A Glass In Their Throats

Rod Liddle writes:

If you fancy a laugh, and have the time to spare, check out the website for REVOLUTION, aka Permanent Revolution, the Trot group some of whose members smashed up Conservative Central Office this week. You might also check out Workers' Power, the Trot group from which REVOLUTION split a year or two back for the usual Pythonesque ideological reasons. Both are, I think, members of the Fifth International, unless they’ve already split from that too. Of course they are committed to overthrowing the oppressive capitalist system by force and handing power to the worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkiing classs. Their members are called Laura and Emily and James and Giles and they have never ever met anyone from the working class. And if anyone from the working classes actually met them they’d most likely ram a glass in their throats.

But still, hey, they’re kids and we should not begrudge them their moments of youthful rebellion occasioned by a fatuous and outdated ideology which the rest of the world has long since left behind. Nobody, however, is calling for these organisations to be banned, despite the fact that they are actively working – however ineptly – for the destruction of our country. Compare that to the odium heaped upon Muslim groups who do not smash anything up, or hurt anyone, but nonetheless call for the overthrow of the state. REVOLUTION and Workers' Power get away with it because they are on the political left and they are white. People want to ban Hizb ut Tahrir because they are on the political right and are, in the main, darkies.

And then there are the anarchists. Anarchist parties are even funnier than Trotskyist parliamentary candidates.

Are these the new Poll Tax protestors? Oh, yes. It is not my concern to defend the Poll Tax. It was in many ways misconceived, and in every imaginable way badly implemented. But if the people who had complained most vociferously about it had been the poor (who in reality had it paid for them through the benefits system, or paid far less than they do now, or both), then it would still be in place. No government since 1979 has cared tuppence about the poor. When Thatcher blamed an underclass for rioting against being dragged into any sort of civic participation, and blamed Major and Heseltine for giving in to that underclass, then she was right. Just not in the way that she thought.

That underclass was not economic, but moral. It was not the poor. It was well-heeled students, dossing graduates, and people like that. That was why there was any surrender. There would have been none to the poor. The restoration of the rates in all but name was paid for by a two and a half per cent increase in VAT, which was hardly any way to help the poor. All the old middle-class rates exemptions (students, clergy, &c) were brought back; they remain in place to this day.

Those are the people who did, and do, object to any sort of civic participation; extremely poor people either ignore such things or never hear about them in the first place, rather than objecting to them. They so objected because of the words and deeds of Margaret Thatcher, with her active scorn for the public realm and her instruction to her followers that their good fortune was their moral superiority, so that others less privileged were manifestly less worthy.