Here’s my drawing of British author Howard Jacobson. I’ve read that it was Jacobson, who came up with the slogan ‘For the Many, Not the Jew’ to promote the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party when he was living in New York. Way back in the 1980s he wrote a parody of the Book of Genesis, which Private Eye reviewed. This was at the same time militant Muslims were demanding Salman Rushdie’s head over the Satanic Verses. The Eye said that Jacobson’s novel showed the difference between Jews and Muslims, because if Jews were at all similar to them, Jacobson would have to move in with the other author. The other year Jacobson won a literary award for his The Finkler Question. From the very, very little I’ve read about it seems to be a tale of adultery in Jewish suburbia. This makes him sound like a kind of Jewish male version of Jilly Cooper with literary pretensions.
For some reason the late Clive James seems to have been a fan of his, and I did have some respect for him a few years ago. Jacobson describes himself as a Humanist, but disliked the New Atheists, as many old school atheists did, for their intolerance and abuse. But that vanished when I read that he was responsible for the slogan parodying Corbyn’s ‘For the Many, Not the Few’. Jacobson’s wretched slogan helped keep in power the Tories, who are determined to privatised the NHS and inflict further cuts on the welfare state at the expense of Britain’s working people. A working class, that has always included Jews. It’s also assisted in the seizure of the Labour leadership by Starmer and his crew, who are using anti-Semitism as an excuse to purge the party of socialists and critics of Israel. And their victims have been particularly Jews. All to protect the Israeli state from a possible Labour administration that would have tried to help the Palestinians gain justice and equality, instead of empty words and toothless condemnations of Israel.
I thought of Jacobson’s wretched slogan, and it seemed to me that you could also alter it, beginning with the names of the organisations pushing the anti-Semitism smears: the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Labour Movement, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and then
‘For Israel
For the Rich
Against the Poor
Against the Jew’
Because the people behind the smears seem to me to be Tories and Thatcherites determined to help the rich get even richer and drive the poor even further into poverty. And those poor also include Jews, who worry along with everyone else about the way the NHS is being run down, the cuts to state services, how they will pay for the social care their elderly relatives need and suffer from the government and management freezing their wages so they also take a cut in salary in real terms.
This comment from the incompetent, libidinous, blustering, greedy clown infesting No. 10 clearly demonstrates the absolute contempt he and his fellow Tories really have for working people. Yesterday Mike put up a piece from a Mirror report, in which Johnson told low paid British workers claiming benefits to make ends meet that they will have to see their wages rise through their own efforts. This is his ‘strong preference’, which he thinks is shared by the vast majority of people in this country. He’s not going to pass legislation to raise wages and doesn’t want them to claim benefits, which is money raised through taxing other people. This is at a time when those on Universal Credit are facing a cut of £1,000 per year. Of course, this is rich coming from the man who got Tory donors to pay for his new wallpaper, a nanny and whined that he couldn’t live off his £150,000 a year salary, as the good peeps on Twitter, including Angela Rayner, reminded us all. And this grasping attitude is shared by his cabinet, as Daniela Nadj pointed out. Rishi Sunak is building a new swimming pool in his garden and Dominic Raab spends £40,000 on a holiday. But for the rest of us, there’s 2,000 food banks and hundreds of baby banks.
Well, this is a typical Tory attitude and it goes back centuries. Way back in the 19th century one of the leading politicians of the day – and it might have been a Liberal rather than a Tory – told a meeting at one of the northern industrial towns that the means of prospering was within their grasp. It’s the old nonsense that if you work hard and have talent, you’ll get on. If you don’t, it’s your own fault. This particular speech was made at time when industrial workers could have a working day going up to 18 hours in poorly ventilated, dangerous factories, and families could be crammed into overcrowded basements.
And when Cameron was in power he declared that he was going to make work pay, not by actually raising wages, but by cutting benefits. Because working people didn’t want to see the closed curtains of their unemployed neighbours. As for the comments about taxation, that sounds like a populist move, but it’s really about not taxing the rich fairly for their share, just like he doesn’t want to damage their profits by making them pay a real living wage.
This is all about protecting and enriching the bloated elite even further by playing on the petty jealous and resentment within certain sections of the working class. All the while supported by the underlying message that we somehow live in a fair society in which full of opportunities to get on. Which is why there are so many graduates now working in burger bars or signing on.
I suppose it had to come and in truth, I’m not really surprised. Indeed, I’ve been half expecting it. I am, after all, a man of the Labour left. I have made no secret that I support a nationalised and properly funded NHS, nationalised utilities, strong trade unions, proper workers’ rights, a living wage, as well as ‘Communist’ policies like worker involvement in management in firms of a certain size, and a special workers’ chamber in parliament. Because 77 per cent of MPs are billionaires and precious few members of Britain’s great working and lower middle classes. And while I am bitterly critical of Black Lives Matter and much of the current anti-racism ideology, I have Black, Jewish, Asian and Muslim friends and relatives. And so I despise the rising prejudices against these ethnicities and religions in the Labour party under Keir Starmer. I have also been a critic of all forms of Fascism and colonialism, and so have published pieces supporting the Palestinians, who have been victims of Israeli racism and ethnic cleansing. Just as I condemn the persecution of Muslims by Modi in Kashmir, the Turkish persecution of ethnic Kurds, China’s genocide of the Uighurs and historic genocides such as the slave trade and the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the South Seas and Australasia. And obviously, the Holocaust, merely reading about which has given me nightmares.
But, as they say, ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. And so today I was sent this darling missive from the Labour party Complaints Team, informing me that I have been accused of anti-Semitism. How vile and grotesque! Here’s the email which I have edited to remove personal details.
“Notice of investigation
Allegations that you may have been involved in a breach of Labour Party rules have been brought to the attention of national officers of the Party. These allegations relate to your conduct on social media which may be in breach of Chapter 2, Clause I.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book. It is important that these allegations are investigated and the NEC will be asked to authorise a full report to be drawn up with recommendations for disciplinary action if appropriate.
We are currently at the investigatory stage of the disputes process and at no time during an investigation does the Labour Party confer an assumption of guilt on any party. You are not currently administratively suspended and no restrictions have been placed on the rights associated with your membership at this time.
However, the Party reserves the right to invoke its powers under Chapter 6 Clause I.1.B and Chapter 1 Clause VIII.5 to impose an administrative suspension in the future should the alleged misconduct continue or additional allegations of misconduct come to the attention of the Party.
It has also been determined that this case may be suitable for the use of NEC disciplinary powers under Chapter 1 Clause VIII.3.A.iii* and Chapter 6 Clause I.1.B** because it involves an incident which may reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on religion or belief .
This means that, upon the conclusion of this investigation, the NEC may impose such disciplinary measures as it sees fit. These measures include suspension from membership of the Party or from holding office in the Party; withholding or withdrawing endorsement as a candidate; and expulsion from membership of the Party.
Attached to this letter is the draft charge(s), the evidence pertinent to the case, and a series of questions which require your response. Upon receipt of your response, and any evidence you intend to rely on in your defence, the Party will be able to conclude this matter as quickly as possible.
Please respond in writing to the London address at the top of this letter or by email within 7 days of the date at the top of this letter.
The Party may consider an extension to this deadline if you are able to provide a clear and compelling reason to do so. The Party will also take reasonable steps to ensure that you have been given an opportunity to respond to these allegations. However, if you do not respond, the NEC is entitled to consider your case without a response.
You should take this letter and your response seriously. Possible outcomes of the NEC disciplinary process could include your expulsion or suspension from the Labour Party.
The Labour Party’s investigation process operates confidentially. That is vital to ensure fairness to you and the complainant, and to protect the rights of all concerned under the Data Protection Act 2018. We must therefore ask you to ensure that you keep all information and correspondence relating to this investigation private, and that do not share it with third parties or the media (including social media). That includes any information you receive from the Party identifying the name of the person who has made a complaint about you, any witnesses, the allegations against you, and the names of Party staff dealing with the matter. If you fail to do so, the Party reserves the right to take action to protect confidentiality, and you may be liable to disciplinary action for breach of the Party’s rules. The Party will not share information about the case publicly unless, as a result of a breach of confidentially, it becomes necessary to correct inaccurate reports. In that case we will only release the minimum information necessary to make the correction. The Party may also disclose information in order to comply with its safeguarding obligations.
The Party would like to make clear that there is support available to you while this matter is being investigated. There are a number of organisations available who can offer support for your wellbeing:
You can contact your GP who can help you access support for your mental health and wellbeing.
The Samaritans are available 24/7 – They offer a safe place for anyone to talk any time they like, in their own way – about whatever’s getting to them. Telephone 116 123.
Citizens Advice – Provide free, confidential and impartial advice. Their goal is to help everyone find a way forward, whatever problem they face. People go to the Citizens Advice Bureau with all sorts of issues. They may have money, benefit, housing or employment problems. They may be facing a crisis, or just considering their options. https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/
If you have questions about the investigation process please contact the Complaints Team, whose details are included in this letter.
It is hoped you will offer your full co-operation to the Party in resolving this matter.
Yours sincerely,
Complaints Team
The Labour Party
* Where a determination has been made as a result of a case brought under disciplinary proceedings concluded at NEC stage under Chapter 6 Clause I.1.B below of these rules, to impose such disciplinary measures as it thinks fit including: formal warning; reprimand; suspensions from membership of the Party, or from holding office in the Party (including being a candidate or prospective candidate at any, or any specified, level) or being a delegate to any Party body, for a specified period or until the happening a specified event; withholding or withdrawing endorsement as a candidate or prospective candidate at any, or any specified, level (such disciplinary power shall be without prejudice to and shall not in any way affect the NEC’s other powers to withhold endorsement under these rules); expulsion from membership of the Party, in which case the NEC may direct that following expiration of a specified period of not less than two nor more than five years, the person concerned may seek readmission to the Party on that basis that Chapter 6.I.2 is not to apply to that readmission; or any other reasonable and proportionate measure. (Chapter 1, Clause VIII.3.A.iii of the Labour Party Rule Book)
** In relation to any alleged breach of Chapter 2 Clause I.8 above by an individual member or members of the Party which involves any incident which in the NEC’s view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on age; disability; gender reassignment or identity; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; or sexual orientation, the NEC may, pending the final outcome of any investigation and charges (if any), suspend that individual or individuals from office or representation of the Party notwithstanding the fact that the individual concerned has been or may be eligible to be selected as a candidate in any election or byelection. The General Secretary or other national officer shall investigate and report to the NEC on such investigation. Upon such report being submitted, the NEC or a sub-panel of Disputes Panel may exercise its powers under Chapter 1 Clause VIII.3.A.iii (Chapter 6, Clause I.1.B of the Labour Party Rule Book)
Please respond to the following questions to the email address outlined in your letter within 7 days of the date on page 1. Your response should include:
A written statement of representation in your defence to the draft charge(s) below.
Any evidence you wish to submit in your defence to the draft charge(s) below.
A written response to the questions contained in this letter.
Your response should be submitted in writing to the Disputes Team by email or by post:
(the Respondent) has engaged in conduct prejudicial and / or grossly detrimental to the Party in breach of Chapter 2, Clause I.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book by engaging in conduct which:
may reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on religion or belief ;
may reasonably be seen to involve antisemitic actions, stereotypes and sentiments;
Engages in stereotypical allegations of Jewish control in the media, economy, government or other societal institutions;
Accuses the Jews as people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust;
Repeats stereotypical and negative physical descriptions/descriptions or character traits of Jewish people, such as references to wealth or avarice and equating Jews with capitalists or the ruling class;
i.1 Shows David Sivier posted the following quotes on this blog on December 5, 2020 at 9:19 pm;
“I’m not surprised that the Blairites and ultra-Zionist fanatics wanted to purge Tony Greenstein from the Labour party, as they have done with so many other entirely decent people.”
“Or rather more narrowly, support for the current viciously racist Israeli administration” ” believe that the Palestinians should be treated decently and with dignity, have also suffered anti-Semitic vilification and abuse if they dare to protest against Netanyahu’s government.”
“Zionism was until recent decades very much a minority position among European Jews.”
“it is an internalisation of gentile anti-Semitism, with which it has collaborated, including in the mass murder of Jews, such as in the Holocaust, by real anti-Semites.”
” far from being a pro-Jewish stance, Zionism in the 19th and early 20th centuries was associated with anti-Semitism.”
“he had previously not come forward to add his support because he didn’t want people to think that he was a Jew-hater.”
“These quotes clearly show that the criticisms of Israel and the Zionist movement by people like Tony Greenstein and the others are historically justified,”
“My own preferred view is that anti-Semitism is simply hatred of Jews as Jews, and that no state or ideology should be beyond debate and criticism. This includes Israel and Zionism.”
“I’ve come across the adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’.
“people, who hold entirely reasonable opinions critical of Israel are being vilified, harassed and purged as the very things they are not, racists and anti-Semites.””
The email continues
“Please respond to these questions to the email address outlined in your letter within 7 days of the date on page 1.
1) Please see the evidence attached overleaf. The Party has reason to believe that this is your Word Press web blog account. Can you confirm this is the case?
2) The Party further has reason to believe that you posted, shared or endorsed these statements yourself. Can you confirm this is the case? If not, each individual piece of evidence is numbered so please specify which of the pieces of evidence you are disputing posting, sharing or endorsing?
3) Taking each item in turn, please explain your reasons for posting, sharing or endorsing each numbered item of evidence included in this pack?
4) Chapter 2, Clause I.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book provides:
“No member of the Party shall engage in conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the Party. The NEC and NCC shall take account of any codes of conduct currently in force and shall regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on age; disability; gender reassignment or identity; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; or sexual orientation as conduct prejudicial to the Party: these shall include but not be limited to incidents involving racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia or otherwise racist language, sentiments, stereotypes or actions, sexual harassment, bullying or any form of intimidation towards another person on the basis of a protected characteristic as determined by the NEC, wherever it occurs, as conduct prejudicial to the Party. The disclosure of confidential information relating to the Party or to any other member, unless the disclosure is duly authorised or made pursuant to a legal obligation, shall also be considered conduct prejudicial to the Party.”
What is your response to the allegation that your conduct may be or have been in breach of this rule?
5) The Code of Conduct: Social Media Policy states that members should “treat all people with dignity and respect” and that “this applies offline and online.” Do you think your conduct has been consistent with this policy?
6) Looking back at the evidence supplied with this letter, do you regret posting, sharing or endorsing any of this content?
7) Do you intend to post, share or endorse content of this nature again in the future?
8) Are there any further matters you wish to raise in your defence?
9) Is there any evidence you wish to submit in your defence?”
I am determined to fight this, although I doubt it will do any good. This is a witch hunt after all, and as those of such great fighters for truth and justice as Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and so many others show, these scumbags have already made up their minds. Well, I was taught from earliest infancy by my parents, relatives and educators that you stand up to thugs and bullies, and you don’t back down or give in to Fascists and Stalinists. And I consider it a badge of honour to suffer the same persecution as these highly principled men and women.
And this is Stalinist. I am being asked if I admit my guilt, just as Stalin’s victims were forced to in the infamous show trials. I wonder if, come a tribunal, the president of the kangaroo court will conclude with the phrase, ‘Let the mad lice be shot’, as Stalin’s judge did. How guilty are you, comrade Rabban. ‘I am guilty, very guilty comrade Starmer’.
I am very much aware that I am breaching confidentiality in posting about this. Well, it’s my confidentiality to breach. I am the victim here, not the Labour party, and I note my accusers are safely anonymous. Cowards and snitches! I am doing so, because the Labour party’s promises are confidentiality are worthless. We saw that when some anonymous invertebrate leaked the accusations against their victims to the press, including the Sunset Times, the Jewish Chronicle and the Scum. The demands for confidentiality are to protect the Labour party and my accusers, not me. They are afraid that if enough people like me go public and air their side of the story on social media, they will be discredited and lose their position.
So be it. They have thrown down the gauntlet. I have picked it up, and I fling the charges back in their faces. As President Truman said of his fight against the military-industrial complex, ‘I am not afraid of this fight. Indeed, I relish it.’
This is another piece from the anti-Islamic YouTuber, the Apostate Prophet. I said yesterday when I posted another piece up by his that I don’t share his atheism nor his wholesale dismissal of all of Islam, although it very definitely isn’t my religion. Not all Muslims are the same, and I got the impression that there is a wide variety of belief and practice within global Islam. It’s therefore wrong and dangerous to give the impression that all Muslims are somehow militant hardliners wishing to impose the sharia and subjugate the unbelievers.
But there certainly are some very unpleasant individuals in the western Islamic community, who would like to impose an extremely strict, repressive version of Islam and who have a bitter hatred of gays, non-Muslims and apostates from Islam. These people, like White Fascists, deserve to be exposed and condemned for their vile views. One of these is Daniel Haqiqatjou. Haqiqatjou is an American Muslim apologist of Iranian extraction. In this post from June last year, 2020, the Apostate Prophet discusses Haqiqatjou’s squalid views and his connections to the Yaqeen Institute, a hard-line Islamic organisation whose leader, Omar Suleiman, attended some kind of public gathering with Joe Biden.
Haqiqatjou would like the death penalty for homosexuality. On LGBTQ Remembrance Day last year, he joked about remembering them through Muslim base jumping. It’s a tasteless joke about the method used by some Muslim countries of executing gays by throwing them off tall buildings. When AP called him a vile piece of sh*t, Haqiqatjou made it clear that people like him wouldn’t be forgotten either. Which is a reference to the traditional Muslim penalty for apostasy, death. The video contains a clip of Haqiqatjou explaining this to one of his callers. He also wrote a piece for the website of Muslim Jurists of America hailing the Sultan of Brunei’s introduction of Islamic law against homosexuals and fornicators, and urged western Muslims to come to Brunei to watch a public caning to see Islamic law in action. Thanks, but I’d rather stay in Britain and watch Gardener’s World. He also whined about how the West looks down on child marriage, but western children are sexually active at 13, 14, 15. The Apostate Prophet points out that this is 14 year old kids having sex with other 14 year olds. It is not a case of thirty year old men marrying 13 year old girls.
Haqiqatjou did, however, have some criticism for his posts from the American Muslim community. This was from an American convert, Justin Parrott, who objected to them, not because he found them to be wrong or offensive, but because he and other Muslim authorities didn’t want him to make Islam look bad. Haqiqatjou dismissed this by saying it is exactly what Jews and Christians have done to their religion, and they won’t look well on Islam unless Muslims convert to their religions. And so he blithely carries on spreading his backward views.
The Apostate Prophet also makes point in this video that there is something wrong in western society. If a westerner expresses hatred of homosexuality, like the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple, or if they express concerns about Islamic grooming gangs and immigration, then they are met with immediate howls of disapproval and cancellation. But the worst thing that happened to Haqiqatjou when he posted his obnoxious views online was that the post was taken down, something he found to be terribly tyrannical. Which is especially rich coming from him, as if left to him he’d end freedom of speech. All in the name of Islam, of course.
And in July last year, Apostate Prophet put up this video in which he questions Haqiqatjou on his attitude to slavery. Guess what! Haqiqatjou doesn’t condemn it. Indeed, he tries to defend it by saying that where it exists, the slaves may be better treated than free workers. He accuses AP of comparing slavery to an idealised form of freedom that has never existed, and may not make people happy. It seems to me to be very clear from this that Haqiqatjou would like to bring back slavery.
Now Haqiqatjou is correct when he says that in countries where slavery still persists, the slaves may be well treated. I can remember one book on modern slavery stating that the lot of slaves in those cultures that still practise traditional slavery is much better than modern from of enslavement, disguised as long-term work contracts, for example. I also suspect that Haqiqatjou has a very romanticised view of Islamic slavery. It could be different from western chattel slavery, in that slaves could serve as soldiers, scribes and arrange their masters’ business affairs. The Mamlukes, the Muslim warriors who ruled Egypt prior to Napoleon’s invasion, were originally such a corps of slave soldiers. Their name actually means ‘White slaves’. And ostensibly free labour, as we’ve seen, can be highly exploitative. The abolitionists’ opponents in the 19th century argued that it was hypocritical of William Wilberforce and the others to demand freedom for enslaved Blacks, when their White ‘factory slaves’ endured such grinding poverty and poor conditions. I suspect Haqiqatjou looks back on Islamic slavery as a time, that actually didn’t exist, when loyal slaves worked for caring, paternalistic masters. One of the British ambassadors to Zanzibar and Pemba in the later 19th century argued that the British government should not bother about demanding the abolition of slavery there because it was so benign and gradually dying out. But it didn’t, and the resentments of the enslaved Africans grew until there was a rebellion in the 1920s in which the ruling Arab class was massacred.
As for Haqiqatjou’s bizarre statement that ‘owning a person is better than renting a person’, this shows his ignorance about the issue. In free labour, the employer rents the worker’s labour. He does not rent the worker. It’s a fine, but important point.
Now I believe that genuine freedom comes with true democratic rights – the right to elect one’s rulers, serve on juries and negotiate with employers over wages and conditions. Which means the right to form trade unions and other professional associations, which Conservatives and Libertarians hate, because their interpretation of freedom is just freedom for the bosses, not the workers. But freedom begins with personal freedom – the freedom to do exactly as one wishes away from work, regardless of the views of one’s master, and not to be tied to one employer. Haqiqatjou, it seems, would like to end that, just as he would like to end secular law and government.
Now I think Haqiqatjou is almost certainly an extreme case. I doubt many western Muslims would want to see the return of slavery. Even the Saudis officially ended it in 1964 or so, although it still goes on in private and foreign workers are treated as slaves under the sponsorship system. I read somewhere that the Mullahs in Iran briefly considered bringing it back after the Islamic Revolution, but they decided against it. And there are certainly Muslims in the West who very strongly oppose views like his.
Unfortunately, liberal, modern Muslims are given no support in their struggles against the hardliners, and there certainly does seem to be a double standard amongst western liberals towards intolerant, repressive Islam. At the moment the west is going through paroxysms of guilt about its historic involvement in the slave trade. I realise that there are a few extremists out there, who would like to have it brought back. They are tiny minority who are rightly marginalised and attacked for their views. But it seems that their Muslim counterparts with deeply unpleasant views, like Haqiqatjou, are free to express similar views and no-one says anything against them.
This has to change.Fighting Islamic intolerance does not equal Islamophobia or fighting Islam. It is defending democracy and freedom, not all of whose enemies are White or somehow virtuous because they’re people of colour.
Last week I posted a piece about the right-wing YouTuber, Ex-Army Paz 49, posting a video supporting the letter of the French generals and squaddies threatening Macron with dire consequences if he didn’t get tough on Muslims. Paz is a former squaddie, who has swallowed the right-wing lie that Marxism, Communism and socialism are all the same thing, really. They have never worked, and are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions across the globe.
This is pretty much true of Communism under Mao, Stalin and the other dictators, who turned their countries into vast open air prisons and ruled with fear, artificial famines, purges and the gulag. But Communism was only one form of Marxism. Before the Russian Revolution, mainstream European Marxism supported democratic elections and the expansion of the suffrage to include all of the working class. One of its leading ideologues, the Austrian Karl Kautsky, hated the Bolsheviks’ destruction of democracy and their disenfranchisement and enslavement of the former governing class. He was also cautious about nationalisation, feeling that it should only be done when the natural development of an industry had turned it into a monopoly. Then it should be taken over by the state and run for the good of society as a whole, and not just its capitalist owners and shareholders.
The mainstream European socialist parties, such as Labour in Britain, the Social Democrats in Germany and Austria, were reformists. They rejected revolution for evolution, preferring to introduce socialism through parliamentary reform. They fully supported democracy and included some of the most bitter critics of the Communist one party states and totalitarian rule. Regarding nationalisation, there was a spread of views within these parties from those on the left who wished for more nationalisation to Social Democrats like Anthony Crossland, who believed that nationalisation should be rejected in favour of progressive taxation and strong trade unions, which would deliver the same results. The consensus was for a mixed economy. There was a minimum of nationalisation – the public utilities – linked to state planning and industrial investment. The result was a period of continued growth that lasted from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s.
But all this is either ignored or utterly unknown to right-wingers like Paz, who really do seem to think that Jeremy Corbyn was some kind of Marxist subversive because he urged a return to the post-War consensus. But just as Marxism and socialism have revived thanks to the obviously failing state of Reaganomics and Thatcherite free trade capitalism, so the old Cold War paranoia about THEM has come back. Paz posted a video last week claiming that Black Lives Matter and Trans activism were all being encouraged by an unknown foreign power in preparation for taking over the country. This is based on something a Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmenov, said on American TV twenty years ago. Bezmenov said that the Soviet authorities regarded western leftists as ‘useful idiots’ and encouraged them in order to weaken the West ready for a Soviet invasion. Paz was convinced, as are many other rightists, that this going on right now. It’s just that ‘we don’t know who’.
This is just standard Cold War state disinformation. Yes, Black Lives Matter are a Marxist organisation and the Critical Race Theory that underpins it and much other Black activism is a Marxist ideology. The Queer Theory that forms the intellectual basis of transgender activism is also a product of the postmodern extreme left. Lenin and the other Soviet leaders certainly did see western fellow travellers as ‘useful idiots’. But I see absolutely no foreign influence behind either BLM or the Trans lobby. They seem to be natural development in certain strands of anti-racist and gay rights activism. In the case of Black Lives Matter, this has gained considerable urgency because Blacks and people of colour have been particularly hard hit by the poverty caused by forty years of wage restraint and welfare cuts, along with the banking crisis and now Covid. As for trans politics, I think this has partly expanded because it’s now viewed as the new battleground over gay rights. And I don’t think the mainstream gay organisations in Britain are Marxist. One of the founders of Stonewall here in Britain, apparently, was Matthew Paris, who was Maggie Thatcher personal private secretary until he got sacked for writing a rude letter to an old lady, who had written to her.
The paranoia about some shadowy foreign power simply looks like the kind of state propaganda put out over here during the 70s and 80s by MI5 and IRD. They claimed that just about every figure on the radical left was somehow in the pay of Moscow. This included the anarchists, the IRA, the PLO and mainstream Labour politicians like Tony Benn, whom they also smeared as supporters of the IRA. It wasn’t true, and some of its targets, like the anarchists, actually found it so wrong to be hilarious. But it was effective in discrediting decent politicians like Benn to a section of the British electorate.
Well, Communism and the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s, though this didn’t get through to a hard line of the paranoid fringe in America. A certain section of the survivalist milieu believed that the USSR hadn’t really collapsed. They had only made it seem that way. In reality the USSR was alive and well, and had secret bases in Canada and Mexico ready to send tanks over the border when the time was right. However, thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, it’s obvious to just about everyone that Communism, except in China and some other minor countries, really has fallen. Hence the fact that Paz and the other rightists are utterly convinced that some foreign power is behind BLM and the trans movement, but don’t really know who.
My guess is that as capitalism continues to fail and discontent spreads, there’s going to be more deliberate disinformation published in the right-wing media smearing the old, traditional left as Communists and Marxists, like they did with Jeremy Corbyn.
Which means there aregoing to be a few more ultra-patriots like Paz convinced that it’s all being done ready for a foreign invasion, but can’t tell you who. Welcome to the new Cold War.
Certain commenters on this blog have described Alex Belfield as my favourite right-winger. Well, he’s not quite that, but I do admit, I watch his videos, which may not be a good thing at all. Belfield is, I’m fairly sure, a working class Tory. He talks about how he comes from a pit estate and inveighs against the way the White working class has been neglected by liberals in the BBC and politics. Who, as he sees it, all read the Guardian, eat oysters like Naga Manchetti, for whom he seems to have a particular dislike, and are determined to push ‘box-tickers’ like gays, the ‘ambivilacious’, by which he means trans and non-binary people, and folks of colour over ordinary working people. His audience is very much the same type of people, who formed UKIP’s constituency: working class Whites in their fifties and over, who feel left behind by the mainstream parties.
There is a genuine issue here. Tony Blair and his successors abandoned the working class in the pursuit of middle class votes and Tory swing voters. At the same time, they retained and promoted minority rights and issues, loudly supporting multiculturalism, feminism and gay rights. The result was that a large section of the working class has become alienated from the Labour party, with many socially conservative older members attracted to right-wing organisations and individuals like the Kippers, Nigel Farage and Belfield. About a decade ago, the BBC put on a series of programmes about race and contemporary racial politics in the UK. One of those was a documentary asking if the White working class was being written out of contemporary politics. The trailer for this showed a man, in stereotypical working class clobber, having words written in black on his face until he gradually became invisible. I think it’s a fair question, and the Labour left is serious about tackling this alienation within an anti-racist framework by working hard for all members of the working class. That’s the best way of fighting Fascism and right-wing populism. But the voices, who are most vocal about defending the White working class are people like Belfield.
And these are people whose political and economic views are actively hostile to working class interests.
Belfield in many ways is a case in point. A few days ago he put up a video lamenting the state of the country. He was particularly concerned about the NHS and the massive waiting lists that have emerged due to Tory maladministration. The Health Service, he declared, was no longer fit for purpose, and would and should be scrapped. He wants it sold off to private administration. In fact, it’s the Tories’ piecemeal privatisation of the NHS that is responsible for waiting lists and poor service, and this will only get worse as they hand over more of it to their noxious backers in the private sector. And if the NHS is sold off completely, it will be transformed into a for-profit service, funded by private medical insurance like America’s. The result will be disastrous. Thousands of people will die and go without the medical care they need because they won’t be able to afford it. Already GPs’ surgeries, that have been handed to private healthcare suppliers, have been closed and their patients left without their traditional doctors, because these surgeries haven’t provided as big a profit to their owners as they’d like.
By championing the NHS’ privatisation, Belfield is most definitely working against, not for, hisworking class viewers and listeners.
He’s also concerned about the lack of opposition to Boris Johnson from the Labour party. He has a point, although it seems to come from his opposition to the lockdown and frustration that all of the parties are supporting it. Looking at the recent dismal election results for Labour, Belfield had a few suggestions of his own how the party could win back votes. Instead of concentrating on issues no-one’s really interested in, like trans rights, Labour should go back to talking to its traditional working class supporters, and start listening to them and take on board the issues that matter to ordinary people. These are bread and butter issues like healthcare provision, jobs and getting enough money to put food on the table. I agree, although I do think that the debate over trans rights is immensely important, if only because of the massive expansion of the number of young women and girls now self-identifying as trans. Labour should be fighting for better healthcare, combatting unemployment and poverty.
But this means a wholesale rejection of Tory and Blairite neoliberalism, a neoliberalism Belfield supports.
It means kicking the parasites out of the NHS and renationalising it. It means restoring the welfare state, so that the poor, the disabled, the elderly and the unemployed are given enough to live on. It means ending the wretched gig economy, including fire and rehire and zero hours contracts. And it definitely means an end to the wage restraint which has seen working people effectively take a cut in wages, while the salaries of the elite become ever more obscenely bloated.
Belfield also clearly misses the decline of traditional working class communities. And this is where he got really interesting. He wanted the return of the old working men’s clubs.
Now I actually agree with him there. Traditional working and lower middle class communities had a solidarity and ethos of mutual support that has vanished as society has become more individualistic. Thatcherism, and it’s Labour party variety, Blairism, partly drew on the decline of the British working class. As more people moved out of the working class into the lower middle class, taking up white collar jobs and buying their own homes rather than living in council estates, the right became convinced that working people were no longer a political force. A few months ago I found a video from one of the right-wing political sites on YouTube, in which a pundit blandly declared that Labour was doomed when working people moved away from their traditional working conditions. When they stopped living in back-to-back housing, for example. I disagree. More people may have moved into the lower middle class, but very many of them still have the views, aspirations and desires traditionally associated with the working class. It doesn’t matter that many of them are now office workers – working conditions in many offices and call centres is as ruthlessly exploitative as Victorian factories. See books like White Collar Sweatshop. Working people, whether labourers or office clerks, still want job security, protection from zero hours and exploitative short term contracts. They want proper sick and maternity pay. They also want proper wages that will support them and their families. They also want and deserve proper NHS treatment, a working welfare state and public utilities that are owned and operated by the state for the good of the British people, not for private, foreign investors.
Which are all Corbynite policies.
The right in America and Britain has benefited from the decline in traditional working class communities. One book I read attacking the Neocons, Confronting the New Conservatism, argued that the neo-Conservatives had been successful in gaining public support because of the social atomisation that came from the decline of working class institutions. The decimation of the trade unions and other working class institutions meant that many working people only met collectively with others when they went to church. And the ‘White flight’ of White working class people to the suburbs away from Black communities in the urban core meant that Black and White Americans were separate and divided, and so the right could play on White racial fears.
This atomisation would be reversed if working class institutions, like the old working men’s clubs, came back.
I don’t think they could be called ‘working men’s’ clubs, not after the progress of feminism. Working people’s clubs, perhaps? It may not be possible to revive them, as it would mean taking on the aggressive individualism that has advanced over the last century, as well as reviving community entertainment and participation so that it could compete with TV, computer games and the internet. But if it could be done, it could very well lead to a very strong revival in working class consciousness. A working class consciousness that would be shared by the lower middle class.
And that could very well scupper all the Thatcherite and Blairite bilge of the last forty-odd years.
Which would be very upsetting for Tories like Belfield.
I went to an amazingly great pro-NHS zoom meeting last night organised, I think, by the anti-NHS privatisation organisations We Own It and/or Keep Our NHS Public. The speakers included Dr. Louise Irvine and Antonio Perez-Iranzo, a Spanish doctor working in the NHS, who described how Centene, the private health care company that’s being given positions on NHS boards and allowed to take over doctors’ surgeries, has managed to wreck healthcare in his home country. They were so terrible that eventually the Valencian government was forced to take the service back inhouse and kick them out. Rabina Khan, a Lib Dem councillor in Tower Hamlets, talked about her experience of the poor service they delivered when they took over the traditional GP’s surgery at which she was a patient. She was particularly concerned about the effect of privatisation on the elderly, and on Black and Bangladeshi women. Another speaker told of the vastly poorer service they gave when they were given NHS contracts and acquired GPs’ surgeries in Nottingham. The final speaker was Jeremy Corbyn, introduced as the ‘best Prime Minister this country never had’. Absolutely. He provided more details on the continuing NHS privatisation, showing his absolutely and unfailing commitment to the great institution created by Nye Bevan. He reminded everyone that one he waved the documents showing this was going to happen in parliament and asked Johnson about it, prime ministerial liar called him a liar. But he was right, and if, anything, understated the case. There was also time given for ordinary folks to ask their questions and give their experiences of the destruction of the NHS by these parasites.
In every case, the story was the same. Centene are given the contracts without warning, over the heads of local people, patients and even other doctors. Notification of the change comes from a bland, corporate letter and people are urged to get on Zoom for further information. This is a problem for older people, those not on the internet or who have problems using it, and people for whom English is not their primary language. Centene is a for-profit American health insurance company. Already big, it became massive in America with the introduction of Obamacare. It states in its corporate literature that it is only interested in making a profit, and that if this doesn’t happen, it will divest itself of those loss-making interests. Louise Irvine stated that, as a doctor, you don’t think of making a profit, even though since the inception of the NHS doctors are actually private businessmen, who contract in to the NHS. The only way to make a profit is to reduce costs. Which means sacking people and actually providing a worse service by reducing the amount of care given. In Nottingham, when Centene took over the service, they dispersed 3,000 of the 11,000 patients in their newly acquired GPs’ surgeries to others.
They are purely in it for the money, the profits of which go outside this country to their American shareholders.
Keep Our NHS Public is planning a demonstration against the privatisation of the NHS In London on Saturday, 3rd July 2021. This also includes issues like patient safety, and pay justice. They are going to assemble outside UCH on Euston Road, NWI at 12.00 before marching to parliament square. There are other protests also planned elsewhere in the country for the same day. Details of them can be found at their website https://keepournhspublic.com/ They also recommended people looking at an essay on this privatisation by a member of the Socialist Health Alliance, whose website is https://sochealth.co.uk.
They are naturally extremely keen for people to join their organisation or set up their own. Whatever we do, we have to organise to show the strength of opposition to this privatisation. They state it will be a long struggle, but people have succeeded in getting contracts taken away from the profiteers Serco, Circle Health and others.
The message is clear: Get rid of Centene and the other private companies profiting from the NHS. Get Boris out, and a proper government in, one committed to ending NHS privatisation.
And that does not include the Labour Blairites, who were as keen to privatise the NHS as their Tory heroes.
Yesterday Mike put up a piece about the shift in voting intention among the young. Many of them are choosing to support the Greens rather than the Labour party. According to stats from the Tory-owned YouGov, 27 per of young people intend to vote Green, as against 35 per cent for Labour and 21 per cent Conservative. Mike and the peeps on Twitter were in no doubt that it was because of Starmer’s miserable leadership. If you punish the previous leader of the party by suspending him, ‘throw the Palestinians under the bus and give in to flag-shaggers’, as Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush said, ‘you lose the youth vote’. Not only that, but if you go back on your election promises to renationalise the NHS and the utilities, strengthen the welfare state and restore the trade unions and workers’ rights, and start giving people a decent living wage, you will lose voters, and not just the young ones. These were all extremely popular policies, but they’re anathema to the Tory Labour right. Hence Starmer has broken all of these promises. They are also not going to support a leadership that seems more determined to purge the Labour left – which is really just traditional, centrist Labour – than fight the Tories.
As it stands, Starmer doesn’t represent anything. He’s an opportunist, as shown the other day when he pledged to back Trans self-ID after people have started questioning it and the danger it represents to women. Most supporters of the trans ideology undoubtedly do so out of conviction, but this looked like a cynical attempt to garner support from the gay and trans communities.
Young people tend to be more radical than their elders, and this generation are particularly worried about the environment. It can be seen in the rise of Extinction Rebellion, who are damned nuisance in my opinion, but I don’t doubt they’re right about the environment. I don’t have the stats available at the moment, but the YouGov figures certainly tally with the results in Bristol at the council elections. Many wards elected Green councillors, particularly in the more radical areas of the city.
Britain’s young people are suffering. Their education has suffered because of the Coronavirus lockdown, their job prospects are also in doubt because of the effect the lockdown has had on the economy, they’re mired in debt thanks to the massive hike in tuition fees brought about by the Tories’ Lib Dem collaborators and the welfare state no longer exists to support them, or anybody else. And they are worried about possible irreversible damage to the Earth’s ecosystem and the final extinction of life, including humanity, on our beautiful world.
They and the rest of the British people need and deserve better. The Tories will always be the Tories, the Lib Dems have no principles when it comes to power, and under Starmer Labour has been hollowed out and turned into a vestigial, sham opposition. So they’re going to the Greens. I don’t this will trouble Starmer, as the attitude among the Blairites seems to be that so long as the party is kept out of the hands of its traditional supporters, the socialists and working class, then everything’s great. Even if the party goes under or loses its place as the main opposition party.
But the party’s real supporters and activists demand better. They want a proper Labour party that stands up for working people. And that means
Simon Tormey, Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner’s Guide (London: One World, revised edition 2013).
Like many people, I’ve been doing some reading during the lockdown. I found this in one of the mail order book catalogues I get, and ordered it as it looked interesting. I got through the post the other day. It was first published in 2004 and was republished in a revised edition nine years later. The blurb for it on the back runs
The financial crisis, bank bailouts, and the dash to austerity have breathed new life into protest movements across the globe, and brought anti-capitalist ideas into the mainstream. But what does it mean to be anti-capitalist? And where is anti-capitalism going – if anywhere?
Simon Tormey explores these questions and more in the only accessible introduction to the full spectrum of anti-capitalist ideas and politics. With nuance and verve, he introduces the reader to the wide variety of positions and groups that make up the movement, including anarchists, Marxists, autonomists, environmentalists, and more. Providing essential global and historical context, Tormey takes us from the 1968 upsurge of radical politics to the 1994 Zapatista insurrection, the 1999 Seattle protests, and right up to Occupy and the uprisings across the Eurozone.
This is a fascinating and bold exploration of how to understand the world – and how to change it.
A biographical note states that Tormey is a political theorist based in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. He was the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham.
The book has an introduction and the following chapters:
The Hows and Whys of Capitalism
Anti-Capitalism after the ‘End of History’
A ‘movement of movements’1: ‘reformism’, or ‘globalisation with a human face’
A ‘movement of movements’ II: renegades, radicals and revolutionaries
The Future(s) of Anti-Capitalism: Problems and Perspectives
There is a timeline of contemporary anti-capitalism, a glossary of key terms, thinkers and movements, and a list of resources.
Although the book was published eight years ago, I think it’s still going to be very relevant. The world may have been in lockdown for the past year with governments supporting their economies, but the Tories have neither gone away nor changed their stripes. It’s been pointed out that they never let a crisis go to waste. Once the lockdown is lifted, they’ll revert back to cutting the welfare state, privatising the NHS and with further attacks on workers’ rights, increasing job insecurity and lowering wages. We will need to organise again and resist them. The book’s short at 181 pages, excluding the index, but it looks like a very useful and necessary contribution to combating neoliberalism and the poverty and misery it is inflicting on working people across the globe.
Down here in Bristol we not only have elections for the city council looming, but also for the elected mayor and police and crime commissioner. Because of health issues, not just my own but also other members of my family, we’ve arranged to have postal votes. The ballot papers arrived the other day, and enclosed with them were booklets produced by the local authority explaining the voting procedure, answering various FAQs and giving policy statements and promises from the candidates. Not only does Bristol have a Labour candidate, the present elected mayor Marvin Rees, but there’s also one from the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, Tom Baldwin. Here’s their election promises from the booklet for the mayoral election.
Mayor Marvin’s runs
“Delivering for Bristol
Building a City of Hope
It is an honour to serve as Mayor of Bristol, the city I am proud to be from and where I am bringing up my family.
Together we have led Bristol in the face of the pandemic, economic downturn, social change and instability, and climate change, with the added uncertainty of Brexit. Many of us have experienced real loss this year, as people have come together like never before to support each other.
Working with partners all over Bristol, we are building a city where nobody is left behind underpinning our ambition with compassion and our commitment to sustainability. We are focused on protecting and creating jobs, and delivering for residents, we are creating jobs by bringing employers like Channel 4 to our city, bringing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment into Bristol, and delivering our mass transit system.
Together, against the odds, we are making a difference.
On 6 May, we are proudly standing on our record of delivery – including all our 2016 pledges and more. With your support, we can all keep building a more sustainable, inclusive, and ambitious Bristol: our City of Hope.”
There then follows a list of what Labour has already achieved.
“9,000 new homes, tripling affordable house-building, rough sleeping down 80%
12,000 work experiences and £9m for south Bristol construction skills centre.
99 new biogas buses, RPZ fees frozen, 75 miles of segregated cycleways
Kept all our libraries and children’s centres open
Building new schools, creating mental health training and free breakfast clubs
Best core city for recycling, deep-cleaned 700 streets, planted 60,000 trees
Won Channel 4 relocation, invested in sport and leisure centres – giving control to communities”
This is followed by his promises for the future
“Building our underground, with free travel for apprentices and students
Protecting jobs and building a living wage city
Investing £1 billion in clean energy and doubling our trees
Investing in more schools and quality work experience
Building 2,000 new homes a year – 1,000 affordable
Investing in social care, helping older people stay in their homes.”
The pages for Tom Baldwin of the TUSC state has the statement ‘TUSC Against Cuts’, and then proceeds as follows:
“Tom says: “The pandemic has exposed the huge injustices and the divide between workers and big business. We’ve had to fight for our safety as the bosses and government put profits first. Now we have to fight to protect jobs and services as they try to make us pay for the crisis.
Bristol needs a mayor who will stand up for ordinary people. I stand for a socialist society run for people not profit.”
‘The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition organises to give a voice to working-class people who have been abandoned by the main parties. It includes the RMT union and the Socialist Party, of which Tom is a member.
Tom is 37 and lives in Aston. He is an active trade unionist and campaigner.
Bristol needs a fightback
Defend jobs and services – Vote Tom Baldwin
A Socialist mayor for the millions, not the millionaires
If elected Tom will…
Build a mass united struggle of workers and young people to win back the council funding taken by the government.
Reverse all cuts to council jobs and services, move budgets based on Bristol’s needs.
Oppose and reverse outsourcing and privatisation.
Never increase council tax, rents and charges faster than wages rise
Push for a publicly owned, top quality and affordable public transport network, run for need not profit
Address the housing crisis by building thousands of council homes and capping private rents
Defend the right to peaceful protest
Fight for decent jobs. Support all campaigns to protect safety, jobs, pay and conditions, including strike action by workers
Stand for jobs and homes for all. Oppose racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and all other forms of oppression and division.
Only take the average wage of a worker in the city, not the inflated £79,000 mayoral salary.’
As you know, I despise Keir Starmer and his continuing destruction of the Labour party, including the purge of left-wingers and socialists, in order to turn it into a Blairite neoliberal party. I’ve also got criticisms of the way Marvin Rees has run the city, but in general I think he’s done a good job and has been a far better mayor than his predecessor, ‘Red Trousers’ Ferguson.
I’ve been told by some of the great peeps on this blog that the TUSC were formed by the people in the Labour party, who were thrown out for opposing Blair’s cuts and policy changes, though I’ve also heard that the Socialist Party is the former Militant Tendency, a group that infiltrated and tried to take over the Labour party in the 1980s. But their policies are what the Labour party should be standing for. The mayoral elections are run according to proportional representation. I would therefore urge people to consider giving the TUSC their second vote.
If more people vote for them, to the point where it’s a significant number, perhaps the leaders of the Labour party will take note, and move the party further to the left. Or it will encourage the present Labour left to continue the struggle against the Blairites by showing them that real, socialist policies are popular and can win.
