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MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Obituary of Harold Wilson Pipe dreams (June 1995) From Socialist Review, No. 187, June 1995, pp. 22&ndash:23. Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The death of Harold Wilson last month has been followed by a wave of nostalgia about the Labour governments he led. Paul Foot recalls the Labour victory of 1964 and how his hopes of the time were swiftly shattered * * * I remember polling day 1964 as if it were yesterday. In the evening after work I spent an hour or two canvassing for the Labour candidate at Hampstead, north London, and then went back home for a party to watch the results. What I remember most was the excitement, which had its roots in confidence. I was 26. For half my life there had been nothing but a Tory government. Now suddenly that government, despite its huge majority, seemed doomed. There was a mood for change, not just for a change of faces or style but a change of policy, a decisive step to the left. We had grown used to full employment, to low inflation, to a welfare state and a big council house building programme. What was in prospect was a government which would shift the whole balance of society from rich to poor, from employer to worker, from (to use J.K. Galbraith’s famous phrase, which was highly popular at the time) private to public affluence. One scene from the Labour campaign stuck in my memory. Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, carried out a whistle stop tour of London marginals. I followed him one afternoon to Clapham, where he spoke to a large and random crowd from the back of a lorry. He spoke without notes, almost inviting interruptions. The interruptions he got were all about race. Race had played a big part in the election in the Midlands especially at Smethwick where the Tory campaign was supported with the slogan, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’ As a result, Labour trimmed its original opposition to Commonwealth immigration controls, and adopted a fudged compromise. On that Clapham lorry Wilson could easily have retreated into this compromise and answered the racist taunts with the usual politician’s claptrap, ‘On the one hand, this, on the other, that.’ But he didn’t. Every time the cry went up, ‘Send home the blacks’, he rounded on the heckler, angry and sarcastic. ‘Whom should we send home? The nurses in our hospitals? The people who drive our buses. Where would our health service be without the black workers who keep it going?’ These questions were greeted with great roars of approval from the crowd, and the hecklers were silenced. No wonder I was excited that October night. The excitement grew as the night went on. Bit by bit an impregnable Tory majority of nearly 100 was whittled down. Up all night, we clung through the day to the radio. At about 2.30 the following afternoon, a left winger called Mendelson was elected for Penistone, Yorks, and Labour had an overall majority. It was quite impossible for even the hardest revolutionary not to feel a rush of joy and even hope. As the months of Labour government went on, the joy subsided, but the hope persevered. My first really grim disillusionment came in July 1965, when the government ushered in immigration laws far more racist and ruthless than anything the Tories had contemplated. Even so, I was prepared to give the government the benefit of the doubt. In October 1965 Wilson could tell the Labour Party conference, ‘Sterling is strong, employment is strong, the economy is strong’ – and he was right. Pensions were up, arbitrary evictions were outlawed, a bill to nationalise steel was before the Commons. In March 1966, less than 18 months after the 1964 triumph, Labour won another election – with a majority of nearly 100. The last conceivable excuse for dallying – a wafer thin Commons majority – had been swept aside. Caithness in the far north of Scotland was a Labour seat. So was Falmouth in Cornwall. It was 1945 all over again but 1945 in peacetime conditions where everyone had a job and there had not even been a noticeable recession for 20 years. Harold Wilson, with his cheeky, cocky demeanour, his cheerful smile and his Yorkshire burr, summed up the confidence and hope. Here was living proof that Labour could deliver a prime minister who was plainly not a MacDonald or an Attlee – a man who genuinely believed in public enterprise and public endeavour, and would not sell the pass. The collapse came very swiftly, in the middle of the clear blue summer of 1966. First, the same Wilson who had in opposition championed the low paid and the trade unions, threw all the forces of his rhetoric against an official strike of seamen, some of the lowest paid workers in the country. When he finally beat the seamen by the most revolting witch hunt, he turned his bile, his office and his government against the entire working class movement.

When he finally beat the seamen by the most revolting witch hunt, he turned his bile, his office and his government against the entire working class movement. The same man who had derided Selwyn Lloyd, former Tory chancellor, for a ‘one sided pay pause’, now instituted a year long total wage freeze, enforced by law and backed by savage cuts in the public spending programme he had advocated. In 1967 he reimposed the health prescription charges he’d abolished. In 1968 he sanctioned another, even more racist, immigration act to keep out persecuted Asians from East Africa. In 1969 he proposed to ban unofficial strikes, the first plan for anti-union laws since the war. Throughout all this he supported the barbaric US invasion of Vietnam with a passion which inspired the US president Johnson to describe him as ‘another Churchill’. Fighting my way through the mountains of guff which have greeted the death of Harold Wilson, I detect one consistent theme. This is the amazing view that Harold Wilson went ‘too fast’, that he was ‘too ambitious’, that he set out to achieve a reform programme which simply wasn’t possible. This theme quickly fades into another: that the Labour leaders of today have ‘learned the lessons of the Wilson period’ and will not make the same mistake. Blair, we are told by everyone, to tumultuous and unanimous applause, will not aim anything like as high as poor old idealist Harold did. As a result, new Labour will, it is widely predicted, last longer than Wilson did. All this makes a grotesque mockery of what really happened in the 1960s and 1970s and what socialists felt about Wilson at the time. The universal feeling on the left – all sections of the left indeed, including many principled people on the Labour right – was that Wilson moved not too fast, but too slowly; that his stand was not too principled, but wholly unprincipled; that he was not ‘too robust’ with capitalists, judges and senior civil servants but too obsequious to them; and that his central failing was not his idealism but his pragmatism. Black Wednesday, July 1966 – the day of the cuts and the wage freeze – was named as such not by a revolutionary but by a mild mannered television journalist called John Morgan, who, like hundreds of thousands of others, had high hopes that the Labour government would lead the way to a new social order. This hope was widespread throughout the left, and it was the dashing of this hope by backsliding and grovelling to the rich and powerful which brought Wilson down so low in the eyes of so many of his former supporters. It follows that if prime minister Blair proceeds slower even than Wilson, if his ambitions are even more circumscribed than Wilson’s were, his downfall will be even more sudden, and even more calamitous. Top of the page Last updated on 2 July 2017

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Off the Christmas tree (December 1986) From Book Choice, Socialist Worker Review, No. 93, December 1986, p. 25. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Quentin Durward by Walter Scott Shoot Down by Bill Johnson (Chatto Windus £10.95) Days Like These by Nigel Fountain (Pluto Press £2.50) I came across some old Walter Scott novels going for next to nothing. I bought them and read Quentin Durward. Scott was a High Tory, deeply hostile to everything represented by the French Revolution through which he lived. He believed in things like chivalry and decency and loving one's neighbour. He also observed, rather to his distaste, that all the High Tories, anti-Jacobins and churchmen around them said they believed in all these things, but behaved entirely differently. Indeed, the higher they were in society, the more cynically and disreputably they trampled on their beliefs. The point of the novel, whose story bumbles along fast and furiously enough to keep you up at night, is to contrast the genuine high-mindedness of the relatively lowly Quentin with the hypocrisy of his masters, expecially the King. Political duplicity was the theme of my second favourite book this year, Shootdown. This book argues that the Korean airliner KAL 007 was deliberately sent over Russian territory by the loony clique of freaks who advise the President of the United States, who have succeeded ever since in covering up their atrocity. It is beautifully told, and superbly argued. Proof of the importance of Shootdown is the way it was ignored and boycotted when it was published, but it is, I gather, soon to come out in paperback. My third choice is a thriller by Nigel Fountain, the best-ever letters editor in Socialist Worker's history. It is a good tale and it makes a lot of political points, not all of which are flattering to the Socialist Workers Party. The best thing about the book is its sceptical hero John Raven. He is so much like Nigel Fountain that he is absolutely irresistible. Top of the page Last updated on 29 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Oil’s not well in East Timor (17 November 1990) From Socialist Worker, 17 November 1990. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 217–219. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The people of the tiny Indonesian province of East Timor are excited about events in the Gulf, the Financial Times reported last week. How can that be? How could anyone possibly be excited about the Gulf? Well, Financial Times correspondent Claire Bolderson has the answer: ‘If the world will rally to save the Kuwaitis from their aggressive next door neighbour, they say, surely it will do the same for them.’ This is logic. The United Nations says it has a duty to protect the integrity of every member state. If one state is attacked by another, the entire world community must join forces to see the aggressor off. The logic is specially powerful in East Timor. The people of that sad country have hardly known a single day of independence. It is the eastern half of a large island in the South Seas. A bloody deal was struck between the two imperial powers – Holland took the west, Portugal the east. After a time the Dutch, who were rather quicker than the other imperialists to realise the game was up, handed over their half to an independent Indonesia, while the Portuguese clung to East Timor every bit as ruthlessly as they clung to their colonies in Africa: Guinea, Angola and Mozambique. As in Africa, Portugal was eventually forced out of East Timor in 1975. There was nothing but chaos, civil war and conquest to follow. The Indonesians invaded and the Timoreans fought with tremendous (and almost wholly unreported) courage and sacrifice. In the terrible wars and famines which followed, probably a third of the population, nearly 200,000 people out of 600,000, were killed. Terror The Indonesian dictators followed up their slaughter with the most ghastly exploitation and the most revolting terror. This has been going on pretty well without a pause now for 15 years. East Timor is a model of the kind of country which ought to be protected by the international community. If there really was a world government with a sense of duty to the underprivileged and the oppressed East Timor would have been rescued long ago from the dragon which devours it. Yet the issue of sending troops to beat back the aggressors and allow a new free country to develop from the ruins of East Timor has never even been discussed at the United Nations. Now and then a resolution deploring the invasion and the atrocities of Indonesia is discussed, and usually traded in exchange for a ‘helpful’ vote from Indonesia about some other part of the world where big companies or states make profits. No one, in short, has lifted a finger to help the wretched people of East Timor, who must imagine that no one has ever heard of their plight. Now that aggression and oppression are suddenly unpopular at the United Nations (and now that American imperialism, Russian imperialism, Chinese, French and British imperialism have responded to the invasion of Kuwait with huge forces, and talk of widespread war) it is hardly surprising that the hopes of the people of East Timor begin to rise. Monster For if the world moves against a monster in Baghdad, might it not do so against a monster in Jakarta? There is after all nothing in logic to separate the two monsters. The regime in Baghdad is hardly more savage than its counterpart in Jakarta. It can hardly be argued that the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 was any more intolerable than the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia 15 years earlier. By every measure possible, the barbarism in East Timor has been as bad, if not far worse, than anything yet experienced in Kuwait. No wonder the East Timoreans are hopeful. But they have misread the reasons for the war in the Gulf. They have to do with the cheap supply of oil. The Americans and their ‘allies’ (what romantic memories that word conjures up) want to get rid of Saddam because he is seen by them as a threat to the stability of the region and the price of oil. The people of East Timor, as they hope and pray for a similar force rescue their country, have only to ask one question to discover whether or not they will be ‘rescued’ by ‘allies’ across the sea. Is there oil in East Timor? If yes, which is possible, it won’t be long before the US cavalry comes over the hill. If no, the people of East Timor, as far as the ‘allies’ are concerned, can rot in hell. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Seize the time (June 1993) From Socialist Review, No.165, June 1993, pp.10-11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The strike at the Timex plant in Dundee has become a symbol of resistance for all workers facing job losses and bosses’ attacks. Paul Foot visited the picket line in Dundee, talked to strikers and draws some lessons from the dispute We socialists are always saying that workers change in struggle – but what a joy and a relief it is when we can test the theory in flesh and blood. When I drew back the curtains in Tayport at 6.30 a.m. on Thursday 20 May, the sun streamed in – it was a glorious spring morning. Half an hour later, across the river and through the city of Dundee, the picket line at Timex was revelling in the sunshine. There were 60 to 70 people there, their numbers alone a great shout of mockery at the Tory anti-union laws’ insistence on six pickets. There was laughter and anger in equal measure – laughter among the pickets themselves, anger as the scabs’ lorries came up the hill and turned into the gate. Inside the lorries, and inside the private cars of the supervisors, strike breakers cowered, some of them hiding their face in balaclavas, others making a pathetic show of defiance, especially after they passed the gates. Each vehicle was greeted with a great roar of rage. Afterwards, some pickets went home. Many others lingered in the sun. There were tea and ham rolls galore. The women crossed the road, laid out their chairs, sat down and talked. Margaret Thompson had just come back from Norway where she picketed the headquarters of the Olsen line, eventual owners of Timex. She’s been to London, Manchester, Newcastle, Brighton on delegations. ‘I’ve been a shop steward for 20 years’ she said, ‘but I never felt half what I feel today. I think it’s because I realise my capabilities. I’m not just a worker at Timex, I’ve got a brain. If you do the same thing for 20 years, your brain goes soft. When I went into Timex as a girl, I was quiet as a lamb. Now I feel like a rottweiler. ‘I think the best thing about this is you suddenly realise you have friends everywhere. At a factory in Newcastle they had exactly £110 in their coffers. After they heard us speak they gave us ... £110, and I suddenly realised I was crying. They’d never met us, and they gave us everything.’ Jessie Britton joins in. ‘They are always complaining about outside agitators. But where would we be without the people from outside who support us? When Campbell Christie [general secretary of the STUC] was here the other day, he came up to talk to me. He asked a young Militant supporter standing next to me: "Do you work at Timex?" He knew that the lad didn’t. When the lad said no, Campbell looked at me knowingly, as if he knew I disapproved. But I told him straight we could never have got where we have without these young people selling papers and whipping up support for us.’ Jessie doesn’t think much of the constant advice from her union leaders to obey the law. ‘They are worried about their assets,’ she says, ‘but we aren’t worried about our assets. We haven’t got any. What use are union assets to us if we lose the strike and can’t have a union?’ I asked gingerly about the role of women in the strike. ‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘right here the men do the dishes and the women do the fighting.’ All morning, the wit and banter were interrupted with furious shouts of invective whenever a scab lorry (usually from a firm called Scottish Express) delivered supplies. Debbie Osborne sums up the mood. ‘When I was in there (contemptuous jerk of the head at the factory gates) I felt like a nobody. Now I feel a somebody. In fact I feel ten times more important than anyone in there.’ I first went to Dundee as a reporter for the Daily Record in 1963 on an assignment to cover a by-election. John Strachey, who had only just won Dundee West in 1959, had died, and the Labour candidate was a nondescript Labour councillor called Peter Doig. Labour’s campaign concentrated on the new prosperity of the city, one of the worst hit by the 1930s slump. Labour boasted, with some reason, of the enormous success of their post-war policy of shifting new industries into the unemployment black spots of the 1930s. Nowhere was that policy more successful than in Dundee. Boosted by huge grants and tax concessions, industry after industry settled in the purpose built industrial estates round town. The old precarious industrial base of jute and shipbuilding was transformed by sparkling new modern factories making the consumer goods of the future, office equipment, wristwatches, fridges. The names most associated with this success were National Cash Register and Timex, each employing thousands of workers, each recognising trade unions Whose stewards came to Labour’s platforms glowing in their new found confidence and strength. Labour won handsomely and won again just as well in the 1964 general election. My reports for the Daily Record were all for Labour, all hostile to the cocksure jute manufacturer who stood for the Tories. But I was unimpressed by Labour’s confidence. The huge corporations which owned these new industries were not Labour corporations. Labour had no control over, nor even a representative on these distant capitalist boardrooms. What would happen if the post-war boom petered out? Would the first factories to suffer not be the ones which had been set up as outposts, the ones with strong unions in foreign countries?

Would the first factories to suffer not be the ones which had been set up as outposts, the ones with strong unions in foreign countries? So it proved. The two huge recessions of 1981 and 1990 played havoc with the new industry so lovingly and expensively redistributed to Dundee. National Cash Register and Timex are still there, pathetic shadows of what they used to be. Timex, for instance, now makes no watches at all. The strong union agreements of the 1960s have been replaced by ‘sweetheart deals’, including even no-strike deals, which left the stewards and rank and file permanently on the defensive. A former president of the engineering union, Hugh Scanlon, once said in a famous TUC speech that every scratch on the trade union movement can lead to gangrene. The sweetheart approach of his successors led to gangrene soon enough. Every concession by the unions was greeted by the employers with cries for more. In Dundee like everywhere else the employers, led on this occasion by the Engineering Employers Federation, started to yearn for the day when they would not have to deal with unions at all. True, the unions were a pushover. But how much more of a pushover would the workers be, how much more clear profit was there to be made, if the unions were utterly broken once and for all? This is the fashionable thinking which led the US corporation which runs Timex to select an ardent Thatcherite from Surrey, Peter Hall, as the new president of their Scottish enterprise. Hall came armed with all the anti-union claptrap of US Timex’s Human Resources Department. He started ‘conversations’ with selected workers which, they soon realised, were aimed at seeking out ‘unhelpful elements’. He placed his own ‘loyalist’ spies in crucial positions. Shortly before Christmas last year, he announced lay offs. On 5 January the workers all got letters – some ‘thick’ (the sack), others ‘thin’ (not the sack). They refused to accept the letters, and occupied the canteen. Hall promised negotiations. The workers went back to work, effectively accepting the principle of lay offs, though they balloted (92 percent) for a strike. From 8 to 29 January they worked rotating shifts to cover for their laid off workmates, and waited for the negotiations which never came. There was no whisper of negotiation from Hall. A plea to go to ACAS was vigorously snubbed. On 29 January, frustrated by the constant prevarication, the workers came out on strike. On 17 February they reported en masse for work. They were told they could return only if they accepted a 10 percent cut in wages and other humiliations, including pension reductions. When they refused, they were locked out, and have been ever since. The tactics of Hall and his Human Resources henchmen are familiar enough in this recession. Since the reaction of the Timex workers has been described by many commentators as ‘old fashioned’, it is worth recalling that Hall’s union busting dates back to the stockyards of Chicago in the first decade of the century, and even earlier. Now as then, success for them depends exclusively on workers’ submission. All those in the trade union movement who have encouraged or tolerated such submission have played into the hands of the employers. Complete union organisations have been laid waste without even a gesture of revolt. Timex, on the other hand, has become a byword in the whole British labour movement because the workers there refused to submit, and have set up a picket and a campaign so powerful that the Timex bosses are split. A historic, old fashioned victory is on the cards. Only on the cards, however. The Engineering Employers Federation and their friends in the government will not decide one day simply to pack it in and let the workers back. They know full well what a disaster such a victory would be for employers all over Scotland. The bosses want to win. They have the usual powerful allies. The Timex strike has the unanimous support of both local councils – Dundee City and Tayside. But the Dundee police still see it as their central duty to protect a rogue employer’s inalienable right to hire scab labour and break strikes. The police behaviour on the mass demonstration on Monday 17 May was abominable. One young woman had her arm broken during arrest, was taken to hospital to have it set, hauled back to the cells, kept behind bars for 27 hours until finally she was released – without charge. Here is the classic outcome of total reliance on support from the Labour Party. Labour supports the strikers – in the councils, in the TUC, in its penetration of almost half the Scottish electorate. But Labour cannot prevent the police, whom they theoretically control, from protecting scabs or breaking the arm of a young woman who came to Dundee to express her solidarity with a cause Labour supports. Almost everyone in Dundee supports the strike, but the machinery of the state in Dundee is determined to break it. If the momentum of the strike is lost even for a week, the EEF and its state will get its breath back, reassert itself, reorganise its newspapers (which have been curiously wobbly on the issue) and launch another offensive. At the strike committee in the AEEU halls where I went after my morning on the picket line, the talk was all of keeping up the momentum, of boosting further the pickets and the delegations, of calling another mass demonstration outside Timex and seeking the help of more outside agitators. These men and women are out to win. They deserve to win and they need to win. Above all they can win. The entire resources – human and financial – of the labour movement should be put at their disposal. Top of the page Last updated on 18.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Three letters to a Bennite Cartoons by Phil Evans (March 1982) Three letters to a Bennite from Paul Foot, Socialist Workers Party (GB), London, March 1982 Produced and distributed for the SWP by Socialists Unlimited Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Letter 1: New Year’s Eve, 1981 Letter 2: 7 January 1982 Letter 3: 12 January 1982 Top of the page Last updated on 22.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Workers Against Racism (1973) An International Socialists pamphlet, 1973, 22 pp. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Who are the racialists? AN UNLIKELY selection of people have been combining over the past few years to pass on an important message to workers. The tones of the message differ from person to person, but the theme is always the same. It is that black people in Britain are the cause of most of our worries. What’s more, we are told, there is a simple solution: stop any more black people coming, and send the ones who are here back ‘home’ again. The people who shout against the blacks are motivated, so they tell us, by a passionate concern for the plight of ‘ordinary’ British working-class people. Take, for instance, Mr John Stokes, one of the leading campaigners against black people, who is Conservative MP for Oldbury and Halesowen. On 31 August 1972, Mr John Stokes had a letter printed in the ordinary people’s newspaper, The Times. ‘Sir,’ he wrote (in the way in which ordinary people properly address their betters), ‘Perhaps the most disquieting feature of today’s crisis over immigration is who in authority is considering the fears of the ordinary English man and woman on this subject which affects them so vitally.’ Mr Stokes is an ordinary businessman, who used to be the chief personnel officer for ICI, but has since branched out on his own. He now runs a profitable personnel selection outfit, which is valued at about a quarter of a million pounds. For a man so obsessed with the aspirations of ordinary people, however, Mr Stokes has some rather unorthodox views on other problems which affect working people. When the miners were on strike in 1972 for a decent wage, for instance, when even the Daily Express had to admit that the vast majority of ordinary people supported the miners, Mr Stokes was screaming in and out of parliament about the ‘monopoly power’ of the miners’ union. Since the strike finished, he has raged against the pickets which won the miners’ victory. Mr Stokes supports the Industrial Relations Act, which has been boycotted by nine million ordinary trade unionists. His only objection to the Act is that it does not go far enough. Yet, when it comes to the blacks, Mr Stokes is overcome with concern for the plight of those same workers, whose organisations and trade unions he detests. A large number of Tory MPs support Mr Stokes’ stand. There is Mr Harold Soref, the Tory MP for Ormskirk, who is constantly complaining about the number of black people in this country. Mr Soref and his family run a prosperous shipping company which deals in the main with South Africa. Then there is Mr Ronald Bell, who is always good for a quote about how ordinary people in his constituency (South Buckinghamshire) are sick and tired of the blacks. Mr Bell conducts a wealthy practice at the bar. One of the most powerful campaigners on behalf of the ordinary white folk of Britain is Mr Duncan Sandys, who is a Companion of Honour, and is a former Tory Minister of almost everything. On 23 January 1970, for instance, speaking at a banquet of the British Jewellers Association, Mr Sandys said: ‘We should offer generous grants to any who would like to settle in their own countries.’ Mr Sandys’ knowledge about the blacks goes deeper even than his experience as Commonwealth Minister from 1960 to 1964. In 1969, he joined the board of Ashanti Goldfields, one of the richest mining companies in Africa, which has made countless millions for its shareholders by robbing the miners of the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Mr Sandys’ contact with the Ashanti Goldfields company brought him to the attention of Lonrho Ltd, perhaps the largest and most unscrupulous of the post-war financial companies whose main function is to plunder Africa. In 1971, five Lonrho directors were arrested on fraud charges in South Africa, and all Lonrho top management was barred from South Africa. In the summer of 1972, Duncan Sandys went to South Africa on behalf of Lonrho and had a few ‘cosy chats’ with the savages who run the South African government. Hey Presto! The fraud charges were dropped, and Lonrho was free once more to mine platinum in South Africa. For this service, Duncan Sandys was given a ‘consultancy’ for Lonrho which brought him £50,000 a year, most of it paid tax-free in the Cayman Islands. Finally there is the country’s most ordinary man, Mr Enoch Powell. In a speech in April 1968 Mr Powell hit all the headlines by suddenly identifying with the ordinary men and women of Britain on the immigration question. He told a story about a man who had approached him in a street in Wolverhampton and said: ‘In this country in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ Mr Powell was tremendously impressed by this remark. He told his Birmingham audience: ‘Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think of something else.’ Again and again since, Mr Powell, who before 1968 was regarded as a bit of a crank, has made a name for himself by voicing what he thinks are the universal demands for ‘fewer blacks’. As in the case of Mr Stokes, his views on other matters do not show quite the same concern for the needs of ordinary people. The ‘proudest moment’ in his life, according to Powell, was when he rose in November 1956 to read the second reading of the Rent Bill which began the dismantling of the restrictions on private housing. What was the effect of the Rent Act, which Powell moved?

It was to evict tens of thousands of working people, who had previously been ‘controlled’ tenants, so that their houses could be sold or split up by property speculators. In London’s Notting Hill and similar areas it led to the rise of unscrupulous landlords whose job it was to evict ‘controlled’ tenants from their houses. It cut the number of rented houses and flats by more than a third. Not a single extra house was built to rent for working people as a result of the Act. It was (with the single exception of the Tories’ Housing Finance Act of 1971, also enthusiastically supported by Powell, Stokes and Co.) the most anti-working class housing law passed this century. Powell is against all regulations on the capitalist system, which he believes has a ‘perfect symmetry’. ‘Often,’ he once said, ‘when I am kneeling down in church I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost, for the gift of capitalism.’ On every subject you can think of – housing, pensions, trade unions, hospitals, factory conditions – Powell stands four square with the rich and mighty against the poor and humble. He is the capitalists’ chief theorist, and he lives in fashionable Eaton Square. As he himself once put it: ‘When I see a rich man I give thanks to God.’ Mr Powell is a rich man like all the others, but his campaigns are run by richer men than he, Stokes and Sandys put together. In April 1973, Mr David Lazarus, a Powellite in Brent, North London, who joined the National Front in 1968 but still manages to hold high office in the Conservative Party, announced that ‘three millionaires’ had agreed to finance a campaign to make Powell’s views more widely known. The most generous of these is Mr Anthony Fisher, who made several million pounds for himself by building up (and selling) Buxted Chickens Ltd. In 1955, Mr Fisher founded the Institute for Economic Affairs, which hires professional economists and authors to give academic respectability to the case for more ‘free enterprise’, less ‘state intervention’, higher council rents, more fee-paying schools and all the rest of the devices whereby the rich keep hold of their wealth at the expense of the people who produce it. Mr Fisher, like Mr Sandys, is an expert in tax avoidance and has a number of ‘interests’ in the Cayman Islands. The second, even more reactionary millionaire is Sir Ian MacTaggart, a former Tory candidate, whose father made his millions out of buying and selling flats in Glasgow. In 1964, Sir Ian put up £100,000 to finance the Property Council, a ginger group whose purpose was to glorify the activities of property speculators. One Property Council leaflet likened property speculators to ‘scientists, doctors and preachers who in the long run improve living and working conditions in all civilised countries.’ The third millionaire is Garfield Weston, the ‘biscuit king’, who controls Associated British Foods, one of Europe’s three biggest food chains. These are the ordinary men who are putting up substantial portions of their vast wealth to subsidise Powell’s campaigns. They support Powell when he fights for the ‘freedom’ of chicken kings and property speculators, and above all they support Powell in his campaign on behalf of the workers against the blacks. This sudden friendship with the workers on one issue – immigration – has been the preoccupation of rich men for hundreds of years. When more than a million Irish men and women came to Britain during the last century, industrialists, shopkeepers and parsons joined together to warn the workers, whom they hated, about the dangers to their stock and religion from Irish immigration. Eighty years ago, large numbers of Jews, fleeing from the tyranny of Tsarist Russia and equally savage regimes in Eastern Europe, started coming to Britain. At once, the warnings stated. Mr W.H. Wilkins wrote a book called The Alien Invasion. Mr Wilkins was a rich magistrate, who had just written a best-seller entitled: The Traffic in Italian Children. ‘One of the leading measures, of the labour legislation of the future,’ wrote Mr Wilkins, ‘will be to protect the English working men against this perpetual pouring in of destitute foreigners. Why, the working classes are asking, should we be robbed of our birthright by the refuse population of other countries?’ Mr Wilkins’ sombre warnings had a rosy introduction from His Right Reverence the Bishop of Bedford, a crusted Tory, and the book was dedicated to another Conservative barbarian, the Earl of Dunraven, who was described as ‘the leader of the movement for protecting our people against the invasion of the destitute and worthless of other lands.’ Thirty-six years later, another Tory, Lt Col A.H. Lane, wrote a book called The Alien Menace. The introduction this time was by a former Tory minister, Lord Sydenham of Coombe. ‘British working men and women,’ wrote Lord Sydenham, who hated both, ‘have no love for the aliens, who in many districts make life harder for them.’ And in 1965, yet another noble Lord, Lord Elton, wrote another book, called this time The Unarmed Invasion, about the terrible threat to British working men and women from black immigration. Magistrates, bishops, army officers, Tory MPs, Earls and Viscounts, aided in the 1930s by Nazis in Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, today by ex-Nazis in the National Front, have been shouting all these years about the danger to the British workers from the immigration of Irishmen, Jews and blacks. Like Sandys, Stokes and Enoch Powell, they devoted the whole of their political life to attacking the working class movement. Yet when immigration is on the agenda, suddenly they become the workers’ friends. Can all this be right? Is it really the case that Powell and his henchmen, so implacably opposed to the workers’ interests on so many fronts, are correct on this single issue? Are we to listen to people who tell us that although Powell is wrong on housing, trade unions, unemployment and the rest he is right about the blacks?

Are workers to march, as London dockers did in 1968, shouting ‘Enoch is Right’? Let us find out. Why did the blacks come? IN THE TEN YEARS before the war, there were never less than one and a half million people unemployed. In the twenty five years after the war, there were never more than three quarters of a million unemployed. Those simple figures tell the story of a post-war boom in the economy such as had never happened in the whole history of capitalism. In pre-war capitalism, when there was a boom and slump at least every ten years, there was always a huge ‘reserve army’ of workers who were unemployed. Each new cycle of investment and expansion could be staffed by workers from this pool. In post-war capitalism, until very recently, this pool has not been available. If the economy was to be kept going, if factories were to be kept open and investment to be continued, workers had to be found from somewhere to fill the ever-increasing gaps in the labour force. This is why black workers came from the West Indies, India and Pakistan. They had been free to come for a hundred and fifty years. They had not come because there were no secure jobs to come to. Now, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were jobs to come to. No one in his right mind prefers a winter in Birmingham to the blue skies of Jamaica. But in Jamaica there was no work, and in Birmingham there was work. And so the workers left their homes and their families and moved to Birmingham. When the ‘boom’ was on, the rich men who now prattle about the ‘dangers’ of immigration were silent. Mr Powell said nothing about immigration control all through the 1950s. In 1960, Mr Powell became Minister of Health and encouraged the recruitment of West Indian nurses to help staff the National Health Service. Mr Duncan Sandys was Minister for the Commonwealth from 1960 to 1964 and said not a word about the need to keep the blacks out. In 1963, Mr Sandys promised the Kenyan Asians, as a reward for their opposition to African independence, that they could if ever they liked come to Britain free from immigration control. The bosses in the factories wanted more workers, and the Tories in the House of Commons were determined to let the workers come. Now what is happening? Now, there is no longer any certainty about economic growth. Now no-one talks about the post-war capitalist miracle. Now the economy stutters forward and back in fits and starts. The capitalist system has not found any way of spiriting away its age-old problems. It still cannot plan its growth or be certain about its prospects. So now, immigrants are not needed any more. Now the racialists, like Powell and Sandys, are let out of their cages to make speeches against immigration and against the blacks. Powell talks of ‘rivers of blood’ flowing in the streets as a result of race conflict. Suddenly, the ‘dangers’ of the black presence are discovered and millionaires start to shriek: ‘Send them all home!’, or, if they are liberals: ‘Let no more come!’ One by one, the arguments pour out of the sewer. ‘Why house these blacks when we haven’t enough houses for our own people?’ ‘Why spend money on schooling for black children, when even our own children don’t get enough schooling?’ Tories who for generations have denied the existence of a shortage in housing or schools, suddenly discover that there are not enough houses or schools, and use the statistics of their own shameful record to blame the black workers. Yet their arguments touch a sensitive nerve among white workers who are only too aware of the shortages around them. Are they true? Whose houses, whose jobs, whose social services? Housing ‘Why house these people when we haven’t enough houses for ourselves?’ is a common argument among anti-immigration campaigners and the argument often strikes a chord in working-class audiences. It seems obvious that if there’s a housing shortage, it will be made worse if more people come into the country looking for a place to live. In fact, the housing shortage has nothing to do with immigration. However much immigration there is, it will not make the slightest difference to the housing shortage. The worst-housed cities in the United Kingdom are Glasgow and Belfast. In Glasgow, 100,000 people live more than three to a room. In the two central wards of Belfast, more than 90 per cent of the people (Protestant and Catholic) do not have an inside lavatory. By every measure, overcrowding, lack of basic amenities, age of dwellings, the two cities are the worst. Yet the rate of immigration into both cities is lower than any other city in the United Kingdom. Both cities have comparatively very few blacks living in them. Indeed both cities have lost substantial numbers of their young workers through emigration. Obviously, the reasons for the housing shortage in those two cities have nothing to do with immigration.

Obviously, the reasons for the housing shortage in those two cities have nothing to do with immigration. Not only in Glasgow and Belfast, but in all our cities, more houses are built in the years of heavy immigration than in the years of light immigration. Last year (1972), less blacks came into this country than in any other year in the past twenty. Fewer houses were built than in any other year in the past ten. The housing shortage got worse quicker last year than in any other year since 1962 – yet immigration was at its lowest. The housing shortage, moreover, existed long before black workers started coming to this country. It was much worse than it is now in the 1920s and 1930s when there was almost no immigration of anyone into this country. So we see that the existence of a housing shortage, and whether that shortage gets worse or better, has nothing to do with immigration. Who causes a housing shortage, then? First, the landlords, who build houses only as long as they can make a healthy profit from them in rent. When the Rent Control Acts were passed as a result of workers’ pressure in 1919, landlords stopped building houses. Then the Labour councils started to build houses at relatively low rents which people could afford. But the rate at which council houses can be built is dictated by the moneylender – who lends money to the councils to pay for the building. The moneylender demands such a fantastic rate of interest that the councils cannot build enough houses. In 1971–72, for instance, in Camden, London, the borough collected £3.7 million in rents from their tenants – and had to pay out £4.5 million in interest charges on money borrowed for building houses. And that’s even before the cost of the actual building is covered. The same sort of figures can be found for local authorities throughout the country. They’ve now got to the stage where they have to pay out so much in interest that they can’t afford to build enough houses. So more and more people become homeless. The moneylender combines with the building industry to ensure that houses built for sale are only within the reach of better-off people. Heavy mortgage rates, which provide more loot for the moneylender, and vast building profits cut down the number and the availability of houses for sale. The landlords, the moneylenders and the way the building industry is run cause the housing shortage, no matter how many people come into this country or leave it. Black workers when they come to this country pay their rates, rents and taxes just like any other worker. Just like any other worker they work – many of them in the building industry. So their contribution to housing is no less than any other worker’s. They are in no way the cause of the housing shortage. Like other workers, they are the victims of it, and in many cases they are the most cruelly-used victims. Jobs Surely, argue the Powellites, if lots of immigrants come into this country they will create more unemployment. The years of heavy black immigration into this country-the 1950s and the early 1960s-were the years of the fullest employment this country has ever seen. In all the 1950s for instance, when there was no control of black immigration into this country and more than 600,000 black workers came in, unemployment throughout the country was less than two per cent. The areas of highest unemployment – Northern Ireland, Scotland, the North East – were the areas of lowest immigration, and the areas of fullest employment, like London and Birmingham, were the areas of highest immigration. Unemployment has been with us as long as capitalism. In the 1930s whole communities in Scotland and Wales were laid waste by unemployment. There was no immigration into any of these communities. People streamed out of them, not into them. Unemployment is caused by industrialists and financiers who cannot sell back their goods to workers in sufficient quantities to keep their factories open. It is the basic flaw of a system run for profit, a capitalist system. Mass immigration of groups of workers has nothing to do with causing unemployment. On the contrary, it is a sign that capitalism in the ‘host country’ is enjoying a spate of full employment. So, once again, immigrants do not cause unemployment. They are just the first victims of it. The Social Services What is true of housing and jobs is true of all the social services. A recent study by two economists at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that immigrants take less out of the social services-that’s education, child welfare, unemployment benefit and old age pensions-than the average for the British population. In 1966, they reported, £62 was spent per head of the population on all these services – while only £52 was spent per head of the immigrant population. Even by 1981, the gap will be roughly the same, £69.9 to £60.7. ‘Immigrants’ demands on the health and welfare services,’ concludes the article, ‘have been lower than the national average because the inflow has hitherto consisted largely of relatively young men and women of working age. It seems likely that this effect will be a fairly long-lasting one.’ The blacks have nothing to do with causing all the shortages in our society, but they suffer from them worse than anyone else. The Grieve Report on London Housing in 1969 gave some horrifying statistics about the housing conditions of black people in the city. 73 per cent of black families were living in one room or two.

73 per cent of black families were living in one room or two. 46 per cent of black families (compared with 11 per cent for the whole population) had no kitchen. 53.2 per cent (compared with 15.1 per cent of the whole population) were sharing a lavatory. 50.9 per cent (compared with 11.8 per cent of the whole population) were sharing baths. Only 9.3 per cent of blacks (compared with more than a third of the whole population) had managed to get into a council house, and in most of those cases the council houses were the oldest and most dilapidated available. Discrimination against black workers goes all through the social scale. Black children are herded into Educationally Subnormal (ESN) schools in far larger numbers than white children. Schools with large numbers of black children are invariably the most overcrowded. When redundancy takes place at a factory where there are large numbers of black workers, the boss invariably tries out a new redundancy rule: Blacks First Out. Somehow or other, Enoch Powell and his crew manage to turn this horrible picture to their own advantage. The plight of the blacks, which is caused to some extent by the racialist pressure of politicians, is, claim the politicians, proof of the blacks’ own fecklessness! After insisting that the blacks have to live in damp, overcrowded houses, and work long hours of overtime in damp, overcrowded mills and factories, the racialists cry: ‘Look, they are weak and sick. They have a higher rate of TB! They are causing overcrowding in the hospitals!’ The people who blame the blacks for the shortages in our society are exactly the people who encourage those shortages. Messrs Powell, Stokes, and their friends are the most angry opponents of all the measures which have been taken or might be taken to alleviate those shortages; council house subsidies, low rents, government subsidies for industry in the ‘unemployed’ regions, better standards for state schools, more power for the Health Service against the drug companies – anything which could provide a few more houses, hospitals and schools are bitterly opposed by the same people who turn round and blame black workers for these shortages. We are always being told that when rich men set up factories or lend money to councils or agree to give some of their spare time to serve as governors of hospitals, they are giving away wealth to the workers, and the workers should be grateful. So powerful is this propaganda, that too often the workers and their unions are grateful for the crumbs. They fight for more crumbs, and then they fight among each other about the distribution of the crumbs. Too often, workers and unions behave like the poor men in the bible underneath Dives’ table, shouting: ‘Here come the crumbs, brothers. Now let us all fight to see how much each section can get for themselves. We will fight each other in the great crumb share-out!’ So when a lot of other poor men appear underneath the table, they create nothing but resentment, and if these other poor men happen to have different coloured skins, then they create even more resentment. ‘If all these people grab some crumbs’, runs the argument, ‘there will be fewer crumbs for us’. The answer to this problem therefore is: KEEP THEM OUT! Keep them out of the country, keep them out of the unions, keep them out of promotion, keep them out of council house estates – and so on, and so on. The rich men are happiest when the squabbling about the crumbs is fiercest. If the poor men under the table are arguing among each other, if one section is yelling Keep Them Out to another section, the rich man is happy because he knows that no questions will be asked. No one will ask: ‘Who made the loaf?’ And no one goes on to ask: ‘Who is sharing it out?’ And no one, therefore, exposes the simple truth. THE POOR MEN HAVE MADE THE LOAF, AND THE RICH MAN HAS STOLEN IT. That rich robber feels safe as long as people argue about crumbs and not about the loaf. That is the principal reason why he so enthusiastically supports immigration controls. Against Immigration Controls ‘I’M NOT A RACIALIST, but I’m in favour of some kind of immigration control.’ How often we hear this from all kinds of people – Tories, Liberals, Labourites. They all pretend that they don’t discriminate between black and white once they’re in this country, but they do think there should be some control of the numbers coming into this country. We in the International Socialists are against all immigration controls. We know that in capitalist society the numbers of people coming into any country will be regulated by the number of jobs available in that country, and we know that overcrowding in that country – bad housing, hospital conditions, inadequate transport and the like – are caused not by the numbers of workers in that country but by a system of society which plans its priorities and makes its decisions in the interests of profit and a minority who benefit from that profit. So we know that immigration controls cannot possibly assist the workers already in that country. We also know that immigration controls create all kinds of hardship for workers and their families who want to come here. As immigration controls have tightened over the last decade, the indignities which black people have to suffer to ‘prove their right’ to enter Britain have multiplied. For instance, the children of black workers already here can only come into the country if they are under 16. So every day an army of immigration officers, the majority of whom are Powellites, use all their powers to ‘prove’ that children who have travelled to London airport to join their Indian or Pakistani parents are over 16. X-ray tests are carried out on these children’s wrist-bones. Trick questions are asked about their brothers and sisters, and so on. Again and again frightened children have been put back on a plane to India or Pakistan. Large numbers of black workers and their wives are held for long periods in remand prisons while immigration officers ‘check out’ their details.

Other black workers who have been promised jobs on the black market have to get into this country by illegal means – in boats run across the Channel by spivs. Once they are here, these workers are constantly subject to the fear of being caught by the police and deported. We stand for the free movement of workers from country to country. We say that immigration controls are against the interests of workers everywhere. We say that the people who shout for immigration controls are doing so either because they are racialists – that is, they think British people are superior to foreigners – or because they like to see workers arguing among themselves because of their different coloured skin. These are the reasons why we opposed the Tory government’s Commonwealth Immigration Act, 1962; the Labour government’s stricter controls in 1965 and the Labour government’s Commonwealth Immigration (Ugandan Asians) Act, 1968. But now there is a new Immigration Act and a new, even more urgent reason for opposing immigration control. It can be summed up in two words: contract labour. Contract labour is labour without rights. It is provided by workers who have not even the slender advantages won for them by their class over the last 150 years. It is labour without trade unions, without votes, without proper insurance, without even the right to live as families. This labour has no check on the most brutal demands of the employers. The European post-war boom has been stoked by contract labour. Millions of workers from surrounding countries have got jobs in Germany, France, Switzerland. There are hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Turks in Germany, Algerians and Spaniards in France, Italians and Egyptians in Switzerland. These workers have jobs without rights. They are not in trade unions. Most of them live in shanty towns. Their houses and factories are not subject to the ‘normal’ health and safety regulations. They are only partly-insured. If they annoy the boss or go on strike, they face the threat of instant deportation without the legal right even to complain. They are a cheap labour force, but above all they are a compliant labour force because of their immigration status. The black workers who have got jobs in Britain over the last 25 years are doing the same sort of work as are the Greeks in Germany or the Spaniards in France. But they have had marginal advantages because of an accident of imperialism. They have been treated as British citizens. They have had the right to vote, the right to join trade unions (as many of them have) and, above all, freedom from the threat of deportation (unless they committed a crime). The Tories and their class have watched the effect of contract labour in Europe with envy. As they linked arms with their fellow-robbers in Europe, so they brought their immigration laws ‘into line’: that is, they established contract labour in Britain. That is what the Immigration Act, 1971, is about. Under the Act, anyone who comes into this country to work is a contract labourer. When his job is finished, so does his right to stay in this country. At any time, he can be deported without right of appeal on the say-so of the Home Secretary. In June 1973, the Tories who sit as Law Lords in the House of Lords added a new twist to this already barbaric Act. They declared that any immigrant who entered illegally at any time since 1962 was also subject to deportation. The Act was made retrospective. Immediately the police forces in the immigrant areas – already hated and despised for their racist activity – started a witch-hunt. Black youths driving cars were asked to submit their passports. Black workers collecting insurance cards also had to show passports. One Asian girl who asked a policeman about the way home was ‘held for questioning’ for two hours. The purpose of the operation was to frighten the black population, and to discourage them from any activity of protest. The dangers of contract labour for the organised labour movement know no bounds. If one section of the working population is under threat of deportation the effect is to weaken not only their own ability to fight for better wages and conditions but that of the entire working-class movement. The trade unions in France and Germany have been consistently weakened by their leaders’ refusal to tackle the problem of contract labour. Again and again, the strike power of workers has been diluted into arguments between ‘indigenous’ workers and immigrant workers. The only way out of the problem is organisation across the board of migrant workers into trade unions and the insistence on the same standards and working conditions for all workers in any one industry or place of work. Such organisation is weakened at once by trade union acceptance of immigration control. It is the immigration controls, not the immigration, which creates the contract labour. Free movement of workers does not lead to contract labour, for there is then no restriction on immigrant workers organising in trade unions and in socialist organisations.

Free movement of workers does not lead to contract labour, for there is then no restriction on immigrant workers organising in trade unions and in socialist organisations. But the controls and the conditions which they place on the immigrant worker inevitably shackle that worker, deter him from trade union and socialist activity, and widen the gulf between workers of different colours and nationalities. So as soon as the trade unionist says ‘Keep Them Out’ he has committed himself not only to discrimination between one set of workers and another, not only to support for police and immigration officials’ bullying of immigrant workers, but finally and inevitably to a system of contract labour which will paralyse his own organisation. That is why International Socialists say in the same breath: NO RACIALISM NO IMMIGRATION CONTROLS Why racism? NOT SO LONG AGO, I was speaking to a meeting of steelworkers in Consett, Co Durham. After a long discussion in which I urged people to join the International Socialists, one steelworker who had been very enthusiastic, picked up the sheet of paper on which were written the four main principles for which the IS stands. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a while, ‘I agree with the first three – but this opposition to racialism and immigration controls. I’m sorry. I hate the blacks.’ I tried to reason with him. How many blacks were there in Consett? He could only think of one – an Indian who had been there for many years. Had he ever met a black man? No, he hadn’t. But he hated them. He knew it was wrong and absurd to say so, and he didn’t know why. Very few workers go as far as that, but many often admit to a feeling of hostility to blacks which they can’t explain. Others will agree that blacks don’t cause the housing or hospital or schools shortage but still admit to uneasiness about them being in this country. When people try to give reasons for this unease they often reply in ridiculous terms, such as: ‘They have noisy parties,’ or ‘their cooking smells’, or ‘they are lazy’. There are plenty of white people who are lazy, whose cooking smells and who have noisy parties. No doubt they cause distress and make themselves, as individuals, unpopular. Why is it, though that individual failings make a whole group of people unpopular? Why is it that people are all too ready to make racialist judgments about individual failings? The answer lies in the history of this country and of its rich rulers. For four centuries these rulers have been plundering people in other countries, most of which happened to be inhabited by people with different coloured skins. First there was plunder by simple conquest and the slave trade, then plunder by economic imperialism. The ruthlessness and brutality of this plunder knew no bounds. Whole civilisations were uprooted and transported. In India, millions of miles of fertile country were turned into a dust-bowl. The population of Dacca fell from 150,000 to 20,000 between 1818–1836. All this was done in order to fatten the planters and shareholders of white Christian civilisation. Christ had taught: Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt do no murder. So every Sunday the representatives of British Christendom had to get up in the pulpits and justify robbery and murder on a mass scale to their congregations. This acrobatic feat was carried out by means of a simple slogan. Christ had taught: ‘He has made of one blood all the nations of the earth’, but the Christian scholars who had shares in the East India Company were quick to point out that Christ had said nothing about skin colour. And so it was that the Christian imperialists developed the theory of the inferiority of the black man. The black man, they claimed, had no history. He had no civilisation. He was a savage. Give him an inch, and he would take a mile. He was obsessed with sex, and his one aim was to rape a white woman. So therefore he had to be treated with ‘firmness and ‘discipline’. That treatment was for his own good. So the mass murder, robbery and rape which was carried out in Africa, Asia and the West Indies were written up in the newspapers and history books as ‘civilising missions’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the standard work of reference among people of learning, stated in its 1884 edition: ‘No full-blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of science, a poet or an artist, and the fundamental equality claimed for him by ignorant philanthropists is belied by the whole history of the race throughout this historic period.’ Newspaper editors whipped themselves into fury at the occasional outbursts of revolt by the black, inferior people who were being civilised by British imperialism. In the autumn of 1865, for instance, a Negro revolt broke out in Morant Bay, Jamaica. For a few days the Negroes ran riot over a couple of plantations. The rebellion was quickly and brutally crushed. Five hundred Negroes were indiscriminately slaughtered. The leader of the revolt, William Gordon, was executed by order of Governor Eyre, whose recourse to barbarism was defended by liberal men of letters in England such as Ruskin, Tennyson, Kingsley, Dickens, and Carlyle.

The leader of the revolt, William Gordon, was executed by order of Governor Eyre, whose recourse to barbarism was defended by liberal men of letters in England such as Ruskin, Tennyson, Kingsley, Dickens, and Carlyle. On 4 November, The Times voiced the outrage of its class: ‘He who has come in as favoured heir of a civilisation in which he had no previous share; he, petted by philanthropists and statesmen and preachers into precocious enjoyment of rights and immunities which other races have been too glad to acquire by centuries of struggles ... he, dandled into legislative and official grandeur by the commiseration of England; that he should have chosen to revolt – this is a thing so incredible that we will not venture to believe it.’ The Times was writing about the agricultural labourer in Jamaica, who worked for half the year for fifteen hours a day for a wage which could not feed or clothe his children, and spent the other half in unemployment and total starvation, whose infant mortality rate was more than 60 per cent and whose condition represented the extremity of poverty and exploitation in all the wretched history of imperialism. British workers and their organisations were encouraged, often with some success, to identify with the exploits of British conquerors abroad. However bad conditions were in the factory or the mill, it was argued, British workers owed their standard of living to the enterprise of their countrymen overseas. From time to time it was true that British workers gained marginal wage advantages from the opening up of ‘markets’ by British imperialists. But the advantage was always short-lived. As each cycle of investment in overseas countries came to an end, so mass unemployment followed in British factories. The ten-year slump during the 1930s came at a time when the bastions of the British Empire in Africa, India and the West Indies were still intact. To put it crudely, the problems created by robbing British workers in Britain could not be solved for capitalism by the robbery of workers in Asia or Africa. Yet the teaching and preaching of a hundred years dies hard. As I found in my meeting at Consett (and as others find all the time in the working-class movement) the lies peddled by Powell do strike a chord in large numbers of workers. They seem to provide an easy way out of the frustrations and insecurities which so many workers feel. Especially where trade union organisation is weak and all other means of solving problems are cut off, the blacks can be made into convenient scapegoats. The propaganda of imperialism, the lies about racial inferiority, are intensely dangerous to the working-class movement. It is not simply that they teach men and women to behave like monsters to their fellow workers. It is also that they threaten the strength of trade-union organisation inside the factory, and so tip the balance of class power still further towards the employers. Consider a few contemporary examples. In 1965, at Courtaulds Red Scar mill near Preston, a quarter of the factory (the worst-paid, hardest-working quarter) was worked by about 900 Pakistanis. The other three-quarters were worked by white workers. One morning, the factory manager walked into the Pakistani quarter and ordered a speed-up. Machines previously worked by four men, he said, would now be worked by three. This meant a huge increase in the amount of work that had to be done, and the Pakistani workers promptly walked out on strike. The local Transport and General Workers Union official advised the white workers not to follow suit, and the factory stayed at work. The strike went on unofficially for nine bitter weeks, and was broken. The Pakistani workers went back to work on the management’s terms. Three weeks later, the same speed-up was introduced in the three white quarters. Since the union officials and white stewards had accepted the principle of the speed-up in the black section, they could not fight it in their own. All the workers suffered because they had been led by people who accepted that there was something inferior about black workers. The same goes for two recent strikes in the East Midlands. In October 1972, several hundred workers at the Mansfield Hosiery mill, Loughborough, came out on strike for wage increases which they had been promised long before. Their union – the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers – was surprised and shocked that these members who had been paying their dues for so long should take any action at all. The white knitters in the factory refused to support the strike for fear that more ‘skilled jobs’ would go to black men. The strike ended in partial victory for the strikers, but the racial attitudes of union and white workers did nothing to help the cause, the conditions or the job security of anyone. In June 1973 Indian and Pakistani workers came out on strike because their shop steward was sacked for responding to the TUC call for a strike on May Day against the freeze. Here was a clear cut case of victimisation of a man who took seriously his role in the trade union movement and responded to an appeal from the TUC. The local TGWU official refused to declare the strike official or to offer support. He, again, is victim to racist attitudes, and every worker in his area will suffer from it. By not supporting Mohammed Sawar at Jaffes, Nottingham, the union will make it more difficult to fight against any victimisation in future, whether the militant victimised is black or white. On 13 June, the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers started its annual conference at Eastbourne. Mr Peter Pendergast, the NUHKW general president, attacked the Mansfield Hosiery strikers for bringing in an ‘outsider’. They should, he said, have relied on the union. He went on: ‘We helped the Asians far more than we have helped our own people.’ Our own people! It is the phrase used again and again by the backward and reactionary sections of the labour movement as an excuse for racial discrimination or immigration control. Our own people! Who are they? Are they people who have been born in Britain, white people who speak English?

Are they people who have been born in Britain, white people who speak English? If so, this group includes Duncan Sandys, John Stokes, Harold Soref and countless other wealthy union-busters and imperialists all over the world. For workers and trade unionists these are not ‘our people’; they are the opposite. They are the sworn enemies of the working class movement whose most crucial political aim is the preservation of wealth, privilege and leisure for their class. Our people, therefore, cannot be defined by their place of birth, the place where they live, the language they talk or the colour of their skin. Our people are the plundered and the dispossessed all over the world who speak a multitude of languages and have many different coloured skins. The common factor of their exploitation binds them together far closer than the trivial differences of skin colour or language. The Asian workers pay dues into the NUHKW every bit as much as white workers. When their union president talks of them as though they were not ‘our people’, he talks like a Tory backwoodsman, not a trade unionist. He is victim to the racialist poison which is eating at the very heart of the British labour movement. We must find the antidote. The fight back FOR THE LAST fifteen years or so, people have tried to fight racialism by leaving the problem to someone else. Worried or confused by the strength of racialist feeling in the working class movement, MPs, councillors and the like have put all their hope in anti-racist activity from the Trades Union Congress or from a Labour government. The Trades Union Congress and the trade union leaders of left and right are all one hundred per cent opposed to racialism. There are a hundred, if not a thousand conference resolutions to prove it. One of the remarkable aspects of such conferences is their almost total whiteness. When Frank Cousins retired as general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (which has the largest number of black workers) he became chairman of the Community Relations Commission, whose job was to ‘further and improve race relations’. But at the Transport and General Workers’ Union conference seven years later – in 1973 – there were only two black delegates out of a thousand. The trade union leaders have passed their motions, but done nothing whatever to combat racial discrimination or immigration controls or the racist ideas which exist in the minds of many of their members. They have done nothing to involve black workers and their problems in the trade unions. They have taken their dues, and passed them by. The same is true of the Labour Party. In 1958, when racist Tories first demanded immigration control, the Labour Party declared itself against all Commonwealth immigration control. Labour leaders like Gaitskell and Brown fought the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 line by line. Yet the first act of the Labour government when it came to power in 1964 was to cut off all labour vouchers for unskilled black workers. In August 1965, still tighter immigration controls were introduced. In 1966, however, the dream of all the multi-racialists came true. Mr Roy Jenkins who has very strong anti-racialist views, was appointed Home Secretary by the Labour government. At once, he started work on a Race Relations Act which would make racial discrimination illegal. After a long fight, the Act was passed in 1968. But in the month it became law, in one demagogic speech about ‘rivers of blood’, Enoch Powell swept away all the good intentions of the Race Relations Act. Powell spoke to the fears and frustrations of the masses, while Jenkins had been staking everything on the decencies of liberal drawing rooms. Powell’s speech followed close on another Immigration Control Act which left tens of thousands of East African Asians stateless. Faced with Powell’s demagogy, the liberals in parliamentary office were impotent. There was nothing left for Wilson and Co but to surrender to Powellite demands. This surrender has been continued out of office. When, in the summer of 1972, Wilson was asked why he had made no comment about the racist hysteria surrounding the entry of a few thousand Ugandan Asians, he replied that no one had asked him to do so! The struggle against racism cannot be left to trade union or Labour leaders. Community Relations Commissions, Race Relations Boards, community liaison officers, welfare associations and the like will not be able to counter the cancerous effects of racialism. I have argued in this pamphlet that racialism is part and parcel of a capitalist system which divides people up into classes in the interests of the minority in charge of industry and finance, the ruling class. It follows that the fight against racism is necessarily part of the fight against capitalism. For seven decades large numbers of people have been content to leave the fight against capitalism and its excesses to Labour MPs and trade union leaders. Politics has meant a vote every five years – and nothing else. The chief beneficiary has been capitalism. The real power with which we can shake and remove capitalism is the mass action of the workers: the power of the miners who defeated the Tory government’s wage policies in 1972; the power of the dockers who, that same year, beat the Tory Industrial Relations Act by a strike in solidarity with their five jailed brothers. That action was ten times more effective in opposition to the Act than all the votes in parliament and all the trade union leaders’ speeches. The same is true about racialism.

The same is true about racialism. When the workers take mass action, when they go on strike, racialist illusions which were quite strong while they were working almost always disappear. In 1968, some dockers hit the headlines by marching to Westminster in support of Enoch Powell. The London dockers at the time had made all kinds of concessions. They had just accepted massive redundancies outlined in the Devlin Report. They were weak, disorientated, isolated. Four years later, the National Front were hoping for similar support from the London docks for their demonstrations against the immigration of Ugandan Asians. The dockers, fresh from their victory at Pentonville, were in an entirely different mood. The dockers’ stewards moved unanimously against any dockers’ participation in anti-immigration demonstrations, and the National Front was forced back on its hard core of middle class perverts. The same pattern has been followed in a large number of recent strikes. In the ‘dirty jobs’ strike of 1970, in the Ford strike of 1971, the hospital workers’ dispute of 1973, there were countless examples of racial solidarity by workers who were previously susceptible to racist propaganda. The reason is that when workers are engaged in strikes, they see right away that solidarity is more important than skin colour. Confidence in their strength replaces the divisions and isolation of ‘normal times’. But militant, trade union action is not enough. Strikes come to an end, and militancy and solidarity can disappear as quickly as they emerged. A determined wage fight in a factory does not ensure that racialism never appears again in that factory. There is still plenty of racialism in the London docks, or in the Post Office or among local government workers. If racialism is to be fought in the working class it has to be tackled at root in the factories, mines, mills, offices. And it has to be tackled politically by workers organised politically. The main objective of the International Socialists is to build IS factory branches which meet regularly to raise political questions inside the factory: that is, to link the trade union battle in their place of work with trade union battles in other places of work, and to link those battles with all the political issues which so closely bear upon them: rents, prices, unemployment, the ‘money crisis’, equal pay, Ireland, Vietnam ... and, of course, racialism. How can such a factory branch fight racialism? It can mount a campaign inside the factory for support for trade union organisation in the countless sweatshops throughout the country which have exploited black labour. The organisation of the small women’s rag trade factories in Southall is one recent example. Secondly, it can insist that any discrimination in its factory or group of factories against black workers should be ended. Thirdly, it can produce constant propaganda in the form of leaflets and verbal arguments against the arguments of Powell and Co. Fourthly, it can link with the town or city branch of the International Socialists to demonstrate and agitate on the broader political questions, such as police harassment of blacks or the barbaric administration of immigration laws. After the recent House of Lords decision making the Immigration Act retrospective, for example, the International Socialists factory branch organisation throughout the country organised a petition against the Act which was signed by many influential rank and file trade unionists. At the same time, the International Socialists trade union fractions organised resolutions and agitation inside the trade unions against the House of Lords decision. This sort of activity has more effect than a student picket outside a police station (although that may well be necessary). Organised trade union and shop stewards’ opposition to racist activity really means something. This sort of activity will only be carried out by political organisation. The man or woman who relies solely on the trade union will protest that such organisation is ‘unconstitutional’ according to union rule, or will excuse himself on grounds of ‘too much time on union business’. In the end, if not at the beginning, that man or woman will become contaminated by racialist ideas. The socialist militant in the factory, when the immigrant worker first comes into the factory, cannot possibly be affected by racialist ideas. He knows that the black worker has behind him a rich tradition of struggle – certainly as rich a tradition as the white worker. The socialist militant sees the black worker as another fighter against the system, whose presence in the factory enriches and strengthens the struggle. For far too long, British workers have listened to professional politicians who have said to them: ‘Vote for me, and you will be all right.’ These Labour politicians have gone out of their way to reassure black workers and anti-racist white workers, that once elected, racism would be fought through parliamentary channels. We have had a good dose of this parliamentary medicine over the past twenty-five years, and it has done nothing to stop the racialist pains. We believe that the answer lies in socialist organisation and propaganda at the roots of the working class. We are building factory branches fast. But nothing like fast enough. Hundreds of such branches could decisively affect the course of racialism in this country over the next few years. That is why white workers who see the dangers of racism to their organisation and black workers who are persecuted and bullied by racialism must join us and help organise. Top of the page Last updated on 23.11.2013

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot When will the Blair bubble burst? (Summer 1995) From International Socialism 2:67, Summer 1995. Copyright © International Socialism. Copied with thanks from the International Socialism Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA. Paralysis has struck down British Labour. Old commitments to changing the hated Thatcherite society are daily cast aside. One Sunday morning David Blunkett goes on television to reaffirm tentatively Labour’s long standing promise to impose VAT on private schools. That same Sunday, in the afternoon, after a call from his Leader, David Blunkett is on again, telling us that Labour has no intention of imposing VAT on private schools. A few days later Derek Fatchett, a Labour front bench spokesman on ‘defence’, launched a spirited attack on the grotesque waste of public money on homes, servants and cooks for senior officers in the armed forces. The Leader called Fatchett in and told him he must never again attack senior army officers without his permission. Jack Cunningham, the very right wing Labour spokesman on industry, gave a public commitment that privatised coal would be renationalised by Labour – only to read in the newspapers of a speech by a more junior Labour spokesman with the ear of the Leader. The speech told a meeting of coal merchants that there were ‘no plans’ to nationalise their industry. Even the health service may not be safe in Labour hands. The rumour as I write is that the party’s health spokeswoman Margaret Beckett threatened to resign in order to hang on to Labour’s long established pledge to dismantle the NHS trusts and return the health service to some form of more elected control. An ‘indissoluble commitment’ to renationalise the railways has now been replaced by a ‘might do, might not do’ compromise written in such gobbledegook that its author must have been John Prescott. The day by day controversy between Labour and the increasingly absurd Tory government is paralysed too. When the deeply reactionary employment secretary Michael Portillo changed the rules making it more difficult for unemployed people to claim benefit, he was roundly attacked by his ‘shadow’, Harriet Harman. He lost the argument all down the line until he asked her whether Labour would abolish his new rules. There was a lot of huffing and puffing, but no reply. In the House of Commons the prime minister has taken to replying to questions from Labour leader Tony Blair with a single question: what would you do? Would Labour squeeze the rich? Would they return opted-out schools to the elected authorities? Would they reverse privatisation with public enterprise? Would they repeal the anti-union laws? Exactly what is the minimum wage? No reply, no reply, no reply. Paralysis. The paralysis flows from the political to the industrial. I recently spoke with Tony Benn at a meeting of nurses called in response to a fantastic offer from the government’s ‘impartial’ review body of a wage increase of 1 percent. The nurses were angry, but the union officials cool. When I remonstrated afterwards with a UNISON official, he replied simply, ‘Well, it’s Blair, isn’t it?’ He meant that the new young Labour leader and his glittering successes in the polls had mesmerised union officials who might otherwise have been stung into action. The same paralysis hit the teaching unions as the government blandly announced new pay cuts for teachers. A campaign against the cuts was launched not by the unions but by the school governors who had been granted new powers over the schools in order to tame the unions. The teachers’ union leaders don’t want to rock the Blair boat. When, at the annual Easter conference, the National Union of Teachers overturned their leaders’ advice and called for a strike ballot, Blair himself led the witch-hunt against the militants. He and his colleagues take every opportunity to make it clear that any industrial action, even the slightest ripple on the social surface, will make it more difficult for Labour to win the next election. The price of this paralysis is very high: continued exploitation without hindrance. Britain’s rulers, hugely enriched by the privatisation, union busting and higher-band tax cuts of recent years, are like burglars who feel that their stealing time is at last running out. They are cramming into their sacks what remains of available booty. The railways, the nuclear industry, even huge savings on slashed disability benefits, are all up for grabs before the election without any meaningful opposition from the Labour or trade union leadership. The most rapacious British ruling class since the war is making hay while its sun still shines. The price, moreover, is not just in pounds and pence: lower wages, longer hours, more sackings and so on. The old defeatist arguments of the mid-1980s, that workers are all frightened or apathetic, are plainly false. There are on all sides signs that more and more of them are ready and willing to fight. Every time they are held back by Labour’s paralysis they lose confidence, hope – and a chance to knock the Tories back. Is it all a bluff? So headlong and relentless is this stampede that some optimistic Labour Party socialists can be heard to say: ‘It is all a bluff.

So headlong and relentless is this stampede that some optimistic Labour Party socialists can be heard to say: ‘It is all a bluff. Tony and John are not really as right wing as they pretend. They are just saying they are right wing so that they can win the election. When they get into office they will revert to their true socialist feelings.’ This is the exact opposite of the truth. The new leaders’ ‘true feelings’ are that they want to run the country not very much differently than it is run at the moment, with marginal adjustments to make it a little bit fairer. A good guide to Tony Blair’s ‘true feelings’ is his original draft of the alternative Clause Four, which promised to ‘work together’ with ‘trade unions, consumer associations and employers’ organisations.’ (The replacement of the word ‘employers’ with the word ‘other’ was the only tangible victory for the trade union negotiators over the new clause.) Unlike all the other Labour leaders this century, Blair himself has no socialist past. During the whole of his youth and his university education there is not the slightest sign of any ideological commitment to socialism. Unlike every other Labour leader this century, he has never at any time in his life been convinced of the argument for a socialist order of society. It has been argued on his behalf that he joined the Labour Party in the early 1980s when most right wing social democrats were joining the Social Democratic Party. In fact, most of the social democrats who joined the SDP were converts from the Labour Party. They were in many ways the more idealistic and evangelistic of the right wing social democrats. Most political careerists, after glancing at the political and electoral realities, stayed with Labour. A young man intending to make a career of anti-Tory politics in 1981 or 1982 was far more certain of a safe seat in parliament and high office with Labour than with the SDP. Though he gingerly toed the more left wing party line when he fought the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, Blair’s politics were never socialistic. They stemmed from a vague Christian notion of togetherness, encapsulated in his well-worn cliché, ‘We achieve more together than we do on our own.’ This togetherness has nothing to do with equality or public ownership. It is as achievable, Blair believes, in a corporation like Hanson or Kingfisher as it is in any public enterprise. That’s why he throws out the ‘baggage’ of a constitutional commitment to common ownership, and fixes his sights on a few very simple and easily attainable objectives, none of which have anything to do with socialism. When does Labour win? No, the Blair offensive is not a bluff, and most Labour Party members know it isn’t. What then is the secret to his enduring appeal among people who suspect his politics? How is it that so many constituency parties have voted to dump Clause Four, to which most of them still feel a strong political attachment? The main reason is their confidence that Blair will win the next general election. Large numbers of Labour Party members have been convinced by the argument that the election cannot be won unless Labour dumps every vestige of its traditional support for socialism and peace. They are impressed by the awful results of the 1983 general election, in which the breakaway Social Democratic Party with the enthusiastic support of the Liberals got almost as many votes as Labour. They ascribe that defeat to the left wing policies in the Labour manifesto. The argument persists through the two subsequent elections as Labour dropped more and more of its left wing policies. Like desperate adventurers in a punctured hot air balloon, they cry for more and more ‘socialist baggage’ to be cast overboard. The Blair paralysis is the logical result of that argument. Political history, however, did not start in 1979. There have been two long periods of Labour government in the last half century. Both these elections, 1945 and 1966, were won with Clause Four in place and far more left wing policies even than in 1983. In 1974 a Tory government was thrown out by the electorate and a Labour government established, even though Labour’s Programme 1973 was far, far to the left of anything written by Labour in the 1980s. The record shows that the results of elections have far more to do with the prevailing popular political mood than with formal policies in manifestos. If Labour does win the next election – and another defeat seems beyond the capacities even of the shadow cabinet – the result will have far more to do with the popular fury with Tory broken promises and sleaze than with the political inclination of the Labour manifesto. Can Blair deliver? But what then? What happens after a Blair victory? Here traditional socialist arguments are inclined to sound irrelevant. Traditionally, socialists in and out of the Labour Party have protested about the backsliding of previous Labour governments; the broken promises and unfulfilled aspirations of the past. They dust down the old manifestos and show how specific promises (for instance, to end the Polaris nuclear missile programme in October 1964) have been systematically broken. This argument has lost its force. Indeed it has to some extent been adopted by Blair and his team as a justification for their paralysis. ‘In the past’, they argue, ‘Labour tried to do too much. They promised things they knew they could not achieve. What we offer is something much more honest. We will say what we can achieve, and we will achieve it.’ This argument is seized on eagerly by all sorts of Labour Party supporters worn down by years of Tory cruelty and greed. But it falls to the ground as soon as anyone asks an old and familiar question. Who runs the country?

Who runs the country? However far he moves to the right, there is one crucial characteristic of past Labour governments which Blair cannot shake off. Like Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Blair must believe that he, as prime minister, will be in charge of events. I recall as one of the formative experiences of my youth going down to 10 Downing Street in late October 1964 as an impressionable reporter. The new young, popular and extremely able prime minister, Harold Wilson, was holding a press conference. He had just stormed into Downing Street by overturning a massive Tory majority. The world, it seemed, lay at his feet. He sat in the cabinet room, puffing on his pipe and beaming benevolently. He conveyed an impression of child-like amazement at his new power. He pointed to a series of buttons attached to his telephone. ‘I can sit here’, he said, ‘and call up the Governor of the Bank of England or the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.’ For anyone interested in politics it was a time of high hope and excitement. The old days of the Tory dynasty, what Wilson called the ‘faded antimacassars of the age of ancestor-worship’, had been removed forever. Here was a new man in charge, committed to a new order, his power conveyed to him by the votes of the people. The disillusionment which followed so swiftly, culminating in the cuts and wage freeze of July 1966, was not so much about specific policies. It was about political power, or rather political impotence. The man who pressed the buttons summoning the Governor of the Bank of England was having his economic policies dictated by that same governor, his foreign policy dictated by that same Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The thread of democracy which attached the new prime minister to the electorate was effortlessly cut by wealthy and powerful people elected by no one. If this seemed true of the first Wilson government of 1964–1970, it was doubly true of the second one – which started in 1974 and went on (after Wilson abandoned it in 1976) until 1979. The first real crisis was in the early summer of 1975, when Wilson reversed all his economic commitments and again set in motion a policy of wage controls followed by public spending cuts. He did not do so by choice. He himself described his role in Downing Street as that of an entirely impotent tenant awaiting eviction by bailiffs, whom he specifically defined: We were living on borrowed time. But what of the bailiffs, in the shape of the international financial community, from cautious treasurers of multinational corporations, multinationals, to currency operators and monetary speculators? Would they give us time to win the support of the miners and take all necessary corrective action? The answer came on 30th June. [1] The answer was no. The government and its electoral majority were evicted from its planned and stated policy by ‘the bailiffs’. The following year, 1976, which rightly became the bogey for the left for years afterwards, Denis Healey, the Labour chancellor, was similarly stampeded by the International Monetary Fund, which insisted, in exchange for a loan to help Britain out of its balance of payments difficulties, that Labour renege on its promises to increase spending on hospitals, schools and public transport. Was the loan really necessary? Years later, when Healey wrote his memoirs, he thought not. ‘The whole affair was unnecessary,’ he wrote. ‘We could have done without the IMF loan at the time only if we – and the world – had known the real facts at the time.’ [2] The Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man of high intelligence, was not informed of the real financial facts! So ill-informed was he about the matters over which he was meant to be in charge that he reversed the entire thrust of his party’s policy, and launched his government on a Thatcherite economic policy before Thatcher even came to office. Later in that same annus horribilis, 1976, Prime Minister James Callaghan chose the Labour Party conference to make a classical statement of Labour’s impotence: What is the cause of high unemployment? Quite simply and unequivocally it is caused by paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce. There are no scapegoats. That is as true in a mixed economy under a Labour government as it is under capitalism or communism. It is an absolute fact of life which no government, be it left or right, can alter … We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. But I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists … So what option did exist? To coin a phrase, back to basics. Callaghan spelled it out quite clearly. ‘We must get back to fundamentals – first, overcoming unemployment now unambiguously depends on our labour costs being at least comparable with those of our major competitors.’ The only way workers could ensure unemployment did not rise was to cut their own wages. Once again, it was not just the breaking of manifesto commitments which disillusioned Labour voters. It was the admission of their government’s impotence. Ever since 1945 Labour politicians had been inspired by the economics of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes provided them with an economic theory which enabled them, so they believed, to organise the national economy so that they could ‘spend their way out of a recession by cutting taxes and boosting government spending’. Once in office, they believed, they could act on Keynes’s theory – and run capitalism fairly without abolishing it. Universal suffrage conferred on them the necessary power to seize the reins without changing the horses. During the 1945–1951 government and, to a lesser extent, the Wilson government of 1964–1970, the Keynesian Labour ministers convinced themselves that they were in charge; and that it was their brilliant management of the economy which for the first time in capitalist history stopped the cycle of booms and slumps.

and that it was their brilliant management of the economy which for the first time in capitalist history stopped the cycle of booms and slumps. In fact, as the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP) argued at the time, they were not in charge at all. The economic stability was caused in the main by the huge spending on unused and unsold arms in peacetime. The full extent of the Labour ministers’ impotence, and the futility of the Keynesian argument, only became clear to ministers during the Wilson/Callaghan government of 1974–1979. The arch-Keynesian James Callaghan abandoned Keynes and reverted to reactionary free market slogans which Tory ministers of the 1950s and early 1960s would have been ashamed to proclaim. Callaghan’s 1976 Declaration of Impotence set the tone for Labour’s three remaining years in office. The Labour government, its impotence sealed by an alliance with the Liberal Party, careered away from even its most marginal aspirations, and stumbled to defeat. Here is the crucial lesson for the Blairites. The point is not, as they argue, that Labour sought to do too much, nor even that they abandoned individual manifesto commitments. It is that Labour’s ability to do anything for the people who voted Labour was systematically removed. They didn’t just abandon individual promises. They lost control altogether. Why don’t Labour governments run the country? Why were these governments not in control? The history of Labour governments is inexplicable in any other language except that of class. The society we live in is controlled by an unelected class which guards its wealth and power jealously against elected politicians whom it regards as upstarts. If those upstarts try, as Labour’s Programme 1973 suggested they should, to ‘shift the balance of wealth and power towards working people and their families,’ they come up against the most relentless ruling class opposition. Here then is the Labour dilemma. Because of the history and origins of the party, because the party rests on trade union support, because of the people who vote Labour, because Labour Party members are overwhelmingly workers, all Labour governments must try to do something for the people who vote Labour. Blair might change Clause Four from a commitment to common ownership, but even he must replace it with a statement committing Labour to ensure that ‘wealth and power is in the hands of the many, not of the few’. His supporters today are no longer hoping for socialism. They are not even hoping for any substantial change in the ownership of industries or in the distribution of wealth. They want no more than a few minor reforms to make the society better than it has been under Major or Thatcher. But to do even that Blair will need, above all, to be in control. Indeed, the more he rejects socialist policies, the more his credibility depends on showing that, once elected, he is in control. The more he abandons what Harold Wilson during the 1964 general election called ‘the moral crusade’ to change the world, the more he relies on his image as an efficient administrator, the more he will depend on being in control. The qualities for which he is renowned – competence, civility, a command of his brief – can only be put to good effect if he can press those buttons in 10 Downing Street much more confidently than even Harold Wilson dared to do. Is there not, the Blairites argue, at least a chance that with a much more moderate agenda, Blair will usher in more reforms than did Wilson or Callaghan? After all, they argue, even those administrations seem much better than anything we’ve experienced since 1979. Labour governments in the past have introduced reforms. Look at the National Health Service. Look at the high rate of council house building in Wilson’s first government, not to mention liberal laws on gays, abortion, capital punishment. Look at the fact that even the 1974–1979 Labour government did, as promised, freeze council rents and take back into public ownership the shipbuilding and aircraft industries. Yet those reforms were not examples of ministers being in control, still less of their personal determination or administrative abilities. They are, once again, impossible to explain except in terms of class. They depended on three factors: the economic ‘leeway’ for reform, the strength and confidence of the opposing classes, and, much less important, the extent of Labour’s electoral commitment. The leeway for reform. All the reforms mentioned above took place against a background in which Britain was in the big economic, industrial and military league, and when there was full employment. After the war Britain was still the second biggest industrial power on Earth. Now it produces 4 percent of world manufacturing output. Even at the height of the Thatcher boom productivity increases in British industry lagged behind those of the US, Germany, Japan and many other countries. Malcolm Rifkind, Britain’s defence secretary, tells his supporters that ‘Britain is a small island off the north west coast of Europe’ and must tailor its defence commitments accordingly. Compare that with the central arguments which wracked the Wilson Labour government less than 30 years ago – whether Britain should keep a substantial military presence ‘East of Suez’. Today even the most enthusiastic Blairites agree that the leeway for reform is tiny. Britain is constantly being overtaken in the league of economic nations. The British economy, even more than its competitors, is plagued by chronic underinvestment. A recent book by a prominent Blairite – The State We’re In by Will Hutton of the Guardian – brilliantly exposes the weakness of the British economy. Hutton ruminates gloomily on the ‘globalisation’ of modern capitalism. His book has been an outstanding success, but his solutions depend on ‘Euro-Keynesianism’, that is applying the failed Keynesian policies of past Labour governments on a European scale, where the prospects for the necessary co-operation and joint action are even grimmer than they were on a national scale in the 1960s and 1970s.

His book has been an outstanding success, but his solutions depend on ‘Euro-Keynesianism’, that is applying the failed Keynesian policies of past Labour governments on a European scale, where the prospects for the necessary co-operation and joint action are even grimmer than they were on a national scale in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a great gulf fixed between the tasks which Hutton outlines and even the remotest possibility that a timid and cautious Blair government, armed with less conviction and confronted by far more ruthless ruling class opposition, could do anything about them. The strength and confidence of the classes. All the above reforms – the NHS in the 1940s, house building the 1960s, the nationalisation of shipbuilding in the 1970s and others at the same time – took place against the background of strong and growing trade unions, rising confidence in the workplace and (in the case of the 1960s and 1970s) industrial victories for the working class. I will show later that these things constantly change – and are changing – but a glance at the strike figures for 1974 compared to those of 1994 shows that in those 20 years the balance of confidence tipped towards the employers. The electoral commitments of Labour. The democracy of parliamentary elections often clashes with capitalism which is essentially undemocratic and hierarchical. The clashes this century between capital and elected Labour governments were inspired by the ruling class’s suspicion and disdain for any government elected by the votes of people it exploits. In these clashes Labour is strengthened at least to some extent by the promises it makes during the election. In 1966, for instance, the Labour Party was committed to abolish health prescription charges and, on taking office, promptly did so. When in 1967 they went to the IMF for a loan, the IMF negotiators insisted above everything else on the imposition of prescription charges. Prime Minister Wilson and his colleagues pleaded, begged, and offered more extensive cuts elsewhere – all to no avail. The negotiators for capitalism were determined that the elected government’s nose should be rubbed in its most treasured commitment. Yet, at least to some extent, the negotiations depended on the commitments. If there had been no commitment to reform, there would have been nothing to negotiate. Control could be swiped from the elected government without hindrance. This is the folly of Blair’s determination to proceed without any commitment to take back any privatised property or redistribute wealth. He will be much weaker without the commitments than with them. On all three counts a new Blair led Labour administration will be substantially weaker even than its pathetic predecessors. Particularly if he is successful in taming any industrial action or confidence before his election, Blair will find himself at the mercy of an arrogant and contemptuous ruling class, eager at once to humiliate him and subdue him to its purpose. All the signs are that he will be a willing captive. But as his control over events is seen to vanish, as he becomes the servant of events rather than their master, so the very characteristics which now serve him in such good stead will become the instruments of his and Labour’s humiliation. His moderation will be ridiculed as weakness, his hostility to dogma as weak minded, his everlasting grin as facetious. A glance at what happened to his hero, Bill Clinton, who won an election after energetically distancing himself from any substantial reforms, reveals just a little of what will happen to Blair in Downing Street. Tossed about like a cork in a whirlpool, he will jettison one commitment after another until, no doubt, he will start to study how his illustrious predecessor Ramsay MacDonald escaped a similar plight and stayed in Downing Street at the head of the Tory party. It won’t be long into a Blair government before the Tories and their press start to howl for a government of national unity. The economic state we’re in – and the whole history of Labourism in Britain this century – points to the inevitable collapse of a Blair administration, with horrific social consequences. This will not just be a personal tragedy for Tony Blair. The pit into which Tony Blair will certainly fall beckons all of us. The failure of a government in which so many socialists and trade unions have placed their faith could lead to the widespread cynicism and pessimism. Why should we vote Labour? The more this grim prospect looms, the more wretched some Labour supporters become. Some on the left argue for an electoral break with Labour. They announce proudly that they will be abstaining in the polling booths and denouncing Labour on the hustings. This small minority argue that Labour has lost all claim to the allegiance of working class votes, and that there is no longer any substance in the claim that Labour has links and roots in the working class. These people do not seem to have noticed that the most blatant and well-endowed effort to smash British Labour – the SDP – collapsed in ruin. Despite OMOV, John Prescott, John Smith, Tony Blair and all the others, the trade unions are still inexorably entwined with the party. In its basic electoral support and in its links with the unions, Labour is still a party with working class roots. When Labour does well at the polls, its worker supporters feel better, more confident; and when Labour goes down, its supporters go down too. In the next general election at least, there will be no credible left alternative to Labour. The only effect of alternative candidates or abstentions will be a stronger Tory party in parliament. Those who propose an exclusively electoral answer to the Blair problem are making the same mistake as Blair himself – putting far too much emphasis on what happens in the ballot box. They are also abandoning all those people who cling loyally to Labour for its class roots but are deeply disturbed by the Blair paralysis. Ironically, indeed, many of the people who voted for Blair as leader in a desperate desire to get rid of the Tories are the most aware of the possible consequences.

They know the implications of the history and of the economic background and the utter spinelessness of every statement that comes from the leader’s office. They know what to expect, and many of them just hang on, grimly expecting it. At a meeting not long ago in Norwich I was interrupted in mid-flow about the inevitable and dreadful consequences of a Blair Labour government. ‘I know, I know,’ said a man standing in the aisle holding his head and begging me not to go on. ‘I know – but I hate the Tories so much I just want to see them beaten at the election, and I don’t care what happens afterwards.’ Such people should not be left to stew in their own hopelessness. Their plaintive question – is the prospect entirely bleak? – needs an answer. What happens when the Blair bubble bursts? No, the prospect is very far from bleak. For a start, there are plenty of signs that Blair’s rightward stampede is resented by large sections of the people who will vote for him. His relentless march to respectability seems to have carried the new Labour leader well to the right of most of his supporters. In a MORI poll last October, for instance, 68 percent of voters spoke up for returning privatised utilities to public ownership and 60 percent were in favour of a wealth tax on people with more than £150,000. An ICM poll the previous month asked the question: ‘Do you think profitable state industries should be run as private companies?’ The question was first asked in 1988 when 30 percent agreed, 53 percent didn’t. In 1994 the percentage agreeing had slumped to 16 with 66 percent against. Even more remarkable, in the same poll 38 percent agreed and 28 percent disagreed with the statement: ‘More socialist planning would be the best way to solve Britain’s economic problems’. Six years ago only 29 percent agreed with the statement: ‘Trade unions should have more say in the way the country is run’. Now the figure has risen to 39 percent, with only 40 percent against – the gap of 25 percent has been cut to 1 percent. In the last poll to ask the question, 60 percent said they would pay more income tax for more social security – more than half said they would pay an extra four pence in the pound. As Blair has moved to the right, his supporters seem to have moved to the left. Blair refused to support the 1994 signal workers’ strike, but more than 70 percent of Labour voters did so. Perhaps the most fascinating recent poll was about Clause Four. In February 1995 Gallup asked a cross-section of voters what they thought of Clause Four. Overwhelmingly the respondents said they opposed it. Then they were told what it said: 37 percent said they were ‘broadly in agreement’, 28 percent broadly in disagreement. Among Labour voters 49 percent agreed, 29 didn’t. The people’s mood is not cowed or broken. Blair’s New Labour seems like a ray of hope – but certainly not the only possible salvation. The people who supported Blair’s campaign to change Clause Four were often the same people who were in broad agreement with the clause. The signal workers dispute showed that ‘old fashioned’ official strikes can win as effectively as they ever could, and the sudden unheralded spurts of militant demonstrations on issues like the export of live animals and the Criminal Justice Act do not fit into the picture the Tories paint of a subdued working class. Indeed, ever since the hospital strikes of 1988, political and industrial resistance has grown – through the successful mass uprising against the poll tax in 1990, the Welling anti-Nazi demonstration in 1993 and the big TUC-sponsored demonstrations for the health service and against racism. There have been growing signs on all sides of a rank and file resistance which takes little notice of what the Labour leaders are saying. All this suggests that a Blair government will have to grapple with a strong grass roots working class resistance. In other words, when the Blair bubble bursts, as it must, people are as likely to move to the left as to the right. If that happens, there will be one crucial difference to last time. Last time the explosion of fury in the working class movement at the right wing policies of the Wilson government after 1974 were held in check by left wing trade union leaders such as Hugh Scanlon of the engineering union and Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union. Their influence was rooted deep in the rank and file. For years the Communist Party had attracted and organised industrial militants, to whom hundreds of thousands of workers responded. During the last Labour government the left wing union leaders and their supporters in the Communist Party had no alternative strategy to that set out by the Labour government. The ‘social contract’ which, as Callaghan blurted out at the 1976 Labour Party conference, was a device to control wages and salaries, was supported unanimously at the 1975 Trades Union Congress. Labour left and Communist militants encouraged their sceptical supporters to vote for freezing their own wages and cutting their own services. Today there is no such organisation of Communist militants, no left trade union leaders of anything like the stature of Hugh Scanlon or Jack Jones. This represents, first, the decline of traditional socialist education and propaganda in the British working class. But it also means that the trade union ‘gendarmerie’ which controlled the working class movement so effectively in the late 1970s is no longer as influential: that an angry and militant reaction to a Blair government can shoot to the surface with less obstruction. Last time Labour made some promises and sold most of them out. Next time, even if it doesn’t make any promises, Labour will quickly lose its only remaining appeal: its appearance as a fair, rational and efficient administrator, committed, however vaguely, to a better world. Last time the sell out led to a shift to the right. This time the situation is more volatile. If socialists, like that man in Norwich, abandon all their ideas and spirit of resistance to a hopeless and ridiculous faith in Tony Blair, then the vacuum created by the Blair disaster can be filled from the right.

If on the other hand there is in place an energetic non-sectarian socialist Party which seeks to build from the bottom up, which brings militants together and encourages them with socialist propaganda and a socialist press, which organises at the rank and file level against fascists, Nazis and racialism, and which opposes any further attempt to make workers pay for the capitalist crisis – then there is every chance that socialism can be put right back on the political agenda; and that masses of angry and disillusioned workers will swiftly make up what they have lost in organisation and education by enrolling in the most effective school of all: the school of industrial struggle. What now? The conclusions have never been more obvious. Parliamentary democracy, though an enormous improvement on the unelected despotisms which still govern most of the world, is not strong enough to control the increasingly multinational capitalist monopolies which gobble up the world’s resources and its labour with the single purpose of boosting their power and their profits. The only power which can control and overturn those monopolies is the power of the people exploited by them: the working class. Socialists must come together and organise where that power lies – in the day by day resistance to capitalism. They must build an organisation which provides a focus for fragmented resistance, and a political strategy based on the most implacable opposition to the monopolies, their state and the class which controls them. In Britain the only party which can do any of this is the Socialist Workers Party. Notes 1. H. Wilson, Final Term: The Labour Government 1974–1976 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1979), p. 114. 2. D. Healey, The Time Of My Life (Michael Joseph 1989), pp. 432–433. Top of the page Last updated on 19.3.2012

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Stop the war The Truth Machine (November 2001) From Socialist Review, No.257, November 2001, pp.12-13. Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Journalist of the decade Paul Foot argues why we should oppose this war – and what media workers can do about it One of the many disadvantages of the present situation is that we have to endure endless television footage of President Bush. Bush has a look on his face that is usually interpreted as a sign of distress at what happened on 11 September. It’s only after you’ve seen him again and again that you realise that the look does not represent distress at all. What it represents is panic – panic that he will not be able to summon up a word which even remotely approximates to the message he wishes to convey. So, for instance, in his first appearance after the atrocity in New York he referred to the ‘cowardly acts’ of the terrorists. Someone must have taken him on one side and said, ‘Well, you know, George, the people who hijacked the airliners are all dead by their own hand. You can call them lots of things, but you can’t really call them cowards.’ So ‘cowards’ came down to ‘folks’, and then, in one desperate moment, ‘evildoers’. This same uncertainty and vacillation seemed to paralyse the reaction to the bombings in New York, so that for a moment it was possible to hope that somewhere in the bowels of the US government there might be some grain of sanity. All those hopes were a bit silly, really. Having an imbecile for a president is a little embarrassing for the military-industrial complex that governs the US. So now we are at war, apparently, to root out the horror of New York. I would define that horror as reckless bombing without warning which leads to the mass murder of innocent people. As a result, every night on the television there are the familiar pictures of explosions in the night air, superannuated generals discussing tactics, endless talk about precision bombing, targeted terrorists, humanitarian missions, international law. And already we can see what it all means – reckless bombing without warning which leads to the mass murder of innocent people. There is another feature of this war that is also familiar – the awful unanimity of people who call themselves our representatives. The day after the hot war broke out in Afghanistan, lots of speeches were made by MPs of all parties. Not a single voice was raised against the waging of war by Britain, the US and other western countries against the poorest country on earth. Tony Blair can go on saying until he is strangled in his own rhetoric that we are not waging war on the Afghan people, but all the brilliant brains among his advisers cannot explain how you drop bombs on Afghan cities without killing Afghan people. He can talk about humanitarian aid, but cannot explain how the dropping of food rations can feed 7 million starving people, many of them rushing desperately away from their homes to avoid the bombs. George Monbiot, one of the few journalists to keep his head, reckoned that, even if all the rations dropped by the bombers get to starving people, they will feed a quarter of them for half a day. Not a single voice was raised in parliament against the declaration of war. There was only one rude noise, and it came from Paul Marsden, the Labour MP for Shrewsbury. Mr Marsden, asked on a point of order if perhaps there might be a vote. ‘There is’, he said, ‘growing disquiet that for the third time parliament has been recalled, yet honourable members have been denied a vote on this war. Can you confirm to me that there will be no vote?’ Opposition to these attacks goes deep Here is the reply of Mr Speaker, the guardian of the cradle of British democracy: ‘It seems as though the honourable gentleman is getting advice already. Procedural advice is best given privately at the chair. If the honourable gentleman wishes to come to the chair I will give him some private advice.’ The Speaker’s answer was greeted with howls of mirth from the honourable members, delighted that a little known backbencher making such an impertinent suggestion should be so firmly put in his place. The result is that British forces have gone to a war in a far off country for which there is precious little justification, and their and our representatives are not even allowed a vote on the matter. This unanimity does not reflect what is going on in the country at large. The opposition to these attacks goes very deep – far deeper than any of the government ministers imagine. Some say, what is the alternative? The New York massacre was a terrible event and we are asked, well, what would you do? Would you appease the terrorists – leave the field open to them? Our reply is no, not at all. We can suggest to Bush, Blair and all the rest of them a whole series of policies that, we guarantee, would do immeasurably more to stop terrorists than bombing the countries in which they live. First, cut off your aid to the state of Israel and its merciless persecution of the Palestinian people. Stop grovelling to the war criminal Sharon. Stop shaking his bloodstained hand. Do all in your power to stop Mr Putin and his KGB in Russia from slaughtering and torturing the people of Chechnya. For that matter, stop propping up dictatorships in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and south Asia. Above all, instead of talking yet again about a New World Order, set about dismantling economic and social priorities which divide the world – yes, even our own world here in Britain and in the US – into classes: grossly rich minorities in power selling each other the weapons of mass destruction so that they can more ruthlessly control and punish the landless, unarmed masses of the dispossessed. These are policies that hold out some hope of subverting terrorism. They are the exact opposite of the policies pursued by our government.

They are the exact opposite of the policies pursued by our government. There is a most vital and urgent need to turn the hearts and minds of the British people against individual terrorism of the type that bombed New York and state terrorism of the type that is bombing Afghanistan. Ten years ago, as the bombs started to rain down on Baghdad, John Pilger and I wrote a letter to the Guardian asking anyone who worked in the media and shared our disgust at the war to come and talk to us in Conway Hall. Some 500 people turned up that night, and there and then we formed Media Workers Against the War. Our aims were simple – in general to oppose the war by every means at our disposal, and in particular to do so in the media. That war only lasted a few weeks, but in that time we set up groups in many newspaper and television offices – groups which met, discussed and challenged the gung-ho bombast of the proprietors. We got an office. We published a bulletin, and engaged the enthusiastic help of hundreds of journalists up and down the country. The situation today is far more intense than it was ten years ago. People are at once far more anxious and far more angry. Anti-war groups are forming all over the country. Media Workers Against the War will be part of a grand alliance of everyone against this war. It needs to be more effective, more powerful than before. Everyone here with even the remotest connection with the media should sign up here and now. We can and must challenge the proprietors and the government ministers for mass support, and force them by the sheer weight of public pressure to get their bombs and missiles out of Afghanistan, and concentrate on economic and social policies that will lead to a world free from capitalist exploitation and free from the racialism, barbarism and terrorism on which it feeds. This article is based on Paul Foot’s speech at the huge Media Workers Against the War meeting in London last month. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Orwell Centenary The Cold War Controversy (July 2003) From Socialist Review, No.276, July 2003, p.10-11. Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today. Paul Foot examines why much of the left rejects Orwell. As the Private Eye columnist Glenda Slagg might ask, ‘George Orwell? Arncha sick of him?’ As the hundredth anniversary of his birth – 25 June 1903 – comes and goes the literary media appear to have taken leave of their senses. Three more full-scale biographies have been produced to enlarge an already enormous pile. Orwell’s rather mediocre love life fills the gossip columns and the Guardian devotes its front page and the main piece in its weekly Review to an old story, first published (in the Guardian) seven years ago, about how Orwell gave a woman he fancied who worked for the secret service a list of names of people he suspected of being ‘fellow-travellers’ or Communist agents. We socialists have a right to be bemused. What is the truth about this remarkable writer? Is he not, obviously, a creature of the right, if not the far right? Was he not feted by the US imperialist establishment for at least three decades? Were not his famous satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, required reading for the sons and daughters of imperialist America and Europe during all the long period of the Cold War? Even before that, was he not savagely attacked as a snob and a dilettante by Harry Pollitt in the Daily Worker in 1936? Was he not an Old Etonian and former police officer in Burma who never forsook that sad upbringing? Were not some of his reflections on the English people during the war nothing but fatuous expressions of jingoism? Is the grass really greener in England than anywhere else, as he claimed? Was he not an outright homophobe? Was the odious epithet ‘pansy’ one of his favourites when describing the socialist poets – Auden, Spender, Isherwood, etc – of the 1930s? Were not his attitudes towards women downright chauvinist? Were not his novels (aside from the satires) relatively third rate, lacking in any real understanding or appreciation of the human spirit? Above all, was he not a splitter, if not even a Franco agent, in the Spanish Civil War as well as the century’s most ardent opponent of the Russian Revolution and all that flowed from it, and did not his writing give the lie direct to all the socialists of his generation and the next who defended the revolution and its leaders? Such is the indictment against Orwell which was the common view on the left for a generation, and was upheld in the 1950s by the New Left Review essays in Out of Apathy, and is still sustained by the Stalinist remnant in the British left. Much of the indictment is hard if not impossible to answer. But almost every part of it is balanced by a rather different picture of George Orwell’s life and works. How does the Pollitt picture of the reactionary snob fit the tramp and downmarket waiter who forsook all worldly wealth to put together the astonishing account of desperate poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) or The Road to Wigan Pier (1936)? How does the image of the splitter fit the young man who went to Spain to kill fascists where the only thing he managed to split was his own throat, shot through by a fascist bullet? How does his alleged support for McCarthyism and the Cold War fit his continued and vehement assertions that he had no truck with either? How does his distaste for the Russian Revolution fit his (admittedly occasional, but nevertheless emphatic) admiration for Lenin? Stalinism The key to the answers to all these questions (and to the almost paranoid hostility to him by Stalinists of all ages including this one) is that George Orwell was the earliest and most eloquent British writer to call himself a revolutionary socialist and yet denounce the influence and propaganda of the most powerful force to describe itself as socialist – Stalinism. As he admitted himself, he showed little or no interest in the Russian Revolution when it happened when he was 14. He wrote almost nothing on the subject until he went to Spain in 1936. In Barcelona he was bowled over by the workers’ revolution there. The first few pages of his book Homage to Catalonia, where the ‘working class was in the saddle’, are still one of the finest pieces of inspirational revolutionary writing. On the front, alongside Spanish and British fellow-fighters, he observed with mounting horror the crushing of that revolutionary fervour by agents of the Russian government. Such people, he deduced, were not socialists at all but ruthless envoys of a ‘mean state capitalism with the grab motive left intact’. He watched while his comrades were hauled off one by one to be questioned, tortured and in one case murdered by the Stalinist secret police. His fury at this process lasted for the rest of his short life. With it came an understanding, utterly at odds with conventional left wing thinking at the time, that any politics that emerged from Stalinists was no more or less than propaganda for the Russian government, and therefore was as likely as not to be reactionary and anti-socialist. On his return from Spain he joined the ILP – the only mainstream organisation opposed to the war, but as the fascist armies lined up for invasion of Britain he swung right over.

On his return from Spain he joined the ILP – the only mainstream organisation opposed to the war, but as the fascist armies lined up for invasion of Britain he swung right over. Yet even his most nationalistic expressions were tempered with a yearning for the sort of democratic and socialist revolution he had seen in Spain. The war could not be won, he reckoned, wrongly, without such a revolution in Britain. And among the enemies of such a revolution were the Communists, who campaigned for Tories and imperialists in by-elections. Orwell got a job with Tribune where he wrote a weekly column full of unorthodoxy. All the staff there were supporters of Zionism, but not Orwell. He opposed it for the effect it would have on the people living in Palestine, and of course was denounced then and later for being anti-Semitic. His satire Animal Farm was equivocal about the revolution that starts it. ‘Old Major’, the revolutionary pig who inspires it, is not Lenin, but neither is he or the revolution reactionary. Orwell never set out his views on the familiar question, ‘Did Lenin lead to Stalin?’ On one occasion he thought ‘yes’; on another he agreed that Lenin would have opposed the Stalinist agenda. Either way, his support for the idea of revolution lasted right until the end of his life, when he finally surrendered to Cold War gloom and tuberculosis. Socialists who are (as I have been) inspired by Orwell’s outspoken fervour and his clear writing style, but puzzled by the questions he never answered would be better off reading John Newsinger’s Orwell’s Politics than any of the interminable biographies now available. John shows how a proper appreciation of Orwell’s work owes a lot to the late Peter Sedgwick, a founder of the International Socialists, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. Sedgwick’s article in International Socialism (another one was promised but it never materialised) was the first real effort on the left to explain the attraction, the inspiration and the contradictions in Orwell’s work. For many of us socialists at the time, the article was an intellectual liberation. It led in my case to further reading and enjoyment of Orwell’s works, and a much greater understanding of the revolutionary inspiration and reactionary contradictions in them. One of Orwell’s many free speech campaigns was for the publication of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, a book eventually published in the early 1960s, beautifully translated by Peter Sedgwick. Like Orwell, Serge was part of a submerged tradition of anti-Stalinist socialist and revolutionary thought, a tradition that the combined obfuscation from both sides of the Cold War cannot suppress forever. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Revolutionary necrophilia (1 June 1991) From Socialist Worker, 1 June 1991. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 25–26. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The Observer has decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) with a lecture for children. Nothing in itself could be more appropriate. From the moment when he first sailed for America in 1768 (at the ripe old age of 39), Thomas Paine dedicated himself to the education of children, and even founded one of the first girls’ schools in history. Who is to give this historic lecture in honour of this great man? The Observer has strained every muscle to get it right. It has come down in favour of someone very famous: the Princess Royal, Princess Anne. No doubt some fatuous fool at the Observer felt that the occasion would be better acclaimed if it was graced by so famous a dignitary. But has anyone at the Observer even read a word of Tom Paine’s? For that matter, has Princess Anne, who, for some astonishing reason, has accepted the invitation? Thomas Paine arrived in America in the nick of time to take part in the great revolutionary agitation which was to end with the British being finally deposed as the imperialist government of America. Paine fanned the embers of revolt with his tough, translucent prose. When the War of Independence – dubbed by Paine the American Revolution – finally broke out, he sustained the morale of Washington’s flagging army with his Crisis Papers. Their central theme was that the British had no business to rule the American states, and that the British king, George III, had no right to rule anywhere, especially not in Britain. Furious Paine’s furious onslaught on the British monarchy (and on monarchy in general) made the rebel armies determined that they would for all time banish the name and concept of king from the United States of America – a resolution which has been sustained ever since. Thomas Paine was honoured by the victorious armies and the new Republican government, but he soon grew tired of honours, and returned to his native Britain. There he threw himself into the furious arguments that followed the French Revolution. His Rights of Man was an answer to Edmund Burke, who had written a poisonous attack on the revolution. At the centre of Burke’s argument was the preservation of the monarchy. The Rights of Man replied with a furious denunciation of monarchy. Hereditary success is a burlesque upon monarchy. It puts it in the most ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot may fill. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a king requires only the animal figures of a man, a sort of breathing automaton. This sort of superstition may last a few years more, but it cannot resist the awakened reason and interest of man. Alas, apparently it can. For 200 years later we still have to put up with the same posturing figures whom Thomas Paine reviled in almost everything he wrote. Paine was exiled from Britain and sentenced to death in his absence. It became a capital crime after 1792 to read the Rights of Man. He died in 1806, despised, forgotten and hated. What fun he would have had with the editor of the Observer and all his prigs and courtiers, bowing and scraping before this latest representative of the Hanoverian dynasty! And how he would have appreciated and lambasted the latest example of the old English disease, revolutionary necrophilia – the love and worship of revolutionaries long after they are safely dead. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Judges’ ruling (December 1995) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 192, December 1995, p. 7. Copyright © 1995 Socialist Review. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Every humiliation for the government is welcome, and it is hard not to rejoice at the stream of judicial decisions from the high court denouncing ministers, especially home secretary Michael Howard. Howard incurred the wrath of the Lord Chief Justice when, without consulting the judges, he arbitrarily increased prison sentences and cut back on remission. The judges insist that Howard’s decisions interfere with what they call the independence of the judiciary. Since the spat, the judges seem to have gone out of their way to come down hard against the home secretary. No one disputes that it is right and often necessary for the victims of arbitrary behaviour by the government or injustice in the courts to challenge the authorities through the legal system. Such challenges sometimes, though rarely, bring relief to people who have been badly treated or wrongly imprisoned. But it would be wrong to conclude from such individual victories that the judges are preferable to elected politicians. The fact that the elected politician nowadays is usually the odious Michael Howard should not confuse anyone into imagining that the high court of the judicature is a source of common sense, or (as it often styles itself) a bastion of liberty against the authoritarian behaviour of governments. The record of the last two periods of Labour government proves the opposite. In 1967, for instance, the judges upheld a decision over schools in Enfield which effectively knocked back the Labour government’s programme to turn grammar schools into comprehensive schools. In 1976, the judges did very much the same over schools in Tameside, Greater Manchester. Much more serious were a series of judicial decisions in the 1970s which laid the foundation for the anti union laws in the 1980s. A decision by the post office workers’ union to stage a one day strike in support of those oppressed by apartheid in South Africa was set aside as illegal by the judges; as were several other actions relating to the strike against the notorious management at Grunwick in north London. Under the Tories, the judges have been viciously opposed to trade unions and Labour councils. Many of the decisions to sequester the miners’ union funds during the great strike of 1984–85 were extremely suspect, even in Tory law. When, partly in protest against Murdoch’s union busting at Wapping, Labour controlled Derbyshire County Council decided by democratic vote to move its advertising for teachers away from the Murdoch owned Times Education Supplement to The Guardian, the Tories took the case to the High Court where the judges denounced it as contrary to natural justice and ordered the people’s money to be poured back into Murdoch’s coffers. This outrageous decision, wholly unsustainable by any rational legal process, could not be explained in any other terms but sheer class prejudice. The judges are not elected and they will act in just as a undemocratic and draconian way under a future Labour government. They are drawn from a narrow and secluded band of barristers, the enormous majority of whom come from ruling class backgrounds and who have never at any stage been even marginally independent from the class from which they come. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Defiant laughter (16 October 1994) From Socialist Worker, 16 October 1994. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 60–61. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. In the prevailing gloom one or two lights shine out brightly. One of them is Ken Loach. Another is Ricky Tomlinson. The other day Ken was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show. Bragg’s light does not shine at all. He is one of the new millionaires, after cashing in on the share options in London Weekend Television which were granted by the directors and ‘personalities’ to each other with the single purpose of making each other rich. Still, Bragg gave up a lot of his programme to Ken Loach, whose film about the miners’ strike he had once censored. Explaining the censorship, Bragg said he had wanted ‘art’ not politics. He accused Ken Loach of having a ‘political agenda’. ‘Yes’, came the reply, modest but firm. ‘I am not ducking that at all.’ ‘What do you mean?’ asked Bragg, who is still a strong supporter of the Labour Party. ‘I mean’, said Ken Loach, ‘that the future lies in common ownership and democratic control of the society by the people who work in it.’ Bragg shut up and went on to discuss art. He did not comment on the courage and strength of a film-maker who has dedicated all his huge talent to what he believes in. Special genius Ken made films to expose the world we live in – in particular Cathy Come Home, a classic about homelessness. But his special genius was to capture the reality of working class life – the pathos and anger which lies behind the bare political anger. He went on making these films as more and more of his formerly radical friends and colleagues fell away into glamour and success. In the early 1980s he was horrified by the trade union leaders’ surrender to the Thatcher onslaught. His four programmes, Questions of Leadership, have been banned ever since they were made by every television channel. The ban held up Ken’s film-making for half a decade, but he never flinched from his insistence that there should be no political censorship – especially in the name of ‘art’. Bragg asked him about his new film Raining Stones and chided him about the sentimental ‘happy ending’ to the film. Ken’s reply was that what needs stressing now is not just the wretchedness of working class life, not just the constant failures and dashing of hopes, but the resilience. If there were unhappy endings to his films when we were winning, there should be happy endings when we are losing, to remind us of our strength and potential. Ken Loach has always used a small group of actors whom he trusts and who think the same way he does. I’m not sure when he stumbled on Ricky Tomlinson, but it was a glorious meeting. Ricky’s uproarious defiant performance in Ken’s film about the building trade in London, Riff Raff, was magnificent. I haven’t seen Raining Stones yet, but the clips are all of Ricky Tomlinson defying and laughing. I have no doubt that the most exhilarating journalistic assignment I ever had was to travel at five in the morning to Leicester in the summer of 1975 to welcome Ricky Tomlinson as he came out of prison. He had got two years after a prosecution inspired and masterminded by the McAlpine family for holding together the 1972 building workers’ strike in Shropshire and North Wales. When Ricky came out of the prison he was laughing. His message to the reporters was that even prison could be defied. It was a great performance, but he was not acting. And, in partnership with Ken Loach, he still isn’t. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Marx alive in Clerkenwell (16 December 1995) From Socialist Worker, No. 1473, 16 December 1995, p. 11. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate of Paul Foot. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. THERE’S AN old Fleet Street saying that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and this column proves it. Not long ago I went round to see Fred Silberman. Fred is one of that large band of older people who have been socialists all their lives and whose commitment did not waver when the Soviet Union collapsed. In mid-life he abandoned a prosperous business for full time work in the labour movement. Fred talks to me about the Marx Memorial Library, of which he is treasurer. He thinks, quite rightly, that not enough Marxists understand the value of the library, support it or use it. When I worked at the Daily Mirror, I often walked over to Clerkenwell Green to prepare a talk in the Marx Memorial Library. It was a friendly, warm place to work in, but its real value was the extraordinary range of its books, pamphlets and newspapers of the movement. For instance, when I was doing some work on A.J. Cook, the Arthur Scargill of the 1920s, I gobbled up whole volumes of the Sunday Worker. This was a brave attempt by the Communist Party in the mid-1920s to produce a popular and broad based newspaper without abandoning socialist commitment. The library was opened a few weeks after Hitler stormed to power in Germany in 1933. It was at the centre of the cultural flowering of the British left in the middle and late 1930s. Striking feature There are pictures and even recordings of some of the great socialist personalities of the time – Ralph Fox, who died on the battlefield in Spain, J.D. Bernal, Paul Robeson. There is a most moving description by Bill Alexander of the awful imprisonment and torture of British volunteers to the International Brigade in Spain. He attributes the survival of many of the prisoners to intellectual and political discussions traceable to the newly formed library at Clerkenwell Green. The library’s most striking feature is the Lenin room where Lenin worked for a year on his exiled revolutionary paper Iskra. The real treasure is the 27,000 books, all related to the working class movement. There are specialist sections on the Spanish Civil War, the Chartists, and the British Communist Party. It costs only £6 a year (that’s 12p a week) to join. Membership gives you access to the library and its research room (if you can find a seat) and the right to take out three books at a time. It’s open every weekday afternoon (except Friday) and Saturday morning. The librarian is Tish Newland, and the address is 37a Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R ODD. Of course, SWP members can easily find fault with the library. It was founded, and has been run consistently ever since, by members of the Communist Party. The very sudden collapse of the CP, both as a purveyor of Marxism and as an active force for change in British politics, is sadly reflected in the choice of books. The tradition of dissent from Stalinism, for instance, and the works of Leon Trotsky and his ideological descendants are lamentably under-represented. There is little sign of any urgency to correct these glaring shortcomings. But it would be a grave mistake for any socialist to dismiss the Marx Memorial Library for such reasons. For one thing, the left in general is far too weak to indulge in sectarian boycotts. For another, much more important, the library is far too rich a resource to be ignored by any socialist. Books are the life blood of our movement, and there is no collection of relevant books anywhere in Britain which even remotely compares with that of the Marx Memorial Library. After a delicious lunch prepared by Fred I joined again and promised to prostitute my journalistic independence by writing this piece. As I say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Top of the page Last updated on 2 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Haunted by the Future (March 2001) From Arts Review, Socialist Review, No.250, March 2001, p.26. Copyright © 2001 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Henry IV Parts I and II by William Shakespeare Barbican Theatre, London The sons and daughters of the rich and famous often live a ‘wild’ life in their youth in which they eat and drink (and even engage in more dangerous pleasures) to excess. Such dalliance causes their parents much distress, but is usually forgiven when the wayward youngsters return to the fold. This is the theme of Shakespeare’s plays about Henry Bolingbroke, who in 1399 became Henry IV, and his son Harry, who in 1413 became Henry V and later won the Battle of Agincourt. Henry IV was weighed down with guilt and self pity about the way, in the best tradition of a Middle Ages English monarch, he had tricked and murdered his predecessor, Richard II. But in Henry IV Part I he is haunted more by the future than the past. His young son has fallen in with ‘bad company’ in the shape of the jovial and irresistible old knight Sir Jack Falstaff, and a band of friendly rogues and ‘loose women’ in Eastcheap. So deeply has the young prince fallen for this jolly crowd that the king and his advisers fear for the future. For Henry IV the past with all its lies and hypocrisies, and the present with the threats of rebellion from Wales and the north, are bad enough. But the future, with its rightful heir to the throne poisoned by strong drink, sex, subversive jokes and pranks, is even worse. Moreover, mere rebuke will not restore the young prince to the Christian and military role cut out for him. A mixture of paternal argument, challenge and adventure holds out the only hope for his salvation. William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of all time, spotted the dramatic potential in this story, not least the clash of hypocrisies between the Falstaff crowd on the one hand, with its relatively harmless inanities, and the menacing deceit, hypocrisy and violence represented by the king and his adversaries. The king fears young Harry Hotspur from Northumberland, but at the same time wishes that the young man’s bravery in the field and rashness in council were qualities he could recognise in his own son and heir. Many socialists (though not Karl Marx, who understood and enjoyed Shakespeare as well as anyone else these last 400 years) like to pretend that the playwright held similar views to their own. Shakespeare was not a revolutionary – if anything the opposite. But his keen ear picked up the revolutionary rumblings of his own times (the Henry IV plays were written in 1598). Shakespeare the man probably wanted to see the wastrel Harry freed from the influence of Falstaff and properly equipped to become a conquering English king. But Shakespeare the playwright observed the prince’s dilemma – caught between the anti-political satire of Fat Old Jack and the insufferable duplicities of the court. He resolved the dilemma by putting the prince back where he belonged, but the resulting rejection of Falstaff at the end of the second play (‘I know thee not, old man’) is one of the most moving moments in all literature. The Henry IV plays are expertly represented at the Barbican in the latest Royal Shakespeare Company production. Desmond Barrit fashions a wonderful Falstaff, and the whole production moves at great pace. No one overacts. If you can only get to one play, choose Part I, where the drama is more sustained and more consistent, and in which Hotspur delivers the delicious riposte to the garrulous Welsh general Kinnock – excuse me, Glendower: Glendower: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’ Hotspur: ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man, But will they come when you do call for them?’ Both plays throb with the turbulence of the times and the revolutionary consequences. The old king prays to what he hopes is his redeemer: ‘Oh God! That one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level.’ As he dies, he begs his son to shy away from interminable civil wars and passes on a message that appears to have been picked up, not just by Henry V, but also by Messrs Bush and Blair. ‘Therefore, my Harry, Be it thy course to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels.’ Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Sean Geraghty & Paul Foot Press Barons’ quest for profits threatens jobs in Fleet Street (5 June 1969) From Socialist Worker, No. 125, 5 June 1969, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Printworkers must break down old inter-union divisions and unite as bosses look to the regions for cheaper labour to solve their problems THE PROTEST march against anti-trade union legislation in London on May 1st was predominantly a printers’ march. At least nine-tenths of the workers on the march came from Fleet Street and the neighbouring newspaper streets and the roll call of the organisations represented sounded like newsboys’ patter. Print and clerical workers from almost all the national newspapers were demonstrating in vast numbers for the first time since the 1930s. To some extent this represented no more than loyalty to the strike calls of branches and chapels. Yet the enthusiasm of the response was due mainly to the profound unease which Fleet Street workers feel about their future. The complacency and confidence of the last 15 years have vanished. “Jobbing” opportunities, big “killings” in overtime and part time work are now difficult to come by. And there has been a sharp increase in the panic jumping around from house to house which prefaces newspaper closures. Vast companies The reason for all this is written in the profit figures for the five vast companies which control 90 per cent of the nation’s press. This year, the press, together with most other industries, will show a handsome profit (for this incidentally, they can thank the government which, in a desperate and futile attempt to “win” the press to Labour, decided that newspapers were a manufacturing industry and as such were eligible for SET refund). But the apparently huge profits disguise a more crucial development. The rate of profits increase is nothing like as high as the rate of increase in turnover or in capital investment. As the big combines produce more and more pap to titillate and bewilder the public, they find that they cannot show the return on profit which they regarded as their “right” in the fine, fat days of the 1950s. In fat years, the proprietors are prepared to maintain lossmaking newspapers to soak up some of their tax liability and to meet some of the overheads of the more profitable papers. But in the lean years, when competition ripens, they will close their loss-makers down. The closure habit is catching, and the newspapers close down like falling dominoes. At the top of this rickety structure is the Sun, whose circulation still drops, though losses have been cut by drastic “reorganisation”, accepted by the unions. The Sun is produced and printed with the People, in profitable property in Long Acre. The IPC bosses would dearly like to close the Sun, move the People to other presses and sell the property to cover the Sun’s losses for the last five years. Unhappily for Hugh Cudlipp and co. there are at present no other presses available for the People, so the Sun may teeter on for a few more months. But Mr. Robert Maxwell’s offer to “buy” the Sun may offer the IPC a heaven-sent opportunity to get rid of their cross. Maxwell, incidentally, wants to run a Labour paper, and therefore, logically, he plans to sack a third of the work force and enter into an “arrangement” with the trade unions to cut wages, raise hours and lower standards under threat of total closure. The Daily Mail and the Daily Sketch, both owned by Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers, are both making losses. Associated Newspapers, of course, make a fat profit, but this comes from their other assets, which include several profitable docks and wharves in the Port of London. Drastic nature In the other combines one profitable newspaper subsidises another which is much less profitable. In all these cases, rationalisation of a drastic nature is being seriously discussed. In Beaverbrook’s Express, there is talk of closing down the London Evening Standard building, merging the production process of both papers and “reorganising” hundreds out of their jobs. Lord Thomson, as soon as his commitments to print the Observer in Printing House Square and the Guardian at Grays Inn Road are fulfilled, plans to move the Times into Thomson House and establish what he once called “a cool climate” for the Observer and the Guardian. Such moves and climates will not take place without a vigorous effort by Thomson to save some of his investment costs by redundancy and cuts in bonuses on the shop floor. But behind all these obvious dangers looms the threat of “regionalisation”. Two years ago, the Daily Mirror started printing a separate edition in Belfast on web-offset, with splashes of colour. The edition has been a glorious success for the bosses. Daily circulation, which extends to parts of Scotland and Eire, is in the region of 750,000. More important, the labour costs compared with a similar effort in England are absurdly small, for the simple reason that less workers are employed for less money. Regionalisation means setting up 15 or 20 operations similar to Belfast in England and Scotland and introducing mass cuts in labour costs in each new regional centre. The added advantage for the bosses of such regionalisation is the big potential in local advertising which is denied the national papers. As the regional editions of the nationals soak up the local advertising, there will be a series of closures of local daily papers, some of which, notably the Glasgow Herald and the Northern Echo, are already unprofitable. But the real advantage for the bosses lies in the hope that they will once and for all escape the firm grip in which the print unions have held them for the last 15 years. Newspaper profits are singularly susceptible to unofficial strike action and in the fat years the bosses have been happier to satisfy demands rather than confront the unions. Advance plans Such "generosity" is ebbing. And although the bosses are terrified of the huge investment and the class confrontation involved, “regionalisation” will occupy more and more of their advance plans. The danger for the print workers is that they will meet this challenge on the defensive, with compromises “taking into account” the profitability of this paper or that, or the rate of unemployment in different regions, or the maintenance of craft traditions Union sectarianism is a real and particular threat in the printing industry where the National Graphical Association boasts control of the machines in almost all the major newspapers and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades boasts the strength of greater numbers and where both unions are easily sidetracked into inter-union squabbles. By contrast, the success of the Liaison Committee at Odhams, where the Sun and People are printed, in countering the traditional animosity between maintenance trades show how much can be achieved by worker cooperation. If the print workers are to avoid serious defeats and redundancies in the near future they will have to organise now to turn the fight outwards against the bosses: To demand cast-iron no-redundancy guarantees; To form more liaison committees in the printing houses; To put real life into the Federated Chapels; To refuse to negotiate under threat or blackmail; And to demonstrate in defence of these demands that they are capable of far more solidarity and militancy than the reactionary and disreputable newspaper proprietors can muster. Sean Geraghty, who writes in his personal capacity, is secretary of Odhams Press Liaison Committee. Paul Foot is a member of the National Union of Journalists. Top of the page Last updated on 13 January 2021

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot House of cards (January 1999) Editorial, Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.226, January 1999, p.3. Copyright © 1999 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. At a time of what seemed like unrelieved gloom, the political scene at Xmas was suddenly bathed in bright light. All of a sudden, without warning, a central pillar of New Labour turned into dust and blew away. Peter Mandelson is New Labour in essence. His book, The Blair Revolution, which he wrote with one of the founders of the late unlamented SDP, Roger Liddle, argued that a New Labour government could provide social justice without interfering with the free flow of capitalism. The book is full of familiar cliches about the irrelevance of public ownership, the importance of reducing the influence of trade unions and the need to get to grips with outdated universal benefits. On page 127, the authors address ‘one of the greatest sources of unfairness’ – ‘the different prospects of couples setting off in life with a flying financial start from their parents and grandparents and those who have no such backing’. This unfairness inspires Mandelson and Liddle to one of the more radical proposals. Poor couples looking for housing should, they say, get a £5,000 sub from the government to help them with their mortgage. Where will the money come from? Why, from the inheritance taxes the Tories were threatening to abolish. The authors are quick to reassure conservative critics that the mortgage bonus would only be available to people whose families could not afford it. It would not have been available, for instance, to Peter Mandelson, who was racked by house hunting problems at almost exactly the same time as he was writing his insipid little book. He was living in a perfectly presentable des res in Clerkenwell, with a pleasant three storey retreat in his constituency, Hartlepool. He was not satisfied, however. He was upwardly mobile. His bad years, when John Smith led the Labour Party, were over. John Smith, an old fashioned right wing social democrat, loathed Mandelson. He regarded him as ‘all froth and public relations’ and banished him from the inner circle to which he had been promoted by Neil Kinnock. Smith’s death in 1994 and his replacement by Tony Blair brought Mandelson scurrying back into Labour’s ruling clique. Blair made a beeline for the rich, and recognised Mandelson’s supreme quality – flattery. Mandelson is, above all else, a courtier, who loves the company of the rich and knows how to flatter them. The rich are always inclined to interpret flattery as perspicacity. Before long, with Blair’s seal of approval on his forehead, Mandelson was flattering his way into the richest boardrooms in the land. The military top brass loved him. He even made friends with the Prince of Wales and his mistress. But his favourites of all the rich and famous were the media barons. He personally persuaded Tony Blair that Rupert Murdoch was a profound political thinker whose papers needed to be courted. Murdoch’s daughter and most likely successor became a close friend of Mandelson. Clive (Lord) Hollick (Express, Anglia TV etc.) worked with Mandelson in Labour’s election unit at Millbank. John Birt, director general of the BBC, was Mandelson’s old buddy at London Weekend Television. How could this high flying courtier hope to keep up with all these rich and powerful friends from a dowdy flat in run down Clerkenwell? Something much grander was needed. His greedy eyes turned to Notting Hill where his friend, the millionaire writer Robert Harris, entertained so lavishly, and where the former SDP leader Sir Ian Wrigglesworth showed off all the fruits of political compromise. A lovely house next to Wrigglesworth’s was for sale, for a little matter of half a million quid. Poor Peter could not begin to raise that much. His salary as a backbencher was a mere £40,000. His flat, already mortgaged, would be lucky to bring in a hundred grand. The Britannia Building Society would only lend him a maximum of £150,000. True, his mother lived in a handsome house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, but even Peter Mandelson could hardly set light to New Labour’s great crusade by evicting his mother and selling her house. Even his own proposal – for a £5,000 housing ‘start’ – would not have helped him. In desperation Peter turned to the only really rich man he knew on the Labour backbenches, Robert Maxwell’s former business colleague and Labour MP for Coventry, Geoffrey Robinson. Robinson happily lent his new young friend £373,000, happily rolled up the interest and happily forgot to insist when, or even if, the loan should be repaid. Hey presto! As soon as Labour won the election, Robinson, an archetypal mediocrity, soared into the government with the grand title, which was not meant to be satirical, of Paymaster General. When the loan was exposed just before Xmas, the Tory press was bewildered. All hailed Mandelson as an employers’ friend, an enemy of trade unions, an opponent of socialism and a moderniser. But few could resist a crack at the old enemy.

But few could resist a crack at the old enemy. The result was that Mandelson was assaulted for trivia. Acres of space were given over to phoney indignation about his cheating the mortgage company. But most sensible people cheat their mortgage company. Similarly, the Tory Party in parliament wriggled and jiggled as they tried to spot a ‘conflict of interest’ between Mandelson as secretary of state at the DTI and a two bit DTI inquiry into some of Robinson’s business deals. All of this missed the point, which was hit at once and in a single sentence by a constituent of Mandelson’s who muttered, ‘I wish I could find someone to lend me £370,000.’ The point was the sheer scale of the money lent, and the ludicrous lifestyle of people who lend and borrow that kind of sum. The man who proclaims the ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice’ of New Labour, who suggests a £5,000 sub for young couples looking for a new home, is at the same time borrowing a sum equivalent to 15 years of the average worker’s total earnings just to buy a house. The huge hoax which is New Labour was suddenly and brilliantly exposed. Nothing works on the public mind more than such a blatant example of personal greed. The whole strategy of ‘softening’ Labour’s image in order to win elections was exposed as a means to propel its soft image makers into the salons of the rich. Like so many marvellous moments, however, the exquisite delight in the fall of Mandelson may be short lived. Many people who put some faith and trust in New Labour may be plunged into despair. ‘They all do it’ – ‘They are all as bad as one another’ – ‘All politicians and politics are rotten to the core’ – these are all common reactions which have in the past turned Labour voters back to the Tories, or pushed them even further to the right. On its own, triumphalist rejoicing at Mandelson’s fall may irritate many Labour voters into rejecting politics altogether. On the other hand, the sudden vulnerability of New Labour, as its great white hope lies bleeding on the wayside, opens out all sorts of opportunities for setting out a socialist alternative. The New Labour road is plainly blocked. The past failures of Old Labour are partly responsible for the blocking. A new road to socialism, from the bottom up, through the skills, energies and solidarity of the people who produce the wealth, is wide open. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Toussaint L’Ouverture and the great Haitian slave revolt (24 January 2004) From Socialist Worker, No.1885, 24 January 2004. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. This month saw the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Caribbean republic of Haiti after a revolutionary uprising against slavery. Who abolished slavery? Children are taught in school that the Tory MP and factory owner William Wilberforce did in the 19th century. Does Wilberforce deserve all the credit? To find out we can start with another question – who discovered America? Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, though several hundred thousand people living there at the time discovered it before him. He also “discovered” Hispaniola, the largest island in what later became known as the West Indies, with around a million inhabitants. Columbus bequeathed the island to the Spanish Empire, which within 250 years managed to exterminate the entire native population. The exterminators, to continue their trade, came to rely increasingly on slaves taken from Africa to work their plantations. By 1789 Hispaniola had been divided and renamed. The eastern half, Santo Domingo, destitute and desolate, was still governed from Spain. The western half, St Domingue, was run by France. It was heavily populated. In 1789 there were 30,000 whites in St Domingue, 40,000 mulattos of mixed race, and half a million black African slaves. St Domingue is now known as Haiti, and is one of the poorest places on earth. In 1789 St Domingue was the richest place on earth, producing sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo and tobacco. The value of its exports made up two thirds of the gross national produce of all France. The whole of this vast surplus was entirely dependent on slave labour. The slaves were allowed no education, no independent thought, no rights. This was a savage, brutalised society, held together by fear and sadism. The French Revolution which began in 1789 started to change all this. Many of the people who took office in the early stages of the revolution were merchants who hated slavery in principle, but benefited from it in practice. So the revolutionary French Assembly made a compromise. It decreed that all of the 500,000 black slaves must stay slaves. French citizenship was extended to any mulattos who could show that their father and mother were born in France – just 400 people. No one was satisfied. It infuriated the planters, patronised the mulattos and ignored the slaves. But the concessions opened a chink of light, paving the way to the great revolt which broke out in St Domingue on 14 August 1791. In a great wave of savagery, slaves slaughtered their masters and burnt their mansions – and were slaughtered in return. By the end of the year a huge slave army had established itself. It was joined by a coachman called Toussaint. Unlike almost all his fellow slaves he could read and write. Very quickly he became the acknowledged leader of the slave army, and remained in charge for 12 years of war. His first enemies were the French planters. Toussaint signed treaties with Spain, which gave him arms in the hope that he might defeat the French and hand the whole island to them. Within months Toussaint’s army had captured all the ports on the north of the island. Very quickly he realised that negotiations with the planters were useless. Messengers sent to negotiate with the planters were executed before they could speak. The result was the slogan which dominated the entire slave campaign, “Liberty or death”. The slave revolt was inextricably intertwined with the French Revolution. In September 1792, as the revolution in France shifted to the left, the new revolutionary convention sent three commissioners and a new general, Laveaux, to St Domingue. Laveaux hated the royalist planters and tried to persuade Toussaint to throw in his lot with revolutionary France. Toussaint remained suspicious even when, in August 1793, the commissioners, on their own initiative, issued a decree abolishing slavery. In 1794, for two reasons, he changed sides. First came the news of a further shift in the French Revolution, with the coming to power of the revolutionaries known as Jacobins. And on 3 February 1794 three delegates from St Domingue took their place in the French Convention, now controlled by the working people of the cities. The delegates were a freed black slave, a mulatto and a white man. The very sight of the black and “yellow” man sent the Convention into prolonged applause. It was carried without discussion that the “aristocracy of the skin” should be tolerated no longer and that slavery should be abolished. This historic news reached Toussaint (who had taken a second name, L’Ouverture, “the opening” to liberty) in spring 1794. Now he knew that not all Frenchmen were racists. At the same time a British expedition of 6,000 men arrived in St Domingue. Britain’s rulers thought there was a chance that the French might be dislodged by a slave revolt and that the British might seize St Domingue. The British war lasted four years-from 1794 to 1798. The British lost 80,000 men in St Domingue. It was one of the greatest military disasters in British history.

It was one of the greatest military disasters in British history. In April 1798 Toussaint led his victorious army into the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the British never returned. By now the revolutionary tide had rolled back in France and the new rulers were weighing up the prospects of restoring slavery in St Domingue. A new commissioner, Hedouville, bribed the mulatto generals, who had fought valiantly for the slaves against the British, to fight against Toussaint. A bloody civil war ended in 1801, when Toussaint marked his triumph by marching into the Spanish half of the island and conquering it. But the slave army now faced a new threat from yet another ruler of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. The British offered their enemy, Napoleon, a short peace so that he could devote his attention to Toussaint L’Ouverture. Napoleon sent a huge expedition. But in the first six months of 1802 the French lost 10,000 men-half to disease, half to the enemy. The French soldiers were confused. As they attacked the black army they were greeted with familiar songs – the Marseillaise, the Ça Ira, the very revolutionary hymns to whose strains they had conquered most of Europe. On 7 June 1802 the beleaguered French generals offered Toussaint a treaty if he would appear in person to discuss it. He did so, and was captured, taken to France and banged up in a freezing prison. To French astonishment the slave army in St Domingue fought with even greater ferocity without their leader. In a matter of months the French were driven out of the island, never to return. This is perhaps one of the most remarkable stories in all human history, but because it turns history upside down it is not told in history books. What happens in real life is not determined by what great men or gods think. Slavery could have gone on for countless decades if the slaves had not fought for their freedom with the most implacable violence. The emancipation of the slaves was fought for and won by the slaves themselves. When in 1803 the British poet William Wordsworth, his own revolutionary enthusiasms already in decline, heard that Toussaint had died of pneumonia in prison he dedicated to the dead slave leader perhaps his finest sonnet – and one that will certainly not be taught by rote at school since it is not about daffodils: Live and take comfort, thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. Read the classic account of the slave revolt and Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James (Penguin, £10.99). For a detailed account of the wider battle against slavery read The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery by Robin Blackburn (Verso, £17). Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot War based on lies ‘We need to concentrate on the big deception’ (26 July 2003) From Socialist Worker, No.1861, 26 July 2003. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Worker Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Paul Foot writes on what really matters among the claims and counter-claims this week BIG FLEAS have little fleas on their backs to bite ’em. Little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum. It’s the same with lies. Big lies generate all sorts of little lies, and in a political world where real ideas and real ideology have been shovelled into the background, the politicians and their media become obsessed with the little lies, and churn them over incessantly so that their audiences and their readers become confused and disorientated. The big lie that dominates the political world at the moment is the one that justified the invasion and occupation of Iraq by American and British troops. This was the lie that the corrupt and murderous regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq posed such a threat to the world that the most powerful armed forces were entitled to rub it out by force, and impose on Iraq a disgusting and apparently endless imperialist occupation. This lie was perfectly plain to millions of people in Britain long before the invasion. It was not, however, plain to the government, the Tory opposition or the BBC. The government and their secret agencies circulated the lie, the Tories almost unanimously took it up and echoed it, and so did the BBC. From that big lie all three organisations seek to divert our attention. There is, for instance, no high-powered public inquiry into the reasons for war and the so called “intelligence” that led us into it. Instead there is to be an inquiry by a single judge into the suicide of a weapons inspector. Mountains of trivia are endlessly debated to distract us from the big lie. What role did Alastair Campbell and the intelligence boffins play in compiling the deceitful dossiers last September and February? What did Dr David Kelly say to Andrew Gilligan of the BBC (who freelances, apparently, for the odious Mail on Sunday) over lunch at the Charing Cross Hotel? What did the doctor say to the BBC’s Susan Watts? Was he bullied by the craven MPs on the foreign affairs select committee? Was he driven to his death by his bosses or by his own uncertainty? Commentators rush to take sides in the trivial debates that follow. Some support the government, others the BBC. The death of Dr Kelly inspires a great outpouring of bogus media grief. Somehow the swarms of little lies and other trivia manage to obscure the big lie, and the big liars – the government, its intelligence chiefs, the Tory leaders and the BBC mandarins – all manage to cling to office. The outstanding achievement of the Stop the War Coalition was that it concentrated the minds of masses of people on the big lie, and organised millions in opposition to it. In all the flurry of little lies we need to concentrate once more on the main question, the big deceit. Did the government, in particular the prime minister, the foreign secretary and the defence secretary, deceive the people in the run-up to the war? Yes they did. Were they supported in that deception by the Tory party and the BBC? Yes they were. Should all these people now pay the price for that deception and get out? Yes they should. Top of the page Last updated on 10 May 2010

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ronan Point – a symbol of all that is best in Labour’s ‘moral crusade’ ... 3,000 people ‘at risk’ in sky-high death traps (14 September 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 88, 14 September 1968, p. 3. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IT IS ALMOST a year now since Francis Taylor, founder, chairman and managing director of Taylor Woodrow Ltd., the second largest construction firm in Britain, burst into the headlines with violent attacks upon the unofficial strikers at London’s Barbican. Night after night the smiling, confident features of Frank Taylor told the public about the ignorant thugs who were holding up the building programme of his subsidiary. On television, Frank ordered one of the strikers to consider the interests of his country. And when the Barbican workers called off the strike with a march through the City of London, there was Frank Taylor, standing next to his brilliant black limousine, smiling patronisingly at the workers he had helped to crush. In recent months very little has been heard of Frank Taylor. The smile is reported to have been wiped from his face. Rumble, roar What disturbed him was a rumble and then a roar in the early morning last May, when a section of 22 stories of a high block of flats in East London were tumbled to the ground by an explosion, killing five people. Taylor Woodrow Anglian, the firm which had built Ronan Point, is half-owned by Taylor Woodrow. Phillips Consultants, the consulting engineer, which Taylor Woodrow insisted had to act for the local borough council, are entirely owned by Taylor. It was Taylor Woodrow who persuaded the West Ham Borough Council to build the newfangled, continental system (known as Larsen Nielsen), as they had persuaded the London County Council before them. Immediately, the company rushed in with explanations. It was, as the Coal Board had said to the Aberfan enquiry, an Act of God. The explosion had been enormous. The distinguished lawyers who represented Taylor Woodrow at the inquiry tried to prove that no building on earth could have withstood that terrible blast. Very quickly the arguments were exposed. A firm of consulting engineers, Bernard Clark and Co., were instructed by the government to investigate the collapse. The Clark Inquiry revealed in a report described as “a summary” (perhaps all the conclusions would have been too much for the authorities) 19 shattering conclusions which have been wholly ignored by the national press, the architectural and engineering journals and television. Here are some of them: The explosion itself was very mild indeed. “In our opinion there are weaknesses in the general design of the building structure.” “The building as constructed is incapable of accepting the consequences of a reasonably mild explosion which may occur due to many causes other than town gas, i.e. various forms of vapour given off from liquid gas available to the domestic market, such as petroleum, butane, also of cellulose thinners, paraffin, and similar volatile liquids for domestic purposes and likely to be stored in small quantities in [of] the flat.” The building was not up to standard fire regulations. “Progressive collapse” of one floor after another is an inevitable characteristic of this kind of building. Resting panels The report, and many similar statements from experts at the inquiry, showed that Ronan Point was kept together simply by resting the floor panels on the walls, and hoping that gravity would keep the building from falling down. The 4-ton floor slabs rest on the outside wall panels – overlapping by 1½ inches. If the Wall is pushed out by 1¼ inches, the floor collapses, as do all the others above and below. Any number of eventualities (many of them natural, and foreseeable) can push the wall out to that extent. Wind can suck wall panels out. An explosion inside the flat caused by as little as two-pints of petrol is enough to push the wall out the crucial 1¼ inches. Subsidence in the ground; expansion of floor panels through underfloor heating; large numbers of people jumping up and down (dancing?) in time on the floor panels – any of these can cause “progressive collapse”. And if the sections which collapse are living rooms in day or evening time, not five, but 500 could be killed. These new forms of buildings are not necessary, still less traditional. Traditional frame building can withstand heavy explosions. Even carefully jointed system buildings rule out progressive collapse. Yet the Larsen Nielsen system, which has no tie between wall and floor, is the most popular with the local authorities. Altogether more than 3,000 working people are living today in sky-rise flats built in the same way as Ronan Point and liable to collapse at the slightest explosion. No wonder Frank Taylor and the directors of Ready Mix Concrete, who own the other half of Taylor Woodrow Anglian are worried. But they are not the only people to blame for the Ronan Point monstrosity. The government has from the outset, welcomed these new “streamlined” techniques, which so effectively kept down the cost of the already monstrously expensive sky-rise flats. Failure to “tie” walls and floors, failure properly to observe fire regulations or basic engineering principles, failure to insist on independent construction engineers – all these add up to a cheaper building. And cheaper buildings are what the Labour government wants. Ronan Point stands today as a monument to the technological revolution about which Wilson enthused in the Good Old Days, and about which the lickspittle Left rejoiced with him. Ronan Point is a symbol of all that’s best in Labour’s moral crusade. Perhaps the inquiry will be forced to recommend that this particular monument be destroyed. But there will still be many others, perhaps with gas turned off (with the tenants; unable to afford electricity, making do with paraffin lamps and other “safe” substitutes), perhaps with token attempts to “secure” the walls and floors but all equally liable to tumble down at any time of the day or night, slaughtering their unsuspecting inhabitants. The shareholders of Taylor Woodrow, whose dividend has been held at 20 per cent for the last three years, need not be unduly worried. Government and local authorities will ensure their firm’s profits for many years to come. And most of them live in buildings which are either safe or heavily insured. Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Hungry for power? (7 November 1992) From Socialist Worker, No.1316, 7 November 1992, p.11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. WE USED to complain about the Labour Party longing for office but being terrified of power. In the last few months there has been quite a change. Now the Labour Party is terrified of both office and power. Robin Cook had a good joke the other day about the concessions made by Heseltine when Tarzan realised he’d gone too far on the pit closures. “I could have asked for a general election,” said Cook. “Maybe we’d have got one as well.” Ho, ho, ho went the backbenches. But wait. Was it so funny after all? During all the momentous crises that have shaken the government since 16 September, not once has the Labour leadership called for a general election. Indeed anything which might so shake the political consensus as to make it even possible that the government might resign – a general strike, for instance, or even a vote of no confidence – has been studiously avoided by Smith, Brown, Beckett and Co. Does this mean that the Labour leaders have lost their lust for office? Not at all. For the trappings of power, for the appearance of power, for the deference which comes naturally to any Secretary of State, the Smith brigade are as hungry as ever. What terrifies them is the responsibility of office. So scared Where does it point to, this impotence of opposition? Does it mean that Major and Co can go on ruling however great the economic crisis and however unpopular their cuts and wage freezes? Not at all. However impotently Labour behaves, they cannot help but represent the power and the fury of the people at the bottom of society who will be most affected by Major’s autumn cuts. The Tories cannot do anything because of the opposition on the ground and Labour cannot do anything because it is so scared of taking over. It is an impasse which cannot last forever. It can be broken by the Tories beating the workers or the workers beating the Tories. In the meantime there is an alternative, one which in my view grows more likely day by day. As the Tories find it more and more impossible to combat the crisis and as Labour finds it more and more impossible to challenge the Tories for the job, the two leaderships could move together. They could break the impasse by joining each other in what both would hail as a Grand Coalition for Recovery. The policies of the coalition would be very much the same as those demanded by the more liberal Tory leaders now. Capital spending programmes would be encouraged, all spending on wages would be discouraged. Some pits would stay open in exchange for a total wage freeze. There would be cuts and freezes in every area of social security. Housing, on the other hand, would get a boost from the release of the council house sales money. With the support of Labour and some big unions, the Tories and big business would get their worst cuts and their Maastricht treaty through parliament. Labour ministers would get their chauffeurs, their seals of office and their turn at the dispatch box. The only thing this new government could not do is solve the capitalist crisis which would go on bashing away at the economy until a great many people start to see what is needed is not a change of leaders in parliament but a change in the economic system. Top of the page Last updated on 7.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Mirror, Mirror on the wall, is Cecil the fairest of them all? (June 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 84, July 1968, p. 4. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. HAROLD WILSON, MAN OF THE YEAR! screamed the Daily Mirror January 1st 1967, and continued in the glittering prose of that paper’s style to sing the Prime Minister’s praises. And no wonder. For every policy which the Daily Mirror had advocated over the previous few years had been faithfully pursued by Wilson’s government. It was the Mirror, way back in 1964, that warned against “too hasty” social reform in the light of the economic crisis. It was the Mirror, early in 1965, which urged the government to “ease up” on its plans to tax profits and capital gains. It was the Mirror, later in 1965, which urged support for the American action in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, the Mirror again supported Labour in 1966. Soon afterwards it launched the most savage of all the press attacks against the striking seamen. And when the economic crisis broke in July 1966, the Mirror urged: “Nothing short of drastic cuts in public expenditure and a wage freeze for at least six months will put the economy right.” (July 15, 1966) We got the cuts and the wage freeze. But perhaps the Mirror’s biggest triumph was the decision in 1967 to apply for British entry into the Common Market, a policy which all the Mirror papers had been urging since 1960. When Wilson applied for Common Market entry, he had, according to the Mirror’s front page "carved a name for himself in British history.” The Mirror’s enthusiasm for the Common Market was, of course, selfless and patriotic. It had nothing to do with the enormous profits which could accrue to the International Publishing Corporation – the Mirror’s owners – in a tariff-free Europe in which IPC would be the biggest publisher, the biggest printer, the biggest manufacturer and supplier of newsprint and typesetting machines, not to say wood pulp from its forests in Canada. Throughout the talks on Europe, the Mirror continued to back Wilson and show him the way. On Rhodesia, on Vietnam, on disciplining rebel MPs, on cleaning-up demonstrators, even on South African arms, the Mirror and Wilson were of one mind. Even in personalities, they agreed. The Mirror liked Brown for a long time, and then started chanting Brown Must Go. Brown went. For a long time, the Mirror yelled for the blood of Douglas Jay, who opposed Common Market entry. Jay went. Every little prejudice was instantly rewarded by dynamic action from No. 10 Downing Street. Now King makes his final demand: that the faithful Wilson himself should go. Suddenly, the government needs not new policies but new leaders. Why? Lost support for Labour means lost readers for Cecil King. He cannot attack the policies of the government because they are good for his profits. So he is forced to kick his faithful servant in the teeth and prepare his next Man of the Year, Roy Jenkins, for similar treatment. Bottom and below SOME PEOPLE thought that things couldn’t get worse electorally. Others that the social policies of the government had reached rock bottom. Both suppositions have now been disproved, the first by the municipal election results, the second by the government’s White Paper on Rents, which threatens to remove control on all controlled properties which have adequate amenities.” The “ new control ” of the 1965 Rent Act is not automatic. It works only if the tenant is prepared to face rent officers and Rent Assessment Committees, which are staffed with lawyers and accountants and by their very composition are sympathetic to the landlord. The old control, enforced by the Glasgow Rent Strike of 1919, was automatic. It applied to the rented property without anyone approaching anyone, and it was therefore effective. The clamour of the Fair Rents Association – a sinister group of politically-motivated men which purports to consist entirely of poverty-stricken old ladies bullied and raped by West Indian tenants paying 2s. 6d. a week for fully-furnished luxury flats – have now forced the government to agree to take effective control off the houses where it still operates. Even the Tories were frightened to do this when they studied the results of their 1957 decontrols. The measure, if enacted, will involve appalling rent increases for the people who can least afford to pay: mainly old tenants in old decaying areas. All these people, however, should take comfort for the Minister of Housing is a hero of the Left, Anthony Greenwood, whose wife launches Polaris submarines as enthusiastically as he used to oppose their manufacture. Tony Greenwood’s a decent Christian fellow. It’s an honour to have your rent doubled by the decisions of a bloke like him. Love thy enemy THE NEW MOOD of unity which is sweeping the revolutionary Left has not, it seemed, penetrated New Park Publications of Clapham. who occupy the same offices as the publishers of the bi-weekly Newsletter. Recently to help me in a book I was writing I wanted to get hold of some excellent articles by Brian Pearce written in Labour Review some years ago, and published by New Park. I rang New Park and asked if I could come down and look through some back numbers in their files. No, I could not, said a woman firmly. Could I buy some back numbers, then? She would see. Then I had a letter from one Carol Curtis of New Park, which said curtly : “We regret we are unable to supply you with back numbers of Labour Review ...” No reasons were given, though I suspect from the lady’s tone that my connection with Socialist Worker and International Socialism was not wholly irrelevant. “Enemies of Marxism” who want to obtain marxist literature should apply in future to the British Museum. * Take Shelter YOUR ISSUE of February 1968 has been drawn to my attention and, in particular, a column by Paul Foot. Despite the passing of time and the self-destroying vindictiveness of his style of writing, I feel I must write and correct two facts in the paragraph about SHELTER. Firstly, its chairman – whether its former chairman or the present one – has not got a 14-bedroomed house, or even a 4-bedroomd house. Secondly, there are no communion services in the office, compulsory or otherwise, daily or weekly, and the majority of the staff, including myself, are not Christians. Therefore his accusation that only people who will attend a communion service are employed is completely without foundation – certainly since I was appointed director over a year ago. Paul Foot also describes us as “an establishment charity.” I would have thought he would find that rather difficult to justify as more than most charities, SHELTER has combined its rescue operation with fairly forceful pressure on society as a whole to bring to an end a problem that must be of some concern to your readers, even if it is not to Mr. Foot. Des Wilson Director, SHELTER The Strand. W.C.2. Paul Foot writes: Yes, sorry. My informant talked about “Shelter.” I now realise that she was talking about the Christian organisation of the same name. Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Red Barbara’s Rocky Road (June 2002) Obituary of Barbara Castle, Socialist Review, No.264, June 2002, p.17. Copyright © 2002 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The life of Labour left winger Barbara Castle. I first heard Barbara Castle speak at a Young Socialist rally in Skegness in 1963. She was 53, I was 25. She was magnificent. She sensed an iconoclasm in the hall, with which she immediately identified. She had a way of rolling her body round her more eloquent phrases that gave the infectious impression of movement, passion and change. I heard her last in January 2001, when she spoke at a memorial meeting for my aunt Jill Craigie. Barbara was almost blind and had to be helped to the microphone. None of the passion, none of the caustic wit and satire so prominent in 1963, was lost. She made no concession whatever to the sentimentality that so often sours these occasions. She left everyone laughing and applauding in an excited and militant mood. We were proud of her. All my life, Barbara Castle was a symbol of the left in the Labour Party. She was reared, intellectually and politically, in the ILP in Bradford. In her halcyon years she was baulked by Tory victories in three successive general elections, and did not achieve high office until Labour won the general election in 1964, when she was shot into the cabinet as the first ever minister of overseas development. She turned out to be an outstanding administrator, easily overcoming the cloying attention of the civil service. As Secretary of State for Transport from 1965 to 1968 she beat off the hysteria of the road lobby. Her Transport Act was one of the few genuine attempts of that government to establish some sort of rational order in the chaos of a thriving capitalism. Then, at the peak of her triumph, came disaster. In 1968 she became the first secretary in charge of employment and productivity, and set to work ‘sorting out’ the ‘problem’ of unofficial strikes, which were then proliferating. She and her advisers, and the entire press, saw these strikes as a menace to good order and industrial discipline, and they had, she concluded, to be controlled. The result was In Place of Strife, a white paper she wrote herself, which proposed a cooling-off period before strikes could take place. Workers who ignored the cooling-off period and stayed out on strike were liable to prosecution, fines and imprisonment. The proposals set out to weaken the fighting spirit of the workers, and were indignantly rejected by the entire trade union movement including right wing trade union leaders. In the summer of 1969 they were replaced by a bromide undertaking in which the union leaders promised to curb unofficial strikes themselves. With this one proposal, Barbara Castle cast away much of the respect she had earned among the organised workers and the Labour left. Why did she set out on this disastrous course? Many leftish commentators at the time (and in recent obituaries) wrote the episode off as an aberration, a flaw perhaps in Barbara’s character. This explanation let the analysts off the hook. For the real cause of In Place of Strife had much deeper roots which probed all the way back to that ILP training. One obituary accurately described Barbara’s attitude to the trade unions as ‘parental’. The role of social democratic government, she believed, was to work with the trade union leaders to achieve a fairer society. If, however, the trades unions behaved badly, they had to be disciplined by the social democratic state, whose weapons of discipline (police, law courts, prisons) were much the same as those used by the Tories when they were in office. This ‘parental’ approach ran right through Barbara Castle’s political career. In her youth, as Barbara Betts, she pandered to the prevailing adoration of Comrade (or more appropriately Father) Stalin. My first job in London in 1964 was on the Daily Herald where I met, and immediately liked, the political editor, Ted Castle, Barbara’s husband. One day, Ted explained to his young protégé what the difference was between the left and right in the Labour Party. ‘It’s all about Russia, Paul,’ he revealed. ‘The left support Russia, the right don’t.’ I remember replying that this was a quite hopeless analysis, absolutely disastrous to the left since it bound them to a state capitalist dictatorship. He looked at me as if I was mad, but the exchange has always seemed to me to explain the intrinsic flaw in modern social democracy – the belief that capitalist society can be changed by intelligent and dedicated people at the top of society without disturbing, let alone agitating, the exploited, the poor and the dispossessed into a revolt that could and would topple the rich and create a socialist order. Ted Castle, incidentally, thought up the name In Place of Strife. In the Tory onslaught that followed Labour’s electoral defeat in 1970, Barbara Castle recovered her militant spirit and revelled in it. When Labour was returned in 1974 she became Secretary of State for Social Services. She applied her administrative skill and her agile mind to the problem of pensions, now so topical. She believed that security in old age was a matter for the state, not for the stock exchange, and she established an earnings-related state pension scheme (Serps), so much fairer and more secure than anything that had gone before it that the Tories (and the new Tories in the Blair government) systematically demolished it. When James Callaghan took over as Labour prime minister in 1976, his first act was to sack Barbara Castle, an act of right wing stupidity and obstinacy she never forgot or forgave. Literally to her dying day, never once losing her wit or her passion, Barbara campaigned to restore the link between earnings and pensions that the Tories had slit. She was throughout a proud and sincere social democrat with all the power and weaknesses that her political persuasion implied. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Press Censorship The media massage (February 1991) From Socialist Worker Review, No.139, February 1991, p.7. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. HOW TO account for the extraordinary shifts of British public opinion in the first week of the war? On the eve of war, the United Nations Association commissioned a public opinion poll which asked whether people favoured immediate war after the 15 January deadline or whether sanctions should be given more time to work. The answers were 47 percent in favour of instant war, 42 percent against. Within a week of the war starting, the polls were proudly recording that more than 70 percent of the British people supported it. One explanation for the switch is what might be called the Denis Healey view of things. He was against the war until it started but refused to say anything against it after it broke out. Healey even voted for the war he had previously opposed, and not a word has passed his lips about the awful dangers of a long war on which subject he was so eloquent before it started. But this isn’t enough to explain quite such a dramatic turnaround. At least part of the responsibility is attached to the way in which the media has been so successfully massaged into war hysteria. One of the mistakes made by many socialists when they criticise the media is to complain about the lack of a range of views. Only one set of opinions, they argue (that of the government and the ruling class) is allowed to circulate in capitalist media. This is often demonstrably false. Even in the case of the current war, it is simply not true. Tony Benn, for instance, has been in high demand, as has Tam Dalyell. In the newspapers, Edward Pearce and John Pilger in the Guardian and no less than three of the five regular columnists on the Daily Mirror have come out against the war while it is being fought. The point is not so much that the (minority) views against the war are not being expressed. The point is that the information both about the conduct of the war and about its origins has been systematically suppressed, so that people simply do not have the facts in front of them. simply do not have the facts in front of them. Herculean efforts have been made to ensure that even the miserable freedoms afforded to reporters and camera crews in the Falklands War are not available this time. Each journalist in the Middle East is shepherded by military censors, usually through the newly created Media Control Units (or MRTs as they are called). Just in case one of these shepherded journalists gets hold of some ‘dangerous’ information, every single official and pooled report is passed back through the Pentagon in Washington before it can be published. When Robert Fisk of the Independent slipped through this net, and found a British army unit lost in the desert, the whole media control industry went berserk. The guidelines issued to editors at the start of the war (or ‘conflict’ as it is called in media jargon) knock out pretty well every possible reporting of every possible fact. They make special reference to the reporting of any damage done to any naval vessel (remembering, presumably, the havoc caused to the war effort when HMS Sheffield was hit by an Argentine Exocet off the Falklands). Names, numbers and pictures of casualties are totally banned until the censor has announced them. Remember the chaos following the bombing of two transport ships in the Falklands when there happened by bad luck to be a camera crew in the area? Locking journalists up in Riyadh, Bahrein and Dahran has secured the first urgent priority: to prevent any news whatever emerging from Iraq during the carpet bombing of Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and other cities. Thus ten times the amount of explosives dropped on Hiroshima were dropped in Iraq without, according to the media, a single civilian dying. Saddam has been happy to play along with this foul fiction, no doubt because a lifetime as a military commander teaches him that casualties on your side are not human lives lost as much as successes for the other side. Many journalists have been stunned by the extent of the censorship into a sullen acceptance of it. The sheer excitement of putting on gas masks and attending briefings in battledress (as the military insist that correspondents in Saudi Arabia do) has convinced many correspondents that they are fighting the war as well. Others at home, or safe in Cairo or Ankara, have fallen in with the general view that in wartime it is right to tell a lot of lies and dress it up in expert military doggerel. But there is resistance, and at the first meeting of Media Workers Against the War on 28 January it came out into the open. The importance of this new organisation is that it can give some courage to those journalists who are opposed to the war and refuse to be browbeaten by the censor or by their executives into telling lies or indulging in hype. The arguments against the war are so strong, and the popular support for war so fragile, that journalists’ resistance to censorship inside and outside media offices is likely to grow. One way of pushing it along is to organise small groups of anti-war journalists inside the offices, and to meet regularly to discuss its coverage. One reason why the authorities are so keen to get the war over quickly is that the longer it drags on the more reluctant will journalists be to lie about it. Top of the page Last updated on 30.12.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Shelley: The Trumpet of a Prophecy (June 1975) From International Socialism (1st series), No.79, June 1975, pp.26-32. Downloaded with thanks from REDS – Die Roten Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I have come to Shelley far too late, and for that I blame my accursed education. I still have the small dark blue text book Shelley by Richard Hughes, which was forced down my throat at school. There is no suggestion in the volume that Shelley had any ideas whatever. He was interested, apparently, in skylarks, clouds, west winds, Apollo, Pan and Arethusa. At University College, Oxford, on the way to the football changing rooms, I would pass each week a ridiculous monument to Shelley, a great dome-shaped sepulchre in which lies a smooth-limbed, angelic young man, carried by sea lions. His limbs arc naked, perfect white, his expression is heavenly, and his genitals have been painted out (once, 1 think, even broken off) by civilised young gentlemen celebrating the rare successes of University College Boat Club. An embarrassed type-written note by the monument states that Shelley was a student of University College in 1810. I recall a senior don telling me at some boring dinner: ‘Shelley, poor fellow. He was drowned while at college.’ In fact, he was expelled in his second term for writing The Necessity of Atheism, the first attack on the Christian religion ever published in English. In my last year at school, we were obliged to buy the new Penguin edition of Shelley, edited by a Tory lady of letters, Isobel Quigly. Her introduction told us: ‘There was about Shelley a nobility of spirit, a height of purpose, a kind of fine-grainedness that is a quality of birth and cannot be grown to.’ Miss Quigly detected someone from her own class. She went on: ‘He was in spirit the most essentially romantic of the poets of his age, and his faults were all faults of an overabundant and undisciplined imagination. No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety.’ So Miss Quigly set about cutting with a will. She castrated Shelley far more effectively than did the rowing oafs of University College, Oxford. Every single expression of radical or revolutionary opinion is cut out of the poems which follow. Poems, like Queen Mab, whose main purpose was political, are cut to a couple of ‘lyrical’ stanzas. This censorship has been going on for more than a hundred and thirty years: Every school generation is taught to read Shelley, as Quigly suggested, for his ‘lyric poetry’. Ever since the 1840s, distinguished bourgeois critics have united in declaring Shelley one of the greatest English lyric poets. They could not ignore his genius, so they claimed his ‘fine-grainedness’ for their class. In the same breath, they forgot about, distorted or censored his ideas. These critics were formed not only to re-write Shelley s poetry, but also to forget about what happened to him when he was alive. The endless stream of Shelley biographies written from about 1870 onwards made light of the most significant feature of the poet’s short life: his persecution by the authorities, political, legal and literary. In 1812, when still a lad of 19, he was hounded out of Devon by the Home Office for writing a ‘seditious’ pamphlet about Ireland. Had he not left Devon when he did, he would almost certainly have been prosecuted (as was one man who put up Shelley’s posters – and was sent to prison for six months). Fleeing from Devon, he settled in Wales, and worked as an agent on a reservoir scheme. This was a time of growing working class agitation, especially in Wales. Despite the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, small strikes were constantly breaking out – even on the reservoir. Shelley became so friendly with the workers, and such an ardent advocate of their cause, that the local Tory landowner, Captain Pilfold, hired a gunman to assassinate him. The gunman missed, twice, but Shelley bad to leave home again. When Shelley’s first wife committed suicide, he was refused custody of his two children by the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, who felt that nice upper class children should not be handed over to a man of Shelley’s ‘dangerous’ political views. Worst of all, however, was the treatment of his writing. Few of the Shelley worshippers of the last century or this have bothered to explain how it was that the ‘greatest lyric poet in English history’ had the utmost difficulty in getting anything published during his lifetime. Prometheus Unbound sold about 20 copies. The original edition of Queen Mab didn’t sell any. The string of political poems which Shelley wrote about the massacre of trade unionists and their families at Peterloo in 1819 were not published – for fear of prosecution for seditious libel. During all his life, this ‘greatest of English lyric poets’ made precisely £40 from his writing – and that from a trashy novel he wrote when he was still at school! In 1818, Shelley’s longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, was reviewed in the High Tory Quarterly by John Coleridge, who had been Shelley’s prefect at Eton. A section of the review gives a fair picture of what the literary establishment, which later adopted him, thought of Shelley at the time: ‘Mr Shelley would abrogate our laws ... He would abolish the rights of property ... be would overthrow the constitution ...

be would overthrow the constitution ... he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles. Marriage he cannot endure ... finally as the basis of the whole scheme, he would have us renounce our belief in religion.’ For this, Coleridge hoped, Shelley would sink ‘like lead to the bottom of the ocean’. When Shelley was drowned, in the Gulf of Spezia three years later, the Courier, as respectable in its time as the Daily Telegraph is today, trumpeted: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned. Now he knows whether there is a God or no.’ The reviewers hated him because of his political opinions – just as reviewers and English teachers of later years came to adore him in spite of his political opinions. While Shelley was alive, his work was censored in total by the authorities. When he was dead, the censorship persisted, selectively, but no less insidiously. The only part of the preface to his poem Hellas which deals with the prospects for English revolution was cut out in all the editions of his poetry for 71 years. The most comprehensive statement of his political position – a 100-page book entitled The Philosophical View of Reform – was suppressed for 100 years. Even when it was produced – in 1920 – it was circulated privately to devotees of the Shelley Society. Now, at last, a glorious book [1] has been published which tells something like the true story. Shelley, it makes plain, was neither a fiend nor a saint. He was, indeed, perhaps the finest poet ever to write in English. But he was also, inseparably, a relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation. he was an atheist and a republican. He sided on every occasion with the masses when they rose against their oppressors: not just when the middle classes rose against feudal monsters in Mexico, Greece or Spain – but also when workers and trade unionists rose against what Shelley called ‘the pelting wretches of the new aristocracy’ – the bourgeoisie. The most casual reading of Shelley makes one thing plain: the genius of his poetry is inextricably entwined with his revolutionary convictions. When he was 19, Shelley wrote the most overtly revolutionary of all his long poems: Queen Mab. He published 250 copies at his own expense, and circulated about 70. (The Investigator got hold of a copy ten years later and described it, predictably, as ‘an execrable publication’ which would produce ‘unmingled horror and disgust’ among all decent readers.) In 1821, Shelley s last year, a radical publisher called William Clark started selling pirate editions of Queen Mab on street bookstalls. Clark was duly prosecuted by the Society for the Prosecution of Vice – led by the Mary Whitehouses of that time – and was forced to take the book off the stalls. The courageous publisher, Richard Carlile, immediately published another edition, and another. Three months after Shelley’s death, there were four cheap editions of Queen Mab circulating in the streets of London, Manchester and Birmingham – many of them bought by small working class societies or illegal trade unions, and read out loud at workers’ meetings. Carlile went on publishing Queen Mab, even when he was sent to prison for ‘sedition’. Richard Holmes writes: ‘The number is not certain but between 1823 and 1841, it has been reckoned, fourteen or more separate editions were published.’ The effect on the rising trade union movement and especially on the Chartists rebellion was electric. Hundreds of thousands of workers were brought to socialist and radical ideas by this extraordinary poem. In an essay on Shelley, written in 1892, Bernard Shaw rote: ‘Same time ago, Mr. H.S. Salt, in the course of a lecture on Shelley, mentioned, on the authority of Mrs. Marx Aveling, who had it from her father, Karl Marx, that Shelley had inspired a good deal of that huge badly-managed popular effort called the Chartist Movement. An old Chartist who was present and who seemed at first much surprised by this statement rose to confess that now he came to think of it (apparently for the first time) it was through reading Shelley that he got the ideas that led him to join the Chartists. ‘A little further inquiry elicited that Queen Mab was known as the Chartists’ bible, and Mr Buxton Forman’s collection of small, cheap copies, blackened with the finger-marks of many heavy-banded trades, are the proof that Shelley became a power – a power that is still growing.’ What the gentlemen of letters censored was dug out and reprinted by the working class movement Read Queen Mab and you will see why. Remember that it was written in 1812, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars when the whole British ruling class was terrified by the French revolution. The extent of misery in the growing British working class was indescribable. In order to suppress the trade unions, and to enforce the Combination Acts, the Tory government moved troops into all Britain’s industrial cities. The Luddites, who had organised to protect their jobs by smashing the machinery, were remorselessly butchered on the scaffold. Production and the war were kept going by prolonged and unremitting terror. In Queen Mab, the spirit of a young girl is wafted into the stratosphere by a Fairy Queen, who shows her the world, distorted and corrupted by wars and exploitation. The Spirit shrinks in horror at the inevitability of it all. Queen Mab replies: ‘I see thee shrink, Surpassing spirit – wert thou human else. I see a shade of doubt and horror fleet Across thy stainless features: yet fear not; This is no unconnected misery, Nor stands uncaused and irretrievable. Man’s evil nature, that apology, Which kings who rule and cowards who crouch, set up For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood Which desolates the discord-wasted land.

Man’s evil nature, that apology, Which kings who rule and cowards who crouch, set up For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood Which desolates the discord-wasted land. NATURE, No! Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower’ The poem is about those kings, priests and statesmen. Here are the priests: Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites, Without a hope, a passion or a love Who, through a life of luxury and lies, Have crept by flattery to the seat of power, Support the system whence their honours flow. :They have three words, (well tyrants know their use, Well pay them for the loan, with usury Torn from a bleeding world) – God, Hell and Heaven. A vengeful, pitiless and Almighty fiend, Whose mercy is a nickname for the rage Of tameless tigers hungering for blood; Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire, Where poisonous and undying worms prolong Eternal misery to those hapless slaves Whose life has been a penance for its crimes; Anti Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie Their human nature, quake, believe and cringe Before the mockeries of earthly power. The wealth of kings was not merely horrible in itself. It derived from the poverty of others who did the work. In his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley wrote: ‘The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilisation without which civilised man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society. ‘Employments are lucrative in inverse ratio to their usefulness. The jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to exist, struggles through contempt and penury, anti perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind ...’ The law, especially the Conspiracy Law, upholds all this, so the law is wrong. ‘The laws which support this system are the result of a conspiracy of the few against the many – who are obliged to purchase this pre-eminence by the loss of all real comfort.’ Queen Mab, which has been scorned for 150 years, is a marvellous poem for socialists. It is full of hatred for exploitation and exploiters, full of hope and faith in the ability of the exploited to create a new society. How did Shelley, born into the aristocracy and educated at an expensive prep school, at Eton and (briefly) at Oxford come to write it? Partly through intellectual conversion, through reading the radical literature of the French revolutionary era. Shelley’s favourite author at school was the ageing philosopher, Willia`m Godwin. Many of the ideas in Queen Mab, including the idea that all wealth stems from labour, are taken from Godwin’s book Political Justice, which was published in 1793. It cost three guineas. Asked whether the book should be prosecuted for sedition, the Prime Minister, Pitt, replied: ‘No book can be seditious at three guineas! Many of the ideas in Political Justice are revolutionary for their time, but Godwin was always careful to insist that any change in society could only come through men and women individually believing in it. He believed in co-operative ownership in the abstract, on the blackboard. He was particularly keen to discourage any association of men and women who thought as he did. Godwin is the idol of latter-day liberals and anarchists, who think about a new, co-operative society, and do nothing to promote it. Unlike Godwin, Shelley involved himself with the working people around him. Wherever he lived – in Keswick, Cumberland, in Dublin, in North Devon and on the reservoir in Wales, he moved continuously among the working people, talking to them, learning from their experience and their aspirations. Richard Holmes tells how, in Wales, he would walk out at night and engage in long conversations with the reservoir workers who were forced to grow their own food by moonlight in order to stay alive. In Dublin in 1812, he spent much of his time talking to the workers. After a few weeks in Dublin, he wrote Proposals For An Association, in which he argued for a political party devoted to catholic emancipation. When William Godwin read the pamphlet, he almost had a fit. He wrote at once to Shelley, ordering him to forget these notions, to beware of violence, to sit back and ‘calmly to await the progress of truth’. When Shelley wrote back politely refusing to wind up his association, Godwin replied, hysterically: ‘Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!’ There is a passage in Queen Mab which shows what Shelley felt about armchair revolutionaries. This is perhaps the only passage in the poem which does not take the lead from Godwin. Indeed, it is partly a satire of Godwin. The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside, To deeds of charitable intercourse And bare fulfilment of the common laws Of decency and prejudice, confines The struggling nature of his human heart, Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds A passing tear purchance upon the wreck Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling’s door The frightful waves are driven – when his son Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man, Whose life is misery, and fear and care; Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil Who ever hears his famished offspring scream; Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze For ever meets, anti the proud rich man’s eye Flashing command, and the heartbreaking scene Of thousands like himself: – he little heeds The rhetoric of tyranny.

Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze For ever meets, anti the proud rich man’s eye Flashing command, and the heartbreaking scene Of thousands like himself: – he little heeds The rhetoric of tyranny. His hate Is quenchless as his wrongs: he laughs to scorn The vain and bitter mockery of words, Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds, And unrestrained but by the arm of power, That knows and dreads his enmity. Shelley did not get that from reading Godwin – or from any other books for that matter. He got it from the workers and the starving peasantry of Cumberland, Dublin, Wales and Devon. It is this belief in the unshakeable resolve of the exploited masses which makes Shelley’s political writing far more powerful than anything written by Godwin. Yet the argument with Godwin persists, at different levels, through all Shelley’s political writing. On the one hand there is the understanding tat the engine of tyranny is exploitation; on the other, the fear, deeply-rooted in his class background, that the masses in revolt would generate violence and plunder; and that therefore the best way to proceed was by gradual reform. It is idle to pretend, like Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx did in their lecture [2] to the Shelley Society in 1885, that Shelley was the perfect scientific socialist. There is a lot in Shelley’s political writing, if taken out of contcxt, which puts him to the right of many other radical thinkers of the time. In 1817, for instance, he wrote a pamphlet A Proposal For Putting Reform to a Vote, in which he argued against universal suffrage. In his larger work, A Philosophical View of Reform, he argued again against the suffrage on the grounds that it would deliver up too much too soon: ‘A Republic, however just in its principle, and glorious in its object, would through the violence and sudden change which must attend it, incur a great risk of being as rapid in its decline as in its growth ... ‘It is better that the people should be instructed in the whole truth; that they should see the clear grounds of their rights; the objects to which they ought to tend; and be impressed with the just persuasion that patience and reason and endurance are the means of a calm yet irresistible progress. This led to his advice to the masses to rely on passive disobedience when the army attacked them; and to resurrect ‘old laws’ to ensure their liberties. Yet, often even in the same works, Shelley s longing for revolutionary change clashes openly with this condescending caution. Again and again, he calls openly for direct challenges to the law (especially to the law of criminal libel) and for ‘the oppressed to take furious vengeance on the oppressors.’ (Letter in 1812). All politics in those years were dominated by the French Revolution. Like many other great poets of his time – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – Shelley was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution. One by one, however, the others abandoned the revolution, and denounced it. Shelley was appalled by the Napoleonic dictatorship – and wrote a poem on Napoleon’s death which started: ‘I hated thee, fallen tyrant’. But he never lost his enthusiasm for the ideas which had given rise to the revolution. His long poem, the Revolt of Islam, though it contains irritatingly few specific ideas about revolutionary politics, is clear on one matter above all else: that in spite of the disease, the terror, the dictatorship, the wars, the poverty and the ruin which followed the revolution the ideas of reason and progress which inspired it will triumph once again. In his preface to the poem he poured scorn on those who gave up their belief in revolutionary ideas because the revolution had been defeated, or had not gone according to plan. The passage could just as well have been written about the generations of disillusioned Communists after the losing of the Russian revolution: ‘On the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of the public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics and enquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to be emerging front their trance ... In that belief I have composed the following poem.’ And so, even after the most frightful catalogue of post-revolutionary tyranny, torture, famine, and disease, the Revolt of Islam remembers the ideas which started the revolution – ‘And, slowly, shall in memory ever burning Fill this dark night of things with an eternal morning.’ Alone of all the poets of his time, Shelley suppresses his own apprehensions about the French revolution and concentrated instead on the coming triumph of the ideas which had unleashed it. Soon after the Revolt of Islam was published, Shelley heft England for Itahly, where he spent the last four years of his life. All this time he was absorbed by political developments in Britain. In March 1819 he wrote his greatest poem, Prometheus Unbound, which the latter-day ‘lyricists’ hail as a ‘classical tragic drama’, but which is, in fact, a poem about the English Revolution.

The Greek legend of Prometheus was taught to us budding Greek scholars (as I behieve it is still taught today) as a moral tale about what happens to subversives when they dare to challenge the authority of God (or the headmaster, or the managing director). Prometheus dared to steal fire from the sun and to bring the benefits of science to mankind. This was intolerable to the King of the Gods, Jupiter, for whom science was something from which only he (and other Gods) should benefit. So Prometheus was chained to a rock, tormented by the daily visits of a vulture who gnawed his liver. To Shelley, Prometheus was a hero, representing the potential of man in revolt against repression. His poem starts with a description of Prometheus’ torture against a background of darkness, disease and tyranny. Asia, Prometheus’ wlfe, determines to release hirn and to overthrow Jupiter. She knows tat there is only one power capable of doing that: the power of Demogorgon, the People-Monster. She and her sister visit Demogorgon in his darkened cave, where she whips and lashes him with argument. Like all good agitators, she starts with the easy questions, playing an popular superstition and servility in order to challenge them. Asia: Who made the living world? Demogorgon: God. Asia: Who made all That it contains? Thought, passion, reason, will Imagination? Demogorgon: God, almighty God. After a bit more of this, her tone switches: Asia: And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse, Which from the links of the great chain of things To every thought within the mind of man Sway and drag heavily – and each one rests Under the load toward the pit of death: Abandoned hope – and love that turns to hate; And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood; Pain whose unheeding and familiar speech ls bowling and keen shrieks day after day; And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell? Demogorgon: He reigns. Asia: Utter his name! A world, pining in pain, Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down! At the end of a long speech and some more furious questions, Asia calls on Demogorgon to arise, unshackle Prometheus and overturn Jupiter. In a sudden climax, he rises. Two chariots appear from the recesses of the cave. Richard Holmes explains what they represent: ‘There are two chariots: the one that brings Demogorgon to Jupiter is undoubtedly terrible and violent: Jupiter, authoritarian government, is to be overwhelmed by massive force, and the process is to be like a volcanic eruption and an earthquake which ruins cities ... ‘Yet there is a second chariot, with its “delicate strange tracery” and its gentle charioteer with “dove-like eyes of hope”. This is the chariot which carries Asia and Panthea back to Prometheus and it seems to indicate that political freedom transforms man’s own nature and substitutes an ethic of love for the ideology of revenge and destruction represented by Prometheus’ curse. ‘The end of Act II leaves both these possibilities open, historically. Revolution will come, but how it will come depends an man himself. There are always two chariots. In either case, it is inevitable and it is to be celebrated.’ This is the crux of Shelley’s revolutionary ideas, For all his caution when writing about universal suffrage or other reforms, he was an instinctive revolutionary. Perhaps the revolution will come slowly, peacefully, gradually – in gentleness and light. Or perhaps (more probably) it will come with violence and civil war. In either case it is to be celebrated. As Mary Shelley put it in an uncharacteristic flash of insight into her husband’s politics: ‘Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and therefore more deserving of sympathy than the great He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side.’ As the news came through from England, so Shelley’s poetry during the year of repression – 1819 – became more and more openly political. Some poems were what he called ‘hate-songs’, shouts of rage and contempt for the men who ran the English government. There are the Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration, which appeals to the Foreign Secretary: ‘Ay, Marry thy Ghastly Wife Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife Spread thy couch in the chamber of life! Marry Ruin Thou Tyrant! and Hell be Thy Guide To the Bed of thy Bride. Or the Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819: ‘Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone. Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched an the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.’ The sonnet England in 1819 starts with the line: ‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.’ There is even a parody of the national anthem! In August came the event which was to haunt Shelley for the rest of his life. More than a hundred thousand trade unionists and their families gathered in St Peters Field near Manchester for a great carnival and meeting at which the main speaker was ‘Orator Hunt’, the reformer.

More than a hundred thousand trade unionists and their families gathered in St Peters Field near Manchester for a great carnival and meeting at which the main speaker was ‘Orator Hunt’, the reformer. The meeting was banned by the Manchester magistrates. On their instruction the yeomanry charged into the crowd hacking with their sabres. Eleven people were killed, and more than 400 injured. One of the dead was a small child which was cut down from its mother s arms. As soon as Shelley heard the news – he was living near Leghorn – he shut himself up in his attic for several days and wrote The Masque of Anarchy, rightly described by Richard Holmes as ‘the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English’. It starts with a dreadful pageant in which the Tory Ministers Castlereagh, Eldon and Sidmouth, dressed respectively as Murder, Fraud and Hypocrisy, ride by, slaughtering ‘the adoring multitude’ as they go. Shelley parts company with the other poets of his age and since who have pretended to favour ‘freedom’ and other fine words, as long as they remain words. He gives a simple definition of freedom. ‘What art thou, freedom? Oh, could slaves Answer from their living graves This demand, tyrants would flee Like a dream’s dim imagery. Thou art not, as imposters say, A shadow soon to pass away A superstition and a name Echoing from the cave of fame. For the labourer thou art bread, And a comely table spread From his daily labour come To a neat and happy home. Thou art clothes and fire and food, For the trampled multitude No – in countries that are free Such starvation cannot be As in England now we see.’ The horror of Peterloo – as the massacre came to be known – hangs over many of Shelley’s later poems. In December 1819, he finished Peter Bell The Third, a satire on Wordsworth. The poem shows how Peter was slowly seduced from his revolutionary ideas by the pressures of society, until he was writing drivel like any old Bernard Levin in the Times: ‘For he now raved enormous folly Of baptisms, Sunday schools and graves ’Twould make George Colman melancholy To have heard him, like a male Molly, Cbaunting those stupid staves. Yet the Reviews, which heaped abuse On Peter while he wrote for freedom As soon as in his song they spy, The folly that spells tyranny Praise him, for those who feed ’em. Then Peter wrote Odes to cbs Devil In one of which he meekly said May Carnage and Slaughter Thy niece anti thy daughter May Rapine and famine Thy gorge ever cramming Glut thee with living and dead! May death and damnation And consternation Flit up fröm heaven with pure intent. Slash them at Manchester Glasgow, Leeds and Cbester Drench all with blood front Avon to Trent!’ The same savage satire is directed against the Tory government in Swellfoot The Tyrant, a joke play in which the king and his ministers are hunted down by their pig-people. Shelley’s censors have done their best to suppress all these poems. In the standard anthologies there is no Masque of Anarchy, no Peter Bell, no Swellfoot, no Men of England, none of the shorter political poems of 1819. To compensate for this awful void, the biographers and Shelley-lovers concocted another myth: that the most powerful influence on Shelley was an ethereal, almost divine quality called ‘love’. Extracts were hacked out of context to prove that Shelley was guided by the ‘love’ which every brave Victorian gentleman felt for his passive, obsequious and domestic wife. But ‘love’, Shelley wrote in the notes to Queen Mab, ‘withers under constraint. Its very essence is liberty. It is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy or fear. It is there most pure, perfect and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.’ For Sbelley love was bound up with the battle for women’s rights, in which he was even more dedicated a crusader than his mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft. In all his, revolutionary poems, the revolutionary leaders are women: Cyntha in the Revolt of Islam; Asia in the Prometheus; Queen Mab, Iona in Swellfoot. All are champions not only of the common people, but also of the rights of their sex: ‘Can man be free if woman be a slave? Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air To the corruption of a closed grave? Can they whose mates are beasts condemned to bear Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish dare To trample their oppressors? In their home, Among their babes, thou knowst a curse would wear The shape of woman – hoary crime would come Behind and Fraud rebuild Religion’s tottering dome.’ It followed that chastity and marriage were a lot of nonsense. ‘Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery ... A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage. Prostitution was ‘the legitimate offspring of marriage’: Shelley, was no prude. There is a thumping organ in Alastor – and another, more prolonged ‘deep and speechless swoon of joy’ in the Revolt of Islam – to prove it. But he had nothing but contempt for ‘unintellectual sensuality’, for ‘annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness’. He was for love, sex, women’s liberation; against chastity, prostitution, promiscuity. Needless to say, these ideas goaded Shelley’s Christian contemporaries to paroxysms of indignation.

Needless to say, these ideas goaded Shelley’s Christian contemporaries to paroxysms of indignation. The same ruling class pretended to deplore the morals of Lord Byron and his harem in Venice. In fact, Byron’s orgies were the source of almost uninterrupted titivation at coming-out-balls; they helped to make an enormous fortune out of Byron’s poems. High society worshipped marriage, subsidised prostitution and tolerated promiscuity. Free love of the type which Shelley advocated ‘undermined the fabric of their national life’ and was on no account to be mentioned, let alone published. All these ideas grew stronger in Shelley as he got older. Stephen Spender in an essay which he wrote in 1953, as he prepared to abandon a dessicated Stalinism for a respectable literary career, wrote that Shelley ‘abandoned his radical ideas’ shortly before his death. This is nonsense. Karl Marx, who enjoyed Shelley almost as much as Shakespeare, understood it better. He wrote: The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice tbat Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois. They grieve that Sbelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism. He was in the advanced guard of socialism for long after his death. All through the great agitations of the last century, through the battle to repeal the Combination Laws, through Chartism, through the early socialist activity of the 1880s and 1890s hundreds of thousands of workers took courage and confidence from Shelley. The reason is not just because Shelley was an instinctive rebel who hated exploitation; but because he combined his revolutionary ideas in poetry. What is the point of poetry? Is it not namby-pamby stuff, the plaything of middle-class education? Certainly, our education would like to reduce poetry to doggerel about trees and clouds and birds which you have to recite in front of teacher and then forget as soon as possible. That is one of the reasons why generation after generation of text-book editors have limited the ‘great poets’ to meaningless meandering through glades. But poetry has another purpose, very dangerous to our educators. As Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry: ‘The most unfailing herald, companion .and follower of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods as this, there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature ...’ Why? Because great poems, like great songs, which are only poems set to music, art easily learnt and remembered. The words linger in the memory over generations. And if the words carry revolutionary ideas, those ideas are communicated in poems far more thoroughly than in prose, in conversation or even in slogans. We socialists have great difficulty in communication. However much we know and understand the political solutions to our social problems, the knowledge and understanding is useless unless we can communicate them. Trade union officialdom has constructed for itself a language of its own, a constipated gobbledegook, which protects it not so much from smooth-tongued employers as from its own rank and file. In the same way, many revolutionary socialists, after years of propaganda in the wilderness, have spun themselves a cocoon in which they and other sectarians can snuggle, safe from the oblivious outside world. Inside the cocoon, there is another language, a hideous, bastard language, unintelligible to the masses. In the same way as the Russians insulted Lenin’s ideas on religion by mummifying his body, so these latter-day Trotskyists insult the clarity and power of Trotsky’s language by mummifying out-of-character and out-of-context sectarian phraseology. As a result, they communicate with nobody but themselves; argue with nobody but themselves; damage nobody but themselves. We can enrich our language and our ability to communicate by reading great revolutionary poetry like that of Shelley. All his life, Shelley was persecuted by the problem of communication. He was not, as his worshippers in later decades pretended, a ‘lyric’ poet interested only in writing beautiful poetry. He was a man with revolutionary ideas, and he wanted to transmit them. His Ode to the West Wind was not a paean of praise to a wonder of nature, but a desperate appeal to the wind to: ‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth And, by the incantation of this verse Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words to all mankind. Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy!’ Shelley wanted the truth about repression and exploitation to go ringing through each heart and brain, so that each heart and brain would unite in action to end that repression and exploitation. So, particulanly in his later poems, he concentrated all his mastery of language, all his genius with rhyme and rhythm into translating the ideas of the revolution to the masses. After 160 years he survives for us not as a lyric poet but as one of the most eloquent agitators of all time. That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children.

That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children. He will help us to communicate our contempt for the corporate despotism under which we live and our faith in the revolutionary potential of the multitude: ‘And these words shall then become Like oppression’s thundered doom Ringing through each heart and brain Heard again, again, again Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you. Ye are many. They are few.’ Notes 1. Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2. Shelley’s Socialism, by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling – just reprinted by the Journeyman Press, 60p. Top of the page Last updated on 19.3.2012

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Blair: our brother our friend (16 June 1979) From Socialist Worker, 16 June 1979. Reprinted in Nick Grant and Brian Richardson, Blair Peach: Socialist and Anti-Racist (London: Socialist Workers’ Party, 2014), pp. 43–44. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. From Manchester to Tolpuddle the martyrs of our movement have been humble people. They neither sought the limelight nor found it. They were unknown except to a close circle of friends and family. They became famous not because of their ambitions nor their vanity, but because of their deaths. Such was a man called Alfred Linnell. No one knows very much about him. He earned a pittance by copying out legal documents. On 21 November 1887 he went down to Trafalgar Square to join the fighters for free speech in the week after Bloody Sunday, when a great demonstration had been broken up by police truncheons. While he was standing, unarmed, and unsuspecting, by the side of the crowd, a posse of police, who had orders to keep Trafalgar Square free of demonstrators “by whatever force was necessary”, charged straight into him, breaking his neck with the horses’ hooves. The police openly despised the people they were charging. They saw them, as the Times leader put it on the day after Bloody Sunday, as “all that is weakest, most worthless and most vicious in the slums of a great city”. These were the “sweepings”, which deserved only to be swept. But the poor of London flocked to commemorate Alfred Linnell. Tens of thousands of socialists, Irish republicans, radicals, feminists and working people of no party and no persuasion joined in what Edward Thompson described as “the greatest united demonstration which London had seen”. The streets were lined all the way to Bow cemetery with crowds of sympathetic onlookers. The few rather shamefaced policeman who dared to appear were greeted with cries of: “That’s your work”. Very, very few of that crowd knew Alfred Linnell. Yet they hailed him, in the words of William Morris at Linnell’s funeral, as “our brother and our friend”. He was a representative of the tens of thousands who had nothing, and when they took to the streets to demand something were ridden down and battered by the forces of law and order. That was nearly 100 years ago and can easily be dismissed as “the sort of thing which happened in the bad old days”. The killing of Blair Peach proves that the same things are still going on today. He was attacked at a demonstration by policeman who, as at Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, were licensed to clear the streets by brutality and violence. In Southall, as in Trafalgar Square 100 years ago, the police were driven on by a contempt for the demonstrators – “black scum” as one mounted officer so politely put it. No doubt the savagery of the blow which ended Blair Peach’s life was prompted at least in part by the fact that his skin was dusky. And Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, has been hailed as brother and friend by thousands of working men and women who did not know him. On 28 April 15,000 of the Asian people of Southall marched in his memory. They stood with clenched fists over the place where he was murdered. And they chanted a single triumphant slogan – “Blair Peach zindabad – long live Blair Peach” It was perhaps the greatest demonstration of solidarity between people of different colours but with similar interests and similar purpose that the town had ever seen. Why? Because Blair Peach, like Alfred Linnell, is a representative of all the people all over Britain who see in the strutting perverts of the National Front the broken bodies of black people battered in the street; who can detect further off but no less horrible the awful spectre of fascism looming over all society, and who stand up and say No. To me and all members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, Blair Peach means even more than that. I never knew him personally. But I knew him as one of the party members who kept socialist organisation alive and well during the worst times. They know how to sustain the Anti Nazi League in an area where two or three delegates turn up to a meeting to which 20 had promised to come. They have endless patience and endurance. They try to excite others into political activity without straining too hard at their patience and endurance. They seem to be at all the meetings and all the demonstrations. They are not in the front when the press cameras are clicking but they are in the front line when the SPG wade in with their coshes. In the last three years – the period by the way in which Blair Peach joined the Socialist Workers Party – these people have been strained to breaking point as more and more of the burden of the organisation of the left has fallen upon them. Blair Peach was killed in the process and that above all is why we honour him. We march at his funeral not just in sympathy with the people who loved him, nor just out of respect for all he did for us but in anger. Top of the page Last updated on 2 September 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Parliamentary privilege (November 1994) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 180, November 1994, p. 4. Copyright © 1994 Socialist Review Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. It couldn’t have happened to a nastier minister. No MP more persistently and offensively represents the true spirit of Thatcherism than Neil Hamilton, the Minister for Corporate Affairs. Hamilton first came to public notice when he attended the 1973 conference of the Italian Fascist Party, MSI, as an observer from the Young Conservatives. Since he was elected Tory MP for Tatton in 1983, he has rested the extreme Thatcherite right, constantly baiting true unionists, the unemployed and the dispossessed. He flaunts the sterile wit and pervasive arrogance of all the Thatcherite Young Turks who grew rich and famous at the expense of others in the Golden Years of Private Enterprise. Hamilton denies being paid £2,000 a time to ask questions, but he does not deny a sumptuous weekend in Paris at the expense of the ghastly old liar and cheat Fayed, the chairman of Harrods. Dinner each night for the MP and his wife cost the Harrods boss £232. How that figure must have delighted ‘scroungers’ in bed: breakfast accommodation so often mocked by Hamilton and his ilk. The media have discovered something they call ‘parliamentary sleaze’. Yet this is one the most time honoured institutions of our mother of parliaments. Many and varied are the ways in which corporate power in capitalist society cuts down all semblance of representative democracy in parliaments and local councils, but the most obvious of them all is buying the representatives. If MPs are paid more by an ‘outside interest’ than by their constituents, then it follows that they will consider the interests of the corporation before those of their constituents. The MP for Loamshire (£31,000 a year) prefers to be the MP for Blue Blooded Merchant Bank plc (£50,000 a year and rising). Representation plays second fiddle to corporate public relations. Before 1975 MPs didn’t even have to declare which firms paid them. The Poulson scandal of the late 1960s and 1970s revealed a clutch of MPs using questions, motions, dining rooms and debates to promote the interests of the corrupt architect. One MP had to resign, and the Register of Interests was set up. No one took much notice of it, even during the 1980s as the number of consultancies, directorships and perks showered on MPs, almost all of them Tory, rose to obscene levels. One Tory MP was so bemused by the way in which his colleagues were growing rich that he actually advertised for a company to take him on as a consultant. The private dining rooms of the House of Commons – why are there private dining rooms there anyway? – became a huge commercial undertaking whereby corporations offered their customers the best food and drink, all consumed in an intoxicating atmosphere of democracy. How wonderful to drink a toast to the hierarchs of the Hanson Trust after a glamorous dinner in the ancient seat of parliament! By the mid-1980s the buying of MPs had become a public and obvious scandal. No one noticed. On and on it went, with the blessing of both prime ministers. Thatcher and Major both used 10 Downing Street as another watering hole to pour booze down the gullets of generous donors to the Tory Party: If parliament was indeed composed of representatives there should be no ‘outside interests’ whatsoever, MPs should, get their salary and not a penny more. Their perks and trips abroad should be ruthlessly wiped out, and their activities subjected to the most rigorous public scrutiny and disclosure. That is what the new House of Commons Privileges Committee should recommend. But since the committee consists of seven Tory MPs, all with business interests, sitting in secret, the chances of even the mildest restrictions on rampant sleaze are spectacularly low. Top of the page Last updated on 25 April

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Portrait of an Appalling Man (February 1974) From International Socialism (1st series), No.66, February 1974, pp.27-28. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £6.00. HERBERT MORRISON was appalling. In his youth he flirted with Marxist ideas and organisations until one day he went to listen to Ramsay Macdonald. From that day, Morrison modelled himself on ‘the old man’, and took up Macdonald’s stance on the extreme right wing of the Labour Party. As leader of the first Labour-controlled London County Council from 1934; as Home Secretary during the war and as overlord of the Labour government’s post-war home policy he never abandoned his passionate hatred of communism or of independent working class activity. When in the early 1920s, the Labour-controlled Poplar borough council paid its unemployed more than the pitiful rates allowed by law and paid its workers more than the rate negotiated by collective bargaining machinery, Morrison, then secretary of the London Labour Party, denounced the Poplar Councillors: ‘No electorate,’ he argued, ‘could trust local authorities which spent ratepayers’ money so recklessly.’ Any direct action by workers or their representatives horrified Herbert Morrison. ‘He rather scorned strikes’, write his biographers. After the collapse of the General Strike in 1926, he gleefully rubbed home the lessons to his supporters. ‘A general strike,’ he argued, ‘must become a physical force, revolutionary struggle aimed at the forcible overthrow of the constitutional government and the seizing of power by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress... nobody with half a brain believes that in Britain such a policy could be successful.’ The alternative to all this direct action nonsense. Morrison argued, was to build up the Labour Party and get hold of parliamentary office. Parliamentary office gave him what he needed to carry out his concept of ‘socialism’ - a well-ordered, well-regulated state capitalist society in which Morrison would be chief orderer and chief regulator. He was the bureaucrat par excellence. Or, as Beatrice Webb put it in her diaries, ‘Herbert Morrison is the quintessence of Fabianism.’ Give him the machinery of government, the blue books, the statistics, the loyal civil servants, the insignia of office and Morrison was in his element. Socialist society, he believed, would be built by a handful of able and enlightened bureaucrats in Whitehall. ‘Public ownership’ to Morrison meant control by bureaucrats selected ‘on their ability’ by the minister. When he was minister of transport in 1930, he refused to appoint workers’ representatives to the board of his new London Transport undertaking. He wanted the undertaking to be run exclusively by ‘men of a business turn of mind’ which, he explained graciously, ‘might include such people as trade union bodies as well as men of business experience in the ordinary sense of the word’. These included Lord Ashfield, the tycoon who owned the main private London transport companies before Morrison’s 1930 Bill. ‘Morrison,’ writes Mr Jones, ‘came to admire Ashfield and had him in mind to be the chairman of the new board. To nationalise Lord Ashfield was his objective.’ Lord Ashfield was thoroughly sympathetic. ‘He became a devotee of the public corporation,’ and did a lot to persuade Liberals and Tories in the House of Commons that ‘Morrisonisation’, as it came to be known, was really a more efficient form of running capitalism. This relationship with big business was taken up even more enthusiastically when Morrison took charge of Labour’s economic policies after the war. ‘Morrison liked dealing with tycoons,’ writes Mr Bernard Donoughue, his other biographer, ‘and in general they liked him, as Chandos said, “because you got down to brass tacks with him”.’ When the Morrisonisation of steel was proposed by the majority in the Labour Cabinet in 1947, Morrison discovered to his horror that the steelmasters were against it. The coalowners and the railway bosses had, after a few statutory grumbles, conceded the Morrisonisation of coal and rail transport. But Sir Andrew Duncan, the steel industry leader and a favourite tycoon of Morrison’s, did not want steel Morrisonised. Morrison promptly sabotaged the Cabinet’s plans by working out new proposals, in secret, with Sir Andrew. The majority of the Cabinet, prompted by Aneurin Bevan, finally forced through steel nationalisation against Morrison’s wishes, but Morrison’s sabotage ensured that steel was not nationalised until the end of the Labour government’s term of office. This left Sir Andrew and his friends much more time to mobilise. Morrison was one of the fiercest anti-communist witch-hunters in British history. He carried out a ruthless and permanent campaign against communists of every description. But his hatred of communists in Britain did not extend to Russia. As Mr Jones writes: ‘He found little similarity between the attitudes of Russian communists and the Communist Party of Great Britain. The former appeared cautious, believing in gradual development; they did not accept workers’ control.’ When Morrison was Home Secretary in January 1941 he proposed that the Daily Worker, the organ of the British Communist Party, which was then advocating a ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line on the war, should be banned by government decree. The Tory-dominated Cabinet agreed. Writing about the incident in his autobiography, Morrison commented: ‘Not unexpectedly there was no protest from Russia about the closing down of the Daily Worker. The Soviet Union admires bold and firm action.’ One state capitalist censor could quickly detect another.

Morrison was a social imperialist of the old Jimmy Thomas school. Visiting New York in 1946, he proclaimed: ‘We are friends of the jolly old Empire. We are going to stick to it ...’ He added, for good measure, ‘The monarchy is a real factor among cementing influences between Britain and the Commonwealth. The monarchy is a great institution.’ Morrison was also, by the same token, a passionate Zionist. ‘In Israel,’ he wrote in The Times in 1950, ‘the spirit of human service exists more sincerely and more in practice than in any other part of the civilised world and we are glad it has a Labour government.’ This devotion to a civilised democratic society extended to Ireland, where Morrison was a passionate supporter of the Orange cause. In July 1943, as Home Secretary, he addressed a meeting of the 30 Club where the crusted Orange monster, Sir Basil Brooke (later Lord Brookeborough) was the guest of honour. Morrison praised the loyalty of Ulster as ‘almost aggressive in its nature’. ‘After the war,’ writes Mr Donoughue, ‘he continued to keep a protective eye on Ulster’s interests in the Labour Cabinet.’ An elected Parliament was at stake, after all, so why should a man like Morrison care about a million evicted Palestinians, or half a million oppressed Catholics? In his private life, Morrison emerges from the book almost as hideous as he was in public. He was greedily ambitious, arrogant, sentimental, male chauvinist, mean. And a hypocrite to the end. ‘Several times,’ he told the Daily Mail on 22 June, 1959, ‘I could have accepted a viscountcy, but all my life I’ve been of the working class and that’s how I’d like to stay.’ Three months later, on 19 September, the Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, announced the appointment of Lord Morrison of Lambeth. All this makes unpromising material for hero-worship, but Mr Jones and Mr Donoughue, lecturers at the London School of Economics, do their best to idolise Morrison. Endless senior civil servants are wheeled out to prove that Morrison was the ‘ablest’ minister they ever dealt with (is it only an impression, or is it the case that all senior civil servants take the view that any minister about whom they happen to be interviewed was the ‘ablest they ever dealt with’?). We are left to marvel at Morrison’s ‘mastery of detail’, his ‘ability to command an argument’, his ‘organisational genius’. For the authors, politics takes place within the square mile which includes the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, all the ministries, and the London School of Economics. Not for them the tumultuous developments outside. Hardly a mention in the book of the great social upheavals which shook the period about which they write, no explanation of the downfall of the Macdonald government; wartime socialist revival; of post-war slumplessness. Politics for them is how ministers behave and respond, and Morrison suits them admirably. The only time Mr Donoughue seems to get upset with Morrison is when the latter offends the Foreign Office mandarins with his brusque manner. ‘He handled ambassadors in a casual and offhand way’ scolds Mr Donoughue. ‘He often received them – and kept them waiting – in his room at the House of Commons leaving the unfortunate but not misleading impression that his prime loyalty and interest lay there rather than with the Office.’ Egad, Sir, What next? If this was just an enormous book by two precise dons about a right-wing Labour leader, that would be the end of the story. But it is not. The account of Morrison’s life is so comprehensible that, almost by accident, it tells us a thing or two about British social democracy. Herbert Morrison represents, perhaps more than anyone else, British social democracy in its heyday. His political life was dominated by the belief that a better life for the dispossessed could be created by the election of Labour governments and councils. Substantial changes were made to the workers’ advantage under Herbert Morrison-especially in London. Patients in LCC hospitals were much better off under Labour; the blind and mentally ill got a much better deal; schools were improved; classes were smaller, teachers better paid; ‘a great change came over the LCC parks’ - more baths were built; more swimming pools, gymnasia, refreshment places, paddling pools, athletic grounds, bowling greens. The briefest comparison between facilities of this kind for workers in London compared with, say, New York, measures the advances of social democracy under Morrison in London. Similarly, the post-war Labour government did force through a Health Service in opposition to the Tories and the doctors; it did nationalise the mines and the railways (leading to better working conditions for the workers in both industries), it did wipe out the old Poor Laws, and establish a new system of industrial injuries compensation. It solved none of the contradictions of capitalism; it left capitalism stronger in 1951 than it had been in 1945. But a wide variety of reforms in a wide variety of areas were carried out by Herbert Morrison and his colleagues. Above all, these reforms, and the hope of much more where they came from connected the Labour Party to the working class. Morrison understood better than any Labour leader does today that his brand of social democracy can only survive as long as it sustained the active interest of large numbers of workers. Morrison never stopped writing Labour Party propaganda. The number of leaflets, pamphlets, brochures which he organised, wrote and distributed from London Labour Party headquarters all the year round was prodigious. He put a premium on individual membership of ordinary workers in the Labour Parties.

He put a premium on individual membership of ordinary workers in the Labour Parties. He organised choirs, dramatic societies, almost anything to sustain and excite the London Labour Party membership. Above all, he realised the danger to his political aspirations of corruption. All his life he fought relentlessly against corruption in the Labour Party, especially in local government. LCC councillors during Morrison’s rule were subjected to the strictest discipline as to their relations with officials or contractors. Morrison himself never accepted any job with private enterprise, though he was offered literally hundreds. Throughout Morrison’s life, the results were obvious. In the 1930s, and, especially, in the 1940s, the British working class did respond, not just with votes, but with interest and involvement Herbert Morrison could not speak anywhere without attracting hundreds, often thousands of people. Any post-war meeting he addressed in South London was attended by an inevitable 1500. The crowds who came to hear him were almost incredible. During the 1950 General Election, he travelled to Yarmouth to speak to a mass rally of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, whose cause he had always espoused. A hundred thousand farm workers poured into Yarmouth from all over East Anglia to hear Herbert Morrison. A hundred thousand! Imagine a visit by today’s Labour deputy, Ted Short, to Yarmouth at election time to speak on the subject of farm workers. Short would be lucky to attract 10 farm workers to his meeting. There is a vast gulf between the strength of social democracy in Herbert Morrison’s time and social democracy today. The gulf is not in aspirations. Judging by resolutions at Labour Party conferences, the Party’s aspirations last year at Blackpool (or the year before at Brighton) were just as grandiose as anything Herbert Morrison ever thought up. Indeed Morrison would have been shocked at the ‘shopping list’ of nationalisation proposals drawn up at those conferences. Rather, the gap is in the connection between the aspirations of Labour politicians and the involvement of their rank and file. No amount of nationalisation resolutions at conference can mask the breathtaking apathy of Labour’s dwindling rank and file. The constituency parties have been abandoned to hacks and careerists, and the MPs and councillors have no one to answer to. As a result, the entire Party has become infected with corruption. There is hardly a Labour MP who does not hold some ‘watching brief or ‘interest’ in industry or public relations to supplement his already vast annual salary; hardly a Labour council in the country free from the attention of rogues and speculators in private enterprise. The corruption is tolerated on a wide scale. One of the few MPs who has tried to clean his Labour Party up - Eddie Milne of Blyth (former seat of Lord Robens) - is being hounded out of his candidature. The process works both ways. Corruption grows because the rank and file either does not exist or does not ask questions. And the rank and file is increasingly sickened by the stench of corruption. It is no good yearning, as Mr Jones tends to do, for the ‘good old days’ when Labour politicians like Herbert Morrison meant something to people, when Labour corruption was the exception, not the rule. The deterioration of social democracy has its roots in the politics of Herbert Morrison, and those like him. If what matters above all is the vote – if the vote paves the path to workers’ power, it follows that the most important contribution of workers to Labour is their vote. All other forms of labour mobilisation - strikes, demonstrations, agitation, education, organisation - inevitably become an embarrassment. Any Gallup Poll will show that all these things are ‘unpopular’. If the votes are to come to Labour, Labour must oppose strikes. It must not make socialist propaganda. It must not organise at the place of work. When all these forms of mobilisation are systematically abandoned, as they have been by the Labour Party, there is nothing else to which workers can respond. There are no pamphlets, very few leaflets, no socialist propaganda, no factory organisation, no local organisation outside vote-collecting, no youth movement worthy of the name – nothing to do to help create a new society save vote for the next hack who comes along. The demobilisation of rank and file members is death to the Labour Party, but that demobilisation is an essential part of a political strategy whose central aim is to shift capitalist society through parliamentary endeavour. Social democracy, in short, is its own grave-digger, and the pit is now deep and black. It is worth dwelling at length on the careers of illusionists like Herbert Morrison if only to harden our resolve to build socialism on the rocks of workplace organisation and direct action which Morrison so detested. Top of the page Last updated on 8.3.2008

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Victor Gollancz: From Marx to muddle (October 1987) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 102, October 1987. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Victor Gollancz Ruth Dudley Edwards Gollancz, £20.00 THE FIRST big public meeting I spoke to was on behalf of the Liberal Party: at an eve-of-poll meeting for Derek Monsey, Liberal candidate in Westminster in the 1959 General Election. When I arrived, very nervous, at the hall, everyone was very excited. “We’ve got a surprise speaker” I was told, “Victor Gollancz.” I was very impressed, though I had never heard of Victor Gollancz. At the end of the meeting a rather kindly old man got up and said he had supported the Labour Party all his life, but now he thought the most important issue in the world was nuclear weapons. As Derek Monsey was the only candidate in Westminster who supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, the old man declared his intention to vote Liberal. There was loud applause from the audience, most of whom were implacably opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament (as was the Liberal Party). At the end of the meeting, I was introduced to the great man. He congratulated me warmly on my speech, and then took me on one side. “I hope you don’t believe any of this nonsense,” he whispered. “You should be a socialist – in fact, I think you will be one.” I was most indignant at the time, but it wasn’t long before the old man’s prediction came true, and I’ve had a sneaking affection for him ever since. The affection grew as I read this comprehensive and enthralling biography. Victor Gollancz never went to parliament. He never taught at university. He had nothing but contempt all his life for the right wing leadership of the Labour Party. Yet he had a profound effect on politics in Britain for at least two decades. His most extraordinary achievement was the Left Book Club, which lasted from 1936 to 1948. In its first ten years, the Club published six million books – a quite staggering figure. At its heyday just before the Second World War, the Club had 57,000 members, each of whom was guaranteed a new book a month. There was also a wide range of old socialist classics, specialist books, scientific books, history books and pamphlets. This enormous output of Club books was augmented, in the run-up to the 1945 election, with the “Yellow back” pamphlets, all directed against the corruption and hopelessness of the Tory years before the war, and each selling about a quarter of a million copies. It is no exaggeration to claim, as Ruth Dudley-Edwards does, that Gollancz, with his commitment and his flair, did a great deal to shift the intellectual climate towards the Labour landslide of 1945. After the war, when Ernie Bevin (“Britain’s Greatest Foreign Secretary” as all important people always call him) was saying, “I try to be fair to the Germans, but I ’ates ’em really”; when various Tories tried to whip up an anti-German fever such as the one which gripped the entire country after the First World War, Gollancz campaigned for an internationalist view. He did not campaign as hard for the nationalisation of German industries (the real issue) as he did for food parcels for the poor. But his campaigning on this issue did a lot to stop anti-German hysteria. Similarly, at the height of the success of Zionism in kicking out the Palestinians and setting up a new state in the Middle East, Gollancz, a Jew and at one time a member of the Jewish Board of Deputies, spoke up for the dispossessed Palestinians. So irrepressible was Gollancz’s vigour, so brilliant his intellect and so vast his conceit that it would seem that he could do anything. Indeed, Marx’s famous comment about history is reversed by this biography to read, “Gollancz made his own history and he made it just as he pleased.” But of course he did not. His life, perhaps even more than most, was circumscribed by the social forces with which he wrestled. For instance, the Left Book Club had a membership of 57,000 in 1939, under a Tory government. Six years later, the dream of most Left Book Club members came true: a Labour government was returned with a massive majority. Everyone rejoiced, and almost at once, the influence of the Left Book Club declined. By the end of 1946 there were only 10,000 members, and in 1948 the Club was dissolved without anyone noticing. How could it be that the thirst for socialist ideas and literature should tail off so very fast at the very moment of apparent triumph? The answer is that in social democratic electoral politics, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. The expectation and hope of a victory was a far greater inspiration to socialist ideas and agitation than was the reality of Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison. Gollancz could sense the disillusionment all right and he never capitulated to the parliamentary cretinism of his former friends, John Strachey and Stafford Cripps. But instead of using the Marxist method which had inspired him in the 1930s to interpret the postwar disillusionment, he turned against Marx altogether: “The real battle is not between capitalism and more socialism, but between the liberal or Western ethic and the totalitarianism of which the Soviet Union is now the major exponent.” Then he argued that all political ideas should be subordinated to higher values, liberal values, religious values. These new statements of “value” won him praise from Tories who had denounced him in the 1930s and early 1940s. How was it possible that such a lively and well-read socialist who did not simply decay as most old socialists do, should so reverse his opinions?

How could a man who in 1929 described Das Kapital as “the fourth most enthralling volume of the world’s literature” recite so soon after the war the familiar reactionary incantations against Marx. Most of the answer, I suspect, lies in the roots of the brand of Marxism which inspired him in the 1930s, and which showed up the grim side of the Left Book Club. In the early years of the Club, Gollancz was completely captive to the Communist Party. He conceded almost everything to them. Twelve of the first 15 of the LBC choices were vetted and approved by the CP (at least ten of those, today, are quite unreadable). The amount of indigestible Stalinist trash turned out in those pink and orange covers was astonishing. Gollancz was one of three “choosers” of the titles. Only one of the others was CP – and even he (Strachey) was not a party member. Yet again and again, even on the simplest issues such as the right to dissent, Gollancz capitulated. It was not simply that Trotsky and everything Trotskyist was not tolerated in the Left Book Club. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was turned down by Gollancz. H.N. Brailsford, one of the first among British socialist writers to appreciate the horrors of the Moscow trials, was one of the authors who suffered worst – both intellectually and financially – from Victor’s stubborn submersion in the CP line. As so often, the party hack or fellow-traveller, when he suddenly becomes aware of his hackery, turns to rend his former mentors, and, in the process, throws the whole ideology out with the bathwater. Gollancz was quick enough to spot the CP’s opportunism over the Hitler-Stalin pact but his indignation led him to reject altogether not just the CP, but all Marxism which he thought they represented. Thus, in a curious way, the Stalinism to which he was converted in the 1930s (he named Stalin as Man of the year 1937) and the social democratic government to which he formally aspired in the 1940s were both disastrous to his political development. Disillusioned with both he turned not to new socialist ideas, but against socialist ideas altogether. I hope I have not put anyone off this book, however. It is far, far more illuminating about the 1930s and 1940s than most of the trivial contemporary stuff on the subject. The character of the man comes through very loud if not very clear. Criticism of him is easy and obvious. But perhaps the most interesting exercise is to compare him and his times with today. In those days of slump and “downturn”, when there was still some life and hope in social democratic politics, they threw up vast, engaging and brilliant personalities who believed they could change the world and acted accordingly. A generation of Labour governments later, there is nothing remotely as impressive as Victor Gollancz anywhere on the Labour stage. Top of the page Last updated on 7.3.2012

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Introduction to In the Heat of the Struggle (September 1993) From In the Heat of the Struggle: 25 Years of Socialist Worker (London: Bookmarks, 1993), pp. 9–12. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. MOST OF the propaganda about a free press in Britain is about as credible as a story from Enid Blyton. Five on a Treasure Island would be an appropriate title for it. Of the 14 million newspapers sold every day in Britain, 92 percent are owned and rigidly controlled by five men. One of these men, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns and controls Sky Television, now directly, without the slightest attention to the views of anyone else, runs a third of the British mass media. The five are in the game for one purpose only: profit. They instinctively support everyone else who produces for profit. The bigger and the richer their friends, the more support they give them in the mass media. Of course everyone in Britain is ‘free’ to produce competitors to these newspapers. Anyone can set up a printing press, hire some writers, and have a stab at creating a mass circulation newspaper capable of competing with the Sun or the Mirror. All you need for this venture – just for a start, that is – is ten million pounds minimum. Then your problems start. The advertising industry, which provides half the revenue for newspapers, and the distribution industry, controlled by two huge monopolies, are also in the hands of the rich, loyal to the rich. The truth is that everyone is as free to set up a newspaper as they are to spend a night in the Ritz. All you need is an enormous amount of money, which only very few people have. It’s impossible to imagine the rich proprietors, rich advertisers and rich distributors will publish newspapers which spread ideas hostile to the rich. If we in the labour movement want a new set of ideas to circulate among workers, we will have to provide, subsidise and circulate our own media. Unless we do so, the rich will have a monopoly in the ideas business even more pernicious that their monopoly of the means of production. The irony is, however, that the labour movement has consistently, throughout the century, abandoned its independent press. The Daily Herald was taken over by the Labour Party in the early 1920s, sold to the TUC a few years later and built into the biggest circulation paper in Britain. In 1958, the TUC sold its stake. The Herald, then selling nearly two million copies a day, closed down in 1964. Murdoch bought its successor in 1969. It is now the Sun. Until recently the Labour Party produced a weekly and monthly paper – Labour Weekly and New Socialist. Now both have vanished. The aspiration of modern Labour has sunk so low that they are happy with the crumbs of spare they are tossed from the high tables of the proprietors. Socialist Worker was born 25 years ago in a tiny room in Tottenham. There were, I think, five of us on the editorial board. The paper was four pages long, and none of us expected it to sell more than 5,000 copies. This is the story of what happened since. It’s not all a success story. The circulation and influence of the paper is still far too small. But there is about everything in this book a single theme, summed up in the three words ‘against the stream’. The hypocrisy and cruelty of the rich, the collaboration of the Labour leaders, the pusillanimity of the trade union leaders – all are exposed here with a single purpose: to build and extend an effective counter-attack. The mood of the paper goes up with the industrial victories of the 1970s and down with the industrial defeats of the 1990s, but its simple, clear commitment to socialism from below steadies it against super-optimism and super-pessimism. It analyses the world all right, but concentrates constantly on the real point: to change it. Top of the page Last updated on 2 September 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot A socialist bookshelf (July 1983) From Socialist Worker, July 1983. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 235–236. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. You have to look hard for some good news these bleak summer days, but I am cheered by two bits of it last week. The first was that the takings at the bookstalls at Marxism 83, a week-long series of meetings, debates and discussions between Marxists, reached an all-time (and in the circumstances quite extraordinary) high of £9,000. More people came to Marxism this year than in any other, but the proportion of books sold to people who registered was higher, I gather, than ever before. These fantastic sales among people who have not got very much money is further proof, if proof were needed, that socialists as a breed read more than anyone else. The ideas which keep people socialists against all the pressures of society push them more and more towards books. But stop! Is there not some hideous deviation here? Is all this book-buying just a sign of property consciousness? I remember during a day school for Socialist Worker readers in Manchester some ten years ago fleeing during a break to a secondhand bookshop with one of the school’s organizers. As I emerged with a couple of prize possessions, he remonstrated with me. Was this not just covetousness for possessions, a sort of obsession with belongings which had a distinctly bourgeois ring to it? I supposed he was right, and hid the books shamefacedly. But on reflection, I realize he was not right at all. First, there is the old argument about private possessions and public property. As John Strachey argued in his little book Why You Should be a Socialist nearly fifty years ago, the whole point about the public ownership and planning of the means of production is that it releases capital for producing things that people need and want. He argued for more public ownership and more equality not to abolish private possessions but to make them more widely available. Then there is a special argument about books. However marvellous the progress in other forms of media such as tapes and videos, for people who think and who value ideas there is no replacement for books. This is because books do not impose a pace on their reader. They can be studied at the reader’s own level of concentration and consciousness. And then they can be re-read. Of course public libraries are wonderful institutions, and under any system even remotely socialist would be expanded far beyond anything we have at present. But there is a peculiar advantage in owning books, since they can be marked, stored away in shelves and in the mind, and returned to again and again when a new idea or argument comes along. In an old questionnaire among Communists in Fife, the third or fourth question was: ‘Are there any books in the house?’ Plenty of workers, usually the best Communists, answered ‘Yes’. And that brings me to the second piece of good news. Last January I was driven from Harwich to Felixstowe by Dave Saunders, a seaman on a North Sea car ferry. We were talking then about the collision of two ferries, which had killed six workers in dreadful circumstances. As we came back to Harwich, Dave suddenly changed the subject and started talking about Shelley. As we went into his house, I fell eagerly on a big bookcase, full of old books of every description: Dickens, Shakespeare and Shelley. Last week I was up that way again, for a meeting in Ipswich, led off with great vigour by Dave Saunders. He was speaking for the workers on the ferries who had gone on strike against a crude attempt of the owners to sabotage their nationally agreed wage rise. I was delighted to see that those workers won their fight (as far as I can see game, set and match). And I certainly believe that Dave Saunders’s bookcase had something to do with it. Top of the page Last updated on 5 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ireland Majority rule (January 1997) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No.204, January 1997, p.7. Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. John Major, who used to believe that his single handed achievement of peace in Ireland would bring him political immortality, has discovered a far more important objective: staying in office. The arithmetic of the British parliament leaves him at the mercy of the Ulster Unionists. Indeed, on one of the last close votes, when the official Unionists voted against the Tories, the government survived only with the support of the absurdly named Democratic Unionists, the Rev Ian Paisley’s Bigot Party. So Major agreed in the autumn that he must do nothing to upset Ulster Unionists. Though the vast majority of people in Britain and in Ireland want to see the end of the union, this tiny band of bigots governs the political agenda on the subject Major’s ‘new realism’ in Ireland coincided with a fresh attempt by Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party to include Sinn Fein in the constitutional talks. After the lamentable failure of its renewed bombing campaign, the pendulum in the IRA swung back in favour of another ceasefire. The only condition Sinn Fein imposed was its immediate participation in the talks. The Irish government rapturously accepted the condition. But Major, nervous of his majority, refused. He imposed a series of ludicrous conditions for Sinn Fein’s entry into the talks-conditions which he knew could not be accepted. There follows an uneasy stalemate in which the pendulum is swinging back to sectarian violence. The hideous attacks on Catholics by Orange gangs in Ballymena remind everyone how awful that violence can be. The main cause of the stalemate of course is the Major government’s approach, a grotesque combination of rhetoric for peace and practical intransigence. The initial ceasefire was squandered, and a new one is spurned. Yet the grim record also exposes the dilemma of the Sinn Fein and nationalist leaders. Their determination to make almost any concession to appease the United States government has left them high and dry when they are rebuffed by the British. They must either return to hopeless violence, which almost everybody in Northern Ireland dreads, or cling to Clinton’s coat tails. Irish workers, North and South, do not want sectarian violence- but nor do they want the capitalism represented by Clinton, Major and Bruton. The fruits of that capitalism are increasingly intolerable on both sides of the border. A recent House of Commons question exposed the fact that living standards in 31.4 percent of households in the North of Ireland fall below half the British national average, a staggering statistic of degradation which is matched by similar figures in the South. A socialist strategy of uniting these poverty stricken working masses across the sectarian border could break the deadlock imposed on Ireland from Clinton in Washington and the Major/Trimble alliance in London. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot How Barbara forgot the starving masses and learned to love the bosses A political profile (5 April 1969) From Socialist Worker, No. 116, 5 April 1969, pp. 2–3. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IT WOULD TAKE a long and fruitless search to discover a Labour Party member more uncompromisingly reactionary, than Joe Gormley, of the Yorkshire Mineworkers Union. Yet it was Gormley who, at the Labour Party National Executive on March 26, moved a resolution condemning the government’s White Paper in Place of Strife. As soon as Gormley had spoken, an amendment to the motion, approving her own white paper was moved by Mrs Barbara Castle, Minister of Employment and Productivity. Mrs Castle spoke modestly for more than half an hour of her painstaking work and wonderful achievements. The amendment was then defeated, with only five votes (all from Ministers) in its favour. The long courtship between the Labour Party’s ‘Left wing’ and Mrs Castle was at an end. Nothing serves a Labour career politician better than the ‘firebrand image’, and no one has developed it more meticulously than Barbara Castle. In her days in the Socialist League before the war, the Metropolitan Water Board during the war and the Bevanite group of Labour MPs after the war (she has been in parliament for Blackburn since 1945) she developed a militant ‘conference’ rhetoric which proved irresistible to the rank and file. Developed Radical Image From the outset, Mrs Castle protected her career as scrupulously as she developed her radical image. She it was who introduced Harold Wilson to the Bevanites, after working after the war as his Parliamentary Private Secretary. Of Wilson’s work at the Board of Trade to revitalise British capitalism after the war, she told a Huyton audience in 1950: ‘He was a man who was a hero to his PPS.’ In the mid-fifties, the Bevanite group began to split between the firebrands who believed in outright opposition to the party leadership and the firebrands who argued that the best way to beat the leadership was to join it. At the end of 1955, the Labour leader-elect, Hugh Gaitskell, told a newspaper that ‘the only Bevanites I would have in a government would be Dick Crossman, Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle’. Mrs Castle straddled both horses – Gaitskellite and Bevanite – by concentrating almost exclusively, from 1956 to 1964, on foreign affairs. She it was who moved the the 1957 resolution at the Labour Party Conference urging that at least one per cent of the national income should be spent on aid to the underdeveloped countries. ‘This is,’ she said, ‘a very specific commitment and a very important one. She it was who raised a lot of fuss about the savagery of British troops in Cyprus and who became first chairman of the anti-apartheid movement and promised that a Labour government would cancel the South African order for Buccaneer aircraft. Thus she remained a militant without ever fully supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or even the campaign for more nationalisation. Avoided Crucial Issues Militant expressions of solidarity with the independence movements in Africa and elsewhere enabled Mrs Castle to avoid more crucial questions at home, chief among which was the problem of the incomes policy. Before 1964, there is very little on Mrs Castle’s record about economic and incomes problems, and she fell neatly into line with the confusing jibberish about a ‘planned growth of incomes’. Mrs Castle’s radicalism was confined almost entirely to her use of words and her obsession with the problems of everyone except those living in Britain. In 1964 she was given a chance to put some of what she had been saying into effect. As Minister for Overseas Development, she improved on her rhetoric about the starving millions and as Minister of Transport she demonstrated that she is an expert in public relations. She even expressed a little public anger at the August 1965 Immigration White Paper and, once, threatened to resign if there was any sell-out to Ian Smith. But the reality of office soon put an end to these childish protests. When Wilson re-shuffled his cabinet early last year he sought around for a loyal, successful Minister to operate the incomes policy. Barbara was the obvious choice. Her radicalism did not stretch to workers’ problems at home. She saw ‘the case’ for matching wage increases with productivity. Workers and trade unionists she believed, could easily be won round to ‘common sense’ with a dash of public relations. The cup of tea with the Ford women strikers was a suitable start to a dismal year in which all Mrs Castle’s vitriol, once directed against South African racialists or British imperialism, has been turned against the people who voted her and her colleagues into power. Anti-Worker Legislation The Tory cliches of a century – ‘lost production’, ‘pointless strikes’, ‘the world not owing us a living’ – have been used to push through the most anti-worker legislation since the Combination Acts. This is not just a personal sell-out. It is the natural development from the phoney and sentimental radicalism which hypnotised the labour movement in the 1950s. * Down the slippery slope ’Our slogan is: “You cannot trust the Tories.” You cannot trust them because they don’t understand the economics of expansion, the theory that you will only increase wealth by spreading it. When the general election comes we shall make it a national remembrance day for the Rent Act and for what the government has done to our coal and cotton industries.’ September 1959 Following Tory victory at at the polls: ‘The working class movement has been divided and weakened. The call must be for political and not merely industrial militancy on the part of trade unions. We have affirmed our belief that it is impossible for us to achieve the moral and social aims for which we stand – a just society, the dignity of the individual, full democracy, the end of the exploitation of man by man throughout the world – unless we transform the economic base of our society and make it one in which common ownership is predominant. Only in this way can we subordinate the growing power of private economic giants in the common interest.’ March 1959 On equal pay for women: ‘Women have waited long enough for this elementary piece of justice. The only answer now is legislation and I’m delighted that a Labour government is pledged to introduce this.’ May 1968 ‘I am not going to preside over a prices and incomes policy under which we tell our people that they have just got to grin and bear things for the next two years. They are a spirited lot and they won’t do it anyway. Harold Wilson has put me in this job to find ways by which we can all help ourselves to an improvement in the quality of our lives within the context of the essential economic policy.’ April 1968 ‘Any individual increases in top salaries are as much subject to the influence of the prices and incomes policy as any wage in this land ... I will never ask wage earners in this country to hold back and make sacrifices if people with top salaries are not going to show any sense.’ July 1968. ‘I am profoundly convinced that the operation of the prices and incomes policy enables us to concentrate on the continuation of the reforms which benefit the workers, the industry and the nation.’ December 1968 Top of the page Last updated on 13 January 2021

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Can Labour win? (March 1989) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 118, March 1989, pp. 16–19. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The fortunes of the Labour Party in the opinion polls has risen in recent weeks. But the party is still only about level with what should be a deeply unpopular Tory government. Many Labour supporters have concluded from this that Labour cannot succeed in winning the next election. Paul Foot looks at the reality. WHEN THE Labour Party was first formed, and had to win votes from the Liberals, politics for Labour Party people was saying what you believed and persuading people to vote for it. Today, stricken by psephology, politics for Labour is finding out what most people believe and pretending to agree with them. It sounds so logical. Political power, we are told, is winning elections. Surely, the way to win elections is to say what people think. Then they vote for you; you win an election, and you have political power. The guide, therefore, is not politics, but polls. The polls tell us people don’t like divided parties so Labour cuts down on argument. The polls tell us people believe Britain should be defended. So former CND stalwarts suddenly conclude that since that nice Mr Gorbachev isn’t an enemy any more, we really need nuclear weapons in this country. Above all, the polls say that Labour is too extreme. So Labour must be moderate. Unless Labour is united, right wing and armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it can’t win an election. All through 1988 the polls showed an obstinate ten point Tory lead over Labour. The psephologists in the Labour Party draw from that a grim conclusion. Labour won’t win. Labour can’t win. Some Labour supporters have decided to sit it out until the next defeat, hoping for some change after that. Others search for an elixir from the voting system itself: a different way of returning people to parliament, perhaps, or a pact with Paddy Ashdown. No-one in all this scrambling talks politics. No-one even wonders what they think themselves. They find out what other people think, and move further and further right until there seems to be precious little difference between them and the Tory enemy. Is it really the case that Labour can’t win? Is it really true that “old fashioned social democratic parties” are out of date in the late 1980s? Anyone who says yes has not looked even as far as across the English Channel. Most of Europe today is dominated by social democracy. In Greece the social democratic PASOK has won the last two elections with handsome majorities. In Spain, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) has done the same. In France in the 1980s there has only been a brief period of anything approaching Thatcherite conservatism. The French President calls himself a socialist. He beat the Tory Chirac by a substantial margin only last year. In Germany there is a conservative government, not half as right wing as Thatcher’s. It has won the last two elections by narrow margins, but it is in deep distress. Within the last few weeks the German Tory Party (the CDU) lost nine percentage points of its vote in West Berlin, which it has held comfortably for 20 years. The Social Democrats gained five points, and the same number of seats as the conservatives. In Italy for much of the 1980s the Prime Minister has been a social democrat. Recent European Election Results* GERMANY: FRANCE: 1983 1987 1981 1988 SPD 193 SPD 186 Socialists 285 Socialists 276 CDU 191 CDU 174 RPR 88 URC 271 CSU 53 CSU 49 UDF 63 GREECE: SPAIN: 1981 1985 1982 1986 PASOK 172 PASOK 162 PSOE 202 PSOE 184 New Democracy 115 New Democracy 125 CDU 106 Christian Parties 105 * number of seats There is nowhere in Europe where there is not a social democratic government or an excellent chance of one in the near future. What explains this difference in the success record in the 1980s between British Labour and its European counterparts? Can it be that Britain has the smallest peasantry in Europe and possibly the world? It has a much smaller peasantry than its former colony Jamaica, which has just returned by a vast majority a social democratic government under a leader who was beaten out of sight eight years ago. Perhaps it is poor Mr Kinnock’s unilateral disarmament policy which hangs (to borrow a cliche universally used by political correspondents) “like an albatross” round his neck? No doubt the champion social democratic leaders in Europe have all shot their albatrosses long ago.

No doubt the champion social democratic leaders in Europe have all shot their albatrosses long ago. No, not true either. The two most successful social democratic parties in Europe in the 1980s – the Spanish PSOE and the Greek PASOK – have gone to the electorate with strong anti-nuclear programmes, and (in the case of Greece) “a solemn pledge” to rid the country of the menace of American military bases. So is there something in the history of British Labour which suggest a terminal decline in the Labour vote? The closest parallel to the psephological pessimism which now saps Labour was in 1959, 1960 and 1961, in the period just after the Labour Party had been beaten three times in a row, each time by a bigger majority. Familiar lamentations filled the air. People had “never had it so good”. The working class didn’t exist any more. If it did, it was only interested in what the New Statesman (then, as now, the leading left wing lamenter) called “the telly in the parlour and the mini on the kerb”. For some reason, left wing intellectuals found special fault with that great liberator, the washing machine. Washing machines, it was widely declared, had sapped the voting loyalty of Labour women. Freed from the splendid old working class habit of washing garments by hand, they were listening to the radio and voting for Harold Macmillan. A psephologist called Mark Abrams wrote a pamphlet entitled Must Labour Lose? He concluded that such were the changes in the class structure of Britain that Labour could never again win an election outright. Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP in Leicestershire, and others who were even closer to the Labour leader, a fervent cold warrior called Hugh Gaitskell, demanded talks with the Liberal Party about electoral pacts. The Tory majority in parliament in 1959 was slightly larger than it is today under Mrs Thatcher. The Tory share of the vote in 1959 was six points higher than Mrs Thatcher achieved in 1983 or 1987. The grip of the “never had it so good” philosophy seemed to be unshakeable. Yet, very suddenly, at the end of those years, the whole Tory edifice fell apart. Macmillan started sacking Cabinet Ministers all over the place. Labour climbed rapidly in the polls and overturned a huge Tory majority without any electoral pacts or proportional representation. Did Labour achieve this miracle by declaring suddenly for an independent deterrent? Not at all. It was, said Harold Wilson, “neither independent or a deterrent”. Labour ran an election campaign committed to scrapping the Polaris missile. He demonstrably won the argument with the Tories on the issue. Was Harold Wilson to the right of Hugh Gaitskell? Did he appear to the electorate as a more moderate, more responsible statesman who would be more welcome in the White House than Hugh Gaitskell? Nothing of the kind. Wilson was a former chairman of the Tribune Group of left wing Labour MPs. He had made extravagant speeches against American and French imperialism in South East Asia. He resigned from the Labour cabinet in 1951, arguing that money which Gaitskell wanted to spend on weapons should be spent instead on a free National Health Service and on aid to poor countries. His policy was not to abandon public ownership but to seize control of the “commanding heights of the economy”. It was not to tame the trade unions, but to allow free collective bargaining. He signalled well before the election that an important member of any new Labour cabinet would be the militant, unilateralist leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, Frank Cousins. Of course, Labour’s policy was not a socialist one. Indeed, Harold Wilson’s devious rhetoric was the language of “dynamic free enterprise” of “cutting the dead wood out of the boardrooms”, to replace old fashioned exploiters with new fashioned ones. But at least in 1963 and 1964 Labour was not the whingeing, backtracking, excuse-peddling rump it had seemed in 1961, but a confident, aggressive and purposeful political party every bit as “left wing” as the more placid organisation which had gone down to defeat three times in the 1950s. The facts of the Labour Party’s own history and the electoral facts in other European countries do not match the pessimism of the psephologists. Indeed even their own figures seem, as this is written, to contradict their own conclusions. In February 1989, the Gallup Poll, always the leader in the field, had to be checked three times before its omniscient organisers would allow it to be published. The psephologists had been talking for so long about Labour’s terminal decline, about the need for a middle ground party, about Mrs Thatcher’s political omnipotence that they could not believe their own figures. In one month, Labour’s percentage of the vote jumped by an astounding five points. The Tories had dropped two; and the “impossible gap” – the gap which could only be breached by fumbling political neuters in the centre – was down from 8.5 to 1.5 percent. Desperately, the psephologists sought an answer to this phenomenon. A second army of questioners were sent out into the field. Why had so many voters, without asking permission of Ivor Crewe or Peter Kellner, dared to change their minds in this unexpected direction? The change had come before Mr Kinnock had started making noises in favour of keeping Polaris and Trident. Some comfort came from the answers on the Health Service. Mr Kenneth Clarke’s proposals for the “accountability” (profitability) of the NHS were, it was discovered, unpopular. But there was nothing surprising about that. Tory policies on the Health Service had always, all through the 1980s, been unpopular. So, for that matter, were their policies on water and electricity privatisation, on mortgages, the poll tax, on pretty well everything they were doing.

An answer could not be found. The electorate were fickle, unpredictable. They were changing, and not a psephologist in the country dared to predict whether they would go on changing or slip back again into that nice comfortable “mould”. Psephology poses as science. It promotes professors, creates entire departments of politics in the universities. But it is not a political science at all. It is merely a record of what people think. It is almost useless as a record of why people think, and absolutely useless as a guide as to how people change their minds. These matters are embedded in the political structure of a society, which is, for all the double talk on the left in recent years, still essentially and vitally a class society. How people think and vote depends upon their confidence and their aspirations. These will shift, often with startling speed, according to the ebb and flow of the struggle between the classes. When one side wins, the other side loses. When one side is winning, their class confidence rises – while the confidence of their enemy falls. Victories and success for either side breed confidence – and the urge to continue the victories and success. Those who say that unemployment and degradation are necessary conditions for socialism don’t understand the motor of social change. Empty stomachs and cold, bare homes lead far more often to despair and reaction than to insurrection and hope. In general, then, the years of mass unemployment – the early 1930s for instance, or the early 1980s – are not Labour’s years. They are Tory years. When people lose confidence in themselves, they seek it elsewhere – in things which are theirs by accident like the colour of their skin. When people are fully employed, precisely when they have those washing machines, when they believe that their children will have a better life, then working class confidence increases, blossoms into cooperation, and reaches out for new ways to organise society. Growing working class confidence has another effect. It pulls with it those who believe they are middle class: people who work for high wages and who dabble at the edge of the capitalist pool. These are the weather vanes of class society. When the workers are winning, the middle class flock to their standard. In the early 1970s London was full of middle class people leaping out of their Volvos demanding to know the way to the revolution. When the bosses are winning, those same people almost overnight become the most virulent opponents of all those who might take away from them the golden crumbs which fall to them from the booming Stock Exchange. Elections in Britain, and anywhere else in the industrialised world, are won or lost by this middle class. One significant development in elections over the last thirty years has been the decline in the automatic allegiance to both the Tory and the Labour Party. As more and more people see themselves as middle class, so the fickleness of the electorate increases. This does not mean, as our psephologist would have it, that the struggle between the classes is less relevant to elections, and to politics generally. On the contrary, if anything the state of the struggle is more relevant, since there are more floaters to be won for this side or for that. Mrs Thatcher, as a determined and class conscious fighter, knows that quite well. She knows that what wins elections for her are class victories in the field. She knew after 1983 that the way to sustain her unpopular government in office was to win on the most important battlefield of all. Once victorious, whether at Orgreave or at Wapping, she knew the majority of the waverers would stay with her. The relationship between class confidence and voting, however, is not uniform, or bound by formula. Often, social democratic governments can win office in elections when the class they represent is being beaten. The classic example in British history is the general election of 1929. Labour, in full flight after the miners strike, with its socialists in a hopeless minority, and its policy almost indistinguishable from that of the Liberals, won more seats than any other party, and formed a minority government. Equally, when the working class is strong and confident, the results may not show themselves dramatically in elections. In 1974, for instance, when two miners strikes had been won, and all kinds of working class victories chalked up in the field, the Labour vote was even lower than it had been in 1970 (when they lost the election). A minority Labour government was formed after the Liberal Party had scored more heavily than at any other election since the war. What is certain, however, is that the state of the class struggle determines how those governments behave. The 1929 government, elected in class weakness, was very quickly overwhelmed and annihilated. The defeat it suffered in 1931 after its leaders joined the Tories in a National Government, was the worst in the history of the party. On the other hand, the minority government of 1974 was much stronger than it looked. It took five years of capitalist attacks, assisted by compromising and backstabbing from the trade union leaders to wear down the class victories of the early 1970s and to usher a revitalised and greedy Tory Party back into the trough. This takes us to the last of the determinants of votes and elections: the steady drip-drip of Labour government failures throughout the century. There is a sort of ratchet whereby each Labour government apostasy pulls down the aspirations and confidence of people who vote Labour. There is an ocean between the genuine, if naive, belief even of men like Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s that full blooded socialism could somehow be introduced by Labour government laws and the obsession with the “social market” which passes for modern Labour Party theory. Each time a Labour government fails, it loses not just the next election but a great army of committed socialists and an army of committed voters. Those voters may come back. The act of voting requires so little commitment and effort that cowed and defeated workers may vote Labour, even in quite large numbers. But their expectation about what will come when they have voted Labour will be unfathomably lower than what they expected, say, in 1945.

For all these reasons, the present policy of the Labour leaders, determined as it is by the psephologists works against even their own miserable aspirations. Any policy of standing back from any struggle, of refusing to recognise that there is a struggle, even of attempting to dampen down any struggle, serves only to damage their own prospects in the long term. When the nurses rose in fury against the government’s policy on the health service the reaction of even the best Labour protagonists such as Robin Cook was to disassociate themselves from the strike, even to urge the nurses back to work. When the P&O workers for a fleeting moment, with the sudden and unexpected assistance of lorry drivers, looked as though they might break one of the nastiest Tory employers in the land, the Labour leaders kept their distance. Again and again, on all sorts of issues, wherever a battle against the Thatcher government has loomed on the horizon, the Labour leadership has set full sail in the opposite direction. For them, there is no connection whatever between class struggle and their own electoral prospects. Indeed, as Neil Kinnock said on television early in February, there is, as far as he is concerned, no class struggle, nor even any classes. His job, he said demurely, was to serve nation, not class. In this way the Labour Party leaders contribute to the stench of class defeat. What can they hope for from such a policy? As the February Gallup poll shows, all is not necessarily lost to them. They may gain votes from Tory blunders. But what are the consequences of this policy – of wait and see – of ducking the strikes for fear of being dubbed militants; of supporting the SAS in Gibraltar or in Ireland for fear of being dubbed unpatriotic; of seeking the back door to office as Manley and Papandreou and Gonzalez and Mitterrand have done? The very most they can hope for, if all the political luck goes their way, is an electoral victory without a strong and confident working class – a recipe for another 1931, without the cushion of Empire to protect the British workers from the consequences. Better to shoot and miss than not to shoot at all. Better to risk the abuse of the gutter press than to watch in the sidelines as another group of workers, another abortion campaign, another effort to pull the troops out of Ireland goes down to defeat. Defeat is not inevitable as the psephologists pretend. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder. Even at its zenith, the Thatcher government is at its most vulnerable. Labour can win, and they can win in some strength if they support the struggles of their friends, build up the confidence of the workers and stop playing parlour games with their enemies. Top of the page Last updated on 1 July 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot The triple whammy (September 1997) From Reviews, Socialist Review, No.211, September 1997, p.26. Copyright © 1997 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The Strange Death of Liberal England George Dangerfield Serif £14.99 It is a rare pleasure not just to recommend a book but to insist with all possible powers of persuasion that anyone lucky enough not to have read it should instantly treat themselves. George Dangerfield’s book covers a period of intense warfare – though the warfare is not as popular as it usually is among historians since the wars were not between nations or races but between governed and governors in the same country. What makes that warfare even more distasteful to official palates is that against all odds the wrong side, the dispossessed, seemed to be winning. The book covers three areas of revolt: the Irish revolt against British rule (and the revolt against that revolt of the Orangemen of the North); the revolt of the women, who had no vote, even though some 60 percent of the men had it; and the revolt of the workers against their employers. Each of these stories takes up about 100 pages, and the last quarter is devoted to what Dangerfield calls ‘the crisis’, the amazing first seven months of 1914 in which all three revolts came to the brink of victory only to be consumed in the unspeakable atrocity of the First World War. More than once, from this account, the First World War emerges not just as an inevitable clash between imperialist forces but as a great conspiracy of the rulers everywhere to rid themselves even if only temporarily from the intolerable demands of their subjects. There are, of course, many history books about this period, many of them written from a position friendly to workers, suffragettes and Irish nationalists, and many of them perhaps more scrupulous with the facts or closer to what might be considered the correct line. Even after 61 years, however, George Dangerfield’s book is supreme. Every page, indeed every sentence, is lifted above the average by his irresistible writing style. The hallmark of this style is that most dangerous of all the weapons in the challenger’s armoury: mockery. The whole book is a mockery of the pretensions of the rulers of the time, most notably the mandarins of Asquith’s Liberal government. Dangerfield describes Asquith as the sort of person you would expect to find at high tables at Oxford and Cambridge colleges, ‘a man almost completely lacking in imagination or enthusiasm’. The same merciless mockery is turned on the Orange leader Carson, the Tory leaders under Bonar Law, the Irish Nationalist parliamentary leader John Redmond, the employers and their indefatigable government negotiator George Askwith. Ministerial reactions and statements are constantly reduced to that ridiculous hypocrisy and pomposity which derives from a relentless desire to hang on to other people’s property. The theme of the book is the collapse of a L(l)iberalism which only in 1906 had seemed unassailable. In the general election that year the Tories were engulfed by the biggest parliamentary landslide achieved by any party ever. Their huge majority was reduced to nothing in the two elections of 1910, and the Liberal government became dependent for its survival on the Irish Nationalists. This is all old hat, churned over by innumerable students of official parliamentary politics. The thrill of Dangerfield’s book is that he carries the Liberal government’s impotence far beyond the boundaries of parliamentary statistics. The government and increasingly the entire ruling class were trapped by what he calls ‘a new energy’ among the downtrodden which grew to such a proportion as to challenge the very right of the ruling class to govern. In Ireland the government was trapped by its reluctance either to accede to the mutinous forces under Carson or (even less) to give way to the growing demand for Irish independence. On suffrage, the government was trapped by a reluctance to extend the vote either to unpropertied men or to women (the two reluctances, as the book proves, were closely allied). The greatest parliamentary impotence of all, however, was brought about by the constant strikes of a newly confident working class. In 1911, 961,000 workers were involved in strikes, a figure which seemed impossible – and was 300,000 higher than ever before. In 1912, however, the figures had risen again ­ to a fantastic 1,233,016. Dangerfield brilliantly describes the most devastating feature of these strikes: their unpredictability. Government negotiators, employers, trade union leaders – all were powerless not only to handle the strikes but even to predict where and when they would happen next. On all three fronts, in those early months of 1914, the prospects looked good. In Ireland a civil war loomed, with the favourites the armed volunteers who demanded total independence for all Ireland. Votes for women, as Dangerfield reveals, were effectively conceded in June 1914, though more as the result of the activities of Sylvia Pankhurst and her working class supporters than her sister Christobel from her safe vantage point in Paris. Above all, the workers’ revolt had crystallised into a triple alliance of the big unions which threatened a general strike. In these circumstances, the impotence of the government brought it home to the British ruling class that they could no longer afford two political parties, one reactionary, one allegedly reformist. The Liberal Party was finished, never again to re-emerge as a remotely relevant force in British politics. Good riddance, says George Dangerfield, in a typical but scintillating display of his glorious prose style, and in a passage which should be read with interest by the apostles of modern Lib-Labourism: ‘The Liberal government was dying with extreme reluctance and considerable skill; you might almost consider it healthy, unless you took a very close look, and it had erected such a fence around it of procrastination and promises that a close look was almost impossible to obtain. ‘The workers were simply dissatisfied with it, they could hardly tell why; and indeed that fine old Liberal Hegelianism of at once believing in freedom and not believing in freedom was beyond the understanding of all but the elect. To interfere in the questions of pensions, of health, strikes, education, conditions of labour – ah yes this could be done; to destroy the absolute powers of the Lords, to cripple the vast landed estates – such actions were highly desirable; but to insist that employers should pay a living wage? That was a frightful impairment of freedom’. Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ship without a keel (June 1994) From Notes of the Month, Socialist Review, No. 176, June 1994, p. 5. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The triumph for the Labour Party in the council elections (to be everyone agrees, by something very similar in the European elections this month), has a soothing effect on lots of socialists. Buoyed by success at the polls, some of Labour’s most militant supporters are inclined to that it is now time to sit back wait for the general election victory which is now inevitable. At an SWP meeting during the MSF conference, a delegate angrily rejected calls for more militant trade union action. Militancy, he said, had not won any gains in the last few years. Now was the time to concentrate all our hopes and efforts on getting Labour elected. ‘Don’t rock the boat, and wait for Labour to storm back into office in 1996 (or 1997).’ That’s the convenient and easy message which seems to have been the favourite at trade union conferences this summer, and will certainly be the tune of the new Labour leader and the conference which elects him. Precisely the same attitudes and advice prevailed in Labour when it was last riding high in the polls, after the poll tax demonstration in 1990, Such fantastic gains were made in the council elections a week or two later – and in by-elections right across Britain – that almost everyone reckoned it a near certainty that Labour would win in 1992. The only danger was the activities of the ‘wild men’, or, to use Neil Kinnock’s favourite term of abuse, ‘the headbangers’. Kinnock and his team made it their main aim in life to life to squash the left, especially in the constituencies. Labour policy shifted further and further to the right. There was universal silence and acquiescence ... and Labour lost the election. All the gains made by employers and reactionaries through all those years of restraint ended with the employers and reactionaries winning the election for the sake of which they had been afforded such a clear run. The gloom on that frightful April night in 1992 was compounded by the fact that a network of militants had been persuaded to make all sorts of concessions in order to win the prize which had now been plucked away from them. The Labour leaders’ main mistake was to measure the political temperature solely by the opinion polls. Polls say how people are going to vote. They seldom record the enthusiasm for one preference or the other. And they are quite incapable of forecasting when public opinion will change. Those of us who take the view that the chief characteristic of our society is that It is divided by class, consider first this question: how are the classes doing in their battle with one another? If the rulers are winning, then, whatever the shifts in opinion polls, they are more likely to win elections; if the workers are winning, then their representatives are more likely to win elections. Of course there are exceptions to that rule, but in most cases the ebb and flow of the class struggle will determine the ebb and flow of radical and reactionary opinion, and so determine what happens at election times. If change can and does take place as the result of workers’ action, or even as a result of elected councillors taking a stand against central government, the party arguing for change will find it much easier to win. This is the background to the argument about the course for Labour in the next two years. The Major government is probably the most unpopular government this century. But the opposition is a ship without a keel. It is based not on the firm foundation of a confidence and strength which knows that it can shake employers and roll back the priorities of Tory administrators and bureaucrats. On the contrary, in the real political struggle, the struggle between the classes, the Tories – the employers and their banks – are winners. The success of the new breed of Thatcherite ‘line managers’, arrogant, offensive, untalented but in the workplace extremely powerful, is testimony to long, long years of ruling class confidence. Like that ship without a keel, such an opposition is vulnerable. No amount of votes piled up in municipal or Euro elections can guarantee it that elusive general election victory. The votes and the widespread fury which they represent need the ballast of class victories. Labour victories at the polls need to be reinforced by real labour victories. The Tories must be humiliated long before the next general election. The confidence of those line managers needs to be cut down by organised labour. The trade union leaders have ‘been backing off a fight ever since Thatcher first brought the Tories into government in 1979. All they have to show for the deference and obedience is a long line of defeats. These will go on unless the union leaders take a stand. If they don’t, their members will have to do it on their own. There is an overwhelming argument now for refusing any longer to accept the demands of ever greedy management; and for fighting back. This is not only a matter for shop stewards and trade unionists. In the Labour councils too there are all sorts of ways in which the Tories can be counted out. The councils have huge sums of money piled up from the sale of council houses. The Tories forbid them to spend that money. They should refuse to obey the Tories and spend it. If they are surcharged they should refuse to cooperate, resign their chairs and go into majority opposition. They should make the councils unmanageable rather than accept any longer the diktats of a government which has plainly lost the support of the people. Labour councillor should resign from all the new government quangos, the development corporations, enterprise agencies, city challenges and all the rest of the business speak nonsense whereby the capitalists have sought to undermine democracy in the urban areas. Up to now Labour representatives have played along; they should call a halt and let the quangos stew in their own juice. Defiance, if widespread and determined enough, would start to win concessions and victories. These will be worth in real ideas and in real votes a hundred times the lead in the opinion polls, and will lay some sort of foundation for a Labour victory which could mean something. Top of the page Last updated on 17 April 2017

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Poetry of protest (July/August 1992) From Socialist Review, No.155, July-August 1992, pp.18-20. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Like most poets, Shelley, born two hundred years ago, seems to have little relevance to our lives and concerns today. On the contrary, argues Paul Foot, his poems are a powerful indictment of injustice and class division, and an inspiration for change SHELLEY WAS BORN 200 years ago, and all over the world he will be celebrated in two very different ways. Those who honour him as a ‘great lyric poet’ will put him on a pedestal and pay him homage. At University College, Oxford, where Shelley was briefly educated, they are planning a great feast. No one will be allowed to mention that Shelley was expelled from the college after only two terms for writing the first atheist pamphlet ever published in English. A quite different set of celebrations is being arranged by the descendants of the people for whom Shelley cared and wrote: the common people, and especially the workers. Very early on in his life Shelley developed a passionate hatred and contempt for the class society in which he found himself. His main teacher was the philosopher William Godwin who put into English the glorious ideas of the Enlightenment. Godwin spurned all revolutionary activity. He sought to change the world by changing people’s minds – a quite hopeless project since people’s thoughts, left to themselves, are at the mercy of their rulers’ propaganda. Shelley worshipped Godwin, but could never agree with his appeals to passivity. He flung himself at once into revolutionary activity. At Oxford he wrote his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which ridiculed all religion. He sent it to every bishop in Oxford demanding a debate. He was on the high road out of the city within half an hour of the first bishop choking over the freshly opened envelope at the breakfast table. Shelley’s first long poem, Queen Mab, is a ferocious and sometimes magnificent diatribe against the social order. In Ireland he wrote and attempted to circulate his Address to The Irish People, in which he argued for an Association to campaign for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. When three revolutionary workers were executed after the Pentridge uprising in Nottinghamshire in 1817, Shelley wrote a furious pamphlet scornfully comparing their unnoticed deaths to the public hysteria about the death of a young princess. In the same year he wrote another pamphlet urging the sort of demands for parliamentary reform which appeared on Chartist banners 20 years later. All this political writing and activity was carried out in almost total isolation. Shelley was inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, but he lived in a time of counter-revolution. The great revolutionary poets of the 1790s – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – were stampeding to the right. Their talent and wit, so effectively directed against the politicians, kings and priests of the ancien regime, was now being deployed in their defence. Shelley was not, as these three were, a renegade. He utterly refused to bend his opinions. He was resolutely revolutionary all his life – but his confidence ebbed and flowed according to the ebb and flow of popular movements and uprisings. After his move to Italy in 1818 his best revolutionary poetry, especially the Ode to Liberty and Hellas, were written in tune with the European revolts of the time – in Spain, Naples and in Greece. But when there was not much happening, especially when the news from England was all bad, he wrote more and more lyric poetry. His political passions were never forsaken, but they were often buried deep in lyrical metaphor. But the anger burned furiously, never far beneath the surface. Every so often it erupted like the volcanoes he was always writing about. The most extraordinary example of this is his poem about the massacre at Peterloo – The Mask of Anarchy. The demonstration in August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was at that time the biggest trade union gathering ever organised in Britain. In spite of the Combination Acts and all the other government inspired measures to do them down, the trade unions were growing in strength and influence. The main speaker at the Manchester demonstration was Henry Hunt, a working class agitator. The huge crowd came with their families as though to a picnic. It was like a miners’ gala of modern times. The ruling class was terrified. The yeomanry, a special police force consisting mainly of wealthy tradesmen, had a single plan: to stop Hunt speaking and teach the new union upstarts a lesson. They charged into the crowd flourishing their weapons and screaming abuse. The crowd scattered where they could, but the yeomanry pursued them, slashing and stabbing with their swords as they went. Altogether 11 people died that day, and 150 more were seriously injured. When news of this day’s work reached Shelley in Italy he was literally speechless with rage. He plunged into the little attic room he used at that time as a study. In five days he never appeared for conversation or recreation. He wrote the 92 verses of The Mask of Anarchy, without any doubt at all the finest poem of political protest ever written in our language.

He wrote the 92 verses of The Mask of Anarchy, without any doubt at all the finest poem of political protest ever written in our language. It has been quoted again and again in protests ever since. The Chartists revelled in it, and reprinted it. Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing. THE MOST POWERFUL element in the poem is Shelley’s anger. The horror of Peterloo had fanned the flames of the fury of his youth. Somehow he hung on to the discipline of rhyme and metre. The poem is in many ways the most carefully constructed thing he ever wrote. The parameters allowed by poetic licence in a long and complicated poem like Prometheus Unbound are very wide. In The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley confined himself to the rhythm of the popular ballads of the time. He wrote in short, strong stanzas, four or (occasionally) five lines apiece, which left him very little room for manoeuvre. The result is electric. The poem starts with a description of a masquerade, in which strange and horrifying shapes appear before the poet, all of them disguised in the masks of the Tory ministers of the day. Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, butcher of the Irish rebellion of 1798, appears as Murder. Seven bloodhounds, the seven countries which signed the Treaty of Vienna which carved up Europe after the counter-revolutionary victory of Waterloo, follow him, fed by their master with human hearts. One by one they glide past ‘in this ghastly masquerade All disguised, even to the eyes As bishops, lawyers, peers and spies.’ Shelley hated them all. They represented the chaos of the hideous class society of the time. This Chaos comes last in the parade, ‘on a white horse, splashed with blood.’ He is Anarchy. In more recent times anarchy has come to be used as a word of the left. But in Shelley’s day the word had no such progressive meaning. It meant horror, chaos, violence. To Shelley it meant what the poem says is written on the brow of the ghastly skeletal figure on the white horse: ‘I am God and King and Law.’ This line is repeated again and again by Anarchy and his sycophants as they carve their bloody path through England. The picture is one of repression and tyranny so horrible and so intransigent that change seems impossible. Shelley’s own protest all his short life had been impotent. Many of his angriest poems end in an empty plea or hope that things will get better. But in The Mask of Anarchy he is inspired by what terrified the yeomanry at Manchester – the enormous potential power of the demonstration. His wishes and hopes now have some substance to them. What happens next in the poem, at the very height of the arrogant oppression of Anarchy and his courtiers, is an act of defiance. A ‘maniac maid’ calling herself Hope flies past with a simple message – she cannot wait any longer. Her father’s children are all dead from starvation – every one except her. The time has come for action, apparently desperate, hopeless action, but action nonetheless: ‘Then she lay down in the street Right before the horse’s feet Expecting with a patient eye Murder Fraud and Anarchy.’ Suddenly there is change. ‘Then between her and her foes A mist, a light, an image rose.’ Many Shelley scholars have taken this ‘mist’ and ‘image’ to be a further sign of Shelley’s ‘prophetic vagueness’, yet another vague hope or wish. But it is much more than that. First, it is linked to the act of defiance of the oppressed. Secondly, as the poem goes on to explain, the ‘image’ changed into something quite different: ‘Till as clouds grow on the blast, Like tower-crowned giants striding fast, And glare with lightnings as they fly And speak in thunder to the sky It grew – a Shape arrayed in mail Brighter than the viper’s scale.’ The vague image has become a ‘shape arrayed in mail’ – the iron fist to deal with the iron heel. Moreover, on its helmet, huge and distinct so that it can be seen a long way off, ‘A planet, like the Morning’s, lay; And those plumes its light rained through Like a shower of crimson dew.’ This is no gentle wish, but an armed class warrior helmeted with the Morning Star, the symbol of organised labour. The ‘shape arrayed in mail’ is soon accompanied by an even more powerful force. Side by side with him, with every step he took towards his oppressors, ‘thoughts sprung’ among the multitude. The combination of armed resistance and thought was Irresistible. Anarchy and all his followers are vanquished. THAT IS A THIRD of the poem. The last two thirds consist of a speech by the ‘maniac maid’ who had flung herself at the horse’s hooves and started the whole process. This is a speech of openly revolutionary agitation, which combines all Shelley’s political ideas. It starts with a definition first of slavery, then of freedom. Classic definitions of both – at a time of bourgeois revolutions throughout Europe – concentrated on the freedoms of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association. In Shelley’s time, when the government permitted none of these things, it seemed natural to concentrate on such matters. Then, as now, Liberty was more fashionable than Equality.

Then, as now, Liberty was more fashionable than Equality. What makes these definitions in The Mask of Anarchy most remarkable is that they begin and end with Shelley’s outrage at economic inequality. There are 13 verses defining slavery. All of them are about economic control. The first verse, in answer to the question ‘What is Slavery?’, goes like this: ‘Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day.’ That sounds uncommonly like what Marx had to say in Capital about wages being kept to the level of the merest subsistence of the worker. One result, of course, is that the workers have no say in what they produce: ‘So by ye for them are made Loom and plough and sword and spade With or without your own will bent To their defence and nourishment.’ This is the theme of the poem – ’them and us’, they who have everything and keep it that way by fraud and force, and us who are left to suffer. There then follows a verse which shows how far Shelley had come since reading Tom Paine and Godwin. Britain had been transformed by the industrial revolution – economic growth at breathtaking speed was shifting the social scenery. Here is the process in Shelley’s definition of slavery; ‘Tis to let the ghost of Gold, Take from toil a thousandfold More than e’er its substance could In the tyrannies of old.’ The rate of exploitation of labour had grown a thousand times. The ‘ghost of gold’ took ‘from toil’ incomparably more than in the old feudal tyrannies. This idea has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. It sounds more like Marx, but is unlikely to have come from him – he was one year old when The Mask of Anarchy was written. Slavery is economic exploitation. Freedom, then, is not a ‘name, echoing from the cave of fame’ but ‘clothes and fire and food for the trampled multitude.’ It is justice (a system of law where what happens in the courts is not bought and sold), peace, wisdom (freedom from religion), science, poetry and thought. Just as the poem seems to be drifting into idealism, Shelley suddenly breaks off in mid-verse, demanding ‘deeds, not words.’ The last part of the poem is a call for another demonstration, stronger and more committed than at St Peter’s Fields. It should be made up of all the oppressed – recruitment for it should start at the very bottom of society. ‘From the workhouse and the prison Where pale as corpses newly risen Women, children, young and old Groan for pain and weep for cold.’ The demonstration should be prepared for another attack by the yeomanry, should meet it with civil disobedience, and should go on defying the forces of the government until the government was defeated by its own impotence over a risen people. Passages in this last section seem over-optimistic today. The belief for instance that the armed forces would split from the yeomanry and take the people’s side puts too much weight on reports of such a split at Peterloo. After fascism, Sharpeville and Tiananmen Square, the appeal of civil disobedience has lost its force. Nor were there any ‘old laws of England which preferred liberty to tyranny – the old laws were even worse than the current ones. But the theme of the poem easily survives these moments of delusion – the theme of anger and defiance, the theme that the long years of Tory government and reaction would come to an end just as soon as the oppressed, especially the new working class, became determined to resist. Peterloo, Shelley insisted, would be avenged. When he finished The Mask of Anarchy he sent it straight off to his friend Leigh Hunt, editor of the radical Examiner, But Hunt did not publish it. Publication in 1819 would have invited instant imprisonment for the author and the publisher. The poem was, after all, a call to arms, and a call so infectious and persuasive, so easy to commit to memory, that no one could predict its political impact. Hunt hung onto the poem long after Shelley’s death. He published it in 1831, as the urgent and unstoppable cry for parliamentary reform blended with a new working class resistance from Merthyr Tydfil to Glasgow. Then, and ever since, everyone who has ever been angry, as Shelley was, at the insufferable pain and arrogance of class society, has learnt the famous climax of this wonderful poem and proclaimed it with increasing urgency: ‘And that slaughter to the nation Shall steam up like inspiration, Eloquent, oracular; A volcano heard afar. And these words shall then become Like oppression’s thundered doom, Ringing through each heart and brain Heard again, again, again – Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you. Ye are many. They are few.’ Top of the page Last updated on 27.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot A Passionate Prophet of Liberation (June 1996) From International Socialism, 2 : 71, June 1996, pp. :131–141. Copyright © 1996 International Socialism. Downloaded with thanks from the International Socialism Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. A review of Blake by Peter Ackroyd, (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) and Witness against the beast – William Blake and the moral law by E.P. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1993) In London in the 1790s, like in London today, it was commonplace to see a woman being beaten up in the street, and equally common for embarrassed or irritated bystanders to pass by on the other side. William Blake had a short temper and often lost it. Walking in the St Giles area, and seeing a woman attacked, he launched himself on the scene with such ferocity that the assailant ‘recoiled and collapsed’. When the abuser recovered, he told a bystander that he thought he had been attacked by the ‘devil himself’. At around the same time Blake was standing at his window looking over the yard of his neighbour when he saw a boy ‘hobbling along with a log tied to his foot’. Immediately he stormed across and demanded in the most violent terms that the boy should be freed. The neighbour replied hotly that Blake was trespassing and had no business interfering in other people’s property (which included, of course, other people’s child labour). The furious argument which followed was only resolved when the boy was released. Some years later, in 1803, Blake was living in a country cottage in Sussex when he came across a soldier lounging in his garden. Blake greeted the soldier with a volley of abuse, and frogmarched him to the local pub where he was billeted. The soldier later testified that as they went, Blake muttered repeatedly, ‘Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves.’ In the south of England in 1803, when soldiers were billeted in every village for fear of a Napoleonic invasion, such a statement was criminal treachery. The soldier promptly sneaked to his superiors. Blake was tried for sedition, and escaped deportation and even possibly a death sentence largely because the soldier made a mess of his evidence and because no one in court knew anything about Blake’s revolutionary views which had been openly expressed ten years previously. He was found not guilty, and went on writing for another 23 years until his death. He never once swerved from his intense loathing of king, soldiers and slavery. These are two of the hundreds of anecdotes in Peter Ackroyd’s glorious biography which will warmly commend Blake to any reader even remotely committed to reform. This warmth enthuses the whole book. Ackroyd revels in Blake’s ‘exuberant hopefulness’ which grew out of his passionate rage at the world he saw around him. The Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience which he wrote in the first fine careless rapture of the French Revolution are presented here not just in scholarly textual analysis but in admiration and wonder. Here is Blake’s disgust with slavery in The Little Black Boy: My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav’d of light. The English child might indeed be ‘white as an angel’ but, if unlucky enough not to be born rich, he or she was likely to be a victim of the vilest exploitation. Ackroyd sets out the whole of Blake’s Song of Innocence called The Chimney Sweeper, which moves in six short verses from utter misery: When my mother died I was very young And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep. To hope, in a dream which first sees all the sweeps in coffins, until: And by came an angel who had a bright key And he opened the coffins and set them all free. Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. And back again to a last verse which seems like an anti-climax: And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark And got with our bags and our brushes to work. Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm, So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm. When I first read that last verse, I took it for what it seemed: a sell out of the indignation which sets the poem off. How does Peter Ackroyd explain it? It has been suggested that this closing line is in sharp contrast to the rest of the poem but in fact it maintains precisely the same note; the innocence of the speaker, and of Tom himself, is a destructive and ignorant innocence because it actively complies both with the horrors of the climbing trade and of the society that accepts it without thought. It is the ‘unorganised innocence’ that can persuade a deformed or dying sweep that he is happy, after all, while confirming the credulous or the sanctimonious in their belief that ‘duty’ is all that needs to be, or can be done. Blake has dramatised a ‘state’ or an attitude without in the least acceding to it; then in the companion poem within Songs of Experience that shares the same title, he emphasises his disgust: And because I am happy, and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury: And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King Who make up a heaven of our misery. The point that the Songs of Experience often harden up the Songs of Innocence is also made by Edward Thompson, who does what Ackroyd has done for the Chimney Sweeper for the Song of Experience called London. I wander thro’ each chartered street Near where the chartered Thames does flow And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

I wander thro’ each chartered street Near where the chartered Thames does flow And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every man, In every infant’s cry of fear in every voice; in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear. How the chimney sweeper’s cry Every blackning Church appalls; And the hapless soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down palace walls But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful harlots’ curse Blasts the new-born infants’ tear And blights with plague the marriage hearse. Edward Thompson traces the use of the word ‘chartered’ to the controversy between Edmund Burke (against the French Revolution) and Thomas Paine (for it). The ‘chartered’ towns excluded from any vestige of control what Burke called ‘the swinish multitude’. The soldier gave his blood for the palaces and the chimney sweep his life and limbs for the churches. Prostitution was the other side of the coin to marriage. The swinish multitude crops up again in a savage poem about a ‘chapel all of gold’ from which Blake sees a serpent turning away: Vomiting his poison out On the bread and on the wine. So I turned into a sty And laid me down among the swine. Blake could see more clearly than most of his contemporaries the rising consciousness of a new class which was being robbed as ruthlessly as any of its predecessors, and he sided unequivocally with the exploited and the poor. This commitment was never dull, never repetitive. It was invigorated and complemented by Blake’s illustrations and engravings. He annotated the books he read with neat and powerful notes which still survive and disclose his ideas and how he expressed them. The smooth talking, smooth painting and very fashionable Sir Joshua Reynolds was dealt with like this: Reynolds: I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed. Blake: A Liar. He never was abashed in his life & never felt his ignorance. Reynolds: I consoled myself by remarking that these ready inventors are extremely apt to acquiesce in imperfection. Blake: Villainy. A lie. Reynolds: But the disposition to abstractions is the great glory of the human mind. Blake: To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the alone distinction of merit. General Knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess. Reynolds: The great use in copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning to colour. Blake: Contemptible. Reynolds: But as mere enthusiasm will carry you but a little way Blake: Damn the fool. Mere enthusiasm is all in all. Thompson calls this Blake’s ‘robust contempt’ for the high and mighty, which he held in common with the other great iconoclastic poets of his time, notably Byron. Like Byron, Blake’s first reaction to the pretensions of great men was to laugh out loud. Byron’s view of his former foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh was succinctly expressed over the great man’s grave: Posterity will ne’er survey A nobler scene than this. Here lie the bones of Castlereagh. Stop traveller, and piss. And here was Blake on the subject of the most respected philosopher of his day (and his devotion to the Classics): A ha to Dr Johnson Said Scipio Africanus Lift up my Roman petticoat And kiss my Roman anus. Add to all this Blake’s enduring belief in sexual liberation as a necessary condition of human freedom. ‘Enjoyment and not abstinence is the food of intellect’, was his motto. Most sex was shut up in private fantasy: The moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virgin That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys In the secret shadows of her chambers; the youth shut up from Lustful joy shall forget to generate, & create an amorous image In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow. One answer was ‘lovely copulation, bliss on bliss’, a regular theme for Blake especially in his paintings and engravings. None of this was poetic licence for the release of male libido, as it plainly was for the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose church Blake joined. Blake, a bitter enemy of monogamy when applied as a church and state edict, lived all his life in apparently harmonious monogamy. He was at his testiest when official theorists and priests argued for discrimination against and/or seclusion of women.

He was at his testiest when official theorists and priests argued for discrimination against and/or seclusion of women. His views on these matters were close to those of his great contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps it was his constant harping on these sexual questions which explains another feature of Blake’s life common to many other reforming writers of the time. As Ackroyd points out, ‘He remained quite unknown in his lifetime.’ His engraving was patronised by famous writers and artists of the time, notably Henry Fuseli, but usually only for hack work much of which has perished. The poems which have fascinated critics all through the 20th century were hardly published, let alone read in his lifetime. He printed the Songs himself, very expensively, and sold very few copies. The Four Zoas, which Ackroyd describes as ‘one of the most extraordinary documents of the decades spanning the 18th and 19th centuries’ wasn’t published until 1889, 63 years after Blake’s death. Again most of Blake’s contemporaries dismissed him as ‘mad’. As he got older, people referred to him more and more as ‘the mad visionary’. Even W.H. Auden a century and a half later declared that ‘Blake went dotty as he sang’. In fact, of course, he was not mad at all. His close friend and colleague John Linell admitted he was often shocked by Blake but affirmed, ‘I never saw anything the least like madness.’ The reason for his ‘madness’ was familiar: he swam against the stream and refused to compromise what he said and never painted for commercial fortune. The hostility of polite society which prescribed him mad ended when he died. In old age he was, as ever, penniless and, as one shocked visitor put it, ‘dirty’. There were six people, including his wife, at his funeral and he was buried in a common grave. But death changed the open hostility to Blake into a grudging patronage which still prevails. Schoolchildren are taught to learn by rote the famous poem, Tiger, Tiger. They chant happily: In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? But which of them connects the poem, written late in 1792, to the French Revolution, or to the press references after the September massacres in Paris to ‘tribunals of tigers’ or to the eyes of Jean Paul Marat gleaming ‘like those of a tiger cat?’ And which of those Tory matrons who round off their party conference every year with a spirited rendering of Blake’s poem Jerusalem have the remotest idea what Blake meant when he cried out for ‘arrows of desire’? How many of them have any idea, either, how determined was the commitment in his pledge, ‘I will not cease from mental fight’? Determined, filled with contempt for the rich and sympathy with the exploited and the poor, eloquent and passionate prophet of liberation of every kind, sane to his friends and family, mad to the outside world, dogged by poverty and calumny all through his 70 years, his poems and his art ignored in his life and patronised after it ­ Blake seems to fit exactly into the pattern of other revolutionary poets of the time, most notably Shelley, who lived in London not far from Blake but never met him, and died aged 29 when Blake was 65. Can we happily place Blake alongside Shelley in the line of British poets and writers who emerged out of the French Enlightenment of the late 18th century and filled the gap between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848? No, we cannot. Here is the paradox about Blake, which is firmly tackled in different ways by both these books. Blake shared with Shelley all the qualities mentioned above. Yet there was a great gulf fixed between them. Shelley revered the Enlightenment, hailed the great contribution to democracy of Rousseau, the anti-clericalism of D’Holbach, the secular encyclopedias of Diderot. Above all he worshipped at the shrine of ‘reason’s mighty lore’. He was a rationalist, bitterly opposed to religion of every kind. He believed in open political activity to change the world. He wrote political pamphlets, tried to form political associations, subscribed to the campaigns to release the victims of oppression. Blake was none of these things and did none of them. Though he knew the circle round Thomas Paine, Holcroft, Horne Tooke and Mary Wollstonecraft, he did not associate with them. The story, made into a BBC play, that he advised Paine to flee from London is, Peter Ackroyd assures us, almost certainly apocryphal. This is how Peter Ackroyd explains the difference between Blake and the Painites: In many respects he was utterly unlike them. If points of religion had been brought up, for example, there would have been manifest differences. His friend in later life, Tatham, adds substance to the suggestion: ‘In one of their conversations, Paine said that religion was a law and a tie to all able minds. Blake on the other hand said what he was always asserting: that the religion of Jesus was the perfect law of Liberty.’ Paine also dismissed Isaiah as ‘one continual incoherent rant’ and Blake celebrated the glory of that prophet. Blake could hardly have been an enthusiast for the works of Joseph Priestley whose materialism and predestinarianism were utterly opposed to everything Blake considered holy. Nor can he have been very impressed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s belief in the ‘law of reason’ and ‘rational religion’. Blake came from an entirely different tradition, a tradition which execrated the ‘reason’ which inspired Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Priestley and Shelley. As we have seen he attended the newly formed New Church of Jerusalem which propagated the views of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. This was a Christian sect whose origins, like so many of its kind, derived from the eternal argument between the paid professionals of the Christian church established and maintained by ruling class robbers, and ordinary believers who want to keep their faith secure from the grasp of governments, monarchs, landowners and priests.

Almost all these sects, therefore, practised and preached political disengagement as an essential feature of their faith. The Swedenborgians were specially insistent on this. They abominated the ridiculous tenets of the Trinity, with all the obeisance to God and God’s representatives on earth which it entails, and replaced it with a ‘divine presence’ in all human beings. Part of the proof of that divine presence was a devotion to sectarian secrecy which kept the believers apart from the real world. They were seen as cranks, of course, and therefore as suspect revolutionaries. When a drunken Birmingham mob, bribed by the authorities, sacked and burned the house of the rationalist Joseph Priestley, they headed for the Swedenborgian’s church to do the same. The church’s pastor, appropriately named Proud, rushed out to head off the crowd, explaining that he and his church had nothing to do with temporal matters such as the French Revolution or Joseph Priestley, and brandishing gold coins which he pressed into the mob leaders’ hands. This worked perfectly, and the crowd went away. Ackroyd and Thompson prove that Blake was no uncritical Swedenborgian. He criticised the New Church again and again. But his ideas were sharply hostile to those of the rational enlightenment. Where did they come from? E.P. Thompson strives to find a ‘vector’ which carried Blake’s ideas to him from the 17th century. He fastens on a sect which grew up around John Reeve and Ludowich Muggleton after the defeat of the Levellers in 1649. This Muggletonian sect, as it became known, was ‘antinomian’, that is ‘against the law’. Its followers argued that the only real law was the law of the divine spirit inside each individual. The Muggletonians were subversive because they defied the law, but they blunted their subversiveness by keeping themselves to themselves in strict sectarian isolation. Half Edward Thompson’s book rather apologetically struggles and strains to establish this ‘missing vector’ between the Muggletonians and Blake. With one rather doubtful exception he can’t find a single credible connection. But he does provide an argument for some form of thread between Blake and the antinomian sectarians who sprung up during the Commonwealth and survived right up to his time (they only died out recently ­ Thompson himself met the last of the Muggletonians ­ in Tunbridge Wells!). The Muggletonians and Blake, Thompson argues, were suspicious of reason. Of course, the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ they disliked were the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of upper class intellectuals who told ordinary people what to think. But this spilled over into a suspicion of the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of people like Thomas Paine whose purpose was exactly the opposite: to assault and expose the rhetoric and arguments of the rulers, and to agitate among the ruled for action to change the world. In this sense, as Thompson grudgingly concludes, antinomian sects like the Muggletonians found themselves in opposition to the intellectual forces which led to the French Revolution. If William Blake was suspicious of its intellectual origins, however, he was most definitely not opposed to the revolution. For a short time he even walked the streets wearing the cap of liberty. The second half of Thompson’s book, which is much more exciting than the first, argues that for this short time there took place in Blake ‘a conjunction between the old antinomian tradition and Jacobinism’. Thompson’s close study of poems like London, The Human Abstract and the Garden of Love reveals a ‘burning indictment of the acquisitive ethic’ which goes far beyond the bounds of Muggletonian mysticism and takes Blake close to the revolutionaries. This is all fascinating, especially from a historian of the stamp of E.P. Thompson whose The Making of the English Working Class (1973) is a classic for any socialist who wants to understand this period. But in trying to force the two traditions together, the rationalist revolutionary and the spiritualist antinomian, Thompson seems to abandon many of the lessons he himself spelt out in his monumental history. He writes: If Blake found congenial the Painite denunciation of the repressive institutions of State and Church, it did not follow that humanity’s redemption from this state could be effected by a political reorganisation of these institutions alone. There must be some utopian leap, some human re-birth, from Mystery to renewed imaginative life. This is not just an account of Paine’s view. It seems to be Thompson’s view too, for he repeats the phrase ‘utopian leap’ in the final paragraph of his book and concludes, ‘To create the New Jerusalem something must be brought in from outside the rationalist system and that something could be found only in the non-rational image of Jesus, in the affirmatives of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love.’ No conclusion of that kind can be found in The Making of the English Working Class, which starts with the founding of the London Corresponding Society, a working class organisation with ‘members unlimited’ which fought precisely and exclusively for parliamentary reform: that is, for the ‘political reorganisation of the institutions of State and Church’. The Society backed up the more feeble Society for Constitutional Information. The Making of the English Working Class goes on to chronicle all the attempts by the new ‘reformers from below’ to challenge and change the unrepresentative and repressive monarchy, parliament, press, church, landowners and employers who ruled Britain. There was no call from any of these reformers for a ‘utopian leap’ perhaps because no practical political leap, by definition, can be utopian. ‘Comrades, we shall now proceed to accomplish a utopian leap’, is not a practical slogan. The whole concept is an abstraction. The chief consequence of relying on an abstraction is political quietism. If you wait and hope for a utopian leap, there is nothing you can do about it. You can only wait and hope.

Blake joined the New Church of the boring and ridiculous Swedenborgians, but he did not join the London Corresponding Society, or even the Society for Constitutional Information. He showed no interest in any of the agitations for parliamentary reform or against the gagging acts and repressive legislation at the end of the 1790s. When the Luddite leaders were hanged in 1813, there was no donation for their families from Blake (as there was from Shelley). When the leaders of the Pentridge uprising (1817) were executed or the Manchester yeomanry mowed down the parliamentary reformers at Peterloo (1819), there was no protest from Blake (as there was on both occasions from Shelley). Thompson compares Blake unfavourably to William Godwin, who is deservedly denounced for spouting his polite philosophy from the sidelines. But at least Godwin risked his neck by publicly supporting his friends on trial for treason in 1794, which is more than Blake managed to do. Indeed on more than one occasion, when the authorities threatened persecution, Blake specifically adapted and softened his language to keep himself clear of the prosecutors. If there was, as Thompson argues, a brief moment where his antinomianism merged with a Jacobin sense of outrage, the moment soon passed, and he hurried back to his splendid isolation. Peter Ackroyd quotes back at Blake a comment from his hero Milton: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be fought for, not without dust and heat’. Blake, Ackroyd continues, ‘eschewed the “heat” of any public voice or role, but, as a result, it is as if he were another Milton raging in a darkened room’. I find all this illuminating because I confess that the bulk of Blake’s longer poems have always mystified and often irritated me. I do not mean only that the poems seem constantly to dissolve into imagery or metaphor. A lot of Shelley’s poetry does that too. But the imagery in Blake is too abstract, too unrelated, too much founded on utopian leaps. E.P. Thompson recognises this vagueness, but comes round to it. In one sense he almost revels in Blake’s isolation and his assaults on what Thompson (I think wrongly) calls ‘ideology’. Perhaps at the end of his life Thompson found in Blake some solace for his own political loneliness. Peter Ackroyd, a Blake enthusiast to the last, is more circumspect: His poetry is often one of declaration and assertion, just as his art resides upon the pictorial plane; much of his creative activity takes place on the immediate surface and there are occasions when an image, or a verse, seems to have no concerted or established sense ­ with the proviso of course that this indeterminacy, this missing signification, is often part of a work’s power. It is like the oblique character of the man himself who, according to one interlocutor, made assertions without bothering with argument or debate; his work shares that same denotative brilliance, but sometimes at the expense of bewildering those who encounter it. I enrol myself in the ranks of the bewildered. But I will not end there because both these books have led me back to Blake and dug up treasures previously buried in mysticism and symbolism. The whole point of the poets who flourished in revolutionary times and who did not bow the knee to God or King or Law is that they have something significant to say to future revolutionaries. Blake should be read precisely because he was a maverick, a pain in the neck not just to the rulers but also to those who more formally and more rationally opposed the rulers. Whatever his religious origins and however haughty his disengagement, he believed perhaps more passionately than all his contemporaries in human emancipation, and he lived his life accordingly. In particular, he needs to be read by any socialist who imagines that in a society where labour is emancipated everyone will be the same and want the same. Is there anyone attempting to work in the tradition of William Blake today? Well, there is Leon Rosselson, a veteran London singer so full of wonderful tunes and emancipating poems that he is ignored by polite society as systematically as Blake was. His latest CD, Intruders, is full of both; and I commend it heartily as I commend both these books, especially Peter Ackroyd’s. The CD ends with a tune I find myself humming almost everywhere. The chorus is pure Blake, incorporating on the one hand the isolated, individualistic Blake who preferred abstract divinity to politics, and on the other the revolutionary Blake who saw perhaps more clearly than anyone else the fantastic, kaleidoscopic potential of human liberation: For all things are holy, the poet once said, And all that is different is part of the dance. And the web of life’s colours needs each single thread For the dance to continue unbroken. Top of the page Last updated on 8 November 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot 101 years of not thinking (May 1986) From Socialist Worker, 17 May 1986. Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp. 96–7. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. FOR A FEW days last week the air was thick with the plummy noises of important people welcoming another lifelong rebel safely home to rest. Everyone loved Manny Shinwell. In the House of Lords, Lord Whitelaw; at his funeral, the Thatcher knight and editor of the Sunday Express, Sir John Junor; in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher herself – all rushed to honour Manny. I pause for a moment here because my mentor, Harry McShane, always said that there were only two of the Red Clydesiders for whom he ever had any time: John Wheatley and Emmanuel Shinwell. When I confronted him with the hideous reality of Emmanuel Shinwell in the early 1960s, Harry would shake his head and say, ‘Yes, that’s all very well, but you should have heard his speeches in the famous 40-hour strike in Glasgow in 1919’. Shinwell was magnificent during that strike and the vast agitation which accompanied it, Harry always insisted. Since he was there and his judgement on such matters was almost always impeccable, I accept it. But consider. Even by that time, most socialists had a healthy suspicion of Shinwell. He had not joined the strong anti-war movement in the West of Scotland working class at that time. After he came out of prison in 1919, he moved quickly to the right. He went to parliament in 1922 and was in government in 1924. He supported Ramsay MacDonald against Cook, Maxton and Wheatley in 1928; but was quick to turn on MacDonald when there was a chance of winning his seat from him In every single major argument in the Labour Party since, Shinwell has been on the right, if not on the extreme right. His former commitment to class war changed very quickly to a commitment to patriotic wars, almost every one of which he supported. He backed Eden and the Tories in their invasion of Suez in 1956. He backed Thatcher in the Falklands in 1982 and I dare say he would have backed her in Libya too. He loved wars and Britain fighting them. No doubt that is why everyone calls him a ‘fighter’. He was a mean, spiteful, pompous, bullying man. He was always sneering at ‘middle class intellectuals’. He sneered, too, at political theory, especially Marxist theory, which, he boasted, he never read. This bluff common-man, give it-to-em-straight approach was good for an ovation at Labour Party conferences but Shinwell’s own life spells out the awful lesson of what happens to working class agitators when they stop thinking and reading. It is true that middle class socialist intellectuals are less reliable than working class socialist intellectuals. What the latter thinks cuts with the grain and their life experience, while for the former socialist theory cuts against that grain. But when working class socialists abandon intellect altogether, when they sneer at books and reading and places of learning and join in the jokes about how nobody can ever understand a word of Marx – then the road for them is Shinwell’s road, the same dreary march from youthful rebellion and enthusiasm to reactionary and platitudinous middle age and chauvinist, ennobled senility. People like Shinwell insult and corrupt the ideas which inspired them in their youth. And when they die, they allow those ideas to be neutered and patronised by Tory prime ministers and editors of the Sunday Express. Top of the page Last updated on 27 October 2019

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Born Unfree and Unequal (April 2003) From Socialist Review, No.273, April 2003, p.18-19. Copyright © 2003 Socialist Review. Downloaded from the new Socialist Review Archive Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Capitalism’s claim of promoting democracy is continually undermined by the growing gap between rich and poor. In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction. This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t. Increase in inequality This is an ancient and familiar division. In the age of Bush and Blair, it has grown almost out of recognition. Both leaders and both governments are hell-bent on increasing it. Examples are so obtrusive and frequent that it is almost embarrassing to repeat them. A report earlier this year by the American Federal Reserve estimated that in the early Clinton years, 1992-98, the ‘net worth’ of the richest 10 percent in the United States stayed fairly steady at 13 times more than the poorest 20 percent. Between 1998 to 2001 the gap shot up to 22.4 times more, and is still rising. Jared Bernstein of the normally sober Economic Policy Institute was shocked. He warned, ‘I think the increase in inequality that’s evident in this report is really pretty alarming. It should really alert those who are thinking about implementing aggressive tax policies.’ Perhaps he was thinking of President George W. Bush, who responded to the alert by cutting taxes on dividends paid by a handful of the American rich who he represents. In Britain the gap is equally horrific, though less dramatically documented. Everyone knows about the poor – nine and a half million homes that can’t afford proper heating, eight million people who can’t afford one or more essential household items like fridges, telephones and carpets, four million who can’t afford fresh fruit and vegetables. The rich are more comfortably protected from statistics – the National Office of Statistics keeps no figures for the richest 1 percent, but everyone accepts that under Blair and Brown the rich and super-rich have sailed off into the stratosphere leaving those impoverished millions in the gutter. Nor is it quite accurate to moan about the divisions between rich and poor countries. Of course, the statistics of that division are shocking, and of course the rich countries gang together in the G8 to make sure the division continues. But the divisions persist, sometimes even more horrifically, in those poor countries too. The World Wealth Report by the US banker Merrill Lynch in 2000 charted the rapid increase in millionaires all over the world, but found the rise sharpest in Asia, a continent made up mainly of desperately poor people. These divisions are a far clearer guide to the world crisis than the rise in terrorism or rogue regimes. Indeed, they explain both. The fact that rogue regimes can continue to dominate their people, or that terrorism seems so attractive to so many of the dispossessed, flows directly from the divisions of wealth and property all over the world. The yawning and ever increasing gap between the wealthy and the masses is the central flaw in the capitalist economic system to which all the world’s leaders, including the rogue regimes, subscribe. Any policy that does not seek to solve that problem is bound to fail. Any war, and particularly an expensive war like the one in Iraq, can only widen those divisions and therefore make things worse. Some people still argue that these divisions can best be healed by the democratic process that obtains in Europe and the US. In the old days of the last century an influential group of people called social democrats argued that with the votes of the masses behind them they could, in their words, achieve a ‘fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’. That was the British Labour Party’s official policy in 1973, 1974 (twice) and even (with the word ‘irreversible’ tactfully left out) in 1979. Such a promise is almost unthinkable today. The Labour Party, like the Democratic Party in the US, is now a plaything of the rich. The government’s policies are manacled to the priorities of the rich. The rich have, quite literally, bought their way into the government as firmly as have their corporate colleagues in the US. One result of this abandonment of social democracy has been the decline in democracy itself. If the policies of the competing parties are the same, if Democrat is really the same as Republican and Labour the same as Tory, then what’s the point in voting? The poor, the workers and the dispossessed lose their champions and, quite logically, abstain from voting.

The poor, the workers and the dispossessed lose their champions and, quite logically, abstain from voting. A great wailing went up when less than 60 percent of those eligible used their votes in the 2001 general election, but that has been the situation in the US for as long as anyone can remember. If electoral politics gets taken over by the rich, used by the rich for their corruptions and their power games, why should the poor and the workers give credibility to that process with their votes? One sad result of this sad process has been the decline of socialist ideas. Many Labour supporters conclude from the long series of Labour failures that the original central inspiration of Labour – socialism – was flawed. Exactly the opposite is the case. The central ideas of socialism are reinforced every day by the continuing disaster of capitalist society. The unimaginable corruptions of private enterprise in recent years – Enron, WorldCom, Ahold, Railtrack, Equitable Life, hedge funds, split investment ‘trusts’, the collapse of private pension funds – are all contemporary proof of the case for public enterprise, for a planned economy in place of one cast adrift in a sea of stock-market chaos. Controlled from below The growing gap between rich and poor is the clearest possible proof of the need for equality – for a society where people whatever their abilities earn roughly the same. And the hierarchical nature of control and power under capitalism – every discrimination, every arbitrary sacking and arrogant abuse of workers by corporate bullies – shouts out for a society controlled from below, a genuine democracy whose institutions are firmly and irrevocably fixed among the masses. The meteoric decline of social democracy in the last three decades leads many people to believe that such a democracy is idealistic, unobtainable. But the truth is that every time the masses stir themselves for reform, they automatically throw up organisations far more democratic than anything experienced or patronised by parliaments. The notion of a representative democracy controlled from below where the representatives are not only elected but can be instantly recalled by the represented, and where the representatives not only promote policies but carry them out, is as relevant today as it was when it was first put into practice by the Paris Commune 132 years ago. The only certainty about such a democracy is that by its nature it cannot possibly be introduced by fawning parliaments such as the one at Westminster, still less by the lobbyists’ plaything on Capitol Hill in Washington. It can only come from a movement from below. Such a movement is much more easy to understand today than even a year ago. The vast movement against war in Iraq – by far the biggest such movement I have seen even in my long lifetime – shows how many people can and will act when they see their governments acting irresponsibly. Many of those millions of people who have demonstrated against the war feel just as strongly about the way the world and its politics are run by corporations, for profit, for the rich, by exploiting the workers and the poor. They are shocked by the constant examples of capitalist waste, of money and wealth spent on frivolity rather than on meeting the needs of a world pining in pain. A recent meeting of the G8 countries agreed to spend a sum of money on the poor that was only just equivalent to the cost of organising G8 conferences! If the mighty human energy unleashed to contest the war can be directed to organise for socialism and against capitalism, if the power of the people who do the work can be organised against those who profit from it, a real prospect opens up for a new and genuine socialist democracy which can truly liberate the world not just from dictators and weapons of mass destruction but from those who profit from both. Top of the page Last updated on 28.11.2004

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Derry: the grim facts about Ulster’s divide and rule city ... (21 December 1968) From Socialist Worker, No. 102, 21 December 1968, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. THE DEMONSTRATIONS which have erupted in Northern Ireland and which, in spite of the sacking of Home Secretary Craig, will almost certainly continue, started in Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second city. Derry’s predicament sums up the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the Unionist government. Here are some of the facts about the city which cannot be found in government handouts. Sub-Standard Housing. There are approximately 12.000 houses in the city, 40 per cent of which are sub-standard. According to the 1961 census, 45 per cent of the households in the city do not have sole use of hot water; 54 per cent do not have a bath; 16 per cent do not have a kitchen sink. About 1,250 households are in ‘multiple occupation’, sharing household amenities. The Derry Housing Association has seven volumes, incorporating some 1,410 documents of cases of ‘intolerable’ housing conditions. And these are all Catholics. To these have to be added at least another 300 households in the Protestant areas of The Fountain and Waterside, where conditions are no better than in the Catholic slums. Overcrowding In 1966,the city’s Medical Officer of Health,who is President of the Apprentice Boys, a high-powered Masonic-type organisation named after the boys who closed the Derry gates against the invading armies in 1688, reported: ‘Overcrowding plays a .arge part in the causation of tuberculosis in the area.’ House-building: The Derry Corporation, which is Unionist-controlled, built no houses in 1967. The following table speaks for itself: Town Pop. Cncl. Houses built in last 5 years* Coleraine 13,578 336 Newry 12,214 659 Portadown 20,710 535 Larne 17,278 212 Limavady 4,811 266 Londonderry 55,681 197 The rate of house-building in Derry (70 houses per 1,000 people) since the war is the slowest of any housing authority in the United Kingdom. And that’s including the effort of the government-sponsored Northern Ireland Housing Trust,which has done most of the house-building in Derry since 1958. The vote is only available in local elections to ratepayers, that is, householders in separate dwellings. More than a quarter of the adults in Derry (8,400 people) cannot vote. There are three wards: South, North and Waterside. Half the Derry people live in South ward. Nearly all of them are Catholics, who vote eight Nationalists on to the Corporation. In North and Waterside there are small Protestant majorities, who return 12 Unionists. Protestants make up about 25 per cent of the Derry population, but their party controls the Corporation. Turned Down This delicate balance controls the Corporation’s housing policy. A proposal by Derry Housing Association to build 450 houses in Pennyburn was turned down – for fear of rehousing Catholics in a Protestant area. Similarly, the Protestant slum-dwellers must stay where they are. To move them out to council houses would mean losing valuable votes. Everything is neatly carved up and Unionists and Nationalists don’t bother to fight elections. Elections don’t happen, unless,like last year, for the first time, the Northern Ireland Labour Party intervenes, getting about 30 per cent of the vote in Catholic and Protestant wards. Unemployment is 12.5 per cent in Derry. 17.4 per cent of males are out of work. Unemployment in Northern Ireland depends very much on the religious nature of the area. High and Low Derry is Catholic – so unemployment is high. Belfast is Protestant – so unemployment is relatively low: Catholic Towns Unemployment Rate % Londonderry 12.5 Newry 15.1 Strabane 16.7 Enniskillen 17.9 Kilkeel 20.4 Protestant Towns Belfast 5.5 Coleraine 8.8 Ballymena 3.1 Portadown 3.8 Newton 3.7 Lurgan 3.5 Antrim 2.5 Top of the page Last updated on 22 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ruth First (January 1988) From Socialist Worker, January 1988. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 157–159. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I imagine there are few socialists in London (or who have recently travelled to London) who have not by now seen A World Apart, the story of Ruth First, as seen through the eyes of her daughter. I fear the film is so very, very good, and its message so powerful, that it may not last long on the screen. So if there is anyone who hasn’t see it – just get down there as soon as possible. There may be some people who are a little puzzled by the final titles which announce that Ruth First was assassinated in Mozambique in 1983. So she was, but the film ends some twenty years earlier, and admirers of Ruth (and there could hardly be any non-admirers alter the film) might be puzzled as to what happened in the interim. During the film Ruth First’s life is all in South Africa, and she died not far away, so you might think that she spent all her life there. She didn’t. Soon after the period covered by the film, she escaped from house arrest and fled to Britain. She was here all through the rest of the 1960s and, I think, all the 1970s. She joined a huge army of South African exiles who made a profound impact on the British Left in those years. Ruth wrote some marvellous books. Her book 117 Days is the finest account I have ever read of the disorientation of the rebel prisoner in a torturer’s prison. Anyone who enjoyed the film should get hold of that book. Unlike many of her friends and contemporaries, Ruth First believed that no progress would ever come to South Africa without armed struggle. I met her often at meetings, which she arranged, of South African guerrillas, trained in armed struggle, who came to London to build support for it. All these people, like Ruth, were members or supporters of the Communist Party. I was always both delighted to be invited, and rather ashamed to find myself (every time) arguing with them. I couldn’t understand why the discussion kept turning back to the governments of the new African states. I remember one furious argument with Ruth about the deposing of Ben Bella in Algeria and his replacement by Boumedienne. She, and the others, regarded this as a great sign of progress. They had the facts to prove it: Boumedienne’s record in struggle, in commitment and in guns. Over the years the same basic argument rocked back and forth. I was told that the Rhodesian armed struggle depended on ‘the friendliness of the front line states’ for its existence. These states, perhaps against their will, behave like bosses towards the people, and as agents for the great companies that carve up Africa. I could not understand the argument that placed these governments above the guerrillas’ own commitment and their own strength. In the end, Ruth First and these brave young men and women wanted a society precisely a world apart from the world run by Kaunda, Nyerere, Boumedienne, Nasser and the rest. Since they wanted something different, since they represented something different, since they were fighting literally to the death for something different, why did they pretend and speak so eloquently for people who represented more of the same? I never got an answer to these questions. On the other hand, to be fair, I never stopped getting the invitations. Ruth First had a sort of grudging respect for the International Socialists (the Socialist Workers Party’s forerunners). She thought that underneath it all we were ‘Trotskyist splitters’, but she did notice that whenever there was a demo or a clash of any kind with apartheid, we were always in the front line. On 14 September 1973 she spoke at a demonstration organized by the IS in Hyde Park. It was to protest against a mine disaster which had killed, I think, twelve African miners as a result of the most appalling employers’ negligence. I remember the date exactly because the disaster happened on the 11th, the same day as the Chilean coup. The Communist Party organized a huge demo on Chile. We guessed wrong and organized one on South Africa. About 600 came to ours, about 20,000 to the other (which we joined rather abjectly, after our meeting was over). In spite of the clash of party loyalties, Ruth First agreed at once to speak on our platform. Before the meeting, we watched the masses forming elsewhere in the park. ‘You made a mistake coming here,’ I laughed at her. ‘No’, she grinned back. ‘I’ll speak at any meeting against racist South Africa. You made the mistake, not I.’ For once, I thought, she won the argument. Top of the page Last updated on 2 September 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Marx’s real tradition (March 1990) From Socialist Worker Review, No. 129, March 1990. Copyright © Estate of Paul Foot. Published on MIA with the permission of the Estate. Paul Foot Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2013. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. THE TUMULTUOUS revolts in Eastern Europe have divided socialists into two camps. In one camp there is gloom and introspection. In the other there is excitement and delight. The two camps represent two different traditions, both calling themselves socialist. For much of the last hundred years or so, these two traditions have become entangled with one another. We had better disentangle them fast, for one tradition is now dead; the other lives. Unless they can free themselves fast, the living will be dragged down by the dead. “Ever since the beginning of time” says a disembodied voice over a spinning globe at the start of Cecil B. de Mille’s Samson and Delilah, “man has striven to achieve a democratic state on earth.” That was probably putting it a little high (especially as the voice went on to assert; “such a man was Samson”), but there is something in it. In all human history, which is the history of exploitation, there have been people who pined or fought for a day when exploitation would cease. Such people wrote Utopias in which men and women lived side by side in freedom, prosperity and peace. Some of these Utopias were in heaven, some were on earth. Their instigators were benevolent men and women who saw themselves as parents leading bemused and discomforted children to a promised land. They were therefore, all of them, elitists, none more so than the French Utopian “socialists” of the early 19th century. They believed their own education, feeling and compassion would usher in the new society. In England the word “socialism” was first popularised by such a man: Robert Owen. Owen detested the exploitation he saw all around him during the industrial revolution. He urged benevolent employers to set up dream factories in which the workers would get clothed, fed, educated and introduced to the fine arts. He didn’t just say it; he did it. If you happen to be near Lanark in Scotland you can go and see the carefully kept result: Owen’s model mill in which most of his ideals were put into effect, without the slightest impact on exploitation in the West of Scotland or anywhere else. New Lanark and all similar Utopias and charities were greeted by the young Karl Marx with the ferocious contempt for which he had a peculiar genius. Marx reckoned that for the first time in history it was possible to end exploitation once and for all. Up to that time, so little was produced that there wasn’t enough to share with everyone. If there was to be any progress, therefore, a surplus had to be creamed off by a ruling class. After the advances of production in the Industrial Revolution there was enough to go round. It was possible to talk (as they started to do in Germany only from 1842, when Marx was 24) of “socialism”, a society where things are produced and distributed socially, to fit everyone’s needs, and in which it is considered a crime for one person to grow rich from the labour of another. How could such a society come about? Was it inevitable because it was so obviously fair and decent? Were industrialists, landlords, bankers suddenly to be struck, as St Paul pretended he was on the road to Damascus, by a blinding light which would show them how monstrous their riches were in the midst of so much poverty? FROM a very early age, Marx recognised the ruthlessness of class rule. He observed how the ruling class behaved like vampires. They sucked blood, which led them to be thirsty for more of it. They were as impervious as vampires to pleas for mercy. They would relinquish their surplus, he concluded, only when it was siezed from them by the very class they robbed. So the first reason why Marx reviled all collaborators with the capitalist system is that they made the abolition of that system and the creation of a socialist society more distant and difficult. There was however a second reason, which was even more important to Marx and to his friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels. They were faced by an argument which we hear on all sides today. “The working class” they were told “are backward, ill-educated, racialist, dirty, mean. How can such a class create a new society free from exploitation and fear?” Marx reacted angrily to such abuse. His descriptions, for instance, of the meetings of workers in Paris when he was first exiled there in the mid-1840s, are full of admiration. But he knew that exploiting society makes wretches of the exploited just as it makes monsters of the exploiters. He knew that centuries of exploitation had left the masses full of, not to put too fine a point on it, shit.

He knew that centuries of exploitation had left the masses full of, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. And this was the best reason of all for the revolution. “This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overturning it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” That was in the German Ideology, written in 1847, when Marx was 29; and the theme – the importance of the self-emancipation of the working class – goes on and on throughout all his writing. It is the very lynch-pin of Marxism. When in 1864 he wrote the principles of the First International Working Men’s Association his very first clause said: “Considering that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves ...” This clause was written into the membership cards of every member of the International. Seven years after the formation of the International the workers of Paris rose, threw off the muck of ages, and set up their own administration entirely free from exploitation. Marx, in a fever of excitement and enthusiasm, wrote perhaps the most powerful political pamphlet in all history, insisting that the Commune’s greatest achievement was the self-emancipation of the working class: “They have taken the actual management of the revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the people itself; displacing the state machinery of the ruling class by a governmental machinery of their own. This is their ineffable crime!” The most consistent theme of all Marx’s writing is this zest for the potential of the working class in struggle. It goes back to the very earliest of Marx’s ideas, when as a young journalist he called himself an “extreme democrat”. Vulgar Marxists of the bureaucratic school (“Marxists” whom Marx and Engels came to despise while they were alive) detect a “great shift” from Marx’s early idealistic journalism to his later scientific work. It is not a shift which Marx recognised. Rather, he noticed that he developed logically from a passionate belief in democracy to a passionate belief in communism. Communism, brought about by a working class in motion, was the most democratic society conceivable, since it came about through democratic action and it removed the most undemocratic aspect of all: economic exploitation of the many by the few. By as early as 1845, Frederick Engels was spelling this out in simple language: “Democracy nowadays is communism ... Democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses ... The proletarian parties are entirely right in inscribing the word ‘democracy’ on their banners.” THE DEMOCRATIC inspiration and the belief in self-emancipation (which are part of the same thing) are the essentials of Marxism. Without them, all the carefully constructed economics, all the earnest philosophy wither on the vine. The spirit of a revolt, the need for a class battle against exploitation – these are the antidotes to the determinism of which Marx was so often accused. The famous statement that people make their own history but they do not make it as they choose is usually quoted by Marxists with the accent on everything after “but”. In fact, the emphasis in the sentence is that men and women determine what happens to them. The point that they have to work within historical circumstances laid down for them is made only to ensure that they fight more effectively. Not long after Marx died (in 1883) a new threat arose to the fight which he believed would soon be won. Men calling themselves Marxists found themselves at the head of “great labour movements”, vast trade unions, socialist newspapers, socialist sporting societies. Such men started to wonder whether all this talk of revolution wasn’t going over the top. They felt they might get to positions of power and influence through the newly-granted franchise, and that when they did so they could legislate for socialism without having to go through messy and probably bloody revolution. Thus, at the end of the 1890s, Edward Bernstein, like countless others after him, proposed to the masses that their world could be improved gradually and peacefully. All they needed to do was vote in a secret ballot. For Bernstein (and for Karl Kautsky, though few noticed his backsliding at this stage) the idea of millions of workers emancipating themselves in the streets and factories was faintly distasteful, if not downright dangerous. The works of these men (except on the fringes: Bernstein, perhaps, on Cromwell; Kautsky on Christianity) do not survive with any relevance today. What does survive is the furious reply delivered to Bernstein and company by the Polish-born revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. Her reply came in two parts: Social Reform or Revolution (1900) and The Mass Strike (1906). The common theme of both pamphlets, the element which lifts them above all other contemporary political writing and makes them so important today, is the “living political school”, “the pulsating flesh and blood”, the “foaming wave” of the working class in struggle. Luxemburg fought like a tiger for Karl Marx’s central principle: that the workers can only be emancipated if they themselves overthrow capitalist society. She exulted in the 1905 Russian Revolution which in a few weeks knocked out an absolutism which had reigned unchecked (in spite of all sorts of benevolent reformers who tried to make it better) for centuries. She rejoiced from her prison cell at the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Russian revolutionary socialists more than anyone else in all history understood Marx’s insistence on self-emancipation. Where Marx had called for it and encouraged it, they carried it out. Reactionary historians and commentators tell us that the tight discipline of the Bolshevik Party made it an undemocratic organisation dedicated to commanding the workers, not representing them. The truth is exactly the opposite. The Bolshevik Party won its soviet majorities in the spring and summer of 1917 precisely because it took its stand on the strength, confidence and potential of the Russian workers.

In State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution And The Renegade Kautsky, Lenin fulminated against parliamentary democracy because it was not democratic enough. It left the capitalist machine intact. It removed working class representatives from the cooperative atmosphere of everyday life in factories, mills, mines and offices. LENIN, in State and Revolution restated his belief in the “elective principle” as the cornerstone of any new socialist society. He repeated again and again in the months and years after October that the working class which had emancipated itself was the only hope for the Revolution. “I calculated’’ he said “solely and exclusively on the workers, soldiers and peasants being able to tackle better than the officials, better than the police, the practical and difficult problems of increasing the production of foodstuffs and their better distribution, the better provision of soldiers, etc. etc.”. He told the First All Russian Congress of Soviets in January 1918: “In introducing workers’ control we knew it would take some time before it spread to the whole of Russia, but we wanted to show that we recognised only one road – changes from below: we wanted the workers themselves to draw up, from below, the new principles of economic conditions.” Lenin’s inspiration, if less flamboyant, was exactly the same as Marx’s and Luxemburg’s. Their socialism depended on the exploitative society being overthrown in struggle by the workers. Lenin realised, therefore, that without the revolutionary class of self-emancipated workers, the revolution would, in his own words, “perish”. Perish it did, for precisely that reason. The self-emancipators, the small Russian working class, were annihilated in war and famine. By 1921 all that was left of them was the top layer, the bureaucracy of revolutionaries without the class which put it there. The self-emancipators were replaced by workers from the countryside who had not emancipated themselves or anyone else. The revolution in Germany was defeated. In Britain it never started. Russia was isolated; its revolutionary inspiration snuffed out. The revolution was lost. Soviet democracy was replaced by state capitalist tyranny. Sad to say, most socialists and communists throughout the world did not notice that it was lost at all. Almost imperceptibly, communists who had been brought up to believe that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class became idol-worshippers in the old Utopian tradition; falling at the feet of Stalin as the benevolent Father of Socialism. In the name of Marxism, the very essence of Marxism, its democratic and self-emancipatory spirit, was at first forgotten, later ridiculed and condemned. Dictatorship over the proletariat was hailed as dictatorship of the proletariat. Murdering opponents was hailed as democratic discipline. Communism and democracy, synonymous for Engels, became exact opposites for Stalinists. More predictably anti-communists made the same mistake. They said there was a direct line from Lenin to Stalin; that all revolutions somehow end in tyranny. The answer to them is a simple one. For all his myriad fetishes, racism and pettiness, Stalin bent his dictatorship to one central purpose: to squeeze out of Russia every single surviving breath of the Revolution. He killed all his former Bolshevik colleagues – save Lenin who died early enough to be turned (against everything he had ever believed) into another icon. Revolutionary decrees were repealed and replaced with their opposites. Factory control was replaced by one-man management; educational reform by educational reaction; internationalism by nationalism and racism; free abortions by rigid abortion controls. The death penalty for serious crimes, abolished by the revolution, was re-imposed. Privileges, domestic servants and all the paraphernalia of ruling class “superiority” were the order of the day. All this was heralded throughout the world as socialism – though the essence of socialism, Lenin’s control from below, had been turned into its very opposite, control from above. After the Second World War, the tragedy repeated itself, as Marx would have said, this time as farce. In the carve-up of the victorious powers, Russia swiped six countries in Eastern Europe. In none of these had the working class emancipated itself. Their emancipation, instead, was imposed by Russian bayonets. Replicas of Stalin’s state capitalist tyranny were set up in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and East Germany. The workers played no part in any of these governments. They did not even have the right to vote them out, as their fellow workers had in much of the West. Resistance of any kind, especially resistance in the workplaces, was met with the most horrific repression. Uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany were put down by tanks. The economies were bent and corrupted to the sustenance of Great Russian imperialism. Ruling class bureaucracies set themselves up in Stalin’s image. The countries came to be known as “socialist countries”.

The countries came to be known as “socialist countries”. Either their relationship with Russia, or their centralised “planned” economies or their stuffed-shirted socialist rhetoric convinced hundreds of thousands of socialists in other countries that, at root, they were socialist. The word caught on in the Eastern European countries themselves, but with a different result. In those countries, where the workers knew that they were being dragooned and terrorised, socialism became a synonym for brutal dictatorship and exploitation. Socialism, the great emancipation, became the word for slavery. And the revolt against that tyranny, when it came, and when it was led, as it inevitably had to be, by the working class, turned first and most viciously against anything which called itself “socialist”. NOW LARGE numbers of socialists, who spent much of their lives in some posture of obeisance to these “socialist countries” are fleeing the field. Some of them are giving up all political commitment. Some, very few, place their faith in the “revolution from above” which they imagine has been set in motion, single-handedly by Mikhail Gorbachev. Others, probably the majority, have abandoned any talk of revolution, and now work for “reform from above” in the Labour Party and its equivalents. The world in which we live is not in its essentials any different from the world which Marx described. It is still run on exploitative lines. A degenerate and cancerous capitalism still gnaws away at the lives of most of the world’s people. There is no sign that “reform from above” worries it even for a moment. It flicks aside the reformers with the same casual cynicism which Marx exposed. The chief difference is that the working class, which still carries the hopes of change, is much bigger now than it was in Marx’s day. While sophisticated commentators insist that the working class is vanishing, it is growing by hundreds of thousands every year and by millions every decade. Russia herself now has sixty million exploited industrial workers: China over one hundred million and among the teeming, hungry masses of what was until recently known as the Third World, new robust organisations are arising, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted “like Venus from the foam”. The events in Eastern Europe have proved like nothing else in the last 50 years that sudden volcanic social change does not happen when stockbrokers forecast it or academics work it out. It comes when the masses move, seek to emancipate themselves and in the process, in Marx’s famous phrase, “educate themselves, the educators”. Dictators and bureaucracies can call themselves socialists for so long. In the end, the actions of the masses will sort them out, and start once more to reveal things as they are. An industrial economy which is “planned” in the interests of a militaristic and parasitic minority is not socialist. It is its opposite: state capitalist. If state capitalism is being “conquered” by the masses emancipating themselves, then those same masses have blazed a path towards the conquering of all capitalism. The urgent need for socialists is to kick the rotten corpse of state capitalism away from Rosa’s “living school” of self-emancipatory socialism; to assert as aggressively as ever the socialist tradition which started with Marx and Engels, and was taken on by Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian revolutionaries, and by a small band of socialists who knew all along that socialism and democracy are synonymous, that neither can ever exist without the other, and that both can only be achieved when the exploited masses use their irresistible power. Top of the page Last updated on 12.8.2013

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Armed and dangerous (March 1996) From Socialist Review, No. 195, March 1996, pp. 8–9. Copyright © 1996 Socialist Review. Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Arguments about whether ministers should resign are not the main point of the Scott Report, says Paul Foot. The real dynamite is in the connection between government and the arms industry – and the level of deception involved So prolonged and extensive was the hype which heralded the Scott Report that an anti-climax was almost inevitable. The government’s approach to the report of the inquiry, which it set up itself, was twofold. Before the report came out, a mighty chorus of former ministers, led by former foreign secretaries Howe and Hurd, claimed that the inquiry had been ‘unfair’ and ‘flawed’. Senior ministers like themselves, they protested, had been asked questions which they had been given beforehand without lawyers to represent them! This was, they claimed, an interference with the inalienable rights of former ministers! On and on droned this chorus as the government braced itself for the report’s publication. When they eventually agreed to let the public read it, they released their own ‘press pack’ which was every bit as deceptive as any deception exposed in the report. The ‘press pack’ extracted the (few) sections in the report which were favourable to the government, and presented them as a fair summary. This worked a treat on the hacks in the government press (the Sun, Express, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Times etc.) all of whom concluded that there was no case at all for resignations. The Scott Report was then savaged in the same newspapers by journalists like former Times editor Simon Jenkins – who forgot to mention his long and close friendship with William Waldegrave, the minister most at risk from Scott’s revelations. Because the million word report was issued at 3.30 p.m. and could not possibly be read in full for at least two days after that, government ministers calculated that their own summary and the legendary laziness of their press toadies would enable them to ride out the storm. The ruse worked pretty well for a day or two but as more and more people read the report the awful truth began to sink in – that again and again, and in the most meticulous detail, Scott exposes government hypocrisy and deception on a grand scale. The basic political deception (which emerges much more clearly from the report than I had imagined) was the so-called ‘tilt to Iraq’. Most people who have studied the matter know that the US and British governments ‘tilted’ to Iraq during the latter stages of the long and murderous Iran/Iraq war of 1980–1988. The Scott Report pushes the tilt back to the very start of the war. As Scott’s figures for military and civilian trade decisively prove, Iraq was favourite from the outset. It follows that ministers’ insistence on their impartiality in the conflict – the foundation stone of their declared policy on defence sales – was sheer hypocrisy. The clearest example of that hypocrisy was the approach of the Export Credits Guarantee Department, which guarantees British exports. From 1985, the ECGD guaranteed the sale of defence equipment to Iraq to the tune of at least £25m a year. No such guarantee was available for Iran. In 1988, when the war ended, the guarantee for Iraq was quadrupled – to £100m. The chief secretary to the treasury who approved that huge leap (and denied any similar facility to Iran) was John Major, the man who has consistently pretended that he knew little or nothing of the arms to Iraq scandal while he was chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary and prime minister. In two other sections, the report exposes the central government hypocrisy – that arms to Iraq were carefully restricted throughout the period. First, all sorts of weaponry, often of the most lethal kind, got to Iraq from Britain through ‘diversionary routes’, chiefly through Jordan. Arms sales from Britain to Jordan were 3,000 percent (about £500 million) higher in the 1980s than in the 1970s. This had nothing to do with the expansion of the Jordanian armed forces, which were actually contracting in the 1980s. Almost all the extra weaponry went on to Iraq, and there were other conduits too: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Portugal, Singapore, Austria. Secondly, the ‘restricted’ policy became much less restricted for Iraq after the ceasefire of 1988. The entire British government was tempted by the honeypot which was opened up by Saddam Hussein as he expanded his vast armed forces after the peace treaty with Iran in 1988. The guidelines were changed to liberate a whole new category of defence sales, and no one was told about it. The effect of the change was further to expand the close friendship between the British government and that of Saddam Hussein. In July 1990, a cabinet meeting chaired by Douglas Hurd agreed to scrap all remaining restrictions on arms sales to Iraq. But before the ministers’ policy could be put into effect, their beloved ally Saddam Hussein wrecked everything by invading Kuwait. The policy of selling all arms to Iraq was rather hurriedly and nervously changed to selling no arms to Iraq. Most people, including the Labour Party, believe that the most important part of Scott’s work dealt with the Matrix Churchill trial in which ‘innocent men were nearly sent to prison because the government didn’t reveal the truth’. Socialists should beware this formulation. The directors of Matrix Churchill were merchants of death who knew perfectly well that the machine tools they were selling to their Iraqi customers were to be used for weapons, including nuclear weapons.

The directors of Matrix Churchill were merchants of death who knew perfectly well that the machine tools they were selling to their Iraqi customers were to be used for weapons, including nuclear weapons. They were not innocent men like the Birmingham Six or the Bridgewater Four. They were not framed for something they didn’t do. Their only defence was that the government knew what they were doing and let them do it, partly because ministers shared their intrinsic capitalist belief in the right to sell arms for a profit, partly because intelligence spooks liked to play silly secret spy games with the exporters. All that happened here was that HM Customs tried to enforce government policy restricting arms to Iraq while the government and the manufacturers were defying that policy. This led, naturally, to a balls-up which the government tried to cover up by denying defence lawyers the information about their own complicity in a conspiracy to defy their own policy. This is the reason why, for the first time ever in a criminal trial, ministers were asked to sign ‘gagging orders’ to keep the information from the defence, and happily did so. Only Michael Heseltine had any doubts about signing, and he signed in the end. What attitude should socialists take to the Scott Report? obviously, they will want to resist and expose the frantic efforts of ministers to play it down and denigrate it. On the other extreme, however, some anti-government politicians and papers have presented the report as a whitewash. The Observer’s headline on the subject was ‘How Scott was nobbled’. The theory here is that Scott was ‘got at’ and agreed to ‘water down’ his report. There is no evidence of this, however. The leaked drafts of the report are strikingly similar to the final version. The misapprehension in the ‘Scott was nobbled’ camp arises from impatience and outrage that the judge did not overtly condemn the government and the ministers responsible for serial hypocrisy and deception. This in turn derives from the belief that a high court judge will approach these matters like any ordinary rational citizen. The idea, however, that any judge will openly condemn a Tory prime minister, especially a serving one, is plainly absurd. just as judges expect deference from their minions, they are deferential to their political masters. There were therefore always clear limits to what Scott would say. His attitude, for instance, to Thatcher and to Major is positively obsequious. He swallows wholesale the fantastic notion that Lady Thatcher, the most interventionist prime minister in modern times, who was fascinated above all other things by arms sales and intelligence matters, did not know that three junior ministers, all of whom worshipped or feared her, changed the whole policy of defence sales to Iraq without her ever hearing of it. Major too, according to Scott, knew nothing about anything, and gets off on that score. But that is nowhere near the end of the story. Within the obvious limits which any socialist could have defined long before the report came out, Scott has applied himself with great care, considerable skill and determination to unravelling the mountains of secret information made available to him. It is this flow of information which makes the Scott inquiry unique. There has been, quite literally, nothing like it before, and the result is an exposé of the way British government works which is vital to anyone who is interested in these matters, and, for those of us who challenge the notion that parliamentary democracy is democratic enough, invaluable. Over and over again, in almost every single instance he investigates, Scott shows how the civil service and the politicians, either together or separately, combined to deceive the public about what really went on. Though of course he does not spell it out, the basic purpose of that secrecy emerges quite clearly. The entire machinery of the two major ministries most closely involved, trade and industry and defence, was organised to assist the arms companies. The attempts of the foreign office to control this ‘gung-ho’ approach in no way made the system any more democratic. For instance one of the main reasons why the foreign office was keen to restrict arms sales to Iraq and Iran was subservience to the government of Saudi Arabia, which was nervous of both Iran and Iraq and with whom the arms companies had far more lucrative business than anything likely to emerge from all the other Gulf states put together. So even the conflicts between the ‘restricters’ and the ‘let-it-all-go’ brigade were part of the same problem. Parliamentary democracy was useful to the arms sellers as long as it legitimised them. If it ever threatened to expose them, or, worse, to provide damaging information about what they were doing, the entire democratic procedure of parliament was brushed aside. The liberal Scott was shocked by this. ‘Why not tell people what you are doing and have a debate about it?’ he kept asking officials and ministers. Their answers were always evasive and unsatisfactory, partly because the real answer (‘We do things for ourselves, our class, our profit’) could not be spelled out. The fact that Scott, unsurprisingly, kneels to prime ministers and avoids spelling out the full force of his own investigation should in no way deflect from this enormous indictment, which, I predict, we will go on quoting extensively for as long as the system it indicts survives. Top of the page Last updated on 8 November 2019

< Paul Foot: Heath’s new race bid (1 February 1969) MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Heath’s new race bid (1 February 1969) From Socialist Worker, No. 107, 1 February 1969, p. 1. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. TORY LEADER Edward Heath made another bid in the new political game which is fascinating commentators at Westminster: The Immigration Auction Game. There are no rules. The prize – estimated at approximately one million votes – goes to the man who can declare the strictest control of coloured immigration as the policy of his party by the next election. There was, before 1968, a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in which no one could overbid by too big a margin. This agreement was broken by Enoch Powell. Now Heath is hopelessly trying to keep up by demanding that the government introduce tougher controls on dependents and ‘reserves the right’ to ban all immigrants ‘if the situation arises’. The bold Labour government has responded immediately by withdrawing the concession of entry for fiancees of immigrants already here. Powell, with the help of Nazi Colin Jordan’s bestselling sticker Powell was Right, is winning all, down the line. None of this has anything to do with the real situation, even the capitalist situation. The number of dependents of coloured immigrants is already declining as the tough controls of August 1965 start to bite. The number of immigrant workers coming in is now down to 4,000 a year. Almost all of these are skilled or professional people. Capitalism, in short, is not threatened in the least degree by immigration. The immigration auction game is restricted entirely to opportunists, men who care for nothing whatever except winning racialist votes. That appears to include almost everyone active in the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Top of the page Last updated on 26 October 2020

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Icon, icon in the wall ... (15 July 1989) From Socialist Worker, 15 July 1989. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000, pp. 22–24. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. What makes an icon out of an iconoclast? Perhaps the greatest iconoclast of all time was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He was an incurable atheist before the Russian Revolution and after it. He went to extravagant lengths to make sure no one in the new revolutionary leadership of Russia was worshipped while alive or when dead. He observed how hierarchical class society indulged in unashamed ancestor worship. Ruling class mandarins became infatuated with the terror of death. Many could not believe that they would ever die, but they compensated for their mortality by fantastic rituals after death. Their religions reassured them that in some way or other their soul or spirit would live on in even greater glory than on earth. To make sure of it they embalmed, buried or entombed each other’s dead bodies in grandiloquent ceremonies. As the acknowledged leader of revolutionary Russia, Lenin insisted on living the life of an ordinary citizen, wholly unadorned with pomp or ceremony. He wrote and spoke often about the importance of a secular approach to life and death and castigated the very notion that the dead were in any way at all more important than the living. Worship When he died in 1924, a furious argument broke out among his followers about what should be done with his body. The immediate, Leninist reaction was published in Pravda: ‘We must not venerate the corpse of Comrade Lenin, but his cause.’ This was the standard Bolshevik view argued vociferously by Trotsky and Bukharin. Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, pleaded: ‘Don’t make an icon out of Ilyich.’ It seemed for a day or two that this conventional Leninist view would prevail. But the Communist Party had already slipped into the hands of Stalin and his allies. They unleashed an orgy of adoration for the dead hero. ‘Under no circumstances can we give to the earth such a great and intensely beloved leader as Ilyich’, argued one leader in the Moscow newspaper Rabochaya Moskva. ‘We suggest his remains be embalmed and left under glass for hundreds of years.’ Stalin agreed. As Lenin’s will proved, Lenin himself had been extremely suspicious of Stalin in the early 1920s. Above all, Lenin was disgusted by Stalin’s religiosity. Stalin loved ornaments, symbols, icons. He believed people should worship their leaders. He set to work with consummate skill to turn the Russian people’s love and respect for Lenin into post-mortem corpse worship. He set up a body, horribly entitled the Immortalisation Commission, which threw up a makeshift mausoleum into which Lenin’s embalmed body was moved only six days after his death. In 1930 it was moved into the great granite monstrosity where it has been ever since (except for a break during the war when, in fear of invasion, it was moved with great difficulty and expense to a safe hiding place in the Urals). Glasnost There, millions of people from all over the world have come to pay their respects to the mummified and petrified body of a man whose whole life was dedicated to the ending of mummification and petrification. Only a handful of ‘splitters and sectarians’ were suitably disgusted. Now that more and more Russians are beginning to think for themselves, one or two people who imagine that glasnost means what it says have expressed doubts about the whole ghastly business, and even suggested that poor old Lenin might be afforded the humble burial or cremation he would have wanted. Not many weeks ago Mark Zakharov, director of the Leninsky Komosol theatre, went on an increasingly popular late night television show called Vzglyad. No matter how much we hate or love a person,’ he said mildly, ‘we don’t have the right to deprive him of burial.’ How did this very moderate and unsuperstitious idea go down with the unsuperstitious moderates who, we are told, run Russia today? It was immediately ostracised and denounced in terms of which Stalin would have been proud. Advice A former political commentator, Georgi A. Zhukov, asked: ‘Why is our state television tolerating such statements?’ The party leader in Vladimir, Ratmir S. Bobovikov, described any argument at all about whether to downgrade Lenin’s body to the miserable status of that of any other mortal as ‘simply immoral’. However much ‘freedom’ is being introduced into the Russian system, its rulers know perfectly well that the icon Lenin is of much more use to them than the iconoclast Lenin. They need Lenin as a symbol of hierarchy and immortality more than ever before. For them the great advantage of having Lenin embalmed and worshipped is that it deflects his adorers from reading him, understanding him and, worst of all, acting on his advice. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Tribunes and the people (January 1990) From Theatre Reviews, Socialist Worker Review, No.127, January 1990, pp.27-28. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Coriolanus “SHAKESPEARE was a Tory without any doubt”. Thus Nigel Lawson, in what must rank as one of the Great Asininities of the 1980s, in an interview in the Guardian in September 1983. Asked to explain himself Mr Lawson slid into characteristic incoherence: “I think that in Coriolanus the Tory virtues, the Roman virtues as mediated through Shakespeare are ... it’s written from a Tory point of view.” In milder and more coherent prose, William Hazlitt, perhaps the greatest Shakespearean critic of all time, tended to the Lawson view: “Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps for some feeling of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of bating the rabble.” In their different ways, Lawson and Hazlitt are both wrong. But from the productions of Coriolanus I have seen over the last 30 years, it is easy to see how anyone could come to that conclusion. The productions without exception have featured Coriolanus as a hero, the citizens as dupes, and the tribunes as self-serving hypocrites. This was true of the Coriolanus played by Laurence Olivier (1959), Alan Howard (1977), Ian McKellen (1986) and now Charles Dance. The present Royal Shakespeare production by Terry Hands seems to me even worse than his former effort in 1977: and that was unpolitical enough. The Coriolanus Shakespeare wrote is something completely different to the stiff, unbalanced and unconvincing play which is constantly produced in our theatres. Any socialist who goes to see Coriolanus must get seated early and listen, for the first few exchanges of the first scene of the first act lay the foundation stone for the entire play. The stage direction is apt: “Enter a company of mutinous citizens, with staves, clubs and other weapons.” In Terry Hands’ production the citizens are all dressed up in the same silly black uniforms. They are easily convertible into a mob. But in Shakespeare’s text each citizen has a character, and a separate argument. The first citizen takes the lead at once and proclaims: “We are all resolv’d rather to die than to famish”. With this agreed, he goes to the second proposition: “Caius Martius is chief enemy of the people”. There then follows a summary of the attitude of the Roman ruling class of the time which is not all that different from the British ruling class today. “If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear; the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread not in thirst for revenge.” Immediately, the second citizen argues with the general view, pointing out Martius’s services to the country, and demanding: “Nay, speak not maliciously.” The argument goes on for a bit until the patrician Menenius arrives to stop the rebellion. Menenius certainly was a Tory, not so much a Thatcher or a Lawson as a Whitelaw or a Macmillan, offering nice words and boring little homilies to the plebs he detests. His chief opponent in the argument which immediately follows is the second citizen, the one who previously had doubts about so rash a course. When Menenius claims the senate cares for the people, the second citizen explodes in fury: “Care for us? True indeed, they ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury to support usurers; repeat daily any wholesome act established against the rich and provide more piercing states daily to chain up and restrain the poor ...” Menenius tries to argue against this with a pleasing enough little metaphor about the limbs in mutiny against the belly which provides the nourishment for the limbs, but he is not very persuasive. And now, very early on in this first act, Caius Martius strides onto the stage, apparently justifying everything the citizens say about him with his first sentence: “What’s the matter you dissentious rogues that rubbing the poor itch of your opinion make yourself scabs?” He then delivers himself of the first of his many diatribes against the common people, calling them in quick succession, curs, geese and hares. He is beside himself with rage because he has just come from the Senate where they have made some concessions to the popular upsurge, granted slight reductions in corn prices and even agreed to the appointment of peoples’ tribunes. Shouts Caius: “The rabble should have first unroof’d the city ere some prevailed with me. It will in time win upon power, and throw forth greater themes for insurrection’s arguing.” He is against all concessions and would even take on all the demonstrators with his sword, had not a messenger suddenly announced the declaration of war with a neighbouring tribe, the Volsces. Martius immediately rushes off to war to become a great general and cover himself with blood and glory. One reason he loves war so much is that it provides plenty of opportunities to rid Rome and the patricians of “our musty superfluity” by which he means the poor and the unemployed. Back comes Martius from the conquered city of the Volsces, Corioles, to be acclaimed Coriolanus, and to seek the all-powerful post of consul. To do that, he must go through certain ceremonies to show his love for the people.

He must appear in humble clothes in the market place, speak to the people and, if they ask, show them his wounds. He despises this ritual. The fascination in his character lies not so much in his personal pride, which is prodigious, but in his inability to accept the advice of the Whitelaws and the Macmillans around him; to be nice to the people in order more effectively to rob them. He can’t stand being nice to them. He hates their working clothes, their stinking breath, their vulgar accents. Above all he hates the tribunes, who come from his class but have agreed to represent another one. The tribunes know perfectly well what Coriolanus is. He is (the word is apposite since it has Roman roots) a fascist. If he becomes consul, they reflect, “our office may, during his power, go sleep.” They therefore argue with the people to reject Coriolanus as consul. In the modern British theatre these scenes are always produced with a heavy bias towards Coriolanus. The tribunes are shown to incite the people against their will and better judgement. Once again, the text is different. The conversation between the tribunes and the citizens immediately after the “humble pie” scene in the market place goes like this. Sicinius (tribune): How now my masters have you chose this man? First Citizen: He has our voices, Sir. Brutus (tribune): We pray the Gods he may deserve your loves. Second Citizen: Amen, Sir. To my poor unworthy notice, he mocked us when he begged our voices. Third Citizen: Certainly, he flouted us outright. Once more there is an argument. The First Citizen, who was the agitator in the first scene, now takes up the cause of moderation. First Citizen: No, ’tis his kind of speech, he did not mock us. Second Citizen: Not one amongst us, save yourself, but he says he used us scornfully. He should have showed us his marks of merit, wounds received for’s country. Sicinius (tribune): Why so he did, I’m sure. Citizens: No, no; no man saw them. The citizens are disgusted by Coriolanus before even a tribune speaks a bad word of him. It is only then that the tribunes bring to bear the political arguments which, in the light of Coriolanus’s contemptuous behaviour and his record, are extremely serious ones. The best arguments come from Brutus. In Hands’ production these arguments are screamed and spat at the crowd as though the very decibel count would force them into the minds of the mob. In the text, though, they are powerful arguments about the advancing dictatorship: “When he had no power But he was a petty servant to the state, He was your enemy, ever spake against Your liberties and the charters that you bear I’ the body of the weal ...” and again a bit later on: “Did you perceive, He did solicit you in free contempt When he did need your loves: and do you think That his contempt shall not be bruising to you When he hath power to crush?” This is the argument used to incite people to action against coming tyranny. In the Paris Commune, for instance, the militants argued for the bloody hand to avoid the severed hand; for the terror of the many against the incomparably more horrible terror of the few. The people respond, reject Martius for consul and, as he makes more and more angry noises against them, threaten to kill him. This threat is withdrawn by advice of the tribunes. Eventually, as the play heaves back and forth from class to class, the tribunes decide on a compromise – banishment – which, like so many compromises since proves disastrous to them and the people. The people are not the collection of fickle idiots and their tribunes are not the screeching hypocrites which appear in Hands’s latest production, and all the other prestigious productions of recent times. The people have a case, and they argue it sensibly between them. The tribunes have a very strong argument, and they put it straight to the people they represent. When a senator asks if they intend “to unbuild the city and to lay all flat”, they answer with a great shout: “the people are the city.” This is not to pretend, Dave Spart-like, that Coriolanus is a revolutionary play against the fascist menace. That would be as ridiculous an interpretation as is the fashionable Lawson view. The people can be fickle: they do switch from side to side to side. They are as likely to murder a king as to worship him. Equally, their representatives are more likely to guard their own backsides than to fight for others of a different class. Coriolanus is a complex character, who gets our sympathy for his hatred of hypocrisy as much as he earns our contempt for his contempt of the common people. This is probably the best political play ever written, precisely because it shifts and moves between arguments and counter-arguments not of dummies and stereotypes but of real human beings.

This is probably the best political play ever written, precisely because it shifts and moves between arguments and counter-arguments not of dummies and stereotypes but of real human beings. Shakespeare knew well enough from his own life experiences (the biggest Midlands riots against the enclosures took place not far from where he was born) that the people had a case. He was also nervous, as almost everyone is, of what may happen if the class born to rule and used to rule is suddenly toppled from power. It is utterly ruinous of the play to take one side and its delicate balances against the other, to glorify the excesses of Coriolanus or to make imbeciles of the tribunes, as this most recent production has done. Bertolt Brecht loved Coriolanus more than any other play. He spent hours with it, rehearsing it, adapting it and even rewriting it to make sure the people had a proper say. In the end he admitted he could not improve on the original. What a tragedy it is that to please the likes of Nigel Lawson so many modern producers of Coriolanus do not learn the same lesson. Top of the page Last updated on 17.1.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Why you should be a socialist ... the case for the new Socialist Workers Party (1977) Published by the Socialist Workers Party, London 1987. Cartoons by Phil Evans. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Chapter 1 THE GROWING WRATH What is going wrong? Why are things getting worse? Why can we afford less? Why are we producing less? Are we living beyond our means? Chapter 2 CAPITALISM – CLASS AND CRISIS Who has to make sacrifices and why? Why are there people unemployed? Who causes economic crisis? Can we afford rich people? Chapter 3 WHAT WOULD YOU PUT IN ITS PLACE? What is socialism? Will it work? What about human nature? Will we all be like battery hens? Chapter 4 LABOUR’S PARLIAMENTARY ROAD – TO NOWHERE On how the Labour Party set out on the parliamentary road to socialism – and found it led in the opposite direction. Chapter 5 KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS: THE TRADE UNION LEADERS Can our trade union leaders lead us to a better world? Why are they always so distant from us? Why do they support wage freezes and cuts? Chapter 6 WHAT ABOUT RUSSIA? Is Russia socialist? Was the Russian revolution socialist? How was the revolution lost? Can you have socialism in one country? Is the Communist Party travelling towards socialism? Chapter 7 THE CHALLENGE OF THE RANK AND FILE Can the workers make a revolution? Aren’t they backward and apathetic? Chapter 8 WANTED – A NEW SOCIALIST PARTY Why is it wanted? What does it do? Doesn’t it lead to more bureaucracy? What socialist grouping can build a real socialist party? Where and how do you join? Top of the page Last updated on 19 August 2016

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Ten things everyone should know about the Labour Party (October 1994) From Socialist Review, No. 179, October 1994, p. 9. Copyright © 1994 Socialist Review Downloaded with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Labour, which is linked to organised workers, is better at any time than the Tories, who are linked to organised capital. ‘Without struggle there is no progress’: everything worth winning by the workers and the dispossessed has to be fought for. The less Labour fights the Tories, the less it is likely to beat them at the polls or anywhere else. The more Labour compromises and prevaricates, the more the fighting spirit of the people who vote Labour is dampened. The more that fighting spirit is dampened, the stronger and more confident grow employers, racialists and reactionaries of every description. The power of the elected parliament is all the time frustrated by the power of the undemocratic banks, corporations, judges and the media. The more a Labour government tries to be fair to the banks, corporations, judges or media, the more it becomes their captive. The more it becomes their captive, the more it attacks the people who vote Labour, thus ensuring a Labour defeat next time. This vicious circle is written into the history of the whole century. Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson couldn’t avoid it. There’s no chance that Blair and Co, further to the right even than Attlee and Wilson, will avoid it either. (Conclusion) Vote Labour, but keep up the fight down below to build the resistance into a force which is strong enough to dictate to the undemocratic elite at the top of society – and put an end to their interminable dictatorship. Top of the page Last updated on 25 April 2017

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Glamorising an atrocity (11 November 1989) From Socialist Worker, 11 November 1989. Reprinted in Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance, London 2000), pp. 215–216. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. I was trying to concentrate on what Nigel Lawson was saying to Brian Walden last Sunday, but I kept being put off by the fact that both men were wearing poppies. Not long ago, I was asked to go in for an interview on early morning television. I had to turn up at half past five in the morning. Hardly had I arrived than I was whisked into ‘make up’, where I was puffed and prettied for a few moments. I was then handed a poppy and told to stick it in my lapel. ‘We’re all wearing poppies today,’ a young woman said brightly. She was very upset when I replied that I was not wearing any poppy, then or at any other time. She rushed out of the room and appeared soon afterwards with the producer of the programme. He explained that it was decided as a matter of policy that all interviewees that morning (I suppose it was 11 November) should wear poppies in their jackets. I said I would not. He assumed I was objecting as a matter of fashion and assured me that a poppy would offset the colour of my jacket. When I explained that I objected not to the style of the poppy (still less to the colour, which was fine) but to what it represented he was most insulted and stormed out of the room. Slaughter I went into the ‘waiting area’, where I made small talk to Cecil Parkinson and Jack Cunningham, who were both wearing poppies. After a few minutes the producer appeared with the news that there was ‘no time’ for my interview but it was time for me to leave. How I feel about poppies, cenotaphs, remembrance days and armistice celebrations is wonderfully expressed in a film now in the cinemas – Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But. The film is about the hunt for years after the First World War to fit the thousands of ‘missing persons’ to real corpses. The whole atmosphere stinks with the obsession and glorification of death in what, with the possible exception of the Holocaust, was the most futile and disgusting slaughter of human beings in all human history. At one stage two men appear to petition the commander. They point out that about 10 percent of the men called up in the war were killed in it. Their complaint is that in their village no one died. Seventeen young men were called up, and 17 came back without even a lost limb to show for their heroism. In all the surrounding villages people were building war memorials, holding masses, probably even wearing poppies (I am not sure when that awful symbol was first thought of), but in their village they had only the living. The two delegates begged the commander to alter the local government boundaries to ‘take in’ a farm from a neighbouring village. Two men from the farm had been killed in the war. The next village had plenty of dead to celebrate and would not miss a mangy two! If the village could claim two dead, the morale of all the villagers would soar. Everyone could join in the mass worship of the dead. It starts as a joke, but the earnestness of the two men soon cuts out any laughter. This was a deadly serious business, into which was thrown the entire effort of the French ruling class. Their most crucial priority at that time was to glorify those who had died, not for their lives but for their deaths, to make of death on the battlefield a human achievement of which all the loved ones of the dead could feel proud. In all the sorrow, and the celebration of sorrow, no one would ask questions – why did all this have to happen, and who is responsible? Atrocity The wretched clusters of people searching for their dead husbands, brothers and sons are acting partly out of grief and nostalgia, but increasingly to build up their own self respect in a deeply chauvinist age. The only point which matters about the First World War and its sequels is that they must not be allowed to happen again. Honouring and worshipping those who died in them, praising them for their patriotic sacrifice and wearing poppies as symbols of their blood on the ground where they fell serves only to glamorise the atrocity and pave the way to the next one. Top of the page Last updated on 30 June 2014

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Bribery and corruption (13 February 1993) From Socialist Worker, No.1329, 13 February 1993, p.11. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. JOHN POULSON died last week. He got enormous obituaries in all the posh papers. These obituaries were written in the sort of reverential tone which might have been reserved, say, for the prodigal son. The general theme was that here was a man who had strayed and should be pitied by all decent upper class people. The real reason for the sympathy was, however, not that Poulson was a crook but that he was caught. Tories are always singing the praises of self made men and John Poulson was certainly that. His background was the very essence of stout hearted English self help. Born into a relatively modest home in Yorkshire, he turned out to be a specially stupid young man. He tried his hand at architecture but could not pass even the most simple exam. Because he managed to set up a practice before the war, he was able to masquerade as a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, though in fact he would never in ten lifetimes have qualified. Poulson was a rotten architect but he was very good at “handling people”. As an employer he was a bully and a skinflint. Greedy Tory But his most consummate skill was assessing the price of everyone he came in contact with. He was a Tory, but he noticed that Tories often charged more (and expected higher bribes) than Labour politicians, so he built his practice on the bribery of Labour councils in the north of England and Scotland. Of course if a greedy Tory came his way Poulson snapped him up. He welcomed wirth open wallet a Tory cabinet minister, Reginald Maudling, and a prominent Tory backbencher, John Cordle, whose membership of the Synod of the Church of England in no way precluded him from accepting generous bribes from John Poulson. Poulson built one of the biggest architectural practices in Europe by the simple device of bribing politicians, council officials, sheikhs and sultans. No Labour chairman of committees was too lowly for Poulson. Vast inedible dinners in hotels were his speciality for Labour councillors. There was no reason at all why John Poulson should ever have been knocked off his pedestal. The business world then (and now) was full of gangsters and charlatans who lived out their life in the full glow of their contemporaries’ high regard. Poulson was done down by his own greed. Like Robert Maxwell in a later period, he became obsessed with obtaining riches which were beyond his grasp. He borrowed too much and spent too much. When he finally went bankrupt, journalists who had honoured him and fed at his table turned on him to gloat at the “greatest corruption story of the decade”. Poulson went to prison for seven years. Yet he did nothing more than what other more skilful “entrepreneurs” have done. In many ways he was a model for the “enlightened self interest capitalism” which became known as Thatcherism. He helped himself at others’ expense, grabbed what he could from his workers, sold his cusptomers short with shoddy goods, built himself a palatial house and promised to do his duty to God and the Queen. When he wrote his life story he called it, appropriately, The Price. It didn’t sell any copies. Before it could even hit the bookstores it was being sued mercilessly by all sorts of people Poulson paid, and who would have done exactly the same if they had had the chance. Top of the page Last updated on 7.2.2005

MIA > Archive > P. Foot Paul Foot Immigration and the British Labour Movement (Autumn 1965) From International Socialism (1st Series), No.22, Autumn 1965, pp.8-13. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. 1. Imperialism and Racial Ideologies Ever since the start of industrial history the ruling classes have sought propaganda methods to divert the attention of the workers from the ineptitude and savagery of capitalism. Imperialism and Race have been used with recurrent fervour for this purpose – and with great success. Both issues are closely interlocked. Hand in hand with propaganda about the glories of empire – so assiduously used to drug the militancy of the worker in the last century – went the notion that those conquered by British marauders were in some way intrinsically inferior to them. For the British such notions were tinged with colour. For the colonised peoples were almost all black or brown, while the British colonists, including those in Australia and America, were white. Thus all white men were great men, and all black men were ignorant illiterate savages. This was no accidental conclusion. It was the deliberate propaganda of 19th century imperialists. It was, no doubt, their countrymen’s success in the business of robbing and plundering overseas which provoked the native Briton to an instinctive dislike of those who came from overseas to join him at work. The French Protestants or Huguenots who fled from Catholic terror at the start of the British industrial revolution were treated – despite their undoubted talents both as artisans and Protestants – suspiciously and even with open violence. Similarly the hundreds of thousands of Irish who came across the Irish sea – driven by imperialism and its famines – were met with undisguised hostility. The working people of Glasgow, for instance, organised an annual treat, which they called Hunting the Barney. After a jovial march through the slum closes of the city, the gentle folk would seek out an Irishman and murder him for sport. [1] Similar outbreaks of crude violence and anti-foreigner propaganda far more savage than anything we know today were commonplace, particularly in the West of Scotland and on Merseyside. Delicate priests would issue from their studies the religious ‘justification’ for such racial intolerance, which was not confined to the ‘lumpen’ mob. Often the most militant, most politically conscious of the embryonic working-class organisations showed most bitterness against the foreigner. To some extent, this was caused by the employers, who, at the time of strike, made common practice of journeying to Ireland and recruiting Irishmen for their factories, mines and mills at half pay. The starving Irishmen were quite prepared to brave the militancy of the English or Scottish trade unionists for a loaf of bread. Often, they paid for their daring with their lives. Such antipathy infiltrated the minds of even the greatest socialist theorists. Frederick Engels wrote of the Irish immigrant in Manchester that ‘his crudity places him little above the savage’ and made it plain that no revolution could depend on this half-savage for support. [2] Some years later Ben Tillett summed up the dilemma of the international socialist in a speech on Tower Hill. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you are our brothers and we will do our duty by you. But we wish you had not come to this country.’ Despite the resentment of the working class and the chauvinist bourgeoisie against the immigrant, the politicians were not worried. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century there were no powers for the Government to control immigration, no powers to deport immigrant criminals nor any demand for such powers. During this period the entire world could, in theory, have come into Britain free of restriction. The reasons for this liberalism were part economic, part political. Economically, Britain was by far the leading capitalist nation, and as such believed firmly in Free Trade. The winners of any race are, by nature, opposed to handicaps. With Free Trade and the free movement of goods went the free movement of that valuable commodity – labour. Similarly, politically, British politicians, not unfairly, regarded themselves as revolutionaries – champions of the new, dynamic capitalism; bitter enemies of the decaying feudalism which still hampered so many countries in Europe. Liberals held out their hands, grandiloquently, to political refugees from feudalism, and gloried in the ‘right of asylum’. Mazzini and Garibaldi, bourgeois revolutionaries par excellence, were welcomed as refugees into Britain, and Gladstone stomped the country pouring out invective against the inhumanity of the Italians in their dealings with Neopolitan political offenders. Palmerston forced the Portuguese into an amnesty for political prisoners. Yet at the same time both statesmen nodded their heads wisely as the convicted patriots (bourgeois revolutionaries also) of the Young Ireland State trials at Clonmel (1848) were deported by the British Government to Tasmania. They welcomed revolutionaries against feudalism in other lands; but they deported revolutionaries against imperialism. Even worse for these gentlemen was the emergence of men and women who called themselves revolutionaries, but who seemed uninterested in the struggle between capitalism and feudalism. These people – ‘anarchists’ or ‘nihilists’ as they were usually called – were opposed not so much to feudalism in one country as to capitalism in all countries. Moreover they were gaining access to Britain by quoting the right of political asylum. A man called Marx, for instance, had lived in Britain for 34 years, as a political refugee, yet his propaganda, apparently, was directed against the British Government as well as the German Government! Other European countries had taken action against anarchists from 1860 onwards, and after the Extradition Act of 1870 Britain promised to keep a close watch on the ports for any incoming ‘anarchists’.

Other European countries had taken action against anarchists from 1860 onwards, and after the Extradition Act of 1870 Britain promised to keep a close watch on the ports for any incoming ‘anarchists’. At the same time the economic basis for free immigration was being gradually undermined. America, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan – all were gaining in competitive strength. The British slumps in the 1870s and 1880s were the deepest of the century, and pressure groups arose, particularly among Midlands Tories, for restrictions on goods to protect Britain against her competitors. With the demands for protection went demands for the control and sifting of immigration labour. Such demands coincided with the persecution of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the consequent exodus of destitute political refugees, heading mainly for America. In the twenty-five years from 1880 to 1905 some 100,000 Jews settled in England, mainly in the East End of London. It was against the Jews that the reactionary Tory rump directed most of its propaganda, resulting in a Royal Commission in 1903. The Royal Commission effectively destroyed all the allegations against the Jews which were current on the extreme Right. The Jews, said the Commission, were not markedly more criminal or diseased than the indigenous population; their houses were overcrowded – but no more so than many houses of English people in other areas. The shocking conditions in which they lived were common throughout the English working class. Nevertheless the Commission (with two out of seven members dissenting) advocated immigration control. Balfour’s Tory Government, relieved by an excuse to introduce worthless and pointless legislation after long years of misrule, hastily drew up an Aliens Act. But so powerful was the Opposition from the Liberals that they were forced to withdraw it and bring forward another Act in 1905. This was opposed again, but was finally passed under the guillotine. The Act gave Home Office officials the right to refuse entry to ‘destitute’ aliens on grounds of poverty or disease. The Labour Party, small as it was, had split over the Aliens Act in 1904, three of its Parliamentary Members opposing the Act, and three abstaining. But in 1905 all six voted against the Act. In a powerful speech Keir Hardie described the Bill as ‘fraudulent, deceitful and dishonourable’. He demanded its replacement by an Unemployed Workmen’s Bill and asserted that ‘there is no demand for this Bill from the working classes’. [3] The Aliens Act became law in August, and in December the Liberals swept into office. They were forced then to manipulate the Act which they had so bitterly opposed, without, apparently, any opposition from the Labour Party, which had grown considerably in Parliamentary strength. Yet it was not until 1911, when Mr Winston Churchill went down to Sydney Street, there to watch heroically while several foreign anarchists were burnt to death, that the Liberals finally gave in to the Tory extremist pressure and promised stricter immigrant legislation. The Liberal Government of the time lasted five years before stiffening restrictions they had opposed; while the Labour Government of 1964-65, in not dissimilar circumstances, has waited nine months. Indeed the Liberal Government refrained from further legislation until 1914, when they hurried through an emergency Aliens Act, intended only for wartime. Such was the monstrous chauvinism of the First World War, however, that the 1914 Act was re-enacted permanently in 1919. The Act gave powers to the Home Secretary arbitrarily to deport all foreigners in Britain, and to his officials to refuse anyone entry on their own initiative. Foreigners in Britain, under the Act, must register with the police and inform them of any movement from district to district. The Act is still in effect today. It is this Act under which Soblen was deported and Delgado was refused leave to land. It is the most savage Act dealing with foreigners in the industrial world, outside Russia, China and Eastern Europe. 2. Labour Party Reactions The Labour Party at the time unanimously opposed the Act. Josiah Wedgwood, for instance, the Labour Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, spoke in terms which were at the time widely accepted throughout the Labour Movement: ‘We believe that the interests of the working classes everywhere are the same, and these gentlemen (the Tories) will find it difficult to spread a spirit of racial hatred amongst those people who realise that the brotherhood of man and the international spirit of the workers is not merely a phrase but a reality.’ [4] Yet the ‘international spirit of the workers’ was to vanish fast from the Labour benches. In the election at the end of 1924 in which the first Labour Government was flung from office, there were two main issues. The first was the ‘Red Letter’ alleged to have come from Zinoviev. The second was alien immigration. From constituency to constituency the Tory candidates raised the issue of immigration, indicating that Labour policy was to ‘Let Them All Come’. To which the Labour leaders argued strenuously that this was not the case. If anything, they boasted, Labour had naturalised fewer foreigners than the Conservatives! Thus, when the Tories hammered the point home soon after the election by moving an adjournment motion for tighter immigration control, Labour collapsed officially. They put up a London ILP-er called John Scurr to move an amendment, not opposing control, as in 1919, but opposing harsher measures. Scurr himself was an internationalist, and, goaded by the Tories during his speech, he slipped into internationalist terminology: ‘We are all internationalists,’ he shouted. Hon. Members: ‘All of you?’ G. Lansbury: ‘Yes, and why not?’ Scurr: ‘We are not afraid to say that we are internationalists – all of us.

Lansbury: ‘Yes, and why not?’ Scurr: ‘We are not afraid to say that we are internationalists – all of us. (Laughter). The boundaries between nations are artificial.’ No one can relate what that laughter represented. Perhaps it was provoked by the expressions on the faces of Labour leaders as they watched Scurr throwing away hundreds of votes by standing up to the racists. As Tory pressure continued, so the Labour Party retreated further. By the time the Labour Government took office in 1929, they had rejected all traces of internationalism in their attitude to aliens. Indeed it was a Labour Home Secretary, John Clynes, who laid the ghost of the ‘right of political asylum’ with his contemptuous refusal to allow Leon Trotsky to enter Britain, on the grounds that ‘persons of mischievous intention would unquestionably seek to exploit his presence for their own ends’. Thus the attitude of the Labour Party – and the trade unions – throughout the twenties and thirties remained thoroughly restrictionist. The old concepts of internationalism which had inspired so many of its members at the outset were very quickly forgotten – and were never again revived. Even the so-called ‘Left’ of the Party, symbolised by the formation of the Socialist League in 1935, stuck firmly to the chauvinist example set by Clynes and Macdonald. These traditions clung grimly to the Labour movement immediately after the election of a Labour Government in 1945. Indeed nothing demonstrated more clearly that the Labour leaders of that time were nonplussed by capitalist development than their attitude to aliens. Cripps, Dalton and company were as convinced as any revolutionary socialist that a slump was inevitable, and that they could do nothing to prevent it. Thus when a few back-benchers, including James Callaghan, called for a Government policy of recruiting labour abroad, Cripps and Dalton turned them down on the grounds that the foreign workers would present a serious problem when (not if) the slump came. Yet as it became clear that full employment – through no action of theirs – was here to stay, the Government was forced to look abroad for more workers. They were hampered by the ludicrous bureaucracy of the Aliens Act, which made any voluntary mass influx of foreigners impossible. Rather than repeal the Act, however (and give the impression of solidarity with the foreign workers), the Government moved outside it and established special schemes known as the European Volunteer Worker schemes. Under these schemes, the Government recruited about 250,000 displaced workers from Europe, including about 100,000 Poles, many of whom were in this country after the war and were reluctant to return to Stalinism in their homeland. A vicious campaign against the Poles, whose terms would bring a flush of pleasure to the cheeks of any modern racialist, was waged by the Communist Party and their two Parliamentary spokesmen, William Gallacher and Phil Piratin. Gallacher and Piratin never missed an opportunity to point out that the Poles were dirty, lazy and corrupt and should go back to their own country. [5] The terms under which these European Volunteer Workers came to Britain were extremely harsh. There was no question of the families, as of right, joining their menfolk, and the wives were allowed in only if they could prove that they too would get a job. If the workers fell ill, they were deported. When a Ukrainian boy who had fallen off a lorry and lost his sight while working as an agricultural labourer was deported to Germany, Mr Ernest Bevin brushed the matter aside with the homily, ‘These people have only been brought here to save them from forcible deportation to the Soviet Union and they have no claim as prisoners of war to remain here.’ Thus spoke the humanitarian Methodism to which the Labour Party owes so much of its heritage. This grisly process of contract labour could not last for ever. The expanding economies of Germany, France, Switzerland and Belgium quickly mopped up not only the remaining supply of displaced workers in Europe, but also the millions of workers who fled, helter-skelter, from the new Workers’ Paradises in the East. For a short time it looked as though the British economy would be throttled by a shortage of labour. What saved it was a historical accident of imperialism. 3. ‘Commonwealth’ Immigrants and Labour’s Collapse For the old robbers and imperialists who had crossed the high seas in search of new forms of exploitation in the nineteenth century, had, as a demonstration of their good manners and better feelings, imposed on their subjects the privilege of British citizenship. The only recognisable right of a British citizen in a colonial country was to come to Britain free of the harsh restrictions of the Aliens Act. Thus from 1948 onwards, workers in the West Indies, and, later, peasants from India and Pakistan began to make use of their sole privilege and seek work in Britain. Unlike aliens, and unlike European Volunteer Workers, these new workers could at will bring with them, or summon after them their wives, children and parents. The Labour Government, under whose auspices the process of Commonwealth immigration started, was happy to sit back and do nothing about it. But large-scale immigration did not begin until 1954. Between 1954 and 1961, when the Conservative Government first introduced a Bill to control Commonwealth immigration, some 200,000 coloured migrants entered the country. They were by no means all unskilled labourers. Many were skilled, white-collar employees – trained doctors, nurses, teachers and the like. Yet the majority of the migrant workers found their way (totally unaided) to the buses of London, the hospitals and engineering shops in the Midlands, and the mills of the West Riding and Lancashire. The initial reaction of the Labour movement was to do and say nothing. There is no official Labour statement on the matter until 1958, and the trade union conference confined themselves to general anti-racialist resolutions without reference to the specific social problems of immigration. Indeed the earliest demands for immigration control – in 1954 – came from Mr John Hynd, the Labour MP for Sheffield, Attercliffe [6], and Mr Patrick Gordon Walker, the Labour MP for Smethwick.