Readers have only until Friday left to see the exhibition in
Carlisle’s Old Town Hall on the successful State Management Scheme, the 200 nationalised
pubs and brewery in our area which was destroyed by the Tories in 1971.
The SMS was living proof of the superiority of public
ownership, paying a profit to the Home Office every year since 1927. A table
shows the award-winning Carlisle State Bitter, Keg and Mild offered a higher
specific gravity and alcohol content than the usual bland brews for a third
cheaper.
It would have been even more successful under democratic
control by the staff and customers instead of the Whitehall bureaucrats who
prevented it from advertising and selling outside the area. The 20 beers from
other brewers on sale in our pubs were
no match.
The state pubs were real social centres for local
communities, with their own sports teams and regular entertainment (my Dad,
Tommy, performed in many of them). Sadly, “entrepreneurial free enterprise” has
since managed to kill most of them off.
The 1970 Tory election campaign was largely funded by the
“Big Seven” brewery companies, who got their payback with the privatisation of
the SMS (today they are financed by the hedge funds). The Labour Party, then a
workers’ party, answered “We believe that if a few firms are able to dictate to
the government in this way they should be taken over.”
This was the first privatisation which paved the way for
Thatcher and Blair/Brown to plunder the common wealth, but it was fought
against by the working class of Carlisle. I wrote the leaflet for the LP and
trade union campaign which was distributed all across town.
How far Labour has since abandoned its socialist principles
and the interests of workers is shown in the contrast between its support for
privatisation today and its stance then. A regional conference of the LP held
in the Viaduct Hotel adopted my resolution, including the following: “The
denationalisation of the Carlisle pubs and brewery is part of the Tory plan to
hive off all publicly owned industries and hand them over to their friends in
big business...We demand not only the retention of the publicly owned pubs and
brewery, but the extension of nationalisation to all the breweries, in
particular the big seven brewery monopolies, under democratic workers’ control,
with compensation being paid only on the basis of proven need.”
As passengers, utility consumers and even as socialisers we
are paying the price for this failure every day.
Brent Kennedy,
Carlisle Socialist Party
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