Unwanted tools
by Colin Liddell
by Colin Liddell
On the 22nd August, a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way on the A66 near Middlesbrough hit a Cleveland Police vehicle head-on, killing two police officers plus the five young men in the Passat. It appears that the five young men had been responding to an attack on one of their homes by a rival gang. The actual accident happened because the five young men decided to drive the wrong way down a busy road to escape another police car, which then decided to call off the chase because it was "too dangerous" to enforce the law. The ploy of driving the wrong way down a busy road may have suggested itself due to an earlier experience in which one of the young men did the same stunt in a TikTok video.
The incident focused national attention on the endemic criminality, thrill-seeking, and anti-social behaviour that dominates many public housing estates in the former industrial parts of Britain.
This is fuelled by welfare, boredom, and the leniency of the criminal system. The latter is very much a political hot potato at the moment, as the UK government is being forced to release thousands of criminals early due to a lack of prison places. Also, the UK legal system is dominated by an ideology that seeks to avoid "criminalising" offenders even when they commit criminal acts.
A few days after the not-so-tragic accident, a crowd of friends, family members, and supporters of the young men who were killed "commemorated" them by taking over a nearby farmer's field, letting off balloons, and burning a few cars into the bargain. Again the police stood back so as not to anger or "criminalise" the criminals.
In these and other incidents, including a case of fatal arson, UK politicians have told the British public that the behaviour of these young men and their supporters is "totally unacceptable" while showing every non-verbal sign that they are bending over backwards to totally accept it.
The problem is that these are traditional "working-class "Labour-voting areas that have recently become receptive to Nigel Farage's Reform UK Party. Although the majority of the population remains actually politically apathetic and generally cynical about politics.
This is fuelled by welfare, boredom, and the leniency of the criminal system. The latter is very much a political hot potato at the moment, as the UK government is being forced to release thousands of criminals early due to a lack of prison places. Also, the UK legal system is dominated by an ideology that seeks to avoid "criminalising" offenders even when they commit criminal acts.
A few days after the not-so-tragic accident, a crowd of friends, family members, and supporters of the young men who were killed "commemorated" them by taking over a nearby farmer's field, letting off balloons, and burning a few cars into the bargain. Again the police stood back so as not to anger or "criminalise" the criminals.
In these and other incidents, including a case of fatal arson, UK politicians have told the British public that the behaviour of these young men and their supporters is "totally unacceptable" while showing every non-verbal sign that they are bending over backwards to totally accept it.
The problem is that these are traditional "working-class "Labour-voting areas that have recently become receptive to Nigel Farage's Reform UK Party. Although the majority of the population remains actually politically apathetic and generally cynical about politics.
Britain's Labour government feels it has to tread delicately and try not to upset this population, which their policies in the past helped to create, and which already feels half-alienated by its own dysfunction and a still lingering attachment to a social and economic model of Britain that no longer exists. In other words, Labour are planning on doing fuck all in the fond hope that this will all blow over, the media will lose interest, and the dysfunction of post-industrial public housing estates will once again be clouded in the fog of amnesia and apathy.
This is fine as long as no coppers get killed
Essentially the problem here is that these people, including the five young men who died in the head-on collision, are "obsolescent human factory equipment." I am here stealing an idea from American White supremacists who like to disparage post-slavery Blacks as "obsolete farm equipment," but the truth is that all sorts of social or racial groups can become "useful" or "useless" depending on a wide range of changing circumstances.
The hope of earlier UK governments was that this problem could be solved by "re-education." No, not the North Korean type, but the other type that involves fancy diplmas.
One year before he became Prime Minister Tony Blair coined the phrase "Education! Education! Education!" at the 1996 Labour Party Conference as the solution for these blighted housing estates. But this was naïve nonsense, and of course nothing of substance happened; the problem remained the same.
Tony Blair pretending to care
As is well known, British industrial success was enormous, with the UK being the dominant global industrial power for at least over a century (1760s-1880s) and then being an extremely important industrial power for perhaps a century after that.
This was built on several factors, which you probably know about already—genius inventors, running water, plentiful coal supplies, domination of the World's oceans, the Protestant work ethic, and plenty of excess capital—but the other very important factor, indeed probably the most important factor, was extremely cheap labour over an unnaturally prolonged period.
All developing countries start off with cheap labour, but, as their economies grow, that soon changes and employers, with their factories booming and facing a labour crunch, are forced to compete to hire workers, driving up wages. That didn't happen in the UK to the same extent, or else it happened at a much slower rate.
In other words, UK labour remained cheaper longer. Why was this?
You could point to a lack of labour organisation; and there is something in that, as trade unions wee essentially invented in Britain but took some time to get going. But the real ace up the sleeve of British capitalism was that they were able to create a "self-impoverishing" working class that acquired the bad habits that constantly immersed it in poverty.
The self-impoverishing nature of the British working classes ensured
a limitless supply of cheap labour, ironically ensuring Britain's wealth
a limitless supply of cheap labour, ironically ensuring Britain's wealth
What I am talking about here is gambling, alcoholism, and prostitution, among other things.
During parliamentary debates in 1844, the Bishop of Exeter claimed there were up to 80,000 prostitutes in London. There is also a meme that "one out of every 60 houses in Victorian London functioned as a brothel." More conservative Metropolitan Police figures counted 7,000 to 8,000 sex workers in London at the time. But, whatever the exact figures were, there was a lot of it about, up and down the length and breadth of the country.
However, the assumption modern audiences make, perhaps influenced by cinematic portrayals of the period, is that most of this was upper class men—"toffs" and "dandies"—taking advantage of lower class women. The epitome of this is the Jack the Ripper legend, where the implication is that Jack is clearly upper class—at least a famous surgeon or even a member of the Royal Family—preying on impoverished working-class women forced into prostitution. The reality, however, is that the vast majority of the clientele of Victorian prostitution, as with alcoholics and gamblers, were members of Britain's vast, self-impoverishing working class.
Those who avoided these traps, by being puritanical, tea-totalling, or straight-edged, could seldom fail to rise in Britain's booming economy. The paradox is that this booming economy was firmly based on the poverty of the majority of the people it employed.
Being impoverished and in debt was essentially the main driver of low wages that kept Britain's "economic miracle" on track for much longer than other economic miracles we have seen, like the Post-War Japanese economic miracle. This latter example ran out of steam for various reasons in the 1990s, but one important reason was because the inherently self-disciplining Japanese workforce overcame its "virtual poverty" by losing the expensive habits that it had picked up in the 1960s and 70s which made it work much harder than was good for itself.
Karoshi
But the focus here is on the post-industrial British working class. In its Victorian heyday, swelled by Catholic Irish immigrants, this demographic served the useful function of being cheap "human factory equipment," while, for the most part, maintaining the wasteful lifestyle habits that ensured its poverty.
It was this that then dictated its low wages, because workers who could put money aside, instead of blowing it all, would be able to demand higher wages from employers. But, thanks to the large number of the continually impoverished, the more abstemious and prudent members of the working class were unable to force up wages. Indeed, they would either be priced out of the labour market by their more desperate fellow workers, or have to upskill and become members of the middle classes themselves. Another option was that by accruing capital they could also emigrate to America or various British colonies, where labour was more valuable, something that was outside the range of the more drunk and disorderly elements of the British working class.
Pissing away a chance to emigrate to one of the better colonies or to upskill into the Middle Classes
It is this aspect of the Victorian British working class that explains so much about the behaviour of their post-industrial, welfare dependent descendants—from the proneness to addiction, pointless thrill-seeking, disrespect for authority, littering, vandalism, anti-social behaviour, and crime.
What we have here is a problem not just of obsolete "human factory equipment," but of a population riddled with the DNA and culture of self-destructive, self-impoverishing behaviours that once suited the needs of Britain's industrial elites.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.
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