The Exile

All across the web we are reading hundreds of comments from people who loath the Tories and cannot believe that they are going to support David Davis. They have a point, because for millions of us the thought of voting Tory makes our flesh crawl. That said, if we look at the Davis Affair in the context of the ongoing realignment in British politics, what is happening starts to make perfect sense.

One of the signs that a realignment is under way is a volatility within the political parties, as they cast around for policies that will bolster their positions. The Davis strategy seems to have as its aim, at least in part, a drive to recover those liberal middle class voters who deserted the Tory Party when it was led by Thatcher. Most went off into the Liberal-Democrat camp until Blair tempted them into the Nu-Lab tent in time for the 1997 election. They are the group that is most outraged by Nu-Labour's drive to intern all and sundry for 42 days without charge. It is highly likely, therefore, that Davis will bring them back into the Tory fold, which let's face it, is where they probably feel most at home.

For its part, Nu-Labour is desperately threshing about looking for policies that will bring back the lost working class voters. The problem that they have is that they cannot raise taxes to do it, because that would only encourage their remaining middle class voters to abandon the party even faster than they are doing so already.

So the governing party is trying to tempt them back on the cheap - which is what this legislation is all about. The problem is that this strategy is predicated upon the notion that working class people are stupid enough to forget that they have now been treated with contempt for over a decade. Sadly for Nu-Labour the voting figures do not agree with that notion.

To put things in a nutshell, the Tories will recover their lost voters and Nu-Labour will continue along the path to extinction.

Once the putrid corpse of Nu-Labour has been consigned to its grave, then the new parties and groups that are already being formed can be expected to unite under one banner. Once that happens the realignment will be complete and the normal balance of party politics will have been restored.

In an amazing twist to the saga of David Davis' resignation and the forthcoming by-election for his seat, the Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews has pledged his support to Davis and will campaign for him.

In a further move that is guaranteed to wipe the smirk of the faces of Nu-Labour creatures, the newly ennobled former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, has also pledged to oppose the 42 day detention law when it reached the House of Lords.

With an eye to bolstering his civil libertarian platform in general, Davis yesterday pledged to support the removal of anyone found to be innocent of a crime from the DNA database. He also pledged to work for tougher laws to control the ever increasing use of CCTV cameras.

Nu-Labour for its part now seems to be seriously considering running a stooge candidate for the seat. John Smeaton the Glasgow Airport baggage handler who helped foil a terrorist plot is a name that is being bandied around.

Given the kicking that one blogger got when he floated this idea, that fact that Nu-Labour is even thinking about this shows just how desperate they are.

I really should go to bed but since Nu-Labour is busy writing its suicide note I thought that it was all too good to pass up on. As I reported in my last posting, a Nu-Labour hack named Luke Akehurst is having his nuts slow roasted over his suggestion that:

It was the "we" bit that first caught my eye, because that is the bit that suggests to the neutral observer that what this pillock really wants is a Nu-Labour stooge candidate.

Anyway, all hell is now breaking loose all across the web. A survivor of the 7/7 attacks in London named Rachel has weighed in to say that she "spits at his repellent idea", and if you think that's a bit rough you really should have a look at the rest of the comments.

Not to be outdone, lots of other buggers are also getting stuck in. The Libertarian Party in a posting headed "Lift a stone, find a Labour activist," called the idea "repulsive". Little Luke got so vewy angwy that he left a comment which simply said: "fuck you lot". It's so nice to see Nu-Labour toadies getting all hot and bothered, it really fucking is.

Later on today when people wake up is when the fun should really start. I must be honest and say that watching Nu-Labour hung out to dry is very, very entertaining.

Update, 15 June 2008, 3.00am

The little spaz is really losing it now. "Come round to my place and say that to my face," says Luke, who is hard, isn't he? Aye, hard as shit and twice as manky. I just love it when middle class pretty boys get upset I really do.

David Davis the Tory shadow Home Secretary has resigned his seat in the commons and will fight a by-election over the vote to extend detention without charge to 42 days.

The main result of this for us is that we get to sit back and watch whilst various types tell us how meaningless this gesture is. Unfortunately for them, the commentators at their postings tend not to agree with this line. As for Davis himself, he wrote a piece for the Guardian and support for his stand seems pretty solid, and that amongst the Guardian's readers to boot. One prime Nu-Labour spaz even suggested that someone - presumably Nu-Labour HQ - should run a stooge, pro-detention candidate, and is being thoroughly roasted for it as I write.

The government has been after a 42 day detention period for some time, but the way this has been handled is a quite wonderful new nail in their coffin. Deals that were cut with various parliamentary factions to get the vote through have only succeeded in making the government look even more sleazy than it did already.

David Davis by way of contrast is coming over in the public eye as a man of principle, who is prepared to put that principle above his parliamentary career. When he is returned to the Commons in three weeks, he will be one of the few MPs who can claim to speak for ideology and principle with a straight face. He will make Nu-Labour's pretty boys look very small indeed.

Let's talk about tits. More specifically, let's talk about big tits: the type of big tits who make up Nu-Labour and who managed to lose Crewe & Nantwich pretty dramatically.

The Tories took the seat with a massive 17.6% swing. Turnout at 58.2% was only slightly down on the general election's 60%. The full results are:

No doubt by the time people read this in Britain the excuses will be rolling thick and fast. Ignore them all, is my advice, because what we have here is more than just a by-election defeat.

This is the end of Nu-Labour. It started with the general election of 1997 when so many working class people saw through the little Fettes fuckboy and simply refused to vote. It continued at subsequent elections that saw Nu-Labour returned with middle class votes and the old Labour residuum. Now that residuum has gone and what is left is a gaping hole in the political spectrum that a new working class party will eventually fill.

The realignment is not yet over, but Crewe & Nantwich is yet another sign that it is under way.

The polls haven't even opened yet for the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, but Paddy Power is one bookmaker that has already started paying out to those punters who backed the Tories to grab the seat.

The question now being asked is who will take the second place slot? The assumption has always been that it would be Nu-Labour, but the money seems to be heading in the direction of the Liberal-Democrats.

Remember that Crewe is a working class railway town that fought the Tory privatisation of the railways tooth and claw. In 1997 Nu-Labour came along and did sweet fuck all about that privatisation.

Crewe isn't going to vote for scum like that, so let's hope that Nu-Labour does finish well down the pack. The new Tory majority will come from the leafy suburb that is Nantwich.

To any Nu-Labourite who reads these words, I hope that he remembers that during the Thatcher years Crewe was a sea of red at election times, with almost every house sporting its Labour poster. This defeat is part of the price that Nu-Labour must pay for the betrayal of so many hopes, and so many desires for revenge.

Having tried to paint the Tories as the party of the upper class for the benefit of the Crewe & Nantwich voters, it is now emerging that Tamsin Dunwoody, the Nu-Labour candidate is not only the grand-daughter of a baroness, but that she owns a stately pile of her own in Wales. Oh, and the top hatted fellow on the left of the above picture, just happens to be an ex-public schoolboy. People, even your friendly Exile couldn't make shit like this up.

So what's the line for today's fun and frivolity? You could vote for Gemma Garett, the large boobed, firm buttocked beauty pictured on the left. Gemma started out as a joke candidate, but Political Betting now sees her as the one who could take serious votes off Nu-Labour. Given the sympathy that should have come her way when Nu-Labour insulted her at the start of the campaign, to say nothing of her incredibly dignified response, that might very well be enough to give her a respectable vote.

If you are determined to vote for a serious party, rather than an individual, why not consider giving your vote to the UKIP? Remember that it was the Tories and the CBI who originally supported Britain's entry into the European Union. They obviously thought that it would be good for them, and so it has been. Equally obviously if something is good for them then it must be bad for us.

However, you could decide that it would be nice to be on the winning side today. The party that will win the election is the bollocks to 'em all party. That would be a great way to demonstrate your contempt, wouldn't it? Just sit at home.

Don't vote: it only encourages them.

The Crewe Blog is running a poll of the candidates for Thursday's Crewe & Nantwich by-election. Your friendly Exile thought long and hard before casting his vote for the lovely Miss Great Britain, Gemma Garret, who just happens to be standing. The buxom young sweetie has been the victim of some Nu-Labour dirty tricks, and would probably welcome a vote from you. So pop on over to the Crewe Blog and give her one. . .

Could the UKIP be the dark horse in this race? According to that same poll they are just ahead of the pack with 27% of the votes cast.

Actually, I would not be all that surprised if the UKIP did well. Contrary to what the Nu-Labourites want people to believe, the party is not of the far-right. Its policy of withdrawal from the EU is something that most leftists would agree with - as would many traditional Labour voters. As usual these days, the chancers who have taken control of the Labour Party want us to believe that they still represent, in some small way, a socialist position. They don't, but that doesn't stop them screaming that EU withdrawal is a rightist argument.

The opinion polls, whether they are from the Guardian or the Independent, are showing that Nu-Labour is about as unpopular as it can get and meltdown seems to be on the horizon.

Peter Hain MP has argued that the only road to salvation lies in appealing to both the working class and what he calls the "aspirational voters". On one level he is quite correct, but Nu-Labour has now got to the stage where the circle can no longer be squared.

That is the key to understanding this looming disaster. In the past, Labour could win because it gave just enough economic goodies to the working class, coupled with just enough social ones to the middle class. From 1997 onwards it used the working class as a donkey vote and both its economic and social policies were aimed at the middle class.

Since 1997 more and more working class people have responded to this by disengaging from politics. Now even the most bovine Nu-Labour supporter realises that there are no longer enough donkeys left to win the formerly safe seats that the party took for granted. As for the middle class that the party wooed so assiduously, they are cheesed off by wars and economic failure.

It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Nu-Labour is trailing badly in the Crewe and Nantwitch by-election and it seems unlikely that they can make up the lost ground in time for the vote on Thursday. If that happens then we really are seeing the end of the whole, wretched Nu-Labour project. The party will struggle along for another two years, and will then face extinction at the polls.

What is happening is that across the country the tribal link that connected the urban working class to the Labour Party is being broken. The habit of voting Labour because it is the party of the working man has almost gone: and a bloody good thing that is to be sure.

Out of the wreckage, new parties will emerge, as is already happening in South Wales. Eventually they will come together to form a party or coalition that will represent the core values of that urban working class. Values of social conservatism and economic radicalism, instead of the other way round.

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.

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.

One of the problems with living abroad is that a lot of events back home tend to get missed. Last night I argued that a realignment of British politics was under way - I just didn't realise quite how far advanced that realignment was. My thanks to the anonymous commentator at that posting for the heads-up.

In Wales certainly the realignment seems to be very advanced indeed. People's Voice is a new movement that is based in the south Wales' valleys and advocates just the kind of solid, old-Labour policies that are needed to ensure that Nu-Labour's journey to the cemetery is not long delayed. It was registered as a political party last year, so hopefully it will soon start to spread beyond its original home.

The movement's origins date back to the General Election of 2005 when the Labour Party decided that what the constituency of Blaenau Gwent needed was an all-female short-list for the Labour nomination. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for Peter Law, who up to then had sat in the Welsh Assembly under the Labour banner. He ran for election as an independent and overturned a 19,000 Labour majority to take the seat.

Labour was forced to apologise for this nonsense, but that didn't stop them trying it on again the following year, after Peter Law's sudden death in 2006. Labour ran one of their smooth, nice and neat candidates, who had previously worked in the media and then as a PR man.

People's Voice supported Trish Law, Peter's widow, for the Assembly seat, and a local electrician named Dai Davies for the Parliamentary one. Both proceeded to romp home to victory in the two by-elections. Since then the party has seen other victories at council level.

The fact that South Wales has a new party that seems to be enjoying a great deal of success does not mean that the realignment of British politics is over, far from it. Furthermore, People's Voice is still only one small voice, but as it and other small, local parties embed themselves into the popular culture that voice will get louder and louder.

Slowly but surely, the British working class is finally beginning to get its act together.

A realignment is taking place in British politics, and it is now just possible to see the outlines of how that reshaped political landscape will look. That a realignment is taking place is beyond doubt; the Nu-Labour strategy of treating the working class with contempt because they have nowhere else to go, whilst competing with the Tories for the votes of the aspiring lower-middle-class, was always doomed to fail in the long run because it was based upon two flawed premises.

The first was that the new voters that Labour attracted would become party identifiers, and thus many would stick with the party come what may. This was always a forlorn hope, but the brutal truth that Blair's new voters were always mere political consumers who could be tempted away by other brands only became clear on the 1st May when Labour finished third in the polls.

The second flawed premise was that the working class would remain loyal to the party because they had no other political home. Nobody seemed to have considered seriously the idea that the working class could start to treat the Labour Party with the same contempt that the party had shown to them. Working class turnout at elections has declined steadily since 1997 and the recent local elections have only accelerated that trend.

The point here is that Labour has now broken its tribal link to the working class voter. People who were never particularly interested in politics, but who voted Labour because they identified with it as being the party of their interests, no longer do so. That link cannot be repaired, and that vote is now but a memory.

A decline in voter turnout is often a sign that a realignment is on the way, but these recent elections also saw the beginnings of a new working class party's formation, especially in South Wales.

In places like Merthyr Tydfil, where the Labour vote used to be weighed and not counted, the party suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of so-called independents. Of course these independents are nothing of the kind: they are the old, South Wales Labour Party regulars who can no longer stomach New Labour and its agenda. It is to be expected that those figures will sooner rather than later give themselves a name and constitute themselves as a party. When that happens, other groups and individuals in the major cities of Northern England and Scotland can be expected to sign up.

The final shape of politics would probably see the Tories remaining as the voice of the middle class, employed in the private sector. The rump of the Labour Party can be expected to join the Liberal-Democrats to form a centre left party that draws its support from the public sector Polyocracy.

The new working class party can be expected to draw on the support of the 5.3 million people in Britain who earn less than $6.67 an hour. These are the people who do the shit jobs, for the shit wages, for the shit gaffers - the people who are boycotting Labour because it no longer even pretends to care about their interests. If we add to that the couple of million who are either unemployed, long term sick or bringing up children on state handouts, then we have a natural constituency for this party of over nine million people - and that is before the party starts offering economic security policies to other groups.

The key to this new party's success would lie in sane and sensible policies that appeal to the working class. It is time to start ignoring the lifestyle issues that have so dominated debate over the past decade. The party needs policies that will put economic security for it people first, second and third on the agenda. Everything else is mere hogwash.

It is rather nice to see the way that the liberal comentariat is complaining at Boris Johnson's victory in the London mayoral elections. As the sour grapes begin to be consumed, it's worth looking at a couple of reasons for this success.

The first is that Labour made a very big mistake in writing Boris off as an upper-class buffoon. He is not actually all that upper-class, having won a scholarship to Eton, and the air of buffoonery has always struck me as a carefully constructed edifice that the younger Alexander Johnson created as part of a process of personal reinvention that began at Eton and terminated at Oxford.

Thinking back to Oxford, there would always be someone who was genuinely a part of the English upper-class who would delight in pointing out that Alex was not really English, since his origins on his grandfather's side are Turkish, and he was born in New York. Jibes like that must have hurt the young Johnson, and I have always believed that this is why he dropped the name Alexander and started calling himself Boris - along with the adoption of the more English than the English persona of Woosterish buffoonery.

That aside, the fact remains that Boris was never the fool that his enemies believed. Fools don't win Eton scholarships, nor do they stroll through a degree in classics at Baliol College, Oxford. Boris Johnson was the sharpest knife in the drawer back in those days and time has only made his edge all the keener. Underestimating their opponent was New-Labour's first big mistake.

The second mistake that they made was in assuming that what is important to them is also important to everyone else. Consider this plea from the heart of a Nu-Labourette that was published in the Guardian on election day. The whole argument that this authoress presented was that Boris was nasty to poofs, blacks and scousers. I suspect that the bit about Liverpool was added as an afterthought because most of the piece is actually taken up with slagging off Boris for his views on the other two.

Now in a world in which the two main parties are interchangeable in terms of economic policy, their social policies matter rather more than would otherwise be the case. Leading on from that is the point that whereas North London chatterwankers may worry about the plight of minorities, a sizeable chunk of Labour's traditional vote is either indifferent or downright hostile to them. The people to whom London is home, who were born there and who walk the streets that their ancestors walked before them, now look around and see that, in the words of a Londoner, "London isn't England any more".

Finally, Boris campaigned hard on the theme of the County Hall parasites who infest the place thanks to Ken Livingstone. Everyone knew what he meant; the race relations advisers, equal opportunities bods and the general coterie of lifestyle types, none of whom produce anything of worth and all of whom draw fat salaries.

Put everything together and add to it the general sense that the government has lost its way economically, and the wonder is not that Boris won, but that he won by such a relatively small margin.

The next mayor of London will be Boris Johnson, according to Conservative Home. I wish that I cared, to be honest. Outside London the labour vote seems to have simply collapsed, at least according to this blog report. Admittedly the blogger is a Tory, but what he writes ties in with other reports that are coming in.

As far as London is concerned, Ken Livingstone is often seen as the voice of the left. Actually, what he is is the voice of the London Left, a far different animal than the left that I grew up with and have always supported.

The London Left in the 1980s was the voice of the liberal middle class that felt left out of politics. It was the voice of ambitious minorities and it deliberately went out of its way to alienate the traditional working class Labour supporters.

Today that ideology has spread throughout the Labour Party and turned it into the party of the middle class, local government employee. The Tories are still the party of private business, so we have had local elections that have been argued out between those middle class types who work for local government and those who don't. As for the working class - they have just been ignored.

So congratulations to Boris Johnson, if indeed he has won. I would have marginally preferred Ken Livingstone, but at the end of the day who cares?

One thing is for sure: British politics as presently organised doesn't care about us.

The future of the class war and of working class organisation may be very different in the future than it was in the past. If you are looking for a Lenin who will lead a vanguard of the working class or a new Labour Party to represent them then I think that you will be disappointed.

The future is here now. Small groups of alienated young men are starting to take matters into their own hands. In parts of the north they go out at night and pile tyres around the closed circuit television cameras and then set them alight. It is called necklacing. Most of this activity never gets reported, but sometimes the news seeps out. This attack on two business parks in High Wycombe is one such exception. How much did the bolt cutters that were used cost? Probably just a few pounds, but the damage done ran into thousands.

This is what it is going to be like: small groups that have only a tenuous link to any other, based around a geographical area where everyone knows everyone else. Some will be violent and others will operate through the political process.

They will be almost impossible to subvert because their small size and homogeneous nature will act to prevent that. If one group is subverted, another will rise to take its place because the issues that led to the first group's creation will not have been addressed.

The Euston Manifesto appears to have died a death. It's second anniversary passed unnoticed on the 13th of this month. The website sits, like a spare prick at a wedding, unwanted and ignored. The blog hasn't been updated since the 24th February and even if you wanted to go and sign-up to the Eustonite's lofty set of principles, you can't. As I reported here, the silly sods couldn't figure out how to stop the porn merchants who were trawling for punters from signing up. Why they bothered I can't imagine since both Eustonites and porno punters are wankers, but never mind...

The Guardian has a long piece on why this load of old wank failed, but from my point of view the answer is simple. The British working class are not in the slightest bit interested in Israel, Darfur, Zimbabwe nor Uncle Tom Cobbly and all. They are interested in jobs, decent housing and cheap services. I might add that the lower middle class gang of social workers, council officers and coppers who conspire to make people's lives a misery, are also pretty high on the working class shit list.

The Euston manifesto failed because it offered nothing that is of any interest to the working people of Britain.

Cheers: David Lindsay

We have argued here at The Exile for quite some time that the British school leaving age should be reduced to 14. We've also considered the main reason why this is unlikely to happen, which is because the education racket is about providing jobs for over-ambitious and under-talented lower-middle-class types with their polytechnic degrees.

The Labour MP Frank Field has now joined the sensible side of this debate and has argued that the school leaving age should be reduced to 14. He argues that half of Britain's children are turfed out of school at the age of 16 with less than the five GCSEs that the government regards as an absolute minimum. He goes on to point out that over 30,000 children gain no qualifications whatsoever. Having met some of these drop-outs, Field was "struck by just how intelligent some of this group are". He then argues that:

A school-leaving certificate testing basic English, maths and IT skills should be instituted. Many of this disenfranchised group would get down to some work if they knew that passing at 14 would free them from school and allow them to work. This group would then have the money that would be wasted on their non-attendance at school put aside as a training endowment. The education budget for a 14 to 18-year-old is £22,000. This sizeable sum could then be spent by the young people themselves on the training that they choose to advance their careers once they realised that being out of work is a tougher proposition than they once thought. But having control over their own budget would also help drive up training standards.

This idea is excellent and should be adopted by any government that wants to improve British educational standards.

The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who make an unproductive living in the teaching and ancillary trades. We are talking about the educational social workers, the administrators and other assorted riff-raff. Overcoming their natural desire to avoid the cold blast of economic reality by keeping their snouts firmly planted in the public trough is going to be difficult, but not impossible.

It's not impossible because this is one issue that, along with opposition to the social work industry, can be almost guaranteed to get working class support. As a class we tend not to have much of an interest in school education, and teachers are barely above social workers in the level of public opprobrium that they attract.

As socialists we believe in a collectivised economy that is run, basically, by and for the producers' of wealth. It makes perfect sense for us to get involved in a campaign that will have working class support behind it, and which aims at hitting the unproductive consumers of wealth: the local government employed lower middle class.