A grown-up attitude

At the last Labour Party conference Neil Kinnock made an impassioned appeal to Labour members to sink their differences and rally round his leadership. He asked them to win power for Labour so that they could end the blight and waste of unemployment and make the world a safer place to live in. Kinnock argued that these social evils flowed from the policies of the Thatcher government, thus implying two things: firstly, that unemployment is the result of government policies; and secondly that a change in government will remedy the situation

Poverty and unemployment have indeed increased in the last four years or so. Where the writer lives—Scotland—there are now three-quarters of a million people living below or on the “official” poverty line and a further quarter of a million working in low paid jobs which place them on or below this line. The poor live on incomes that give a married couple with two youngsters only £59.20 a week, or £8.46 a day. a payment which in real terms is only 25 per cent above Rowntree’s official poverty line of 1936, which he considered “the minimum in which physical efficiency could be maintained”. These appalling figures apply equally to other parts of Britain. Recent estimates of poverty, using only a slightly more generous estimate than that of the DHSS. put the number of British people in poverty at fifteen million. Once in poverty a whole series of forms of deprivation follow: bad health, poor housing and educational facilities, and so on. Poverty has no respect for age; it hits the young and the old the hardest. One Glasgow pensioner puts its impact in vivid terms: “Eighty-two years old and hardly a stick of furniture to call my own. I can’t afford to heat my house and eat as well”.

The cause of poverty is not to be found in the policies of the Thatcher government, but in capitalism itself. It is a society of glaring contradictions in which people starve in the face of a mountain of food, where people are homeless and at the same time building workers are made unemployed; where more is spent on amassing weapons of annihilation than on health. Capitalism is blind to need; it exists only to accumulate wealth for the tiny proportion of the population who own the resources of society. Because it is based on the anarchy of the market, from time to time it stumbles into crisis. This, of course, occurs on a world-scale and not just in Britain. We at present are living through such a world depression, in which workers have been thrown out of jobs not because they have produced too little, but paradoxically because they have produced “too much”. The trouble with Kinnock and Thatcher is that they assume that governments can do something about it. Slumps, they claim, can be ended through changes in government policy. For Kinnock it is increased government expenditure; for Thatcher it is decreasing public expenditure.

Both are doomed to failure. In the 1970s government expenditure increased four times yet unemployment rose from half-a-million to two million. Faced with such problems. Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor, imposed the first round of spending cuts in the social services. The Thatcher government has carried on where Labour left off in the belief that cutting public expenditure and reducing taxation would stimulate investment in industry. What both miss is the fact that slumps are natural features of capitalism. As an economic system capitalism has been characterised by booms and slumps throughout its historical development. Only when business confidence is restored by the prospects of renewed profitability will investment recommence and unemployment fall as output increases. Claims that Labour or Tory can get Britain working are fatuous and also encourage people to believe in simplistic notions of good and bad governments.At the moment the very mention of the word “Thatcherism” is enough to make a left winger foam at the mouth, to seethe with anger and indignation. The reaction is quite understandable. Thatcher and her crowd, in their exhortations to the unemployed to get on their bikes and find work, and their comparisons of striking miners with international terrorists, are callous and calculating. The trouble is that their rhetoric and complacency amid a multitude of personal disasters distract people from examining the system they represent and fix attention on personalities. Not so long ago the personification of evil was Edward Heath. Since then he has become a good guy, although not as good as Kinnock.

Although we cannot compare the government performances of Thatcher and Kinnock, comparison can be made between former Labour governments and the present Tory one. In the area of trade unionism the left argues that present Tory policy is designed to shackle and weaken organised labour. We would agree with this verdict, but is the Labour Party any better? During the so-called winter of discontent James Callaghan, Labour Prime Minister,