We read in today’s paper that the late Bob Crow’s office was “…stuffed with working class memorabilia, including a bust of Lenin.” This news has filled me with an irresistible desire to have a statue of Lenin too. It’s usually said that, while Stalin was a genocidal monster, Lenin was much more idealistic in his communism, altogether softer. This is not true. Lenin instituted his own genocides and persecutions, concentration camps and the whole apparatus of totalitarian control. Men as diverse as Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell wrote of his extreme ruthlessness and cruelty. So why do I have this craving for a statue of Lenin? Well, you see, it’s like this…

The winter’s heavy rains caused our birdbath in the garden to sink and the basin has come off. It will have to be chucked out and I’d like to replace it with something suitable. I think I will get a statue of Lenin so that at garden parties in the summer my friends can come and throw stones at it. This is in the fine Victorian tradition when householders used to put pictures of those they couldn’t abide in strategic places in the lavatory.

What I object to though is this report which puts busts of Lenin among “working class memorabilia.” For the British working people were never communists. There was a fine tradition of British socialism which loathed the communist dictatorships. This was the socialism of the Workers’ Educational Association, night schools, self-improvement, apprenticeships, chapel-singing, friendly societies and charitable works. This is the world we have lost. It has been replaced by two hideous developments. One is the radical chic nomenclature in the BBC and much of the rest of the mass media, the Champagne socialists of Hampstead and Primrose Hill and the nauseating, fawning hypocrisy of the theatrical luvvies, the movie crowd and what are fatuously referred to as “the arts.” The other development is generational institutionalised  lethargy promoted by the dependency culture which has been enthusiastically promoted and maintained by the Labour Party in order to  buy votes in the general elections.

We used to have socialist patricians with a moral conscience and millions of ordinary folk possessed by the protestant work ethic. Now we have Socialist Estates of the Realm incarnated in the all-powerful corporate bureaucracies of the NHS and the useless state schools which do not exist to provide the services for which they were set up but for the benefit of their highly-unionised employees.

And we no longer have the working class: we have the underclass.

I wonder if Bob Crow’s executors have put his statue of Lenin on E-bay yet?