FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES?

Calls by General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing Chief of the General Staff, for Britain to train and equip a “citizen army” to prepare the country for a coming land war might be seen as a signal for the men in white coats to escort him quietly to his new (secure) care home. It is, nevertheless, a sign of the times.

The General hardly had in mind training and arming workers in a workers militia. That’s an excellent idea for a state embarking on the perilous journey to build socialism, but probably not what he had in mind. His wish was presumably for an expanded Territorial Army – lots of politically conservative reservists who can be summoned from their peacetime occupations to fight on foreign soil. No doubt the General would be happy for them to be used, if suitably trained, to suppress unruly workers in UK towns and cities. They won’t, however, be needed to ‘fight them on the beaches’. Neither Russia nor China, however much the US might provoke them, will be storming up our beaches in the foreseeable future. Driven to confrontation, they could well react in other ways, but these won’t be ways against which weekend soldiers will be much use.

The risk of conflict reaching our shores should not be ignored. The correct response is not to increase our spending on conventional arms and illegal nuclear weapons, especially when the systems to deliver the latter are leased from the US and probably have a hidden mechanism to enable the US to disable them. Instead, we need an independent, ethical and humane foreign policy: one that seeks a resolution to the war in Ukraine instead of funding its continuation; one that doesn’t support menacing US fleets off China signalling support of Tiwan (how would the US react if China sent a fleet to support blockaded Cuba?); and one that doesn’t turn a blind eye to Israeli genocide in Palestine. Such a policy, would require us to quit NATO and AUKUS and free ourselves from the imperialist policies pursued by past and present US Presidents  – and who know what his possible successor will come up with?

The workers militia can come later.

HOW MUCH IS YOUR MP WORTH?

The decision by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) that MPs’ basic pay for 2023-24 will increase by 2.9% attracted little attention. This modest increase is in line with that for  public sector earnings according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). What should have attracted more attention is that the award would result in an MP’s basic salary of £86,584 per annum. According to the ONS, the median annual earnings for someone in full time employment was only £34,963 in 2022-23. MPs also benefit from Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund.  The taxpayers’ contribution to this is difficult to estimate as there is no requirement to balance the Fund as the taxpayer pays for the difference between benefits paid and MP’s contributions.  The Times has estimated that membership of the Fund is worth an extra £40,000[i] for every MP. To put this another way, the employer’s contribution is around 46%, compared with the statutory minimum of 3% paid by employers to the rest of us.

Despite  this largess, MPs are allowed to supplement their salaries with outside ‘earnings’. The Guardian estimated these to have totalled £10 million in 2022[ii].

Yet all is not well with our handsomely rewarded MPs. In an article in the Guardian on 30 December headed ‘You can’t be weak – MPs tell of hidden toll on mental health of a career in Commons’, Peter Walker describes, in heart rending detail, the trials and tribulations of being an MP. Mental breakdowns, feelings of low esteem, a sense of futility, public abuse and the inconvenience of constituency work. It is, however, Walker’s use of the term ‘career’ that most sticks in the throat. Could it be that MPs’ feelings of futility and low esteem arise from their failure to understand what they are for?

An MP is supposed to represent in parliament his or her constituents until the next general election. Nothing more, nothing less. They are not social workers – they lack the training to do this. They are not Party workers, even though many spend much of their time filling in the depleted ranks of party activists. In the case of Labour MPs, they are not even delegates from their Constituency Labour Party –  their allegiance,  as Andrew Murray points out in his new book[iii] , is only to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Don’t miss Andrew when he speaks to the Croydon Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group at Ruskin House at 7.30 pm on 18 January.

If aspiring MPs want a ‘career’ they should look to the Civil Service, the Armed Forces, the Police and what’s left of the NHS; but they need to be aware that a ‘career’ implies systematic assessments, performance reviews and a pay scale. MPs are not subject to any of these. In their world, advancement requires only ingratiation and patronage. They are already at the top of the pay scale from Day One. Aspiring MPs would, however, be well advised to forgo a career in teaching and the universities even if they were qualified, for such jobs offer very little career progression.

It’s still, no doubt, possible to have a career in parts of the private sector where outsourcing and casualisation have not totally undermined employment – but don’t expect a defined benefit pension. Banking and other forms of hucksterism do, of course, provide excellent ‘livings’ for some, as does drug trafficking, but the trick with both is, of course, not to get caught.

The ultimate socialist solution is that adopted in the Paris Commune as described by Engels[iv]

• all posts, administrative, judicial and educational, to be filled by election on the basis of universal suffrage
• All officials, high or low, to be paid the average wage

We are not there yet, but curtailing the excessive financial remuneration of MPs and prohibiting them from taking second jobs and accepting other sleazy income would be a start.

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[i] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-pension-perks-equivalent-to-extra-40-000-a-year-on-top-of-81-000-annual-salary-5st6pkmfb

[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/06/mps-paid-10m-for-second-jobs-and-freelance-work-over-past-year

[iii] Andrew Murray, Is Socialism Possible in Britain? Reflections on the Corbyn Years, Verso 2022

[iv] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

NEW YEAR QUIZ

Our New Year Quiz this year only has one question –

Question: What do you do with a system that

• Allows extreme wealth to be accumulated and passed on by some while relying on foodbanks to support others.
• Is unwilling to curtail the extraction, importation and burning of fossil fuels sufficiently quickly to avoid climate collapse.
• Supports colonial expansion and genocide by its ‘allies’.
• Has no solution for the waves of immigration  caused by wars for which it shares responsibility.
• Fails to provide adequate housing for its own population.
• Under-funds its public health service and those who work for it.
• Claims that unproportional mass votes every few years choosing between two or three  undemocratically run and very similar parties represents ‘democracy’.
• Has a hereditary head of state and a second chamber stuffed with appointees, many of whom have donated to one of the above parties.
• Possesses at huge cost weapons of mass destruction targeted at civilian populations.
• Obstructs acts of solidarity by workers and imposes restrictions on their trade unions.
• Seeks to curtail demonstrations and prosecute demonstrators.
• Maintains a ‘free’ press owned by oligarchs.
• Turns a blind eye to tax havens and other methods of tax avoidance by the rich while imposing sanctions on those claiming its meagre levels of social support.

Answer:

You abolish it!

and start to build a replacement whose organisation and wealth distribution are initially based on the amount of work we perform or have previously performed.

To contribute to this task, apply to join the Communist Party of Britain by e-mailing croydon@communistparty.org.uk.

Happy New Year!

A PUNITIVE WEALTH TAX

The Communist Manifesto called for the abolition of all rights of inheritance. Many communists and most others on the Left might now settle, at least as a start, for a significant wealth tax. It’s not, however, widely appreciated that we already have a punitive wealth tax. The problem with it is that it only taxes the less well off.

Anyone with savings or assets worth more than £23,250 (or £24,000 in Wales) is expected to fund their own care at home or in a residential care home. This care is provided by a multiplicity of small businesses and a few large chains, all relying on poorly paid and insecurely employed workers. After meeting minimum legal requirements and the undemanding requirements of the regulator (in England the Quality Care Commission), directors are required by law to prioritise the interests of the shareholders, not those of ‘customers’, in this case care home residents.

Approaching half a million people live in care homes, half of whom pay for their own care and the other half are paid for by cash-strapped (or in the case of Croydon, bankrupt) local authorities. About the same number receive social care at home, paid for by the recipients but with means tested funding from the same cash-strapped local authorities.  

Few millionaires are going to hang around in a care home until the fees reduce their assets to £23,250. They prefer to move to sunnier climes where the tax rates are lower or, if they must stay in the UK,  use trust funds to, in effect, hide their assets from the tax man. There is also the House of Lords for those who need a day centre without the need to mix with ‘ordinary people’. Membership simply requires a large donation to the Tory Party.

Andy Burnham, Health Secretary in the last Labour government, proposed a National Care Service, funded by a compulsory levy on estates. This would have been a step in the right direction, but was attacked by the Tories in the election of 2010 as a ‘death tax’ and duly scrapped by the incoming coalition government (thank you, LibDems).

It seems unlikely that Sir Keir Starmer will include Burnham’s plan in ‘his’ forthcoming election manifesto. Every pressure should, however, be brought to bear on him not to duck the issue.

Not history

Describing King Charles’s visit to Parliament in the Guardian today, John Crace reflects that  “there are procedures and protocols to be observed. Preferably with as much pageantry and absurdity as possible. We Brits like our history to come as costume drama”.

“We Brits” is a very diverse demographic. An independent bourgeois Scotland would no doubt seek to replicate such flummery, albeit in a less expensive way with the head of state paying occasional flying visits on the Commonwealth model but staying, cost-free, in his second home. In Northern Ireland the botched Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol has perhaps already secured a majority for the republicanism. But the underlying idea Crace expressed has some substance: many people in the UK still think “history” is a record of the doings of Great People, with the ‘little people’ merely providing the backdrop – serving the Great People when not dying in plagues, famines and wars. Isn’t this what we are taught from the cradle, tested on at school and have rammed down our throats 24/7 by the mass media? The BBC provides a spectacular example. History, we are taught, is the six wives of Henry VIII and the state funeral of Winston Churchill.

As communists, we see things differently. Karl Marx wrote in the very first sentence of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle[1].

Thus, much of our thinking concerns the laws that influence how this struggle developed in the past and how we can influence it in future. The flummery to which we have been subjected, and will continue to have to endure for the next fortnight or so, is not ‘history’, but, if we can observe its effect objectively and dispassionately, we can learn how effective it still is in distracting people from their social and economic concerns and whether it will continue to work in future.

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[1] Marx subsequently qualified this by making clear he was referring to written history and there would have been a time in pre-history before society had developed along exploitative lines

Time we woke up?

Professor Richard J Evans, writing in the current edition of the London Review of Books (2 December 2021) describes how the Tory government, loyally supported by the ‘Yellow Press’ that is the Telegraph, Mail and Express, has been tampering with Life in the United Kingdom: a Guide for New Residents, the information booklet on which applicants for naturalized British citizenship are examined.

The first version of Life in the United Kingdom, published by the New Labour government in 2004, at least acknowledged the presence of enslaved and Black people in Britain in the 18^th century and pointed out that the enslaved played a significant role in their own emancipation. The 2013 edition, the first published under the Tory government (with the collaboration of the Lib-Dems), omitted all such references and characterized emancipation of slaves as a gift to enslaved people from a benevolent British ruling class. The uncomfortable fact that tens of thousands died on British slave ships was omitted.

Professor Evans reminds us that in 2020 the Historical Society published a letter signed by 175 historians denouncing Life in the United Kingdom as “fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false in its account of slavery, the slave trade and the process of decolonization”. This criticism was, of course, ignored.

More recent history was also distorted in the 2013 edition of Life in the United Kingdom. Drawing on the work of  Frank Trentmann, Professor Evans points out that all references to the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s have been omitted, as has any reference to his racist philosophy and motives.

What is the Tories’ motive in trying to impose a single, supposedly patriotic narrative on historical teaching, research and public presentation? One explanation is that it is part of a cultural war directed at the straw man that is ‘woke’ and is simply a cynical, tactical move to drive a wedge between the significant body of opinion in Britain supporting working class solidarity and anti-racism and an enfeebled post-Corbyn Labour Party willing to make whatever compromises are called for to secure a parliamentary majority. A deeper explanation is that capitalism requires an ideology that explains the world as fixed and unchangeable in order to secure an acceptance of the status quo. The changes to Life in the United Kingdom perpetuate such an ideology.

The world is, however, neither fixed nor, if communists and our allies have anything to do with it, unchangeable. Let’s hope we succeed: without such change, the status quo will ensure that humanity is doomed.

The Assault on Truth

There were probably some raised eyebrows at Peter Oborne’s choice of the Morning Star to speak about his new book The Assault on Truth. It’s a withering and well documented piece which demonstrates how Boris Johnson, in particular, and the populist right, in general, systematically lie with impunity – but why had Oborne chosen the Morning Star to promote his book? Was he not a former journalist on the Spectator and Daily Mail and, until he resigned in 2015, Chief Political Commentator at the Daily Torygraph? Wouldn’t they provide better publicity?

Necessity drove Oborne to  choose the Morning Star.  Whether or not the readers of our yellow press would like to read it, Oborne’s book makes uncomfortable reading for the unsavoury bunch of mega rich tax avoiders  who own and manipulate our mass media . They have collectively ignored it and the state broadcasting service, aka the BBC, has predictably followed suit. Peter Oborne would have been well aware that any coverage in the Morning Star would not generate any secondary coverage by the BBC. The state broadcaster has a long standing policy of pretending that the Morning Star does not exist.

Peter Oborne is no socialist. His views appear to hark back to a golden age when capitalists behaved ‘honourably’; and he appears to share George Orwell’s anti-communism, failing in particular, to recognise that communists act in a principled way when assessing whether means justify ends – something  I endeavoured to point out in the letters section of the Morning Star following publication of his interview. He is, however, undoubtedly right to argue that Boris Johnson has plumbed new depths in dishonesty and his book is meticulously research, sourced and referenced. One would like to think that it will give Johnson and his aides a few sleepless nights – but, unfortunately, I doubt it.

References

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/truth-first-casualty-war-probity-public-life-and-politics

The Assault on Truth, Peter Oborne, Simon & Schuster, 2020 – available from your local bookshop – don’t buy it on Amazon!

The Coronavirus Pandemic: a view from Croydon

The coronavirus pandemic and its social consequences are moving so quickly that anything we write today is likely to be rendered obsolete tomorrow, especially when it is written from the narrow perspective and vantage point of Croydon and its local Communist Party branch. Nevertheless, here are a dozen recommendations that we might have been discussing at our AGM on Thursday had it not been postponed.

1. A government of national unity. It is unacceptable that someone as unsuitable, untrustworthy and clearly as out of his depth as the Fat Controller should be heading up a Tory government at a time of national crisis.

2. Full disclosure of the government’s modelling of the epidemic in England, Scotland and Wales so that it can be scrutinised by the wider medical and academic community. Remember how wrong were the government’s narrow pool of medical advisers over mad cow disease?

3. More comprehensive reporting and publication of the numbers of infections and deaths at the local level.

4. Responsibility for managing the epidemic in Northern Ireland to be transferred to the Republic. A single, unified strategy is called for in the island of Ireland. Covid-19 does not respect borders, least of all ones as porous at that between the North and the South of Ireland.

5. Compulsory requisitioning of private hospitals. It is simply unacceptable that the government should be further subsidising these parasitic institutions by hiring their facilities at commercial prices.

6. Nationalisation without compensation of UK retail banks, i.e. those behind the ring fence set up following the Vickers report, before they fail.  They should then be supervised by the Bank of England, which itself should be brought completely under government control. We must learn from the mistakes in the 2007-8 bail out of banks and not use public funds to protect bank shareholders and their over-paid senior management while leaving their customers to suffer. We can then ensure that banks support socially useful activities rather than prioritise building up their own reserves as they did following the 2008 financial crisis. If necessary, relevant parts of UK industry should also be taken over to preclude profiteering, co-ordinate manufacture of respiratory equipment and promote not-for-profit vaccine research and distribution.

7. The homeless should be taken off the streets immediately and properly housed. The acquisition of vacant properties and second homes could be undertaken to facilitate this.

8. Food banks should be run down as quickly as practicable and replaced with adequate levels of social payments. To this end, Universal Credit should be immediately transformed into a more generous and less restrictive system and workers on zero hours contracts and others in the gig economy brought within its ambit.

9. The government should disregard the bleating from Richard Branson and other UK airlines to bail them out. If they are failing, they should be put into administration and their fleets mothballed. The opportunity this would provide to formally abandon Heathrow expansion should be taken.

10. The wealth of UK citizens held abroad in tax havens should be re-patriated and further flight of capital abroad halted by the immediate imposition of capital controls. A comprehensive wealth tax should be imposed to help finance the crisis.

11. Evictions and mortgage foreclose on individual’s primary homes should be made illegal.

12. A mandatory role for trade unions in every workplace. This would ensure that exposure to infection by employees is related to social need and is fairly distributed. Employers cannot be trusted to carrry this out unchecked.

This list of recommendations isn’t comprehensive; nor does it necessarily represent current, official CP policy. In essence, a social revolution is called for – and that is CP policy. These recommendations are how we view things from Croydon. If you agree or disagree with any or all of them, let us know.

Tesco and Equal Pay for Equal Work

Do markets have memory? No, according to a basic tenet of market fundamentalism, the philosophy of the rich and powerful which is endorsed by their high priests, the professors of neoclassical economics. Markets, they contend, are forward looking and respond only to changes in prospects, not past events. This is why they are beyond challenge. They reflect the future and condition what is possible in the present. Furthermore, in the case of financial markets, they respond instantaneously – the so called ‘efficient market hypothesis’. Thus news that Tesco was being pursued through the conciliation service ACAS by the law firm Leigh Day over an equal pay claim that could cost Tesco £4 billion may have dented Tesco’s share price to the extent that investors thought it likely to succeed, but there was no question of customers having to pay for the £4 billion settlement, should it succeed, with higher prices. Future prices would be affected, according to this theory, only to the extent that the average cost of employing staff in future increases.

For communists, two issues arise here.

• While we agree that markets don’t have memory, the economy we actually experience is one of State Monopoly Capitalism in which institutional pressures are brought to bear to protect capital, including that invested in Tesco. To understand this economy, we need to begin our analysis not, where the neoclassical economists begin, with market prices, efficient or otherwise, and work backwards but with production, labour and the creation of value by workers and work forward, identifying with whom this created value ends up. It doesn’t end up with workers, whether shop floor or warehouse, male or female. After workers receive enough to survive and replicate (assuming their offspring are still needed), it ends up with those who own the capital – the 1% and the 0.1%.
• While communists fully support equal pay for equal work claims such as that against Tesco, we recognise that capitalism is incapable of achieving this except in the very limited case of a single workplace – and even then it is hard enough to achieve and sustain. Equal pay for equal work across an entire economy is the defining condition of socialism, which Marx defined as from each according to their means to each according to their work. That is not something that social democracy can, or even wishes, to deliver as, it would rent asunder our existing institutions (on which they, themselves, depend) and replace them with the more democratic framework needed for building communism with its ultimate aim of from each according to their means to each according to their need.

 

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD – AND THEN CHANGING IT

The BBC is required under its new Charter to provide “impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them”. Its failure to do so renders BBC news coverage increasingly irrelevant. It’s now not only Question Time that leads so many of us immediately to reach for the off button. Much BBC news coverage is more likely to increase blood pressure than increase understanding and engagement.

The requirement to provide “impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them” has, however, prompted the BBC to propose in its Religion and Ethics Review published this week that its coverage of religious issues should be increased and “greater religious understanding” incorporated into its news reporting. Investigative reporting of the corrosive influence of religiously segregated schools in Northern Ireland and, increasingly, the UK mainland would assist this understanding, but that’s not quite what the authors of the Review had in mind.

One problem for the Review was that it couldn’t avoid recognising that an increasing number of people in the UK do not affiliate to any traditional religion. It was in response to this awkward fact that it concluded that the extended coverage it recommends would also have to “reflect beliefs which aren’t founded on religion”. What “beliefs unfounded on religion” the review had in mind was not explained, so one has to speculate. Belief in creationism, that blood transfusion is impermissible  and (I suspect) that the world is flat are all endorsed by followers of some traditional religion. The Review will have to look to belief in flying saucers for truly independent beliefs – or have I missed its endorsement somewhere?  The Review did, however, identify the  target audience for unaffiliated believers: those not engaged with traditional religion who are “spiritual and interested in the big issues affecting them”.

As communists we are most certainly interested in the “big issues”, and not only those that affect us personally. Furthermore, communist philosophy, i.e. Marxism, provides, in our view, the best understanding there has ever been of the world around us. So can we expect to benefit from this envisaged extended coverage by the BBC? Of course not! We will be excluded, ostensibly because we are not “spiritual”. This is correct in the sense that we don’t rely on spirits to understand the world. However, the real reason we will be excluded is because, as Marx wrote, we not only seek to understand the world, we seek to change it. That is the reason the BBC will exclude us; but while it remains the mouthpiece of the ruling class, we would not have it any other way.

The BBC can do what it wants, but if you want to learn about Marxism and how it can help us to understand and change the world, you can join the Communist University of South London (CUiSL) which runs classes at 7.30 pm on the third Thursday of each month at Ruskin House, 23 Coombe Road, Croydon CR2 0BN. In the Spring Term we will be studying eco-socialism. For more details e-mail cuisl@communist-party.org.uk.