tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31588679.post9160771416253888562..comments2023-10-21T16:25:58.899+01:00Comments on Three Score Years And Ten: 50th Anniversary - Dronfield Contact ClubHarry Barneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01600933854461096745noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31588679.post-10426485305847817472014-08-15T23:56:52.962+01:002014-08-15T23:56:52.962+01:00Ernie : A valuable comment on the 50th Anniversary...Ernie : A valuable comment on the 50th Anniversary itself; although the celibrations will take place over the weekend. Our Labour Party's contribution will be on Sunday. I especially liked your top up on Gramsci.Harry Barneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01600933854461096745noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31588679.post-17508008615653156272014-08-15T09:02:16.647+01:002014-08-15T09:02:16.647+01:00Harry
As someone who has had a colourful life and...Harry<br /><br />As someone who has had a colourful life and (as always) with few ups and downs I'm acutely conscious that although I have a lot to be grateful for, I tend to be a bit of an old grumps and a natural pessimist. But (from my perspective) there is a lot to be pessimistic about the way the Labour Party has been performing and our neoliberal society is going.<br /><br />Nevertheless, I do like your Gramsci quote written in 1929 while he was incarcerated in a fascist jail. Faced with his predicament, only the most intellectually brilliant, unique and courageous of men and women would be able find something positive to say in such desperate and terrifying circumstances. His associated quotation: “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned” seems timeless and especially relevant.<br /><br />In this respect, your article on the Contact Club and local history is a useful reminder that personal ambition and greed is not the only thing that motivates the human spirit and that collective help and support is as relevant today as ever. A reminder that we are not alone insofar as it the young speaker you refer too and all those desperate for change and social justice (inside and outside the Labour Party) who must be the catalyst for a more fair and good society and for the sort of democratic and peaceful change that you, me and many others would prefer. <br />Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17418284619910629989noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31588679.post-5332279178192994032014-08-12T11:53:51.414+01:002014-08-12T11:53:51.414+01:00Ernie : You will remember visiting the Contact Clu...Ernie : You will remember visiting the Contact Club for another celibration - the 120th Anniversary of the founding of the ILP. It was held on the exact anniversary date for when Keir Hardie and company set the ball rolling in Bradford on 14 January 1893. The meeting that was held is described here - http://dronfieldblather.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-ilp-at-dronfield.html<br /><br />The Dronfield Discussion Group you attended carries on an old tradition which I describe above on this thread. The views you express are often amongst those that surface in debate. If we can keep some of our 50 year old Contact Club spirit alive, then we have a chance of influencing some people somewhere at sometime. Our last speaker was a 24 year old who gave a fine talk which you would fully have approved of; on "Attitudes to Welfare Reform". <br /><br />As Gramsci pointed out, our pessimism of the intellect has to be matched by an optimism of the will. After all the founders of the Contact Magazine and the Contact Club were into this 50 years ago, which was itself a problematic period following 12 years of Tory Governments. They at least turned their own world upside down.Harry Barneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01600933854461096745noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31588679.post-70645362307257626982014-08-12T05:50:01.607+01:002014-08-12T05:50:01.607+01:00Harry
This is a lovely story of local history in ...Harry<br /><br />This is a lovely story of local history in your adopted town of Dronfield which you have served so well over many years. <br /><br />In these modern times of rabid consumerism, market spin, corporate greed and me-me individualism it is a breath of fresh air to be reminded that local people can (if enabled) do things for themselves and for their communities collectively and without the need for celebrity hype and personal advantage. <br /><br />What is so sad, in my opinion, is the way that the Labour Party seems to have been taken over by look-a-like politicians and would-be government leaders whose primary aim seems to be self-serving careerism and managing the system (albeit with a more human face) and in such a way that there is little or no alternative political culture and education that was such an important feature of the Labour Movement in the years before Thatcher and the triumph of neoliberalism. <br /><br />This is an unbelievable horror story for someone like myself who worked as an engineer in the 1960’s and 70’s and became politicised and active via the world of work, the trade union movement, Labour Party and the ILP.<br /><br />While I have no doubt whatsoever that the neoliberal nightmare and the UK’s current political, economic and social arrangements are unsustainable, I am not at all sure that the Labour Party can be an agent for change. That the New Labour apologist will ever accept that we live in a Plutocracy and that big money has captured our democratic institutions (which in my opinion are unfit for purpose) or that these descendants of Kinnock, Blair, Mandelson, et al, will ever challenge the widely accepted notion that we live in a meritocracy where hard work is rewarded handsomely while the excluded and those at the bottom of the ladder must be forced (for their own good) to bow to the needs of corporate Britain via slave labour (dead end and expensive) work schemes and zero hour contracts.<br /><br />And of course this was only possible because the Labour leadership was and is complicit (over decades) in rubbishing the trade unions and never, ever, supporting working people who take industrial action in defend their wages, conditions of employment and their jobs.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17418284619910629989noreply@blogger.com