[fabians] and drink soaked trots

The weathermen - did they know which way the wind blew?

This is more a comment on the second last post, run as a stand-alone here:

First of all - our Tiberius. As I can't believe he doesn't know it already, then I'd have to say he was being a little less than "genuous" in saying Fabians aren't Marxists.

As a former paid up Fabian [and who wouldn't have been at our university with those professors?], there wasn't one of us without a grounding in Marx and Engles and in the left wing community of the time, the big battle was between Trotskyites and Stalinists. I can't remember now which epithet the Trots hated more -ites or -ists but we used the wrong one.

Our heroes were Shaw and Tawney, of course and we cut no ice with anyone in the Rik Mayall class of urban guerilla who were busy beating up on each other. I can say though that our tactics were not greatly different from what I see of CP now and the British government and EU as a whole.

There's an agenda, the people behind the govenment fly kites, try things on, move people into positions of power, the whole show and the funny thing to me [not funny in its consequences] is that they really don't deviate one iota [um?] from the grand plan as laid down all those years ago.

We tried a bit of revolutionary stuff ourselves and began a group - Anarchist Revolutionary Students in Education which the quick on the anagram uptake will recognize for what it was - and we issued ultimata to the administration scribbled on toilet roll, demanding memorial stones be laid to Linda Lovelace and so on. The problem was that the admin got in on the joke and so we had to disband.

Then we set up a company called Truly Ruly, dedicated to selling mementos of our drink soaked board meetings and the thing was that we got to the establishment stage, due to a few of us actually having viable businesses already. I was the interface with the corporations interviewer. At one point I was simultaneously a member of Labour and the Young Conservatives and yes, it was possible. I did it. The latter was mainly for the better class of girl at the parties.

We had a car club and rallied after a fashion and we had a monthly rag which, while it was ostensibly about cars, was actually a series of left wing diatribes about this or that. It fell through, as our Veedubs did in ditches in the forest.

But on reaching man's estate, the things of childhood had to be put away - socialism, schoolboy pranks and so on and the business of making a living in the real world took over. So never one for rabble rousing or a follower of clarion calls for action, a product of the Fabian days, I preferred to build dossiers, piece together evidence and so on.

Another thing added to the mix in the days before I became a school head was how important reputation actually is. It took me a long time to realize it and that for every year establishing it, it took one minute to undo and my model in this was a former head who'd been criticized for weakness but he was misunderstood.

His method was to resist all calls for precipitate action and slowly pieced together stories from all parties, all sides, then arrived at a decision and stood by it. For his resistance to being steamrolled into a quick decision he was labelled indecisive.

Let's face it - did Drake drop his bowls and shriek: "Oh mgd, the Spaniards and fly down to his ships?"

On the other hand, he could move fast if he had to, say, in a safety situation with a child.

If he got it into his head that something didn't ring true, he was like a terrier or to mix analogies, a heat seeking missile and usually broke through in the end. Non-transparency was one of the biggest no-nos.

All of these above are fragments of Higham's approach too with one added negative - he's a stubborn bstd as well.