George Orwell, in his book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, describes in detail the physical hell that Britain’s coal miners had to endure in return for a living wage:
Most of the things one imagines in hell are in there - heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.
The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National ... by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.
This strength that the miners exhibited, invisibly, underground had to have some counterpart on the surface. And so the National Union of Mineworkers fought on their behalf to defend their safety and their livelihoods.
Sixty years later Guardian journalist Seamus Milne, in his book ‘The Enemy Within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners’, detailed how the vendetta that Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Conservative government held against the NUM. Margaret Thatcher regarded the miners, with their collective recourse to industrial action to defend their jobs, their wages and the safety regulations that kept them alive, as ‘the enemy within’. The Chancellor Nigel Lawson felt that the Government had a duty to confront and destroy the miner’s industrial power akin to facing ‘the threat of Hitler in the late 1930s’. The bitter strike which resulted lasted for almost a year and was lost, narrowly, by the miners.
The consequences for the Labour movement were, just as the Tories had calculated, catastrophic. Membership of trade unions has almost halved since Thatcher and Co. began their all out assault on trade union power in 1979, and had already diminished considerably by 1992, when the Government announced that it was to close a third of Britain’s coal pits, with the loss of 31,000 jobs. There were huge protests against the closures but the NUM itself had already lost a great deal of members and a lot of the support which had sustained it through the strike eight years earlier. The Labour Party, which was in the process of concluding that if it was ever to regain power it would have to abandon most of its founding principles, offered no support whatsoever and the battle was lost.
Now what pits survive in Britain are in private hands, employing a tiny amount of people in very unsafe conditions. The communities that came into being because of the mines are now some of Europe’s poorest towns, suffering from high levels of long-term unemployment and heroin addiction. Not that the world has no need of coal, or that its production is not profitable; the regular news reports from China about tragic accidents show us where and how it is obtained, and at what price. ( Read more... )
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Provocative funnyman Charlie Brooker just took the words right outta my mouth and wrote something about the current fashion for hoisting the England flag out of car windows:
Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation's dimbos to wear dunce's caps in public. No one would stand for it. There'd be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and co to the Nazis. We'd see rioting in the streets - badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.
Those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea - but they shouldn't be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they're flags. And flags are rubbish.
I'm not sure if I dislike flags as such, although I certainly share some of this writer's concern about recent displays of my country's emblem:
Is it just me, or is anyone else slightly worried about the number of St George's flags flying from road vehicles right now? Of course, these displays of patriotism are to be expected in the build-up to next month's World Cup - which England enters with more confidence than at any time since 1970. This time, though, the flags seem to be on show earlier than ever.
In fact, they started appearing the day after the local elections on May 4. Apart from the Labour meltdown and the Tories getting their first respectable vote for 14 years, the big story of the election was the rise of the British National party, which gained 28 seats, nearly 20 in London alone. Could it be that many of the England flag-wavers are in fact supporters of this racist party, glorying in their "victory" and celebrating their racial pride?
I agree with both articles in that I think that the only reason anyone would want to buy and display their country's flag is because they are either right-wing or a little bit thick - or possibly, in a tiny minority of cases of course, both. Taking pride in the place where you happen to have been born is, in my humble onion, akin to holding up a piece of paper with 'MY MUM'S BETTER THAN YOUR MUM' written on it. At the same time, it is true to say that there have been a lot of people who aren't white proudly displaying the flag, so it may well be that we are witnessing one of those 'look at me I'm queer!' reclaiming-abusive-words-and-symbols-from-the-right-wing moments. I sincerely hope so. ( Read more... )
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My New Favourite Person, Matthias Matussek, a journalist for Der Spiegel magazine, wrote recently in the Guardian's Germany special:
It was after repeated futile complaints about the primitive image of Germany cultivated by the English (as Nazis and frozen-faced engineers), that a plan was hatched by a group of German politicians and diplomats, among them my brother, Thomas, who was, until March, German envoy to Britain. What if they flew in a few English history teachers and wined and dined them like little potentates at the government's expense? If, after their stay, the teachers knew more about Heine's poems, Claudia Schiffer's golden tresses, Beethoven's symphonies, Humboldt's adventures, Willy Brandt's biography and, ja, if we must, notorious "pop idol" judge Dieter Bohlen (Germany's answer to Simon Cowell) - the good news would gradually filter down to the pupils.
Nearly two dozen teachers were invited to Berlin, Dresden and Bonn. They resided in five-star hotels, attended the opera, sauntered around the Reichstag, and - as emissaries of not just England but Britain - exchanged platitudes with representatives of the German nation. This red-carpet treatment cost German taxpayers some €52,000 (£35,000).
And what did the rotters do? They spurned all the attention as though it were some kind of indecent proposition. "It wasn't a great experience," a paper quoted one teacher, Peter Liddell, as saying. At the opera, the woman next to him nodded off, he reported. They went along for the ride. But that wouldn't change the curriculum, which - after all - calls for Hitler, Hitler and more Hitler. A colleague summed it up for the record: "Nazis are sexy. Evil is fascinating."
There are three simple lessons here. One: the British have zero interest in the new Germany. Two: the British have zero interest in the old Germany. Three: the British are interested only in Nazi Germany.
And that, I would say, is not a German problem, but a British one.
Gut gesagt! I'd imagine that in the Rwanda-Somalia-Cultural Revolution style chaos of the British Secondary School Classroom, amidst the shouting and the stabbing and the smoke, the teacher is comforted by the fact that there is always a magic word which will make the students shut up, sit down and pay attention. That word is 'Hitler'.( Read more... )
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