The News in Review
Aftermath of Profumo
If Mr. Macmillan is forced out and if, as now seems likely, the Tories lose the next election, we may be sure that the unhappy Mr. Profumo will get a lot of the blame for it.
This, of course, will be hardly fair or accurate, The government have been in trouble for a long time and so has the Prime Minister. Profumo’s indiscretion was only the last, if the most News of the Worldish, of the events which have exploded under the Tories’ confident conviction that they could do no wrong and that there was no reason why they should not stay in power for ever.
There were good grounds for this confidence. As each political crisis was ridden, as each potentially dangerous policy was ruthlessly pushed through, as Macmillan airily brushed all criticism under the nearest carpet, the working class faithfully piled up the Tory majorities. Mac and whoever he chose for his men seemed to be unbeatable.
Now, it seems all that is to be changed and, unless after hanging on, the Conservatives can recover the ground they have lost, we shall have a Labour government next time.
If that does happen the reasons for it will be no less foolish than in the past. The working class voters will think that the Labour Party is more efficient, cleverer, perhaps morally sounder, than the Tories. They may decide that the secrets of British capitalism will be better guarded under, say, Mr. George Wigg than they have been under Mr. Macmillan. Or perhaps they will virtually give up thinking about it and simply decide, as if politics were like a game of Ludo, that it is time Labour had a turn.
Whatever the detailed reasons, if the electorate return a Labour government it will be because they are hoping for better things from them. In this hope they will be as mistaken as they were in 1945 and again twelve years ago when they changed back to the Tories. Neither of these parties—nor indeed any capitalist party—can provide the sort of world which human beings should live in.
It is a safe bet that some future journalist-cum-historian will write up a romantic, exaggerated account of the Profumo affair in which the ex-Minister of War will be given an importance out of his due. In fact, the most that he has done is to contribute a little more to the probability that the British working class, sometime in the next year or so, will change from supporting one capitalist party to another.
BTC dies
The British Transport Commission is now dead. Would there be any of its stockholders grateful enough to contribute towards a suitable memorial?
Consider the facts. Doctor Beeching has proved, says the government, that a lot of the railway system cannot make a profit. Under the Beeching regime lines have been shut down wholesale and, of course, there is the Big Chop yet to come.
Now if this sort of thing happened in a privately controlled industry the people who held stock in it would suffer. Their dividends at the least would be cut and in all probability would disappear altogether.
Not so on the railways, nor in the other nationalised concerns. The Transport Commission’s final accounts showed a total deficit for its term of life of £143.6 million, almost entirely due to the unprofitable operation of the railways. Yet concealed in this deficit was the sum of £74.4 million arising from payments of interest on stock and other central charges.
Which means that tens of millions of pounds have been paid out to stockholders, of one kind or another, from railway lines many of which were not making a profit and some of which have indeed been closed.
The story is the same in the coal industry, where the recent small surplus represented an actual operating profit of £25.4 million, when we take into account the interest which the NCB is liable to pay. And this interest, again, bore no relation to the fact that there have been widespread closures of coal mines.
Even for capitalism, this is something of an Alice-in-Wonderland story. The whole point, which is quite obscured in the regular hullabaloo over the finances of State industries, is that nationalisation basically changes nothing. The workers in State industries continue to turn out surplus value, a fair chunk of which goes out in the form of profit. For them, it is exploitation as usual.
For the capitalist class it is profits as usual. Even if the profits are unusual—and unusually generous.
The Kennedy tour
It was not, of course, just to visit the Ould Homestead that Mr. Kennedy came to Europe, although one of the uses of his tour was to make plain, by his refusal to open the Giant’s Causeway and his other references to Anglo-Irish relations, his support for the cause of Irish republicanism.
The Irish part of the journey was, predictably, a pressman’s junket, with a faked up cottage, pigs dragged into the kitchen and the President taking a dish of tea with kind, puddeny Irish ma’s.
Beneath this ballyhoo, Kennedy was in deadly earnest. He came to rally support for his governments European policy, which has been under some heavy fire of late. He came to put the de Gaulle concept of an independently united Europe in what Washington thinks is its place. He came to win Germany away from the temptations of the stubborn old man in Paris and to make sure that Adenauer’s successor will be receptive to American influence.
It was also noticeable that, for the usual diplomatic reasons, Kennedy did not see Harold Wilson. This gave some support to the rumours that one of the results of Wilson’s recent trip to Washington is that the American government does not look favourably upon the prospect of a Labour win at the next election. Did Wilson really give Kennedy cause to adopt this attitude? Perhaps, if Labour is returned next time, we shall find out.
The real reason for visits like Kennedy’s is all too often hidden in a cloud of newspaper nonsense. The men who meet in high conference are there to stand up for the interests of their country’s ruling class. They talk about the carve up of the capitalist world and the economic and military steps they can take to keep the carve up as they want it. They discuss the disputes which capitalism is so constantly heir to.
These men appear to hold the fate of the world in their hands. But the reality lies deeper. The working class must see this essential fact and resolve to do away with the social system which produces these leaders, their cynicism, and the perpetual threat of war.