Forty years ago, when I was covering the miners’ strike, I spent half my life drinking with the provisional wing of the TUC general council in downstairs ‘members only’ boozers, before the relaxation of the licensing laws (think The Winchester in Minder).
If someone had told me then that one day the Labour Party would deliberately put tens, nay hundreds, of thousands of ‘working people’ out of, er, work, I’d have thought they’d spent too long on the laughing juice, even by the thirsty standards of the 1980s.
Who would have believed that the Labour Party – or as Neil Kinnock called it, the Lay-ber Party – would, in our lifetime, be in favour of shutting down coal mines, power stations, steel works, oil rigs, refineries, car factories?
Leave it out, Brian. One for the strasse, then I’ll call you a cab.
Not only that, but the dopey bird who until recently ran the TUC – once the hairy-arsed domain of the Vic Feathers and Len Murrays of this world – actually reckons ‘working from home’ is a way to behave and the sooner we shut down what’s left of British industry the better…
And to think, I once dubbed my old mate and sparring partner Ron Todd, then leader of the Transport and General Workers Union – when it had the best part of two million members – the ‘Toddausaurus’.
Ron, a patriotic, tough former Royal Marine, cut his teeth as the former convener at Ford’s Essex car works – spiritual home of the Grey Cortina, Transit, White Van Man and the Made In Dagenham women machinists’ strike, subsequently turned into a hit movie starring Bob Hoskins and Jaime Winston.
If someone had told me 40 years ago that one day the Labour Party would deliberately put ‘working people’ out of work, I’d have thought they’d spent too long in the boozer
This week alone we learned that the once thriving Vauxhall plant in Luton is to close as a direct result of Ed ‘Frank Spencer’ Miliband’s lunatic Net-Zero obsession
Today the movie would star Ed Miliband as Frank Spencer (‘I’ll pay for any damage’) and Donald Pleasance as Keir Starmer, the Angel of Death, blowing up the Dagenham factory with laser beams from a Chinese satellite in space and carpeting Canvey Island with solar panels.
None of the old school TUC bosses could ever have imagined that the Labour Party their unions created, and they bankrolled would, in the not too distant, actively conspire to make hundreds of thousands of their own members redundant.
Even the sensible wing of the trades union movement, the likes of Eric Hammond of the electricians, and Terry Duffy of the engineers, would have been horrified at the policies of the modern ‘Labour’ party.
I’m old enough to remember the 1970s when a Labour government poured taxpayers’ millions into car manufacturing, bailed out everything from steelmaking to coal mining and rejoiced in spending the North Sea Oil bounty.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t that long ago when Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown was encouraging us all to switch our cars from ‘dirty’ petrol to ‘green’ diesel.
You couldn’t, etc…
Today, the party of the ‘workers’ is busting a gut to bankrupt the country by closing any last vestige of industrial endeavour. This week alone we learned that the once thriving Vauxhall plant in Luton is to close as a direct result of Ed ‘Frank Spencer’ Miliband’s lunatic Net Zero obsession.
(Some mothers really do have ‘em. And don’t forget Labour’s fall-back when Starmer inevitably implodes is the ‘Prince Across the Water’, Mister Ed’s equally gormless big brother Dave, last spotted running Thunderbird Three in New York.)
The party which once stood side-by-side with Barmy Arthur Scargill’s attempted Communist-putsch-cum-civil war, disguised as a last-ditch campaign to keep open loss-making coal mines, now views fossil fuels as a vampire contemplates garlic
Labour is prepared to sacrifice jobs in home-grown energy production on the altar of the false god of being ‘world leader’ in cutting carbon emissions. Pictured, Net-Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, the Prime Minister and Chancellor Rachel Reeves at a manufacturing facility in Chester
The party which once stood side-by-side with Barmy Arthur Scargill’s attempted Communist-putsch-cum-civil war, disguised as a last-ditch campaign to keep open loss-making coal mines, now views fossil fuels as a vampire contemplates garlic.
Labour is prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of jobs in home-grown energy production on the altar of the false god of being ‘world leader’ in cutting carbon emissions.
And to hell with any hope of prosperity in any of the so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats in the North of England, which prospered in the age of coal and could now be Britain’s own self-sufficient energy powerhouse if fracking hadn’t been pole-axed to keep the dwindling number of losers who read The Guardian happy.
As for the Labour revival in Scotland, where did they get the idea that banning further North Sea oil exploration was in the best interests of the estimated 200,000 people in the Aberdeen area and beyond whose jobs depend on it?
Our steel industry is dead as a dodo, too, beyond hope, because of Net Zero nonsense – which, to be honest, the Tories under Boris and Mother Theresa are equally culpable.
But this column is about the extraordinary transformation of the Labour Party through the Looking Glass in my career.
They have trashed everything they once held dear, whether you agreed with it or not.
The clue is in the name. They call themselves the ‘Labour’ Party, but today they are no longer the party of organised, honest labour, which they were in my days as an industrial correspondent.
In fact, they give every indication of despising industry, unless it is windmills made in China.
The car workers of Luton, the steel workers of Wales, the oil workers of Aberdeenshire are all collateral damage on their crusade to create a broke, ideologically correct, new world, fit for public sector parasites and taxpayer-funded yuman rites lawyers in their overpriced North London slums.
The ‘working people’ they once allegedly represented are being burned on the bonfire of their Kentish Town vanities.
If I sound sour, forgive me. But 40-odd years ago I played a small walk-on part helping the Rons, Brians, Bills and Terrys reclaim Labour from the Scargills and their assorted headcases in Militant etc. Look how that’s turned out.
If you want me, I’ll be down The Winchester, drinking with ghosts.