The
below is from the Socialist Standard January 1965
‘Here,
it was obvious, was what they call a great man. Propped up, glassy
eyed, at the window, flapping his hand at the crowd outside. Oozing
in his senility, like the old Disraeli with his corsets and lacquered
hair. Famous visitors came and went. An enormous cake was carried in,
with sacks full of cards and telegrams. The flashlights popped and
the television cameras whirred. Winston Churchill was ninety years
old.
Most
people were agreed that this was a remarkable achievement. Perhaps it
was, in a way. An impressive feature of the many newspaper
reminiscences of the old man in his hey day was the amount of hard
liquor which he has put down. One article said that when he was Prime
Minister, he drank champagne and brandy with every meal and sipped at
tumblers of whisky and soda all through the day. A man of lesser
constitution would almost certainly have been killed by such a deluge
of alcohol.
Churchill’s
consumption of drink is typical of the gusto with which he has lived
his life, and it is this gusto which has been the subject of much
recent hypocrisy. First, the business of those ninety years. It is
too obvious that to be born into a family like the Churchills gives a
person a built in advantage in their prospects of longevity because,
everything else being equal, they are going to get the best of
everything. The best food. A secure and comfortable home. The best
education and, if they want it, an interesting job.
It
is a different matter for the people who were cheering so
enthusiastically outside Churchill’s window on his birthday and it
is worthwhile to take a look at how they live. Their lives may be
summed up in one word poverty, although it is a different kind from
the poverty their parents knew, in the days when Churchill was a
young man. They are, first of all, the people who make the wealth of
the world. They design the factories where it is made, they plan its
production and they work on the benches and assembly lines where the
wealth comes rolling off. They transport the wealth all over the
world. Some of them sit in offices, adding up how much profit their
employers have made and how much they can hope to make in the future.
Without these people, capitalist society would collapse.
But
that is not likely to happen. Because not only do those people make
the world’s wealth but they do their best to make sure that their
employers get the profit which comes from production. Almost all of
them are fervent protectors of property rights and readily join up,
and if necessary die, to protect the property of one set of employers
against the intrusions of another. Patiently, willingly, they trudge
through their meagre lives bearing the burden of a parasite class
which lives off their labours. They keep this class in luxury, so
that one of its members can be a burbling old man at a window—yet
rich beyond any dreams of the people outside.
These
producing, organising, protecting, patient people are the working
class and it is sadly typical of them that they should be so
enthusiastic about the birthday of a man who has never entirely
hidden his contempt for them.
It
is no exaggeration to say that working class life is itself a health
hazard. Inferior, constricted housing and sub-standard food is a
health hazard. So are typical working conditions—the remorseless
assembly line, the endless flow of paper across a harrassed desk. So
is the essential insecurity of employment—the fact that a worker’s
livelihood depends upon his holding down a job. The strains of
working class existence are very real, but they are unknown to a
Churchill. Randolph Churchill, in an illuminating passage in his
autobiography, shows what a Churchill conceives as poverty by
claiming that his family was "poor but honest’’—although
they could afford to send him to Eton.
There
is a lot of evidence to show that illness or lack of it —is not
entirely a matter of chance but one of social background. The
Registrar General’s Decennial 1958 Supplement pointed out that the
places in this country where the average person stood the greatest
chance of an early death were Salford, Liverpool, Manchester and
Wigan. It is no coincidence that these are areas of dense population
and that the death rates are largely caused by the high incidence of
bronchitis. A few years after, in September 1963. Dr. Ian Richardson,
of the school of social medicine at Aberdeen, said that among the
people of North East Scotland chronic bronchitis was four times more
prevalent in what he called the “lower” social classes than in
the “ upper.”
What
this means is that if we are born rich we have a better chance of
staying healthy and living longer than if we are born poor.
Churchill, ninety years old, was born rich.
Next,
the business of the great man. It is a long time since the Second
World War started, but there is no need for distance to lend
enchantment to the part which Churchill is supposed to have played in
the Allied victory. In the organs of capitalist opinion no praise is
too lavish, no phrase too extravagant, to describe his period as
wartime Prime Minister. Only a few small voices are to be heard
trying to balance this picture, to point out the misjudgments which
Churchill made and those of the men in whom he put his confidence.
The late Lord
Cherwell was
one of these men and he made many mistakes. He was hopelessly wrong
in his estimate of the effect of the allied bomber offensive. A
recent book The
Battle of the V. Weapons reveals
that there was plenty of evidence that the Germans were preparing to
launch rockets against this country, but Cherwell refused to believe
it until it was too late. Yet Cherwell stayed in Churchill's favour,
and was still there after the war.
Such
evidence puts Churchill into perspective as a less than infallible
man. who came into the Premiership with the customary history of
mistakes. His name has always been linked with the massive, bloody
muddle of Gallipoli. Randolph
Churchill tells
how a schoolmate refused to be his chum because his father had been
killed at the Dardanelles, for which he blamed Winston Churchill. The
periods which Churchill spent in posts like Chancellor of the
Exchequer and Home Secretary were not outstanding for their
brilliance he did the jobs in much the same way, and with much the
same futility, as any other politician.
For
only one thing did he stand out. Between the wars he became the
spokesman of the group which saw German capitalism as the greater
threat to the established European powers. To stifle this threat
Churchill was prepared to do a deal with any other country—even the
Soviet Union, which he so quickly turned against after the war. An
unforeseen twist to events between the wars might have made Churchill
wrong, but in fact he tuned out to be right: Germany was a bigger
threat than Russia. This was what gave him the job of Prime Minister
at the crucial time, and subsequently loaded him with the myth that
he beat German capitalism almost on his own.
The
Allied victory did not end Churchill’s miscalculations and
indiscretions. In 1945, British capitalism needed a political party
which was prepared to push through a big programme of
nationalisation, a State health scheme and the like. It needed a
continuation of government control over things like building and
direction of labour. It needed a party with an image of freshness,
one which might repair the morale of a war weary working class by
giving the impression of a determination to get on with the job of
rebuilding Britain.
The
Labour Party seemed to fill these needs pretty well and so they rode
to power. Against this impressive tide of events, Churchill offered
only an appeal to working class sentiment and his attempt to frighten
everyone with his ruinously unwise "Gestapo” speech. When the
votes were counted, the great man theory had once more been put in
its place. The British working class had faithfully decided that the
needs of British capitalism should take precedence over the ambitions
of one man.
As the newspapers were anxious to point out,
the 1945 election result did not mean that the voters had lost their
respect for Churchill. Everywhere he went he was feted. They all
loved his funny bowler, his cigar, his V sign. With his jaw clamped,
he epitomised the outraged nostalgia of every patriotic slum dweller
for the days when the map was covered in pink and a British gunboat
was enough to put any number of natives in their place. Good Old
Winnie, they cried, in an ecstasy of admiration.
What did
they have to thank Churchill for? Did they thank him for always being
so militant in defence of the interests of the British ruling class?
Did they thank him for urging them on to the battlefields of the
world—on to the dusty fly blown slopes at Gallipoli, or into the
icy death of an Artic convoy ? Did they thank him for the slaughter
of Dresden? For managing the British
Gazette during
the General Strike ? For always, in fact, fighting the working class
tooth and nail whenever they tried to stand out for their own
interests ?
A sardonic opinion, perhaps, bred by years of
hammering against the solid brick wall of working class ignorance, is
that the workers actually enjoy absorbing punishment. Treat them
mean, a Tory minister once said, and keep them keen. Churchill has
never treated the working class other than meanly; he has never
disguised his contempt for them, be has never relaxed in his demands
that they should accept whatever burdens and terrors capitalism has
imposed on than. And the workers have kept keen. Now Churchill has
reached ninety, and presumably has not much longer to live, they are
actually grateful to him for all that be has done to them.
Could
gratitude, or devotion, or plain damned stupidity, go farther than
that ?
Ivan
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/03/churchills-birthday-1965.html
Extract
from Socialist
Standard
November 2012
‘Orton
satirises Britain’s ‘popular’ wartime leader Churchill who died
in 1965. In 1967, Hochhuth’s play Soldiers implicated
Churchill in the 1943 Sikorski crash. This member of the capitalist
class is also responsible for miners killed in Tonypandy, anarchists
burned to death in Sidney Street, 150,000 war deaths in Gallipoli,
millions of deaths in the Bengal Famine of 1943, half a million
deaths in Allied bombing of German cities, threats to machine gun
strikers in the 1926 General Strike and the gassing of Kurdish rebels
in Iraq in 1920 In the 1960s the Lord Chamberlain would not allow
Churchill’s phallus at the end of the play, so it was replaced with
his cigar.’
Steve
Clayton
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/08/what-joe-orton-saw-2012.html
