James Foley
Labour Party elections played a formative political role for me. One of my earliest memories, aged seven, involves chasing a Conservative Party election wagon down the street screaming, “What about the miners!” My next door neighbour — a Neanderthal right-winger, aged eight — asked how I could support Kinnock, a man who openly kissed his wife in public.
He later joined the Officer Training Corps. Clearly Tories learn hypocrisy and sexual repression at the same age socialists learn class hatred.
No matter the circumstances, a Conservative government is never a positive thing for most people. The Tories recruit their membership from the traditional ruling class; their real prejudices are always with the very wealthy, no matter how “caring” they want to appear.
Just look at how shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley described the economic crisis: “On many counts, recession can be good for us. People tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol, eat less rich food and spend more time at home with their families.” Never mind that poverty is the biggest killer in Britain; never mind that if you live in the poorest areas of Glasgow you will die younger than the average resident of the Gaza Strip. From a Tory angle, all of our health problems could be solved if the great unwashed had less money to blow on fags, booze, and crisps and more time to be “strong fathers” to their lice-infested tearaway brats.
Nevertheless, electing a Labour Party to government is no real boon for your average worker. May 1st 1997 was a mass revolt against corruption, prejudice, and hypocrisy. But Labour made the rich even richer: the top one percent, about 600,000 people increased their share of national wealth from twenty, to twenty-four percent after seven years of Labour government. The poor got marginal reforms: a £3.50 minimum wage, for instance, although this made no real difference — in practice, real wages have been virtually stagnant.
Electing Labour heightened the expectations of ordinary people, but they were not rewarded. Blair and Brown sanctioned shady private corporations to pillage the remains of the public sector. Meanwhile, they embraced every opportunity to test our weapons industry’s finest produce on starving third world civilians.
Most pundits interpret the budget announcement as Labour’s ‘move to the left’. The top tax band, which covers the top 1 percent of earners, will increase from forty to forty-five percent. However, remember that it is not long since Brown scrapped the 10p income tax band for the very poor, a decision that had enormous ramifications for people struggling to afford gas bills and rising food prices.
It has taken the greatest economic crisis since WWII for Labour to even consider taxing the rich. Before Thatcher was elected, the very rich paid eighty-three percent income tax; at best, we have edged past halfway to restoring the ‘progressive’ conditions of the 1970s.
Given that there is no viable political alternative, I hope Labour beats the Conservatives at the next election. Labour receives ninety percent of its funds from the trade union movement, and a more powerful movement from below — strikes, demonstrations, and so on — could force them into concessions that maintain living standards during the crisis. The Tories make most of their funding deals at yacht parties, and recruit their membership from Rotary Clubs, the Women’s Institute, and the Glasgow University Union.
Many reasonable people support Labour, for the same reason a scrawny seven year old touted at Tory wagons and supported Neil Kinnock’s public sex acts. But this loyalty is misplaced. Labour’s leadership are loyal to the same people who made millions at the expense of the miners, the dockers, the print workers, the single mothers, and — yes — even the students during 18 years of Tory rule.
If you still hate Thatcher, make sure you support the working class organisations she tried to destroy, and not the Labour Party she unwittingly created.