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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 our ruling class walk all over us didn’t used to be true. There was an organised fight against the depredations and starvation visited on the working class with little quarter given. Communists were often arrested and beaten, workers would sabotage and occupy. If you wonder why we now have things like the NHS and used to have free education it’s because of this period. The ruling class were terrified we would take their toys away and introduced the reforms that created the quiet post-war period while holding on to the class-ridden, sclerotic British system underneath. This disarmed us, and we forgot who we are, calling ourselves middle class, and believing the good times were never going to end.
For example, if we look at the run up to the First World War, there was a period known as the Great Unrest where the emerging unions started to take on their owners there were incidents such as the 1911 Transport Strike in Liverpool(PDF). Working class hero Winston…
