Frances Barber Joins Rachel Riley and Tracy Ann Oberman in Raving Anti-Corbyn Paranoia

I’ve blogged several times before about how the visceral, personal hatred of Jeremy Corbyn by Countdown numbers woman Rachel Riley and ‘jobbing’ actor Tracy Ann Oberman seems to be driving them towards the abyss of sheer madness. Oberman seemed to believe a few months ago that the Labour leader was personally stalking her. Because he showed up at a Manchester theatre in which she was performing. His presence had nothing to do with her. He’s a patron of the theatre, had been personally involved in setting up and was there to see the show. Now Frances Barber, another Z-list celeb with a deep hatred of the Labour leader appears to be joining them on their journey towards the funny farm.

Yesterday an Islamist terrorist started attacking people with a knife around Fishmongers’ Hall in London. Tragically, he killed two people with a knife before London’s finest turned up and shot and killed him. The murderer had been imprisoned on terrorism charges, but had been paroled and released. He had absolutely no connection with the Labour leader whatsoever, but Barber decided he had to because, as everyone knows, because the Tories and anti-Semitism smear merchants have told them, Corbyn is a friend of terrorists.

Corbyn, as well as Boris Johnson and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick had all praised the actions and extreme courage of the public. But despite this praise for the victims of the attack, Barber tweeted out

People died.  Innocent men & women going to work were stabbed by a terrorist. Jeremy Corbyn is on their side. I fucking hate him.

When somebody pointed out that this was quite a leap of logic, she replied

How fabulous! I leapt he’s a total shithead.

When someone else told her that she may have been deceived by a fake tweet going around, she said that she had no interest in it, and that Corbyn was a ‘terrorist sympathizer’. At this point, someone suggested that she needed help, at which point, as Zelo Street says, ‘the paranoia set in’. She accused that tweeter of having been sent by Aaron Bastani, whom she decided to call ‘Bastardi’. Back to the fake tweet, she denied ever seeing it and declared that Corbyn had ‘loved terrorists all his god damn life’ and was ‘a vile anti-British Communist’.

She then went back to claiming that all her detractors had been set on her by Bastani, declaring

Bastardi has released his demons . Nasty upsetting. Who needs it. But I’m ok.

Which was followed by

This is the way politics is conducted now? Pillory the enemy. Hateful . It’s why after 40 years I left this poison.

By this time the peeps on Twitter were wondering about Barber’s mental health. Responding to Kate, a woman obviously concerned for Frances’ sanity, she tweeted

“Kate thinks I’m mentally ill because I don’t adore Corbyn. Hahahaha”.

Another person, Ian Fraser, decided that she was just deranged. So Barber declared he was ‘a journeyman’.

And then it was back to blaming Bastani for all the peeps coming to tell her that she was wrong, or plain nuts.

Asshole Bastardi has sent all you little ants. Honestly guys it’s too tragic.

When someone suggested that Barber should stop typing, ’cause it was gone midnight, she replied

Bastardi is now so desperate he is pretending fake worrying about The Grand Masters life. Oh my days.

Covering this little interchange, Zelo Street concluded

‘Frances Barber would blame Corbyn and Bastani if her train was late. Sad, really.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/frances-barbers-london-bridge-meltdown.html

Looking at her weird accusations and her personal hatred of Corbyn and Aaron Bastani, it’s hard not to agree with two of the commenters to that article. One, who was anonymous, posted

The woman is either seriously ill or shouldn’t mix a keyboard with The Curse Of John Barleycorn.

‘Jonathan’ concurred, saying

The likes of Frances Barber like other the other minor slebs Rachel Riley & Tracey Ann Oberman, are either seriously suffering from a delusional disorder or more likely been at the sauce or possibly both.

And according to ‘Mark’, somebody had briefly amended her Wiki page so that it read that she ‘was an anti-Islamic Zionist with a Corbyn fixation who does some acting, when she’s sober enough.’

I got the impression that Barber is part of the circle around Oberman and Riley, who have swallowed the toxic nonsense that Corbyn is anti-Semitic and that British society is now so full of Jew-hatred, that it’s like Nazi Germany c. 1937. This is the exact opposite of what’s happening. There are no brown-shirted hordes marching through the streets chanting anti-Semitic slogans. Nobody is burning books or proposing any kind of anti-Semitic legislation. Nobody wants Jewish Brits to be forced out of their jobs, their homes and their country. Even the I’s repulsive Simon Kelner, who has been pushing the anti-Semitism smears as hard as any of the other liars and propagandist hacks, has said that if Corbyn does take power on 13th of next month, nothing will happen to Britain’s Jews. In fact, as Jeremy Corbyn has shown time and again, he has actively supported Jews against discrimination and persecution. But, well, as Boy George once sang in the ’80s ‘And truth means nothing in some strange places’.

But Barber’s rants also say much about her, Riley’s and Oberman’s twisted view of the world. They really are so twisted with hatred, that in my view they really can’t accept that anyone who takes a different view of Corbyn isn’t part of a troll army or defended by one. Mike had similar accusations flung at him during a spat with one of the anti-Semitism smear merchants. When ordinary people turned up to defend him, the smear merchant accused Mike of having set his followers upon him. Mike had done no such thing. They were defending Mike entirely willingly and unprompted, because they like and trust Mike, and know he’s telling the truth. Just like the people telling Barber she was wrong and possibly unhinged were also doing it spontaneously. But to me it looks like Riley and Oberman do deliberately set their followers on people. Indeed, Oberman is part of a network of trolls, which includes David Collier and the Gnasherjew outfit. So when Barber accuses her critics of being sent to attack her by Aaron Bastani, I believe that it not only shows her own personal fixation with him, but possibly that it’s also a bit of projection on her part. It’s the kind of thing she’d do, or like to do, and so they must be doing it.

It also reminds me of the rants of Steve Renstrom, AKA She-Bop Steve, an American artist who believes that the Californian senator Alan Cranston is at the heart of global conspiracy and is responsible for killing, amongst others, the acts Jim Belushi and Natalie Wood. Of the latter Renstrom’s written

Star Magazine T.V. ad, Natalie Woods’ close friend, Wadkins, tries to wink to indicate B.S. info as to how and why she died. The hog who drowned her remotely from the Federal Building downtown, fooling millions, replaces Wadkins’ wink with a “detectably hog” mechanical wink to say to the ‘Dupe Troops’ “No secret we’re involved since you knew already via, say, Ms. Woods’ “Brainstorm” Flick.

They had to wipe out that simple wink! (Frakin, squirmin, insane, desperate Nazis.) In “Brainstorm” an actor reaches over and touches her neck letting us 20,000 “meat puppets” material witness’ know she was in danger.

Or the notoriously rants of Dr. Francis E. Dec, who believed he was being persecuted by the police and their Black puppet underlings as part of the ‘COMMUNIST GANGSTER GOVERNMENT’ conspiracy which was turning people into ‘GANGSTER FRANKENSTEIN EARPHONE RADIO SLAVES’. In one of his truly barking screeds, Dec claimed that the cops and their Black assistants

SPRAY ME WITH POISON NERVE GAS from AUTOMOBILE EXHAUSTS AND EVEN LAWN MOWERS, DEADLY ASSAULTS EVEN IN MY YARD WITH KNIVES, EVEN BRICKS AND STONES, EVEN DEADLY TOUCH TABIN, or ELECTRIC SHOCK “FLASH LITE”, EVEN REMOTE ELECTRONICALLY CONTROLLED AROUND CORNERS TRAJECTION OF DEADLY TOUCH TARANTULA SPIDERS.

Looking at the increasingly nonsensical rants Riley, Oberman and Barber are making about the Labour leader, I really begin to wonder how long it will be before they start writing similarly deranged and paranoid pieces about him.

 

Lib Dems Now Claiming that Only They Can Stop Tory Majority

The Lib Dems have started changing their tactics, I see. According to an article in last Monday’s I, 25th November 2019, Jo Swinson has scaled back her ambitions. She is no longer saying that the Lib Dems are going to form a government. Instead, she’s just claiming that it’s only her party that can stop the Tories forming a majority. The article by Nigel Morris reads

Jo Swinson says the Liberal Democrats are best placed to prevent Boris Johnson securing a majority as her party continues to scale back its election ambitions.

The party no longer portrays its leader as a prime minister in waiting as it struggles to make headway in opinion polls.

Ms Swinson acknowledged the Prime Minister appeared to be ‘on course’ for victory at the moment. And she signalled the Lib Dems were changing tack to argue that Remain supporters should support them to stop Mr Johnson winning a majority for his version of Brexit. Surveys yesterday suggested the party averages around 15 per cent in the polls, which could leave them with fewer than the 21 seats they held when the election was called.

Ms Swinson suggested on BBC 1’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday that she could give the go-ahead for Mr Johnson’s Brexit blueprint as long as it was conditional on a second referendum.

This should raise red flags for anyone, who really think the Lib Dems are progressive and are actually the party of Remain. It has always seemed to me that Swinson’s support for the Remain campaign was tactical. Only two per cent more of her party support Remain than the number of Labour supporters who do so. And she is absolutely not a progressive in any sense of the word. She’s an arch-Thatcherite. She consistently voted with the government under the Tories, in fact far more so than many leading Conservatives. And she wants to put up a statue to Thatcher.

This looks to me that she’s trying to imply that she’s willing to form a coalition with Labour when she absolutely isn’t. She’s said that she would prefer a Conservative government to Corbyn, and that’s definitely the way she’ll go. If there is another hung parliament and it’s a choice between the two parties, she’ll do exactly what Nick Clegg did and join Boris in government without a moment’s hesitation. And I think that in negotiations between the parties, her commitment to a second referendum will be jettisoned. Or postponed. Or something, so she doesn’t have to act on it.

Don’t be misled. Swinson is preparing to sell out Lib Dem voters yet again. Just like her party did under Clegg.

 

Tory Lead Down to Less than 5 per cent in Targeted Labour Constituencies

More evidence that the Tories are actually going down in the polls, not up. A day or so ago the papers were all running stories claiming that Labour were revising their election strategy following polls predicting that they faced being beaten by the Tories at the coming election. Yesterday’s Metro followed the rest of them in this with the article ‘Labour ‘hits reset button’ after grim poll warning’ by Dominic Yeatman. But a closer reading of the article showed that things were quite so rosy for the party of lies, racism, bigotry, poverty, starvation and death. It stated that the poll by YouGov showed that the Tories were leading in 43 of the 76 Labour constituencies they were targeting. But in most of these the lead was by less than 5 per cent.

It also predicted that the Lib Dem’s share of the vote would fall from 20 to 13, and that Anna Soubry, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Angela Smith would lose their seats.

First the Tory lead was 20 points, then it was ten, then seven, and now in most of the Labour seats they hope to take it’s below 5. Despite the prediction that they would win a majority of 68 seats, the trend for them is quite definitely down, not up.

Which is why, as Dr. Moderate demonstrated in his tweets about their election strategy, they’ve changed their tactics from attack to defence, trying to hold on to their seats instead of attacking Labour’s. And why they’re practically braking electoral law by sending begging letters full of lies urging people to vote for them along with the postal votes in marginals.

Tacky Tories send ‘begging letter’ alongside postal votes in marginal constituencies

Despite puff headlines and articles the Tories and the press are worried. And it’s showing.

Tories Go Goebbels and Threaten Channel 4 after Humiliation on Climate Change Debate

One of the defining features of every dictatorship has been rigid control of the press. In the former USSR and Soviet bloc until Gorbachev, the media was owned and controlled by the state, and it dutifully followed the party line. The leader was praised, and his opponents were vilified. Before being rounded up, imprisoned and shot, of course. It was exactly the same in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The newspapers there were privately owned, but even so had to follow the party line. In Germany, this was set by Josef Goebbels, the infamous ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’. The Tories also have an intolerant attitude to the media. Most of the newspapers are owned by proprietors, who support the Tories and so have a strong Tory bias. The Tories therefore expect the press and media to follow their line. When they don’t, they start flinging around accusations of bias. When it’s state-owned companies, like the Beeb, they start making threats of ending the license fee or privatising the corporation, as I remember them doing so in the 1990s. With private broadcasters they threaten to remove their broadcasting license. Thatcher did this to London Weekend Television in the 1980s following the company’s documentary, ‘Death of the Rock’. This showed that the SAS team that killed an IRA terror squad in Gibraltar had acted as a death squad. The terrorists had been under army surveillance during their entire journey through Spain, and could have been picked up at any point with minimal bloodshed. The programme concluded that they had been deliberately executed. Thatcher went berserk at this demonstration of British lawlessness, and withdrew LWT’s broadcasting license. It was replaced instead by Carlton, no doubt named after the infamous Tory club.

And the Tories were making the same threats yesterday to Channel 4, after the programme humiliated Johnson in its leaders’ debate over climate change. Johnson has now resorted to Tweezer’s tactic of running away from possible tough or hostile interviews. He refused to turn up to be grilled by Andrew Neil on his show on the Beeb, which has embarrassed our state broadcaster, as they got Corbyn on his show by falsely telling him that they would be interviewing Boris this week, and that it had all been agreed with the Tories when it hadn’t. Fearing a repeat of last Friday’s leader debates, when Britain’s oafish Trump junior was properly shown to be a blustering moron, Johnson scarpered again. Channel 4 therefore took the decision to go ahead with the debate, but put in a melting ice sculpture to represent the BoJob.

Realising that a Conservative non-appearance didn’t look good, the Tories decided to send Boris’ father and Michael Gove, his best mate. Who weren’t allowed on the programme for the simple reason, as Channel 4’s news editor Ben de Pear pointed out, that as lovely and charming as they were, they weren’t the party’s leader. Gove started lying about how he turned up at Channel 4, but was turned away because Corbyn and Sturgeon didn’t want to debate a Conservative. This was disproved by Robert Peston, who tweeted

Classic Vote Leave tactics this whole ‘Gove turns up’ while CCHQ complains to regulator Ofcom about Ch4 barring him. It is all about proving to supporters that the London media establishment are against them (don’t laugh) while trying to intimidate all broadcasters.

Unable to get their own way, the Tories have complained about the debate to Ofcom, claiming that the channel has broken its legal requirement to be impartial and that the refusal to admit Gove and Stanley Johnson was a partisan stunt. They also told Buzzfeed News that if they’re re-elected, they would review Channel 4’s broadcasting license.

Sunny Hundal pointed out the sheer hypocrisy behind this.

If Corbyn had threatened Channel 4’s license over climate change debate, every newspaper in Britain would rightly be calling it ‘Stalinist’. Yet the press is silent and BBC is treating it as a legit story.

Zelo Street concluded

‘Tory commitment to free speech does not include dissent. Who’s being Stalinist now?’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/tories-threaten-to-curtail-free-speech.html

The Tories don’t like freedom of speech at all. They withdrew LWT’s broadcasting license after ‘Death on the Rock’, and had a Panorama documentary how the party had an overlapping membership with the BNP, National Front and other Fascists, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’ suppressed. And during their coalition government with the Lib Dems, they passed legislation providing for a system of secret courts. If the government decides it is necessary for reasons of national security, the accused may be tried in courts from which the press and public are banned. They may not know the identity of their accusers, nor the crimes of which they are accused or the evidence against them. It a system from the pages of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, and is the same as the perverted judicial systems of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. And Cameron also wanted to make street demonstrations more difficult by passing legislation that would restrict the right to march and demonstrate under the pretence of protecting local residents from ‘nuisance’.

With this latest threat to Channel 4, the Tories have shown themselves not only cowards and bullies, but an active threat to freedom of speech. Get them out, and Labour in!

Video of British Scientist Eric Laithwaite Explaining Principle of Magnetic Levitation (Maglev)

This is a fascinating film from Imperial College London. Shot in 1975, it shows great British scientist/engineer Eric Laithwaite explaining how a maglev train would work. He begins with first principles, simply showing how magnets act upon each other with bar magnets. Magnets with the same poles facing each other repel, and he demonstrates how this can be used to suspend one magnet above another. This can be done with ring magnets, but usually something has to hold them in place, like the solid glass tube in this video. But ordinary magnets don’t generated enough lift to raise heavy objects off the ground. He then moves on to electromagnets and how these can also be made to move aluminium objects along them when using AC current. The electromagnets can be flattened out to produce a kind of river – the ‘Magnetic River’ of the film’s title – along which an aluminium sheet can be propelled at great speed. He then shows how the same principle could be used to drive a train by placing a model on the maglev track.

Laithwaite was working on making maglev trains a reality when the project was cancelled due to the budget cuts of the late 70s. The idea has since been taken up by German and other, foreign engineers. It has been seen by visionary scientists and SF writers like Arthur C. Clarke as the solution to current transport problems through the great speed that these trains could in theory attain without friction from wheels touching the tracks. They would also be clean and green through being powered by electricity, preferably solar power, rather than the burning of coal or other hydrocarbons. See the discussion about them in Clarke’s Profiles of the Future.

Laithwaite is one of the great scientists most people have never heard of. In the 1990s he got caught up in developing anti-gravity based on his experiments with gyroscopes. His claim that he had discovered a new principle of anti-gravity propulsion was not accepted by the scientific community. I’ve got the impression that the furor that aroused has caused his earlier, solid work to be unfairly overlooked.

I realise the video’s long at just over 18 minutes, but it’s worth persevering with if you’re interested in the subject. Before computer graphics came in, this is pretty much what science broadcasting was like when I was a schoolboy. It was simply the scientist, engineer or presenter standing in front of the camera talking with the machine or other object in front of them, and using simple diagrams or illustrations. And I’m really impressed with the way Laithwaite is able to explain a sophisticated piece of engineering in ordinary, non-technical language. As one of the commenters says on the YouTube page for this, he would have been a great science teacher.

He isn’t quite on his own here. Helping him with the equipment is his mysterious assistant, Barry, who helps set the apparatus up and loads the sheets of aluminium and then the model train on the maglev tracks, but who never speaks.

It’s a very basic presentation compared to some of the films on today’s popular science television, and it’s not clear if it was intended for broadcast. But it was experts like Dr. Laithwaite who brought science to ordinary people and inspired a new generation witih its wonder when I was young.

Today the government is concerned about the lack of young people choosing to study STEM subjects. Perhaps if broadcasters were able to find a few more experts with ability to explain science with the simplicity of some of those, who graced our TVs then, people able to convey real enthusiasm for the subject, and weren’t afraid of putting more popular science programmes on TV, there would be more school and university students taking up these subjects.

 

 

Video of DIY Atmospheric Water Generators

Atmospheric Water Generators are machines that work on the same principle as dehumidifiers. They produce water from atmospheric moisture. The difference between them and the dehumidifiers is that the water they produce should be safe to drink.

In this video from desertsun 02’s channel on YouTube, a man shows off a simple AWG that’s he’s built himself. The explanatory paragraph for it runs

DIY Atmospheric Water Generator. Unit pulls Pure ‘distilled water’ straight out of the air! works best in hot humid conditions. this simple design pumps near freezing water thru a long section of copper coil. coil becomes very cold and dew (condensate) forms on the coil. the dew is then caught by a drip-pan located beneath the coil. *note that this unit has the added benefit of dehumidifying the air. *an AWG is essentially just a “Food Safe” dehumidifier. (my previous video shows this unit being operated primarily as a dehumidifier… the difference being that that design has plastic parts that come in contact with the water). to keep the water as ‘pure’ as possible, i used only aluminum and copper in this version. main thing with these is to keep the coils clean. if coils are cleaned after each use, the water generated is ‘distilled water’.

Of course, it raises the question that if he’s using cold water to condense the water in the atmosphere, why doesn’t he simply drink the water rather than go to all the bother of cooling and pumping it around just to get a few ounces from the atmosphere. But it’s a brilliant piece of home engineering, and scientists and engineers are building machines like these to give people in deprived, parched areas potable water. And we may need more of these machines very soon if the planet continues to warm up and desertification increases.

Of Course the Tories Are Privatising the NHS

More lies from the party of smear and bully: they’re denying they’re selling off the NHS. At around 10.00 O’Clock on Wednesday Jeremy Corbyn appeared, brandishing a copy of the documents of the negotiations between Donald Trump and his British counterpart, Boris. And two minutes after he made his speech, the Tory spin machine trundled into action using what Peter Oborne has called its paramilitary wing, Guido Fawkes. The site stated that they had all six of the documents Corbyn had seen, and one didn’t mention the NHS at all. And the second, he declared, showed that Britain was heading for cheaper drugs through the deal with the Americans.

The Torygraph’s Christopher Hope then claimed that Corbyn was a threat to national security, as those documents had been marked secret. Zelo Street has pointed out how hypocritical this is, coming from the man or the paper that leaked ambassador Kim Darroch’s confidential views on what a massive imbecile Trump is. Tory chairman James Cleverly decided to add his tuppence worth’s, a declared that this breach of confidentiality by Corbyn showed his wasn’t fit to be Prime Minister. This was then refuted by Aaron Bastani of Novara Media, who pointed out that if that was true, then what about Fawkes, which had uploaded the documents with the civil servants’ names attached. Which Corbyn hadn’t done. And Pete tweeted that the documents actually showed that NHS access to generic drugs is an issue for the US.

This was confirmed by Steve Peers, who cited the relevant texts to disprove the Fawkes’ lies utterly. Peers tweeted

This is either ignorant or dishonest about Trump’s trade policy on drug pricing. It’s the other way around – Trump’s policy is to *increase* the prices paid for drugs outside the US … Here’s Trump’s policy on drug pricing in his own words, objecting to ‘unreasonably low prices’ outside the US – from the House of Lords library briefing on ‘the NHS and future trade deals’, 4 July 2019.

Some have objected to Corbyn saying that Trump seeks ‘full market access’ for medical products. But this phrase is found in the Trump administration’s own public document setting out its objectives in the US/UK talks … this falls short of the claim that “the NHS is for sale” in the trade talks with Trump. But we do know: a) patents/NHS drug pricing is under discussion (although we can’t be certain what final FTA would say on this) … b) Trump’s objective is NHS paying *more*, not less.

Zelo Street concluded its coverage of this with the comment

‘Labour’s revelation has cut through. The Tory boot boys have confirmed it. Game changer.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/labour-nhs-leak-validated-by-tory-spin.html

But the Tories are still pursuing a policy of NHS privatisation even without the wretched trade negotiation with Trump.

They and the Blairites have been doing it for forty years, ever since Thatcher got into power in 1979. She really did want to privatise the NHS completely, but was only prevented by a cabinet revolt. So she contented herself with privatising the ancillary services by opening them up to private tender, and trying to encourage a target of 15 per cent of the British population to take out private health insurance instead.

This piecemeal privatisation continued under John Major, who introduced the private finance initiative, in which private firms would cooperate with the government to build hospitals. A few years ago Private Eye published a piece on this, revealing that its architect, Peter Lilly, saw it as an opportunity to open up the NHS to private enterprise.

Then in 1997 Blair’s new Labour came to power, and the process of privatisation was ramped up. Blair was no kind of socialist. He was an ardent Thatcherite, who the Leaderene in her turn hailed as her greatest success. He immediately pushed through a series of reforms in which the management of hospitals would be opened up to private healthcare companies. At the same time, the NHS could also contract in private healthcare providers like hospitals. The new polyclinics or health centres that the Blair regime established were also to be privately managed by companies like BUPA, Circle Health and Virgin Healthcare. And the Community Care Groups of doctors, which were supposed to be responsible for allowing doctors to manage their own funds, were part of this policy. They could raise money through private enterprise and contract in private healthcare companies.

One of Blair’s Health Secretaries wished to reduce the NHS to nothing more than a kitemark on services provided by private companies.

And this policy was continued and expanded in turn by the Tories.

They have done nothing to repeal any of this legislation. Instead they have taken it further. Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill is particularly obnoxious as underneath its convoluted verbiage it absolves the Health Secretary from the responsibility of ensuring that everyone in the UK has access to proper healthcare. This overturns one of the core principles of the NHS that has been there ever since it was set up by Nye Bevan and the Labour Party in 1948.

And it has gone on. The Tories wanted to give whole regions over to private healthcare providers, which would have brought the NHS’ complete privatisation that much closer. At the moment the majority of medical contracts have been given to private healthcare providers. Mike revealed on his blog that about 309 contracts had been given out, thus refuting the Tory claim that they aren’t selling the Health Service off.

Let’s be clear: Corbyn is not wrong and the Tories ARE selling the NHS – now

This is a process that has been going for decades. But it is extensively covered by books like Raymond Tallis’ and Jackie Davis’ NHS – SOS. I’ve also written pamphlets on it, one of which is still available from Lulu. See my publications’ page on this site. And there are other books. Many others.

The Tories are selling off the NHS, and it is only Corbyn and his team that oppose it. The Blairites in Labour and the Lib Dems are utterly complicit in it.

If you still value the NHS, vote Labour.

Tory NHS Lies Now Too Much for Private Eye

The colossal lies put out by the Tory party about building new hospitals, recruiting new nurses, and expanding the number of GP appointments have been ripped to shreds by leftwing bloggers and news and comment sites like Mike’s, Zelo Street and many, many others. And it seems Private Eye now shares that highly critical views. On page 7 of their latest edition for 29th November to 12th December 2019 there’s this little article, ‘Tory Story’. It runs

It’s hard to rank the Conservative’s NHS pledges in order of ridiculousness.

“40 new hospitals”, but only six existing refurbs named and costed; 50,000 new nurses – when 19,000 of them are already employed by the NHS which is already 40,000 nurses short; or 50m more GP appointments when the number of GPs has fallen despite a previous failed pledge to recruit another 5,000. But dwarfing all of these is the absurd pledge that no one will have to sell their house to fund social care, with nothing in their manifesto to explain how.

In other words, the last is yet another empty Tory election promise that they’ve no intention of keeping. This seems to be a bit of a volte face on the part of Eye’s editor, Ian Hislop. I can remember him making a sarcastic comment about Labour’s opposition to people having to pay for their social care on I Have I Got News For You. Possibly something changed in the meantime, and one of Hislop’s relatives is now having to face the possibility of selling their home to pay for it.

Either way, it shows that people are realising that the Tories’ lies about improving the NHS are just that – lies. While they privatise it.

The Three Photographs That Reveal the Real Reason for the Anti-Semitism Smears Against Labour

Mike and the great Jewish anti-racist, anti-Zionist activist Tony Greenstein have both extensively covered and refuted the anti-Semitism smears and witch-hunts against the Labour party. And as Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis published his latest attempt to revive them, they have both put on their blogs a series of posts which very effectively demolish the smears and the Chief Rabbi’s pretence that he’s motivated by a genuine fear for the safety of Britain’s Jews.

Here’s a photo Mike put up on his blog, from a tweet by Mirvis congratulating him on gaining 10 Downing Street.

 

And this image, of Mirvis gurning next to Netanyahu, or, as I’ve heard him described by one Jewish academic, ‘that bastard Netanyahu’, was tweeted by Zoe Zeero.

Her caption reads

With predictable timing, the same week that Labour announces they would no longer continue to sell weapons to Israel and Saudi Arabia, out pops the Tory-donating, Netanyahu-supporting Rabbi to denounce Labour.

In 2015, not that long after the bombardment of Gaza which led to the loss of 2000 Palestinian lives including 500 children, Rabbi Mirvis wrote that ‘Israel would not survive without its weapons.

The rabbi, who used to live in Israel and is personal friend of both Boris Johnson as well as Netanyahu, has frequently defended Israel’s right to bomb Palestinians.

It is then followed by a series of internet addresses supporting her statement.

Here’s the real reason Chief Rabbi Mirvis attacked Jeremy Corbyn and Labour: he’s a TORY (and a racist, it seems)

And Tony Greenstein put up this photo of Marie van der Zyl, the current president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, personally protesting against Chris Williamson speaking in Brighton.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-hypocrisy-of-ephraim-mirviss.html

Hold on! Wasn’t she down there protesting because the former Labour MP is a vicious anti-Semite? Well, ostensibly yes. Even though he isn’t a Jew-hater, as Greenstein, Mike, and Williamson’s many supporters, gentile and Jewish, have pointed out. Zyl, and the rest of the Board of Deputies, are Tories to a man and woman. They’re also arch-Zionists. It’s written into the Board’s constitution, so that anti-Zionist or simply Israel-critical Jews aren’t represented.

Mirvis and his predecessor as Chief Rabbi, R. Jonathan Sacks, and the Board and rest of the anti-Semitism smear merchants are Conservatives and ultra-Zionists. They hate and fear Corbyn and his supporters, left-wing, traditional Labour members and supporters like Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Mike, Martin Odoni and all the others, because they want to overturn four decades of Thatcherism. Four decades of our state industries, including the NHS, being sold off. Four decades of the unions being smashed, the poor, the unemployed and the disabled being demonised and denied proper state support. Four decades of racism against Blacks, Asians and now, most particularly, Muslims. Four decades of workers’ rights being eroded, and exploitative contracts introduced, all in the name of creating a fluid labour market. Four decades of poverty, misery, starvation, despair and death.

All for the profit of the very rich, the corporate giants donors giving money to Tory and New Labour coffers.

And let’s make it very clear: they certainly do not represent all of Britain’s Jews by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve blogged before about how unrepresentative the Chief Rabbinate and the Board are. They only represent the United Synagogue. They don’t represent secular Jews, who don’t attend worship, nor the Orthodox. And they really don’t represent the Haredi Jewish community, who have repeated written letters in support of Corbyn because Corbyn has always been a friend to Jews and defended their interests. In the case of the Haredi community, this was particularly demonstrated when he prevented a historic burial ground from being redeveloped.

David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group has particularly pointed out that they don’t represent the Jewish poor, Jewish single mothers and other Jewish peeps facing the same issues of poverty, marginalisation and disenfranchisement as the wider British public. They don’t represent the Jews, who work in and support our NHS and public services, or who depend on them for their healthcare and supplies of electricity and water. The ordinary people, who use buses and trains to get to and from work, the shops or school.

Mirvis, van der Zyl and the rest only represent their community’s rich elite. As Tony Greenstein has pointed out, they risk encouraging the very anti-Semitism they claim to condemn by appearing to show that the Jewish community is composed of nothing but rich capitalists determined to stamp out any movement that wishes to empower working people.

Their actions and attitudes conform to the anti-Semitic stereotype the real Jew-haters and Fascists have used to stir up resentment and hatred against the Jewish people.

And as ultra-Zionists, Chief Rabbis Sacks and Mirvis, and van der Zyl and the Board, have followed Israel’s lead in using spurious claims of anti-Semitism as a weapon against legitimate criticism of Israel for its barbarous maltreatment of the Palestinians. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement were explicitly set up to counter criticism of Israel following its bombardment of Gaza. Corbyn has been attacked and vilified, not because he is a genuine anti-Semite, but because he wants a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

As do many Jews and Israelis, who have also been viciously smeared as anti-Semitic and self-hating, by people like Sacks, Mirvis and van der Zyl. 

Don’t be taken in by the Tory lies and ultra-Zionist propaganda. These three pictures show the real motivations behind the anti-Semitism accusations. They also show that the Tories have nothing really left to use against Corbyn and Labour except these fake accusations.

Vote them out, and Corbyn and Labour in! Because Corbyn, unlike the Tories, will make a better Britain and, as the Labour pledges on race and faith shows, he is serious about tackling racism.

And that has always included defending Jews, fighting anti-Semitism and fighting for all the British people’s poor.

£70 Bn Black Hole in Tory Spending Pledges

Despite all the Tory bluster, as Mike has pointed out Labour’s spending plans are properly costed and have the support of 163 leading economists. They have sent a letter to the Independent stating their support, saying

It seems clear to us that the Labour party has not only understood the deep problems we face, but has devised serious proposals for dealing with them.

We believe it deserves to form the next government.

Labour spending plans are backed by leading economists

The Tories, however, have always claimed that they are the party of proper fiscal responsibility, who truly understand economics. In contrast to profligate, spendthrift Labour, they can be trusted with wise, frugal expenditure.

So how do their manifesto pledges stand up?

Not well. According to an article in Tuesday’s I, they’ve got a black hole to the tune of £ 70 bn in theirs.

The article by Hugo Gye reads

The Conservatives face a £70bn black hole in their spending plans after making a string of manifesto promises without explaining how to pay for them.

Boris Johnson has pledged to build dozens of hospitals, create a new rail network and set up a hi-tech “gigafactory” to make electric cars. He is also promising national insurance cuts, a new system of social care and relief for indebted students. None of his policies is costed in the party manifesto revealed on Sunday. They add up to £52.2bn in added capital investment, and an extra £20.6bn on the annual bill for day-to-day spending, according to figures calculated by I.

The Conservative manifesto proposed a rise in day-to-day spending of £2.9 bn as well as £3.6bn in tax cuts. But it also contained a number of policies with no price tag attached.

The biggest is Northern Powerhouse Rail, a new network linking Liverpool to Hull via Manchester and Leeds, which will cost £39 bhn. Other promised capital projects not costed by the manifesto include building 40 new hospitals and the construction of a gigafactory to make eco-friendly vehicles.

Tory sources said future investment plans would be funded by a £100 bn pot of capital expenditure, only £22 bn of which has so far been allocated to specific projects. The shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said, “With no evidence behind any of their figures, it looks like the Conservatives’ fake news approach applies to their manifesto too.”

The deputy Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, added: “Boris Johnson’s relationship with numbers has all the hallmarks of his relationship with the truth – nonexistent.”

That’s precisely how it seems to me.

The fact that these pledges are not costed suggests very strongly to me that, like his promise to build 40 new hospitals, they’re lies. The Tories have no intention of honouring them. They’re only interested in slashing welfare spending and privatising the NHS and anything else they can get their hands on for the benefit of their rich corporate donors, Donald Trump and the American private healthcare industry, and the hedge funds. And they are going to wreck this country to do so.

Don’t be fooled by them. Labour really stands for restoring the welfare state, public infrastructure and the NHS. And it’s all properly costed.

They are the party of economic sense. Not the loony, lying Tories.