Yobboes and Loonies
Richard West
As the coal strike drags to a bitter end, Scargill
it is fascinating to see where Arthur gets his support, as indicated by this account of a demonstration in London last Sunday:
'Every coalfield was represented, some under the traditional richly-embroidered banners and others under the newer art of the year-long strike proclaiming "Women Against Pit Closures", "London Gays against pit closures" and even "Cypriot Youth against pit closures" (Daily Tele- graph, 25 February). A still more revealing item appeared in the Guardian Diary the Previous Saturday: 'Money still continues to flood in as a result of the second miners' families appeal advertised in both the Guardian and the Times — so much so that the• organisers are planning to advertise again next week. The second appeal has so far raised a further £.100,000 — L3,000 from TUries readers and the rest from the Guar- (Ilan. But Times readers needn't be down- hearted — they more than made up for It With the volume of hate mail they also sent in.'
.Those two items neatly show that the militants of the Yobbo class are now getting their firmest support from the militants of the Loony class. The Yobboes (the term was invented by Mr Auberon Waugh) march with their richly- embroidered banners from the mining vil- lages, rather incongruously joined by femin- ists, homosexuals and immigrants, three of the groups that make up the readership of the Guardian, the Loony newspaper. The armies of Mr Ken Livingstone, head of the Greater London Council and Britain's main Loony politician, have joined with the armies of Arthur Scargill, head of the Islational Union of Miners, and now Bri-
tain's outstanding Yobbo. On the face of it, this alliance of Yob- boes and Loonies is an unlikely one. The Yobbo class (the derogatory term was first used to describe their boorish and violent behaviour on strike) belong to the old industries like coal, steel, shipbuilding, railways, docks and textiles. Their strength has always lain in the North, Scotland and South Wales. The Loony class are white- collar workers in a few professions like teaching and journalism, but overwhelm- ingly in the Civil Service and in the even larger bureaucracies of local government, the Quangoes and Qualgoes — the latter a new term coined for Quasi-autonomous local government organisations. The Loonies include in their ranks, or draw support from, what they call 'minority groups', although this term is sometimes applied to women as well as to homo- sexuals, blacks, Irish and so on.
The Yobbo-Loony alliance is not found- ed on love nor even mutual respect. The Yorkshire miners are not, to put it mildly, famous for sharing the household chores with their wives; nor for tolerance towards people of other races. In most mining districts it is an unwritten rule, in some a written rule, that coloured people may not be employed. It is no secret that Mr Scargill and Mr Livingstone loathe one another. The Guardian is not widely read down the pits.
So why do the Loonies now support the Yobboes? The simple answer is that both classes want to protect their subsidies from the government and ultimately from the taxpayers. The Yobboes want a con- tinuance • of the subsidies to uneconomic pits, to shipyards that are two years late on delivery, to docks where ships no longer arrive, to mills producing steel that nobody wants to buy, to a railway service crippled by over-manning and by restrictive practices.
In wages, number and power, the Loonies probably now exceed the Yob- boes. The Guardian almost every day carries page after page of advertisements for community relations workers, leisure officers, alcoholism executives and the like. Opening Monday's issue, one finds an advertisement for a journalist in Manches- ter City Council's Town Clerk's Depart- ment, Police Research and Development Unit, to edit a bi-monthly bulletin for the Manchester Council's Police Monitoring Committee. The advertisement takes up a further four column inches of space (at great cost to the Manchester ratepayers, at great financial advantage to the Guardian) with the now obligatory rigmarole: 'The City Council operates a Union Mem- bership agreement under which a new employee is required to become a member of a recognised union. . . Manchester City Council is an Equal Opportunity Em- ployer, and we positively welcome applica- tions from women and men, regardless of their racial, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, sexuality, or responsibilities for dependants.' The revenue from adver- tisements for the Loony class has made the Guardian a very rich newspaper, at the expense of the tax-and rate-payers. No wonder that the Guardian is as fearful as all the rest of the Loony class, at threats to cut the staff and expenditure of the Civil
Service, the local authorities, the Quangoes and Qualgoes, not to mention the BBC, the Arts Council, the National Theatte. .
The Loonies now support the Yobboes because they fear that if Mrs Thatcher breaks the miners, and then goes on to break the railway unions, she may attack the power of the parasite bureaucrat class.
If only she would! Most of the evidence suggests that the power of the Loonies has actually grown since 1979. She has not even abolished the Equal Opportunities Commission. However, if this or any other government really did start to reduce public expenditure, the Yobboes and Loonies would fight each other for what remained of the hand-out. The industrial class and the bureaucratic class are natural enemies.
We must look to France to see what happens when Yobboes and Loonies fall out. The Yobboes there, the old blue beret class, were traditionally Communist voters and members of the Confederation Gener- ale de Travail (CGT). Unlike their British counterparts, the French Yobboes did not destroy the mines, docks, mills and rail- ways. The Loony class in France are Socialists and were swept to power with Francois Mitterrand in 1982, when they set about turning the schools into comprehen- sives, increasing the staff of local and central government, and sucking up to the feminists, homosexuals and immigrants. This provoked opposition from the Right, and still more from the Yobboes. The Communists have become very hostile to France's four million immigrants. Still more of the Yobbo class, some 15 per cent of the whole population, now supports M. Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. The Le Pen campaign is directed not only at immigrants but Jews, feminists, homosex- uals, students and intellectuals. Socialist demonstrators are now frequently beaten up by Communists and by the National Front. In Liberation, the French equivalent of the Guardian, 'working-class' is almost a term of abuse. Perhaps our Loonies should look to France, and then think again before backing the miners on strike.
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