Recently, there was a wave of outrage on social media sparked by the new Labour government’s refusal to overturn the two-child benefit cap, which has greatly exacerbated the distress of many of Britain’s poorest families, punishing little children for the crime of having been born into the wrong class.
The cap essentially treats families with more than two children as if their hardship were their own fault, reinforcing the ruling class’s Malthusian dogma that having ‘too many children’ is the essential cause of working-class penury rather than capitalist wage-slavery and exploitation.
Just seven Labour MPs and a single Tory voted to scrap this scapegoating measure. The seven Labour ‘rebels’ (a rebellion that can only be described as performative) were duly ‘punished’ with a suspension of several months from the party whip.
Cue social media outrage and the following defiant statement on Twitter from leading rebel MP Zarah Sultana:
“I have been informed by the chief whip and the Labour party leadership that the whip has been withdrawn from me for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, which would lift 330,000 children out of poverty.
“I will always stand up for the most vulnerable in our society.”
Such a statement would be more believable if it didn’t come from someone who has just been elected to a new parliament on the basis of staying inside the Labour party – that faithful servant of Anglo-American imperialism, that endorser of zionism, that cheerleader for every criminal aggressive war, that executor of death by a thousand cuts at home and of endless genocides abroad.
What crimes would the Labour party have to commit for Ms Sultana to consider that it was time to really fight for the ‘most vulnerable’ by genuinely (instead of performatively) opposing Labour and the imperialist system it represents?
What would it take for her to stop making her living as a spokesperson for the very regime that creates more poor people every single day (as a necessary condition for the amassing of vast wealth at the other end of the social scale) and then victimises and blames them for their poverty?
Imperialist Labour from the start
It is now a century since Britain had its first Labour government – a government which VI Lenin advocated workers should elect so that they would learn from their own experience that it was a servant of imperialism and not a friend of the workers. So that they would realise it was not and never could be a vehicle for socialism.
That very first Labour government in 1924 shocked workers by using police, army, spies and emergency powers to break strikes and sabotage the labour movement, which had begun the year on a wave of militancy. It left the civil service and state structures entirely intact, and its ministers allowed themselves meekly to be directed in their new roles as frontpeople for a system of government over which they should expect to have no meaningful say.
Their eagerness to please their ruling-class masters and their rampant chauvinism in regard to the righteousness of the criminal enterprise known as the British empire may surprise readers today, brought up as they have been to believe in the socialist foundations of this anti-worker organisation.
A few choice quotes from members of that first government can give an idea of where their loyalties lay then, and where they still lie today. (Spoiler: it’s not with the workers at home or the oppressed abroad.)
That same government appointed a Fabian, Sydney Olivier, to run the India office, who stated:
“The programme of constitutional democracy … was not native to India … It was impossible for the Indian people or Indian politicians to leap at once into the saddle and administer an ideal constitution …
“The right of British statesmen, public servants, merchants and industrialists to be in India today was the fact that they had made the India of today, and that no home rule or national movement could have been possible in India had it not been for their work.”
The same Sydney Olivier (uncle of the actor Laurence) had formerly been governor of Jamaica, and remarked:
“I have said that the West Indian negro is not fit for complete democratic citizenship in a constitution of modern parliamentary form, and I should certainly hold the same opinion with respect to any African native community.”
He was not alone.
Former railwaymen’s union leader JH Thomas was appointed to the colonial office in 1924, where he expressed the pious wish that “it would be realised, when the time came for them to give up the seals of office, that they had not only been mindful of their responsibility, but had done nothing to weaken the position and prestige of this great empire”.
Three months later, this great traitor to the working class reiterated that the Labour government “intended above all else to hand to their successors one thing when they gave up the seals of office and that was the general recognition of the fact that they were proud and jealous of, and were prepared to maintain, the empire”.
This first Labour administration, which was so keen to make it clear that the British empire was “safe in our hands” imprisoned communists in India and arrested nationalist leaders without trial. In its few months in office, it also bombed Iraqi villages and supported counter-revolutionary attempts to overthrow the government of Dr Sun Yat-sen in China.
As leading Labour politician JR Clynes put it:
“In the same period of years, no Conservative or Liberal government has done more than we did to knit together the great Commonwealth of Nations which Britain calls her empire … Far from wanting to lose our colonies, we are trying to keep them.”
All this only came as a surprise to those who had not been paying attention to the words and actions of the Labour party’s founders.
As far back as 1901, the man who would go on to become Britain’s first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, told an audience in London:
“So far as the underlying spirit of imperialism is a frank acceptance of national duty exercised beyond the nation’s political frontiers … it cannot be condemned … the compulsion to expand and to assume world responsibility is worthy at its origin.”
Fabian eugenicist poison
The Fabian Society was the home of the chief theoreticians of the Labour party. Leading Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb were the authors of the Labour manifesto’s clause iv, which was supposed to gull the general populace into believing the party had socialist intent.
Of course, clause iv was never acted on by the party in office. It remained a piece of paper until such time as the Labour party of Tony Blair in 1996 decided that such a genuflexion before the socialist-leaning sentiments of the masses was no longer necessary.
The Webbs wrote the following in an article in the New Statesman (which they founded) in 1913 discussing the falling birthrate amongst the upper stratum of workers and intelligentsia, which they plainly considered a disaster:
“Into the scarcity thus created in particular districts, in particular sections of the labour market, or in particular social strata, there rush the offspring of the less thrifty, the less intellectual, the less foreseeing of races and classes – the unskilled casual labourers of our great cities, the races of eastern or southern Europe, the negroes, the Chinese possibly resulting, as already in parts of the USA, in such a heterogeneous and mongrel population that democratic self-government, or even the effective application of the policy of a national minimum of civilised life, will become increasingly unattainable.
“If anything like this happens, it is difficult to avoid the melancholy conclusion that, in some cataclysm that is impossible for us to foresee, that civilisation characteristic of the western European races may go the way of half a dozen other civilisations that have within historic times preceded it; to be succeeded by a new social order developed by one or other of the coloured races, the negro, the kaffir or the Chinese.”
These were and remain the racist, imperialist and anti-worker sentiments of the Labour party from that day to this. Labour never has been and never will be a friend to the working class. It never has been and never will be a vehicle for socialism. All those who pretend otherwise are working for our class enemies and must be exposed.
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