December 20th – We’re a bunch of weak-kneed
sycophants these days. The incidence of labour fighting for their rights
against the bosses seems to be a thing of the past. Gone are the days of Everybody out and secondary picketing,
bus-loads of belligerent workers traversing the country in support of their
brothers, days of solidarity and comradeship. By stealth and our own
complacency successive governments have chipped away at worker’s rights until
we barely have the authority to take a crap without seeking written permission.
Trouble was we misused our power. Always the same. Get someone in charge, some
tin-pot general, and they start to believe their own press cuttings, begin to
think they’re Icarus; and it works
like this at every level of both power and command. Politicians, union bosses,
heads of large corporations, CEO’s, they all have the potential to trample on
their own ego and many of them do, to the great relief of the daily news.
Back in the late 19th Century, Joseph Arch began
what became the Agricultural Workers
Union as;
…by the light of a solitary lamp, the committee members sat
on the old farmhouse chairs or stood on the stone-flagged floor round the
table, compiling the list of newly-joined members, counting the union funds
heaped in two large tea cups - and discussing ways and means of building the
union.
Paints a grand picture. Suffice to say that a
rocky road eventually led to the formation of The National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers in 1906. Mr. Arch became an M.P. and was well
respected as a champion for agricultural workers whose job had been made much
easier when Jethro Tull invented the seed drill in 1701. Gone were the days of
hand broadcasting seed with the commensurate loss of both seed and eventual
crop. The hit and miss efforts of before gave way to a precision sowing method
that cut costs dramatically in a few short seasons. Thing is, those savings
were just pocketed by the landowners and not a cent went to the farm workers. Neither
increased wages or bonus payments to the workers for better harvests; no wonder
Joseph Arch found fertile ground when he first mooted the possibility of
forming a union.
Standing
on one leg whilst doing anything is difficult; standing on one leg whilst
playing a flute is just show-offy; but it gets one noticed. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull made it his trademark, an
idiosyncrasy that still persists to this day. As the front man for the band Jethro Tull, which was formed this day
in 1967, he/they have been continually touring and recording even up to the
present day. With the money he made from his albums and touring, Mr. Anderson
bought a Scottish estate on the Isle of Skye
and invested in salmon farming which gave him and his wife (as sole
shareholders) a business worth multi-millions. As a landowner he exploited the
landscape (I don’t have time to discuss the environmental consequences of
salmon farming here; if you’re interested, read up on it…it’s not a pretty
picture) and, it would seem, turned the original Jethro Tull legacy on its head.
3) The Lark Ascending
– Composer – Ralph Vaughan-Williams – David Nolan/Violin – London Symphony
Orchestra – Conductor/Vernon Handley
Quintessential
English music, based on The Lark
Ascending, a beautiful and evocative poem by George Meredith. Hearing this
takes me back to my childhood, of summer days spent bird-nesting with my father
and pushing cattle aside to drink from ice-cold trough-springs to slake my
thirst. For soldiers in war, in any war but particularly 1914-18, the landscape
Mr. Vaughan-Williams creates was their
reason and their reasoning; not the music but the emotion the music stirs, a
reminder of all that can and should be preserved about England, all that is worth
fighting (and dying?) for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR2JlDnT2l8
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