On buying a tablecloth

I wanted to buy a tablecloth yesterday so I wandered along to Sainsbury's to see what they had. Finding a tablecloth was the easy bit, but figuring out how big it was turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Needless to say the packaging only had the measurements in centimetres, which are just unfathomable numbers to me. I asked the girl at customer service what 180cm x 125cm came to and she looked at me blankly. Then she tried to find someone who might know, and when that fialed she scampered off to find a free computer so that she could Google it. Returning with a hapless look on her face she mumbled something about seeing if her desk diary had the information, which was when I told her to forget it and walked out without my tablecloth.

My next port of call was a discount warehouse that also sold tablecloths in the metric style that nobody understands. I found one that was 210cm x 150cm and I held it up to see if that action would inspire God to give me the size in feet and inches. Needless to say the bugger ignored me so I turned to a bloke who was stood next to me.

"Any idea how big 210cm x 150cm is, mate?

"Dunno, sounds big though, dunnit?"

"Yeah, but how big?"

"I think that 180cm is about six foot," he said, dubiously.

"I seem to remember that the wife told me that she was 1 metre 50 tall, and I think that's 150cm, isn't it?

"I suppose so," said the bloke.

"Well, I'm a midge's dick over six foot so this is taller than me," I said.

"And it's as wide as your missus is long," the bloke chipped in, happily.

"Should fit the table," I said, before thanking the bloke for his help.

So I got myself a tablecloth, but really, do we think that it is a good idea to use a system of measurement that very few British people even pretend to understand, on the principle that deep down inside we are all good European federasts?

Brigitte Eicke and her wartime diary

A quite wonderful diary that was written by a teenage girl in wartime Germany has just been published and is now being rubbished by the pure at heart. Der Spiegel says that she was "a cog in the wheels that kept Nazi Germany turning," and the Independent lambastes her prose as nothing more than a "banal account of everyday life."

Brigitte Eicke was 15 in 1942 and training as a secretary, who began writing the diary to improve her stenography skills. By all accounts she tells us about going to the cinema in an air raid, how she felt when her district was bombed and the joys of getting chatted up by some soldiers.

David Kynaston used a lot of similar diaries to write Austerity Britain, 1945-1951. None of the diaries deal with great events, and all are the accounts of ordinary people caught up in those extraordinary years. Yet I do not recall anyone damning those writers because they did not refer endlessly to the government and its actions.

Had this dairy been produced by a British girl then it would be hailed as an example of British pluck under fire, and how the people were determined to carry on with their lives as all hell raged around them. Brigitte is German so cannot be given the same treatment. She should have written an anti-Nazi screed to be taken seriously by people who were not even born when those terrible events were happening.

It is quite amazing to see the way in which modern, middle class liberalism seeks to set the terms of debate by presenting one narrative as heroic, or at least acceptable, and damning another as unacceptable and all because the work is not what the reviewer wants to read.

Especially when they are the same type of narratives written by the same type of people.

The Betrayal of the Working Class, Part Two

In the final paragraphs of part 1 of this blog I gave an example of the way in which the white working class, particularly males, were betrayed by “New” (liberal-left) Labour , citing Deputy Leader Harriet Harman's so-called “equality” proposals on employment.

Harman, the privately educated daughter of a solicitor and a Harley Street surgeon, and niece of the Countess of Longford, proposed that all groups of workers who could be designated by sexual orientation, religion, colour, ethnicity, age, disability and sex, had recourse to law if they claimed discrimination in employment opportunities on any of these grounds. Only white, heterosexual, able-bodied males, most of whom would, by sheer weight of numbers, be working class, were disbarred from doing so.

This was further proof the party had abandoned the utilitarian socialist left principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” for the narrow, liberal-left policy of championing diversity and minority rights, mainly those of immigrants, deliberately encouraging multiculturalism rather than emphasising integration into the long established, social and cultural structures of the host nation.

It was the liberal-left's equivalent of China’s cultural revolution. But unlike in China, as far as these cultural revolutionaries were concerned the UK's existing and long settled working class was irrelevant, even a hindrance to their objectives. Mao’s “Red Guards” aimed to destroy the “four olds” – old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas – by using peasants and workers to shatter the traditional ways they wanted replaced. But with Britain short on peasants, or even a proletariat in the Marxist sense, the liberal-left looked to other groups to achieve a rejection of past values.

For them minority rather than workers’ rights, coupled with multiculturalism, middle class liberal guilt over racism and what they considered the iniquities of  colonial “exploitation” - even residual shame over the slave trade despite the fact that that British imperialism had been at the forefront of ending it -  would be used to fracture the traditional structures responsible for what they regarded as the privilege, patriarchy and sexual repression that had blighted society in the past.

As far as the last two were concerned though  the attitudes of some of the new cultures now  embraced were often less enlightened than those of the host nation – eg: the treatment of women and gays by many Muslims, blacks and Afro Caribbeans.   But as was so often the case with these new ideologues such was their arrogance and belief in the “rightness” of their ideas any inconvenient contradictory evidence was ignored.

It was as if the ethos now driving them  was that if their policies proved detrimental to the WWC then so be it because they too were one of the “olds “, as much a part of the outdated traditional societal structure as the aristocracy and the Tory middle class.

In fact many people who would now smugly describe themselves  as of the new “concerned,  and caring” middle class, had little difficulty supporting these new policies as their employment status, financial  background and post-codes ensured relative immunity from their effects.  New immigrants settled in Tower Hamlets and Hackney not Hampstead, Islington or the affluent suburbs.

Although the class structure of the UK had not changed fundamentally the political philosophy of the growing middle class who were now a dominant force, certainly had.   This was centre left liberal rather than Tory and much more willing to accommodate Britain’s own cultural revolution.   

Forget the aristocracy, they were dinosaurs facing extinction or eccentric conversion to new causes, and in the new politics the WWC were equally antediluvian.  “Sun readers and chavs” whose votes equated to mob rule. Or as one particularly arrogant believer in the new politics put it “majoritarianism (sic)  hijacked by the tribal” proving, if proof was needed, the new ideology was neither liberal nor democratic.

The WWC's alienation  from the political process may have been disguised in recent years by the fall in voter turnout at general elections, down from 85% in 1950 to 60%  in 2001, the lowest for six decades. In '05 it rose to  just above that and in 2010 turnout of 65% was still the third lowest in 60 years. But by sheer weight of numbers it is statistically inconceivable that this reduction was due to anything other than working class abstention.     

“New” Labour victories relied on its move to the centre ground of politics with new “enlightened”  middle class liberal-left voters doing enough on such low turn-outs to compensate for the loss of its old working class constituency, many of whom no longer bothered to vote for a party from which they were estranged by policies they felt were often directly detrimental to their interests.

The essay from which this extract has been taken focused on the betrayal of the WWC by the intellectual left.  However we are now beginning to see something  similar on the Conservative right and this time it's traditional Tory grass roots supporters who are being betrayed.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Cameron's  enthusiastic, but as many Tory traditionalists would say,  unnecessary pursuit of gay marriage. In this they'd be joined by many from the working class and, it would appear, less strident members of the gay community itself, particularly as he has no mandate for such legislation.

Cameron himself may not have used  the phrase “swivel-eyed loons” to describe his party's long-standing members.  But when any new leader makes a virtue of “de-toxifying” the party he's inherited, and one of his most senior  ministers describes it's stance on issues which many traditionalists  previously supported as “nasty”, it's hardly  surprising they too are beginning to share the sense of disenfranchisement and betrayal inflicted on the white working class by the intellectual left.

* * *

This two part blog was supplied by Colin Harrow and was extracted from his essay “The Betrayal of the White Working Class by the Intellectual Left.” After a working life as a journalist he retired as Managing Editor of Mirror Group Newspapers

However he was born in the East End of London and has never forgotten his working class roots. A lifelong “Old” Labour supporter he describes himself as being on the radical left, a “Blairite” as in Eric (George Orwell) rather than Tony.

Although retaining an interest in politics in retirement he has re-invented himself as a painter and his work can be seen on www.colinharrowart.co.uk  

The Betrayal of the Working Class, Part One

This two part blog was supplied by Colin Harrow and was extracted from his essay “The Betrayal of the White Working Class by the Intellectual Left.” After a working life as a journalist he retired as Managing Editor of Mirror Group Newspapers

However he was born in the East End of London and has never forgotten his working class roots. A lifelong “Old” Labour supporter he describes himself as being on the radical left, a “Blairite” as in Eric (George Orwell) rather than Tony.

Although retaining an interest in politics in retirement he has re-invented himself as a painter and his work can be seen on www.colinharrowart.co.uk  

One of the most significant changes in UK politics since the 60s  has been the Labour Party’s abandonment of the white working class as its natural constituency..

For most of the 20^th. century its vote gave the  party its legitimacy. Without it no Labour government would have been elected.  Labour was first and foremost the political voice  of the working class.   However their relationship has now changed fundamentally and the growing alienation of the white working class (WWC) from its former natural political ally means it has been all but  disenfranchised.

When this happens to any section of society it is an affront to social justice. But when those affected are the largest single population group it threatens  democracy itself. Universal suffrage becomes a hollow pretence.   

People who feel unrepresented create a political vacuum, and when numbered in millions and parties like the BNP wait in the wings, warning bells should ring, not just within the Labour party, but in the country at large. 

The rise of parties on the far right in Europe who've capitalised on working class resentment over  immigration, cannot be ignored.  By moving its focus away from the interests of the WWC Labour has committed the biggest act of betrayal in British political history, and their acknowledged policy on immigration has been a major factor in this.

Peter Mandelson's recent statement  that Labour encouraged mass immigration, even to the point of sending out “search parties,”  and his admission that this had created employment problems, confirmed it, because those most affected were the WWC who constituted the bulk of the UK's workforce and it was their jobs that were most likely to be taken by immigrants.    

Mandelson's admission followed “New” Labour advisor Andrew Neather's revelation that the party encouraged immigration to make the UK “truly multicultural” and to “rub the right's noses in diversity.”   In fact  most of the  noses rubbed in multiculturalism and diversity belonged to  those without whose votes Labour would never have enjoyed a day in office. 

The old socialist left values Labour once espoused, based on the Utilitarian principle of “ the greatest good for the greatest number” had mutated into those of the modish, middle class,  metropolitan, metro-sexual,  liberal-left elite  obsessed with individual and minority rights. 

Their goal of inclusivity and special protection for minority groups, often out of all proportion to their numbers in the population,  was relentlessly pursued in all areas of public life even if this was at the expense of long-settled communities and meant air-brushing some of them, particularly  WWC males, out of the picture of British society.   

An example of this can be seen in the post office of a small town in the north of England (no doubt replicated elsewhere) where there are three shop window sized display posters promoting the GPO as “an essential part of everyday life.”  They are the only posters displayed.

One shows a young, mixed race boy, the second a woman in a sari carrying a young girl, and the third a Eurasian man also with a child.  The racial mix represented bears no relation to the town’s population which is overwhelmingly white.  

A second example was provided when I recently applied to renew my passport.  Of the 20 or so sample head shots advising how to present picture identification to accompany the application more than half showed either a mixed race male or an Asian/mid-eastern woman wearing a headscarf.  The others featured an elderly white woman or a child.   

There was not one representation of a white male. Seeing these would lead a visitor from another planet to conclude that white males, and in fact white women other than the elderly , were as much aliens in the community as the visitors themselves.

Of course minorities should not be ignored, or sidelined.   The extent to which any society protects their rights and includes them as full members of the community is a vital measure of any claim to call itself civilised. 

But to do so by pretending the politically acceptable image of society is one in which the  majority population is marginalised  is madness.   Minority rights should never be subservient to those of the majority.  They are equal.   But when they are given precedence, particularly when this is detrimental to the majority population in social housing and other public services , is not only perverse but a recipe for disaster for any political party promoting such policies.

However for the new liberal left any new minority group that could be identified and used “to rub the right's noses in diversity”  appears to have been automatically championed, invariably at the  expense of the WWC.

A clear demonstration of this was Harriet Harman's proposals on “equality” in employment giving employers the right to use race, ethnicity and sex as the ultimate arbiter in their choice of who should, or should not, be given a job. 

As the majority of employees in Britain are WWC males they were bound to be most affected by this legislation as every other group who could claim to designate themselves by sexual orientation, religion, colour, ethnicity, age, disability and sex, had recourse to law if they alleged discrimination in employment opportunities on any of these grounds.

Only white, heterosexual, able-bodied males, most of whom would, by sheer weight of numbers, be working class, were disbarred from doing so if they felt they had been discriminated against in favour of a member of one of these other groups.    They would be the sole victims of such “affirmative action.” If ever proof was needed of “New” (liberal-left) Labour's betrayal of the WWC it was Harman's so-called “equality” proposals.

Concludes tomorrow.