The Exile

Bob Wareing, the Labour MP for Liverpool West Derby has been deselected, reports Neil Clark. The NuLabourites have chosen Stephen Twigg, a former MP who has no connection to Liverpool, to stand in his place.

First it has to be said that Wareing is 77 years old and should have retired a decade ago. That said, the fact that the local party has chosen Twigg, rather than a local activist, probably says more about the state of the NuLab base than it does about either Wareing or Twigg.

Put simply, what we are seeing is further evidence of the internal colonialism under which working class people are now forced to live. It could be said that it is their own fault, because they chose to disengage from politics. However, that disengagement came about because politics, in the shape of the Labour Party, no longer represented them.

The Wareing Affair is a case in point. In 1983 Liverpool registered a 5% swing to Labour - it was the only part of the country that saw through Thatcher and the class she represented. Given that Liverpool has been hammered time and again since then, it would be ludicrous to claim that the bulk of the population in Liverpool West Derby have suddenly become adherents to the NuLab notion of supporting globalised capitalism, screwing working class people and acting as America's batman in various wars of aggression. So why was Stephen Twigg, a man who believes in all of those things, chosen?

The Local Labour Party has been taken over, that's why. Not by the right, not by the left, but by that new sub-strata of social workers, teachers and council officers who form the colonial caste in our cities.

Yes, people are fighting back - this blog is an example of that - but I do fear that their call for a new party is just so much pissing in the wind. We need more than a new set of initials. We need an organisation that reflects our culture of drink beer, shag women and bollocks to the boss.

Labour started to go wrong when it ceased to represent the urban working class in any cultural sense. That happened before the party dumped the economic policies that working class people believe in.

This stranglehold that the class enemy has on politics means that we are treated as scum who are only needed to vote for whatever middle class tosser the local colonial class want to impose. It is also why a new party is not enough. It has to be a new party that will make people like Twigg feel afraid - very, very afraid.

The issue is as atavistic as that. It is time that the middle class felt the bladder tightening sensation that only fear brings.

If Bob Wareing does carry out his promise to stand as an independent, then could that be the start of the fightback? Only time will tell, but The Exile has a nice, Latin motto that a working class party should adopt: Oderint dum metuant!

As the American economy weakens, and as the country's army gets more bogged down in Iraq, many countries are taking the opportunity to create new trading arrangements that will bypass the Americans and their globalised system completely. Venezuela and Belarus are the latest to sign bilateral agreements that involve barter trade and which ignore the dollar. As Neal Clark says, we are "witnessing the formation of an alternative power bloc," one which began with Venezuela and Cuba, grew to involve Bolivia and now has roped in Belarus.

The response of many toy-town leftists to these moves is to sneer from the sidelines. If everything is not as Leon Trotsky predicted it, prior to this death almost 70 years ago, then they are not interested.

Actually what they are not interested in is helping to destroy globalised capitalism. This is the bastard offshoot of the old capitalism that we grew up with and it is the number one enemy for the new century. If it can be destroyed, then the underlying capitalist system that all socialists want to smash will have suffered a serious reversal.

The destruction of globalisation is not the end of the war, in other words, but it could mark the end of the beginning. Besides, we need a victory after all these years of defeat. So the crushing of imperialism in Iraq is one step down the road, support for alternative economic arrangements between sovereign states is another.

Let's keep our eyes on the prize, folks. If we are serious about smashing capitalism, then ending globalisation is as good a place as any to start.

I've found a site that has the words to Red Fly The Banners - O, that great anthem guaranteed to annoy Trots and Tories everywhere. This version is slightly different because it has "four for the Communist thinkers," instead of "the great philosophers," which is the version that we used to rant out whenever polytechnic students were around in one of our swill shops. The great philosophers, of course, were Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

The final verse we used to roar out with great gusto was number thirteen: "the holes in Trotsky's head," but here we have a fourteenth verse: "the IQ of the average Trot".

All good stuff, and as so many Trots have now moved over into Nu-Labourism, it is right and proper that we remember the old songs and the old philosophy that underpinned them.

Making a political video is easy: you just get a few boring buggers around a table and then send everyone who watches it to sleep. Let's look at some new ideas for political video...

Probably some of the most effective, subversive video has been produced not by politicos, but by bored out of their skulls night workers employed at the Somerfield chain of supermarkets. The point here is not that these are technically well crafted examples of agitprop video. They are not, and most break all the rules of video shooting - cameras wobble, zoom lenses are overused and the sound quality is atrocious.

That said, they are wildly popular amongst the target audience, which consists of young, bored out of their skulls working class people. They encourage others to treat their employer with the same contempt as these Somerfield people do. That's all...These videos will never encourage the revolution, but if they help to engender a little bit more contempt for the boss class they will have served their purpose.

As you can see, agitprop video doesn't have to be dull and boring. You can be having a laugh and a joke while you are filming - so long as the laugh and the joke is at the enemies' expense.

Let's think about some ideas, shall we? The social work filth make good, easy targets because everyone hates them anyway. Can you grab some footage of one fat ugly social worker walking next to a thin ugly social worker? If you can then stick the Laurel and Hardy theme to it and a mocking title at the end. Bingo - you have a clip that people will watch, will pass around, and which will make your local social work filth feel humiliated.

Ridicule is a potent weapon, so use it as much as you can. We don't have to play by their rules, in fact it is much better for us if we don't. Most people who have crossed swords with social work filth will have received a letter at some point that explains just how "well trained" they are. OK, so find some old woman who can remember going to a chimp's tea party at her local zoo. The chances are that the chimp keeper will have used those very words when explaining how the monkeys were persuaded to sit around the table.

Your video could then go:

1. Shot of a person reading from the letter.
2. He asks the camera what "highly trained" means?
3. Interview with old person.
4. Return to original person, who says that he is still baffled. Are social workers more highly trained than chimps?

A video like that could run less than a minute. If an issue with the council is simmering, a video like that could just help it bubble.

The middle class has a low tolerance for mockery and questions about their status, so let's give them plenty of both. In a previous posting I mentioned the matter of Codie Stott, the Salford schoolgirl who was arrested for asking the wrong questions at school. Reading a little bit more into the case, it now turns out that when young Codie asked her question, she was greeted by a teacher who screamed the refrain: "That's racism! You're going to get done by the police"

Come on people, this is too good to miss. A video recreating that scene, shot in someone's kitchen, would be well worth the effort. The comic possibilities are just endless - and that is the whole point - it is about using mockery to undermine the middle class's fragile sense of self worth.

These are just a few ideas, and I am sure that you can come up with a lot more. Use video as part of your community campaign: you know it makes sense!

People, let's forget about the community newsletter - video is what people watch, either on YouTube or via their mobile 'phone or I-pod. Your videos should run for between 30 seconds and about five minutes. Yes, that's right, because anything much over five minutes runs the risk that the viewer will lose interest. Sorry, folks, today's generation have been brought up on music videos and have the attention span of a lobotomised goldfish.

Assuming that you know very little about video making, let's start with the basics. If you don't have a video camera, you might like to buy one that uses the MiniDV system. They are the most popular cameras on the market so go with the flow has always been The Exile's way of thinking.

If you don't have a camera and are unemployed, then a second hand Digital 8 video camera is fine. The cassettes are bigger than the MiniDV's version - so is the camera come to that - but other than that the two systems are virtually the same.

Another option is to use a digital still camera because many of them will also shoot video. Just check that your camera isn't one that only shoots very short clips. Most Sony cameras allow you to shoot so long as there is space on the memory stick. For instance a one gig stick allows for about 45 minutes of recording time.

The disadvantage of using a still camera's video function is that you cannot usually connect an external microphone to the camera. That said, if your subject is close, you can pick up their voice with the camera's internal microphone. It is just not as good, that's all. However, if you are not videoing someone speaking on a noisy street, or if you decide to add a music soundtrack of your own later, using a still camera is very much an option.

All of the above types of camera will do. However, two types will cause problems and should be avoided. The first is the video camera that uses a DVD disk. Editing those videos is such a pain that they are to be avoided at all costs. The second type to give a body swerve to is the camera that has an internal memory and which records the files in MP4 format. Getting editing programmes for this format is expensive; finding a converter so that you can put your video out in the popular MPG or WMV is just as hard. Just don't use them, OK?

Having got your gear, there are two mistakes that people make when they start to shoot video. The first is they waft the camera about like a fart in a breeze. People, keep the fucker still! Your eyes may dart from place to place, but if you do that with the camera you will make your video unviewable. Shoot clear shots with the camera angle set before you press the record button. Once you have pressed it, don't move the camera and hold it very, very steady.

The second mistake the folk make is using the zoom - "Look, my camera has a zoom," they seem to be saying.

Yes, I know it has a fucking zoom, and I'm telling you not to use it. As with waving the camera around it makes the footage unwatchable.

If you must zoom and pan, then do it very, very slowly and not very often. Far better not to use these techniques at all until you become more expert at film making.

You have finished shooting. Now you need to get the raw footage into your computer for editing. If you used a still camera, then the MPG files will load in the same way that photographs do. If you have a video camera, it is a bit more complicated, but not much.

If your computer runs on Windows XP then you have a programme called Windows Movie Maker. Open it, connect your camera to the computer via the cable that came with it and then switch the camera on. WMM will pretty much do the rest. I advise you to switch off the create clips function - record the footage as one file.

Movie Maker will ask you what the settings are for your recording and will offer you a "best quality for playback on my computer" option. Ignore that and go to "other settings". There you should choose "Video for local playback (2.1 Mbps)" as this is the best quality.

Once the footage is on your computer, then you can use Windows Movie Maker to edit it, add titles, stick in a voice-over or add music. You can also add fades and dissolves to make scene changes easier on the eye. Just play around with the programme until you feel happy at using it.

Windows has a special page devoted to Movie Maker which is well worth studying. You can find it here.

Very well, now you have your finished video - how do you distribute it?

The first way is via YouTube and for that you should convert your WMV file into an MP4. This is easy, just download the Videora Converter, which is a free programme. I would suggest that for YouTube you should set the conversion rate at a high quality - it will make for a big file but once YouTube has it they will convert it to Flash Media and it will look better on the computer monitor if your file has been of a high quality to begin with.

What did you say? You can't download YouTube videos? Well, there are programmes out there that allow you to do that, but the quality is crap. Why not make a version for people to watch on their mobiles and I-Pod Videos? Most of these devices use MP4 as their standard, so just run the file through the Videora Converter again, but this time choose a lower rate that will make for a smaller file. Remember, if they are watching the video on a small screen, you don't need a very high quality video.

What about the people who want to watch your epic on a computer? Run the file through Windows Move Maker one more time and set the capture to about 512 KBS. At that rate the video is just about watchable at full screen, but looks much better at half-screen. Play around until you find the best quality for your needs.

Finally, upload your video files to a server - they are plenty of them about that offer free web space. Besides, how can you call yourselves a community group if you don't have your own web page? Geocities gives you 15 meg and Lycos gives you 20 megs.

Up next - some ideas to think about for videos. Meanwhile I have some videos of my own that you might like to see. In all cases, just click over to the page and follow the link at the bottom to get the video.

The first was shot using a digital still camera, and consists of views of a lake in my area. The second is the ruins of Teotihuacan, and was shot using a video camera. Both videos have music soundtracks that I added.

Following on from my last posting, if matters do come to a head on a council estate because the social work filth are attacking our children, then any attempt to prescribe action will fail. It will fail because what is likely to happen is that some father, outraged at the way his family is treated will explode in some way or another. The press will get involved, the TV, and any local political group that is involved with the family will only have to play catch-up to an agenda that will be media led.

In a situation like this, a group needs to understand basic media techniques, and the most basic of all is the press release. If written properly a press release will be used by the local newspapers as is - so make sure that you know how to create them.

The basic format of your press release should always be the same. This is mine:

1. At the top of the page you have the name of your group in headline text and below it, in a slightly smaller font, the words "Press Release". You can call it a news release if you want to because sometimes the TV and radio get a bit twitchy if you don't.

2. Below this on the left side you should have, contact, address, telephone, e-mail. Always issue your press releases under one person's name - that way the local hacks can get in touch with an individual with whom they will build up a relationship over time.

3. Put in a horizontal line at this point. That way the journalist knows that the basic information is over and the release is about to begin.

4. Below the line put in the headline. Use a size 14 font.

5. Next comes the text, in a 12 font. Try to write as if you were the jounalist - you want them to use your text verbatim for the story. Keep it simple, keep it sweet, but remember that you are an agitator, so you can use synonyms to alter the readers' perceptions.

Let me give you an example. Back in 1996 Oldham social work filth were trying to get my late father into a nursing home. I decided that a shot across the bows was in order and sent out a press release to the two local newspapers.

The headline read:

"Oldham social work industry seeks to force war veteran into a workhouse."

Now let's look at the language used here. The first thing we note is my use of "industry" instead of "department". That was deliberate and aimed at undercutting the the social workers sense of self importance. If you look back to the previous posting, you will see that I argue that central to the middle class sense of worth is the notion that what they do is morally good - take that away from them and you have hit their morale. Thus whenever a met a piece of social work filth I would always adopt a matey, jocular tone with them. As if I understood that they were just timeservers and jobsworths, leaching off the public purse. That attitude started with this press release.

Secondly we have the war veteran reference: my father was a veteran, and this aimed at putting him on a higher level than a mere "old man". He was an old man, but he was also a war veteran.

Finally the use of the word workhouse should be considered. It still strikes fear into many old people's hearts and conjurs up images of breaking rocks for a night's bed. That was why I used it: I knew that it would provoke an immediate sympathy for him amongst the elderly.

The first paragraph of the release read:

Charles Bell (81) thought that he had seen the last of conflict the day he stood on Lunebourg Heath in 1945 and watched the German army stream in to surrender. However, he had reckoned without the actions of Oldham social work industry, who are determined to force old soldier Charlie into a workhouse.

Note how Charles Bell became Charlie? The idea was to make him friendly - good old Charlie, nice old Charlie, decent old Charlie. First I used his formal name because I wanted the notion of soldier Charles Bell to be drummed home, but after that it was all about poor, persecuted Charlie.

Note also how language from the headline is repeated in that first paragraph - ram the message home, people!

My press release caused quite a stir. The Oldham Chronicle telephoned me in Mexico and did an interview. They ran the story in their own words, but the free sheet used my exact press release - so after that I mainly sent stories to them and they always ran them.

It got to the stage where I invented "sources close to Oldham Council," and "a social work source" and the social work filth went wild. They started an internal investigation to find out who was leaking information. Nobody was - I made it all up!

So press releases work and they should form to first line of attack for any group seeking to further agitate the waters.

However, and here is the kicker, they only work if they are about matters of public interest. So find the local issue, whatever it is, and use it to your advantage.

It should be the proudest day of any mother's life: the day her baby says "mummie" for the first time. For one British working class mother the day is seared into her memory because it was also the last time she saw her two year old daughter. The child has been seized by social work filth, on spurious charges, as was her sister within an hour of that child's birth. The police tried to find evidence to validate the state-sponsored kidnappings, but even they, long experts at finding grounds to fit-up the innocent, could find nothing in this case. In January of this year they announced that no prosecution would be forthcoming.

The social work filth then responded to this by placing the babies with prospective adopters and the innocent parents received a voicemail message telling them that all visiting rights would cease. They have not seen their babies since. Their lawyers have told them that the chances of recovering their babies are slim. However, they have been told by the social work filth that if they have any further children they "may" be allowed to keep them. How nice it was of this filth to give their permission in that way. And doesn't it just tell you who is in control of working class people in working class districts? The couple may have another child and the social work filth may decide to let them keep that child. Permission has been thus been granted, and thus control over our lives by this new colonial administrative class has been further demonstrated. Instances of class power like this are becoming all the frequent in Britain today.

Living in a working class district in Britain is increasingly similar to living in a colonial territory during the days of empire. The residents are the natives, the kaffirs, the chavs, and the colonial administrators are the teachers, police, social workers and assorted council officials, all of whom parachute into the territory in the morning, and then scuttle out as quickly as possible at day's end. Even the councillors, the men and women who are supposed to legitimise these characters' actions, are increasingly outsiders who do not live in the wards that they ostensibly represent.

To make matters worse, the working class response to a polity that no longer even pretends to do anything other than toss them a few scraps has been to disengage from politics completely. Into the vacuum has stepped a new breed of party member. By and large he is polytechnic (semi) educated and employed in local government as a teacher, social worker or generic manager. He lives in a nearby authority and runs for office in that council. He has more in common both culturally as well as economically with the teachers, social workers and council officers that he is supposed to supervise, than he does with the council tenants who voted for him. As types like this expand their influence, yet more working class people withdraw from politics.

In a strange way, this may turn out to be of benefit to working class activism in the long run. Mobilising our people on the basis of unemployment or economic inequality doesn't work. The reason is that unemployment and underemployment are the default setting for most working people during most of their lifetimes. Almost every generation undergoes at least one recession - those of us who were unemployed in the 1980s were told by our fathers what it was like in the 1930s. Some of us railed against our lot, but most just made their lived tolerable by tightening their belts and reverting to the default position of acceptance.

Put another way, if working class people do become involved in class politics again, then it will not be on the basis of their economic uncertainty alone. They are used to that and accept it as naturally as they accept the spring rains.

What may bring about a change are new factors that are related to the way that working class people are increasingly controlled and managed in their home districts. This brings us back to the notion that parts of Britain are little more than colonial territories, that the people who live there are the natives, and that the council officials are the colonial administrators.

Had these administrators left people alone and just concentrated on collecting their inflated wages, then this argument would not be viable. The fact is that they can't do this because an essential component of lower middle class ideology is the notion that whatever they are doing has to be justified in some moral sense. To this we might add the sheer sense of knicker moistening power that these creatures must feel as they exercise their control over our lives. Middle class self righteousness and the euphoria of power: it's a powerful combination.

The enemy has chosen to use our children to coerce obedience into us and as an example of their power over us. That was there big mistake because this is the one issue that should force the working class to begin its resistance. The number of instances where middle class scum have attacked us via our children is growing, and leads this writer to conclude that virtually all working class districts must have instances that can be used as mobilisation issues.

In Salford, one schoolgirl was arrested for saying something in class that these creatures did not like. Codie Stott, a Salford girl, had the temerity to ask a teacher why she could not be taught in her own language. A week later, no doubt following various discussions between various parasitic polywallahs, all cheerfully getting in on the act to prove how important they are, the girl was arrested and held for an afternoon before being released. The aim was obviously to instil terror and obedience into the wider community. Say what we say, think how we tell you to think, that was the message.

This threat is pretty much guaranteed to fail for the same reason that the teaching trade is not going to provide much of an impetus for a renaissance in working class political activity. Simply put, nobody gives a shit about the teachers. Parents tell their children to ignore them, to get through the school years with as little fuss as possible. They go on to say that teachers have always been that way, and that is a cue for some anecdote from the parents' days that helps put the whole thing into perspective. More importantly, Codie Stott, who will have left school by now, can walk past her old school building every day for the rest of her life and stick two fingers up at the lower middle class scum inside. If she does that then there is absolutely nothing that any of them can do to her, her family or her class.

That cannot be said of the social work industry. As has already been demonstrated, they are taking our children into care on spurious grounds and even when we prove our innocence, we find that they are being put up for adoption. Our women are seen as little more than brood mares, the providers of children for barren women or men who cannot get it up - the middle class in other words.

What we need to do is to start making these actions the focus of our resistance. Community groups need to be formed to defend an estate's children. The resistance needs to be community based, thus to draw on the collectivist tradition that is at the root of working class political action.

We have the issue: the question is do we still have the bottle to use it? In the next essay, we shall look at some ways in which such community groups could grow and the tactics that can be used.

I doubt if most people in Britain have even heard of Gustavo Cisneros. He is Venezuela's answer to Rupert Murdoch and until a year ago his Venevisión network was as hostile to Hugo Chavez Frias as Murdoch was to the Labour Party in Britain.

However, there the similarity ends. In Britain as soon as a weary Labour Party elected him as its leader, Tony Blair scuttled off to perform the ritual known as the osculum infame on Murdoch's bum hole.

Chavez Frias, by way of contrast, knows how to deal with creatures like this. Government agents were turned loose to crawl all over Cisnero's holdings, making him realise that his multi billion pound fortune was under threat.

So he caved in and today is a good little boy who sees things the Bolivarian way. As such his network did not lose it license to broadcast, as happened to the rival RCTV company.

This is a lesson that Labour should have learned. Chavez Frias faced the combined might of all the Venezuelan media and he came out on top because he offered policies that the bulk of the working class would support. He did not bother his head with social issues: he concentrated on the bread and butter issues that are the only things that working class people are interested in.

Having taken power he basically offered capitalism a deal: support me or die. Offers like that are a once in a lifetime, never to be repeated, take it or leave it deal. Cisneros took the offer and survived.

As socialists we need to learn from this and stop being afraid of the capitalist media. It, along with all of capitalism, can only survive because we allow it. It may be in the interests of a future socialist government in Britain to allow the Murdoch machine to keep on turning. If that is the case, then Murdoch needs to have a lesson in the reality of power such as Chavez gave Cisneros.

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.

Following on from last night's post, Duncan Money commented that a working class party of the type we advocated already exists. It is called the Independent Working Class Association, and it has four councillors in Oxford.

Looking at the party's manifesto, most of the concerns that working class people have seem to be addressed: this is obviously not a bunch of students out to change the world before going off to earn a packet in the City of London.

The Exile is a bit dubious about their idea of lowering the age of majority to 16, but one can't have everything. By and large the people behind the IWCA come over as sane, sensible and working class: they are out to answer people's real needs, and are not putting themselves forward as the workers' vanguard.

The Labour Party was established in 1900 as the political voice of the labouring, or working, class. For most of its history it has been an alliance of socialists and labourists. The former were mainly, but not entirely, middle class, and the latter were the party's working class core.

Today the party has shed its image as being the voice of the working class in favour of a policy that takes the working class vote for granted - on the principle that we have nowhere else to go - and which competes aggressively with the Tories and Liberal-Democrats for middle class support.

This has left the working class without a political voice and it has responded to this by disengaging from politics altogether. The problem here is that by doing so it only encourages the Labour Party to move further to the right and seek yet more middle class votes.

What working class activists should do is recognise that the old Labour Party coalition of middle and working class activists can never be bolted back together again. A new working class party should be formed, but one that avoids the mistakes of earlier attempts to create such bodies.

We need to accept that the British working class are not socialists and most of them never will be. Thus an attempt to set up a socialist party will more than likely go the way of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party and become yet another set of boring initials that most people are not interested in.

What is needed is a party that can bring together working class socialists and labourists. The party needs to have in the preamble to its constitution a variation of the old Labour Party's clause four. It should state that the aim of the party is to: Ensure the economic security of the working class via the collectivisation and democratic management of the British economy.

Social issues need to be avoided for the simple reason that they are divisive: economic ones are not. The party must keep as many people inside the tent as possible. It isn't that working class people are hostile to much social policy, but they are indifferent to it. Why create divisions within our ranks when the victors in any such faction fight are not going to gain any extra votes as a result of that victory?

Secondly, the party should make it a matter of tactical policy to attack and ridicule the middle class, as a class. The socialists will join in with gusto because they know that to destroy capitalism, the middle class which acts as capitalism's buffer, must first be destroyed. For the more pragmatic labourists, the tactic will make sense because the local middle class - the teachers, social workers and council officials - are already loathed and feared, anyway. Again, we play to our strengths and not our weaknesses; we unite our class and do not seek to divide it.

Leading on from this, the party should adopt as its symbol the sarcastic working class two-fingered gesture of contempt. For too long the Labour Party sought to educate and uplift its working class supporters: and the working class supporters just ignored them. Put another way the party sought to indoctrinate them into an acceptance of middle class mores and culture and it failed. Many of our new party's natural supporters will be working class by conviction and culture, as well as by income. We need to accept this, and we need to work with the grain of our classes' values and not against it.

For this reason, the party might want to consider inviting the likes of the great Bernard Manning along to give it a collective laugh at the founding conference. To do so would be to enrage the middle class, and thus increase the party's appeal. With luck, and a dose of press management, the very people that working class people loath will start to attack the party. The more they do this, the more the party can be expected to grow.

How can this party be got off the ground? Well, to a certain extent, the roots are already pushing through to the surface. Many housing estates already have a residents' group of some kind, the trick is to contact them and offer some kind of coordination. A founding conference is possible, if enough people agree to attend, but we have to accept that most members of these groups are too poor to pay for their travel and lodgings. It would make more sense to offer a conference online. A model constitution could be drawn up, and if a group accepted it, then that group would become the party's branch in that area. It is then up to each branch to recruit other members for their constituency.

It is probably too early to worry about a national leadership. What is needed first and foremost is to get everyone singing from the same choir sheet, more or less, and worry about who becomes General-Secretary after the party starts winning some council seats. We should remember that many candidates were elected as Independent Labour prior to the official creation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. What is being offered here is simply a variation on that theme.

Finally, what should this party be called? Well, it will be the party that represents the British working class. The name should be simple, and it should state what the party is about. There is really only one possible name:

Every now and then you read something that rocks you back on your heels and leaves you feeling tired, sad and very old. The Daily Telegraph has just done that with an article about NuLab's woes. The key paragraph that hit me with such force is this one:

A Cambridge don, quoting an old man he had met in Hackney recently, put it to me with brilliant succinctness last week: in the eyes of the political elite, the white working class "has gone from the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth within three generations". This group, salt or scum, is likely to be decisive this week.

I hope that our decisive influence on Thursday's elections is by way of a massive abstention. If we are now alone - and it looks as if we are - then voting for other middle class parties makes no sense at all.

What can we do after this? All I can suggest is the old refrain that we need to take back our Labour Party and make it once again the party that represents the economic interests of people that the middle class treat and think of as scum.

Being alone has its advantages. We no longer have to even pretend to be interested in middle class demands - so stuff the Euston manifesto! We can offer terms to a section of that class if they vote for our party, but the terms should be laid down by us.

If we don't, then I fear that the British working class will become the ghettoised and forgotten element in British politics. However, we are the majority of the population: the vast majority that does shit jobs for shit wages for shit gaffers. If we stand together, then our enemies will have to respect and fear us once again.

Back in November of last year I posted the call of oderint dum metuant, and I'll shout it again: Let the fuckers hate us so long as they fear us!

The British local elections will be held next month and NuLab if facing a humiliating meltdown. Rather than face up to the reality of the situation, which is that working class people see nothing worth voting for in NuLab, the Blairites are casting around for scapegoats. They seem to have decided that the British National Party fits the bill nicely. Unfortunately, being Blairites, they cannot see the truth that is staring them in the face.

The BNP is exploiting a growing sense of frustration with genuine problems: the lack of affordable housing, the increase in low-level crime, the failure of inner-city schools, the loss of a sense of identity among white working-class men following the collapse of traditional industries.

A new socialist blog has just started up, and it looks good so far. One posting had me nodding my head wearily as the writer listed the various grouplets that have tried, and failed, to become the voice of the British working class. I have to be honest and say that the last thing we need right now is yet another set of initials.

So what can be done? Well, one of the reasons why these new parties fail to get off the ground is that they don't have roots in any local community. If we look back to 1893 and the birth of the Independent Labour Party, we can see that what actually happened in Bradford was the coming together of many local groups and parties, quite a few of which that had been in existence for around a decade by that time. In other words people were not being asked to support a new party; they carried on supporting the local group that already existed.

A second reason why these new parties fail is that they tend to be run by infantile Trots who think that the revolution is just around the corner. The latest seems to be the Socialist Party, formerly known as Militant. Anything that Trots touch they fuck up - in that they are fully in tune with their mentor who ended up head-butting an ice pick.

It is far better to take a leaf out of the old ILP's book and form an alliance between socialists and labourists. The reason why the proposal, debated at Bradford, to call the new party the Socialist Labour Party was defeated was due to the fact that the bulk of the delegates knew that the majority of working class people were not socialists. However, labourism, coming as it does from the unions, was something that the ordinary person could relate to.

That common sense approach is something that is sadly lacking today. People from the labourite wing of the movement are just as cheesed off and isolated as we are. It makes no sense at all to leave them on the sidelines by setting up yet another socialist sect. We need to unite socialists and labourists under one banner.

Hence the modest proposal. Let socialists and labourists build their local parties and groups and when there are enough of them - and when they are winning council seats and when union branches and trades' councils are supporting them - then let us have a conference to set up a new party that will act as a voice for the urban working class.

As part of this modest proposal, I would suggest that if we ever get to the stage where enough groups exist to form a new party, then we take our cue from Bradford in 1893. The party should be called the Independent Labour Party and the conference should simply re-adopt the original consitution.

John Mortimer has an acerbic article in the Daily Telegraph that sets out the logical case against a smoking ban. It is both witty and informative, and makes the point that there is something very rum about a government objecting to smokey pubs and at the same time sending people off to die at the behest of a foreign government.

I don't think that it is controversial to say that the people who do not smoke are largely middle class and the ones who do are basically working class. Now, I know that part of the argument put forward in favour of a ban is to protect workers in pubs and such places, but I don't accept that line at all. If the anti-smoking brigade were serious about workers' rights they would be campaigning as well for stronger unions and a hike to the minimum wage. I shall not hold my breath waiting for them to do that.

What this is about is power: it is about the middle class filth demonstrating its power over the working class. The only reason why these creatures can get away with this is due to the fact that NewLab exists and the unions have been emasculated. If we still had a party speaking for us in Parliament, if the middle classes still shit their loads at the mention of the unions, then none of this would be happening.

Why do I think that it might be a good thing? Largely because it is one issue that will hit the working man on a daily basis and remind him just who is out to screw him. It won't lead to a new party being formed to represent the working class - it is not that type of issue - but it might just lead to a further erosion of the NewLab vote. Then, finally, we can take back our party and start the long, long task of rebuilding it: and creating policies with revenge in mind.

I was chatting to a friend from back home the other day and the conversation turned, as it always does, to the disaster that was the 1980s. My friend asked me if I could think of anything positive that came out of that bewildering, devastating decade. I replied that it was one retreat after another, but now I think I can see one cack-handed gain that we made. It's strange how these things don't seem so obvious until long after the event.

When I was a young man in the 1970s one of the things that truly got on my nerves was the division between skilled and unskilled men. I have commented on this before, in one of my digs at the lad, Eric, but let me return to it again.

I was a cinema projectionist in those days. I can remember meeting people who, after asking what I did for a living, would then demand, always in plonking tones: "Is that a skilled job, or what?"

Now, I did not have an answer to that, and I still don't. The answer I always gave was "who cares?" The problem was that they clearly did. To them the divide was not between labour and capital, it was within the working class. Their enemy was less the employer and more the unkilled and semi-skilled who might encroach upon their position as members of the Aristocracy of Labour. Half the strikes in those days seemed to involve demarkation disputes, as skilled workers demanded that a clear line be kept between them and the general workers below them.

Of course, any sucessful strike weakens the power of the management, but it was still a matter of gritting my teeth and wracking my brains to say something that was positive about gits like this. Especially since I knew that so many of them voted Tory. In fact, so many of them were actually card-carrying members of that party that I sometimes used to role my eyes in despair.

Now, I have to pause here for a moment, because it needs to be stressed that these gits were not really working-class Tories. My father was - I used to tease him that he was the only member of the 8th Army to vote for Churchill in 1945. However, my father was also a committed member of the T&GWU who always went to his union meetings and always stood on the picket line when a strike was called. His objections were to the chargehands and foremen at the factory where he worked as a labourer: he regarded them as "jumped-up buggers who become like Hitler when you give 'em a white coat to wear".

Now, the reader should not think that working-class people like my father did not believe in more holidays, higher pay and strong health and safety measures, because the did - they were trades' unionists, after all. However they also tended to believe in a kind of natural order to society. Men like my father may have known their place, but they expected the rest of society to respect the place where they stood. According to him, the senior management, former army officers to a man, did just that.

I do not accept my father's views, but I do accept their legitimacy as part of a strand of British working class ideology. However, those views are far, far removed from the attitudes of the gits mentioned above. Those tossers were not in the labour movement because they wanted to be there: they were in it because they wanted to use their muscle to keep a clear line between themselves and the rest. In my mother words, they were nothing more than "folk who've got a class above themselves and who think they are summat, but they are nowt a pound".

1983 was a watermark election because in that year the Aristocracy of Labour went over to the Tories in vast numbers. At the same time, both my parents voted Labour for the first time in their lives. They knew that it was a fight between classes and that the battle lines had been drawn. Within a few short years, many members of that old Aristocracy had found that their factories had closed and they looked ahead to years on the dole. It was the end of British gittery and a good thing too. Some have no doubt managed to arse-lick their way into well paying , non-union jobs. The rest have been thorougly proletarianised by the experience.

Visiting the UK these days I see that the old division within the working class no longer exists. Travelling around Manchester, in the districts of Ancoats, Miles Platting and Newton Heath, I don't hear those old idiotic questions being asked. The division now is as it should always have been: between the employer and the cockroaches who support him, and the rest of us.

The bad news is that the British working class is without any organisation, but at least it is far more homogenous in its views than it was thirty years ago. Thanks to dear Margaret Hilda Thatcher the divisions within our ranks are a thing of the past.

The year was probably 1967 and I would have been 11 years old on the day in question. It must have been that year because that was when Parliament voted to decriminalise homosexuality. Obviously the bill was making its way through when I heard a snatch of conversation between two men as I walked down a street in Manchester with my parents: "There'll be puffs walking around if this gets through," said one to the other.

I was old enough to know what they were talking about, but too young to have an opinion about it. For some reason that sentence has stuck in my mind all these years. That fragment of a conversation, heard almost 40 years ago, forms the basis of what I believe is wrong with socialism today.

Working class people join unions and vote Labour for economic reasons. What they want from the Labour Movement is basically economic. Economic security comes at the top of the list; control over the work process would probably come in at a close second. Nationalisation is certainly on the list, but it is unlikely to be at the top. British working people are a pragmatic bunch and have shown no desire to proceed to full-blown socialism over the past decades. I think that it is fair to say that so long as our people have a long-term job, with a decent wage and a union to ensure that terms and conditions improve every year, most of them will be happy with that.

The middle class types who join the movement tend to be people who are motivated by social or moral issues, rather than economic ones. Often this leads to some confusion in their little minds because they assume that as they have some issue with state policy, and as working class people also have issues outstanding with that same state, then all those issues are the same. Well, that is not the case because working class people tend to be economically radical and socially conservative. Middle class types tend to be the other way around, and the time has come when this circle can no longer be squared.

It could be squared in the 1960s, which is when I heard that bit of conversation. It could be done then because there were plenty of issues that could be traded off to keep everyone more or less happy. The types got some of the social legislation that they wanted, and we got more holidays, stronger unions and more control at work. We could live with their agenda because more of ours was being implemented.

The problem only came to a head in the early 1980s when government attacks on the unions, high levels of unemployment and a Labour Party that seemed more concerned about social issues all came to a head. Labour began to lose votes in election after election because the party seemed to be trying to copy the American Democratic Party, and had become a party of conflicting interest groups. Rights for this group or that, be they women, minorities, homosexuals or whatever, all became the buzz words of the day, as indeed they are now. Labour still had an economic agenda, but it got drowned out by the caterwauling of middle class types, as they pursued their own agendas.

Now, of course the Labour Movement must support increased rights for working women, that goes without saying. However, assuming that all woman share the same values simply because all woman have vaginas is silly. Working women may want a creche at work for their children, more time off after giving birth, more flexible working hours so that they can juggle home and work. Alternatively, they may not even want to work. Why cannot a wife and mother not stay at home to care for the next generation, and be paid a wage for doing that? These are the issues that strike me as sensible for a working class body to be discussing. Instead, talk is taken up with the "glass ceiling," and similar non-issues. In the case of minorities, we are told that only a few Asians are members of the boards of large companies and no blacks at all are to be found. As if anyone in the Labour Party should care.

The point is obvious: the glass ceiling is not a problem for working women; it is a problem for middle class whores. Blacks and Asians who sit on the boards of companies are clearly not a part of labour's tribe and we should not even pretend to be interested in their desires. The Labour Movement should articulate the aspirations of working class people, and should state quite clearly that the only dividing line is that of social class: working class people on one side and two-legged cockroaches on the other.

Success at this in the early 1960s meant that Smith & Nephew Ltd, could no longer get away with paying the Pakistani workers that they had imported into Nelson, Lancashire, £6-0-0 a week when the white workers were receiving £7-0-0. The unions refused to tolerate it on the basis of class solidarity. That led to the Labour government being pressured into banning that particular management wheeze, which happened as part of the two Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968.

The failure to articulate a clear, class-based ideology has led to the indigenous working class losing faith in Labour as the vehicle for their aspirations. When Labour talks about issues that are only of concern to types, the working man loses interest in a debate that is not about him or his concerns. When councils are perceived as doing favours for one ethnic minority at the expense of the rest, all that happens is that many Labour people cease to believe in the party as a whole. The fact that many of these favours consist of middle class jobs for middle class types only makes the situation worse.

How did this unhappy state of affairs come about? There are obviously many reasons, but the main one to my mind is that types are just better at getting their agenda over than we are. Working people tend to respond to a crisis with strikes and/or demonstrations, but if there is no perceived crisis they tend to get on with their lives rather than go to meetings. Leading on from this is the fact that the people who write for newspapers and work on television tend also to be types. It became a kind of vicious circle as midde class types propounded an agenda in the political parties, an agenda that was taken up by the media and sold back not as the desires of a minority, but as the common sense views of everyone. Working class people responded by switching off from a political process that increasingly ceased to articulate their views.

How to get back the lost millions? Well, for that to even begin to happen, NewLab must first lose, and lose badly. The middle class element that has taken over the party should be discredited by this and then encouraged to go off and seek pastures new. The people who will remain within the party will be its labourite and socialist element who know that people like us have no other home but Labour.

Then, Labour must rally the tribe and that tribe will only rally if the old call goes out for jobs, strong unions to protect those jobs and a programme of nationalisation that can be presented as being about strengthening workers' rights still further. A few social issues can be thrown out as table scraps, just so long as those who propound such issues understand that the days when we took a backseat to them are over. The scraps they can have, but the feast will be ours.