Hope Not Hate’s 10 Reasons to Oppose Paul Nuttall

After the Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, here’s another Arturo Ui figure in this country, whose racial populism should be opposed. Paul Nuttall, who looks to me like Ade Edmondson as the stupid, vulgar and violent hooligan Eddie Hitler in his and Rik Mayall’s comedy series, Bottom, has just become head of UKIP. And Hope Not Hate have today put up ten good reasons why decent people should oppose him and his party. Here’s their list of 10 reasons, with a few of my comments underneath.

1. He has strongly supported Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ billboard. That was the party’s advert that showed a line long of immigrants supposedly queuing up to get into Europe. It aroused strong criticism because it was almost identical to a Nazi poster, showing the lines of eastern European Jews, who they accused of threatening to overrun western civilisation.

2. He believes there is a secret coordinated Muslim plot to become a majority in Europe.
The Islamophobic right has been claiming that this is the case for years, despite demographic evidence to the contrary. It’s called ‘Eurabia’, and is based on the belief that Muslim birthrates are so far ahead of White European population growth that within one or two generations we’ll be a minority in our own countries. It’s a nasty, vicious lie, and one that has been exploited by the hatemongers in the Fascist right. There’s a propaganda movie on YouTube that shows pictures of street fighting and a Europe in flames, which claims that this is what will happen to Europe by the ’20s, when there will be a civil war between Muslims and their Leftist allies on one side, and ‘patriots’ – read: Nazis, on the other. There was a scandal in Wiltshire about a year or so ago, when one of the Kippers in that county made a speech, or series of speeches, claiming that this would happen. This was rightly greeted with so much outrage that the politico had to resign.

3. In a speech in the European Parliament, Nuttall labelled the response of the EU to the refugee crisis as “freedom of movement of Jihad”.
Which is the same argument Trump uses to support his ban on Muslim immigration: some of them might be terrorists. Despite the fact that, as they’re refugees, jihad is the reason they’re fleeing the Middle East.

4. He wants to ban the burqa.
One of the reasons this needs to be resisted is that it gives the state the power to dictate religious observances, which should be a matter of individual choice, contravening the human right to freedom of religion. And if it can be done to Muslims, it can be extended to other religious or philosophical groups.

5. Nuttall has called for the NHS to be privatised.
To support this, the article in Hope Not Hate has a link to this video below, by the National Health Action party, where Nuttall calls it a ‘monolithic hangover from days gone by’. This alone is an excellent reason for shunning Nuttall and his wretched party.

6. He wants a 31% flat rate of tax, meaning the rich pay far less.

7. He wants prison conditions to be made deliberately worse and the 1967 Criminal Justice Act to be abolished.
Despite the constant refrains of the likes of the Heil and Express, prisons are grim places. The Mirror this morning carried a report on the rising number of suicides in British prisons, which are far more than those outside. And Private Eye has regularly carried news stories in its ‘In The Back’ column about young offenders committing suicide, or being beaten to death by the other inmates, sometimes in adult jails. Does Nuttall really more useless and avoidable deaths in prison? It’s also unsurprising that he also wants the return of the death penalty, which Hope Not Hate points out would mean that Britain would share the same attitude towards crime as Belarus, a military dictatorship.

8. Nuttall believes climate change is a “hair-brained theory”.
It’s also not going to surprise anyone that he’s also another supporter of fracking.

9. Was one of only 14 MEPs to vote against a crackdown on the illegal ivory trade.
People have been concerned about the devastation of elephant populations in Africa, thanks to the illegal ivory trade since at least the 1990s. A few years ago I think one of the royals even suggested that objects made from ivory before the international ban date should be junked as a deterrent to the poachers by making ivory absolutely unsaleable. Clearly, this view is not shared by Nuttall, who obviously is no fan of conservation and protecting the environment.

10. Opposes same-sex marriage.
This seems to be the bog-standard, default position of the majority of Kippers. Or at least, those who open their mouths.

See: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/ukip/10-reasons-to-oppose-nuttall-5075

All of this just shows that, not only is Nuttall deeply bigoted, and his party opposed to many of the institutions, not least the NHS, which have made Britain a healthy, tolerant society, but it also bears out what Tom Pride and many other bloggers have also shown: that the Kippers aren’t offering anything new, or different, but are the extreme right of the Tory party.

The Pro-Slavery Origins of the Electoral College

The role of the electoral college in the election of Donald Trump has come under a lot of scrutiny and debate over the past few days. Killary won the popular vote by about 1/2 million or so more votes than the orange-tanned Nazi. But Trump was ahead in the electoral college, and so won the election. Many Americans now are discussing abolishing the electoral college as an anti-democratic institution.

They’re right. It is anti-democratic. It was meant to be from the very beginning. In this piece from Outdate Democracy, the American constitutional lawyer, Paul Finkelman, explains how the electoral college was deliberately invented by James Madison, in order to preserve the power of the slave states. The Founding Fathers discussed various methods by which the present could be elected, including restricting his election to the governors. This was rejected. Madison believed that the ‘fittest thing’ would be for American citizens to elect their president. But there was a problem, in that if this was based only on the numbers of White people, who were the only people who could vote, the south would be at a serious disadvantage. 30%-50% of the population of these states were slaves. The result was that these states had a smaller voting population than the north. As a result, the electoral college was devised, by which a slave was considered only 3/5 of a human being. This nevertheless gave these states the necessary numbers in their populations, to be able to send their own candidates to the White House. Finkelman shows that if the situation had not been invented, then possibly four of the first five presidents wouldn’t have been elected. He concludes that the electoral college is the last relic of slavery, and one that is now unnecessary, as all the residents in a state now have the right to vote.

It’s an interesting perspective on what is, to us Brits, a bizarre and very convoluted aspect of the system of American democracy. And I’ve no doubt it’s true. Along with footage of Dr Finkelman speaking, there’s also pictures of Blacks working in the fields, and on the auction block from the 19th century, and adverts for slaves, which make it very clear what a degrading and inhuman system the electoral college was intended to preserve.

Northcliffe on the Threat of Coercion by Advertisers

I also picked up yesterday a copy of Anthony Sampson’s Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century (London: John Murry 2004). This attempts to describe how the country has become less democratic, and government and big business more unaccountable. It’s a very good book, and accurately describes how we have lost power to the governing elites. One of the most immediately significant passages deals with the way newspapers have increasingly come to reflect the interests of their advertisers.

This was brought home most powerfully this last week with the scandal over the suppression of adverse news about HSBC by the Telegraph. HSBC is heavily involved in tax avoidance, and is being investigated by the Swiss, Americans and other nations for money laundering. Yet this was largely kept out of the pages of the Torygraph on the express orders of its chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan. HSBC was the advertiser the newspaper believed it could not afford to lose, and so instructed its journalists to do everything not to offend it. The resulting scandalous lack of coverage, and the suppression of other news stories and their substitution by puff pieces to satisfied other advertisers, so outraged the columnist Peter Oborne that he resigned. Oborne has written a piece on the Net describing his decision and the circumstances that led up to it. Mike has covered this extensively, including linking to Oborne’s piece, on his own blog over at Vox Political.

Sampson notes in his section on the growing power of advertisers that Lord Northcliffe, the press tycoon, was well aware of their power and did everything he could to keep it in check. Northcliffe said in 1922 ‘Do not let the advertisements rule the paper’. Apparently for a brief period he had the hall porter at the Daily Mail censor them. Northcliffe himself was a major pillar of the establishment, but he was absolutely right in this instance. Unfortunately, Murdoch MacLennan and the others weren’t listening.