Letters | 14 February 2009

Solidarity with the strikers

Sir: As a member of the English working class I write to express my approval of and agreement with Rod Liddle’s article (‘Would the working class vote Labour now?, 7 February). I would compare the action of the strikers with those of the shipyard workers of Gdansk in 1980 whose actions exposed to the world the falseness of the Polish Communist Party’s claim to protect the class it purported to represent. These strikers have shown up New Labour’s pretence that it cares about British workers. Peter Mandelson’s performance was eerily reminiscent of the party hacks who were wheeled out to attack Solidarity.

What must have sent a shiver through the ‘chattering classes’ and mortified Guardian readers was the sight of the strikers displaying the Union flag rather than banners in favour of ‘human rights, multi-culturalism and diversity’. New Labour always raises the issue of the BNP as this is the spectre that haunts them in the night — the fear that the working class will follow the example of the French workers, who now vote in large numbers for the Front National.

During the first free elections in Poland in 1989 the clergy were ordered not to get involved in the elections, so in the churches there was a simple slogan ‘Think what the Communist Party has done for you and vote accordingly’. English workers should apply the same maxim to New Labour.

J. Fairclough
Manchester

Suicide in the Depression

Sir: Matthew Lynn (Business, 31 January) takes J.K. Galbraith’s tale in his book The Great Crash, 1929 of window washers being mistaken for distraught brokers as proof that no newly poor moneymen hurled themselves from tall buildings. However, Winston Churchill was in New York City that week, and wrote that on 30 October ‘under (my) bedroom window a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade’.