A Conspiracy of Trash

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Friday 20 March 2015

WHAT THE HELL IS THE LABOUR PARTY?

Well we all know exactly what the Conservative Party is, what it stands for and what it most definitely does not! Currently, as the senior partner in a Coalition Government, its leadership is made up of ex public school boys who either went to Oxford or Cambridge or are wealthy members of the middle and upper-middle class who made their careers in business. Indeed its Party in Government stands for business and wealth creation and very much like the last Blair and Brown Labour administration facilitates the unchecked and highly questionable activities of banks and their executives along with the highly permissive regime of its tax collecting arm the Inland Revenue towards tax avoidance by many multinational corporations and super-rich individuals. What the Conservatives are not is a political Party with any real emotional attachment or interest in the ordinary working people of Britain, except that is, when it comes to having a very real and strong attachment to their vote!

The Conservative Party is one that supports mass immigration whether it be from the European Union, Africa or Asia and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Their heart may not be in it but their head certainly is, otherwise why would David Cameron keep openly promising on an annual basis to substantially reduce mass immigration into the United Kingdom and year after year fail to do so. Not simply fail but indeed see it vastly increase year after year. It’s a plain fact that he and his Home Office have really taken no concrete or practical steps to curtail its numbers, thus turning the promises he regularly makes into highly questionable statements of intent. Had he intended to keep these promises then he would have done so. That being the case one can only question the sincerity of that intent.

The Conservative Party is, I repeat, a Party of mass immigration. The free movement of cheap Labour drives down the cost of wages, something which suits the interests of employers and business, its natural allies. Conversely it is not a Party with a supportive disposition towards the organization of Labour and workers organizations such as trades unions. However it performs the great political trick of actually existing on behalf of the few with most of its support coming from a thin majority of the many! In the last five years of Conservative led Coalition Government most Public Sector workers along with many millions of others employed in retail and the service sector have had their wages frozen or seen increases well below the level of inflation. They’ve seen a serious decline in their standard of living, fuelled let it be said by double and triple the rate of inflation rises in their utility bills. The undoubted initial cause of this deadly deterioration was the disastrous and grossly irresponsible investment policies of British banks facilitated let it be said, by the deregulation of checks on their conduct by Gordon Brown’s Labour Government.

The Labour Party and its recent Governments have much to answer for. Before the time of the great post Second World War Labour Government and even up to the years of Harold Wilson and beyond the Labour Party, with its close links to the trades unions, was viewed as the political Party that stood for the rights and interests of working people. And maybe it still was before Tony Blair and his friends took over its leadership, but from the mid 1990s it passed through a substantial political change, a comprehensively abandoning its socialist policies such as they were to become a Party of New Labour, something fundamentally different. Its leadership refused to repeal Margaret Thatcher’s anti-trades union legislation and quickly made it clear they were no longer willing to continue with its one time close relationship with the unions. In fact they turned their backs on the trades union movement and presented a more than friendly face to Tory right wing newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch, once an arch supporter of Thatcher. In short, in turning their backs on more than 100 years of the history of the Party they rejected all the old socialist values of the Labour Movement which had in the past created the National Health Service and free Secondary and Higher Education and instead turned their face towards business. From 1997 the Old Labour Party died along with its values of social justice and equality and became something very different indeed.

Almost immediately free higher education, so important for bright working class students, was abandoned and the National Health Service opened its doors to privatization.

Today, it’s very difficult to know what the Labour Party is and what it actually stands for, but many of its social policies from 1997 provide us with a very fair clue. From that time on, in fact almost from the day Blair and his acolytes took power the Labour Government became wedded to the idea of mass immigration and multiculturalism. Initially the flood gates were opened to a great wave of immigrants from south-east Asia, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh. In ten years more than five million Muslim immigrants from these countries with religious beliefs and practices so very different to the Christian tradition of worship in the UK and from a culture fundamentally alien to that which prevailed in the industrial areas of the Midlands and North of England settled in large numbers in what was once the industrial heartland of Britain. This vast wave or mass immigration was welcomed without a murmur and throughout the entire period no-one in Blair’s New Labour Government sought to consult the British people or ask their opinion. In fact, such was their determination to press ahead with their policy that they presented the view that to ask any questions of any kind about the new multiculturalism and sudden appearance of millions of south-east Asian Muslims was likely to warrant the accusation of racist bias or bigotry.

Actually this was New Labour playing the race card in reverse! Anyone questioning their immigration policies clearly had a touch of the nasties about them and with the aid of the BBC all forms of criticism were duly suppressed and anyone opening their mouth was accused of racism! That said, what New Labour actually stood for during this time in respect of its immigration policy was plain intolerance! The same circumstance reoccurred during the last years of Blair Government with its open encouragement of mass immigration from East Europe, particularly Poland. The two million Poles who quickly took up residence were welcomed as economic migrants, people who had little to no interest in permanent settlement in Britain but were here purely to exploit economic opportunity along with all the services and financial benefits this country freely provides from the taxes of its citizens. It became a mantra for New Labour politicians when justifying the arrival of the vast number of immigrants to our shores from east Europe to say that they were taking jobs that British workers, particularly those that were young, didn’t want. This entirely false accusation was magnified into a wider calumny that British youth were lazy and preferred to live on state benefits rather than work.

This generalized attack on British working people, unemployed more often than not due to the collapse of traditional industrial occupations, met with no fierce condemnation from Blair’s New Labour and alas became a kind of stick widely used by the Tory media to dispirit and demoralize all those many millions of our working and unemployed poor who slowly drifted into the Underclass. New Labour’s immigration policies in effect created a reserve army of cheap labour for their new found friends in business. This said, what then is the difference today if between the social and economic policies of the two main political Parties? Well take a look from any direction you like and you’ll find little to separate the two. There is no real difference. The Tories are blatant in turning a blind eye to the rascal misconduct of all their friends in the Financial Services Sector while Labour just wants to keep all the misdeeds under wraps or give it an altogether more human face. Neither Party has anything substantial to offer the working man except perhaps for this. That Cameron and his Liberal Democrat playmates are just a gang of unrequited rascals while the supposedly social democrat Miliband seeks to somehow ameliorate the economic catastrophe caused in main by his former boss Dark Gordon.

You know the intentions of a future Conservative Government from George Osborne’s recent budget. The recent offering by the current Coalition to increase the minimum hourly wage by a handful of pence was an absolute disgrace to the many millions of British workers who receive it, particularly the young. Shameful really when one considers the billions of pounds they print on monthly basis and hand to the banks in the process of Quantitative Easing which actually means just printing money they haven’t got in the first place! A contemptuous handful of coppers for the poor and a shameless handing out piles of printed money to the banking executives! Tiny percentage increases in pensions and tiny tax reduction sweeteners to small investors, but then massive incentives to the tax avoidance rascals with a few promises chucked in to get tough which can only raise a laugh in the boardrooms. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of our students are stuck with impossible debt for the fees they still have to pay.

And all of this Scrooge-like miser approach in the name of the deficit and with much worse to come if they are re-elected with appalling future cuts throughout the entire range of public services. A vote for the Conservatives is indeed a vote for a future massive attack on any Welfare State we have left including the NHS.

So what then does the Labour Party stand for and what is any future Labour Government likely to do? Thin on the ground as any of their promises may be, certain things are for sure. Miliband will protect the NHS; he will reduce the terrible burden of debt on students by reducing their fees and he will seriously increase the miserly minimum wage along with ending the wretched overall situation in employment practices by scaling down zero hours contracts and ending the fearful state of insecurity suffered by millions of workers. And best of all perhaps there might be the eventual promise of A Living Wage to the many who currently can’t make ends meet. If it looks good and sounds good it comes with a price, that of the possibility of further increases in immigration, but then it would be no worse at all to what the Tories have been dishing up. In addition however there’d be Labour’s continuing commitment to the EU with no promise at all of a Referendum that would let the British people decide. The Tories will always be Tories but with Miliband there just might be the guarantee that the ghastly mistakes of his predecessor Gordon Brown would not be repeated

The Conservatives stand for thin smears of jam for the many and chocolate cake for the few. It says a great many things. We all love chocolate after all and it’s a kind of incentive for more of us to get our hands on it. That’s why so many people voted for Thatcher time after time. They wanted something more than the jam. They might have been entirely unrealistic but they were always hopeful. She damaged their community spirit and turned them into chocolate hopeful individualists. A greedy dream of the rich and tasties! Previously Labour badly let its electorate down so maybe Miliband has learned the lesson and won’t repeat the dreadful mistake. If he promises to protect the health of the nation then he’ll probably do it, tax the wealthy and much more generously spread out the jam.

As for the Liberal Democrats facing a hiding… they’ll promise everything because they’ve nothing to lose. They conspired with the Tories over the last five years to make the poor pay for the bankers and despite what they say about them saving the country, well you have to be either stupid or a fanatic not to know that they’re a bunch of plain liars.

More about the Clegg Gang in my next post!

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