Sunday, June 5, 2022

50 Years Ago: Who Rules Britain? (1993)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The mass of the people, including the workers, seem to have all kinds of ideas floating in their heads, from Churchill-worship to astrology. To what extent these ideas correspond to the realities of the world to-day is quite a different matter. Captain Gammans certainly appears to hold a very low opinion of the intelligence of people when he makes the following claim:
“With two short intervals, the Conservative Party was in power during the twenty years between the two wars. There is no reason for it to be very much ashamed of its record at home".
This is the kind of statement calculated to bring even the deadest of dodos back to life. Mass unemployment, slums, the wholesale reduction of the workers' standard of living (enforced, as in the case of the miners in 1926, by a lock-out), all this pitiful record of poverty and downright starvation imposed consciously and deliberately on a people by the wealthiest ruling-class that ever existed—culminating in a world war! It is obviously not in the nature of a ruling-class to have any sense of shame.

(From an article by “S. R.", Socialist Standard, June 1943.)

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