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 Churchill sent hundreds of troops and police to attack the strikers, even stationing a warship in the Mersey to intimidate them. It had the opposite effect and the City was shut down with support coming from all over the country, except for moving food and other essentials where needed. This also shows the limits of the union's thinking: once they got what they wanted things were allowed to go back to normal and all that energy was lost. It was still a great victory, though. Several people died in the clashes with the troops, and the police were quite happy to provoke and break heads with the usual zero consequences.
When the troops returned after the 2nd World War all of this stuff was still well within living memory. This is why Attlee was allowed to do what he did.
So, let's look at the antics of the current Labour Party. There's a complicated-sounding issue where interest rates are too high. In essence, if interest rates are around the same value as the combination of inflation and growth then running a deficit as a government costs nothing. When they're too high, you have to introduce idiocy like austerity in order to stop the debt growing faster than it can be paid back. Remember, the Bank are bankers, as is Reeves, so they do things that work for bankers (as in the wealthy) and the rest of us don't figure. They're currently selling the bonds the government issued during the Covid lock down, this is done to reverse quantitive easing and instead perform quantitive tightening. The glut of bonds means no-one wants to buy them, so they have to promise high interest rates to make them worth it. Professor Richard J Murphy explains this mechanism here., There's no real reason to be doing this other than trying to force austerity on the quiet. There was no need to create the bonds in the first place, we have a sovereign currency and it was really a book keeping exercise, but that's a discussion for another day.
When you combine the forcing up of interest rates with low to no growth things look really bad. When you add this to them not being willing to pull even some the wealth that doubled during Covid back into the main economy it's a real pickle. Reeves has the power to order the Bank to stop selling the bonds, but she's a banker and won't. There's also the deceit that the Bank of England is be independent from political interference, but them selling the bonds shows they're the ones doing the interfering, forcing the interest rates up so Reeves will have to cut spending. We're all supposed to not notice that this is a political choice, and the interest rates/bonds thing is not being discussed in the corporate media at all. Of course, she has to do nothing of the sort.
The whole thing is a sham and a lie, just like the land that's fit for heroes. Austerity is a political choice, as is not taxing the wealthy. They want a land that's fit for bankers, and that isn't people like you and me.
The heroes had to fight to get the land they were supposed to have been given by their betters, and they did. We don't need anyone to tell us what's best for us, thanks. We will decide for ourselves. There's a long and proud tradition we can all pick up and lay claim to. Which land do we want to live in? The one built on winning back what's already ours, or one where the clowns continue to drown in Champagne?
