Making the natives restful

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When Beatrice Webb was a young woman in the 1870s she had a choice of two careers before her: either an anthropologist in a far flang corner of the Empire, or a sympathetic academic studying the indigenous habitat of the English worker.

In the event she chose the latter, espousing both 'gas and water socialism' and founding the Fabian Society in 1883.

Nowadays the New Fabians of the GLC's Economic Policy Group continue her tradition.

The policy being applied by the Labour Metropolitan councils in Sheffield, London and the West Midlands was the product of an earth-shattering sociological discovery made in the mid-1970s. Academic researchers looking into the Lucas Aerospace company made a stunning and quite shocking discovery.

"Capitalism produces weapons of destruction like tanks and missiles rather than socially useful goods like ambulances and lung machines."

Apparently, and this still has to be fully confirmed, they do this because they can make more money out of guns than out of butter.

Moreover, the intellectual ramifications of this advance in human knowledge are still being felt, particularly around the more backward Labour councils.

Yes, primitive thinkers in the past like Marx and Engels had blindly groped towards these truths with their limited mental apparatuses - but we had to wait till the publication of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Plan revealed. Like Galileo's disco. ery that the earth revolved around the sun, like Fleming's discovery of penicillin, the advent of the Lucas plan breathed a whole new lease of life into flagging careers and aspirations.

The Plan's solution to society's dilemma was daring in its simplicity. Why not harness the skills and technology that produces bombs to produce hospital equipment instead. Then, we'll have cracked it!

So the GLC set up the Greater London Enterprise Board and the Popular Planning nit to translate these revelations into reality.

Hence, from the days of municipalising the drains and the dust carts we have moved to the higher plane of the Alternative Workers' Plan. New teams of anthropologists were recruited who would to out into the hinterlands,_rather like their forefathers, Radcliffe Brown and the Webbs had done, and interview the natives.

More amazing new insights were culled from these explorations.

No, the working class was not, as had previously been though, a homogeneous social blob. They were divided into distinct clans and kinship networks -there was the AUEW tribe, the GMBATU clan and the NUPE peoples of South East London.

In collecting information for the Plan, Wendy Wheelwright wrote in the seminal 'Custom and culture amongst the AUEW": "I nervously clutched my Sony recorder as I approached their collective watering hole, ''The Duffy Arms". Unlike the polygamous Dinka tribesmen of the southern Sudan, the AUEW people are monogamous and consume a strange malt and barley liquid which they call 'bitter"

They celebrate by placing a large forefinger into their proboscis and moving it about and by emitting noxious fumes from their hind-quarters. Even more, they tell each other folklore tales of epic events from the past. Quite fascinating. Apparently cannibals from the Laurence Scott tribe in the north once ate one of their leaders, Ken Cure, by roasting him alive over a brazier ru a picket line.

"Absolutely amazing", • 1 said. "Could they not have solved the dispute through bargaining rather than being ghastly to Mr Cure?" I proferred tentatively. 'He negotiated with the gaffers without consulting the lads," they said. "Really! That's incredible!" I answered. One could only marvel at the novelty of their ways.

But should the researcher in collecting facts for the Workers' Plan, take sides in the battles between chiefs and tribespeople? Absolutely not, the GLC ethnographers tell us.

No. They support the perspective of the TUC Education Department called 'Tribal Centred Learning". In other words the AUEW learn from NALGO who learn from NUPE and so on.

Our GLC academic always respects the totality of the kinship system he has discovered. Taking his cue from Dr Who's visit to the planet of the Cybermen, our intrepid explorer must not support either Len Murray and the TUC General Council or the NGA peoples of Stockport and Bedford.

We must all recognise that it is part of an evolving natural world in which every actor has his/her role. To do otherwise would be the equivalent of Charles Darwin advocating support for weaker strains of organisms against stronger strains in ''The Origin of Species"

Furthermore, struggle and conflict between different sections of the kinship system is thoroughly bad for everyone concerned, particularly for the researcher, as he may get defined as a left wing troublemaker and Ken may dock his salary. This is what happened to TUC tutors in the North West who had the temerity and insensitivity to raise politics on shop stewards courses.

It is wrong for people from a higher culture to impose their values on people from an inferior cultural system. This is the Economic Policy Group approach.

Hence, this is why the EPC Alternauve Workers Plan is important. It means they can go beyond conflict.

For example, I hear that the Greater London Enterprise Board are now considering buying the Stockport Messenger Group and they are drawing up a workers plan whereby the printing press would produce socially useful goods, in this case toilet paper under contract to the TUC General Council.

Who said the British middle class was not philanthropic?

NOEL LUTON, Bournemouth

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Where we stand Organiser no.162