Getting the public to appreciate the public good

He wished to God the dust would settle. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot.

Ah, I wish I could write with le Carré’s intense succinctness. A few short sentences to conjure up an entire atmosphere. This is Peter Guillam, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, undertaking one of the most terrifying tasks as a spy: stealing information from his own service, in the duty room of its headquarters in London.

But it’s the idea le Carré expresses that struck me. No one gives a hoot for a place that many people use: “it isn’t mine, so it isn’t my responsibility”. I suspect we’ve all come across that attitude at some time or another.

It poses a problem for Socialists. How do you get everyone to take responsibility for something none of them owns as an individual, but we all own as a collective?

The simple way around the issue is to go for nationalisation instead of public ownership. Unfortunately, they’re absolutely not the same thing. A nationalised undertaking belongs to the state, not to the people. The extent to which it serves the public interest depends on who controls the state.

As I repeatedly point out to the fans of nationalisation, it was a nationalised industry, the National Coal Board, that was responsible for the slagheap slip at Aberfan in 1966, when 144 people were killed, 116 of them children. It was that same National Coal Board that broke the back of the miners and, in effect, killed the coal industry in Britain in the 1984 strike. 

‘Nationalised’ is not synonymous with ‘at the service of the people’.

One of Luton’s most attractive places: Stopsley Common

There are, however, instances of common use, if not common ownership. The trouble is, like the duty room in the spy service building where Guillam was at work, because no one owns it, some may well abuse it.

Danielle joined volunteers cleaning Luton streets when we lived there. What’s more, one of the loveliest places nearby was Stopsley Common, its very name underlining that it’s a public asset. Sadly, though, some people felt that this tract of common land was an ideal place for dumping waste. It was repeatedly disfigured by piles of builders’ rubble. Someone had decided that, since it was cheaper to dump the waste on the Common than take it to a tip, and the land didn’t belong to them as individuals, they might just as well leave it there.

It’s an international problem, as we confirmed this weekend. Near us, here in Spain, La Vallesa woods are even more spectacularly beautiful than Stopsley, and just as much a public resource. We joined volunteers there this weekend to clear up junk. It included, once more, builders’ rubble. In some cases, the rubble was in sacks, which had been dragged quite a way from the road, as though the people who left it were prepared to make a special effort to make it more difficult to collect.

Why drag it into the woods?
By the road, it would have been easy for the Council to collect

The woods don’t belong to them. To use Le Carré’s language, they don’t give a hoot.

The encouraging factor, on the other hand, is that there are people who do give a hoot. There were several dozen people there helping to clear up. There’s not a huge amount one can do in a couple of hours, but it was nonetheless a pleasure to see so many show up.

Volunteers cleaning up the rubbish

They represent the spirit that can make common ownership viable. That’s the public at its best.

We just need to educate the waste-dumpers to see things the same way. They’re the public at its worst, least concerned with the wellbeing of all. Make no mistake about it: it’s the biggest blockage to a socialised approach to the public good, and the attitude is by no means limited to the most privileged in society. A mindset change is needed throughout society.

When we’ve surmounted that obstacle, one of the fundamental planks of socialist thinking will stop being just a pious wish and become a feasible objective. But don’t be fooled – it’s very different and far better than mere nationalisation.

Who'd be a democratic socialist? Depends on what you mean by it

On 21 October 1966, 40,000 cubic metres of stones and mud slid down a hillside in Wales. In their track stood the village of Aberfan and Pantglas Junior School. 116 children and 28 adults died.

Aberfan: aftermath of disaster

The heap that slid was slurry from the nearby coalmine. It had been dumped for years on top of known springs. The constant flow of water made it unstable and many voices had been raised in concern.

The slagheap was the responsibility by the National Coal Board. It had taken control of the coal industry when it was nationalised by Attlee’s iconic Labour government. It was headed by Alf Robens, a former Labour MP who had held the position of Minister for Power in that same government.

Robens falsely claimed that the disaster could not have been foreseen. He strove to minimise the Coal Board’s contribution to reconstruction, which only proceeded when a new Labour government under Harold Wilson came up with some money, though that didn’t stop £150,000 being taken from the charitable fund for the disaster (ultimately paid back by yet another Labour government, under Tony Blair).

Why do I recall that story now?

Because just recently some friends on the left accused me of not being a “democratic socialist”. I don’t take offence at such attacks: they merely balance charges of being a “raving socialist” levelled at me from the right (the centre-right: I don’t knowingly have friends in the hard right). Still, it’s a criticism that deserves consideration.

I’ve always thought that central to socialism is the slogan, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. There are huge difficulties with this principle, not least that no one can really say what anyone’s needs are.

Generally, many socialists accept as an intermediate step the slogan, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their contribution”. Achieving even that would be a huge step forward. And we’re a long way from doing so.

A recent report reveals that chief executives of top UK companies are, on average, paid in a year what someone on a median income would take 160 years to earn.

Major company chief executives may be doing an important job. But their claims to take responsibility are empty. When companies go wrong, Chief Executives generally just move on. Tony Hayward, Chief Executive of BP at the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, has taken up lucrative new positions with Glencore Xstrata and Corus. As his history shows, these top executives aren’t always as competent as one might hope: the link between ther contribution and reward is hard to see. Certainly, it isn’t established at 160 times median pay.

Tackling this kind of problem strikes me as central to democratic socialism.

Sadly, however, those who most loudly proclaim their socialism take what to me seems a far more reductionist view of socialism. They equate it with nationalisation of industry which they conflate with people’s control. That sounds democratic. Indeed, with people’s control it would seem likely that a more socialistic approach, linking remuneration to contribution might be adopted.

Sadly, the real experience of nationalisation is that it produces not people’s control but state control. The bureaucrats who run nationalised industries don’t act in the interests of the people, but generally in the interests of the self-proclaimed elite that includes men of Tony Hayward’s ilk.

Aberfan shows how such bureaucrats can be sucked into the game and ignore the legitimate claims of ordinary people. I sympathise with the Aberfan father who wanted the cause of his son’s death to be recorded as “buried alive by the National Coal Board”. The same coal board would do Thatcher’s bidding and bury the entire British coal industry less than twenty years later.

It also saddens me that many friends on the left line up with the Brexit camp in the great debate that dominates British politics. In a pamphlet on the subject, an MP for whom I have great admiration expressed his surprise at the fact that the far right shares his desire to leave the European Union. Only his surprise surprises me. The driving force for Brexit is fear of immigration and a nationalistic loss of local state power – a fundamental concern of the far right.

On the other hand, one of the few forces to have resisted the hegemony of the Tony Haywards has been the EU. It has ensured the adoption of employment laws that are anathema to the top executives. It represents a bulwark against the kind of behaviour of employers that marked the National Coal Board and Lord Robens at Aberfan. It guarantees freedoms, including the freedom of movement, that give wage earners the right to pursue the best opportunities for themselves anywhere across the world’s largest trading bloc.

Why would any democratic socialist want to give any of that up?

Brexit: "bringing back control" to hand it to Washington?
Thanks for sharing, @AnnEnglishRose

So, friends who doubt my democratic socialist credentials, here’s my answer: if democratic socialism is reduced to state control of industry and a nationalistic refusal of merged sovereignty with our neighbours, then certainly I want no part of it. If, on the other hand, democratic socialism means battling against the injustice and regressive effect of inequity, revealed in individuals being paid 160 times more than others for delivering not even a fraction of 160 times as much; if it means working with other nations to defend our rights and extend our prosperity; why, then democratic socialism is precisely what I believe in.

And isn’t that precisely what the Labour Party should be about?

Aberfan: man-made disaster

Fifty years ago today I was thirteen years old. I wasn’t highly alert to what might be happening outside the world of school and friends and family. 

Hey, I was thirteen.

Even so, I looked with incomprehension mixed with revulsion at the pictures on TV from a small Welsh village I’d never heard of, where a slag heap had slid down a hill and engulfed a school. 116 children, younger than I, had died as well as 28 adults. I might never have heard the name of Aberfan but after that, I’d never forget it.

Aberfan child coffins: the aftermath of a catastrophe made by man

A slag heap. The waste product of a coal mine. Surely an industry as old and established as mining knew how to handle slag? But it turned out that they didn’t. They’d simply planted it on the slope of a hill that was soaked with rainwater and natural springs. Underneath all that slag, the ground had become saturated and slippery and the whole thing had, eventually, come tumbling down.

A few hours later, and the school would have been empty. But as it was all but a handful of the village’s children were wiped out.

Perhaps even sadder was the other irony, that many had warned of the disaster to come. A year earlier, the head of the school, Ann Jennings had presented a petition about the tip from mothers of pupils, to the local council. No action was taken. And Ann Jennings would be one of the victims of the slip.

One of the most shameful repercussions of that terrible day in 1966 was the behaviour of Lord Robens, then Chairman of the National Coal Board. He denied that the slip could have been prevented, a statement that was found to be false by the enquiry into the disaster. He denied that the Coal Board had any responsibility towards Aberfan other than to stabilise the remains of the tip. When he finally agreed to get rid of it insisted, he had the gall to insist that £150,000 of the money raised for the village by the disaster relief fund (nearly 10% of the total) should be diverted to help pay for that work.

Robens had been a Labour MP – Labour, for Pete’s sake – and even a member of one of the great Labour governments, Attlee’s. The National Coal Board had been set up as a result of the nationalisation of the coal mines.

One of the central aims of socialism is to ensure that the sources of economic wealth, the means of production, should be held by the whole of society on behalf of the whole of society. This strikes me, as it would anyone who feels inspired by socialist views, as a highly laudable objective. I have to admit, though, that it’s hard to see a satisfactory way of achieving it. The shortcut adopted by many socialists or social democrats, from many countries, in the middle of the last century, was to nationalise industries. That means bringing them under state control.

It seems to make sense. At first view, the state represents everyone and belongs to everyone. So if it owns the means of production, then everyone owns them.

The problem comes at second view. Because do we all really own the state? Isn’t it, in reality, controlled by an elite as isolated and opaque as occupants of the board rooms of private industry? If they control the state, how can we say that we own what the state owns?

The lesson of Aberfan seems powerful to me. State ownership is not popular ownership. In that  little Welsh village, a state-owned industry did terrible damage to the people. It was ungenerous in its assistance and then it tried to leech on the support others gave.

Stateism isn’t socialism. The State is capable of being just as oppressive towards people as any private industry. State ownership isn’t in itself a route to liberation, it’s merely an economic tool to be used where it’s useful and avoided where it isn’t: some industries are better state-owned than privately-owned, some are better state-owned today but not tomorrow, others it’s best to keep well away from the state.

Socialism, if it’s to be worth anything, is about doing far more than demanding nationalisation. It’s about helping people like the inhabitants of Aberfan. Doing what we can to make sure that avoidable suffering is never inflicted on them again and, where it’s unavoidable – as in natural rather than man-made disasters – to come to their aid. The rest is just a means to those ends.

For today, though, on the fiftieth anniversary of that catastrophe, we should put all that aside and just focus on the victims. And remember the incomprehension so many of us felt back then. Even callous thirteen-year olds.