Ah, the same stereotyping of the unemployed the ignorant right has always done.
Freedom of movement would be a lovely Lennonesque dream if it were about cultural diversity. But it isn't, it's about providing corporate multinationalism with a cheap labour pool to control wage demands and allow them to eke maximum profit, which as Marx explained, Capitalism demands. It used to be that if a union made demands considered unreasonable, the factory owners would threaten to move the factory abroad. Now they don't even need to pay to do that, because they can bring the workforce to the factory.
It beggars belief that so many left wingers have taken the side of the right over globalisation within such a short time. We were out on the streets against it less than 20 years ago. Now the left is sucking corporate dick in fear of being labelled racist. I have lovely Polish neighbours, who work in the supermarkets that wouldn't even give me an interview a few years ago when I was unemployed. I don't blame them for coming here to earn twice what they could at home. But the claim that the unemployed don't want to work is a plain, stinking, Mail-inspired lie, and shame on you for regurgitating it.
That bullshit TV programme about the recruitment agency was just more pauper porn. As anybody who's been unemployed knows, if you refuse a job, they stop your benefit. In 2012 I was sent to one of the biggest agencies sucking up millions in public money to do the DWP's dirty work, which has less than a 5% success rate, and in 13 weeks the agent I was assigned to found me 2 jobs to apply for. I was finding more every week by myself, including the job I eventually got.
I don't deny there are probably one or two weed dealers who don't really want 6am starts stacking shelves with tins of baked beans but I wanted to work, just like the thousands of others like me I saw at the Jobcentre. Who fits more conveniently into the pauper porn, me or the weed dealer? Let me give you a clue: no TV cameras came round our way.
Of course, without Latvians doing 12 backbreaking hours a day in a field for a pittance on an industialised farm run by a corporation, you might have to pay a bit more for your watery strawberries. Poor you.
How does this fit in with Trump though, MFG? you ask. Reasonable question.
'Populism' has become a dirty word, journalistic shorthand for ignorant, uneducated, uninformed, uncultured, racist, thuggish...choose your own adjective. What it actually means is "the political philolosophy of the People's Party. Grass roots democracy; working-class activism."
That is not Donald Trump but it is why he succeeded, or perhaps more accurately, where Clinton failed.
Brexit, Sanders, Syriza and other "populist" movements have happened for the same reasons, not because the world suddenly "lurched to the right." The right has simply identified it quicker. This is still something I worry the left is being slow to realise and accept.
We innocently bought the Clash's Sandinista album like we were funding the fight against Somoza and dictators everywhere. The Sandinista leaders were all published poets. One was also a priest. You can't say they were uneducated and uncultured neo-nazis. They were populists trying to effect change. Ditto Che Guevara in Cuba.
I've appealed to people to address the policies but to avoid stereotyping those who voted, because it's not that simple anymore. People who voted twice for Obama voted for Trump. That's not easy to explain; easier to just stereotype them all as redneck hillbillies in Lynyrd Skynyrd teeshrts. Jon Stewart, a lberal voice of reason in the US, said the same thing. You don't make muslims a monolith, they're individuals, but the same thing is being done with Trump voters.
I've voted Labour all my life. I'm not one of those who swings elections. The far right do not swing elections. The people who decide elections are the middle ground, the supposedly "reasonable" people.
The same people who resist change once hung posters of the Clash and Che Guevara on their walls. Now they long to maintain a status quo which has brought the human race to the edge of extinction, fearful of change, while labelling any demand for change as a desire to return to the past. Why? Because Emma Thompson said so? The Guardian's business editor, Larry Elliot, wrote many articles with facts on why he supported Leave. Its environment correspondent, George Monbiot, was also for Leave. Paul Wilson, its most left wing journalist, wanted Leave but wanted to wait for a Labour government to do it, which wasn't really an option because it was now or never. Meanwhile, the Guardian's showbiz and fashion correspondents were for Remain. Yet the same old cliches about Leave having no facts and being uninformed continued. I asked a few Remainers to explain the difference between the European Commission and the European Council to me. None of them could. So much for being informed.
But the EU protects our rights, MFG, I hear whispered from the back of the class. Does it really?
The same people who claim that also tut about the horror stories coming out of Amazon warehouses - a bloke had to camp in a tent outside because they were charging him for their own bus to work - and they protest the ability of multinationals to move profits around the EU to avoid paying tax. Yay, the workers!
The discrimination directive wasn't passed because EU leaders considered it "too expensive" and they're laws we can do better ourselves. They're right. The party which once gave us Section 28 introduced gay marriage. Meanwhile, some of those EU nations still mandatorily sterilise transgender people. Of course you don't mind being in a political institution with them but you don't want to live there, right? Maybe that's why so many people after the referendum declared they were moving to New Zealand (rather than Latvia), oblivious to the irony that New Zealand is not in the EU and we're about to become quite New Zealandish, once the EU stops trying to punish us like an abusive husband for wanting to leave.
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