Getting Better Yet?

I watched Made in Dagenham on Sunday afternoon. Ah nostalgia – they don’t make it like they used to, do they? A heart-warming story of the days when Trade Unions had a noble and valuable role. It was made very clear in the film that Labour was the party of the working classes and a creation of the well-intentioned unions. I can remember as a boy believing, as did my mother, that Barbara Castle was a paragon of the conviction politician, determined to bring about change and improvement. Good for her.

But the film also made clear that the unions themselves had a role in their own decline with the caricature of Bernie Inn Diplomacy; whole days off work for a ten-minute meeting, management and union officials alike ‘playing the game’ and missing the overall point of their existence and in fact often working against the interests of the very people they represented. Don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it, they told the women, we know best.

In their heads they had the stirring words of the Communist Party Manifesto Chapter II and longed for “[The] formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” And blindly followed the party plans to destabilise society and reform it in the image of a utopia imagined fully a century earlier.

And here we are today. Where Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini failed, Monnet and Spinelli and Herman Van Rompuy have played the long game and what we see all around us is a world that Marx may well have approved of. Marriage devalued, education defunct, religion fragmented and nobody trusting anybody else. A universal welfare society with ever more members, creating ever more precious 'equality'. To each according to his greed, from each according to what we can screw out of him. Down and down we sink.

Barbara Castle would have been would have been horrified to see where this was going, but the old Labour Party was too blunt an instrument to get any further than the 1970s and the enterprise culture of the 1980s destroyed collective action for good. That’s why New Labour had to be invented and why it had to embark on a programme of ‘progressive’ socialism to sell to a largely freed proletariat the notion not of unity, but of infinite merry variety. “Look at us, we’re fucking lovely!” said Tony Blair, “Things can ONLY get better!” (Few heard when he added, “…for me.”)

And all around Europe Marx’s other little helpers helped themselves to the reins, placed them in little Angela’s hands and helped her cracked the whip. Crack – there go the borders. Crack - there goes your currency. Crack – there go your freedoms and now you dare not speak out you belong to us. The Glorious Fatherland Project is almost complete.

Adolf Groucho Herman Marx

What is happening in Cyprus can and will happen elsewhere. You can see it happening, but you are powerless to resist. You can feel it coming for you and your family, but you have nothing left with which to fight it. Being IN Europe means entirely controlled BY Europe. Things can only begin to get better when we are out. And the EU's representative on earth, Dave-Ed Camiliclegg will NEVER let you have a say in that.