UNION CITY BLUES
An alphabet soup of ridiculous people and ridiculous organizations is having a immigration whine-in this coming weekend at the
Ironically, the conference’s main sponsors are trade unions. They don’t appear to have the elementary connection between mass immigration, lower wages, less social harmony and poorer quality of life – a connection that would be apparent to an intelligent five year old. But it is all too typical of the way trade unions have evolved, or devolved.
Once, trade unions were mostly interested in improving the conditions of the workers they represented. While they have always been a radical or potentially radical element in the body politic, they were a necessary development in the 19th century, and played a magnificent role in improving the lives of countless numbers of people. Without them the living and working conditions of countless factory hands, mill hands and miners would have been even worse than they were.
The early trade unionists were very often from a devoutly non-conformist religious background, and their lives and the politics they espoused were rooted firmly in their local communities, and a quietly courageous tradition of hard work, thrift, common sense and a kind of understated idealism based on Christian values. Through sheer character and their own examples, they achieved great things for their communities and acquired deserved respect. The unions’ choral singing, their brass bands, their banners and their myths became inextricable parts of provincial culture. Unionists never lost a feeling of being part of the English family– even if they were often at loggerheads with other members of the family. But in times of war or other crisis, they were willing to subsume their sectional interests until the danger was past.
But then something happened. The trade unionists of the 1890s-1940s died or retired, and they were often replaced by people who were from the same social background, but who did not share the piety or patriotism of their predecessors. From the 1950s onwards many trade unionists started to forget about their communitarian concerns and to take positions on such extraneous matters as the Cold War, nuclear weapons, the United States, ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘Islamophobia’, and all the rest of the demons that have haunted the postwar ‘intelligentsia’. Soviet money and influence were wielded to evil effect, playing on the vanity of a new generation of unionists who felt that their predecessors had been too parochial. By the 1980s, while rank-and-file trade unionists were pretty the same down-to-earth people they had always been, the leaders of many unions had become ossified into a reflexive ‘hard-Left’ position on the issues of the day.
Their dogmatism (and, in some cases, actual disloyalty to
But emotions boiled over, and an abstract ideological battle became a highly personal confrontation between a man who hated the state (and by extension the nation) and a woman who felt (paradoxically) that the force of the state should be used in order that the state could be made smaller. Mrs Thatcher, of course, prevailed, but vast damage had been done in much of northern and central England, in Scotland and Wales, where coal and other industries had all been effectively outsourced or handed over to foreign control, leaving millions of people with no employment, no prospects, no worthwhile retraining and no community spirit. It was a softening up for our present therapeutic state, where fewer and fewer people have real jobs, or produce actual things – but just play around in money management, service industries and entertainment, like gilded and gelded Eloi.
Since those tumultuous 1980s, trade unions have scarcely protested about outsourcing, mass immigration or any other aspect of globalisation, although globalization has accelerated the process of de-employment, de-skilling and wage-cutting begun in 1979. On the contrary, their one-time radicalism has been transmuted into a blend of bog-standard Guardian-type social poses and Financial Times-type economic poses. They too now effectively believe that nations are passé, and should be superseded by global free markets with unlimited movement of people, where everyone has equality of opportunity and equality of outcome – a stance really quite similar to that of big businesses, except that businessmen don’t believe in equality of outcome. Their political stances have moved beyond parody, with even the Fire Brigade Union now more interested in ethnic quotas than in saving lives.
Caught up in the middle of this titanic non-battle between uncaring business and uncaring ‘worker representatives’ are the real British, of all classes and occupations – but all of them increasingly insecure, indebted, outsourced and outmoded.DT
A laconic item in the Daily Telegraph of March 22nd records the survival, against the odds, of a solitary European beaver in the Thames, more than 400 years after it became extinct in
SCHOOL FOR SNITCHES
A nurse at a Worcestershire boarding school has been sacked from her job because she smacked her ten year old son at home. The boy had apparently sworn at her. The lady in question, Susan Pope, was arrested with her husband, and they spent 32 hours in a cell. They were then released without charge, and no further action will be taken. However, the child has no been placed o the child protection nregister, which means that social services have to be involved, and it was this that made the school, Malvern St James, decide that she should be sacked for “gross misconduct”. The school feels that it could not risk its reputation. Like so many other parts of British society, having a quiet life is what matters most to the school. This is fairly cowardly, but the real villain of the piece is Mrs Pope’s 15 year old son, who contacted the police in the first place. Now there is an unpleasant urchin – a good candidate for excision from the will. DT