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After this spring’s European elections and the victory of two British National Party members I wrote and drew this. I still think it is true, although I have added one small paragraph at the end.
Only idiots could fail to see the symbolic importance of Britain returning its first fascist members to the European parliament after yesterday’s elections.
We have for too long ignored unfashionable but pervasive problems in our political conversation – namely, poverty, the provision of public housing and low-paid, badly regulated employment. These traditional concerns have been mixed with the great economic experiment of globalisation and the free movement of labour, which suited the interests of large industries when capital was also flowing easily. Nobody appears to have thought much about what would happen when times were not so good and the imaginary money supply dried up. This is why we are all going to have to relearn some hard lessons during the next few years. This is also why Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour party is so firmly jammed in the electoral and economic toilet. Frankly, they deserve to be.
Sadly, the present alternatives, Conservatives and Liberal Democrat, do not look any more impressive as potential governments.
The BBC will get a Question Time ratings smash tonight (there will be lots of public protest and media hoopla too.) But with luck, people will also get to see what an odious little toad Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, really is.
However, many of the problems which he talks about and that attract his supporters run a traditional risk of being ignored – and it is these things which are the true enemy because they create the environment in which outright racism and the BNP can flourish.
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Here is an image from 1838 tweaked for the modern Royal Mail, the planned* strike and the increasingly regal Lord Mandelson. There is some useful context to issues around the service and the industrial dispute available from the BBC. Billy Hayes, leader of the Communication Workers Union has a public say in the Mirror and the FT looks at the bigger picture and the value of the Mail as a saleable asset after the next election.
If it wasn’t the ‘Royal’ Mail does anyone think the organisation would still be in public hands after the past thirty years of privatisations?
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There is an instructive story going on today about the relationship between these four apparently distinct things. The Spectator Magazine briefly reports on it here. There’s a cartoon about the attempts to use a legal injunction or gag, on The Guardian Media Group here too.
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In the FTGideon Rachman offers a short analysis of the Conservative conference and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s speech. James Landale offers a longer round up for the BBC.
The full text of the Shadow Chancellor’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference. It is interesting to compare today’s meat from the bone (his candour about what is coming with a Conservative government) with what he said in September while the thinking was going on. Links via Craig Elder and The Guardian.
