By John McIlroy

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OF SOLIDARITY Africa Independent 90p plus Trade Unions 20p post) In South Africi 28 Middle AQUESTION Party - affiliated organisations were required to pay a compulsory levy to the Parliamentary Representation Fund as well as an affiliation fee. The bulk of the LRC cash came from the unions and while some of them simply paid it out of the General Funds, others set up special parliamentary representation funds and financed them by a compulsory levy of their members.

After Labour's successes in the 1906 election several unions made payments to members and officials as in those days - and until 1911 - MPs were not paid. An attack on these financial sinews as one means of crippling Labour's progress was soon under way.

The Trade Union Acts 1871-6 which had given the unions important protections had also defined a trade union as "any Published by Socialist Forum for Southern Solidarity.

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nd es Act, in force for almost 20 years bit e right in believing that polital speakers who are so solicirus for the non-Labour trade nionist who has to contract at of the political levy are less incerned with the principle of eedom of thought than with re income which the Labour arty draws from the unions." The 1927 Trades Disputes it replaced the system of conacting out by a system of Jatracting in, requiring unions i collect political contributions I means of a separate distinct vy and banned the transfer I money from other funds to the blitical fund. Moreover, civil irvice unions were forbidden ¡ affiliate to the Labour Party ad to the TUC. | The 1927 Act lasted for almost to decades, Ramsay McDonald iling to gain sufficient Liberal upport for a repeal in 1929 hen the second minority bour government took office. The number of trade unionists filiated to the Labour Party from 75% to below 50% tween 1926 and 1938. In the ro years after the Act, party nds fell by one-third, union intributions being halved. lhilst it is difficult to measure actly because of the general treat and fall in membership this period the Act undoubtIly had an impact.

Membership Nonetheless, the unions were imulated to raise considerable uns voluntarily. Party affiliain fees were increased and dividual membership • also se. The impact of the Act was * disastrous. Labour did win in 45 despite its influence. Many unions largely ignored provisions despite warnings bm' the Chief Registrar of jendly Societies in 1928, 136 and 1938. Unions such as e Durham Miners and the into the political fund.

Some unions like the Railway Clerks increased the proportion of payers 'through imaginative campaigning.

But others such as the Scottish Motormen simply gave. up political contributions. Perhaps a typical example of the impact was the TGWU whose political levy payers fell from 77% in 1927 to 62% in 1932 or the NUR, an overall fall from 92% to 57% in 1943.

The Act remained a burning issue at union conferences throughout the Thirties. But a big step back was taken when in 1936 the National Council for Labour consisting of representatives of the TUC and Labour Party agreed that their objective should be to return the law to the pre-1927 position i.e. with contracting out still allowed. This was a retreat on the previous position of opposing giving rights to free riders. Despite its overwhelming majority the 1945 Labour government in repealing the 1927 Act merely restored the 1913 situation to which in its time there had been bitter labour movement opposition.

It is a sad comment on the softening of trade union principles and trade union self-confidence that whereas today's right wing attack on the unions' right to finance their own political party is couched in terms even more fundamental than Tory opposition to the 1913 Act, the answer from the left has been far more defensive and limited.

We should oppose today's plans for legislation on the political levy by firmly arguing the necessity for the unions to be free of any state interference in what they do with the money which comes from their member's labours.

Once a democratic decision on CAPITAL punishment once lay at the centre of the ruling class's strategies for control of the masses. Never was this more the case than in the eighteenth century, when the landed gentry - who had generally made their money through corruption in government office or through monopolies in trade - protected their property by means of extensive array of capital statutes.

Notorious among the acts that were passed on their behalf were the so-called Black Acts. They made it an hangable offence to hunt the precious deer of the landlords, to poach, to sell game, to black one's face with the intention of poaching (thus the name of the acts), to break down the head of a fishpond, to kill cattle, to cut down trees belonging to another, to commit arson, to send anonythreatening letters try to rescue someone from custody; 8tne forth.

The hanging itself was a public ceremony, with all the trappings of a military parade. The condemned person would be taken in an open cart from his or her place of confinement to the gallows (e.g. at Tyburn, where Marble Arch in London stands today). In full view of the public at large they would be strangled to a painful death by the rope:

The whole gruesome business was a show of power by the ruling class. It was meant to instil terror into the hearts of the masses and at the same time to make them aware that power over life and death lay at the discretion of their rulers.

As often as not, the victims could be pardoned and transported overseas on a convict ship instead; but this act of mercy, which could be left until he last moment, depended absolutely on the good grace of the monarch and his fellow rulers.

Domination

This combination of terror and mercy formed the èssence of punishment at a time when the ruling class was defending its own form of domination with all its might.

In the course of the eighteenth century, however, we also find the great bourgeois reformers (Beccaria, Manzoni, Howard, Romilly etc) make their case against capital punishment as both barbaric and futile.

They declared that capital punishment violated the fundamental rights of human beings, that it was an inhuman punishment. They declared also that such punishments were useless in the modern world.

Far from deterring people from violence, they set an example of the most horrific and cold-blooded violence being given legal sanction. By definition, they cut out the very A gruesome show of power possibility of reform.

Juries were becoming unwilling to convict and judges unwilling to sentence, when the punishment was so out of proportion to the offence committed. I'ne manufacturers argued that they needed certainty of punishment and not the remote threat of a dreadful punishment if their property was to be adequately protected.

On the basis of these and other arguments, the retorming bourgeoisie won. Capital punishment was reserved for a few major offences (mainly murder). Hanging was removed from the public domain and hidden behind prison walls. The torture associated with hanging was as far as possible done away with • - improvements in the technology of the knot and the drop were intended to make death as quick and painless as possible.

In place of the rope, there arose the familiar institutions of the modern age, the police and the prisons.

The spirit of punishment in the new age of bourgeois rule was caught by Kant and Hegel. Hegel wrote: "punishment is the right of the criminal. It is an act of his own will... His crim is the negation overturning, denial, subversion] of right. Punishment is the negation of the negation and consequently an affirmation of right solicited and forced upon the criminal by himself."

Torture

The new penitentiaries of the early nineteenth century were intended to replace physical torture by mental torture, to link vengeance on the criminal with penance in the criminal, the corporal punishment of isolation with the spiritual punishment of guilt.

This penal theory was expounded at length by the philosopher utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham: punishment must make the criminal the judge of his own crime; it must appear to terrorise the masses... that in their punishment criminals pass sentence UL. themselves. A whole machinery of power and control was set up to ensure that this fetish of power was sustained.

The convicts were shut behind prison walls, cut off from intercourse with the outside world, subjected to a regime of constant surveillance, subjected to an internal regime of rewards and punishments to ensure that in word and gesture - if not in their hearts - they consented to the punishments inflicted upon them.

Penitence

In today's prison codes, the watchword of the prison is penitence, lor the reformation of criminals into human beings. The reality of the prison is less fine: we find in fact a reinforcement of all the inhuman conditions - the deprivation, Isolation, mutual competition, racism, etc - that lead men and women to commit crimes in the first place.

The crisis of modern punishment is that the reality increas ingly deviates from the ideal. The right wing answer to this crisis is not to alter the reality but to do away with the ideal. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current howls for the reintroduction of the death penalty. The Tory hounds have faith that this will magically solve the problem of murder, or at least of certain kinds of murder, like terrorism or murder of police or prison officers.

What a consciousness they reveal in their choice of victims for the rope! They pick on terrorism, a form of murder which, however reprehensible, at least is committed out of an altruistic defence of a collective cause and not just out of individual demoralisation. The ultimate penalty is to be used on the murderers of those in power, the police and prison officers, and not against the vast abuse of their vast powers which the police and prison officers commit when they kill innocent civilians. least for reform.

The evidence shows conclusively that it fails to deter. One example cited in the Home Office Research Unit Study shows that the number of police officers murdered on duty has not varied as a result of the abolition of hanging in 1965.

It has remained at a constant rate of between zero and two in almost every year from 1957 onward. It has twice risen as high as three (1975 and 1982) and once to four (1966) but it was zero from 1967 to 1969. The last murder of a prison officer on duty in England and Wales occurred in 1965!

As regards "terrorism", no one in their right mind can believe that the introduction of judicial hanging into the Northern Ireland situation will answer any of the problems of that area except increase the determination of the Catholiçs to get rid of the English presence.

Finally perhaps we may note the huge risk of selecting the wrong victim, if the long list of those wrongly imprisoned for murders which they did not commit is anything to go by.

Why then do the blood-lust Tories want to bring back the rope? My own belief is that it represents today what it did in the eighteenth century: a massive show of force combining terror and discretion (now of the Home Secretary). This worship of power substitutes for any serious look at crime itself or the conditions which generate it.

Marx's comment upon capital punishment in his own time still holds good as a perspective today.

'Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system which breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones.

At the time of writing the outcome of the Commons vote is not known: we know only that there exists a fine balance weighed slightly against the reintroduction of hanging. The church is split, with the Archbishop of Canterbury coming out against and clerical rank and file in letters to the Times declaring that hanging is a Christian duty, no less.

Some of the Tories are worried about the consequence of reintroducing hanging in Northern Ireland.

Once again, the onus of consistent support for the defence of the most basic, humanitarian rights lies with us = socialists.

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