What's Left?
AdiFoo.r is .unlikely to have attended the 'Which Way For Labour?' meeting at St. Pancras Town Hall last weekend; it was spon- sored by the Doily Worker, an organisation for which he has little sympathy. Still, he might have been interested in some of the speeches. Jack Dash, a docker, asserted, 'We are building Social- ocial-
'But I'm on a twelve-day fast. ollishei –nothing but
ism the good old way—not an hour passes but there's a strike in the docks.' And Bert Edwards, of the Vehicle Builders, reassured. the audience about Socialism. 'I've seen it,' he said, '1 went on a delegation at the invitation of the Polish and East German metal workers. They flew us out; they flew us back; they even gave us pocket money. Socialism does work!'
Mr. Foot could no doubt argue that these visions of Socialism are not the real thing. But what is the real thing? The delegates at the Daily Worker conference are, on the face of it, better entitled to call themselves Socialists than Mr. Foot and his Tribune friends; Tribune, after all, repre- sents a distinct deviation from Marxist orthodoxy. Yet Mr. Foot continues to write (and talk, on Patiorania and elsewhere) as if he and his friends alone have the right to use the name.
But Mr. Foot is not consistent. Trying to summon up international support, he claims in his article this week that 'Almost all the figures of some substance in the Commonwealth—Nehru. Manley. Eric Williams, Mboya, Nkrumah—call themselves Socialists.' Perhaps they do; but what would he call them if he was under their rule? The thought of Mr. Foot Binging away under Nkrumah, or remaining a faithful member of Congress under Nehru, is grotesque—and it is equally impossible to imagine him working in harmony with such `Socialists' as Cheddi Jagan. The term is no longer applicable to such men. Nkrumah, for one, is fast making Ghana a highly organised capitalist enterprise, with very substan- tial inducements for foreign entrepreneurs in the shape of tax and other concessions; and whatever may be thought of Nkrumah's authoritarian poli- tics, he has thereby shown himself to be not a Socialist but a pragmatist willing—as those mem- bers of the Labour Party here whom Mr. Foot delights. to excoriate are now willing—to accept the facts of life.
Socialism of the style which Michael Foot still preaches in Tribune is not so much wicked— though it has been put to many evil uses--as irrelevant. Events have long since shown that it is impossible to impose public ownership upon a democracy without sacrificing the democracy. Nobody in his senses would suggest that the present compromise between public ownership and private enterprise which we have reached is ideal: in some ways it is extremely inefficient and it is always, by its very flexibility. hard to defend. But the majority of the electorate have recently intimated on successive occasions that they prefer it that way. It is still necessary—all the more necessary. in fact—to keep a watchful and critical eye on how things are going: Mr. Foot is entitled to his opinion land a great many people who dislike his views would agree with him) that material prosperity ought not to be the electorate's only criterion. He is also, of course, entitled to campaign to get the electorate to change its mind and accept his policies. What he is foolish to do is to maintain that those members of his party who wish to make their party's policy a little less remote from reality are traitors. Every Socialist is a traitor to other Socialists, and the public is more than a little tired of hearing them all saying so.
Mr. Foot is on safer ground when he says that the LCC is not Socialist. Sir Ike' Hayward and his flock represent what happens to Socialists when they entrench themselves in power; they are transformed into bureaucrats. It is the same pro- cess that can be observed ,in the civil service--the Monico affair. in a sense, is the LCC's Crichel Down. Where Mr. Foot goes astray is in imagin- ing that this is exceptional. A newly-elected Labour council may, indeed, introduce useful re- forms, inject new vision into their town's plan- ning; but give th.:m a few years and they become as bad as t he LCC.
That is why. th..ugh it is possible to agree with Mr. Foot, and.with Henry George, th'at the case for public ownership of land is in theory obvious, the case against it in practice is very strong. The State can be as rough and as tough and as un- scrupulous a landlord as the worst speculator : Crichel Down is only one of a thousand examples from the post-%‘ ar years. The fact is that 'Fat- headed bureaucratic Councils,' as Mr. Foot calls them, are not the less fatheaded, and are much more bureaucratic. if they have more power, not least when they can pretend to be•using it' for the public good. The richer they are, the more poten- tially dangerous—as are trade unions. One of the most powerful and, for its size, wealthiest trade unions in America is, after all, the Teamsters': and had the leaders of the Electrical Trades Union here not botched their opportunities, this could have been true of them too. There is nothing to suggest that the London County Council's beha- viour over the Monico site would have been any less deplorable had it been the owner of the whole of the Piccadilly area.
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