They imply that our actions are wholly a matter of "free will". In fact, human beings like any other animal, are conditioned, by our environment and experiences, as well as by our physical make-up. Just as a dog can be conditioned to be a vicious attack dog, or else a guide dog for the blind, so the conditioning that life gives to us determines how we think and act. To be consistent, we have to accept that even a Hitler is the product of the material world, even if that doesn't change how we respond to him and those like him. But, I was watching the TV last night, and the first thought that came into my mind to describe what I saw was "Pure Evil".I was watching the last in the series of Alan Davies' "Teenage Revolution". The series has been a recounting of the comedians experience of growing up as a teenager in the 1980's. It is a not uncommon account of a young person from a middle class background who rebels against their upbringing. It is the experience of someone who from that background, and who essentially retained the same lifestyle as an entertainer, rebels as a lifestyle choice, not as a necessity. In other words dilletantism. As part, of last night's programme Davies recalls the point when he joined the Labour Party. It is a time when the working class was in a decisive battle against Capital, its State, and its political representation in the form of the Thatcher Government.
From 1979, the Tories had set out to wage Class War against the working-class using the Ridley Plan as their military strategy, and the economic doctrine of Hayek, as the means to force Capital to resist Labour by reducing the Money Supply, and at the same time to undermine the economic conditions that enabled the working-class to continue with simply bargaining within the system. It was one of those moments when that “Social-democratic Consensus” I have described as being the framework by which Big Capital has operated over the last 100 years or so, broke down.Outside such periods we have the luxury of being able to analyse our condition, to self-criticise, and to engage in similar criticism of the position of others. We can present our own views by means such as this blog, and so on.
But, during conditions like the 1980's, although we have a duty to continue to argue our own views, and to point out where we believe others are wrong, the emphasis is different. In such conditions the real question is put in the way Billy Bragg put it, in his song featured in Davies previous programme - “Which side are you on?” Scargill had bad, bureaucratic Stalinist politics. Many miners themselves thought that it had been madness not to have had an overtime ban in place long before the strike to prevent the Government building up stocks ready for the confrontation they were clearly planning. Some thought a national ballot should have been held. But, once the strike began, those questions were secondary to the need to be on the side of the Miners, and all the other workers supporting them. Anyone who refused to do that because they objected to Scargill's politics, to the tactics adopted and so on,
quite simply placed themselves on the other side of the class barricades, and became the enemy just as much as Thatcher and MacGregor.The same was true of Liverpool and other Councils struggles against the Government. Militant were a pretty abysmal, sectarian organisation. On issue after issue that the left had been involved in, be it fighting fascism, CND, opposing sexism and homophobia, Ireland and many more, the Militant frequently stood aside from any broad movement, describing them as Popular Fronts, in order instead to establish their own activity with the hope of “Building The Party”. In the process they pissed off large sections of the Labour Movement. When it came to the struggle in Liverpool that meant that there was already a reservoir of opposition to them, and the tactics that were adopted, for example, the failure to link up with the Miners, were abysmal too. Yet, despite that the question was still posed in those stark terms. This was just as much a matter of life and death class struggle as the Miners Strike. It was still a question of - “Which side are you on.” In fact, just as with the Miners Strike, it should not have been a question of Liverpool or any other Council fighting the Tories. That fight should from the beginning have been a fight led, and co-ordinated by the Labour Party as the Workers Party. Instead, the reality was that the LP, understood as the vast majority of its members, were supporting those struggles. It was the leadership of the LP, along with its co-thinkers at the head of the TUC, which were refusing to provide such support, refusing to provide any kind of leadership.
It was with the knowledge of that, with the experience of living through those events not as an entertainer for whom these events were a source of material, but as a worker, as a Trade Union militant, who was standing on a Miners Picket line from day one, until the return to work, who was the Secretary of the local Trades Council Miners Support committee, and who through the LP was busy every week collecting money for local Miners and their family that part of what I saw in that programme turned my stomach and provoked that impression of “Pure evil”.
Davies showed the ranting speech of Kinnock at the 1985 LP Conference, where he attacked Liverpool City Council for their struggle against Thatcher's Class War.
Throughout the Miners Strike, Kinnock had refused to give support to the Miners, let alone act in any way to mobilise political support. I remember going to a huge rally in Stoke where Scargill and Kinnock were to speak. When Kinnock entered the hall, the response from all of the Miners I was with echoed out in unison, “Mind your back Arthur!” they shouted to Scargill. They were right. Kinnock might have been standing in front of him, but the knife was ready to stab him and the Miners in the back. And, with the Miners defeated, and Thatcher rampant, Kinnock took the opportunity not to try to mobilise the Labour movement to try to avoid a similar defeat, but instead to come to Thatcher's aid once more by attacking Council's like Liverpool who were putting up the resistance that he and the Labour leadership should have been providing. He used it to destroy, for a generation, the LP's ability to act as a means of resistance to the political attacks of Capital, and to make it ready for its domination by the ideas of Thatcherism itself, in the form of Blair and Brown.Davies says that he was so impressed by Kinnock's speech, attacking workers in struggle, and siding with Thatcher, that he sent off for a copy of it. That tells us just how much of a revolution he was engaged in! It tells us just how little he had in common with those sentiments of Billy Bragg - “Which side are you on?” Davies was clearly not on the side of the workers, not on the side of the revolution, but like Kinnock on the side of our class enemies. In that speech attacking Liverpool, Kinnock sunk to all time lows of hypocrisy. Having failed to support the Miners, and thereby aided in their defeat, he had shown the same degree of class betrayal when it came to Labour Councils. The clear message of his politics, which was echoed by the Soft Left within the LP at large, was that workers should lay down and die, not rock the boat, and thereby facilitate the return of a Labour government. The consequence of that would have to be that labour Council's – as many were already doing – would have to implement the Tory Cuts, and sack thousands of workers. But, what did Kinnock's attack focus on – the fact that Liverpool (as part of a very questionable, but understood tactic) had issued redundancy notices to its workers! Within months, Kinnock was to do exactly the same thing, but not as a tactic, by sacking loads of LP staff!
But, what wrenched my gut, was what happened as Davies watched this speech with Mr and Mrs Kinnock. On the platform behind him was the late Joan Maynard, who was shaking her head in rightful disgust at Kinnock's open betrayal of the workers in struggle.
His comment, “Look at Stalin's Nanny shaking her head", was said with all the bile of someone who has been on one side of a war. Worse, was his and his wife's comment in response to the late Eric Heffer's subsequent walk-out during the speech - “Welcome to oblivion.” But, of course, Kinnock and his wife were on one side of a class war, so it is no wonder they should exhibit such grotesque bile.
They were on Thatcher's side in that Class War, whereas Maynard, Heffer, Scargill and the Militant, for all their faults, were on our side. Eric Heffer who was certainly no Stalinist, had more principle, let alone socialist principle in his little finger than Mr. & Mrs Kinnock have ever had in their entire bodies.Of course, Kinnock and the Soft Left's argument might have had some validity if the idea of “not rocking the boat” in order to get a Labour Government, would have given workers any confidence that such an eventuality would have saved them from the iniquities of Thatcherism. But, it was a Labour Government, of which Kinnock had been part, that had begun the process of Cuts in the 1970's. It was Labour under Healey that had abandoned Keynesianism in favour of Monetarism. It was a labour government that had imposed a Pay Freeze on workers that eventually led to the winter of Discontent, and Thatcher winning the election.
Moreover, as a tactic it wasn't even working. After 1979, Thatcher became the most unpopular Prime Minister on record, and it appeared that even then the party might have ditched her. Although, we hear all of the stories today about Michael Foot, and his donkey jacket, the reality is that even in 1981, when he was leading mass demonstrations in cities across the country to mobilise opposition to the Tories, and the rising levels of unemployment, he and the LP were at 51% in the opinion polls. Had an election been held then a landslide Labour Victory dwarfing 1945 would have been achieved.What had undermined that was the fact that Labour began to pull back from such activities. Worse, when Thatcher embarked on her adventure of the Falklands War, Labour backed her. After Thatcher defeated the steel workers, and moved on as part of the Ridley Plan to other groups of workers, whilst Labour failed to provide the necessary leadership, she began to look like a winner, and Labour to have no answer. When the SDP split, the writing was on the wall for Labour's immediate electoral prospects. But Kinnock and the Soft Left's cringeing approach rather than seeing Labour win increasing support, simply saw them have to concede more and more ground to the Tories, politically and ideologically.
Ironically, the clearest refutation of Kinnock's approach came with the removal of Thatcher. It was not Kinnock and the Soft Left's “Don't rock the boat” approach, which led to Thatcher's dismissal, but the very opposite. It was the eruption of that same kind of mass grass roots movement that had developed in response to the attacks on Liverpool and other Councils, and the Miners Strike, in the form of the anti-Poll Tax Movement,
again ironically due in large part to the Militant and its inheritors, which undermined Thatcher and led to her being removed by the Tories. Even then, when those who stood on the right side of the Class divide, had done the heavy lifting for Kinnock and the Soft Left, they could not seal the deal. In the most cringeing piece of television footage available Kinnock sealed Labour's fate at the 1992 Election, with his repeated shout of “Well, Alright” at the Sheffield Rally, where he appeared like some kind of Southern Evangelical Preacher selling his own brand of snake oil. It made you want to cringe, because like the snake oil salesmen it was so obviously fake, but that is what Kinnock is, and always has been – fake.He could not return to oblivion as he wished upon Eric Heffer, because in reality, at least as a socialist politician, he had never emerged out of it. Even as a bourgeois politician he was a rank failure, and, like all such failures, his main role, today, is to act as a cameo in the kind of programmes as this. In Christian burial services they say “Ashes to ashes”, but in Kinnock's case it would be more appropriate to say “Shite to shite”. Of course, in his and his wife's personal terms, none of that matters.
They may not have achieved the earning potential of Tony and Cherie Blair, who inherited the devastated LP that Kinnock created, but, unlike the tens of thousands of Miners and other workers, whose lives were devastated as a result of the Class War waged against them by Thatcher and Kinnock, they were sure to be provided with a lucrative reward for the betrayal of the workers. Whereas all the SDP'ers were given Peerages from which to draw an easy and large income, Mr. and Mrs Kinnock were simply provided with lucrative jobs in Europe. Those miners were right in their warning to “Watch Your back”. Workers should bear that warning in mind today in response to today's Kinnocks. Then, perhaps, we might be able to bring them all to account for their sins.
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