Seneca III sends a retrospective on Labour-governed Britain from the end of the Second World War until the present.

Memories and Cycles

by Seneca III

The early impressions of childhood take on a permanency that later experiences of places, people, smells, patterns of sound and memorable events impressed during the journey of life do not, because as time passes those things register in the back rooms of the mind, whilst the memories of childhood become a sort of mental book cover that outlasts all of the pages it holds together. Thus it is that I, as I enter into the late winter of my years, can clearly remember the Air Raid Shelters in the middle of my terraced street, the Anderson Shelters in the back gardens and the burnt-out factory opposite that had fallen foul of a stray Luftwaffe incendiary intended for the railhead shunting yards a mile to the north.

Most vividly of all I remember VE day and the street party when the wives and mothers of those still serving overseas in the BAOR or the Far East of those KIA or WIA and still lying in hospitals had laid out trestle tables piled high with cakes and savouries of all shapes and sizes baked from hoarded and probably black-market flour, sugar and spices. I remember as if it was yesterday the yards and yards of Union Jack bunting fluttering and chattering overhead in the gentle breeze of a warm early May, competing with the chirrupings of the flock of house sparrows that descended in a flurry upon the crumbs that had fallen from our eager young hands.

However, no matter that the cycles of history move slowly, they do so inexorably, and thereafter my time of growing up in a post-war world would become one of revelations, of the taste of real butter and the end to rationing, of taking my carefully horded pennies down to the corner shop and buying as many gobstoppers and sherbets as I could afford. I remember a frenzy of digging and cable laying in the street outside which my mother told me was to bring ‘AC’ to replace the old ‘DC’, a piece of meaningless information to me then but one which was to lie inert in my childhood memory until later in life.

But time never rests in one place, and those few short years of innocence continued after my father had been demobbed and we were a family at last. There followed primary school, secondary school, an eleven plus exam and a grammar school. Beyond the confines of those institutions it was by then a world of Teddy Boys, of drainpipe trousers, crepe-soled blue suede shoes, Elvis haircuts, a time of the daily horse and cart deliveries of milk and bread being replaced by electric floats that didn’t drop heaps of steaming fertiliser for our vegetable patch and then they in their turn were eventually replaced by the early ‘supermarkets’ which were small enough to fit in a far corner of one of the enormous emporia we shop in today.

I missed the ’60s in their entirety, being overseas and up to my neck in mud, blood and beer, but the resultant slippery slope that the ’60s created slid us into cultural decline that was inescapable and was the precursor the toxic, hedonistic ‘wokeism’ that now permeates every aspect of our existence and is having a similar but far more deleterious effect. History does indeed repeat itself, mostly in different ways, but repeat itself it does.

Thereafter, despite being rather apolitical at the time, I gradually became aware of the intermittent series of Labour governments that had taken office following the dissolution of the wartime coalition. First came the Clement Atlee government of 1945-1951, which brought with it a not unreasonable incarnation of relatively benign Socialism, staffed as it was in the main by people who had experienced the deprivations of at least one world war and in some cases two, and who wanted no more of it.

Atlee and his confederates had come into power in 1945 determined to improve the lot of the common man. Their objective was to bring about full employment, a mixed economy and a greatly enlarged system of social services provided by the State, and on the whole they were successful. To that end, they undertook the nationalisation of public utilities and major industries, implemented wide-ranging social reforms, including the passing of the National Insurance Act of 1946, the National Assistance Act of 1948 and the formation of the National Health Service (NHS), also in 1948. However, what Atlee and his comrades didn’t foresee was how their Labour successors and their Union puppet-masters would, over time, distort, manipulate and use those successes in order to create this oppressive draconian abomination of a country that Starmer and his Thought Police now seek to rule with a draconian fist in the name of that fatal oxymoron Diversity Equity and Inclusion. But, before we address that, let us have a look at Atlee’s successors in order of their appearance.

First out of the blocks came the two term Prime Minister Harold Wilson (1964-1970 and 1974-1976) the pipe-smoking, allegedly philandering, outwardly genial man-of-the-people who was as much a puppet of the Trade Unions and the far left as Starmer is today. During his first term as Prime Minister Wilson initiated and participated in the infamous beer and sandwiches meetings with Union leaders in Number 10. In the five years from 1964 up until the last increases made by his first administration, supplementary benefits went up by 26%, and sickness and unemployment benefits by 153%, sowing the seeds for the burden created now by the millions happily living on benefits and contributing nothing to the commonweal.

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