Stripped of the specifically Christian element, these views were also echoed in the recent remarks by the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, when he inveighed against the consumerist ‘I-society’ as exemplified by the contemporary obsession with iPads and iPhones.

A 79-year-old woman has died from head injuries after trying to fight off teenage muggers who robbed her of the bag containing her husband’s ashes.

Of course these youths didn’t know what the bag contained. But what a terrible commentary on our society, where not even the dead are safe from muggers who have no qualms about robbing an elderly woman.

Attempts to portray the right’s rise as a return of trends in the 1930s, when Mosley’s Blackshirts marched the streets, with grand self-flattering claims from ‘anti-fascists’ that by opposing the EDL they are repeating the Battle of Cable Street, fails to address its very modern causes. The mainstream left must realise its own role in any rise of right wing populism in Britain. By abandoning much of their traditional constituency or treating them with disdain, and embracing culturally divisive politics, they have created a space and for the far right to fill.

What about, for instance, South Africa or Venezuela; want, squalor and ignorance do prevail in these places to the extent that people may be forced to turn to crime simply to survive. Asks John Blance.
One of the miracles of the human condition is the fact that in many places around the world, people are able to live in conditions of real poverty and deprivation without turning to crime or living in squalor. Such people live on less money than we can imagine here in the west and yet are honest, clean and proud. They have not lost their self-respect. Once you lose that, no amount of money will satisfy you. Here in our lazy decadent society, we not only worship money but our modern heros are often those who managed to acquire it effortlessly, without working.
Yes, there is great poverty in this country, but it has nothing to do with money

“Well, it is about time that every rebel wakes up to the fact that "the people" and the working class have nothing in common.”
--Joe Hill


We have our lives run by them. The newspapers and television put forward their view of the world. Schools teach about the great (or unfortunate) history of their society and produce a spectrum of graduates and dropouts fit for different kinds of work. The government provides services to keep their society running smoothly. And when all else fails, they have the police, the prisons and the army.

This is not our community.

Whenever this kind of working class resistance breaks out, politicians try to extinguish it in a flood of petitions, lobbying and election campaigns. But when we are fighting for ourselves, our activity looks completely different from theirs. We take property away from landlords and use it for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and end up fighting with the police. We form groups where everyone takes part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our country. We fight for ourselves. This is not the ultimate form of democracy. We are imposing our needs on society without debate—needs that are directly contrary to the interests and wishes of rich people everywhere. There is no way for us to speak on equal terms with this society.

We are brought together with other workers and assigned different tasks. We specialize in different aspects of the work and repeat these tasks over and over again. Our time at work is not really part of our lives. It is dead time controlled by our bosses and managers. During our time at work we make things that our bosses can sell. These things are objects like cotton shirts, computers and skyscrapers or qualities like clean floors and healthy patients or services like having a bus take you where you want to go, having a waiter take your order or having someone call you at home to try to get you to buy things you don’t need. The work is not done because of what it produces. We do it to get paid, and the boss pays us for it to make a profit.

As for the ever-fascinating ‘what if’ of the Second World War, can we please be spared such tedious comments as ‘if we lost the war, why are we speaking English and not German?’ . Appearance and reality are not the same thing, and one doesn’t have to be physically conquered and subjugated to be defeated. You could argue that our principal rivals in World War Two were the Americans, and we are now speaking American. But our laws are made in Brussels and Luxembourg, by an organisation wholly dominated by Germany.

Similar sentiments voiced by Irving earned censure during his well-publicized lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt. [See note] To Judge Charles Gray's castigation of him as a "racist," for example, Irving retorted: "My own feelings about race are precisely the same as 95 percent of the people of my generation ... If the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the beach."

"We rightly complain that young people cannot get work. So why import foreigners to do that work, while paying our own children to take to crime and sit at home smoking dope?".

I think that's a little unfair, many immigrants do no work and take to crime and sit at home smoking dope but still we welcome them with open arms, I suppose they are trying to be good citizens. Then there are all the illegal immigrants who can't be deported because they have formed an attachment to a pet hamster or goldfish.

Neve mind we are promised, not that we believe it, that immigration levels will be cut but the figures quoted, even if they were true, are still ludicrously high.

*****I attended a meeting organised by ORA at York university round this time to set up such a national organisation. It may have been that i was taking too many drugs att this time but i have the vague memory that The Who were playing York university that night and that the anarchists pushed one of their Rolls Royces into a lake and we were later confronted by an enraged Pete Townsend. I know there is a later WHO album cover with similar roller in lake cover so I may have confused reality in a drug haze. Anyone remember?

"Frankie Cokeupthenozza"

I'm not being patronising and shit. I honestly don't know how to talk to people about politics if they don't understand class

Nothing will change in this country with regard to social mobility and the dominance of an inbred ruling class till the public schools are brought down. Consider the absolute absurdity of millions of working class people in London submitting to the rule of an old etonian prime minister and an old etonian mayor.

reinstitute grammar schools

What passes for architecture today is usually just a load of boxes piled on top of each other. Great art is an unmade bed. Could it be that the kings and the aristocracy had impeccable taste and, as they were paying for it, expected value for money? Now we have committees and we get 'The Angel of the North'.

Apparently. the key to high government office in Britain, is a first class Oxford degree in Modern Greats, preferably from Magdalen. Magdalen is unjustly proud, that five of its members are part of the present government.. Of these Huhne, Hunt and Hague were brilliant scholars of PPE, as is the PM Cameron (Brasenose). Therefore it is a legitimate concern to examine the subject matter, that these outstanding scholars were taught, to produce the less than superb state of the country they govern. Politics and economics are tangible subjects and one can more or less guess the tenor of these courses. But what is the content of the course in philosophy? Well, Doctor Ralph Walker, a most amiable Magdalen fellow, and eminent faculty member for nearly half a century, recalls his experience in the present number of “Oxford Philosophy” (Summer Editon 2011, page 7):


“...Oxford philosophers shared a conception of what the important philosphical problems were and how to resolve hem. ….In 1970 Davidson came to Oxford: suddenly we stopped talking about Wittgenstein and turned to Tarskian truth- theories. In 1972 we all agreed with Quine`s `dismissal of Aristotelian essentialism; then everyone read Kripke and by the autumn, the only question was about necessity of origin.” . Later Prof Walker made a side trip to OU Administration. “When I went there, Dummett`s anti realism was a central concern. When I returned the interest had died.” ditto.

Surely it is not surprising, that students fed on such a diet of trivia can not be expected to solve the real and essential problems of present day society and the policy of wasting scarce financial resources on the teaching of these esoteric doctrines, benefits no one but the erudite teaching staff.

I wish more power to your elbow to stop this rubbish