I met the veteran British Labour politician, Michael Foot, who died last week at the age of 96, twice, with a spread of twenty years between the two occasions. The first time I met him was in the Autumn of 1979 a few months after the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher had come to power that May. He was 66 at the time and had broken his ankle. I remember hobbling up to the urinal next to the one I was using. I engaged him as best I could while we washed our hands. He was speaking at a talk on 'Forty Years On' from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, something he had witnessed as an MP and in 1940 had written 'Guilty Men' attacking the appeasers of Hitler. Interestingly he wrote it under the Classical pseudonym Cato and later wrote another book under the name Cassius. In some ways I feel an affinity with him in terms of the need to protect your private life and especially those you love, when making political points.
The thing about Foot which I was to witness that day was though at times his speeches wandered, they were always engaging and full of life. He was able to quote extensively and was very adept at using people's own words against them. On the day of his death I listened to the speech he made in 1979 (in those days there was only radio coverage not television coverage) at the time of the vote of no-confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan; it was played on the Parliament channel. It was both funny and poignant in the ideas and challenges it laid out. I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a political speech so much.
I met Michael Foot again when he was launching 'Dr. Strangelove, I Presume' (1999). He was standing in Bloomsbury waiting to be collected. I had seen him at a bus stop in the Charing Cross Road a couple of years earlier. Despite his age (86 in 1999), he seemed full of energy. I had once met his doctor who outlined how he walked vigorously across Hampstead Heath. He had been rejected from volunteering for the army for the Second World War on the grounds of his asthma and he seemed to wear thick glasses all his life. One might have thought in his late 80s he was going to slow down, but as it turned out he had another entire decade of life ahead of him.
Anyway, again I had encountered Foot on his way to an event that I was actually attending myself. I took the opportunity to approach him and recounted how we had met twenty years earlier, though of course he would not have remembered. The world seemed incredibly different to 1979 to me and I got a bit of a sense of how the full expanse of his life appeared. The event was a small scale thing and had a kind of collegiate atmosphere. Some of the audience seemed to presume that his age was making him forgetful and this seemed to be the case when he did not respond to one question. The same question was asked again and very honestly, he said that he had not responded to it earlier, though he had taken in on board fully, because he had no answer for it. It was clear that his mind was as sharp as ever.
Michael Foot was an easy focus for ridicule, something that really haunted him when he was leader of the Labour Party, 1980-83. He was ridiculed for appearing at the Cenotaph in a duffel coat as if it was offensive. However, in my eyes, it was practical for a man of his age (Thatcher was 54 when she came to office) standing around in November and to some degree the extent of the ridicule suggests that he was still seen as a challenge by the Conservatives. In her first term of office Thatcher was not as secure as people now assume. There was uncertainty even within her own party about the direction she was going in, certainly away from the policies of Edward Heath towards an anti-European Community (ironically something she shared in common with Foot), far more pro-America and certainly pro-nuclear policy, backed by New Right monetarist economic policies which were wrecking so much of British industry. If it had not been for the Falklands Conflict of 1982 and the populist chauvinism that that threw up she would have found it far harder at the 1983 election than she did. Politics had turned very nasty as seen by the comedian Kenny Everett's (1944-95) call to a baying Conservative crowd to 'kick away Michael Foot's stick!'. Foot had used a stick to walk since a car accident in 1963.
Neil Kinnock made a very important point last week about Foot's role in keeping the Labour Party alive during the dark days of the Thatcher regime. The tendency among many Labour supporters in 1979 and beyond was to become more radical and move over to revolutionary politics. This threatened to remove the Labour Party from the mainstream of British politics, and as we know from the extreme left and extreme right parties, let alone people like the Green Party, such a location means not having representation in the UK parliament. Thatcher stated that she wanted to move towards a political system like that of the USA with two parties that were pretty close together around a rather right-wing 'centre' and in a television interview said she wanted to see the end of Socialist and semi-Socialist parties (a way she had characterised the Liberal Party on another occasion). A more radical Labour Party would possibly have allowed her to do that. However, given the fact that we have the kind of political pattern that Thatcher wished for, circulating around the Thatcherite Consensus with Labour and the Conservatives so close, perhaps the purging of the extremists under Kinnock after he became leader in 1983 might suggest that it meant moving to what Thatcher desired.
Foot's integrity and willingness to embrace challenging, if not utterly radical policies, meant he could not be beaten down by extremists like Militant Tendency, within his own party. While Labour now might be shorn of true radicalism it is intact and in fact that might be Foot's greatest legacy. The creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) including disgruntled right-wing Labour MPs in 1981, showed the risks of fragmentation for the Labour Party. Even if Labour managed to lose the argument for reforming policies the party did not shatter in the way it had after 1931 condemning it to impotence for a decade or the way the Liberal Party did after 1922 leaving it feeble for the rest of the 20th century. Becoming a number of small differently shaded left-wing parties would have meant no hope for anyone opposed to Thatcher. Kinnock had a party to take over even if it had to lose a lot of what he and Foot had stood for before it could come back to power, or, perhaps not, given the irregularities of the 1992 election.
Foot was particularly condemned in the 1980s for supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament. He did this because he had long believed in the immorality of nuclear weapons, but of course there would have been a real economic benefit for the UK if it had given up on nuclear weapons in the 1980s. The Trident nuclear weapons cost £1 billion per year to keep and the estimated total is £97 billion by the time they will have been scrapped. To replace them will costs £130 billion. These are sums which make bailing out the banks look pretty minor. The Polaris system, that preceded Trident, which the UK bought for £300 million in 1962 (worth around £6 billion at today's values) . If this money had gone into hospitals or transport or education or power generation, Britain would be in a very different situation to where it is today. We know that the fear of a Soviet invasion was constantly falsified and certainly from the 1970s onwards the USSR would have found it impossible to invade West Germany even if they had wanted to. The Soviets had minimal concern about the UK and yet we had to cripple our economy for the sake of a fantasy, making lots of US arms manufacturers very rich in the meantime. Even President General Dwight Eisenhower (president 1953-61) spoke of the 'military-industrial complex' that was so influential in the USA and clearly in the UK too. British jobs were not created by the regular purchase of US nuclear weapons. The current Labour government does not support the abolition of the UK's nuclear weapons, only the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) backs such a policy even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years.
In many ways, however, Foot represented an older generation of politician. He was probably out of date even in the 1960s when Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had adopted his pipe and raincoat as his trade marks for the television era. Foot appeared as he was, an ordinary old man of the kind you might see in the post office. However, the public want someone with a certain style than marks them out from the ordinary; John Major only really succeeded by being painfully ordinary. For Foot it would always be ideas and good policies that would mark out a politician but the public no longer felt that, for them style was now more important than substance.
Foot was more of the style of the Gladstone era in which long speeches which showed the erudite knowledge of the speaker were the norm and were a kind of entertainment and education as well as stirring. In the sound bite age, his wandering speeches could not be easily 'chunked' for the short attention span viewers. His legacy fed into Neil Kinnock, his successor as leader of the Labour Party, who though far younger (41 when he became Labour leader in 1983) did not shake off the lengthy expositions that Foot had favoured. These men were right, politics is not simple and simplifying it makes policies have a tendency to error. However, after the 1970s British society was 'tired of politics' and no-one can be bothered to listen to policy outlined, they would rather have emotionally swaying chunks of information that they can be certain are 'true' without analysing them at all.
Foot held fast to the deeply held views he had. He was not a pragmatist as that would have been to betray his views. He was a republican (seeking abolition of the monarchy) and was ardently opposed to nuclear weapons at a time when they had been made to seem 'vital' for Britain despite their huge expense and the hazard they presented. Similarly he believed in a mixed economy, i.e. with state-run and privately-run businesses, which ironically in the era of the enduring Thatcherite consensus fostered by Tony Blair, we have ended back with. Yet, the 1980s were seemingly all about 'free enterprise', well in fact not really free, just enterprise for the privileged and the already wealthy. Whilst millions were losing their jobs this fantasy of a society where ordinary people could be rich was sold very successfully to too many voters. Foot could not have lied to the public that way. Providing opportunity for all is costly but is morally right. In that respect, Foot can be seen as contributing to a humanist morality (he was an atheist) something which seems very at odds in the current UK where we have a choice between selfish, (in effect immoral), behaviour fostered by the right and the left seemingly to adhere to a sense that only faiths can supply morality, especially fostered by the Blairite New Labour, though more muted under Gordon Brown.
Michael Foot was a living reminder of a different, moral-based, intellectually-engaging form of politics which we seem so far away from these days even though the extremities of Thatcherism have been curtailed (for now). One has to admire someone of such ability and conviction and I feel proud that I was able to meet and talk with him on two occasions.
Showing posts with label Neil Kinnock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neil Kinnock. Show all posts
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Unfeasible 'What If?' of the Miners' Strike 1984-5
This is very much a British focused posting that probably means very little to anyone under the age of 35 unless you grew up in the coal mining and former coal mining areas of the UK. It is twenty-five years since the last (coal) miners' strike in British history broke out. At the time there were around 180,000 miners (working at 170 mines) of whom around 130,000 went on strike, the notable area not going on strike being Nottinghamshire mines which employed 49,000 miners. These days there are about 6,000 coal miners working at 12 mines in the UK. The strike started on 3rd March 1984 and there has been a lot of media coverage of the 25-year anniversary of the strike which ran officially for a year to 3rd March 1985. The divisions it provoked are still felt in many locations across Britain and it is often seen, along with the Falklands Conflict in the foreign field, as defining Thatcherism. The leader of the miners' union, the NUM, Arthur Scargill, is still around and is still incredibly bitter especially towards the Labour Party and other trades unions who he feels betrayed the miners by not giving them sufficient political support and effectively causing a general strike in order to bring down the Thatcher government. Interestingly, in an article in 'The Guardian' today he claims that Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party 1983-92 would have become prime minister in 1992 if he had given stronger support to the miners. I am going to look at this argument.
In some ways I respect Arthur Scargill. What he said about the longevity of coal mining in Britain (the country had 300 years supply of coal remaining at 1980s levels of consumpton) and the fact that the Conservative government was going to destroy the industry for political reasons was all true. However, Scargill has been unable to accept defeat and continues very bitterly to look for scapegoats. People condemn Scargill as having brought misery to thousands of miners and leading a strike which at times became violent (though much less so than the media portrayal of it). Eleven people involved in different sides of the strike were killed and the battles between strikers and police led to the injury of hundreds more. The iconography of events lasts longer than the facts of what happened, so we are left with a legacy of something resembling a medieval conflict, with shield walls of police opening to allow mounted police to ride down strikers with batons as knights would have come down on peasants 600 years earlier and hussars did on strikers of the 19th century. Scargill is also condemned for bringing about a strike which did not have only industrial goals but also political ones, namely to end the Thatcher government, and possibly, bring about some kind of Socialist revolution.
It is clear that Scargill is a Socialist, perhaps a revolutionary too, but the main element of the strike was to protest the systematic accelerated destruction of the UK's basic industries brought about by the Thatcher governments (1979-90). Of course UK coal mining would have faced challenges no matter what government had been in power as the 1970s and 1980s saw a shift in the pattern of industry across the globe. As early as 1974, a year after the USA, the UK first generated more income from service industries than manufacturing. No-one was really in a position to halt that shift. Coal mining alongside steel manufacturing, ship building and many other forms of engineering was facing decline. Scargill, loyal to his followers, was unwilling to consider any coal mine in the UK was 'uneconomical' so closing any was a real challenge to him. Of course many were profitable and very modern and yet Thatcher seemed to be keen to rid the UK of the industry. Thatcher's New Right monetarist policy smashed through so much industry in Britain anyway pushing unemployment up to 4 million (when it is properly counted, not the way the government manipulated the figures) but with coal mining she set out on a path of utter, planned destruction. Scargill says that NUM had negotiated five settlements with the NCB (National Coal Board - the employers) even while the strike was on, the last coming in October 1984, but these were derailed directly by the government.
I think a lot of this stems from how Thatcher saw coal miners as a political challenge just by their very existence. This was on two bases. First that in the 1973-4, 'three-day week' period they had shown how powerful they were in disrupting all kinds of industry by choking off coal supply to power stations. Second coal mining villages had a strong sense of community that (in many areas, not all) the Thatcherite policies of bribery did not seem to penetrate. She also wanted revenge for the miners strikes 1972 (their first strike in almost fifty years) and 1974 which effectively brought down the government of Conservative Edward Heath in 1974. Thatcher had no love for Heath but I think she felt the Conservative Party itself had been humiliated and so she wanted to get revenge by closing down the industry which had been nationalised in 1947. Of course Thatcher hated trades unions anyway, but the NUM was seen as the epitome of what she despised in them, by destroying the coal mining industry she knew she could destroy the union. Norman Tebbit, the very nasty leading light of the Thatcher regime, saw the battle with the NUM as a 'war on democracy', so not only elements of the NUM but clearly the Conservative leadership went into what should have been an industrial dispute with the perspective that it was more widely political.
We know that Thatcher envisaged a final showdown because of the preparations she made. In 1984 the UK had enough stocks of coal to provide sufficient for two years and everyone knew no strike can last that long; even a year meant incredible sacrifice by strikers. The moment this stockpile was secured the miners had lost because however much they striked they could not impinge on anyone outside their own communities. Thatcher was going to closed the bulk of the mines anyway, she had no need to negotiate. The harsh police action, which set many officers up for life with the amount of overtime payments they accrued, also showed other unions that they could expect merciless action if they struck. What always strikes me as curious is why the NUM was not aware of the stockpiling of coal. Even if it was a mix of UK dug coal and certainly of cheap foreign coal, probably from Poland and Australia, why was no-one aware of its build up? Surely there were seamen and dockers who noticed it coming in week after week; surely there were workers at power stations who knew they had big stocks. To put it in context, multinational oil companies such as Shell and BP have long argued that it is almost impossible to stockpile more than 90 days' supply of oil, even during the 1950s and 1960s when consumption was less. The Ministry of Defence used to hold around 5-10 days' worth of oil. So where do you put 2 years' worth of coal without anyone noticing? I accept that it might have been bought and held overseas ready for import, but I doubt Thatcher would have run the risk that seamen and dockers would refuse to ship and unload it once a miners' strike was underway.
Scargill believes he 'had' victory in October 1984 and was undermined by the pit deputies' (the health and safety staff in mines) union NACODS returning to work. This is a delusion on Scargill's part. Even a deal with the NCB would have been insufficient, Thatcher would have found a way to either provoke the strike into continuing or simply to introduce the mine closures she wanted all along. Scargill's harping on the failure of the five settlements, suggests he did not have wider political goals, but simply wanted to save the jobs of miners. However, even if this is true and his focus was purely industrial, there is no dispute that Thatcher was seeking no settlement, she simply want to destroy the mining industry and the NUM in particular. There could be no 'victory' for the strikers, in fact there could have been no compromise even, it was always going to be utter defeat.
The other thing that Thatcher put in place before the miners' strike was legislation, notably on a compulsory ballot before a strike. This was not as radical as it might appear, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle had proposed the same approach at the end of the Labour governments 1964-70, though the penalties such as fining unions and sequestering their funds that Thatcher added on were harsher. Scargill would not call a ballot and simply relied on his charisma to get tens of thousands of miners to strike for him and probably 10,000 or so to be active on picket lines. Thatcher's legislation had been set up to mean immediate hardship for strikers. They could not claim benefits and because of the attempts to sequester the union's funds, the money was moved abroad and so there was no strike pay. Clearly this was what Thatcher had intended and I imagine she was quite stunned by the level of self-sacrifice that the miners were willing to go through to maintain the strike so long.
The lack of a ballot was the most divisive element among the Labour Party and other trades unions. Scargill argues that Neil Kinnock used it as an excuse not to support the strike. The Labour Party was supportive of strikers in need, but were undermined by Scargill's dictatorial approach to calling and sustaining the strike. Scargill claims he has evidence of Kinnock's 'treachery' and the 'class collaboration of union leaders' notably of the EETPU electricians' union and the EMA managers' union. To some extent Scargill was already out-of-date even in 1984. He had not learned the lessons even of 1972-4 let alone of 1926 (the year of the 9-day General Strike), that there has never been strong working class consciousness in the UK, this is a very individualist society and that individualism had been increased by consumerism of the 1970s and the Thatcherite policies of the early 1980s. Scargill tended to think that the whole of the UK was like a mining village, but community and a sense of being part of a class was something that much of the population had turned their backs on in the preceding twenty years. In addition, I imagine many unions and many industries feared they would be next and were not keen to draw attention to themselves. Scargill's cockiness also did not endear him to others in the labour movement.
Seeing footage of Thatcher at the time of the Falklands Conflict, my mother said the prime minister was unsettling as she seemed to revel in the loss of life of British soldiers in the fight. Her appearance at the time was alarming and she certainly seemed energised by a sense of violence. The famous footage of her swathed in cream clothing, riding a tank, also gives that feel. If there had been anything close to a general strike, she would have been literally ecstatic, I have no doubt, to be able to move troops in. She spoke of the miners as the 'enemy within' and clearly would have relished a shift to martial law. I have recounted the events of 1910-11 and it is certain we would have seen something similar, especially as the powers of military intervention without declaring a state of emergency had been so strengthened in the mid-1970s. Thatcher would have held back from declaring a state of emergency as it would have made her look too much like Heath who declared five of the eleven that have been declared in Britain. However, she would not have held back from using military force if the strike had spread beyond the miners and that would have meant at least people crushed below military vehicles if not the gunshot injuries of the type of 1911.
I think Scargill would have won a ballot easily. Given how much support he had for the strike anyway, over such a long period, he could have had the ballot and still had his strike. This would have wrong-footed the Nottinghamshire miners and would have made it harder for the Labour Party and other unions to be lukewarm. Of course we would not have had a general strike along the lines I think Scargill still dreams of, but the NUM could not have been sequestered and there would have been far more funds coming to the strikers. In terms of international support the NUM did very well in attracting funds (though of course not from Libya despite what the newspapers said at the time and have subsequently retracted) and with a ballot, I imagine that would have raised even more funds. This would not have won the NUM the strike but it may have reduced the hardship of tens of thousands of families. Not having a ballot led to the creation of the UDM (Union of Democratic Mineworkers) as a breakaway, collaborationist union. Of course, this step did not spare them from the destruction of the mining industry which was a foregone conclusion and many now regret joining this union which gained them nothing though to those individuals seemed right at the time.
Scargill argues that if Kinnock had been more active in supporting the strike, Thatcher would still have fallen in 1990 (so even on Scargill's scenarion, having won the 1987 election, not brought down by the strike) but Kinnock would have won in 1992 rather than losing closely as he did. This is an entirely flawed counter-factual. Scargill forgets how frightened the electorate was of a Labour government in the 1980s. Again, he needed to get out of miners' villages and travel to working areas elsewhere in the UK. He would have found lifelong Labour supporters hesistant at voting Labour because the Conservatives had successfully convinced them that a Labour government meant higher taxes. If Kinnock had supported the strike more openly, whether with or without a ballot, not only would there have been no Labour government in 1992 there might not have been one in 1997 either, because it would have been so easy for the Conservatives to play on the fears (and fear rather than hope is what wins elections, just ask George Bush and ironically Barack Obama, viz economic fears) of voters that a Labour government would not only mean higher taxes but a government that permitted industrial violence. Even Blair, let alone Smith, would have had difficulty shaking off this image if Labour leaders were seen supporting the miners' strike of 1984-5 especially with the success in associating it with violence and the dictatorships of Libya and the USSR.
The Conservatives use of the media was very skillful. I always think it is ironic that the Conservatives attacked the BBC so much for its apparent bias towards the left-wing, notably Norman Tebbit. In fact as has been revealed careful editing of footage of the Orgreave battle the most renowned conflict of the strike, made it appear that the police was simply responding rather than initiating the attack as was later revealed to be the case. So much of the media saw the labour movemement in all its forms as at best ridiculous and at worst evil and used such terminology. Among many people there was a dichotomy, they drunk down the media bias even though in fact it was referring to people just like themselves. The irony is, of course, is that UK trade unionists have always been conservative and often Conservative. Portraying them as being dangerous revolutionaries or even in Scargill's case, just seeing them as a force for political change, has always been mistaken. By definition someone who joins an organisation, pays their fees, works within often strict rules and has pride in the heritage of their organisation is not reckless nor wishing to bring down the society which allowed the union to prosper.
Travelling around the UK it is stunning today how little evidence of a huge industry now remains and Scargill's fears of 1984 have come true. Some communities are left as wastelands, some have managed to survive and even thrive. Even without Thatcher there would be less coal mining in the UK in 2009 than in 1984, but the harsh crushing of an industry so quickly would not have happened. The miners' strike of 1984-5 is a part of modern British society. For many people it seems so distant, lumped in with events of the decade before. For others it remains painful, almost current. The after-effects for families divided by the strike are akin to the countries coming out of occupation by the Germans 1944-5. People remain hostile to collaborators but that ignores the often immense pressures on individuals to do right by their families. The language of 'treachery' and betrayal just stokes up that hostility that is so current still for thousands of people. Admitting that there was no hope of winning and that individuals did what they felt right, given the limited information that everyone had at the time, should be a basis for reducing hostility. Out of such division only the heirs of Thatcher can benefit.
The coal miners were doomed the moment Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. She was going to destroy them and put in place in the years up to 1984 a structure which gave her more than enough tools to do that. On this basis, really no matter what Scargill, Kinnock, the NUM or the Labour Party did was going to make any difference. Certainly the Labour Party could have been wrecked by greater involvement in the strike the way that the NUM was and we might have Kinnock sitting around today bitterly complaining about what went wrong in 1984. I do think, however much Scargill, squirms, he blundered in not calling a ballot. However, given that he had been defeated by Thatcher before the strike started, that was more about his reputation than any political gains it would have had. However, perhaps we are all looking at the strike the wrong way. Given that the NUM never had any hope of victory, to have caused so much of an upset to the political system, to marked British history with an event it will never forget, to exhibit so much self-sacrifice with so much dignity in the face of overwhelming odds were the 'wins' of the dispute for the workforce.
In some ways I respect Arthur Scargill. What he said about the longevity of coal mining in Britain (the country had 300 years supply of coal remaining at 1980s levels of consumpton) and the fact that the Conservative government was going to destroy the industry for political reasons was all true. However, Scargill has been unable to accept defeat and continues very bitterly to look for scapegoats. People condemn Scargill as having brought misery to thousands of miners and leading a strike which at times became violent (though much less so than the media portrayal of it). Eleven people involved in different sides of the strike were killed and the battles between strikers and police led to the injury of hundreds more. The iconography of events lasts longer than the facts of what happened, so we are left with a legacy of something resembling a medieval conflict, with shield walls of police opening to allow mounted police to ride down strikers with batons as knights would have come down on peasants 600 years earlier and hussars did on strikers of the 19th century. Scargill is also condemned for bringing about a strike which did not have only industrial goals but also political ones, namely to end the Thatcher government, and possibly, bring about some kind of Socialist revolution.
It is clear that Scargill is a Socialist, perhaps a revolutionary too, but the main element of the strike was to protest the systematic accelerated destruction of the UK's basic industries brought about by the Thatcher governments (1979-90). Of course UK coal mining would have faced challenges no matter what government had been in power as the 1970s and 1980s saw a shift in the pattern of industry across the globe. As early as 1974, a year after the USA, the UK first generated more income from service industries than manufacturing. No-one was really in a position to halt that shift. Coal mining alongside steel manufacturing, ship building and many other forms of engineering was facing decline. Scargill, loyal to his followers, was unwilling to consider any coal mine in the UK was 'uneconomical' so closing any was a real challenge to him. Of course many were profitable and very modern and yet Thatcher seemed to be keen to rid the UK of the industry. Thatcher's New Right monetarist policy smashed through so much industry in Britain anyway pushing unemployment up to 4 million (when it is properly counted, not the way the government manipulated the figures) but with coal mining she set out on a path of utter, planned destruction. Scargill says that NUM had negotiated five settlements with the NCB (National Coal Board - the employers) even while the strike was on, the last coming in October 1984, but these were derailed directly by the government.
I think a lot of this stems from how Thatcher saw coal miners as a political challenge just by their very existence. This was on two bases. First that in the 1973-4, 'three-day week' period they had shown how powerful they were in disrupting all kinds of industry by choking off coal supply to power stations. Second coal mining villages had a strong sense of community that (in many areas, not all) the Thatcherite policies of bribery did not seem to penetrate. She also wanted revenge for the miners strikes 1972 (their first strike in almost fifty years) and 1974 which effectively brought down the government of Conservative Edward Heath in 1974. Thatcher had no love for Heath but I think she felt the Conservative Party itself had been humiliated and so she wanted to get revenge by closing down the industry which had been nationalised in 1947. Of course Thatcher hated trades unions anyway, but the NUM was seen as the epitome of what she despised in them, by destroying the coal mining industry she knew she could destroy the union. Norman Tebbit, the very nasty leading light of the Thatcher regime, saw the battle with the NUM as a 'war on democracy', so not only elements of the NUM but clearly the Conservative leadership went into what should have been an industrial dispute with the perspective that it was more widely political.
We know that Thatcher envisaged a final showdown because of the preparations she made. In 1984 the UK had enough stocks of coal to provide sufficient for two years and everyone knew no strike can last that long; even a year meant incredible sacrifice by strikers. The moment this stockpile was secured the miners had lost because however much they striked they could not impinge on anyone outside their own communities. Thatcher was going to closed the bulk of the mines anyway, she had no need to negotiate. The harsh police action, which set many officers up for life with the amount of overtime payments they accrued, also showed other unions that they could expect merciless action if they struck. What always strikes me as curious is why the NUM was not aware of the stockpiling of coal. Even if it was a mix of UK dug coal and certainly of cheap foreign coal, probably from Poland and Australia, why was no-one aware of its build up? Surely there were seamen and dockers who noticed it coming in week after week; surely there were workers at power stations who knew they had big stocks. To put it in context, multinational oil companies such as Shell and BP have long argued that it is almost impossible to stockpile more than 90 days' supply of oil, even during the 1950s and 1960s when consumption was less. The Ministry of Defence used to hold around 5-10 days' worth of oil. So where do you put 2 years' worth of coal without anyone noticing? I accept that it might have been bought and held overseas ready for import, but I doubt Thatcher would have run the risk that seamen and dockers would refuse to ship and unload it once a miners' strike was underway.
Scargill believes he 'had' victory in October 1984 and was undermined by the pit deputies' (the health and safety staff in mines) union NACODS returning to work. This is a delusion on Scargill's part. Even a deal with the NCB would have been insufficient, Thatcher would have found a way to either provoke the strike into continuing or simply to introduce the mine closures she wanted all along. Scargill's harping on the failure of the five settlements, suggests he did not have wider political goals, but simply wanted to save the jobs of miners. However, even if this is true and his focus was purely industrial, there is no dispute that Thatcher was seeking no settlement, she simply want to destroy the mining industry and the NUM in particular. There could be no 'victory' for the strikers, in fact there could have been no compromise even, it was always going to be utter defeat.
The other thing that Thatcher put in place before the miners' strike was legislation, notably on a compulsory ballot before a strike. This was not as radical as it might appear, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle had proposed the same approach at the end of the Labour governments 1964-70, though the penalties such as fining unions and sequestering their funds that Thatcher added on were harsher. Scargill would not call a ballot and simply relied on his charisma to get tens of thousands of miners to strike for him and probably 10,000 or so to be active on picket lines. Thatcher's legislation had been set up to mean immediate hardship for strikers. They could not claim benefits and because of the attempts to sequester the union's funds, the money was moved abroad and so there was no strike pay. Clearly this was what Thatcher had intended and I imagine she was quite stunned by the level of self-sacrifice that the miners were willing to go through to maintain the strike so long.
The lack of a ballot was the most divisive element among the Labour Party and other trades unions. Scargill argues that Neil Kinnock used it as an excuse not to support the strike. The Labour Party was supportive of strikers in need, but were undermined by Scargill's dictatorial approach to calling and sustaining the strike. Scargill claims he has evidence of Kinnock's 'treachery' and the 'class collaboration of union leaders' notably of the EETPU electricians' union and the EMA managers' union. To some extent Scargill was already out-of-date even in 1984. He had not learned the lessons even of 1972-4 let alone of 1926 (the year of the 9-day General Strike), that there has never been strong working class consciousness in the UK, this is a very individualist society and that individualism had been increased by consumerism of the 1970s and the Thatcherite policies of the early 1980s. Scargill tended to think that the whole of the UK was like a mining village, but community and a sense of being part of a class was something that much of the population had turned their backs on in the preceding twenty years. In addition, I imagine many unions and many industries feared they would be next and were not keen to draw attention to themselves. Scargill's cockiness also did not endear him to others in the labour movement.
Seeing footage of Thatcher at the time of the Falklands Conflict, my mother said the prime minister was unsettling as she seemed to revel in the loss of life of British soldiers in the fight. Her appearance at the time was alarming and she certainly seemed energised by a sense of violence. The famous footage of her swathed in cream clothing, riding a tank, also gives that feel. If there had been anything close to a general strike, she would have been literally ecstatic, I have no doubt, to be able to move troops in. She spoke of the miners as the 'enemy within' and clearly would have relished a shift to martial law. I have recounted the events of 1910-11 and it is certain we would have seen something similar, especially as the powers of military intervention without declaring a state of emergency had been so strengthened in the mid-1970s. Thatcher would have held back from declaring a state of emergency as it would have made her look too much like Heath who declared five of the eleven that have been declared in Britain. However, she would not have held back from using military force if the strike had spread beyond the miners and that would have meant at least people crushed below military vehicles if not the gunshot injuries of the type of 1911.
I think Scargill would have won a ballot easily. Given how much support he had for the strike anyway, over such a long period, he could have had the ballot and still had his strike. This would have wrong-footed the Nottinghamshire miners and would have made it harder for the Labour Party and other unions to be lukewarm. Of course we would not have had a general strike along the lines I think Scargill still dreams of, but the NUM could not have been sequestered and there would have been far more funds coming to the strikers. In terms of international support the NUM did very well in attracting funds (though of course not from Libya despite what the newspapers said at the time and have subsequently retracted) and with a ballot, I imagine that would have raised even more funds. This would not have won the NUM the strike but it may have reduced the hardship of tens of thousands of families. Not having a ballot led to the creation of the UDM (Union of Democratic Mineworkers) as a breakaway, collaborationist union. Of course, this step did not spare them from the destruction of the mining industry which was a foregone conclusion and many now regret joining this union which gained them nothing though to those individuals seemed right at the time.
Scargill argues that if Kinnock had been more active in supporting the strike, Thatcher would still have fallen in 1990 (so even on Scargill's scenarion, having won the 1987 election, not brought down by the strike) but Kinnock would have won in 1992 rather than losing closely as he did. This is an entirely flawed counter-factual. Scargill forgets how frightened the electorate was of a Labour government in the 1980s. Again, he needed to get out of miners' villages and travel to working areas elsewhere in the UK. He would have found lifelong Labour supporters hesistant at voting Labour because the Conservatives had successfully convinced them that a Labour government meant higher taxes. If Kinnock had supported the strike more openly, whether with or without a ballot, not only would there have been no Labour government in 1992 there might not have been one in 1997 either, because it would have been so easy for the Conservatives to play on the fears (and fear rather than hope is what wins elections, just ask George Bush and ironically Barack Obama, viz economic fears) of voters that a Labour government would not only mean higher taxes but a government that permitted industrial violence. Even Blair, let alone Smith, would have had difficulty shaking off this image if Labour leaders were seen supporting the miners' strike of 1984-5 especially with the success in associating it with violence and the dictatorships of Libya and the USSR.
The Conservatives use of the media was very skillful. I always think it is ironic that the Conservatives attacked the BBC so much for its apparent bias towards the left-wing, notably Norman Tebbit. In fact as has been revealed careful editing of footage of the Orgreave battle the most renowned conflict of the strike, made it appear that the police was simply responding rather than initiating the attack as was later revealed to be the case. So much of the media saw the labour movemement in all its forms as at best ridiculous and at worst evil and used such terminology. Among many people there was a dichotomy, they drunk down the media bias even though in fact it was referring to people just like themselves. The irony is, of course, is that UK trade unionists have always been conservative and often Conservative. Portraying them as being dangerous revolutionaries or even in Scargill's case, just seeing them as a force for political change, has always been mistaken. By definition someone who joins an organisation, pays their fees, works within often strict rules and has pride in the heritage of their organisation is not reckless nor wishing to bring down the society which allowed the union to prosper.
Travelling around the UK it is stunning today how little evidence of a huge industry now remains and Scargill's fears of 1984 have come true. Some communities are left as wastelands, some have managed to survive and even thrive. Even without Thatcher there would be less coal mining in the UK in 2009 than in 1984, but the harsh crushing of an industry so quickly would not have happened. The miners' strike of 1984-5 is a part of modern British society. For many people it seems so distant, lumped in with events of the decade before. For others it remains painful, almost current. The after-effects for families divided by the strike are akin to the countries coming out of occupation by the Germans 1944-5. People remain hostile to collaborators but that ignores the often immense pressures on individuals to do right by their families. The language of 'treachery' and betrayal just stokes up that hostility that is so current still for thousands of people. Admitting that there was no hope of winning and that individuals did what they felt right, given the limited information that everyone had at the time, should be a basis for reducing hostility. Out of such division only the heirs of Thatcher can benefit.
The coal miners were doomed the moment Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. She was going to destroy them and put in place in the years up to 1984 a structure which gave her more than enough tools to do that. On this basis, really no matter what Scargill, Kinnock, the NUM or the Labour Party did was going to make any difference. Certainly the Labour Party could have been wrecked by greater involvement in the strike the way that the NUM was and we might have Kinnock sitting around today bitterly complaining about what went wrong in 1984. I do think, however much Scargill, squirms, he blundered in not calling a ballot. However, given that he had been defeated by Thatcher before the strike started, that was more about his reputation than any political gains it would have had. However, perhaps we are all looking at the strike the wrong way. Given that the NUM never had any hope of victory, to have caused so much of an upset to the political system, to marked British history with an event it will never forget, to exhibit so much self-sacrifice with so much dignity in the face of overwhelming odds were the 'wins' of the dispute for the workforce.
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
The Death of 'Democratic' Capitalism
Many people would argue that capitalist economies by definition are exploitative. That they rely on comparatively cheap labour to produce items to sell to consumers who are generally the cheap labour themselves and their pay is kept at a level which is only sufficient to allow them to buy those things in the long-run and not to advance through accumulating their own wealth so they can establish their own exploitative businesses. However, for most of the 20th century and certainly following the Second World War, there was a gradual movement away from that crude form of capitalism towards something more tempered. Most visibly we saw the evolution of welfare states across Europe which meant that by the 1960s most people were guaranteed housing, schooling, health care, public transport, etc. which allowed them to accumulate enough to allow them to enjoy things like holidays and consumer goods. This in turn boosted the consumer industry and capitalists found it was quite a good idea to keep this going especially as heavy industry began to decline in the 1970s and the service industry sector boomed. In the UK it is now sustained by credit rather than decent salaries, so is pretty fragile, but elsewhere in Europe and other industrialised parts of the world it is still roughly in place. The Communist states provided the basics for their people but had very little to offer in consumer items and with the fall of Communism they gave up the basics in return for opportunity to have access to such consumer items, and even more sharply than in the West, those who could get access did well, those who could not (the majority) were worse off, hence the continuing popularity of the Communists in the post-Communist countries as after the First World War.
As the Italian historian Donald Sassoon (see 'One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century' (1998)) who has spent his life looking at Socialism, has argued, actually more things that Socialists aim for such as health care, education, care of the elderly, decent salaries and working conditions, etc. are not achieved when capitalism is in crisis but when it is booming. I have termed this 'democratic capitalism' in that while consumers and workers are still effectively exploited, they also receive protection from the worst fluctations of the capitalist economies. In addition, there is an element in this 'democracy' which tends to get overlooked. The workers and the big capitalists are the usual focus of commentary on our economies, but I would argue, that those who make the jump and stop working for someone else and begin running their own business are also a characteristic of that democratic element. In the same way one would contrast say a monarchy in which only members of the royal family could run the country with a democracy where, in theory, anyone can be elected prime minister, and also take up many other lower positions locally, regionally and nationally to which they would have no access in a monarchy or a dictatorship. In the UK small business people gained this right gradually from the the 18th century onwards and while it took time for such people to be accorded anything like the access to influence that big businesses (especially those based on land) had, by the 20th century they had clearly won it. Thus, I see the ability of people to turn from workers to running small businesses as a further element of the democratic capitalism we once had. Of course many business go bust and these people return to the workers, but like someone who loses an election, generally they can try again.
So, you might be thinking, well this is a common example of capitalism with big business, small business and employees, with protection for those people who need it. However, I am arguing that such a form of capitalism is now dead and that we have almost reverted to the unfettered capitalism of the mid-19th century which meant the rich were immensely wealthy and the bulk of the population lived vicariously; in addition, the rich shaped all governmental policy and behaviour and anyone beneath them had no power. In addition, the ability to make the jump from worker to small business person is being crushed by the all encompassing corporations. In 1996 Michael Heseltine when Deputy Prime Minister (1995-7; he had been Secretary for Trade & Industry 1992-5) advised large companies effectively not to settle their bills to small businesses knowing that once they collapsed they would not be liable for the debt. This came from a leading Conservative and the party was supposed to be the one that backed business people whatever their size. Heseltine of course had become a millionaire at the age of 30 in 1963 so could be scathing of those struggling with small businesses. What this seemed to mark was a shift in the UK from backing any capitalism to backing the capitalism of the super-rich (or turbo-rich as they seem to be being called now). This was aided through the Thatcher years (1979-91) by selling off utilities which became very profitable businesses. On the surface this seemed to benefit small investors, but of course by the 1990s all their shares had been bought up by the big investment companies. Similarly encouragement to allow people to buy their council houses seem to be the democratisation of house ownership, but in fact with the slump of 1990-3 engineered by Thatcher's government and that of her successor John Major (1991-7) they lost control of these to the hands of multi-property owning landlords who rose to be millionaires too. Thus, the 1980s and 1990s saw the squeeze put on those people who would normally have been rising capitalists in favour of the richer.
Of course, Thatcher also ran through the welfare state stripping it of funds, making people feel guilty about using it and blaming anyone who did (which is one reason why millions of pounds of benefits go unclaimed each year), banning councils from building social housing, wrecking union rights, forcing public sector jobs to go to private companies paying the lowest wages, not allowing pensions to rise with inflation and so on. She did a very good job of stripping away so much of the safety net that had taken decades to construct. This is why the UK saw the rise of the underclass who have dropped out of society that no longer makes an effort to support them. Pressure on ordinary people came from many directions. I have noted how invidious the utility companies are and just today are reports about the percentage of poor families with children who cannot afford to heat their homes properly. Due to the use of metered utilities poor people actually have to pay more for their fuel than rich people, the same goes for food as they cannot access out-of-town stores that have the cheaper food; they cannot get bank loans and even legitimate loan companies can charge quite legally many times as much interest as those richer people can access. Thus, the system is engineered in the UK that once you have fallen into the poor category you are never going to get out. Increasingly, nor are your children, as schools become more selective, and as I have noted in previous posts even intelligent poor children fall quickly behind at school, they are condemned to live the same lives as their parents, however hard they might work. Due to the attitudes fostered in the 1980s such people are made to fill guilty and portrayed to the rest of us as lazy and deserving of their situation. Every class has lazy people in it, but poverty is an incredible motivator and I believe the greatest scroungers are among the rich.
So, for over twenty years, Britain has been moving to a less democratic capitalism, in which those who have least ability to pay are paying more. This was shown most sharply by the so-called Community Charge (better known as the Poll Tax) introduced to Scotland in 1989 and to the rest of the UK in 1990 and scrapped in 1993 following some of the most severe civil unrest the UK had seen for almost a decade. This tax was deemed 'fair' because everyone in a district no matter what they earnt paid the same amount to live in a house or flat in that district no matter how scummy or luxurious the property was or if they just rented one room in a house or had a whole mansion to themselves. About 1 million people disappeared from records overnight as they sought to avoid being stung by this tax which made up much more of your outgoings if you were poor or if you were rich. Even now in a borough like Tower Hamlets (small but densely populated, in East London) there are 60,000 (out of a population of over 200,000 people) fewer on the census register than registered with local doctors, because of the lingering fear of being found, despite the shift to the Council Tax which is based on property size.
Despite this steady erosion democratic capitalism it has now entered a new phase going beyond even the rich of the past. Even they are weak in the new set-up. This has been highlighted in a new book 'Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives' by Robert Peston (2008) which though apparently flawed, highlights how that the people who run the UK are these so-called 'turbo-rich', going beyond the plutocrats of the past in their wealth and power. Of course Thatcher laid the ground for this by scrapping restrictions on taking capital generated in the UK out of the country, though this was simply jumping the gun as the EU insisted on it for all member states by 1990. Now, if a wealthy individual dislikes the government's policies they can simply threaten to shift some of their wealth elsewhere. Apparently, according to Peston the 1000 most wealthy people in the UK (out of a population of 62,000,000) owns £360,000,000,000 (€496 billion; US$716 billion) equivalent to 50 times the economy of Uruguay; roughly the same as the economy of Taiwan or Indonesia (which are the 20th and 21st richest countries in the world; about £10 billion more than even oil-rich Saudi Arabia in 22nd place). Beneath this 1000 must be many more billions owned and think of this replicated across the USA, Germany and Japan. In past postings I have referred to a map which showed the percentage of people living in various parts of the UK who were wealthy enough to be exempt from the norms of social behaviour. These 1000 people are rich enough to be exempt from the norms of government behaviour. They can murder people, make them disappear, drive them out of their homes and business and no-one can stop them.
You may say, well there have always been the rich. What is worsening the situation is the permitting of things like equity funds which simply buy up successful businesses and then load them with debt like a parasite draining their host rather than allowing that business to grow, pay better wages and employ more people. The richer you are the smaller a percentage of your income goes on tax. Multi-national companies learned this as early as the 1910s with oil companies leading the way. Peston claims that the tax 'efficiencies' of the super-rich deprive the government of equivalent to the rest of us paying 5p in the £ (i.e. a 5% tax rate) and so equivalent to hundreds of schools, hospitals, houses, battleships, space rockets, whatever you want to spend it on. This is just what we lose through their tax fiddles. They have distorted the economy of the whole South-East of England as I have noted before, pushing the cost of housing out of the reach of the bulk of even well-off people, and because their friends in the Thatcher regime smashed social housing, people cannot fall back on that as they would do in the past. It is almost as if these super-rich want to rub our noses in the muck to show how deprived we actually are. They are further pushing into health care, prisons, the Post Office, all the utilities, places where we previous got a bit of leeway if were not that rich, or in fact just comfortable. It is as if it is not only their greed wishing to earn more than whole states, it is that they feel they have to get us back for the 20th century when they were pressed a little bit to contribute to the rest of the population who actually power the businesses that they suck money from. Now we are being told, you stepped out of line, accept your station, here is the whipping to remind you not to get cocky again, not to ask for a welfare system, but to fight with each other for health and a house and an education so that you have no strength and we can pay you as low as we like to.
This is what the New Right agenda of the mid-1970s was working to. It was put into action in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and the USA effectively forcing other more reluctant countries to follow suit (now with Sarkozy in France even the last outpost of a welfare society is being dismantled) and the countries coming out of Communism to rush blindly down the same path. As I have noted before Bush has favoured the super-rich as his core constituency and has engineered wars on their behalf (I think they fear fundamentalist Islam because it does not support consumerism and Iraq was just about the oil supply and business opportunities anyway). In Britain Blair was too enamoured of the Thatcher image to challenge it and even courted the super-rich. Maybe a Labour victory in 1992 was the last chance to reverse it, maybe it was too late by then, it certainly is now.
So what is our future? Well, probably by 2030 we will look very much like 1830. The welfare state is crumbling so fast in the UK that free at point of need dentistry is all but gone and health care will follow. Schooling is increasingly segregated and opportunities increasingly limited. There will always be a few people who will break out, but increasingly it will be because they win the lottery or a talent show than through hard work. Optimism will be sapped from us, the sense that we can achieve, especially through establishing our own businesses, will be taken from us. We are returning to a kind of feudal society in which we remain in our place in society and the bulk of us get the basics we need to surivive at the sufferance of our suppliers. Once we become old or no longer useful we are discarded. I think if even Winston Churchill, the Conservative prime minister (1940-5; 1951-5) let alone the ministers of Clement Attlee's Labour governments (1945-51) would look in utter horror at beggars so numerous on Britain's streets. We are charging back to the Victorian era with the plutocrats farther reaching and more powerful than ever before.
Suddenly while writing this a quote came back to me which I managed to track down and now it seems eerily prescient. It was made in 1983 by Neil Kinnock warning the audience about what would happen if Margaret Thatcher won the election (which she did with a large majority). He was Shadow Cabinet spokesman on education at the time but went on to lead the Labour Party to defeat in 1987 and 1992. He was condemned as a 'windbag' but actually was more a old school speaker who used rhetoric in the way Welsh politicians of the past like Aneurin Bevan and David Lloyd George did, so was increasingly out of step with the 'sound bite' era rising in the 1980s. This, I think seems a classic and it may weaken my argument to refer back so far for a comment and to someone unsuccessful, but I do not think it weakens the warning which is probably even truer now than it was 25 years ago.
"... I warn you.
I warn you that you will have pain — when healing and relief depend upon payment.
I warn you that you will have ignorance — when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty — when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.
I warn you that you will be cold — when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work — when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you that you will be quiet — when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you that you will have defence of a sort — with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound — when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less — when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
...
— I warn you not to be ordinary
— I warn you not to be young
— I warn you not to fall ill
— I warn you not to get old."
As the Italian historian Donald Sassoon (see 'One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century' (1998)) who has spent his life looking at Socialism, has argued, actually more things that Socialists aim for such as health care, education, care of the elderly, decent salaries and working conditions, etc. are not achieved when capitalism is in crisis but when it is booming. I have termed this 'democratic capitalism' in that while consumers and workers are still effectively exploited, they also receive protection from the worst fluctations of the capitalist economies. In addition, there is an element in this 'democracy' which tends to get overlooked. The workers and the big capitalists are the usual focus of commentary on our economies, but I would argue, that those who make the jump and stop working for someone else and begin running their own business are also a characteristic of that democratic element. In the same way one would contrast say a monarchy in which only members of the royal family could run the country with a democracy where, in theory, anyone can be elected prime minister, and also take up many other lower positions locally, regionally and nationally to which they would have no access in a monarchy or a dictatorship. In the UK small business people gained this right gradually from the the 18th century onwards and while it took time for such people to be accorded anything like the access to influence that big businesses (especially those based on land) had, by the 20th century they had clearly won it. Thus, I see the ability of people to turn from workers to running small businesses as a further element of the democratic capitalism we once had. Of course many business go bust and these people return to the workers, but like someone who loses an election, generally they can try again.
So, you might be thinking, well this is a common example of capitalism with big business, small business and employees, with protection for those people who need it. However, I am arguing that such a form of capitalism is now dead and that we have almost reverted to the unfettered capitalism of the mid-19th century which meant the rich were immensely wealthy and the bulk of the population lived vicariously; in addition, the rich shaped all governmental policy and behaviour and anyone beneath them had no power. In addition, the ability to make the jump from worker to small business person is being crushed by the all encompassing corporations. In 1996 Michael Heseltine when Deputy Prime Minister (1995-7; he had been Secretary for Trade & Industry 1992-5) advised large companies effectively not to settle their bills to small businesses knowing that once they collapsed they would not be liable for the debt. This came from a leading Conservative and the party was supposed to be the one that backed business people whatever their size. Heseltine of course had become a millionaire at the age of 30 in 1963 so could be scathing of those struggling with small businesses. What this seemed to mark was a shift in the UK from backing any capitalism to backing the capitalism of the super-rich (or turbo-rich as they seem to be being called now). This was aided through the Thatcher years (1979-91) by selling off utilities which became very profitable businesses. On the surface this seemed to benefit small investors, but of course by the 1990s all their shares had been bought up by the big investment companies. Similarly encouragement to allow people to buy their council houses seem to be the democratisation of house ownership, but in fact with the slump of 1990-3 engineered by Thatcher's government and that of her successor John Major (1991-7) they lost control of these to the hands of multi-property owning landlords who rose to be millionaires too. Thus, the 1980s and 1990s saw the squeeze put on those people who would normally have been rising capitalists in favour of the richer.
Of course, Thatcher also ran through the welfare state stripping it of funds, making people feel guilty about using it and blaming anyone who did (which is one reason why millions of pounds of benefits go unclaimed each year), banning councils from building social housing, wrecking union rights, forcing public sector jobs to go to private companies paying the lowest wages, not allowing pensions to rise with inflation and so on. She did a very good job of stripping away so much of the safety net that had taken decades to construct. This is why the UK saw the rise of the underclass who have dropped out of society that no longer makes an effort to support them. Pressure on ordinary people came from many directions. I have noted how invidious the utility companies are and just today are reports about the percentage of poor families with children who cannot afford to heat their homes properly. Due to the use of metered utilities poor people actually have to pay more for their fuel than rich people, the same goes for food as they cannot access out-of-town stores that have the cheaper food; they cannot get bank loans and even legitimate loan companies can charge quite legally many times as much interest as those richer people can access. Thus, the system is engineered in the UK that once you have fallen into the poor category you are never going to get out. Increasingly, nor are your children, as schools become more selective, and as I have noted in previous posts even intelligent poor children fall quickly behind at school, they are condemned to live the same lives as their parents, however hard they might work. Due to the attitudes fostered in the 1980s such people are made to fill guilty and portrayed to the rest of us as lazy and deserving of their situation. Every class has lazy people in it, but poverty is an incredible motivator and I believe the greatest scroungers are among the rich.
So, for over twenty years, Britain has been moving to a less democratic capitalism, in which those who have least ability to pay are paying more. This was shown most sharply by the so-called Community Charge (better known as the Poll Tax) introduced to Scotland in 1989 and to the rest of the UK in 1990 and scrapped in 1993 following some of the most severe civil unrest the UK had seen for almost a decade. This tax was deemed 'fair' because everyone in a district no matter what they earnt paid the same amount to live in a house or flat in that district no matter how scummy or luxurious the property was or if they just rented one room in a house or had a whole mansion to themselves. About 1 million people disappeared from records overnight as they sought to avoid being stung by this tax which made up much more of your outgoings if you were poor or if you were rich. Even now in a borough like Tower Hamlets (small but densely populated, in East London) there are 60,000 (out of a population of over 200,000 people) fewer on the census register than registered with local doctors, because of the lingering fear of being found, despite the shift to the Council Tax which is based on property size.
Despite this steady erosion democratic capitalism it has now entered a new phase going beyond even the rich of the past. Even they are weak in the new set-up. This has been highlighted in a new book 'Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives' by Robert Peston (2008) which though apparently flawed, highlights how that the people who run the UK are these so-called 'turbo-rich', going beyond the plutocrats of the past in their wealth and power. Of course Thatcher laid the ground for this by scrapping restrictions on taking capital generated in the UK out of the country, though this was simply jumping the gun as the EU insisted on it for all member states by 1990. Now, if a wealthy individual dislikes the government's policies they can simply threaten to shift some of their wealth elsewhere. Apparently, according to Peston the 1000 most wealthy people in the UK (out of a population of 62,000,000) owns £360,000,000,000 (€496 billion; US$716 billion) equivalent to 50 times the economy of Uruguay; roughly the same as the economy of Taiwan or Indonesia (which are the 20th and 21st richest countries in the world; about £10 billion more than even oil-rich Saudi Arabia in 22nd place). Beneath this 1000 must be many more billions owned and think of this replicated across the USA, Germany and Japan. In past postings I have referred to a map which showed the percentage of people living in various parts of the UK who were wealthy enough to be exempt from the norms of social behaviour. These 1000 people are rich enough to be exempt from the norms of government behaviour. They can murder people, make them disappear, drive them out of their homes and business and no-one can stop them.
You may say, well there have always been the rich. What is worsening the situation is the permitting of things like equity funds which simply buy up successful businesses and then load them with debt like a parasite draining their host rather than allowing that business to grow, pay better wages and employ more people. The richer you are the smaller a percentage of your income goes on tax. Multi-national companies learned this as early as the 1910s with oil companies leading the way. Peston claims that the tax 'efficiencies' of the super-rich deprive the government of equivalent to the rest of us paying 5p in the £ (i.e. a 5% tax rate) and so equivalent to hundreds of schools, hospitals, houses, battleships, space rockets, whatever you want to spend it on. This is just what we lose through their tax fiddles. They have distorted the economy of the whole South-East of England as I have noted before, pushing the cost of housing out of the reach of the bulk of even well-off people, and because their friends in the Thatcher regime smashed social housing, people cannot fall back on that as they would do in the past. It is almost as if these super-rich want to rub our noses in the muck to show how deprived we actually are. They are further pushing into health care, prisons, the Post Office, all the utilities, places where we previous got a bit of leeway if were not that rich, or in fact just comfortable. It is as if it is not only their greed wishing to earn more than whole states, it is that they feel they have to get us back for the 20th century when they were pressed a little bit to contribute to the rest of the population who actually power the businesses that they suck money from. Now we are being told, you stepped out of line, accept your station, here is the whipping to remind you not to get cocky again, not to ask for a welfare system, but to fight with each other for health and a house and an education so that you have no strength and we can pay you as low as we like to.
This is what the New Right agenda of the mid-1970s was working to. It was put into action in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and the USA effectively forcing other more reluctant countries to follow suit (now with Sarkozy in France even the last outpost of a welfare society is being dismantled) and the countries coming out of Communism to rush blindly down the same path. As I have noted before Bush has favoured the super-rich as his core constituency and has engineered wars on their behalf (I think they fear fundamentalist Islam because it does not support consumerism and Iraq was just about the oil supply and business opportunities anyway). In Britain Blair was too enamoured of the Thatcher image to challenge it and even courted the super-rich. Maybe a Labour victory in 1992 was the last chance to reverse it, maybe it was too late by then, it certainly is now.
So what is our future? Well, probably by 2030 we will look very much like 1830. The welfare state is crumbling so fast in the UK that free at point of need dentistry is all but gone and health care will follow. Schooling is increasingly segregated and opportunities increasingly limited. There will always be a few people who will break out, but increasingly it will be because they win the lottery or a talent show than through hard work. Optimism will be sapped from us, the sense that we can achieve, especially through establishing our own businesses, will be taken from us. We are returning to a kind of feudal society in which we remain in our place in society and the bulk of us get the basics we need to surivive at the sufferance of our suppliers. Once we become old or no longer useful we are discarded. I think if even Winston Churchill, the Conservative prime minister (1940-5; 1951-5) let alone the ministers of Clement Attlee's Labour governments (1945-51) would look in utter horror at beggars so numerous on Britain's streets. We are charging back to the Victorian era with the plutocrats farther reaching and more powerful than ever before.
Suddenly while writing this a quote came back to me which I managed to track down and now it seems eerily prescient. It was made in 1983 by Neil Kinnock warning the audience about what would happen if Margaret Thatcher won the election (which she did with a large majority). He was Shadow Cabinet spokesman on education at the time but went on to lead the Labour Party to defeat in 1987 and 1992. He was condemned as a 'windbag' but actually was more a old school speaker who used rhetoric in the way Welsh politicians of the past like Aneurin Bevan and David Lloyd George did, so was increasingly out of step with the 'sound bite' era rising in the 1980s. This, I think seems a classic and it may weaken my argument to refer back so far for a comment and to someone unsuccessful, but I do not think it weakens the warning which is probably even truer now than it was 25 years ago.
"... I warn you.
I warn you that you will have pain — when healing and relief depend upon payment.
I warn you that you will have ignorance — when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty — when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.
I warn you that you will be cold — when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work — when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you that you will be quiet — when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you that you will have defence of a sort — with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound — when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less — when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
...
— I warn you not to be ordinary
— I warn you not to be young
— I warn you not to fall ill
— I warn you not to get old."
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