I gather that she’s been in today’s Guardian, where she’s written a piece about the death of Tina Turner. Turner was one of the greatest soul singers, even appearing as Auntie Entity, the ruler of Bartertown, in the film Mad Max 3, for which she also sang and performed a theme song. Shola’s piece lamented the fact that the singer had died before Blacks had received their proper compensation for their historic enslavement by White Europeans and Americans. She’s an intensely controversial figure. Some people feel that she is anti-British and I believe there was 38 Degrees petition launched by someone to stop the TV companies using her as a guest on their shows when debating racism and related topics. I feel that the issues of Black compensation for slavery raises questions about such compensation that crosses racial and national boundaries and which may affect Shola herself. Slavery was practised for millennia across the globe. Black Africans were enslaved by other African nations, as well as Muslim Arabs and Turks, as well as Indians, Persians and Afghans. Odiously, slavery still persists in Africa and the global south, and has been revived in Islamist-held Libya and Uganda. At the same time, Europeans were held in bondage as serfs until into the 19th century in parts of Europe, and were also enslaved by the invading Turks and pirates from Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. This rises the issue that if compensations is to be paid to enslaved Blacks, then the same principle should mean that the victims of these forms of slavery should also receive compensation from those, who historically enslaved them.
I’ve therefore sent her this message via the message box on her website. I’ll let you know if I get an answer
‘Dear Shola,
I was struck by your article in today’s Guardian about the death of the great soul singer, Tina Turner, and lamenting the fact that she died before Black people had received reparations for slavery. The question of slavery reparations raises issues extending beyond western Blacks, including the complicity of African aristocracies, the enslavement of Blacks by other nations, including Islam and India, as well as indigenous White European forms of bondage and their enslavement by the Barbary pirates and the Turkish empire. As the granddaughter of an African prince, I would be particularly interested in your perspectives on these issues.
Regarding indigenous African complicity in the slave trade, I’ve doubtless no need to tell you about how generally Black Africans were captured and enslaved by other Black African peoples, who then sold them on to White Europeans and Americans. The most notorious slaving states were included Dahomey, Benin and Whydah in west Africa, while on the east coast the slaving peoples included the Yao, Marganja and the Swahili, who enslaved their victims for sale to the Sultan of Muscat to work the clove plantations on Zanzibar. They were also purchased by merchants from India, and then exported to that country, as well as Iran, Afghanistan and further east to countries like Sumatra. It has therefore been said that reparations should consist of Black Africans compensating western Blacks. Additionally, Black Africans were also enslaved by other Muslim Arabs in north Africa and then the Turkish empire. What is now South Sudan was a particular source of Black slaves and one of the causes of the Mahdi’s rebellion was outrage at the banning of slavery by the British. This raises the issue of whether Turkey, Oman, India and other north African and Asian states should also compensate the Black community for their depredations on them.
The complicity of the indigenous African chiefs in the slave trade has become an issue recently in Ghana and Nigeria. I understand that the slavery museum in Liverpool was praised by campaigners and activists from these nations for including this aspect of the slave trade. I would very much like to know your views on this matter. Forgive me if I have got this wrong, but I understand you are of the Igbo people. These also held slaves. I would also like to know if you could tell me a bit more about this, and how this may have affected your family’s history. Your grandfather was, after all, a chief, and this raises the awkward question of whether your family owned slaves. If they did, how were they manumitted and did your family give them reparations for their enslavement?
There is also the question of the enslavement of Whites both under conditions of domestic servitude and by the Muslim powers of the Turkish empire and Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Serfdom in England died out in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it continued in European countries into the 18th and 19th centuries. Prussia only liberated its serfs in 1825 and the Russian serfs were only freed in 1860. Serfdom is considered a form of slavery under international law, as I understand. If Blacks are to be granted compensation for their enslavement, then as a general principle the descendants of White European serfs should also be compensated for their ancestors’ servitude.
In Britain, a from of serfdom continued in the Scottish and Northumbrian mining industries. Miners were bondsmen, whose contracts bound them to the mining companies and who were metal identity collars to prevent them running away exactly like slaves. I would be grateful if you would tell me whether their descendants should also receive compensation for their forefathers’ virtual enslavement.
Over a million White Europeans and Americans, mostly from southern European countries such as France, Spain and Italy, were enslave by the Barbary pirates. This only came to an end with the French conquest and occupation of Alegria. If people are to be compensated for their ancestors’ enslavement, then presumably America and Europe should also receive compensation from these nations for this. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 14th century by Mehmet II resulted in the depression of the indigenous White Christian population into serfdom as well as the imposition of slavery. When Hungary was conquered, the Turks levied a tribute of a tenth of the country’s population as slaves. When one of the Greek islands revolted in the 1820s, it was put down with dreadful cruelty and the enslavement of 20,000 Greeks. Do you feel that the descendants of these enslaved Balkan Whites should also receive compensation from their former Turkish overlords?
There is also the fact that after Britain abolished the slave trade, she paid compensation to the former African slaving nations for their losses as part of a general scheme to persuade them to adopt a trade in ‘legitimate’ products. This was believed to benefit both Britain and the African nations themselves. How do you feel about the payment of such compensation? Do you feel that it is unfair, and that these nations should pay it back to us, or that they should pay it to the descendants of the people they enslaved?
Finally, slavery still persists today in parts of Africa and has even revived. The Islamist terror groups that have seized control of half of the former Libya have opened slave markets dealing in the desperate migrants from further south, who have made their way to the country in the attempt to find sanctuary in Europe. At the same time, slave markets have also opened in Uganda. Slavery is very much alive around the world today. I would be greatly interested in your perspectives on this issue, which is affecting people of colour in the global south. How do you feel it should be tackled? Are you working with anti-slavery organisations, such as Anti-Slavery International and the various organisations by former African slaves to combat this? If not, I would be very grateful if you could tell me why not, when you are obviously motivated by a human outrage at the plight of the historic victims of western slavery.
I hope you will be able to provide me with answers to these questions, and very much look forward to receiving your reply.
Okay, I just caught the announcement on today’s midday news that the Beeb has launched a fact checking and verification service. I didn’t quite catch all of the announcement, but I think there was something about the war in Ukraine. Assuming that this was part of the same announcement rather than a separate news item about the war, it may have been related to the conflicting claims yesterday made by Russia and Ukraine about Bakhmut. The Russians claimed they had taken the town, while the Ukrainians denied it. The BBC seemed to be saying that this new service would be able to cut through such confusion. The Beeb also announced a few years ago that they were going to launch a service aimed at checking and rebutting the fake news coming out of the internet. The announcement today seems to suggest that they’ve finally completed setting the service up. Events have moved on a bit since then, and internet fake news and the ‘alternative facts’ put out by Donald Trump aren’t such a pressing issue on the public mind. They’ve therefore decided to announce its launch with a more topical question, such as who’s telling the truth about the war in Ukraine.
But can the Beeb itself be trusted? One of the right-wing news outlets – I can’t remember which one – said that Britain had one of the very lowest rates of public trust in the news in the world. Only 13 per cent of us, according to polls, supposedly believe the newspapers. I think the amount of trust in the Beeb might by higher, but it seems to me that this will also have been hit by allegations by the Tories about left-wing bias, particularly over Brexit. But the BBC has shown several times to people on the left that it can’t be trusted. It wholeheartedly took part in the mass demonization of Jeremy Corbyn as an evil anti-Semite. And I particularly remember the way it blatantly edited and censored Alex Salmond during the referendum a few years ago on Scottish independence. Their correspondent, Nick Robinson, had asked Salmond if he was afraid that the Scottish financial firms, located in Edinburgh, would move south if Scotland became independent. Salmon answered that they’d gone into that, and the firms wouldn’t. This clip was gradually edited during the day so that first it appeared that Salmond hadn’t given a satisfactory answer, and then that he ignored the question altogether.
And part of the problem isn’t what the Beeb or the rest of the lamestream media tells you, but what they don’t. Like the Maidan Revolution that toppled the pro-Russian Ukrainian president eleven years ago and started the path to the current war wasn’t a spontaneous, popular uprising, but carefully stage-managed by Hillary Clinton and her deputy Victoria Nuland in the state department with the cooperation of the National Endowment for Democracy. Other lowlights that found their way into the alternative media were reports that Clinton and Nuland had been recorded discussing whether or not they wanted the boxer-turned-politico Klyuchko in the Ukrainian cabinet. The gruesome twosome were also recorded lamenting that they hadn’t rigged the Palestinian elections, thus allowing the Palestinians to elect a Hamas government.
Today’s announcement is no doubt intended to reinforce the Beeb’s image as a source of unbiased, objective news. Certainly, that’s the image the corporation likes to project of itself. A few years ago, there was an advert for the Beeb’s news programmes which stated that the Beeb was listened to all over the world, especially in countries with authoritarian and dictatorial governments. The people in these countries trusted it to give them the real news that was being suppressed or distorted by their official news agencies.
Except I think it may be too late for that. The Beeb has shown itself too biased, too untrustworthy too often. You’re far better off getting information from the left-wing alternative internet channels like Novara Media and OpenDemocracy. The internet is notorious for the amount of rubbish, fake news and conspiracy theories circulating on it. But sometimes it’s more truthful than the mainstream news. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the fake news the Beeb will now claim to have checked and refuted is actually truthful, but needs to be discredited because it doesn’t fit the establishment agenda.
Two of the proposals in the leaked Labour manifesto were bringing the voting age down to 16 and giving the vote to EU nationals. Starmer had said in an interview that it felt wrong, when knocking on doors, to deny voting rights to people who had been here, contributing to the economy, for 10, 20, 30 years. However, That Preston Journalist put up a piece last night saying that these policies had not gone down well with the public, and that Starmer was now already thinking of ditching them, if not the entire manifesto. The Depress has run a story today reporting that Starmer had issued a sort-of climb down after Michael Gove, the ‘Levelling-Up’ Secretary, had written to him asking why he wanted to give the supreme benefit of British citizenship, the right to vote, to people who weren’t British citizens. And, of course, there are also the usual allegations that Starmer was trying to rig elections and drag Britain back into the EU. The first of these allegations is massively hypocritical, of course, after Reet-Snob admitted that the Voter ID laws were the Tories’ own attempt at gerrymandering. Starmer has responded by saying that the proposal to enfranchise EU citizens wouldn’t be a priority, considering the more pressing problems of the economy. He said that none of his five missions concern electoral change. But Tory MPs have commented that he hasn’t repudiated the policy either.
I think they’re right. He hasn’t repudiated it. He’s given the same answer he gave about trans rights when he was asked about that issue during the controversy about it in Scotland. He said then that it wouldn’t be a priority under Labour, before going back to support them, or apparently support them later. And given the way he breaks promises like the Tories, you have no idea whether he’s serious about these policies or not.
Last week the government was forced to bring yet another rail company back into public ownership because of its dreadful failures and shabby service. As organisations like We Own It and Bring Back British Rail have been pointing out for years, this is just one in a long series of cases where failing rail companies have had to be renationalised. Rail privatisation, which was introduced by John Major’s Tory government and hyped as improving the rail network through private industry, has failed. As We Own It and Bring Back British Rail have long argued, it is high time the rail network as a whole was renationalised. They have therefore produced a standard letter for people to send to the responsible minister, Mark Harper, calling for this. Here’s their message about it.
‘Dear David,
The Government has JUST announced it is taking TransPennine Express (TPE) into public ownership.
A few months ago, 8000 of you emailed the Transport Department calling for both TPE and Avanti to be run in-house – for people not profit.
This is your victory. It shows that when you take action you get wins.
The next 24 hours are a huge chance to double your VICTORY. Email Mark Harper, the transport secretary, now to take the rest of our railway system into public ownership.
With allies like Bring Back British Rail, Association of British Commuters and the rail unions, you’ve forced the government to take TransPennine Express into public ownership.
Now that you’ve got this victory, you can press for more.
The first 24 hours after a government decision are crucial. Ministers and their staff will be watching anxiously to see how the public reacts.
If their inboxes fill up with your letters supporting the TransPennine decision, and demanding they go even further, they’ll know public ownership is popular.
Our latest poll shows 67% of the public support taking all of our railway into public ownership.
This groundswell of support for public ownership will influence their ongoing discussions about other railway lines.
Tell the Transport Secretary now: more privatisation won’t help our railways.
Thanks to your actions, TPE will be the seventh rail franchise to come into public operation in just 6 years!
LNER, Northern, Transport for Wales Rail, Southeastern, ScotRail, and the Caledonian Sleeper have all been brought into public operation since 2018.
By emailing Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, today you can get even more wins for a railway run for people, not profit – and also ensure these wins are permanent.
Thank you!
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, and Imogen — the We Own It team
P.S. Here’s a photo from the fantastic action We Own It, Bring Back British Rail, RMT and others held outside the Department for Transport in March demanding TPE be taken into public ownership.
I’ve signed it, because it’s badly needed and I’m sick of the public sector supporting failing private companies simply for reasons of Tory free market ideology.
I noticed that GB News had a Johnbosco Nwogbo on one of their programmes to debate the issue of rail nationalisation. This looks like the same John Bosco who appears as part of the We Own It team above. He’s been a speaker on many of the online meetings and rallies against the privatisation of our vital public services. I didn’t watch the GB News item on the grounds that it would annoy me. John Bosco himself has a very deep grasp of the facts and is, like the rest of We Own It and similar organisations, well able to marshal powerful arguments in favour of nationalisation. I’m therefore sure he was more than a match for his free market opponent. And for some of the other morons mouthing off on the network.
This is a very short video from the PoliticsJoe site on YouTube of the leader of the SNP in Westminster having a very sharp dig at Keir Starmer for his betrayal of the country’s students. Flynn says that David Cameron convinced his coalition partner, Nick Clegg, to drop his pledge to end tuition fees. Flynn therefore has to congratulate Rishi Sunak on similarly convincing Starmer to drop his commitment to ending tuition fees. Of course, the Tories are highly delighted. Sunak grins like a maniac and looks around him to the Tory benches, who are also enjoying the joke immensely. Starmer just sits there with an expression half-grimace, half-stupid grin. Sunak then take to the despatch box to state that more people have gone to university under the Tories than ever before. Flynn responds by taking the floor again to say that the Conservatives don’t believe in ending tuition fees, the Liberal Democrats don’t believe in ending tuition fees, and now Labour doesn’t believe in ending tuition fees. He therefore appeals to the Speaker, ‘isn’t it true that all of them mainstream parties have failed Britain’s young people?’ Sunak responds by stating that more underprivileged young people are going to university in England than in Scotland.
I don’t like the way Flynn handed Sunak an opportunity to make the Tories look good, but his gibe at Starmer is right on target and deserved. As for more people going to university under the Tories than ever before, that’s probably true but it’s the continuation of a trend that began under Blair. It also doesn’t answer the real point underneath Flynn’s statement, which is that students are being burdened with mountainous debt. As for more underprivileged young people going to university in England rather than Scotland, that’s because the population of England is far greater than Scotland and there are more universities. Sunak is not helping students, as they’re faced not only with student debt, but also with the costs of living away from home during the cost of living crisis.
But Starmer isn’t going to help students either, although he still seems to want people to believe that he might with his wibbling that the current system is wrong and Labour will look at alternative ways of paying tuition fees. Well, some of us can remember Thatcher’s big plan in the 1980s to get businesses to sponsor students at university, even if they weren’t studying a subject related to the sponsor. That idea didn’t last long, despite all the fanfare. I don’t think any similar alternative to state payment of tuition fees Starmer might dream will last long either. The Guardian was similarly sceptical about Starmer’s ambiguous statement. They compared it to Schrodinger’s Cat, a metaphor for the behaviour of sub-atomic particles in quantum physics. In the metaphor, a cat is locked in a box with an instrument measuring atomic decay and a flask of poison. The atomic device randomly decides whether or not to smash the flask and release the poison, killing the cat. How can you tell if the moggy’s alive or dead? You can’t unless you open the box and make an observation. Until that time, the cat is both alive and dead, in the same manner that, in quantum physics, particles can be in two contradictory states until the scientist makes an observation. Starmer’s position on tuition fees is like the cat: it both is and isn’t in favour of dropping tuition fees.
But quantum physics, while it holds sway in the sub-atomic world, doesn’t work in the macro world which is subject to Einsteinian relativity. Similarly, Starmer’s position on tuition fees comes down to him deciding against ending them and betraying students. He wants us to believe otherwise, but that’s what it amounts to.
His repeated betrayals and breaking of pledges and promises have made him a laughing stock. As a leader, he’s a treacherous liability. And unfortunately we can’t blame this on Tory influence.
He’s doing it again! Starmer is about to break another pledge. Are there any promises he won’t break, any principles he won’t betray? Sky News and the Independent have reported that during an interview on Radio 4 this morning, the Tory infiltrator in chief of the former Labour party announced that he was considering dropping his promise to end tuition fees. According to him, the economy is different now than when he made the pledge. Excuse me, but I’ve heard this one before. Whenever a politician goes back on a policy they’ve previous supported, one of the excuses trotted out is, ‘Now is not the time’. Tweezer did it when she went back on her election pledge to have workers in the boardroom. It also, I think, brings to mind a quote from Malcolm X. X warned his followers to be aware of betrayal by White liberals. I think he may have said that they were worse than Conservatives, because the racists were honest about what they were. But when it came to reforms to empower Blacks, White liberals would often give the excuse that they agreed with them, but the time was not right. This isn’t racial politics, but it does accurately describe Starmer and his mentality regarding radical reforms.
The Independent’s article describes how Blair brought in tuition fees, how they were initially capped and then raised and then raised again by the coalition government of Cameron and Clegg. The interviewer on Radio 4 brought up the fact that Starmer had made a series of pledges, like taking the utilities back into government ownership, and then dropped them. So Starmer replied by saying that it was quite wrong that Labour had dropped all of these pledges. Really? Mike over at Vox Political has a long list of all the promises Starmer’s broken. And he started, more or less, on day one when he was elected head of the party. He said he was going to retain Corbyn’s policies, which he then dropped, one by one, just as he persecuted the former leader’s supporters. As for Corbyn himself, one of the YouTube channels showed just how two-faced Starmer was about him by showing clips of Starmer giving glowing testimony about Corbyn before later going on to decry him. It’s all a bit Stalinist, like the way under Communism the latest member of the Politburo was hailed as men of great intelligence and integrity who would lead the workers’ to victory over capitalism before being denounced as an evil capitalist imperialist lackey and co-conspirator with Trotsky a few weeks or months later. Communist politicians and apparatchiks during Stalin’s reign used to read Pravda to see if they would be mentioned as the intended victims of yet another anti-Soviet plot that existed only in Stalin’s paranoid imagination. If they were, then they could tell that they were in favour with the old brute. If they weren’t, it meant that they’d fallen out of favour and could so be expecting a knock at the door from the NKVD/KGB. And the victims of the show trials were frequently smeared as collaborators with Trotsky. I supposed the contemporary Labour party equivalent is being accused of supporting Corbyn and being an anti-Semite.
But Starmer still wanted people to think he was sincere about reforming tuitions fees. He said that the present system was unfair and Labour was looking at alternative ways they could be paid. How? I don’t see any alternative. Either the government pays the tuition fees or the students have to. There may be some fudge, so that the government pays it as a loan, but you’d still be stuck with students having to pay them.
The paper went for comment to the head of Labour Students, who really wasn’t impressed. She rightly mentioned that students are now faced with mountains of debt and stated that this would be Starmer’s ‘Nick Clegg moment’. This referred to Clegg’s pledge to end tuition fees, which he immediately reneged on once he was in power with Cameron. And the decision to retain or raise tuition fees, I’ve forgotten which, was Clegg’s. Cameron was apparently ready to let him honour his policy announcement. I was doing a Ph.D. at uni when Clegg went back on his word, and naturally the former head of the Lib Dems was not popular amongst some students. Indeed, for some of them he became synonymous with treachery.
Starmer’s hesitancy about this decision, his determination to reject it while telling everyone that he still supports it, reminds me of his indecision over changing the Gender Recognition Act. Starmer was first in favour of it, then when the issue helped to bring down Sturgeon in Scotland he announced that it wouldn’t be a priority for Labour, before changing his position yet again and swinging back to support it. But in answer to that knotty question ‘Do women have penises?’ Starmer tried to have it both ways and declared that 99.99 per cent of women don’t have penises. All that did was provoke more ridicule and allowed Sunak to score points for the gender critical side by saying that no, women don’t have penises.
Apparently, it doesn’t matter what the issue is, Starmer will break any promise he makes about it while telling you that he still supports it. He really can’t be trusted.
A few days ago Keir Starmer announced that if Labour came to power, boys would be taught to respect women in school. I can see the point of this, though it also seems to me to be a bit prim and schoolmarmish. It reminds me of the female management advisor who appeared on one of the TV shows a year or two ago and advised managers not to allow men to discuss sport at work in case it led to chauvinist behaviour. It also displays the totalitarian woke fixation with controlling how people think. But as a policy, I also find it rather threadbare as it ignores the real, material problems ordinary people are facing. This is the cost of living crisis with rising electricity bills and food prices. Some parents, and I think it may well be mostly mothers here, have been denying themselves the food they need in order to give enough to their children. People need higher wages, and unemployment and disability benefits at a level where they can afford food and other necessities. And, of course, an end to the humiliating, vindictive and persecutory sanctions regime. Starmer’s announcement does nothing to address these issues, nor those of massive profiteering by the oil and power companies and the raw sewage being pumped into our waterways. And you wonder how sincere Starmer is about anyway. He’s broken every other promise.
I wonder if it was designed to appeal to women following the debacle in Scotland over the gender recognition bill that brought down the SNP. Scots were rightly worried and angry at violent rapists and child abusers being put in women’s prisons after declaring that they were trans. Starmer and various other leading Labour MPs have made it clear that they believe transwomen are women and support the trans ideology, though Starmer’s commitment to it briefly wavered when Sturgeon was forced to resign. He stated that amending the gender recognition act would not be a priority under a Labour government. He’s been criticised for his bizarre statement that 99 per cent of women don’t have penises, while the right and gender critical have applauded Sunak’s statement that no, women don’t have male sexual organs. I wondered if Starmer had become worried that he was losing the support of ordinary women because of the trans controversy, and so made the announcement about teaching boys respect for women as a ploy to win it back.
I got this from the pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS organisation yesterday.
‘Dear David,
The government wants to use the huge NHS waiting list as an excuse to bring in more NHS privatisation.
You can make sure they know that we won’t let them normalise NHS privatisation. They need to know that there’ll be a public uproar if they push for more NHS privatisation.
We can create a big uproar if thousands of us write to our MPs now. Can you push back against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation?
*We have not prepared a template email for you to send to your MP. Writing a short email to your MP in your own words, straight from your heart, based on your own experiences or those of your family and friends will be incredibly powerful and make your MP sit up and listen.
Speaking to Tory press outlet, Conservative Home, Rishi Sunak said NHS privatisation has “worked in the past and we are going to do more of that going forward”.
It will come as no surprise to you that Rishi Sunak is absolutely wrong. NHS privatisation has never worked.
Not unless “working” means stuffing public money into the pockets of private healthcare shareholders.
Open Democracy reported last week that despite private hospitals being paid over half a billion pounds to help with NHS waiting lists, fewer patients are being seen overall.
We know that NHS privatisation is causing deaths. A recent Oxford study linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.
We also know that private cleaning companies contracted to clean our hospitals are leaving our hospitals full of germs, leading the NHS to spend an extra £1 billion to deal with the health fallout of privatisation.
Private companies with NHS contracts made £831 million in profits between 2011 and 2017 from just one form of NHS outsourcing. What a waste! We could have used that money to treat more people.
NHS privatisation might be working for greedy private companies like Centene and Virgin. It’s just not working for our communities.
Rishi Sunak wants to normalise NHS privatisation, using the crisis as his excuse because he knows that NHS privatisation is massively unpopular – even among those who voted for the Conservatives in the last election.
Over 68% of Conservative voters in our polling want private companies out of our NHS, with just 18% wanting more privatisation in the NHS.
Labour (77%), LibDem (75%) and other voters (73%) also massively support an NHS run for people, not profit.
Millions of us are waiting for healthcare and can’t see our GP, so it might seem like common sense to use the private sector so that people can get help immediately.
But we already know it doesn’t work. The government has already been doing that. It’s just not working.
Politicians need to face the facts. The real and popular solution is to invest directly into NHS capacity and pay our NHS staff.
Can you make sure your MPs know that you saw what Sunak said and that you are absolutely against it?
Regardless of your MP’s party, it is really important that you make your voice heard.
If your MP is Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Independent, email them and tell them to write to Rishi Sunak and let him know you oppose his plans to invest public money in private companies instead of directly into the NHS.
If your MP is Labour, email them and tell them to write to Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting asking them to confirm that Labour does not agree with Rishi Sunak that NHS privatisation has worked well.
If you live in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, email your MP and ask them to contact the Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish government to make sure that they are NOT following Rishi Sunak’s lead.
You can have a big impact in showing that it’s a choice between investing in the NHS and investing in the private sector.
Making this choice clear is really important as we approach the next election. Your MP needs to know this is an issue people in your constituency really care about.
We can create a public outcry against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation. Please write to your MP now and share this action with friends and family too.
Thank you so much for all you do to protect our NHS from privatisation and for being a part of this key fight as we approach the next general election.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team
PS: We would usually provide you with a ready-made letter to send to your MP, but your MP hearing from you, in your own words, will really make them sit up and listen. Your letter can be very short. What matters most are your experiences with the NHS and those of your family and/or friends. Speak from the heart. Make sure they know you want Labour to commit to investing directly in our NHS and not in private companies.‘
I have indeed written to my MP about this, and requested her to write to Streeting and Starmer to confirm that they won’t support Sunak’s privatisation plans. I’ll let you know if I get a reply. If you feel as I do about this issue, please also write to your MPs as well.
I don’t know how true this is, as it was reported on GB News by Tom Harwood, former teaboy to far right outfit Guido Fawkes. According to the station that a Labour MP has said has two political biases, right and far right, LGBTQ Labour, the gay rights wing of the party, is considering withdrawing from Pride marches because they are afraid for their safety. It’s because of the anger Keir Starmer has generated within the gay community due to his flip-flopping on the trans issue. First he was solidly behind reforming the gender recognition act, then after seeing it contribute to the fall of Nicola Sturgeon, he wasn’t. The militant gay rights organisation are also angry that he was talking to a ‘homophobic’ pastor about allowing gender critical organisation to attend and speak at conference.
There are several things to unpack here. The first is that, if this is true, then I believe LGBTQ Labour are entirely justified in their fears. There is a culture of violence in militant trans activism. We’ve seen this played out in violent demonstrations against gender critical activists on university campuses and public meetings. The most recent example of this was the mobbing of Kellie-Jay ‘Posie Parker’ Keen in New Zealand. And this is quite apart from Audrey Hale’s shooting of six people, including three children, at an American school. Militant trans rhetoric online is soaked in slogans about killing ‘TERFs’ with some of those posting pictures of themselves with firearms. In fact, LGBTQ Labour are fully behind and pushing for reform of the gender recognition act as well as outlawing anything but the affirmative care model of gender therapy on the grounds that anything else amounts to conversion therapy.
But it absolutely wrong to associate the gender critical movement with homophobia. Many of the women in the gender critical movement are lesbians. There are also gay men, some of whom, like Ted Sargent, are veterans of the original Stonewall riots. Sargent was assaulted and knocked to the ground at an American Pride march recently because he carried a banner stating that trans rights were nothing to do with gay rights.
There is a growing dissatisfaction among gays and lesbians with the mainstream gay rights organisations like Stonewall. They feel that these organisations have kicked gay people to the kerb in order to concentrate almost solely on the trans issue. Again and again they have posted up pieces about various gay rights meetings and events in which nearly all the speakers have been trans, speaking about trans, with only a minority of gay men speaking. And absolutely no lesbians.
There is also growing anger with attempts by the trans lobby to change the definition of homosexual from same-sex attracted to same gender attracted. This means that trans-identified biological men have and are demanding sex from lesbians because, despite their masculine biology, they identify as women. Ditto with gay men being pressured to have sex with trans-identified women, who identify as men and therefore consider themselves gay men. Gender critical gays and lesbians have stated that this is a new form of conversion therapy, similar to the old where gays were pressured to have straight sex in order to cure them.
There are a number of complaints online that where this ideology is being upheld and enforced – in Canada, America and Britain, it has led to the massive closure of traditional gay and lesbian pubs and clubs. The gay scene has, according to them, moved back underground, with gays meeting and socialising in private homes as they used to when homosexuality was illegal.
As for gender critical organisations attending the Labour conference, I think they have every right to. The LGB Association, a gay organisation that solely represents gay men and women, tried to attend the last one but were banned because of the trans activists. They have been accused of being a hate group, but I have seen absolutely no evidence of this except real concerns about how the trans ideology is damaging the mental and biological health of vulnerable people as well as excluding and marginalising gay people within the organisations. They have a right to be heard as well as their opponents.
I don’t know, however, how much this will affect relations between gay Labour members and activists and Pride at a local level. A group from my local Labour party attended the Pride march in Bristol last year, and the year before the Labour administration painted one of the zebra crossings in Bristol’s old city in the trans flag.
Aside from the trans issue, I’ve also read online comments from gay people, who have become generally disenchanted with Pride. In their view it has gone from something that had a real point – fighting real homophobia and anti-gay legislation – to something rather more menacing. Rather than being subversive and liberating, they feel that it has become oppressive and conformist, with corporations and organisations using it as an opportunity to demonstrate how virtuous they are in this regard. I don’t know about over here, but in America there are also growing concerns about the blatant displays of kink in Pride as the marches state they welcome children.
There are some real fractures occurring in the British gay movement. How big the supposed split between LGBTQ Labour and Pride is moot. GB News is a right-leaning broadcaster with an interest in attacking the Labour party so the report may well be exaggerated. But there are cracks appearing as many gays become increasingly disenchanted with their organisations’ focus on trans to what they feel is their exclusion.
That Preston Journalist is a former Conservative local councillor, now turned right-wing YouTube. Much of his content has been attacking Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP in Scotland, but now that McKrankie, as he calls her, is in dead trouble with her husband arrested and the rozzers digging up her garden, he may be turning to other targets. Like Keir Starmer and the Labour party. Starmer has provoked controversy with his wretched attack ads against Rishi Sunak. These claim that Sunak is soft on crime, letting armed gunmen and child abusers escape custodial sentences. However, whatever else you can say about Sunak – and there’s so much – this isn’t his fault. It’s the decision of the judges sentencing them. More than that, Starmer was part of the committee that drafted the sentencing guidelines. Emily Thornberry appeared on the news yesterday to try and defend Stalin. When she was asked whether Stalin was part of the committee, she said she couldn’t remember. Which is unlikely, as she wrote to Starmer at the time objecting to him proposing lighter sentences for rapists. Many on them left are sick of the attack ads, and I think Novara Media have called them a descent into the gutter. It reminds me of the Labour election broadcast the party ran under Ed Miliband, which personally attacked Nick Clegg. Most people thought that was too low as well. But it is in line with Starmer’s Blairite values. Back in 2004 Blair got himself into a controversy over anti-Semitism when he produced an ad depicting the-then leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard, as a pig. Howard’s Jewish, and so it’s not hard to see how the ad would cause upset amongst Jews and anti-racism activists. Not that the other parties are exactly innocent themselves. The Tories produced an ad showing Blair with demon eyes. I think this got called the ‘curse of Finkelstein’, after the ad executive who designed it. Instead of putting people of Blair, it put people off the Tories. The Lib Dems also produced a poster which merged the faces of John Prescott and Ann Widdecombe. This was supposed to show that the two parties were basically the same and they offered the only real alternative. This backfired as it turned out most of those who saw the picture simply thought it was just a picture of Widdecombe.
But Starmer’s history of mendacity also makes him vulnerable to similar attacks. The Preston Journalist therefore gleefully shows a video someone has made of Starmer breaking just about every promise he’s made. It begins with his pledge to nationalise the utilities and includes his warm comments about Jeremy Corbyn before sticking the knife in him. Usually I wouldn’t put That Preston Journalist’s material up here, but hey, it’s Starmer and he deserves it. Especially as the Labour right cooperated with the Tories and Lib Dems to suppress the Labour left, including being members of Conservative internet groups. In fact, they were more venomous in their hatred of the Labour left than the Conservatives. I therefore have no qualms about serving this back to them.
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