What baked beans can tell us about war in the Middle East

We have been advised to stock up with baked beans in a recent Sunday newspaper. Shortages may well be coming our way. The last time I read this advice about baked beans I was a newly married 27-year-old living in a rented flat in Paddington that now would be worth a few million pounds. I was a printer for the cutely named English Folk Dance & Song Society, a bike ride away. It was definitely a different world.

The Netanyahu-Trump decision to blow away any chance that Iran has of seriously injuring Israel is the recent cause for suggesting we bring out the beans. Back in the 1970s, it was the decision of oil producers to withdraw production that caused chaos to the economy. But likewise, it was a Middle Eastern – or a Muddle Eastern – issue, if you consider the incredible muddle that successive US administrations and their allies have made in this area.

Arab-Israeli wars have been added to by Iranian, Afghani, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese wars that have been based on threats to western interests. So you could say baked beans get wheeled out when vitriolic language and threats turn to war. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

I have no desire to make light of a very dangerous situation that faces us. But baked beans seem, on occasions in my lifetime, to have taken on this symbolic role underlining the tragedy that periodically upsets the economic apple cart. That brings us perilously close to world war. That threatens whatever peace we have managed to garner out of the Second World War.

A year after the outbreak of advice about baked beans, I was actually working for HJ Heinz, the biggest purveyor of baked beans in the UK. Still thinking shortages, I bought damaged cans of Heinz beans for a few pence, believing that the need for beans would soon return. I should say I also bought an immeasurable amount of tinned custard as I loved the stuff.

My presence in the workforce at Heinz was not simply about money and wages. I was a member of a revolutionary Marxist group who were still fighting the Russian revolution and the fact that the USSR was no longer revolutionary. We were trying to push the working classes into becoming revolutionary and my clandestine role was to recruit members to our cause.

Read more:

• Donald Trump is no less of a villain for winning an election – beware his effect on UK politics
• What will the Middle East conflict mean for UK energy bills?
• This is the reality of life for millions of children facing war in the Middle East

Interestingly, our bit of the puzzle, still fighting the Russian revolution, fitted in well with the wars over oil and the creation of Israel that kept the Middle East in flames. For the Cold War meant any local disagreement was adopted by one or other of the massive war machines created by the Second World War: the Russians and the Americans.

Hence any confrontation meant that each side could be seen as a client of either Russia or America. War by surrogacy. The war machines built in the Second World War having a go at each other through their clients. Which is exactly what is going on now, through Russia siding with Iran and America backing Israel.

You might even call them the baked bean wars.

As revolutionary socialists, my comrades and I did not manage to move the needle with regards to creating a revolutionary party made up of baked bean workers. Ideological issues intervened and splits appeared. I was thrown out of the party, or resigned before being pushed, and then returned to printing from bean canning. There, I eventually moved into small-time publishing.

And then, as Britain’s basic industries were closed down and mental institutions were emptied, the hospitals and prisons and then the streets filled up. And out of that maelstrom of social revolution of a reactionary kind was born the Big Issue.

One thing that the appeal to horde baked beans does alert us to is the practicality of preparing for a breakdown. That whatever our governments have been doing since the Second World War, they have not been ensuring that there won’t be a third. That warnings about a third, which we have had periodically since the end of the second, need to be taken seriously, however often they have been made.

In my opinion, this latest baked bean appeal is freighted on a need by America to address its slippage from supreme power to impotent power. To, as the Chinese call it, ‘a paper tiger’. A tiger without teeth. And Trump is determined, until proven truly impotent, to reassert that former primacy the US once had. America’s defence though, Trump sees as so tied in with a defence of Israel that they are inseparable.

Trump’s argument, shared by Netanyahu, is that successive US administrations have allowed Iran to become an incredible superpower, more so than any other in the area. And in re-establishing US supremacy in the world, taking out Iran is the most potent demonstration of that returning power.

Trump, in other words, is trying to reverse what he sees as softness, demonstrating his contempt for former presidents who got America into such a weakened state that he has to now fight against their legacy. We may wish to see this as mad. But there is a logic in the eyes of a man like Trump.

Of course, Trump seeing America as weakened by former presidents’ actions on the international stage does not take into account the great change wrought by the US closing down its industrial base. Exporting jobs to China, followed by the rest of the world doing similar, making China the workshop of the world – a title formerly held by Great Britain and then the US – demonstrates a great shift in real power. China has galloped ahead and such a reality is poorly addressed by a Trumpian view of the world.

Addressing the enfeeblement of US power in a Trumpian manner is far from safe. Neurotic might even be the term that springs to mind. But it is not a neurotic act to take in some extra beans and think of energy-saving strategies. And it must also raise the question of what is the UK politically doing while Rome burns?

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – and always take the magazine. It’s how vendors earn with dignity and move forward.

You can also support online:
Subscribe to the magazine or support our work with a monthly gift. Your support helps vendors earn, learn and thrive while strengthening our frontline services.

Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.