Sunday 11 April 2010

RIP Anna Walentynowicz

Her sacking from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in 1980 helped to spark the creation of Solidarity, the Solidarity that the people who have now taken over the Labour Party did not show with the eventually victorious trade union-based opposition to Communism in the Eastern Bloc, especially Poland, and elsewhere. None of that Christianity, patriotism or social conservatism for them. Those are features of Old Labour, sweetie.

Not that the people who now run the Conservative Party showed any with the eventually victorious non-racial, non-violent, non-Marxist, pro-Commonwealth opposition to apartheid. None of that pro-Commonwealth stuff for them. That's the Old Tories, sweetie.

Nor were these ostensible monetarists apparently even aware of the doubts about, or outright hostility towards, nuclear weapons articulated by Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch and, above all, Enoch Powell. One may doubt the patriotic, fiscally responsible or fiscally conservative effect of monetarism, but the intent, and therefore the anti-nuclear stance, was there at the start. Yet the second generation didn't seem to notice. And however much they claimed to idolise Powell, they never showed the slightest sign of agreeing with him about anything, or else they could not have been in any way devoted to Margaret Thatcher.

6 comments:

  1. Thank you for mentioning Anna Walentynowicz.

    I'm not British. I understand some, but not all, of your post.

    Do you feel like going into more detail for someone who is not up on how your parties reacted to Solidarity in 1980?

    Thanks if you have time for that.

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  2. Certainly.

    The trade unions were at that time heavily influenced by the Communist Party and its allies, so that, with honourable but extremely rare exceptions, no support was given (sometimes quite the reverse, in fact) to a movement made up of the same patriotic, socially conservative, often Catholic working-class campaigners for social justice who were in fact the unions' grassroots members and the Labour Party's core supporters.

    As for the Conservative Party, it likes to claim credit for bringing down the Soviet Bloc, even though its own finest minds always fully understood that it would inevitably collapse in exactly that way that it eventually did. In any objective, dispassionate way, you will search the Thatcher Government's record in vain for the slightest practical expression of patriotism, social conservatism, or public Christianity, while it duly scorned the very term "social justice".

    Look what capitalism has done to Eastern Europe, including Poland. Your enemy's enemy is not necessarily your friend. He could at least as easily be another of your enemies.

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  3. Harry's Place are pretending to mourn her. A Straight Left site, what a nerve.

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