fahrenheit451:283

September 12 2018 is the last day of the Trades Union Congress annual conference. Its social media hashtag has been #TUC150 .

Imagine one of the creatures in Jurassic Park wearing a happy birthday hat.

The TUC's greatest historic strength in past decades and its greatest weakness these last 40 years, is its symbiotic relationship with the Labour Party - what once was only supposed to have been the organised labour movement's parliamentary wing.

And so it goes. Parties and movements and the ideas that they are founded on to promote and which motivate them must all at some stage come to falter ,fail and die out.The late 19th century born idea of Social democracy /parliamentary Socialism is the latest case in point.

But long after the actual material circumstances conducive to a particular political ideology's growth and development have evolved and become increasingly less favourable to that particular ideology,the proponents of it continue their sterile endeavour of essentially continuing to march ( and dragoon everyone else to march along with them ) in the entirely wrong historic direction.

And once Class politics is abandoned and the distinctive Class oriented parties and movements enter instead the murky quagmires of identity and gender politics,then truly their cause is lost.

That the headline speaker at #TUC150 is the Archbishop of Canterbury,sums up the predicament of the movement succinctly.

That the other day, Congress actually approved a motion in support of Gender-self indentification as a policy priority,underscores the TUC's predicament.

The TUC's timely death as with that of the Labour Party and equally so the Conservative Party's ought to resonate across all echelons of the  British polity irrespective of any level of political awareness.

The moment ,TUC General secretary O'Grady announced that the TUC would add its " might " to the #PeoplesVote campaign for a second referendum of the UK's continued EU membership, is the moment the TUC -all it ever did and all that it is ever likely to do- passed irrevocably into the annals of history;its death notice failing to be recorded in the obituary columns.

fahrenheit451:227

You know that feeling of dread you get at the onset of what you know will be a migraine headache?

The same sickening sense of foreboding is achieved by listening to what that vapid and lacklustre straw man masquerading as the current leader of the British Labour Party has to say on the EU’s ” Freedom of Movement “.
The impending sense of nausea he induces when evading the issue is all too palpable.

It is also all too indicative of the 200 #LabourIn MPs’ tawdry metropolitan PC ideology.

For some reason, this antidemocratic, seditionist, parliamentary rabble and quite a large swathe of otherwise serious and rational people on the British ” Left ” think and behave and speak as if the ineluctable Laws of the Capitalist means of production,distribution and exchange , i.e. the totality of the Capitalist economic system has ceased to operate.

Despite their voluble and disingenuous abusive harangues to the contrary, they e.g  most of Labour most of the time and most of the other ” left ” most of the time categorically deny the following.:-

The basis of the laws of supply and demand are – that the less you have of something,the higher the price of it inexorably is.The more you have of something the lower the price of that becomes.

Seriously,the operation of the capitalist system is really simple, that’s why it works.

An increase in the availability of labour in what is ” a labour market ” will overall lower the price of labour.A shortage of labour would increase the price thereof.

Adam Smith expounded on this, Marx certainly knew that this is how our world operates.

But not according to Corbyn or Slogans With Placards or any other amongst the dreck of failed PC multiculturalist neophytes who show off their faux-revolutionary,anti-capitalist politics at Uni.

Sad.

Unrestricted labour market competition is called freedom of movement.

Utterly ghastly.

Time for sovereign borders and tariff barriers and each nation State to its own.

Time for autarky and higher wages.

Time to smash the #EU to smithereens.

And that Comrades, is Revolutionary!

( The observant reader might be aware that but with a few minor edits,this blog post originally appeared on January 10,2017 under fahrenheit451:117 )

fahrenheit451:175

Jeremy Corbyn used his appearance on the Andrew Marr show Sunday morning to pledge that any new policy would stop the “ wholesale importation of underpaid workers from Central Europe ”. This elicited a wave of hostile reactions particularly from the anti-brexit Remoaner dim witted Leftists who actually,contrary to accepted economic science, insist and promulgate their flat earth style theory that increased labour market competition increases wages.
The usual inquisitorial litany of charges they level at anyone advocating the end of the neoliberal EU's  unrestricted freedom of movement consists of but isn't limited to , xenophobia, racism, scapegoating of immigrants.
" Remoaners " - whether of the left or right  -never even attempt to explain how increased labour market competition does actually drive up the general level of wages. The insidious and genuinely disturbing authoritarian rhetoric of the Remain campaign precludes dissent from their received wisdom.
A typical Trades Union constitution such as the UNITE Trade Union constitution ( 2011 ) is self-evidently in breach of the Leftoid/marxoid flat earthers' fundamental principles. After all, how can any Trade union defend let alone improve wages and working conditions under the remorseless onslaught of unfettered unlimited immigration numbers? Real wages have been eroded these past 40 years and UK GDP has lain dormant since the crash of 2007/08.
2.1 The objects of the Union shall, so far as may be lawful, be:
2.1.1 To organise, recruit and represent workers, and strengthen workplace organisation to
achieve real union power for its members.
2.1.2 To defend and improve its members’ wages and working conditions...
2.1.3 To defend and improve the social and economic well-being of members and their
families...
On that basis alone, Trades Unions have failed utterly and have became moribund and historically redundant since they demonstrably cannot or are unwilling to fulfill their own primary functions.
On a wider perspective, the national infrastructure of schools,hospitals and housing have all undergone unprecedented  additional pressures and subsequent shortages of availability. How can the authorities  either centrally or locally plan for and make adequate provision for their citizens if the authorities have absolutely no idea how many more people will  keep arriving.
Acknowledgement alone of these problems has for decades now been denounced as racist scapegoating of migrants. The bien pensants of metropolitan domiciled, Oxbridge doctrinaire elites and their subservient political class hirelings have dragged Society to the very edge of an unprecedented cataclysm,one that they appear to have every intention of triggering - the annulment of the EU Referendum Result ,the betrayal of Brexit.

fahrenheit451:131

There is something singularly maudlin when something or someone you knew had no chance in succeeding, fulfills that premonition. Two short years ago,the tribalist petty demagogues and largely ineffectual activists from across the far left spectrum danced around the totem poles of their own ancestral delusions. They'd paid their £3 and had voted for Corbyn and lo and behold the great non-hope had won! Then the scurrilous,mendacious cynical hypocrites of mainstream Labour set about spending over a year conducting a putative Party civil War that ended with Corbyn getting re-elected with a larger mandate than previously anticipated. The truth of all of that is that History has passed all of the Labour Party by.The Men of Action who've so dramatically reappeared on the centre stage of History are not from the ranks of the antideluvian Left. Two years on from Corbyn's corporeal manifestation in front of his newly acquired acolytes, The Independent opines :-

The only way Corbyn can succeed, is by taking the sharp left turn that he was elected to do. The people also need to see an authoritative and relentless streak that has so far been absent from his leadership. In short, Corbyn must fight back. He needs to take control of the party before he can take control of the country, otherwise he is nothing but a sitting duck.

One of the ways this can be achieved is through enabling the democratic right of CLPs to reselect and deselect their parliamentary candidates, and organising in order to ensure that young, up and coming, “fire in the belly” left wingers replace those who are actively seeking to undermine the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................

" Need to see an authoritative and relentless streak that has so far been absent.." 

The actual reason for this noted absence of such a streak is simply that it isn't in his character let alone his ideological DNA.

Corbyn is a metropolitan flaneur,a weedy disingenuous understatement of a corporeal non entity.Then again, the rest of Labour's 200+ antidemocratic seditionist parliamentary rabble don't even make it past the amoeba stage.

Left and Right dissolved a long long time ago. And Labour along with them. Amen.

fahrenheit451:117

You know that feeling of dread you get at the onset of what you know will be a migraine headache? The same sickening sense of foreboding is achieved by listening to what that humongously vapid and lacklustre straw man masquerading as the current leader of the British Labour Party has to say on the EU's " Freedom of Movement ". The impending sense of nausea he induces when evading the issue is all too palpable. It is also all too indicative of the 200 #LabourIn MPs' tawdry metropolitan PC ideology. For some reason, this antidemocratic, seditionist, parliamentary rabble and quite a large swathe of otherwise serious and rational people on the British " Left " think and behave and speak as if the ineluctable Laws of the Capitalist means of production,distribution and exchange , i.e. the totality of the Capitalist economic system has ceased to operate. Despite their voluble and disingenuous abusive harangues to the contrary, they e.g  most of Labour most of the time and most of the other " left " most of the time categorically deny the following.:- The basis of the laws of supply and demand are that the less you have of something,the higher the price of it inexorably is.The more you have of something the lower the price of that becomes.  Seriously,the operation of the capitalist system is really simple, that's why it works. 100 tons of potatoes might fetch a sum of say £1per ton; if only 1 ton of spuds became available, the price would rocket. An increase in the availability of labour in what is " a labour market " will overall lower the price of labour.A shoratge of labour would increase the price. Adam smith expounded on this Marx certainly knew that this is how our world operates. But not according to Corbyn or Slogans With Placards or any other amongst the dreck of failed PC multiculturalist neophytes who show off their faux-revolutionary,anticapitalist politics at Uni. Sad.  Unrestricted labour market competition is called freedom of movement. Utterly ghastly. Time for sovereign borders and tariff barriers and each nation State to its own.Time for autarky and higher wages. Time to smash the #EU to smithereens. And that Comrades is Revolutionary!

fahrenheit451:108

Boy are the PC-indoctrinated, metropolitan domiciled "elites " smarting! They still haven't managed to calm down from the 23rd. June EU Referendum. And across the Big Pond the same moaning,whining drivel can be heard just as loud and clear from the American PC lobby and its acolytes. MSM ( mainstream media ) has been awash with contrived facts and figures and supposed eye-witness tales of incidents wholly inimical to the Gospel of Liberalism. Racism, Xenophobia, Islamophobia,Homophobia; you can apparently even have expressions of transphobia,whatever that it is meant to be; the point is all those Thought Crimes have escalated in numerical magnitude since the EU Referendum in the UK and since the Election of Donald Trump in the USA. None of the aforementioned manifestations of " phobia " has actually occurred, none of the " reports " turned out to be true. #LabourIn, the official antidemocratic,seditionist campaign to annul #Brexit comprising 200 Labour Party MPs has been at the forefront of the longest and most divisive co-ordinated campaign of slander and vilification of the British Working Class in modern history. That much is undeniably true. Not a single commentator,academic,politician or PC indoctrinated leftist/liberal atheistic bigot is intellectually capable of answering the central query on the " need " for the freedom of movement of labour within the EU and outside of it, namely  " Unrestricted competition in the labour market is beneficial for British workers because..?". There ain't no because, because migration/immigration/freedom of movement of labour is simply the practical implementation of the commodification of human labour,which is an objective capitalist economic necessity whereby labour is made continually available at the lowest possible price to the capitalist. As if THEY didn't know! 

fahrenheit451:091

When erudition no longer avails one has to resort to using facts.  On Friday June 24th.2016,Independence Day dawned for the People of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And as the tsunami shock waves of that Historic National Epiphany spread exponentially across the world, the high powered, entrenched forces of ( Metropolitan-domiciled ) Wealth,Elitism and Neoliberlism set in motion their putative counter revolution. Once upon a time such malevolent conspirators would have been dealt with by the now sadly absent Sedition Act of 1661. Nowadays it falls to the People themselves and the true ,honest and authentic representatives of their expressed Will,to deal with such unconstitutional perturbations. We are The Watchmen of our democratic polity now and for the forseeable future. The Sanctity and inviolability of that uniquely sublime and transcendent inheritance must be secured and History has appointed by fiat those who shall fulfill that duty and render invaluable service to generations yet unborn. Here are the facts, as gleaned from some excellent post-referendum numbers crunching from, Chris Hanretty, Reader in Politics, University of East Anglia.

The results of the referendum were not announced according to Westminster constituencies, but by local authority area. 

Chris Hanretty

Reader in Politics, University of East Anglia.

Aug 18

Revise estimates of Leave vote share in Westminster constituencies

Shortly after the referendum I published estimates of the share of the vote won by Leave in parliamentary constituencies in England and Wales. These estimates showed that most parliamentary constituencies in England and Wales had voted to Leave (421 of 574 if you're counting), and that most Labour-held seats had also voted to Leave.The difference between the two estimates are slight. 32 constituencies were formerly estimated to have voted Leave, but are now estimated to have voted Remain; 11 went the other way. This means a net change of +21 for Remain in England and Wales. Including Scotland, this means that 401 of 632 constituencies (63%) are now judged to have voted for Leave.

Hanretty estimated that 7 out of 10 Labour held parliamentary constituencies voted for Leave.

Some more facts:- Of the present 230 Labour Members of Parliament, only 10 openly declared themselves for the Leave campaign and as such formed the #LabourLeave campaign ; their 220 " comrades " organised #LabourIn.

Final fact:- The 2016 Labour Party National Conference " voted " not to debate Brexit.

fahrenheit451:087

It is axiomatic that an increase in the supply of labour decreases the price thereof. 
Obvious? 
Not to the British Trades Union Congress; who dare not even contemplate a  debate on unrestricted competition in the UK labour market. 
The TUC along with their ideological confreres in the Labour Party subscribe to the shibboleth extolled by the European Union, that of  " the free movement of labour within the EU ". 
For example, gleaned from official Polish government statistics,the official rate of unemployment in Poland in 2003 ( a year before accession to the EU ) was at over 20%,  in 2016 it stands at just over 8%. 
Poland in keeping with the other largely bankrupt, economically moribund, rustbelt former Warsaw Pact states has been a major beneficiary of the very EU dictum so enthusiastically embraced and propagated by our own TUC. 
The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania have not somehow been magically transformed into vibrant,growth-orientated economies by their membership of the EU.They have however been able to export their vast numbers of unemployed to those regions of the EU able to absorb them. The UK, Germany, Sweden and France chief amongst them.

Not that the necessary infrastructure was in place nor put into place to assist this process.
No additional housing provision, no additional schools provision, no additional health service beds or GP surgeries; because no national government could reasonably estimate how many would suddenly turn up on their respective doorsteps at any time. 

Capitalism at its heart is anarchic and therefore unpredictable, despite all protestations to the contrary by leading capitalist spokesmen. Actions have forseeable consequences. 
 Trades Unions are universally predicated on the principle of defending, maintaining and seeking to improve the pay and working conditions of their members. 

They are not in existence to prioritise policies other than those aforementioned.
 And yet..so it goes.  

fahrenheit451:079

The western " Left ",such as they are, were long ago  comprehensively ideologically emasculated. Over 50 years of unadulterated petty-bourgeois liberal indoctrination has ensured that the Left's fundamental position on the Ownership and control of the Means of Production,Distribution and Exchange got taken down. An engineered deluge of effete bien pensant ephemera such as the intellectualised, pseudo-moral sophistry of being Politically Correct; the espousal of meta-fictions such as multiculturalism and the (from a Class Conscious revolutionary position ) incongruous and ultimately incomprehensible support for mass immigration have proven all too effective against the Political representatives of the proletarian cause. The principles and objectives of the Ruling Elites-the owners and controllers of the Means of production et al. have endured. Trades Unions, for example, whose first organisational principle is to defend, maintain and seek to improve the wages and working conditions of their members, were transformed by their passive acceptance of an aspect of the dominant ideology.The Trades Union movement and their political representatives have long since welcomed, supported and still advocate intensive competition in the national labour market. The objective Class purpose of Competition is to lower the price of that good,service or commodity around which competition takes place. Global Corporate Usurer-Capitalism is not some uniquely quasi-moral, do-gooding phenomenon that strives to bring about universal peace and brotherhood.The Ruling Elites and their satrapies within the political class, have managed to reify the otherwise rationally preposterous fiction of immigration, as some intrinsically noble and worthwhile,life-affirming expression of the human spirit. Why would they want to do that other than as a useful and necessary tool to maintain downward pressure on wages? Given the objective Historic materialist developments and prevailing conditions, accusations of treachery or cowardice or opportunism or collaboration with the Class enemy would of course be perfectly understandable; however I think that the Trades Union and Labour movement as a whole, and not just its ephemeral " Right wing " ( as some would have it) are shills for the dominant ideology, accomplices to the exploitation and pauperisation of the majority of mankind. It therefore follows that all their fixtated, pseudo-leftist/liberal  prattle about imagined phenomena such as Racism, Islamophobia , multiculturalism, immigration, equal rights for this that and t'other are complete and utter bollocks ,always were ,always will be.

fahrenheit451:057

In a fortnight's time Great Britain will be on the very cusp of a historic sea-change. A seemingly interminable EU Referendum campaign will be all but over. And yet one story has managed to upstage the whole EU-In/Out slanging match. Step forward Mike Ashley, the boss of Sports Direct. Ashley was called to give evidence before a Parliamentary Select Committee concerning issues over his Company, Sports Direct's treatment of workers, abuse of their employment and other Rights including illegal underpayment of wages. And boy did he get pilloried and rightly so. Pernicious, venal, boastful, unscrupulous, hectoring,  and mendacious to an astounding degree in full view of the Media and Public; all that Mr.Ashley was missing from his wardrobe to complete his self-authored caricature as a Victorian mill owner was the iconic top hat. Yet,what single characteristic of Mr.Ashley's management style and draconian behaviour toward his Company's employees differentiates him from every other similar CEO ? Quite simply none, at least none of any discernible significance. He simply is one capitalist bastard amongst a whole legion of capitalist bastards. Sports Direct business model with its use of,according to his own evidence, an 80% zero hours contract workforce and a workplace culture of fear,uncertainty and harassment is pretty much the universal benchmark across the logistics/warehousing sector as a whole. The only genuine surprise, from my own Activist's point-of-view, is just how much of a surprise, indeed startling and shocking revelation this has been portrayed as in the Media to the general Public. Kudos to the UNITE Union for spearheading a very long and arduous campaign against Ashley's High Street Empire. The Trades Union movement on the whole has alas, not effectively engaged with the spreading cancer of zero hours agency contracts,nor with the cold blooded business practices that all Agencies utilise with virtual impunity against the many millions of workers now wholly dependent on casualised precarious work. Ashley's antiquated, oppressive tyranny is a symptom and a pretty major one at that, but clearly what needs to be addressed and focused on is the cause of such heinous, inhumane, and demeaning conditions of employment being allowed to exist and take shape in the first place.