The Exile

Have a great weekend!

This is why America is winning her war to subjugate Iraqnam. Let the Iranazoids see America's finest in training and then tremble at what awaits them when these brave men, with their state of the art equipment, are deployed to reduce them to submission.

Following on from last night's posting which was concerned with Polish immigration in Crewe, there is a theory kicking around left-wing circles that one of the reasons for Nu-Labour's decision to allow all and sundry into the country is a desire for revenge. Revenge against whom you may wonder? Revenge against the working-class who voted for Thatcher is the answer. I heard this theory articulated on two different occasions in London recently, and I must say that it has a superficial attraction.

The problem with it is that the more you think about it, the less logical it is. The northern working class loathed Thatcher with a passion, and it is the northern working class, in places like Crewe, who are finding themselves left behind as foreign workers take their jobs. By way of contrast, those creatures who were duped into falling for the Tory line are only now coming to realise what a big mistake it all was - and they live in the south, by and large.

My theory is that Nu-Labour is basically following the old Tankie line - the one that said that the party had lost confidence in the working class. Let's face it, Nu-Labour has always loathed us. We smoke, laugh at the likes of Roy "Chubby" Brown and Bernard Manning, and don't give a tinker's cuss about events in various third world shitholes. To make matters worse, we are not interested in lifestyle politics, or we are positively hostile to them.

How much nicer it must be for the Nu-Labourites to only have to deal with the East Europeans. If you think about it, those chancers actually share all those Nu-Labour aspirational values that Blair was always going on about. In other words, they want to get on within the framework of capitalism.

Now as far as we are concerned, work is that place where we go to get our money. Employer's place, employer's profits and employer's problems - that's always been our attitude. That's not to say that we don't want to get on as well - we do, but by making the boss pay us more money for less work.

So, the theory goes, the Eastern Europeans are allowed in as the new working class. We increasingly become the unmentionables, the helots, to be hated and feared. To be corralled on our estates, thus to provide an income for that new colonial caste of social workers, council managers and teachers that I have previously discussed.

It's just a theory of mine, and we are never going to get any Nu-Labourite to confirm its veracity. However, it has a certain internal consistency and simplicity that makes me think that it is closer to the truth of what is actually going on in Britain than anything else that I have heard up to now.

Even if the theory itself is flawed, and government policy was not in any way based on ideas like that, then the effects of that policy are such as to ensure that the outcome is the same as if it had been the intention all along: we are the new helots and there is no escaping that fact.

Labour has tried to diffuse the row over the 10p tax rate with benefits all round, obviously in the hope that this will be enough to bolster the party's showing in next week's Crewe by-election. However, there is one factor that all the benefits in the world won't alter, and that is the number of Polish workers who now live in Crewe and who compete with the locals for jobs.

At least 6,000 Poles now live in the town out of a total population of less than 50,000, and the unpublicised effects of this will probably be yet another factor that sticks the boot into Nu-Labour's hopes of holding the seat.

A few websites do discuss the issue, and there the reaction is mixed. However, as this Crewe blogger makes plain, most people sit around in the pubs and complain, rather than make their views clear on-line. That said, reading the comments that the posting elicited, it seems clear to me that Polish immigration is going to be a major negative factor for Nu-Labour next week.

It could have been so very different, couldn't it? When Britain had an influx of Commonwealth immigrants in the post-war years the Labour government headed by Harold Wilson pushed the first Race Relations Acts through parliament to prevent management scum from paying immigrant workers less than their British counterparts.

Today, Nu-Labour has pretty much left all the old anti working class legislation that the Tories passed in place. The result of this is that wage rates in places like Crewe are reduced across the board. That might not be a problem for a Polish worker who just wants to make a few bob before he heads off back home, but it will probably turn out to be yet another nail in the coffin of Nu-Labour, as the locals in Crewe refuse to turn out to vote for the party that has so signally failed to represent their interests.

Are you a cat fight fan? If you are then get on over to The Money Blog and sit back and watch the antics of at least one participant in in an electronic fight to the finish between God knows how many harridans.

I am still not quite sure what is going on, and to be honest I don't care all that much. This is the posting that got the girls a-trembling and my take on the situation over there has just this minute been posted.

Heaven only knows if they'll come back today, but even if they don't I still urge all aficionados of the battling fishwife genre to pay a visit to The Money Blog and sit back, jaws open, at the total and complete lunacy of it all.

Just over two years ago I argued that a smoking ban might just be a good thing in the long run. It would act to remind ordinary working class of just how much the middle class vermin wanted to control them, and just how little their opinions counted for these days. Back in March of this year I predicted that Labour will lose the next General Election. The only thing that I want to add to that now is that the smoking ban looks set to be a rather bigger issue than I thought when I made the prediction.

Across the country more and more working class people are uniting around a growing banner of opposition to the smoking ban. The ban effects us every single day because we are the ones who still smoke. As I said in that March 2006 posting, the ban is galvanising people into action. I just didn't expect that it would happen so quickly, nor that the opposition would manage to organise itself so well.

Luton is not a place that you think of when it comes to working class militancy, but that town is one of the places where the two Labour MPs face defeat at the hands of working class activists who are outraged at the smoking ban.

The pubs themselves look set to become Tory campaigning offices, with their walls plastered with anti-Labour propaganda, in much the same way as they were a century ago when faced with the threat of the temperance backed Liberals.

This is an issue that is still under the political radar, but it is rapidly becoming a very big issue on the council estates that Labour needs to win if it is to remain in government. As I have said elsewhere, in a world in which the two main parties are in pretty total agreement on economic matters, then social issues are what divides them and how people vote on those social issues will decide the outcome of the next election.

Smoking looks set to become one of the very big issues. If David Cameron wants to win as much as he seems to, then he should offer repeal of the anti-smoking legislation as part of his Tory Party programme.

I'm having a lazy night here at The Exile, but don't let that trouble you because the postings are a-hopping over at The Money Blog.

The main item on the agenda is a report on revenge. . . That is to say how to get it when you need it. Just pop over there and read it for yourself, it's well worth it.

Heading the night's entertainment is a TV advert from about 1982. How to lose weight by getting AIDS, or Ayds, or something. Anyway, for some reason the advertising campaign failed - I can't think why.

See you at The Money Blog!

Labour looks set to lose the Crewe by-election on the 22nd May. That governments lose seats in by-elections isn't news, but this loss may very well be due to Labour's misreading of working class attitudes towards the upper class.

As you can see from this report, Labour is trying to present the Tory candidate as a son of privilege, a toff, in other words. The problem is that working class people tend not to object all that much to the toffs - it's the middle-class that they despise.

If that is hard to grasp, then consider the fact that Boris Johnson has just been elected as mayor of London. Consider also all those working class people who once voted for Churchill, MacMillan, Eden and then Home in the 1950s and 60s. It may be argued that Home lost the 1964 election, but it was by the narrowest of margins, and that was in spite of Harold Wilson's constant jibes in the Commons about Home's aristocratic origins.

The simple truth is that ordinary people do not particularly dislike the upper class, partly because they are removed from working class lives, but mainly because quite often those same toffs are willing to vote for measures that working class people support. The Tories in the 1950s used to gloat that they had built more council houses than Labour, and at the same time they went out of their way to appease the unions.

Compare working class attitudes to those earlier Tories with the atavistic loathing that was directed at the likes of Thatcher and Tebbit. That loathing was only partly due to actual policies: a big chunk of it came from the knowledge that those creatures were close enough to us to be recognisable as being akin to the foremen and under managers at work.

So Labour is on course to lose Crewe. One of the reasons is that it is attacking the type of person that Labour voters are indifferent too. The targets they should go for are the children of those foremen and under managers: the social work scum, teaching trade and local government jobsworths.

Labour will not do that because those chancers are the new party activists, councillors and client voters. Labour can have them or it can have its traditional voters, but it can't have both. All their whining about toffs won't change that.

I fell about laughing when this one arrived in my mailbox. I hope that you find it as entertaining as I did and we'll be back for more fun and games next week.