The prominent Black anti-racism activist, Marc Wadsworth, has been expelled from the Labour party for anti-Semitism in a profoundly controversial decision that makes a mockery of justice. Wadsworth was accused of anti-Semitism by the Blairite MP, Ruth Smeeth. He saw her at a meeting passing on information to a Torygraph journo sat next to her. So he made a comment about certain Labour MPs working with the Tory press.
He said absolutely nothing about Jews, but Smeeth did what the Blairites and the Israel lobby tend to do when criticised by their opponents: scream that they are being abused and demand their critics’ expulsion. In this case, Smeeth declared that it was anti-Semitic abuse, because she’s Jewish.
Wadsworth didn’t even know that she was. But this didn’t stop the right-wing media pillorying him as a ‘vile anti-Semite’ who made Smeeth weep.
In fact, Wadsworth had made a fair comment about a long-standing issue. Labour MPs have in the past joined forces against their leaders. I can remember when I was briefly a member of the Fabian Society one of the issues being debated was whether Labour MPs should be allowed to write columns in the Tory press. This was in the 1980s when the press and the rest of the media, including the Beeb, was doing its level best to attack the Labour party under first Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock.
Under the definition of anti-Semitism the Israel lobby wants the Labour party to adopt, an alleged anti-Semitism remark must be judged according to whether there is hate behind it. Instead, the NCC decided that the remark was anti-Semitic purely because they were advised that it could be perceived as such.
As the Tories themselves hollered when Labour brought in more sweeping legislation against hate speech, perceptions are no ground for condemning a comment as racist because of their subjective nature. You need better, more objective standards of proof, such as showing that there was racial hate behind it.
This is what the judgement did not do. An innocent man has been expelled merely on the say-so of a right-wing MP, who herself admitted that she was trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. And understandably there has been massive outrage amongst Black and other ethnic minority supporters of the Labour party.
Mike has posted a couple of articles on this. In one he describes how the party escorting Smeeth to the ruling were all white, as were all the officials, who decided Wadsworth was guilty. He compared it to a lynching. Black critics of the decision have denounced the court for the racist way it treated Wadsworth. One woman said that they spoke to him as if he was a servant, and did not take into account how difficult many Blacks find it to speak up against powerful Whites. Grassroots Black Labour have also issued condemnations of the judgement and its treatment of Blacks.
Mike today has asked whether the Labour party has just blown its chances of winning London. New Labour lost the support of many Blacks, just as it lost the support of working class Whites, because it took them for granted and ignored them. It expected them to continue voting Labour, because they had nowhere else to go. Instead, many of them, like many White working class folks, simply didn’t vote.
The Conservatives’ position in the metropolis is shaky. So shaky, that a few weeks ago there were rumours that London Tories were going to split and form a separate party. But that seems to have gone by the wayside. Labour did have a very real chance of taking London, but this has been put in jeopardy by this grossly unjust decision.
And I wonder if this wasn’t done deliberately. As the Blairites showed when they threatened to split the Labour party during their Chicken Coup against Corbyn, they have no qualms against making the Labour party unelectable, just as long as they can hold on to power.
And a few weeks ago, the press was full of a new, centrist party, financed to the tune of £50 million, being set up by businessmen and donors. It was going to be pro-European. This had Euan Blair, the son of Tony Blair, as one of its members. As Blair himself has also made comments about the need for a centrist, pro-European party, there has been some speculation, including by myself, that he’s somehow involved in this all.
Then last week, buried in the pages of the I, was a little report about a new, pro-European, centrist party, Renew, which was fielding candidates in London. The article said that they were hoping to win over Tory voters dissatisfied with Brexit. It sounds like the party being touted by the press a few weeks ago. If it isn’t, it’s very similar.
Which raises the question: have the Blairites deliberately passed an unjust decision against Wadsworth to alienate BAME Londoners, in the hope of either boosting support for Renew, or simply handing London to the Tories?
If they have, then it’s supporting an opposing party, which is an expulsion offence. But the Blairites have the attitude that such things only apply to the centre-left, not to free market Thatcherites and supporters of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians like themselves.
Labour needs to win back the support of it Black and ethnic minority members and supporters. Along with everybody else, who is sick of decent, anti-racist activists – which have included very many Jews – of being smeared, suspended and expelled on false charges of anti-Semitism.
The decision against Marc Wadsworth, and other decent people like him, should be overturned. The recommendations contained in the Chakrabarti Report should be implemented to stop further travesties of justice. Allegations of anti-Semitism should, like other allegations, be examined and fairly and impartially. And the party should absolutely not give into those, who make such false allegations purely for political gain.
Here’s another example of the double standards used by the Blairite right in the Labour party. Yesterday Mike put up a piece about the outrage amongst Labour supporters when John Woodcock tweeted in favour of Amber Rudd. Woodcock acknowledged that Rudd had ‘screwed up’ and that there was ‘a big question mark over her competence’, but then said that Labour had more in common with her than others in the Conservatives, and that we should be careful what we wished for.
Mike posted some of the tweets from Labour members, pointing out that the Labour party has, or should have, absolutely nothing in common with a racist, xenophobic party that is deporting its citizens, and depriving them of medical care, welfare support and their livelihoods.
Others criticised Woodcock for his complete indifference to the suffering involved. It didn’t happen to him, so he wasn’t bothered.
And a couple of people stated that it showed real attitude of the so-called ‘Centrists’ to a far right, Fascistic government. They have repeatedly been quite content to facilitate them and their policies.
This is exactly right, and it comes from the fundamental nature of Blair’s New Labour. Fearing he would never win against the Right, Blair effectively gave in. He rejected socialism and moved the Labour party rightward, so that it ignored its traditional working class base to try to gain the votes instead of the aspirational middle classes. At the same time, he also tried to win over the Tory press. Cabinet ministers have said that Rupert Murdoch was a silent presence at meetings, as Blair and his coterie worried about their policies would go down with the media baron. He was also eager, but unsuccessful, to gain the support of Paul Dacre and the Heil.
Many of New Labour’s policies were Tory cast-offs. The Private Finance Initiative was devised by Peter Lilley as a way of getting private industry into the NHS. Academy schools were another Tory policy that had been tried under Maggie Thatcher by Norman Baker, though under a different name. They were a failure, but that didn’t stop the scheme being revived once again by Blair and loudly hailed as the way to reform the British school system.
Blair was a Thatcherite. She called him her greatest success, and was the first person he invited to visit in 10 Downing Street. The Labour right aren’t ‘centrists’, ‘moderates’ or any of the other mendacious names the right-wing media has given to them. They are Thatcherite entryists. In fact, it’s fair to call them right-wing extremists, as one of the tweeters Mike has reposted states.
And several of the Blairite MPs share the Tories hatred of the unemployed and immigrants. Or at least, they do if there’s votes in it. Remember when one female MP announced before Corbyn won the leadership election that Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories? This clearly came from someone, who had never spent time unemployed, desperately searching for work, or being humiliated by Jobcentre workers, with the threat of sanctions and the food bank never far away.
And then, when the Tories seemed to be gaining a bit of popularity by whipping up yet more hatred of immigrants, another so-called moderate declared that, if Labour wanted to get elected, they should listen to and embrace the anti-immigration sentiments of the British public.
Which is very much what Labour would be doing, if it collaborates in keeping Amber Rudd as Home Secretary. I’m aware that there are probably people much worse behind her, waiting for her job. But the ‘better the devil you know argument’ shouldn’t apply here. Rudd has presided over a vile, racist policy that has seen 7.600 odd people deported from their homes in Britain as illegal immigrants, despite the fact that they have a perfect right to live here as British citizens. It shows that for some of the so-called moderates genuine anti-racism can be conveniently forgotten in the pursuit of votes and alliances with the other Thatcherites on the opposite side of the House.
Woodcock has already been reported to the Whips for his criticism of Corbyn’s handling of the Salisbury poisoning. Mike has also pointed out that his tweet in support of Rudd constitutes the support of a political opponent. Woodcock, however, remains an MP. He therefore states that the National Executive Committee and NCC should call on him to resign, and expel him if he does not. One of the tweeters also made the point that Woodcock’s comments also put the party into disrepute. This is another offence that results in a reprimand or suspension, at least as it has been applied to the Corbyn supporters the Thatcherites in the party have tried to purge.
This should, of course, be what happens. He should be formally disciplined and expelled. But it won’t, because of the double standards of the Blairites in charge of the disciplining process, and their determination to undermine Corbyn while hanging to power whatever the cost.
Okay, you’ll have to indulge me a bit in this post, because I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which YouTube video it’s in, so I can’t post it up here. But the British comedian and anti-Fascist ranter Dick Coughlan was interviewed a little while ago about Fascism and his own videos against it. Coughlan started off making vlogs promoting atheism, and then turned to attacking racism and the far right as these became increasingly prominent. He’s made a series of videos lampooning and effectively critiquing Nazis, the Alt Right and the far right men’s rights activists, as well as showing very clearly that the Holocaust most definitely did exist.
In the interview he talks at one stage about how he saw the vile policies of the BNP being adopted over successive elections by the Tories. It started well over a decade ago, when the BNP looked like they were about to make their breakthrough into mainstream British politics. Mercifully, they lost massively in the 2004 general elections. But despite their defeat, their policies were taken over by the Tories. And this happened in subsequent elections.
And so Britain under the Tories has moved steadily closer to real Fascism.
The BNP are now, hopefully, a spent force. According to Hope Not Hate, their last councillor has said he will not be standing at the next election. But if they’ve vanished as a force in British politics, their place is being taken on the far right by islamophobic groups like Britain First, the EDL, and underground Nazi organisations like the banned National Action.
And the threat of Fascism also comes from mainstream government, with the Tories adopting their policies.
It’s time to stop and resist the Tories as the racists they are.
Mike put up a piece last night responding to another malign comment uttered by Michael Gove. Gove is the former cabinet minister responsible for education, and so can fairly be blamed for a good portion of the problems now affecting our educational system.
He’s a close of ally of Boris Johnson, though this didn’t stop BoJo stabbing him in the back over Brexit. Nevertheless, he showed his loyalty to Boris, as well as his complete ignorance and utter incompetence in the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. This was the British woman of Iranian origin, who went back to Iran on holiday. She was visiting relatives, but the Iranians threw her in jail on the trumped up charge of spying. Boris made her situation worse by claiming that she was teaching journalism. She wasn’t, and Johnson’s comment was seized on by the Iranians as confirmation of their own allegations that she was trying to overthrow the regime. Gove then appeared on TV to support Boris, and declared in an interview that ‘we don’t know what she was doing’. This was wrong, and showed Gove really didn’t know what he was talking about. And it just made matters worse for Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who used his stupid comments as more proof of espionage and put more years on her sentence.
Now Gove has waded in to give his considered thoughts on the current scandal of the deportations of the Windrush generation and their children. OH no! cried Gove, it’s not that bad. It’s just been ‘weaponised’ by the Labour party to divert attention from the massive anti-Semitism in their ranks.
No, Gove, it isn’t. As Mike points out, the evidence shows that anti-Semitism in the Labour party has actually fallen under Jeremy Corbyn. But this won’t matter to the Tories. Like Goebbels, they prefer to repeating a good, useful lie until people believe it. Well, it worked with a lot of people under Thatcher. There’s always the possibility, however, that Gove really does believe what he says, or, just as likely, he’s so ignorant of the facts and the issues involved that he doesn’t know any better. Just like he didn’t know better than to mug up on the real facts before holding forth about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
The deportation of the Windrush generation is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s a vile, racist policy in itself. But it’s also offensive and dangerous because, as Lammy shows, they were British citizens. The Social Contract theory of government states that political authority arose when the early human community joined together to elect a powerful figure – a king- to protect their lives, families and property. The theory was first formulated in Ancient Greece, where it was taken over by Plato. It was the basis of some medieval theories about the origins and duties of kingship, and formed the basis of the political theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. It has also been used to argue for the people’s right to remove their sovereigns and leaders, and to form democratic, representative governments.
Social Contract theory’s been more or less rejected by scholars. One of the reasons is because their almost certainly was never a primal meeting of the early human community, to elect a leader using legal terms that wouldn’t exist until thousands of years later. Even so, it has still be influential. Rawls attempted to defend it, or advance a similar theory, in his A Theory of Justice. And it remains true that one of the very basis, essential functions of government is to preserve the lives and property of its citizens.
But this the Tories have signally not done. They have decided to remove the basic right of citizenship from the Windrush migrants, simply because of their ethnicity. This has led to their deportation from a country, in which they have every right to live, and the denial of other essential rights. Like cancer treatment under the NHS, and other basis services to which they are entitled.
Not that this bothers the Tories. They’re whole attitude to government is based on marginalising and depriving the poorest, most vulnerable sections of the population in order to give more wealth and power to the rich elite. Hence the attacks on the poor, the unemployed, the disabled as well as the normal attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities.
This is what has made the deportations extremely dangerous. It has shown that the Tories regard basic citizenship not as a right, but a gift that can be withdrawn on a whim or for reasons of political expediency.
This is not about Labour trying to use it to deflect attention from the anti-Semitism smears and witch hunt in its own ranks. This is about protecting a group, that has been subject to a monstrous injustice, and preserving fundamental civic rights.
Not that you can expect Gove to admit to all this, as someone who has constantly supported the Tories’ persecution of marginal and underprivileged groups.
It’s time to get him, Tweezer and the rest of them out of office.
Following the exposure this week of the Tories’ policy of expelling British citizens of the Windrush generation as illegal immigrants, there’s been speculation which group of British citizens of lawful immigrant origins will be next. Mike mentioned in one of his piece that in 2019-20 it may be the Ugandan Asians. These were the Asian population of Uganda, who were expelled in the 1970s by the dictator, torturer and mass-murderer Idi Amin. Their plea for asylum was turned down by a number of countries, including India. But they were taken in by Britain under Ted Heath. it’s to Heath’s credit, just as the clandestine removal of the citizenship laws protecting the Windrush people and their forcible removal from this country shows how vile and racist David Cameron, Theresa May and the rest of the Tories are. I’ve already posted up a piece making it very clear how despicable it would be if Tweezer’s government then turns on the Ugandan Asians.
But there was a piece in the I last week suggesting that she may also be about to target the Chagos Islanders. The Chagos Islands are in the Indian Ocean, and have been a continuing imperial scandal since the mid-70s. The Islanders were forcibly removed from their homes after Britain gave the islands to America to build a massive military base. Because Cold War, need to stop global Communism and all the rest of the horrific reasons Britain and America have given for treating ordinary people in the Developing World as dirt.
Of course, the British Empire has been taking over indigenous peoples’ land and removing them since it first started to appear in the 16th century. When the British and other European nations arrived in the Caribbean to challenge Spain’s possession of the New World, they embarked on a campaign to cleanse their newly conquered territories of the indigenous Caribs.
In the early 20th century, in a close parallel to this, the British also removed a South Sea island people from their home to Fiji, so that it could be mined. This trashed the island, making it uninhabitable. The islanders have been trying to sue the British government since in order to get compensation and a recognition of wrongdoing, but they’ve had no success.
The Chagos Islanders have also been trying to sue the British government, and they also have received zero justice. There have been a series of articles about the British government’s maltreatment of them in Private Eye. The minister responsible for the decision to grant the island to the Americans was Denis Healey. The Eye contacted him to question him about it, but as far as I can recall they received the usual ministerial non-answers. I’ve got a feeling that they might also have been a bit tetchy as well.
According to the I, after the decision was made, the Islanders were deported to Mauritius and other countries, from whence some of them migrated to Britain. And so they’re now left vulnerable to being deported from this country, which owes them justice, under the same squalid and racist policies that have seen the expulsion of over 7,000 children of Windrush immigrants. This is despite the fact that, as David Lammy showed in his tweet, the Windrush migrants were British citizens under the terms of the 1948 British Citizenship Act.
It’s not hard to see the ministerial logic which came down in favour of their removal from their homeland. There are only a few thousand Chagos Islanders, and so under the utilitarian logic of the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ the government clearly decided it could easily sacrifice them to keep the Americans happy, preserve the Special Relationship, and keep global communism at bay.
It’s still a global injustice, and one that will be compounded if Tweezer and his minions decided to deport them from Britain.
May, Rudd and the rest of the Tories have shown themselves to be utterly racist in passing and supporting this legislation. Get rid of them, before they attack anyone else.
Also today, Mike put up a piece commenting on Lenny Henry giving Tweezer a well-deserved verbal kicking at the memorial service for Stephen Lawrence. He was the Black youth murdered by a gang of White racist thugs nearly a quarter of a century ago. It has been a major scandal because of the way the Met police were extremely reluctant to investigate the case. Independent investigations and proper, investigative journalism, revealed institutional racism at the Met, as well as allegations of corruption. One other reason why the cops didn’t want to prosecute the murderers, is because they were the sons of notorious London gangsters. And so there were repeated attempts to bring them to trial, but due to the Met’s incompetence and racism, several of these fell apart and the butchers walked. I can also remember Private Eye being extremely critical of some sections of the tabloid press, like the Scum, because of the way some of their hacks seemed to be siding with the thugs, seeing them as little more than a group of cheeky, ‘un-pc’ lads rather than the racist murderers they were.
Stephen Lawrence’s murder and his commemoration is naturally an important issue, and particularly for Henry. The former comedian has been actively campaigning against racism and to improve opportunities for Black people, particularly in film and television, ever since he presented The Black and White Media Show on the Beeb right at the beginning of the 1980s. Mike has put up the clip with him laying into Tweezer, as it’s well done, and makes her squirm. Ah, schadenfreude! The pleasure of someone else coming to grief. And in this case, why not? It’s no more, and indeed, a lot less, than Tweezer deserves.
But Mike’s article is also important because he’s put up a couple of tweets from the Labour politician and Black rights activist, David Lammy. Lammy quotes the 1948 Nationality Act to show that the Windrush people were British citizens. He wrote
Here is the relevant section of the 1948 British Nationality Act. The Windrush Generation were British citizens when they were invited here. Their citizenship is theirs by right. It is not a gift that your government is benevolently granting them. They are reclaiming their rights pic.twitter.com/8BaTKqDFGn
He’s absolutely right. I always understood that, under the terms of the existing legislation at the time, citizens of one Commonwealth country were automatically British citizens with a right to enter Britain. I’ve also been told that Winston Churchill, who was himself quite racist, fully accepted and supported this principle. It only changed in 1979 when Maggie Thatcher reformed the legislation to make further New Commonwealth immigration difficult. Which contributed to the outrage at Tory racism at the time, apart from the general massive racism in British society and the poverty and discrimination endured by Black and Asian Brits.
But as I’ve said in a previous article, May and the Tories seem to regard citizenship not as something, which is people’s by right, but something like a gift, which can be bestowed or withdrawn on a whim. This cavalier attitude to the law and fundamental rights puts each and every one of us in danger, regardless of colour, ethnicity and immigration status. It means she and the Tories feel they can remove and deny us the protections that are ours by right under law, at any time they like. Just as May did when she quietly had the legislation protecting the Windrush migrants repealed.
The Tories are a danger to individual liberty and the rule of law. As well as horrendous racist bigots. Get them out. Now!
Ugandan Asians are next for deportation as reported on the Westminster Hour on R4 22/4/18. How far are the Tories going to take this?
Voting all Tory councillors out on May 3rd tells Tess her policies are cruel & her power base erodes, something Tories can’t stand. https://twitter.com/bassmadman/status/988329689885310977 …
Mike checked her source, and found that what she said was correct, at least according to the Beeb. He states
Carole Hawkins is absolutely correct. Listen to that evening’s edition of Westminster Hour and around 18 minutes into the programme you will hear: “The next group to be snared in this will be Ugandan Asians; people who were allowed to come here by Ted Heath when they were fleeing Idi Amin. And that is going to be another painful moment in the life of the government.”
It continues: “They arrived in 71-72 so we can expect to get that problem for the government in 2019-2020… This problem is not going to go away.”
Mike’s article is worth reading in total as it comments on the institutional racism behind May’s immigration policies. It’s not just the discrimination against the children of Windrush migrants. This includes the story of two brothers, who have had their lives wrecked by May’s decision that they, and others like them, aren’t British citizens but foreign residents, who should be deported. It’s also the very high rates of racism and racist abuse in the Border Control Force and aggressive policing by officers looking for Asian men with foreign passports.
But the possibility that the government has been thinking about doing the same to the Ugandan Asians is a new, particularly vile low, even by the Tories’ abysmal standards.
As Mike points out in his piece, the Ugandan Asians were expelled from their homeland by the country’s vicious dictator, Idi Amin. They were given sanctuary in Britain in 1971-2 by Ted Heath, after many other nations, including India, refused to take them in. Immigration was a very hot topic, I’ve read since then that many Tories thought Heath was risking electoral disaster by allowing them to come to Britain. But he did, and it’s undoubtedly to his credit, despite everything else he stood for as a Tory.
Way back in the 1990s our mother helped to run a small day centre for the elderly here in south Bristol. One of the guest speakers, who came in to talk to the seniors using the club was a member of Bristol’s Asian community. The man was also a Ugandan Asian. He told of his people’s expulsion by Amin. They were forced out of their homes and businesses and made to leave. And along the route out of the country, to the airport or wherever, there were roadblocks, the soldiers on which took the opportunity to rob the expellees of whatever they could. I think he said that you would have wept if you saw how they robbed and abused people. And I’ve no doubt he’s right. But, he continued, Ugandan Asians are grateful to Britain for taking them in.
I believe that the community also has its own museum, or at least a museum gallery devoted to them in one of the northern towns. I think I saw it featured a year or so ago on Bargain Hunt or one of the other related antiques programmes put out by the Beeb. That part of the programme and the gallery itself also covered the community’s expulsion and their arrival in Britain.
Now it seems that May and her vile crew have decided that they want to deny citizenship and expel the children of people, who have already endured one traumatic expulsion by a vicious dictator.
The Ugandan Asian community included professionals and businesspeople, and Britain has benefited from their hard work and skills. Now the Tories want to repay them and their gratitude towards Britain for giving them refuge, by throwing them out.
Absolutely disgraceful. As is the treatment of the Windrush generation. I’d even call it a national disgrace, because of how badly it reflects on Britain.
And for all her huffing and puffing, trying to put the blame on Labour, this all comes down to Cameron and Tweezer. May took the decision to destroy the landing permits, which would have allowed the Windrush children to prove their citizenship. She also secretly removed the legislation that protected them.
She’s a racist bully, picking on those members of the Black and Asian community she thinks she can brutalise and throw out without anyone noticing or complaining. Well, she’s wrong. And people are rightly outraged.
She should resign. Now. No ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. And if she doesn’t, parliament should work until she does. Because she has shown by her actions that she regards British citizenship not as a right, but as a gift that can be withdrawn at the whim of herself and the other racist monsters in her party. And until she goes, and proper regulations are put in place to correct this and stop it being inflicted on anyone else, no-one in this country is safe.
Another day, another smear from the Blairites and the Israel lobby. Mike on his blog this morning put up a piece commenting and exposing another lie made from John Mann. Mann apparently has previous when it comes to making false statements, including to parliament. This, as Mike rightly points out, is an offence, but the Tories have done it so regularly and with such absolute impunity that it’s more or less a dead letter. Mann also gets very stroppy when people actually point out he’s lying, and threatens them with m’learned friends.
In this case, the man, who libels you as an anti-Semite if you mention the historical fact that the Nazis did sign an agreement with the Zionists to send Jews to Israel, as been claiming that ‘the anti-Semites’ in Momentum sent his wife a dead bird through the post.
I’ve some little sympathy for him, as his wife was sent the dead animal, and yes, it was nasty and distressing. However, that’s where the truth stops in Mann’s latest half-truth. The incident happened in 2012, three years before Momentum was formed. The man, who sent it, Roger Dyas-Elliot, isn’t a Marxist, but has instead been described as ‘slightly eccentric’. He has a lot of books and is a massive fan of Barbara Cartland. Mann’s wife is a councillor for Worksop East, and Dyas-Elliot sent her the creature because he was angry at the applications panel for Bassetlaw not allowing him to stand as a Labour candidate.
Mann also ranted on Twitter about ‘anti-Semitic’ tweets from Momentum rubbishing yesterday’s debate about anti-Semitism. Mike commented that from what he’d seen, there was no anti-Semitism. Just people making accurate comments about the issue. He also declared that it was time to sue each and every member of Momentum for libel.
Having critiqued this latest claim of abuse by Mann, Mike ends his piece about it by drawing the obvious comparison with Monty Python: it is an ex-claim, having joined the Choir Invisibule.
As for Mann threatening to sue people, who point out his lies, there’s a simply answer to that. Private Eye use it whenever someone they’ve exposed threatens them with legal action and they’re absolutely confident that they’re right:
Arkell Vs. Pressdram.
Which is a polite way of telling them to go away, but using much cruder language inadmissible before the judge.
You do wonder, however, how long the Blairites and the Israel lobby can go on making these flagrant lies, before it becomes too much for even the mainstream media to bother repeating them. The more they make these claims of anti-Semitism and abuse, the more people are actually starting not to believe them. Even the Israel lobby itself is starting to wake up to the fact that these smears aren’t working like they did, and people are seeing through them. But that doesn’t stop them from making them.
Here’s another great video from the left-wing American news site, The Young Turks. It’s a video of Milo Yiannopolis, one of the stars of the Alt Right, being run out of a New York bar. Yiannopolis is gay, half-Jewish, and with a fondness for choosing Blacks as his romantic/ sexual partners. Despite this, Yiannopolis’ own comments and remarks are vehemently racist, as well as deeply anti-feminist and, bizarrely, anti-gay, quite apart from the real racism and misogyny at the core of the Alt Right movement itself. A few years ago he caused controversy when he went on a tour of colleges and universities all over America as part of his campaign to spread the ideas of the Alt Right. Or simply to wind up the left and anyone who takes anti-racism and women’s rights seriously. He styles himself a ‘virtuous troll’, you see, which is supposed to justify him performing stunts and making comments that have absolutely no point except to cause offence. In this case, he succeeded, and Yiannopolis was very happy to talk about how intolerant leftists were on campus. Never mind the real intolerance Yiannopolis himself spouts and represents with his very White supremacist and misogynist friends in the Alt Right.
He was all set to have a book published by Simon and Schuster, I believe, until the footage went viral of him on the Joe Rogan Show apparently condoning child abuse. He was talking about his own abuse by a Roman Catholic priest, which he claimed at the time was a very positive thing, and spoke equally positively about how young boys in such relationships weren’t being abused, but were in fact being psychologically helped.
It was rubbish; vile, dangerous, rubbish. Yiannopolis got dropped by the publisher, sacked from one of his jobs and there was considerable anger within the Republican party. So Yiannopolis appeared a little while later to make a tearful speech declaring that he most certainly does not condone child abuse, and that he recognises that he was himself a victim of it.
But he’s still a racist, and no matter how much he complains about the intolerance of the Left, progressive Americans aren’t standing for it.
The clip shows the welcome Yiannopolis got when he went into a bar in New York for a drink. Unknown to him, the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America were already in there for a meeting. And they let him know exactly what they thought of him by chanting ‘Racist scum get out!’ Yiannopolis took their advice and left.
He turned up on social media to complain that the Socialists wouldn’t let him go to his chair or get his bag. The video shows that he made all this up. The Socialists in the bar don’t stop him from doing anything. They just stand there and chant, until Yiannopolis and what looks like a couple of his friends make their way out.
The hosts for this video, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, state that the Socialists called him a racist because, when he was defining what the Alt Right stood for, he did canvas and take on board the views of White supremacists and the Klan. It’s therefore entirely accurate to describe him as a Nazi. They also make the point that this exactly what he deserves because of his racism and bigotry.
I’ve no doubt that even now various Republican hacks and shills are probably writing articles about how intolerant the Left is, and how they’re blocking free speech and democracy. Just like the Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing press over here a little while ago was moaning that ‘political correctness’ on British university campuses, and the ‘no-platforming’ of speakers with extreme right-wing, racist, misogynist or other offensive beliefs were a threat to free speech and the democratic free exchange of ideas at university. It’s all nonsense. What they’re really afraid of is the free enquiry they claim to be defending. They resent the fact that students do have and discuss left-wing beliefs, and are active challenging Conservative dogma and policy. And as Tweezer’s despicable treatment of the Windrush generation has shown, all too many in the Tory party are racist and support the institutionally racist maltreatment of non-Whites. From this perspective, it very much looks like their denunciations of ‘left-wing intolerance’ are merely another piece of camouflage to disguise their intention to legitimise real intolerance in the form of racism and right-wing bigotry on campus. All in the name of protecting Conservative values and freedom of speech.
So much for the Tories and their vaunted ‘Respect’ policy. These are the people, who claim that Labour is riddled with anti-Semites and misogynists, all busily insulting nice young Blairites like Luciana Berger and Angela Eagle. Berger has received anti-Semitic abuse and threats, but they’re nowhere near as extensive on the left as she’s claimed. And one Blairite made up her tale of misogynist abuse completely. They exaggerate and lie because it’s convenient for them to say so, in order to cling to power in the Labour Party. And, of course, for their allies in the Tories to cling to power in government.
Allies? Really? Isn’t that going too far? No, not at all. As one terrified local Blairite Labour leader called for Tories and Lib Dems to join her party, in order to stop it being overrun by the ‘far left’, by which she means Momentun and mainstream social democrats, and the Blairites stand for exactly the same policies as the Tories – privatisation and welfare cuts – it’s fair to describe them as exactly that.
Jones had written an article criticising the mainstream media for living in the London bubble. It ignores everything outside the capital, and is dominated by groupthink. It is also full of mediocrities and incompetents, who got there not on personal merit, but because of who they knew.
Mike was a professional journalist, and brings his own considerable journalistic skills to his blogging. And he entirely concurred. And what Jones said is not remotely controversial, except to offended establishment journos. The Guardian and Independent have talked about how national journalism is dominated by London. Just as so many of the leading journos were also friends and neighbours of Dave Cameron in the Cotswolds. I noticed long ago that some of the stories that got into the national press about burglaries and murders were only in there, because they occurred in London. The same crimes are perpetrated all over the country, but these cases were only considered worthy of national news because they took place in the nation’s capital.
As for groupthink and classicism, you can see it. The mainstream media all follow the establishment line that unquestioningly accepts the need for austerity, and gets very shrill and upset when somebody else does. You look at the backgrounds of the main journos, and you’ll see that the majority of them are very comfortably upper-middle class with family connections to the press and media. Paul Dacre’s father was another hack with the Mail, when he was writing admiring stories about Hitler in the ’30s, for example. The editor of the Scum is an old Etonian.
And what makes this situation worse, though Jones didn’t mention it, is that the industry relies heavily on unpaid interns. The worst offender is the Groaniad, if Private Eye exposes can be believed. It’s very difficult for talented outsiders to break into, and they are being exploited by the hacks and mediocrities above them.
This was all too much for the establishment journos, who all dogpiled into Jones to revile him. And the odious Soames was in there as well, calling him by a homophobic epithet. Jones is gay, and Soames called him a ‘sh*tweasel’. According to the Urban Dictionary, this is someone who inserts his penis up another’s bottom by surprise without warning. So pretty much an anal rapist, then.
It’s an ugly term, and an ugly slur. Mike considers the possibility that Soames may not have known what it meant, and though it just meant he was someone who stabbed people in the back, in the conventional way.
Not an excuse.
Not that Soames is exactly a stranger to controversy. I can remember how he was all over the News Quiz on Radio 4 under Major for his monstrously bigoted comments.
But the silence about this from the Tories and the mainstream media is deafening. As Mike points out, you can imagine the howls of outrage from the Tories and the mainstream press if this had come from a Labour MP, and directed at a Tory or Blairite. Especially with the upcoming debate on anti-Semitism. But when it’s good, right-wing Tories making such comments, there’s nothing.
So much for the new Tory embrace of the gay community. Well, I can remember how, over a decade ago, backbench Tory after backbench Tory had to resign after making homophobic and racist comments. Cameron said he was going to clean it all out as part of his campaign to modernise the party. He clearly hasn’t, as Soames remark shows.
The Tories are an organised hypocrisy, and this shows once again how corrupt and partisan the mainstream press are. Get them out.
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