Patriotism – a politician’s refuge (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gordon Brown wants us to “embrace” the Union Jack and to ape the sillier patriots in America by displaying it in our front gardens. But why do they want us to be patriotistic?

It was not so long ago – certainly within the tormented, frustrated memories of masses of under-educated children – that we were taught British history began with the arrival in these isles of the Romans. Well at least that made it easier for the people who needed to be known as teachers; rather than work at any seismographic-type research or presentation they need only instruct their famished pupils to open the allocated history book and begin to recite from Page One. A corollary of this careless policy was the assumption that history began in Britain because it was a special place, where special people were bred. Telling those kids they should be grateful to be British elevated them from their hopeless, infested poverty through a belief that to be British was best and that all other peoples of the world should be treated with sympathy – respect could be allowed to intrude only if the others kept to their place in the anthropological order of things. It worked alright – as witnessed by the pupils’ daily salute of the classroom portrait of the king and queen.

One whose portrait did not hang in the classroom, but whom the kids were often reminded of as an icon of British superiority, was Captain Scott the naval officer who led the 1910 expedition to Antarctica. Scott’s previous experience there taught him a lot about the perils in setting foot in the place and about the need for detailed, meticulous planning. He was ready to go back and this time, apart from certain scientific operations, there was no doubt about the intention of the expedition. The brochure aimed at potential sponsors put it: “The main object of this expedition is to reach the South Pole, and to secure for the British Empire the honour of that achievement”. Scott himself saw it as “. . . an empire expedition . . . by a set of men who will represent the hardihood and energy of our race”. Implicit in these declarations was that Scott’s men would be the first to get to the Pole but when he stopped off at Melbourne on the way to Antarctica he learned that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen would be in competition with him.

Scott

After landing and setting up camp at Cape Evans Scott’s men experienced a succession of emergencies which, while no lives were lost, were a grim foretaste of what was to come. The Pole party – Scott and four others – set out on 1 November 1911. They arrived at the Pole on 16 January 1912, after a journey which had all but drained them of all their resources, to find that Amundsen had got there a month before them; a black flag was there, fixed to a sledge. “Well we have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition with some feelings, and must face our 800 miles of solid dragging – and goodbye to most of the day dreams” wrote Scott. But it turned out to be worse than that. Battered by savage weather and malnourished, the five men were simply unable to get back to Cape Evans. The first to die was Taffy Evans, whose reputation was as one of the strongest in the expedition. He collapsed on 17 February and died quietly in the tent that night. The rest of them pressed on; Titus Oates could hardly walk and Scott’s feet were so damaged that he thought amputation was the best he could hope for. They had no choice but to shelter, as best they could, in the tent until the blizzard blew itself out but there was no let up in the weather.

It was then that Oates went out into the storm to die and the three others – Scott, Wilson and Bowers – stayed to die together, on or about 23 March 1912, eleven miles from the depot where they had left the food which should have saved their lives. “We shall stick it out to the end, but we are weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far” wrote Scott in his diary. Their bodies were found by a search party eight months later.

Decline

That was not the time for any useful appraisal of Scott and his expedition – of the mistakes, the miscalculations, the flawed equipment. That would come later. Meanwhile, on 14 February 1913 there was a short memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral in which, according to the Daily Sketch, the keynote was “ . . .  a song of thankfulness for that these sons of our common country had died as they had lived, in the spirit which is the noblest heritage of Englishmen”. During the service thousands of captive schoolchildren throughout the country were subjected to “. . . the true story of five of the bravest and best men who have ever lived on the earth since the world began. You are English boys and girls, and you must often have heard England spoken of as the greatest country in the world, or perhaps you have been told that the British Empire . . . is the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen . . .” How many of those schoolchildren, or readers of the Daily Sketch, thought back to a year before, to another service at that same cathedral centred on the victims of the Titanic disaster, when the destruction of the unsinkable liner had said something about the decline in British power, as had the humiliation of the British army by the Boers. In the near future was the 1914/18 war, the traumas of the naval battle of Jutland (when a British admiral wondered out loud whether there was “something wrong with our bloody ships”) and the slaughter on the first day of the Somme offensive, which re-aligned British military history. Scott’s tragedy was cynically used to blanket the reality of what was happening to British capitalism and to its people.

Falklands

On the way southwards to Antarctica lie the Falkland Islands, which hardly anyone apart from stamp collectors had heard of before 1982 when they were briefly occupied by Argentine forces until they were ejected by a British Task Force. This victory in a far away place was remarkable for its effect on the British political scene. Since the end of the war British armed forces had not enjoyed a string of unqualified successes; among their most stressful experiences was the Suez campaign in 1956, which was little short of humiliation for British interests in the Middle East. At home the 1970s were notable as a time of economic decline, with unemployment reaching three million. In this situation the effects of a British military victory reached far beyond the battle zone, encouraging workers to believe that although they were on the dole there was still something to be said for being able to call themselves British. In 1982 this particular delusion was called the “Falklands Factor”. According to Thatcher, “it is no exaggeration to say that the outcome of the Falklands War transformed the British political scene . . . but the so-called Falklands Factor was real enough. I could feel the impact of the victory wherever I went”. One of the places she went to was Cheltenham Racecourse, to address a Tory party rally, where she exulted that after the Falklands victory “. . . we rejoice that Britain has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before”. To encourage the mood and flavour it with a bit of Battle of Britain memories, Vera Lynn was recruited to sing The White Cliffs of Dover at the victory parade.

Strikes

But in the same speech Thatcher stated what she meant by the impact of the Falklands factor and the re-kindled spirit. As the troopships returning from the Falklands sailed into Portsmouth harbour a banner hung from the sides of one of them, with advice for striking railway workers: “Call Off The Rail Strike Or We’ll Call Down An Air Strike”. This referred to a strike called by the National Union of Railwaymen (as it then was) which, Thatcher said, “. . . just didn’t fit – didn’t match the spirit of these times . . .” The strike leaders were “ . . . misunderstanding the new mood of the nation”. Another dispute involved the ancillary workers in the NHS; it had been rumbling on for some time but Thatcher was not impressed: “There is a limit to what every employer can afford to pay out in wages”; clearly, the new spirit did not involve any appreciation of the value of low paid workers doing jobs which were vital to the welfare of patients. Partly through the Falklands Factor, the Tories swept to a massive victory in the 1983 election, which gave Thatcher all the encouragement she needed to take on the trade unions – in particular the miners. It was an example of how patriotic hysteria is used directly against the working class.

Brown

One who has obviously absorbed the necessary lesson in this is Gordon Brown. Addressing the Fabian Society last January, in what was heralded as his first major speech of 2006 – which did not leave us breathless about what else was to come from him before the year was out – he declared that it was time for the “modern” Labour Party and its supporters to be “unashamedly patriotic as, for too long, such feelings have been caricatured as being tied up with right wing beliefs, when in fact they encompass progressive ideas of liberty, fairness and responsibility”. He also raved about what he saw as the need to “embrace” the Union Flag and to ape the sillier patriots in America by displaying it in our front gardens. Brown was “absolutely right” about this, said ex-Tory Prime Minister John Major, whose concept of an ideal Britain encompassed warm beer and elderly ladies cycling through country lanes to get to evensong at some ancient village church. It was not known whether Brown was comfortable to receive support from such a quarter; in any case he is probably accustomed by now to dealing with the fact that his party is indistinguishable from the Tories, especially in the matter of showing up as flag-waving, mindless patriots.

Malignant

Patriotism has run through politics like a malignant fault. It did not represent progressive ideas when, in the case of Scott, it was applied to persuade millions of workers that they should endure the terror of the trenches and all the other miseries of that war. The same was true when it was used by the Thatcher government, in the wake of the Falklands victory, to push through measures which damaged the trade unions and so increased the vulnerability of the working class in relation to their employers. It is not a progressive idea now, when the Blair government wields it to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with all they mean in terms of destruction and murder. Enormous damage has been done, throughout the world, by the notion that one country and its people are superior to the others. A truly progressive policy – socialism – recognises the essential unity of the human race and the urgent need to celebrate it by building society on that basis.

Ivan

Letter: Media Manipulation (1998)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Media Manipulation

Dear Editors,

I want this letter published because I believe my voice is not being heard. I want my voice heard because there is nothing so frustrating as not being given a chance to speak.

My subject is this: Princess Diana. Old hat? Maybe. At the time of writing, it has been a year since she died, and by the time you get round to this, it will probably be long gone, but I need to speak.

I was inspired to speak by a radio phone-in on Radio One about Princess Diana and death in general-asking opinions, that kind of thing. I tried to call with my opinions but my efforts proved fruitless. I listened to the calls that were aired. They were all grieving citizens, shocked and saddened by her death, feeling they had lost someone special to them.

All I wanted to say was this: I was surprised when I heard the news, as it is not the kind of thing one expects to happen. But Princess Diana was such a tiny, incidental part of my life—a mere face in the background—that in (literally) a matter of minutes (I can’t really remember how many), I had consigned Diana to the same mental file that held such people as Kurt Cobain—dead people who have had virtually no impact on my life. In other words, my life went on as per usual—in my mind and in what I did.

Then they called off the Top 40 out of respect. It may sound cruel, but this made me angry. Are my interests not as important as the media’s? Someone who I don’t know, never have known and have never been connected to in any way is dead so I have to put my little bit of Sunday pleasure on hold?

Loads of people who I don’t know die all the time. While I write this, while you read this, while you do anything. Millions of people die in their mid-thirties. Millions of people die in agonisingly gory road accidents. So? Would you, or I, or anyone give a flying one about these people if we only barely knew them from a few pictures and stuff someone else has told you. Yeah, you might think “Oh, dear, what an awful shame”, but you wouldn’t cry and send thousands of presents-it’s none of your business. So why does it matter if this person’s rich or royal?

The socialist follow-on from this argument was inevitable. The first socialist point is the money/royal thing of course. The implication from the outpouring of grief is that royal, rich, famous people are all far more worthy of mass mourning than people who are “normal”—if such a thing exists. The logical conclusion is that royal, rich, famous people deserve better treatment in all aspects of life than other people, people who are moderate in money and quiet of life.

I think this media hype about the royals is getting ordinary Joes to view the royal family as demi-gods because of their status. They are the ruling class and if the working class is brainwashed by the media into hero worshipping the rich and famous, they will believe that with them in charge everything’s great and so no need for any kind of change.

The second socialist point is that all the callers to the aforementioned phone-in were Di fans. One man likened her death to losing a sister. Several of them said it had changed the world for the better-since people had become more socially aware and eager for Diana’s charity work to be continued. (The world getting better? The word “bollocks” springs to mind.)

My point is that there were no indifferent people. There were no anti-royals. Where are they? Surely some must exist. I saw “Diana-the mourning after” on Channel 4 and there I saw people who thought how I did. Where were those people?

The first possibility is that people were put off from phoning with those kind of views because they thought they wouldn’t be listened to. This is an example of how people can be forced to give up through the use (by others) of the powerful capitalist weapon of “not taking any notice”. They try, try, try and fail, fail, fail. Not everyone is strong enough to continue.

The second idea is that people got through to a researcher, said what they intended to say on air and were “refused access”. The calls were screened. They don’t want those kinds of nasty views dirtying up the airwaves. This is censorship, which only promotes one image of Britain. The world as we know it. Thus, the media can convince people they are alone in feeling like this. No-one wants to be alone, so they conform because they are scared of being noticed or hated or whatever may happen if you stand out. People will be convinced also that it is wrong to be different. This is probably because lone people and titchy other radical groups cannot be controlled with the great mass and so present a terrible inconvenience. Being different and alone is therefore wrong. People must conform. This worry about if you are weird stops you from worrying if the system is weird. Plus they can make you buy things to make you look less weird! Profits up!

Celia Gardner , 

St. Austell, Cornwall

Reply:

We hope you like the article “Digging up the dead” in our September issue.

The Last Word: Praise the Fraud (1997)

The Last Word column from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Christians have been waiting for two thousand years for The Second Coming of their messiah whose legendary previous appearance ended in tears and an alleged promise to return before too long. More circumspect in matters of messianic madness, the Jews are still waiting for their saviour to descend for the first time. Others have succumbed more recently to self-deluding sightings, ranging from the tragic to the pathetic. In America a group of nutters, combined communally in a house with a fast-talker who convinced them that he was the messianic presence, committed collective Christian kamikaze, each taking with them a five-dollar bill to spend in heaven. The idea of heaven as a cross between a school tuck shop and the box office to Disneyland would be almost sweet in its infantile innocence were its consequences not so awful. Less dramatic in his barminess, a certain Mr B. Creme in this country has pursued a persistent campaign via the classified ad columns of various newspapers, intermittently informing the gullible that the messiah is on earth (currently residing in Brick Lane, east London, at the last announcement) and is soon to be interviewed on daytime TV.

Messianic delusions: the sigh of the oppressed in a heartless world. Hans Toch’s unequalled account of the social resilience of such aberrations remains, after several decades, the best book on the subject; for a less academic treatment, Monty Python's Life of Brian is as good a treatment as any of the meeting of despair with ignorance and the ensuing farcical-fatal divine comedy. With the fast-approaching millennium we might as well sit back and prepare for lots more of these fraudulent and fantastic heavenly portents, for they will come as sure as New Years eve lager turns to piss.

For the Independent, a newspaper not commonly associated with moments of messianic excitement (or excitement at all), the day after the election produced a moment of such embarrassing messiah-spotting that we can only hope that copies of its 3 May edition will be pulped to save the future blushes of writers and readers alike. (If you have a copy, keep it, and make the buggers blush in the days to come.) It began with a modest half-page colour photo of the saviour surrounded by wildly-enthusiastic crowds (supplied by the Archangel Mandelson) and a headline stating BRITAIN MEETS ITS FUTURE. For the future to be embodied in one disembodied smile seems a rather anticlimactic culmination to several thousand years of history. Nonetheless, the Independent had spotted "the future”, and, like the Webbs’ encounter with Stalin, who are mere people of reason to argue with them?

This was but the beginning of the messianic account. Polly Toynbee, a former candidate for the SDP, wrote a front-page story which owed unacknowledged inspiration to the North Korean press on the day that the latest dictator was appointed. Here are the quotes from the crowd with which she peppers her outstandingly stupid piece:"If I live to be 1200 there’ll never be another day like it! . . .”, "I know it’ll take a long time. It’ll be hard. He can’t do everything now. It may take years, but he'll look after the poor and the working class. I trust him ... ”, "I love him, oh I love him. I want to give him a big kiss!" (Toynbee attributes names and occupations to these deluded wretches, but we will not publish them here for the sake of their future embarrassment.) Quite what Polly would have written had David Owen won in 1987 defies the imagination. Next to this piece of propagandist garbage appeared another by Yvette Cooper, one of those elected for New Labour to assist the messiah in his earthly works. Her contribution informs us that "As I sit and try to write, on the morning after the election, I keep jumping out of my seat and hopping round the room. I keep grinning." Could this be the first possible defector to the Natural Law Party? In the presence of such joy surely nothing less than a few hours of yogic flying would be appropriate.

"The world has really changed" ends the piece by Ms Cooper. The world did not change. Just like every messianic moment in the sad history of such events, the world remains brutally indifferent to the cries of mass delusion. At the time of writing the new Prime Minister has just appointed as his "Minister of European Competitiveness” the chairman of BP. This man was not elected: he is to be offered a place in government via a seat in the House of Lords. He happens to head a company which stands condemned for contributing tens of millions of pounds to Colombian death squads paid to murder and rape indigenous peasants who are in the way of BP’s oil explorations in the land which they and their ancestors have inhabited for centuries. Even the Colombian government, whose soldiers are paid for this murderous service by BP, had admitted that its troops are out of control. But oil is oil, and profit is profit and capitalism is capitalism and . . . what was that about the world changing?

Steve Coleman

Digging up the dead (1998)

From the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is the season for disinterring royal parasites. In Russia it was the Tsar. Here in Britain it is the Queen of Hearts.

In Russia they have dug up the Czar in order to rebury him with the blessing of a befrocked inmate from the Holy Asylum of Russian Orthodoxy. Oddly, this church took the view that these were probably not the Czar's real bones-so they carried out the reburial more in the spirit of an alcoholic drinking the blood of Christ than with the respect that they would have given to genuine feudal despotism. In Britain, under Tony Blair's very very modern government, Tsarism has been revived in solidarity with the Romanov dynasty. The "modernisers" have appointed a Drugs' Tsar, and a Roads' Tsar. Peter Mandelson has apparently asked nicely if he might one day become an Ottoman Emperor, even though he is so manifestly suited to the role of Rasputin.

In Britain it is the season for reliving the Death of England's Truest Rose. On the basis that psychotic experiences are always best the second time round, the first anniversary of Di and Dodi's demise down the Tunnel of Love is being celebrated in the manner that primitive tribespeople celebrated the coming of the rain god. Publishers are rushing over one another to produce the most trite and sugary memorial books. Few words, mainly pictures: a fair summary of her approach to life. Fading rock stars compete to perform in memory of the fallen goddess. A memorial garden has been planned for Kensington, although some of the odious residents of that district have protested that this will only bring crowds of awful common people to their patch. The Spencer Family, older in its aristocratic idleness than the Wolfgang-Come-Lately Windsors (aka Saxe-Coburgs), are milking public memory for all they can get; the hero of last year's funeral, the slimy Earl, continues to promote the cult of Diana-worship in the manner of a man with the recipe for making hamburgers out of hamster droppings. The whole thing is manifestly distasteful. But—as the broadsheet feature writers say—What does it say about Britain in the late Nineties?

There was an awful lot of twaddle written last year about how the public reaction to the royal death was proof that British people are soft, gentle and know how to cry. British workers have actually known how to cry for quite a long time. Capitalism has a capacity to give plenty of exercise to the tear ducts of its victims. Even the Guardian, that mouthpiece of the liberal reformer's conscience, published articles suggesting that the Left were spoilsports if they refused to join in the patriotic frenzy which followed the death of the Princess. One or two left-feminists then wrote to the newspaper declaring that at last they could feel as others around them did: yes, they wept, they sobbed, they commiserated with the poor Princes with only the grounds of Eton and several Palaces to console them-they, in short, were as sucked in by the spectacle as everybody else. Yesterday the poor miners and their destroyed pit villages; today the sad Princess; of perspective there was none.

Okay then, Marxist big-mouth, what precisely did this outburst of grief tell us about the condition of Britain and its population? Well, if you really want to know ...

Alienation

When millions of people feel alienated—politically, economically, psychologically—they are easy prey for spectacles inviting them to displace their feelings about themselves for someone or something else. It was tragically moving last summer to hear of people saying that they had grieved for the Princess more than for their own spouse or parents. They were not necessarily being insincere. Just as people who fail in life can enjoy the illusion of success by watching "their" leader win an election or "their" striker score a goal, so it is possible for a repressed ocean of feelings to flood out when it seems safe for people to weep in public. Many workers who grieved were crying for themselves: for their deprived lives and need to invest so much in a fairytale character whose wealth and privilege would never be their own. That she was a vulnerable being-like most of us-whose huge PR success was to manufacture an identity with the unprivileged that the haughty Queen has never even attempted, made the death seem like a personal loss to those alienated from their own personalities. For them, any distraction was more bearable than life as it is.

When people have nothing to say about life they indulge in the rituals of death. That is why burying people is now the main occupational activity of the religious. In Russia it is easier to remember the Romanovs than think about where the next dinner is coming from. In Britain it is easier for Blair to lead the weeping for a caring princess than to give a single penny more to single mothers or the disabled-who are having their benefits cut. When she was living Diana was perceived by most of the press as a pretty vacuous, self-righteous and self-indulgent figure of fun and with a little pity. From her nuisance calls to ex-lovers to her arrogant claim to be the only significant social worker in Britain ("a Queen of Hearts", so help us), she was a living caricature of dim-but-niceness. Once she was dead the follies could be ignored and she could be used to symbolise all of the virtues so manifestly missing in those with any actual power.

Nationalist hysteria

National hysteria is nationalist hysteria. The flag-waving crowds on the day of the funeral were reminiscent of pictures from North Korea after the death of Kim-Il-Sung or China after Mao. How we scoffed at those gullible dupes as they paraded in the streets, forcing out patriotic songs through their tears. The more cynical believed that they were hired stooges, paid a few quid to weep in public. But the Di death squads in this country showed how easy it is for this kind of mania to spread even in the so-called advanced democracies. The nationalist illusion that UK PLC is our company and its ruling elite are the head of our family is precisely the way that vast millions of workers have been kept in line ideologically over the decades of capitalist history-and earlier. The spectacle of the proles from "below stairs" sobbing into their McDonald cartons at the loss of a champagne-swigging aristocrat, who spent her last night at the Ritz in Paris before making her ill-fated journey in the presence of a drunk driver must have been music to the ears of the small minority who possess but do not produce. Far, far better to have the workers marching to the beat of the nationalist drum than behind a miners' union band.

In fact, vast numbers of people were not in the least distraught by the death of the princess. The "public" that mourned as One Nation was, like all unified nations, an illusory construction. The vulgar way of creating this illusion is to lock off those who dissent from the position required by the public. This was what happened to heretics in the past who dared to question religion: they were beaten into submission, locked away or killed. The Russian Czars murdered numerous dissenters. (Will Yeltsin and the Orthodox Church be holding televised memorial services for them, incidentally?) In contemporary China there are literally millions of dissenters perishing in prison camps for the crime of refusing to act like the public their rulers require.

During the Diana madness last September there were many workers whose own lives were far more interesting to them than that of the royal leeches. They were rarely to be heard on the phone-in programmes (except to be demonised as unpatriotic, unfeeling freaks) and were never reported in the media. More than one person has reported to the present writer an actual fear of dissenting in public from the general hysteria. One woman, who was walking away from the funeral route towards the supermarket, said that she was sneered at by the gathering crowds as some sort of a traitor. Yet when she arrived at the supermarket there were plenty of people there. It is quite likely that the majority of us whose indifference to the affairs of the Houses of Windsor and Spencer were in a majority. But there were others determined to project an image of a nation stunned by grief.

It has been said by well-meaning leftists that, even though it might have been a diversionary exercise, the events of last year were an indication of how spontaneously people can create a popular movement. Well, apart from the fact that it may well have been less popular than it seemed, and was certainly not spontaneous, this probably tells us more about the Left's idea of social change than how history can really be made. Certainly, if one's idea of a movement is to have an iconic leader—be it Blair, Lenin, Thatcher or Di—followed by cheering masses (a wholly disparaging term for workers), then last summer's funeral antics were a model of how to generate a mass movement.

The movement of the majority that socialists want will be rather different. No leaders, be they princesses or party chiefs, will have any role to play. No priests. No pathetic dribbling over the corpses of the dead. No mindless anthems or idiots' flags. No followers. No police to keep us in line. Neither gods nor capitalists. That will a movement of the living; more liberating in every way than capitalism's spectacles of the dead.

Steve Coleman

Misplaced Admiration (1997)

Blogger's Note:

The following article appeared in the Socialist Standard ten years ago, in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. It is reproduced here from the pamphlet, 'A Socialist Life -  a collection of articles from the Socialist Standard 1995-2000' by Heather Ball.

From the October 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do I care that Diana Spencer was killed in a car crash in Paris? I do, but not to order and never in the way I am expected to care. In almost all cases we humans are saddened by death. We know that without any doubt we must all come to an end and to know how this will take place or where or when is probably at the back of most of our minds. But I find it incomprehensible that I should be expected to grieve to distraction over a woman I have never met, was never likely to meet and had no desire to meet. Not only that but I now find that an assumption is made that I will automatically become involved in some of the sickening hypocrisy that we have all witnessed in the wake of her death, and I must say I find this deeply insulting to my intelligence.

If Diana preached that we should not discriminate against people with AIDS, so what? If she told us that land mines should not be used to kill civilians, so what? Is there something intrinsically clever or wise about this? So many of us have said the same. But Diana was listened to and admired because like everything else under capitalism she had been "packaged", her money and her position entitling her to be "right" in the eyes of those people who are impressed by such things.

She was a princess and princesses, unlike other people, apparently, KNOW these things. Wealth had made her attractive and interesting, ensuring therefore, that when she spoke about AIDS victims, the homeless children, then she would be taken much more seriously than when we lesser mortals give voice on similar subjects.

So only the successful and the wealthy have that priority of wisdom, while the rest of us are seldom consulted except for one day every five years when we have the dubious honour of being invited to put a cross against the name of some remote person who knows and understands less than we do.

So what is it about human beings that they often cannot differentiate between what is real and matters and what is cosmetic, contrived and overly sentimental? Centuries of conditioning must be one of the reasons why the human race resorts to adulation of the rich and the powerful, the sages, the clever ones, those who know what is best for us, whom we allow to enslave us, resulting in an almost innate inferiority. The media and the system under which we all live encourage this. It is to their advantage.

Many of us will have worked all our lives to change this system of society, while others believe that belonging to a trade union or joining the Labour Party will increase the chances of a better life for the working class, believing that reform will bring about change and benefit us all. Socialists know that only by eradicating capitalism can we begin to redress injustice and poverty and look towards a sensible and rational life for us and our children and their children.

Meanwhile, my heart aches for those who do not dare to trust their own judgement, who fawn on the shallow figures in our society and make gods and goddesses of them because they have never considered that the power to change what is sick in this world lies in their own hands.

Heather Ball