Illtyd Harrington – Fruits of years of struggle are being trampled upon

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Published: 17th March, 2011
ILLTYD HARINGTON: 'AS I PLEASE'

WE are in a bleak midwinter of reaction. A harsh biting wind is cutting through us. We once believed in  the future and a great wave swept us along confidently. 

Now the hard-faced men have moved like the gang in A Clockwork Orange, aided and abetted, to their everlasting shame, by the party that founded the Welfare State. I hesitate to use the word “lackeys” with its Kremlin connotations. They are a razor gang with Vince Cable resembling the Cellophane Man in the musical Chicago.

Labour looks rather like worried tourists trapped in a suspended cable car waiting for the Alfred Hitchcock solution. 

The tragic irony is that the Liberals, who kept their nerve under Lloyd George, are now hacking away at the foundations of our tolerant society.

This is a desperate time for those on the Left who believe in a better future. 

This is the land of Lost Horizon. Politicians are despised in general and have little idea how to fix the Chariot of Fire which will take us to the Golden Jerusalem.

The million or so people who have been thrilled by the courage and optimism in Les Misérables are seldom aware of the struggle that had be fought for everyday, literally throughout the 19th and 20th century.

Professor Kenneth O Morgan is a left-of-centre Labour peer and he retells this history* which led to the need for a Labour Party, for trade union legality and for the rights to leisure, pleasure and a fair wage.

We are slipping backwards on a very steep slope. Who now believes that in the 1840s  French workers were demanding a 40-hour week and the right to work? This challenge was mirrored in Britain where the workers faced a punitive penal system and trans­portation for the slightest criminal offence.

Last week, millions of workers were formally told work longer and pay more for a smaller pension. Benidorm is denied.

London is now dangerously polarised. A Knightsbridge flat fetches £54million while council tenants face a 7 per cent rent increase in Camden.

The pension policy was introduced to the world by Lord Hutton, a rather alarming looking Labour peer with a grimace that would frighten the public hangman, who was beloved by Blair and Brown.

It is worthwhile to remember that the first Reform Bill of 1832 was vigorously opposed and victory only achieved an increase from 14 to 17 per cent of the male population able to vote. 

And this was after a period of intense repression when the Duke of Wellington yelled “Damn democracy”. Shelley said of the Prime Minister Robert Peel that he had a smile “like the gleam of the silver plate on a coffin lid”.

Even the middle-class demands for a vote in the Chartists movement fizzled out. It took 50 years until 1867 and 1884. Neither of my two Irish great grandfathers would have qualified, and women didn’t get it till 1918. That was perhaps the most lasting progressive step of all.

All praise must be given to the Liberal Party who throughout the 19th century were on the side of the people. But it took the arrival of David Lloyd George, a diminutive, randy, quicksilver-minded solicitor from the Welsh hills to deliver the 1906 triumph. 

It is quite astounding to read what this man did. Teachers ought to explain what was the 1909 People’s Budget and the 1911 Parliament Bill which told the House of Lords: either comply or we’ll flood you with alternatives.

Winston Churchill, the patron saint of the Conservative party, was then Lloyd George’s ally.

The 1906 and the 1997 general elections produced a similar euphoric mood throughout the country, historians believe. They were blue-sky days, a shift of power to the people. Now the moral compass has been smashed up. 

In 1994 on his ascension to the Labour throne, Tony Blair used the word socialism once. He used the word new 37 times. 

No one in the modern leadership of the party can define the word socialism. 

Try telling teenagers that until 1955 nearly 60 per cent of houses in London had no running hot water.

This government is being led by Burke and Hare, the grave robbers – and they ended up manufacturing their own corpses. These two in Number 10 Downing Street will have a gruesome inheritance.

Morgan,  the biographer of James Callaghan is no Cassandra, and he has no answers. Last week the Sun gave Labour 45 per cent of the vote . More than once I have heard it said that it was better for us to get deeper into mess and the voters would rise up as one. Unfortunately there is no record of the deprived becoming politically motivated. In fact in the 1930s the most deprived areas had sizeable Conservative votes. 

I spoke to the architect of new Labour Lord Mandelson this morning. He was in Brazilia. He is still convinced his solution is right.

But, meanwhile I have been reading Lenin under the sheets with a torch. “Weeks go by and become decades and nothing happens. Then decades go by in a week and everything happens.” 

Those who still doubt my words may recall the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana who said: “Those  who ignore the past are doomed to relive it “.

*Ages of Reform: Dawns and Downfalls of the British Left by Kenneth O Morgan published by IBTauris