Pomp and its Circumstance
If political journalists, who are hard men but who like the rest of us have to earn a living, ever get down on their knees to offer up a prayer of thanks, it must be for George Brown. Perhaps Brown is what the insurance companies call accident prone; at all events, he seems incapable of staying out of trouble, and of the headlines. If he is not waggling on television under some sort of Outer Influence, George is threatening to resign. If he is not cuddling Princess Margaret he is turning up in a dinner jacket at a reception for some visiting dignitary, when the invitation was quite clear that everyone should wear white tie, tails and decorations.
Some people, most of them likely never to wear tails, get very annoyed about this flouting of conventions. Others give three cheers for George, for his lovable sincerity and constant pride in his humble origins. Amid the uproar from both sides, the essential facts go unnoticed.
Take, for a start, Brown’s dinner jacket at the reception for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. If he had really wanted to strike a blow against the flummery of State occasions, if he really wanted to remind those present that the affairs they had been discussing would affect the lives of millions of people, he could have done better than a dinner jacket which, although it is one step down from tails, is more than one step ,up from a lounge suit. He might have come along in a sports jacket and flannels, like Harold Wilson on his first Sunday as Prime Minister. Or, to really make the point, what was wrong with a boiler suit and cloth cap, drinking out of the saucer and wiping his mouth on his sleeve?
What Brown overlooked was that this particular battle was fought and lost a long time ago. The Labour government which came into office in 1924 had many problems waiting for it, but apparently none was so pressing or so onerous as the question of what to wear when they were at Court, or of how to behave when they mixed with their social betters, or of how to make sure of an invitation to the next Royal Garden Party.
When that government took office there were something like one and a quarter million people registered as unemployed, people who could barely afford a dinner, let alone a fancy suit to eat it in. The world abroad was in its customary troublous state, with disputes in Ireland and the Middle East. But there were high hopes of what Ramsay Macdonald and his men would do, of how they would transform society. Jerusalem may not actually have been built yet, but the Labour M.P.s were going to Westminster to lay the foundation stones.
The first thing Macdonald had to do was to go along to meet the King, for the first time in his life, and to show him the man the workers had given him as Prime Minister. Perhaps some of Labour’s more naive supporters thought Macdonald would take advantage of this historic opportunity to tell the King that the days of the ruling class were numbered. In fact what happened was that the King did the telling; he let Macdonald know how concerned he was that nothing should be done to upset the routines and the ceremonies of the Court and Macdonald, who had come to all this from a precarious childhood with an unmarried mother in a poverty-stricken Scottish fishing village, who had needed police protection from the crowds who disagreed with his opposition to the 1914/18 war, who was supposed to be the man to build the new society, assured the King that nothing would so be done.
Labour’s first Premier was as good as his word. The next day he appeared in the full glory of Court dress with knee breeches, gold braid and a sword. Even the old ladies of Kensington, once so fearful of what would happen to them when Labour nationalised women, had to concede that he was a magnificent figure, especially compared to the gnome-like Stanley Baldwin.
Of course Macdonald’s men had to follow suit and not a few of them did so with enthusiasm. In his book Decline And Fall Of the Labour Party John Scanlon recalls having lunch with a Labour Under Minister whose only topic of conversation was the cost of full Court dress, and whether he could hope to be in office long enough to get his moneysworth. Labour Ministers discovered that the class struggle could be carried on only as long as they were dressed in a tail coat; they presented their daughters at Court, they went to Royal Garden Parties and, so that their wives would not embarrass them on such occasions, they sent them to the Webb’s Half Circle Club, where they learned to disguise the fact that they came from mining villages and industrial slums.
All this was a long time ago. No Minister is now required to fool around with a sword when he goes to Buckingham Palace to let the Queen know how capitalism is running, and it is a long time since anyone was sent to the House of Lords with anything more enduring than a Life Peerage. The ritual of capitalist government has changed, and continues to change, but in one form or another it lives on, under Tory or Labour. Indeed, there is evidence that the Labour Party are as enthusiastic about it as the Conservatives.
A few months back, for example, the Wolverhampton Labour Party caused a minor storm by drinking a toast to Harold V/ilson and the Labour government when they should have been toasting the Queen. Tory M.P.s like Quintin Hogg and Gerald Nabarro, who can never be accused of having any doubts about which side of the barricades they serve on, denounced this as “disloyal, repulsive, scurrilous.”
Now this might have been a chance for the Labour Party to show a little revolutionary glow, if not exactly the fire with which they once said they were consumed. They might even have argued with Hogg and Nabarro. Instead, in effect they agreed with them:
“Harold Wilson is a good Prime Minister. He is loyal to the Queen; so are we.” (Cllr. Frank Clapham, vice chairman Woverhampton Labour Party.)
“… had anyone suggested I should have toasted the Queen at that point I would gladly have done so. I am not in any way disloyal. In fact, I sympathise with some of the tasks which Royalty has to undertake.” (Terence Duffy, the man who proposed the toast.)
“The loyalty to this country and its Sovereign of members of the Labour Party is not in question.” (Letter from Ten Downing Street, authorised by Harold Wilson.)
It is clear that Labour has not travelled far, in any direction, since Macdonald in his knee breeches thrilled them all. It is worth asking what is meant, when they declare their loyalty to this country and its Sovereign.
This country is one of many capitalist states in the world, which means that it is one where socially there are two types of people. One type consists of those who never have anyone getting up to swear loyalty to them, who always look rather comical when any of them dares to put on a tail coat and who can be easily recognised because they have to work for a living. They are the working class, who serve and suffer under capitalism but who continually vote for the system to carry on.
What sort of a living these people get can be gauged, if not from our own experience as workers, from the mass of statistics about us. Last April, for example, the Inland Revenue published a survey of personal incomes by regions for 1964/5. Something like 59 per cent of the cases had an income below £999 a year. On the other hand, there were 369 people—and anyone with the inclination can work out what percentage of the cases they were—with an income between £50,000 and £75,000, and 121 with an income between £75,000 and £100,000.
It is clear that an income of £100,000 a year does not come entirely, if at all, from working for it. Here, then, we have the other type of person in capitalist society, who can dress up, who often receives the loyalty and servitude of the workers and who also supports caoutakist parties, for the simple reason that they enable him to cream off the benefits and the privileges of the system
It is the job of governments to protect the privileges and interests of this class. In this country, these interests are often expressed in a mass of ritual and flummery. Parlisment, which makes the laws by which property society is organised, eannot start its business until a lot of over mature men have staged a procession dressed in funny clothes. The Courts where the laws of capitalism are interpreted and applied are run by people in impractical gowns and ludicrous, uncomfortable wigs. Every so often, the royal and aristocratic figureheads of the capitalist class put on heavy and expensive robes and show themselves, dripping with jewels, to the loyal and underprivileged workers lining the streets to gawk at a Coronation or a State visit or a Royal premiere.
This dressing up, this ritual, may annoy some people even some politicians—but behind it all capitalism works with its own deadly firmness of purpose. Frail bodied judges in mediaeval wigs hand out long sentences to tough criminals lor offences against property. State visitors come in their finery to play their part in capitalism’s perilous tangle of international rivalries. To abolish the rituals, to make the Head of State do his job in an off-the-peg suit, would be worse than an empty gesture. For in a society of privilege, we might as well have an occasional admission that it exists, even if workers are so docile that, with the gorgeous evidence of it paraded before their very eyes, they can only stand and cheer.
This is the very heart of the matter. Not a few firebrands have confused the privileges of capitalism with their ceremonial expression. Not a few have thought that to abolish royalty would be an attack on the system of inequalities. They ignore the fact that the Royal Family is only the apex of a pyramid and that the whole thing has its foundations in political ignorance and apathy.
And who are among the greatest contributors to this ignorance and apathy, if not the Labour Party, who stand for privilege when they say they stand for equality? Who have the most to answer for, if not the Labour leaders whose lifetime of political activity might have taught them the futility of mere gestures while capitalism’s business of exploitation and oppression goes on unchecked? George Brown has had many accidents in his time but one he has always managed to avoid, and that is blowing the gaff on his own party.
IVAN