The Exile

Nu-Labour is in political "meltdown" according to Alex Salmon, the Scottish First Minister. He has a point as Cllr George Ryan, who was widely expected to be the Labour candidate has withdrawn from the contest, leaving the party without a standard bearer and with less than three weeks to go before the polls open.

Cllr Ryan has claimed family problems as the reason for his withdrawal, but your cynical old Exile is dubious about that one. There are few problems that cannot be solved by the income that would arrive courtesy of the House of Commons' gravy train - something else is going on, so let's do some speculating about what that might be.

Glasgow East is not just a working class constituency, it is also a Catholic working class constituency. Now this has little to do with theology, but it does have an awful lot to do with tribal, intra-working-class identity. It is not about going to mass, but it is about how people define themselves and how their identities are proclaimed.

Nu-Labour has basically become the anti-Catholic party in the eyes of many people. As Jim Dobbin MP wrote:

There was the attempt by Alan Johnson, when education secretary, to force faith schools to take 25 per cent of non-believers. Then there was the adoption agency legislation to stop discrimination against gays and lesbians which finished up discriminating against the Catholic Church. Catholic adoption agencies are now closing. . . There are five million Catholics in the country. If the government think they can disregard even a small number of these voters then they are living in cloud cuckoo land.

The problem is that the post-modern Nu-Labour Party does think that it can disregard Catholics social issues in the same way that it felt that it could ignore traditional working class economic demands. The party just felt that since they did not believe in all that stuff then neither did anyone else - and if they did believe, well, they had nowhere else to go.

However, in Scotland, they do have somewhere else to go - they can dump the Labour Party and vote for the Scottish National Party who are now the favourites to win the seat.

This may be why George Ryan has decided not to contest the seat. He has seen the writing on the wall and doesn't want to be remembered as the man who lost Glasgow East. Far better to wait until the whole Nu-Labour wankfest is over and a new party has been created to represent the socially conservative, economically radical working class once again.

All being well we can start the funeral oration for Nu-Labour on the 25th of this month. It should be in the early hours of the morning on that day when the results of the Glasgow East by-election will be in, and the seat looks set to fall to the Scottish National Party.

Unlike Henley, which was a safe Tory seat, and Crewe and Nantwich, a seat that could be marginal in a bad year for Labour, Glasgow East is the third safest Labour seat in the whole of Scotland. In 1997 it returned a Labour MP with 66% of the vote, a share that still remained at almost 61% in 2005. How on earth could this seat fall?

Turnout is part of the answer. In 1997 62% turned out to vote, but by 2005 that had fallen to just 48%. As we saw in Crewe, it is the traditional Labour voters who are now refusing to be voting fodder for the Nu-Labour middle class machine.

In Glasgow East the SNP are the main challengers, but the great Tommy Sheridan might throw his hat into the ring as well. Sheridan was the man who led Scottish opposition to the Tory Poll Tax in the late 1980s, and in spite of his legal problems he is still a man who commands a lot of respect north of the border. Besides, those problems are mainly due to a spot of extra-curricular shagging and the Murdoch press. Neither of those are going to hold him back in that part of the world. He won't win the seat, but he might just allow the SNP an easy and comfortable majority.

In many ways Glasgow East represents this writer's Britain in microcosm. As the Spectator points out, official unemployment stands at just over 6%, but if you factor in the hidden unemployment that comes from long-term sickness benefit claimants and single parents, then the figure jumps to half the workforce.

Once upon a time the Labour Party existed to represent those people, but now it ships in immigrants by the bucketload to keep wages low, and to take all and every available job. The contempt that Nu-Labour demonstrates for the class that gave it birth by that policy alone is breathtaking, but when we add in the fact that everything that the party says and does is aimed with an eye to the so-called aspirational vote, then we can see that there is nothing that remains in that party for us.

In spite of these factors, and as we have pointed out before, Nu-Labour could probably have got away with all this, given the benefits payments and the fact that most working class people don't read party statements, but where they really fucked up was by turning that same aspirational set of cockroaches loose on us. By building them up as our colonial administrators, Nu-Labour virtually guaranteed its own demise. The point here is that we as a class could live with the mill owners because they were remote figures who did not feature in people's day to day lives. It was the foremen and under-managers that everyone loathed. Today their spiritual descendants are the social work filth, council officials and general pen-pushing scum.

In spite of everything, Glasgow East is a big catch for any opposition to take. Nevertheless, if it falls from Nu-Labour's grasp, then we can start to celebrate the demise of that most loathsome organisation that acts to ensure that we remain powerless and poor for ever.

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.

Starting tomorrow The Exile will run a series of guest postings by UKSecretCourts, the nom de guerre of a young Welsh agitvideo maker. Most of her postings will involve a video that you will be able to watch here, along with an explanation to ram her message home.

If you tune in tomorrow for the first offering you will find out why UKSecretCourts loathes the social work filth, but why am I providing space for her videos here?

The quick answer is that she is a very good video maker and I want her work to get as wide an exposure as possible. However, that is only part of the answer.

Socialism is built out of the wreckage of capitalism. However, the days when working class people had the economic muscle to hold the capitalist state to ransom have clearly gone, so how can we even irritate the state, given those circumstances? Obviously we need to rethink our strategies.

Capitalism cannot survive without a large parasitic middle class that acts as a buffer between the working class and the owners of capital. This middle class is given rewards by capitalism for its loyalty, and its members enjoy having us to look down on. However, as a class it is weak, and open to attack on many fronts. If that class could be damaged then capitalism itself would be damaged. At the very least, one could envisage a situation where the likes of Rupert Murdoch suddenly decided that it was in their interests to dump that class and seek new arrangements with ours. At best, the sky would be the limit for our class. It all depends on how badly we can degrade those parasitic lumps of shit that go under the generic name of middle class.

As far as those creatures who work in the private sector are concerned, then their time will come, but not yet. We cannot fight a group over whom we have no economic or political leverage. However, that is not the case as far as the middle class scum who are employed by local government is concerned.

This brings me, in a roundabout sort of way to the social work filth. The stories about them are legion - and most working class people loathe, despise and fear them. If those creatures did not exist then they would have to be invented because as targets for working class action they are that perfect.

To make matters even nicer, they are also despised by the middle class proper who tend to work in the private sector. Partly this is due to the fact that the taxes paid by that group help to provide the wages for the highly unproductive social work industry, but it is also due to the sheer effrontery of the industry's members. Just click on this link if you want to know what I mean and consider the number of times that the social work filth who are writing there use the word professional, or one of its derivatives.

The point here is that true professionals don't need to announce their status at every opportunity. However, scabby little slags with their pathetic poly degrees and their equally pathetic demands for status do - and that is another good reason why we might be able to count on allies in this battle.

Obviously the alliance would only be tactical, as our aim is to destroy an entire class. That said, wouldn't it be wonderful if, with just a little prodding from us, the middle class started to fight a civil war? We could just sit in the pub, throw the beer down the necks, and watch the show.

So, having been given this group who consume resources that we as a class need for ourselves, we would be fools if we did not take advantage of the situation by using them to rally our own people to battle.

Let's have the fuckers, in other words.

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.

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.

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.

There isn't anything that I can disagree with about this posting, and it is getting quite a justified airing around the socialist blogs. I think that there are two reasons why we have come to this pretty pass. The first is the professionalising of politics, and the second the takeover of the Labour Party at local level.

When Sir Winston Churchill lost the 1945 election it looked for a time as if Chartwell, Churchill's Kent home, would have to go on the market. A group of well wishers bought it and the Churchill's remained there until their deaths, whereupon it passed to the nation.

In those days it was expected that a Tory or Liberal would have a private income and that Labour men would have union sponsorship. I meant that the Commons more or less represented the two great classes that make up British society. It also meant that the middle class rabble by and large were kept out of politics.

Today becoming a member of the House of Commons is a tasty little earner for an ambitious little scrote who wants to trouser away a few thousand pounds a year. It is not the wage that is the problem, but all those lovely tax free expenses.

That by itself is not enough to explain why the Labour benches are now crawling like maggots over a corpse with middle class scrotes. The blame for that can be laid at the door of the lower middle class who have basically taken over the local Labour Parties. As was argued here, living in a working class district these days is rather like living under colonial rule. This being so, why does anyone expect those local colonial administrators to select someone who hates their guts? They choose someone from a nice home, with a nice background, who will put forward nice policies, that nice people like. The job of the working class is to turn out and vote for these chancers every four years or so. Other than that they must know their place.

The only way that this will change is if working class people stop allowing themselves to be used as voting fodder. To a certain extent this is happening, as more and more of our people simply refuse to vote.

That said, we need a pro-active answer, and one that will rally our tribe to battle. Partly that is what The Exile is all about, exploring paths that will lead to our class taking its justified retribution. Alas, although I can see the problem, I do not have an answer to it.