1960s >> 1967 >> no-753-may-1967

The Budget
Callaghan’s 1967 Budget, for the man in the street whose fortune is supposed to be involved in it, was nothing more than a bore. Very few people seemed to be aware that April 11 was Budget Day; even fewer seemed to care.

The reason for the apathy was that nobody expected any great changes in taxation; the financial pundits had almost unanimously forecast what is called a standstill Budget, although there were the usual pleas for some sections of the population (somebody seems to have suddenly discovered that there are actually people living in dire poverty) and for some regions of the country (it seems, suddenly to have become obvious in certain quarters that unemployment is not a thing of the past).
Callaghan, apparently, agreed with the experts. “Steady as she goes” was his epithet for the Budget and that was the most newsworthy thing about it. (Although one banker called it the Puppet On A String Budget.)

Budget day is always the time for the airing of two delusions. The first is that a Chancellor of the Exchequer, by using Bank Rate or any of the other financial measures at his disposal, can exert an exact and sensitive control over the economy.

In truth, capitalism is quite uncontrollable—as many Chancellors have found to their cost. Callaghan was not the first Labour leader to apply nautical terms to a financial situation; last July Wilson, admitting that things were out of control, said that the economy had been “blown off course.”

The second delusion is that changes in taxation have some significant effect on working class conditions. The most that any Budget can do to a worker is for a time to alter his take home pay, up or down, by a few shillings.

In the long run a worker gets paid what it takes to keep him. That is a fact of capitalism and, like its economic anarchy, is something which no Chancellor can change.

Our Boys in Aden
What are British troops doing in Aden, apart from putting the boot in and expressing a willingness to accept a massive punch-up?

The newspapers tell us they are keeping the peace, which avoids the question of why the peace is threatened.

Aden was annexed (a diplomat’s word for stolen) by Britain in 1839, and used as a base to guard the trade route to India. (It is still the only fortified point between Egypt and Bombay).

When the British left India in 1948 it could have been the end of their interest in Aden, had it not been for the rich oil fields which had been discovered in the Middle East.

Aden now stands guard on the Persian Gulf, where two-thirds of the oil resources of Western capitalism lie. Britain gets more than half its oil from the countries around the Persian Gulf and British oil companies own about one third of the Gulf’s production.

It is to protect these interests that Our Boys in Aden are being killed—and are themselves doing a bit of killing. Sir William Luce, who was Governor of Aden 1959-60. made it clear in an article in the Daily Telegraph on April 12 last:

“We did not undertake the ‘policing’ of the Gulf for some vague, altruistic purpose; we went there, and have remained there, because it has suited us to do so.”

By “we” and “us” Sir William is really talking about the East India Company in the old days and the oil companies today. These are the interests which need working class bodies to protect them, interests which are threatened today by claims from Persia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and by the opposing Aden nationalists.

British capitalism’s only hope is to stay in Aden until some sort of order has been imposed in this conflict. A withdrawal now could well plunge the place into a Congo-like war, with serious results for the oilmen of the Persian Gulf.

So it looks as if Our Boys in Aden will have to carry on keeping the peace for a while, even if they have to kill half the population to do it.

The Bristol Affair
Bristol Siddeley Motors’ excess profits on aero-engine overhaul—they had to pay back the government £3.9m.—is but one example of what goes on in capitalism. Recent years have also seen the Ferranti affair and the collapse of various insurance companies. But what effect do such commercial malpractices have on the working class as a whole? Well-meaning political reformers see this as a moral issue in which the community is harmed by loop-holes in the law and by administrative shortcomings which a minority exploit to line their pockets. The fog of moral indignation raised serves to obscure some very important points as far as the profit-making of capitalism is concerned. In the long run profits are not made by charging excessive prices or by milking the funds of companies. These are exceptional cases and fail to explain the source of the profit gained by the bulk of industrial and commercial enterprises. To find the answer production itself must be examined.

The people who do the work of producing and distributing goods and services do so for a wage or salary. However many sources of cheating are blocked off, and however much money is recovered by the government, wages will not be affected. These are normally raised by workers organising in unions to press for more. Employers, of course, are organised to resist these demands and to press their own for greater productivity or pay cuts as conditions demand.

Workers’ pay is part of the capital invested in production and is not their share of the product (which belongs in whole to the employer). Wages amount on the average to the sum of the things required to maintain workers and their families as healthy and efficient workers. As a class workers produce more than is needed to keep them and it is from this surplus that the employing class get their incomes. This comes to them in various forms such as rent, interest and profit and also provides the source of the funds which are needed by the government to finance their collective requirements such as armaments and the education, health and welfare of their workers.

So when arms contractors make more than the accepted rate of profit, it is a hindrance to the whole of the capitalist class in any country. The Bristol affair is but one of the sectional quarrels of capitalism in which all are striving for the maximum advantage. The government may be quite competent to deal with Bristol Siddeley but cannot hope to touch the greater question of the exploitation of the working class which is the norm of capitalism, with or without the swindles.