The Farce Of Consumer Protection
In 30 pages and over 150,000 words the team of eleven men and women who signed the final report of the Molony committee on Consumer Protection made recommendations about ways of securing that the things people buy shall be a little nearer to what they want and what the makers and sellers claim them to be.
The Committee made a large number of observations and recommendations, the most important of the latter category being the proposal to set up a 12-man Consumer Council “to devise and advance” the means of resolving the problems of consumers. But the Council is not itself to prepare test reports on articles offered for sale, or receive complaints or take proceedings. Its chief functions are to get information about consumer’s problems, determine what can be done and give advice and guidance through Citizen’s Advice Bureaux and other organisations and by its own publications. It all sounds very vague and ineffective. Other recommendations are that whatever protection is now given by hire-purchase law shall no longer be limited to transactions worth less than £300, but shall be extended (taking in cars and caravans), and that misleading descriptions of articles offered for sale shall be made more difficult by tightening up the administration of the Merchandise Marks Acts and widening their scope to all classes of goods.
At the time of writing the Government has not announced its intention about the recommendations, only undertaking to “study the reactions of all parties affected before finally concluding what we should do.”
What is more interesting than the details of the Committee’s recommendations is what they did not do, and the principle on which they worked.
If buyers in great numbers complain that they are being misled or defrauded by sellers it would seem that two lines of action would theoretically be open to a Committee set up to solve the problem; to place legal restrictions on the freedom of action of sellers, or to abolish the buyer-seller relationship. The latter is the solution inherent in establishing a Socialist system of society and was not even thought of by the Committee. The Committee, however, managed to find a third solution, which is to allow the sellers to behave as at present, but to encourage the buyers to show more aggressive resistance. So the Economist, in its issue of July 28th, after an implied approval of what it calls “slick American style selling,” blames the 15 million British housewives for not standing up to it, and hopes that with more information and advice they will be encouraged to do so:
“This is why it was so important that the Molony report . . . should get its balance of recommendations just right. The right precept is full free speech for the advertiser and salesman, but also full free speech (and sufficient detailed information) against them. In the event the Molony committee severely avoids being anti-salesman, but seems not quite sufficiently radically pro-consumer.”
Quality goods
No doubt the Government will implement parts of the Molony recommendations and if the Labour Party, with or without association with the Liberals, becomes the Government after the next election, it is certain that they will do much the same. It is equally certain that the problem will not be solved, nor even stated. Neither this Committee nor the earlier Committees that ploughed the same field, nor any of the Party spokesmen and newspapers that have offered alternative proposals have got as far as admitting why these deceitful practices go on, much less accepting the logical conclusion that there is only one way to end them.
There is a question that could be asked. In a world in which technically it would be possible to produce and distribute only first-class articles, not needing false deceptions and high power salesmanship to make them acceptable, why do the producers and distributors put out so much that is inferior and cheap and known to be so by the purchasers, and so much that is, in addition, dressed up to look better than it is? The manufacturers have a simple answer to the first part of the question. What would be the use, they would say, of producing masses of good quality articles that the majority of the population could not afford to buy. It is the poverty problem of every country in the world today—one standard of quality and quantity for the rich few, and another for the poor majority, and none of the governments are concerned to put an end to this situation. We also have to accept that many workers still regard it as natural and inevitable—like the workers rebuilding the Prime Minister’s residence at 10, Downing Street, who told a Guardian correspondent:
“There should be a sense of achievement on a job like this—doing something exceptional, you know. Another added, It’s not just a housing estate after all—you can’t just bung it up.” (27 March 1962.)
These workers probably themselves live in just such a bunged-up estate.
The other aspect—the adulterations, the false descriptions, the petty cheating, is in a different category and a complex one for those who govern. It can hit the rich shopper as well as the poor one, and while some manufacturers are prepared to legislate to limit it, others want it left alone. Their interests are divided and only pettifogging “remedies” are possible. Some manufacturers of high-quality, high-cost, articles would be happy to see the advertising carried on by their mass producing rivals curbed; and the latter would favour laws against the swindling activities of cheap-jack competitors who undersell them; but how is this to be done without hampering the normal business in which they are all engaged, that of making profit?
The dilemma they face here is closely paralleled by the problem of placing limits on the exploitation of the workers. All capitalist profit flows from the exploitation of the workers, so there is a common interest in continuing it, but if particular groups of employers carry exploitation to extremes by child labour, excessive hours, dangerous and insanitary factories, it undermines the health of the workers (not to mention their fitness to be soldiers) and damages the profit interest of the whole class of exploiters.
So also in the field of legal restrictions on the sale of defective and misrepresented goods. Committees of inquiry expose the evils (like the one that sat just over a century ago), then the interested parties squabble about the minimum of legislation they are prepared to enact.
Those at the back cry forward and those at the front cry back! While Jean Robertson in the Sunday Telegraph (29/7/62) criticises the Molony Committee for being too timid and points out that “while we were waiting for Molony, four modest consumer Bills introduced by private members were killed off in his name”, the Guardian (26/7/62) while admitting that some of the existing regulations under the Merchandise Marks Act “are enforced slackly or not at all” goes on to plead the traditional businessman’s case against legal restrictions: “There is much to be said against attempts to interfere administratively with too many points in the complicated business of distribution.”
Adulteration
The problem examined by the Molony Committee is not new, though in earlier times it went by the cruder name of adulteration, and this time the scope of the inquiry was expressly limited. The Committee confined itself to private consumers, cutting out the sale of goods to manufacturers, farmers and traders. Nor did it include services, though admitting there is much complaint about such work as the repair of radio and television sets. It excluded food and drugs on the ground that these are covered by the Food and Drugs Act, 1955, and excluded the nationalised power industries (except the sale of solid fuels) mainly because in these industries functions and relationship to the public have been determined as a matter of government policy. They admitted that they heard much complaint about prices being excessive, but decided against making recommendations because it would be difficult and costly to fix prices and in any event “vigorous competition” makes price control unnecessary. They fell back on the good old myth of the capitalist economists that the consumer has “wide freedom of choice” and this is his best protection. (Paragraph 6.)
As already remarked, the problem of adulteration is not new. The 1950 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britanica in an article under that heading divides it into three types, the intentional palming off of an inferior article, the addition of injurious ingredients, and the deliberate or negligent use of contaminated or deteriorated material not necessarily injurious. Having produced evidence that such practices existed from the earliest historical times the article smugly avoids inquiry into their precise causes with the remark that “adulteration of the first kind is probably as old as human greed itself” which, of course, adds nothing to our knowledge.
The Encyclopedia writer did, however, throw light on a development that explains why the Molony Committee became necessary and the form its inquiries took:
“… as the rise of the factory gradually took the manufacturing of many foods out of the home, and away from the farm and the village, the forms of adulteration became at once more invidious, more numerous and more difficult of detection. The proof of the pudding was no longer in the eating, but in the laboratory.”
This development has extended to all sorts of products, not only foods: in our century it is not enough for the buyer “to beware,” he now must have at his disposal expert knowledge and means of elaborate testing.
For the economic background we must turn to Marx for more enlightenment about adulteration. In Volume I of Capital (Chapters VI, X and XXIV) he reproduced from the reports of committees of inquiry over a century ago numerous examples of the widespread practice of adulterating foodstuffs, medicines and other articles, and showed how the demand for laws against adulteration of bread came from bakers themselves: they saw their trade being ruined through the lower prices charged by their adulterating rivals.
The moral
But unlike the Encyclopedia, which avoided seeking the real cause and took refuge in a sort of original sin, the greed of the human race, Marx pin-pointed it in the class structure of capitalist society, which functions through the exploitation of one class by another and by the necessity of making profit:
“This fanatic love of the capitalist for profit is expressed … by the adulteration of the elements of production, which is one of the principal means of reducing the value of the constant capital in comparison with the variable capital, and thus raising the rate of profit.” (Capital Vol. III Page 100.)
The moral of this ought to be obvious—though not to government committees. What is needed is not more laws and regulations to restrict capitalism’s freedom of action in the market, but the abolition of a system of society that works through the Market; having in its place production solely for use, so that there will be no-one against whom consumers will need to be protected.
H.