Trade unions represent a great social good with little or no protection from government and precious little support from civil bodies.
Because of the historic influence of those recalcitrant thugs,Communists in trade unions there has been with much noise, little light shed on the internal workings of trade unions.
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In Northern Ireland,we are involved in a struggle for mere democracy or national independence and social wellbeing. In his latter years,the lost leader of the British left found comfort in this socialist democracy,not socialism,that being Tony Benn. (The arrest of Tony Benn proves that there is nothing more certain than right-wingers and their medical agents turning turtle under pressure of events such as the political crisis engendered by the collapse of Marxist dictatorships).
In a colony such as the North right-wingers and their fellow travellers are well known for getting their hands on others' income and chattels to feather their nests in their new places of abode.
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......to broach the main issue of the post's title first, politicians in the North of Ireland do not openly criticise the labour movement when there are mainstream advocates appointed as spokesmen. Most progressive politicians will legislate for labour demands as per prior Westminster legislation and in accordance with the pre-existing local conditions of lower expectations.
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England and Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland
Do we now have a public perspective talking down the regional consensus for social equality and legal justice?
Britain does have a lot of whimsies on the left and right of the political spectrum.
This is everywhere so in Europe since semi-fascist rhetoric emerged into the open in the 1970's.
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Labour politics in the age of the internet and social media
Many influential individuals and those who regulate society from day to day do not accept that democratic criticism improves lives and makes politicians do their jobs. The growing number of public pensioners in Britain do not criticise because they do not have the power of class articulation or any economic clout.
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In the 1980's and 1990's, the industrial powerhouse that was Britain was reduced to ruin and desolation by politicians in the pocket of high finance and big businesses.
Vehement opposition to trade unions from privately-owned media and financial cartels hoisted rich brats into power. These political parasites were responsible for Britain's failure to advance politically and socially.
The legacy of Thatcher is that enormous wealth rests in a few hands.
We live against a backdrop of industrial decline, social dystopia, police terror and a multi-polar state without any one body at the helm of government.
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In Northern Ireland for the period from the Good Friday Agreement to the present, the matter of criticism of doctors,those trusty servants and accomplices of the police, generated no meaningful response from the Stormont Assembly.
What should the world make in these difficult times,the labelling of a generation as mentally ill?
Progress for 790 000 is bought at the cost of the rights of 382 000 so we can only blame the Stormont camarilla.
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24.6.2022
The labour influence in the other part of Ireland
In the South,big money interests legislate reluctantly when confronted by the labour movement. They have to be confronted with the ultimate threat of a general strike or generalised labour discord to gain concessions for the low paid and marginalised. Social stasis is due to the influence of the South's neo-colonial politics. Joining them in their party hullabaloos and pensioner street scenes are decaying mediaeval elements of churchmen and far-right bigots in the police and army.
Britain and Ireland in summa ,the remains of the day
It is socialists who clear away the wreckage left by Irish and English 'free-market' economics when they are allowed by backward looking electorates.
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The battle for democracy as it must be fought with the recent past in mind
There would be no need for a change of government anywhere or any democratic upheaval if properly thought-out civil and legal and dispute resolution procedures applied. I refer to political upheavals such as happened in Russia in 1991.
The present day. The Russian lesson of the suppression of fair and bi-partisan criticism
Only a fool would ignore the government use of psychiatric medicine in the control of protest. Soviet psychiatry was a manifestation of a deep moral malaise and the enduring crisis of political authority.
Perestroika. My political contribution to law-governed societies in the East (1983)
The Soviet bureaucracy used my well-meaning totemic intervention in the form of slogans for Openness, Democracy and Restructuring to try to paper over growing.political and lack of real equality in pay and conditions and the growing problem of relations in international currency exchange.
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20.8.2022
A storm petrel of reaction,the Blairite harping on about the NHS and Good Friday Agreement
Blair undermined the Bill of Rights 1689 with a series of regressive laws while conducting wars of international aggression and plunder. The Bill of Rights 1689 is and was widely accepted as the basis of all law-governed societies in the West.
Reform,the health issue and society,the police-medical nexus
The sturdy representatives of the state manifested constantly their claims for bounty money in the form of percentage-linked, harmonised salary increases for doctors and police while Labour and Tories played silly games with people's lives.
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Who will be the cock-of-the-walk in gross income terms after the current round of bottom-up industrial unrest subsides?
Cock-of-the-walk will be doctors and state employees at the HIGHER level in Northern Ireland.
They already have incomes well in excess of their needs AND they are receiving them from the British Government.
Make no mistake about the greed of our middle classes, working men and women of the British Isles. State employees who cry 'wolf' too often such as NHS doctors,teachers and well-paid civil servants are sadly missing from what Michelle and Barack Obama could clearly see (and the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army in Ireland and Britain have an overriding imperative to serve). I refer to the benefactors of the poor,the hungry,the foreigner,the stranger, the homeless person, the displaced, the refugee,the asylum seeker, the person "seeking only workmen's wages" and the hungry child.
That is one thing a fat English Labour and Tory politician and the rich man have in common, neglect for the poor and down-at-heel and BRAZEN IDOLATRY OF MONEY AND POWER OVER PEOPLE'S LIVES.
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The big picture In the West
Apart from Ireland and California which are clearly on long-term upward swings in terms of technical applications, Europe's and North America's "Glory Days" of capital accumulation of the last thirty years are over.
The Stormont Assembly?
The DUP MLA's are not to be taken seriously as normal rational people and Sinn Fein's politicians are destined for a relatively short-lived notoriety.
The great democratic deficit in the North of Ireland is down to the fact that the spoofer dominates the Northern media and the police force controls political discourse.
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The future? The working class? A separate party?
Marx could see that the workers in the North, South, Britain, France and Germany should have their own political party and the non-craft worker his own union.
There are democratic socialist parties in Britain, Ireland and in almost every country in the world. Because of modern education, every sane and grounded person realises that political parties based on the dictatorship of the proletariat are a thing of the past.
Gorbachev,that potentate of the Soviet Union
An historical illustration of authoritarianism which I found objectionable at the time was the Soviet Union. If Gorbachev had taken the slogan caption of mine "Democratisation" seriously,he would have, at the earliest political opportunity,called for a multi-party democracy. Between December 1983 and December 1991,if recollection serves me right,he never even once mentioned the subject.
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22.11.2022
Modern times
The magnificent 11.5-14% pay award won by refuse and recycling workers and litter-pickers and street cleaners and lower grades of district council workers is a great victory for the 2022 strike movement.
It is the largest victory in many years,37 at my reckoning.
Let us now turn our attention in Fermanagh and Omagh District Council to the depletion of services in our local hospital.
Forward with Labour!
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21.3.2023
No politician in Northern Ireland,not a single one of them,has a whit of intelligent knowledge or inherited wisdom in their background. None has any tangible or real connection to the Labour movement.We say to these political types who send out morons in football supporter clubs to harass critics and normal people, "Wise up!" Street-combers have their order of appearance in sequence,form and manner,most of them no better than walking dungheaps.
Their politics are the politics of Moriarty ("Parnell",Collected Poems, William Butler Yeats, Everyman's Library) and the views expressed are characterised by James Joyce in "The Dead" (Short Stories).
Lenin's question,"What is to Be Done?"
For that,we must read James Connolly.
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13.9.2023
To those in Sinn Fein and isolated little groups of dissident republicans,not forgetting almost all of the Communists and revolutionary socialists,I say,
"Are you not going to spit the bit out. You are being used by idle b.....ds who have drawn the dole every day of their lives and overweight haverils in musical pony troupes. They are ratting on you to police and priests who tell it all back to Gardai and PSNI bigots and strutting martinets who answer to Charles of Saxe-Coburg as head of state."
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16.9.2023
The Southern Army and its political interventions.Nos
Silly Free State "tradition" is based on agrarian socialism,a web of illusion put up by small farmers and farmers' spokesmen.
A hoax,a delusion,therefore!
As The British Army in Northern Ireland Volumes 1-3 puts it,"The Irish country people are long on talk and short on information."
City people see in country people comrades in the fight for jobs and higher wages. The worldly wise journalist and advocate sees country people's socialism as no more than stubbornness and truculence. The Irish countryman sees in the town dweller a fanatic out to cheat him. His simple notions and transparent deceptions must be met with scorn and contempt.
The countryman's reactionary nature is down to a mind full of precipitate nonsense, real-life games of violence and thuggery and conservative mischief .
Why,so?
Because the country person is a 'cute hoor' who pushes someone from the town into the frontline to take the bullet for him. Those who mix with idiots become like them.
That explains a lot of the tomfoolery elucidated and dramatised in my oral soliloquoy in July-August 1988 in Rathmines,Dublin,a 'drama' with profound and far-reaching consequences for the Eastern Socialists.
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The Southern state since the Programme for National Recovery (1987)
It occurs to me that much social naiveté in relation to the Irish Tories emanates from country people. We think of the shoneen, Bertie Ahern. The source of his clowning with employers and farmers was his lack of real economic insights and of basic intelligence. Ahern presented his crookery with Manchester building firms as help for unemployed emigrants and increasing the Irish Government's influence abroad.
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16.11.2023
The spaltum created by Leninism between the trade union struggle and the political struggle (Two Tactics of Social Democracy, 1902-3) is dated. Unions are often struggling with falling membership, ageing members and real apathy.
Politics? Going to law?
People turn to that fickle type of person,a politician,for support and mediation because the courts are closed to the majority.
Why are courts the prerogative of the rich?
Even with Legal Aid,few can negotiate the perils of the judiciary and the legal profession.
Politicians thrive in a background of no labour organisation having the power or determination to bring them to account. The trade union official is in an ambiguous relation with a politician (Lenin,Left Wing Socialism,an Infantile Disorder,1919).
However,in the North of Ireland,these days, politicians can do more to help individuals than trade unions but they can only do so because they mediate social differences. Sooner or later, every politician will spurn his or her constituent and ask him or her to go away.
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9.8.2024
Labour is better for jobs and housing, industrial employment and public housing, certainly not private housing.
Take for instance the period of reflation after the labour troubles and strikes of the years 1978-79.
In Northern Ireland industrial employment rose from 210 000(1979) to 230 000 (1981).
Then the wreckers moved in with the demolition ball to destroy Britain's and Labour's industrial heritage. Because of the reactionary influence of an over-weened police force and a cowboy in the White House the real economy of the West entered a terminal decline.
That decline in Northern Ireland has led to endemic, unreported crime,the triumph of the idler and the waster and the exaltation of the showbiz celebrity and spiv.
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18.5.2025
A waged worker does not have security of employment. That fact marks the origin of trade unionism (and craft hostility to general workers and the unemployed worker).
The government employee has no need of trade unions and should not be in one because he usually has more than adequate means of economic support. In addition ,he enjoys political solidarity in the form of employer arbitration,civil society support and legal protection.
The craft worker and general worker only unite against government employee when circumstances are pressing and urgent. Those circumstances embrace minimal remuneration to keep living standards up and maintain safe working arrangements and adequate provision for sick leave, unemployment and leisure.
Only a Labour fool such as Brendan Howlin or Ernest Blythe talks and acts in the manner of the country squire by cutting wages,living standards and social standards. The trimmer is never welcome in labour circles and his nemesis is the general strike when trade unions break free from the halter of a runaway coach. That is indicative of a political collapse.
Eventually nationalist whimsies whether they be from Fine Gael or Fianna Fail or Sinn Fein or country wiseacres prevail and society goes back in time about twenty or thirty years.
The lessons of the past are clear.
Irish Labour Party heads always desert and betray trade unionists and the poor and clear a path for quack remedy salesmen such as Sinn Fein and independents as they describe themselves. In the latter instance,I refer to Danny Healy-Rae,the Kerry landlord.
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While there may be very little that can be said in favour of Fianna Fail, under Ahern it led a democratic revolution which laid bare the timbers of the sinking ship of cronyism and nationalism and corruption so beloved of the Catholic Church and GAA. Those who lament the passing of the age of Lynch, Haughey and Reynolds lament the passing of the age of terrorism, unrest and emigration and they do not favour the economic rebirth of our country.
It has been led by Fianna Fail,solely and alone with only the occasional prod from others.
Fianna Fail is getting on its feet again after a difficult hiatus .
Even Sinn Fein has become a democratic party and the nationalist element of all parties is in retreat. A country rescued from the scrapheap is set on the path of open government and strict accountability.
That,my good sirs,is a DEMOCRATIC revolution. Not a workers republic but the patient's condition is improving and he is out of a coma (or 'bind').
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14.7.2025
While honest if loud argument is preferable to the endless verbiage of the bourgeois press and media particularly of middle class dilettantes at the BBC,the third way and the alternative to this peculiarly Irish form of rabble-rousing and political clamour is sane dialogue between opposing political parties,opposing factions within nations and countries at loggerheads.What we are getting from the US President is empty upper class rhetoric aiming at gaining preference for American wares and boosts to the Western domination of poor countries.
