I’m from a deprived generation. I wasn’t lucky enough to
be born into a mining community; I wasn’t lucky enough to be brought up to
believe I deserved a job for life. I never inherited the right to harbour
hatred for anybody who managed me, or for anybody who achieved success outside
the confines of collective action. And I never did master the art of looking
down on anybody who believed he could get by on his own merit without the
permission of a shop steward.
Outside of the hive you have to do it all for yourself; there
is nobody else to blame. But at least you don’t have to undergo the indignity
of being spat on because your grandfather was a scab. In some caring
communities the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons and bitter memories
are long and twisted. I didn’t have the union to fight my corner, but I also
didn’t have the unions to tell me and mine, forever and after, what to think
and how to vote and who to hate.
When a company I worked for went into decline, or when I
was made redundant or made up my own mind to leave, or on the one occasion I was
constructively dismissed, I neither expected nor received assistance. It was my
life, my decisions, my responsibility to accept the consequences, good or bad.
It’s called freedom and it’s a good thing, but to some people it appears to be pure
selfishness.
To Labour, Mick Phillpot was a product of Thatcherism. “Greed!”
shrieked Glenda Jackson, among others blaming the actions of every bad British
citizen on the legacy of somebody who left power over two decades ago. This is the
same opposition who snarl and spit at whatever the coalition proposes to rein
in thirteen years of Labour profligacy, which ended just the other day. Of
course, not a single Labour MP ever claimed dubious expenses or took lucrative
seats on boards; no union leader ever earned a salary way in excess of those he
represented, or demanded free living for life and as we all know, Lord John Prescott
fought tooth and nail not to be ennobled.
Always with the shouting and the spittle, the Left,
always the apoplectic outrage. High drama. No wonder they attracted an Oscar winner
to their ranks. It’s a wonder she isn’t rolled out to rend her garments in
public more often. Perhaps they could erect a small stage for her at the funeral
next week, where she can give her Ophelia... to an audience of none. Those
staging their own little protests will selfishly try and disrupt the occasion.
But their hysterical ranting will be drowned out by the quiet dignity of those
they despise so much.
Glenda in The Commons Yesterday
Maybe this is the fundamental difference between Left and
everybody else. The Left live in frenzied denial of human nature and treat
every manifestation of it with visceral loathing as a thing to be suppressed,
subjugated and legislated into change. Whereas everybody else accepts the
animal that we are and then we shrug and try to rise above it.
