An item in The Spectator by
Alex Massie on 20 December linked to a post on 18 December in his own blog by
Eric Joyce MP that does a good hatchet job on ideas of
what is and what isn't a Member of Parliament who can be described as
"working class".
He points out in a prime
effort of deconstruction that it is not at all clear how an individual might be
defined as such with any accuracy and without taking account of the overall
career and work done over his or her lifetime.
Eric soon will be the
former Member for Falkirk as a result of happenings and unintended
consequences. He will be aware of the
career of Andrew Carnegie (Wikipedia), the famous Scot who went from rags, or
at least cloth making, to vast riches in the USA in the 19th Century and did much
for the education of the Scottish Working Class with part of the money.
Being of the Left, he has
doubts about market forces and the question of class, but this is a very large and
complicated subject. It may be that his
thinking might be owed to the life and career of Keir Hardie (Wikipedia)
pictured above, whose stepfather, David Hardie came from Falkirk.
Which raises the
interesting question, who does the Labour Party now belong to? The metropolitan and academic Marxist and
Leninist (as in Tony Benn etc.) internationalist versions of socialism or the
Evangelical, Temperance and social communal form of Keir Hardie?
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