OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Once upon a time the Labour Party stood for decency, honesty and integrity; for social justice, liberty, social equality and comradeship. They were a Party of high moral values and standards.

Today they’ve abandoned most of their principles and core values and become liars, cheats and thieves who’ve allowed their financial friends in the City of London to attack and damage the Welfare State and standard of living of millions of already poor people.

During their recent decade or more in power Labour Governments actively worked to turn the United Kingdom into a venue for mass immigration. One and a half million Poles and half a million non-EU East Europeans were allowed into the UK along with three to five million Muslims (the exact figure will never  be known) with permanent resident status, mainly from Pakistan but also Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, the Lebanon and countless other Arab and Muslim states. The question is WHY when most of the latter come from cultures whose values are alien to our own, who are fundamentally indifferent if not hostile to our values and whose youth are at best antagonistic to our kids both black and white but particularly the former. Who are in a word racist and whose women young and old are not allowed to educate themselves outside Muslim traditions and are often denied an education in co-educational non faith schools.

Furthermore these Labour Governments through the direction of their various Home Secretaries allowed fanatical Muslim clerics to publically preach hatred against other faiths, protected by the police, and also permitted despicable and grossly offensive Muslim race hate propaganda to be sold openly in public places.

And all this to say nothing of allowing East European criminals and criminal gangs mainly from Albania and Romania to enter the United Kingdom and perpetrate violence and endless effortless criminality on the streets of major British cities. It was not the Conservative Party that allowed these things to happen but the New Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

And it was these Labour Governments that used the undercover police spying organisation set up by Margaret Thatcher to spy on trades union activists and the Trade Union Movement, to continue their work infiltrating protest groups, from students and environmentalists to Green activists, clean energy campaigners, animal welfare, anti-genetically modified crops and many other generally harmless organisations whose worst transgressions were a bit of pathetic sabotage, paint spraying and chaining themselves to trees. Naturally no spying on the real criminals, saboteurs and hidden cliques who really did conspire privately to fix interest rates and wreck our economy like the bankers and financial fraudsters. Naturally no spying on tax avoidance companies set up in tax havens. No spying on Members of Parliament fiddling their expenses and defrauding the public. No spying on any of the City of London finance houses by these police infiltrators whose behaviour was at best reprehensible and often downright criminal. And of course no spying on New Labour friendly Rupert Murdoch newspapers!  

Not a bit of it! It was all quite okay with New Labour Government Home Secretaries and Police Ministers. These Labour Governments were endlessly more filthy than the plain nasty Tory Governments that preceded them. No-one ever expected anything better from those bastards, but the Labour Party and its Governments knowingly betrayed everything decent they ever stood for, backed up by a Trades Union leadership that stayed effortlessly silent and complicit in all the atrocities of lying, cheating and thieving perpetrated on the British people.

Light touch regulation. One of the key phrases of New Labour Government. So what did it mean for the Utility Companies who supplied your gas, electricity and water? Actually it meant NO REGULATION. No Government control on their ability to put up their prices on a regular basis. During the period of New Labour Government there was less control over Utility Companies operating in the United Kingdom than those anywhere else in Europe. No wonder that most now operating here are foreign owned. New Labour welcomed them in with open arms. Light touch regulation meant they could do whatever they liked. Same as the boys in the City of London. Same as the local authority charges that endlessly increased. 

Damage, break up and change the cultural character, traditions and unity of the working class by dumping in their midst millions of culturally alien immigrants. Rob their youth of employment and educational opportunities by destroying apprenticeships and driving up study costs to infinity. Take away from them activities that were once traditionally theirs and turn them into ridiculous overweight slobs.

THANK YOU NEW LABOUR.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING     

Once upon a time Journalists did their best to seek the truth and tell it best as they could or were allowed. Today most are plain liars who manipulate or temporise with facts, use detectives or police informants to investigate private, too often sad or damaged lives and reveal the secrets of the unfortunate to a mass market for money, obtaining information for their stories through illegal methods to dig dirt and do harm. And these charming people have the gall to use campaigning platforms as a cover for thoroughly filthy conduct and think themselves decent when they are more often dishonourable and dirty. Once they knew where the truth was. Today, having sold themselves to dirty men and women with unclean values they don’t have a clue. They have been a conduit for buying for-sale politicians and facilitating the mass communication of lies to influence and control the way people think.

They may have begun with a concern for freedom and truth but that was somehow always light in their minds. Easily bought and so easily sold. Now we know what so many of you are, even though there are some glorious, courageous exceptions. Real heroes actually in a dark time. Yes, you know who you are and will never change. It’s just hard to stay clean these days…

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Once upon a time Barclays Bank was founded by a Quaker family whose values were sober prudence, integrity and honesty. The only quakers associated with Barclays these days are its shareholders, savers and the staff who work in its high street branches who don’t know whether they’ll still have a job tomorrow! When their head office executives are not busy illegally manipulating interbank lending rates they’re screwing their savers with derisory interest rates for borrowing their money.

But that’s alright! Alternatively there’s HSBC, now shown by federal authorities in the United States to have been a conduit there for laundering billions of dollars of Mexican “drugs kingpins and rogue nations, ” according to a Senate Committee investigating money laundering claims at the bank. Banking controls and oversight was too lax it appears AND SOMEONE WAS RESPONSIBLE!! One of the HSBC officials interviewed said he found it “painful and embarrassing” to talk about the bank’s shortcomings while the bank’s Head of Group Compliance resigned at the hearing!

My, if you’d ridden your mule into one of their banks over there wearing a sombrero, poncho and sandals they’d have invited you round the back for a chili while they offloaded the loot in your saddle-bags.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

There was once a time when you really believed in the Inland Revenue! They were tough all right. Make a mistake with a few quid and you got a really bad letter. Yes, they were tough and you didn’t like your hard earned money going to pay for the palatial lifestyles of the African gangsters who now ran the ex-colonies, but you accepted it. The Inland Revenue! Straight as a die, no favours for anyone and everyone treated the same. You could count on them for absolute fairness. No flies on them. Right?

Wrong! In recent years members of its Executive Board have been getting up to all kinds of tricks as individuals, as executive directors of private companies registered in tax havens! One particular speciality noted in the recent Channel Four Despatches program has been designing tax avoidance schemes for clients of their companies. And goodness only knows, they should know about such things also working as they do as senior management at the Inland Revenue!   

Nothing illegal in all these capers of course. Being paid by the Inland Revenue to crack down on tax avoidance while at the same time working privately as an executive director of a company where your skills are profitably used to create such schemes and make lots of loot for your company that pays little to no tax because it’s registered in a tax haven!

FANTASTIC WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT WHICH OF COURSE YOU CAN IF YOU WORK RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE INLAND REVENUE.

Conflict of interest? Double standards? Downright moral rottenness? What on earth are you talking about? It’s all above board and legal! And they’ve also been helping large corporations get round every loophole going for years!

New Labour, what a lovely bunch of people they are!

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Once upon a time when all the world was young your local constituency Member of Parliament used to be a nice old dear. You remember him or her don’t you? Sir Someone or Other if he was a Tory and likewise Lady Spade-Dasher in a blue suit with pearls. She let you call her Maude if she liked you! Labour MP’s were ex trade unionists neutered at some Oxford college to be harmless who now talked fries instead of chip butties.

Ah the good old days! The elderly sir so and so probably fingering boys in some below pavement public toilet or tonguing out some Private Secretary hopeful late nights in his Commons Office while her Ladyship, MP of some rural constituency and seriously ugly at best, no doubt having her way with a certain prize vegetable from the local farmers show, the competition of which she’d been chief judge.

Labour MPs altogether more earnest. No sexual slush like the Tories. Talked about Lenin till two in the morning somehow sounding like they really meant it without having a clue then forgetting the whole thing over the next round of beer. Hundreds of them who once really cared about working people because that’s where they came from all that long time ago.

Then it all changed! With Thatcher the Tories turning into nasty little thuggies from Essex. The women too arrogant, the men too vile by half only New Labour under Blair took a far bigger, far deeper dive into moral oblivion. The Tories stayed Tory. The Labour professionals, boys and girls, chucked everything once decent overboard and joined the Tories. Well not quite in their political outlook. Not entirely that is. Oh no, they joined them in fiddling and cheating on their expense claims. Became thieves and rascals just like everyone else.

The best was yet to come my friends! Expenses were one thing, handing over the working class and the poor, the Welfare State and its lifeline benefits to the banking and financial rascals of the City of London was Labour’s Gift.

Members of Parliament! Once they served people. Now they serve themselves. Not all of them. Some still care. Most can’t. They have no moral compass. They can’t get back what they never had in the first place.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Working class women of the fifties and sixties were once lithe, slim and good looking. They were quiet, sober and knew how to cook. Today they’re often so fat with thighs, arses and stomachs that are frankly disgusting, even obscene, and roses no less, tattooed over their arse cracks that you just can’t help but wonder if they have any awareness at all of just what they look like in their grossly absurd mini-skirts. To an outside observer they’re just an out of control sick joke. Teenage girls on the other hand, Friday nights and weekends, are more often than not pissed out of their heads, falling over in streets, full of vile manners and rudery and more often than not chlamydia-ed up to the eyeballs! A really great advert for working class femininity these days!

Their husbands, boyfriends or both follow not far behind. You need to be a generation or two on to remember men in their thirties or forties, or teenage lads, say in the 1950s and ‘60s. Some guys had tattoos. A few, not many, and they were mainly Navy. Certainly not teenagers! When you worked out at a gym you always washed or showered at the end of your routine. What you didn’t do was just spray on some shit that made you smell like a tart as a substitute. Again, very few guys wore earrings and those that did were regarded with suspicion.

Earrings, spraying on scent, tattoos all over your legs, arms and body, hair colouring and shaved legs? Leave it out. Working class guys once worked in apprenticeships, in mines… They built ships and engines, roads and houses. Did tough manual labour. Today they work in shops, serve coffee, drive vans, work for the council or if they’re over fifty do something in ‘Heritage’. They drink twenty pints of tasteless lager every weekend with their mates, watch football, abuse their wives, have no deep fundamental interests and make nothing. Their thought processes are restricted and limited. The cultural shift between them and their counterparts of the fifties and sixties is remarkable in appearance if only for the silly gold chains and jewelled decoration that hang on them today along with the moron look of their endlessly shaved heads! The fact that they look different is because they ARE different, the profound cultural difference of appearance and values based on the fundamental change in their work lives. They’re no longer employed in masculine occupations demanding physical exertion and their pathetic modes of self-expression are a desperate form of digression from their altered, neutered lives.

British men and women, boys and girls, look different, think different and are different. Most, but certainly not all, care about themselves as individuals and no-one else. They’ve been Thatcherised at the deepest psychological levels. Millions of people with pictures and writing all over them who get drunk, look obscene and can barely think for themselves outside their vile appearance. The British working class, never culturally great, once had some very fine moments. After all, they kicked the shit out of the Nazis! Now they’ve had a job done on them and they’ve allowed it to happen. They’ve been cheapened. Woozified!

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

You need to be over 60 to remember real footballers and football. You need to be ‘old’ or have talked to ‘old’ people and asked them who and what they remember. Either that or have seen old newsreel footage. Seen what it was like then. Men from poor working class backgrounds who knew how to kick a leather ball and make it go where they wanted… knew how to pass that ball to each other… knew how to run with it… to dribble with it…

Dribble with it? I can already hear the sound of protest from media pundits of newspaper and television. Dribble with it? You mean actually run with it and get it round the player from the opposing team in front of you? Jesus, did they actually do such things in those days? We thought that dribbling was when you foamed at the mouth or something they did up north in l920s working men’s clubs. You know, had it on bread with margarine.

Forget Chelsea and Manchester. Those days it was Blackpool, Preston North End, Bolton, Huddersfield, Newcastle and Everton! Working men’s towns with working class lads playing for peanuts, but boy they were good. They knew how to control that leather football. Knew how to run with it and knew how to think on their feet. And they were proud of who they were. They didn’t spit in front of their audience of kids on the field of play or shout abuse. They didn’t pretend they were fouled because very few of them did that kind of thing anyway. They didn’t have private medical staff or personal agents. They didn’t put themselves about all over the place because they understood the ragged urchins that paid sixpence to see them. That’s what they were themselves once… ragged urchins who had a dream.

And now? What are they now? The so called footballer turned into a vile, out of control, thoroughly untalented prima donna, petulant on the field as well as off. You’ve seen them ‘train’ haven’t you? Doing their little skips from side to side and running three yards with the ball and congratulating themselves with little high fives! And they call it ‘training’ joke, joke! Yes, the professional footballer of today and the ragged urchins who once loved and adored you now turned into drunken foul-mouths who can’t control themselves. Whose only wish is to mimic the petulant character and prima-donna life style of his spitting useless idol who can’t even pass a ball on the run. 

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

But then that’s okay because no-one remembers how it once was anymore. They’ve all gone to cemeteries and crematoria everyone! Their skilled footballers, their honest, caring MPs, their typewriter tapping journalists all thrilled to be bringing the truth to a mass public with a wonderful story, the honest, caring managers who sat in the back rooms of high street banks and wanted to help people and try their best for them, the Labour Party, full of men who’d fought in the War or worked down mines who actually knew what life was like and wanted to do good things for people, the tax collectors who believed in fairness and honesty all round… They were all of them the same kind of people. Of whatever social class or wealth, values or manners they all shared the same fundamental thing… that same fundamental streak of plain common decency that ran through each and every one of them no matter who they were.

Do you remember any of it, any of you? That wonderful thing? That’s not right… That ain’t fair… That’s just no good…

Those words stand like giants of men and women. Giants when you compare them to the words of today’s cheating bankers, rotten politicians, lying journalists, pathetic working class men and women and rat-shit footballers. Once, not so long ago, people were mostly the same. Had the same basic streak of fundamental decency in them. Now they’re not like that anymore. That something special has gone, replaced by foul mouthed, selfish, uncaring Thatcherite individualism of the worst kind.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING!

And I suppose, dear readers, that some of you think that I’m just having a rant. That’s what they call it these days. Powerfully express the opinions of so many and you’re ranting. You’re really not allowed to do that you see. It’s quite okay for all of the above and so many more plain awful creeps to do what they do and collectively shit over everyone BUT WHEN SOMEONE PUTS IT TOGETHER, POINTS OUT WHAT GHASTLY PEOPLE THEY ARE AND WONDERS HOW THEY’VE SUDDENLY COME AMONG US IT’S CALLED HAVING A RANT!  

Yeah, they can collectively shit on our values and sensibilities but that’s okay, but stand up and point the finger and you’re having a rant! Well you know where you can stick your peevish complaint!

TRUTH IS ON THE MARCH