Many are the reasons for thinking Arthur Scargill is a dick.
Mine is how his tactics during the miners' strike made clear he failed to take his political theories seriously – if there is a
working class and it is engaged in class struggle with an oppressive ruling
class, then you work on the basis said ruling class ain’t going to
roll on its back for a tickle when you ask for more (and dear lord they
didn’t).
That was then. The credit crunch and subsequent run of
banking scandals have made clear we are still ruled by a ruling class and that
our society, polity and economy are structured in ways that favour them over us.
Like seriously, it;s as blatant as toffs in top hats exercising droit
seigneur in the town square.
Obviously, I’m a paranoid, leftie trot. Obviously. Except then
you compare/contrast how the state treated the fuck nuggets who took part in
the shopping riots with that of the people who caused the credit crunch in
Britain, bent the interest rates (and potentially loads of other price indices)
used to price gazillions worth of lending and assets globally, facilitated
Mexican drug cartel money laundering, missold financial products on an
industrial scale and so on and so on.
So on the one hand, the fuck nuggets were rounded up pronto
and rushed thru all night courts that dished out exemplary
sentances left, right and centre e.g. the two Dundee teenagers who were
arrested in August, and given 3 years in December for trying to organise a riot
on Facebook that didn’t actually take place.
By contrast, years after the event, one bloke has just been charged here with
offences of conspiracy to defraud years after the actual event. One. Am
guessing one reason for the delay here was that the SFO and FSA (as was) tried to debate whether what was very obviously a criminal offence was actually a criminal offence (it was, there shouldn’t have been any debate).
As for causing the credit crunch in Britain, industrialised misselling
and so forth? Well, 2 blerks are no longer knights and have given up a bit of
the huge pensions they’re already getting paid at an age an increasing majority
of people can only dream of retiring at. At the same time loads of the other
execs who got paid shed loads to do all this have moved on to the hardship that
is sitting on the board of companies smaller than the ones they ran into the
ground or else early retired to a Portugese golf course. As for money laundering,
well the CEO at the time became a government minister. That'll teach 'em.
You’re right you really couldn’t make it up. And yet,
despite all of that, fiscal austerity and all of the associated and vile strivers
vs skivers bile appears to have genuinely popular political support i.e. some
poor sod who hasn’t been able to get a job for over a year is apparently the real cause of
Britain’s current economic malaise. And the disabled, especially the disabled.
Sociologically, for me, this provides a useful perspective
on Mike Savage’s Great British Class Survey. He says there’s 7 classes? I say
arse. There’s a single, coherent, ruling class that occassionally takes in the
most ambitious and capable plebs (but only ever on an individual basis) and
then there’s everybody else. Really, all the schemata presented in the Class
Survey proves is that beneath the ruling class lies an incoherent, sky-plus
numbed mass that can be randomly sliced and diced into whatever categories you
want because they’re no more meaningful, conscious or aligned than the kind of
dreck marketing firms spew out at regular intervals; they’re certainly not the
kind of classes Arthur Scargill failed to recognise.
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