Just A Few Minor Details

by Les May

BETWEEN 10 May 1940 and 23 May 1945 Labour MPs were part of a coalition led by Winston Churchill.   Initially Clement Attlee was a member of the five man Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal.  From February 1942 Attlee was also Deputy Prime Minister.

In other words any planning for the post war world, including planning for an overhaul of the health care system, was as much done by Labour politicians as it was by those from other parties.   Labour didn’t just ‘get lucky’, implement existing plans drawn up by someone else and take all the credit for the formation of the NHS, as two recent contributors would have us believe.

Listening to Jeremy Hunt this morning I was left with the impression that one of the responses to the staggering number of deaths in Care Homes and similar facilities is likely to be a coming together of the Care Services and the NHS. This has been a long term ambition of Andy Burnham who has written and spoken about this since he was Health Secretary 2009-2010.   If, as I expect, legislation to bring this about will be in a future Queen’s Speech will the two recent contributors who are so keen to deny Labour credit for establishing the NHS be demanding that Burnham receives a share of the credit for a coming together of the care and health services?  Personally I am happy to give credit for this to whatever government brings it about.

As for the ‘Libertarian Left’ if it does not like the ‘statist’ model we have now it has had 73 years to bring into existence a viable alternative to the NHS and has done precisely nothing.   It is always ready to snipe from the sidelines, but never wants to devote time and energy to giving some thought to exactly how an alternative system would deliver specialist as well as routine care; how it would deal with epidemics of, for example, winter flu; provide a vaccination service for children which by its nature relies on ‘herd immunity’ to be fully effective; or how it would be funded.  What would its response to the Covid19 pandemic look like? How much thought has it given to international trade or international terrorism, cyber hacking or effective strategies to combat climate change?

Any answers to questions like this will be a long time coming, not least because so many of those who sail under the flag of the ‘Libertarian Left’ have lost themselves on the barren shores of ‘trans issues’, both for and against. 

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From whence did social welfare come?

 State Control or Social Initiatives?

 by Brian Bamford

LES MAY engaging with Carl Faulkner's comment and considering the founding of the NHS, writes:

'As my Libertarian friends endlessly remind me there were other schemes in operation even before the NHS was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

'Bevan would have been familiar with the Tredegar Medical Aid Society as he was the local MP. In return for contributions from its members it provided health care free at the point of use. (my emphasis)

'This model of funding was rejected by Bevan.'


Les clearly admires the Attlee government of 1945, which formed the first Labour majority government and in particular he favours its Keynesian approach to economic management aimed to maintain full employment, a mixed economy and a greatly enlarged system of social services provided by the state.  This amounts to a supreme faith in what in the 20th century amounted to Fabian managerialism.  It is a view that after the Second World War prevailed in which it was considered that as George Orwell observed in 1946:  'For quite fifty years past the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy'*   (James Burnham & the Managerial Revolution [1946]).

At that time after the war it must have seemed that big government was onto a winner, and Orwell then felt able to write:  'The ever increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the "managerial" class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones; the decay of representative institutions and the importance of one-party regimes...'

The problem with this approach is that it represented a shift from the capitalist and the dividend grabbers to a 'new boss class' of the technical elite functionaries blessed with cushy jobs and all on a generous state stipend.  As Orwell observed above it became 'the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state'.  There was still the spirit of entitlement of the elite and the dependency of the working-class.

The difficulty is still that this analysis is too mechanical as well as managerial and top-down.  It lacks an evolutionary grasp of how the concept of social welfare entered and developed inside our culture.

Colin Ward described how the social concepts permeated sociologically:  'Anarchists are frequently told that their antipathy to the state is historically outmoded, since a main function of the modern state is the provision of social welfare.  They respond by stressing that social welfare in Britain did not originate from government, nor from the post-war National Insurance laws, nor with the the initiation of the National Health Service in 1948.'   **
 

Rather as Mr Ward argues:  'It evolved from the vast network of friendly societies and mutual aid organizations that sprung up through working-class self-help in the 19th century.'

This is what is implied by Carl Faulkner in his perceptive comment on this Blog:  'It could be argued that is was predictable that the NHS was established by a Labour government due to it being elected in 1945 - when plans for what was to be called the NHS were well advanced but lost in the mists of time.'

Indeed it was 'lost in the midst of time', as the anarchist Mr Ward explains:
'The founding father of the NHS was the then member of parliament for Tredegar in South Wales, Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Government's Minister of Health.  His constituency was the home of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, founded in1870 and surviving until 1995.'

It gave medical care for the local employed workers, who were mostly miners and steelworkers, but also (unlike the pre-1948 National Health Insurance) for the needs of dependents, children, the old, the non-employed: everyone living in the district.

A retired miner told Peter Hennessey that when Bevan initiated the National Health Service, 'We thought he was turning the country into one big Tredegar.'  Alas, it was not to be, and as Mr. Ward observes in his brief book:  'In practice the Health Service has been in a state of continuous reorganization ever since its foundation, but has never submitted to a local and federalized approach to medical care.'

More seriously Ward argues 'ever since full employment and the system of PAYE (automatic deduction of tax as a duty of employers) was introduced during the Second World War, the central government's Treasury has creamed off the cash that once supported local initiatives.' 

Furthermore, in keeping with the spirit of local spontaneity Colin Ward suggests:   
'If the pattern of local self-taxation on the Tredegar model had become the general pattern for health provision, this permanent daily need would not have become the plaything of central government financial policy.'

There is a price to pay for the pattern of State funding medical care applied by Nye Bevan and approved by Les May, and it now being played out as different governments enact various outsourcing schemes promote what Ward called 'the virtues of profit-making private enterprise.'


What follows from this debate is what will be the consequences of the pandemic for the psychology of the general population?  Will people look to the state for salvation in fear of a repeat performance of another potential pandemic threat or second wave?  If so, I suspect it will represent a reactionary response to the politics of the pandemic.




* Oligarchy, government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes. Oligarchies in which members of the ruling group are wealthy or exercise their power through their wealth are known as plutocracies.

**  'ANARCHISM: A Very Short Introduction' by Colin Ward (Oxford) 2004.

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'Thank You Nye Bevan', Revisited

by Les May

  Carl Faulkner said...

'It could be argued that is was predictable that the NHS was established by a Labour government due to it being elected in 1945 - when plans for what was to be called the NHS were well advanced but lost in the mists of time.

'Contemporary news reports from 1944 demonstrate that plans for the NHS were already well advanced. They had moved on considerably from the Beveridge Report in 1942 (see: Towards A Healthier Britain - (Minister Of Health's Speech 1944)

'Unfortunately, the whole issue has been claimed by Labour and its supporters as 'theirs', with seemingly total and utter reverence towards one man.

'Like the substitute who makes his first appearance late on and scores the winning goal in the FA Cup finaal, it is often the politician who is in the right place at the right time, who receives all the praise - even if they never claimed nor asked for it themselves.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyjbUK88CB4

Thursday, 14 May 2020 at 17:49:00 BST

CARL Faulkner’s comment above about my original article rather misses the point of what I was trying to say.  As my Libertarian friends endlessly remind me there were other schemes in operation even before the NHS was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

Bevan would have been familiar with the Tredegar Medical Aid Society as he was the local MP. In return for contributions from its members it provided health care free at the point of use. (my emphasis)

This model of funding was rejected by Bevan.   The scheme that was eventually introduced was, and is, funded from taxation.  That is why I think we should be happy to say; ‘Thank you Nye Bevan’.   And I make no apology for saying so.

The advantages of not making it a contributory scheme can best be seen by contrasting it with National Insurance.  In the 1970s many married women were seduced into paying reduced NI contributions. When they reached the pensionable age for women they only then realised the disadvantage they had brought upon themselves.

At some point we are going to have to rethink how the elderly, infirm and disabled members of our society are cared for in order to bring some parity between the Care Service and the NHS in terms of provision of resources in the form of personnel and resources.   I would argue strongly for a service funded by taxation on the basis that we all run the same risk of needing such care at some time in our life just the same as we all run the same risk of needing care by the NHS.

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Thank You Nye Bevan

by Les May

EVERY TIME I hear a Tory minister talk about ‘Our NHS’ I wince a little.  The National Health Service was the creation of the post war Labour government. But even that is not quite true; the NHS as we know it was the creation of one man, Aneurin Bevan, better known as Nye Bevan, which is why we have an NHS facility named after him in Rochdale.

Certainly there were other people who deserve credit, especially William Beveridge whose 1942 report fed the appetite for the state to take better care of its citizens.

Beveridge advocated a scheme that was universal in that it was to cover all people and comprehensive in that it would cover all needs.  He assumed that it would be run by local government and that it would be a social insurance scheme with a contribution from the government of the day.   Beveridge also favoured patients paying ‘hotel’ charges for their stay in hospital and charges for ‘appliances’.

His scheme would have replaced the one that had gradually evolved so that in the 1930s about 90% of the workforce had social insurance, which covered the of the GP service and sick pay.  The other 10% and all dependants either had private insurance or made full out-of-pocket payments.  The costs of hospital care were met by private insurance, such as workers' contributory schemes.  This met the needs of about 10 millions of the population and the rest paid means-tested charges. Local and national taxes funded public health, hospitals and the specialist clinics run by local authorities.

Bevan saw things differently and effectively nationalised the health service. He favoured a fully tax-financed system.  He did this because funding based upon national taxation is inherently more redistributive.  He also regarded free access to health care to be a citizen's right and not something conditional on the payment of contributions.  In addition a tax based scheme neatly sidestepped the problem of how, politically and administratively, the non-insured could be turned away from a universal service.

‘The collective principle asserts that... no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.’

— Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, p. 100

We should be thankful that we have a tax based system. Imagine if you felt ill and found that your insurance would pay for a test for Covid19, but not for your treatment or care.   It has happened in the USA.   Imagine if you have just recovered from a stay in hospital being treated for a Covid19 infection and then someone starts chasing you for ‘hotel charges’.

What Bevan did not solve in 1948 was the question of who should pay for the care of the elderly. Should it be the NHS and its tax based system or local authorities who were free to make a charge.  No one else has shown the will to solve it since.

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Dispiriting election redraws political map of UK

'This is an awful result', said Dave Smith 

of the Blacklist Support Group

by Brian Bamford

 
LAST SATURDAY the Financial Times leader writer began an editorial thus:
'A dispiriting election has produced a seismic outcome.  Britain's political landscape has been redrawn as it was by Tony Blair's New Labour victory in 1997, or Margaret Thatcher's win in 1979.  The Conservative landslide is a vindication of Boris Johnson's strategy of going all-out for a new Brexit deal and building his campaign around delivering it....  Yet the result, combined with the Scottish National party's surge in Scotland and nationalist gains in Northern Ireland, will strain the integrity of the UK.'

At the same time in an e-mail written immediately following the election Dave Smith secretary of the Blacklist Support Group, which has been consistently loyal to the Labour Party wrote:
'This is an awful result for the entire labour movement.

'Whatever people's thoughts on Corbyn or Brexit; the Labour manifesto commitments on workers rights, NHS & public services, renationalisation of rail & utilities, house building and the climate were supported by the majority of the population.  All these things are now at risk from a right wing Johnson government.'

Yet prior to the election in another e-mail he had wisely warned us:  'working people should never place dewy eyed trust in politicians, lawyers or union leaders to solve our problems for us; continuing to build a movement remains essential.' 

But what really happened under the Attlee Labour Government of 1945?

MILITARY BLACKLEGS & the 1945 LABOUR GOVERNMENT 

Dave Smith does well to remind us that we should not 'place dewey eyed trust in politicians' etc.   for within six days of the Labour Government taking office in 1945, it sent conscript troops into the Surrey Docks, London, to break a ten-week-old strike against a wage-cut....

Yet in a Labour amendment to the Military Training Bill, in Hansard on May 12th, 1939, this same Labour Party had declared:
'No conscript should be required to take duty in aid of the civil power in connection with a trade dispute, or to perform, in consequence of a trade dispute, any civil or industrial duty customarily performed by a civilian.'

Surely there is some inconsistency here?

THE GREAT ILLUSION 

In 1959, on the Aldermaston CND march, some trade union critics, who described themselves as 'syndicalists', not unlike Dave Smith of the Blacklist Support Group today, claimed at that time:  'we believe many sincere but starry-eyed Labour supporters have already half-forgotten the events during those six years in which every Socialist principle was betrayed by the politicians... [and that] It is no service to the working class for the truth to be hidden, however embarrassing and unpalatable it may be for some people.'  (How Labour Governed 1945-1951 - DIRECT ACTION PAMPHLET:  Publications Committee, SWF).

 THE LABOUR PROGRAM in 1945

Like Len McCluskey said last week about the panicky policy incontinence of the current Labour Party, the 1945 Labour Government, with a vast majority, had an economic programme based on two principles - 'a give-away programme and state control of economic functions'.

Dave Smith in his generally depressing Tweet continues to argue in this gloomy vain:

'For blacklisted construction workers, our hope for a public inquiry into the Consulting Association scandal now appears to be off the agenda for the next few years at the very least.' 

Bro. Smith was here pinning his faith on Page 48 of the Labour Manifesto:

'We will establish public inquiries into historical injustices including blacklisting and Orgreave, and ensure the second phase of the Grenfell Inquiry has the confidence of all those affected, especially the bereaved families and survivors.'*

When I last spoke personally to Dave Smith in 2015, at a Blacklist Support Group conference on  'Bullying, blacklisting and whistleblowing' at a two-day event at the University of Greenwich, I expressed my concerns and doubts about his hopes about getting a future Labour Government to solve the problem of blacklisting etc. by creating a distinguished public inquires.  Since 1979, when the alternative newspaper RAP had first exposed Cyril Smith, I long had the experience of seeking public inquires owing to the work I had put in to get something done about child abuse in Rochdale and beyond.  Sadly, by the time the inquiry will finally get to publish its report many of the alleged victims will be beyond help.

The Blacklist & the Consulting Association

Tameside Trade Union Council in Greater Manchester, has been involved with what later became known as the 'BOYS ON THE BLACKLIST' during the Daf dispute in Manchester's Piccadilly in 2003.  That was well before it had been finally confirmed that the blacklist actually existed in 2009** by subsequent events in which the Information Commissioner raided an office of the Consulting Association in Droitwitch, Cheshire.

As the Financial Times leader above indicates the political landscape of the UK  has changed substantially.  But it is not the end of history which some may claim.  The nationalist issues both in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as the FT editor suggests, may still come back to haunt the Tory Government.

Dave Smith is right in his blunt response to be 'gutted' by the outcome!  It is a slap in the face for what passes for the British left.  But we at Northern Voices have always been clear that we have historically even less faith in politicians than Dave Smith has ever had.  George Orwell told the poet Stephen Spender that he always avoided going to cocktail parties to mix with literary folk for fear it may interfere with his own critical judgement of their literary work.  

Could it be that being based and rooted in London that Dave Smith and some of the Blacklist Support Group, may well have become too close to the some of the Labour politicians down there and that it could have clouded their judgement?

In the years since the late naughties that I have known them; Dave Smith and the Blacklist Support Group, have always struck me as one of the most decent phenomena on the British left in this country bar none, aside perhaps from my own personal friends among the Boys on the Blacklist in the North of England, and I don't think that those associated with my own political persuasion among the English anarchists are a patch on them.  Other parts of the British left, especially including the British anarchists, who have presented us with the politics of a shabby little shocker.  Although I believe that Dave Smith and the Blacklist Support Group are wholly committed to fairness and common decency they will be well aware that the Labour party, when in Government, has failed to make serious in-roads towards the abolition of British blacklisting. 

Despite what Dave Smith declares about us placing our faith 'dewey eyed trust in politicians'; I fear that these honourable activists may suffer from being too trusting of people inside the Westminster bubble.      

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*  Page 48 of the Labour Manifesto:

"We will establish public inquiries into historical injustices including blacklisting and Orgreave, and ensure the second phase of the Grenfell Inquiry has the confidence of all those affected, especially the bereaved families and survivors. We will also consider a public inquiry in the case of Zane Gbangbola.

We will require judicial warrants for undercover operations and retain the Mitting Inquiry into undercover policing.

We will release all papers on the Shrewsbury 24 trials and 37 Cammell Laird shipyard workers and introduce a Public Accountability Bill".

The Blacklist Support Group are proud to have stood shoulder to shoulder on shared platforms for more than 10 years with campaigners fighting for justice for Orgreave, Grenfell, Zane Gbangbola, victims of undercover political policing, the Shrewsbury Pickets and Cammell Laird ship workers. We have demanded and fought for a public inquiry for over a decade - its is our campaigning that has led to this manifesto commitment.  We therefore whole heartedly support this pledge towards getting the truth we, and other working class miscarriages of justice, deserve.  But working people should never place dewy eyed trust in politicians, lawyers or union leaders to solve our problems for us; continuing to build a movement remains essential.  

Full manifesto available to view here: https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/

**  'During 2008/09 the Iinformation Commisioner's Office carried out an investigation into employment blacklisting in the construction industry.  As part of that investigation, the ICO seized information from a company called The Consulting Association.  Some of the information we seized amounted to a 'blacklist' of individuals who were considered to pose a risk to their employers if employed within the construction industry.'

***  
Following the blacklisting scandal the Labour Government came forward with regulations. These regulations are so weak that they will not deter blacklisting. The only recourse for someone who has been blacklisted still remains taking a case to an employment tribunal and financial loss has to be proved. UCATT has constantly argued for the regulations to be strengthened. They necessary changes are:

• Make blacklisting a criminal offence
• When a blacklist is discovered all those on it are automatically told.
• An automatic right to compensation for everyone blacklisted.
• For the regulations to be widened from the narrow confines of “trade union activities” to the wider “activities associated with trade unions”. Ensuring trade unionists can’t be blacklisted for taking unofficial industrial action, such as a ban on voluntary overtime.

Trevor Philips & The Novichok of Politics

by Les May

I'M seventy six.  The first thing I do each morning is take a pill to lower my blood pressure.  Yesterday I forgot until mid morning.  My wife asked me what I was doing.  When I told her she said she was surprised I was willing to take a daily pill when I am usually sceptical about medication.  I replied “I’m trying to make sure I live long enough to see a proper Labour government again”.

My dad was mentally ill; my mother illiterate.  For the first eleven years of my life six of us lived in a ‘two up, two down’ on Deeplish (a district of Rochdale).   It had gas lighting, an outside lavatory, the sink was a rectangular depression in slab of stone, in other words a ‘slop stone’, and the outside wall was constantly damp in winter.  The rent was 10/6 (53p or £14.40p at 2018 prices).

In 1953 we got lucky and were allocated a ‘council house’. The rent was £1 a week which is equivalent to £27.12p (£117.52 per calendar month, PCM) at present day prices.  After 26 years of Tory governments and 13 years of Labour governments selling off council houses the rent of a now privately owned ex-council house on the Belfield estate (another district of Rochdale) is £460 PCM. These houses were built as a result of a Labour government’s 1930 Housing Act piloted through the Commons by Arthur Greenwood.

My dad worked as a road sweeper, on the bins or ‘the tubs’ (these served the outlying houses which did not have mains drainages).   When he could no longer hold down a job and went into hospital we did not starve thanks to Labour’s 1948 National Assistance Act. It’s what enabled me to stay at school until I was 18.

Unsurprisingly my political hero is Clement Attlee. In a very real sense all I have I feel I owe to the 1945 Labour Government.  I got a good education which enabled me to work until I was 67.  I had a job which did not make me rich, but it gave me a house and the security that allowed us to turn it into a home.  When an unexpected bill arrives I don’t have to ask a Wonga lookalike for a loan.  It wasn’t just the money that supported my family which allowed us to break out of poverty I’m grateful for.  I’m equally grateful that we were not viewed as scroungers. Today we would be.

I’ve voted Labour all my life because I want everyone to have the chances I had. I despaired throughout the Blair years and the Harman interregnum.  When Corbyn was elected leader I looked forward to him setting the Labour party in a new direction.  Equality of opportunity is not enough, not least because it is impossible to achieve.  We have to care about equality of outcome if other families are to have the same support that mine had.

When I read that Trevor Philips has said ‘Labour is led by antisemites and racists who basically want to essentially eliminate anyone who disagrees with them’, I ask myself how anyone can so casually toss about words that are the political equivalent of Novichok and yet in almost the same breath say ‘We have to find a way to talk to each other with respect’.

As a Labour supporter I feel tainted by Philips’ poisonous comments.  It is as if he is accusing me of being a racist.  Like so many other people who use this kind of language he produces no evidence for it.  He’s acting like the Trump of Labour politics.

What we are seeing from Philips, Umanna, Field, Regan and their ilk is self indulgence and a polishing of their egos.  They don’t care about the families like the one I grew up in.  They don’t care that ordinary families cannot find a home. They don’t want a proper Labour government which will tackle at root the gross inequalities in our society and build the council houses people need.  They style themselves ‘centre left’ and attack Corbyn for being too left wing.  Corbyn is far less radical in his politics than Attlee was.  Just look at Attlee’s record on nationalisation if you want confirmation.

Jeremy’s Promised Land!

by Christopher Draper

I’ve just come back from a day-school on the Balfour declaration where no-one mentioned the elephant in the room.  Speakers gave Arthur Balfour, Lloyd George and Lord Rothschild a well deserved kicking but ignored those ultimately responsible for handing Palestine over to the gang of Zionist thugs who concocted the apartheid State of Israel.

The Spirit of ‘45

On 26th July 1945 a British Labour government took office with an overwhelming majority, a popular mandate for Socialism and legal responsibility for the administration of Palestine.  Despite Jews being a in minority, owning just 6% of the land, Zionist terrorists launched a murderous campaign to drive the Arab population from their homeland and transform Palestine into an ethnically-cleansed State of Israel.
As well as attacks on Palestinians, Clement Attlee and his Labour chums were left in no doubt of the Zionist’s systematic savagery after 91 people were murdered at the King David Hotel, the British Embassy in Rome was blown up, a bomb was planted in the Colonial Office and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin himself received a letter bomb but instead of defending the Palestinians from colonisation Labour opted for expediency. In 1947, even before the government’s mandate had expired, this most left-wing of Labour Governments announced its intention to walk away, leaving Palestine to the Zionists.

Ignorance is Bliss

This utter betrayal characterises the record of the 1945-51 Labour regime so revered by activists who imagine Jeremy might lead us back to that Garden of Eden. This is a fiction apparent to anyone who takes the trouble to examine the real record of that government though many lazily prefer the myth. I don’t want to bludgeon readers with endless argument but instead offer a few pointers you can investigate and decide upon for yourself.

Conscription

Post-war Labour was expected to rapidly demilitarise but instead Attlee established permanent peace-time conscription that continued throughout Labour’s reign until it was finally abolished in 1960 by a Tory administration. It soon became apparent that Labour required a conscript army to carry out its industrial and colonial policies.

Labouring Under Labour

· July 1945, within a week of taking office Labour sent strikebreaking troops into London’s Surrey Docks. The strike was defeated and 900 dockers suspended.
· October 1945 - 21,000 conscript troops broke national port strike
· Aug 1947 - 40 Grimethorpe miners taken to court for striking
· Jan 1948 - 191 Durham miners summonsed for striking
· March 1948 - 2 Neath miners prosecuted for stay-down strike
· May 1949 - troops defeated Avonmouth strike
· Sep 1950 - 10 members of gasworkers strike committee charged with conspiracy
· February 1951 – 7 London and Mersey dockers charged with conspiracy
Between 1945 and 1951 Labour ordered troops across picket lines 18 times. It retained Wartime Order 1305 to make strikes illegal and twice invoked the Emergency Powers Act of 1920. Labour even revived the secret Supply & Transport Organisation the Tories had used to break the 1926 General Strike. Ever ready to act against workers Labour never once invoked the 1305 clause that prohibited employers from imposing “lock-outs”. Printworkers locked-out by the London Master Printers Federation in August 1950 got no support from Attlee’s government but successfully defended their jobs and conditions through their own collective action.

Pacifying the Natives

Pacifying the Natives
In 1924 J H Thomas, foreign minister of Britain’s first Labour government reassuringly declared; “I am here to see there is no mucking about with the British Empire”.  On the day of Labour’s 1945 election victory his successor, Ernest Bevin announced, “British foreign policy will not be altered in any way under the Labour Government”. In practice this meant;
· 1945 September Vietnam – bloody suppression of popular uprising
· 1945 October Java - Seaforth Highlanders crush popular uprising
· 1945 December Greece - 5-year military campaign against socialists
· 1946 Albania - naval action and confiscation of gold reserves
· 1946 January Cyprus – 18 trade unionists imprisoned
· 1947 Kenya - troops shoot “uncooperative” Kenyans
· 1947 Aden – brutal suppression of “civil disturbances”
· 1947 August India – abandoned to partition and violence
· 1948 Malaya – brutal colonial war against insurgency
· 1948 February Ghana - Nkrumah jailed and 29 killed
· 1949 April Uganda - 8 demonstrators killed many arrested
· 1949 November Nigeria – 21 strikers shot dead at Enugu Colliery
· 1950 Korea – troops sent to support US intervention
· 1950 March Botswana – exiled Seretse Khama for marrying a white woman
· 1951 June Persia – “Gunboat diplomacy” of cruiser Mauritius

In Bed With Fascists

Whilst continuing to wield the big stick in the colonies Labour kow-towed to its new best friend, the United States. Bevin created NATO as an anti-communist alliance to facilitate American hegemony in Europe.  Alliances with fascists proved preferable to friendship with socialists soft on communism. After the war Labour kept interned at Chorley concentration camp 226 Spanish anti-fascists who’d fought against both Franco and the Nazis.  An even worse fate awaited their 136 comrades who Labour deported back to Franco’s torture chambers.  Attlee’s government then proceeded to grant Franco’s fascist regime official recognition as it did to Fascist Portugal, a fellow member of NATO, an organisation supposedly founded to defend freedom!

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Following Attlee’s agreement on the 1945 nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he insisted that Britain must now have its own nuclear bomb.  Bevin agreed, with obscene enthusiasm, “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs…We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”.

MP’s & Pensioners

With wages averaging around £5 a week Labour raised the Old Age Pension to just a quarter of this amount, 26 shillings, but they managed more for themselves, increasing MP’s salaries from £600 a year to £1000 with £5,000 for the Postmaster General.

Ethel’s Prescience

Despite this shameful record Labour loyalists cling to the legacy of the NHS, but this was a Liberal scheme and would have been introduced by them if they’d been elected in 1945.  After all it was Lloyd George who started the Welfare State by introducing Old Age Pensions in 1908 and Liberals Beveridge and Keynes who drafted the welfare measures Labour carried out (Labour’s education system was devised by a Tory, Rab Butler).   As the Guardian noted, even “the Tory manifesto pledges were not all that different from Labour’s”.   Labour’s NHS used the same top-down, hierarchical model as in its other Nationalisations. Just before Labour government took office, in 1944, the writer Ethel Mannin presciently identified “ersatz socialism”, “Socialism without tears, an attempt at pacifying the capitalist with compensation for his confiscated property – a sort of social appeasement, which will leave a class system of society, and which offers no new
approach to life and no recognition of “the soul of man”… “Coarse comfort, like petted animals” is exactly the aim of such palliatives as the Beveridge Plan.
What sort of fool imagines the rich would simply relinquish their power and wealth on the vote of a Parliamentary majority?  Only by organising and educating ourselves at work and in our own communities could we ever hope to wrest control from the powerful and manipulative. Jeremy might well lead us down the Parliamentary road but it won’t, never did and never could, lead us into the Garden of Eden.

CD November 2017 

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Are Smith and Corbyn two sides of same coin?

Thinking the Unthinkable

by Les May

As the delegates left the Labour conference after the result of the leadership election was announced one of the people the BBC had assigned to cover the event asked an interviewee ‘How will Corbyn’s centrist MPs react’.

Now forgive me for asking but does not the whole history of the party, how it came into existence and where it derives much of its support and funding indicate that if it is anything at all it is a distinctly left of centre party?  If it isn’t and does not see its future as being just that, then why does it exist at all? 

As I have pointed out before the whole locus of British politics has moved sharply to the Right in the past thirty years.  Even Tory politicians like Ted Heath pursued policies which by contemporary standards would be viewed as dangerously left wing.  As William Keegan pointed out last year the Tory press attacks Labours policies which are ‘far less radical than those of the Attlee governments’.

One thing that even Corbyn’s fiercest internal critics cannot deny is that he has shifted the debate about what policies the Labour party should pursue sharply to the Left.  Both Angela Eagle and Owen Smith realised at once that there were no votes in promoting or advocating the Blairite policies.  Apart from Smith’s advocacy of a second referendum on leaving the EU he seems to have set out an agenda very similar to that advocated by Corbyn.

But I would urge a note of caution on both Corbyn supporters like myself and the ‘centrist’ MPs in the parliamentary Labour party. 

Re-nationalising the railways is a ‘no brainer’ to many Labour supporters but whether that would improve peoples’ daily experience of train travel depends upon whether you think that ownership is the problem or whether you think that it is more a question of how the railways are run.

Is the prime concern to run an ‘efficient’ service, i.e. an over optimised service being run at the lowest possible cost, or is it to run the railways as a public service.  By the latter I mean trains run sufficiently frequently and with sufficient seating to ensure that commuting is not a misery, and that the present over complicated ticketing arrangements will be abandoned and it will once again be possible to walk into any station and book a train to anywhere in the country at any time.

If the choice is for ‘railways as a public service’ re-nationalisation alone will not do the trick.  It needs a recognition that there will be costs to the public purse.

The MPs who voted to show that they had ‘no confidence’ in Corbyn seem to think that it his leadership which is the major obstacle to winning the 2020 election.  What they fail to recognise is that we no longer live in a predominantly two or sometimes three party political world.  Like it or not we  can no longer rely on a Scottish Labour vote and in England we now live in a five party world, Labour, Tory, Liberal, Green and UKIP.  Dividing the total vote in this way and factoring in the likely effects of the upcoming boundary changes suggests to me that there is a real danger that the Tories will win irrespective of who is Labour leader.

Preventing this may mean that Labour MPs and party members have to ‘think the unthinkable’, and both form a united front against the Tories and abandon uncritical support for the present ‘first past the post’ electoral system which it has been argued favours centrist policies designed to attract ‘swing’ voters in a few key constituencies.

I’d love to think that Labour could get the sort of electoral mandate that Attlee’s 1945 government had, but it’s just not going to happen.  Recognising this I can either ‘keep the faith’ or become a dissenter and run the risk of being called a ‘traitor to socialism’.  As I live in the real world and not a fantasy world I’ll choose the latter.

One of the claimed advantages of the ‘first past the post system’ is that it keeps the link between the individual MP and the voters, i.e. you vote for an MP first and the party second.  But think on this.  I’m likely to be moved into the Rochdale constituency under the boundary changes.  At present the MP is Simon Danczuk and if Rochdale Labour party endorses him for the 2020 election, pigs will fly before I’ll vote for him.  And I’m not alone.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/20/jeremy-corbyn-modern-capitalism-needs-opponent

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alternative-Towards-New-Progressive-Politics/dp/1785900498