The Vice of Kings. Jasun Horsley

London School of Economics in 1910. He worked for the Inland Revenue during World War One, as well as being a minister of food. During World War Two, he was head of the British Petroleum mission in Washington D.C., principal assistant secretary in the Ministry of Supply and the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and personal assistant to the deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee. From 1945 to 1964, Piercy served as chairman of the Industrial & Commercial Finance Corporation which was set up to provide means to smaller businesses in the United Kingdom. He was also a director of the Bank of England from 1946 to 1956. That's a total of two directors of the Bank of England (the B of E helped found the National Socialist Party in Germany during the 1930s) whom my “socialist” grandfather chose to single out in his seven-page memoir.

      During this same period (the mid- to late 1950s), Northern Dairies became affiliated with Mackintosh (Quality Street) and Terry's chocolate companies. My grandfather also mentions a trip to Dublin—Northern Ireland being the first place which Alec's company extended its business to: “The Irish gave me…a better understanding of the men of history and conviction who will fight to the end and achieve little. So often such men are better at dying than living. They will not even consider that it is possible to be good at both” (Ounsworth, 1987, p. 10).

      In 1962, the year my brother was born, Alec received a letter from Errol Barrow, the premier of Barbados, inviting him to bring dairy trade there. As it happens, Barrow also studied at the London School of Economics. Jumping ahead several decades, my father spent the last years of his life in Barbados, having moved there after he left Northern Foods. He ran an ice cream business during his retirement years: a return to his roots, since his first major success as a director of Northern Dairies was to acquire a stake in the Mr. Whippy ice cream company and then sell it at a large profit two years later.

      In the 1980s, while my father was going from success to success as the chairman of Northern Foods, my grandfather, in his late seventies, entered into “very active voluntary work both with Hull's top security prison and Age Concern” (Ounsworth, 1987, p. 8.) (Age Concern was the banner title used by a number of charitable organizations concerned with the needs of older people and based chiefly in the four countries of the United Kingdom.) It was presumably the former activity that led to Alec's involvement with Jimmy Boyle. I don't know much about his work with Age Concern, but I do know that he was involved with some sort of scandal in his later years concerning a bicycle business by which he allegedly embezzled money by stealing old people's pensions.

      I also know that my father disliked Alec for his entire life. Even after Alec had died, he appeared to bear ill feelings for him. Yet beyond indicating that Alec was a bully, I never really knew why.

       CHAPTER II

      A brief history of Fabianism: co-opting the left and right

      “To speak of scientific management in school and society without crediting the influence of the Fabians would do great disservice to truth, but the nature of Fabianism is so complex it raises questions this essay cannot answer. To deal with the Fabians in a brief compass as I'm going to do is to deal necessarily in simplifications in order to see a little how this charming group of scholars, writers, heirs, heiresses, scientists, philosophers, bombazines, gazebos, trust-fund babies, and successful men and women of affairs became the most potent force in the creation of the modern welfare state, distributors of its characteristically dumbed-down version of schooling.”

      —John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education

      As a child and teenager attending private school, I never had any time for history. I hated school with a passion and experienced its regimentations as suffocating and oppressive. Every class was an ordeal to be endured, and my overall ambition was simply to avoid as much as possible being in any way influenced, shaped, or informed by the “masters” and their regimens. In terms of historical facts, I retained almost nothing of what we were taught in history (just a bit about Mussolini getting the trains to run on time). So for me to be writing a historical work overflowing with names, dates, and events, all of which I fear may be numbing to the reader, and to find my own interest so keen, is ironic, to say the least. But then, a large part of my ennui at school related to my felt sense that what I was being taught was not the real truth.

      Another, even deeper reason for my ennui at school was that the methods of teaching—which as we'll see directly relate to Fabian methods of social engineering—were very much meant to be soul-deadening and mind-crushing. It was only that I would not, or could not, submit to them. As it happens, the first thing that really tipped me off that something was missing from my family's “official” history was the Fabian link to my grandfather. And one of the first really shocking discoveries was that two of the schools which my siblings and I had attended also had Fabian affiliations, even though there was no reason to think my grandfather had anything to do with our being sent there. In fact, in all the time I spent with my family, I don't remember ever once hearing anyone mention the Fabian Society.

      Yet once I began to follow that lead, I quickly found out that the Fabians are the conspiracy bugaboo of the right. This presented a problem so far as finding reliable information about them, because a great deal of the unofficial history of the Society seems to be confined to websites with axes to grind. Actually, what I was initially looking for was some sort of concrete evidence of sexual abuse in my family history, since all the signs seemed to point that way. The Jimmy Boyle/Kray connection certainly did, and I began to wonder: Did the Fabian octopus share a tentacle or two with that of organized crime and child sexual abuse?

      Early Fabians tended to downplay their interest in—or debt to—Karl Marx but there can be little doubt that they were inspired by his work, directly or otherwise. I say directly because Marx lived in London from 1849 up to his death in 1883, and spent countless hours working on his Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Museum (which then housed the British Library collection). George Bernard Shaw was introduced to Marx's work by Henry Hyndman, who discovered The Communist Manifesto in 1864 and formed Britain's first socialist political party, The Social Democratic Federation, in 1881. He was the first author to popularize Marx's works in English and introduced them to Shaw around 1882. The Fellowship of the New Life (which later became the Fabian Society) was founded the following year, in 1883, the year of Marx's death.¹

      Shaw described Marx's Kapital as

      not a treatise on Socialism: it is a jeremiad against the bourgeoisie…. It was addressed to the working classes; but the working man respects the bourgeoisie, and wants to be a bourgeois. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself…like myself, bourgeois, who painted the flag red. The professional and penniless younger son classes are the revolutionary element in society: the proletariat is the Conservative element…. Marx made me a Socialist and saved me from becoming a literary man. (1949, pp. 49–50)

      The Fellowship of the New Life dissolved in 1898, after which the Fabian Society grew to become a preeminent academic society in the UK. Many Fabians participated in the formation of England's Labour Party in 1900. The party's constitution, written by Sidney Webb, borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society. As seen in the Labour Party Foundation Conference in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and sent one delegate. (See World Heritage Encyclopedia, no date given.) The Society grew throughout 1930–1940 over many countries under the British rule, and many future leaders of these countries were influenced by the Fabians during their struggles for independence from the British. These leaders included India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (whose fashion sense—“the Nehru jacket”—influenced the counterculture²), Obafemi Awolowo, who later became the premier of Nigeria's defunct Western Region, and the founder of Pakistan, barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, had a political philosophy strongly influenced by the Fabian Society. In the twenty-first century, the Fabian Society's influence is felt through Labour Party leaders and former prime ministers of Great Britain, such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

      The name Fabian was apparently suggested by the spiritualist Frank Podmore, after the brilliant third century Roman general, Quintus Fabius (Maximus Verrucosus, 303-203 BC). Fabius was made a