Hope Not Hate on the Disgusting Views of Kipper Lee Harris

As Britain tries to come to turns with the assassination of Jo Cox by a committed, Nazi, Lee Harris, the Kipper candidate for Shotton and South Hefton in the council elections last year, abandoned any attempt at maintaining a tactful silence. While expressing his own disgust at Cox’s murder, Harris posted on social media a strongly worded condemnation of everything Jo Cox stood for. He wrote on social media

Let us not forget that it is cultural Marxist, PC, Europhilic MPs like her we have to thank for the sorry state this nation is in.

Her ideology was cancerous to this nation, and now her comrades shamelessly milk her death in a desperate attempt to shame us into staying in a corporatist dictatorship.

I’m sure some will be offended by this post, and those who are, I know will be the virtue signalling SJW [Social Justice Warriors] that are milking her death in a last ditch attempt at shaming us into staying in the EU.

See: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/ukip/ukip-continue-their-overbearing-sensitivity-4925

This is pretty much typical of some of the verbiage and jargon coming from the extreme Right. Anti-racist activists and those on the genuine Left are attacked as ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and ‘cultural Marxists’. Right-wingers like Harris think that ‘cultural Marxism’ means the Frankfurt school and the tactics formulated by the Italian Communist, Antonia Gramsci, of attempting to change the nature of European and American capitalist society by attacking its culture. It isn’t. ‘Cultural Marxism’ was the term coined by British Marxists when Maggie Thatcher passed a law purging them from teaching in Higher Education. They got round this by making the fine distinction that they weren’t ‘Marxist’, but ‘Marxian’ – that is, they were Marxists by culture, not politics. It’s a very tenuous distinction, but it did manage to allow them to keep their jobs.

As for being called a ‘Social Justice Warrior’, while it is a term of contempt, the fact is that since that social justice – anti-racism, anti-sexism and attitudes to combat poverty and improve the circumstances of the working class, disabled and unemployed, are still under threat. There have been enormous strides made since the 1970s in tacking racism and sexism, but these are still extremely powerful issues where discrimination is very much present. As shown by the fact that Harris and many of the Brexiters haven’t been able to reconcile themselves to the fact that Cox was murdered by someone with a very long commitment to the Nazi Right.

Harris himself has a particular hatred of the Labour party. Hope Not Hate a few piccies of election pamphlets in the above article, in which he promises ‘to continue the failings of the Labour Party. It has let our communities down for too long!’ He also says, ‘Labour once stood for the working class, defending our way of life, defending our jobs, but now all they care about is pandering to big donors and big business. They are the party that started to privatise the NHS after all’.

This is a fair description of the greed and neoliberal economic policies at the heart of Blairite ‘New Labour’, but it doesn’t represent either Ed Miliband or the party’s new leadership under Jeremy Corbyn. As for the EU being a ‘corporatist dictatorship’, there’s a reasonable point mixed in with a gross lie. I’ve put up material discussing the massive power the EU constitution does give to corporations, and there are indeed several points in European commercial law that strongly protect and promote neoliberal economics. However, the EU is not a dictatorship, and it is a gross distortion to say that it is. This line seems to come from the old Eurosceptic idea that the EU is merely Napoleon’s Empire or Adolf Hitler’s Nazi-dominated Europe resurrected and marketed to Europe’s peoples in a more palatable form. It isn’t. It was set up by European statesmen, including Winston Churchill, after the War in the hope that by promoting European unity, such extreme nationalist movements and the drive by individual countries to conquer and dominate the country would be successfully combated. I don’t think it’s been entirely successful. Unfortunately, EU policy does represent too much the interest of the big EU nations, like France and Germany, at the expense of the smaller nations. But I do think that it has done much to promote international peace and reconciliation after the War, and so has done much to calm international tension, even if it has not succeeded in altogether eradicating it.

As for Harris’ comments about the Labour – if Harris was serious about them from a left-wing perspective, he could have joined a number of alternative Socialist groups and organisations. Buddy Hell, over at Guy Debord’s Cat, was so disillusioned with the Blairite takeover the Labour party that he joined Left Unity, if I recall correctly. I think one of the small, alternative Socialist parties was formed from all the trade unionists and Labour party members, who were thrown out of the Labour party because they did not back Bliar and Broon’s austerity campaigns.

But Harris hasn’t done that. Instead he’s moved to the Right, and shown how he despises much of the ideology of the Left with his attacks on ‘social justice warriors’. If you look through many of the classic statements of Socialism, several of them make the point that Socialists champion the working class in order to bring about a classless society, and as part of a general campaign to establish greater social equality. Marx, Engels and the early Fabians had some vile attitudes to what they considered to be less developed, backward nations, but as early as the 1920s the Labour party adopted a policy of granting the colonies their independence at the earliest possibility. Even when they were committed to the British Empire, such as in the book Empire, Your Empire, published by the Left Book club, they were critical of the way Britain’s imperial possessions around the world were being exploited. The author of that book wanted these countries developed, but in the interest of their indigenous peoples. As indeed did the veteran Socialist thinker and writer, G.D.H. Cole.

As for Labour privatising the health service, unfortunately, much of this was done by Bliar and Broon. But they were following policies established in the 1980s by Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe had looked at ways of abolishing the NHS and replacing it with a private medical service such as that in America. They didn’t, because they knew that it would lose them the next election. Also, Patrick Jenkin, the Health Secretary, reported just how awful American medical care was after he went on a fact-finding mission to the US. Nevertheless, she wanted more private medical care in and outside the NHS, including tax relief for people with private medical insurance. She also introduced further charges for hitherto free medical treatments in the NHS. One of these was eye tests at opticians. She stopped that, and then had one of her cabinet ‘vegetables’ try to con the nation into believing that after charges had been introduced, demand had actually gone up. It was Thatcher, who removed compulsory state funding for the elderly in nursing homes, with the result that many people now have to mortgage or sell their elderly relatives’ houses to pay for the tens of thousands of pounds it costs a year to keep them in such homes. She also picked a fight with the dentists, so that the majority left the NHS. And then Peter ‘I’ve got a little list’ Lilley introduced the Private Finance Initiative specifically as a way for big business to make money out of the health service under John Major. Bliar and Broon expanded this cruddy system, but they didn’t invent it.

Despite appealing to working constituents, Harris is, like the Kipper leadership, a Tory. He wants to capitalise on many people’s genuine disaffection from the Labour party due to neoliberal leadership of the Blairites. But he himself is very much a man of the right, and his stance is shown by the fact that he is not concerned with defending the NHS from its privatisation by Cameron and the Lib Dems. This has been going on for over half a decade now. Even last year he could not plead ignorance of it, not if he was serious about defending the NHS or his constituents against austerity and the cuts.

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