A piece of my part of the world, south Bristol, tragically got in the news yesterday. Two boys were stabbed to death in Ilminster Avenue in Knowle West, a suburb in south Bristol. There were reports it was part of a gang attack and it has been announced that a 44 year-old man and 15-year old boy have been arrested. And the racists have been out in force commenting on some of the news clips of the incident posted on YouTube. They’ve been saying that the perps are going to be Blacks or Muslims.
This is unlikely because of the nature of the area.
Knowle West is a council estate with a lot of problems. My mother used to teach in the infants school in Ilminster Avenue years ago. It’s an area with drug problems as well as more than its fair share of crime. Back in the ’70s and 80s there were families with children by different fathers. A lot of the men were in and out of prison, and while they were inside their wives or partners would get another man. It also had a reputation for being rough. Families that had been feuding with each other for generations were suddenly put next to each other when the place was built. But it’s not a Black or Asian ghetto.
There are Blacks and Asians there, and always have been, possibly more now than there were when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. But it’s a majority White area, and back then the people terrorising the place were White, like the local skinhead gang, the Cosso boys. I also haven’t heard of an racial tensions in the area. Indeed, when I was growing up, there was an older Black bloke who got on the bus there, who was greeted by all the other White passengers of the same age from the neighbourhood. There was a scandal over the abuse of Asian asylum seekers by a racist White family a decade ago, but I haven’t heard of anything similar since. I have also heard from female relatives that they feel safer walking through Knowle West than they do in other parts of Bristol.
It’s possible that the assailants were Black or Asian, but if they are, they would most likely have had to come from outside the area. At the moment it’s far more likely that they’re White.
So let’s stop the racial speculation for the moment until someone shows otherwise.
Bleeding Cool is an American magazine that covers comics and SF films and television. In their piece on forthcoming comics and strips from 2000AD/Rebellion, they reveal the appearance of a new comic about an aspiring young magician, Androgeus Frost. Expecting to go to an elite, Hogwarts-style school, Frost instead gets dumped in Lowborn High, an inner city school, where he and his new friends have to solve wizarding mysteries. Here’s the piece about it.
Lowborn High
REBELLION / 2000AD FEB241667 David Barnett For as long as anyone can remember, Wychdusk Manor has been the school to which all the top magical novices are sent, where they are trained to become the world’s greatest wizards. Androgeus Frost, part of one of the wizarding worlds’ most esteemed families, always thought it was a sure thing he’d get in, but somehow finds himself dumped at Lowborn High, a struggling inner-city comprehensive school for those with mediocre magical talent. Androgeus finds himself with all the other duds, drop-outs, and those who don’t have the upper-class wizarding family background. Making friends with Maisy, Ali and Dril, soon the group of friends find there are mysteries to solve and the pupils of Lowborn High can still be capable of some truly amazing feats! In Shops: Apr 03, 2024 SRP: 0′
This is obviously a kind of anti-Hogwarts/ Harry Potter strip, and it’s in the very best traditions of 2000AD. The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic (@ Tharg from Betelgeuse) had a very strong satirical streak, observing trends in contemporary politics and culture and then sending it up. Maggie Thatcher appeared in the Robohunter strip as the robot PM Iron Aggie, with a campaign to get the country singing. Judge Dredd featured lunatic DJs, stupid and repulsive fashion trends and TV game shows featuring crime and murder. Boy band New Kids on the Block got sent up as New Juves on the Block, with their lyrics ‘We’re hot, you’re not, let’s rock’. Michael Jackson and Prince became Jackson Prince, who spends too much time in cryogenic hibernation and is awoken as a brain-damaged zombie who can only sing ‘Ziller’, a mumbled, garbled version of his greatest hit. And the ruthless media moguls put him on tour again. And yes, in one story dinosaurs break into Mega City One from the Cursed Earth and eat a natural history TV presenter with a marked similarity to Botanic Man David Bellamy. Space trucker Ace Garp and his crew took cargo to the war-torn planet Stallone, passing through the Van Rambo Belt, to meet its inhabitants. Who all wear bandannas and have their noses on the back of their heads. This looks like a reference to Stallone breaking his nose in one of the Rambo movies. And who can forget Blair One, which satirised Tony Blair as a kind of Mach One, a superman with his own computer built into his brain, Dr Spin. This had Blair, on the advice of the computer, sending unmarried mothers to work down the mines, singing, ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go. We Work all day for rubbish pay, thank you, Toni-o.’
Some strips very based very much on popular TV of the time. There was an Inspector Morse -style Judge strip, whose hero was a middle aged, cantankerous British Judge in Brit Cit, who was despised and distrusted by his superiors. 2000AD’s founder, writer and creator Pat Mills, is very definitely a man of the left, who sides with the working class and the counterculture against the rich and elite. One of his complaints is that there are few books with genuine working class heroes. It looks like Dave Barnett and Anna Morozova have taken onboard the comic’s anti-establishment ethos and produced an inverted Harry Potter comic.
‘David, it’s not bad enough that Avanti West Coast makes passengers pay for the worst train service in the UK. [1] Now they’ve described the taxpayer subsidies they get for their substandard service as “free money”, and joked that their performance-related payments were “too good to be true.” [2]
Enough is enough. We all deserve reliable, affordable train services. Together we can make an example out of Avanti West Coast – and force all train companies to clean up their act in the process – but only if enough of us speak out.
David, over 60,000 people have already signed the petition demanding Avanti bosses hand back their taxpayer-funded bonuses. Will you add your name, and then share with your family and friends?It only takes a few seconds to add your name:
David, how would you feel if the bosses of one of the UK’s worst train operators joked about your taxpayer cash being “free money”, and that their performance-related payments were “too good to be true”? [1] Well you don’t have to imagine it, because that’s what the bosses of Avanti West Coast were caught red-handed doing. They’re not even denying it. [2]
This story has just broken, and you can bet that the bosses of Avanti West Coast will be desperately hoping this doesn’t turn into the next Paula Vennells campaign, where millions of people demand they are held accountable for their actions. [3] That’s where we, the 38 Degrees community, come in.
David, imagine if by this time tomorrow, over 100,000 people signed a petition demanding that Avanti bosses hand back every penny in bonuses they have received at the taxpayers’ expense. Our campaign could make it on the front pages of newspapers and all over the media – increasing the pressure and forcing them to answer for their behaviour.
So, if you’d like to be one of the first to add your name, will you sign the petition today and share it with your family and friends? It only takes 30 seconds.
It’s no secret that Avanti is Britain’s worst performing rail company. [4] And to make matters worse, Graham Sutherland, the CEO of FirstGroup which owns Avanti, will be paid £1.1m plus £682,000 in bonuses for 2023, while chief financial officer Ryan Mangold earned £3m, including £2.5m in bonuses. [5] This beggars belief!
Latest figures from the Office of Rail and Road statistics show Avanti cancelled 2,976 trains between April and November 2023, an average of more than 13 per day. [6] Despite this poor performance, Avanti and CrossCountry were even rewarded with new long-term contracts by the Government in September. [7]
Not only are Avanti a poorly-run rail company, they find it funny to laugh at the daylight robbery they are getting away with. So, they should be made to pay back every penny in taxpayer-money they received as bonuses as punishment.
If you’d like to be one of the first to add your name, sign the petition today and share it with your family and friends too. It only takes 30 seconds.
I go this message online from the Labour party’s Yvette Cooper. I’ve posted any number of articles criticising – rightly – the Labour party and Keir Starmer’s Toryism and destructive and vindictive factionalism. But this time I think the party is doing the right thing in its plan to cut knife crime. That is, if they go along with it and Starmer doesn’t think it’s another policy that’ll get him criticised and which Tory voters won’t like.
‘David, yesterday, the government let young people down again.
Knife crime has gone up by a shocking 77% since 2015, and the number of fatal stabbings has hit a record high, with the steepest increases in our towns and suburbs.
Too many young lives are being lost, too many families and communities left distraught.
Yet the Conservatives have repeatedly and shamefully failed to act.
Ministers have said 16 times that they will ban the online sale of dangerous knives. Yet even with the changes they belatedly announced yesterday, it will still be easier to buy dangerous machetes and ninja swords online than it is to buy a kitchen knife on the high street.
Enough is enough. We need urgent action to save lives. Only Labour is determined to do that.
Keir Starmer has made it part of our mission for the next Labour government to halve knife crime. That is why we have set out an urgent plan:
Get knives off our streets with an urgent crackdown on the possession and sale of lethal knives, and bring in new and stronger laws to crack down on dangerous knife sales
Crackdown on criminal gangs who are luring teenagers into violence, by making child criminal exploitation an offence and strengthening the serious and organised crime strategy
Community prevention work and early intervention to stop young people being drawn into crime through a major new Young Futures Programme including new youth hubs and mental health support
Immediate interventions and serious consequences for young people caught carrying a knife with referrals to Youth Offending Teams, sanctions and bespoke intervention plans
Create a new cross-government coalition to end knife crime, bringing together political and community leaders to help tackle the issue and keep young people safe
With the Tories, dangerous knives remain on our streets. It’s yet another crushing example of us all paying the price for Tory sticking plaster politics.
Only Labour will restore security to Britain’s streets with a mission to halve serious violence and rebuild confidence in policing and the criminal justice system.
Labour will make cutting knife crime a priority to make our streets safe – for you, your family, and your community.
Read Grahame Morris’ new article on why “If it wasn’t for the heroic efforts of journalists, Israel’s brutal assault on the Palestinian people would be taking place in a total media blackout” here & RT our message here.
Zarah Sultana to Sunak – Stop Arming Israeli War Crimeshere
#CeasefireNow – Keep up the Pressure on Starmer – report on our bloc at last week’s demo here
4) REMINDER: Follow us on Social media
10,000s of you took part in our recent online lobbying, petitions and events. Please make sure to also follow us on Twitter here & Facebook here for all the latest.
5) NEW DATE: Can there be a just peace for Palestine? session at Dayschool: A World To Win.
Saturday 17 February. 11am-4.30pm. In-person. Central London. Register here .
Please note that in solidarity with the ASLEF strike and national day of action with Palestine this event has been rescheduled for Saturday February 17, 2024.
Join our session with: Ryvka Barnard, Palestine Solidarity Campaign // Hugh Lanning, Labour & Palestine // Jess Barnard, Labour NEC.
Plus: John McDonnell MP // Özlem Onaran, Professor of Economics, Greenwich // Richard Burgon MP Rodrigo Toneto, Brazilian PT Youth // Kate Hudson, CND // Sarah Woolley, BFAWU GS & more.
‘David, while taxes are rising for people like you and me, it’s never been easier for the rich and powerful to avoid them. [1] In just the last few days, it’s been revealed HMRC hasn’t charged a single company over tax evasion, despite new laws, while Overseas Territories aren’t reporting firms using them as tax havens, and just yesterday it was revealed two thirds of the the UK’s richest earners paid less tax in 2023 than in the year before. [2]
Billionaires are being let off the hook through legal tax avoidance schemes, and getting richer and richer, while we make up the difference. It’s just not right. Whilst our schools and hospitals fall apart, HMRC has chosen to go after… ordinary people making a little extra money selling their clothes online. [3] And the Government are even talking about more tax breaks, which will benefit the wealthy. [4]
Enough is enough. It’s time we shut these schemes down. David, the Government wants a boost before the election, and polls show the public would prefer services to have better funding over yet more tax breaks. [5] This is our chance to pressure Jeremy Hunt to shut down legal tax avoidance schemes, so we have more money for our NHS and public services.
David, will you sign the petition and share it with your family and friends? It’s going to need huge numbers signing to get politicians to act.It only takes a few seconds to add your name:
An investigation has found HMRC has not charged a single company under landmark legislation passed six years ago to crack down on corporate tax evasion, with a senior MP calling the findings “appalling.” [6] Meanwhile, British Overseas Territories were meant to publish databases of firms registered with them before the end of 2023, but only Gibraltar met the deadline, despite others promising they would do so since 2019. [7]
Closing legal schemes like the non-dom tax loophole would mean just 70,000 wealthy individuals paying a little more tax to help give our NHS, schools and public services the vital support they need. [8] With terrible poll ratings, the Government will want to be seen to be taking action to protect public services and make people’s lives better. We just need to give them a push – and show them this is the kind of action voters want.
38 Degrees has a proud track record of holding the rich and powerful to account. Just a few weeks ago, Paula Vennells was forced to hand back her CBE after 1.2 million of us signed the petition demanding she was stripped of the honour. [9] We can do it again if we work together.
So if you want to help hold some of the richest people in the country to account – and make sure they pay their fair share – will you add your name to the petition today? It only takes a few seconds to add your name:
I’m still reading James Meek’s book on how this country’s public utilities have been wrecked by Thatcherite privatisation. I’ve just finished the chapters on the mess it made of the railways and the water supply, and am roughly half-way through the chapter on electricity. I intend to put up posts on these particular subjects in due course, but it might be sometime before I finish the book. Because it gets me so angry with the way the utilities and the British public have been sold out that sometimes the only thing I can do is put the book down and go and do something else instead. Or else my head will literally explode, like Kryten’s when something gets Red Dwarf’s metal man too infuriated.
I’ve just got to the pages in the book which describe how Littlechild, the academic behind the privatisation of British electricity, contrived a formula to allow the electricity companies to make massive profits while supposedly keeping prices down. But instead it allowed the companies to manipulate the system by taking power stations strategically offline to create massive profits and grossly inflated prices. Ed Wallis, the head of Powergen, did it in Yorkshire and Warwickshire.
At the moment there have been stories in the right-wing press about the French coming into provide us with electricity that we couldn’t produce domestically. I have a feeling this is all being blamed on the Green agenda, such as it is. In fact it’s almost certainly due to the privatisation of the energy companies, many of which are owned by the French state company EDF. And what also comes across very strongly in that chapter is the bewilderment and anger the French trade unionists have over the privatisation of British electricity and the supine attitude, as they see it, of the British trade unions.
One member of the French union, the CGT, told his British counterpart, ‘There’s only one country stupid enough to privatise its electricity, and that’s Britain’.
So much for the admiration the foreigners were expected to have for Thatcherite , global Britain.
As for the term ‘privatisation’, it was coined in 1936 as reprivatisierung, to describe the Nazi economic policy of mass privatisation. Which I think counts against the Nazis being some kind of socialists.
Hey-ho! According to a piece I found on my internet news feed earlier today, yet another Tory MP has accused the Beeb of being biased against his wretched party. When asked for an example of such bias, he cited Radio 4’s The News Quiz. Meanwhile, I also see that Rishi Sunak has denied that the Tories want to privatise it. This is, quite frankly, a lie. The Tories and their pet media have been demanding the privatisation of the Beeb for years. They’ve been threatening the corporation with it ever since the ’90s. It partly comes from the Thatcherite doctrinaire hatred of state monopolies, but also comes from their desire to fawn over that nice Mr Murdoch and given him near total domination of the country’s media in the hope that he’ll continue to promote them in his papers.
But back to the News Quiz. This has been on Radio 4 since the ’70s. It’s on, or was on Friday evenings at 6, and repeated at 12.30 the following Saturday. It’s the radio parent of Have I Got News For You. It’s a panel game, in which the two teams are asked questions about events in the news that week. Like HIGNFY, it’s satirical. Not all the questions are verbal – sometimes there’s also a musical clue, and these can be very odd. One, years ago, was the satirist Tom Lehrer’s Masochism Tango, while another was the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra playing Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. An announcer reads out bizarre news stories between each round, and the show ends, after the final scores are announced, with the participants reading various bizarre news clippings. I listened to it for a number of years from the 1980s to the early years of this century. The teams and guest panellists included Richard Ingrams and Ian Hislop from Private Eye, and Alan Coren representing Punch. Guests included MPs like Roy Hattersley and that titan of British comedy, Peter Cook. During one edition, Cook, in answer to a question, one on a long ramble about how the EEC as it was then was trying to breed a single European newt and was training it to jump over the dykes in the Netherlands. When I started listening, it was hosted by Barry Took, who later retired and his place taken by the journalist Simon Hoggart, who sadly died. It was then taken over by Sandi Toksvig, and it was at that point I stopped listening.
Many of the old stalwarts of British comedy had passed away with the advancing years. Peter Cook left us in the ’90s, along with another colleague from Private Eye, Willie Rushton. Alan Coren, whose column was for years the only reason to buy Punch, passed away later in the first years of this millennium. And I think the quality declined. Appearing on the News Quiz instead was Jeremy Hardy and Andy Hamilton. Hardy was very left-wing, and his rant about the stupidity and grotesque appearance of the audience at the Tory party conference is, in my view, extremely accurate. Back in the 90s I was so bored one afternoon that I did turn on the Tory conference just for something to watch, and then turned it off shortly afterwards because of the horrible nature and appearance of the audience as they guffawed over another joke by some equally horrible cabinet MP at the expense of the poor and single mothers.
The Tories regularly attack the BBC for supposed bias simply as a way of trying to silence any criticism. For the past forty years we’ve mostly been governed by the Tories, and so they’ve duly been the targets of the majority of the jokes and satire, as well as serious criticism from programmes like Newsnight. Back in the ’90s, the Tory press regularly attacked that programme and its host, Paxo, for being biased against them. Then, when Paxo was taken off the programme to present University Challenge and in came Blair and New Labour as the new government, the same press ranted about how biased the Beeb was for removing Paxman from Newsnight so that he couldn’t give Blair, Mandelson and co the same mauling he’d given the Tories. Yes, it’s contradictory and doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t matter with propaganda. As Goebbels pointed out, you just carry on telling the same big lies until they stick.
I stopped listening to the News Quiz, not because of its political bias, but because of its anti-religious slant. This was in 2007 or so with the rise of the New Atheists. Comedians in particular seem in particular to have taken up the cause. And every week or so there was an anti-religious rant by Toksvig and Hardy, as well as a sneer from Hamilton. I got fed up with it, and so did what liberals had told people to do if they don’t like the content of a programme: turn it off.
I also didn’t like the programme’s metropolitan bias. It seemed to exist very much in the London bubble. The only universities worth mentioning were Oxford and Cambridge, and there was an attitude of contempt for those towns around the country dealing with the history of their involvement in the slave trade. I remember Liverpool being a target of such comments over a story about its slavery museum. But there was no mention of London’s involvement in the abominable trade. London started off in the 17th century as the leading centre of the slave trade in Britain, before it was overtaken by my home city of Bristol, which was then overtaken in its turn by Liverpool. Even after London had officially stopped trading in slaves, it may still have carried on surreptitiously through financing it in Liverpool and other cities. So it seemed to me that there was just a bit of hypocrisy about this issue.
Since then Toksvig has left the News Quiz and gone on to helm another comedy panel show, QI, previously hosted by Stephen Fry. And I stopped watching that for the same reason I stopped listening to the News Quiz: it’s anti-religious bias. Every week it seemed Fry would rant or sneer at religion with Christianity as the particular target. This culminated in a Christmas edition where he claimed it was all modelled on the Roman cult of Mithras, which is very highly dubious. The News Quiz itself carries on with Miles Jupp having replaced Toksvig.
The Quiz’s ratings have declined, and this has been put down to competition from more splenetic and savage satire online. The Quiz, which started out when only television and the print media were available, is therefore slower and more sedate and genial in its satire than the bloggers and vloggers online. I dare say this is the case, but as I said, I gave up because of its overt atheism and metropolitan bias, not because it was too genteel. As for Tory claims of political bias, this can be safely ignored. They’ve been spinning this line for decades. Sometimes there’s some truth in it, but more often than not it’s just propaganda.
This is another short video of AI art from the @ClassicDanceTracks channel on YouTube, imagining what a rave at Hogwarts would be like. Slytherin House is the rival to whichever house Potter and his friends are in, and contain snobbish villains like Draco Malfoy and his father. This video shows Malfoy and the evil lord Voldemort raving, dancing and playing electric guitars, as well as plenty of Hogwarts pupils wearing witches’ hats. The background music isn’t the Prodigy this time. It’s Rage Against the Machine. It all reminds me of some of the Goth nights at the nightclubs in Cheltenham back in the ’90s.
Some of the images in this set of videos shows Harry and his mates getting drunk and smoking spliffs. They’re funny, but just for the record I don’t condone underage drinking or drug abuse. Drinks are expensive, drugs are illegal and some of them, like Molly and Spice, do apparently wreck people’s brains and turn them into zombies. You can find videos of the victims of these drugs staggering around various districts in cities in America and over here. And you can have just as much fun dancing the night away when you’re sober. That’s the sermon over, enjoy the video.
I’m long-term sick, so I’m not a member of a union and too ill to join this campaign personally. But I thoroughly support it, and am putting this up here for anyone who is interested in joining it. Because we need trade unions desperately. Thanks to Tory and New Labour attacks on union power, wages have declined and working conditions deteriorated. The benefits that working people used to enjoy came from long years of struggle by the unions. And Sunak and the Tories, and no doubt Starmer as well, are reversing all this.
‘Dear David,
Last year we saw huge strikes and massive wins for our movement. But to remain strong we need to see hundreds more joining a union or stepping up to be a leader in their workplace.
The only way our movement is going to grow is by people like you getting out on the street and having conversations with others.
Every year, people around the country run events during #HeartUnions week to spread the word about why trade unions are vital for everyone at work.
This HeartUnions week, 12-18 February 2024, we’ll be supporting people to run their own recruitment stall.
One event means we might reach 100 new people, but if lots of us step up to lead events we’ll reach thousands of workers who are yet to join a union!
Pick a date to run your event. We want to see as much activity happening during HeartUnions week 12-18 February.
Decide where to run your stall. It could be in your workplace, a train station, or busy city centre. Just pick somewhere that you’ll be able to reach people!
Recruit some people to join you on the day. The minimum you need is you handing out in your local area, but it helps to have a team.
Add your event to the map so we can keep track of all the activity and you can invite others. (You can check out the map here)
Tell us your postal address and we’ll post you a bundle of resources to use on the day.
David Barnett
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