A TIMELY TRACT by Ken Coates Brian Abel-~Smith's latest Fabian tract, Labour's Social Plans* is one of the most effective bulls-eyes to have been scored by the society for a long time, Taking as his point of departure the (oppositional) views of C.A.R. Crossland and Douglas Jay, who once identified socialism as a willingness to give "an exceptional priorifj/’*6 "overcoming poverty, distress and social squalor", Mr, Abel-Smith carefully documents the complete failure of the Labour Government to act upon these sentiments, Two-fifths of the schools for 13-16 year-olds are seriously isadequste; university expansion has not even kept up with the population ‘bulge', never mind the increased demand from qualified but rejected students; there is a famine of doctors in the health service; home helps, district nurses and health visitors are mal-distributed between one area and another to an extent which leaves some areas scandalously deprived; in the hospitals money problems are acute, with growing problems of cross-infection in operating theatres, apalling conditions in psychiatric wards, and increasingly depressed and hopeless conditions for the staffs, About a million people live below the standards set by national assistance, but do not apply for help; about a third of the unemployed workers on national assistance had their benefits cut back by the infamous 'wage-stop' rulings; 74 million people, 2% million of them children, live at or around the levels set by national assistance, while 2 million, including 700,000 children, live below this standard. Far from introdwing a crash programme to improve the woefully negkected public services which caters for all the people deprived in this manner, the freeze is obviously making matters worse, But Abel-Smith shows that even the plans of the Government will not improve things. Between 1958/64 public services! expenditure went up by 343%, The National Plan, based on pre-freeze projections, budgets for an increase, between 1964/70, of only 28%. Even though Britain now lags behind all the Common Market countries in provision for social security; though housing expenditure as a proportion of the Gross National Product is budgeted in the plan for 3.9% as against 5% in the recent past in New Zealand, Greece and Switzerland, 53% in Italy and Sweden, and TE in Israel; though on the most ambitious projection of the plan it will still in 1970 take 60 years to replace our antiquated and grossly inadequate ‘old hospitals; and though the hesitant and botched movement to comprehensive schooling will be lubricated by the very minimum of capital outlay: with all these gross defects in the plan, in fact its targets will manifestly not be realised, and conditions will have worsened both relatively and absolutely in a number of key sectors, As Abel-Smith wryly exclaims: "T would conclude that a man from Mars given Crosland's definition of -. socialism and official statistics might easily make a mistake in his efforts to identify the socialist party." This indictment is a scarifying support to the argument of Professor Townsend, chairman of the Fabian Society, who launched, the other week, an all-round plitz on the Government's abdication of responsibility in this field, When it comes to prescriptions, however, Mr. Abel-Smith is not so firmly grounded, His proposals that motor insurance companies should be billed for the cost of road accident cases, and that employers should pay for the treatment of industrial accidents, are fair enough, but meagre, A shrewder move would be the implementation of his suggestion that employers should be forced to pay as much to the National Health Service as their workpeople: this could allow the hospital building programme to be doubled, But while many of proposals for alterations in taxation are very interesting, the key proble the achievement of an explosive economic growth on a basis acceptable to *Labour's Social Plans, Fabian Tract 369, price 2/6, °mtinued over/
the working people: which implies, with a force which becomes daily more
imperative, a whole series of thorough-going socialist structural reforms
in the economy:@ great expansion of planning under workers' control, of
public ownership and democratic congrol of industry, and a sharp realignment
of British trade and political influence within the world as a whole, In
assuming that the crisis will soon go away, and then Labour can evolve a new,
more proper Nationgl Plan, Mr. “bel-Smith is being hyper=optimistic, Even
if the crisis is temporarily eased, the bankers will still be cracking the
whip, and Mr, Wilson will be most unlikely to provoke them by too precipit-
ously feeding the hungry or housing the homeless,
The kind of welfare programme so rightly demanded in this excellent pamphlet
requires a government which will mobilise the enthusiasm of trade unionists
and put recalcitrant bankers in gaol. At the moment, we are saddled with
an adminstration which does the opposite, Mr, Abel-Smith, who comes from
a famous banking family, might reasonably, in filial respect, be rather
reluctant to pose the alternatives in this stark way, but nevertheless his
pamphlet is of immense help to those of ys whaedo.