{"id":8233,"date":"2010-11-08T00:00:35","date_gmt":"2010-11-07T23:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=8233"},"modified":"2010-11-04T01:03:49","modified_gmt":"2010-11-04T00:03:49","slug":"the-party-game-is-over-stand-and-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/11\/the-party-game-is-over-stand-and-fight\/","title":{"rendered":"The Party Game Is Over. Stand and Fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rise like lions after slumber
\nIn unvanquishable number.
\nShake your chains to earth like dew.
\nWhich in sleep has fallen on you.
\nYe are many \u2013 they are few.<\/em><\/p>\n

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley\u2019s The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don\u2019t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.<\/p>\n

Born of the \u201cnever again\u201d spirit of 1945, social democracy in Britain has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when \u00a31 trillion of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described \u201cfinanciers\u201d as the nation\u2019s \u201cgreat example\u201d and his personal \u201cinspiration\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is not to say Parliamentary politics is meaningless. They have one meaning now: the replacement of democracy by a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born. The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang, assisted by venal MPs, finished Thatcher\u2019s work and built the foundation of the present \u201ccoalition\u201d. This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-avoided fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballentaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.<\/p>\n

Today, they are claiming 21st century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a \u201cdeficit crisis\u201d. A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the second world war, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the great arts edifices of London\u2019s South Bank.<\/p>\n

There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a \u201cpublic spending review\u201d. The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that\u2019s beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a \u201cshock doctrine\u201d as applied to Pinochet\u2019s Chile and Yeltsin\u2019s Russia.<\/p>\n

In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; asylum seekers can be \u201crestrained\u201d to death on commercial flights and should fellow passengers object, anti-terrorism laws will deal with them. Abroad, British militarism colludes with torturers and death squads.<\/p>\n

The playwright Athol Fugard is right. With Harold Pinter gone, no acclaimed writer or artist dare depart from their well remunerated vanity. With so much in need of saying, they have nothing to say. Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, leader of the minority Liberal Democrats, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction\u2019s compliance with the dismantling of much of British post-war society. The theft of \u00a383bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations like Rupert Murdoch\u2019s. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge \u00a340bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who \u201ccheat\u201d the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule \u00a30.5bn, and that \u00a310.5bn in benefit payments were not claimed at all. The Labour Party is his silent partner..<\/p>\n

The propaganda arm in the press and broadcasting dutifully presents this as unfortunate but necessary. Mark how the fire-fighters\u2019 action is \u201ccovered\u201d. On Channel 4 News, following an item that portrayed modest, courageous public servants as basically reckless, the presenter Jon Snow demanded that the leaders of the London Fire Authority and the Fire Brigades Union go straight from the studio and \u201cmediate\u201d now, this minute. \u201cI\u2019ll get the taxis!\u201d he declared. Forget the thousands of jobs that are to be eliminated from the fire service and the public danger beyond Bonfire Night. Knock their jolly heads together. \u201cGood stuff!\u201d said the presenter.<\/p>\n

Ken Loach\u2019s 1980s documentary series , Questions of Leadership, opens with a sequence of earnest young trade unionists on platforms, exhorting the masses. They are then shown older, florid, self-satisfied and finally adorned in the ermine of the House of Lords. Once, at a Durham Miners\u2019 Gala, I asked Tony Woodley, now the joint general secretary of Unite, \u201cIsn\u2019t the problem the clockwork collaboration of the union leadership?\u201d He almost agreed, implying that the rise of bloods like himself would change that. The British Airways\u2019 cabin crew strike, over which Woodley presides, is said to have made gains. Has it? And why haven\u2019t the British unions risen as one against totalitarian laws that place free trade unionism in a vice?<\/p>\n

The BA workers, the fire-fighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; and listen to the public\u2019s support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 johnpilger.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}