This article by John Molloy first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
THE English international footballer Len Shackleton, who played the majority of his career in the 1950s was among the first, if not the first footballer to release an autobiography. His book is famous for the inclusion of a chapter called The Average Director’s Knowledge of Football. The chapter was a single, blank page. Perhaps a future biography of Manchester United minority shareholder, the billionaire tax exile, Jim Ratcliffe, chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the INEOS chemicals group, will include a chapter of similar length to capture his contribution to British race relations. Before issuing the familiar “non-apology” apology famous people use when they are called out (the usual limp “sorrow” if his “choice of language has offended some people”) he had used the platform offered to him on Sky News to pontificate on the world as he saw it and what he saw was that the UK was “colonised by immigrants”.
The traditional veneration of the wealthy means that figures such as a Ratcliffe can sound off unchallenged irrespective of the staggering inaccuracy of their expressed views. Taking just one example, he stated “The population of the UK was 58 million in 2020. Now it’s 70 million”. This figure was out by over 9 million. This set the tone for his venting that “you can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits”, ignoring the millions of working poor (thanks the economic policies and austerity shaped welfare polices supported by the likes of Ratcliffe) who scrape by, as employers allow the state to supplement low wages with Universal Credit and/or housing benefit – the landlords’ benefit. Similarly, tedious expressions opposing ”big-government” do not mean that such entrepreneurs are averse to additional Government handouts for their own enterprises. As the Morning Star report Ratcliffe’s company has received “almost £700 million in loan guarantees from the British government, as well as a £50m handout for the refinery site it closed in Grangemouth.”
Of course, if such interventions were merely ill-informed, they could be ignored but their impact is twofold. Firstly, such people are listened to and secondly their “free speech” is the license for the wider expression of racial intolerance in all its ugliest, destructive forms. On the first point Governments jump to respond and appease such figures. Indeed, in the last 40 years there are numerous examples of business shaping the industrial relations and social policy landscape.
When there’s even a hint of a different approach (Labour’s ever diluted Employment Rights proposals or the NI Assembly’s Good Jobs Bill) that might move the UK towards hardly revolutionary European norms, the ear-splitting squealing of capitalist pigs is deafening. While some of their reaction is performative, it also hints at their vulnerability in that they know, historically, that collective, democratic challenge can stop the powerful acting with impunity. While on the industrial front they do not want labour to have a presence or a voice, wherever else an alternative voice is expressed will also be a target, whether in a court (hence the threat to juries) or in relation to how they define freedom of speech – free to the point when you say, “Free Palestine.”
The insertion of greater democracy into any campaign, therefore, is an attempt to “lock” the everyday struggles for a life of human dignity free from want to a broader vision of an alternative society. The censored releases from the “Epstein files” show what this is an alternative to – the financial “masters of the universe” worldview is rooted in gender and racial exploitation, a wholesale rejection of any democratic accountability – their sociopathic paradise islands – a graveyard of human decency. It also reinforces why the ideological “brush” depicted on the Soviet poster “Comrade Lenin cleanses the Earth of filth” showing Lenin sweeping away the old financial, political and religious order, will be just as necessary in this century as it was in the last.