click on https://www.theeuroprobe.org/2022-011-the-origins-of-the-trade-unions-and-labour/
A true British worker and how coal miners were treated when working (also known as ‘White Privilige’)
Mick Greenhough editor@theeuroprobe.org
I come from a line of coal miners. My grandfather had to work flat out to feed his family with virtually no opportunity to ‘better himself’. Due to the complete lack of Safety he was very badly injured underground and quite unable to work any more. My father, who at the age ot 10 had won one of 4 open scloarships in Derby on the basis of his ability at maths, had leave school to go down the mine when he was 11 and his brother also who was 9. Grandad was generously awarded 5 shillings and bag of coal a week so the pennies they earnt were essential. As such you would have thought they would be ardent Socialists or even Marxists but they were devout Protestant Primitive Methodists and Chartists. Incidentally they worked in the same pit as Dennis Skinner’s dad. They were very patriotic and pro British and my dad was dismayed at the anti British policies of todays Socialist Labour Party. He was incensed as he felt his Labour Party has been hijacked by socialist toffs and how they have betrayed what our ancestors had fought so hard to establish. The Labour Party of today is no longer the ‘Party of the Working Class’.
A true British worker and how coal miners were treated when working (also known as ‘White Privilige’)
However strategic industries such as electricity, water, gas should be under the control of the government but run by those who know how to run a company not politically motivated civil servants. Coal is far to valuable a raw material to just be burnt.
Mick Greenhough editor@theeuroprobe.org
In 1534 Henry VIII had a conflict with the Pope as to who had ultimately authority over England. Henry resolved the dilema by evicting the Pope and his Catholic power base of monks in the monastries and destroyed them. However he did not do so in Ireland as then it was a very remote and forgotten land and that has led to problems even today. He then established the Church of England. Martin Luther had recently started the Protestant anti Pope movement so the CoE steadfastly adopted Protestantism. Henry remained a Catholic to his death so the Reformation was driven mainly by Elizabeth 1, William Tyndale and Cromwell. Since then England has had fight some very bloody battles to keep the Pope out of the UK. However the CoE is almost a clone of the CoR but without Confession, Mass and with NO Popery. It retained nearly all the CoR’s authoritarianism, bells, smells and fancy regailia. This led to the birth of the Methodist Church by those who rejected that authoritarianism and adopted more plain attire. As is human nature the Methodist clergy in time began to adopt the authoritarianism of the CoE. The new emerging industrial age required workers who were both literate and numerate so the working men started to become educated and began to read. In 1800 some of those working men began to reject that new, increacing authoritarianism of the Methodist clergy so they were thrown out of the Methodist Church. They felt they did not need a ‘gate keeper’ to speak to God for them as they could speak to him directly themselves. They were still devout Christians and became known as Primitive Methodists who did not indulge in the brainwashing of children but passed their lifestyle on to their children by example. They started street preaching and became very popular and resonated with working men particularly in the heavy industries such as the mines, potteries, steel, textile workers etc. Those working in these new industries began to become more affulent and assertive. Then in 1838 the Chartist Movement started by working men who demanded enfranchisement.
The industrial age led to much exploitation of workers from children and women working in the mines to the them being expoloited in the textile mills. However there were many industrial employers who at the same time built model villages for their workers. The Jacksons in Ironbridge to the Roundtrees and Cadbury’s.
The People’s Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic:
- A vote for every man aged twenty-one years and above, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
- The secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
- No property qualification for Members of Parliament (MPs), to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
- Payment of Members, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation.
- Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies (rotten boroughs) to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
- Annual parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in every twelve months.
It was the Primitive Methodists, who had acquired the skills of public speaking by their street preaching, who were able to give voice to the Chartist men assembling outside of the factories. From this cooperation the Labour Party was formed by Kier Hardy, a Scottish miner turned journalist, in 1892 and the Trade Unions joined in. There were several examples of workers striking to demand better wages and conditions in the early 1800s but they were very local and uncoordinated. The Trade Unions were formally made legal in 1834 but were only ad hoc until much later and were generally formed from the much earlier trade guilds and the Labour Party formed from those Trade Unions. They were almost completely from the ‘working class’. My old dad was very conscious that there were no Spiv Lawyers, Academics, middle class Fabians or showbiz dilittantes working down the pit then or since. Today you have to be a right Posh lad to be a leading Socialist
With the exporting of our manufacturing facilities overseas ‘to boost inward investment'(?) by the succesive governments the ‘working men’ of the heavy industries have all but gone. They have more or less been replaced by people who will be in financial difficulties if they do not get their cash in hand at the end of each month and are at the mercy of the state’s conditional benevolence.
Sadly the Labour Party of the workers has long since been hijacked by the Spiv Lawyers, Middle Class Fabians, champaign Socialist millionaires, academics and showbiz dilittanties, all tending to crypto Marxism, offering freebees for votes (but paid for by the taxpayer) with very few ‘working men’ left. The New ‘Working Class’ are now just voting fodder for the self aclaimed toffs running the Labour Party. Wealthy Marxists are continually quietly trying to take over the Labour Party.
The Union leaderships often hijacked by the Marxist Tendancy.
The number of Labour MPs who had working-class jobs before entering politics and their steady decline as Labour HQ implant their chosen complient ex-intern graduates (who have rarely had a proper job, if any) into constituencies to be their candidates.
Workers such as the railway workers should buy shares in their rail company then they will get a share of the profits each year?
Why and how have the ‘working class’ lost control of their Labour Party? The Labour Party of 2024 is far more concerned with their Union paymasters than the pensioners and ‘working class’.
What is the Parliamentary Internship Programme? | PIP
Envisioned by backbench Member of Parliament (MP) Alfred Hales in 1969, the non-partisan Parliamentary Internship Programme (PIP) creates unique training opportunities for young professionals and recently brainwashed university graduates, to increase their knowledge of Parliament, and provide MPs with skilled assistants during their ten-month tenure. Children of the working classes need not apply. This seems to apply to all parties as it also supplies a steady stream of Wet Tory MPs.
Labour MPs with a working class background. More and more MPs and their hangers-on have only ever worked as or for politicians. The number of working men is steadily reducing.
1992-1997: 59 MPs
1997-2001: 55 MPs
2001-2005: 49 MPs
2005-2010: 37 MPs
2010-2015: 20 MPs
2015-2017: 13 MPs
2017-2019: 12 MPs
2019-now: 7 MPs and one of them is Reform
This has happened to the Tory Party as well which is why so many Non True Tories have been elected as ersatz Tory MPs. Many Tory MPs are now Pale Blue to watery Green – the One Nation Tories
Many of the Unions have been infiltrated and hijacked by Marxist militants. (view the film ‘The Angry Silence’ with Richard Attenborough 1960 where even his kids were attacked at school by Marxist ‘useful idiots’). The remit of the Marxist leadership is to exploit the solidarity of the Trade Union members as a means to try to reduce our very successful Industrial Society and Market economy to a destitute shambles. They can then rebuild a brave new Marxist society from the ashes. The overwhelming strength of working men is their collective solidarity when striking. This causes a conflict within those striking who realise their ‘solidarity’ is being exploited by their Union Leaders for nefarious ends. These leaders are now more interested in exploiting that collective power of the working men to achieve politically damaging the government rather than improving their members welfare, which now seems to be useful but periferal. Today’s Labour Party and Unions leaders are nothing like what they started out as and they clearly no longer represent ‘the workers’. Now many Labour MPs have motives that are quite different to those who they have persuaded to vote for them. Many Union leaders also have very different motives as well from those of their members and take any reason to call a strike if it will damage the government. In this they are often aided and abeted by the pig headed and arrogant attitude of the management.
How do Marxists become leaders of Unions? From personal experience when being actively involved in, and assisting in a strike when an apprentice and getting to know the Shop Convenor – who I much later found out to be a member of the UK Communist Party. He clearly took a shine me and explained that conflicts over pay and conditions were only reasons to be given to the workers. The Union had to find a grievance of the workers to exploit – which there often was and then to call a strike. We won our apprentices strike and got a pay rise but the company then cancelled the Gratis Christmas bonus so in the end we were not much better off. The Shop Convenor told me it did not matter that the strike had not fully achieved its aim. If it had damaged the company then it had been worth it. Arthur Scargill, Red Robbo and Jack Dash are good examples of that opinion. Any strike, regardless of its outcome, is considered by the Marxist leaders to be a success. “if it has damaged the company/country then even if the strike fails to achieve its desired outcome it is considered a success”. The Rail and Doctors strikes of today are good examples.
An interesting follow up was that I then went to Kingston CAT to do a Dip Tech in Mechanical Engineering. I was having a cup of tea in a break one morning when 2 blokes came and sat with me. They were obviously not of the college. They clearly knew of my involvment in the strike and were trying to recruit me to become chairman of the students union with an offer of £20/month – cash (my monthly wage was then £16.2s) through my letter box if I did. I was not ameanable so they stormed off in a huff. I never found out who they were or where that money was to come from.
It was about this time I started bumping into the Sevenoaks Young Socialists. I was puzzled as most of them lived in very large detached houses with 2 or 3 cars in the drive – frequently in private roads. Many of them got a new car for their 21st birthday. It puzzles me to this day As said earlier ‘You have to be very Posh now to be a leading Socialist’ . A good example is the very wealthy champaigne crypto Marxists running the Junior Doctors strike. The junior Doctors should have a pay increase to catch up with inflation but the NHS spend their money on Diversity Officers, Net Zero Officers and other non clinical posts who are clearly far more important to the NHS than doctors. The money is not there post Covid, the country is skint, and they want to expolit the juniour Drs need to help destroy our democraticly elected government.
I also attended a couple of Union meetings which were quite eye openers. The most important weapon working men have is their solidarity. My personal experience is that the activists will call a Union meeting in the evening when other events are on (a big football match) but some of the ‘normal’ members will still attend. The activists would then proceed to speak endlessly on petty, boring subjects until all those ‘wrong’ members got fed up and went home. They then have the meeting proper and an election to elect themselves as the shop stewards ‘at an organised Union meeting’, all perfectly ‘democratic’???’
If several Unions can coordinate their strikes so much the better.
By the ’80s many coal mines had to be closed as they were worked out after 300 years of mining the coal and were completely uneconomic often bring up more bats than coal. Wilson closed down far more mines than Thatcher. Scargill called the the miners out on strike ostensibly to stop the closures but really it was to try to bring down the elected government. Thatcher and Walker outsmarted Scargill and won the very nasty and diversive strike. The mines still had to close but many of the redundant miners were not found viable alternative work and many close knit mining communities were devastated. It was done to quickly with little or no planning.
The Unions also successfully completely wrecked the UK car and ship building industries so they moved overseas or went bankrupt. When the manufacturing of some of them returned to the UK they had foreign owners who get the profits. The docks were saved by containerisation and the Print Media saved by Digital printing.
As said this decline was often aided and abetted by management who were usually extremely arrogant and pig headed who are more interested in the ‘bottom line’ of the accounts than improving their products.
It was never the intention of the Chartists and Prims that they would be represented by a Socialist and Marxist elite. They are more intent on using the strength of the members and strikes to help destroy the Free Market Economy for a Marxist Soviet state than the improving their members lifestyle.
Labour no longer represents the ‘working man and woman’ but then who does with the Tory Party is no longer Tory and the Lib Dems and Greens are little more than Woke joke parties. The main parties Tory, Labour, Lib Dem & Greens are all more or less the same following the UN 2030 policy. Perhaps the Reform Party is now the Party for all gainfully working people and all people in difficulty? We can only live in hope.
We have a ‘Labour’ party in power but it is not Labour. It is a left wing Socialist party masquerading as Labour.