Monday 6 November 2017

It's about time I spoke again to the Nation

Well, what a tangled web some people seem to weave.Whose covering what up?In a world dominated by a 'superpower' that manages to elect a 100 carat moron as it' President and 52% of the British population can believe a phoney statement written on the side of a bus  I suppose anything can happen.
And that appears to be the new reality,fake news has always been with us, the only difference today is that the fake news is probably the real news and the pillocks who denounce the news as fake are themselves fakes .
Right now we are in the middle of the crisis of confidence in the behaviour of members of Parliament and Cabinet ministers and who knows who else? I have no doubt that there are some shady people operating within the palace of Westminster, But that's hardly news fake or otherwise. People with power tend to abuse that in the process of self-aggrandisement and the usual construct of ego tripping.
Why should we be surprised, what bothers me, from a socialist perspective if the anyone should be surprised. Way back at beginning of the last century when the Labour Party was created it was set up to represent the interests of working people unlike the Tories and the Liberals who represented the then, as now, the power elites who owned most of the wealth and behaved with the arrogance of the ruling class. Parliament is not a neutral benevolent institution designed to promote fairness and equality or justice. For a century the Labour Party has tried to amend and to make Parliament more representative of the interests of working people. It has made some progress over the years it has sometimes defended the interests of those who elected it to represent them and has fought against the worst iniquities of the class society which we still find ourselves in.
There are some who believe that the class war is a historic war, over and done with and we all live in the Sunny uplands of a benign meritocratic society. That we are all equal, that we will have the same chance, that we all benefit from the system equally
. Yet the news about the way the rich and their hedge funds and their secret companies and their offshore investments are able to salt away billions of pounds without paying taxShould really remind us all about the society that we live in. Why even our own beloved Mrs Saxe-Coberg Gotha can manage to hide millions of pounds in some territory in the Caribbean really demonstrates what's going on. Of course we are told that dear didn't know where money was going, the old dear who guards seriously her wealth and her position, to believe that she didn't know her advisers were stuffing chunks of fortune in offshore accounts is a bit like believing in fairies are the divine right of kings.
By now Parliament should be able to put a stop to the shenanigans of those who rule, be they the old aristocracy or Lord Ashcroft. But then that is assuming that Parliament has the will or the capacity to change the power structures in this country.
And so I come back to my original point about what's going on in Westminster today that it attracting so much prurient interest, the sex lives of the denizens of the Gilded Palace. What I find disturbing is Not simply the arrogance and exploiting of positions of power but the dreadful reality that the reasons why so many of those young people who are assaulted do not report what happened to them is that they will damage their career chances. Working as an intern should not be seen as a step towards a parliamentary career, for a socialist working in Westminster is not a job in itself but a task to help the liberation of the people that they are supposed to be working for,And that is the core of the problem, MPs certainly from the Labour Party should be not professional bourgeois .politicians but rather representatives of their communities.It seems to me whether Labour representative calls himself herself a politician then that's where the rot sets in. The poet EE Cummings said of politician" he's an arse on which everyone sits except a man."
Politics is not a trade or profession, it is not a route for someone to make a career, or to get rich, or to be powerful, or to be idolised – the best people in parliament have been those who came from being elected by their workmates to represent them against the bosses to fight for their rights in the workplace and to serve not for themselves but for those who have no voice and need someone to act as a spokesperson. I despise those in the Labour Party who see themselves as politicians and not socialists, who see a career structure be it as a full-time union official, being a councillor, or being an intern or a Parliamentary Assistantis that will look good on their CV When they go for interview to a constituency party.