Distant Voices Read online

  Perhaps the real tragedy of the Labour Party is the time its wilful distractions have lost. The ‘market’ revolution has begun and there is now the popular will to resist it; but where is the mass-movement banner? Soon, capital will no longer need living labour, except as minor disposable servants. With an entire workforce being de-skilled and their communities destroyed, the balance of dependency between capital and labour is being altered as never before – so much so that capital will soon be able to free itself of labour, while still holding labour captive. That is, unless people fight.

  The lessons of how not to fight were demonstrated on December 9. The defenders of labour, led by Norman Willis, the staunch royalist, called a National Day of Recovery. This was the TUC’s response to the two great demonstrations in October that followed the Government’s proclamation that it was virtually closing down the coal industry. The TUC general council first sought the views of employers, while ‘ruling out a general strike’. In other words, all that the defenders of labour can offer is a call to working people to consummate a union of shop-floor, boardroom and government while their only power – their labour – is emasculated by their new conjugal partners.

  Willis’s successor, John Monks, has been rewarded for his modernist thinking with a promise of two confidential meetings a year with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kenneth Clarke. ‘I think’, said Monks, ‘there is a recognition that things are going to go in a direction inimical to the traditional values that the prime minister claims to espouse, and that the world of work may be connected with this development.’9 Although the TUC denies it, the model appears to be the American system, where one in five of all workers, and nearly half of all young workers, earn poverty-line wages; where working hours are longer and holidays shorter than in most advanced industrial countries; where the rate of accidents in the workplace doubled in the 1980s as a result of deregulation and imposed overtime.

  And what of Labour? John Smith did turn up at the great rally in Hyde Park in October 1992. His absence would have been embarrassing; this was a time when even the Daily Mail was discovering the ‘nobility’ of Britain’s miners. When Smith spoke, he urged the ‘public’ to keep up the pressure. As mining communities were attacked during the winter and spring, he said nothing. He did not even reply to the NUM’s appeal for support for a one-day strike. He went on to address the Confederation of British Industry’s conference and, according to the Daily Mirror, caused his audience to laugh nine times.

  While many Labour Party members despair at this, they remain fixed in the belief that there is no alternative to Labour. They should look to New Zealand. During the 1980s the New Zealand Labour Party and the conservative Nationals became indistinguishable as the ‘New Right’. At the general election in November 1993 the breakaway Alliance, representing Labour’s activists, took 18.3 per cent of the vote. Alliance leader Matt McCarten has refused to join a coalition with Labour. ‘The main arena is now going to be in Parliament’, he said, ‘because Parliament is going to be democratic, at last. We will vote for laws that move towards our manifesto and against laws that go against it. We are a mass movement, and we shall address issues of class and race and gender. It’s a beginning.’10

  December 1992 – December 1993

  THE COUP

  BORIS YELTSIN’S ‘REFORMS’, said President Clinton last week, ‘must be protected because they represent our way of life.’ John Major echoed that Britain’s support for Yeltsin’s ‘democracy’ was ‘unambiguously clear’. Yeltsin, meanwhile, had just issued his umpteenth decree, suspending the constitution and taking control of the media ‘in order to guard its independence’.

  This, of course, is normal behaviour in many countries ‘protected’ by the west. Should democracy break out in these places – that is, democracy in the dictionary, rather than the Orwellian, sense – it is quickly discouraged or crushed. Haiti, Angola and Zaire are recent examples. There is a western Newspeak that complements this process. Yeltsin’s opponents are ‘hardliners’ or ‘former communists’, regardless of their democratic credentials. Widespread public opposition to his ‘reforms’ is unmentionable; the fact that 60 million pensioners stand on the brink of starvation is irrelevant.

  Our controlled perspective of events in Russia, which owes much to a perverse use of language that is the currency of news, mirrors the way we are directed to see events at home. Here, ‘reforms’ that are similar in nature and purpose, if not in scale, are at a critical stage. The destruction of the value of pensions in Russia and the economic warfare being waged against millions of people in Britain come from the same ideological source, which is the antithesis of democracy. When Margaret Thatcher said there was ‘no such thing as society’, she was defining the ideology that bears her name worldwide.

  As Thatcher knew, society is something that can only be organised collectively and through the public and community sphere; and every day that society cedes its countervailing power to the absolute claims of ‘the market’ it dies. It dies not only in socialist terms, but in liberal terms. The great wave of unemployment and insecurity has now broken over the middle class; and those liberal commentators who insist that Thatcherism is discredited deny the evidence of their eyes. Thatcherism remains in safe hands. Indeed, it is unlikely Thatcher herself would have done all that Major is doing, such as privatising the railways and preparing to sell off the Post Office. Major’s media persona as a decent, if incompetent, drone has been, for him, a godsend.

  The coup against democracy in Britain has been a silent one. Here there is no Yeltsin and no constitutional difficulty; the coupmasters are a coalition of accredited factions. There is the government faction and the ‘opposition’ faction. Should their alliance be doubted, I recommend a reading of last month’s anthem to ‘the market’ by Gordon Brown, and the recent speeches of Tony Blair on crime and punishment. ‘Blair’, said Kenneth Clarke, then Home Secretary, ‘is the best opponent I’ve had. We’re trying hard to find differences on law and order.’ In its quest to out-Tory the Tories, Labour has become the New Right in what is, in effect, a one-party state.

  In the meantime, and with virtually unlimited prerogative powers provided by the British Crown, the Thatcherite executive has appointed an unelected, secret nomenclature. This bureaucracy is in charge of the ‘reforms’ that are destroying democratic accountability in Britain. For example, the National Health Service is now run entirely by the Government’s placemen. The one small local democracy component was scrapped under the legislation that gave the NHS over to the ‘internal market’ – the system that causes death after death among patients denied treatment by the ‘logic’ of the market.11

  In education, the Schools Examination and Assessment Council now dictates directly to schools ‘on anything from the age at which children should use commas to when they should learn to swim’. Following the abolition of the elected Greater London Council, its £7.5 billion budget went to unelected and unaccountable bodies such as the London Docklands Development Corporation. Thus, millions in state aid were ‘invested’ in the bankrupt Canary Wharf and other disasters.12

  The list of undemocratic bodies embraces every area of public control, from the Training and Enterprise Councils to the Teachers’ Pay Review Body. Whereas in the days of ‘consensus’ some effort was made to include trade unionists and ‘ordinary people’ on quangos, today’s secretive committees are packed with right-wing sectarians, of whom the principals are approved by the Policy Unit at Downing Street. And many such ‘loyalists’, as Thatcher called them, skip from one quango to another. (This is not to suggest they would be different if replaced by Labour nominees, as the singular voice of the bi-party parliamentary select committees demonstrates.)13

  At the same time the Crown prerogative (this active, political power of the monarchy is almost never mentioned in the British press) gives government ministers undefined discretionary powers to abolish any level of sub-national government. These powers were used in abolishing the Greater
London Council and metropolitan counties in the mid-1980s. The executive even drafted a bill to abolish elections to speed up the counties’ demise.14

  Of course, a ‘free market and a centralised state’ were the essence of Thatcherism. The ‘logic’ of this is expressed in exquisite doublespeak. As the market was ‘freed’ (that is, rigged), so democracy was ‘freed’ (more tightly controlled than ever). The Yeltsin Russians and the Li Peng Chinese understand this well, and that their own anti-democracy can flourish behind a façade of ‘new economic zones’, run on cheap labour and environmental vandalism.

  However, they can learn from Britain. Take the rigged energy ‘market’, the jewel in the crown. The privatising of coal, and the decimation of pits, will make wealthy the placemen who run electricity, gas and coal. The final destruction of the miners’ union is a bonus. The scrapping of some 50,000 working lives is irrelevant to the ‘dynamics’ of the market.

  The coupmasters depend on the media to spread the exciting word and to silence those who understand its truth. However, it is too easy to believe that political reality is fabricated by the media. In fact, there is a kind of critical intelligence and common sense inherent in ordinary language, in the way people arrive at their values. According to Social Trends, most of the British have dangerous thoughts about ‘market’ ideology. More than three-quarters of them believe profit is something that should be invested and go to the benefit of working people. Barely three per cent believe that shareholders and managers should benefit.

  Increasingly, the British middle class understands that the destruction of the trade union movement and the public sector is a threat to their security. The concerted action that is now building among teachers, health workers, railway workers, miners and other public employees is likely to receive wide support. If eight million can take part in a general strike in Italy, often in defiance of their trade union aristocracy, something similar can happen here. If direct action can prevent France from dismissing thousands of employees, the same can happen here. The problem is one of national leadership, not impact. A secret Ford management document says, ‘A British truck fleet dispute would probably result in the progressive closure of all Ford European manufacturing plants within three days.’

  Such is the power that working people have within their grasp. Once again, they are the countervailing power. There is no other.

  April – December 1993

  THE ITALIAN FACTOR

  WATCHING THE POLITICAL caricatures at the Tory Party conference in Blackpool last week, I recalled Edward Thompson’s lament that he belonged to ‘an emaciated political tradition, encapsulated within a hostile national culture’. Thompson described this country as his ‘reluctant host’, suggesting that those who oppose Toryism are a beleaguered minority.

  I can well understand his sense of despair; millions of people all over Britain will have felt the same as they watched the precocious Peter Lilley and the unctuous Michael Howard competing for Armband of the Week. Their targets were the vulnerable: the old, the young, the disabled, single parents and those men and women who exercise and defend the right to work for more than a pittance, and in safety.

  Under Margaret Thatcher and John Major much has been achieved in these areas. More than ten million British workers now live in poverty. A quarter of all British children are growing up in poverty. As in the early nineteenth century, new prisons are to be built to meet the predictable boom in petty crime.

  Of course, there will be no new prisons for those who owe £23,000 million in unpaid corporation tax and £1,600 million in unpaid Value Added Tax; and for those who engage in City fraud amounting to £5,300 million every year. Lilley and Howard said nothing about the £12,000 million in public money lost in the privatising of the water, gas and electricity industries; and the decimation of the pits that means that foreign coal has to be imported; and the acceptable corruption.

  Tory Britain is not a long way from corrupt Italy. Lo stile è diverso. Indeed, acceptable corruption is evident at every level of the Tory pyramid, from the selling of knighthoods (£500,000 in party ‘donations’; individuals usually no less than £50,000), to the ‘packing’ of health trusts with the acolytes and funders of the Tory Party, to the manipulation of official statistics, to the lying that is now part of ministerial duty, as the enquiry under the judge, Lord Justice Scott, has shown.

  The Scott inquiry is an aberration. Meant as a device to silence parliamentary debate following the scandalous behaviour of ministers in the Matrix Churchill affair, it has provided a glimpse, no more, of the rottenness of state power in Britain, or how the system works. It has shown how the Government embarked on a cover-up in which it was ready to see innocent businessmen go to prison rather than admit that it had deceived Parliament.

  In the witness box ministers have blamed their officials, and the officials have charted the extent of the lying. Margaret Thatcher has been directly implicated in approving arms exports to Saddam Hussein, while denying everything. John Major has also denied everything, in spite of the fact that he was the chief secretary to the Treasury who increased export credits to Iraq, and foreign secretary when the guidelines for trade with Iraq were being administered by William Waldegrave, his minister of state, and chancellor when Customs and Excise reported to his private office that it had begun investigating Matrix Churchill, and prime minister when he discussed with Alan Clark, a defence minister, the export of arms to Iraq. Appearing before the enquiry, Major uttered this gem: ‘One of the charges at the time was that in some way, because I had been foreign secretary, chancellor of the exchequer and prime minister, I must have known what was going on.’15

  There may at times be a farcical ‘carry on’ element to Tory corruption, but corruption it is. And ordinary Tories apparently believe it is. In a poll taken by the Daily Telegraph, 64 per cent of its readers found the government most of them had voted for ‘disreputable’ and ‘sleazy’.16

  Here, I disagree with Edward Thompson: I believe that Toryism as the ‘host culture’ is an illusion, albeit a powerful one. What it has, above all, is an unchallenged voice. For example, Thatcher was not a ‘unique political force’, as her mythmakers contend. What she did was to popularise petit-bourgeois reaction and to silence any opposing voice. Indeed, her greatest single achievement was the co-opting of British liberalism: from the liberal media to the Labour Party.

  The liberal intelligentsia, in the press and academia, never seriously exposed Thatcherism by denouncing its tactics and decoding its language. Fraudulent notions of ‘freedom’, ‘choice’, ‘enterprise’, ‘modernising’ (as in Cruise missiles and the Labour Party), ‘family values’ and ‘reform’ were not only allowed to become common usage, but were adopted by those once proud of their liberal credentials.

  Moreover, liberal celebration of the rigged ‘market’ was always assured; count the number of times the BBC refers to ‘economic reforms’, a propaganda term. In a recent Panorama, the falsehoods of the Government’s current assault on single mothers were reinforced with some of the most reactionary voices in Britain, dubious statistics from America and the reporter’s judgmental question: ‘Should we accept single mothers as the norm?’17

  Who are ‘we’? ‘We’ are those who work to and speak for a Tory agenda while pretending otherwise. ‘We’ are the New Right. The present Labour Party leadership, who are Thatcher’s greatest triumph, are every bit as effective as Lilley and Howard. ‘We are the party of law and order,’ announced Tony Blair in Brighton, no doubt prompting Michael Howard to up the ante one week later.18 This is the essence of the relationship between the two party leaderships. Gordon Brown says he will not take Value Added Tax off fuel; Kenneth Clarke concurs. David Blunkett says there is ‘not enough productivity’ in certain London hospitals; Virginia Bottomley agrees and promises to close them. Barry Sheerman, from Labour’s front bench, urges the minister for defence procurement to sell more British arms to tyrants like the Emir of Kuwait; the minister assures him he will do
his best. And so the pattern proceeds, with each side pushing the other along the same sectarian path.

  For this reason the Labour Party conference was significant. The ‘broad church’ was finally demolished, and John Smith’s ‘triumph’ had nothing to do with the ‘democratic principles enshrined in one man, one vote’, but in the historic fact that Labour’s New Right is finally accepted by the media.

  The official Tory, as well as the liberal, media understand the scale of the New Right’s achievement: that Labour has finally rejected Anthony Crosland’s argument, which spoke for the party’s once dominant old right, that ‘a concerted attack on the maldistribution of wealth should be part of Labour’s policy’. That last veil has now been dropped. At Brighton, the term ‘one member, one vote’ represented an attack not on the trade union establishment, but on the party’s remaining egalitarian values. In order to give John Smith his media triumph, trade union leaders reversed the democratic decisions of their rank and file. For example, 750 delegates of the Union of Communication Workers voted against Smith’s proposals. At Brighton, just nineteen delegates went against them.

  It is this kind of collaboration that has served to blunt real political opposition in Britain. When the party conference voted democratically against the nonsense of keeping Trident, the leadership demonstrated its commitment to ‘democracy’ by ignoring it.

  In my experience, Britain’s ‘host culture’ is a rich mosaic of multicultural life: of people who enjoy both their differences and their sense of community and owe no allegiance to an ancien régime or Toryism’s ‘modernised’ successor. Like Social Trends, a Guardian poll has found that Britons are now well to the left of all the ‘mainstream’ parties. Clear majorities believe that there is ‘one law for the rich and one for the poor’; that privatisation should be stopped; that there should be higher taxes; that it is more important to reduce unemployment than to control inflation.19 In other words, those who have ‘put out the people’s eyes’, to paraphrase Milton, have not blinded them.