Down in the pubs off Throgmorton Street at lunch-time, the members of the Stock Exchange were falling over to buy each other drinks. They were shouting and yelling, laughing, cheering and singing, as it Utopia had suddenly descended on them from out of the blue, and I suppose, for them, it had.
A quick visit to the Financial Times building showed that the Index was up a staggering 23.5 points—a bigger jump than that caused by. the declaration of peace in 1945, the announcement withdrawals semtement rops frem Vietnam missiles settlement Cuban missiles affair-in fact the largest jump ever recorded in a single day in the thirty five years of the the existence of the F.T. Index.
The big pension funds, and unit trusts, who have, much to the chagrin of the Market, OCCIVIOW in recent months, were out in force buy ing with a vengeance. Up shot the Government Stocks, too, with added to War Loan, which rose to £37: 10s.
The afternoon saw heavy profit taking, and quick, sharp selling of many of the shares that had rocketed in the morning, but, nevertheless, the 351.7, and more than £1000m. been added to the value of shares quoted on the market in a single day.
Further confidence came from a 26 point leap in the pound on the foreign exchange markets and it ended at 2.4002 U.S. dollars.
ICI, for example shot up 4s.4½ to 49s.6d. in the morning, and even thouch it fell hack to 47 during co-operate with his economic policies.
Afthough 1968 and the first few weeks of 1969 saw an almost unprecedented boom in shares, the City was always mistrustful Wilson administration, but with Heath in it can look forward to the remedying of many of its specific grievances.
If the 1971 budget includes reduction, or at least a modification Corporation Tax, and adjustment of Capital Gains Tax, the abolition of S.E.T., the restoration of tax relief for loan interest, and a lowering of direct, personal taxation through the imposition in some shape or form of Value Added Tax, the Stock Market is likely to jump for joy again, and if the international economic situation is more amenable, the first two years of the Tory administration are likely to witness a rampant bull market.
There are other factors too: the Tories are pledged, in no uncertain fashion, to the abolition of the Land Commission, and it is probable, or at least possible, that moves will be made Ian Smithwards-both moves will be welcomed by the City. Share tipsters already pointing to Rhodesian Bonds as the one thing certain to climb under the present Government.
There are other more menacing factors, such as the alliance which has always existed between Powell's purist Capitalist economics and the racketeers of the City. Earlier this year, when a group of stock-brokers staged a demonstration on the floor of the House in favour of the Rhodesian Government, one saw the point at which the two dominating aspects of Powellite ranting come together.
Everyone in the City was celebrating after the election; in one Champagne drenched directors office, I was told "not to worry" how much I drank, because "The Tories will soon allowing tax free entertainment expenses businessmen
favour of the disbandment B Specials. He remained silent during the pre-Christmas Ulster in Westminster- -"He must have had trouble with his false teeth"-and in the postChristmas Ulster debate-"He probably still had indigestion from his turkey." He and "Major Chee-Chee, " were traitors to Unionism. "Mr. Henry Clarke does not stand for justice. He stands for Landlordsim. He would walk on the Protestant working class." Clarke had even gone so far as to "defile the flag" by printing election posters with a cut-out of his "bighead" imposed over a Union Jack.
Paisley then went on into a more general tirade calling for the return of the B Specials, law and order and end to the toleration of law-breakers like Bernadette Devlin. He stood, of course, for equal treatment of Catholics but this had to be a "justice based on righteousness."
The only specific political proposals he made were for helping the motorist by cutting taxes on petrol, government aid to small farmers and a rise in old-age pensions. He seemed curiously unsure of these less uniquely Protestant demands, as if he could not feel their relevance but knew they were felt to have some in the wide world beyond his loyalist horizons. "MY FRIEND, YOU ARE A FOOL"
His speech concluded, Paisley offered to answer questions. The first one received the crushing reply: "My friend, you are a fool." The next, on the Common Market, led Paisley to say that he was against the Common Market because" it would be the end of Ulster's Constitution." After a few desultory and easily deflected queries Paisley called for an end, and "Three cheers for the bands, the Lambeg drummers and the police." God Save the Queen was then sung, and as all attention was focussed on the chanting Paisley, his heavies beat a boy in the crowd who had asked a hostile question earlier on.
Paisley's rhetoric, and the way he organises his rallies, aim to evoke a familiar and parochial past, using that curious jumble of religious and military symbols that goes to make up Orange culture. At the same time he is blatantly agressive and defiant of political politeness. His attacks on his opponents are evocatively physical-Henry Clarke's false teeth, Bernadette Devlin "with or without her appendix," and "Major CheeChee, the back of whose ugly neck I have to look at three days a week in the Stormont Parliament." On both occasions he was elected (to Stormont, and then to Westminster) he made victory speeches that rejected the formalities of the usual victor's address. In the Bannside, after saying "this is not the place to comment on the signicance of my election," he launched vigorous assault on the Unionist Party, the Belfast Telegraph and the "traitor O'Neill" who had held the seat before him. When the recent result was announced, he proceeded to thank HOL the returning officer or his constituents, but "the God I serve." He then went on to belabour Henry Clarke whose 20,000 majority had disappeared and to say that the people of Antrim now had a "representative of the people."
HIS CLASS RHETORIC this populist demagogy corresponds to a political truth. The Unionist Party rests on an alliance of the Protestant ruling class and the Protestant proletariat and farmers. That alliance no longer protects the workers and farmers and Paisley's appeal rests precisely on this developing class split within Unionism. This is the fundamental reason why the official Unionists are unable to fight back, and why they came to deal with him. His policies are theirs, but his are more blatant and reject the formal co-operation with Westminster and Dublin required for the political and economic survival of their class position Paisleyism, manipulating the memories of former crises ("remember 1960"*) is a defensive reaction to the decay of this sectarian protestant bloc. As such he has clearly got limits. Such categories as he USeS are enough to express a solidarity, but not to resolve the problem. You can't be "loyalist" to a Westminster that betrays you, and "our province" cannot survive on its own. His uncertain attempts to inject a bo of economics into his rhetoric shows that he is aware of this limit but unable to surmount it.
British observers have handled Paisley (and Bernadette Devlin) in terms of the racialist anti-Irish stereotypes that date from the pre-1921 period but were revived again in 1968. They are either terrified of him or else scorn him as a buffoon and an upstart. When the Antrim results were delayed by a hitch in counting, the BBC radio commentator Hardiman Scott went on about how "This is all very Irish"... In fact Paisley cannot function in Westminster like he does in Ulster. His rhetoric and his appeal lies in asserting his authority over an audience who respond to his cultural and ideological outlook because they share it. Even in Stormont his first speech was unsure and dull. The timid quakings of bourgeois commentators here are consequently unrounded Paisley will not unduly disturb the trivial and inebriated ranks of the House of Commons.
HE STANDS ALONE In Ulster his strategy is not to supplant the official Unionists. First, he himself can only work alone. His allies are insignificant men and his fellow-candidate Beattie was defeated in Belfast. Allies who do appear to deny his supremacy, like the clown Maj. Buting, are thrown out. This is one limit on his creating a party. The other is that he doesn't need to. He organises separately to move the Unionist Party itself. He makes pacts with them and they pursue Paisleyite policies in their election campaigns. None of the Unionists in the election talked about reforms.
Paisley has altered the relative weight of the different classes within the Unionist bloc to preserve its traditional policies, "old-fashioned traditional Unionism" as he calls it. But in so doing he has undermined the effete clique of landowners and businessmen who run the Unionist Party. It will take a long process of propaganda and revolutionary organisation to tame this determined Presbytarian bullock. For -to do so means winning the Protestant working class to the socialist policies that alone can resolve the social and economic difficulties that Paisleyism expressca Bernadette Devlin is not in Armagh jail for breaking the law or for resisting the law, she has been jailed for fighting the law. Even "worse", for inflicting a partial defeat on it, when she helped the Bogsiders beat back the Royal Ulster Constabulary last August Bernadette has played a central role in the three stages of the development of the Ulster crisis". Fifteen months ago in April 1969 when she was elected to Stormont, she became the political expression of the Civil Rights movement A Connolly socialist, a Catholic Unity candidate, a student at Queens, a girl - this extraordinary combination produced the youngest member of Westminster's Parliament. This originality reflected the new development of the Catholics in the North, The attachment for Bernadette, that is so deeply felt, is based on hope, that she represents a new and therefore bearable future.
The day after her election to Parliament was announced, rioting broke out in the Bogside. It began from trivial incidents, and swiftly escalated to barricades and police brutalities; and it was then that the RUČ invaded Sam Devenney's house, beat his children and murdered Devenney himself. (see the article by Bernadette in Black Dwarf No. 33) Apart from the interviews Bernadette Devlin's first task as a newly elected MP was to go and see the Devenney family. A fact which helped ensure that for her a seat in Parliament was linked to a determination to fight the RUC., by force if necessary.
The second moment when Bernadette takes the centre of the decrepit stage of Northern Irish politics, was in August. Reinforced herself by her knowledge of what had happened in April, her presence in the Bogside helped ensure massive press coverage and forced a degree of restraint on the police, and above all helped to keep up the morale of the Bogsiders themselves. When, battered and exhausted the RUC admitted defeat the situation of the Ulster statelet was transformed.
The British sent in their troops, and used the opportunity to push through reforms, in a las attempt to turn the North into a modern Dem ocracy'. The "B' specials were abolished, a central housing authority established, etc. etc. But these reforms were pushed through to ensure the preservation of the reactionary one Party political system that existed throughout the North's fifty year history.
The jail sentence that Bernadette is now serving, comes from charges laid against her for the fighting in Bogside last year. Her sudden arrest on the road to Derry turns the spotlight onto her for a third time, and again at a moment when the North is in convulsion. The result of her appeal and the decision to sentence her were delayed until after the results of the General Election, In part because putting her down if she had been defeated would have ensured her final humiliation, in part because to sentence her during the campaign would have guaranteed her success.
Black Dwarf July 71970 page 7 fought the State voked into an attack on the British troops, and bigoted republican-led sectarian fighting, better armed and more deadly than any time since the war, breaks to the open in Belfast. For Bernad ette, this third escalation is a defeat. Much of the responsibility lies ion Catholic shoulders, as the Irish working class again divides against itself It will ensure a period of reaction that will make her own jail sentence seem mild.
For now the imperialist government in Westminster, and on this there is no difference between the two parties, has decided to use force to break the extremists and enforce British. domination.
Not that reforms will be forgotten. In a striking editorial called 'The Fever of Ulster' The Times has outlined British policy and the strategy behind it (June 301970). Reforms, it says. are necessary, not because they are needed, but because: "The faction of the IRA that is formenting violence now has its own gunmen and the teenage mobs to play with. The much broader section of the community that joined in or supported civil rights agitation are not yet its pawns. It is of crucial importance that they do not become its pawns, that they are not given cause to abandon their strong interest in the preservation of the peace in favour of the view that what they regard as their rights can only be won by armed rebellion."
On the other hand if"...for weakness of will or for any other reason, the United Kingdom Govemment might be tempted to pull out...Armed subversion would cease to be a futile and crim inal throw that it is now recognised to be by the overwhelming majority of people in both parts of Ireland: it would become the violent means to a realisable objective...
What conclusion does the Times draw from this? As well as reforms, "Harsher tactics by the troops in the face of rioters would be justified. Verbal reassurances now require the backing of action.' As one such reassurance was that petrol bombers would be shot, this is an open instiga tion to the British Army to open fire The ruthlessness, and self interest of the ruling class are contained in these quotes. Reform and repression are both necessary and in both cases the reason is the same. To prevent the masses from taking their own command of history. Reforms are necessary because otherwise the people in Ireland may be forced to take open action Whilst the ultimate will to control the North must be shown, otherwise the people will naturally take the opportunity to throw the British This double strategy of concession and ruthlessness is not the product of unbelievable sche ming and shrewdness. It is two prongs of a well honed fork, that has borne the British rulin class through an imperial epoch, a weapon tha serves one overriding imperative: keep the masses down! and that serves a single collective end: class rule.
Bernadette has been jailed for the same reason that reforms are in progress and ruthless repress ion on the way. For she represents the possibil ity of a people in arms. In contrast to the sectarian fighting in Belfast, the Bogsiders rose to confront the British, Already they have staged the United Kingdom's first, if limited, prostag
Black Dwarf July 7 1970 page 8 byMike Rosen.
Guided by the firm logic that the really worthwhile thing about banging your head against a wall is that it's great when you stop, 99.9% of us carry around that hopelessly romantic crutch: somewhere there is a place where I could get away from it all.
There is no escape from the myth that you can escape. But like all the major crutches and placebos that we surround ourselves with to ward off visions of personal and/or worldwide holocausts they are worth a bit of thought before lobbing into the dustbin.
For a start, just where the hell is this place that everybody gets away to and who or what is the it all'? The, British Travel Association don't have information on 'it all' but they do know that getting away for 60% of British humans means away from Britain, for nearly a third of them it means Spain, and for a third of them, Spain means Majorca. So what has this consensus of the consensus of the consensus place got? For a start "it's a happy holiday paradise where long peaceful days fade lazily into warm nights with stars twinkling in cloudless skies." Or in brief, "bustling resorts, tiny villages with white-washed houses, long stretches of golden sand, dotted with palm-umbrellas to shade sun-worshippers, all form part of the delightfully gay kaleidoscope which is Majorca." It's worth remembering that "farmers with their slow, clopping donkeys wend their unhurried ways along green-hedged lahes" and that it was probably some out-of-work arts graduate who picked up a fiver or two to write this shit for Benson Publie Relations Ltd. (ref. 'Lyons 1970 Holidays, Champagne Jets to the Sun from 29gns') The key to the thing can be found of course encapsulated in a photo of sand bums and tits where you know that your sun-tan is there for the asking on the sands of Arenal's inviting beach. (not Arsenal)
The main chords In actual fact the job of selling holidays is a serious business and obviously a potentially lucrative one. About f990 millions were spent on holidays (including travelling to and fro) last year. But quite apart from the financial issue (and the vast 'conning swindling machine that it is) you can hear just in the extracts quoted most of the main chords of the summer hols sound. Why do long peaceful days fade, why should it interest me that the villages are tiny but the resorts are bustling and what have farmers and donkeys got to do with it? The crucial contradiction that all brochure readers have to face up to and then conceal is (1) that the getting-away-from-it-all syndrome carries with it the rural idyll in all its gruesome glory alongside the fact (2) that because he is a stinking capitalist he has to amass his clients into profitable fun-loving clusters. So on your holiday you will be virtually alone and at one with Nature, enjoying the solitude of an empty landscape sharing the pleasure of living with happy swains (elsewhere referred to as labourers, peasants etc.). And at one and the same time be part of an amazing gay crowd of fun-seekers enjoying Whitbread's Tankard, non-stop light music and the twinkling lights of cars skidding in the donkey shit.
It's an old problem facing the imperialist abroad. He wants to enjoy the natives and enjoy himself. As all his sensibilities belong to the mother country with its assumptions of deluxe living, private-property-acquiring and herrenvolk status,' he can't let himself shed these and envy the life of the "flower-bedecked fisher-folk." Quite the contrary: the fact that it is an illusion that he is envying their lives reinforces his original outA classie historical case is that of Cecil Sharp the folksong collector who went to the Appalachian Mountains in the US during the first world war. On the one hand he was bowled over with deUght at finding a community whose folk culture had survived the industrial revolution and on the Getting a bit The next thing that's great about getting away is that it should hold out the possibility of getting a bit. But who's going to get a bit of what? English girl with swarthy Latin? To be fair, it's not exactly recommended in the brochures. English bloke with local maiden? This is seen as a possi bility. The holidays posters of the world are mostly bikini adverts in disguise. But of course the real possibility of your stay in our air-conditioned hotel should be the chance of knocking off one of your fellow fun-seekers. In actual fact, though lying about all day in the sun gets your gonads going it also makes them too hot (and blistered) to handle.
Actually the commercial relationship-rather than physiological-between sun and sex for the white anglo-saxons is a study on its own. Obviously the sun is Majorca's main natural resource given that it has now become a central summer preoccupation of the pasty-faced caucasian. I can remember the sadistic delight I used to enjoy when the girls at school came back from their six day fry-ups on Rimini beach. At the time it seemed to sum up the absurdity (not to say tragedy) of the holiday biz. For them it meant working every Saturday at hairdressers; months of brochure swatting (though god knows what minutiae of criteria operate between the sun-soaked sands of one beach and the sun-drenched sands of another); months of fantasy about lonely but mature men who would introduce them to pleasures they didn't know existed (I think that was the phrase); the careful choice of every garment, bangle and body-servicing implement to cover all six days and so on. It seemed then and now a peak in surrendering one's personal resources of self organisation to the bastards. A yearsworth of Pearl and Dean compressed into a week with all those bad colour one minute films about Torrino's and its suburban continental cuisine. And underving it all was the impliestion that the satisbest equals it costs more operates as the magnet to the consumer. When it applies to fridges, this is in the short term tolerable but as it moves more and more towards an assessment of experience itself the fouler it gets. The name "Package Tours' is accurate. If fucking could be bottled, the Pope couldn't stop them marketing it.
Back to the beginning The two concepts that lie behind the original notion of a holy day are rest and celebration. Nowadays these rests between periods of labour are only real "rests" in our consciousnesses, which assume that labour is dull, albeit necessary, and that it is possible to fragment both our live and ourselves into periods which are more or less self-expressive, more or less "the real me," and so on. In primitive, non-exploitative societies, however, the concepts of rest and celebration are linked with each other and with labour itself. Celebrations preceded or terminated the collective achievement-the hunt, harvest etc. In the primitive situation the "rest" period was in fact taken up with the labour of art-religion: i.e., placing the work that had to be done into its position in the cosmos. You couldn't get away from it all—you were part of it all....
With exploitative societies you have the growth of an awareness of two tasks: one for the master,
one composed many cross-currents. For example, on April 1st the church was either unable (at the highest level) or unwilling (at the lower levels) to prevent what was effectively an annual cultural revolution in which pre-christian cults rose to the surface and inverted the christian order and there were orgies on the altar and lords of misrule and SO on. In fact one of the great myths that christians consistently get away with is the idea that there was this integral ball of ideology called christianity that rolled across the world wiping out all indigenous religions, and that this situation lasted until for some mysterious reason (eg nationalism) things got a bit steamy round the renaissance and Luther announced that he was a turd in the world's straining arsole.
The medieval idea of a holyday, contained within it 1) the idea of time off (as given by master). 2) time one, to perform the christian duties-and 3) time on, on the residual indigenous rituals.
To suggest however that this produced any confusion in the minds of the practitioners would be a misrepresentation. Rather what occurred were constant attempts by the catholic hierarchy to put down the pagan rave-ups, and to persecute backsliding lower clergy drawn in to the churchyard dances. Certain kinds of songs were banned, dances were forbidden and so on. When we remember that the priest John Ball wrote "When Adam del ved, and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" in 1381 (The Peasant's Revolt) and again that the mystery plays ran simultaneously with folkfestivals then we can see that the notion of a By the time we get round to fully fledged stinking capitalism then master and worker are in open conflict over that same period of rest and celebration. Here is the way nineteenth century farm labourer expressed it in a song abut the rural labour markets or "Terms":
"The Harvest time when it comes round They'll grudge you sabbath rest They'll let you to the worship But they like the working best The dinner hour it vexes them And then to us they'll say Come on my lands you'll get your rest When lying in the clay' By the time we reach today the situation is even further complicated. As we can see from the song, the right of the working classes to have a break from suicidal labour was not freely given. Every minute's break from the production line has had to be won by industrial action and yet any analysis of the consumer state can reveal that man's leisure time is a gold mine for the exploiter. (It must be, because they print all the prices in the brochures about a millionth of an inch high.) So we're face to face with chestnut: have the working classes yet again 'conspired' to bring about their own oppression? And isn't it in the capitalist's interests anyway to have a bunch of beaming happy workers back in the office and shop refreshed by their ten days on the beach?
Get away with you There has been a struggle by workers to win holidays for themselves because work as specified by capitalism is for most, intolerable, whilst an expression of that position is obviously an implied threat to the order. The reasons why it is intolerable are not simply because it is dirty, cancer inducing, back-breaking and gene-distorting. The jor referred to as 'your' job is in fact someone else's job the bugger who buys it. You don't play a part in controlling or organising it. You are unaware of how it is integrated with other tasks needed to complete, distribute or market the produet of your labour. The ideal subject of CapitaBlack Dwarf July 71970 page 9 este But then the very division of life into work (which is good for you but boring), and leisure (which is pleasurable) could only grow out of a society organised along these lines. Passive man is very much in demand. He asks no questions about the division of his life and labour, and he accepts the fragmentation. Education is for him a short term phenomenon, and its here in the for mative years that the great work ethic is laid down. The ethic states that unless a child is compelled to do certain kinds of work he will never be convinced of the need for it, and leisure becomes a breather, fixed, between work spells Such an atmosphere is the ideal breading ground for "I've got to get away from it all", and it was Mathew Arnold, the Nineteenth Century's Chief Inspector of Schools, who mused that it would be fun to be a gypsy cruising about without a care in the world, just glancing at the odd book every now and then.
Your head and the system There are two crucial points here: 1) It is obvious nonsense that one leaves anything behind. Instead you bring the whole lot with you: the great howling wizzing machine in your head that assessed and chose that particular kind of holiday at that particular time. Any new set of friends and relationships that may be attempted during the hols can only come from the basis of the way you operated before.
2) The very financial system that you enter into with such glee as being the means for getting away is in itself only another parallel institution to the one you work in. (Short of going to China, I suppose) This perhaps is seen most clearly at a place like Butlins with its armies of badly paid pleasure dispensers playing reveille and bingo over big brother speakers all day long.
As it stands at the moment one of the immediate prospects held out to workers is Butlins. Built as palaces of fun out of green timber, giant replicas of fun-birds and beasts dangling from the ceiling of the swimming pools, every minute of the day a potential competition of bubbling babies. and glamorous grandmothers—it looks like hell. It is in fact not far from the prospect of prototype passive inan. What makes Butlins not simply bearable but actually a giant success is that try though the little chaps in their red blazers do to organise your life into an endless stream of bubbles and fun you can actually make off to the snooker room. Butlins seems to offer moments of companionship to people who never forget it. A second potential of holidays is obviously discovery. "Woburn Abbey radiates the art history and tradition the elegance of a bygone age", as the Duke puts it—"see the Great State Bedroom -(Queen Victoria slept there) and Monkeys swinging in the trees" (did she do that too?)
So is it all doom and grudders and the only solution to stay at home and brood on all those idiots frolicking on the beach while you have seen, crystal clear, through the whole grisly conspiracy?
What are the pointers towards a life where work versus unwork does not exist? This after all is what the great hippy freak-out is all about. All you need is love, and all you need to do is get away and do it.
The only snag about this is that someone has to produce the great heaps of technological gunge that make all the great sounds needed for the exercise. And hell-you need a fridge. But is there a resolution of the problem of 1) trying to turn unwork into antiwork, 2) leading a sufficiently inte grated life for the sake of sanity, 3) and having a good time? The problem lies in part in coming to terms with anti-work. This the hippy philosophy never does. Anti-work for them is simply just not working and letting the juice pour in. Somewhere along the line a marxist has to see his job as imagining a system in which work is the self-fulfilling permanent activity of man. This may mean that what any individual does, would have to be diversified. It may mean that the notion of a holiday of "getting away from it all" ebbs away into the idea of simply going somewhere else to work. And it may also mean the revival of festival and celebration Freetime is not free so long as it is time given by the people who make you unfree. Freetime is
Black Dwarf July 7 1970 page 10 The Middle East no: 2 FRED HALLIDAY communique This is the latest military communique issued by the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf, as published in the Beirut Marxist-Leninist weekly, al-Horria. It should be borne in mind that communications inside Dhofar are extremely bad, and it
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.. while Bogside Special Report