Now for a bit about the latest right-wing rage about pop music. This morning there were a number of videos on YouTube by various pundits, right-wing and otherwise, discussing or denouncing a pop video. I honestly don’t know who the pop star who made it is, and have actually forgotten his name. I gather he had quite a successful career a few years ago, after which he came out of the closet and revealed he was gay. A little while later he said he was non-binary and now he seems to have gone a bit further in declaring his sexual identity. The video showed him in a revealing dress or robe, surrounded with dancers wearing chaps to expose their rear ends, during which he mimes various sex acts. Right-wing American YouTuber Matt Walsh was outraged, while somebody on GB News defended it, and claimed the video’s critics were homophobic.
What struck me, as someone who grew up in the 1980s, was how familiar it all was. I can remember when Frankie Goes to Hollywood were shocking the press and provoking scandal and outrage with their single ‘Relax’. It’s video seemed to be about a man in suit being pushed and pulled about the dance floor in a gay club by people dressed as gay bikers, watched by a fat bloke dressed as Nero. The single was banned, so say, by the BBC, although I’ve heard since that it was simply that one particular DJ refused to play it. This was entirely counterproductive, as the moment people heard it was banned they went out and bought it, with the result that it got to No. 1. And then there was Divine, an overweight drag queen and friend of American underground filmmaker John Waters, who starred in several of Waters’ deranged productions. Divine also had a hit in that decade, ‘Walk Like a Man’. Of course, Divine was a drag queen, rather than trans, but he wasn’t too far away from this latest attempt to climb the charts. The video’s shocking now, but it’s little different from what people were listening to and watching in the ’80s.
And the worst thing that came out of that decade was Margaret Thatcher. Her policies have done far more damage than anything that came out of the charts ever did.
Michael Heaver is another hard-right YouTuber pushing Reform and praising Brexit to the rafters, despite the devastation this has wreaked on our economy and the lives and livelihood of British workers and businesses. If Brexit was a religion, his would be the blind faith of the true-blue Thatcherite fanatic. And this morning Heaver posted a video praising the latest effusion from Reform’s current fuehrer, Richard Tice. Tice is upset that 5.2 million people are in receipt of benefits. This, he declares, is one eighth of the working population. But at the same time, there are job vacancies going unfilled, which is why the government is importing foreigners. This is because some people on benefit are doing better than they would be if they were working, and so are leaving their jobs to live off benefits. The welfare state is properly there to support those genuinely in need, but people are using it as a lifestyle choice. We must therefore cut benefits in order to force people back to work so the government won’t import more foreigners as cheap labour.
There are so many falsehoods in this statement that it’s amazing in its own way. Firstly, most people on benefits in the UK are actually working. They’re forced to use state benefits as well because their pay is insufficient. As for people deliberately leaving work to live on benefits – presumably he means jobseekers’ allowance – does he know anybody who’s suffered that humiliating process? My guess is he doesn’t, because otherwise he’d know it was a lie. Actually, on second thoughts, it’s quite possible he knows it’s wrong, and is deliberately lying anyway. For a start, the Tories passed legislation years ago stopping people from receiving benefit immediately after resigning from work. The wait for a claim to come through is several weeks, so if your previous job paid so badly you didn’t have anything left over by the end of the month, the further wait would push you down to starvation level. As does the various sanctions imposed on the unemployed and disabled for the flimsiest of reasons. Welfare researchers and activists, like the excellent Disabled People Against Cuts, have shown that in the case of the Fitness to Work assessments, this is based on an assumption that a certain percentage of cases must be fraudulent. There is therefore pressure on the assessors to find the disabled well enough to work. Hence we have had assessors declaring that people in terminal comas were fit to work. They even asked amputees when they expected their limbs to grow back!
And then there is the humiliating process of claiming benefits itself. This takes its inspiration from the Victorian idea of ‘less eligibility’: receiving state aid must be made so humiliating that it will deter people from claiming it. It’s one of Thatcher’s disgusting ‘Victorian values’. And so you are required to spend so many hours a day looking for a job, keep a log of the jobs you’ve applied for, while the clerk dealing with you keeps asking why you’re still claiming and didn’t apply for that one yet. Claiming benefits is unpleasant, difficult and humiliating.
But this is ignored by Tice, who is simply spouting more of the ‘make work pay’ nonsense pushed by David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith when he was head of the DWP. And then there’s the stuff about immigration.
This is nonsense because Brexit has resulted in a loss of foreign labour. Many of the foreign workers in the NHS have left Britain, including skilled doctors and nurses. I think we also lost the foreign fruit pickers, who used to come here, which is probably the type of workers Tice is thinking of when he talks about cheap foreign labour. But when the issue of forcing unemployed Brits to work as fruit pickers came up a while ago and was being discussed, many of the commenters on YouTube had said they’d tried and been turned down as farmers preferred foreigners. Some of the farmers rejecting British labour said it was because Brits were lazy. Possibly. Or perhaps just not so easy to exploit.
As for immigration generally, I have the distinct impression that the type of foreign workers the government is keen to recruit are skilled workers, particularly in the STEM subjects. They are definitely not keen on importing unskilled labour to add to the number of domestic workers with a similar lack of skills. Though here again, unskilled immigrants do take the jobs Brits don’t want, like cleaners, as shown in Ken Loach’s film, Dirty, Pretty Things. But my guess is that when Tice and the other members of the anti-immigrant right start ranting about low-skilled foreign immigrants, much of their audience will automatically think of the Channel migrants. But these unfortunately haven’t been recruited. They’re asylum seekers, who have been excluded from the official ways of applying for sanctuary in Britain. Hence part of the hostility to them.
Tice’s spiel is pretty much the old Daily Mail directed at the unemployed and non-White immigration jammed together. It’s nonsense, but will appeal to the readers of the right-wing press, who’ve been subjected to the same bilge since before the welfare state was founded. It also bears out Tony Benn’s statement that when a government wants to persecute its working people, it begins with immigrants.
Don’t be fooled. Tice is not a friend of ordinary working Brits. The solution to the problem of making work pay is to raise wages. This is the solution in classical economics to the problem of a shortage of workers. But this would cut into the already bloated profits of the obscenely rich that Tice, the Tories and the other hard right parties are pandering to.
They want to keep working people poor, starving and desperate, whatever lip service they give to the welfare state. And they’re using the old spectre of foreign labour to do it.
Rishi Sunak, our unelected Prime Minister, has pushed through parliament his wretched anti-strike legislation. Put working people are organising to push it back. I got this message from Megaphone, the internet campaigning branch of the TUC. There’s a wave of protests planned for tomorrow, and the Megaphone is naturally keen for people to get involved.
‘David,
Last night, the government rammed its shameful anti-strike bill through the House of Commons.
Instead of tackling the cost of living crisis, the Prime Minister is attacking key workers and clamping down on our most basic rights.
The campaign to protect our right to strike does not end here. The Bill will now be debated in the House of Lords and there is still time to have these laws scrapped. But that will only happen if we take to the streets.
On Wednesday February 1st (tomorrow!), working people are coming together at rallies and picket lines up and down the country to defend our right to strike.
We now have more than 80 events registered on Megaphone, with more being added every hour.
With close to half a million workers on strike tomorrow, it’s the biggest day of industrial action in a decade.
Let’s march together to show our teachers, firefighters, civil servants, rail workers, NHS workers and countless others that we support their action to defend pay, jobs and services. Let’s send a clear message to the government that we will not be ignored.
The protest in Bristol starts at 10.45 am and is at Defra Horizon House, BS1 5AH. I really don’t know where that is, and am unable to attend due to sickness. But I am full square behind the protesters in Bristol and elsewhere in the country.
Here’s another razor-sharp piece of satire from the Long Johns, the late John Bird and John Fortune, though it’s set very firmly in the past. It’s from Raveemismail’s channel on YouTube, and has them performing their dialogue in period costume as an ordinary investor caught out by a predatory broker selling shares in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. This was a notorious financial scandal when shares were being sold in the South Sea Company. Very handsome profits were promised, the shares skyrocketed in value but there was absolutely nothing backing them up. The whole affair collapsed ruining people. The dialogue also mentions a similar scandal of 90 years previously, the tulipomania that hit the Netherlands where members of the respectable Dutch middle class bankrupted themselves buying tulips. This is obviously acutely relevant to similar crashes far more recently, like the subprime mortgages and the bankers’ crash. From the comments to the video it seems that it was also relevant to the way bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were being pushed. It just shows that how relevant some incidents from the past still are in the 21st first century.
This is so much the case that one American investment house used to require its employees to read the book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in the 19th century. The book discussed a series of historical and contemporary fads, from alchemy and the witch craze in the Middle Ages to the craze for people saying ‘Quoz’ in England at the time. And one of these was the South Sea Bubble. It’s a pity nobody took that piece of history more seriously, or we might have avoided the bankers’ crash, austerity, and nigh on 15 years of austerity and poverty inflicted on the poor and ordinary working people in order to keep the banks afloat and give more money to the already bloated rich.
Just got this from the Arise Festival of Left-wing Ideas:
‘BREAKING: Firefighters deliver emphatic mandate for industrial action
Hello David
We are writing to share the breaking news that Firefighters have delivered a decisive mandate for strike action, with 88% voting Yes on a 73% turnout. You can:
Yours in solidarity. The Arise & Labour Assembly volunteers.‘
This is so overwhelming that the vote would still be valid and binding even under Sunak’s proposed cruddy legislation to stifle strikes. We’ve seen the firefighters before lock horns with the government over pay and redundancies. This is shows how massively discontented they are, and with good reason.
So maximum support to our firefighters, and out with Sunak and the Tories.
So much for anything the Conservatives may tell us about putting more money into the health service and training more medical professionals to fill the gaping shortage left by underfunding, overwork and burn out. It’s because of the extra work doctors have had to perform due to the crisis that so many are leaving the NHS. We need new doctors, not to mention more nurses and other medical professionals, trained up. But the Tories really don’t want to spend the money. The excellent Maximilien Robespierre has put up a short video on his YouTube channel reporting that it costs £160,000 to train a doctor until he or she graduates. Some of this is paid by the students themselves in their tuition fees. But it still costs the state, and so the Tories have instructed the universities not train so many. Those universities that do will be fine £100,000.
Other countries are also experiencing problems training doctors and medical staff, but they also have better access to foreign doctors to fill the vacancies. But we don’t. Thanks to Brexit, 4,000 of the 37,000 foreign doctors working in the NHS have since left.
All this is, as the Sea-Green Incorruptible explains, done to keep two of the various factions in the Tory party happy. The block on spending money is to keep the small government Tories on side, while the ban on foreign recruitment is to placate the bigots and racists. And in the meantime ordinary people face queues and cancellations, while the doctors that remain are worked to point of exhaustion and beyond.
But still, they’ve got to give those big tax cuts to their rich donors.
That Preston Journalist, whose real name, I am assured by the great people who comment here, is Ashley Kaminski, put up a genuinely heart-breaking video last night. People had been queuing outside a soup kitchen in Glasgow. Among the adults were ten children, including a babe in arms. Kaminski thought that this was terrible, as he should. He’s an avowed opponent of Nicola Sturgeon and all her works, dubbing her ‘McKrankie’ after her supposed resemblance to one half of a double act back in the 1980s. From the tone of his piece, he clearly wanted to blame her, but couldn’t quite. It was wrong, he said, whoever was responsible.
Okay, I don’t know what powers the devolved Scots parliament has, especially regarding welfare policies. I am sure that many Scots voted SNP, not because they wanted independence, but simply because they wanted a proper welfare state, something that wasn’t being offered by Jim Murphy’s Scottish Labour party. But this scandalous situation has been around far longer than the SNP’s administration, and it afflicts communities right across Britain. In Scotland there was a parliamentary inquiry into food banks a few years ago. One of those speaking before the committee was a volunteer, who described the intensely dispiriting deprivation and poverty he saw as he did his job. And I can remember putting up a 19th-early 20th century poem about children queuing outside a food kitchen. It’s disgusting that Britain has returned to such levels of poverty.
But Krankie isn’t responsible. The Tories are. They’ve insisted on wages so low working families can’t make ends meet, and cut welfare payments again and again, all with mantra of encouraging ‘welfare scroungers’ to look for work, making work pay and all the other nonsense. They’ve also introduced benefit sanction after benefit sanction, all with the same intention. It also helps to fiddle the unemployment statistics, as if they’re off the DHSS’ books, they aren’t counted as unemployed.
It’s possible that Sturgeon’s policies aren’t helping the situation north of the border. But the ultimate blame lies with the Tories, and it started when Ruth Davidson, the head of the Conservatives up there, was in power. And Sturgeon definitely isn’t responsible for it down south in England and Wales.
I don’t usually watch the party political broadcasts. I find them too boring, depressing and, in the case of the Tories, infuriating. But I caught a bit of the Greens’ broadcast last night, and was impressed. They stated that as part of their platform of policies they would renationalise the NHS, end its outsourcing and make social care free at the point of use as with the health service. Excellent! This is what the Labour party should be doing, and should have done 16 years ago when Blair won his landslide victory in 1997. But I’m afraid Starmer won’t. Everything he’s said has raised warning signs that he means to privatise more of the health service following Blair’s precedent, starting with using private healthcare providers to clear the backlog of cases. This is exactly what the Tories have been saying. Or course, Jeremy Corbyn wanted to renationalise the NHS, along with the public utilities and restore and revitalise the welfare state. Which is why they smeared him, first as a Communist, then as an anti-Semite, enthusiastically aided by Starmer’s allies in the Labour party.
I’ve very mixed feelings about the Greens. They’re very woke. There was a controversy a few years ago about the schools in Brighton, which I think is a Green council or their MP is Green, teaching Critical Race Theory and White Privilege. In Scotland the Greens are behind the SNP’s wretched Gender Recognition Act, which would lower the age people can legally declare themselves trans to 16 amongst other reforms. I don’t doubt that it’s meant well, but I strongly feel it will do much harm by encouraging confused young people to pursue medical treatment that may be totally inappropriate for them and could lead to lasting harm.
But I entirely support their demand for a properly nationalised and funded NHS.
I am just annoyed that it’s the Greens, who are regarded as an extreme, fringe party, demanding this and not Labour.
Well, a few years ago the Greens took a number of local seats from Labour in the council elections in Bristol until they were only one or two behind them on the council. I would therefore not blame anyone if, in the forthcoming council elections, they turned their votes away from Starmer’s Labour and voted Green instead.
More on the infighting breaking out in the Tory ranks as their popularity continues to crumble. The right-wing mouthpiece dubbed by Zelo Street as the Blues musician ‘Whinging Dan Hodges’, according to a video put up this morning by That Preston Journalist, has said that it’s only a matter of time now before Johnson tries to get back into power and oust Sunak. This will probably happen after the Tories take a kicking in the council elections in May. That Preston Journalist felt that even if Johnson was able to improve the Tories’ popularity a little bit, it wouldn’t be enough and they should spend some time in opposition in order to rebuild.
I agree, but with one difference. They should go into opposition and never come out.
I’m sorry I haven’t posted much today, but hopefully normal service will resume tomorrow. As the Beeb always used to say whenever they suffered a technical fault right in the middle of something you really, really wanted to watch. Things may be looking very bleak for the Tories as some of their traditional supporters may start abandoning them for the rival parties. Or simply abandon them, full stop. The New Culture Forum posted a very short video today in which their main man, Peter Whittle, reported that the Tory party was offering its membership lessons in racial awareness, microaggressions and ‘White resentment’. This was Critical Race Theory wokeness, and showed that the party has been captured. Whittle therefore urged his organisation’s viewers and supporters not to vote Tory, even if that meant not voting at all.
Last night GB News, Reform, or both were celebrating three Tory councillors switching to Tice’s band of crazed rightists. The Lotus Eaters also have not been impressed by the Tories. They’ve hosted an American comedian on their channel, and have just posted a video about how he finds the British Tories ‘cringe’. Meanwhile, Labour enjoys a 29 point lead ahead of the Tories.
I don’t know how big the numbers of people leaving the Tories for Reform will be. Probably smaller than expected, considering the way UKIP fizzled out despite all the hoo-ha about it breaking the mould of British politics, becoming the fourth biggest party and so on. I’ve no problem with them taking votes away from the Tories if that weakens them still further and allows Labour to get in.
But I definitely don’t want them to become a major political force pulling the country further to the right.
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