The current popularity amongst the Tories and their lackeys for Jacob Rees-Mogg is a particular concern of mine. Mogg is the highly privileged son of William Rees-Mogg, a titled member of the aristocracy, who wrote at various times for the Times and Independent. Rees-Mogg senior lived in one of the villages around Bath, if I recall correctly. His son is the Tory MP for north Somerset, just south of where I live in Bristol.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has somehow endeared himself to the Tories and part of the British public through his polite, aristocratic and anachronistic demeanour. He’s been called ‘the minister for the 18th century’. He now has a fan club, Moggmentum, in imitation of Corbyn’s support group of Momentum. He also has 25,000 followers on Twitter. One fan of his in Somerset is such a mad fan of his, that he had Mogg’s face tattooed on him, which became one of the evening’s news stories for the local news programme, Points West here in Bristol a few weeks ago. He’s so popular indeed, that he’s being touted as a possible successor to Theresa May.
This should terrify anyone, with any real idea of politics and the true state of this country. For his smooth, cultured and quiet-spoken politesse, Mogg’s own views are highly reactionary, and frankly horrific. He began his career as a politician campaign in Fife, where the major platform of his campaign was trying to convince impoverished fisherfolk that retaining an hereditary House of Lords was supremely important and beneficial. And as a blue-blooded aristo, he is convinced that the poor should be kept firmly in their place, serving and transferring whatever wealth they have to the rich and powerful. A little while ago Mike did a feature on him on his blog. He discussed the numerous instances in which Mogg had consistently voted down bills, which would improve conditions for the poor and disabled, and voted instead for cutting benefits and privatizing what’s left of the welfare state.
It probably isn’t too much to say that many of those, who vote for him either believe themselves to be of the same class as him, and so will also benefit by his efforts to restore aristocratic privilege. Or else they’re members of the lower classes, who have been convinced through repetition of the same claims down the generations that the aristocracy are the country’s natural rulers, and working people should know their place. Like the various servants Mum met while working in that part of Somerset, who voted Tory because that’s the way Master voted.
Guy Debord’s Cat has written a very good piece over on his site, describing just how vile Mogg and what he represents actually are. He writes
It’s a sure sign of the Conservative Party’s dearth of talent that Jacob Rees Mogg should be talked up as a possible successor to the hapless and utterly useless Theresa May. Many people find Moggy endearing. They love his plummy RP accent. They love his double-breasted suit jackets. They love his fustiness. They love his toffee-nosed demeanour and they love his apparently Waugh-esque wit. At Nowhere Towers we take a different view: we find him tiresome and representative of an ages old problem with Britain. Namely, he reeks of privilege and his accent and ‘eccentric’ charm masks a ruthlessness and cruelty that is common to many members of his class.
When it comes to loving one’s oppressor, the Brits have both rationalized and elevated their oppression a fine art. We love our posh bastards. Don’t we? Remember how people fawned over Bozza? I haven’t forgotten. Both of them went to Eton and Oxford. Both of them are seen as rather buffoonish, though for very different reasons. And both are seen as thoroughly British eccentrics. But that’s the problem: many people refuse to see through their media-constructed façades and choose to see oh-so-disarming posh twits instead. Please, wake up!
That Moggy should be touted by some Tories as a counterweight to Jeremy Corbyn’s soaring popularity speaks volumes about the parlous condition of his party and the dire health of our media.
He goes on to mention three articles taking apart Mogg, his highly deceptive appeal, exposing what he really represents, from Skwawkbox, the New Statesman and Victor Lewis-Smith. But he goes on to discuss an event the other articles don’t. This is the time in 2013 when Mogg went off to a formal, black tie dinner with the Traditional Britain Group. His article includes a photo from the evening, showing Mogg seated next to two truly horrific fixtures of the British Far Right, Jack Buckby of the Cultural Nationalists and the BNP, and Gregory Lauder-Frost.
The Traditional Britain Group itself, from what I’ve seen of it, is another xenophobic, anti-immigrant, racist group, which particularly despises Islam. They also want to restore the old class system and privatize the NHS. Gerry Gable of the anti-Nazi organization, Searchlight, warned Mogg not to attend. But he did. When he was exposed by the press, he made a gushing Mea Culpa condemning racism, distancing himself from them, and claimed he had been misinformed and acted in ignorance.
To me, this is less than convincing. As the French philosophical feline points out, most people if invited to attend a function by a group they know nothing about would try to know what it stood for first.
The article then goes on to discuss just how unpleasant Buckby and Lauder-Frost are. As well as founding the National Culturalists, which was banned on campus as a racist, Fascist organization by the Students’ Guild at Liverpool University, Buckby was also a member of the BNP. He was their candidate for the Batley and Spen bye-election, caused by the assassination of Jo Cox. Which shows this character’s complete lack of class. He was also press officer for Liberty GB. The Cat’s article states that it is anti-immigration. That’s true, but it’s also specifically against one ethnic group of immigrants: Muslims. It was founded as part of the Islamophobic ‘counter-jihad’ movement by many of the same people involved in the EDL.
Demonstrating Buckby’s personal nastiness, the Cat’s article has a clip of him being interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 News, along with an Irish expert on White supremacist and Fascist movements and a young Black woman from Black students’ group. Guru-Murthy makes it very clearly that he despises Buckby’s views, but has to interview him as part of the programme’s mission to investigate minority opinions. Buckby spends much of the interview vehemently denying that he is at all racist, while loudly declaring that we shouldn’t allow more Muslim immigrants into the country because of their inherently violent, criminal nature. When one of the two women argues against him, he replies by saying ‘I hope you don’t get raped.’ Because all Muslims are rapists, right?
Lauder-Frost, it seems, is a former member of the Monday Club, who used to chair their Foreign Affairs Committee, and is the Traditional Britain Group’s vice-president and treasurer. Before joining them, he was one of the steering committee of the Conservative Democratic Alliance, formed by disaffected members of the Monday Club. There’s also a clip of him being interviewed on Vanessa Feltz’s radio show. Lauder-Frost spends much of the interview sneering at Doreen Lawrence, whom he feels should not have been elevated to the House of Lords. Because she’s ‘a nothing’, who he claims hasn’t done anything for this country and despises it. It’s not hard to see behind his attitude a mixture of racism and sheer class snobbery. Doreen Lawrence is a Black woman, and not a member of the British aristocracy. Hence Lauder-Frost is utterly horrified at her taking a seat in the upper house.
Now it’s true that Doreen Lawrence has made statements where she has said she doesn’t have any love for this country. Or that’s how it’s been reported. It grates, but she has every right. Her son, Stephen, was murdered by a gang of racist thugs, who got off scot-free. The Met investigating his murder was corrupt and riddled with racism, and the thugs were the sons of notorious gang bosses. See the press coverage at the time, and also Private Eye passim ad nauseam. She then dedicated her life to trying to obtain justice for her murdered child. This is a far better reasons for being given an honour than simply being Dave Cameron’s hairdresser.
Lauder-Frost also waffles on about how immigrant groups don’t support this country at sports matches, which recalls Norman Tebbitt’s infamous comment about coloured immigrants not supporting Britain at cricket. He also recommends that we should go back to the Tory party’s 1970s promise for ‘assisted repatriation’ for coloured immigrants to go back to their countries of origin. Feltz is definitely not impressed, and pointedly asks him where she should go, as she’s Jewish, and one set of her grandparents came from Poland, while another of her antecedents was also not British. Lauder-Frost simply says that if he was a Zionist, he would say she should go to Israel. To cap it all, Lauder-Frost is also a massive fan of the Nazis. No wonder Feltz was unimpressed. As were no doubt every other decent person listening to the programme, regardless of ethnicity or religious beliefs.
The TBG was also invited to a dinner by the Bow Group, another outfit like the Monday Club on the extreme right of the Tories. The Cat cites Louise Haigh, the Labour politico, who managed to get the Nazi youth group, Britain First, banned, who states very clearly that Lauder-Frost’s comments about Doreen Laurence and assisted repatriation are racist, and that the Bow Group should not invited them to their functions.
The TBG’s other vice-president is Professor John Kersey, a traditionalist Roman Catholic clergyman, a professor at a right-wing university with branches in the Caribbean and West Africa, who is nostalgic for the old days of feudalism. If you follow the link on the Cat’s blog, you come to a site for the British followers of the Austrian Libertarian, Von Mises. Kersey is also the Director of Cultural Affairs of the Libertarian Alliance.
Other members of the Traditional Britain Group are Stuart Millson and Jonathan Bowden. Together these two charmers founded the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus. Millson was also a former member of the BNP and an officer in Western Goals, which the Cat describes as ‘semi-Fascist’. He’s not alone in this assessment. Western Goals also got into the pages of Lobster as a Far Right organization. Also in the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus was Mark Cotterill a former member of the NF. The Cat then describes how Millson joined the Tories despite being a member of the BNP and having had dinner with Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Tories refused to throw him out, and Millson only resigned after this was exposed by the Mirror.
The Cat’s article concludes
The Tories may deny it, but many of their members are sympathetic to groups like the TBG. Indeed, in the 1970s NF members joined local Conservative Clubs and were members of the Monday Club. Others are members of The Freedom Association, the faux libertarian pressure group that talks warmly about their idea of ‘freedom’, while working hard to deny it to others. Tories may complain about ‘entryism’ in the Labour Party, but for decades extreme-right entryists joined the party and they’re still joining.
Moggy’s antiquated views are only matched by his sartorial style. If you find him amusing or endearing, you might want to ask yourself this: what kind of friends are the TBG? Rees Mogg only apologised when he got caught by Liberal Conspiracy. If that had never happened, Moggy would have got away with it. Makes you wonder…
The Cat’s article also has a link to the original piece by the Liberal Conspiracy website.
For more information, see: https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/friends-like-these/
The Cat certainly ain’t wrong about Fascist infiltration of the Tory party. Lobster a few decades ago devoted several pieces to exposing this. And it’s something else you won’t see being reported by the Beeb. Way back in the 1980s the BBC was due to screen a Panorama expose, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, on the Far Right’s infiltration of the Tory. Maggie and the Tories, however, threw a strop and the BBC was forced to spike the programme.
As for the Libertarians, their definition of liberty is definitely reserved only for the upper classes. They hate socialism, trade unions and organized labour. I can’t remember which one of the libertarian organisations actually did it, but one of them invited the head of a central American death squad to their annual dinner. As for Kersey being a fan of feudalism, this adds a new dimension to Von Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom. Von Hayek thought it was socialism, but as subsequent events show, it’s really the far right-wing economics he advocated.
Libertarians have always denied being Fascists, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that’s exactly what they are. I’ve put up several pieces from the American YouTuber, Reichwing Watch, on how Libertarian not only shares many of the same tenets and attitudes of Fascism and Nazism, but that its adherents are beginning to admit this quite openly. One Black YouTuber, ‘That Guy T’, discusses and advocates ‘anarcho-Fascism’ on his vlog.
As for Mogg, while he denies sharing the Traditional Britain Group’s racism, he certainly shares their attitude towards aristocratic privilege, and keeping the poor and marginalized so. It shows how corrupt and class-ridden this country is that this man is at all popular, let alone an MP and possible successor to May.
Tags: 'Maggie's Militant Tendency', 'Momentum', 'Points West', 'That Guy T', 'The Independent', 'The Road to Serfdom', anti-racism, Aristocracy, Assassination, Assisted Repatriation, Bath, Batley and Spen, BBC, Benefit Cuts, Blacks, BNP, Boris Johnson, Bow Group, Bristol, Britain First, Censorship, Channel 4 News, Class, Clergy, Conservatives, Corruption, Counter Jihad Movement, Cricket, Cultural Nationalists, David Cameron, Death Squads, Doreen Lawrence, EDL, Elections, Entryism, Eton, Evelyn Waugh, Feudalism, Fife, Gerry Gable, Gregory Lauder-Frost, Guy Debord's Cat, House of Lords, Immigration, Islamophobia, Jack Buckby, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Jean-Marie le Pen, Jeremy Corbyn, Jews, Jo Cox, John Kersey, Jonathan Bowden, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Labour Party, Liberal Conspiracy, Libertarian Alliance, Liberty GB, Liverpool University, Lobster, Mark Cotterill, Metropolitan Police, Moggmentum, Monday Club, Murder, Muslims, New Statesman, NF, Norman Tebbitt, Oxford, Panorama, Private Eye, Privatisation, racism, Rape, Reighwing Watch, Revolutionary Conservative Caucus, Searchlight, Servants, Skwawkbox, Somerset, Stephen Lawrence, Stuart Millson, Students' Guild, the Poor, the Rich, The Times, Theresa May, Traditional Britain Group, Universities, Vanessa Feltz, Victor Lewis Smith, Vlogs, Von Hayek, Von Mises, Vox Political, Welfare State, Western Goal, White Supremacism, William Rees-Mogg, Women, Youtube, Zionism
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
August 27, 2017 at 1:04 pm |
just another sad psycho…lotta them about these days..
August 27, 2017 at 3:33 pm |
There are, and the problem with Mogg is that for some bonkers reason, some people like him.
September 13, 2017 at 10:40 am |
The “success” of Mogg and his Eton / Aristo Social Darwinists has in part been the post war propaganda of rehabilitation of the aristocracy. The likes of Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey, Titanic, and many other dramas on TV, and films, the constant fawning coverage of the idle rich in Hello and other magazines and “newspapers”, has been allied to the domination of all types of media by the middle class, and the public school Oxbridge /Russell group cliques.
The working class that remember pre WWII, like my own family in service before WWI, and dying in the workhouses in the 1920s while the ” bright young things” partied in the country houses of the aristocracy, hated the whole system of class oppression. They hated Churchill, I knew families where his name could not be mentioned, or was spat at hearing it. It was that visceral. Diana was another godsend to the class system, and once again had the poor weeping for the troubles of the rich. Now we have Mogg slickly portrayed as a “gent” when he is nothing less than a crypto fascist, who thinks anyone who went to state schools is “as thick as a potted plant” – but instead he fears us as the deadly plague of triffids! Time to have his predilections for the far right exposed now.
September 13, 2017 at 2:54 pm |
That’s really interesting, Florence. They said on a feature about Winston Churchill that at his funeral, the dockers operating the cranes on the Thames did not want to lower the machines’ booms as a sign of respect. Very many working class people despised him for his part in breaking the General Strike. And one of my aunts was no certainly no fan of his. She always regarded him as a warmonger.
I absolutely agree with you about the way Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey have also done their bit to rehabilitate the aristocracy and their privilege. And I can’t say I was impressed with Titanic either. But I also think that part of it has been the ‘heritage’ movement that came in with Margaret Thatcher. One of the essays I can remember writing when I was taking an MA in History at UWE was on ‘Why Do Many Historians Regard Heritage as a Dirty Word?’ This looked at the writings of the opponents of the heritage industry – the various museums and theme parks, which were being erected at the same time the real workplaces they commemorated, and the working class communities dependent on them, were being closed down and destroyed.
One very interesting part of this was the role of the National Trust, and the way it had completely changed its role into the exact opposite of that envisaged by Ruskin and its founders. They had wanted the National Trust to take over and preserve the countryside and buildings, that were important to working people. In the 1940s, however, the organization had been taken over by various aristocratic snobs, who redirected its orientation away from working people, their homes and environment, to preserving the stately homes of the rich. This was particularly emphasized during the 1970s, when the heritage sector launched a massive concerted effort to save Britain’s stately homes from demolition. To do this they created a largely fake sense of panic by massively exaggerating the numbers that were supposedly being pulled down.
As for the death of Lady Diana, Private Eye made the best comment about the whole affair. They pointed out that while her death was sad, she was no alabaster saint. They also regularly attacked the various media pundits, who tried to present her as something she wasn’t. This included the feminists, who saw her as a type of feminist martyr, destroyed by the patriarchal monarchy, and various other individuals, who should have known much better, who spouted nonsense about ‘the Diana Revolution’.
As for those of us, who went to state schools being ‘as thick as potted plants’, ha! Last week there was a feature in the I about a study which found that former state school pupils did better at medical school than those from private schools. And I can also remember that there have been previous studies that also discovered that kids from comprehensives actually performed better at uni. I am not surprised. I mentioned this to Mum, who used to be a teacher. She told me that some of the private schools in Bristol were simply crammers, that concentrated on getting children to pass the exams to get into university. But this was at the expense of providing a good, general all-round education. Which explains an awful lot. Like how Edwina Currie could have had an Oxford education, when she’s as thick as two short planks. And perhaps working class success at university also explains why the Blairites, Lib Dems and Tories want to price them out of it by introducing and raising tuition fees.
September 13, 2017 at 8:26 pm
So very true. I think it was in yesterday’s post about JRM that you refer to them as “single helix” offspring, that made me laugh, but so true!
September 13, 2017 at 8:50 pm
I’m glad you liked that turn of phrase! 🙂 I can’t claim to have invented it, however. It came from a remark Howard, the head of the precinct SWAT Team, said in the TV police series, Hill Street Blues. The character was quite racist, and used it as part of a nasty, disparaging comment about non-Whites. However, the bit about only possessing a single-strand of DNA struck me as being very appropriate to Rees-Mogg and the other inbred members of his class.