Jeremy’s Promised Land!

by Christopher Draper

I’ve just come back from a day-school on the Balfour declaration where no-one mentioned the elephant in the room.  Speakers gave Arthur Balfour, Lloyd George and Lord Rothschild a well deserved kicking but ignored those ultimately responsible for handing Palestine over to the gang of Zionist thugs who concocted the apartheid State of Israel.

The Spirit of ‘45

On 26th July 1945 a British Labour government took office with an overwhelming majority, a popular mandate for Socialism and legal responsibility for the administration of Palestine.  Despite Jews being a in minority, owning just 6% of the land, Zionist terrorists launched a murderous campaign to drive the Arab population from their homeland and transform Palestine into an ethnically-cleansed State of Israel.
As well as attacks on Palestinians, Clement Attlee and his Labour chums were left in no doubt of the Zionist’s systematic savagery after 91 people were murdered at the King David Hotel, the British Embassy in Rome was blown up, a bomb was planted in the Colonial Office and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin himself received a letter bomb but instead of defending the Palestinians from colonisation Labour opted for expediency. In 1947, even before the government’s mandate had expired, this most left-wing of Labour Governments announced its intention to walk away, leaving Palestine to the Zionists.

Ignorance is Bliss

This utter betrayal characterises the record of the 1945-51 Labour regime so revered by activists who imagine Jeremy might lead us back to that Garden of Eden. This is a fiction apparent to anyone who takes the trouble to examine the real record of that government though many lazily prefer the myth. I don’t want to bludgeon readers with endless argument but instead offer a few pointers you can investigate and decide upon for yourself.

Conscription

Post-war Labour was expected to rapidly demilitarise but instead Attlee established permanent peace-time conscription that continued throughout Labour’s reign until it was finally abolished in 1960 by a Tory administration. It soon became apparent that Labour required a conscript army to carry out its industrial and colonial policies.

Labouring Under Labour

· July 1945, within a week of taking office Labour sent strikebreaking troops into London’s Surrey Docks. The strike was defeated and 900 dockers suspended.
· October 1945 - 21,000 conscript troops broke national port strike
· Aug 1947 - 40 Grimethorpe miners taken to court for striking
· Jan 1948 - 191 Durham miners summonsed for striking
· March 1948 - 2 Neath miners prosecuted for stay-down strike
· May 1949 - troops defeated Avonmouth strike
· Sep 1950 - 10 members of gasworkers strike committee charged with conspiracy
· February 1951 – 7 London and Mersey dockers charged with conspiracy
Between 1945 and 1951 Labour ordered troops across picket lines 18 times. It retained Wartime Order 1305 to make strikes illegal and twice invoked the Emergency Powers Act of 1920. Labour even revived the secret Supply & Transport Organisation the Tories had used to break the 1926 General Strike. Ever ready to act against workers Labour never once invoked the 1305 clause that prohibited employers from imposing “lock-outs”. Printworkers locked-out by the London Master Printers Federation in August 1950 got no support from Attlee’s government but successfully defended their jobs and conditions through their own collective action.

Pacifying the Natives

Pacifying the Natives
In 1924 J H Thomas, foreign minister of Britain’s first Labour government reassuringly declared; “I am here to see there is no mucking about with the British Empire”.  On the day of Labour’s 1945 election victory his successor, Ernest Bevin announced, “British foreign policy will not be altered in any way under the Labour Government”. In practice this meant;
· 1945 September Vietnam – bloody suppression of popular uprising
· 1945 October Java - Seaforth Highlanders crush popular uprising
· 1945 December Greece - 5-year military campaign against socialists
· 1946 Albania - naval action and confiscation of gold reserves
· 1946 January Cyprus – 18 trade unionists imprisoned
· 1947 Kenya - troops shoot “uncooperative” Kenyans
· 1947 Aden – brutal suppression of “civil disturbances”
· 1947 August India – abandoned to partition and violence
· 1948 Malaya – brutal colonial war against insurgency
· 1948 February Ghana - Nkrumah jailed and 29 killed
· 1949 April Uganda - 8 demonstrators killed many arrested
· 1949 November Nigeria – 21 strikers shot dead at Enugu Colliery
· 1950 Korea – troops sent to support US intervention
· 1950 March Botswana – exiled Seretse Khama for marrying a white woman
· 1951 June Persia – “Gunboat diplomacy” of cruiser Mauritius

In Bed With Fascists

Whilst continuing to wield the big stick in the colonies Labour kow-towed to its new best friend, the United States. Bevin created NATO as an anti-communist alliance to facilitate American hegemony in Europe.  Alliances with fascists proved preferable to friendship with socialists soft on communism. After the war Labour kept interned at Chorley concentration camp 226 Spanish anti-fascists who’d fought against both Franco and the Nazis.  An even worse fate awaited their 136 comrades who Labour deported back to Franco’s torture chambers.  Attlee’s government then proceeded to grant Franco’s fascist regime official recognition as it did to Fascist Portugal, a fellow member of NATO, an organisation supposedly founded to defend freedom!

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Following Attlee’s agreement on the 1945 nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he insisted that Britain must now have its own nuclear bomb.  Bevin agreed, with obscene enthusiasm, “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs…We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”.

MP’s & Pensioners

With wages averaging around £5 a week Labour raised the Old Age Pension to just a quarter of this amount, 26 shillings, but they managed more for themselves, increasing MP’s salaries from £600 a year to £1000 with £5,000 for the Postmaster General.

Ethel’s Prescience

Despite this shameful record Labour loyalists cling to the legacy of the NHS, but this was a Liberal scheme and would have been introduced by them if they’d been elected in 1945.  After all it was Lloyd George who started the Welfare State by introducing Old Age Pensions in 1908 and Liberals Beveridge and Keynes who drafted the welfare measures Labour carried out (Labour’s education system was devised by a Tory, Rab Butler).   As the Guardian noted, even “the Tory manifesto pledges were not all that different from Labour’s”.   Labour’s NHS used the same top-down, hierarchical model as in its other Nationalisations. Just before Labour government took office, in 1944, the writer Ethel Mannin presciently identified “ersatz socialism”, “Socialism without tears, an attempt at pacifying the capitalist with compensation for his confiscated property – a sort of social appeasement, which will leave a class system of society, and which offers no new
approach to life and no recognition of “the soul of man”… “Coarse comfort, like petted animals” is exactly the aim of such palliatives as the Beveridge Plan.
What sort of fool imagines the rich would simply relinquish their power and wealth on the vote of a Parliamentary majority?  Only by organising and educating ourselves at work and in our own communities could we ever hope to wrest control from the powerful and manipulative. Jeremy might well lead us down the Parliamentary road but it won’t, never did and never could, lead us into the Garden of Eden.

CD November 2017 

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