Left Wing Histories

Which make up, alack, the vast majority of published works on post-war Britain, are to be avoided at all costs, for they never, ever, say anything new or interesting.

Here is a ten point guide to the average "People's" or "New" or "Cultural" history of Britain, 1945-2000:

1) People were nice before 1979. During this period, most people (apart from the right wing press and the paranoid agents of the state) were in favour of social justice. Social justice means very high taxation, excellent wage deals for the public sector, and, generally, successful strikes. This point stands despite the fact that most people were racist, sexist, homophobic fucks, before 1997.

2) The "media" are uniformly against left wing politics, and have engaged in a vast number of intricate conspiracies to bring down said politics since 1945. This is despite the will of the people, except where it is with the will of the people, in which case the people are fucking bastards. Examples include: Harold Wilson, who was in no way paranoid, but was a real victim of an extreme right wing country (in which case why the fuck was he PM then); John Stonehouse (in no way a criminal, more a victim of the right wing press); and, of course, Tony Benn, misinterpreted as a proto-Commie since 1966.

3) Conservatives are cynical, Labour supporters "idealistic". This is a key, recurring trope in lefty histories of Britain. The "Tories" have always and everywhere, cleverly used their total control of the media (see above) to defeat the will of the People. Elections won by Labour attract no comment, elections won by "The TORIES" are because of unfair voting systems.

4) Trade Unions were the victims of a cynical population hungry for personal greed over personal justice. Nuff Said.

5)Left Wing extremists are just comedians, whereas right wing extremists are nasty fuckers. Leaving aside the fact that the IRA, the Angry Brigade, and the Baader Meinhof Gang were all variants of lefties, this seems a bit crap anyway when your best argument is that Ross McWhirter kept some "dodgy" political company.

6) The IRA were forced to bomb loads of innocent civilians. See above.

7) Everyone before 1997 was a racist fucker. Common proofs of this thesis include: The Black and White Minstrel Show, Love thy Neighbour, the NF, and anyone who happened to say anything lefties don't agree with now. This, apparently, proves that we are much nicer people now. And guess what's to blame....


8) Greed. The 80s were totally about greed, and in no way about trying to improve yourself and your family, and even if they were that is fucking well bad enough, you selfish bunch of cunts. Everyone carried MASSIVE mobile phones and wore REALLY SHARP SUITS apart from the three million who didn't even have a job. So on the one hand everyone was really poor, and on the other hand everyone was a greedy fucker. By the way, success=greed; so anyone earning over an arbitrary sum an average lefty historian considers "enough" is a cunt. Or "was" a cunt, as these fuckers are almost certainly all dead of a greed induced coronary by now. By the way anyone who didn't support 46% pay claims by certain unions was a selfish fucking cunt, whether or not he was a self-employed nobody working *exactly* to the timetables of the unions in 1973. SO it goes that the argument was between those interested in social justice, and those keen on loading themselves with Bentleys and 24 carat gold. There was no in between. By definition.

9) Before *spits* Thatcher, everyone agreed that the State should run all industries for our benefit, and that people should just shut the fuck up, pay their taxes, get what they're given, and like it. Or be fascist bastards. And as anyone who drove an Austin Allegro, Maxi, Princess, Ambassador; a Rover SD; knows, nationalised car industries produced indisputably brilliant vehicles. After that bitch, some top-hatted cunts made us think that only the rich had the right to anything at all. Thatcher herself famously said that the poor should die and painfully[subs- find ref, will you, I'm off to the pub].

10) Doctor Who was loads better under "The Consensus" than after.


Point No10 is, I am afraid, easily refuted: in Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor says, being urged by Sarah to destroy the embryonic Daleks: "Do I have the right?" and, in fact does not do it: a Dalek does, belatedly. Under our liberated regime, he would of said: "Of course I have the ****ing right, are you a ****ing extremist or something???" Subsequently he would have ditched Sarah as "Insane-Sar" and led a galactic campaign against anti-Dalekists, writing articles in Gallifrey Guardian against her. And rightly so. Anti-Dalekists have far too much power, indeed are parasites (c the BROTHER damn his government-shilling hide, of the AUTHOR of REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS*)

Well, despite the unfortunate expression of right-wing extremism in Genesis of the Daleks: VOTE WILSON!

Through a timewarp. As I am about to do. In 1964, 1966, NOT 1970, Feb 1974, NOT Oct 1974. Oooh, I'd get such a turn-on voting Wilson in Feb 74. Holey Moley my post-war political interest has become pornographic, I do believe I am getting a 26.8% bone on - hey Hal, you can inflate me by that much in August 1975 alright!!! Obviously I'll vote Heath with some reluctance in Oct 74 but I'm sure you'll understand my decision: I don't really fancy another Christmas by candlelight (yes yes, ok so the last one was under the Tories) but these clowns have done nothing to prevent it, and the NUM and other unions are supposed to be their mates. They're supposed to have the ears of the union leaders (and this was supposed to be a parliamentary democracy -2008 Ed).

Also I'd NOT VOTE CALLAGHAN IN MAY 1979 if this requires my execution then fair enough. I'd vote (shield your sensitive socialist eyes, dear reader) THATCHER (oooh, couldn't you just hear me say it????? Even with your eyes closed???)

But I would have voted Callaghan in 1977. Not 1978, but 1977; then it still looked as if Labour could achieve what the Tories (ssssssss!!!) never would be able to. This, again, is a weird point against a democratic society; that you would vote for a party, or not, based on its record of taking on non-democratic institutions: such as those that had, bizarrely, power over who an employer could only employ people based on their union affiliation (it is TRULY alien to a free society that a union could demand your membership before it let you join the employ of a third party; it is weird that a union could think a secret ballot undemocratic; it is sinister that a union should demand the right to prevent people who do not belong to to it from working). No, I would have voted Labour in 1977: out of sheer defeatism. In 1978 I would have begun to waver but would not have voted Thatcher; in 1979 I would voted Thatcher whatever 21st century leftwing historians were later to make of her views on race. Oddly enough this is now really important among "social" historians of the late twentieth century: the views of leftwing politicians who truly believed that British people should not be able to vote for different parties, or own their own houses, or make money, or do anything for their children beyond aborting them are rather less publicised.


As far as I know Mrs Thatcher never professed her admiration for a regime which had deliberately and knowingly murdered millions of its citizens: hence, unlike Tony Benn (another fact which *always* escapes lefty historians) she earns my support. Yes she supported Pinochet but against those who always thought that Soviet Russia was alright, and by the standards of the cold war, it's somewhat small-fry. I'd love (St Eric of) Hobsbawm to explain to me why millions of deaths in the service of socialism were ok but Pincohet's Chile was an abomination. She (Thatcher, not Eric) loses it for what happened in the first half of the 1980s; she loses my respect and support for that dire, terrible period of alienation that continues to blight us today: but, like Eric Hobsbawm on a rather smaller scale, I will never be a trophy for anti-capitalists, and I don't have 20 million deaths on my conscience.


But Mrs Thatcher made my childhood; she brought me up amid the violence, the hate and the threat of melted milk bottles. Mrs Thatcher was not my milk snatcher; Mr Callaghan, Mr Benn and Mr Foot were my milk snatchers: men who apparently "believed" that not being in a union made you a cunt, that being a miserable little cocksucker who just wanted to pay the fucking bills made you a selfish fucking bastard. The hate and the violence, was, of course, the produce of Messrs Attle, Macmillan, Wilson and Heath as much as it was of Mrs Thatcher: but oddly enough, when things went bad, all turned out to have been rosy in the post-imperial garden until those fucking(monetarist) Tories turned up, like a rash of nettles.

Well, Mr Foot, Mr Benn: your boys will be dealt one hell of a beating come 2010: and if the Tories have any sense at all, they will scour the universities for, and purge them of, the scumbags that to this day proclaim that wanting your family to be comfortable is grossly irresponsible selfishness. Hopefully they will impale, alive, those life-sucking academics who believe they have a right to tell every other fucker what to think while taking the taxes of all those bastard (capitalist) voters, with their little small businesses, their internet operations, their stupid ideas for money making schemes: because lefties know better don't they? They know all you fuckers are just cunts, that you should be destroyed while you pay for their little articles, their closed-shop journals, their air of total smugness.

Fuck them. Despite my authoritarian old Tory tendencies, fuck all public-parasites, destroy all tenured twats, kill all of those arsewitted historians who all preach to the same, tiny audience, and receive all the plaudits that the daily shrinking audience of the Guardian can muster.

Fuck them right off, and let's build a world we actually want, not a world we're told we want.

For a start we can slash taxes on sex.

You mean there aren't...what the.......oh. I'll get my...er...




*Fuck me are you an idiot or something: David Aaronovitch.

The Origin of Laws

Interesting 5 Live debate on the Eu Constitution/Treaty today, the usual Eu-philes calling everyone else "bigoted/xenophobes/little Englanders" and Mark Mardell intervening only to make pro-EU points, but what interested me was this. One caller pointed out that EU law is framed by the Commission,after secret or hidden negotiations and reviewed by the parliament, but ultimate authority rests with the commission, unelected. Recently of course an EU commissioner graciously decided to allow Britain to continue to use imperial units without threat of crminial prosecution. I'm not commenting on the truth of all this, by the way.

Victoria Derbyshire challenged the caller by saying: "If it's a good law, does it matter where it comes from?" and the caller did answer her, but it struck me that for the first time to my knowledge someone openly questioned whether or not law makers should be elected, accountable, removable, and their laws open to repeal. Her argument rested on the philosophy of a given law - is it right? Do I agree with it? Does it satisfy my sense of justice or ethics - and the concept of a lawmaker deriving their legitimacy from the consent of the governed was not mentioned.

It's seemed clear to me for a while that we're moving towards a kind of technocracy, where "experts" really do know better than everyone else because the modern world is so complex; but it's rare for someone so openly to challenge the basic tenet of democracy and then to replace it with something resembling this: If the modern world really is unfathomably complex, and if some people really do understand it better than us, then they do have a greater right to frame it than we do. Our view, or vote, is largely irrelevant. Moreover, if a principle is right, or "good", then it should be enacted, regardless of the wishes of the people.

Am I then an old reactionary in thinking that laws which affect my day to day life: which measurements I am to use; how long I can work; what I should think about certain events or people; should be enacted, if at all, by a government elected by the people with a mandate for that, and that they should be able to be repealed when they fall out of favour or outlive their usefulness and the lawmakers removed?

I'm not saying that our current system does this well, but it is at least supposed to, and we can scrutinise it and hold it to account. I don't see the EU commission held to account much at all, and it depresses me that intelligent people want less public involvement in law-making rather than more.

Then again, everything depresses me so that's largely irrelevant.

Public Wish for More Surveillance - Not Me, Mate

This is interesting. Not that the government is using terrorism to regiment and survey its people during their lawful business in the most intrusive way, assuming that all passengers are potential terrorists; no, that is to be expected. What is interesting is this:

Passengers are ready to accept airport-style security screening at certain railway stations, Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander has said.
A trial of X-ray body scanners and other machines will report shortly, Mr Alexander told MPs.

But he said initial findings suggested passengers "understood the need" for extra security.

People, says the government, wish to be watched more closely; people, declare the government, want the state to assume they are deadly radicals when they're on their way up the Northern Line. The article does not make clear who was asked about this.

The Dept of Transport website does not exactly promote it either, and a short search doesn't turn up the survey or its methodology.

Mr Alexander said the threat of a terrorist attack in the UK remained "severe".

...by way of a final little reminder to everyone to accept surveillance if they hadn't already. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the thought that this government wants to create and sustain an atmosphere of fear, in which communities are divided against each other, hatred and ignorance increase, and intrusion into daily life is normal.


This benevolent government has made or is to make great use of:

300 000 cctv cameras
6000 speed cameras
cameras at rubbish tips

...and many other methods, including chips in bins, company use of data sold by govenrment or other companies, the new NHS database, posted on below, ID cards, and the new transport plan, which will involve almost continuous surveillance of millions of vehicles.

Apart from occasional grumbling, we seem to have agreed that we must be watched all the time, whether to "save lives", or "protect the environment" or whatever; but the fact is, we're giving the government too much license to assume that we are murderous, world wrecking bastards who would destroy everything given half a chance, and that only the benevolent, extended government can stop us. Why can't we have a government that respects us as citizens (rather than which denigrates us as "polluters") and engages us as adults?

No: that would be too much to ask. MPs pay rise? Why not? Creating a feverish atmosphere of suspicion and intolerance doesn't come cheap you know.