One of Mosley’s policies for the British Union of Fascists was to turn the House of Lords into an industrial chamber. This would be like Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Fasces and Corporations in which representatives of management and the trade unions for particular industries would sit to manage the economy. It’s an interesting idea, and the Germans had experimented with a similar chamber in 1919. When Mosley was attempting his political return after the War, he was still considering having people elected according to industry rather than geographical location, and included his thoughts on it in his book Mosley-Right or Wrong (London: Lion Books 1961):
‘Question 152: Do you advocate an occupational franchise?
Answer: I think it is the best method, but it is not essential to our system. So long as government has sufficient power of action in its defined sphere to carry out the mandate of the electors during its period of office, the essential is there. Government elected by the people will be able to do what the people want done, and they can sack it by their votes at the next election if it does not do the job to their satisfaction.
But as parliament still plays a very important part in our systems, it is preferable that it should be elected in a modern instead of an obsolete way. I mean by this that in early days of the geographical franchise, when the main industry was agriculture, men exercised the very limited franchise of those days in the area where they both lived and worked. Residential and industrial interests were really identical. But now a man’s occupation may be completely separated from his residence. Certainly his interests in these two spheres are no longer identical, and most men and women are more interested in their occupation than where they happen to live.
In their occupation they are well informed concerning its problems and the people engaged in it. They are more likely to select the best people to represent them.
Further, the resulting parliament will be a serious one, more likely to approach problems in the spirit of the search for truth, rather than the frivolous mood of party warfare. That is why I prefer and occupational franchise, but it is not essential to the success of our system. People may prefer not immediately to change so many of the traditional methods.’ (p. 151).
I’d very much like working people and their industries to be represented in parliament, especially as it is now dominated by representatives of industry. When Cameron was in power 77 % of MPs were company directors and senior executives. But the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations didn’t actually do anything except cheer Mussolini and rubber stamp his polices.
As well as laying out Mosley’s policies for post-War Britain and Europe, much of the book is an attempt to justify his conduct before the War as head of the BUF. He attempts to present himself as a democratic politician and definitely not a raging anti-Semite. The BUF wasn’t responsible for violence, and in power Mosley will respect all the traditional liberties like free elections and Habeas Corpus. He also attempts to redefine various Fascist doctrines. For example, he declares that the leadership principle just means that the person in charge of a particular policy, task or ministry should be held absolutely personally responsible for it, and that the buck shouldn’t be passed among members of various committees. It’s a good attitude, especially as we’ve seen officials responsible for catastrophic failures try to shrug off their responsibility for it. But that’s not what the leadership principle means. It looks like a version of Hitler’s Fuehrerprinzep, or ‘leader principle’. Simply put, this meant that the head of an organisation was its leader, and his staff or employees had an absolute duty to obey him, such as the relationship between a factory manager and his workers.
As for Mosley respecting democracy, I don’t believe a word of it.
Mosley is completely unrepentant of the actions and policies of the BUF. He considered them justified at the time, and says so in his book. If Mosley had seized power, Britain would have become another wretched Fascist dictatorship in which the individual would have no rights, political parties and genuine working class trade unions would be smashed and illegal. Opposition politicians would be attacked and incarcerated and Jewish Brits would either be expelled or exterminated. I’ve no doubt that he would have collaborated with Hitler in the Holocaust. After Hitler became the international star of Fascism, eclipsing Mussolini, Mosley changed the name of his gang of thugs to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. His Fascist Quarterly, set up as a rival to Gollancz’s Left Book Club, contained pieces by leading Nazis as well as other Fascists.
While I like the idea of an industrial parliament, Fascism itself is a murderous tyranny which has to be fought everywhere.
David D. Roberts, Syndicalist Tradition & Italian Fascism (University of North Carolina Press, 1979).
Syndicalism is a form of revolutionary socialism that seeks to overthrow the liberal state and replace it with a society based on the trade unions in which they run industry. It was particularly strong in France, and played a major role in Catalonia and the struggle against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. It has also been a strand in the British labour movement, and produced a peculiar British form, Guild Socialism, whose leaders included the great socialist writer and former Fabian, G.D.H. Cole.
Fascism Mixture of Different Groups
Fascism was a strange, heterogenous mixture of different, and often conflicting groups. These included former syndicalists, radicalised veterans from the First World War, ultra-conservative Nationalists and the Futurists, an aggressive modern artistic movement that celebrated war, speed, violence, masculinity, airplanes, cars and the new machine age. Some of these groups shared roughly the same ideas. The war veterans were deeply impressed with the corporative constitution drafted by Alceste de Ambris for D’Annunzio’s brief regime in Fiume, the Carta de Carnaro. Superficially, the Fascist syndicalists shared the same goal of creating a corporate state to govern industrial relations and run industry. However, they approached this from very different directions. The Nationalists, led by Alfredo Rocco, were ultra-Conservative businessmen, who attacked liberal democracy because of the corruption involved in Italian politics. At the same time they feared the power of the organised working class. As Italy modernised, it underwent a wave of strikes. In response, Rocco recommended that the state should take over the trade unions, using them as its organ to discipline the workers, keep the masses in their place while training them to perform their functions efficiently in the new, industrial Italy. The syndicalists, on the other hand, wanted the trade unions to play a role in industrial management and at the same time draw the working class into a fuller participation in politics. The working class had been excluded from the liberal state, but through their economic organisations, the unions, they could play a much fuller role as these governed their everyday lives. They saw the corporations and the corporate state as a means of increasing democracy and popular participation, not limiting it.
Fascist Corporativism
The corporations themselves are industrial organisations rather like the medieval guilds or trade unions. However, they included both the trade unions and employers organisations. There were already nine of them, but by the end of the regime in 1943 there were 27. Under Rocco’s Labour Charter, the Carta del Lavoro, strikes and lockouts were forbidden in the name of industrial peace and class collaboration. The corporation were required to settle labour disputes. However, if management and the unions were unable to reach agreement, then the dispute was to be referred to labour magistracy for settlement in special labour courts. Mussolini also reformed the Italian parliament, transforming the Chamber of Deputies into a Chamber of Fasces and Corporations. In practice the corporate state never amounted to very much. It never won over real working class support, and the corporations were never given real legislative power. It merely added another layer of bureaucracy and acted as nothing more than a rubber stamp to pass the policies Mussolini had already made. And he seems to have used it as ideological window dressing to give the impression that here was more to Fascism than his personal dictatorship.
The Unification of Italy and Political Alienation
The book argues that the corporate state was a genuine attempt to solve the deep problems of Italian unification left over from the Risorgimento. At the same time, it was also a radical response to the crisis, breakdown and revision of Marxist socialism and the failure of Marxist syndicalism in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The process of unification has produced an attitude of deep alienation from the state and politics amongst Italians, and Fascism was partly a response to this. This alienation isn’t confined to Italians, but it is particularly acute. Social studies in the 1970s showed that Italians are less likely than Americans, Brits or Germans to become politically involved. They regard the state as distant with little interest in them. At the same time, there is also an expectation that the bureaucrats in Rome will help them.
Like Germany, Italy was unified by military force and the invasion of the other, constituent states. However, for reasons of speed and a determination to preserve the new nation’s fragile unity, the other Italian states were simply annexed by Piedmont to be governed from there. There was supposed to be a constituent assembly in which the other states were to have their say in the creation of the new Italy, but this simply didn’t happen. At the same time, the industrialisation promoted by Italian liberals was concentrated in the north, so that the south remained backward and agricultural. The franchise was extremely restricted. It excluded illiterates, so that originally only 2 per cent of the population could vote. This was later extended to 7 per cent. At the same time, Italy’s leaders prevented the formation of proper political parties by taking over individuals from different parliamentary factions in order to form workable governing majorities. At the same time there was discontent and widespread criticism of the protectionism imposed to help the development of Italian heavy industry. Middle class critics believed that this unfairly benefited it at the expense of more dynamic and productive sectors of the economy. This led to the belief that Italy was being held back by class of political parasites.
This backwardness also led to an acute sense of pessimism amongst the elite over the character of the Italian people themselves. The Americans, British and Germans were disciplined with proper business values. Italians, on the other hand, were lazy, too individualistic and defied authority through lawlessness. This meant that liberalism was inadequate to deal with the problems of Italian society. ‘This English suit doesn’t fit us’, as one Fascist said. But this would change with the adoption of Fascism. One of Mussolini’s minions once declared that, thanks to Fascism, hard work and punctuality were no longer American, German and British values.
Syndicalism, Marxism and the Revision of Socialism
By the 1890s there was a crisis throughout Europe in Marxist socialism. Marx believed that the contradictions in capitalism and the continuing impoverishment of working people would lead to eventual revolution. But at this stage it was evident that capitalism was not collapsing. It was expanding, wages were rising and the working class becoming better off. This led to the reformist controversy, in which socialist ideologues such as Bernstein in Germany recommended instead that socialist parties should commit themselves to reforming capitalism gradually in order to create a socialist society. The syndicalists were originally Marxists, who looked forward to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. However, they became increasingly disenchanted with Marxism and critical of the leading role of the working class. They originally believed, as with the French syndicalist Georges Sorel, that the class-conscious workers would be a new source of values. But they weren’t. They also believed that this would only be achieved through a long process of education through general strikes. They were horrified by the biennio rosso, the two years of strikes and industrial unrest that came after the end of the war, when it seemed that the Italian labour movement was going to follow the Russian Bolsheviks and create a revolution for which Italy and it working class were not ready.
At the same time, they came to reject Marxism’s doctrine that the political was determined by the economic sphere. They believed that Italy’s political problems could not be reduced to capitalism. Hence they believed that capitalism and private industry should be protected, but made subordinate to the state. Work was a social duty, and any industrial who did not run his company properly could, in theory, be removed and replaced. They also sought to give the workers a greater role in industrial management. This led them to go beyond the working class. They found a new revolutionary group in the Italian war veterans, who were radicalised by their experiences. These would have joined the socialists, but the latter had been strongly neutralist and as a result rejected and ridiculed the former soldiers for their patriotism. These found their ideological and political home with the syndicalists. At the same time, the syndicalists rejection of Marxist socialism led to their rediscovery of other, non-Marxist socialist writers like Mazzini, who also rejected liberalism in favour of a tightly knit Italian nation. Their bitter hatred of the corruption in Italian politics and its parasites led them to join forces with anarchists and other sectors of the Italian radical tradition. They believed that for Italy truly to unite and modernise, the workers should join forces with properly modernising industrialists in an alliance of producers.
Syndicalist Opposition to Mussolini’s Rapprochement to the Socialists
Looking at the development of Italian Fascism, it can seem that there was a certain inevitability to the emergence of Mussolini’s dictatorship and the totalitarian Fascist state. But this argues that there was nothing inevitable about it, and that it was forced on Mussolini in order to stop his movement falling apart. When Mussolini entered parliament and took over as prime minister, he seemed to be transforming what was originally a movement into the very type of party that the Fascist rank and file were in revolt against. Fascism was reconstituted as a party, and when the future Duce met the kind, he wore the top hat and frock coat of an establishment politician. Worse, Mussolini had started out as a radical socialist, and still seemed determined to work with them and other working class and left-wing parties. He signed a pacification pact with the Socialists and Populists, the Roman Catholic party, stopping the Fascist attacks on them, the trade unions and workers’ and peasants’ cooperatives. This horrified the syndicalists, who saw it as a threat to their own programme of winning over the workers and creating the new, corporatist order. As a result they pressurised Mussolini into rescinding that pacts, Mussolini and Fascism moved right-ward to ally with the capitalists and industry in the destruction of working class organisations.
Syndicalists and the Promotion of the Working Class
But it seems that the syndicalists were serious about defending the working class and giving it a proper role through the corporations in the management of industry and through that, political participation in the Italian state. Left Fascists like Olivetti and Ugo Spirito believed that the Italian state should operate a mixed economy, with the state running certain companies where appropriate, and the trade unions owning and managing cooperatives. Some went further, and recommended that the corporations should take over the ownership of firms, which would be operated jointly by management and the workers. This never got anywhere, and was denounced by other left syndicalists, like Sergio Pannunzio, one of their leaders.
From Internationalism to Imperialism
The book also raises grim astonishment in the way it reveals how the Syndicalists, who were initially quite internationalist in outlook, came to support Fascist imperialism. They shared the general Fascist view that Italy was being prevented from developing its industry through British and French imperialism. The two powers blocked Italy from access to trading with their colonies. They were therefore also critical of the League of Nations when it was set up, which they saw as an attempt by the great powers to maintain the international status quo. The Nationalists, who were formally merged with the Fascists, went further and demanded that Italy too should have an empire to benefit its industry, but also to provide land for colonisation by the surplus Italian population. Without it, they would continue to be forced to emigrate to countries like America and Britain, where they would become the lowest and most despised part of their working class. The syndicalists were also acutely aware of how low Italians were regarded and exploited in these countries, even by other members of the working class.
The syndicalists during the war and early post-war years criticised the Nationalists for their militarism and imperialism. Instead of looking forward to perpetual war, as the Nationalists did, they wanted to see instead the emergence of a new, federal European order in which nations would cooperate. This new federal state would eventually cover the world. They also looked forward to a new, equitable arrangement over access to the colonies. Pannunzio did support colonialism, which he believed was bringing civilisation to backward areas. But he also believed that colonies that were unable to become nations in their own right should be taken over by the League of Nations. Pannunzio declared ‘Egotism among nations is a material and moral absurdity; nations … cannot lived closed and isolated by must interact and cooperate’. This changed as time went on and Mussolini established the corporate state. This was always fragile and tentative, and accompanied by concessions to other sectors of Fascism on the right. In order to defend their fragile gains, the syndicalists gave their full backing to the Second World War and its imperialism, which they saw as a crusade to bring the corporate state, the great Italian achievement, but a backward world.
Workers Should Have a Role In Government, But Not Through Totalitarianism
I have to say I like certain aspects of the corporate state. I like the idea of trade unionists actively involved in the management of industry and in a special department of parliament, although as Sidney and Beatrice Webb point out in their Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, there are severe drawbacks with it. But any such corporatist chamber would have to be an expansion of liberal democracy, not a replacement for it. And I utterly reject and despise Fascism for its vicious intolerance, especially towards socialism and the working class, its rejection of democracy, and especially the militarism, imperialism and racism. Like Nazism it needs to be fought everywhere, in whatever guise it arises.
And the book makes very clear that the corporate state was an exaggerated response to genuine Italian problems, problems that could be solved within liberal, democratic politics.
Perhaps one day we shall see the return of trade unionists to parliaments reformed to allow them to play their proper role in government and industry. I make this recommendation in my booklet, For A Worker’s Chamber. But it should never be through any kind of autocratic, totalitarian regime.
Here’s another interesting question posed by the changing policies of the Italian Fascist state towards industry and the financial sector. Fascism celebrated and defended private industry as the essential basis of the Italian economy and society. When Mussolini first took power in the early 1920s, he declared that Fascism stood for ‘Manchester School’ capitalism – privatisation, cuts to public services and expenditure and the lowering of wages and welfare benefits. But this changed with the development of the Fascist state through the establishment of the corporations – industrial organisations combining the employers’ organisations and the trade unions, which were supposed to take over the management of industry – autarky, which aimed to make Italy self-sufficient and the movement to a centrally planned economy.
This was partly achieved in the early 1930s when Mussolini set up two state institutions to buy out the Italian banks following the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression. These not only bought out the banks, but also the industries these banks owned and controlled, so that the Italian state ended up owning just under a fifth of the Italian economy.
This is described in a passage in the article ‘Industry’ in Philip V. Cannistraro’s Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1982). This runs
Two public agencies were created to save banks and crucially affected industries: the Istituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI) on November 13, 1931, which was to control credit; and the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI) on January 23, 1933. IRI was by far the more radical solution, for it purchased all the shares of stock in industrial, agricultural, and real estate companies previously held by banks. (The banking law of 1936 prohibited banks from extending long-term credit to industrial concerns). Although the industrialists fully expected a return to “normalcy” and to private enterprise after the crisis had passed, Mussolini had successfully created an instrument for the permanent intervention of government in the economy. By 1939 IRI controlled a series of firms representing 44.15 percent of the capital of Italian stock values and 17.80 percent of the total capital of the country – hence, the Fascist government controlled a proportionately larger section of national industry than any other government in Europe except the Soviet Union. (p. 278).
This allowed the government to interfere and restructure the Italian economy leading to the expansion of the manufacturing economy and a reduction in imports. On the other hand, poor government planning and an inefficient bureaucracy meant that Italian domestic manufactures were frequently inferior and the country had a lower growth rate than many other western European countries.
But this contrasts very strongly with policy of Britain and America to the financial sector after the 2008. The banks were bailed out with public money, but were not nationalised and the government has continued with its ‘light touch’ approach to regulation. Meaning that the banks have been free to carry on pretty much as before. Public spending, especially on welfare, has been drastically cut. Despite the Tories claiming that this would boost the economy and they’d pay of the debt within a couple of years or so, this has very definitely not happened. In fact, the debt has massively increased.
This has added to the long term problems of Britain’s manufacturing industry. Left-wing economists have pointed out that Britain’s domestic industries suffer from a lack of capital because the financial sector is geared towards overseas investment. A situation that has no doubt got worse due to globalisation and the personal investment of many Tory and New Labour MPs in foreign industry and their savings in offshore tax havens. British industry has also suffered from the ignorance and neglect of successive prime ministers from Maggie Thatcher onwards. Thatcher couldn’t understand that her policy of keeping the Pound strong would damage British exports, and in any case did not want to rescue failing British industries. They were either to be allowed to go under, or else sold to foreign companies and governments. Tony Blair went further, and believed that manufacturing industry’s place in the British economy could be successfully taken over by the financial sector and the service industries.
But this has also been a failure. Ha-Joon Chang in his 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism has pointed out that manufacturing industry is still very much of vital importance. It’s just that it has grown at a slower rate than the other sectors.
Fascist Italy was a totalitarian dictatorship where Mussolini ruled by fear and violence. There was no freedom of speech or conscience in a system that aimed at the total subordination of the individual, economy and society. Mussolini collaborated with Hitler in the persecution of the Jews, although mercifully this wasn’t quite so extreme so that 80 per cent of Italian Jews survived. The regime was aggressively militaristic aiming at the restoration of a new, Roman-style empire in the Mediterranean. Albania, Greece and Ethiopia were invaded along with Tripoli in Libya and Fascist forces were responsible for horrific atrocities as well as the passage of race laws forbidding racial intermixture with Black Africans.
It was a grotesque, murderous regime which was properly brought to an end by the Allied victory of the Second World War. It must never be revived and Fascism must be fought every where. But it does appear that Mussolini’s policy towards the banks and industry was better than that pursued by our supposedly liberal democracies. But the governments of our own time are also becoming increasingly intolerant and authoritarian. The danger of our country becoming similar repressive dictatorship under Boris and the Tories is very real.
We desperately need the return to power of a genuinely socialist Labour government, committed to investment in the welfare state and public services with a nationalised NHS, a mixed economy and positive commitment to democracy and freedom of speech rather than the illusion maintained by the mainstream media and Tory press.
And that will mean overturning over three decades of Thatcherite orthodoxy on the banks and financial sector, just as Mussolini changed his policies towards them with the aim of restoring and expanding Italian industry.
This disturbing video comes from The Michael Brooks Show. Brooks was a co-host on Sam Seder’s Majority Report, and, like him, is Jewish. They have the same stance on Israel, attacking the Israeli state and its persecution of the Palestinians. Brooks’ criticism of this ad is all the more acute because he is partly of German Jewish heritage, the people, who first suffered the horrific persecution under the Nazis that led eventually to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people across Europe.
Brooks simply says that this is one of the most disturbing political ads ever. It’s for Ayelet Shaked, the Justice Minister in the current Likud coalition government. He describes her as far, far Right, because of the horrific comments she’s made about the Palestinians. She’s recommended killing Palestinian children, so that the ‘snakes’ don’t grow up and try to avenge their parents’ deaths by the Israelis. This is a truly Fascist statement. Himmler and the Nazis made almost exactly the same comment to justify their extermination of whole communities, which defied them. Like the Czech village of Lidice, where all males over the age of 13 were hanged. Brooks states he came to it after he was on Israeli television discussing apartheid.
The advert, in Hebrew with English subtitles, shows Ayelet spraying on perfume from a bottle marked ‘Fascism’. At the end of it, after she finishes spraying herself, she says, ‘Smells like democracy to me’.
And after further brief statements about how disturbing the ad is, that’s how this segment of The Michael Brooks Show ends. I don’t think the message behind Shaked’s video could be anymore explicit: she is actively embracing Fascism. Or if not quite that, it’s a piece of Orwellian Doublespeak where words have the opposite meaning, like ‘War is peace’. Perhaps it’s meant as rebuff to her critics, who are denouncing her as a Fascist. She might be trying to claim in a twisted way that she’s a democrat. But it’s still appalling, even if that’s the case, as it seems to suggest that what others call Fascism, she calls democracy. Which just means she’s still embracing and supporting Fascism.
Not that factions within Israeli society haven’t explicitly supported Fascism in the past. Apart from the Israeli state’s Fascistic persecution of the Palestinians, Buddy Hell has pointed out on the Guy Debord’s Cat blog that in the 1920s the early Zionist pioneers had a Fascist party, the Maximalist Legalists, who wanted to create a Fascist corporative state like Mussolini’s Italy. And Fascists and apologists for dictatorship have claimed that their regimes are somehow more democratic than the democracies. Both Hitler and Mussolini used plebiscites to legitimise their regimes, and then claimed that this proved their governments’ democratic superiority. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a series of Latin American writers and philosophers drew on Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship to claim that the continent simply couldn’t be governed through Anglo-Saxon-style democracy, and needed the rule of great men – the caudillos, military dictators – in order to make progress. Two of these have titles which suggest their authors considered that personal dictatorship in Latin America somehow constituted a unique form of democracy suited to the continent. These were Las democracias latinas de America by the Peruvian author Francisco Garcia Calderon and Cesarismo democratico by the Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz.
Brooks says of this video that it hasn’t been discussed much in America. There’s no need to ask why. The establishment in America, Britain and Europe supports Israel as an outpost of western democracy and culture in the Middle East. This support is strongest on the Conservative Right. In the 1970s American Conservatives claimed that Israel should be supported because of its Judaeo-Christian culture, declaring that ‘their values are our values’. A few weeks ago the wretched Katie Hopkins, who has now made herself so personally toxic that she’s been sacked from the Heil, made the same claim. Well, Mussolini also made a similar claim that he was supporting Christianity and specifically Roman Catholicism after he signed the Lateran Accords with the papacy in the late 1920s. the support Fascism received from large sections of the European Christian churches has been a stain on their reputation ever since, and has been one of the major causes of the massive growth in atheism in western Europe in the 20th century. That hasn’t stopped the religious Right in America continuing to support brutal right-wing regimes, like General Pinochet in Chile and the vicious Contras in Nicaragua. Ronald Reagan even notoriously declared that the latter were ‘the moral equivalent of our founding fathers’. Radical critics of America and its history of racism and the systematic repression of left-wing movements would probably agree. Thus the mainstream news organisations aren’t going to show or discuss this advert, because Shaked’s embrace of Fascism would immediately discredit Israel in the eyes of most severely normal people in America, Britain and elsewhere.
The advert is particularly damaging to specific examples of what may be considered anti-Semitic in the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. This rules that it is anti-Semitic to compare Jews to Nazis, claim that Israel is a racist endeavour, or compare its persecution of the Palestinians to the Holocaust. Now Shaked in this advert hasn’t actually gone that far. She isn’t spraying herself with a perfume called ‘Nazi’, ‘Third Reich’, or ‘Hitler’. But she isn’t far off. Marxist historians would actually say that she has. Soviet historians did not refer to ‘National Socialism’ when discussing Nazism, in case this suggested that Hitler’s dictatorship was somehow similar to their own system of government. They referred to it instead as ‘Nazi-Fascism’. There are differences between Nazism and Fascism, but to most people the regimes are more or less synonymous. Nazism was a form of Fascism, and Mussolini passed racist and anti-Semitic legislation in imitation of Hitler’s Germany. If this was shown on TV and in discussed everywhere in the press, the Israel lobby could hardly try to silence those calling Israel racist and Fascist for its persecution of the Palestinians, when one of its leading cabinet ministers is shown in a campaign advert created by her own team fully embracing the accusation.
Whatever the Israel lobby now says, no matter how hard they deny it and try to silence those, who speak out about it, Shaked’s advert shows that she has no problem with Fascism, or at least being described as a Fascist. In the meantime Israel is supplying arms to real, extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic regimes like Fidesz in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland and the blatant Nazis of the Azov battalion in Ukraine. And Jewish bloggers like David Rosenberg have made their fears for these nations’ Jewish minorities very clear.
How overt does Israeli racism have to get before our media notices, or has the moral courage and integrity to report on it. And if Oswald Mosley returned to lead the BUF goose-stepping through the East End, would the Jewish Chronicle and Board of Deputies support him if he bought Israeli guns for his stormtroopers and paid his tributes to those murdered by his Nazi counterparts at Yad Vashem?
Okay, I’ve completed the cover art for another book I wrote a few years ago. Entitled For a Workers’ Chamber, this argues that as most MPs are millionaires and company directors, who legislate in favour of their own class, there should be a separate parliamentary chamber for working people, elected by working people, to represent and legislate for them.
I go through and survey the various movements to put working people either in parliament, or create legislative assemblies especially for them, from the Chartists in the 19th century, the Soviet movements in Russia and Germany, anarcho-syndicalism, Fascism and the corporative state, and post-War British form of corporativism, in which unions were also to be involved in industrial consultations, before this all collapsed with the election of Maggie Thatcher. Who was also a corporativist, but had absolute no desire to involve working people or their unions. It also discusses the system of workers’ self-management in the former Yugoslavia, where workers not only had voice in running their factories, but there were also legislative assemblies at the local and national level specifically to represent them.
I haven’t been able to find a mainstream publisher, so I’m going to publish it with the print-on-demand people, Lulu. Here’s the art.
On Sunday night, Lobster put up my review for them of Philip M. Coupland’s Farming, Fascism and Ecology: A Life of Jorian Jenks (Abingdon: Routledge 2017). Jenks was the son of a Liberal lawyer, but from childhood he always wanted to be a farmer. After studying at agricultural college in Britain, he then went to New Zealand to seek his fortune there. He couldn’t acquire a farm, and so worked as an agricultural official for the New Zealand government. He returned to Britain to begin an agricultural career over here, becoming one of the pioneers of the nascent Green and organic movements.
Jenks was convinced that laissez faire economics was creating massive soil erosion and infertility. If this was not checked, mass starvation and famine would result. He believed that Britain should concentrate on developing its own agriculture to the fullest extent possible, and not live ‘parasitically’ from the produce of its colonies. This was disastrous for them, and forced the peoples of those colonies into poverty as they were forced to subsidise the production of the goods they exported to the motherland. Jenks wished to see a return to an organic, agricultural society to replace the passive proletariat into which working people had been depressed. He was bitterly critical of the influence of finance capitalism, which he believed manipulated politics from behind the scenes. Due to its covert influence, democracy was a sham.
Jenks was sincere in his desire to improve conditions for farmers and farm workers, and was part of a series of non-party political organisations which worked to accomplish this, whose members also included socialists. He joined the BUF and wrote several articles for their magazine, and drafted their agricultural policy, because he found that Mosley’s ideas for the regeneration of British agriculture were very much in line with his own. Mosley’s went much further, however, and demanded the establishment of an agricultural corporation which would include representatives of the farmers, farm workers’ union, and consumers, as part of a Fascist corporative state.
Jenks was a founder member of the Soil Association, but because of his Fascist politics, he’s obviously an extremely controversial figure. Coupland’s book notes how Jenks has been used by figures on both the Left and Right to discredit the Green movement, and how he was denounced by the present head of the Soil Association, Jonathan Dimbleby.
Jenks is therefore interesting as the subject of a biography, not just in himself, but also in the wider context of British politics, Fascism and the emergence of the British and global Green movement. He was in contact with the leaders of similar movements around the world, including America and New Zealand, where the heads of these organisations were Jewish, as well as Germany. There much of the early Green movement disgustingly appears to have been founded by Nazis like Walter Darre, the head of Hitler’s agricultural department and ‘Reich Peasant Leader’.
Jenks was also a vicious anti-Semite. He actually didn’t write or say much about the Jews. However, some of the passages where he does talk about them are chilling, as the language used is very close to genocidal, if not actually well into it. Coupland writes
Several times Jenks also paralleled the issue of agricultural vermin to the ‘Jewish problem’. On one occasion, he compared these two issues, writing that: ‘There can be no truce with Brer Rabbit any more than there can be with the undesirable alien. If he is tolerated, he takes possession. He gives no quarter and should be given none. Of the rabbit, Jenks wrote:
[s]o long as you don’t have to foot the bill it’s easy to be sentimental about him as it is to be sentimental about the Jews. But the result in each case is that the poor defenceless creature ultimately takes possession. Any sensible person will agree that the best way to stop cruelty to rabbits is to abolish them, and if modern methods could be systematically applied, abolition is by no means impossible.
A year or so later, Jenks commended Colonel Leonard Ropner, MP for his denunciation in the House of Commons of rabbits as ‘a plague’ and for his statement that ‘If virtual extermination cannot be obtained, the next best thing is to provide effective control.’ In a scarcely veiled reference to the Jews, he continued that [t]he attitude of British Union towards the rabbits is similar to its attitude towards the two-legged plague – Britons First.
Given the shadow cast over history by the German programme to exterminate the Jews during the Second World War, it is difficult to read these lines without imputing to Jenks a desire that Jews and rabbits should share the same fate. However, even in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, this was not the objective of policy, no matter how cruel and unjust the treatment of the Jewish people there, systematic murder only replaced the policy of forced emigration in the particular conjunction of circumstances from 1941 onwards. Jenks was clear about what was required for the Jews:
There is then but one solution; to remove anti-Semitism by removing the Semite, to relieve irritation by removing the irritant,, to end the circumstances which have made the Jew a parasite by bringing about the re-integration of the Jewish nation.
He suggested this might be achieved in one of the ‘sparsely-populated but fertile areas in Africa, in South America, in Asiatic Russia, in which a re-united Jewish race could create anew its nationality and establish a new home.’ This echoed BUF policy, as detailed in Mosley’s Tomorrow We Live, which demanded the compulsory resettlement of Jews in Britain to a territory other than Palestine. Jenks’ prescription for the Jewish future was additionally connected to his central assumption that a healthy national society was one rooted in the soil:
In regaining contact with the soil, it would set the Jewish character on a broader basis; in regaining national dignity, it would triumphantly fulfil its racial destiny. In withdrawing its disturbing influence from other nations, it would obtain peace and goodwill in place of strife and animosity. (Pp. 103-4).
I’m writing about his vile views of the Jews, and recommendations that they be expelled and given a homeland elsewhere, in order to criticise and attack one of the other arguments used to smear Mike and very many other, decent people as anti-Semites because they had the temerity to mention the Ha’avara Agreement. This was the brief pact Hitler made with the Zionists to send Jews to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, before the Nazis decided on their vile ‘Final Solution’ in 1942. But according to the Blairites and the Israel lobby, if you mention this, as Ken Livingstone did, you’re an anti-Semite. Mike did, as part of his defence of Livingstone in his ‘The Livingstone Presumption’, and like Red Ken, he was duly smeared.
It is an historical fact, however, that many of the people, who demanded a separate homeland for the Jews were anti-Semites and Fascists. They wanted them to be given a homeland elsewhere as a way of removing them from their real homelands in Europe. And the last paragraph, in which Jenks describes how the Jewish people would benefit from having a homeland of their own, is actually very close indeed, if not identical, to the aspirations of the Zionists themselves. They too hoped that anti-Semitism would cease if Jews became like other peoples and had a homeland of their own. And Mike, Red Ken and the others, who discussed this, were not anti-Semites for doing so. The smears against them were a vicious attempt by the Israel lobby to suppress and rewrite history in order to deal with their opponents in the Labour party.
It’s time Mike and the other decent people, who’ve been libelled and smeared, had justice and were reinstated. And for those, who libelled them instead to be investigated and brought to account for their libels.
My review is at Lobster 76. Go over to the Lobster site, click on ’76’, and then click on article when it appears on the contents.
At first glance, Anarcho-Fascism should be a contradiction in terms. Anarchism stresses the absolute autonomy of the individual, while Fascism glorifies the state, and subordinates the individual to the collective. In the case of Italian Fascism, this was the nation and the state. As Mussolini said, ‘Nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, everything for the state’. It was also il Duce who coined the term, totalitarianism, when he talked about ‘the total state’. For Hitler and the Nazis, the individual should be subordinated to the volk, the racial group. He once declared that the individual should never be left alone, even in a skat club.
I’ve put up a couple of posts recently commenting on the way Libertarianism, which has previously described itself as Anarcho-Capitalism or Anarcho-Individualism, is morphing into what its own supporters are calling Anarcho-Fascism. I’ve already posted up a video from Reichwing Watch about the way Libertarianism is becoming a front for Fascism. In this video Reichwing Watch goes on to show how the Anarcho-Capitalists themselves are formulating Anarcho-Fascism.
The video features a series of Libertarian ideologues, politicians and bloggers, including That Guy T, Rand and Ron Paul, Ayn Rand and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, as well as clips from a documentary on Italian Fascism, Noam Chomsky and Adolf Hitler himself.
The Libertarians, including That Guy T, the Pauls and Hoppe make it clear that Libertarianism is compatible with Fascism because it is about preserving personal rights and individual liberty against democracy and the masses. It rejects rights for minorities and the poor, and, like Fascism, is firmly opposed to the organized working class and Socialism. That Guy T and Hoppe talk openly of forcibly removing Socialists and others, including, for Hoppe, democrats, who fail to recognize individual autonomy and wish to foist their views on the collective. Libertarianism is firmly in favour of private industry, as was Hitler. There’s also a clip of the Nazi leader rhetorically asking by what right the working class demands a role in government and to manage industry. Noam Chomsky also explains how modern industry is anti-democratic, as you have a small number of the owners of industry at the top, who give the orders to the mass of workers at the bottom. And the clips from the documentary on Fascist Italy serve to make clear just how brutal Mussolini’s thugs were in dealing with Socialists, democrats, and anyone else, who was a threat to the state.
There’s also a piece from a Vox documentary explaining that Trump supporters rate highly on the scale psychologists use to measure authoritarianism. The presenter states that these questions are posed very delicately. They don’t directly ask for views on race, which people are likely to avoid or disguise, but as them more general questions, such as whether they prize liberty or discipline in rearing children. On some issues, such as crime, authoritarians are indistinguishable from everyone else. However, they are much more afraid of foreign threats, and favour curtailing civil liberties to counter them, to the point where it can be used to predict just who supports the orange buffoon in the White House.
An older gentleman speaking in the video, who clearly had been a Libertarian, talks about the Social Darwinism in Libertarianism, and how they sneer at and attack the poor in order to reward the rich. He cites Ron Paul’s tax policy, which was aimed at penalizing the poor to subsidise the rich, as an example. There’s a clip from an interview with Ayn Rand, in which the founder of Objectivism rejects humanitarianism, and reproaches humanity as a ‘sacrificial species’. The older gent goes on to explain how Mussolini himself overcame the apparent contradiction between Fascist statism and Libertarian individualism when he subsidized the publication in Italy of her books, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. These glorify the wealthy, intellectual, Nietzschean superman against the mass of the uncreative poor, who are vilified as ‘feeders’. As for tax policies which benefit the rich over the poor, there’s another clip from one of Hitler’s speeches, showing that he also shared this Social Darwinist view.
The Fascistic nature of Libertarianism and its organisations and supports has been around for decades. I remember how, way back in the 1988 or ’89, there was a controversy when it was discovered that one of the Libertarian organisations in Britain had links to one of the Fascist regimes and its death squads in Central America. I think it might have been Guatemala. And Lobster has published articles showing that the Freedom Foundation in Britain, previously the National Association For Freedom, or NAFF, was violently opposed to Socialism and trade unions.
One of the aspects of this video, which is particularly shocking, is that one of the speakers advocating Anarcho-Fascism, That Guy T, is Black. ‘T’ is clearly educated and intelligent, so it’s astonishing that he’s all-out in favour of a movement that particularly despises ethnic minorities, including Blacks, to the point of active persecution. Mainstream Conservatives, whose views ‘T’ seems to have picked up, see the poverty, alienation and disenfranchisement of Black Americans as their fault. As they see it, Blacks lack the individualism, discipline and entrepreneurial spirit to improve themselves and lift themselves out of poverty. Instead, they condemn themselves to low achievement and dependence on state welfare programmes.
This is nonsense, of course. Black poverty is caused by the same social and economic causes as White poverty, as well as pressure from a social and political system that, even after the abolition of slavery, was explicitly established to keep them in an inferior status through segregation and Jim Crow. A system whose legacy is still very evident today, and which may become worse yet due to the Right’s hatred of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.
But if you want to see how Fascism – genuine Fascism – views Blacks, you only have to look at the Klan, the bitter hatred of White supremacist groups and neo-Nazi movements like the American Nazi Party and the BNP, NF and their ilk over on this side of the Pond.
As for the links between Fascism and Anarchism, Italian Fascism and the corporate state had its origins partly in a section of the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement, that decided what they were opposed to wasn’t capitalism and the state, but laissez-faire individualism. They revised syndicalism so that the new industrial organisations – the Fascist corporations – not only comprised trade unions, but also the employers’ organisations. The latter were left largely intact and retained their influence after Mussolini set about smashing the old working class trade unions in order to render them powerless.
During the Spanish Civil War, the Fascists tried to win over the Anarcho-Syndicalists on the grounds that both movements praised dynamism, rejected parliamentary democracy, and the corporative state partly realized the Syndicalists’ ideal of a state based on industrial associations. The Anarchists and Syndicalists weren’t impressed, however, and very definitely rejected such an attempt to stifle genuine working class autonomy.
They were right. And this new, permutation of Fascism, in the guise of Libertarianism, also needs to be strong rejected and fought.
By which I certainly don’t mean supporting racism, xenophobia, genocide and the destruction of democracy, or vile, strutting dictators.
British and American politics are now dominated to an overwhelming extent by the interests of corporations and big business. Corporations in America sponsor and donate handsomely to the campaign funding of congressmen and -women, who return the favour, passing legislation and blocking other acts to the benefit of their corporate sponsors. I put up a piece a little while ago from the radical internet news service, Democracy Now!, reporting on how funding by the Koch brothers has resulted in policies that massively favour the oil industry, against the Green movement and efforts to combat climate change. Hillary Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, is also part of this corrupt web. She sits a number of leading American companies, and was paid something like a quarter of a million dollars for speeches she made to Wall Street. This has had a demonstrable effect on her policies, which strongly favour big business and, naturally, the financial sector. This corruption of American democracy ultimately goes back to the 1970s, when a court ruled that sponsorship by a corporation constituted free speech under the law, thus undermining the legislation that had existed for over 150 years against it. After about forty years of corporate encroachment on the res publica, the result is that America is no longer a democracy. A recent report by Harvard University concluded that the nation had become an oligarchy. This is reflected by the low rating of Congress in polls of the American public. These have shown that only about 14% of Americans are happy that their parliament represents them.
This situation is no different over here, although the corruption has been going on for much longer. ‘Gracchus’, the pseudonymous author of the 1944 book, Your MP, detailed the various Tory MPs who were the owners or managers of companies. Earlier this evening I posted piece about the recent publication of a book, Parliament Ltd: A Journey to the Dark Heart of British Politics, which revealed that British MPs have about 2,800 directorships in 2,450 companies. It’s blurb states that MPs are not working for the general public. They are working for these companies. Nearly a decade or so ago, George Monbiot said pretty much the same in his book, Corporate State, as he investigated the way outsourcing, privatisation and the Private Finance Initiative meant that the state was increasingly in retreat before the encroachment of corporate power, which was now taking over its functions, and official policies were designed to support and promote this expansion. This has meant, for example, that local councils have supported the construction of supermarkets for the great chains, like Sainsbury’s, despite the wishes of their communities, and the destructive effects this has on local traders, shopkeepers and farmers.
In America, there is a growing movement to end this. One California businessman has set up a campaign, ‘California Is Not For Sale’, demanding that Congressmen, who are sponsored by corporations, should wear sponsorship logos exactly like sportsmen. In my last blog post, I put up an interview between Jimmy Dore, a comedian with The Young Turks, and David Cobb, the Outreach Officer with Move to Amend, a campaign group with 410,000 members across America, working to remove corporate sponsorship.
As I’ve blogged before, we desperately need a similar campaign in Britain. But it would be strongly resisted. Tony Blair’s New Labour was notorious for its soft corruption, with Peter Mandelson’s notorious statement that the party was ‘extremely relaxed about getting rich’. The Tories are no better, and in many ways much worse. When this issue was raised a few years ago, a leading Tory dismissed it with the statement that the Tory party was the party of business. David Cameron pretended to tackle the problem of political lobbying, but this was intended to remove and limit political campaigning by charities, trade unions and other opposition groups, leaving the big lobbying companies and the Tories’ traditional corporate backers untouched.
This corporate domination of politics and the legislature has been termed ‘corporatism’. This also harks back to the corporate state, one of the constitutional changes introduced in Italy by the Fascists under Mussolini. This was partly developed from the Italian revolutionary syndicalist tradition. The corporations were supposed to be a modern form of the medieval guilds. They consisted of both the employer’s organisations and the trade unions for particular industries, and were responsible for setting terms and conditions. Parliament was abolished and replaced with a council of corporations. Mussolini made much of this system, arguing that it had created social peace, and that it made Fascism a new political and economic system, neither Socialist nor capitalist.
In fact, the corporate state was nothing more than ideological camouflage to hide the fact that Fascism rested on brute force and the personal dictatorship of Mussolini. The power of trade unions was strictly subordinated to the control of the industrialists and the Fascist party. The Council of Corporations had no legislative power, and was really just there to rubber stamp Musso’s decisions.
But if the Tories and big business want a corporate state, perhaps they should get a corporate state, though following the more radical ideas of Fascist theorists like Ugo Spirito. Spirito was a philosophy professor, teaching at a number of Italian universities, including Genoa, Messina, Pisa and Rome. At the Ferrara Congress on Corporative Studies, held in May 1932, he outraged the Fascist leadership and conservatives by arguing that the Corporate state had resulted in property acquiring a new meaning. In the corporations, capital and labour would eventually merge in the large corporations, and their ownership would similarly pass from the shareholders to the producers, who manage it based on their industrial expertise. It was attacked as ‘Bolshevik’, and Spirito himself later described it as ‘Communist’. Despite the denunciations, it was popular among university students, who wanted the Fascist party to return to its radical Left programme of 1919.
If we are to have a corporate state with industrialists represented in parliament, as so promoted by neoliberal politicians, we should also include the workers and employees in those industries. For every company director elected to parliament, there should be one or more employees elected by the trade unions to represent the workforce. And as another Fascist, Augusto Turati argued, there should be more employee representatives elected than those of the employers because there are more workers than managers.
And as the outsourcing companies are performing the functions of the state, and those captains of industry elected to parliament are also representatives of their companies, these enterprises should be subject to the same public oversight as state industries. Their accounts and the minutes of their meetings should be a matter of public record and inspection. Considerations of commercial secrecy should not apply, because of the immense responsibility they have and the importance of their duties to the public, particularly as it affects the administration of the welfare state, the health service, and the prison and immigration system.
On the other hand, if this is too ‘Socialist’, then industry should get out of parliament and stop perverting democracy for its own ends and inflicting poverty and hardship of the rest of us.
Noel O’Sullivan in his book on Fascism (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd 1983) has an appendix containing the constitution of Fiume. This was the proto-Fascist state founded by the Nationalist poet, playwright and adventurer, D’Annunzio, shortly after the First World War. The island had been granted to the new kingdom of Yugoslavia, although it had previously been part of Dalmatia, which had been a Venetian possession in the Middle Ages. The decision of the people of Fiume to join Yugoslavia was seen as a bitter insult to the notion of Italianita, Italian character and pride, and so, assisted by the Syndicalist sailors, D’Annunzio marched on the island, conquered it, and set up what has been described as ‘a comic-opera’ government that lasted a year before the Italian government succeeded in ousting it.
In power, D’Annunzio’s regime had all the hallmarks and practices that were adopted by Mussolini, including the corporative state and speeches from the balcony by the dictator. D’Annunzio and his collaborators published a constitution, formally setting out the basis of the new statelet’s government. Article 17, in the section ‘The Citizens’ lists the people, who would be denied their rights as citizens under the law. It stated
Those citizens shall be deprived of political rights by formal sentence, who are: condemned by law; defaulters with regard to military service for the defence of the territory; defaulters in the payment of taxes; incorrigible parasites on the community if they are not incapacitated from labour by age or sickness. (p. 196).
This criminalises conscientious objectors, those unable to pay tax, and malingering benefit scroungers. It’s so close to modern Tory ideology that I’m surprised Ian Duncan Smith didn’t have it framed and put up behind his desk, or that Peter Lilley didn’t read it out twenty years ago when he was goose-stepping up and down the Tory Party conference reading out his ‘little list’ of people he didn’t like. Naturally, this was all about welfare scroungers, including unmarried mothers. You know, the people Sir Keith Joseph thought were a menace to ‘our stock’, and so presumably ought to be culled for eugenic reasons.
But while the Tories hate people, who don’t pay their taxes if their poor and simply dodging them, they do seem just to love the rich, who decide that paying taxes is for the little people, and demand all kinds of tax loopholes and offshore schemes to avoid paying their whack. They can’t do enough for them. Which is why I think it might be a good idea to introduce a version of the law over here. Instead of denying the rights of citizenship to people on welfare and anti-militarists, it should instead just deny it to the wealthy, who can pay their taxes but seek to withhold them. I think that would be a good policy. After all, if they’re using offshore accounts as a basis for avoiding tax, then they can’t or shouldn’t complain if their right to vote, stand as a political candidate or serve on a jury is removed from them. I think a dose of that revision of the Fascist law could be very popular. Just not with the rich or the Tories.
One of the institutions of the Italian Fascist state was the Corporations. This was partly developed from Syndicalism, the form of Anarchism that advocates the abolition of the state and the control of industry by trade unions. The Corporations in Fascist Italy were a type of giant trade union, based on the medieval guilds, which included both the trade unions and the employers’ organisations for a particular industry. Instead of parliament, there was a council of corporations, which was supposed to regulate the economy. Il Duce claimed that this was the cornerstone of the Fascist state, which had transcended both capitalism and Socialism, and had created social peace. In fact the Fascist corporations were a device used to break the power of the unions, and place them under the control of the state and the employers. The main ideological influence in their creation was that of the Nationalist, Alfredo Rocco, rather than radical National Syndicalists like Augusto Turati or Panunzio.
And so of the regulations contained in Musso’s Charter of Labour read very much like standard Tory screeds against welfare scroungers, nationalisation and the trade unions. The Fascists did indeed grant some concessions to the workers, like free Sundays, an annual paid holiday, extra pay for night work, and insurance paid both by workers and the employers.
It begins with the statement ‘Work in all its forms is a social duty’. Articles VII and IX also state ‘The Corporative State considers private enterprise in the domain of production to be the most efficient method and the most advantageous to the interests of the nation … The state intervenes in economic production only when private enterprise fails or is insufficient or when the political interests of the state are involved’. See Elizabeth Wiskemann, Fascism in Italy: Its Development and Influence (Basingstoke: MacMillan Education 1970) 23. As well as making work ‘a social duty’, the Charter also criminalised its withdrawal. Strikes and lockouts were banned under the Fascist state, and there were Labour Courts which were supposed to settled industrial disputes.
The Tories certainly have the first attitude, that work is a duty, and are doing their level best to criminalise strikes without making them illegal. Hence Cameron’s passing a law that makes a strike illegal, even if the majority of union members have voted for it, if less than half of the members of the trade union have turned up and voted. If this same principle is adopted for politics, then this government should similarly be in jail, as only about 30 per cent or so of the population actually bothered to turn out and vote. They have also voted to use agency workers to act as blacklegs in strikes, just as Mussolini supplied blacklegs in Italian strikes, and his British imitators, the British Fascisti did over here. Cameron also wanted strikers on picket lines to give their names to the police and wear armbands identifying who they were, but this was a step too far even for David Davies, who called it a ‘Francoist’ idea.
Thatcherism has been described as ‘Corporativism without the working class’, and there is more than element of truth in that. The Tory party has been drawn overwhelmingly from the upper and middle classes, including the heads of businesses, and makes no secret of being the party of business. This is when it suits them, of course. At other times, they’re claiming to be the party of the poor. Which is why Cameron, aIDS and Osbo are all pukka Eton-educated Toffs. The legislation they pass is designed to protect the businesses they run, including smashing the unions and keeping wages low to provide a constant supply of cheap, dispensable labour.
Interesting, the Charter of Labour also states that industry was only to use labour from the Fascist controlled Labour Exchanges. I’ve reblogged a piece today from Private Eye, about how the Tories stopped the JobCentres from finding jobs for people, because they were better at it than the private firms that have been set up, and whose directors no doubt donate generously to the Tory party. It also casts a different light on a jobs fair held in aIDS’ Chingford constituency the other year. This was held in the local Conservative Club, which tells you how close Chingford business is to the Tories, and ominously suggests the Tory determination to maintain outright political control of the Labour market.
The Tories got very angry indeed when one leading trade unionist compared their anti-union legislation with the Nazis, but as this shows, there are very strong comparisons with Fascist Italy as well.
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