1974
UP PARK CAMP (VERSION) * JOHN HOLT * CHANNEL ONE * JA
Both sides of this track are outstanding, but I tend to play the version more. The song is about the notorious Up-Park Camp prison in Jamaica. Alexander Bustamante Jamaica's first Prime Minister was held there for seventeen months in 1940 for his workers union activities. It may come as a surprise to many young folk that politicians from the Left were at one time in history on the side of working people! With the advent of President Clinton, a particularly smarmy charlatan, who introduced something called 'New Democracy, this was a situation that by the end of the 20th century had changed out of all recognition in many western countries, most notably America and the UK. This new Left political orthodoxy was in part developed and adopted by another distasteful slimy group, this time from the privileged elites in Britain, headed by a posh ex public school boy come lawyer, Blair a born fanny merchant), who renamed it 'Third Way', and in Germany by Shroeder as 'Neue Mitte', others like the French Socialists and the Swedish Democrats were more sneaky about it, but lapped it up just the same. Of course this is a simplification of something that goes back before the evil access of Clinton/Blair.Iin America things began to change for the left in the 1960s with the rise of 'new liberalism', based on the counter-cultural movements of feminism, gay rights, ecology and the anti-Vietnam War movement. While the Labour Party's modernization in Britain dates back to earlier electoral failure (remember much of it has to do with gaining POWER) after three electoral defeats in the 1950s Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour party, proposed the abandonment of Clause Four (a commitment to public ownership) from the party's constitution. It was, however, Clinton, the man who supposedly stood for truth yet told lies to camera, and his miniature cry baby doppelganger Blair, who dealt the killer blow to any, even symbolic, position that the left were for the working classes, or against the hegemonic power of capitalism, or for that matter, even 'good' people.
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