Clown World YT put this interesting little video up on his YouTube channel three days ago. This YouTuber is very much a man of the anti-migrant, anti-immigration and passionately anti-Labour right. But this is a video that should concern critics of Nigel Farage right across the political spectrum. Because it looks very much like a grift, or the dodgy dark money the party and its donors rely on that has been documented extensively by Open Democracy.
For 350 British smackers, you too can own a black, football style T-Shirt, with gold lettering, proudly proclaiming your support of Reform, each one signed by Nigel Farage. But as Mr Clown World shows, only £1 actually goes to Reform. Where does the rest of it go? Don’t know. I think here it should be remembered that Reform isn’t a political party, but a private company. So is that money going to Farage and his shareholders?
The video also shows the growing disenchantment many of the anti-immigrant right have with Reform. They don’t like the way Farage is behaving as a petty dictator, throwing out anyone he doesn’t like. They don’t like Reform selecting as its candidate for one of the London boroughs a Bangladeshi who supports reparations for slavery. They feel very much that Farage, if he gets his rear end in power, will jettison all his opposition to anti-racism and anti-immigration in order to be popular. I wonder if his supporter for these causes is tactical and conditional, and that his real goal is to introduce more anti-worker Trumpian politics into the UK.
This comes from the radical American magazine Jacobin via Daily Dose of Democracy. I get sent online editions of the latter after signing one of their petitions against the Orange Generalissmo, noting that I wasn’t American but a foreigner, of course. Double Dose of Democracy is very much a Democrat e-newsletter, but it has an emphasis on protecting democracy similar to Open Britain and other pro-democracy movements here in Blighty. In this article, Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone skewers the fearmongering the Right was spewing a few years ago about liberals like the ACLU and so on waging a war against Christmas. She argues instead that there is indeed a real was being fought against the Christmas season, but it’s being waged by very rich, miserly bosses trying to screw every last bit of work from their underpaid staff. Read it for yourself.
Liza Featherstone, Jacobin: “In the right-wing imaginary, the War on Christmas had a good run. Fox News host John Gibson alleged in a 2005 book that liberals were planning to ‘ban the sacred holiday,’ and a moral panic was born, yielding outrage after outrage almost every year. This year, however, the defenders of all things merry and bright have been pretty quiet, and polling shows that even among conservatives and Donald Trump supporters, a declining minority of Americans believe that the beloved holiday is under siege. Sensitive neighbors (and corporations hoping to avoid their ire) may continue to wish us a ‘Happy Holidays,’ the ACLU may continue to object to religious iconography in the town square, yet Americans are ignoring the likes of Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, instead adulting with a ‘live and let live’ attitude. This rare moment of cultural chill allows us to come together as Americans to confront the real war on Christmas, the one you won’t hear about on Fox News: a class war. If you’ve read Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, you’ll remember that the main character is one of literature’s nastiest bosses. Ebenezer Scrooge hates the holiday and resents giving his employee, Bob Cratchit, even one paid day off with his family, calling Christmas ‘a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket’ and demanding that the terrified Cratchit be at his desk “all the earlier’ the next day. As bad as that sounds, poor Bob Cratchit had it easier than many American workers today. A recent survey of over one thousand workers found that one in ten were working on Christmas Day. Nearly one in four expected to be working on Christmas Eve, while more expected to work on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Reasons included needing the money and lacking paid time off. Dickens, like his contemporary, Karl Marx, made observations about capitalism and its abuses to the human spirit that remain all too relevant today; in this case, his point was that bosses don’t stop acting like bosses at the holidays. Today, layoffs at this time of year are common. Last week, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been elected to exactly no government office but suddenly seems to be running everything, was apparently seeking to outdo Scrooge by trying to force a government shutdown, which would have meant that active-duty soldiers and other government workers wouldn’t get their paychecks. For some workers, conditions on the job get even worse at Christmastime. One of the reasons Americans give for working during the holiday is the fact that it is an especially busy time of year for their company or industry. As Teamsters went on strike at seven Amazon warehouses — in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Southern California — some workers have observed that they were barely seeing their loved ones this season, considered ‘peak’ for the company. ‘When you think of the holidays you think of spending time with your family, you think of reconnecting,’ a packer in Staten Island told Labor Notes, ‘And during peak, all you can think of is sleep.’ Even for those who don’t have to slave away in an Amazon warehouse, exploitation gets in the way of Christmas. Many people don’t get paid enough to enjoy travel and gift-giving. In fact, financial stress during the holiday season is so common that articles advising us how to manage it are published every year. Dickens was smart enough about class relations under capitalism to know that Scrooge’s transformation wouldn’t have been realistic without an extraordinary plot twist. Scrooge needs an intervention — by ghosts. Dickens knew that getting capitalists to behave humanely, at Christmas or at any time of year, would require a departure from the realism he employs in many of his other novels.”
Just wishing everybody reading this blog a really merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Yes, I know Christmas Day and Boxing Day are over, and the New Year is nearly upon us. I should have put this up a few days ago, but laziness and circumstances intervened. Like Boxing Day morning I was in hospital again having a regular infusion to treat the myeloma.
Regardless of the tardiness of this seasonal message, I hope you all had a great Christmas with family, relatives and friends, regardless of your religion or lack thereof. And I hope you and all you care for will have a peaceful and prosperous New Year.
There’s obviously been great excitement about the DoJ’s release of the papers of the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and speculation about what it contains and who’s in it. Like Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, for example. It’s been reported that Trump and his cronies have been busy trying to block the release of any material that may possibly relate to him. People have also wondered where Epstein got his money. Maverick physicist Eric Weinstein said in an interview with Joe Rogan a little while ago that when he met Epstein to do some maths for him, Epstein’s behaviour seemed wrong. Epstein at the time was officially a millionaire financial investor. Weinstein showed up at his home to go through the maths on some issue. Epstein was still occupied elsewhere, so he was shown into the lounge and given a cup of coffee. When Epstein finally emerged, he apologised for being late as he was working on some financial business, which Weinstein thought was an odd way of describing it. He also wondered where Epstein was getting his money. Epstein was a millionaire, but his lifestyle and expenditure was that of the mega-rich, who were far above him in wealth. It’s thus been suggested that he had connections to the CIA and Mossad. However, in the interview between front woman Amy Goodman and David Enrich of the New York Times, it’s revealed that Epstein got it from scams and his connections to rich and powerful people, who protected him.
Here’s the blurb for the video.
‘As the Trump administration is expected to release investigative files related to Jeffrey Epstein later this week, a recent New York Times investigation delves into one of the biggest mysteries about the deceased sexual predator: how the college dropout with no financial training rose through the world of finance and amassed his wealth, which enabled his abuse and insulated him from scrutiny for decades. David Enrich, deputy investigations editor at The New York Times and lead author of the report, headlined “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich,” says Epstein’s early success in business was due to a series of lucky breaks, lies and scams that nevertheless convinced sophisticated investors and business titans to give him their money. “What surprised me the most was just how pedestrian some of his scams were,” says Enrich. “He was just grabbing people’s money and running with it.”‘
The video’s proper title is ‘They Cut Me When I Was Eight Years Old’ and it comes from the #NotSilent6Podcast on YouTube. I realise that Christmas Eve when people are looking forward to all the fun of Christmas Day and the rest of the Christmas season isn’t the most suitable time for such a grim subject. But I felt I had to put it up after one of the right-wing YouTubers put up on his channel a piece from an LBC phone-in where their presenter was talking to an African woman, who was outraged that FGM was outlawed in this country. The woman seemed to believe, from the way she said that it was a White nurse that told her that if she cut her baby, she’d report her, that the opposition to it was just White racism. No. It isn’t. It’s based on very sound medical reasons, and as I hope this video makes very clear, it isn’t just Whites who despise the custom and want it banned. I have to say that I really admire the LBC lady arguing with her. From what I saw, she remained polite and civil throughout. I’m not sure how many people could have done this when talking to someone supporting such vile mutilation of small girls.
The brief blurb for the video gives the following information:
‘Fatou Baldeh, a survivor of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and a leading human rights activist. She was cut as a child only 8years old, and being told never to talk about it. But she broke that silence — for the 230 million girls and women affected by FGM worldwide. Fatou Baldeh is a TIME Women of the Year 2025, a recipient of the Clooney Foundation for Justice Award, and the U.S. State Department’s International Women of Courage Award.’
There are other girls and young women like Baldeh also campaigning against it in Britain. One of these is a Bristol girl, who appeared a few years ago on the local BBC news programme, Points West.
This photo from 1868 came up on Monday on my Google news feed, and I’ve been meaning to put it up here since. But alas, I haven’t got round to it until now. The current controversy and debate over White European and American complicity in the slave trade and the demand for reparations has overshadowed the fact that, after Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, it acted as the world’s policeman against the abominable trade. It signed a series of treaties with different countries, such as France and, in the Indian Ocean, the Imaum of Muscat banning the trade. These treaties gave the signatories the reciprocal right of search to board and examine any vessel they suspected of carrying slaves. Suspected slaving ships were seized and taken to Sierra Leone, where a mixed court with representatives from Britain and the ship’s nation would judge it’s case. If found guilty, the ship would be seized and the crew of the capturing naval ship awarded its prize money, and the slaves aboard it would be freed. These could stay in Sierra Leone, originally founded by the British Anti-Slavery Society as a colony for freed slaves, or transported to the West Indies as ‘liberated Africans’. They were officially registered to show that they were legally taken there, rather than illegally imported slaves, and apprenticed to masters and employers, who would teach them a trade. The officers in charge of the ships patrolling the seas and oceans against the slave trade were largely evangelical Anglican Christians.
This photo shows the grim reality of the trade. In contrast to the myth of White sailors violently taking Black Africans, the slaves were captured by Black Africans themselves in raids termed razzias. They were then transported to the coast, where they were then sold to European and American slavers. Before the Scramble for Africa and the expansion of European conquest and colonization in the 19th century, powerful African coastal states prevented European penetration of the continent. Resident European slavers were kept isolated in their own ghettoes in the West African city states. Examination of the copious ledger and documents compiled by the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases it was the African slavers who approached Europeans to sell their slaves, rather than Europeans approaching Africans.
The families of the boys in this picture were almost certainly killed by the slave raiders, although the registers of incoming freed slaves in the West Indies do record women with their children and the separation of mothers from their children was not allowed. It6 is to this country’s great credit that after its involvement in the trade that it turned so resolutely against it, patrolling the seas from the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
This is really interesting. I got a notification on my Google news feed yesterday about the book Egyptology: The Missing Millennium – Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writing by Okasha El Daly. This refutes the standard view I grew up with that the invading Arabs had no interest in Egypt’s ancient history and culture, and that this only revived with emergence of modern Egyptology by Europeans following Napoleon’s invasion and scientific expedition.
However, the standard Islamic view is that the period before the coming of Islam is the jahiliyya, the age of ignorance or dark age, and Muslims are not supposed to be interested in it. It’s why Islamists like Anjem Chaudhary in Britain told a British interviewer a decade or so ago that he wanted the pyramids to be destroyed, and why the Islamic State, when the took Mosul, destroyed the pre-Islamic artefacts in the local museum. Egyptians do have a strong connection to their past. This was shown when one statue of an ancient overseer was dug up, and the Egyptian workmen on the dig called it ‘the headman of our village’ because of its likeness to their village elder. Even so, participation in modern Egyptology could be hazardous. Ghoneim, the first native Egyptian to head the country’s Egyptology department, was assassinated.
Here’s what Amazon says about the book:
Egyptology: The Missing Millennium brings together for the first time the disciplines of Egyptology and Arabic Studies, seeking to overturn the conventional opinion of Western scholars that Moslems/ Arabs had no interest in pre-Islamic cultures.
This book examines a neglected period of a thousand years in the history of Egyptology, from the Moslem annexation of Egypt in the seventh century CE until the Ottoman conquest in the 16th century. Concentrating on Moslem writers, as it is usually Islam which incurs blame for cutting Egyptians off from their ancient heritage, the author shows not only the existence of a large body of Arabic sources on Ancient Egypt, but also their usefulness to Egyptology today.
‘Using sources as diverse a sthe accounts of travellers and treasure hunters to books on alchemy, the author shows that the interest in ancient Egyptian scripts continued beyond classical writers, and describes attempts by medieval Arab scholars, mainly alchemists, to decipher the hieroglyph script. He further explores medieval Arab interest in Ancient Egypt, discussing the interpretations of the intact temples, as well as the Arab concept of Egyptian kingship and state administration – including a case study of Queen Cleopatra that shows how the Arabic romance of this queen differs significantly from Western views.
This book will be of great interest to academics and students of archaeology, Arabic studies and Egyptology, as well as anyone with a general interest in Egyptian history.<br><br>
‘This is an impressive piece of work. It deals with a grossly neglected and misunderstood subject -the interest and knowledge of Ancient Egypt on the part of Arabic/ Moslem writers in the Medieval period – and it covers this subject from many aspects.’ Professor Charles Burnett, The Warburg Institute’
More anti-LGBT clampdown from Russia’s dictator. Ursula Le Guin is one of the truly stellar figures in Science Fiction and Fantasy. She’s probably best known for her children’s fantasy, The Wizard of Earthsea, which contains many of the tropes that turn up in subsequent fantasy novels like Harry Potter. This includes schools for child wizards and witches, which I think also feature in The Worst Witch books. But she also wrote a series of groundbreaking, highly regarded SF novel expressing her radical left-wing and feminist views. The novel The Dispossessed is about an scientist from an alien moon, Anarres, travelling to its main planet, Arres. The moon was originally settled as a mining colony, but has undergone a revolution and become an anarchist society. Religion is banned, there are no prisons and the very idea of their existence is absolutely abhorrent to the moon’s inhabitant. Males and females are equal, ,and perform the same job. Clothing is kept to minimal, all-purpose wear for both sexes. There is no marriage, but in practice people form longstanding domestic partnerships. There is a defence force of a kind in the syndics, a guild for soldiers-cum-police. I don'[t think there’s much in the way of official punishment for murder, but the family and friends of the murderer are free to inflict whatever revenge they choose on the murderer. There is no animal life on the land, so people live on fruit, veg and fish.
Keeping this altogether is the Centre, a computer complex tasked with coordinating the economy. This is a society that takes Marx’s dictum that in the age of true communism, the government of people will be replaced by the administration of things. The Centre also prescribes people’s work for them. The hero, Shevek, has been given the task of creating an ansible, a faster than light communication device. He defects to the main world, a capitalist hellhole, to continue his work when it is taken away from him. He is highly critical of this world and its throw-away-society. It’s an ecologically aware book, critical of the devastation capitalism haw wrought on the environment. He meets the human ambassador, who comes from an Earth reduced to a mineral-poor desert, where the consumption of what resources survive is very strictly controlled. A revolution breaks out, Shevek becomes a hero and inspirational figure to the anarchists and their socialist allies, before departing back to his anarchist moon. It’s very much a product of its time, when scientists were worried about the Earth running out of resources and the Club of Rome and nascent ecological groups, such as Friends of the Earth, were warning about the threat of extinction to so much of our wildlife. I still remember the campaigns to Save the Whale and the Tiger. The idea of people being taken away from one set of work and given other tasks was a part of Maoist ideology. In China at the time, intellectuals were taken away from their established work and set to perform manual labour as an attack on the bourgeois class system.
Clearly this is a book that would make Farage and his supporters’ eyes bug with hatred quicker than you could say ‘cultural Marxism’.
I don’t think it’s aged terrible well, as the experience of the Communist bloc has shown that these societies rapidly became horrific dictatorships unable to compete with capitalism in the provision of goods and services, beset by shortages and a whole slew of economic and social problems. But as I write the free market capitalism of Maggie Thatcher is rapidly failing as well.
Le Guin said that she was a feminist, and wanted to express this but not so that it would upset anyone. The novel in question, The Left Hand of Darkness, is one such. It’s set on an alien world, which suffers extremely severe winters. These are too harsh for reproduction, so for most of the year the humanoid inhabitants are sexually neutral. This changes in the meeting season, when they become individually male and female. But there is no continuity with the sex they were the previous year. Males one year may become females another, and vice-versa. It’s been praised by feminists and their male supporters, like Neil Gainman, for showing that men and women are basically the same.
Putin and his goons have decided to ban it as an attack on marriage. They’ve based this on a series of anti-LGBT legislation and have raided bookshops.
I think it’s similarity to current trans-ideology may be at the heart of it though. Clearly the idea that individuals can change their sex, and that fundamental identity does not always equal biology anticipates some of the fundamental doctrines of queer theory. Russia and many of the other former Communist bloc countries is very hostile to homosexuality. It’s not banned in Russia, and there is a thriving gay scene in St. Petersburg. The Beeb showed this years ago in a travel programme about modern Russia with two presenters, a man and a women. The lady went to St. Petersburg, where as well as piloting a boat through the city’s canals, she danced the night away at a gay disco. The lad, meanwhile, went east, me3ting a pair of tough backwoodsmen who very definitely did not like homosexuality. Russia and countries like Poland and Hungary have banned the promotion of homosexuality, particularly in schools. Back in the 90s amongst the profusion of small press magazines covering just about every topic or interest under the sun, there was a magazine for transpeople, Eon: The Magazine of Transkind. It took it’s name from Eonism, an absolute term for transvestism, after the Chevalier d’Eon, A French spy and transvestite. In one edition they went to the former Soviet Union to cover how transpeople were victims of persecution and assault in the new, post-Communist society.
I’m not a fan of Le Guin. I respect her as one of the great figures of SF and Fantasy, but her work doesn’t appeal to me. But I haven’t seen any reason to ban her either. Not in a society where you are free not read an author if you disagree with them, and where also you should be free to write and argue against them if you so wish. As for the way marriage has been undermined in the developed societies of the west and the former Soviet bloc, this is due to far greater factors than anything written by Ursula Le Guin. Marx and Engles decried it as a slavery for women in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. As well as later attacks by feminists in the 60s and 70s, it’s been undermined by the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and the liberalisation of the divorce laws. Before this was passed by Roy Jenkins in the 1960s, couples could only divorce for reasons of adultery. Which meant that couples who couldn’t stand the sight of each other were bound together for better or worse, for richer or poorer, forever. John Mortimer, lawyer and the author of the Rumpole of the Bailey novels, recalled the case of one man, who hated his wife so much that he used to come home from work in different clothes in the hope people would think she was having an affair and he could divorce her.
Put simply, I find it astonishing that Putin and his supporters are so insecure about the state of marriage that they want to ban the book, quite apart from this being yet another attack on literature and free thought.
That’s the news I got from an article from one of the defence newspapers that came up on my Google feed the other day. Not drones, but humanoid robots, which already makes it sound a bit too much like The Terminator. It also reminds me very strongly of the 2000 AD strip, ‘ABC Warrior’, about a band of robot soldiers fighting in a future war between the West and the Volgan Republic. Which is obviously a very thinly disguised metaphor for the Russians. The strip was created way back in the 1980s by writer Pat Mills and the late, very much missed comics artist Kevin O’Neil. And i9t now seems very prophetic, especially as in recent reiterations of the strip the world has hit peak oil and the West is tryiing to steal the Volgans; oil.
The strip had a touch of horror and the supernatural, as one variety of these robot soldiers were an order of robotic monks, monitoring the war from orbit in orbit to detect and prosecute war criminals. These had taken up mysticism and the occult and had developed supernatural powers. Captured war criminals were judged by the cowled androids, and when found guilty, were executed. But their leader, the very sinister Deathlok, was there to provide spiritual comfort by mediating with them before sending them on their great journey. Sadly, or perhaps mercifully, I doubt the new set of war robots will have anything like them.
This is a long piece explaining how Reform really aren’t a political party led by the grassroots representing the silent majority of ordinary Brits, but a private corporations led and run for its CEA, Farage, senior management and corporate donors. Who are actually a tiny group of three people.
‘Dear David,
Nigel Farage wants you to think he’s leading a grassroots rebellion. A party of ordinary people finally rising up against the establishment. But when you follow the money, the truth is a lot less romantic: in many ways, Farage is the establishment.
75% of all donations since 2019 have come from just three men: Christopher Harborne, Jeremy Hosking, and Richard Tice. Not three million ordinary contributors. Three millionaires.
It might be reasonable to bankroll a party because you like the cut of its jib. But when a party is reliant on a flood of cash from wealthy donors, the obvious question arises: whose interests does that party end up serving?
When you look at what these men are known for, and you look at what Reform UK’s leadership has been saying and promising, the overlaps are hard to miss.
Let’s start with Christopher Harborne. He’s a major cryptocurrency investor, with reported interests linked to Tether, the ‘stablecoin’ giant. He gave Reform UK a record £9 million,the largest political donation from a living donor in the history of British politics.
What strings came attached?
Byline Times reports that Nigel Farage has been talking up Tether, urging Britain to “embrace” it and to become a global trading centre of stablecoins – mocking calls for caution from the Bank of England as the work of “dinosaurs.”
That’s the leader of a political party – currently in pole position for Downing Street – publicly advocating for a product and a sector directly related to his biggest donor’s financial interests. It was also revealed in November that Tether was used to facilitate the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine and assist Russians in evading Western sanctions.
Then there’s Jeremy Hosking, who has donated £1.7 million to Reform UK. He’s a wealthy investment manager, whose company Hosking Partners has at least $134m invested in the fossil fuel sector. Unsurprisingly, he has strong negative opinions about net zero.
Reform UK says it will scrap net zero and related subsidies, fast-tracking licences for North Sea drilling and test sites. That would be a complete 180 shift from Britain’s policy direction, and it just so happens that donors like Hosking stand to benefit tremendously.
While you can’t prove a quid pro quo – that Hosking donated to secure that policy – it does at least mean that Reform UK’s climate programme is perfectly tailored to the interests of fossil-fuel investors rather than voters.
And then there’s Richard Tice, a property tycoon and Deputy Leader of Reform UK, worth a reported £40 million.
Property and planning may sound less dramatic than crypto or oil and gas, but it’s where many fortunes are made in Britain. Planning policy determines who gets to build, where they get to build, and what they can extract from the public realm in the process. It’s also at the heart of the cost-of-living crisis we face today (the longest such squeeze on record).
Reform UK has plotted a major overhaul of the planning system, including fast-track planning for brownfield sites and a “loose fit planning policy” with pre-approved guidelines.
That’s certainly developer-friendly language. Britain needs to build far more homes, faster, and there is little denying that the current system is broken. But the issue is that when the party’s internal power structure and donor base includes a major property figure, the “Is this in the public interest?” question becomes inseparable from “Who stands to profit?”
The greater picture is clear: three wealthy men, operating in sectors where Government has always picked winners and losers, lining up with a party that explicitly plans to change policy in order to make them the winners.
Reform UK stands as the most dramatic example of how this broken system actually operates. A system where a handful of mega-donors can effectively underwrite a political project, and where the rest of the country is then asked to treat that project as the authentic expression of popular will.
While none of this is necessarily illegal, it exposes a very real problem: how power really works and the urgent need to fix our democracy before it breaks entirely.
Legality is a low bar. Perhaps a better metric is whether it’s utterly eroding people’s basic faith in democracy itself. Is our system about the needs and aspirations of voters, or just who writes the biggest cheques?
If a party is only viable because of three very wealthy men, then those three men and their financial interests matter. And the policies that overlap with their profits deserve vastly more scrutiny than they’re currently getting.
Ignore the culture wars, the red herrings and the dead cats thrown out to distract and derail debate. Britain has a growing campaign finance problem. And until we fix it, we’ll keep getting politics shaped by the people who can afford to buy it.
All the best
Conor
Conor McKenzie Digital Engagement Manager, Open Britain’
There you have it: What was cynically said about democracy applies to Reform: it’s the best political party money can buy.
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