FORUM: Illtyd harrington: ‘as i please’

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Published: 3 March, 2011

A united front must challenge this injustice 

FIRST a lesson from history. On Sunday June 21, 1941, Hitler sealed his fate by taking on Joe Stalin. Later that day our prime minister Churchill, who used to spit out the word “Bolshevism” contemptuously,  pledged his full support for the new ally  Joseph Stalin.

Common cause was struck and,  as often happens, the most improbable people woke up to find themselves in the same bed.

In 2011 the best in British life –  kindness, charity, fair play and communal concern – are being trampled into the ground.

Our economic survival, it seems, demands the virtual end of financial support for the most needy and clinically ill. 

It is an incontrovertible fact that in thousands of cases the basic requirements for a daily comfortable life are to be abruptly and brutally removed.

Ebenezer Scrooge is stalking the corridors  of power. 

This indiscriminate and illogical depriving of funds for local councils and voluntary bodies is the height of cynicism. 

Number 10, like a robber baron, stands back and says “now do it for yourselves”.

This parody of democracy is bewildering. And many workers and volunteers are being left to face impossible and unattainable targets.

This is particularly so in Camden.

This strikes not only at the welfare state but at the basic values of British society: “We are responsible one for the other” – a long-held tenet of our national ethos.

We are waiting for the true and authentic voice of the Tory party to break its silence.

Do they need reminding that it was none other than Churchill who said  when welcoming the Welfare State proposals in 1944: “It is to provide care for those in need from the cradle to the grave”, while his moderate minister of education RA Butler laid down that every student will be provided for as far as possible in accordance with his/her age, aptitude and ability?

No one can forbear to cheer at this common sense. And what are we to make of those Liberals in parliament – from the party which provided the midwife to the Welfare State in the person of Lloyd George – who are now totally colluding in its undermining and destruction. In the heartlands of the Liberals there must be grave disturbance. 

We are still allegedly subscribing to a Christian Judaic humanitarian principle. Nine hundred years ago the monks at the new Westminster Abbey practised compassion for the sick, the old and the young. Today, across the road, madness prevails.

Labour in Camden, I’m afraid, will have a difficult job in explaining why they are the handmaidens of ever-more unpleasant government policy.

Last week when I went to my birthplace in South Wales, I found my father’s dole document for 1935. Total payment: 150 pence. My share of it as one of three children was 10p a week. My mother used to cover us with overcoats in bed.

I laughed coldly this week when the pensions authority told me I would receive an extra 25p a week when I reached 80. 

I wrote a letter back saying that at the end of the month it was a toss-up between heading for the pound shop or buying five pages of the Observer. But at least it was an increase on 1935.

At least the shirtless ones then fought back  – mass demonstrations, hunger marches, very public statements of anger. In Merthyr we even became a distressed area. But it did nothing to solve our 80 per cent unemployment.

Those days have gone. Camden is a place of political reality and compassion. The New Journal’s Christmas Hamper Appeal is a little indicator of what people really want. 

Time was when the churches expressed in unequivocal ways their alarm at what was happening. The bench of bishops confronted Thatcher and her concept of society. David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, came away saying: “We were not received with unalloyed rapture.”

Protest in its very British form CAN change desperate attitudes. Harold Macmillan, for instance, tried to warn the Tory party of selling the family silver. Good advice. 

Locally there is an enviable tradition of challenging injustice. Wet Tories must come out from the shower – they have nothing to hide.

The mainstream of Camden life is just that – pro-life.  And  it will reject I’m sure the scorch and burn and self-destruction which follows such attacks on basic rights.

A Tory government has lost its marbles. Its rank and file are concerned. 

And Labour should remember that it was they who in 1951  introduced unnecessary prescription charges to pay for £50million of armaments. It took Harold Wilson 20 years later to restore them. And believe it or not, the state of Britain did not collapse like a heap of cards. Injustice must be challenged.