Prejudice is often the last to go

Subject: Prejudice is often the last to go

One cannot but be struck by the similarity of the conditions pertaining to "the workers" and those of what can loosely called the workers today. They had no voice !!
Capitalism and the power of money has dislodged any effective voice they once had, other than the magnificent period brought about by the Attlee government of 1946 to 1950 of reasoned socialism.
Of course it is impractical to compare the population before the  First World War to the one we have now. Now there is the 'apparent wealth' brought about by the credit revolution, in which consumerism is allowed to flourish through the build up of a gargantuan  debt, now running into trillions of pounds.
The voices ranged against the iniquitous 'exploitation of labour', at the turn of the 20th century, such as  the Independent Labour Party, and the Fabians led by Sydney and Beatrice Webb were a sideshow against the industrialists. Even the Unions were split amongst themselves representing initially, the individual craft based workers but the enrolment of non skilled workers caused a schism amongst the craft based unions who valued their representation of skills.  It deflected the collective strength inherent in the labour force and it was only with the arrival of the concept of Syndicalism (a French interpretation of Unionism) a concept where the "importance" of labour was matched to the "importance" of capital, neither one  superior to the other. 

Imported from France and the USA, this much more overt form of protests was developed, with growing interlinked strikes and the eventual challenge of a "General Strike". The industrialists for the first time felt threatened and it began to change the calculus in labour relations.
It is reasonable to accept that conflict between the 'workers' and 'owners' is fair if for no other reason than there was money involved but there is no such reason to support a conflict between a people and their Parliament, a parliament where the trust of the people resides to solve conflict.
Sadly the Parliament of its day in 1903 - 13 was not a representative parliament and much like the parliament we see today, an agenda to weaken the rights of the workers in favour of the employer and the owners of capital was insidiously at work.  In this we see a hardening of attitudes towards the class which used to be the muscle used to turn the wheel but which today is fast loosing its position in the mechanism of the production of wealth.
This Westminster Parliament had form.  Its harsh relations regarding the treatment of the people of Ireland 50 years previously in 1850 and the resentment still seen to this day in the eyes of ordinary Irish people raised on a visceral hatred of the English through years of conflict and the extremely harsh treatment meted out by the Protestant landlords to their Catholic tenants.

Sometimes you have to be amongst the people and see the malevolence in their eyes, a malevolence born of years of storytelling, particularly in Western Ireland where the 'Potato Famine' was at its worst in terms of the starvation. The treatment of the Irish Catholic  was far harsher than that of a  Black Person living in South Africa during the period of Apartheid or the Slave living in North America. It had, in its total disregard for the human condition, echo's of what the Nazi Party thought and did to the Jews. 

Successive  Parliaments in England were guilty by proxy of doing little or nothing, whilst the county staved to death. In the the ideological belief in laissez faire, the "relief" was left to the Protestant landowners to distribute and when that was found to be inefficient  the "relief" was further limited because of the fear that "charity" would destroy the equilibrium of free trade.
It's not an easy read to discover that the privileged in England had such a warped view of humanity that they felt the Irish to be less than human but there are echo's today in the Tory parties obsession to balance the books on the back of the poor. Some thing's never change and prejudice is often the last to go.