Without apology or explanation Passive Complicity reposts this from 18 April 2014.

School holidays series  Part two
by Quentin Cockburn

Whilst trawling the internet for Dalek images, (from which to build our life size fully functional Dalek), we accidentally came upon a You tube video of Colin Furze.

Colin Furze.  Might be thirty.  He is English, possibly from the midlands and enjoys doing crazy hare-brained things.  Dangerously, without a helmet, and invariably dressed in ‘nice pants’ shirt and tie.  His colleagues must wear ties also.  A tie instills respectability.  Colin doesn’t give a hoot about respectability.  Colin runs a youtube channel, (you can subscribe) and he demonstrates to all kiddies, how to make a pulse jet, a turbo jet, a rocket propelled skateboard, a flame thrower, a cyclotron, with little more than basic tools and basic materials.  The turbo jet made without welding from a toilet brush holder, a second hand turbo unit, spark plug and gas bottle is truly inspiring.  Colin Furze is the natural enemy of the contemporary parent.  He is almost subversive, and I’m amazed he hasn’t been banned.

He makes it quite clear, “Hey kids, bored with endless consumerism, wasted days in shopping malls?  “Venture outside, collect this hard waste, take it home and convert the everyday object into something sublime and potentially dangerous.”  The subtext writ large, is simple; “ Do it yourself”, and have the time of your life.

I think it’s because the oldest child amongst us, (myself) has always been fascinated by the simplicity and sheer brutal force that the pulse jet, (power unit for the V1) inspires.  It had always been my intention, before arsonists, psychopaths, and misfits had regularly begun the process of burning the Latrobe Valley, to equip myself with a pulse jet, missile body and ramp, and launch it across the Latrobe Valley.  I could in one act achieve an apotheosis with ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’

and demonstrate that to all intents and purposes the Satanic Mills of Hazelwood, Australia’s filthiest power station, as the perfect setting to anoint an accursed people with what they really crave, Fear and Victimhood.

The pulse jet powered bicycle or the motorised pram are perhaps the most subversive.  The Pulse jet makes a hell of a noise, when hand fashioned, fitted and glows a menacingly deep red.  Furze roars across an abandoned air field, (any over-designed soul-less public space will do) on a bicycle with a flaming tail, deafening noise, and just the hint of explosion.  He waves and roars in an exstasy of happiness.  It’s infectious.

If you subscribe to Furze’ vision, you get all you need to know, but that’s unnecessary, because what Furze has done, (and he deserves a knighthood for this) is to realign the co ordinates, and suggest most emphatically, ‘Life is boring, staid, and predictable’.  As a kid you’re unlikely to be handling gunpowder to the mate as you grapple with the Dons off Trafalgar, you are unlikely to stow away, join the circus, take up droving, and get part time work as a test pilot, but you can, if you use a little bit of initiative and a few mates make your own fun and that’s the point.  You may blow yourself up, may lose the sight of one eye, be limbless, but as the boy Roger in Swallows and Amazons was taught as they recklessly and dangerously and bravely, set sail for the first time, upon the subject of drowning, “if duffers will, if not wont’.  It’s as simple as that.

If you’re a nong, you’ll be selected by Darwin’s law as unfit to proceed, and just as likely to die in all the safe ways we’ve devised since banning everything.  In car smashes, airplane pilot psychosis, from trains, trams, dooring, cyber bullying, facebook rage, or synthetic implant collapse.

But you wont die from drugs or the crucifying loneliness of being left alone on the net, watching telly, whilst your parents grind themselves in to dust sacrificing those odd weeks for quality time, when you’d rather they be bludgeoned to death at work.

As early as 2018, solar could be economically viable to power big cities. By 2040 over half of all electricity may be generated in the same place it’s used. Centralised, coal-fired power is over
wrote Giles Parkinson in theguardian.com, Monday 7 July 2014 11.53 AEST
For further reports on power generation in Australia see  the ABC’s 4Corners of 7 July here

Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day.

For several days the price, normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour, hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week, largely because of the influence of one of the newest, biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar.

“Negative pricing” moves, as they are known, are not uncommon. But they are only supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is mostly asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they pay others to pick up their output.

That’s not supposed to happen at lunchtime. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office building are in use, factories are in production. That’s when fossil fuel generators would normally be making most of their money.

The influx of rooftop solar has turned this model on its head. There is 1,100MW of it on more than 350,000 buildings in Queensland alone (3,400MW on 1.2m buildings across the country). It is producing electricity just at the time that coal generators used to make hay (while the sun shines).

The impact has been so profound, and wholesale prices pushed down so low, that few coal generators in Australia made a profit last year. Hardly any are making a profit this year. State-owned generators like Stanwell are specifically blaming rooftop solar.

Tony Abbott, the prime minister, likes to say that Australia is a land of cheap energy and he’s half right. It doesn’t cost much to shovel a tonne of coal into a boiler and generate steam and put that into a turbine to generate electricity.

The problem for Australian consumers (and voters) comes in the cost of delivery of those electrons – through the transmission and distribution networks, and from retail costs and taxes.

This is the cost which is driving households to take up rooftop solar, in such proportions that the level of rooftop solar is forecast by the government’s own modellers, and by private groups such as Bloomberg New Energy Finance, to rise sixfold over the next decade. Households are tipped to spend up to $30bn on rooftop modules.

Last week, the WA Independent market Operator forecast that 75% of detached and semi detached dwellings, and 90% of commercial businesses could have rooftop solar by 2023/24.

The impact on Queensland’s markets last week is one of the reasons why utilities, generators and electricity retailers in particular want to slow down the rollout of solar.

The gyrations of wholesale power prices are rarely reflected in consumer power bills. But let’s imagine that the wholesale price of electricity fell to zero and stayed there, and that the benefits were passed on to consumers. In effect, that coal-fired energy suddenly became free. Could it then compete with rooftop solar?

The answer is no. Just the network charges and the retailer charges alone add up to more than 19c/kWh, according to estimates by the Australian energy market commissioner. According to industry estimates, solar ranges from 12c/kWh to 18c/kWh, depending on solar resources of the area, Those costs are forecast to come down even further, to around 10c/kWh and lower.

Coal, of course, will never be free. And the rapid uptake of rooftop solar – dubbed the democratisation of energy – is raising the biggest challenge to the centralised model of generation since electricity systems were established more than a century ago.

Network operators in Queensland, realising the pent up demand for rooftop solar, are now allowing customers to install as much as they want, on the condition that they don’t export surplus electricity back to the grid.

Households and businesses have little incentive to export excess power. They don’t get paid much for it anyway. Ergon Energy admits that this will likely encourage households to install battery storage.

The next step, of course, is for those households and businesses to disconnect entirely from the grid. In remote and regional areas, that might make sense, because the cost of delivery is expensive and in states such as Queensland and WA is massively cross-subsidised by city consumers.

The truly scary prospect for coal generators, however, is that this equation will become economically viable in the big cities. Investment bank UBS says this could happen as early as 2018.

The CSIRO, in its Future Grid report, says that more than half of electricity by 2040 may be generated, and stored, by “prosumers” at the point of consumption. But they warn that unless the incumbent utilities can adapt their business models to embrace this change, then 40% of consumers will quit the grid.

Even if the network operators and retailers do learn how to compete – from telecommunication companies, data and software specialists like Google and Apple, and energy management experts – it is not clear how centralised, fossil-fuel generation can adapt. In an energy democracy, even free coal has no value.

Today, during NAIDOC Week, Passive Complicity brings an interview with Dr Tom Calma by the ABC’s Margaret Throsby.  The link to the podcast is below the bio.

Dr Calma is an Aboriginal elder from the Kungarakan tribal group and a member of the Iwaidja tribal group whose traditional lands are south west of Darwin and on the Coburg Peninsula in the Northern Territory of Australia, respectively. He has been involved in Indigenous affairs at a local, community, state, national and international level and worked in the public sector for 40 years and is currently on a number of boards and committees focussing on rural and remote Australia, health, education and economic development.

Jackie French in her 2013 history of Australia ‘Let the Land Speak’ shows that the Australian land was a veritable larder, one which those with the knowledge could live very well with minimal effort.  She goes on to show how the desecration of this larder by white invaders was undertaken through arrogance, and an inability to see what was there.  This desecration continues today with the guilt assuaged by denying it was ever there.  Today’s extract recounts in part French’s visit to her ancestors farm in the southern tablelands of NSW.  They took this land up in the 1840’s.

Peter (Ffrench), knew what a proper farm should be like.  He recreated his hunk of Australian landscape and within two decades it looked much like the Glenelly of Ireland (his native home), at least in a wet year. The trees were ringbarked and burnt or cut down. The under storey of thorn bush, hop bush, wild cherry and tens or even hundreds of other species of natives were burnt, too.  His sheep and cattle, tended by ex-convict shepherds and his tribe of sons, soon exterminated the native ground covers, orchids, dichondra, murrnong and hundreds of other plants as well as the native grasses

I (Jackie French) first saw the land near the old homestead in 1983.  It looked like Ireland: grey rain from a grey sky.  The erosion gully ran swift with clear water, disguising the clay bank that would have glared pale and bright in dry weather.  The mist hung over green rye grass and clover.  The cattle were fat and wet, looking at us with that resentful gaze of domesticated animals who know you have come from a dry ute and have coats to keep off the rain.  The only trees on the property were old pines, half rotted and perhaps even dating back (well into the 19th Century). There was no gum tree to be seen except on the far-off hills.

Peter Ffrench and his descendants had done a good job of recreating his Glenelly, but they stole the land’s health and productivity to do it.  They thought they were heroes, not villains, taming the wilderness and bringing forth grain and fruit were there was none.

The truth was that civilisation was already here, nor was the land a wilderness but a carefully created sustainable living larder.  Don’t underestimate the courage, determination, and endurance of these early settlers and their families.  But their inability to see the land as it was, and determination to recreate it into British parkland, would lead to the 1840’s and 1890’s depressions, and add to the misery of the 1930’s Great Depresssion and the recessions of the 1990’s and the later global financial crisis.  They also turned a generous landscape – one where every two or three steps would give you something to eat – into a simplified semidesert.

Almost every form of standard Australian agriculture is an example of profound misunderstanding of the land, from plough and land clearing to adding superphosphate or growing orchards in neat rows. (See, for example, Ian Anderson ‘Australia’s growing disaster’, New Scientist, Issue 1998, July 1995)  These were compounded by stocking with animals unsuited to the soil, water resources and native vegetation, from domestic stock like sheep, goats, pigs, deer and cattle, to wild rabbits, cats, starlings, blackbirds, pigeons and cane toads.  These were all introduced because of a rigid mindset. . . There was no understanding of the burden of salt carried by this ancient land . . .  so that clearing and irrigation could create a desert in less than a hundred years.

Our poetry editor Ira Maine concludes* his series on Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”. (*The right to add more is reserved)

Goldsmith, friend of fellow Irishman, the statesman Edmond Burke, (the father of modern conservative politics) and  dinner companion to most of the London literati of the period; James Boswell and Dr Samuel Johnson who hardly need introduction. David Garrick, the greatest actor of his day, of whom it was said that his interpretation of the Bard was so intelligent that it was like watching Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.  The Irishman Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who owned the Drury Lane Theatre in London and wrote ‘The Rivals’ and ‘The School for Scandal’, plays which are still essential to a modern English education. Incidentally, people were aghast to discover Sheridan calmly drinking wine in Drury Lane as his much loved theatre burnt to the ground.

“Surely a man can take a glass of claret by his own fireside?’ he asked of his critics.

It was the influence of Sheridan amongst others which finally gained for Samuel Johnson a permanent pension of 300 pounds a year from George the Third.  Prior to this the great man had been confined to the debtor’s prison on at least two occasions.

Dr Johnson first launched his London dining and literary group ‘The Club’ in 1764 at the prompting of the major English painter,  Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the Royal Academy.   Before it was wound up, long after Johnson’s death Johnson’s ‘Club’ had numbered amongst its members Edward Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) Joseph Banks of Darwin and the Beagle, and Charles James Fox, one of the most influential Whig politicians of the period.

What companions Goldsmith had! How splendid their dinner tables must have been! Still, it is a very well established fact that if you put half-a-dozen bright Irishmen together, or even two or three… or just one…

Incidentally (and I have this on good authority) the dinner table was provided by yet another Irishman, Henry, the Duke of Rathcoole (west of Dublin) at de Burgh House in the Strand, and presided over by his step daughter, the renowned beauty, the Lady Juanita Gilles-Beaux,who, fluent in both Gaelic and French, was a not inconsiderable poet herself. Her portrait, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

But enough of this frivolity.

Now that the horror of enclosure has happened, the familiar made desolate, even Auburn’s pub;  ‘… Where nut brown draughts inspired, 

And grey beard mirth and smiling toil retired…’ is no more.

The school,‘Where many a time he triumphed…’ has ceased to exist.  The church, houses, barns, stables, the forge, all that went to make up the rhythm and pace of Auburn’s country life has been levelled, razed, brushed aside and hidden, as if the magnitude of the sin committed were too great to bear the light of day.

Goldsmith addresses the ruined village;

‘…One only master grasps thy whole domain.
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.
No more the glassy brook reflects the day,
But, choked with sedges, works it’s weary way.
Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all.
And the long grass o’er tops the mouldering wall.
And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.

These vast new fabulously profitable farms grew wheat almost exclusively during the Napoleonic Wars.  Europe, devastated by its wars with the French could produce little food and looked to England to feed its troops.  Monoculture, as we all know, provides only briefly intense seasonal work.  This cropping, on a scale never seen before, was hugely profitable for the landholder but, to a peasantry denied access to their traditional lands and way of life, it was a death sentence.  This system, designed without regard for a centuries old way of life, was calculated to utterly break the spirit of the people.  It did precisely that.

Now Goldsmith addresses the country itself and informs its government that, by their actions they have sown the seeds of their own destruction;

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Princes, Lords may flourish or may fade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made.
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

Princes and Lords are ten a penny, not worth tuppence, and are easily bought with thirty pieces of silver.  Destroy your own peasantry however, and the spiritual coinage of the realm is utterly and irretrievably debased.

Famine, the result of denying the peasantry access to land, meant that millions of people literally starved to death throughout the British Isles in the slump following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. When relief in the way of grain arrived by ship from America, British authorities would not allow it to land because they thought it would cause the price of home grown grain to tumble. People went on starving to death. They called this abomination ‘Laissez Faire Capitalism’.

As he walks about the seashore, the poet observes the crowds on the strand, queueing to get on board emigrant ships.  Goldsmith is aware that he is observing the veins and arteries, the life blood of the British Isles being lost forever to the sea.  An entire way of life being contemptuously thrown on the mercies of the ocean.

‘…and thou, sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid;
Still first to fly when sensual joys invade,
Unfit to these degenerate times of shame
To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame.
Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe,
That found’st me poor at first, and keep’st me so;
Thou guide by which the noble arts excell,
Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well.

The Muse, that ‘loveliest maid’ the great creative force, cannot exist in either this ‘degenerate’ time or this ‘degenerate’ country. Neither can the ’nurse of every virtue’ stay behind when its people depart. The gift of the Muse, the Muse itself, the capacity for joy, for laughter, for originality is inseparable from the people and must sail away with them.

This conceit of Goldsmith’s; that the muse, out of shame, would wholly abandon ‘degenerate’ England and instead offer her favours to the New Wortld, was quietly prescient, it also demonstrates Goldsmith’s belief that a peasantry, by recreating itself in these new locations proves;
‘…self dependent power can time defy..’
and that countries in possession of a people;
‘…that states of native strength possesr
though very poor, may still be very blest…’

Nowadays some of the most creative people on the planet are products of these new worlds.

Nevertheless, Goldsmith hopes that as time passes and people learn, the Muse might;

This truth, this inevitability, this abandonment of  ‘degenerate’ England by the Muse has Goldsmith hope that as time passes and people learn, the Muse might;

‘Still let thy voice prevailing over time,
Redress the rigours of the inclement clime;
And slighted truth, with thy persuasive strain,
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain.
Teach him that states of native strength possest,
Though very poor, may still be very blest.
That trades proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As oceans sweep the labour’d mole away.
While self dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky.

Essentially, this is a poem about the destructive force of greed, of ‘trades proud empire’, and its devastating effect on the vast majority of a country’s population.  It also suggests that a country’s long term stable future can only be guaranteed if the ‘self dependent power’ of the peasantry is firmly established.  That is, a non-aspirational, well grounded, self-sufficient people who are absolutely independent of the deliberately manufactured ‘aspirational’ blandishments of our corrosive consumer society.

We still have some way to go.

Ira Maine, Poetry Editor.

This post was first published on 15 December 2010.   The racist Intervention continues with white Australia’s complicity.  

अच्छा दिन मेरे दोस्त

A documentary on SBS reminded me that many moons ago I read several Hunter S. Thompson books. I like to think some of Hunter’s writing rubbed off on me: Fear and Loathing under the Intervention.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVT2tAV_66k

Hunter S. wrote that there was a rumour that Edmund Muskie (then running for President) was alleged to be addicted to a little known drug Ibogaine. Hunter S. started the rumour.

I herewith start a rumour: There is a rumour that Mal Brough and Jenny Macklin are both alleged to be addicted to Ibogaine.

I haven’t been able to come up with any other explanation for their politically motivated attack on Aboriginal Australia.

On the news last night: An NT enquiry has not come up with any explanation for the $70 million that is missing from the “Closing the Gap” SIHIP (Strategic Indigenous housing and infrastructure program) initiative.

Hunter S. supported George McGovern’s Presidential campaign. McGovern’s main platform was that: The war in Vietnam was a mistake and we should withdraw immediately. McGovern lost.

Kevin Rudd and now Julia Gillard (both also alleged to be addicted to Ibogaine) should have said: The NTER Intervention was a mistake and we should withdraw immediately. Kevin didn’t and Julia won’t. Their humanity and common sense are dwarfed by their fear of defeat and their determination to cling to power.

Mind you, if they withdrew the Ginger Bread Men, I am at a loss to imagine how we’d manage without them. How could this society function without the bee-watcher-watchers?

Last week a young lady that grew up in Yuendumu rang from Stirling (500Km or so by road) enquiring if we were buying seeds. She turned up with some relatives and her two small daughters.

They’d brought Watiyawarnu (Acacia Tennuissima), Paturtu (Acacia Melleodora), Manja (Acacia Aneura), Kanalarampi (Acacia Cowleana) and Wakulpiri (Acacia Coriacea) seed.

When I spoke (bad) Warlpiri to their mother, the little girls (around 10 years old) were surprised and amused, so I struck up a conversation with one of them (in Warlpiri). Yes, she spoke Warlpiri at home, and yes she was going to school, and so on. With justified pride their mother told me that her daughters spoke four languages (Anmatyere, Alyawarra, Kateij and Warlpiri). As an afterthought she said “and English”. When the seeds were being weighed, the little girl named them (in Warlpiri).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnHoqHscTKE   I don’t believe in an Interventionist God….

A father of five works for us, but only manages part time hours. He spends much time pushing a pram.

Presumably based on “information received”, Yuendumu police were looking for him. They eventually caught up with him out the front of the Intervention Store. For all to see they proceeded to search him for drugs. They made him take off his shoes etc. They found nothing.

Whence the presumption of innocence? Whence the due respect of discreetly searching him at the Yuendumu Police Station?

Everyone thought that there was nothing wrong with this kuntangka (shame job) situation, this humiliation. It was seen as normal. These are truly a conquered people.

So will they re-introduce tar and feathering and the stocks? Why not!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LgkuPfcN3c  The Police….”I’ll be watching you!…”
अगली बार (शायद अगले साल) तक
(Decode Google Translate from Hindi)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl3UKV1z9lM
सिर्फ एक बोनस गाना:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO3ZMdcL8Pc

Myth has it that the penal colony in New South Wales suffered from starvation particularly from 1789 through to 1894.  In her 2013 history of Australia “Let the land speak” (Harper Collins) Jackie French argues strongly that this did not occur, that there was only a fear of starvation, exacerbated by a lack of understanding of the land they were in, and amplified by the isolation the white colonists felt.   She argues that the land and harbour provided sufficient food for all there, and that the reports of starvation, or of imminent starvation were due entirely to the shortage of wheat flour.  As Tarquin O’Flaherty has shown in his series “Man as Machine” wheat flour bread was considered the staple food for those of the British Isles.  French argues there was ample protein, primarily from the seafood – fish and shellfish of Sydney harbour – carbohydrates from corn grown and available, and necessary vitamins from food grown.  There was also a good supply of imported rations.  She points to the absence of scurvy as solid evidence that adequate vitamin C was being supplied.  She points to many reasons for the myth of starvation but:

‘Mostly the myth has persisted, and grown because our society is increasingly dislocated from the growing or harvesting of the food we eat.  Few people today have wandered the Australian bush or seaside, gathering more than enough food to survive on as they walk.  Much of the bush accessible to city bushwalkers has been dramatically simplified, and its food potential reduced, due to overgrazing by European animals, stock like cattle, sheep and horses, or feral rabbit, deer and goats, as well as repeated bushfires – not the firestick farming of the Dharug (local indigenous people), but hot, out of control flames as well as repeated ‘control burning’ with little understanding of what, or how much, needs to be burnt.  The bush that most Australians see now is no longer a living larder.

Nor are we a peasant society anymore, used to growing our own food.  Many gardeners grow vegetables, but they assume they need to buy fertiliser and watering systems to do so. (You don’t.)  Foods like pasta, rice and chicken are so cheap that it is a rare gardening cook who feeds their family purely on homegrown produce.  Yet it’s anot only possible to do so, it was actually a common experience two hundred years ago, and there are those in Australia who still manage it.

Tumalong, or Darling Harbour, is indeed a place of food.  But the tumult of ice-cream parlours, sushi bars and pasta palaces blinds us to the abundance there once was, when women cooked their fish in their cohoes and with every step you took the land offered you food: fresh, health, but also social.  Plaiting fish traps with other women in the shade of a tree while the kids gathered freshwater mussels – the laughter as well as the indigenous food has vanished from that generous land below the concrete of Darling Harbour.

The first colonists failed to recognise the living larder around them.  Over the next two hundred years European settlers would destroy much of the bounty of the land, and think they were doing good as they extinguished it.’

from ‘Let the land speak’ by Jackie French (Harper Collins) 2013, p 169

Having caught his breath Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his discourse on the poor, the rich and the relationship between the two.

There had always been Poor Laws.  This meant that people suffering hardship received some form of help from their local parish or council rates.  The Speenhamland System, in the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars, was devised to alleviate extreme poverty caused by high food prices.  At a meeting of magistrates in the town of Speenhamland in Berkshire, it was decided that people on low wages should have their money sufficiently topped up by the parish to ensure they they remained healthy enough to go on working.  This system was immediately open to exploitation.  Employers of all descriptions began to deliberately pay low wages in the sure and cynical knowledge that the parish would make up the difference.  This system spread slowly throughout the country, existed in various forms, and was universally reviled as the guaranteed path to pauperism.  Eventually it was replaced, in 1834, by the Poor Law Amendment Act.

Incidentally, following the Black Death in the 14^th century, which caused vast labour shortages, governmental regulation of labourers and their wages brought workhouses into existence.  With the scarcity of workers, labourers were not allowed to pursue higher wages in other parishes.  The law, terrified that freedom of movement would cause wages to rise, insisted that labourers sought work only in an agreed area.  If there was no work available locally, and the labourer was forbidden to look elsewhere, then it naturally followed that the parish must provide work.  They did this by using an early form of the workhouse.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16^th century, the greatest act of architectural vandalism in English history, gave local parishes another headache.  Monasteries for centuries had kept hospices to care for the elderly, the sick and the poor.  They had also provided work to labourers, cooks and gardeners.  These people were now thrown ‘on the parish’, and the parish was now responsible for their health and wellbeing.  Lots of them, for lack of alternative accommodation, wound up being housed in the workhouse, which meant that the workhouse very rapidly, besides rock-breaking, had to take on the responsibilities of a hospital.

In the 18^th century, and in the way of bureaucrats, it was decided (in theory) that anyone seeking Poor Relief must enter the workhouse where work would be provided in exchange for board and lodgings.  (In fact, outdoor relief continued.)  There would be no pay.  In response to this legislation, workhouses were built all over the UK and their managers encouraged to make conditions as difficult as possible for the inmates.  Politicians were as paranoid then as they are now.  In their mindless, demented way they became obsessed, fixated on the idea of ‘dole bludgers’, and believed that anybody who is unemployed, for whatever reason, and seeks Poor Relief, is not only a contemptible failure, but a low criminal as well.

In the great majority of cases, the workhouse was the last thing a man wanted.  In times of economic slump, all a man needed was a little money to tide him over while he hunted for another job.  The workhouse literally pauperised him.  He worked all day, usually at rock breaking, earned no money at all, and so was in no position to go looking for work.  By the middle of the 19^th century, workhouses were being run like businesses, with the distinct advantage that the labour was free.

In the meantime, canals were being dug, railways built and the voteless lower orders were becoming increasingly pissed off.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Continuing from yesterday’s post Tarquin O’Flaherty continues to flay the 19th C British ruling classes

The delight of the great mass of people in accepting the new and astonishingly wide ranging slew of  reforms being offered by the Whigs was short lived.  It became quickly evident, as little as a year after the new (1832) Reform Act became law, that the interests of the newly installed, newly governing ‘middle-class’ didn’t differ all that much from those they had deposed.  The new lot were, its true, much less ruthless than their predecessors, infinitely more pragmatic, and much more kindly disposed towards the interests of the merchant class.  It is also true that Grey, having brilliantly read the aspirations of this new ‘middle’ class, gave them power in order to emasculate them.  These arrivistes, having taken up the franchise and elected their members, were not entirely surprised to discover that their interests now differed markedly from those of the working class.  Gradually at first, and then more quickly, they abandoned the association.  Without the vote, they reasoned, the working class, those who had once been their friends, were now rapidly becoming their enemies, which is precisely what Grey had intended.  The new government had set its feet firmly on the road, as Juvenal had observed, to becoming utterly abominable.

There were other considerations: Unions, the Corn Laws, Speenhamland, the Workhouse and the Poor Laws.

What must be understood of the UK at the time of Napoleon was that a man’s wealth was judged purely on how much land he owned.  On this land, corn (wheat) was being grown, not only to feed European troops, but to provide the people of the UK with bread.

The Napoleonic Wars began in 1793 and ended in 1815.  During all this time the price of wheat kept on rising.  As the wars came to an end and the demand for wheat lessened, the price began to fall.  Cheaper imported grain threatened the high priced domestic product.  Immediately the UK government brought in the 1815 Corn Laws, designed specifically to shore up and protect the artificially high price of UK wheat against cheaper foreign imports.  Imported corn could only be sold at the artificial domestic rate.  The Corn Laws remained in place until 1846.  This meant that bread on the domestic market became so expensive that factory owners were forced to pay higher wages simply so their employees could buy bread.  Those without the benefit of these higher wages ate potatoes.  When potato blight happened and potatoes rotted in the ground, people without the benefit of bread were allowed to starve to death.  Economists of the day viewed this as collateral damage and left them to it.  Factory owners, always keen to reduce wages, lobbied endlessly against the Corn Laws, but the repeal of the Corn Laws took thirty years and then only because millions of people, spud dependent UK residents, villagers, ploughmen, farriers and cottagers with their wives and kids were being buried in mass graves as a result of a deliberate, Corn Law engineered famine.

It is interesting to note that the Wikipedia BBC account of the Irish Famine of the 1840’s, in defending UK government policy of the time, insists that a vast amount of imported grain was available in Ireland in 1847.  Available?  To whom was it available?  It was certainly not available to the people of West Cork, who starved to death in their thousands in 1847.  These desperate people were all within a forty mile radius of Cork city, the biggest port on the Irish south coast.  So, what happened to this wonderful, life saving grain, the distribution of which was in the hands of the caring British administration?  This is the BBC, hypocritically re-writing history.  Huge amounts of this potentially life-saving grain was stolen, syphoned off or re-exported.  There was too much money to be made to waste it on the hungry.

What this BBC ‘account’ also fails to mention, indeed ignores completely is that prior to 1847, and for fifty years before that, England’s Corn Laws had made the price of home grown grain so high that people couldn’t afford bread.  It also fails to mention the appalling levels of absolute penury that existed in Ireland before the famine began, as a direct result of the UK government’s racist attitudes and discriminatory laws directed against the 90 per cent Catholic population of Ireland.

Enough already…

I’ll catch my breath and be back tomorrow