Ian Blackford, the SNP politico, who tore to shred’s May’s ‘strong and stable’ slogan in parliament last week, now demands her resignation in this video from RT.
He says
Mr Speaker, first, ‘Strong and Stable’; we were promised a vote on the Brexit deal, but this PM can’t even do her own job because of the Tory civil war. This government, Mr Speaker, is an embarrassment… This government is a farce, the Tory party is in chaos, the PM is a disgrace with her actions, the reality is that people across Scotland and the UK are seeing this today. Prime Minister, take responsibility, do the right thing, resign.
May then rises and replies with a load of drivel about how she has deferred the vote on Brexit because she and her government has listened to views across the House, and it’s because of that they are pursuing the matter further with the EU. She then claims that she was being respectful of the views raised in the House.
I’ve seen no evidence of respect from Tweezer, and certainly not in her treatment of the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and the homeless. As for respecting her cabinet colleagues, there was briefly a video on YouTube last night asking if she told the EU that she was going to defer the vote on Brexit before she told them. And the sheer suddenness with which Tweezer made the decision after she had repeatedly told the House indicates that it had nothing to do with respect and everything to do with Tweezer fearing for her own tenure of No. 10. As Denis Skinner said, borrowing a phrase of Maggie Thatcher’s, she was ‘frit’.
She’s a disgrace, and it’s high time the country was rid of her and her government.
Last fortnight’s issue of Private Eye, for the 30th November – 13th December, carried a story suggesting that Esther McVey’s resignation from the cabinet may have been for reasons other than a concern over Brexit. Instead, the satirical magazine suggested, Iain Duncan Smith’s collaborator in the murder and starvation of the old, homeless, unemployed and disabled was due to her wishing to avoid having to answer questions about whether her department has tried to cover up the stats on the deaths on disabled people. The piece, in the ‘HP Sauce’ column on page 10 ran:
<strong>Esther McVey’s sudden cabinet resignation over Brexit does have a silver lining for the former work and pensions secretary. It means she avoids having to answer tricky questions about whether her erstwhile department tried to cover up links between its controversial “fitness for work” tests and the deaths of benefit claimants.
Marsha de Cordova, Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, and Stephen Lloyd, the Lib Dem’s work and pensions spokesman, wants to establish whether inquest rulings linking the so-called work capability assessment to the deaths of at least two mentally ill claimants were passed to the independent expert tasked with annual reviews of the test. They also want to know whether the results of internal investigations into the deaths of other claimants were passed on.
If they were, they certainly did not feature in Dr Paul Litchfield’s reviews in 2013 and 2014 – and he himself is keeping schtum. A recent Freedom of Information request from Disability News Service also failed to elicit an answer, with the Department for Work and Pensions simply saying it did not hold the information – and it clearly wasn’t prepared to find out.
Let’s see if the two crusading MPs fare any better with McVey’s successor at the DWP, the returning Remainer Amber Rudd, who in her early defence of universal credit looks every bit as evasive as McVey.
This is very much in Mike’s particular sphere of interest over at Vox Political. As a carer, Mike is very concerned about the Tories’ attacks on the disabled and the lethal consequences of their sanctions regime and the Fitness for Work tests. Followers of his blog will recall the struggle Mike had to get the DWP under IDS to release the stats on the number of people, who’d died under their reforms of the benefits system.
On Friday, 23rd November 2018, Mike ran this story speculating that the Minister for the Genocide of the Disabled had resigned because she wanted to avoid being questioned about the number of deaths Tory policies have caused:
Remember when Esther McVey quit the government last week, claiming it was because of Brexit, and I suggested she was running to avoid having to answer the criticisms of the Department for Work and Pensions raised by UN inspector Philip Alston?
It turned out that she had already exchanged words with the special rapporteur on poverty – but now it seems I was not wrong after all, as Ms McVey’s departure allowed her to avoid answering questions on a possible link between the hated Work Capability Assessment carried out by private contractors on behalf of the DWP and the deaths of benefit claimants.
This issue is whether the government showed key documents linking the deaths of claimants with the work capability assessment (WCA) to Dr Paul Litchfield, the independent expert hired to review the test in 2013 and 2014.
Dr Litchfield carried out the fourth and fifth reviews of the WCA but has refused to say if he was shown two letters written by coroners and a number of secret DWP “peer reviews”.
In the light of recent revelations, it seems reasonable to ask whether this is because he was asked to sign a ‘gagging order’ – a non-disclosure agreement requiring him not to say anything embarrassing or critical about the Conservative government or its minister.
Dr Litchfield published his two reviews in December 2013 and November 2014, but neither mentioned the documents, which all link the WCA with the deaths of claimants.
Disability News Service raised the issue in July, prompting Opposition spokespeople to send official letters demanding an explanation. Labour shadow minister for disabled people Marsha de Cordova’s was written on July 25, and Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman Stephen Lloyd’s followed on August 2.
Neither had received a response by the time Ms McVey walked out, as DNS reported.
I think we can safely conclude that the four-month delay – so far – indicates Ms McVey intended never to respond. The disagreement over Brexit provided a handy excuse to do a runner.
Will Amber Rudd be more forthcoming?
The evidence of her time at the Home Office suggests the opposite.
Mike’s report of the affair covered the same points as that in the Eye, but adds details about Dr Litchfield’s reports and speculates that he may not have given details of the numbers of deaths because he had been forced to sign a gagging order, as very many of the charities and other organisations working with Tweezer’s gang of cutthroats have been forced to do.
One of the problems facing modern print journalism is that by the time they’ve put a story into the paper, everyone’s already read about it on the Net. This is the reason why newspapers have increasingly become similar to magazines with celebrities interviews, media stories and articles on subjects that are of interest, but not necessarily particularly topical.
I went back to reading Private Eye after a hiatus, when I was sick and tired of the magazine’s constant attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. This seems to have calmed down recently, but I’ve no doubt that it’s still bubbling away somewhere underneath. It does carry much excellent information on the shabby deals going on behind the scenes, in politics, local government, business and the press, which isn’t reported in the rest of the media. It’s that which still makes the magazine worth reading.
However, the mainstream media has shown to a rapidly increasing number of people that it is deeply biased and untrustworthy. And it has plenty of competitors from the various left-wing news organisations on the web. Like the Disability News Service, the Canary, the Skwawkbox and very many others. Left-wing bloggers and vloggers are also increasingly turning to them, rather than rely on the viciously biased, mendacious British press. Gordon Dimmack announced on one of his videos a few weeks ago that he wasn’t going to rely on the mainstream media for his stories any longer. This was on a video in which he took apart the lies in a story in the Groaniad about Julian Assange.
The British media, including the Beeb, is feeling threatened. Very threatened. A week or so ago the Radio Times published an article lamenting the polarization in political opinion due to people no longer trusting mainstream news sources, and turning instead to others which conformed to their own views. Thus the political consensus was breaking down. They also ran another article celebrating Question Time and its presenter, Dimbleby. Well, the consensus opinion pushed by the media is largely right-wing, pro-Tory and anti-Corbyn, with the Corporation’s news as massively bias as the Tory papers, from whom some of their journos have come. And Question Time has also angered many people, because of this pro-Tory bias and the way it has packed both panels and audience with Tories and Tory supporters.
It’s entirely right that people are turning away from the lamestream media with its bias and lies to the left-wing blogs, vlogs and other news outlets on the web. They aren’t Tory propaganda outlets, and are increasingly getting the stories before the mainstream papers and broadcasters.
And as this article from Private Eye shows, one of those blogs, which is getting the news to people first, before the mainstream press, is Vox Political.
Another short video of less than a minute from RT, again showing Corbyn tearing into May for callousness towards the disabled.
It begins with May calling on the House to
Remember, Remember the Rt. Hon. member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, under Labour there is no money left.
Corbyn stands up and replies
Mr Speaker, when I hear a Prime Minister talking about difficult decisions, what always happens afterwards, in these contexts, is the poorest lose out in our society. 4.3 million disabled people are now in poverty, 50,000 were hit by appalling cuts in Employment Support Allowance Benefit alone last year, this government labeled disabled people scroungers, it called those unable to work skivers.
Corbyn continues, but the video cuts him off, showing instead Amber Rudd looking furious.
She may well rage, because once again, Corbyn’s right. I’ve noticed that every government, whenever they make benefit cuts, they always preface it with some spiel about it being a difficult decision. But it is always used as part justification for cuts that will hit the poor. It’s been like that since Thatcher, and I dare say it was part of political repertoire, and almost certainly Tory repertoire, long before then.
And it doesn’t matter how furiously Rudd and her gang of thugs and over-privileged bullies deny it, the Tories do regard the poor, the unemployed and the disabled as scroungers. As did New Labour. It’s built into the work capability test and its assumption that the mass of the disabled and long-term sick are malingerers. It’s in the lies the Tory media spouts about benefit cheats, which have led the public to believe that 25 per cent or so of all benefit claims are fraudulent, whilst the reality is less than 1 per cent.
I don’t know what May was talking about at the beginning of the video, but I guess it must have been about how funding for benefits was severely cut under Labour. Well, it may have been. Cameron and IDS organized their election strategy on campaigning against New Labour’s closures of hospitals and cuts to the NHS. But it was all hypocrisy. When they got into power, this policy was dropped as the act it was. They carried on closing hospitals, and broke their promise not to cut NHS funding. They lied, as they have always lied, because the Tories are a party of liars. And after they’ve made their cuts, they twist the statistics to claim that in real terms, they’re putting more money into the NHS or the welfare state than ever before. But that’s always just another set of lies.
May and the Tories have put disabled people in desperate poverty. They do regard them as scroungers and skivers, and now disabled people have to live with the abuse of an angry, misled public as well as the misery the Tories have directly inflicted. It’s long past time May, IDS, Rudd and the whole wretched lot were thrown out of power for good.
I’ve put up a number of quotations from the book The Spirit and Structure of Germany Fascism by the American economist Robert A. Brady, published over here by Victor Gollancz in 1937. Brady was concerned to show how the Nazis in Germany had allowed the German business classes to seize power and crush and exploit the workers, as well as creating and exploiting a murderous hatred of Jews, Gypsies and other people they consider ‘subhuman’ and an enemy of the German, Aryan race.
In the last chapter of the book, ‘The Looming Shadow of Fascism’, Brady shows that many of the attitudes of German business were identical to those businessmen elsewhere in Europe. The chapter includes passages from other publications, including those by explicitly pro-Nazi American writers, whose ideas are similar or even identical to those of the Third Reich. And he warns that a Fascist seizure of power from organized, monopoly capitalism was a real threat in America. A threat that would result in the persecution of ethnic minorities like the Japanese, Jews, Mexicans and Blacks. He writes
In all the complicated, confused, and myth-charged experiences of the human race, there can be no more curious spectacle than that which is taking place along this line before our very eyes in every capitalistic land to-day. Here we have the business enterprise, perhaps the most completely amoral and materialistic single-purpose institution the human mind has yet devised, governed by a class of men who may be ever so sentimental with their children and ever so “kind and gentle with their wives,” but who, in order to maintain their position unimpaired as the prime material beneficiaries of economic activity, are compelled to resort to the wholesale promotion of one of the most incredibly jejune, intellectually and emotionally shallow, and crudely primitive “faiths” known in the iridescent annals of myth and fable.
The doctrinal position of business evangelism has two faces, an inner and an outer. The first is that which business men believe concerning themselves and their human kind. The second is that which they wish the remainder of the population to believe about the business-military hierarchy-the “leaders’-on the one hand, and about the proper role each , and every member of the rank and file should expect to play in this “best of all possible worlds: on the other.
Both these propaganda faces are the same in all nations ordered on a capitalist basis. There is a veritable mountain of literature obtainable in every one of these countries which could be used to illustrate the close parallels in the programme, the doctrine, and the mood of their respective business communities. The variations which one will find are in the form of adaptations of the same doctrinal positions to local or national circumstances; they do not indicate differences in doctrine. As was shown in many different places in the preceding chapters, almost the entirety of the German Nazi programme and line of argumentation is identical in content and point of view with that of the American business community. Such elements as the persecution of the Jews is different, not in intent, but only in the fact that such persecution could serve Nazi ends in Germany in the particular circumstances of the years 1933-6. When the American situation has ripened to that of Germany in 1933, there will be race terror in the United States as well, and it will be anti-negro, anti-Jew, anti-Mexican, and anti-Japanese. (pp. 337-8, my emphasis).
Brady was clearly afraid of Fascism seizing power in America within a few years of his writing the book. Mercifully, he was wrong. But only just. A group of businessmen did meet various generals in the 1930s with the intention of organizing a coup to overthrow F.D. Roosevelt after he launched his New Deal. And those businessmen were the literal parents and ideological founders of modern Libertarianism.
Big business has been gaining increasing power in America and Britain since the days of Thatcher and Reagan. Trade unions have been smashed, welfare programmes destroyed, the state provision of healthcare also cut back. Wages have been frozen under the guise of curbing inflation. The result is growing poverty, job insecurity, homelessness and starvation. 330,000 Brits are homeless. A quarter of a million are keeping body and soul together through food banks. And over a thousand disabled people have died because they’ve been thrown off benefits in what Mike over at Vox Political has described as cheque book genocide.
And with poverty has come increasing racism, stoked by fears over mass migration and affirmative action/positive discrimination programmes. In Britain Tweezer and the Tories set up posters and sent vans round to Black areas telling illegal immigrants to hand themselves in. Windrush migrants, who have every right to live in this country, were illegally deported. Islamophobia is on the rise, partly caused by the suicide bombings that have occurred as blow-back from the Islamist groups aided and abetted by the West as allies in our wars in the Middle East, and by migrants forced out of the region and elsewhere by the very same wars. So we’ve had UKIP, Brexit and the lies of the ‘Leave’ campaign in Britain. While in America there’s Trump and his friends and supporters in the Alt-Right. He wants to build a wall with Mexico to protect American from further immigration. Armed troops have been sent down to the border to shoot unarmed illegal immigrants, and the Republicans are stoking up fears about the migrant caravan from Honduras. Quite apart from the increase in White Supremacist domestic terrorism, including the massacre of the worshippers at a synagogue because they were closely linked to a Jewish charity aiding asylum seekers come to the US, and therefore, to the perpetrator, enemies of the White race.
We’re not at the level of an imminent Fascist takeover yet. But the signs are there, and Brady’s warning remains chillingly relevant.
I found this very interesting passage in Robert A. Brady’s The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937). It’s about the Labour Front, or Deutschearbeitsfront to give it its German name.
This was the Nazi organization which was set up to replace the trade unions, which the Nazis declared were ‘Marxist’ and banned. This provided some recreational services to German workers through the Strength Through Joy movement and a minimum of restraint on employers. Instead of the trade union committee, there was a Council of Trustees, elected by the workers, but selected by the employer, whose job was to explain and promote the boss’ decisions, and give him any complaints the workers had.
But German employer-worker relations were strictly hierarchical, and followed the Nazi Fuhrerprinzip or ‘Leader Principle’. Just as Adolf Hitler was the Fuhrer of the German people, so the employer was the Fuhrer of his workforce. German employment law forbade the sacking of workers, who had been employed for over year without giving them due notice. And mass discharges in plants over a certain size had to be preceded by giving the Council of Trustees due written notice.
But the workers were also bound to their employers, and could not leave them if they worked on farms, while those that were employed in industry would not receive unemployment benefit for six weeks if they left their previous job without proper cause. Brady writes
Here as elsewhere the whole machinery redounds primarily to the advantage of the employer. Every effort is made to cut down labour turnover. In late chapters various methods for achieving this effect will be discussed. But the Labour Front has not been content with programmes for attaching workers to a given plot ground,, and hence to a particular employer, nor with an absolute prohibition against strikes of all kinds. These it heartily endorses, but it goes even further.
It goes so far, for example, as to declare workers who leave agricultural employment during the crop season saboteurs and unworthy of German citizenship. It warns all that “to gather well and surely the harvest is your foremost and weightiest task. Whoever neglects this duty and leaves his position with the farmer without due warning in order to into industry is a saboteur, and must be excluded from the community of the German people…” There are other and more direct punitive measures: “A labourer who gives up his work place without important or justified grounds or who has lost his position through a situation which justified his immediate discharge can receive as a rule no unemployment subsidy for six weeks…” Simultaneously, he can be “locked out” from his place of last, and all other employment until such time as he can submit proof of the reasons for losing the first job. (pp. 130-, my emphasis).
So far, workers aren’t being stopped from finding another job if they leave their previous employment, and farm labourers who give up their jobs aren’t being denounced as saboteurs. But it is Tory policy not to give unemployed workers unemployment benefit for a certain number of weeks. I can remember when it was brought in under John Major. You weren’t given unemployment benefit for a set period if you had made yourself ‘voluntarily unemployed’. And this policy has been extended to any unemployed individual, regardless of whether they left their job voluntarily or not, through the delays Cameron and May have built into the benefits system, and particularly with the problems accompanying the rollout of Universal Credit. So far, however, the Tories haven’t also followed the Nazi policy sending the ‘workshy’ – arbeitscheu – to the concentration camps. But perhaps its only a matter of time.
Tony Greenstein on his blog showed how completely false the accusations of anti-Semitism made against Corbyn’s supporters in the Labour party were by discussing the case of one man, who was so accused because he put up a photoshopped picture of a Jobcentre sign saying ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. This was the Nazi slogan on the entrance to Auschwitz, ‘Work Makes You Free’. But there’s nothing anti-Semitic in the photo. It’s a comment on the government’s policy towards the unemployed. Particularly as Ian Duncan Smith, or some other Tory minister with a similar hatred for the proles, had actually written a newspaper column with a paragraph stating that ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ was quite right. Someone else spotted the paragraph, and had it removed from the website on which it was posted, before they thought too many had seen it. But they had, and many had taken screenshots.
It is no exaggeration in this respect to say that the Tories are following Nazi policy towards the unemployed. And this is likely to get even worse the longer they’re in power. And if they carry on as they are, eventually the Tory conferences will start with May goose-stepping on to the stage to cries of ‘Sieg Heil!’ and ‘Duce, Duce!’
Here’s another satirical video taking a swipe at Tweezer from YouTube. This time it’s those jolly funsters Cassetteboi editing May’s speeches to make her sing about how stupid, evil and ridiculous her government is.
The lyrics they make her sing are
The government should be able
To say more than
‘Strong and Stable’
And it’s wrong
To believe the fable
That I belong
At the negotiating table
And how can I negotiate
If I can’t face Corbyn
In a debate?
It’s easy to investigate
Precisely why
I won’t participate
I want to make sure
I can ignore
The public concerns about
U-Turns
You have to learn
There is no proof
That I will tell you the truth
I don’t know why
People vote for me
It’s like
The more policies
I talk about
The more problems
You see
And let’s not forget
It’s me you elect
It means a harmful
Far-right Brexit
Everything we do
As we leave the EU
Will be not for the many
But for the few
I know whose side I’m on
Ordinary people are easy
To dismiss
And yes
The message we’re sending them
Is this:
I could go
Into a lot more detail
Explain why this government
Continues to fail
We’ve had cuts
On an industrial scale
And it’s plain
We must not prevail
We cut police spending
By more than a fifth
And lives are being put at risk
But I will lie to you
And say
We’ve made life safer
In the UK
There are other plans
You might have to confront
Think of one man, Jeremy Hunt
And surprise surprise
Yes, we want to privatise
The NHS
Have we made the Health Service
Better or worse?
You can’t trust me
Ask a nurse
And our new rules
For education
Will underfund schools
So that they need donations
That is the absurd situation
We’re facing
That’s how
Right now
It’s difficult
For schools and hospitals
And if we win
It will be
Impossible
Only trust the Conservatives
If you don’t rely on
Public services
And remember
At the heart of our agenda
We’re making life harder
For people with dementia
It doesn’t have to be this way
And
These things don’t have
To stay the same
You can use your vote to say
‘Not in my name’
I don’t know why
People vote for me
It’s like
The more policies
I talk about
The more problems
You see
The video ends simply with the word ‘Vote’ against a black background.
It was put up last year, 2017, and clearly refers to the election, which put May in power. And it’s still very relevant. She didn’t turn up to a debate with Jeremy Corbyn, sending Amber Rudd instead. Now she’s challenged him to another debate, but it’s still questionable whether she’ll turn up for that one. After all, she doesn’t like turning up for anything that it isn’t very carefully stage managed and packed with her supporters and no-one else.
And Tweezer and her cabinet of horrors are still aiming at a far-right Brexit, they’re still cutting public services, privatizing the NHS and making life very difficult for people with dementia, as well as everyone else who is sick, disabled, unemployed or simply poor. And our schools are horribly underfunded, because Tweezer and the rest would like to privatise them as well.
We do need a vote on this one. We need her Brexit vote to fail spectacularly, and her government to plunge into crisis.
We nee a new election. One that will get Corbyn into government, and the Tories out. Hopefully for a very, very long time.
This is another very short video from RT, put up in anticipation of the march tomorrow by the WASPIs – Women Against State Pension Inequality. It shows some of the protests and questions in the parliament that these ladies have raised over the past few years.
It begins by showing scenes in parliament, followed by a demonstration outside, with protesters holding banners, one of which says very clearly, ‘You Are Killing Us.’ This is intercut with a woman explaining why they were marching. She says
We are marching against the acceleration to the state pension age that began for women in 1995.
This is followed by a female MP with a Scots accent saying
Given that the Prime Minister is a WASPI woman herself, how he can justify a rise of 413 per cent in the number of women over 60 in receipt of ESA, because of this government’s refusal to give them their pension?
This is followed by someone from the government benches standing up to say
I do accept that the government must do all we can to assist everyone affected into retraining and employment and provide support if that is not possible. And that commitment to provide support is clear, unequivocal and ongoing.
It’s the usual Tory lies we’ve heard whenever the opposition or campaigners show that state welfare provision is woefully inadequate. They immediately start lying, telling everyone that state support is there, and how there is more of it in real terms than there was under Labour. Or a big increase is coming. As for all this guff about retraining, this reminds me how the Tories have tried to disguise the exploitation of the unemployed in their wretched ‘welfare to work’ training by presenting it as teaching the unemployed the necessary skills, discipline and experience to get a job. Or by pretending that the ‘Jobs Coaches’ who ring up the unemployed to pressure them into getting work are something other than officious pests, whose job is to humiliate and degrade their victims into feeling so wretched that they’ll leap at any job, no matter how poorly paid or exploitative.
We’ve heard these lies before. So have the women in the video, who respond to this load of Tory nonsense with cries of ‘shame’ and ‘Shame on you!’
Women generally have been the worst hit by the Tories’ austerity campaign, but as it’s ordinary people suffering, it really doesn’t matter whether the PM is a WASPI woman or not. She’s rich and entitled, and so couldn’t care less what happens to those women, or people generally, for that matter, who are less fortunate than her. At the same time, the Tories will show off her, and their other female MPs, as a demonstration that they’re somehow empowering women. But all the women they’ve empowered, are rich girls, who, like the blokes on the Tory benches, seem to get a kick out of inflicting more and harsher poverty, degradation and despair on those lower down the social ladder.
I’m sick of their lies, and wish the ladies on the march every success. And I hope it will encourage a few more people, who might be inclined to listen to them, to turn their backs on the Tories, and hasten their departure from power. If May goes tomorrow, it won’t be too soon.
On Saturday I put up a number of extracts from Robert A. Brady’s The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937) to show that, contrary to what the Republicans in America and the Tories in this country would have us believe Nazism was firmly capitalist, not socialist. Brady argued that Nazism was, economically, monopoly capitalism with businessmen put in charge of the economy, very much like the corporatist capitalism introduced by the Tories, the Republicans and Blair’s New Labour.
Brady also argued that the autocratic social structure of Fascism was based very much on the hierarchical structure of business and the armed forces, including the businessmen’s contempt for the low paid. He wrote
With respect first to the condition, it has been pointed out in the first chapter of this study, and illustrated in subsequent chapters, that the German business community did not depart one iota from tried and true “business principles” when they underwrote the Nazi programme. Every business practices towards its own staff the “leader” and the “authority” principles, and it undeviatingly aspires towards the “total” principle. That is to say, all officers and staff members are appointed and removed from on top entirely at the discretion of management (leader principle), and authority is from the top down, responsibility from the bottom up (authority principle). And every employer attempts to control so far as humanly possible the attitudes, beliefs, and points of view (weltanschauung) of his employees and every section of the public with which he comes in contact (total principle).
Every business establishment is, in other words, completely autocratic and completely undemocratic in structure, ideology, and procedure. It is, by the same token, completely intolerant of all opposition within or without, or of any criticism which does not redound to the advantage of the profit-making possibilities of the enterprise. The enterprise may be compelled, it is true, to make important concessions on all points, but it should not be forgotten that these are concessions, not departures from principle.
Furthermore, every employer regards the gradation of pay and authority amongst the staff over which he presides as being essentially just and sound, because each indicates the relative ability he or she possesses by the position occupied. The criteria are not productive, but acquisitive. Each is paid according to his ability to acquire or “get ahead”, not according to his contribution to output. If the two – contribution to output and contribution to acquisition – happen to go together, well and good. If they do not, it matters little, since their juxtaposition is a matter of accident, not of interdependence.
The condition of society in which the business men would rule would be that one which is natural to them. It would, as a matter of course, be centralized, autocratic, and intolerant, and it would be so constructed that each would get exactly what he deserves for the simple reason that according to the rules he deserves whatever he can get. It is the well accepted business view that most, if not all of the unemployed are shiftless, worthless, irresponsible, and undisciplined. it is taken as axiomatic that the lowest wage-earner receives all that “is coming to him,” since if he could get more by any means which does not disturb business routine it is obvious that he would. His failure is the measure of his incompetence, and with that all has been said about it that may be mentioned by gentlemen of good breeding and respectable station!
This condition is one that would normally appeal to the conventional army officer. The military is the only other completely undemocratic, completely autocratic, and completely intolerant – completely “leader”, “authoritarian”, and “totalitarian” – organization in modern society. Provided due allowance is made for recognition of the military hierarchies of “authority” and “duty” in the fascist state, it can be fitted into the pattern of the businessman’s ultima thule without a single tonal jar. The moods, attitudes, points of view, values, and appraisals of human worth are fundamentally the same.
It is for this reason that it seems so easy for the military and business hierarchies to get together as they have in Italy, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, and many other places. But the significance of this natural alliance is that the military holds the key to political power. Once the alliance takes place, fascism is here unless the elements arrayed against it-as in Spain-possess superior force. It does not follow that the army rank and file will follow their officers any more than it does that labourers will follow their employers. But, if they do, fascism is practically certain to gain the ascendancy. (pp. 335-7).
The shared values of business, the military and Fascism helps explain why the British stock exchange applauded at the news of the Fascist revolt in Spain, at least according to Orwell, and why sections of Conservative party have always overlapped with the Fascist fringe, such as the National Front and the BNP. And why the Libertarians, like the Freedom Association, formerly the National Association for Freedom, or NAAF – make your own jokes up – backed murderous Fascist regimes in South and Central America. Of course, Milton Friedman, the founder of Monetarism, Thatcher’s favourite economic theory, and the Chicago School supported right-wing dictators like General Pinochet because they reasoned that it would only be through a Fascist coup that their programme of completely destroying the welfare state and state economic interference could be implemented.
And it exactly explains the Conservative and New Labour hatred of low wage workers and the unemployed, and why Thatcher was so keen on supporting the police and military against strikers. And it’s also a very strong argument for introducing some measure of industrial democracy – workers’ control – in order to make this country truly democratic.
And this is quite apart from the imperialism that is at the heart of Fascism – the wars fought for the benefit of American and western multinationals, from the coups in Latin America to the latest, so-called humanitarian interventions in the Middle East.
We desperately need a programme like Corbyn’s, which offers both industrial democracy, and a better deal for the unemployed and those in work in Britain and an end to wars abroad. Because without it, as we’ve seen, is the road to real Fascism, as shown in the militantly racist and anti-Semitic parties gaining strength in Europe.
Yesterday Mike had his hearing before a Labour party tribunal in Wales to decide the charge against him of being an anti-Semite. As is clear to anyone who reads anything Mike has actually written, rather than lies put out by a corrupt, mendacious press and the Israel lobby, an anti-Semite is the very last thing Mike is. He isn’t at all racist or prejudiced, as a gay friend of his tried to make clear to three men, who suspiciously approached him last week wanting to talk to him about the charge. Mike found that encounter extremely suspicious. They knew him by name, though he’d never met them, and claimed that they’d read about him in the papers, although as Mike wrote on his blog, he only featured in them in May last year, 2017. That’s a long time ago. It could all have been perfectly innocuous, but Mike wondered if they weren’t there to intimidate him in the last few days before he defended himself. It’s quite possible. It also wouldn’t have surprised me if they weren’t private detectives hired by someone to see if they couldn’t dig any dirt on him. It’d be odd, but it’s not unknown.
And then there was the trial itself. As Mike has said in detail in his blog, it was a complete kangaroo court. They had no evidence against him whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada, nichts, and nitchevo. But it didn’t matter. They were obviously determined to find him guilty. I have absolutely no doubt Mike defended himself to the very best of his ability, and that, were it a properly constituted court of law, he would have won the case. Either that, or even now his lawyers would be filing objections to a miscarriage of justice. But this is the Labour party witch hunt against Corbynites, so truth didn’t matter.
What apparently did matter was how his comments appeared, especially to the ‘Jewish community’. As the numerous left-wing Jewish bloggers on the internet have said with great clarity, there is no monolithic Jewish community. Judaism has always been a community of different opinions and views, as shown by the old Jewish adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’. The group the press have chosen to present as Britain’s Jewish community are the official, Jewish Zionist establishment, the Chief Rabbi and Board of Deputies of British Jews. Which basically represents the United Synagogue and no-one else. They don’t represent the secular Jewish community, nor Orthodox Jews. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is solidly Zionist, as defined by their constitution. So they don’t represent non- or anti-Zionist Jews. Tony Greenstein has also cited proper sociological studies from respected scholars, which show that British Jews are almost wholly upper middle class. This doesn’t mean that British Jews are all Conservatives by any means, but those making the smears of anti-Semitism certainly are, as you can see from the political bias of the Jewish Chronicle. It’s a Conservative, business-oriented, religious establishment using anti-Semitism as a tool for smearing its opponents because they threaten them as Socialists seeking to empower ordinary people – which includes Jews – and support the Palestinians in their desperate search for justice against Israeli oppression. And this Conservative, Zionist Jewish establishment is closely interwoven with the Blairites in the Labour party. Blair’s followers are a minority, and always were. But they control the party bureaucracy, or at least key positions in it.
And in that position, they behave as the Stalinists they revile Corbyn’s supporters of being. Before Stalin came to power, the position of General Secretary in the Communist party was a relatively minor post. The secretary was there basically to make sure that only those of good character were party members. Which is incredible, I know, given the bloody history of the Russian Communist party and its satellites in eastern Europe. They gave it to Stalin, because everybody thought he was thick, and would be satisfied with the post. His job would be to throw out the drunks and seducers. Instead, Stalin used his position to purge the party of his opponents, and cram it with his supporters. As the old butcher said, ‘It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.’
And this has been the strategy the Blairites and their allies, the Israel lobby, have adopted in attacking genuine, Socialist Labour party members. They’ve launched a purge of the party, using anti-Semitism and other, equally vague charges as the pretext to get rid of awkward members. And so they have smeared decent, anti-racist men and women. Not just Mike, but also Marc Wadsworth and Jackie Walker, two people of colour, who have been dedicated anti-racists that have consistently battled bigotry and Fascism. Just like Ken Livingstone, who is also no anti-Semite, as is shown very clearly in his book, Livingstone’s Labour. Like Tony Greenstein, a Jewish member of the party, like Walker, and like her and Wadsworth, also an ardent opponent of Fascism. And there are so many people like them. As I’ve pointed out, ad nauseam, the decent people they’ve smeared as anti-Semites and worse include self-respecting Jews, people who have suffered real anti-Semitism, including assault. People who lost family members in the Shoah, or whose parents were lucky enough to survive the horrors of the camps. People, who should never be insulted with such smears.
And some of the charges are risible. One man was accused of being an anti-Semite, because he posted a photo-shopped image of a jobcentre sign saying, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. This was the slogan above the gates of Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It means roughly ‘Work Makes You Free’. Which is the attitude of the Tory party. One of them even wrote a newspaper article using the phrase, until someone spotted it and realized that quoting Nazi slogans against those they persecuted wasn’t going to go down too well with the British public, and the offending paragraphs were removed. And the concentration camps didn’t just contain Jews. They held others the Nazis considered politically or biologically undesirable, like Socialists, trade unionists, Communists, prostitutes, recidivist criminals, the mentally ill, Russian prisoners of war and other slave workers from the Slav peoples, and Romanies. The charge against this fellow was so weak it could have been blown over in a light wind. But nevertheless, he was accused and convicted by people, who had already decided the answer.
It’s also very clear from Mike’s article that they didn’t like him refuting their attacks on other party members in public. This was bringing the party into disrepute. In fact they did that the moment they made their false accusations. The overwhelming concern here, it seems, was to preserve the reputation of the people further up the party, who made the accusations. It’s a very, very authoritarian attitude. Important people have spoken – don’t contradict them! And, to quote the Japanese proverb, the nail that stands up must be hammered down. Blair and his cronies always were authoritarian, centralizing power around them and making it very clear that dissent from Old Labour would very definitely not be tolerated. And so they were determined not to let their superiors be embarrassed by having the public shown the facts.
And it was clear from their choice of chair that Mike was never going to get a fair hearing. The person is charge was Maggie Cousins, who has form in these matters. From what I gather, this is what she does. She presides over these kangaroo courts as a kind of corporate hatchetwoman.
This was, ultimately, a PR stunt to reassure a Zionist Jewish establishment, that will never tolerate a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn, no matter what concessions are made to it, and a wider, Tory media that is seizing on any and every possible opportunity to misrepresent the Labour party as a threat to society.
I’m very impressed by Mike’s speech to them, citing Stan ‘the Man’ Lee, the creator of Marvel Comic’s superheroes with ‘Jolly’ Jack Kirby. Lee, Kirby and the majority of the creators of America’s comics industry were Jews. Lee’s real name was Stanley Martin Leiber. Kirby’s was Jake Kurzberg. There was little specifically Jewish in the comics, except that occasionally there was the odd Yiddish word or two. But there was a concern for the marginalized, and racially persecuted. This was shown in metaphorical form in the X-Men, an underground of young mutants, feared and persecuted for their special powers by outside society, and in more overt forms when Blaxsploitation emerged in the ’70s, and Marvel gave us heroes like Powerman, alias Luke Cage, hero for hire, the Black Panther, Brother Voodoo and more. And as I’ve described before, the tales did show very clearly how the Nazis regarded and treated Jews, albeit in science fictional form. These strips together preached an anti-racist message, which could sometimes be overt, as when the Black Panther went up against the Klan, or when an Adolf Hitler clone took the guise of the Hatemonger to turn Americans against each other. These were the comics Mike and I read as kids, and which definitely influenced us. They taught racial tolerance, respect and co-operation, and that bigotry, racism and oppression must be fought and defeated, at all times, everywhere. And Stan and his fellow inmates of the merry Marvel madhouse spread that vital message through the medium of popular literature – the comics. They aren’t great literature, although there’s some truly great writing and superb art in a medium that has often been critically reviled and disparaged. But they were read and enjoyed by millions, and in their way helped to make Anglophone society more tolerant. That’s Stan’s legacy to the world, which Mike duly paid tribute to in his speech at the end.
RIP, Stan Lee, a true titan of the four-colour funny papers.
It’s disgusting that Mike, and so many others have been treated this way by a party that should be defending people like him and the others against a predatory, Conservative establishment. Rather than propping up it up with lies, smears and derisory pretence at justice, presided over by faceless bureaucrats and cynical, moral cowards.
Mike’s made it very clear that he will fight on to clear his name and redress this gross injustice. I wish him all the best, as I do everyone else, who has been smeared by these bullying moral vacuities.
Here’s another story from the I, simply reporting a piece that was in another newspaper. Yesterday, the I was repeating a piece from the Sunday Times that David Miliband might come back to England to lead the new ‘centrist’ Blairite party that’s been debated for months now. Today, 13th November 2018, the I ran a piece about an article in the Scum, in which the Spice Girls called upon the people of Britain to support Tweezer in her Brexit negotiations with Brussels.
The article on page 7 of newspaper ran
The Spice Girls have called on Britons to back up Theresa May in her Brexit negotiations.
The band were known for their girl power message during the 1990s, but Emma Bunton, aka Baby Spice, told The Sun of a change in message more than 20 years on. She said, “It’s people power. We’re about equality and bringing everyone together.”
Bandmate Geri Horner also backed Mrs May, saying the Prime Minister did not have an “easy position”.
She said: “We don’t have to agree on politics, it’s bigger than that. You can just support a woman doing the best she can and that’s it.”
Er, no, you don’t have to support May. She might be doing the best she can, but she’s the head of a party that has single-handedly done its absolute and level best to reduce ordinary working people, the sick, the disabled and the unemployed to grinding poverty. While at the same time depriving them of employment rights, privatizing the health service and stripping back the welfare state to make benefits as difficult and as humiliating to obtain as possible. As a result, something like 14 million are in poverty, a quarter of a million at least are using food banks, and homelessness has shot up. And there is an ongoing genocide of the disabled which is largely ignored by the mass media. Her predecessor, David Cameron, by calling the referendum did more to split the UK than Sinn Fein and the Scots Nats, because everyone in Northern Ireland and Scotland wishes to remain in Europe. It’s only we English, who swallowed the xenophobic rubbish and outright lies of the Leave campaign.
And whatever Tweezer says, any deal she makes will not benefit the vast majority of this country’s people. Despite her party’s rhetoric, there have no interest in doing anything to improve conditions for the rest of us. Quite the opposite. The Tory party is the party of the rich and affluent, the aristocracy and the business classes. Thanks to austerity, their wealth has massively increased while Britain’s working people have become much poorer. Any deal May will want to make with Brussels will be intended to benefit them, not us.
The best thing in the circumstances will be for Tweezer’s negotiations to fail, an election called and the Tories kicked out and replaced with a proper, Labour government that can actually do the job of rebuilding our economy, welfare state, NHS and relationship with Europe.
As for the Spice Girls themselves, I don’t hate them, but I was never a fan. They always struck me as Conservatives, and a number of my friends didn’t think much of them, regarding them as a manufactured band. As for their slogan ‘Girl Power’, the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror film website, Moria, in its review of their film, Spice World, said it was meaningless. It was a kind of ‘post-feminist feminism’, and so was essentially as meaningless and empty as their music. The video for ‘Spice Up Your Life’, in which the girls fly through a dark, twilight city of towering skyscrapers, drenched in rain and given occasional illumination by a distant searchlight on high-tech surf boards seems so much based on Los Angeles of the SF film Blade Runner that I’m surprised Ridley Scott didn’t sue them for copyright. Blade Runner is one of the great classics of SF cinema, not least for its striking cityscape and Vangelis’ synthesizer score. It’s a downbeat, depressing movie, in sharp contrast to ‘Spice Up Your Life’, which is just a piece of inconsequential fun. But the movie had something deep to say about humanity and our assumptions of moral superiority over the biological machines we may create to serve us. Plus the fact that it had that awesome speech by Rutger Hauer as the Replicant leader, Roy Batty, to Harrison Ford’s Rik Deckard at the end: ‘Now you know what it’s like to be a slave. To live in fear. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, seen ships on fire off the shores of Orion…’ etc. Seeing the Spice Girls’ video of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ the other day on YouTube reminded of just how great a piece of cinematic art Blade Runner was.
As for ‘people power’ and the rhetoric about equality and bringing everyone together, that’s very rich coming from the Scum. The Scum’s the mouthpiece of the Tory party, which has done everything it can since it was founded by Murdoch to divide Britain, not least through its strident, persistent racism. It’s thanks to the Tory party and their imitators, New Labour, that there is now a yawning chasm between rich and poor, while the Tories have exacerbated and created further racial divisions by whipping up hatred and fear against immigrants and asylum seekers. Quite apart from the general hatred and fear the Tory press incites against the unemployed and disabled, whom they despise and denigrate as ‘scroungers’.
The Spice Girls are planning a comeback, and if people like their music, that’s fine. They gave people a lot of pleasure back in the 1990s. But this time, their message in the Scum is definitely best ignored.
