DOES ANYONE WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD?
The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
Milton Friedman
As I write the following abandoned words, dreams, visions imagination, hope and far-sightedness, the United Kingdom’s General Election is just eight days away. Yet it is an epic battle with no real Generals, planned and run by disingenuous political leprechauns, fought by lemmings. Its true infantry are not the thousands of paid-up party members and their ranting spin doctors. The true infantry are us, the people, yet we have confined ourselves to barracks. Why? Because we’re tired, exhausted by a century of false starts and bad endings. Modern politics is like a rudderless ocean liner, adrift in a sea of instantly disposable ideas, where the galley boy has usurped the Captain.
Sure, there are some decent people taking part. Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP has made the best of the failed Scottish independence ballot with verve, clarity and youthful energy. The Greens and the Welsh Nationalists have good hearts. There’s even a TUC/Socialist Alliance who speak common sense, yet they stand a snowball’s chance in hell of making headway. So why are we stuck in this sluggish morass?
The answer is, there are no politicians of vision, no-one who wants to truly change the world, no-one to offer true inspiration with the courage it takes to bulldoze the accumulated detritus of a hundred years aside and start again.
When we look at lists of those people who have truly changed the world in the past, for better or, in many cases, for worse, we see characters driven by an intense sense of vision. Martin Luther King, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thomas Paine, Lenin, Keir Hardie, Trotsky, and loathe though I am to say it, Thatcher, Gorbachov and yes, even Hitler. They inspired those around them by laying the world out on the table like a basket of over-ripe fruit and pointing out which items to dispose of. They had new ideas, yet they braved a tsunami of opposition which they defied with sheer passion and determination. Some, like Mao, Stalin and Hitler, became hideously drunk with success and paid history’s price. Others were divisive, like Thatcher, whose grocer mentality and parochial sense of greed have left a split legacy of hate and adoration. Yet all of these people had looked at their contemporary world, didn’t like what they saw, and crafted a form of politics which the masses recognised as something new; something to change the scene and make history.
So what is politics today, in Britain? It has become a series of soundbites played on an eternal loop. When all else fails, blame ‘the previous government’. Its practitioners no longer physically resemble ‘the man in the street’. As the semi-official 51st state of the USA, our political leaders ascend to their heights by their image. Clean-cut, Savile Row suited, 30-something Metropolitans, in the main, university educated, and in many cases, ex-Public School. There are few members of Parliament in the 21st century who have ever done any of those jobs they ‘pretend’ to do for those hard-hat, hi-vis vest factory visit photo opportunities. Getting one’s hands dirty? That’s the gardener’s job, or the nanny’s.
This is no longer ‘show business for ugly people’. In a country which is really run by billionaire and millionaire press barons and bankers, one needs ‘the look’ to achieve that opportunistic perch between your Masters and the great unwashed. If today’s parties put forward a potential visual front bench of Clement Attlee, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill or Aneurin Bevan, the City’s media fashionistas would machine-gun them down to a man.
![]()
 |
| 'Unfashionable' Michael Foot with some uncomfortable company |
Perhaps Labour leader Michael Foot’s donkey jacket put paid to any notion of proletarian imagery, although having two kitchens is ‘out’ and the ability to eat a bacon sandwich is ‘in’.
Today, Miliband, Clegg and Cameron attempt to convince us they mean business (ultimately what they’re in it for, anyway) by removing jackets, loosening ties and rolling up shirt sleeves. Ah, look at that - these blokes are getting down with the workers; let’s stand around in an ordered semi-circle and listen - it’s almost like an extra tea break.
What the Conservative Party stands for is what it has always stood for: money. The word ‘conservative’ means traditional, conventional, conformist, and unadventurous. These are the cornerstones of hanging on to wealth and privilege, hidden behind their steady exhortations to ‘hard working tax payers / families’. Yet do any of us ever ask - is it not just enough to be a worker - does everything we do need to be prefixed by the word ‘hard’? Some Tories like to regard themselves as ‘One Nation’ conservatives. This meaningless catch-all offers the misty image of us all being ‘in this together’, the ‘Big Society’. In other words, you lot keep working hard, we’ll pocket the profits and every five years we’ll roll our sleeves up again and tell a few more lies. Cameron told pupils at one of his new, pet ‘academy’ projects
“At Eton, my favourite teacher had a block of wood on his desk and if he caught you napping he would throw this block of wood at your head. Health and safety means you can’t do this anymore!”
No, Dave. What you and Iain Duncan Smith do now is throw lethal blocks at anyone in need of compassion or a safety net. By definition, this greedy gang certainly don’t want to change their world. They like it just the way it is, with a few extra bonuses thrown in.
No, Dave. What you and Iain Duncan Smith do now is throw lethal blocks at anyone in need of compassion or a safety net. By definition, this greedy gang certainly don’t want to change their world. They like it just the way it is, with a few extra bonuses thrown in.
The Liberal Democratscome across as a gathering of spineless u-turning cowards, always the bridesmaids, never the bride. Clegg and Cable and the rest of that wishy-washy amber brigade, bereft of any real power, breathe in the heady fiscal ozone from their City masters’ slipstream and belch in our faces uttering vacuities about ‘balance of power’ and being ‘a brake on extremism’. Yet they are Tories too, albeit cardboard and string puppet versions. When many of them did speak out in Westminster against Andrew Lansley’s sinister 2012 Health and Social Care Act, Clegg made sure they voted in favour. Mustn’t upset ‘call me Dave’. The Lib Dem’s most dubious asset in that expensive hall of geriatrics, the House of Lords, Shirley Williams (another deserter from her original faith), who had criticised the bill at every stage, toed the coward’s line and voted for it. Why? The Global Corporate World must be obeyed.
And there’s The Labour Party. No longer ‘New’. A party which, in its current manifestation, disgraces the very noun, ‘Labour’ which means ‘those who contribute by toil to production’ ‘the people, class, or workers involved in physical toil done for wages’. There might be the odd ex-miner or postman in the ranks, but the rest? Balls, Mandelson, Straw, the few remaining hangers-on from ‘Blair’s Babes’? What do they know about ‘physical toil’? When did they last tread the aisles of Aldi or Lidl for something they could afford from their decimated benefits?
On October 4 1994 Labour’s new Washington puppet, materialistic war-monger, friend of violent dictators, Tony Blair, drew back his regal purple curtain to reveal his intended reversal of everything the Labour Party had believed in back in 1918. Soon, he’d done the City’s bidding by abandoning Clause 4 of the constitution: Until Blair ditched it, the party’s aim was laid out thus:
“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
What this renunciation of principle achieved was exactly what Thatcher hungered for: a complete reversal of each and every one those aims. ‘People’ now had a different spelling; ‘Profit’. Ed Miliband likes to bang on about the party’s noble founder.
 |
| The young Keir Hardie |
James Keir Hardie was the illegitimate son of a servant, his father a ship’s carpenter. At the age of nine he worked a 12 hour day as a baker’s delivery boy for 3 shillings and sixpence per week. (That’s just under 20p.) He became a coal miner at the age of eleven. Has much changed since his ‘Sunshine of Socialism’ speech of April 11 1914, when he said of the struggle to launch the party:
“I may recall the fact that in those days, and for many years thereafter, it was tenaciously upheld by the public authorities, here and elsewhere, that it was an offence against laws of nature and ruinous to the State for public authorities to provide food for starving children, or independent aid for the aged poor. Even safety regulations in mines and factories were taboo. They interfered with the ‘freedom of the individual’. As for such proposals as an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, the right to work, and municipal houses, any serious mention of such classed a man as a fool.”
Ah, yes. The ‘individual’. You knew all about that, eh, Maggie?
Ah, yes. The ‘individual’. You knew all about that, eh, Maggie?
 |
| Keir Hardie at the end of his days |
None of these people want to change the world because they are frightened by the looming shadows of Canary Wharf and Wall Street. They want to retain the current status quo, but with added levels of punitive severity. They know full well that any notion of revolutionary change can be controlled through the very medium I am now using to offload my bitter disappointment. There may be many more of ‘us’ than there are ‘them’, but it’s ‘them’ who hold all the cards. The corporate suits posing as politicians today, insulated from reality by the Express, Daily Mail, The Sun and Telegraph, could never be scared by Lenin’s words:
“We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society.”
At 72, I am in the final years of my life yet as a young man, full of active hope, I could never have imagined that half a century on, I would sing such a tragic swansong as this. Undoubtedly, Britain is, compared to the rest of the globe, still a fine place to live. Yet the misery, war and poverty which girdles the earth has the same root cause; greed. There are no more Castros, Che Guevara is a T-shirt, and Paine’s Rights of Man will be crushed by the tanks of Global Capitalism.
 |
| Thomas Paine |
All that is left to my generation is a fading sense of gratitude for the Great Landslide of 1945, the beleaguered NHS, pensions, rock and roll and the odd continental holiday. The first three decades of my life seemed to offer hope. The last four have been a downhill ride in a hideous time-machine. After May 7 2015, that time machine could be programmed to take us back to the privation of 1935. Make no mistake; that’s what the Eton boys want, because in their view, the poor, the disabled, the unemployed, have only themselves to blame. Yet one thing will remain constant: greed will continue to make our world even uglier tomorrow than it is today.