The news in review
POLITICS
Labour at Scarborough
The last time the Labour Party went to Scarborough for its Annual Conference, the unilateralists won the day and the delegates went home amid the bitter recriminations provoked by Gaitskell’s promise to fight, fight and fight again.
This year, under Wilson’s surer, craftier hand, Labour has had a happier time of it. According to the Daily Telegraph, the party leadership regard their 1963 Conference as exhilarating. A more accurate word for it would be nauseating.
Because, apart from anything else which was evident at the Conference, the Labour Party has so obviously dropped almost everything that it ever stood for. Nationalisation of the land has been quietly replaced under the carpet, until some other member who mistakenly thinks that he belongs to a party of principle brings it out again. A Labour government will keep the public schools in existence—not an unexpected decision, especially as so many of the Labour leadership went to such schools themselves. The earnings rule for old age pensioners, which cuts their pension if they earn a bit of money on the side, is to stay in force; after all, no government could ever be accused of wanting to make the life of a retired worker too easy. Wage restraint will be the policy of a Labour government, dignified now by the new, Frank Cousins euphemism of a ” planned growth of wages.”
Now the Labour Party, even in the days when it stood openly and proudly for wholesale nationalisation, abolition of the Monarchy, higher wages and all sorts of other pet Left Wing schemes, was not a Socialist Party, for the simple reason that none of these things have anything to do with Socialism. But at least in those days they seemed to stand for something a little different from their opponents and in that belief many people joined the party and worked for what they thought was going to be a brave new world.
And now? The Labour Party today stands for only one thing; to win as many votes as possible. All their policies, all their statements, even the contributions at the Conference, were overshadowed by the coming election which they hope so confidently to win. Any hint of a quarrel which-“would have made copy for the Tory -press was squashed. (Wilson is a master at sorting out these disputes without a public row, yet getting what he wants.) Some subjects, like foreign policy, were not allowed on the agenda because they had caused such an uproar in past years. The Conference did its best to avoid any mention of the Denning Report, with its undertones of “immoral Toryism”; only that dreadful fellow Ted Hill was uncouth enough to break this rule.
The big scheme to provide more scientists, and more opportunities for their work, is regarded as a potential vote winner. Writing in The Guardian on October 4th, Richard Crossman told how Wilson had first mentioned the matter to him, just after Gaitskell had died:
“I know that most of them (the scientists) voted for us in 1945,” I said, “but by 1959 four fifths of them had become anti-working class and anti-Labour.” “Well, the only way to win them back is to make Labour the party of science . . .” (said Wilson).
This is the end of an inevitable process, foreseen by Socialists when the Labour Party first came into existence. A party which aims for power within capitalism must appeal to the ignorance of the working class whom it wants to vote for it. And the end of that is a shameless chasing after votes, with every pronounce-men intended as a lasso to rope in the floating voter.
Today, more obviously than ever, the Labour Party is an alternative administration for British capitalism. It is, in fact, another Conservative Party, even if it is one which is trying to shake off the uncomfortable memories of a history strewn with discredited theories and what passed at one time for political principles.
AT HOME
The Denning Report
Lord Denning’s famous report must have been a bitter disappointment to those workers who had looked forward to brightening their dull lives with a judicially worded account of which minister had been sleeping with which model and using whose car to run her about in. Even the bizarre figure of the naked waiter had the sting taken out of him by the simple fact that Denning interviewed the man. This may be the end of the Profumo affair. No more is the press obviously seething with suppressed rumours, as it was last spring. The Daily Mirror hastily dropped the matter, in favour of pointing up the new Labour image as an energetic, forward looking party of the scientific future.
Before the scandal finally dies, then, perhaps we may be allowed our say. Pro-fumo’s supposed sin was that he lied to the House of Commons; but if every politician who had done that were forced to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds . . . Capitalism is full of lies; it cannot, indeed, exist without its representatives continually trying to mislead people, sometimes under the excuse of military security, sometimes on the grounds of commercial interests, sometimes not even on these justifications.
And the morals of capitalist politicians should not be a concern of the working class. There have been plenty of “moral” political leaders, as well as many who have led a more interesting, if more complicated, private life. They have all administered capitalism in roughly the same way, which is never pleasant for the people who work, and vote, for capitalism. The real scandal is that millions of people are exploited, degraded and suppressed by capitalism yet continue to support it. Beside that monstrous fact, Profumo and the seamy world in which he moved is put into its proper historical insignificance.
Fall Out
While we are on the subject of lies, we should comment on one of the most recent examples of capitalism’s trying to mislead us.
For years, we have been assured by the politicians and by the military men that fall out from bomb tests was nothing to get worried about. Only the neurotic, they said, would get worked up over the latest multi-megaton blast off and such people, after all, are not the stiff-backed, firm-jawed specimens that a military nation needs. (Some of this propaganda was almost like Feiffer’s famous cartoon in The Observer some years ago, which had the government stick up massive posters which told the population that Black Spots Are Good For You.)
Now some of the facts about the recent levels of fall out are coming to light and they are enough to make the most placid person sit up and take notice. The latest annual report of the Radiobiological Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Council tells us that 1962 was the worst year on record for fall out. The level of the deadly strontium in our diet was higher last year than at any time since detailed records were first opened in 1958. For 1963 the picture promises to be even blacker.
Sir John Cockcroft, who was once the Director of the Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell, has revealed that at least once during the last two years consideration had to be given to stopping the supply of fresh milk to children, because of the fears about the high radioactive contamination of it. And there were other indications of the threat to life which the atomic age means to us.
The fact that the official lies about fall out have been nailed will not, of course, prevent similar lies being told in the future. Nor, if the past is any guide, does it mean that the working class will indignantly reject the lies and all that goes with them. Nevertheless, we shall continue to point out that capitalism lives by its terror and its destructive forces and that it bolsters these up with lies. Yet it claims to be a “moral” system of society, in which truth and honesty are respected. Perhaps that is its biggest lie of all.
Morals at Benenden
No hint of immorality, at least of one kind, down at Benenden School in Kent, where Princess Anne is continuing to learn how to be an upper-crust young lady.
Going down to the local church of a Sunday, the princess heard the vicar tell her:
“Don’t be -obsessed with sex, the newspapers, radio etc., can deal with nothing else. Forget it, it is only a trifle compared with the search for the Kingdom . . . Some of you girls may one day find yourselves working in a big office and you will find it an awful rat race … Do not be involved in this sort of thing . . . You should not worry about it . . . It is no good trying to ‘keep up ‘ for the sake of ‘keeping up’”.
Nice sentiments—for the Benenden girls, at any rate. They are rich enough to be able to avoid the nastier economic consequences of sexual promiscuity, anyway. Those consequences are reserved for the working class. So is the worry about the results of more “acceptable” sexual activity, which often lands a working class man and wife with a child which they cannot afford and therefore do not welcome. The ruling class avoid these problems for the simple reason that they have enough money to do so. For them, sex, in any shape or form, may easily be a trifle.
Did the princess and her chums have a good giggle at the bit about ending up in the rat race in a big office? This again is something reserved for the daughters of the working class. They are the people who get involved in “that sort of thing,” they are the people who try to “keep up,” they are the people who do the worrying about whether they are making the grade.
The text of the sermon was “Do not worry, put your trust in God,” And, of course, in the dividend cheques.
ABROAD
Ben Bella takes over
Ben Bella, President of the Algerian Republic, has now taken over full dictatorial powers and has had these confirmed by an extraordinary session of the Algerian National Assembly.
This has followed an internal struggle in the Algerian government, in which Ben Bella has ousted his rivals one by one and has gradually strengthened his hold on the country in the process.
There are a number of ironies in this situation.
The “full powers” which the Assembly gave to Ben Bella are not clear in their scope. This was a dodge frequently resorted to by French governments in the days of the Fourth Republic. Such measures usually meant some attack upon whatever democracy existed in France at the time. In the war in which the F.L.N. was then engaged against the French government, the Algerian Nationalists used the promise of liberty freely in their propaganda. Anyone who has learned anything of recent history will not be surprised to hear that one of the first casualties of the successful nationalist revolution is the democracy which they claimed to be fighting for.
It is ironical, too, that Ben Bella should have resorted to a measure which his opponents of yesterday found so useful. The French government used every trick in the game in the war against the F.L.N. and the Algerian propagandists were not slow to make capital out of the fact. Are they silent, now that their leader has shown that he is willing to learn from everyone—even his former enemies?
And what about those Algerians who fought so long and so bloodily against French rule? Are they satisfied, now that one form of oppression has been replaced by another? And those do-gooders who are forever seeking out nationalist movements, preferably on the African continent, to support? Will they realise that such movements seek only to impose an indigenous capitalist class upon a country and that in the end this can turn out as bad, or worse, for the people of that country as the foreign rule they were persuaded to take arms against?
Surplus in the States
In America they are still battling with the problem of their surplus grain. Some of it they have given away (under strictly controlled conditions, of course), some of it they have stored in ships and in silos. Some of it has never been grown, by the simple process of paying farmers not to cultivate their land. But the stuff keeps piling up; there is now about 1,200 million bushels of it.
The latest solution to be offered to this problem has come from two United States Senators. They want the grain burnt for conversion into alcohol, backed up by legislation to ensure that all petrol sold in the States contains a certain percentage of the grain alcohol.
This is at least something of a variation on the old idea of simply burning the stuff, which was so popular in the Thirties. Ironically, one of the Senators has pointed out that the conversion idea was put forward then, but was killed by the oil companies, who did not want anyone muscling in on their markets. Nobody cared that there were millions of unemployed, in America and elsewhere, who would rather have seen the grain turned into food which they could get their hands on. it was a more economical idea to burn it.
In the same way, it is now more economical to store the grain than to upset the world market by releasing the stuff so that it can help to relieve the monstrous problem of malnutrition and hunger which afflicts so large a part of the world’s population.
In humane terms, the problem is simpler. It would be a matter of moving the grain from one part of the world, where there was a surplus, to another part, where there was a shortage. A sane social system would do just that. But capitalism has to satisfy its profit motive before anything else and that leads it to all manner of tortuous shadow wrestling rather than tackle a problem direct.
If the Americans choose to burn their grain to make petrol for their cars instead of to feed the world’s hungry (there is, of course, no shortage of petrol in the States anyway!), they may seem to some people to be guilty of a reckless waste of the world’s resources. But by the standards which capitalism imposes on these things they will be doing something like the right thing.
Oil in the Congo
The Italian State Oil Company, ENI, has obtained a virtual monopoly of oil refining in the Belgian Congo. The foundation stone of their refinery, at Moanda on the Congo estuary, has been laid and building has started.
This has come after a certain amount of dirty work behind the scenes. A four country consortium, consisting of British and Dutch (Shell) U.S.A. (Texaco and Mobiloil) and Belgian (Petrocongo) interests, was bidding for a contract to build another refinery on the estuary, at a cost lower than the Italians are charging. It has now been revealed, after months of delaying tactics by the Congo government, that ENI had the thing sewn up a long time ago by a secret clause in the agreement which they signed with the government.
The consortium are annoyed about this. But, as the history of the Middle East has shown, oil companies could hardly exist profitably unless they signed secret agreements with foreign governments and did not pull an occasional double cross on their opponents.
Another squeal from the consortium was that the decision to let the Italians build amounted to granting a monopoly of oil refining in the Congo. Yet the four companies can hardly complain on this score, for what else was their consortium but an attempt to eliminate competitive bidding for the refining rights? And if the consortium had won a contract which excluded other oil companies, would they have then complained about monopolies? On the contrary, they would have put their public relations men to work, to point out the supposed benefits which their monopoly brought to everyone.
At such times, it is common for capitalist concerns to talk about the “rights” and the “wrongs” of a situation. But really capitalism knows not such concepts; “profitable” and “non-profitable” are its standards of judgment. When companies try to introduce their own style of morals into the jungle of capitalist interests, which they do when it suits them, they are trying to ride two horses which are travelling in exactly opposite directions.
BUSINESS
About the Chunnel
The recent report of the French and British working group did very little to clear up the confusion over the “Bridge or Tunnel”‘ Channel controversy.
This controversy, of course, has been raging for a long time and whenever there has been a threat of any sort of progress towards a solution, it has always been baulked. The reasons are drearily familiar. Not enough capital available. Not profitable enough. Opposition from other interests which have sunk money into the more established methods of getting across the Channel.
In this way, what may be one of the good ideas of the Twentieth Century has been persistently obstructed. There is nothing remarkable in this the need to conform to capitalism’s profit motive has killed countless schemes in the past, even if some of them have been good ideas from the point of view of human comfort and convenience.
Meanwhile, travellers to the Continent have been affected by the controversy. Last August, when British Railways applied for permission to close its South-ampton/Le Havre ferry route, and to convert the ships into car carriers for use elsewhere, they made it plain that their application had been delayed for some time because of the uncertainty over the Tunnel. The conversion of the ships is planned as a temporary measure, to tide BR over the period before a possible Tunnel may be operating. If the Tunnel is not built, the Railways may decide that it will, pay them to buy some modern steamers. At the moment, it is not an economic risk for BR to invest in new ships which a Tunnel would make obsolete before they had paid their way. In the meantime, their passengers must continue to suffer the cattle-truck conditions which exist during the holiday season on the older cross-Channel steamers.
British Railways cannot be blamed for trying to conform to capitalism’s order of priority. This is common to all manner of businesses. It certainly applies to the Tunnel. The working group, after all, preferred, a Tunnel because a bridge would cost twice as much and would be less likely to bring a “reasonable economic return” while a Tunnel would “show an overall net profit.”
The Kitchen Front
One of the hottest commercial wars in this country at the moment is raging over who is going to sell the housewife a washing machine and whether .she will buy it at a shop or on her doorstep.
On one side is young, brash Mr. John Bloom, who has presided over the growth of his company from a dying safety razor firm into a £9¾ million boom baby which now commands twenty-five per cent, of the home market in washing machines. Mt. Bloom has thrived on the direct selling technique, with its “cut out the middle man” line of sales talk
On the other side are the giants of the domestic electrical industry, among them Hoover Limited, a £24 million company which heads the washing machine league with 28 to 30 per cent. of the home market. Hoover’s profits are now climbing out of the relative doldrums of a few years ago, when they declined to some £5 million—this year they should be nearer £12 million. Hoover, and the other firms which deal through the retail trade, condemn direct selling as the dubious gimmick of the parvenu. Hoover are now the respectable aristocrats of the industry, although before the war they were the upstarts, whose door-to-door salesmen earned themselves a reputation for foot-in-the-door malpractices.
Not content with his slice of the English market, Mr. Bloom is now challenging Hoover’s dominance in the export field. He has already announced that he is thinking of going into the market in the United States. Rumour has it that he is due to open up in the Far East. And talks have started with the American Studebaker Corporation with the object of setting up a joint company to sell domestic appliances on the Continent.
Some time ago Rolls Razor began to include a vacuum cleaner with every washing machine they sold; two machines, they claimed, for the price of one. With the approach of winter they have replaced the “give away” cleaner with a tangential fan heater. This is a direct slap at Hoover, who only recently brought out their own fan heater, at a retail price of fourteen guineas. Mr. Bloom has said that he feels that this winter may ‘be as bad as last—with his new offer, he probably hopes that it will be as bad.
All this promises to hot up even more, with all the techniques of doubtful publicity brought into play. Whichever company wins this war, it can have little in it for the working class, reverently referred to by the admen as “the housewife” or “the consumer.”
They have, after all, gained nothing from the previous battles of this kind. And there have been enough of them; Hoover, for one, has seen off several rivals since the war. But Bloom’s Rolls Razor is the most serious threat yet. As the Sunday Telegraph put it, Mr. Bloom “. . . is no stranger to cut-throat competition.” Indeed.