Archive for April, 2015

Joshua Bonehill: Hollywood Nazi Troll?

April 30, 2015

I found this interesting little statement by the comedy fuehrer, Joshua Bonehill, on the entry for him on the Rationalwiki site through the link to it on the SlatUKIP page. I’ve posted a number of pieces on Bonehill commenting on his ludicrous attempts to set himself up as some kind of Far Right generalissimo. He is notorious for hacking into other people’s blogs and twitter accounts in order to malign or threaten them. One of his favourite tactics is to claim falsely that they are paedophiles, a particularly vile and dangerous smear. He was also found guilty of making false claims against pub, whose staff were threatened following another of his lies. He claimed that they wouldn’t serve British servicemen in order not to upset Muslims.

Bonehill as Britain’s prospective Fascist dictator, Bonehill posts racist and anti-Semitic material on his blog. He was appealing for people to join his neo-Nazi organisation as members of an elite bodyguard for him, now styling himself the Founder. He was one of the leading names behind a Far Right march against the ‘jewification’ of Stamford Hill, a predominantly Jewish community in London.

The National British Resistance

A few weeks ago he also got in his local paper for launching his latest Fascist party, National British Resistance, in one of the parks in Yeovil. Despite claiming later on his blog that his party’s founding was attended in secret by fifty Fascists, some of whom had flown in from Northern Ireland, the only member of his massive Fascist legion to appear was, er, him.

He pretty much resembles Spode and his Blackshorts , P.G. Wodehouse’s spoof of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists in Jeeves and Wooster, though ‘Founder’ Bonehill’s antics include stunts that Spode would definitely consider well below acceptable behaviour. Like being thrown out of Tesco for trying to defecate in their frozen food section, or prosecution for trying to break into a police station to steal uniforms and equipment.

Bonehill and Trolling

According to a statement by Bonehill himself, preserved on the Rationalwiki, all this Fascist posturing may be just that: a pose. Bonehill has said that this is an attempt to create a false persona in order to troll the Far Right and anti-Fascists alike, based on David Bowie’s adoption of the Ziggy Stardust persona in the 1970s. The full statements says

“It was after listening to David Bowie’s iconic album, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust” on repeat for the best part of a day, I realised that I too could potentially create a “Persona” and play a character but instead of basing my character in the musical world, I’d place him in the political world – Leader Bonehill, the Founder was born.

Firstly I created my fictional and satire news website – this was the Daily Bale – and set about generating headlines which quickly went viral throughout 2013. I was responsible for creating myths such as the campaign to ban black pudding and various other oddities that were quickly picked up upon right-wing groups such as the EDL and Britain First to which went viral.

Very quickly I found myself at the head of a large news network and found that I had the power to make many hundreds of thousands of people believe utterly insane and crazy things under the guise of Daily Bale News. To this day, people still share Daily Bale articles and I believe it will withstand the test of time.

[…]

After the Daily Bale I took upon elevating my persona the Leader and Founder to another level which became the “National British Resistance”. The NBR was a Far-Right Nationalist movement led by the fierce and no-nonsense dictator, Leader Bonehill.

Through the NBR I made many outlandish claims for instance one of them was that I could “heal” the Left-Wing through a rebirth process and I also claimed to be a “Right-Wing messiah”. I stood in astonishment as people were eating this bait and taking me VERY seriously to the point where I became the obsession of many social media users.

It wasn’t until the press and media caught onto my activity and started reporting on me as a real person that the ego started to be transferred into the real world. I was invited to speak at meetings and felt almost forced to display this persona in public and this I couldn’t keep on doing because it fundamentally went against everything I believe in as a person.

Yes – I make no bones about it, for the past 16 months I have been trolling relentlessly at the expense of both the Left and the Right – it has been through this trolling that I am now appearing back in court over Daily Bale articles but this was a price I was prepared to pay and knew that my actions would of course have very real world consequences.

Leader Bonehill came alive and consumed me at times, the ego almost controlled me and took upon a very powerful and possessive role in my normal everyday life. I found myself almost believing that I was a “Right-Wing messiah” and had been sent from another planet to free the people and bring about a new great nationalist age – though this of course in reality was absolute bollocks and would never happen.

[…]

Everything I have said and done, right from posing for photographs or the videos I have made are the result of this “Persona”. These do not represent my real views and can instead be seen as a comical ‘act'”.

According to the RationalWiki site, Bonehill has since taken this down, but it’s been archived elsewhere. The piece can be read at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Joshua_Bonehill-Paine.

From this, it would seem that Founder Bonehill is a ‘Hollywood Nazi’, the term the Far Right give to those play acting at being Fascists, but who aren’t the real Nazi thing. And there have been any number of them.

The grotesque theatricality of Fascism, with its bonkers leaders spouting their vitriolic nonsense to crowds at from government palaces and the Nuremberg stadium, the whole weird, twisted spectacle of marches, rallies and parades, and the sinister fascination with its regalia – the uniforms, flags, badges, propaganda posters – has attracted a number of characters over the years, who have adopted it not from any sympathy with Fascism, but from a simple desire to shock and upset. To epater les bourgeois.

Hippies and Punk Fascist Styles

In the 1960s there was a Hippy Nazi party in Florida, which probably had no purpose other than to wind up the straights. One section of the Punks in the 1970s deliberately courted controversy by dressing up in Nazi uniform as part of their general assault on staid, conventional society. Sid Vicious apparently wandered around a Jewish area of Paris in Nazi uniform, but surprisingly wasn’t beaten up.

David Bowie

Bonehill claims he was inspired by Bowie and Ziggy Stardust. In fact, the Thin White Duke did was at the centre of controversy in the 1970s because of his apparent Nazi inclinations. He was arrested by West Berlin’s finest for getting drunk and making the Fascist salute outside the remains of Hitler’s bunker on the anniversary of the Fuehrer’s birthday. Or death – I can’t remember which.

Bowie also directly prompted the formation of Rock Against Racism, after he announced on British television that in the elections that year there was only ‘one choice’ to run the country, and so was offering himself as the Fascist candidate.

Bowie obviously isn’t, and never was, a true Fascist of any kind. For all the homosexuality amongst certain sections of the Nazi party, the Nazis themselves hated gay men and sent them to the concentration camps. They also had very strict and traditional ideas on gender roles. A woman’s place was ‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche’ – children, kitchen, church. As for masculinity, this was belligerent and aggressive. One Italian Fascist slogan proclaimed ‘Fighting is to man, what motherhood is to woman’. Bowie’s bisexual, androgynous persona in Ziggy Stardust would have been bitterly hated and denounced by the Nazis, just as it was by more traditional, staid members of the older generation.

And there are two other reasons why the Nazis also wouldn’t have adopted Bowie. Pop music has its roots in the mixture of White American country music, and Black barrelhouse jazz. The Nazis, as racists, hated Jazz because of its origins in Black culture, and what they saw as its permissiveness and sexual decadence. Quite apart from the fact that Bowie wasn’t racist, as shown by his later marriage to Iman, a woman whose name is the Arabic for ‘Faith’.

The impression I had was that Bowie in the 1970s was less a Fascist, than a very confused mam, driven nearly to the edge of sanity by the adulation of his fans.

Laibach and the NSK

Then there’s NSK and the Industrial rock band, Laibach. They were from the former Yugoslavia, and were part of a wider art collective, Neue Slowenische Kunst, or ‘New Slovenian Art’ in English. Way back in the 1980s they produced a very Wagnerian cover version of ‘Live is Life’, by the Austrian pop band, Opus. The video was shot very much in the style of the kind of Nazi propaganda films celebrating the countryside, hiking and healthy peasant values. The whole album, Opus Dei, could be seen as an exercise in the kind of music that would have been produced, had the Nazis decided to cover the Beatles, Rod Stewart and Queen.

According to one, very scurrilous and entirely unreliable website, the group deliberately set out to portray themselves as genuine neo-Nazis, dressing in Nazi uniforms. They did so, not because they really were members of the hordes of European stormtroopers, but simply to frighten and annoy the Yugoslav government. The band themselves were anti-Nazi, some of the images they used in their art was designed by anti-Nazi artists. Matters finally came to head when the band spectacularly announced that they were ending the whole charade at a concert. They apparently declared ‘We are as much Fascists as Hitler was an artist’. The Aryan warriors of the Far Right immediately went into meltdown. I’ve heard tales of British Nazis angrily destroying their records when they heard about how they’d been deceived.

When the civil war erupted in the former Yugoslavia, and real Fascism raised its ugly head in the chaos of violence, terror and brutal ethnic cleansing, NSK fled to western Europe. They’ve still continued to make music. One of their most recent projects was on the score for the Finnish SF film, The Iron Sky. This was about a war between an America led by a female president, not too far removed from Sarah Palin, and a Nazi colony on the Moon founded after the fall of the Third Reich.

Laibach’s imagery and artistic style draws partly on Wagnerian opera and the imagery and non-racial motifs of the Third Reich, but this is very much artistic pastiche. Their album Opus Dei can be seen as a comment on the Fascist cult of the leader, and the Second World War as trans-European international conflict, but there’s no racist or anti-Semitic content in the music or covered songs themselves.

The Imperial league of British Fascists

At a much lower level, there also have been a number of small groups here in Britain that have attempted to pose as Nazis in order to cause panic and outrage. Way back in the 1990s or early part of this century, the sceptical Ufolks at Magonia reported the furore surrounding the appearance of another bunch of neo-Nazis in the greater London area. This group styled themselves the Imperial League of British Fascists, and were photographed in the local press in Nazi regalia. Further investigation, however, revealed that there was no such Imperial League, and the assembled stormtroopers were merely the supposed informant, who revealed the story to the press, and his mates having a tasteless laugh.

The Fake Nazis of German TV News

Something similar happened in Germany at about the same time. The Fortean Times reported a case, where a group neo-Nazis supposedly filmed in secret goose-stepping about and generally lowering the standards of the Bundesrepublik, were also found to be the film-maker’s own mates in fancy dress. The film-maker had started a scam in which he produced bogus footage of fringe groups performing weird rituals, and then sent them in to the local news programmes on German television as supposedly real events. For which he was paid. He started with the KKK, then moved to the Odinists and Germanic Neo-Pagans before finally being caught with the Nazis. A particularly eagle-eyed viewer noticed that some of the stormtroopers were the same people as the Klansmen and pagans in his other films.

It’s a funny incident, but underneath the comedy is the sobering, horrific reality of the Third Reich and its murder of tens of millions purely because of their race and political beliefs. Contemporary Germany is still coming to terms with the Hitlerdiktatur and its horrors, which means that stunts like this go beyond a joke.

Bonehill – Not Artist, Just Bully

So, if Bonehill is only posing as Nazi as part of some twisted idea of trolling the public and the Far Right, then he’s not the first by any means. Others have done it long before, and no doubt there’ll be similar idiots doing the same in the future as long as the Nazis and their shock value retain some kind of perceived comedic potential.

Possibly the best thing that can be said of many of these individuals, like the German Nazis in the spoof footage, and the Imperial League of British Fascists, is that they stopped when they were finally caught out. Laibach, by far the best of them, knew when to pack it all in and just carry on as rock musicians. Although their music was partly a pastiche of Nazi forms, they had a following, which recognised this as an artistic statement, rather than a genuine political stance , which allowed them to go on long after they had given up the joke.

Bonehill, by contrast, seems to be just a genuinely malign and unpleasant character, who seems to get some kind of perverse pleasure through being personally insulting and persecuting his victims. He is responsible, after all, for posting grotesquely libellous smears against others, including manufacturing a fake image of a Labour election poster for a particularly controversial Black female politico, claiming that she hates Whites.

There’s no artistic value in these antics. Bonehill doesn’t have the musical talents of Bowie, Sid Vicious, Siouxie Sioux or Laibach, and, unlike some of the provocations of the extreme Left, he can’t and doesn’t justify these as Situationist happenings, as Malcolm McLaren did with the excesses of the Punks. It just seems to be personal abuse and victimisation, simply from a bizarre, malicious delight in tormenting others. It’s bullying, pure and simple, no better than the weird personal abuse meted out online by other, normal trolls, who at least don’t try to justify their actions through appeals to David Bowie’s stage antics four decades ago.

This is, of course, assuming that Bonehill is a ‘Hollywood Nazi’. He may well be, but if he is, it appears that there’s also something inside him that enjoys the feelings of malign power he gets by posing as a wannabe dictator.
Whatever the reality is, he’s unpleasant, and it’s long past time the trolling and vilification stopped.

Tory candidate calls rural voters “straw-sucking yokels”

April 30, 2015

Heaton-Jones has tried to excuse his comments, made when he was a DJ in Wiltshire, as just something he said in order to stir things up a bit. At the time he was trying to be a shock jock. Among other comments he made, he said he was sick of whingeing farmers, and their complaints that they were being ripped off by the supermarkets. I know farming folk in Wales, and this isn’t a whinge: it’s a legitimate complaint. They are not getting a fair price for their produce and it is hurting them, and so damaging our countryside.

Heaton-Jones wrote his piece in response to a march through Wiltshire by members of the Countryside Alliance in support of fox hunting. He’s right about the stupid cruelty of the fox hunting brigade, but completely wrong about some of the real issues that may also have motivated some to join the protests.

Since they emerged in the 17th century, the Tories have always been the party of the ‘landed interest’ – the aristocracy and the large gentlemen farmers. This, however, shows the real contempt they have for rural Britain, and how low an opinion they have of its people.

This isn’t really particularly surprising, as the Tories now represent the London metropolitan elite. Nobody else really matters, and certainly not the ‘straw-sucking yokels’ outside the capital. A few years ago, the Daily Mail’s Liz Jones filled her column with bile and hate about her new home and neighbours in Exmoor. She had moved to that part of the West Country following the break-up of her marriage. The pieces she wrote tended to be long, extended laments about how unfortunate she, a proper urban sophisticate was, to be living in out in the boondocks with such uneducated peasants. The Mail loved it, but her neighbour’s didn’t: somebody fired a shotgun at her letterbox.

Heaton-Jones seems to have much the same attitude and prejudices as Jones, but possibly without the same grotesque, maudlin self-pity. His prospective constituents should give him the heave-ho on the 7th.

Pride's Purge

(not satire – it’s the Tories!)

Perhaps not quite the level of pleb – but referring to your predominantly rural electorate as “straw-sucking yokels” is perhaps not the best way to win over voters.

So it will be interesting to see if these remarkable comments by Peter Heaton-Jones  – the Tory candidate for the very rural constituency of North Devon – affect his chances for election on May 7th.

To be fair, in the same article Heaton-Jones also referred to “chinless foxhunters”, so he obviously wasn’t completely off the mark:

Conservative candidate says ‘straw-sucking yokels’ jibe was ‘not my view’

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UKIP candidate calls Gurkhas “parasites” and “mercenaries”

April 30, 2015

I would say that this shows the weird racism and xenophobia in UKIP almost at its most anti-patriotic and historically illiterate. Unfortunately, nearly every day brings news of another pronouncement by UKIP that is almost as stupid and offensive.

To most Brits, the Gurkhas are very far from mercenaries. They have fought courageously and proudly for Britain for over 150 years. This began after a battle between British and Nepalese forces, which impressed the Gurkha people that we were worthy warriors, with whom they could serve with honour.

Their contribution to Britain’s armed forces and their service fighting for us and with us is greatly valued by the British public. This was seen a few years ago when Joanna Lumley won a resounding victory for her campaign to get the public to lobby parliament to support Gurkha soldiers and their families.

Walker’s comments are especially offensive this week, when the British public’s thoughts will be with the Nepalese people following the devastating earthquake.

Looking down at the comments, there have been the usual claims that Walker’s Twitter account was hacked, and that this was a fake post by Joshua Bonehill. Well, it’s not impossible. The Yeovil Caudillo has a history of posting malign material under sockpuppets or under the guise of others in order to smear them. And he has recently done this to another Kipper. Unfortunately, it seems all too likely that this comes from Walker himself, following Raheem Kassam’s comment that Kippers will automatically claim their accounts have been hacked when their comments get them into hot water. Kassam is one of Farage’s advisors, so this pretty much comes from the horse’s mouth.

Pride's Purge

(not satire – it’s the UKIP!)

UPDATE: Walker seems to have deleted his Twitter account – obviously hoping he got away with it. I imagine he’s going to pretty unhappy there are screenshots of his comments (see below).

Bill Walker – UKIP’s parliamentary candidate for Aldershot – thinks Gurkhas and their families are parasites:

ukip gurkhas

Shortly after this, Walker also retweeted a comment from a colleague referring to Gurkhas as “mercenaries”:

mercenaries ghurkas

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Wonder if it’s official UKIP policy that people who are prepared to risk their lives serving in the British Army are parasites?

Anyone fancy asking Nigel Farage?

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Charity Commission tells charities that signed pro-Tory letter to “remedy the situation swiftly”

April 30, 2015

This is quite ironic, considering that in the 1980s the Freedom Association, then known as the National Association for Freedom (NAFF – honestly!) tried to get the Charities Commission to throw out Oxfam and a number of other charities because they were supposedly political groups, rather than simple charitable organisations.

And of course, this follows hard on the heels of the revelations that the letter from businessmen supporting the Tories came from the Conservatives themselves, particularly friends of Samantha Cameron. And even then, several of the businesses they simply assumed would support them have now asked to be left off the list.

It just shows the sheer arrogance of the Tories and the sense of aristocratic entitlement running through them that they automatically expect support, regardless of the legal niceties of the situation, and frequently don’t bother with actually consulting the organisations themselves to see if they actually do.

Pride's Purge

(not satire – it’s the UK today!)

A spokesman for the Charity Commission has given a strong statement concerning four charities which supposedly signed a pro-Tory letter in the Daily Telegraph:

“Signing a letter in support of a political party is not a legitimate activity for a charity. We will be writing to all four charities to establish the facts and expect them to remedy the situation swiftly if they have not done so already. The commission will decide what further action, if any, is necessary once the charities have responded.”

One of the charities – Diverse Cymru – has already asked the newspaper to delete its name from the letter, which it says was included “in error” – but their requests have so far been ignored by both the Tories and the Telegraph.

More details here:

Charity Commission writes to four charities that signed pro-Tory letter in The Daily Telegraph

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Related articles…

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Brixton Rises Up As Rage Against The Rich Explodes Across The Capital

April 27, 2015

This is another story about unrest in the metropolis that somehow doesn’t seem to have been reported elsewhere in the country. It doesn’t seem to have been in any of the papers. More evidence of the deliberate under-reporting of demonstrations against the Condem regime.

I don’t agree with the violence nor the vandalism, but I can well sympathise with the despair and anger behind it. The developers and elite letting agents like Foxtons should have expected it. After all, there has been considerable anger at the way Notting Hill, a predominantly working class Black area, has been colonised by the middle class White media set. There have been similar campaigns against the gentrification of poor Black areas in America, most notably around the brownstone properties in New York.

And when people in a poor community like Brixton with a deep-seated resentment at the poverty and racial injustice they’ve suffered, are faced with losing their homes to the extremely rich, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the situation would become explosive.

As for Tessa Jowell and her plans to enable people to negotiate a three year tenancy with their landlords, this is Labour trying its best not to alarm the middle classes before the election, and give more ammunition to the Daily Mail, the Torygraph and the Murdoch press. This really won’t make much difference, as these papers are all aligned against them anyway. Murdoch has even said that if Miliband gets in, his papers are finished. Which in its own way, is as good an endorsement of the Labour leader as any other.

the void

reclaim-brixton1On the Sunday Politics show yesterday Labour’s Tessa Jowell admitted that her party’s proposed three year tenancies are voluntary.  Tenants will be able to ‘negotiate’ a three year contract but landlords will be under no obligation to provide one.

What a fucking joke, and one that shows the Labour Party are every bit as out of touch as the chinless toffs they pretend to oppose.  According to one property firm there are currently 5 tenants chasing each private rental property on the market across the UK and in London that jumps to 8 people desperately competing for every home.  If Jowell thinks that tenants have any bargaining power at all when the odds are so heavily stacked against them then she is living in a dream world – or at least a world where she doesn’t ever have to worry about having no home.

When one of our most basic…

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Hedge fund manager donates to Lib Dem schools minister hoping for further privatisation of schools

April 27, 2015

This isn’t the first or the only time private enterprises looking to run schools have made handsome donations to the Coalition parties in order to get a foot in the door teaching – or indoctrinating – Britain’s schoolchildren.

And it hasn’t just been hedge fund managers. One of the donors has been a certain Mr R. Murdoch, formerly Australian, now resident across the Atlantic in America. The Dirty Digger also fancies himself running some of Britain’s schools in a privatised educational system.

In which case, God help us all. Murdoch has built his journalistic success appealing to the lowest common denominator. The standards on the Sun are barely literate, and even the intellectual level of the venerable Times went down after he bought that. Plus the fact that his editors have displayed all the moral integrity of Walter Matthau’s character in the Jack Lemon/ Walter Matthau movie, The Front Page. Letting Murdoch educate our children really would be letting the blind lead the blind.

Pride's Purge

(not satire – it’s the UK today!)

A leading hedge fund manager has donated substantial amounts of money to the general election campaign of Lib Dem schools minister David Laws.

But why would a Hedge Fund manager be giving money to a former Lib Dem Schools Minister?

Could it be because the main hedge fund manager in question – Paul Marshall – is on the board of a leading private chain of schools which is in line to take over even more lucrative state school contracts if Laws wins re-election?

The fact is that UK schools – just like our hospitals – have now become an extremely profitable and lucrative business to City fat cats.

And be sure there will be more of this – much much more of this – if we have another 5 years of Lib Dem and Tory ministers selling off our hospitals and schools.

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Company demands Tories remove director’s signature from business letter

April 27, 2015

Yet more embarrassment for the Tory party as they try to pose as the party of the small businessman. The letter printed by the Telegraph purporting to come from 200 businessmen was also equally bogus. It now turns out that most of those, who signed that were friends of Sam Cam.

Not that we weren’t really warned about the Tory propensity for lies and falsehoods before. The Conservatives have lied their way through this parliament with false statements and doctored statistics. They lied so badly to get into power, that their election promises have been taken down and officially rubbed out of Tory history from their website.

We should have known how lightly the Tories value truth, honesty and open government from David Cameron’s job. Is he an economist? No. Political scientist? No. Businessman, like Michael Howard? Don’t be daft. He’s a PR man. His job is to spin, produce slanted news and doctor information to get the results he wants. He’s a professional liar, who runs a government of liars.

Pride's Purge

(not satire – it’s the Tories!)

Oh dear.

Looks like the Tories’ letter supposedly from small business owners is already unravelling:

Tory business letter

It also appears the letter was mostly signed by Tory Party activists and people who don’t even own a business.

Not surprising that, seeing as real surveys show that most small and medium-sized business owners in fact prefer Labour:

Tories the party of business? Nope. More business owners support Labour

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Vox Political on the Mail’s ‘Worst Crisis Since Abdication’

April 26, 2015

There’s been talk this week of Labour forming some kind of pact with the SNP. Some of this has come from the SNP themselves, who have been keen to show their voters that a vote for them will still leave Scotland with power in Westminster through a weakened Labour party forced into coalition with them. Sturgeon’s predecessor, Alex Salmond, was heard at one point making a joke that he was already writing Labour’s budget.

Much of this also comes from the Tories, who are trying to scare the electorate with the prospect of a Labour/SNP coalition raising taxes and breaking up the three-hundred year union between England, Wales and Scotland. This reached its most extreme point so far, when the Mail on Sunday quoted Theresa May as declaring that this was Britain’s greatest constitutional crisis since abdication.

Even the guests on Andrew Marr’s show this morning thought that this was going too far, and smacked of desperation by the Tories.

Mike over at Vox Political has this article on it, Mockery of May and the Mail: Worst crisis since when? Mike points out the irony of this headline. A coalition between the SNP and Labour, which Ed Miliband has said will not happen, is deemed by the Mail to be worse than the abdication of Edward VIII, a Nazi supporter. The same Daily Heil was that was run by a Nazi sympathiser with a hatred of Jews at the same time.

The twitterati have also found the Mail’s hysteria immensely funny, and have produced their own list of crises that are as bad or worse as the abdication. Like having to tell Jeremy Clarkson his dinner’s not ready. Or finding out that Button Moon wasn’t real. Even John Prescott cracked a joke at the paper’s expense, tweeting about how he had to eat fish and chips without vinegar.

Mike goes on to quote the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour, who said May was entitled to her opinion, but she was wrong to impugn the legitimacy of a free and fair election.

The cartoonist Gary Baker also stated that it was a good job May didn’t have real issues to deal with, like child abuse, otherwise her comments would seem puerile.

Mike’s article can be read at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/04/26/mockery-of-may-and-the-mail-worst-crisis-since-when/. Go there and see some of the things that count as a terrible crisis of the same magnitude as the abdication.

The Mail, of course, has a very long history of making hysterical claims about the effects of a Labour government. Remember how a decade ago there were reports of an asteroid out in space that was poised to smash into Earth, ending life as we know it? Private Eye spoofed the Mail by producing a mock Daily Mail headline declaring that due to the asteroid, house prices would plummet and Labour was to blame. Which pretty much describes the Mail’s fixation with mortgages, house prices and the Labour party.

Behind May’s comment there are some very sinister implications. By declaring a coalition between SNP and Labour a crisis of the same type as the abdication, as Patrick Wintour points out, she seems to imply that the results of an election between the two would be invalid. If that’s the case, then what is she implicitly suggesting? That the election result should be declared null and void? New elections held, until the ‘right’ party won, and the union was safe once again? Or perhaps she thinks that, in the event of such a coalition, Cameron, Farage and Clegg should seize power at the head of the army, and rule as a military junta? Thatcher was a big fan of General Pinochet after all, and Cameron strikes me as a man, who would just love to be Britain’s General Franco. And if the Scots ever voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, would May then recommend that the army should be sent in to stop them seceding?

Now I don’t actually think the Tories believe any of this. It’s just rhetoric to scare the voters, just like all the scare stories in the past about Labour being really a front for the Communist party, ready to turn Britain into a Soviet satellite. Frederick Forsythe, one of Thatcher’s favourite novelists, wrote a book about that way back in the 1990s. Needless to say, Maggie liked it enormously, as it reinforced her own bonkers paranoid suspicions about the British Left.

The Soviet Union, alas for the Tories, has vanished along with the rest of the Communist bloc. And as most of the Russian oligarchs are now funding the Tories, they can’t run another Zinoviev letter scare, like they did with the Sun in 1987. So they’re reduced to running bizarre headlines like this in Daily Fail.

It’s ridiculous, but the superpatriots in the Tory party will believe it. Along with the Kippers. In a recent interview with the Scottish Herald, David Coburn, the controversial UKIP politico declared that living in Scotland was like Communist Czechoslovakia. Somehow, I can’t see anyone who really grew up in Communist Eastern Europe agreeing. Like the Czechs and Slovaks, who have come over here since their countries joined the EU.

National Front Intimidation of Labour Canvassers in Broadstairs, Kent

April 26, 2015

The stormtroopers of the Far Right may be declining in the numbers, but they’re still up to their old tricks. I found this video on the SlatUKIP page of them marching up and down the seafront in Broadstairs in Kent, yelling abuse at the Labour canvassers there. The video was originally taken by the goose-steppers themselves, who for some reason decided to take it down. But not before it was saved and put up by the good peeps at the SlatUKIP site. It’s at

The stormtroopers can be heard shouting ‘paedophile appeasers’, presumably referring to the atrocious behaviour by Rotherham council in covering up the systematic abuse of White girls by the Asian grooming gang.

However, rape, child abuse and sexual exploitation are by no means confined to any one section of the community. And the stormtroopers of the Far Right have absolutely no business accusing anyone of child abuse. Not when so many members of the British Nazi fringe have been convicted of crimes against children. See the various articles at Hope Not Hate and over at EDL News. There’s an entire article there listing the various Nazis, who have been found guilty of abusing children. Just be warned – it’s a very long, and ignominious one.

A few years ago when it looked like the BNP was going to make its electoral breakthrough, Nick Griffin tried his best to play down his party’s thuggish reputation. They weren’t goose-stepping, ugly bruisers looking to beat up anyone, who happened to be a different colour, or believed in the dangerously subversive idea of democracy and equality. No, they were respectable, community-based politicians.

Then the BNP suffered a massive decline in support, and once again split into various warring factions. And as the numbers dwindled, the Fascists turned back to their roots and all the old ways began to come back. So it’s back to anti-Semitism, and abuse and intimidation of Blacks and Asians, and, of course, the Left.

Gulzabeen Afsar, UKIP and Nazi Anti-Semitism

April 26, 2015

Earlier today I reblogged Tom Pride’s piece, reporting a tweet from the Tory councillor Gulzabeen Afsar that she would never support ‘al Yahud’ Miliband. Al-Yahud is Arabic for ‘the Jew’. It’s a blatant statement of anti-Semitism.

Her statement is somewhat ironic, as Ed Miliband has been criticised by some British Jews for not being as pro-Israel as they feel he should. Moreover, there are initiatives by the Jewish and Islamic communities in Britain to overcome prejudice and extremism and establish good relations between them. There was a section about this on the Beeb’s One Show a few weeks ago.

And it hasn’t just been in Britain. In Norway about a month ago Muslims formed a protective shield around a local synagogue against attack by Fascists during a neo-Nazi demonstration.

Afsar’s anti-Semitism seems to come from the bizarre conspiracy theories that were deliberately imported into the Islamic world by the Nazis in their attempt to find allies in the Middle East and North Africa during the Second World War. Before then, the Islamic world was much less anti-Semitic than Europe.

And anti-Semitism is hardly confined to parts of the Tories, or sections of the British Muslim community. A very high percentage of Kippers stated that they did not want a Jewish prime minister. And the meme below is directed against one Kipper politico, who has made statements showing he believes all the anti-Semitic conspiracy bilge claiming that the Second World War was deliberately created by the Jews. He also denied the Holocaust.

Kipper Holocaust Denial

The Kippers are, of course, horrendously Islamophobic. There’s hardly a week goes by with some Kipper, somewhere, saying something monstrous about Muslims. Both Afsar’s and this joker’s views ultimately come from the Nazis. And they have absolutely no place in 21st century Britain, regardless of the colour or faith of the person saying them.