"Make the Best of Your Own Resources before Trading with other Countries"
Posted by admin on Jun 14th, 2011 to Andrew Brons' BNP Ideas web site
Robert Blatchford (1851-1943) was one of the founders of the Labour Party. But his ideas and writings show just how far the Labour Party of Blair, Brown and Milliband has sunk from the high and patriotic ideals and genuine concern for ordinary working-class White Britons of its founders.
A former Army Sergeant-Major, Bob Blatchford founded the Manchester branch of the Fabian Society in 1890. The following year he launched a weekly Socialist newspaper, The Clarion and helped set up the Independent Labour Party, forerunner of today’s Labour. He went on to set out his ideas in two important books, Merrie England (1893) and Britain for the British (1902).
As the titles of these works suggest, Blatchford’s Socialism, like that of many of the other Labour Movement pioneers, was of a robust patriotic kind rooted in a concern for the well-being of ordinary British folk. Utterly unlike the canting cosmopolitan Political Correctness of the millionaire lawyers and plutocrats who were to hijack Labour later.
Unlike modern socialists who think everyone is the same, Blatchford argued that:
“Men are made what they are by two forces: heredity and environment. Your intellect and character are at birth what your forefathers made them”. He praised the British people for being “intelligent, industrious, strong, and famous for their perseverance, their inventiveness and resource”.
On economic issues, Blatchford slammed the soulless materialism of Capitalism: “Your Manchester School” – the forebears of Thatcher’s economic liberalism – “treat all social and industrial problems from the standpoint of mere animal subsistence. They do not seem to think that you have any mind. With them it is a question of bread and cheese and be thankful”.
As a socialist patriot Blatchford slammed the Free Trade dogma that was to take over the Labour as well as the Tory Party years later:
“My ideal is that … people should make the best of their own country before attempting to trade with other peoples.”
He warned the people of Britain:
“Don’t you see that if we destroy our agriculture we destroy our independence at a blow, and become a defenceless nation? Don’t you see that the people who depend on foreigners for their food are at the mercy of any ambitious statesman who chooses to make war upon them?”
He is still right there!
This founder of the Labour Movement also stood up against cheap immigrant labour undercutting the native British worker, supported strengthening our defence forces and backed the Britons of Ulster.
Inevitably Blatchford and the patriotic wing of the Labour movement fell out with the cosmopolitan internationalists who were infiltrating and taking it over.
In 1915, along with H.G. Wells and other leading British Socialists, he founded the Socialist National Defence League to support “the eternal idea of nationality.”
As the National Democratic Party, the League won ten seats in the 1918 General Election. Sadly it subsequently folded, instead of forming the base for a genuinely British Socialist patriotic movement, free from both Marxism and Fascism.
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This is food for thought,but then he went on to found the Manchester Branch of the Fabian Society,more food for thought! but contrary to the aims and views of Nationalism, or even basic patriotism.Was it not the Fabians whose aims were Marxist and somewhat akin to Internationalism i,e the introduction of gradual Socialist reforms through infiltration of the then patriotic establishment, and to bring this change without the British public being aware of it.
ReplyDelete"I have always been a Tory Democrat...You remember that from the first the Clarion crowd and the Hardie crowd were out of harmony...I loathe the “top-hatted, frock-coated magnolia-scented” snobocracy as much as you do; but I cannot away with the Keir Hardies and Arthur Hendersons and Ramsay MacDonalds and Bernard Shaws and Maxtons. Not long ago you told me in a letter of some trade union delegates who were smoking cigars and drinking whisky at the House of Commons at the expense of their unions. You liked them not. Nor do I like the Trade Union bigots who have cheated J. H. Thomas of his pension...I am glad the Labour Party is defeated because I believe they would have disrupted the British Empire. I dreaded their childish cosmopolitanism; their foolish faith that we could abolish crime by reducing the police force. All the other nations are out for their own ends. American enthusiasm for Naval Disarmament is not dictated by a love of peace. It is an expression of naval rivalry. All the nations hated our naval supremacy. Do the Americans love us? Do the French love us? Is France, America, Italy, devoted to an unselfish and human peace? Can we dispel the bellicose sentiments of Russia and China and Japan by sending an old pantaloon to talk platitudes at Geneva, or by disbanding the Horse Guards and scrapping a few submarines?...The England of my affection and devotion is not a country nor a people: it is a tradition, the finest tradition the world has ever produced. The Labour Party do not subscribe to that tradition; do not know it; could not feel it. And if that tradition is to survive, the policy of scuttle and surrender must be abandoned. You agree with all this I feel sure. You always upheld the Pax Britannica. We have not drifted apart, old pal: our separation is only geographical."
ReplyDeleteRobert Blatchford