Farnell is in Great Fabian Socialist Tradition

WRITERS on the left in Rochdale have been anxious to infer right-wing tendencies in the proposal of the Labour Council to inflict on-the-spot penalties upon the beggars in Rochdale town centre.   Were as, for my part I see Richdard farnell and even Simon Danczuk in the great tradition of Fabian state socialism.

Some leftist critics of Rochdale council have summoned up references to the German laws of the 1930s, and people like the pacifist Phillip Gilligan was  driven to write in the Rochdale Observer (March 18th, 2017):
'....after coming to power in Germany, the Nazis sought to exclude many groups from their so-called "national community", including those who they labelled "asocials".  There measures became steadily more oppressive and, in just one week in 1937, 11,000 beggars and homeless people were arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.  They were never seen again.'

Before Hitler and the Nazis established any kind of clean-up campaign against anti-social elements it was the Fabian state socialist Bernard Shaw who who as early as 1931 was filmed delivering a 'Paramount Sound News Exclusive' which caused outrage at the time.  J. Kelly Nestuck writes describing this encounter  vividly:
'In the black and white footage, Shaw, with his Irish lilt and smug grin, seems to argue in favour making everybody "come before a properly appointed board, just as he might come before the income tax commissions," to justify their existence..

'If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more," he suggests, "then clearly we cannot use the big organisation of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself.'

How very practical and rational these old fashioned state socilalists like Shaw were, and somewhere I seem to remember that Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew many of these Fabian socialists, would ponder the puzzle about whether if the great man Shaw and a lame beggar were in a boat and one should have been sacificed which one should go overboard; Muggeridge took the view, as I recall, that humankind would benefit far more 'if  it was Shaw who took a header into the depths'.

Most anarchists and decent people would have no hesitation in making a similar choice if Simon Danczuk and/ or Richard Farnell were poised aboard a craft in difficulties with a pair of limbless beggars.