More from the satirical YouTube band The Iain Duncan Smiths. Yeah, I’ll put up something a bit different later, promise! But I felt I had to put this up as Blair is returning to politics as Starmer’s international advisor. Yes, the man who destroyed Iraq and helped destabilise the Middle East ready for the rise of ISIS is going to tell Starmer how international affairs should be run. This song reminds us all what Blair is: a war criminal. It’s a version, I think, of the Blur song that got made into a footy anthem for a TV ad some time again. The Iain Duncan Smiths’ version of it has Blair telling the EU to sack then-president Jean-Claude Juncker, denying that his invasion has anything to do with his connections to the EU or big business, sneering at SJWs and boasting about how he’s getting tons of money from J.P. Morgan. And the chorus is, of course, of all his victims dying exploding.
Go to their YouTube page for this song and its lyrics.
More fun from the Iain Duncan Smiths. In this video from their YouTube channel they tear into Laura Kuenssberg’s very biased political coverage by having her sing a version of one of Bjork’s hits. This shows up how she ignores Tory scandals to concentrate on those in the Labour party. Emjoy!
The Iain Duncan Smith are a left-wing satirical group on the internet, who specialise in songs sending up the right. And that includes the right of the Labour party. In this video from two years ago, they lampoon Starmer going round the country meeting members of the public, who have the same bonkers right-wing attitudes he has. This includes one young chap, who tells Stalin he hasn’t voted Labour since 1945. Because as soon as he saw Jeremy Corbyn being born, he knew he was a wrong ‘un. And then there’s the man who announces that all under-25s should be put in prison. They should also be forced to let themselves into pubs to serve drinks until they amass their property portfolio. The video might be two years old, but nothing’s changed in the meantime and Starmer’s still very much like that. The video comes, of course, from their channel on YouTube.
Some of the videos I’ve been watching over the last few days while I’ve been laid low with this ‘orrible cold have been satirical pieces tearing into Laura Kuenssberg and Kiddie Starver. I’ll put those up later. But I thought I’d start the day with a bit of fun. I’ve also been watching old comedy acts like Larry Grayson, and I’ve found several of the Roly Polies. They were a dance troupe of ladies of a certain age and girth, who first appeared on national television with Les Dawson. I think they got some criticism from feminists, which, if true, is very unfair. When they appeared, they weren’t being mocked. People enjoyed the way they gently overturned or simply ignored the convention of that kind of dance that the performers had to be young and slender. They weren’t, but could still dance! And Dawson himself, it must be said, was a man of ample frame himself. I think a lot of women felt they had more in common with these girls than with ordinary dancers, and especially enjoyed their performances because of it.
Here they are with Dawson at a Royal Variety Performance with a video from Chema Marin’s YouTube channel.
I’m sad and disappointed at this news, but not surprised. While the so-called ‘commies’ of the real Labour party celebrate Clem Attlee and Nye Bevan, the founder of the welfare state, Starmer and his coteries worship Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown, the heart of New Labour. Blair got rid of Labour’s commitment to nationalisation and replaced it with Thatcherism: private industry, the further part-privatisation of the NHS and the dismantlement of the welfare state and deliberate humiliation of welfare claimants. BlaIr won three elections, but with lower votes than Corbyn had in 2019. And during his long tenure of power the party lost members as ordinary Labour voters, activists and supporters felt ignored and betrayed by a party that had turned against them in order to win Tory voters and big business and its donors.
Starmer is a true-blue all-the-way-through Blairite. The Labour shop a few months ago was selling New Labour, Tony Blair branded merchandise. Now it seems Starmer has also given the war criminal some kind of official post. Arch-right-wing YouTuber Mahyar Tousi reported last night that Starmer had just made him the party’s ‘Global Advisor’. Because Blair has set up an institute employing 75 people meddling in 40 countries, according to a report in the Spectator. This was followed by a long stream of tin foil hat paranoid nonsense from Tousi about Blair being a globalist, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum and ‘Star Trekky’ one world government.
In fact, rather than pushing for a global green communist order, as the extreme right views ‘globalists’ like Schwab, Blair almost certainly follows the neoliberal orthodoxies of the IMF. Their favoured solution to every economic crisis presented to them by countries in the developing world seeking help was privatisation, with state industries preferably sold to American multinationals and the scaling down of the state bureaucracy. More often than not, this made the situation worse. Some countries prospered by not paying any attention at all to the advice. As a devotee of Thatcher and the free market, this is almost certainly the line Blair will take towards economic development in these nations.
Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq and other Neo-Con imperial adventures are responsible for much of the hatred towards America and Britain felt by the rest of the world, and particularly Islam. This has been shown in polls carried out by reputable organisations. Contrary to right-wing claims that the Muslim world hates us because of our freedoms, and especially that enjoyed by western women, what they really hated us for was invading their countries. The Iraq invasion destroyed that country, but this wasn’t recognised by the Obama administration. One of Hillary Clinton’s deputies tried telling a crowd in Turkey during a diplomatic tour that conditions for women had improved immensely since the invasion and allied occupation. She was then squarely put right by a group of Iraqi women who told her how the situation had actually become much worse. I doubt Blair has learned anything from these imperial debacles either.
His solution to the wave of Islamist terrorism following 9/11 and 7/7 was to claim that he was an admirer of Islam and read the Quran regularly. He also recruited various mullahs and Islamic community leaders to his anti-radicalisation schemes and initiatives. Ed Hussein, a former member of the Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, describes in his book The Islamist how the various Muslim clergy and preachers traipsing through the door of No. 10, one after another, were all hypocrites. All of them were radicals pretending to be moderates. And after leaving office, Blair set up an international organisation to promote interfaith dialogue, lampooned in Private Eye as Drawing All Faiths Together (D.A.,F.T.)
Blair has absolutely nothing to offer Britain or the world. His economic views are a shop-worn neoliberalism well past its sale-by date, which is doing nothing but but making peoples’ lives poorer and more miserable. He is a war criminal who destroyed countries so the big oil companies could grab their oil and American multinationals their state industries. And despite his best efforts to appeal to the Muslim community there is still a threat from Islamist terrorism and recruitment.
If Blair really has been given some kind of office by Starmer, then all I can see is more people deciding to leave the party and more voters turning away from it. At the moment, Starmer’s appeal to the electorate appears to be that he is not the Tories. That’s not good enough when he’s breaking one pledge after another and showing every inclination of following their economic agenda.
But then, back in the 90s when Blair emerged, an anagram game produced this description from Blair’s name: ‘I am Tory Plan B’.
This is a grim video about the persistence of slavery around the world today. It comes from the List 25 channel on YouTube, which is one of those channels that specialise in presenting the top ‘x’ number of different facts. In this case, it’s countries which still retain slavery and lure the poor and foreign migrants seeking work into bondage. It describes the state of slavery and its causes in each country, as well as noting at the outset the general causes, such as sex trafficking, forced marriage, child servitude, bonded labour, war, poverty and migration due to climate change. There are 49.6 million people in slavery today, and the number is growing by 2 million a year.
The list starts with the countries with the lowest number of slaves and ends with the highest. It runs from Kuwait at the no. 25 spot, to India at no. 1 with over 18 million slaves. The other nations are: Cambodia, Libya, South Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, United States, Russia, Indonesia, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Bangladesh, Nigeria, North Korea, Mauretania, Pakistan, Burundi and China.
In the case of Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the slave system seems to be based on these countries’ Islamic migrant sponsorship laws. These require immigrants to be sponsored by individuals or organisations in these countries, who then take away their passports. Migrant workers suffer horrendous living and working conditions, and women find themselves forced into domestic servitude and sexual abuse. The situation is so bad that one of the Asian countries supplying migrant workers to one of these countries recently warned its citizens not to go to one of the Gulf Arab states because they would be exploited. There are similar situations in Cambodia and Indonesia, where migrant workers are lured into these nations with promises of work and good pay, only to find themselves stripped of their rights, dignity and autonomy by ruthless exploiters.
Slavery in Libya has exploded partly through the enslavement of Black migrants trying to pass through the country to get to Europe. The video discusses the CNN documentary that revealed this, and the international outrage it caused. Something similar is also behind the persistence of slavery in Turkey, where many of the enslaved are migrants from war-torn and poverty stricken countries in the Middle East, who have sought asylum in a country that is safe and politically stable. This is also part of the causes of the over one million people enslaved in the US, who are migrants from the south who fall into the clutches of criminal gangs due to the immigration laws. And this is apart from the system of forced labour in the American prison system. Slavery in Russia tends to be people from the Middle East, though it also includes Nigerians and other Africans. As with countries like Cambodia and the Arab countries, they’re lured in with promises of work and good pay, as well as opportunities to get to Europe.
In some of the other countries, slavery takes the form of state mandated forced labour. In Eritrea this is its conscription of the country’s youth into military service. There is no set limit to this, and it can last for decades, and conscripts are often used on non-military projects. Uzbekistan uses a system of traditional forced labour for harvesting cotton, which the state tries to disguise as a traditional, voluntary custom. And in North Korea it’s the forced labour of this Stalinist Communist state, all done while telling its citizens they live in a socialist paradise.
In Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, warfare, either domestic or in the surroundings states, has resulted in the enslavement of children as soldiers. In China, some parents sell their sons to childless couples. In nations like Iran and Afghanistan, the slaves are people from dirt-poor regions trying to find work in more prosperous areas, only to be enslaved by criminal gangs.
Religious and race-based slavery also exists. Although slavery had been banned in Sudan since the 1920s, it re-emerged with the Islamofascist National Islamic Front, who enslaved the Black tribes and subjected them to forced conversion to Islam. Slavery in Mauretania is caste-based, and historically began when the lighter skinned, Arabic-speaking Moors from the north conquered and enslaved the indigenous, darker skinned people.
The presenter states that this list only barely scratches the surface of slavery around the world today, and is very much upset that ‘it’s still a thing’. He can’t understand how it still exists, and is so upset that he fluffs the videos ending.
It’s a disturbing but necessary video. The concentration on the historic injustice and horror of transatlantic slavery can blind people to the fact that it was practiced outside Europe and still persists. Back in the ’90s there was an excellent book on modern slavery, Disposable People, that I can remember reviewing for the database on materials on slavery at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum. At that time the global slave population was about 22 million – obscenely high, but since then the number has more than doubled. It was a sobering, chilling read. It covered the enslavement of workers in the logging and mining camps of Brazil, Thailand and the other southeast Asian countries of the Golden Triangle. One of the atrocities the book describes was an incident where a prostitute’s customer in one of the frontier Amazon towns cut her head off, and then motored up and down the river waving her severed head around. Utter scum.
The piece on Eritrea explains some of the videos about migrants to Britain I’ve also caught on YouTube. Many of the Channel migrants come from the country. There was also a video put up by one of the anti-immigrant vloggers of a group of women protesting against a hotel housing them in their town. They were arguing with one of the migrants, an Eritrean. At one point a car beeped or banged. The man crouched down and started wailing with his hands over head, before coming to himself and standing up and continuing to talk calmly and reasonably. This looks to me very, very much like real PTSD, either from warfare or genuine, brutal physical abuse and maltreatment. Assuming it’s not put on, I think this man is the genuine article – someone who really is trying to find asylum and not just work.
The kidnapping and sale of children in Chinese culture has been a problem since the 19th century. One of the governors of Hong Kong, James Pope Hennessey, tried to combat the kidnapping of girls with the cooperation of the indigenous Chinese community. Unfortunately, it failed, partly due to cultural resistance from the Chinese, or part of the community, that resented an attack on a traditional custom. The girls sold frequently got better food and clothing from their purchasers, so it was claimed, than they did from their real parents.
Some African peoples also have a custom whereby poor parents send their children to live with wealthier relatives, in the hope that they will get a better education and opportunities. This can result in the child’s abuse and enslavement. I wondered if that was behind the horrendous death of Victoria Climbie 23 years or so ago. The girl had been sent by her African parents to live with an aunt and her boyfriend in London. These monsters abused and tortured the poor child until they finally murdered her.
As for India, this is the reality of the state that Modi’s trying to build. And despite its iniquities, the postmodernist crowd are doing precious little to demand change and reform. The followers of Postcolonialism are only interested in injustice when it can be blamed on the imperial powers and won’t criticise traditional culture. This has naturally angered the country’s feminists.
Some of this rise in slavery is also due to global neo-liberalism. The book Falling Off The Edge describes how this has resulted in a race to the bottom of countries repealing workers’ rights, extending hours and lowering pay in order to make labour as cheap as possible to compete globally. These are the countries that Priti ‘Vacant’ Patel and the rest of the authors of Britannia Unchained told us lazy Brits to copy so that Britain could compete against them.
I also have to say that I would have much more sympathy with the protesters and activists campaigning against the legacy of the historic transatlantic slave trade if they were also campaigning against its modern incarnation. But they don’t. One of the defenders of this attitude said in the I that it would be a distraction. Perhaps, but it would also be necessary.
There are organisations and charities fighting to combat slavery, like Anti-Slavery International, which grew out of Britain’s abolitionist movement, and African organisations run by former slaves. These need more support if we are ever to eradicate this evil from the planet.
I’m something of a fan of Hinge and Bracket, who were the comic creations of George Logan and Patrick Fyffe. The characters, Dr Evadne Hinger and Dame Hilda Bracket, were musical ladies of a certain age who performed comic renditions of classical music and Edwardian parlour songs. They had their own, long-running show, Dear Ladies, about their lives in a fictional small Suffolk town, written by Giles Brandreth. The series ended in the 1980s, not because it wasn’t popular, but because the Beeb was nervous about the representation of gays in comedy during the AIDS epidemic. Neither Logan, Fyffe, Brandreth or the show’s producer saw any problem, but the show was cancelled anyway. I don’t think many people at the time realised that Logan and Fyffe were gay, because drag was so much a part of British comedy regardless of the sexual orientation of the performer. The Two Ronnies frequent did sketches in drag, along with Les Dawson and other comedians/ comic actors who were definitely straight. Also, from what I’ve seen and remember, there was nothing or at least very little explicitly about homosexuality in their performances. The comedy was all about their two female alter egos, who were played as women. I can sympathise with the Beeb in the issue, but I think they were overreacting somewhat.
Although their TV careers had ended, the two still performed as their characters. This little piece comes from Louie Bel Ombrage’s channel on YouTube from three years ago. It shows Evadne Hinge singing a piece, very much in the classical/parlour song tradition, sending up the Coronavirus lockdown and its restrictions. She celebrates the NHS working heroically despite the absence of PPE, and ends with her flicking the ‘V’ sign. Which would, I’m sure, never have happened on television.
I posted a piece last week about Blair sliding out from whatever stone he’s been hiding under to criticise Rishi Sunak for taxing and spending too much. Which shows that, far from being true Labour, he’s now a member of the extreme Tory fanatics who think that Sunak is some kind of evil commie and refer to the Tories as ‘Consocialists’. This is a short piece from Novara Media showing Corbyn’s calm, measured and incisive response when asked about Blair’s statement by Robert Peston.
Corbyn simply replies that as a rich man, Blair would be worried about tax. Too right! Which is why Blair’s financial affairs are labyrinthine in the extreme. His money’s invested in a maze of holding companies owning other holding companies, presumably as a way of legally avoiding paying tax. Corbyn also quietly points out that if you’re talking about cutting tax, but not decreasing government services, that leads to outsourcing and privatisation. Which is actually more expensive. Yes, it is. There is now far more being pumped into the privatisation railway companies in subsidies than were given to British rail, for example.
Blair is, of course, the great molten idol of Keir Starmer, and so that is, I think, what we can expect from the Kid Starver if he gets his backside into No. 10.
I’ve also noticed that this fortnight’s Private Eye is still running the smear about rampant anti-Semitism in the Labour party and Starmer rooting it out. I’ll have to read more of it sometime. I haven’t so far, because it’s just the Eye following establishment groupthink. They’ve got to keep the smears up in case the Corbynites come back!
And they really don’t want to tell their readers that most of those smeared as Jew-haters are themselves self-respecting Jews, many of whom have suffered real abuse and violence from bigots and Nazis.
This appeared on my YouTube feed from the Gay Black History Channel. This isn’t an area I know much about, but the video is very interesting and, I believe, necessary. There’s a wave of terrible, virulent anti-gay hatred going through parts of Africa. Extremely persecutory legislation against gay and trans people is being passed in countries like Ghana and Uganda, and gays and trans people are being subjected not just abuse but also mob attacks. When the Americans spoke out about this in Ghana as part of a diplomatic visit, the country’s president very firmly put them in their place by telling them that Africans had a right to their own views and culture on this matter and that they wouldn’t be told what to do and believe by foreigners. I think part of the argument over homosexuality in African is the belief that it didn’t exist in Africa until it was spread by Islam. Nigel Barley in his book The Innocent Anthropologist states that the Dowayo people allow much more physical contact between males than is customary in the west. He was embarrassed by the way his Dowayo friends would sit in his lap and stroke his hair, for example. But they had no conception of homosexuality. When one of their bulls attempted to mount another, they saw it as the animals ‘fighting over women’.
I think it’s probably true that some African peoples probably didn’t have it in their societies, or didn’t recognise it. But this video shows that many others did. The Fante, a Ghanaian people who warred against the Ashanti, had gay marriage, as did a number of the Muslim peoples who migrated southward from the north, such as the Berbers. The video states that they believed that people with heavy souls were attracted to men, while light souls were attracted to women. Naturally, they also consider that pagan Fante society was more open-minded about same-sex love than the Christians and Muslims that came after them. The video doesn’t mention them, but another African people who tolerated and practised homosexuality were the Azande, particularly their aristocracy. This has been compared by anthropologists to homosexuality amongst the Spartans. These were warrior cultures, and so homosexuality among men was seen not as effeminate, but hypermasculine, entirely fitted to macho killers.
I also wonder how much of the bitter hatred of gays in Africa is due to the kleptocrats robbing these countries’ peoples deliberately misdirecting them. These are extremely corrupt countries – back in the ’90s the Financial Times called them kleptocracies and said it was only a courtesy of the west that they were called countries at all. These a nations where people occupying even little pieces of power use it to rob and cheat. And so I wonder if the kleptocrats are using gays to direct hatred and resentment away from themselves.
Either way, the video shows that the Fante certainly had gay people in their society, who married, and that they had their own understanding of it. Thus the modern persecution of gays in Ghana can’t be excused as traditional African attitudes and morality.
I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything on this blog for several days. Dad died last week and we’ve been busy trying to sort everything out. He’d been ill for some time, but had gone into a rapid decline over the past month. He received excellent care, however, from the NHS, the doctors,, nurses. ambulance crews and carers who looked after him in his final weeks. They were absolutely brilliant and fine examples why we need to keep and support the NHS and protect it against Tory and New Labour privatisers.
I’ve also come down with a horrible, stinking cold. It is only a cold, but it’s left me very weak, quite apart from being bunged up with phlegm and having a sore throat. So, one way or another, I’ve had a rough few days. But I hope to get a few things posted up in the next few days.
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