The wages and jobs of men at the bottom are under attack.

ee4m · 2016-03-28T17:57:10+00:00

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people - usually in the poorest parts of Britain - who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly 'vibrant communities'.

If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn't come from such 'vibrant' areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).

We might live in 'vibrant' places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.

But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients - not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as 'racists'.

What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as 'racist'.

And it also meant cheap servants for the rich new middle-class, for the first time since 1939, as well as cheap restaurants and - later on - cheap builders and plumbers working off the books.

It wasn't our wages that were depressed, or our work that was priced out of the market. Immigrants didn't do the sort of jobs we did.

They were no threat to us.

The only threat might have come from the aggrieved British people, but we could always stifle their protests by suggesting that they were modern-day fascists.

Peter Hitchens: How I am partly to blame for mass immigration

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader's ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls the woman's work "freedom to live her own life." Gudge wants steady and obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism—to workmen, not to Gudge—Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take arms against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must take arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed gentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge's washing to people who can't practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.

G.K. Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World

Title	The wages and jobs of men at the bottom are under attack.
Author	ee4m
Upvotes	0
Comments	2
Date	March 28, 2016 2:09 PM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/4caa6c/the_wages_and_jobs_of_men_at_the_bottom_are_under/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/the-wages-and-jobs-of-men-at-the-bottom-are-under.953119 https://theredarchive.com/post/953119

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