A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

I feel cheated: I would very likely have been on that march and I don’t remember seeing any pin-striped chap. (Actually I don’t remember seeing anybody like that in Oxford, except possibly a proctor.)

“shower”? Is that a kind of person?

It’s a collective noun for a certain kind of people. I think, although I may be completely wrong, that it’s short for “shower of shit”.

Or perhaps a public-school reference to a clique which, ah, ‘shared a shower’? We *are* talking about those shocking Etonian degenerates, aren’t we? :)

maybe it was acker bilk: http://www.boisdale.co.uk/members/images/Acker%20Bilk.jpg

What an excellent combination, although probably not so simultaneously – the Wurzels remixed with Django seems unpalatable. Although I must admit this is only in my mind, and not from a realised event, I’d rather keep it that way. I wonder what other completely implausible and hilarious linkages Wikipedia can throw up?

Well, no hair was visible at all. Maybe balding is the wrong word. (I really, really, doubt he was shaving it to be trendy – this was even before pony tails were kosher).

Andrew 01.13.09 at 2:59 am
“Everyone wearing a bowler hat is balding!”

If he had a Financial Times and an umbrella, then he could just be in uniform.
(‘Yes, Minister’ reference)

astrongmaybe reads blogs with much more close attention than I usually do: kudos.

That’s a good tune, one of many Newman has created (including “Political Science,” which generates from a similar impulse; “When She Loved Me” –weep-inducing in the context of Toy Story II; most of the LP “Rednecks,” etc. etc. )

There’s one Randy Newman song that if I really work at it (like viewing a more difficult dual-object optical illusion) I can see as ironic, but which I can instantly and emotionally stir an eye-welling, breast-swelling patriotic feeling in me. That song is “Follow the Flag.”

You can stand alone
Or with somebody else
Or stand with all of us, together
If you can believe
In something bigger than yourself
You can follow the flag forever

They say it’s just a dream
That dreamers dreamed
That it’s an empty thing that really has no meaning
They say it’s all a lie
But it’s not a lie
I’m going to follow the flag ’til I die

Into every life a little rain must fall
But it’s not gonna rain forever
You can rise above–you can rise above it all
We will follow the flag together
We will follow the flag together

—

I can’t believe that Newman wrote an unironic, non-cynical song, but it really works for me as a national anthem: and I’m a liberal Bush-hatin’ lifelong Democrat.

I found a video of him performing it live, though I like the CD version better, with string accompaniment and studio patriotism added. At this point I’m not sure anyone –even Randy Newman himself– could convince me that “Follow the Flag” isn’t a great straightforward patriotic song.

Randy Newman is fantastic.

That bowler hatted gent was surely Angry of Mayfair:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=8YpAdK0CrTY

If he had a Financial Times and an umbrella, then he could just be in uniform.

If he just had the umbrella, he could have been out of uniform. (Official civilian dress for officers in the Brigade of Guards: suit, Guards tie, rolled umbrella, bowler hat. This is really true.)

Curiously, my post on the background to the mining strike, citing real news stories in The Guardian and the BBC with links, seems to have been censored.

#26 Harry: “I don’t think the software is sophisticated enough to recognize smears by association.”

Not a smear by association but part of the reality of what went on. You were in London at the time while I was in Yorkshire in the middle of it. Remember that the Labour Party in opposition didn’t back the NUM strike and other trade unions backed off supporting the NUM. Members of the NUM in Yorkshire were not permitted to ballot on the strike and any who kept working were dubbed scabs and abused. Why do you suppose all that was?

The fact is that both the Thatcher and Major government sunk billions of taxpayers’ money into supporting the nationalised coal mining industry – I suggest checking out the external borrowing requirements of the nationalised industries (including coal) in David Butler (ed): Twentieth-Century British Political Facts (8th ed. 2000), p.444, which is hardly a partisan source.

The strike issue was about sinking even more taxpayers’ money in the mining industry.

“The Conservative Government wanted to avoid any strike or confrontation. . . ”
Peter Walker, the cabinet minister responsible for the mining industry at the time:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3503545.stm

I doubt many readers here have the patience and interest to follow the detail of a debate on the historic year-long mining strike in Britain 1984/5.

It’s relevant to appreciate that world oil prices fell by about half over 1985/6 so any government commitment to maintain mining industry jobs regardless of economic context – the demand of the strikers – would have become hugely costly for taxpayers as the price of coal for electricity generation relates to oil prices and the energy content of coal. Losses of the state-owned coal industry would have become even greater.

It’s also relevant to appreciate that one reason the strike failed was because millions of tons of powerstation coal had stockpiled above ground prior to the strike. Too much coal was being produced at the time compared with demand for coal for electricity generation. Indeed, so much that there was a problem finding where to put it all.

See, too, this news report in The Economist of May 27, 1978 (p.21-23) on the prescient Ridley Report to the Conservative Party on policy for the party in government for the future of the nationalised industries, including (explicitly) coal:
http://www.co-opnet.coop/viewtopic.php?t=367&highlight=ridley+report

The Ridley Report of 1978 anticipated the likelihood of a mining strike during a future Conservative government and proposed contingency planning ahead.

Readers interested in dispassionate sources on the strike could try:

Martin Adeney and John Lloyd – two eminent journalists: The Miners’ Strike (1986)

Gavin Lightman QC: The Lightman Report on the NUM (Penguin Books, 1990)

The latter was commissioned by the NUM executive in order to find out what really happened to the monies collected and donated in support of the miners’ strike. Leading recommendations of that report in 1990 included: ” . . a proper account is urgently required of the monies and property of the Union . . ” as the destination of substantial sums, including a reported donation from Soviet miners, couldn’t be accounted for.

Right, I do think it is worth mentioning that the government deployed the secret services to spy on its political enemies. It is also worth mentioning that, from fairly early on in the strike, the police acted without due regard for the law they were charged with upholding (I was a victim of this lawlessness myself, and while I recognise that the behaviour to which I was subject, and which I witnessed, would not now be tolerated, it was widespread at the time).

“Right, I do think it is worth mentioning that the government deployed the secret services to spy on its political enemies.”

C’mon. I don’t know how it was in London at the time but in Yorkshire, as mentioned, a popular topic of conversation was whether the mining strike would bring down a government that had been elected the previous June with a majority of c. 170 when the turnout at the election was more than 70%.

For all that, as I learned from personal conversations, avowed leftists felt robbed of an election they had expected to win comfortably with the most “socialist” manifesto that the Labour Party had had since 1945 – nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawing from the European Common Market.

The industrial action in the strike became increasingly violent and political subversion wasn’t just a hypothetical possibility. Women and girls who worked as clerical workers for the coal board and who weren’t on strike were abused and harassed on their way to work. There was mass picketing. I repeat, the strike was not supported by the Labour Party and other trade unions backed off supporting the NUM.

“Relevant to what, other than demonstrating the wisdom of hindsight?”

I don’t know for a fact whether the government was expecting the steep fall in world oil prices 1985/6 but remember, the NUM was getting professional economic advice from at least one economics professor. In fact, I was told by academic contacts that another economics professor was also advising the NUM. What I do know is that taxpayers would have paid a huge price if all mining jobs had been guaranteed regardless as the NUM demanded.

“I’m not sure who, or what, you’re arguing with now.”

I’m concerned with analysis, not with playing a blame game.

Well, Phil, try rereading the thread for starters. I freely admit that there are no soundbites and many will probably have much difficulty in rebutting the analysis with the citations.

Well, Harry, that´s a rather disreputable mixture of workerism, libertarianism, Blairism and cynicism, if you ask me. Yes, some working class people are resentful of students, something I understand very well and have a great deal of sympathy with. Other people some working class are resentful towards include immigrant workers and relatively well-off women. As a socialist, though, I am not sure that anything of value grows out of such sectarian resentments.

(I hate to break it to you but philosophy professors are generally treated as working class heroes where I come from. Perhaps they should fund your own research? Compared to students they seem much more unambiguously members of a privileged elite. And that system seemed to work pretty well in the nineteeth century, which seems to be the reference point on these issues for many of Blair´s supporters. Taking on part-time work, as shelf-stackers say, would no doubt be a hardship for some of them, but there far more serious injustices in the world, right?)

I find it hard to believe that your argument that since the university system is already dominated by market imperatives we should not only accept this state of affairs but seek to consolidate it is actually meant in earnest. Actually I was reminded of these satyrical remarks from the Communist Manifesto:

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women.

Perhaps you endorse Marx and Engels´ satyrical conclusion here, which is arrived at by chain of reasoning structurally parallel to yours?

As for your assertion that:

the people who have their chances for self-realisation smashed to pieces at the very start of their adult lives are not going to college, and wouldn’t be even if it were free and there were a generous maintenance grant

it is simply false, on any reasonable understanding of the reference of your definite description (´the people who…´). These are some of the people but there are many, many others. Not everybody who begins university is able to complete her degree and of those who do it is ridiculous to assert that in a capitalist society they will all find fulfilling jobs, humanly tolerable jobs or even any job at all. As a university teacher you are surely aware of this. You are also doubtless aware that in the UK since the introduction of these policies HE dropout rates have risen greatly, especially among students from poorer families.

Anyway, to try to make my original point clear, it´s not the position on tuition fees which I find frustrating so much as the argument you give for it, which I do think is a particularly disreputable Blairite canard. The underlying principle and point of agreement between you and your stockbroker friend is that state subsidies of learning are unjust because they involve appropriating the earnings which other people are able to receive through their own efforts and ownership of productive resources. That is a libertarian argument, not a socialist one at all, even if you think (misguidedly in my opinion) that it can be employed in order to achieve material gains for workers.

Katharine, the Germans basically did with their mines what the NUM wanted done with British mines, and it has cost them a lot, of the same order of magnitude as re-unification. Now, Germany was in a better financial position in the 80s than was Britain, but God knows they could have done with that money in the 1990s.

Sorry, Phil, but my response to Katherine has been censored again – admittedly it includes a link to a relevant entry in Wikipedia – and the response may satisfy your request for an argument.

I’m saying that all the evidence shows that the 1984/5 mining strike was totally pointless and that this is widely recognised nowadays in election results where Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party regularly comes at or close to the bottom of polls.

I think Bob was mainly trying to fill in younger and non-British readers and to undermine any romanticism they might have had about the strike, no? I don’t remember having any romanticism at the time, though no doubt I did. The idea that they would bring down the government was laughable, and while no doubt plenty of Yorkshire miners and Trots fantasized thus, the government of the day, I am certain, harboured no such delusions. The Ridley plan was a political, more than an economic, plan, which saw the devastation of union power as the key goal. It was a massive success, and I would say it was pretty clear only a few months into the strike that the government couldn’t lose (I got seriously active in August 1984, splitting my waking hours from then on pretty much equally between studying and doing various activities to raise money — but by September I already couldn’t see how a victory could be achieved). Scargill’s Stalinist sympathies and friends were relevant to the bad strategy and tactics adopted, but not at all to any sensible person’s choice about whether or not to support the strike.

I’ll give you my own anecdote though. I was attacked by a police officer during what was, effectively, a police riot, during the last ditch demonstration 10 days before the end of the strike. Having beaten me up, he arrested me. When we were in the van he picked out a mate of his to act as a witness, and told him that I had thrown a bottle full of liquid with a rag hanging out of it at him. His mate said that he had seen that. In the van they proceeded to continue beating up various of us who had been arrested. In the police station they stopped attacking us, but turned their attention to the few women, all of whom were verbally harassed and groped by several of the police officers. When, eventually, the case came to court, the two police officers managed to succeed in contradicting not only themselves, but each other, in their descriptions both of what I purportedly did, and also what else was happening around them. These contradictions were clearly pointed out. The magistrate found me guilty. Most amusingly, when a police complaints officer visited me (after my dad, mortifyingly embarrassingly, called them) he basically said he believed every word I told him, that this was just a standard story, and that there was no chance of any complaint succeeding. The widespread criminality of the police during the strike was licensed from the very top, and was, in my opinion, much worse than the use of the secret services against the government’s political enemies. I have no regrets about working in support of that strike, and I would be ashamed if I hadn’t.

None of this addresses the economic case for and against pit closures. There are all sorts of good reasons for relying less on coal, and the economic argument for slowly scaling down the industry with appropriate measures to ensure that communities were not devastated and that well paid and skilled work would be available for members of those communities, was a good one, I think. I might have felt a real dilemma if that had
been what the strike was against.

Harry – I see that my posts are still being censored, a surprising denial of freedom of expression in an academic forum.

Bob — you’re very touchy. Or very rude. The moderation software is catching something and holding things up — I am not, and wouldn’t (and my day has been long and full, leaving no time to check for moderation). If it makes you feel better look at comment #5 in the Cohen reading group thread, which was also held up. Why? I’ve no idea.
In fact you are being touchy and rude, now I look at your comment.

It’s worth noting that Bob B omits any mention of the volume of coal imported from South Africa, any consideration of the ethics of that, or indeed the continued dependence of the British electricity generation system on South African coal for years afterwards.

Let alone the fact that the “dash for gas” leaves us in the energy security hole we are in now.

As for his assertions that the government of the day didn’t want the strike, that contradicts the memoirs of most of the politicians from that government.

Guess what Bob, you aren’t the only person on the internet who was in Yorkshire at the time, so your fake “authority” doesn’t wash.

The most amusing part of the whole business in retrospect was the way the scab union got shafted by British Coal and the government afterwards. They’d been promised job security in return for helping to undermine the strike, but many of them got the P45 all the same.