Forthcoming Arise Festival Events

‘REGISTER HERE: Vulture Capitalism – Grace Blakeley & Jeremy Corbyn In Conversation

Online. Mon. May 20, 6.30pm. Register here // RT here // FB share here.

Grace Blakeley & Jeremy Corbyn will talk about her new book Vulture Capitalism – the book you need to understand what is happening in the world around you – & what you can do to change it. (Order the book  here.) Join us for this very special event!

In Vulture Capitalism, acclaimed journalist Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crisis are the intended result of our capitalist system. It’s not broken, it’s working exactly as planned.

Hosted by Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas. Free event, but solidarity donations essential to hosting & streaming costs – please donate £20 or what you can afford here.

ALSO COMING UP:

1) Class War in Britain – the Miners’ Strike 40 Years on

Online. Sat. June 1, 1- 4pm. Register here // RT here // Invite & share here. 

An afternoon of online political education, discussion & debate on one of the most important struggles in our history, including what really happened; the role of the state & media; & lessons for solidarity & socialism today.

With: John Hendy KC, who represented the NUM in the 1980s // Mike Jackson, Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners co-founder // Ian Lavery MP, striking miner in 84/5 & former NUM President // Chris Peace, Orgreave Truth & Justice Campaign // Jon Trickett MP, councillor elected during the strike & campaigner for coalfield communities.

Plus: Sabby Dhalu. Stand up to Racism // Carolyn Jones, Morning Star // Mish Rahman, LP NEC // Matt Willgress, Arise // Sarah Woolley, BFAWU.

Hosted by Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas. Media partner – Labour Outlook. Free event, but solidarity donations essential to hosting & streaming costs – please donate £20 or what you can afford here.

2) IN-PERSON CONFERENCE: A Labour Movement Agenda for a Labour Government

All-day, Saturday May 25, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BB. Register here // Retweet John here.

John McDonnell MP // Mick Lynch, RMT General Secretary // Rebecca Long Bailey MP // Fran Heathcote, PCS General Secretary // Asad Rehman, War on Want // Ellen Clifford, Disabled People Against Cuts // Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography // Lord Prem Sikka // Mary Robertson, Lecturer at QMUL // Andrew Fisher, IPaper Columnist //Jess Barnard, Labour NEC // Johh Hendy KC, IER // Jacqui McKenzie, Human Rights Lawyer // Ann Pettifor, author, The Case for the Green New Deal.

Hosted by Claim the Future. Supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung London Office. Circulated by Arise & Labour Assembly,‘

The Ghost and the Brain

This is another response to a recent article by CJ, a very long-time psychical researcher and member of the paranormal research group ASSAP. Over the past few days he has written a two-part article discussing the Psycho-Social Hypothesis of the UFO experience and its possible flaws, which I have also responded to. Now he has put up a similar thought-provoking essay on the possible neurological origins of the ghost experience.

CJ states that we don’t just see with our eyes, but with our brains. There are particular sections of the brain devoted to turning the electro-chemical impulses from our peepers in to vision, and our conscious visual perception of the world around us. Among other parts of brain mentioned by him is the visual cortex located at the rear of the skull. People who have received an injury to this section of the brain may become cortically blind. There’s nothing wrong with their eyes or optic nerves, but the blow to the visual cortex means that they cannot translate the impulses from the eyes into images in their brains. There also a related phenomenon in which the cortically blind nevertheless seem to have some kind of vision subconsciously. When these people are asked to point to a person or object, they are perfectly able to do so with accuracy, even though they aren’t consciously seeing anything. To them, it’s all guesswork, even though something more than this is operating.

This leads to the thorny question of what is actually going on when people see ghosts. Scholars, theologians and spiritualists have been discussing the nature of spooks since the days of the Greek philosophers. And many people, who believe that scepticism only arose in the 18^th century Enlightenment, would probably be astonished how much scepticism towards ghosts, demons and magic there was in the Middle Ages and before. Theologians had to wrestle with the problem of how ghosts could be seen, if the soul was immaterial. They concluded that there was a third form of material between the soul and ordinary matter. This was spirit. It was extremely tenuous, but nevertheless could be seen, and so could souls when they were embedded or cloaked in it. In the 19^th century some Spiritualists suggested that the deceased were made of matter as we are, but this was at a higher vibration and so usually invisible to us. This followed 19^th century theories about the ether and how atoms were some kind of whirlpool within this attenuated stuff that pervaded the entire cosmos.

A similar explanation has been used by Contactees and members of UFO-based New Religions to explain their contacts with the space brothers. These religions arose before humans had sent probes to the neighbouring planets and discovered how hostile they were to organic life like ours. George Adamski, dubbed by UFO Magazine ‘the great pretender’ because of his notorious hoaxes, claimed that he had met and interacted with men and women from Venus and Mars. Mars, unfortunately, is not the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs full of beautiful alien princesses, feudal warlords and alien creatures. Nor is the world of canals of Schiaparelli. It is an almost-completely airless world more like the Moon, and any life existing there is probably microbial. Venus is not C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra either, or the various primordial swamps suggested by previous scientists. It’s a hell world of sulphuric acid rain, a mean temperature of 400 degrees and an atmospheric pressure 40 times that of Earth. Any life departed from its rocky surface many millions of years ago. But several decades ago, a gentleman from the Aetherius Society tried to explain away this divergence from his religion’s teaching on Wogan. Debating the issue with astronomy presenter and broadcaster Patrick Moore, the presenter of the Sky at Night, this said that the aliens on Venus with which his religion claimed to be in contact, had not been detected because they were at a higher vibration.

Back to ghosts, CJ appears to be following the view of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research that ghosts are hallucinations, though of a different nature from that experienced by schizophrenics and others with mental health problems. They suggested that ghosts were hallucinations caused by other minds, living or dead. Crisis apparitions are one example. These are when a person suddenly sees an image of a friend or loved one on the verge of death. The SPR believed that they are caused by the dying individual telepathically sending out an image of themselves to the percipient. The theory that ghosts were telepathic impressions from other minds is the central premise behind L. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic ghost story, The House and the Brain.

There is clearly something to this. There are ghost encounters that do indeed suggest that the experience is in some sense hallucinatory, but nevertheless also objective, generated by something or someone. In one of the cases investigated by Tony Cornell, an academic and veteran paranormal investigator, he and a colleague were called out to a haunting in a woman’s house. Their car broke down along the way, and so one of them stayed to get this sorted out while the other went on to talk to the woman. When he arrived, she explained to him that there was a red-headed woman by the fireplace. His fellow turned up a few minutes later, having heard nothing of the previous conversation. When he came in, he asked who the woman by the fireplace was. This suggests that there was an objective element to the experience, in that there was something or someone there generating the image of the woman seen by the house’s occupant and one, but not both, of the ghosthunters. This has given rise to the Stone Tape theory, based on the ideas of T.C. Lethbridge, in which there is something in the environment that records mental impressions, and which replays them to certain sensitive individuals. These people then experience them as ghosts.

If this is correct, then it raises the question of what changes or features in the visual cortex or other structures of the brain involved in vision, that allow genuine mediums and clairvoyants and ordinary people to perceive ghosts. The brain, it has been said, is the most complicated organised structure in the cosmos. At the moment there are controversies over the possible existence of neurological differences between certain sections of humanity. There has been a long-time debate over whether there is a difference between the brains of men and women, and whether this is the cause of different mental abilities between the sexes. Obviously this is intensely controversial. A few decades ago one neuroscientist discovered that the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemisphere’s of the brain, was thicker in women. This discovery was received with fury by some, and there have been demonstrations against the neurologist, including physical assault, one of which left him with a fractured skull. See the relevant article in the volume The Human Brain Evolving. Differences in brain structure have also been claimed as the origin of homosexuality. A Californian doctor, LaVey, claimed after extensive dissection of the brains of gay men, that one section of their brains was more similar to heterosexual women than to hetero men. And it has also been claimed that gay women’s brains are similarly more like that of heterosexual men than heterosexual women. This appears to be the accepted view. But some neurologists have questioned whether men’s and women’s brains are all that different. These doctors and surgeons point out that you can’t immediately tell the sex of a brain from its appearance. There may be immense problems examining the question of a neurological origin of the ghost experience.

And it is questionable whether the theory that ghosts are some form of hallucination actually explains all the varieties of the ghost experience. Looking through Hillary Evans’ excellent Seeing Ghosts, it is clear that people’s experiences of seeing and encountering ghosts is extremely varied, and often doesn’t simply consist of seeing or hearing them. Some of the encounters in the book are about instances where the percipient had eaten with a supposed ghost in a café or restaurant, only to find out later that this person had been dead for days before. Yet when they met them, they behaved like a fully embodied, corporeal being. And what about poltergeists, the noisy ghosts that throw objects about? These appear to have a physical reality, at least in their effect on the homes and property of the people haunted by them. They aren’t hallucinations, although the entity responsible for the hurled plates or whatever may also be invisible and immaterial in itself, just as the ghost causing the hallucinatory experience in that model is also objectively invisible and immaterial. It is possible that there is no single ghost experience, but a variety of related or apparently similar phenomena, and so no single explanation is possible. Or it may be there is a single ghost phenomenon, but that it involves a number of factors and processes, including hallucinations, but that these may vary according to types of experience. CJ has stated that this is the first part of his discussion of ghosts and hallucinations, and promised that in his next piece he’ll return to the subject of UFOs. I await both with interest.

For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/09/ghosts-working-notes-part-one/

What Are UFOs: Part 2

Is the Psycho-Social Hypothesis Failing the Stress Test?

This is my response to the second part of CJ’s searching investigation of what UFOs are, published on his blog yesterday. In this piece, CJ explains his dissatisfaction with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. As he explains, the psycho-social hypothesis or model means different things to different people, but it roughly states that the UFO experience is shaped by social stresses and anxieties. My view of the phenomenon is slightly different, following that of the small press magazine Magonia. This was for a long time Britain’s leading sceptical UFO magazine, with slogans like ‘Hard on Ufology, hard on the causes of Ufology’ parodying Blair’s slogan on crime. It was based very much on the psycho-social model, which to them meant that UFO encounters were internal, psychological events prompted in many cases by an external object or phenomenon. The imagery experienced in these encounters was drawn from popular culture and folklore. Thus, in the ancient and medieval worlds, people encountered fairies, angels, gods and demons. In our modern, scientific age these have been replaced by spacecraft and aliens.

CJ makes it clear that he is certainly not an opponent of the PSH, and that he shares many of the views of Jean-Michel Abrassart. Dr Abrassart is a sceptical Belgian psychologist and UFO researcher who presented a fascinating talk on UFOs to ASSAP at their weekly online Zoom meeting last week. He showed research from a Belgian perspective that UFO narratives are shaped by culture. Belgium is a multilingual country with three different linguistic groups: the Flemish, who speak a form of Dutch; the Walloons, who speak French, and a small, German-speaking enclave. His research showed that stories of UFO encounters were sometimes confined to particular ethnicities and did not cross over to the others despite all of them sharing and occupying the same country.

CJ did not take aim at the whole Psycho-Social Hypothesis but just one aspect: that mentioned above – the theory that UFO flaps appear in response to social anxieties. He also notes that many UFOs are indeed misidentified astronomical phenomena. Jean-Michel showed how many of the flaps followed the 18-year Saros or Metonic cycle. This is when the Earth and Moon adopt the same positions to each other after that number of years, and has been used to predict eclipses since the days of ancient Greece.  It also allows one to test some UFO sightings, by returning to the location with the witness when the Moon appears in the same position as the original sighting. While it sounds ridiculous that people could misidentify such a familiar sight as the Moon, there is certainly corroborating evidence on this side of the North Sea. Magonia mentioned decades ago the case of a group of British coppers who began to believe that their car was being pursued by a UFO. They knew that in reality the object above them was the Moon, but had to stop their vehicle for a moment to be sure.

CJ then goes to show how many of the classic flaps correlate with the social anxieties of the time. The sightings of Martians in the 1950s were a response to Cold War anxieties. That of the 1970s was spurred by the emerging awareness of the ecological crisis, while the dark, sinister encounters of the ‘90s reflected the predominance of paranoia and conspiracy theories in popular culture. But these flaps don’t always reflect those fears.

There was definitely more than element of paranoia in 50s Ufology, following the writings of Donald Keyhoe who was convinced that the UFOs were preparing to invade. The American Air Force general, Kolman von Kebizcy also called for America to prepare for an invasion from Mars following the 1952 mass sightings of UFOs over Washington D.C. But it was also the era of the Contactee, people who believed they had met aliens and been given messages to impart to the rest of humanity. These were generally greetings of interplanetary brotherhood and warnings about the threat of nuclear weapons, which also reflected contemporary concerns about the threat of nuclear annihilation. In some of the messages, these were a threat to the planet itself and would throw it out of orbit if used. Other aliens warned that they put not only humanity but the whole universe in peril, and were forcing the other intelligent beings of the cosmos to act. These encounters and their messages from benevolent but concerned aliens resemble the plot of the film The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was based on an SF short story, ‘The Return of the Master’.

The 1970s were another decade of great social anxiety. The report, Limits to Growth, had been published arguing that in the very near future the Earth would become massively overpopulated. Humanity would use up the planet’s resources leading to the collapse of civilisation. The Club of Rome had published its findings that the world’s flora and fauna were also threatened. This led to the foundation of various Green parties in western Europe, along with campaigns by newly formed environmental groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature, to save the whale and the tiger. Popular children’s television shows like Newsround covered these issues for their young viewers along with the threat to the Ozone layer from aerosols. There were also numerous UFO encounters, of which one of the best known is probably the abduction of Travis Walton, an American logger. This was later filmed in the 90s as Fire in the Sky. It was also the decade Steven Spielberg released his blockbusting Close Encounters, with its final scenes in which short, spindly aliens emerge from the alien mothership to meet a group of human scientists. All the people they have taken over the decades come out of the craft with them to rejoin their families. Finally, they depart, taking the film’s ordinary joe hero, Roy Neary, with them. This has undoubtedly had a massive impact on UFOs in popular culture worldwide. There were comic book adaptations and spoofs in film and television, including Britain’s own long-running comedy show, The Goodies. And the film’s slogan, ‘We Are Not Alone’, became a catch-phrase for UFOs and aliens generally. I don’t, however, recall the aliens encountered in this period giving messages about the ecological crisis. This appeared more in the 90s.

Then there was the 90s and the explosion of UFOs and conspiracy culture. The latter partly had its roots in controversies over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the resulting Gulf War. Many on the left believed that, instead of being a war of liberation to free the country from a murderous dictator, it was instead a ‘resource war’ to steal those nations’ oil. In America protesters marched chanting ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go! We won’t die for Texaco’. These fears and anxieties were fanned still further by George Bush Senior’s statement about creating ‘a new order’. To many, this recalled Adolf Hitler and his declaration of the same thing, as well as conspiracy theories about the founding of America by the Freemasons, as shown in the Eye in the Pyramid on the dollar bill and the slogan ‘Novo Ordo Saecularum’ – New World Order.

It also roughly coincided with the publication of two books which together helped to shape the emerging abduction narrative. These were Above Top Secret by the British violinist, Tim Good, and Communion, by the American horror writer Whitley Streiber. Good’s book claimed that America had secretly made contact with the aliens and there were secret bases all over the world, plus a group Above Top Secret, the Majestic 12, set up to supervise these encounters. Streiber’s book claimed that he had been repeatedly abducted and examined by Grey aliens. The two, and the many other similar books that they inspired, founded the abduction mythology in which America had done a secret deal with the aliens to allow them to kidnap and experiment on humans, including sexually, resulting in the creation of half-human hybrid children. This myth became a social panic, with abduction researchers like Bud Hopkins and Leo Sprinkle taking their experiencers on popular talks shows like Oprah. It exerted a very strong influence on the X-Files, whose heroes, FBI agents Scully and Mulder, were on the trail of a secret conspiracy to create human-alien hybrids in preparation for a hostile alien invasion.

So what about today? The past few years have also been a period of acute social stress. This was most pronounced with the Covid pandemic and lockdown. The virus itself was sufficiently terrifying to many ordinary people, following as it did films about scientists battling deadly germs which threatened to destroy humanity. I think one of these in the 90s was Outbreak, while a similar film, The Satan Bug, was released in the 70s. There was also stress caused by the government’s response of locking down society and industry to prevent the spread of the disease. Inessential businesses were shut down and the public were allowed out only for essential activities like shopping and a day’s exercise. People naturally worried about their jobs and businesses. There were also some truly damaging conspiracy theories, in which it was claimed that the vaccines offered against the disease contained mind control chips, or that the real purpose of the lockdown was to allow the World Economic Forum to seize power and create the one world superstate.

And this is where it gets interesting. If UFOs and other paranormal encounters are produced by social stress, then we should have experienced another wave of sightings of alien spaceships, ghosts and other supernatural beings. But we haven’t. CJ has gone through the stats. People are not seeing more alien spaceships. At the same time, the male suicide rate hasn’t risen and there hasn’t, mercifully, been an increase in self-harm either. Nor are people turning to religion or the paranormal.

Not that you would know it from the press. CJ states that magazines and newspapers, including New Scientist, have been telling their readers that the stressed population is indeed turning to religion and the paranormal, and encounters with aliens and spooks have very definitely risen. The gentlemen and ladies of the Fourth Estate have duly contacted CJ to confirm their views, only to close the interviews when he disappoints them by stating plainly that this isn’t happening. I think we can be confident this is correct. Not only is he a very diligent researcher himself, but he is assisted by Becky, who did her PhD analysing the Society for Psychic Research’s Census of Hallucinations to show that the core ghost phenomenon did not change in the 19^th century. It has been said the Victorian period saw changes in ghost imagery and narratives in popular culture. For example, ghosts generally appear solid, but Victorian artists drew them as transparent simply to show they were ghosts. This may present another challenge to the Psycho-Social Model if real ghost experiences don’t match those in popular culture, as in shows like Scooby Doo or Rentaghost.

This poses the question of what is going on here. Is the Psycho-Social Model totally invalid, despite apparently holding true for previous flaps? Or perhaps the psychological and social mechanisms that create flaps during times of stress are actually more complex than previously thought, and require a number of subtle factors that have been absent during the Covid outbreak? Or perhaps this follows a continuing trend of cultural exhaustion that some have claimed is being experienced elsewhere in society and the arts.

One of these is Stephen E. Andrews, a former bookseller and the author of 100 Science Fiction Books You Must Read. On his YouTube channel, Outlaw Bookseller, he reviews and discusses literature and bookshops, especially Science Fiction. In one of his videos he discusses hauntology, a cultural phenomenon in which the arts turn back to the past and previous tropes and images. He argues that this is occurring now in Science Fiction, as authors use the same old plots and ideas, and that this is also part of a general trend in wider literature and the arts. Here’s a link to one of his videos on hauntology.

Why you “prefer the Science -Fiction Books with the old covers”: HAUNTOLOGY & SCIENCE FICTION #sf (youtube.com)

Apart from the issue identified by CJ, the 20^th century was a period of immense social and political change. This included the collapse of the European empires and the rise of America and the Communist Soviet Union to superpower status, as well as the shock in domestic culture of the emergence of the teenager and youth culture, feminism and the promise and threat of new technology like the atomic bomb, genetic engineering and information technology. These trends were reflected in the arts and literature, including Science Fiction. Aldous Huxley predicted a future in which babies would be grown in hatcheries in Brave New World, published in the 1920s. But this began to look like it could become reality in 1962 with the experiments of the Italian biologist Daniele Petracci. Petracci was experimenting with gestating human embryos outside the womb. One of these had even progressed to developing eyes and limbs before the experiment ended. And the second half of the 20^th century saw other scientific advances that seemed similarly threatening of promising. These included household robots, holidays in space and flying cars. These have not materialised, with the exception of flying cars. The Outlaw Bookseller considers that scientific advance is accelerating, but looking at books such Paul Milo’s Your Flying Car Awaits about the failed predictions of the 20^th century, it could seem instead that scientific and technological invention has slowed down. Some of this is due to the problems tackled being far more complex than scientists in the 50s and 60s believed, as in aging. It could be that in the absence of the spectacular social and technological change promised in previous decades, western society has settled down to a pattern and that some of the changes previously regarded as shocking are now viewed as part of traditional western society. There is still a suspicion towards parts of youth culture, for example, but Mods, Rockers and Punks no longer cause quite the alarm they did when they first emerged, and indeed are frequently the subject of affectionate nostalgia. Perhaps it isn’t just social stress that is required for UFO flaps, but specific social stresses about new social phenomena, and that society has become used to many of the old threats and concerns. In the absence of lunar and Martian colonies, for example, space travel seems almost routine. The exploration of space, and the possibility of alien life are still the subjects of immense interest. And any number of books, films and TV stories are still coming out about invasion by hostile aliens. But they’ve become an accepted part of the media landscape, and so the element of novelty that may have been part of the impetus behind previous decades’ flaps are absent. And so, although society was gripped by tension during the Covid outbreak, this did not lead to people turning to the paranormal, or meeting a helpful spaceman offering advice.

For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/07/ufos-cjs-angle-part-2/

1964 Tonight Documentary on the Cave Dwelling Villagers of Troos in France

This video comes from the BBC Archives channel on YouTube, and is about the village of Troos, forty miles from Paris, where the people live in caves dug out of the hillside. The village used to be site of a medieval fortress. The people are troglodytes, a word that means simply cave dwellers, but it has unfortunate connotations of subhuman cavemen and women, which these people clearly aren’t. Their homes’ frontages seem otherwise unremarkable, except that they are more or less flat to the hillside. Inside, they have all the amenities of the average French house of the time. They’re cheap, and cool in summer and hot in winter. The locals would, however, prefer a modern house, and are being priced out of their homes by wealthy Parisians, who want a nice, fashionable holiday home. Just like so many rural communities are seeing their houses bought up and priced out of the reach of local people in Britain today.

There are people living in similar accommodation today. A few years ago I read an article in an archaeological magazine about a community in rural Scotland whose homes were similarly dug out of the local cliff. And people used to how their homes dug out of the cliffside in Bridgnorth. Bridgnorth is divided into an upper and a lower town, and to get to the upper town from one side means either using the funicular railway or taking a long, winding route up. And cut into part of the cliff face are homes very much like those of Troos. I know people from there, who said that the advantage of these homes was that if you needed an extra room, all you had to do was dig out. I think this was stopped along with further construction of such dwellings, by the local council because of fears it was weakening the hillside.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi Says Why ‘the Wrong Kind of Jews’ Are Supporting Palestine and Gaza

This is a video from Double Down News, one of the left-wing internet news channels that got our right-wing, establishment media so rattled. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is the head of the Jewish Voice for Labour, and another victim of the anti-Semitism smears and witch-hunts. I think she has been purged from the Labour party because she dared to criticise Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. She states here quite clearly that she is the wrong type of Jew, the Jews who aren’t shown on the media giving their support to the Palestinians despite the fact that there are thousands of them and more across the world. Instead the media goes to the Chief Rabbis, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and, heaven forfend, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, all of whom have support for Israel written into their DNA, instead of talking to anti-Zionist Jews like herself. The media presents Jews as the frightened victims of the police guarding Jewish no-go zones. Instead, the opposite is almost true. Jews are demonstrating for Palestine like other, reasonable people. They include Holocaust survivors and the children of Holocaust survivors, concerned that what was done to them will not be inflicted on another people. As for being scared and frightened, she is scared and frightened because she, and people like her, have been abused and silenced. But what is going on in Gaza is not religious, it is an attack on people by settler-colonialism, which is perpetrating human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and plausible genocide. As for the chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ she states that this is about Palestinians being between those borders, with the implication that this does not mean the extermination of the Israelis.

She is given hope by the many people marching and demonstrating for Gaza across the world, including America, and trying to shut down arms factories. Many of them are Jewish, such as the young man she met today. He had family in Israel, and it was the first demonstration he’d been on, but it was the first time he felt empowered to do so.

The video concludes with her appealing to people to support Double Down News as a way of avoiding right-wing media bias.

The video shows Jewish demonstrators, including Holocaust survivors, marching and holding placards making their opposition to the genocide in Gaza very clear.

Open Britain on the Threat of Farage Becoming Tory Prime Minister

‘Dear David,

We need to talk about Farage. Again.

In a terrifyingly matter-of-fact interview with the Sun’s Harry Cole, Steve Bannon, the architect of Donald Trump’s polarising presidency, gave Farage a glowing endorsement and set out how he would go about succeeding Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.

Bannon believes that Farage could soon ride a wave of populist sentiment all the way to Number 10, especially if the Tories take a drubbing in the next election. (Spoiler: They’re going to.) His strategic advice? Take a page from the MAGA playbook and stage a hostile takeover of the Conservative Party.

And now, in his most recent email to his supporters, Farage has given his strongest hint yet at a potential return to frontline politics.

The prospect of Farage at the helm of a radicalised Tory party, steering the UK down a path of increased nationalism and xenophobia, is deeply troubling. At Open Britain, we’ve been warning about this possibility for some time now. With these brazen comms, it’s starting to look less like a potential distant nightmare and more a well-planned future reality. The 2029 election may seem a long way off, but the foundations for the profound political shift it could bring are being laid now.

We cannot afford to be complacent. It’s essential we spend the next five years growing, organising, mobilising, and fighting for the values that define us as a nation – openness, tolerance, and unity. We need to counter the siren song of populism with a positive vision of a Britain that works for everyone and secure the functional democracy needed to deliver it.

The next five years will be a pivotal period in our history. The decisions we make – and the policies the next government implements – will shape our country for generations to come. Will we succumb to the politics of division and fear in a country that is a democracy in name only, or will we stand together and build a brighter, more inclusive future with a democracy that works for everyone?

It’s up to all of us to get involved, speak out, and make our voices heard. There are more than a quarter of a million of us in Open Britain. We have the potential to be a powerful force for good. Together, we can ensure that the UK remains a beacon of democracy and hope in an increasingly uncertain world.

Let’s do exactly that.

All the best, The Open Britain Team‘

Why am I not surprised the Sun has interviewed Steve Bannon, who was praising the prospect of Farage taking the reigns of government? Way back in the early part of this century, when the Scum got into trouble for printing a cartoon showing pigs demonstrating against being compared with Arabs, Private Eye reminded its readers that Rupert Murdoch’s mighty organ already had 19 judgements against it for racism by the former Press Complaints Commission. It’s probably no surprise then, that they’re backing the man who used to sing Hitler Youth Songs when a boy at public school.

38 Degrees Survey on How to Cut NHS Waiting Times

‘David, it’s been reported that one in five of us are stuck on an NHS waiting list – 2 million more than previously thought! [1]

The Government has boasted about bringing the numbers down slightly in recent months. The truth is that millions of us are still left languishing in fear and pain, waiting for treatment – hundreds of thousands more than when Rishi Sunak promised that “NHS waiting lists will fall” back in January last year. [2] That’s nothing to celebrate.

We’re in an election year and the NHS tops the list of concerns for many of us. So our message to political parties couldn’t be clearer: enough is enough – we can’t wait any longer. Any party that wants to form the next government must make plans to end these endless waiting lists.

The plan is simple, David. If enough of us share our stories about how bad things have got, alongside our personal experiences of when things worked in the past, we can show how the NHS has worked for us before and can work again, but only if there’s the political will.

So David, will you share your NHS experience with us today to help pile the pressure on our politicians to bring waiting lists down? It only takes a few minutes to share your story but it could make all the difference. Here’s the first question to get you started:

Do you believe it’s possible for the NHS to give us the care we need, when we need it?

YES

NO

Only recently, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, was arguing for MORE privatisation of the NHS to tackle waiting lists. [3] But we all know that opening up the doors of our NHS to profit-hungry private companies could signal the end of the NHS as we know it. [4] The experts are clear, privatisation drains money from the NHS, poaches NHS staff and services and is ultimately bad for patients. [5]

This is not the solution.

Our NHS is in crisis: it’s no accident, but it is an emergency. Most of us will know someone who’s on the waiting list – often living in pain or discomfort – waiting for months or even years for treatment, tests or assessments. This is a direct result of the Government’s failure to deliver on their promise to bring waiting times down.

But it doesn’t have to be like this, David.

Will you help us highlight the difference in how the NHS used to work for us and the state of it today? There are a few quick questions for you to answer. Here’s the first question to get you started:

Do you believe it’s possible for the NHS to give us the care we need, when we need it?

YES

NO

Thanks for all you do,

Tom, Megan and the 38 Degrees team

NOTES:
[1] BBC: One in five waiting for hospital care in England, survey suggests
Independent: NHS waiting list could be 2 million higher than thought, new data suggests
[2] BBC: Rishi Sunak: Hold me to account if NHS waiting lists don’t fall
Huffington Post: Rishi Sunak Promised To Cut NHS Waiting Lists. They’ve Gone Up By 330,000
The Guardian: NHS waiting lists falling but will stay above pre-Covid levels until 2030, IFS says
[3] The Financial Times: NHS should ‘seek to use’ private healthcare capacity, Wes Streeting says
The Guardian: ‘Middle-class lefties’ won’t stop Labour using private sector to cut NHS backlog, Streeting says
[4] The Financial Times: Investors eye opportunities in Labour pledge to boost private health sector
[5] The Guardian: NHS privatisation drive linked to rise in avoidable deaths, study suggests
The Guardian: Investors are making a fortune from UK healthcare. Why is nobody holding private equity to account?
The Guardian: NHS doctors offered up to £5,000 to recruit colleagues for private hospitals‘

I’ve completed the survey. My experience with my local Hospital Trust has been excellent, but others haven’t been nearly so lucky with theirs. And yes, we do have to make appointments to see the doctor. I can remember, waaaay back when I was at school in the 1980s, when you could make an appointment with your GP and be seen the same day. So does Anne Widdecombe, now one of the leaders of Reform. Reform are Thatcherite to the core, and fervently anti-immigrant and pro-Brexit. Widdecombe says that it could be done, conveniently forgetting she was part of the crowd that reduced it to its present parlous state. It can indeed, Anne, but not by and Reform.

As to how it can be improved, my suggestions are:

1. Renationalise it, so that all the funding goes into paying its staff and not into the corporate bureaucracy, management bonuses and share dividends of the outsourcing companies.
2. Raise funding to continental levels.
3. Train more doctors, nurses and other health professionals.

If this is done, which requires real will and determination, we could have again the world class NHS that the Tories have done so much to destroy.

The Megaphone on a Memorial Day for Workers

‘Dear David,

Every year people lose their lives at work.

Most don’t die of mystery illnesses, or in tragic “accidents”. They die because a boss took a shortcut and put them at risk.

Workers Memorial Day (IWMD) 28 April commemorates those workers. 

We’re getting in touch because there’s a memorial event happening in your area this weekend. Click on the map to find it.

Take me to the map

Workplace deaths are preventable deaths. Trade unions fight for a future where no worker must risk their health or life while doing their job.

Can’t make it to an event?

Share with your friends, family and colleagues: click to tweet, share on Facebook or WhatsApp
Take a look at the resources on the TUC website

In Solidarity,

Lois,Megaphone UK’

This is why we need the health and safety legislation the right-wing press is always telling us is crippling British industry. If you look at the stats, the figures for the number of people injured or killed at work dropped significantly when these laws were introduced in the 1970s.

We Own It Celebrate Starmer’s Declaration that He Will Renationalise the Railways and Their Members Who Campaigned for It

‘Dear David,

Labour has just announced that they will take our whole railway into public ownership over the next five years.

And they’ve gone beyond just pledging it – they’ve outlined a detailed plan to make it happen.

We’ll have to make sure they carry out this plan after the election, but this is HUGE – and your campaigning made it happen.

Labour’s pledge only affects England but whether you are in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, you helped make this happen.

Over the last few years, you’ve campaigned and won victories to take several rail services into public hands.

✅ TransPennine Express – renationalised in May 2023

✅ ScotRail – renationalised in April 2022

✅ Southeastern – renationalised in October 2021

✅ Transport for Wales Rail – renationalised in February 2021

✅ Northern Rail – renationalised in March 2020

NOW the rest of our railways will come into public hands where they belong – to work for passengers, not overseas shareholders.

This is YOUR win!

YOU won this – with your online actions, donations, protests, social media sharing, and talking to friends and family.

With your help, we were able to commission polling that shows that 67% of people want rail in public ownership!

We have been able to use today’s announcement as an opportunity to spread the message, with Johnbosco on BBC Radio Sussex and Times Radio.

YOU can quite rightly feel pleased and proud of these victories but there’s still work to do!

Labour is not planning to create a publicly owned ROSCO (ROlling Stock COmpany) to take on new fleets when needed. Currently, private rolling stock companies are extracting hundreds of million per year from our railway. Read our blog ‘Riding the ROSCO gravy train’ on our website.

YOUR campaigning can continue to make a difference.

The cost of travelling by rail has increased substantially in real terms since privatisation. And it’s no wonder: over £30 billion has leaked out of the system in the last 3 decades, mostly going to line shareholders’ pockets.

Under public ownership, we could be saving enough to bring down bills by 18% instead of hiking them every year.

YOU are passionate about public ownership, not only of public transport, but also water, NHS, energy, Royal Mail – and other public services. Public services should be run for people not profit.

So THANK YOU SO MUCH for all you do to fight for public services in public ownership. Whether you donate or not, every action you take adds strength to our movement. Together we can win so much more.

Public ownership is talked about as a solution much more these days: YOU DID THAT!

In solidarity,

Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen and John – the We Own It team.’

Starmer’s announcement is welcome, but I’m not entirely convinced. He’s still convinced, like all Thatcherites, that private enterprise is the solution for everything and state ownership and management is utterly dreadful and inefficient. I’m not surprised that he’s said that he isn’t going to create a state-owned rolling stock company, as nationalising anything runs very much against his grain. And I really don’t trust him to honour his promise, not after he’s broken so many in the past. But it’s a start.

Related to this, the Groaniad has put up a piece with a headline that was is needed is complete rail nationalisation. Exactly. And we could have had that, along with the nationalisation of the other utilities and the NHS, and so much more, if Jeremy Corbyn had got into No. 10. And the reason he didn’t was partly because the left-wing press joined the confected lies and smears of the right-wing press that Jezza was a terrible anti-Semite for not backing the Israeli state’s brutal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Over the past few years the Groan has published a number articles supporting policies that were very much part of the Corbynist platform. It’s too bad they didn’t do it when he was head of the Labour party.

Also related: the Torygraph has also, apparently, published an article with a headline quoting Starmer as saying that if he loses his seat, he’ll work in a Kentish Town bookshop. I don’t know which bookshop he means, as I didn’t read the article, but I look forward to him serving customers behind the counter.

Rather than high-tailing it into the House of Lords which is where failed politicos and their donors usually end up.

Horror Writer Thomas Ligotti on Company Managers Who Get Promoted Through Destroying the Company

I’ve been watching videos by the Outlaw Bookseller recently. He’s a retired bookshop manager, now living in Bath, who talks about literature and book collecting, and particularly Science Fiction and Horror. In one of his videos he discusses Horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s novel, My Work Is Not Yet Done. This differs from much horror literature in not being set in Gothic castles and catacombs, but instead in the corporate work place. One of the characters is a manager, who comes along with flip charts and checklists purporting to improve productivity and employee performance. As the story goes on, the characters realise that all his management strategies are rubbish. They don’t actually work, and instead make the situation work. At which point, the manager gets promoted to another position.

Ligotti’s been going for decades now. He was published in a variety of British small press horror, SF and fantasy magazines in the ’80s and ’90s and is very much respected as one of the great writers of the genre. I’m not a big fan of ‘Orror. I’ve read Dracula, some of Brian Lumley’s grim tales, H.P. Lovecraft and a few others, but it’s not a genre that really appeals to me. But that description of the manager seems very well observed. Way back in the ’80s and ’90s Private Eye used to cover various big businessmen, who were recruited to head blue chip companies like ICI with very generous salaries. These men then proceeded to wreck these companies so that their share prices plummeted, at which point they were released. Again, with obscenely generous severance packages. The same people would then go on to be recruited by another, previously successful company or organisation and then proceed to do the same again. And I’ve met people who’ve experienced this in real life. I was talking about it to a taxi driver, who told me that it happened to a company he had worked for. The company recruited a manager at an expensive pay package, who then proceeded to run it into the ground, before being given the heave-ho with another massively generous pay package. Who then went off to do it to some other company.

No wonder British industry’s in a state. It’s full of the incompetent and greedy running companies into the ground, while being massively rewarded for their greed and incompetence. And I dare say that if anyone says anything about their grossly inflated pay, they’ll get the usual nonsense about market rates and having to pay large amounts to recruit talent.

Even when the people recruited are massively untalented and a real destructive force with their incompetence. But no doubt they went to the right schools and know the right people, so they carry on in their mission to wreck western business in order to get themselves bigger and more lucrative promotions.