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A land that’s fit for bankers
No-one is taught this in school any more, if they ever were, but just after the first world war, when millions died to preserve the imperial empire of our owners, the British government promised the returning soldiers that they would live in a land that’s fit for heroes. Of course, and as usual, this was a lie. The 1920s gave us the stock market crash, hoarded food being thrown in the sea because no profit could be made from feeding starving people with it, and mass unemployment. It was a bitter time to try and survive if you weren’t wealthy.
In Britain we had the Jarrow Crusade, a march from Jarrow in Tyneside to London, protesting starvation and unemployment. There was a deep contradiction in the working class movement at this time. What became the modern Labour Party worked with the employed, in the trade unions, trying to keep jobs and conditions in the face of the capitalist onslaught and stay respectable. The newly formed Communist party tended to work with the unemployed. There were huge battles, and a general strike in 1926 that the traditional unions undermined.
The complacent picture we are often sold now, when there is an apparent rule of law, people don’t get angry and take physical action to stop things happening they don’t agree with, is a relatively new phenomenon. The complaint you often hear, that compared with the French working class, we just let…
