Musings on Black Monday and the death of Thatcher

Ted Bruning of Cambridge Left Unity muses on Thatcher’s death, IDS’s benefit cuts, the right’s war on Immigration, falling standards of living and why we need Left Unity.

I keep getting shared posts on Facebook urging me to be “Proud to be British” and usually illustrated with union jacks, old soldiers, and/or WWII RAF fighter planes. In the past, when I bothered to comment at all, I’d always say that I wasn’t “proud” to be British because I’m British by accident of birth, and I’m only proud of my own achievements. But, I would add, I was often “grateful” to be British.

Now I’m not even grateful. Instead, I’m frightened.

Two events – IDS’s Black Monday and the death of Mrs Thatcher – have brought out into the open a long-simmering polarisation of opinion within the working class with an added dimension of contempt and loathing that is deeply worrying for the future. The abuse being flung about so liberally on social media between, on the one hand, working-class Tories who fetishize Mrs T (forgetting the mess she left!) and dismiss all on benefits as scroungers (even though most people on benefits are actually in work) and, on the other, those who really do remember the carnage of the ‘80s and understand that whether you’re in work or not is largely a matter of dumb luck looks close to descending into 1930s-style street-fighting. Luckily for all of us, having a good rant on FB or Twitter seems to be a substitute for this kind of thing rather than a prelude to it, which perhaps explains why attendance at the average EDL event rarely makes double figures.

But where does this bitterness, this hostility, come from? It’s easy to blame the Sun and the Daily Mail; but people buy them voluntarily, and the media make their money by fanning and inflaming passions rather than creating them. I think, myself, that the root of it all is a sense of powerlessness. Got a job? Your employer could go bust tomorrow and you don’t have a say in the matter. Voted in 2010? Turns out the manifesto you voted for was a pack of lies. And whose fault is it (and here the Sun and the Daily Mail really do take the blame)? Scroungers. Asylum seekers. Migrant workers.

It’s got so bad now that to try to explain a few facts is to invite a slap. That refugees (sorry, asylum seekers) get almost no benefits. That migrant workers contribute disproportionately, paying their full whack of direct and indirect taxes and subsidising the schools and hospitals they’re accused of swamping. That 99.9% of unemployed people are desperate for work and that benefits simply don’t meet the cost of living.

Where will all this lead? Unless we can turn the tide of ignorance and paranoia, we can look forward to generations of working-class people being intimidated, blackmailed and hoodwinked into accepting ever lower pay, ever worse working conditions, an ever more degraded quality of life. It’s a spiral. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to break out of.

All over Britain, though, people are coming together, often in small single-issue groups outside the political mainstream – because who trusts Labour? – to fight back. The anger and energy of organisations like Occupy and Black Triangle are real forces for change, but only if they can unite and focus. Can Left Unity be the nucleus around which these forces can crystallise? The answer’s in the name…