The Exile

Popular resistance to capitalism's advances can take many forms. As we have seen in Iraq, tribalism and religious militias are often far more effective at mobilising that resistance than some pillock with a well-thumbed copy of Das Capital. How could popular resistance work in the UK? Well, in the same way that it has always worked: by drawing on popular attitudes that are rooted in our culture. The job for the socialist activists would be then to organise on the basis of that popular culture. However, the resistance has to come first.

You're not with me, I can tell, so I have an idea: let's take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

Many years ago I had a mate named Frank Higgins who worked as a mill yard man. Cotton would arrive on the lorries and Frank would see that it got moved from the yard to wherever it was going to be stored in the warehouse. Then he would move the finished rolls of cotton from the warehouse to the lorries that carried it away. Basically, if it happening in the yard, then it happened because Frank wanted it to happen.

Frank had a quite amazing talent: he could fart at will. So when some under-manager came into the yard and gave Frank some old buck, Frank would just take the weight on his right foot, lift his arse a couple of inches and let rip. He would then look the lump of management filth in the eye and come out with his catchphrase: "Good arse," he would say.

What happened next really depended upon the order that Frank had received. If he had been told to do something that actually was his job to do, then he would light a cigarette - always taking his time, so that management filth knew that things were not always going to go their way - and then he would slowly walk off to carry out the task. If he knew that he was being asked to do something that was not his job, then he would just ignore the directive and leave the person stood in the yard, surrounded by the pungent odour of a Frank Higgins' special.

I suppose at this point you are expecting to be told that Frank was the union steward or mill convener, but he was nothing of the sort. He wasn't interested in the union and only went to his meetings when a pay rise was being discussed. He was just a typical bloke who had a very rare talent for farting. Like all of us he did his hours, but he was able to demonstrate both by word and arse the utter contempt that he felt for the boss's place, boss's problems and boss's profits.

I thought about "Good-Arse" Higgins yesterday when I read this load of old wank in the Daily Telegraph. A Further Education college wants to stop its female pupils from whistling at some building workers. On one level it is silly, but if you read through the article, then you will see that The Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill will make it a criminal offence to whistle! All of a sudden it ceases to be silly.

It is a demonstration of class power, nothing more and nothing less. It is no longer enough that we do our bastard hours, now we are being conditioned to do them in the way that the middle class management filth wants. We have to behave in a manner that they find acceptable.

Now I know what the reply of "Good-Arse" Higgins would be to all this. It should be our reply as well. There is a river of blood that separates working class attitudes, culture and values from those held by the vermin that stands on the other bank.

Let's be honest - our women are well used to handling Jack the lad when he gets fresh and are quick with the old two fingered salute and stream of obscenities. However, the next time you see some little lower middle class tart, make sure that you drop her a whistle even if she is so fucking ugly that if she had the last cunt on earth you would sooner have a wank. In your own little way you are making your very own political statement.

Although not as ripe a statement as the ones that Frank Higgins used to make.

This is one of my parents' wedding photographs. On my father's right stand the Lilley family. Lily, my mother's cousin, had married Jack Lilley and much to everyone's amusement became the magnificently named Lily Lilley. Uncle Jack died in the 1970s and John, their only son, emigrated to Tasmania in about 1970. I lost touch with Auntie Lily after my mother died in 1989. In 1998 she was brutally murdered in her own home by two girls.

In 1986 my cousin, Edward Pither of Nelson, Lancashire, was murdered by two burglars, again in his own home. Two murders in one family are two too many.

Both murders were the responsibility of the people concerned. However, both sets of murderers are also the products of feral societies and a polity that first wanted to deliberately impoverish them, and then tried to force them into adopting a set of mores that are not theirs.

Auntie Lily was the daughter of my mother's aunt. Take a look at her and everyone else in that photo. They look confident, don't they? The men had all just emerged from the army and are wearing their demob suits. The women's dresses were all made by my mother who was a dressmaker by trade. The confidence on the adults' faces came from their belief that they were never going to have to return to the 1930s; that things were just going to get better and better for people like them.

My Uncle Jack was a dairyman. He carried big churns full of milk that had just arrived from the nearby farms into the plant where they were either pasteurised or sterilised. Then he loaded crates full of milk bottles onto his cart and set off to make his deliveries. He had a neck like a bull and arms like tree trunks.

My father was a factory labourer and his brother Albert who is standing on the right of the photo was a warehouseman. Neither of them wanted to do that work. My father tried to make a living as an artist, and Uncle Albert used his gratuity money to set up a literary journal, but neither of them had much success, so they settled down to factory labour. On the basis of that they all married, had children, paid their way in the world and lived out their lives.

And then it all went bad. The Tory aim from 1979 to 1997 was to ensure that the working class knew its place and to help ensure that, the traditional jobs were destroyed. It was the only way to reverse the post-war trend of working class improvement and to set a clear economic line between us and them.

Alas for their hopes, but working class people never learned to mind their manners. What happened was that they became feral. Petty criminality came first, then drugs, then more criminality. Labour, the act of labouring for a living, created its own social discipline. When the jobs vanished so did the social discipline.

Labour came along in 1997 and made things worse. Instead of re-industrialising Britain they introduced Thatcherism with a smiley face. Lot's of jobs were created for social workers, teachers, council managers and other assorted scum and nothing for us.

The young people complain that there is nothing to do. Reading the reports of Auntie Lily's death that theme comes up time and time again. Guess what? The kids are right: there is nothing for them to do. All the adventure playgrounds in the world will not alter the fact that a teenager should be looking forward to leaving school and choosing whether to go down a pit, stand behind a lathe or look after a machine. Thanks to government policy over the past 30 years, all a teenager has to look forward to is a life of unemployment or underemployment.

Thus we turn on each other, and that is why my aunt and cousin were killed.

It was going to be a very hot summer, that much was obvious by the April of 1976. Spring just didn't arrive that year, as we went from winter to summer without even a pause. My first memory of that time is of how I decided, in about the April, that looking for a job could wait: this weather was something special and I didn't want anything tedious like work getting in the way of my enjoyment of it.

I had been made redundant the month before, but that was not a problem. We had a thing called earnings related benefit that was paid on top of the dole for the first six months of unemployment. The amount of the benefit depended upon the wage earned, hence the name, and since I earned about £25 a week, my ERB was quite high. So there I was, still only 19 years old, with redundancy money jangling in my pocket, and a long hot summer to enjoy. I decided to get a job when either the summer, or my money, ended. Luckily for me they both coincided...

We need to remember that Britain had a social wage in those days. Basically you did your hours at some job or other. As everyone else did the same this meant that council house rents were cheap, buses were frequent and cost coppers to ride, and all manner of services such as gas, electricity and the telephone that today cost an arm and leg, then cost next to nothing.

Of course, for those who wanted to arse-lick their way up the corporate ladder, things were not quite so rosy. The more money you earned the more income tax you paid. Government revenue in those days came mainly from direct taxation, so those creatures ended up paying quite a wack. To make make matters even nicer, inflation was high, but we had strong unions that ensured regular pay rises. The employers' men didn't, but they could console themselves with the fact that they were "staff" and not "workers". As I used to like pointing out, being staff and having 25p in the pocket would get them a pint of bitter. For some reason they never enjoyed my humour as much as my mates did.

Who in his right mind would not have wanted to be a young working man during the summer of 1976? I took my redundancy pay, signed on the dole every two weeks, and spent the summer drinking beer and chasing women.

One of the women I caught was called Lucy, a lovely Zimbabwean girl who worked as a nurse at Park Hospital in Manchester. I met her one night in a disco, and she told me that she was from Rhodesia. "Don't you mean Zimbabwe," I replied? She gave me a lovely kiss there and then and that was me fixed up.

Lucy lived in a nice, subsidised nurses' home, and ate in the nice subsidised canteen that was provided to the hospital's staff. Getting to visit her was easy. I didn't have a car so I caught a bus into Piccadilly, Manchester, and then another one going out to the hospital. If I stayed too long, but wasn't invited to spend the night, then I used the all night buses to get home. They only ran every hour and cost twice as much as the ordinary service, but they got people to their destinations. Today Manchester does not have all-night buses, so getting around is more difficult without a car.

A couple of years later, when the Callaghan government started to cut back on public services and the bus fares went through the roof, I learned to drive and bought a car. However, that was in the future, and in 1976 I travelled everywhere on cheap public transport.

I remember taking Lucy over to York for a few days. We travelled on the British Rail train which left and arrived on time and the fare was cheap - it had to be, I was signing on, remember?

However, most of the summer was spent relaxing in Piccadilly Gardens, just soaking up the sun and chatting to anyone who wanted to help me kill another beautiful day. Today you would go and sit in a pub's garden, but they scarcely existed in 1976. Pubs in Manchester were working men's swill shops that opened their doors at 11.00am and closed them at 3.00pm. Come 5.30pm they opened up again until 10.30pm - except Fridays and Saturdays when they stayed open until 11.00pm.

However, this did not mean that you could not keep on drinking all night - far from it. Oxford Road Station Approach had a well known drinking club that I used to go in a lot. It opened when the pubs closed and stayed serving until the last customer left, usually at dawn. Just across Oxford Road and behind the Palace Theatre was another drinking dive that catered to the all-afternoon brigade. Both these places got full with shift workers like me, policemen, the local hard men and prostitutes. They were great places to meet interesting people and get sloshed out of your brain.

So the summer went on. That never ending summer. Until one day it started to rain and I decided that it was time to go and get another bastard fucking job. So I did. It took me about a week, and that was me done along with the summer.

There will never be a summer like the summer of 1976 because when it ended something ended in Britain. The notion that you could live well as a working class person, in a society that tried to share its resources fairly, and in which you did not have to bust a ball to earn a buttie, has gone from the popular memory. People may tell their children about how you could change jobs on a whim - they do - but the memory of everything else that we enjoyed has gone. We need to bring that memory back and make it a political demand.

Until that happens, we will never have another summer and the winter that has now lasted for 30 years will remain.

I remember a television programme from the 1970s that was fronted by Lord Chalfont, of blessed memory. The noble lord stood in front of the camera, clipboard in hand, and reeled of the statistics which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Britain was on the fast track to Communism. It was a wonderful programme, and I have always thought that it was such a pity that everything he said was pure bollocks.

The programme was wonderful because middle class types watched it and felt that their already existing fears were justified. Actually all that was happening was that inflation was high and people like me had strong unions to off-set this. Our real incomes were rising whilst the suburbanites, who did not have unions, were finding that theirs were falling. As a young fellow I could never understand why the manager was sometimes so offhand when paying my wages. The older men explained it: I had worked overtime and my wages that week were more that the manager was pulling. They didn't like it because their whole pathetic existence was only validated by the belief that they were somehow better, or superior, to us. That belief took a hard knock 30 years ago when we were often pulling in more than them. I developed a habit towards the end of the decade of counting my wages out, very, very slowly in front of the fool who had just paid me. Just to remind him of what my week's screw was . . .

Let's fast forward to 1983. The General Election was underway and Michael Foot, the Labour leader was visiting the North-West. My part of Manchester had been dumped into Oldham West constituency as part of the boundary changes and, being unemployed, I spent the day cheering him on as part of a mixed group of Labour and Communist Party folk.

There was a smallish group of Tories who were trying to mount a counter-demonstration as Footie arrived on the top deck of his open-topped double decker bus. We gave the clenched fist salute and the Tories started screaming that we were socialists! It was so damned funny that it took us a few minutes to recover our composure - then one of the lads walked over and showed them his CPGB card and that really set the maggots a-squarking!

We pointed out all the things that Labour was going to do - inventing most of them, let's be honest - and I saw one woman's lower lip start trembling. "You don't care about decent people," she wailed.

"Yes, we fucking well do," I replied. "We just don't care about the ten-bob millionaires who are nowt a pound!"

That was the end of that. We won the consituency with 46% of the vote and bemoaned the fact that the majority was so low. Over the coming years we worked and worked that part of the country until we had removed all the Tory councillors and the Labour MPs were getting returned with majorities of over 50%. It took time, but eventually Scotland, Wales and Northern England were all solid socialist fiefdoms.

Then we ballsed it all up. We elected a carpetbagger as leader of the Labour Party, a man who would turn our party into a forum for the views of the people that we despised. Now, no working man can have the sheer pleasure of counting out his wages before his gaffer, secure in the knowledge that his wage packet is fatter than that of the creature in front of him. Labour Party activists no longer get that rosy glow of pleasure that used to come when some type screamed abuse at them. The bastards are no longer afraid. . .

We need to take back our movement. Labour exists to speak for the working man and has wife and kids. We need policies that appeal to people like us, rather than the interlopers who now run the party. The message should be that Labour is about real jobs, about strong unions to defend those jobs and about high taxes on the middle classes to help pay for over a generation's insolence from these creatures.

I can't remember the year, but it was the mid 1970s, and I am pretty convinced that the place was Red Lion Square in London. The National Front were due to hold a meeting and the unions, Trades' Councils and political parties were all clamouring for people to go along and "peacefully protest". Yeah, right.

A small group of us, me the projectionist, a Manchester docker and two lads who worked in factories, decided to get the train down. This we duly did and we arrived at Euston Station in the late afternoon. We had a couple of pints near Euston and set off for the demonstration.

When we got there we found that time had slipped us by and we couldn't actually reach the rest of the crowd because of the police lines. We could hear the racket coming from just down the street, but getting to it was out of the question. Standing around in the drizzle did not seem like a good idea, so someone suggested that we take shelter in a pub that was at the other end of the street. We justified this by saying that if the evil Nazis managed to burst out of the square, then we would spring into action as a sort of strategic reserve. Feeling thoroughly justified we walked down the street and went into the swill shop.

The place was almost empty - I wonder why? - so getting served was easy. I had to listen the the same whinge as before because, of course, the docker wanted his pint of mixed and stubbornly refused to believe that nowhere in London served mild. Anyway, we took our bitters and went and sat in a corner. Then we saw them for the first time. A group of six blokes about our ages. We knew who they were and they had certainly clocked us. The National Front were sitting in the other corner of the pub.

We were wearing the same type of clothes, that's the rum thing. They were not skinheads in bovver boots and we were not festooned with badges. One of the labourers had been given an ANL badge by a girl who wanted to recruit him into her three-initial party, but after he had shagged her the badge had been thrown away. Other than that all we were wearing were our union badges and the docker had his CPGB badge on as well, but they were all small, brass things and could not be seen across a room. Nevertheless, we recognised them and they damn well knew who we were.

"Wotcha do," shouted one of their group to nobody in particular in ours.

"Docker," shouted our docker back. "What about you?"

"Meat Porter," came the reply.

Everyone digested this information and then an NFer shouted over: "I'm a docker too."