Category: Sunday

keir Hardie, the first Labour Party leader joined the work force as early as the age of seven and so, did not have the benefit of formal education. He was born at a time when education was neither free nor compulsory in Britain. In any case, he had to go out into the big bad world to contribute his own quota, small as it had to be to the family finances so that there just was no room for such niceties as education even if it was to be at the primary school level. In any case, what was the use of any level of education to a young man whose destiny was to dig coal until he succumbed to tuberculosis or scoliosis by the age of fifty or less? These antecedents dictated that if he was going to make anything of his life, be had to pull himself up by his own boot straps. That means that he was a self made man in every sense of the word. In addition to these difficulties, he was also brought up in a suite of two rooms which shows quite clearly that he was born with very little and grew up with less. But there was another side to this bent coin. This was at a time when the mine owners and freshly minted industrialists were making money hand over fist from their investments at home and abroad as British companies repatriated literally, mountains of gold and silver from the far flung Empire. It is just that the members of the British working class were being squeezed as ferociously as any British subject in India, Africa and the Caribbean. Indeed, my calculation is that for example, people living in Achebe’s fictional village of Umofia in their time got more out of life than the lowly Scottish miner or the young lady making so called safety matches in some infernal factory in London or Birmingham. Not to talk of those of them who were tied to the mechanised weaving looms in the dark mills of Manchester. With his nonconformist Methodist background and the drudgery in which his life was bound, Hardie was fiercely motivated to bring about a change in the lives of people around him. He was driven by a strong desire to make life better for others, not by waging war on any group or class of people but on the ideas which they gave voice to. Marx was also known in his time as having advised the workers of the world to unite against their oppressors which is why, contrary to popular opinion, Hardie refused to support the participation of British working men in the slaughter of workers from other lands who like their British counterparts were slaving in the service of their own local capitalists. He was therefore opposed to the very idea of British workers being turned into soldiers to be slaughtered on the killing fields of the First World War. To him, it was clear that workers were only sacrificial victims on the altar of rampant capitalism. He would have been extremely distressed had he lived to hear of the rivers of blood which were shed on the Western front during the war. He was spared that by dying in 1915 long before the meat grinder battles which were uselessly fought at Verdun, the Somme, Pachendale and indeed, other battle fields.

Starmer’s antecedents are by no means as humble as Hardie’s but without the foundation for social welfare laid by people like Hardie, the trajectory of Starmer’s life and career would have been much lower than they have been. His parents came from the massive British underclass working solidly at some lowly manufacturing or service job into which their children would have been absorbed in their turn. Starmer escaped this trap which was laid in his path by centuries of tradition when he passed his eleven plus examination and was admitted into a grammar school from where he acquired a solid education which ended at Oxford from where he finished his studies after his first class Law degree from the University of Leeds. His background is therefore quite similar to other post-war British Prime Ministers starting with Ted Heath in the seventies.

Perhaps the most memorable member of this group has been Margaret Thatcher, the green grocer’s daughter who through grit and determination, not to talk of sheer bloody mindedness, hacked her way through to the office of the British Prime Minister, the first female to accomplish this feat.

Following the colour of her political career it was obvious that Thatcher’s constituency did not include the majority underclass from which she herself had risen so spectacularly. As far as she was concerned, anyone with the determination to succeed could do so, prevailing circumstances notwithstanding. Anyone who did not succeed in life had no-one else to blame but themselves. All you needed to get on in life was a job and if you had no job, it was your duty to find one whichever way you could. Her father may have been self employed but her circumstances were no better or worse than they were for Starmer who also climbed out of the underclass in the same way that she did; by the way of the kind of education she received, not because she was born on the right side of the track but because she won a big prize in the genetic lottery which left her with the ability to process school lessons and pass examinations with greater ease than most of her contemporaries. Like Starmer, she was the first in her family to go to a university but whilst Starmer stayed more or less true to his working class roots, Thatcher turned away completely from the class within which she was raised as soon as she had acquired the required polish to do so. She became an archetypical Tory even if she would not have been comfortable in their company at least at the beginning of her political career. But she had a clear penchant for seizing the tide whenever it arose and riding the tide to eventual success. When Heath lost the 1974 election, she sensed his vulnerability and exploited it maximally, riding that tide to become the first female party leader in Britain.

As the leader of Opposition, Thatcher sensed the growing frustration of the country with the antics of the Labour unions and set herself up as the hammer of the unionists and in doing so, convinced majority of voters that she was capable of curbing the powers of the unions and being able to do so, move the country forward. By the end of her first term in office however, it was apparent that her honeymoon with Britons was over and their association was soon to be dissolved. Then again, a saving tide swelled up thousands of miles in the South Atlantic where the Argentine ruling junta annexed a group of islands which the British called Falklands and the Argentines referred to as  Malvinas. Sensing an opportunity and the rising of another helpful tide, Thatcher sent an expeditionary force halfway round the world to chase the Argentines off the islands which had been colonised by less than a few hundred sheep farmers. This war which in reality registered nothing on the Richter scale of war acted to rally the country behind Thatcher and riding on the wave of popularity created, the Conservatives were returned to power at the next elections. Thatcher interpreted this to mean an endorsement of her union bashing policy. The immediate result of this was the long running battle with the coal miners led by Arthur Scargill. When the smoke cleared, the miners had lost the war and thousands of them lost their jobs and a way of life was brought to an abrupt end. Thatcher’s effect on the polity was electrifying as she controlled the economy as no Prime Minister had done before or since. She was one of the first disciples of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of monetary economics which spread the belief that money should not remain in government hands but must be stuffed in the private pockets of those with proven capacity to make money. According to the boys from Chicago, there was nothing in economics which was beyond the capacity of market forces to accomplish or at least brought under control.

Under Thatcher, people were encouraged or even more than that, exhorted in high blown language to make money and of course spend it whichever way they wanted. In  Thatcher’s Britain, it was a case of privatisation gone mad as all previously nationalised companies including those involved in the mining and steel making industries were put up for sale to whoever had the wherewithal to buy them. People were given the option to buy council houses and millionaires were being created as fast as people were being pushed into poverty on the other end of the economic scale. Actually, I paid a couple of visits to Thatcher country at the height of her pomp and glory and came away with the feeling that palpable hunger was stalking the high streets of Britain even as no less palpable wealth was being flaunted by the yuppies, so called young upwardly mobile young persons who had been enriched by Thatchernomics. All those outside looking into Britain could see that the bubble created had no chance of achieving anything close to longevity and so it proved. Part of Thatchernomics dictated the lowering of income tax, a policy which suited the yuppies to the ground at the expense of people who had little disposable income. The loss of government income had to be made up through personal taxes. Matters came to a head with the introduction of the poll tax which was so unpopular that other Tories saw it as a stumbling block to vote gathering. They had no choice but to rebel against their leader. It fell to Geoffrey  Howe, the Foreign Minister and deputy to the Prime Minister to deliver the speech in parliament which parodied the words of Oliver Cromwell who centuries earlier had dismissed parliament with the words, ‘in God’s name, go’. The Prime Minister had been told to go and Margie had to go but not before having held on to power for no less than eleven years, longer than anyone in British history, to be succeeded by John Major as unlikely a successor as anyone could be.

Read Also: The British vote for change (II)

John Major had a most interesting background for  a politician, not to talk of member of the Conservative Party. His father was at least for part of his life a music performer and he was so unimpressed with school that he left as soon as he possibly could without breaking the law at an age just short of sixteen years with three O level subjects to his credit.  Thereafter he tried his hands at several jobs but found none that was suitable for a boy of his rather limited academic qualifications. It was said that he could not even get a job as a bus conductor on account of his height. Eventually, he settled for being articled in the field of insurance and ended up in the employ of Standard Bank which brought him all the way to Standard Bank in Jos. He worked in Nigeria for a few months before he was involved in a serious motor accident which led to his being transferred back home to Britain for the treatment of his injuries.

As expected, one of his first acts in government was to repeal the poll tax law which had been the undoing of his predecessor in office. After all the excitement of the Thatcher years, Major tried to reduce the heat in the polity especially since Labour Party had a comfortable lead in the polls. To the surprise of many, including Major himself, the Conservatives won a clear majority over the Labour Party under the leadership of Neil Kinnock in the general election following the departure of Margaret Thatcher. Eventually, in 1997 the Labour Party now led by Tony Blair won the general election to bring an end to the eighteen year long rule of the Conservative Party.

To be continued.