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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>State of terror</h1>
<h3>(October 1995)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index6.html#sr95_10" target="new">No. 190</a>, October 1995, pp. 12–13.<br>
Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review.<br>
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal served to highlight the plight of over 3,000 Death Row prisoners in the US. <em>Paul Foot</em> looks at the history and injustice of capital punishment in Britain</strong></p>
<p class="fst">As we contemplate the horrors of Death Row we’re inclined to write off capital punishment as a peculiarly American barbarism, a throwback to the distant reactionary past, unthinkable in civilised social democratic Britain. In fact, between 1900 and 1949 some 632 people were murdered by the British state because they had allegedly committed murder.</p>
<p>In 1949 there was a Labour government in office. In the (Tory) Federal Republic of Germany capital punishment had just been abolished. In Holland and Scandinavia there had been no capital punishment for more than 50 years. British Labour, true to its radical traditions, could not make up its mind. It ducked the question by appointing a Royal Commission, which took four years to report. In the interim, with Labour still in office, Timothy Evans, a young Welsh worker, was brutally done to death by the hangman for murdering his beloved baby daughter – a murder to which Reginald Christie confessed several years later.</p>
<p>The Royal Commission report in 1953 saw arguments on both sides, and its recommendations were equivocal. The (Tory) government happily decided to do nothing. But the argument would not go away. It was taken up enthusiastically by reformers of every description. Influential books by the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz and by Arthur Koestler put the case against. In 1957 capital punishment was abolished for most murders and retained only for murders of policemen or with firearms. Under this law James Hanratty, a young worker from north London, was hanged for a murder near Bedford on the A6 when (as later evidence proved) he was 200 miles away in Rhyl at the time.</p>
<p>The argument for abolition got angrier. In 1965 the new Labour government allowed time for a private member’s bill which finally abolished it.</p>
<p>Through all those years the argument on both sides of the Atlantic was rational.</p>
<p>The case for capital punishment was based almost exclusively on its effectiveness as a deterrent. It was widely agreed by people on both sides of the argument that capital punishment was wholly indefensible unless it prevented murder on a substantial scale.</p>
<p>The more the argument for capital punishment depended on a rational case for deterrence, the more it was lost. The Royal Commission found no conclusive evidence of deterrence. Especially impressive were the statistics from the United States where capital punishment had been abolished in some states, not in others. In North Dakota, for instance, where capital punishment was abolished in 1915, the murder rate was slightly lower than in South Dakota where the social composition was very similar and where capital punishment was still in force. In Maine capital punishment had been abolished in 1876 and reintroduced after a right wing hullabaloo following an especially nasty murder. The murder rate, however, went up even faster, so capital punishment was abolished again in 1887 – after which the rate subsided.</p>
<p>The truth was that there was no correlation at all between the incidence of capital punishment and the incidence of murder. Murders were mainly personal or domestic crimes, immune from deterrence. Moreover, there were plenty of American ‘mistakes’ similar to the tragedies of Timothy Evans and James Hanratty. Capital punishment did not deter murders, and if a ‘mistake’ was made, there was no way of putting it right.</p>
<p>In the 1950s and 1960s the possibility of such a mistake was widely dismissed in polite society. Lord Chancellor Lord Kilmuir, discussing the Evans case, told parliament that the idea that a judge, jury and the court of appeal could convict the wrong person was ‘in the realms of fantasy’. Those realms of fantasy have been visited again and again in recent years as an enormous stream of prisoners wrongly convicted for murder have emerged from the high court after years of wholly unjustified, and not at all fantastical, imprisonment.</p>
<p>As long as the argument remains on a rational level – does hanging deter? – capital punishment doesn’t stand a chance. The most remarkable feature of the recent enthusiasm for the rope and the electric chair, however, is that it casts all reason aside. It is founded almost entirely on medieval incantations about ‘retribution’ (‘an eye for an eye’) and on a belief in violent punishment as a means of keeping the ‘criminal classes’ (that is, the lower classes) in order.</p>
<p>The loonies who swept into the US Congress and Senate in last year’s right wing backlash couldn’t care less whether capital punishment deters or not. They are like the lynch mobs in those westerns where justice for a (usually white) victim of crime is the instant murder of someone who might (or might not) be responsible. Guilt and deterrence are not really relevant provided the anger of the mob is assuaged in blood.</p>
<p>There is a grim logic behind this abandonment of logic. It was summed up for me when I was asked recently to take part in an episode of the BBC’s <em>Moral Maze</em>. The issue was the state murder of some poor British man who had been on Death Row for as long as anyone could remember. I came armed with the legal statistics about deterrence and mistakes by the legal system. They were brushed aside. An American professor in London declared, ‘I am with Thomas Hobbes. I want people to live in permanent fear of the laws.’</p>
<p>This assertion, which I dare say is a bit hard on Hobbes, explains what is happening. As the lunacies and unfairnesses of the market system become more and more obvious, as the precious market fails more and more ostentatiously to deliver the even-handed, civilised, rational society it promises, so the people who benefit from it seek to escape from rational thought altogether. Unable any longer even to pretend that their system can erode the poverty and inequality which create crime, they search for slogans which will satisfy the rage of the victims of crime and keep them in order at the same time. ‘Kill the murderers!’ is a fine slogan for both purposes, especially as almost all the alleged murderers due to be killed are poor or black or both.</p>
<p>It matters not an iota that killing murderers does nothing to stop killing or murder, or that the people being executed may not be murderers at all. What matters is the immediate satisfaction of blood lust. The <em>feeling</em> that something is being done is far better than the reality of <em>doing</em> something, especially when doing something means dismantling the inequalities on which class society depends. It follows that the politicians and businessmen who clamour for these state murders are far, far more guilty of violence and social chaos than any of the victims of their society whom they want to murder.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
State of terror
(October 1995)
From Socialist Review, No. 190, October 1995, pp. 12–13.
Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review.
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal served to highlight the plight of over 3,000 Death Row prisoners in the US. Paul Foot looks at the history and injustice of capital punishment in Britain
As we contemplate the horrors of Death Row we’re inclined to write off capital punishment as a peculiarly American barbarism, a throwback to the distant reactionary past, unthinkable in civilised social democratic Britain. In fact, between 1900 and 1949 some 632 people were murdered by the British state because they had allegedly committed murder.
In 1949 there was a Labour government in office. In the (Tory) Federal Republic of Germany capital punishment had just been abolished. In Holland and Scandinavia there had been no capital punishment for more than 50 years. British Labour, true to its radical traditions, could not make up its mind. It ducked the question by appointing a Royal Commission, which took four years to report. In the interim, with Labour still in office, Timothy Evans, a young Welsh worker, was brutally done to death by the hangman for murdering his beloved baby daughter – a murder to which Reginald Christie confessed several years later.
The Royal Commission report in 1953 saw arguments on both sides, and its recommendations were equivocal. The (Tory) government happily decided to do nothing. But the argument would not go away. It was taken up enthusiastically by reformers of every description. Influential books by the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz and by Arthur Koestler put the case against. In 1957 capital punishment was abolished for most murders and retained only for murders of policemen or with firearms. Under this law James Hanratty, a young worker from north London, was hanged for a murder near Bedford on the A6 when (as later evidence proved) he was 200 miles away in Rhyl at the time.
The argument for abolition got angrier. In 1965 the new Labour government allowed time for a private member’s bill which finally abolished it.
Through all those years the argument on both sides of the Atlantic was rational.
The case for capital punishment was based almost exclusively on its effectiveness as a deterrent. It was widely agreed by people on both sides of the argument that capital punishment was wholly indefensible unless it prevented murder on a substantial scale.
The more the argument for capital punishment depended on a rational case for deterrence, the more it was lost. The Royal Commission found no conclusive evidence of deterrence. Especially impressive were the statistics from the United States where capital punishment had been abolished in some states, not in others. In North Dakota, for instance, where capital punishment was abolished in 1915, the murder rate was slightly lower than in South Dakota where the social composition was very similar and where capital punishment was still in force. In Maine capital punishment had been abolished in 1876 and reintroduced after a right wing hullabaloo following an especially nasty murder. The murder rate, however, went up even faster, so capital punishment was abolished again in 1887 – after which the rate subsided.
The truth was that there was no correlation at all between the incidence of capital punishment and the incidence of murder. Murders were mainly personal or domestic crimes, immune from deterrence. Moreover, there were plenty of American ‘mistakes’ similar to the tragedies of Timothy Evans and James Hanratty. Capital punishment did not deter murders, and if a ‘mistake’ was made, there was no way of putting it right.
In the 1950s and 1960s the possibility of such a mistake was widely dismissed in polite society. Lord Chancellor Lord Kilmuir, discussing the Evans case, told parliament that the idea that a judge, jury and the court of appeal could convict the wrong person was ‘in the realms of fantasy’. Those realms of fantasy have been visited again and again in recent years as an enormous stream of prisoners wrongly convicted for murder have emerged from the high court after years of wholly unjustified, and not at all fantastical, imprisonment.
As long as the argument remains on a rational level – does hanging deter? – capital punishment doesn’t stand a chance. The most remarkable feature of the recent enthusiasm for the rope and the electric chair, however, is that it casts all reason aside. It is founded almost entirely on medieval incantations about ‘retribution’ (‘an eye for an eye’) and on a belief in violent punishment as a means of keeping the ‘criminal classes’ (that is, the lower classes) in order.
The loonies who swept into the US Congress and Senate in last year’s right wing backlash couldn’t care less whether capital punishment deters or not. They are like the lynch mobs in those westerns where justice for a (usually white) victim of crime is the instant murder of someone who might (or might not) be responsible. Guilt and deterrence are not really relevant provided the anger of the mob is assuaged in blood.
There is a grim logic behind this abandonment of logic. It was summed up for me when I was asked recently to take part in an episode of the BBC’s Moral Maze. The issue was the state murder of some poor British man who had been on Death Row for as long as anyone could remember. I came armed with the legal statistics about deterrence and mistakes by the legal system. They were brushed aside. An American professor in London declared, ‘I am with Thomas Hobbes. I want people to live in permanent fear of the laws.’
This assertion, which I dare say is a bit hard on Hobbes, explains what is happening. As the lunacies and unfairnesses of the market system become more and more obvious, as the precious market fails more and more ostentatiously to deliver the even-handed, civilised, rational society it promises, so the people who benefit from it seek to escape from rational thought altogether. Unable any longer even to pretend that their system can erode the poverty and inequality which create crime, they search for slogans which will satisfy the rage of the victims of crime and keep them in order at the same time. ‘Kill the murderers!’ is a fine slogan for both purposes, especially as almost all the alleged murderers due to be killed are poor or black or both.
It matters not an iota that killing murderers does nothing to stop killing or murder, or that the people being executed may not be murderers at all. What matters is the immediate satisfaction of blood lust. The feeling that something is being done is far better than the reality of doing something, especially when doing something means dismantling the inequalities on which class society depends. It follows that the politicians and businessmen who clamour for these state murders are far, far more guilty of violence and social chaos than any of the victims of their society whom they want to murder.
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Last updated on 2 November 2019
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Red verse in Horsham</h1>
<h3>(30 November 1996)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 30 November 1996.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000), pp. 81–82.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">In 1892 the playwright and critic Bernard Shaw was invited to Horsham to take part in a lunch to celebrate the first centenary of the birth of the poet Shelley.</p>
<p>Unhappily for important people in this market town, Shelley is probably the only famous person ever to have been born in Horsham, so they had to make the best of it. In 1892 they had their lunch and opened a public library.</p>
<p>Shaw mocked them mercilessly.</p>
<p>On all sides there went up the cry: ‘We want our great Shelley, our darling Shelley, our best noblest highest of poets. We will not have it said that he was a Leveller, an atheist, a foe to marriage, an advocate of incest.’</p>
<p>Shaw got the 5.19 back to London and went to another Shelley celebration meeting in the East End, composed almost entirely of working people which, he reported, ‘beat Horsham hollow’.</p>
<p>A hundred and four years later the chief executive of Horsham District Council (controlled by the Liberals, with a Tory opposition and no Labour representation at all) rings me up. Would I come and speak at the opening of a huge sculpture commissioned by the council and paid for by Sainsbury’s to celebrate the second centenary of Shelley’s birth?</p>
<p>I went through the usual preliminaries – was he sure he had the right member of the Foot family? Did he realise (a) Shelley’s politics, and (b) mine?</p>
<p>Yes, yes, yes, he said – my name had been put forward by someone from the Workers Educational Association.<br>
</p>
<h4>Huge sculpture</h4>
<p class="fst">OK, so I went. It was a cold November evening. The magnificent sculpture of a fountain is by Angela Connor, who said enough to me to make it clear she and I were the only socialists on the platform. I and the secretary of the Fountain Society were the only speakers and were both very glad (because of the cold) to stick to our five minute limit.</p>
<p>On the train down I wondered whether the district council had taken leave of its senses, and reckoned that there would be (at most) half a dozen people shivering in misery. In fact there were more than 1,000 people crowded round the fountain.</p>
<p>After the short ceremony, as the huge fountain started rather falteringly to spurt its jets into the air, most of them stayed, cheerfully chatting and shuffling their feet to keep out the cold.</p>
<p>I simply could not, cannot understand it, unless it is that people are interested in the place where they live, and especially in the giants of history who have lived there in the past, and on whose shoulders we try to light up the present.<br>
</p>
<h4>Egalitarian democracy</h4>
<p class="fst">Anyway, I said that Shelley was by any reckoning among the five greatest poets who had ever written in English; that his control of language, rhyme and rhythm was as unsurpassed as his intellect was all-embracing.</p>
<p>Why had so little of what he wrote been published in his lifetime? Because he was a Leveller, an atheist, a feminist and a republican – but above all a revolutionary who wanted the whole social order overturned and replaced by an egalitarian democracy.</p>
<p>When I said that Shelley had to contend all his short life with a Tory government, three times re-elected, which finally drowned in its own sleaze, I thought I heard people laughing.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="updat">Last updated on 30 June 2014</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Red verse in Horsham
(30 November 1996)
From Socialist Worker, 30 November 1996.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 81–82.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
In 1892 the playwright and critic Bernard Shaw was invited to Horsham to take part in a lunch to celebrate the first centenary of the birth of the poet Shelley.
Unhappily for important people in this market town, Shelley is probably the only famous person ever to have been born in Horsham, so they had to make the best of it. In 1892 they had their lunch and opened a public library.
Shaw mocked them mercilessly.
On all sides there went up the cry: ‘We want our great Shelley, our darling Shelley, our best noblest highest of poets. We will not have it said that he was a Leveller, an atheist, a foe to marriage, an advocate of incest.’
Shaw got the 5.19 back to London and went to another Shelley celebration meeting in the East End, composed almost entirely of working people which, he reported, ‘beat Horsham hollow’.
A hundred and four years later the chief executive of Horsham District Council (controlled by the Liberals, with a Tory opposition and no Labour representation at all) rings me up. Would I come and speak at the opening of a huge sculpture commissioned by the council and paid for by Sainsbury’s to celebrate the second centenary of Shelley’s birth?
I went through the usual preliminaries – was he sure he had the right member of the Foot family? Did he realise (a) Shelley’s politics, and (b) mine?
Yes, yes, yes, he said – my name had been put forward by someone from the Workers Educational Association.
Huge sculpture
OK, so I went. It was a cold November evening. The magnificent sculpture of a fountain is by Angela Connor, who said enough to me to make it clear she and I were the only socialists on the platform. I and the secretary of the Fountain Society were the only speakers and were both very glad (because of the cold) to stick to our five minute limit.
On the train down I wondered whether the district council had taken leave of its senses, and reckoned that there would be (at most) half a dozen people shivering in misery. In fact there were more than 1,000 people crowded round the fountain.
After the short ceremony, as the huge fountain started rather falteringly to spurt its jets into the air, most of them stayed, cheerfully chatting and shuffling their feet to keep out the cold.
I simply could not, cannot understand it, unless it is that people are interested in the place where they live, and especially in the giants of history who have lived there in the past, and on whose shoulders we try to light up the present.
Egalitarian democracy
Anyway, I said that Shelley was by any reckoning among the five greatest poets who had ever written in English; that his control of language, rhyme and rhythm was as unsurpassed as his intellect was all-embracing.
Why had so little of what he wrote been published in his lifetime? Because he was a Leveller, an atheist, a feminist and a republican – but above all a revolutionary who wanted the whole social order overturned and replaced by an egalitarian democracy.
When I said that Shelley had to contend all his short life with a Tory government, three times re-elected, which finally drowned in its own sleaze, I thought I heard people laughing.
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Last updated on 30 June 2014
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<p> </p>
<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Plague of the market</h1>
<h3>(29 June 1996)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 29 June 1996.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000, pp. 166–167.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The argument about BSE continues to be conducted at such a kindergarten level – ‘If you ban my beef, I won’t play ball with you’ – that everyone in high places ignores the question: how did we get into the mess in the first place?</p>
<p>There are lots of experts on European politics who can tell you how the balance of power is tipping in the commission, but haven’t got a clue what caused BSE in Britain in the mid-1980s or how to put a stop to it.</p>
<p>The discussions in parliament are particularly ill-informed and irrelevant. MPs ‘represent’ their constituencies by chauvinistic clamour about jobs lost in closed abattoirs, redundant butchers, desolated dairy farms, etc. It seems there is no one there to represent the fears of a population threatened by a terrifying, mystifying and murderous epidemic.</p>
<p>The Southwood Commission, which was set up soon after BSE started raging through British farms, concluded that it was all the fault of feeding meat to herbivorous cattle.<br>
</p>
<h4>Real culprit</h4>
<p class="fst">Though this process was introduced without a whisper of protest from Labour or Liberal parties, everyone now agrees it was disgraceful. Yet no one has been brought to book for it.</p>
<p>The Southwood Commission, and the huge parliamentary select committee inquiry which followed it, concluded that, once the new regulations about animal feed and removing the spines and heads of cattle were introduced, BSE would quickly vanish.</p>
<p>Not so. Seven years after the regulations, BSE continues to rage through British herds. It follows either that the cause had nothing to do with the feed, or that the regulations have not been properly enforced, or that BSE can be passed on from one generation of cattle to the next.</p>
<p>Once again, everyone accepts that in the first few years of the regulations they were scrupulously ignored at every stage. The regulations have now been tightened up. But still the BSE plague rushes on.</p>
<p>If the disease is inherited, or if its cause lies somewhere else in the food chain – in the rendering industry for instance, whose monopoly producer, Prosper Mulder, contributed so generously to the Tory party – the grim fact remains that no one knows whether even a mass slaughter of cattle will stop the disease.<br>
</p>
<h4>Tory mafia</h4>
<p class="fst">At the end of the 20th century, in the oldest industrial country in the world, where scientists can devise rockets to hit others travelling many times faster than the speed of sound, no one has a clue about the extent of or solution to a relatively straightforward cattle disease.</p>
<p>All the proposed answers to the BSE crisis avoid the real culprit: free enterprise. Whatever the scientific cause of BSE, the political and economic cause was the grotesque notion that regulations and restrictions in the public interest, even when that public interest protects people’s lives, are ‘bad for business’ and should therefore be curtailed.</p>
<p>This is the culture which led to the ‘freeing’ of wholly inappropriate and probably contaminated animal feed, to the lowering of temperatures and monopolisation in the rendering industry, and to the increasing confidence among the Tory mafia which runs farms, slaughterhouses and butchers that it can do what it likes.</p>
<p>If these farms and industries had been publicly owned and publicly controlled in the interests of the people who eat meat rather than the people who profit from it, the awful ravages of the BSE plague would have been impossible.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="updat">Last updated on 8 November 2019</p>
</body> |
MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Plague of the market
(29 June 1996)
From Socialist Worker, 29 June 1996.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 166–167.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The argument about BSE continues to be conducted at such a kindergarten level – ‘If you ban my beef, I won’t play ball with you’ – that everyone in high places ignores the question: how did we get into the mess in the first place?
There are lots of experts on European politics who can tell you how the balance of power is tipping in the commission, but haven’t got a clue what caused BSE in Britain in the mid-1980s or how to put a stop to it.
The discussions in parliament are particularly ill-informed and irrelevant. MPs ‘represent’ their constituencies by chauvinistic clamour about jobs lost in closed abattoirs, redundant butchers, desolated dairy farms, etc. It seems there is no one there to represent the fears of a population threatened by a terrifying, mystifying and murderous epidemic.
The Southwood Commission, which was set up soon after BSE started raging through British farms, concluded that it was all the fault of feeding meat to herbivorous cattle.
Real culprit
Though this process was introduced without a whisper of protest from Labour or Liberal parties, everyone now agrees it was disgraceful. Yet no one has been brought to book for it.
The Southwood Commission, and the huge parliamentary select committee inquiry which followed it, concluded that, once the new regulations about animal feed and removing the spines and heads of cattle were introduced, BSE would quickly vanish.
Not so. Seven years after the regulations, BSE continues to rage through British herds. It follows either that the cause had nothing to do with the feed, or that the regulations have not been properly enforced, or that BSE can be passed on from one generation of cattle to the next.
Once again, everyone accepts that in the first few years of the regulations they were scrupulously ignored at every stage. The regulations have now been tightened up. But still the BSE plague rushes on.
If the disease is inherited, or if its cause lies somewhere else in the food chain – in the rendering industry for instance, whose monopoly producer, Prosper Mulder, contributed so generously to the Tory party – the grim fact remains that no one knows whether even a mass slaughter of cattle will stop the disease.
Tory mafia
At the end of the 20th century, in the oldest industrial country in the world, where scientists can devise rockets to hit others travelling many times faster than the speed of sound, no one has a clue about the extent of or solution to a relatively straightforward cattle disease.
All the proposed answers to the BSE crisis avoid the real culprit: free enterprise. Whatever the scientific cause of BSE, the political and economic cause was the grotesque notion that regulations and restrictions in the public interest, even when that public interest protects people’s lives, are ‘bad for business’ and should therefore be curtailed.
This is the culture which led to the ‘freeing’ of wholly inappropriate and probably contaminated animal feed, to the lowering of temperatures and monopolisation in the rendering industry, and to the increasing confidence among the Tory mafia which runs farms, slaughterhouses and butchers that it can do what it likes.
If these farms and industries had been publicly owned and publicly controlled in the interests of the people who eat meat rather than the people who profit from it, the awful ravages of the BSE plague would have been impossible.
Top of the page
Last updated on 8 November 2019
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<p> </p>
<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Judges rule against a free press</h1>
<h3>(12 July 1997)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1553, 12 July 1993, p.11.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the <a href="https://secure.marxists.org/copyright-permissions/paul-foot.txt" class="absref" target="new">Estate</a>. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>EVERYONE BELIEVES in a free press – but very few people in high places believe in the free circulation of information to that press.</strong></p>
<p>Workers know what is going on in their workplaces. Many are shocked at what they know. Many would like to pass it on to other people, via the free press or the free television.</p>
<p>Increasingly, however, employers everywhere are ganging up to protect themselves against the revelation of even the most trivial “inside” information.</p>
<p>Not long ago a young journalist called Richard Goodwin who worked for an engineering trade paper was rung up by a source in a company with some fairly horrific information about the company’s internal finances.</p>
<p>Goodwin, as he had been trained to do, rang the company to check the information. His answer was a high court injunction stopping him and his paper from publishing the information and demanding to know who leaked it.</p>
<p>At the time we in the National Union of Journalists regarded this as a bit of a joke. Certainly, we believed, the injunction could not possibly be sustained in the courts. The Contempt of Court Act passed in the early years of the Thatcher government had a specific clause which allowed journalists not to disclose their sources.<br>
</p>
<h4>Grotesque bonuses</h4>
<p class="fst">There were very few exceptions to this rule. One of them was national security. Another was “the interests of justice”. Neither category seemed remotely relevant to the Goodwin case.</p>
<p><em>But the courts, in ascending authority, solemnly declared that it was in the interests of justice for employers to be able to identify any “disloyal” member of their staff and to sack them.</em></p>
<p>So decreed Lord Bridge (the judge who first jailed the Birmingham Six) in the key judgement, The injunction stood. Goodwin bravely refused to name his source and was fined £5,000.</p>
<p>The National Union of Journalists took his case to Europe, citing the Declaration of Human Rights, and won the case. The fine was annulled, Goodwin cleared, and the company which took the case had to pay a lot of costs.</p>
<p><strong>A considerable victory, and a good day for the freedom of the press. But did it mean that this sort of nonsense wouldn’t happen again?</strong></p>
<p>Consider what has happened this month, only a year after the Goodwin judgement. On 28 May, <strong>Marketing Week</strong>, a magazine not unlike the one which employed Richard Goodwin, published leaked accounts of Camelot, the lottery company.</p>
<p>The accounts showed grotesque bonuses for the lottery monopolists. They were due to be published anyway five days later. Camelot directors demanded an injunction to force the magazine to deliver the leaked documents.</p>
<p>Once again the magazine pleaded Section Ten of the Contempt of Court Act. The source of the information, they declared, would be revealed if the documents were returned.</p>
<p>Aha, replied Camelot, that is the whole point of disclosing it. Ignoring any talk about the public interest, their lawyers had the cheek to argue that the “interests of justice” demanded that their mole be identified and sacked.</p>
<p>And Mr Justice Martin Kay agreed!</p>
<p>The freedom of the press sounds nice in after dinner speeches at the Inns of Court. But for judges on the bench the security of profit and the virtual enslavement of employees which it demands is far more important.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Judges rule against a free press
(12 July 1997)
From Socialist Worker, No.1553, 12 July 1993, p.11.
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
EVERYONE BELIEVES in a free press – but very few people in high places believe in the free circulation of information to that press.
Workers know what is going on in their workplaces. Many are shocked at what they know. Many would like to pass it on to other people, via the free press or the free television.
Increasingly, however, employers everywhere are ganging up to protect themselves against the revelation of even the most trivial “inside” information.
Not long ago a young journalist called Richard Goodwin who worked for an engineering trade paper was rung up by a source in a company with some fairly horrific information about the company’s internal finances.
Goodwin, as he had been trained to do, rang the company to check the information. His answer was a high court injunction stopping him and his paper from publishing the information and demanding to know who leaked it.
At the time we in the National Union of Journalists regarded this as a bit of a joke. Certainly, we believed, the injunction could not possibly be sustained in the courts. The Contempt of Court Act passed in the early years of the Thatcher government had a specific clause which allowed journalists not to disclose their sources.
Grotesque bonuses
There were very few exceptions to this rule. One of them was national security. Another was “the interests of justice”. Neither category seemed remotely relevant to the Goodwin case.
But the courts, in ascending authority, solemnly declared that it was in the interests of justice for employers to be able to identify any “disloyal” member of their staff and to sack them.
So decreed Lord Bridge (the judge who first jailed the Birmingham Six) in the key judgement, The injunction stood. Goodwin bravely refused to name his source and was fined £5,000.
The National Union of Journalists took his case to Europe, citing the Declaration of Human Rights, and won the case. The fine was annulled, Goodwin cleared, and the company which took the case had to pay a lot of costs.
A considerable victory, and a good day for the freedom of the press. But did it mean that this sort of nonsense wouldn’t happen again?
Consider what has happened this month, only a year after the Goodwin judgement. On 28 May, Marketing Week, a magazine not unlike the one which employed Richard Goodwin, published leaked accounts of Camelot, the lottery company.
The accounts showed grotesque bonuses for the lottery monopolists. They were due to be published anyway five days later. Camelot directors demanded an injunction to force the magazine to deliver the leaked documents.
Once again the magazine pleaded Section Ten of the Contempt of Court Act. The source of the information, they declared, would be revealed if the documents were returned.
Aha, replied Camelot, that is the whole point of disclosing it. Ignoring any talk about the public interest, their lawyers had the cheek to argue that the “interests of justice” demanded that their mole be identified and sacked.
And Mr Justice Martin Kay agreed!
The freedom of the press sounds nice in after dinner speeches at the Inns of Court. But for judges on the bench the security of profit and the virtual enslavement of employees which it demands is far more important.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>The question lingers on<br>
<small><small>[CLR James]</small></small></h1>
<h3>(July 1989)</h3>
<hr class="infotop">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 1 July 1989.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the <a href="https://secure.marxists.org/copyright-permissions/paul-foot.txt" class="absref" target="new">Estate</a>. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2007.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Hogsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot">
<p class="fst">I watched the Channel Four tribute last week to CLR James. It was presented by my friend Tariq Ali (he is a friend of mine but I, unhappily, am not a friend of his. He will not talk to me, ever since I wrote a review of his book which he said was patronising). It was typical of Tariq’s flair and push that he should have got so much time at such short notice on television for the great man.</p>
<p>Ever since I met the long, frail and trembling CLR James at Glasgow Central Station in 1963, and took him to a tiny meeting of Young Socialists where he spoke about the African National Revolution, he has been a special hero of mine.</p>
<p><strong>He was one of the very few people who understood the dialectical significance of the game of cricket in general and of West Indian cricket in particular.</strong></p>
<p>It would be insulting to CLR’s memory however not to challenge one part of the discussion. All five participants agreed, there can be no doubt about it, that CLR James’s chief hero in history was Lenin.</p>
<p>All at once agreed, and there can be no doubt about this either, that for the last 20 years of his life (at least) CLR James ‘rejected the theory of the vanguard party.’ At once the discussion moved off into other areas.</p>
<p><strong>How?</strong></p>
<p>I wished the programme had been on video and I, like some celestial controller, had been able to stop it and redirect it.</p>
<p>For the crucial question here is surely this: why and how could such an inspired supporter of Lenin have rejected what was beyond dispute the central inspiration of Lenin’s political existence?</p>
<p><strong>All his life, even when he was shipwrecked with a handful of bickering émigrés, Lenin disciplined his whole being to the forging of socialist organisation.</strong></p>
<p>Ever since capitalist society was first challenged, its challengers have recognised the importance of such organisation.</p>
<p>The very earliest groups of working people in Britain who met together to oppose emerging capitalism called themselves Corresponding Societies, combinations, associations, all words which highlighted the joining together of people in common cause against their oppressors.</p>
<p>Nothing could be more obvious than that the strength and power of class society requires an equivalent strength and power to change it, and that on our side that strength and power depends upon socialists joining together and acting in common purpose.</p>
<p>The more centrally controlled and disciplined the ruling class, the more centrally controlled and disciplined must be its opponents.</p>
<p><strong>In recent years it has been fashionable to criticise the notion of the ‘vanguard party’ as (here is that word again) ‘patronising.’</strong></p>
<p>Yet everyone who expresses an opinion about political matters is engaging in a form of leadership. ‘I think this’ surely means ‘And you should think this too’ or it is quite useless.</p>
<p>Unless people express an opinion as a standard which they hope and want other people to follow, the opinion itself is frivolous. It has no relation to what should be the purpose of the opinion in the first place – to change the world.</p>
<p>Those who express opinions and hold views on their own, trusting to their own individualism and independence, are often more patronising than those who organise with others.</p>
<p><strong>Their ‘freedom of expression’ is entirely untempered by the opinions and activities of others who agree with them, and they are therefore more (not less) likely to patronise the people for whom they speak.</strong></p>
<p>It has always been a mystery to me that such an unequivocal and eloquent supporter of the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins as CLR James could, at the latter end of his life, be such an opponent of those who sought to organise themselves as the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks did.</p>
<p>On the few occasions I had the chance to argue with him I tried to get an answer to this conundrum. I never got one that even started to satisfy me.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
The question lingers on
[CLR James]
(July 1989)
From Socialist Worker, 1 July 1989.
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2007.
Transcribed by Christian Hogsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I watched the Channel Four tribute last week to CLR James. It was presented by my friend Tariq Ali (he is a friend of mine but I, unhappily, am not a friend of his. He will not talk to me, ever since I wrote a review of his book which he said was patronising). It was typical of Tariq’s flair and push that he should have got so much time at such short notice on television for the great man.
Ever since I met the long, frail and trembling CLR James at Glasgow Central Station in 1963, and took him to a tiny meeting of Young Socialists where he spoke about the African National Revolution, he has been a special hero of mine.
He was one of the very few people who understood the dialectical significance of the game of cricket in general and of West Indian cricket in particular.
It would be insulting to CLR’s memory however not to challenge one part of the discussion. All five participants agreed, there can be no doubt about it, that CLR James’s chief hero in history was Lenin.
All at once agreed, and there can be no doubt about this either, that for the last 20 years of his life (at least) CLR James ‘rejected the theory of the vanguard party.’ At once the discussion moved off into other areas.
How?
I wished the programme had been on video and I, like some celestial controller, had been able to stop it and redirect it.
For the crucial question here is surely this: why and how could such an inspired supporter of Lenin have rejected what was beyond dispute the central inspiration of Lenin’s political existence?
All his life, even when he was shipwrecked with a handful of bickering émigrés, Lenin disciplined his whole being to the forging of socialist organisation.
Ever since capitalist society was first challenged, its challengers have recognised the importance of such organisation.
The very earliest groups of working people in Britain who met together to oppose emerging capitalism called themselves Corresponding Societies, combinations, associations, all words which highlighted the joining together of people in common cause against their oppressors.
Nothing could be more obvious than that the strength and power of class society requires an equivalent strength and power to change it, and that on our side that strength and power depends upon socialists joining together and acting in common purpose.
The more centrally controlled and disciplined the ruling class, the more centrally controlled and disciplined must be its opponents.
In recent years it has been fashionable to criticise the notion of the ‘vanguard party’ as (here is that word again) ‘patronising.’
Yet everyone who expresses an opinion about political matters is engaging in a form of leadership. ‘I think this’ surely means ‘And you should think this too’ or it is quite useless.
Unless people express an opinion as a standard which they hope and want other people to follow, the opinion itself is frivolous. It has no relation to what should be the purpose of the opinion in the first place – to change the world.
Those who express opinions and hold views on their own, trusting to their own individualism and independence, are often more patronising than those who organise with others.
Their ‘freedom of expression’ is entirely untempered by the opinions and activities of others who agree with them, and they are therefore more (not less) likely to patronise the people for whom they speak.
It has always been a mystery to me that such an unequivocal and eloquent supporter of the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins as CLR James could, at the latter end of his life, be such an opponent of those who sought to organise themselves as the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks did.
On the few occasions I had the chance to argue with him I tried to get an answer to this conundrum. I never got one that even started to satisfy me.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Voting for our class</h1>
<h3>(June 1987)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index3.html#sr87_06" target="new">No. 99</a>, June 1987, pp. 14–15.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<br>
<table width="80%" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="c"><strong>Does voting make any difference? Should socialists vote at all? If so, which way should we vote? And what about tactical voting? <em>Paul Foot</em> looks at the arguments.</strong></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">A NEW political epidemic is striking down political commentators on the left. It is called tactical voting. From <strong>Marxism Today</strong> to the <strong>New Statesman</strong>, all of which were healthy Labour supporters in 1983, a feeble cry has gone up that the only way to save us from ruin is to vote tactically. Former Labour voters are urged in the day before polling day to study the opinion polls (many of which will be commissioned by the same people who are asking us to read them), look which party is most likely to beat the Tories in your constituency, and vote accordingly. If the party is SDP, vote for it. If Liberal, vote Liberal.</p>
<p>Eric Hobsbawm, the former Marxist, tells us that the differences between voting Labour and Liberal are very slight. The most urgent need of all decent people, he says, is the removal of the Thatcher government from office. In the face of this need, why pay attention to old loyalties? What use is a Labour vote in a constituency where Labour cannot win, but where a decent-minded SDP candidate can?</p>
<p>Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that these new realists win the day, and that the Thatcher government <em>is</em> toppled by a combination of Labour and the Alliance. In what way will the new government improve the lot of the working class? Will they, for instance, cut down unemployment? They will try to do so. But every single example over the last ninety years of political history shows that they will not succeed.</p>
<p>In 1924, 1929 and 1977 Labour ruled with the tacit consent of the Liberals. In all three cases unemployment was higher at the end of the period than it was at the beginning: in spite of the sincere promises of both parties that it would be reduced. Will the new parliament build more houses, more schools, more hospitals? Will it rescue the National Health Service?</p>
<p>Will it do such things when, in 1967 and again in 1971, a Labour government, not dependent on Liberals and utterly committed to doing all these things, was thrown into reverse on all these issues and was forced to cut the housing programme, cut the schools programme and even levy charges on the sacrosanct National Health Service?</p>
<p>These are the “issues” which, the Hobsbawms of this world tell us, should guide our judgement and our advice on polling day. Yet in their heart of hearts they must know that a Liberal-SDP-Labour government is even less likely to improve the conditions of the working class than have previous Labour governments.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">BUT wait, they might reply. Readers of <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong> have been told over the years that electing <em>Labour</em> governments makes little or no difference to what happens in the economic and political field. That is quite right. Anyone reading this paper or <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> will be fed to the brim with the argument that the elected governments in capitalist society are not in control of that society.</p>
<p>However much they may wish to reform, however much they legislate for reform their wishes and their legislation are swept aside by economic tides which they do not control or even understand.</p>
<p>So although Labour may pass plenty of laws which look good for the workers, the economic movements which they do not control leave these laws like signposts in the wilderness, better than no signposts at all, but no use for anyone’s improvements. What use an Employment Protection Act, shoring up the trade unions’ role in the machinery of the state, if the whole of that machinery is flung into a campaign to restrict workers’ power on the shop floor and to restrain their wages?</p>
<p>What use Equal Pay Acts and Race Relations Acts if the tides of sexism and racialism are flowing because of an economic recession? Of course the laws passed by Labour governments are likely to be better than those passed by Tory governments, but if the economic conditions which govern people’s lives are worse nevertheless, what use the new laws?</p>
<p>All these arguments apply, of course, a hundred times more to a Lib-Lab government than they do to a Labour government. But do they lead, as our critics so often suggest, to an electoral abstentionism?</p>
<p>If we mean it when we say that the colour of the governments in office makes precious little difference to the lives of the workers, why bother to take part in the vote at all? Why not shout a plague on both your houses, burn your ballot paper or write “socialism” on it, or put up socialist revolutionary candidates who argue not for crumbs but for the whole bakery?</p>
<p>The first answer is that we live in the real world, not one we would like to live in. In this real world almost every worker who thinks like a socialist supports the Labour Party. The enormous majority of such people, including pretty well every militant trade unionist, believes that change can come through the Labour Party in office.</p>
<p>The second one is that the Labour Party came into existence to represent the working class (and no other class) in parliament. It was founded, and still is founded, on the trade unions. Trade unions in turn came into existence to improve the lot of working class people. They devised democratic constitutions which made their leaders and executives subject to some form of rank and file control.</p>
<p>Discussion and debate would be sheltered from the capitalist class and its media. Just as that ruling class resented the granting of the vote in the first place, so they doubly resented the formation and the survival of working class-based parties which brought the organised working class into the elections.</p>
<p>However much the ruling class were able to contain and corrupt such Labour Parties when they got to office, they never let up in their resentment of these parties’ existence, and have used all their mighty powers to replace them with “alternatives” which will not be subject in any way to the decisions or the debates of the organised working class movement.</p>
<p>Thus in 1931, although the power of the ruling class was able to humble a Labour government, split off its leaders, reverse all its policies and replace that government with fourteen years of Tory rule, they never forgot that the organised trade union movement could not stomach further cuts in the dole, and refused its consent to a Labour government to carry them through. Even such entirely negative control is enough to unite the ruling class against the Labour Party.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">SO the issue of what to do in that split second in the ballot box every four or five years is not a difficult one for socialists who see the world clearly through its class divisions. It is a class issue. The Labour Party is founded on the working class. The Liberal Party is not. The SDP is not. If the Alliance replaces the Labour Party as the main anti-Tory Party the organised working class will be removed from its electoral politics, and that-will demoralise every class conscious worker in the land.</p>
<p>On election night, while the Hobsbawms and the Kellners are cheering every time Labour comes bottom of the poll and the Alliance candidate is elected on tactical votes, the militant worker who thinks a bit about politics will feel, from the same news, confused and disorientated. In his marvellous pamphlet, <strong>What Next?</strong>, Leon Trotsky denounced those who dismissed all the institutions of bourgeois democracy as though they were all part of some gigantic capitalist plot. He wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilising it, fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sports clubs, the co-operatives etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of the bourgeois democracy, but can do so only by taking the road to revolution; this has been proved both by theory and by experience. And these bulwarks of workers’ democracy within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for the taking of the revolutionary road.”</p>
<p class="fst">Trotsky probably overstated the case a little. He was talking, after all, about the urgent menace of fascism, and the need to unite all elements of the workers’ movement against it. And the educational, sports clubs, and co-ops have long since gone. But the basic point is as important now as it was in 1931.</p>
<p>The revolution he spoke of is <em>impossible</em> if the bulwarks built by the workers – including the trade unions and their political parties – are torn down by the rulers; and every defeat for the unions, every defeat for Labour at the polls, pushes the revolution back.</p>
<p>In the polling booths, vote Labour. The day after, keep up the effort to build a socialist organisation in the struggle at the point of production, where the working class has power, and not in parliament, where it hasn’t.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Voting for our class
(June 1987)
From Socialist Worker Review, No. 99, June 1987, pp. 14–15.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Does voting make any difference? Should socialists vote at all? If so, which way should we vote? And what about tactical voting? Paul Foot looks at the arguments.
A NEW political epidemic is striking down political commentators on the left. It is called tactical voting. From Marxism Today to the New Statesman, all of which were healthy Labour supporters in 1983, a feeble cry has gone up that the only way to save us from ruin is to vote tactically. Former Labour voters are urged in the day before polling day to study the opinion polls (many of which will be commissioned by the same people who are asking us to read them), look which party is most likely to beat the Tories in your constituency, and vote accordingly. If the party is SDP, vote for it. If Liberal, vote Liberal.
Eric Hobsbawm, the former Marxist, tells us that the differences between voting Labour and Liberal are very slight. The most urgent need of all decent people, he says, is the removal of the Thatcher government from office. In the face of this need, why pay attention to old loyalties? What use is a Labour vote in a constituency where Labour cannot win, but where a decent-minded SDP candidate can?
Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that these new realists win the day, and that the Thatcher government is toppled by a combination of Labour and the Alliance. In what way will the new government improve the lot of the working class? Will they, for instance, cut down unemployment? They will try to do so. But every single example over the last ninety years of political history shows that they will not succeed.
In 1924, 1929 and 1977 Labour ruled with the tacit consent of the Liberals. In all three cases unemployment was higher at the end of the period than it was at the beginning: in spite of the sincere promises of both parties that it would be reduced. Will the new parliament build more houses, more schools, more hospitals? Will it rescue the National Health Service?
Will it do such things when, in 1967 and again in 1971, a Labour government, not dependent on Liberals and utterly committed to doing all these things, was thrown into reverse on all these issues and was forced to cut the housing programme, cut the schools programme and even levy charges on the sacrosanct National Health Service?
These are the “issues” which, the Hobsbawms of this world tell us, should guide our judgement and our advice on polling day. Yet in their heart of hearts they must know that a Liberal-SDP-Labour government is even less likely to improve the conditions of the working class than have previous Labour governments.
BUT wait, they might reply. Readers of Socialist Worker Review have been told over the years that electing Labour governments makes little or no difference to what happens in the economic and political field. That is quite right. Anyone reading this paper or Socialist Worker will be fed to the brim with the argument that the elected governments in capitalist society are not in control of that society.
However much they may wish to reform, however much they legislate for reform their wishes and their legislation are swept aside by economic tides which they do not control or even understand.
So although Labour may pass plenty of laws which look good for the workers, the economic movements which they do not control leave these laws like signposts in the wilderness, better than no signposts at all, but no use for anyone’s improvements. What use an Employment Protection Act, shoring up the trade unions’ role in the machinery of the state, if the whole of that machinery is flung into a campaign to restrict workers’ power on the shop floor and to restrain their wages?
What use Equal Pay Acts and Race Relations Acts if the tides of sexism and racialism are flowing because of an economic recession? Of course the laws passed by Labour governments are likely to be better than those passed by Tory governments, but if the economic conditions which govern people’s lives are worse nevertheless, what use the new laws?
All these arguments apply, of course, a hundred times more to a Lib-Lab government than they do to a Labour government. But do they lead, as our critics so often suggest, to an electoral abstentionism?
If we mean it when we say that the colour of the governments in office makes precious little difference to the lives of the workers, why bother to take part in the vote at all? Why not shout a plague on both your houses, burn your ballot paper or write “socialism” on it, or put up socialist revolutionary candidates who argue not for crumbs but for the whole bakery?
The first answer is that we live in the real world, not one we would like to live in. In this real world almost every worker who thinks like a socialist supports the Labour Party. The enormous majority of such people, including pretty well every militant trade unionist, believes that change can come through the Labour Party in office.
The second one is that the Labour Party came into existence to represent the working class (and no other class) in parliament. It was founded, and still is founded, on the trade unions. Trade unions in turn came into existence to improve the lot of working class people. They devised democratic constitutions which made their leaders and executives subject to some form of rank and file control.
Discussion and debate would be sheltered from the capitalist class and its media. Just as that ruling class resented the granting of the vote in the first place, so they doubly resented the formation and the survival of working class-based parties which brought the organised working class into the elections.
However much the ruling class were able to contain and corrupt such Labour Parties when they got to office, they never let up in their resentment of these parties’ existence, and have used all their mighty powers to replace them with “alternatives” which will not be subject in any way to the decisions or the debates of the organised working class movement.
Thus in 1931, although the power of the ruling class was able to humble a Labour government, split off its leaders, reverse all its policies and replace that government with fourteen years of Tory rule, they never forgot that the organised trade union movement could not stomach further cuts in the dole, and refused its consent to a Labour government to carry them through. Even such entirely negative control is enough to unite the ruling class against the Labour Party.
SO the issue of what to do in that split second in the ballot box every four or five years is not a difficult one for socialists who see the world clearly through its class divisions. It is a class issue. The Labour Party is founded on the working class. The Liberal Party is not. The SDP is not. If the Alliance replaces the Labour Party as the main anti-Tory Party the organised working class will be removed from its electoral politics, and that-will demoralise every class conscious worker in the land.
On election night, while the Hobsbawms and the Kellners are cheering every time Labour comes bottom of the poll and the Alliance candidate is elected on tactical votes, the militant worker who thinks a bit about politics will feel, from the same news, confused and disorientated. In his marvellous pamphlet, What Next?, Leon Trotsky denounced those who dismissed all the institutions of bourgeois democracy as though they were all part of some gigantic capitalist plot. He wrote:
“In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilising it, fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sports clubs, the co-operatives etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of the bourgeois democracy, but can do so only by taking the road to revolution; this has been proved both by theory and by experience. And these bulwarks of workers’ democracy within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for the taking of the revolutionary road.”
Trotsky probably overstated the case a little. He was talking, after all, about the urgent menace of fascism, and the need to unite all elements of the workers’ movement against it. And the educational, sports clubs, and co-ops have long since gone. But the basic point is as important now as it was in 1931.
The revolution he spoke of is impossible if the bulwarks built by the workers – including the trade unions and their political parties – are torn down by the rulers; and every defeat for the unions, every defeat for Labour at the polls, pushes the revolution back.
In the polling booths, vote Labour. The day after, keep up the effort to build a socialist organisation in the struggle at the point of production, where the working class has power, and not in parliament, where it hasn’t.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>If only Harold had got the date right</h1>
<h3>(July 1970)</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 11 July 1970.<br>
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), <strong>In the Heat of the Struggle</strong>, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.186-7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">In THE offices of <strong>Tribune</strong> in Smithfield, London, a myth has been born. Like many similar myths before it, it is likely to be believed following the shock and disillusionment of the election.</p>
<p>The theme is a simple one: that Harold Wilson and his advisers in the leadership handed the election on a plate to the Tories and that the decision to go to the country in June with a low-pitched election campaign were the real reasons for the Tory victory.</p>
<p>The alternative is equally simple. With an election later in the year, fought with a high-pitched campaign, the Tory disaster would never have come about and Harold Wilson would be back in Downing Street for most of the seventies.</p>
<p>One question, however, remains unanswered. What evidence is there that if the Labour leadership had held on till October any more of the ‘wounds’ inflicted by the government would have been ‘healed’?</p>
<p>Was it not just as likely that with an Irish crisis, a worsening balance of payments situation, and roaring inflation, a few more ‘wounds’ would have been inflicted in the intervening months and the ‘fighting spirit of 1964 and 1966’ (whatever that was) would have been further dampened?</p>
<p>Harold Wilson’s basic theme throughout the last six months had been that Labour must run the capitalist system as efficiently and profitably as possible and must engineer an election victory every four or five years.</p>
<p>Although <strong>Tribune</strong> is free in its criticism of the government’s record over the past six years, it singles out the 1970 Budget for special attention. It complains that when Jenkins had money to give away he should have given it away to the Labour movement.</p>
<p><strong>Tribune</strong> argues that if the Chancellor had done this in the 1970 Budget, the workers would have voted Labour with greater enthusiasm and in greater numbers.</p>
<p>No doubt this is true. But the point is that big business works under the same laws whether there’s a boom or not.</p>
<p>No self-respecting capitalist will waste money on higher wages just because he has higher profits. He needs to invest his profits to make sure they increase even more. He may feel that directors and shareholders deserve a little reward. But wages are too large a part of the costs to permit substantial increases.</p>
<p>The Labour government accepted these priorities from the start. They accepted them in their manifesto before the 1964 election, which <strong>Tribune</strong> approved. And, cheered on by <strong>Tribune</strong>, they accepted them in 17 stumbling months before March 1966 when <strong>Tribune</strong> called for an early general election.</p>
<p>They accepted them in four cruel and wavering years after 1966, in which time the Parliamentary Labour Party became a play-thing of the increasingly vicious machine of big business.</p>
<p>Workers and students outside parliament reacted in the most powerful outburst of militancy since the war. None of this was reflected in parliament or in the Labour Party, which, as the tide of militancy rose, lost supporters and influence in the trade union movement.</p>
<p>The Labour Left and <strong>Tribune</strong> reacted by bitching and sneering at revolutionaries (see Francis Flavius on the International Socialists and Socialist Labour League in <strong>Tribune</strong> of 5 June). It isolated the struggle for socialism within parliamentary boundaries and by mouthing old slogans and old responses, it must take a share of the blame for the isolation of politics from militancy.</p>
<p>The election result is a bad blow for the British working class movement. But it will have even worse consequences if socialists now believe that the violence and barbarism of capitalist society can be ended or even altered by tinkering around with election dates and framing different policies for Budget Day.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
If only Harold had got the date right
(July 1970)
From Socialist Worker, 11 July 1970.
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.186-7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
In THE offices of Tribune in Smithfield, London, a myth has been born. Like many similar myths before it, it is likely to be believed following the shock and disillusionment of the election.
The theme is a simple one: that Harold Wilson and his advisers in the leadership handed the election on a plate to the Tories and that the decision to go to the country in June with a low-pitched election campaign were the real reasons for the Tory victory.
The alternative is equally simple. With an election later in the year, fought with a high-pitched campaign, the Tory disaster would never have come about and Harold Wilson would be back in Downing Street for most of the seventies.
One question, however, remains unanswered. What evidence is there that if the Labour leadership had held on till October any more of the ‘wounds’ inflicted by the government would have been ‘healed’?
Was it not just as likely that with an Irish crisis, a worsening balance of payments situation, and roaring inflation, a few more ‘wounds’ would have been inflicted in the intervening months and the ‘fighting spirit of 1964 and 1966’ (whatever that was) would have been further dampened?
Harold Wilson’s basic theme throughout the last six months had been that Labour must run the capitalist system as efficiently and profitably as possible and must engineer an election victory every four or five years.
Although Tribune is free in its criticism of the government’s record over the past six years, it singles out the 1970 Budget for special attention. It complains that when Jenkins had money to give away he should have given it away to the Labour movement.
Tribune argues that if the Chancellor had done this in the 1970 Budget, the workers would have voted Labour with greater enthusiasm and in greater numbers.
No doubt this is true. But the point is that big business works under the same laws whether there’s a boom or not.
No self-respecting capitalist will waste money on higher wages just because he has higher profits. He needs to invest his profits to make sure they increase even more. He may feel that directors and shareholders deserve a little reward. But wages are too large a part of the costs to permit substantial increases.
The Labour government accepted these priorities from the start. They accepted them in their manifesto before the 1964 election, which Tribune approved. And, cheered on by Tribune, they accepted them in 17 stumbling months before March 1966 when Tribune called for an early general election.
They accepted them in four cruel and wavering years after 1966, in which time the Parliamentary Labour Party became a play-thing of the increasingly vicious machine of big business.
Workers and students outside parliament reacted in the most powerful outburst of militancy since the war. None of this was reflected in parliament or in the Labour Party, which, as the tide of militancy rose, lost supporters and influence in the trade union movement.
The Labour Left and Tribune reacted by bitching and sneering at revolutionaries (see Francis Flavius on the International Socialists and Socialist Labour League in Tribune of 5 June). It isolated the struggle for socialism within parliamentary boundaries and by mouthing old slogans and old responses, it must take a share of the blame for the isolation of politics from militancy.
The election result is a bad blow for the British working class movement. But it will have even worse consequences if socialists now believe that the violence and barbarism of capitalist society can be ended or even altered by tinkering around with election dates and framing different policies for Budget Day.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<p> </p>
<h1><small><small>Left Alternative</small></small><br>
Beyond the Crossroads</h1>
<h3>(December 2003)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.280, December 2003, p.16-17.<br>
Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded from the new <a href="http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a><br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em><strong>Paul Foot</strong> puts the case for a unity coalition of the left.</em></p>
<p class="fst">The vast demonstration against Bush on 20 November once again opened wide the increasingly intolerable contradiction on the British left. These demonstrations in 2003 were far greater than anything in the 1960s or indeed at any other time before or since, yet when the crowds have dispersed, there is so little sign of any political result. The huge Labour majority cannot even prevent parliament from moving yet another step closer to the privatisation of the health service. The Tory opposition moves further to the right, flirting with a return to capital punishment, and the Liberal Democrats, though they pretend to be suspicious of the warmongers, are, as always, extremely nervous of any forthright opposition to the capitalist and imperialist establishment. It is futile to stand back and jeer at the fact that there is no representation of the biggest political movement in modern times. The question is: what can be done about it?</p>
<p>There are plenty of signs that the mass mobilisation against the war reflects a deep hostility to the government on many other issues. Wherever it is possible to raise socialist alternatives – public ownership and comprehensive education – people respond enthusiastically. How can we combine these attitudes effectively enough to make a real impact on the Blairite Labour/Tory/Liberal consensus? And how can we do that without stumbling once again on the obstacle that has held up the socialist left for so long – sectarianism?</p>
<p>When a collection of socialist organisations formed the Socialist Alliance in 1999, the main object was to present a united front of organisations whose members were no longer prepared to devote their time and energy to attacking one another. The alliance has had a lot of success in quite a short time. But it has failed to make the breakthrough many of us hoped for. Indeed, some of the founding organisations have left the alliance and struck out once again into glorious, and useless, isolation. The alliance’s outstanding success in England and Wales – Michael Lavalette’s election in Preston – was achieved by a genuine attempt to seek out and represent large numbers of people in Preston who were against the war and against racism. Elsewhere, the alliance has been less successful, even in Brent East where, against a background of profound disillusionment with the government and an excellent alliance candidate, we only just managed to get clear of the ruck of independent candidates who cluttered up and divided the left opposition. If we are to make any headway in the vital business of transforming the mass opposition into a fighting socialist force we need to look again at the organisation and structure of the British left.</p>
<p>The building blocks for a new structure are plain for everyone to see. The expulsion of George Galloway from the Labour Party for his opposition to the war in Iraq; the hostility to Blair and co among large numbers of trade unionists, including trade union leaders like Bob Crow, Mark Serwotka and Dave Ward, and the growing disgust with capitalism that emerges from organisations like Globalise Resistance, the European Social Forum and large elements of the green movement. In all these areas, there is a common cry for new organisations, broadly-based in the community, that go deeper into the popular consciousness than the alliance has done so far.</p>
<p>Such an argument can easily be taken too far. A coalition calling itself something like ‘Peace and Justice’ for instance, seems to me undesirable – not only because it means all things to all people but chiefly because it seems to reject the socialist alternative at a time when the argument for socialist solutions is stronger and more popular than ever. On the other hand, both the name and the intentions of any new coalition need to engage as many people as possible, even if they do not regard themselves primarily as socialists. The principles should be as simple as possible – for public ownership and comprehensive education, and against privatisation, imperialism, the war in Iraq, the New Labour government and its Tory/Liberal allies. The simple aim of the new coalition should be to recapture some of the loyalty to socialist ideas and principles that used to inspire people to campaign for and vote for Labour. Candidates who run in elections for the new coalition should explain how they will speak and vote on all the relevant issues. In London, for instance, as Blair, Prescott and Clarke proceed to tear up the comprehensive system of education, coalition candidates, locally and nationally, should set out precisely how they intend – as elected councillors, assembly members and MPs – to fight for, restore and improve comprehensive schools.</p>
<p>The coalition’s approach to organisations that join it should be both tolerant and impatient: tolerant of the right of individual parties to proceed with their own agenda, impatient of any attempt to make sectarian capital out of the coalition. I would hope that my own party, the Socialist Workers Party, would enter such a new coalition with all the enthusiasm with which we joined the Socialist Alliance, and would work as powerfully as we can for the new coalition in the hope, but not the condition, that its success would be our success.</p>
<p>The huge <em>British Politics at the Crossroads</em> meeting in London on 29 October laid the basis for such a new coalition. I hope it proceeds quickly. We have no time to lose.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Left Alternative
Beyond the Crossroads
(December 2003)
From Socialist Review, No.280, December 2003, p.16-17.
Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.
Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Paul Foot puts the case for a unity coalition of the left.
The vast demonstration against Bush on 20 November once again opened wide the increasingly intolerable contradiction on the British left. These demonstrations in 2003 were far greater than anything in the 1960s or indeed at any other time before or since, yet when the crowds have dispersed, there is so little sign of any political result. The huge Labour majority cannot even prevent parliament from moving yet another step closer to the privatisation of the health service. The Tory opposition moves further to the right, flirting with a return to capital punishment, and the Liberal Democrats, though they pretend to be suspicious of the warmongers, are, as always, extremely nervous of any forthright opposition to the capitalist and imperialist establishment. It is futile to stand back and jeer at the fact that there is no representation of the biggest political movement in modern times. The question is: what can be done about it?
There are plenty of signs that the mass mobilisation against the war reflects a deep hostility to the government on many other issues. Wherever it is possible to raise socialist alternatives – public ownership and comprehensive education – people respond enthusiastically. How can we combine these attitudes effectively enough to make a real impact on the Blairite Labour/Tory/Liberal consensus? And how can we do that without stumbling once again on the obstacle that has held up the socialist left for so long – sectarianism?
When a collection of socialist organisations formed the Socialist Alliance in 1999, the main object was to present a united front of organisations whose members were no longer prepared to devote their time and energy to attacking one another. The alliance has had a lot of success in quite a short time. But it has failed to make the breakthrough many of us hoped for. Indeed, some of the founding organisations have left the alliance and struck out once again into glorious, and useless, isolation. The alliance’s outstanding success in England and Wales – Michael Lavalette’s election in Preston – was achieved by a genuine attempt to seek out and represent large numbers of people in Preston who were against the war and against racism. Elsewhere, the alliance has been less successful, even in Brent East where, against a background of profound disillusionment with the government and an excellent alliance candidate, we only just managed to get clear of the ruck of independent candidates who cluttered up and divided the left opposition. If we are to make any headway in the vital business of transforming the mass opposition into a fighting socialist force we need to look again at the organisation and structure of the British left.
The building blocks for a new structure are plain for everyone to see. The expulsion of George Galloway from the Labour Party for his opposition to the war in Iraq; the hostility to Blair and co among large numbers of trade unionists, including trade union leaders like Bob Crow, Mark Serwotka and Dave Ward, and the growing disgust with capitalism that emerges from organisations like Globalise Resistance, the European Social Forum and large elements of the green movement. In all these areas, there is a common cry for new organisations, broadly-based in the community, that go deeper into the popular consciousness than the alliance has done so far.
Such an argument can easily be taken too far. A coalition calling itself something like ‘Peace and Justice’ for instance, seems to me undesirable – not only because it means all things to all people but chiefly because it seems to reject the socialist alternative at a time when the argument for socialist solutions is stronger and more popular than ever. On the other hand, both the name and the intentions of any new coalition need to engage as many people as possible, even if they do not regard themselves primarily as socialists. The principles should be as simple as possible – for public ownership and comprehensive education, and against privatisation, imperialism, the war in Iraq, the New Labour government and its Tory/Liberal allies. The simple aim of the new coalition should be to recapture some of the loyalty to socialist ideas and principles that used to inspire people to campaign for and vote for Labour. Candidates who run in elections for the new coalition should explain how they will speak and vote on all the relevant issues. In London, for instance, as Blair, Prescott and Clarke proceed to tear up the comprehensive system of education, coalition candidates, locally and nationally, should set out precisely how they intend – as elected councillors, assembly members and MPs – to fight for, restore and improve comprehensive schools.
The coalition’s approach to organisations that join it should be both tolerant and impatient: tolerant of the right of individual parties to proceed with their own agenda, impatient of any attempt to make sectarian capital out of the coalition. I would hope that my own party, the Socialist Workers Party, would enter such a new coalition with all the enthusiasm with which we joined the Socialist Alliance, and would work as powerfully as we can for the new coalition in the hope, but not the condition, that its success would be our success.
The huge British Politics at the Crossroads meeting in London on 29 October laid the basis for such a new coalition. I hope it proceeds quickly. We have no time to lose.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><em>New Statesman</em>, Decline and Fall</h1>
<h3>(October 1996)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.201, October 1996, p.21.<br>
Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Not long ago a group of earnest young members of the Communist Party produced a theoretical magazine. Since they assumed they were Marxists, they called it <strong>Marxism Today</strong>. As Thatcher rolled from triumph to triumph, they decided that Marxism was pretty well irrelevant. They started to use the magazine’s awkward title not as a description of the journal’s content but as a kind of joke. The best part of the joke was to give substantial space to interviews with Tories. ‘The Tories are in power,’ they would explain. ‘They have a right to be heard.’ Thus month after month <strong>Marxism Today</strong> appeared with Tory ministers and their supporters on the cover.</p>
<p>Right wing politicians and ideologues were quoted in the newspapers as having said this or that – ‘to <strong>Marxism Today</strong>’. The circulation rose quite quickly. But soon the new readers realised that they could read what Tories are saying more accurately and more persuasively in, say, the <strong>Telegraph</strong>, the <strong>Daily Mail</strong>, the <strong>Express</strong>, the <strong>Star</strong>, etc., etc., etc. <strong>Marxism Today</strong> sank swiftly into oblivion.</p>
<p>Its fate came back to me the other day as I was reading the <strong>New Statesman</strong>. A prominent feature was by Steven Norris MP. Norris had just resigned as a junior minister of transport in the Tory government, a post which he had occupied with studied mediocrity. He had just announced, in the style of so many of his Tory heroes of recent years, that he was leaving politics to spend more time with his wallet. Appropriately, he had taken a couple of directorships with the bus companies his ministry had been ‘liberating’.</p>
<p>What was he doing writing in the <strong>New Statesman</strong>? He was defending the privatisation of the railways, the most monstrous and corrupt of all the Tory privatisations. At the last count only 11 percent of the British population said they supported it. In a desperate effort to buck the popular view, the massed ranks of the right wing press pulled out all the stops to ‘put the case’ for railway privatisation. Now, to their astonishment and joy, they were joined by one of the very few influential journals on the left.</p>
<p>Is this an exception? Any socialist who with gritted teeth fights their way through a copy of the <strong>New Statesman</strong> today is struck again and again not just by the awful blandness of tone, or even by the supercilious sneers which professional parliamentary pundits substitute for ideas, but by its shamelessly reactionary politics. Under the banner of ‘letting everyone have their say’, the <strong>New Statesman</strong> has recently given tracts of space to the bigots of the anti-abortion campaign, to old style union bashing and to the most frightful reactionary economics. The strident support for free enterprise and the market takes its tune from the ideological heroes of the present editorial team, most of whom were in the late Social Democratic Party. These articles are worth reading for one reason only: to remind us that the SDP had no distinctive economic policy at all save to back the market; and that its only purpose was to keep the Tories in office by splitting the Labour Party. The fact that the splitters are now back in the Labour saddle is the clearest proof of Labour’s collapse into Tory ideology and Tory policies. But for the <strong>New Statesman</strong> Roger Liddle, Peter Mandelson and co., Tories in all but name, are the ‘radicals’ of the hour.</p>
<p>The <strong>New Statesman</strong> was started in 1912 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There was nothing revolutionary about their intentions. From the outset the <strong>New Statesman</strong> was directed exclusively to the middle class left. Although the <strong>New Statesman</strong> did not exclude Tories, its general thrust was to challenge received capitalist notions in politics and economics and to give some intellectual reinforcement to the burgeoning Labour Party.</p>
<p>In 1931, after the disaster of the 1929-31 Labour government, the <strong>New Statesman</strong> was bumping along with a circulation of 7,000. A new editor was appointed: Kingsley Martin, a man of great charisma and editorial skill. Martin was a maverick with no clear ideas, but he was permanently at war with the establishment, and gave acres of space not just to Fabian socialists like G.D.H. Cole but to more fiery types such as H.N. Brailsford, perhaps the best socialist writer in Britain at the time. Martin had the knack of picking out the best people to put the argument against the received notions of the time, and, as capitalism slumped into a deeper and deeper pit, more and more people bought his paper. He lasted 30 years. By the time he handed over to John Freeman in 1961, the <strong>New Statesman</strong> was selling 70,000.</p>
<p>There is no case for any nostalgia here. Again and again, the <strong>New Statesman</strong> got it wrong, usually through ideological cowardice. Martin, for instance, recognised George Orwell’s despatches from Spain as probably the finest British journalism of his time, but he refused to publish them for fear of falling out with Stalinist orthodoxy. But there was never any doubt of the paper’s hostility to the rich and powerful. Into the bargain, and for the same reasons, under a series of inspired literary editors, the ‘back half’ of the <strong>New Statesman</strong> became the best review section in all the British press.</p>
<p>These priorities continued under John Freeman and even under his successor, Paul Johnson (yes, the same Neanderthal reactionary who now infests the <strong>Daily Mail</strong>). Though the circulation started steadily to go down, there was no doubt that the magazine continued with its left wing priorities. After a period in which it seemed to be knocked senseless by the new victorious Thatcherism, the <strong>New Statesman</strong> regained some of its tradition of resistance and challenge under the now much reviled Steve Platt.</p>
<p>Its recent takeover by the millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson and the appointment of the former SDP stalwart Ian Hargreaves as editor heralded a complete break with all these traditions and a lurch to the right so shameless and so sudden that socialists everywhere have been throwing it away in disbelief. What was left of the challenge of the <strong>New Statesman</strong> has now been totally engulfed in the Blair menace, which instead of exposing and defying the hideous priorities of modern capitalism, sings its praises. Tories queue up to be interviewed in it. It has much more money behind it than had <strong>Marxism Today</strong>. It may last longer on the Robinson millions. But its future, I guess, will be much the same.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
New Statesman, Decline and Fall
(October 1996)
From Socialist Review, No.201, October 1996, p.21.
Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Not long ago a group of earnest young members of the Communist Party produced a theoretical magazine. Since they assumed they were Marxists, they called it Marxism Today. As Thatcher rolled from triumph to triumph, they decided that Marxism was pretty well irrelevant. They started to use the magazine’s awkward title not as a description of the journal’s content but as a kind of joke. The best part of the joke was to give substantial space to interviews with Tories. ‘The Tories are in power,’ they would explain. ‘They have a right to be heard.’ Thus month after month Marxism Today appeared with Tory ministers and their supporters on the cover.
Right wing politicians and ideologues were quoted in the newspapers as having said this or that – ‘to Marxism Today’. The circulation rose quite quickly. But soon the new readers realised that they could read what Tories are saying more accurately and more persuasively in, say, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Express, the Star, etc., etc., etc. Marxism Today sank swiftly into oblivion.
Its fate came back to me the other day as I was reading the New Statesman. A prominent feature was by Steven Norris MP. Norris had just resigned as a junior minister of transport in the Tory government, a post which he had occupied with studied mediocrity. He had just announced, in the style of so many of his Tory heroes of recent years, that he was leaving politics to spend more time with his wallet. Appropriately, he had taken a couple of directorships with the bus companies his ministry had been ‘liberating’.
What was he doing writing in the New Statesman? He was defending the privatisation of the railways, the most monstrous and corrupt of all the Tory privatisations. At the last count only 11 percent of the British population said they supported it. In a desperate effort to buck the popular view, the massed ranks of the right wing press pulled out all the stops to ‘put the case’ for railway privatisation. Now, to their astonishment and joy, they were joined by one of the very few influential journals on the left.
Is this an exception? Any socialist who with gritted teeth fights their way through a copy of the New Statesman today is struck again and again not just by the awful blandness of tone, or even by the supercilious sneers which professional parliamentary pundits substitute for ideas, but by its shamelessly reactionary politics. Under the banner of ‘letting everyone have their say’, the New Statesman has recently given tracts of space to the bigots of the anti-abortion campaign, to old style union bashing and to the most frightful reactionary economics. The strident support for free enterprise and the market takes its tune from the ideological heroes of the present editorial team, most of whom were in the late Social Democratic Party. These articles are worth reading for one reason only: to remind us that the SDP had no distinctive economic policy at all save to back the market; and that its only purpose was to keep the Tories in office by splitting the Labour Party. The fact that the splitters are now back in the Labour saddle is the clearest proof of Labour’s collapse into Tory ideology and Tory policies. But for the New Statesman Roger Liddle, Peter Mandelson and co., Tories in all but name, are the ‘radicals’ of the hour.
The New Statesman was started in 1912 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There was nothing revolutionary about their intentions. From the outset the New Statesman was directed exclusively to the middle class left. Although the New Statesman did not exclude Tories, its general thrust was to challenge received capitalist notions in politics and economics and to give some intellectual reinforcement to the burgeoning Labour Party.
In 1931, after the disaster of the 1929-31 Labour government, the New Statesman was bumping along with a circulation of 7,000. A new editor was appointed: Kingsley Martin, a man of great charisma and editorial skill. Martin was a maverick with no clear ideas, but he was permanently at war with the establishment, and gave acres of space not just to Fabian socialists like G.D.H. Cole but to more fiery types such as H.N. Brailsford, perhaps the best socialist writer in Britain at the time. Martin had the knack of picking out the best people to put the argument against the received notions of the time, and, as capitalism slumped into a deeper and deeper pit, more and more people bought his paper. He lasted 30 years. By the time he handed over to John Freeman in 1961, the New Statesman was selling 70,000.
There is no case for any nostalgia here. Again and again, the New Statesman got it wrong, usually through ideological cowardice. Martin, for instance, recognised George Orwell’s despatches from Spain as probably the finest British journalism of his time, but he refused to publish them for fear of falling out with Stalinist orthodoxy. But there was never any doubt of the paper’s hostility to the rich and powerful. Into the bargain, and for the same reasons, under a series of inspired literary editors, the ‘back half’ of the New Statesman became the best review section in all the British press.
These priorities continued under John Freeman and even under his successor, Paul Johnson (yes, the same Neanderthal reactionary who now infests the Daily Mail). Though the circulation started steadily to go down, there was no doubt that the magazine continued with its left wing priorities. After a period in which it seemed to be knocked senseless by the new victorious Thatcherism, the New Statesman regained some of its tradition of resistance and challenge under the now much reviled Steve Platt.
Its recent takeover by the millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson and the appointment of the former SDP stalwart Ian Hargreaves as editor heralded a complete break with all these traditions and a lurch to the right so shameless and so sudden that socialists everywhere have been throwing it away in disbelief. What was left of the challenge of the New Statesman has now been totally engulfed in the Blair menace, which instead of exposing and defying the hideous priorities of modern capitalism, sings its praises. Tories queue up to be interviewed in it. It has much more money behind it than had Marxism Today. It may last longer on the Robinson millions. But its future, I guess, will be much the same.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>No sects please</h1>
<h3>(February 1986)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 15 February 1986.<br>
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), <strong>In the Heat of the Struggle</strong>, Bookmarks, London 1993, p. 227.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">FOR MOST of my life I’ve been putting up with being called a ‘sectarian’. This means, I think, that I’m more interested in the fortunes of a small group of socialists than in the future of society or the working class.</p>
<p>The accusation normally comes from those who protest that they are part of the ‘broad movement’, or the ‘wider Labour movement’ or some such phrase, and that therefore the interests of the entire working class are far more important to them than the squabbles between groupuscules of the left.</p>
<p>It’s a charge which, I confess, often puts me on the defensive, because we all know quite well that there is a fanatical and sectarian streak in the Marxism of small groups. Their very smallness, their apparent isolation from society at large tends to turn them inwards and to attract them to mumbo-jumbo and theology.</p>
<p>There’s a temptation always to attack other socialists (who can occasionally even be defeated) rather than the real powers that be (who can’t).</p>
<p>The Socialist Workers Party has been lectured over the years on such sectarianism by broad movement papers on the left such the <strong>New Statesman</strong> and the <strong>Tribune</strong>.</p>
<p>I’m a faithful reader of both. Last week, the <em>Diary</em> in the <strong>New Statesman</strong> was written by Ian Williams, a Labour Party member in Liverpool who has written some perfectly good stuff in the past.</p>
<p>His Diary this week has seven paragraphs. The second paragraph is an attack on Derek Hatton. It is a pretty nasty attack, by the way, but Ian Williams is a known opponent of Militant in Merseyside, so I suppose it was predictable.</p>
<p>Then, in paragraph six, Ian Williams attacks (wait for it) Militant in a paragraph reeking of sectarianism. In paragraph seven he starts off by attacking Militant for saying he writes for the ‘right wing’ <strong>New Statesman</strong>. In three out of seven paragraphs he attacks Militant and not a word about the Labour leadership or even about the Tory government.</p>
<p>For relief from this, I turned to <strong>Tribune</strong> and the star column of David Blunkett. David devotes pretty well all his column this week to the ‘Lunatics on the Left who test out socialist purity by whether it matches the high-pitched squeal of their own tuning fork rather than a commitment to policy.’</p>
<p>David is very cross with a lot of lunatics on the left who keep raising ‘points on the agenda’ at meetings and not allowing party leaders like himself to get on with explaining the policy which will bring Labour to office. He doesn’t deal with the difficulties encountered by socialists in the Labour Party who take the old fashioned view that people should not be kicked out of the party because they are committed to socialist policies.</p>
<p>Everywhere I meet Labour Party members the talk is the same. Very left wing people tell me they are ‘shocked’ by the ‘corruption’ in the Liverpool Labour Party. Almost everyone has a new joke about Derek Hatton. Everyone is against witch hunts. Witches are all very well, and they don’t stop Labour winning elections. But really, you know, when all is said and done, these Militant people are beyond the pale.</p>
<p>Well, it was a relief, I can tell you, to turn to <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> where there is not a single attack on Militant in the entire paper. Indeed, I can’t find any attack on any socialist grouping.</p>
<p>There are some heavy bashes at Rupert Murdoch, and at Tony Dubbins and Brenda Dean for letting him smash their unions, and then there are some attacks on people called Botha and Duvalier, who as far as I know, are not members of any Trotskyist tendency. But there isn’t even a spare inch anywhere for a single nasty joke about Derek Hatton. Who are the sectarians?</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
No sects please
(February 1986)
From Socialist Worker, 15 February 1986.
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, p. 227.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
FOR MOST of my life I’ve been putting up with being called a ‘sectarian’. This means, I think, that I’m more interested in the fortunes of a small group of socialists than in the future of society or the working class.
The accusation normally comes from those who protest that they are part of the ‘broad movement’, or the ‘wider Labour movement’ or some such phrase, and that therefore the interests of the entire working class are far more important to them than the squabbles between groupuscules of the left.
It’s a charge which, I confess, often puts me on the defensive, because we all know quite well that there is a fanatical and sectarian streak in the Marxism of small groups. Their very smallness, their apparent isolation from society at large tends to turn them inwards and to attract them to mumbo-jumbo and theology.
There’s a temptation always to attack other socialists (who can occasionally even be defeated) rather than the real powers that be (who can’t).
The Socialist Workers Party has been lectured over the years on such sectarianism by broad movement papers on the left such the New Statesman and the Tribune.
I’m a faithful reader of both. Last week, the Diary in the New Statesman was written by Ian Williams, a Labour Party member in Liverpool who has written some perfectly good stuff in the past.
His Diary this week has seven paragraphs. The second paragraph is an attack on Derek Hatton. It is a pretty nasty attack, by the way, but Ian Williams is a known opponent of Militant in Merseyside, so I suppose it was predictable.
Then, in paragraph six, Ian Williams attacks (wait for it) Militant in a paragraph reeking of sectarianism. In paragraph seven he starts off by attacking Militant for saying he writes for the ‘right wing’ New Statesman. In three out of seven paragraphs he attacks Militant and not a word about the Labour leadership or even about the Tory government.
For relief from this, I turned to Tribune and the star column of David Blunkett. David devotes pretty well all his column this week to the ‘Lunatics on the Left who test out socialist purity by whether it matches the high-pitched squeal of their own tuning fork rather than a commitment to policy.’
David is very cross with a lot of lunatics on the left who keep raising ‘points on the agenda’ at meetings and not allowing party leaders like himself to get on with explaining the policy which will bring Labour to office. He doesn’t deal with the difficulties encountered by socialists in the Labour Party who take the old fashioned view that people should not be kicked out of the party because they are committed to socialist policies.
Everywhere I meet Labour Party members the talk is the same. Very left wing people tell me they are ‘shocked’ by the ‘corruption’ in the Liverpool Labour Party. Almost everyone has a new joke about Derek Hatton. Everyone is against witch hunts. Witches are all very well, and they don’t stop Labour winning elections. But really, you know, when all is said and done, these Militant people are beyond the pale.
Well, it was a relief, I can tell you, to turn to Socialist Worker where there is not a single attack on Militant in the entire paper. Indeed, I can’t find any attack on any socialist grouping.
There are some heavy bashes at Rupert Murdoch, and at Tony Dubbins and Brenda Dean for letting him smash their unions, and then there are some attacks on people called Botha and Duvalier, who as far as I know, are not members of any Trotskyist tendency. But there isn’t even a spare inch anywhere for a single nasty joke about Derek Hatton. Who are the sectarians?
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>In the colonial style</h1>
<h3>(July 1996)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Reviews</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index6.html#sr96_07" target="new">No. 199</a>, July–August 1996, p. 28.<br>
Transcribed & marked up up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>A Struggle for Power</strong><br>
Theodore Draper<br>
<em>Little, Brown £25</em></p>
<p class="fst">This book opens with a sentence of breathtaking banality. Justifying ‘another book on the American Revolution’, Theodore Draper writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘In my view, the Revolution was basically a struggle for power between Great Britain and its American colonies.’</p>
<p class="fst">Er, yes. But 330 pages later Draper explains what he means and why the sentence is not so banal after all.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘The <em>raison d’etre</em> of the American colonies for the British was economic. The colonists knew that the weak link in the British colonial chain was the need to hold on to the American market for British manufactures.’</p>
<p class="fst">What he meant by this early statement of the obvious was that there are hundreds of interpretations of the American Revolution, most of them connecting old fashioned American jingoism with modern American imperialism. But there are very few books on the subject which start at the real beginning: economics.</p>
<p>Draper’s book starts with a fascinating account of a pamphlet war in Britain which started in 1759, in the middle of what was really the first world war, the Seven Years War between Britain and France. The question for debate in these pamphlets sounds bizarre. In the event of a peace settlement, which of two territories should Britain insist on seizing from the French: Canada or Guadeloupe? The argument for getting exclusive control of the big one – Canada – seemed irresistible; and so, eventually, the French were chucked out. But several perspicacious commentators argued instead for Guadeloupe. First, it was stunningly rich. Secondly, it was easier to defend. Thirdly, most important, the confidence and ambitions of the Americans would be enormously increased if the French threat was removed from Canada. Fifteen years before the first shots were fired in the American War of Independence, there were people on both sides of the ocean who foresaw a widening breach between the economic interests of Britain and those of her American colonies.</p>
<p>For at least a decade after 1759, though, the old colonial arguments held out. British industry and commerce desperately needed the huge, burgeoning and captive market in the American colonies. The colonies were not expensive to run – they ran themselves through their own assemblies. Of course, the elections to those assemblies cut out the vast majority of the population. But they were home grown, and paid scant regard to the British-appointed governors who spent most of their time whining for their expenses. For more than 100 years the relationship had survived uneasily as a sort of stand off. Draper describes it as ‘dual power’. Sovereign Britain laid down the ground rules while the day to day administration was carried out by the local American assemblies. Because the relationship was essentially exploitative, however, dual power could not last forever. As time went on, the British government demanded more, and the American colonists conceded less. What finally started to blow the whole imperial edifice to pieces was a familiar little word: tax.</p>
<p>The British had won the Seven Years War, but they still had to pay for it. As soon as the war was over, in 1763, the faction in the British parliament which demanded more money from the colonies grew in stature and influence. These gentlemen could not see why the colonies should not pay more tax to help defray the expenses of keeping their country secure for British trade. So in quick succession the British parliament passed laws demanding new taxes from the Americans – first a sugar tax, then a stamp tax, then a series of other measures designed to bring the colonies to heel. These were known (after a particularly brainless and bullying chancellor of the exchequer) as the Townshend Acts. One by one the taxes were passed into law, and one by one they were repealed as the Americans united against them. ‘No taxation without representation!’ was the cry. What infuriated and united the people in all 13 colonies was not so much the economic burden of the new taxes, which Draper shows was relatively light. Americans united behind the principle that Americans should decide what taxes they should pay; and that taxation was not a matter which could in any way be trusted to a distant parliament for which no American had a single vote.</p>
<p>Opposition to the new taxes could be disturbingly uncivilised. In the Boston riots against the stamp tax in 1765, for instance, the ‘mob’ broke into the prisons and freed everyone who had been sent there for riot or any other political offence. Though the British had by this time installed troops, they were nothing like strong enough to cope with these mighty demonstrations, and the people were repeatedly triumphant. Their triumphs stoked up the fury of the new British chancellor soon to be prime minister, Edward North, an even denser bigot than Townshend. The implacability of the colonists and the stubbornness of the British government continued up to the Boston Tea Party (brilliantly explained by Draper) and on to the hot war which eventually broke out in 1775.</p>
<p>I had hoped when I opened the book that it would deal with the armed struggle for independence, and the extraordinary, revolutionary experiments in democracy which took place during the war, especially in Philadelphia. Instead, the book stops at the start of the war, so in a way the really exciting events are yet to come. But Draper’s book is grittily attractive nevertheless. It never abandons its roots in the economics which, Draper insists, set the war going in the first place. This insistence on the essentially colonial nature of the war answers a lot of questions. The enforced, uneasy unity between the classes during the war explains why the Americans could defeat what was then the biggest and proudest military machine on earth – but it also explains why the American Revolution did not go half so far as its French successor in extirpating the dark forces of feudalism. It took another 100 years or so, for instance, for bourgeois America to rid itself of the vile barbarism of slavery. (The French Revolution, by contrast, abolished slavery in a single decree early in 1794.) The class war kept breaking out in the American Revolution, but it was continually fudged at the edges by the colonial war. What Governor Shirley of Boston called ‘working artificers, seafaring men and the low sort of people’ were called up to do their bit to get rid of the English. They were put back in their place rather more meekly than in France a decade later, and this long but easy to read history book goes a long way to explaining why.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
In the colonial style
(July 1996)
From Reviews, Socialist Review, No. 199, July–August 1996, p. 28.
Transcribed & marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
A Struggle for Power
Theodore Draper
Little, Brown £25
This book opens with a sentence of breathtaking banality. Justifying ‘another book on the American Revolution’, Theodore Draper writes:
‘In my view, the Revolution was basically a struggle for power between Great Britain and its American colonies.’
Er, yes. But 330 pages later Draper explains what he means and why the sentence is not so banal after all.
‘The raison d’etre of the American colonies for the British was economic. The colonists knew that the weak link in the British colonial chain was the need to hold on to the American market for British manufactures.’
What he meant by this early statement of the obvious was that there are hundreds of interpretations of the American Revolution, most of them connecting old fashioned American jingoism with modern American imperialism. But there are very few books on the subject which start at the real beginning: economics.
Draper’s book starts with a fascinating account of a pamphlet war in Britain which started in 1759, in the middle of what was really the first world war, the Seven Years War between Britain and France. The question for debate in these pamphlets sounds bizarre. In the event of a peace settlement, which of two territories should Britain insist on seizing from the French: Canada or Guadeloupe? The argument for getting exclusive control of the big one – Canada – seemed irresistible; and so, eventually, the French were chucked out. But several perspicacious commentators argued instead for Guadeloupe. First, it was stunningly rich. Secondly, it was easier to defend. Thirdly, most important, the confidence and ambitions of the Americans would be enormously increased if the French threat was removed from Canada. Fifteen years before the first shots were fired in the American War of Independence, there were people on both sides of the ocean who foresaw a widening breach between the economic interests of Britain and those of her American colonies.
For at least a decade after 1759, though, the old colonial arguments held out. British industry and commerce desperately needed the huge, burgeoning and captive market in the American colonies. The colonies were not expensive to run – they ran themselves through their own assemblies. Of course, the elections to those assemblies cut out the vast majority of the population. But they were home grown, and paid scant regard to the British-appointed governors who spent most of their time whining for their expenses. For more than 100 years the relationship had survived uneasily as a sort of stand off. Draper describes it as ‘dual power’. Sovereign Britain laid down the ground rules while the day to day administration was carried out by the local American assemblies. Because the relationship was essentially exploitative, however, dual power could not last forever. As time went on, the British government demanded more, and the American colonists conceded less. What finally started to blow the whole imperial edifice to pieces was a familiar little word: tax.
The British had won the Seven Years War, but they still had to pay for it. As soon as the war was over, in 1763, the faction in the British parliament which demanded more money from the colonies grew in stature and influence. These gentlemen could not see why the colonies should not pay more tax to help defray the expenses of keeping their country secure for British trade. So in quick succession the British parliament passed laws demanding new taxes from the Americans – first a sugar tax, then a stamp tax, then a series of other measures designed to bring the colonies to heel. These were known (after a particularly brainless and bullying chancellor of the exchequer) as the Townshend Acts. One by one the taxes were passed into law, and one by one they were repealed as the Americans united against them. ‘No taxation without representation!’ was the cry. What infuriated and united the people in all 13 colonies was not so much the economic burden of the new taxes, which Draper shows was relatively light. Americans united behind the principle that Americans should decide what taxes they should pay; and that taxation was not a matter which could in any way be trusted to a distant parliament for which no American had a single vote.
Opposition to the new taxes could be disturbingly uncivilised. In the Boston riots against the stamp tax in 1765, for instance, the ‘mob’ broke into the prisons and freed everyone who had been sent there for riot or any other political offence. Though the British had by this time installed troops, they were nothing like strong enough to cope with these mighty demonstrations, and the people were repeatedly triumphant. Their triumphs stoked up the fury of the new British chancellor soon to be prime minister, Edward North, an even denser bigot than Townshend. The implacability of the colonists and the stubbornness of the British government continued up to the Boston Tea Party (brilliantly explained by Draper) and on to the hot war which eventually broke out in 1775.
I had hoped when I opened the book that it would deal with the armed struggle for independence, and the extraordinary, revolutionary experiments in democracy which took place during the war, especially in Philadelphia. Instead, the book stops at the start of the war, so in a way the really exciting events are yet to come. But Draper’s book is grittily attractive nevertheless. It never abandons its roots in the economics which, Draper insists, set the war going in the first place. This insistence on the essentially colonial nature of the war answers a lot of questions. The enforced, uneasy unity between the classes during the war explains why the Americans could defeat what was then the biggest and proudest military machine on earth – but it also explains why the American Revolution did not go half so far as its French successor in extirpating the dark forces of feudalism. It took another 100 years or so, for instance, for bourgeois America to rid itself of the vile barbarism of slavery. (The French Revolution, by contrast, abolished slavery in a single decree early in 1794.) The class war kept breaking out in the American Revolution, but it was continually fudged at the edges by the colonial war. What Governor Shirley of Boston called ‘working artificers, seafaring men and the low sort of people’ were called up to do their bit to get rid of the English. They were put back in their place rather more meekly than in France a decade later, and this long but easy to read history book goes a long way to explaining why.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>The Case for Socialism</h1>
<h4>What the Socialist Workers Party Stands For</h4>
<h3>(1990)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">First published in London in July 1990 by the Socialist Workers Party (GB).<br>
Copyright © 1990 Socialist Workers Party and Paul Foot.<br>
Published here with permission.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="link"><big><a href="preface.htm">Preface</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap1.htm">1. The Foaming Wave</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap2.htm">2. The Full Tide</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap3.htm">3. The Tottering Thrones</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap4.htm">4. The Growing Wrath</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap5.htm">5. The New Eminence</a><br>
<br>
<a href="chap6.htm">6. A World to Win</a></big></p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
The Case for Socialism
What the Socialist Workers Party Stands For
(1990)
First published in London in July 1990 by the Socialist Workers Party (GB).
Copyright © 1990 Socialist Workers Party and Paul Foot.
Published here with permission.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Preface
1. The Foaming Wave
2. The Full Tide
3. The Tottering Thrones
4. The Growing Wrath
5. The New Eminence
6. A World to Win
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Stop the Cuts</h1>
<h3>(1976)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">A Rank and File pamphlet published by the Rank & File Organising Committee, 1976.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="link"><big><a href="ch1.htm">A letter from Maureen Robertson</a><br>
<br>
<a href="ch2.htm">Death by a thousand cuts</a></big><br>
<a href="ch2.htm#s1">Housing</a><br>
<a href="ch2.htm#s2">Education</a><br>
<a href="ch2.htm#s3">The Health Service</a><br>
<a href="ch2.htm#s4">Personal services</a><br>
<a href="ch2.htm#s5">The end of the subsides: You’re on your on now</a><br>
<br>
<big><a href="ch3.htm">Yes, we can afford it!</a></big><br>
<a href="ch3.htm#s1">Mr Healey’s pipe dream</a><br>
<a href="ch3.htm#s2">In conclusion</a><br>
<br>
<big><a href="ch4.htm">Why can’t Labour help us?</a><br>
<br>
<a href="ch5.htm">The challenge of the Rank and File</a></big><br>
<a href="ch5.htm#s1">What to fight for:<br>
No Redundancies No Cuts!</a><br>
<a href="ch5.htm#s2">Insist on full establishment</a><br>
<a href="ch5.htm#s3">No unfilled vacancies</a><br>
<a href="ch5.htm#s4">How to fight</a><br>
<br>
<big><a href="appendix.htm">What to fight for:<br>
A Programme for Struggle</a></big></p>
<p> </p>
<p class="link"><a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Stop the Cuts
(1976)
A Rank and File pamphlet published by the Rank & File Organising Committee, 1976.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
A letter from Maureen Robertson
Death by a thousand cuts
Housing
Education
The Health Service
Personal services
The end of the subsides: You’re on your on now
Yes, we can afford it!
Mr Healey’s pipe dream
In conclusion
Why can’t Labour help us?
The challenge of the Rank and File
What to fight for:
No Redundancies No Cuts!
Insist on full establishment
No unfilled vacancies
How to fight
What to fight for:
A Programme for Struggle
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Last updated on 24 July 2018
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Corruption</small><br>
Members declare an unhealthy interest</h1>
<h3>(November 1996)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Notes of the Month</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.202, November 1996, p.8.<br>
Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">John Major decided many months ago to cling to office right up to the deadline (1 May 1997). Nothing seems more likely to interfere with this carefully constructed timetable than the government’s corruption. When the <strong>Guardian</strong> revealed two years ago that the mendacious Harrods store boss, Mohamed Al Fayed, had been spraying money round politicians in exchange for questions and influence in parliament, the government responded in the usual way: by passing the buck to a committee.</p>
<p>Lord Nolan, a former tax barrister, was the man chosen for the chair of this committee and he promptly proposed the appointment of the former auditor general, Sir Gordon Downey, as a new Parliamentary Commissioner of Standards.</p>
<p>Sir Gordon’s embarrassing job was to supervise the behaviour of MPs to see if they lived up to the rules set down in their register of interests.</p>
<p>These rules derive from the old fashioned view that an MP’s main job is to represent constituents. Instead of banning all MPs’ pay except their parliamentary salaries, the rules allow ‘outside interests’ provided (a) they are declared and (b) they don’t lead to conflict with the MP’s representative role. All this is entirely fanciful. Pretty well every Tory MP has some ‘outside interest’ which pays better than the parliamentary salary, and this leads to constant corruption.</p>
<p>Neil Hamilton, perhaps the nastiest of all the extreme right wingers who went to parliament in the 1980s, enjoyed a standard of life far beyond anything which could be bought with his parliamentary salary. He was apparently quite prepared to distribute ‘favours’ to people who would pay him (or set up an account at John Lewis for his wife) even when he was a minister.</p>
<p>When Hamilton was fingered, the government reacted exactly as it had done during the Scott inquiry. It concentrated not on rooting out the rotten apple but on protecting it. The importance of the leaked memo from Thatcherite whip David Willetts is that it shows how the Tory whips’ office works: ignoring the corruption and seeking to limit its exposure. The main reason for this approach is that there is not one rotten apple but a whole barrel of them.</p>
<p>So arrogant is the government in its death agonies, and so recklessly does it proceed, that it is constantly being found out. In the process, it irritates many of its own supporters. The glorious spectacle of the awful ‘Two Brains’ Willetts being gored by a Tory backbencher on the standards select committee was a sign of the nervousness and vulnerability of the government. Nor can ministers shake off the Hamilton sleaze. It will loom large over them in constant committees and inquiries until the election.</p>
<p>The other point about the Willetts scandal, however, is less exhilarating. It is that the key questioner was Tory, not Labour. The parliamentary Labour Party is far less corrupt than the Tories. Very few Labour MPs have highly paid ‘outside interests’. The whole sleaze story presents a marvellous opportunity to hound and bully the government to the polls, and so disrupt its timetable. The fact that Labour can attack without fear of counter-attack makes their performance even more pathetic than usual.</p>
<p>The silence of New Labour’s frontbencher on the committee, Ann Taylor, and Labour’s determination not to resign wholesale from a committee which is so obviously rigged, is proof that they prefer the medieval conventions of the House of Commons to driving the Tories out.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Corruption
Members declare an unhealthy interest
(November 1996)
From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.202, November 1996, p.8.
Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
John Major decided many months ago to cling to office right up to the deadline (1 May 1997). Nothing seems more likely to interfere with this carefully constructed timetable than the government’s corruption. When the Guardian revealed two years ago that the mendacious Harrods store boss, Mohamed Al Fayed, had been spraying money round politicians in exchange for questions and influence in parliament, the government responded in the usual way: by passing the buck to a committee.
Lord Nolan, a former tax barrister, was the man chosen for the chair of this committee and he promptly proposed the appointment of the former auditor general, Sir Gordon Downey, as a new Parliamentary Commissioner of Standards.
Sir Gordon’s embarrassing job was to supervise the behaviour of MPs to see if they lived up to the rules set down in their register of interests.
These rules derive from the old fashioned view that an MP’s main job is to represent constituents. Instead of banning all MPs’ pay except their parliamentary salaries, the rules allow ‘outside interests’ provided (a) they are declared and (b) they don’t lead to conflict with the MP’s representative role. All this is entirely fanciful. Pretty well every Tory MP has some ‘outside interest’ which pays better than the parliamentary salary, and this leads to constant corruption.
Neil Hamilton, perhaps the nastiest of all the extreme right wingers who went to parliament in the 1980s, enjoyed a standard of life far beyond anything which could be bought with his parliamentary salary. He was apparently quite prepared to distribute ‘favours’ to people who would pay him (or set up an account at John Lewis for his wife) even when he was a minister.
When Hamilton was fingered, the government reacted exactly as it had done during the Scott inquiry. It concentrated not on rooting out the rotten apple but on protecting it. The importance of the leaked memo from Thatcherite whip David Willetts is that it shows how the Tory whips’ office works: ignoring the corruption and seeking to limit its exposure. The main reason for this approach is that there is not one rotten apple but a whole barrel of them.
So arrogant is the government in its death agonies, and so recklessly does it proceed, that it is constantly being found out. In the process, it irritates many of its own supporters. The glorious spectacle of the awful ‘Two Brains’ Willetts being gored by a Tory backbencher on the standards select committee was a sign of the nervousness and vulnerability of the government. Nor can ministers shake off the Hamilton sleaze. It will loom large over them in constant committees and inquiries until the election.
The other point about the Willetts scandal, however, is less exhilarating. It is that the key questioner was Tory, not Labour. The parliamentary Labour Party is far less corrupt than the Tories. Very few Labour MPs have highly paid ‘outside interests’. The whole sleaze story presents a marvellous opportunity to hound and bully the government to the polls, and so disrupt its timetable. The fact that Labour can attack without fear of counter-attack makes their performance even more pathetic than usual.
The silence of New Labour’s frontbencher on the committee, Ann Taylor, and Labour’s determination not to resign wholesale from a committee which is so obviously rigged, is proof that they prefer the medieval conventions of the House of Commons to driving the Tories out.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Harry McShane</h1>
<h3>(April 1988)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, April 1988.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990</strong> (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 162–165.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The commonest jibe of reactionaries against revolution is that it is an infatuation of youth. When people get old, we are constantly told, they drop the silly idealisms of their youth. They become ‘old realists’.</p>
<p>I contemplated this jibe last Saturday as I stood (it was standing room only) in Craigton Crematorium with some 300 other people, many of them elderly Glasgow workers. We were paying our last respects to Harry McShane.</p>
<p>Harry died last week. He was ninety-six. He became a revolutionary Marxist in 1908, and he died a revolutionary Marxist in 1988. Can anyone show me one other person in the whole history of the world who was a revolutionary Marxist for eighty years?</p>
<p>It would be wonderful enough if it were just that Harry managed to sustain these ideas all that time. But ideas like his are not ‘just’ sustained. They can <em>only</em> be sustained in the heat of the struggle between the classes.</p>
<p>All his life Harry was an agitator in that struggle, a fighter. He made up his mind very early on (somewhere round 1910) that the socialist society he wanted was not going to be made by anyone <em>for</em> the workers; it was going to be made <em>by</em> the workers or not at all – and therefore their battles against employers and government were central to the whole process of political change.</p>
<p>The workers needed to use their muscle (‘We never realize how strong we are,’ he used to say again and again) but their muscle alone was not enough without politics.</p>
<p>Ever since he broke with the church at the age of sixteen and became a lifelong incurable atheist, Harry read books – books about British imperialism in Ireland and in Africa; about women’s liberation; about the Russian Revolution; about religion. He read these books, and encouraged others to read them, not in the interests of some arid scholarship but in order to improve his understanding of the world so that it could more speedily be changed.</p>
<p>Harry was an engineering worker. He was a close ally of the Scottish Marxist John Maclean, and campaigned with him on Clydeside against the imperialist war of 1914–18. He joined the Communist Party almost as soon as it was founded and was a member for thirty years.</p>
<p>He was the Scottish correspondent of the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> and Scottish organizer of the National Unemployed Workers Movement. Like pretty well all other Communists of the time, he was unwilling to accept the collapse of the workers’ state in Russia. He once told me of his excitement when he visited Russia in 1931. ‘It was so easy to believe the workers <em>were</em> in charge,’ he said.</p>
<p>After the war though, his doubts grew. They sprang from his faith in the rank and file of the working class. What was happening to that rank and file in Czechoslovakia in 1948, or East Berlin in 1953?</p>
<p>In Britain the rank and file of the Communist Party were treated increasingly as a stage army, always expected to agree with the leadership. When he was disciplined for <em>not</em> taking part in a standing ovation for a party official, Harry had had enough – if he’d been disciplined because he <em>had</em> given a standing ovation, perhaps he would have understood.</p>
<p>There is a picture in the Glasgow <strong>Daily Record</strong> sometime in 1953 of Harry walking across Queens Park with his hat in his hand. It was the day he left the Communist Party. ‘I couldn’t stop them taking the picture,’ he explained.</p>
<p>But when the same paper (and the <strong>Daily Express</strong>) offered him £500 – more than a year’s salary – to ‘tell all’ about the Communist Party, he swore at both of them (he seldom swore, but he did on that occasion). Instead, he went back (at the age of sixty-two) to the yards as a labourer, and worked until he was sixty-nine to pay the stamps to qualify for a pension.</p>
<p>When I met him first in 1961, he was supported politically only by two outstanding socialist workers, Hugh Savage and Les Foster, who had broken from the Communist Party with him. He was seventy – but full of the joys of life, and of the hopes of a better world. He was still a revolutionary socialist through and through. He was quite determined that a socialist world could and should be won.</p>
<p>He was scarred from his bitter experience with the Communist Party, and wary of joining another political organization. But when, in 1963, we set up the first fledgling organization of the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party) in the Horseshoe Bar near Glasgow’s Central Station, Harry never missed a meeting. When in the same year the TUC called for a demonstration against unemployment, Harry helped to organize the buses.</p>
<p>In the great debates which took place in the Glasgow trades council at that time (and they <em>were</em> great debates; greater by far than anything you hear in parliament) Harry relentlessly attacked his former Communist Party colleagues for selling out simple class solidarity in exchange for a ship order from Russia, or to send another cosy delegation to Warsaw or Budapest.</p>
<p>He identified Russia as state-capitalist, and the Communists as unwitting stooges of another imperial power. Yet when he was approached by the organizer for Catholic Action in the trades council, and asked to form a loose anti-Communist alliance, he swore again.</p>
<p>‘At least these people believe they are socialists – you don’t believe in anything except your god,’ he spat at the frightened delegate, who (literally) ran away.</p>
<p>The Right to Work marches of the late 1970s were meat and drink to Harry. He sent off the first march from Manchester with a truly magnificent speech, bettered only when he spoke to 6,000 people at the final rally in the Albert Hall.</p>
<p>His theme in these speeches was a simple one. With his sly humour he would outline the government’s ‘plans for unemployment’. ‘Plans for this, plans for that, they’ve always got plans,’ he would say. Then he would show how no government ever had the slightest effect on unemployment. The ebb and flow of the capitalist tide swept over all governments and all plans. Only the workers in action could do anything to roll it back.</p>
<p>We all know that great men and women don’t make history, but we also know that working-class history would be a mean thing if it were not enriched by great men and women.</p>
<p>Great revolutionaries cast aside the temptations and pressures of the capitalist world in a single-minded commitment to change it. Harry McShane did all that with a cheerfulness and comradeship which charmed and enthused any socialist (or any potential socialist) who ever met him.</p>
<p>He died in an old people’s home. He left a few books to his friends. He had survived on his pension, almost without supplement, for the last twenty-eight years of his life. He never had any property, yet he was perhaps the most contented man I have ever met; utterly happy as long as he was fighting for his class.</p>
<p>He kept up that fight with undiminished enthusiasm through good times and through bad. Because his politics were based on the working class, he had a sharp instinct for the shifts in the class mood.</p>
<p>One afternoon as he sat in the back of an old van which was carrying a party of us to speak on disarmament at the Mound in Edinburgh he remarked, just as a matter of interest: ‘Last time I was here there were 20,000 people at the meeting.’ That day he spoke to twenty.</p>
<p>These desperate turns in the mood of his class never deflected him from his purpose, or even from his speaking skills. On the days when he spoke to very few people (I once held the platform when he spoke outside John Browns shipyard in Clydebank to <em>no one at all</em>!) he was as persuasive and passionate as ever I heard.</p>
<p>‘Things will come up again, Paul,’ he reassured me as we trooped home that day. ‘When they are not listening, then it’s even more important that we keep the ideas alive.’</p>
<p>Anyone who knew Harry knows their good fortune. Anyone who didn’t know him can reflect on his extraordinary life whenever they feel worn down by the old realism or the new. He was, is and will be an inspiration and example to us all.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Harry McShane
(April 1988)
From Socialist Worker, April 1988.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 162–165.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The commonest jibe of reactionaries against revolution is that it is an infatuation of youth. When people get old, we are constantly told, they drop the silly idealisms of their youth. They become ‘old realists’.
I contemplated this jibe last Saturday as I stood (it was standing room only) in Craigton Crematorium with some 300 other people, many of them elderly Glasgow workers. We were paying our last respects to Harry McShane.
Harry died last week. He was ninety-six. He became a revolutionary Marxist in 1908, and he died a revolutionary Marxist in 1988. Can anyone show me one other person in the whole history of the world who was a revolutionary Marxist for eighty years?
It would be wonderful enough if it were just that Harry managed to sustain these ideas all that time. But ideas like his are not ‘just’ sustained. They can only be sustained in the heat of the struggle between the classes.
All his life Harry was an agitator in that struggle, a fighter. He made up his mind very early on (somewhere round 1910) that the socialist society he wanted was not going to be made by anyone for the workers; it was going to be made by the workers or not at all – and therefore their battles against employers and government were central to the whole process of political change.
The workers needed to use their muscle (‘We never realize how strong we are,’ he used to say again and again) but their muscle alone was not enough without politics.
Ever since he broke with the church at the age of sixteen and became a lifelong incurable atheist, Harry read books – books about British imperialism in Ireland and in Africa; about women’s liberation; about the Russian Revolution; about religion. He read these books, and encouraged others to read them, not in the interests of some arid scholarship but in order to improve his understanding of the world so that it could more speedily be changed.
Harry was an engineering worker. He was a close ally of the Scottish Marxist John Maclean, and campaigned with him on Clydeside against the imperialist war of 1914–18. He joined the Communist Party almost as soon as it was founded and was a member for thirty years.
He was the Scottish correspondent of the Daily Worker and Scottish organizer of the National Unemployed Workers Movement. Like pretty well all other Communists of the time, he was unwilling to accept the collapse of the workers’ state in Russia. He once told me of his excitement when he visited Russia in 1931. ‘It was so easy to believe the workers were in charge,’ he said.
After the war though, his doubts grew. They sprang from his faith in the rank and file of the working class. What was happening to that rank and file in Czechoslovakia in 1948, or East Berlin in 1953?
In Britain the rank and file of the Communist Party were treated increasingly as a stage army, always expected to agree with the leadership. When he was disciplined for not taking part in a standing ovation for a party official, Harry had had enough – if he’d been disciplined because he had given a standing ovation, perhaps he would have understood.
There is a picture in the Glasgow Daily Record sometime in 1953 of Harry walking across Queens Park with his hat in his hand. It was the day he left the Communist Party. ‘I couldn’t stop them taking the picture,’ he explained.
But when the same paper (and the Daily Express) offered him £500 – more than a year’s salary – to ‘tell all’ about the Communist Party, he swore at both of them (he seldom swore, but he did on that occasion). Instead, he went back (at the age of sixty-two) to the yards as a labourer, and worked until he was sixty-nine to pay the stamps to qualify for a pension.
When I met him first in 1961, he was supported politically only by two outstanding socialist workers, Hugh Savage and Les Foster, who had broken from the Communist Party with him. He was seventy – but full of the joys of life, and of the hopes of a better world. He was still a revolutionary socialist through and through. He was quite determined that a socialist world could and should be won.
He was scarred from his bitter experience with the Communist Party, and wary of joining another political organization. But when, in 1963, we set up the first fledgling organization of the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party) in the Horseshoe Bar near Glasgow’s Central Station, Harry never missed a meeting. When in the same year the TUC called for a demonstration against unemployment, Harry helped to organize the buses.
In the great debates which took place in the Glasgow trades council at that time (and they were great debates; greater by far than anything you hear in parliament) Harry relentlessly attacked his former Communist Party colleagues for selling out simple class solidarity in exchange for a ship order from Russia, or to send another cosy delegation to Warsaw or Budapest.
He identified Russia as state-capitalist, and the Communists as unwitting stooges of another imperial power. Yet when he was approached by the organizer for Catholic Action in the trades council, and asked to form a loose anti-Communist alliance, he swore again.
‘At least these people believe they are socialists – you don’t believe in anything except your god,’ he spat at the frightened delegate, who (literally) ran away.
The Right to Work marches of the late 1970s were meat and drink to Harry. He sent off the first march from Manchester with a truly magnificent speech, bettered only when he spoke to 6,000 people at the final rally in the Albert Hall.
His theme in these speeches was a simple one. With his sly humour he would outline the government’s ‘plans for unemployment’. ‘Plans for this, plans for that, they’ve always got plans,’ he would say. Then he would show how no government ever had the slightest effect on unemployment. The ebb and flow of the capitalist tide swept over all governments and all plans. Only the workers in action could do anything to roll it back.
We all know that great men and women don’t make history, but we also know that working-class history would be a mean thing if it were not enriched by great men and women.
Great revolutionaries cast aside the temptations and pressures of the capitalist world in a single-minded commitment to change it. Harry McShane did all that with a cheerfulness and comradeship which charmed and enthused any socialist (or any potential socialist) who ever met him.
He died in an old people’s home. He left a few books to his friends. He had survived on his pension, almost without supplement, for the last twenty-eight years of his life. He never had any property, yet he was perhaps the most contented man I have ever met; utterly happy as long as he was fighting for his class.
He kept up that fight with undiminished enthusiasm through good times and through bad. Because his politics were based on the working class, he had a sharp instinct for the shifts in the class mood.
One afternoon as he sat in the back of an old van which was carrying a party of us to speak on disarmament at the Mound in Edinburgh he remarked, just as a matter of interest: ‘Last time I was here there were 20,000 people at the meeting.’ That day he spoke to twenty.
These desperate turns in the mood of his class never deflected him from his purpose, or even from his speaking skills. On the days when he spoke to very few people (I once held the platform when he spoke outside John Browns shipyard in Clydebank to no one at all!) he was as persuasive and passionate as ever I heard.
‘Things will come up again, Paul,’ he reassured me as we trooped home that day. ‘When they are not listening, then it’s even more important that we keep the ideas alive.’
Anyone who knew Harry knows their good fortune. Anyone who didn’t know him can reflect on his extraordinary life whenever they feel worn down by the old realism or the new. He was, is and will be an inspiration and example to us all.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Lewis Grassic Gibbon</small><br>
Poet of the Granite City</h1>
<h3>(December 2001)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.258, December 2001, p.24-25.<br>
Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>The great Scots writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born 100 years ago this year. <strong>Paul Foot</strong> looks at the work of this champion of change</em></p>
<p class="fst">Many, many years ago, way back in 1975, I was working full time as a reporter on <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>. That was the best job I ever had because I could integrate what I wrote with what I thought. Another advantage was a close friendship with the other full time reporter on the paper – Laurie Flynn. Laurie spent a lot of time encouraging me to read an obscure Scottish writer with the ludicrous name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Partly to shut him up and partly to while away the 14-hour journey, I set off on a speaking tour of Scotland, armed only with a copy of <strong>A Scots Quair</strong>, a trilogy of Grassic Gibbon novels.</p>
<p>On the way to Inverness, my first stop, I read the whole of the opening novel, <strong>Sunset Song</strong>, and on the way back, through Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh, I read the other two, <strong>Cloud Howe</strong> and <strong>Grey Granite</strong>. I never stopped reading throughout the entire journey, except perhaps to gaze out of the window south of Aberdeen, drinking in the scenery Grassic Gibbon so gloriously described. The experience was a conversion, a rapture only once previously encountered – when I first read the poems of Shelley. And this was not a coincidence, since Grassic Gibbon was an unreconstructed Shelleyan and had even named one of his novels <strong>Stained Radiance</strong>, a quote from <em>Adonais</em>, Shelley’s mournful obituary to John Keats.</p>
<p>Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s background could not have been more different to that of Shelley. He was born James Leslie Mitchell 100 years ago in Aberdeenshire. His father was an impoverished crofter, Danes Mitchell, and that weird pen name came from his mother, Lellias Grassic Gibbon. He was brought up on the land, and all his life retained a healthy contempt for the reactionary seduction of agricultural work and rural life. He was educated at a school where the teachers were instructed not to educate the children of crofters, and his father was bitterly hostile to the notion that children should learn anything that might interfere with adult work. Somehow the precocious youngster defied his father and his teachers, and read everything he could lay his hands on.</p>
<p>In 1917, at the age of 16, he ran away to Aberdeen and got a job as a cub reporter on a local paper. In Aberdeen he joined the trades council, which had a fine history and had welcomed many famous socialist speakers at its meetings. The official history of the trades council recalls with special pleasure the visit of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor and the magnificent rendering of Shelley’s <em>Ode to the West Wind</em> by her friend Edward Aveling. Like many other British cities in 1917, Aberdeen had a new soviet, formed in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. The soviet’s most enthusiastic founder was the 16 year old Lewis Grassic Gibbon.</p>
<p>Not much later the young socialist moved to Glasgow where he got a job on <strong>Farmers Weekly</strong>. He was sacked after a few months for fiddling his expenses so that he could make donations to the British Socialist Party, one of the three organisations that merged to form the Communist Party in 1920. He was promptly blacklisted by the newspaper employers in the west of Scotland, and could not get a job anywhere as a journalist. So he joined the army and travelled round the world as a not altogether loyal member of the Royal Army Service Corps. In nine years in the army (1919-28) he developed a taste and a talent for travel writing. His descriptions of faraway places have stood the test of time, and many of them have been reprinted.</p>
<p>He came out of the army in 1928 determined to devote his life to writing, and settled down with his wife Rhea in Welwyn Garden City. Few newspaper or magazine publishers would take his stuff, though one of his first published short stories was read and acclaimed by H.G. Wells.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Scots Quair</h4>
<p class="fst">Most great writers have purple passages in their lives. Shelley’s was in the months following the Peterloo massacre in 1819. Grassic Gibbon’s was from 1928, when he left the army, till his shockingly early death from peritonitis in February 1935. He was only 33. He had one novel published in 1928 and another in 1929. He wrote the trilogy, <strong>A Scots Quair</strong>, from 1932 to 1934. In between he wrote another novel, <strong>Spartacus</strong>, about the Thracian slave leader of a revolution in Roman times. His attitude to Spartacus was similar to that of Karl Marx who, asked by his daughter Eleanor who was his favourite character in all history, replied at once ‘Spartacus’, even though any well read Marxist could have told him that Spartacus lived many hundreds of years before the proletariat even existed. Marx (and Grassic Gibbon) were electrified not by Spartacus’s deep understanding of the slave economy, but by his fighting spirit. In between all these novels there is a mountain of journalism and travel writing that defies belief, even though Grassic Gibbon revealed that he consistently wrote on average 4,000 words a day (you try it).</p>
<p>The trilogy, <strong>A Scots Quair</strong> (nothing queer about it, by the way, it is derived from the word quire – a literary work of any length), is by far the best of Grassic Gibbon’s novels. The other novels are written mainly in plain English while the trilogy is in the vernacular, the Scottish language as perfected by the common people of Aberdeenshire. English people, especially those who pride themselves on their ‘mainstream’ literary heritage, are inclined to jib at the language in the trilogy. In fact it represents Grassic Gibbon’s ability to reflect the ordinary language of ordinary Scottish people that makes the trilogy so much superior to the comparatively flat narrative of his other novels. He captures the music and the irony of the language, conveying his political message not by dreary (or even subtle) propaganda, but chiefly by means of a gentle, searing mockery. He manages without humiliating his characters to detect and untie the knots in their thinking. His characters are so subtly blended and balanced, their thoughts and expressions so riddled with dialectic and larded with humour that the reader cannot help being absorbed in them.</p>
<p>Examples? All three books are examples, but since this is mainly a political publication I’ll just pick this out from <strong>Sunset Song</strong>, when a new and rather strange minister called Colquohoun first comes to Kinraddie. As so often, the paragraph starts with a reactionary theme and slowly changes until the whole theme is destroyed in mirth:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘You couldn’t well call him pro-German, like, for he’d been a plain soldier all through the war. Folk felt clean lost without a bit of name to hit at him with, till Ellison said he was a Bolshevik, one of those awful creatures, coarse tinks, that made such a spleiter in Russia. They’d shot their King-creature, the Tsar they called him, and they bedded all over the place, folk said, a man would go home and find his wife commandeered any bit night and Lenin and Trotsky lying with her. And Ellison said the same would come in Kinraddie if Mr Colquohoun had his way; maybe he was feared for his mistress, was Ellison though God knows there’d be little danger of her being commandeered, even Lenin and Trotsky would fair be desperate before they would go to that length.’<br>
</p>
<h3>A remarkable character</h3>
<p class="fst">Presiding over all three books and over three epochs of peasantry, bourgeoisie and rising working class, is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable characters in all literature, more remarkable than any female character in Jane Austen, George Eliot or even the Brontes. Her common sense and good nature survive the most appalling tragedies and triumphs. She can tell an opportunist from a long way off, but is keen that her husband and son should detect hypocrisy for themselves.</p>
<p>The period in which Grassic Gibbon wrote the trilogy was the aftermath of the betrayal of British Labour by Ramsay MacDonald and the other apostates of the second labour government:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘But sign news came that fair raised a stir – a Labour government thrown out at last. And Ramsay MacDonald was in with the Tories, and they were fine. And then the wireless sets listened in and Ramsay came on with his holy voice and maa’hd like a sheep, but a holy like sheep, that the country needed to be saved and he would do it, aye he was a fine chap now that he had jumped onto the gentry side.’</p>
<p class="fst">In an essay on MacDonald in 1932, Grassic Gibbon got down to the roots to topple the old poseur, remarking that he ‘never penetrated words with the process of thought’.</p>
<p>I want to deal briefly with a common criticism on the left of Grassic Gibbon’s work. Dealing mainly with the third book in the trilogy, <strong>Grey Granite</strong>, it suggests that the novel falls victim to what became known as ‘third period Stalinism’, the short period when the Communist Parties, on orders from Moscow, denounced the rest of the left as ‘social fascists’ and clung to lunatic sectarianism that they alone on the left could possibly be right. Alleged proof of this theory is the role of Chris’s son, Euan, who becomes a revolutionary Communist and organises exclusively for the revolution, laying about the rest of the left with sectarian abandon.</p>
<p>Well, I read the story of Euan as the story of a young man who wants to put an end to capitalism, and wants above all else to organise for that end. And anyway, Euan’s story is only half the picture. The other half is provided by Euan’s girlfriend Ellen, and above all by his mother Chris, both of whom have their say in criticising the young firebrand. The relationships between Euan and Ellen, and between Euan and Chris, are portrayed with such delicacy and sensitivity that Grassic Gibbon himself must have had some personal experience of both. Was he even a member of the Communist Party? In her biography of Grassic Gibbon, Betty Reid, a stalwart party member and membership secretary for many years, thought he was a member for only a short time. Grassic Gibbon himself in a letter to a friend in November 1934, shortly before he died, wrote, ‘I’m not an official Communist as they won’t let me in’. That sounds right, and anyway Grassic Gibbon’s early death spared him from making up his mind about the real horrors of Stalinism. Unlike his friend and collaborator Hugh Macdiarmid, he would not have withstood the Stalinist tirade for long without subjecting it to the same merciless mockery he aimed at capitalism.</p>
<p>We leave Euan putting on his boots to go on an unemployed march, and his mother returning to Kinraddie, where she started her life, and reflecting above all on its changes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘That was the best deliverance of all, as she saw it, sitting there, quiet. That change will rule the earth and the sky and the waters underneath the earth. Change, whose face she once feared to see, whose right hand was Death and whose left hand Life might be stayed by none of the dreams of men, love, hate, compassion, anger or pity, gods or devils or wild crying to the sky. He passed and re-passed in the ways of the wind, Deliverer, Destroyer and Friend in one.’</p>
<p class="fst">This belief in and understanding of change, materialistic irreligious change, inspired Grassic Gibbon every bit as it inspired Shelley when he wrote his <em>Ode to the West Wind</em> – the ‘destroyer and preserver’ the ‘trumpet of a prophecy’, the ‘tempestuous’ revolution.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Poet of the Granite City
(December 2001)
From Socialist Review, No.258, December 2001, p.24-25.
Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The great Scots writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born 100 years ago this year. Paul Foot looks at the work of this champion of change
Many, many years ago, way back in 1975, I was working full time as a reporter on Socialist Worker. That was the best job I ever had because I could integrate what I wrote with what I thought. Another advantage was a close friendship with the other full time reporter on the paper – Laurie Flynn. Laurie spent a lot of time encouraging me to read an obscure Scottish writer with the ludicrous name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Partly to shut him up and partly to while away the 14-hour journey, I set off on a speaking tour of Scotland, armed only with a copy of A Scots Quair, a trilogy of Grassic Gibbon novels.
On the way to Inverness, my first stop, I read the whole of the opening novel, Sunset Song, and on the way back, through Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh, I read the other two, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. I never stopped reading throughout the entire journey, except perhaps to gaze out of the window south of Aberdeen, drinking in the scenery Grassic Gibbon so gloriously described. The experience was a conversion, a rapture only once previously encountered – when I first read the poems of Shelley. And this was not a coincidence, since Grassic Gibbon was an unreconstructed Shelleyan and had even named one of his novels Stained Radiance, a quote from Adonais, Shelley’s mournful obituary to John Keats.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s background could not have been more different to that of Shelley. He was born James Leslie Mitchell 100 years ago in Aberdeenshire. His father was an impoverished crofter, Danes Mitchell, and that weird pen name came from his mother, Lellias Grassic Gibbon. He was brought up on the land, and all his life retained a healthy contempt for the reactionary seduction of agricultural work and rural life. He was educated at a school where the teachers were instructed not to educate the children of crofters, and his father was bitterly hostile to the notion that children should learn anything that might interfere with adult work. Somehow the precocious youngster defied his father and his teachers, and read everything he could lay his hands on.
In 1917, at the age of 16, he ran away to Aberdeen and got a job as a cub reporter on a local paper. In Aberdeen he joined the trades council, which had a fine history and had welcomed many famous socialist speakers at its meetings. The official history of the trades council recalls with special pleasure the visit of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor and the magnificent rendering of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind by her friend Edward Aveling. Like many other British cities in 1917, Aberdeen had a new soviet, formed in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. The soviet’s most enthusiastic founder was the 16 year old Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Not much later the young socialist moved to Glasgow where he got a job on Farmers Weekly. He was sacked after a few months for fiddling his expenses so that he could make donations to the British Socialist Party, one of the three organisations that merged to form the Communist Party in 1920. He was promptly blacklisted by the newspaper employers in the west of Scotland, and could not get a job anywhere as a journalist. So he joined the army and travelled round the world as a not altogether loyal member of the Royal Army Service Corps. In nine years in the army (1919-28) he developed a taste and a talent for travel writing. His descriptions of faraway places have stood the test of time, and many of them have been reprinted.
He came out of the army in 1928 determined to devote his life to writing, and settled down with his wife Rhea in Welwyn Garden City. Few newspaper or magazine publishers would take his stuff, though one of his first published short stories was read and acclaimed by H.G. Wells.
A Scots Quair
Most great writers have purple passages in their lives. Shelley’s was in the months following the Peterloo massacre in 1819. Grassic Gibbon’s was from 1928, when he left the army, till his shockingly early death from peritonitis in February 1935. He was only 33. He had one novel published in 1928 and another in 1929. He wrote the trilogy, A Scots Quair, from 1932 to 1934. In between he wrote another novel, Spartacus, about the Thracian slave leader of a revolution in Roman times. His attitude to Spartacus was similar to that of Karl Marx who, asked by his daughter Eleanor who was his favourite character in all history, replied at once ‘Spartacus’, even though any well read Marxist could have told him that Spartacus lived many hundreds of years before the proletariat even existed. Marx (and Grassic Gibbon) were electrified not by Spartacus’s deep understanding of the slave economy, but by his fighting spirit. In between all these novels there is a mountain of journalism and travel writing that defies belief, even though Grassic Gibbon revealed that he consistently wrote on average 4,000 words a day (you try it).
The trilogy, A Scots Quair (nothing queer about it, by the way, it is derived from the word quire – a literary work of any length), is by far the best of Grassic Gibbon’s novels. The other novels are written mainly in plain English while the trilogy is in the vernacular, the Scottish language as perfected by the common people of Aberdeenshire. English people, especially those who pride themselves on their ‘mainstream’ literary heritage, are inclined to jib at the language in the trilogy. In fact it represents Grassic Gibbon’s ability to reflect the ordinary language of ordinary Scottish people that makes the trilogy so much superior to the comparatively flat narrative of his other novels. He captures the music and the irony of the language, conveying his political message not by dreary (or even subtle) propaganda, but chiefly by means of a gentle, searing mockery. He manages without humiliating his characters to detect and untie the knots in their thinking. His characters are so subtly blended and balanced, their thoughts and expressions so riddled with dialectic and larded with humour that the reader cannot help being absorbed in them.
Examples? All three books are examples, but since this is mainly a political publication I’ll just pick this out from Sunset Song, when a new and rather strange minister called Colquohoun first comes to Kinraddie. As so often, the paragraph starts with a reactionary theme and slowly changes until the whole theme is destroyed in mirth:
‘You couldn’t well call him pro-German, like, for he’d been a plain soldier all through the war. Folk felt clean lost without a bit of name to hit at him with, till Ellison said he was a Bolshevik, one of those awful creatures, coarse tinks, that made such a spleiter in Russia. They’d shot their King-creature, the Tsar they called him, and they bedded all over the place, folk said, a man would go home and find his wife commandeered any bit night and Lenin and Trotsky lying with her. And Ellison said the same would come in Kinraddie if Mr Colquohoun had his way; maybe he was feared for his mistress, was Ellison though God knows there’d be little danger of her being commandeered, even Lenin and Trotsky would fair be desperate before they would go to that length.’
A remarkable character
Presiding over all three books and over three epochs of peasantry, bourgeoisie and rising working class, is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable characters in all literature, more remarkable than any female character in Jane Austen, George Eliot or even the Brontes. Her common sense and good nature survive the most appalling tragedies and triumphs. She can tell an opportunist from a long way off, but is keen that her husband and son should detect hypocrisy for themselves.
The period in which Grassic Gibbon wrote the trilogy was the aftermath of the betrayal of British Labour by Ramsay MacDonald and the other apostates of the second labour government:
‘But sign news came that fair raised a stir – a Labour government thrown out at last. And Ramsay MacDonald was in with the Tories, and they were fine. And then the wireless sets listened in and Ramsay came on with his holy voice and maa’hd like a sheep, but a holy like sheep, that the country needed to be saved and he would do it, aye he was a fine chap now that he had jumped onto the gentry side.’
In an essay on MacDonald in 1932, Grassic Gibbon got down to the roots to topple the old poseur, remarking that he ‘never penetrated words with the process of thought’.
I want to deal briefly with a common criticism on the left of Grassic Gibbon’s work. Dealing mainly with the third book in the trilogy, Grey Granite, it suggests that the novel falls victim to what became known as ‘third period Stalinism’, the short period when the Communist Parties, on orders from Moscow, denounced the rest of the left as ‘social fascists’ and clung to lunatic sectarianism that they alone on the left could possibly be right. Alleged proof of this theory is the role of Chris’s son, Euan, who becomes a revolutionary Communist and organises exclusively for the revolution, laying about the rest of the left with sectarian abandon.
Well, I read the story of Euan as the story of a young man who wants to put an end to capitalism, and wants above all else to organise for that end. And anyway, Euan’s story is only half the picture. The other half is provided by Euan’s girlfriend Ellen, and above all by his mother Chris, both of whom have their say in criticising the young firebrand. The relationships between Euan and Ellen, and between Euan and Chris, are portrayed with such delicacy and sensitivity that Grassic Gibbon himself must have had some personal experience of both. Was he even a member of the Communist Party? In her biography of Grassic Gibbon, Betty Reid, a stalwart party member and membership secretary for many years, thought he was a member for only a short time. Grassic Gibbon himself in a letter to a friend in November 1934, shortly before he died, wrote, ‘I’m not an official Communist as they won’t let me in’. That sounds right, and anyway Grassic Gibbon’s early death spared him from making up his mind about the real horrors of Stalinism. Unlike his friend and collaborator Hugh Macdiarmid, he would not have withstood the Stalinist tirade for long without subjecting it to the same merciless mockery he aimed at capitalism.
We leave Euan putting on his boots to go on an unemployed march, and his mother returning to Kinraddie, where she started her life, and reflecting above all on its changes:
‘That was the best deliverance of all, as she saw it, sitting there, quiet. That change will rule the earth and the sky and the waters underneath the earth. Change, whose face she once feared to see, whose right hand was Death and whose left hand Life might be stayed by none of the dreams of men, love, hate, compassion, anger or pity, gods or devils or wild crying to the sky. He passed and re-passed in the ways of the wind, Deliverer, Destroyer and Friend in one.’
This belief in and understanding of change, materialistic irreligious change, inspired Grassic Gibbon every bit as it inspired Shelley when he wrote his Ode to the West Wind – the ‘destroyer and preserver’ the ‘trumpet of a prophecy’, the ‘tempestuous’ revolution.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>‘A groundswell of anger and dismay’</h1>
<h3>(July 1998)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Racism, incompetence, collusion or corruption?</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.221, July 1998, pp.2-3.<br>
Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><em><strong>Paul Foot</strong> writes about the Stephen Lawrence case</em></p>
<p class="fst">Everyone knows that the rich and powerful, through the newspapers and television channels they own and control, normally succeed in keeping their reins on public consciousness. The ‘stories’ that interest and excite people are, as a result, safely marooned in palaces or sports stadia. Every now and then, however, a story circulates which defies these rules, and which engages the public attention in spite of every effort from on high to suppress it. Such a story is the 1993 murder in Eltham, south east London, of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and its aftermath.</p>
<p>Five months after the murder, one of Scotland Yard’s senior detectives, Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Osland, now a Tory councillor in Croydon, circulated a memorandum announcing that he was ‘losing patience’ with Neville and Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s parents, and suggesting that the police officers engaged in the murder inquiry should sue the couple for libel. The irony in the notion that police officers who had not brought Stephen’s murderers to justice should secure damages from his parents was plainly lost on Mr Osland. He felt he and his force had been entirely justified by a ‘review’ conducted by a senior detective in London, Detective Chief Superintendent Roderick John Barker. Mr Barker’s ‘review’ which flowed from a secret inquiry and was of course not published, had discovered that the police investigation following the Lawrence murder was almost entirely flawless.</p>
<p>This remained the official police view as the long saga of the hunt for Stephen’s murderers unfolded. Weeks after the murder, five men were arrested. Two were identified by a witness to the murder, Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brookes. But Duwayne’s evidence was tainted – by a police officer who was appointed to drive him home and whose account of the conversation he had with Duwayne (which Duwayne hotly contested) persuaded the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the charges.</p>
<p>Angry and disillusioned, the Lawrence family took out a private prosecution against three of the men. The prosecution failed – largely because of the ‘tainting’ of Duwayne Brookes’s evidence by his police escort. An inquest jury proclaimed unequivocally that Stephen had been murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. The <strong>Daily Mail</strong> (in a sudden fit of conscience brought on by the fact that Neville Lawrence had once painted the house of the <strong>Mail</strong> editor) named the five original suspects and denounced them as the murderers. In spite of all this, the position five years on is that the murderers of Stephen Lawrence are still at large.</p>
<p>The early and prolonged confidence of the Metropolitan Police in their handling of the case began to wilt with the publication last year of part of the report by Kent police into the Lawrence investigation. The report was highly critical of the Metropolitan Police in charge of the murder inquiry. It concentrated on their failure to respond to information which flowed in to them immediately after the murder. On the day after the murder, a reliable informant, known as James Grant (a pseudonym) gave the inquiry team the names of the five suspects, who, he disclosed, had been carrying out racist attacks systematically in the area, who carried knives and boasted about using them on black people they met in the street, and who were out on the rampage in the area of the murder on the night it happened. Other reliable information followed. Most extraordinary was a witness who said she had visited the suspects’ home on the day after the murder and had seen them washing clothes and wiping blood off a knife. The senior officers in charge of the inquiry, however, decided not to arrest the suspects. They adopted a policy of delay’ which in the view of the Kent police hopelessly hampered the investigation and made it much more difficult to procure vital evidence. Despite its critical tone, however, the Kent police report concluded only that the officers in charge of the Lawrence investigation had been either mistaken or incompetent. The report effectively acquitted the investigating police of racism or corruption.</p>
<p>The report was the nominal reason behind Jack Straw’s decision to set up a full public inquiry into the events before and after Stephen’s death. The nominal reason was bolstered by the continued campaign of Neville and Doreen Lawrence, who refused to be fobbed off or patronised. Their long battle had swung huge sections of the British public behind them. When the public inquiry into the events opened almost exactly five years after Stephen’s death, the large room at the Elephant and Castle designated for the public hearings was packed with supporters of the family. The enthusiasm for the campaign was not confined to south London or to black people. As sellers of <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> all over Britain were to discover, a groundswell of anger and dismay about the Lawrence case was building up all over the country, among people of all colours and of all and no political persuasions.</p>
<p>This groundswell grew and grew as the inquiry proceeded in its quaint and sedate way. It overflowed into the hearings themselves, not just in applause and tears for the Lawrences and for Duwayne Brookes but also in mocking laughter at the police.</p>
<p>Leaflets were issued from ‘the public gallery’ which consistently denounced the apparent reluctance of the police to disclose documents. This unexpected and entirely admirable expression of public outrage shifted the inquiry itself to such an extent that a grim story is beginning to emerge which is entirely different from anything originally contemplated.</p>
<p>The early intention of the inquiry, it seemed, had been to contain criticism of the police within the boundaries of the Kent report: to blame the investigating officers for incompetence and mistakes, but nothing more. In the early days, this damage limitation exercise was conducted uneasily but reasonably effectively. It changed only with the rising clamour outside and the determination of the Lawrences and Duwayne Brookes’s lawyer to get answers to the questions which Kent police had not even asked. Why had the suspects not been arrested immediately? Why had the information from the informers been allowed to fester for so long? Gradually, a name started to be floated in cross-examination: Norris. David Norris was one of the five suspects. His father was Clifford Norris, a well known gangland racketeer, and arms smuggler, who is now in prison. Clifford Norris, h emerged, had paid an important witness not to give evidence against his boy. Could Norris have in any way influenced the police to ‘go easy’ on the lad?</p>
<p>At first the lawyers for the police and the inquiry mocked any such suggestion and dismissed it. But then it emerged that Clifford Norris had been seen in pubs on several occasions with a flying squad officer called Coles. Customs officers had mounted a surveillance operation on Coles, and were surprised to see him handing over plastic bags to their suspect. They reported Coles to the police who investigated him and, remarkably, cleared him.</p>
<p>So what, was the initial reply? What had Coles to do with Stephen Lawrence? Quite a lot, it then emerged. First, the officer in charge of the murder investigation, DCS Iain Crampton, who took the decision not to arrest the five suspects, has worked with Coles at Bexleyheath police station. When Coles was in trouble for the Customs business over Norris, Crampton had written him a glowing reference. Secondly, Coles had been selected as an escort officer for the key witness, Duwayne Brookes, when the latter gave evidence in the private prosecution at the Old Bailey.</p>
<p>Such revelations hugely shifted the axis of the inquiry. Increasingly, the police seemed on the run. The cross-examination of former DCS Barker, whose report had given such comfort to the police in 1993, was so embarrassing that the inquiry chairman, Sir William Macpherson, denounced him as ‘not credible’ and his report as ‘indefensible’. The feeling of even the most servile journalist at the inquiry (and most of them are not servile at all) is that there is more, much more to come out yet; and whether it does or not depends at least to some extent on the persistence and growth of the justice for Stephen Lawrence campaign.</p>
<p>The inquiry continues. For the moment, however, the story of the campaign is powerful evidence against those who moan that the British people are ‘intrinsically racist’ or that it is ‘impossible to interest anyone in individual justice campaigns’. The campaign has carved the name of Stephen Lawrence deep into the consciousness of the working masses, the enormous majority of whom detest the racist gangs who pour blood onto the streets, and admire the strength and courage of those who campaign to put a stop to them once and for all.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
‘A groundswell of anger and dismay’
(July 1998)
From Racism, incompetence, collusion or corruption?, Socialist Review, No.221, July 1998, pp.2-3.
Copyright © 1998 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Paul Foot writes about the Stephen Lawrence case
Everyone knows that the rich and powerful, through the newspapers and television channels they own and control, normally succeed in keeping their reins on public consciousness. The ‘stories’ that interest and excite people are, as a result, safely marooned in palaces or sports stadia. Every now and then, however, a story circulates which defies these rules, and which engages the public attention in spite of every effort from on high to suppress it. Such a story is the 1993 murder in Eltham, south east London, of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and its aftermath.
Five months after the murder, one of Scotland Yard’s senior detectives, Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Osland, now a Tory councillor in Croydon, circulated a memorandum announcing that he was ‘losing patience’ with Neville and Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s parents, and suggesting that the police officers engaged in the murder inquiry should sue the couple for libel. The irony in the notion that police officers who had not brought Stephen’s murderers to justice should secure damages from his parents was plainly lost on Mr Osland. He felt he and his force had been entirely justified by a ‘review’ conducted by a senior detective in London, Detective Chief Superintendent Roderick John Barker. Mr Barker’s ‘review’ which flowed from a secret inquiry and was of course not published, had discovered that the police investigation following the Lawrence murder was almost entirely flawless.
This remained the official police view as the long saga of the hunt for Stephen’s murderers unfolded. Weeks after the murder, five men were arrested. Two were identified by a witness to the murder, Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brookes. But Duwayne’s evidence was tainted – by a police officer who was appointed to drive him home and whose account of the conversation he had with Duwayne (which Duwayne hotly contested) persuaded the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the charges.
Angry and disillusioned, the Lawrence family took out a private prosecution against three of the men. The prosecution failed – largely because of the ‘tainting’ of Duwayne Brookes’s evidence by his police escort. An inquest jury proclaimed unequivocally that Stephen had been murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. The Daily Mail (in a sudden fit of conscience brought on by the fact that Neville Lawrence had once painted the house of the Mail editor) named the five original suspects and denounced them as the murderers. In spite of all this, the position five years on is that the murderers of Stephen Lawrence are still at large.
The early and prolonged confidence of the Metropolitan Police in their handling of the case began to wilt with the publication last year of part of the report by Kent police into the Lawrence investigation. The report was highly critical of the Metropolitan Police in charge of the murder inquiry. It concentrated on their failure to respond to information which flowed in to them immediately after the murder. On the day after the murder, a reliable informant, known as James Grant (a pseudonym) gave the inquiry team the names of the five suspects, who, he disclosed, had been carrying out racist attacks systematically in the area, who carried knives and boasted about using them on black people they met in the street, and who were out on the rampage in the area of the murder on the night it happened. Other reliable information followed. Most extraordinary was a witness who said she had visited the suspects’ home on the day after the murder and had seen them washing clothes and wiping blood off a knife. The senior officers in charge of the inquiry, however, decided not to arrest the suspects. They adopted a policy of delay’ which in the view of the Kent police hopelessly hampered the investigation and made it much more difficult to procure vital evidence. Despite its critical tone, however, the Kent police report concluded only that the officers in charge of the Lawrence investigation had been either mistaken or incompetent. The report effectively acquitted the investigating police of racism or corruption.
The report was the nominal reason behind Jack Straw’s decision to set up a full public inquiry into the events before and after Stephen’s death. The nominal reason was bolstered by the continued campaign of Neville and Doreen Lawrence, who refused to be fobbed off or patronised. Their long battle had swung huge sections of the British public behind them. When the public inquiry into the events opened almost exactly five years after Stephen’s death, the large room at the Elephant and Castle designated for the public hearings was packed with supporters of the family. The enthusiasm for the campaign was not confined to south London or to black people. As sellers of Socialist Worker all over Britain were to discover, a groundswell of anger and dismay about the Lawrence case was building up all over the country, among people of all colours and of all and no political persuasions.
This groundswell grew and grew as the inquiry proceeded in its quaint and sedate way. It overflowed into the hearings themselves, not just in applause and tears for the Lawrences and for Duwayne Brookes but also in mocking laughter at the police.
Leaflets were issued from ‘the public gallery’ which consistently denounced the apparent reluctance of the police to disclose documents. This unexpected and entirely admirable expression of public outrage shifted the inquiry itself to such an extent that a grim story is beginning to emerge which is entirely different from anything originally contemplated.
The early intention of the inquiry, it seemed, had been to contain criticism of the police within the boundaries of the Kent report: to blame the investigating officers for incompetence and mistakes, but nothing more. In the early days, this damage limitation exercise was conducted uneasily but reasonably effectively. It changed only with the rising clamour outside and the determination of the Lawrences and Duwayne Brookes’s lawyer to get answers to the questions which Kent police had not even asked. Why had the suspects not been arrested immediately? Why had the information from the informers been allowed to fester for so long? Gradually, a name started to be floated in cross-examination: Norris. David Norris was one of the five suspects. His father was Clifford Norris, a well known gangland racketeer, and arms smuggler, who is now in prison. Clifford Norris, h emerged, had paid an important witness not to give evidence against his boy. Could Norris have in any way influenced the police to ‘go easy’ on the lad?
At first the lawyers for the police and the inquiry mocked any such suggestion and dismissed it. But then it emerged that Clifford Norris had been seen in pubs on several occasions with a flying squad officer called Coles. Customs officers had mounted a surveillance operation on Coles, and were surprised to see him handing over plastic bags to their suspect. They reported Coles to the police who investigated him and, remarkably, cleared him.
So what, was the initial reply? What had Coles to do with Stephen Lawrence? Quite a lot, it then emerged. First, the officer in charge of the murder investigation, DCS Iain Crampton, who took the decision not to arrest the five suspects, has worked with Coles at Bexleyheath police station. When Coles was in trouble for the Customs business over Norris, Crampton had written him a glowing reference. Secondly, Coles had been selected as an escort officer for the key witness, Duwayne Brookes, when the latter gave evidence in the private prosecution at the Old Bailey.
Such revelations hugely shifted the axis of the inquiry. Increasingly, the police seemed on the run. The cross-examination of former DCS Barker, whose report had given such comfort to the police in 1993, was so embarrassing that the inquiry chairman, Sir William Macpherson, denounced him as ‘not credible’ and his report as ‘indefensible’. The feeling of even the most servile journalist at the inquiry (and most of them are not servile at all) is that there is more, much more to come out yet; and whether it does or not depends at least to some extent on the persistence and growth of the justice for Stephen Lawrence campaign.
The inquiry continues. For the moment, however, the story of the campaign is powerful evidence against those who moan that the British people are ‘intrinsically racist’ or that it is ‘impossible to interest anyone in individual justice campaigns’. The campaign has carved the name of Stephen Lawrence deep into the consciousness of the working masses, the enormous majority of whom detest the racist gangs who pour blood onto the streets, and admire the strength and courage of those who campaign to put a stop to them once and for all.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>‘We need socialist newspapers<br>
like never before’</h1>
<h3>(10 April 1993)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 10 April 1993.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000), pp. 232–234.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Friends and comrades have been commiserating with me for losing my job on the <strong>Mirror</strong>, and indeed I am sad about it. But my main reaction, looking back on 13 years of Thatcher, Maxwell and Co, is that I have had it pretty good.</p>
<p>For a known and declared member of the Socialist Workers Party to be given a page in a mass circulation tabloid was remarkable. To hang on to it for all that time was pretty well incredible. The surprise is not so much that I was pushed out, but that it took so long for it to happen.</p>
<p>Ever since 1945 there has been a radical tradition in the <strong>Daily Mirror</strong>. Most of the paper of course wasn’t political at all, and the political part of it was pretty firmly controlled by right wing Labour.</p>
<p>George Brown, the very right wing deputy leader of the Labour Party in the 1960s was paid a retainer with the <strong>Mirror</strong>. He was a close friend and political ally of the <strong>Mirror</strong> columnist Jack Connor, who wrote under the pseudonym Cassandra.</p>
<p>Cecil King, chairman of the <strong>Mirror</strong> in the 1960s, was an MI5 agent who tried to lead a coup against the elected Labour government in 1968 and was sacked for his pains.</p>
<p>Still, there was a radical tradition symbolised by an Australian sub-editor who joined the paper in the early 1960s – John Pilger. When John turned his hand to reporting he quickly revealed an astonishingly evocative writing power. His skill as a writer was entwined with a strong socialist consciousness.</p>
<p>He was outraged by the divisions between rich and poor, and incensed by the violent means by which imperialism, especially US imperialism, sought to preserve those divisions. John wrote reams of magnificent reports for the <strong>Mirror</strong> which continued all through the 1970s and halfway through the 1980s until Maxwell summarily sacked him.</p>
<p>John turned his skills to television. His contacts with the working class, who followed his reports in the <strong>Mirror</strong> with such enthusiasm, became less frequent. As Maxwell no doubt anticipated, his sacking was a triumph for the rich.</p>
<p>Chinks of light in the capitalist media were a feature of the 1960s and 1970s. Almost every paper, even the most foul reactionary ones, employed socialists who, with varying frequency, could get their ideas across.</p>
<p>The <strong>Sunday Times</strong>, it is worth recalling, was a marvellous paper of record in those days. The very first act of Andrew Neil when he took over the <strong>Sunday Times</strong> editorship in 1983 was to sack the editor of the investigative <em>Insight</em> column, Christopher Hird, and disband his team.</p>
<p>Other chinks have been shut out as the ruling class has gained in confidence in the last decade. Even the liberal press has become almost exclusively preoccupied with its own gloom and hatred of people, which drive it to more and more reactionary conclusions.</p>
<p>The bitter turmoil at the <strong>Mirror</strong> over the last few months has been portrayed in the financial media as a desperate attempt to ‘restore to profitability’ a dying old carcass of a newspaper. In fact the <strong>Mirror</strong> was making good profits. At every twist and turn in the struggle I got the overriding impression that there was more to this than a greedy management determined to smash the unions.</p>
<p>They were out, at the same time, to extinguish the tiniest flicker of any genuine radical information which might inflame the masses. When Harold Lind, a media consultant, wrote in the <strong>Times</strong> last October that there were too many good journalists on the <strong>Mirror</strong> and that they should be dispensed with, he meant that, for the masses, any old trash will do.</p>
<p>This was the Wapping school of journalism in full attack, and the new <strong>Mirror</strong> boss Montgomery and his acolytes took up the challenge with a ruthless zeal.</p>
<p>When I started work as a journalist 32 years ago it was possible to imagine some areas where my socialist ideas would be published in the mass media in some form. Now I am not so sure. The control of the British media has always been in the hands of five or six men, but in the past they have deferred to some semblance of variety and democracy. Now they seem united in their desire to silence every whisper of dissent.</p>
<p>One conclusion for socialists is to hold our heads in despair. Another is more positive: to proclaim the case for socialist papers, openly declaring their socialist ideas.</p>
<p>Such papers by definition cannot circulate in the same market as the capitalist papers. They cannot depend on the same support from capitalist advertisers and distributors. Their economics and their circulation depend on the sacrifice and time of socialists themselves.</p>
<p>This is not just flag-waving for <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>. The uniformity of the capitalist press should not provide anyone with an excuse to make our socialist papers more sectarian and hysterical. On the contrary. The more uniform the capitalist papers become, the more socialist editors should ensure their papers are open, democratic and varied.</p>
<p>But the developments in the capitalist press, including the union-busting and censorship at the <strong>Mirror</strong> which led to my departure, make a strong case even stronger. We need socialist newspapers like never before.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
‘We need socialist newspapers
like never before’
(10 April 1993)
From Socialist Worker, 10 April 1993.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 232–234.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Friends and comrades have been commiserating with me for losing my job on the Mirror, and indeed I am sad about it. But my main reaction, looking back on 13 years of Thatcher, Maxwell and Co, is that I have had it pretty good.
For a known and declared member of the Socialist Workers Party to be given a page in a mass circulation tabloid was remarkable. To hang on to it for all that time was pretty well incredible. The surprise is not so much that I was pushed out, but that it took so long for it to happen.
Ever since 1945 there has been a radical tradition in the Daily Mirror. Most of the paper of course wasn’t political at all, and the political part of it was pretty firmly controlled by right wing Labour.
George Brown, the very right wing deputy leader of the Labour Party in the 1960s was paid a retainer with the Mirror. He was a close friend and political ally of the Mirror columnist Jack Connor, who wrote under the pseudonym Cassandra.
Cecil King, chairman of the Mirror in the 1960s, was an MI5 agent who tried to lead a coup against the elected Labour government in 1968 and was sacked for his pains.
Still, there was a radical tradition symbolised by an Australian sub-editor who joined the paper in the early 1960s – John Pilger. When John turned his hand to reporting he quickly revealed an astonishingly evocative writing power. His skill as a writer was entwined with a strong socialist consciousness.
He was outraged by the divisions between rich and poor, and incensed by the violent means by which imperialism, especially US imperialism, sought to preserve those divisions. John wrote reams of magnificent reports for the Mirror which continued all through the 1970s and halfway through the 1980s until Maxwell summarily sacked him.
John turned his skills to television. His contacts with the working class, who followed his reports in the Mirror with such enthusiasm, became less frequent. As Maxwell no doubt anticipated, his sacking was a triumph for the rich.
Chinks of light in the capitalist media were a feature of the 1960s and 1970s. Almost every paper, even the most foul reactionary ones, employed socialists who, with varying frequency, could get their ideas across.
The Sunday Times, it is worth recalling, was a marvellous paper of record in those days. The very first act of Andrew Neil when he took over the Sunday Times editorship in 1983 was to sack the editor of the investigative Insight column, Christopher Hird, and disband his team.
Other chinks have been shut out as the ruling class has gained in confidence in the last decade. Even the liberal press has become almost exclusively preoccupied with its own gloom and hatred of people, which drive it to more and more reactionary conclusions.
The bitter turmoil at the Mirror over the last few months has been portrayed in the financial media as a desperate attempt to ‘restore to profitability’ a dying old carcass of a newspaper. In fact the Mirror was making good profits. At every twist and turn in the struggle I got the overriding impression that there was more to this than a greedy management determined to smash the unions.
They were out, at the same time, to extinguish the tiniest flicker of any genuine radical information which might inflame the masses. When Harold Lind, a media consultant, wrote in the Times last October that there were too many good journalists on the Mirror and that they should be dispensed with, he meant that, for the masses, any old trash will do.
This was the Wapping school of journalism in full attack, and the new Mirror boss Montgomery and his acolytes took up the challenge with a ruthless zeal.
When I started work as a journalist 32 years ago it was possible to imagine some areas where my socialist ideas would be published in the mass media in some form. Now I am not so sure. The control of the British media has always been in the hands of five or six men, but in the past they have deferred to some semblance of variety and democracy. Now they seem united in their desire to silence every whisper of dissent.
One conclusion for socialists is to hold our heads in despair. Another is more positive: to proclaim the case for socialist papers, openly declaring their socialist ideas.
Such papers by definition cannot circulate in the same market as the capitalist papers. They cannot depend on the same support from capitalist advertisers and distributors. Their economics and their circulation depend on the sacrifice and time of socialists themselves.
This is not just flag-waving for Socialist Worker. The uniformity of the capitalist press should not provide anyone with an excuse to make our socialist papers more sectarian and hysterical. On the contrary. The more uniform the capitalist papers become, the more socialist editors should ensure their papers are open, democratic and varied.
But the developments in the capitalist press, including the union-busting and censorship at the Mirror which led to my departure, make a strong case even stronger. We need socialist newspapers like never before.
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Last updated on 30 June 2014
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>I urge you to join the socialists</h1>
<h3>(17 November 2001)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1775, 17 November 2001.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/" target="new"><em>Socialist Worker</em> Website</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">“Are you a socialist?” I asked a fellow speaker at an anti-war rally the other day. I knew the answer was yes. The speaker had taken the whole of his time exposing the dreadful gap between the world’s rich and poor, between the handful of billionaires on the one hand and the “world pining in pain” on the other. He had said more than enough to convince me that he didn’t believe these frightful facts were caused by accident or sent by god. On the contrary-they were connected. The poor are poor because the rich are rich, and vice versa.</p>
<p>The explanation for this, the most frightful fact about our civilisation, is exploitation. That is the control of the means of production by a small minority who organise the wealth they control to their own advantage, and to the disadvantage of the people who work for them.</p>
<p>This exploitation explains the horrors we see around us, including the horror of 11 September, and drives our rulers to “settle” such horrors with more horrors and more killings. Capitalism, the rule of the rich minority, is the enemy.</p>
<p>The antidote to capitalism is socialism, a democratic system of society where the wealth is owned and controlled by the people who produce it. It is easy to set out these simple principles, and easy to answer yes to the question I asked.</p>
<p>But other questions flow directly from that answer. The easiest, it seems to me, is, “Can I be a socialist on my own?” The whole point about socialism is that it is a society run by collective effort. Instead of splitting people one from another, socialism encourages cooperation. None of us individuals know more than a little or can contribute more than a little.</p>
<p>In a cooperative society we can pool our abilities and resources to create more for everyone, and to share it out fairly. The same principle applies to changing from capitalism to socialism. Though it is corrupt and decadent to the core, capitalism is an extremely powerful system, bolstered all the time by class solidarity.</p>
<p>The rich and mighty combine to confuse and humiliate workers and the poor. The only answer is for workers and the poor to combine to fight back.</p>
<p>The weakest organisation on the left, therefore, is the NANAS – the National Association of Non-Aligned Socialists, the people who profess to know everything and do nothing. They cause no problem at all to capitalists and militarists. Not much better are the socialists who believe that the best road to socialism is to wait for it to be ushered in by parliament.</p>
<p>These prevaricators always seem to have a reason to do nothing themselves and leave the campaigning, and the challenge, to someone else. Those few socialists who have joined the Labour Party have found themselves sidelined, patronised and vilified.</p>
<p>As a result many of them have left, and many more are thinking of leaving. If they are to make any real impact on capitalist society, socialists have to come together in an organisation committed to campaigning against capitalist society in whatever guise it appears.</p>
<p>In any area or workplace the ceaseless struggle between exploited and exploiters shows itself in countless different ways. Workers may go on strike, tenants may combine to fight the threat of eviction, black people may be victimised or attacked because of the colour of their skin, women and gays may be discriminated against.</p>
<p>There may be – indeed there is right now – a monstrous war in which the forces of the rich have combined their military might to pulverise the poor. In all these struggles the crying need is for socialist organisation, in which socialists can combine to produce their own newspapers, magazines and propaganda, and organise solidarity for those who have had the guts to take their bosses on.</p>
<p>Socialists are no better, cleverer or sharper than anyone else. But if and when they act together they have far more influence on society than they had when they were isolated individuals.</p>
<p>I have been a member of the Socialist Workers Party since its formation in 1977, and of its predecessor for many years before that. I have watched while other socialist organisations disintegrated and collapsed under pressure from outside, or from their own insistence that the best way to proceed is, like capitalists, from the top down.</p>
<p>The SWP has survived the rise and fall of Stalinism and the lure of office in the Labour Party. It continues to campaign and fight alongside anyone who challenges capitalism and all its works. The SWP remains today by far the strongest of the socialist organisations to the left of the Labour Party.</p>
<p>I urge anyone marching against the war who answers yes to my original question to join with us, fight with us and help us to organise.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
I urge you to join the socialists
(17 November 2001)
From Socialist Worker, No.1775, 17 November 2001.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“Are you a socialist?” I asked a fellow speaker at an anti-war rally the other day. I knew the answer was yes. The speaker had taken the whole of his time exposing the dreadful gap between the world’s rich and poor, between the handful of billionaires on the one hand and the “world pining in pain” on the other. He had said more than enough to convince me that he didn’t believe these frightful facts were caused by accident or sent by god. On the contrary-they were connected. The poor are poor because the rich are rich, and vice versa.
The explanation for this, the most frightful fact about our civilisation, is exploitation. That is the control of the means of production by a small minority who organise the wealth they control to their own advantage, and to the disadvantage of the people who work for them.
This exploitation explains the horrors we see around us, including the horror of 11 September, and drives our rulers to “settle” such horrors with more horrors and more killings. Capitalism, the rule of the rich minority, is the enemy.
The antidote to capitalism is socialism, a democratic system of society where the wealth is owned and controlled by the people who produce it. It is easy to set out these simple principles, and easy to answer yes to the question I asked.
But other questions flow directly from that answer. The easiest, it seems to me, is, “Can I be a socialist on my own?” The whole point about socialism is that it is a society run by collective effort. Instead of splitting people one from another, socialism encourages cooperation. None of us individuals know more than a little or can contribute more than a little.
In a cooperative society we can pool our abilities and resources to create more for everyone, and to share it out fairly. The same principle applies to changing from capitalism to socialism. Though it is corrupt and decadent to the core, capitalism is an extremely powerful system, bolstered all the time by class solidarity.
The rich and mighty combine to confuse and humiliate workers and the poor. The only answer is for workers and the poor to combine to fight back.
The weakest organisation on the left, therefore, is the NANAS – the National Association of Non-Aligned Socialists, the people who profess to know everything and do nothing. They cause no problem at all to capitalists and militarists. Not much better are the socialists who believe that the best road to socialism is to wait for it to be ushered in by parliament.
These prevaricators always seem to have a reason to do nothing themselves and leave the campaigning, and the challenge, to someone else. Those few socialists who have joined the Labour Party have found themselves sidelined, patronised and vilified.
As a result many of them have left, and many more are thinking of leaving. If they are to make any real impact on capitalist society, socialists have to come together in an organisation committed to campaigning against capitalist society in whatever guise it appears.
In any area or workplace the ceaseless struggle between exploited and exploiters shows itself in countless different ways. Workers may go on strike, tenants may combine to fight the threat of eviction, black people may be victimised or attacked because of the colour of their skin, women and gays may be discriminated against.
There may be – indeed there is right now – a monstrous war in which the forces of the rich have combined their military might to pulverise the poor. In all these struggles the crying need is for socialist organisation, in which socialists can combine to produce their own newspapers, magazines and propaganda, and organise solidarity for those who have had the guts to take their bosses on.
Socialists are no better, cleverer or sharper than anyone else. But if and when they act together they have far more influence on society than they had when they were isolated individuals.
I have been a member of the Socialist Workers Party since its formation in 1977, and of its predecessor for many years before that. I have watched while other socialist organisations disintegrated and collapsed under pressure from outside, or from their own insistence that the best way to proceed is, like capitalists, from the top down.
The SWP has survived the rise and fall of Stalinism and the lure of office in the Labour Party. It continues to campaign and fight alongside anyone who challenges capitalism and all its works. The SWP remains today by far the strongest of the socialist organisations to the left of the Labour Party.
I urge anyone marching against the war who answers yes to my original question to join with us, fight with us and help us to organise.
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Last updated on 10 May 2010
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h4>Socialist Worker Stop the war demonstration special</h4>
<h1>Real democracy</h1>
<h3>(15 February 2003)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1838, 15 February 2003.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/" target="new"><em>Socialist Worker</em> Website</a><br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<table align="center" width="75%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="c"><strong>Parliament is not nearly democratic enough. We need a revolution to get genuine control, writes Paul Foot</strong></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">IF YOU asked George Bush what he thinks he is fighting for in Iraq he would reply, if he is capable of an answer, that he is striking a blow for democracy. The people of the US, Britain, Spain and other European countries elect their governments. The people of Iraq do not. So the war against Iraq is a battle for democracy against tyranny.</p>
<p>What is it, this representative democracy that apparently drives our government to war? It is an idea that only took hold in Britain in the 20th century. The first election when most people could vote for their government was in 1918. In the same year the chief beneficiary, the new Labour Party, formed itself into a proper organisation with a set of liberating aims. In the course of the century several Labour governments with parliamentary majorities have been elected.</p>
<p>Until 1997, all of them were in almost permanent strife with a set of people who had an enormous amount of power but precious few votes. Industrialists, for instance, only had one vote each. But they could arbitrarily sack or cut the pay of hundreds of thousands of people who also had one vote each.</p>
<p>Bankers and financiers had one vote each, but they could affect the lives of millions with a flick on the tiller of the exchange rate. The tussle between elected Labour governments and the small, tightly knit group of politically motivated men who controlled the wealth, armed forces and media was never much of a contest.</p>
<p>Though the extent of their victory varied, the rich won every time. One result was the decline of aspirations of Labour governments. They became indistinguishable from Tory governments. The Blair government has handed more and more power and influence to capitalists, landlords and moneylenders. The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer.</p>
<p>Fewer and fewer people bother to vote. In 2001 far fewer people voted than in any election since 1918. The experience of Labour governments has exposed the weakness of democracy both to maintain the enthusiasm of the voters and to represent the people who need it most – the poorest and the weakest.</p>
<p>Tony Benn is one of the few politicians of the period to recognise what was happening, and to act accordingly. In an introduction to a volume of his diaries published in 1987, he wrote that the lessons of his long experience in parliament “led me to the conclusion that Britain is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system which is in essence intact”.</p>
<p>When he finally decided not to stand for parliament he said he was leaving to play a more active part in politics. One response to this gloomy history is to reject the very notion of representative democracy. This is a profound error.</p>
<p>Parliamentary democracy, and things like free speech, a free press and free association, are invaluable to any campaign for a more egalitarian society. The fact that this article, and <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, can be published is a precious part of a democratic heritage, won in years gone by much braver people than we are.</p>
<p>The objection to parliamentary democracy is not that it is democratic or representative, but that it is nothing like democratic or representative enough. The revolutionary writer and fighter Karl Marx wrote 140 years ago about the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1871. He noted three central features.</p>
<p>First, it was freely elected by a majority. Second, its representatives got the same wages as the people who elected them. And third, the elected government formed the executive as well as the legislative power. That means that it not only passed the laws, usually in the form of decrees, but also carried them out. The forms of the new power made it possible to convert political promises into political action.</p>
<p>Similar alternatives to ordinary parliamentary institutions have occurred again and again through the 20th century – in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Germany and Hungary in 1919 and the ensuing years, in Spain in 1936, in Hungary in 1956, and in Portugal in 1974. In the best cases workers threw up organisations based on elected councils, with their representatives paid the same and subject to instant recall.</p>
<p>These councils were more efficient and effective representatives than their parliamentary equivalents because they were more democratic. They formed themselves quite naturally in the struggle for emancipation by the exploited masses. And they all emerged at times of revolution.</p>
<p>The reason for that is very simple. The existing power structure, including parliamentary democracy, is tolerated by the controllers of wealth only as long as that control is not threatened.</p>
<p>It follows that the only real democratic alternatives to parliamentary democracy can emerge when the minority control of the capitalists is challenged. In each of these cases of revolution, the pendulum swung back to different points of reaction-either to terrible tyrannies or to parliamentary democracies every bit as feeble as before.</p>
<p>The chief reason for this decline was the failure of the revolutionary forces to organise their new strength, to unite their forces powerfully enough to stave off the reaction and move forward to a new social order.</p>
<p>It is a grim irony of history that on the one occasion where the revolutionaries were led by a party – Russia in October 1917 – the working class base of that party was destroyed in civil war before it could consolidate its advances.</p>
<p>The lessons are plain. There are democratic alternatives to parliament, but they are only likely to emerge when there is a challenge from below to the economic rule of the minority.</p>
<p>How can we encourage such a challenge? Revolutions cannot be created out of thin air. They can only arise in an atmosphere of confidence. So the only way to work for a revolution and a more democratic society is to relate to the day to day struggles that always absorb the exploited lives of the working people.</p>
<p>Every strike, every demonstration, every manifestation of revolt carries with it the seed of revolution. The pompous and self absorbed activities of the representatives of parliamentary democracy work against such a revolution because they constantly dampen down, mock and humiliate live protest.</p>
<p>They pretend they are democrats, but by their actions prove the opposite. The seeds of a new more democratic society can only be sown in struggle against the old one.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Socialist Worker Stop the war demonstration special
Real democracy
(15 February 2003)
From Socialist Worker, No.1838, 15 February 2003.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Parliament is not nearly democratic enough. We need a revolution to get genuine control, writes Paul Foot
IF YOU asked George Bush what he thinks he is fighting for in Iraq he would reply, if he is capable of an answer, that he is striking a blow for democracy. The people of the US, Britain, Spain and other European countries elect their governments. The people of Iraq do not. So the war against Iraq is a battle for democracy against tyranny.
What is it, this representative democracy that apparently drives our government to war? It is an idea that only took hold in Britain in the 20th century. The first election when most people could vote for their government was in 1918. In the same year the chief beneficiary, the new Labour Party, formed itself into a proper organisation with a set of liberating aims. In the course of the century several Labour governments with parliamentary majorities have been elected.
Until 1997, all of them were in almost permanent strife with a set of people who had an enormous amount of power but precious few votes. Industrialists, for instance, only had one vote each. But they could arbitrarily sack or cut the pay of hundreds of thousands of people who also had one vote each.
Bankers and financiers had one vote each, but they could affect the lives of millions with a flick on the tiller of the exchange rate. The tussle between elected Labour governments and the small, tightly knit group of politically motivated men who controlled the wealth, armed forces and media was never much of a contest.
Though the extent of their victory varied, the rich won every time. One result was the decline of aspirations of Labour governments. They became indistinguishable from Tory governments. The Blair government has handed more and more power and influence to capitalists, landlords and moneylenders. The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer.
Fewer and fewer people bother to vote. In 2001 far fewer people voted than in any election since 1918. The experience of Labour governments has exposed the weakness of democracy both to maintain the enthusiasm of the voters and to represent the people who need it most – the poorest and the weakest.
Tony Benn is one of the few politicians of the period to recognise what was happening, and to act accordingly. In an introduction to a volume of his diaries published in 1987, he wrote that the lessons of his long experience in parliament “led me to the conclusion that Britain is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system which is in essence intact”.
When he finally decided not to stand for parliament he said he was leaving to play a more active part in politics. One response to this gloomy history is to reject the very notion of representative democracy. This is a profound error.
Parliamentary democracy, and things like free speech, a free press and free association, are invaluable to any campaign for a more egalitarian society. The fact that this article, and Socialist Worker, can be published is a precious part of a democratic heritage, won in years gone by much braver people than we are.
The objection to parliamentary democracy is not that it is democratic or representative, but that it is nothing like democratic or representative enough. The revolutionary writer and fighter Karl Marx wrote 140 years ago about the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1871. He noted three central features.
First, it was freely elected by a majority. Second, its representatives got the same wages as the people who elected them. And third, the elected government formed the executive as well as the legislative power. That means that it not only passed the laws, usually in the form of decrees, but also carried them out. The forms of the new power made it possible to convert political promises into political action.
Similar alternatives to ordinary parliamentary institutions have occurred again and again through the 20th century – in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Germany and Hungary in 1919 and the ensuing years, in Spain in 1936, in Hungary in 1956, and in Portugal in 1974. In the best cases workers threw up organisations based on elected councils, with their representatives paid the same and subject to instant recall.
These councils were more efficient and effective representatives than their parliamentary equivalents because they were more democratic. They formed themselves quite naturally in the struggle for emancipation by the exploited masses. And they all emerged at times of revolution.
The reason for that is very simple. The existing power structure, including parliamentary democracy, is tolerated by the controllers of wealth only as long as that control is not threatened.
It follows that the only real democratic alternatives to parliamentary democracy can emerge when the minority control of the capitalists is challenged. In each of these cases of revolution, the pendulum swung back to different points of reaction-either to terrible tyrannies or to parliamentary democracies every bit as feeble as before.
The chief reason for this decline was the failure of the revolutionary forces to organise their new strength, to unite their forces powerfully enough to stave off the reaction and move forward to a new social order.
It is a grim irony of history that on the one occasion where the revolutionaries were led by a party – Russia in October 1917 – the working class base of that party was destroyed in civil war before it could consolidate its advances.
The lessons are plain. There are democratic alternatives to parliament, but they are only likely to emerge when there is a challenge from below to the economic rule of the minority.
How can we encourage such a challenge? Revolutions cannot be created out of thin air. They can only arise in an atmosphere of confidence. So the only way to work for a revolution and a more democratic society is to relate to the day to day struggles that always absorb the exploited lives of the working people.
Every strike, every demonstration, every manifestation of revolt carries with it the seed of revolution. The pompous and self absorbed activities of the representatives of parliamentary democracy work against such a revolution because they constantly dampen down, mock and humiliate live protest.
They pretend they are democrats, but by their actions prove the opposite. The seeds of a new more democratic society can only be sown in struggle against the old one.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>AEF Leaders Give Up<br>
the Fight</h1>
<h3>(30 November 1968)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1968/index.html#n0099" target="new">No. 99</a>, 30 November 1968, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><b>WITH HARDLY, a discussion the majority of the National Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers’ Union voted on Friday November 22 to accept the employers proposals for the engineering workers over the next three years.</b></p>
<p>The AEF President, Hugh Scanlon, argued that a national engineering strike should still be called. He was outvoted by 31 to 23.</p>
<p>This was a bigger majority against militant action than at any other time during the long drawn-out dispute.</p>
<p>By their cowardly vote, the committee’s majority have condemned the men and women they represent to three years’ work study, three years’ ’measured day work’, three years’ flexibility – above all to three years in which the shop stewards, the only representatives of the workers on the shop floor, will be hamstrung and obstructed by continued interference from union officials.</p>
<p>‘Wage drift’, through which shop floor workers could force their wages up by up to £1 a week every year, will now be a matter, not for the steward but the union official and the boss.</p>
<p>No wonder that Mr. Martin Jukes, director general of the Engineering Employers’ Federation, told the <b>Financial Times</b>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘I am very glad they have accepted and we hope the Confederation will adopt the same attitude.’</p>
<p class="fst">Mr. Jukes’ hopes were fulfilled. On Monday November 25, the Confederation Engineering Committee humbly fell into line with the AEF. Only the Transport and General Workers representatives opposed the deal.</p>
<p>Now, however, come reports that the government, who strongly supported the employer’s proposals during the agreement, is threatening to refer the agreement to the Prices and Incomes Board.</p>
<p>What will the AEF National Committee, do then?</p>
<p>How can they create any militancy and opposition to the PIB from a rank and file whose declared militancy and willingness to fight they have blatantly ignored?</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
AEF Leaders Give Up
the Fight
(30 November 1968)
From Socialist Worker, No. 99, 30 November 1968, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
WITH HARDLY, a discussion the majority of the National Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers’ Union voted on Friday November 22 to accept the employers proposals for the engineering workers over the next three years.
The AEF President, Hugh Scanlon, argued that a national engineering strike should still be called. He was outvoted by 31 to 23.
This was a bigger majority against militant action than at any other time during the long drawn-out dispute.
By their cowardly vote, the committee’s majority have condemned the men and women they represent to three years’ work study, three years’ ’measured day work’, three years’ flexibility – above all to three years in which the shop stewards, the only representatives of the workers on the shop floor, will be hamstrung and obstructed by continued interference from union officials.
‘Wage drift’, through which shop floor workers could force their wages up by up to £1 a week every year, will now be a matter, not for the steward but the union official and the boss.
No wonder that Mr. Martin Jukes, director general of the Engineering Employers’ Federation, told the Financial Times:
‘I am very glad they have accepted and we hope the Confederation will adopt the same attitude.’
Mr. Jukes’ hopes were fulfilled. On Monday November 25, the Confederation Engineering Committee humbly fell into line with the AEF. Only the Transport and General Workers representatives opposed the deal.
Now, however, come reports that the government, who strongly supported the employer’s proposals during the agreement, is threatening to refer the agreement to the Prices and Incomes Board.
What will the AEF National Committee, do then?
How can they create any militancy and opposition to the PIB from a rank and file whose declared militancy and willingness to fight they have blatantly ignored?
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Dividing Ireland</h1>
<h3>(July-August 1988)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, No.111, July-August 1988, pp.21-24.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><strong>Why are Catholics fighting Protestants in Northern Ireland? Why indeed is it the only place in the world where Catholics are fighting Protestants? <em>Paul Foot</em> looks back to the root of the problem – the partition of Ireland and the role Britain played in the creation of Northern Ireland.</strong></p>
<p class="fst">THE REALITY of human existence in Ireland over the last few centuries has been dominated by the British Empire. Ireland is the oldest colony in that empire. Marx summed up the nature of that long imperial rule in a single sentence:</p>
<p>“England has never ruled Ireland in any other way, and cannot rule it in any other way, except by the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption.” Four hundred years ago Ireland was “planted” with colonists loyal to the British crown. Under the cover of the Protestant religion, armed and equipped by the most powerful force on earth, these colonists made Ireland safe for British landlords. The Irish population was kept in order by consistent and ruthless violence.</p>
<p>The fervour of the colonists’ Protestantism rose and fell according to the rise and fall of the Irish resistance. The Orange Order was set up in 1795. Its founding declaration described it as “a barrier to revolution and an obstacle to compromise”. It was formed to meet the growing Irish resistance of the 1790s, which included many dissident Protestants. The Orange Order was a powerful force in the smashing by Britain of the Great Rebellion of 1798.</p>
<p>As the counter-revolution succeeded, so the Orange Order lost its purpose. It was wound up in 1836 and lay dormant for nearly fifty years. When it was revived again, in 1885, a new threat to British rule had emerged – the battle for Home Rule.</p>
<p>The notion of an independent Ireland horrified whole sections of the British landed aristocracy and the Tory Party. Lord Randolph Churchill summed up the tactics of his class in Ireland with his famous decision to “play the Orange card. Let us hope it turns out the ace and not the two.” By whipping up Protestants’ belief in their superiority because of their religion, the unity of the Irish people could be dealt a death blow, and the landlords and capitalists would continue to hold the reins.</p>
<p>The Home Rule Bills introduced by the Liberals in the 1880s were defeated by a combination of the Tory Party and the old “Whig” landowning section of the Liberals.</p>
<p>But in 1910 there were two elections with almost exactly the same result. They left the Irish Nationalists holding the balance in parliament and able to demand of the Liberals a Home Rule Bill which would grant Ireland independence. In exchange they offered Irish votes for other parts of the Liberal programme.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">UNEASILY the Liberals published their Home Rule Bill. It promulgated Home Rule for <em>all</em> Ireland. No one had ever thought that Home Rule could mean anything else. In 1912, however, the imperialists, landlords and capitalists played the Orange card once more.</p>
<p>An obscure Liberal MP called Agar-Roberts put down an amendment to exclude from the Home Rule Bill the whole of Ulster, the northernmost of the four ancient provinces of Ireland.</p>
<p>Effectively this meant that Home Rule could be achieved by Catholics in three quarters of Ireland, while Protestants would stay part of Britain in the other quarter.</p>
<p>The standard of Ulster was raised by Edward Carson, a Liberal and Southern Irish Protestant who had made a name for himself at the bar (not least in the persecution of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality).</p>
<p>He understood that the division of Ireland, with one half in Britain, the other out, would immeasurably weaken the whole impact of Home Rule. He argued on two lines.</p>
<p>The first was financial. The figures about the development of capitalism in the two parts of Ireland at that time spoke for themselves. In 1907, for instance, the value of all manufactured goods exported from Ireland was £20.9 million. Nearly 95 percent of manufacturing industry was concentrated in and around the burgeoning city of Belfast. With this area safe in the Imperial Free Trade area, the only substantial profits of British capitalists in Ireland would be secure.</p>
<p>The second argument, which sprang from the first, dealt with what Carson called “the labour problem”. The years 1911 to 1913 in Britain were marked by great labour agitations, huge strikes on railways, on the docks and in the pits.</p>
<p>Carson showed that in the areas of Ireland where Protestants felt themselves to be in the ascendant, labour agitation was curbed. If workers could be persuaded to look for their salvation to their religion and not to their class, the prospects for employers were immeasurably improved.</p>
<p>Protestants had to feel <em>better, superior</em>, but if they lived in a statelet where <em>everyone</em> was a Protestant, how could they feel themselves better than anyone else?</p>
<p>The new state, therefore, had not only to be predominantly Protestant, it had to include numbers of Catholics who could play the pan of the underdogs; the permanent victims of discrimination.</p>
<p>This led to some argument among the new Ulster movement. How many counties should be in the new British enclave they all wanted? The <em>nine</em> counties envisaged by the Agar-Roberts amendment had too brittle a Protestant majority (only 100,000 or so out of nearly one and three quarter million). It was obviously unsafe. A slight change in the birth rate could destroy the Protestant majority.</p>
<p>On the other hand the <em>four</em> counties of the north east (Derry, Armagh, Down and Antrim), though their Protestant majority was unshakeable, were too small in size and in its Catholic population to look viable as a separate state. A compromise between the two was needed. Carson favoured a new “Ulster” of six counties in which the predominantly Catholic counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone were added to the four’ ‘safe’’ Protestant ones. This still left a vast Protestant majority (about three to two). It ensured a decent land area and a sizeable population of about 600,000 Catholics who could permanantly play second fiddle to the million Protestants.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">AFTER SETTLING their differences on the size of the new British statelet they wanted in Ireland, Carson and the Tories started a furious campaign which lasted through most of 1912, all of 1913 and 1914 until the outbreak of the First World War.</p>
<p>The most extraordinary feature of this campaign was its utter contempt for parliament and the law.</p>
<p>Grand old parliamentarians though Carson and the Tory leaders were, they were quick to scoff at the supremacy of parliament when the integrity of their empire and the size of their profits were at stake.</p>
<p>Bonar Law, the Tory leader, told a massive meeting at Blenheim Palace:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities ... I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I would not be prepared to support them...”</p>
<p class="fst">These words soon turned into guns as Ulster Volunteers were armed in huge numbers to fight against the will of parliament. The army was openly incited by the Tories and the Carsonites to refuse to intervene.</p>
<p>Fifty eight officers at the Curragh signed a statement effectively refusing to take up arms against Protestant Ulster. They were supported by their general and chief of operations. They were immediately promised by the Liberal Secretary of State for War that the government had “no intention to crush political opposition to the Home Rule Bill”.</p>
<p>The gun running went on and the Volunteers enormously increased in fire power and in confidence.</p>
<p>The Liberals, however, still depended for their office on the Irish Nationalists. In 1912 and even in 1913 the Nationalists were absolutely adamant that they would not concede a single county in their demand for Home Rule.</p>
<p>John Redmond, the Nationalist leader, made his position quite plain in a speech on 11 April 1912:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The idea of two nations in Ireland is revolting and hateful. The idea of our agreeing to the partition of our nation is unthinkable.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">BY THE BEGINNING of 1914, however, Redmond and the Nationalist leadership were agreeing to the unthinkable nullificiation of all their hopes and aspirations. They were negotiating partition of their homeland.</p>
<p>How could that be? They had the votes to throttle the Liberal government. They had the support for Home Rule for all Ireland from the vast majority of the Irish people.</p>
<p>Yet they were in essence nervous and “practical” politicians. They did not want a war before they could take up their seats of government in their own country. After all, they argued, surely half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.</p>
<p>Against this “common sense”, “practical” approach was raised in Ireland another voice which argued in terms of class, the voice of Irish Marxist James Connolly.</p>
<p>Connolly watched the scheming of Redmond and Devlin with a mixture of contempt and horror. He knew enough about the poison of religious discrimination to realise that the partition of Ireland would write that discrimination permanently into the constitution of both halves of Ireland, and that the damage to the working class movement throughout the island would be incalculable.</p>
<p>He wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Such a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and Devlin, the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster, would mean a carnival of reaction North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured. To it Labour should give the bitterest opposition, against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death, if necessary ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Just as Carson and Bonar Law for their class had seen the exclusion of North East Ulster as crucial to the continued robbery of the Irish people, so James Connolly from his side saw straight through to the real purpose and consequence of the plot. Half a loaf was <em>not</em> better than no loaf at all if the half loaf had poison in it.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">CONNOLLY’S campaign and the partition plot were held up. War broke out in Europe and the nation states hurled their working classes at one another in a desperate battle for markets.</p>
<p>The Home Rule Bill was left “on the table”. Redmond and Devlin at once agreed to become recruiting sergeants for the mass slaughter on behalf of the Empire they were trying to get their country to leave.</p>
<p>James Connolly was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916. The rising was quickly crushed and Connolly, who had been injured in the fighting, was dragged from prison, strapped to a chair and shot.</p>
<p>On 29 May, not much more than a month after the rising was crushed, the new British prime minister, Lloyd George, in an effort to persuade the United States of America to join in the war on Britain’s side, made a sudden attempt to “solve” the Irish question once again.</p>
<p>He proposed immediate Home Rule for the 26 counties, with the six counties of the north east excluded as a British enclave. For this plan he got the instant agreement of John Redmond. But the proposal, and Redmond’s acquiescence, was quickly doused in a great wave of protest which engulfed all Ireland.</p>
<p>The lead was taken by the emerging Irish working class movement, whose growing representative bodies – there was for instance a great rash of newly formed trades councils – denounced partition and Redmond with unanimous ferocity.</p>
<p>The old Nationalist Party seemed almost overnight to vanish, to be replaced by a militantly republican organisation called Sinn Fein. Within months the whole of British authority in Ireland was in jeopardy.</p>
<p>Almost as soon as Lloyd George had proposed his partition plan, he dropped it. Redmond never recovered from the rejection of his treachery and died soon afterwards.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">FOLLOWING the elections of 1918 a predominantly Conservative coalition government was returned, headed by the Liberal Lloyd George. Seventy-six Sinn Feiners were elected as Irish MPs, 36 of whom were in prison. The Nationalists were effectively annihilated. The prospect of long term British rule in all Ireland was no longer credible.</p>
<p>Once again the British rulers went back to their old plan. Once more they played the Orange card. The plot was simple – to hold Ireland by force while establishing the six north eastern counties as a “safe” British enclave.</p>
<p>The Government of Ireland Bill proposed two parliaments, one in the 26 counties, the other in the six. While the parliaments were set up, some sort of law and order had to be maintained by the time honoured methods recognised by Marx fifty years earlier: “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”.</p>
<p>On 23 June 1921 the Ulster parliament (composed, needless to say, of a majority of Protestants determined to maintain “a Protestant state for a Protestant people”) was opened by the King. At once the British rulers breathed a sigh of relief. Ulster was safe, the sectarian enclave was assured – and now it was no longer necessary to fight the rebels in the South. Instead they could be called to London for a conference.</p>
<p>On 8 July, only two weeks after the Ulster parliament was opened, Eamonn De Valera, the leader of Sinn Fein, was called to London for a secret meeting with Lloyd George. Three months later a full scale Sinn Fein delegation was ushered into Downing Street for talks with British ministers.</p>
<p>These rebels were represented by two journalists (Arthur Griffiths and Erskine Childers), two solicitors (Gavin Duffy and Eamonn Duggan), a landowner (Robert Barton) and a bank clerk (Michael Collins).</p>
<p>They were, in the purest meaning of the word, petty bourgeois leaders. They represented a stronger strain of nationalism than had Redmond and Devlin – but nationalism nevertheless. There was not a single voice of labour at the conference table, not a word to harken back to the magnificent and prophetic writings of Connolly eight years earlier.</p>
<p>The British ministers had a plan which was well summed up by Bonar Law. “I would give the South anything,” he said “or almost anything, but I would not enforce anything on Ulster.”</p>
<p>A great diplomatic game was then played out, according to this plan. Hours, and then days were spent discussing matters such as the Oath of Allegiance which future Irish MPs should or should not take to the Crown, the possible Dominion status of the new independent state, the access to Irish ports by the British navy in time of war and the question of tariff barriers.</p>
<p>In all these matters the British ministers had only a passing interest, but they kept the Irishmen talking over them interminably. Every now and then, with much grunting and bad temper, the British ministers would make a concession.</p>
<p>In all these matters Griffiths, Collins and Co (Childers, by far the most uncompromising of the original six, was swiftly removed from the negotiating table) felt, quite rightly, that they were making progress.</p>
<p>They agreed that the question of Ulster should be left to last. When it came, at last, the treaty was almost complete. It seemed churlish to quibble about the last question on the agenda.</p>
<p>Each one of the five restated their opposition to partition. Ireland was indivisible. Partition of their country could not be contemplated. When Lloyd George, in a “final” offer, suggested a Boundary Commission which would look into the fairness or otherwise of the six county state, one by one the Sinn Feiners started to think about the unthinkable, and finally signed the unsignable.</p>
<p>All five, including Michael Collins, the most implacable of the Sinn Fein fighters in the war against the Black and Tans, signed the treaty which cut their country in half.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">STILL THE MATTER was not yet finally decided, however. The treaty had to be ratified by the Irish parliament, the Dáil. There was angry opposition to what was seen as a “sell-out”. Day after day the debate raged. Astonishingly, however, the argument mirrored the treaty discussions in London. There <em>was</em> opposition from the militant Republicans. But what worried them was the oath of allegiance to the Crown, the accessibility of Irish ports to the British navy and the status of the new independence.</p>
<p>Three hundred and thirty eight pages recorded the great Dáil debate; yet of these only nine were devoted to partition.</p>
<p>For nearly a year Ireland was plunged into another war – between the new government representing the Sinn Fein majority for the treaty and the anti-treaty militants. The best elements of Sinn Fein were systematically destroyed not by the British against whom they had fought so bravely, but by their own government, armed by the British.</p>
<p>Since Lloyd George’s diplomatic triumph of 1922 every single one of James Connolly’s worst predictions have come true.</p>
<p>The carnival of reaction has swung on, North and South. In the North the Orange Ascendancy has held onto its power by means of (I repeat the phrase yet again) “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”. Special police forces, gerrymandered voting systems, discriminatory employment and housing policies – all these and many more have served to create one of the most reactionary societies in the world.</p>
<p>In the South all movements for progress have been frustrated or patronised by the Roman Catholic Church. It is not simply that medieval superstitions still pass for government policy in matters of state intervention in people’s sex lives, but also that the reaction in the South has held back social reform movements.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">HOW DOES the argument used by Carson and his colleagues for partition in 1912 to 1922 stand up today? The financial reasons they gave then have vanished. The old industries of the North are in decay.</p>
<p>If profits were all they were interested in the British ruling class would have abandoned Northern Ireland long ago. But the second reason for partition – the emasculation of the working class – is as powerful now as it ever was. A united Ireland, especially if the unity was achieved through what would appear to Northern Protestants as British treachery, would lead to a united working class movement in circumstances of great political unrest. It is a frightening prospect for important people in London and in Dublin.</p>
<p>It is worth almost endless expenditure on troops and intelligence services to keep the lid on the kettle.</p>
<p>While Dublin governments, which are swapped from time to time between the two conservative parties, are much more interested in doing deals with London to make sure there is no real change in the line of partition.</p>
<p>Even the supposedly Republican Fianna Fail party much prefers the devil it knows (a divided island and a sectarian statelet) to the devil it doesn’t know, which could turn into the most frightening devil of all, a conscious, united and fighting working class. I’ll leave the final word to Connolly:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A real socialist movement cannot be built by temporising in front of a dying cause such as that of the Orange Ascendancy, even although in the paroxysms of its death struggle it assumes the appearance of energy like unto that of health. A real socialist movement can only be born of struggle, of uncompromising affirmation of the faith that is in us. Such a movement infallibly gathers to it every element of rebellion and of progress, and in the midst of the storm and stress of the struggle solidifies into a real revolutionary force.”</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Dividing Ireland
(July-August 1988)
From Socialist Worker Review, No.111, July-August 1988, pp.21-24.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Why are Catholics fighting Protestants in Northern Ireland? Why indeed is it the only place in the world where Catholics are fighting Protestants? Paul Foot looks back to the root of the problem – the partition of Ireland and the role Britain played in the creation of Northern Ireland.
THE REALITY of human existence in Ireland over the last few centuries has been dominated by the British Empire. Ireland is the oldest colony in that empire. Marx summed up the nature of that long imperial rule in a single sentence:
“England has never ruled Ireland in any other way, and cannot rule it in any other way, except by the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption.” Four hundred years ago Ireland was “planted” with colonists loyal to the British crown. Under the cover of the Protestant religion, armed and equipped by the most powerful force on earth, these colonists made Ireland safe for British landlords. The Irish population was kept in order by consistent and ruthless violence.
The fervour of the colonists’ Protestantism rose and fell according to the rise and fall of the Irish resistance. The Orange Order was set up in 1795. Its founding declaration described it as “a barrier to revolution and an obstacle to compromise”. It was formed to meet the growing Irish resistance of the 1790s, which included many dissident Protestants. The Orange Order was a powerful force in the smashing by Britain of the Great Rebellion of 1798.
As the counter-revolution succeeded, so the Orange Order lost its purpose. It was wound up in 1836 and lay dormant for nearly fifty years. When it was revived again, in 1885, a new threat to British rule had emerged – the battle for Home Rule.
The notion of an independent Ireland horrified whole sections of the British landed aristocracy and the Tory Party. Lord Randolph Churchill summed up the tactics of his class in Ireland with his famous decision to “play the Orange card. Let us hope it turns out the ace and not the two.” By whipping up Protestants’ belief in their superiority because of their religion, the unity of the Irish people could be dealt a death blow, and the landlords and capitalists would continue to hold the reins.
The Home Rule Bills introduced by the Liberals in the 1880s were defeated by a combination of the Tory Party and the old “Whig” landowning section of the Liberals.
But in 1910 there were two elections with almost exactly the same result. They left the Irish Nationalists holding the balance in parliament and able to demand of the Liberals a Home Rule Bill which would grant Ireland independence. In exchange they offered Irish votes for other parts of the Liberal programme.
UNEASILY the Liberals published their Home Rule Bill. It promulgated Home Rule for all Ireland. No one had ever thought that Home Rule could mean anything else. In 1912, however, the imperialists, landlords and capitalists played the Orange card once more.
An obscure Liberal MP called Agar-Roberts put down an amendment to exclude from the Home Rule Bill the whole of Ulster, the northernmost of the four ancient provinces of Ireland.
Effectively this meant that Home Rule could be achieved by Catholics in three quarters of Ireland, while Protestants would stay part of Britain in the other quarter.
The standard of Ulster was raised by Edward Carson, a Liberal and Southern Irish Protestant who had made a name for himself at the bar (not least in the persecution of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality).
He understood that the division of Ireland, with one half in Britain, the other out, would immeasurably weaken the whole impact of Home Rule. He argued on two lines.
The first was financial. The figures about the development of capitalism in the two parts of Ireland at that time spoke for themselves. In 1907, for instance, the value of all manufactured goods exported from Ireland was £20.9 million. Nearly 95 percent of manufacturing industry was concentrated in and around the burgeoning city of Belfast. With this area safe in the Imperial Free Trade area, the only substantial profits of British capitalists in Ireland would be secure.
The second argument, which sprang from the first, dealt with what Carson called “the labour problem”. The years 1911 to 1913 in Britain were marked by great labour agitations, huge strikes on railways, on the docks and in the pits.
Carson showed that in the areas of Ireland where Protestants felt themselves to be in the ascendant, labour agitation was curbed. If workers could be persuaded to look for their salvation to their religion and not to their class, the prospects for employers were immeasurably improved.
Protestants had to feel better, superior, but if they lived in a statelet where everyone was a Protestant, how could they feel themselves better than anyone else?
The new state, therefore, had not only to be predominantly Protestant, it had to include numbers of Catholics who could play the pan of the underdogs; the permanent victims of discrimination.
This led to some argument among the new Ulster movement. How many counties should be in the new British enclave they all wanted? The nine counties envisaged by the Agar-Roberts amendment had too brittle a Protestant majority (only 100,000 or so out of nearly one and three quarter million). It was obviously unsafe. A slight change in the birth rate could destroy the Protestant majority.
On the other hand the four counties of the north east (Derry, Armagh, Down and Antrim), though their Protestant majority was unshakeable, were too small in size and in its Catholic population to look viable as a separate state. A compromise between the two was needed. Carson favoured a new “Ulster” of six counties in which the predominantly Catholic counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone were added to the four’ ‘safe’’ Protestant ones. This still left a vast Protestant majority (about three to two). It ensured a decent land area and a sizeable population of about 600,000 Catholics who could permanantly play second fiddle to the million Protestants.
AFTER SETTLING their differences on the size of the new British statelet they wanted in Ireland, Carson and the Tories started a furious campaign which lasted through most of 1912, all of 1913 and 1914 until the outbreak of the First World War.
The most extraordinary feature of this campaign was its utter contempt for parliament and the law.
Grand old parliamentarians though Carson and the Tory leaders were, they were quick to scoff at the supremacy of parliament when the integrity of their empire and the size of their profits were at stake.
Bonar Law, the Tory leader, told a massive meeting at Blenheim Palace:
“There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities ... I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I would not be prepared to support them...”
These words soon turned into guns as Ulster Volunteers were armed in huge numbers to fight against the will of parliament. The army was openly incited by the Tories and the Carsonites to refuse to intervene.
Fifty eight officers at the Curragh signed a statement effectively refusing to take up arms against Protestant Ulster. They were supported by their general and chief of operations. They were immediately promised by the Liberal Secretary of State for War that the government had “no intention to crush political opposition to the Home Rule Bill”.
The gun running went on and the Volunteers enormously increased in fire power and in confidence.
The Liberals, however, still depended for their office on the Irish Nationalists. In 1912 and even in 1913 the Nationalists were absolutely adamant that they would not concede a single county in their demand for Home Rule.
John Redmond, the Nationalist leader, made his position quite plain in a speech on 11 April 1912:
“The idea of two nations in Ireland is revolting and hateful. The idea of our agreeing to the partition of our nation is unthinkable.”
BY THE BEGINNING of 1914, however, Redmond and the Nationalist leadership were agreeing to the unthinkable nullificiation of all their hopes and aspirations. They were negotiating partition of their homeland.
How could that be? They had the votes to throttle the Liberal government. They had the support for Home Rule for all Ireland from the vast majority of the Irish people.
Yet they were in essence nervous and “practical” politicians. They did not want a war before they could take up their seats of government in their own country. After all, they argued, surely half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.
Against this “common sense”, “practical” approach was raised in Ireland another voice which argued in terms of class, the voice of Irish Marxist James Connolly.
Connolly watched the scheming of Redmond and Devlin with a mixture of contempt and horror. He knew enough about the poison of religious discrimination to realise that the partition of Ireland would write that discrimination permanently into the constitution of both halves of Ireland, and that the damage to the working class movement throughout the island would be incalculable.
He wrote:
“Such a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and Devlin, the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster, would mean a carnival of reaction North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured. To it Labour should give the bitterest opposition, against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death, if necessary ...”
Just as Carson and Bonar Law for their class had seen the exclusion of North East Ulster as crucial to the continued robbery of the Irish people, so James Connolly from his side saw straight through to the real purpose and consequence of the plot. Half a loaf was not better than no loaf at all if the half loaf had poison in it.
CONNOLLY’S campaign and the partition plot were held up. War broke out in Europe and the nation states hurled their working classes at one another in a desperate battle for markets.
The Home Rule Bill was left “on the table”. Redmond and Devlin at once agreed to become recruiting sergeants for the mass slaughter on behalf of the Empire they were trying to get their country to leave.
James Connolly was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916. The rising was quickly crushed and Connolly, who had been injured in the fighting, was dragged from prison, strapped to a chair and shot.
On 29 May, not much more than a month after the rising was crushed, the new British prime minister, Lloyd George, in an effort to persuade the United States of America to join in the war on Britain’s side, made a sudden attempt to “solve” the Irish question once again.
He proposed immediate Home Rule for the 26 counties, with the six counties of the north east excluded as a British enclave. For this plan he got the instant agreement of John Redmond. But the proposal, and Redmond’s acquiescence, was quickly doused in a great wave of protest which engulfed all Ireland.
The lead was taken by the emerging Irish working class movement, whose growing representative bodies – there was for instance a great rash of newly formed trades councils – denounced partition and Redmond with unanimous ferocity.
The old Nationalist Party seemed almost overnight to vanish, to be replaced by a militantly republican organisation called Sinn Fein. Within months the whole of British authority in Ireland was in jeopardy.
Almost as soon as Lloyd George had proposed his partition plan, he dropped it. Redmond never recovered from the rejection of his treachery and died soon afterwards.
FOLLOWING the elections of 1918 a predominantly Conservative coalition government was returned, headed by the Liberal Lloyd George. Seventy-six Sinn Feiners were elected as Irish MPs, 36 of whom were in prison. The Nationalists were effectively annihilated. The prospect of long term British rule in all Ireland was no longer credible.
Once again the British rulers went back to their old plan. Once more they played the Orange card. The plot was simple – to hold Ireland by force while establishing the six north eastern counties as a “safe” British enclave.
The Government of Ireland Bill proposed two parliaments, one in the 26 counties, the other in the six. While the parliaments were set up, some sort of law and order had to be maintained by the time honoured methods recognised by Marx fifty years earlier: “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”.
On 23 June 1921 the Ulster parliament (composed, needless to say, of a majority of Protestants determined to maintain “a Protestant state for a Protestant people”) was opened by the King. At once the British rulers breathed a sigh of relief. Ulster was safe, the sectarian enclave was assured – and now it was no longer necessary to fight the rebels in the South. Instead they could be called to London for a conference.
On 8 July, only two weeks after the Ulster parliament was opened, Eamonn De Valera, the leader of Sinn Fein, was called to London for a secret meeting with Lloyd George. Three months later a full scale Sinn Fein delegation was ushered into Downing Street for talks with British ministers.
These rebels were represented by two journalists (Arthur Griffiths and Erskine Childers), two solicitors (Gavin Duffy and Eamonn Duggan), a landowner (Robert Barton) and a bank clerk (Michael Collins).
They were, in the purest meaning of the word, petty bourgeois leaders. They represented a stronger strain of nationalism than had Redmond and Devlin – but nationalism nevertheless. There was not a single voice of labour at the conference table, not a word to harken back to the magnificent and prophetic writings of Connolly eight years earlier.
The British ministers had a plan which was well summed up by Bonar Law. “I would give the South anything,” he said “or almost anything, but I would not enforce anything on Ulster.”
A great diplomatic game was then played out, according to this plan. Hours, and then days were spent discussing matters such as the Oath of Allegiance which future Irish MPs should or should not take to the Crown, the possible Dominion status of the new independent state, the access to Irish ports by the British navy in time of war and the question of tariff barriers.
In all these matters the British ministers had only a passing interest, but they kept the Irishmen talking over them interminably. Every now and then, with much grunting and bad temper, the British ministers would make a concession.
In all these matters Griffiths, Collins and Co (Childers, by far the most uncompromising of the original six, was swiftly removed from the negotiating table) felt, quite rightly, that they were making progress.
They agreed that the question of Ulster should be left to last. When it came, at last, the treaty was almost complete. It seemed churlish to quibble about the last question on the agenda.
Each one of the five restated their opposition to partition. Ireland was indivisible. Partition of their country could not be contemplated. When Lloyd George, in a “final” offer, suggested a Boundary Commission which would look into the fairness or otherwise of the six county state, one by one the Sinn Feiners started to think about the unthinkable, and finally signed the unsignable.
All five, including Michael Collins, the most implacable of the Sinn Fein fighters in the war against the Black and Tans, signed the treaty which cut their country in half.
STILL THE MATTER was not yet finally decided, however. The treaty had to be ratified by the Irish parliament, the Dáil. There was angry opposition to what was seen as a “sell-out”. Day after day the debate raged. Astonishingly, however, the argument mirrored the treaty discussions in London. There was opposition from the militant Republicans. But what worried them was the oath of allegiance to the Crown, the accessibility of Irish ports to the British navy and the status of the new independence.
Three hundred and thirty eight pages recorded the great Dáil debate; yet of these only nine were devoted to partition.
For nearly a year Ireland was plunged into another war – between the new government representing the Sinn Fein majority for the treaty and the anti-treaty militants. The best elements of Sinn Fein were systematically destroyed not by the British against whom they had fought so bravely, but by their own government, armed by the British.
Since Lloyd George’s diplomatic triumph of 1922 every single one of James Connolly’s worst predictions have come true.
The carnival of reaction has swung on, North and South. In the North the Orange Ascendancy has held onto its power by means of (I repeat the phrase yet again) “the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption”. Special police forces, gerrymandered voting systems, discriminatory employment and housing policies – all these and many more have served to create one of the most reactionary societies in the world.
In the South all movements for progress have been frustrated or patronised by the Roman Catholic Church. It is not simply that medieval superstitions still pass for government policy in matters of state intervention in people’s sex lives, but also that the reaction in the South has held back social reform movements.
HOW DOES the argument used by Carson and his colleagues for partition in 1912 to 1922 stand up today? The financial reasons they gave then have vanished. The old industries of the North are in decay.
If profits were all they were interested in the British ruling class would have abandoned Northern Ireland long ago. But the second reason for partition – the emasculation of the working class – is as powerful now as it ever was. A united Ireland, especially if the unity was achieved through what would appear to Northern Protestants as British treachery, would lead to a united working class movement in circumstances of great political unrest. It is a frightening prospect for important people in London and in Dublin.
It is worth almost endless expenditure on troops and intelligence services to keep the lid on the kettle.
While Dublin governments, which are swapped from time to time between the two conservative parties, are much more interested in doing deals with London to make sure there is no real change in the line of partition.
Even the supposedly Republican Fianna Fail party much prefers the devil it knows (a divided island and a sectarian statelet) to the devil it doesn’t know, which could turn into the most frightening devil of all, a conscious, united and fighting working class. I’ll leave the final word to Connolly:
“A real socialist movement cannot be built by temporising in front of a dying cause such as that of the Orange Ascendancy, even although in the paroxysms of its death struggle it assumes the appearance of energy like unto that of health. A real socialist movement can only be born of struggle, of uncompromising affirmation of the faith that is in us. Such a movement infallibly gathers to it every element of rebellion and of progress, and in the midst of the storm and stress of the struggle solidifies into a real revolutionary force.”
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h4>Challenging for Hackney mayor</h4>
<h1>Shaking up New Labour</h1>
<h3>(14 September 2002)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1817, 14 September 2002.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/" target="new"><em>Socialist Worker</em> Website</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="c"><em>AWARD-WINNING campaigning journalist Paul Foot has been selected as the Socialist Alliance candidate in October’s election for mayor of Hackney in east London. Voting begins on Monday 7 October, in three weeks time. His campaign has already attracted national media attention. <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> spoke to Paul Foot.</em></p>
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<p class="fst"><strong>Why are you standing for mayor?</strong></p>
<p class="fst">“WHAT HAS prompted me to stand is New Labour’s decision to have elected mayors. I actually voted against the proposal that there should be an elected mayor in Hackney, and the Socialist Alliance was against it. The whole purpose of elected mayors, which was introduced in the Local Government Act 2000, was to make local government even less representative.</p>
<p>“Labour’s whole idea is that society should be controlled by ‘clever and gifted’ people at the top, who decide about the distribution of resources. There is an obstacle for the government in this whole strategy – it has to get its crony elected.</p>
<p>“One of the main reasons the Socialist Alliance in Hackney decided to stand for mayor is because the very democratic process that Labour wants to curb can be used to stand the whole thing on its head.”</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>What issues are central to your campaign?</strong></p>
<p class="fst">“HACKNEY IS one of the poorest areas in the whole of Europe. There is a tremendous amount of poverty and destitution. Hackney has some of the worst records in Britain on health, infant mortality, and education provision.</p>
<p>“We urgently need two new non-religious mixed secondary schools in Hackney. It is an incredible fact that in this borough there will soon be only one mixed secular secondary school. Hackney has faced diabolical cuts.</p>
<p>“We face the privatisation of the school meals service. I will be arguing to stop the privatisation and to campaign on the issue with the trade unions. There are a whole series of cuts the council is making to save little bits of money. These can appear to be very small issues, but they affect people’s lives. They are stopping passes for the disabled. They are going to concrete in children’s swimming pools.</p>
<p>“On one local estate, the Pembury, there have been police raids in an operation called ‘Thumbs Up’. This really means the police will be arresting a lot of young black kids, who will be stopped and searched because they are black. We should have a full inquiry into that.</p>
<p>“I don’t see how anyone who claims to be a representative of the people of Hackney can escape saying that they are absolutely opposed to any war on Iraq. I’m absolutely opposed to the war. It is going to be at the front of my campaign, and in all my leaflets. I’m also opposed to the government’s treatment of asylum seekers and I am for welcoming asylum seekers to this country.”</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Your campaign has already got New Labour worried with reports that it approached Mo Mowlam to stand against you.</strong></p>
<p class="fst">“I WAS delighted to hear they had approached Mo Mowlam. I’m pretty sure they approached her after the first announcement that I had decided to stand. I do think they are a little bit nervous. If a man in a monkey suit or a robo-cop is elected, as has been the case in two previous mayoral elections, the government can handle it. It can deal with a maverick or reactionary candidate.</p>
<p>“But if a socialist is elected then that sets all sort of difficulties. A socialist like myself will argue that there are not limited resources for services and the things people need. On the contrary, the resources available in society are enormous. I’m not going to be curbed.</p>
<p>“The government have made sure there are all sorts of restrictions on the mayor’s powers. The mayor’s policies will be funded from the council budget. Everything will have to be approved by a cabinet which includes two existing councillors. But I will keep demanding that we need proper resources in Hackney. We need a tube in Hackney. We need to stop the sell-off of council housing. We need to change course dramatically towards public enterprise, not private enterprise, and towards comprehensive education and away from all the talk of faith schools and city technology colleges.</p>
<p>“I can’t promise that if I’m mayor two new secondary schools will definitely be built. At least there would be someone who has a mandate from the people to say ‘this is what I believe in and this is what I intend to campaign for’. The slogan I’ve developed is that I’ve been all my life a campaigning and investigative journalist and I intend to be a campaigning and investigative mayor.</p>
<p>“I’m going to go and find out and expose what is going on and campaign to change it.”</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Two thirds of the electorate in Hackney did not vote in the council elections this year. What would you say to people who say it’s not worth voting?</strong></p>
<p class="fst">“I can understand people’s attitude to politicians. This is part of a process which has been happening over the last 100 years.</p>
<p>“There has been a consistent surrender of the power of elected representatives to the power of the non-elected people who run society – the big businessmen, the policemen, the judges, those who run the media. The effect of the first Blair government was to make Labour indistinguishable from the Tories.</p>
<p>“So I’m absolutely sympathetic with those who don’t vote. On the other hand, the end product of such thought means there is the danger of unrepresentative government.</p>
<p>“There is the danger of dictatorship or ceding all the power to the businessmen and the High Court. And this is something we should try to stop. I would say to people, do you really want to give up your rights to be represented?</p>
<p>“We are offering representation for working class people that is very different to the consensus of the main parties.”</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>What sort of campaign are you going to have?</strong></p>
<p class="fst">“WE ARE going to leaflet every house in Hackney. And on top of that we are producing an eight-page <em>Foot for Mayor</em> supplement. We’ve got a very loyal and a very hardworking core of people in the Socialist Alliance. The campaign will depend on pulling people in who aren’t normally associated with political activity.</p>
<p>“To help do this we are also organising local meetings. Today I’m going to a meeting with the people who campaigned against the scrapping of disabled passes in Hackney.</p>
<p>“In the next week or so I’m hoping to speak to people in tenants associations, to local trade unionists, and to people in the Turkish community. If we achieve nothing else in the election, we will have guaranteed an increase in the socialist propaganda in this area, and hopefully also engaged new people in political activity.”</p>
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<h4>London Borough of Hackney</h4>
<ul>
<li>Some 85 percent of households have an income of below £20,000, compared to 66 percent in the rest of London.<br>
</li>
<li>21 percent of men and 11 percent of women are unemployed – the highest rate in London.<br>
</li>
<li>112 of the most deprived estates in England are in Hackney.<br>
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<li>Infant mortality and stillbirth rates are 50 percent higher than the national average.</li>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Challenging for Hackney mayor
Shaking up New Labour
(14 September 2002)
From Socialist Worker, No.1817, 14 September 2002.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
AWARD-WINNING campaigning journalist Paul Foot has been selected as the Socialist Alliance candidate in October’s election for mayor of Hackney in east London. Voting begins on Monday 7 October, in three weeks time. His campaign has already attracted national media attention. Socialist Worker spoke to Paul Foot.
Why are you standing for mayor?
“WHAT HAS prompted me to stand is New Labour’s decision to have elected mayors. I actually voted against the proposal that there should be an elected mayor in Hackney, and the Socialist Alliance was against it. The whole purpose of elected mayors, which was introduced in the Local Government Act 2000, was to make local government even less representative.
“Labour’s whole idea is that society should be controlled by ‘clever and gifted’ people at the top, who decide about the distribution of resources. There is an obstacle for the government in this whole strategy – it has to get its crony elected.
“One of the main reasons the Socialist Alliance in Hackney decided to stand for mayor is because the very democratic process that Labour wants to curb can be used to stand the whole thing on its head.”
What issues are central to your campaign?
“HACKNEY IS one of the poorest areas in the whole of Europe. There is a tremendous amount of poverty and destitution. Hackney has some of the worst records in Britain on health, infant mortality, and education provision.
“We urgently need two new non-religious mixed secondary schools in Hackney. It is an incredible fact that in this borough there will soon be only one mixed secular secondary school. Hackney has faced diabolical cuts.
“We face the privatisation of the school meals service. I will be arguing to stop the privatisation and to campaign on the issue with the trade unions. There are a whole series of cuts the council is making to save little bits of money. These can appear to be very small issues, but they affect people’s lives. They are stopping passes for the disabled. They are going to concrete in children’s swimming pools.
“On one local estate, the Pembury, there have been police raids in an operation called ‘Thumbs Up’. This really means the police will be arresting a lot of young black kids, who will be stopped and searched because they are black. We should have a full inquiry into that.
“I don’t see how anyone who claims to be a representative of the people of Hackney can escape saying that they are absolutely opposed to any war on Iraq. I’m absolutely opposed to the war. It is going to be at the front of my campaign, and in all my leaflets. I’m also opposed to the government’s treatment of asylum seekers and I am for welcoming asylum seekers to this country.”
Your campaign has already got New Labour worried with reports that it approached Mo Mowlam to stand against you.
“I WAS delighted to hear they had approached Mo Mowlam. I’m pretty sure they approached her after the first announcement that I had decided to stand. I do think they are a little bit nervous. If a man in a monkey suit or a robo-cop is elected, as has been the case in two previous mayoral elections, the government can handle it. It can deal with a maverick or reactionary candidate.
“But if a socialist is elected then that sets all sort of difficulties. A socialist like myself will argue that there are not limited resources for services and the things people need. On the contrary, the resources available in society are enormous. I’m not going to be curbed.
“The government have made sure there are all sorts of restrictions on the mayor’s powers. The mayor’s policies will be funded from the council budget. Everything will have to be approved by a cabinet which includes two existing councillors. But I will keep demanding that we need proper resources in Hackney. We need a tube in Hackney. We need to stop the sell-off of council housing. We need to change course dramatically towards public enterprise, not private enterprise, and towards comprehensive education and away from all the talk of faith schools and city technology colleges.
“I can’t promise that if I’m mayor two new secondary schools will definitely be built. At least there would be someone who has a mandate from the people to say ‘this is what I believe in and this is what I intend to campaign for’. The slogan I’ve developed is that I’ve been all my life a campaigning and investigative journalist and I intend to be a campaigning and investigative mayor.
“I’m going to go and find out and expose what is going on and campaign to change it.”
Two thirds of the electorate in Hackney did not vote in the council elections this year. What would you say to people who say it’s not worth voting?
“I can understand people’s attitude to politicians. This is part of a process which has been happening over the last 100 years.
“There has been a consistent surrender of the power of elected representatives to the power of the non-elected people who run society – the big businessmen, the policemen, the judges, those who run the media. The effect of the first Blair government was to make Labour indistinguishable from the Tories.
“So I’m absolutely sympathetic with those who don’t vote. On the other hand, the end product of such thought means there is the danger of unrepresentative government.
“There is the danger of dictatorship or ceding all the power to the businessmen and the High Court. And this is something we should try to stop. I would say to people, do you really want to give up your rights to be represented?
“We are offering representation for working class people that is very different to the consensus of the main parties.”
What sort of campaign are you going to have?
“WE ARE going to leaflet every house in Hackney. And on top of that we are producing an eight-page Foot for Mayor supplement. We’ve got a very loyal and a very hardworking core of people in the Socialist Alliance. The campaign will depend on pulling people in who aren’t normally associated with political activity.
“To help do this we are also organising local meetings. Today I’m going to a meeting with the people who campaigned against the scrapping of disabled passes in Hackney.
“In the next week or so I’m hoping to speak to people in tenants associations, to local trade unionists, and to people in the Turkish community. If we achieve nothing else in the election, we will have guaranteed an increase in the socialist propaganda in this area, and hopefully also engaged new people in political activity.”
London Borough of Hackney
Some 85 percent of households have an income of below £20,000, compared to 66 percent in the rest of London.
21 percent of men and 11 percent of women are unemployed – the highest rate in London.
112 of the most deprived estates in England are in Hackney.
Infant mortality and stillbirth rates are 50 percent higher than the national average.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Learning from experience?</h1>
<h3>(June 1989)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 10 June 1989.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">I spent a lively hour or so the other morning at Tony Benn’s house.</p>
<p>The official subject for discussion was rather boring (I don’t remember what it was).</p>
<p>What we talked about was a very interesting question indeed: why is it that the parliamentary politician I most detested 20 years ago is the parliamentary politician I most admire today.</p>
<p>Anyone leafing through the pages of <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> in the months after it first became a weekly paper in 1968 would come across a great many references to The Hon. Anthony Wedgewood Benn, the ‘supremo’ Minister for Technology.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Vacuous</h4>
<p class="fst">Among the subjects dealt with were the same minister’s vacuous enthusiasm for the European Common Market, his creating of a specially nasty private monopoly in ship-building, his sponsoring of a uranium mine in racist South West Africa to the delight of the mines owners, Rio Tinto Zinc, his support for In Place of Strife, an openly anti-union bill, his pretending all the time that he was a socialist and a democrat.</p>
<p><em>When Labour went into opposition, and Tony Benn (as he now insisted he was called) went into opposition, he became, as far as I was concerned, even more detestable. When he called at a Labour Party conference for a standing ovation for the Upper Clyde Shipyard workers, who were fighting the very employers Benn had created, I was almost literally sick.</em></p>
<p>As he assumed the mantle of Supreme Socialist in the Labour Party, I (and <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>) attacked him with ever increasing vigour as a monstrous hypocrite who could not be trusted an inch.</p>
<p>When Labour resumed office in the mid-1970s, it soon turned out that all our attacked on Benn were utterly justified.</p>
<p>After a year fiddling about with a couple of co-ops, he allowed himself to be sacked as industry minister, and moved over to energy where he made some pathetic speeches about the wonders of North Sea oil. If he was fighting against the Labour government, not many people in the movement knew it.</p>
<p><em>What they got was rising unemployment and cuts in services, and Benn (who never resigned) took his share of the responsibility.</em></p>
<p>Soon after Labour lost in 1979, we had <em>The Debate of the Decade</em> in the Central Hall, in which we argued the toss on reform or revolution (Benn and others for reform; myself and others for revolution).</p>
<p>During that debate I recall Tony passionately supporting many of the measures of the Labour government. He also declared that he was not in favour of troops coming out of Ireland.</p>
<p>He then entered what I can only describe as a Crippsian stage. Sir Stafford Cripps suddenly became a very left wing socialist in the 1930s, and called for the next Labour government to take the most drastic steps to curtail capitalism, including the creation of enough peers to outvote the entire House of Lords.</p>
<p><em>This was the theme of Tony Benn’s speeches in 1981 and 1982.</em></p>
<p>During the miners’ strike he had a long flirtation with a shameless Stalinism. He talked a lot about the war and how wonderful Russia was.</p>
<p>Through all this time there was no doubt in my mind that at some stage or other the ‘true’ Tony Benn would revert to his old reformist and careerist self, throw away – as Cripps did – the baggage of revolutionary rhetoric, shed his momentary Stalinism and prepare once more for parliamentary power.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Moving</h4>
<p class="fst">None of these things happened. Instead, as the ‘downturn’ continued, as defeat led to defeat, as more and more socialists became demoralised to the point of declaring that the working class of the world had vanished, Tony Benn moved relentlessly to the left.</p>
<p>His attacks on Kinnock over the latest policy reviews (sell outs) were savage, witty and <em>implacable</em>. His speech on the first big China demonstration called unequivocally for action from below.</p>
<p>Tony Benn is, I think, the only Labour politician this century who has moved so sharply in that direction, so that he is now, at his ripe age, a socialist who is quite unrecognisable from the fatuous, trend setting babbler of his youth.</p>
<p>Unlike Cripps, Tony Benn does not have a career in front of him. He will not be a minister in Kinnock’s government. He would not want to be.</p>
<p>It is, I suppose, wise in the view of all that past to be sceptical, but I prefer to see in the steady progression of Tony Benn the most unpredictable proof that some people, however few, can and do move to the left according to what they find out in their experience, and according to what they read and learn.</p>
<p>It is not inevitable that people slide to the right as they get older. People do not always remain fixed in a reformist (or for that matter revolutionary) mould. Tony Benn has proved both. And he has not stopped moving.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Learning from experience?
(June 1989)
From Socialist Worker, 10 June 1989.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I spent a lively hour or so the other morning at Tony Benn’s house.
The official subject for discussion was rather boring (I don’t remember what it was).
What we talked about was a very interesting question indeed: why is it that the parliamentary politician I most detested 20 years ago is the parliamentary politician I most admire today.
Anyone leafing through the pages of Socialist Worker in the months after it first became a weekly paper in 1968 would come across a great many references to The Hon. Anthony Wedgewood Benn, the ‘supremo’ Minister for Technology.
Vacuous
Among the subjects dealt with were the same minister’s vacuous enthusiasm for the European Common Market, his creating of a specially nasty private monopoly in ship-building, his sponsoring of a uranium mine in racist South West Africa to the delight of the mines owners, Rio Tinto Zinc, his support for In Place of Strife, an openly anti-union bill, his pretending all the time that he was a socialist and a democrat.
When Labour went into opposition, and Tony Benn (as he now insisted he was called) went into opposition, he became, as far as I was concerned, even more detestable. When he called at a Labour Party conference for a standing ovation for the Upper Clyde Shipyard workers, who were fighting the very employers Benn had created, I was almost literally sick.
As he assumed the mantle of Supreme Socialist in the Labour Party, I (and Socialist Worker) attacked him with ever increasing vigour as a monstrous hypocrite who could not be trusted an inch.
When Labour resumed office in the mid-1970s, it soon turned out that all our attacked on Benn were utterly justified.
After a year fiddling about with a couple of co-ops, he allowed himself to be sacked as industry minister, and moved over to energy where he made some pathetic speeches about the wonders of North Sea oil. If he was fighting against the Labour government, not many people in the movement knew it.
What they got was rising unemployment and cuts in services, and Benn (who never resigned) took his share of the responsibility.
Soon after Labour lost in 1979, we had The Debate of the Decade in the Central Hall, in which we argued the toss on reform or revolution (Benn and others for reform; myself and others for revolution).
During that debate I recall Tony passionately supporting many of the measures of the Labour government. He also declared that he was not in favour of troops coming out of Ireland.
He then entered what I can only describe as a Crippsian stage. Sir Stafford Cripps suddenly became a very left wing socialist in the 1930s, and called for the next Labour government to take the most drastic steps to curtail capitalism, including the creation of enough peers to outvote the entire House of Lords.
This was the theme of Tony Benn’s speeches in 1981 and 1982.
During the miners’ strike he had a long flirtation with a shameless Stalinism. He talked a lot about the war and how wonderful Russia was.
Through all this time there was no doubt in my mind that at some stage or other the ‘true’ Tony Benn would revert to his old reformist and careerist self, throw away – as Cripps did – the baggage of revolutionary rhetoric, shed his momentary Stalinism and prepare once more for parliamentary power.
Moving
None of these things happened. Instead, as the ‘downturn’ continued, as defeat led to defeat, as more and more socialists became demoralised to the point of declaring that the working class of the world had vanished, Tony Benn moved relentlessly to the left.
His attacks on Kinnock over the latest policy reviews (sell outs) were savage, witty and implacable. His speech on the first big China demonstration called unequivocally for action from below.
Tony Benn is, I think, the only Labour politician this century who has moved so sharply in that direction, so that he is now, at his ripe age, a socialist who is quite unrecognisable from the fatuous, trend setting babbler of his youth.
Unlike Cripps, Tony Benn does not have a career in front of him. He will not be a minister in Kinnock’s government. He would not want to be.
It is, I suppose, wise in the view of all that past to be sceptical, but I prefer to see in the steady progression of Tony Benn the most unpredictable proof that some people, however few, can and do move to the left according to what they find out in their experience, and according to what they read and learn.
It is not inevitable that people slide to the right as they get older. People do not always remain fixed in a reformist (or for that matter revolutionary) mould. Tony Benn has proved both. And he has not stopped moving.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Workers’ movement</small><br>
The party’s just begun</h1>
<h3>(January 2002)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.259, January 2002, pp.16-18.<br>
Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><em><strong>Paul Foot</strong> argues that spontaneous activity is not enough – we need collective organisation</em></p>
<p class="fst">‘We are many – they are few.’ With that historic reminder, the poet Shelley ended his furious poem about the massacre of trade unionists at Peterloo. The line has been quoted (well, misquoted really, since Shelley, in self imposed exile in Italy, wrote, ‘Ye are many – they are few’) a million times since. It reminds the world’s exploited masses of their numerical superiority over their exploiters. The line was written nearly 200 years ago, and its simple truth grows more obvious every day. There is still a vast – and growing – gap between the few, the secure and comfortable minority ruling the world, and the many, the hungry and insecure masses. There are still much more of the many than the few. Why hasn’t that numerical superiority led automatically to the overthrow of the minority?</p>
<p>One answer is that the rich minority have used much of their wealth to arm themselves with mighty weaponry to protect their ill-gotten gains. But their continuing power does not depend only on force of arms. The chief reason for their ability to continue in power is their control over ideas. They control not only where and for what rewards people work, but how people think. People are not born with a set of ideas and thoughts. They grow into them. They are taught in schools and colleges, and through the mass media, such as newspapers and television. All of these are controlled in different ways, and reflect the will and purpose of the capitalist few.</p>
<p>These reactionary ideas continually clash with people’s experience. The clash of most human beings’ experience with the ideas handed down to them led to the formation of an independent labour movement, with independent labour parties, organised to challenge capitalism. This in turn led to a further ideological offensive by the ruling class on the exploitation of ideas, with the unhappy result in the western democracies that the official labour movements were shackled to the exploiters they set out to tame. The chief reason for the demise of these labour organisations is their own passivity. The instinct of labour leaders, especially at, times of crisis, is to compromise, to back off from any challenge. Terrified that they will lose their own positions as important people in society, they prefer to compromise and vacillate. They prefer the existing state of things to the unknown. They prefer passivity to activity.</p>
<p>One result of this approach is an ideological surrender. There was a time, for instance, when the leaders of the British Labour Party were committed to their own independent educational organisations – the Plebs League, the Workers’ Educational Association, and so on. A hundred years of Labour passivity have reduced these organisations to ruins. Now the Labour leaders spend their time organising focus groups and opinion polls. The focus group organisers and the pollsters are expressly forbidden to challenge any one of the views they record. The point is to find out what people think so that policies can be devised to win their votes. This process pretends to be democratic – ’it’s only finding out what people think’. In fact it is the exact opposite of any genuine democracy. That depends entirely on the process of argument, of challenge and counter-challenge. Without such argument and challenge the most disgusting prejudices fester in what Marx called ‘the muck of ages’, and, as they fester, multiply. So the vital business of confronting capitalist and racist arguments has to be conducted outside the educational institutions and media of capitalist society. How best to ensure that?</p>
<p>In his last great poem, <em>Samson Agonistes</em>, John Milton, who played an active part in the English Revolution of the 1640s, asked:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,<br>
And by their vices brought to servitude<br>
Than to love bondage more than liberty –<br>
Bondage in ease, than strenuous liberty?’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">In the triumph of Royalist counter-revolution Milton saw the dangers of political passivity, of ideological sloth. The reactionaries took advantage of that passivity and sloth to restore their tyranny. The alternative to bondage in passivity was strenuous liberty. In plain terms, this meant that if you want to change the world for the better you have to do something about it. And, as the Levellers proved in the English Revolution, you are much more likely to do something effective if you act in concert with others.<br>
</p>
<h4>A history of strikes</h4>
<p class="fst">In the centuries after Milton died exploitation increased, but so did the forces that can defeat exploitation. Capitalism brought the horrors of factory work, but also produced a new class, the working class, whose predominant characteristic was its power to stop exploitation by stopping working. Strikes and work-ins, however, did not come about by some magical process. They required the active and conscious participation of rebellious workers. There are times in British working class history where that spontaneous activity flowered so tempestuously that many workers became convinced that their activity on its own was enough to change the social order. In Britain these times were the Great Unrest of 1911-14, the massive wave of industrial struggle after the First World War, the General Strike of 1926, and the seemingly unstoppable wave of strikes from 1969 to 1974. In all these times there were socialists who believed that the strikes themselves would stamp out capitalism and usher in a new democratic social order controlled from below. Yet all these tidal waves of workers’ protest were quite easily surfed by the capitalist rulers, who, as soon as the strikes were over, embarked on a sustained and highly organised counter-offensive. At the start of 2002 that counter-offensive is still winning.</p>
<p>The way the capitalists organised and coordinated their counter-offensive teaches us another lesson. Just as activity is the necessary antidote to passivity, so that activity needs to be organised on our side every bit as effectively as it is on theirs. Capitalists know that they need constantly to coordinate their efforts to achieve their ends. The way in which, for instance, Margaret Thatcher and Nicholas Ridley organised the industrial counter-attack in the 1980s, the way they picked off the weaker, less democratic unions before launching themselves, their police and their newspapers against the miners, printers and dockers, proved that for all their verbal hostility to class struggle they fight it with the most ruthless and coordinated determination.<br>
</p>
<h4>Coordination and activity</h4>
<p class="fst">So the second lesson we can learn from the other side is the need for coordination, for linking the different and disparate struggles of the dispossessed. This is not just a matter of strikes and solidarity with strikes. It involves coordination on every issue that constricts working people – housing, social services, discrimination of every kind, Third World debt, constant wars waged by the rich and strong against the poor and weak, and countless other issues that are all part of the grotesque fabric of capitalist society. It involves, too, linking current struggles with those that have been waged in the past. Our rulers constantly revel in their history – glorifying the ‘grand old figures’ of the past, pompous bores like Gladstone and imperialist fanatics like Churchill. We have a history too, a much more heroic history than theirs, and one that needs to be learned, studied and blended into the struggles of today.</p>
<p>How to combine activity and coordination? The question leads to the third crucial ingredient of a successful fight for a different world order – party organisation. It is a platitude, so obvious that it is embarrassing to write it down, that you can’t be an effective socialist on your own. The most brilliant socialist theoretician, the most scintillating writer, the most eloquent orator, cannot achieve any real change in capitalist society unless they cooperate with others. Just as the idea of socialism envisages a society where individuals pool and share their resources, so pooling and sharing resources and abilities is crucial to the achievement of socialism. We are up against a class of enormous wealth that understands only too well how to pool its resources in the fight against anyone who threatens it. The idea that we can defeat that class by shrieking on our own, however stout our hearts of oak and steely our determination, is either absurd fantasy or hideous arrogance.</p>
<p>If socialists are to achieve anything, they have to come together in a party. Over the last century hundreds of thousands of socialists responded to that obvious conclusion by joining the Labour Party. A hundred years of passivity and vacillation have reached their miserable climax with the four B’s – Blair, Brown, Blunkett and Byers. An effective socialist party today has to break with that tradition. The party we need cannot any longer pin its faith in reform through parliament. It has to be a revolutionary party. What does that mean? Well, we can learn a lot from the Russian Revolution, from Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party, but that was a long time ago, and most people equate Russian socialism with the horrors of Stalinism. The truth is that none of us knows exactly how a revolution is to be conducted or what it will achieve. All we know is that any socialist society thrown up by a convulsion from below is bound to be incomparably superior to the wars, poverty and exploitation handed down to us by capitalism, and that therefore as we organise against capitalism on every front we show it no quarter.</p>
<p>People recoil from the notion of such a party for many different reasons. Some protest about the idea of a vanguard, a party offering leadership to the working class, a notion they denounce as ‘elitist’. But anyone who suggests a course of action, indeed anyone who offers an analysis of what is going on and what should go on, is by that definition elitist. Moreover, the more isolated those suggestions and analyses, the less they are debated and backed by a collective, the more elitist they become. Others protest at party discipline – ’I’m not going to be pushed around by any central committee,’ they proudly proclaim. This has always seemed to be the most ridiculous claim, since discipline wielded by an elected committee is what gives a socialist party its greatest strength – its ability to act together, to produce newspapers and propaganda, to organise demonstrations, combine and coordinate lots of socialists where, without the party, only a few might take part. It is precisely that discipline and that ability to act together that provides the party with its greatest asset, the self confidence of its members, a self confidence that flows from the knowledge that when we think, debate and act we do so with others inspired by the same ideas and the same objective.</p>
<p>In recent years, when anti-capitalist campaigning has suddenly and thrillingly become fashionable all over the world, I detect a new objection to the building of a socialist party: ‘Why do I have to join a party? Why can’t I just take part in campaigns, such as Globalise Resistance or the campaign against the war in Afghanistan?’ To these I ask other questions. Where did those campaigns come from? How can they be sustained? For all their mass support, these campaigns and others like them did not emerge out of thin air. They required organisation – yes, leadership. And almost all the recent campaigns have at some stage or other sought out and recruited organisations and organised parties. Of the socialist parties in Britain today by far the largest, by far the most disciplined, by far the party most likely to organise wider campaigns in a non-sectarian manner, is the Socialist Workers Party, whose main (though not its only) fault is that it is not big enough.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Workers’ movement
The party’s just begun
(January 2002)
From Socialist Review, No.259, January 2002, pp.16-18.
Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Paul Foot argues that spontaneous activity is not enough – we need collective organisation
‘We are many – they are few.’ With that historic reminder, the poet Shelley ended his furious poem about the massacre of trade unionists at Peterloo. The line has been quoted (well, misquoted really, since Shelley, in self imposed exile in Italy, wrote, ‘Ye are many – they are few’) a million times since. It reminds the world’s exploited masses of their numerical superiority over their exploiters. The line was written nearly 200 years ago, and its simple truth grows more obvious every day. There is still a vast – and growing – gap between the few, the secure and comfortable minority ruling the world, and the many, the hungry and insecure masses. There are still much more of the many than the few. Why hasn’t that numerical superiority led automatically to the overthrow of the minority?
One answer is that the rich minority have used much of their wealth to arm themselves with mighty weaponry to protect their ill-gotten gains. But their continuing power does not depend only on force of arms. The chief reason for their ability to continue in power is their control over ideas. They control not only where and for what rewards people work, but how people think. People are not born with a set of ideas and thoughts. They grow into them. They are taught in schools and colleges, and through the mass media, such as newspapers and television. All of these are controlled in different ways, and reflect the will and purpose of the capitalist few.
These reactionary ideas continually clash with people’s experience. The clash of most human beings’ experience with the ideas handed down to them led to the formation of an independent labour movement, with independent labour parties, organised to challenge capitalism. This in turn led to a further ideological offensive by the ruling class on the exploitation of ideas, with the unhappy result in the western democracies that the official labour movements were shackled to the exploiters they set out to tame. The chief reason for the demise of these labour organisations is their own passivity. The instinct of labour leaders, especially at, times of crisis, is to compromise, to back off from any challenge. Terrified that they will lose their own positions as important people in society, they prefer to compromise and vacillate. They prefer the existing state of things to the unknown. They prefer passivity to activity.
One result of this approach is an ideological surrender. There was a time, for instance, when the leaders of the British Labour Party were committed to their own independent educational organisations – the Plebs League, the Workers’ Educational Association, and so on. A hundred years of Labour passivity have reduced these organisations to ruins. Now the Labour leaders spend their time organising focus groups and opinion polls. The focus group organisers and the pollsters are expressly forbidden to challenge any one of the views they record. The point is to find out what people think so that policies can be devised to win their votes. This process pretends to be democratic – ’it’s only finding out what people think’. In fact it is the exact opposite of any genuine democracy. That depends entirely on the process of argument, of challenge and counter-challenge. Without such argument and challenge the most disgusting prejudices fester in what Marx called ‘the muck of ages’, and, as they fester, multiply. So the vital business of confronting capitalist and racist arguments has to be conducted outside the educational institutions and media of capitalist society. How best to ensure that?
In his last great poem, Samson Agonistes, John Milton, who played an active part in the English Revolution of the 1640s, asked:
‘But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude
Than to love bondage more than liberty –
Bondage in ease, than strenuous liberty?’
In the triumph of Royalist counter-revolution Milton saw the dangers of political passivity, of ideological sloth. The reactionaries took advantage of that passivity and sloth to restore their tyranny. The alternative to bondage in passivity was strenuous liberty. In plain terms, this meant that if you want to change the world for the better you have to do something about it. And, as the Levellers proved in the English Revolution, you are much more likely to do something effective if you act in concert with others.
A history of strikes
In the centuries after Milton died exploitation increased, but so did the forces that can defeat exploitation. Capitalism brought the horrors of factory work, but also produced a new class, the working class, whose predominant characteristic was its power to stop exploitation by stopping working. Strikes and work-ins, however, did not come about by some magical process. They required the active and conscious participation of rebellious workers. There are times in British working class history where that spontaneous activity flowered so tempestuously that many workers became convinced that their activity on its own was enough to change the social order. In Britain these times were the Great Unrest of 1911-14, the massive wave of industrial struggle after the First World War, the General Strike of 1926, and the seemingly unstoppable wave of strikes from 1969 to 1974. In all these times there were socialists who believed that the strikes themselves would stamp out capitalism and usher in a new democratic social order controlled from below. Yet all these tidal waves of workers’ protest were quite easily surfed by the capitalist rulers, who, as soon as the strikes were over, embarked on a sustained and highly organised counter-offensive. At the start of 2002 that counter-offensive is still winning.
The way the capitalists organised and coordinated their counter-offensive teaches us another lesson. Just as activity is the necessary antidote to passivity, so that activity needs to be organised on our side every bit as effectively as it is on theirs. Capitalists know that they need constantly to coordinate their efforts to achieve their ends. The way in which, for instance, Margaret Thatcher and Nicholas Ridley organised the industrial counter-attack in the 1980s, the way they picked off the weaker, less democratic unions before launching themselves, their police and their newspapers against the miners, printers and dockers, proved that for all their verbal hostility to class struggle they fight it with the most ruthless and coordinated determination.
Coordination and activity
So the second lesson we can learn from the other side is the need for coordination, for linking the different and disparate struggles of the dispossessed. This is not just a matter of strikes and solidarity with strikes. It involves coordination on every issue that constricts working people – housing, social services, discrimination of every kind, Third World debt, constant wars waged by the rich and strong against the poor and weak, and countless other issues that are all part of the grotesque fabric of capitalist society. It involves, too, linking current struggles with those that have been waged in the past. Our rulers constantly revel in their history – glorifying the ‘grand old figures’ of the past, pompous bores like Gladstone and imperialist fanatics like Churchill. We have a history too, a much more heroic history than theirs, and one that needs to be learned, studied and blended into the struggles of today.
How to combine activity and coordination? The question leads to the third crucial ingredient of a successful fight for a different world order – party organisation. It is a platitude, so obvious that it is embarrassing to write it down, that you can’t be an effective socialist on your own. The most brilliant socialist theoretician, the most scintillating writer, the most eloquent orator, cannot achieve any real change in capitalist society unless they cooperate with others. Just as the idea of socialism envisages a society where individuals pool and share their resources, so pooling and sharing resources and abilities is crucial to the achievement of socialism. We are up against a class of enormous wealth that understands only too well how to pool its resources in the fight against anyone who threatens it. The idea that we can defeat that class by shrieking on our own, however stout our hearts of oak and steely our determination, is either absurd fantasy or hideous arrogance.
If socialists are to achieve anything, they have to come together in a party. Over the last century hundreds of thousands of socialists responded to that obvious conclusion by joining the Labour Party. A hundred years of passivity and vacillation have reached their miserable climax with the four B’s – Blair, Brown, Blunkett and Byers. An effective socialist party today has to break with that tradition. The party we need cannot any longer pin its faith in reform through parliament. It has to be a revolutionary party. What does that mean? Well, we can learn a lot from the Russian Revolution, from Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party, but that was a long time ago, and most people equate Russian socialism with the horrors of Stalinism. The truth is that none of us knows exactly how a revolution is to be conducted or what it will achieve. All we know is that any socialist society thrown up by a convulsion from below is bound to be incomparably superior to the wars, poverty and exploitation handed down to us by capitalism, and that therefore as we organise against capitalism on every front we show it no quarter.
People recoil from the notion of such a party for many different reasons. Some protest about the idea of a vanguard, a party offering leadership to the working class, a notion they denounce as ‘elitist’. But anyone who suggests a course of action, indeed anyone who offers an analysis of what is going on and what should go on, is by that definition elitist. Moreover, the more isolated those suggestions and analyses, the less they are debated and backed by a collective, the more elitist they become. Others protest at party discipline – ’I’m not going to be pushed around by any central committee,’ they proudly proclaim. This has always seemed to be the most ridiculous claim, since discipline wielded by an elected committee is what gives a socialist party its greatest strength – its ability to act together, to produce newspapers and propaganda, to organise demonstrations, combine and coordinate lots of socialists where, without the party, only a few might take part. It is precisely that discipline and that ability to act together that provides the party with its greatest asset, the self confidence of its members, a self confidence that flows from the knowledge that when we think, debate and act we do so with others inspired by the same ideas and the same objective.
In recent years, when anti-capitalist campaigning has suddenly and thrillingly become fashionable all over the world, I detect a new objection to the building of a socialist party: ‘Why do I have to join a party? Why can’t I just take part in campaigns, such as Globalise Resistance or the campaign against the war in Afghanistan?’ To these I ask other questions. Where did those campaigns come from? How can they be sustained? For all their mass support, these campaigns and others like them did not emerge out of thin air. They required organisation – yes, leadership. And almost all the recent campaigns have at some stage or other sought out and recruited organisations and organised parties. Of the socialist parties in Britain today by far the largest, by far the most disciplined, by far the party most likely to organise wider campaigns in a non-sectarian manner, is the Socialist Workers Party, whose main (though not its only) fault is that it is not big enough.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>No challenge, no change</h1>
<h3>(July 1989)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong> 121, July/August 1989, pp. 10–11.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the <a href="https://secure.marxists.org/copyright-permissions/paul-foot.txt" class="absref" target="new">Estate</a>. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
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<p class="c"><strong>The two year wait for Labour’s Policy Review is over. Labour now claims it is ready to “make the change”, ready to “meet the challenge” of the 1990s. <em>Paul Foot</em> here argues that any change has been towards the right and unity around Kinnock – change that offers neither a trace of socialism nor a hope for socialists.</strong></p>
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<p class="fst">A LONG time ago people joined the Labour Party to make the world a better place. The early Labour Party policy statements and manifestos held out the prospect of changing the world by replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system. The ideas were put down in writing so that they could persuade other people of the socialist case.</p>
<p>Some modern idealists imagine that that is the task of Labour policy statements today. They should take time off (it will have to be a lot of time I’m afraid because the document is written in the most turgid style I have ever had the misfortune to come across) to read <strong>Meet the Challenge, Make the Change</strong> the climax of Labour’s long policy review. The document is fantastically described in a sub-head, <em>A new agenda for Britain</em>.</p>
<p>It is not about a new Britain at all, nor does it include a single political argument which its authors want to win. Its purpose is to fit in with what people already think, or want, or imagine they think they want. It is a product of the polls hysteria which has overpowered all modern Labour leaders. For them political propaganda, policy statements, manifestos are exclusively designed to win elections by telling people what they want to hear. The section on nuclear weapons, which is understandably kept to last, is a sublime example of that. It starts with a scathing attack on Britain’s nuclear deterrent.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is inaccurate to describe Britain’s nuclear capability as a deterrent. If the Soviet Union were not deterred by the immense nuclear arsenal of the United States, it certainly will not be deterred by Britain’s nuclear capability, constituting 4 percent of the total.”</p>
<p class="fst">This common-sense demolition of the nuclear deterrent theory for Britain must surely lead the document to propose the cancellation of British nuclear weapons projects. It leads to exactly the opposite. Britain, it concludes, will <em>keep</em> its Polarises and its Tridents under a Labour Government, not because they deter anyone, still less because they might ever be used (the document promises “no first strike” and if you don’t strike first with these things you don’t strike at all), but because <em>they are there</em>.</p>
<p>“Labour will immediately seek to place all of Britain’s nuclear capability”, promises the document, “into international disarmament negotiations”. The weapons will be useful only in so far as they can play a part in getting rid of themselves and other weapons in international negotiations.</p>
<p>But wait a minute. If the weapons don’t deter the Russians, or anyone else, who is going to take the blindest bit of notice of them in international negotiations?</p>
<p>No one but a fool would be persuaded by that argument. But the section has nothing to do with argument or persuasion. The whole point is that unilateral nuclear disarmament is deemed by the polls to be unpopular at election times.</p>
<p>An argument therefore has to be found for keeping nuclear weapons. It does not matter a scrap whether or not the authors or even the Labour leaders are convinced by the argument.</p>
<p>The same sort of approach infects the section of the policy review about economic policy. Twenty five years ago (1964) Labour’s manifesto said this:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“None of these aims (full employment, industrial expansion, a sensible distribution of industry, an end to traffic chaos, lower prices or a solution of the balance of payments problem) will be achieved by leaving the economy to look after itself. They will only be achieved by socialist planning.”</p>
<p class="fst">There then followed a long passage on a proposed National Plan which, it was hoped, would take the economy by the throat and push and pull it in a socialist direction. Now listen to this new policy review:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Japanese realise, as we do, that in very many areas of the economy the market and competition are essential in meeting the demands of consumers, promoting efficiency and stimulating innovation, and often the best means of securing all the myriad, incremental changes which are needed to take the economy forward; but they also realised that the market had to be directed and managed within an industrial strategy developed in consultation with government.”</p>
<p class="fst">The National Plan has turned into “consultation” with government, or what the document in one of its more alluring subheadings proclaims is “a new partnership with business’’. Most of the <em>argument</em> in this section attacks the <em>failure</em> of market forces – the unemployment, the lack of training, the abuse of the environment etc. etc. But the <em>conclusion</em> is almost exactly the opposite: that the market works well enough, and needs only to be seduced or chivvied a little by government.</p>
<p>Although the <em>argument</em> is against private enterprise and the free market, the <em>policy</em> is very much in favour of both because that is what the polls say the people want and they must have what they want through a new Labour government.</p>
<p>Another example is the “strategy for the private sector” in health. “We are”, the document proudly announces, “opposed to the private practice. It is inefficient and wasteful of resources, provides a very limited range of services, and is heavily concentrated in a few areas in the country.”</p>
<p>Quite. On and on run the <em>arguments</em> leading inexorably to a “strategy” which would abolish private practice. But no. “We intend to make the NHS so good that the need for private practice will disappear.”</p>
<p>And in the meantime? The private sector stays.</p>
<p>Why? Not because anyone who writes the document or speaks up for the Labour Party wants it to – but because, it is argued, the majority think people have a “right” to privileged health treatment, and therefore it is better not to propose what pretty well everyone in the Labour Party knows is the right and proper policy.</p>
<p>When it comes to specific policies about big questions, the manifesto is strangely silent. It excels, as did all its predecessors, in flowery pledges which no one knows how to fulfil and no one has the slightest intention of fulfilling. Among these I cite two famous old favourites: “We shall get interest rates down” (p. 13). “We made explicit our commitment to rid Britain of the scourge of unemployment” (p. 9).</p>
<p>Mark these two beauties down, and wait. The Labour manifesto of 1964 promised to bring down interest rates, and the Labour government raised them from 5 to 7 percent in its fifth week of office. The Labour manifesto of 1974 promised to rid Britain of the scourge of unemployment, but doubled unemployment within two years of getting into office.</p>
<p>This fundamental objection applies to the whole document. Of course there are several small and specific reforms in it which will improve life a little for some people.</p>
<p>However, the ghost which has dogged all other Labour programmes dogs this one too. <em>How</em>are such things to be carried out if me ruling class turns hostile (as it always does)? Is there really a snowball in hell’s chance of even the most modest of these proposals being passed through parliament by a government which is, in effect, being governed by hostile forces more powerful than itself?</p>
<p>On this question the document is entirely silent. Years have been spent putting together all these hundreds of detailed proposals, yet not a moment’s thought has been spared for the question, how are they going to be carried out?</p>
<p>In one astonishing passage the document promises: “We will present our manifesto to the British people and, when elected, will carry out the mandate we have been given.”</p>
<p>That is extraordinary. It will, if it happens, be the first time in the whole history of the world that any such thing has been achieved by a social democratic or working class party in parliamentary office.</p>
<p>It won’t happen. The challenge will not be met. The change will not be made. And this document, like so many others in the past, with all its rotten language and treachery to its own argument, will take its place in the pantheon of forgotten aspirations and lost illusions.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
No challenge, no change
(July 1989)
From Socialist Worker Review 121, July/August 1989, pp. 10–11.
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The two year wait for Labour’s Policy Review is over. Labour now claims it is ready to “make the change”, ready to “meet the challenge” of the 1990s. Paul Foot here argues that any change has been towards the right and unity around Kinnock – change that offers neither a trace of socialism nor a hope for socialists.
A LONG time ago people joined the Labour Party to make the world a better place. The early Labour Party policy statements and manifestos held out the prospect of changing the world by replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system. The ideas were put down in writing so that they could persuade other people of the socialist case.
Some modern idealists imagine that that is the task of Labour policy statements today. They should take time off (it will have to be a lot of time I’m afraid because the document is written in the most turgid style I have ever had the misfortune to come across) to read Meet the Challenge, Make the Change the climax of Labour’s long policy review. The document is fantastically described in a sub-head, A new agenda for Britain.
It is not about a new Britain at all, nor does it include a single political argument which its authors want to win. Its purpose is to fit in with what people already think, or want, or imagine they think they want. It is a product of the polls hysteria which has overpowered all modern Labour leaders. For them political propaganda, policy statements, manifestos are exclusively designed to win elections by telling people what they want to hear. The section on nuclear weapons, which is understandably kept to last, is a sublime example of that. It starts with a scathing attack on Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
“It is inaccurate to describe Britain’s nuclear capability as a deterrent. If the Soviet Union were not deterred by the immense nuclear arsenal of the United States, it certainly will not be deterred by Britain’s nuclear capability, constituting 4 percent of the total.”
This common-sense demolition of the nuclear deterrent theory for Britain must surely lead the document to propose the cancellation of British nuclear weapons projects. It leads to exactly the opposite. Britain, it concludes, will keep its Polarises and its Tridents under a Labour Government, not because they deter anyone, still less because they might ever be used (the document promises “no first strike” and if you don’t strike first with these things you don’t strike at all), but because they are there.
“Labour will immediately seek to place all of Britain’s nuclear capability”, promises the document, “into international disarmament negotiations”. The weapons will be useful only in so far as they can play a part in getting rid of themselves and other weapons in international negotiations.
But wait a minute. If the weapons don’t deter the Russians, or anyone else, who is going to take the blindest bit of notice of them in international negotiations?
No one but a fool would be persuaded by that argument. But the section has nothing to do with argument or persuasion. The whole point is that unilateral nuclear disarmament is deemed by the polls to be unpopular at election times.
An argument therefore has to be found for keeping nuclear weapons. It does not matter a scrap whether or not the authors or even the Labour leaders are convinced by the argument.
The same sort of approach infects the section of the policy review about economic policy. Twenty five years ago (1964) Labour’s manifesto said this:
“None of these aims (full employment, industrial expansion, a sensible distribution of industry, an end to traffic chaos, lower prices or a solution of the balance of payments problem) will be achieved by leaving the economy to look after itself. They will only be achieved by socialist planning.”
There then followed a long passage on a proposed National Plan which, it was hoped, would take the economy by the throat and push and pull it in a socialist direction. Now listen to this new policy review:
“The Japanese realise, as we do, that in very many areas of the economy the market and competition are essential in meeting the demands of consumers, promoting efficiency and stimulating innovation, and often the best means of securing all the myriad, incremental changes which are needed to take the economy forward; but they also realised that the market had to be directed and managed within an industrial strategy developed in consultation with government.”
The National Plan has turned into “consultation” with government, or what the document in one of its more alluring subheadings proclaims is “a new partnership with business’’. Most of the argument in this section attacks the failure of market forces – the unemployment, the lack of training, the abuse of the environment etc. etc. But the conclusion is almost exactly the opposite: that the market works well enough, and needs only to be seduced or chivvied a little by government.
Although the argument is against private enterprise and the free market, the policy is very much in favour of both because that is what the polls say the people want and they must have what they want through a new Labour government.
Another example is the “strategy for the private sector” in health. “We are”, the document proudly announces, “opposed to the private practice. It is inefficient and wasteful of resources, provides a very limited range of services, and is heavily concentrated in a few areas in the country.”
Quite. On and on run the arguments leading inexorably to a “strategy” which would abolish private practice. But no. “We intend to make the NHS so good that the need for private practice will disappear.”
And in the meantime? The private sector stays.
Why? Not because anyone who writes the document or speaks up for the Labour Party wants it to – but because, it is argued, the majority think people have a “right” to privileged health treatment, and therefore it is better not to propose what pretty well everyone in the Labour Party knows is the right and proper policy.
When it comes to specific policies about big questions, the manifesto is strangely silent. It excels, as did all its predecessors, in flowery pledges which no one knows how to fulfil and no one has the slightest intention of fulfilling. Among these I cite two famous old favourites: “We shall get interest rates down” (p. 13). “We made explicit our commitment to rid Britain of the scourge of unemployment” (p. 9).
Mark these two beauties down, and wait. The Labour manifesto of 1964 promised to bring down interest rates, and the Labour government raised them from 5 to 7 percent in its fifth week of office. The Labour manifesto of 1974 promised to rid Britain of the scourge of unemployment, but doubled unemployment within two years of getting into office.
This fundamental objection applies to the whole document. Of course there are several small and specific reforms in it which will improve life a little for some people.
However, the ghost which has dogged all other Labour programmes dogs this one too. Howare such things to be carried out if me ruling class turns hostile (as it always does)? Is there really a snowball in hell’s chance of even the most modest of these proposals being passed through parliament by a government which is, in effect, being governed by hostile forces more powerful than itself?
On this question the document is entirely silent. Years have been spent putting together all these hundreds of detailed proposals, yet not a moment’s thought has been spared for the question, how are they going to be carried out?
In one astonishing passage the document promises: “We will present our manifesto to the British people and, when elected, will carry out the mandate we have been given.”
That is extraordinary. It will, if it happens, be the first time in the whole history of the world that any such thing has been achieved by a social democratic or working class party in parliamentary office.
It won’t happen. The challenge will not be met. The change will not be made. And this document, like so many others in the past, with all its rotten language and treachery to its own argument, will take its place in the pantheon of forgotten aspirations and lost illusions.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Ever since Malthus</h1>
<h3>(10 September 1994)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 10 September 1994.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000, pp. 277–278.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Once there lived a man called Malthus who was worried that so many people in the world didn’t have enough to eat. He came up with a very simple answer. There were too many people in the world.</p>
<p>The whole calculation could be reduced to the level of a New Testament parable. There were two loaves of bread and there were 5,000 people. If you were Jesus Christ you could divide up the loaves between the 5,000.</p>
<p>But if you weren’t Jesus Christ all you could do was ensure that somehow 4,994 people weren’t there any more – leaving six people for two loaves, which is about right.</p>
<p>Ever since Malthus had this brilliant idea he has been followed by all sorts of earnest people who want to solve the problems of world poverty.</p>
<p>The same argument keeps cropping up in different guises. For instance, you often hear, ‘There are too many people in this country for the jobs available.’<br>
</p>
<h4>Formula works</h4>
<p class="fst">Get rid of some of the people, or stop allowing so many in, and then we can share out the jobs. If the formula works for jobs, what’s more, it can work for hospital beds and houses and every social facility.</p>
<p>These are the ‘rational arguments’ with which racists spread their prejudices. And isn’t it funny how often ‘too many people’ means too many black people?</p>
<p>This week – 200 years of so after Malthus – there’s a big conference in Cairo. Various governments are gathering with United Nations experts to discuss ways of keeping the population down.</p>
<p>Some of the governments have had a good shot at population control already. For instance, the government of Indonesia, which is heavily represented at Cairo, tried out a fascinating new method population control in East Timor. It wiped out a third of the population by shooting and burning them to death.</p>
<p>But why, if starvation and poverty are the result of too many people are people starving even more horrifically in East Timor than they were before President Suharto engaged in his own special brand of the Final Solution?</p>
<p>In the industrial countries of the West the most prosperous years in all history were the years when large numbers of people flooded in from other countries.<br>
</p>
<h4>Malthusian monstrosity</h4>
<p class="fst">Mass immigration coincided with a better standard of living not just for the people previously living in the country but for the immigrants as well. Mass immigration coincided with full employment. There were more people and more jobs. The whole Malthusian monstrosity was turned on its head.</p>
<p>People are not just consumers, empty vessels waiting to be filled from finite quantities of food and drink. They produce food. The more they come together and pool their resources, the more they can produce.</p>
<p>Five thousand can make many more loaves per head than six.</p>
<p>The problem is not too many people. If people could decide what they produce, there would be more than enough food and accommodation for three times the world’s population.</p>
<p>The problem is that only a minority decide – a minority who want to organise production for their own benefit and for no one else’s.</p>
<p>That’s why they promote people like Malthus – to prove that hunger and poverty are not the fault of the rich for deciding not to produce what people need, but the fault of the poor and hungry for being too many.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Ever since Malthus
(10 September 1994)
From Socialist Worker, 10 September 1994.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 277–278.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Once there lived a man called Malthus who was worried that so many people in the world didn’t have enough to eat. He came up with a very simple answer. There were too many people in the world.
The whole calculation could be reduced to the level of a New Testament parable. There were two loaves of bread and there were 5,000 people. If you were Jesus Christ you could divide up the loaves between the 5,000.
But if you weren’t Jesus Christ all you could do was ensure that somehow 4,994 people weren’t there any more – leaving six people for two loaves, which is about right.
Ever since Malthus had this brilliant idea he has been followed by all sorts of earnest people who want to solve the problems of world poverty.
The same argument keeps cropping up in different guises. For instance, you often hear, ‘There are too many people in this country for the jobs available.’
Formula works
Get rid of some of the people, or stop allowing so many in, and then we can share out the jobs. If the formula works for jobs, what’s more, it can work for hospital beds and houses and every social facility.
These are the ‘rational arguments’ with which racists spread their prejudices. And isn’t it funny how often ‘too many people’ means too many black people?
This week – 200 years of so after Malthus – there’s a big conference in Cairo. Various governments are gathering with United Nations experts to discuss ways of keeping the population down.
Some of the governments have had a good shot at population control already. For instance, the government of Indonesia, which is heavily represented at Cairo, tried out a fascinating new method population control in East Timor. It wiped out a third of the population by shooting and burning them to death.
But why, if starvation and poverty are the result of too many people are people starving even more horrifically in East Timor than they were before President Suharto engaged in his own special brand of the Final Solution?
In the industrial countries of the West the most prosperous years in all history were the years when large numbers of people flooded in from other countries.
Malthusian monstrosity
Mass immigration coincided with a better standard of living not just for the people previously living in the country but for the immigrants as well. Mass immigration coincided with full employment. There were more people and more jobs. The whole Malthusian monstrosity was turned on its head.
People are not just consumers, empty vessels waiting to be filled from finite quantities of food and drink. They produce food. The more they come together and pool their resources, the more they can produce.
Five thousand can make many more loaves per head than six.
The problem is not too many people. If people could decide what they produce, there would be more than enough food and accommodation for three times the world’s population.
The problem is that only a minority decide – a minority who want to organise production for their own benefit and for no one else’s.
That’s why they promote people like Malthus – to prove that hunger and poverty are not the fault of the rich for deciding not to produce what people need, but the fault of the poor and hungry for being too many.
Top of the page
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Morse code</h1>
<h3>(23 January 1993)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1326, 23 January 1993, p.11.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>IT IS the last episode of <em>Morse</em> this week, and that is a cause of profound mourning all across the country.</strong></p>
<p>The estimate is that more than 20 million households will have the telly on for <em>Morse</em>.</p>
<p>I started watching Morse too late – I used to scoff at friends who hurried home to catch it. “Just another police soap,” I thought. “What’s all the fuss about?”</p>
<p>In fact of course the appeal of the series has been that it is not a police soap at all. Morse is not real. He is most people’s role model of what a policeman/detective ought to be like.</p>
<p>He ought to be ruminative, gentle, rather highbrow in his tastes and radical in his politics. He ought to think his way to his solution. Above all, if he does his job properly, there’s no need for him to show his power.</p>
<p>If detectives were really like that, they’d be popular.</p>
<p>They are not like that. Talking about Morse, John Stalker said there are “plenty of eccentrics” in the CID but he had to agree that very few of those “eccentrics” (“oddballs” or just plain “nutters” might be a better description) are like Morse.</p>
<p><strong>I rather doubt if you could find a chief inspector anywhere in the country who remotely corresponds to him.</strong></p>
<p>The macho culture in the police force is now almost entirely dominant. This is not just reflected in the racism and sexism which are so often written about and so permanently obvious, especially in London.</p>
<p>Its effect on detection is to make a mockery of the very word. Crimes are “solved” not by any process which can be called detection but by “information” bribed from the underworld, the pampering of supergrasses, confessions extracted by threats, blackmail or (in extreme cases) good old fashioned torture.<br>
</p>
<h4>Sophisticated inspector</h4>
<p class="fst">No doubt it is the yearning for the good old days (which probably never existed anyway) of the sophisticated inspector and his happily married, jocular, hard working but always respectful sergeant which accounts for some of Morse’s popularity.</p>
<p><strong>But that Is not all, not by any means. The success of the characters is that they have been blended into a series of extraordinary stories, some much better than others but all rooted in the real world and sensitive and responsive to it.</strong></p>
<p>Last week’s episode, the best I’ve seen, was a quite outstanding, gripping and unpredictable story about rape and women’s reaction to it.</p>
<p>It was enriched by a brilliant performance from Harriet Walker who fooled, I suspect, all her audience with her caricature of the slightly scatty and helpless psychiatrist. Her steel ran deep, and it was reinforced by an astonishing (and gloriously impossible) outburst of uncompromising feminism from a policewoman.</p>
<p>This was high drama, superbly acted and brilliantly filmed. It was not easy to follow – I doubt whether more than a handful of people guessed the shocking ending.</p>
<p>Its remarkable popularity is a great slap in the face to the highbrows on the Independent Television Commission who believe that the telly watching public are a load of morons who have been led by the nose for far too long by lefties.</p>
<p>It was this “thinking” which led to the London independent television franchise being taken from Thames and handed to Carlton, a company which, to judge from its early offerings, can’t tell whether it has more contempt for itself or for its public.</p>
<p><em>Morse</em> shows that if you give people good drama, well written and full of sophisticated humour and suspense, they will like it, and like it much more than all the safe sentimental pap served up to them to keep them quiet.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Morse code
(23 January 1993)
From Socialist Worker, No.1326, 23 January 1993, p.11.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IT IS the last episode of Morse this week, and that is a cause of profound mourning all across the country.
The estimate is that more than 20 million households will have the telly on for Morse.
I started watching Morse too late – I used to scoff at friends who hurried home to catch it. “Just another police soap,” I thought. “What’s all the fuss about?”
In fact of course the appeal of the series has been that it is not a police soap at all. Morse is not real. He is most people’s role model of what a policeman/detective ought to be like.
He ought to be ruminative, gentle, rather highbrow in his tastes and radical in his politics. He ought to think his way to his solution. Above all, if he does his job properly, there’s no need for him to show his power.
If detectives were really like that, they’d be popular.
They are not like that. Talking about Morse, John Stalker said there are “plenty of eccentrics” in the CID but he had to agree that very few of those “eccentrics” (“oddballs” or just plain “nutters” might be a better description) are like Morse.
I rather doubt if you could find a chief inspector anywhere in the country who remotely corresponds to him.
The macho culture in the police force is now almost entirely dominant. This is not just reflected in the racism and sexism which are so often written about and so permanently obvious, especially in London.
Its effect on detection is to make a mockery of the very word. Crimes are “solved” not by any process which can be called detection but by “information” bribed from the underworld, the pampering of supergrasses, confessions extracted by threats, blackmail or (in extreme cases) good old fashioned torture.
Sophisticated inspector
No doubt it is the yearning for the good old days (which probably never existed anyway) of the sophisticated inspector and his happily married, jocular, hard working but always respectful sergeant which accounts for some of Morse’s popularity.
But that Is not all, not by any means. The success of the characters is that they have been blended into a series of extraordinary stories, some much better than others but all rooted in the real world and sensitive and responsive to it.
Last week’s episode, the best I’ve seen, was a quite outstanding, gripping and unpredictable story about rape and women’s reaction to it.
It was enriched by a brilliant performance from Harriet Walker who fooled, I suspect, all her audience with her caricature of the slightly scatty and helpless psychiatrist. Her steel ran deep, and it was reinforced by an astonishing (and gloriously impossible) outburst of uncompromising feminism from a policewoman.
This was high drama, superbly acted and brilliantly filmed. It was not easy to follow – I doubt whether more than a handful of people guessed the shocking ending.
Its remarkable popularity is a great slap in the face to the highbrows on the Independent Television Commission who believe that the telly watching public are a load of morons who have been led by the nose for far too long by lefties.
It was this “thinking” which led to the London independent television franchise being taken from Thames and handed to Carlton, a company which, to judge from its early offerings, can’t tell whether it has more contempt for itself or for its public.
Morse shows that if you give people good drama, well written and full of sophisticated humour and suspense, they will like it, and like it much more than all the safe sentimental pap served up to them to keep them quiet.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Democracy and socialism</small><br>
Century of the great hope</h1>
<h3>(January 2000)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.237, January 2000, pp.14-16.<br>
Copyright © 2000 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>Prospects for peaceful social change seemed inevitable 100 years ago. But, the fight for the vote did not challenge economic power, argues <strong>Paul Foot</strong>, and so we still have to achieve real democracy</em></p>
<p class="fst">Margarethe von Trotta’s fabulous film about Rosa Luxemburg opens on New Year’s Eve 1899 with a huge centenary party ball organised by the German Social Democratic Party. The scene throbs with gaiety, ribaldry, and above all hope. All the great leaders of the rising new movement were there to celebrate the dawn of a new era, the start of another hundred years, which everyone assumed would be incomparably better than the century of wars and dictators which was drawing to a close.</p>
<p>What was the chief cause of this great hope? It was not just that the German Social Democratic Party was increasing its influence throughout the country, but that everyone expected that before too long the mass of the German people would win the vote, and that vote would lead inevitably to a prolonged period of democratic government. The essence of that new democracy was conveyed by the word ‘social’ in the party’s name. Of democratic bourgeois parties, ever since 1848, the workers had had their fill. Now at last their place was to be taken by a socialist party whose democratic qualifications were millions of workers’ votes. Now at last the travesty of democracy would give way to a government committed to measures which would be passed through parliament and at last put a stop to the rulers’ interminable exploitation of the working class.</p>
<p>Two characters dominated that tumultuous celebration: Karl Kautsky, the doyen of German Social Democracy, unbending in his insistence on Marxist politics in the party, and Rosa herself, fresh from a furious argument with Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein had argued against the idea that social change could only come about through social revolution. This was understandable in an age of tyranny, Bernstein argued, but plain silly when the workers, without risking either the violence or the unknown future course of revolution, could change society by electing deputies to parliament and therefore, through the majority they were certain to win in those parliaments, change the country’s laws, customs and inequalities. Rosa replied that capitalism would never consent to being reformed into another system, and would certainly resist every measure that threatened to take the country and its industry towards socialism. Those who worked from the top of society to change it from the top wanted, she argued, merely to reform the capitalist system, while she and her comrades wanted to abolish the system altogether and replace it by socialism. It was quite wrong, she concluded, to pretend that this was an argument about ends and means. Those who wanted to reform capitalism rather than replace it were seeking ‘a different goal’.</p>
<p>The argument was still raging when the SPD luminaries gathered for their New Year Ball in 1899. Many guests, including Karl Kautsky, responded to the Marxist language favoured by Rosa Luxemburg, though the more practical politicians among them, again including Karl Kautsky, were secretly impressed and even excited by Bernstein’s parliamentary perspective. In the film the argument hovers lightly, almost frivolously, over the celebrations without spoiling them. Whatever happened, all the guests assumed and rejoiced that under the auspices of the mighty new party life would get better.</p>
<p>Two decades later the SPD was elected to national office after the defeat of the German Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of that revolution, was fished out of a river after being murdered by troops under the orders of the new SPD government. Karl Kautsky and most of the other SPD leaders had voted for the unspeakably murderous First World War, and the intellectual heirs of Bernstein were all in high office. In 1933 the right to vote, the very basis of their power and the essence of the celebrations at the centennial ball, was abruptly usurped. No sooner was Adolf Hitler elected chancellor than he banned all future elections, wiped out trade unions and opposition parties, and installed himself as fascist dictator. The century of the great hope became the century of the Holocaust.</p>
<p>The British experience was similar, if slower and less dramatic. British Labour leaders were far more reluctant than their German counterparts to form an independent party. They did so gingerly, and still glancing nostalgically back to the days when they were welcome in the Liberal Party. The clinching argument was the need for an independent party which would represent the working masses and fight for those masses against the rich and powerful. The new Labour Party ushered in a new era of democracy. Until then the choice for British electors was between Tories and Liberals, two parties which drew their leaders and policies from the propertied minority. The notion that by voting Labour the British people could elect a government which would then pass laws in the interests of labour and the working class was a million times more democratic than anything which had gone before. For the first time democracy meant something more tangible for the workers: a chance to choose a friendly government which could reverse the oppressive balance of class forces and immeasurably improve the lives of working people. In a speech in 1923 the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, explained that these changes would come through elected Labour governments which would, by persistently passing reforming laws, bring about a ‘gradual supercession’ of capitalism.</p>
<p>Almost at once MacDonald got his chance. The general election of 1929 returned Labour as the largest party. Less than two years later, in conditions of mass unemployment and economic crisis, neither of which had been expected, let alone predicted, MacDonald and his close colleagues proposed a plan to cut the dole for millions of unemployed workers. The plan was intolerable to the rank and file of the Labour Party and to the TUC. Rather than accept the majority view of the party they had built and led, MacDonald, chancellor Philip Snowden, and Jimmy Thomas, whose special ministerial responsibility was unemployment and under whose term of office unemployment had tripled, crossed the floor of the House of Commons and joined the Tories in what they called a national government. At the subsequent general election Labour lost 3 million votes and all but 50 of its MPs.</p>
<p>Shocked and angry, Labour Party members rallied to calls from the left never again to allow such a betrayal. The newly formed Socialist League argued that the only effective antidote to such a betrayal was a thoroughgoing socialist policy and a ruthless determination by the next socialist government to pass that policy into law. The League’s policies were designed to breathe some life into the democracy so humiliated by the MacDonald betrayal. But by the time Labour was re-elected in 1945, on the crest of precisely the wave of popular socialist conviction which the League had anticipated, the Labour leaders had lost any enthusiasm they may have had for replacing the power of capital. Despite its nationalisations and the National Health Service, the postwar Labour government stuck firmly to the old rules of parliamentary government, and before three years were out had become, for all to see, the servant of capital, not the master of it.</p>
<p>The same wretched process, greatly exaggerated, dogged the two other periods of majority Labour government after the war – under Harold Wilson from 1964 to 1970, and Wilson and James Callaghan from 1974 to 1979. Both succumbed to the ‘continuity of policy’ which Stafford Cripps of the Socialist League had castigated as the harbinger of compromise and betrayal. Both accepted the dictation of reactionary foreign policy priorities from the United States and blatantly anti-union decisions from the judiciary. Above all, both governments trailed helplessly behind the economic priorities of capitalism: if the market called for high unemployment, the government conceded it; if the market called for low investment, the government conceded it; if the market called for cuts in public services, the government conceded them. Yet no one elected the market, and each time the elected government conceded to the market another slice of democracy was lost.</p>
<p>Nor was the power of capital to dictate policy restricted to periods of Labour government. In the autumn of 1992 the newly elected Tory government was proceeding happily along its carefully chosen path with Britain as a member of the ERM, which set the European rate for the currency. Massive speculation by wealthy gamblers, none of whom were elected or had any concern about public policy except to make the swiftest buck for themselves, forced the government, against its declared will, to abandon the policy and leave the ERM. Interviewed about this six years later, Kenneth Clarke, who was home secretary at the time, said the ERM debacle proved the fantastic political power of market forces. ‘We as a government were totally out of control,’ he revealed. Nor was the Tory government alone in that humiliation. Membership of the ERM was the declared policy of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.</p>
<p>The combined effect of this relentless drain of democracy has been to convince the professional politicians that there is no real scope for any substantial change in the social order. For formerly bourgeois politicians, Liberal and Tory, this new mood represented no change. They always stood for capitalism, and are quite content to continue to do so. For Labour, which stood for at least a gradual supercession of the capitalist order and a slow, gradual march to socialism, the new pessimism required a sharp change in direction. The election in 1994 of the openly Liberal politician Tony Blair to replace the social democrat John Smith as Labour leader was the first sign of this change. Then in quick succession came the removal from the party constitution of Clause Four, which had committed it to public ownership, and a string of watered-down commitments whose combined effect was to ensure that under a Labour government the rich get richer while the workers and their unions are held firmly in the judicial grip which Margaret Thatcher had fashioned for them. As the coup de grace in this slaughter of former commitments, Blair, almost as soon as he was elected, held meetings with the Liberal Democrats to offer them seats in the cabinet. He yearned for the day when British democracy would once again hold out a glorious choice between a Tory Party committed to capitalism and an anti-Tory party committed to capitalism. Labour’s huge 1997 majority in the Commons – itself a sign of the growing wrath against years of Thatcherism – made it impossible for Blair to clinch his cherished Lib-Lab dream, but he is determined to keep trying. The conclusion at the end of the century of the great hope is that the highest aspirations of the modern Labour Party reach no further than those of the Democratic Party in the United States: that social democracy can now be dispensed with, and that any true meaning of the word ‘democracy’ will vanish with the ‘social’.</p>
<p>One reaction to this sad story is to proclaim the invulnerability of capitalism, and to limit politics and political action to the reactionary vistas of Tony Blair. This is the reaction of people who believe either a) that there is no working class with common wants and common interests or b) that the working class has no power to make its presence and its interests felt in high society. Coincidentally, this sort of pessimism was rife in Britain 100 years ago when a Tory government was in apparently unshakeable control and the voters were about to be seduced by a juicy war in South Africa. That pessimism was soon shattered in the great burst of agitation by workers, women and Irish republicans in the years leading up the First World War. It was shattered still further in the Russian Revolution and the burst of workers’ confidence which it inspired all over the world. The plain fact is that as long as society is split into classes, as long as the rich try to get richer by bashing the poor, there will inevitably be periods of mass protest as the workers and the poor organise to hit back.</p>
<p>The class struggle, in short, is not over. It will show itself again and again. As it does so, another temptation will distract workers. So sick will so many of them be of the long periods of passivity, or of the hideous betrayal of socialist principles by the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, that they will urge their followers to abandon politics to professional politicians and do their best to batter down the ramparts of capitalism armed only with strikes and demonstrations. Such a strategy leaves the rich class with their strongest weapon intact. They know, as they did in 1911 and 1921 and 1972, that workers’ militancy can fall as fast as it can rise, and that great explosions of militancy can dissolve like fireworks in the night. They know that as long as militancy can be confined to its own borders it can be contained and eventually defeated.</p>
<p>Socialist politics, based on the aspirations of rank and file workers, can bind that militancy together and arm it with answers to the inevitable questions. Why should better off workers go on strike – why not redistribute the wealth of richer workers among the starving millions? Is it really true that one man’s wage rise is another man’s price rise? Above all, what is this socialism and why should it be any better than what we have at present? The very questions themselves are unanswerable by those who support a society ruled by a bureaucratic state capitalist tyranny or by a grasping ruling class. The answers can only come from a militant working class movement in revolt against capitalism.</p>
<p>The case emerges clearly for socialist organisation whose strength and potential come from its links to workers’ militancy and their readiness to use their power to fight. The enduring political lesson of the 20th century is that socialism and social democracy through the ballot box have failed on both counts, and that there is no short cut to socialism from the rulers of class society, however enlightened or socialistic those rulers claim to be. There is no socialism, and because of that no true democracy. Those who believed that either or both could be achieved through the ballot box alone have been confounded. Roll on the next century, not only of the great democratic hope but also of the greatest possible democratic achievement: the emancipation of labour.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Democracy and socialism
Century of the great hope
(January 2000)
From Socialist Review, No.237, January 2000, pp.14-16.
Copyright © 2000 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Prospects for peaceful social change seemed inevitable 100 years ago. But, the fight for the vote did not challenge economic power, argues Paul Foot, and so we still have to achieve real democracy
Margarethe von Trotta’s fabulous film about Rosa Luxemburg opens on New Year’s Eve 1899 with a huge centenary party ball organised by the German Social Democratic Party. The scene throbs with gaiety, ribaldry, and above all hope. All the great leaders of the rising new movement were there to celebrate the dawn of a new era, the start of another hundred years, which everyone assumed would be incomparably better than the century of wars and dictators which was drawing to a close.
What was the chief cause of this great hope? It was not just that the German Social Democratic Party was increasing its influence throughout the country, but that everyone expected that before too long the mass of the German people would win the vote, and that vote would lead inevitably to a prolonged period of democratic government. The essence of that new democracy was conveyed by the word ‘social’ in the party’s name. Of democratic bourgeois parties, ever since 1848, the workers had had their fill. Now at last their place was to be taken by a socialist party whose democratic qualifications were millions of workers’ votes. Now at last the travesty of democracy would give way to a government committed to measures which would be passed through parliament and at last put a stop to the rulers’ interminable exploitation of the working class.
Two characters dominated that tumultuous celebration: Karl Kautsky, the doyen of German Social Democracy, unbending in his insistence on Marxist politics in the party, and Rosa herself, fresh from a furious argument with Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein had argued against the idea that social change could only come about through social revolution. This was understandable in an age of tyranny, Bernstein argued, but plain silly when the workers, without risking either the violence or the unknown future course of revolution, could change society by electing deputies to parliament and therefore, through the majority they were certain to win in those parliaments, change the country’s laws, customs and inequalities. Rosa replied that capitalism would never consent to being reformed into another system, and would certainly resist every measure that threatened to take the country and its industry towards socialism. Those who worked from the top of society to change it from the top wanted, she argued, merely to reform the capitalist system, while she and her comrades wanted to abolish the system altogether and replace it by socialism. It was quite wrong, she concluded, to pretend that this was an argument about ends and means. Those who wanted to reform capitalism rather than replace it were seeking ‘a different goal’.
The argument was still raging when the SPD luminaries gathered for their New Year Ball in 1899. Many guests, including Karl Kautsky, responded to the Marxist language favoured by Rosa Luxemburg, though the more practical politicians among them, again including Karl Kautsky, were secretly impressed and even excited by Bernstein’s parliamentary perspective. In the film the argument hovers lightly, almost frivolously, over the celebrations without spoiling them. Whatever happened, all the guests assumed and rejoiced that under the auspices of the mighty new party life would get better.
Two decades later the SPD was elected to national office after the defeat of the German Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of that revolution, was fished out of a river after being murdered by troops under the orders of the new SPD government. Karl Kautsky and most of the other SPD leaders had voted for the unspeakably murderous First World War, and the intellectual heirs of Bernstein were all in high office. In 1933 the right to vote, the very basis of their power and the essence of the celebrations at the centennial ball, was abruptly usurped. No sooner was Adolf Hitler elected chancellor than he banned all future elections, wiped out trade unions and opposition parties, and installed himself as fascist dictator. The century of the great hope became the century of the Holocaust.
The British experience was similar, if slower and less dramatic. British Labour leaders were far more reluctant than their German counterparts to form an independent party. They did so gingerly, and still glancing nostalgically back to the days when they were welcome in the Liberal Party. The clinching argument was the need for an independent party which would represent the working masses and fight for those masses against the rich and powerful. The new Labour Party ushered in a new era of democracy. Until then the choice for British electors was between Tories and Liberals, two parties which drew their leaders and policies from the propertied minority. The notion that by voting Labour the British people could elect a government which would then pass laws in the interests of labour and the working class was a million times more democratic than anything which had gone before. For the first time democracy meant something more tangible for the workers: a chance to choose a friendly government which could reverse the oppressive balance of class forces and immeasurably improve the lives of working people. In a speech in 1923 the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, explained that these changes would come through elected Labour governments which would, by persistently passing reforming laws, bring about a ‘gradual supercession’ of capitalism.
Almost at once MacDonald got his chance. The general election of 1929 returned Labour as the largest party. Less than two years later, in conditions of mass unemployment and economic crisis, neither of which had been expected, let alone predicted, MacDonald and his close colleagues proposed a plan to cut the dole for millions of unemployed workers. The plan was intolerable to the rank and file of the Labour Party and to the TUC. Rather than accept the majority view of the party they had built and led, MacDonald, chancellor Philip Snowden, and Jimmy Thomas, whose special ministerial responsibility was unemployment and under whose term of office unemployment had tripled, crossed the floor of the House of Commons and joined the Tories in what they called a national government. At the subsequent general election Labour lost 3 million votes and all but 50 of its MPs.
Shocked and angry, Labour Party members rallied to calls from the left never again to allow such a betrayal. The newly formed Socialist League argued that the only effective antidote to such a betrayal was a thoroughgoing socialist policy and a ruthless determination by the next socialist government to pass that policy into law. The League’s policies were designed to breathe some life into the democracy so humiliated by the MacDonald betrayal. But by the time Labour was re-elected in 1945, on the crest of precisely the wave of popular socialist conviction which the League had anticipated, the Labour leaders had lost any enthusiasm they may have had for replacing the power of capital. Despite its nationalisations and the National Health Service, the postwar Labour government stuck firmly to the old rules of parliamentary government, and before three years were out had become, for all to see, the servant of capital, not the master of it.
The same wretched process, greatly exaggerated, dogged the two other periods of majority Labour government after the war – under Harold Wilson from 1964 to 1970, and Wilson and James Callaghan from 1974 to 1979. Both succumbed to the ‘continuity of policy’ which Stafford Cripps of the Socialist League had castigated as the harbinger of compromise and betrayal. Both accepted the dictation of reactionary foreign policy priorities from the United States and blatantly anti-union decisions from the judiciary. Above all, both governments trailed helplessly behind the economic priorities of capitalism: if the market called for high unemployment, the government conceded it; if the market called for low investment, the government conceded it; if the market called for cuts in public services, the government conceded them. Yet no one elected the market, and each time the elected government conceded to the market another slice of democracy was lost.
Nor was the power of capital to dictate policy restricted to periods of Labour government. In the autumn of 1992 the newly elected Tory government was proceeding happily along its carefully chosen path with Britain as a member of the ERM, which set the European rate for the currency. Massive speculation by wealthy gamblers, none of whom were elected or had any concern about public policy except to make the swiftest buck for themselves, forced the government, against its declared will, to abandon the policy and leave the ERM. Interviewed about this six years later, Kenneth Clarke, who was home secretary at the time, said the ERM debacle proved the fantastic political power of market forces. ‘We as a government were totally out of control,’ he revealed. Nor was the Tory government alone in that humiliation. Membership of the ERM was the declared policy of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.
The combined effect of this relentless drain of democracy has been to convince the professional politicians that there is no real scope for any substantial change in the social order. For formerly bourgeois politicians, Liberal and Tory, this new mood represented no change. They always stood for capitalism, and are quite content to continue to do so. For Labour, which stood for at least a gradual supercession of the capitalist order and a slow, gradual march to socialism, the new pessimism required a sharp change in direction. The election in 1994 of the openly Liberal politician Tony Blair to replace the social democrat John Smith as Labour leader was the first sign of this change. Then in quick succession came the removal from the party constitution of Clause Four, which had committed it to public ownership, and a string of watered-down commitments whose combined effect was to ensure that under a Labour government the rich get richer while the workers and their unions are held firmly in the judicial grip which Margaret Thatcher had fashioned for them. As the coup de grace in this slaughter of former commitments, Blair, almost as soon as he was elected, held meetings with the Liberal Democrats to offer them seats in the cabinet. He yearned for the day when British democracy would once again hold out a glorious choice between a Tory Party committed to capitalism and an anti-Tory party committed to capitalism. Labour’s huge 1997 majority in the Commons – itself a sign of the growing wrath against years of Thatcherism – made it impossible for Blair to clinch his cherished Lib-Lab dream, but he is determined to keep trying. The conclusion at the end of the century of the great hope is that the highest aspirations of the modern Labour Party reach no further than those of the Democratic Party in the United States: that social democracy can now be dispensed with, and that any true meaning of the word ‘democracy’ will vanish with the ‘social’.
One reaction to this sad story is to proclaim the invulnerability of capitalism, and to limit politics and political action to the reactionary vistas of Tony Blair. This is the reaction of people who believe either a) that there is no working class with common wants and common interests or b) that the working class has no power to make its presence and its interests felt in high society. Coincidentally, this sort of pessimism was rife in Britain 100 years ago when a Tory government was in apparently unshakeable control and the voters were about to be seduced by a juicy war in South Africa. That pessimism was soon shattered in the great burst of agitation by workers, women and Irish republicans in the years leading up the First World War. It was shattered still further in the Russian Revolution and the burst of workers’ confidence which it inspired all over the world. The plain fact is that as long as society is split into classes, as long as the rich try to get richer by bashing the poor, there will inevitably be periods of mass protest as the workers and the poor organise to hit back.
The class struggle, in short, is not over. It will show itself again and again. As it does so, another temptation will distract workers. So sick will so many of them be of the long periods of passivity, or of the hideous betrayal of socialist principles by the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, that they will urge their followers to abandon politics to professional politicians and do their best to batter down the ramparts of capitalism armed only with strikes and demonstrations. Such a strategy leaves the rich class with their strongest weapon intact. They know, as they did in 1911 and 1921 and 1972, that workers’ militancy can fall as fast as it can rise, and that great explosions of militancy can dissolve like fireworks in the night. They know that as long as militancy can be confined to its own borders it can be contained and eventually defeated.
Socialist politics, based on the aspirations of rank and file workers, can bind that militancy together and arm it with answers to the inevitable questions. Why should better off workers go on strike – why not redistribute the wealth of richer workers among the starving millions? Is it really true that one man’s wage rise is another man’s price rise? Above all, what is this socialism and why should it be any better than what we have at present? The very questions themselves are unanswerable by those who support a society ruled by a bureaucratic state capitalist tyranny or by a grasping ruling class. The answers can only come from a militant working class movement in revolt against capitalism.
The case emerges clearly for socialist organisation whose strength and potential come from its links to workers’ militancy and their readiness to use their power to fight. The enduring political lesson of the 20th century is that socialism and social democracy through the ballot box have failed on both counts, and that there is no short cut to socialism from the rulers of class society, however enlightened or socialistic those rulers claim to be. There is no socialism, and because of that no true democracy. Those who believed that either or both could be achieved through the ballot box alone have been confounded. Roll on the next century, not only of the great democratic hope but also of the greatest possible democratic achievement: the emancipation of labour.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Labour’s Crisis</small><br>
Ghost of a chance</h1>
<h3>(November 2000)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>News Review</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.246, November 2000, p.5<br>
Copyright © 2000 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Suddenly, totally unexpectedly, a strange and ghastly creature from the past flutters across the political stage – a Tory government. A what? Not a past Tory government, nor even a Labour government pretending to be a Tory government. But for a fleeting moment, and in at least three proper opinion polls, a majority of British people answered the question, ‘How would you vote at the next election?’ with the preposterous reply, ‘Conservative.’ Convert these polls into a general election and the phantasma, the spectre, is converted into reality – a Tory government with William Hague as prime minister.</p>
<p>Not for eight years, not since Heseltine closed the pits and Lamont ran up the interest rates to 15 percent, have the Tories led in the opinion polls. What was the cause of this sudden shift? Was there a spectacular disaster for the government? On the contrary. Many pundits, myself included, were predicting that the Labour lead in the polls was so huge and the prospect – not the reality, but the prospect – of Brown’s budget so alluring that Blair might call an October election and have done with the Tories for another five years at least.</p>
<p>Was it perhaps the emergence of William Hague as a charismatic leader, or of his Tory team as thrusting dynamos with even a glimmer of an answer to people’s problems? To ask the question is to answer it. The Tories are a hopeless bunch, even more anonymous and lacklustre than they were under John Major, split all ends up over Europe and careering to the right in a maniacal frenzy. The real answer is much more serious. It is that the fuel crisis, and the government’s dithering over it, left people uneasy and uncertain. The violent fluctuations of the opinion polls showed that old party loyalties are unreliable.</p>
<p>New Labour’s ministers are unpopular not so much for what they say and do, but for what they don’t say and don’t do. The hallmark of the government is paralysis. It doesn’t say yes and it doesn’t say no. It doesn’t say stop and it doesn’t say go. Too nervous to climb, too frightened to fall, it bides its time and clings to the wall. In a society cut into classes, paralysis is not even neutrality. It leaves things as they are – in the exclusive hands of the rich who grow more and more confident that they will be able to hang on to their wealth and power.</p>
<p>The reason for the sudden rise in the polls for the Tories has nothing to do with them and even less to do with the ‘apathy of the masses’. The blame lies squarely on New Labour. Three and a half years after the biggest election victory of all time, three and a half years of uninterrupted economic stability, three and a half years of the most hopeless opposition anyone could imagine, leave us with opinion polls showing Labour neck and neck with the Tories.</p>
<p>It is small comfort that the Tories immediately threw away their advantage by wheeling on the awful Widdecombe to make a hash (if she will pardon the expression without reaching for her manacles) of even a Tory conference speech on law and order. It is not much comfort if the polls just for a moment swing away from the Tories again. The point is that New Labour with its Tory privatisations, Tory tax breaks, Tory dinner parties for the rich and Tory chief inspector of schools has so confused its supporters that they can’t any longer tell the difference between this government and its predecessor.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Labour’s Crisis
Ghost of a chance
(November 2000)
From News Review, Socialist Review, No.246, November 2000, p.5
Copyright © 2000 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Suddenly, totally unexpectedly, a strange and ghastly creature from the past flutters across the political stage – a Tory government. A what? Not a past Tory government, nor even a Labour government pretending to be a Tory government. But for a fleeting moment, and in at least three proper opinion polls, a majority of British people answered the question, ‘How would you vote at the next election?’ with the preposterous reply, ‘Conservative.’ Convert these polls into a general election and the phantasma, the spectre, is converted into reality – a Tory government with William Hague as prime minister.
Not for eight years, not since Heseltine closed the pits and Lamont ran up the interest rates to 15 percent, have the Tories led in the opinion polls. What was the cause of this sudden shift? Was there a spectacular disaster for the government? On the contrary. Many pundits, myself included, were predicting that the Labour lead in the polls was so huge and the prospect – not the reality, but the prospect – of Brown’s budget so alluring that Blair might call an October election and have done with the Tories for another five years at least.
Was it perhaps the emergence of William Hague as a charismatic leader, or of his Tory team as thrusting dynamos with even a glimmer of an answer to people’s problems? To ask the question is to answer it. The Tories are a hopeless bunch, even more anonymous and lacklustre than they were under John Major, split all ends up over Europe and careering to the right in a maniacal frenzy. The real answer is much more serious. It is that the fuel crisis, and the government’s dithering over it, left people uneasy and uncertain. The violent fluctuations of the opinion polls showed that old party loyalties are unreliable.
New Labour’s ministers are unpopular not so much for what they say and do, but for what they don’t say and don’t do. The hallmark of the government is paralysis. It doesn’t say yes and it doesn’t say no. It doesn’t say stop and it doesn’t say go. Too nervous to climb, too frightened to fall, it bides its time and clings to the wall. In a society cut into classes, paralysis is not even neutrality. It leaves things as they are – in the exclusive hands of the rich who grow more and more confident that they will be able to hang on to their wealth and power.
The reason for the sudden rise in the polls for the Tories has nothing to do with them and even less to do with the ‘apathy of the masses’. The blame lies squarely on New Labour. Three and a half years after the biggest election victory of all time, three and a half years of uninterrupted economic stability, three and a half years of the most hopeless opposition anyone could imagine, leave us with opinion polls showing Labour neck and neck with the Tories.
It is small comfort that the Tories immediately threw away their advantage by wheeling on the awful Widdecombe to make a hash (if she will pardon the expression without reaching for her manacles) of even a Tory conference speech on law and order. It is not much comfort if the polls just for a moment swing away from the Tories again. The point is that New Labour with its Tory privatisations, Tory tax breaks, Tory dinner parties for the rich and Tory chief inspector of schools has so confused its supporters that they can’t any longer tell the difference between this government and its predecessor.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>A hero of Labour</h1>
<h3>(1 May 1993)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 1 May 1993.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000), pp. 51–52.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Good political biography is rare enough, and even rarer in the labour movement, so I gleefully report my enjoyment of Caroline Benn’s book on Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party.</p>
<p>This is not in any way a hagiography. Indeed, by constantly sizing up Hardie from the vantage point of the women he knew and loved – his wife and daughter whom he expected to live on a pittance of a pound a week, and his numerous lovers, including Sylvia Pankhurst – Caroline Benn draws a picture of a vain, self regarding and slightly unpleasant man.</p>
<p>This is most definitely not the saintly hero painted by so many sentimental socialists. Nor, however, is this Hardie the villain of conventional revolutionary historians, who indicate that he was politically indistinguishable from his notorious successor as leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald.</p>
<p>As the book proves beyond doubt, Hardie was at every twist and turn in the story preferable to MacDonald.</p>
<p>He was contemptuous of and uneasy in high society, which MacDonald loved. He was suspicious of Liberals, whom MacDonald constantly cuddled. Above all, Hardie kept his working class roots, while MacDonald was always trying to tear them up.</p>
<p>As so often emerges from biographies of the central figures of British labour history, Keir Hardie seems a mass of contradictions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Olive branches</h4>
<p class="fst">On the one hand, he is accommodating, seeking to make alliances, holding out olive branches to the other side. On the other, he is trumpeting his deep hostility to all things Liberal, insisting on the purest of pure Labour and denouncing Liberal ministers, especially Winston Churchill, whom he called a charlatan and a liar.</p>
<p>On the one hand he is telling his colleagues that parliament is all that matters. On the other hand, he is the consummate campaigner, never stopping his endless, lifelong stomp round the country, speaking at more meetings in a month than most of us active socialists would expect to address in a year.</p>
<p>How to resolve these contradictions? Caroline Benn has a go with this:</p>
<p class="quoteb">As so often happened in Hardie’s life when he found himself drifting towards Liberalism (as he had been since 1908) it was events in the industrial field which re-radicalised him.</p>
<p class="fst">The astonishing and quite unexpected strike wave of 1911, which awoke the railwaymen and the miners and the Irish countryside from which so many of them had come, brought Hardie quickly back to the politics of his youth.</p>
<p>He toured the mining areas, speaking with great passion about the hardship and courage of the strikers and their families. He denounced the bosses and Churchill with the most ferocious passion. He was all his life an internationalist, an anti-militarist, a supporter of women’s liberation and an opponent of British rule in Ireland.</p>
<p>Of course, it is easy over all these years to pick out juicy examples of Hardie’s reformism: his pettifogging parliamentarianism, his sentimentality, his endless appeals to higher values.</p>
<p>But he emerges from this marvellous biography as a proletarian socialist who believed in his class, who wanted to improve it through parliament. But he realised that, whatever the possibilities of parliament, little or nothing would be achieved unless the workers acted for themselves.</p>
<p>From young trade union organiser to veteran agitator, he was always aware that strikes make trade unions, not vice versa.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
A hero of Labour
(1 May 1993)
From Socialist Worker, 1 May 1993.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 51–52.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Good political biography is rare enough, and even rarer in the labour movement, so I gleefully report my enjoyment of Caroline Benn’s book on Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party.
This is not in any way a hagiography. Indeed, by constantly sizing up Hardie from the vantage point of the women he knew and loved – his wife and daughter whom he expected to live on a pittance of a pound a week, and his numerous lovers, including Sylvia Pankhurst – Caroline Benn draws a picture of a vain, self regarding and slightly unpleasant man.
This is most definitely not the saintly hero painted by so many sentimental socialists. Nor, however, is this Hardie the villain of conventional revolutionary historians, who indicate that he was politically indistinguishable from his notorious successor as leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald.
As the book proves beyond doubt, Hardie was at every twist and turn in the story preferable to MacDonald.
He was contemptuous of and uneasy in high society, which MacDonald loved. He was suspicious of Liberals, whom MacDonald constantly cuddled. Above all, Hardie kept his working class roots, while MacDonald was always trying to tear them up.
As so often emerges from biographies of the central figures of British labour history, Keir Hardie seems a mass of contradictions.
Olive branches
On the one hand, he is accommodating, seeking to make alliances, holding out olive branches to the other side. On the other, he is trumpeting his deep hostility to all things Liberal, insisting on the purest of pure Labour and denouncing Liberal ministers, especially Winston Churchill, whom he called a charlatan and a liar.
On the one hand he is telling his colleagues that parliament is all that matters. On the other hand, he is the consummate campaigner, never stopping his endless, lifelong stomp round the country, speaking at more meetings in a month than most of us active socialists would expect to address in a year.
How to resolve these contradictions? Caroline Benn has a go with this:
As so often happened in Hardie’s life when he found himself drifting towards Liberalism (as he had been since 1908) it was events in the industrial field which re-radicalised him.
The astonishing and quite unexpected strike wave of 1911, which awoke the railwaymen and the miners and the Irish countryside from which so many of them had come, brought Hardie quickly back to the politics of his youth.
He toured the mining areas, speaking with great passion about the hardship and courage of the strikers and their families. He denounced the bosses and Churchill with the most ferocious passion. He was all his life an internationalist, an anti-militarist, a supporter of women’s liberation and an opponent of British rule in Ireland.
Of course, it is easy over all these years to pick out juicy examples of Hardie’s reformism: his pettifogging parliamentarianism, his sentimentality, his endless appeals to higher values.
But he emerges from this marvellous biography as a proletarian socialist who believed in his class, who wanted to improve it through parliament. But he realised that, whatever the possibilities of parliament, little or nothing would be achieved unless the workers acted for themselves.
From young trade union organiser to veteran agitator, he was always aware that strikes make trade unions, not vice versa.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Inspiring memory</h1>
<h3>(12 December 1992)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 12 December 1992.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000), pp. 49–50.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">I doubt if the Socialist Workers Party will ever put on a better memorial meeting than the one held last Friday in celebration of the restless, bustling and inspiring life of Dave Widgery.</p>
<p>The chief problem for the organisers was the enormous range of Dave’s interests, friends, heroes and admirers.</p>
<p>There was no problem about his commitment to the Socialist Workers Party. I first met Dave in the middle of the 1968 ‘revolution’ on York station. He had come from speaking at the university which he denounced, his eyes shining, as a ‘great middle class fun palace’. He glowered at me. ‘They don’t need you there at all. They need the proletariat.’</p>
<p>Even when he used an old fashioned word like proletariat he had a way of making it sound ultra-modern, like something from the lyrics of a popular rock band. And in his last book (and his best, by the way, in case anyone thinks that revolutionaries get stale as they get older), <strong>Some Lives!</strong>, he used the word ‘proletarian’ quite naturally again and again.<br>
</p>
<h4>Knew better</h4>
<p class="fst">Dave was a party man. He loved and admired Peter Sedgwick, and had a lot in common with him. But when Peter finally dropped out of the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP) some time in the mid-1970s, Dave would not let him go without a ferocious argument.</p>
<p>Dave knew better than most of his friends and contemporaries that you cannot be a socialist on your own.</p>
<p>Dave was all those things which so many of his 1968 generation ended up denouncing. He was a Leninist and a vanguardist. He was not in the SWP because it was the ‘best of the bunch’ or because he ‘had to be in something’ (two explanations I’ve heard for his commitment). Nor even was his reason for membership his agreement with the basic policies which distinguished the SWP from other left organisations.</p>
<p>The chief reason was that he agreed with the sort of party the SWP was trying to build.</p>
<p><strong>Socialist Worker</strong> editor Chris Harman’s speech last Friday ended with a sharp attack on the left paper <strong>Tribune</strong> for a sectarian assault on an obituary in <strong>Socialist Review</strong>. ‘He didn’t sell enough papers,’ scoffed <strong>Tribune</strong>.</p>
<p>In fact there are few people alive today who have sold more copies of <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> (over 25 years, remember—Dave was at the very first <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> editorial board meeting in 1967). He knew that if socialist papers are not sold directly, hand to hand, they do not sell at all (<strong>Tribune</strong> I cite as an example).</p>
<p>The majority of the speakers last Friday were not members of the SWP. Sheila Rowbotham spoke of Dave’s abiding solidarity with the women’s and gay liberation movements. Anna Livingstone, a fellow doctor in the East End, enthused us with her stories of Dave’s battle for the health of the working class.<br>
</p>
<h4>In particular</h4>
<p class="fst">After a moving and quite brilliant speech which reminded me of his, my, and Dave’s hero C.L.R. James, Darcus Howe ended by saying he had fathered five children in Britain.</p>
<p>Four, he said, had grown up black and angry, battling all the time against the awful racism around them. The fifth, he said, grew up ‘black at ease’. She had ‘space’ to develop her own personality.</p>
<p>Darcus ascribed this ‘space’ to the work of the Anti Nazi League in general and Rock Against Racism and Dave Widgery in particular. There could not have been a more powerful tribute to this firecracker of a revolutionary whom we have lost far too soon.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Inspiring memory
(12 December 1992)
From Socialist Worker, 12 December 1992.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 49–50.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I doubt if the Socialist Workers Party will ever put on a better memorial meeting than the one held last Friday in celebration of the restless, bustling and inspiring life of Dave Widgery.
The chief problem for the organisers was the enormous range of Dave’s interests, friends, heroes and admirers.
There was no problem about his commitment to the Socialist Workers Party. I first met Dave in the middle of the 1968 ‘revolution’ on York station. He had come from speaking at the university which he denounced, his eyes shining, as a ‘great middle class fun palace’. He glowered at me. ‘They don’t need you there at all. They need the proletariat.’
Even when he used an old fashioned word like proletariat he had a way of making it sound ultra-modern, like something from the lyrics of a popular rock band. And in his last book (and his best, by the way, in case anyone thinks that revolutionaries get stale as they get older), Some Lives!, he used the word ‘proletarian’ quite naturally again and again.
Knew better
Dave was a party man. He loved and admired Peter Sedgwick, and had a lot in common with him. But when Peter finally dropped out of the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP) some time in the mid-1970s, Dave would not let him go without a ferocious argument.
Dave knew better than most of his friends and contemporaries that you cannot be a socialist on your own.
Dave was all those things which so many of his 1968 generation ended up denouncing. He was a Leninist and a vanguardist. He was not in the SWP because it was the ‘best of the bunch’ or because he ‘had to be in something’ (two explanations I’ve heard for his commitment). Nor even was his reason for membership his agreement with the basic policies which distinguished the SWP from other left organisations.
The chief reason was that he agreed with the sort of party the SWP was trying to build.
Socialist Worker editor Chris Harman’s speech last Friday ended with a sharp attack on the left paper Tribune for a sectarian assault on an obituary in Socialist Review. ‘He didn’t sell enough papers,’ scoffed Tribune.
In fact there are few people alive today who have sold more copies of Socialist Worker (over 25 years, remember—Dave was at the very first Socialist Worker editorial board meeting in 1967). He knew that if socialist papers are not sold directly, hand to hand, they do not sell at all (Tribune I cite as an example).
The majority of the speakers last Friday were not members of the SWP. Sheila Rowbotham spoke of Dave’s abiding solidarity with the women’s and gay liberation movements. Anna Livingstone, a fellow doctor in the East End, enthused us with her stories of Dave’s battle for the health of the working class.
In particular
After a moving and quite brilliant speech which reminded me of his, my, and Dave’s hero C.L.R. James, Darcus Howe ended by saying he had fathered five children in Britain.
Four, he said, had grown up black and angry, battling all the time against the awful racism around them. The fifth, he said, grew up ‘black at ease’. She had ‘space’ to develop her own personality.
Darcus ascribed this ‘space’ to the work of the Anti Nazi League in general and Rock Against Racism and Dave Widgery in particular. There could not have been a more powerful tribute to this firecracker of a revolutionary whom we have lost far too soon.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Falling flats ruin<br>
Labour’s building boast</h1>
<h3>(23 November 1968)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1968/index.html#n0098" target="new">No. 98</a>, 23 November 1968, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">HOUSING MINISTER Anthony Greenwood refused to go on television to discuss the collapse of flats at Ronan Point, but he was happy to appear on BBC-2 and drool on about Christianity and <i>Cathy Come Home</i>.</p>
<p>In the course of his appearance, Mr. Greenwood reminded his audience approximately seven times that Labour had built more houses in the last three years than at any other time in British history.</p>
<p>In fact, although Greenwood himself specifically abandoned his pledge for 500,000 houses by 1970 last January, it is still the proud boast of Transport House that despite squeezes and recession and high interest rates, marginally more houses have been built under Labour than under the Tories.</p>
<p>The truth is that Greenwood and his henchmen are absolutely terrified by what happened at Ronan Point – not because they fear another block might fall down but because the clamour for repairs and strengthening could damage their aims to build more houses.</p>
<p>A glance at the statistics shows that it is in high flats that Labour has managed to increase the number of dwellings most substantially. The fantastic speed with which these gerry-built blocks can be erected, and the large number of dwellings they incorporate is bound to give a great boost to house-building figures.</p>
<p>Evacuation of all the GLC’s unsafe system-built blocks, however, may be followed in other parts of the country.</p>
<p>Building resources previously devoted to housebuilding will have to be diverted to complicated, lengthy repair-work. Moreover, the new blocks that are erected will take longer – because of the new safety requirements.</p>
<p>In other words the ‘new technology’ which the government pioneered in housebuilding lies in ruins. It was based on a craze for numbers – regardless of safety or size.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Falling flats ruin
Labour’s building boast
(23 November 1968)
From Socialist Worker, No. 98, 23 November 1968, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
HOUSING MINISTER Anthony Greenwood refused to go on television to discuss the collapse of flats at Ronan Point, but he was happy to appear on BBC-2 and drool on about Christianity and Cathy Come Home.
In the course of his appearance, Mr. Greenwood reminded his audience approximately seven times that Labour had built more houses in the last three years than at any other time in British history.
In fact, although Greenwood himself specifically abandoned his pledge for 500,000 houses by 1970 last January, it is still the proud boast of Transport House that despite squeezes and recession and high interest rates, marginally more houses have been built under Labour than under the Tories.
The truth is that Greenwood and his henchmen are absolutely terrified by what happened at Ronan Point – not because they fear another block might fall down but because the clamour for repairs and strengthening could damage their aims to build more houses.
A glance at the statistics shows that it is in high flats that Labour has managed to increase the number of dwellings most substantially. The fantastic speed with which these gerry-built blocks can be erected, and the large number of dwellings they incorporate is bound to give a great boost to house-building figures.
Evacuation of all the GLC’s unsafe system-built blocks, however, may be followed in other parts of the country.
Building resources previously devoted to housebuilding will have to be diverted to complicated, lengthy repair-work. Moreover, the new blocks that are erected will take longer – because of the new safety requirements.
In other words the ‘new technology’ which the government pioneered in housebuilding lies in ruins. It was based on a craze for numbers – regardless of safety or size.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>‘Parliamentary socialism’:<br>
Labour’s road to disaster</h1>
<h3>(1 May 1969)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1969/index.html#n0120" target="new">No. 120</a>, 1 May 1969, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">SOON AFTER the armistice of 1918, Dame Margot Asquith, wife of the wartime Prime Minister, wrote a letter to J.H.Thomas, the former railwaymen’s leader, then an MP. The letter read:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Dear Mr Thomas, As you are such a friend of ours I thought you would like this fine telegram from the King to my husband on the great day. I am not writing to you about politics, but to tell you from my heart how brave and good I think you have been and how much my husband thinks of you. We told the King at lunch exactly what we thought of you and he was very nice about you. Be careful of your health and keep tight hold of your men – and God Bless You. Margot Asquith.’ (J.H. Thomas: <strong>My Story</strong>, p. 29)</p>
<p class="fst">The letter according to Thomas ‘seemed to lift itself out of a mass of cherished correspondence’, and diligently he devoted himself to the Dame’s instructions and ‘kept tight hold of his men’.<br>
</p>
<h4>Empire</h4>
<p class="fst">Six years later, Thomas became the first Labour Colonial Secretary and introduced himself to the heads of his department with the words: ‘I am here to see that there is no mucking about with the British Empire’</p>
<p>Five years later still he was the ‘troubleshooter’ in the 1929 Labour government, appointed to solve the problem of unemployment. He solved it by increasing it threefold and cutting the unemployment benefit.</p>
<p>Then he left the Labour Party to serve in the National Government and his career ended in a court case involving fraud.</p>
<p>Conventional Labour historians prefer to dismiss the careers of men like Thomas, Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald as examples of personal aberration or original sin. But the Thomas road from working-class origins through parliament to betrayal symbolises the futility of 50 years of parliamentary activity and aspirations on the part of British Labour.</p>
<p>Even today, after the unimaginable collapse in the last four and a half years, conventional ‘left-wing’ demonstrations move, as if pulled by a magnet, to parliament, there to conduct ‘a lobby’, and so-called revolutionaries pin their politics to the idiotic slogan: Make the Left MPs fight.</p>
<p>The history of the British Labour Party is a history of parliamentary disaster. In 1924, a Labour government supported by the Liberals did nothing at all.</p>
<p>This was a considerable achievement compared with the record of the 1929–1931 government which did everything in its power to protect the gold standard and the interests of industrialists against the clamour of the unemployed.</p>
<p>The Labour government of 1945 and 1951 is remembered with sentimental nostalgia by the official Labour left, who recall the nationalisation of coal, railways, gas, electricity – and the National Health Service.</p>
<p>The real achievement of the 1945–51 Labour government has been less widely-publicised. As two commentators, one of whom is a Cabinet Minister in the present administration, put it:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘In 1948–1950. when the economy appeared to be gaining both internal and external balance, there was a substantial shift away from planning in the direction of a free market system.’ (<strong>The Labour Government and British Industry</strong> by A.Rogow and Peter Shore, p. 71)</p>
<p class="fst">Under the smokescreen of nationalisation and welfare reforms the post-war Labour government concentrated its main efforts on the re-establishment of a capitalism seriously weakened by the war. Weak, plaintive industrialists grew, under Labour’s careful succour into implacable monopolists who wanted no more of ‘socialism’.</p>
<p>The inevitable irony was that Labour, because of the working-class support which it had ignored, was hounded from office by the very industrialists whom it had nourished.</p>
<p>By 1964, the Labour programme had been considerably diluted by the pressure of those who sought office. The reformist scraps offered to the masses have now been withheld and in their place the Labour government is now set on a course which is further to the right even than MacDonald’s in 1930.</p>
<p>The MacDonald government did at least repeal the Tory 1927 Trade Union Act which sought in some circumstances to make trade unionists liable for damage from disputes. Similarly. Wilson’s government passed an act in its first year of office overturning the</p>
<p>House of Lords’ Rookes <em>v.</em> Barnard decision, making a trade union official liable for strike damage.</p>
<p>It took a real election triumph, like 1966, to propel the government on a collision course with the unions and to enable them to propose legislation which shackles the unions more than the 1927 Act – and more than anything else since the first Labour parliamentarian entered Westminster.</p>
<p>Parliamentarians and reformists seek to explain all this as an unhappy accident. Unfortunately, they explain, the Labour governments were always dominated by right-wingers, who took the wrong course. Left-wingers, they proclaim, would have moved in a socialist direction.<br>
</p>
<h4>Darlings</h4>
<p class="fst">But would they? Were not Wilson, Castle, Crossman, Greenwood darlings of the left? Was it an accident that every one of the promoted left-wingers, with the single exception of Frank Cousins, who had a good job to go back to and has now found an even better one, not only were ‘converted’ to the anti-working class politics of the government, but also became their most enthusiastic supporters?</p>
<p>History suggests otherwise. Keir Hardie, father of the ‘Labour Left’, called on his countrymen to rally to the flag in 1914 when he said, ‘the boom of guns can be heard’.</p>
<p>And Robert Blatchford, theoretical inspirer of the Left, made his teenage daughter play <em>Rule Britannia</em> every day throughout the First World War.</p>
<p>In 1925 a group of left-wingers drew up a Manifesto, headed the Socialist Club and printed in <strong>Lansbury’s Weekly</strong>. ‘A Labour government’ it declared at the outset ‘would be pledged to establish a socialist state.’</p>
<p>It proposed several acts of immediate legislation including the abolition of the House of Lords (‘no fraternisation with the enemy’), the abolition of the police and the handing over of police duties to a ‘citizens’ army’ with elected officers.</p>
<p>The manifesto was signed by Marion Phillips, Susan Lawrence, George Lansbury, Ernest Thurtle and John Scurr. By 1929, Marion Phillips, then an MP, was the staunchest defender of the proposed cut in unemployment benefit. Miss Lawrence was an Under Secretary of State, and sharply attacked John Wheatley for daring to attack the government.</p>
<p>George Lansbury was in the Cabinet and was a member of the Labour Party executive which framed the rules for the expulsion of James Maxton. The rules under which the expulsion was based were drawn up by John Scurr, chairman of the Consultative Committee.</p>
<p>And Mr Thurtle, who was Lansbury’s private secretary, resigned from the ILP because it would not support the policies of the MacDonald government.</p>
<p>Exactly the same process followed the 1931 debacle. The left-wing, under Stafford Cripps, joined the Socialist League.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Continuity of policy,’ wrote Cripps, ‘can find no place in a socialist programme. It is this complete severance with all traditional theories of government, this determination to seize power from the ruling class and transfer it to the people as a whole, that differentiates the present political struggle from all those that have gone before’.</p>
<p class="fst">‘This determination’ was amply demonstrated by Cripps himself as President of the Board of Trade and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1945–51 government, in which posts he fought heroically to protect British capitalism from competitors abroad and militants at home.</p>
<p>The reason for all this is <em>not</em> to be found in personal weakness or betrayal nor in the predominance of ‘right-wingers’, whatever that may mean. The personal betrayals are the reflection of something much deeper: the fundamental relief of Labour parliamentarians that the road to socialism can be paved in parliament: that universal suffrage to five-yearly parliaments is a sufficient precondition for the change from capitalism to socialism.</p>
<p>This view, held incidentally by Karl Marx, grossly underestimates the power and flexibility of the capitalist system. It underestimates the ability of the men who control industry and commerce to absorb democratic processes through parliaments every five years, while retaining undemocratic control of the power that matters: economic power.</p>
<p>The geographic basis of the parliamentary democracy (with its assumption that MPs must represent all: their constituents whatever their class) and the long gap between elections puts parliamentary representatives at an enormous distance from the people they represent, and by whom they cannot be recalled for five years.</p>
<p>The gap is further exaggerated by the cretinism and pomp of parliament itself for whose ‘charms’ and ‘glory’ no one, not even Maxton or Bevan, has failed to succumb.</p>
<p>With very little difficulty, the capitalist class has been able to ensure that the British labour movement, blinkered by its desire for parliamentary power, becomes separated from its representatives, and accordingly corrupted and deformed by the lack of democracy in its own ranks.<br>
</p>
<h4>Dilemma</h4>
<p class="fst">Faced with continued destruction and bribery from the ruling class, the Labour parliamentarian is confronted with a dilemma. Either he mobilises <em>outside</em> parliament confronts capitalism and calls in question his parliamentary illusions. Or he must try to run capitalism better than his opponents.</p>
<p>Without exception, he prefers to foster his illusions and pursue the latter course.</p>
<p>With parliamentary obsessions run insistence on ‘law and order’, the ‘good of the nation’ and so on, with which slogans the ruling class has persuaded Labour governments to discipline and humiliate the people who voted for them.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the certainty that in the extreme event of a Labour government moving seriously to tip the class balance in favour of the workers by parliamentary action, the capitalist class will abandon its parliamentary pretensions and move to a more direct struggle outside.</p>
<p>The idea that the ruling class will stand aside muttering about a ‘fair fight’ as the Workers’ Control Act,1969 is passed through the Commons (and the Lords?) is the fantasy of those who have not read about Vienna in 1934, or of Barcelona in 1936, or Athens in 1967, or (a prediction) Rome in 1969.</p>
<p>The slightest possibility that a social democratic government will move firmly against the capitalists will be greeted not with formal protests from Her Majesty’s Opposition but with flights of capital, military coups and mercenary invasions.</p>
<p>Ruling class power cannot be legislated out of existence. It has to be seized.</p>
<p>Office has nothing to do with power. Parliament does not offer the ‘road to socialism’. It offers a cul-de-sac. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in <strong>Reform and Revolution</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘In the history of classes, Revolution is the act of political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being.</p>
<p class="quote">‘In each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of, and in contradistinction to, the conquest of political power and social revolution do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.’</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
‘Parliamentary socialism’:
Labour’s road to disaster
(1 May 1969)
From Socialist Worker, No. 120, 1 May 1969, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
SOON AFTER the armistice of 1918, Dame Margot Asquith, wife of the wartime Prime Minister, wrote a letter to J.H.Thomas, the former railwaymen’s leader, then an MP. The letter read:
‘Dear Mr Thomas, As you are such a friend of ours I thought you would like this fine telegram from the King to my husband on the great day. I am not writing to you about politics, but to tell you from my heart how brave and good I think you have been and how much my husband thinks of you. We told the King at lunch exactly what we thought of you and he was very nice about you. Be careful of your health and keep tight hold of your men – and God Bless You. Margot Asquith.’ (J.H. Thomas: My Story, p. 29)
The letter according to Thomas ‘seemed to lift itself out of a mass of cherished correspondence’, and diligently he devoted himself to the Dame’s instructions and ‘kept tight hold of his men’.
Empire
Six years later, Thomas became the first Labour Colonial Secretary and introduced himself to the heads of his department with the words: ‘I am here to see that there is no mucking about with the British Empire’
Five years later still he was the ‘troubleshooter’ in the 1929 Labour government, appointed to solve the problem of unemployment. He solved it by increasing it threefold and cutting the unemployment benefit.
Then he left the Labour Party to serve in the National Government and his career ended in a court case involving fraud.
Conventional Labour historians prefer to dismiss the careers of men like Thomas, Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald as examples of personal aberration or original sin. But the Thomas road from working-class origins through parliament to betrayal symbolises the futility of 50 years of parliamentary activity and aspirations on the part of British Labour.
Even today, after the unimaginable collapse in the last four and a half years, conventional ‘left-wing’ demonstrations move, as if pulled by a magnet, to parliament, there to conduct ‘a lobby’, and so-called revolutionaries pin their politics to the idiotic slogan: Make the Left MPs fight.
The history of the British Labour Party is a history of parliamentary disaster. In 1924, a Labour government supported by the Liberals did nothing at all.
This was a considerable achievement compared with the record of the 1929–1931 government which did everything in its power to protect the gold standard and the interests of industrialists against the clamour of the unemployed.
The Labour government of 1945 and 1951 is remembered with sentimental nostalgia by the official Labour left, who recall the nationalisation of coal, railways, gas, electricity – and the National Health Service.
The real achievement of the 1945–51 Labour government has been less widely-publicised. As two commentators, one of whom is a Cabinet Minister in the present administration, put it:
‘In 1948–1950. when the economy appeared to be gaining both internal and external balance, there was a substantial shift away from planning in the direction of a free market system.’ (The Labour Government and British Industry by A.Rogow and Peter Shore, p. 71)
Under the smokescreen of nationalisation and welfare reforms the post-war Labour government concentrated its main efforts on the re-establishment of a capitalism seriously weakened by the war. Weak, plaintive industrialists grew, under Labour’s careful succour into implacable monopolists who wanted no more of ‘socialism’.
The inevitable irony was that Labour, because of the working-class support which it had ignored, was hounded from office by the very industrialists whom it had nourished.
By 1964, the Labour programme had been considerably diluted by the pressure of those who sought office. The reformist scraps offered to the masses have now been withheld and in their place the Labour government is now set on a course which is further to the right even than MacDonald’s in 1930.
The MacDonald government did at least repeal the Tory 1927 Trade Union Act which sought in some circumstances to make trade unionists liable for damage from disputes. Similarly. Wilson’s government passed an act in its first year of office overturning the
House of Lords’ Rookes v. Barnard decision, making a trade union official liable for strike damage.
It took a real election triumph, like 1966, to propel the government on a collision course with the unions and to enable them to propose legislation which shackles the unions more than the 1927 Act – and more than anything else since the first Labour parliamentarian entered Westminster.
Parliamentarians and reformists seek to explain all this as an unhappy accident. Unfortunately, they explain, the Labour governments were always dominated by right-wingers, who took the wrong course. Left-wingers, they proclaim, would have moved in a socialist direction.
Darlings
But would they? Were not Wilson, Castle, Crossman, Greenwood darlings of the left? Was it an accident that every one of the promoted left-wingers, with the single exception of Frank Cousins, who had a good job to go back to and has now found an even better one, not only were ‘converted’ to the anti-working class politics of the government, but also became their most enthusiastic supporters?
History suggests otherwise. Keir Hardie, father of the ‘Labour Left’, called on his countrymen to rally to the flag in 1914 when he said, ‘the boom of guns can be heard’.
And Robert Blatchford, theoretical inspirer of the Left, made his teenage daughter play Rule Britannia every day throughout the First World War.
In 1925 a group of left-wingers drew up a Manifesto, headed the Socialist Club and printed in Lansbury’s Weekly. ‘A Labour government’ it declared at the outset ‘would be pledged to establish a socialist state.’
It proposed several acts of immediate legislation including the abolition of the House of Lords (‘no fraternisation with the enemy’), the abolition of the police and the handing over of police duties to a ‘citizens’ army’ with elected officers.
The manifesto was signed by Marion Phillips, Susan Lawrence, George Lansbury, Ernest Thurtle and John Scurr. By 1929, Marion Phillips, then an MP, was the staunchest defender of the proposed cut in unemployment benefit. Miss Lawrence was an Under Secretary of State, and sharply attacked John Wheatley for daring to attack the government.
George Lansbury was in the Cabinet and was a member of the Labour Party executive which framed the rules for the expulsion of James Maxton. The rules under which the expulsion was based were drawn up by John Scurr, chairman of the Consultative Committee.
And Mr Thurtle, who was Lansbury’s private secretary, resigned from the ILP because it would not support the policies of the MacDonald government.
Exactly the same process followed the 1931 debacle. The left-wing, under Stafford Cripps, joined the Socialist League.
‘Continuity of policy,’ wrote Cripps, ‘can find no place in a socialist programme. It is this complete severance with all traditional theories of government, this determination to seize power from the ruling class and transfer it to the people as a whole, that differentiates the present political struggle from all those that have gone before’.
‘This determination’ was amply demonstrated by Cripps himself as President of the Board of Trade and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1945–51 government, in which posts he fought heroically to protect British capitalism from competitors abroad and militants at home.
The reason for all this is not to be found in personal weakness or betrayal nor in the predominance of ‘right-wingers’, whatever that may mean. The personal betrayals are the reflection of something much deeper: the fundamental relief of Labour parliamentarians that the road to socialism can be paved in parliament: that universal suffrage to five-yearly parliaments is a sufficient precondition for the change from capitalism to socialism.
This view, held incidentally by Karl Marx, grossly underestimates the power and flexibility of the capitalist system. It underestimates the ability of the men who control industry and commerce to absorb democratic processes through parliaments every five years, while retaining undemocratic control of the power that matters: economic power.
The geographic basis of the parliamentary democracy (with its assumption that MPs must represent all: their constituents whatever their class) and the long gap between elections puts parliamentary representatives at an enormous distance from the people they represent, and by whom they cannot be recalled for five years.
The gap is further exaggerated by the cretinism and pomp of parliament itself for whose ‘charms’ and ‘glory’ no one, not even Maxton or Bevan, has failed to succumb.
With very little difficulty, the capitalist class has been able to ensure that the British labour movement, blinkered by its desire for parliamentary power, becomes separated from its representatives, and accordingly corrupted and deformed by the lack of democracy in its own ranks.
Dilemma
Faced with continued destruction and bribery from the ruling class, the Labour parliamentarian is confronted with a dilemma. Either he mobilises outside parliament confronts capitalism and calls in question his parliamentary illusions. Or he must try to run capitalism better than his opponents.
Without exception, he prefers to foster his illusions and pursue the latter course.
With parliamentary obsessions run insistence on ‘law and order’, the ‘good of the nation’ and so on, with which slogans the ruling class has persuaded Labour governments to discipline and humiliate the people who voted for them.
Finally, there is the certainty that in the extreme event of a Labour government moving seriously to tip the class balance in favour of the workers by parliamentary action, the capitalist class will abandon its parliamentary pretensions and move to a more direct struggle outside.
The idea that the ruling class will stand aside muttering about a ‘fair fight’ as the Workers’ Control Act,1969 is passed through the Commons (and the Lords?) is the fantasy of those who have not read about Vienna in 1934, or of Barcelona in 1936, or Athens in 1967, or (a prediction) Rome in 1969.
The slightest possibility that a social democratic government will move firmly against the capitalists will be greeted not with formal protests from Her Majesty’s Opposition but with flights of capital, military coups and mercenary invasions.
Ruling class power cannot be legislated out of existence. It has to be seized.
Office has nothing to do with power. Parliament does not offer the ‘road to socialism’. It offers a cul-de-sac. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in Reform and Revolution:
‘In the history of classes, Revolution is the act of political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being.
‘In each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of, and in contradistinction to, the conquest of political power and social revolution do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.’
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>A question of principle</h1>
<h3>(15 July 1995)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No. 1451, 15 July 1995, p. 11.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>FOR NEARLY 30 years Robert Maclennan has been the MP for Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Against the tide Maclennan increased his majority for Labour in 1970 and held the seat in the other three elections of the 1970s.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>The winds</h4>
<p class="fst">Now even that rather dubious reputation has been thrown to the winds. As an “elder statesman” Maclennan was entrusted with the Liberal slot on the special committee set up by Tory MPs to protect themselves from the attack on them by Lord Nolan.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>He is a director of Atlantic Telenetwork and a consultant to the <strong>Encyclopaedia Britannica</strong>, but thanks to his own sturdy support for the Tories on the committee, no one can know how much he gets from either.</p>
<p>MPs get about £70,000 a year in pay and allowances. They have stupendously long holidays and a generous pension scheme.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
A question of principle
(15 July 1995)
From Socialist Worker, No. 1451, 15 July 1995, p. 11.
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
FOR NEARLY 30 years Robert Maclennan has been the MP for Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland.
In 1966, to everyone’s astonishment, he seized for the Labour Party a seat which had always been a Liberal or Tory fiefdom. The idea that they should be represented in parliament by a Labour MP obviously appealed to the increasingly abandoned landless labourers of Caithness, not to mention the new workers at the Dounreay nuclear site at Thurso.
Against the tide Maclennan increased his majority for Labour in 1970 and held the seat in the other three elections of the 1970s.
In 1981, without having the chance to vote about it, the people of Caithness suddenly found themselves represented by another party: the Social Democratic Party. Maclennan had coolly switched to the SDP while remaining in the parliament to which he had been elected for Labour.
In 1983 and 1987 he won the seat for the SDP, of which he later became leader. Under the influence of his lacklustre and backward leadership, the SDP finally evaporated. Unabashed, Maclennan joined yet another party, the Liberal Democrat Party, under whose colours he fought and won the election of 1992.
Thus the great stride forward which had wrested Caithness and Sutherland from its reactionary Liberal tradition turned into a great stride back. Thanks to Maclennan Caithness was Liberal again.
Maclennan is a crushingly boring politician, whose collected speeches would do wonders for an insomniac. In the past, however, he had given the impression of worthiness.
The winds
Now even that rather dubious reputation has been thrown to the winds. As an “elder statesman” Maclennan was entrusted with the Liberal slot on the special committee set up by Tory MPs to protect themselves from the attack on them by Lord Nolan.
Nolan and his commissioners, who were set up by Major to rid the Commons of sleaze, recommended that MPs should declare how much money they get from outside sources: directorships, consultancies and so on.
This modest proposal has the almost unanimous support of the electorate – even Tory voters support it strongly. Indeed most voters – 78 percent in fact – take the obvious view that MPs should not get a penny more than their salary.
Horror of horrors! The massed ranks of Tory MPs, who have got so used to consultancies that one of them recently advertised for one, combined at once to oppose Nolan’s proposal.
Here were Quentin Davies from rural Lincolnshire with at least four plum consultancies, Sir Archie Hamilton, former armed forces minister, with six directorships mostly connected with the armed forces, Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith with three directorships and a consultancy. Labour members of the committee unanimously supported disclosure.
A lot hinged on the solitary Liberal member, the former red from Caithness, Robert Maclennan. He voted with the Tories to “postpone” (ie do nothing about) the problem of disclosure.
He is a director of Atlantic Telenetwork and a consultant to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but thanks to his own sturdy support for the Tories on the committee, no one can know how much he gets from either.
MPs get about £70,000 a year in pay and allowances. They have stupendously long holidays and a generous pension scheme.
Of course we expect the Tories to defend their slush. The vote of Robert Maclennan clears up any doubt as to the principled position of the Liberal Democrats.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>‘Positive’ surrender</h1>
<h3>(11 July 1992)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 11 July 1992.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000, pp. 188–189.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Well, here is the <strong>Financial Times</strong> 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.’</p>
<p>This speech was not greeted with rapturous applause.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Rough guide</h4>
<p class="fst">Dobson Plan 2 calls on miners to ‘protect safety standards’. Here is a rough guide to such a plan. (1) Ask the new private management, which has taken over without a struggle or even a complaint, because the cards are stacked against struggles and complaints, to maintain safety standards. (2) If they don’t, lower the standards a little. (3) If that doesn’t work, lower the standards a lot. (4) If management still insist on cutting safety corners, burst into tears.</p>
<p>So desperate are the Labour leaders to surrender that it is becoming almost impossible for socialists to read or listen to them any longer.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
‘Positive’ surrender
(11 July 1992)
From Socialist Worker, 11 July 1992.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 188–189.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The National Union of Mineworkers was polite enough to invite Labour’s energy spokesman, Mr Frank Dobson, to speak at its conference in Scarborough last week.
The union, not surprisingly, is opposed to the government’s plans to take the coal industry back to the dark days of the filthiest representatives of the ruling class, the coal owners. The proposals are so hideous, the delegates must have mused, that even Mr Dobson, a man not best known for his amazing rhetoric might be moved to some indignation. Perhaps he would read up a little on the history of the coal owners.
A reference to the mass evictions in Durham in the 1840s by the Marquess of Londonderry would have gone down well. So might a study of the comparative safety statistics in British mines under private and public ownership.
The very least the rank and file can have expected was a ferocious attack on the Tories and a declaration of unswerving support for the NUM’s campaign against privatisation from the Labour Party, inside and outside parliament.
Well, here is the Financial Times report of what happened: ‘Mr Dobson said he believed “the cards are stacked heavily against keeping coal in the public sector” and the NUM should draw up plans to protect the most vulnerable pits and maintain safety standards.’
This speech was not greeted with rapturous applause.
Perhaps the sceptical miners imagined themselves following Mr Dobson’s advice. The first part of the Dobson plan had them ‘drawing up plans to protect the most vulnerable pits’. Here is a possible plan for protecting a vulnerable pit. (1) Try to ensure that the pit does not close. (2) If it does close, try to ensure jobs for all the miners thrown out of work. (3) If that doesn’t work, try to get decent redundancy pay. (4) If that doesn’t work, burst into tears.
This would be a positive Dobson plan as opposed to a negative plan to try to stop privatisation and closures by refusing to dig coal until public ownership is guaranteed. According to Dobson, the ‘cards’ ‘stacked against’ the success of any such plan, so the miners should settle for failure.
Rough guide
Dobson Plan 2 calls on miners to ‘protect safety standards’. Here is a rough guide to such a plan. (1) Ask the new private management, which has taken over without a struggle or even a complaint, because the cards are stacked against struggles and complaints, to maintain safety standards. (2) If they don’t, lower the standards a little. (3) If that doesn’t work, lower the standards a lot. (4) If management still insist on cutting safety corners, burst into tears.
So desperate are the Labour leaders to surrender that it is becoming almost impossible for socialists to read or listen to them any longer.
I doubt whether there has been a time in the entire century when British Labour has been so abject, so obsequious to Tories, to employers, to the City, to the newspaper barons – to everyone in authority.
Before the election they were at least afraid to lose. Now it seems they positively want to lose. They take on the mantle of defeat with a cheerful enthusiasm which would astonish the most dedicated masochist.
Their only hint of eloquence is in their pleas to their followers to play their part in the disaster. Their slogan is written in scarlet across the flag they sing about every year: ‘We lost. We’re certain to lose again. So make sure you all lose as well’.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>How the TUC killed workers’ paper</h1>
<h3>(September 1973)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 15 September 1973.<br>
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), <strong>In the Heat of the Struggle</strong>, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.96-7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">IN JANUARY 1911 there was a printworkers’ strike and lock-out in London. Sir Joseph Causton, boss of the <strong>Daily News</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Herald</strong>.</p>
<p>Helped by the <strong>Herald</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Herald</strong> a year later.</p>
<p>The paper played a crucial role in the upsurge of working class activity before the start of the First World War.</p>
<p>Through the <strong>Daily Herald</strong> 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 <strong>Herald</strong> proclaimed, in a front page headline: SOUTH WALES MINERS FIND A BETTER WAY THAN THE BALLOT.</p>
<p>Lansbury, then editor of the <strong>Herald</strong> wrote, in his book, <strong>The Miracle of Fleet Street</strong>: ‘All this time the dominant note of the <strong>Daily Herald</strong> 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 <strong>Herald</strong> for libel and took £200 damages.’</p>
<p>To continued cluck-clucking from Labour and trade union leaders, the <strong>Daily Herald</strong> 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.</p>
<p>When Jim Larkin, Irish workers’ leader, was released from prison in 1913, he wrote first to the <strong>Daily Herald</strong>, thanking the paper for its support.</p>
<p>When one 1918 anti-war <strong>Herald</strong> 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.</p>
<p>By 1920 the <strong>Herald</strong> 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.</p>
<p>But under capitalism the <strong>Herald</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The only source of heavy subsidy was the trade unions and so, reluctantly, in September 1922 Lansbury handed over the <strong>Herald</strong> to the TUC and the Labour Party.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Circulation was maintained and even increased slightly, but the problems of the paper redoubled.</p>
<p>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 <strong>John Bull</strong>.</p>
<p>Elias agreed to print and publish the <strong>Herald</strong> with the support of the trade union movement. Ernest Bevin, a young dockers’ leader, stomped the country to build up its circulation.</p>
<p>Bevin and other trade union leaders used their influence to drum up more than 100,000 extra readers, and when the <strong>Daily Herald</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Herald</strong> won the race to two million readers, the paper steadily deteriorated.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In 1961, the TUC sold out. When IPC took over Odhams, it also took over the <strong>Herald</strong> completely. The paper continued to decline.</p>
<p>In 1964 it was re-named the <strong>Sun</strong> and rejigged to get rid of its ‘cloth cap’ image. It lost its working class readers too. Finally, in 1969, the <strong>Sun</strong> was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who has turned it into mass-circulation pornography.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The wretched history of the <strong>Daily Herald</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>We must rebuild a mass socialist press in Britain – but not by making the same mistakes as made by the <strong>Daily Herald</strong>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Herald</strong>, burnt and buried by the Trades Union Congress.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
How the TUC killed workers’ paper
(September 1973)
From Socialist Worker, 15 September 1973.
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.96-7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IN JANUARY 1911 there was a printworkers’ strike and lock-out in London. Sir Joseph Causton, boss of the Daily News, swore he would never give in to the printers’ demand for a 50-hour week and the rest of the press responded with a cataract of lies and abuse against the locked-out men.
The printers decided they had had enough. They produced a daily eight-page sheet which put the workers’ side in the dispute. They called it the Daily Herald.
Helped by the Herald, the strikers won their demands. By the time the strike sheet folded on 28 April that year, large numbers of men and women were demanding a permanent, mass circulation paper for labour.
There were urgent discussions all over the country. Ben Tillett, who had led the great dockers’ strike of 1889, George Lansbury, Labour leader from East London, and a host of other workers’ representatives finally raised enough money to start the Daily Herald a year later.
The paper played a crucial role in the upsurge of working class activity before the start of the First World War.
Through the Daily Herald League it organised support for strike after strike – especially among London transport workers, dockers and Midlands iron workers. When the South Wales miners came out on strike in 1914 the Herald proclaimed, in a front page headline: SOUTH WALES MINERS FIND A BETTER WAY THAN THE BALLOT.
Lansbury, then editor of the Herald wrote, in his book, The Miracle of Fleet Street: ‘All this time the dominant note of the Daily Herald was its fierce attack on the leaders of the Labour Party ... The leaders of the trade unions were also attacked. The most reactionary of all the trade union leaders, Jimmy Thomas, sued the Herald for libel and took £200 damages.’
To continued cluck-clucking from Labour and trade union leaders, the Daily Herald and its League took up the struggles of Irish workers against imperialist bosses, of women in their fight for emancipation, and against British invasion of Russia after the 1917 revolution.
When Jim Larkin, Irish workers’ leader, was released from prison in 1913, he wrote first to the Daily Herald, thanking the paper for its support.
When one 1918 anti-war Herald rally was banned by the Albert Hall Council, the electricians’ union threatened to pull out the plugs for the following week’s Victory Ball. The council, under pressure from the government, rapidly changed its mind.
By 1920 the Herald had built a circulation of more than 250,000 copies a day. For all its faults it was founded on the fighting spirit of working people. ‘We were to all intents and purposes a rank and file paper,’ wrote Lansbury.
But under capitalism the Herald was in difficulty. Its circulation, though large did not bring in enough revenue in sales alone to enable it to compete with the other popular dailies.
Its working class readership was unattractive to advertisers and because Lansbury was hostile to any form of revolutionary organisation, the paper had around it no organisation which would sell or subsidise it from rank and file contributions.
The only source of heavy subsidy was the trade unions and so, reluctantly, in September 1922 Lansbury handed over the Herald to the TUC and the Labour Party.
Almost at once, the fire went out of it. Strikes were only supported after they had been declared official, ‘Dangerous subjects’, notably Ireland, were carefully avoided.
Circulation was maintained and even increased slightly, but the problems of the paper redoubled.
They were solved, in capitalist terms, by an arch-capitalist, Julius Elias. Elias, later Viscount Southwood, was a printing boss who had previously teamed up with the crooked and reactionary Horatio Bottomley in the printing and publication of the crooked and reactionary magazine John Bull.
Elias agreed to print and publish the Herald with the support of the trade union movement. Ernest Bevin, a young dockers’ leader, stomped the country to build up its circulation.
Bevin and other trade union leaders used their influence to drum up more than 100,000 extra readers, and when the Daily Herald was first printed under its new management – 51 percent of the shares owned by Elias’ Odhams press and 49 percent by the TUC – it had reached a circulation of more than two million.
All through the 1930s, Elias concentrated on building the paper’s circulation by means of all kinds of free gifts and competitions, while the TUC and Labour leaders drummed up readership from their rank and file. Although the Herald won the race to two million readers, the paper steadily deteriorated.
Politics were relegated as far as possible, and the TUC directors ensured that what politics were published safely reflected the views of the TUC leaders.
The process continued after the war. As the Labour leaders became less and less interested in their rank and file, so they lost interest in their daily paper.
In 1961, the TUC sold out. When IPC took over Odhams, it also took over the Herald completely. The paper continued to decline.
In 1964 it was re-named the Sun and rejigged to get rid of its ‘cloth cap’ image. It lost its working class readers too. Finally, in 1969, the Sun was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who has turned it into mass-circulation pornography.
At last week’s TUC Richard Briginshaw, general secretary of the print union NATSOPA, moved the ritual TUC motion complaining at the anti-trade union bias of the capitalist press. Vague demands were made in the debate as they will be at the Labour Party conference next month, for a new TUC/Labour Party paper.
The wretched history of the Daily Herald since its take-over by the TUC 50 years ago proves how self-destructive is reformist, social democratic propaganda. A workers’ paper is useless unless its propaganda is backed and enriched by organisation and agitation. Unless workers see their paper as a guide to action and organisation as well as arguments against the Tories and their system, the paper is bound to lose out to the big battalions.
The crucial characteristic of Labour reformism is its distaste for working class organisation and independent action. Its papers can only argue and state. They cannot agitate. So they cannot rely on the people who read the paper to subsidise and sell it. They need the ‘business genius’ of the Viscount Southwoods and the advertising of great capitalist corporations. And in the hunt for such genius and such advertising they defeat their own propaganda.
We must rebuild a mass socialist press in Britain – but not by making the same mistakes as made by the Daily Herald. The driving force of our socialist press must be the belief in independent working class action, and the need for socialist papers to organise and co-ordinate that action.
We cannot build a socialist paper without socialist organisation – or vice versa. That simple fact is written in the ashes of 50 years’ copies of the Daily Herald, burnt and buried by the Trades Union Congress.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>They all knew he was a crook</h1>
<h3>(December 1991)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 14 December 1991.<br>
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), <strong>In the Heat of the Struggle</strong>, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.272-3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">IF I had not already been a socialist, the astonishing events at the <strong>Daily Mirror</strong> in the last few days would have quickly made me one. They are calling the Maxwell Robbery the greatest financial scandal of all time.</p>
<p>He robbed some £300 million from the workers at the <strong>Mirror</strong>, either from their company or from their pension fund.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the early 1980s Maxwell became chairman of one of the biggest public companies in the country, the British Printing Corporation.</p>
<p>In July 1984, on what we on the <strong>Mirror</strong> 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Mirror</strong>?</p>
<p>Yes, he could. From the moment he came into the building, Maxwell set himself the single task of breaking the trade unions.</p>
<p>Maxwell’s fall, like his rise, was symbolic of the Tory government’s fortunes. Like them he believed the capitalist</p>
<p>boom of the 1980s would last forever.</p>
<p>In a sort of frenzy he started buying up everything which came up for sale in the United States, Portugal, Argentine and Israel.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Mirror</em> workers’ pension fund.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Maxwell adored Margaret Thatcher, and Thatcher repaid the compliment. When Julia Langdon joined the <strong>Mirror</strong> political staff from the <strong>Guardian</strong>, Thatcher applauded her decision. ‘A dose of Maxwell will do you good,’ she trumpeted.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Mirror</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>They too are stuck deep in mud of capitalist corruption.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
They all knew he was a crook
(December 1991)
From Socialist Worker, 14 December 1991.
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.272-3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IF I had not already been a socialist, the astonishing events at the Daily Mirror in the last few days would have quickly made me one. They are calling the Maxwell Robbery the greatest financial scandal of all time.
He robbed some £300 million from the workers at the Mirror, either from their company or from their pension fund.
All around there is a great tut-tutting. Newspapers which only weeks ago were describing Maxwell as a ‘swashbuckling buccaneer’ now fall over one another to denounce him for what he was – a revolting crook. Nowhere is the embarrassment greater than in the City.
In 1971 a distinguished lawyer and a distinguished accountant declared after a careful examination of Maxwell’s relations with a company called Leasco that Maxwell was not fit to chair a public company.
In the early 1980s Maxwell became chairman of one of the biggest public companies in the country, the British Printing Corporation.
In July 1984, on what we on the Mirror called Black Friday, he became chairman of the Mirror Group of Newspapers – which ran five national newspapers with a combined circulation of four million copies every weekday and six million every Sunday. How could this happen?
Every reason has been thought of except the right one – that Maxwell was a valuable standard bearer for his class when it was on the offensive in the 1980s. His brash, old fashioned style fitted the needs of the bosses of the Thatcher decade.
In an aggressive cowboy manner much admired by the bankers he had smashed the unions at BPCC and turned the company into profit. Could he not do the same at the Mirror?
Yes, he could. From the moment he came into the building, Maxwell set himself the single task of breaking the trade unions.
Maxwell’s fall, like his rise, was symbolic of the Tory government’s fortunes. Like them he believed the capitalist
boom of the 1980s would last forever.
In a sort of frenzy he started buying up everything which came up for sale in the United States, Portugal, Argentine and Israel.
He borrowed and borrowed from his most faithful supporter, the National Westminster Bank, which could never forget the way he smashed the unions at BPCC and saved the bank an embarrassing insolvency.
Up and up went the takeovers and the loans in an endless spiral of megalomania and greed. No one stopped him – not a banker, not an adviser, not a regulator, not a government minister, not a policeman. What did stop him was the fatal flaw in the market system which promoted him.
Suddenly the boom evaporated. The ‘impossible’ recession swept over him. Interest rates climbed and the revenue from his new companies slumped. Squeezed more and more tightly, he turned for final salvation to the huge sums piled up in the Mirror workers’ pension fund.
Long ago Tories and capitalists used to argue that pension funds were proof of the burgeoning economic power of the workers. ‘With so much money in pension funds’, it was said, ‘millions of workers have a stake in the system.’
The argument overlooked the reality of control of the pension funds. The money was paid in by workers, but controlled by a handful of capitalists and accountants who used it to lubricate the Stock Exchange.
Maxwell adored Margaret Thatcher, and Thatcher repaid the compliment. When Julia Langdon joined the Mirror political staff from the Guardian, Thatcher applauded her decision. ‘A dose of Maxwell will do you good,’ she trumpeted.
But Maxwell was not a Tory – he supported the Labour Party. Into his plush inner circle came a clutch of right wing Labour Party supporters, most of them ennobled as Maxwell hoped to be.
There was Lord Donoghue, the biographer of Herbert Morrison, Lord Williams – a city slicker and deputy leader of the Labour peers – former Attorney General Sam Silkin and former Solicitor General Peter Archer. While Maxwell behaved like a Tory, while he broke the unions like a Tory, while he stalked the Mirror and other enterprises he owned with all the arrogance of a Tory grandee, he said he was a supporter of the Labour Party and the Labour leadership glowed with delight.
Now, instead of revelling in his disgrace, instead of exposing it as a disgrace of capitalism like all the other disgraces of recent years – Polly Peck, Ferranti and BCCI – the Labour leaders can only fret and fume and hope the whole thing will go away.
They too are stuck deep in mud of capitalist corruption.
Socialists need not be mealy mouthed. Maxwell was a great fat capitalist. His rise and fall reflected the rise and fall of British capitalism in the 1980s. He went up on backs of workers and down in the crisis of the market system.
This grotesque and apparently immovable statue to modern capitalism has come crashing down and no one wants to put an another remotely like it in its place.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Slaughterhouse Six</h1>
<h3>(July 2002)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Theatre Reviews</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.265, July 2002, p.24.<br>
Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded from the new <a href="http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a><br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>Review of <strong>Rose Rage</strong>, adapted from Willliam Shakespeare by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London</em></p>
<p class="fst">Readers of <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, 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 <em>Rose Rage</em>, an adaptation in two parts of William Shakespeare’s three <em>Henry VI</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘From London by the King was I pressed forth;<br>
My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s man<br>
Came on the part of York, pressed by his master.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">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 <em>Coriolanus</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The original <em>Henry VI</em> 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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Slaughterhouse Six
(July 2002)
From Theatre Reviews, Socialist Review, No.265, July 2002, p.24.
Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.
Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Review of Rose Rage, adapted from Willliam Shakespeare by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London
Readers of Socialist Review, you have about three weeks to book for a truly exhilarating dramatic experience. At the Haymarket theatre, 12 young men (well, they all looked young to me, which may not be the same thing) under the direction of Edward Hall smash, slash, slither and shriek their way through a tremendous performance of Rose Rage, an adaptation in two parts of William Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. These were the first of Shakespeare’s plays. They were written in 1591 or 1592, at the end of the Elizabethan age, when friends of the queen were worried what would happen when she died. She had no children, and her supporters feared a return to the chaos and wars of the past, in particular the Wars of the Roses that divided English rulers and killed hundreds of thousands of English citizens in the second half of the 15th century.
William Shakespeare was not a revolutionary. He owed his brilliance as a playwright not to sympathy with the revolutionaries, but to an understanding and insight into all human beings, including revolutionaries. A familiar theme of all his history plays may well have been to warn his audiences of the dangers of the breakdown of law and order, and a consequent collapse into anarchy. But he was far too sensitive a writer to allow his plays to degenerate into crude declarations of loyalty to god and king.
His plays are about the arguments of the time, so skilfully portrayed that, if properly directed, they reflect the arguments of Shakespeare’s time and of our time too. As the nobles’ factions form after the death of Henry V, it suddenly becomes clear that in the civil wars that follow, every king, every queen, every prince, every priest, every duke and every titled ninny is concerned exclusively with their own power and their own wealth, and will fight for both by any murderous means available to them. The bloodbath that follows turns the country into an abattoir. The scenes in this production open with all 12 actors sharpening knives for the slaughter. Each murder is accompanied by a butcher with a platter of red, freshly carved meat in front of him. And the whole reckless orgy of killing is hailed throughout by incantations of hypocrisy in honour of god, of England’s green and pleasant land, and of peace in our time.
The futility of the civil wars between lords who raise armies in different parts of England and France is grimly illustrated by a famous battle scene watched over by the anguished, vacillating king. A father kills a son, and then a son kills his father. The son records how this frightful tragedy was all the fault of the warring lords:
‘From London by the King was I pressed forth;
My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s man
Came on the part of York, pressed by his master.’
In the middle of these ghastly battles (St Albans (twice), Northampton, Wakefield, Towton Moor, Hedgeley Moor, Hexham, Shrewsbury, Tewkesbury) comes suddenly another one, which meant something to the people who promoted it. In 1450 the enraged and starving agricultural labourers of Kent rose up in revolt under the leadership of Jack Cade. Like the rebellion of the starving mob in Rome in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Cade’s army gets handsome treatment in the play. And Edward Hall’s production makes the rebellion seem and sound like an angry anti-capitalist demonstration in contemporary Britain. As Cade’s comrade Dick the Butcher demands, ‘The first thing that we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ The ferocious crowd moves among the audience demanding the bodies of lawyers. I confess I was greatly relieved that I and my companion (the editor of this magazine) could claim we were not lawyers.
Shakespeare’s excuse for so much sympathetic emphasis on the revolutionary mob is that the Cade rebellion was part of a plot by the Duke of York to overthrow the king. But again, the playwright’s eye and ear can’t really permit such an unlikely story. When a nobleman accuses Cade of being a dupe of the Duke of York, Cade mutters, aside to the audience: ‘He lies, for I invented it myself.’
These plays were written on the eve of the English Revolution, a real mass uprising of the lower classes of which Queen Elizabeth and her supporters were far more frightened than of yet another internecine war between titled members of her class. Shakespeare knew that his job was to warn of anarchy to come, yet he could not help seeing and understanding the desperate craving of the masses.
The original Henry VI plays are difficult to follow. New characters keep coming on stage, and are difficult to distinguish or identify. Edward Hall’s tremendously exciting production cuts out the crap, and leaves the essence clear and pure without once disturbing Shakespeare’s narrative or his poetry. There are outstanding performances by Robert Hands as the French-born Queen Margaret and Tony Bell as Jack Cade – and many others. Though the audience was ecstatic, there were far too many empty seats.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>All fall down</h1>
<h3>(November 1990)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, No.136, November 1990, pp.13-14.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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 <strong>Times</strong>, William Kay. Mr Kay called his book <strong>Tycoons</strong>, and based it on thirteen interviews with men who made millions in the early 1980s.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Like Gunn, Ashcroft enjoyed the special applause of the liberal press. While Gunn’s main backer had been the <strong>Observer</strong>, Ashcroft’s was the <strong>Guardian</strong>. Indeed in 1987, at the height of the ‘Thatcher miracle’, Ashcroft was named <em><strong>Guardian</strong> Young Businessman of the Year</em>. That paper wrote of him in March that year:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Capital</strong>, 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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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’:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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!’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
All fall down
(November 1990)
From Socialist Worker Review, No.136, November 1990, pp.13-14.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
WHEN SOMEONE comes to write a history of the Great Thatcher Decade (the 1980s), one of their basic texts should be a little book by a former City Editor of the Times, William Kay. Mr Kay called his book Tycoons, and based it on thirteen interviews with men who made millions in the early 1980s.
One of the self-made men was Gerald Ronson, whose Heron Corporation was unheard of when he launched his first ‘brilliant, daring’ take over bid in 1981. Ronson told Kay that Heron was a ‘very conservative business.’ He said he didn’t take risks, he just bet on certainties. What’s more, he kept strictly within the law. ‘There are plenty of crooks in the petrol business,’ he told Kay, ‘but they don’t come to work for us.’
This was surprising because perhaps the biggest crook of them all was Gerald Ronson. He made his fortune not so much by ‘daring’ bids but by gambling on the stock exchange. His greatest gamble was in 1986 when his friend, the super-swindler Sir Jack Lyons, asked him to buy some shares in Guinness to boost the share price in the firm’s takeover of Distillers. Ronson obliged with a cool £25 million. He lost not a penny on this investment of course, but as a reward for stumping up so much at an awkward time Guinness slipped him a personal donation of £7 million.
Ronson and Lyons were only caught when the biggest swindler of them all, the American stock exchange gangster Boesky, grassed on them to save his skin. The crooked transactions by which Ronson and Lyons rigged the institutions they loved could not possibly have been exposed by ordinary journalists since there was no public record of them whatsoever.
Ronson and Lyons were not ‘rotten apples’ in the capitalist barrel, as has been pretended. On the contrary they were both very close to the grandest apple of them all, the prime minister. Lyons was a personal friend, and Thatcher’s two closest advisers, Tim Bell and Gordon Reece, both in their own right entrepeneurs of the kind she admires, were paid advisers to Guinness at the time.
The ruthlessness with which Thatcher and her cronies pursued the values of free enterprise did not extend to obeying the rules laid down by that free enterprise. Indeed, in a way, one of the central tenets of that free enterprise was that its devotees should feel free to make up their own rules.
What can be called the Guinness syndrome haunts the whole of the rest of Mr Kay’s book. One rotten apple has gone to prison, but all over the industrial and financial scene other apples are falling off the tree. One such was Mr John Gunn. Here is what he told William Kay in 1985:
‘I am a free market socialist, in that I like lots of people to do well. The only way I can do that is to make sure the company makes a lot of money and the exchequer makes a lot of money. I am as capitalistic as you can get, but I do not think the trappings are important. Creation of wealth is almost a duty, because of the widespread benefits that flow from it.’
The only real wealth created by Mr Gunn, however, ended up in his own bank account. His business was ‘money-broking’, speculating, taking companies over and gambling on the outcome in the stock exchange. It can safely be said that he and his companies created not a single penny’s worth of real wealth. What they did was roll about in the mud of wealth created by others.
So successful was John Gunn with his money-broking that an old shipping family, the Cayzers of British and Commonwealth, appointed him chief executive in 1986. The Cayzers, crusted Tories every one of them, had made their huge wealth from a shipping line which mainly serviced South Africa.
John Gunn moved at once to sell anything which could possibly be of any real use to anyone. Away went the shipping line and onto the dole went thousands of people who worked for it. Instead, British and Commonwealth concentrated on ‘financial services.’ The Cayzers saw the danger, cashed in their millions, and ran.
The new British and Commonwealth, based on financial services, was applauded at every turn by the newspapers’ business editorials. Gunn and B&C moved from one glorious City takeover to another until earlier this year the whole ramshackle edifice collapsed into bankruptcy.
Until the end, John Gunn kept up the enormous payments £100,000 a year) which British and Commonwealth have traditionally paid to the Conservative Party. Another enthusiastic get-rich-quick Tory in the same mould was John Ashcroft, chairman of Coloroll, a group based on home furnishings, but which, under the impetuous Ashcroft, went into the stock market in grand style, taking over a whole series of harmless, old fashioned and often paternalistic old companies in the business.
Like Gunn, Ashcroft enjoyed the special applause of the liberal press. While Gunn’s main backer had been the Observer, Ashcroft’s was the Guardian. Indeed in 1987, at the height of the ‘Thatcher miracle’, Ashcroft was named Guardian Young Businessman of the Year. That paper wrote of him in March that year:
‘He is shrewd, personable, witty, unashamedly materialistic and fired by an almost boyish enthusiasm for stealing a market from under a competitor’s nose – “the idea of selling Japanese ceramics in Japan is quite amusing,” he says.’
Shrewdly, personably, wittily and materialistically Ashcroft went on stealing markets from competitors’ noses (and managed to treble his own salary in the process.) In the summer of this year Coloroll called in the receiver. It owed £300 million. Hundreds of workers (the lucky ones who had not been sacked while the boyish Mr Ashcroft pursued his fantastic ambitions) were thrown onto the dole.
The stories of Ronson, Gunn and Ashcroft have been repeated over and over again in the last twelve months. Celebrated Thatcherite entrepreneurs like Sophie Mirman of Sock Shop, George Davies of Next, Azil Nadir of Polly Peck, have all come crashing down. Harris Queensway, the brainchild of another Thatcher knight, the carpet king Sir Phil Harris, is now bust (though Harris himself sold out well before the disaster, for a little matter of £60 million).
Even the two top spokesmen for the Thatcher miracle – Murdoch and Maxwell – are in desperate trouble. Scandal after scandal has rocked the City: Barlow Clowes, Dunsdale, Fer-ranti. What does it all mean?
Four years ago the doomed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, first uttered the phrase which identified the greatest glory of the Thatcher years: ‘virtuous cycle.’ The theory was that the slumps and booms of capitalism, the endless cycle of recession followed by boomlet were all in the past.
Miraculously, the modern Tory government had found a formula which would ensure perennial growth, the gradual lowering of balance of payments deficits, inflation, taxes, interest rates all at the same time. A new virtuous world opened up, in which the capitalist economy went on growing and growing forever, and in which everyone had a chance to make themselves into millionaires as the Thatcher millionaires had done. In this atmosphere, there was no problem at all about borrowing more and more money to expand the already vast new empires of the self-made men who typified the Thatcher era.
The feature which is common to all the cases above (and all the others not mentioned) is overconfidence. There was overconfidence to borrow endlessly in the certainty that interest rates would never rise again; overconfidence to break laws and regulations at will; over-confidence that the very fact of having a fortune ensured a fortune forever. What motivates these people? Is it all personal gain? In one of the more glorious passages in Capital, Marx traces the history of avarice in the development of capitalism. To begin with individual capitalists showed the most rigorous self-sacrifice in their personal lives.
‘But the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment ... Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation.’
But however great the avarice or enjoyment of luxury by these creatures of speculation and the credit system, the real driving force in their lives is ‘the passion for accumulation’:
‘The capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes labour power out of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments.’ The drive is always to go on accumulating and exploiting long after the individual capitalist has stashed away a million times more cash than he can hope to spend on himself in ten lifetimes. His motto is (in Marx’s words): ‘accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets!’
These grand accumulators, half-crazed with their own self-importance and their invulnerability, acted as stalking horses for more cautious capitalists who held back, urging, like the gallant second lieutenant: ‘through that gap, sergeant, I’m close behind.’ Into the gap, sweetened by New Years Honours and egged on by sycophants in the press, plunged Thatcher’s New Entrepreneurs sacking and borrowing, sacking and borrowing in a virtuous crusade to usher in the capitalist millennium.
The game has been up since the great stock exchange crash of October 1987, which, like the great gales of the same month, was predicted by absolutely no one. Suddenly the cycle is not virtuous any more, but vicious. We are back with the same old stop and go, boom and slump. The decade of the Thatcher knights has come to an end at almost exactly the same time as has their own glory. They borrowed too much. They sacked too many skilled workers, and trained no one in their place. They are suddenly an embarrassment, to be disposed of as quickly as possible, in prison or in bankruptcy, while the real rulers try grimly to hang on to their credibility and their profits.
The demise of the great bounty hunters of the 1980s is a symbol of the demise of the crude confidence which sustained their class ten years ago. The brash assurance with which, for instance, Sir Keith Joseph told his chauffeur in 1980, ‘we need four million out of work’ has gone.
They have played their cards, and found them useless. Rather like the Labour leaders at the end of their last term of office in the late 1970s, the Tory leaders are stumbling from one crisis to another, uncertain what will happen next, no longer confident they can win. They are falling back more and more on what was beyond doubt their most remarkable achievement in the 1980s: their bludgeoning of the Labour opposition into a pale and pathetic shadow of their own self-serving capitalistic selves.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Thatcher: class warrior</h1>
<h3>(February 1985)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, February 1985.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990</strong> (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 3–4.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>A suitable prelude is an article in the <strong>Mail on Sunday</strong>’s colour magazine by the reactionary critic, Anthony Burgess. His piece, gloriously entitled <em>The Sexuality of Power</em>, ends by comparing Margaret Thatcher to Venus de Milo. He makes the subtle point that whereas Venus had no arms, Mrs Thatcher has plenty.</p>
<p>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 <em>convictions</em> and her <em>passions</em>, which, it will be argued, contrast magnificently with the dull pragmatism of her two predecessors, Heath and Macmillan.</p>
<p>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 <em>Any Questions</em>. 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.</p>
<p>When, after the programme, I said that I thought the Labour government was behaving rather like a Tory one, she blithely agreed. <em>But</em>, she insisted, in a very maternal way, there <em>was</em> a crucial difference between the two parties: in the people they represent.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>at once</em>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Margaret Thatcher and her <em>arrivistes</em>, people whose parents had to hang on by their fingertips to stay in the ruling class at all, believe that they are superior <em>because they are superior</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Thatcher: class warrior
(February 1985)
From Socialist Worker, February 1985.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 3–4.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Thatcher-worship, which goes on all the time in a continuous Mass in T, will rise to a crescendo in the next few weeks. A new excuse to sing the praises of the Prime Minister in otherwise difficult times comes with the tenth anniversary of her becoming leader of the Conservative Party.
A suitable prelude is an article in the Mail on Sunday’s colour magazine by the reactionary critic, Anthony Burgess. His piece, gloriously entitled The Sexuality of Power, ends by comparing Margaret Thatcher to Venus de Milo. He makes the subtle point that whereas Venus had no arms, Mrs Thatcher has plenty.
Grateful and sycophantic press barons will be eager to impress on their readers that Mrs Thatcher is a wonder woman, her political intelligence and grasp far greater than anything else seen in Britain (or any other country) in the postwar period. Above all, she will be heralded for her convictions and her passions, which, it will be argued, contrast magnificently with the dull pragmatism of her two predecessors, Heath and Macmillan.
When I try to read all this, I remember an evening in Plymouth some sixteen years ago when I first appeared on the BBC radio programme Any Questions. A Labour government was in office with a majority of 100. A Labour MP and I were ’balanced’ on the right by Malcolm Muggeridge and Margaret Thatcher MP.
When, after the programme, I said that I thought the Labour government was behaving rather like a Tory one, she blithely agreed. But, she insisted, in a very maternal way, there was a crucial difference between the two parties: in the people they represent.
When I next came across her, she was speaking as minister for education at the Tory Party conference in 1970, declaring with tremendous passion that the school-leaving age would be raised to sixteen, and that much more money would be spent on the state sector.
She is not someone who fights when she thinks she may be beaten. The miners’ strike of the winter 1980–81 is a very good example of that. She withdrew a pit closure programme at once.
Mrs Thatcher’s real skill comes from her deep sensitivity to the ebbs and flows in the fortunes of her class. She is a class general, who knows no sentiment in the struggle.
The old aristocratic leaders of the Tory Party believed they were superior to the lower orders chiefly through divine intervention or God’s will. They were therefore inclined to dilute their class passions with occasional bouts of compassion, doubt or hesitation.
Margaret Thatcher and her arrivistes, people whose parents had to hang on by their fingertips to stay in the ruling class at all, believe that they are superior because they are superior. There is, therefore, in their class war strategy not a hint of doubt or guilt. They have a better sense of the state of the battle, and a stronger will to win it.
Unlike Macmillan, Thatcher was deeply suspicious of the Keynesian economics and full employment of the postwar years. She sensed that although these things could not be reversed at the height of the boom, they were fundamentally corrosive of her class. Long before most Tory leaders she sensed an ebb in that confidence, and she seized the time.
She knew that mass unemployment breeds despair in workers, and that that despair would breed its own confidence among her people. She knew that trade union leaders were only powerful as long as they were allowed to seem so. She sensed the union leaders’ special weakness, their suspension between the two classes, and their unwillingness to side with either. She reckoned that if the union leaders were expelled from the corridors of power, they would be reduced to pleading to be allowed in again.
Mrs Thatcher is not an intellectual giant, nor has she risen to such heights through her beauty or her oratorical skills. She is a new-fashioned two-nation Tory who understands the simple truth, which evades far too many of us: that class confidence comes out of class strength, and that her class can win only if the other class loses.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h4>Obituary</h4>
<h1>We owe him a huge debt</h1>
<h3>(28 September 2002)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1819, 28 September 2002.<br>
Copied with thanks from the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/" target="new"><em>Socialist Worker Website</em></a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> and Duncan would appear on Monday mornings to write the leaders.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Obituary
We owe him a huge debt
(28 September 2002)
From Socialist Worker, No.1819, 28 September 2002.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
MUSING MISERABLY on the death of Duncan Hallas, three pictures come into my mind. I first heard him speak in public at a conference of the International Socialists way back in the late 1960s. An argument was raging, inspired by something called the “micro-faction”, whose line was that the coming of socialism could be left to the spontaneous movement of the working class.
At the time, dominated by continuous trade union victories and enormous demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the argument seemed persuasive. Duncan swept down to the front. “Lots and lots of workers vote Tory,” he started, and I groaned. But in a few powerful sentences he utterly demolished the “spontaneists”.
Political development in the working class, he insisted, was uneven. The most conscious and socialist elements had to come together as a potential leadership. As he swept on, my groan developed into a cheer. I got to know Duncan more intimately some years later when I was working on Socialist Worker and Duncan would appear on Monday mornings to write the leaders.
He would grab himself a disgusting coffee, light up an infernal cigarette, bark out testy comments about the state of the world, and then, grabbing a biro, would scribble out in longhand an impeccable editorial. He was the most coherent socialist I ever knew, whether he was writing or speaking.
My third memory of him comes from a park in Leicester where we had gathered to confront the fascists. As always, Duncan started by addressing the strength in the opposing argument. Was it really permissible for democrats and socialists to deny free speech to the fascists? In powerful language Duncan recalled the violent intimidatory marches of Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s.
By the time he’d finished he’d proved beyond doubt that free speech for fascists leads to the crushing of freedom of those they harassed. Duncan Hallas was a great man, and our debt to him is immeasurable.
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<h2>Paul Foot et al.</h2>
<h1>Army reign of terror</h1>
<h3>(August 1971)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 21 August 1971.<br>
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), <strong>In the Heat of the Struggle</strong>, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.50-1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><strong>Special analysis by Paul Foot, Brian Trench, Jimmy Grealy and Chris Harman</strong></p>
<p class="fst">THE most savage terrorism of all, that of the British army, is on the loose in Belfast. All pretence that Northern Ireland is a democracy has been cast aside.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>No one was put on trial, let alone interned, for this indiscriminate murder. The present arrests have nothing to do with stopping violence. Leaders of both wings of the IRA have repeatedly made it clear that they are opposed to attacks on the Protestant section of the population</p>
<p>Their ‘crime’ in the eyes of the British government is that they have armed themselves to defend the lives of Catholic workers from attacks by armed Orangemen and that they want the British troops out of Ireland.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Irish people, socialists and republicans in Britain must rally to support their countrymen and comrades in the North of Ireland.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot et al.
Army reign of terror
(August 1971)
From Socialist Worker, 21 August 1971.
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.50-1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Special analysis by Paul Foot, Brian Trench, Jimmy Grealy and Chris Harman
THE most savage terrorism of all, that of the British army, is on the loose in Belfast. All pretence that Northern Ireland is a democracy has been cast aside.
Men have been imprisoned without charge or trial. Many will be held there for years. The few who have been released tell of torture practised by the British army and the Northern Ireland police.
In the streets a score or more of people have been killed, most of them from the nationalist section of the population. Already, thousands of people are streaming in terror out of Belfast into primitive refugee camps in Southern Ireland.
The British government claims that it has had to introduce internment – imprisonment without trial – in order to ‘clear out the murderers’. The British press has backed up Heath and Maudling by continual talk of ‘terrorists’.
Most of the killing, however, has been carried out not by the IRA but by the British army and the bigoted thugs in the Orange Order.
Two years ago, the homes of working-class people in the Falls Road, Belfast, and other areas, were attacked by crazed mobs of police and armed Orangemen. A dozen or more people were killed.
Government ministers and newspaper owners in Belfast knew full well who was responsible for those murders. Official government inquiries admitted that the police were to blame.
No one was put on trial, let alone interned, for this indiscriminate murder. The present arrests have nothing to do with stopping violence. Leaders of both wings of the IRA have repeatedly made it clear that they are opposed to attacks on the Protestant section of the population
Their ‘crime’ in the eyes of the British government is that they have armed themselves to defend the lives of Catholic workers from attacks by armed Orangemen and that they want the British troops out of Ireland.
In the name of ‘peace’, violence has been deliberately provoked by Northern Ireland and Westminster governments. The 20 deaths and all which follow are directly the responsibility of Messrs Heath, Maudling and Faulkner.
The basis of the Northern Ireland state for 50 years has been religious hatred. By deliberately fostering a loathing for Catholics among the Protestant working class, the big landowners, industrialists and their British backers have clung to popular support.
Protestants have been given marginal privileges to distract them from unemployment and slum housing. They have been organised into bodies like the Orange Order, which every few years launches murderous attacks upon Catholic areas.
Two years ago the British government was forced to introduce reforms designed, it was claimed, to end discrimination against Catholics. In doing so, it undermined the foundation of rule through the Stormont regime.
The British government, however, is not prepared to see Stormont collapse without a struggle. Every gesture of opposition to reform from the right wing of the Unionist Party and the supporters of Ian Paisley, has been greeted with concessions from the British government.
The decision to intern was taken to appease the Unionist right wing, which for more than a year has placed internment top of the list of its demands upon the government.
What has been the reaction of British liberalism and the British Labour Party to this flagrant breach of the ‘traditional civil liberties’ for which, laughably, the United Kingdom is meant to stand? Unanimously, the British press has approved the decision to intern. Little or nothing has been allowed in their pages to disturb the solidarity between the press and the British troops. The facts about internment have not been sought. In the rare instances where journalists have discovered some of the truth about the internment camps, the editors have consigned their reports to the waste paper basket.
The reaction of the Labour Party has been in direct violation of everything for which the labour movement stands. Mr Harold Wilson is in the Scillies, apparendy out of contact with the worst breach of civil liberties in the UK for a hundred years. Mr. Callaghan, Labour’s Home Affairs spokesman, has described the internment as ‘a gamble’. He obviously hopes it will succeed. He has uttered not one word about the brutality, let alone the principle, of internment.
But Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and all the editors in the world cannot stop the resistance. In Northern Ireland, the resistance rules in the beleaguered areas. From five o’clock in the morning the streets are full of people determined to ensure that the ‘snatch squads’ will not surprise them again.
Irish people, socialists and republicans in Britain must rally to support their countrymen and comrades in the North of Ireland.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Can Labour bring jobs?</h1>
<h3>(18 June 1994)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1397, 18 June 1994, p.11.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>A FEW of the more learned political commentators have discovered a “crucial difference” between the candidates standing for the Labour Party leadership.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Moonshine</h4>
<p class="fst">A Labour government was elected and Thomas became Lord Privy Seal with special responsibility for the unemployed. The unemployment figures tripled in two years and Thomas, perhaps logically, joined the Tories.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The new Tory leader, Thatcher, became a champion of full employment. Then she got into office and we were back to four million unemployed.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Can Labour bring jobs?
(18 June 1994)
From Socialist Worker, No.1397, 18 June 1994, p.11.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
A FEW of the more learned political commentators have discovered a “crucial difference” between the candidates standing for the Labour Party leadership.
One candidate, John Prescott, “puts full employment at the centre of the agenda”. He wants the party to “make a commitment” to full employment, which he defines by an old 1944 standard as at least 97 percent of the workforce at work.
The other two candidates are more cautious about the figures. This should make the choice pretty easy. In all my life I have never heard a politician (or anyone else, for that matter) say that they are in favour of unemployment.
Everyone agrees that unemployment is a bad thing and should be banned. All governments would like to ban it, but it has an irritating quality of not being susceptible to bans.
Indeed there is a pattern in the politics of this century which suggests that the more anxious politicians say they are about unemployment the more it flourishes when they are in office.
This is especially true of the Labour Party. The Labour Party, since it gets its votes from the working class, has an obvious interest in preferring work and wages to dole and poverty.
In the election of 1929 every other policy was subordinated to the single specific aim of reducing unemployment. Jimmy Thomas MP, the railway union leader, was adamant that all socialistic nonsense should be rejected in favour of the practical business of getting the one million unemployed back to work.
Moonshine
A Labour government was elected and Thomas became Lord Privy Seal with special responsibility for the unemployed. The unemployment figures tripled in two years and Thomas, perhaps logically, joined the Tories.
John Prescott cites the post-war majority Labour government as the model of how unemployment can be wiped out. It was wiped out during that government but so it was for the next 13 years or so – under a Tory government.
The first substantial rise in unemployment after the war happened under a Labour government – in 1967. Then in 1972 unemployment reached a million under the Tories.
Labour was furious. It patented a slogan: “Back to work with Labour.” Under the Labour government which followed, unemployment soared to one and a half million.
The new Tory leader, Thatcher, became a champion of full employment. Then she got into office and we were back to four million unemployed.
The level of unemployment has never this century been set by the government. It has been set by the level of industrial activity, which in turn has been decided by the unelected people who own and control the means of production.
The “free market” has been left free to rise and fall as it suits its controllers. If government wants to insist on full employment, therefore, it must nationalise, control and interfere with the free market in a manner which John Prescott is not prepared even to contemplate.
Unless accompanied by a warning about the need to fight the priorities of capitalism all talk of a “commitment to full employment” is so much old fashioned moonshine.
P.S. If I had a vote, by the way, I would vote for John Prescott in preference to Blair and Beckett, certainly not for his worthless pledges on unemployment, but because as far as I know he’s the only candidate who’s ever been on strike and fought hard against an employer.
He will not refer to it, but I will. He was an excellent militant in his native Hull in the seamen’s strike of 1966.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Ireland</small><br>
Come all you young rebels</h1>
<h3>(January 2001)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.248, January 2001, p.26.<br>
Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>History is a battleground says <strong>Paul Foot</strong> – especially in Ireland</em></p>
<p class="fst">Get out your diaries for January and, if you find a lot of meetings there already, prepare your video recorders. A four part series, each part one hour long, is coming up on BBC1 and must not be missed by any socialist or Republican on either side of the Irish Sea. Called Rebel Heart and written by Ronan Bennett, its absorbing subject is the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and its aftermath all the way up to the partition of Ireland in 1922 and the civil war that followed.</p>
<p>The series doesn’t need a recommendation from me or from <strong>Socialist Review</strong>. 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 <strong>Daily Telegraph</strong> 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 <strong>Daily Telegraph</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <em>Rebel Heart</em> 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.’</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Telegraph</strong>, are not invented by Ronan Bennett. They really happened in the way the film describes.</p>
<p>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,</p>
<p>Connolly wrote a series of articles in whatever paper would publish him. In the <strong>Irish Worker</strong> 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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="fst"><em><strong>Rebel Heart</strong> is on BBC1 Sundays 9 p.m. from 14 January</em></p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Ireland
Come all you young rebels
(January 2001)
From Socialist Review, No.248, January 2001, p.26.
Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
History is a battleground says Paul Foot – especially in Ireland
Get out your diaries for January and, if you find a lot of meetings there already, prepare your video recorders. A four part series, each part one hour long, is coming up on BBC1 and must not be missed by any socialist or Republican on either side of the Irish Sea. Called Rebel Heart and written by Ronan Bennett, its absorbing subject is the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and its aftermath all the way up to the partition of Ireland in 1922 and the civil war that followed.
The series doesn’t need a recommendation from me or from Socialist Review. An irresistible accolade has already been showered on it by the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble, and his acolyte the editor of the Daily Telegraph in London, Charles Moore. David Trimble officially complained to the BBC about the series before he had even seen it. On the day of its press showing the Daily Telegraph, still masquerading as the ‘paper you can trust’, published a whole page of strident propaganda against the series and its author. In order to distinguish between what it regards as ‘fact’ (sacred) and ‘comment’ (free), Mr Moore added a leading article in which he lambasted the BBC for even contemplating a series based on what he regards as biased history. Nowhere in either piece was it disclosed that Mr Moore is himself a dedicated Ulster Unionist and a consistent campaigner for Unionist candidates in Northern Ireland. His position is absolutely clear. He is for free speech for Ulster Unionists, but utterly opposed to free speech for Republicans or indeed anyone who dares expose the ghastly history of Ulster Unionism over the whole of the 20th century.
Moore and his dwindling band of supporters can’t abide any record of what happened in Ireland in the years immediately following the Easter Rising. They like to imagine that the flame lit by Connolly, Pearse and the other leaders of that doomed but heroic revolt was extinguished forever with the British soldiers’ bullets that murdered most of them in the prison yards. Moore, Trimble and Co still go pale with fury at any mention of what happened next – the spread, like wildfire, of the spirit of revolt across the whole of Ireland culminating in 1918 in the election of Sinn Fein candidates in 73 of the 105 constituencies in all Ireland.
Ronan Bennett’s story, based on a young and fictional middle class participant in the rising, his love affair with a young sharpshooter whom he met on the Dublin barricades, and his subsequent heroics in the awakening of the west of Ireland, brings to the story a new and vital dimension: the impact of these events on Republicans in the six counties of the North. The hero’s girlfriend lives in Belfast, which at the time was still an integral part of Ireland. So the story moves between the open revolution in the south and west to the North, where Michael Collins came to be seen by most of his instinctive supporters as more of a renegade than a hero.
The series does not deal in detail with the London negotiations in which Collins and the other Irish delegates were easily persuaded by the British prime minister, Lloyd George, and his advisers to divide the island and leave the Northern six counties in the hands of the British and the Orange Order. When Collins returned from London, he ordered his best recruits in the North back to the South to help him fight for the treaty against its furious Republican opponents. The result was a civil war in which the best and toughest fighters against the British turned their guns on each other, with frightful consequences. Rebel Heart ends ironically in a fatal shootout between the hero and a Collins supporter he had recently sprung from a death sentence in a British jail. As the two comrades lie dying from their wounds, they can’t help giggling. ‘At least’, says one, ‘we died for Ireland.’
As in all the great moments of revolutionary history there is a persuasive argument on both sides, and in the personal tragedy of Ronan Bennett’s series it is hard not to sympathise with both. On the one hand are the 26 counties, two thirds of all Ireland, free at last from imperialist rule, with their own army and their own parliament. On the other hand is the beleaguered minority in the North, defenceless against the sectarian savagery of legitimised Orange rule. The horror of the latter is revealed in a dramatisation of the murders in their home of the adult male members of a Belfast Republican family by a deranged and detested police chief. These murders, despite the hysterical protests of the Daily Telegraph, are not invented by Ronan Bennett. They really happened in the way the film describes.
The argument is left in some doubt, though the script’s sympathy with the rebels against the treaty is pretty clear. It’s a pity no space could be found for the definitive answer to the problem of the North as set out in a series of scorching articles by the executed hero of the rising, James Connolly. Two years before the rising, as nationalist leaders started to flirt with partition,
Connolly wrote a series of articles in whatever paper would publish him. In the Irish Worker of 14 March 1914 he denounced partition as ‘the depth of betrayal’. His famous conclusion was that partition ‘would mean a carnival of reaction North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements while it endured’.
James Connolly could reach such devastatingly prophetic conclusions because, unlike Collins, Pearse, de Valera and all the other leaders of the rising, he was a socialist who directed his attention first and foremost to the working class. He was driven into a paroxysm of fury by the mere suggestion that the future of industrial Ulster would be handed over to the likes of David Trimble and Charles Moore.
Rebel Heart is on BBC1 Sundays 9 p.m. from 14 January
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Unemployment – The Socialist Answer</h1>
<h3>(1963)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">A <em>Labour Worker</em> Pamphlet.<br>
First published 1963 by the Labour Worker, 10 Kersland Street, Glasgow, W2.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høsbjerg, with thanks to Derek Howl.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h4><a href="#pt1">INTRODUCTION</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt1-1">The Myths</a><br>
<a href="#pt1-2">The Realities</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt2">WHY UNEMPLOYMENT</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt2-1">The Excuses</a><br>
<a href="#pt2-2">‘Demand’ and Overproduction</a><br>
<a href="#pt2-3">The Cold War Cure</a><br>
<a href="#pt2-4">The Pressure on Wages</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt3">UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE TORIES<br>
The Three Dilemmas of Mr. Maudling</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt3-1">1. Tory ‘Expansion’ and Unemployment</a><br>
<a href="#pt3-2">2. Arms Expenditure</a><br>
<a href="#pt3-3">3. Depressed Areas</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt4">UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt4-1">Labour’s Remedy</a><br>
<a href="#pt4-2">Wooing Big Business</a><br>
<a href="#pt4-3">‘Work at any Price’</a><br>
<a href="#pt4-4">The Limits of Reform</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt5">HOW TO FIGHT UNEMPLOYMENT</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#pt5-1">‘Do-it-yourself’ Demands</a><br>
<a href="#pt5-2">Five Days’ Work or Five Days’ Pay</a><br>
<a href="#pt5-3">No Sackings – Share the Work</a><br>
<a href="#pt5-4">Workers’ Control</a></h4>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<a name="pt1"></a>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<a name="pt1-1"></a>
<h4>The Myths</h4>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“A new situation has arisen which shows certain
similarities with what happened in the early 1930’s. I do not
intend to convey the idea that we must repeat the sad experiences of
those years, but I do think we shall have to take definite measures
to see that they are not repeated.”</em><br>
<strong>Mr. Per Jacobssen, director of the International Monetary Fund, 20. 2. 1963</strong></p>
<p class="fst">The director of the International Monetary Fund is not employed to
instruct workers as to their prospects in the future, nor is it his
job to comment on the best action for the world’s unemployed. He is
concerned to report to the international employing class on the
nature and progress of world capitalism. The “sad experiences” of
the 1930’s for Mr. Jacobssen were not the experiences of millions
of workers cut off from their only source of livelihood, but the
experiences of capitalists, whose profits, on the whole, were small
and whose productive capacity was seriously underemployed. Mr
Jacobssen knows quite well that the employing class will act out of
sheer desperation to avoid those experiences, and it is to desperate
action, no doubt, that he urges it to act. The capitalist, wherever
he operates, listens and understands. He knows only too well what Mr.
Jacobssen is talking about. He himself is able to observe the
accounts of his business, and to study them in the light of past
experience. And he <em>knows</em> that the next few years will be a
period of difficulty and distress. He makes no effort to question
this forecast nor to examine the causes of it. In fact, he knows very
well that investigation and question of that kind can only do him
harm. His job, then, is to hush everything up ... to get out the old,
old platitudes, dust them up a little, and present them to a cynical
apathetic public.</p>
<p>We have been asked in the past few months ‘to put our shoulders
to the belts’, ‘to tighten our wheels’, ‘to get our nose to
the wall’ and ‘our backs stuck into the grindstone’. References
have been made to Dunkirk. For the religious among us, there is the
story of the seven lean years and seven fat years, and, if that is
not enough, there is always the attraction of forty days (or months)
in the wilderness without food or drink. All this nonsense will be
spewed out during the next few months. Newspaper columnists,
television commentators, politicians from all parties, businessmen –
all will carry to the country the same unmistakeable message: “All
right. We’ve had our good times. Now’s the time for a bit of
‘consolidation’ and ‘self-sacrifice’.”<br>
</p>
<a name="pt1-2"></a>
<h4>The Realities</h4>
<p class="fst">The worker on the other hand has no interest in this mythology. He
is concerned rather with the reasons for all this sacrifice. The
shipyard in Glasgow, whose yard closed overnight; the girl bank
employee in London who got her notice because of “necessary review
of staff owing to serious difficulties in the banking business”;
the Birmingham builder whose job, once safe, now depends on the local
authority’s plans for new houses, which get less and less ambitious
every year ... these people will want to know <em>why</em>. Machines,
computers, and building techniques improve and increase every day.
The productive capacity of society stretching from the Rockies to the
Urals has doubled and re-doubled over and over again since the
beginning of the century. The worker himself produces more every
year, in less time, and yet his own condition is suddenly infinitely
worse. His weekly income is slashed five times. Furniture on hire
purchase has to be given up. Housekeeping money has to be halved.
Luxuries of any kind have ruthlessly to be abandoned. What used to be
a careful but comfortable way of life is changed overnight into a
grim struggle to keep the family alive. <em>Why?</em></p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<a name="pt2"></a>
<h3>Why Unemployment?</h3>
<a name="pt2-1"></a>
<h4>The Excuses</h4>
<p class="fst">A small factory closes. A shipyard is merged. Twenty or thirty
office workers are told that they can go elsewhere. Stories like this
are commonplace to-day. And just as commonplace are the official
reasons given by the bosses for the sackings. These have a depressing
sameness about them. Take some examples. On the 9th January 1963, the
bosses of Rolls Royce decided to put 16,000 men on short time. The
reason? “There has”, said the official statement, “been a
decline in orders in the company’s aero-engine division”. Or take
the statement of Mr. J.M. Wotherspoon, plant manager of Remington
Rand typewriter factory at Hillington Glasgow. On 8th February the
company coolly announced that 1,100 men would lose their jobs the
following week. Mr. Wotherspoon’s statement of explanation must
have brought great comfort to the workers. “For months” he said
“we have been overproducing, hoping the typewriter market would
improve. It hasn’t. In fact, there has been a slump in overseas
orders for typewriters and sets of parts. We had to do this to
protect the continued operation of the factory”. The same reasons
had been put before 1,200 French workers at Lyons a month earlier
when Remington closed a large typewriter factory there.</p>
<p>What a relief such statement must be to the redundant workers!
Those long, drab mornings at the Labour Exchange will no doubt be
cheered by the thought that the reasons for the sackings were good
ones, that, after all, demand had slumped; that, after all, the Rolls
Royce bosses and Mr. Wotherspoon are still in work.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt2-2"></a>
<h4>‘Demand’ and Overproduction</h4>
<p class="fst">Let us look a little closer at these excuses: “fall in orders”,
“slackening demand”, “overproduction”. Perhaps it means that
no one wants any more aeroplanes or typewriters. Perhaps the world is
so saturated with these (and other) commodities that mankind can now
do without for a period. Possibly there are enough aeroplanes for
everyone to travel wherever they wish, enough typewriters to supply
everyone who wants one. To find out, we could ask the 15,000
aero-workers at Rolls Royce how often they have travelled on an
aeroplane. We could ask the 1,100 Remington workers whether they are
all perfectly satisfied with their typewriters.</p>
<p>The fact is, of course, that there is still a desperate need for
both these commodities. Only a tiny percentage of the world
population have travelled on an aircraft, and very very few own
typewriters. The simple fact is that the average worker can’t
<em>afford</em> a typewriter or a trip in an aeroplane. His wages are
simply not enough for him to contemplate either. The “markets”
and the “orders” which the bosses talk about have nothing
whatever to do with what people want. They refer only to what people
can afford.</p>
<p>“Afford” – what does this mean? To millions and millions of
workers it means the size of the wage packet – the small brown
package he gets each week in return for producing the aeroplane or
the typewriter or whatever else he does. The value of that packet is
not the same as the value of what he has produced.</p>
<p>For the boss has snaffled a proportion of it – as surplus value
– as profit. When we think of the fact that the vast majority of
people are workers, and that they only get paid a proportion of the
wealth they produce, we can immediately see the problem which the
boss class must face: <em>“who is to buy the goods”?</em></p>
<p>Of course the boss class themselves can buy a certain amount of
goods. Mr. Roy Thompson can charter an aeroplane to go and see Mr.
Khruschev one weekend. Lord Robens in fact can actually buy an
aeroplane. But the bosses cannot possibly absorb more than a tiny
proportion of the mass of goods produced.</p>
<p>There is only one alternative. To sell the goods to the worker.
But the profit which the boss must make is not realised until he
sells his goods at a price. The price must be enough to allow him to
pay his workers and get the profit. In other words, the workers’
wages are too low to buy back the goods which they produce. That is
an essential characteristic of the capitalist system. It means that
from time to time the capitalist cannot sell his goods. Like Mr.
Wotherspoon and Mr. Rolls Royce he shuts up shop, pays his workers
off or puts them on short time.</p>
<p>But why from time to time? If the system was as shaky as that, you
might expect it to be in a state of permanent crisis – as it was in
the thirties. The point is that he crisis would only be permanent if
all workers were employed on “consumer” goods, which they would
be expected to buy. Of course, that is not the case. Workers are
employed on making heavy machinery, which they do not buy. Others
waste their time in advertising or in journalism or in dead-end
office work which contributes precisely nothing to the production of
things which are necessary or desirable. As investment in machinery
and factory-building goes up, more and more workers are employed in
this field. More and more wages which they can spend on consumer
goods, thus for a time alleviating the problem of overproduction. But
one fine day the factory is completed. The workers who built it and
installed the machinery are then laid off. As there is a tendency for
many employers to invest and start building at about the same time -
the beginning of a boom –the completion of the jobs also occur at
about the same time and large numbers of workers are thus made
redundant – the beginning of a slump. Then there is more productive
capacity for a smaller market. The problem starts over again.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt2-3"></a>
<h4>The Cold War Cure</h4>
<p class="fst">Why then has there not been mass unemployment, no slump, since
1939? The answer is that the ruling class has resorted in desperation
to the panacea which has solved so many of its problem the past ... <em>war</em>.</p>
<p>War means the employment of vast numbers of workers on producing
absolutely nothing for personal consumption. They produce for
destruction and savagery. Tanks, guns, warships and so on are turned
out by the million. Workers are paid for doing it, and the problem of
overproduction simply does not arise. The fact that millions of
workers are slaughtering each other under phoney and meaningless
banners is, of course, of no consequence to the capitalist class.</p>
<p>Since the Korean war, the ruling classes of the world have worked
a new system – <em>war in peacetime</em>. This is sometimes known as
‘The Cold War’, or ‘Peaceful Co-Existence’ or ‘The Balance
of Power’. One thing is clear. It has nothing whatever to do with
the workers. The bosses on one side of the Iron Curtain call down
threats and counter-threats on the heads of the bosses on the other
side. Workers may be impressed by the nature of the calumnies. But
whether in Russia or in America they are being exploited just the same.</p>
<p>War in peacetime means that an enormous hunk of what we produce
every year – 7% in Britain; 10% in America; even more in Russia –
is diverted into armaments – some of them so hideous that no one
even dares to contemplate what would happen if they were used.
Hundreds of thousands of workers are paid to produce these weapons,
or to join the army etc. etc. The money they are paid opens up new
markets in which the consumer goods industries can sell their produce.</p>
<p>International capitalism has – for the time being – solved its
problems by using its productive capacity, which could produce a
better and more satisfying life for thousands upon thousands of us,
to manufacture the ugliest, most disgusting and most utterly useless
products in the whole of human history.</p>
<p>But wait! Why is it necessary for them to produce armaments?<br>
</p>
<a name="pt2-4"></a>
<h4>The Pressure on Wages</h4>
<p class="fst">Why can they not use some of their profits to raise wages? This
would create the markets in which to sell their consumer goods, and
all capacity would be used on things which people <strong>need. </strong>Certainly
it would. But one of the most charming characteristics of the
capitalist class is that they are always at each other’s throats.
One boss’s success is another’s failure. The forces of capitalism
are concentrating into huge monopoly blocks (sometimes, as in Russia,
a whole nation’s enterprise is one single state capitalist bloc),
but the competition intensifies. It becomes more and more vicious,
more and more regardless of workers’ interests. This competition
forces the boss to <em>accumulate</em> the surplus wealth he extracts
from the worker. The greatest problem for every boss – the one
which keeps him awake at nights – is the question: “Have I enough
capital accumulated?’’ For if the answer is “no”, then the
competitor down the road or across the seas will invest more, produce
cheaper goods, and undersell him in the markets. It is his instinct
of self-preservation which forces him to <em>accumulate as a top
priority</em>. If he is to survive, <em>nothing else matters</em> but
accumulation of wealth from the exploited workers. That is why
Anthony Wotherspoon expresses “sadness” at having to sack
workers, he does it nevertheless – because the loss of orders is
damaging the level of accumulation in Remington Rand. The slogan of
capitalism is now the same as it always has been. “We must
accumulate. The workers, their needs, their wants, their families and
their aspirations can go to hell (or heaven) provided we accumulate.”</p>
<p>And, of course, there is only one major item in his accounts which
the individual capitalist can alter – his wage bill. The
never-ending drive to accumulate forces him for ever to keep his
wages in check. And as the rate of profit (that is, the amount of
profit made for the amount invested) goes down and down so there have
to be ‘wage pauses’ and ‘guiding lights’ and the National
Incomes Commission.</p>
<p>This, then, is the terrible dilemma of the capitalist class. If
wages are low generally, then there is no market for the goods he
produces. If wages are high, he cannot accumulate enough. Whatever
“solution” he finds for one problem, in some degree, he lands
himself in the other. Either way, it means unemployment, misery among
thousands of workers ... and the most terrible waste of human
endeavour and productive forces.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<a name="pt3"></a>
<h3>Unemployment and the Tories:<br>
The Three Dilemmas of Mr. Maudling</h3>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Lord Hailsham: “I offer you faith and courage. What
more do you want?”<br>
A voice: “A f... job.”</em><br>
<strong>Public meeting of workers in Hartlepoole, Durham, Jan 29th.</strong></p>
<a name="pt3-1"></a>
<h4>1. Tory ‘Expansion’</h4>
<p class="fst">Capitalist “expansion” involves a whole series of petty fiscal
measures. A fall in bank rate here, a cut in purchase tax there, a
release of credits, and other gimmicks. The net result is to increase
demand for a period until capitalists from other nations cash in on
the expanding market, imports rise, and the national capitalist class
has to shut down again or be beaten on its home ground.</p>
<p>The pattern of unemployment in post-war Britain has been one of
regular cycles, with the graph rising and failing within narrow
limits and corresponding roughly to the “expansion” measures.
Another feature about the figures is the regular decline in the
summer as construction work and catering trades get into full swing.</p>
<p>Over the years the tendency has been for unemployment to drop less
and less as the “squeeze” is lifted. The “peaks” of the graph
have climbed higher and higher. The number of wholly unemployed, in
February 1963, was slightly more than 600,000 which is easily the
highest since the war. The previous highest, just before the last
election “boom” in 1959, was 530,000.</p>
<p>Similarly, and this really frightens the Tories, the fall in
unemployment figures as the brakes are taken off has become more and
more negligible. It looks as though the process has now reached its
logical conclusion ... that the normal methods of Tory “expansion”
<em>do not any longer have any noticeable effect on the unemployment
figures</em>. “The economy” and “production” can “grow”
and “grow”, but unemployment remains at the same rate, and even
increases! Thus the National Institute of Economic and Social
Research predict that a growth rate of 3% will see the same number of
unemployed at the end of the year. And the <strong>Financial Times</strong> –
the Internal Bulletin of the British capitalist class – of February
11th, 1963, went even further:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“When an economy starts to expand from a position of
over-capacity, is can achieve impressive increases in production
without making any substantial dent in unemployment ... it is quite
possible that a more efficient use of manpower can lead to
unemployment and production rising simultaneously”.</p>
<p class="fst">As more and more plant is manufactured, and more and more goods
pour onto the market (witness the new car factories at Halewood,
Liverpool, and Linwood, Paisley), there is greater productive
capacity <em>for the same market</em>. The capitalist dog-fight becomes
more and more vicious... and the boss’s natural reaction is to turn
to his labour force and trim it of all unnecessary and unsavoury
elements. He throws out the old and the unskilled. And he throws out
the militants. The two serious labour disputes at Dunlop, Coventry,
and Fords, Dagenham, both involved the arbitrary sacking of militant
shop stewards.</p>
<p>This is the process described so politely as “a more efficient
use of manpower” which leads “unemployment and production to rise
simultaneously”. But it puts the wretched Tory Chancellor in a
terrible dilemma. If he leaves “expansion” at the normal rate,
the unemployment figure will rise nevertheless. If he expands further
than the limit, his class will lose out to the rest of the world
capitalists who will rush in to exploit the new huge markets. Thus
inflation: thus balance of payments troubles. Mr. Maudling, who
understand the capitalist system as well as anyone else, put his
position in a brutal moment of frankness in the Commons Debate on
unemployment, December 17th, 1962.</p>
<p class="quoteb">Maudling: “A level of unemployment of 550,000 to
600,000 is too high. On the other hand, a level of unemployment half
that would lead us back into the difficulties of inflation and
balance of payments which we have seen in the past.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">Hon. Members: “Oh”.</p>
<p class="quoteb">Maudling: “I do not say that these problems are
insoluble, but it is unreal to try to pretend that we can bring the
unemployment rate down to half what it is at the moment without
running into problems”.</p>
<p class="fst">The honourable members who shouted “Oh” simply did not
understand the nature of the capitalist system.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt3-2"></a>
<h4>2. Arms Expenditure</h4>
<p class="fst">The Tories are saved from sudden, drastic slump by the continued
expenditure of huge resources upon armaments. But even this is no
permanent stabiliser. The technical demands of the “deterrent”
rise every year, and so, out of all proportion to what the ruling
class can afford, do the costs. Different sections of the class are
already complaining bitterly about the heavy burden of the arms bill.
Why, after all, could they not exploit the consumer boom with the
extra profits?</p>
<p>Keeping the “deterrent”, then, means not only infuriating many
of the bosses who produce consumer goods, but also spending so much
of the national product on armaments that huge gaps are left in
investment in consumer goods industries, which can be promptly filled
by competitors from abroad. Cutting the arms bill, on the other hand,
may mean the end of the “deterrent”, but also thins out the extra
markets of the armaments workers. Poor Mr. Maudling is trapped again.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt3-3"></a>
<h4>3. Depressed Areas</h4>
<p class="fst">President Kennedy in his “state of the nation” speech last
year referred to heavy unemployment in some regions as the second
most important problem facing the administration. In Britain, where
capitalism is oldest, the problem is intense. Northern Ireland at
present has 11.2% unemployed, while productivity in that hard-hit
area has been rising for the past two years twice as fast as anywhere
else in the United Kingdom! In Scotland the figure is 6.2%, the North
of England 7%, Wales 6%. The average for Britain as a whole is 3.2%,
and in the largest area, London and the South East, the figure is a
mere 2.3% (the highest for years). Ever since the Local Employment
Act, 1960, the Tories have strained British capitalism almost to the
limit in an attempt to heal these economic deformities. They have
spent more than £75,000,000 in inducements to individual capitalists
who have set up shop in development districts. Here and there they
have succeeded. But the general picture is one of total failure.
Scotland has received the lion’s share of the money (£43,000,000).
Yet unemployment in Scotland has risen steadily since the act was
passed, as has the steady stream of unemployed Scots crossing the
Border to find work elsewhere.</p>
<p>Here, then, is Mr. Maudling’s third dilemma. For the economies
in the depressed areas are so dependent on heavy, declining industry
that the degree of “reflation” needed to get them growing again
is about twice or even three times that which the already expanding
areas like London can stand. To “stimulate” in an attempt to
revive Scotland would mean chaotic inflation in the South, and
serious balance of payments problems. To keep the South in check is
to suffocate the depressed areas still further. The Tories take the
latter course, but they do not enjoy either. These then are the
problems faced by capitalism in an era of ever-expanding machinery
and automation. All of them point inevitably down the road of slow
and steady increases in unemployment, to the “boom” periods
coming less and less often, to the “depression” periods becoming
more and more disastrous. The Tories will pin their faith in keeping
enough workers in “prosperity” to win the elections. This
optimistic notion, as well as the entire tragicomedy of dilemmas,
could be laughed to scorn by the workers ... if, and only if, the
Labour movement had something better to offer them. But has it?</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<a name="pt4"></a>
<h3>Unemployment and the Labour Movement</h3>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The Government has therefore decided to express the
full employment standard of the United Kingdom at a level of 3% at
the seasonal peak.”</em><br>
<strong>Hugh Gaitskell, Chancellor of Exchequer, March 22nd 1951.</strong></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“I beg to move: “That this House expresses its
deep concern at the rise in unemployment figures to 814,000 (3.2%) ...</em><br>
<em>“It is both a tragedy and a scandal that this
House, in 1963, should again have to debate heavy unemployment ...”</em><br>
<strong>Douglas Jay, Opposition front Bench, February 4th 1963.</strong></p>
<a name="pt4-1"></a>
<h4>Labour’s Remedy</h4>
<p class="fst">Hans Christian Andersen has an excellent fairy story about a King
who bought a “magic” suit of clothes from a couple of fraudulent
tailors. The suit of clothes did not in fact exist, but the “magic”
about it was that it was invisible to fools.</p>
<p>The King, the Queen and all the courtiers and hangers-on agreed
that the suit of clothes was the most magnificent thing that they had
ever seen. It was unanimously decided that it should be worn on the
next royal parade.</p>
<p>The masses, too, had been informed about the magic suit, and they
did not want to appear fools either. So they all cheered and cheered
as the King, surrounded by artillery, cavalry and infantry, was
carried through the centre of the town in shining, innocent nudity.</p>
<p>Just so do Mr. Wilson, Mr. Callaghan, Mr. Woodcock and Mr.
Cousins, flanked by the armoury of 13 million votes, sport themselves
before an ever-increasing body of apathetic supporters clothed in
“magic” remedies for unemployment.</p>
<p>The central panacea of the Labour leadership is the direction of
industry to the depressed areas.</p>
<p>All past experience proves how futile such policies are.</p>
<p>Way back in 1935 the Government introduced a lukewarm and totally
ineffective Special Areas Act to try to “channel” industry from
the South to Scotland and other “depressed” areas. In 1938 the
Barlow Commission recommended stringent Government control of
industrial development in the South. In 1945 the Coalition Government
introduced the Distribution of Industry Act – which was to become
the foundation of Labour’s policy toward location of industry. The
Act granted special powers to the Government and local authorities to
develop land and industry in certain specified areas (which included
huge chunks of Scotland) in order to entice private industry to
expand in these areas. There were also other inducements – such as
low rents, and building grants, and lump sums to cover the loss
suffered by the move North.</p>
<p>The <em>Town and Country Planning Act, 1947</em>, gave the Government
powers to control industrial development by refusing industrial
development certificates to firms wishing to set up shop or expand in
the congested area.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt4-2"></a>
<h4>Wooing Big Business</h4>
<p class="fst">How well did the two Governments – Labour and Tory – succeed
with these powers at their command? If we take the amount of
industrial building it looks at first sight as if the Labour
Government succeeded in channelling industry to the development
areas. Between 1945 and 1951 30% of all British industrial building
took place in the development areas. Between 1952 and 1958 the figure
slumped to 18.8%. But a closer look shows a different picture.
Between 1945 and 1948 44% of all building was in the development
areas (20% in Scotland). In the three years 1949 to 1951 the figure
went down to 18.9% – almost exactly the same figure as was
maintained in the following seven years under the Tories!</p>
<p>The point was that immediately after the war, when a great many
firms were starting again from scratch (this is particularly true of
a large number of firms from the USA) – private enterprise was
relatively susceptible to “steering” under the Distribution of
Industry Act, and a “tough” industrial development certificate
policy. But from 1948 – with capitalism gaining confidence and
building more extensions to existing plant, resistance to Government
powers increased, and private firms began their accustomed
conglomeration near their big markets – in the South.</p>
<p>Between 1948 and 1962 both Labour and the Tories failed to shift
private enterprise from its firm resolve to stay and expand in the
South. Yet Labour’s case remains today the same as it has been for
the last ten years – Labour would use the existing powers with
greater effect than did the Tories.</p>
<p>Against this background of legislation to solve the problem of
unemployment (all of which has failed dismally) we can take a better
look at the solutions at present offered by the various parties and
trade union bodies. First there is a policy of “negative direction”
of industry – or the refusing of industrial development
certificates, where possible, to firms wishing to develop in the
South. This policy is backed by generous -“inducements” to firms
to move into the development areas (low rents, building grants etc.).
This is the broad policy of the Tory Party, the Labour Party and the
Liberal Party. There are three main reasons why it is totally
inadequate and worthless.</p>
<p>The first, as I have shown, is that it has failed. If
industrialists are refused permission to expand where they want to,
<em>they will not expand at all</em> (cf. Mr. R. Maudling, then
President of the Board of Trade, November 9th 1959: “There is
always the possibility that firms prevented from setting up in areas
of their own choice will decide not to expand at all – but to do
nothing”).</p>
<p>The second is that where it does succeed, there is no permanancy
in the industry which develops in the areas. The factories which have
gone to Scotland are branch factories and “bits and pieces”.</p>
<p>The branch factories are always the first to close in times of
recession, always the first to pay off workers, or put them on short
time. They are always the last in the queue for heavy investment and
modernisation. The “bits and pieces” are wholly unstable, and
provide not even a semblance of a basis for industrial prosperity.</p>
<p>Thirdly, there is the trend of British capitalism towards Europe.
The industrialist who is refused permission to build in Birmingham,
Coventry or London will not turn to Liverpool or Glasgow. He will
turn to Hamburg, Rotterdam and Paris. It’s important to remember in
this era of European “internationalism” that our Government’s
control of private industry is strictly limited by national
boundaries. Capitalism is as international as ever.</p>
<p>But lastly, and most important, this policy leaves the initiative
to private enterprise. It is a policy of wait and see. The idea
behind it is that the Government should not act until private
enterprise acts. Then, of course, it is to act “toughly” with a
few expensive bribes thrown in. There is no real plan behind the
policy. No one is to sit down and decide what type of industry is
best in Scotland. The initiative lies, as always in the hands of Big
Business and Profit. That is why the policy has been, and always will
be, utterly futile.</p>
<p>Why not admit right away that private enterprise – because of
the historical development in Britain – cannot successfully move to
the North. Why not admit right away that the only answer is public
enterprise under workers’ control?</p>
<p>Not public enterprise alone – as the sacking of miners and
railwaymen by nationalised industries bears witness to, but public
enterprise <em>under worker’s control</em>.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt4-3"></a>
<h4>‘<strong>Work at Any Price’</strong></h4>
<p class="fst">The policy of the Labour Party leaders aims to tinker with
capitalism, not abolish it. Petty tinkering with administrative
details is always the prerogative of fashionable Labour economists.</p>
<p>But they do not even start to provide an answer to the essential
contradictions of the capitalist system. Nor do they anywhere
threaten the continued existence of class society in all its most
ruthless forms.</p>
<p>In fact, the official Labour Party policy statement has some
interesting things to say about class rule in industry:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“With certain honourable exceptions, our finance and
industry need a major shake-up at the top. Too many directors owe
their position to family, school or political connections. If the
dead wood were cut out of Britain’s boardrooms and replaced by the
keen young executives, production engineers and scientists who are at
present denied their legitimate prospects of promotion, our
production and export problems would be more manageable.”
(<strong>Signposts for the Sixties</strong>, p. 10)</p>
<p class="fst">The important struggle, in other words, is for better and brighter
bosses. Our boardrooms will be plastered with the new slogan of the
Left: “Etonians keep out! Only Winchester and Manchester Grammar
School can give the correct training these days!” Nor is the
perspective of the Trade Union movement any clearer. Most of the
“solutions” from that quarter have been for “expansion” along
conventional capitalist lines. In some instances the leadership has
resorted to the most appalling remedies. “Jobs For Scotland” –
a “campaign” conducted by the Scottish TUC to attract more jobs
to Scotland was divorced completely from the rank and file.
“Direction of industry” to Scotland, with all its narrow
chauvinistic implications, was the central theme. This sort of zany
nationalism, which has nothing to do with socialism, reached its
logical conclusion in a frantic letter written by Mr. John McWillian,
Labour convener of Fife County Council, to Sir Patrick Henessey,
managing director of Fords in Britain. “Why not bring your
Liverpool factory to Fife” was the theme of the letter. “We won’t
go on strike up here”. This deliberate class-collaboration merely
delights the capitalists and serves to prolong the insecurity of the
workers.</p>
<p>To solve the problem of unemployment in the shipyards the STUC
propose a “scrap and build” policy for Britain’s navy. In the
1930’s the unemployed Fenians in the South Side of Glasgow
discussed an idea to blow up the power station to create more work.
The idea was dismissed when someone pointed out that the ruling class
would simply leave them in darkness! No less stupid is the idea of
the STUC. Unnecessary, futile and extremely pernicious work, like the
building of a Polaris submarine, should be boycotted completely by
the workers and their representatives.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt4-4"></a>
<h4>The Limits of Reform</h4>
<p class="fst">And so the miserable story goes on and on. Demands for petty,
administrative reform. Demands for the restoration of national
prestige. Demands for “work for work’s sake”, for the
construction of the most horrible weapons of war... irrelevant,
idiotic demands made without thought or consideration and
intermingled with all the flatulent pomposity, petty wit and sterile
academics which are the peculiar characteristics of the latter-day
working class representative.</p>
<p>Creeping unemployment is not the result of “evil” men in
power, or of “the tired, old men on the Tory benches”. The young,
active and no doubt super-virile President Kennedy with all the best
intensions in the world can do nothing to stop it. Nor is it the
result of administrative muddles in Whitehall, or of an overdose of
Anglophilia at the expense of the Scots.</p>
<p>The reason is that we live in a class society, in which the
productive forces cannot be used to satisfy the needs and desires of
the workers. The competitive rat-race of capitalism meant, in the
thirties, that huge numbers of men and machinery were redundant,
useless, to be thrown aside. To-day it means that hundreds of
thousands of men and millions of pounds worth of machinery are
employed in creating worthless weapons, which can only be used for
the destruction of mankind. And even with the drastic measures,
unemployment is beginning to grow again.</p>
<table width="60%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" align="center" border="6">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">This is the system which the fashionable Labour intellectuals
would have us accept, and reform. But unemployment rises
relentlessly, the prophets of permanent affluence are paying the
penalty for ten years of class collaboration, ten years without
theory, without propaganda, without thought. The cold wind from
the North whips away the scanty tatters of reformism, exposing the
awe-inspiring nakedness of the entire Labour leadership.</p>
<p>Capitalism cannot be reformed out of overproduction and a
falling rate of profit. It cannot use the productive force which
it has so ingeniously developed to produce what people need and
want. As long as capitalism continues, the threat of unemployment
hangs over the head of every worker. It is the job of the Labour
movement, while fighting the day to day struggle with all the
militancy at its command, to expose the flaws and frauds of
capitalism and call for its replacement.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<a name="pt5"></a>
<h3>How to Fight Unemployment</h3>
<a name="pt5-1"></a>
<h4>‘Do It Yourself’ Demands</h4>
<p class="fst">How to fight unemployment? But, first of all, who is to do the
fighting? The capitalist class will never give way before an elite of
bureaucrats or professional revolutionaries. It will convert them or
smash them. Nor can the workers look to the capitalist State to solve
their problems for them. The State is only an instrument of the
ruling class. It simply serves as a convenient instrument to pool the
resources of individual capitalist, and do their dirty work for them.
Transport is run for the business man by the State; so is coal,
electricity, gas, water and so on. Recently the Tories have all but
“nationalised” the ports, to the hysterical cheers of the Labour
Party. Nor did the Tories object to the nationalisation of coal and
railways by Labour. It’s perfectly possible that there won’t be
any serious objection to the nationalisation of steel (except of
course by the steel bosses). Nationalisation by the State has nothing
to do with the workers. It simply means that the enterprise is run
more efficiently, the workers exploited more clinically in the
interests of the ruling class.</p>
<p>Nor can the worker expect to sit in his house and leave it to his
representatives. <em>The more he sits at home, the less are they his
representatives.</em> If there is no pressure from below, the trade
union official, the Member of Parliament, the local councillor become
absorbed and fascinated with bureaucracy, charmed and delighted with
petty power. Very soon he will put away all thought of the people he
represents and continue on his irrelevant road to nowhere.</p>
<p><em>The slogan for the workers must be “Do it Yourself”.</em> At
every twist and turn in the industrial struggle, challenge the
bosses’ right to hire and fire, challenge his right to run the
workers’ lives. But, through the Labour Party, through the trade
unions, and on the factory floor <em>do it yourself</em>.</p>
<p>What to do? To oppose the bosses at the points where their case is
weakest, and to expose the absurdity of class society with every
demand and complaint.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt5-2"></a>
<h4>Five Days Work or Five Days Pay</h4>
<p class="fst">The most immediate and obvious effect of unemployment is the fall
in living standards of the unemployed. Suddenly, through no fault of
his own, although he is prepared to work five days a week, he is
told: “You are no longer any use. Go away.” And his living
standards are cut by five times.</p>
<p>Workers, both employed and unemployed, should demand that the boss
who sacks his workers would continue to pay them full rates of pay
until he can offer them work again. A sacked worker is much more
important than a shareholder. Let him be entitled to at least the
same sort of benefits.</p>
<p>Side by side with this demand, it is vital continually to oppose
all unnecessary work. If the unemployed get full maintenance, it is
easier for miners in Fife to oppose a coal-fired power station, when
an oil-fired station is cheaper and easier for all concerned; it is
easier, too, for shipyard and chemical workers to refuse to waste
their time in the construction of weapons of war.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt5-3"></a>
<h4>No Sackings – Share the Work</h4>
<p class="fst">When the boss finds that through a drop in orders or a new
machine, he wants to cut his labour force, the workers should demand
that not a single sacking takes place. Instead the available works
should be shared out between the existing labour force, <em>without
loss of pay</em>. If ten men can do the work in four days, why not
twenty men in two days? The work is done just the same, and all the
men are happier.</p>
<p>However, the strength of trade union organisation varies
tremendously from industry to industry, and from factory to factory.</p>
<p>Probably, at present, in most industries such demands cannot be
won. What then?</p>
<p>If the fight for 5 days’ work or 5 days’ pay is lost, we must
fight for demands on a sliding scale:</p>
<ol>
<li>Shorter working week (i.e., four days) with loss of pay.</li>
<li>Retraining of personnel to take other jobs within the
establishment.</li>
<li>In the event of redundancy having to be accepted, an
attempt to keep redundant workers on the payroll of the firm until
suitable alternative work has been found outside.</li>
<li>In the event of failure compensation payments whilst
looking for alternative work, plus severance pay.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">Severance pay should come as a last resort when all else fails,
and on terms dictated by the workers not the boss; and not accepted
at the first opportunity as a sort of leaving present from the boss,
which has been the attitude of many union leaders.</p>
<p>To the demand for a 35-hour week or a 7-hour day the bosses always
have some reason for saying it is impossible. In those balmy days of
“full” employment the answer was “No, there’s a shortage of
labour.” Today, they say “No, we can’t afford it – increased
labour costs,” etc. Both ways the workers lose out.</p>
<p>Our answer must be clear. “We, the workers ‘can’t afford’
unemployment!!! It is your profits and your capitalist system which
prevents a 35-hour, 30-hour or an even shorter week.”</p>
<p>At the same time we must stand firm on the question of overtime.
We must say: “Whilst our fellow-workers are on the dole will not
work overtime for you.” By banning overtime we force the boss to
take on more workers from the dole queue.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt5-4"></a>
<h4>Workers’ Control</h4>
<p class="fst">These demands raise the question of workers’ status. They assume
that the worker can run his own life, can indeed run his own
industry, and that he is much more entitled to benefits from industry
than the shareholder of the boss himself. When put to the boss they
do not allow him to bluff with statistics or Parliamentary manoeuvre.
They force him openly to defend his system. These demands clear away
the debris of clichés about “faith and courage”, about “two
world wars” about “national prestige” and “making Britain
great”. They expose the hard core of capitalist society ... the
struggle between the classes.</p>
<p>All the time this struggle is going on. And wherever the issue is
boss against worker, the worker must be supported. Every wage claim,
every strike in workers’ interests must be supported, every sacking
bitterly opposed. Yet all this is useless unless, somewhere, the idea
of socialism begins to take root among the workers.</p>
<p>For socialism, workers’ control of all industry, agriculture and
services, is the only real hope for the end of unemployment.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Unemployment – The Socialist Answer
(1963)
A Labour Worker Pamphlet.
First published 1963 by the Labour Worker, 10 Kersland Street, Glasgow, W2.
Transcribed by Christian Høsbjerg, with thanks to Derek Howl.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
INTRODUCTION
The Myths
The Realities
WHY UNEMPLOYMENT
The Excuses
‘Demand’ and Overproduction
The Cold War Cure
The Pressure on Wages
UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE TORIES
The Three Dilemmas of Mr. Maudling
1. Tory ‘Expansion’ and Unemployment
2. Arms Expenditure
3. Depressed Areas
UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
Labour’s Remedy
Wooing Big Business
‘Work at any Price’
The Limits of Reform
HOW TO FIGHT UNEMPLOYMENT
‘Do-it-yourself’ Demands
Five Days’ Work or Five Days’ Pay
No Sackings – Share the Work
Workers’ Control
Introduction
The Myths
“A new situation has arisen which shows certain
similarities with what happened in the early 1930’s. I do not
intend to convey the idea that we must repeat the sad experiences of
those years, but I do think we shall have to take definite measures
to see that they are not repeated.”
Mr. Per Jacobssen, director of the International Monetary Fund, 20. 2. 1963
The director of the International Monetary Fund is not employed to
instruct workers as to their prospects in the future, nor is it his
job to comment on the best action for the world’s unemployed. He is
concerned to report to the international employing class on the
nature and progress of world capitalism. The “sad experiences” of
the 1930’s for Mr. Jacobssen were not the experiences of millions
of workers cut off from their only source of livelihood, but the
experiences of capitalists, whose profits, on the whole, were small
and whose productive capacity was seriously underemployed. Mr
Jacobssen knows quite well that the employing class will act out of
sheer desperation to avoid those experiences, and it is to desperate
action, no doubt, that he urges it to act. The capitalist, wherever
he operates, listens and understands. He knows only too well what Mr.
Jacobssen is talking about. He himself is able to observe the
accounts of his business, and to study them in the light of past
experience. And he knows that the next few years will be a
period of difficulty and distress. He makes no effort to question
this forecast nor to examine the causes of it. In fact, he knows very
well that investigation and question of that kind can only do him
harm. His job, then, is to hush everything up ... to get out the old,
old platitudes, dust them up a little, and present them to a cynical
apathetic public.
We have been asked in the past few months ‘to put our shoulders
to the belts’, ‘to tighten our wheels’, ‘to get our nose to
the wall’ and ‘our backs stuck into the grindstone’. References
have been made to Dunkirk. For the religious among us, there is the
story of the seven lean years and seven fat years, and, if that is
not enough, there is always the attraction of forty days (or months)
in the wilderness without food or drink. All this nonsense will be
spewed out during the next few months. Newspaper columnists,
television commentators, politicians from all parties, businessmen –
all will carry to the country the same unmistakeable message: “All
right. We’ve had our good times. Now’s the time for a bit of
‘consolidation’ and ‘self-sacrifice’.”
The Realities
The worker on the other hand has no interest in this mythology. He
is concerned rather with the reasons for all this sacrifice. The
shipyard in Glasgow, whose yard closed overnight; the girl bank
employee in London who got her notice because of “necessary review
of staff owing to serious difficulties in the banking business”;
the Birmingham builder whose job, once safe, now depends on the local
authority’s plans for new houses, which get less and less ambitious
every year ... these people will want to know why. Machines,
computers, and building techniques improve and increase every day.
The productive capacity of society stretching from the Rockies to the
Urals has doubled and re-doubled over and over again since the
beginning of the century. The worker himself produces more every
year, in less time, and yet his own condition is suddenly infinitely
worse. His weekly income is slashed five times. Furniture on hire
purchase has to be given up. Housekeeping money has to be halved.
Luxuries of any kind have ruthlessly to be abandoned. What used to be
a careful but comfortable way of life is changed overnight into a
grim struggle to keep the family alive. Why?
Why Unemployment?
The Excuses
A small factory closes. A shipyard is merged. Twenty or thirty
office workers are told that they can go elsewhere. Stories like this
are commonplace to-day. And just as commonplace are the official
reasons given by the bosses for the sackings. These have a depressing
sameness about them. Take some examples. On the 9th January 1963, the
bosses of Rolls Royce decided to put 16,000 men on short time. The
reason? “There has”, said the official statement, “been a
decline in orders in the company’s aero-engine division”. Or take
the statement of Mr. J.M. Wotherspoon, plant manager of Remington
Rand typewriter factory at Hillington Glasgow. On 8th February the
company coolly announced that 1,100 men would lose their jobs the
following week. Mr. Wotherspoon’s statement of explanation must
have brought great comfort to the workers. “For months” he said
“we have been overproducing, hoping the typewriter market would
improve. It hasn’t. In fact, there has been a slump in overseas
orders for typewriters and sets of parts. We had to do this to
protect the continued operation of the factory”. The same reasons
had been put before 1,200 French workers at Lyons a month earlier
when Remington closed a large typewriter factory there.
What a relief such statement must be to the redundant workers!
Those long, drab mornings at the Labour Exchange will no doubt be
cheered by the thought that the reasons for the sackings were good
ones, that, after all, demand had slumped; that, after all, the Rolls
Royce bosses and Mr. Wotherspoon are still in work.
‘Demand’ and Overproduction
Let us look a little closer at these excuses: “fall in orders”,
“slackening demand”, “overproduction”. Perhaps it means that
no one wants any more aeroplanes or typewriters. Perhaps the world is
so saturated with these (and other) commodities that mankind can now
do without for a period. Possibly there are enough aeroplanes for
everyone to travel wherever they wish, enough typewriters to supply
everyone who wants one. To find out, we could ask the 15,000
aero-workers at Rolls Royce how often they have travelled on an
aeroplane. We could ask the 1,100 Remington workers whether they are
all perfectly satisfied with their typewriters.
The fact is, of course, that there is still a desperate need for
both these commodities. Only a tiny percentage of the world
population have travelled on an aircraft, and very very few own
typewriters. The simple fact is that the average worker can’t
afford a typewriter or a trip in an aeroplane. His wages are
simply not enough for him to contemplate either. The “markets”
and the “orders” which the bosses talk about have nothing
whatever to do with what people want. They refer only to what people
can afford.
“Afford” – what does this mean? To millions and millions of
workers it means the size of the wage packet – the small brown
package he gets each week in return for producing the aeroplane or
the typewriter or whatever else he does. The value of that packet is
not the same as the value of what he has produced.
For the boss has snaffled a proportion of it – as surplus value
– as profit. When we think of the fact that the vast majority of
people are workers, and that they only get paid a proportion of the
wealth they produce, we can immediately see the problem which the
boss class must face: “who is to buy the goods”?
Of course the boss class themselves can buy a certain amount of
goods. Mr. Roy Thompson can charter an aeroplane to go and see Mr.
Khruschev one weekend. Lord Robens in fact can actually buy an
aeroplane. But the bosses cannot possibly absorb more than a tiny
proportion of the mass of goods produced.
There is only one alternative. To sell the goods to the worker.
But the profit which the boss must make is not realised until he
sells his goods at a price. The price must be enough to allow him to
pay his workers and get the profit. In other words, the workers’
wages are too low to buy back the goods which they produce. That is
an essential characteristic of the capitalist system. It means that
from time to time the capitalist cannot sell his goods. Like Mr.
Wotherspoon and Mr. Rolls Royce he shuts up shop, pays his workers
off or puts them on short time.
But why from time to time? If the system was as shaky as that, you
might expect it to be in a state of permanent crisis – as it was in
the thirties. The point is that he crisis would only be permanent if
all workers were employed on “consumer” goods, which they would
be expected to buy. Of course, that is not the case. Workers are
employed on making heavy machinery, which they do not buy. Others
waste their time in advertising or in journalism or in dead-end
office work which contributes precisely nothing to the production of
things which are necessary or desirable. As investment in machinery
and factory-building goes up, more and more workers are employed in
this field. More and more wages which they can spend on consumer
goods, thus for a time alleviating the problem of overproduction. But
one fine day the factory is completed. The workers who built it and
installed the machinery are then laid off. As there is a tendency for
many employers to invest and start building at about the same time -
the beginning of a boom –the completion of the jobs also occur at
about the same time and large numbers of workers are thus made
redundant – the beginning of a slump. Then there is more productive
capacity for a smaller market. The problem starts over again.
The Cold War Cure
Why then has there not been mass unemployment, no slump, since
1939? The answer is that the ruling class has resorted in desperation
to the panacea which has solved so many of its problem the past ... war.
War means the employment of vast numbers of workers on producing
absolutely nothing for personal consumption. They produce for
destruction and savagery. Tanks, guns, warships and so on are turned
out by the million. Workers are paid for doing it, and the problem of
overproduction simply does not arise. The fact that millions of
workers are slaughtering each other under phoney and meaningless
banners is, of course, of no consequence to the capitalist class.
Since the Korean war, the ruling classes of the world have worked
a new system – war in peacetime. This is sometimes known as
‘The Cold War’, or ‘Peaceful Co-Existence’ or ‘The Balance
of Power’. One thing is clear. It has nothing whatever to do with
the workers. The bosses on one side of the Iron Curtain call down
threats and counter-threats on the heads of the bosses on the other
side. Workers may be impressed by the nature of the calumnies. But
whether in Russia or in America they are being exploited just the same.
War in peacetime means that an enormous hunk of what we produce
every year – 7% in Britain; 10% in America; even more in Russia –
is diverted into armaments – some of them so hideous that no one
even dares to contemplate what would happen if they were used.
Hundreds of thousands of workers are paid to produce these weapons,
or to join the army etc. etc. The money they are paid opens up new
markets in which the consumer goods industries can sell their produce.
International capitalism has – for the time being – solved its
problems by using its productive capacity, which could produce a
better and more satisfying life for thousands upon thousands of us,
to manufacture the ugliest, most disgusting and most utterly useless
products in the whole of human history.
But wait! Why is it necessary for them to produce armaments?
The Pressure on Wages
Why can they not use some of their profits to raise wages? This
would create the markets in which to sell their consumer goods, and
all capacity would be used on things which people need. Certainly
it would. But one of the most charming characteristics of the
capitalist class is that they are always at each other’s throats.
One boss’s success is another’s failure. The forces of capitalism
are concentrating into huge monopoly blocks (sometimes, as in Russia,
a whole nation’s enterprise is one single state capitalist bloc),
but the competition intensifies. It becomes more and more vicious,
more and more regardless of workers’ interests. This competition
forces the boss to accumulate the surplus wealth he extracts
from the worker. The greatest problem for every boss – the one
which keeps him awake at nights – is the question: “Have I enough
capital accumulated?’’ For if the answer is “no”, then the
competitor down the road or across the seas will invest more, produce
cheaper goods, and undersell him in the markets. It is his instinct
of self-preservation which forces him to accumulate as a top
priority. If he is to survive, nothing else matters but
accumulation of wealth from the exploited workers. That is why
Anthony Wotherspoon expresses “sadness” at having to sack
workers, he does it nevertheless – because the loss of orders is
damaging the level of accumulation in Remington Rand. The slogan of
capitalism is now the same as it always has been. “We must
accumulate. The workers, their needs, their wants, their families and
their aspirations can go to hell (or heaven) provided we accumulate.”
And, of course, there is only one major item in his accounts which
the individual capitalist can alter – his wage bill. The
never-ending drive to accumulate forces him for ever to keep his
wages in check. And as the rate of profit (that is, the amount of
profit made for the amount invested) goes down and down so there have
to be ‘wage pauses’ and ‘guiding lights’ and the National
Incomes Commission.
This, then, is the terrible dilemma of the capitalist class. If
wages are low generally, then there is no market for the goods he
produces. If wages are high, he cannot accumulate enough. Whatever
“solution” he finds for one problem, in some degree, he lands
himself in the other. Either way, it means unemployment, misery among
thousands of workers ... and the most terrible waste of human
endeavour and productive forces.
Unemployment and the Tories:
The Three Dilemmas of Mr. Maudling
Lord Hailsham: “I offer you faith and courage. What
more do you want?”
A voice: “A f... job.”
Public meeting of workers in Hartlepoole, Durham, Jan 29th.
1. Tory ‘Expansion’
Capitalist “expansion” involves a whole series of petty fiscal
measures. A fall in bank rate here, a cut in purchase tax there, a
release of credits, and other gimmicks. The net result is to increase
demand for a period until capitalists from other nations cash in on
the expanding market, imports rise, and the national capitalist class
has to shut down again or be beaten on its home ground.
The pattern of unemployment in post-war Britain has been one of
regular cycles, with the graph rising and failing within narrow
limits and corresponding roughly to the “expansion” measures.
Another feature about the figures is the regular decline in the
summer as construction work and catering trades get into full swing.
Over the years the tendency has been for unemployment to drop less
and less as the “squeeze” is lifted. The “peaks” of the graph
have climbed higher and higher. The number of wholly unemployed, in
February 1963, was slightly more than 600,000 which is easily the
highest since the war. The previous highest, just before the last
election “boom” in 1959, was 530,000.
Similarly, and this really frightens the Tories, the fall in
unemployment figures as the brakes are taken off has become more and
more negligible. It looks as though the process has now reached its
logical conclusion ... that the normal methods of Tory “expansion”
do not any longer have any noticeable effect on the unemployment
figures. “The economy” and “production” can “grow”
and “grow”, but unemployment remains at the same rate, and even
increases! Thus the National Institute of Economic and Social
Research predict that a growth rate of 3% will see the same number of
unemployed at the end of the year. And the Financial Times –
the Internal Bulletin of the British capitalist class – of February
11th, 1963, went even further:
“When an economy starts to expand from a position of
over-capacity, is can achieve impressive increases in production
without making any substantial dent in unemployment ... it is quite
possible that a more efficient use of manpower can lead to
unemployment and production rising simultaneously”.
As more and more plant is manufactured, and more and more goods
pour onto the market (witness the new car factories at Halewood,
Liverpool, and Linwood, Paisley), there is greater productive
capacity for the same market. The capitalist dog-fight becomes
more and more vicious... and the boss’s natural reaction is to turn
to his labour force and trim it of all unnecessary and unsavoury
elements. He throws out the old and the unskilled. And he throws out
the militants. The two serious labour disputes at Dunlop, Coventry,
and Fords, Dagenham, both involved the arbitrary sacking of militant
shop stewards.
This is the process described so politely as “a more efficient
use of manpower” which leads “unemployment and production to rise
simultaneously”. But it puts the wretched Tory Chancellor in a
terrible dilemma. If he leaves “expansion” at the normal rate,
the unemployment figure will rise nevertheless. If he expands further
than the limit, his class will lose out to the rest of the world
capitalists who will rush in to exploit the new huge markets. Thus
inflation: thus balance of payments troubles. Mr. Maudling, who
understand the capitalist system as well as anyone else, put his
position in a brutal moment of frankness in the Commons Debate on
unemployment, December 17th, 1962.
Maudling: “A level of unemployment of 550,000 to
600,000 is too high. On the other hand, a level of unemployment half
that would lead us back into the difficulties of inflation and
balance of payments which we have seen in the past.”
Hon. Members: “Oh”.
Maudling: “I do not say that these problems are
insoluble, but it is unreal to try to pretend that we can bring the
unemployment rate down to half what it is at the moment without
running into problems”.
The honourable members who shouted “Oh” simply did not
understand the nature of the capitalist system.
2. Arms Expenditure
The Tories are saved from sudden, drastic slump by the continued
expenditure of huge resources upon armaments. But even this is no
permanent stabiliser. The technical demands of the “deterrent”
rise every year, and so, out of all proportion to what the ruling
class can afford, do the costs. Different sections of the class are
already complaining bitterly about the heavy burden of the arms bill.
Why, after all, could they not exploit the consumer boom with the
extra profits?
Keeping the “deterrent”, then, means not only infuriating many
of the bosses who produce consumer goods, but also spending so much
of the national product on armaments that huge gaps are left in
investment in consumer goods industries, which can be promptly filled
by competitors from abroad. Cutting the arms bill, on the other hand,
may mean the end of the “deterrent”, but also thins out the extra
markets of the armaments workers. Poor Mr. Maudling is trapped again.
3. Depressed Areas
President Kennedy in his “state of the nation” speech last
year referred to heavy unemployment in some regions as the second
most important problem facing the administration. In Britain, where
capitalism is oldest, the problem is intense. Northern Ireland at
present has 11.2% unemployed, while productivity in that hard-hit
area has been rising for the past two years twice as fast as anywhere
else in the United Kingdom! In Scotland the figure is 6.2%, the North
of England 7%, Wales 6%. The average for Britain as a whole is 3.2%,
and in the largest area, London and the South East, the figure is a
mere 2.3% (the highest for years). Ever since the Local Employment
Act, 1960, the Tories have strained British capitalism almost to the
limit in an attempt to heal these economic deformities. They have
spent more than £75,000,000 in inducements to individual capitalists
who have set up shop in development districts. Here and there they
have succeeded. But the general picture is one of total failure.
Scotland has received the lion’s share of the money (£43,000,000).
Yet unemployment in Scotland has risen steadily since the act was
passed, as has the steady stream of unemployed Scots crossing the
Border to find work elsewhere.
Here, then, is Mr. Maudling’s third dilemma. For the economies
in the depressed areas are so dependent on heavy, declining industry
that the degree of “reflation” needed to get them growing again
is about twice or even three times that which the already expanding
areas like London can stand. To “stimulate” in an attempt to
revive Scotland would mean chaotic inflation in the South, and
serious balance of payments problems. To keep the South in check is
to suffocate the depressed areas still further. The Tories take the
latter course, but they do not enjoy either. These then are the
problems faced by capitalism in an era of ever-expanding machinery
and automation. All of them point inevitably down the road of slow
and steady increases in unemployment, to the “boom” periods
coming less and less often, to the “depression” periods becoming
more and more disastrous. The Tories will pin their faith in keeping
enough workers in “prosperity” to win the elections. This
optimistic notion, as well as the entire tragicomedy of dilemmas,
could be laughed to scorn by the workers ... if, and only if, the
Labour movement had something better to offer them. But has it?
Unemployment and the Labour Movement
“The Government has therefore decided to express the
full employment standard of the United Kingdom at a level of 3% at
the seasonal peak.”
Hugh Gaitskell, Chancellor of Exchequer, March 22nd 1951.
“I beg to move: “That this House expresses its
deep concern at the rise in unemployment figures to 814,000 (3.2%) ...
“It is both a tragedy and a scandal that this
House, in 1963, should again have to debate heavy unemployment ...”
Douglas Jay, Opposition front Bench, February 4th 1963.
Labour’s Remedy
Hans Christian Andersen has an excellent fairy story about a King
who bought a “magic” suit of clothes from a couple of fraudulent
tailors. The suit of clothes did not in fact exist, but the “magic”
about it was that it was invisible to fools.
The King, the Queen and all the courtiers and hangers-on agreed
that the suit of clothes was the most magnificent thing that they had
ever seen. It was unanimously decided that it should be worn on the
next royal parade.
The masses, too, had been informed about the magic suit, and they
did not want to appear fools either. So they all cheered and cheered
as the King, surrounded by artillery, cavalry and infantry, was
carried through the centre of the town in shining, innocent nudity.
Just so do Mr. Wilson, Mr. Callaghan, Mr. Woodcock and Mr.
Cousins, flanked by the armoury of 13 million votes, sport themselves
before an ever-increasing body of apathetic supporters clothed in
“magic” remedies for unemployment.
The central panacea of the Labour leadership is the direction of
industry to the depressed areas.
All past experience proves how futile such policies are.
Way back in 1935 the Government introduced a lukewarm and totally
ineffective Special Areas Act to try to “channel” industry from
the South to Scotland and other “depressed” areas. In 1938 the
Barlow Commission recommended stringent Government control of
industrial development in the South. In 1945 the Coalition Government
introduced the Distribution of Industry Act – which was to become
the foundation of Labour’s policy toward location of industry. The
Act granted special powers to the Government and local authorities to
develop land and industry in certain specified areas (which included
huge chunks of Scotland) in order to entice private industry to
expand in these areas. There were also other inducements – such as
low rents, and building grants, and lump sums to cover the loss
suffered by the move North.
The Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, gave the Government
powers to control industrial development by refusing industrial
development certificates to firms wishing to set up shop or expand in
the congested area.
Wooing Big Business
How well did the two Governments – Labour and Tory – succeed
with these powers at their command? If we take the amount of
industrial building it looks at first sight as if the Labour
Government succeeded in channelling industry to the development
areas. Between 1945 and 1951 30% of all British industrial building
took place in the development areas. Between 1952 and 1958 the figure
slumped to 18.8%. But a closer look shows a different picture.
Between 1945 and 1948 44% of all building was in the development
areas (20% in Scotland). In the three years 1949 to 1951 the figure
went down to 18.9% – almost exactly the same figure as was
maintained in the following seven years under the Tories!
The point was that immediately after the war, when a great many
firms were starting again from scratch (this is particularly true of
a large number of firms from the USA) – private enterprise was
relatively susceptible to “steering” under the Distribution of
Industry Act, and a “tough” industrial development certificate
policy. But from 1948 – with capitalism gaining confidence and
building more extensions to existing plant, resistance to Government
powers increased, and private firms began their accustomed
conglomeration near their big markets – in the South.
Between 1948 and 1962 both Labour and the Tories failed to shift
private enterprise from its firm resolve to stay and expand in the
South. Yet Labour’s case remains today the same as it has been for
the last ten years – Labour would use the existing powers with
greater effect than did the Tories.
Against this background of legislation to solve the problem of
unemployment (all of which has failed dismally) we can take a better
look at the solutions at present offered by the various parties and
trade union bodies. First there is a policy of “negative direction”
of industry – or the refusing of industrial development
certificates, where possible, to firms wishing to develop in the
South. This policy is backed by generous -“inducements” to firms
to move into the development areas (low rents, building grants etc.).
This is the broad policy of the Tory Party, the Labour Party and the
Liberal Party. There are three main reasons why it is totally
inadequate and worthless.
The first, as I have shown, is that it has failed. If
industrialists are refused permission to expand where they want to,
they will not expand at all (cf. Mr. R. Maudling, then
President of the Board of Trade, November 9th 1959: “There is
always the possibility that firms prevented from setting up in areas
of their own choice will decide not to expand at all – but to do
nothing”).
The second is that where it does succeed, there is no permanancy
in the industry which develops in the areas. The factories which have
gone to Scotland are branch factories and “bits and pieces”.
The branch factories are always the first to close in times of
recession, always the first to pay off workers, or put them on short
time. They are always the last in the queue for heavy investment and
modernisation. The “bits and pieces” are wholly unstable, and
provide not even a semblance of a basis for industrial prosperity.
Thirdly, there is the trend of British capitalism towards Europe.
The industrialist who is refused permission to build in Birmingham,
Coventry or London will not turn to Liverpool or Glasgow. He will
turn to Hamburg, Rotterdam and Paris. It’s important to remember in
this era of European “internationalism” that our Government’s
control of private industry is strictly limited by national
boundaries. Capitalism is as international as ever.
But lastly, and most important, this policy leaves the initiative
to private enterprise. It is a policy of wait and see. The idea
behind it is that the Government should not act until private
enterprise acts. Then, of course, it is to act “toughly” with a
few expensive bribes thrown in. There is no real plan behind the
policy. No one is to sit down and decide what type of industry is
best in Scotland. The initiative lies, as always in the hands of Big
Business and Profit. That is why the policy has been, and always will
be, utterly futile.
Why not admit right away that private enterprise – because of
the historical development in Britain – cannot successfully move to
the North. Why not admit right away that the only answer is public
enterprise under workers’ control?
Not public enterprise alone – as the sacking of miners and
railwaymen by nationalised industries bears witness to, but public
enterprise under worker’s control.
‘Work at Any Price’
The policy of the Labour Party leaders aims to tinker with
capitalism, not abolish it. Petty tinkering with administrative
details is always the prerogative of fashionable Labour economists.
But they do not even start to provide an answer to the essential
contradictions of the capitalist system. Nor do they anywhere
threaten the continued existence of class society in all its most
ruthless forms.
In fact, the official Labour Party policy statement has some
interesting things to say about class rule in industry:
“With certain honourable exceptions, our finance and
industry need a major shake-up at the top. Too many directors owe
their position to family, school or political connections. If the
dead wood were cut out of Britain’s boardrooms and replaced by the
keen young executives, production engineers and scientists who are at
present denied their legitimate prospects of promotion, our
production and export problems would be more manageable.”
(Signposts for the Sixties, p. 10)
The important struggle, in other words, is for better and brighter
bosses. Our boardrooms will be plastered with the new slogan of the
Left: “Etonians keep out! Only Winchester and Manchester Grammar
School can give the correct training these days!” Nor is the
perspective of the Trade Union movement any clearer. Most of the
“solutions” from that quarter have been for “expansion” along
conventional capitalist lines. In some instances the leadership has
resorted to the most appalling remedies. “Jobs For Scotland” –
a “campaign” conducted by the Scottish TUC to attract more jobs
to Scotland was divorced completely from the rank and file.
“Direction of industry” to Scotland, with all its narrow
chauvinistic implications, was the central theme. This sort of zany
nationalism, which has nothing to do with socialism, reached its
logical conclusion in a frantic letter written by Mr. John McWillian,
Labour convener of Fife County Council, to Sir Patrick Henessey,
managing director of Fords in Britain. “Why not bring your
Liverpool factory to Fife” was the theme of the letter. “We won’t
go on strike up here”. This deliberate class-collaboration merely
delights the capitalists and serves to prolong the insecurity of the
workers.
To solve the problem of unemployment in the shipyards the STUC
propose a “scrap and build” policy for Britain’s navy. In the
1930’s the unemployed Fenians in the South Side of Glasgow
discussed an idea to blow up the power station to create more work.
The idea was dismissed when someone pointed out that the ruling class
would simply leave them in darkness! No less stupid is the idea of
the STUC. Unnecessary, futile and extremely pernicious work, like the
building of a Polaris submarine, should be boycotted completely by
the workers and their representatives.
The Limits of Reform
And so the miserable story goes on and on. Demands for petty,
administrative reform. Demands for the restoration of national
prestige. Demands for “work for work’s sake”, for the
construction of the most horrible weapons of war... irrelevant,
idiotic demands made without thought or consideration and
intermingled with all the flatulent pomposity, petty wit and sterile
academics which are the peculiar characteristics of the latter-day
working class representative.
Creeping unemployment is not the result of “evil” men in
power, or of “the tired, old men on the Tory benches”. The young,
active and no doubt super-virile President Kennedy with all the best
intensions in the world can do nothing to stop it. Nor is it the
result of administrative muddles in Whitehall, or of an overdose of
Anglophilia at the expense of the Scots.
The reason is that we live in a class society, in which the
productive forces cannot be used to satisfy the needs and desires of
the workers. The competitive rat-race of capitalism meant, in the
thirties, that huge numbers of men and machinery were redundant,
useless, to be thrown aside. To-day it means that hundreds of
thousands of men and millions of pounds worth of machinery are
employed in creating worthless weapons, which can only be used for
the destruction of mankind. And even with the drastic measures,
unemployment is beginning to grow again.
This is the system which the fashionable Labour intellectuals
would have us accept, and reform. But unemployment rises
relentlessly, the prophets of permanent affluence are paying the
penalty for ten years of class collaboration, ten years without
theory, without propaganda, without thought. The cold wind from
the North whips away the scanty tatters of reformism, exposing the
awe-inspiring nakedness of the entire Labour leadership.
Capitalism cannot be reformed out of overproduction and a
falling rate of profit. It cannot use the productive force which
it has so ingeniously developed to produce what people need and
want. As long as capitalism continues, the threat of unemployment
hangs over the head of every worker. It is the job of the Labour
movement, while fighting the day to day struggle with all the
militancy at its command, to expose the flaws and frauds of
capitalism and call for its replacement.
How to Fight Unemployment
‘Do It Yourself’ Demands
How to fight unemployment? But, first of all, who is to do the
fighting? The capitalist class will never give way before an elite of
bureaucrats or professional revolutionaries. It will convert them or
smash them. Nor can the workers look to the capitalist State to solve
their problems for them. The State is only an instrument of the
ruling class. It simply serves as a convenient instrument to pool the
resources of individual capitalist, and do their dirty work for them.
Transport is run for the business man by the State; so is coal,
electricity, gas, water and so on. Recently the Tories have all but
“nationalised” the ports, to the hysterical cheers of the Labour
Party. Nor did the Tories object to the nationalisation of coal and
railways by Labour. It’s perfectly possible that there won’t be
any serious objection to the nationalisation of steel (except of
course by the steel bosses). Nationalisation by the State has nothing
to do with the workers. It simply means that the enterprise is run
more efficiently, the workers exploited more clinically in the
interests of the ruling class.
Nor can the worker expect to sit in his house and leave it to his
representatives. The more he sits at home, the less are they his
representatives. If there is no pressure from below, the trade
union official, the Member of Parliament, the local councillor become
absorbed and fascinated with bureaucracy, charmed and delighted with
petty power. Very soon he will put away all thought of the people he
represents and continue on his irrelevant road to nowhere.
The slogan for the workers must be “Do it Yourself”. At
every twist and turn in the industrial struggle, challenge the
bosses’ right to hire and fire, challenge his right to run the
workers’ lives. But, through the Labour Party, through the trade
unions, and on the factory floor do it yourself.
What to do? To oppose the bosses at the points where their case is
weakest, and to expose the absurdity of class society with every
demand and complaint.
Five Days Work or Five Days Pay
The most immediate and obvious effect of unemployment is the fall
in living standards of the unemployed. Suddenly, through no fault of
his own, although he is prepared to work five days a week, he is
told: “You are no longer any use. Go away.” And his living
standards are cut by five times.
Workers, both employed and unemployed, should demand that the boss
who sacks his workers would continue to pay them full rates of pay
until he can offer them work again. A sacked worker is much more
important than a shareholder. Let him be entitled to at least the
same sort of benefits.
Side by side with this demand, it is vital continually to oppose
all unnecessary work. If the unemployed get full maintenance, it is
easier for miners in Fife to oppose a coal-fired power station, when
an oil-fired station is cheaper and easier for all concerned; it is
easier, too, for shipyard and chemical workers to refuse to waste
their time in the construction of weapons of war.
No Sackings – Share the Work
When the boss finds that through a drop in orders or a new
machine, he wants to cut his labour force, the workers should demand
that not a single sacking takes place. Instead the available works
should be shared out between the existing labour force, without
loss of pay. If ten men can do the work in four days, why not
twenty men in two days? The work is done just the same, and all the
men are happier.
However, the strength of trade union organisation varies
tremendously from industry to industry, and from factory to factory.
Probably, at present, in most industries such demands cannot be
won. What then?
If the fight for 5 days’ work or 5 days’ pay is lost, we must
fight for demands on a sliding scale:
Shorter working week (i.e., four days) with loss of pay.
Retraining of personnel to take other jobs within the
establishment.
In the event of redundancy having to be accepted, an
attempt to keep redundant workers on the payroll of the firm until
suitable alternative work has been found outside.
In the event of failure compensation payments whilst
looking for alternative work, plus severance pay.
Severance pay should come as a last resort when all else fails,
and on terms dictated by the workers not the boss; and not accepted
at the first opportunity as a sort of leaving present from the boss,
which has been the attitude of many union leaders.
To the demand for a 35-hour week or a 7-hour day the bosses always
have some reason for saying it is impossible. In those balmy days of
“full” employment the answer was “No, there’s a shortage of
labour.” Today, they say “No, we can’t afford it – increased
labour costs,” etc. Both ways the workers lose out.
Our answer must be clear. “We, the workers ‘can’t afford’
unemployment!!! It is your profits and your capitalist system which
prevents a 35-hour, 30-hour or an even shorter week.”
At the same time we must stand firm on the question of overtime.
We must say: “Whilst our fellow-workers are on the dole will not
work overtime for you.” By banning overtime we force the boss to
take on more workers from the dole queue.
Workers’ Control
These demands raise the question of workers’ status. They assume
that the worker can run his own life, can indeed run his own
industry, and that he is much more entitled to benefits from industry
than the shareholder of the boss himself. When put to the boss they
do not allow him to bluff with statistics or Parliamentary manoeuvre.
They force him openly to defend his system. These demands clear away
the debris of clichés about “faith and courage”, about “two
world wars” about “national prestige” and “making Britain
great”. They expose the hard core of capitalist society ... the
struggle between the classes.
All the time this struggle is going on. And wherever the issue is
boss against worker, the worker must be supported. Every wage claim,
every strike in workers’ interests must be supported, every sacking
bitterly opposed. Yet all this is useless unless, somewhere, the idea
of socialism begins to take root among the workers.
For socialism, workers’ control of all industry, agriculture and
services, is the only real hope for the end of unemployment.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>T. Cliff and Zionism</h1>
<h3>(January 1988)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, January 1988.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990</strong> (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 159–161.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Red Russia</strong>. This is a marvellous pamphlet by John Reed, published in this country in 1919.</p>
<p>Dave has something else up his sleeve, however, which brings me back to Gaza. This is another pamphlet, completed on 12 November 1945, called <a href="../../../cliff/works/1946/me/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Middle East at the Cross Roads</strong></a>. It was written in Jerusalem by someone called T. Cliff.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">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.</p>
<p class="fst">The same point is made in a rather different way a couple of pages later, under the heading: <em>Can Zionism be Anti-Imperialist?</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">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.</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The pamphlet puts it well:</p>
<p class="quoteb">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.</p>
<p class="fst">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?</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
T. Cliff and Zionism
(January 1988)
From Socialist Worker, January 1988.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 159–161.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Pondering the critical comments of the representatives of American Jewry on the Christmas upheavals in Gaza and on the West Bank, I go to Central Books to buy myself a Christmas present.
I know there is one there for me because Dave, who runs the shop and is a crafty fellow, has informed me that for £10 I can get a copy of Red Russia. This is a marvellous pamphlet by John Reed, published in this country in 1919.
Dave has something else up his sleeve, however, which brings me back to Gaza. This is another pamphlet, completed on 12 November 1945, called Middle East at the Cross Roads. It was written in Jerusalem by someone called T. Cliff.
I rush through the pamphlet and find one or two clues in it which help a lot in understanding the Christmas crisis in the occupied territories. For instance:
Zionism occupies a special place in imperialist fortifications. It plays a double role, firstly, directly as an important pillar of imperialism, giving it active support and opposing the liberatory struggle of the Arab nation, and second as a passive servant behind which imperialism can hide and towards which it can direct the ire of the Arab masses.
The same point is made in a rather different way a couple of pages later, under the heading: Can Zionism be Anti-Imperialist?
Zionism and imperialism have both common and antagonistic interests. Zionism wants to build a strong Jewish capitalist state. Imperialism is indeed interested in the existence of a capitalist Jewish society enveloped by the hatred of colonial masses, but not that Zionism should become too strong a factor. As far as this is concerned, it is ready to prove its fairness to the Arabs.
This ‘double role’ and these ‘common and antagonistic interests’ are likely to lie fallow for many years of unchallenged exploitation, but when the volcano erupts, the contradiction is stretched to breaking point.
On the one hand the instinct of the American State Department and its business backers is to support the brutality of the Israeli army; on the other they know they must somehow keep up the fiction of their ‘fairness to the Arabs’ to maintain their robbers’ conspiracy with the reactionary regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
The dilemma solves itself for the moment in the cautious criticism by American Jewish organizations and in the US abstention in the United Nations Security Council.
Such matters are seized on by all those people who call themselves socialists and supporters of Labour, but who line up with the Israeli state. They point to the criticisms of the American Jews, and to the UN abstention as examples of the ‘moderate approach’ to Zionism. ‘How much better’, they exclaim, ‘is this kind of fraternal criticism to the nasty hostility to Zionism which so often spills over into anti-semitism!’
Of all the many prevarications of what is known as the ‘soft left’ I find this line on Zionism the most distasteful. Otherwise humane and intelligent socialists seem able to discuss these matters without even for a moment considering the unimaginable horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people by Zionist aggression and imperialism.
This is an old and quite appalling story of lands seized, a people expelled, starved, brutalized and robbed of their own country by naked military force. Whatever the double role which Zionism performs for imperialism, the fact is that Zionism from first to last has never wavered in its support for imperialism and capitalism in the Middle East.
If it once unleashed terrorist forces against the British mandate, it did so solely to embarrass British imperialism in the eyes of American imperialism and to shift its allegiance from one to the other.
The explanation of the ‘softness’ stems from the feeling that the Jews are a persecuted race, and suffered horribly at the hands of Hitler. Yet how on earth can one set of concentration camps justify another? Concentration camps are precisely what are being built in Gaza and the West Bank this very moment.
The pamphlet puts it well:
It is a tragedy that the sons of the very people which has been persecuted and massacred in such a bestial fashion ... should itself be driven into a chauvinistic militaristic fervour and become the blind tool of imperialism in subjugating the Arab masses.
That sounds pretty good today. To write it in 1945 took the most extraordinary courage and clarity of Marxist thought. Who was this chap T. Cliff anyway?
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Last updated on 2 September 2014
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Rogues and ‘scroungers’</h1>
<h3>(29 July 1995)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No. 1453, 29 July 1994, p. 11.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2018.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>“NEW ATTACK On Dole Cheats” – the recent headline in the <em>Daily Mail</em> could have come any week since the very beginning of what is now loosely known as “social security”.</strong></p>
<p>The government and its supporters are obsessed by the notion that hundreds of millions are flowing down the drain from social security fraud.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Control of poor people’s lives is the essence of this operation, and the control is increasingly invasive and intolerable.<br>
</p>
<h4>Big bankers</h4>
<p class="fst">This month the Benefit Agency reckons that the controls and the crackdowns on the 20 million people on benefit “saved the taxpayer” £717 million.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>This was Nick Leeson who lost hundreds of millions on the international stock markets.</p>
<p><strong>What a happy conclusion for the big bankers!</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>It was not so much a failure of controls as a case of no controls at all.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>If that is true, and it nearly is, the economic system we live under is revealed as all the more grotesque.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Rogues and ‘scroungers’
(29 July 1995)
From Socialist Worker, No. 1453, 29 July 1994, p. 11.
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2018.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“NEW ATTACK On Dole Cheats” – the recent headline in the Daily Mail could have come any week since the very beginning of what is now loosely known as “social security”.
The government and its supporters are obsessed by the notion that hundreds of millions are flowing down the drain from social security fraud.
To deal with that obsession, a vast network of snoopers and spies has been set up by government to catch the cheats. They spend every hour of every day working out new ways of ensuring, for instance, that people on disability allowance can’t walk properly, or that people on carers’ allowance aren’t inventing the people they care for.
Control of poor people’s lives is the essence of this operation, and the control is increasingly invasive and intolerable.
Big bankers
This month the Benefit Agency reckons that the controls and the crackdowns on the 20 million people on benefit “saved the taxpayer” £717 million.
Now pass on to the amazing story of Barings Bank. The most quoted sentence in the recent report of the Board of Banking Supervision states that the Barings collapse was “due to the unauthorised and ultimately catastrophic activities of, it appears, one individual”.
This was Nick Leeson who lost hundreds of millions on the international stock markets.
What a happy conclusion for the big bankers!
The fraud could be blamed entirely on a single rogue crook who went to a grammar school and therefore probably shouldn’t have been allowed into a decent bank in the first place.
But wait. The sentence goes straight on as follows, “... that went undetected as a consequence of a failure of management and other controls of the most basic kind”.
The main control which Barings escaped was the Bank of England’s iron rule that no British bank can expose itself to (i.e. gamble) more than 25 percent of its capital. A simple point, you might think – easy to understand and easy to enforce. Yet in its last few months Barings managed to expose 73 percent of its capital.
How? By an “informal concession” granted by a relatively junior Bank of England official. Apparently he told the blue bloods who run Barings in London that they really didn’t have to worry about the rules. For this “informal concession” there was no precedent, no regulation, no need to refer to anyone in authority.
It was not so much a failure of controls as a case of no controls at all.
Barings shipped out £827 million under this concession. Remember Barings was one smallish merchant bank, and remember that figure (£717 million) for the total recovery from controls on the alleged social security fraud on benefit paid to 20 million people.
The few City gents who feel they owe society an explanation shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, no one really lost anything from the Barings collapse.”
If that is true, and it nearly is, the economic system we live under is revealed as all the more grotesque.
If £827 million can be shipped out from Britain and used for stock exchange gambling without anyone really noticing or losing anything, then what more proof is needed to establish that losses for the rich can easily and instantly be made up?
Losses for the poor, on the other hand, caused by cuts, stricter controls and witch hunts over benefits, are irrecoverable, devastating and in more and more cases even lethal.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Tony Cliff</h1>
<table width="80%" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4>Revolutionary political theorist and organiser who fired the Socialist Workers Party with his charisma, charm and vision</h4>
<h3>(11 April 2000)</h3>
</td>
</tr>
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<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">Originally published in <strong>The Guardian</strong>, 11 April 2000<br>
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>REDS – Die Roten</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>His death is shocking. Very few of us who knew him well believed that such an essentially youthful figure could ever pass away.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Don’t mourn, organise!” was one of Cliff’s most consistent slogans, and somehow we must try to live up to it.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong><em>Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), socialist activist, born May 20 1917; died April 9 2000</em></strong></p>
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REDS – Die Roten > IS Tendency | IS Tendenz
Paul Foot
Tony Cliff
Revolutionary political theorist and organiser who fired the Socialist Workers Party with his charisma, charm and vision
(11 April 2000)
Originally published in The Guardian, 11 April 2000
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the REDS – Die Roten.
The first I heard of Tony Cliff, who has died aged 82, was from Gus Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, Minister of Transport. Forty years ago, Gus was a charismatic leader of the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists and had an awesome reputation from a Clydeside apprentices’ strike. In late 1961, he reckoned it was time the Young Socialists took some serious lessons in Marxist theory, and arranged a weekend school to be addressed by two leaders of an obscure Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists.
Gus and I met the couple in an airport lounge. I can still see them coming in: Mikhael Kidron, smart, suave, urbane, and Tony Cliff, short and scruffy, looking and sounding like a rag doll. As we mumbled through the niceties of introductions, the rag doll looked irritated and shy. We climbed into a taxi.
As we did so, I saw a newspaper poster about events in the Congo, and remarked, partly to break the silence, that I’d never really understood the Congo. Quick as a flash, the rag doll came to life, and started jabbering with amazing speed and energy. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I do remember my clouds of doubt and misunderstanding suddenly disappearing and the role of the contestants in the Congo, including the United Nations, becoming brutally clear.
I met Cliff many hundreds of times subsequently, sometimes for private conversations, more often on shared platforms, from which we urged our audiences to join IS and its successor, the Socialist Workers Party, and to organise for socialism. Though he often made exactly the same speech and cracked the same jokes, I never failed to be astonished and enthused.
His death is shocking. Very few of us who knew him well believed that such an essentially youthful figure could ever pass away.
Tony Cliff was born Ygael Gluckstein, the son of a Zionist building contractor, in Palestine, in May 1917, in between the great Russian revolutions. He was speedily converted out of Zionism by observing the treatment of Arab children. Aged 13, he wrote in a school essay: “It is so sad that there are no Arab kids in the school.” The teacher scrawled across the page the single word: “Communist”.
She was right, and Cliff was always grateful for her perception. He fought vigorously against the exclusion of Arabs from the closed Zionist economy. When a speaker from the Haifa trades council spoke glowingly of the anti-fascist uprising in Vienna in 1934, and ended his speech with a tribute to the Paris Commune and workers’ unity, Cliff, aged 17, heckling from the back of the hall, added the one word “international”. In this context, “international” meant Arab, and the stewards responded by twisting his finger till it broke.
Cliff joined the Communist party, but was quickly disillusioned by the party’s nationalism. He became a Trotskyist before he was 20 and devoted the rest of his life to building revolutionary socialist organisations. He came to Britain with his newly-married South African wife, Chanie, and was promptly expelled from the country on the advice of the Special Branch; he spent five years in poverty in Ireland until allowed to return.
In the 1950s, he formed the Socialist Review Group, which grew into IS in the early 1960s and the SWP in 1977. For a long time, these groups remained tiny. But when the Communist party, with its (comparatively) huge roots in the organised working class, collapsed in 1989, the SWP became by far the largest and most confident of the socialist organisations to the left of the Labour party.
This achievement was due largely to Cliff’s most striking qualities; his immense intellectual power and his ability to explain his libertarian Marxism in simple language. His unique intellectual contribution was to describe, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union as state capitalist, and therefore imperialist – a proposition as shocking to most socialists of the time as it was inspiring to those of us who were convinced by it.
With the theory of state capitalism came a number of associated ideas, all of them based on Marx’s message that the emancipation of labour must be the work of labour itself; that capitalism is far too strong and sophisticated a system to be brought down or replaced from on high; and that the workers alone, through their union organisations and instinctive solidarity, have the power to bring about that vital change. This power, moreover, cannot be effectively mobilised without political organisation in the working class rank and file.
These themes emerged from Cliff’s early books about Russia, China and eastern Europe, and his later four-volume biographies of Lenin (in the 1970s) and Trotsky (in the 1980s).
They emerged even more clearly from Cliff’s tireless public speaking. His wild accent often startled his audiences, but they were soon giggling at his folksy jokes, like the parable in which a flea boasts to the ox on whose back he is riding: “Look how far we have ploughed today.”
My favourite featured an Arabian sultan, who went to Manchester to buy a cooling system for his palace. As he was chatting to the managing director in his office, the sultan heard a blast on a hooter. Out of the window he saw, to his horror, thousands of workers walking out of the factory. In a hysterical panic, he shrieked at the managing director, who told him not to worry. Half an hour later the hooter went again, and the workers returned from their break. “Don’t worry about the cooling system,” concluded the sultan. “Just give me the hooter.”
Cliff died without a penny in his pocket or any property to speak of. He was always bored stiff by property or talk of property. He left a far richer inheritance: thousands of us socialists, who, without him, would have degenerated into apathy, opportunism or careerism; a wife, who lived and fought by his side for 55 years, and two sons and two daughters, all of whom, in their different ways, are inspiring socialists and engaging companions.
“Don’t mourn, organise!” was one of Cliff’s most consistent slogans, and somehow we must try to live up to it.
Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), socialist activist, born May 20 1917; died April 9 2000
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>What Really Took Place on the QE2</h1>
<h3>(8 February 1969)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1969/index.html#n0108" target="new">No. 108</a>, 8 February 1969, pp. 2–3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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 [<i>word missing</i>]’.</p>
<p>Now it is the turn of the labour correspondents to blame the delays on the QE2 on the workers.</p>
<p>One by one, the stories of ‘mass theft’ and ‘inexcusable delay’ are finding their way into print.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>Working-class Clydeside has grim memories of unemployment, and a healthy contempt for the frivolous waste of the luxury liner.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>To start with, this was the first ship built on the Clyde which was ‘all maronite’.<br>
</p>
<h4>Insisted</h4>
<p class="fst">Ever since two Greek hulks caught fire in New York harbour some years ago, the American government has insisted that all new ships should be lined with fire-proof maronite. Their insistence on this brittle material is not entirely unrelated to the huge American investment in Cape Asbestos, who produce it.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>John Browns (one of the firms in UCS) had two saws, which, because of their own needs, they banned from the contractors.</p>
<p>Tom Goldie, a joiners’ steward explained what this situation meant:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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".</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.’<br>
</p>
<h4>Wasted</h4>
<p class="fst">Vacuum cleaners, too, were in constant demand, and there were no more than 30 for the use of 550 joiners on the ship. Hundreds of hours were wasted in queues for cleaners.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Accordingly, from November 19 a series of panic sackings took place – noticeably of 500 joiners.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Blame</h4>
<p class="fst">Had these men been allowed to work uninterrupted, without the sackings, the finishing work would have been completed weeks ago.</p>
<p>As it is, however, the management were able to save about £[<i>figure missing</i>] ½m in redundancy pay, then turn round and and blame the workers for the delay!</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
What Really Took Place on the QE2
(8 February 1969)
From Socialist Worker, No. 108, 8 February 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
THE SHIPPING correspondents of the national press have paid for their free cruise from Las Palmas on the new Queen Elizabeth II by saying unanimously that the cruise liner ‘will be a great [word missing]’.
Now it is the turn of the labour correspondents to blame the delays on the QE2 on the workers.
One by one, the stories of ‘mass theft’ and ‘inexcusable delay’ are finding their way into print.
From Clydeside workers comes a rather different story. They do not deny that a certain amount was taken from the ship, or that, wherever possible, jobs were ‘made to last’.
Working-class Clydeside has grim memories of unemployment, and a healthy contempt for the frivolous waste of the luxury liner.
The difference between the glitter of the liner and the squalor in which the men who build it are forced to live is one of the crudest contradictions in capitalism and the workers do not hold back from snaffling whatever they can.
The story of delay and incompetence which surrounds the QE2, however, has little to do with the workers. Three points in particular emerged from a long conversation with joiners who worked on the ship, none of which are likely to be brought to our attention by the national press.
To start with, this was the first ship built on the Clyde which was ‘all maronite’.
Insisted
Ever since two Greek hulks caught fire in New York harbour some years ago, the American government has insisted that all new ships should be lined with fire-proof maronite. Their insistence on this brittle material is not entirely unrelated to the huge American investment in Cape Asbestos, who produce it.
The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders therefore decided that the QE2 should be lined throughout with maronite. They had not reckoned on the fact that soon after work started, asbestosis, a fatal cancer caused by dust from asbestos materials like maronite was classified as an industrial disease.
The TUC doctor at once insisted that maronite should not be cut unless by a covered saw or with a vacuum cleaner to remove the dust.
The employers were forced to abide by this ruling, but neither they nor their subcontractors were prepared to pay for more than a very few cleaners and saws.
John Browns (one of the firms in UCS) had two saws, which, because of their own needs, they banned from the contractors.
Tom Goldie, a joiners’ steward explained what this situation meant:
‘About five times a day, we’d have to cut maronite, and this meant carrying a big slab of the stuff about four decks up to the saw.
‘There was always a long queue waiting to use it, and invariably while you were standing there a gaffer would say "Get lost and come back in half an hour".
‘Often, you’d come back to find exactly the same situation all day. You could waste about three hours a day just waiting to cut a bit of maronite.’
Wasted
Vacuum cleaners, too, were in constant demand, and there were no more than 30 for the use of 550 joiners on the ship. Hundreds of hours were wasted in queues for cleaners.
A second big delaying factor was the need constantly to have things ‘looking smart’ for the ‘walk-rounds’ of the ship by the UCS bosses, or, worse still, for the directors of Cunard. Lord Mancroft, who has been complaining about the ship’s delay recently, was a regular visitor, with his wife and family, of course.
Before such visits, the foremen all over the ship would blurt out orders to put up panels with only two screws and clear passages by any stop-gap method that came to hand.
Invariably, after such walk-rounds, the piecemeal work would have to be dismantled and the work done all over again, with the loss of countless hours.
One of the most sinister, and unexplained, reasons for the chaos in the management’s labour planning towards the end of the QE2 building was an agreement signed with the finishing trade unions on September 2, 1968.
This agreement stated that any worker employed for a continuous period of nine months by UCS would be entitled to a minimum of two years’ redundancy pay.
Many of the finishing trade workers started on the boat last March and April and would have been entitled to substantial redundancy pay if they were still working by last December.
Accordingly, from November 19 a series of panic sackings took place – noticeably of 500 joiners.
About 100 of the joiners were re-employed a week later, and more still before the ship left Greenock. Some of the men were working on the ship all the way to Las Palmas and back, and are still on her now at Southampton.
Blame
Had these men been allowed to work uninterrupted, without the sackings, the finishing work would have been completed weeks ago.
As it is, however, the management were able to save about £[figure missing] ½m in redundancy pay, then turn round and and blame the workers for the delay!
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Tony Blurs the past</h1>
<h3>(30 July 1994)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 30 July 1994.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000), pp. 190–191.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Hark to Tony Blair, in a radio interview on 17 July:</p>
<p class="quoteb">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.</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>They are preparing the ground for an assault on Labour voters more outrageous and contemptible than even Ramsay MacDonald ever imagined.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Tony Blurs the past
(30 July 1994)
From Socialist Worker, 30 July 1994.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 190–191.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Hark to Tony Blair, in a radio interview on 17 July:
The trade unions will have no special and privileged place in the next Labour government. They will have the same access to it as the other side of industry.
This is heralded in every single newspaper as an example of the ‘new fairness’ of the new Labour leadership. Out go ‘special privileges’ for the unions. In comes a new approach: everyone, whatever side they are on, will be treated equally. This sounds unanswerable.
Why should someone be discriminated against according to ‘which side’ of industry they are on? At last this ancient discrimination has been put to flight by the charming and equable Mr Blair.
Harold Wilson once likened government in Britain to a driver of a motor car whose job is to steer a difficult path along a road covered with hazards. Blair’s new formula presents government as a football referee, carefully enforcing the rules of a game where 22 players of roughly equal strength and ability fight for supremacy on the field. From now on the referee will play fair between ‘one side of industry’ and ‘the other’.
A rather different argument won the day 94 years ago when a handful of trade union delegates, socialists and former Liberals came together to form the Labour Party. Their problem was this: one side of industry owned all the means of production, one side of industry determined the level of wages and of prices, and one side of industry decided whether people were hired or fired. The level of investment in industry, what was made, how it was made and by whom, foreign policy, whether or not there should be wars with millions killed – all these matters were determined by a small wealthy minority.
This minority had been represented in parliament for more than 200 years by two parties, Liberals (or Whigs) and Tories. It was time, the delegates decided, to seek parliamentary representation for their side of industry – the people who did the work.
Blair and Co argue that a lot of water has flown under the bridge since those bad old days and that society has changed so much that the central principle behind the foundation of the Labour Party – parliamentary representation for trade unionists in particular and the working class in general – can now be chucked overboard.
But a small wealthy handful still own all the capital wealth and a grossly disproportionate slice of the income. Their economic decisions still shut out the enormous majority of people affected by them. All the statistics show the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor and of trade unionists whose organisations have been crippled and humiliated by a series of laws and open class offensives.
There are not 50 million people of roughly similar strength and ability running around the British field of life, demanding a fair referee. There are a tiny handful – no more than one and a half million – who are economic and political giants determined to exploit the majority.
The need for parliamentary representation of the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, trade unionists against employers, has never been more dramatically exposed by the statistics of society.
Those politicians who argue that the millionaires with their police forces, their judges and their armies, who vote Tory, should have ‘equal access’ to Labour ministers as the working people who vote Labour, are not just making an error of judgement.
They are preparing the ground for an assault on Labour voters more outrageous and contemptible than even Ramsay MacDonald ever imagined.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Do-It-Yourself Politics Threaten<br>
N. Ireland’s Police Regime</h1>
<h3>(26 October 1968)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1968/index.html#n0094" target="new">No. 94</a>, 26 October 1968, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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,</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’<br>
</p>
<h4>Bludgeoned</h4>
<p class="fst">It was the Derry Housing Action Committee which inspired the weak, liberal Civil Rights Association to hold a march in Londonderry – a march, which, as we reported two weeks ago, was bludgeoned out of the streets by police fanatics.</p>
<p>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!’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>John White, secretary of the Derry Republican Club, one of the most active organisations affiliated to. the DHAC, told me:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><i>‘We are socialists. We want an Irish workers’ republic, and we will work with anyone who works in a militant way toward that aim.’</i></p>
<p class="fst">The movement, started in Derry, has now taken root in Queens University, Belfast, which used to be the most reactionary university in Britain.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the enthusiasm and spontaneity of the meetings the students have moved from a vacuous liberalism to harder, more militant demands.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><i>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.</i></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>Then Craig said that the IRA was behind it all – an allegation which was laughed at equally loudly.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Resentment</h4>
<p class="fst">The reply to Craig is simple.</p>
<p>YES, the men he named do wish to end the bourgeois state in Ireland.</p>
<p>YES, they do intend to campaign for an Irish workers’ republic.</p>
<p>But, unhappily for Craig and his fanatical friends, they do not intend to do it with sectarian slogans and adventurist violence.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Do-It-Yourself Politics Threaten
N. Ireland’s Police Regime
(26 October 1968)
From Socialist Worker, No. 94, 26 October 1968, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
All the signs are that the exploited people of Northern Ireland, denied even the semblance of parliamentary democracy available to the rest of the United Kingdom, are beginning to ‘do it themselves’, to act to seize the basic rights and services denied them by an intolerant and reactionary government,
Eamonn Melaugh, secretary of the Derry Housing Action Committee, formed last March with the express purpose of encouraging and stimulating rent strikes and other forms of direct action to improve some of the worst housing conditions in Europe, told me:
‘We’ve had 50 years of talk, 50 years of pacifism and 50 years of failure to end discrimination, poverty and exploitation in this city.’
Bludgeoned
It was the Derry Housing Action Committee which inspired the weak, liberal Civil Rights Association to hold a march in Londonderry – a march, which, as we reported two weeks ago, was bludgeoned out of the streets by police fanatics.
During the weekend following the march, in one street in the Catholic heart of the city, all the ground-floor windows were broken by a posse of police yelling ‘Come out, you fenian bastards!’
The police, like the government, rely upon religious prejudice to maintain their squalid regime. The Ulster Unionist Party gets the support of masses of Protestant workers because it has fanned the flames of religious intolerance for half a century, setting one section of the workers against another with the inevitable lurid tales of Catholic horror.
Such men are frightened now. The movement started by the Derry Housing Action Committee is not founded, as was the Irish Republican Army, on religious sectarianism.
John White, secretary of the Derry Republican Club, one of the most active organisations affiliated to. the DHAC, told me:
‘We are socialists. We want an Irish workers’ republic, and we will work with anyone who works in a militant way toward that aim.’
The movement, started in Derry, has now taken root in Queens University, Belfast, which used to be the most reactionary university in Britain.
During the last three weeks it has been transformed by scenes which bear comparison with the Sorbonne University in Paris last May. Hardly an evening has gone by without the massive McMurdie Hall being filled with some 600–700 students meeting spontaneously to discuss the next form of action for ‘civil rights’.
As a result of these meetings, the students have marched twice into the centre of Belfast. On the first occasion the police would not let them through to City Hall, because, they argued, there would be a fight with the supporters of the extremist Protestant Unionist, the Rev. Ian Paisley.
The second time, however, last Wednesday (October 16) the students called in support from Young Socialists and workers, doubled their numbers and marched unimpeded to the City Hall where they held a meeting.
In the enthusiasm and spontaneity of the meetings the students have moved from a vacuous liberalism to harder, more militant demands.
On the morning of the first march, for instance, they agreed unanimously to support their Vice-Chancellor and ban all non-student elements from the march. That same evening, after the sit-down, the vast majority voted to invite young workers and Young Socialist organisations to the next demonstration.
The terror of the authorities at the prospect of workers and students acting for themselves can be measured by the reactions of William Craig, known variously as the Papadopoulos or the Lardner-Burke of Ulster.
First, Craig tried to justify the brutality of his riot squads in Derry by claiming that the march was organised by communists. This was greeted with wild laughter.
Betty Sinclair, Communist Secretary of the Belfast Trades Council and secretary of the Civil Rights movement, had originally been opposed to marching in the face of a police ban, and, on the students’ first sit-down had rushed up and down the line of sitting students begging the demonstrators to ‘go home now you have made your point’.
Then Craig said that the IRA was behind it all – an allegation which was laughed at equally loudly.
Finally, on October 16, Craig made a statement in the Stormont parliament ‘naming names’ of conspirators in the Irish Workers’ Group, who, he said, wanted to end the bourgeois state in Northern Ireland.
He named Gery Lawless, who lives in London, Eammon McCann of the Derry Labour Party and Rory McShane, next year’s President of Queens Students Representative Council.
Resentment
The reply to Craig is simple.
YES, the men he named do wish to end the bourgeois state in Ireland.
YES, they do intend to campaign for an Irish workers’ republic.
But, unhappily for Craig and his fanatical friends, they do not intend to do it with sectarian slogans and adventurist violence.
They intend to do it by helping to direct the resentment and frustration of the Irish workers away from Catholicism or Protestantism – away, in short, from themselves and towards their real oppressors whom Mr. Craig represents.
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<h2>Tony Cliff</h2>
<h1>A World to Win</h1>
<hr class="section">
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<h4>by Paul Foot</h4>
<p class="fst">When I went to Glasgow as a young reporter in the autumn of 1961 I carried the good wishes of the socialists who were grouped around the <strong>New Left Review</strong>. ‘Be careful,’ warned Stuart Hall, <strong>NLR</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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 <strong>Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>International Socialism</strong>, each issue of which, incidentally, I looked forward to with my first-ever intellectual passion, he wrote a ferocious attack on Deutscher, entitled <em>The End of the Road: Deutscher’s Capitulation to Stalinism</em>. 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 <strong>Heretics and Renegades</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > Cliff > Paul Foot > A World to Win
Tony Cliff
A World to Win
Introduction
by Paul Foot
When I went to Glasgow as a young reporter in the autumn of 1961 I carried the good wishes of the socialists who were grouped around the New Left Review. ‘Be careful,’ warned Stuart Hall, NLR editor of the time, ‘there are a lot of Trots in the Glasgow Young Socialists.’ I replied that I was quite confident I could deal with the Trots, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea what a Trot was. I conjured up a vision of social misfits, slightly deranged and hysterical, against whom the masses could easily be convened by a dose of standard Oxford Union rhetoric. I had been President of the Union that previous golden summer at Oxford, and had only recently come into contact with socialists of any description.
As predicted, I met the Glasgow Trots very quickly. Most of them were in the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists on the south of the River Clyde. Their mentor at that time was a lively barber called Harry Selby, who toured Young Socialist branches in the city. If he thought you were remotely interested in his ideas, he would reach for his bag and produce tracts from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky which he would lend you on payment of a small deposit. Selby was a member of the Labour Party. He believed passionately that revolutionary socialists should be members of workers’ political organisations until those organisations became revolutionary. So steadfastly did Harry believe in this concept of ‘deep entrism’ that he eventually became a rather ineffectual Labour Member of Parliament for Govan. He was treated with suspicion by the Labour Party, and with something approaching hatred by the Communist Party which in these days controlled the Glasgow Trades Council To the young workers who flocked to join the newly-established Young Socialists – the youth organisation of the Labour Party – he brought enthusiasm, humour and some electrifying ideas about how the ugly and cruel capitalist society could swiftly be changed by a revolution. When asked about Russia, he would reply that Russia was a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ whose socialism had been corrupted by a Stalinist clique. The clique could quite easily be removed by a political revolution, though not a social revolution. The distinction was a little difficult to understand but, it seemed to me, would have to be accepted for the time being. My general approach was that the Oxford Union had little or nothing to contribute to these young firebrands, and my most sensible course was to keep quiet. Thus did I fulfil my promise to ‘deal with the Trots’ by effectively accepting everything they said. If I had any doubts, I quickly relegated them. The building of the Berlin Wall, I explained at one Young Socialist open air meeting just off Sauchiehall Street, had a clear purpose: to stop ‘bourgeois elements’ so vital to economic growth from leaving the country. When a rude fellow shouted, ‘Nonsense, man – it’s to keep the workers in,’ I conveniently (and accurately) wrote him off as a drunk.
Some time during the winter of 1961-62 Gus MacDonald, the most able and engaging of the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists, decided that the movement needed a theoretical shot in the arm somewhat stronger than that provided by Harry Selby. He told me he had heard of a Trotskyist sect based in London called the Socialist Review Group, and that its two leaders, Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron, were outstanding speakers. He duly set up a weekend school addressed by the two men. Their subjects covered the entire face of the earth, including Russia.
I went down with Gus to the British European Airways terminal in St Enoch Square to meet the mysterious duo. They arrived late on a flight from London. As they walked into the terminal I was struck by the differences between them. Mike Kidron was impeccably dressed, urbane and charming. His companion Cliff, short and scruffy, was plainly terrified of being bored. The usual chatter about the times of the plane and the journey to the place where they were staying noticeably irritated and embarrassed him. As we climbed into a taxi I spotted a newspaper poster about the war in the Congo. ‘The Congo,’ I sighed. ‘I just haven’t a clue what I think about that.’ Quick as a flash, the dishevelled mess in the corner of the taxi sprang into life and, without pausing for even a moment’s dialogue, let loose a volley of sentences impossible to decipher but equally impossible not to understand. I can’t remember exactly what he said over the next ten minutes or so, but I do know that I never again had any doubts about the role of European and US imperialism in the Congo, and the subservience to that imperialism of the United Nations. I found to my surprise that I was laughing, not because anything said had been especially funny but just because the political explanation was so obvious.
Over and over again in the 40 years or so since that first conversation I have had to stop myself bursting out laughing at something Cliff said. This is not only because he was a public speaker of natural and exceptional wit, but chiefly because of his ability to explain an issue with such clarity and force that I could not help laughing at my own inability previously to understand it. Another point struck me during that momentous weekend. The contributions from the platform seemed to be completely free of the self regard or self interest which I had come to expect as standard qualities in political speakers. There were no votes to be won, no careers at stake. There was only one driving force, one reason for what was being said: conviction.
The first bombshell dropped by Cliff was that Russia was not a degenerated workers’ state, indeed not a workers’ state at all. The forms of political organisation in Russia – no stock exchange or private profit – might appear socialistic but the content of that organisation, exploitation of the working class by a new ruling class, was capitalist. If Russia was state capitalist, moreover, so were the Russian satellites in Eastern Europe, so was China, so (this was far too much for me to take at the time, so soon after the Cuban Revolution) was Cuba.
In this little life story Cliff reveals how he puzzled over this issue for years before bouncing out of bed one morning and declaring to his long-suffering wife, Chanie, ‘Russia is state capitalist.’
This issue may seem arcane, almost irrelevant in the 1990s, but to a young socialist at the beginning of the 1960s it was utterly crucial. The entire politics of the left were dominated by Russia and its supporters in the British Communist Party. My very first recollection of a difficult political argument was the alleged difference between the British and French invasion of Egypt in 1956 and the Russian invasion of Hungary a few weeks later. The first was plainly an act of blatant imperialism; the second (since Russia was a degenerated workers’ state) a skilful device to protect the workers’ states from reactionaries elsewhere, including the right wing fifth column in Budapest, Another consequence of supporting Russia against the West was a scepticism about democracy. Indeed, the very word ‘democracy’ was suspect, since it appeared to exist only in the capitalist West and hardly at all in the workers’ states in the East.
Cliff laid waste to all this. Russia was state capitalist, he asserted, and therefore imperialist. The Russian invasion of Hungary was every bit as outrageous as that of Britain and France at Suez. The essence of socialism was the social control of society from below; and there was none of that in Russia, even less in any of what he called Stalin’s satellites in Eastern Europe. Indeed, he observed, although he was down to speak about the Soviet Union, he could not even begin to do so since ‘soviet’ was die Russian word for workers’ council and there were no proper Soviets in any of the Russian Empire.
It is hard, after so long a period, to convey the effect of such opinions in the political atmosphere of the early 1960s. In this book Cliff tells the story of his conversion to the theory that Russia was state capitalist almost in passing. For those of us young socialists of the time to whom the theory was entirely new, the effect was the very opposite of transitory. It was devastating. It threatened not only a residual sympathy for what seemed at least like state planning in Russia, but also a whole view of politics, including, crucially, the notion that socialist change could come from the top of society, planned and executed by enlightened people, educated ministers and bureaucrats. The whole purpose of the Oxford Union was threatened by this message. For if Russia was state capitalist, what was the point of working politically with other enlightened people, for instance for more state control of British industry?
I resolved on no account to be hijacked by this new heresy. I got hold of a moth-eaten paperback edition of Cliff’s book on the subject, then entitled Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis, and read it so carefully that it fell to pieces. The broad brush of the theory fascinated me almost as much as it horrified me. But the broad brush did not matter. Cliff’s writing style was hopeless – he had not the slightest idea how to use the English language to make his point. What finally convinced me was the relentless detail of the argument. It was in the chapter on the separation of the Russian Communist Party from the rank and file of the Russian walking class, in the pages in which Cliff traced the removal from all political office of any trace either of the Russian Revolution or of the working class rank and file, that my resistance finally snapped. There was no way in which such a rigid and brutal bureaucratic society could be described either as socialist or as a workers’ state, or indeed as even marginally democratic. ‘State capitalist’ exactly fitted the bill.
Not much later, when I was still in Glasgow in 1963, the third volume of Isaac Deutscher’s majestic biography ofTrotsky was published. I read all three volumes in quick succession, utterly overcome by the depth of analysis and the grandeur of the language. When I exulted over the book to Cliff, he was not at all impressed. In an article in the 1963 winter edition of the quarterly magazine International Socialism, each issue of which, incidentally, I looked forward to with my first-ever intellectual passion, he wrote a ferocious attack on Deutscher, entitled The End of the Road: Deutscher’s Capitulation to Stalinism. With hardly a word of appreciation for the magnificent biography,. Cliff honed in on a passage in a separate Deutscher article in a collection of essays entitled Heretics and Renegades in which the sage set out this advice to an ‘ex-Communist man of letters’ like himself. ‘He cannot join the Stalinist camp or the anti-Stalinist holy alliance without doing violence to his better self. So let him overcome the cheap ambition to have a finger in the political pie. He may withdraw into the watchtower instead – to watch with detachment and alertness this heaving chaos of a world.’ This conclusion sent Cliff into paroxysms of rage. Anyone who ever said a word in support of Isaac Deutscher was screeched at interminably: ‘To die watchtower! To the watchtower!’ Of all the awful crimes of the left, none infuriated Cliff like passivity. For people who knew the world was rotten, to sit back and do nothing about it was for him the ultimate aberration.
So it was for Trotsky. Many years later Cliff himself wrote a four-volume biography of Trotsky. I would still recommend the Deutscher but, like his equally long biography of Lenin, Cliff’s Trotsky is indispensable to modern socialists. Throughout all his books the theme is action. The key question surpassing all others is Lenin’s – what is to be done? 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.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>May Days and heydays</h1>
<h3>(May 1985)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, May 1985.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990</strong> (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–222.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">I went with a light heart to Newcastle on May Day on what I assumed would be a great workers’ rally.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I went back to the station where, at last, someone <em>had</em> come to meet me. When I got to the hall I was shocked to find (at most) 120–130 people there.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Sitting there on the platform, I felt myself nibbled at by all kinds of heresies. Was it not true that the working-class movement <em>was</em> in decline?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Then I got another shock. It came from a contribution from the floor. May Day, we were reminded, was a celebration of <em>international</em> 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!</p>
<p>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 <em>have</em> been turned over and depleted in the last twenty years.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>On the way back from Newcastle I picked up the <strong>International Herald Tribune</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
May Days and heydays
(May 1985)
From Socialist Worker, May 1985.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–222.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I went with a light heart to Newcastle on May Day on what I assumed would be a great workers’ rally.
Twelve years ago I was in Newcastle on or around May Day for a hundredth anniversary meeting of the Trades Council. Jimmy Reid was the main speaker, but he didn’t turn up. The meeting was chaired by an AUEW official, who told me blithely as he looked round the hall that there were, he thought, ‘about 350 shop stewards here’. It was 1973, the year between the two great miners’ strikes. Everyone was confident and proud of their movement in one of its strongest areas. The meeting was terrific.
I was in Newcastle last year too, for perhaps the best meeting of my life. It was a glorious June day and the Northumberland miners were holding a strike rally. Some 5,000 miners and their families marched into the park with their banners. They were full of confidence and pride. It was marvellous.
Last week’s meeting had been carefully organized over many weeks. Derek Hatton, deputy leader of beleaguered Liverpool City Council, was the main speaker – but he didn’t turn up.
When I got to the station there was no one to meet me, and I had forgotten the name of the hall. I wandered round the streets by the station searching for posters. There weren’t any. I took a taxi to the university, to the poly, to every place in Newcastle I could remember ever speaking at. I rang the local paper. No one anywhere had heard of any Trades Council May Day meeting.
I went back to the station where, at last, someone had come to meet me. When I got to the hall I was shocked to find (at most) 120–130 people there.
The composition of the meeting was completely different to that of 1973. There were a handful of miners’ wives there – friends I think of Ann Lilburn, one of the speakers – but pretty well nobody from the great rally the previous June.
The mood of the meeting was sad, low, rudderless. If it hadn’t been for the Socialist Workers Party which supplied half the audience (at least) and five out of seven questions, it would have been the most gigantic flop.
Sitting there on the platform, I felt myself nibbled at by all kinds of heresies. Was it not true that the working-class movement was in decline?
Was it not true that the shop stewards of 1973 represented yards and factories which had since closed, with nothing to replace them? How could anything be built in a place like this, where getting on for 20 per cent of the workforce is unemployed, without the slightest hope of the kind of jobs which workers could expect in the 1960s and 1970s?
Then I got another shock. It came from a contribution from the floor. May Day, we were reminded, was a celebration of international working-class solidarity, and perhaps we ought to be talking not so much about the defeat of the miners in Britain, but about the great strike and lock-out of miners in South Africa. I realized I had spoken on May Day for three quarters of an hour without a single reference to any workers anywhere else in the world!
No wonder I had been so depressed. The insularity which infects us all when we feel low concentrates our minds on what we see around us – on the British working-class movement, whose traditional organizations and methods have been turned over and depleted in the last twenty years.
At the same time, however, in other countries huge working classes are being created almost every year. Countries and even continents where there was no working class fifty years ago are now teeming with a huge proletariat, much of it unorganized, but all of it exploited beyond belief, and showing strong signs of organizing and fighting back.
On the way back from Newcastle I picked up the International Herald Tribune, and read of two vast strikes in South Korea; of the lock-out in the South African goldfields; of the stirring of workers’ unrest in the shanty towns around construction sites in Saudi Arabia.
Across the world, the working class is vastly bigger and more recognizable than it was in what seems to us to have been the ‘heyday’ of 1973.
If we lose sight of that, if we think for one moment of the working class as white, male shop stewards representing shipyard workers in Newcastle, then we are certain victims of gloom, introspection and, worse of all, inertia.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Capitalism is stripped bare</h1>
<h3>(12 August 1995)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 12 August 1995.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000), pp. 279–280.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Here is the capitalist argument in all its bare beauty.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Predatory</h4>
<p class="fst">The Monopolies and Mergers Commission is a very sedate and moderate body composed almost exclusively of Tories and entrepreneurs.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Capitalism is stripped bare
(12 August 1995)
From Socialist Worker, 12 August 1995.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 279–280.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Here is the capitalist argument in all its bare beauty.
Private enterprise breeds competition. Competition forces firms to cut prices, and this leads to an endless spiral of cheaper goods and services. It also leads to variety, since capitalists are always looking for ways of doing something new.
Born again Christians Brian Souter and his sister Ann Gloag believe in capitalism. They are a dream – Dick Whittington capitalists who started off in Dundee with a couple of old buses and now run the second biggest bus company in the country.
The very name of the company, Stagecoach, has a romantic ring about it. It follows, of course, that they got where they are today by dint of hard work and competitive free enterprise.
Well, no, actually. They got where they are today chiefly because of the government’s obsession with flogging off the old publicly-owned bus companies.
Predatory
The Monopolies and Mergers Commission is a very sedate and moderate body composed almost exclusively of Tories and entrepreneurs.
In its report just out on the activities of Stagecoach in Darlington, however, the commission has resorted to regrettably extreme language. ‘Predatory, deplorable and against the public interest’ were the exact words used.
What happened in Darlington? After studying the Tory bus laws, the Labour council decided to privatise the municipal bus company and called for bids. By far the lowest bid came from a firm called Yorkshire Transit, which employed a lot of the bus drivers from the old publicly-owned company. The council made it quite clear that Yorkshire Transit, according to the basic rules of free competition and tendering, had won the contract.
At once Stagecoach recruited the best and most hard working of the council drivers on fantastic bonus rates of up to £1,000 and guarantee of three years work.
For the first few weeks in which Yorkshire Transit struggled to meet its new obligations, Darlington was flooded out with Stagecoach buses from all over the country.
The drivers had instructions to watch out for the scheduled buses and to nip in front of them at the bus stops and nick their custom. If the drivers weren’t quick enough it didn’t really matter – because the Stagecoach services were entirely free. Even the most principled supporter of public ownership in Darlington was reluctant to pay for a bus ride when another was offered along the same route with no conductor and no fare.
In five weeks flat Yorkshire Transit was smashed and Stagecoach, which had lost the tender on the first call, was awarded it. Ever since it has hardened and toughened its monopoly in Darlington – and of course now (since there are no competitors) Stagecoach charges high fares.
This is the eighth time either the MMC or the Office of Trading has slammed Stagecoach. From northern Scotland to eastern Kent, its companies have gobbled up the former public bus undertakings, driven the competition off the road, cut wages, smashed the unions and sacked loyal drivers.
None of its fantastic growth is due to competition or free enterprise. On the contrary, Stagecoach used its strength in numbers of buses and in cash in the bank to knock out the competition.
The privatisation of the bus industry has had exactly the opposite effect to that promised by the Thatcherite think tanks in the 1980s. There are now less people travelling by bus – because the fares are higher, there are less bus routes in the unpopulated areas and much less accountability.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>‘An Agitator of the Worst Type’</h1>
<h4>A portrait of miners’ leader A.J. Cook</h4>
<h3>(January 1986)</h3>
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<p class="info">Originally published as a pamphlet in January 1986 by the Socialist Workers party.<br>
Based on a talk given at the Socialist Workers Party Easter Rally, Skegness, April 1985.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">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 <strong>Daily Herald</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>‘Have you seen who’s been elected secretary of the Miners’ Federation,’ he bawled. ‘Cook! A raving tearing Communist. <em>Now</em> the miners are in for a bad time.’ <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>At college he read the brilliant pamphlet <strong>The Miners’ Next Step</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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 <strong>The Miners’ Next Step</strong>. 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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In its obituary of Cook ten years later, the Communist Party paper <strong>The Daily Worker</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Mail</strong> of 21 June 1924, a few days after his election, reported:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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”.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">I read that quotation during the 1984-5 miners’ strike in <strong>The Guardian</strong>, 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, <strong>The Decline and Fall of the Labour Party</strong>. ‘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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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 <em>to</em> the meeting. Cook was speaking <em>for</em> 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.’ <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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, <em>there must be unity</em>. Transport workers, especially those on the railways who moved coal, needed to be alerted now, and prepared for struggle.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>. It was edited by a Communist Party member, but its tone and orientation were quite different to that of the <strong>Workers’ Weekly</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>The miners, of course, could have nothing to do with the settlement. They were forced to stay on strike – locked out on impossible terms – <em>after</em> 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.</p>
<p>His first task, then, was to set the record straight about the General Strike. He did so in a magnificent pamphlet, <strong>The Nine Days</strong>. The pamphlet is comparable in many ways with Karl Marx’s famous pamphlet on the Paris Commune, <strong>The Civil War in France</strong>. 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. <strong>The Nine Days</strong>’ opening paragraph goes straight to the point:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>But the victory had been thrown away by people whose only desire seemed to be to call off the strike.</p>
<p>All profits from <strong>The Nine Days</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Reading the <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> 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 <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> about birth control and women’s suffrage, subjects in which he had not shown the slightest interest before the strike.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Morning Post</strong>.</p>
<p>‘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.’ <a id="f3" href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’ <a id="f4" href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p>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.’ <a id="f5" href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a></p>
<p>There was dramatic proof of this in South Wales. ‘The <strong>Western Mail</strong>, 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 <strong>Western Mail</strong> were solemnly burned and buried, Bevan delivering the funeral oration. He also had the paper banned from the Tredegar library.’ <a id="f6" href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a><br>
</p>
<p class="fst">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 <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> as early as 22 August: ‘Reports of a drift back to work are greatly exaggerated’.</p>
<p>They <em>were</em> exaggerated, but still there <em>was</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>The Coal Shortage: Why the Miners Will Win</strong>, with a foreword by A.J. Cook.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>This was followed in November by <strong>The Miners Struggle and the Big Five Banks</strong>, 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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>For this, Cook earned himself a thoroughly deserved rebuke in the <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>, 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.’</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">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 <em>did</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>any</em> chance of getting work, men were forced to leave the union (or the area).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The march, which took place that November, was a tremendous success. It is fully chronicled in Wal Hannington’s book, <strong>Unemployed Struggles</strong>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>They called it ‘conciliation’. The time had come, they argued, to stop talking about class war and to start talking with the employers.</p>
<p>A.J. Cook didn’t call it conciliation. He called it collaboration. He took over a regular column in the <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>. 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. <em>Why</em> should the working-class movement collaborate? What would they get out of it?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <strong>The Mond Moonshine</strong>, whose preface by the old ILP member Joseph Southall is worth quoting in full:</p>
<h5>HOW THE WOLVES MADE PEACE WITH THE SHEPHERDS<br>
AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SHEEP</h5>
<p class="quoteb">Mundus the Wolf said to the shepherds: ‘Why should there not be peace between you and us, seeing that we both depend on the sheep for a living so that our interests are the same?’</p>
<p class="quote">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?’</p>
<p class="quote">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 ...</p>
<p class="quote">And Cocus answered: ‘Are not the jaws of the wolves red even now with the blood of the sheep?’</p>
<p class="quote">To which Lemon replied loftily: ‘Cocus speaks only for himself – the Council of Shepherds will deal with him.’</p>
<p class="quote">And Bender (who had charge of the shearing, and was naturally woolly in consequence) said to the Wolves:</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.’</p>
<p class="quote">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.</p>
<p class="fst">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 <strong>Mond’s Manacles</strong>.</p>
<p><em>‘There can be no peace with poverty or unemployment,’</em> it ended. <em>‘There can be no peace with capitalism.’</em></p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Express</strong> of 16 January 1928 had this to say:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">These attacks, which were widely publicised in the press, led to Cook getting an offer of help from an unexpected area.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This difficulty continued throughout the campaign. Lots of people agreed with Maxton and Cook. The basic arguments seemed unanswerable. It <em>was</em> pointless making friends with enemies such as theirs. It <em>was</em> 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 <em>do</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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 <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> advocating caution, compromise, walking before you can run, and the importance of a Labour government as a first step to socialism.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Dear Arthur,</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘Your notes in last week’s <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> 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.’</p>
<p class="fst">Pollitt’s letter ended:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Dear Harry,</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In March, for instance, he said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">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 <strong>Daily Mirror</strong>’s verdict.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>No, most emphatically, we cannot, for there is another vital ingredient to the end of this story.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <strong>Workers’ Life</strong>, the weekly party paper, trumpeted – on 13 December 1929:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">Every single sentiment in that sentence was the exact opposite of the truth. December 1929 was <em>not</em> ‘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 <strong>Workers’ Life</strong> again, on 30 August 1929, just before Cook collapsed during his speech at the Swansea TUC:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘The Communist Party must energetically fight the Left Social-Democrats as the most dangerous enemies of the working class.’</p>
<p class="fst">The <em>most dangerous</em> enemies. Worse than bankers or employers or Tories or spies!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>(‘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.)</p>
<p>Meanwhile Cook’s accolade for the Prince of Wales gave <strong>Workers’ Life</strong> a marvellous opportunity, and the paper scarcely referred to the miners’ leader without adding the tag ‘that notorious friend of the smiling Prince’.</p>
<p>Cook was immediately stung to reply. His answer in <strong>Workers’ Life</strong> 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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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 ...</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Cook persevered. He wrote again to <strong>Labour Monthly</strong>, 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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">His article ended with a desperate plea for comradely argument and assessment:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">For this appeal, Arthur Cook got the usual kick in the teeth. A note at the end of the article declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘The <strong>Labour Monthly</strong> says farewell to him without regret and with the contempt that he deserves.’</p>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Labour Monthly</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>If they really were intent on forming new unions, what need was there to debate with them his own awkward and embarrassing position?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>What then, in 1985, is a fitting epitaph for Arthur James Cook?</p>
<p>There are some who might prefer the obituary in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> of 3 November 1931, which could hardly contain its pleasure that another ‘social fascist’ had died in agony.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">Some might prefer that, as I say, if only because it is <em>safe</em>. 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.</p>
<p>I prefer the epitaph written by Robin Page Arnot, who was, I think, on the staff of the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> at the time, and who later wrote a series of marvellous histories of the British miners and their struggles.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’ <a id="f7" href="#n7" name="f7">[7]</a></p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Walter Citrine, <strong>Men and Work</strong>, p.77.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> Arthur Horner, <strong>Incorrigible Rebel</strong> (London 1960), p.72.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n3" href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> <strong>Morning Post</strong>, 10 June 1926.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n4" href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>, 6 June 1926.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n5" href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>, 18 July 1926.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n6" href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> Michael Foot, <strong>Aneurin Bevan</strong> (London 1962), vol.1, pp.70-71.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n7" href="#f7" name="n7">7.</a> Robin Page Arnot, <strong>The Miners: Years of Struggle</strong> (London 1953), p.541.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
‘An Agitator of the Worst Type’
A portrait of miners’ leader A.J. Cook
(January 1986)
Originally published as a pamphlet in January 1986 by the Socialist Workers party.
Based on a talk given at the Socialist Workers Party Easter Rally, Skegness, April 1985.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IT WAS a sunny morning in June 1924, and the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Fred Bramley, had had a good breakfast. He settled down comfortably at his desk to read the Daily Herald, which, in a sort of way, he owned. On the front page he read something which propelled him out of his chair and down the passage to the office of his assistant general secretary, Walter Citrine.
‘Have you seen who’s been elected secretary of the Miners’ Federation,’ he bawled. ‘Cook! A raving tearing Communist. Now the miners are in for a bad time.’ [1]
Who was this raving, tearing Communist who had caused such consternation in the upper echelons of the TUC, and whose election at 39 as leader of one of the largest and most powerful trade unions on earth had shocked the press and the government?
Arthur James Cook was born at Wookey in Somerset in 1885, the son of a soldier. He had worked for a short time on a farm but before long had moved with thousands of other farmworkers into the pits of South Wales. From his earliest youth, he had taken a keen interest in what went on about him, and cared about it. Perhaps, he concluded, God would put it all right. He became a teacher in the Baptist Youth, and by the age of eighteen had reached the rank of deacon.
On his first day in the pits, a fall of rock killed the man working next to him, and young Arthur had to drag the body to the surface. The conditions in the pits soon persuaded him that heaven would have to wait. What mattered immediately was a better life on earth, and under it. In 1905 he joined the Independent Labour Party, and campaigned vigorously for Labour candidates in the 1906 election.
Soon he was moving fast to the left. The newly-elected Liberal government did little to curb the greed of the coal-owners. The gap between the hard and dangerous work of the miners and the huge surplus wealth of the owners did not seem to play a part in the official politics which he encountered. The socialism of the ILP seemed to have no contact with the hard and bitter struggle fought by the men around him. A new political creed was sweeping the South Wales coalfield at the time. It was called syndicalism. Its advocates argued that the power of the workers to organise or disrupt their own production – their power to strike – was the only power which the owners were likely to recognise: the only power which might change the miners’ conditions and the only power which could eventually change society.
The new power was anathema to the new Labour leaders, who called for voting instead of striking. Ramsay Macdonald, who later became leader of the Labour Party, wrote a furious attack on syndicalism. He grudgingly admitted that its roots, though weak in the rest of the country, were strong and deep in the South Wales coalfield. Macdonald noted that when ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, the American socialist leader, came to Britain to preach his brand of anarcho-syndicalism, the only place he got a really good reception was South Wales. His ideas had already been sown by another foreign influence: by the Spanish immigrant workers brought into the Merthyr area by the ironmasters in 1907. They were brought in as blacklegs, but they proved a constant menace to the coal-owners and the ironmasters with their sharply-defined anarcho-syndicalist ideas and their enthusiasm for strikes.
In 1911, the young Cook went to the Central Labour College in London, where his half-formed ideas were given new force by books and lectures. He had to cut short his time there by a year – chiefly because the owners threatened to evict his family unless he paid the rent – but by the time he left, he was a convinced Marxist, and a lifelong supporter of independent working-class education.
At college he read the brilliant pamphlet The Miners’ Next Step, written by his fellow rank-and-file miners in South Wales. The pamphlet – one of the landmarks in our trade union literature – exposed the treacherous role which the union leaders had played in the struggle with the coal-owners. Its answer was to reform the Miners’ Federation, to bring the power of officials much more firmly to heel, and to place the union and the people who ran it under the control of the rank and file.
The pamphlet had a profound effect on the young Arthur Cook. In 1913 he resigned from the ILP, and joined instead the South Wales Socialist Society, which talked a militant working-class politics far more to his liking. When the First World War began the following year, most miners didn’t go to the slaughter in the trenches, since coal was vital to the war effort. Cook was against the war – and, after 1917, for the Russian Revolution.
As the war ended, he was arrested for sedition, apparently for advocating revolution in connection with the food shortages of early 1918. The highest tribute to him came from John Williams, deputy chief constable of Glamorgan, who had been following him about like a sniffer dog. ‘Cook,’ Williams declared in one of his frequent letters to the Home Office, ‘is an agitator of the worst type and has been the cause of the major portion of labour unrest in this district since 1913.’
The agitator spent three months in prison for that offence, which didn’t spoil his chances in the various elections he fought for officials’ places in the union after the war. He fought on the ideas and principles of The Miners’ Next Step. If he won an election, he promised, he would seek to make his office part of the rank-and-file struggle for better conditions and a better society.
This strategy fitted the mood of the South Wales miners after the war. In 1919 Cook was elected secretary of the Rhondda No.1 Lodge by 18,230 votes to 17,531. It was a narrow victory, but until then Cook had been virtually unknown in official union circles. The position in the Rhondda gave him a platform – and a springboard into neighbouring areas, where he started to use his powers as a preacher to the full. ‘With uplifted arms,’ a contemporary account records in 1920, ‘he warned his hearers of the coming revolution.’
In 1921 he played a vigorous role during the Great Lock-out imposed by the coal-owners, which the miners lost on ‘Black Friday’. In losing the battle, Cook seemed for a moment to lose his confidence, and started to prevaricate about workers’ power.
This upset the small Communist Party, which had been formed from the various revolutionary socialist parties in 1920. Cook joined the Communist Party at the beginning of the lock-out, but left a few months later after being called to the militant Maerdy lodge to answer for his apparent ‘vacillations’ at the end of the lock-out.
In its obituary of Cook ten years later, the Communist Party paper The Daily Worker claimed that Cook had been expelled. He was not. It was far more likely that he left the party with the party’s explicit permission. For A.J. Cook was already a considerable figure in the South Wales coalfields, and his progress would certainly have been hindered by formal party membership.
Certainly, everything he did in the next two years had the full approval of the Communist Party. He campaigned for the Miners’ Federation to break with the British Trades Union Congress and join the Red International of Labour Unions, a revolutionary breakaway organised from Russia. The South Wales miners voted to join the RILU, though the proposal was lost in the Federation at large. Soon afterwards, the Communist Party took the lead in forming the Miners Minority Movement, a rank-and-file movement among miners devoted to clearing out the federation’s traditional leadership and building unity with workers in other industries.
The Minority Movement was tested in fire almost before it was fully formed. Frank Hodges, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, was elected an MP in the 1924 General Election. To his surprise and disgust, he was told he could no longer be secretary of the Federation if he insisted on taking his seat. He went to parliament, and resigned the secretaryship.
The succession was keenly fought. A.J. Cook was almost unheard of outside South Wales, and in South Wales itself he had the keenest fight of all, winning the nomination there by only a handful of votes out of 150,000. The Minority Movement campaigned hard for Cook all over the coalfields. When he won, again by a small majority, there were many, including Fred Bramley at the TUC, who were amazed. Men like Bramley, not for the first time, had misjudged the mood in the coalfields. It was hardening with every month.
As soon as A.J. Cook got into the MFGB offices at Russell Square he announced that expenses and perks for the secretary were forthwith abolished. He made it clear that he would not accept fees for any speech made anywhere because of his position. Then he set about the most striking innovation of all. Every weekend, he announced, he would speak in the coalfields about the miners and the working-class movement.
These decisions were shocking enough to the stout-hearted and stout-bellied gentlemen at the TUC, but worse was to follow. Wherever he went, Cook made it clear that he stood uncompromisingly for class war. The Daily Mail of 21 June 1924, a few days after his election, reported:
‘Mr A.J. Cook, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation, was the guest of a social evening held by the Holborn Labour Party at 16 Harpur Street, Theobalds Road, WC, last night. Mr Cook said that Mr J.H. Thomas and Mr Tom Shaw had no political class consciousness, and that the Labour leaders and trade union leaders were square pegs in round holes. He was glad to find some Red Socialists in London. He hoped he would find more later. Mr Cook added: “I believe solely and absolutely in Communism. If there is no place for the Communists in the Labour Party, there is no place for the Right Wingers. I believe in strikes. They are the only weapon”.’
With quotations like that ringing in the ears of the Labour leaders, Arthur Cook set off for the series of weekend meetings in the coalfields which went on all the way to the General Strike and beyond. This was one of the most extraordinary agitations in the history of the British working class movement. Old miners today still remember the impact of these huge meetings, to which Cook would often speak two or three times over, so that all could hear.
What was it about the man which made him so electric and compelling a speaker? Middle-class commentators of the time could not understand it. Beatrice Webb, who met him during the General Strike, was not impressed. She wrote in her diaries:
‘He is obviously overwrought, but, even allowing for this, it is clear he has no intellect and not much intelligence. He is a quivering mass of emotions, a mediumistic magnetic son of creature not without personal attractiveness – an inspired idiot, drunk with his own words, dominated by his own slogans.’
I read that quotation during the 1984-5 miners’ strike in The Guardian, whose industrial correspondent, as though to appease the intellectual snobbery of that paper’s readers, applied it freely to Arthur Scargill. Its tone and purpose was aptly satirised by John Scanlon, who published a book in 1930 called, rather prematurely, The Decline and Fall of the Labour Party. ‘It was noticed, too,’ wrote Scanlon, ‘that when Mr Cook addressed meetings, he did not hold the lapels of his jacket as all good statesmen do. 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.
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.
‘I want to warn you most seriously that the government of Russia is making war on this country daily,’ Sir Henry said. ‘Mr Cook,’ he went on (cries of ‘Shoot Him!’, ‘Lynch Him!’) ‘has declared that he is a Bolshevik and is proud to be a humble disciple of Lenin. He is treating the miners of this country whom we all respect and honour (Cheers!) as cannon fodder in order to achieve his vainglorious ambitions.’ [3]
Those cries of ‘Shoot Him!’, ‘Lynch Him!’ were not just extravagances shouted out in the heat of the moment. The Home Secretary, a specially nasty specimen called Sir William Joynson-Hicks, had let it be known that although of course he was firmly in favour of law and order and was absolutely against any form of violence, he would not take it too hard if someone gave Mr Cook a taste of his own medicine.
Patriots and leaders of the master race therefore came together and plotted violence against the miners’ leaders. Wherever Cook went, he was under threat from some bold band of ex-officers or fascist oafs. At one meeting such a group did corner him at the foot of a platform and smashed his leg against it. The injury was a source of constant pain for the rest of his life.
Yet the press campaign was a complete failure. Throughout the seven months, the loyalty and admiration for Cook among the miners and supporters grew. Ellen Wilkinson, then a young left-wing Labour MP, wrote: ‘In thousands of homes all over the country, and particularly miners’ homes, there is hanging today, in the place of honour, the picture of A.J. Cook. He is without a shadow of a doubt the hero of the working women.’ [4]
A woman signing herself Mrs Adamson went even further: ‘Cook is trusted implicitly. The malicious attacks of the capitalist Press only serve to strengthen the loyalty the miners and their wives feel for him.’ [5]
There was dramatic proof of this in South Wales. ‘The Western Mail, published in Cardiff, put the coalowners’ case more blatantly than any other newspaper in the country, and Bevan was particularly affronted when it made a vicious, and, as he believed, obscene attack on A.J. Cook. He therefore organised a huge procession to Waumpound, the mountain between Ebbw Vale and Tredegar, where copies of the Western Mail were solemnly burned and buried, Bevan delivering the funeral oration. He also had the paper banned from the Tredegar library.’ [6]
IN SPITE of all this loyalty, in spite of the women, in spite of the tremendous solidarity among workers all over the country symbolised by the miniature miners’ lamps dangling from peoples’ lapels, the owners had the whip in their hand, and they used it. An ominous phrase creeps into the Sunday Worker as early as 22 August: ‘Reports of a drift back to work are greatly exaggerated’.
They were exaggerated, but still there was a drift back to work. By the end of August, 80,000 miners were back – less than 10 per cent of the total. 60,000 of those men were in two areas, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. A Notts Labour MP sponsored by the miners, George Spencer, was trying to organise a separate return to work, and, eventually, a separate union. Spencer followed the press by appealing to the Notts miners about Cook’s political views. At the Miners’ Federation conference in September he demanded to know whether the ‘views of revolution’ spoken by A.J. Cook were the views of the Federation. Cook replied: ‘I am in Mansfield next week. Come and ask me there.’ Spencer was thrown out of the conference as a blackleg.
Yet the situation in Nottinghamshire was desperate. A.J. Cook set up a special headquarters there and rushed from meeting to meeting. He was like a beaver desperately trying to dam the flood. When he spoke, in, say, Hucknall, thousands of miners who had gone back to work would openly pledge to rejoin the strike. They would do so, perhaps for two or three days, and then, bowed down by shame and hunger, would drift back to work.
As Cook felt the tide ebbing away from him (as he had always expected it would do) he redoubled his efforts to win the key to victory: solidarity from other trade unionists, especially transport workers. He wrote anxious letters to Bromley, the engine drivers’ leader, and to Cramp and Thomas of the National Union of Railway-men. Some industrial production was being maintained, he pointed out, because foreign coal and scab coal was being shifted round the country by rail. An embargo on ‘black coal’ (as he called it, rather absurdly) would stop the owners.
The replies were as blunt as ever. The railwaymen had ‘done their bit’ during the General Strike. The General Strike had now been called off, and the union leaders could not see their way to protecting their own members if they were victimised for helping the miners. Thus throughout the seven months there was not a single gesture of strike solidarity for the miners from transport trade unionists.
Cook never stopped making the point. He enrolled the Labour Research Department, newly-formed under the influence of the Communist Party, to provide the figures for the workers to show just how huge a dent the miners had made in the side of British capital. In October, the LRD published The Coal Shortage: Why the Miners Will Win, with a foreword by A.J. Cook.
The effect of the strike on the economy, the pamphlet showed, was catastrophic. Pig iron production, which had averaged 538,000 tons a month from January to April, was down to 14,000 tons in August. Steel production, 697,000 tons a month from January to April, had slumped to 52,000 tons. The president of the Federation of British Industries, Sir Max Muspratt, had estimated the total cost of the strike to the beginning of October at an incredible £541 million (enormously greater in real terms than even the most exaggerated estimate for the cost of the 1984ndash;5 strike). ‘By the end of the year,’ the pamphlet concluded, ‘the loss would amount to between £1,000 and £1,500 million.’
This was followed in November by The Miners Struggle and the Big Five Banks, again with a foreword by A.J. Cook, in which he wrote: ‘The miners are not broken – they continue to fight; their destiny is in your hands. An embargo on blackleg coal and a levy on all workers must be adopted to save the miners from defeat.
‘And to the miners who are fighting I say: Every honest worker in the world admires your courage and loyalty in the fight which was forced upon you by the rapacious mine-owners, who have at their service the banks, the press and the resources of the press.’
This was not whistling in the dark. Even in November, as the Miners’ Federation delegate conference met to discuss the drift back to work under pressure of unspeakable hunger and poverty in the coalfields and the intransigence of the owners and the government, the solidarity of the majority astonished owners and ministers.
But the shock steeled their determination to grind the miners down. Defeat stared the union in the face, yet the loyalty of the miners, especially in the ‘hard areas’ such as South Wales and Durham, was apparently unshakeable. Militants like Arthur Horner urged a ‘stepping up’ of the strike and more pressure for solidarity action. Others, like Aneurin Bevan, called for an orderly return.
Cook knew that an end of the strike meant defeat – not just on hours and wages but on district agreements which would, effectively, break the union for a long period, perhaps for ever. He wanted the strike to go on, but he knew it could not do so without new sources of funds. He staked all on a levy of trade unionists, and was prepared to compromise to get it.
Here is the first sign of the waverings which he had shown as the struggle faded in 1921. In July 1926, a clutch of bishops, wringing their hands and washing them on alternate days, ‘came forward’ with proposals to settle the dispute. The proposals were no more than a request for another government subsidy, another ‘moratorium’, this time for four months, and ‘independent compulsory arbitration’ at the end of it.
The coal-owners, of course, would have no truck with these suggestions. They were for an outright victory in the wake of the General Strike, and when their Christian consciences clashed with their dividend payment, God was asked to wait. The government agreed with the owners (as they always did). The miners’ response was therefore irrelevant. Perhaps because it was irrelevant, the executive of the Federation accepted the proposals, and Cook recommended them in the Sunday Worker.
A ballot was held on the bishops’ proposals. The miners rejected them, against the advice of their own executive. The ‘tactic’ therefore boomeranged, and although Cook’s personal stock did not fall, there were some militants who wondered aloud why he had wavered.
In September, at the TUC Congress in Bournemouth, he wavered again, more crucially. The General Council had promised him a voluntary levy of all trade union members. But they wanted something in exchange. Cook had to agree to speak against any full-scale public debate on the union leaders’ sell-out of the General Strike.
Jack Tanner of the Engineers Union refused to accept the General Council’s report on the General Strike. He moved that the conference ‘refer it back’, and hold a full debate on the behaviour of the General Council during the Nine Days. The conference responded warmly to his appeal, and there were plenty of wet trousers on the platform. If the vote went against them, Thomas and Co. would have to justify themselves in public!
Their saviour was A.J. Cook. He intervened, to thunderous applause, just after Tanner had spoken. ‘We have a million miners locked out,’ he said. ‘We are more concerned just now to get an honourable settlement for these million men than we are in washing dirty linin in this Congress.’ The motion was defeated.
For this, Cook earned himself a thoroughly deserved rebuke in the Sunday Worker, from George Hardy, secretary of the National Minority Movement. ‘What did he gain?’ asked Hardy. ‘A pious resolution, and a false sense of security because the leaders were not with him.’
They were not. They did not even deliver the levy until they knew it was far too late. By the time the levy funds started to trickle in, the miners were broken. The drift back to work had turned into a flood, especially in the Midlands. While the ‘hard areas’ still remained solid (Durham miners balloted to stay out even after a delegate conference had ordered a return), there was nothing for it but to go back on the owners’ terms.
ARTHUR COOK had anticipated the full extent of the defeat, but the immediate impact of it was lost on him. As soon as the miners went back to work, he accepted a long-standing invitation to Moscow. Throughout the strike, he had faced down the red-baiters by assuring them that he did support revolutionary Russia. Russian workers, he pointed out, in spite of the most terrible hardships, contributed more to the strike fund than the combined contributions of unions affiliated to the TUC.
In Moscow, where he spent several weeks, Cook was lionised. The visit acted as a kind of cushion against the fearful reality of the British coalfields. But when he returned in late January 1927 there was no hiding place.
Up and down the coalfields, there was unrelieved gloom. There had been mass sackings of lodge and branch officials. Those that were allowed back to work were browbeaten from the first hour. The wages and hours ‘negotiated’ in the new ‘district agreements’ (a euphemism for the owners’ terms) were horrific. Ancient union privileges, such as the rights of the men to elect their own checkweighmen, were torn up.
Down the mine, there was harassment and speed-up, with the inevitable fatal results. In March 1927, for instance, 66 miners were killed in an explosion and fall at Cwm colliery. Everyone except the owner agreed it was due to speed-up following the lock-out.
The union was lucky to survive at all. In many places, it didn’t. At Maerdy pit, in South Wales, the proud flagship of the Federation for a quarter of a century, the owners wreaked terrible revenge. They refused to recognise the union, and victimised anyone known to be a member. In 1927 there were 377 employed members of the lodge at Maerdy; in 1928, only eight; in 1929, 25. In 1927, the lodge had 1,366 unemployed members; in 1928, 724; and in 1929, 325. This was not because the overall unemployment figures were falling – quite the reverse. It was just that to stand any chance of getting work, men were forced to leave the union (or the area).
The Great Depression is usually placed in the 1930s, when unemployment climbed to over three million. The Great Depression in the South Wales coalfield started immediately after, and as a direct result of, the Miners’ Lock-out. The poverty of the mining families, especially those in the more militant pits where the sackings and victimisations were the hardest, is, literally, unimaginable. Those that could afford the journey left the area. Other miners simply drifted away from their families to seek some sort of work during the week in or around London, or to beg in the London streets. Almost as soon as he got back to his office in Russell Square, Cook found himself besieged by South Wales miners who came to the offices day by day to beg for money or a crust of bread.
Arthur Horner has a lovely story of how he and a couple of tough Communists took Cook to task for giving away most of his salary to such beggars. He told Cook that if he gave away everything he had it would make precious little difference to the problem, and reminded him that his own family had a right to live. One afternoon, Horner and two comrades went themselves to the miners’ headquarters to protest. While they were with Cook, the doorman came in to say an unemployed miner had asked to see Cook. ‘I will deal with him,’ said Horner, gruffly, and stormed out to berate the wretched fellow for begging from his union secretary.
The man told Horner his story. Horner gave him half the money he had saved to keep him in London for a week. He returned to Cook and the others, intending to bluff it out. He found them giggling. They had been listening at the keyhole to find out, as Cook put it, how a ‘really hard man’ deals with a ‘really hard problem’.
What could be done for these desperate members? Cook’s instinct was to mobilise them. At a huge anti-government meeting on Penrhys Mountain, South Wales, on 13 September 1927, Cook proposed, almost by accident, that the ‘starving masses’ in the miners’ area should march to London, to what he called ‘the fountain head of the trouble’. Wal Hannington, the Communist Party agitator who followed Cook, took up the idea. He had already run hunger marches of the unemployed in the depression of 1921, and was to organise many others in the 1930s. He proposed a miners’ hunger march from South Wales to London. The proposal was acclaimed with a mighty roar.
The march, which took place that November, was a tremendous success. It is fully chronicled in Wal Hannington’s book, Unemployed Struggles. Though the book was written in 1936, long after Hannington had fallen out with Cook, he pays generous tribute to the miners’ leader for his role. Cook spoke to enormous meetings on the road: of 3,000 in Swindon; 5,000 in Reading and more than 100,000 in Trafalgar Square.
You often meet old socialists who will tell you proudly of the hunger marches of the old days. What they don’t tell you is that these marches were hated and denounced by the leaders of the TUC and of the Labour Party. The organisers were variously described as rabble-rousers, agitators, Communists and incendiaries, and the union mandarins seized every opportunity to smear the marchers – sometimes even by ridiculing their shabby clothes! A.J. Cook’s part in the 1927 Hunger March endeared him still further to the rank-and-file miners, but infuriated his colleagues in the TUC, who were developing a new policy to shield themselves from their self-inflicted impotence.
They called it ‘conciliation’. The time had come, they argued, to stop talking about class war and to start talking with the employers.
A.J. Cook didn’t call it conciliation. He called it collaboration. He took over a regular column in the Sunday Worker. Week after week he savaged J.H. Thomas and the other trade union leaders. He started, as always, from the condition of the workers, especially of the miners. He asked whether there was the slightest sign that the capitalist system had relented, or was treating workers better than previously. On the contrary, the workers were worse off, the rich better off. Exploitation, the engine of the system, was working at a tremendous pace, but it did not solve the basic problems of society; it made them worse. Unemployment and poverty were on the rise. Why should the working-class movement collaborate? What would they get out of it?
The questions were not answered. They were ignored. At the 1927 TUC Congress in Edinburgh in September, George Hicks, the building workers’ leader, once a Marxist and a man of the left, devoted his presidential address to the new concept of ‘conciliation’. The reward for this initiative came on 23 November, when a group of employers under Sir Alfred Mond, a South Wales industrialist, called for a conference to discuss the ‘common interests’ of trade unionists and employers. The new TUC president, Ben Turner of the wool workers, readily accepted. He started talking to Mond regularly, and on 12 January 1928 a delegation from the TUC met a delegation of employers headed by Mond.
Cook protested furiously. The TUC, he said, had no mandate to enter such discussions with employers. No such idea had been put to the movement, or decided at any democratic conference. He attended the Mond-Turner conference at Burlington House in January 1928 and scathingly attacked both sides for congratulating each other when workers he represented had not enough to eat. He rushed out a pamphlet, The Mond Moonshine, whose preface by the old ILP member Joseph Southall is worth quoting in full:
HOW THE WOLVES MADE PEACE WITH THE SHEPHERDS
AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SHEEP
Mundus the Wolf said to the shepherds: ‘Why should there not be peace between you and us, seeing that we both depend on the sheep for a living so that our interests are the same?’
Then Bender, Diggitt and Lemon, three of the Shepherds, said: ‘Let there be peace and cooperation’ and with this most of the shepherds agreed for they thought: ‘Why should we have the danger and trouble of fighting the wolves who speak so pleasantly?’
But Cocus, sturdy shepherd, who had fought hard for the sheep when other shepherds fled, did not trust the Wolves, and especially old Mundus whose origin was doubtful ...
And Cocus answered: ‘Are not the jaws of the wolves red even now with the blood of the sheep?’
To which Lemon replied loftily: ‘Cocus speaks only for himself – the Council of Shepherds will deal with him.’
And Bender (who had charge of the shearing, and was naturally woolly in consequence) said to the Wolves:
‘Let us get round a table and explore every avenue, without prejudice, to hammer out ways and means to get out of the present chaos on to the highway of comfort and prosperity like that of Rome, which was not built in a day.’
Now what he meant by all this nobody knows, but while he was speaking the Wolves made off with a number of lambs and many valuable fleeces. Then did the Wolves rejoice for they knew the value of sheep’s clothing.
Mundus was Mond of course, and Cocus, Cook. Bender was Ben Turner; Diggitt was Ben Tillett and Lemon was Walter Citrine. This was the theme of Cook’s pamphlet, which was published in March 1928, and was followed in the late summer by another entitled Mond’s Manacles.
‘There can be no peace with poverty or unemployment,’ it ended. ‘There can be no peace with capitalism.’
These attacks on his colleagues goaded them to reply in the only way they knew. The cry went up: Cook must be expelled! Under the heading TUC TIRED OF MR COOK’, the Daily Express of 16 January 1928 had this to say:
‘Relations between Mr A.J. Cook, the miners’ secretary, and his colleagues on the General Council of the Trade Union Congress have almost reached breaking point.
‘So much indignation has been roused among his colleagues by his behaviour that the council may not be content to pass a mere vote of censure, and more drastic measures may be taken. The possibility of excluding Mr Cook from further meetings is being discussed. It is an open secret that since he joined the General Council last September [1927] Mr Cook has provoked angry scenes at every meeting. Matters have reached the stage at which he has been threatened more than once with physical violence by several of his colleagues.’
These attacks, which were widely publicised in the press, led to Cook getting an offer of help from an unexpected area.
The ‘Mond Moonshine’ had been having its effect on the Labour Party too. Hypnotised by the prospect of a General Election in which it might once more gain office, the Labour Party leadership were rapidly cutting out of speeches, policies and documents any reference to class war or to socialism. There policies spoke about ‘one nation’ and ‘pulling together in both sides of industry’. This appalled those members of the ILP who were still committed to socialist ideas. In particular, John Wheatley, perhaps the most dedicated socialist ever to get to parliament for the Labour Party, publicly declared his view that defeat at the polls was better than a victory under Ramsay Macdonald and the then Labour leaders.
Wheatley’s secretary and assistant at the time, John Scanlon, called Cook to a meeting in the House of Commons attended by some of the more left-wing MPs of the ILP. The meeting spawned the idea of a ‘public campaign’ to win back both the Labour Party and the trade unions to class struggle and socialist solutions to capitalist crises. Thus was born the ‘Cook-Maxton’ manifesto.
The idea was simple. The two most popular orators of the labour movement at the time – Arthur Cook of the miners and James Maxton, the fiery ILP MP for Bridgeton in Glasgow – would travel the country speaking to a ‘manifesto’ which sought to put the blame for the country’s ills on capitalism, and urged the Labour Party to commit itself to socialist policies if ever it formed a government.
The campaign was launched at a monster meeting in St Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow in July. So many people turned up that the speakers had to speak again at an overflow meeting outside. But at once, the campaign ran into trouble. John Wheatley wanted it to encourage dissident Labour Party members to refuse to support Mondist right-wing candidates at the election. Maxton disagreed, arguing that it was not the job of the campaign to split the Labour Party. Maxton’s view prevailed. Because no one trusted Cook to curtail his revolutionary ardour, he was asked to write out his Glasgow speech and submit it for approval before making it. Although the speech reads well enough, it lost its originality and fervour; and the meeting was a bit of a flop.
This difficulty continued throughout the campaign. Lots of people agreed with Maxton and Cook. The basic arguments seemed unanswerable. It was pointless making friends with enemies such as theirs. It was clear that the interests of the classes were opposed to one another, and that any policy based on collaboration was bound to shackle a future Labour government, and drive it into the arms of capitalism, but what could people who agreed do about it? If the argument was not a guide to some sort of action, then it quickly lost its initial attractiveness. It was the analysis without the remedy – the prerogative of the quack throughout the ages.
So the Cook-Maxton campaign livened up left-wing politics for a brief summer, and then everyone settled down to what seemed the only practicable task on offer: the return of a Labour government.
On and on went Cook, however. He seemed indomitable. At the TUC in Swansea in September 1928 he faced his tormentors once more. He spoke powerfully against Mondism, and against any further meetings between the employers and the General Council.
‘You cannot under the capitalist structure avoid unemployment,’ he said. ‘Do not have alliances with the enemy. That is breaking a vital principle and is going to bind us with shackles to capitalism.’
He was followed to the rostrum (this Congress was the first to introduce the rostrum) by Herbert Smith, the miners’ president and Cook’s staunchest ally in the lock-out of 1926. Smith was brutal. He savaged Cook from his first sentence.
‘I do not speak for Arthur Cook and I do not speak for Herbert Smith. I speak for the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, which supports the General Council.’
Smith was correct. The Miners’ Federation itself had moved to the right under the pressure of the employers’ offensive. Cook was isolated not only on the General Council; he was in a minority among his fellow miners. At the MFGB conference that summer of 1928, a resolution approving Mondism had met with fierce resistance, but had been passed.
Smith’s blunt attack exposed the weakness of Arthur Cook’s position. Cook was on the General Council and was able to speak at the TUC because he was secretary of the Miners’ Federation. Yet bhis own ideas about the political and economic situation were now opposed by his own union.
From all sides, both in the Congress proceedings and outside the conference hall, the questions rained down on him. Who did Cook think he was? Was he not abusing his position both as miners’ secretary and as member of the General Council in expressing his extremist views? Were not the miners Mondists now? Why should the miners’ union and the TUC be used as a sounding board for Communist ideas by someone who was elected to represent an organisation which thought and voted quite differently? What right had Cook to expect to hold either position if he continued to abuse both?
Cook had an answer. He had been elected on the programme of the Minority Movement in 1924 – a programme which was absolutely opposite to that now promulgated by his union. He would stick to that, whatever happened. He rose at the TUC to give his accustomed reply. As he spoke, he collapsed, and was rushed to hospital.
IT WAS a bleak autumn for Arthur Cook. He had never been a fit man. He suffered from many of the familiar miners’ illnesses, bronchitis, emphyzema and so on. The pain in his leg from the fight in 1926 had never gone away. Now, worse news was to come. The doctors confirmed what he had dreaded: that he was being eaten up by cancer and would be lucky to live another five years.
In hospital, he mused on the contradictions of his position. The truth was that his central argument did not stand up. True, he had been elected on the platform of the Minority Movement in 1924. But there had been enormous changes since then, all for the worse. Strong, confident lodges had been destroyed. People’s faith in the union was immeasurably weakened. In slump and poverty, working people did not turn in the mass to ideas of revolutionary change. They withdrew, sought immediate ways out of their difficulties, and geared for compromise, however hopeless or ridiculous it appeared.
The mood had changed completely. Cook knew that in spite of all his popularity among the miners, if he stood and fought again on the same platform he would almost certainly be defeated. The support of the rank-and-file miners – the rock on which he had built his reputation and his confidence – had slipped away from him.
In these circumstances what use was his old and famous slogan: ‘You can only take what you are strong enough to take and only hold what you are strong enough to hold’? This slogan – the core of the syndicalist ideas of his youth – was fine as long as the curve of workers’ militancy and confidence pointed upwards. But what happened when it turned down – what if you could take nothing, and hold precious little? What role was there for the syndicalist then – especially the syndicalist who had reached high office through expression of his militant views?
Was he to pretend that the mood was different and continue to campaign against his colleagues on the basis of a militancy which did not exist? Or was he to retreat to compromise, to hold what he could even if it meant rejecting some of the ideas with which his closest followers associated him?
No doubt his illness, and the short span of life in pain which loomed in front of him, played a part in his decision. No doubt the tough and wily Walter Citrine, who visited him in his hospital bed, had some influence on him. Whatever the cause, by October that same year, 1928, he was writing in the Sunday Worker advocating caution, compromise, walking before you can run, and the importance of a Labour government as a first step to socialism.
At once, one of his staunchest supporters wrote and urged him not to slide. Harry Pollitt, a Manchester engineer who had devoted his life to the Communist Party, wrote on 25 October:
‘Dear Arthur,
‘Glad to hear of your recovery, but amazed at the sharp turn of events so far as your policy is concerned. I believe that your present line is the most dangerous to yourself that you have ever taken. Unless you are more than careful, you will find that more dirty actions will be taken by the MFGB in your name and over your signature, against the militant miners, than have ever been taken before.
‘Your notes in last week’s Sunday Worker are appalling. I wouldn’t presume to write you, only for our close friendship, and no one knows better than I do all you have gone through. But you know you have had our backing and help as well. For the last two weeks I have been speaking all over Lancashire on the Swansea TUC stating the fight you put up there, getting support for you, making your position clear, and then you throw it all away in the misguided conception you are doing the right thing. You are not. You could sweep all the coalfields on the one union issue, but unless you break with them, you’ll find it too late.’
Pollitt’s letter ended:
‘I beg of you, for the sake of the miners’ best interests and your own, resume your open fight. It will rally to you all that is best in the movement. When you have been fighting the hardest, you have had the greatest mass support. On your present lines, you’ll not only lose it, you’ll knock the heart out of thousands of the MFGB’s best lads. Is it worth it? Of course it isn’t. They believe they have got you down. They’ll wipe their feet on you. They won’t forget all they have to pay you back.’
It was a moving and prophetic appeal. But the crucial problem disturbing Cook – should he resign as secretary or should he continue and compromise – was not touched on. There was something fundamentally dishonest about using the prestige of elected office to preach policies which were not acceptable to the majority of the electorate – the union membership. This dishonesty, however, probably didn’t even occur to Harry Pollitt. So his letter was of little help. Cook replied, sadly and pathetically:
‘Dear Harry,
‘Regret delay in answering your letter. Am much better now, but not yet A1. Now don’t worry; shall not go over to the reactionaries. They wait for my body. Tactics may be wrong, but I am up against difficult proposition – when to force issue. Cannot explain by letter but should like to see you as they are out for a smash. Future must be thought out.
‘Do not blame rank and file but b— machinery which keeps rank and file at bay. Their power in machine – when and how to test it ... I am firm in one national union and want to swap coalfields, but when and how. See me soon. I have nought to fear in a fight. Yours ever for the workers, AJC.’
This letter – one of the very few which survive from Cook – shows that in late October he was still thinking of a tactical withdrawal, while keeping friends and counsel among the Communists. As with so many tactical withdrawals, it soon turned into a rout.
Before long Cook was making peace with the TUC leadership, and even the Labour leadership which he had denounced so mercilessly for the previous five years. In February, he attended a meeting with the Labour leaders in which he agreed that the next Labour government could postpone the nationalisation of the mines beyond the first session of parliament. He spoke more and more enthusiastically for the Labour Party on public platforms in the run-up to the 1929 election.
In March, for instance, he said:
‘I have fought for and will continue to fight for a Labour government as a step to socialism; to repeal the pernicious 8-hours Act; to secure a Minimum Wage, adequate pensions at 60, nationalisation of the mines, minerals and by-products. A Labour government would bring new life and hope to the workers; it would increase faith in trade unionism and would lead us nearer to socialism.’
In the election campaign, he was persuaded, as an ultimate humiliation, to speak for Ramsay Macdonald at Seaham Harbour, where his friend Harry Pollitt was standing as a Communist. Pollitt records with some relish that he waited outside a hall until Cook arrived in a big car, and deliberately turned away when Cook ‘waved a cheery greeting’ across the street.
Making peace with Ramsay Macdonald and Co. meant making peace with the establishment in general. In April 1929, Cook found himself at the Mansion House in the City of London at a luncheon for the chief helpers of the Miners’ Distress Fund, a charity sponsored by the Prince of Wales.
The Prince made a pretty speech, and then, to everyone’s surprise, Cook was on his feet congratulating the Prince on his ‘whole-hearted enthusiasm’ for the miners’ fund, and especially for his appeal the previous Christmas on the radio. Only eleven months previously, Cook had mercilessly scoffed at wealthy city slickers and royalty who sought to solve their consciences with charity for the miners. Now in a burst of warm-hearted impetuousness he appeared in public as yet another groveller before royalty.
He never had the time or health to taste the bitter fruits of the 1929-31 Labour government to the full. He watched aghast as the Eight Hours Bill was not repealed, how there were no provisions for adequate pensions at 60 or a minimum wage for miners.
He saw very quickly that the Labour government was not bringing new life and hope to the workers. Instead, it brought more unemployment, more sickness and more despair. He noticed that in two years the government had decreased faith in trade unionism and had postponed any socialism by as long as anyone could see into the future. He noticed (indeed he even remarked, once, in public) that while Macdonald had regretted he could not nationalise the mines in the first session of parliament, he did not nationalise them in the second session either. By the third session, Macdonald (and Thomas, and Snowden) had joined the Tory Party in a government which postponed nationalisation for another sixteen years.
In January 1931 his right leg was amputated above the knee. He bore the pain and disability with his usual cheerfulness and good spirits. Visitors from across the political spectrum came to see him in hospital. One of the more persistent of them was Sir Oswald Mosley, Labour MP for Smethwick, who was outraged by the spinelessness of the Labour government. He demanded more public spending to cut unemployment, and a programme of public works which heralded what later became known as Keynesianism. Mosley wrote a manifesto along these lines, and persuaded Arthur Cook to sign it.
A few months later, Mosley and John Strachey, Cook’s former editor and aide, broke with the Labour Party to form the New Party. Both men pleaded with Cook to be a founder member of the party, but Cook refused. He would not leave the Labour Party, he said, but he promised he would vote for the New Party at the next election.
He never got the chance. He now hardly ever left the trade union hospital at Manor House, Golders Green, in North London. On a bitterly cold night, 2 November 1931, a nursing sister approached him to prepare him for sleep. ‘Sister, it’s cold tonight,’ smiled Cook. ‘Go make yourself a cup of tea before you attend to me.’ She did. When she returned the miners’ secretary was dead. He was 47 years old.
THE OBITUARIES in the Press gushed with relief for a dead enemy. They rejoiced in Cook’s death-bed conversion. ‘Miners’ leader who turned against the Communists: Extremist views which became considerably modified’ was the Daily Mirror’s verdict.
Harry Pollitt’s warning had been cruelly vindicated. The reactionaries ‘wiped their feet on him’. Cook had become, by the end, a victim not just of appalling illness but of the syndicalism which inspired him. A union leader carried to office by militant policies and workers’ confidence is like a marker buoy. As long as the seas are high, it guides, leads and moves with the current. When the tide goes out, the buoy is left on the sand, without purpose, marking nothing.
The position of such a leader is his greatest obstacle. To renounce it, to return to the rank and file, seems to be throwing away enormous advantage. Yet to stay in a position which is not properly representative leaves no option but to compromise or to cheat. Cook was not a cheat, so he compromised.
The first and most obvious lesson is the importance of socialist organisation, rooted and committed to the rank and file. In such an organisation we can keep our socialist commitment not just in the flow of the tide – which is easy – but in its ebb as well.
When the workers’ confidence turns down, when employers and rulers win the day, the only way to keep high the aspirations for a new social order is through association with other socialists, learning from and teaching one another, extending our understanding of how the revolutionary tide has ebbed and flowed in the past. But, above all, we need to relate to whatever active struggle, however tiny, there is going on. Perhaps the worst aspect of A.J. Cook’s compromise in 1929 was his turning away from the unofficial miners’ strikes at Dawdon in County Durham, and Binley in Warwickshire.
However great the victory of the ruling class, it can never escape the continuing class struggle. Since the society it governs is founded on exploitation, there will always be people resisting it, sometimes aggressively, confidently and successfully; more often defensively, and unsuccessfully. This resistance is the only real hope for lasting change. Association with it by organised socialists is the best guarantee that the socialist ideas which inspire us can be kept alive and relevant in the bad times as easily as they can in the good. Tactical demands and practical slogans are cut down to size at such a time – but this way they never lose contact with socialist aspirations or the living battles of real people on which they depend.
So is that the end of the story? Can we dump A.J. Cook in the dustbin of history along with all the other trade union leaders who took office to change the world and ended up changing only themselves?
No, most emphatically, we cannot, for there is another vital ingredient to the end of this story.
The Communist Party, which moved A.J. Cook for high office, which championed him through his great campaign of 1924-5, which ordered him to cede ‘all power to the General Council’ in the 1926 General Strike (even to the extent of surrendering the newsprint for the Sunday Worker to the TUC) was embarked at the time of Cook’s greatest doubt and illness on a campaign of the most hideous sectarianism and insularity.
This was the notorious ‘Third Period’, ordered from Stalin’s Moscow and adopted by those Party members who were more susceptible to the ‘line’ from Russia than they were to the real experiences of the working people they pretended to represent.
In the ‘Third Period’, the line went, capitalism was in complete disarray, and socialist revolution was on the agenda. In such a period, the greatest obstacles to revolution were not the bankers or the industrialists, but the ‘fakers’ on the left who pretended they had a way forward and therefore deliberately obstructed the revolution. The crucial task in such an ‘epoch’ (a favourite revolutionary word) was to ‘break with’ the old order in the working-class movement. Unions which flirted with Mond had to be abandoned and new revolutionary unions set up in their place. Strikes had to be called in opposition to the union leadership – even if they were hopeless – with the specific aim of challenging that leadership.
The full force of the rhetoric which Communists used to turn on the ruling class was now turned on the elected leaders of the working class. Workers’ Life, the weekly party paper, trumpeted – on 13 December 1929:
‘In an era in which the prospect of revolutionary mass struggle looms ahead, our tactics should be based on the assumption that the purpose of the Left Social-Democratic manoeuvres is only a counterrevolutionary one.’
Every single sentiment in that sentence was the exact opposite of the truth. December 1929 was not ‘an era in which the prospect of revolutionary mass struggle looms ahead’. The purpose of the ‘Left Social-Democratic manoeuvres’ (meaning those on the left of the Labour Party) were to shift the party to the left or hold it where it was, but without moving too quickly or jeopardising election chances – nothing whatsoever to do with counter-revolution. The false conclusion, however, flowed freely from the false facts: here’s Workers’ Life again, on 30 August 1929, just before Cook collapsed during his speech at the Swansea TUC:
‘The Communist Party must energetically fight the Left Social-Democrats as the most dangerous enemies of the working class.’
The most dangerous enemies. Worse than bankers or employers or Tories or spies!
The fight against these ‘most dangerous enemies’ gathered force through 1929. The Communist Party press and the party faithful whipped themselves into a lather of self-righteous fury against them.
Poor Arthur Cook got it worst. At the moment his doubts were first expressed, the Communist Party jumped on him from a vast height. ‘A.J. Cook joins the Old Gang’, announced the Sunday Worker on 15 March 1929, and every issue of the Party press from that date until his death sought some new form of malicious gossip about him. ‘Cook the Renegade!’ became an almost obligatory headline.
The paper reported that Cook had been, without a break, a member of the ILP since 1905 (which was nonsense); that he had called in the police at the TUC Congress (which was not true) and that he was as bad a ‘social fascist’ as you could find anywhere – worse even than Jimmy Maxton.
(‘Social fascist’ was a phrase coined by the Communist Party to describe people who called themselves socialist but supported policies which took the unions into the same organisations as the employers – because this was also a crucial industrial policy in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. It was grotesque, even as a description of the right-wing union leaders, let alone people like Cook and Maxton, and utter political nonsense – as the Communist Party was to discover later and at appalling cost when the real fascists turned on Communists and ‘social fascists’ alike.)
Meanwhile Cook’s accolade for the Prince of Wales gave Workers’ Life a marvellous opportunity, and the paper scarcely referred to the miners’ leader without adding the tag ‘that notorious friend of the smiling Prince’.
Cook was immediately stung to reply. His answer in Workers’ Life took the form of an open letter to his old friend and comradeArthur Horner, who was himself soon to run foul of his party’s domineering sectarianism.
‘I am constrained to reply,’ wrote Cook, ‘hoping yet that we can reconcile our differences and still continue our comradeship which was forged in class struggle.
‘You know that you were wrong when you stated that I have joined the enemies of the revolutionary struggle – neither has what you term the trade union and Labour Party bureaucracy got hold of me ... I have and shall continue to oppose Mondism because I am working and fighting for socialism.
‘You know as well as I do the terrible conditions in the coalfields, and the suffering of the women and children. I have been compelled to do the most unpleasant tasks of begging for food, money, boots, and cast-off clothing. Practically every day young men, stranded, call for food, clothing and shelter at my office. I have done my best for them. Every day the post brings letters to me and Mrs Cook begging for help, especially from expectant mothers, terrible epistles of agony and despair.
‘I have heard their cry for help, and have done all I can to give assistance. I have helped all I can, begged all I can, till I have been almost demented and in despair, because I hate charity and reliefs which make us all beggars ...
‘I now want remedies instead of relief. The more poverty increases, the more our people sink into despair and become the hopeless prey of all the most reactionary influences and movements.’
The remedy, he went on, lay in industrial and political power. Industrial power had to be built up in the trade unions, political power sought through the Labour Party.
‘This cannot be done,’ he wrote, ‘by forming new unions, thus dividing the workers and intensifying the struggle between workers and leaders in our present weakened state.’ Nor could it be done, he concluded, by standing Communist Party candidates against Labour candidates in a ‘first past the post’ electoral system, where Communist candidates who did well would only split the workers’ vote and let the Tories in.
The letter, published on 29 April 1929, bore tragic testimony to the awful dilemma which Cook faced. It exposed his weakness as a militant leader of a demoralised and passive workforce. But it was not the letter of someone who had abandoned the ideas and principles of his life and youth; and, on the subject of breakaway unions at least, it undoubtedly won the argument.
The Communist Party, however, was not in a mood to argue. Denunciation was more appropriate to their line, which was being dictated with more and more urgency from Moscow. The same party which, a few years later, would fling itself at the feet of any opportunist trade union leader who offered a cliché on behalf of the Popular Front, now drowned the most powerful and principled union leader their movement had ever known in stale sectarian polemic.
Cook persevered. He wrote again to Labour Monthly, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, which published his letter in June. He started by complaining that he had been misquoted, which he had been. On the policy of breakaway unions, he wrote:
‘The Communist Party are trying to destroy the only means for protection now, and the only means to create and construct a new social order. They are out to smash the MFGB, the TUC and the Labour Party – quite an ambitious proposal. No more insane object could ever have been formulated outside a lunatic asylum.’
His article ended with a desperate plea for comradely argument and assessment:
‘Comradeship means something higher and nobler than the example set by the Communist Party in their campaign of personalities, hate, vilification and destruction. We must fight capitalism with all the weapons at our disposal in an organised fashion. This needs power, which only trade unions can create by industrial and political argument.’
For this appeal, Arthur Cook got the usual kick in the teeth. A note at the end of the article declared:
‘The Labour Monthly says farewell to him without regret and with the contempt that he deserves.’
The Labour Monthly and its party were saying farewell to a lot of other Communists during 1929. In the eighteen months after the General Strike, 5,000 people had joined the Communist Party, doubling its membership. They joined in disgust at the sell-outs of the General Council and the rightward drift to Mondism following the defeat of the miners. These 5,000 people were overwhelmingly working-class militants, many of them victimised, who were looking for a new lead to strengthen the working-class movement.
But in place of policies which would expose the false ideas put forward by the trade union leaders and strengthen the rank and file, the party simply denounced those leaders and trumpeted crazy notions for new revolutionary trade unions. The Communist Party literature and press reeked of stale jargon. Life in the party became monkish and fanatical. All those who argued with Communists were seen to be against them. All those persuaded by the weakness of the workers to seek salvation in the Labour Party were denounced as reformist and revisionist trash.
The 5,000 left almost as soon as they had joined. Party membership dropped from 10,730 in October 1926 to 5,500 in March 1928, and to 3,200 in December 1929. Soon after this the party took its great leap forward to a daily paper (made possible only by a generous subsidy from Russia), but membership in December 1930 was down to 2,555.
For Arthur Cook, the sectarianism of the Communist Party was first a shock; secondly an excuse. As the abuse mounted, so he no longer felt it necessary to argue his position with his former comrades.
If they really were intent on forming new unions, what need was there to debate with them his own awkward and embarrassing position?
His only way out of his impasse was to resign the secretaryship, and perhaps fight for it again with a militant programme. If he’d won again, he could easily have seen off his adversaries in the TUC. If he’d lost, he would be a rank-and-file miner again, no doubt unemployed, and too ill to work, but at least clear and confident in his politics. There never was at any time in Arthur Cook’s life the slightest suggestion that he kept his position because he needed the money or liked the life-style. He was giving a huge proportion of his small income away anyway.
Resignation, forcing another election, was a powerful and practicable alternative. Any friend or comrade could have advised him down that road. But the know-alls of the Communist Party were so eager to denounce a precious new ‘social fascist’ that they could not even open a dialogue with him.
Thereby hangs a moral. The only point in remembering our past is so that it can guide us in the present. In spite of all the obvious differences in scale and detail, the period which followed the defeat of the miners in 1926 is grimly similar to the times we live in now.
As we try to steer our tiny socialist craft through the same sort of stormy waters, what dangers loom up ahead? On the one side is the huge Rock of Reformism, to which we are lured by the prospect of defeating a vicious and victorious Tory government. Sink your differences, sing the sirens on this rock. Submerge your strikes and demonstrations, put all your energies into knocking out the Tories at the next election, and replacing them with a Labour government pledged at least to improve the lot of working people at the expense of the rich and powerful.
We can see that rock more clearly now than socialists could see it after 1926. Then, there had never been a majority Labour government. Now, we have had years and years of majority Labour governments, most of them in peacetime conditions. We have watched all those governments turn against the people who elected them, and savage them.
As they do so, thousands of their supporters turn away. The ideas which inspired generations of socialists are polluted because, it seems, they cannot be put into practice.
Nevertheless, as after 1926, the current pulls us still towards that rock, and we must steer hard against it; hard for independent socialist organisation rooted in the self-activity of workers, which alone holds out the prospect of real change.
But as we pull the tiller over, we had better beware other sirens on rocks which are perhaps less obvious and where the warnings are less shrill. Theirs are the voices which beckon us away altogether from the real, living working-class movement, which becalm us in eddies and pools where other socialists are sailing around in smaller and smaller circles, amusing and abusing one another with great gusto, but having no effect whatever on what workers say and do, and so no effect whatever on the world outside.
Sectarianism is the philosophy of socialists who have ‘discovered the truth’ about revolution and consider it to be so obvious that everybody else must have discovered it too. ‘Everybody else’, therefore, must be ‘selling out’. Sectarianism is the creed of those who cannot see that most workers – by far the great majority of them – will stay ‘reformist’ either because they do not see an alternative, or because they fear the alternative, until all other roads are shut to them. Sectarianism is the hiding place for socialists who refuse to accept that they must be part of the working-class movement or they are finished.
What then, in 1985, is a fitting epitaph for Arthur James Cook?
There are some who might prefer the obituary in the Daily Worker of 3 November 1931, which could hardly contain its pleasure that another ‘social fascist’ had died in agony.
‘Throughout his whole career,’ it concluded, ‘Cook wavered from side to side, finally ending up in the camp of the workers’ enemies, but still trying to cover up his treachery with high-sounding phrases and gaudy promises.’
Some might prefer that, as I say, if only because it is safe. It is, however, wrong, offensive and arrogant, and will cut off whoever says it from any miner who ever heard A.J. Cook speak, or talked to others who heard him.
I prefer the epitaph written by Robin Page Arnot, who was, I think, on the staff of the Daily Worker at the time, and who later wrote a series of marvellous histories of the British miners and their struggles.
‘There never had been a British miners’ leader like Arthur James Cook; never one so hated by the government, so obnoxious to the mine-owners, so much a thorn in the flesh of other general secretaries of unions; never one who during his three years’ mission from 1924 to 1926 had so much unfeigned reverence and enthusiastic support from his fellow-miners. Neither to Tommy Hepburn nor Tom Halliday, neither to Alexander McDonald or Ben Pickard, neither to the socialists Keir Hardie nor Robert Smillie did the miners of Britain accord the same unbounded trust and admiration as they reposed for those three years and more in A.J. Cook. That support was his strength, and it was his only strength. When he lost it, he lost the ground on which he lived and moved and had his being. Today his faults are forgotten or forgiven amongst the older miners who tell the younger men their recollections of past days; and still in every colliery village there abides the memory of a great name.’ [7]
I prefer that epitaph because it seems to me that one of the important tests of socialists’ behaviour is how we relate to, and how we criticise, great working-class leaders who can lead their class in the heat of the struggle, impervious to the most awful onslaught from the other side. Of such leaders Arthur Cook was undoubtedly one.
Footnotes
1. Walter Citrine, Men and Work, p.77.
2. Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (London 1960), p.72.
3. Morning Post, 10 June 1926.
4. Sunday Worker, 6 June 1926.
5. Sunday Worker, 18 July 1926.
6. Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan (London 1962), vol.1, pp.70-71.
7. Robin Page Arnot, The Miners: Years of Struggle (London 1953), p.541.
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>The great times they could have had</h1>
<h3>(September 1988)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>London Review of Books</strong>, Vol. 10 No. 16, 15 September 1988, pp. 12–13.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor</strong><br>
by Charles Higham<br>
<em>Sidgwick, 419 pp, £17.95</em></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor</strong><br>
by Michael Bloch<br>
<em>Bantam, 326 pp, £14.95</em></p>
<p class="fst">A great many books and articles have been published recently about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Spectator</strong>, 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.’</p>
<p>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, <strong>Abdication</strong>). 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 ...’</p>
<p>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 <strong>Tatler</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Mail</strong>, which itself enthusiastically supported the Fascists in the Thirties. Michael Bloch’s <strong>Secret File of the Duke of Windsor</strong>, the latest in this genre (inevitably serialised in the <strong>Daily Mail</strong>), 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.’</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Mail</strong>. It is a political melodrama of the highest consequence.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But these are really niggles. Gossip <em>is</em> 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.</p>
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<h2>Letters</h2>
<p class="info"><strong>LRB</strong>, Vol. 10 No. 19, 27 October 1988</p>
<p class="fst"><em>From Diana Mosley:</em></p>
<p class="fst">Among many strange assertions made about the Windsors by your reviewer of <strong>Wallis: The Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor</strong> (<strong>LRB</strong>, 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.</p>
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<p class="info"><strong>LRB</strong>, Vol. 10 No. 20, 10 November 1988</p>
<p class="fst"><em>From Paul Foot:</em></p>
<p class="fst">In answer to Diana Mosley’s letter (Letters, 27 October), I quote from Charles Higham’s <strong>Wallis</strong>, 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.</p>
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<p class="fst"><em>Paul Foot</em><br>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
The great times they could have had
(September 1988)
From London Review of Books, Vol. 10 No. 16, 15 September 1988, pp. 12–13.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor
by Charles Higham
Sidgwick, 419 pp, £17.95
The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor
by Michael Bloch
Bantam, 326 pp, £14.95
A great many books and articles have been published recently about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany.
Mr Higham’s book has been greeted with a tremendous shout of fury. ‘Universally slated’ was how Sidgwick and Jackson described its reception to me. It has been passed over for serialisation. Film rights, once assured, are now in jeopardy. Writing in the Spectator, Frances Donaldson, modestly omitting to refer to her own worthy, if rather pedestrian biography of Edward VIII, could not contain her indignation. ‘Nor am I alone in thinking it rather shocking,’ she boomed, ‘that Mr Higham was able to find a reputable British publisher for his book.’
Lady Donaldson doesn’t believe for a moment that either the Duke or Duchess of Windsor were even pro-Nazi. She follows in a long line of biographers, historians and journalists who concede, since it is plainly on the record, that the Duke and Duchess were both opposed to war with Germany, but who dismiss the idea that they were sympathetic to Fascism as a ‘mistaken notion’ (Brian Inglis’s conclusion in his 1966 account, Abdication). Lady Donaldson denounces Charles Higham for retailing tittle-tattle, and concludes that if you leave out the gossip and the speculation there is nothing left in his biography which we didn’t know before.
What is the picture so gaudily painted by Mr Higham? Wallis Warfield was born (out of wedlock) into a rich and comfortable middle-class family in Baltimore. She went to high-society schools, where she read Kipling to her boyfriends. She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive and powerful propagandist for Mussolini. While still friendly with Caetani, Wallis forged even closer bonds with Felipe Espil, First Secretary at the Argentinian Embassy in Washington, an ardent Fascist and a representative of the savage Irigoyen dictatorship in Buenos Aires.
Mr Higham, who has certainly done his homework in the American state files, produces clear evidence that Wallis Spencer, as she then was, was hired as an agent for Naval Intelligence. The purpose of her visit to China in the mid-Twenties, where she accompanied her husband, who also worked for Intelligence, was to carry secret papers between the American Government and the warlords they supported against the Communists. In Peking her consort for a time was Alberto de Zara, Naval Attaché at the Italian Embassy, whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was often expressed in verse. When she moved to Shanghai, she made another close friend in another dashing young Fascist, Count Galeazzo Ciano, later Mussolini’s Foreign Secretary. Wallis’s enthusiasm for the Italian dictatorship was, by this time, the only thing she had in common with her husband, Winfield Spencer. In 1936, ten years after the couple were divorced, Spencer was awarded the Order of the Crown of Italy, one of the highest decorations of the Mussolini regime.
Ernest Simpson, the dull partner in a shipping firm whom Wallis married in 1928, had close business ties with Fascist Italy. But her feeling for Fascism cannot be attributed only to her men friends. On the contrary, the ‘new social order’ brayed around the world by the Italian dictator and his representatives fitted precisely with Wallis’s own upbringing, character and disposition. She was all her life an intensely greedy woman, obsessed with her own property and how she could make more of it. She was a racist through and through: anti-semitic, except when she hoped to benefit from rich Jewish friends; and anti-black (‘Government House with only a coloured staff would put me in my grave,’ she moaned when, many years later, her husband was the Governor of the Bahamas). She was offensive to her servants, and hated the class they came from.
Her Fascist sympathies stayed with her all her life. When she needed a lawyer to start a libel action in 1937, she chose the Parisian Nazi Armand Grégoire. Even when the war was on, she fraternised with the pro-Nazi French businessman, Charles Bedaux. Perhaps her most consistent British confidante and friend was Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald’s wife. As the Windsors and the Mosleys grew old in exile, they took regular solace together, meeting and dining twice a week and musing about the great times they could have had if only the British had seen sense and sided with Hitler and Mussolini against the Reds.
Of all the bonds which united this dreadful woman to the glamorous Prince of Wales in the late-Twenties, none was so strong as their shared politics. Charles Higham’s biography sets out the facts about the Prince’s Fascist leanings and sympathy with the Nazi cause and the corporate state in Italy. The Prince was proud of his German origins, spoke German fluently, and felt an emotional, racial and intellectual solidarity with the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re Jews or anything else, and added that the dictators are very popular these days, and that we might want one in England before long.’ Not long afterwards the Prince confided in a former Austrian ambassador, Count Mensdorff, who wrote: ‘It is remarkable how he expressed his sympathies for the Nazis ...’
Such sympathies were of course common, at least for a while, in London society, but when others began to waver, the Prince of Wales remained steadfast. He asked the Germans to fix up a special dinner for him at the German Embassy, as a special mark of his solidarity with their government. The Germans, on instructions from Berlin, invited Mrs Simpson, who was then his paramour. The company he kept in London burgeoned with keen young supporters of the Nazi ‘experiment’. Edward (‘Fruity’) Metcalfe, one of his closest friends, and the best man at his wedding to Wallis, appeared in the Tatler dressed up in Fascist regalia at a ‘Blackshirt’ dinner. When the Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare fixed up a deal with Pierre Laval, the French Foreign Secretary and a Nazi fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was completed.
In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, could not stomach the idea of a monarch marrying a twice-divorced woman. The objections, it is said, were moral and religious. The truth is, however, that throughout the centuries archbishops and prime ministers have miraculously overcome their moral objections to royal idiosyncrasies in the bedchamber. The real objection to the liaison between the King and Mrs Simpson was that both were Nazi sympathisers at a time when the more far-sighted civil servants, politicians and businessmen were beginning, sometimes reluctantly, to realise that British interests and German interests were on a collision course. As the biographers of Baldwin, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, observed, ‘the government had awakened to a danger that had nothing to do with any question of marriage.’
Charles Higham quotes an FBI file in Washington: ‘Certain would-be state secrets were passed on to Edward, and when it was found that Ribbentrop’ – the German Ambassador in London – ‘actually received the same information, immediately Baldwin was forced to accept that the leakage had been located.’ Higham then asserts (without quoting the relevant passage): ‘The same report categorically states that Wallis was responsible for this breach of security.’ Of Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and head of British Intelligence, Higham writes (and here he does provide the evidence): he ‘was Wallis’s implacable enemy from the day he was convinced she was a Nazi collaborator’.
It is this, far more than any moral consideration, which explains the determination and the ruthlessness with which Baldwin and his administration dealt with the King before his abdication. They were prepared to put up with him, as long as he was acting on his own. They bypassed him. By midsummer 1936, Higham writes, ‘all confidential documents were withheld from the King.’ The prospect of a Nazi King backed up by an infinitely more able and resourceful Wallis Simpson was intolerable. If the King wanted Mrs Simpson, he would have to get out. If he wanted to stay as King, she would have to be banished. The King’s choice (the ‘woman I love’, and exile) came as a great relief to the Government. Yet Edward remained a menace as he continued, in his exile, to offer the Nazis solidarity. When war broke out, he was summoned back to England and sent to France on military duty with the rank of Major-General. His lack of interest and enthusiasm for the job, which he showed by coolly abandoning his duties to attend some parties in the South of France with Wallis, would, in normal circumstances, have led to a court-martial. The Duke of Windsor was not court-martialled. He was made Governor of the Bahamas.
Wherever he went, people noted his Nazi sympathies, which were fanned to fury by the Duchess. As early as 1937, Sir Ronald Lindsay, British Ambassador to Washington, wrote to his wife that the Duke of Windsor was ‘trying to stage a comeback, and his friends and advisers were semi-Nazis.’ A month or two later, Lindsay wrote, officially: ‘The active supporters of the Duke of Windsor within England are those elements known to have inclinations towards Fascist dictatorships, and the recent tour of Germany by the Duke of Windsor and his ostentatious reception by Hitler and his regime can only be construed as a willingness on the part of the Duke of Windsor to lend himself to these tendencies.’ On that tour, the Duke seemed to take special pleasure in greeting the enthusiastic crowds with the Nazi salute. Years afterwards, he would proudly show his guests the pictures of him and Wallis being greeted by the Führer. David Eccles, then a young civil servant, met the Duke and Duchess in Spain and reported ‘The Duke is pretty fifth column.’ In Portugal, the Geman Ambassador Oswald Baron von Hoyningen-Heune, relayed to his superiors in Berlin the Duke’s conviction that ‘had he remained on the throne, war could have been avoided.’ ‘He describes himself,’ von Hoyningen-Heune continued, ‘as a firm supporter of a compromise peace with Germany. The Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.’
Many opponents of the view that the Duke and Duchess were active supporters of the Nazis throughout these times point to his interest in workers’ conditions and to his visit to South Wales in 1936, when he made the famous (and fatuous) statement that ‘something should be done’ about unemployment. Yet the provision of good facilities for hardworking people was crucial to the Nazi idea of a ‘new social order’ and a key to its popularity.
Once they were exiled to the Bahamas, and closely watched by both British and American Intelligence, the royal couple’s Nazi sympathies were kept in check. Even there, however, they associated with Fascist businessmen, in particular the corrupt Harold Christie, with whom the Duke, with the help of the Bahamian taxpayer, went into partnership. As the war swung towards the Allies, the couple’s enthusiasm for the Nazis began to lose its fervour, and in their autobiographies, written much later, both Duke and Duchess would take refuge in the familiar excuse that they had underestimated the horror of the Fascist regimes.
Their former adversaries in the British Government and Civil Service were among the many people who assisted them in their rewriting of their past. The Duke’s brother, George VI, made every effort to ensure that the fact that the King of England had been a Hitler supporter before the war was kept under wraps. Armand Grégoire, the Duchess’s Nazi lawyer, was tried for collusion with the enemy and sent to prison for life, without being asked for (or volunteering) information about his role as intermediary between the royal couple and his Nazi masters. Charles Bedaux, who might have been persuaded to trade some such information in exchange for lenient treatment, committed suicide while under arrest for treason. Coco Chanel, an intimate friend of the Duchess, was arrested and charged with treason against the French state. The evidence against her was prodigious. She had worked directly for Nazi Intelligence against her own government. After a 24-hour interrogation by American Intelligence, however, she was released. ‘Had she been forced to stand trial, with the threat of execution as an employee of an enemy government,’ Higham writes, ‘she could easily have exposed as Nazi collaborators the Windsors and dozens of others highly placed in society. Despite the hatred of the Windsors at Buckingham Palace, the royal family would not willingly tolerate an exposé of a member of the family.’
This sense of solidarity prompted the King to send the Keeper of the Royal Pictures on a secret mission to Germany soon after the war to collect from the Schloss Kronberg, family home of the Princes of Hesse, a bundle of documents which exposed the connection between the Windsors and the Nazis. The Keeper of the Royal Pictures and an associate went to great lengths to retrieve these papers, which have never been seen since. The Keeper of the Royal Pictures was Anthony Blunt, who for nearly ten years had been an active agent of the Russian Government. By 1945 Blunt’s loyalty to his king had superseded his loyalty to Communism, and he kept quiet about his secret mission. In 1964, when he finally confessed to his KGB past, his interrogator was a middle-ranking MI5 man called Peter Wright. Wright was summoned to the Palace. On the one hand, he was told by Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary, that the Palace would do all they could to help, and, on the other, warned that Blunt might mention his trip to Germany after the war, and ordered abruptly not to pursue this particular matter. In the event, despite hundreds of hours’ interrogation, Blunt never told Wright (or anyone else) about what he found in Germany. Possibly, like Coco Chanel, he knew that a promise to keep quiet about the papers would ensure his own immunity from prosecution.
Whether intended or not, the refusal to accept that the Windsors were Fascists has gone on and on. The ‘Great Love Story’ has appeared on television, and in numerous books. Experts argue about the psychology of the King, the ambition of Wallis Warfield, the hypocrisy of the British Establishment, the size of Edward’s penis, and whether or not he was a foot-fetishist. All these matters are marvellous for serialisation in the Daily Mail, which itself enthusiastically supported the Fascists in the Thirties. Michael Bloch’s Secret File of the Duke of Windsor, the latest in this genre (inevitably serialised in the Daily Mail), has but four references to Hitler and continues in the traditional view that the Duke was naive. He thought, Bloch suggests, that the Nazis were ‘rough but reasonable men’, and underestimated their barbarism. Charles Higham has an answer to this: ‘The repeated absurdity of journalists that the couple’s commitment to Fascism and a negotiated peace in World War Two was based upon a transcendent foolishness stood exposed the moment one entered a conversation with the Windsors. Whatever one might think of their views, those views were not entered into lightly or from a position of blind ignorance.’
Wallis did not want to be the Duchess of Windsor. In personal terms, she preferred her tedious and undemanding husband Ernest Simpson to the ever-whining, introspective and hypochondriacal Duke. She wanted to be mistress to the King, not the wife of an exiled duke. She begged the King to stand by his throne, seeing herself as a modern Mrs Fitzherbert, in charge of the court but not of the court, enjoying all the pomp and influence of a queen without being the Queen. This desire was not inspired by straightforward social ambition: it came from her anxiety to influence the course of political events. The story, in short, is not just soppy sexist trash, as portrayed in the Daily Mail. It is a political melodrama of the highest consequence.
One of the weaknesses of modern republican theory is that it tends to concentrate on the personal weaknesses of the Royals. How could anyone, it is asked, support a system which raises on a pedestal people like Edward VIII or George IV or Andy and Fergie? Are they not absurd, ridiculous figures, unfit for anything but a jewellery auction or a hunt ball? This argument always falls flat. The influence of a monarchy which has long ago been stripped of real political power lies precisely in its absorption of people’s aspirations, griefs, ambitions and endeavours. Weaknesses, therefore, are as adorable as strengths. Princess Diana has no O levels – so what? Nor have most other people. Fergie is a mindless Sloane with nothing but a cheerful grin – so what?
A cheerful grin is no bad thing when most people aren’t feeling at all cheerful. Royal idiocies, divorces, selfishnesses, as detailed in the popular press, are not destructive of modern monarchy. On the contrary, they provide a vital link between the monarchs and their subjects.
So it was with the Windsors. The King of England fell for a divorced woman and beastly old Baldwin wouldn’t let him have her. How rotten of him! How many others have fallen for unsuitable partners, but have not had their jobs taken away from them because of it? So it was that the people maintained their sympathy for the ‘gallant young Prince’. The one quality of the Duke of Windsor which might have broken the spell of the British monarchy – his Fascist leanings – was discreetly buried.
Charles Higham’s is an important book. But there is a great deal wrong with it. He has provided his critics with plenty of hostages. Again and again, he quotes the most scurrilous and unlikely gossip, without proving it. It is no good quoting one contemporary hazarding a guess that Wallis was the lover of Count Ciano, and that she even had an abortion as a result. There is not the slightest proof of this, and anyway it is beside the point. It is no good inventing (or guessing at) Wallis’s sexual education in the brothels of Shanghai or for that matter entering the royal bedchamber to speculate about what exactly went on there. There are times – far too many of them – when bald assertions are not backed by the evidence they need; the notes and the index are a disgrace; and Higham’s biographical method, piling incident on incident and referring only to the day and the month, continually loses the thread of the narrative.
But these are really niggles. Gossip is a dangerous commodity, but no biography worth its salt could survive without it. The plain fact is that for all its weaknesses the book is enthralling from first to last and for one central reason. It exposes both its main subject and her royal catch, not as the dim-witted, self-obsessed lovers who have been pickled for posterity, but as nasty, determined Fascists who wanted to preside over a ‘new social order’ which would do away for ever with all pretence at democracy and consign all opposition to the holocaust.
Letters
LRB, Vol. 10 No. 19, 27 October 1988
From Diana Mosley:
Among many strange assertions made about the Windsors by your reviewer of Wallis: The Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor (LRB, 15 September) he says that my husband and I dined with them twice a week. Twice a year would be nearer the mark. We always accepted their invitations because dining with them was invariably enjoyable and sometimes interesting, but we were not asked twice a week. This could easily have been checked, because they kept a book in which visitors signed their names. I first met the Duchess nearly ten years after the end of the war, and was not her ‘confidante’. The Windsors were hospitable neighbours, no more.
Diana Mosley
Orsay, France
LRB, Vol. 10 No. 20, 10 November 1988
From Paul Foot:
In answer to Diana Mosley’s letter (Letters, 27 October), I quote from Charles Higham’s Wallis, pages 343 and 344: ‘Much of 1952 and 1953 was absorbed in work on the two houses. During this period the Duke resumed and the Duchess acquired a warm friendship … The Mosleys dined at the Mill twice a week, and the Windsors almost as frequently at the Temple de la Gloire.’ Mr Higham quotes (on page 402) as a source for this statement ‘one of the most memorable interviews of his life’ – afforded him in her home by Lady Mosley. This information was difficult to check since, most unhappily, I do not have direct access to the Duchess of Windsor’s visitors’ book.
Paul Foot
London N16
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Doing the Deed of Death</h1>
<h3>(March 2002)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Arts Review</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.261, March 2002, p.29.<br>
Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>Julius Caesar</strong><br>
by William Shakespeare<br>
Barbican, London</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars<br>
But in ourselves that we are underlings.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Very early on in Shakespeare’s play <em>Julius Caesar</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Doing the Deed of Death
(March 2002)
From Arts Review, Socialist Review, No.261, March 2002, p.29.
Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Julius Caesar
by William Shakespeare
Barbican, London
‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves that we are underlings.’
Very early on in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar one senior senator, Cassius, engages another, Brutus, in one of the most eloquent and effective agitations in all literature. Rome is threatened by a dictatorship under Caesar, the military conqueror, and the more democratically minded senators are moved to revolt. Cassius stirs Brutus with Caesar’s overriding ambition, and above all by his claim to be greater and more ‘constant’ than other men. If Rome is to prove true to its democratic traditions, he argues, Caesar must go. Popular revolt is out of the question since it might threaten the senators themselves. So when he considers the options to himself, Brutus concludes that ‘it must be by his death’. The seeds of the patrician conspiracy are sown and put into practice.
William Shakespeare was not a revolutionary – quite the reverse. His own sympathies would have rested, almost certainly, with the dictator and his fawning successor, Mark Anthony. The playwright’s supreme artistry, however, did not depend on his views, but on his powers of observation of human behaviour, and transmitting what he observed into drama. Thus Cassius’s argument is as accurately conveyed as is Caesar’s determination not to give an inch to reform or the reformers, or Brutus’s insistence that the assassination must be carried out as decently as possible.
Moreover, as I realised for the first time watching the Royal Shakespeare Company production, Cassius is always right. He is right about refusing permission to Mark Anthony to speak at Caesar’s funeral, and right to seek to avoid the disastrous battle at Philippi. Mark Anthony is a great orator, and makes a famous speech over Caesar’s body, but once he successfully turns the mob in his favour he reveals himself as no less ruthless a tyrant than his hero. The ebb and flow of the argument in the first part of the play is irresistible, whatever side you take.
In this production, Tim Piggot-Smith reveals Cassius’s agitation eloquently enough without really conveying the anger and passion that Shakespeare intended. Though the production clearly favours the conspirators by dressing Caesar’s supporters in fascist uniforms and ridiculing Caesar (Ian Hogg) as a ranting buffoon (which he wasn’t), and although Greg Hicks sensitively identifies Brutus’s dilemmas, it’s still hard to come away from the production with the feeling that the conspirators get as fair a hearing as they should. Partly this is the fault of the play itself, which disintegrates horribly after the assassination. I’ve never been able to understand the row between Cassius and Brutus as they prepare for the final battle, and nor is the play helped by the ghost of Caesar staggering round the stage in his underpants. But the early arguments, the excitement of the conspiracy and its aftermath, are as powerful as ever, and not to be missed.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h4>Obituary of Harold Wilson</h4>
<h1>Pipe dreams</h1>
<h3>(June 1995)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index6.html#sr95_06" target="new">No. 187</a>, June 1995, pp. 22&ndash:23.<br>
Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<table width="80%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="c"><strong>The death of Harold Wilson last month has been followed by a wave of nostalgia about the Labour governments he led. <em>Paul Foot</em> recalls the Labour victory of 1964 and how his hopes of the time were swiftly shattered</strong></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Obituary of Harold Wilson
Pipe 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’.
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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Off the Christmas tree</h1>
<h3>(December 1986)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Book Choice</em>, <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index3.html#sr86_12" target="new">No. 93</a>, December 1986, p. 25.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>Quentin Durward</strong> by Walter Scott<br>
<br>
<strong>Shoot Down</strong> by Bill Johnson (<em>Chatto Windus £10.95</em>)<br>
<br>
<strong>Days Like These</strong> by Nigel Fountain (<em>Pluto Press £2.50</em>)</p>
<p class="fst">I came across some old Walter Scott novels going for next to nothing. I bought them and read <strong>Quentin Durward</strong>. 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 <em>said</em> they believed in all these things, but <em>behaved</em> 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.</p>
<p>Political duplicity was the theme of my second favourite book this year, <strong>Shootdown</strong>. 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 <strong>Shootdown</strong> is the way it was ignored and boycotted when it was published, but it is, I gather, soon to come out in paperback.</p>
<p>My third choice is a thriller by Nigel Fountain, the best-ever letters editor in <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>'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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Off 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 Scott
Shoot 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Oil’s not well in East Timor</h1>
<h3>(17 November 1990)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 17 November 1990.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000, pp. 217–219.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The people of the tiny Indonesian province of East Timor are excited about events in the Gulf, the <strong>Financial Times</strong> reported last week. How can that be?</p>
<p>How could anyone possibly be excited about the Gulf? Well, <strong>Financial Times</strong> 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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The logic is specially powerful in East Timor. The people of that sad country have hardly known a single day of independence.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the terrible wars and famines which followed, probably a third of the population, nearly 200,000 people out of 600,000, were killed.<br>
</p>
<h4>Terror</h4>
<p class="fst">The 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Monster</h4>
<p class="fst">For 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Oil’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.
Terror
The 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.
Monster
For 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Seize the time</h1>
<h3>(June 1993)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.165, June 1993, pp.10-11.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>The strike at the Timex plant in Dundee has become a symbol of resistance for all workers facing job losses and bosses’ attacks. <strong>Paul Foot</strong> visited the picket line in Dundee, talked to strikers and draws some lessons from the dispute</em></p>
<p class="fst">We 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.</p>
<p class="quote">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">Jessie Britton joins in.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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 <em>Militant</em> 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.’</p>
<p class="fst">Jessie doesn’t think much of the constant advice from her union leaders to obey the law.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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?’</p>
<p class="fst">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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">I first went to Dundee as a reporter for the <strong>Daily Record</strong> 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.</p>
<p>My reports for the <strong>Daily Record</strong> 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>en masse</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Seize 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 dispute
We 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?
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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Three letters to a Bennite</h1>
<h4>Cartoons by Phil Evans</h4>
<h3>(March 1982)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><strong>Three letters to a Bennite from Paul Foot</strong>, Socialist Workers Party (GB), London, March 1982<br>
Produced and distributed for the SWP by Socialists Unlimited<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="link"><big><a href="../../1982/3letters/letter1.htm">Letter 1: New Year’s Eve, 1981</a><br>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Three letters to a Bennite
Cartoons by Phil Evans
(March 1982)
Three letters to a Bennite from Paul Foot, Socialist Workers Party (GB), London, March 1982
Produced and distributed for the SWP by Socialists Unlimited
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Letter 1: New Year’s Eve, 1981
Letter 2: 7 January 1982
Letter 3: 12 January 1982
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Workers Against Racism</h1>
<h3>(1973)</h3>
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<p class="info">An International Socialists pamphlet, 1973, 22 pp.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<h4>Who are the racialists?</h4>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <strong>The Times</strong>.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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 <em>the ordinary English man and woman</em> on this subject which affects them so vitally.’</p>
<p class="fst">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 <strong>Daily Express</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>Mr Powell was tremendously impressed by this remark. He told his Birmingham audience:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Here is a <em>decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman</em> 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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>The Alien Invasion</strong>. Mr Wilkins was a rich magistrate, who had just written a best-seller entitled: <strong>The Traffic in Italian Children</strong>.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘One of the leading measures, of the labour legislation of the future,’ wrote Mr Wilkins, ‘will be to protect the <em>English working men</em> against this perpetual pouring in of destitute foreigners. Why, the <em>working classes</em> are asking, should we be robbed of our birthright by the refuse population of other countries?’</p>
<p class="fst">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.’</p>
<p>Thirty-six years later, another Tory, Lt Col A.H. Lane, wrote a book called <strong>The Alien Menace</strong>. The introduction this time was by a former Tory minister, Lord Sydenham of Coombe. ‘<em>British working men and women</em>,’ wrote Lord Sydenham, who hated both, ‘have no love for the aliens, who in many districts make life harder for them.’</p>
<p>And in 1965, yet another noble Lord, Lord Elton, wrote another book, called this time <strong>The Unarmed Invasion</strong>, about the terrible threat to British working men and women from black immigration.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Why did the blacks come?</h4>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!’</p>
<p>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?<br>
</p>
<h4>Whose houses, whose jobs, whose social services?</h4>
<h4>Housing</h4>
<p class="fst">‘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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>nothing to do</em> with immigration.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>work</em> – <em>many</em> 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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Jobs</h4>
<p class="fst">Surely, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Social Services</h4>
<p class="fst">What 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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!’</p>
<p>The people who blame the blacks for the shortages in our society are <em>exactly the people who encourage those shortages</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>are</em> 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 <em>fight each other</em> in the great crumb share-out!’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>No one will ask: ‘Who made the loaf?’ And no one goes on to ask: ‘Who is sharing it out?’</p>
<p>And no one, therefore, exposes the simple truth. THE POOR MEN HAVE MADE THE LOAF, AND THE RICH MAN HAS STOLEN IT.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Against Immigration Controls</h4>
<p class="fst">‘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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In June 1973, the Tories who sit as Law Lords in the House of Lords added a new twist to this already barbaric Act.</p>
<p>They declared that any immigrant who entered illegally <em>at any time since 1962</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Such organisation is weakened at once by trade union acceptance of immigration control. It is the immigration <em>controls</em>, 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 <em>controls</em> 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.</p>
<p>That is why International Socialists say in the same breath:</p>
<p class="c"><strong>NO RACIALISM<br>
NO IMMIGRATION CONTROLS</strong><br>
</p>
<h4>Why racism?</h4>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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: ‘<em>They</em> have noisy parties,’ or ‘<em>their</em> cooking smells’, or ‘<em>they</em> 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 <em>individual</em> failings make a whole <em>group</em> of people unpopular? Why is it that people are all too ready to make racialist judgments about individual failings?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>The <strong>Encyclopaedia Britannica</strong>, the standard work of reference among people of learning, stated in its 1884 edition:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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, <strong>The Times</strong> voiced the outrage of its class:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>The Times</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p><em>Our own people!</em> 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.</p>
<p><em>Our own people!</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>The fight back</h4>
<p class="fst">FOR 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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The <em>real power</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Secondly, it can insist that any discrimination in its factory or group of factories against black workers should be ended.</p>
<p>Thirdly, it can produce constant propaganda in the form of leaflets and verbal arguments against the arguments of Powell and Co.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <em>cannot possibly</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Workers 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.
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?
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.
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.
Jobs
Surely, 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 Services
What 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!’
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.
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 RACIALISM
NO 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?
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.
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 back
FOR 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.
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.
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.
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
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<h1>When will the Blair bubble burst?</h1>
<h3>(Summer 1995)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialism <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/isj2/index2.html#isj2-067" target="new">2:67</a></strong>, Summer 1995.<br>
Copyright © International Socialism.<br>
Copied with thanks from the <a href="http://www.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/" target="new"><em>International Socialism</em> Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Is it all a bluff?</h4>
<p class="fst">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 <em>employers’ organisations</em>.’ (The replacement of the word ‘employers’ with the word ‘other’ was the only tangible victory for the trade union negotiators over the new clause.)</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>When does Labour win?</h4>
<p class="fst">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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Labour’s Programme 1973</strong> 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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Can Blair deliver?</h4>
<p class="fst">But what then? What happens after a Blair victory?</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Who runs the country?</h4>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p class="quoteb">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. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p class="fst">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.’ <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> 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 <em>annus horribilis</em>, 1976, Prime Minister James Callaghan chose the Labour Party conference to make a classical statement of Labour’s impotence:</p>
<p class="quoteb">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 …</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>anything</em> for the people who voted Labour was systematically removed. They didn’t just abandon individual promises. They lost control altogether.<br>
</p>
<h4>Why don’t Labour governments run the country?</h4>
<p class="fst">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 <strong>Labour’s Programme 1973</strong> 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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>have</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<ol type="i">
<li><em>The leeway for reform.</em> 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’.<br>
<br>
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 – <strong>The State We’re In</strong> by Will Hutton of the <strong>Guardian</strong> – 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.<br>
</li>
<li><em>The strength and confidence of the classes.</em> 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.<br>
</li>
<li><em>The electoral commitments of Labour.</em> 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 <em>above everything else</em> 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.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Why should we vote Labour?</h4>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>I don’t care what happens afterwards</em>.’ Such people should not be left to stew in their own hopelessness. Their plaintive question – is the prospect entirely bleak? – needs an answer.<br>
</p>
<h4>What happens when the Blair bubble bursts?</h4>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>What now?</h4>
<p class="fst">The conclusions have never been more obvious.</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>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.<br>
</li>
<li>The only power which can control and overturn those monopolies is the power of the people exploited by them: the working class.<br>
</li>
<li>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.<br>
</li>
<li>In Britain the only party which can do any of this is the Socialist Workers Party.</li>
</ol>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> H. Wilson, <strong>Final Term: The Labour Government 1974–1976</strong> (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1979), p. 114.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> D. Healey, <strong>The Time Of My Life</strong> (Michael Joseph 1989), pp. 432–433.</p>
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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.)
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?
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
Notes
1. 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Stop the war</small><br>
The Truth Machine</h1>
<h3>(November 2001)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.257, November 2001, pp.12-13.<br>
Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>Journalist of the decade <strong>Paul Foot</strong> argues why we should oppose this war – and what media workers can do about it</em></p>
<p class="fst">One 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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?’<br>
</p>
<h4>Opposition to these attacks goes deep</h4>
<p class="fst">Here 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, as the bombs started to rain down on Baghdad, John Pilger and I wrote a letter to the <strong>Guardian</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="fst"><em>This article is based on Paul Foot’s speech at the huge Media Workers Against the War meeting in London last month.</em></p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Stop the war
The 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 it
One 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 deep
Here 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.
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.
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Orwell Centenary</small><br>
The Cold War Controversy</h1>
<h3>(July 2003)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.276, July 2003, p.10-11.<br>
Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded from the new <a href="http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a><br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em><strong>George Orwell</strong> 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. <strong>Paul Foot</strong> examines why much of the left rejects Orwell.</em></p>
<p class="fst">As the <strong>Private Eye</strong> 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 <strong>Guardian</strong> devotes its front page and the main piece in its weekly <strong>Review</strong> to an old story, first published (in the <strong>Guardian</strong>) 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.</p>
<p>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, <strong>Animal Farm</strong> and <strong>Nineteen Eighty-Four</strong>, 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 <strong>Daily Worker</strong> 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?</p>
<p>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 <strong>New Left Review</strong> essays in <strong>Out of Apathy</strong>, 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 <strong>Down and Out in Paris and London</strong> (1933) or <strong>The Road to Wigan Pier</strong> (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?<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinism</h4>
<p class="fst">The 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 <strong>Homage to Catalonia</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Orwell got a job with <strong>Tribune</strong> 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 <strong>Animal Farm</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Orwell’s Politics</strong> 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 <strong>International Socialism</strong> (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 <strong>Memoirs of a Revolutionary</strong>, 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.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Orwell Centenary
The 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 Archive
Marked 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?
Stalinism
The 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.
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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Revolutionary necrophilia</h1>
<h3>(1 June 1991)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 1 June 1991.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000), pp. 25–26.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The <strong>Observer</strong> has decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s <strong>Rights of Man</strong> (1791) with a lecture for children.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Who is to give this historic lecture in honour of this great man? The <strong>Observer</strong> has strained every muscle to get it right. It has come down in favour of someone very famous: the Princess Royal, Princess Anne.</p>
<p>No doubt some fatuous fool at the <strong>Observer</strong> felt that the occasion would be better acclaimed if it was graced by so famous a dignitary. But has anyone at the <strong>Observer</strong> even read a word of Tom Paine’s? For that matter, has Princess Anne, who, for some astonishing reason, has accepted the invitation?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Crisis Papers</strong>.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Furious</h4>
<p class="fst">Paine’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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>His <strong>Rights of Man</strong> 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 <strong>Rights of Man</strong> replied with a furious denunciation of monarchy.</p>
<p class="quoteb">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.</p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>Paine was exiled from Britain and sentenced to death in his absence. It became a capital crime after 1792 to read the <strong>Rights of Man</strong>. He died in 1806, despised, forgotten and hated.</p>
<p>What fun he would have had with the editor of the <strong>Observer</strong> and all his prigs and courtiers, bowing and scraping before this latest representative of the Hanoverian dynasty!</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Revolutionary 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.
Furious
Paine’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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Judges’ ruling</h1>
<h3>(December 1995)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Notes of the Month</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index6.html#sr95_12" target="new">No. 192</a>, December 1995, p. 7.<br>
Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review.<br>
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Times Education Supplement</strong> to <strong>The Guardian</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Judges’ 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Defiant laughter</h1>
<h3>(16 October 1994)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 16 October 1994.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Articles of Resistance</strong>, London 2000, pp. 60–61.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">In the prevailing gloom one or two lights shine out brightly. One of them is Ken Loach. Another is Ricky Tomlinson.</p>
<p>The other day Ken was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on <em>The South Bank Show</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Yes’, came the reply, modest but firm. ‘I am not ducking that at all.’</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘What do you mean?’ asked Bragg, who is still a strong supporter of the Labour Party.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘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.’</p>
<p class="fst">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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Special genius</h4>
<p class="fst">Ken made films to expose the world we live in – in particular <em>Cathy Come Home</em>, a classic about homelessness.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the early 1980s he was horrified by the trade union leaders’ surrender to the Thatcher onslaught. His four programmes, <em>Questions of Leadership</em>, have been banned ever since they were made by every television channel.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>Bragg asked him about his new film <em>Raining Stones</em> and chided him about the sentimental ‘happy ending’ to the film.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <em>Riff Raff</em>, was magnificent.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen <em>Raining Stones</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It was a great performance, but he was not acting. And, in partnership with Ken Loach, he still isn’t.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Defiant 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 genius
Ken 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Marx alive in Clerkenwell</h1>
<h3>(16 December 1995)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No. 1473, 16 December 1995, p. 11.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot.<br>
Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In mid-life he abandoned a prosperous business for full time work in the labour movement.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>When I worked at the <strong>Daily Mirror</strong>, 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.</p>
<p><strong>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 <em>Sunday Worker</em>. 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.</strong></p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Striking feature</h4>
<p class="fst">There 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The library’s most striking feature is the Lenin room where Lenin worked for a year on his exiled revolutionary paper <strong>Iskra</strong>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Marx 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 feature
There 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Haunted by the Future</h1>
<h3>(March 2001)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Arts Review</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.250, March 2001, p.26.<br>
Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>Henry IV Parts I and II</strong><br>
by William Shakespeare<br>
Barbican Theatre, London</p>
<p class="fst">The 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Shakespeare was not a revolutionary – if anything the opposite. But his keen ear picked up the revolutionary rumblings of his own times (the <em>Henry IV</em> plays were written in 1598).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The <em>Henry IV</em> 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:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst"><em>Glendower:</em> ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’<br>
<em>Hotspur:</em> ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man,<br>
But will they come when you do call for them?’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Both plays throb with the turbulence of the times and the revolutionary consequences. The old king prays to what he hopes is his redeemer:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Oh God! That one might read the book of fate,<br>
And see the revolution of the times<br>
Make mountains level.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Therefore, my Harry,<br>
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds<br>
With foreign quarrels.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p> </p>
<p class="link"><a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Haunted 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 II
by William Shakespeare
Barbican Theatre, London
The 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 times
Make 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 minds
With foreign quarrels.’
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<h2>Sean Geraghty & Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Press Barons’ quest for profits<br>
threatens jobs in Fleet Street</h1>
<h3>(5 June 1969)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1969/index.html#n0125" target="new">No. 125</a>, 5 June 1969, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<table width="80%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h4>Printworkers must break down old inter-union divisions and unite as bosses look to the regions for cheaper labour to solve their problems</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">THE PROTEST march against anti-trade union legislation in London on May 1st was predominantly a printers’ march.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Print and clerical workers from almost all the national newspapers were demonstrating in vast numbers for the first time since the 1930s.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Vast companies</h4>
<p class="fst">The 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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>At the top of this rickety structure is the <strong>Sun</strong>, whose circulation still drops, though losses have been cut by drastic “reorganisation”, accepted by the unions.</p>
<p>The <strong>Sun</strong> is produced and printed with the <strong>People</strong>, in profitable property in Long Acre. The IPC bosses would dearly like to close the <strong>Sun</strong>, move the <strong>People</strong> to other presses and sell the property to cover the <strong>Sun</strong>’s losses for the last five years.</p>
<p>Unhappily for Hugh Cudlipp and co. there are at present no other presses available for the <strong>People</strong>, so the <strong>Sun</strong> may teeter on for a few more months.</p>
<p>But Mr. Robert Maxwell’s offer to “buy” the <strong>Sun</strong> may offer the IPC a heaven-sent opportunity to get rid of their cross.</p>
<p>Maxwell, incidentally, wants to run a Labour paper, and therefore, logically, he plans</p>
<p>to 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.</p>
<p>The <strong>Daily Mail</strong> and the <strong>Daily Sketch</strong>, both owned by Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers, are both making losses.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Drastic nature</h4>
<p class="fst">In 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.</p>
<p>In Beaverbrook’s <strong>Express</strong>, there is talk of closing down the <strong>London Evening Standard</strong> building, merging the production process of both papers and “reorganising” hundreds out of their jobs.</p>
<p>Lord Thomson, as soon as his commitments to print the <strong>Observer</strong> in Printing House Square and the <strong>Guardian</strong> at Grays Inn Road are fulfilled, plans to move the <strong>Times</strong> into</p>
<p>Thomson House and establish what he once called “a cool climate” for the <strong>Observer</strong> and the <strong>Guardian</strong>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But behind all these obvious dangers looms the threat of “regionalisation”. Two years ago, the <strong>Daily Mirror</strong> started printing a separate edition in Belfast on web-offset, with splashes of colour.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 a</p>
<p>series of closures of local daily papers, some of which, notably the <strong>Glasgow Herald</strong> and the <strong>Northern Echo</strong>, are already unprofitable.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h4>Advance plans</h4>
<p class="fst">Such "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.</p>
<p>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 traditions</p>
<p>Union 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 the</p>
<p>Society of Graphical and Allied Trades boasts the strength of greater numbers and where both unions are easily sidetracked into inter-union squabbles.</p>
<p>By contrast, the success of the Liaison Committee at Odhams, where the <strong>Sun</strong> and <strong>People</strong> are printed, in countering the traditional animosity between maintenance trades show how much can be achieved by worker cooperation.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ul>
<li>To demand cast-iron no-redundancy guarantees;<br>
</li>
<li>To form more liaison committees in the printing houses;<br>
</li>
<li>To put real life into the Federated Chapels;<br>
</li>
<li>To refuse to negotiate under threat or blackmail;<br>
</li>
<li>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.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p class="note"><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Sean Geraghty & Paul Foot
Press Barons’ quest for profits
threatens 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 problems
THE 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 companies
The 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 plans
to 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 nature
In 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 into
Thomson 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 a
series 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 plans
Such "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.
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 traditions
Union 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 the
Society 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>House of cards</h1>
<h3>(January 1999)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>Editorial, Notes of the Month</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.226, January 1999, p.3.<br>
Copyright © 1999 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>Peter Mandelson is New Labour in essence. His book, <strong>The Blair Revolution</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 (<strong>Express</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
House 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.
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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Toussaint L’Ouverture and<br>
the great Haitian slave revolt</h1>
<h3>(24 January 2004)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1885, 24 January 2004.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/" target="new"><em>Socialist Worker</em> Website</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<table width="80%" align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="c"><strong>This month saw the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Caribbean republic of Haiti after a revolutionary uprising against slavery.</strong></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In 1789 there were 30,000 whites in St Domingue, 40,000 mulattos of mixed race, and half a million black African slaves.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The slaves were allowed no education, no independent thought, no rights. This was a savage, brutalised society, held together by fear and sadism.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>The slave revolt was inextricably intertwined with the French Revolution.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Toussaint remained suspicious even when, in August 1793, the commissioners, on their own initiative, issued a decree abolishing slavery.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It was carried without discussion that the “aristocracy of the skin” should be tolerated no longer and that slavery should be abolished.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The French soldiers were confused. As they attacked the black army they were greeted with familiar songs – the <em>Marseillaise</em>, the <em>Ça Ira</em>, the very revolutionary hymns to whose strains they had conquered most of Europe.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="quoteb">Live and take comfort, thou hast left behind<br>
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;<br>
There’s not a breathing of the common wind<br>
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;<br>
Thy friends are exultations, agonies<br>
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="note">Read the classic account of the slave revolt and Toussaint L’Ouverture, <strong>The Black Jacobins</strong> by C.L.R. James (Penguin, £10.99). For a detailed account of the wider battle against slavery read <strong>The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery</strong> by Robin Blackburn (Verso, £17).</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Toussaint L’Ouverture and
the 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.
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 behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies
And 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).
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h4>War based on lies</h4>
<h1>‘We need to concentrate on<br>
the big deception’</h1>
<h3>(26 July 2003)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1861, 26 July 2003.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/" target="new"><em>Socialist Worker</em> Website</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><strong>Paul Foot writes on what really matters among the claims and counter-claims this week</strong></p>
<p class="fst">BIG FLEAS have little fleas on their backs to bite ’em. Little fleas have smaller fleas, and so <em>ad infinitum</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Mail on Sunday</strong>) 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
War based on lies
‘We need to concentrate on
the 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 week
BIG 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h4>Ronan Point – a symbol of all that is best<br>
in Labour’s ‘moral crusade’ ...</h4>
<h1>3,000 people ‘at risk’<br>
in sky-high death traps</h1>
<h3>(14 September 1968)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1968/index.html#n0088" target="new">No. 88</a>, 14 September 1968, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><b><i>IT IS ALMOST a year now</i> 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.</b></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In recent months very little has been heard of Frank Taylor. The smile is reported to have been wiped from his face.</p>
<h4>Rumble, roar</h4>
<p class="fst">What 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Very quickly the arguments were exposed. A firm of consulting engineers, Bernard Clark and Co., were instructed by the government to investigate the collapse.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Here are some of them:</p>
<ol>
<li>The explosion itself was very mild indeed.<br>
</li>
<li>“In our opinion there are weaknesses in the general design of the building structure.”<br>
</li>
<li>“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.”<br>
</li>
<li>The building was not up to standard fire regulations.<br>
</li>
<li>“Progressive collapse” of one floor after another is an inevitable characteristic of this kind of building.<br>
</li>
</ol>
<h4>Resting panels</h4>
<p class="fst">The 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And most of them live in buildings which are either safe or heavily insured.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Ronan Point – a symbol of all that is best
in 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, roar
What 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 panels
The 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.
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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Hungry for power?</h1>
<h3>(7 November 1992)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, No.1316, 7 November 1992, p.11.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>WE USED to complain about the Labour Party longing for office but being terrified of power.</strong></p>
<p>In the last few months there has been quite a change. Now the Labour Party is terrified of both office and power.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Does this mean that the Labour leaders have lost their lust for office? Not at all.</p>
<p>For the <em>trappings</em> 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 <em>responsibility</em> of office.<br>
</p>
<h4>So scared</h4>
<p class="fst">Where 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.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the meantime there is an alternative, one which in my view grows more likely day by day.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Hungry 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 scared
Where 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Mirror, Mirror on the wall,<br>
is Cecil the fairest of them all?</h1>
<h3>(June 1968)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1968/index.html#n0084" target="new">No. 84</a>, July 1968, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">HAROLD WILSON, MAN OF THE YEAR! screamed the <b>Daily Mirror</b> 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 <b>Daily Mirror</b> had advocated over the previous few years had been faithfully pursued by Wilson’s government.</p>
<p>It was the <b>Mirror</b>, way back in 1964, that warned against “too hasty” social reform in the light of the economic crisis. It was the <b>Mirror</b>, early in 1965, which urged the government to “ease up” on its plans to tax profits and capital gains. It was the <b>Mirror</b>, later in 1965, which urged support for the American action in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, the <b>Mirror</b> 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 <b>Mirror</b> 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)</p>
<p>We got the cuts and the wage freeze.</p>
<p>But perhaps the <b>Mirror</b>’s biggest triumph was the decision in 1967 to apply for British entry into the Common Market, a policy which all the <b>Mirror</b> papers had been urging since 1960. When Wilson applied for Common Market entry, he had, according to the <b>Mirror</b>’s front page "carved a name for himself in British history.”</p>
<p>The <b>Mirror</b>’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 <b>Mirror</b>’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.</p>
<p>Throughout the talks on Europe, the <b>Mirror</b> 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 <b>Mirror</b> and Wilson were of one mind.</p>
<p>Even in personalities, they agreed. The <b>Mirror</b> liked Brown for a long time, and then started chanting Brown Must Go. Brown went. For a long time, the <b>Mirror</b> 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.</p>
<p>Now King makes his final demand: that the faithful Wilson himself should go. Suddenly, the government needs not new policies but new leaders.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt2"></a>
<h4>Bottom and below</h4>
<p class="fst">SOME PEOPLE thought that things couldn’t get worse electorally. Others that the social policies of the government had reached rock bottom.</p>
<p>Both suppositions have now been disproved, the first by the municipal election results, the second by the government’s <i>White Paper on Rents</i>, which threatens to remove control on all controlled properties which have adequate amenities.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The old control, enforced by the Glasgow Rent Strike of 1919, was <i>automatic</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<a name="pt3"></a>
<h4>Love thy enemy</h4>
<p class="fst">THE 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 <b>Newsletter</b>. Recently to help me in a book I was writing I wanted to get hold of some excellent articles by Brian Pearce written in <b>Labour Review</b> some years ago, and published by New Park.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <b>Labour Review</b> ...” No reasons were given, though I suspect from the lady’s tone that my connection with <b>Socialist Worker</b> and <b>International Socialism</b> was not wholly irrelevant.</p>
<p>“Enemies of Marxism” who want to obtain marxist literature should apply in future to the British Museum.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<a name="pt4"></a>
<h3>Take Shelter</h3>
<p class="fst">YOUR 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<table width="100%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="60%">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="fst"><i>Des Wilson</i><br>
Director, SHELTER<br>
The Strand. W.C.2.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<a name="pt5"></a>
<p class="fst"><b>Paul Foot writes:</b> Yes, sorry. My informant talked about “Shelter.” I now realise that she was talking about the Christian organisation of the same name.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Mirror, 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 below
SOME 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 enemy
THE 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 Shelter
YOUR 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.
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 Wilson
Director, SHELTER
The 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Red Barbara’s Rocky Road</h1>
<h3>(June 2002)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>Obituary of Barbara Castle</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.264, June 2002, p.17.<br>
Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded from the new <a href="http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a><br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>The life of Labour left winger Barbara Castle.</em></p>
<p class="fst">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>In Place of Strife</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>In Place of Strife</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>Daily Herald</strong> 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 <strong>In Place of Strife</strong>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Red 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 Archive
Marked 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Press Censorship</small><br>
The media massage</h1>
<h3>(February 1991)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, No.139, February 1991, p.7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">HOW TO account for the extraordinary shifts of British public opinion in the first week of the war?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the newspapers, Edward Pearce and John Pilger in the <strong>Guardian</strong> and no less than three of the five regular columnists on the <strong>Daily Mirror</strong> have come out against the war while it is being fought.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 shepherded</p>
<p>journalists 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.</p>
<p>When Robert Fisk of the <strong>Independent</strong> slipped through this net, and found a British army unit lost in the desert, the whole media control industry went berserk.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>HMS Sheffield</em> was hit by an Argentine Exocet off the Falklands).</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Thus ten times the amount of explosives dropped on Hiroshima were dropped in Iraq without, according to the media, a single civilian dying.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Many journalists have been stunned by the extent of the censorship into a sullen acceptance of it.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But there is resistance, and at the first meeting of Media Workers Against the War on 28 January it came out into the open.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Press Censorship
The 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 shepherded
journalists 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.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
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<h1>Shelley:<br>
<small>The Trumpet of a Prophecy</small></h1>
<h3>(June 1975)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialism</strong> (1st series), <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/isj/index3.html#isj079" target="new">No.79</a>, June 1975, pp.26-32.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from <a href="http://www.marxists.de" target="new"><strong>REDS – Die Roten</strong></a><br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">I have come to Shelley far too late, and for that I blame my accursed education. I still have the small dark blue text book <strong>Shelley</strong> by Richard Hughes, which was forced down my throat at school.</p>
<p>There is no suggestion in the volume that Shelley had any ideas whatever. He was interested, apparently, in skylarks, clouds, west winds, Apollo, Pan and Arethusa.</p>
<p>At University College, Oxford, on the way to the football changing rooms, I would pass each week a ridiculous monument to Shelley, a great dome-shaped sepulchre in which lies a smooth-limbed, angelic young man, carried by sea lions. His limbs arc naked, perfect white, his expression is heavenly, and his genitals have been painted out (once, 1 think, even broken off) by civilised young gentlemen celebrating the rare successes of University College Boat Club. An embarrassed type-written note by the monument states that Shelley was a student of University College in 1810. I recall a senior don telling me at some boring dinner: ‘Shelley, poor fellow. He was drowned while at college.’ In fact, he was expelled in his second term for writing <strong>The Necessity of Atheism</strong>, the first attack on the Christian religion ever published in English.</p>
<p>In my last year at school, we were obliged to buy the new Penguin edition of Shelley, edited by a Tory lady of letters, Isobel Quigly. Her introduction told us: ‘There was about Shelley a nobility of spirit, a height of purpose, a kind of fine-grainedness that is a quality of birth and cannot be grown to.’ Miss Quigly detected someone from her own class.</p>
<p>She went on:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘He was in spirit the most essentially romantic of the poets of his age, and his faults were all faults of an overabundant and undisciplined imagination. No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety.’</p>
<p class="fst">So Miss Quigly set about cutting with a will. She castrated Shelley far more effectively than did the rowing oafs of University College, Oxford. Every single expression of radical or revolutionary opinion is cut out of the poems which follow. Poems, like <em>Queen Mab</em>, whose main purpose was political, are cut to a couple of ‘lyrical’ stanzas. This censorship has been going on for more than a hundred and thirty years: Every school generation is taught to read Shelley, as Quigly suggested, for his ‘lyric poetry’.</p>
<p>Ever since the 1840s, distinguished bourgeois critics have united in declaring Shelley one of the greatest English lyric poets. They could not ignore his genius, so they claimed his ‘fine-grainedness’ for their class.</p>
<p>In the same breath, they forgot about, distorted or censored his ideas.</p>
<p>These critics were formed not only to re-write Shelley s poetry, but also to forget about what happened to him when he was alive. The endless stream of Shelley biographies written from about 1870 onwards made light of the most significant feature of the poet’s short life: his persecution by the authorities, political, legal and literary. In 1812, when still a lad of 19, he was hounded out of Devon by the Home Office for writing a ‘seditious’ pamphlet about Ireland. Had he not left Devon when he did, he would almost certainly have been prosecuted (as was one man who put up Shelley’s posters – and was sent to prison for six months).</p>
<p>Fleeing from Devon, he settled in Wales, and worked as an agent on a reservoir scheme. This was a time of growing working class agitation, especially in Wales. Despite the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, small strikes were constantly breaking out – even on the reservoir. Shelley became so friendly with the workers, and such an ardent advocate of their cause, that the local Tory landowner, Captain Pilfold, hired a gunman to assassinate him. The gunman missed, twice, but Shelley bad to leave home again.</p>
<p>When Shelley’s first wife committed suicide, he was refused custody of his two children by the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, who felt that nice upper class children should not be handed over to a man of Shelley’s ‘dangerous’ political views.</p>
<p>Worst of all, however, was the treatment of his writing. Few of the Shelley worshippers of the last century or this have bothered to explain how it was that the ‘greatest lyric poet in English history’ had the utmost difficulty in getting anything published during his lifetime. <em>Prometheus Unbound</em> sold about 20 copies. The original edition of <em>Queen Mab</em> didn’t sell any. The string of political poems which Shelley wrote about the massacre of trade unionists and their families at Peterloo in 1819 were not published – for fear of prosecution for seditious libel.</p>
<p>During all his life, this ‘greatest of English lyric poets’ made precisely £40 from his writing – and that from a trashy novel he wrote when he was still at school!</p>
<p>In 1818, Shelley’s longest poem, <em>The Revolt of Islam</em>, was reviewed in the <strong>High Tory Quarterly</strong> by John Coleridge, who had been Shelley’s prefect at Eton.</p>
<p>A section of the review gives a fair picture of what the literary establishment, which later adopted him, thought of Shelley at the time:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Mr Shelley would abrogate our laws ... He would abolish the rights of property ... be would overthrow the constitution ... he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles. Marriage he cannot endure ... finally as the basis of the whole scheme, he would have us renounce our belief in religion.’</p>
<p class="fst">For this, Coleridge hoped, Shelley would sink ‘like lead to the bottom of the ocean’. When Shelley <em>was</em> drowned, in the Gulf of Spezia three years later, the <strong>Courier</strong>, as respectable in its time as the <strong>Daily Telegraph</strong> is today, trumpeted: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned. <em>Now</em> he knows whether there is a God or no.’</p>
<p>The reviewers hated him because of his political opinions – just as reviewers and English teachers of later years came to adore him in spite of his political opinions. While Shelley was alive, his work was censored in total by the authorities. When he was dead, the censorship persisted, selectively, but no less insidiously.</p>
<p>The only part of the preface to his poem <em>Hellas</em> which deals with the prospects for English revolution was cut out <em>in all the editions of his poetry for 71 years.</em> The most comprehensive statement of his political position – a 100-page book entitled <strong>The Philosophical View of Reform</strong> – was suppressed for <em>100 years</em>. Even when it was produced – in 1920 – it was circulated privately to devotees of the Shelley Society.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">Now, at last, a glorious book <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> has been published which tells something like the true story. Shelley, it makes plain, was neither a fiend nor a saint. He was, indeed, perhaps the finest poet ever to write in English. But he was also, inseparably, a relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation. he was an atheist and a republican. He sided on every occasion with the masses when they rose against their oppressors: not just when the middle classes rose against feudal monsters in Mexico, Greece or Spain – but also when workers and trade unionists rose against what Shelley called ‘the pelting wretches of the new aristocracy’ – the bourgeoisie. The most casual reading of Shelley makes one thing plain: the genius of his poetry is inextricably entwined with his revolutionary convictions.</p>
<p>When he was 19, Shelley wrote the most overtly revolutionary of all his long poems: <em>Queen Mab</em>. He published 250 copies at his own expense, and circulated about 70. (<strong>The Investigator</strong> got hold of a copy ten years later and described it, predictably, as ‘an execrable publication’ which would produce ‘unmingled horror and disgust’ among all decent readers.)</p>
<p>In 1821, Shelley s last year, a radical publisher called William Clark started selling pirate editions of <em>Queen Mab</em> on street bookstalls. Clark was duly prosecuted by the Society for the Prosecution of Vice – led by the Mary Whitehouses of that time – and was forced to take the book off the stalls. The courageous publisher, Richard Carlile, immediately published another edition, and another. Three months after Shelley’s death, there were four cheap editions of <em>Queen Mab</em> circulating in the streets of London, Manchester and Birmingham – many of them bought by small working class societies or illegal trade unions, and read out loud at workers’ meetings.</p>
<p>Carlile went on publishing <em>Queen Mab</em>, even when he was sent to prison for ‘sedition’.</p>
<p>Richard Holmes writes: ‘The number is not certain but between 1823 and 1841, it has been reckoned, fourteen or more separate editions were published.’ The effect on the rising trade union movement and especially on the Chartists rebellion was electric. Hundreds of thousands of workers were brought to socialist and radical ideas by this extraordinary poem. In an essay on Shelley, written in 1892, Bernard Shaw rote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Same time ago, Mr. H.S. Salt, in the course of a lecture on Shelley, mentioned, on the authority of Mrs. Marx Aveling, who had it from her father, Karl Marx, that Shelley had inspired a good deal of that huge badly-managed popular effort called the Chartist Movement. An old Chartist who was present and who seemed at first much surprised by this statement rose to confess that now he came to think of it (apparently for the first time) it was through reading Shelley that he got the ideas that led him to join the Chartists.</p>
<p class="quote">‘A little further inquiry elicited that <em>Queen Mab</em> was known as the Chartists’ bible, and Mr Buxton Forman’s collection of small, cheap copies, blackened with the finger-marks of many heavy-banded trades, are the proof that Shelley became a power – a power that is still growing.’</p>
<p class="fst">What the gentlemen of letters censored was dug out and reprinted by the working class movement</p>
<p>Read <em>Queen Mab</em> and you will see why. Remember that it was written in 1812, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars when the whole British ruling class was terrified by the French revolution. The extent of misery in the growing British working class was indescribable. In order to suppress the trade unions, and to enforce the Combination Acts, the Tory government moved troops into all Britain’s industrial cities. The Luddites, who had organised to protect their jobs by smashing the machinery, were remorselessly butchered on the scaffold. Production and the war were kept going by prolonged and unremitting terror.</p>
<p>In <em>Queen Mab</em>, the spirit of a young girl is wafted into the stratosphere by a Fairy Queen, who shows her the world, distorted and corrupted by wars and exploitation. The Spirit shrinks in horror at the inevitability of it all.</p>
<p>Queen Mab replies:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘I see thee shrink,<br>
Surpassing spirit – wert thou human else.<br>
I see a shade of doubt and horror fleet<br>
Across thy stainless features: yet fear not;<br>
This is no unconnected misery,<br>
Nor stands uncaused and irretrievable.<br>
Man’s evil nature, that apology,<br>
Which kings who rule and cowards who crouch, set up<br>
For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood<br>
Which desolates the discord-wasted land.<br>
NATURE, No!<br>
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The poem is about those kings, priests and statesmen. Here are the priests:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,<br>
Without a hope, a passion or a love<br>
Who, through a life of luxury and lies,<br>
Have crept by flattery to the seat of power,<br>
Support the system whence their honours flow.<br>
:They have three words, (well tyrants know their use,<br>
Well pay them for the loan, with usury<br>
Torn from a bleeding world) – God, Hell and Heaven.<br>
A vengeful, pitiless and Almighty fiend,<br>
Whose mercy is a nickname for the rage<br>
Of tameless tigers hungering for blood;<br>
Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire,<br>
Where poisonous and undying worms prolong<br>
Eternal misery to those hapless slaves<br>
Whose life has been a penance for its crimes;<br>
Anti Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie<br>
Their human nature, quake, believe and cringe<br>
Before the mockeries of earthly power.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The wealth of kings was not merely horrible in itself. It derived from the poverty of others who did the work. In his notes to <em>Queen Mab</em>, Shelley wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilisation without which civilised man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society.</p>
<p class="quote">‘Employments are lucrative in inverse ratio to their usefulness. The jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to exist, struggles through contempt and penury, anti perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind ...’</p>
<p class="fst">The law, especially the Conspiracy Law, upholds all this, so the law is wrong. ‘The laws which support this system are the result of a conspiracy of the few against the many – who are obliged to purchase this pre-eminence by the loss of all real comfort.’</p>
<p><em>Queen Mab</em>, which has been scorned for 150 years, is a marvellous poem for socialists. It is full of hatred for exploitation and exploiters, full of hope and faith in the ability of the exploited to create a new society. How did Shelley, born into the aristocracy and educated at an expensive prep school, at Eton and (briefly) at Oxford come to write it?</p>
<p>Partly through intellectual conversion, through reading the radical literature of the French revolutionary era. Shelley’s favourite author at school was the ageing philosopher, Willia`m Godwin. Many of the ideas in <em>Queen Mab</em>, including the idea that all wealth stems from labour, are taken from Godwin’s book <strong>Political Justice</strong>, which was published in 1793. It cost three guineas. Asked whether the book should be prosecuted for sedition, the Prime Minister, Pitt, replied: ‘No book can be seditious at three guineas!</p>
<p>Many of the ideas in <strong>Political Justice</strong> are revolutionary for their time, but Godwin was always careful to insist that any change in society could only come through men and women individually believing in it.</p>
<p>He believed in co-operative ownership in the abstract, on the blackboard. He was particularly keen to discourage any association of men and women who thought as he did. Godwin is the idol of latter-day liberals and anarchists, who <em>think</em> about a new, co-operative society, and do nothing to promote it.</p>
<p>Unlike Godwin, Shelley involved himself with the working people around him. Wherever he lived – in Keswick, Cumberland, in Dublin, in North Devon and on the reservoir in Wales, he moved continuously among the working people, talking to them, learning from their experience and their aspirations. Richard Holmes tells how, in Wales, he would walk out at night and engage in long conversations with the reservoir workers who were forced to grow their own food by moonlight in order to stay alive. In Dublin in 1812, he spent much of his time talking to the workers.</p>
<p>After a few weeks in Dublin, he wrote <strong>Proposals For An Association</strong>, in which he argued for a political party devoted to catholic emancipation. When William Godwin read the pamphlet, he almost had a fit. He wrote at once to Shelley, ordering him to forget these notions, to beware of violence, to sit back and ‘calmly to await the progress of truth’.</p>
<p>When Shelley wrote back politely refusing to wind up his association, Godwin replied, hysterically: ‘Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!’</p>
<p>There is a passage in <em>Queen Mab</em> which shows what Shelley felt about armchair revolutionaries. This is perhaps the only passage in the poem which does not take the lead from Godwin. Indeed, it is partly a satire of Godwin.</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,<br>
To deeds of charitable intercourse<br>
And bare fulfilment of the common laws<br>
Of decency and prejudice, confines<br>
The struggling nature of his human heart,<br>
Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds<br>
A passing tear purchance upon the wreck<br>
Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling’s door<br>
The frightful waves are driven – when his son<br>
Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion<br>
Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man,<br>
Whose life is misery, and fear and care;<br>
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil<br>
Who ever hears his famished offspring scream;<br>
Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze<br>
For ever meets, anti the proud rich man’s eye<br>
Flashing command, and the heartbreaking scene<br>
Of thousands like himself: – he little heeds<br>
The rhetoric of tyranny. His hate<br>
Is quenchless as his wrongs: he laughs to scorn<br>
The vain and bitter mockery of words,<br>
Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds,<br>
And unrestrained but by the arm of power,<br>
That knows and dreads his enmity.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Shelley did not get that from reading Godwin – or from any other books for that matter. He got it from the workers and the starving peasantry of Cumberland, Dublin, Wales and Devon. It is this belief in the unshakeable resolve of the exploited masses which makes Shelley’s political writing far more powerful than anything written by Godwin.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">Yet the argument with Godwin persists, at different levels, through all Shelley’s political writing. On the one hand there is the understanding tat the engine of tyranny is exploitation; on the other, the fear, deeply-rooted in his class background, that the masses in revolt would generate violence and plunder; and that therefore the best way to proceed was by gradual reform.</p>
<p>It is idle to pretend, like Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx did in their lecture <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> to the Shelley Society in 1885, that Shelley was the perfect scientific socialist.</p>
<p>There is a lot in Shelley’s political writing, if taken out of contcxt, which puts him to the right of many other radical thinkers of the time. In 1817, for instance, he wrote a pamphlet <strong>A Proposal For Putting Reform to a Vote</strong>, in which he argued against universal suffrage. In his larger work, <strong>A Philosophical View of Reform</strong>, he argued again against the suffrage on the grounds that it would deliver up too much too soon:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘A Republic, however just in its principle, and glorious in its object, would through the violence and sudden change which must attend it, incur a great risk of being as rapid in its decline as in its growth ...</p>
<p class="quote">‘It is better that the people should be instructed in the whole truth; that they should see the clear grounds of their rights; the objects to which they ought to tend; and be impressed with the just persuasion that patience and reason and endurance are the means of a calm yet irresistible progress.</p>
<p class="fst">This led to his advice to the masses to rely on passive disobedience when the army attacked them; and to resurrect ‘old laws’ to ensure their liberties.</p>
<p>Yet, often even in the same works, Shelley s longing for revolutionary change clashes openly with this condescending caution. Again and again, he calls openly for direct challenges to the law (especially to the law of criminal libel) and for ‘the oppressed to take furious vengeance on the oppressors.’ (Letter in 1812).</p>
<p>All politics in those years were dominated by the French Revolution. Like many other great poets of his time – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – Shelley was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution. One by one, however, the others abandoned the revolution, and denounced it. Shelley was appalled by the Napoleonic dictatorship – and wrote a poem on Napoleon’s death which started: ‘I hated thee, fallen tyrant’. But he never lost his enthusiasm for the ideas which had given rise to the revolution. His long poem, the <em>Revolt of Islam</em>, though it contains irritatingly few specific ideas about revolutionary politics, is clear on one matter above all else: that in spite of the disease, the terror, the dictatorship, the wars, the poverty and the ruin which followed the revolution the ideas of reason and progress which inspired it will triumph once again. In his preface to the poem he poured scorn on those who gave up their belief in revolutionary ideas because the revolution had been defeated, or had not gone according to plan. The passage could just as well have been written about the generations of disillusioned Communists after the losing of the Russian revolution:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘On the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of the public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics and enquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to be emerging front their trance ... In that belief I have composed the following poem.’</p>
<p>And so, even after the most frightful catalogue of post-revolutionary tyranny, torture, famine, and disease, the <em>Revolt of Islam</em> remembers the ideas which started the revolution –</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘And, slowly, shall in memory ever burning<br>
Fill this dark night of things with an eternal morning.’<br>
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>Alone of all the poets of his time, Shelley suppresses his own apprehensions about the French revolution and concentrated instead on the coming triumph of the ideas which had unleashed it.</p>
<p>Soon after the <em>Revolt of Islam</em> was published, Shelley heft England for Itahly, where he spent the last four years of his life. All this time he was absorbed by political developments in Britain. In March 1819 he wrote his greatest poem, <em>Prometheus Unbound</em>, which the latter-day ‘lyricists’ hail as a ‘classical tragic drama’, but which is, in fact, a poem about the English Revolution.</p>
<p>The Greek legend of Prometheus was taught to us budding Greek scholars (as I behieve it is still taught today) as a moral tale about what happens to subversives when they dare to challenge the authority of God (or the headmaster, or the managing director). Prometheus dared to steal fire from the sun and to bring the benefits of science to mankind. This was intolerable to the King of the Gods, Jupiter, for whom science was something from which only he (and other Gods) should benefit.</p>
<p>So Prometheus was chained to a rock, tormented by the daily visits of a vulture who gnawed his liver.</p>
<p>To Shelley, Prometheus was a hero, representing the potential of man in revolt against repression.</p>
<p>His poem starts with a description of Prometheus’ torture against a background of darkness, disease and tyranny. Asia, Prometheus’ wlfe, determines to release hirn and to overthrow Jupiter. She knows tat there is only one power capable of doing that: the power of Demogorgon, the People-Monster. She and her sister visit Demogorgon in his darkened cave, where she whips and lashes him with argument. Like all good agitators, she starts with the easy questions, playing an popular superstition and servility in order to challenge them.</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst"><strong>Asia:</strong> Who made the living world?<br>
<strong>Demogorgon:</strong> God.<br>
<strong>Asia:</strong> Who made all<br>
That it contains? Thought, passion, reason, will<br>
Imagination?<br>
<strong>Demogorgon:</strong> God, almighty God.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>After a bit more of this, her tone switches:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst"><strong>Asia:</strong> And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,<br>
Which from the links of the great chain of things<br>
To every thought within the mind of man<br>
Sway and drag heavily – and each one rests<br>
Under the load toward the pit of death:<br>
Abandoned hope – and love that turns to hate;<br>
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;<br>
Pain whose unheeding and familiar speech<br>
ls bowling and keen shrieks day after day;<br>
And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?<br>
<strong>Demogorgon:</strong> He reigns.<br>
<strong>Asia:</strong> Utter his name! A world, pining in pain,<br>
Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down!</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">At the end of a long speech and some more furious questions, Asia calls on Demogorgon to arise, unshackle Prometheus and overturn Jupiter. In a sudden climax, he rises. Two chariots appear from the recesses of the cave. Richard Holmes explains what they represent:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘There are two chariots: the one that brings Demogorgon to Jupiter is undoubtedly terrible and violent: Jupiter, authoritarian government, is to be overwhelmed by massive force, and the process is to be like a volcanic eruption and an earthquake which ruins cities ...</p>
<p class="quote">‘Yet there is a second chariot, with its “delicate strange tracery” and its gentle charioteer with “dove-like eyes of hope”. This is the chariot which carries Asia and Panthea back to Prometheus and it seems to indicate that political freedom transforms man’s own nature and substitutes an ethic of love for the ideology of revenge and destruction represented by Prometheus’ curse.</p>
<p class="quote">‘The end of Act II leaves both these possibilities open, historically. Revolution will come, but how it will come depends an man himself. There are always two chariots. In either case, it is inevitable and it is to be celebrated.’</p>
<p class="fst">This is the crux of Shelley’s revolutionary ideas, For all his caution when writing about universal suffrage or other reforms, he was an instinctive revolutionary. Perhaps the revolution will come slowly, peacefully, gradually – in gentleness and light. Or perhaps (more probably) it will come with violence and civil war. <em>In either case it is to be celebrated</em>. As Mary Shelley put it in an uncharacteristic flash of insight into her husband’s politics:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and therefore more deserving of sympathy than the great He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side.’</p>
<p class="fst">As the news came through from England, so Shelley’s poetry during the year of repression – 1819 – became more and more openly political. Some poems were what he called ‘hate-songs’, shouts of rage and contempt for the men who ran the English government. There are the <em>Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration</em>, which appeals to the Foreign Secretary:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Ay, Marry thy Ghastly Wife<br>
Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife<br>
Spread thy couch in the chamber of life!<br>
Marry Ruin Thou Tyrant! and Hell be Thy Guide<br>
To the Bed of thy Bride.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Or the <em>Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819</em>:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,<br>
Two scorpions under one wet stone.<br>
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,<br>
Two crows perched an the murrained cattle,<br>
Two vipers tangled into one.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The sonnet <em>England in 1819</em> starts with the line:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">There is even a parody of the national anthem!<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">In August came the event which was to haunt Shelley for the rest of his life. More than a hundred thousand trade unionists and their families gathered in St Peters Field near Manchester for a great carnival and meeting at which the main speaker was ‘Orator Hunt’, the reformer. The meeting was banned by the Manchester magistrates. On their instruction the yeomanry charged into the crowd hacking with their sabres. Eleven people were killed, and more than 400 injured. One of the dead was a small child which was cut down from its mother s arms.</p>
<p>As soon as Shelley heard the news – he was living near Leghorn – he shut himself up in his attic for several days and wrote <em>The Masque of Anarchy</em>, rightly described by Richard Holmes as ‘the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English’. It starts with a dreadful pageant in which the Tory Ministers Castlereagh, Eldon and Sidmouth, dressed respectively as Murder, Fraud and Hypocrisy, ride by, slaughtering ‘the adoring multitude’ as they go.</p>
<p>Shelley parts company with the other poets of his age and since who have pretended to favour ‘freedom’ and other fine words, as long as they remain words. He gives a simple definition of freedom.</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘What art thou, freedom? Oh, could slaves<br>
Answer from their living graves<br>
This demand, tyrants would flee<br>
Like a dream’s dim imagery.<br>
<br>
Thou art not, as imposters say,<br>
A shadow soon to pass away<br>
A superstition and a name<br>
Echoing from the cave of fame.<br>
<br>
For the labourer thou art bread,<br>
And a comely table spread<br>
From his daily labour come<br>
To a neat and happy home.<br>
<br>
Thou art clothes and fire and food,<br>
For the trampled multitude<br>
No – in countries that are free<br>
Such starvation cannot be<br>
As in England now we see.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The horror of Peterloo – as the massacre came to be known – hangs over many of Shelley’s later poems. In December 1819, he finished <em>Peter Bell The Third</em>, a satire on Wordsworth. The poem shows how Peter was slowly seduced from his revolutionary ideas by the pressures of society, until he was writing drivel like any old Bernard Levin in the <strong>Times</strong>:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘For he now raved enormous folly<br>
Of baptisms, Sunday schools and graves<br>
’Twould make George Colman melancholy<br>
To have heard him, like a male Molly,<br>
Cbaunting those stupid staves.<br>
<br>
Yet the Reviews, which heaped abuse<br>
On Peter while he wrote for freedom<br>
As soon as in his song they spy,<br>
The folly that spells tyranny<br>
Praise him, for those who feed ’em.<br>
<br>
Then Peter wrote Odes to cbs Devil<br>
In one of which he meekly said<br>
May Carnage and Slaughter<br>
Thy niece anti thy daughter<br>
May Rapine and famine<br>
Thy gorge ever cramming<br>
Glut thee with living and dead!<br>
<br>
May death and damnation<br>
And consternation<br>
Flit up fröm heaven with pure intent.<br>
Slash them at Manchester<br>
Glasgow, Leeds and Cbester<br>
Drench all with blood front Avon to Trent!’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The same savage satire is directed against the Tory government in <em>Swellfoot The Tyrant</em>, a joke play in which the king and his ministers are hunted down by their pig-people.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">Shelley’s censors have done their best to suppress <em>all</em> these poems. In the standard anthologies there is no <em>Masque of Anarchy</em>, no <em>Peter Bell</em>, no <em>Swellfoot</em>, no <em>Men of England</em>, none of the shorter political poems of 1819. To compensate for this awful void, the biographers and Shelley-lovers concocted another myth: that the most powerful influence on Shelley was an ethereal, almost divine quality called ‘love’. Extracts were hacked out of context to prove that Shelley was guided by the ‘love’ which every brave Victorian gentleman felt for his passive, obsequious and domestic wife.</p>
<p>But ‘love’, Shelley wrote in the notes to <em>Queen Mab</em>, ‘withers under constraint. Its very essence is liberty. It is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy or fear. It is there most pure, perfect and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.’</p>
<p>For Sbelley love was bound up with the battle for women’s rights, in which he was even more dedicated a crusader than his mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft. In all his, revolutionary poems, the revolutionary leaders are women: Cyntha in the <em>Revolt of Islam</em>; Asia in the <em>Prometheus</em>; <em>Queen Mab</em>, Iona in <em>Swellfoot</em>. All are champions not only of the common people, but also of the rights of their sex:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Can man be free if woman be a slave?<br>
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air<br>
To the corruption of a closed grave?<br>
Can they whose mates are beasts condemned to bear<br>
Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish dare<br>
To trample their oppressors? In their home,<br>
Among their babes, thou knowst a curse would wear<br>
The shape of woman – hoary crime would come<br>
Behind and Fraud rebuild Religion’s tottering dome.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">It followed that chastity and marriage were a lot of nonsense.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery ... A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.</p>
<p class="fst">Prostitution was ‘the legitimate offspring of marriage’: Shelley, was no prude. There is a thumping organ in <em>Alastor</em> – and another, more prolonged ‘deep and speechless swoon of joy’ in the <em>Revolt of Islam</em> – to prove it. But he had nothing but contempt for ‘unintellectual sensuality’, for ‘annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness’. He was <em>for</em> love, sex, women’s liberation; <em>against</em> chastity, prostitution, promiscuity.</p>
<p>Needless to say, these ideas goaded Shelley’s Christian contemporaries to paroxysms of indignation. The same ruling class pretended to deplore the morals of Lord Byron and his harem in Venice. In fact, Byron’s orgies were the source of almost uninterrupted titivation at coming-out-balls; they helped to make an enormous fortune out of Byron’s poems. High society worshipped marriage, subsidised prostitution and tolerated promiscuity. Free love of the type which Shelley advocated ‘undermined the fabric of their national life’ and was on no account to be mentioned, let alone published.</p>
<p>All these ideas grew stronger in Shelley as he got older. Stephen Spender in an essay which he wrote in 1953, as he prepared to abandon a dessicated Stalinism for a respectable literary career, wrote that Shelley ‘abandoned his radical ideas’ shortly before his death. This is nonsense. Karl Marx, who enjoyed Shelley almost as much as Shakespeare, understood it better. He wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice tbat Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois. They grieve that Sbelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.</p>
<p class="fst">He <em>was</em> in the advanced guard of socialism for long after his death. All through the great agitations of the last century, through the battle to repeal the Combination Laws, through Chartism, through the early socialist activity of the 1880s and 1890s hundreds of thousands of workers took courage and confidence from Shelley. The reason is not just because Shelley was an instinctive rebel who hated exploitation; but because he combined his revolutionary ideas in <em>poetry</em>.</p>
<p>What is the point of poetry? Is it not namby-pamby stuff, the plaything of middle-class education? Certainly, our education would like to reduce poetry to doggerel about trees and clouds and birds which you have to recite in front of teacher and then forget as soon as possible.</p>
<p>That is one of the reasons why generation after generation of text-book editors have limited the ‘great poets’ to meaningless meandering through glades. But poetry has another purpose, very dangerous to our educators. As Shelley wrote in his <strong>Defence of Poetry</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘The most unfailing herald, companion .and follower of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods as this, there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature ...’</p>
<p class="fst">Why? Because great poems, like great songs, which are only poems set to music, art easily learnt and remembered. The words linger in the memory over generations. And if the words carry revolutionary ideas, those ideas are communicated in poems far more thoroughly than in prose, in conversation or even in slogans.</p>
<p>We socialists have great difficulty in communication. However much we know and understand the political solutions to our social problems, the knowledge and understanding is useless unless we can communicate them. Trade union officialdom has constructed for itself a language of its own, a constipated gobbledegook, which protects it not so much from smooth-tongued employers as from its own rank and file. In the same way, many revolutionary socialists, after years of propaganda in the wilderness, have spun themselves a cocoon in which they and other sectarians can snuggle, safe from the oblivious outside world. Inside the cocoon, there is another language, a hideous, bastard language, unintelligible to the masses.</p>
<p>In the same way as the Russians insulted Lenin’s ideas on religion by mummifying his body, so these latter-day Trotskyists insult the clarity and power of Trotsky’s language by mummifying out-of-character and out-of-context sectarian phraseology. As a result, they communicate with nobody but themselves; argue with nobody but themselves; damage nobody but themselves.</p>
<p>We can enrich our language and our ability to communicate by reading great revolutionary poetry like that of Shelley.</p>
<p>All his life, Shelley was persecuted by the problem of communication. He was <em>not</em>, as his worshippers in later decades pretended, a ‘lyric’ poet interested only in writing beautiful poetry. He was a man with revolutionary ideas, and he wanted to transmit them. His <em>Ode to the West Wind</em> was <em>not</em> a paean of praise to a wonder of nature, but a desperate appeal to the wind to:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe<br>
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth<br>
And, by the incantation of this verse<br>
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth<br>
Ashes and sparks, my words to all mankind.<br>
Be through my lips to unawakened earth<br>
The trumpet of a prophecy!’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Shelley wanted the truth about repression and exploitation to <em>go ringing through each heart and brain</em>, so that each heart and brain would unite in action to end that repression and exploitation. So, particulanly in his later poems, he concentrated all his mastery of language, all his genius with rhyme and rhythm into translating the ideas of the revolution to the masses.</p>
<p>After 160 years he survives for us not as a lyric poet but as one of the most eloquent agitators of all time.</p>
<p>That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children. He will help us to communicate our contempt for the corporate despotism under which we live and our faith in the revolutionary potential of the multitude:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘And these words shall then become<br>
Like oppression’s thundered doom<br>
Ringing through each heart and brain<br>
Heard again, again, again<br>
<br>
Rise like lions after slumber<br>
In unvanquishable number<br>
Shake your chains to earth like dew<br>
Which in sleep had fallen on you.<br>
Ye are many. They are few.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p> </p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> <strong>Shelley: The Pursuit</strong>, by Richard Holmes, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> <strong>Shelley’s Socialism</strong>, by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling – just reprinted by the Journeyman Press, 60p.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Shelley:
The Trumpet of a Prophecy
(June 1975)
From International Socialism (1st series), No.79, June 1975, pp.26-32.
Downloaded with thanks from REDS – Die Roten
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I have come to Shelley far too late, and for that I blame my accursed education. I still have the small dark blue text book Shelley by Richard Hughes, which was forced down my throat at school.
There is no suggestion in the volume that Shelley had any ideas whatever. He was interested, apparently, in skylarks, clouds, west winds, Apollo, Pan and Arethusa.
At University College, Oxford, on the way to the football changing rooms, I would pass each week a ridiculous monument to Shelley, a great dome-shaped sepulchre in which lies a smooth-limbed, angelic young man, carried by sea lions. His limbs arc naked, perfect white, his expression is heavenly, and his genitals have been painted out (once, 1 think, even broken off) by civilised young gentlemen celebrating the rare successes of University College Boat Club. An embarrassed type-written note by the monument states that Shelley was a student of University College in 1810. I recall a senior don telling me at some boring dinner: ‘Shelley, poor fellow. He was drowned while at college.’ In fact, he was expelled in his second term for writing The Necessity of Atheism, the first attack on the Christian religion ever published in English.
In my last year at school, we were obliged to buy the new Penguin edition of Shelley, edited by a Tory lady of letters, Isobel Quigly. Her introduction told us: ‘There was about Shelley a nobility of spirit, a height of purpose, a kind of fine-grainedness that is a quality of birth and cannot be grown to.’ Miss Quigly detected someone from her own class.
She went on:
‘He was in spirit the most essentially romantic of the poets of his age, and his faults were all faults of an overabundant and undisciplined imagination. No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety.’
So Miss Quigly set about cutting with a will. She castrated Shelley far more effectively than did the rowing oafs of University College, Oxford. Every single expression of radical or revolutionary opinion is cut out of the poems which follow. Poems, like Queen Mab, whose main purpose was political, are cut to a couple of ‘lyrical’ stanzas. This censorship has been going on for more than a hundred and thirty years: Every school generation is taught to read Shelley, as Quigly suggested, for his ‘lyric poetry’.
Ever since the 1840s, distinguished bourgeois critics have united in declaring Shelley one of the greatest English lyric poets. They could not ignore his genius, so they claimed his ‘fine-grainedness’ for their class.
In the same breath, they forgot about, distorted or censored his ideas.
These critics were formed not only to re-write Shelley s poetry, but also to forget about what happened to him when he was alive. The endless stream of Shelley biographies written from about 1870 onwards made light of the most significant feature of the poet’s short life: his persecution by the authorities, political, legal and literary. In 1812, when still a lad of 19, he was hounded out of Devon by the Home Office for writing a ‘seditious’ pamphlet about Ireland. Had he not left Devon when he did, he would almost certainly have been prosecuted (as was one man who put up Shelley’s posters – and was sent to prison for six months).
Fleeing from Devon, he settled in Wales, and worked as an agent on a reservoir scheme. This was a time of growing working class agitation, especially in Wales. Despite the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, small strikes were constantly breaking out – even on the reservoir. Shelley became so friendly with the workers, and such an ardent advocate of their cause, that the local Tory landowner, Captain Pilfold, hired a gunman to assassinate him. The gunman missed, twice, but Shelley bad to leave home again.
When Shelley’s first wife committed suicide, he was refused custody of his two children by the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, who felt that nice upper class children should not be handed over to a man of Shelley’s ‘dangerous’ political views.
Worst of all, however, was the treatment of his writing. Few of the Shelley worshippers of the last century or this have bothered to explain how it was that the ‘greatest lyric poet in English history’ had the utmost difficulty in getting anything published during his lifetime. Prometheus Unbound sold about 20 copies. The original edition of Queen Mab didn’t sell any. The string of political poems which Shelley wrote about the massacre of trade unionists and their families at Peterloo in 1819 were not published – for fear of prosecution for seditious libel.
During all his life, this ‘greatest of English lyric poets’ made precisely £40 from his writing – and that from a trashy novel he wrote when he was still at school!
In 1818, Shelley’s longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, was reviewed in the High Tory Quarterly by John Coleridge, who had been Shelley’s prefect at Eton.
A section of the review gives a fair picture of what the literary establishment, which later adopted him, thought of Shelley at the time:
‘Mr Shelley would abrogate our laws ... He would abolish the rights of property ... be would overthrow the constitution ... he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles. Marriage he cannot endure ... finally as the basis of the whole scheme, he would have us renounce our belief in religion.’
For this, Coleridge hoped, Shelley would sink ‘like lead to the bottom of the ocean’. When Shelley was drowned, in the Gulf of Spezia three years later, the Courier, as respectable in its time as the Daily Telegraph is today, trumpeted: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned. Now he knows whether there is a God or no.’
The reviewers hated him because of his political opinions – just as reviewers and English teachers of later years came to adore him in spite of his political opinions. While Shelley was alive, his work was censored in total by the authorities. When he was dead, the censorship persisted, selectively, but no less insidiously.
The only part of the preface to his poem Hellas which deals with the prospects for English revolution was cut out in all the editions of his poetry for 71 years. The most comprehensive statement of his political position – a 100-page book entitled The Philosophical View of Reform – was suppressed for 100 years. Even when it was produced – in 1920 – it was circulated privately to devotees of the Shelley Society.
Now, at last, a glorious book [1] has been published which tells something like the true story. Shelley, it makes plain, was neither a fiend nor a saint. He was, indeed, perhaps the finest poet ever to write in English. But he was also, inseparably, a relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation. he was an atheist and a republican. He sided on every occasion with the masses when they rose against their oppressors: not just when the middle classes rose against feudal monsters in Mexico, Greece or Spain – but also when workers and trade unionists rose against what Shelley called ‘the pelting wretches of the new aristocracy’ – the bourgeoisie. The most casual reading of Shelley makes one thing plain: the genius of his poetry is inextricably entwined with his revolutionary convictions.
When he was 19, Shelley wrote the most overtly revolutionary of all his long poems: Queen Mab. He published 250 copies at his own expense, and circulated about 70. (The Investigator got hold of a copy ten years later and described it, predictably, as ‘an execrable publication’ which would produce ‘unmingled horror and disgust’ among all decent readers.)
In 1821, Shelley s last year, a radical publisher called William Clark started selling pirate editions of Queen Mab on street bookstalls. Clark was duly prosecuted by the Society for the Prosecution of Vice – led by the Mary Whitehouses of that time – and was forced to take the book off the stalls. The courageous publisher, Richard Carlile, immediately published another edition, and another. Three months after Shelley’s death, there were four cheap editions of Queen Mab circulating in the streets of London, Manchester and Birmingham – many of them bought by small working class societies or illegal trade unions, and read out loud at workers’ meetings.
Carlile went on publishing Queen Mab, even when he was sent to prison for ‘sedition’.
Richard Holmes writes: ‘The number is not certain but between 1823 and 1841, it has been reckoned, fourteen or more separate editions were published.’ The effect on the rising trade union movement and especially on the Chartists rebellion was electric. Hundreds of thousands of workers were brought to socialist and radical ideas by this extraordinary poem. In an essay on Shelley, written in 1892, Bernard Shaw rote:
‘Same time ago, Mr. H.S. Salt, in the course of a lecture on Shelley, mentioned, on the authority of Mrs. Marx Aveling, who had it from her father, Karl Marx, that Shelley had inspired a good deal of that huge badly-managed popular effort called the Chartist Movement. An old Chartist who was present and who seemed at first much surprised by this statement rose to confess that now he came to think of it (apparently for the first time) it was through reading Shelley that he got the ideas that led him to join the Chartists.
‘A little further inquiry elicited that Queen Mab was known as the Chartists’ bible, and Mr Buxton Forman’s collection of small, cheap copies, blackened with the finger-marks of many heavy-banded trades, are the proof that Shelley became a power – a power that is still growing.’
What the gentlemen of letters censored was dug out and reprinted by the working class movement
Read Queen Mab and you will see why. Remember that it was written in 1812, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars when the whole British ruling class was terrified by the French revolution. The extent of misery in the growing British working class was indescribable. In order to suppress the trade unions, and to enforce the Combination Acts, the Tory government moved troops into all Britain’s industrial cities. The Luddites, who had organised to protect their jobs by smashing the machinery, were remorselessly butchered on the scaffold. Production and the war were kept going by prolonged and unremitting terror.
In Queen Mab, the spirit of a young girl is wafted into the stratosphere by a Fairy Queen, who shows her the world, distorted and corrupted by wars and exploitation. The Spirit shrinks in horror at the inevitability of it all.
Queen Mab replies:
‘I see thee shrink,
Surpassing spirit – wert thou human else.
I see a shade of doubt and horror fleet
Across thy stainless features: yet fear not;
This is no unconnected misery,
Nor stands uncaused and irretrievable.
Man’s evil nature, that apology,
Which kings who rule and cowards who crouch, set up
For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood
Which desolates the discord-wasted land.
NATURE, No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower’
The poem is about those kings, priests and statesmen. Here are the priests:
Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,
Without a hope, a passion or a love
Who, through a life of luxury and lies,
Have crept by flattery to the seat of power,
Support the system whence their honours flow.
:They have three words, (well tyrants know their use,
Well pay them for the loan, with usury
Torn from a bleeding world) – God, Hell and Heaven.
A vengeful, pitiless and Almighty fiend,
Whose mercy is a nickname for the rage
Of tameless tigers hungering for blood;
Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire,
Where poisonous and undying worms prolong
Eternal misery to those hapless slaves
Whose life has been a penance for its crimes;
Anti Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie
Their human nature, quake, believe and cringe
Before the mockeries of earthly power.
The wealth of kings was not merely horrible in itself. It derived from the poverty of others who did the work. In his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley wrote:
‘The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilisation without which civilised man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society.
‘Employments are lucrative in inverse ratio to their usefulness. The jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to exist, struggles through contempt and penury, anti perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind ...’
The law, especially the Conspiracy Law, upholds all this, so the law is wrong. ‘The laws which support this system are the result of a conspiracy of the few against the many – who are obliged to purchase this pre-eminence by the loss of all real comfort.’
Queen Mab, which has been scorned for 150 years, is a marvellous poem for socialists. It is full of hatred for exploitation and exploiters, full of hope and faith in the ability of the exploited to create a new society. How did Shelley, born into the aristocracy and educated at an expensive prep school, at Eton and (briefly) at Oxford come to write it?
Partly through intellectual conversion, through reading the radical literature of the French revolutionary era. Shelley’s favourite author at school was the ageing philosopher, Willia`m Godwin. Many of the ideas in Queen Mab, including the idea that all wealth stems from labour, are taken from Godwin’s book Political Justice, which was published in 1793. It cost three guineas. Asked whether the book should be prosecuted for sedition, the Prime Minister, Pitt, replied: ‘No book can be seditious at three guineas!
Many of the ideas in Political Justice are revolutionary for their time, but Godwin was always careful to insist that any change in society could only come through men and women individually believing in it.
He believed in co-operative ownership in the abstract, on the blackboard. He was particularly keen to discourage any association of men and women who thought as he did. Godwin is the idol of latter-day liberals and anarchists, who think about a new, co-operative society, and do nothing to promote it.
Unlike Godwin, Shelley involved himself with the working people around him. Wherever he lived – in Keswick, Cumberland, in Dublin, in North Devon and on the reservoir in Wales, he moved continuously among the working people, talking to them, learning from their experience and their aspirations. Richard Holmes tells how, in Wales, he would walk out at night and engage in long conversations with the reservoir workers who were forced to grow their own food by moonlight in order to stay alive. In Dublin in 1812, he spent much of his time talking to the workers.
After a few weeks in Dublin, he wrote Proposals For An Association, in which he argued for a political party devoted to catholic emancipation. When William Godwin read the pamphlet, he almost had a fit. He wrote at once to Shelley, ordering him to forget these notions, to beware of violence, to sit back and ‘calmly to await the progress of truth’.
When Shelley wrote back politely refusing to wind up his association, Godwin replied, hysterically: ‘Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!’
There is a passage in Queen Mab which shows what Shelley felt about armchair revolutionaries. This is perhaps the only passage in the poem which does not take the lead from Godwin. Indeed, it is partly a satire of Godwin.
The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,
To deeds of charitable intercourse
And bare fulfilment of the common laws
Of decency and prejudice, confines
The struggling nature of his human heart,
Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds
A passing tear purchance upon the wreck
Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling’s door
The frightful waves are driven – when his son
Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion
Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man,
Whose life is misery, and fear and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil
Who ever hears his famished offspring scream;
Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze
For ever meets, anti the proud rich man’s eye
Flashing command, and the heartbreaking scene
Of thousands like himself: – he little heeds
The rhetoric of tyranny. His hate
Is quenchless as his wrongs: he laughs to scorn
The vain and bitter mockery of words,
Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds,
And unrestrained but by the arm of power,
That knows and dreads his enmity.
Shelley did not get that from reading Godwin – or from any other books for that matter. He got it from the workers and the starving peasantry of Cumberland, Dublin, Wales and Devon. It is this belief in the unshakeable resolve of the exploited masses which makes Shelley’s political writing far more powerful than anything written by Godwin.
Yet the argument with Godwin persists, at different levels, through all Shelley’s political writing. On the one hand there is the understanding tat the engine of tyranny is exploitation; on the other, the fear, deeply-rooted in his class background, that the masses in revolt would generate violence and plunder; and that therefore the best way to proceed was by gradual reform.
It is idle to pretend, like Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx did in their lecture [2] to the Shelley Society in 1885, that Shelley was the perfect scientific socialist.
There is a lot in Shelley’s political writing, if taken out of contcxt, which puts him to the right of many other radical thinkers of the time. In 1817, for instance, he wrote a pamphlet A Proposal For Putting Reform to a Vote, in which he argued against universal suffrage. In his larger work, A Philosophical View of Reform, he argued again against the suffrage on the grounds that it would deliver up too much too soon:
‘A Republic, however just in its principle, and glorious in its object, would through the violence and sudden change which must attend it, incur a great risk of being as rapid in its decline as in its growth ...
‘It is better that the people should be instructed in the whole truth; that they should see the clear grounds of their rights; the objects to which they ought to tend; and be impressed with the just persuasion that patience and reason and endurance are the means of a calm yet irresistible progress.
This led to his advice to the masses to rely on passive disobedience when the army attacked them; and to resurrect ‘old laws’ to ensure their liberties.
Yet, often even in the same works, Shelley s longing for revolutionary change clashes openly with this condescending caution. Again and again, he calls openly for direct challenges to the law (especially to the law of criminal libel) and for ‘the oppressed to take furious vengeance on the oppressors.’ (Letter in 1812).
All politics in those years were dominated by the French Revolution. Like many other great poets of his time – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – Shelley was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution. One by one, however, the others abandoned the revolution, and denounced it. Shelley was appalled by the Napoleonic dictatorship – and wrote a poem on Napoleon’s death which started: ‘I hated thee, fallen tyrant’. But he never lost his enthusiasm for the ideas which had given rise to the revolution. His long poem, the Revolt of Islam, though it contains irritatingly few specific ideas about revolutionary politics, is clear on one matter above all else: that in spite of the disease, the terror, the dictatorship, the wars, the poverty and the ruin which followed the revolution the ideas of reason and progress which inspired it will triumph once again. In his preface to the poem he poured scorn on those who gave up their belief in revolutionary ideas because the revolution had been defeated, or had not gone according to plan. The passage could just as well have been written about the generations of disillusioned Communists after the losing of the Russian revolution:
‘On the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of the public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics and enquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to be emerging front their trance ... In that belief I have composed the following poem.’
And so, even after the most frightful catalogue of post-revolutionary tyranny, torture, famine, and disease, the Revolt of Islam remembers the ideas which started the revolution –
‘And, slowly, shall in memory ever burning
Fill this dark night of things with an eternal morning.’
Alone of all the poets of his time, Shelley suppresses his own apprehensions about the French revolution and concentrated instead on the coming triumph of the ideas which had unleashed it.
Soon after the Revolt of Islam was published, Shelley heft England for Itahly, where he spent the last four years of his life. All this time he was absorbed by political developments in Britain. In March 1819 he wrote his greatest poem, Prometheus Unbound, which the latter-day ‘lyricists’ hail as a ‘classical tragic drama’, but which is, in fact, a poem about the English Revolution.
The Greek legend of Prometheus was taught to us budding Greek scholars (as I behieve it is still taught today) as a moral tale about what happens to subversives when they dare to challenge the authority of God (or the headmaster, or the managing director). Prometheus dared to steal fire from the sun and to bring the benefits of science to mankind. This was intolerable to the King of the Gods, Jupiter, for whom science was something from which only he (and other Gods) should benefit.
So Prometheus was chained to a rock, tormented by the daily visits of a vulture who gnawed his liver.
To Shelley, Prometheus was a hero, representing the potential of man in revolt against repression.
His poem starts with a description of Prometheus’ torture against a background of darkness, disease and tyranny. Asia, Prometheus’ wlfe, determines to release hirn and to overthrow Jupiter. She knows tat there is only one power capable of doing that: the power of Demogorgon, the People-Monster. She and her sister visit Demogorgon in his darkened cave, where she whips and lashes him with argument. Like all good agitators, she starts with the easy questions, playing an popular superstition and servility in order to challenge them.
Asia: Who made the living world?
Demogorgon: God.
Asia: Who made all
That it contains? Thought, passion, reason, will
Imagination?
Demogorgon: God, almighty God.
After a bit more of this, her tone switches:
Asia: And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,
Which from the links of the great chain of things
To every thought within the mind of man
Sway and drag heavily – and each one rests
Under the load toward the pit of death:
Abandoned hope – and love that turns to hate;
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;
Pain whose unheeding and familiar speech
ls bowling and keen shrieks day after day;
And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?
Demogorgon: He reigns.
Asia: Utter his name! A world, pining in pain,
Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down!
At the end of a long speech and some more furious questions, Asia calls on Demogorgon to arise, unshackle Prometheus and overturn Jupiter. In a sudden climax, he rises. Two chariots appear from the recesses of the cave. Richard Holmes explains what they represent:
‘There are two chariots: the one that brings Demogorgon to Jupiter is undoubtedly terrible and violent: Jupiter, authoritarian government, is to be overwhelmed by massive force, and the process is to be like a volcanic eruption and an earthquake which ruins cities ...
‘Yet there is a second chariot, with its “delicate strange tracery” and its gentle charioteer with “dove-like eyes of hope”. This is the chariot which carries Asia and Panthea back to Prometheus and it seems to indicate that political freedom transforms man’s own nature and substitutes an ethic of love for the ideology of revenge and destruction represented by Prometheus’ curse.
‘The end of Act II leaves both these possibilities open, historically. Revolution will come, but how it will come depends an man himself. There are always two chariots. In either case, it is inevitable and it is to be celebrated.’
This is the crux of Shelley’s revolutionary ideas, For all his caution when writing about universal suffrage or other reforms, he was an instinctive revolutionary. Perhaps the revolution will come slowly, peacefully, gradually – in gentleness and light. Or perhaps (more probably) it will come with violence and civil war. In either case it is to be celebrated. As Mary Shelley put it in an uncharacteristic flash of insight into her husband’s politics:
‘Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and therefore more deserving of sympathy than the great He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side.’
As the news came through from England, so Shelley’s poetry during the year of repression – 1819 – became more and more openly political. Some poems were what he called ‘hate-songs’, shouts of rage and contempt for the men who ran the English government. There are the Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration, which appeals to the Foreign Secretary:
‘Ay, Marry thy Ghastly Wife
Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife
Spread thy couch in the chamber of life!
Marry Ruin Thou Tyrant! and Hell be Thy Guide
To the Bed of thy Bride.
Or the Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819:
‘Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone.
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched an the murrained cattle,
Two vipers tangled into one.’
The sonnet England in 1819 starts with the line:
‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.’
There is even a parody of the national anthem!
In August came the event which was to haunt Shelley for the rest of his life. More than a hundred thousand trade unionists and their families gathered in St Peters Field near Manchester for a great carnival and meeting at which the main speaker was ‘Orator Hunt’, the reformer. The meeting was banned by the Manchester magistrates. On their instruction the yeomanry charged into the crowd hacking with their sabres. Eleven people were killed, and more than 400 injured. One of the dead was a small child which was cut down from its mother s arms.
As soon as Shelley heard the news – he was living near Leghorn – he shut himself up in his attic for several days and wrote The Masque of Anarchy, rightly described by Richard Holmes as ‘the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English’. It starts with a dreadful pageant in which the Tory Ministers Castlereagh, Eldon and Sidmouth, dressed respectively as Murder, Fraud and Hypocrisy, ride by, slaughtering ‘the adoring multitude’ as they go.
Shelley parts company with the other poets of his age and since who have pretended to favour ‘freedom’ and other fine words, as long as they remain words. He gives a simple definition of freedom.
‘What art thou, freedom? Oh, could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand, tyrants would flee
Like a dream’s dim imagery.
Thou art not, as imposters say,
A shadow soon to pass away
A superstition and a name
Echoing from the cave of fame.
For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
To a neat and happy home.
Thou art clothes and fire and food,
For the trampled multitude
No – in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.’
The horror of Peterloo – as the massacre came to be known – hangs over many of Shelley’s later poems. In December 1819, he finished Peter Bell The Third, a satire on Wordsworth. The poem shows how Peter was slowly seduced from his revolutionary ideas by the pressures of society, until he was writing drivel like any old Bernard Levin in the Times:
‘For he now raved enormous folly
Of baptisms, Sunday schools and graves
’Twould make George Colman melancholy
To have heard him, like a male Molly,
Cbaunting those stupid staves.
Yet the Reviews, which heaped abuse
On Peter while he wrote for freedom
As soon as in his song they spy,
The folly that spells tyranny
Praise him, for those who feed ’em.
Then Peter wrote Odes to cbs Devil
In one of which he meekly said
May Carnage and Slaughter
Thy niece anti thy daughter
May Rapine and famine
Thy gorge ever cramming
Glut thee with living and dead!
May death and damnation
And consternation
Flit up fröm heaven with pure intent.
Slash them at Manchester
Glasgow, Leeds and Cbester
Drench all with blood front Avon to Trent!’
The same savage satire is directed against the Tory government in Swellfoot The Tyrant, a joke play in which the king and his ministers are hunted down by their pig-people.
Shelley’s censors have done their best to suppress all these poems. In the standard anthologies there is no Masque of Anarchy, no Peter Bell, no Swellfoot, no Men of England, none of the shorter political poems of 1819. To compensate for this awful void, the biographers and Shelley-lovers concocted another myth: that the most powerful influence on Shelley was an ethereal, almost divine quality called ‘love’. Extracts were hacked out of context to prove that Shelley was guided by the ‘love’ which every brave Victorian gentleman felt for his passive, obsequious and domestic wife.
But ‘love’, Shelley wrote in the notes to Queen Mab, ‘withers under constraint. Its very essence is liberty. It is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy or fear. It is there most pure, perfect and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.’
For Sbelley love was bound up with the battle for women’s rights, in which he was even more dedicated a crusader than his mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft. In all his, revolutionary poems, the revolutionary leaders are women: Cyntha in the Revolt of Islam; Asia in the Prometheus; Queen Mab, Iona in Swellfoot. All are champions not only of the common people, but also of the rights of their sex:
‘Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air
To the corruption of a closed grave?
Can they whose mates are beasts condemned to bear
Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish dare
To trample their oppressors? In their home,
Among their babes, thou knowst a curse would wear
The shape of woman – hoary crime would come
Behind and Fraud rebuild Religion’s tottering dome.’
It followed that chastity and marriage were a lot of nonsense.
‘Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery ... A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.
Prostitution was ‘the legitimate offspring of marriage’: Shelley, was no prude. There is a thumping organ in Alastor – and another, more prolonged ‘deep and speechless swoon of joy’ in the Revolt of Islam – to prove it. But he had nothing but contempt for ‘unintellectual sensuality’, for ‘annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness’. He was for love, sex, women’s liberation; against chastity, prostitution, promiscuity.
Needless to say, these ideas goaded Shelley’s Christian contemporaries to paroxysms of indignation. The same ruling class pretended to deplore the morals of Lord Byron and his harem in Venice. In fact, Byron’s orgies were the source of almost uninterrupted titivation at coming-out-balls; they helped to make an enormous fortune out of Byron’s poems. High society worshipped marriage, subsidised prostitution and tolerated promiscuity. Free love of the type which Shelley advocated ‘undermined the fabric of their national life’ and was on no account to be mentioned, let alone published.
All these ideas grew stronger in Shelley as he got older. Stephen Spender in an essay which he wrote in 1953, as he prepared to abandon a dessicated Stalinism for a respectable literary career, wrote that Shelley ‘abandoned his radical ideas’ shortly before his death. This is nonsense. Karl Marx, who enjoyed Shelley almost as much as Shakespeare, understood it better. He wrote:
The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice tbat Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois. They grieve that Sbelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.
He was in the advanced guard of socialism for long after his death. All through the great agitations of the last century, through the battle to repeal the Combination Laws, through Chartism, through the early socialist activity of the 1880s and 1890s hundreds of thousands of workers took courage and confidence from Shelley. The reason is not just because Shelley was an instinctive rebel who hated exploitation; but because he combined his revolutionary ideas in poetry.
What is the point of poetry? Is it not namby-pamby stuff, the plaything of middle-class education? Certainly, our education would like to reduce poetry to doggerel about trees and clouds and birds which you have to recite in front of teacher and then forget as soon as possible.
That is one of the reasons why generation after generation of text-book editors have limited the ‘great poets’ to meaningless meandering through glades. But poetry has another purpose, very dangerous to our educators. As Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry:
‘The most unfailing herald, companion .and follower of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods as this, there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature ...’
Why? Because great poems, like great songs, which are only poems set to music, art easily learnt and remembered. The words linger in the memory over generations. And if the words carry revolutionary ideas, those ideas are communicated in poems far more thoroughly than in prose, in conversation or even in slogans.
We socialists have great difficulty in communication. However much we know and understand the political solutions to our social problems, the knowledge and understanding is useless unless we can communicate them. Trade union officialdom has constructed for itself a language of its own, a constipated gobbledegook, which protects it not so much from smooth-tongued employers as from its own rank and file. In the same way, many revolutionary socialists, after years of propaganda in the wilderness, have spun themselves a cocoon in which they and other sectarians can snuggle, safe from the oblivious outside world. Inside the cocoon, there is another language, a hideous, bastard language, unintelligible to the masses.
In the same way as the Russians insulted Lenin’s ideas on religion by mummifying his body, so these latter-day Trotskyists insult the clarity and power of Trotsky’s language by mummifying out-of-character and out-of-context sectarian phraseology. As a result, they communicate with nobody but themselves; argue with nobody but themselves; damage nobody but themselves.
We can enrich our language and our ability to communicate by reading great revolutionary poetry like that of Shelley.
All his life, Shelley was persecuted by the problem of communication. He was not, as his worshippers in later decades pretended, a ‘lyric’ poet interested only in writing beautiful poetry. He was a man with revolutionary ideas, and he wanted to transmit them. His Ode to the West Wind was not a paean of praise to a wonder of nature, but a desperate appeal to the wind to:
‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth
And, by the incantation of this verse
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words to all mankind.
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy!’
Shelley wanted the truth about repression and exploitation to go ringing through each heart and brain, so that each heart and brain would unite in action to end that repression and exploitation. So, particulanly in his later poems, he concentrated all his mastery of language, all his genius with rhyme and rhythm into translating the ideas of the revolution to the masses.
After 160 years he survives for us not as a lyric poet but as one of the most eloquent agitators of all time.
That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children. He will help us to communicate our contempt for the corporate despotism under which we live and our faith in the revolutionary potential of the multitude:
‘And these words shall then become
Like oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain
Heard again, again, again
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many. They are few.’
Notes
1. Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
2. Shelley’s Socialism, by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling – just reprinted by the Journeyman Press, 60p.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Blair: our brother<br>
our friend</h1>
<h3>(16 June 1979)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 16 June 1979.<br>
Reprinted in Nick Grant and Brian Richardson, <strong>Blair Peach: Socialist and Anti-Racist</strong> (London: Socialist Workers’ Party, 2014), pp. 43–44.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">From Manchester to Tolpuddle the martyrs of our movement have been humble people. They neither sought the limelight nor found it. They were unknown except to a close circle of friends and family. They became famous not because of their ambitions nor their vanity, but because of their deaths.</p>
<p>Such was a man called Alfred Linnell. No one knows very much about him. He earned a pittance by copying out legal documents. On 21 November 1887 he went down to Trafalgar Square to join the fighters for free speech in the week after Bloody Sunday, when a great demonstration had been broken up by police truncheons.</p>
<p>While he was standing, unarmed, and unsuspecting, by the side of the crowd, a posse of police, who had orders to keep Trafalgar Square free of demonstrators “by whatever force was necessary”, charged straight into him, breaking his neck with the horses’ hooves.</p>
<p>The police openly despised the people they were charging. They saw them, as the Times leader put it on the day after Bloody Sunday, as “all that is weakest, most worthless and most vicious in the slums of a great city”. These were the “sweepings”, which deserved only to be swept.</p>
<p>But the poor of London flocked to commemorate Alfred Linnell. Tens of thousands of socialists, Irish republicans, radicals, feminists and working people of no party and no persuasion joined in what Edward Thompson described as “the greatest united demonstration which London had seen”. The streets were lined all the way to Bow cemetery with crowds of sympathetic onlookers. The few rather shamefaced policeman who dared to appear were greeted with cries of: “That’s your work”. Very, very few of that crowd knew Alfred Linnell. Yet they hailed him, in the words of William Morris at Linnell’s funeral, as “our brother and our friend”.</p>
<p>He was a representative of the tens of thousands who had nothing, and when they took to the streets to demand something were ridden down and battered by the forces of law and order.</p>
<p>That was nearly 100 years ago and can easily be dismissed as “the sort of thing which happened in the bad old days”. The killing of Blair Peach proves that the same things are still going on today. He was attacked at a demonstration by policeman who, as at Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, were licensed to clear the streets by brutality and violence.</p>
<p>In Southall, as in Trafalgar Square 100 years ago, the police were driven on by a contempt for the demonstrators – “black scum” as one mounted officer so politely put it. No doubt the savagery of the blow which ended Blair Peach’s life was prompted at least in part by the fact that his skin was dusky. And Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, has been hailed as brother and friend by thousands of working men and women who did not know him.</p>
<p>On 28 April 15,000 of the Asian people of Southall marched in his memory. They stood with clenched fists over the place where he was murdered. And they chanted a single triumphant slogan – “Blair Peach zindabad – long live Blair Peach”</p>
<p>It was perhaps the greatest demonstration of solidarity between people of different colours but with similar interests and similar purpose that the town had ever seen. Why? Because Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, is a representative of all the people all over Britain who see in the strutting perverts of the National Front the broken bodies of black people battered in the street; who can detect further off but no less horrible the awful spectre of fascism looming over all society, and who stand up and say No.</p>
<p>To me and all members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, Blair Peach means even more than that. I never knew him personally. But I knew him as one of the party members who kept socialist organisation alive and well during the worst times. They know how to sustain the Anti Nazi League in an area where two or three delegates turn up to a meeting to which 20 had promised to come.</p>
<p>They have endless patience and endurance. They try to excite others into political activity without straining too hard at their patience and endurance. They seem to be at all the meetings and all the demonstrations. They are not in the front when the press cameras are clicking but they are in the front line when the SPG wade in with their coshes. In the last three years – the period by the way in which Blair Peach joined the Socialist Workers Party – these people have been strained to breaking point as more and more of the burden of the organisation of the left has fallen upon them. Blair Peach was killed in the process and that above all is why we honour him.</p>
<p>We march at his funeral not just in sympathy with the people who loved him, nor just out of respect for all he did for us but in anger.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Blair: our brother
our friend
(16 June 1979)
From Socialist Worker, 16 June 1979.
Reprinted in Nick Grant and Brian Richardson, Blair Peach: Socialist and Anti-Racist (London: Socialist Workers’ Party, 2014), pp. 43–44.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
From Manchester to Tolpuddle the martyrs of our movement have been humble people. They neither sought the limelight nor found it. They were unknown except to a close circle of friends and family. They became famous not because of their ambitions nor their vanity, but because of their deaths.
Such was a man called Alfred Linnell. No one knows very much about him. He earned a pittance by copying out legal documents. On 21 November 1887 he went down to Trafalgar Square to join the fighters for free speech in the week after Bloody Sunday, when a great demonstration had been broken up by police truncheons.
While he was standing, unarmed, and unsuspecting, by the side of the crowd, a posse of police, who had orders to keep Trafalgar Square free of demonstrators “by whatever force was necessary”, charged straight into him, breaking his neck with the horses’ hooves.
The police openly despised the people they were charging. They saw them, as the Times leader put it on the day after Bloody Sunday, as “all that is weakest, most worthless and most vicious in the slums of a great city”. These were the “sweepings”, which deserved only to be swept.
But the poor of London flocked to commemorate Alfred Linnell. Tens of thousands of socialists, Irish republicans, radicals, feminists and working people of no party and no persuasion joined in what Edward Thompson described as “the greatest united demonstration which London had seen”. The streets were lined all the way to Bow cemetery with crowds of sympathetic onlookers. The few rather shamefaced policeman who dared to appear were greeted with cries of: “That’s your work”. Very, very few of that crowd knew Alfred Linnell. Yet they hailed him, in the words of William Morris at Linnell’s funeral, as “our brother and our friend”.
He was a representative of the tens of thousands who had nothing, and when they took to the streets to demand something were ridden down and battered by the forces of law and order.
That was nearly 100 years ago and can easily be dismissed as “the sort of thing which happened in the bad old days”. The killing of Blair Peach proves that the same things are still going on today. He was attacked at a demonstration by policeman who, as at Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, were licensed to clear the streets by brutality and violence.
In Southall, as in Trafalgar Square 100 years ago, the police were driven on by a contempt for the demonstrators – “black scum” as one mounted officer so politely put it. No doubt the savagery of the blow which ended Blair Peach’s life was prompted at least in part by the fact that his skin was dusky. And Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, has been hailed as brother and friend by thousands of working men and women who did not know him.
On 28 April 15,000 of the Asian people of Southall marched in his memory. They stood with clenched fists over the place where he was murdered. And they chanted a single triumphant slogan – “Blair Peach zindabad – long live Blair Peach”
It was perhaps the greatest demonstration of solidarity between people of different colours but with similar interests and similar purpose that the town had ever seen. Why? Because Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, is a representative of all the people all over Britain who see in the strutting perverts of the National Front the broken bodies of black people battered in the street; who can detect further off but no less horrible the awful spectre of fascism looming over all society, and who stand up and say No.
To me and all members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, Blair Peach means even more than that. I never knew him personally. But I knew him as one of the party members who kept socialist organisation alive and well during the worst times. They know how to sustain the Anti Nazi League in an area where two or three delegates turn up to a meeting to which 20 had promised to come.
They have endless patience and endurance. They try to excite others into political activity without straining too hard at their patience and endurance. They seem to be at all the meetings and all the demonstrations. They are not in the front when the press cameras are clicking but they are in the front line when the SPG wade in with their coshes. In the last three years – the period by the way in which Blair Peach joined the Socialist Workers Party – these people have been strained to breaking point as more and more of the burden of the organisation of the left has fallen upon them. Blair Peach was killed in the process and that above all is why we honour him.
We march at his funeral not just in sympathy with the people who loved him, nor just out of respect for all he did for us but in anger.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Parliamentary privilege</h1>
<h3>(November 1994)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Notes of the Month</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index6.html#sr94_11" target="new">No. 180</a>, November 1994, p. 4.<br>
Copyright © 1994 Socialist Review<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">It couldn’t have happened to a nastier minister. No MP more persistently and offensively represents the true spirit of Thatcherism than Neil Hamilton, the Minister for Corporate Affairs. Hamilton first came to public notice when he attended the 1973 conference of the Italian Fascist Party, MSI, as an observer from the Young Conservatives.</p>
<p>Since he was elected Tory MP for Tatton in 1983, he has rested the extreme Thatcherite right, constantly baiting true unionists, the unemployed and the dispossessed. He flaunts the sterile wit and pervasive arrogance of all the Thatcherite Young Turks who grew rich and famous at the expense of others in the Golden Years of Private Enterprise. Hamilton denies being paid £2,000 a time to ask questions, but he does not deny a sumptuous weekend in Paris at the expense of the ghastly old liar and cheat Fayed, the chairman of Harrods. Dinner each night for the MP and his wife cost the Harrods boss £232. How that figure must have delighted ‘scroungers’ in bed: breakfast accommodation so often mocked by Hamilton and his ilk.</p>
<p>The media have discovered something they call ‘parliamentary sleaze’. Yet this is one the most time honoured institutions of our mother of parliaments. Many and varied are the ways in which corporate power in capitalist society cuts down all semblance of representative democracy in parliaments and local councils, but the most obvious of them all is buying the representatives. If MPs are paid more by an ‘outside interest’ than by their constituents, then it follows that they will consider the interests of the corporation before those of their constituents. The MP for Loamshire (£31,000 a year) prefers to be the MP for Blue Blooded Merchant Bank plc (£50,000 a year and rising). Representation plays second fiddle to corporate public relations.</p>
<p>Before 1975 MPs didn’t even have to declare which firms paid them. The Poulson scandal of the late 1960s and 1970s revealed a clutch of MPs using questions, motions, dining rooms and debates to promote the interests of the corrupt architect. One MP had to resign, and the Register of Interests was set up. No one took much notice of it, even during the 1980s as the number of consultancies, directorships and perks showered on MPs, almost all of them Tory, rose to obscene levels. One Tory MP was so bemused by the way in which his colleagues were growing rich that he actually advertised for a company to take him on as a consultant. The private dining rooms of the House of Commons – why are there private dining rooms there anyway? – became a huge commercial undertaking whereby corporations offered their customers the best food and drink, all consumed in an intoxicating atmosphere of democracy. How wonderful to drink a toast to the hierarchs of the Hanson Trust after a glamorous dinner in the ancient seat of parliament!</p>
<p>By the mid-1980s the buying of MPs had become a public and obvious scandal. No one noticed. On and on it went, with the blessing of both prime ministers. Thatcher and Major both used 10 Downing Street as another watering hole to pour booze down the gullets of generous donors to the Tory Party:</p>
<p>If parliament was indeed composed of representatives there should be no ‘outside interests’ whatsoever, MPs should, get their salary and not a penny more. Their perks and trips abroad should be ruthlessly wiped out, and their activities subjected to the most rigorous public scrutiny and disclosure. That is what the new House of Commons Privileges Committee should recommend. But since the committee consists of seven Tory MPs, all with business interests, sitting in secret, the chances of even the mildest restrictions on rampant sleaze are spectacularly low.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Parliamentary privilege
(November 1994)
From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 180, November 1994, p. 4.
Copyright © 1994 Socialist Review
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
It couldn’t have happened to a nastier minister. No MP more persistently and offensively represents the true spirit of Thatcherism than Neil Hamilton, the Minister for Corporate Affairs. Hamilton first came to public notice when he attended the 1973 conference of the Italian Fascist Party, MSI, as an observer from the Young Conservatives.
Since he was elected Tory MP for Tatton in 1983, he has rested the extreme Thatcherite right, constantly baiting true unionists, the unemployed and the dispossessed. He flaunts the sterile wit and pervasive arrogance of all the Thatcherite Young Turks who grew rich and famous at the expense of others in the Golden Years of Private Enterprise. Hamilton denies being paid £2,000 a time to ask questions, but he does not deny a sumptuous weekend in Paris at the expense of the ghastly old liar and cheat Fayed, the chairman of Harrods. Dinner each night for the MP and his wife cost the Harrods boss £232. How that figure must have delighted ‘scroungers’ in bed: breakfast accommodation so often mocked by Hamilton and his ilk.
The media have discovered something they call ‘parliamentary sleaze’. Yet this is one the most time honoured institutions of our mother of parliaments. Many and varied are the ways in which corporate power in capitalist society cuts down all semblance of representative democracy in parliaments and local councils, but the most obvious of them all is buying the representatives. If MPs are paid more by an ‘outside interest’ than by their constituents, then it follows that they will consider the interests of the corporation before those of their constituents. The MP for Loamshire (£31,000 a year) prefers to be the MP for Blue Blooded Merchant Bank plc (£50,000 a year and rising). Representation plays second fiddle to corporate public relations.
Before 1975 MPs didn’t even have to declare which firms paid them. The Poulson scandal of the late 1960s and 1970s revealed a clutch of MPs using questions, motions, dining rooms and debates to promote the interests of the corrupt architect. One MP had to resign, and the Register of Interests was set up. No one took much notice of it, even during the 1980s as the number of consultancies, directorships and perks showered on MPs, almost all of them Tory, rose to obscene levels. One Tory MP was so bemused by the way in which his colleagues were growing rich that he actually advertised for a company to take him on as a consultant. The private dining rooms of the House of Commons – why are there private dining rooms there anyway? – became a huge commercial undertaking whereby corporations offered their customers the best food and drink, all consumed in an intoxicating atmosphere of democracy. How wonderful to drink a toast to the hierarchs of the Hanson Trust after a glamorous dinner in the ancient seat of parliament!
By the mid-1980s the buying of MPs had become a public and obvious scandal. No one noticed. On and on it went, with the blessing of both prime ministers. Thatcher and Major both used 10 Downing Street as another watering hole to pour booze down the gullets of generous donors to the Tory Party:
If parliament was indeed composed of representatives there should be no ‘outside interests’ whatsoever, MPs should, get their salary and not a penny more. Their perks and trips abroad should be ruthlessly wiped out, and their activities subjected to the most rigorous public scrutiny and disclosure. That is what the new House of Commons Privileges Committee should recommend. But since the committee consists of seven Tory MPs, all with business interests, sitting in secret, the chances of even the mildest restrictions on rampant sleaze are spectacularly low.
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">P. Foot</a></p>
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Portrait of an Appalling Man</h1>
<h3>(February 1974)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialism</strong> (1st series), <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/isj/index2.html#isj066" target="new">No.66</a>, February 1974, pp.27-28.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician</strong><br>
Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones<br>
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £6.00.</p>
<p class="fst">HERBERT MORRISON was appalling. In his youth he flirted with Marxist ideas and organisations until one day he went to listen to Ramsay Macdonald. From that day, Morrison modelled himself on ‘the old man’, and took up Macdonald’s stance on the extreme right wing of the Labour Party. As leader of the first Labour-controlled London County Council from 1934; as Home Secretary during the war and as overlord of the Labour government’s post-war home policy he never abandoned his passionate hatred of communism or of independent working class activity.</p>
<p>When in the early 1920s, the Labour-controlled Poplar borough council paid its unemployed more than the pitiful rates allowed by law and paid its workers more than the rate negotiated by collective bargaining machinery, Morrison, then secretary of the London Labour Party, denounced the Poplar Councillors: ‘No electorate,’ he argued, ‘could trust local authorities which spent ratepayers’ money so recklessly.’</p>
<p>Any direct action by workers or their representatives horrified Herbert Morrison. ‘He rather scorned strikes’, write his biographers. After the collapse of the General Strike in 1926, he gleefully rubbed home the lessons to his supporters.</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘A general strike,’ he argued, ‘must become a physical force, revolutionary struggle aimed at the forcible overthrow of the constitutional government and the seizing of power by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress... nobody with half a brain believes that in Britain such a policy could be successful.’</p>
<p class="fst">The alternative to all this direct action nonsense. Morrison argued, was to build up the Labour Party and get hold of parliamentary office.</p>
<p>Parliamentary office gave him what he needed to carry out his concept of ‘socialism’ - a well-ordered, well-regulated state capitalist society in which Morrison would be chief orderer and chief regulator. He was the bureaucrat <em>par excellence</em>. Or, as Beatrice Webb put it in her diaries, ‘Herbert Morrison is the quintessence of Fabianism.’ Give him the machinery of government, the blue books, the statistics, the loyal civil servants, the insignia of office and Morrison was in his element. Socialist society, he believed, would be built by a handful of able and enlightened bureaucrats in Whitehall.</p>
<p>‘Public ownership’ to Morrison meant control by bureaucrats selected ‘on their ability’ by the minister. When he was minister of transport in 1930, he refused to appoint workers’ representatives to the board of his new London Transport undertaking. He wanted the undertaking to be run exclusively by ‘men of a business turn of mind’ which, he explained graciously, ‘might include such people as trade union bodies as well as men of business experience in the ordinary sense of the word’. These included Lord Ashfield, the tycoon who owned the main private London transport companies before Morrison’s 1930 Bill.</p>
<p>‘Morrison,’ writes Mr Jones, ‘came to admire Ashfield and had him in mind to be the chairman of the new board. To nationalise Lord Ashfield was his objective.’ Lord Ashfield was thoroughly sympathetic. ‘He became a devotee of the public corporation,’ and did a lot to persuade Liberals and Tories in the House of Commons that ‘Morrisonisation’, as it came to be known, was really a more efficient form of running capitalism.</p>
<p>This relationship with big business was taken up even more enthusiastically when Morrison took charge of Labour’s economic policies after the war. ‘Morrison liked dealing with tycoons,’ writes Mr Bernard Donoughue, his other biographer, ‘and in general they liked him, as Chandos said, “because you got down to brass tacks with him”.’</p>
<p>When the Morrisonisation of steel was proposed by the majority in the Labour Cabinet in 1947, Morrison discovered to his horror that the steelmasters were against it. The coalowners and the railway bosses had, after a few statutory grumbles, conceded the Morrisonisation of coal and rail transport. But Sir Andrew Duncan, the steel industry leader and a favourite tycoon of Morrison’s, did not want steel Morrisonised. Morrison promptly sabotaged the Cabinet’s plans by working out new proposals, in secret, with Sir Andrew. The majority of the Cabinet, prompted by Aneurin Bevan, finally forced through steel nationalisation against Morrison’s wishes, but Morrison’s sabotage ensured that steel was not nationalised until the end of the Labour government’s term of office. This left Sir Andrew and his friends much more time to mobilise.</p>
<p>Morrison was one of the fiercest anti-communist witch-hunters in British history. He carried out a ruthless and permanent campaign against communists of every description. But his hatred of communists in Britain did not extend to Russia. As Mr Jones writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘He found little similarity between the attitudes of Russian communists and the Communist Party of Great Britain. The former appeared cautious, believing in gradual development; they did not accept workers’ control.’</p>
<p class="fst">When Morrison was Home Secretary in January 1941 he proposed that the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, the organ of the British Communist Party, which was then advocating a ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line on the war, should be banned by government decree. The Tory-dominated Cabinet agreed. Writing about the incident in his autobiography, Morrison commented: ‘Not unexpectedly there was no protest from Russia about the closing down of the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>. The Soviet Union admires bold and firm action.’ One state capitalist censor could quickly detect another.</p>
<p>Morrison was a social imperialist of the old Jimmy Thomas school. Visiting New York in 1946, he proclaimed: ‘We are friends of the jolly old Empire. We are going to stick to it ...’ He added, for good measure, ‘The monarchy is a real factor among cementing influences between Britain and the Commonwealth. The monarchy is a great institution.’</p>
<p>Morrison was also, by the same token, a passionate Zionist. ‘In Israel,’ he wrote in <strong>The Times</strong> in 1950, ‘the spirit of human service exists more sincerely and more in practice than in any other part of the civilised world and we are glad it has a Labour government.’</p>
<p>This devotion to a civilised democratic society extended to Ireland, where Morrison was a passionate supporter of the Orange cause. In July 1943, as Home Secretary, he addressed a meeting of the 30 Club where the crusted Orange monster, Sir Basil Brooke (later Lord Brookeborough) was the guest of honour.</p>
<p>Morrison praised the loyalty of Ulster as ‘almost aggressive in its nature’. ‘After the war,’ writes Mr Donoughue, ‘he continued to keep a protective eye on Ulster’s interests in the Labour Cabinet.’ An elected Parliament was at stake, after all, so why should a man like Morrison care about a million evicted Palestinians, or half a million oppressed Catholics?</p>
<p>In his private life, Morrison emerges from the book almost as hideous as he was in public. He was greedily ambitious, arrogant, sentimental, male chauvinist, mean. And a hypocrite to the end. ‘Several times,’ he told the <strong>Daily Mail</strong> on 22 June, 1959, ‘I could have accepted a viscountcy, but all my life I’ve been of the working class and that’s how I’d like to stay.’ Three months later, on 19 September, the Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, announced the appointment of Lord Morrison of Lambeth.</p>
<p>All this makes unpromising material for hero-worship, but Mr Jones and Mr Donoughue, lecturers at the London School of Economics, do their best to idolise Morrison. Endless senior civil servants are wheeled out to prove that Morrison was the ‘ablest’ minister they ever dealt with (is it only an impression, or is it the case that all senior civil servants take the view that any minister about whom they happen to be interviewed was the ‘ablest they ever dealt with’?). We are left to marvel at Morrison’s ‘mastery of detail’, his ‘ability to command an argument’, his ‘organisational genius’.</p>
<p>For the authors, politics takes place within the square mile which includes the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, all the ministries, and the London School of Economics. Not for them the tumultuous developments outside. Hardly a mention in the book of the great social upheavals which shook the period about which they write, no explanation of the downfall of the Macdonald government; wartime socialist revival; of post-war slumplessness. Politics for them is how ministers behave and respond, and Morrison suits them admirably. The only time Mr Donoughue seems to get upset with Morrison is when the latter offends the Foreign Office mandarins with his brusque manner. ‘He handled ambassadors in a casual and offhand way’ scolds Mr Donoughue. ‘He often received them – and kept them waiting – in his room at the House of Commons leaving the unfortunate but not misleading impression that his prime loyalty and interest lay there rather than with the Office.’ Egad, Sir, What next?</p>
<p>If this was just an enormous book by two precise dons about a right-wing Labour leader, that would be the end of the story. But it is not. The account of Morrison’s life is so comprehensible that, almost by accident, it tells us a thing or two about British social democracy.</p>
<p>Herbert Morrison represents, perhaps more than anyone else, British social democracy in its heyday. His political life was dominated by the belief that a better life for the dispossessed could be created by the election of Labour governments and councils.</p>
<p>Substantial changes <em>were</em> made to the workers’ advantage under Herbert Morrison-especially in London. Patients in LCC hospitals were much better off under Labour; the blind and mentally ill got a much better deal; schools were improved; classes were smaller, teachers better paid; ‘a great change came over the LCC parks’ - more baths were built; more swimming pools, gymnasia, refreshment places, paddling pools, athletic grounds, bowling greens. The briefest comparison between facilities of this kind for workers in London compared with, say, New York, measures the advances of social democracy under Morrison in London.</p>
<p>Similarly, the post-war Labour government did force through a Health Service in opposition to the Tories and the doctors; it did nationalise the mines and the railways (leading to better working conditions for the workers in both industries), it did wipe out the old Poor Laws, and establish a new system of industrial injuries compensation. It solved none of the contradictions of capitalism; it left capitalism stronger in 1951 than it had been in 1945. But a wide variety of reforms in a wide variety of areas were carried out by Herbert Morrison and his colleagues.</p>
<p>Above all, these reforms, and the hope of much more where they came from <em>connected</em> the Labour Party to the working class. Morrison understood better than any Labour leader does today that his brand of social democracy can only survive as long as it sustained the active interest of large numbers of workers. Morrison never stopped writing Labour Party propaganda. The number of leaflets, pamphlets, brochures which he organised, wrote and distributed from London Labour Party headquarters all the year round was prodigious. He put a premium on individual membership of ordinary workers in the Labour Parties. He organised choirs, dramatic societies, almost anything to sustain and excite the London Labour Party membership.</p>
<p>Above all, he realised the danger to his political aspirations of corruption. All his life he fought relentlessly against corruption in the Labour Party, especially in local government. LCC councillors during Morrison’s rule were subjected to the strictest discipline as to their relations with officials or contractors. Morrison himself never accepted any job with private enterprise, though he was offered literally hundreds.</p>
<p>Throughout Morrison’s life, the results were obvious. In the 1930s, and, especially, in the 1940s, the British working class did respond, not just with votes, but with interest and involvement Herbert Morrison could not speak anywhere without attracting hundreds, often thousands of people. Any post-war meeting he addressed in South London was attended by an inevitable 1500. The crowds who came to hear him were almost incredible. During the 1950 General Election, he travelled to Yarmouth to speak to a mass rally of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, whose cause he had always espoused. A hundred thousand farm workers poured into Yarmouth from all over East Anglia to hear Herbert Morrison. A hundred thousand! Imagine a visit by today’s Labour deputy, Ted Short, to Yarmouth at election time to speak on the subject of farm workers. Short would be lucky to attract 10 farm workers to his meeting.</p>
<p>There is a vast gulf between the strength of social democracy in Herbert Morrison’s time and social democracy today. The gulf is not in aspirations. Judging by resolutions at Labour Party conferences, the Party’s aspirations last year at Blackpool (or the year before at Brighton) were just as grandiose as anything Herbert Morrison ever thought up. Indeed Morrison would have been shocked at the ‘shopping list’ of nationalisation proposals drawn up at those conferences.</p>
<p>Rather, the gap is in the connection between the aspirations of Labour politicians and the involvement of their rank and file. No amount of nationalisation resolutions at conference can mask the breathtaking apathy of Labour’s dwindling rank and file.</p>
<p>The constituency parties have been abandoned to hacks and careerists, and the MPs and councillors have no one to answer to. As a result, the entire Party has become infected with corruption. There is hardly a Labour MP who does not hold some ‘watching brief or ‘interest’ in industry or public relations to supplement his already vast annual salary; hardly a Labour council in the country free from the attention of rogues and speculators in private enterprise. The corruption is tolerated on a wide scale. One of the few MPs who has tried to clean his Labour Party up - Eddie Milne of Blyth (former seat of Lord Robens) - is being hounded out of his candidature. The process works both ways. Corruption grows because the rank and file either does not exist or does not ask questions. And the rank and file is increasingly sickened by the stench of corruption.</p>
<p>It is no good yearning, as Mr Jones tends to do, for the ‘good old days’ when Labour politicians like Herbert Morrison meant something to people, when Labour corruption was the exception, not the rule. The deterioration of social democracy has its roots in the politics of Herbert Morrison, and those like him. If what matters above all is the vote – if the vote paves the path to workers’ power, it follows that the most important contribution of workers to Labour is their vote. All other forms of labour mobilisation - strikes, demonstrations, agitation, education, organisation - inevitably become an embarrassment. Any Gallup Poll will show that all these things are ‘unpopular’. If the votes are to come to Labour, Labour must oppose strikes. It must not make socialist propaganda. It must not organise at the place of work.</p>
<p>When all these forms of mobilisation are systematically abandoned, as they have been by the Labour Party, there is nothing else to which workers can respond. There are no pamphlets, very few leaflets, no socialist propaganda, no factory organisation, no local organisation outside vote-collecting, no youth movement worthy of the name – <em>nothing to do</em> to help create a new society save vote for the next hack who comes along. The demobilisation of rank and file members is death to the Labour Party, but that demobilisation is an essential part of a political strategy whose central aim is to shift capitalist society through parliamentary endeavour.</p>
<p>Social democracy, in short, is its own grave-digger, and the pit is now deep and black. It is worth dwelling at length on the careers of illusionists like Herbert Morrison if only to harden our resolve to build socialism on the rocks of workplace organisation and direct action which Morrison so detested.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Portrait of an Appalling Man
(February 1974)
From International Socialism (1st series), No.66, February 1974, pp.27-28.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician
Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £6.00.
HERBERT MORRISON was appalling. In his youth he flirted with Marxist ideas and organisations until one day he went to listen to Ramsay Macdonald. From that day, Morrison modelled himself on ‘the old man’, and took up Macdonald’s stance on the extreme right wing of the Labour Party. As leader of the first Labour-controlled London County Council from 1934; as Home Secretary during the war and as overlord of the Labour government’s post-war home policy he never abandoned his passionate hatred of communism or of independent working class activity.
When in the early 1920s, the Labour-controlled Poplar borough council paid its unemployed more than the pitiful rates allowed by law and paid its workers more than the rate negotiated by collective bargaining machinery, Morrison, then secretary of the London Labour Party, denounced the Poplar Councillors: ‘No electorate,’ he argued, ‘could trust local authorities which spent ratepayers’ money so recklessly.’
Any direct action by workers or their representatives horrified Herbert Morrison. ‘He rather scorned strikes’, write his biographers. After the collapse of the General Strike in 1926, he gleefully rubbed home the lessons to his supporters.
‘A general strike,’ he argued, ‘must become a physical force, revolutionary struggle aimed at the forcible overthrow of the constitutional government and the seizing of power by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress... nobody with half a brain believes that in Britain such a policy could be successful.’
The alternative to all this direct action nonsense. Morrison argued, was to build up the Labour Party and get hold of parliamentary office.
Parliamentary office gave him what he needed to carry out his concept of ‘socialism’ - a well-ordered, well-regulated state capitalist society in which Morrison would be chief orderer and chief regulator. He was the bureaucrat par excellence. Or, as Beatrice Webb put it in her diaries, ‘Herbert Morrison is the quintessence of Fabianism.’ Give him the machinery of government, the blue books, the statistics, the loyal civil servants, the insignia of office and Morrison was in his element. Socialist society, he believed, would be built by a handful of able and enlightened bureaucrats in Whitehall.
‘Public ownership’ to Morrison meant control by bureaucrats selected ‘on their ability’ by the minister. When he was minister of transport in 1930, he refused to appoint workers’ representatives to the board of his new London Transport undertaking. He wanted the undertaking to be run exclusively by ‘men of a business turn of mind’ which, he explained graciously, ‘might include such people as trade union bodies as well as men of business experience in the ordinary sense of the word’. These included Lord Ashfield, the tycoon who owned the main private London transport companies before Morrison’s 1930 Bill.
‘Morrison,’ writes Mr Jones, ‘came to admire Ashfield and had him in mind to be the chairman of the new board. To nationalise Lord Ashfield was his objective.’ Lord Ashfield was thoroughly sympathetic. ‘He became a devotee of the public corporation,’ and did a lot to persuade Liberals and Tories in the House of Commons that ‘Morrisonisation’, as it came to be known, was really a more efficient form of running capitalism.
This relationship with big business was taken up even more enthusiastically when Morrison took charge of Labour’s economic policies after the war. ‘Morrison liked dealing with tycoons,’ writes Mr Bernard Donoughue, his other biographer, ‘and in general they liked him, as Chandos said, “because you got down to brass tacks with him”.’
When the Morrisonisation of steel was proposed by the majority in the Labour Cabinet in 1947, Morrison discovered to his horror that the steelmasters were against it. The coalowners and the railway bosses had, after a few statutory grumbles, conceded the Morrisonisation of coal and rail transport. But Sir Andrew Duncan, the steel industry leader and a favourite tycoon of Morrison’s, did not want steel Morrisonised. Morrison promptly sabotaged the Cabinet’s plans by working out new proposals, in secret, with Sir Andrew. The majority of the Cabinet, prompted by Aneurin Bevan, finally forced through steel nationalisation against Morrison’s wishes, but Morrison’s sabotage ensured that steel was not nationalised until the end of the Labour government’s term of office. This left Sir Andrew and his friends much more time to mobilise.
Morrison was one of the fiercest anti-communist witch-hunters in British history. He carried out a ruthless and permanent campaign against communists of every description. But his hatred of communists in Britain did not extend to Russia. As Mr Jones writes:
‘He found little similarity between the attitudes of Russian communists and the Communist Party of Great Britain. The former appeared cautious, believing in gradual development; they did not accept workers’ control.’
When Morrison was Home Secretary in January 1941 he proposed that the Daily Worker, the organ of the British Communist Party, which was then advocating a ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line on the war, should be banned by government decree. The Tory-dominated Cabinet agreed. Writing about the incident in his autobiography, Morrison commented: ‘Not unexpectedly there was no protest from Russia about the closing down of the Daily Worker. The Soviet Union admires bold and firm action.’ One state capitalist censor could quickly detect another.
Morrison was a social imperialist of the old Jimmy Thomas school. Visiting New York in 1946, he proclaimed: ‘We are friends of the jolly old Empire. We are going to stick to it ...’ He added, for good measure, ‘The monarchy is a real factor among cementing influences between Britain and the Commonwealth. The monarchy is a great institution.’
Morrison was also, by the same token, a passionate Zionist. ‘In Israel,’ he wrote in The Times in 1950, ‘the spirit of human service exists more sincerely and more in practice than in any other part of the civilised world and we are glad it has a Labour government.’
This devotion to a civilised democratic society extended to Ireland, where Morrison was a passionate supporter of the Orange cause. In July 1943, as Home Secretary, he addressed a meeting of the 30 Club where the crusted Orange monster, Sir Basil Brooke (later Lord Brookeborough) was the guest of honour.
Morrison praised the loyalty of Ulster as ‘almost aggressive in its nature’. ‘After the war,’ writes Mr Donoughue, ‘he continued to keep a protective eye on Ulster’s interests in the Labour Cabinet.’ An elected Parliament was at stake, after all, so why should a man like Morrison care about a million evicted Palestinians, or half a million oppressed Catholics?
In his private life, Morrison emerges from the book almost as hideous as he was in public. He was greedily ambitious, arrogant, sentimental, male chauvinist, mean. And a hypocrite to the end. ‘Several times,’ he told the Daily Mail on 22 June, 1959, ‘I could have accepted a viscountcy, but all my life I’ve been of the working class and that’s how I’d like to stay.’ Three months later, on 19 September, the Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, announced the appointment of Lord Morrison of Lambeth.
All this makes unpromising material for hero-worship, but Mr Jones and Mr Donoughue, lecturers at the London School of Economics, do their best to idolise Morrison. Endless senior civil servants are wheeled out to prove that Morrison was the ‘ablest’ minister they ever dealt with (is it only an impression, or is it the case that all senior civil servants take the view that any minister about whom they happen to be interviewed was the ‘ablest they ever dealt with’?). We are left to marvel at Morrison’s ‘mastery of detail’, his ‘ability to command an argument’, his ‘organisational genius’.
For the authors, politics takes place within the square mile which includes the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, all the ministries, and the London School of Economics. Not for them the tumultuous developments outside. Hardly a mention in the book of the great social upheavals which shook the period about which they write, no explanation of the downfall of the Macdonald government; wartime socialist revival; of post-war slumplessness. Politics for them is how ministers behave and respond, and Morrison suits them admirably. The only time Mr Donoughue seems to get upset with Morrison is when the latter offends the Foreign Office mandarins with his brusque manner. ‘He handled ambassadors in a casual and offhand way’ scolds Mr Donoughue. ‘He often received them – and kept them waiting – in his room at the House of Commons leaving the unfortunate but not misleading impression that his prime loyalty and interest lay there rather than with the Office.’ Egad, Sir, What next?
If this was just an enormous book by two precise dons about a right-wing Labour leader, that would be the end of the story. But it is not. The account of Morrison’s life is so comprehensible that, almost by accident, it tells us a thing or two about British social democracy.
Herbert Morrison represents, perhaps more than anyone else, British social democracy in its heyday. His political life was dominated by the belief that a better life for the dispossessed could be created by the election of Labour governments and councils.
Substantial changes were made to the workers’ advantage under Herbert Morrison-especially in London. Patients in LCC hospitals were much better off under Labour; the blind and mentally ill got a much better deal; schools were improved; classes were smaller, teachers better paid; ‘a great change came over the LCC parks’ - more baths were built; more swimming pools, gymnasia, refreshment places, paddling pools, athletic grounds, bowling greens. The briefest comparison between facilities of this kind for workers in London compared with, say, New York, measures the advances of social democracy under Morrison in London.
Similarly, the post-war Labour government did force through a Health Service in opposition to the Tories and the doctors; it did nationalise the mines and the railways (leading to better working conditions for the workers in both industries), it did wipe out the old Poor Laws, and establish a new system of industrial injuries compensation. It solved none of the contradictions of capitalism; it left capitalism stronger in 1951 than it had been in 1945. But a wide variety of reforms in a wide variety of areas were carried out by Herbert Morrison and his colleagues.
Above all, these reforms, and the hope of much more where they came from connected the Labour Party to the working class. Morrison understood better than any Labour leader does today that his brand of social democracy can only survive as long as it sustained the active interest of large numbers of workers. Morrison never stopped writing Labour Party propaganda. The number of leaflets, pamphlets, brochures which he organised, wrote and distributed from London Labour Party headquarters all the year round was prodigious. He put a premium on individual membership of ordinary workers in the Labour Parties. He organised choirs, dramatic societies, almost anything to sustain and excite the London Labour Party membership.
Above all, he realised the danger to his political aspirations of corruption. All his life he fought relentlessly against corruption in the Labour Party, especially in local government. LCC councillors during Morrison’s rule were subjected to the strictest discipline as to their relations with officials or contractors. Morrison himself never accepted any job with private enterprise, though he was offered literally hundreds.
Throughout Morrison’s life, the results were obvious. In the 1930s, and, especially, in the 1940s, the British working class did respond, not just with votes, but with interest and involvement Herbert Morrison could not speak anywhere without attracting hundreds, often thousands of people. Any post-war meeting he addressed in South London was attended by an inevitable 1500. The crowds who came to hear him were almost incredible. During the 1950 General Election, he travelled to Yarmouth to speak to a mass rally of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, whose cause he had always espoused. A hundred thousand farm workers poured into Yarmouth from all over East Anglia to hear Herbert Morrison. A hundred thousand! Imagine a visit by today’s Labour deputy, Ted Short, to Yarmouth at election time to speak on the subject of farm workers. Short would be lucky to attract 10 farm workers to his meeting.
There is a vast gulf between the strength of social democracy in Herbert Morrison’s time and social democracy today. The gulf is not in aspirations. Judging by resolutions at Labour Party conferences, the Party’s aspirations last year at Blackpool (or the year before at Brighton) were just as grandiose as anything Herbert Morrison ever thought up. Indeed Morrison would have been shocked at the ‘shopping list’ of nationalisation proposals drawn up at those conferences.
Rather, the gap is in the connection between the aspirations of Labour politicians and the involvement of their rank and file. No amount of nationalisation resolutions at conference can mask the breathtaking apathy of Labour’s dwindling rank and file.
The constituency parties have been abandoned to hacks and careerists, and the MPs and councillors have no one to answer to. As a result, the entire Party has become infected with corruption. There is hardly a Labour MP who does not hold some ‘watching brief or ‘interest’ in industry or public relations to supplement his already vast annual salary; hardly a Labour council in the country free from the attention of rogues and speculators in private enterprise. The corruption is tolerated on a wide scale. One of the few MPs who has tried to clean his Labour Party up - Eddie Milne of Blyth (former seat of Lord Robens) - is being hounded out of his candidature. The process works both ways. Corruption grows because the rank and file either does not exist or does not ask questions. And the rank and file is increasingly sickened by the stench of corruption.
It is no good yearning, as Mr Jones tends to do, for the ‘good old days’ when Labour politicians like Herbert Morrison meant something to people, when Labour corruption was the exception, not the rule. The deterioration of social democracy has its roots in the politics of Herbert Morrison, and those like him. If what matters above all is the vote – if the vote paves the path to workers’ power, it follows that the most important contribution of workers to Labour is their vote. All other forms of labour mobilisation - strikes, demonstrations, agitation, education, organisation - inevitably become an embarrassment. Any Gallup Poll will show that all these things are ‘unpopular’. If the votes are to come to Labour, Labour must oppose strikes. It must not make socialist propaganda. It must not organise at the place of work.
When all these forms of mobilisation are systematically abandoned, as they have been by the Labour Party, there is nothing else to which workers can respond. There are no pamphlets, very few leaflets, no socialist propaganda, no factory organisation, no local organisation outside vote-collecting, no youth movement worthy of the name – nothing to do to help create a new society save vote for the next hack who comes along. The demobilisation of rank and file members is death to the Labour Party, but that demobilisation is an essential part of a political strategy whose central aim is to shift capitalist society through parliamentary endeavour.
Social democracy, in short, is its own grave-digger, and the pit is now deep and black. It is worth dwelling at length on the careers of illusionists like Herbert Morrison if only to harden our resolve to build socialism on the rocks of workplace organisation and direct action which Morrison so detested.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Victor Gollancz: From Marx to muddle</h1>
<h3>(October 1987)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, No. 102, October 1987.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>Victor Gollancz</strong><br>
Ruth Dudley Edwards<br>
<em>Gollancz, £20.00</em></p>
<p class="fst">THE FIRST big public meeting I spoke to was on behalf of the Liberal Party: at an eve-of-poll meeting for Derek Monsey, Liberal candidate in Westminster in the 1959 General Election. When I arrived, very nervous, at the hall, everyone was very excited. “We’ve got a surprise speaker” I was told, “Victor Gollancz.” I was very impressed, though I had never heard of Victor Gollancz.</p>
<p>At the end of the meeting a rather kindly old man got up and said he had supported the Labour Party all his life, but now he thought the most important issue in the world was nuclear weapons. As Derek Monsey was the only candidate in Westminster who supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, the old man declared his intention to vote Liberal.</p>
<p>There was loud applause from the audience, most of whom were implacably opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament (as was the Liberal Party).</p>
<p>At the end of the meeting, I was introduced to the great man. He congratulated me warmly on my speech, and then took me on one side. “I hope you don’t <em>believe</em> any of this nonsense,” he whispered. “You should be a socialist – in fact, I think you will be one.”</p>
<p>I was most indignant at the time, but it wasn’t long before the old man’s prediction came true, and I’ve had a sneaking affection for him ever since.</p>
<p>The affection grew as I read this comprehensive and enthralling biography. Victor Gollancz never went to parliament. He never taught at university. He had nothing but contempt all his life for the right wing leadership of the Labour Party. Yet he had a profound effect on politics in Britain for at least two decades.</p>
<p>His most extraordinary achievement was the Left Book Club, which lasted from 1936 to 1948. In its first ten years, the Club published <em>six million books</em> – a quite staggering figure. At its heyday just before the Second World War, the Club had 57,000 members, each of whom was guaranteed a new book a month. There was also a wide range of old socialist classics, specialist books, scientific books, history books and pamphlets.</p>
<p>This enormous output of Club books was augmented, in the run-up to the 1945 election, with the “Yellow back” pamphlets, all directed against the corruption and hopelessness of the Tory years before the war, and each selling about a quarter of a million copies. It is no exaggeration to claim, as Ruth Dudley-Edwards does, that Gollancz, with his commitment and his flair, did a great deal to shift the intellectual climate towards the Labour landslide of 1945.</p>
<p>After the war, when Ernie Bevin (“Britain’s Greatest Foreign Secretary” as all important people always call him) was saying, “I try to be fair to the Germans, but I ’ates ’em really”; when various Tories tried to whip up an anti-German fever such as the one which gripped the entire country after the First World War, Gollancz campaigned for an internationalist view.</p>
<p>He did not campaign as hard for the nationalisation of German industries (the real issue) as he did for food parcels for the poor. But his campaigning on this issue did a lot to stop anti-German hysteria. Similarly, at the height of the success of Zionism in kicking out the Palestinians and setting up a new state in the Middle East, Gollancz, a Jew and at one time a member of the Jewish Board of Deputies, spoke up for the dispossessed Palestinians.</p>
<p>So irrepressible was Gollancz’s vigour, so brilliant his intellect and so vast his conceit that it would seem that he could do anything. Indeed, Marx’s famous comment about history is reversed by this biography to read, “Gollancz made his own history and he made it just as he pleased.” But of course he did not. His life, perhaps even more than most, was circumscribed by the social forces with which he wrestled.</p>
<p>For instance, the Left Book Club had a membership of 57,000 in 1939, under a Tory government. Six years later, the dream of most Left Book Club members came true: a Labour government was returned with a massive majority. Everyone rejoiced, and almost at once, the influence of the Left Book Club declined. By the end of 1946 there were only 10,000 members, and in 1948 the Club was dissolved without anyone noticing.</p>
<p>How could it be that the thirst for socialist ideas and literature should tail off so very fast at the very moment of apparent triumph? The answer is that in social democratic electoral politics, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. The expectation and hope of a victory was a far greater inspiration to socialist ideas and agitation than was the reality of Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison.</p>
<p>Gollancz could sense the disillusionment all right and he never capitulated to the parliamentary cretinism of his former friends, John Strachey and Stafford Cripps. But instead of using the Marxist method which had inspired him in the 1930s to interpret the postwar disillusionment, he turned against Marx altogether:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The real battle is not between capitalism and more socialism, but between the liberal or Western ethic and the totalitarianism of which the Soviet Union is now the major exponent.”</p>
<p class="fst">Then he argued that <em>all</em> political ideas should be subordinated to higher values, liberal values, religious values. These new statements of “value” won him praise from Tories who had denounced him in the 1930s and early 1940s.</p>
<p>How was it possible that such a lively and well-read socialist who did <em>not</em> simply decay as most old socialists do, should so reverse his opinions? How could a man who in 1929 described <strong>Das Kapital</strong> as “the fourth most enthralling volume of the world’s literature” recite so soon after the war the familiar reactionary incantations against Marx. Most of the answer, I suspect, lies in the roots of the brand of Marxism which inspired him in the 1930s, and which showed up the grim side of the Left Book Club.</p>
<p>In the early years of the Club, Gollancz was completely captive to the Communist Party. He conceded almost everything to them. Twelve of the first 15 of the LBC choices were vetted and approved by the CP (at least ten of those, today, are quite unreadable). The amount of indigestible Stalinist trash turned out in those pink and orange covers was astonishing.</p>
<p>Gollancz was one of three “choosers” of the titles. Only one of the others was CP – and even he (Strachey) was not a party member. Yet again and again, even on the simplest issues such as the right to dissent, Gollancz capitulated.</p>
<p>It was not simply that Trotsky and everything Trotskyist was not tolerated in the Left Book Club. George Orwell’s <strong>Homage to Catalonia</strong> was turned down by Gollancz. H.N. Brailsford, one of the first among British socialist writers to appreciate the horrors of the Moscow trials, was one of the authors who suffered worst – both intellectually and financially – from Victor’s stubborn submersion in the CP line.</p>
<p>As so often, the party hack or fellow-traveller, when he suddenly becomes aware of his hackery, turns to rend his former mentors, and, in the process, throws the whole ideology out with the bathwater. Gollancz was quick enough to spot the CP’s opportunism over the Hitler-Stalin pact but his indignation led him to reject altogether not just the CP, but all Marxism which he thought they represented.</p>
<p>Thus, in a curious way, the Stalinism to which he was converted in the 1930s (he named Stalin as Man of the year 1937) and the social democratic government to which he formally aspired in the 1940s were both disastrous to his political development. Disillusioned with both he turned not to new socialist ideas, but against socialist ideas altogether.</p>
<p>I hope I have not put anyone off this book, however. It is far, far more illuminating about the 1930s and 1940s than most of the trivial contemporary stuff on the subject. The character of the man comes through very loud if not very clear. Criticism of him is easy and obvious. But perhaps the most interesting exercise is to compare him and his times with today.</p>
<p>In those days of slump and “downturn”, when there was still some life and hope in social democratic politics, they threw up vast, engaging and brilliant personalities who believed they could change the world and acted accordingly. A generation of Labour governments later, there is nothing remotely as impressive as Victor Gollancz anywhere on the Labour stage.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Victor Gollancz: From Marx to muddle
(October 1987)
From Socialist Worker Review, No. 102, October 1987.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Victor Gollancz
Ruth Dudley Edwards
Gollancz, £20.00
THE FIRST big public meeting I spoke to was on behalf of the Liberal Party: at an eve-of-poll meeting for Derek Monsey, Liberal candidate in Westminster in the 1959 General Election. When I arrived, very nervous, at the hall, everyone was very excited. “We’ve got a surprise speaker” I was told, “Victor Gollancz.” I was very impressed, though I had never heard of Victor Gollancz.
At the end of the meeting a rather kindly old man got up and said he had supported the Labour Party all his life, but now he thought the most important issue in the world was nuclear weapons. As Derek Monsey was the only candidate in Westminster who supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, the old man declared his intention to vote Liberal.
There was loud applause from the audience, most of whom were implacably opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament (as was the Liberal Party).
At the end of the meeting, I was introduced to the great man. He congratulated me warmly on my speech, and then took me on one side. “I hope you don’t believe any of this nonsense,” he whispered. “You should be a socialist – in fact, I think you will be one.”
I was most indignant at the time, but it wasn’t long before the old man’s prediction came true, and I’ve had a sneaking affection for him ever since.
The affection grew as I read this comprehensive and enthralling biography. Victor Gollancz never went to parliament. He never taught at university. He had nothing but contempt all his life for the right wing leadership of the Labour Party. Yet he had a profound effect on politics in Britain for at least two decades.
His most extraordinary achievement was the Left Book Club, which lasted from 1936 to 1948. In its first ten years, the Club published six million books – a quite staggering figure. At its heyday just before the Second World War, the Club had 57,000 members, each of whom was guaranteed a new book a month. There was also a wide range of old socialist classics, specialist books, scientific books, history books and pamphlets.
This enormous output of Club books was augmented, in the run-up to the 1945 election, with the “Yellow back” pamphlets, all directed against the corruption and hopelessness of the Tory years before the war, and each selling about a quarter of a million copies. It is no exaggeration to claim, as Ruth Dudley-Edwards does, that Gollancz, with his commitment and his flair, did a great deal to shift the intellectual climate towards the Labour landslide of 1945.
After the war, when Ernie Bevin (“Britain’s Greatest Foreign Secretary” as all important people always call him) was saying, “I try to be fair to the Germans, but I ’ates ’em really”; when various Tories tried to whip up an anti-German fever such as the one which gripped the entire country after the First World War, Gollancz campaigned for an internationalist view.
He did not campaign as hard for the nationalisation of German industries (the real issue) as he did for food parcels for the poor. But his campaigning on this issue did a lot to stop anti-German hysteria. Similarly, at the height of the success of Zionism in kicking out the Palestinians and setting up a new state in the Middle East, Gollancz, a Jew and at one time a member of the Jewish Board of Deputies, spoke up for the dispossessed Palestinians.
So irrepressible was Gollancz’s vigour, so brilliant his intellect and so vast his conceit that it would seem that he could do anything. Indeed, Marx’s famous comment about history is reversed by this biography to read, “Gollancz made his own history and he made it just as he pleased.” But of course he did not. His life, perhaps even more than most, was circumscribed by the social forces with which he wrestled.
For instance, the Left Book Club had a membership of 57,000 in 1939, under a Tory government. Six years later, the dream of most Left Book Club members came true: a Labour government was returned with a massive majority. Everyone rejoiced, and almost at once, the influence of the Left Book Club declined. By the end of 1946 there were only 10,000 members, and in 1948 the Club was dissolved without anyone noticing.
How could it be that the thirst for socialist ideas and literature should tail off so very fast at the very moment of apparent triumph? The answer is that in social democratic electoral politics, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. The expectation and hope of a victory was a far greater inspiration to socialist ideas and agitation than was the reality of Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison.
Gollancz could sense the disillusionment all right and he never capitulated to the parliamentary cretinism of his former friends, John Strachey and Stafford Cripps. But instead of using the Marxist method which had inspired him in the 1930s to interpret the postwar disillusionment, he turned against Marx altogether:
“The real battle is not between capitalism and more socialism, but between the liberal or Western ethic and the totalitarianism of which the Soviet Union is now the major exponent.”
Then he argued that all political ideas should be subordinated to higher values, liberal values, religious values. These new statements of “value” won him praise from Tories who had denounced him in the 1930s and early 1940s.
How was it possible that such a lively and well-read socialist who did not simply decay as most old socialists do, should so reverse his opinions? How could a man who in 1929 described Das Kapital as “the fourth most enthralling volume of the world’s literature” recite so soon after the war the familiar reactionary incantations against Marx. Most of the answer, I suspect, lies in the roots of the brand of Marxism which inspired him in the 1930s, and which showed up the grim side of the Left Book Club.
In the early years of the Club, Gollancz was completely captive to the Communist Party. He conceded almost everything to them. Twelve of the first 15 of the LBC choices were vetted and approved by the CP (at least ten of those, today, are quite unreadable). The amount of indigestible Stalinist trash turned out in those pink and orange covers was astonishing.
Gollancz was one of three “choosers” of the titles. Only one of the others was CP – and even he (Strachey) was not a party member. Yet again and again, even on the simplest issues such as the right to dissent, Gollancz capitulated.
It was not simply that Trotsky and everything Trotskyist was not tolerated in the Left Book Club. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was turned down by Gollancz. H.N. Brailsford, one of the first among British socialist writers to appreciate the horrors of the Moscow trials, was one of the authors who suffered worst – both intellectually and financially – from Victor’s stubborn submersion in the CP line.
As so often, the party hack or fellow-traveller, when he suddenly becomes aware of his hackery, turns to rend his former mentors, and, in the process, throws the whole ideology out with the bathwater. Gollancz was quick enough to spot the CP’s opportunism over the Hitler-Stalin pact but his indignation led him to reject altogether not just the CP, but all Marxism which he thought they represented.
Thus, in a curious way, the Stalinism to which he was converted in the 1930s (he named Stalin as Man of the year 1937) and the social democratic government to which he formally aspired in the 1940s were both disastrous to his political development. Disillusioned with both he turned not to new socialist ideas, but against socialist ideas altogether.
I hope I have not put anyone off this book, however. It is far, far more illuminating about the 1930s and 1940s than most of the trivial contemporary stuff on the subject. The character of the man comes through very loud if not very clear. Criticism of him is easy and obvious. But perhaps the most interesting exercise is to compare him and his times with today.
In those days of slump and “downturn”, when there was still some life and hope in social democratic politics, they threw up vast, engaging and brilliant personalities who believed they could change the world and acted accordingly. A generation of Labour governments later, there is nothing remotely as impressive as Victor Gollancz anywhere on the Labour stage.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Introduction to <em>In the Heat of the Struggle</em></h1>
<h3>(September 1993)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>In the Heat of the Struggle: 25 Years of</strong> <em><strong>Socialist Worker</strong></em> (London: Bookmarks, 1993), pp. 9–12.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">MOST OF the propaganda about a free press in Britain is about as credible as a story from Enid Blyton. <strong>Five on a Treasure Island</strong> would be an appropriate title for it. Of the 14 million newspapers sold every day in Britain, 92 percent are owned and rigidly controlled by five men. One of these men, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns and controls Sky Television, now directly, without the slightest attention to the views of anyone else, runs a third of the British mass media.</p>
<p>The five are in the game for one purpose only: profit. They instinctively support everyone else who produces for profit. The bigger and the richer their friends, the more support they give them in the mass media.</p>
<p>Of course everyone in Britain is ‘free’ to produce competitors to these newspapers. Anyone can set up a printing press, hire some writers, and have a stab at creating a mass circulation newspaper capable of competing with the <strong>Sun</strong> or the <strong>Mirror</strong>. All you need for this venture – just for a start, that is – is ten million pounds minimum. Then your problems start. The advertising industry, which provides half the revenue for newspapers, and the distribution industry, controlled by two huge monopolies, are also in the hands of the rich, loyal to the rich. The truth is that everyone is as free to set up a newspaper as they are to spend a night in the Ritz. All you need is an enormous amount of money, which only very few people have.</p>
<p>It’s impossible to imagine the rich proprietors, rich advertisers and rich distributors will publish newspapers which spread ideas hostile to the rich. If we in the labour movement want a new set of ideas to circulate among workers, we will have to provide, subsidise and circulate our own media. Unless we do so, the rich will have a monopoly in the ideas business even more pernicious that their monopoly of the means of production. The irony is, however, that the labour movement has consistently, throughout the century, abandoned its independent press. The <strong>Daily Herald</strong> was taken over by the Labour Party in the early 1920s, sold to the TUC a few years later and built into the biggest circulation paper in Britain. In 1958, the TUC sold its stake. The <strong>Herald</strong>, then selling nearly two million copies a day, closed down in 1964. Murdoch bought its successor in 1969. It is now the <strong>Sun</strong>. Until recently the Labour Party produced a weekly and monthly paper – <strong>Labour Weekly</strong> and <strong>New Socialist</strong>. Now both have vanished. The aspiration of modern Labour has sunk so low that they are happy with the crumbs of spare they are tossed from the high tables of the proprietors.</p>
<p><strong>Socialist Worker</strong> was born 25 years ago in a tiny room in Tottenham. There were, I think, five of us on the editorial board. The paper was four pages long, and none of us expected it to sell more than 5,000 copies. This is the story of what happened since. It’s not all a success story. The circulation and influence of the paper is still far too small. But there is about everything in this book a single theme, summed up in the three words ‘against the stream’. The hypocrisy and cruelty of the rich, the collaboration of the Labour leaders, the pusillanimity of the trade union leaders – all are exposed here with a single purpose: to build and extend an effective counter-attack. The mood of the paper goes up with the industrial victories of the 1970s and down with the industrial defeats of the 1990s, but its simple, clear commitment to socialism from below steadies it against super-optimism and super-pessimism. It analyses the world all right, but concentrates constantly on the real point: to change it.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Introduction to In the Heat of the Struggle
(September 1993)
From In the Heat of the Struggle: 25 Years of Socialist Worker (London: Bookmarks, 1993), pp. 9–12.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
MOST OF the propaganda about a free press in Britain is about as credible as a story from Enid Blyton. Five on a Treasure Island would be an appropriate title for it. Of the 14 million newspapers sold every day in Britain, 92 percent are owned and rigidly controlled by five men. One of these men, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns and controls Sky Television, now directly, without the slightest attention to the views of anyone else, runs a third of the British mass media.
The five are in the game for one purpose only: profit. They instinctively support everyone else who produces for profit. The bigger and the richer their friends, the more support they give them in the mass media.
Of course everyone in Britain is ‘free’ to produce competitors to these newspapers. Anyone can set up a printing press, hire some writers, and have a stab at creating a mass circulation newspaper capable of competing with the Sun or the Mirror. All you need for this venture – just for a start, that is – is ten million pounds minimum. Then your problems start. The advertising industry, which provides half the revenue for newspapers, and the distribution industry, controlled by two huge monopolies, are also in the hands of the rich, loyal to the rich. The truth is that everyone is as free to set up a newspaper as they are to spend a night in the Ritz. All you need is an enormous amount of money, which only very few people have.
It’s impossible to imagine the rich proprietors, rich advertisers and rich distributors will publish newspapers which spread ideas hostile to the rich. If we in the labour movement want a new set of ideas to circulate among workers, we will have to provide, subsidise and circulate our own media. Unless we do so, the rich will have a monopoly in the ideas business even more pernicious that their monopoly of the means of production. The irony is, however, that the labour movement has consistently, throughout the century, abandoned its independent press. The Daily Herald was taken over by the Labour Party in the early 1920s, sold to the TUC a few years later and built into the biggest circulation paper in Britain. In 1958, the TUC sold its stake. The Herald, then selling nearly two million copies a day, closed down in 1964. Murdoch bought its successor in 1969. It is now the Sun. Until recently the Labour Party produced a weekly and monthly paper – Labour Weekly and New Socialist. Now both have vanished. The aspiration of modern Labour has sunk so low that they are happy with the crumbs of spare they are tossed from the high tables of the proprietors.
Socialist Worker was born 25 years ago in a tiny room in Tottenham. There were, I think, five of us on the editorial board. The paper was four pages long, and none of us expected it to sell more than 5,000 copies. This is the story of what happened since. It’s not all a success story. The circulation and influence of the paper is still far too small. But there is about everything in this book a single theme, summed up in the three words ‘against the stream’. The hypocrisy and cruelty of the rich, the collaboration of the Labour leaders, the pusillanimity of the trade union leaders – all are exposed here with a single purpose: to build and extend an effective counter-attack. The mood of the paper goes up with the industrial victories of the 1970s and down with the industrial defeats of the 1990s, but its simple, clear commitment to socialism from below steadies it against super-optimism and super-pessimism. It analyses the world all right, but concentrates constantly on the real point: to change it.
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>A socialist bookshelf</h1>
<h3>(July 1983)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, July 1983.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990</strong> (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 235–236.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">You have to look hard for some good news these bleak summer days, but I am cheered by two bits of it last week.</p>
<p>The first was that the takings at the bookstalls at <em>Marxism 83</em>, a week-long series of meetings, debates and discussions between Marxists, reached an all-time (and in the circumstances quite extraordinary) high of £9,000. More people came to <em>Marxism</em> this year than in any other, but the proportion of books sold to people who registered was higher, I gather, than ever before.</p>
<p>These fantastic sales among people who have not got very much money is further proof, if proof were needed, that socialists as a breed read more than anyone else. The ideas which keep people socialists against all the pressures of society push them more and more towards books.</p>
<p>But stop! Is there not some hideous deviation here? Is all this book-buying just a sign of property consciousness?</p>
<p>I remember during a day school for <strong>Socialist Worker</strong> readers in Manchester some ten years ago fleeing during a break to a secondhand bookshop with one of the school’s organizers.</p>
<p>As I emerged with a couple of prize possessions, he remonstrated with me. Was this not just covetousness for possessions, a sort of obsession with belongings which had a distinctly bourgeois ring to it?</p>
<p>I supposed he was right, and hid the books shamefacedly. But on reflection, I realize he was not right at all. First, there is the old argument about private possessions and public property.</p>
<p>As John Strachey argued in his little book <strong>Why You Should be a Socialist</strong> nearly fifty years ago, the whole point about the public ownership and planning of the means of production is that it releases capital for producing things that people need <em>and want</em>. He argued for more public ownership and more equality not to abolish private possessions but to make them more widely available.</p>
<p>Then there is a special argument about books. However marvellous the progress in other forms of media such as tapes and videos, for people who think and who value ideas there is no replacement for books.</p>
<p>This is because books do not impose a pace on their reader. They can be studied at the reader’s own level of concentration and consciousness. And then they can be re-read.</p>
<p>Of course public libraries are wonderful institutions, and under any system even remotely socialist would be expanded far beyond anything we have at present.</p>
<p>But there is a peculiar advantage in owning books, since they can be marked, stored away in shelves and in the mind, and returned to again and again when a new idea or argument comes along.</p>
<p>In an old questionnaire among Communists in Fife, the third or fourth question was: ‘Are there any books in the house?’ Plenty of workers, usually the best Communists, answered ‘Yes’.</p>
<p>And that brings me to the second piece of good news. Last January I was driven from Harwich to Felixstowe by Dave Saunders, a seaman on a North Sea car ferry.</p>
<p>We were talking then about the collision of two ferries, which had killed six workers in dreadful circumstances.</p>
<p>As we came back to Harwich, Dave suddenly changed the subject and started talking about Shelley. As we went into his house, I fell eagerly on a big bookcase, full of old books of every description: Dickens, Shakespeare and Shelley.</p>
<p>Last week I was up that way again, for a meeting in Ipswich, led off with great vigour by Dave Saunders.</p>
<p>He was speaking for the workers on the ferries who had gone on strike against a crude attempt of the owners to sabotage their nationally agreed wage rise.</p>
<p>I was delighted to see that those workers won their fight (as far as I can see game, set and match). And I certainly believe that Dave Saunders’s bookcase had something to do with it.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
A socialist bookshelf
(July 1983)
From Socialist Worker, July 1983.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 235–236.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
You have to look hard for some good news these bleak summer days, but I am cheered by two bits of it last week.
The first was that the takings at the bookstalls at Marxism 83, a week-long series of meetings, debates and discussions between Marxists, reached an all-time (and in the circumstances quite extraordinary) high of £9,000. More people came to Marxism this year than in any other, but the proportion of books sold to people who registered was higher, I gather, than ever before.
These fantastic sales among people who have not got very much money is further proof, if proof were needed, that socialists as a breed read more than anyone else. The ideas which keep people socialists against all the pressures of society push them more and more towards books.
But stop! Is there not some hideous deviation here? Is all this book-buying just a sign of property consciousness?
I remember during a day school for Socialist Worker readers in Manchester some ten years ago fleeing during a break to a secondhand bookshop with one of the school’s organizers.
As I emerged with a couple of prize possessions, he remonstrated with me. Was this not just covetousness for possessions, a sort of obsession with belongings which had a distinctly bourgeois ring to it?
I supposed he was right, and hid the books shamefacedly. But on reflection, I realize he was not right at all. First, there is the old argument about private possessions and public property.
As John Strachey argued in his little book Why You Should be a Socialist nearly fifty years ago, the whole point about the public ownership and planning of the means of production is that it releases capital for producing things that people need and want. He argued for more public ownership and more equality not to abolish private possessions but to make them more widely available.
Then there is a special argument about books. However marvellous the progress in other forms of media such as tapes and videos, for people who think and who value ideas there is no replacement for books.
This is because books do not impose a pace on their reader. They can be studied at the reader’s own level of concentration and consciousness. And then they can be re-read.
Of course public libraries are wonderful institutions, and under any system even remotely socialist would be expanded far beyond anything we have at present.
But there is a peculiar advantage in owning books, since they can be marked, stored away in shelves and in the mind, and returned to again and again when a new idea or argument comes along.
In an old questionnaire among Communists in Fife, the third or fourth question was: ‘Are there any books in the house?’ Plenty of workers, usually the best Communists, answered ‘Yes’.
And that brings me to the second piece of good news. Last January I was driven from Harwich to Felixstowe by Dave Saunders, a seaman on a North Sea car ferry.
We were talking then about the collision of two ferries, which had killed six workers in dreadful circumstances.
As we came back to Harwich, Dave suddenly changed the subject and started talking about Shelley. As we went into his house, I fell eagerly on a big bookcase, full of old books of every description: Dickens, Shakespeare and Shelley.
Last week I was up that way again, for a meeting in Ipswich, led off with great vigour by Dave Saunders.
He was speaking for the workers on the ferries who had gone on strike against a crude attempt of the owners to sabotage their nationally agreed wage rise.
I was delighted to see that those workers won their fight (as far as I can see game, set and match). And I certainly believe that Dave Saunders’s bookcase had something to do with it.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1><small>Ireland</small><br>
Majority rule</h1>
<h3>(January 1997)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Notes of the Month</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.204, January 1997, p.7.<br>
Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">John Major, who used to believe that his single handed achievement of peace in Ireland would bring him political immortality, has discovered a far more important objective: staying in office. The arithmetic of the British parliament leaves him at the mercy of the Ulster Unionists. Indeed, on one of the last close votes, when the official Unionists voted against the Tories, the government survived only with the support of the absurdly named Democratic Unionists, the Rev Ian Paisley’s Bigot Party.</p>
<p>So Major agreed in the autumn that he must do nothing to upset Ulster Unionists. Though the vast majority of people in Britain and in Ireland want to see the end of the union, this tiny band of bigots governs the political agenda on the subject</p>
<p>Major’s ‘new realism’ in Ireland coincided with a fresh attempt by Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party to include Sinn Fein in the constitutional talks. After the lamentable failure of its renewed bombing campaign, the pendulum in the IRA swung back in favour of another ceasefire. The only condition Sinn Fein imposed was its immediate participation in the talks. The Irish government rapturously accepted the condition. But Major, nervous of his majority, refused. He imposed a series of ludicrous conditions for Sinn Fein’s entry into the talks-conditions which he knew could not be accepted. There follows an uneasy stalemate in which the pendulum is swinging back to sectarian violence. The hideous attacks on Catholics by Orange gangs in Ballymena remind everyone how awful that violence can be.</p>
<p>The main cause of the stalemate of course is the Major government’s approach, a grotesque combination of rhetoric for peace and practical intransigence. The initial ceasefire was squandered, and a new one is spurned. Yet the grim record also exposes the dilemma of the Sinn Fein and nationalist leaders. Their determination to make almost any concession to appease the United States government has left them high and dry when they are rebuffed by the British. They must either return to hopeless violence, which almost everybody in Northern Ireland dreads, or cling to Clinton’s coat tails.</p>
<p>Irish workers, North and South, do not want sectarian violence- but nor do they want the capitalism represented by Clinton, Major and Bruton. The fruits of that capitalism are increasingly intolerable on both sides of the border. A recent House of Commons question exposed the fact that living standards in 31.4 percent of households in the North of Ireland fall below half the British national average, a staggering statistic of degradation which is matched by similar figures in the South. A socialist strategy of uniting these poverty stricken working masses across the sectarian border could break the deadlock imposed on Ireland from Clinton in Washington and the Major/Trimble alliance in London.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Ireland
Majority rule
(January 1997)
From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.204, January 1997, p.7.
Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
John Major, who used to believe that his single handed achievement of peace in Ireland would bring him political immortality, has discovered a far more important objective: staying in office. The arithmetic of the British parliament leaves him at the mercy of the Ulster Unionists. Indeed, on one of the last close votes, when the official Unionists voted against the Tories, the government survived only with the support of the absurdly named Democratic Unionists, the Rev Ian Paisley’s Bigot Party.
So Major agreed in the autumn that he must do nothing to upset Ulster Unionists. Though the vast majority of people in Britain and in Ireland want to see the end of the union, this tiny band of bigots governs the political agenda on the subject
Major’s ‘new realism’ in Ireland coincided with a fresh attempt by Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party to include Sinn Fein in the constitutional talks. After the lamentable failure of its renewed bombing campaign, the pendulum in the IRA swung back in favour of another ceasefire. The only condition Sinn Fein imposed was its immediate participation in the talks. The Irish government rapturously accepted the condition. But Major, nervous of his majority, refused. He imposed a series of ludicrous conditions for Sinn Fein’s entry into the talks-conditions which he knew could not be accepted. There follows an uneasy stalemate in which the pendulum is swinging back to sectarian violence. The hideous attacks on Catholics by Orange gangs in Ballymena remind everyone how awful that violence can be.
The main cause of the stalemate of course is the Major government’s approach, a grotesque combination of rhetoric for peace and practical intransigence. The initial ceasefire was squandered, and a new one is spurned. Yet the grim record also exposes the dilemma of the Sinn Fein and nationalist leaders. Their determination to make almost any concession to appease the United States government has left them high and dry when they are rebuffed by the British. They must either return to hopeless violence, which almost everybody in Northern Ireland dreads, or cling to Clinton’s coat tails.
Irish workers, North and South, do not want sectarian violence- but nor do they want the capitalism represented by Clinton, Major and Bruton. The fruits of that capitalism are increasingly intolerable on both sides of the border. A recent House of Commons question exposed the fact that living standards in 31.4 percent of households in the North of Ireland fall below half the British national average, a staggering statistic of degradation which is matched by similar figures in the South. A socialist strategy of uniting these poverty stricken working masses across the sectarian border could break the deadlock imposed on Ireland from Clinton in Washington and the Major/Trimble alliance in London.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>How Barbara forgot the starving masses<br>
and learned to love the bosses</h1>
<h4>A political profile</h4>
<h3>(5 April 1969)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1969/index.html#n0116" target="new">No. 116</a>, 5 April 1969, pp. 2–3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">IT WOULD TAKE a long and fruitless search to discover a Labour Party member more uncompromisingly reactionary, than Joe Gormley, of the Yorkshire Mineworkers Union.</p>
<p>Yet it was Gormley who, at the Labour Party National Executive on March 26, moved a resolution condemning the government’s White Paper in <strong>Place of Strife</strong>.</p>
<p>As soon as Gormley had spoken, an amendment to the motion, approving her own white paper was moved by Mrs Barbara Castle, Minister of Employment and Productivity.</p>
<p>Mrs Castle spoke modestly for more than half an hour of her painstaking work and wonderful achievements. The amendment was then defeated, with only five votes (all from Ministers) in its favour.</p>
<p>The long courtship between the Labour Party’s ‘Left wing’ and Mrs Castle was at an end.</p>
<p>Nothing serves a Labour career politician better than the ‘firebrand image’, and no one has developed it more meticulously than Barbara Castle.</p>
<p>In her days in the Socialist League before the war, the Metropolitan Water Board during the war and the Bevanite group of Labour MPs after the war (she has been in parliament for Blackburn since 1945) she developed a militant ‘conference’ rhetoric which proved irresistible to the rank and file.<br>
</p>
<h4>Developed Radical Image</h4>
<p class="fst">From the outset, Mrs Castle protected her career as scrupulously as she developed her radical image. She it was who introduced Harold Wilson to the Bevanites, after working after the war as his Parliamentary Private Secretary.</p>
<p>Of Wilson’s work at the Board of Trade to revitalise British capitalism after the war, she told a Huyton audience in 1950:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘He was a man who was a hero to his PPS.’</p>
<p class="fst">In the mid-fifties, the Bevanite group began to split between the firebrands who believed in outright opposition to the party leadership and the firebrands who argued that the best way to beat the leadership was to join it.</p>
<p>At the end of 1955, the Labour leader-elect, Hugh Gaitskell, told a newspaper that ‘the only Bevanites I would have in a government would be Dick Crossman, Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle’.</p>
<p>Mrs Castle straddled both horses – Gaitskellite and Bevanite – by concentrating almost exclusively, from 1956 to 1964, on foreign affairs.</p>
<p>She it was who moved the the 1957 resolution at the Labour Party Conference urging that at least one per cent of the national income should be spent on aid to the underdeveloped countries.</p>
<p>‘This is,’ she said, ‘a very specific commitment and a very important one.</p>
<p>She it was who raised a lot of fuss about the savagery of British troops in Cyprus and who became first chairman of the anti-apartheid movement and promised that a Labour government would cancel the South African order for Buccaneer aircraft.</p>
<p>Thus she remained a militant without ever fully supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or even the campaign for more nationalisation.<br>
</p>
<h4>Avoided Crucial Issues</h4>
<p class="fst">Militant expressions of solidarity with the independence movements in Africa and elsewhere enabled Mrs Castle to avoid more crucial questions at home, chief among which was the problem of the incomes policy.</p>
<p>Before 1964, there is very little on Mrs Castle’s record about economic and incomes problems, and she fell neatly into line with the confusing jibberish about a ‘planned growth of incomes’.</p>
<p>Mrs Castle’s radicalism was confined almost entirely to her use of words and her obsession with the problems of everyone except those living in Britain.</p>
<p>In 1964 she was given a chance to put some of what she had been saying into effect. As Minister for Overseas Development, she improved on her rhetoric about the starving millions and as Minister of Transport she demonstrated that she is an expert in public relations.</p>
<p>She even expressed a little public anger at the August 1965 Immigration White Paper and, once, threatened to resign if there was any sell-out to Ian Smith. But the reality of office soon put an end to these childish protests. When Wilson re-shuffled his cabinet early last year he sought around for a loyal, successful Minister to operate the incomes policy.</p>
<p>Barbara was the obvious choice. Her radicalism did not stretch to workers’ problems at home. She saw ‘the case’ for matching wage increases with productivity. Workers and trade unionists she believed, could easily be won round to ‘common sense’ with a dash of public relations.</p>
<p>The cup of tea with the Ford women strikers was a suitable start to a dismal year in which all Mrs Castle’s vitriol, once directed against South African racialists or British imperialism, has been turned against the people who voted her and her colleagues into power.<br>
</p>
<h4>Anti-Worker Legislation</h4>
<p class="fst">The Tory cliches of a century – ‘lost production’, ‘pointless strikes’, ‘the world not owing us a living’ – have been used to push through the most anti-worker legislation since the Combination Acts.</p>
<p>This is not just a personal sell-out. It is the natural development from the phoney and sentimental radicalism which hypnotised the labour movement in the 1950s.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<a name="quotes"></a>
<h3>Down the slippery slope</h3>
<p class="quoteb">’Our slogan is: “You cannot trust the Tories.” You cannot trust them because they don’t understand the economics of expansion, the theory that you will only increase wealth by spreading it. When the general election comes we shall make it a national remembrance day for the Rent Act and for what the government has done to our coal and cotton industries.’ <em>September 1959</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">Following Tory victory at at the polls: ‘The working class movement has been divided and weakened. The call must be for political and not merely industrial militancy on the part of trade unions. We have affirmed our belief that it is impossible for us to achieve the moral and social aims for which we stand – a just society, the dignity of the individual, full democracy, the end of the exploitation of man by man throughout the world – unless we transform the economic base of our society and make it one in which common ownership is predominant. Only in this way can we subordinate the growing power of private economic giants in the common interest.’ <em>March 1959</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">On equal pay for women: ‘Women have waited long enough for this elementary piece of justice. The only answer now is legislation and I’m delighted that a Labour government is pledged to introduce this.’ <em>May 1968</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">‘I am not going to preside over a prices and incomes policy under which we tell our people that they have just got to grin and bear things for the next two years. They are a spirited lot and they won’t do it anyway. Harold Wilson has put me in this job to find ways by which we can all help ourselves to an improvement in the quality of our lives within the context of the essential economic policy.’ <em>April 1968</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">‘Any individual increases in top salaries are as much subject to the influence of the prices and incomes policy as any wage in this land ... I will never ask wage earners in this country to hold back and make sacrifices if people with top salaries are not going to show any sense.’ <em>July 1968.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">‘I am profoundly convinced that the operation of the prices and incomes policy enables us to concentrate on the continuation of the reforms which benefit the workers, the industry and the nation.’ <em>December 1968</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
How Barbara forgot the starving masses
and learned to love the bosses
A political profile
(5 April 1969)
From Socialist Worker, No. 116, 5 April 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IT WOULD TAKE a long and fruitless search to discover a Labour Party member more uncompromisingly reactionary, than Joe Gormley, of the Yorkshire Mineworkers Union.
Yet it was Gormley who, at the Labour Party National Executive on March 26, moved a resolution condemning the government’s White Paper in Place of Strife.
As soon as Gormley had spoken, an amendment to the motion, approving her own white paper was moved by Mrs Barbara Castle, Minister of Employment and Productivity.
Mrs Castle spoke modestly for more than half an hour of her painstaking work and wonderful achievements. The amendment was then defeated, with only five votes (all from Ministers) in its favour.
The long courtship between the Labour Party’s ‘Left wing’ and Mrs Castle was at an end.
Nothing serves a Labour career politician better than the ‘firebrand image’, and no one has developed it more meticulously than Barbara Castle.
In her days in the Socialist League before the war, the Metropolitan Water Board during the war and the Bevanite group of Labour MPs after the war (she has been in parliament for Blackburn since 1945) she developed a militant ‘conference’ rhetoric which proved irresistible to the rank and file.
Developed Radical Image
From the outset, Mrs Castle protected her career as scrupulously as she developed her radical image. She it was who introduced Harold Wilson to the Bevanites, after working after the war as his Parliamentary Private Secretary.
Of Wilson’s work at the Board of Trade to revitalise British capitalism after the war, she told a Huyton audience in 1950:
‘He was a man who was a hero to his PPS.’
In the mid-fifties, the Bevanite group began to split between the firebrands who believed in outright opposition to the party leadership and the firebrands who argued that the best way to beat the leadership was to join it.
At the end of 1955, the Labour leader-elect, Hugh Gaitskell, told a newspaper that ‘the only Bevanites I would have in a government would be Dick Crossman, Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle’.
Mrs Castle straddled both horses – Gaitskellite and Bevanite – by concentrating almost exclusively, from 1956 to 1964, on foreign affairs.
She it was who moved the the 1957 resolution at the Labour Party Conference urging that at least one per cent of the national income should be spent on aid to the underdeveloped countries.
‘This is,’ she said, ‘a very specific commitment and a very important one.
She it was who raised a lot of fuss about the savagery of British troops in Cyprus and who became first chairman of the anti-apartheid movement and promised that a Labour government would cancel the South African order for Buccaneer aircraft.
Thus she remained a militant without ever fully supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or even the campaign for more nationalisation.
Avoided Crucial Issues
Militant expressions of solidarity with the independence movements in Africa and elsewhere enabled Mrs Castle to avoid more crucial questions at home, chief among which was the problem of the incomes policy.
Before 1964, there is very little on Mrs Castle’s record about economic and incomes problems, and she fell neatly into line with the confusing jibberish about a ‘planned growth of incomes’.
Mrs Castle’s radicalism was confined almost entirely to her use of words and her obsession with the problems of everyone except those living in Britain.
In 1964 she was given a chance to put some of what she had been saying into effect. As Minister for Overseas Development, she improved on her rhetoric about the starving millions and as Minister of Transport she demonstrated that she is an expert in public relations.
She even expressed a little public anger at the August 1965 Immigration White Paper and, once, threatened to resign if there was any sell-out to Ian Smith. But the reality of office soon put an end to these childish protests. When Wilson re-shuffled his cabinet early last year he sought around for a loyal, successful Minister to operate the incomes policy.
Barbara was the obvious choice. Her radicalism did not stretch to workers’ problems at home. She saw ‘the case’ for matching wage increases with productivity. Workers and trade unionists she believed, could easily be won round to ‘common sense’ with a dash of public relations.
The cup of tea with the Ford women strikers was a suitable start to a dismal year in which all Mrs Castle’s vitriol, once directed against South African racialists or British imperialism, has been turned against the people who voted her and her colleagues into power.
Anti-Worker Legislation
The Tory cliches of a century – ‘lost production’, ‘pointless strikes’, ‘the world not owing us a living’ – have been used to push through the most anti-worker legislation since the Combination Acts.
This is not just a personal sell-out. It is the natural development from the phoney and sentimental radicalism which hypnotised the labour movement in the 1950s.
*
Down the slippery slope
’Our slogan is: “You cannot trust the Tories.” You cannot trust them because they don’t understand the economics of expansion, the theory that you will only increase wealth by spreading it. When the general election comes we shall make it a national remembrance day for the Rent Act and for what the government has done to our coal and cotton industries.’ September 1959
Following Tory victory at at the polls: ‘The working class movement has been divided and weakened. The call must be for political and not merely industrial militancy on the part of trade unions. We have affirmed our belief that it is impossible for us to achieve the moral and social aims for which we stand – a just society, the dignity of the individual, full democracy, the end of the exploitation of man by man throughout the world – unless we transform the economic base of our society and make it one in which common ownership is predominant. Only in this way can we subordinate the growing power of private economic giants in the common interest.’ March 1959
On equal pay for women: ‘Women have waited long enough for this elementary piece of justice. The only answer now is legislation and I’m delighted that a Labour government is pledged to introduce this.’ May 1968
‘I am not going to preside over a prices and incomes policy under which we tell our people that they have just got to grin and bear things for the next two years. They are a spirited lot and they won’t do it anyway. Harold Wilson has put me in this job to find ways by which we can all help ourselves to an improvement in the quality of our lives within the context of the essential economic policy.’ April 1968
‘Any individual increases in top salaries are as much subject to the influence of the prices and incomes policy as any wage in this land ... I will never ask wage earners in this country to hold back and make sacrifices if people with top salaries are not going to show any sense.’ July 1968.
‘I am profoundly convinced that the operation of the prices and incomes policy enables us to concentrate on the continuation of the reforms which benefit the workers, the industry and the nation.’ December 1968
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Can Labour win?</h1>
<h3>(March 1989)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, No. 118, March 1989, pp. 16–19.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the <a href="https://secure.marxists.org/copyright-permissions/paul-foot.txt" class="absref" target="new">Estate</a>. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><strong>The fortunes of the Labour Party in the opinion polls has risen in recent weeks. But the party is still only about level with what should be a deeply unpopular Tory government. Many Labour supporters have concluded from this that Labour cannot succeed in winning the next election. <em>Paul Foot</em> looks at the reality.</strong></p>
<p class="fst">WHEN THE Labour Party was first formed, and had to win votes from the Liberals, politics for Labour Party people was saying what you believed and persuading people to vote for it. Today, stricken by psephology, politics for Labour is finding out what most people believe and pretending to agree with them.</p>
<p>It sounds so logical. Political power, we are told, is winning elections. Surely, the way to win elections is to say what people think. Then they vote for you; you win an election, and you have political power.</p>
<p>The guide, therefore, is not politics, but polls. The polls tell us people don’t like divided parties so Labour cuts down on argument. The polls tell us people believe Britain should be defended. So former CND stalwarts suddenly conclude that since that nice Mr Gorbachev isn’t an enemy any more, we really need nuclear weapons in this country. Above all, the polls say that Labour is too extreme. So Labour must be moderate. Unless Labour is united, right wing and armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it <em>can’t win an election</em>.</p>
<p>All through 1988 the polls showed an obstinate ten point Tory lead over Labour. The psephologists in the Labour Party draw from that a grim conclusion. Labour won’t win. Labour can’t win.</p>
<p>Some Labour supporters have decided to sit it out until the next defeat, hoping for some change <em>after</em> that. Others search for an elixir from the voting system itself: a different way of returning people to parliament, perhaps, or a pact with Paddy Ashdown.</p>
<p>No-one in all this scrambling talks politics. No-one even wonders what they think themselves. They find out what other people think, and move further and further right until there seems to be precious little difference between them and the Tory enemy.</p>
<p>Is it really the case that Labour can’t win? Is it really true that “old fashioned social democratic parties” are out of date in the late 1980s?</p>
<p>Anyone who says yes has not looked even as far as across the English Channel. Most of Europe today is dominated by social democracy. In Greece the social democratic PASOK has won the last two elections with handsome majorities. In Spain, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) has done the same. In France in the 1980s there has only been a brief period of anything approaching Thatcherite conservatism. The French President calls himself a socialist. He beat the Tory Chirac by a substantial margin only last year.</p>
<p>In Germany there is a conservative government, not half as right wing as Thatcher’s. It has won the last two elections by narrow margins, but it is in deep distress. Within the last few weeks the German Tory Party (the CDU) lost nine percentage points of its vote in West Berlin, which it has held comfortably for 20 years.</p>
<p>The Social Democrats gained five points, and the same number of seats as the conservatives. In Italy for much of the 1980s the Prime Minister has been a social democrat.</p>
<table cellspacing="3" align="center" cellpadding="3">
<tbody><tr>
<th colspan="9">
<p class="smc"><big>Recent European Election Results*</big></p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th colspan="4">
<p class="sm1"><big>GERMANY:</big></p>
</th>
<td rowspan="9">
<p class="sm1"><big> </big></p>
</td>
<th colspan="4">
<p class="sm1"><big>FRANCE:</big></p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th colspan="2" width="23%">
<p class="smc">1983</p>
</th>
<th colspan="2" width="23%">
<p class="smc">1987</p>
</th>
<th colspan="2" width="23%">
<p class="smc">1981</p>
</th>
<th colspan="2" width="23%">
<p class="smc">1988</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">SPD</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">193</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">SPD</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">186</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Socialists</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">285</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Socialists</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">276</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">CDU</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">191</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">CDU</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">174</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">RPR</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">URC</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">271</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">CSU</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 53</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">CSU</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 49</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">UDF</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 63</p>
</td>
<td colspan="2">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th colspan="4">
<p class="sm1"><big>GREECE:</big></p>
</th>
<th colspan="4">
<p class="sm1"><big>SPAIN:</big></p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th colspan="2">
<p class="smc">1981</p>
</th>
<th colspan="2">
<p class="smc">1985</p>
</th>
<th colspan="2">
<p class="smc">1982</p>
</th>
<th colspan="2">
<p class="smc">1986</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">PASOK</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">172</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">PASOK</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">162</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">PSOE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">202</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="sm1">PSOE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">184</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="bottom">
<p class="sm1">New Democracy</p>
</td>
<td valign="bottom">
<p class="smc">115</p>
</td>
<td valign="bottom">
<p class="sm1">New Democracy</p>
</td>
<td valign="bottom">
<p class="smc">125</p>
</td>
<td valign="top">
<p class="sm1">CDU</p>
</td>
<td valign="top">
<p class="smc">106</p>
</td>
<td valign="bottom">
<p class="sm1">Christian Parties</p>
</td>
<td valign="bottom">
<p class="smc">105</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="9">
<p class="sm1"><small>* number of seats</small></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">There is nowhere in Europe where there is not a social democratic government or an excellent chance of one in the near future.</p>
<p>What explains this difference in the success record in the 1980s between British Labour and its European counterparts? Can it be that Britain has the smallest peasantry in Europe and possibly the world? It has a much smaller peasantry than its former colony Jamaica, which has just returned by a vast majority a social democratic government under a leader who was beaten out of sight eight years ago.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is poor Mr Kinnock’s unilateral disarmament policy which hangs (to borrow a cliche universally used by political correspondents) “like an albatross” round his neck? No doubt the champion social democratic leaders in Europe have all shot their albatrosses long ago.</p>
<p>No, not true either. The two most successful social democratic parties in Europe in the 1980s – the Spanish PSOE and the Greek PASOK – have gone to the electorate with strong anti-nuclear programmes, and (in the case of Greece) “a solemn pledge” to rid the country of the menace of American military bases.</p>
<p>So is there something in the history of British Labour which suggest a terminal decline in the Labour vote?</p>
<p>The closest parallel to the psephological pessimism which now saps Labour was in 1959, 1960 and 1961, in the period just after the Labour Party had been beaten three times in a row, each time by a bigger majority.</p>
<p>Familiar lamentations filled the air. People had “never had it so good”. The working class didn’t exist any more. If it did, it was only interested in what the <strong>New Statesman</strong> (then, as now, the leading left wing lamenter) called “the telly in the parlour and the mini on the kerb”.</p>
<p>For some reason, left wing intellectuals found special fault with that great liberator, the washing machine. Washing machines, it was widely declared, had sapped the voting loyalty of Labour women. Freed from the splendid old working class habit of washing garments by hand, they were listening to the radio and voting for Harold Macmillan.</p>
<p>A psephologist called Mark Abrams wrote a pamphlet entitled <strong>Must Labour Lose?</strong> He concluded that such were the changes in the class structure of Britain that Labour could never again win an election outright. Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP in Leicestershire, and others who were even closer to the Labour leader, a fervent cold warrior called Hugh Gaitskell, demanded talks with the Liberal Party about electoral pacts.</p>
<p>The Tory majority in parliament in 1959 was slightly larger than it is today under Mrs Thatcher. The Tory share of the vote in 1959 was six points higher than Mrs Thatcher achieved in 1983 or 1987. The grip of the “never had it so good” philosophy seemed to be unshakeable.</p>
<p>Yet, very suddenly, at the end of those years, the whole Tory edifice fell apart. Macmillan started sacking</p>
<p>Cabinet Ministers all over the place. Labour climbed rapidly in the polls and overturned a huge Tory majority without any electoral pacts or proportional representation.</p>
<p>Did Labour achieve this miracle by declaring suddenly for an independent deterrent?</p>
<p>Not at all. It was, said Harold Wilson, “neither independent or a deterrent”. Labour ran an election campaign committed to scrapping the Polaris missile. He demonstrably won the argument with the Tories on the issue.</p>
<p>Was Harold Wilson to the right of Hugh Gaitskell?</p>
<p>Did he appear to the electorate as a more moderate, more responsible statesman who would be more welcome in the White House than Hugh Gaitskell?</p>
<p>Nothing of the kind. Wilson was a former chairman of the Tribune Group of left wing Labour MPs. He had made extravagant speeches against American and French imperialism in South East Asia.</p>
<p>He resigned from the Labour cabinet in 1951, arguing that money which Gaitskell wanted to spend on weapons should be spent instead on a free National Health Service and on aid to poor countries. His policy was not to abandon public ownership but to seize control of the “commanding heights of the economy”. It was not to tame the trade unions, but to allow free collective bargaining.</p>
<p>He signalled well before the election that an important member of any new Labour cabinet would be the militant, unilateralist leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, Frank Cousins.</p>
<p>Of course, Labour’s policy was not a socialist one. Indeed, Harold Wilson’s devious rhetoric was the language of “dynamic free enterprise” of “cutting the dead wood out of the boardrooms”, to replace old fashioned exploiters with new fashioned ones.</p>
<p>But at least in 1963 and 1964 Labour was not the whingeing, backtracking, excuse-peddling rump it had seemed in 1961, but a confident, aggressive and purposeful political party every bit as “left wing” as the more placid organisation which had gone down to defeat three times in the 1950s.</p>
<p>The facts of the Labour Party’s own history and the electoral facts in other European countries do not match the pessimism of the psephologists. Indeed even their own figures seem, as this is written, to contradict their own conclusions. In February 1989, the Gallup Poll, always the leader in the field, had to be checked three times before its omniscient organisers would allow it to be published. The psephologists had been talking for so long about Labour’s terminal decline, about the need for a middle ground party, about Mrs Thatcher’s political omnipotence that they could not believe their own figures.</p>
<p>In <em>one month</em>, Labour’s percentage of the vote jumped by an astounding five points. The Tories had dropped two; and the “impossible gap” – the gap which could only be breached by fumbling political neuters in the centre – was down from 8.5 to 1.5 percent.</p>
<p>Desperately, the psephologists sought an answer to this phenomenon. A second army of questioners were sent out into the field. <em>Why</em> had so many voters, without asking permission of Ivor Crewe or Peter Kellner, dared to change their minds in this unexpected direction?</p>
<p>The change had come <em>before</em> Mr Kinnock had started making noises in favour of keeping Polaris and Trident. Some comfort came from the answers on the Health Service. Mr Kenneth Clarke’s proposals for the “accountability” (profitability) of the NHS were, it was discovered, unpopular. But there was nothing surprising about that. Tory policies on the Health Service had always, all through the 1980s, been unpopular. So, for that matter, were their policies on water and electricity privatisation, on mortgages, the poll tax, on pretty well everything they were doing. An answer could not be found.</p>
<p>The electorate were fickle, unpredictable. They were changing, and not a psephologist in the country dared to predict whether they would go on changing or slip back again into that nice comfortable “mould”.</p>
<p>Psephology poses as science. It promotes professors, creates entire departments of politics in the universities. But it is not a political science at all. It is merely a record of what people think. It is almost useless as a record of why people think, and absolutely useless as a guide as to how people change their minds.</p>
<p>These matters are embedded in the political structure of a society, which is, for all the double talk on the left in recent years, still essentially and vitally a class society. How people think and vote depends upon their confidence and their aspirations. These will shift, often with startling speed, according to the ebb and flow of the struggle between the classes.</p>
<p>When one side wins, the other side loses. When one side is winning, their class confidence rises – while the confidence of their enemy falls. Victories and success for either side breed confidence – and the urge to continue the victories and success.</p>
<p>Those who say that unemployment and degradation are necessary conditions for socialism don’t understand the motor of social change. Empty stomachs and cold, bare homes lead far more often to despair and reaction than to insurrection and hope.</p>
<p>In general, then, the years of mass unemployment – the early 1930s for instance, or the early 1980s – are not Labour’s years. They are Tory years. When people lose confidence in themselves, they seek it elsewhere – in things which are theirs by accident like the colour of their skin. When people are fully employed, precisely when they have those washing machines, when they believe that their children will have a better life, <em>then</em> working class confidence increases, blossoms into cooperation, and reaches out for new ways to organise society.</p>
<p>Growing working class confidence has another effect. It pulls with it those who believe they are middle class: people who work for high wages and who dabble at the edge of the capitalist pool. These are the weather vanes of class society. When the workers are winning, the middle class flock to their standard. In the early 1970s London was full of middle class people leaping out of their Volvos demanding to know the way to the revolution. When the bosses are winning, those same people almost overnight become the most virulent opponents of all those who might take away from them the golden crumbs which fall to them from the booming Stock Exchange.</p>
<p>Elections in Britain, and anywhere else in the industrialised world, are won or lost by this middle class. One significant development in elections over the last thirty years has been the decline in the automatic allegiance to both the Tory and the Labour Party. As more and more people see themselves as middle class, so the fickleness of the electorate increases. This does not mean, as our psephologist would have it, that the struggle between the classes is less relevant to elections, and to politics generally.</p>
<p>On the contrary, if anything the state of the struggle is more relevant, since there are more floaters to be won for this side or for that. Mrs Thatcher, as a determined and class conscious fighter, knows that quite well. She knows that what wins elections for her are class victories in the field. She knew after 1983 that the way to sustain her unpopular government in office was to win on the most important battlefield of all. Once victorious, whether at Orgreave or at Wapping, she knew the majority of the waverers would stay with her.</p>
<p>The relationship between class confidence and voting, however, is not uniform, or bound by formula. Often, social democratic governments can win office in elections when the class they represent is being beaten.</p>
<p>The classic example in British history is the general election of 1929. Labour, in full flight after the miners strike, with its socialists in a hopeless minority, and its policy almost indistinguishable from that of the Liberals, won more seats than any other party, and formed a minority government.</p>
<p>Equally, when the working class is strong and confident, the results may not show themselves dramatically in elections. In 1974, for instance, when two miners strikes had been won, and all kinds of working class victories chalked up in the field, the Labour vote was even lower than it had been in 1970 (when they lost the election). A minority Labour government was formed after the Liberal Party had scored more heavily than at any other election since the war.</p>
<p>What is certain, however, is that the state of the class struggle determines how those governments behave. The 1929 government, elected in class weakness, was very quickly overwhelmed and annihilated. The defeat it suffered in 1931 after its leaders joined the Tories in a National Government, was the worst in the history of the party.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the minority government of 1974 was much stronger than it looked. It took five years of capitalist attacks, assisted by compromising and backstabbing from the trade union leaders to wear down the class victories of the early 1970s and to usher a revitalised and greedy Tory Party back into the trough.</p>
<p>This takes us to the last of the determinants of votes and elections: the steady drip-drip of Labour government failures throughout the century. There is a sort of ratchet whereby each Labour government apostasy pulls down the aspirations and confidence of people who vote Labour. There is an ocean between the genuine, if naive, belief even of men like Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s that full blooded socialism could somehow be introduced by Labour government laws and the obsession with the “social market” which passes for modern Labour Party theory.</p>
<p>Each time a Labour government fails, it loses not just the next election but a great army of committed socialists <em>and</em> an army of committed voters. Those voters may come back. The act of voting requires so little commitment and effort that cowed and defeated workers may vote Labour, even in quite large numbers. But their expectation about what will come when they have voted Labour will be unfathomably lower than what they expected, say, in 1945.</p>
<p>For all these reasons, the present policy of the Labour leaders, determined as it is by the psephologists works against even their own miserable aspirations. Any policy of standing back from any struggle, of refusing to recognise that there is a struggle, even of attempting to dampen down any struggle, serves only to damage their own prospects in the long term.</p>
<p>When the nurses rose in fury against the government’s policy on the health service the reaction of even the best Labour protagonists such as Robin Cook was to disassociate themselves from the strike, even to urge the nurses back to work.</p>
<p>When the P&O workers for a fleeting moment, with the sudden and unexpected assistance of lorry drivers, looked as though they might break one of the nastiest Tory employers in the land, the Labour leaders kept their distance.</p>
<p>Again and again, on all sorts of issues, wherever a battle against the Thatcher government has loomed on the horizon, the Labour leadership has set full sail in the opposite direction. For them, there is no connection whatever between class struggle and their own electoral prospects. Indeed, as Neil Kinnock said on television early in February, there is, as far as he is concerned, no class struggle, nor even any classes.</p>
<p>His job, he said demurely, was to serve nation, not class. In this way the Labour Party leaders contribute to the stench of class defeat.</p>
<p>What can they hope for from such a policy? As the February Gallup poll shows, all is not necessarily lost to them. They may gain votes from Tory blunders.</p>
<p>But what are the consequences of this policy – of wait and see – of ducking the strikes for fear of being dubbed militants; of supporting the SAS in Gibraltar or in Ireland for fear of being dubbed unpatriotic; of seeking the back door to office as Manley and Papandreou and Gonzalez and Mitterrand have done?</p>
<p>The very most they can hope for, if all the political luck goes their way, is an electoral victory without a strong and confident working class – a recipe for another 1931, without the cushion of Empire to protect the British workers from the consequences.</p>
<p>Better to shoot and miss than not to shoot at all. Better to risk the abuse of the gutter press than to watch in the sidelines as another group of workers, another abortion campaign, another effort to pull the troops out of Ireland goes down to defeat. Defeat is <em>not</em> inevitable as the psephologists pretend.</p>
<p>It is the bright day that brings forth the adder. Even at its zenith, the Thatcher government is at its most vulnerable. Labour can win, and they can win in some strength if they support the struggles of their friends, build up the confidence of the workers and stop playing parlour games with their enemies.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Can Labour win?
(March 1989)
From Socialist Worker Review, No. 118, March 1989, pp. 16–19.
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The fortunes of the Labour Party in the opinion polls has risen in recent weeks. But the party is still only about level with what should be a deeply unpopular Tory government. Many Labour supporters have concluded from this that Labour cannot succeed in winning the next election. Paul Foot looks at the reality.
WHEN THE Labour Party was first formed, and had to win votes from the Liberals, politics for Labour Party people was saying what you believed and persuading people to vote for it. Today, stricken by psephology, politics for Labour is finding out what most people believe and pretending to agree with them.
It sounds so logical. Political power, we are told, is winning elections. Surely, the way to win elections is to say what people think. Then they vote for you; you win an election, and you have political power.
The guide, therefore, is not politics, but polls. The polls tell us people don’t like divided parties so Labour cuts down on argument. The polls tell us people believe Britain should be defended. So former CND stalwarts suddenly conclude that since that nice Mr Gorbachev isn’t an enemy any more, we really need nuclear weapons in this country. Above all, the polls say that Labour is too extreme. So Labour must be moderate. Unless Labour is united, right wing and armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it can’t win an election.
All through 1988 the polls showed an obstinate ten point Tory lead over Labour. The psephologists in the Labour Party draw from that a grim conclusion. Labour won’t win. Labour can’t win.
Some Labour supporters have decided to sit it out until the next defeat, hoping for some change after that. Others search for an elixir from the voting system itself: a different way of returning people to parliament, perhaps, or a pact with Paddy Ashdown.
No-one in all this scrambling talks politics. No-one even wonders what they think themselves. They find out what other people think, and move further and further right until there seems to be precious little difference between them and the Tory enemy.
Is it really the case that Labour can’t win? Is it really true that “old fashioned social democratic parties” are out of date in the late 1980s?
Anyone who says yes has not looked even as far as across the English Channel. Most of Europe today is dominated by social democracy. In Greece the social democratic PASOK has won the last two elections with handsome majorities. In Spain, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) has done the same. In France in the 1980s there has only been a brief period of anything approaching Thatcherite conservatism. The French President calls himself a socialist. He beat the Tory Chirac by a substantial margin only last year.
In Germany there is a conservative government, not half as right wing as Thatcher’s. It has won the last two elections by narrow margins, but it is in deep distress. Within the last few weeks the German Tory Party (the CDU) lost nine percentage points of its vote in West Berlin, which it has held comfortably for 20 years.
The Social Democrats gained five points, and the same number of seats as the conservatives. In Italy for much of the 1980s the Prime Minister has been a social democrat.
Recent European Election Results*
GERMANY:
FRANCE:
1983
1987
1981
1988
SPD
193
SPD
186
Socialists
285
Socialists
276
CDU
191
CDU
174
RPR
88
URC
271
CSU
53
CSU
49
UDF
63
GREECE:
SPAIN:
1981
1985
1982
1986
PASOK
172
PASOK
162
PSOE
202
PSOE
184
New Democracy
115
New Democracy
125
CDU
106
Christian Parties
105
* number of seats
There is nowhere in Europe where there is not a social democratic government or an excellent chance of one in the near future.
What explains this difference in the success record in the 1980s between British Labour and its European counterparts? Can it be that Britain has the smallest peasantry in Europe and possibly the world? It has a much smaller peasantry than its former colony Jamaica, which has just returned by a vast majority a social democratic government under a leader who was beaten out of sight eight years ago.
Perhaps it is poor Mr Kinnock’s unilateral disarmament policy which hangs (to borrow a cliche universally used by political correspondents) “like an albatross” round his neck? No doubt the champion social democratic leaders in Europe have all shot their albatrosses long ago.
No, not true either. The two most successful social democratic parties in Europe in the 1980s – the Spanish PSOE and the Greek PASOK – have gone to the electorate with strong anti-nuclear programmes, and (in the case of Greece) “a solemn pledge” to rid the country of the menace of American military bases.
So is there something in the history of British Labour which suggest a terminal decline in the Labour vote?
The closest parallel to the psephological pessimism which now saps Labour was in 1959, 1960 and 1961, in the period just after the Labour Party had been beaten three times in a row, each time by a bigger majority.
Familiar lamentations filled the air. People had “never had it so good”. The working class didn’t exist any more. If it did, it was only interested in what the New Statesman (then, as now, the leading left wing lamenter) called “the telly in the parlour and the mini on the kerb”.
For some reason, left wing intellectuals found special fault with that great liberator, the washing machine. Washing machines, it was widely declared, had sapped the voting loyalty of Labour women. Freed from the splendid old working class habit of washing garments by hand, they were listening to the radio and voting for Harold Macmillan.
A psephologist called Mark Abrams wrote a pamphlet entitled Must Labour Lose? He concluded that such were the changes in the class structure of Britain that Labour could never again win an election outright. Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP in Leicestershire, and others who were even closer to the Labour leader, a fervent cold warrior called Hugh Gaitskell, demanded talks with the Liberal Party about electoral pacts.
The Tory majority in parliament in 1959 was slightly larger than it is today under Mrs Thatcher. The Tory share of the vote in 1959 was six points higher than Mrs Thatcher achieved in 1983 or 1987. The grip of the “never had it so good” philosophy seemed to be unshakeable.
Yet, very suddenly, at the end of those years, the whole Tory edifice fell apart. Macmillan started sacking
Cabinet Ministers all over the place. Labour climbed rapidly in the polls and overturned a huge Tory majority without any electoral pacts or proportional representation.
Did Labour achieve this miracle by declaring suddenly for an independent deterrent?
Not at all. It was, said Harold Wilson, “neither independent or a deterrent”. Labour ran an election campaign committed to scrapping the Polaris missile. He demonstrably won the argument with the Tories on the issue.
Was Harold Wilson to the right of Hugh Gaitskell?
Did he appear to the electorate as a more moderate, more responsible statesman who would be more welcome in the White House than Hugh Gaitskell?
Nothing of the kind. Wilson was a former chairman of the Tribune Group of left wing Labour MPs. He had made extravagant speeches against American and French imperialism in South East Asia.
He resigned from the Labour cabinet in 1951, arguing that money which Gaitskell wanted to spend on weapons should be spent instead on a free National Health Service and on aid to poor countries. His policy was not to abandon public ownership but to seize control of the “commanding heights of the economy”. It was not to tame the trade unions, but to allow free collective bargaining.
He signalled well before the election that an important member of any new Labour cabinet would be the militant, unilateralist leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, Frank Cousins.
Of course, Labour’s policy was not a socialist one. Indeed, Harold Wilson’s devious rhetoric was the language of “dynamic free enterprise” of “cutting the dead wood out of the boardrooms”, to replace old fashioned exploiters with new fashioned ones.
But at least in 1963 and 1964 Labour was not the whingeing, backtracking, excuse-peddling rump it had seemed in 1961, but a confident, aggressive and purposeful political party every bit as “left wing” as the more placid organisation which had gone down to defeat three times in the 1950s.
The facts of the Labour Party’s own history and the electoral facts in other European countries do not match the pessimism of the psephologists. Indeed even their own figures seem, as this is written, to contradict their own conclusions. In February 1989, the Gallup Poll, always the leader in the field, had to be checked three times before its omniscient organisers would allow it to be published. The psephologists had been talking for so long about Labour’s terminal decline, about the need for a middle ground party, about Mrs Thatcher’s political omnipotence that they could not believe their own figures.
In one month, Labour’s percentage of the vote jumped by an astounding five points. The Tories had dropped two; and the “impossible gap” – the gap which could only be breached by fumbling political neuters in the centre – was down from 8.5 to 1.5 percent.
Desperately, the psephologists sought an answer to this phenomenon. A second army of questioners were sent out into the field. Why had so many voters, without asking permission of Ivor Crewe or Peter Kellner, dared to change their minds in this unexpected direction?
The change had come before Mr Kinnock had started making noises in favour of keeping Polaris and Trident. Some comfort came from the answers on the Health Service. Mr Kenneth Clarke’s proposals for the “accountability” (profitability) of the NHS were, it was discovered, unpopular. But there was nothing surprising about that. Tory policies on the Health Service had always, all through the 1980s, been unpopular. So, for that matter, were their policies on water and electricity privatisation, on mortgages, the poll tax, on pretty well everything they were doing. An answer could not be found.
The electorate were fickle, unpredictable. They were changing, and not a psephologist in the country dared to predict whether they would go on changing or slip back again into that nice comfortable “mould”.
Psephology poses as science. It promotes professors, creates entire departments of politics in the universities. But it is not a political science at all. It is merely a record of what people think. It is almost useless as a record of why people think, and absolutely useless as a guide as to how people change their minds.
These matters are embedded in the political structure of a society, which is, for all the double talk on the left in recent years, still essentially and vitally a class society. How people think and vote depends upon their confidence and their aspirations. These will shift, often with startling speed, according to the ebb and flow of the struggle between the classes.
When one side wins, the other side loses. When one side is winning, their class confidence rises – while the confidence of their enemy falls. Victories and success for either side breed confidence – and the urge to continue the victories and success.
Those who say that unemployment and degradation are necessary conditions for socialism don’t understand the motor of social change. Empty stomachs and cold, bare homes lead far more often to despair and reaction than to insurrection and hope.
In general, then, the years of mass unemployment – the early 1930s for instance, or the early 1980s – are not Labour’s years. They are Tory years. When people lose confidence in themselves, they seek it elsewhere – in things which are theirs by accident like the colour of their skin. When people are fully employed, precisely when they have those washing machines, when they believe that their children will have a better life, then working class confidence increases, blossoms into cooperation, and reaches out for new ways to organise society.
Growing working class confidence has another effect. It pulls with it those who believe they are middle class: people who work for high wages and who dabble at the edge of the capitalist pool. These are the weather vanes of class society. When the workers are winning, the middle class flock to their standard. In the early 1970s London was full of middle class people leaping out of their Volvos demanding to know the way to the revolution. When the bosses are winning, those same people almost overnight become the most virulent opponents of all those who might take away from them the golden crumbs which fall to them from the booming Stock Exchange.
Elections in Britain, and anywhere else in the industrialised world, are won or lost by this middle class. One significant development in elections over the last thirty years has been the decline in the automatic allegiance to both the Tory and the Labour Party. As more and more people see themselves as middle class, so the fickleness of the electorate increases. This does not mean, as our psephologist would have it, that the struggle between the classes is less relevant to elections, and to politics generally.
On the contrary, if anything the state of the struggle is more relevant, since there are more floaters to be won for this side or for that. Mrs Thatcher, as a determined and class conscious fighter, knows that quite well. She knows that what wins elections for her are class victories in the field. She knew after 1983 that the way to sustain her unpopular government in office was to win on the most important battlefield of all. Once victorious, whether at Orgreave or at Wapping, she knew the majority of the waverers would stay with her.
The relationship between class confidence and voting, however, is not uniform, or bound by formula. Often, social democratic governments can win office in elections when the class they represent is being beaten.
The classic example in British history is the general election of 1929. Labour, in full flight after the miners strike, with its socialists in a hopeless minority, and its policy almost indistinguishable from that of the Liberals, won more seats than any other party, and formed a minority government.
Equally, when the working class is strong and confident, the results may not show themselves dramatically in elections. In 1974, for instance, when two miners strikes had been won, and all kinds of working class victories chalked up in the field, the Labour vote was even lower than it had been in 1970 (when they lost the election). A minority Labour government was formed after the Liberal Party had scored more heavily than at any other election since the war.
What is certain, however, is that the state of the class struggle determines how those governments behave. The 1929 government, elected in class weakness, was very quickly overwhelmed and annihilated. The defeat it suffered in 1931 after its leaders joined the Tories in a National Government, was the worst in the history of the party.
On the other hand, the minority government of 1974 was much stronger than it looked. It took five years of capitalist attacks, assisted by compromising and backstabbing from the trade union leaders to wear down the class victories of the early 1970s and to usher a revitalised and greedy Tory Party back into the trough.
This takes us to the last of the determinants of votes and elections: the steady drip-drip of Labour government failures throughout the century. There is a sort of ratchet whereby each Labour government apostasy pulls down the aspirations and confidence of people who vote Labour. There is an ocean between the genuine, if naive, belief even of men like Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s that full blooded socialism could somehow be introduced by Labour government laws and the obsession with the “social market” which passes for modern Labour Party theory.
Each time a Labour government fails, it loses not just the next election but a great army of committed socialists and an army of committed voters. Those voters may come back. The act of voting requires so little commitment and effort that cowed and defeated workers may vote Labour, even in quite large numbers. But their expectation about what will come when they have voted Labour will be unfathomably lower than what they expected, say, in 1945.
For all these reasons, the present policy of the Labour leaders, determined as it is by the psephologists works against even their own miserable aspirations. Any policy of standing back from any struggle, of refusing to recognise that there is a struggle, even of attempting to dampen down any struggle, serves only to damage their own prospects in the long term.
When the nurses rose in fury against the government’s policy on the health service the reaction of even the best Labour protagonists such as Robin Cook was to disassociate themselves from the strike, even to urge the nurses back to work.
When the P&O workers for a fleeting moment, with the sudden and unexpected assistance of lorry drivers, looked as though they might break one of the nastiest Tory employers in the land, the Labour leaders kept their distance.
Again and again, on all sorts of issues, wherever a battle against the Thatcher government has loomed on the horizon, the Labour leadership has set full sail in the opposite direction. For them, there is no connection whatever between class struggle and their own electoral prospects. Indeed, as Neil Kinnock said on television early in February, there is, as far as he is concerned, no class struggle, nor even any classes.
His job, he said demurely, was to serve nation, not class. In this way the Labour Party leaders contribute to the stench of class defeat.
What can they hope for from such a policy? As the February Gallup poll shows, all is not necessarily lost to them. They may gain votes from Tory blunders.
But what are the consequences of this policy – of wait and see – of ducking the strikes for fear of being dubbed militants; of supporting the SAS in Gibraltar or in Ireland for fear of being dubbed unpatriotic; of seeking the back door to office as Manley and Papandreou and Gonzalez and Mitterrand have done?
The very most they can hope for, if all the political luck goes their way, is an electoral victory without a strong and confident working class – a recipe for another 1931, without the cushion of Empire to protect the British workers from the consequences.
Better to shoot and miss than not to shoot at all. Better to risk the abuse of the gutter press than to watch in the sidelines as another group of workers, another abortion campaign, another effort to pull the troops out of Ireland goes down to defeat. Defeat is not inevitable as the psephologists pretend.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder. Even at its zenith, the Thatcher government is at its most vulnerable. Labour can win, and they can win in some strength if they support the struggles of their friends, build up the confidence of the workers and stop playing parlour games with their enemies.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>The triple whammy</h1>
<h3>(September 1997)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <em>Reviews</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.211, September 1997, p.26.<br>
Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/srindex.htm" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>The Strange Death of Liberal England</strong><br>
George Dangerfield<br>
<em>Serif £14.99</em></p>
<p class="fst">It is a rare pleasure not just to recommend a book but to insist with all possible powers of persuasion that anyone lucky enough not to have read it should instantly treat themselves. George Dangerfield’s book covers a period of intense warfare – though the warfare is not as popular as it usually is among historians since the wars were not between nations or races but between governed and governors in the same country. What makes that warfare even more distasteful to official palates is that against all odds the wrong side, the dispossessed, seemed to be winning.</p>
<p>The book covers three areas of revolt: the Irish revolt against British rule (and the revolt against that revolt of the Orangemen of the North); the revolt of the women, who had no vote, even though some 60 percent of the men had it; and the revolt of the workers against their employers. Each of these stories takes up about 100 pages, and the last quarter is devoted to what Dangerfield calls ‘the crisis’, the amazing first seven months of 1914 in which all three revolts came to the brink of victory only to be consumed in the unspeakable atrocity of the First World War. More than once, from this account, the First World War emerges not just as an inevitable clash between imperialist forces but as a great conspiracy of the rulers everywhere to rid themselves even if only temporarily from the intolerable demands of their subjects.</p>
<p>There are, of course, many history books about this period, many of them written from a position friendly to workers, suffragettes and Irish nationalists, and many of them perhaps more scrupulous with the facts or closer to what might be considered the correct line. Even after 61 years, however, George Dangerfield’s book is supreme. Every page, indeed every sentence, is lifted above the average by his irresistible writing style. The hallmark of this style is that most dangerous of all the weapons in the challenger’s armoury: mockery. The whole book is a mockery of the pretensions of the rulers of the time, most notably the mandarins of Asquith’s Liberal government.</p>
<p>Dangerfield describes Asquith as the sort of person you would expect to find at high tables at Oxford and Cambridge colleges, ‘a man almost completely lacking in imagination or enthusiasm’. The same merciless mockery is turned on the Orange leader Carson, the Tory leaders under Bonar Law, the Irish Nationalist parliamentary leader John Redmond, the employers and their indefatigable government negotiator George Askwith. Ministerial reactions and statements are constantly reduced to that ridiculous hypocrisy and pomposity which derives from a relentless desire to hang on to other people’s property.</p>
<p>The theme of the book is the collapse of a L(l)iberalism which only in 1906 had seemed unassailable. In the general election that year the Tories were engulfed by the biggest parliamentary landslide achieved by any party ever. Their huge majority was reduced to nothing in the two elections of 1910, and the Liberal government became dependent for its survival on the Irish Nationalists. This is all old hat, churned over by innumerable students of official parliamentary politics. The thrill of Dangerfield’s book is that he carries the Liberal government’s impotence far beyond the boundaries of parliamentary statistics.</p>
<p>The government and increasingly the entire ruling class were trapped by what he calls ‘a new energy’ among the downtrodden which grew to such a proportion as to challenge the very right of the ruling class to govern.</p>
<p>In Ireland the government was trapped by its reluctance either to accede to the mutinous forces under Carson or (even less) to give way to the growing demand for Irish independence. On suffrage, the government was trapped by a reluctance to extend the vote either to unpropertied men or to women (the two reluctances, as the book proves, were closely allied). The greatest parliamentary impotence of all, however, was brought about by the constant strikes of a newly confident working class. In 1911, 961,000 workers were involved in strikes, a figure which seemed impossible – and was 300,000 higher than ever before. In 1912, however, the figures had risen again to a fantastic 1,233,016. Dangerfield brilliantly describes the most devastating feature of these strikes: their unpredictability. Government negotiators, employers, trade union leaders – all were powerless not only to handle the strikes but even to predict where and when they would happen next.</p>
<p>On all three fronts, in those early months of 1914, the prospects looked good. In Ireland a civil war loomed, with the favourites the armed volunteers who demanded total independence for all Ireland. Votes for women, as Dangerfield reveals, were effectively conceded in June 1914, though more as the result of the activities of Sylvia Pankhurst and her working class supporters than her sister Christobel from her safe vantage point in Paris. Above all, the workers’ revolt had crystallised into a triple alliance of the big unions which threatened a general strike.</p>
<p>In these circumstances, the impotence of the government brought it home to the British ruling class that they could no longer afford two political parties, one reactionary, one allegedly reformist. The Liberal Party was finished, never again to re-emerge as a remotely relevant force in British politics. Good riddance, says George Dangerfield, in a typical but scintillating display of his glorious prose style, and in a passage which should be read with interest by the apostles of modern Lib-Labourism:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘The Liberal government was dying with extreme reluctance and considerable skill; you might almost consider it healthy, unless you took a very close look, and it had erected such a fence around it of procrastination and promises that a close look was almost impossible to obtain.</p>
<p class="quote">‘The workers were simply dissatisfied with it, they could hardly tell why; and indeed that fine old Liberal Hegelianism of at once believing in freedom and not believing in freedom was beyond the understanding of all but the elect. To interfere in the questions of pensions, of health, strikes, education, conditions of labour – ah yes this could be done; to destroy the absolute powers of the Lords, to cripple the vast landed estates – such actions were highly desirable; but to insist that employers should pay a living wage? That was a frightful impairment of freedom’.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
The triple whammy
(September 1997)
From Reviews, Socialist Review, No.211, September 1997, p.26.
Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review.
Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The Strange Death of Liberal England
George Dangerfield
Serif £14.99
It is a rare pleasure not just to recommend a book but to insist with all possible powers of persuasion that anyone lucky enough not to have read it should instantly treat themselves. George Dangerfield’s book covers a period of intense warfare – though the warfare is not as popular as it usually is among historians since the wars were not between nations or races but between governed and governors in the same country. What makes that warfare even more distasteful to official palates is that against all odds the wrong side, the dispossessed, seemed to be winning.
The book covers three areas of revolt: the Irish revolt against British rule (and the revolt against that revolt of the Orangemen of the North); the revolt of the women, who had no vote, even though some 60 percent of the men had it; and the revolt of the workers against their employers. Each of these stories takes up about 100 pages, and the last quarter is devoted to what Dangerfield calls ‘the crisis’, the amazing first seven months of 1914 in which all three revolts came to the brink of victory only to be consumed in the unspeakable atrocity of the First World War. More than once, from this account, the First World War emerges not just as an inevitable clash between imperialist forces but as a great conspiracy of the rulers everywhere to rid themselves even if only temporarily from the intolerable demands of their subjects.
There are, of course, many history books about this period, many of them written from a position friendly to workers, suffragettes and Irish nationalists, and many of them perhaps more scrupulous with the facts or closer to what might be considered the correct line. Even after 61 years, however, George Dangerfield’s book is supreme. Every page, indeed every sentence, is lifted above the average by his irresistible writing style. The hallmark of this style is that most dangerous of all the weapons in the challenger’s armoury: mockery. The whole book is a mockery of the pretensions of the rulers of the time, most notably the mandarins of Asquith’s Liberal government.
Dangerfield describes Asquith as the sort of person you would expect to find at high tables at Oxford and Cambridge colleges, ‘a man almost completely lacking in imagination or enthusiasm’. The same merciless mockery is turned on the Orange leader Carson, the Tory leaders under Bonar Law, the Irish Nationalist parliamentary leader John Redmond, the employers and their indefatigable government negotiator George Askwith. Ministerial reactions and statements are constantly reduced to that ridiculous hypocrisy and pomposity which derives from a relentless desire to hang on to other people’s property.
The theme of the book is the collapse of a L(l)iberalism which only in 1906 had seemed unassailable. In the general election that year the Tories were engulfed by the biggest parliamentary landslide achieved by any party ever. Their huge majority was reduced to nothing in the two elections of 1910, and the Liberal government became dependent for its survival on the Irish Nationalists. This is all old hat, churned over by innumerable students of official parliamentary politics. The thrill of Dangerfield’s book is that he carries the Liberal government’s impotence far beyond the boundaries of parliamentary statistics.
The government and increasingly the entire ruling class were trapped by what he calls ‘a new energy’ among the downtrodden which grew to such a proportion as to challenge the very right of the ruling class to govern.
In Ireland the government was trapped by its reluctance either to accede to the mutinous forces under Carson or (even less) to give way to the growing demand for Irish independence. On suffrage, the government was trapped by a reluctance to extend the vote either to unpropertied men or to women (the two reluctances, as the book proves, were closely allied). The greatest parliamentary impotence of all, however, was brought about by the constant strikes of a newly confident working class. In 1911, 961,000 workers were involved in strikes, a figure which seemed impossible – and was 300,000 higher than ever before. In 1912, however, the figures had risen again to a fantastic 1,233,016. Dangerfield brilliantly describes the most devastating feature of these strikes: their unpredictability. Government negotiators, employers, trade union leaders – all were powerless not only to handle the strikes but even to predict where and when they would happen next.
On all three fronts, in those early months of 1914, the prospects looked good. In Ireland a civil war loomed, with the favourites the armed volunteers who demanded total independence for all Ireland. Votes for women, as Dangerfield reveals, were effectively conceded in June 1914, though more as the result of the activities of Sylvia Pankhurst and her working class supporters than her sister Christobel from her safe vantage point in Paris. Above all, the workers’ revolt had crystallised into a triple alliance of the big unions which threatened a general strike.
In these circumstances, the impotence of the government brought it home to the British ruling class that they could no longer afford two political parties, one reactionary, one allegedly reformist. The Liberal Party was finished, never again to re-emerge as a remotely relevant force in British politics. Good riddance, says George Dangerfield, in a typical but scintillating display of his glorious prose style, and in a passage which should be read with interest by the apostles of modern Lib-Labourism:
‘The Liberal government was dying with extreme reluctance and considerable skill; you might almost consider it healthy, unless you took a very close look, and it had erected such a fence around it of procrastination and promises that a close look was almost impossible to obtain.
‘The workers were simply dissatisfied with it, they could hardly tell why; and indeed that fine old Liberal Hegelianism of at once believing in freedom and not believing in freedom was beyond the understanding of all but the elect. To interfere in the questions of pensions, of health, strikes, education, conditions of labour – ah yes this could be done; to destroy the absolute powers of the Lords, to cripple the vast landed estates – such actions were highly desirable; but to insist that employers should pay a living wage? That was a frightful impairment of freedom’.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Ship without a keel</h1>
<h3>(June 1994)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <em>Notes of the Month</em>, <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/socrev/index6.html#sr94_06" target="new">No. 176</a>, June 1994, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The triumph for the Labour Party in the council elections (to be everyone agrees, by something very similar in the European elections this month), has a soothing effect on lots of socialists. Buoyed by success at the polls, some of Labour’s most militant supporters are inclined to that it is now time to sit back wait for the general election victory which is now inevitable.</p>
<p>At an SWP meeting during the MSF conference, a delegate angrily rejected calls for more militant trade union action. Militancy, he said, had not won any gains in the last few years. Now was the time to concentrate all our hopes and efforts on getting Labour elected.</p>
<p>‘Don’t rock the boat, and wait for Labour to storm back into office in 1996 (or 1997).’ That’s the convenient and easy message which seems to have been the favourite at trade union conferences this summer, and will certainly be the tune of the new Labour leader and the conference which elects him.</p>
<p>Precisely the same attitudes and advice prevailed in Labour when it was last riding high in the polls, after the poll tax demonstration in 1990, Such fantastic gains were made in the council elections a week or two later – and in by-elections right across Britain – that almost everyone reckoned it a near certainty that Labour would win in 1992. The only danger was the activities of the ‘wild men’, or, to use Neil Kinnock’s favourite term of abuse, ‘the headbangers’. Kinnock and his team made it their main aim in life to life to squash the left, especially in the constituencies. Labour policy shifted further and further to the right. There was universal silence and acquiescence ... and Labour lost the election.</p>
<p>All the gains made by employers and reactionaries through all those years of restraint ended with the employers and reactionaries winning the election for the sake of which they had been afforded such a clear run. The gloom on that frightful April night in 1992 was compounded by the fact that a network of militants had been persuaded to make all sorts of concessions in order to win the prize which had now been plucked away from them.</p>
<p>The Labour leaders’ main mistake was to measure the political temperature solely by the opinion polls. Polls say how people are going to vote. They seldom record the enthusiasm for one preference or the other. And they are quite incapable of forecasting when public opinion will change.</p>
<p>Those of us who take the view that the chief characteristic of our society is that It is divided by class, consider first this question: how are the classes doing in their battle with one another? If the rulers are winning, then, whatever the shifts in opinion polls, they are more likely to win elections; if the workers are winning, then their representatives are more likely to win elections. Of course there are exceptions to that rule, but in most cases the ebb and flow of the class struggle will determine the ebb and flow of radical and reactionary opinion, and so determine what happens at election times. If change can and does take place as the result of workers’ action, or even as a result of elected councillors taking a stand against central government, the party arguing for change will find it much easier to win.</p>
<p>This is the background to the argument about the course for Labour in the next two years. The Major government is probably the most unpopular government this century. But the opposition is a ship without a keel. It is based not on the firm foundation of a confidence and strength which knows that it can shake employers and roll back the priorities of Tory administrators and bureaucrats. On the contrary, in the real political struggle, the struggle between the classes, the Tories – the employers and their banks – are winners. The success of the new breed of Thatcherite ‘line managers’, arrogant, offensive, untalented but in the workplace extremely powerful, is testimony to long, long years of ruling class confidence.</p>
<p>Like that ship without a keel, such an opposition is vulnerable. No amount of votes piled up in municipal or Euro elections can guarantee it that elusive general election victory. The votes and the widespread fury which they represent need the ballast of class victories.</p>
<p>Labour victories at the polls need to be reinforced by real labour victories. The Tories must be humiliated long before the next general election. The confidence of those line managers needs to be cut down by organised labour. The trade union leaders have ‘been backing off a fight ever since Thatcher first brought the Tories into government in 1979. All they have to show for the deference and obedience is a long line of defeats.</p>
<p>These will go on unless the union leaders take a stand. If they don’t, their members will have to do it on their own. There is an overwhelming argument now for refusing any longer to accept the demands of ever greedy management; and for fighting back.</p>
<p>This is not only a matter for shop stewards and trade unionists. In the Labour councils too there are all sorts of ways in which the Tories can be counted out. The councils have huge sums of money piled up from the sale of council houses. The Tories forbid them to spend that money. They should refuse to obey the Tories and spend it. If they are surcharged they should refuse to cooperate, resign their chairs and go into majority opposition. They should make the councils unmanageable rather than accept any longer the diktats of a government which has plainly lost the support of the people.</p>
<p>Labour councillor should resign from all the new government quangos, the development corporations, enterprise agencies, city challenges and all the rest of the business speak nonsense whereby the capitalists have sought to undermine democracy in the urban areas. Up to now Labour representatives have played along; they should call a halt and let the quangos stew in their own juice.</p>
<p>Defiance, if widespread and determined enough, would start to win concessions and victories. These will be worth in real ideas and in real votes a hundred times the lead in the opinion polls, and will lay some sort of foundation for a Labour victory which could mean something.</p>
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Paul Foot
Ship without a keel
(June 1994)
From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 176, June 1994, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The triumph for the Labour Party in the council elections (to be everyone agrees, by something very similar in the European elections this month), has a soothing effect on lots of socialists. Buoyed by success at the polls, some of Labour’s most militant supporters are inclined to that it is now time to sit back wait for the general election victory which is now inevitable.
At an SWP meeting during the MSF conference, a delegate angrily rejected calls for more militant trade union action. Militancy, he said, had not won any gains in the last few years. Now was the time to concentrate all our hopes and efforts on getting Labour elected.
‘Don’t rock the boat, and wait for Labour to storm back into office in 1996 (or 1997).’ That’s the convenient and easy message which seems to have been the favourite at trade union conferences this summer, and will certainly be the tune of the new Labour leader and the conference which elects him.
Precisely the same attitudes and advice prevailed in Labour when it was last riding high in the polls, after the poll tax demonstration in 1990, Such fantastic gains were made in the council elections a week or two later – and in by-elections right across Britain – that almost everyone reckoned it a near certainty that Labour would win in 1992. The only danger was the activities of the ‘wild men’, or, to use Neil Kinnock’s favourite term of abuse, ‘the headbangers’. Kinnock and his team made it their main aim in life to life to squash the left, especially in the constituencies. Labour policy shifted further and further to the right. There was universal silence and acquiescence ... and Labour lost the election.
All the gains made by employers and reactionaries through all those years of restraint ended with the employers and reactionaries winning the election for the sake of which they had been afforded such a clear run. The gloom on that frightful April night in 1992 was compounded by the fact that a network of militants had been persuaded to make all sorts of concessions in order to win the prize which had now been plucked away from them.
The Labour leaders’ main mistake was to measure the political temperature solely by the opinion polls. Polls say how people are going to vote. They seldom record the enthusiasm for one preference or the other. And they are quite incapable of forecasting when public opinion will change.
Those of us who take the view that the chief characteristic of our society is that It is divided by class, consider first this question: how are the classes doing in their battle with one another? If the rulers are winning, then, whatever the shifts in opinion polls, they are more likely to win elections; if the workers are winning, then their representatives are more likely to win elections. Of course there are exceptions to that rule, but in most cases the ebb and flow of the class struggle will determine the ebb and flow of radical and reactionary opinion, and so determine what happens at election times. If change can and does take place as the result of workers’ action, or even as a result of elected councillors taking a stand against central government, the party arguing for change will find it much easier to win.
This is the background to the argument about the course for Labour in the next two years. The Major government is probably the most unpopular government this century. But the opposition is a ship without a keel. It is based not on the firm foundation of a confidence and strength which knows that it can shake employers and roll back the priorities of Tory administrators and bureaucrats. On the contrary, in the real political struggle, the struggle between the classes, the Tories – the employers and their banks – are winners. The success of the new breed of Thatcherite ‘line managers’, arrogant, offensive, untalented but in the workplace extremely powerful, is testimony to long, long years of ruling class confidence.
Like that ship without a keel, such an opposition is vulnerable. No amount of votes piled up in municipal or Euro elections can guarantee it that elusive general election victory. The votes and the widespread fury which they represent need the ballast of class victories.
Labour victories at the polls need to be reinforced by real labour victories. The Tories must be humiliated long before the next general election. The confidence of those line managers needs to be cut down by organised labour. The trade union leaders have ‘been backing off a fight ever since Thatcher first brought the Tories into government in 1979. All they have to show for the deference and obedience is a long line of defeats.
These will go on unless the union leaders take a stand. If they don’t, their members will have to do it on their own. There is an overwhelming argument now for refusing any longer to accept the demands of ever greedy management; and for fighting back.
This is not only a matter for shop stewards and trade unionists. In the Labour councils too there are all sorts of ways in which the Tories can be counted out. The councils have huge sums of money piled up from the sale of council houses. The Tories forbid them to spend that money. They should refuse to obey the Tories and spend it. If they are surcharged they should refuse to cooperate, resign their chairs and go into majority opposition. They should make the councils unmanageable rather than accept any longer the diktats of a government which has plainly lost the support of the people.
Labour councillor should resign from all the new government quangos, the development corporations, enterprise agencies, city challenges and all the rest of the business speak nonsense whereby the capitalists have sought to undermine democracy in the urban areas. Up to now Labour representatives have played along; they should call a halt and let the quangos stew in their own juice.
Defiance, if widespread and determined enough, would start to win concessions and victories. These will be worth in real ideas and in real votes a hundred times the lead in the opinion polls, and will lay some sort of foundation for a Labour victory which could mean something.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Poetry of protest</h1>
<h3>(July/August 1992)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.155, July-August 1992, pp.18-20.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>Like most poets, Shelley, born two hundred years ago, seems to have little relevance to our lives and concerns today. On the contrary, argues <strong>Paul Foot</strong>, his poems are a powerful indictment of injustice and class division, and an inspiration for change</em></p>
<p class="fst">SHELLEY WAS BORN 200 years ago, and all over the world he will be celebrated in two very different ways. Those who honour him as a ‘great lyric poet’ will put him on a pedestal and pay him homage. At University College, Oxford, where Shelley was briefly educated, they are planning a great feast. No one will be allowed to mention that Shelley was expelled from the college after only two terms for writing the first atheist pamphlet ever published in English.</p>
<p>A quite different set of celebrations is being arranged by the descendants of the people for whom Shelley cared and wrote: the common people, and especially the workers. Very early on in his life Shelley developed a passionate hatred and contempt for the class society in which he found himself. His main teacher was the philosopher William Godwin who put into English the glorious ideas of the Enlightenment. Godwin spurned all revolutionary activity. He sought to change the world by changing people’s minds – a quite hopeless project since people’s thoughts, left to themselves, are at the mercy of their rulers’ propaganda. Shelley worshipped Godwin, but could never agree with his appeals to passivity. He flung himself at once into revolutionary activity. At Oxford he wrote his pamphlet <strong>The Necessity of Atheism</strong>, which ridiculed all religion. He sent it to every bishop in Oxford demanding a debate. He was on the high road out of the city within half an hour of the first bishop choking over the freshly opened envelope at the breakfast table.</p>
<p>Shelley’s first long poem, <em>Queen Mab</em>, is a ferocious and sometimes magnificent diatribe against the social order. In Ireland he wrote and attempted to circulate his <strong>Address to The Irish People</strong>, in which he argued for an Association to campaign for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. When three revolutionary workers were executed after the Pentridge uprising in Nottinghamshire in 1817, Shelley wrote a furious pamphlet scornfully comparing their unnoticed deaths to the public hysteria about the death of a young princess. In the same year he wrote another pamphlet urging the sort of demands for parliamentary reform which appeared on Chartist banners 20 years later.</p>
<p>All this political writing and activity was carried out in almost total isolation. Shelley was inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, but he lived in a time of counter-revolution. The great revolutionary poets of the 1790s – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – were stampeding to the right. Their talent and wit, so effectively directed against the politicians, kings and priests of the <em>ancien regime</em>, was now being deployed in their defence.</p>
<p>Shelley was not, as these three were, a renegade. He utterly refused to bend his opinions. He was resolutely revolutionary all his life – but his confidence ebbed and flowed according to the ebb and flow of popular movements and uprisings. After his move to Italy in 1818 his best revolutionary poetry, especially the <em>Ode to Liberty</em> and <em>Hellas</em>, were written in tune with the European revolts of the time – in Spain, Naples and in Greece. But when there was not much happening, especially when the news from England was all bad, he wrote more and more lyric poetry. His political passions were never forsaken, but they were often buried deep in lyrical metaphor.</p>
<p>But the anger burned furiously, never far beneath the surface. Every so often it erupted like the volcanoes he was always writing about. The most extraordinary example of this is his poem about the massacre at Peterloo – <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em>. The demonstration in August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was at that time the biggest trade union gathering ever organised in Britain. In spite of the Combination Acts and all the other government inspired measures to do them down, the trade unions were growing in strength and influence. The main speaker at the Manchester demonstration was Henry Hunt, a working class agitator. The huge crowd came with their families as though to a picnic. It was like a miners’ gala of modern times.</p>
<p>The ruling class was terrified. The yeomanry, a special police force consisting mainly of wealthy tradesmen, had a single plan: to stop Hunt speaking and teach the new union upstarts a lesson. They charged into the crowd flourishing their weapons and screaming abuse. The crowd scattered where they could, but the yeomanry pursued them, slashing and stabbing with their swords as they went. Altogether 11 people died that day, and 150 more were seriously injured.</p>
<p>When news of this day’s work reached Shelley in Italy he was literally speechless with rage. He plunged into the little attic room he used at that time as a study. In five days he never appeared for conversation or recreation. He wrote the 92 verses of <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em>, without any doubt at all the finest poem of political protest ever written in our language. It has been quoted again and again in protests ever since. The Chartists revelled in it, and reprinted it. Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THE MOST POWERFUL element in the poem is Shelley’s anger. The horror of Peterloo had fanned the flames of the fury of his youth. Somehow he hung on to the discipline of rhyme and metre. The poem is in many ways the most carefully constructed thing he ever wrote. The parameters allowed by poetic licence in a long and complicated poem like <em>Prometheus Unbound</em> are very wide. In <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em>, Shelley confined himself to the rhythm of the popular ballads of the time. He wrote in short, strong stanzas, four or (occasionally) five lines apiece, which left him very little room for manoeuvre. The result is electric. The poem starts with a description of a masquerade, in which strange and horrifying shapes appear before the poet, all of them disguised in the masks of the Tory ministers of the day. Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, butcher of the Irish rebellion of 1798, appears as Murder. Seven bloodhounds, the seven countries which signed the Treaty of Vienna which carved up Europe after the counter-revolutionary victory of Waterloo, follow him, fed by their master with human hearts. One by one they glide past ‘in this ghastly masquerade</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">All disguised, even to the eyes<br>
As bishops, lawyers, peers and spies.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Shelley hated them all. They represented the chaos of the hideous class society of the time. This Chaos comes last in the parade, ‘on a white horse, splashed with blood.’ He is Anarchy. In more recent times anarchy has come to be used as a word of the left. But in Shelley’s day the word had no such progressive meaning. It meant horror, chaos, violence. To Shelley it meant what the poem says is written on the brow of the ghastly skeletal figure on the white horse: ‘I am God and King and Law.’</p>
<p>This line is repeated again and again by Anarchy and his sycophants as they carve their bloody path through England. The picture is one of repression and tyranny so horrible and so intransigent that change seems impossible.</p>
<p>Shelley’s own protest all his short life had been impotent. Many of his angriest poems end in an empty plea or hope that things will get better. But in <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em> he is inspired by what terrified the yeomanry at Manchester – the enormous potential power of the demonstration. His wishes and hopes now have some substance to them. What happens next in the poem, at the very height of the arrogant oppression of Anarchy and his courtiers, is an act of defiance. A ‘maniac maid’ calling herself Hope flies past with a simple message – she cannot wait any longer.</p>
<p>Her father’s children are all dead from starvation – every one except her. The time has come for action, apparently desperate, hopeless action, but action nonetheless:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Then she lay down in the street<br>
Right before the horse’s feet<br>
Expecting with a patient eye<br>
Murder Fraud and Anarchy.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Suddenly there is change.</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Then between her and her foes<br>
A mist, a light, an image rose.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Many Shelley scholars have taken this ‘mist’ and ‘image’ to be a further sign of Shelley’s ‘prophetic vagueness’, yet another vague hope or wish. But it is much more than that. First, it is linked to the act of defiance of the oppressed. Secondly, as the poem goes on to explain, the ‘image’ changed into something quite different:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Till as clouds grow on the blast,<br>
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,<br>
And glare with lightnings as they fly<br>
And speak in thunder to the sky<br>
It grew – a Shape arrayed in mail<br>
Brighter than the viper’s scale.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The vague image has become a ‘shape arrayed in mail’ – the iron fist to deal with the iron heel. Moreover, on its helmet, huge and distinct so that it can be seen a long way off,</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘A planet, like the Morning’s, lay;<br>
And those plumes its light rained through<br>
Like a shower of crimson dew.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">This is no gentle wish, but an armed class warrior helmeted with the Morning Star, the symbol of organised labour.</p>
<p>The ‘shape arrayed in mail’ is soon accompanied by an even more powerful force. Side by side with him, with every step he took towards his oppressors, ‘thoughts sprung’ among the multitude. The combination of armed resistance and thought was Irresistible. Anarchy and all his followers are vanquished.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THAT IS A THIRD of the poem. The last two thirds consist of a speech by the ‘maniac maid’ who had flung herself at the horse’s hooves and started the whole process. This is a speech of openly revolutionary agitation, which combines all Shelley’s political ideas. It starts with a definition first of slavery, then of freedom. Classic definitions of both – at a time of bourgeois revolutions throughout Europe – concentrated on the freedoms of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association.</p>
<p>In Shelley’s time, when the government permitted none of these things, it seemed natural to concentrate on such matters. Then, as now, Liberty was more fashionable than Equality. What makes these definitions in <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em> most remarkable is that they begin and end with Shelley’s outrage at economic inequality. There are 13 verses defining slavery. All of them are about economic control. The first verse, in answer to the question ‘What is Slavery?’, goes like this:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Tis to work and have such pay<br>
As just keeps life from day to day.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">That sounds uncommonly like what Marx had to say in <strong>Capital</strong> about wages being kept to the level of the merest subsistence of the worker. One result, of course, is that the workers have no say in what they produce:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘So by ye for them are made<br>
Loom and plough and sword and spade<br>
With or without your own will bent<br>
To their defence and nourishment.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">This is the theme of the poem – ’them and us’, they who have everything and keep it that way by fraud and force, and us who are left to suffer. There then follows a verse which shows how far Shelley had come since reading Tom Paine and Godwin. Britain had been transformed by the industrial revolution – economic growth at breathtaking speed was shifting the social scenery. Here is the process in Shelley’s definition of slavery;</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘Tis to let the ghost of Gold,<br>
Take from toil a thousandfold<br>
More than e’er its substance could<br>
In the tyrannies of old.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The rate of exploitation of labour had grown a thousand times. The ‘ghost of gold’ took ‘from toil’ incomparably more than in the old feudal tyrannies. This idea has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. It sounds more like Marx, but is unlikely to have come from him – he was one year old when <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em> was written.</p>
<p>Slavery is economic exploitation. Freedom, then, is not a ‘name, echoing from the cave of fame’ but ‘clothes and fire and food for the trampled multitude.’ It is justice (a system of law where what happens in the courts is not bought and sold), peace, wisdom (freedom from religion), science, poetry and thought. Just as the poem seems to be drifting into idealism, Shelley suddenly breaks off in mid-verse, demanding ‘deeds, not words.’</p>
<p>The last part of the poem is a call for another demonstration, stronger and more committed than at St Peter’s Fields. It should be made up of all the oppressed – recruitment for it should start at the very bottom of society.</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘From the workhouse and the prison<br>
Where pale as corpses newly risen<br>
Women, children, young and old<br>
Groan for pain and weep for cold.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The demonstration should be prepared for another attack by the yeomanry, should meet it with civil disobedience, and should go on defying the forces of the government until the government was defeated by its own impotence over a risen people. Passages in this last section seem over-optimistic today. The belief for instance that the armed forces would split from the yeomanry and take the people’s side puts too much weight on reports of such a split at Peterloo. After fascism, Sharpeville and Tiananmen Square, the appeal of civil disobedience has lost its force. Nor were there any ‘old laws of England which preferred liberty to tyranny – the old laws were even worse than the current ones. But the theme of the poem easily survives these moments of delusion – the theme of anger and defiance, the theme that the long years of Tory government and reaction would come to an end just as soon as the oppressed, especially the new working class, became determined to resist. Peterloo, Shelley insisted, would be avenged.</p>
<p>When he finished <em>The Mask of Anarchy</em> he sent it straight off to his friend Leigh Hunt, editor of the radical <em>Examiner</em>, But Hunt did not publish it. Publication in 1819 would have invited instant imprisonment for the author and the publisher. The poem was, after all, a call to arms, and a call so infectious and persuasive, so easy to commit to memory, that no one could predict its political impact. Hunt hung onto the poem long after Shelley’s death. He published it in 1831, as the urgent and unstoppable cry for parliamentary reform blended with a new working class resistance from Merthyr Tydfil to Glasgow. Then, and ever since, everyone who has ever been angry, as Shelley was, at the insufferable pain and arrogance of class society, has learnt the famous climax of this wonderful poem and proclaimed it with increasing urgency:</p>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">‘And that slaughter to the nation<br>
Shall steam up like inspiration,<br>
Eloquent, oracular;<br>
A volcano heard afar.</p>
<p class="fst">And these words shall then become<br>
Like oppression’s thundered doom,<br>
Ringing through each heart and brain<br>
Heard again, again, again –</p>
<p class="fst">Rise like lions after slumber<br>
In unvanquishable number<br>
Shake your chains to earth like dew<br>
Which in sleep had fallen on you.<br>
Ye are many. They are few.’</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p> </p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Poetry of protest
(July/August 1992)
From Socialist Review, No.155, July-August 1992, pp.18-20.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Like most poets, Shelley, born two hundred years ago, seems to have little relevance to our lives and concerns today. On the contrary, argues Paul Foot, his poems are a powerful indictment of injustice and class division, and an inspiration for change
SHELLEY WAS BORN 200 years ago, and all over the world he will be celebrated in two very different ways. Those who honour him as a ‘great lyric poet’ will put him on a pedestal and pay him homage. At University College, Oxford, where Shelley was briefly educated, they are planning a great feast. No one will be allowed to mention that Shelley was expelled from the college after only two terms for writing the first atheist pamphlet ever published in English.
A quite different set of celebrations is being arranged by the descendants of the people for whom Shelley cared and wrote: the common people, and especially the workers. Very early on in his life Shelley developed a passionate hatred and contempt for the class society in which he found himself. His main teacher was the philosopher William Godwin who put into English the glorious ideas of the Enlightenment. Godwin spurned all revolutionary activity. He sought to change the world by changing people’s minds – a quite hopeless project since people’s thoughts, left to themselves, are at the mercy of their rulers’ propaganda. Shelley worshipped Godwin, but could never agree with his appeals to passivity. He flung himself at once into revolutionary activity. At Oxford he wrote his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which ridiculed all religion. He sent it to every bishop in Oxford demanding a debate. He was on the high road out of the city within half an hour of the first bishop choking over the freshly opened envelope at the breakfast table.
Shelley’s first long poem, Queen Mab, is a ferocious and sometimes magnificent diatribe against the social order. In Ireland he wrote and attempted to circulate his Address to The Irish People, in which he argued for an Association to campaign for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. When three revolutionary workers were executed after the Pentridge uprising in Nottinghamshire in 1817, Shelley wrote a furious pamphlet scornfully comparing their unnoticed deaths to the public hysteria about the death of a young princess. In the same year he wrote another pamphlet urging the sort of demands for parliamentary reform which appeared on Chartist banners 20 years later.
All this political writing and activity was carried out in almost total isolation. Shelley was inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, but he lived in a time of counter-revolution. The great revolutionary poets of the 1790s – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – were stampeding to the right. Their talent and wit, so effectively directed against the politicians, kings and priests of the ancien regime, was now being deployed in their defence.
Shelley was not, as these three were, a renegade. He utterly refused to bend his opinions. He was resolutely revolutionary all his life – but his confidence ebbed and flowed according to the ebb and flow of popular movements and uprisings. After his move to Italy in 1818 his best revolutionary poetry, especially the Ode to Liberty and Hellas, were written in tune with the European revolts of the time – in Spain, Naples and in Greece. But when there was not much happening, especially when the news from England was all bad, he wrote more and more lyric poetry. His political passions were never forsaken, but they were often buried deep in lyrical metaphor.
But the anger burned furiously, never far beneath the surface. Every so often it erupted like the volcanoes he was always writing about. The most extraordinary example of this is his poem about the massacre at Peterloo – The Mask of Anarchy. The demonstration in August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was at that time the biggest trade union gathering ever organised in Britain. In spite of the Combination Acts and all the other government inspired measures to do them down, the trade unions were growing in strength and influence. The main speaker at the Manchester demonstration was Henry Hunt, a working class agitator. The huge crowd came with their families as though to a picnic. It was like a miners’ gala of modern times.
The ruling class was terrified. The yeomanry, a special police force consisting mainly of wealthy tradesmen, had a single plan: to stop Hunt speaking and teach the new union upstarts a lesson. They charged into the crowd flourishing their weapons and screaming abuse. The crowd scattered where they could, but the yeomanry pursued them, slashing and stabbing with their swords as they went. Altogether 11 people died that day, and 150 more were seriously injured.
When news of this day’s work reached Shelley in Italy he was literally speechless with rage. He plunged into the little attic room he used at that time as a study. In five days he never appeared for conversation or recreation. He wrote the 92 verses of The Mask of Anarchy, without any doubt at all the finest poem of political protest ever written in our language. It has been quoted again and again in protests ever since. The Chartists revelled in it, and reprinted it. Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
THE MOST POWERFUL element in the poem is Shelley’s anger. The horror of Peterloo had fanned the flames of the fury of his youth. Somehow he hung on to the discipline of rhyme and metre. The poem is in many ways the most carefully constructed thing he ever wrote. The parameters allowed by poetic licence in a long and complicated poem like Prometheus Unbound are very wide. In The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley confined himself to the rhythm of the popular ballads of the time. He wrote in short, strong stanzas, four or (occasionally) five lines apiece, which left him very little room for manoeuvre. The result is electric. The poem starts with a description of a masquerade, in which strange and horrifying shapes appear before the poet, all of them disguised in the masks of the Tory ministers of the day. Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, butcher of the Irish rebellion of 1798, appears as Murder. Seven bloodhounds, the seven countries which signed the Treaty of Vienna which carved up Europe after the counter-revolutionary victory of Waterloo, follow him, fed by their master with human hearts. One by one they glide past ‘in this ghastly masquerade
All disguised, even to the eyes
As bishops, lawyers, peers and spies.’
Shelley hated them all. They represented the chaos of the hideous class society of the time. This Chaos comes last in the parade, ‘on a white horse, splashed with blood.’ He is Anarchy. In more recent times anarchy has come to be used as a word of the left. But in Shelley’s day the word had no such progressive meaning. It meant horror, chaos, violence. To Shelley it meant what the poem says is written on the brow of the ghastly skeletal figure on the white horse: ‘I am God and King and Law.’
This line is repeated again and again by Anarchy and his sycophants as they carve their bloody path through England. The picture is one of repression and tyranny so horrible and so intransigent that change seems impossible.
Shelley’s own protest all his short life had been impotent. Many of his angriest poems end in an empty plea or hope that things will get better. But in The Mask of Anarchy he is inspired by what terrified the yeomanry at Manchester – the enormous potential power of the demonstration. His wishes and hopes now have some substance to them. What happens next in the poem, at the very height of the arrogant oppression of Anarchy and his courtiers, is an act of defiance. A ‘maniac maid’ calling herself Hope flies past with a simple message – she cannot wait any longer.
Her father’s children are all dead from starvation – every one except her. The time has come for action, apparently desperate, hopeless action, but action nonetheless:
‘Then she lay down in the street
Right before the horse’s feet
Expecting with a patient eye
Murder Fraud and Anarchy.’
Suddenly there is change.
‘Then between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose.’
Many Shelley scholars have taken this ‘mist’ and ‘image’ to be a further sign of Shelley’s ‘prophetic vagueness’, yet another vague hope or wish. But it is much more than that. First, it is linked to the act of defiance of the oppressed. Secondly, as the poem goes on to explain, the ‘image’ changed into something quite different:
‘Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly
And speak in thunder to the sky
It grew – a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper’s scale.’
The vague image has become a ‘shape arrayed in mail’ – the iron fist to deal with the iron heel. Moreover, on its helmet, huge and distinct so that it can be seen a long way off,
‘A planet, like the Morning’s, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.’
This is no gentle wish, but an armed class warrior helmeted with the Morning Star, the symbol of organised labour.
The ‘shape arrayed in mail’ is soon accompanied by an even more powerful force. Side by side with him, with every step he took towards his oppressors, ‘thoughts sprung’ among the multitude. The combination of armed resistance and thought was Irresistible. Anarchy and all his followers are vanquished.
THAT IS A THIRD of the poem. The last two thirds consist of a speech by the ‘maniac maid’ who had flung herself at the horse’s hooves and started the whole process. This is a speech of openly revolutionary agitation, which combines all Shelley’s political ideas. It starts with a definition first of slavery, then of freedom. Classic definitions of both – at a time of bourgeois revolutions throughout Europe – concentrated on the freedoms of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association.
In Shelley’s time, when the government permitted none of these things, it seemed natural to concentrate on such matters. Then, as now, Liberty was more fashionable than Equality. What makes these definitions in The Mask of Anarchy most remarkable is that they begin and end with Shelley’s outrage at economic inequality. There are 13 verses defining slavery. All of them are about economic control. The first verse, in answer to the question ‘What is Slavery?’, goes like this:
‘Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day.’
That sounds uncommonly like what Marx had to say in Capital about wages being kept to the level of the merest subsistence of the worker. One result, of course, is that the workers have no say in what they produce:
‘So by ye for them are made
Loom and plough and sword and spade
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.’
This is the theme of the poem – ’them and us’, they who have everything and keep it that way by fraud and force, and us who are left to suffer. There then follows a verse which shows how far Shelley had come since reading Tom Paine and Godwin. Britain had been transformed by the industrial revolution – economic growth at breathtaking speed was shifting the social scenery. Here is the process in Shelley’s definition of slavery;
‘Tis to let the ghost of Gold,
Take from toil a thousandfold
More than e’er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.’
The rate of exploitation of labour had grown a thousand times. The ‘ghost of gold’ took ‘from toil’ incomparably more than in the old feudal tyrannies. This idea has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. It sounds more like Marx, but is unlikely to have come from him – he was one year old when The Mask of Anarchy was written.
Slavery is economic exploitation. Freedom, then, is not a ‘name, echoing from the cave of fame’ but ‘clothes and fire and food for the trampled multitude.’ It is justice (a system of law where what happens in the courts is not bought and sold), peace, wisdom (freedom from religion), science, poetry and thought. Just as the poem seems to be drifting into idealism, Shelley suddenly breaks off in mid-verse, demanding ‘deeds, not words.’
The last part of the poem is a call for another demonstration, stronger and more committed than at St Peter’s Fields. It should be made up of all the oppressed – recruitment for it should start at the very bottom of society.
‘From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain and weep for cold.’
The demonstration should be prepared for another attack by the yeomanry, should meet it with civil disobedience, and should go on defying the forces of the government until the government was defeated by its own impotence over a risen people. Passages in this last section seem over-optimistic today. The belief for instance that the armed forces would split from the yeomanry and take the people’s side puts too much weight on reports of such a split at Peterloo. After fascism, Sharpeville and Tiananmen Square, the appeal of civil disobedience has lost its force. Nor were there any ‘old laws of England which preferred liberty to tyranny – the old laws were even worse than the current ones. But the theme of the poem easily survives these moments of delusion – the theme of anger and defiance, the theme that the long years of Tory government and reaction would come to an end just as soon as the oppressed, especially the new working class, became determined to resist. Peterloo, Shelley insisted, would be avenged.
When he finished The Mask of Anarchy he sent it straight off to his friend Leigh Hunt, editor of the radical Examiner, But Hunt did not publish it. Publication in 1819 would have invited instant imprisonment for the author and the publisher. The poem was, after all, a call to arms, and a call so infectious and persuasive, so easy to commit to memory, that no one could predict its political impact. Hunt hung onto the poem long after Shelley’s death. He published it in 1831, as the urgent and unstoppable cry for parliamentary reform blended with a new working class resistance from Merthyr Tydfil to Glasgow. Then, and ever since, everyone who has ever been angry, as Shelley was, at the insufferable pain and arrogance of class society, has learnt the famous climax of this wonderful poem and proclaimed it with increasing urgency:
‘And that slaughter to the nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
And these words shall then become
Like oppression’s thundered doom,
Ringing through each heart and brain
Heard again, again, again –
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many. They are few.’
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>A Passionate Prophet of Liberation</h1>
<h3>(June 1996)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialism</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/isj2/index2.html#isj2-071" target="new">2 : 71</a>, June 1996, pp. :131–141.<br>
Copyright © 1996 International Socialism.<br>
Downloaded with thanks from the <a href="http://www.lpi.org.uk/ijindex.htm" target="new">International Socialism Archive</a>.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>A review of <strong>Blake</strong> by Peter Ackroyd, (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) and <strong>Witness against the beast – William Blake and the moral law</strong> by E.P. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1993)</em></p>
<p class="fst">In London in the 1790s, like in London today, it was commonplace to see a woman being beaten up in the street, and equally common for embarrassed or irritated bystanders to pass by on the other side. William Blake had a short temper and often lost it. Walking in the St Giles area, and seeing a woman attacked, he launched himself on the scene with such ferocity that the assailant ‘recoiled and collapsed’. When the abuser recovered, he told a bystander that he thought he had been attacked by the ‘devil himself’. At around the same time Blake was standing at his window looking over the yard of his neighbour when he saw a boy ‘hobbling along with a log tied to his foot’. Immediately he stormed across and demanded in the most violent terms that the boy should be freed. The neighbour replied hotly that Blake was trespassing and had no business interfering in other people’s property (which included, of course, other people’s child labour). The furious argument which followed was only resolved when the boy was released.</p>
<p>Some years later, in 1803, Blake was living in a country cottage in Sussex when he came across a soldier lounging in his garden. Blake greeted the soldier with a volley of abuse, and frogmarched him to the local pub where he was billeted. The soldier later testified that as they went, Blake muttered repeatedly, ‘Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves.’ In the south of England in 1803, when soldiers were billeted in every village for fear of a Napoleonic invasion, such a statement was criminal treachery. The soldier promptly sneaked to his superiors. Blake was tried for sedition, and escaped deportation and even possibly a death sentence largely because the soldier made a mess of his evidence and because no one in court knew anything about Blake’s revolutionary views which had been openly expressed ten years previously. He was found not guilty, and went on writing for another 23 years until his death. He never once swerved from his intense loathing of king, soldiers and slavery.</p>
<p>These are two of the hundreds of anecdotes in Peter Ackroyd’s glorious biography which will warmly commend Blake to any reader even remotely committed to reform. This warmth enthuses the whole book. Ackroyd revels in Blake’s ‘exuberant hopefulness’ which grew out of his passionate rage at the world he saw around him. The <strong>Songs of Innocence</strong> and the <strong>Songs of Experience</strong> which he wrote in the first fine careless rapture of the French Revolution are presented here not just in scholarly textual analysis but in admiration and wonder. Here is Blake’s disgust with slavery in <em>The Little Black Boy</em>:</p>
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<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">My mother bore me in the southern wild,<br>
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;<br>
White as an angel is the English child:<br>
But I am black as if bereav’d of light.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The English child might indeed be ‘white as an angel’ but, if unlucky enough not to be born rich, he or she was likely to be a victim of the vilest exploitation. Ackroyd sets out the whole of Blake’s <strong>Song of Innocence</strong> called <em>The Chimney Sweeper</em>, which moves in six short verses from utter misery:</p>
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<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">When my mother died I was very young<br>
And my father sold me while yet my tongue<br>
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep<br>
So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">To hope, in a dream which first sees all the sweeps in coffins, until:</p>
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<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="fst">And by came an angel who had a bright key<br>
And he opened the coffins and set them all free.<br>
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run<br>
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">And back again to a last verse which seems like an anti-climax:</p>
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<p class="fst">And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark<br>
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.<br>
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm,<br>
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">When I first read that last verse, I took it for what it seemed: a sell out of the indignation which sets the poem off. How does Peter Ackroyd explain it?</p>
<p>It has been suggested that this closing line is in sharp contrast to the rest of the poem but in fact it maintains precisely the same note; the innocence of the speaker, and of Tom himself, is a destructive and ignorant innocence because it actively complies both with the horrors of the climbing trade and of the society that accepts it without thought. It is the ‘unorganised innocence’ that can persuade a deformed or dying sweep that he is happy, after all, while confirming the credulous or the sanctimonious in their belief that ‘duty’ is all that needs to be, or can be done. Blake has dramatised a ‘state’ or an attitude without in the least acceding to it; then in the companion poem within <strong>Songs of Experience</strong> that shares the same title, he emphasises his disgust:</p>
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<p class="fst">And because I am happy, and dance and sing,<br>
They think they have done me no injury:<br>
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King<br>
Who make up a heaven of our misery.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The point that the <strong>Songs of Experience</strong> often harden up the <strong>Songs of Innocence</strong> is also made by Edward Thompson, who does what Ackroyd has done for the <em>Chimney Sweeper</em> for the Song of Experience called <em>London</em>.</p>
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<td>
<p class="fst">I wander thro’ each chartered street<br>
Near where the chartered Thames does flow<br>
And mark in every face I meet<br>
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.</p>
<p class="fst">In every cry of every man,<br>
In every infant’s cry of fear<br>
in every voice; in every ban,<br>
The mind-forged manacles I hear.</p>
<p class="fst">How the chimney sweeper’s cry<br>
Every blackning Church appalls;<br>
And the hapless soldier’s sigh<br>
Runs in blood down palace walls</p>
<p class="fst">But most thro’ midnight streets I hear<br>
How the youthful harlots’ curse<br>
Blasts the new-born infants’ tear<br>
And blights with plague the marriage hearse.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Edward Thompson traces the use of the word ‘chartered’ to the controversy between Edmund Burke (against the French Revolution) and Thomas Paine (for it). The ‘chartered’ towns excluded from any vestige of control what Burke called ‘the swinish multitude’. The soldier gave his blood for the palaces and the chimney sweep his life and limbs for the churches. Prostitution was the other side of the coin to marriage. The swinish multitude crops up again in a savage poem about a ‘chapel all of gold’ from which Blake sees a serpent turning away:</p>
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<td>
<p class="fst">Vomiting his poison out<br>
On the bread and on the wine.<br>
So I turned into a sty<br>
And laid me down among the swine.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Blake could see more clearly than most of his contemporaries the rising consciousness of a new class which was being robbed as ruthlessly as any of its predecessors, and he sided unequivocally with the exploited and the poor. This commitment was never dull, never repetitive. It was invigorated and complemented by Blake’s illustrations and engravings. He annotated the books he read with neat and powerful notes which still survive and disclose his ideas and how he expressed them. The smooth talking, smooth painting and very fashionable Sir Joshua Reynolds was dealt with like this:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Reynolds:</strong> I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Blake:</strong> A Liar. He never was abashed in his life & never felt his ignorance.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Reynolds:</strong> I consoled myself by remarking that these ready inventors are extremely apt to acquiesce in imperfection.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Blake:</strong> Villainy. A lie.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Reynolds:</strong> But the disposition to abstractions is the great glory of the human mind.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Blake:</strong> To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the alone distinction of merit. General Knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Reynolds:</strong> The great use in copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning to colour.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Blake:</strong> Contemptible.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Reynolds:</strong> But as mere enthusiasm will carry you but a little way</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>Blake:</strong> Damn the fool. Mere enthusiasm is all in all.</p>
<p class="fst">Thompson calls this Blake’s ‘robust contempt’ for the high and mighty, which he held in common with the other great iconoclastic poets of his time, notably Byron. Like Byron, Blake’s first reaction to the pretensions of great men was to laugh out loud. Byron’s view of his former foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh was succinctly expressed over the great man’s grave:</p>
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<p class="fst">Posterity will ne’er survey<br>
A nobler scene than this.<br>
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh.<br>
Stop traveller, and piss.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">And here was Blake on the subject of the most respected philosopher of his day (and his devotion to the Classics):</p>
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<td>
<p class="fst">A ha to Dr Johnson<br>
Said Scipio Africanus<br>
Lift up my Roman petticoat<br>
And kiss my Roman anus.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Add to all this Blake’s enduring belief in sexual liberation as a necessary condition of human freedom. ‘Enjoyment and not abstinence is the food of intellect’, was his motto. Most sex was shut up in private fantasy:</p>
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<p class="fst">The moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virgin<br>
That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys<br>
In the secret shadows of her chambers; the youth shut up from<br>
Lustful joy shall forget to generate, & create an amorous image<br>
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.</p>
</td>
</tr>
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<p class="fst">One answer was ‘lovely copulation, bliss on bliss’, a regular theme for Blake especially in his paintings and engravings. None of this was poetic licence for the release of male libido, as it plainly was for the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose church Blake joined. Blake, a bitter enemy of monogamy when applied as a church and state edict, lived all his life in apparently harmonious monogamy. He was at his testiest when official theorists and priests argued for discrimination against and/or seclusion of women. His views on these matters were close to those of his great contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft.</p>
<p>Perhaps it was his constant harping on these sexual questions which explains another feature of Blake’s life common to many other reforming writers of the time. As Ackroyd points out, ‘He remained quite unknown in his lifetime.’ His engraving was patronised by famous writers and artists of the time, notably Henry Fuseli, but usually only for hack work much of which has perished. The poems which have fascinated critics all through the 20th century were hardly published, let alone read in his lifetime. He printed the <strong>Songs</strong> himself, very expensively, and sold very few copies. <strong>The Four Zoas</strong>, which Ackroyd describes as ‘one of the most extraordinary documents of the decades spanning the 18th and 19th centuries’ wasn’t published until 1889, 63 years after Blake’s death. Again most of Blake’s contemporaries dismissed him as ‘mad’. As he got older, people referred to him more and more as ‘the mad visionary’. Even W.H. Auden a century and a half later declared that ‘Blake went dotty as he sang’. In fact, of course, he was not mad at all. His close friend and colleague John Linell admitted he was often shocked by Blake but affirmed, ‘I never saw anything the least like madness.’ The reason for his ‘madness’ was familiar: he swam against the stream and refused to compromise what he said and never painted for commercial fortune.</p>
<p>The hostility of polite society which prescribed him mad ended when he died. In old age he was, as ever, penniless and, as one shocked visitor put it, ‘dirty’. There were six people, including his wife, at his funeral and he was buried in a common grave. But death changed the open hostility to Blake into a grudging patronage which still prevails. Schoolchildren are taught to learn by rote the famous poem, <em>Tiger, Tiger</em>. They chant happily:</p>
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<p class="fst">In what distant deeps or skies<br>
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?</p>
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<p class="fst">But which of them connects the poem, written late in 1792, to the French Revolution, or to the press references after the September massacres in Paris to ‘tribunals of tigers’ or to the eyes of Jean Paul Marat gleaming ‘like those of a tiger cat?’ And which of those Tory matrons who round off their party conference every year with a spirited rendering of Blake’s poem <em>Jerusalem</em> have the remotest idea what Blake meant when he cried out for ‘arrows of desire’? How many of them have any idea, either, how determined was the commitment in his pledge, ‘I will not cease from mental fight’?</p>
<p>Determined, filled with contempt for the rich and sympathy with the exploited and the poor, eloquent and passionate prophet of liberation of every kind, sane to his friends and family, mad to the outside world, dogged by poverty and calumny all through his 70 years, his poems and his art ignored in his life and patronised after it Blake seems to fit exactly into the pattern of other revolutionary poets of the time, most notably Shelley, who lived in London not far from Blake but never met him, and died aged 29 when Blake was 65. Can we happily place Blake alongside Shelley in the line of British poets and writers who emerged out of the French Enlightenment of the late 18th century and filled the gap between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848?</p>
<p>No, we cannot. Here is the paradox about Blake, which is firmly tackled in different ways by both these books. Blake shared with Shelley all the qualities mentioned above. Yet there was a great gulf fixed between them. Shelley revered the Enlightenment, hailed the great contribution to democracy of Rousseau, the anti-clericalism of D’Holbach, the secular encyclopedias of Diderot. Above all he worshipped at the shrine of ‘reason’s mighty lore’. He was a rationalist, bitterly opposed to religion of every kind. He believed in open political activity to change the world. He wrote political pamphlets, tried to form political associations, subscribed to the campaigns to release the victims of oppression.</p>
<p>Blake was none of these things and did none of them. Though he knew the circle round Thomas Paine, Holcroft, Horne Tooke and Mary Wollstonecraft, he did not associate with them. The story, made into a BBC play, that he advised Paine to flee from London is, Peter Ackroyd assures us, almost certainly apocryphal. This is how Peter Ackroyd explains the difference between Blake and the Painites:</p>
<p class="fst">In many respects he was utterly unlike them. If points of religion had been brought up, for example, there would have been manifest differences. His friend in later life, Tatham, adds substance to the suggestion:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘In one of their conversations, Paine said that religion was a law and a tie to all able minds. Blake on the other hand said what he was always asserting: that the religion of Jesus was the perfect law of Liberty.’</p>
<p class="fst">Paine also dismissed Isaiah as ‘one continual incoherent rant’ and Blake celebrated the glory of that prophet. Blake could hardly have been an enthusiast for the works of Joseph Priestley whose materialism and predestinarianism were utterly opposed to everything Blake considered holy. Nor can he have been very impressed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s belief in the ‘law of reason’ and ‘rational religion’.</p>
<p>Blake came from an entirely different tradition, a tradition which execrated the ‘reason’ which inspired Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Priestley and Shelley. As we have seen he attended the newly formed New Church of Jerusalem which propagated the views of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. This was a Christian sect whose origins, like so many of its kind, derived from the eternal argument between the paid professionals of the Christian church established and maintained by ruling class robbers, and ordinary believers who want to keep their faith secure from the grasp of governments, monarchs, landowners and priests. Almost all these sects, therefore, practised and preached political disengagement as an essential feature of their faith. The Swedenborgians were specially insistent on this. They abominated the ridiculous tenets of the Trinity, with all the obeisance to God and God’s representatives on earth which it entails, and replaced it with a ‘divine presence’ in all human beings. Part of the proof of that divine presence was a devotion to sectarian secrecy which kept the believers apart from the real world. They were seen as cranks, of course, and therefore as suspect revolutionaries. When a drunken Birmingham mob, bribed by the authorities, sacked and burned the house of the rationalist Joseph Priestley, they headed for the Swedenborgian’s church to do the same. The church’s pastor, appropriately named Proud, rushed out to head off the crowd, explaining that he and his church had nothing to do with temporal matters such as the French Revolution or Joseph Priestley, and brandishing gold coins which he pressed into the mob leaders’ hands. This worked perfectly, and the crowd went away.</p>
<p>Ackroyd and Thompson prove that Blake was no uncritical Swedenborgian. He criticised the New Church again and again. But his ideas were sharply hostile to those of the rational enlightenment. Where did they come from? E.P. Thompson strives to find a ‘vector’ which carried Blake’s ideas to him from the 17th century. He fastens on a sect which grew up around John Reeve and Ludowich Muggleton after the defeat of the Levellers in 1649. This Muggletonian sect, as it became known, was ‘antinomian’, that is ‘against the law’. Its followers argued that the only real law was the law of the divine spirit inside each individual. The Muggletonians were subversive because they defied the law, but they blunted their subversiveness by keeping themselves to themselves in strict sectarian isolation.</p>
<p>Half Edward Thompson’s book rather apologetically struggles and strains to establish this ‘missing vector’ between the Muggletonians and Blake. With one rather doubtful exception he can’t find a single credible connection. But he does provide an argument for some form of thread between Blake and the antinomian sectarians who sprung up during the Commonwealth and survived right up to his time (they only died out recently Thompson himself met the last of the Muggletonians in Tunbridge Wells!). The Muggletonians and Blake, Thompson argues, were suspicious of reason. Of course, the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ they disliked were the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of upper class intellectuals who told ordinary people what to think. But this spilled over into a suspicion of the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of people like Thomas Paine whose purpose was exactly the opposite: to assault and expose the rhetoric and arguments of the rulers, and to agitate among the ruled for action to change the world. In this sense, as Thompson grudgingly concludes, antinomian sects like the Muggletonians found themselves in opposition to the intellectual forces which led to the French Revolution.</p>
<p>If William Blake was suspicious of its intellectual origins, however, he was most definitely not opposed to the revolution. For a short time he even walked the streets wearing the cap of liberty. The second half of Thompson’s book, which is much more exciting than the first, argues that for this short time there took place in Blake ‘a conjunction between the old antinomian tradition and Jacobinism’. Thompson’s close study of poems like <em>London</em>, <em>The Human Abstract</em> and the <em>Garden of Love</em> reveals a ‘burning indictment of the acquisitive ethic’ which goes far beyond the bounds of Muggletonian mysticism and takes Blake close to the revolutionaries.</p>
<p>This is all fascinating, especially from a historian of the stamp of E.P. Thompson whose <strong>The Making of the English Working Class</strong> (1973) is a classic for any socialist who wants to understand this period. But in trying to force the two traditions together, the rationalist revolutionary and the spiritualist antinomian, Thompson seems to abandon many of the lessons he himself spelt out in his monumental history. He writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">If Blake found congenial the Painite denunciation of the repressive institutions of State and Church, it did not follow that humanity’s redemption from this state could be effected by a political reorganisation of these institutions alone. There must be some utopian leap, some human re-birth, from Mystery to renewed imaginative life.</p>
<p class="fst">This is not just an account of Paine’s view. It seems to be Thompson’s view too, for he repeats the phrase ‘utopian leap’ in the final paragraph of his book and concludes,</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘To create the New Jerusalem something must be brought in from outside the rationalist system and that something could be found only in the non-rational image of Jesus, in the affirmatives of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love.’</p>
<p class="fst">No conclusion of that kind can be found in <strong>The Making of the English Working Class</strong>, which starts with the founding of the London Corresponding Society, a working class organisation with ‘members unlimited’ which fought precisely and exclusively for parliamentary reform: that is, for the ‘political reorganisation of the institutions of State and Church’. The Society backed up the more feeble Society for Constitutional Information. <strong>The Making of the English Working Class</strong> goes on to chronicle all the attempts by the new ‘reformers from below’ to challenge and change the unrepresentative and repressive monarchy, parliament, press, church, landowners and employers who ruled Britain. There was no call from any of these reformers for a ‘utopian leap’ perhaps because no practical political leap, by definition, can be utopian. ‘Comrades, we shall now proceed to accomplish a utopian leap’, is not a practical slogan. The whole concept is an abstraction. The chief consequence of relying on an abstraction is political quietism. If you wait and hope for a utopian leap, there is nothing you can do about it. You can only wait and hope.</p>
<p>Blake joined the New Church of the boring and ridiculous Swedenborgians, but he did not join the London Corresponding Society, or even the Society for Constitutional Information. He showed no interest in any of the agitations for parliamentary reform or against the gagging acts and repressive legislation at the end of the 1790s. When the Luddite leaders were hanged in 1813, there was no donation for their families from Blake (as there was from Shelley). When the leaders of the Pentridge uprising (1817) were executed or the Manchester yeomanry mowed down the parliamentary reformers at Peterloo (1819), there was no protest from Blake (as there was on both occasions from Shelley). Thompson compares Blake unfavourably to William Godwin, who is deservedly denounced for spouting his polite philosophy from the sidelines. But at least Godwin risked his neck by publicly supporting his friends on trial for treason in 1794, which is more than Blake managed to do. Indeed on more than one occasion, when the authorities threatened persecution, Blake specifically adapted and softened his language to keep himself clear of the prosecutors. If there was, as Thompson argues, a brief moment where his antinomianism merged with a Jacobin sense of outrage, the moment soon passed, and he hurried back to his splendid isolation.</p>
<p>Peter Ackroyd quotes back at Blake a comment from his hero Milton:</p>
<p class="quoteb">‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be fought for, not without dust and heat’.</p>
<p class="fst">Blake, Ackroyd continues, ‘eschewed the “heat” of any public voice or role, but, as a result, it is as if he were another Milton raging in a darkened room’. I find all this illuminating because I confess that the bulk of Blake’s longer poems have always mystified and often irritated me. I do not mean only that the poems seem constantly to dissolve into imagery or metaphor. A lot of Shelley’s poetry does that too. But the imagery in Blake is too abstract, too unrelated, too much founded on utopian leaps. E.P. Thompson recognises this vagueness, but comes round to it. In one sense he almost revels in Blake’s isolation and his assaults on what Thompson (I think wrongly) calls ‘ideology’. Perhaps at the end of his life Thompson found in Blake some solace for his own political loneliness. Peter Ackroyd, a Blake enthusiast to the last, is more circumspect:</p>
<p>His poetry is often one of declaration and assertion, just as his art resides upon the pictorial plane; much of his creative activity takes place on the immediate surface and there are occasions when an image, or a verse, seems to have no concerted or established sense with the proviso of course that this indeterminacy, this missing signification, is often part of a work’s power. It is like the oblique character of the man himself who, according to one interlocutor, made assertions without bothering with argument or debate; his work shares that same denotative brilliance, but sometimes at the expense of bewildering those who encounter it.</p>
<p>I enrol myself in the ranks of the bewildered. But I will not end there because both these books have led me back to Blake and dug up treasures previously buried in mysticism and symbolism. The whole point of the poets who flourished in revolutionary times and who did not bow the knee to God or King or Law is that they have something significant to say to future revolutionaries. Blake should be read precisely because he was a maverick, a pain in the neck not just to the rulers but also to those who more formally and more rationally opposed the rulers. Whatever his religious origins and however haughty his disengagement, he believed perhaps more passionately than all his contemporaries in human emancipation, and he lived his life accordingly. In particular, he needs to be read by any socialist who imagines that in a society where labour is emancipated everyone will be the same and want the same.</p>
<p>Is there anyone attempting to work in the tradition of William Blake today? Well, there is Leon Rosselson, a veteran London singer so full of wonderful tunes and emancipating poems that he is ignored by polite society as systematically as Blake was. His latest CD, <em>Intruders</em>, is full of both; and I commend it heartily as I commend both these books, especially Peter Ackroyd’s. The CD ends with a tune I find myself humming almost everywhere. The chorus is pure Blake, incorporating on the one hand the isolated, individualistic Blake who preferred abstract divinity to politics, and on the other the revolutionary Blake who saw perhaps more clearly than anyone else the fantastic, kaleidoscopic potential of human liberation:</p>
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<p class="fst">For all things are holy, the poet once said,<br>
And all that is different is part of the dance.<br>
And the web of life’s colours needs each single thread<br>
For the dance to continue unbroken.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
A Passionate Prophet of Liberation
(June 1996)
From International Socialism, 2 : 71, June 1996, pp. :131–141.
Copyright © 1996 International Socialism.
Downloaded with thanks from the International Socialism Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
A review of Blake by Peter Ackroyd, (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) and Witness against the beast – William Blake and the moral law by E.P. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
In London in the 1790s, like in London today, it was commonplace to see a woman being beaten up in the street, and equally common for embarrassed or irritated bystanders to pass by on the other side. William Blake had a short temper and often lost it. Walking in the St Giles area, and seeing a woman attacked, he launched himself on the scene with such ferocity that the assailant ‘recoiled and collapsed’. When the abuser recovered, he told a bystander that he thought he had been attacked by the ‘devil himself’. At around the same time Blake was standing at his window looking over the yard of his neighbour when he saw a boy ‘hobbling along with a log tied to his foot’. Immediately he stormed across and demanded in the most violent terms that the boy should be freed. The neighbour replied hotly that Blake was trespassing and had no business interfering in other people’s property (which included, of course, other people’s child labour). The furious argument which followed was only resolved when the boy was released.
Some years later, in 1803, Blake was living in a country cottage in Sussex when he came across a soldier lounging in his garden. Blake greeted the soldier with a volley of abuse, and frogmarched him to the local pub where he was billeted. The soldier later testified that as they went, Blake muttered repeatedly, ‘Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves.’ In the south of England in 1803, when soldiers were billeted in every village for fear of a Napoleonic invasion, such a statement was criminal treachery. The soldier promptly sneaked to his superiors. Blake was tried for sedition, and escaped deportation and even possibly a death sentence largely because the soldier made a mess of his evidence and because no one in court knew anything about Blake’s revolutionary views which had been openly expressed ten years previously. He was found not guilty, and went on writing for another 23 years until his death. He never once swerved from his intense loathing of king, soldiers and slavery.
These are two of the hundreds of anecdotes in Peter Ackroyd’s glorious biography which will warmly commend Blake to any reader even remotely committed to reform. This warmth enthuses the whole book. Ackroyd revels in Blake’s ‘exuberant hopefulness’ which grew out of his passionate rage at the world he saw around him. The Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience which he wrote in the first fine careless rapture of the French Revolution are presented here not just in scholarly textual analysis but in admiration and wonder. Here is Blake’s disgust with slavery in The Little Black Boy:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav’d of light.
The English child might indeed be ‘white as an angel’ but, if unlucky enough not to be born rich, he or she was likely to be a victim of the vilest exploitation. Ackroyd sets out the whole of Blake’s Song of Innocence called The Chimney Sweeper, which moves in six short verses from utter misery:
When my mother died I was very young
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep
So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.
To hope, in a dream which first sees all the sweeps in coffins, until:
And by came an angel who had a bright key
And he opened the coffins and set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.
And back again to a last verse which seems like an anti-climax:
And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm,
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
When I first read that last verse, I took it for what it seemed: a sell out of the indignation which sets the poem off. How does Peter Ackroyd explain it?
It has been suggested that this closing line is in sharp contrast to the rest of the poem but in fact it maintains precisely the same note; the innocence of the speaker, and of Tom himself, is a destructive and ignorant innocence because it actively complies both with the horrors of the climbing trade and of the society that accepts it without thought. It is the ‘unorganised innocence’ that can persuade a deformed or dying sweep that he is happy, after all, while confirming the credulous or the sanctimonious in their belief that ‘duty’ is all that needs to be, or can be done. Blake has dramatised a ‘state’ or an attitude without in the least acceding to it; then in the companion poem within Songs of Experience that shares the same title, he emphasises his disgust:
And because I am happy, and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
The point that the Songs of Experience often harden up the Songs of Innocence is also made by Edward Thompson, who does what Ackroyd has done for the Chimney Sweeper for the Song of Experience called London.
I wander thro’ each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear
in every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the chimney sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls;
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlots’ curse
Blasts the new-born infants’ tear
And blights with plague the marriage hearse.
Edward Thompson traces the use of the word ‘chartered’ to the controversy between Edmund Burke (against the French Revolution) and Thomas Paine (for it). The ‘chartered’ towns excluded from any vestige of control what Burke called ‘the swinish multitude’. The soldier gave his blood for the palaces and the chimney sweep his life and limbs for the churches. Prostitution was the other side of the coin to marriage. The swinish multitude crops up again in a savage poem about a ‘chapel all of gold’ from which Blake sees a serpent turning away:
Vomiting his poison out
On the bread and on the wine.
So I turned into a sty
And laid me down among the swine.
Blake could see more clearly than most of his contemporaries the rising consciousness of a new class which was being robbed as ruthlessly as any of its predecessors, and he sided unequivocally with the exploited and the poor. This commitment was never dull, never repetitive. It was invigorated and complemented by Blake’s illustrations and engravings. He annotated the books he read with neat and powerful notes which still survive and disclose his ideas and how he expressed them. The smooth talking, smooth painting and very fashionable Sir Joshua Reynolds was dealt with like this:
Reynolds: I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed.
Blake: A Liar. He never was abashed in his life & never felt his ignorance.
Reynolds: I consoled myself by remarking that these ready inventors are extremely apt to acquiesce in imperfection.
Blake: Villainy. A lie.
Reynolds: But the disposition to abstractions is the great glory of the human mind.
Blake: To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the alone distinction of merit. General Knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.
Reynolds: The great use in copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning to colour.
Blake: Contemptible.
Reynolds: But as mere enthusiasm will carry you but a little way
Blake: Damn the fool. Mere enthusiasm is all in all.
Thompson calls this Blake’s ‘robust contempt’ for the high and mighty, which he held in common with the other great iconoclastic poets of his time, notably Byron. Like Byron, Blake’s first reaction to the pretensions of great men was to laugh out loud. Byron’s view of his former foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh was succinctly expressed over the great man’s grave:
Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler scene than this.
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh.
Stop traveller, and piss.
And here was Blake on the subject of the most respected philosopher of his day (and his devotion to the Classics):
A ha to Dr Johnson
Said Scipio Africanus
Lift up my Roman petticoat
And kiss my Roman anus.
Add to all this Blake’s enduring belief in sexual liberation as a necessary condition of human freedom. ‘Enjoyment and not abstinence is the food of intellect’, was his motto. Most sex was shut up in private fantasy:
The moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virgin
That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chambers; the youth shut up from
Lustful joy shall forget to generate, & create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
One answer was ‘lovely copulation, bliss on bliss’, a regular theme for Blake especially in his paintings and engravings. None of this was poetic licence for the release of male libido, as it plainly was for the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose church Blake joined. Blake, a bitter enemy of monogamy when applied as a church and state edict, lived all his life in apparently harmonious monogamy. He was at his testiest when official theorists and priests argued for discrimination against and/or seclusion of women. His views on these matters were close to those of his great contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft.
Perhaps it was his constant harping on these sexual questions which explains another feature of Blake’s life common to many other reforming writers of the time. As Ackroyd points out, ‘He remained quite unknown in his lifetime.’ His engraving was patronised by famous writers and artists of the time, notably Henry Fuseli, but usually only for hack work much of which has perished. The poems which have fascinated critics all through the 20th century were hardly published, let alone read in his lifetime. He printed the Songs himself, very expensively, and sold very few copies. The Four Zoas, which Ackroyd describes as ‘one of the most extraordinary documents of the decades spanning the 18th and 19th centuries’ wasn’t published until 1889, 63 years after Blake’s death. Again most of Blake’s contemporaries dismissed him as ‘mad’. As he got older, people referred to him more and more as ‘the mad visionary’. Even W.H. Auden a century and a half later declared that ‘Blake went dotty as he sang’. In fact, of course, he was not mad at all. His close friend and colleague John Linell admitted he was often shocked by Blake but affirmed, ‘I never saw anything the least like madness.’ The reason for his ‘madness’ was familiar: he swam against the stream and refused to compromise what he said and never painted for commercial fortune.
The hostility of polite society which prescribed him mad ended when he died. In old age he was, as ever, penniless and, as one shocked visitor put it, ‘dirty’. There were six people, including his wife, at his funeral and he was buried in a common grave. But death changed the open hostility to Blake into a grudging patronage which still prevails. Schoolchildren are taught to learn by rote the famous poem, Tiger, Tiger. They chant happily:
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
But which of them connects the poem, written late in 1792, to the French Revolution, or to the press references after the September massacres in Paris to ‘tribunals of tigers’ or to the eyes of Jean Paul Marat gleaming ‘like those of a tiger cat?’ And which of those Tory matrons who round off their party conference every year with a spirited rendering of Blake’s poem Jerusalem have the remotest idea what Blake meant when he cried out for ‘arrows of desire’? How many of them have any idea, either, how determined was the commitment in his pledge, ‘I will not cease from mental fight’?
Determined, filled with contempt for the rich and sympathy with the exploited and the poor, eloquent and passionate prophet of liberation of every kind, sane to his friends and family, mad to the outside world, dogged by poverty and calumny all through his 70 years, his poems and his art ignored in his life and patronised after it Blake seems to fit exactly into the pattern of other revolutionary poets of the time, most notably Shelley, who lived in London not far from Blake but never met him, and died aged 29 when Blake was 65. Can we happily place Blake alongside Shelley in the line of British poets and writers who emerged out of the French Enlightenment of the late 18th century and filled the gap between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848?
No, we cannot. Here is the paradox about Blake, which is firmly tackled in different ways by both these books. Blake shared with Shelley all the qualities mentioned above. Yet there was a great gulf fixed between them. Shelley revered the Enlightenment, hailed the great contribution to democracy of Rousseau, the anti-clericalism of D’Holbach, the secular encyclopedias of Diderot. Above all he worshipped at the shrine of ‘reason’s mighty lore’. He was a rationalist, bitterly opposed to religion of every kind. He believed in open political activity to change the world. He wrote political pamphlets, tried to form political associations, subscribed to the campaigns to release the victims of oppression.
Blake was none of these things and did none of them. Though he knew the circle round Thomas Paine, Holcroft, Horne Tooke and Mary Wollstonecraft, he did not associate with them. The story, made into a BBC play, that he advised Paine to flee from London is, Peter Ackroyd assures us, almost certainly apocryphal. This is how Peter Ackroyd explains the difference between Blake and the Painites:
In many respects he was utterly unlike them. If points of religion had been brought up, for example, there would have been manifest differences. His friend in later life, Tatham, adds substance to the suggestion:
‘In one of their conversations, Paine said that religion was a law and a tie to all able minds. Blake on the other hand said what he was always asserting: that the religion of Jesus was the perfect law of Liberty.’
Paine also dismissed Isaiah as ‘one continual incoherent rant’ and Blake celebrated the glory of that prophet. Blake could hardly have been an enthusiast for the works of Joseph Priestley whose materialism and predestinarianism were utterly opposed to everything Blake considered holy. Nor can he have been very impressed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s belief in the ‘law of reason’ and ‘rational religion’.
Blake came from an entirely different tradition, a tradition which execrated the ‘reason’ which inspired Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Priestley and Shelley. As we have seen he attended the newly formed New Church of Jerusalem which propagated the views of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. This was a Christian sect whose origins, like so many of its kind, derived from the eternal argument between the paid professionals of the Christian church established and maintained by ruling class robbers, and ordinary believers who want to keep their faith secure from the grasp of governments, monarchs, landowners and priests. Almost all these sects, therefore, practised and preached political disengagement as an essential feature of their faith. The Swedenborgians were specially insistent on this. They abominated the ridiculous tenets of the Trinity, with all the obeisance to God and God’s representatives on earth which it entails, and replaced it with a ‘divine presence’ in all human beings. Part of the proof of that divine presence was a devotion to sectarian secrecy which kept the believers apart from the real world. They were seen as cranks, of course, and therefore as suspect revolutionaries. When a drunken Birmingham mob, bribed by the authorities, sacked and burned the house of the rationalist Joseph Priestley, they headed for the Swedenborgian’s church to do the same. The church’s pastor, appropriately named Proud, rushed out to head off the crowd, explaining that he and his church had nothing to do with temporal matters such as the French Revolution or Joseph Priestley, and brandishing gold coins which he pressed into the mob leaders’ hands. This worked perfectly, and the crowd went away.
Ackroyd and Thompson prove that Blake was no uncritical Swedenborgian. He criticised the New Church again and again. But his ideas were sharply hostile to those of the rational enlightenment. Where did they come from? E.P. Thompson strives to find a ‘vector’ which carried Blake’s ideas to him from the 17th century. He fastens on a sect which grew up around John Reeve and Ludowich Muggleton after the defeat of the Levellers in 1649. This Muggletonian sect, as it became known, was ‘antinomian’, that is ‘against the law’. Its followers argued that the only real law was the law of the divine spirit inside each individual. The Muggletonians were subversive because they defied the law, but they blunted their subversiveness by keeping themselves to themselves in strict sectarian isolation.
Half Edward Thompson’s book rather apologetically struggles and strains to establish this ‘missing vector’ between the Muggletonians and Blake. With one rather doubtful exception he can’t find a single credible connection. But he does provide an argument for some form of thread between Blake and the antinomian sectarians who sprung up during the Commonwealth and survived right up to his time (they only died out recently Thompson himself met the last of the Muggletonians in Tunbridge Wells!). The Muggletonians and Blake, Thompson argues, were suspicious of reason. Of course, the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ they disliked were the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of upper class intellectuals who told ordinary people what to think. But this spilled over into a suspicion of the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of people like Thomas Paine whose purpose was exactly the opposite: to assault and expose the rhetoric and arguments of the rulers, and to agitate among the ruled for action to change the world. In this sense, as Thompson grudgingly concludes, antinomian sects like the Muggletonians found themselves in opposition to the intellectual forces which led to the French Revolution.
If William Blake was suspicious of its intellectual origins, however, he was most definitely not opposed to the revolution. For a short time he even walked the streets wearing the cap of liberty. The second half of Thompson’s book, which is much more exciting than the first, argues that for this short time there took place in Blake ‘a conjunction between the old antinomian tradition and Jacobinism’. Thompson’s close study of poems like London, The Human Abstract and the Garden of Love reveals a ‘burning indictment of the acquisitive ethic’ which goes far beyond the bounds of Muggletonian mysticism and takes Blake close to the revolutionaries.
This is all fascinating, especially from a historian of the stamp of E.P. Thompson whose The Making of the English Working Class (1973) is a classic for any socialist who wants to understand this period. But in trying to force the two traditions together, the rationalist revolutionary and the spiritualist antinomian, Thompson seems to abandon many of the lessons he himself spelt out in his monumental history. He writes:
If Blake found congenial the Painite denunciation of the repressive institutions of State and Church, it did not follow that humanity’s redemption from this state could be effected by a political reorganisation of these institutions alone. There must be some utopian leap, some human re-birth, from Mystery to renewed imaginative life.
This is not just an account of Paine’s view. It seems to be Thompson’s view too, for he repeats the phrase ‘utopian leap’ in the final paragraph of his book and concludes,
‘To create the New Jerusalem something must be brought in from outside the rationalist system and that something could be found only in the non-rational image of Jesus, in the affirmatives of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love.’
No conclusion of that kind can be found in The Making of the English Working Class, which starts with the founding of the London Corresponding Society, a working class organisation with ‘members unlimited’ which fought precisely and exclusively for parliamentary reform: that is, for the ‘political reorganisation of the institutions of State and Church’. The Society backed up the more feeble Society for Constitutional Information. The Making of the English Working Class goes on to chronicle all the attempts by the new ‘reformers from below’ to challenge and change the unrepresentative and repressive monarchy, parliament, press, church, landowners and employers who ruled Britain. There was no call from any of these reformers for a ‘utopian leap’ perhaps because no practical political leap, by definition, can be utopian. ‘Comrades, we shall now proceed to accomplish a utopian leap’, is not a practical slogan. The whole concept is an abstraction. The chief consequence of relying on an abstraction is political quietism. If you wait and hope for a utopian leap, there is nothing you can do about it. You can only wait and hope.
Blake joined the New Church of the boring and ridiculous Swedenborgians, but he did not join the London Corresponding Society, or even the Society for Constitutional Information. He showed no interest in any of the agitations for parliamentary reform or against the gagging acts and repressive legislation at the end of the 1790s. When the Luddite leaders were hanged in 1813, there was no donation for their families from Blake (as there was from Shelley). When the leaders of the Pentridge uprising (1817) were executed or the Manchester yeomanry mowed down the parliamentary reformers at Peterloo (1819), there was no protest from Blake (as there was on both occasions from Shelley). Thompson compares Blake unfavourably to William Godwin, who is deservedly denounced for spouting his polite philosophy from the sidelines. But at least Godwin risked his neck by publicly supporting his friends on trial for treason in 1794, which is more than Blake managed to do. Indeed on more than one occasion, when the authorities threatened persecution, Blake specifically adapted and softened his language to keep himself clear of the prosecutors. If there was, as Thompson argues, a brief moment where his antinomianism merged with a Jacobin sense of outrage, the moment soon passed, and he hurried back to his splendid isolation.
Peter Ackroyd quotes back at Blake a comment from his hero Milton:
‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be fought for, not without dust and heat’.
Blake, Ackroyd continues, ‘eschewed the “heat” of any public voice or role, but, as a result, it is as if he were another Milton raging in a darkened room’. I find all this illuminating because I confess that the bulk of Blake’s longer poems have always mystified and often irritated me. I do not mean only that the poems seem constantly to dissolve into imagery or metaphor. A lot of Shelley’s poetry does that too. But the imagery in Blake is too abstract, too unrelated, too much founded on utopian leaps. E.P. Thompson recognises this vagueness, but comes round to it. In one sense he almost revels in Blake’s isolation and his assaults on what Thompson (I think wrongly) calls ‘ideology’. Perhaps at the end of his life Thompson found in Blake some solace for his own political loneliness. Peter Ackroyd, a Blake enthusiast to the last, is more circumspect:
His poetry is often one of declaration and assertion, just as his art resides upon the pictorial plane; much of his creative activity takes place on the immediate surface and there are occasions when an image, or a verse, seems to have no concerted or established sense with the proviso of course that this indeterminacy, this missing signification, is often part of a work’s power. It is like the oblique character of the man himself who, according to one interlocutor, made assertions without bothering with argument or debate; his work shares that same denotative brilliance, but sometimes at the expense of bewildering those who encounter it.
I enrol myself in the ranks of the bewildered. But I will not end there because both these books have led me back to Blake and dug up treasures previously buried in mysticism and symbolism. The whole point of the poets who flourished in revolutionary times and who did not bow the knee to God or King or Law is that they have something significant to say to future revolutionaries. Blake should be read precisely because he was a maverick, a pain in the neck not just to the rulers but also to those who more formally and more rationally opposed the rulers. Whatever his religious origins and however haughty his disengagement, he believed perhaps more passionately than all his contemporaries in human emancipation, and he lived his life accordingly. In particular, he needs to be read by any socialist who imagines that in a society where labour is emancipated everyone will be the same and want the same.
Is there anyone attempting to work in the tradition of William Blake today? Well, there is Leon Rosselson, a veteran London singer so full of wonderful tunes and emancipating poems that he is ignored by polite society as systematically as Blake was. His latest CD, Intruders, is full of both; and I commend it heartily as I commend both these books, especially Peter Ackroyd’s. The CD ends with a tune I find myself humming almost everywhere. The chorus is pure Blake, incorporating on the one hand the isolated, individualistic Blake who preferred abstract divinity to politics, and on the other the revolutionary Blake who saw perhaps more clearly than anyone else the fantastic, kaleidoscopic potential of human liberation:
For all things are holy, the poet once said,
And all that is different is part of the dance.
And the web of life’s colours needs each single thread
For the dance to continue unbroken.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>101 years of not thinking</h1>
<h3>(May 1986)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, 17 May 1986.<br>
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), <strong>In the Heat of the Struggle</strong>, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp. 96–7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">FOR A FEW days last week the air was thick with the plummy noises of important people welcoming another lifelong rebel safely home to rest.</p>
<p>Everyone loved Manny Shinwell. In the House of Lords, Lord Whitelaw; at his funeral, the Thatcher knight and editor of the <strong>Sunday Express</strong>, Sir John Junor; in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher herself – all rushed to honour Manny. I pause for a moment here because my mentor, Harry McShane, always said that there were only two of the Red Clydesiders for whom he ever had any time: John Wheatley and Emmanuel Shinwell.</p>
<p>When I confronted him with the hideous reality of Emmanuel Shinwell in the early 1960s, Harry would shake his head and say, ‘Yes, that’s all very well, but you should have heard his speeches in the famous 40-hour strike in Glasgow in 1919’.</p>
<p>Shinwell was magnificent during that strike and the vast agitation which accompanied it, Harry always insisted. Since he was there and his judgement on such matters was almost always impeccable, I accept it. But consider. Even by that time, most socialists had a healthy suspicion of Shinwell. He had not joined the strong anti-war movement in the West of Scotland working class at that time.</p>
<p>After he came out of prison in 1919, he moved quickly to the right. He went to parliament in 1922 and was in government in 1924.</p>
<p>He supported Ramsay MacDonald against Cook, Maxton and Wheatley in 1928; but was quick to turn on MacDonald when there was a chance of winning his seat from him In every single major argument in the Labour Party since, Shinwell has been on the right, if not on the extreme right.</p>
<p>His former commitment to class war changed very quickly to a commitment to patriotic wars, almost every one of which he supported. He backed Eden and the Tories in their invasion of Suez in 1956. He backed Thatcher in the Falklands in 1982 and I dare say he would have backed her in Libya too. He loved wars and Britain fighting them. No doubt that is why everyone calls him a ‘fighter’.</p>
<p>He was a mean, spiteful, pompous, bullying man. He was always sneering at ‘middle class intellectuals’. He sneered, too, at political theory, especially Marxist theory, which, he boasted, he never read.</p>
<p>This bluff common-man, give it-to-em-straight approach was good for an ovation at Labour Party conferences but Shinwell’s own life spells out the awful lesson of what happens to working class agitators when they stop thinking and reading. It is true that middle class socialist intellectuals are less reliable than working class socialist intellectuals. What the latter thinks cuts with the grain and their life experience, while for the former socialist theory cuts against that grain.</p>
<p>But when working class socialists abandon intellect altogether, when they sneer at books and reading and places of learning and join in the jokes about how nobody can ever understand a word of Marx – then the road for them is Shinwell’s road, the same dreary march from youthful rebellion and enthusiasm to reactionary and platitudinous middle age and chauvinist, ennobled senility.</p>
<p>People like Shinwell insult and corrupt the ideas which inspired them in their youth. And when they die, they allow those ideas to be neutered and patronised by Tory prime ministers and editors of the <strong>Sunday Express</strong>.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
101 years of not thinking
(May 1986)
From Socialist Worker, 17 May 1986.
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.
FOR A FEW days last week the air was thick with the plummy noises of important people welcoming another lifelong rebel safely home to rest.
Everyone loved Manny Shinwell. In the House of Lords, Lord Whitelaw; at his funeral, the Thatcher knight and editor of the Sunday Express, Sir John Junor; in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher herself – all rushed to honour Manny. I pause for a moment here because my mentor, Harry McShane, always said that there were only two of the Red Clydesiders for whom he ever had any time: John Wheatley and Emmanuel Shinwell.
When I confronted him with the hideous reality of Emmanuel Shinwell in the early 1960s, Harry would shake his head and say, ‘Yes, that’s all very well, but you should have heard his speeches in the famous 40-hour strike in Glasgow in 1919’.
Shinwell was magnificent during that strike and the vast agitation which accompanied it, Harry always insisted. Since he was there and his judgement on such matters was almost always impeccable, I accept it. But consider. Even by that time, most socialists had a healthy suspicion of Shinwell. He had not joined the strong anti-war movement in the West of Scotland working class at that time.
After he came out of prison in 1919, he moved quickly to the right. He went to parliament in 1922 and was in government in 1924.
He supported Ramsay MacDonald against Cook, Maxton and Wheatley in 1928; but was quick to turn on MacDonald when there was a chance of winning his seat from him In every single major argument in the Labour Party since, Shinwell has been on the right, if not on the extreme right.
His former commitment to class war changed very quickly to a commitment to patriotic wars, almost every one of which he supported. He backed Eden and the Tories in their invasion of Suez in 1956. He backed Thatcher in the Falklands in 1982 and I dare say he would have backed her in Libya too. He loved wars and Britain fighting them. No doubt that is why everyone calls him a ‘fighter’.
He was a mean, spiteful, pompous, bullying man. He was always sneering at ‘middle class intellectuals’. He sneered, too, at political theory, especially Marxist theory, which, he boasted, he never read.
This bluff common-man, give it-to-em-straight approach was good for an ovation at Labour Party conferences but Shinwell’s own life spells out the awful lesson of what happens to working class agitators when they stop thinking and reading. It is true that middle class socialist intellectuals are less reliable than working class socialist intellectuals. What the latter thinks cuts with the grain and their life experience, while for the former socialist theory cuts against that grain.
But when working class socialists abandon intellect altogether, when they sneer at books and reading and places of learning and join in the jokes about how nobody can ever understand a word of Marx – then the road for them is Shinwell’s road, the same dreary march from youthful rebellion and enthusiasm to reactionary and platitudinous middle age and chauvinist, ennobled senility.
People like Shinwell insult and corrupt the ideas which inspired them in their youth. And when they die, they allow those ideas to be neutered and patronised by Tory prime ministers and editors of the Sunday Express.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Born Unfree and Unequal</h1>
<h3>(April 2003)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Review</strong>, No.273, April 2003, p.18-19.<br>
Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.<br>
Downloaded from the new <a href="http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/" target="new">Socialist Review Archive</a><br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>Capitalism’s claim of promoting democracy is continually undermined by the growing gap between rich and poor.</em></p>
<p class="fst">In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t.<br>
</p>
<h4>Increase in inequality</h4>
<p class="fst">This is an ancient and familiar division. In the age of Bush and Blair, it has grown almost out of recognition. Both leaders and both governments are hell-bent on increasing it. Examples are so obtrusive and frequent that it is almost embarrassing to repeat them. A report earlier this year by the American Federal Reserve estimated that in the early Clinton years, 1992-98, the ‘net worth’ of the richest 10 percent in the United States stayed fairly steady at 13 times more than the poorest 20 percent. Between 1998 to 2001 the gap shot up to 22.4 times more, and is still rising. Jared Bernstein of the normally sober Economic Policy Institute was shocked. He warned, ‘I think the increase in inequality that’s evident in this report is really pretty alarming. It should really alert those who are thinking about implementing aggressive tax policies.’ Perhaps he was thinking of President George W. Bush, who responded to the alert by cutting taxes on dividends paid by a handful of the American rich who he represents.</p>
<p>In Britain the gap is equally horrific, though less dramatically documented. Everyone knows about the poor – nine and a half million homes that can’t afford proper heating, eight million people who can’t afford one or more essential household items like fridges, telephones and carpets, four million who can’t afford fresh fruit and vegetables. The rich are more comfortably protected from statistics – the National Office of Statistics keeps no figures for the richest 1 percent, but everyone accepts that under Blair and Brown the rich and super-rich have sailed off into the stratosphere leaving those impoverished millions in the gutter.</p>
<p>Nor is it quite accurate to moan about the divisions between rich and poor countries. Of course, the statistics of that division are shocking, and of course the rich countries gang together in the G8 to make sure the division continues. But the divisions persist, sometimes even more horrifically, in those poor countries too. The World Wealth Report by the US banker Merrill Lynch in 2000 charted the rapid increase in millionaires all over the world, but found the rise sharpest in Asia, a continent made up mainly of desperately poor people.</p>
<p>These divisions are a far clearer guide to the world crisis than the rise in terrorism or rogue regimes. Indeed, they explain both. The fact that rogue regimes can continue to dominate their people, or that terrorism seems so attractive to so many of the dispossessed, flows directly from the divisions of wealth and property all over the world. The yawning and ever increasing gap between the wealthy and the masses is the central flaw in the capitalist economic system to which all the world’s leaders, including the rogue regimes, subscribe. Any policy that does not seek to solve that problem is bound to fail. Any war, and particularly an expensive war like the one in Iraq, can only widen those divisions and therefore make things worse.</p>
<p>Some people still argue that these divisions can best be healed by the democratic process that obtains in Europe and the US. In the old days of the last century an influential group of people called social democrats argued that with the votes of the masses behind them they could, in their words, achieve a ‘fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’. That was the British Labour Party’s official policy in 1973, 1974 (twice) and even (with the word ‘irreversible’ tactfully left out) in 1979. Such a promise is almost unthinkable today. The Labour Party, like the Democratic Party in the US, is now a plaything of the rich. The government’s policies are manacled to the priorities of the rich. The rich have, quite literally, bought their way into the government as firmly as have their corporate colleagues in the US.</p>
<p>One result of this abandonment of social democracy has been the decline in democracy itself. If the policies of the competing parties are the same, if Democrat is really the same as Republican and Labour the same as Tory, then what’s the point in voting? The poor, the workers and the dispossessed lose their champions and, quite logically, abstain from voting. A great wailing went up when less than 60 percent of those eligible used their votes in the 2001 general election, but that has been the situation in the US for as long as anyone can remember. If electoral politics gets taken over by the rich, used by the rich for their corruptions and their power games, why should the poor and the workers give credibility to that process with their votes?</p>
<p>One sad result of this sad process has been the decline of socialist ideas. Many Labour supporters conclude from the long series of Labour failures that the original central inspiration of Labour – socialism – was flawed. Exactly the opposite is the case. The central ideas of socialism are reinforced every day by the continuing disaster of capitalist society. The unimaginable corruptions of private enterprise in recent years – Enron, WorldCom, Ahold, Railtrack, Equitable Life, hedge funds, split investment ‘trusts’, the collapse of private pension funds – are all contemporary proof of the case for public enterprise, for a planned economy in place of one cast adrift in a sea of stock-market chaos.<br>
</p>
<h4>Controlled from below</h4>
<p class="fst">The growing gap between rich and poor is the clearest possible proof of the need for equality – for a society where people whatever their abilities earn roughly the same. And the hierarchical nature of control and power under capitalism – every discrimination, every arbitrary sacking and arrogant abuse of workers by corporate bullies – shouts out for a society controlled from below, a genuine democracy whose institutions are firmly and irrevocably fixed among the masses. The meteoric decline of social democracy in the last three decades leads many people to believe that such a democracy is idealistic, unobtainable. But the truth is that every time the masses stir themselves for reform, they automatically throw up organisations far more democratic than anything experienced or patronised by parliaments.</p>
<p>The notion of a representative democracy controlled from below where the representatives are not only elected but can be instantly recalled by the represented, and where the representatives not only promote policies but carry them out, is as relevant today as it was when it was first put into practice by the Paris Commune 132 years ago. The only certainty about such a democracy is that by its nature it cannot possibly be introduced by fawning parliaments such as the one at Westminster, still less by the lobbyists’ plaything on Capitol Hill in Washington. It can only come from a movement from below.</p>
<p>Such a movement is much more easy to understand today than even a year ago. The vast movement against war in Iraq – by far the biggest such movement I have seen even in my long lifetime – shows how many people can and will act when they see their governments acting irresponsibly. Many of those millions of people who have demonstrated against the war feel just as strongly about the way the world and its politics are run by corporations, for profit, for the rich, by exploiting the workers and the poor. They are shocked by the constant examples of capitalist waste, of money and wealth spent on frivolity rather than on meeting the needs of a world pining in pain. A recent meeting of the G8 countries agreed to spend a sum of money on the poor that was only just equivalent to the cost of organising G8 conferences!</p>
<p>If the mighty human energy unleashed to contest the war can be directed to organise for socialism and against capitalism, if the power of the people who do the work can be organised against those who profit from it, a real prospect opens up for a new and genuine socialist democracy which can truly liberate the world not just from dictators and weapons of mass destruction but from those who profit from both.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Born Unfree and Unequal
(April 2003)
From Socialist Review, No.273, April 2003, p.18-19.
Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review.
Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Capitalism’s claim of promoting democracy is continually undermined by the growing gap between rich and poor.
In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction.
This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t.
Increase in inequality
This is an ancient and familiar division. In the age of Bush and Blair, it has grown almost out of recognition. Both leaders and both governments are hell-bent on increasing it. Examples are so obtrusive and frequent that it is almost embarrassing to repeat them. A report earlier this year by the American Federal Reserve estimated that in the early Clinton years, 1992-98, the ‘net worth’ of the richest 10 percent in the United States stayed fairly steady at 13 times more than the poorest 20 percent. Between 1998 to 2001 the gap shot up to 22.4 times more, and is still rising. Jared Bernstein of the normally sober Economic Policy Institute was shocked. He warned, ‘I think the increase in inequality that’s evident in this report is really pretty alarming. It should really alert those who are thinking about implementing aggressive tax policies.’ Perhaps he was thinking of President George W. Bush, who responded to the alert by cutting taxes on dividends paid by a handful of the American rich who he represents.
In Britain the gap is equally horrific, though less dramatically documented. Everyone knows about the poor – nine and a half million homes that can’t afford proper heating, eight million people who can’t afford one or more essential household items like fridges, telephones and carpets, four million who can’t afford fresh fruit and vegetables. The rich are more comfortably protected from statistics – the National Office of Statistics keeps no figures for the richest 1 percent, but everyone accepts that under Blair and Brown the rich and super-rich have sailed off into the stratosphere leaving those impoverished millions in the gutter.
Nor is it quite accurate to moan about the divisions between rich and poor countries. Of course, the statistics of that division are shocking, and of course the rich countries gang together in the G8 to make sure the division continues. But the divisions persist, sometimes even more horrifically, in those poor countries too. The World Wealth Report by the US banker Merrill Lynch in 2000 charted the rapid increase in millionaires all over the world, but found the rise sharpest in Asia, a continent made up mainly of desperately poor people.
These divisions are a far clearer guide to the world crisis than the rise in terrorism or rogue regimes. Indeed, they explain both. The fact that rogue regimes can continue to dominate their people, or that terrorism seems so attractive to so many of the dispossessed, flows directly from the divisions of wealth and property all over the world. The yawning and ever increasing gap between the wealthy and the masses is the central flaw in the capitalist economic system to which all the world’s leaders, including the rogue regimes, subscribe. Any policy that does not seek to solve that problem is bound to fail. Any war, and particularly an expensive war like the one in Iraq, can only widen those divisions and therefore make things worse.
Some people still argue that these divisions can best be healed by the democratic process that obtains in Europe and the US. In the old days of the last century an influential group of people called social democrats argued that with the votes of the masses behind them they could, in their words, achieve a ‘fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’. That was the British Labour Party’s official policy in 1973, 1974 (twice) and even (with the word ‘irreversible’ tactfully left out) in 1979. Such a promise is almost unthinkable today. The Labour Party, like the Democratic Party in the US, is now a plaything of the rich. The government’s policies are manacled to the priorities of the rich. The rich have, quite literally, bought their way into the government as firmly as have their corporate colleagues in the US.
One result of this abandonment of social democracy has been the decline in democracy itself. If the policies of the competing parties are the same, if Democrat is really the same as Republican and Labour the same as Tory, then what’s the point in voting? The poor, the workers and the dispossessed lose their champions and, quite logically, abstain from voting. A great wailing went up when less than 60 percent of those eligible used their votes in the 2001 general election, but that has been the situation in the US for as long as anyone can remember. If electoral politics gets taken over by the rich, used by the rich for their corruptions and their power games, why should the poor and the workers give credibility to that process with their votes?
One sad result of this sad process has been the decline of socialist ideas. Many Labour supporters conclude from the long series of Labour failures that the original central inspiration of Labour – socialism – was flawed. Exactly the opposite is the case. The central ideas of socialism are reinforced every day by the continuing disaster of capitalist society. The unimaginable corruptions of private enterprise in recent years – Enron, WorldCom, Ahold, Railtrack, Equitable Life, hedge funds, split investment ‘trusts’, the collapse of private pension funds – are all contemporary proof of the case for public enterprise, for a planned economy in place of one cast adrift in a sea of stock-market chaos.
Controlled from below
The growing gap between rich and poor is the clearest possible proof of the need for equality – for a society where people whatever their abilities earn roughly the same. And the hierarchical nature of control and power under capitalism – every discrimination, every arbitrary sacking and arrogant abuse of workers by corporate bullies – shouts out for a society controlled from below, a genuine democracy whose institutions are firmly and irrevocably fixed among the masses. The meteoric decline of social democracy in the last three decades leads many people to believe that such a democracy is idealistic, unobtainable. But the truth is that every time the masses stir themselves for reform, they automatically throw up organisations far more democratic than anything experienced or patronised by parliaments.
The notion of a representative democracy controlled from below where the representatives are not only elected but can be instantly recalled by the represented, and where the representatives not only promote policies but carry them out, is as relevant today as it was when it was first put into practice by the Paris Commune 132 years ago. The only certainty about such a democracy is that by its nature it cannot possibly be introduced by fawning parliaments such as the one at Westminster, still less by the lobbyists’ plaything on Capitol Hill in Washington. It can only come from a movement from below.
Such a movement is much more easy to understand today than even a year ago. The vast movement against war in Iraq – by far the biggest such movement I have seen even in my long lifetime – shows how many people can and will act when they see their governments acting irresponsibly. Many of those millions of people who have demonstrated against the war feel just as strongly about the way the world and its politics are run by corporations, for profit, for the rich, by exploiting the workers and the poor. They are shocked by the constant examples of capitalist waste, of money and wealth spent on frivolity rather than on meeting the needs of a world pining in pain. A recent meeting of the G8 countries agreed to spend a sum of money on the poor that was only just equivalent to the cost of organising G8 conferences!
If the mighty human energy unleashed to contest the war can be directed to organise for socialism and against capitalism, if the power of the people who do the work can be organised against those who profit from it, a real prospect opens up for a new and genuine socialist democracy which can truly liberate the world not just from dictators and weapons of mass destruction but from those who profit from both.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Derry: the grim facts about<br>
Ulster’s divide and rule city ...</h1>
<h3>(21 December 1968)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/etol/newspape/sw-gb/1968/index.html#n0102" target="new">No. 102</a>, 21 December 1968, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">THE DEMONSTRATIONS which have erupted in Northern Ireland and which, in spite of the sacking of Home Secretary Craig, will almost certainly continue, started in Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second city.</p>
<p>Derry’s predicament sums up the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the Unionist government.</p>
<p>Here are some of the facts about the city which cannot be found in government handouts.<br>
</p>
<h4>Sub-Standard</h4>
<p class="fst"><b>Housing.</b> There are approximately 12.000 houses in the city, 40 per cent of which are sub-standard.</p>
<p>According to the 1961 census, 45 per cent of the households in the city do not have sole use of hot water; 54 per cent do not have a bath; 16 per cent do not have a kitchen sink.</p>
<p>About 1,250 households are in ‘multiple occupation’, sharing household amenities.</p>
<p>The Derry Housing Association has seven volumes, incorporating some 1,410 documents of cases of ‘intolerable’ housing conditions. And these are all Catholics.</p>
<p>To these have to be added at least another 300 households in the Protestant areas of The Fountain and Waterside, where conditions are no better than in the Catholic slums.<br>
</p>
<h4>Overcrowding</h4>
<p class="fst">In 1966,the city’s Medical Officer of Health,who is President of the Apprentice Boys, a high-powered Masonic-type organisation named after the boys who closed the Derry gates against the invading armies in 1688, reported: ‘Overcrowding plays a .arge part in the causation of tuberculosis in the area.’</p>
<p class="fst"><b>House-building:</b> The Derry Corporation, which is Unionist-controlled, built no houses in 1967. The following table speaks for itself:</p>
<table cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" align="center" width="250">
<tbody><tr>
<th>
<p class="sm1">Town</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">Pop.</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">Cncl. Houses<br>
built in last<br>
5 years*</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Coleraine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">13,578</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">336</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Newry</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12,214</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">659</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Portadown</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">20,710</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">535</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Larne</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">17,278</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">212</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Limavady</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 4,811</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">266</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Londonderry</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">55,681</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">197</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">The rate of house-building in Derry (70 houses per 1,000 people) since the war is the slowest of any housing authority in the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>And that’s including the effort of the government-sponsored Northern Ireland Housing Trust,which has done most of the house-building in Derry since 1958.</p>
<p>The vote is only available in local elections to ratepayers, that is, householders in separate dwellings. More than a quarter of the adults in Derry (8,400 people) cannot vote.</p>
<p>There are three wards: South, North and Waterside.</p>
<p>Half the Derry people live in South ward. Nearly all of them are Catholics, who vote eight Nationalists on to the Corporation.</p>
<p>In North and Waterside there are small Protestant majorities, who return 12 Unionists. Protestants make up about 25 per cent of the Derry population, but their party controls the Corporation.<br>
</p>
<h4>Turned Down</h4>
<p class="fst">This delicate balance controls the Corporation’s housing policy.</p>
<p>A proposal by Derry Housing Association to build 450 houses in Pennyburn was turned down – for fear of rehousing Catholics in a Protestant area.</p>
<p>Similarly, the Protestant slum-dwellers must stay where they are. To move them out to council houses would mean losing valuable votes.</p>
<p>Everything is neatly carved up and Unionists and Nationalists don’t bother to fight elections.</p>
<p>Elections don’t happen, unless,like last year, for the first time, the Northern Ireland Labour Party intervenes, getting about 30 per cent of the vote in Catholic and Protestant wards.</p>
<p>Unemployment is 12.5 per cent in Derry. 17.4 per cent of males are out of work.</p>
<p>Unemployment in Northern Ireland depends very much on the religious nature of the area.<br>
</p>
<h4>High and Low</h4>
<p class="fst">Derry is Catholic – so unemployment is high. Belfast is Protestant – so unemployment is relatively low:</p>
<table cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<th>
<p class="sm1">Catholic<br>
Towns</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">Unemployment<br>
Rate %</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Londonderry</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Newry</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">15.1</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Strabane</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">16.7</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Enniskillen</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">17.9</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Kilkeel</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">20.4</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>
<p class="sm1">Protestant<br>
Towns</p>
</th>
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Belfast</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 5.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Coleraine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8.8</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Ballymena</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.1</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Portadown</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.8</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Newton</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.7</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Lurgan</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 3.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Antrim</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 2.5</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Derry: the grim facts about
Ulster’s divide and rule city ...
(21 December 1968)
From Socialist Worker, No. 102, 21 December 1968, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
THE DEMONSTRATIONS which have erupted in Northern Ireland and which, in spite of the sacking of Home Secretary Craig, will almost certainly continue, started in Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second city.
Derry’s predicament sums up the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the Unionist government.
Here are some of the facts about the city which cannot be found in government handouts.
Sub-Standard
Housing. There are approximately 12.000 houses in the city, 40 per cent of which are sub-standard.
According to the 1961 census, 45 per cent of the households in the city do not have sole use of hot water; 54 per cent do not have a bath; 16 per cent do not have a kitchen sink.
About 1,250 households are in ‘multiple occupation’, sharing household amenities.
The Derry Housing Association has seven volumes, incorporating some 1,410 documents of cases of ‘intolerable’ housing conditions. And these are all Catholics.
To these have to be added at least another 300 households in the Protestant areas of The Fountain and Waterside, where conditions are no better than in the Catholic slums.
Overcrowding
In 1966,the city’s Medical Officer of Health,who is President of the Apprentice Boys, a high-powered Masonic-type organisation named after the boys who closed the Derry gates against the invading armies in 1688, reported: ‘Overcrowding plays a .arge part in the causation of tuberculosis in the area.’
House-building: The Derry Corporation, which is Unionist-controlled, built no houses in 1967. The following table speaks for itself:
Town
Pop.
Cncl. Houses
built in last
5 years*
Coleraine
13,578
336
Newry
12,214
659
Portadown
20,710
535
Larne
17,278
212
Limavady
4,811
266
Londonderry
55,681
197
The rate of house-building in Derry (70 houses per 1,000 people) since the war is the slowest of any housing authority in the United Kingdom.
And that’s including the effort of the government-sponsored Northern Ireland Housing Trust,which has done most of the house-building in Derry since 1958.
The vote is only available in local elections to ratepayers, that is, householders in separate dwellings. More than a quarter of the adults in Derry (8,400 people) cannot vote.
There are three wards: South, North and Waterside.
Half the Derry people live in South ward. Nearly all of them are Catholics, who vote eight Nationalists on to the Corporation.
In North and Waterside there are small Protestant majorities, who return 12 Unionists. Protestants make up about 25 per cent of the Derry population, but their party controls the Corporation.
Turned Down
This delicate balance controls the Corporation’s housing policy.
A proposal by Derry Housing Association to build 450 houses in Pennyburn was turned down – for fear of rehousing Catholics in a Protestant area.
Similarly, the Protestant slum-dwellers must stay where they are. To move them out to council houses would mean losing valuable votes.
Everything is neatly carved up and Unionists and Nationalists don’t bother to fight elections.
Elections don’t happen, unless,like last year, for the first time, the Northern Ireland Labour Party intervenes, getting about 30 per cent of the vote in Catholic and Protestant wards.
Unemployment is 12.5 per cent in Derry. 17.4 per cent of males are out of work.
Unemployment in Northern Ireland depends very much on the religious nature of the area.
High and Low
Derry is Catholic – so unemployment is high. Belfast is Protestant – so unemployment is relatively low:
Catholic
Towns
Unemployment
Rate %
Londonderry
12.5
Newry
15.1
Strabane
16.7
Enniskillen
17.9
Kilkeel
20.4
Protestant
Towns
Belfast
5.5
Coleraine
8.8
Ballymena
3.1
Portadown
3.8
Newton
3.7
Lurgan
3.5
Antrim
2.5
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<h2 class="western">Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Ruth First</h1>
<h3>(January 1988)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker</strong>, January 1988.<br>
Reprinted in Paul Foot, <strong>Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980</strong>–<strong>1990</strong> (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 157–159.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">I imagine there are few socialists in London (or who have recently travelled to London) who have not by now seen <em>A World Apart</em>, the story of Ruth First, as seen through the eyes of her daughter.</p>
<p>I fear the film is so very, very good, and its message so powerful, that it may not last long on the screen. So if there is anyone who hasn’t see it – just get down there as soon as possible.</p>
<p>There may be some people who are a little puzzled by the final titles which announce that Ruth First was assassinated in Mozambique in 1983. So she was, but the film ends some twenty years earlier, and admirers of Ruth (and there could hardly be any non-admirers alter the film) might be puzzled as to what happened in the interim.</p>
<p>During the film Ruth First’s life is all in South Africa, and she died not far away, so you might think that she spent all her life there. She didn’t. Soon after the period covered by the film, she escaped from house arrest and fled to Britain. She was here all through the rest of the 1960s and, I think, all the 1970s. She joined a huge army of South African exiles who made a profound impact on the British Left in those years.</p>
<p>Ruth wrote some marvellous books. Her book <strong>117 Days</strong> is the finest account I have ever read of the disorientation of the rebel prisoner in a torturer’s prison. Anyone who enjoyed the film should get hold of that book.</p>
<p>Unlike many of her friends and contemporaries, Ruth First believed that no progress would ever come to South Africa without armed struggle. I met her often at meetings, which she arranged, of South African guerrillas, trained in armed struggle, who came to London to build support for it. All these people, like Ruth, were members or supporters of the Communist Party. I was always both delighted to be invited, and rather ashamed to find myself (<em>every</em> time) arguing with them. I couldn’t understand why the discussion kept turning back to the <em>governments</em> of the new African states.</p>
<p>I remember one furious argument with Ruth about the deposing of Ben Bella in Algeria and his replacement by Boumedienne. She, and the others, regarded this as a great sign of progress. They had the facts to prove it: Boumedienne’s record in struggle, in commitment and in guns.</p>
<p>Over the years the same basic argument rocked back and forth. I was told that the Rhodesian armed struggle depended on ‘the friendliness of the front line states’ for its existence. These states, perhaps against their will, behave like bosses towards the people, and as agents for the great companies that carve up Africa. I could not understand the argument that placed these governments above the guerrillas’ own commitment and their own strength.</p>
<p>In the end, Ruth First and these brave young men and women wanted a society precisely <em>a world apart</em> from the world run by Kaunda, Nyerere, Boumedienne, Nasser and the rest.</p>
<p>Since they wanted something different, since they represented something different, since they were fighting literally to the death for something different, why did they pretend and speak so eloquently for people who represented more of the same?</p>
<p>I never got an answer to these questions. On the other hand, to be fair, I never stopped getting the invitations.</p>
<p>Ruth First had a sort of grudging respect for the International Socialists (the Socialist Workers Party’s forerunners). She thought that underneath it all we were ‘Trotskyist splitters’, but she did notice that whenever there was a demo or a clash of any kind with apartheid, we were always in the front line.</p>
<p>On 14 September 1973 she spoke at a demonstration organized by the IS in Hyde Park. It was to protest against a mine disaster which had killed, I think, twelve African miners as a result of the most appalling employers’ negligence.</p>
<p>I remember the date exactly because the disaster happened on the 11th, the same day as the Chilean coup.</p>
<p>The Communist Party organized a huge demo on Chile. We guessed wrong and organized one on South Africa. About 600 came to ours, about 20,000 to the other (which we joined rather abjectly, after our meeting was over).</p>
<p>In spite of the clash of party loyalties, Ruth First agreed at once to speak on our platform. Before the meeting, we watched the masses forming elsewhere in the park. ‘You made a mistake coming here,’ I laughed at her. ‘No’, she grinned back. ‘I’ll speak at any meeting against racist South Africa. You made the mistake, not I.’</p>
<p>For once, I thought, she won the argument.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Ruth First
(January 1988)
From Socialist Worker, January 1988.
Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 157–159.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I imagine there are few socialists in London (or who have recently travelled to London) who have not by now seen A World Apart, the story of Ruth First, as seen through the eyes of her daughter.
I fear the film is so very, very good, and its message so powerful, that it may not last long on the screen. So if there is anyone who hasn’t see it – just get down there as soon as possible.
There may be some people who are a little puzzled by the final titles which announce that Ruth First was assassinated in Mozambique in 1983. So she was, but the film ends some twenty years earlier, and admirers of Ruth (and there could hardly be any non-admirers alter the film) might be puzzled as to what happened in the interim.
During the film Ruth First’s life is all in South Africa, and she died not far away, so you might think that she spent all her life there. She didn’t. Soon after the period covered by the film, she escaped from house arrest and fled to Britain. She was here all through the rest of the 1960s and, I think, all the 1970s. She joined a huge army of South African exiles who made a profound impact on the British Left in those years.
Ruth wrote some marvellous books. Her book 117 Days is the finest account I have ever read of the disorientation of the rebel prisoner in a torturer’s prison. Anyone who enjoyed the film should get hold of that book.
Unlike many of her friends and contemporaries, Ruth First believed that no progress would ever come to South Africa without armed struggle. I met her often at meetings, which she arranged, of South African guerrillas, trained in armed struggle, who came to London to build support for it. All these people, like Ruth, were members or supporters of the Communist Party. I was always both delighted to be invited, and rather ashamed to find myself (every time) arguing with them. I couldn’t understand why the discussion kept turning back to the governments of the new African states.
I remember one furious argument with Ruth about the deposing of Ben Bella in Algeria and his replacement by Boumedienne. She, and the others, regarded this as a great sign of progress. They had the facts to prove it: Boumedienne’s record in struggle, in commitment and in guns.
Over the years the same basic argument rocked back and forth. I was told that the Rhodesian armed struggle depended on ‘the friendliness of the front line states’ for its existence. These states, perhaps against their will, behave like bosses towards the people, and as agents for the great companies that carve up Africa. I could not understand the argument that placed these governments above the guerrillas’ own commitment and their own strength.
In the end, Ruth First and these brave young men and women wanted a society precisely a world apart from the world run by Kaunda, Nyerere, Boumedienne, Nasser and the rest.
Since they wanted something different, since they represented something different, since they were fighting literally to the death for something different, why did they pretend and speak so eloquently for people who represented more of the same?
I never got an answer to these questions. On the other hand, to be fair, I never stopped getting the invitations.
Ruth First had a sort of grudging respect for the International Socialists (the Socialist Workers Party’s forerunners). She thought that underneath it all we were ‘Trotskyist splitters’, but she did notice that whenever there was a demo or a clash of any kind with apartheid, we were always in the front line.
On 14 September 1973 she spoke at a demonstration organized by the IS in Hyde Park. It was to protest against a mine disaster which had killed, I think, twelve African miners as a result of the most appalling employers’ negligence.
I remember the date exactly because the disaster happened on the 11th, the same day as the Chilean coup.
The Communist Party organized a huge demo on Chile. We guessed wrong and organized one on South Africa. About 600 came to ours, about 20,000 to the other (which we joined rather abjectly, after our meeting was over).
In spite of the clash of party loyalties, Ruth First agreed at once to speak on our platform. Before the meeting, we watched the masses forming elsewhere in the park. ‘You made a mistake coming here,’ I laughed at her. ‘No’, she grinned back. ‘I’ll speak at any meeting against racist South Africa. You made the mistake, not I.’
For once, I thought, she won the argument.
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<h2>Paul Foot</h2>
<h1>Marx’s real tradition</h1>
<h3>(March 1990)</h3>
<hr class="infotop">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Worker Review</strong>, No. 129, March 1990.<br>
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the <a href="https://secure.marxists.org/copyright-permissions/paul-foot.txt" class="absref" target="new">Estate</a>. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2013.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot">
<p class="fst">THE TUMULTUOUS revolts in Eastern Europe have divided socialists into two camps. In one camp there is gloom and introspection. In the other there is excitement and delight.</p>
<p>The two camps represent two different traditions, both calling themselves socialist. For much of the last hundred years or so, these two traditions have become entangled with one another. We had better disentangle them fast, for one tradition is now dead; the other lives. Unless they can free themselves fast, the living will be dragged down by the dead.</p>
<p>“Ever since the beginning of time” says a disembodied voice over a spinning globe at the start of Cecil B. de Mille’s <em>Samson and Delilah</em>, “man has striven to achieve a democratic state on earth.” That was probably putting it a little high (especially as the voice went on to assert; “such a man was Samson”), but there is something in it.</p>
<p>In all human history, which is the history of exploitation, there have been people who pined or fought for a day when exploitation would cease. Such people wrote Utopias in which men and women lived side by side in freedom, prosperity and peace.</p>
<p>Some of these Utopias were in heaven, some were on earth. Their instigators were benevolent men and women who saw themselves as parents leading bemused and discomforted children to a promised land. They were therefore, all of them, elitists, none more so than the French Utopian “socialists” of the early 19th century. They believed their own education, feeling and compassion would usher in the new society.</p>
<p>In England the word “socialism” was first popularised by such a man: Robert Owen. Owen detested the exploitation he saw all around him during the industrial revolution. He urged benevolent employers to set up dream factories in which the workers would get clothed, fed, educated and introduced to the fine arts.</p>
<p>He didn’t just say it; he did it. If you happen to be near Lanark in Scotland you can go and see the carefully kept result: Owen’s model mill in which most of his ideals were put into effect, without the slightest impact on exploitation in the West of Scotland or anywhere else.</p>
<p>New Lanark and all similar Utopias and charities were greeted by the young Karl Marx with the ferocious contempt for which he had a peculiar genius. Marx reckoned that for the first time in history it was possible to end exploitation once and for all. Up to that time, so little was produced that there wasn’t enough to share with everyone. If there was to be any progress, therefore, a surplus had to be creamed off by a ruling class.</p>
<p>After the advances of production in the Industrial Revolution there <em>was</em> enough to go round. It was possible to talk (as they started to do in Germany only from 1842, when Marx was 24) of “socialism”, a society where things are produced and distributed socially, to fit everyone’s needs, and in which it is considered a crime for one person to grow rich from the labour of another.</p>
<p>How could such a society come about? Was it inevitable because it was so obviously fair and decent? Were industrialists, landlords, bankers suddenly to be struck, as St Paul pretended he was on the road to Damascus, by a blinding light which would show them how monstrous their riches were in the midst of so much poverty?<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">FROM a very early age, Marx recognised the ruthlessness of class rule. He observed how the ruling class behaved like vampires. They sucked blood, which led them to be thirsty for more of it. They were as impervious as vampires to pleas for mercy.</p>
<p>They would relinquish their surplus, he concluded, only when it was siezed from them by the very class they robbed.</p>
<p>So the first reason why Marx reviled all collaborators with the capitalist system is that they made the abolition of that system and the creation of a socialist society more distant and difficult.</p>
<p>There was however a second reason, which was even more important to Marx and to his friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels. They were faced by an argument which we hear on all sides today. “The working class” they were told “are backward, ill-educated, racialist, dirty, mean. How can such a class create a new society free from exploitation and fear?”</p>
<p>Marx reacted angrily to such abuse. His descriptions, for instance, of the meetings of workers in Paris when he was first exiled there in the mid-1840s, are full of admiration. But he knew that exploiting society makes wretches of the exploited just as it makes monsters of the exploiters.</p>
<p>He knew that centuries of exploitation had left the masses full of, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. And this was the best reason of all for the revolution.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overturning it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”</p>
<p class="fst">That was in the <a href="../../../marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm" target="new"><strong>German Ideology</strong></a>, written in 1847, when Marx was 29; and the theme – the importance of the self-emancipation of the working class – goes on and on throughout all his writing. It is the very lynch-pin of Marxism.</p>
<p>When in 1864 he wrote the principles of the First International Working Men’s Association his very <a href="../../../../history/international/iwma/documents/1864/rules.htm" target="new">first clause</a> said: “Considering that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves ...” This clause was written into the membership cards of every member of the International. Seven years after the formation of the International the workers of Paris rose, threw off the muck of ages, and set up their own administration entirely free from exploitation. Marx, in a fever of excitement and enthusiasm, wrote perhaps <a href="../../../marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm" target="new">the most powerful political pamphlet in all history</a>, insisting that the Commune’s greatest achievement was the <em>self-emancipation</em> of the working class:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“They have taken the actual management of the revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the people itself; displacing the state machinery of the ruling class by a governmental machinery of their own. This is their ineffable crime!”</p>
<p class="fst">The most consistent theme of all Marx’s writing is this zest for the potential of the working class in struggle. It goes back to the very earliest of Marx’s ideas, when as a young journalist he called himself an “extreme democrat”.</p>
<p>Vulgar Marxists of the bureaucratic school (“Marxists” whom Marx and Engels came to despise while they were alive) detect a “great shift” from Marx’s early idealistic journalism to his later scientific work. It is not a shift which Marx recognised. Rather, he noticed that he developed logically from a passionate belief in democracy to a passionate belief in communism.</p>
<p>Communism, brought about by a working class in motion, was the most democratic society conceivable, since it came about through democratic action and it removed the most undemocratic aspect of all: economic exploitation of the many by the few. By as early as 1845, Frederick Engels was spelling <a href="../../../marx/works/1845/12/01.htm" target="new">this</a> out in simple language:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Democracy nowadays is communism ... Democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses ... The proletarian parties are entirely right in inscribing the word ‘democracy’ on their banners.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THE DEMOCRATIC inspiration and the belief in self-emancipation (which are part of the same thing) are the essentials of Marxism. Without them, all the carefully constructed economics, all the earnest philosophy wither on the vine.</p>
<p>The spirit of a revolt, the need for a class battle against exploitation – these are the antidotes to the determinism of which Marx was so often accused.</p>
<p>The famous statement that people make their own history but they do not make it as they choose is usually quoted by Marxists with the accent on everything after “but”. In fact, the emphasis in the sentence is that men and women determine what happens to them. The point that they have to work within historical circumstances laid down for them is made only to ensure that they fight more effectively.</p>
<p>Not long after Marx died (in 1883) a new threat arose to the fight which he believed would soon be won. Men calling themselves Marxists found themselves at the head of “great labour movements”, vast trade unions, socialist newspapers, socialist sporting societies.</p>
<p>Such men started to wonder whether all this talk of revolution wasn’t going over the top. They felt they might get to positions of power and influence through the newly-granted franchise, and that when they did so they could legislate for socialism without having to go through messy and probably bloody revolution.</p>
<p>Thus, at the end of the 1890s, Edward Bernstein, like countless others after him, proposed to the masses that their world could be improved gradually and peacefully. All they needed to do was vote in a secret ballot. For Bernstein (and for Karl Kautsky, though few noticed his backsliding at this stage) the idea of millions of workers emancipating themselves in the streets and factories was faintly distasteful, if not downright dangerous.</p>
<p>The works of these men (except on the fringes: Bernstein, perhaps, on Cromwell; Kautsky on Christianity) do not survive with any relevance today. What does survive is the furious reply delivered to Bernstein and company by the Polish-born revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg.</p>
<p>Her reply came in two parts: <a href="../../../luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Social Reform or Revolution</strong></a> (1900) and <a href="../../../luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/index.htm" target="new"><strong>The Mass Strike</strong></a> (1906). The common theme of both pamphlets, the element which lifts them above all other contemporary political writing and makes them so important today, is the “living political school”, “the pulsating flesh and blood”, the “foaming wave” of the working class in struggle.</p>
<p>Luxemburg fought like a tiger for Karl Marx’s central principle: that the workers can only be emancipated if they themselves overthrow capitalist society. She exulted in the 1905 Russian Revolution which in a few weeks knocked out an absolutism which had reigned unchecked (in spite of all sorts of benevolent reformers who tried to make it better) for centuries. She rejoiced from her prison cell at the Russian Revolution of 1917.</p>
<p>The Russian revolutionary socialists more than anyone else in all history understood Marx’s insistence on self-emancipation. Where Marx had called for it and encouraged it, they carried it out.</p>
<p>Reactionary historians and commentators tell us that the tight discipline of the Bolshevik Party made it an undemocratic organisation dedicated to commanding the workers, not representing them. The truth is exactly the opposite. The Bolshevik Party won its soviet majorities in the spring and summer of 1917 precisely because it took its stand on the strength, confidence and potential of the Russian workers. In <a href="../../../lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm" target="new"><strong>State and Revolution</strong></a> and <a href="../../../lenin/works/1918/prrk/index.htm" target="new"><strong>The Proletarian Revolution And The Renegade Kautsky</strong></a>, Lenin fulminated against parliamentary democracy because it was not democratic enough. It left the capitalist machine intact. It removed working class representatives from the cooperative atmosphere of everyday life in factories, mills, mines and offices.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">LENIN, in <strong>State and Revolution</strong> restated his belief in the “elective principle” as the cornerstone of any new socialist society. He repeated again and again in the months and years after October that the working class which had emancipated itself was the only hope for the Revolution. “I calculated’’ he said “<em>solely and exclusively</em> on the workers, soldiers and peasants being able to tackle better than the officials, better than the police, the practical and difficult problems of increasing the production of foodstuffs and their better distribution, the better provision of soldiers, etc. etc.”.</p>
<p>He told the First All Russian Congress of Soviets in January 1918:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In introducing workers’ control we knew it would take some time before it spread to the whole of Russia, but we wanted to show that we recognised only one road – <em>changes from below</em>: we wanted the workers themselves to draw up, from below, the new principles of economic conditions.”</p>
<p class="fst">Lenin’s inspiration, if less flamboyant, was exactly the same as Marx’s and Luxemburg’s. Their socialism depended on the exploitative society being overthrown in struggle by the workers. Lenin realised, therefore, that without the revolutionary class of self-emancipated workers, the revolution would, in his own words, “perish”.</p>
<p>Perish it did, for precisely that reason. The self-emancipators, the small Russian working class, were annihilated in war and famine. By 1921 all that was left of them was the top layer, the bureaucracy of revolutionaries without the class which put it there.</p>
<p>The self-emancipators were replaced by workers from the countryside who had not emancipated themselves or anyone else. The revolution in Germany was defeated. In Britain it never started. Russia was isolated; its revolutionary inspiration snuffed out. The revolution was lost. Soviet democracy was replaced by state capitalist tyranny.</p>
<p>Sad to say, most socialists and communists throughout the world did not notice that it was lost at all. Almost imperceptibly, communists who had been brought up to believe that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class became idol-worshippers in the old Utopian tradition; falling at the feet of Stalin as the benevolent Father of Socialism.</p>
<p>In the name of Marxism, the very essence of Marxism, its democratic and self-emancipatory spirit, was at first forgotten, later ridiculed and condemned. Dictatorship <em>over</em> the proletariat was hailed as dictatorship <em>of</em> the proletariat. Murdering opponents was hailed as democratic discipline. Communism and democracy, synonymous for Engels, became exact opposites for Stalinists.</p>
<p>More predictably anti-communists made the same mistake. They said there was a direct line from Lenin to Stalin; that all revolutions somehow end in tyranny. The answer to them is a simple one.</p>
<p>For all his myriad fetishes, racism and pettiness, Stalin bent his dictatorship to one central purpose: to squeeze out of Russia every single surviving breath of the Revolution. He killed all his former Bolshevik colleagues – save Lenin who died early enough to be turned (against everything he had ever believed) into another icon. Revolutionary decrees were repealed and replaced with their opposites.</p>
<p>Factory control was replaced by one-man management; educational reform by educational reaction; internationalism by nationalism and racism; free abortions by rigid abortion controls. The death penalty for serious crimes, abolished by the revolution, was re-imposed. Privileges, domestic servants and all the paraphernalia of ruling class “superiority” were the order of the day.</p>
<p>All this was heralded throughout the world as socialism – though the essence of socialism, Lenin’s control from below, had been turned into its very opposite, control from above.</p>
<p>After the Second World War, the tragedy repeated itself, as Marx would have said, this time as farce. In the carve-up of the victorious powers, Russia swiped six countries in Eastern Europe. In none of these had the working class emancipated itself. Their emancipation, instead, was imposed by Russian bayonets.</p>
<p>Replicas of Stalin’s state capitalist tyranny were set up in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and East Germany. The workers played no part in any of these governments. They did not even have the right to vote them out, as their fellow workers had in much of the West. Resistance of any kind, especially resistance in the workplaces, was met with the most horrific repression. Uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany were put down by tanks.</p>
<p>The economies were bent and corrupted to the sustenance of Great Russian imperialism. Ruling class bureaucracies set themselves up in Stalin’s image.</p>
<p>The countries came to be known as “socialist countries”. Either their relationship with Russia, or their centralised “planned” economies or their stuffed-shirted socialist rhetoric convinced hundreds of thousands of socialists in other countries that, at root, they were socialist. The word caught on in the Eastern European countries themselves, but with a different result.</p>
<p>In those countries, where the workers knew that they were being dragooned and terrorised, socialism became a synonym for brutal dictatorship and exploitation. Socialism, the great emancipation, became the word for slavery. And the revolt against that tyranny, when it came, and when it was led, as it inevitably had to be, by the working class, turned first and most viciously against anything which called itself “socialist”.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">NOW LARGE numbers of socialists, who spent much of their lives in some posture of obeisance to these “socialist countries” are fleeing the field.</p>
<p>Some of them are giving up all political commitment. Some, very few, place their faith in the “revolution from above” which they imagine has been set in motion, single-handedly by Mikhail Gorbachev. Others, probably the majority, have abandoned any talk of revolution, and now work for “reform from above” in the Labour Party and its equivalents.</p>
<p>The world in which we live is not in its essentials any different from the world which Marx described. It is still run on exploitative lines. A degenerate and cancerous capitalism still gnaws away at the lives of most of the world’s people. There is no sign that “reform from above” worries it even for a moment. It flicks aside the reformers with the same casual cynicism which Marx exposed.</p>
<p>The chief difference is that the working class, which still carries the hopes of change, is much bigger now than it was in Marx’s day. While sophisticated commentators insist that the working class is vanishing, it is growing by hundreds of thousands every year and by millions every decade. Russia herself now has sixty million exploited industrial workers: China over one hundred million and among the teeming, hungry masses of what was until recently known as the Third World, new robust organisations are arising, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted “like Venus from the foam”.</p>
<p>The events in Eastern Europe have proved like nothing else in the last 50 years that sudden volcanic social change does not happen when stockbrokers forecast it or academics work it out. It comes when the masses move, seek to emancipate themselves and in the process, in Marx’s famous phrase, “educate themselves, the educators”.</p>
<p>Dictators and bureaucracies can call themselves socialists for so long. In the end, the actions of the masses will sort them out, and start once more to reveal things as they are. An industrial economy which is “planned” in the interests of a militaristic and parasitic minority is not socialist. It is its opposite: state capitalist.</p>
<p>If state capitalism is being “conquered” by the masses emancipating themselves, then those same masses have blazed a path towards the conquering of all capitalism.</p>
<p>The urgent need for socialists is to kick the rotten corpse of state capitalism away from Rosa’s “living school” of self-emancipatory socialism; to assert as aggressively as ever the socialist tradition which started with Marx and Engels, and was taken on by Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian revolutionaries, and by a small band of socialists who knew all along that socialism and democracy are synonymous, that neither can ever exist without the other, and that both can only be achieved when the exploited masses use their irresistible power.</p>
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MIA > Archive > P. Foot
Paul Foot
Marx’s real tradition
(March 1990)
From Socialist Worker Review, No. 129, March 1990.
Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2013.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
THE TUMULTUOUS revolts in Eastern Europe have divided socialists into two camps. In one camp there is gloom and introspection. In the other there is excitement and delight.
The two camps represent two different traditions, both calling themselves socialist. For much of the last hundred years or so, these two traditions have become entangled with one another. We had better disentangle them fast, for one tradition is now dead; the other lives. Unless they can free themselves fast, the living will be dragged down by the dead.
“Ever since the beginning of time” says a disembodied voice over a spinning globe at the start of Cecil B. de Mille’s Samson and Delilah, “man has striven to achieve a democratic state on earth.” That was probably putting it a little high (especially as the voice went on to assert; “such a man was Samson”), but there is something in it.
In all human history, which is the history of exploitation, there have been people who pined or fought for a day when exploitation would cease. Such people wrote Utopias in which men and women lived side by side in freedom, prosperity and peace.
Some of these Utopias were in heaven, some were on earth. Their instigators were benevolent men and women who saw themselves as parents leading bemused and discomforted children to a promised land. They were therefore, all of them, elitists, none more so than the French Utopian “socialists” of the early 19th century. They believed their own education, feeling and compassion would usher in the new society.
In England the word “socialism” was first popularised by such a man: Robert Owen. Owen detested the exploitation he saw all around him during the industrial revolution. He urged benevolent employers to set up dream factories in which the workers would get clothed, fed, educated and introduced to the fine arts.
He didn’t just say it; he did it. If you happen to be near Lanark in Scotland you can go and see the carefully kept result: Owen’s model mill in which most of his ideals were put into effect, without the slightest impact on exploitation in the West of Scotland or anywhere else.
New Lanark and all similar Utopias and charities were greeted by the young Karl Marx with the ferocious contempt for which he had a peculiar genius. Marx reckoned that for the first time in history it was possible to end exploitation once and for all. Up to that time, so little was produced that there wasn’t enough to share with everyone. If there was to be any progress, therefore, a surplus had to be creamed off by a ruling class.
After the advances of production in the Industrial Revolution there was enough to go round. It was possible to talk (as they started to do in Germany only from 1842, when Marx was 24) of “socialism”, a society where things are produced and distributed socially, to fit everyone’s needs, and in which it is considered a crime for one person to grow rich from the labour of another.
How could such a society come about? Was it inevitable because it was so obviously fair and decent? Were industrialists, landlords, bankers suddenly to be struck, as St Paul pretended he was on the road to Damascus, by a blinding light which would show them how monstrous their riches were in the midst of so much poverty?
FROM a very early age, Marx recognised the ruthlessness of class rule. He observed how the ruling class behaved like vampires. They sucked blood, which led them to be thirsty for more of it. They were as impervious as vampires to pleas for mercy.
They would relinquish their surplus, he concluded, only when it was siezed from them by the very class they robbed.
So the first reason why Marx reviled all collaborators with the capitalist system is that they made the abolition of that system and the creation of a socialist society more distant and difficult.
There was however a second reason, which was even more important to Marx and to his friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels. They were faced by an argument which we hear on all sides today. “The working class” they were told “are backward, ill-educated, racialist, dirty, mean. How can such a class create a new society free from exploitation and fear?”
Marx reacted angrily to such abuse. His descriptions, for instance, of the meetings of workers in Paris when he was first exiled there in the mid-1840s, are full of admiration. But he knew that exploiting society makes wretches of the exploited just as it makes monsters of the exploiters.
He knew that centuries of exploitation had left the masses full of, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. And this was the best reason of all for the revolution.
“This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overturning it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”
That was in the German Ideology, written in 1847, when Marx was 29; and the theme – the importance of the self-emancipation of the working class – goes on and on throughout all his writing. It is the very lynch-pin of Marxism.
When in 1864 he wrote the principles of the First International Working Men’s Association his very first clause said: “Considering that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves ...” This clause was written into the membership cards of every member of the International. Seven years after the formation of the International the workers of Paris rose, threw off the muck of ages, and set up their own administration entirely free from exploitation. Marx, in a fever of excitement and enthusiasm, wrote perhaps the most powerful political pamphlet in all history, insisting that the Commune’s greatest achievement was the self-emancipation of the working class:
“They have taken the actual management of the revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the people itself; displacing the state machinery of the ruling class by a governmental machinery of their own. This is their ineffable crime!”
The most consistent theme of all Marx’s writing is this zest for the potential of the working class in struggle. It goes back to the very earliest of Marx’s ideas, when as a young journalist he called himself an “extreme democrat”.
Vulgar Marxists of the bureaucratic school (“Marxists” whom Marx and Engels came to despise while they were alive) detect a “great shift” from Marx’s early idealistic journalism to his later scientific work. It is not a shift which Marx recognised. Rather, he noticed that he developed logically from a passionate belief in democracy to a passionate belief in communism.
Communism, brought about by a working class in motion, was the most democratic society conceivable, since it came about through democratic action and it removed the most undemocratic aspect of all: economic exploitation of the many by the few. By as early as 1845, Frederick Engels was spelling this out in simple language:
“Democracy nowadays is communism ... Democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses ... The proletarian parties are entirely right in inscribing the word ‘democracy’ on their banners.”
THE DEMOCRATIC inspiration and the belief in self-emancipation (which are part of the same thing) are the essentials of Marxism. Without them, all the carefully constructed economics, all the earnest philosophy wither on the vine.
The spirit of a revolt, the need for a class battle against exploitation – these are the antidotes to the determinism of which Marx was so often accused.
The famous statement that people make their own history but they do not make it as they choose is usually quoted by Marxists with the accent on everything after “but”. In fact, the emphasis in the sentence is that men and women determine what happens to them. The point that they have to work within historical circumstances laid down for them is made only to ensure that they fight more effectively.
Not long after Marx died (in 1883) a new threat arose to the fight which he believed would soon be won. Men calling themselves Marxists found themselves at the head of “great labour movements”, vast trade unions, socialist newspapers, socialist sporting societies.
Such men started to wonder whether all this talk of revolution wasn’t going over the top. They felt they might get to positions of power and influence through the newly-granted franchise, and that when they did so they could legislate for socialism without having to go through messy and probably bloody revolution.
Thus, at the end of the 1890s, Edward Bernstein, like countless others after him, proposed to the masses that their world could be improved gradually and peacefully. All they needed to do was vote in a secret ballot. For Bernstein (and for Karl Kautsky, though few noticed his backsliding at this stage) the idea of millions of workers emancipating themselves in the streets and factories was faintly distasteful, if not downright dangerous.
The works of these men (except on the fringes: Bernstein, perhaps, on Cromwell; Kautsky on Christianity) do not survive with any relevance today. What does survive is the furious reply delivered to Bernstein and company by the Polish-born revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg.
Her reply came in two parts: Social Reform or Revolution (1900) and The Mass Strike (1906). The common theme of both pamphlets, the element which lifts them above all other contemporary political writing and makes them so important today, is the “living political school”, “the pulsating flesh and blood”, the “foaming wave” of the working class in struggle.
Luxemburg fought like a tiger for Karl Marx’s central principle: that the workers can only be emancipated if they themselves overthrow capitalist society. She exulted in the 1905 Russian Revolution which in a few weeks knocked out an absolutism which had reigned unchecked (in spite of all sorts of benevolent reformers who tried to make it better) for centuries. She rejoiced from her prison cell at the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The Russian revolutionary socialists more than anyone else in all history understood Marx’s insistence on self-emancipation. Where Marx had called for it and encouraged it, they carried it out.
Reactionary historians and commentators tell us that the tight discipline of the Bolshevik Party made it an undemocratic organisation dedicated to commanding the workers, not representing them. The truth is exactly the opposite. The Bolshevik Party won its soviet majorities in the spring and summer of 1917 precisely because it took its stand on the strength, confidence and potential of the Russian workers. In State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution And The Renegade Kautsky, Lenin fulminated against parliamentary democracy because it was not democratic enough. It left the capitalist machine intact. It removed working class representatives from the cooperative atmosphere of everyday life in factories, mills, mines and offices.
LENIN, in State and Revolution restated his belief in the “elective principle” as the cornerstone of any new socialist society. He repeated again and again in the months and years after October that the working class which had emancipated itself was the only hope for the Revolution. “I calculated’’ he said “solely and exclusively on the workers, soldiers and peasants being able to tackle better than the officials, better than the police, the practical and difficult problems of increasing the production of foodstuffs and their better distribution, the better provision of soldiers, etc. etc.”.
He told the First All Russian Congress of Soviets in January 1918:
“In introducing workers’ control we knew it would take some time before it spread to the whole of Russia, but we wanted to show that we recognised only one road – changes from below: we wanted the workers themselves to draw up, from below, the new principles of economic conditions.”
Lenin’s inspiration, if less flamboyant, was exactly the same as Marx’s and Luxemburg’s. Their socialism depended on the exploitative society being overthrown in struggle by the workers. Lenin realised, therefore, that without the revolutionary class of self-emancipated workers, the revolution would, in his own words, “perish”.
Perish it did, for precisely that reason. The self-emancipators, the small Russian working class, were annihilated in war and famine. By 1921 all that was left of them was the top layer, the bureaucracy of revolutionaries without the class which put it there.
The self-emancipators were replaced by workers from the countryside who had not emancipated themselves or anyone else. The revolution in Germany was defeated. In Britain it never started. Russia was isolated; its revolutionary inspiration snuffed out. The revolution was lost. Soviet democracy was replaced by state capitalist tyranny.
Sad to say, most socialists and communists throughout the world did not notice that it was lost at all. Almost imperceptibly, communists who had been brought up to believe that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class became idol-worshippers in the old Utopian tradition; falling at the feet of Stalin as the benevolent Father of Socialism.
In the name of Marxism, the very essence of Marxism, its democratic and self-emancipatory spirit, was at first forgotten, later ridiculed and condemned. Dictatorship over the proletariat was hailed as dictatorship of the proletariat. Murdering opponents was hailed as democratic discipline. Communism and democracy, synonymous for Engels, became exact opposites for Stalinists.
More predictably anti-communists made the same mistake. They said there was a direct line from Lenin to Stalin; that all revolutions somehow end in tyranny. The answer to them is a simple one.
For all his myriad fetishes, racism and pettiness, Stalin bent his dictatorship to one central purpose: to squeeze out of Russia every single surviving breath of the Revolution. He killed all his former Bolshevik colleagues – save Lenin who died early enough to be turned (against everything he had ever believed) into another icon. Revolutionary decrees were repealed and replaced with their opposites.
Factory control was replaced by one-man management; educational reform by educational reaction; internationalism by nationalism and racism; free abortions by rigid abortion controls. The death penalty for serious crimes, abolished by the revolution, was re-imposed. Privileges, domestic servants and all the paraphernalia of ruling class “superiority” were the order of the day.
All this was heralded throughout the world as socialism – though the essence of socialism, Lenin’s control from below, had been turned into its very opposite, control from above.
After the Second World War, the tragedy repeated itself, as Marx would have said, this time as farce. In the carve-up of the victorious powers, Russia swiped six countries in Eastern Europe. In none of these had the working class emancipated itself. Their emancipation, instead, was imposed by Russian bayonets.
Replicas of Stalin’s state capitalist tyranny were set up in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and East Germany. The workers played no part in any of these governments. They did not even have the right to vote them out, as their fellow workers had in much of the West. Resistance of any kind, especially resistance in the workplaces, was met with the most horrific repression. Uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany were put down by tanks.
The economies were bent and corrupted to the sustenance of Great Russian imperialism. Ruling class bureaucracies set themselves up in Stalin’s image.
The countries came to be known as “socialist countries”. Either their relationship with Russia, or their centralised “planned” economies or their stuffed-shirted socialist rhetoric convinced hundreds of thousands of socialists in other countries that, at root, they were socialist. The word caught on in the Eastern European countries themselves, but with a different result.
In those countries, where the workers knew that they were being dragooned and terrorised, socialism became a synonym for brutal dictatorship and exploitation. Socialism, the great emancipation, became the word for slavery. And the revolt against that tyranny, when it came, and when it was led, as it inevitably had to be, by the working class, turned first and most viciously against anything which called itself “socialist”.
NOW LARGE numbers of socialists, who spent much of their lives in some posture of obeisance to these “socialist countries” are fleeing the field.
Some of them are giving up all political commitment. Some, very few, place their faith in the “revolution from above” which they imagine has been set in motion, single-handedly by Mikhail Gorbachev. Others, probably the majority, have abandoned any talk of revolution, and now work for “reform from above” in the Labour Party and its equivalents.
The world in which we live is not in its essentials any different from the world which Marx described. It is still run on exploitative lines. A degenerate and cancerous capitalism still gnaws away at the lives of most of the world’s people. There is no sign that “reform from above” worries it even for a moment. It flicks aside the reformers with the same casual cynicism which Marx exposed.
The chief difference is that the working class, which still carries the hopes of change, is much bigger now than it was in Marx’s day. While sophisticated commentators insist that the working class is vanishing, it is growing by hundreds of thousands every year and by millions every decade. Russia herself now has sixty million exploited industrial workers: China over one hundred million and among the teeming, hungry masses of what was until recently known as the Third World, new robust organisations are arising, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted “like Venus from the foam”.
The events in Eastern Europe have proved like nothing else in the last 50 years that sudden volcanic social change does not happen when stockbrokers forecast it or academics work it out. It comes when the masses move, seek to emancipate themselves and in the process, in Marx’s famous phrase, “educate themselves, the educators”.
Dictators and bureaucracies can call themselves socialists for so long. In the end, the actions of the masses will sort them out, and start once more to reveal things as they are. An industrial economy which is “planned” in the interests of a militaristic and parasitic minority is not socialist. It is its opposite: state capitalist.
If state capitalism is being “conquered” by the masses emancipating themselves, then those same masses have blazed a path towards the conquering of all capitalism.
The urgent need for socialists is to kick the rotten corpse of state capitalism away from Rosa’s “living school” of self-emancipatory socialism; to assert as aggressively as ever the socialist tradition which started with Marx and Engels, and was taken on by Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian revolutionaries, and by a small band of socialists who knew all along that socialism and democracy are synonymous, that neither can ever exist without the other, and that both can only be achieved when the exploited masses use their irresistible power.
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Last updated on 12.8.2013
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