The Importance of Human Kindness – Class Consciousness Project
https://classconsciousnessproject.blog/2024/07/13/the-importance-of-human-kindness/

God Save the King? – Class Consciousness Project
https://classconsciousnessproject.blog/2023/08/01/god-save-the-king/

Honours From Thieves – Class Consciousness Project
https://classconsciousnessproject.blog/2024/07/15/honours-from-thieves/

🇬🇧 New PM’s quotes:

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The trade union bureaucrats sell out the workers once more.
Sharon Graham is a servant of British capitalism just as much as Starmer.

NOW: Ursula von der Leyen has been re-elected as president of the European Commission.

The European Union has thus doubled down on its seemingly unwavering commitment to the war of extermination against Gaza. There have already been calls for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Von der Leyen for complicity in war crimes and genocide.

Always the spokesperson for the military-industrial complex, co-organizer of the refugee mass grave in the Mediterranean and new best friend of Italian fascist Giorgia Meloni, Von der Leyen is once again the representative of the European Commission.

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Hans Baluschek (German, 1870-1935) - Ironworks, 1925,

Just to reiterate, it is now a century since Britain had its first Labour government – a government which Lenin advocated workers should elect SO THAT THEY WOULD LEARN FROM THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE that it was a servant of imperialism and not a friend of the workers. So they would realise it was not and never could be a vehicle for socialism.

That very first Labour government in 1924 shocked workers by using police, army, spies and emergency powers to break strikes and sabotage the labour movement, which had begun the year on a wave of militancy. It left the civil service and state structures entirely intact and its ministers allowed themselves meekly to be directed in their new roles as frontpeople for a system of government over which they should expect to have no meaningful say.

Their eagerness to please their ruling-class masters and their rampant chauvinism in regard to the rightness of the criminal enterprise known as the British empire may surprise readers today, brought up as they have been to believe in the socialist foundations of this anti-worker organisation.

A few choice quotes from members of that first government can give an idea of where their loyalties lay then, and where they still lie today. (Spolier: it's not with the workers at home or the oppressed abroad.)

That same government appointed a Fabian, Sydney Olivier, to run the India office who stated:

The programme of constitutional democracy ... was not native to India ... It was impossible for the Indian people or Indian politicians to leap at once into the saddle and administer an ideal constitution ... The right of British statesmen, public servants, merchants and industrialists to be in India today was the fact that they had made the India of today, and that no home rule or national movement could have been possible in India had it not been for their work.

The same Sydney Olivier had formerly been governor of Jamaica, and remarked:

I have said that the West Indian negro is not fit for complete democratic citizenship in a constitution of modern parliamentary form, and I should certainly hold the same opinion with respect to any African native community.

Former railwaymen's union leader JH Thomas was appointed to the colonial office, and expressed the pious wish that

... it would be realised, when the time came for them to give up the seals of office, that they had not only been mindful of their responsibility, but had done nothing to weaken the position and prestige of this great empire.

Three months later this great traitor to the working class reiterated that the Labour government

... intended above all else to hand to their successors one thing when they gave up the seals of office and that was the general recognition of the fact that they were proud and jealous of, and were prepared to maintain, the empire.

This first Labour administration, which was so keen to make it clear that the British empire was "safe in our hands" imprisoned communists in India and arrested nationalist leaders without trial, bombed Iraqi villages, supported counter-revolutionary attempts to overthrow the government of Dr Sun Yat-sen in China.

As leading Labour politician JR Clynes put it:

In the same period of years, no Conservative or Liberal government has done more than we did to knit together the great Commonwealth of Nations which Britain calls her empire ... Far from wanting to lose our colonies, we are trying to keep them.