Hey, Wait a Minute!! at Charlotte Gore.
I grew up in the Labour heartlands. My own family's experience of Labour does not differ significantly from that of a small shopkeeper dealing with the Mob. Except that mobsters don't usually confiscate businesses altogether, preferring to "wet their beaks" rather than steal the whole damned birdbath. One of the most difficult aspects of British politics is coping with Labourites' insufferably sanctimonious sense of their own moral superiority.
Charlotte Gore blogged recently about LabourHome using the Houses of Parliament as the background to its blog banner and elicited a polite response from the designer, thanking her for her feedback. Comrade Alex Hilton's comment, however, was more in Labour style;
working class into parliament, something quite unpopular with the
liberals at that time…
I enjoyed Charlotte's response;
history of universal suffrage in the UK, and was surprised to discover
that it was a Liberal that gave us the 1918 Representation of the
People Act, the one that extended voting rights to all adult males (and
women over 30 with appropriate property rights) and a Conservative,
Stanley Baldwin, that gave us the 1928 Representation of the People Act
that extended voting rights to all adults, male and female.
Going back a little earlier, it was Gladstone – another Liberal
Prime Minister – that got us the 1884 Reform Act that added another 6
million to the number who could vote.
It’s funny, when I try to think where Labour has empowered anyone but themselves and those that fund them (including trade unions and all the other rubbish) I come up blank…
One can only speculate as to what she means by "all the other rubbish," but her point is well made. Like the Mob, Labour is a creature of sectional interests. It does not serve the working class, but services it (in the agricultural sense of that verb). No organisation has done more damage, for example, to the educational opportunities of the British working classes. Their offspring are far less prevalent in the professions now than they were when I (as a working class boy from a state school and redbrick university) trained as a solicitor decades ago. Labour's typical solution has not been to address the problem (which would involve confessing that its mad ideology caused it) but rather to bludgeon the universities and the professions into lowering their standards; promoting fake "equality" by devaluing education itself.
The Alex Hiltons of this world sing "The Red Flag" and "The Internationale" with misty-eyed sentimentality. You should have seen the look on the faces of my Russian colleagues when I played Billy Bragg's renditions of the same at a party at my Moscow home! But the true anthem of the Labour Party is the version that goes;
The working class can kiss my arse, I've got the boss's job at last…
Just look at the current cabinet. Look from pig to man, and from man to pig and then tell me it's not true.
The Last Ditch by Tom Paine 
Leave a comment