Something Is Rotten in the United Kingdom! Notes on the Social Situation

The election on 12 September 2015 of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of that ultra-opportunist charabanc that is the British Labour Party has stirred up a new wave of stolid enthusiasm, particularly amongst that part of Europe’s petit-bourgeois “left” which, in the attempt to keep its head above water as the tsunami of the crisis overwhelms it together with its miserable privileges, desperately tries to cling to one lifebelt or the other, so as not to sink deeper and deeper into the social chasm: the “socialist” Pope, the Spanish podemos, the US “democratic left” and, naturally, “Tsipras now and forever” (by the way: there has been no more talk of Greece since the massive dose of parliamentary-democratic tranquillizers and opiates handed out so liberally a few months ago; in the meantime, however, the Greek proletariat continues to spit blood!).

Lamenting that “over here” there is no-one of this calibre, Alberto Burgio, for example, in an article of 20 September in the Italian daily Manifesto, invoked the “Corbyn model”. “We have all [???] read about Jeremy Corbyn’s victory and rejoiced [!!!], in the hope that this is the first step along a path that will not only lead the Labour Party to evict the Right from Downing Street at the next elections, but will also, after a half a century restore the British left to a tradition of struggle in defence of the proletariat, social rights and peace. To a glorious history of battles alongside the Unions and the more advanced social movements, which has been abandoned since the twenty years of Thatcher’s rule.” Boom! The Labour Party as the spearhead of the British proletarian movement? What compendium of jokes has the ineffable Burgio been using for his studies?

The Labour Party has always been His/Her Majesty’s Royal Firefighter, with the precise role of appeasing, containing, deviating the fighting spirit of miners and railwaymen, dockers and metalworkers, teachers, janitors, bus and underground drivers and so on, skilfully taking turns (the stick and the carrot) with the Tories and their governments. Are we forgetting the great 1926 General Strike? The battles of the unemployed in the ‘30s? The miners’ strikes by which the whole of the post-Second World War period was punctuated right up to the – long and bitter – one of 1984-85? The amazing arm wrestling between the Ford Dagenham women workers in 1968 or the Grunwick, Willesden (North London) workers, many of whom of Asian and Afro-Caribbean origins, which lasted two years between 1976 and 1978? The constant turbulence linked to the living and working conditions of the huge mass of immigrant proletarians from all parts of the ex-Empire? All episodes (amongst so many) in which the Labour Party, scientifically and con-scientiously, played its role as firefighter and saboteur, reposing each time in its union base, the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

And so, after the “disappointments” (of differing sorts) coming under the names of Blair or Milliband, up pops Corbyn the populist, a sort of pale maximalist à la Serrati (but reduced to… less than a half size!), an expression of the bourgeoisie’s parasitism and thus also of its left wing, or the “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”, in Lenin’s words. When all is said and done, we are well aware of this. The ruling class dominates thanks also to its own historical memory, its own century-old experience. And memory and experience remind it where the great threat to its power comes from: the proletariat, even when prostrated as it is by defeat upon defeat and seemingly incapable of reacting. The stick and the carrot, this is the only alternative the bourgeoisie knows: and the carrot is steeped in sedatives. “So, Viva Corbyn!”, hisses the ruling class to itself, “if he manages to rein in the rearing horse, which is nonetheless a thoroughbred, despite the stick.” Literally, “We’re in for hard times! Let’s call up the firefighters!” And without doubt times are going to be hard… indeed, they already are.

A few figures

It was sufficient to glance at the British press around the time of Corbyn’s election, to get an idea of the explosive situation reigning in Great Britain. Let us try to sum it up, without claiming to be exhaustive ¹:

- The July Budget approved by the government represents a further step along the path to dismantling the welfare system the country was so proud of in the past. London’s Institute for Fiscal Studies (an institutional organism for analysis and research) ² calculates that the poorest 10% of the population of working age will lose an average 800 pounds a year of net income (almost 7%); the second 10% will lose 1,300 (over 7%); the third 1,100 (over 5%); the fourth more than 600 (over 3%). As opposed to this, suffice it to say that the richest 30% will lose at most a fraction of 1%: the gap continues to widen. Starting from April 2016 (and remaining unchanged for four years) there will be cuts to housing and unemployment benefits for the population of working age and to tax relief for workers and their families, whilst the threshold for progressively reducing benefits and allowances will be lowered (from 6,420 pounds a year to 3,850).

- Meanwhile, the number of workers on zero-hour contracts has leapt by one fifth in a year, with 744,000 people now having no guarantee of working hours or wages in their main job. 2.4% of the workforce is now employed in this way in their main job (according to employers, however, the figure could be higher: 1.5million, up 6% on last year; of these, there are more women than men and 20% of the jobs are held by students). Income levels can fluctuate wildly, with a general downward trend (£300 a week less on average than workers in secure jobs): if the living wage (in practice the minimum hourly rate) of £7.20 is taken as a basis, something like 3.2 million workers are earning less than this.³

- Because of cuts to tax credits, 2.7 million working-class families (with 5 million children amongst the country’s poorest) will lose an average 750 pounds a year pro capite. It goes without saying that this will reflect on the children’s living conditions: the National Children’s Bureau seems to be merely stating the obvious when it stresses that in vast areas of the country (the north, west and certain areas of London), children under the age of five are more and more likely to suffer from tooth decay and obesity… To repeat the scandalized words of Carol Ewing, Vice-President for health policy at the Royal College of Paediatric and Child Health: “In a country that boasts it has one of the best health services in the world, this sort of health inequality cannot and should not exist.” Yes, well… Should not… In addition, the 6.2% cut (equal to 200 million pounds) in public health financing for local authorities, resulting in cutting back on services and staff (health visitors), will only make the situation worse.

- Again “stating the obvious”: life expectancy is soaring…for the rich. According to the organization Public Health England, quoted in the Lancet, 40% of ill health is caused by “lifestyle, diet, etc.”, with huge regional variations that do not depend on geography but on income. The enlightened and enlightening statement by Prof. John Ashton of the Faculty of Public Health (another institutional organization) goes as follows: “healthy life expectancy powerfully reflects our social environment: having a living wage, living in decent housing and eating healthy food.” Well done, Ashton!

- The number of households with problem debt has soared 28% in the last three years leaving 3.2 million people struggling (hardest hit are young people, the self-employed and low-income families). An extra 700,000 more households have fallen into problem debt since 2012, leaving them to spend a quarter of their monthly gross income on repaying credit cards, loans and overdrafts. In the next five years low-income lone parents will find their standard of living falling more and more, even if they are working full-time.

These few figures are sufficient to trace an alarming picture. The law of increasing misery strikes mercilessly: yet there are still those who dare deny it.

The “housing question”

As if all this were not sufficient, here is another, equally dramatic “issue”. London and other medium-to-large scale cities, especially their city centres, may seem like so many open-air building yards (excavations, cranes, scaffolding for horrible constructions issuing from the nightmares of some richly paid super-star: building yards nonetheless subject to the peaks and dips of the market, with long pauses and sudden accelerations). But the reality hidden behind (or beneath?) them is quite different. As has been happening for a good century and a half now, in Great Britain as elsewhere, the housing issue is once again cropping up: the other face of land rent, building speculation by capital in its perennial, breathless search for oxygen… Here, too, a few figures will help sketch out the situation ⁴:

- House prices rise unceasingly: today houses cost roughly seven times the average family income; on top of this, for those who take the daring step of buying a home, come the mortgage and loans to be paid back monthly. In 2013 alone, the number of repossessed houses amounted to 28,900: returning to their original owners (individuals, banks, building societies, institutions, etc.) due to failure to pay mortgages. The famous “right to buy”, reminiscent of Thatcher (“Everyone a home-owner!” was the slogan), shows its true face. Moreover, the project – in some cases already put into practice – of extending the “right to buy” to tenants’ associations will make the situation even more difficult.

- The number of families that prefer to rent privately rather than buy is on the increase: today there are over nine million of them, of which 1.3 million families with children. But rents are also going up, as well as the incidence of hidden costs and threats of eviction for failure to pay the rent. Moreover, in many of these flats living conditions are dreadful: a third of the homes rented privately do not come up to the Decent Homes Standard...

- As a consequence, the number of homeless people is rising: more than fifty thousand family units a year find themselves in this condition, with over 2000 people obliged to literally live out on the streets. Rough sleeping ⁵ has increased by 55% over the past five years: in London the number of homeless rose by one third between autumn 2013 and autumn 2014, whilst, in December 2014, 62 thousand families throughout England were in temporary accommodation, with another 280 thousand at risk and the number of families surviving on a day to day basis in bed and breakfast accommodation had tripled (from 630 in 2010 to 2,040 last year). Evictions, making ample use of the “forces of law and order”, are a familiar scene here as elsewhere: it’s a small (capitalist) world! In particular the phenomenon of revenge evictions is gaining ground, with evictions aimed at tenants who dare complain to owners about the conditions they are obliged to live in: 200 thousand in 2013! (What is more, as a consequence of the July Budget, young unemployed people under 21 will automatically be ineligible for benefits or allowances for buying a home).

- It is estimated that 250 thousand new houses a year would be needed to cover the needs of the British population, whilst less than half that number are actually built. Contrasting with this pure and simple fact, the model skyscrapers soar into the air and the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie puff out their chests with national pride…

Naturally there are many who compete to offer solutions to this problem. But in 1872 in The Housing Question (Part 2: How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question), Friedrich Engels wrote: “In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion – that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew... This method is called Haussmann. By the term ‘Haussmann’ I do not mean merely the specifically Bonapartist manner of the Parisian Haussmann – breaking long, straight and broad streets through the closely-built workers’ quarters and erecting big luxurious buildings on both sides of them, the intention thereby, apart from the strategic aim of making barricade fighting more difficult, being also to develop a specifically Bonapartist building trades’ proletariat dependent on the government and to turn the city into a pure luxury city. By ‘Haussmann’ I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighbourhood.” Brief, to the point and, above all, topical.

Antiproletarian repression

On this scenario, in itself a dramatic one, the attack on the proletariat is rounded off with the preventive work of repressing any possible, organized reaction in the future. The Trade Union Bill debated in September foresees a series of mechanisms and regulations that do not vary much from those that have been or will be put in place by (right, central-left or “left”) governments in other countries ⁶: all of them aim to cage in the fights and strike down any attempt at grassroots organization.

Thus, in The Guardian of 15/9 we learn that the Bill foresees a 50% threshold of votes in favour, in order to initiate any industrial action (and one of 40% of eligible voters, in “services of importance to the public sector”), and lifting the ban on using agency workers to replace staff on strike (in practice the legalization of blacklegging): in addition, the unions must inform police and employers two weeks in advance of any strike plans, including details of the planned use of placards and loudspeakers, blogs and other social media, whilst the “head” of each picket line (consisting of not more than six strikers) will have to wear an armband and provide police and employers with their personal details (in practice legalized informing). Heavy fines (up to 20 thousand pounds) will be inflicted on union organizations if they fail to observe these rules (in practice the legitimization of official trade unions, able to pay such high penalties, and contrary to all grassroots organizations).

Faced with these proposals, comes a revealing comment from Angela Eagle, Corbyn’s newly appointed shadow business secretary: “With the number of days lost to strike action down 90% in the last 20 years, there is absolutely no necessity whatsoever to employ the law in this draconian way” ⁷. Need we say more? With “supporters” like this, the British proletariat is done for!

***

Yes, there’s something rotten in the State of Great Britain and only a widespread and determined revival of class antagonism can sweep it aside. The British proletariat (by which, let it be clear, we mean its native components as well as past and recent immigrants) have a great tradition of struggle, often spontaneous and conducted with great determination and generosity: and we are certain that it will soon give proof of its wish to continue in this tradition. But this is not enough. In Britain, as elsewhere, the dramatically urgent question arises of the political direction of the fights that are bound to break out: the question of the revolutionary party, absent from the scene for too long in Great Britain and in the rest of the world.