Good old Maggie, eh? She sorted out those pesky unions, holding the country to ransom. And, bless her, she let you buy your own council house. Hey, you even managed to get yourself a piece of the ‘shareholding democracy’ when she sold off the utilities and telecoms so her fat cat mates in the City could get ever richer.
“There is no such thing as society” she intoned and you lapped it up, eagerly, as you bought into the culture of greed is good. You were happy bowing to the rule of profit. All hail the wealth creators!
The miners’ strike? Fuck ‘em, right? You scabbed and even gloated while doing so. Waving your wage packet from the safety of the reinforced bus as the police escorted you through.
Once Maggie got through with Arthur, she started on the steel industries, the civil service, nurses, teachers, you name it. Anything to eradicate even a semblance of solidarity and collective action. You urged her on, voted her in three times, licking your lips as an extra holiday a year became a reality. A new car every three years and, Christ, check out your pension, Mr Fat Wallet! Let the good times roll! Yep, she changed Britain forever and Tony Blair MP, or I’m Tory Plan B, to use an appropriate anagram, carried on her work. Extended it, deepened it and made it unassailable for another decade at least.
By 2000, the Thatcher revolution was complete. Solidarity, collective endeavour and helping your neighbour, all wiped from the cultural landscape along with the once-thriving and vibrant communities that spawned those ideals and kept them alive. Of course, there were a few downsides for you, a few niggling doubts starting to set in. Pension looking very shaky all of a sudden, your meagre shares worthless and your Mum’s new hip postponed three times as the NHS cuts, sorry, ‘reforms’, really started to bite.
And then, horror of horrors, the markets crashed, your house price fell and, almost before you knew it, there were mobs of feral youths rampaging around outside. Burning your car and pissing through your letterbox. Youths that were the second and third generations from the communities you helped destroy. After all, a penny extra on your income tax to subsidise inner city scum? Sod that!
Youths brainwashed and conditioned by the collective sum of thirty years consumerist propaganda. You gotta have ‘stuff’, you gotta have money and ‘things’. Sadly, they lacked the education to join the dots. Couldn’t work out why their schools were closed or the funding cut, as teachers, scape-goated by successive governments struggled to make a difference, all the while trying to defend their own jobs, pay and conditions. Ditto the firemen, nurses, dinner ladies et al…
Yeah, they wanted the ‘stuff’ but how? No job, no chance of one, university maybe? Slog your balls off to end up thirty grand in debt, ready to stack shelves on minimum wage or join all the other degree holders on the dole. Besides, they were ‘scum’, ‘chavs’ ‘feral pond life’ ‘scroungers’ and ‘criminals’, right? Condemned, alienated, cut off and excluded from society, they created their own. Based on imported gang culture, violence, drugs. Where fear, respect and having a ‘rep’ became the aspirations to replace the ones from which they’d been cut off.
And so now you cower in your devalued house, the one with negative equity, bleating that it’s not fair! That these animals aren’t political! They’re just greedy, immoral, violent thugs! Of course they are. What else could they be? You supported the wiping out of entire communities and the destruction of entire industries if it stood in the way of an extra few quid in your pocket, caring only for yourself. Why should the looting scum be any different? You never gave a shit for anyone but yourself, why should they?
So you cry for the firemen to put out the blaze engulfing your home, the firemen you scorned and sneered at when they were on strike, asking for your support. You need an ambulance now as the Mrs has keeled over with all the stress, terror and horror of the last few days. The same ambulance men you thought should be privatised, cut and sacked. After all, why should you have to pay for anything from your taxes?
You made this happen. You and the millions of selfish, greedy, short sighted bastards just like you. You got the world you created, the world you deserved. So suck it up. Stop snivelling. Stop your hypocritical cries of outrage and moral indignation. Everything has to be paid for, yeah? Well, you had yours and now you’ve got the bill. Time to pay…
Dear all,
While clearing out the bloody spam, I’ve inadvertently deleted all the comments on this article
Particular apologies to ‘DS’ to whom I’d spent twenty minutes composing a reply *sigh*
Feel free to repost your remarks, guys, if you can be arsed, if not, thanks anyway to you all for taking the time to read the piece and for taking the trouble to comment.
Cheers, H.
OK, managed to to save ‘em but cannot republish using the authors original email addys so this one from NEIL SCOTT
“Excellent, Harry”
This one from DAVID HARWOOD
“That about sums it up! – Come back into politics Harry, your country needs you!”
This one from RUSSELL SAXTON
“In a nutshell”
This one from DS
“Can’t and won’t disagree with every point made, but this is every bit as sensationalist and one-sided as the exclamations of outrage from the people you’re undoubtedly targeting.
Rarely is anything in life as black and white as anybody is making it out to be, yourself included. Suggesting that the current socio-political landscape is the direct result of every member of the voting public is just plain ridiculous – there are thousands upon thousands of right-leaning individuals out there with a high degree of social conscience and responsibility.
It’s simoply not as easy as painting every Tory voter with the ‘capitalist egomaniac’ brush.”
My reply to DS
“If I agreed with you first point, “…but this is every bit as sensationalist and one-sided as the exclamations of outrage from the people you’re undoubtedly targeting”, Which I don’t, I’d be tempted to point out that maybe a little ‘bending of the stick’ was necessary to offset the depressingly reactionary and unimaginative hang ‘em/flog ‘em/jail ‘em/shoot ‘em raving which seems to constitute a long term solution for huge swathes, probably the majority, of both the public and the media.
Regarding your second point, actually, yes it is that “…black and white”. Yes it is that simple. The fact remains (and, ironically, the right recognize this while the majority of the public dismiss it as cod-Marxist dementia) that under capitalism there is a direct conflict between profit and labour. It is inescapable, it is unavoidable and is a key feature of its mechanism. Simply and crudely put, if the choice is between closing a few inner city schools and hospitals or protecting the huge profits of a multinational by using tax payers contributions to bail them out, well, you know what happens, what has happened. Both the message and logic is clear: profit, not people, is key. Inevitably, as funds become increasingly scarce, the poorer are squeezed ever harder, in terms of their jobs, pay, conditions and public services so that profits, and subsequently huge salaries and astronomical bonuses, can be not just maintained but increased.
Also, I did not suggest that “…current socio-political landscape is the direct result of every member of the voting public”. As you rightly observe, such an accusation would be ridiculous. My remarks were aimed at those members of the working class and trade union members who bought into the Thatcherite ‘dream’ with gusto, only to end up wailing at its inevitable consequences. There is no more fitting example of this than the scabs that went on to form the UDM, crying and whining that they were betrayed and stitched up by the Tories when Heseltine announced the final pit closures in the early 90s.
Having said that, of course, the fact remains that “…the current socio-political landscape” is a direct result of government policy and intervention (or rather lack of, in the case of the latter) and the economics that flowed from those policies. Given that, it’s not the most outrageous suggestion, surely, to insist that those voting for such policies shoulder some of the responsibility for their outcome?
Finally, regarding your last point, “It’s simoply [sic] not as easy as painting every Tory voter with the ‘capitalist egomaniac’ brush”, you are, of course, quite correct and I suggested no such thing. In fact, the majority of Tory voters are, obviously, drawn from the working class and certainly they are not, in the main, “capitalist egomaniacs”. Instead, they are, to put it frankly, brainwashed and the inevitable result of a huge ideological propaganda offensive. At this point, I’m rather fond of trotting out one of the right’s favourite mantras, namely that of ‘individual responsibility’ At some point, people have to stop being so unthinking and reconsider their knee-jerk prejudice, bigotry and unquestioning swallowing of the ruling class agenda.
Another much-loved ruling class mantra is ‘back to basics’. Quite agree. We need to get back to basics and really start considering what kind of society do we really want? If we want young people to have respect, both for themselves and others, if we want to provide a future of gainful employment, reasonable living standards, a drop in crime and a happier more fulfilled society, we simply have to accept we cannot build such a world where we simultaneously place private profit above all other considerations. We cannot continue to perpetuate a culture of shallow consumerism and greed, while our ‘betters’ and ‘superiors’ fiddle expenses, take bribes and get into bed with media magnets and fashion policy to suit a rich and privileged minority, to give just a few examples.
We can have obscene bonuses, record profits and unimaginable wealth for a tiny minority or we can have reasonable living standards for the majority, low crime, well funded public services and a society that values the collective aspirations of good citizenship, civic responsibility and moral virtue.
We cannot have both…”
This one from DAVID BUNTING
“Powerful stuff and the best most damning analysis of these events that i have read. Thank you for this”
My pleasure, David. Thanks for your kind remarks but, more importantly, for taking time to read the piece.
The Left also carries a lot of responsibility. Education has been devalued for decades, as have family structures that – for any and all of their faults – provided an underpinning for a coherent society. Yes, Maggie and her followers carry a major part of the blame, with policies that were not only economically illiterate but societally suicidal, but this situation has been a long time in the making. The erosion of aspiration and undermining of self-improvement – something on which the Labour Party, Co-Op and Trade Union movements were based – is also part of it. And more besides – the Left must look in the mirror as well, when it seeks out someone or something to blame.
I think you need to clarify what you mean by the ‘left’. If you mean the Labour Party, both in and out of government, then no argument from me. I would argue that the left’s biggest failure was in capitulating to the Thatcherite agenda, instead of having the ideological balls to mark out clear red water between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and formulating polices that were both biased towards the majority and were coherent, too.
With regard to education, again, no argument from me. The complete shambles the Blair administrations made of education were so disastrous, one could be forgiven for thinking it was almost deliberate, ahem…
In terms of the family (and by that I mean not just the Church and establishment-approved married couple with 2.4 children, but any stable environment where a child has secure, loving parenting and care, from one or more adults), well, in times of social and economic deprivation, this is one of society’s most vulnerable units. On the one hand, the right say mums should stay at home and look after their kids while axing jobs and slashing wages. The result? Families split as its not economically viable to stay together and the women end up on benefits, looking after their kids as one-parent families, only to be denigrated, scorned and added to the establishment hate-list, along with ‘chavs’ ‘benefit scroungers’ etc
harry, you’ve bloody nailed it mate. That sums up all I’ve been trying to articulate as to how we got ourselves in this awful mess. The tories trashed society, the public good and the working class – and now, it’s trashing them and all their greedy, selfish supporters. Serves them right.
Harry, thanks for your reasoned and polite response – having gone on to read your excellent ‘Rules of Facebook’ there was a part of me that foresaw a dismissive tirade. In that same Facebook article you make reference to levels of ‘political illiteracy’ and whilst I’d make my case for avoiding being labelled in that category, I’ll freely admit to having little in the way of an in-depth interest or knowledge in the workings of the political machine.
I couldn’t agree more with your assessment of the “depressingly reactionary” opinions being voiced by many – and my suggestion that your piece was equally “sensationalist and one-sided” was the result of a clear failure to understand your position and, more importantly, your ‘target audience’ as it were.
My apologies on that, which will be a common theme in my ‘justification’ of my previous comments. I took your piece, somewhat naïvely, as being directed at wider group than you intended – your later comment in your response, that your comments were “…aimed at those members of the working class and trade union members who bought into the Thatcherite ‘dream’” puts me right here, and adds (or rather clarifies) context.
Reading it as a statement to the voting public as a whole, your piece seemed somewhat unfair. After the last election we’re all aware of how many (or how few!) voters may be considered as being supporters of any incumbent government.
My “black and white” comment is also a contextual thing, I guess. I wouldn’t argue with your profit versus labour conflict, indeed I work in the private sector for a very large PLC and I’m only too aware of the constant drive for profit, and therefore the constant pressure on ‘costs’ of which labour is, of course, the largest example in the majority of cases. Whilst that is a fact of capitalist life though, my “black and white” comment was intended as a reference to individuals political tendencies rather than the core workings of the political system. As I said there are thousands of right-leaning voters (myself included – yes, I ticked the Tory box at the last election) who are a long way from ‘capital-C’ Capitalists, the same as the vast majority on the left of the fence who are presumably not advocating life in the style of Communist Russia. I understand though that there remains a Capitalist drive behind the interests of the Conservative party, and of late, to some extent, Labour as well. The issue remains, I would suggest, in the political two or three party system. I am what is often referred to as ‘small-c conservative’ in my politics, and whilst I’m open to discussions* on alternatives there is a perceived lack of meaningful alternatives to the ‘big-c Conservative’ vote.
*(a discussion far to lengthy to go into here, I’m sure)
Of course I accept that “those voting for [the parties responsible for] such policies” – I bracket, as it’s surely fair to say that not every voter for a government has 100% approval for their every policy – should be prepared to shoulder some of the responsibility. That’s a core fact of the democratic process. My issue with recent events, and the idea of trying to cram them wholly into one side or other of a political argument, is that it’s far from just those individuals who are paying the price of the actions of the few. Indeed those at the top of the Tory-voting food-chain are probably less impacted by the actions, in many cases, than the communities from which the rioters/looters/disaffected youth/idiots (pick your poison) come. Again though, I appreciate the intention and target audience of your piece, and that it was by no means a justification of events.
Ultimately it strikes me that we’re both in agreement regarding the big picture, I wholeheartedly agree with your closing two paragraphs, and I would hope that this ideal could be reached with a review of priorities by people on all sides of the political fence. Again I’m maybe naïve in that view, particularly coming from a right-leaning position, and in believing that there is a middle ground to be had somewhere. One which allows for private profit, and community/social conscience, to be held in balance. I understand that it would take a massive sea-change from the working- and middle-class right, one can dream though – right?
I think you’re a classic voter that the left has utterly refused to inspire, actually. Our agreement on my two final paragraphs is the important common ground, as far as I’m concerned.
Agreeing what sort of society we want is half the battle. The problem these days is that so many people are utterly disgusted by politics and politicians of all shades that even reaching a theoretical consensus is miles away. Never mind agreeing about how we’re actually going to get there
Brilliant…..I couldn’t have put it better myself, every point you made is completely valid and it is exactly what many of us have been thinking for years.
Instead of tackling the root causes of the rioting, they are now writing a blank cheque to the police to crush any uprising, so, yet again, they get all the overtime they want so that they can smash the uprising & in 20 years time they will be on documentaries stating how well they did financially during the riots & what goods they purchased & how many fucking holidays they went on, this is not new politics but it sucks!
Excellent. I thought I was the only one who felt this.
The troubles have been boiling, brewing and simmering for a long time now. I come from one of those broken communities. Little is left of my villages once proud industry (coal) but we have never forgot…
Is she dead yet?
Not yet, Paul, sadly, but the I’ve put the champers on ice. Won’t be long now…
Great article, Harry
Really insightful. Have a read of this for a couple of key points you missed – (1) the advancement of technology and (2) job saturation: http://www.blottr.com/crime/breaking-news/quick-fix-or-long-haul-political-fallout-uk-riots
Together, both articles really sum up the true problems this country face. Now we need to find a long-lasting solution. Answers on a postcard…
PS. Incidentally, Harry – what are your opinions regarding North London Solfed’s response to the London riots: http://www.solfed.org.uk/?q=north-london-solfeds-response-to-the-london-riots
Not too much to disagree with there, David. Measured, balanced and pretty much on the money, as far as I can see.
I particularly liked this point: “Consecutive governments have gone to great lengths to destroy any sort of notion of working class solidarity and identity. Is it any surprise, then, that these rioters turn on other members of our class?” Very true indeed!
The irony is that both Labour and Tory governments have so successfully neutered the labour and trade union movement, and criminalised protest and dissent, that once where the TUC bureaucrats would simply call a demo, we’d march down the embankment, rally in Hyde Park, listen to a few speeches and then trot off home again, thinking we’d achieved something, and the ruling classes could smirk knowing the steam and pressure had been let off, there is now nowhere for that pressure and steam to go but into destruction and violence!
You’d almost think they were consciously constructing the conditions for insurrection!
Hi Harry, just found your site through this post on the guardian today. inspiring stuff, cheers.
Thanks very much, James
Always nice to see a new face here.
By the way Harry, the champers is on ice in my home as well. I live in a Tory heartland but come from a long line of Sheffield steelworkers and miners and saw as a child visiting relatives the damage done on whole communities by the snatcher. I will have great fun telling my neighbours why the bunting is up when she buys the farm.
Good man. You, me and a few million more, I suspect