MAKE UNEMPLOYMENT HISTORY

Allan takes the opportunity to promote his new book

This edition of The Village Pump carries a synopsis of my new book Magnificent Vision: The Right to Work. I hesitate to recommend purchase of the book before it is properly reviewed in the national press. I foresee difficulty in getting such a review printed as the book presents an offbeat argument not easily grasped in its entirety. But there is no need to buy it now; most of its content can be seen on website www.f-u-r-i.co.uk Naturally, I'd be delighted were someone to buy the book now.

Although difficult in parts, the book is tremendously interesting and tremendously important. It warns of a world slump in two or three decades from now, mass unemployment and a nuclear world war, possibly wiping out civilisation. Most of it is easy to read: a straightforward account of the violence coming from mass unemployment, with compelling evidence from the French, Bolshevik, Nazi and Iranian Revolutions and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Mass unemployment is identified as the basic cause of World Wars I and II. The book proposes abolishing poverty by abolishing unemployment, adopting the changed slogan MAKE UNEMPLOYMENT HISTORY. It envisages a legal right to work for everyone (including the old) secured constitutionally as a fundamental human right. It is practicable because it must be made practicable. Otherwise there is the real risk of World War III and possibly the end of civilisation. It is going to be an uphill struggle to achieve recognition of the validity of this argument and to get the book reviewed. However, the argument is intellectually robust, quite coherent and amply supported by a mass of historical evidence. I feel confident that it will eventually prevail.

A major obstacle is what I call the Unemployment Submergence Tendency - Submergency for short. This is the virtually universal tendency to underrate the influence of unemployment as a disturbing factor. The concept of Submergency leads to a new view of history which sees past studies of human conflict as fundamentally flawed in their neglect of the unemployment factor. The book is severely critical of the vast community of historians who are seen as ostriches.

Anyway, if you feel up to grappling with this argument, please read the following synopsis and consider buying the book.

Alan Whitford