Cartoon of Belfield and Andy the Gabby Cabby Going Down the Lambley Pub

I don’t know if this video is satire or a homage to the duo. It’s a cartoon from Ryanonwifi’s YouTube channel of Belfield meeting Andy the Gabby Cabby after Belfield’s return from a luxury trip to Vegas. The speech in the cartoon sounds automated, but the dialogue really does skewer Belfield, with his jokes about ‘jellywobblers’, especially those belonging to ‘Carol Vordernorks’ and the way he insults people by calling them ‘shushi-shushi, champagne sipping, Guardian-reading socialists. Ryanonwifi is a fan of Andy the Gabby Cabby, whose relationship with Belfield is unclear. And I’m not sure if Ryanonwifi really intended to be so, but it really does seem like a biting spoof of the convicted stalker.

Alex Belfield’s Suspension from YouTube: Update

Andy the Gabby Cabby posted another video yesterday discussing mad right-winger Alex Belfield’s suspension from YouTube. The Cabby didn’t appear himself, but gave the video over to Belfield to say what had happened. According to Belfield, he’d been suspended for several reasons. One was the factcheckers complaining against his remarks about Covid. The second was because he’d been contacted by a journalist for the Times, who wanted to ask him about the smears against Keir Stalin that appeared on one his videos and accused him of making them. Belfield states that he doesn’t even appear in the video and that it’s just Boris Johnson speaking. He therefore called the hack a ‘farthead’, and so got himself banned on that account. And the remarks left by his commenters suggest that it was also because of his personal comments about Carol Vorderman. Not that he seems dismayed by the ban. He talks about having expected it 1 1/2 years ago, and is proud of all the support he’s had from his fans, who he regards as a real family., He’s going to set up his private VOR club, charging a pound a week, which’ll be set up in March.

I’m not surprised that Belfield got a strike against him because of his attitude to the Coronavirus. He’s one of a number of right-wingers, who don’t believe that the disease is all that bad and urge the lockdown to be lifted. He does, however, urge everyone to take the vaccine and has been very careful about what he says about it. But clearly, not careful enough. This comes after 157 medical professionals wrote to YouTube urging that it ban Joe Rogan because one of his guests was sceptical about the efficacy of the lockdown. This was followed by Neil Young taking his videos off the platform, or threatening to.

I can sort of sympathise with him to a certain extent with the Times journo after the way its sister paper smeared Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Nevertheless, even if Belfield didn’t speak on the video and it was all Johnson, the video repeated a terrible, dangerous smear that Belfield didn’t correct. A smear that has resulted in the Labour leader being mobbed, vilified and receiving death threats. And no, I don’t have much sympathy for him, not when he and the other Blairites were all too keen to smear decent , anti-racist women and men as anti-Semites. This was even when they’d opposed real Fascism and anti-Semitism all their lives, like Mark Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and so many others, and were themselves Jewish, like Walker and Greenstein. Because of those smears, these people have been viciously abused and received death threats. Jackie Walker talks about some of the horrendous messages she’s had in one of her videos. She’s been told she should be lynched – an especially horrible comment as her mother was a southern American Black civil rights activist – and she should be cut up, set on fire and her body dumped in bin bags. One entirely blameless Jewish lady in Devon had her car firebombed after the Campaign for Anti-Semitism declared that she was an anti-Semite. These smears are all because these people supported Jeremy Corbyn and/or opposed the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Or else like Mike they dared to correct the fake history pushed by the Labour apparat to show that those accused were innocent.

As for Belfield vanishing behind a paywall, this may well be the end of his popularity. He may retain his fandom, but I can’t see it growing again without the massive public exposure through YouTube. Even if it’s only a pound, people don’t like paywalls, as some of the newspapers have found with their online content. Besides this, there are still unanswered questions about his legal entanglements. Jim Round, one of the great commenters on this blog, has remarked

‘This was predicted by some as the July court case gets closer, he has still not admitted that he is the defendant, and refused to answer questions about donations.
It is not a “ban” as such, as he is still deleting a lot of his content, Playboard is your friend here.
With regards to free speech, as said before, Belfield is quite hypocritical here as if you disagree with him, you get cut off, abused and/or harrassed by him.
I know what you are getting at with over zealous T&C’s but human nature will always unfortunately bring out the bullies who think they can say what they like with no right to reply.’

I’ve seen some of that bullying attitude myself in a video Belfield put up several weeks ago., accusing a caller of wanting to let in 100 million immigrants. The caller, a polite young chap, had called in to challenge him on his opposition to asylum seekers. Belfield responded by saying that there were millions of starving people who’d like to come to Britain. There were 100 million such people in Nigeria, so should we let them all it? Should we round them up and take them here? The lad didn’t know how to respond, so eventually Belfield cut him off. He then sneered and joked with the next caller, who did agree with him, how the poor fellow wanted to allow in 100 million immigrants. But while the lad hadn’t handled the question well, he hadn’t said anything about letting in 100 million people. It was Belfield misrepresenting him, and by extension everyone else who doesn’t share his opposition to ‘dinghy divers’. And Belfield’s remarks about BBC personnel being ‘Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping, oyster-eating, uni-educated Naga Manchushi types’, or alternatively saying they’re lesbian, Celie Imrie-types with clipboards, really is just abuse.

But it does show the poisonous hatred of some parts of the right towards the left, articulated on behalf of working class Whites, who have been left behind by the middle classes and affirmative action.

Mad Right-Wing YouTuber Alex Belfield Banned by YouTube for Two Weeks

A day or two ago Alex Jones, the right-wing host of the Voice of Reason channel on YouTube, was handed a temporary ban for two weeks. At first it was thought that he’d been banned for three months, but Andy the Gabby Cabby, another YouTuber sympathetic to Belfield, has cleared that up. He’s been in communication with him, and apparently he’s only been suspended for a fortnight, but it was because he had already had two strikes against him within a three month period before suffering the third complaint resulting in his suspension. The Blackbelt Barrister, a YouTube legal expert, has also weighed in on the case. Citing expert legal opinion on the 2003 Information Act, the Barrister states that, in the opinion of the judicial authorities, the Act should only be used against communications that physically threaten a person’s safety or which stir up racial hatred. They should not be used to chill personal opinion or censor offensive views, even if those views make someone feel uncomfortable.

This is fine, but I don’t think Belfield has actually been charged with anything under the Act. Belfield has been banned from YouTube because it’s a private company, as are the other internet platforms. As private companies they are quite within their rights to set their own terms and conditions and restrict what may be said on them. The right got very upset about all this a few years ago when they started being censored for issues like misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia and so on. Left-wingers, however, pointed out that this was simply private industry acting as a private company and not in the public interest. They also pointed out how ironic it was this had happened to the right, who are staunch supporters of private companies against state-owned industries. There were even demands from some that the government should set up a nationalised internet platform to allow a proper exchange of views without censorship. Which would be really ironic considering that the right is worried about government censorship and attacks on free speech rather than that by powerful corporations.

So what brought about Belfield’s ban? Well, it seems from another post by the Gabby Cabby that it was a complaint against Belfield by Carol Vorderman because of his comments about her ‘assets’. The Cabby stated it was unclear whether this was about her property, or something rather more personal. Quite.

Belfield has regularly criticised the former Countdown star along with a number of other celebrities including Katie Price and Philip Schofield. This includes comments on her home or homes as well as more personal remarks about how she has apparently enhanced her bosom to retain the attention of the jaded public. He’s satirised her as a character ‘Carol Vordernorks’ in drag with fake breasts and a thick Brummie accent. I’ve never found this to be funny and it’s really just personal abuse. My sympathies in this instance are very firmly with Vorderman. I don’t know her, but she’s always come across as perfectly genial and polite on TV, and is herself an extremely intelligent woman. Not only does she have a degree in engineering from Oxford, but she’s also a pilot and a patron of the air cadets. She’s also active trying to get more people, especially girls, into science and flight, and has done her bit supporting the RAF. I really don’t know what Belfield has against her, as it doesn’t seem like there’s the same kind of personal feud he apparently has with the BBC and its producers, and the presenter Jeremy Vine, which have seen him involved in a legal battle over the past few years.

Belfield himself has thanked YouTube for paying for his house and giving him a livelihood, and claims his shows about the country are now sold out. He states that he will come back, but is going to launch a ‘secret VOR channel’ on the 28th of this month. This seems to confirm rumours that he’s about to vanish behind a paywall.

Belfield has some very right-wing views, some of which I regard as particularly dangerous. Like his demands that the NHS should be privatised, although in a video he made shortly before he was banned he urged people not to give to the NHS, because this would tell Johnson that we can be charged, ‘and then we’re all f***ed’. I wonder what he thinks will happen if he gets his way and the NHS is privatised. I am well aware that there are members of this blog who heartily despise Belfield. I watch some of his videos because he says openly what the rest of the right doesn’t, but who share his attitudes. And I do share his opposition to the transgender craze, but not trans people, which is causing real suffering to mentally and emotionally vulnerable young people. I firmly believe that some youngster are being misdiagnosed and put on a long course of medical treatment and physical transformation predominantly for ideological reasons and against their best interests. Some of the children now identified as transgender seem to be gay and come from extremely homophobic backgrounds, so it looks like a form of gay conversion therapy. This can be compared to the situation in Iran, where gays are given the choice of transitioning to the opposite sex or execution. I realise that such gender critical views are controversial, but the science behind them, to this layman’s eyes, seems solid. There is considerable censorship of such views, including threats and personal violence. Therefore, on this score, I support Belfield for posting against the transgender craze even if I find some of his other views mistaken, offensive and dangerous.

And rather than seeing anyone banned, I would prefer that people instead showed their opposition by blogging against them and winning arguments. I would rather have this done to make their views unpopular rather than censorship.

Because there are too many attempts already to censor what we can say with the Tories doing their best to outlaw public demonstrations against their monstrous policies.