Bristol and Labour’s Elected Mayor, and the Arguments Against

On the fourth of May parts of the country are due to go to the polls again. These are mostly council elections, but down here in Bristol it’ll be for a referendum on the system of elected mayors the city has had for the past few years. At the moment the elected mayor is Marvin Rees for Labour. His predecessor, Ferguson, was supposedly an Independent, but he had been a Lib Dem. He personally promoted himself by wearing red trousers, even at funerals when he toned the colour down to dark claret. His first act was to change the name of the Council House to City Hall for no real reason. His administration was responsible for running through a programme of immense cuts. He intended to make £90 million of them, but told Bristolians that they shouldn’t be afraid. He also turned down grant money from central government to which the city was qualified and untitled. I heard at a meeting of the local Labour party that he left the city’s finances in a colossal mess, and it has taken a great effort for Marvin’s administration to sort them out.

The local Labour party has thrown itself four-square behind the elected mayoralty. It’s being promoted in the election literature from the party, boasting about how, under Rees, 9,000 new homes have been built, green power and other initiatives invested in. The opposition parties, by contrast, have wasted council taxpayers’ hard earned money on trivialities.

I think the party is also holding an on-line meeting tonight to convince members that the system of elected mayors is a positive benefit. Speakers include Andy Burnham amongst other prominent politicos. One of the claims being made is that elected mayors are democratic and transparent, whereas the previous committee system meant that decisions were taken behind closed doors.

But I am not convinced by any means that the elected mayoralty is a benefit.

Bristol South Labour MP Karin Smyth has stated that she is also no fan of the system. She has made it plain that she is not criticising Marvin’s administration, and is very diplomatic in her comments about his predecessor. But she has described the system as ‘too male’ and believes that the city should go back to being run by the council, whose members were elected and in touch by their local communities. The anti-male sexism aside, I agree with her. There have been studies done of business decision-making that show that while a strong chairman is admired for leadership, collective decision-making by the board actually results in better decisions. And one criticism of Rees’s government in Bristol is that he is not accountable to local representatives and has zero qualms about overruling local communities.

Here’s a few examples: a few years ago there were plans to build a new entertainment stadium in Bristol. This was due to be situated just behind Temple Meads station in an area that is currently being re-developed. It’s a superb site with excellent communications. Not only would it be bang right next to the train station, but it’s also not very far from the motorway. All you have to do if your coming down the M32 is turn left at the appropriate junction and carry on driving and your at Temple Meads in hardly any time at all. But Marvin disagreed, and it wanted it instead located in Filton, miles away in north Bristol.

Then there’s the matter of the house building at Hengrove Park. This is another issue in which Rees deliberately overruled the wishes of local people and the council itself. Rees decided that he wanted so many houses built on the site. The local people objected that not only was it too many, but that his plans made no provision for necessary amenities like banks, shops, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies and so on. They submitted their own, revised plans, which went before the council, who approved them. If I remember correctly, the local plans actually conformed to existing planning law, which Marvin’s didn’t. But this didn’t matter. Rees overruled it. And I gather that he has also done the same regarding housing and redevelopment in other parts of south Bristol, like nearby Brislington.

Rees definitely seems to favour the north and more multicultural parts of the city over the south. And I’m afraid his attitude comes across as somewhat racist. South Bristol is largely White, though not exclusively. There are Black and Asian residents, and have been so for at least the past forty years. Rees is mixed race, but his own authoritarian attitude to decision making and the reply I got a few years ago from Asher Craig, his deputy-mayor and head of equalities, suggests that he has little or no connection to White Bristolians. When I wrote to Asher Craig criticising her for repeating the claim that Bristol was covering up its involvement in the slave trade, despite numerous publications about the city and the slave trade going all the way back to the ’70s, in an interview on Radio 4, she replied by telling me that I wouldn’t have said that if I’d heard all the interview. She then went on about the ‘One Bristol’ school curriculum she had planned and how that would promote Blacks. It would be diverse and inclusive, which she declared was unfortunately not always true about White men. This is a racial jibe. She may not have meant it as such, but if the roles were reversed, I’m sure it would count as a micro-aggression. And when I wrote to her and Cleo Lake, the Green councillor from Cotham, laying out my criticisms of her motion for Bristol to pay reparations for slavery, I got no reply at all.

A few years ago I also came across a statement from a Labour group elsewhere in the city, stating that Blacks should ally themselves with the White working class, because they did not profit from or support the slave trade. This is probably true historically, but it also reveals some very disturbing attitudes. Support for slavery has become something of a ‘mark of Cain’. If you have an ancestor who supported, you are forever tainted, even if you are the most convinced and active anti-racist. And Critical Race Theory and the current craze for seeking out monuments to anyone with connections to the slave trade, no matter how tenuous, is part of an attitude that suspects all Whites of racism and tainted with complicity in the trade, except for particular groups or individuals. It disregards general issues that affect both Black and White Bristolians, such as the cost of living crisis and the grinding poverty the Tories are inflicting on working people. These problems may be more acute for Black Bristolians, but they’re not unique to them. Working people of all colours and faiths or none should unite together to oppose them as fellow citizens, without qualification. But it seems in some parts of the Labour party in the city, this is not the attitude.

Rees’ overruling of local people in south Bristol does seem to me to come from a certain racial resentment. It seems like it’s motivated by a determination to show White Bristolians that their boss is a man of colour, who can very firmly put them in their place. I may be misreading it, but that’s how it seems to myself and a few other people.

Now I believe that, these criticisms aside, Rees has been good for the city. He was very diplomatic and adroit in his handling of the controversy over the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, despite the obvious disgust at it he felt as a descendant of West Indian slaves. But Rees ain’t gonna be mayor forever. Indeed, he has said that he isn’t going to run again. There is therefore the distinct possibility that his successor won’t be Labour. And then there’ll be the problem of opposing someone, who always has the deciding vote and can overrule the decisions of the council and the rest of his cabinet.

The people of Bristol voted for the system following a series of deals between different parties to get control of the council, where the individual parties by themselves had no clear majority. It convinced many people that the system allowed them to get into power over the heads of the real wishes of Bristol’s citizens. Now the Lib Dems and the Tories are demanding an end to the system. It’s clearly a matter of self-interest on their part, as obviously they are trying to abolish a Labour administration and the system that supports it.

But I believe that on simple democratic principles the elected mayoralty should go and the city return to government by the council.

Oh yes, and they should start calling it the Council House once again, instead of continuing with Ferguson’s egotistic name for it.

An Iraqi Woman Describes the State of her Country before Bush and Blair’s Invasion

I found this very telling quotation from the May 7, 2007 edition of the Washington Post over at William Blum’s Anti-Empire Report, issue 93.

“I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college,” Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi told American peace activist Medea Benjamin in 2010. “I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything — electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein.”

This, and much other fascinating material on the corrupt state of the American Empire and capitalism, can be found at https://williamblum.org/aer/read/93

Saddam Hussein was a horrendous monster. There is absolutely no question about that. But this is what he also did for his country, which we were not told about. Apart from seizing the country’s oil supply, the neocons were also extremely keen to privatise the country’s state-owned enterprises and sell them to American companies. They also removed all the import tariffs, in order to create the kind of absolute free trade utopia they believe in and which everyone else considers sheer lunacy. And guess what? Everyone else was right. Every other nation dumped their cheap goods in Iraq, their businesses couldn’t compete, and the result was bankruptcies and an unemployment rate running at 60 per cent. And this was quite apart from the massive increase in sectarian violence and the occupation of large parts of the country by ISIS.

This is what you’re voting for if you support the Blairites.

The Immense Popularity of the Beveridge Report, and its Reception by Labour and the Tories

A week or so ago I had a debate on here with a critic, who objected to my crediting Aneurin Bevan with the creation of the NHS. He asserted that the Beveridge Report, on which the NHS is based, was a policy of the wartime National Government, and also had Conservative support.

This is true. However, the Beveridge Report was based on the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Socialist Medical Association, who had been demanding a free medical service for decades. Indeed, a free health service had been Labour party policy since the 1930s. And while the Tories in the Coalition government also supported Beveridge’s outline of the welfare state, it had particularly strong support in the Labour party.

Pauline Gregg in her book, The Welfare State, describes the massive popularity the Beveridge Report enjoyed with just about all parts of the British population on pages 19-20.

On November 20, 1942, only seventeen months after the appointment of the Committee, it was ready and signed. On December 2, it was made available to the public, and seen at once to go even beyond the expectations of The Times. Though called, simply, Social Insurance and Allied Services, it was an eloquent cry to end poverty, disease, and unemployment, and purported to supply the means of doing so. Its appeal was instantaneous. Queues besieged the Stationary Office in Kingsway. Not only the Press but BBC news bulletins summarized the Report. Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, needed only a few hours in which to perceive its enormous propaganda value, and soon it was being trumpeted across the world in many languages. At the cost of 2s, the then normal price of a government White Paper, it immediately became a best-seller at home and abroad, the subject of leading articles, letters to the Press, speeches and discussions at every level of society. Beveridge himself explained his Plan to millions on the radio and on the cinema screen, as well as addressing countless meetings. In twelve months 256,000 copies of the full Report were sold, 369,000 copies of an abridged edition, 40,000 copies of an American edition. Permission was given for translation into Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Translations were published in Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Mexico, and Switzerland. Parts 1 and VI were translated into Czech, the abridgement into Italian and Chinese.

The Trades Union Congress and the Co-operative Party gave it their blessing. the National Council of Labour, representing all the bodies of organized Labour, called for the legislation necessary to implement the Report at an early date. The Liberal Party supported it, and through Geoffrey Mander welcomed the general principles of “that momentous report”. A group of young Tories tabled a motion in the House of Commons requiring the Government “to set up forthwith the proposed Ministry of Social Security for the purpose of giving effect to the principles of the Report”. “We believe”, said Quintin Hogg, who sponsored this motion, “the keynote of the restatement of political controversy after the war to be practical idealism.” The Beveridge scheme, said another Tory Member of Parliament, “touches the individual life of every man, woman and child in the country and reaches deep down into the homes of the people”. The Labour Party made the Report peculiarly its own. “It expresses”, said Sydney Silverman at its Conference in 1943, “the basic principle of this Party, the only thing which entitled us at the beginning and entitles us now to regard ourselves as fundamentally different from all other parties.” The Report, wrote The Times, had changed the phrase “freedom from want” from a vague though deeply felt aspiration into a plainly realizable project of national endeavour. “Sir William Beveridge and his colleagues have put the nation deeply in their debt, not mere for a confident assurance that the poor need not always be with us, but far a masterly exposition of the ways and means whereby the fact and the fear of involuntary poverty can be speedily abolished altogether.” The Report, it concluded, “is a momentous document which should and must exercise a profound and immediate influence on the direction of social changes in Britain.

Gregg notes on page 23 that in the House of Commons, when it came to a vote only a minority voted for the immediate implementation of the policy. In the end the Labour Party tabled an amendment calling for the early implementation of Beveridge’s plan as a test of Parliament’s sincerity. She also notes on page 25 that many Tory MPs voted against the motion as a reaction against the Plan’s support by Labour.

Meanwhile the Labour amendment was put to the House of Commons. “The Beveridge Plan”, said James Griffiths, moving it, “has become in the minds of the people and the nation both a symbol and a test. It has become, first of all symbol of the kind of Britain we are determined to build when the victory is won, a Britain in which the mass of the people shall ensured security from preventable want. Almost … every comment that has been made in the Press and on the platform since the Report was issued, the widespread interest taken in it and in its proposals, and the almost universal support given to it, are clear indications that the Report and the plan meet a deep-felt need in the minds and hearts of our people.”

But the effect of calling upon a Labour amendment was to unite the Tories against it, in spite of their own speeches, and Griffiths’ amendment was lost by 335 votes to 119, leaving the original non-committal motion to stand. It was a regrettable position. After the welcome and the publicity given to Beveridge’s proposals, and the high hopes raised, the Report was accepted by then sent to another Committee at Whitehall, who spent nearly two years considering it. Further consideration of details had, indeed, been assumed by its author. But the impression given was of shelving the Report, of wriggling out of the proposals. “This”, said Griffiths after the counting of the votes in the House of Commons,” makes the return of the Labour Party to power at the next election an absolute certainty.”

(My emphasis).

The commenter also found my story, about how the pharmacist father of one of my mother’s friends declared he was going to vote Labour because so many people needed the NHS ‘absurd’. This was presumably because he couldn’t accept the idea of a true-blue Tory businessman ever voting Labour. But this paragraph shows this was pretty much what did happen, and the government knew it the moment the Tories voted against the Labour motion.

As for Sydney Silverman’s statement that support for the welfare state is what makes the Labour party fundamentally different from all other parties, it’s a pity that this wasn’t taken on board by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they decided to continue Thatcher’s programme of dismantling the welfare state and privatising the NHS. And it’s a pit that it isn’t recognised by Bliar’s successors – Liz Kendall and now Dan Jarvis.

Health Provision before the NHS

I’ve been having a debate here with a critic, who objected to my description of Nye Bevan as the architect of the NHS. His contention appears to be that there was no private healthcare in Britain even before the establishment of the NHS, and that no-one really suffered through the charges that were made for some essentially services, as the poor were already treated free of charge on the Poor Law. I’ve made it very plain to this critic that I believe he has a very rosy view of healthcare before the NHS.

My mother was told by one of her friends, a staunch Tory, that her father was a pharmacist, who also voted Tory. However, at the 1945 election, he called his family together to say that he was voting Labour, because the NHS was needed. He was tired of having to supply drugs on credit, because the working class sick could not pay.

Florence too has bad memories of the state of health provision before the NHS. In her comment to this critic’s reply to my rebuttal of his original comments, she wrote:

I must have missed the response Billellson. I wonder where he has taken his information from, because it does not match my own family experience, whatever the social historians say. Maybe both sides of my family were “unlucky” to have lived in areas where the cover was non-existent.

All I know is that one of my fathers’ brothers was taken ill, aged 7 in the 1920’s, and the family could not afford a doctor, but by the time they realised how ill he was, his appendix had already burst. I think he was taken into a charitable (church?) hospital, but it took nearly a week for him to die horribly in agony from peritonitis. They never got over the loss of a child, especially when they also had a lot of guilt about delaying because of “the cost of the doctor”.

My mother’s family at the same time, were members of the “Saturday Club” where each family paid 6d a week (on Saturday) which paid for a doctor to visit. My mother was struck down with rheumatic fever, and the dr went to her home and diagnosed it, again, she must have been 7, so that was the 1930′ s. They couldn’t afford hospital care, so she was nursed at home by her mother & neighbours for over 6 month, while she was rigid and paralysed.

These were the experiences of the working class before the NHS, and like Harry Price, I can say that the experience haunted both families. I can see the gleam in the eyes of the vultures circling the NHS, and I fear for those who do not have this direct link to the pre-NHS days, knowing that 20 million in the UK already live in poverty, and that a pay per visit system would be intolerable in the 6th richest country, with a health service with funding that is a model that was held up to other countries to follow. However that was the preferred system for both Letwin and Hunt in their publications calling for the end of the NHS 20 years apart, so it seems there has long been continuity and ambition to effectively remove the universal system from the poor. So when the effects of long term hunger and poverty take hold, there will be little between any of us and that early grave, except the ability to pay with money you don’t have.

One final point,(despite the length of this reply, sorry) that Billelleson stated “but nobody was expected to sell their house.”. That was for me the one item that gave his words a hollow ring. Nobody in the working class actually owned their houses. To pay even the Dr’s fee they would have to sell an item of furniture or clothing, or pawn a wedding ring. There were no heirlooms, after all, my great grand-dad died in the workhouse!

Pat Young also describes the horrendous provision of healthcare before the establishment of the NHS in her book Mastering Social Care, published by MacMillan in 1992. She writes

There were some state-provided services prior to 1948. For example, public health, in the form of water and sewage systems, was provided under the Public Health Act of 1848. Services for pregnant women and young children were introduced at the beginning of this century. From 1911, employment-linked insurance provided cover for doctors’ services for people in work. Local authorities ran poor law infirmaries, public hospitals and mental hospitals. Hospitals were also provided by charitable organisations.

However, there was great variations in the standards of care provided by these services, and considerable stigma attached to much of the provision. The insurance system only covered the person in employment and did not extend to the families of workers. The following quotations based on accounts of people living in Sheffield give some indication of the quality of life in the period before 1948.

[In] Attercliffe in Sheffield’s East End which housed the heavy industry of the Don Valley and the workforce which operated it – bronchitis was a way of life. People expected to live with it, suffer from it and eventually die from it, with only their weekly bottle of medicine for relief.

Two women describe their memories as follows:

Bills from general practitioners were always hard to meet … Kay remembered especially a doctor in the Crookesmoor dstrict of Sheffield who employed a debt collector… The effects were particularly severe for working-class women, who due to a policy of not employing married women in Sheffield always tended to fall outside the insurance scheme. ‘Mother never had the doctor.’ ‘You just didn’t go to the doctor until you were on your last legs.’ Kay recalled how her own mother hadn’t gone to the doctor even though she was in bed with asthma. And Jessie likewise how her mother continued to suffer with high blood pressure, even though she knew that tablets were available which could have helped to lessen her condition.

Looking at health from the other side, the extracts below are from a doctor who worked as a GP before the beginning of the National Health Service.
Dr Arnold Elliot remembers

I ran my practice from a small house in Ilford, but most surgeries were lock-up shops in industrial areas. On the whole, most of them were awful, with no running water, heat, lighting or toilets, some with no couches.

I knew one East end doctor who had a cigarette machine in his waiting room. Many doctors had two doors; one for ‘panel’ patients (the insured workers) and one for private patients, who weren’t kept waiting.

Doctors didn’t speak to each other, because they were deadly enemies. They went in for head-hunting the breadwinning panel patient, who would often bring in the rest of his family.

Various private arrangements were set up for his dependants – so-called ‘clubs’-where they paid a small amount a week for a doctor and medicine. For the destitute, there were dispensaries, which engaged the services of a doctor for a small annual payment … Doctors used to dispense their own medicines too. The pharmaceutical firms came round and filled up the big ‘Winchester’ bottles every week. Many of the medicines were placebos; aspirin, for instance, which was available in a red or yellow mixture. You had to give the same colour to a patient every week, and sometimes there’d be trouble when you had a locum in and he gave out the wrong one. It sounds immoral, but that was trade.

From another perspective, Sir George Godber was involved in setting up the National Health Service. In 1942, before the NHS, he surveyed hospitals in Britain. He tells what his survey found.

You must remember hospitals in those days were very different from today. An isolation hospital might only have five beds. There was a hospital for scarlet fever in the Prime Minister’s (Margaret Thatcher’s) home town of Grantham that was housed in a wooden hut on the top of a hill without sewers or water – the water was delivered by cart once a week. The system in 1942 was incapable of delivering modern medicine. There were dilapidated buildings, insanitary conditions on the wards, inadequate space for radiology and laboratory services.

There were casual wards were tramps stayed overnight and even more depressing house wards where elderly residential patients waited to die in the most uncivilised conditions – the night spent in narrow and dark dormitories of 20 to 30 beds and the daytime sitting on hard benches in a different room looking at their feet.

(pp. 255-8)

This to my mind comprehensively disproves the somewhat rosy view that there was, nevertheless, good healthcare provision before the NHS. I therefore consider the subject closed to discussion.

Vox Political: Jeremy Corbyn to Recommend Councils Run Local Services

Mike over at Vox Political reported a story on BBC News, that Jeremy Corbyn was about to tell a conference in Nottingham that privatisation did not work, and that local authorities should take over the management of local services. Corbyn said

After a generation of forced privatisation and outsourcing of public services, the evidence has built up that handing services over to private companies routinely delivers poorer quality, higher cost, worse terms and conditions for the workforce, less transparency and less say for the public.

Mike’s article is at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/06/jeremy-corbyn-councils-should-run-local-services/. Go and read it for further information.

This is really going to put the cat among the pigeons. Privatisation was supposed to solve all this, by taking local services out of the hands of bureaucrats and giving them to entrepreneurs, who automatically knew far better than anyone else how they should be run. Local services would be better managed, more efficient, and there would be more ‘choice’. This was one of Thatcher’s favourite terms, it was her automatic buzzword for the supposed benefits of capitalism.

Except that, in many cases, the ‘choice’ was illusory. There were no other companies lining up to take over services. Or if there were, they were targeting the most profitable areas, for obvious reasons. In Bristol First Bus and its fellow subsidiaries have the monopoly of the bus service. There are other providers, but they only operate sporadic services. I think there is more competition over in Bath, but this has produced different problems. I once bought a return from one bus company over there, thinking that it would apply to buses generally, only to be told I couldn’t use it when I got on the bus run by that company’s rival.

What Corbyn is recommending is ‘municipalisation’. There was a lot of talk about it in the mid-1990s, when Bliar scrapped Clause 4. Of course, the talk was a sop to Old Labour about the traditional basis of Socialism – the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Of course, Bliar and the other New Labourites were convinced Neo-Liberals, and so nothing was done about municipalisation. It was quietly discarded.

In fact, municipalisation was a very old idea and much local industry was already owned and operated by local councils in the late 19th century. Both Liberal and Tory councils, for example, took over the ownership of the local gas and water companies. George Bernard Shaw, in his paper, ‘he Transition to Socialism’ made it the basis for the transformation of the country into a Socialist state, reconstituted as a federation of municipalities.

He wrote:

We now foresee our municipality equipped with land and capital for industrial purposes. At first they will naturally extend the industries they already carry on, road making, gas works, tramways, building and the like …

… Eventually the land and industry of the whole town would pass by the spontaneous action of economic forces into the hands of the municipality; and, so far, the problem of socializing industry would be solved…

This then, is the humdrum programme of the practical Social Democrat to-day. There is not one new item in it. All are applications of principles already admitted, and extensions of practices already in full activity. All have on them that stamp of the vestry which is so congenial to the British mind. None of them compels the use of the words Socialism or Revolution: at no point do they involve guillotining, declaring the Rights of Man, or swearing on the altar of the country, or anything else that is supposed to be essentially un-English. And they are sure to come-landmarks on our course already visible to farsighted politicians even of the party which dreads them.

Elsewhere he said that when he heard people shouting that Socialism would not work, he thought of them getting their gas from the municipal gas works, walking along the municipal movements on their way to the municipal pharmacy or clinic. Of course, Thatcher saw all this coming and it made her ‘frit’ in her own words. So she was determined to privatise everything she could, to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’. Well, the ability of private industry on its own to solve municipal problems has long been disproved. What happened to all the Urban Development Corporations she set up after the 1981 riots? They were supposed to be able to regenerate struggling areas using all the power of private industry, without interference from the politicos. In fact, they were all quietly wound up, one after another. And now its time to look again at municipalisation to turn back the disastrous wave of privatisation under which our nation is sinking.