Running Commentary
Carter’s Collapse?
After the blue-chinned scowl of Nixon and the fumbling, stumbling of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter’s grin was meant to represent a new era in American politics.
They said Carter was clean — no hint of a Watergate hung about him. He was clever — no after-effects of playing too much American football without a helmet clogged up his mental processes. He was energetic, skipping from his campaign ’plane with the spring of a young deer.
And his smile — open, warm, ready, friendly. With his pretty wife and his photogenic daughter, he just had to be the greatest president since Roosevelt dominated American politics from his wheelchair.
Carter started as if he intended to be different, running his Cabinet meetings in open-necked sportswear and with the press watching. This, we were told, was truly open government, as if there has ever been, or is likely ever to be, a capitalist state which really allowed its secrets to be open to public scrutiny.
And then Carter kept talking about human rights, as if this was his own original discovery, and as if a politician mouthing about human rights had any significance for those humans.
Well, it has all collapsed very quickly, and the news from America indicates that the voters there are disillusioned with their grinning president, whose hold on his position gets more precarious each day.
Carter, it is said, fumbles and delays, changing his mind almost day by day over issues like the fuel shortage which is so hot in America. His financial policy is described as indecisive and inconsistent. Meanwhile, American capitalism gets deeper into crisis, with the threat of worse to come.
Even if Carter were decisive, clear and firm, it would make absolutely no difference to the grim realities of life under capitalism for the American workers. That is one lesson for them to learn from this, the collapse of their latest idol. Another is that all politicians are powerless in the face of the anarchy of capitalism, which means that the ecstasy with which their coming to power is greeted always turns soon to disillusionment and then to despair.
Jimmy Carter’s grin won a lot of votes, but for the American workers it is no laughing matter.
Crueller Cuts?
Like the Flanders swamps of 1914-18, there are many much fought-over fields in the politics of capitalism. One of these is so-called public expenditure, about which there promises to be an increasingly fearsome battle during the Tories’ period of office.
The term public expenditure generally refers to money spent by government and councils. About this there are many myths, one of them being that public expenditure is good; it means hospitals, social services and — something beloved by millions of workers — big new roads.
Because of this, public expenditure is supposed to actually create something also beloved by millions of workers — jobs. (There is no actual record from earlier societies of slaves ever welcoming the making of new chains for themselves, but let that pass.)
One thing which must be said is that public expenditure also finances agencies like the police and the prisons which are, perhaps, not beloved by quite so many workers, and armed forces and armaments, which are beloved only by those workers who take sides in the matter.
But a myth we are going to hear a lot of over the next few years is that since public expenditure is good, it is something favoured only by the Labour Party and which the wicked Tories will do their best to abolish.
Memories in politics are notoriously short, so it is useful to remind ourselves that the last Labour government, like all its predecessors, made consistently savage cuts in public spending.
As a result of these cuts, hospitals were shut in the face of strong objections, social services were severely restricted, schooling was cut back. A Conservative government could hardly have been more Scrooge-like in its zeal.
This fact of history was clearly illustrated in a recent (June 19) article in The Guardian by Joel Barnett, who was Chief Secretary to the Treasury in Callaghan’s government. This article, by a typical Labour sleight of word, was both an attack on the Tories for their planned cuts and a justification of those imposed by Labour:
I don’t believe present levels of public expenditure should be sacrosanct, nor that every programme should be, as it were, untouchable, and free from cuts.
In the battles to come, and in the increasing pressures on their living standards, workers will — as usual — be bombarded by lies, myths, distortions. It is vital that they remember: both Tories and Labour run capitalism as savagely as they need to. And capitalism cannot be coaxed out of its own basic savagery into benignity by spending money, public or private, big or small.
Anti-Social Insecurity
It is not often that any person — and still less, any capitalist agency — is given the gift to see themselves as others see them. It is even more surprising that this should happen to, of all things, the Department of Health and Social Security (for such it is described).
To explain this strange happening, let us go back a little into recent history. During the last war, the British capitalist class realised that mere patriotism was not enough to persuade the workers to accept what they were required to endure.
Something more was needed: a mixture of threats and promises. Out of this latter grew the assurances that after the war capitalism would bend all its efforts to building a better society, free of the mistakes which were made before 1939.
And out of that came the famous Beveridge Report, parent of the National Health Service and the National Insurance Scheme introduced by the post-war Labour government. A central principle of National Insurance was that its benefits would be available as of right to anyone in need — in other words, without being subject to the notorious Means Test — and that they would be enough to meet all needs. It was envisaged that a small minority of people in rare cases would need extra help, and for those there would be the Supplementary Benefits, which would be means tested.
Well, it has not worked out like that at all, and now the original idea of Beveridge is in tatters. About one-tenth of the population — something like six million people — need to apply for Supplementary Benefit, which pays out some £2 billion a year.
This increasing reliance on what was supposed to be only a safety net has meant that the scheme has become more and more complex something unwelcome to workers who are sick or old or infirm, and who need a simpler method of claiming benefit.
A recent report by the Supplementary Benefits Commission called attention to this crisis and suggested that, to meet the needs of applicants, the scheme needs an extra £200 million a year. The Commission chairman described the need as “urgent” and said that unless the government acted swiftly, “it will be impossible to maintain standards of service for people in Britain who are in real need . . .”
Those workers who rely on Social Security will be amazed to learn that the treatment they get from the DHSS is called a service and that it aspires to standards. On the receiving end, they know how this patch-up job of capitalism simply does not work. They may get some consolation to know that the SBC now thinks the same.
Would that some ghostie would give the same gift, of seeing themselves as others see them, to all the agencies of so-called reform within capitalism.