, you have had the greatest mass support. On your present lines, you’ll not only lose it, you’ll knock the heart out of thousands of the MFGB’s best lads. Is it worth it? Of course it isn’t. They believe they have got you down. They’ll wipe their feet on you. They won’t forget all they have to pay you back.’It was a moving and prophetic appeal. But the crucial problem disturbing Cook – should he resign as secretary or should he continue and compromise – was not touched on. There was something fundamentally dishonest about using the prestige of elected office to preach policies which were not acceptable to the majority of the electorate – the union membership. This dishonesty, however, probably didn’t even occur to Harry Pollitt. So his letter was of little help. Cook replied, sadly and pathetically:‘Dear Harry,‘Regret delay in answering your letter. Am much better now, but not yet A1. Now don’t worry; shall not go over to the reactionaries. They wait for my body. Tactics may be wrong, but I am up against difficult proposition – when to force issue. Cannot explain by letter but should like to see you as they are out for a smash. Future must be thought out.‘Do not blame rank and file but b— machinery which keeps rank and file at bay. Their power in machine – when and how to test it ... I am firm in one national union and want to swap coalfields, but when and how. See me soon. I have nought to fear in a fight. Yours ever for the workers, AJC.’This letter – one of the very few which survive from Cook – shows that in late October he was still thinking of a tactical withdrawal, while keeping friends and counsel among the Communists. As with so many tactical withdrawals, it soon turned into a rout.Before long Cook was making peace with the TUC leadership, and even the Labour leadership which he had denounced so mercilessly for the previous five years. In February, he attended a meeting with the Labour leaders in which he agreed that the next Labour government could postpone the nationalisation of the mines beyond the first session of parliament. He spoke more and more enthusiastically for the Labour Party on public platforms in the run-up to the 1929 election.In March, for instance, he said:‘I have fought for and will continue to fight for a Labour government as a step to socialism; to repeal the pernicious 8-hours Act; to secure a Minimum Wage, adequate pensions at 60, nationalisation of the mines, minerals and by-products. A Labour government would bring new life and hope to the workers; it would increase faith in trade unionism and would lead us nearer to socialism.’In the election campaign, he was persuaded, as an ultimate humiliation, to speak for Ramsay Macdonald at Seaham Harbour, where his friend Harry Pollitt was standing as a Communist. Pollitt records with some relish that he waited outside a hall until Cook arrived in a big car, and deliberately turned away when Cook ‘waved a cheery greeting’ across the street.Making peace with Ramsay Macdonald and Co. meant making peace with the establishment in general. In April 1929, Cook found himself at the Mansion House in the City of London at a luncheon for the chief helpers of the Miners’ Distress Fund, a charity sponsored by the Prince of Wales.The Prince made a pretty speech, and then, to everyone’s surprise, Cook was on his feet congratulating the Prince on his ‘whole-hearted enthusiasm’ for the miners’ fund, and especially for his appeal the previous Christmas on the radio. Only eleven months previously, Cook had mercilessly scoffed at wealthy city slickers and royalty who sought to solve their consciences with charity for the miners. Now in a burst of warm-hearted impetuousness he appeared in public as yet another groveller before royalty.He never had the time or health to taste the bitter fruits of the 1929-31 Labour government to the full. He watched aghast as the Eight Hours Bill was not repealed, how there were no provisions for adequate pensions at 60 or a minimum wage for miners." }
{ "content": "He saw very quickly that the Labour government was not bringing new life and hope to the workers. Instead, it brought more unemployment, more sickness and more despair. He noticed that in two years the government had decreased faith in trade unionism and had postponed any socialism by as long as anyone could see into the future. He noticed (indeed he even remarked, once, in public) that while Macdonald had regretted he could not nationalise the mines in the first session of parliament, he did not nationalise them in the second session either. By the third session, Macdonald (and Thomas, and Snowden) had joined the Tory Party in a government which postponed nationalisation for another sixteen years.In January 1931 his right leg was amputated above the knee. He bore the pain and disability with his usual cheerfulness and good spirits. Visitors from across the political spectrum came to see him in hospital. One of the more persistent of them was Sir Oswald Mosley, Labour MP for Smethwick, who was outraged by the spinelessness of the Labour government. He demanded more public spending to cut unemployment, and a programme of public works which heralded what later became known as Keynesianism. Mosley wrote a manifesto along these lines, and persuaded Arthur Cook to sign it.A few months later, Mosley and John Strachey, Cook’s former editor and aide, broke with the Labour Party to form the New Party. Both men pleaded with Cook to be a founder member of the party, but Cook refused. He would not leave the Labour Party, he said, but he promised he would vote for the New Party at the next election.He never got the chance. He now hardly ever left the trade union hospital at Manor House, Golders Green, in North London. On a bitterly cold night, 2 November 1931, a nursing sister approached him to prepare him for sleep. ‘Sister, it’s cold tonight,’ smiled Cook. ‘Go make yourself a cup of tea before you attend to me.’ She did. When she returned the miners’ secretary was dead. He was 47 years old. THE OBITUARIES in the Press gushed with relief for a dead enemy. They rejoiced in Cook’s death-bed conversion. ‘Miners’ leader who turned against the Communists: Extremist views which became considerably modified’ was the Daily Mirror’s verdict.Harry Pollitt’s warning had been cruelly vindicated. The reactionaries ‘wiped their feet on him’. Cook had become, by the end, a victim not just of appalling illness but of the syndicalism which inspired him. A union leader carried to office by militant policies and workers’ confidence is like a marker buoy. As long as the seas are high, it guides, leads and moves with the current. When the tide goes out, the buoy is left on the sand, without purpose, marking nothing.The position of such a leader is his greatest obstacle. To renounce it, to return to the rank and file, seems to be throwing away enormous advantage. Yet to stay in a position which is not properly representative leaves no option but to compromise or to cheat. Cook was not a cheat, so he compromised.The first and most obvious lesson is the importance of socialist organisation, rooted and committed to the rank and file. In such an organisation we can keep our socialist commitment not just in the flow of the tide – which is easy – but in its ebb as well.When the workers’ confidence turns down, when employers and rulers win the day, the only way to keep high the aspirations for a new social order is through association with other socialists, learning from and teaching one another, extending our understanding of how the revolutionary tide has ebbed and flowed in the past. But, above all, we need to relate to whatever active struggle, however tiny, there is going on. Perhaps the worst aspect of A.J. Cook’s compromise in 1929 was his turning away from the unofficial miners’ strikes at Dawdon in County Durham, and Binley in Warwickshire.However great the victory of the ruling class, it can never escape the continuing class struggle. Since the society it governs is founded on exploitation, there will always be people resisting it, sometimes aggressively, confidently and successfully; more often defensively, and unsuccessfully. This resistance is the only real hope for lasting change. Association with it by organised socialists is the best guarantee that the socialist ideas which inspire us can be kept alive and relevant in the bad times as easily as they can in the good. Tactical demands and practical slogans are cut down to size at such a time – but this way they never lose contact with socialist aspirations or the living battles of real people on which they depend.So is that the end of the story? Can we dump A.J. Cook in the dustbin of history along with all the other trade union leaders who took office to change the world and ended up changing only themselves?No, most emphatically, we cannot, for there is another vital ingredient to the end of this story.The Communist Party, which moved A.J. Cook for high office, which championed him through his great campaign of 1924-5, which ordered him to cede ‘all power to the General Council’ in the 1926 General Strike (even to the extent of surrendering the newsprint for the Sunday Worker to the TUC) was embarked at the time of Cook’s greatest doubt and illness on a campaign of the most hideous sectarianism and insularity.This was the notorious ‘Third Period’, ordered from Stalin’s Moscow and adopted by those Party members who were more susceptible to the ‘line’ from Russia than they were to the real experiences of the working people they pretended to represent." }
{ "content": "In the ‘Third Period’, the line went, capitalism was in complete disarray, and socialist revolution was on the agenda. In such a period, the greatest obstacles to revolution were not the bankers or the industrialists, but the ‘fakers’ on the left who pretended they had a way forward and therefore deliberately obstructed the revolution. The crucial task in such an ‘epoch’ (a favourite revolutionary word) was to ‘break with’ the old order in the working-class movement. Unions which flirted with Mond had to be abandoned and new revolutionary unions set up in their place. Strikes had to be called in opposition to the union leadership – even if they were hopeless – with the specific aim of challenging that leadership.The full force of the rhetoric which Communists used to turn on the ruling class was now turned on the elected leaders of the working class. Workers’ Life, the weekly party paper, trumpeted – on 13 December 1929:‘In an era in which the prospect of revolutionary mass struggle looms ahead, our tactics should be based on the assumption that the purpose of the Left Social-Democratic manoeuvres is only a counterrevolutionary one.’Every single sentiment in that sentence was the exact opposite of the truth. December 1929 was not ‘an era in which the prospect of revolutionary mass struggle looms ahead’. The purpose of the ‘Left Social-Democratic manoeuvres’ (meaning those on the left of the Labour Party) were to shift the party to the left or hold it where it was, but without moving too quickly or jeopardising election chances – nothing whatsoever to do with counter-revolution. The false conclusion, however, flowed freely from the false facts: here’s Workers’ Life again, on 30 August 1929, just before Cook collapsed during his speech at the Swansea TUC:‘The Communist Party must energetically fight the Left Social-Democrats as the most dangerous enemies of the working class.’The most dangerous enemies. Worse than bankers or employers or Tories or spies!The fight against these ‘most dangerous enemies’ gathered force through 1929. The Communist Party press and the party faithful whipped themselves into a lather of self-righteous fury against them.Poor Arthur Cook got it worst. At the moment his doubts were first expressed, the Communist Party jumped on him from a vast height. ‘A.J. Cook joins the Old Gang’, announced the Sunday Worker on 15 March 1929, and every issue of the Party press from that date until his death sought some new form of malicious gossip about him. ‘Cook the Renegade!’ became an almost obligatory headline.The paper reported that Cook had been, without a break, a member of the ILP since 1905 (which was nonsense); that he had called in the police at the TUC Congress (which was not true) and that he was as bad a ‘social fascist’ as you could find anywhere – worse even than Jimmy Maxton.(‘Social fascist’ was a phrase coined by the Communist Party to describe people who called themselves socialist but supported policies which took the unions into the same organisations as the employers – because this was also a crucial industrial policy in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. It was grotesque, even as a description of the right-wing union leaders, let alone people like Cook and Maxton, and utter political nonsense – as the Communist Party was to discover later and at appalling cost when the real fascists turned on Communists and ‘social fascists’ alike.)Meanwhile Cook’s accolade for the Prince of Wales gave Workers’ Life a marvellous opportunity, and the paper scarcely referred to the miners’ leader without adding the tag ‘that notorious friend of the smiling Prince’.Cook was immediately stung to reply. His answer in Workers’ Life took the form of an open letter to his old friend and comradeArthur Horner, who was himself soon to run foul of his party’s domineering sectarianism.‘I am constrained to reply,’ wrote Cook, ‘hoping yet that we can reconcile our differences and still continue our comradeship which was forged in class struggle.‘You know that you were wrong when you stated that I have joined the enemies of the revolutionary struggle – neither has what you term the trade union and Labour Party bureaucracy got hold of me ... I have and shall continue to oppose Mondism because I am working and fighting for socialism.‘You know as well as I do the terrible conditions in the coalfields, and the suffering of the women and children. I have been compelled to do the most unpleasant tasks of begging for food, money, boots, and cast-off clothing. Practically every day young men, stranded, call for food, clothing and shelter at my office. I have done my best for them. Every day the post brings letters to me and Mrs Cook begging for help, especially from expectant mothers, terrible epistles of agony and despair.‘I have heard their cry for help, and have done all I can to give assistance. I have helped all I can, begged all I can, till I have been almost demented and in despair, because I hate charity and reliefs which make us all beggars ...‘I now want remedies instead of relief. The more poverty increases, the more our people sink into despair and become the hopeless prey of all the most reactionary influences and movements.’The remedy, he went on, lay in industrial and political power. Industrial power had to be built up in the trade unions, political power sought through the Labour Party.‘This cannot be done,’ he wrote, ‘by forming new unions, thus dividing the workers and intensifying the struggle between workers and leaders in our present weakened state.’ Nor could it be done, he concluded, by standing Communist Party candidates against Labour candidates in a ‘first past the post’ electoral system, where Communist candidates who did well would only split the workers’ vote and let the Tories in." }
{ "content": "The letter, published on 29 April 1929, bore tragic testimony to the awful dilemma which Cook faced. It exposed his weakness as a militant leader of a demoralised and passive workforce. But it was not the letter of someone who had abandoned the ideas and principles of his life and youth; and, on the subject of breakaway unions at least, it undoubtedly won the argument.The Communist Party, however, was not in a mood to argue. Denunciation was more appropriate to their line, which was being dictated with more and more urgency from Moscow. The same party which, a few years later, would fling itself at the feet of any opportunist trade union leader who offered a cliché on behalf of the Popular Front, now drowned the most powerful and principled union leader their movement had ever known in stale sectarian polemic.Cook persevered. He wrote again to Labour Monthly, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, which published his letter in June. He started by complaining that he had been misquoted, which he had been. On the policy of breakaway unions, he wrote:‘The Communist Party are trying to destroy the only means for protection now, and the only means to create and construct a new social order. They are out to smash the MFGB, the TUC and the Labour Party – quite an ambitious proposal. No more insane object could ever have been formulated outside a lunatic asylum.’His article ended with a desperate plea for comradely argument and assessment:‘Comradeship means something higher and nobler than the example set by the Communist Party in their campaign of personalities, hate, vilification and destruction. We must fight capitalism with all the weapons at our disposal in an organised fashion. This needs power, which only trade unions can create by industrial and political argument.’For this appeal, Arthur Cook got the usual kick in the teeth. A note at the end of the article declared:‘The Labour Monthly says farewell to him without regret and with the contempt that he deserves.’The Labour Monthly and its party were saying farewell to a lot of other Communists during 1929. In the eighteen months after the General Strike, 5,000 people had joined the Communist Party, doubling its membership. They joined in disgust at the sell-outs of the General Council and the rightward drift to Mondism following the defeat of the miners. These 5,000 people were overwhelmingly working-class militants, many of them victimised, who were looking for a new lead to strengthen the working-class movement.But in place of policies which would expose the false ideas put forward by the trade union leaders and strengthen the rank and file, the party simply denounced those leaders and trumpeted crazy notions for new revolutionary trade unions. The Communist Party literature and press reeked of stale jargon. Life in the party became monkish and fanatical. All those who argued with Communists were seen to be against them. All those persuaded by the weakness of the workers to seek salvation in the Labour Party were denounced as reformist and revisionist trash.The 5,000 left almost as soon as they had joined. Party membership dropped from 10,730 in October 1926 to 5,500 in March 1928, and to 3,200 in December 1929. Soon after this the party took its great leap forward to a daily paper (made possible only by a generous subsidy from Russia), but membership in December 1930 was down to 2,555.For Arthur Cook, the sectarianism of the Communist Party was first a shock; secondly an excuse. As the abuse mounted, so he no longer felt it necessary to argue his position with his former comrades.If they really were intent on forming new unions, what need was there to debate with them his own awkward and embarrassing position?His only way out of his impasse was to resign the secretaryship, and perhaps fight for it again with a militant programme. If he’d won again, he could easily have seen off his adversaries in the TUC. If he’d lost, he would be a rank-and-file miner again, no doubt unemployed, and too ill to work, but at least clear and confident in his politics. There never was at any time in Arthur Cook’s life the slightest suggestion that he kept his position because he needed the money or liked the life-style. He was giving a huge proportion of his small income away anyway.Resignation, forcing another election, was a powerful and practicable alternative. Any friend or comrade could have advised him down that road. But the know-alls of the Communist Party were so eager to denounce a precious new ‘social fascist’ that they could not even open a dialogue with him.Thereby hangs a moral. The only point in remembering our past is so that it can guide us in the present. In spite of all the obvious differences in scale and detail, the period which followed the defeat of the miners in 1926 is grimly similar to the times we live in now.As we try to steer our tiny socialist craft through the same sort of stormy waters, what dangers loom up ahead? On the one side is the huge Rock of Reformism, to which we are lured by the prospect of defeating a vicious and victorious Tory government. Sink your differences, sing the sirens on this rock. Submerge your strikes and demonstrations, put all your energies into knocking out the Tories at the next election, and replacing them with a Labour government pledged at least to improve the lot of working people at the expense of the rich and powerful.We can see that rock more clearly now than socialists could see it after 1926. Then, there had never been a majority Labour government. Now, we have had years and years of majority Labour governments, most of them in peacetime conditions. We have watched all those governments turn against the people who elected them, and savage them.As they do so, thousands of their supporters turn away. The ideas which inspired generations of socialists are polluted because, it seems, they cannot be put into practice." }
{ "content": "Nevertheless, as after 1926, the current pulls us still towards that rock, and we must steer hard against it; hard for independent socialist organisation rooted in the self-activity of workers, which alone holds out the prospect of real change.But as we pull the tiller over, we had better beware other sirens on rocks which are perhaps less obvious and where the warnings are less shrill. Theirs are the voices which beckon us away altogether from the real, living working-class movement, which becalm us in eddies and pools where other socialists are sailing around in smaller and smaller circles, amusing and abusing one another with great gusto, but having no effect whatever on what workers say and do, and so no effect whatever on the world outside.Sectarianism is the philosophy of socialists who have ‘discovered the truth’ about revolution and consider it to be so obvious that everybody else must have discovered it too. ‘Everybody else’, therefore, must be ‘selling out’. Sectarianism is the creed of those who cannot see that most workers – by far the great majority of them – will stay ‘reformist’ either because they do not see an alternative, or because they fear the alternative, until all other roads are shut to them. Sectarianism is the hiding place for socialists who refuse to accept that they must be part of the working-class movement or they are finished.What then, in 1985, is a fitting epitaph for Arthur James Cook?There are some who might prefer the obituary in the Daily Worker of 3 November 1931, which could hardly contain its pleasure that another ‘social fascist’ had died in agony.‘Throughout his whole career,’ it concluded, ‘Cook wavered from side to side, finally ending up in the camp of the workers’ enemies, but still trying to cover up his treachery with high-sounding phrases and gaudy promises.’Some might prefer that, as I say, if only because it is safe. It is, however, wrong, offensive and arrogant, and will cut off whoever says it from any miner who ever heard A.J. Cook speak, or talked to others who heard him.I prefer the epitaph written by Robin Page Arnot, who was, I think, on the staff of the Daily Worker at the time, and who later wrote a series of marvellous histories of the British miners and their struggles.‘There never had been a British miners’ leader like Arthur James Cook; never one so hated by the government, so obnoxious to the mine-owners, so much a thorn in the flesh of other general secretaries of unions; never one who during his three years’ mission from 1924 to 1926 had so much unfeigned reverence and enthusiastic support from his fellow-miners. Neither to Tommy Hepburn nor Tom Halliday, neither to Alexander McDonald or Ben Pickard, neither to the socialists Keir Hardie nor Robert Smillie did the miners of Britain accord the same unbounded trust and admiration as they reposed for those three years and more in A.J. Cook. That support was his strength, and it was his only strength. When he lost it, he lost the ground on which he lived and moved and had his being. Today his faults are forgotten or forgiven amongst the older miners who tell the younger men their recollections of past days; and still in every colliery village there abides the memory of a great name.’ [7]I prefer that epitaph because it seems to me that one of the important tests of socialists’ behaviour is how we relate to, and how we criticise, great working-class leaders who can lead their class in the heat of the struggle, impervious to the most awful onslaught from the other side. Of such leaders Arthur Cook was undoubtedly one. Footnotes1. Walter Citrine, Men and Work, p.77.2. Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (London 1960), p.72.3. Morning Post, 10 June 1926.4. Sunday Worker, 6 June 1926.5. Sunday Worker, 18 July 1926.6. Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan (London 1962), vol.1, pp.70-71.7. Robin Page Arnot, The Miners: Years of Struggle (London 1953), p.541. Top of the pageLast updated on 27 October 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThe great times they could have had(September 1988)From London Review of Books, Vol. 10 No. 16, 15 September 1988, pp. 12–13.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsorby Charles HighamSidgwick, 419 pp, £17.95The Secret File of the Duke of Windsorby Michael BlochBantam, 326 pp, £14.95A great many books and articles have been published recently about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany.Mr Higham’s book has been greeted with a tremendous shout of fury. ‘Universally slated’ was how Sidgwick and Jackson described its reception to me. It has been passed over for serialisation. Film rights, once assured, are now in jeopardy. Writing in the Spectator, Frances Donaldson, modestly omitting to refer to her own worthy, if rather pedestrian biography of Edward VIII, could not contain her indignation. ‘Nor am I alone in thinking it rather shocking,’ she boomed, ‘that Mr Higham was able to find a reputable British publisher for his book.’Lady Donaldson doesn’t believe for a moment that either the Duke or Duchess of Windsor were even pro-Nazi. She follows in a long line of biographers, historians and journalists who concede, since it is plainly on the record, that the Duke and Duchess were both opposed to war with Germany, but who dismiss the idea that they were sympathetic to Fascism as a ‘mistaken notion’ (Brian Inglis’s conclusion in his 1966 account, Abdication). Lady Donaldson denounces Charles Higham for retailing tittle-tattle, and concludes that if you leave out the gossip and the speculation there is nothing left in his biography which we didn’t know before.What is the picture so gaudily painted by Mr Higham? Wallis Warfield was born (out of wedlock) into a rich and comfortable middle-class family in Baltimore. She went to high-society schools, where she read Kipling to her boyfriends. She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive and powerful propagandist for Mussolini. While still friendly with Caetani, Wallis forged even closer bonds with Felipe Espil, First Secretary at the Argentinian Embassy in Washington, an ardent Fascist and a representative of the savage Irigoyen dictatorship in Buenos Aires.Mr Higham, who has certainly done his homework in the American state files, produces clear evidence that Wallis Spencer, as she then was, was hired as an agent for Naval Intelligence. The purpose of her visit to China in the mid-Twenties, where she accompanied her husband, who also worked for Intelligence, was to carry secret papers between the American Government and the warlords they supported against the Communists. In Peking her consort for a time was Alberto de Zara, Naval Attaché at the Italian Embassy, whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was often expressed in verse. When she moved to Shanghai, she made another close friend in another dashing young Fascist, Count Galeazzo Ciano, later Mussolini’s Foreign Secretary. Wallis’s enthusiasm for the Italian dictatorship was, by this time, the only thing she had in common with her husband, Winfield Spencer. In 1936, ten years after the couple were divorced, Spencer was awarded the Order of the Crown of Italy, one of the highest decorations of the Mussolini regime.Ernest Simpson, the dull partner in a shipping firm whom Wallis married in 1928, had close business ties with Fascist Italy. But her feeling for Fascism cannot be attributed only to her men friends. On the contrary, the ‘new social order’ brayed around the world by the Italian dictator and his representatives fitted precisely with Wallis’s own upbringing, character and disposition. She was all her life an intensely greedy woman, obsessed with her own property and how she could make more of it. She was a racist through and through: anti-semitic, except when she hoped to benefit from rich Jewish friends; and anti-black (‘Government House with only a coloured staff would put me in my grave,’ she moaned when, many years later, her husband was the Governor of the Bahamas). She was offensive to her servants, and hated the class they came from.Her Fascist sympathies stayed with her all her life. When she needed a lawyer to start a libel action in 1937, she chose the Parisian Nazi Armand Grégoire. Even when the war was on, she fraternised with the pro-Nazi French businessman, Charles Bedaux. Perhaps her most consistent British confidante and friend was Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald’s wife. As the Windsors and the Mosleys grew old in exile, they took regular solace together, meeting and dining twice a week and musing about the great times they could have had if only the British had seen sense and sided with Hitler and Mussolini against the Reds." }
{ "content": "Of all the bonds which united this dreadful woman to the glamorous Prince of Wales in the late-Twenties, none was so strong as their shared politics. Charles Higham’s biography sets out the facts about the Prince’s Fascist leanings and sympathy with the Nazi cause and the corporate state in Italy. The Prince was proud of his German origins, spoke German fluently, and felt an emotional, racial and intellectual solidarity with the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re Jews or anything else, and added that the dictators are very popular these days, and that we might want one in England before long.’ Not long afterwards the Prince confided in a former Austrian ambassador, Count Mensdorff, who wrote: ‘It is remarkable how he expressed his sympathies for the Nazis ...’Such sympathies were of course common, at least for a while, in London society, but when others began to waver, the Prince of Wales remained steadfast. He asked the Germans to fix up a special dinner for him at the German Embassy, as a special mark of his solidarity with their government. The Germans, on instructions from Berlin, invited Mrs Simpson, who was then his paramour. The company he kept in London burgeoned with keen young supporters of the Nazi ‘experiment’. Edward (‘Fruity’) Metcalfe, one of his closest friends, and the best man at his wedding to Wallis, appeared in the Tatler dressed up in Fascist regalia at a ‘Blackshirt’ dinner. When the Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare fixed up a deal with Pierre Laval, the French Foreign Secretary and a Nazi fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was completed.In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, could not stomach the idea of a monarch marrying a twice-divorced woman. The objections, it is said, were moral and religious. The truth is, however, that throughout the centuries archbishops and prime ministers have miraculously overcome their moral objections to royal idiosyncrasies in the bedchamber. The real objection to the liaison between the King and Mrs Simpson was that both were Nazi sympathisers at a time when the more far-sighted civil servants, politicians and businessmen were beginning, sometimes reluctantly, to realise that British interests and German interests were on a collision course. As the biographers of Baldwin, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, observed, ‘the government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.’Charles Higham quotes an FBI file in Washington: ‘Certain would-be state secrets were passed on to Edward, and when it was found that Ribbentrop’ – the German Ambassador in London – ‘actually received the same information, immediately Baldwin was forced to accept that the leakage had been located.’ Higham then asserts (without quoting the relevant passage): ‘The same report categorically states that Wallis was responsible for this breach of security.’ Of Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and head of British Intelligence, Higham writes (and here he does provide the evidence): he ‘was Wallis’s implacable enemy from the day he was convinced she was a Nazi collaborator’.It is this, far more than any moral consideration, which explains the determination and the ruthlessness with which Baldwin and his administration dealt with the King before his abdication. They were prepared to put up with him, as long as he was acting on his own. They bypassed him. By midsummer 1936, Higham writes, ‘all confidential documents were withheld from the King.’ The prospect of a Nazi King backed up by an infinitely more able and resourceful Wallis Simpson was intolerable. If the King wanted Mrs Simpson, he would have to get out. If he wanted to stay as King, she would have to be banished. The King’s choice (the ‘woman I love’, and exile) came as a great relief to the Government. Yet Edward remained a menace as he continued, in his exile, to offer the Nazis solidarity. When war broke out, he was summoned back to England and sent to France on military duty with the rank of Major-General. His lack of interest and enthusiasm for the job, which he showed by coolly abandoning his duties to attend some parties in the South of France with Wallis, would, in normal circumstances, have led to a court-martial. The Duke of Windsor was not court-martialled. He was made Governor of the Bahamas." }
{ "content": "Wherever he went, people noted his Nazi sympathies, which were fanned to fury by the Duchess. As early as 1937, Sir Ronald Lindsay, British Ambassador to Washington, wrote to his wife that the Duke of Windsor was ‘trying to stage a comeback, and his friends and advisers were semi-Nazis.’ A month or two later, Lindsay wrote, officially: ‘The active supporters of the Duke of Windsor within England are those elements known to have inclinations towards Fascist dictatorships, and the recent tour of Germany by the Duke of Windsor and his ostentatious reception by Hitler and his regime can only be construed as a willingness on the part of the Duke of Windsor to lend himself to these tendencies.’ On that tour, the Duke seemed to take special pleasure in greeting the enthusiastic crowds with the Nazi salute. Years afterwards, he would proudly show his guests the pictures of him and Wallis being greeted by the Führer. David Eccles, then a young civil servant, met the Duke and Duchess in Spain and reported ‘The Duke is pretty fifth column.’ In Portugal, the Geman Ambassador Oswald Baron von Hoyningen-Heune, relayed to his superiors in Berlin the Duke’s conviction that ‘had he remained on the throne, war could have been avoided.’ ‘He describes himself,’ von Hoyningen-Heune continued, ‘as a firm supporter of a compromise peace with Germany. The Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.’Many opponents of the view that the Duke and Duchess were active supporters of the Nazis throughout these times point to his interest in workers’ conditions and to his visit to South Wales in 1936, when he made the famous (and fatuous) statement that ‘something should be done’ about unemployment. Yet the provision of good facilities for hardworking people was crucial to the Nazi idea of a ‘new social order’ and a key to its popularity.Once they were exiled to the Bahamas, and closely watched by both British and American Intelligence, the royal couple’s Nazi sympathies were kept in check. Even there, however, they associated with Fascist businessmen, in particular the corrupt Harold Christie, with whom the Duke, with the help of the Bahamian taxpayer, went into partnership. As the war swung towards the Allies, the couple’s enthusiasm for the Nazis began to lose its fervour, and in their autobiographies, written much later, both Duke and Duchess would take refuge in the familiar excuse that they had underestimated the horror of the Fascist regimes.Their former adversaries in the British Government and Civil Service were among the many people who assisted them in their rewriting of their past. The Duke’s brother, George VI, made every effort to ensure that the fact that the King of England had been a Hitler supporter before the war was kept under wraps. Armand Grégoire, the Duchess’s Nazi lawyer, was tried for collusion with the enemy and sent to prison for life, without being asked for (or volunteering) information about his role as intermediary between the royal couple and his Nazi masters. Charles Bedaux, who might have been persuaded to trade some such information in exchange for lenient treatment, committed suicide while under arrest for treason. Coco Chanel, an intimate friend of the Duchess, was arrested and charged with treason against the French state. The evidence against her was prodigious. She had worked directly for Nazi Intelligence against her own government. After a 24-hour interrogation by American Intelligence, however, she was released. ‘Had she been forced to stand trial, with the threat of execution as an employee of an enemy government,’ Higham writes, ‘she could easily have exposed as Nazi collaborators the Windsors and dozens of others highly placed in society. Despite the hatred of the Windsors at Buckingham Palace, the royal family would not willingly tolerate an exposé of a member of the family.’This sense of solidarity prompted the King to send the Keeper of the Royal Pictures on a secret mission to Germany soon after the war to collect from the Schloss Kronberg, family home of the Princes of Hesse, a bundle of documents which exposed the connection between the Windsors and the Nazis. The Keeper of the Royal Pictures and an associate went to great lengths to retrieve these papers, which have never been seen since. The Keeper of the Royal Pictures was Anthony Blunt, who for nearly ten years had been an active agent of the Russian Government. By 1945 Blunt’s loyalty to his king had superseded his loyalty to Communism, and he kept quiet about his secret mission. In 1964, when he finally confessed to his KGB past, his interrogator was a middle-ranking MI5 man called Peter Wright. Wright was summoned to the Palace. On the one hand, he was told by Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary, that the Palace would do all they could to help, and, on the other, warned that Blunt might mention his trip to Germany after the war, and ordered abruptly not to pursue this particular matter. In the event, despite hundreds of hours’ interrogation, Blunt never told Wright (or anyone else) about what he found in Germany. Possibly, like Coco Chanel, he knew that a promise to keep quiet about the papers would ensure his own immunity from prosecution." }
{ "content": "Whether intended or not, the refusal to accept that the Windsors were Fascists has gone on and on. The ‘Great Love Story’ has appeared on television, and in numerous books. Experts argue about the psychology of the King, the ambition of Wallis Warfield, the hypocrisy of the British Establishment, the size of Edward’s penis, and whether or not he was a foot-fetishist. All these matters are marvellous for serialisation in the Daily Mail, which itself enthusiastically supported the Fascists in the Thirties. Michael Bloch’s Secret File of the Duke of Windsor, the latest in this genre (inevitably serialised in the Daily Mail), has but four references to Hitler and continues in the traditional view that the Duke was naive. He thought, Bloch suggests, that the Nazis were ‘rough but reasonable men’, and underestimated their barbarism. Charles Higham has an answer to this: ‘The repeated absurdity of journalists that the couple’s commitment to Fascism and a negotiated peace in World War Two was based upon a transcendent foolishness stood exposed the moment one entered a conversation with the Windsors. Whatever one might think of their views, those views were not entered into lightly or from a position of blind ignorance.’Wallis did not want to be the Duchess of Windsor. In personal terms, she preferred her tedious and undemanding husband Ernest Simpson to the ever-whining, introspective and hypochondriacal Duke. She wanted to be mistress to the King, not the wife of an exiled duke. She begged the King to stand by his throne, seeing herself as a modern Mrs Fitzherbert, in charge of the court but not of the court, enjoying all the pomp and influence of a queen without being the Queen. This desire was not inspired by straightforward social ambition: it came from her anxiety to influence the course of political events. The story, in short, is not just soppy sexist trash, as portrayed in the Daily Mail. It is a political melodrama of the highest consequence.One of the weaknesses of modern republican theory is that it tends to concentrate on the personal weaknesses of the Royals. How could anyone, it is asked, support a system which raises on a pedestal people like Edward VIII or George IV or Andy and Fergie? Are they not absurd, ridiculous figures, unfit for anything but a jewellery auction or a hunt ball? This argument always falls flat. The influence of a monarchy which has long ago been stripped of real political power lies precisely in its absorption of people’s aspirations, griefs, ambitions and endeavours. Weaknesses, therefore, are as adorable as strengths. Princess Diana has no O levels – so what? Nor have most other people. Fergie is a mindless Sloane with nothing but a cheerful grin – so what?A cheerful grin is no bad thing when most people aren’t feeling at all cheerful. Royal idiocies, divorces, selfishnesses, as detailed in the popular press, are not destructive of modern monarchy. On the contrary, they provide a vital link between the monarchs and their subjects.So it was with the Windsors. The King of England fell for a divorced woman and beastly old Baldwin wouldn’t let him have her. How rotten of him! How many others have fallen for unsuitable partners, but have not had their jobs taken away from them because of it? So it was that the people maintained their sympathy for the ‘gallant young Prince’. The one quality of the Duke of Windsor which might have broken the spell of the British monarchy – his Fascist leanings – was discreetly buried.Charles Higham’s is an important book. But there is a great deal wrong with it. He has provided his critics with plenty of hostages. Again and again, he quotes the most scurrilous and unlikely gossip, without proving it. It is no good quoting one contemporary hazarding a guess that Wallis was the lover of Count Ciano, and that she even had an abortion as a result. There is not the slightest proof of this, and anyway it is beside the point. It is no good inventing (or guessing at) Wallis’s sexual education in the brothels of Shanghai or for that matter entering the royal bedchamber to speculate about what exactly went on there. There are times – far too many of them – when bald assertions are not backed by the evidence they need; the notes and the index are a disgrace; and Higham’s biographical method, piling incident on incident and referring only to the day and the month, continually loses the thread of the narrative.But these are really niggles. Gossip is a dangerous commodity, but no biography worth its salt could survive without it. The plain fact is that for all its weaknesses the book is enthralling from first to last and for one central reason. It exposes both its main subject and her royal catch, not as the dim-witted, self-obsessed lovers who have been pickled for posterity, but as nasty, determined Fascists who wanted to preside over a ‘new social order’ which would do away for ever with all pretence at democracy and consign all opposition to the holocaust.LettersLRB, Vol. 10 No. 19, 27 October 1988From Diana Mosley:Among many strange assertions made about the Windsors by your reviewer of Wallis: The Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor (LRB, 15 September) he says that my husband and I dined with them twice a week. Twice a year would be nearer the mark. We always accepted their invitations because dining with them was invariably enjoyable and sometimes interesting, but we were not asked twice a week. This could easily have been checked, because they kept a book in which visitors signed their names. I first met the Duchess nearly ten years after the end of the war, and was not her ‘confidante’. The Windsors were hospitable neighbours, no more. Diana MosleyOrsay, FranceLRB, Vol. 10 No. 20, 10 November 1988From Paul Foot:" }
{ "content": "In answer to Diana Mosley’s letter (Letters, 27 October), I quote from Charles Higham’s Wallis, pages 343 and 344: ‘Much of 1952 and 1953 was absorbed in work on the two houses. During this period the Duke resumed and the Duchess acquired a warm friendship … The Mosleys dined at the Mill twice a week, and the Windsors almost as frequently at the Temple de la Gloire.’ Mr Higham quotes (on page 402) as a source for this statement ‘one of the most memorable interviews of his life’ – afforded him in her home by Lady Mosley. This information was difficult to check since, most unhappily, I do not have direct access to the Duchess of Windsor’s visitors’ book. Paul FootLondon N16 Top of the pageLast updated on 7.3.2012" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootDoing the Deed of Death(March 2002)From Arts Review, Socialist Review, No.261, March 2002, p.29.Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Julius Caesarby William ShakespeareBarbican, London‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our starsBut in ourselves that we are underlings.’Very early on in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar one senior senator, Cassius, engages another, Brutus, in one of the most eloquent and effective agitations in all literature. Rome is threatened by a dictatorship under Caesar, the military conqueror, and the more democratically minded senators are moved to revolt. Cassius stirs Brutus with Caesar’s overriding ambition, and above all by his claim to be greater and more ‘constant’ than other men. If Rome is to prove true to its democratic traditions, he argues, Caesar must go. Popular revolt is out of the question since it might threaten the senators themselves. So when he considers the options to himself, Brutus concludes that ‘it must be by his death’. The seeds of the patrician conspiracy are sown and put into practice.William Shakespeare was not a revolutionary – quite the reverse. His own sympathies would have rested, almost certainly, with the dictator and his fawning successor, Mark Anthony. The playwright’s supreme artistry, however, did not depend on his views, but on his powers of observation of human behaviour, and transmitting what he observed into drama. Thus Cassius’s argument is as accurately conveyed as is Caesar’s determination not to give an inch to reform or the reformers, or Brutus’s insistence that the assassination must be carried out as decently as possible.Moreover, as I realised for the first time watching the Royal Shakespeare Company production, Cassius is always right. He is right about refusing permission to Mark Anthony to speak at Caesar’s funeral, and right to seek to avoid the disastrous battle at Philippi. Mark Anthony is a great orator, and makes a famous speech over Caesar’s body, but once he successfully turns the mob in his favour he reveals himself as no less ruthless a tyrant than his hero. The ebb and flow of the argument in the first part of the play is irresistible, whatever side you take.In this production, Tim Piggot-Smith reveals Cassius’s agitation eloquently enough without really conveying the anger and passion that Shakespeare intended. Though the production clearly favours the conspirators by dressing Caesar’s supporters in fascist uniforms and ridiculing Caesar (Ian Hogg) as a ranting buffoon (which he wasn’t), and although Greg Hicks sensitively identifies Brutus’s dilemmas, it’s still hard to come away from the production with the feeling that the conspirators get as fair a hearing as they should. Partly this is the fault of the play itself, which disintegrates horribly after the assassination. I’ve never been able to understand the row between Cassius and Brutus as they prepare for the final battle, and nor is the play helped by the ghost of Caesar staggering round the stage in his underpants. But the early arguments, the excitement of the conspiracy and its aftermath, are as powerful as ever, and not to be missed. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootObituary of Harold WilsonPipe dreams(June 1995)From Socialist Review, No. 187, June 1995, pp. 22&ndash:23.Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The death of Harold Wilson last month has been followed by a wave of nostalgia about the Labour governments he led. Paul Foot recalls the Labour victory of 1964 and how his hopes of the time were swiftly shattered* * *I remember polling day 1964 as if it were yesterday. In the evening after work I spent an hour or two canvassing for the Labour candidate at Hampstead, north London, and then went back home for a party to watch the results. What I remember most was the excitement, which had its roots in confidence. I was 26. For half my life there had been nothing but a Tory government. Now suddenly that government, despite its huge majority, seemed doomed. There was a mood for change, not just for a change of faces or style but a change of policy, a decisive step to the left.We had grown used to full employment, to low inflation, to a welfare state and a big council house building programme. What was in prospect was a government which would shift the whole balance of society from rich to poor, from employer to worker, from (to use J.K. Galbraith’s famous phrase, which was highly popular at the time) private to public affluence.One scene from the Labour campaign stuck in my memory. Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, carried out a whistle stop tour of London marginals. I followed him one afternoon to Clapham, where he spoke to a large and random crowd from the back of a lorry. He spoke without notes, almost inviting interruptions. The interruptions he got were all about race.Race had played a big part in the election in the Midlands especially at Smethwick where the Tory campaign was supported with the slogan, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’ As a result, Labour trimmed its original opposition to Commonwealth immigration controls, and adopted a fudged compromise.On that Clapham lorry Wilson could easily have retreated into this compromise and answered the racist taunts with the usual politician’s claptrap, ‘On the one hand, this, on the other, that.’ But he didn’t. Every time the cry went up, ‘Send home the blacks’, he rounded on the heckler, angry and sarcastic. ‘Whom should we send home? The nurses in our hospitals? The people who drive our buses. Where would our health service be without the black workers who keep it going?’ These questions were greeted with great roars of approval from the crowd, and the hecklers were silenced.No wonder I was excited that October night. The excitement grew as the night went on. Bit by bit an impregnable Tory majority of nearly 100 was whittled down. Up all night, we clung through the day to the radio. At about 2.30 the following afternoon, a left winger called Mendelson was elected for Penistone, Yorks, and Labour had an overall majority. It was quite impossible for even the hardest revolutionary not to feel a rush of joy and even hope.As the months of Labour government went on, the joy subsided, but the hope persevered. My first really grim disillusionment came in July 1965, when the government ushered in immigration laws far more racist and ruthless than anything the Tories had contemplated. Even so, I was prepared to give the government the benefit of the doubt. In October 1965 Wilson could tell the Labour Party conference, ‘Sterling is strong, employment is strong, the economy is strong’ – and he was right. Pensions were up, arbitrary evictions were outlawed, a bill to nationalise steel was before the Commons.In March 1966, less than 18 months after the 1964 triumph, Labour won another election – with a majority of nearly 100. The last conceivable excuse for dallying – a wafer thin Commons majority – had been swept aside. Caithness in the far north of Scotland was a Labour seat. So was Falmouth in Cornwall. It was 1945 all over again but 1945 in peacetime conditions where everyone had a job and there had not even been a noticeable recession for 20 years.Harold Wilson, with his cheeky, cocky demeanour, his cheerful smile and his Yorkshire burr, summed up the confidence and hope. Here was living proof that Labour could deliver a prime minister who was plainly not a MacDonald or an Attlee – a man who genuinely believed in public enterprise and public endeavour, and would not sell the pass.The collapse came very swiftly, in the middle of the clear blue summer of 1966. First, the same Wilson who had in opposition championed the low paid and the trade unions, threw all the forces of his rhetoric against an official strike of seamen, some of the lowest paid workers in the country. When he finally beat the seamen by the most revolting witch hunt, he turned his bile, his office and his government against the entire working class movement. The same man who had derided Selwyn Lloyd, former Tory chancellor, for a ‘one sided pay pause’, now instituted a year long total wage freeze, enforced by law and backed by savage cuts in the public spending programme he had advocated.In 1967 he reimposed the health prescription charges he’d abolished. In 1968 he sanctioned another, even more racist, immigration act to keep out persecuted Asians from East Africa. In 1969 he proposed to ban unofficial strikes, the first plan for anti-union laws since the war. Throughout all this he supported the barbaric US invasion of Vietnam with a passion which inspired the US president Johnson to describe him as ‘another Churchill’." }
{ "content": "Fighting my way through the mountains of guff which have greeted the death of Harold Wilson, I detect one consistent theme. This is the amazing view that Harold Wilson went ‘too fast’, that he was ‘too ambitious’, that he set out to achieve a reform programme which simply wasn’t possible. This theme quickly fades into another: that the Labour leaders of today have ‘learned the lessons of the Wilson period’ and will not make the same mistake. Blair, we are told by everyone, to tumultuous and unanimous applause, will not aim anything like as high as poor old idealist Harold did. As a result, new Labour will, it is widely predicted, last longer than Wilson did.All this makes a grotesque mockery of what really happened in the 1960s and 1970s and what socialists felt about Wilson at the time. The universal feeling on the left – all sections of the left indeed, including many principled people on the Labour right – was that Wilson moved not too fast, but too slowly; that his stand was not too principled, but wholly unprincipled; that he was not ‘too robust’ with capitalists, judges and senior civil servants but too obsequious to them; and that his central failing was not his idealism but his pragmatism.Black Wednesday, July 1966 – the day of the cuts and the wage freeze – was named as such not by a revolutionary but by a mild mannered television journalist called John Morgan, who, like hundreds of thousands of others, had high hopes that the Labour government would lead the way to a new social order. This hope was widespread throughout the left, and it was the dashing of this hope by backsliding and grovelling to the rich and powerful which brought Wilson down so low in the eyes of so many of his former supporters. It follows that if prime minister Blair proceeds slower even than Wilson, if his ambitions are even more circumscribed than Wilson’s were, his downfall will be even more sudden, and even more calamitous. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 July 2017" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootOff the Christmas tree(December 1986)From Book Choice, Socialist Worker Review, No. 93, December 1986, p. 25.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Quentin Durward by Walter ScottShoot Down by Bill Johnson (Chatto Windus £10.95)Days Like These by Nigel Fountain (Pluto Press £2.50)I came across some old Walter Scott novels going for next to nothing. I bought them and read Quentin Durward. Scott was a High Tory, deeply hostile to everything represented by the French Revolution through which he lived. He believed in things like chivalry and decency and loving one's neighbour. He also observed, rather to his distaste, that all the High Tories, anti-Jacobins and churchmen around them said they believed in all these things, but behaved entirely differently. Indeed, the higher they were in society, the more cynically and disreputably they trampled on their beliefs. The point of the novel, whose story bumbles along fast and furiously enough to keep you up at night, is to contrast the genuine high-mindedness of the relatively lowly Quentin with the hypocrisy of his masters, expecially the King.Political duplicity was the theme of my second favourite book this year, Shootdown. This book argues that the Korean airliner KAL 007 was deliberately sent over Russian territory by the loony clique of freaks who advise the President of the United States, who have succeeded ever since in covering up their atrocity. It is beautifully told, and superbly argued. Proof of the importance of Shootdown is the way it was ignored and boycotted when it was published, but it is, I gather, soon to come out in paperback.My third choice is a thriller by Nigel Fountain, the best-ever letters editor in Socialist Worker's history. It is a good tale and it makes a lot of political points, not all of which are flattering to the Socialist Workers Party. The best thing about the book is its sceptical hero John Raven. He is so much like Nigel Fountain that he is absolutely irresistible. Top of the pageLast updated on 29 October 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootOil’s not well in East Timor(17 November 1990)From Socialist Worker, 17 November 1990.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 217–219.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The people of the tiny Indonesian province of East Timor are excited about events in the Gulf, the Financial Times reported last week. How can that be?How could anyone possibly be excited about the Gulf? Well, Financial Times correspondent Claire Bolderson has the answer: ‘If the world will rally to save the Kuwaitis from their aggressive next door neighbour, they say, surely it will do the same for them.’This is logic. The United Nations says it has a duty to protect the integrity of every member state. If one state is attacked by another, the entire world community must join forces to see the aggressor off.The logic is specially powerful in East Timor. The people of that sad country have hardly known a single day of independence.It is the eastern half of a large island in the South Seas. A bloody deal was struck between the two imperial powers – Holland took the west, Portugal the east.After a time the Dutch, who were rather quicker than the other imperialists to realise the game was up, handed over their half to an independent Indonesia, while the Portuguese clung to East Timor every bit as ruthlessly as they clung to their colonies in Africa: Guinea, Angola and Mozambique.As in Africa, Portugal was eventually forced out of East Timor in 1975. There was nothing but chaos, civil war and conquest to follow. The Indonesians invaded and the Timoreans fought with tremendous (and almost wholly unreported) courage and sacrifice.In the terrible wars and famines which followed, probably a third of the population, nearly 200,000 people out of 600,000, were killed. TerrorThe Indonesian dictators followed up their slaughter with the most ghastly exploitation and the most revolting terror. This has been going on pretty well without a pause now for 15 years.East Timor is a model of the kind of country which ought to be protected by the international community. If there really was a world government with a sense of duty to the underprivileged and the oppressed East Timor would have been rescued long ago from the dragon which devours it.Yet the issue of sending troops to beat back the aggressors and allow a new free country to develop from the ruins of East Timor has never even been discussed at the United Nations.Now and then a resolution deploring the invasion and the atrocities of Indonesia is discussed, and usually traded in exchange for a ‘helpful’ vote from Indonesia about some other part of the world where big companies or states make profits. No one, in short, has lifted a finger to help the wretched people of East Timor, who must imagine that no one has ever heard of their plight.Now that aggression and oppression are suddenly unpopular at the United Nations (and now that American imperialism, Russian imperialism, Chinese, French and British imperialism have responded to the invasion of Kuwait with huge forces, and talk of widespread war) it is hardly surprising that the hopes of the people of East Timor begin to rise. MonsterFor if the world moves against a monster in Baghdad, might it not do so against a monster in Jakarta? There is after all nothing in logic to separate the two monsters.The regime in Baghdad is hardly more savage than its counterpart in Jakarta. It can hardly be argued that the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 was any more intolerable than the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia 15 years earlier. By every measure possible, the barbarism in East Timor has been as bad, if not far worse, than anything yet experienced in Kuwait.No wonder the East Timoreans are hopeful. But they have misread the reasons for the war in the Gulf. They have to do with the cheap supply of oil. The Americans and their ‘allies’ (what romantic memories that word conjures up) want to get rid of Saddam because he is seen by them as a threat to the stability of the region and the price of oil.The people of East Timor, as they hope and pray for a similar force rescue their country, have only to ask one question to discover whether or not they will be ‘rescued’ by ‘allies’ across the sea.Is there oil in East Timor? If yes, which is possible, it won’t be long before the US cavalry comes over the hill. If no, the people of East Timor, as far as the ‘allies’ are concerned, can rot in hell. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootSeize the time(June 1993)From Socialist Review, No.165, June 1993, pp.10-11.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The strike at the Timex plant in Dundee has become a symbol of resistance for all workers facing job losses and bosses’ attacks. Paul Foot visited the picket line in Dundee, talked to strikers and draws some lessons from the disputeWe socialists are always saying that workers change in struggle – but what a joy and a relief it is when we can test the theory in flesh and blood. When I drew back the curtains in Tayport at 6.30 a.m. on Thursday 20 May, the sun streamed in – it was a glorious spring morning. Half an hour later, across the river and through the city of Dundee, the picket line at Timex was revelling in the sunshine. There were 60 to 70 people there, their numbers alone a great shout of mockery at the Tory anti-union laws’ insistence on six pickets. There was laughter and anger in equal measure – laughter among the pickets themselves, anger as the scabs’ lorries came up the hill and turned into the gate. Inside the lorries, and inside the private cars of the supervisors, strike breakers cowered, some of them hiding their face in balaclavas, others making a pathetic show of defiance, especially after they passed the gates. Each vehicle was greeted with a great roar of rage.Afterwards, some pickets went home. Many others lingered in the sun. There were tea and ham rolls galore. The women crossed the road, laid out their chairs, sat down and talked.Margaret Thompson had just come back from Norway where she picketed the headquarters of the Olsen line, eventual owners of Timex. She’s been to London, Manchester, Newcastle, Brighton on delegations.‘I’ve been a shop steward for 20 years’ she said, ‘but I never felt half what I feel today. I think it’s because I realise my capabilities. I’m not just a worker at Timex, I’ve got a brain. If you do the same thing for 20 years, your brain goes soft. When I went into Timex as a girl, I was quiet as a lamb. Now I feel like a rottweiler.‘I think the best thing about this is you suddenly realise you have friends everywhere. At a factory in Newcastle they had exactly £110 in their coffers. After they heard us speak they gave us ... £110, and I suddenly realised I was crying. They’d never met us, and they gave us everything.’Jessie Britton joins in.‘They are always complaining about outside agitators. But where would we be without the people from outside who support us? When Campbell Christie [general secretary of the STUC] was here the other day, he came up to talk to me. He asked a young Militant supporter standing next to me: \"Do you work at Timex?\" He knew that the lad didn’t. When the lad said no, Campbell looked at me knowingly, as if he knew I disapproved. But I told him straight we could never have got where we have without these young people selling papers and whipping up support for us.’Jessie doesn’t think much of the constant advice from her union leaders to obey the law.‘They are worried about their assets,’ she says, ‘but we aren’t worried about our assets. We haven’t got any. What use are union assets to us if we lose the strike and can’t have a union?’I asked gingerly about the role of women in the strike. ‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘right here the men do the dishes and the women do the fighting.’All morning, the wit and banter were interrupted with furious shouts of invective whenever a scab lorry (usually from a firm called Scottish Express) delivered supplies. Debbie Osborne sums up the mood.‘When I was in there (contemptuous jerk of the head at the factory gates) I felt like a nobody. Now I feel a somebody. In fact I feel ten times more important than anyone in there.’I first went to Dundee as a reporter for the Daily Record in 1963 on an assignment to cover a by-election. John Strachey, who had only just won Dundee West in 1959, had died, and the Labour candidate was a nondescript Labour councillor called Peter Doig. Labour’s campaign concentrated on the new prosperity of the city, one of the worst hit by the 1930s slump. Labour boasted, with some reason, of the enormous success of their post-war policy of shifting new industries into the unemployment black spots of the 1930s. Nowhere was that policy more successful than in Dundee. Boosted by huge grants and tax concessions, industry after industry settled in the purpose built industrial estates round town. The old precarious industrial base of jute and shipbuilding was transformed by sparkling new modern factories making the consumer goods of the future, office equipment, wristwatches, fridges. The names most associated with this success were National Cash Register and Timex, each employing thousands of workers, each recognising trade unions Whose stewards came to Labour’s platforms glowing in their new found confidence and strength. Labour won handsomely and won again just as well in the 1964 general election.My reports for the Daily Record were all for Labour, all hostile to the cocksure jute manufacturer who stood for the Tories. But I was unimpressed by Labour’s confidence. The huge corporations which owned these new industries were not Labour corporations. Labour had no control over, nor even a representative on these distant capitalist boardrooms. What would happen if the post-war boom petered out? Would the first factories to suffer not be the ones which had been set up as outposts, the ones with strong unions in foreign countries?" }
{ "content": "So it proved. The two huge recessions of 1981 and 1990 played havoc with the new industry so lovingly and expensively redistributed to Dundee. National Cash Register and Timex are still there, pathetic shadows of what they used to be. Timex, for instance, now makes no watches at all. The strong union agreements of the 1960s have been replaced by ‘sweetheart deals’, including even no-strike deals, which left the stewards and rank and file permanently on the defensive.A former president of the engineering union, Hugh Scanlon, once said in a famous TUC speech that every scratch on the trade union movement can lead to gangrene. The sweetheart approach of his successors led to gangrene soon enough. Every concession by the unions was greeted by the employers with cries for more. In Dundee like everywhere else the employers, led on this occasion by the Engineering Employers Federation, started to yearn for the day when they would not have to deal with unions at all. True, the unions were a pushover. But how much more of a pushover would the workers be, how much more clear profit was there to be made, if the unions were utterly broken once and for all?This is the fashionable thinking which led the US corporation which runs Timex to select an ardent Thatcherite from Surrey, Peter Hall, as the new president of their Scottish enterprise. Hall came armed with all the anti-union claptrap of US Timex’s Human Resources Department. He started ‘conversations’ with selected workers which, they soon realised, were aimed at seeking out ‘unhelpful elements’. He placed his own ‘loyalist’ spies in crucial positions.Shortly before Christmas last year, he announced lay offs. On 5 January the workers all got letters – some ‘thick’ (the sack), others ‘thin’ (not the sack). They refused to accept the letters, and occupied the canteen. Hall promised negotiations. The workers went back to work, effectively accepting the principle of lay offs, though they balloted (92 percent) for a strike. From 8 to 29 January they worked rotating shifts to cover for their laid off workmates, and waited for the negotiations which never came. There was no whisper of negotiation from Hall. A plea to go to ACAS was vigorously snubbed. On 29 January, frustrated by the constant prevarication, the workers came out on strike. On 17 February they reported en masse for work. They were told they could return only if they accepted a 10 percent cut in wages and other humiliations, including pension reductions. When they refused, they were locked out, and have been ever since.The tactics of Hall and his Human Resources henchmen are familiar enough in this recession. Since the reaction of the Timex workers has been described by many commentators as ‘old fashioned’, it is worth recalling that Hall’s union busting dates back to the stockyards of Chicago in the first decade of the century, and even earlier. Now as then, success for them depends exclusively on workers’ submission. All those in the trade union movement who have encouraged or tolerated such submission have played into the hands of the employers. Complete union organisations have been laid waste without even a gesture of revolt.Timex, on the other hand, has become a byword in the whole British labour movement because the workers there refused to submit, and have set up a picket and a campaign so powerful that the Timex bosses are split. A historic, old fashioned victory is on the cards.Only on the cards, however. The Engineering Employers Federation and their friends in the government will not decide one day simply to pack it in and let the workers back. They know full well what a disaster such a victory would be for employers all over Scotland.The bosses want to win. They have the usual powerful allies. The Timex strike has the unanimous support of both local councils – Dundee City and Tayside. But the Dundee police still see it as their central duty to protect a rogue employer’s inalienable right to hire scab labour and break strikes. The police behaviour on the mass demonstration on Monday 17 May was abominable. One young woman had her arm broken during arrest, was taken to hospital to have it set, hauled back to the cells, kept behind bars for 27 hours until finally she was released – without charge. Here is the classic outcome of total reliance on support from the Labour Party. Labour supports the strikers – in the councils, in the TUC, in its penetration of almost half the Scottish electorate.But Labour cannot prevent the police, whom they theoretically control, from protecting scabs or breaking the arm of a young woman who came to Dundee to express her solidarity with a cause Labour supports.Almost everyone in Dundee supports the strike, but the machinery of the state in Dundee is determined to break it. If the momentum of the strike is lost even for a week, the EEF and its state will get its breath back, reassert itself, reorganise its newspapers (which have been curiously wobbly on the issue) and launch another offensive.At the strike committee in the AEEU halls where I went after my morning on the picket line, the talk was all of keeping up the momentum, of boosting further the pickets and the delegations, of calling another mass demonstration outside Timex and seeking the help of more outside agitators.These men and women are out to win. They deserve to win and they need to win. Above all they can win. The entire resources – human and financial – of the labour movement should be put at their disposal. Top of the pageLast updated on 18.1.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootThree letters to a BenniteCartoons by Phil Evans(March 1982)Three letters to a Bennite from Paul Foot, Socialist Workers Party (GB), London, March 1982Produced and distributed for the SWP by Socialists UnlimitedTranscribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Letter 1: New Year’s Eve, 1981Letter 2: 7 January 1982Letter 3: 12 January 1982 Top of the pageLast updated on 22.1.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWorkers Against Racism(1973)An International Socialists pamphlet, 1973, 22 pp.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Who are the racialists?AN UNLIKELY selection of people have been combining over the past few years to pass on an important message to workers. The tones of the message differ from person to person, but the theme is always the same. It is that black people in Britain are the cause of most of our worries.What’s more, we are told, there is a simple solution: stop any more black people coming, and send the ones who are here back ‘home’ again. The people who shout against the blacks are motivated, so they tell us, by a passionate concern for the plight of ‘ordinary’ British working-class people.Take, for instance, Mr John Stokes, one of the leading campaigners against black people, who is Conservative MP for Oldbury and Halesowen. On 31 August 1972, Mr John Stokes had a letter printed in the ordinary people’s newspaper, The Times.‘Sir,’ he wrote (in the way in which ordinary people properly address their betters), ‘Perhaps the most disquieting feature of today’s crisis over immigration is who in authority is considering the fears of the ordinary English man and woman on this subject which affects them so vitally.’Mr Stokes is an ordinary businessman, who used to be the chief personnel officer for ICI, but has since branched out on his own. He now runs a profitable personnel selection outfit, which is valued at about a quarter of a million pounds. For a man so obsessed with the aspirations of ordinary people, however, Mr Stokes has some rather unorthodox views on other problems which affect working people. When the miners were on strike in 1972 for a decent wage, for instance, when even the Daily Express had to admit that the vast majority of ordinary people supported the miners, Mr Stokes was screaming in and out of parliament about the ‘monopoly power’ of the miners’ union.Since the strike finished, he has raged against the pickets which won the miners’ victory. Mr Stokes supports the Industrial Relations Act, which has been boycotted by nine million ordinary trade unionists. His only objection to the Act is that it does not go far enough. Yet, when it comes to the blacks, Mr Stokes is overcome with concern for the plight of those same workers, whose organisations and trade unions he detests.A large number of Tory MPs support Mr Stokes’ stand. There is Mr Harold Soref, the Tory MP for Ormskirk, who is constantly complaining about the number of black people in this country. Mr Soref and his family run a prosperous shipping company which deals in the main with South Africa. Then there is Mr Ronald Bell, who is always good for a quote about how ordinary people in his constituency (South Buckinghamshire) are sick and tired of the blacks. Mr Bell conducts a wealthy practice at the bar.One of the most powerful campaigners on behalf of the ordinary white folk of Britain is Mr Duncan Sandys, who is a Companion of Honour, and is a former Tory Minister of almost everything. On 23 January 1970, for instance, speaking at a banquet of the British Jewellers Association, Mr Sandys said: ‘We should offer generous grants to any who would like to settle in their own countries.’Mr Sandys’ knowledge about the blacks goes deeper even than his experience as Commonwealth Minister from 1960 to 1964. In 1969, he joined the board of Ashanti Goldfields, one of the richest mining companies in Africa, which has made countless millions for its shareholders by robbing the miners of the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Mr Sandys’ contact with the Ashanti Goldfields company brought him to the attention of Lonrho Ltd, perhaps the largest and most unscrupulous of the post-war financial companies whose main function is to plunder Africa. In 1971, five Lonrho directors were arrested on fraud charges in South Africa, and all Lonrho top management was barred from South Africa.In the summer of 1972, Duncan Sandys went to South Africa on behalf of Lonrho and had a few ‘cosy chats’ with the savages who run the South African government. Hey Presto! The fraud charges were dropped, and Lonrho was free once more to mine platinum in South Africa. For this service, Duncan Sandys was given a ‘consultancy’ for Lonrho which brought him £50,000 a year, most of it paid tax-free in the Cayman Islands.Finally there is the country’s most ordinary man, Mr Enoch Powell. In a speech in April 1968 Mr Powell hit all the headlines by suddenly identifying with the ordinary men and women of Britain on the immigration question. He told a story about a man who had approached him in a street in Wolverhampton and said: ‘In this country in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’Mr Powell was tremendously impressed by this remark. He told his Birmingham audience:‘Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think of something else.’Again and again since, Mr Powell, who before 1968 was regarded as a bit of a crank, has made a name for himself by voicing what he thinks are the universal demands for ‘fewer blacks’. As in the case of Mr Stokes, his views on other matters do not show quite the same concern for the needs of ordinary people. The ‘proudest moment’ in his life, according to Powell, was when he rose in November 1956 to read the second reading of the Rent Bill which began the dismantling of the restrictions on private housing. What was the effect of the Rent Act, which Powell moved? It was to evict tens of thousands of working people, who had previously been ‘controlled’ tenants, so that their houses could be sold or split up by property speculators." }
{ "content": "In London’s Notting Hill and similar areas it led to the rise of unscrupulous landlords whose job it was to evict ‘controlled’ tenants from their houses. It cut the number of rented houses and flats by more than a third. Not a single extra house was built to rent for working people as a result of the Act. It was (with the single exception of the Tories’ Housing Finance Act of 1971, also enthusiastically supported by Powell, Stokes and Co.) the most anti-working class housing law passed this century.Powell is against all regulations on the capitalist system, which he believes has a ‘perfect symmetry’. ‘Often,’ he once said, ‘when I am kneeling down in church I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost, for the gift of capitalism.’On every subject you can think of – housing, pensions, trade unions, hospitals, factory conditions – Powell stands four square with the rich and mighty against the poor and humble. He is the capitalists’ chief theorist, and he lives in fashionable Eaton Square. As he himself once put it: ‘When I see a rich man I give thanks to God.’Mr Powell is a rich man like all the others, but his campaigns are run by richer men than he, Stokes and Sandys put together. In April 1973, Mr David Lazarus, a Powellite in Brent, North London, who joined the National Front in 1968 but still manages to hold high office in the Conservative Party, announced that ‘three millionaires’ had agreed to finance a campaign to make Powell’s views more widely known.The most generous of these is Mr Anthony Fisher, who made several million pounds for himself by building up (and selling) Buxted Chickens Ltd. In 1955, Mr Fisher founded the Institute for Economic Affairs, which hires professional economists and authors to give academic respectability to the case for more ‘free enterprise’, less ‘state intervention’, higher council rents, more fee-paying schools and all the rest of the devices whereby the rich keep hold of their wealth at the expense of the people who produce it. Mr Fisher, like Mr Sandys, is an expert in tax avoidance and has a number of ‘interests’ in the Cayman Islands.The second, even more reactionary millionaire is Sir Ian MacTaggart, a former Tory candidate, whose father made his millions out of buying and selling flats in Glasgow. In 1964, Sir Ian put up £100,000 to finance the Property Council, a ginger group whose purpose was to glorify the activities of property speculators. One Property Council leaflet likened property speculators to ‘scientists, doctors and preachers who in the long run improve living and working conditions in all civilised countries.’The third millionaire is Garfield Weston, the ‘biscuit king’, who controls Associated British Foods, one of Europe’s three biggest food chains. These are the ordinary men who are putting up substantial portions of their vast wealth to subsidise Powell’s campaigns. They support Powell when he fights for the ‘freedom’ of chicken kings and property speculators, and above all they support Powell in his campaign on behalf of the workers against the blacks.This sudden friendship with the workers on one issue – immigration – has been the preoccupation of rich men for hundreds of years. When more than a million Irish men and women came to Britain during the last century, industrialists, shopkeepers and parsons joined together to warn the workers, whom they hated, about the dangers to their stock and religion from Irish immigration.Eighty years ago, large numbers of Jews, fleeing from the tyranny of Tsarist Russia and equally savage regimes in Eastern Europe, started coming to Britain. At once, the warnings stated. Mr W.H. Wilkins wrote a book called The Alien Invasion. Mr Wilkins was a rich magistrate, who had just written a best-seller entitled: The Traffic in Italian Children.‘One of the leading measures, of the labour legislation of the future,’ wrote Mr Wilkins, ‘will be to protect the English working men against this perpetual pouring in of destitute foreigners. Why, the working classes are asking, should we be robbed of our birthright by the refuse population of other countries?’Mr Wilkins’ sombre warnings had a rosy introduction from His Right Reverence the Bishop of Bedford, a crusted Tory, and the book was dedicated to another Conservative barbarian, the Earl of Dunraven, who was described as ‘the leader of the movement for protecting our people against the invasion of the destitute and worthless of other lands.’Thirty-six years later, another Tory, Lt Col A.H. Lane, wrote a book called The Alien Menace. The introduction this time was by a former Tory minister, Lord Sydenham of Coombe. ‘British working men and women,’ wrote Lord Sydenham, who hated both, ‘have no love for the aliens, who in many districts make life harder for them.’And in 1965, yet another noble Lord, Lord Elton, wrote another book, called this time The Unarmed Invasion, about the terrible threat to British working men and women from black immigration.Magistrates, bishops, army officers, Tory MPs, Earls and Viscounts, aided in the 1930s by Nazis in Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, today by ex-Nazis in the National Front, have been shouting all these years about the danger to the British workers from the immigration of Irishmen, Jews and blacks. Like Sandys, Stokes and Enoch Powell, they devoted the whole of their political life to attacking the working class movement. Yet when immigration is on the agenda, suddenly they become the workers’ friends.Can all this be right? Is it really the case that Powell and his henchmen, so implacably opposed to the workers’ interests on so many fronts, are correct on this single issue? Are we to listen to people who tell us that although Powell is wrong on housing, trade unions, unemployment and the rest he is right about the blacks? Are workers to march, as London dockers did in 1968, shouting ‘Enoch is Right’? Let us find out. Why did the blacks come?" }
{ "content": "IN THE TEN YEARS before the war, there were never less than one and a half million people unemployed. In the twenty five years after the war, there were never more than three quarters of a million unemployed. Those simple figures tell the story of a post-war boom in the economy such as had never happened in the whole history of capitalism.In pre-war capitalism, when there was a boom and slump at least every ten years, there was always a huge ‘reserve army’ of workers who were unemployed. Each new cycle of investment and expansion could be staffed by workers from this pool.In post-war capitalism, until very recently, this pool has not been available. If the economy was to be kept going, if factories were to be kept open and investment to be continued, workers had to be found from somewhere to fill the ever-increasing gaps in the labour force. This is why black workers came from the West Indies, India and Pakistan. They had been free to come for a hundred and fifty years. They had not come because there were no secure jobs to come to. Now, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were jobs to come to. No one in his right mind prefers a winter in Birmingham to the blue skies of Jamaica. But in Jamaica there was no work, and in Birmingham there was work. And so the workers left their homes and their families and moved to Birmingham.When the ‘boom’ was on, the rich men who now prattle about the ‘dangers’ of immigration were silent. Mr Powell said nothing about immigration control all through the 1950s. In 1960, Mr Powell became Minister of Health and encouraged the recruitment of West Indian nurses to help staff the National Health Service. Mr Duncan Sandys was Minister for the Commonwealth from 1960 to 1964 and said not a word about the need to keep the blacks out. In 1963, Mr Sandys promised the Kenyan Asians, as a reward for their opposition to African independence, that they could if ever they liked come to Britain free from immigration control. The bosses in the factories wanted more workers, and the Tories in the House of Commons were determined to let the workers come.Now what is happening? Now, there is no longer any certainty about economic growth. Now no-one talks about the post-war capitalist miracle. Now the economy stutters forward and back in fits and starts. The capitalist system has not found any way of spiriting away its age-old problems. It still cannot plan its growth or be certain about its prospects.So now, immigrants are not needed any more. Now the racialists, like Powell and Sandys, are let out of their cages to make speeches against immigration and against the blacks. Powell talks of ‘rivers of blood’ flowing in the streets as a result of race conflict. Suddenly, the ‘dangers’ of the black presence are discovered and millionaires start to shriek: ‘Send them all home!’, or, if they are liberals: ‘Let no more come!’One by one, the arguments pour out of the sewer. ‘Why house these blacks when we haven’t enough houses for our own people?’ ‘Why spend money on schooling for black children, when even our own children don’t get enough schooling?’ Tories who for generations have denied the existence of a shortage in housing or schools, suddenly discover that there are not enough houses or schools, and use the statistics of their own shameful record to blame the black workers. Yet their arguments touch a sensitive nerve among white workers who are only too aware of the shortages around them. Are they true? Whose houses, whose jobs, whose social services?Housing‘Why house these people when we haven’t enough houses for ourselves?’ is a common argument among anti-immigration campaigners and the argument often strikes a chord in working-class audiences. It seems obvious that if there’s a housing shortage, it will be made worse if more people come into the country looking for a place to live.In fact, the housing shortage has nothing to do with immigration. However much immigration there is, it will not make the slightest difference to the housing shortage. The worst-housed cities in the United Kingdom are Glasgow and Belfast. In Glasgow, 100,000 people live more than three to a room. In the two central wards of Belfast, more than 90 per cent of the people (Protestant and Catholic) do not have an inside lavatory. By every measure, overcrowding, lack of basic amenities, age of dwellings, the two cities are the worst.Yet the rate of immigration into both cities is lower than any other city in the United Kingdom. Both cities have comparatively very few blacks living in them. Indeed both cities have lost substantial numbers of their young workers through emigration. Obviously, the reasons for the housing shortage in those two cities have nothing to do with immigration.Not only in Glasgow and Belfast, but in all our cities, more houses are built in the years of heavy immigration than in the years of light immigration. Last year (1972), less blacks came into this country than in any other year in the past twenty. Fewer houses were built than in any other year in the past ten. The housing shortage got worse quicker last year than in any other year since 1962 – yet immigration was at its lowest. The housing shortage, moreover, existed long before black workers started coming to this country. It was much worse than it is now in the 1920s and 1930s when there was almost no immigration of anyone into this country. So we see that the existence of a housing shortage, and whether that shortage gets worse or better, has nothing to do with immigration." }
{ "content": "Who causes a housing shortage, then? First, the landlords, who build houses only as long as they can make a healthy profit from them in rent. When the Rent Control Acts were passed as a result of workers’ pressure in 1919, landlords stopped building houses. Then the Labour councils started to build houses at relatively low rents which people could afford. But the rate at which council houses can be built is dictated by the moneylender – who lends money to the councils to pay for the building. The moneylender demands such a fantastic rate of interest that the councils cannot build enough houses. In 1971–72, for instance, in Camden, London, the borough collected £3.7 million in rents from their tenants – and had to pay out £4.5 million in interest charges on money borrowed for building houses. And that’s even before the cost of the actual building is covered.The same sort of figures can be found for local authorities throughout the country. They’ve now got to the stage where they have to pay out so much in interest that they can’t afford to build enough houses. So more and more people become homeless.The moneylender combines with the building industry to ensure that houses built for sale are only within the reach of better-off people. Heavy mortgage rates, which provide more loot for the moneylender, and vast building profits cut down the number and the availability of houses for sale. The landlords, the moneylenders and the way the building industry is run cause the housing shortage, no matter how many people come into this country or leave it.Black workers when they come to this country pay their rates, rents and taxes just like any other worker. Just like any other worker they work – many of them in the building industry. So their contribution to housing is no less than any other worker’s. They are in no way the cause of the housing shortage. Like other workers, they are the victims of it, and in many cases they are the most cruelly-used victims. JobsSurely, argue the Powellites, if lots of immigrants come into this country they will create more unemployment. The years of heavy black immigration into this country-the 1950s and the early 1960s-were the years of the fullest employment this country has ever seen. In all the 1950s for instance, when there was no control of black immigration into this country and more than 600,000 black workers came in, unemployment throughout the country was less than two per cent.The areas of highest unemployment – Northern Ireland, Scotland, the North East – were the areas of lowest immigration, and the areas of fullest employment, like London and Birmingham, were the areas of highest immigration.Unemployment has been with us as long as capitalism. In the 1930s whole communities in Scotland and Wales were laid waste by unemployment. There was no immigration into any of these communities. People streamed out of them, not into them.Unemployment is caused by industrialists and financiers who cannot sell back their goods to workers in sufficient quantities to keep their factories open. It is the basic flaw of a system run for profit, a capitalist system. Mass immigration of groups of workers has nothing to do with causing unemployment. On the contrary, it is a sign that capitalism in the ‘host country’ is enjoying a spate of full employment. So, once again, immigrants do not cause unemployment. They are just the first victims of it. The Social ServicesWhat is true of housing and jobs is true of all the social services. A recent study by two economists at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that immigrants take less out of the social services-that’s education, child welfare, unemployment benefit and old age pensions-than the average for the British population. In 1966, they reported, £62 was spent per head of the population on all these services – while only £52 was spent per head of the immigrant population. Even by 1981, the gap will be roughly the same, £69.9 to £60.7. ‘Immigrants’ demands on the health and welfare services,’ concludes the article, ‘have been lower than the national average because the inflow has hitherto consisted largely of relatively young men and women of working age. It seems likely that this effect will be a fairly long-lasting one.’The blacks have nothing to do with causing all the shortages in our society, but they suffer from them worse than anyone else. The Grieve Report on London Housing in 1969 gave some horrifying statistics about the housing conditions of black people in the city. 73 per cent of black families were living in one room or two. 46 per cent of black families (compared with 11 per cent for the whole population) had no kitchen. 53.2 per cent (compared with 15.1 per cent of the whole population) were sharing a lavatory. 50.9 per cent (compared with 11.8 per cent of the whole population) were sharing baths. Only 9.3 per cent of blacks (compared with more than a third of the whole population) had managed to get into a council house, and in most of those cases the council houses were the oldest and most dilapidated available.Discrimination against black workers goes all through the social scale. Black children are herded into Educationally Subnormal (ESN) schools in far larger numbers than white children. Schools with large numbers of black children are invariably the most overcrowded. When redundancy takes place at a factory where there are large numbers of black workers, the boss invariably tries out a new redundancy rule: Blacks First Out.Somehow or other, Enoch Powell and his crew manage to turn this horrible picture to their own advantage. The plight of the blacks, which is caused to some extent by the racialist pressure of politicians, is, claim the politicians, proof of the blacks’ own fecklessness! After insisting that the blacks have to live in damp, overcrowded houses, and work long hours of overtime in damp, overcrowded mills and factories, the racialists cry: ‘Look, they are weak and sick. They have a higher rate of TB! They are causing overcrowding in the hospitals!’" }
{ "content": "The people who blame the blacks for the shortages in our society are exactly the people who encourage those shortages. Messrs Powell, Stokes, and their friends are the most angry opponents of all the measures which have been taken or might be taken to alleviate those shortages; council house subsidies, low rents, government subsidies for industry in the ‘unemployed’ regions, better standards for state schools, more power for the Health Service against the drug companies – anything which could provide a few more houses, hospitals and schools are bitterly opposed by the same people who turn round and blame black workers for these shortages.We are always being told that when rich men set up factories or lend money to councils or agree to give some of their spare time to serve as governors of hospitals, they are giving away wealth to the workers, and the workers should be grateful. So powerful is this propaganda, that too often the workers and their unions are grateful for the crumbs. They fight for more crumbs, and then they fight among each other about the distribution of the crumbs. Too often, workers and unions behave like the poor men in the bible underneath Dives’ table, shouting: ‘Here come the crumbs, brothers. Now let us all fight to see how much each section can get for themselves. We will fight each other in the great crumb share-out!’So when a lot of other poor men appear underneath the table, they create nothing but resentment, and if these other poor men happen to have different coloured skins, then they create even more resentment. ‘If all these people grab some crumbs’, runs the argument, ‘there will be fewer crumbs for us’. The answer to this problem therefore is: KEEP THEM OUT! Keep them out of the country, keep them out of the unions, keep them out of promotion, keep them out of council house estates – and so on, and so on.The rich men are happiest when the squabbling about the crumbs is fiercest. If the poor men under the table are arguing among each other, if one section is yelling Keep Them Out to another section, the rich man is happy because he knows that no questions will be asked.No one will ask: ‘Who made the loaf?’ And no one goes on to ask: ‘Who is sharing it out?’And no one, therefore, exposes the simple truth. THE POOR MEN HAVE MADE THE LOAF, AND THE RICH MAN HAS STOLEN IT.That rich robber feels safe as long as people argue about crumbs and not about the loaf. That is the principal reason why he so enthusiastically supports immigration controls. Against Immigration Controls‘I’M NOT A RACIALIST, but I’m in favour of some kind of immigration control.’ How often we hear this from all kinds of people – Tories, Liberals, Labourites. They all pretend that they don’t discriminate between black and white once they’re in this country, but they do think there should be some control of the numbers coming into this country.We in the International Socialists are against all immigration controls. We know that in capitalist society the numbers of people coming into any country will be regulated by the number of jobs available in that country, and we know that overcrowding in that country – bad housing, hospital conditions, inadequate transport and the like – are caused not by the numbers of workers in that country but by a system of society which plans its priorities and makes its decisions in the interests of profit and a minority who benefit from that profit. So we know that immigration controls cannot possibly assist the workers already in that country.We also know that immigration controls create all kinds of hardship for workers and their families who want to come here. As immigration controls have tightened over the last decade, the indignities which black people have to suffer to ‘prove their right’ to enter Britain have multiplied. For instance, the children of black workers already here can only come into the country if they are under 16. So every day an army of immigration officers, the majority of whom are Powellites, use all their powers to ‘prove’ that children who have travelled to London airport to join their Indian or Pakistani parents are over 16. X-ray tests are carried out on these children’s wrist-bones. Trick questions are asked about their brothers and sisters, and so on.Again and again frightened children have been put back on a plane to India or Pakistan. Large numbers of black workers and their wives are held for long periods in remand prisons while immigration officers ‘check out’ their details.Other black workers who have been promised jobs on the black market have to get into this country by illegal means – in boats run across the Channel by spivs. Once they are here, these workers are constantly subject to the fear of being caught by the police and deported.We stand for the free movement of workers from country to country. We say that immigration controls are against the interests of workers everywhere. We say that the people who shout for immigration controls are doing so either because they are racialists – that is, they think British people are superior to foreigners – or because they like to see workers arguing among themselves because of their different coloured skin.These are the reasons why we opposed the Tory government’s Commonwealth Immigration Act, 1962; the Labour government’s stricter controls in 1965 and the Labour government’s Commonwealth Immigration (Ugandan Asians) Act, 1968.But now there is a new Immigration Act and a new, even more urgent reason for opposing immigration control. It can be summed up in two words: contract labour.Contract labour is labour without rights. It is provided by workers who have not even the slender advantages won for them by their class over the last 150 years. It is labour without trade unions, without votes, without proper insurance, without even the right to live as families. This labour has no check on the most brutal demands of the employers." }
{ "content": "The European post-war boom has been stoked by contract labour. Millions of workers from surrounding countries have got jobs in Germany, France, Switzerland. There are hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Turks in Germany, Algerians and Spaniards in France, Italians and Egyptians in Switzerland. These workers have jobs without rights. They are not in trade unions. Most of them live in shanty towns. Their houses and factories are not subject to the ‘normal’ health and safety regulations. They are only partly-insured. If they annoy the boss or go on strike, they face the threat of instant deportation without the legal right even to complain. They are a cheap labour force, but above all they are a compliant labour force because of their immigration status.The black workers who have got jobs in Britain over the last 25 years are doing the same sort of work as are the Greeks in Germany or the Spaniards in France. But they have had marginal advantages because of an accident of imperialism. They have been treated as British citizens. They have had the right to vote, the right to join trade unions (as many of them have) and, above all, freedom from the threat of deportation (unless they committed a crime).The Tories and their class have watched the effect of contract labour in Europe with envy. As they linked arms with their fellow-robbers in Europe, so they brought their immigration laws ‘into line’: that is, they established contract labour in Britain. That is what the Immigration Act, 1971, is about. Under the Act, anyone who comes into this country to work is a contract labourer. When his job is finished, so does his right to stay in this country. At any time, he can be deported without right of appeal on the say-so of the Home Secretary.In June 1973, the Tories who sit as Law Lords in the House of Lords added a new twist to this already barbaric Act.They declared that any immigrant who entered illegally at any time since 1962 was also subject to deportation. The Act was made retrospective. Immediately the police forces in the immigrant areas – already hated and despised for their racist activity – started a witch-hunt. Black youths driving cars were asked to submit their passports. Black workers collecting insurance cards also had to show passports. One Asian girl who asked a policeman about the way home was ‘held for questioning’ for two hours. The purpose of the operation was to frighten the black population, and to discourage them from any activity of protest.The dangers of contract labour for the organised labour movement know no bounds. If one section of the working population is under threat of deportation the effect is to weaken not only their own ability to fight for better wages and conditions but that of the entire working-class movement. The trade unions in France and Germany have been consistently weakened by their leaders’ refusal to tackle the problem of contract labour. Again and again, the strike power of workers has been diluted into arguments between ‘indigenous’ workers and immigrant workers. The only way out of the problem is organisation across the board of migrant workers into trade unions and the insistence on the same standards and working conditions for all workers in any one industry or place of work.Such organisation is weakened at once by trade union acceptance of immigration control. It is the immigration controls, not the immigration, which creates the contract labour. Free movement of workers does not lead to contract labour, for there is then no restriction on immigrant workers organising in trade unions and in socialist organisations. But the controls and the conditions which they place on the immigrant worker inevitably shackle that worker, deter him from trade union and socialist activity, and widen the gulf between workers of different colours and nationalities. So as soon as the trade unionist says ‘Keep Them Out’ he has committed himself not only to discrimination between one set of workers and another, not only to support for police and immigration officials’ bullying of immigrant workers, but finally and inevitably to a system of contract labour which will paralyse his own organisation.That is why International Socialists say in the same breath:NO RACIALISMNO IMMIGRATION CONTROLS Why racism?NOT SO LONG AGO, I was speaking to a meeting of steelworkers in Consett, Co Durham. After a long discussion in which I urged people to join the International Socialists, one steelworker who had been very enthusiastic, picked up the sheet of paper on which were written the four main principles for which the IS stands.‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a while, ‘I agree with the first three – but this opposition to racialism and immigration controls. I’m sorry. I hate the blacks.’I tried to reason with him. How many blacks were there in Consett? He could only think of one – an Indian who had been there for many years. Had he ever met a black man? No, he hadn’t. But he hated them. He knew it was wrong and absurd to say so, and he didn’t know why.Very few workers go as far as that, but many often admit to a feeling of hostility to blacks which they can’t explain. Others will agree that blacks don’t cause the housing or hospital or schools shortage but still admit to uneasiness about them being in this country. When people try to give reasons for this unease they often reply in ridiculous terms, such as: ‘They have noisy parties,’ or ‘their cooking smells’, or ‘they are lazy’. There are plenty of white people who are lazy, whose cooking smells and who have noisy parties. No doubt they cause distress and make themselves, as individuals, unpopular. Why is it, though that individual failings make a whole group of people unpopular? Why is it that people are all too ready to make racialist judgments about individual failings?" }
{ "content": "The answer lies in the history of this country and of its rich rulers. For four centuries these rulers have been plundering people in other countries, most of which happened to be inhabited by people with different coloured skins. First there was plunder by simple conquest and the slave trade, then plunder by economic imperialism. The ruthlessness and brutality of this plunder knew no bounds. Whole civilisations were uprooted and transported. In India, millions of miles of fertile country were turned into a dust-bowl. The population of Dacca fell from 150,000 to 20,000 between 1818–1836. All this was done in order to fatten the planters and shareholders of white Christian civilisation.Christ had taught: Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt do no murder. So every Sunday the representatives of British Christendom had to get up in the pulpits and justify robbery and murder on a mass scale to their congregations. This acrobatic feat was carried out by means of a simple slogan. Christ had taught: ‘He has made of one blood all the nations of the earth’, but the Christian scholars who had shares in the East India Company were quick to point out that Christ had said nothing about skin colour. And so it was that the Christian imperialists developed the theory of the inferiority of the black man. The black man, they claimed, had no history. He had no civilisation. He was a savage. Give him an inch, and he would take a mile. He was obsessed with sex, and his one aim was to rape a white woman. So therefore he had to be treated with ‘firmness and ‘discipline’. That treatment was for his own good. So the mass murder, robbery and rape which was carried out in Africa, Asia and the West Indies were written up in the newspapers and history books as ‘civilising missions’.The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the standard work of reference among people of learning, stated in its 1884 edition:‘No full-blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of science, a poet or an artist, and the fundamental equality claimed for him by ignorant philanthropists is belied by the whole history of the race throughout this historic period.’Newspaper editors whipped themselves into fury at the occasional outbursts of revolt by the black, inferior people who were being civilised by British imperialism. In the autumn of 1865, for instance, a Negro revolt broke out in Morant Bay, Jamaica. For a few days the Negroes ran riot over a couple of plantations. The rebellion was quickly and brutally crushed. Five hundred Negroes were indiscriminately slaughtered. The leader of the revolt, William Gordon, was executed by order of Governor Eyre, whose recourse to barbarism was defended by liberal men of letters in England such as Ruskin, Tennyson, Kingsley, Dickens, and Carlyle. On 4 November, The Times voiced the outrage of its class:‘He who has come in as favoured heir of a civilisation in which he had no previous share; he, petted by philanthropists and statesmen and preachers into precocious enjoyment of rights and immunities which other races have been too glad to acquire by centuries of struggles ... he, dandled into legislative and official grandeur by the commiseration of England; that he should have chosen to revolt – this is a thing so incredible that we will not venture to believe it.’The Times was writing about the agricultural labourer in Jamaica, who worked for half the year for fifteen hours a day for a wage which could not feed or clothe his children, and spent the other half in unemployment and total starvation, whose infant mortality rate was more than 60 per cent and whose condition represented the extremity of poverty and exploitation in all the wretched history of imperialism.British workers and their organisations were encouraged, often with some success, to identify with the exploits of British conquerors abroad. However bad conditions were in the factory or the mill, it was argued, British workers owed their standard of living to the enterprise of their countrymen overseas.From time to time it was true that British workers gained marginal wage advantages from the opening up of ‘markets’ by British imperialists. But the advantage was always short-lived. As each cycle of investment in overseas countries came to an end, so mass unemployment followed in British factories. The ten-year slump during the 1930s came at a time when the bastions of the British Empire in Africa, India and the West Indies were still intact. To put it crudely, the problems created by robbing British workers in Britain could not be solved for capitalism by the robbery of workers in Asia or Africa.Yet the teaching and preaching of a hundred years dies hard. As I found in my meeting at Consett (and as others find all the time in the working-class movement) the lies peddled by Powell do strike a chord in large numbers of workers. They seem to provide an easy way out of the frustrations and insecurities which so many workers feel. Especially where trade union organisation is weak and all other means of solving problems are cut off, the blacks can be made into convenient scapegoats.The propaganda of imperialism, the lies about racial inferiority, are intensely dangerous to the working-class movement. It is not simply that they teach men and women to behave like monsters to their fellow workers. It is also that they threaten the strength of trade-union organisation inside the factory, and so tip the balance of class power still further towards the employers." }
{ "content": "Consider a few contemporary examples. In 1965, at Courtaulds Red Scar mill near Preston, a quarter of the factory (the worst-paid, hardest-working quarter) was worked by about 900 Pakistanis. The other three-quarters were worked by white workers. One morning, the factory manager walked into the Pakistani quarter and ordered a speed-up. Machines previously worked by four men, he said, would now be worked by three. This meant a huge increase in the amount of work that had to be done, and the Pakistani workers promptly walked out on strike. The local Transport and General Workers Union official advised the white workers not to follow suit, and the factory stayed at work. The strike went on unofficially for nine bitter weeks, and was broken. The Pakistani workers went back to work on the management’s terms.Three weeks later, the same speed-up was introduced in the three white quarters. Since the union officials and white stewards had accepted the principle of the speed-up in the black section, they could not fight it in their own. All the workers suffered because they had been led by people who accepted that there was something inferior about black workers.The same goes for two recent strikes in the East Midlands. In October 1972, several hundred workers at the Mansfield Hosiery mill, Loughborough, came out on strike for wage increases which they had been promised long before. Their union – the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers – was surprised and shocked that these members who had been paying their dues for so long should take any action at all. The white knitters in the factory refused to support the strike for fear that more ‘skilled jobs’ would go to black men. The strike ended in partial victory for the strikers, but the racial attitudes of union and white workers did nothing to help the cause, the conditions or the job security of anyone.In June 1973 Indian and Pakistani workers came out on strike because their shop steward was sacked for responding to the TUC call for a strike on May Day against the freeze. Here was a clear cut case of victimisation of a man who took seriously his role in the trade union movement and responded to an appeal from the TUC. The local TGWU official refused to declare the strike official or to offer support. He, again, is victim to racist attitudes, and every worker in his area will suffer from it. By not supporting Mohammed Sawar at Jaffes, Nottingham, the union will make it more difficult to fight against any victimisation in future, whether the militant victimised is black or white.On 13 June, the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers started its annual conference at Eastbourne. Mr Peter Pendergast, the NUHKW general president, attacked the Mansfield Hosiery strikers for bringing in an ‘outsider’. They should, he said, have relied on the union. He went on: ‘We helped the Asians far more than we have helped our own people.’Our own people! It is the phrase used again and again by the backward and reactionary sections of the labour movement as an excuse for racial discrimination or immigration control.Our own people! Who are they? Are they people who have been born in Britain, white people who speak English? If so, this group includes Duncan Sandys, John Stokes, Harold Soref and countless other wealthy union-busters and imperialists all over the world. For workers and trade unionists these are not ‘our people’; they are the opposite. They are the sworn enemies of the working class movement whose most crucial political aim is the preservation of wealth, privilege and leisure for their class.Our people, therefore, cannot be defined by their place of birth, the place where they live, the language they talk or the colour of their skin. Our people are the plundered and the dispossessed all over the world who speak a multitude of languages and have many different coloured skins. The common factor of their exploitation binds them together far closer than the trivial differences of skin colour or language. The Asian workers pay dues into the NUHKW every bit as much as white workers. When their union president talks of them as though they were not ‘our people’, he talks like a Tory backwoodsman, not a trade unionist. He is victim to the racialist poison which is eating at the very heart of the British labour movement. We must find the antidote. The fight backFOR THE LAST fifteen years or so, people have tried to fight racialism by leaving the problem to someone else. Worried or confused by the strength of racialist feeling in the working class movement, MPs, councillors and the like have put all their hope in anti-racist activity from the Trades Union Congress or from a Labour government.The Trades Union Congress and the trade union leaders of left and right are all one hundred per cent opposed to racialism. There are a hundred, if not a thousand conference resolutions to prove it. One of the remarkable aspects of such conferences is their almost total whiteness. When Frank Cousins retired as general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (which has the largest number of black workers) he became chairman of the Community Relations Commission, whose job was to ‘further and improve race relations’.But at the Transport and General Workers’ Union conference seven years later – in 1973 – there were only two black delegates out of a thousand. The trade union leaders have passed their motions, but done nothing whatever to combat racial discrimination or immigration controls or the racist ideas which exist in the minds of many of their members. They have done nothing to involve black workers and their problems in the trade unions. They have taken their dues, and passed them by." }
{ "content": "The same is true of the Labour Party. In 1958, when racist Tories first demanded immigration control, the Labour Party declared itself against all Commonwealth immigration control. Labour leaders like Gaitskell and Brown fought the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 line by line. Yet the first act of the Labour government when it came to power in 1964 was to cut off all labour vouchers for unskilled black workers. In August 1965, still tighter immigration controls were introduced. In 1966, however, the dream of all the multi-racialists came true. Mr Roy Jenkins who has very strong anti-racialist views, was appointed Home Secretary by the Labour government. At once, he started work on a Race Relations Act which would make racial discrimination illegal. After a long fight, the Act was passed in 1968. But in the month it became law, in one demagogic speech about ‘rivers of blood’, Enoch Powell swept away all the good intentions of the Race Relations Act. Powell spoke to the fears and frustrations of the masses, while Jenkins had been staking everything on the decencies of liberal drawing rooms.Powell’s speech followed close on another Immigration Control Act which left tens of thousands of East African Asians stateless. Faced with Powell’s demagogy, the liberals in parliamentary office were impotent. There was nothing left for Wilson and Co but to surrender to Powellite demands. This surrender has been continued out of office. When, in the summer of 1972, Wilson was asked why he had made no comment about the racist hysteria surrounding the entry of a few thousand Ugandan Asians, he replied that no one had asked him to do so!The struggle against racism cannot be left to trade union or Labour leaders. Community Relations Commissions, Race Relations Boards, community liaison officers, welfare associations and the like will not be able to counter the cancerous effects of racialism.I have argued in this pamphlet that racialism is part and parcel of a capitalist system which divides people up into classes in the interests of the minority in charge of industry and finance, the ruling class. It follows that the fight against racism is necessarily part of the fight against capitalism. For seven decades large numbers of people have been content to leave the fight against capitalism and its excesses to Labour MPs and trade union leaders. Politics has meant a vote every five years – and nothing else. The chief beneficiary has been capitalism.The real power with which we can shake and remove capitalism is the mass action of the workers: the power of the miners who defeated the Tory government’s wage policies in 1972; the power of the dockers who, that same year, beat the Tory Industrial Relations Act by a strike in solidarity with their five jailed brothers. That action was ten times more effective in opposition to the Act than all the votes in parliament and all the trade union leaders’ speeches.The same is true about racialism. When the workers take mass action, when they go on strike, racialist illusions which were quite strong while they were working almost always disappear. In 1968, some dockers hit the headlines by marching to Westminster in support of Enoch Powell. The London dockers at the time had made all kinds of concessions. They had just accepted massive redundancies outlined in the Devlin Report. They were weak, disorientated, isolated. Four years later, the National Front were hoping for similar support from the London docks for their demonstrations against the immigration of Ugandan Asians. The dockers, fresh from their victory at Pentonville, were in an entirely different mood. The dockers’ stewards moved unanimously against any dockers’ participation in anti-immigration demonstrations, and the National Front was forced back on its hard core of middle class perverts.The same pattern has been followed in a large number of recent strikes. In the ‘dirty jobs’ strike of 1970, in the Ford strike of 1971, the hospital workers’ dispute of 1973, there were countless examples of racial solidarity by workers who were previously susceptible to racist propaganda.The reason is that when workers are engaged in strikes, they see right away that solidarity is more important than skin colour. Confidence in their strength replaces the divisions and isolation of ‘normal times’. But militant, trade union action is not enough. Strikes come to an end, and militancy and solidarity can disappear as quickly as they emerged. A determined wage fight in a factory does not ensure that racialism never appears again in that factory. There is still plenty of racialism in the London docks, or in the Post Office or among local government workers.If racialism is to be fought in the working class it has to be tackled at root in the factories, mines, mills, offices. And it has to be tackled politically by workers organised politically.The main objective of the International Socialists is to build IS factory branches which meet regularly to raise political questions inside the factory: that is, to link the trade union battle in their place of work with trade union battles in other places of work, and to link those battles with all the political issues which so closely bear upon them: rents, prices, unemployment, the ‘money crisis’, equal pay, Ireland, Vietnam ... and, of course, racialism.How can such a factory branch fight racialism? It can mount a campaign inside the factory for support for trade union organisation in the countless sweatshops throughout the country which have exploited black labour. The organisation of the small women’s rag trade factories in Southall is one recent example.Secondly, it can insist that any discrimination in its factory or group of factories against black workers should be ended.Thirdly, it can produce constant propaganda in the form of leaflets and verbal arguments against the arguments of Powell and Co.Fourthly, it can link with the town or city branch of the International Socialists to demonstrate and agitate on the broader political questions, such as police harassment of blacks or the barbaric administration of immigration laws." }
{ "content": "After the recent House of Lords decision making the Immigration Act retrospective, for example, the International Socialists factory branch organisation throughout the country organised a petition against the Act which was signed by many influential rank and file trade unionists. At the same time, the International Socialists trade union fractions organised resolutions and agitation inside the trade unions against the House of Lords decision. This sort of activity has more effect than a student picket outside a police station (although that may well be necessary). Organised trade union and shop stewards’ opposition to racist activity really means something.This sort of activity will only be carried out by political organisation. The man or woman who relies solely on the trade union will protest that such organisation is ‘unconstitutional’ according to union rule, or will excuse himself on grounds of ‘too much time on union business’. In the end, if not at the beginning, that man or woman will become contaminated by racialist ideas. The socialist militant in the factory, when the immigrant worker first comes into the factory, cannot possibly be affected by racialist ideas. He knows that the black worker has behind him a rich tradition of struggle – certainly as rich a tradition as the white worker. The socialist militant sees the black worker as another fighter against the system, whose presence in the factory enriches and strengthens the struggle.For far too long, British workers have listened to professional politicians who have said to them: ‘Vote for me, and you will be all right.’ These Labour politicians have gone out of their way to reassure black workers and anti-racist white workers, that once elected, racism would be fought through parliamentary channels. We have had a good dose of this parliamentary medicine over the past twenty-five years, and it has done nothing to stop the racialist pains.We believe that the answer lies in socialist organisation and propaganda at the roots of the working class. We are building factory branches fast. But nothing like fast enough. Hundreds of such branches could decisively affect the course of racialism in this country over the next few years. That is why white workers who see the dangers of racism to their organisation and black workers who are persecuted and bullied by racialism must join us and help organise. Top of the pageLast updated on 23.11.2013" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot When will the Blair bubble burst?(Summer 1995)From International Socialism 2:67, Summer 1995.Copyright © International Socialism.Copied with thanks from the International Socialism Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.Paralysis has struck down British Labour. Old commitments to changing the hated Thatcherite society are daily cast aside. One Sunday morning David Blunkett goes on television to reaffirm tentatively Labour’s long standing promise to impose VAT on private schools. That same Sunday, in the afternoon, after a call from his Leader, David Blunkett is on again, telling us that Labour has no intention of imposing VAT on private schools. A few days later Derek Fatchett, a Labour front bench spokesman on ‘defence’, launched a spirited attack on the grotesque waste of public money on homes, servants and cooks for senior officers in the armed forces. The Leader called Fatchett in and told him he must never again attack senior army officers without his permission. Jack Cunningham, the very right wing Labour spokesman on industry, gave a public commitment that privatised coal would be renationalised by Labour – only to read in the newspapers of a speech by a more junior Labour spokesman with the ear of the Leader. The speech told a meeting of coal merchants that there were ‘no plans’ to nationalise their industry.Even the health service may not be safe in Labour hands. The rumour as I write is that the party’s health spokeswoman Margaret Beckett threatened to resign in order to hang on to Labour’s long established pledge to dismantle the NHS trusts and return the health service to some form of more elected control. An ‘indissoluble commitment’ to renationalise the railways has now been replaced by a ‘might do, might not do’ compromise written in such gobbledegook that its author must have been John Prescott.The day by day controversy between Labour and the increasingly absurd Tory government is paralysed too. When the deeply reactionary employment secretary Michael Portillo changed the rules making it more difficult for unemployed people to claim benefit, he was roundly attacked by his ‘shadow’, Harriet Harman. He lost the argument all down the line until he asked her whether Labour would abolish his new rules. There was a lot of huffing and puffing, but no reply. In the House of Commons the prime minister has taken to replying to questions from Labour leader Tony Blair with a single question: what would you do? Would Labour squeeze the rich? Would they return opted-out schools to the elected authorities? Would they reverse privatisation with public enterprise? Would they repeal the anti-union laws? Exactly what is the minimum wage? No reply, no reply, no reply. Paralysis.The paralysis flows from the political to the industrial. I recently spoke with Tony Benn at a meeting of nurses called in response to a fantastic offer from the government’s ‘impartial’ review body of a wage increase of 1 percent. The nurses were angry, but the union officials cool. When I remonstrated afterwards with a UNISON official, he replied simply, ‘Well, it’s Blair, isn’t it?’ He meant that the new young Labour leader and his glittering successes in the polls had mesmerised union officials who might otherwise have been stung into action.The same paralysis hit the teaching unions as the government blandly announced new pay cuts for teachers. A campaign against the cuts was launched not by the unions but by the school governors who had been granted new powers over the schools in order to tame the unions. The teachers’ union leaders don’t want to rock the Blair boat. When, at the annual Easter conference, the National Union of Teachers overturned their leaders’ advice and called for a strike ballot, Blair himself led the witch-hunt against the militants. He and his colleagues take every opportunity to make it clear that any industrial action, even the slightest ripple on the social surface, will make it more difficult for Labour to win the next election.The price of this paralysis is very high: continued exploitation without hindrance. Britain’s rulers, hugely enriched by the privatisation, union busting and higher-band tax cuts of recent years, are like burglars who feel that their stealing time is at last running out. They are cramming into their sacks what remains of available booty. The railways, the nuclear industry, even huge savings on slashed disability benefits, are all up for grabs before the election without any meaningful opposition from the Labour or trade union leadership. The most rapacious British ruling class since the war is making hay while its sun still shines. The price, moreover, is not just in pounds and pence: lower wages, longer hours, more sackings and so on. The old defeatist arguments of the mid-1980s, that workers are all frightened or apathetic, are plainly false. There are on all sides signs that more and more of them are ready and willing to fight. Every time they are held back by Labour’s paralysis they lose confidence, hope – and a chance to knock the Tories back. Is it all a bluff?So headlong and relentless is this stampede that some optimistic Labour Party socialists can be heard to say: ‘It is all a bluff. Tony and John are not really as right wing as they pretend. They are just saying they are right wing so that they can win the election. When they get into office they will revert to their true socialist feelings.’ This is the exact opposite of the truth. The new leaders’ ‘true feelings’ are that they want to run the country not very much differently than it is run at the moment, with marginal adjustments to make it a little bit fairer. A good guide to Tony Blair’s ‘true feelings’ is his original draft of the alternative Clause Four, which promised to ‘work together’ with ‘trade unions, consumer associations and employers’ organisations.’ (The replacement of the word ‘employers’ with the word ‘other’ was the only tangible victory for the trade union negotiators over the new clause.)" }
{ "content": "Unlike all the other Labour leaders this century, Blair himself has no socialist past. During the whole of his youth and his university education there is not the slightest sign of any ideological commitment to socialism. Unlike every other Labour leader this century, he has never at any time in his life been convinced of the argument for a socialist order of society. It has been argued on his behalf that he joined the Labour Party in the early 1980s when most right wing social democrats were joining the Social Democratic Party. In fact, most of the social democrats who joined the SDP were converts from the Labour Party. They were in many ways the more idealistic and evangelistic of the right wing social democrats. Most political careerists, after glancing at the political and electoral realities, stayed with Labour. A young man intending to make a career of anti-Tory politics in 1981 or 1982 was far more certain of a safe seat in parliament and high office with Labour than with the SDP. Though he gingerly toed the more left wing party line when he fought the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, Blair’s politics were never socialistic. They stemmed from a vague Christian notion of togetherness, encapsulated in his well-worn cliché, ‘We achieve more together than we do on our own.’ This togetherness has nothing to do with equality or public ownership. It is as achievable, Blair believes, in a corporation like Hanson or Kingfisher as it is in any public enterprise. That’s why he throws out the ‘baggage’ of a constitutional commitment to common ownership, and fixes his sights on a few very simple and easily attainable objectives, none of which have anything to do with socialism. When does Labour win?No, the Blair offensive is not a bluff, and most Labour Party members know it isn’t. What then is the secret to his enduring appeal among people who suspect his politics? How is it that so many constituency parties have voted to dump Clause Four, to which most of them still feel a strong political attachment?The main reason is their confidence that Blair will win the next general election. Large numbers of Labour Party members have been convinced by the argument that the election cannot be won unless Labour dumps every vestige of its traditional support for socialism and peace. They are impressed by the awful results of the 1983 general election, in which the breakaway Social Democratic Party with the enthusiastic support of the Liberals got almost as many votes as Labour. They ascribe that defeat to the left wing policies in the Labour manifesto. The argument persists through the two subsequent elections as Labour dropped more and more of its left wing policies. Like desperate adventurers in a punctured hot air balloon, they cry for more and more ‘socialist baggage’ to be cast overboard. The Blair paralysis is the logical result of that argument.Political history, however, did not start in 1979. There have been two long periods of Labour government in the last half century. Both these elections, 1945 and 1966, were won with Clause Four in place and far more left wing policies even than in 1983. In 1974 a Tory government was thrown out by the electorate and a Labour government established, even though Labour’s Programme 1973 was far, far to the left of anything written by Labour in the 1980s. The record shows that the results of elections have far more to do with the prevailing popular political mood than with formal policies in manifestos. If Labour does win the next election – and another defeat seems beyond the capacities even of the shadow cabinet – the result will have far more to do with the popular fury with Tory broken promises and sleaze than with the political inclination of the Labour manifesto. Can Blair deliver?But what then? What happens after a Blair victory?Here traditional socialist arguments are inclined to sound irrelevant. Traditionally, socialists in and out of the Labour Party have protested about the backsliding of previous Labour governments; the broken promises and unfulfilled aspirations of the past. They dust down the old manifestos and show how specific promises (for instance, to end the Polaris nuclear missile programme in October 1964) have been systematically broken. This argument has lost its force. Indeed it has to some extent been adopted by Blair and his team as a justification for their paralysis. ‘In the past’, they argue, ‘Labour tried to do too much. They promised things they knew they could not achieve. What we offer is something much more honest. We will say what we can achieve, and we will achieve it.’ This argument is seized on eagerly by all sorts of Labour Party supporters worn down by years of Tory cruelty and greed. But it falls to the ground as soon as anyone asks an old and familiar question. Who runs the country?" }
{ "content": "However far he moves to the right, there is one crucial characteristic of past Labour governments which Blair cannot shake off. Like Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Blair must believe that he, as prime minister, will be in charge of events. I recall as one of the formative experiences of my youth going down to 10 Downing Street in late October 1964 as an impressionable reporter. The new young, popular and extremely able prime minister, Harold Wilson, was holding a press conference. He had just stormed into Downing Street by overturning a massive Tory majority. The world, it seemed, lay at his feet. He sat in the cabinet room, puffing on his pipe and beaming benevolently. He conveyed an impression of child-like amazement at his new power. He pointed to a series of buttons attached to his telephone. ‘I can sit here’, he said, ‘and call up the Governor of the Bank of England or the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.’ For anyone interested in politics it was a time of high hope and excitement. The old days of the Tory dynasty, what Wilson called the ‘faded antimacassars of the age of ancestor-worship’, had been removed forever. Here was a new man in charge, committed to a new order, his power conveyed to him by the votes of the people.The disillusionment which followed so swiftly, culminating in the cuts and wage freeze of July 1966, was not so much about specific policies. It was about political power, or rather political impotence. The man who pressed the buttons summoning the Governor of the Bank of England was having his economic policies dictated by that same governor, his foreign policy dictated by that same Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The thread of democracy which attached the new prime minister to the electorate was effortlessly cut by wealthy and powerful people elected by no one. If this seemed true of the first Wilson government of 1964–1970, it was doubly true of the second one – which started in 1974 and went on (after Wilson abandoned it in 1976) until 1979. The first real crisis was in the early summer of 1975, when Wilson reversed all his economic commitments and again set in motion a policy of wage controls followed by public spending cuts. He did not do so by choice. He himself described his role in Downing Street as that of an entirely impotent tenant awaiting eviction by bailiffs, whom he specifically defined:We were living on borrowed time. But what of the bailiffs, in the shape of the international financial community, from cautious treasurers of multinational corporations, multinationals, to currency operators and monetary speculators? Would they give us time to win the support of the miners and take all necessary corrective action? The answer came on 30th June. [1]The answer was no. The government and its electoral majority were evicted from its planned and stated policy by ‘the bailiffs’. The following year, 1976, which rightly became the bogey for the left for years afterwards, Denis Healey, the Labour chancellor, was similarly stampeded by the International Monetary Fund, which insisted, in exchange for a loan to help Britain out of its balance of payments difficulties, that Labour renege on its promises to increase spending on hospitals, schools and public transport. Was the loan really necessary? Years later, when Healey wrote his memoirs, he thought not. ‘The whole affair was unnecessary,’ he wrote. ‘We could have done without the IMF loan at the time only if we – and the world – had known the real facts at the time.’ [2] The Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man of high intelligence, was not informed of the real financial facts! So ill-informed was he about the matters over which he was meant to be in charge that he reversed the entire thrust of his party’s policy, and launched his government on a Thatcherite economic policy before Thatcher even came to office. Later in that same annus horribilis, 1976, Prime Minister James Callaghan chose the Labour Party conference to make a classical statement of Labour’s impotence:What is the cause of high unemployment? Quite simply and unequivocally it is caused by paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce. There are no scapegoats. That is as true in a mixed economy under a Labour government as it is under capitalism or communism. It is an absolute fact of life which no government, be it left or right, can alter … We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. But I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists …So what option did exist? To coin a phrase, back to basics. Callaghan spelled it out quite clearly. ‘We must get back to fundamentals – first, overcoming unemployment now unambiguously depends on our labour costs being at least comparable with those of our major competitors.’ The only way workers could ensure unemployment did not rise was to cut their own wages." }
{ "content": "Once again, it was not just the breaking of manifesto commitments which disillusioned Labour voters. It was the admission of their government’s impotence. Ever since 1945 Labour politicians had been inspired by the economics of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes provided them with an economic theory which enabled them, so they believed, to organise the national economy so that they could ‘spend their way out of a recession by cutting taxes and boosting government spending’. Once in office, they believed, they could act on Keynes’s theory – and run capitalism fairly without abolishing it. Universal suffrage conferred on them the necessary power to seize the reins without changing the horses. During the 1945–1951 government and, to a lesser extent, the Wilson government of 1964–1970, the Keynesian Labour ministers convinced themselves that they were in charge; and that it was their brilliant management of the economy which for the first time in capitalist history stopped the cycle of booms and slumps. In fact, as the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP) argued at the time, they were not in charge at all. The economic stability was caused in the main by the huge spending on unused and unsold arms in peacetime. The full extent of the Labour ministers’ impotence, and the futility of the Keynesian argument, only became clear to ministers during the Wilson/Callaghan government of 1974–1979. The arch-Keynesian James Callaghan abandoned Keynes and reverted to reactionary free market slogans which Tory ministers of the 1950s and early 1960s would have been ashamed to proclaim. Callaghan’s 1976 Declaration of Impotence set the tone for Labour’s three remaining years in office. The Labour government, its impotence sealed by an alliance with the Liberal Party, careered away from even its most marginal aspirations, and stumbled to defeat.Here is the crucial lesson for the Blairites. The point is not, as they argue, that Labour sought to do too much, nor even that they abandoned individual manifesto commitments. It is that Labour’s ability to do anything for the people who voted Labour was systematically removed. They didn’t just abandon individual promises. They lost control altogether. Why don’t Labour governments run the country?Why were these governments not in control? The history of Labour governments is inexplicable in any other language except that of class. The society we live in is controlled by an unelected class which guards its wealth and power jealously against elected politicians whom it regards as upstarts. If those upstarts try, as Labour’s Programme 1973 suggested they should, to ‘shift the balance of wealth and power towards working people and their families,’ they come up against the most relentless ruling class opposition. Here then is the Labour dilemma. Because of the history and origins of the party, because the party rests on trade union support, because of the people who vote Labour, because Labour Party members are overwhelmingly workers, all Labour governments must try to do something for the people who vote Labour. Blair might change Clause Four from a commitment to common ownership, but even he must replace it with a statement committing Labour to ensure that ‘wealth and power is in the hands of the many, not of the few’.His supporters today are no longer hoping for socialism. They are not even hoping for any substantial change in the ownership of industries or in the distribution of wealth. They want no more than a few minor reforms to make the society better than it has been under Major or Thatcher. But to do even that Blair will need, above all, to be in control. Indeed, the more he rejects socialist policies, the more his credibility depends on showing that, once elected, he is in control. The more he abandons what Harold Wilson during the 1964 general election called ‘the moral crusade’ to change the world, the more he relies on his image as an efficient administrator, the more he will depend on being in control. The qualities for which he is renowned – competence, civility, a command of his brief – can only be put to good effect if he can press those buttons in 10 Downing Street much more confidently than even Harold Wilson dared to do.Is there not, the Blairites argue, at least a chance that with a much more moderate agenda, Blair will usher in more reforms than did Wilson or Callaghan? After all, they argue, even those administrations seem much better than anything we’ve experienced since 1979. Labour governments in the past have introduced reforms. Look at the National Health Service. Look at the high rate of council house building in Wilson’s first government, not to mention liberal laws on gays, abortion, capital punishment. Look at the fact that even the 1974–1979 Labour government did, as promised, freeze council rents and take back into public ownership the shipbuilding and aircraft industries.Yet those reforms were not examples of ministers being in control, still less of their personal determination or administrative abilities. They are, once again, impossible to explain except in terms of class. They depended on three factors: the economic ‘leeway’ for reform, the strength and confidence of the opposing classes, and, much less important, the extent of Labour’s electoral commitment.The leeway for reform. All the reforms mentioned above took place against a background in which Britain was in the big economic, industrial and military league, and when there was full employment. After the war Britain was still the second biggest industrial power on Earth. Now it produces 4 percent of world manufacturing output. Even at the height of the Thatcher boom productivity increases in British industry lagged behind those of the US, Germany, Japan and many other countries. Malcolm Rifkind, Britain’s defence secretary, tells his supporters that ‘Britain is a small island off the north west coast of Europe’ and must tailor its defence commitments accordingly. Compare that with the central arguments which wracked the Wilson Labour government less than 30 years ago – whether Britain should keep a substantial military presence ‘East of Suez’." }
{ "content": "Today even the most enthusiastic Blairites agree that the leeway for reform is tiny. Britain is constantly being overtaken in the league of economic nations. The British economy, even more than its competitors, is plagued by chronic underinvestment. A recent book by a prominent Blairite – The State We’re In by Will Hutton of the Guardian – brilliantly exposes the weakness of the British economy. Hutton ruminates gloomily on the ‘globalisation’ of modern capitalism. His book has been an outstanding success, but his solutions depend on ‘Euro-Keynesianism’, that is applying the failed Keynesian policies of past Labour governments on a European scale, where the prospects for the necessary co-operation and joint action are even grimmer than they were on a national scale in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a great gulf fixed between the tasks which Hutton outlines and even the remotest possibility that a timid and cautious Blair government, armed with less conviction and confronted by far more ruthless ruling class opposition, could do anything about them. The strength and confidence of the classes. All the above reforms – the NHS in the 1940s, house building the 1960s, the nationalisation of shipbuilding in the 1970s and others at the same time – took place against the background of strong and growing trade unions, rising confidence in the workplace and (in the case of the 1960s and 1970s) industrial victories for the working class. I will show later that these things constantly change – and are changing – but a glance at the strike figures for 1974 compared to those of 1994 shows that in those 20 years the balance of confidence tipped towards the employers. The electoral commitments of Labour. The democracy of parliamentary elections often clashes with capitalism which is essentially undemocratic and hierarchical. The clashes this century between capital and elected Labour governments were inspired by the ruling class’s suspicion and disdain for any government elected by the votes of people it exploits. In these clashes Labour is strengthened at least to some extent by the promises it makes during the election. In 1966, for instance, the Labour Party was committed to abolish health prescription charges and, on taking office, promptly did so. When in 1967 they went to the IMF for a loan, the IMF negotiators insisted above everything else on the imposition of prescription charges. Prime Minister Wilson and his colleagues pleaded, begged, and offered more extensive cuts elsewhere – all to no avail. The negotiators for capitalism were determined that the elected government’s nose should be rubbed in its most treasured commitment. Yet, at least to some extent, the negotiations depended on the commitments. If there had been no commitment to reform, there would have been nothing to negotiate. Control could be swiped from the elected government without hindrance. This is the folly of Blair’s determination to proceed without any commitment to take back any privatised property or redistribute wealth. He will be much weaker without the commitments than with them.On all three counts a new Blair led Labour administration will be substantially weaker even than its pathetic predecessors. Particularly if he is successful in taming any industrial action or confidence before his election, Blair will find himself at the mercy of an arrogant and contemptuous ruling class, eager at once to humiliate him and subdue him to its purpose. All the signs are that he will be a willing captive. But as his control over events is seen to vanish, as he becomes the servant of events rather than their master, so the very characteristics which now serve him in such good stead will become the instruments of his and Labour’s humiliation. His moderation will be ridiculed as weakness, his hostility to dogma as weak minded, his everlasting grin as facetious. A glance at what happened to his hero, Bill Clinton, who won an election after energetically distancing himself from any substantial reforms, reveals just a little of what will happen to Blair in Downing Street. Tossed about like a cork in a whirlpool, he will jettison one commitment after another until, no doubt, he will start to study how his illustrious predecessor Ramsay MacDonald escaped a similar plight and stayed in Downing Street at the head of the Tory party. It won’t be long into a Blair government before the Tories and their press start to howl for a government of national unity.The economic state we’re in – and the whole history of Labourism in Britain this century – points to the inevitable collapse of a Blair administration, with horrific social consequences. This will not just be a personal tragedy for Tony Blair. The pit into which Tony Blair will certainly fall beckons all of us. The failure of a government in which so many socialists and trade unions have placed their faith could lead to the widespread cynicism and pessimism. Why should we vote Labour?The more this grim prospect looms, the more wretched some Labour supporters become. Some on the left argue for an electoral break with Labour. They announce proudly that they will be abstaining in the polling booths and denouncing Labour on the hustings. This small minority argue that Labour has lost all claim to the allegiance of working class votes, and that there is no longer any substance in the claim that Labour has links and roots in the working class. These people do not seem to have noticed that the most blatant and well-endowed effort to smash British Labour – the SDP – collapsed in ruin. Despite OMOV, John Prescott, John Smith, Tony Blair and all the others, the trade unions are still inexorably entwined with the party. In its basic electoral support and in its links with the unions, Labour is still a party with working class roots. When Labour does well at the polls, its worker supporters feel better, more confident; and when Labour goes down, its supporters go down too." }
{ "content": "In the next general election at least, there will be no credible left alternative to Labour. The only effect of alternative candidates or abstentions will be a stronger Tory party in parliament. Those who propose an exclusively electoral answer to the Blair problem are making the same mistake as Blair himself – putting far too much emphasis on what happens in the ballot box. They are also abandoning all those people who cling loyally to Labour for its class roots but are deeply disturbed by the Blair paralysis.Ironically, indeed, many of the people who voted for Blair as leader in a desperate desire to get rid of the Tories are the most aware of the possible consequences. They know the implications of the history and of the economic background and the utter spinelessness of every statement that comes from the leader’s office. They know what to expect, and many of them just hang on, grimly expecting it. At a meeting not long ago in Norwich I was interrupted in mid-flow about the inevitable and dreadful consequences of a Blair Labour government. ‘I know, I know,’ said a man standing in the aisle holding his head and begging me not to go on. ‘I know – but I hate the Tories so much I just want to see them beaten at the election, and I don’t care what happens afterwards.’ Such people should not be left to stew in their own hopelessness. Their plaintive question – is the prospect entirely bleak? – needs an answer. What happens when the Blair bubble bursts?No, the prospect is very far from bleak. For a start, there are plenty of signs that Blair’s rightward stampede is resented by large sections of the people who will vote for him. His relentless march to respectability seems to have carried the new Labour leader well to the right of most of his supporters.In a MORI poll last October, for instance, 68 percent of voters spoke up for returning privatised utilities to public ownership and 60 percent were in favour of a wealth tax on people with more than £150,000. An ICM poll the previous month asked the question: ‘Do you think profitable state industries should be run as private companies?’ The question was first asked in 1988 when 30 percent agreed, 53 percent didn’t. In 1994 the percentage agreeing had slumped to 16 with 66 percent against. Even more remarkable, in the same poll 38 percent agreed and 28 percent disagreed with the statement: ‘More socialist planning would be the best way to solve Britain’s economic problems’. Six years ago only 29 percent agreed with the statement: ‘Trade unions should have more say in the way the country is run’. Now the figure has risen to 39 percent, with only 40 percent against – the gap of 25 percent has been cut to 1 percent. In the last poll to ask the question, 60 percent said they would pay more income tax for more social security – more than half said they would pay an extra four pence in the pound.As Blair has moved to the right, his supporters seem to have moved to the left. Blair refused to support the 1994 signal workers’ strike, but more than 70 percent of Labour voters did so. Perhaps the most fascinating recent poll was about Clause Four. In February 1995 Gallup asked a cross-section of voters what they thought of Clause Four. Overwhelmingly the respondents said they opposed it. Then they were told what it said: 37 percent said they were ‘broadly in agreement’, 28 percent broadly in disagreement. Among Labour voters 49 percent agreed, 29 didn’t.The people’s mood is not cowed or broken. Blair’s New Labour seems like a ray of hope – but certainly not the only possible salvation. The people who supported Blair’s campaign to change Clause Four were often the same people who were in broad agreement with the clause. The signal workers dispute showed that ‘old fashioned’ official strikes can win as effectively as they ever could, and the sudden unheralded spurts of militant demonstrations on issues like the export of live animals and the Criminal Justice Act do not fit into the picture the Tories paint of a subdued working class. Indeed, ever since the hospital strikes of 1988, political and industrial resistance has grown – through the successful mass uprising against the poll tax in 1990, the Welling anti-Nazi demonstration in 1993 and the big TUC-sponsored demonstrations for the health service and against racism. There have been growing signs on all sides of a rank and file resistance which takes little notice of what the Labour leaders are saying. All this suggests that a Blair government will have to grapple with a strong grass roots working class resistance. In other words, when the Blair bubble bursts, as it must, people are as likely to move to the left as to the right.If that happens, there will be one crucial difference to last time. Last time the explosion of fury in the working class movement at the right wing policies of the Wilson government after 1974 were held in check by left wing trade union leaders such as Hugh Scanlon of the engineering union and Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union. Their influence was rooted deep in the rank and file. For years the Communist Party had attracted and organised industrial militants, to whom hundreds of thousands of workers responded. During the last Labour government the left wing union leaders and their supporters in the Communist Party had no alternative strategy to that set out by the Labour government. The ‘social contract’ which, as Callaghan blurted out at the 1976 Labour Party conference, was a device to control wages and salaries, was supported unanimously at the 1975 Trades Union Congress. Labour left and Communist militants encouraged their sceptical supporters to vote for freezing their own wages and cutting their own services." }
{ "content": "Today there is no such organisation of Communist militants, no left trade union leaders of anything like the stature of Hugh Scanlon or Jack Jones. This represents, first, the decline of traditional socialist education and propaganda in the British working class. But it also means that the trade union ‘gendarmerie’ which controlled the working class movement so effectively in the late 1970s is no longer as influential: that an angry and militant reaction to a Blair government can shoot to the surface with less obstruction.Last time Labour made some promises and sold most of them out. Next time, even if it doesn’t make any promises, Labour will quickly lose its only remaining appeal: its appearance as a fair, rational and efficient administrator, committed, however vaguely, to a better world. Last time the sell out led to a shift to the right. This time the situation is more volatile. If socialists, like that man in Norwich, abandon all their ideas and spirit of resistance to a hopeless and ridiculous faith in Tony Blair, then the vacuum created by the Blair disaster can be filled from the right. If on the other hand there is in place an energetic non-sectarian socialist Party which seeks to build from the bottom up, which brings militants together and encourages them with socialist propaganda and a socialist press, which organises at the rank and file level against fascists, Nazis and racialism, and which opposes any further attempt to make workers pay for the capitalist crisis – then there is every chance that socialism can be put right back on the political agenda; and that masses of angry and disillusioned workers will swiftly make up what they have lost in organisation and education by enrolling in the most effective school of all: the school of industrial struggle. What now?The conclusions have never been more obvious.Parliamentary democracy, though an enormous improvement on the unelected despotisms which still govern most of the world, is not strong enough to control the increasingly multinational capitalist monopolies which gobble up the world’s resources and its labour with the single purpose of boosting their power and their profits. The only power which can control and overturn those monopolies is the power of the people exploited by them: the working class. Socialists must come together and organise where that power lies – in the day by day resistance to capitalism. They must build an organisation which provides a focus for fragmented resistance, and a political strategy based on the most implacable opposition to the monopolies, their state and the class which controls them. In Britain the only party which can do any of this is the Socialist Workers Party.Notes1. H. Wilson, Final Term: The Labour Government 1974–1976 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1979), p. 114.2. D. Healey, The Time Of My Life (Michael Joseph 1989), pp. 432–433. Top of the pageLast updated on 19.3.2012" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootStop the warThe Truth Machine(November 2001)From Socialist Review, No.257, November 2001, pp.12-13.Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Journalist of the decade Paul Foot argues why we should oppose this war – and what media workers can do about itOne of the many disadvantages of the present situation is that we have to endure endless television footage of President Bush. Bush has a look on his face that is usually interpreted as a sign of distress at what happened on 11 September. It’s only after you’ve seen him again and again that you realise that the look does not represent distress at all. What it represents is panic – panic that he will not be able to summon up a word which even remotely approximates to the message he wishes to convey.So, for instance, in his first appearance after the atrocity in New York he referred to the ‘cowardly acts’ of the terrorists. Someone must have taken him on one side and said, ‘Well, you know, George, the people who hijacked the airliners are all dead by their own hand. You can call them lots of things, but you can’t really call them cowards.’ So ‘cowards’ came down to ‘folks’, and then, in one desperate moment, ‘evildoers’.This same uncertainty and vacillation seemed to paralyse the reaction to the bombings in New York, so that for a moment it was possible to hope that somewhere in the bowels of the US government there might be some grain of sanity. All those hopes were a bit silly, really. Having an imbecile for a president is a little embarrassing for the military-industrial complex that governs the US.So now we are at war, apparently, to root out the horror of New York. I would define that horror as reckless bombing without warning which leads to the mass murder of innocent people. As a result, every night on the television there are the familiar pictures of explosions in the night air, superannuated generals discussing tactics, endless talk about precision bombing, targeted terrorists, humanitarian missions, international law. And already we can see what it all means – reckless bombing without warning which leads to the mass murder of innocent people.There is another feature of this war that is also familiar – the awful unanimity of people who call themselves our representatives. The day after the hot war broke out in Afghanistan, lots of speeches were made by MPs of all parties. Not a single voice was raised against the waging of war by Britain, the US and other western countries against the poorest country on earth. Tony Blair can go on saying until he is strangled in his own rhetoric that we are not waging war on the Afghan people, but all the brilliant brains among his advisers cannot explain how you drop bombs on Afghan cities without killing Afghan people. He can talk about humanitarian aid, but cannot explain how the dropping of food rations can feed 7 million starving people, many of them rushing desperately away from their homes to avoid the bombs. George Monbiot, one of the few journalists to keep his head, reckoned that, even if all the rations dropped by the bombers get to starving people, they will feed a quarter of them for half a day.Not a single voice was raised in parliament against the declaration of war. There was only one rude noise, and it came from Paul Marsden, the Labour MP for Shrewsbury. Mr Marsden, asked on a point of order if perhaps there might be a vote. ‘There is’, he said, ‘growing disquiet that for the third time parliament has been recalled, yet honourable members have been denied a vote on this war. Can you confirm to me that there will be no vote?’ Opposition to these attacks goes deepHere is the reply of Mr Speaker, the guardian of the cradle of British democracy: ‘It seems as though the honourable gentleman is getting advice already. Procedural advice is best given privately at the chair. If the honourable gentleman wishes to come to the chair I will give him some private advice.’ The Speaker’s answer was greeted with howls of mirth from the honourable members, delighted that a little known backbencher making such an impertinent suggestion should be so firmly put in his place. The result is that British forces have gone to a war in a far off country for which there is precious little justification, and their and our representatives are not even allowed a vote on the matter.This unanimity does not reflect what is going on in the country at large. The opposition to these attacks goes very deep – far deeper than any of the government ministers imagine." }
{ "content": "Some say, what is the alternative? The New York massacre was a terrible event and we are asked, well, what would you do? Would you appease the terrorists – leave the field open to them? Our reply is no, not at all. We can suggest to Bush, Blair and all the rest of them a whole series of policies that, we guarantee, would do immeasurably more to stop terrorists than bombing the countries in which they live. First, cut off your aid to the state of Israel and its merciless persecution of the Palestinian people. Stop grovelling to the war criminal Sharon. Stop shaking his bloodstained hand. Do all in your power to stop Mr Putin and his KGB in Russia from slaughtering and torturing the people of Chechnya. For that matter, stop propping up dictatorships in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and south Asia. Above all, instead of talking yet again about a New World Order, set about dismantling economic and social priorities which divide the world – yes, even our own world here in Britain and in the US – into classes: grossly rich minorities in power selling each other the weapons of mass destruction so that they can more ruthlessly control and punish the landless, unarmed masses of the dispossessed. These are policies that hold out some hope of subverting terrorism. They are the exact opposite of the policies pursued by our government. There is a most vital and urgent need to turn the hearts and minds of the British people against individual terrorism of the type that bombed New York and state terrorism of the type that is bombing Afghanistan.Ten years ago, as the bombs started to rain down on Baghdad, John Pilger and I wrote a letter to the Guardian asking anyone who worked in the media and shared our disgust at the war to come and talk to us in Conway Hall. Some 500 people turned up that night, and there and then we formed Media Workers Against the War. Our aims were simple – in general to oppose the war by every means at our disposal, and in particular to do so in the media. That war only lasted a few weeks, but in that time we set up groups in many newspaper and television offices – groups which met, discussed and challenged the gung-ho bombast of the proprietors. We got an office. We published a bulletin, and engaged the enthusiastic help of hundreds of journalists up and down the country.The situation today is far more intense than it was ten years ago. People are at once far more anxious and far more angry. Anti-war groups are forming all over the country. Media Workers Against the War will be part of a grand alliance of everyone against this war. It needs to be more effective, more powerful than before. Everyone here with even the remotest connection with the media should sign up here and now. We can and must challenge the proprietors and the government ministers for mass support, and force them by the sheer weight of public pressure to get their bombs and missiles out of Afghanistan, and concentrate on economic and social policies that will lead to a world free from capitalist exploitation and free from the racialism, barbarism and terrorism on which it feeds.This article is based on Paul Foot’s speech at the huge Media Workers Against the War meeting in London last month. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootOrwell CentenaryThe Cold War Controversy(July 2003)From Socialist Review, No.276, July 2003, p.10-11.Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.Downloaded from the new Socialist Review ArchiveMarked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today. Paul Foot examines why much of the left rejects Orwell.As the Private Eye columnist Glenda Slagg might ask, ‘George Orwell? Arncha sick of him?’ As the hundredth anniversary of his birth – 25 June 1903 – comes and goes the literary media appear to have taken leave of their senses. Three more full-scale biographies have been produced to enlarge an already enormous pile. Orwell’s rather mediocre love life fills the gossip columns and the Guardian devotes its front page and the main piece in its weekly Review to an old story, first published (in the Guardian) seven years ago, about how Orwell gave a woman he fancied who worked for the secret service a list of names of people he suspected of being ‘fellow-travellers’ or Communist agents.We socialists have a right to be bemused. What is the truth about this remarkable writer? Is he not, obviously, a creature of the right, if not the far right? Was he not feted by the US imperialist establishment for at least three decades? Were not his famous satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, required reading for the sons and daughters of imperialist America and Europe during all the long period of the Cold War? Even before that, was he not savagely attacked as a snob and a dilettante by Harry Pollitt in the Daily Worker in 1936? Was he not an Old Etonian and former police officer in Burma who never forsook that sad upbringing? Were not some of his reflections on the English people during the war nothing but fatuous expressions of jingoism? Is the grass really greener in England than anywhere else, as he claimed? Was he not an outright homophobe? Was the odious epithet ‘pansy’ one of his favourites when describing the socialist poets – Auden, Spender, Isherwood, etc – of the 1930s? Were not his attitudes towards women downright chauvinist? Were not his novels (aside from the satires) relatively third rate, lacking in any real understanding or appreciation of the human spirit? Above all, was he not a splitter, if not even a Franco agent, in the Spanish Civil War as well as the century’s most ardent opponent of the Russian Revolution and all that flowed from it, and did not his writing give the lie direct to all the socialists of his generation and the next who defended the revolution and its leaders?Such is the indictment against Orwell which was the common view on the left for a generation, and was upheld in the 1950s by the New Left Review essays in Out of Apathy, and is still sustained by the Stalinist remnant in the British left. Much of the indictment is hard if not impossible to answer. But almost every part of it is balanced by a rather different picture of George Orwell’s life and works. How does the Pollitt picture of the reactionary snob fit the tramp and downmarket waiter who forsook all worldly wealth to put together the astonishing account of desperate poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) or The Road to Wigan Pier (1936)? How does the image of the splitter fit the young man who went to Spain to kill fascists where the only thing he managed to split was his own throat, shot through by a fascist bullet? How does his alleged support for McCarthyism and the Cold War fit his continued and vehement assertions that he had no truck with either? How does his distaste for the Russian Revolution fit his (admittedly occasional, but nevertheless emphatic) admiration for Lenin? StalinismThe key to the answers to all these questions (and to the almost paranoid hostility to him by Stalinists of all ages including this one) is that George Orwell was the earliest and most eloquent British writer to call himself a revolutionary socialist and yet denounce the influence and propaganda of the most powerful force to describe itself as socialist – Stalinism. As he admitted himself, he showed little or no interest in the Russian Revolution when it happened when he was 14. He wrote almost nothing on the subject until he went to Spain in 1936. In Barcelona he was bowled over by the workers’ revolution there. The first few pages of his book Homage to Catalonia, where the ‘working class was in the saddle’, are still one of the finest pieces of inspirational revolutionary writing. On the front, alongside Spanish and British fellow-fighters, he observed with mounting horror the crushing of that revolutionary fervour by agents of the Russian government. Such people, he deduced, were not socialists at all but ruthless envoys of a ‘mean state capitalism with the grab motive left intact’. He watched while his comrades were hauled off one by one to be questioned, tortured and in one case murdered by the Stalinist secret police. His fury at this process lasted for the rest of his short life. With it came an understanding, utterly at odds with conventional left wing thinking at the time, that any politics that emerged from Stalinists was no more or less than propaganda for the Russian government, and therefore was as likely as not to be reactionary and anti-socialist.On his return from Spain he joined the ILP – the only mainstream organisation opposed to the war, but as the fascist armies lined up for invasion of Britain he swung right over. Yet even his most nationalistic expressions were tempered with a yearning for the sort of democratic and socialist revolution he had seen in Spain. The war could not be won, he reckoned, wrongly, without such a revolution in Britain. And among the enemies of such a revolution were the Communists, who campaigned for Tories and imperialists in by-elections." }
{ "content": "Orwell got a job with Tribune where he wrote a weekly column full of unorthodoxy. All the staff there were supporters of Zionism, but not Orwell. He opposed it for the effect it would have on the people living in Palestine, and of course was denounced then and later for being anti-Semitic. His satire Animal Farm was equivocal about the revolution that starts it. ‘Old Major’, the revolutionary pig who inspires it, is not Lenin, but neither is he or the revolution reactionary. Orwell never set out his views on the familiar question, ‘Did Lenin lead to Stalin?’ On one occasion he thought ‘yes’; on another he agreed that Lenin would have opposed the Stalinist agenda. Either way, his support for the idea of revolution lasted right until the end of his life, when he finally surrendered to Cold War gloom and tuberculosis.Socialists who are (as I have been) inspired by Orwell’s outspoken fervour and his clear writing style, but puzzled by the questions he never answered would be better off reading John Newsinger’s Orwell’s Politics than any of the interminable biographies now available. John shows how a proper appreciation of Orwell’s work owes a lot to the late Peter Sedgwick, a founder of the International Socialists, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. Sedgwick’s article in International Socialism (another one was promised but it never materialised) was the first real effort on the left to explain the attraction, the inspiration and the contradictions in Orwell’s work. For many of us socialists at the time, the article was an intellectual liberation. It led in my case to further reading and enjoyment of Orwell’s works, and a much greater understanding of the revolutionary inspiration and reactionary contradictions in them. One of Orwell’s many free speech campaigns was for the publication of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, a book eventually published in the early 1960s, beautifully translated by Peter Sedgwick. Like Orwell, Serge was part of a submerged tradition of anti-Stalinist socialist and revolutionary thought, a tradition that the combined obfuscation from both sides of the Cold War cannot suppress forever. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootRevolutionary necrophilia(1 June 1991)From Socialist Worker, 1 June 1991.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 25–26.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The Observer has decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) with a lecture for children.Nothing in itself could be more appropriate. From the moment when he first sailed for America in 1768 (at the ripe old age of 39), Thomas Paine dedicated himself to the education of children, and even founded one of the first girls’ schools in history.Who is to give this historic lecture in honour of this great man? The Observer has strained every muscle to get it right. It has come down in favour of someone very famous: the Princess Royal, Princess Anne.No doubt some fatuous fool at the Observer felt that the occasion would be better acclaimed if it was graced by so famous a dignitary. But has anyone at the Observer even read a word of Tom Paine’s? For that matter, has Princess Anne, who, for some astonishing reason, has accepted the invitation?Thomas Paine arrived in America in the nick of time to take part in the great revolutionary agitation which was to end with the British being finally deposed as the imperialist government of America.Paine fanned the embers of revolt with his tough, translucent prose. When the War of Independence – dubbed by Paine the American Revolution – finally broke out, he sustained the morale of Washington’s flagging army with his Crisis Papers.Their central theme was that the British had no business to rule the American states, and that the British king, George III, had no right to rule anywhere, especially not in Britain. FuriousPaine’s furious onslaught on the British monarchy (and on monarchy in general) made the rebel armies determined that they would for all time banish the name and concept of king from the United States of America – a resolution which has been sustained ever since.Thomas Paine was honoured by the victorious armies and the new Republican government, but he soon grew tired of honours, and returned to his native Britain. There he threw himself into the furious arguments that followed the French Revolution.His Rights of Man was an answer to Edmund Burke, who had written a poisonous attack on the revolution. At the centre of Burke’s argument was the preservation of the monarchy. The Rights of Man replied with a furious denunciation of monarchy.Hereditary success is a burlesque upon monarchy. It puts it in the most ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot may fill. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a king requires only the animal figures of a man, a sort of breathing automaton. This sort of superstition may last a few years more, but it cannot resist the awakened reason and interest of man.Alas, apparently it can. For 200 years later we still have to put up with the same posturing figures whom Thomas Paine reviled in almost everything he wrote.Paine was exiled from Britain and sentenced to death in his absence. It became a capital crime after 1792 to read the Rights of Man. He died in 1806, despised, forgotten and hated.What fun he would have had with the editor of the Observer and all his prigs and courtiers, bowing and scraping before this latest representative of the Hanoverian dynasty!And how he would have appreciated and lambasted the latest example of the old English disease, revolutionary necrophilia – the love and worship of revolutionaries long after they are safely dead. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootJudges’ ruling(December 1995)From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 192, December 1995, p. 7.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.Every humiliation for the government is welcome, and it is hard not to rejoice at the stream of judicial decisions from the high court denouncing ministers, especially home secretary Michael Howard. Howard incurred the wrath of the Lord Chief Justice when, without consulting the judges, he arbitrarily increased prison sentences and cut back on remission. The judges insist that Howard’s decisions interfere with what they call the independence of the judiciary. Since the spat, the judges seem to have gone out of their way to come down hard against the home secretary.No one disputes that it is right and often necessary for the victims of arbitrary behaviour by the government or injustice in the courts to challenge the authorities through the legal system. Such challenges sometimes, though rarely, bring relief to people who have been badly treated or wrongly imprisoned. But it would be wrong to conclude from such individual victories that the judges are preferable to elected politicians. The fact that the elected politician nowadays is usually the odious Michael Howard should not confuse anyone into imagining that the high court of the judicature is a source of common sense, or (as it often styles itself) a bastion of liberty against the authoritarian behaviour of governments.The record of the last two periods of Labour government proves the opposite. In 1967, for instance, the judges upheld a decision over schools in Enfield which effectively knocked back the Labour government’s programme to turn grammar schools into comprehensive schools. In 1976, the judges did very much the same over schools in Tameside, Greater Manchester. Much more serious were a series of judicial decisions in the 1970s which laid the foundation for the anti union laws in the 1980s. A decision by the post office workers’ union to stage a one day strike in support of those oppressed by apartheid in South Africa was set aside as illegal by the judges; as were several other actions relating to the strike against the notorious management at Grunwick in north London.Under the Tories, the judges have been viciously opposed to trade unions and Labour councils. Many of the decisions to sequester the miners’ union funds during the great strike of 1984–85 were extremely suspect, even in Tory law. When, partly in protest against Murdoch’s union busting at Wapping, Labour controlled Derbyshire County Council decided by democratic vote to move its advertising for teachers away from the Murdoch owned Times Education Supplement to The Guardian, the Tories took the case to the High Court where the judges denounced it as contrary to natural justice and ordered the people’s money to be poured back into Murdoch’s coffers. This outrageous decision, wholly unsustainable by any rational legal process, could not be explained in any other terms but sheer class prejudice.The judges are not elected and they will act in just as a undemocratic and draconian way under a future Labour government. They are drawn from a narrow and secluded band of barristers, the enormous majority of whom come from ruling class backgrounds and who have never at any stage been even marginally independent from the class from which they come. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootDefiant laughter(16 October 1994)From Socialist Worker, 16 October 1994.Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 60–61.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.In the prevailing gloom one or two lights shine out brightly. One of them is Ken Loach. Another is Ricky Tomlinson.The other day Ken was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show. Bragg’s light does not shine at all. He is one of the new millionaires, after cashing in on the share options in London Weekend Television which were granted by the directors and ‘personalities’ to each other with the single purpose of making each other rich.Still, Bragg gave up a lot of his programme to Ken Loach, whose film about the miners’ strike he had once censored. Explaining the censorship, Bragg said he had wanted ‘art’ not politics. He accused Ken Loach of having a ‘political agenda’.‘Yes’, came the reply, modest but firm. ‘I am not ducking that at all.’‘What do you mean?’ asked Bragg, who is still a strong supporter of the Labour Party.‘I mean’, said Ken Loach, ‘that the future lies in common ownership and democratic control of the society by the people who work in it.’Bragg shut up and went on to discuss art. He did not comment on the courage and strength of a film-maker who has dedicated all his huge talent to what he believes in. Special geniusKen made films to expose the world we live in – in particular Cathy Come Home, a classic about homelessness.But his special genius was to capture the reality of working class life – the pathos and anger which lies behind the bare political anger. He went on making these films as more and more of his formerly radical friends and colleagues fell away into glamour and success.In the early 1980s he was horrified by the trade union leaders’ surrender to the Thatcher onslaught. His four programmes, Questions of Leadership, have been banned ever since they were made by every television channel.The ban held up Ken’s film-making for half a decade, but he never flinched from his insistence that there should be no political censorship – especially in the name of ‘art’.Bragg asked him about his new film Raining Stones and chided him about the sentimental ‘happy ending’ to the film.Ken’s reply was that what needs stressing now is not just the wretchedness of working class life, not just the constant failures and dashing of hopes, but the resilience. If there were unhappy endings to his films when we were winning, there should be happy endings when we are losing, to remind us of our strength and potential.Ken Loach has always used a small group of actors whom he trusts and who think the same way he does. I’m not sure when he stumbled on Ricky Tomlinson, but it was a glorious meeting. Ricky’s uproarious defiant performance in Ken’s film about the building trade in London, Riff Raff, was magnificent.I haven’t seen Raining Stones yet, but the clips are all of Ricky Tomlinson defying and laughing. I have no doubt that the most exhilarating journalistic assignment I ever had was to travel at five in the morning to Leicester in the summer of 1975 to welcome Ricky Tomlinson as he came out of prison.He had got two years after a prosecution inspired and masterminded by the McAlpine family for holding together the 1972 building workers’ strike in Shropshire and North Wales. When Ricky came out of the prison he was laughing. His message to the reporters was that even prison could be defied.It was a great performance, but he was not acting. And, in partnership with Ken Loach, he still isn’t. Top of the pageLast updated on 30 June 2014" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootMarx alive in Clerkenwell(16 December 1995)From Socialist Worker, No. 1473, 16 December 1995, p. 11.Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.THERE’S AN old Fleet Street saying that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and this column proves it. Not long ago I went round to see Fred Silberman.Fred is one of that large band of older people who have been socialists all their lives and whose commitment did not waver when the Soviet Union collapsed.In mid-life he abandoned a prosperous business for full time work in the labour movement.Fred talks to me about the Marx Memorial Library, of which he is treasurer. He thinks, quite rightly, that not enough Marxists understand the value of the library, support it or use it.When I worked at the Daily Mirror, I often walked over to Clerkenwell Green to prepare a talk in the Marx Memorial Library. It was a friendly, warm place to work in, but its real value was the extraordinary range of its books, pamphlets and newspapers of the movement.For instance, when I was doing some work on A.J. Cook, the Arthur Scargill of the 1920s, I gobbled up whole volumes of the Sunday Worker. This was a brave attempt by the Communist Party in the mid-1920s to produce a popular and broad based newspaper without abandoning socialist commitment.The library was opened a few weeks after Hitler stormed to power in Germany in 1933. It was at the centre of the cultural flowering of the British left in the middle and late 1930s. Striking featureThere are pictures and even recordings of some of the great socialist personalities of the time – Ralph Fox, who died on the battlefield in Spain, J.D. Bernal, Paul Robeson.There is a most moving description by Bill Alexander of the awful imprisonment and torture of British volunteers to the International Brigade in Spain. He attributes the survival of many of the prisoners to intellectual and political discussions traceable to the newly formed library at Clerkenwell Green.The library’s most striking feature is the Lenin room where Lenin worked for a year on his exiled revolutionary paper Iskra.The real treasure is the 27,000 books, all related to the working class movement. There are specialist sections on the Spanish Civil War, the Chartists, and the British Communist Party. It costs only £6 a year (that’s 12p a week) to join.Membership gives you access to the library and its research room (if you can find a seat) and the right to take out three books at a time. It’s open every weekday afternoon (except Friday) and Saturday morning. The librarian is Tish Newland, and the address is 37a Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R ODD.Of course, SWP members can easily find fault with the library. It was founded, and has been run consistently ever since, by members of the Communist Party.The very sudden collapse of the CP, both as a purveyor of Marxism and as an active force for change in British politics, is sadly reflected in the choice of books.The tradition of dissent from Stalinism, for instance, and the works of Leon Trotsky and his ideological descendants are lamentably under-represented. There is little sign of any urgency to correct these glaring shortcomings.But it would be a grave mistake for any socialist to dismiss the Marx Memorial Library for such reasons. For one thing, the left in general is far too weak to indulge in sectarian boycotts.For another, much more important, the library is far too rich a resource to be ignored by any socialist. Books are the life blood of our movement, and there is no collection of relevant books anywhere in Britain which even remotely compares with that of the Marx Memorial Library.After a delicious lunch prepared by Fred I joined again and promised to prostitute my journalistic independence by writing this piece. As I say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Top of the pageLast updated on 2 November 2019" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHaunted by the Future(March 2001)From Arts Review, Socialist Review, No.250, March 2001, p.26.Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Henry IV Parts I and IIby William ShakespeareBarbican Theatre, LondonThe sons and daughters of the rich and famous often live a ‘wild’ life in their youth in which they eat and drink (and even engage in more dangerous pleasures) to excess. Such dalliance causes their parents much distress, but is usually forgiven when the wayward youngsters return to the fold. This is the theme of Shakespeare’s plays about Henry Bolingbroke, who in 1399 became Henry IV, and his son Harry, who in 1413 became Henry V and later won the Battle of Agincourt. Henry IV was weighed down with guilt and self pity about the way, in the best tradition of a Middle Ages English monarch, he had tricked and murdered his predecessor, Richard II. But in Henry IV Part I he is haunted more by the future than the past. His young son has fallen in with ‘bad company’ in the shape of the jovial and irresistible old knight Sir Jack Falstaff, and a band of friendly rogues and ‘loose women’ in Eastcheap. So deeply has the young prince fallen for this jolly crowd that the king and his advisers fear for the future.For Henry IV the past with all its lies and hypocrisies, and the present with the threats of rebellion from Wales and the north, are bad enough. But the future, with its rightful heir to the throne poisoned by strong drink, sex, subversive jokes and pranks, is even worse. Moreover, mere rebuke will not restore the young prince to the Christian and military role cut out for him. A mixture of paternal argument, challenge and adventure holds out the only hope for his salvation.William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of all time, spotted the dramatic potential in this story, not least the clash of hypocrisies between the Falstaff crowd on the one hand, with its relatively harmless inanities, and the menacing deceit, hypocrisy and violence represented by the king and his adversaries. The king fears young Harry Hotspur from Northumberland, but at the same time wishes that the young man’s bravery in the field and rashness in council were qualities he could recognise in his own son and heir.Many socialists (though not Karl Marx, who understood and enjoyed Shakespeare as well as anyone else these last 400 years) like to pretend that the playwright held similar views to their own.Shakespeare was not a revolutionary – if anything the opposite. But his keen ear picked up the revolutionary rumblings of his own times (the Henry IV plays were written in 1598).Shakespeare the man probably wanted to see the wastrel Harry freed from the influence of Falstaff and properly equipped to become a conquering English king. But Shakespeare the playwright observed the prince’s dilemma – caught between the anti-political satire of Fat Old Jack and the insufferable duplicities of the court. He resolved the dilemma by putting the prince back where he belonged, but the resulting rejection of Falstaff at the end of the second play (‘I know thee not, old man’) is one of the most moving moments in all literature.The Henry IV plays are expertly represented at the Barbican in the latest Royal Shakespeare Company production. Desmond Barrit fashions a wonderful Falstaff, and the whole production moves at great pace. No one overacts. If you can only get to one play, choose Part I, where the drama is more sustained and more consistent, and in which Hotspur delivers the delicious riposte to the garrulous Welsh general Kinnock – excuse me, Glendower:Glendower: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’Hotspur: ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man,But will they come when you do call for them?’Both plays throb with the turbulence of the times and the revolutionary consequences. The old king prays to what he hopes is his redeemer:‘Oh God! That one might read the book of fate,And see the revolution of the timesMake mountains level.’As he dies, he begs his son to shy away from interminable civil wars and passes on a message that appears to have been picked up, not just by Henry V, but also by Messrs Bush and Blair.‘Therefore, my Harry,Be it thy course to busy giddy mindsWith foreign quarrels.’ Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Sean Geraghty & Paul FootPress Barons’ quest for profitsthreatens jobs in Fleet Street(5 June 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 125, 5 June 1969, p. 2.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Printworkers must break down old inter-union divisions and unite as bosses look to the regions for cheaper labour to solve their problemsTHE PROTEST march against anti-trade union legislation in London on May 1st was predominantly a printers’ march.At least nine-tenths of the workers on the march came from Fleet Street and the neighbouring newspaper streets and the roll call of the organisations represented sounded like newsboys’ patter.Print and clerical workers from almost all the national newspapers were demonstrating in vast numbers for the first time since the 1930s.To some extent this represented no more than loyalty to the strike calls of branches and chapels. Yet the enthusiasm of the response was due mainly to the profound unease which Fleet Street workers feel about their future.The complacency and confidence of the last 15 years have vanished. “Jobbing” opportunities, big “killings” in overtime and part time work are now difficult to come by. And there has been a sharp increase in the panic jumping around from house to house which prefaces newspaper closures. Vast companiesThe reason for all this is written in the profit figures for the five vast companies which control 90 per cent of the nation’s press. This year, the press, together with most other industries, will show a handsome profit (for this incidentally, they can thank the government which, in a desperate and futile attempt to “win” the press to Labour, decided that newspapers were a manufacturing industry and as such were eligible for SET refund).But the apparently huge profits disguise a more crucial development. The rate of profits increase is nothing like as high as the rate of increase in turnover or in capital investment.As the big combines produce more and more pap to titillate and bewilder the public, they find that they cannot show the return on profit which they regarded as their “right” in the fine, fat days of the 1950s.In fat years, the proprietors are prepared to maintain lossmaking newspapers to soak up some of their tax liability and to meet some of the overheads of the more profitable papers.But in the lean years, when competition ripens, they will close their loss-makers down. The closure habit is catching, and the newspapers close down like falling dominoes.At the top of this rickety structure is the Sun, whose circulation still drops, though losses have been cut by drastic “reorganisation”, accepted by the unions.The Sun is produced and printed with the People, in profitable property in Long Acre. The IPC bosses would dearly like to close the Sun, move the People to other presses and sell the property to cover the Sun’s losses for the last five years.Unhappily for Hugh Cudlipp and co. there are at present no other presses available for the People, so the Sun may teeter on for a few more months.But Mr. Robert Maxwell’s offer to “buy” the Sun may offer the IPC a heaven-sent opportunity to get rid of their cross.Maxwell, incidentally, wants to run a Labour paper, and therefore, logically, he plansto sack a third of the work force and enter into an “arrangement” with the trade unions to cut wages, raise hours and lower standards under threat of total closure.The Daily Mail and the Daily Sketch, both owned by Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers, are both making losses.Associated Newspapers, of course, make a fat profit, but this comes from their other assets, which include several profitable docks and wharves in the Port of London. Drastic natureIn the other combines one profitable newspaper subsidises another which is much less profitable. In all these cases, rationalisation of a drastic nature is being seriously discussed.In Beaverbrook’s Express, there is talk of closing down the London Evening Standard building, merging the production process of both papers and “reorganising” hundreds out of their jobs.Lord Thomson, as soon as his commitments to print the Observer in Printing House Square and the Guardian at Grays Inn Road are fulfilled, plans to move the Times intoThomson House and establish what he once called “a cool climate” for the Observer and the Guardian.Such moves and climates will not take place without a vigorous effort by Thomson to save some of his investment costs by redundancy and cuts in bonuses on the shop floor.But behind all these obvious dangers looms the threat of “regionalisation”. Two years ago, the Daily Mirror started printing a separate edition in Belfast on web-offset, with splashes of colour.The edition has been a glorious success for the bosses. Daily circulation, which extends to parts of Scotland and Eire, is in the region of 750,000. More important, the labour costs compared with a similar effort in England are absurdly small, for the simple reason that less workers are employed for less money.Regionalisation means setting up 15 or 20 operations similar to Belfast in England and Scotland and introducing mass cuts in labour costs in each new regional centre.The added advantage for the bosses of such regionalisation is the big potential in local advertising which is denied the national papers. As the regional editions of the nationals soak up the local advertising, there will be aseries of closures of local daily papers, some of which, notably the Glasgow Herald and the Northern Echo, are already unprofitable.But the real advantage for the bosses lies in the hope that they will once and for all escape the firm grip in which the print unions have held them for the last 15 years. Newspaper profits are singularly susceptible to unofficial strike action and in the fat years the bosses have been happier to satisfy demands rather than confront the unions. Advance plansSuch \"generosity\" is ebbing. And although the bosses are terrified of the huge investment and the class confrontation involved, “regionalisation” will occupy more and more of their advance plans." }
{ "content": "The danger for the print workers is that they will meet this challenge on the defensive, with compromises “taking into account” the profitability of this paper or that, or the rate of unemployment in different regions, or the maintenance of craft traditionsUnion sectarianism is a real and particular threat in the printing industry where the National Graphical Association boasts control of the machines in almost all the major newspapers and theSociety of Graphical and Allied Trades boasts the strength of greater numbers and where both unions are easily sidetracked into inter-union squabbles.By contrast, the success of the Liaison Committee at Odhams, where the Sun and People are printed, in countering the traditional animosity between maintenance trades show how much can be achieved by worker cooperation.If the print workers are to avoid serious defeats and redundancies in the near future they will have to organise now to turn the fight outwards against the bosses:To demand cast-iron no-redundancy guarantees; To form more liaison committees in the printing houses; To put real life into the Federated Chapels; To refuse to negotiate under threat or blackmail; And to demonstrate in defence of these demands that they are capable of far more solidarity and militancy than the reactionary and disreputable newspaper proprietors can muster. Sean Geraghty, who writes in his personal capacity, is secretary of Odhams Press Liaison Committee. Paul Foot is a member of the National Union of Journalists. Top of the pageLast updated on 13 January 2021" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHouse of cards(January 1999)Editorial, Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.226, January 1999, p.3.Copyright © 1999 Socialist Review.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.At a time of what seemed like unrelieved gloom, the political scene at Xmas was suddenly bathed in bright light. All of a sudden, without warning, a central pillar of New Labour turned into dust and blew away.Peter Mandelson is New Labour in essence. His book, The Blair Revolution, which he wrote with one of the founders of the late unlamented SDP, Roger Liddle, argued that a New Labour government could provide social justice without interfering with the free flow of capitalism. The book is full of familiar cliches about the irrelevance of public ownership, the importance of reducing the influence of trade unions and the need to get to grips with outdated universal benefits. On page 127, the authors address ‘one of the greatest sources of unfairness’ – ‘the different prospects of couples setting off in life with a flying financial start from their parents and grandparents and those who have no such backing’. This unfairness inspires Mandelson and Liddle to one of the more radical proposals. Poor couples looking for housing should, they say, get a £5,000 sub from the government to help them with their mortgage. Where will the money come from? Why, from the inheritance taxes the Tories were threatening to abolish.The authors are quick to reassure conservative critics that the mortgage bonus would only be available to people whose families could not afford it. It would not have been available, for instance, to Peter Mandelson, who was racked by house hunting problems at almost exactly the same time as he was writing his insipid little book. He was living in a perfectly presentable des res in Clerkenwell, with a pleasant three storey retreat in his constituency, Hartlepool. He was not satisfied, however. He was upwardly mobile. His bad years, when John Smith led the Labour Party, were over. John Smith, an old fashioned right wing social democrat, loathed Mandelson. He regarded him as ‘all froth and public relations’ and banished him from the inner circle to which he had been promoted by Neil Kinnock.Smith’s death in 1994 and his replacement by Tony Blair brought Mandelson scurrying back into Labour’s ruling clique. Blair made a beeline for the rich, and recognised Mandelson’s supreme quality – flattery. Mandelson is, above all else, a courtier, who loves the company of the rich and knows how to flatter them. The rich are always inclined to interpret flattery as perspicacity. Before long, with Blair’s seal of approval on his forehead, Mandelson was flattering his way into the richest boardrooms in the land. The military top brass loved him. He even made friends with the Prince of Wales and his mistress. But his favourites of all the rich and famous were the media barons.He personally persuaded Tony Blair that Rupert Murdoch was a profound political thinker whose papers needed to be courted. Murdoch’s daughter and most likely successor became a close friend of Mandelson. Clive (Lord) Hollick (Express, Anglia TV etc.) worked with Mandelson in Labour’s election unit at Millbank. John Birt, director general of the BBC, was Mandelson’s old buddy at London Weekend Television. How could this high flying courtier hope to keep up with all these rich and powerful friends from a dowdy flat in run down Clerkenwell? Something much grander was needed.His greedy eyes turned to Notting Hill where his friend, the millionaire writer Robert Harris, entertained so lavishly, and where the former SDP leader Sir Ian Wrigglesworth showed off all the fruits of political compromise. A lovely house next to Wrigglesworth’s was for sale, for a little matter of half a million quid. Poor Peter could not begin to raise that much. His salary as a backbencher was a mere £40,000. His flat, already mortgaged, would be lucky to bring in a hundred grand. The Britannia Building Society would only lend him a maximum of £150,000. True, his mother lived in a handsome house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, but even Peter Mandelson could hardly set light to New Labour’s great crusade by evicting his mother and selling her house. Even his own proposal – for a £5,000 housing ‘start’ – would not have helped him.In desperation Peter turned to the only really rich man he knew on the Labour backbenches, Robert Maxwell’s former business colleague and Labour MP for Coventry, Geoffrey Robinson. Robinson happily lent his new young friend £373,000, happily rolled up the interest and happily forgot to insist when, or even if, the loan should be repaid. Hey presto! As soon as Labour won the election, Robinson, an archetypal mediocrity, soared into the government with the grand title, which was not meant to be satirical, of Paymaster General.When the loan was exposed just before Xmas, the Tory press was bewildered. All hailed Mandelson as an employers’ friend, an enemy of trade unions, an opponent of socialism and a moderniser. But few could resist a crack at the old enemy. The result was that Mandelson was assaulted for trivia. Acres of space were given over to phoney indignation about his cheating the mortgage company. But most sensible people cheat their mortgage company. Similarly, the Tory Party in parliament wriggled and jiggled as they tried to spot a ‘conflict of interest’ between Mandelson as secretary of state at the DTI and a two bit DTI inquiry into some of Robinson’s business deals." }
{ "content": "All of this missed the point, which was hit at once and in a single sentence by a constituent of Mandelson’s who muttered, ‘I wish I could find someone to lend me £370,000.’ The point was the sheer scale of the money lent, and the ludicrous lifestyle of people who lend and borrow that kind of sum. The man who proclaims the ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice’ of New Labour, who suggests a £5,000 sub for young couples looking for a new home, is at the same time borrowing a sum equivalent to 15 years of the average worker’s total earnings just to buy a house.The huge hoax which is New Labour was suddenly and brilliantly exposed. Nothing works on the public mind more than such a blatant example of personal greed. The whole strategy of ‘softening’ Labour’s image in order to win elections was exposed as a means to propel its soft image makers into the salons of the rich.Like so many marvellous moments, however, the exquisite delight in the fall of Mandelson may be short lived. Many people who put some faith and trust in New Labour may be plunged into despair. ‘They all do it’ – ‘They are all as bad as one another’ – ‘All politicians and politics are rotten to the core’ – these are all common reactions which have in the past turned Labour voters back to the Tories, or pushed them even further to the right. On its own, triumphalist rejoicing at Mandelson’s fall may irritate many Labour voters into rejecting politics altogether.On the other hand, the sudden vulnerability of New Labour, as its great white hope lies bleeding on the wayside, opens out all sorts of opportunities for setting out a socialist alternative. The New Labour road is plainly blocked. The past failures of Old Labour are partly responsible for the blocking. A new road to socialism, from the bottom up, through the skills, energies and solidarity of the people who produce the wealth, is wide open. Top of the pageLast updated on 27.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootToussaint L’Ouverture andthe great Haitian slave revolt(24 January 2004)From Socialist Worker, No.1885, 24 January 2004.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.This month saw the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Caribbean republic of Haiti after a revolutionary uprising against slavery.Who abolished slavery? Children are taught in school that the Tory MP and factory owner William Wilberforce did in the 19th century. Does Wilberforce deserve all the credit? To find out we can start with another question – who discovered America?Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, though several hundred thousand people living there at the time discovered it before him. He also “discovered” Hispaniola, the largest island in what later became known as the West Indies, with around a million inhabitants.Columbus bequeathed the island to the Spanish Empire, which within 250 years managed to exterminate the entire native population. The exterminators, to continue their trade, came to rely increasingly on slaves taken from Africa to work their plantations.By 1789 Hispaniola had been divided and renamed. The eastern half, Santo Domingo, destitute and desolate, was still governed from Spain. The western half, St Domingue, was run by France. It was heavily populated.In 1789 there were 30,000 whites in St Domingue, 40,000 mulattos of mixed race, and half a million black African slaves.St Domingue is now known as Haiti, and is one of the poorest places on earth. In 1789 St Domingue was the richest place on earth, producing sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo and tobacco. The value of its exports made up two thirds of the gross national produce of all France. The whole of this vast surplus was entirely dependent on slave labour.The slaves were allowed no education, no independent thought, no rights. This was a savage, brutalised society, held together by fear and sadism.The French Revolution which began in 1789 started to change all this. Many of the people who took office in the early stages of the revolution were merchants who hated slavery in principle, but benefited from it in practice.So the revolutionary French Assembly made a compromise. It decreed that all of the 500,000 black slaves must stay slaves. French citizenship was extended to any mulattos who could show that their father and mother were born in France – just 400 people.No one was satisfied. It infuriated the planters, patronised the mulattos and ignored the slaves. But the concessions opened a chink of light, paving the way to the great revolt which broke out in St Domingue on 14 August 1791.In a great wave of savagery, slaves slaughtered their masters and burnt their mansions – and were slaughtered in return. By the end of the year a huge slave army had established itself.It was joined by a coachman called Toussaint. Unlike almost all his fellow slaves he could read and write. Very quickly he became the acknowledged leader of the slave army, and remained in charge for 12 years of war.His first enemies were the French planters. Toussaint signed treaties with Spain, which gave him arms in the hope that he might defeat the French and hand the whole island to them.Within months Toussaint’s army had captured all the ports on the north of the island. Very quickly he realised that negotiations with the planters were useless. Messengers sent to negotiate with the planters were executed before they could speak. The result was the slogan which dominated the entire slave campaign, “Liberty or death”.The slave revolt was inextricably intertwined with the French Revolution.In September 1792, as the revolution in France shifted to the left, the new revolutionary convention sent three commissioners and a new general, Laveaux, to St Domingue. Laveaux hated the royalist planters and tried to persuade Toussaint to throw in his lot with revolutionary France.Toussaint remained suspicious even when, in August 1793, the commissioners, on their own initiative, issued a decree abolishing slavery.In 1794, for two reasons, he changed sides. First came the news of a further shift in the French Revolution, with the coming to power of the revolutionaries known as Jacobins. And on 3 February 1794 three delegates from St Domingue took their place in the French Convention, now controlled by the working people of the cities. The delegates were a freed black slave, a mulatto and a white man. The very sight of the black and “yellow” man sent the Convention into prolonged applause.It was carried without discussion that the “aristocracy of the skin” should be tolerated no longer and that slavery should be abolished.This historic news reached Toussaint (who had taken a second name, L’Ouverture, “the opening” to liberty) in spring 1794. Now he knew that not all Frenchmen were racists.At the same time a British expedition of 6,000 men arrived in St Domingue. Britain’s rulers thought there was a chance that the French might be dislodged by a slave revolt and that the British might seize St Domingue.The British war lasted four years-from 1794 to 1798. The British lost 80,000 men in St Domingue. It was one of the greatest military disasters in British history. In April 1798 Toussaint led his victorious army into the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the British never returned.By now the revolutionary tide had rolled back in France and the new rulers were weighing up the prospects of restoring slavery in St Domingue. A new commissioner, Hedouville, bribed the mulatto generals, who had fought valiantly for the slaves against the British, to fight against Toussaint.A bloody civil war ended in 1801, when Toussaint marked his triumph by marching into the Spanish half of the island and conquering it. But the slave army now faced a new threat from yet another ruler of France, Napoleon Bonaparte.The British offered their enemy, Napoleon, a short peace so that he could devote his attention to Toussaint L’Ouverture. Napoleon sent a huge expedition. But in the first six months of 1802 the French lost 10,000 men-half to disease, half to the enemy." }
{ "content": "The French soldiers were confused. As they attacked the black army they were greeted with familiar songs – the Marseillaise, the Ça Ira, the very revolutionary hymns to whose strains they had conquered most of Europe.On 7 June 1802 the beleaguered French generals offered Toussaint a treaty if he would appear in person to discuss it. He did so, and was captured, taken to France and banged up in a freezing prison.To French astonishment the slave army in St Domingue fought with even greater ferocity without their leader. In a matter of months the French were driven out of the island, never to return.This is perhaps one of the most remarkable stories in all human history, but because it turns history upside down it is not told in history books. What happens in real life is not determined by what great men or gods think.Slavery could have gone on for countless decades if the slaves had not fought for their freedom with the most implacable violence. The emancipation of the slaves was fought for and won by the slaves themselves.When in 1803 the British poet William Wordsworth, his own revolutionary enthusiasms already in decline, heard that Toussaint had died of pneumonia in prison he dedicated to the dead slave leader perhaps his finest sonnet – and one that will certainly not be taught by rote at school since it is not about daffodils:Live and take comfort, thou hast left behindPowers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;There’s not a breathing of the common windThat will forget thee; thou hast great allies;Thy friends are exultations, agoniesAnd love, and man’s unconquerable mind.Read the classic account of the slave revolt and Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James (Penguin, £10.99). For a detailed account of the wider battle against slavery read The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery by Robin Blackburn (Verso, £17). Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootWar based on lies‘We need to concentrate onthe big deception’(26 July 2003)From Socialist Worker, No.1861, 26 July 2003.Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Paul Foot writes on what really matters among the claims and counter-claims this weekBIG FLEAS have little fleas on their backs to bite ’em. Little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum. It’s the same with lies. Big lies generate all sorts of little lies, and in a political world where real ideas and real ideology have been shovelled into the background, the politicians and their media become obsessed with the little lies, and churn them over incessantly so that their audiences and their readers become confused and disorientated.The big lie that dominates the political world at the moment is the one that justified the invasion and occupation of Iraq by American and British troops. This was the lie that the corrupt and murderous regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq posed such a threat to the world that the most powerful armed forces were entitled to rub it out by force, and impose on Iraq a disgusting and apparently endless imperialist occupation.This lie was perfectly plain to millions of people in Britain long before the invasion. It was not, however, plain to the government, the Tory opposition or the BBC. The government and their secret agencies circulated the lie, the Tories almost unanimously took it up and echoed it, and so did the BBC.From that big lie all three organisations seek to divert our attention. There is, for instance, no high-powered public inquiry into the reasons for war and the so called “intelligence” that led us into it. Instead there is to be an inquiry by a single judge into the suicide of a weapons inspector.Mountains of trivia are endlessly debated to distract us from the big lie. What role did Alastair Campbell and the intelligence boffins play in compiling the deceitful dossiers last September and February? What did Dr David Kelly say to Andrew Gilligan of the BBC (who freelances, apparently, for the odious Mail on Sunday) over lunch at the Charing Cross Hotel? What did the doctor say to the BBC’s Susan Watts? Was he bullied by the craven MPs on the foreign affairs select committee? Was he driven to his death by his bosses or by his own uncertainty?Commentators rush to take sides in the trivial debates that follow. Some support the government, others the BBC. The death of Dr Kelly inspires a great outpouring of bogus media grief. Somehow the swarms of little lies and other trivia manage to obscure the big lie, and the big liars – the government, its intelligence chiefs, the Tory leaders and the BBC mandarins – all manage to cling to office.The outstanding achievement of the Stop the War Coalition was that it concentrated the minds of masses of people on the big lie, and organised millions in opposition to it.In all the flurry of little lies we need to concentrate once more on the main question, the big deceit. Did the government, in particular the prime minister, the foreign secretary and the defence secretary, deceive the people in the run-up to the war? Yes they did.Were they supported in that deception by the Tory party and the BBC? Yes they were. Should all these people now pay the price for that deception and get out? Yes they should. Top of the pageLast updated on 10 May 2010" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootRonan Point – a symbol of all that is bestin Labour’s ‘moral crusade’ ...3,000 people ‘at risk’in sky-high death traps(14 September 1968)From Socialist Worker, No. 88, 14 September 1968, p. 3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.IT IS ALMOST a year now since Francis Taylor, founder, chairman and managing director of Taylor Woodrow Ltd., the second largest construction firm in Britain, burst into the headlines with violent attacks upon the unofficial strikers at London’s Barbican.Night after night the smiling, confident features of Frank Taylor told the public about the ignorant thugs who were holding up the building programme of his subsidiary.On television, Frank ordered one of the strikers to consider the interests of his country. And when the Barbican workers called off the strike with a march through the City of London, there was Frank Taylor, standing next to his brilliant black limousine, smiling patronisingly at the workers he had helped to crush.In recent months very little has been heard of Frank Taylor. The smile is reported to have been wiped from his face.Rumble, roarWhat disturbed him was a rumble and then a roar in the early morning last May, when a section of 22 stories of a high block of flats in East London were tumbled to the ground by an explosion, killing five people.Taylor Woodrow Anglian, the firm which had built Ronan Point, is half-owned by Taylor Woodrow. Phillips Consultants, the consulting engineer, which Taylor Woodrow insisted had to act for the local borough council, are entirely owned by Taylor. It was Taylor Woodrow who persuaded the West Ham Borough Council to build the newfangled, continental system (known as Larsen Nielsen), as they had persuaded the London County Council before them.Immediately, the company rushed in with explanations. It was, as the Coal Board had said to the Aberfan enquiry, an Act of God. The explosion had been enormous. The distinguished lawyers who represented Taylor Woodrow at the inquiry tried to prove that no building on earth could have withstood that terrible blast.Very quickly the arguments were exposed. A firm of consulting engineers, Bernard Clark and Co., were instructed by the government to investigate the collapse.The Clark Inquiry revealed in a report described as “a summary” (perhaps all the conclusions would have been too much for the authorities) 19 shattering conclusions which have been wholly ignored by the national press, the architectural and engineering journals and television.Here are some of them:The explosion itself was very mild indeed. “In our opinion there are weaknesses in the general design of the building structure.” “The building as constructed is incapable of accepting the consequences of a reasonably mild explosion which may occur due to many causes other than town gas, i.e. various forms of vapour given off from liquid gas available to the domestic market, such as petroleum, butane, also of cellulose thinners, paraffin, and similar volatile liquids for domestic purposes and likely to be stored in small quantities in [of] the flat.” The building was not up to standard fire regulations. “Progressive collapse” of one floor after another is an inevitable characteristic of this kind of building. Resting panelsThe report, and many similar statements from experts at the inquiry, showed that Ronan Point was kept together simply by resting the floor panels on the walls, and hoping that gravity would keep the building from falling down.The 4-ton floor slabs rest on the outside wall panels – overlapping by 1½ inches. If the Wall is pushed out by 1¼ inches, the floor collapses, as do all the others above and below.Any number of eventualities (many of them natural, and foreseeable) can push the wall out to that extent. Wind can suck wall panels out. An explosion inside the flat caused by as little as two-pints of petrol is enough to push the wall out the crucial 1¼ inches.Subsidence in the ground; expansion of floor panels through underfloor heating; large numbers of people jumping up and down (dancing?) in time on the floor panels – any of these can cause “progressive collapse”. And if the sections which collapse are living rooms in day or evening time, not five, but 500 could be killed.These new forms of buildings are not necessary, still less traditional. Traditional frame building can withstand heavy explosions. Even carefully jointed system buildings rule out progressive collapse.Yet the Larsen Nielsen system, which has no tie between wall and floor, is the most popular with the local authorities. Altogether more than 3,000 working people are living today in sky-rise flats built in the same way as Ronan Point and liable to collapse at the slightest explosion.No wonder Frank Taylor and the directors of Ready Mix Concrete, who own the other half of Taylor Woodrow Anglian are worried. But they are not the only people to blame for the Ronan Point monstrosity.The government has from the outset, welcomed these new “streamlined” techniques, which so effectively kept down the cost of the already monstrously expensive sky-rise flats.Failure to “tie” walls and floors, failure properly to observe fire regulations or basic engineering principles, failure to insist on independent construction engineers – all these add up to a cheaper building. And cheaper buildings are what the Labour government wants.Ronan Point stands today as a monument to the technological revolution about which Wilson enthused in the Good Old Days, and about which the lickspittle Left rejoiced with him. Ronan Point is a symbol of all that’s best in Labour’s moral crusade.Perhaps the inquiry will be forced to recommend that this particular monument be destroyed. But there will still be many others, perhaps with gas turned off (with the tenants; unable to afford electricity, making do with paraffin lamps and other “safe” substitutes), perhaps with token attempts to “secure” the walls and floors but all equally liable to tumble down at any time of the day or night, slaughtering their unsuspecting inhabitants." }
{ "content": "The shareholders of Taylor Woodrow, whose dividend has been held at 20 per cent for the last three years, need not be unduly worried. Government and local authorities will ensure their firm’s profits for many years to come.And most of them live in buildings which are either safe or heavily insured. Top of the pageLast updated on 22 October 2020" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootHungry for power?(7 November 1992)From Socialist Worker, No.1316, 7 November 1992, p.11.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.WE USED to complain about the Labour Party longing for office but being terrified of power.In the last few months there has been quite a change. Now the Labour Party is terrified of both office and power.Robin Cook had a good joke the other day about the concessions made by Heseltine when Tarzan realised he’d gone too far on the pit closures. “I could have asked for a general election,” said Cook. “Maybe we’d have got one as well.” Ho, ho, ho went the backbenches.But wait. Was it so funny after all? During all the momentous crises that have shaken the government since 16 September, not once has the Labour leadership called for a general election.Indeed anything which might so shake the political consensus as to make it even possible that the government might resign – a general strike, for instance, or even a vote of no confidence – has been studiously avoided by Smith, Brown, Beckett and Co.Does this mean that the Labour leaders have lost their lust for office? Not at all.For the trappings of power, for the appearance of power, for the deference which comes naturally to any Secretary of State, the Smith brigade are as hungry as ever. What terrifies them is the responsibility of office. So scaredWhere does it point to, this impotence of opposition? Does it mean that Major and Co can go on ruling however great the economic crisis and however unpopular their cuts and wage freezes? Not at all.However impotently Labour behaves, they cannot help but represent the power and the fury of the people at the bottom of society who will be most affected by Major’s autumn cuts.The Tories cannot do anything because of the opposition on the ground and Labour cannot do anything because it is so scared of taking over. It is an impasse which cannot last forever. It can be broken by the Tories beating the workers or the workers beating the Tories.In the meantime there is an alternative, one which in my view grows more likely day by day.As the Tories find it more and more impossible to combat the crisis and as Labour finds it more and more impossible to challenge the Tories for the job, the two leaderships could move together.They could break the impasse by joining each other in what both would hail as a Grand Coalition for Recovery. The policies of the coalition would be very much the same as those demanded by the more liberal Tory leaders now.Capital spending programmes would be encouraged, all spending on wages would be discouraged. Some pits would stay open in exchange for a total wage freeze. There would be cuts and freezes in every area of social security. Housing, on the other hand, would get a boost from the release of the council house sales money.With the support of Labour and some big unions, the Tories and big business would get their worst cuts and their Maastricht treaty through parliament. Labour ministers would get their chauffeurs, their seals of office and their turn at the dispatch box.The only thing this new government could not do is solve the capitalist crisis which would go on bashing away at the economy until a great many people start to see what is needed is not a change of leaders in parliament but a change in the economic system. Top of the pageLast updated on 7.2.2005" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootMirror, Mirror on the wall,is Cecil the fairest of them all?(June 1968)From Socialist Worker, No. 84, July 1968, p. 4.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.HAROLD WILSON, MAN OF THE YEAR! screamed the Daily Mirror January 1st 1967, and continued in the glittering prose of that paper’s style to sing the Prime Minister’s praises. And no wonder. For every policy which the Daily Mirror had advocated over the previous few years had been faithfully pursued by Wilson’s government.It was the Mirror, way back in 1964, that warned against “too hasty” social reform in the light of the economic crisis. It was the Mirror, early in 1965, which urged the government to “ease up” on its plans to tax profits and capital gains. It was the Mirror, later in 1965, which urged support for the American action in Vietnam.Not surprisingly, the Mirror again supported Labour in 1966. Soon afterwards it launched the most savage of all the press attacks against the striking seamen. And when the economic crisis broke in July 1966, the Mirror urged: “Nothing short of drastic cuts in public expenditure and a wage freeze for at least six months will put the economy right.” (July 15, 1966)We got the cuts and the wage freeze.But perhaps the Mirror’s biggest triumph was the decision in 1967 to apply for British entry into the Common Market, a policy which all the Mirror papers had been urging since 1960. When Wilson applied for Common Market entry, he had, according to the Mirror’s front page \"carved a name for himself in British history.”The Mirror’s enthusiasm for the Common Market was, of course, selfless and patriotic. It had nothing to do with the enormous profits which could accrue to the International Publishing Corporation – the Mirror’s owners – in a tariff-free Europe in which IPC would be the biggest publisher, the biggest printer, the biggest manufacturer and supplier of newsprint and typesetting machines, not to say wood pulp from its forests in Canada.Throughout the talks on Europe, the Mirror continued to back Wilson and show him the way. On Rhodesia, on Vietnam, on disciplining rebel MPs, on cleaning-up demonstrators, even on South African arms, the Mirror and Wilson were of one mind.Even in personalities, they agreed. The Mirror liked Brown for a long time, and then started chanting Brown Must Go. Brown went. For a long time, the Mirror yelled for the blood of Douglas Jay, who opposed Common Market entry. Jay went. Every little prejudice was instantly rewarded by dynamic action from No. 10 Downing Street.Now King makes his final demand: that the faithful Wilson himself should go. Suddenly, the government needs not new policies but new leaders.Why? Lost support for Labour means lost readers for Cecil King. He cannot attack the policies of the government because they are good for his profits. So he is forced to kick his faithful servant in the teeth and prepare his next Man of the Year, Roy Jenkins, for similar treatment. Bottom and belowSOME PEOPLE thought that things couldn’t get worse electorally. Others that the social policies of the government had reached rock bottom.Both suppositions have now been disproved, the first by the municipal election results, the second by the government’s White Paper on Rents, which threatens to remove control on all controlled properties which have adequate amenities.”The “ new control ” of the 1965 Rent Act is not automatic. It works only if the tenant is prepared to face rent officers and Rent Assessment Committees, which are staffed with lawyers and accountants and by their very composition are sympathetic to the landlord.The old control, enforced by the Glasgow Rent Strike of 1919, was automatic. It applied to the rented property without anyone approaching anyone, and it was therefore effective. The clamour of the Fair Rents Association – a sinister group of politically-motivated men which purports to consist entirely of poverty-stricken old ladies bullied and raped by West Indian tenants paying 2s. 6d. a week for fully-furnished luxury flats – have now forced the government to agree to take effective control off the houses where it still operates.Even the Tories were frightened to do this when they studied the results of their 1957 decontrols. The measure, if enacted, will involve appalling rent increases for the people who can least afford to pay: mainly old tenants in old decaying areas.All these people, however, should take comfort for the Minister of Housing is a hero of the Left, Anthony Greenwood, whose wife launches Polaris submarines as enthusiastically as he used to oppose their manufacture. Tony Greenwood’s a decent Christian fellow. It’s an honour to have your rent doubled by the decisions of a bloke like him. Love thy enemyTHE NEW MOOD of unity which is sweeping the revolutionary Left has not, it seemed, penetrated New Park Publications of Clapham. who occupy the same offices as the publishers of the bi-weekly Newsletter. Recently to help me in a book I was writing I wanted to get hold of some excellent articles by Brian Pearce written in Labour Review some years ago, and published by New Park.I rang New Park and asked if I could come down and look through some back numbers in their files. No, I could not, said a woman firmly. Could I buy some back numbers, then? She would see.Then I had a letter from one Carol Curtis of New Park, which said curtly : “We regret we are unable to supply you with back numbers of Labour Review ...” No reasons were given, though I suspect from the lady’s tone that my connection with Socialist Worker and International Socialism was not wholly irrelevant.“Enemies of Marxism” who want to obtain marxist literature should apply in future to the British Museum.*Take ShelterYOUR ISSUE of February 1968 has been drawn to my attention and, in particular, a column by Paul Foot. Despite the passing of time and the self-destroying vindictiveness of his style of writing, I feel I must write and correct two facts in the paragraph about SHELTER." }
{ "content": "Firstly, its chairman – whether its former chairman or the present one – has not got a 14-bedroomed house, or even a 4-bedroomd house. Secondly, there are no communion services in the office, compulsory or otherwise, daily or weekly, and the majority of the staff, including myself, are not Christians. Therefore his accusation that only people who will attend a communion service are employed is completely without foundation – certainly since I was appointed director over a year ago.Paul Foot also describes us as “an establishment charity.” I would have thought he would find that rather difficult to justify as more than most charities, SHELTER has combined its rescue operation with fairly forceful pressure on society as a whole to bring to an end a problem that must be of some concern to your readers, even if it is not to Mr. Foot. Des WilsonDirector, SHELTERThe Strand. W.C.2.Paul Foot writes: Yes, sorry. My informant talked about “Shelter.” I now realise that she was talking about the Christian organisation of the same name. Top of the pageLast updated on 22 October 2020" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootRed Barbara’s Rocky Road(June 2002)Obituary of Barbara Castle, Socialist Review, No.264, June 2002, p.17.Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.Downloaded from the new Socialist Review ArchiveMarked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The life of Labour left winger Barbara Castle.I first heard Barbara Castle speak at a Young Socialist rally in Skegness in 1963. She was 53, I was 25. She was magnificent. She sensed an iconoclasm in the hall, with which she immediately identified. She had a way of rolling her body round her more eloquent phrases that gave the infectious impression of movement, passion and change.I heard her last in January 2001, when she spoke at a memorial meeting for my aunt Jill Craigie. Barbara was almost blind and had to be helped to the microphone. None of the passion, none of the caustic wit and satire so prominent in 1963, was lost. She made no concession whatever to the sentimentality that so often sours these occasions. She left everyone laughing and applauding in an excited and militant mood. We were proud of her.All my life, Barbara Castle was a symbol of the left in the Labour Party. She was reared, intellectually and politically, in the ILP in Bradford. In her halcyon years she was baulked by Tory victories in three successive general elections, and did not achieve high office until Labour won the general election in 1964, when she was shot into the cabinet as the first ever minister of overseas development. She turned out to be an outstanding administrator, easily overcoming the cloying attention of the civil service. As Secretary of State for Transport from 1965 to 1968 she beat off the hysteria of the road lobby. Her Transport Act was one of the few genuine attempts of that government to establish some sort of rational order in the chaos of a thriving capitalism.Then, at the peak of her triumph, came disaster. In 1968 she became the first secretary in charge of employment and productivity, and set to work ‘sorting out’ the ‘problem’ of unofficial strikes, which were then proliferating. She and her advisers, and the entire press, saw these strikes as a menace to good order and industrial discipline, and they had, she concluded, to be controlled. The result was In Place of Strife, a white paper she wrote herself, which proposed a cooling-off period before strikes could take place. Workers who ignored the cooling-off period and stayed out on strike were liable to prosecution, fines and imprisonment. The proposals set out to weaken the fighting spirit of the workers, and were indignantly rejected by the entire trade union movement including right wing trade union leaders. In the summer of 1969 they were replaced by a bromide undertaking in which the union leaders promised to curb unofficial strikes themselves. With this one proposal, Barbara Castle cast away much of the respect she had earned among the organised workers and the Labour left.Why did she set out on this disastrous course? Many leftish commentators at the time (and in recent obituaries) wrote the episode off as an aberration, a flaw perhaps in Barbara’s character. This explanation let the analysts off the hook. For the real cause of In Place of Strife had much deeper roots which probed all the way back to that ILP training. One obituary accurately described Barbara’s attitude to the trade unions as ‘parental’. The role of social democratic government, she believed, was to work with the trade union leaders to achieve a fairer society. If, however, the trades unions behaved badly, they had to be disciplined by the social democratic state, whose weapons of discipline (police, law courts, prisons) were much the same as those used by the Tories when they were in office.This ‘parental’ approach ran right through Barbara Castle’s political career. In her youth, as Barbara Betts, she pandered to the prevailing adoration of Comrade (or more appropriately Father) Stalin. My first job in London in 1964 was on the Daily Herald where I met, and immediately liked, the political editor, Ted Castle, Barbara’s husband. One day, Ted explained to his young protégé what the difference was between the left and right in the Labour Party. ‘It’s all about Russia, Paul,’ he revealed. ‘The left support Russia, the right don’t.’ I remember replying that this was a quite hopeless analysis, absolutely disastrous to the left since it bound them to a state capitalist dictatorship. He looked at me as if I was mad, but the exchange has always seemed to me to explain the intrinsic flaw in modern social democracy – the belief that capitalist society can be changed by intelligent and dedicated people at the top of society without disturbing, let alone agitating, the exploited, the poor and the dispossessed into a revolt that could and would topple the rich and create a socialist order. Ted Castle, incidentally, thought up the name In Place of Strife.In the Tory onslaught that followed Labour’s electoral defeat in 1970, Barbara Castle recovered her militant spirit and revelled in it. When Labour was returned in 1974 she became Secretary of State for Social Services. She applied her administrative skill and her agile mind to the problem of pensions, now so topical. She believed that security in old age was a matter for the state, not for the stock exchange, and she established an earnings-related state pension scheme (Serps), so much fairer and more secure than anything that had gone before it that the Tories (and the new Tories in the Blair government) systematically demolished it. When James Callaghan took over as Labour prime minister in 1976, his first act was to sack Barbara Castle, an act of right wing stupidity and obstinacy she never forgot or forgave.Literally to her dying day, never once losing her wit or her passion, Barbara campaigned to restore the link between earnings and pensions that the Tories had slit. She was throughout a proud and sincere social democrat with all the power and weaknesses that her political persuasion implied. Top of the pageLast updated on 28.11.2004" }
{ "content": "MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul FootPress CensorshipThe media massage(February 1991)From Socialist Worker Review, No.139, February 1991, p.7.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.HOW TO account for the extraordinary shifts of British public opinion in the first week of the war?On the eve of war, the United Nations Association commissioned a public opinion poll which asked whether people favoured immediate war after the 15 January deadline or whether sanctions should be given more time to work.The answers were 47 percent in favour of instant war, 42 percent against. Within a week of the war starting, the polls were proudly recording that more than 70 percent of the British people supported it.One explanation for the switch is what might be called the Denis Healey view of things. He was against the war until it started but refused to say anything against it after it broke out.Healey even voted for the war he had previously opposed, and not a word has passed his lips about the awful dangers of a long war on which subject he was so eloquent before it started.But this isn’t enough to explain quite such a dramatic turnaround. At least part of the responsibility is attached to the way in which the media has been so successfully massaged into war hysteria.One of the mistakes made by many socialists when they criticise the media is to complain about the lack of a range of views. Only one set of opinions, they argue (that of the government and the ruling class) is allowed to circulate in capitalist media. This is often demonstrably false.Even in the case of the current war, it is simply not true. Tony Benn, for instance, has been in high demand, as has Tam Dalyell.In the newspapers, Edward Pearce and John Pilger in the Guardian and no less than three of the five regular columnists on the Daily Mirror have come out against the war while it is being fought.The point is not so much that the (minority) views against the war are not being expressed. The point is that the information both about the conduct of the war and about its origins has been systematically suppressed, so that people simply do not have the facts in front of them. simply do not have the facts in front of them.Herculean efforts have been made to ensure that even the miserable freedoms afforded to reporters and camera crews in the Falklands War are not available this time.Each journalist in the Middle East is shepherded by military censors, usually through the newly created Media Control Units (or MRTs as they are called). Just in case one of these shepherdedjournalists gets hold of some ‘dangerous’ information, every single official and pooled report is passed back through the Pentagon in Washington before it can be published.When Robert Fisk of the Independent slipped through this net, and found a British army unit lost in the desert, the whole media control industry went berserk.The guidelines issued to editors at the start of the war (or ‘conflict’ as it is called in media jargon) knock out pretty well every possible reporting of every possible fact.They make special reference to the reporting of any damage done to any naval vessel (remembering, presumably, the havoc caused to the war effort when HMS Sheffield was hit by an Argentine Exocet off the Falklands).Names, numbers and pictures of casualties are totally banned until the censor has announced them. Remember the chaos following the bombing of two transport ships in the Falklands when there happened by bad luck to be a camera crew in the area?Locking journalists up in Riyadh, Bahrein and Dahran has secured the first urgent priority: to prevent any news whatever emerging from Iraq during the carpet bombing of Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and other cities.Thus ten times the amount of explosives dropped on Hiroshima were dropped in Iraq without, according to the media, a single civilian dying.Saddam has been happy to play along with this foul fiction, no doubt because a lifetime as a military commander teaches him that casualties on your side are not human lives lost as much as successes for the other side.Many journalists have been stunned by the extent of the censorship into a sullen acceptance of it.The sheer excitement of putting on gas masks and attending briefings in battledress (as the military insist that correspondents in Saudi Arabia do) has convinced many correspondents that they are fighting the war as well.Others at home, or safe in Cairo or Ankara, have fallen in with the general view that in wartime it is right to tell a lot of lies and dress it up in expert military doggerel.But there is resistance, and at the first meeting of Media Workers Against the War on 28 January it came out into the open.The importance of this new organisation is that it can give some courage to those journalists who are opposed to the war and refuse to be browbeaten by the censor or by their executives into telling lies or indulging in hype.The arguments against the war are so strong, and the popular support for war so fragile, that journalists’ resistance to censorship inside and outside media offices is likely to grow.One way of pushing it along is to organise small groups of anti-war journalists inside the offices, and to meet regularly to discuss its coverage.One reason why the authorities are so keen to get the war over quickly is that the longer it drags on the more reluctant will journalists be to lie about it. Top of the pageLast updated on 30.12.2004" }