With Cameron and his establishment cronies choosing to
ignore calls for enquiries into truth behind the causes and events surrounding
the 1984-5 Miners’ strike, it is worthwhile and timely to bring up some other
cases in which the historical record has been warped in the interest of the
British ruling class.
It is a severe blow to the Tories and their fellow
capitalists in Parliament (including Blairites, Brownites, New Blue Labourites,
LibDems, nationalists etc.) that Thatcher and her administration have been
proven to have compulsively lied to the British public over the cause of the
1984 strike. This is, however, only one instance of the anti-working class
nature of the operation of the British state.
Michael Gove, for instance, has attacked the
‘Blackadder representation’ of the relationship between British officers and
men in World War 1. This representation was of working class ‘lions’ led by
public school educated ‘donkeys’. Now as anyone who has the merest knowledge of
the horrors of this inter-imperialist conflict knows, the tactics adopted by
the upper crust officers meant that huge swathes of working class men were
asked to walk to their deaths as they were mown down in their tens of thousands
by machine guns.
No wonder that we have the example of
anti-establishment action as portrayed in the book and film about ‘The Monacled
Mutineer’. No wonder that there are reports that the officer casualty rates
were so high because they were being shot by their own troops (sometimes from
behind). The public school officer ‘toffs’ were thought to be idiots and thus
needed to be removed to prevent further carnage.
There are the instances of British troops sent to
fight against the Bolsheviks in Russia who mutinied. The Bolsheviks were, of
course, the ‘peace’ party of Russia, calling for the Country to cease
involvement in the conflict. It is believed for example that over 60 of the
mutinous British troops were imprisoned in Bodmin Gaol with the death penalty
hanging over them and only Royal intervention prevented most of them from being
executed.
In parallel to this dislike of public school officers,
it has also been asserted that the reason most overseas British troops voted
Labour in 1945 was that they had seen at close hand the incompetence of the
privileged, snobby, officer groups purporting to lead them.
‘History Today’ magazine for February 2014 has as its
front page title ‘Don’t mention the Civil Wars.’ The Subtitle is ‘Why is
Britain embarrassed by its revolutionary past?’ Well there is certainly no
embarrassment on the part of British socialists who recognise from events such
as the Putney debates and figures such as Colonel Rainsborough that here was
the birth of true, meaningful, democratic political thought and ideas in these
islands. These ideas in due course influenced events abroad as in the French
and American revolutions.
The real suppression of these revolutionary events in
Britain has come from our own ‘Establishment’. An example of this was the
meddling of the Queen’s grandfather, King George V, in British politics during
1923-4 when he was trying to prevent the election of a Labour government. The
Labour politician George Lansbury reminded the monarch that a former King,
Charles 1 had lost his head as a result of political meddling. George V was so
upset by this that he was unwilling to accept Lansbury as a minister in the
subsequently elected 1924 Labour administration. The rat, Ramsey MacDonald,
then Party leader, acceded to the King’s request. (Lansbury’s granddaughter,
the actress Angela, is due to reappear on the London stage this year). King
George was also unwilling for Labour politicians to sing ‘the Red Flag’ in his
presence.
Bringing events closer to the present, we have seen
the suppression of the truth over circumstances surrounding ‘Bloody Sunday’ in
Ireland with the instigation of ‘whitewash’ enquiries. We have, similarly, seen
the ‘whitewash’ enquiries into events surrounding the Hillsborough disaster and
those leading to the declaration of war on Iraq. The deception here, (by Blair
and his cronies), involved the existence of what were in reality fictitious
weapons of mass destruction. The events involving the Shrewsbury 24
construction workers action and imprisonments have been, similarly, covered up.
The suppression of the teaching of this history of the
‘left’ and working class in Britain also extends into modern day school
curriculums. It would be cynical for anyone to say that the British working
class is ‘embarrassed’ by its revolutionary past when it is more often than not
being hidden from view by the privileged. We can be sure that Gove, Cameron and
the rest will be at the forefront of this suppression of the truth!
Source: Socialist Labour Party February 2014
