LET’S HEAR IT - THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING!
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| You'll look fine on a poster, Russell, but what's your SOLUTION? |
I’m a peasant. I live in a nice house, I have a state pension and a car, two TV sets, and I earn a few extra quid from writing. But I’m a peasant, because I come from a long working class heritage and since leaving school in 1959, I’ve done just about every manual job a modern peasant might be expected to do. Labouring, farm work, hospital porter, factory foreman, sewage worker, milkman, bread delivery man, sailor, driver, printer, shop manager, salesman … then, in 1997, finally, writer. All my family have worked with their hands. My brother is a brilliant carpenter, as was his dad (who was my fine step father), and my patriarchal bloodline in Barnsley were all coal miners. My Mother was a maid and a cook and a cleaner. Thankfully, we were able to break this chain with our son, Martin, who managed to get a BA and PhD and can now be referred to as ‘Doctor’. Our much missed and beloved late daughter, Sarah, spent 30 years of her life in the NHS nursing the elderly. But we’re still peasants.
It’s silly to say this makes us ‘proud’. That’s as daft as patriotism. You are born wherever your mother has you, and into what social class she occupied. It’s facile to say I’m ‘proud’ of being English or a peasant any more than David Cameron would proclaim his pride in social inequality and capitalism. But Capitalists, by virtue of their wealth, have choices. Their wealth protects them from ‘the peasantry’ and they have a handy firewall between the disenchanted and the money. This protective barrier, Whitehall, MI5, GCHQ, the Police, Parliament and the House of Lords is made up of people who sit in the bearable comfort zone of middle to higher income. Anyone below them, unions, for example, who wish to challenge the status quo and release the imprisoned genie of equality from its well-sealed bottle, will immediately set off Capitalism’s burglar alarm and the firewall will clamp down around us like a massive steel barrier.
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| India today - Britain tomorrow? The Bullingdon Boys would love this ... |
But looking at the way things are, something has to give. We’ve had pointless, expensive foreign wars. Wages are deliberately kept down. The poor shoulder the blame for everything, innocent though they are. Anything owned by and run by the people is immediately stolen by rapacious capital, which sees the notion of ‘profit’ as the only exchange permissible between human beings. Our politicians only serve themselves. People are feeling powerless, currently forced into a corner to defend our last great possession, the NHS. Now, sadly, they are turning to the vacuous side-show of a phoney politics, a blatant diversionary façade erected by Ukip. Deny it as they may, but Ukip’s constantly expanding xenophobia is every bit as toxic as that developed by Hitler and Goebbels in the 1930s. Ukip are a dangerous distraction, and if people think that the world will be a better place with Farage in power, they should look more carefully at what he stands for.
A NEW PEASANT'S REVOLT?
The Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381 was a medieval result of just the same set of inequalities. A violent system of punishments for offenders prevented peasants from causing trouble. Most areas in England had well-garrisoned castles, the equivalent of our GCHQ and MI5, and the serving soldiers were usually enough to guarantee reasonable behaviour among medieval peasants. Taxes were high, wages low. Barons and Royalty became greedier by the day and lived in luxury. In 1380, Richard II had introduced a new tax called the Poll Tax. This made everyone who was on the tax register pay 5p. It was the third time in four years that such a tax had been used. By 1381, the peasants had had enough. 5p was an impossible commitment then. If you could not pay in cash, you paid in kind, with your seeds, tools etc., the very things peasants needed to survive in the coming year. Pointless foreign wars drained the coffers, and, as ever, the poor were stamped upon until they could take no more punishment, and in place of today’s Ebola fear-mongering, they had the real threat of the Black Death.
Sounds familiar? So what do we do? Occupy a few concourses outside banks, wave banners, express our anger and dismay, then go home. But the peasants of 1381 did something no-one had done before or since - they captured the Tower of London. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King’s Treasurer were killed. The peasants were supported by the Nigel Farage of their day, a priest called John Ball from Kent. The king, Richard II, was only 14 at the time but despite his youth, he agreed to meet the peasants at a place called Mile End. There, the peasant’s angry and aggressive leader, Wat Tyler, who had marched to London, destroyed tax records and tax registers, imagined that the King’s agreement to the peasant’s demands would be honoured. But as with the ‘promises’ we’ve all heard, such as ‘no university fees’ or ‘no top-down re-organisation of the NHS’, what could Tyler and John Ball have expected from those who lived in luxury, who turned out in their regal finery to meet this ragtag army of ordinary folk? Honour? Unbroken promises? On June 15th, the King and his entourage, including London’s Mayor, Sir William Walworthe, met the rebels at Smithfield outside of the city’s walls. At this meeting, the Lord Mayor killed Wat Tyler. John Ball was hanged, as were many other peasant leaders. Richard did not keep any of his promises, claiming that they were made under threat and were therefore not valid in law.
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| The murder of Wat Tyler |
That duplicity of the powers-that-be is now the standard of 21st century capitalism. As Hitler said, make the lies big enough and tell them enough times and the people will believe you. David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt and Iain Duncan Smith are all today’s King Richards and Barons, and Boris Johnson is our very own Sir William Walworthe.
So who can we, the people, turn to? Capitalism has ground the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky into the ground. The Labour Party, once the champion of the working man, offers nothing more than the limp manifesto of the spineless Nick Clegg. They all dance around the witches’ cauldron of Europe and Immigration, oblivious to the legacy of WW1 and the Third Reich.
And into this dark melee steps a leather-trousered comedian, Russell Brand. Is he the new Wat Tyler, the new John Ball? Does he seriously think we can bring some sort of fairness and equality to our sorry world by avoiding the ballot box? It’s hard to say. But at least he’s raising his head above the parapet and making people think about all this. He writes brilliantly, and has a lion’s courage. But he has no solutions. The only trouble is, in the zoo which governs us, lions don’t count. It’s that big, dumb boa constrictor, Nigel Farage, and his army of stinging tarantulas who are calling the tune. Maybe, then, we should let Ukip have their way. Once they come out in their true fascist colours and we’ve suffered even more inequality, then perhaps a new peasant’s revolt might be on the cards at last. But this time, we’ll not be meeting the king and the mayor. We’ll be giving them a manual job, a tool box and a council house, and showing them that there’s another life out here, one which they’ve preferred to ignore for far too long.