Sham Pain Socialists
Before American billionaires, Saudi Sheiks and Russian Oligarchs began buying up the country’s top flight football clubs, most were in the hands of local self-made men, pillars of the community who’d made a mint from industry and were fond of reminding anyone still awake that they’d risen from nothing and had started life without shoes on their feet. The chauffeur-driven Rolls parked in the spot reserved for the club chairman was the defining symbol of the success that was generally their favourite subject. In their eyes, it gave them carte-blanche to lecture the less lucky townspeople and talk down to them with a pompous superior air. Although most of that ilk voted Tory as part of their conscious crawl towards the golf-club set and the Lord Mayor’s robes, their attitude was not dissimilar from those whose guilt at accumulating wealth is compensated for by so-called ‘Socialist’ principles – those that specialise in spinning yarns about their hard start because they seem to believe their humble origins provide them with a special insight into a world they haven’t set foot in for a quarter-of-a-century or more.
Take old Two-Jags himself, John Prescott. His public image is based on the premise that simply because he’s never modified his northern accent and apparently has a down-to-earth sense of humour (not forgetting he’s handy with his fists), this somehow qualifies him as a bona-fide Class Warrior, romanticising hardship and wearing the distant memory of it as a badge of honour. Yet, stand him next to Dennis Skinner, who I shouldn’t imagine has ever swung a croquet mallet in anger, and New Labour’s Les Dawson doesn’t seem quite so convincing. One is authentic and the other is a facade – or to use another analogy, one is a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup and the other is a bottle of Morrison’s Value Tomato Sauce. The Beast of Bolsover is as genuine as the ‘Duck-House’ Tories who were caught out in the expenses’ scandal; he never pretends to be anything other than what he actually is, and neither do the back-bench Conservatives from the Shires. Whether or not I agree with either, I respect the absence of pretence in both.
Similarly, I’d rather Cameron and Osborne dress like Bullingdon ponces 24/7 and admit they really couldn’t care less about any social demographic other than their own than adopt Estuary English when addressing factory-workers, attempting to display Bloke-ish credentials they don’t actually possess; ditto Blair in jeans, playing the trendy dad announcing the birth of his son outside No.10. It is this kind of false PR that alienates the electorate from the leading politicians. They’re fond of Boris Johnson because he is what he is. People respect authenticity and abhor their elected representatives posing as what they’re not. They’re not like the electorate; they’re freaks. I heard a Tory MP interviewed on the radio yesterday who claimed he’d wanted to be an MP from the age of ten! How obnoxious a smart-arse must a ten-year-old be that aspires to become a Member of Parliament? The answer is the one that becomes a Member of Parliament.
The hypocritical posturing of those who rose from nothing to something maintaining the facade of ‘The Street’ sticks in the throat; during the Scottish Independence Referendum, a load of them were bussed into Scotland from California, although the most tedious Professional Scotsman of recent decades, Sean Connery, was noticeably absent. Irvine Welsh, who rose to prominence by brutally documenting the harsh realities of inner-city Edinburgh, now resides in Chicago. He recently declared he was ‘not so much middle-class as upper-class’. Fine; I have no problem with that at all. For someone whose origins were humble posing as a toff has an ironic and knowing humour attached to it, yet the other way round is always attempted with tongue firmly distanced from cheek. It’s like women laughing hysterically when confronted by male strippers in a way that men don’t when cheek-to-cheek with the female equivalent. Aping the trimmings of a toff is more honest than the reverse because posing as a Socialist who gives a shit about the residents of the bottom rung whilst quaffing champers on King Rupert’s yacht is beneath whatever lays beneath contempt.
In the early 1980s, the New Romantics were written-off by the post-punk music press as silly little rich kids getting wasted on daddy’s credit card, yet most emanated from more modest stock – unlike the likes of diplomat’s son and ex-public schoolboy Joe Strummer. Then again, dressing down is often a middle-class affectation. The real Proles can’t wait to leap out of the closet wearing everything in it. The Blitz Kids were only really playing at Beau Brummell by flirting with regal flamboyance, and their movement was an unashamed, arch celebration of artifice. Not that the majority of the university-educated music journos would have understood. They got Joe Strummer because he was one of their own, expressing sartorial solidarity with their fantasy concept of the working man.
I was very impressed with the articulate and eloquent maiden speech of the SNP’s Mhairi Black in the Commons this week; the 20-year-old Baby of the House sounded to me like she was speaking from the heart and didn’t have that cowering, pathetic ‘Please love me, Middle England; I’m almost a Tory’ aura of the Labour front-bench. It matters not that I remain opposed to Scottish independence or that I mistrust anyone who overdoes the Socialist Fundamentalism bit to the point where they come across as an ISIS convert in a flat cap. What my ears heard was a remarkably potent cold wind of reality blowing through the cracks in the walls of the Palace of Westminster and cooling the cocoon of hot air that generally permeates the chamber. This wasn’t some smug and self-satisfied Parliamentary veteran lecturing the nation as to the needs of the common people as if they themselves belonged to the breed merely because they had fifty years previously; this was someone who was speaking sense instead of market-researched hyperbole and doing so with an authority born of the present, not the past.
Various hopes and ambitions are associated with Socialism – a fairer and more equal society for all, caring for one’s fellow man and the afflicted, giving voice to those who otherwise don’t have one – though these are elements of humanity that any decent person could live by; Christianity is supposed to be founded on similar principles. Philanthropy motivated by genuine compassion for the less fortunate rather than being some crafty tax dodge is undoubtedly a good thing and there are plenty of people in this world who exhibit selflessness to a degree that one cannot but admire; some don’t even attribute their compassion to Socialism. The privileged can sympathise with the left just as the poor can find reason with the right. But if you once belonged to the two-up/two-down, outside loo-world and are forever reminding every interviewer to grill you of the fact, put your money where your mouth is and give back to the community you came from rather than constantly condemning the party you oppose for destroying it. If you’re not prepared to do that, shut up.
Petunia Winegum
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July 16, 2015 at 9:20 am -
Sounds like Nick Clegg in drag. Real streets my arse.
“Born in Paisley in 1994, Black was educated at Lourdes Secondary School, Glasgow, and the University of Glasgow, where she was awarded a First-class honours degree in Politics and Public Policy in June 2015.” -
July 16, 2015 at 9:22 am -
“Socialism is incapable of defending Democracy” (Baron Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, 1936). He was talking about both the Nazis and the other mob.
‘Nuff said…-
July 16, 2015 at 9:37 am -
ANY special interest group is incapable of defending democracy.
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July 16, 2015 at 9:45 am -
Wow, you’re really on top form today Pet, what a superb piece. I couldn’t agree more with you. The only point where I would take issue, is using Dennis Skinner as an example of a “genuine socialist”. To me he comes over as very fake indeed. He certainly likes holding onto power, with all the trappings of luxury it brings. Surely he should have quit years ago – the old fraud. The best example I could give of a genuine socialist as a counterpoint to Boris Johnson would be Dave Nellist, who as far as I know only ever accepted the current average wage as salary, donating the excess to worthy causes. He was of course booted out of the Labour Party for sticking to his principles.
It really does grate when someone claims humble beginnings. Almost all politicians are guilty of this. A few that really piss me off are “Circus Boy” John Major, “14 pints a day” William Hague, “2 Jags” John Prescott and “slum dweller” David (Michael) Davis. Another thing that a lot of politicians are fond of telling everyone is that they have “immigrant” antecedents. Outside the world of politics, one twat that puts on common airs and graces is fiddler Nigel Kennedy – what a plonker!
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July 16, 2015 at 9:59 am -
Nigel’s first appearance on TV was as a child prodigy in the company of Yehudi Menuhin on Clunk-Click in 1973 (I think).
It’s noticeable that though the media tries to tie Jimmy Savile into Thatcher’s Tories, he was resolutely non party-political his whole life.
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/up-workers.html
“Perhaps Jimmy’s most overtly “political” moment came in 1987 – arguably when Thatcherism was in it’s pomp. It became the year of her third Election victory. Maggie would win her third term of office on June 11th 1987. For four months prior to this, Jimmy was promoting what was billed as the biggest ever mass demonstration in Britain… but not in a way that was meant to be helpful to the government of the day. “-
July 16, 2015 at 11:01 am -
Yes, I’ve seen that, and at that stage of his career he spoke with a mouth packed with plums. Mind you, if you’ve ever seen the old black and white footage of an early appearance by Jimmy Page in a skiffle group, he had a middle class accent and his ambition was to find a cure for cancer.
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July 16, 2015 at 10:01 am -
Of course, I myself would be the last person to talk about my first home being a two-up/two-down outside-loo back-to-back. Try telling that to youngsters today and they don’t believe you…
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July 16, 2015 at 1:26 pm -
I spent my first 14 years in a two-up/two-down outside-loo back-to-back – I’m not there now. Call it progress, call it social mobility, call it success, whatever. I remember it all from those 50 years ago and don’t hanker to go back there.
It’s true that youngsters today find it hard to believe, mainly because they only ever see the ‘older you’ in its current surroundings of profligate luxury, not the ‘younger you’ getting up in the morning to the ice on the inside of your windows and hoping the outside bog hadn’t frozen overnight.
I don’t think I’ve ever used the ‘dragged myself up from the gutter’ argument as a bullshitting vehicle, I just expect folk to take me as I am now: what I was then is for me alone to know and remember. But I do retain the accent and a little of the dialect, so maybe they’ve all worked it out anyway. -
July 16, 2015 at 8:22 pm -
Two-up/two-down! An house! With t’floors, t’ceilings and a roof??? Oh you were lucky, some on us dreamed of living in’t house, oh t’would’ve been a palace to us! etc, etc, etc….
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July 16, 2015 at 10:49 pm -
I can remember wiping my backside with newspaper. At least the press was good for summat back then…
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July 17, 2015 at 11:12 am
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July 16, 2015 at 3:14 pm -
Agreed, Alex.
Whilst I could not agree with Mr Nellist’s politics, I respected and admired his integrity.
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July 16, 2015 at 5:00 pm -
Have you noticed how many times politicians tell you “What the people want is ….” and then proceed to tell you the latest Left/Right/Centrist Party line!
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July 16, 2015 at 9:47 am -
Whenever I hear of someone whose ambition was to become an MP, I think of the emperor Claudius disqualifying from jury service a man who presented himself despite being exempt due to the number of his children. I’m inclined to think that anyone who specifically wants to be an MP (or Councillor etc) as opposed to serving the community in any way possible should be treated with suspicion.
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July 16, 2015 at 11:11 am -
The MP in question might be forgiven as he was a disabled child who had difficulty walking. I think disabled children are often ambitious to do more than just succeed.
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July 16, 2015 at 3:16 pm -
I have long said that a strong desire to seek public office should be sufficient grounds for disqualification.
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July 16, 2015 at 3:30 pm -
Fully in agreement. MP’s should be selected on the same basis as juries, totally at random and from a cross section of society. At least that way there’s a small chance of occasionally getting a handful of competent people representing us, and let’s be honest, regardless of who was picked, it couldn’t possibly get any worse.
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July 16, 2015 at 3:38 pm -
A very good suggestion, one which I have myself advocated in the past. Of course, it’s very unlikely to come to fruition, after all Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas and those already in power don’t want to give it up. It would, however, be very interesting to see how such a system would work, quite well is my guess.
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July 16, 2015 at 3:40 pm -
July 16, 2015 at 3:58 pm -
Tend to agree with Ted here too, but I’m not sure I share your trust in the outcome of a random selection process. It would, though, deal a serious blow to the old school tie, job for the boys attitudes that often seem to prevail. Also, since the lucky few selected would probably only just be getting the hang of governing as the next election rolls by, this arrangement would in practice hand all the rest of the real power to the Civil Service and, having one eye on the EU, I am really not sure that would be a good thing (plus, of course, within a generation all the scum that would ordinarily have gone into politics would now be pushing their way into senior positions in the Civil Service).
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July 16, 2015 at 5:59 pm -
Rather than MPs, maybe the random selection process should be used for all 500 members of a new ‘Upper House’ instead.
As a scrutinising and revising chamber, that would mean that any legislation raised in the Commons by MPs (i.e. by the Government of the day) would need to pass a ‘sanity check’ of that random sample of Joe/Josephine Public in order to become law.
And if 20% of the ‘sample’ was changed every year, each person serving a 5 year maximum, it would be continually refreshed during the term of any Government, and before any of them ‘went native’.
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July 16, 2015 at 11:44 am -
Hull is a LegoLand like no other – they build estates, they knock ’em down, they care not about their original visions of a modernist Utopia and they don’t give a fig for those that exercised their ‘right to buy’. A mile or so from where I am, thousands of “unloved” Victorian terraces have recently been demolished to make way for “Eco-Homes”.. Many of those “unloved” terraces were sold to unknown London or Foreign-based investors in the late 90s & early 00’s and left to rack & ruined, unoccupied. Said owners were then paid a considerable sum by the council under compulsory purchase orders. Ker-ching!
I understand members of Mr Prescott’s immediate family are on the boards of the demolition & construction companies who repeatedly “win” the Hull redevelopment contacts.
Meanwhile, despite having both Alan Johnson & Prescott as 2 of it’s 3 MP’s throughout the New Labour years and despite being awarded the farcical “City Of Culture 2017″, the city is in a worse state than ever, and not for nothing does it stink of fish & bullshit.I understand this is “socialism”?
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July 16, 2015 at 12:36 pm -
I was luckty enough to be a guest at a dinner at the Houses of Parliament the other night. (I am not, and have never been, a member of any political party.) On the terrace next to the river where we found ourselves enjoying a pre-prandial prosecco, there flowed a virtual procession of political big-wigs and their hangers-on, including the mighty Lord Prescott. He looked totally at home in the assembled company, with his trademark perma-smirk.
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July 16, 2015 at 1:15 pm -
They’re only socialists when it suits them. Don’t see any of them complaining about this:
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July 16, 2015 at 1:17 pm -
Have any notable ‘Socialists’ objected to the MPs’ imminent 10% pay rise whilst public sector pay rises are limited to 1%, I wonder?
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July 16, 2015 at 3:39 pm -
Quite!
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July 16, 2015 at 3:40 pm -
Any idea how many years of 1% the public sector workers have had since the last pay rise for MP’s ? Just a question… does anyone know ? Knowing that would enable a more rational comparison than is demonstrated by simply observing a 1% vs 10% rate.
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July 16, 2015 at 3:58 pm -
I don’t know when the last pay rise for MPs was. They used to say higher pay for MPs would have made the abuse of the expenses system unnecessary, but I’m not so convinced. Many of a Ministerial rank were amongst the worst abusers of that system and the majority of them already received an income from directorships or ‘consultancy’ posts.
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July 16, 2015 at 5:09 pm -
If you take a rational look at the expenses scandal what actually happened was that the Blair Witch Project determined MP pay rises were bad PR so they put the nod and the wink out that the claiming of petty cash was the way to go. This wasn’t the first time the socialists had done this. Reading Thatcher’s memoir she records that she saw through a large rise because the Wilson/Callaghan governments had done the self-same thing. Not that I’m a fan of MPs getting big pay – usually when the markets says there are many candidates willing to do the job, the pay-rate goes down, not up. Perhaps the mistake is that we imagine MPs are very powerful and therefore must be well paid, rather than whipped puppies who say little and do less.
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July 16, 2015 at 1:43 pm -
Fate has the best sense of humour …
“The principle of how the NHS is funded has (mostly) stood firm since 1946, summed up in clause 4 of its White Paper”
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July 16, 2015 at 1:16 pm -
Dennis Skinner hasn’t been a ‘worker’ since 1966. Forty-five years as an MP sounds pretty ‘establishment’ to me.
The election of Mhairi Black just shows that donkeys with rosettes get elected in some constituencies and how empty the SNP stables are.
What has this candidate, for instance, got in common with the people of rural Perthshire?
“Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was born in Chelsea in 1970, and raised in Edinburgh. Her mother is half-Welsh and half-Czech actress who performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and her father was of Pakistani origin. Her father was also the first Asian councillor elected in Scotland, in 1986 for the New Town/Stockbridge ward on Lothian Regional Council, representing the Conservative Party. Ahmed-Sheikh was educated at Craigmount High School, George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh, the University of Edinburgh (MA) and the University of Strathclyde (LLB & Postgraduate Diploma in Law).
A practising Muslim, she is married to Zulfiqar Sheikh and they have four children: Aleezay; Saif; Shonzay; Veneezay.[7] She received an OBE in the 2014 New Year Honours. – Wikipedia
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July 16, 2015 at 3:14 pm -
Al McGrahey was set free by Kenny McAskill in 2009, the same year as the LSE were raking in the Muslim moolah in 2009.
Nothing like socialism to set you free and oil money to grease the palms. -
July 16, 2015 at 7:00 pm -
“The election of Mhairi Black just shows that donkeys with rosettes get elected in some constituencies and how empty the SNP stables are”
I invite you to take a look at some facts and figures. The sitting MP for Paisley, Douglas Alexander, had held the seat since 1997. A loyal Labour stalwart, he held ministerial posts under both Blair and Brown and never voted against his party.
Paisley had been a labour stronghold since at least the 60s (unsurprising when you consider that it encompasses the Clyde shipyards; Black’s grandfather had been a shipbuilder). So Alexander comfortably held the seat by large majorities: 13,000 over the LibDems in 2005 (the SNP came a narrow third with less than 7,000 votes) and almost 40,000 over the SNP in 2010. Come May 2015 and he loses to Black by 16,000 votes. The SNP had over 23,000 votes, while the conservative votes were almost unchanged from 2010; Labour had under 18,000 votes, a drop of 6,000 from 2010. Analysis is complicated by the fact that the 2015 turnout was higher than in previous elections, but there is little doubt that a large number of Labour voters switched to the SNP.
So JimS, care to explain who was the “donkey in the rossette” here?
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July 16, 2015 at 1:17 pm -
Well, I suppose there’s something to be admired in being prepared to lay out a smorgasbord of ones prejudices for all to feast upon. Not really my cup of tea, though.
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July 16, 2015 at 2:33 pm -
Appalling as it is unappealing, is the vomit inducing fealty to political party, that is a big problem. What the UK needs, could do with – are independent MP’s who make consideration to, in equal measure as far as it could be equal and of three primary responsibilities – prioritizing:
i. Country – always begging the question – what can I do to aid, enable and make MY country a safer and better place.
ii. Duty to constituents.
iii. helping keep governance to a minimum and costs to less than that.
Next, what is blindingly necessary, to separate the executive from the legislature.
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July 16, 2015 at 3:33 pm -
Well said ! I wholeheartedly agree. The problem that you mention is made immeasurably worse by the system of ‘whipping’, which serves to prevent MP’s from being both ambitious and honourable (where the latter is even a consideration).
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July 16, 2015 at 4:14 pm -
Also blindingly necessary… getting rid of the corrupting process of lobbying.
Business lobbying often substitutes for real investment… they can obtain a better return at lower risk. This sort of corruption is an absolutely sure sign that goverment has already got too big.
Political associations (including charities, eco groups, health groups, and so on) often exert an undue influence on policy and even more frequently make a claim on public money to pursue their special interests. This is like the whole of society undergoing some sort of S&M session… these special interest groups do harm to us and then charge us for doing so.
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July 16, 2015 at 4:24 pm -
Lobbying developed to my memory when Business taxes were revamped back when the Poll tax was being invented. The costs shot up alarmingly. Since “business” has no democratic vote (short of gerrymandering it’s workforce) I think lobbying was seen as a way to “give business a voice”. I worked for a large corporate and there was no question of us meddling with politicians in my first years with them, but suddenly around 1984-ish we were virtually being given plan-a-grams as to how to cultivate our local MP. The quid-pro-quo wasn’t money of course but rather publicity akin to the old favourite of getting the local mayor to open the shop or whatever. We were corporate but it’s not hard to imagine the way local entrepreneurs might want to cosy up in a perhaps less obvious way. With the advent of the internet and niche marketing the possibilities become endless. The labour guys even ended up referring to themselves as a taxi for hire. It’s hard to see this danger decreasing when Madge off the estate is MP this Parliament.
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July 16, 2015 at 6:07 pm -
The problem with lobbying is that, if you try to ban it, then it would simply move into covert lobbying – it would still happen, but it would be harder to see and, therefore, impossible to regulate. Without relative openness, it would risk becoming even more corrupt and corrupting than it currently is, whether done by big corporates, charities, trade unions or local shopkeepers.
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July 16, 2015 at 6:00 pm -
Hear, hear!
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July 16, 2015 at 6:20 pm -
Of course the answer to it all is obvious , everybody should get involved . Join their local associations , put themselves forward for possible selection by their appropriate constituency party , get themselves elected to office of some kind and then sort it all out. The only downside being that they will then have little or no private life. If their partner is stupid enough to watch porn on “their” tv , or if they decide to enliven an evening by a bit of “sexting” there is every chance they will be found out. Anyone who puts themselves forward will therefore generally be pretty thick skinned and have a fairly high opinion of themselves , but should we be surprised ?
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July 16, 2015 at 6:42 pm -
Socialists?
well….“It has come to our attention , back in the Good Ol’US of A, that pinko-commie-fag subversives have been infiltrating this one horse dung heap of a town.”.
So here’s what we do:
.”Anybody wearing red, anybody left handed, anybody with a funny walk, anybody who doesn’t like apple pie on Sunday,anybody who has never seen a Debbie Reynold’s movie,
we’ll round them up, put ’em in a field AND BOMB THE BASTARDS!”-
July 16, 2015 at 7:22 pm -
You have it backwards dwarf, that is the modus operandi of the socialists eg Stalin, Mao, Che, Pol Pot…..
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July 16, 2015 at 10:46 pm -
Why do folk always miss out Hitler, the national socialist, I wonder?
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July 16, 2015 at 7:02 pm -
Great piece PW.
No political affiliations whatever myself; and am rather fond of remembering that I came from a crap estate; it still is & I have little desire to return, though I do occasionally drive through when visiting family who’ve moved further out.
I do have a thing about the left, which I guess we all dally with in our teens.
It just seems to me that there are the well educated lefties who are adept at getting airtime because they’re fluent even though they talk utter bo**ocks. e.g. Owen Jones. The BBC have a lot to answer for. Then we have those who seem to collect wealth, like a black hole in a suit when near money; too many to name, male or female.
The one thing that is common is that they all want to impose their dream of socialist nirvana on us- and entirely at our expense. If there is one who has ‘predistributed’, or ‘redistributed’ his or her own wealth for the causes they want us to pay for, please tell.
Where is the setting of examples, of leadership?Biased against the left? I think half the Tories are in the same camp, & the skidmark that is libdemmery is just for those too posh for labour.
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July 16, 2015 at 7:25 pm -
Might we enquire what Petunia thinks of Jeremy Corbin?
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July 16, 2015 at 7:55 pm -
Unrealistic prospect for Labour leader, though I would imagine the government would be more than happy to see him in charge of the opposition benches. I regard him as a token lefty inclusion in the same way that Diane Abbott was last time round. I think the major problem for Labour at the moment is that there is no outstanding candidate whatsoever.
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July 16, 2015 at 10:44 pm -
Jeremy or Diane would be the perfect leaders. God forbid the socialist party have an actual socialist as leader eh? A party that doesn’t even beieve in it’s own ethos has no chance of ever getting my vote or anyone elses hopefully.
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July 17, 2015 at 8:32 am -
Their problem is, just as with Miliband Minor, any leader needs to pass the ‘Electability Test’, which young Ed failed so miserably.
Same applied with Michael Foot back in the 80s, a deeply principled politician, a high intellect etc, but was never going to be elected nationally in a month of Sundays.
Both Corbyn and Abbott would always fail the ‘Electability Test’ – if Labour adopted either as leader, we would then know they don’t really want power, just the impotent joy of opposition. It’s mere mutual masturbation to have all those high socialist principles but absolutely no chance of ever putting them into practice in government – perpetually sitting on the sidelines criticising, but never in a position to achieve anything or prove that you were right.
As Petunia observes above, there is no outstanding candidate currently evident who could lead Labour back to power (certainly none of the four on offer), but that’s no excuse for adopting a complete no-hoper in the electoral stakes, just to get your political onanistic kicks.-
July 17, 2015 at 8:53 am -
But then what is Labour for? If it cannot be a socialist party what is it for? Child Abuse and Elites seems to be pushing it backwards into some kind of French revolution position where the Aristocracy is the problem, and we all know where that led. Last I heard, Tom watson and Simon Danzcuk were vying for the position of Deputy, before they had a clue who even wanted to be leader. Wasnlt the Dauphin merely a puppet?
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July 17, 2015 at 9:51 am -
But if Labour ceases to be electable, then it becomes just another nagging pressure-group, banging on impotently about its ‘issues’. The party can have much pride in what it achieved in the last 100 years, but it only ever achieved it by first being elected.
Its challenge now is to put forward an alternative vision of Britain which can resonate with enough of the electorate to secure power – whatever else we may think of him, Tony Blair did exactly that, three times. Britain is, by nature, a ‘conservative’ state, so any socialist party must first acknowledge that in order to pass the ‘test’ – that’s what Blair did.
Until Labour gets a message which enough people like, and a leader with that presentational power, it will be condemned to wither and die, which would be a serious loss to democracy, as the necessary balance to rampant commercialism would go with it.-
July 17, 2015 at 10:15 am -
* The party can have much pride in what it achieved in the last 100 years, but it only ever achieved it by first being elected. *
The only prolonged governments it has ever had before Blair was first the post-war one. This is what it did: After the famous 1945 landslide under Clement Attlee (1945–51) it set up the welfare state with the National Health Service and nationalised a fifth of the economy.
The second was the “Wilson” years, which ultimately led to the near bankruptcy of a post-Empire nation. The new labour achievement seems to have been bankruptcy based on trying to behave like an Empire.
The NHS really is the Golden Calf isn’t it.
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July 17, 2015 at 10:55 am -
This is what happened post Callaghan, when the left’s Michael Foot became leader against all the expectations of supposedly informed opinion. Labour split, with the formation of the SDP by a number of “moderate” Labour members led by important former ministers like Williams, Owen and Jenkins. Corbyn would move Labour further to the left than even Foot did – the reaction of Labour “moderates”/”Blairites” to a Corbyn leadership would be interesting.
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July 17, 2015 at 10:33 am -
In ditching clause 4 of its constitution , Anthony Blair ripped the old socialist heart out of Labour, though it was merely making official what had been party practice for decades. Corbyn is an old school hard left socialist who apparently believes in a planned economy (like the Bourbons he seems incapable of learning or forgetting – to have taken a look at what happened with so called “planned economies” in real socialist states and revised his opinions accordingly). An economy planned, no doubt, by the likes of the learned Jeremy and his friend Red Len….. while the whole of Asia and Africa is at the same time encouraged to settle in the UK.
These people are dangerous fools who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near real political power. Unfortunately with generations of youth brainwashed by the Marxoid reducators, the BBC and the on line leftard echo chamber, and with mass immigration altering the nation’s demographics radically, the chance of the true believing tribunes of the Utopianist left getting into power is not as impossible as some might currently believe.
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July 16, 2015 at 7:27 pm -
Slightly off topic but there is an interesting story behind the “Toffs and Toughs” photograph. As you know, it has often been used to illustrate the class divide in England.
It was taken in July 1937 after the annual Harrow v. Eton cricket match at Lord’s. The two toffs were going off for the weekend at the house of the smaller one in the country and were waiting to be picked up by his family’s car.
There was a surprise in the way their lives unfolded. The following year the taller toff went to visit his parents in India where he died after contracting diphtheria. The shorter one joined the family stockbroking firm but became mentally unstable and died in a psychiatric institution. By contrast, the three local lads led long and happy lives. The taller one became a senior civil servant.
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July 16, 2015 at 7:51 pm -
Thanks for the background. I’ve been aware of that pic for a long time, first seeing it in a book on 20th century history as a child; but as for the individuals involved, I’ve never found anything out about them. I always wondered if it was staged or just a gem the photographer stumbled upon.
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July 16, 2015 at 11:32 pm -
It has been suggested that it was semi-staged and that the photographer saw the two Harrovians waiting outside the cricket ground and got the three local boys to stand alongside them.
Anyway, Google “toffs and toughs” for more information. The ‘toffs’ were Peter Wagner and Thomas “Tim” Dyson and the ‘toughs’ were Jack Catlin, George Salmon and George Young. Jack Catlin was the one who became a senior civil servant.
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July 17, 2015 at 1:28 am -
Interesting and all too brief tale but thank you for sharing it here.
Diphtheria, a horrible pestilential disease [aren’t they all?] was once a fairly common disease in Europe, and today Diphtheria still kills many living in poverty on the subcontinent.
And the other poor lad, a very grim state of affairs, “mentally unstable and died in a psychiatric institution” and covers a multitude of very sad and terrible possibilities.
It is the same now and was then, breakdowns were not uncommon, for, so many young people have crises in their latter teens, are sometimes tempestuous formative years. Even back then, parental pressure was a ‘thing’, if expectations are too onerous, children do and can suffer breaks with what is called ‘the reality’ – depression, Schizophrenia, manic episodes but probably no doubt, his family was at least able to afford him the best care available at that time – though some of the tales of patient therapy emanating from such institutions cause the hairs of the skin to prickle on end.
It is arguable whether things have improved at all, for mental patients these days, it is ‘care in the community’, which consists mainly being left to their own devices. Maybe, sometimes I think that, the patients of yesteryear were far better off, away and in protective care and even poor, indifferent, bad care was preferable.
However, we know so little about mental disorders and society doesn’t acknowledge the appalling fact, mental health it is the poor relation of the Health service, ignored and woefully underfunded.
But then scream, HMG pours £20 billion down the drain into the black hole of Brussels and fritters annually another £12 billion giving it away to foreign despots, we call it ‘aid’, yet “there’s no money for you though”: the poor bloody taxpayers. All because, our parliamentarians care so much, strange it is, how generous you can be with other people’s money.Glad to hear that, the three ‘rogues’ led longer hopefully more fulfilled lives. Human existence, aching transient, buzzing hither and thither and burning so bright, yet too much pain and hurt. Why then, do we make it so damn difficult for ourselves, aren’t fortune’s slings and arrows, enough?
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July 16, 2015 at 7:29 pm -
Doh! Corbyn…….of course.
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July 16, 2015 at 7:58 pm -
“Various hopes and ambitions are associated with Socialism – a fairer and more equal society for all, caring for one’s fellow man and the afflicted, giving voice to those who otherwise don’t have one …”
Socialism’s biggest problem is that it thinks it has a monopoly on those aims. It doesn’t. Pretty well everybody in politics shares those aims (except possibly the ‘equality’, which given the variance of human gifts and natures is an impossibility anyway), though they may have a different strategy to achieve them.
Rather like all the other political ‘-isms’, socialism has a core of good sense, but falls down when subjected to the full force of realism. The complexity of the human condition and the rapid change in current circumstances tends to leave it floundering, often trying to solve yesterday’s problems. Historically, political parties with a degree of flexibility and pragmatism, and the willingness to identify and tackle the nation’s current problems, have appealed to a majority of the electorate more regularly than the more ideological ones.
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July 16, 2015 at 8:04 pm -
Oh, yes – agreed; as I said in the piece (without quoting precisely), these sentiments should be a given for any decent human being.
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July 17, 2015 at 12:25 am -
I tend to think when something is a political “ism” it becomes a rigid dogma and good sense gets short shrift from those who cling to the dogmas of “ism” rather than change when its clear the “ism” and reality/sense don’t even have a nodding acquaintance. Jeremy Corbomite (I love self styled people’s tribunes with such proletarian first names) strikes me as this sort – while the Miliband brothers, to differing degrees, were eventually able to grow out of the Marxist drivel and Utopianist fantasies of the hard left they’d been spoon fed from the cradle.Wherever socialism has been implemented in a full on fashion it has not only led to mounds of corpses and repression, but has completely failed to deliver its most basic promise, a standard of living for the majority approaching that in the advanced nations which stuck to a basically capitalistic economy. Capitalism is actually not really “ism” – unlike socialism, communism, Nazism etc – nobody “thought it up” one afternoon at the library and decided to impose it on the world, the way to recognise a genuine political “ism”. Rather it it developed naturally with human interaction – it was named and classified long after it existed in practice. If Corbo and his kind can’t look at a century of hard left disaster, failure and misery – leading to one “socialist” state after another abandoning the mad experiment – and learn a lesson, they are complete idiots. The societies they want us to ape built walls to keep people in. Many of the hard left in the states they created ended up being murdered by their own system – even fleeing from their little paradise to the “hated capitalist” west didn’t necessarily save them from the long blood drenched arm of the regimes they made, witness the fate of Trotsky.
I won’t admire a man for standing firm to his ideology if that ideology is a rotten one.
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July 17, 2015 at 8:10 am -
Isn’t the real difference that socialism, perhaps all synthetic ‘isms’, tend to be imposed on the basis that any other view is wrong and cannot be tolerated? I can’t think of an example of such totalitarianism ending well. Doesn’t really matter if it’s Islam, Marx, or some twisted interpretation.
Capitalism seems to me to be an expression of normal human instinct & behaviour, necessarily subjected to some social controls to protect against extreme consequences. And it can thrive alongside some of the other ‘isms’; it’s not really an ideology.-
July 17, 2015 at 9:49 am -
When religions are also social blueprints they are “isms” – thus Islam, Judaism and Christianity are/have been forms of government and social organization, and only to varying degrees expressions of a metaphysical relationship between the human and the divine – which to my mind is what genuine “religion” should be primarily about. The more a “religion” is a societal blueprint the more it becomes philosophically akin to non theocratic “isms”. All forms of “ism” tend to turn toxic as they become dogmas which close the mind, and where they can, many of their acolytes engage in various forms of persecution of “heretics”/ unbelievers. The closing down of debate on any issue is the fruit of dogmatic “ism” adherents riding roughshod over the objective and critical values which challenged the old received orthodoxies in the 18th century, and finally became intellectually prevalent in the west. A “climate change” zealot calling for “sceptics” to be silenced by compulsion, as such people “threaten the survival of planet”, is the ideological descendent of the heretic burners of the days of great Christian secular power in Europe prior to the 18th century, who saw any divergence away from what they perceived as the word of God as a deadly threat to the immortal souls of humanity. The types of dogmas may change, old ones wither, new ones come into being, but the internal mindset/tendencies which seems to so easily enslave many people to “isms” is eternal.
As to Lard Prescott, he’s what my old dad would call “a starving socialist”.
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July 17, 2015 at 10:00 am -
Christianism? Never heard of it.
There is of course a very powerful movement called Evangelism.-
July 17, 2015 at 10:43 am -
Lutherism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism. Islamism sounds clumsy, so it’s rendered as Islamist. Protestantism was persecuted by Catholicism and vice versa, while both persecuted athe”ism”and pagan”ism”.
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July 17, 2015 at 10:49 am -
wiki says:
-ism is a suffix in many English words, first usage , originally derived from Ancient Greek -ισμός (-ismos), reaching English through Latin, via French. It is often used in philosophy to define specific ideologies, and, as such, at times it is used as a noun when referring to a broad range of ideologies in a general sense.
The suffix ‘ism’ qua ism is neutral and therefore bears no connotations associated with any of the many ideologies it has been appended to; such determinations can only be informed by public opinion regarding specific ideologies like ageism, cubeism etc. According to Merriam–Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage it is a belief, attitude, style, etc., that is referred to by a word that ends in the suffix -ism : the act, practice, or process of doing something
The first recorded usage of the suffix ism as a separate word in its own right was in 1680. By the nineteenth century it was being used by w:Thomas Carlyle to signify a pre-packaged ideology. It was later used in this sense by such writers as w:Julian Huxley and w:George Bernard Shaw.
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July 17, 2015 at 11:09 am -
In the end language is what people make it in usage. I like the term pre-packaged ideology, it neatly encapsulates a concept which could have been specially devised by the Devil to ruin humanity.
“Macbeth’s justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evil doers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no IDEOLOGY.”
– Solzhenitsyn – “The Gulag Archipelago”
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July 16, 2015 at 10:18 pm -
Mick Jagger was the son of a respectable schoolteacher and his first TV appearance was in gym shorts on his Dad’s TV program. That was before he was a Delta bluesman and a rebel, of course.
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July 17, 2015 at 10:51 am -
I thought he was born in a cross-fire hurricane
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July 18, 2015 at 5:23 pm -
Petunia you appear to be an extremely sad person locked into a class war mind set
This does not afford you the right to look down your middle class nose at those who have strived to better their lot and the lives of their family.
The bien pensant attitude you adopt reeks of nothing less than ‘guardianista’ hypocrisy. Unfortunately you are also too smug to ever revognise that fact.
Love and Peace
Bill-
July 18, 2015 at 5:49 pm -
July 18, 2015 at 6:40 pm -
Middle Class? Pet? *insert maniacal laughter here*
Pet has told us enough about herself and her origins that we know she’d struggle to make , in caste terms, ‘Untouchable’. Dear God man, she even once wrote an entire post about football…
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July 18, 2015 at 6:42 pm -
To think that I once fretted that Pet was too left wing for this site, and wouldn’t find it easy to adopt a neutral viewpoint…..
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