I’ve put up several pieces already this week commenting on and critiquing some of the videos put up by mad internet radio host Alex Belfield. Belfield is very much a man of the right, who rails against ‘namby-pamby pinko liberal Guardian-reading lefty-twirlies’ and entitled ‘whippersnappers’ in just about every one of his videos. I very much do not share his political views, especially when he demands the privatisation of the NHS. But sometimes he says something with which I agree and believe to be absolutely correct.
This is one of them. In his piece below, Belfield expresses his concerns about the police’s announcement that they will be increasing the use of computer facial recognition systems. Belfield’s worried about the privacy issue here. He points out that it will be used to track you on the motorway, and that it is also being used in some of the cashless stores now being trialled. In these stores, you are watched by the CCTV cameras and the machines make note of your purchases. You walk out of the store without handing over cash, but simply use your card to pay. As Belfield points out, the police can use the information from facial recognition systems and CCTV footage to reconstruct your day, including where you went and what you bought. And it’s not just adults being targeted. Critics have attacked plans to introduce CCTV surveillance in schools.
These are real, pressing issues that have been around for a long time. Back in the late 90s at the beginnings of Blair’s reign I read a book I’d taken out of the library which criticised the use of CCTV cameras and the electronic bourse. This was supposed to be the new form of cashless payment. Everyone would have a card which contained their biometric details and money, which would be used to pay for everything from groceries to trips on the bus. Tory Tony Blair was very much interested in forcing a biometric ID card on us all. The book and organisations such as Privacy International argued that this would lead to a surveillance state. A recent edition of Panorama, ‘Are You Worried Yet, Human?’, examined dangerous developments in AI. These included computer systems that could pilot jets remotely so that they performed better than when they were flown by human pilots. But most of the programme concentrated on the threat posed by computer surveillance. The Chinese are building computer systems and centres to gather data so that their citizens are constantly monitored. The programme spoke to Chinese dissidents who had been arrested and detained using such computer-collected footage.
This is exactly the type of totalitarian society depicted in Science Fiction dystopias. The first season titles of the classic BBC SF series, Blake’s 7, started with a CCTV camera followed by a black-suited soldier, faced hidden by helmet visor and gas mask. This was a trooper of the Federation, the totalitarian galactic empire against which Blake and his crew of former criminals fought. Comics legend Alan Moore has expressed his own worries about CCTV surveillance. He has said in interviews that he deliberately put them in the Fascist Britain he depicted in V For Vendetta in order to scare readers. What worries him is that these cameras have now become completely accepted. Moore’s an anarchist, but Tory Niall Ferguson has said the same thing. He recalls coming back from China and being shocked to find CCTV surveillance being used here, but ignored and accepted by everyone.
Belfield says that these systems and cashless electronic payment are being used to track us, and to keep records of what we’ve bought by companies so they can sell us stuff. That’s only part of the story. Another reason the electronic payment is being pushed instead of cash is so that governments can use it to track what we’re purchasing and seeing if we’re doing anything illegal. Privacy International was dedicated to combating such threats to our liberty. But I’m not aware that this is anything more than the viewpoints of a small number of individuals at present. Blair was prevented from introducing biometric ID cards, but the increased use of facial recognition systems and the push towards cashless payment suggests that the people who were calling for its introduction 20 years or so ago really haven’t gone away.
Belfield is absolutely right to point out that this is a threat to our liberty. It’s just a shame that he is one of the small number of people who are doing so.
I’ve said many times on this blog that Thatcher’s privatisation of the utilities and the railways has been an utter, complete, unmitigated failure and that these services should be renationalised. I am very pleased to say that a number of mainstream hacks are finally waking up to this. I got this email from anti-privatisation, pro-NHS group ‘We Own It’ reporting that journos on the Times, Torygraph, Herald and the Guardian have written pieces criticising privatisation. They also describe how various rail companies have had to be renationalised, and that nationalisation is part of Labour’s Green New Deal and Shadow Transport Secret Jim McMahon supports the renationalisation of the railways. It also castigates Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves for opposing nationalisation on ideological grounds, even when they claim the complete opposite.
“Dear David,
People are waking up to the fact that privatisation has failed the UK for nearly 40 years.
In the Times, Jon Yeomans talks about Thatcher’s sell offs, saying “More than 30 years later, Britain lives with the consequences of that 1980s revolution. From buses to trains to energy, there are signs that the wheels may be coming off.”
In the Herald, Lesley Riddoch asks on behalf of frustrated Scots “Is there any way to escape privatised Britain other than independence?”
Scotland is bringing its railway into public ownership.
Wales is bringing its railway into public ownership.
The East Coast line was brought into public ownership in 2018 (it’s now run by the government’s operator of last resort).
The Northern franchise was brought into public ownership in 2020.
And this week Southeastern, after defrauding the government of £25 million, has also been brought into public hands.
As the Telegraph (yes, the Telegraph) says “the Southeastern debacle exposes the failure of Britain’s rail privatisation”.
It’s not just rail – with Covid, the bus ‘market’ (never much of a market) is collapsing.
The Guardian comments on the proposed merger of Stagecoach and National Express, saying “Passengers, who have seen rail fares rocket and local bus services wither, may also hope this signals the end of a chapter when a few could profit so enormously from an essential public service.”
Meanwhile Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, who has committed to re-regulating the buses there (a victory of our campaign!) comments about himself and Mayors Tracy Brabin and Dan Jarvis “Between us we are rolling back the 1980s, we are overturning the Thatcher legacy.”
At the Labour party conference, shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband talked about the Green New Deal, committing to “a green Britain where public and alternative models of ownership play their proper role in making the transition affordable, secure and fair.”
Shadow transport secretary Jim McMahon confirmed his support for public ownership of rail and buses.
And Labour delegates voted for a Green New Deal, including public ownership of transport and energy, with speech after inspiring speech explaining why this is needed.
Despite all of this, Keir Starmer (who hasn’t responded yet to our open letter) and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have said they don’t support nationalising the energy supply companies. They’ve said they don’t want to be “ideological” about it.
But the truth, as Cat writes in the Guardian today, is that privatisation is an extreme ideological experiment that has failed us all for decades, and people have had enough of it.
When the Times, the Telegraph, the Herald and the Guardian are questioning privatisation, when more and more of our railway is being brought into public ownership, when Mayors are re-regulating buses, and when the energy market is in crisis – there’s a shift happening.
On moral and on economic grounds, privatisation just isn’t making sense anymore.
Don’t tell Sid
Cat, Alice, Johnbosco, Matthew, Zana and Anna – the We Own It team
PS Who’s Sid? In 1986, when Thatcher sold off British Gas, the company was floated on the stock market, accompanied by the famous ‘Tell Sid’ advertising campaign.
This shows precisely how out of touch, far right and ideological Starmer and Reeves are. They’re still pushing Thatcherism when it’s increasingly obvious that Thatcherism is dying. As for the Tory privatisation slogan in the 1980s, this was ‘If you see Sid, tell him’. It was a hidden gibe at Sidney Webb and the Fabians, who advocated the nationalisation of the utilities. Now it seems Sid is may just have the last laugh yet.
If you see Maggie, tell her: privatisation is disaster.
Mike put up a piece this morning reporting that the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union had disaffiliated from the Labour party following the party’s threat to expel their lead, Ian Hodson. Hodson’s crime was to have dealings with one of the organisations Starmer has expelled on the trumped up charge of anti-Semitism, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt. LAW was founded to support Labour members, who had been unfairly accused of anti-Semitism and expelled. However, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt was perfectly acceptable when Hodson dealt with it. The expulsion is yet another example of Starmer’s retroactive justice, which has always been the mark of the tyrant. BFAWU is one of the founding members of the Labour party, and Keir Starmer is the first Labour leader to have driven such a union away. This is yet another first in his long list of disgrace and treachery. BFAWU planned their vote to coincide with Starmer’s speech but it was moved forward to the day before. They also released a statement criticising the bargain basement Stalin for ignoring Tory inflicted poverty to carry on a factional campaign against the left.
The statement, as quoted by Mike, ran
“We need footballers to campaign to ensure our schoolchildren get a hot meal. Workers in our sector, who keep the nation fed, are relying on charity and good will from family and friends to put food on their tables. They rely on help to feed their families, with 7.5% relying on food banks, according to our recent survey.
“But instead of concentrating on these issues we have a factional internal war led by the leadership. We have a real crisis in the country and instead of leadership, the party’s leader chooses to divide the trade unions and the membership by proposing changes to the way elections for his successor will take place.
“We don’t see that as a political party with any expectations of winning an election. It’s just the leader trying to secure the right wing faction’s chosen successor.
“The decision taken by our delegates doesn’t mean we are leaving the political scene; it means we will become more political and we will ensure our members’ political voice is heard as we did when we started the campaign for £10 per hour in 2014.
“Today we want to see £15 per hour for all workers, the abolition of zero hours contracts and ending discrimination of young people by dispensing with youth rates.
“The BFAWU will not be bullied by bosses or politicians. When you pick on one of us you take on all of us. That’s what solidarity means.”
(Boldings Mike’s)
The campaign for a minimum wage is yet another cause Stalin has betrayed. He initially supported it, but now has turned against it, presumably because it’ll upset the Tory businessmen and right-wing media he’s trying to impress.
I wonder if Stalin is trying to manufacture a break with the unions, or at least those that threaten the dominance of the right. The Tories, as the party of the rich and business, hate the unions with a passion and have done everything they reasonably could to destroy them or at least severely curtail their power. The unions are blamed for the industrial unrest of the 1970s, and there have been a series of attempts by the Tories to stop the union levy to the Labour party. And one refrain used by the Tories over and over again is that the Labour party is the puppet of its trade union bosses. In fact Labour was partly founded to represent the trade unions, developing from the ‘Lib-Labs’ – the union representatives who sat in parliament as members of the Liberal party in the late 19th century and the Labour representation committee. Blair’s New Labour remodelled itself on the Conservatives following the example of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, who embraced Republican policies in order to appeal to Repeal voters. Starmer is doing the same, trying to purge the party of socialists and rejecting the socialist policies of the last manifesto, policies that he planned to support, in order to appeal to Tory voters and businessmen. Starmer seems to follow Blair in wishing for donations from business to be the main source of party income, rather than subscriptions from the party’s members and funding from the unions. Essentially the New Labour project was a capitulation to Tory criticism. And right at the beginning of his leadership, Tory Tony threatened to cut all ties with unions if they didn’t support his reforms of the party.
This is why I think Keef Stalin may be trying to engineer a split with the unions in his campaign to remodel the party fully into a clone of the Tories.
Stalin’s driving away of BFAWU is an attack on the essential character of the party and its history as a genuinely working class organisation.
And I am afraid that unless he and his clique are stopped, it will just be the first of many such anti-union attacks.
More about mad YouTuber Alex Belfield, whom some of the commenters here have described as my favourite right-winger. A few days ago Belfield put up a video claiming that the new police and crime commissioner for Yorkshire, a Black woman, was trying to cover up the kind of Muslim grooming gangs responsible for the terrible, 20 year-long abuse of White girls in Rotherham. A systematic abuse which the police and authorities knew very well was going on, but did nothing to stop because they were afraid it would cause riots. Belfield was commenting on an video he’d been sent of the Black commissioner being interviewed on a northern local news programme. A White chap, not in the studio, was claiming that the police and authorities had not accepted that there was a particular problem with certain communities. The Black woman responded by saying that rape appears everywhere in all communities, and it was therefore wrong to accuse certain individual communities. She had been raped by a White man, for example, but she wasn’t blaming all White men. To be fair, this has been the general response by anti-racists to the scandal, who fear that some of the coverage is deliberately spreading islamophobia by portraying Muslims, and Muslim immigrants, as dangerous rapists determined to prey on White women.
I think the problem here was not that the lady was trying to cover up what had gone on Rotherham and elsewhere, but that she was not responding to the White man’s specific point. Yes, rape and sexual abuse really definitely isn’t confined to any one race or community. Anti-racist researchers have cited statistics showing that the Muslim and Pakistani communities aren’t any more likely to engage in rape or paedophilia than the rest of Britain’s people. And unfortunately you can find more than enough rapists and child abusers in the White population. However, I can remember reading years ago that rapists tend to target those of their own race. White men rape White women. Black men rape Black women. But these gangs specifically targeted White girls, who were subjected to racist verbal abuse during their rape. Even though the Rotherham scandal has broken and similar rape gangs are being rounded up and prosecuted, there really does seem a determination to avoid talking about the racist nature of these offences. I think this comes from a general reluctance by the press and authorities to discuss openly deal with anti-White racism.
There is at the moment a rise in islamophobia, particularly in Starmer’s Labour party. Starmer makes much about tackling anti-Semitism, but has done nothing about the abuse and bullying his supporters in the party bureaucracy have meted out to Muslim and Black activists. One third of Muslims in the party have claimed that they have been verbally abused because of their religion. Some of this islamophobia comes from 9/11, the 7/7 suicide bombings and similar acts of terrorism, like the London Bridge knife attacker. Others factors are the fatwa Ayatollah Khomeini imposed on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses and the mass demonstrations against the previous pope for quoting the very hostile views of a Byzantine emperor on Islam. Crowds of angry Muslims marching down the street shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ and waving placards saying ‘Behead the Pope’ and ‘Islam will conquer the west’ won’t endear Islam to non-Muslims, even if they come from a small minority.
And much harm has been done by the cover-up of the abuse in Rotherham. This has given the impression to many Whites that their lives don’t matter to the authorities, who consider it more important to stop race conflict by protecting Muslim criminals. I also believe that the refusal of anti-racists to deal with anti-White racism in the same way as the deal with prejudice, abuse and violence against Black and Asians is harmful because it does leave issues like the Rotherham scandal open to exploitation by the right, and real racists.
We need to have Black and Asian people obviously joining the White friends to march against anti-White racism, just as Whites join their friends from those communities marching against the racism directed at them. This is not happening, but until it does, scandals like Rotherham will fester and contribute to more anti-Muslim suspicion and hate.
I’ve put up several pieces on this blog commenting on, and occasionally reblogging, videos from mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield. I don’t share his right-wing political opinions, but he’s interesting for what he says about the attitudes of a certain type of working class Conservative. And occasionally he does say something worthwhile that people across the political spectrum can agree on. This morning he put up a video attacking Gemma Collins for eating a £700 steak in a very expensive London restaurant. Belfield states that the steak itself couldn’t have cost more than £50, and quotes the prices of steak available from your average supermarket that are much, much lower at about a tenth of that. He finds this kind of very ostentatious, massively expensive consumption on overpriced luxuries obscene when large numbers of Brits can only get their meals at food banks and those that aren’t are worried about how they’re going to pay for their next meal.
He also describes another similar obscene display of wealth when a group of Japanese businessmen came in to a restaurant and ordered £1,000 bottles of wine. Of which they only drank one glass before leaving. The restauranteur was not impressed by what Belfield describes, rather vulgarly, as ‘willy-waggling’ and so gathered he staff and treated them to the expensive steaks and wine the Japanese had left behind untouched.
Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m particularly surprised by these crass, offensive displays of wealth. I read a book on Japan years ago by a former Times journalist, who remarked that as many Japanese had become millionaires, they’d overtaken the Americans for vulgar displays of wealth. One example of this is a Japanese department store which served, for the equivalent of $100, tea containing gold flakes. This could be drunk in a special room set aside where the drinker could contemplate a print of Van Gogh’s ‘The Sunflowers.’ Then there’s the brand of Swizz vodka, Goldberg, which also contains gold flakes. In the case of the Japanese tea, I suspect there’s an influence there from Chinese alchemy. This differed from the western type in being focused on the quest for immortality. Chinese alchemists believed that this could be achieved by replacing the perishables materials of the human body with imperishable matter, and so slowly poisoned their clients by getting them to eat gold, pearls and so on. On the other hand, it could just be a display of tasteless vulgarity.
Of course, there are other ways in which the people Private Eye once described as the ‘futile rich’ flaunt their wealth in front of the poor. Grossly overpriced clothes has always been one favourite, like the £7,000 leather trousers Tweezer sported when she had her rear end in 10 Downing Street. And modern celebrity culture, unfortunately, is characterised by a very materialist attitude in which actors, sportsmen and pop stars frequently engage in tasteless demonstrations of their wealth. You think of all the jewellery sported by a certain type of pop star with the dollar sign, for example.
Gemma Collins and a number of other celebs is a frequent target of Belfield’s, along with Carol Vorderman, Katie Price and Marcus Rashford, amongst others. Some of these attacks seem based on little more than personal dislike. Others, such as his attacks on Diane Abbott, seem rather more for political reasons. But there’s a serious point behind his video on Collins and the gold-wrapped steak. Such displays of very conspicuous wealth are obscene and offensive when people are poor and starving, and always have been. It’s how revolutions start. The guzzling of such food and drink recalls Marie Antoinette’s inflammatory comment during the French Revolution. When told the starving masses had no bread, she supposedly said, ‘Let them eat cake’. The result of this contempt for the poor was the overthrow of the monarchy and the massacre of the aristocracy as enemies of the people.
Despite the right’s attempt to monopolise politics and discredit the left, some writers and academics are very much afraid that the increasing gulf between rich and poor will provoke an uprising. Watch out! When people are starving and desperate, eating £700 steaks is the kind of behaviour that will have the peasants picking up their pitchforks and the tumbrils once again rolling down the streets on the way to the guillotine.
This is very, very interesting. After Conference voted yesterday for the nationalisation of the electricity companies, it seems that the Tories are considering a similar measure, if only as a temporary solution to the energy crisis. Johnson’s government is considering intervening to ensure that no customers are cut off as firms fail. According to the Independent, the business secretary, Kwesi Kwarteng, is not only holding talks with the energy companies and has spoken to Ofgem, the energy regulator, he has also indicated that he is prepared to appoint a temporary administrator for firms the government may take into public ownership as a temporary solution to the crisis.
And the government has also taken over Southeast Trains. Well, the government has been briefly taking over failing train companies for the past ten years or so, because John Major’s privatisation of British Rail is a far greater disaster than anything served up in the former company’s cafes. This latest nationalisation is also going to be temporary, but it shows how much of a failure privatisation has been. The only solution is to nationalisation the utilities permanently.
But Starmer’s Labour leadership really doesn’t want to do that. Mike’s article quotes a tweet by the mighty Aaron Bastani parodying a statement by the ghastly Rachel Reeves as saying that it’s not the right time for nationalisation and that the demand for it is ‘ideological’. As Bastani says, it’s precisely the moment. And as Mike says, it shows that Labour is now more right-wing than the Tories. He goes on to say:
‘Reeves made herself and her boss sound like idiots – which, of course, they are.
Their protestations – her yesterday (September 27), him on Sunday (September 26) – weren’t pragmatic, no matter how often they tried to shoehorn that word into their comments.
They were ideological – exactly what Reeves and Starmer were trying to deny.
But it’s a stupid ideology.
Starmer’s entire policy is: butter up the business bosses. He is convinced that if he sucks up to the fat cats, they’ll support him into government after the next election. He is wrong for a very obvious reason.
Business leaders really are pragmatic. They can see that Brexit has created serious issues for the energy firms, for fuel supply and in other areas due to knock-on effects, and they acknowledge that their firms would be better-off under government control for the duration of the problem.
In other words: by lurching leftwards towards privatisation, Boris Johnson has done the right thing.
And where does this leave Starmer (and Reeves)?
Absolutely nowhere. Not only are they out of touch with party members; they are out of touch with the entire United Kingdom.‘
Absolutely. I remember talking to a co-worker years ago when the Financial Times was still a Liberal paper. It had run an article which definitely supported a publicly-owned NHS. I found this odd considering that the FT is the paper of financial capitalism, and so I’d expected it to be in favour of privatisation. My co-worker explained to me that the firms supplying the NHS would not want the Health Service broken up, because dealing with a single, large company is much easier for them.
There was absolutely no opposition from the Tories when Labour nationalised electricity in 1945, or indeed any of the utilities, because they knew very well it made absolute, perfect sense. It was nonsense having Britain’s electricity produced by a number of separate, competing companies.
And Ken Loach’s magnificent documentary, The Spirit of 45, shows that the same problems existed when the railways were split up into different companies. The trains running from the different companies along their separately owned pieces of track frequently intersected with each other and caused delays. And the first thing that was got rid of after nationalisation was the massive clearing house which consisted of well over a hundred different clerks passing chits to each other. These were representatives of the different railway companies passing notes billing each other for the use of their different pieces of track and train services.
Privatisation is a mess. It doesn’t work, and has been repeatedly shown not to work.
But Starmer and the appalling Reeves don’t want to admit that. Part of this comes from the fear they’ll get from the right-wing press, with whom Starmer is desperate to ingratiate himself. And much of it is ideological. I can remember a piece by Brian Gould in one of the left-wing broadsheets back in the 1980s talking about how he tried to argue with the-then Labour leadership that free market economics was not the solution. But it was pointless. Their eyes were all aglow with the light of the religious convert. Starmer is the heir to Blair and Thatcher.
And Thatcher’s privatisations were also considered bonkers at the time. I’ve been told that the orthodox view taken by economists in the 1970s was that, while free trade and private industry worked perfectly well in many sectors, it could not be applied to the utilities. Thatcher’s privatisations were a shocking divergence from mainstream economics, whatever nonsense the Tory press and media talked boosting them. As for Monetarism, Robin Ramsay, the main man behind conspiracies ‘zine Lobster, has said that when he studied economics in the 1970s Monetarism was considered so ludicrous and stupid lecturers hardly considered it worth mentioning. Monetarism noisily died the death in the 1990s, with even the Daily Heil publishing articles arguing it was a failure.
Starmer and Reeves are well out of touch. Now is exactly the right time to demand nationalisation.
But they’re too blinded by Thatcherism to realise this. Or perhaps it would be better to use a phrase of the Iron Lady’s about her opponents: they’re ‘frit’.
Thatcherism is a failure. It’s pure Zombie economics. It should have died years ago, but it’s kept stumbling on by right-wing politicians like the Tories and Starmer out of a mixture of ideology and desire to benefit the rich rather than the working class.
I’ve said several times that as the failure of Thatcherite free market capitalism increases, the Tories will try to divert attention away from it by concentrating instead on issues of race and immigration. And this is has happened in the shape of the right-wing YouTubers Alex Belfield and Sargon of Gasbag and the Lotus Eaters. For example, the privatisation of the utilities ain’t working. This is why Jeremy Corbyn in his brilliant 2019 manifesto argued for their renationalisation. Just over 50 per cent of the British public agree with the renationalisation of the electricity companies with only 14 per cent opposing. Keir Starmer is one of those, as he tied himself up in knots on the Andrew Marr show this Sunday denying that he had ever said he was in favour of nationalisation while he very much had talked in favour of common ownership in his campaign to become party leader. Mike in his piece about it asked what common ownership meant if not nationalisation. Well, there are other forms of social ownership, such as municipalisation. When Blair dropped the commitment to nationalisation – Clause IV – from the Labour constitution back in the 1990s, his apologists stated that it didn’t mean that other forms of common ownership would be ruled out and specifically pointed to municipalisation. On the other hand, people have said that despite these arguments, it was very clear what the removal of Clause IV meant: the end of Labour as a socialist party and a commitment to private enterprise. Conference challenged that as well when they voted overwhelmingly for return of the electricity companies to state ownership.
This is clearly an embarrassment to Starmer, especially as the motion was passed not just by the traditional Labour left, Corbyn’s supporters, but also by members of the party’s right. Which means that people across the party have woken up and realised that the private ownership of the electricity sector isn’t working.
So, how are popular right-wing YouTubers like Belfield, who makes much of having 300,000 supporters, and the Lotus Eaters responding to this decision? Well, from what I can see, they ain’t. Instead Belfield and the Lotus Eaters are making much of the statement by one of the hosts at the Conference yesterday that too many white men were putting their hand up, and that this didn’t represent the diversity of the people in the hall. Belfield and the Lotus Eaters both extensively discuss and criticise diversity and racial issues. Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, is an avowed anti-feminist. You’ll remember that he gained notoriety a year or so ago over a tweet he sent to Jess Philips telling her that he ‘wouldn’t even rape her.’ I think this is quite deliberate. They seem to be trying to appeal to the same constituency as UKIP, of which Sargon was briefly a member and which he helped to destroy. When he joined, everyone who didn’t have such strong views about race or migration immediately denounced his recruitment and left. Academic studies of UKIP, such as for example the book, Revolt on the Right, have found that the party’s core supporters were socially conservative older White men of 50 +, who felt left behind by Blair’s multicultural Britain. At the same time, the core supporters of the Republicans and especially Trump in America were supposed to be angry White men. Which explains why Belfield and the Lotus Eaters have seized on the statement by a conference host which sought to minimise them.
When not exploiting the call for fewer questions from White men, Belfield has been playing up personalities. Keith Vaz has returned, and this has been criticised by Belfield after reports of bullying by him. Belfield also attacked him for supposedly looking the other way when Asian workers in Leeds were being paid starvation wages by their Asian employers, a situation also ignore by Black Lives Matter. It’s a fair point, although the local Labour MP has pointed out that she repeatedly tried to get something done about it but was ignored by the local council. He also repeated the criticisms of Angela Rayner for calling the Tories ‘scum’. Well, it is unparliamentary language, but Nye Bevan, the Labour politico who set up the NHS and welfare state, famously called the Tories ‘vermin’. He was angry about the real poverty and suffering their policies had caused, and to which we’re returning thanks to Cameron’s, Tweezer’s and Johnson’s determination to drag us all back to the Victorian age. And then there’s Claudia Webbe, who stands accused of using misogynistic language against someone and threatening to attack them with acid. This is serious stuff, but it’s a distraction from the serious point that a majority of the party at Conference has decided that electricity privatisation is a failure. This is a direct assault on Maggie, and so can’t be tolerated.
The fact that Belfield and the Lotus Eaters aren’t arguing against electricity nationalisation, which they would have done at one time, shows that part of the Tory media realises very well that it isn’t working. They still support it, but have no arguments for keeping it in private hands.
So all they can do is make personal attacks and hope people will ignore the rest.
Yes, you read that correctly. I’m accusing the Blairites in the Labour party of institutional anti-Semitism. They maintain that they, and only they, are the true defenders of Jews in the Labour party, who are being terribly victimised by the Corbynite left. The truth is that they are themselves sectarian anti-Semites, carrying on a campaign to vilify and purge the party of ‘the wrong sort of Jews’. These are severely normal, decent Jewish peeps, who despise the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and support Jeremy Corbyn and his socialist policies. Simply by not showing the required amount of support for Israel, they challenge the image the Board of Deputies of British Jews seeks to present, that Britain’s diverse Jewish community is uniformly behind Israel and that Zionism is an integral and indivisible aspect of true Judaism. In fact, British Judaism is like any other religion composed of many different sects and denominations, and Jews, like everyone else, vary widely in the religious and political beliefs, including on Israel and Zionism. The Board and the Blairites in the Labour party, however, cannot tolerate such religious and political independence, and so demonise and expel these decent people with false accusations of anti-Semitism and self-hatred.
They struck again at the weekend when the vice-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, a grassroots Jewish organisation that represents Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, Leah Levane, was expelled from the party. Levane’s crime, according to the JVL, was that she was one of the signatories to an open letter organised by Labour Against the Witch Hunt. This is an organisation campaigning against the anti-Semitism smears and purges, that seeks to expose them for what they are – a politically motivated campaign against the left and critics of Israel. She had also spoken at an even organised by the Labour In Exile Network, founded by former members of the party, who have been falsely accused and purged. These organisations are now proscribed, but they were perfectly acceptable when Levane committed her ‘crimes’. But Starmer’s Labour party has made justice retroactive, which is a feature of arbitrary government condemned by Kant and the great Enlightenment philosophers and which is a feature of totalitarian regimes, despots and tyrants throughout history. It’s an attitude to justice that shows that Starmer is completely unfit to run any kind of democratic state.
The Blairites also pulled the stunt of telling her she was being expelled in an email sent in the middle of the night, another stunt which seems to be deliberately intended to disorient the victim and not give them enough time to formulate a response. Levane didn’t realise she’d been expelled until she went to the conference, where she was refused entry.
It really doesn’t surprise me that Levane has been hit like this. The Blairites would dearly love to expel Jewish Voice for Labour altogether. One Blairite, Neil Coyle, made this very clear when he tweeted that they should be purged along with other ‘Commies’. Which also shows that the Blairites are riddled with the old anti-Semitic fear of the Communist Jew. It also reminds me very strongly of the Nazi propaganda which claimed that the SPD, the German Labour party, was filled with Jews who were trying to take over the party and force non-Jews out.
Mike’s in his piece about this sorry squalid affair, has also included a picture showing the sorry, squalid hypocrisy of Starmer himself. It’s a photo of him at a gathering somewhere, standing in front of a banner saying ‘Kick Israeli Racism Out of Fifa’. Not only does this show Starmer as the massive hypocrite he is, it also suggests to me that he knows extremely well that the pro-Palestinian rights campaign isn’t anti-Semitic. Many of the organisations have Jewish members, such as Tony Greenstein, and rules making it very clear that genuine anti-Semites and self-hating Jews, such as Gilad Atzmon, are very definitely not welcome.
Blairism is corrupt and institutionally anti-Semitic. Leah Levane should have her membership restored immediately, as should everyone else unfairly accused and purged.
I wonder sometimes if the Communists and Trotskyites didn’t throw in the towel too soon. They were always looking for the collapse of capitalism, and while that didn’t happen and probably won’t, they would have realised that Thatcherism, at least, isn’t working and made real efforts to make the British public realise it. Communism collapsed with the velvet revolution in eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the countries of the former Soviet bloc threw off their chains and embraced democracy and free market capitalism. Francis Fukuyama declared that it was ‘the end of history’. Liberalism in the broad sense of the mixture of liberal democracy and capitalism, had seen off its rivals and would now reign supreme and unchallenged as the global ideology bringing peace, freedom – both political and economic – and prosperity to everyone.
But it hasn’t worked out like that.
Thatcher’s privatisation of the public utilities here in Britain haven’t brought the necessary investment these sectors needed. As Ken Loach’s superb documentary, The Spirit of 45, makes very clear, the power, water and railway industries are natural monopolies that need national planning and support. This has been particularly shown time and again in the management of the railways. Major’s privatisation of British Rail in the 1990s and its breakup into separate companies resulted in a spate of horrendous train crashes. Insult was added to injury by the rail companies passing the buck and accusing each other of responsibility for the disasters. As a result, the company owning the railway network itself, Railtrack, had to be renationalised in 2002. Privatisation did not work. And it has continued to fail with the private railways companies. Several have had to be taken back into state administration after providing poor service. However, this has always been excused as a temporary measure and the government has insisted on finding some other private company to run those services afterwards. After a series of such failures, this strategy now looks more than a little desperate. It’s an attempt to fend off the obvious: that private enterprise isn’t providing a proper, decent rail service and the only way to run it properly is to renationalise it.
It is very much the same with the government’s part-privatisation of Britain’s schools. Declining standards in state schools led Thatcher to experiment with privately-run schools outside the control of Local Education Authorities. These were then called ‘city academies’. They were another failure, and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, was forced to wind them up quietly. Unfortunately, Tony Blair thought it was a wizard idea and it became a major part of New Labour education policy. Simply called ‘academies’, these schools would be run by private companies. Some of these would specialise in particularly subjects, such as Maths and science. Expertise from private industry would ensure that standards would be high, and they would provide a powerful incentive through their competition for the remaining state schools to improve their performance. Except that didn’t happen either. The academies don’t perform any better than ordinary state schools once the massive difference in funding is taken into account. An academy may receive tens of millions of funding compared to a fraction of million that the Local Education Authority receives to spend on all the schools it runs. Furthermore, many of the academies have only been able to maintain their high standards through being highly selective about their intakes. Pupils that may not reach the marks demanded by the schools, including those with behavioural problems or who come from poorer families, are often excluded and expelled. Educational performance and standards in many academies has been so abysmal that the chains managing them have collapsed and the schools once again taken into public administration. But private enterprise under the Tories cannot be allowed to fail, and so we had the grim spectacle a few years ago of Nicky Morgan, the Tory education secretary, repeatedly not answering the questions on the Andrew Marr show why the government was pushing ahead with turning schools into academies when just a little while ago 25 academies had had to be taken over by the government again.
Now, thanks to a mixture of Brexit and global problems elsewhere, the gas industry is in crisis. There are shortages of gas, a number of the smaller companies have already collapsed and customers are being faced with sharp price rises. Novara Media have even said that the government has admitted that if there are severe problems with the major gas suppliers, then they will have to be nationalised.
Gas, like electricity, should never have been privatised in the first place. When it was initially privatised, the company was not split up into separate, competing companies and so it was able to dominate the market as a private monopoly. Now some of those companies are suffering because they are unable to cope with free market conditions. This says to me very much that Jeremy Corbyn was right – that the public utilities need to be publicly owned and rationally managed as part of an integrated system. This is another point that Ken Loach’s documentary makes very well.
And Brexit has created further problems. The establishment of a customs border with Eire overturns one of the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and so threatens to return Northern Ireland to sectarian violence and chaos. There is a shortage of CO2 as a result of which some foods and other goods may suffer shortages. And there may be further shortages, including petrol and other fuels, because Brexit has also resulted in fewer haulage drivers. Some are even now predicting a new ‘Winter of Discontent’, like that in 1979 that resulted in the defeat of the-then Labour government and the election of Maggie Thatcher.
I remember the petrol crisis of the ’70s, when OPEC suddenly raised oil prices and there were queues at petrol pumps. Just as I remember how Ted Heath’s dispute with the coal miners resulted their strike, the three-day week and power cuts. It got to the point that by the middle of the decade the right were expecting a Communist takeover and the end of civilisation as we know it. There were supposedly private militias being formed by bonkers right-wingers while parts of the establishment wanted to overthrow the minority Labour government in a coup to be replaced by a kind of coalition government composed of representatives from all the parties. Well, that was what the Times discussed in its articles. The security services, however, were forming plans to round up trade unionists and left-wing politicians and activists and intern them on a Scottish island somewhere. The editor of the Mirror went to Sandhurst to interest them in overthrowing the government but was met with a no doubt polite refusal. I think he, or one of the other plotters, even went as far as Paris to see if that old Fascist, Oswald Mosley, would be interested in leading the new government.
All that has been used in the Tory myth that socialism doesn’t work, and only creates the economic and political chaos that helped bring Britain to its knees. Chaos that was only ended by the glorious reign of Maggie.
Except that these problems look like they’re coming back, and this time the fault is Brexit and the free market.
I think Boris will be able to find temporary solutions to alleviate, but not cure, some of these problems. He has, for example, introduced new legislation to encourage lorry drivers from the continent to come over here. But the underlying structural problems remain. The only way to solve them is through nationalisation.
The Labour party is in an excellent position to drive this home, at least in the case of gas. Even if it doesn’t go that far, it should still be landing hard blows on Johnson and the Tories because of Brexit’s massive failures. But Starmer isn’t doing that. Instead, as Zelo Street pointed out in a piece published a day or so ago, the Labour leader is more intent instead on destroying democracy in his party as part of his war on the left.
Which is why I’m almost nostalgic for the old Socialist Workers’ Party. They’re still around, rebranded as ‘the Socialist Party’, but they’re nowhere near as active as they were. Whenever there was any kind of crisis or major issue you could count on them turning up with their megaphones and copies of their newspaper to harangue the masses and demand further action against the problem. Unfortunately, in many cases the Socialist Workers’ Party were the problem. They colonised left-wing issues in an attempt to turn protest groups into front organisations, which they could then use to produce further discontent. Rock Against Racism collapsed when the SWP took over the leadership of that organisation, formed to protest against the rise of Fascism. They were also busy infiltrating the Labour party and other left-wing parties here and abroad with the intention of radicalising them. I think the eventual hope was to create some kind of mass revolutionary movement. It didn’t work, and has only resulted in purges, such as that of Militant Tendency by Kinnock in the 1980s. In fact, the policy has helped strengthen the right in the Labour party, as they smeared Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters as Trotskyite infiltrators as the pretext for their continue purge.
The Trotskyites lived, however, in the firm belief that capitalism would eventually fail. Well, it isn’t doing that now, but it should be abundantly clear that Thatcherite free market capitalism isn’t working. The SWP would have realised that and tried to get the message across. The Labour left, which isn’t remotely Trotskyite, realises too that Thatcherism isn’t working. Their solution is simply a return to the mixed economy of the social democratic consensus. This wasn’t perfect, but it operated far better than the free market shambles we have now. And no, mixed economies are not ‘Communist’, ‘Trotskyist’ or ‘far left’. The real Communists and Trotskyists hated it as a form of capitalism, just as they hated reformist socialist parties like Labour.
But Starmer’s leadership is pledged to propping up the same wretched free market capitalism. Which is why I really feel there should be a mass movement driving home the point, again and again, that Thatcherism is ideologically and economically bankrupt. It is doing nothing but producing chaos in the economy and industry, and poverty and starvation to Britain’s working people. And this poverty will get worse. This is why I’m almost nostalgic for the wretched SWP, as they would have been determined to drive this home. And who knows? Perhaps if they behaved like a reasonable party, they might have gained further support and forced the Labour party to rediscover its socialist heritage in order to head off a challenge from real Communists.
Depressingly, David Evans won the vote about remaining Labour’s general secretary, and so will stay to continue his and his fellow Blairites’ wretched purge against socialists and critics of Israel. But further evidence has emerged that these purges really are politically motivated, and are all about getting rid of Corbyn’s followers. The group Red Collective put up an audio recording, which Mike has reblogged on his article about Evans’ winning the vote. In it, Evans says that they were concerned that Corbyn was overshadowing the rest of party, and so they decided to strip members of their rights. He waffles about how this didn’t come easy to him, as he believes in freedom of expression. I doubt that. I doubt that very much, as he and the NEC have been suspending people for too long and for too little for this to be remotely credible. It’s simply a mantra he and other authoritarians say to stop people accusing them of being dictatorial, intolerant authoritarians.
The recording strongly suggests that Evans and his followers have been deeply involved in an organised campaign to subvert Labour party democracy, acting from factional interests against the left. If there was any decency still left amongst the party’s bureaucrats and leadership, this should cause serious questions to be raised about Evans’ suitability to remain as General Secretary. Mike has also said that it is actually a resigning issue. I agree, especially as there are now concerns that the election that confirmed Evans as General Secretary may have been rigged.
Unfortunately, standards in public life have fallen to such an extent that those officials and government ministers responsible for the most appalling incompetence, maladministration and corruption remain in office. Which is how Boris still remains as our blustering, grasping and utterly inept Prime Minister as Brexit Britain collapses from food and petrol shortages.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 