GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS

By Arthur Scargill

(TUC CONGRESS 1980)

Once upon a time there were Three National Union of Honeyworkers Bears. Father Socially Deprived Bear, Mother Socially Deprived Bear, and Baby Socially Deprived Bear. And they all lived together in a criminally highly-rented, rate-capped, damp, rat-infested, totally inadequate council house in the woods. One day, they all went off to picket at their local honey pit , as after eighteen years of Tory misrule they were grossly underpaid and didn't have any alternative but to withdraw their labour and take strike action! Soon afterwards a girl by the name of Goldilocks, who was on her way to see her Grandma, noticed the house of The Three Bears and went into it. She didn't know that it was wrong to go into somebody else's house without their permission as her father was a policeman and she'd seen him do it many a time! On the table were three bowls of porridge. Now in the past Bears had been able to afford a substantial meal of meat stew, but under the yoke of Conservatism, and I want to make myself very clear on this point, porridge was all they could damn well afford! First Goldilocks tried the porridge of Father Socially Deprived Bear, but that was too hot. Then she tried the porridge of Mother Socially Deprived Bear, but that was too cold. Then she tried the porridge of Baby Socially Deprived Bear, and that was just right. So she ate it all up. Then, not content with that, and with a black-hearted underhanded deviousness that would have done credit to Thatcher herself, she mixed together the bowls of too hot and too cold porridge and ate them as well! Then the wolf came in, and Goldilocks said "Oh Grandma, what a big mouth you've got", And the Wolf said "I know, I borrowed it from Michael Foot. And they all rotted in a hell of Conservative making.