What's really behind Brexit? Owen Jones writes that it's all about Margaret Thatcher's attack on workers:
Seven years ago, a group of Tory MPs published a book entitled Britannia Unchained that argued that Britain “rewards laziness”, that British workers were “the worst idlers in the world”, and that “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work”. Businesses were deterred from hiring people, they claimed, because of employment laws that made them fear “taking a risk and hiring new staff”. The solution? Repealing those laws – or what should more accurately be described as rights. Three of the book’s authors are now in the cabinet: Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Liz Truss.
Boris Johnson himself . . . declared that “the weight of employment regulation is now back-breaking”, singling out “the collective redundancies directive, the atypical workers’ directive, the working time directive and a thousand more”.
Karl Marx wrote in 1852:
“The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.”
One hundred and seventy years later, for the Tories, nothing has changed.
Image: Peoples Democracy
2 comments:
British management, Tory to a fault and long imbued with the notion that the working class were lazy, was proven to be rubbish long ago. The Japanese, led by Honda, opened car factories in England in the 1980s and had zero problems with British workers. That was because their management was organized and not rank amateurs like the British Leyland (and everyone else for that matter) dunderheads. I spent time in British industry in the early 1970s before this sea change, and it was an eye-opener. My previous summer jobs at NRC showed Canadian government work ran better than commercial British business!
The old saying that bad workmen always blame their tools, should read British toffs, managers, upper crust rentiers and old Etonians always blame the workers. So Boris is hard at it again as a relic of the past in this regard, much as he regards the EU getting the worse end of the deal from Brexit. It's a superiority attitude that's quite unjustified, and why a Brexited Blighty will sink like a stone IMO. Those cheps need a colonial empire to run, along with shorts, pith helmets and a baton for instant changing of minds. And yes, I was born there, went to private school till age 11 when my parents got the hell out and came to Canada. So I have some idea what I'm saying.
BM
Boris and his acolytes still believe that the sun never sets on the British Empire, BM. But the skies keep getting darker and darker.
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