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.

Scargill and Corbyn: sad memories and disturbing premonitions

An old friend came to visit us recently, and it was a delight to have her with us. Among many other conversations, we remembered many of our early experiences together, including the time when her husband, whom I shall call Alan, and I would travel in and out of work with a third friend, and talk at length in the long commute through appalling traffic.

The Miners’ strike
Great courage defeated by brutal opposition and lousy leadership

It was 1984, and in England the great miners’ strike was raging. Alan was something of a champagne socialist: from a wealthy background, he’d attended one of the great (and expensive) schools and had never lacked the money to indulge his sense of social conscience. He stood hard and fast on the left and one of his fundamental stands was unqualified and entire support for the miners.

“I support the miners too,” I would assure him, “just not their union leader.”

The union was the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the leader Arthur Scargill.

Many years previously, I’d spent some time in one of the mining villages, Conisbrough, of one of the great English coalfields, South Yorkshire. I’d come to know a few miners and when they struck in 1972 and 1974, I was overwhelmed by their courage, their determination and their superb organisation. They won both strikes and I was delighted with their victory.

In 1984, their courage and determination were as powerful as ever. Not so, however, the organisation.

Firstly, the strike started in March. You don’t have to know a lot about the economics of the energy sector to guess that the time of greatest demand for any kind of fuel would be the winter. In March, the peak period of demand was just passing and the country was about to enter the time of lowest need for coal. In other words, there could be no time better selected for the opponents of the miners to be able to weather (literally) any strike. In fact, to wear the strikers down until, exhausted, they could carry on no longer.

In addition, the 1972 and 1974 strikes were so effective because the miners were united across the country. The NUM had a strict rule book and it explicitly specified that a national strike could only be called with a 55% majority of all those voting in a ballot of the entire union. Scargill knew he wasn’t going to get that majority, so he resorted to a cunning plan. He would have the regions strike, one by one, which only required a simple majority in each of them.

Naturally, like most such devious plans, it failed. Some regions refused to strike and, in particular in the Midlands, a large number of miners kept working throughout.

With support for the strike split even within the NUM, other unions didn’t come out in support themselves. That meant that the strike became a struggle between some of the miners – a majority but still too few – and the government of Maggie Thatcher. With the miners so weakened, the timing so poor, and up against an enemy so strong-willed, there could only be one outcome to the strike.

The miners struggled on but, almost a year to the day after the start of their great battle, they were beaten and went back to work, unsuccessful, defeated. Over the next few years, the government took apart coal mining in Britain, shutting down nearly all the collieries. It was one of the worst defeats the working class movement has suffered in the country.

Alan, of course, didn’t see things that way. He saw the miners as right and anyone who dared to criticise the timing or leadership of the strike, as a backsliding reactionary enemy of the noble working class. So I was entirely wrong and Arthur Scargill deserved our unqualified support.

The commute in that car began to feel even longer than it actually was.

Curiously, after the strike was finally lost, Scargill did two things which, in my mind, mark him for the kind of man he truly was. He had himself named President of the NUM for life, so no one else could ever take over from him at the head of the shadow of a union he still nominally led. And he moved into a luxurious home the NUM owned in London, which he occupied until the remnants of the union finally to took him to court to drive him out.

In other words, he had all the sense of entitlement of any man of the right (think Boris Johnson), while claiming to belong to the radical left.

Why do I mention all this today? Because within Labour I’m up against a huge number of people who could be Alan’s heirs. They demand total, unbending, unquestioning allegiance to the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. This is because they believe him incapable of ever being mistaken, just as Scargill was sure he could never be wrong. 

In my view, however, Corbyn’s as poor a leader as Scargill was. Up against a deeply unpopular government, he has led the party into a poll position that is constantly behind, possibly by as much as ten points.

In other words, it feels to me as though this man of the radical left is intent on doing to Labour exactly what Scargill did to the NUM. And now, just as then, those of us who don’t share the enthusiasm of his supporters, are regarded as traitors.

I can’t end this without mentioning one particular irony. Corbynism is keen on taking Britain into an era of socialism. A key element on that journey is nationalising major industries. The belief seems to be that a nationalised industry is owned by the public. That was a belief that was pardonable before we’d really tried nationalisation, back in the forties. Now, though, we know that a nationalised industry belongs to the state, not the people. What therefore matters is who controls the state.

Against what body do today’s Scargillites or Corbynists think the NUM struck? It was the NCB, the National Coal Board, the nationalised coal extraction industry. It proved itself just as vicious and forceful an enemy of organised workers as any private company. In its final victory over the NUM, it proved itself even more effective.

Nationalised industries are a stepping stone to socialism? If you can still believe that after what happened with the NCB, I’m afraid you’re as prone to self-delusion as Alan was, as Scargill’s admirers were and, sadly, as Corbyn’s are today.

Being principled is great. In the right cause

It’s not enough to have a conscience.

We all tend to respect honesty and principle in politicians. Well, we don’t get that much opportunity to do so, since in the age of spin and soundbites, it’s hard to find a politician that displays much of either. Which perhaps makes us all the more admiring of those who do.

But honesty and principle, like courage, have much in common with a gun: what matters isn’t so much the thing in itself, as where it’s pointing. It would be hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher showed great courage, resolution, pure grit, but she used it to destroy communities up and down the country. Back in 1970, I taught in a mining village in South Yorkshire; today the population has fallen by over a third, and rates of unemployment or invalidity are frighteningly high. The price of the crushed miners’ strike…

Maggie: grit and courage misapplied

I can think of no better example of misapplied honesty and principle, analogous to Thatcher’s misapplication of courage and resolution, than the case of Robert E. Lee. He occupies a place of honour today, for many, as one of the great generals of history, although he fought, indeed became the leading military figure, on the Confederate side in the American Civil War. That’s the defeated side, and generally now felt to be the wrong side (except by a few diehards in the southern US).

That meant he fought on the side of states defined by slavery – it was their one common point – although he called it “a moral and political evil” and personally freed his slaves. He fought against the Union, although he considered the so-called right of states to secede as “idle talk.”

So why did he fight on the slave-holding Secessionists’ side?

His father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee died a disgraced bankrupt, but in his youth he’d been a dashing cavalry commander in the army George Washington led to fight for independence from Britain. The father had claimed “Virginia is my country; her will I obey, however lamentable the fate to which it may subject me.” Virginia came first.

Likewise, Robert Lee, the son, claimed “if the government is disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.”

So Lee turned down the opportunity to take overall command of the forces of the Union to which he was ostensibly committed, even though it was offered to him not just by a Northerner, the President, Abraham Lincoln, but by the Commanding General of the Army, Winfield Scott – who was a Virginian like Lee. Indeed, another Virginian, George H. Thomas, had a distinguished career as a general on the Union side, and a distant cousin of Lee, Samuel Phillips Lee became an Admiral in the Union navy.

Many admire Lee’s commitment to the principle that he could not fight against his own country, which he saw as being Virginia rather than the United States.

I however have real trouble with that notion. He was undoubtedly a man of conscience, and it’s apparently honourable to live by one’s conscience. But surely the admiration ends when doing so leads to your fighting for two bad causes, secession and slavery, especially if you believe in neither?

Robert E. Lee: principled and honest,
but for the wrong cause – which he didn't even believe in

It’s like Thatcher’s courage. It would have been wonderful, employed in furthering a good cause. it was lamentable when used for a bad one.

It isn’t abstract principle that counts. It’s the concrete application made of it.