THE WORKING CLASS FESTIVAL.

 Help The Working Class Festival

         At a time when the ordinary people's culture and living standards are being savagely attacked we need more than ever to come together not just to celebrate our own culture but to regain that spirit of solidarity among all the ordinary people of this country. By coming together and hearing songs and poetry of the people's struggles, tragedies and victories we can find that common cause between us all. For this reason I feel strongly about Alun Parry's work in organising and running this WORKING CLASS FESTIVAL and would hope that such events will soon become common throughout the whole of the country. We the ordinary people have a culture, a history and if we come together we can have a future fit for all our children and our grandchildren. please support this Festival and perhaps, who knows, you might feel up to organising one in your own area. 

A MUSIC FESTIVAL--- THAT'S MAGIC.  

      The Working Class Life & Music Festival run by Alun Parry, starts next month in Liverpool. It has over 40 events and takes place right across Liverpool from 22nd April to 30th April. It is the largest celebration of working people on the planet.

      I’m urging supporters to join up as a Festival Champion to help spread the word. It’s really easy and only takes seconds to do each mission.

      If you believe in what the festival is doing, sign up as a champion too just by clicking this link

http://www.workingclassmusic.org.uk/get-involved/

http://www.parrysongs.co.uk/

P.S. Please do help the festival. It takes seconds and it's really needed and important. http://www.workingclassmusic.org.uk/get-involved/

ann arky's home.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE---.

     

      It seems that our lords and masters, the millionaires at the Westminster House of Hypocrisy and Corruption have decided that we should all have water meters fitted. Hard lines on all those pensioners that like their garden and wander around in the evening lovingly watering their blooms. Also, what about those ,and there are millions of them, families on low incomes with a couple of kids spread across the country in cities like Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester and all those rural poor, in this green and pleasant land? Economic necessity may mean that you all take a bath together, there's a lot of water in a bath. Of course to our millionaire public school thugs, it won't make one little bit of difference, they'll probably just sign another standing order. However it should make a lot of money for the meter manufacturers, fitters and water companies. Of course it will be you and I that will pay for it all, as usual. Do you want a meter? Did you ask for a meter?Ah, the beauty of our democracy.

        I would suggest that all the local communities should organise to stop this extra burden being heaped on the poorest of our communities at a time of wage cuts/freezes, increase VAT, increase unemployment and benefit cuts. Water is the most basic of all human needs and clean water is essential from a health point of view. Anything that hinders your access to clean water is an attack on your health and well being and should not be tolerated in any society, least of all a very rich and developed country. Don't be conned into thinking this is not a very, very rich country, we can spend billions on arms bills and fight wars on the other side of the planet and carry a bunch of pampered parasites on our back. Think of all those resources being transferred to the community, instead of being used to destroy, kill and maim working class people in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is our country, let's start to shape to our benefit, get the parasites off our back.

 

ann arky's home.

WORKERS KNOW YOUR HISTORY-1911.

      

      The ordinary people of this country, (and all other countries for that matter) have had to struggle for every little improvement in their living standards. We in this the 21st century sometimes forget just how hard and brutal that struggle has been. There have been beatings, prison, blacklisting and death heaped on those involved in those struggles, and the enemy has always been the same. the employers with the back up of the state apparatus. One such long and hard struggle was the 1911 dock strike. Most of the cities in the UK were involved in this bitter dispute but in Liverpool it brought the city to a standstill, had the military on the streets and two strikers were shot.

        The following is a short extract from Mike Royden's Local History Pages.  

        "---With a general strike in the city, the introduction of permits to move goods and services across city, the deteriorating situation was viewed with alarm, both locally and at government level.14 The permit system was really a working class control of the means of distribution, and even authorities in the city accepted that this was the only way to move goods; this was highlighted when the Head Postmaster asked the strike committee for permission to move mail via permit around the city.15

        The City Council saw their authority in the city slipping into the hands of the strike committee and the Lord Mayor cabled the Home Office informing them that ‘a revolution was taking place in the city ….. and that anarchy prevailed’.

        Porcupine recognised ‘the crimson flag of anarchy’, rioting and looting persisted and targeted in areas bordering the sectarian enclave dividing lines to affect shops and property of opponents religion, when shops and property belonging to people’s own religion survived.16

       The government realised that the strike committee had taken the first step of organising the transport of goods for themselves; Hikins even suggests that if allowed to continue, it could have resulted in social revolution, civil war and an end to state authority, a scenario that forced the government to take the only option open to it; that of persuading the employers, and owners to agree to union demands.17 This course of action had been promoted by Dunning in a communication to the Home Office prior to10 August when the initial contingents of police and military units arrived. 18---"

     Though we have moved to the 21st. century we should never lose sight of the fact that the struggle still goes on, what we have gained from struggle can be taken away again, and the protagonists are still the same.

This time it is the government cuts but lets not forget that it is at the behest of the financial/corporate bosses and if we don't want to return to the conditions of the 1911 era then we had better be ready to fight just as hard and long as those of the 1911 dock strike. You can rest assured that the powers that be, the millionaire cabal, are prepared to fight hard and long to get their way and safe guard their billions floating around in the banking casinos of this corporate gambling world.  They will not hesitate to put the troops on the street and the would not hesitate to give the order to fire. They will fight to protect their pampered, privileged positions with every means at the disposal. So we have no alternative but to do likewise. The Victorian era poverty awaits the meek.
a look at some of Glasgow's working class history of struggle.

ann arky's home.