Just before Christmas, Hope Not Hate, the anti-Fascist, anti-religious extremist magazine published their list of Christmas turkeys. These were the top ten Fascists, who had done so much to destroy to destroy the British Far Right fringe with their own incompetence and massive stupidity. It’s a black comedy, considering that these people are violent racists, who have led bloody attacks on left-wingers, Blacks, Asians, gays and now increasingly Muslims. But these idiots are also something of a laughing stock, and deserve all the mockery and ridicule they get.
The first on the list, at number ten, is Andrew Brons. Brons was the leader of the Strasserite wing of the National Front. Like many of the above ‘national revolutionaries’, he’s also had run-ins with Britain’s finest. He got into Private Eye when he was campaigning a few years ago, which reminded everyone of an incident in the early ’70s. Brons had been in Birmingham with another member of the Aryan Herrenvolk screaming slogans in Nazi uniform. One of Birmingham’s finest, who had an Asian surname, came up to him to have a word and tell him to decease. Brons immediately had the affrontery to hide behind British freedom of speech, and inform the rozzer that he didn’t expect the cop to understand that, because he came from an inferior race.
It’s a bizarre and hypocritical defence, considering that Fascists don’t believe in freedom of speech, along with irritating other little bits like democracy, the rule of law, the right to a fair trial and so on. I think the cop had a better understanding of it all than he did. I can’t quite remember the rest of the tale, but I got the impression that the rest of the conversation probably took place at the police station.
Sorry about the sexual explicitness of this article, but it shows how bizarre and prudish Thatcher’s attitude to sexual awareness was.
Amongst the documents released under the thirty year rule yesterday were a number that revealed the battle between Norman Fowler and Maggie over how much the general public should be told about the transmission of HIV. There was a serious fear in Britain and the rest of the world that unless action was taken, AIDS would become a massive epidemic that would carry off millions of lives. It has, it is true, done so, and continues to do so, especially in Africa. The fear in Britain and other parts of the western world was that the contagion would be far more severe, perhaps even comparable with the Black Death which destroyed between a third and a half of the European population in the late 14th century.
Governments in Britain, America, New Zealand and Australia rushed out public information films to inform people of the dangers of this terrifying new disease. The one shown in Australia/NZ was particularly horrifying, as it showed Death knocking down people like bowling pins. In America, the approach was rather more subtle. All governments were urging their peoples to use condoms during sex to prevent the spread of the infection. American prudishness and sensitivity meant that in their films, contraception couldn’t be explicitly mentioned. The film therefore showed someone putting on a sock to protect his feet, while giving a little speech urging people to put similar items on if they wanted to protect themselves while having sex. A number of comedians made jokes about how ridiculous and spectacularly uninformative this was at the time.
But Maggie Thatcher seems to have shared some of those prudish attitudes. Fowler wished to publish a string of adverts in newspapers and magazines pointing out the particular dangers of anal sex. At the time this accounted for 85% of all cases. Thatcher, however, wanted to block this, as she was afraid that if the great British public found out about it, they’d start doing it.
At which point, you begin to wonder precisely where Thatcher got her ideas on sex from, and how much she really understood the people over whom she ruled. Perhaps well brought up ‘gels’ of her class and generation weren’t supposed to know about such things, rather like the massive sexual ignorance that plagued 19th century England. Unfortunately, even my grandparents’ time, such basic biological facts as menstruation weren’t taught in schools, so that many girls were frightened and bewildered by the changes that their bodies underwent at puberty.
And in the first half of the 20th century, when homosexuality was illegal, a number of people really didn’t know it even existed until they were in the early adulthood. I can remember a friend of mine telling me about one writer or actor, I’ve forgotten quite who, who said that he was in the 20s when he found out that there were such things as gays. And even then, his first reaction was that the person who told him was pulling his leg.
But by the time Thatcher got into power in the 1980s, people knew about gays and anal sex all right. All Thatcher needed to do to find out about this was to have one of her cabinet ministers tell her some of the coarse jokes being bandied around bars and pubs. Or school playgrounds. I found out about it all in secondary school, where there were some very crude jokes. Many of the circumlocutions used for gay men also referred obliquely to anal sex. In 19th century England one of such euphemisms was ‘gentleman of the back door’. Lenny Henry had a section on his TV show at the time, sending up the contemporary vogue for screen adaptations of novels set in pre-independence India. These were The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India. Henry spoofed them and the racial attitudes behind them as ‘The Jewel in India’s Passage’, which is surely a double entendre on the back passage, the human rectum. Just a few years ago Julian Clary made the same double entendre in the title of his autobiography, A Young Man’s Passage.
Or Thatcher could simply have turned the TV on. The 1980s saw a number of dramas, which included gay characters, or dealt with gay relationships. Gay sex could not be shown on TV, along with masturbation and bestiality, but even so there was a new sexual frankness there. And some of the comedies could be extremely explicit and very coarse, despite the traditional constraints on what was fit for broadcast. One of the programmes I remember on ITV at the time was Spooner’s Patch’, a police comedy about a particularly coarse and boorish police captain and his unit. It was written by Galton and Simpson, the pair responsible for the classic Steptoe and Son, who really should have known better. One episode included homosexuality, and had Spooner making a number of very coarse and bigoted comments about ‘brown hatters’. These were very clear in describing homosexuality in terms of anal sex, even if they didn’t describe it in those exact terms. It was all a very long way away from the 1950s, when comics and comedy writers were told they could not makes jokes about ‘effeminacy in men’, along with other taboo subjects such as religion, the monarchy, disability or the colour question.
What made Thatcher’s views even more anachronistic and misplaced is that a few years previously there had been the massive scandal surrounding the gay affair Jeremy Thorpe had with a male model, leading blackmail demands and a hitman allegedly being hired to shoot the man’s dog. This was so notorious that it led to schoolchildren using ‘Jeremy’ as a term of abuse.
All this shows just out of touch and petit bourgeois Thatcher and her sexual attitudes actually were. Now there are genuine issues about how much children should be taught about sex in schools, including homosexuality. Children do need some, if only to understand their bodies, the physical changes that go with puberty, and the need to protect themselves against STDs, and not just AIDS. There are those, who would prevent them knowing even about that. Peter Hitchens, the Conservative journalist and writer for the Mail on Sunday, opposes sex education on the grounds that it was started in Hungary in order to break the power of conservative Christian parental attitudes. He believes it encourages promiscuity. This is news to me. I remember the sex education we had at school, how awkward some of out teachers looked talking about it. And despite raging teenage hormones, the dry descriptions of the act were quite enough to put you off it. In the same way, Thatcher must have been out of her tiny little mind to think that knowing about anal sex would make the rest of British society want to try it. Anyone already interested in experimenting with gay sex was far more likely to be influenced by David Bowie and the sexual ambiguity of his Ziggy Stardust persona than get even remotely turned on by an advert warning of the dangers of a terrible and debilitating disease.
There are reasonable limits to how much children should be taught about sex and when. But adults reading newspapers and magazines are different. People need to be informed. And, to paraphrase the slogan used about the disease at the time, it’s not just AIDS which will kill you due to ignorance.
Yesterday, documents released to the public under the thirty-year rule included a memo Oliver Letwin wrote to Maggie Thatcher on the riots in 1985. These included a number of racist statements revealing Letwin’s contempt and absolute lack of any kind of sympathy or understanding of Black Britons and the problems facing them at that time. He denied that the rioting was due to racism, despite the fact that this was extremely well-documented in the Met police. He stated that riots, and the problems of crime, and social inequality plaguing the Black community were due to their moral defects and declared that White people didn’t riot. This comes as news to me, as one of the areas in Bristol that has been hit by rioting is Hartcliffe. This was a council estate, built in the 1960s as dormer suburb to house the workers at the local Wills tobacco factory. It also has had its problems with high crime and increasing marginalisation. It’s population is also largely White. Letwin also didn’t want to see ‘positive discrimination’ introduced, and sneered at welfare spending on the Black poor stating that they would merely use the money for discos and drugs.
Letwin has apologised for the memo. Nevertheless, it’s contents are so offensive that the long-time Black activist, Darcus Howe, has stated that it borders on the criminal. He had no confidence in David Cameron to do anything for the Black people of Britain, and called on Corbyn to use this incident to show his support for British Blacks, and that Labour was no longer the party of Blair and the two Milibands.
I’ve mixed feelings about Howe. At times his attitudes are too bitter, and he does seem determined to put the worst racist interpretation on matters. A few years ago at the turn of the century one of the terrestrial TV channels did a programme in which he looked at the Caribbean today, and its heritage. The tone was almost unrelentingly bitter. He seemed to hate the fact that portraits of the historic leaders of one of the Caribbean nations were still on the walls of the country’s legislature, and condemned the four hundred years or so of British rule in the West Indies for the suffering this had inflicted on his people. In this, obviously, he has a point. The economies of the Caribbean nations were built on slavery almost from the moment they were colonised by Europeans. Many of the leading figures in colonial society – the governors and presidents – were slave-owners and the architects of the racist social and economic system on the islands. Having said that, there is still an argument for keeping their pictures around, as they are part of the history of the Caribbean nations. Regardless of how immoral the regime over which they presided was, they were still founders of the modern Caribbean states and so need to be remembered, even though their racial attitudes and policies totally deserve to be condemned.
Elsewhere, Howe seemed to have missed the point. There was a group of White West Indians, including a few White Brits, down by the docks toasting the victories of the British navy over the Spanish. Howe raged that they were celebrating the enslavement of his people. But they weren’t. They were celebrating the British navy repeatedly defeating the Spanish. Now at the time those victories were part of the British campaign to wrest the Caribbean from the Spanish Empire, and developing it using slave labour. But the Brits did not toast the introduction of slavery or the enslavement of Blacks. It was a nationalist, rather than racist, celebration. And really all about jolly British tars like Walter Raleigh singeing the king of Spain’s beard. Slavery was not mentioned.
But here Howe does have a point. And, despite Letwin’s apologies, and recent Tory attempts to win over Black voters, I really don’t think attitudes have changed in the Tory party. I’ve been told by former party members that the Tory party generally doesn’t like Blacks. Mind you, they also despise the White poor.
The attitude of the Conservative party and New Labour is that poverty is caused by the moral failings of the individual. If you’re poor, it’s because you’re lazy, or ‘feckless’, in the words of Gordon Brown. ATOS and now Maximus were called in to administer the ‘fitness for work’ tests in order to prevent as many people as possible claiming invalidity benefit. As very many bloggers have pointed out, including the Angry Yorkshireman and Johnny Void, modern Tory welfare policy is centred on the Victorian concept of ‘less eligibility’. Welfare is supposed to be made as difficult and demeaning as possible in order to deter people from claiming it.
And I’ve no doubt the majority of Tories really are afraid that giving the poor money is wasteful, and that they will just use it on ‘discos and drugs’, or alcohol and superfluous consumer products that they shouldn’t be able to afford.
So I’m not impressed by Letwin’s apology either. It may well be that he’s moved on, and is no longer as racist as he was. But the same attitudes towards poverty and social exclusion remain at the very centre of the Tory party and their attitudes towards the poor and working class, and particularly, but by no means exclusively, Blacks.
British Fascist Leader Oswald Mosley unfurls the Fascist Flag in Westminster, 1932.
This is another video from The Young Turks. They’ve done a number of reports on violence at Trump rallies, where the crowd or stewards have beaten up protestors. In this piece, they discuss an incident where a ‘celebrity boxer’, Todd ‘the Punisher’ Poulton, slammed into and knocked to the ground a protester. The man had dared to call Trump a ‘Fascist’.
This is exactly like Oswald Mosley’s rallies in Britain in the 1930s and then just after World War II. Mosley was the leader of the British Fascist party, the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Or to give it its full name, the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. Their rallies and marches were notorious for the violence meted out to their opponents. The Fascist stewards, the ‘Biff Boys’, were trained by a boxer, Ted Lewis. Lewis was Jewish, and for a long time this led many historians to believe that Mosley was a late convert to anti-Semitism. In fact, recent studies of Mosley, like Steven Dorrell’s Blackshirt, show that he was an anti-Semite from the start.
After the War, Mosley tried to make a comeback, ditching the Fascist uniform in favour of ordinary suits. In his manifesto, Mosley: Right or Wrong? he argues for an apartheid Britain, from which Blacks and the majority of Jews have been expelled. Those that remain are kept rigidly separate from the gentile, White British. Mosley attempted to justify this policy on both racial and cultural grounds. Jewish culture, he argued, was incompatible with ‘British’ values.
Trump is almost exactly like Mosley. Both are extremely rich, though Mosley was an aristo and Trump an American businessman. Both want the expulsion or exclusion of particular ethnic minorities from their countries, and the remainder segregated from the general population.
It’s as if the immense changes and improvements in racial attitudes over the last 80 years simply haven’t happened. It’s astonishing to see something like Donald Trump holding mass rallies in this, the second decade of the 21st century, just like Mosley and his squadristi eight decades before. Surely 45 million were not killed in a terrible global war against Fascism, just for it to come back now?
This is a brilliant little piece from Kyle Kulinski, one of the presenters at the internet news show, Secular Talk. I don’t support the channel’s secularist, anti-religious views, but do agree with much about what they say politically. This is one of the pieces.
A Californian businessman has become so fed up with the corporate corruption of politics, that he has launched a campaign, ‘California Is Not For Sale’. In order to shame the politicians, who accept donations from corporations to represent their interests in Congress, he is pressing for those politicians to have to wear the logos of their sponsors. His acknowledged goal is that every politician, who enters Congress should have a clean suit. In other words, they should represent not their corporate donors, but the people, who elected them.
And the businessman pushing for this change is a Republican. Kulinski points out that this shows how bi-partisan the issue is. Everyone is fed up with the corruption in American politics. Here’s the video.
I think it would be an excellent idea if the same idea was tried over here. British politics is in a very similar situation. Politicians and political parties, including New Labour under Tony Blair, have shown themselves extremely keen to accept donations and sponsorship from corporations. Under John Major this ‘sleaze’ got so bad that Private Eye started publishing the various Tory politicos, who belonged to the drinks corporations when they started voting against the laws proposed to solve some of Britain’s emerging drink problem. And the situation has not got better. The Eye has run many articles over the years documenting the corporate sponsorship of events at the various party conferences, Conservative and Labour. One means by which corporations have entered party politics is by creating various think-tanks to press for certain policies. These are then taken up by the political parties. At the same time, corporations send senior employees to work in the various political parties, supposedly advising and helping them draft legislation. The most notorious example of this is the banks and large accountancy firms, which have sent their employees to work in the Inland Revenue and the treasury, to assist the government in producing ‘tax efficient’ and ‘business-friendly’ financial legislation. Thus the big banks are let off the hook for their role in wrecking the economy, corporations escape paying their rightful share of the tax burden, leaving poor to be hit by welfare cuts and tax increases. All in the name of fiscal responsibility.
I do differ strongly with Kulinski when he says that he wants to get union funding out of politics. The situation is different in America, where there is no real working class party as such. Here in Britain it’s different. The Labour Party was founded by various socialist parties and the trade unions to represent the working class. Hence the name. Thus the trade unions are part of the Labour party, and should continue to be so, whatever Blair or his minions think about severing ties with them.
But otherwise I think this is a great idea. We do need to shame the corporate whores at Westminster, by making them wear the logos of the companies, who bought them. After all, if they’re proud – or shamelessness enough – to display and boast of the firms sponsoring the events at the party conference, then they should have the guts to wear their badges in parliament.
This is another excellent piece I found on 1000 Natural Shocks (over 18s only). I’ve blogged several times about the way the rich justify their power and wealth, and the vast inequalities in society, by demonising the poor. They ease their consciences by declaring that if the many are poor, it’s somehow because it’s their fault. They’re lazy, feckless and immoral. The whole Tory welfare policy of taking benefits away from people in order to somehow encourage them to find work is based on this.
The great 19th century American novelist was well aware of such prejudices, as this quote very succinctly shows.
I found this meme over at 1000 Natural Shocks (over 18s only), explaining the real reason why capitalism will collapse.
This was actually one of the contradictions realised by the critics of orthodox economic theory, such as Major C.H. Douglas, the inventor of the Social Credit movement. He argued that Britain was suffering from ‘poverty amidst plenty’, where goods and services were available. It was just that ordinary people couldn’t afford them. He therefore recommended giving people vouchers as well as money so they could purchase food and other necessities.
Social Credit never took on, except in Western Canada where it’s another far-right, Nazi movement by any other name. The problem Douglas identified is real, and is getting worse. It was supposed to have been solved by Keynesianism and the welfare state, but as that was ostentatiously junked by Thatcher in favour of monetarism – though she did surreptitiously return to Keynesian economics later in her regime – the problem has got worse. It’s why a town in Canada and now Finland have tried to eradicate poverty by giving all their citizens a guaranteed income, and why similar schemes are being backed by parts of the German Social Democrats.
These are a couple of cartoons I came across on 1000 Natural Shocks (over 18s only), bitterly satirising the way American police shoot and kill Blacks unnecessarily. The first is a response to the shooting of a young Black man in Chicago, and the second a more general reaction to the problem. Many of the victims were unarmed, or were actually walking away when they were shot. Some seem to have been killed simply because they talked back to the officer, who responded violently. This situation escalated under the officer pulled his gun and shot his victim.
I’m reblogging these because the Tories are considering arming the police, supposedly to protect us against a terror attack by allowing them to respond immediately, instead of waiting for the armed police units to arrive. There have already been incidents in Britain where the police have shot and killed innocent people, as I’ve pointed out in my last post. This will only increase the problem, till it reaches a crisis, as in America now.
And the presence of armed police on duty against terrorists has already resulted in the death of an innocent man. This was Jean Charles Menezes, the Brazilian student, who was gunned down by the police in London after he was mistaken for an Islamist terrorist. And this was done by supposedly highly trained and responsible police officers. Arming the ordinary police in preparation for suspected terrorist attacks will just make the deaths of innocents like Senhor Menezes more likely.
And it will increase Muslim disaffection. A few years ago, someone wrote a piece in the Independent arguing that the 1980 riots that broke out up and down Britain were not generally about race, but were ‘local insurrections against the police’. This is also true, though much of the rioting was motivated by racial tension. St Pauls in Bristol was one of the areas hit. It’s an area with a highly ethnically mixed population, including Blacks, Whites and Asians. It was a high crime area suffering from high unemployment, and there was a very heavy police presence. One Black resident of the area has said in a piece in one of the papers that there was a feeling at the time that ‘the police were occupying St Paul’s’.
Now consider the immense disaffection that would similarly break out if armed police start patrolling majority Black or Muslim areas. It’ll lead to similar feeling that the police are ‘occupying’ those areas, and drive some, perhaps only a minority, but certainly some, into the arms of the extremists.
We cannot allow this. Good policing is done by consent, not just armed force. And the latter should always be the last resort.
Mike over at Vox Political reported a few days ago the government’s latest plan to tackle the terrorist threat: armed police. It seems one of the Paris murderers had pictures of Birmingham on his mobile, suggesting that the Islamists were planning an attack there. The government has stated that, at present, it takes too long for armed police units to respond, and are considering arming the police as that they can react immediately to a terrorist attack, or threat of one.
Mike raises the point that armed police have been used as instruments of political oppression, and asks whether anyone thinks it would be a good idea to give them guns now, with this present highly authoritarian government.
It wouldn’t. In fact, it would be a disaster, and potentially make the situation much worse.
Before we come to the issue of armed police being used to suppress freedom and civil liberties, there is the whole issue of how far the public can trust armed police to protect the innocent. And there’s a very large question mark over this. There’s a massive controversy in America at this very moment over ‘Black Lives Matter’, a protest movement that points to the disproportionate number of Black Americans who have been shot and killed by the police unnecessarily. These have included people, who have been unarmed, or were simply running away from the police. Some were violent, but did not present such a threat that lethal force had to be employed. They could simply have been restrained by the cops using their own physical force, or batons and tasers. Unarmed Whites have also been needlessly killed by the rozzers, but the Black community is particularly subject to this kind of lethal policing. This is possibly due to Blacks being perceived as innately more violent, thuggish and threatening than Whites.
And we’ve seen the same phenomenon here in Britain. There were the riots nearly four years ago over the death of Mark Duggan, the criminal who was shot by the police despite being unarmed. And when I was at school, back in the 1980s, there was a huge outcry then after a Black child was accidentally shot by a police officer while searching the child’s bedroom during a raid. There was also another incident in my home city of Bristol, where the cops shot a man, who they believed was armed. He was carrying not a firearm, but a chair leg, and shouting, ‘it’s a chair leg’, when they shot him.
The problem in America is that the police are too willing to use firearms in preference and other, less extreme methods of capturing or subduing a suspect. And I’m afraid that if we arm the police, they will follow this same precedent. And it concerns British police officers as well. Last summer I was talking to the partner of a British police officer, a woman, who has herself tackled violent offenders. He told me that his wife has successfully disarmed potentially lethal situations using simple negotiation, though she had used her own strength when necessary. She believed, along with others in the force, in policing by consent. You can only successfully police a community when that community trusts you. This will may be lost if officers come to rely too much on their firearms. And as far as the American officers, who automatically shot the suspect in response to a potentially violent situation, she had nothing but disdain. They were badly trained. She took pride in the fact that, no matter what dangers she encountered during her working day, she could end her shift knowing that nobody had died.
All this is likely to be jeopardised by arming the police, and especially if they are supposed to be armed against the threat of militant Islamism. There’s already massive discontent amongst Black British about the ‘stop and search’ policy in London, which has seen a disproportionate number of Blacks stopped and harassed by the Fuzz as potential suspects, simply because of their ethnicity. If this attitude is transferred to Muslims, it will provoke similar levels of discontent amongst them. At the moment the authorities are helped by ordinary Muslims, who do report individuals or actions they find suspicious. This will be lost if Muslims believe they’re under suspicion, simply because of they’re faith, with the ordinary and moderate lumped in with the extremists. It’ll isolate those, who still want to help the authorities, who will risk being branded ‘chocolate Muslims’, the Muslim equivalent of the term ‘Uncle Tom’. And it may alienate some even further, driving them into extremism rather than away.
And armed police in general are a real threat to freedom. The communist authorities in the Eastern bloc used military police units to clamp down on civil unrest and demands for democracy. And Putin is pretty much still doing it in today’s nominally democratic Russia. This government is all too willing to turn them into an authoritarian force. Remember the way the police were used to crush the miners’ strike in the 1980s? Blair and the Tories have passed successive legislation to ban and suppress protest marches and demonstrations, especially in front of parliament and Downing Street. There are any number of account of the cops using excessive force against marchers during riots. And one of the provisions in the government’s anti-trade union legislation, which fortunately didn’t get passed, was that strikers and picketers should have to give their names to the police. This was too much even for David Davies, on the Right of the Tory party, who declared it to be ‘Francoist’. And so it is.
The present government are highly authoritarian, and are doing everything they can to stifle dissent and democratic questioning of their authority. Given past examples, it’s absolutely certain that they will used an armed police force to suppress what remaining liberties we have. They’re pretty much Fascists already. They just wear business suits instead of black shirts and jackboots.
I found this cartoons of Trump, showing him for exactly what he is, over at 1000 Natural Shocks (over 18s only). First, there is the picture of him with Hitler.
And here he is as the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, complete with flying monkeys.
Unfortunately, he’s cast his malign spell over far too many Americans.
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