Cruising

Three years ago Revoltina and I decided to go on a short Mediterranean cruise. It was something she had wanted to do for years, and sales from the farm had been good that year and Dick had promised to keep things ticking over while we were away.
With it being a Mediterranean cruise I had expected the crew to be from France and Spain, Greece and Turkey, Italy and Algeria, Morocco and Egypt.
Not a bit of it. The overwhelming majority of the staff were from Indonesia and the Philippines. 
Once out of sight of land we could have been somewhere in the Far East. The passengers were predominantly indigenous aboriginal English and the dusky servants were from, what in the heyday of Imperialism, were called the 'Lower Races.'
Not much has changed in a hundred years!
I felt excruciatingly embarrassed I can tell you.
The ship was a mess, lilting to one side. Some of the cabins had flooded and a port of call was missed out. So the passengers grumbled.
They didn't grumble about being waited on by pitifully paid Non People.
You see, they say, the wages are good for those countries.
The crew and staff worked extremely long hours. You see, they say, it gives them a chance to earn more than they would back home.
They are months and months away from their husbands and wives and children.
But we are doing them a favour, trading with them, employing them, transferring our wealth to them.
Like I suppose, 'we' are giving employment to Bengali garment workers. Like we give work to Chinese cockle pickers. Like the millions of foreigners now providing cheap foreign labour within the United Kingdom, ready to replace the decadent English who have a Devil's pact with their masters.
What remains of the English people will one day wake up. You cannot maintain your own labour rights, good conditions and good wages, whilst simultaneously exploiting the foreigner.
The Australians have always understood this, keeping out cheap labour firstly with the White Australia policy, and later on with skills and capital based quotas.
But the English aspire to be nothing more than a little lord.
And how better for the humiliated members of a hierarchy to feel better than to go abroad and let Johnny Foreigner wait on you, to tramp around Peru, to cycle round Vietnam, to do some good work in Tanzania, to cruise the Mediterranean, waited on by delightfully servile foreigners, while dispensing our valuable currency to the grateful, childlike, under-developed natives.