I’ve got no new information to add to this. Mike and the peeps on Twitter have said it all very eloquently and cogently. But I felt I had to add my voice to theirs condemning Simon Hoare, the Tory chairman of the Northern Ireland Select Committee and his disgusting announcement that he is going to abstain on the government’s Internal Market Bill. This is the piece of legislation that will break international law by contradicting our treaties and agreements with the EU. And it’s a real threat to peace in Northern Ireland because it imposes a hard border between the Six Counties and the Republic. But it was an essential part of the Good Friday Agreement that the border would remain open.
The Americans have already warned the Tories that if th20 years e Bill gets passed, any future agreement with Britain is gone. That means that all Johnson’s rubbish and guff about getting a good deal with America is just null and void, bluff, bluster, propaganda and lies.
But the real harm could be to the people of Ulster. Those of us of a certain age can remember the horrors of the twenty years or so of terrorism in Northern Ireland and the IRA’s bombing campaign on the mainland. I don’t know how many people were killed, maimed and injured. I do remember the day the IRA bombed Magg’s department store in Bristol. Fortunately no-one was hurt. It wasn’t just the IRA – Loyalist paramilitaries also carried out their atrocities, and there is more than ample evidence that British armed forces, which were originally sent into Ulster to keep the peace impartially, actively colluded with them, as well as the infamous Bloody Sunday Massacre.
The Daily Heil has been fiercely critical of the NI peace agreement, claiming that contrary to all the publicity the paramilitaries are still active. Well, I think one of its editors, David English, was a member of the Loyal Orange Order. Their anti-Catholic activities resulted in a concerned British government launching an investigation into them in the late 19th century, as I found out while working in the archives of the former Empire and Commonwealth Museum. I dare say they are. But the violence seems to be very, very much less than I remember and there does seem to be, or at least was, a real atmosphere of positivity and optimism. The great people of Ulster really did seem at last able to live in peace with the hope that tomorrow would be better. Ordinary, innocent people didn’t have to live in the fear that they were going to be shot or bombed in their homes, pubs or work.
Too many people from both the Nationalist and Loyalist communities and politicians of goodwill from Britain, Ulster and Eire and worked too hard and risked and sacrificed too much for this fragile peace to be put in jeopardy. I know personally people from both communities in Northern Ireland, who hate the bigotry and violence.
No-one should die or live in fear simply because Boris and the Brexiteers – surely the name of a really grotty pop band – want to stick two fingers up to the European Union. Abstention isn’t an option: this is just Pilate washing his hands at Christ’s crucifixion again. Hoare might have eased his conscience, but it’s a weak gesture simply so that he hangs on to his job.
You can’t abstain. Not when people’s lives and the political stability of an entire province hangs in the balance. He should do the decent thing and vote against.
Just as Starmer had no business ordering the Labour Party to abstain but not to vote against more Tory legislation granting British forces immunity from prosecution for war crimes.
This could all blow back in Tories’ faces. A majority of Ulster Protestants also want to keep the border open. The province voted to remain in the EU, and some political commenters have argued that this leaves the way open for Eire winning them over and so creating a united Ireland. I think this is far too optimistic, but who knows? If all the people of Ulster want to join Eire rather than have their trade and personal contacts disrupted by a harder border, than there honestly can be no argument. Not if it was the result of a genuinely democratic campaign free of intimidation from the men of violence.
There’d be a united Ireland, and Cameron and Boris would have succeeded in breaking the Union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. And when Blair made peace in partnership with Eire and the Americans, some people claimed that he had betrayed his people.
No: he and his partners gave them peace. A peace that Boris is set to destroy and Hoare is doing nothing to preserve.
The Tories are a disgrace. A murderous disgrace. The people of Ireland and Britain deserve better. And the Tories deserve nothing but our hatred and contempt for their willingness to risk more violence.
Yesterday, Gavin Williamson, the secretary of state for education, issued his departments guideline informing schools what they could not teach. This included materials from organisations determined to end capitalism, as well as anti-Semitic material, opposition to freedom of speech and which approves of illegal activity. The Labour Party’s John McDonnell pointed out that this would mean that it’s now illegal to teach large sections of British history and particularly that of the Labour Party, trade unions and socialism, because all these organisations at different times advocated the end of capitalism. He is, of course, right. In 1945 or thereabouts, for example, the Labour Party published an edition of the Communist Manifesto. He concluded
“This is another step in the culture war and this drift towards extreme Conservative authoritarianism is gaining pace and should worry anyone who believes that democracy requires freedom of speech and an educated populace.”
The economist and former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varousfakis, who has also written a book, The Crisis of Capitalism, also commented this guidance showed how easy it was for a country to lose itself and slip surreptitiously into totalitarianism. He said
“Imagine an educational system that banned schools from enlisting into their curricula teaching resources dedicated to the writings of British writers like William Morris, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Paine even. Well, you don’t have to. Boris Johnson’s government has just instructed schools to do exactly that.”
Quite. I wonder how the ban affects even mainstream textbooks, which included anti-capitalist or other extremist literature. For example there are any number of readers and anthologies of various political or historical writings published by perfectly mainstream publishers for school and university students. Such as the one below, Critics of Capitalism: Victorian Reactions to ‘Political Economy’, edited by Elisabeth Jay and Richard Jay, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1986). This collects a variety of writings authors such as John Francis Bray, Thomas Carlyle, Marx and Engels, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hill Green, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. These texts obviously document and illustrate the reactions to the rise of economics as an academic subject in the 19th century, and several of the authors are titans of 19th century British culture, literature and political philosophy, like the art critic Ruskin, the socialist, writer and artist, William Morris, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the liberal political philosophers John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hill Green, and Matthew Arnold, the headmast of Rugby, the author of Culture and Anarchy. This is quite apart from Marx and Engels and John Francis Bray, who was a socialist and follower of Robert Owen. Carlyle’s now largely forgotten, but he was a philosopher and historian who was massively influential in his day.
Clearly this is an entirely respectable text from a very respectable publisher for history students. But, thanks to the government’s new guidelines, you could well ask if it’s now illegal to teach it in schools, thanks to its anti-capitalist contents.
The same question also applies to very respectable histories by respectable, mainstream historians and political scientists, of extremist movements and ideologies like Fascism, Nazism, Communism and anarchism. For example, one of the books I used while studying the rise of Nazism at college was D.G. Williamson’s The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982). It’s an excellent little book published as part of their Seminar Studies in History range. These are short histories of various periods in history from King John and the Magna Carta to the origins of the Second World and the Third Reich, which include extracts from texts from the period illustrating particularly aspects and events. Williamson’s book is a comprehensive history of the Nazi regime, and so includes extracts from Nazi documents like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Goebbel’s diaries and as well as eyewitness account of Nazi war crimes and individual acts of heroism and resistance. It presents an objective account of Hitler’s tyranny including its horrors and atrocities. There is absolutely no way it, nor other books like it, could remotely be considered pro-Nazi or presenting any kind of positive assessment of Hitler’s regime.
But if schools are now forbidden from teaching anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic, racist and anti-democratic material, does this mean that they are also forbidden from using books like Williamson’s, which include the writings of the Nazis themselves to show the real nature of the regime and the motivations of the men behind it. I hope not, and Owen Jones in his tweet attacking the new guidelines quotes them. From this, it should be possible to make a distinction between texts produced by extremist organisations and extracts from them in mainstream histories or editions from mainstream publishers. According to Jones’ tweet, the guidelines state
Schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters. This is the case even if the material is not extreme, as the use of it could imply endorsement or support of the organisation. Examples of extreme political stances, include, but are not limited to
a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism or end free and fair elections.
2. opposition to the right of freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion and conscience.
3. the use or endorsement of racist, including anti-Semitic language or communications.
4. the encouragement or endorsement of illegal activity.
5. a failure to condemn illegal activities in their name or in support of their cause, particularly violent actions against people and property.
Responding to Jones’ tweet, Jessica Simor QC asks this very pertinent question
Do the fourth and fifth bullet points mean that schools should not accept Government money?
Good point.
I also have no doubt that the vast majority are going to be extremely careful about which organisation’s materials they use because of the danger of using extremist or otherwise inappropriate material.
But I can also how sometimes it may also be necessary for schools to use such materials in order to criticise them and educate their pupils about their dangers. For example, in the 1980s the BNP or NF tried to appeal to schoolchildren by launching a comic. Other extremists have also turned up at the school gates on occasion. When I was at school in Bristol during the ’81/2 race riots, a White agitator with a beard like Karl Marx’s turned up outside the school entrance with a megaphone trying to get the kids to join in. We ignored him and the headmaster next day in assembly said very clearly that any child who did join the rioting would be expelled.
Nazis are also known for lying and deliberately distorting history. If some Nazi group, for example, produced a pamphlet aimed at schoolchildren and teachers found it being passed around the playground one of the actions they could take, as well as simply banning it and punishing any kid who tried to promote it, might be for a suitably qualified teacher to go through it, pointing out the deliberate lies. When Hitler himself seized power, one Austrian university lecturer embarrassed the fuhrer by showing his students how Hitler took his ideas from the cheap and grubby neo-Pagan literature published in the back streets of Vienna. One of these pamphlets claimed that the ancient Aryans had possessed radio-electric organs that gave them superpowers like telepathy. I think it was highly unlikely that anyone listening to this professor’s lectures on Hitler ever came away with the idea that Hitler had some deep grasp of the essential forces of human biology and and natural selection.
I see absolutely no point to this legislation whatsoever. Teachers, parents and educators are already careful about what is taught in schools. In the past few years most incidents of this type have come from fundamentalist religious schools. These have mostly been Muslim schools, which have been caught teaching their students to hate Christians, Jews and non-Muslims, but there was also a Jewish school which became the centre of controversy for its opposition to homosexuality. In the 1980s Thatcher and the right-wing press ran scare stories about Communist teachers indoctrinating students with evil subversive subjects like peace studies. I am not aware that anyone with extreme left-wing, Communist or Trotskite views has been trying to indoctrinate children. But there are concerns about Black Lives Matter, which I have heard is a Marxist organisation. If that is the case, then the guidelines seem to be an attempt to ban the use of their materials. BLM did produce materials for a week of action in schools, which was thoroughly critiqued by Sargon of Gasbag, aka Carl Benjamin, the sage of Swindon and the man who broke UKIP. Sargon has extreme right-wing Conservative views himself, though I honestly don’t believe that he is genuinely racist and his criticisms of the BLM school material was reasonable. Williamson’s guidelines look like a badly thought out attempt to stop them being used without causing controversy by tackling the organisation’s anti-racism or its critique of White society.
But it also marks the growing intolerance of the Tories themselves and their determination that schools should be used for the inculcation of their own doctrines, rather than objective teaching that allows children to come to their own. Way back in the 1980s Thatcher tried to purge the universities of Marxists by passing legislation making it illegal for them to hold posts in higher education. They got round it by making a subtle distinction: they claimed to be Marxian rather than Marxist. By which they argued that they had Marxist culture, but weren’t actually Marxists. It’s a legal sleight of hand, but it allowed them to retain their teaching posts.
These new guidelines look like an extension of such previous legislation in order to preserve capitalism from any kind of thorough critique. Even when, as the peeps Mike quotes in his article, show very clearly that it is massively failing in front of our eyes.
In his chapter ‘The Violence of the Debtfare State’ in Vickie Cooper and David Whyte, eds., The Violence of Austerity (London: Pluto Press 2017), David Ellis uses the term ‘debtfare’ to describe the dismantling of state welfare provision and its replacement by debt and credit. And I’m starting to wonder how far this can go before something like debt slavery arises. The Romans abolished debt slavery, but the punishment for debt was addictio, forced labour. People are being forced into mountains of debt through poverty created by austerity and the removal of living wages and proper unemployment and disability benefits. Students are also mired in it through tuition fees which now may amount to tens of thousands of pounds.
I am therefore left wondering at what point the various banks and other organisations offering credit will stop it and start demanding their money back or some other form of repayment. Clearly if people remain in debt, they can’t repay the money. The alternatives seem to be either that the banks keep on giving them credit in the hope that they’ll be able to repay something, or else write it off as a loss. But if the number of people in irrecoverable debt hits millions, what happens? If the levels of indebtedness actually starts to harm the banks and the other organisations, will they turn to the state to demand some kind of forced labour in order to make good their profits?
I’ve already pointed out the similarity of the workfare schemes to the forced labour systems of Stalin’s Russia. Stalin used slave labour from the gulags to industrialise the Soviet Union. Business managers would give the KGB lists of the kind of workers their enterprise needed, and the KGB would then have those with the appropriate skills and qualifications accused of anti-Soviet crimes and arrested. The workfare scheme now used to punish the unemployed doesn’t teach anybody any new skills, nor does it allow them to find employment. Indeed the stats a while ago showed that people on workfare were less likely to get a job than if they were left to their own initiative. But workfare does supply cheap, state-subsidised labour to the scheme’s backers and the parties’ business donors, like the supermarkets.
So if the number of people in grievous, irrecoverable debt, will the government simply write them off and let them starve to death, as so many disabled people have done already thanks to false assessments under the Work Capability Tests? Or will they decide they can still make some money for business by pressing them into compulsory labour in order to work their way out of it, as in the Roman system?
I’m not saying this will happen or even that it’s likely. But I do wonder if it’s a possibility.
Yesterday Mike reported that Dominic Cummings was considering appointing the former editor of the Daily Heil, the legendarily foul-mouthed Paul Dacre as head of the broadcasting watchdog, OFCOM, and Charles Moore, the former editor of the Torygraph and biographer of Maggie Thatcher, as head of the Beeb. ‘Coordination’ – Gleichschaltung – was the term the Nazis used for their takeover of organisations and the imposition of Nazi aims and policies. This obviously included the press, radio, cinema and the arts under Hitler’s infamous propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels.
The process by which the Nazis imposed their censorship and control of the press is described in this paragraph from the entry ‘Press in the Third Reich’ in James Taylor and Warren Shaw’s A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton Books 1987).
With the coming of the Third Reich in 1933, all papers were required to conform and editors were held responsible for the content of their papers. Such newspapers of high reputation as the Berliner Tageblatt or the Frankfurter Zeitung survived, though not as independent journals; and the latter was closed when it published adverse criticism of the late Professor Troost, Hitler’s favourite architect. From 1938, when Otto Dietrich became Reich press chief, editors were given official stories to follow. Foreign papers were still on sale in the large towns of Germany, but were forbidden when war began in 1939. The apparatus of news suppression was operated by the Gestapo; news distortion was the task of the editors of the recognised journals. (p. 278).
If this is correct – and Zelo Street has also put up an article arguing that it isn’t, and is in fact a dead cat flung on the table by Cummings to distract attention from the government’s disastrous handling of the Coronavirus crisis – then the British media will be almost totally in the control of the Tories. Mike’s put up the reaction of some of peeps on Twitter to the news. The former editors of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger and Will Hutton, respectively commented
Paul Dacre to run Ofcom, Charles Moore to run the BBC. Because Boris wants them. No process. No joke. This is what an oligarchy looks like
and
Floating Paul Dacre to direct OfCom and Charles Moore to chair the BBC is tip of the ice-berg. Follows Dido Harding, who takes Tory whip in the Lords, heading up NHS Test and Trace, and innumerable other Tory appointments. Its an one-party state. The sense of entitlement is brazen.
Yes, it is. It is the creation of totalitarian media control, though I don’t doubt that the Tories will deny this until they’re blue in the face and claim that we still have a free press and media.
The danger to free speech and genuine independent reporting is very real. Thatcher had the Panorama documentary, Maggie’s Militant Tendency, which claimed that the Tories had been infiltrated by Neo-Nazis and Fascists spiked. She retaliated to London Weekend Television’s documentary, ‘Death on the Rock’, which claimed that the SAS had acted as a death squad in the extra-judicial execution of an IRA squad they could have rounded up at any time in Spain and Gibraltar by removing the company’s broadcasting license. This was then awarded to Carlton.
Goebbels’ official title during the Third Reich was ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’. Perhaps it’s also a good title for Cummings and his attempts to impose Tory absolute control on the press and broadcasting.
Donald Trump in America and the Tories over here have started their attack on our countries’ education systems. Trump has set up a commission to make American schooling more patriotic and teach American schoolkids that they are part of an exceptional nation. Over here, Johnson and his clown cabinet have ruled that it is illegal for schools to teach criticisms of capitalism or use anti-capitalist materials, along with materials attacking democracy or which are anti-Semitic. This seems to be a reaction to Black Lives Matter, which is a Marxist organisation that criticises American society from a Marxist as well as Black anti-racist perspective. Trump has already banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory to federal institutions. In my opinion, Trump was quite right to do so. Critical Race Theory states quite openly that all Whites are racist, and any institutions created by Whites must automatically also be racist and oppressive to Blacks and other people of colour.
Trump’s demand for patriotic American education is different, and it was compared to the Hitler Youth, although I put up a piece a few days ago making the case that it was much more comparable to the Italian Fascists’ reforms of the Italian school curriculum.
The Nazis also reformed their school history syllabus in order to teach their twisted view that capitalism, democracy, socialism and all Germany’s economic and political woes were down to the Jews and would be solved by Hitler and his band of thugs. Johnson has rejected anti-Semitism, but there are many real, vicious anti-Semites as well as anti-Black and anti-Asian racists in his party, so perhaps it’s only time before Boris introduces a racist element into the curriculum.
In addition to the Hitler Youth, the Nazis also introduced a Nazi pupils’ league for grammar school boys and a students’ league for the universities. The kids in these leagues went around beating up and bullying the children of socialists and democrats. I found this complaint about their attacks in J. Noakes and G. Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919-1945, Vol 1: The Rise to Power 1919-1934 (Exeter: University of Exeter 1983).
To the Oldenburg Ministery for Churches and Schools, 21 November 1930
The Committee of the Oldenburg branch of the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold submits the following matter to the State Ministry with a request for a prompt comment:
Leaflets have recently been distributed in the playgrounds of the schools of the city of Oldenburg and its vicinity, inviting people to join a National Socialist Pupils’ Association. We enclose one of these leaflets.
A number of pupils have already followed the appeal to join this pupils’ association. These consider themselves pledged, in the spirit of the leaflet, to bully those who disagree with them. In the playground these pupils join together and sing National Socialist combat songs. Children of Republicans are called names, their satchels are smeared with swastikas, and they are given leaflets with swastikas or ‘Heil Hitler’ or ‘Germany awake’ written on them. In the school in Metjendorf the son of a Republican was beaten up during the break by members of the pupils’ association so badly that he had to stay at home for over a week. Grown-ups who are known to be members of a Republican party are called names by the pupils when they pass by the school. In one case this even happened out of the window of a classroom.
Since the children of Republicans are unfortunately in a minority in secondary schools they cannot defend themselves against these combined attacks. With an effort they preserve their self-control, but as soon as the child gets home, this too collapses. He then seeks refuge in tears and complaints. The parents find that lessons following breaks in which their child has been molested by his class mates are useless because he is too preoccupied with the events of the break. Sometimes teachers, not knowing the reason for the child’s inattention, punish him as well. The same state of mind influences his homework, which therefore cannot be of a standard which a child in a good, cheerful mood would normal achieve. Again this has its effects at school.
It might be answered that parents and children have the right to make a complaint. This is true and yet at the same time not true. It must unfortunately be said that apart from a group of teachers who would treat such a complaint objectively, there are a number from whom this cannot be counted on and to whom one does not turn because they too are National Socialists or are active in other right-wing associations;. The relationship of trust necessary between teachers and parents and their children has completely gone.
Since we have heard that some headmasters have already declared that they are not in a position to deal with these incidents as required, since they have received no instructions from the Ministry, we request that such instructions should be issued as soon as possible. We can presumably be sure that the Sate Ministry will admit an attitude which does justice to all concerned and will decree tha tpupils’ associations of political organisations are forbidden.
Yours faithfully,
The committee of the Oldenburg Branch of the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold. (p. 79)
The Reichsbanner Red-Black-Gold was a paramilitary organisation set up in 1924 by the German Socialist party and other democrats to defend the Weimar republic against the right-wing paramilitaries.
Is this the future of the British school system? Are the Tories going to go further and found right-wing pupils and students’ associations to enforce proper patriotic and pro-capitalist teaching by school staff and the correct patriotic attitudes amongst other pupils? Various right-wing American organisations, like Turning Point, have a university professor watch or something of that name, which compiles lists of left-wing university professors with the aim of getting them fired for teaching their doctrines. Incidentally, the BNP/NF did something similar in British schools in the 1980s. They encouraged schoolchildren to monitor their teachers in case they were teaching Communist ideas, and report to them. Then the storm troopers would come for them and beat them up. Boris hasn’t introduced that, but that’s a natural development of this process of political censorship.
This legislation is also completely unnecessary. There has been legislation banning the indoctrination of children in schools since at least the 1980s, when Maggie Thatcher and the right-wing press ran a similar scare campaign about Communist teachers and the introduction of Peace Studies as a subject. Further legislation was introduced over a decade ago by Tony Blair. These laws stipulated that teachers could not present their own personal political or religious views as fact. If they were somehow required to state their views, they had to make it clear that it was only what they believed. As for prohibiting children from studying material which attacks democracy or promotes anti-Semitism, apart from it rather obviously makes studying the Nazis difficult, I believe that schools are already required to teach British values. Which are democracy, tolerance, diversity and so on.
This new legislation seems to me to have absolutely nothing to do with protecting vulnerable and impressionable minds from indoctrination by extremists. It seems to me to be a deliberate attempt to use the fears generated by Black Lives Matter and its Marxist, anti-capitalist ideology to sneak in Tory, establishment indoctrination instead.
I fond this passage, ”Moderates’ versus ‘Left Wing’ – a Misleading Description’ in Tony Benn’s Argument’s for Democracy, edited by Chris Mullin (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1981). In it, the great man shows that its the Labour party as a whole that’s moderate, and those the media describes as moderates aren’t always moderate Labour, but just as likely Tories or Lib Dems. He writes
First, the uxse of the adjectives ‘moderate’ and ‘left wing’ mjerits some examination. The Labour Party, being avowedly socialist in its aims, is itself left wing and so are all its members, as compared to the Conservatives and Liberals. Moreover, the term ‘moderate’ is equally confusing. By any world standard of socialism, the entire Labour Party is exceptionally moderate, offering, even in its supposedly ‘full-blooded’ manifestos in the past, the most modest proposals for changes in the structure of wealth and power, all to be achieved firmly within the framework of parliamentary democracy, complete with regular and free general elections. The main characteristics of the ‘left wing’ of the party are that it may be more analytical and philosophical in its approach, and more committed to carrying through the policies agreed at conference, once they have been endorsed by the electorate and a Labour government is in power. By contrast, some of the self-proclaimed ‘moderates’ have ended up in other political parties. Whatever else they turned out to be, the were not moderate socialists but committed Conservatives or Liberals. Thus the labelling now in general use is not very accurate in describing the wide spread of opinion within the party, and the spirit of tolerance to be found among people of differing views. (p. 35).
Everything Benn said is right, and unfortunately as true now as it was when he wrote it nearly forty years ago. The Labour Party has always been very moderate in its approach to socialism. That’s why it aroused such scorn from Lenin and the Communists, and why historically even other continental socialists, who had more moderate views, looked down upon the Labour party as something that wasn’t really, or was just barely, socialist.
And we’ve seen that the so-called ‘moderates’ in the Labour party were and are anything but. They’re neoliberal Thatcherites, true-blue Tories. They were caught intriguing against Jeremy Corbyn in order to prevent the Labour Party winning the 2017 and 2019 elections. In their struggles to overthrow him, some of them even appealed to Tories and Lib Dems to join constituency Labour parties. One of the intriguers was, apparently, a member of a Conservative internet group, and more extreme in his bitter hatred of Corbyn and his supporters than the real Tories. But you’ll be purged as a member of the hard left and an anti-Semite if you dare mention this. It’s only Corbyn and his supporters that are infiltrators.
As for Jeremy Corbyn and the Left, I’ve said many times before: Corbyn wasn’t particularly. The policies he adopted and advocated were traditional Labour policies of a mixed economy, strong welfare state, properly nationalised NHS and strong trade unions able to protect working people. This is the social democratic consensus which governed this country from the end of the Second World War to Thatcher’s election in 1979. It is not even remotely Communist or Trotskyite. But the media have bellowed and screamed that it is, and unfortunately there are too many people who believe this flagrant lie. People who have no idea what Communism is, or what Trotsky said.
Tony Benn: the greatest Labour leader and Prime Minister this country never had.
Mike’s mentioned this in his piece about Starmer now trying to win back donors to the Labour party when its haemorrhaging ordinary members thanks to his return to Blairism. One of the shows the peeps on Channel 4’s Gogglebox watched on Friday was an interview by Andrew Marr of Keir Starmer. And unfortunately, if the clip can be believed, Starmer was completely trounced by Marr.
The Labour leader was repeatedly asked what he would do about the Covid crisis. Starmer’s reply was a refrain of ‘We support the government’. Marr remarked that Starmer had done so much condemning past Tory policies in retrospect that Johnson had called him ‘Dr. Hindsight’. This is biting, but it appears from the clip that Starmer has earned. He was presented as having nothing to say against Johnson and his policies, which are wrecking this country, and impoverishing and destroying the lives and livelihoods of its people.
Starmer’s performance at PMQ’s has shown that when he does care to attack Johnson, he can land devastating blows. And it shouldn’t be hard. Johnson’s administration is one long catalogue of abject failures and U-turns. So much so, in fact, that Zelo Street has presented some very persuasive posts arguing that the Tories are considering easing him out and replacing him with someone else, like Michael Gove, Rishi Sunak or Priti Patel. But Starmer seems determined to put up only the weakest, most ineffectual opposition.
This is almost certainly because Starmer’s a Blairite. Blair’s policy was to take over those of the Conservatives and try win over their voters and their press and media. He was a neoliberal, whom Margaret Thatcher regarded as her greatest achievement. Much of New Labour campaigning was based on the claim that they could implement these policies better and more efficiently than the Tories themselves. They also made a feeble effort to retain their traditional working class support by presenting themselves as being less extreme and harsh in their welfare reforms than the Tories. But as one of the Blairite women MPs – I think it may have been Rachel Reeves – announced that Labour would be harder on the unemployed than the Tories, this claim is extremely dubious. Blair, Brown and their cronies also expected to retain working class support because they didn’t think they had anywhere else to go.
That argument doesn’t work. Some members of the working class simply stopped voting Labour. Others, a minority, moved to the right and started supporting UKIP and then the Fuhrage’s Brexit party. And many in the traditional Labour heartlands of the north and midlands were won over at the last general election by the Tories’ promise ‘to get Brexit done’. Starmer and the Labour leadership shouldn’t be so complacent about working class support.
But Starmer has shown that he has little idea or even interest in winning back traditional Labour supporters. Despite the vicious hostility the Tories and their complicit media succeeded in whipping up against Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s policies – nationalised utilities, a properly funded, state owned NHS that provides treatment to everyone, free at the point of service, strong trade unions and restored worker’s rights, and a proper welfare state that gives people what they really need and deserve to live on, instead of forcing them to rely on food banks and charity. But this conflicts with Blairite neoliberalism, and so Starmer has shown that he’s determined to move away from them and the working class in order to present Labour yet again as a pale imitation of the Conservatives.
It seems very much to me that Starmer and his supporters were never primarily against the Tories. They were just anti-Corbyn. Especially considering the allegations about the Blairite plotters and how they actively conspired to have the party lose the 2017 and 2019 elections. Through the past years they called on Tory and Lib Dem supporters to help them in their campaign against the Labour leader. Alistair Campbell even went as far as campaigning for the Lib Dems.
The result is Starmer’s appallingly feeble performance in the clip shown on Gogglebox. Starmer’s determined to hang on to Blairite policies, but Mike has argued that they won’t work this time. The Tories are destroying this country, and what is needed is a complete change of policies, not just a change of parties.
Starmer and his Blairite policies are wrecking the Labour Party. He should go, and make way for someone better able to attack and defeat the Tories.
After over two decade’s absence, the satirical puppet show Spitting Image is coming back to TV. A new series is going to be screened by Britbox, the channel of past shows created by the Beeb and ITV. I found this trailer for the new series on YouTube and it shows that, like its predecessor, the show is very definitely not going to pull its punches sending up politicos, religious figures and other celebrities.
The trailer satirises Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Kanye West, the Pope, Gwynneth Paltrow, Kim Kardashian and various sports stars, as well as Vladimir Putin. Warning: some of the humour is very coarse, such as the last sketch in which a naked Putin beats up Johnson and Trump, also naked, in a sauna. This contains full frontal puppet nudity. Which in itself is enough to boggle the mind.
Here it is, in it all its grotesque splendour and horror. Enjoy!
On page 261 on Mosley’s book, Mosley – Right or Wrong?, Britain’s Fascist leader is asked what he thinks of the Conservatives. Mosley’s gives a full and devastating reply, which very definitely shows that he’s not impressed by them. He says
The virtue of Conservatism is that it is the party of patriotism. It means well. Unfortunately, the leaders it selects arrive at results precisely the opposite to its intentions. So the party which existed to preserve the Empire has ended by liquidating the Empire. The party which believes in Great Britain has been the main architect of Small Britain. The party which believes in stability is bringing our country to the verge of chaos. But we need not traverse again the ground I covered in another answer. It is enough to state the undeniable fact that the Conservative Party has been chiefly responsible for the policies of Britain during the last fifty years.
What is the character which has produced this lamentable conclusion to a chapter in British history? ?This is the party of the smug, the satisfied, in an age which demands dynamism; the party of privilege when survival depends on promotion by merit; the party which exploits talent but never trusts it; the party of the tired, which calls a yawn a policy; the party of snobbery about the wrong things, which rejects intellect but reveres rank; the party of the climber, without aim to climb beyond a perch on a rotten bough; the party without purpose or great design; the party of small expedients to face the need of great decisions; the party which is always late, and now exists only as an ineffective brake on socialist policies; the party which wills the end of the greatness but always rejects the means; the party which excluded Churchill in all his years as a creative spirit, and used him only for the fatal process which finally destroyed the values in which it professed to believe; the party which detests brilliance and loves dullness; the party which idealizes the small, the the grey, the mediocre, and will achieve its ideal in the state to which it is reducing Britain, if that condition be not the final lethargy of death.
Mosley’s Britain would have been a brutal Fascist dictatorship, a one-party state ruled by fear and thuggery. Despite his repeated claims not to be an anti-Semite, Mosley would have put in place a kind of apartheid in which only those Jews, who were judged culturally British, would have been allowed to remain and Blacks and Asians very definitely discriminated against if not actively persecuted. I don’t doubt that had he seized power during the War, he would have turned Britain into another Nazi satellite or ally and fully collaborated in the Holocaust.
As for the British Empire, it was not the glorious institution Mosley and the Tories claim. There were some noble aspects to it – there were British governors and military commanders, who took very seriously their duty of stamping out slavery and the slave trade, for example. But we did exploit its subject peoples. Its end was marked by ruthless warfare against the rising nationalist movements in which British forces did commit atrocities and massacres. Quite apart from more covert systems of undermining these countries’ aspirations for freedom, like election rigging. In the case of Iran, an independent nation that provoked our wrath by nationalising its oil industry, we organized a coup that toppled its last, democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq. See John Newsinger’s book The Blood Never Dried: A people’s History of the British Empire, and Rory Cormac’s Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy.
But Mosley is absolutely right about the Tory party. They are the party of the traditional class system, and have shown themselves determined to maintain and expand the power of the immensely rich at the expense of everyone else – the poor, the disabled, working people, the unemployed. Their Brexit policies are destroying this country, their economic policies have wrecked this country’s industry and prosperity and their determination to privatise the NHS and destroy the welfare state is creating mass poverty, misery, starvation and illness. But never mind – their pet press sings their praises and spins every failure as some kind of magnificent achievement if it can, just so long as the poor are kept down, and the rich given more tax breaks and subsidies.
Mosley’s Britain would have been a murderous, totalitarian nightmare. Fascism everywhere needs to be fought and defeated. But he was right about the Tories.
A couple of hours ago I got an email from the Labour Assembly Against Austerity. They are petitioning against Sunak’s support package announced earlier this week on the grounds that it doesn’t go nearly far enough in giving people the help they need. They wrote
‘Urgently Needed – A Plan for the People
Rishi Sunak’s announcement this week was too little, too late, and will not prevent a massive increase in unemployment. We need to fight for every job and we need to fight for an economic plan for the people. As part of this campaigning, over 9000 people have now signed up in support of this plan to fight the Tories and put people first. Please help us get this up to 10,000 by taking 30 seconds to:
Let’s keep fighting the Tories and for a better future – for people and planet,
The Labour Assembly Against Austerity Volunteer Team.’
The text of the petition runs
A Post-Pandemic Plan for the People – #PeopleBeforeProfit. Add Your Name!The economic crisis we now face is set to be the worst any of us have experienced. We urgently need to transform our economy and society to ensure that people’s jobs, livelihoods and health come before private profit.
DEFEND LIVINGS STANDARDS AND JOBS – INVEST IN OUR FUTURE
The fight to prevent soaring unemployment is paramount. We need to build a movement that demands the Government takes the action needed to create full-employment with well-paid secure jobs for all. This will need massive, sustained investment in our infrastructure, in council housing, transport, public services, industry and beyond. We must eradicate financial insecurity through a minimum earnings guarantee at a decent level, ensure Statutory Sick Pay at living wage levels, support for renters, and build a Social Security System that is universal and not punitive. The crisis has shown we need trade unions more than ever. Greater union rights and freedoms will help end the exploitative zero-hour and precarious contracts that dominate our economy, save jobs and give workers a proper say in their workplace.
REBUILDING TO TACKLE THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE AND ACHIEVE SOCIAL JUSTICE:
We must rebuild in a way that tackles the existential threat of climate breakdown with ambitious, redistributive policies that put jobs, equality and improving people’s lives first. Research shows £85bn investment in green infrastructure could help create 1.24 million jobs in 2 years. The state must urgently invest to create high-quality green jobs and technologies through a Green New Deal, providing a just, environmentally sustainable transition of our industries and infrastructure by safeguarding the employment of all.
UNIVERSAL, PUBLICLY-OWNED SERVICES:
Our public services provided the vital support needed during the pandemic. But this crisis also sharply exposed how a decade of austerity and privatisation has left them at breaking point. We need to rebuild them to be the world class services our communities deserve creating hundreds of thousands of socially useful jobs at the same time. Only public ownership and universality will ensure access to our public services. Our transport system should be integrated and upgraded, with the railways and buses publicly owned and education properly funded and free for all. NHS under-funding, staff shortages and privatisation must end. We urgently need a public, universal social care service.
EQUALITY FOR ALL:
This pandemic has shone a spotlight on the deep structural inequalities in our society. Now is the time for real change. The dismantling of systematic inequality and liberation for all must be at the heart of how we rebuild better. The Black Lives Matter movement has rightly pushed the structural racism to the top of the political agenda. Real government action, not just words, is now needed. Women and disabled people have already seen a rolling back of equality gains under the Tories and these risk being further undermined, while LGBT+ people face a reactionary government which is not afraid to use the tactics of divide and rule. We must demand an end to the scapegoating of disabled people on benefits.
If you support it, please go over to their website and sign it, as I’ve done.
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