Keef Stalin Purges Ken Loach from Labour Party as Part of anti-Corbynite Witch Hunt

This shows you how utterly contemptible, treacherous and unprincipled Keir Starmer is, and how he is completely unfit to lead the Labour party. Mike has put up a piece today reporting that Starmer has purged Loach from the party, because the great cineaste has refused to dissociate himself from others purged from the party without evidence. This is in accordance, as I recall, of one of the demands Starmer pledged himself to from the Board of Deputies of British Jews: that anyone in the Labour party who still retained contact with someone thrown out due to anti-Semitism would themselves be thrown out. Stalin used exactly the same approach to his victims during the Soviet purges of the 1930s. If you continued to remember or make inquiries about anyone ‘disappeared’ by the KGB, let alone dared to defend anyone who had been accused of anti-Soviet propaganda or being a capitalist agent or saboteur, you would also be arrested, tortured and shot or sent to the camps. The accused become, in Orwell’s phrase, ‘unpersons’, erased from history.

I think Loach has probably been in Starmer’s and the Board’s firing line for a very long time. He was a prominent supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and decades previously had produced a film or play about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. For which he was accused of anti-Semitism by, among others, the leading synagogue in Belgium. He was also warmly welcomed as a very honoured guest when he attended a gathering of Jewish Voice for Labour. I’ve no doubt they’re also set to be purged along with the various other left-wing groups, like Labour Marxists and Socialist Appeal, because, according to Blairite Neil Coyle, they’re ‘Commies’. I doubt Coyle would know a true Communist if one came up and bit him. It’s just a term of abuse the neoliberals have taken to using to smear anyone who wants a return to the social democratic consensus of the period from 1948 to 1979. And the ultra-Zionists of the Board of Deputies no doubt hate them because they’re Jews, who’re critical of Israel and its barbarous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The Board can’t tolerate alternative forms of Judaism that criticise and reject Zionism, and Jewish Voice for Labour very definitely shows that by no means all Jews automatically and uncritically support the Israeli state. Simply by existing, they’re a challenge to the Board’s claim to represent all British Jews, when in fact the Board only represents the United Synagogue. And so I’ve no doubt that the Blairites will try to thrown them out next.

Loach himself is a very well respected film-maker. A few years ago when Cameron was infesting Downing Street, he made I, Daniel Blake, about how the DWP persecuted and maltreats the unemployed. Before then, he made Dirty, Pretty Things, about the despised underclass of immigrants who do the dirty jobs we don’t want, like office cleaners. But he’s best known for his film Kes, about a lad from a deprived northern working class community and his relationship with a kestrel. There has been a storm of protest against Loach’s purge on Twitter, and one of those posting was a teacher in a comprehensive school in one of the towns devastated by Thatcher’s pit closures. He describes the electrifying effect it had when it was shown to the schoolkids. Kes is one of the classics of British cinema. It has been shown on Channel 4, when that channel still took seriously its original founding mission of providing alternative programming. I think the DVD of the film is released by the British Film Institute.

Loach’s social realism isn’t to everyone’s taste, and I can’t say that his films really appeal to me. But he is a major figure in British cinema, and his purging by Starmer shows the latter’s utter contempt for the cultural sector. It seems intended to show that it doesn’t matter who the victim is, nor how important or respected they are in the arts, Starmer will throw them out. This will be taken as a threat by other left-wing film makers, theatre producers and directors. Who will be very justified in asking

“Is Starmer a fit person to run the country?”

Back in the 1980s there was an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, in which Hacker is irritated when the National Theatre, or a fictional version thereof, stages a play lampooning his administration. In revenge, and in order to secure their compliance, he threatens to close their premises down, turning them once again into ‘strolling players’ as in Shakespeare’s time. People in the arts may well be wondering if this is how Starmer intends to treat any dissent on their part, by closing them down or depriving them of funding or finding some other way to discredit and silence them.

This is not just an attack on one man. It is a symbolic warning to other major figures in the arts.

Free speech is under attack in the UK from the Tories, who wish to ban all forms of public protest if they get the chance.

And Starmer seems determined to extend this silencing to movies and the arts.

Tags: 'Dirty Pretty Things', 'I Daniel Blake', 'Kes', 'Yes Prime Minister', Board of Deputies of British Jews, British Film Institute, Channel 4, Conservatives, Gulags, Immigration, Jewish Voice for Labour, Keir Starmer, KGB, Labour Marxists, Labour Party, Margaret Thatcher, marxism, Miniing, Neil Coyle, Palestine, Protests, Purges, Schools, Socialist Appeal, stalin, the ARts, tony blair, Vox Political, Zionism