My YouTube Video Urging People to Vote Labour to Defend the NHS

I’ve had my own YouTube channel for a few years now. I haven’t posted anything on there for quite a while, and most of the stuff I have posted up there is about archaeology, early musical instruments and few home-made space videos. However, today I put up a video urging people to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour to prevent the Tories privatising the NHS.

I state that it began when Margaret Thatcher came to power as part of her campaign to dismantle the welfare state, but that Thatcher was stopped from doing so by her a cabinet revolt and her Personal Secretary, Patrick Jenkin. The cabinet realised that if she did privatise the NHS, it would immediately result in the Tories losing an election. Also, Jenkin went to America and realised just how bad the American system of private healthcare was. So Maggie settled for trying to expand private healthcare in Britain, aiming to have 25 per cent of the British people take out private health insurance.

A few years later in the 1980s there came a dispute between her and the dentists, which resulted in very many of them leaving the NHS. The result of that is that, while there still are NHS dentists, you need to look for them. And private dental care is not cheap. So people are going without proper dentistry.

After that, Peter Lilley in John Major’s administration introduced the Private Finance Initiative, under which private corporations build and manage hospitals for the NHS. It’s essentially a scheme to keep the costs of construction and management off the books. In practice it’s massively more expensive than simply having them build by the state. Those hospitals, clinics and other medical services built through it also tend to be smaller than through ordinary hospitals built by the state. See the chapter in George Monbiot’s Captive State. This was all done to open up the NHS to private investment.

This programme was expanded by Tony Blair, as he, like the Tories, was approached by private healthcare firms such as Unum, Virgin Health, Circle Health and BUPA to privatise more NHS services. His health secretary, Alan Milburn, wished to reduce the NHS to a kitemark for services provided for the state by private healthcare companies. He split the NHS up and handed its management to CCGs – Community Care Groups. This was supposed to be giving doctors greater freedom and more choice. However, it doesn’t do this as most doctors simply don’t have enough time to spend on administration. The CCGs were given the power to raise money privately, and commission services from private healthcare providers. Again, hospitals and the health centres or polyclinics Blair also built were also to be managed by private companies.

This programme did not stop when David Cameron’s new Conservative government was voted into power in 2010. Cameron had claimed that he going to stop further cuts in the NHS. He didn’t. He expanded the privatisation programme even further. The 2012 healthcare act formulated by his health minister, Andrew Lansley, is a convoluted document, but it removes the Health Secretary from having to provide medical services. Furthermore, the Tories have also passed legislation allowing the NHS to charge for services, even ambulance care. And this is still going ahead under Theresa May.

There is a real danger that the NHS will be abolished, and the country will return to the way it was before the Labour government introduced it. Private healthcare is not more economical and efficient than state healthcare. Private insurance companies and hospitals spend much more on management, including advertising, legal teams and simply trying to raise money from investors, to make sure their shareholders see a profit. There are about 50 million Americans without health insurance. 33,000 Americans die every year from lack of medical care. And it was like that before the NHS, when the charity hospitals, where people were sent if they didn’t have private health insurance, or weren’t covered by the state health insurance scheme, spent much of their time trying to raise money. And millions of people were denied healthcare, because they couldn’t afford it.

Jeremy Corbyn has said that he will renationalise the NHS. Dr. David Owen has also sponsored a bill to renationalise the NHS. They need our support. And so, if you want to keep the NHS, you should vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

For further information, see the following books:
NHS-SOS, edited by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis (London: OneWorld 2015)
Dr. Youseff El-Gingihy, How to Privatise the NHS in 10 Easy Steps (Zed Books)
and my own, Privatisation: Killing the NHS, published by Lulu.

Member of Audience on ‘Question Time’: Tories Just Talk About Brexit and Insult Jeremy Corbyn

This was also posted on YouTube by The Darwinian Left. It’s a very short clip from Thursday’s Question Time, in which a member of the audience states that he can’t understand May’s election strategy. She clearly doesn’t want to hold an election, as she won’t participate in debate or talk to the media. He also says that he hasn’t heard the Tories articulate a single policy on the economy, NHS, education or welfare. All they want to do is talk about Brexit, about which we’ve already had a referendum, and insult Jeremy Corbyn.

The gentleman is entirely correct. And the Tories can’t talk about their policies, because they’re dreadful. Thanks to their continued attacks on the NHS and the welfare state, millions more are in poverty. 8 million people, according to the UN, are in ‘food insecure’ households. Meaning they don’t know where the next meals coming from. The Tories are deliberately running down the NHS in order to prepare it from privatisation. Ditto education, though they’ve had a few setbacks there. They wanted to turn every school into an academy. That failed. They wanted to bring back grammar schools. That was widely attacked and shot down.

They are failures, who have succeeded only in making the extremely rich even richer, while destroying the welfare state in a deliberate policy of making working people poorer. But obviously they can’t say this, as it’ll lose them the election.

And so all they have left is trying to fearmonger about foreigners and smear Jeremy Corbyn. And even in the Brexit negotiations they’re a massive failure. May hasn’t got the deal Britain needs from Europe, though you won’t hear her admit that. And actually, Jeremy Corbyn’s in a much stronger position through his extensive and good relations with European Socialist parties. Though you won’t hear that on the Beeb.

So that leaves the Tories with just insulting Jeremy Corbyn.

There is another element to this clip which I find amusing. It’s the way Dimblebore starts to stammer out a reply, but just can’t manage it, when faced with the obvious truth of this comment.

Ian Hislop Attacks Tories and BBC Pro-Tory Bias on HIGNFY

I found this clip from Friday’s Have I Got News For You on Scot TV’s YouTube Channel. In it, Ian Hislop pointed asks why there haven’t been any questions about the Tories yet on the programme. When told by Kirsty Young that they’re coming, he replies that he hopes not, as there are too many of them already. He then goes to skewer Tory hypocrisy in stealing Ed Miliband’s policy of capping energy prices. When Labour did it, he points out, the Tories yelled that it was ‘very, very bad’. It was interfering in the operation of the market. But when the Tories do it, it’s still interfering, ‘but in a good way’. He also mocked her for her constant refrain about being ‘strong’ and ‘stable’.

There’s also a very nice clip in the programme of May announcing that she intends cutting down on immigration in order to prevent ‘tourism’.

I think this has already happened. It’s a Freudian slip. Despite all their claims, the Tories and their allies in UKIP haven’t been able to cut down on immigration, just as Mike and other left-wing bloggers said they couldn’t. But according to the I newspaper, they have managed to dissuade more tourists from taking their hols in our fair country.

May clearly knew this, and unconsciously let it slip.

As for preventing terrorism by cutting down on immigration, that simply won’t wash. Many of those responsible for Islamist terror attacks were actually born here. And then there is the terrorist atrocities carried out by indigenous White Fascist terrorists, such as the Nazi who bombed a gay pub and Asian restaurant more than a decade ago. I think he killed and maimed thirty people, including a bride. Clamping down on immigration won’t stop Nazis like him doing their best to kill and mutilate decent people of all races. The Tories’ rhetoric on immigration is simply a cynical attempt to exploit racial fears about a situation that they cannot and won’t change, as they hope to be able to play on it again.

Majority Report’s Michael Brooks Urges Brits to Vote Labour against Odious Theresa May

In this clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, the host Michael Brooks urges British voters to support Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party against the Tories and their right-wing agenda. The Majority Report is an American progressive internet news programme. Brooks notes that May has called this snap election, despite lying that she wouldn’t. He also correctly says that she’s claiming its about getting enough support for her to win a strong Brexit. However, the real reason is that the Tories are decimating Labour in the polls. In Brooks’ opinion, this isn’t because Corbyn lacks a strong left-wing programme, but because of strategic mistakes by his campaign team and his own failures in trying to get his points across.

However, Brooks also says that in this speech in the House of Commons, Corbyn is precisely right. He plays a clip showing Jeremy Corbyn attacking the Tories for standing for the rich few against the many poor, for their massive mishandling of the economy, their deliberate incompetence in running down the NHS, and for creating a situation where millions are struggling to make ends meet. The Labour leader sums up their attitude, spearing May’s pretensions to be a strong leader: ‘They are strong against the weak, and weak against the strong’.

Brooks states that’s exactly right, and also mocks May’s wails that she’s ‘strong’, and her bizarre laugh. He also states that Brits should go in for damage limitation and vote Labour, as the Tories will bring in an even harsher austerity regime, which will leave millions much poorer, all for the benefit of the rich corporations. Just as the right has done over in his homeland, America. He also recommends that people in marginal constituencies should vote Green, SNP or Liberal to stop the Tories.

He’s right about Jeremy Corbyn’s analysis of the Tories’ attitude to the poor. They are bullies, who fear and hate the weak and vulnerable, and wish to create an impoverished working and lower middle class, who will be desperate to accept any kind of work, no matter how exploitative, from their lords and masters.

I don’t agree, however, with his analysis of Corbyn’s leadership. It has not been for want of trying that Corbyn trails in the polls. He has been consistently undermined and attacked by the Blairites in Labour, and the press. Corbyn has and is campaigning much harder than May, but you won’t know about this, because the press and the biased BBC won’t report it. Similarly, you won’t hear much about his policies either, in the same way that Tony Benn’s and Ken Livingstone’s policies weren’t properly reported in the 1980s. The press than simply attacked them as dangerous Commies from the ‘loony left’, despite the fact that both were highly rational men, who very carefully considered their policies. And unfortunately it was effective. One of the books I bought on media bias begins with the description from one woman how she was told by a friend that she wouldn’t vote for Tony Benn. This was despite the fact that she shared all of Benn’s beliefs, including getting British troops out of Northern Ireland. When the lady pointed this out, and asked her friend why she wasn’t voting for him after all this, the woman replied that it was because Benn ‘was mad’. The press said so, so it has to be correct.

The press lies, and the campaign against fake news is simply the mainstream press trying to stop their competitors in the new media from spoiling their lies by telling the truth.

Brooks is also wrong when he advises people to vote Lib Dem, SNP and Green in marginal constituencies. I don’t think the Greens are strong enough electorally to be able to get an MP into parliament, even with tactical Labour votes. As for the Lib Dems, I’ve seen no indication that, if people vote for them, they won’t do what they did last time and immediately jump in bed with the Tories. I also very strongly believe that if people return to voting Labour in Scotland, not only will it strengthen the left throughout the UK, it’ll also drive the Tories finally out of Scotland completely.

More Tory Madness at the Polls: Theresa May Most Popular Leader Since Churchill

What are they on?
Or to put it another way, how stupid and gullible do they think the British public is?

I’ve blogged today about the unreliability of the polls. These supposedly show that May has a 16 per cent lead over Jeremy Corbyn, who is, as the Tories and the Blairites are constantly screaming, supposedly unelectable. But those same polls, as Mike has said on his blog, show that the Tory lead apparently fell by eight points in just one week. And the I newspaper also claimed in an article this past week, that while May was in an overall lead, Labour was far more popular with young people.

All this is I can believe. I also mentioned in my last article about the polls a piece by Guy Debord’s Cat, where he argued that polling isn’t designed to provide an objective description of how popular our leaders are, or who really thinks what about a particular issue. They’re carefully manufactured by the polling companies – largely Tory – and the media – also largely Tory – to show the results they want, in the hope of influencing the electorate, thus showing the power of the press as opinion formers.

Hence the constant refrain from the Blairites, the Tories and their lickspittles in the press that Jeremy Corbyn is supposedly massively unpopular with suitable polling figures trotted out to show this. Supposedly. In fact, the media and Corbyn’s opponents within and outside the Labour party are absolutely terrified of him being popular. If – terrible thought! – Corbyn actually wins the election, it will put an end to nearly forty years of Thatcherism in one form or another. The rich might have to start paying their fair share of the public purse again, while the poor might start seeing improvements to wages, services and proper welfare provision. One that provides them with the maintenance they need and treats them with the respect and dignity they deserve. And it will stop the privatisation of the NHS, which UNUM, Branson, BUPA, Circle Health and the other private healthcare providers angling to get some of the market occupied by the NHS are so keen on.

Now I’m prepared to accept that May probably is in the lead over Corbyn in terms of personal popularity, because of the relentless campaign by the mainstream media to promote her. That lead, however, needs to be heavily qualified. Richard Seymour in his book Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics has pointed out that the ‘Project Fear’ the mainstream media has launched against Corbyn in the hope of terrifying people into not voting for him has backfired. People are reacting against the media’s demonization and constant lying. And so far from making Corbyn unpopular, he’s become more so with people expressing their support for the Labour leader, and getting news and information about him, not from the papers, TV or radio, but from social media on the Net. This is being done spontaneously by ordinary people not connected to the Labour party.

But this is one claim about May’s popularity I find extremely difficult to believe.

According to Have I Got News For You, who announced this straight-faced, Theresa May is the most popular British Prime Minister since the War.

As the little lad used to say on Different Strokes way back in the ’80s: ‘What you talkin’ about, Willis?’

So we’re being asked to believe that Theresa May, who doesn’t want to appear in the leader debates, says she doesn’t want to talk to the press, and makes very few public appearances, and when she does, they’re very carefully stage-managed, is more popular than, well, great British Prime Ministers like Clement Atlee, Harold MacMillan, Harold Wilson or even Tony Blair and Maggie Thatcher? Thatcher was a disaster for this country, but she was massively popular. She was also was massively unpopular, to the point where she was supposedly the most popular and unpopular British Prime Minister since the War. She’s still the great, molten idol of the Tories and Blairite Labour. The first thing Blair did was have her round No. 10 for tea after he won the election.

Thatcher was so strident and strong that she got the nickname ‘the Iron Lady’. May, by contrast, is very definitely weak and wobbly, as Mike’s pointed out, despite all the cries by the Tories and the press that she’s ‘strong’ and ‘stable’.

So the question has to be asked: do the Tories and the press really think that we’re all that stupid to believe this rubbish?

Or, alternatively, have they been drinking too much, or partaking of Jazz cigarettes or other illicit recreational substances? I mentioned in an earlier post that the mugwumps about which May was asked, apart from being an Algonkin word meaning ‘great chief’, were also the strange lizard creatures in David Cronenberg’s film version of The Naked Lunch. Very roughly based on the novel by William S. Burroughs, this is about a pest control man, who suffers massive, very weird hallucinations after he becomes addicted to the poisons he uses to exterminate the bugs and other vermin. The mugwumps in the movie are just some of the bizarre creatures he sees.

Boris Johnson this week called Corbyn a ‘mutton-headed mugwump’, and now the Tory press reckons she’s the most popular Prime Minister since Churchill. Whether or not illegal substances are involved, someone’s clearly tripping.

Theresa May and Mugwump celebrate her lead in the polls. Don’t have nightmares.

Desperate May Steals Labour Policies

Okay, I was weak. I admit it. Against my better judgement, and what I told you all on this blog last week, I watched Have I Got News For You. The programme’s still biased against Labour, but there are, here and there, a few sharp pokes at the Tories.

One of the sharpest last night came from Ian Hislop, who attacked the Tories’ hypocrisy in stealing a policy that they’d previously denounced from Not Very ‘Red’ Ed Miliband. At the last general election, Miliband had said that Labour would put a cap on energy prices. Of course, faced with a threat to corporate profit at the expense of the poor, the Tories went bug-eyed with fury. This was an horrendous interference with the operation of the free market. To neoliberals, the market is molten idol, which must remain sacrosanct at all times. The same rhetoric was used in the 19th century to justify the global price of grain going up, leading to massive famine in India. It was part of the operation of market forces, which all responsible politicians and economists should respect. Even when it meant the death of millions from starvation. See the description of this sordid episode in the book Late Victorian Holocausts.

Of course, the Tories have no concern for the poor. In fact, they actively hate and despise them. But they are afraid of losing the election. So May, it seems, stole Miliband’s policies. And Hislop justifiably pointed out the Toris’ double-standards in this. Under Miliband, it was a horrendous attack on the free market. Under May, well, it’s still a horrendous attack on the free market.

So much for May’s ‘strong and stable’ government. It is, as Mike has pointed out, weak and wobbly. So wobbly that she’s trying to steal policies from Labour, and hoping that nobody will notice.

Well they have.

Not that anybody should be taken in by this. The Tories are a party of inveterate liars. May’s predecessor, David Cameron, broke so many of his election promises that the Tories went through their on-line records censoring them in an effort to rewrite history. As for May, she was going to put workers in the boardroom. Until she was elected, that is, when it became a bad idea.

Which all bears out what Oscar Wilde – or someone- said about May’s party: The Conservatives are an organised hypocrisy.

Weak and Wobby May Gets Hit with the Mugwumps

Which can be very painful, and requires careful treatment.

Mike yesterday put up a piece describing the way the ‘strong and stable’ Tories, led by weak and wobbly Theresa May were disintegrating before our very eyes. This features some cool video and sound clips clearly showing May looking and sounding lost. Literally, in one case, where she really doesn’t know where she is.

Boris Johnson had attacked Jeremy Corbyn as a ‘mutton-headed mugwump’. So when May appeared on his show, Chris Doidge of Radio Derby asked her if she knew what it was. Listen to it. She doesn’t answer him, but immediately answers a completely different question, about how the Tories represent ‘strong and stable leadership’. Thus giving those trying Mike’s Tory election drinking game their first sup of booze of the day.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the term as

An Algonkin word meaning a chief; in Eliot’s Indian Bible the word “centurion” in Acts is rendered mugwump. It is now applied in the USA to independent members of the Republican party, those who refuse to follow the dictates of a Caucus, and all political Pharisees whose party vote cannot be relief upon. It is also used in the sense of “big shot” or “boss”.

Johnson was probably thinking of this definition to insult Corbyn by reminding him of the way many members of his party had conspired against him. But it’s also something of a Tory own goal, as there’s clearly opposition to her in her own party. Otherwise, why would the Sun have put such bug-eyed headlines as ‘Crush the Saboteurs’ on their front page?

Of course, in the David Cronenberg’s 1991 film of William S. Burrough’s novel, The Naked Lunch, the mugwumps are the weird lizard-like creatures the hero sees, thanks to the hallucinatory effects of the pest poison to which he has become addicted.

A mugwump and friend discuss May’s strong and stable Tory leadership.

Ah, but who knows what rarified pleasures go on behind the closed doors of the Bullingdon Club!

Then there’s the clip of her appealing to people to come to ‘this particular town’. As one of the Tweeters Mike quotes points out, she doesn’t know where she, and isn’t pleased to be there. Another Tweeter also points out that she looks to the right and down, which is a classic ‘tell’ of liars.

Thursday she turned up in Leeds to give a speech at a workplace. Another Tweeter stated that the clip of that, too, is deceptive. She gave her talk after work, to an audience that as exclusively invited. Far from being a great popular speaker, like Corbyn, it’s all very carefully stage-managed.

There’s a comparison to be made there with Stalin and Mussolini. Stalin also wasn’t a great public speaker, contrary to the impression that mad dictators bent on genocide are always great orators. He used to give his speeches at the annual May Day parades via gramophone records, with a very carefully vetted audience as far away from him as possible.

As for il Duce, the old thug was surrounded wherever he went with members of his secret police in plain clothes. Thus he was always guaranteed an appreciative audience to the exclusion of any real members of the public, who may have wanted to see him. At one public gathering, he asked all the plain clothes thugs to take a step back so that he could see the genuine public. Well, they did, and he didn’t: the crowd was entirely made up of secret policemen, like one of the jokes from G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

And Nero also surrounded himself with a sycophantic claque of followers, whenever he fancied himself as the great lyric poet at the theatre. He’s infamous for fiddling while Rome burns. Which is a fair analogy for May’s performance in Britain under Tory leadership. She’s also warbling on to a hand-picked claque, posturing as the great orator, while the country collapses in poverty thanks to her party’s massive economic mismanagement and determination to grind working people down through welfare cuts, wage freezes and the privatisation of the NHS.

Vox Political Invents the Theresa May Drinking Game

Mike has also made a few acute observations about Theresa May’s complete inability to articulate any clear vision for Britain, except to parrot the words ‘strong and stable’ at every opportunity instead of giving a clear answer.

Well, I suppose we shouldn’t expect anything more from the woman. When asked about Brexit, she just mindlessly repeated the formula ‘Brexit means Brexit’ like a scratched record, all while glaring at the crowd as if they were morons even to ask her such as basic question. She’s got no answers and is incapable of saying anything unless it’s previously been programmed into her by Lynton Crosby back at Tory Central Office.

So Mike’s decided to have a bit of fun with it. He’s invented a new drinking game. You take a bottle of something nice – it doesn’t have to be booze. Abstainers can enjoy it with a soft drink or a cordial. And then every time May repeats the word ‘strong’ or ‘stable’ you take a slug. If you haven’t had a ‘lavatorial accident’ by the end of the footage, then somebody’s edited the clip.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/04/27/lets-play-the-theresa-may-general-election-drinking-game/

Clearly, if you that every time she appears on TV or in the media, it won’t be long before you’re in that state frequently enjoyed by the late, great Oliver Reed. Which is possibly the only way many people are able to stand her.

Tory Troubles at the Polls

After being foully slandered in turn for his defence of those falsely accused of anti-Semitism by the Blairites and Israel lobby, I’m very glad to say that Mike is back bashing the Tories. And he’s on form. On Thursday he published a piece commenting on the finding by Tory-owned polling company, YouGov, that the Conservative’s lead ahead of Labour had gone down by a massive eight points in one week. Instead of 24 points, they were now down to 16. And as Mike pointed out, there was time to whittle that down to zero in the weeks before the election.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/04/27/tory-lead-falls-by-eight-points-in-one-week/

The I newspaper also carried a piece reporting that, while the Tories were in the lead overall, Labour was far more popular with young people. Which I can well believe. It’s the pattern you find in America with Bernie Sanders. The younger generations haven’t been filled with the same fear of Communism, which has been used by the corporatists to crush any kind of initiatives for change and social justice. They’ve also been hit hard by the neoliberal assault on workers’ rights and what little there is of a welfare state in America to give more profits and power to the big corporations. Just as they have over here. In both Britain and America they’re facing a harder, poorer future, with lower quality of life and a shorter life expectancy than their parents. And so it’s natural that they start reviving the radical tradition in British and American politics, which was derailed by the election of Thatcher and Reagan.

I don’t entirely trust the polls. As Guy Debord’s Cat has pointed out, they’re there not to model the public’s mood accurately, but to influence election results. They’re carefully manufactured and shaped by the polling companies and the media to give the results they want – which is nearly always that progressive, genuinely liberal social policies are unpopular, and you should wholeheartedly support the latest right-wing attack on the poor if you don’t want to be a loser. But is it great to see those same polls showing that the Tories are also in a bit of trouble.

Zionist Fearmongering and Israel’s Demographic Crisis

Tuesday evening I got the news from Mike, of Vox Political, that he’d been libelled as an anti-Semite by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who wish to have him deselected as his local Labour candidate in the Powys council elections. As I blogged yesterday, Mike is actually one of the least prejudiced people I know. As his record shows, he is not remotely anti-Semitic, or prejudiced against anyone else based on their skin colour, religion or sexual preference. When he was at College, he was asked by one of his Jewish friends to be a reader in her commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. Mike was one of those reading out some of the names of the millions butchered by the Nazis. He was very proud of the fact that the girl was deeply moved by his performance.

Mike’s real crime is to oppose the attempts of the Israel lobby and the Blairites within the Labour party to silence Israel’s critics by smearing them as anti-Semites. It’s standard practise for the Zionist lobby in general. Decent people, who stand together with the Palestinians against their brutalisation, massacre and expulsion, are libelled as racists. The victims includes not only anti-racist gentiles, but also proud Jews, from the secular to the Torah-observant. Indeed, many of the Jewish victims of these smears believe that the Zionist lobby especially singles out Jews for particular vilification. Those so maligned by the Zionists also include Israelis, like Dr Ilan Pappe, who was forced out of his homeland because of his determination to present and publish the truth about Israel’s crimes against humanity. But Dr Pappe is no self-hating Jew, and has defended his people, the Israelis. In one video I put up a few months ago, he spoke about how Israelis were decent people, who just need the facts of their country’s terrorisation of the country’s indigenous people explained to them. Before he was forced out, he was very proud at opening his home, every Thursday evening, to his fellow Israelis so he could do just that. He states that these evenings were very well attended by decent, but confused Israelis, seeking the truth.

While I am certainly not complacent about the threat of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the West, I am very sceptical of some of the grosser claims about it made by apologists for the Israeli regime. These are a gross distortion of what is really happening and are made, not to protect British or European Jews, but to provide further colonists for Israel.

Over the past decade and a half, various individuals have come forward claiming that the situation facing Jews in Europe today is exactly like that which faced their parents and grandparents in the 1930s. This often reaches extremely grotesque and hysterical anticipations of a renewed Holocaust in the very near future. Round about 2004 the Conservative magazine the Spectator, published a review of an American book set in France in the next decade or the 2030s. The remnants of the Socialist parties in the European parliament had joined forces with the burgeoning Islamic parties to begin the process of exterminating the Jews. This farrago was given a glowing review, if memory serves me correctly, by Frederick Raphael, then back in the media eye after his work on the script for Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut. This was part of a standard narrative being sold to the European and American public by the Zionist right after 9/11. There were various books published in America, which claimed that the response of the Left after 9/11 and their attempts to defend innocent Muslims against victimisation, showed that liberals in America and Socialists in Europe where inherently anti-Semitic.

Many of those making these libels offered a simple solution for European Jews: they should emigrate to Israel. This was made by a rabbi in the south of France following attacks on Jews in his country a few years ago. One of the top level bureaucrats at the BBC, Danny Cohen, resigned and emigrated to Israel a few years ago, making the same claims.

As a Brit and a European, I don’t recognise these portrayals of my continent and my country, although I do realise that there is a terrible culture of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. These claims aren’t made to combat genuine anti-Semitism. They’re made to encourage Jews to move to Israel, because of the profound demographic crisis the country is facing. That crisis is explained in the chapter on modern Israel in the history textbook, The Modern Middle East, edited by Albert Hourani.

In the 1990s there was a poll of Jewish young people, which asked them where they would rather live. Would they rather live in America, where their neighbours were Christians, who loved them, or Israel, where their neighbours were Muslims, who hated them? I’ve forgotten the exact figure, but about 75 per cent of the youngsters, who responded said ‘America’.

The country’s leaders are also faced with a demographic crisis caused by Arab immigration, lower Israeli fertility and pressure from the Likud party’s coalition partners, who want to colonise the West Bank. Jewish Israelis are less fertile, in the strict demographic sense of having fewer children, than Arabs. As a result, many Israelis fear that they will be outbred by the Arabs, thus undermining Israel’s character as the Jewish state. Moreover, diaspora Jews are becoming increasingly assimilated into the general population. On May 21, 1986, The New York Times carried this snippet under the headline ‘Concern in Israel over Immigration’.

… Prof. Robert Bacchi, head of the Hebrew University statistics department, told the Cabinet that today’s 9.5 million Jews living outside of Israel would shrink to about 8 million by the year 2000 if current demographic trends in assimilation, intermarriage and low birth rates continues.

Prime Minister Shimon Pere said the answer is that every Jewish family in Israel should have four children. On Sunday the Cabinet approved in principle the allocation of as much as $20 million to help 6,000 infertile Israeli couples have children.

Quoted in Adam Parfrey, ‘Eugenics: The Orphaned Science’, in Adam Parfrey, ed. Apocalypse Culture, expanded and revised edition (Feral House 1990) 227-8.

The Israeli state relies on Arab labour in many sectors of the economy, to perform menial or other low-waged work that Jewish Israelis do not with to perform, like fruit picking. In some areas, such as the Negev, the Jewish population is extremely thinly spread. But Likud’s coalition partners are keen to expand Jewish colonisation of the Occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank, as part of their programme to create a greater Eretz Israel matching the boundaries of ancient Israel. However, to do so with Israel’s present population would mean withdrawing Jews from areas like the Negev to colonise these areas. As a result, they would become wholly, or almost wholly, Arab.

It seems very clear to me that Likud and their ethno-nationalist partners are trying to solve this problem by encouraging Jewish emigration by the diaspora in which fearmongering and anti-Semitic slurs are a major instrument. Israel’s critics are vilified and the all-too real threat of rising anti-Semitism grotesquely exaggerated and misrepresented, in order to make European and British fear and distrust their gentile compatriots, in the hope that they will move to Israel to bolster that country’s declining share of the population.

It’s a vile policy, that goes back to the 1930s. A little while ago I posted a piece about how some of the Zionist leaders made it quite clear that they were happy for the Nazis to butcher Jewish Europeans, if that encourage the survivors to move to Israel. They really hated those patriotic Jewish organisations, like the League of Jewish Servicemen, the Bund Judischer Frontsoldaten, in Germany, who fought for Jews to continue to live in peace in their historic European homelands.

Fears of a similar holocaust are being played up by the Zionists for exactly the same reasons today. It’s a vile, racist policy designed to make European Jews feel insecure and suspicious of wider, gentile society, in order to provide more colonists for what is a European settler state. Right up to the point of smearing and vilifying Jews and Israelis, who object to this policy, as anti-Semites themselves.

Hence the lies and smears, of which Mike, Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and so many, many others, have been victims. We need to stand together, Jews and gentiles alike, against these lies and attempts to divide us. Just as we need to stand together against the genuine anti-Semites now crawling out of the woodwork, the Islamophobes, and those who would stir up hatred against Blacks, Asians, gays or whoever.