Mike reported a little while ago that the Tories were going ahead with their plans to demand photographic identification of voters at polling stations before allowing people to cast their votes. This is supposedly to cut down on voting fraud, despite the fact that actual instances are so low they’re negligible. Of course, the people who will find it most difficult to produce such identification will be students and the poor. Which is why the Tories are introducing it.
It’s another trick they’ve learned from the American Republicans, who introduced similar legislation over there. It prevents the poor, students and Blacks – the demographics mostly likely to vote Democrat – from being able to vote. And such tricks to stop working class radicals and Blacks from voting have a long history in America. All the way back to the Populist movement in the 1890s. This was a left-wing movement of America’s rural poor against exploitation by the great landlords. Bhaskar Sankara gives a brief description of it, and its fall, in his book The Socialist Manifesto. He writes
But ferment was growing in rural America. The Populist Movement sprang from the 1870s struggles of indebted farmers in central Texas but soon spread throughout the country. As the price of cotton collapsed and the economy entered a depression in the 1890s, the Populists fervently supported Debs during the Pullman Strike, backed many demands made by labor, and were leading tenant and sharecropper efforts against the crop-lien system. Populist leader Tom Watson challenged white and black farmers to organise across racial lines, telling a crowd, “You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system that beggars both.”
In 1892, the movement formed a national political party around a progressive platform that called for a graduated income tax, nationalised railways, debt relief, and public works to combat unemployment. Planter elites responded with a campaign of electoral fraud and violence, including the lynching of hundreds of organisers, while the Democratic Party came to co-opt much of the movement’s platform in 1896. After the pro-Populist Democrat William Jennings Bryant’s election loss that year, the movement fell apart. Legislative efforts to disenfranchise blacks through poll taxes and biased “literacy tests” were expanded, helping prevent another multi-racial movement from emerging for decades. (pp. 163-4).
That’s the tactics of the Right. Keep whites and blacks attacking each other, so that they don’t unite against the system that’s oppressing both, and bring in laws to disqualify Blacks and the White poor from voting. The Tories also do both. But they haven’t yet started lynching members of the Labour party. So far, that’s been left to the far right. Thomas Mair and his assassination of Labour MP Jo Cox. Then there are the crazed Brexiteers who screamed at Anna Soubry that she was a traitor, and who took a model gibbet to their protests outside parliament, and the Nazi, homophobic thugs who beat up Owen Jones.
Perhaps after the Tories have introduced voter ID and similar legislation, they’ll bring back lynching as well. They’ve encouraged people to beat up the disabled already.
More evidence that the Tories are actually going down in the polls, not up. A day or so ago the papers were all running stories claiming that Labour were revising their election strategy following polls predicting that they faced being beaten by the Tories at the coming election. Yesterday’s Metro followed the rest of them in this with the article ‘Labour ‘hits reset button’ after grim poll warning’ by Dominic Yeatman. But a closer reading of the article showed that things were quite so rosy for the party of lies, racism, bigotry, poverty, starvation and death. It stated that the poll by YouGov showed that the Tories were leading in 43 of the 76 Labour constituencies they were targeting. But in most of these the lead was by less than 5 per cent.
It also predicted that the Lib Dem’s share of the vote would fall from 20 to 13, and that Anna Soubry, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Angela Smith would lose their seats.
First the Tory lead was 20 points, then it was ten, then seven, and now in most of the Labour seats they hope to take it’s below 5. Despite the prediction that they would win a majority of 68 seats, the trend for them is quite definitely down, not up.
Which is why, as Dr. Moderate demonstrated in his tweets about their election strategy, they’ve changed their tactics from attack to defence, trying to hold on to their seats instead of attacking Labour’s. And why they’re practically braking electoral law by sending begging letters full of lies urging people to vote for them along with the postal votes in marginals.
Here’s an interesting little piece from today’s I for the 28th Mary 2019. Change UK came very much bottom of the poll in the Euro elections this Thursday, and the recriminations have started. Anna Soubry as criticised her party leader, Heidi Allen, for telling people to vote tactically. She considers that Allen was effectively telling them not to vote for their party.
The article by David Hughes, titled ‘Allen’s bizarre strategy hit votes, says Soubry’, on page 10, runs
Senior figures in Change UK were involved in a public row after the party formed by breakaway Tory and Labour MPs failed to win any MEPs.
Anna Soubry, the party’s Brexit spokeswoman, accused leader Heidi Allen of “bizarre” behaviour for suggesting their supporters engage in tactical voting.
Former Tory minister Ms Soubry said “over 600,000 people went and voted for us, a genuinely new party”, which was an “extremely good” result, she claimed.
But she criticised Ms Allen, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today: “I think it is rather bizarre for an interim leader on the eve of a poll to tell people essentially not to vote for their party.” Mocking the leader, she added: “Let’s engage now in big, grown up politics.”
Former Tory MP Ms Allen acknowledged that her party needed to learn from what went wrong in the European Parliament elections before the next general election.
I caught a snippet of one of the female members of Change UK talking on the Beeb the other day comparing her party’s performance with that Farage’s Brexit. She said that Brexit’s success wasn’t surprising, as it wasn’t really a new party. It was simply another vehicle for Nigel Farage and his campaign against the EU. Which is exactly true. It’s simply another version of UKIP when it was under Nigel Farage’s leadership, complete with the racism, anti-environmentalism, anti-feminism, planned destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. All of which the female speaker for Change UK didn’t mention, probably because they’re also mostly policies shared by the Tories, Blairite Labour and Change UK, with the possible exception of the anti-feminism.
She then complained that Change UK really was a genuinely new party, trying a different type of politics. A politics that was no confined to party interests. Here she was utterly wrong. There was absolutely nothing new about Change UK. It was the same old Thatcherite neoliberalism, still demanding austerity, the privatisation of the NHS and the destruction of the welfare state. It very happily continued the existing system of parliamentary corruption by working for the interests of its rich, corporate donors, instead of the British electorate. That’s why it was registered as a private company, rather than a political party, so that they could hide their accounts. It was, unlike the Tories, pro-Remain, and tried to dress up its solid hostility to policies that would genuinely improving conditions for working people by claiming that it was somehow centrist and non-partisan. Which is what the Lib Dems have also been saying for decades. And many people would have been put off voting for Change UK because of their selfish rejection of democratic principle by refusing to hold by-elections in their constituencies after they switched parties.
The simple fact is that Change UK is a party no-one wants and practically no-one voted for. But they really can’t accept that, and so have to carry on with all this rubbish about being a brave, new party and finding someone they blame for a defeat all of them deserved. I doubt, however, that the recriminations and backbiting are going to stop here. Time to get the popcorn in and watch as they melt down!
On Wednesday Mike put up another piece reporting and commenting on Corbyn’s departure on a meeting Tweezer had called between the party leaders. He walked out when Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna of The Independent Group walked in. The lamestream media were spinning this as a fit of pique on Corbyn’s part. In fact, as Mike and the peeps he quotes on Twitter pointed out, Corbyn was quite right: TINGe shouldn’t have been there. They’re not a party, and their inclusion in the talks was a calculated insult. Labour stated that Corbyn walked out as the talks were supposed to be bilateral, and Tweezer had changed the format from what had been previously agreed. And Mike and the Tweeters also weren’t impressed with Tweezer’s decision to hold a press conference later that evening at which she said zero that was new or even interesting. Many of them made the point that she’s now an utterly spent force, with no authority whatsoever. It’s about time she left and there was a general election.
There are other reasons why Corbyn was quite right to walk out on them. Firstly, they’re a danger to democracy. As has been said, they ain’t a party but a private corporation. This means that they don’t have to display their accounts as proper parties are supposed to, and so we don’t know who’s funding them. Donald Trump is under investigation in America of being a stooge for Putin. By the same logic, it’s entirely proper to ask if TINGe are also in the pay of a foreign government. And it is not remotely anti-Semitic to ask if that government is Israel, considering that their official have conspired to undermine the British cabinet, Zionist groups within the Labour party that are hostile to Corbyn, such as Labour Friends of Israel, have received funding from them and the Israeli government has an entire ministry, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs under cabinet minister Gilad Elon devoted to spreading propaganda, including most particularly accusations of anti-Semitism, against perceived opponents of Israel.
The question of funding also concerns potentially corrupt relationships between ministers and government officials and industry in this country. New Labour, and John Major’s government before it, became notorious for ‘sleaze’, in which private industry received favours from the government in return for sponsoring them. George Monbiot described the situation under Blair’s Labour party, and the holding of government posts by various leading industrialists in his book, Captive State. By keeping their accounts secret, it appears that TINGe are determined to go on in this manner. In America, the corporatist corruption of Congress has proceeded to such an extent that Americans have lost faith in their politicians’ willingness to represent them, and a study published by Harvard University stated that as a result America was no longer a fully functioning democracy.
Furthermore, TINGe also aren’t a genuine political party in that they have no mass membership nor any mechanism for allowing one to decide party policy. Just as they don’t really have policies. Except, of course, that Chris Leslie and the voting records of the others have made it very clear that they stand for all the neoliberal, anti-welfare policies of the Tories, including tuition fees and not raising taxes on the rich. They’ve also said that they would go into a supply and confidence relationship with Tweezer if the DUP pulled out of theirs.
It’s also been suggested by commenters on alternative media that they intend to try to discipline the Labour party and pull it in a rightward direction from outside, at the very moment that the country’s political mood as a whole is going left. TINGe have promised that they will open up their books sometime in the future, but this is just promises. As it stands, by incorporating themselves as a business, not a party, they have made themselves literally unaccountable as a political movement.
TINGe thus represent nothing so much as a Blairite splinter group, determined to shore up the Tories from outside. Just like Blairites in the local parties tried to get Conservatives and Lib Dems to join in order to oust Corbyn in the Labour leadership elections. Corbyn was right to see the political trap and walk. As for the meeting itself, I doubt Tweezer was going to say anything of value whatsoever. She didn’t when she called an earlier meeting of the leaders of the other political parties before. She didn’t listen to them, just harangued them about how they should vote for her deal. I doubt anything changed this time.
Tweezer and TINGe are an affront to democracy. We need a general election to get rid of both of them.
I found this short video by Mark Braithwaite on his channel over on YouTube. It’s just under two minutes long, and is of Ann Soubry being told by her constituents exactly what they think of her for leaving the Tories and not holding a bye-election. They ask her why, if she believes in democracy so much, she doesn’t hold a bye-election. One tells her that he thinks she only left because she wasn’t in the cabinet. Another tells her that while she thinks she’s a rebel, she isn’t. She is also told that she is showing disrespect to her constituents for not holding a bye-election, because they didn’t vote for her as an Independent, they voted for her as a Tory. And she’s also disrespecting the 17.5 million people, who voted to Leave by demanding a second referendum on Brexit.
It’s all rather amusing. And I can quite believe that her motivation for leaving the Tories is frustrated ambition. A Labour MP yesterday said he believed that Chuka Umunna hadn’t left Labour for any better or nobler reason than that. He departed because he knew he would never be the party’s leader.
But Soubry doesn’t seem to have left the Tories at all. Not in her heart. According to a recent post by the Angry Yorkshireman over at Another Angry Voice, she’s said that she still intends to campaign for the Tories. And she and Umunna also believe she should be allowed to go back to the Tory party when she wishes, and that it’s terrible that the Tories won’t have her. Which shows how utterly inept Umunna would have been as a Labour leader, if he believes it’s acceptable for a member of his political grouping to campaign for a rival party. See https://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com/2019/02/chuka-umunna-thinks-ex-tory-members-of.html
The Independents are quickly showing themselves to be an absolute farce. And I don’t doubt that they’ll be gone at the next election. And good riddance!
In this 20 minute long video from Novara Media, presenter Aaron Bastani utterly demolishes the new ‘Independent’ grouping of MPs. He shows that rather than being any kind of new politics, they are simply the old, Blairite and Tory politics neoliberal politics. They are radically out of tune with what people really want, especially millennials, who have left much worse off than the preceding generation by the same politics the Blairites and Tories were pushing. And they’re being promoted by the media because they represent the old style of politics the media like: austerity with a smiley face.
Labour MPs All Going Before They’re Pushed
Bastani begins the video by describing how the departure of the seven Labour MPs – Gavin Shuker, Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Ann Coffee, Luciana Berger, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, who left to form the Independents – wasn’t actually a surprise. They were all loud critics of Corbyn, and almost all of them had been subject to motions of ‘no confidence’ or were facing deselection. They were then joined the next day by Joan Ryan, another critic of Corbyn, who had also lost a ‘no confidence’ motion. They were then joined the day after that by Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston from the Tories, who complained about the old, ‘broken’ politics of Labour versus Tories.
Independents Not Democratic, and Not a Political Party
The Independents, however, aren’t a political party as such. Which means that they don’t get the Short Money given to opposition parties. This could add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. They also don’t have to conform to the same standards as proper political parties, although they claim that they will try to do so as best they can. They also don’t have a membership. You can give them your name and contact details, and make a donation, but there is no mechanism for creating a mass organisation where the membership can determine policy. It’s a private organisation more than a political party. But what concerns Bastani the most is that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, because this would ‘crush democracy’. It’s doublespeak, and the truth is that they don’t want bye-elections because they’d lose.
Angela Smith’s Racism
He then goes on to describe how the seven founding ex-Labour members claim that they were driven out of the party by its racism, only for Angela Smith to say within hours the most racist thing he’s ever heard a politician say on television. To show how badly their launch went, Bastani produces some viewing figures. On the Monday the video of their launch had 75,000 views on Twitter. The video of Angela Smith’s apology got 700,000 views. But the video of Smith making her racist comments got even more – 1.5 million views. And while the Mirror and the Guardian wanted to splash on a video by Tom Watson, which got 500 shares on Facebook, Novara’s video of their own Ash Sarkar showing the corruption at the heart of the group – she challenged smith on her chairmanship of a parliamentary group supporting water privatisation, funded largely by the water companies – got 200,000 views. Chris Leslie then appeared later on the Beeb to sort this out. Where once again he talked about their love of democracy. A love so strong, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, thus disenfranchising the hundreds of thousands of people, who voted for these 11 MPs. They claimed to be anti-racist, but set a new record by being racist ‘pretty much by lunchtime’.
People More Politically Engaged, Not Less
But their fundamental principle is that people don’t want Labour or Tory, but what Labour used to be 15 years ago. But at the 2017 election, 82 per cent of the population voted for either of the two main parties – Tories or Labour. That was the highest percentage the parties had since 1979. In 2010 only 65 per cent of the public voted Labour or Tory. The idea that people are turning away from the two main parties when there is a clear choice, socialism or neoliberalism, isn’t true. And the claim that people are disengaged from politics doesn’t stand up either. Voter turn-out was higher in the 2017 election, just as it was higher during the Scottish reference in 2014, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Which was the biggest democratic exercise in British history. More people voted in that than in any previous general election or referendum. And Labour now has more than 500,000 members – more than it has had in a generation. The same is true for the SNP. More people are members of political parties now than at any point in Bastani’s lifetime. And if people genuinely do want centrist politics, how is it that the Lib Dems, who got only 8 per cent of the vote in 2015, got even less in 2017? This was despite the ‘media Einsteins’ telling us all that they would do well against the two main parties in a Brexit election. It’s almost as if, says Bastani, that the media don’t know what they’re talking about when they claim to know what the public wants.
Labour Policies Massively Popular
And then there are the policy issues. Labour’s policies are very popular. They’re right at the top of the list of why people voted Labour. But they don’t want to imitate these popular policies. Chris Leslie in an interview with New Scientist said he didn’t want a top tax rate of 50 per cent. That’s not a Corbynite policy, it’s one of Gordon Brown’s. He was also against stopping tuition fees and rejects the renationalisation of the railways, both extremely popular policies. These aren’t just popular with Labour voters, but also with Tories and Lib Dems. And polls conducted by IPPR And Sky News did polls at the end of last year which showed clear majorities of the British public wanting the Bank of England to keep house prices down and a minimal presence, at least, of workers on company boards. People don’t want centrist policies. They’re moving left, as shown on poll after poll.
Millennials Left-Wing because of Neoliberalism
And there’s a clear generational difference. At the last Labour split in 1981 when the SDP was formed, there was a clear movement to the right and post-war socialist policies had become unpopular. And yet when this split happened, the Economist carried an article decrying the popularity of socialism amongst millennials both in America and Britain. This meant ‘Generation Z’ young people, who want the government to address climate change as a fundamental part of 21st century politics. And these millennials despised the Tories, as shown by footage of an anti-Tory march. These are going to be the voters of the 2020s. And they’re not going to be bought off. They’re not left-wing because of something the read in a book, or because they want to be countercultural. They’re left-wing because their living standards and expectations are lower than their parents, they have a less expansive welfare state, they’re going to have higher levels of debt and earn less, and they will have to deal with systemic crises like demographic aging and climate change. They rightly feel that they’re screwed over. And the idea that these same people are going to agree with Chris Leslie’s idea of politics is probably the stupidest thing you’ll hear this year. And this is only February.
The Failure of Centrist Parties in France, America, Italy, Spain and Canada
But since 2015 centrist politicians have been hammered in election like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Emmanuel Macron in France was hailed as the saviour of French centrism, despite only taking 24 per cent of the vote in the first round. Now he’s the most unpopular president in French history after months of protests by the gilets jaunes, which have been met with tear gas attacks by the gendarmes, which have left people losing their eyes and their lives. Then there’s Matteo Renzi of the Partito Democratico, the Democratic Party, the Italian sister party to Britain’s Labour. In 2014 they took 42 per cent of the vote. But he was out within two years, having lost a referendum by 20 points. And in the last election the party lost half of their senators, leaving Italy governed by the Five Star Movement and the far-right Liga. Then there’s the example of the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez. The PSOE is the Spanish equivalent of the Labour party. He’s also suffered mass protests and this week Spain called new general elections, which his party are certain to lose. Centrism is not popular in Europe or America, so the Independents have to turn to Canada’s Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau is now less popular in his country than Donald Trump in the US. Not that the media pushing ‘centrism’ will tell you this.
The Centrist Real Policy: More Austerity
The unpopularity of centrist politics is due to the fact that they still haven’t solved the problems of global capitalism created by the 2008 crash. They believed that financialisation would create the economic growth that would support public services. But financialisation hasn’t created growth since 2008. And as they can’t create prosperity and tackle income inequality, all they’ve have to give us is austerity ‘with a nice smiley face’.
Labour Splitters against Iraq Inquiry, For Welfare Cuts
And not only do the eight former Labour MPs have Brexit in common, they also voted against an independent inquiry into Iraq. A million people have been affected by the war, along with those, who suffered under ISIS, and Iranian influence has expanded across the Middle East. The idea that Iraq is irrelevant is not only absurd, it is a disgrace. People have died, and it has made an already volatile region even more so. And Britain is directly responsible. The former Labour MPs also abstained on the vote of welfare reform before Corbyn came to power. They do not stand for a moral foreign policy, or for a more just social system at home.
Their politics are a mixture of careerism and opportunism, and their opposition to Brexit actually makes a new deal more likely. They are driven by fundamental democratic principles, but won’t stand for a bye-election. No members, no policies, no party democracy, no vision. Bastani states that this isn’t the future of politics, it’s the past, and the worst aspects at that. He looks forward to sensible people joining them, because they’re going to be found out sooner or later. And if we want to establish the primacy of socialist ideas, he says, then bring it on.
Here’s another cheering little video, although unfortunately it is from the Grauniad so you will have to hold your nose. It’s of Jeremy Corbyn at the rally in Broxtowe really putting the boot into the Labour defectors. He says what they really stand for: austerity and protecting the rich against the poor.
The video begins with Corbyn saying that he’s very sad at the people, who’ve left the party. He says this to them, that on June 2017 he was elected on a manifesto, a manifesto that promised to end austerity. A manifesto that promised to end student fees. A manifesto that promised to bring into public ownership rail, mail, and water. It was a manifesto that was to be transformative for the lives of people of this country. And so when the media talk about the bravery of those who walk away, Anna Soubry voted for austerity and said it was a good thing. Almost immediately after leaving, Chris Leslie tells us that we should not be ending university fees, we should not be increasing corporation tax for the rich of this country, we should be cutting corporation tax and increasing the burden on others. He then shouts,
‘I tell you what, the Labour party believes in equality and justice. That was what was at the centre of our manifesto, and that is what will be at the centre of the next manifesto, whenever that election comes.’
He then goes on to talk about the increase in the Labour vote at the 2017 election, which was the biggest in any election since 1945. That was because the party campaigned, the community campaigned, people got together and started talking about politics, about life, about how our society could be run. It wasn’t the old transactional politics, but the new involved politics of the future. And what’s different about Labour is the membership is three times bigger, but it’s also much more involved, much more involved with the communities, and it is those communities and those members that will be making the policies that will write the manifestos for the future.
Absolutely. And it’s because Labour’s policies are inspiring, and that the party is empowering people, that Red Tories like Berger and Leslie have joined true blue Tories like Soubry. And they and the media are attacking Corbyn and smearing him as an anti-Semite, because they have nothing else to use. Their policies are old, outmoded and massively unpopular. It’s time they, and the Tories themselves, were gone.
Here’s an antidote to all the ant-Corbyn smears and propaganda by the Tories, the media and the ‘Independents’. It’s this two and a half minute video put up by Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver of a Labour party rally for Corbyn in Broxtowe.
The video shows the immense crowds there, and the banner for East Midlands Labour Party. Mark asks one of the ladies speaking there what she thinks of Anna Soubry, the austerity supporting former Tory, who joined the Independents the other day. The lady replies
‘She’s a Tory! She’s a Tory! The new Independent grouping has cuddled up to Tories. What do they think they’re doing? All their doing is propping up the Tory government. It’s disgraceful.’
She’s not alone in condemning them. Another woman says ‘Anna Soubry’s resigned from her party so we’re looking forward to a bye-election and getting some in place, who can sort out the problems around here. The cuts have had a detrimental effect on elderly people, on schools – I’m a teacher’ A young woman says that the party needs to pull together and get behind Corbyn. They should be fighting the Tory government, not among themselves. What is important is to get a socialist into No. 10.
A young man appears, who says that he thinks it really is important that there should be a bye-election, and that Anna Soubry should do the right thing. She has no mandate to represent people on the new basis here. An Asian gent says it’s nothing to do with politics. Soubry should resign and have a bye-election. Mark asks him why he thinks she won’t resign. He replies that it’s because she wants to stay and a hold on to power.
The video then moves on to show the first lady on the podium telling the crowd that the Independents are wrong, and they just don’t care. They would rather see a Tory government than a real, socialist Labour government. They would rather support the politics of austerity, the draining of our public services of the money that they need. They would rather see the bitterness and appalling unfairness of Universal Credit.
The video then goes to an elderly White man, who says that it’s a continuation of what Thatcher started, and it’s got even worse. He thought Thatcher was bad enough, but… And then he shakes his head, saying ‘I don’t know what’s really happening.’
The video then moves back to show the first lady telling the crowd ‘Stand tall! Stand firm! Be proud! Our future is coming and it is coming soon! I introduce to you the next prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn!’ There is rapturous applause.
Back to the elderly gent, who says, ‘Corbyn – they’re frightened of him. And they’re frightened of all the their privileges and wealth dwindled away’.
The video ends with a picture of Chunky Mark with a cardboard placard reading ‘2019: Get Rid of the Tories’.
Absolutely! Get rid of them both within and without the Labour party!
This is another great video from left-wing YouTuber Gordon Dimmack expertly taking apart the new, Independent group of MPs, the Tory splitters who have joined them, and how they signal a possible return to politics of Tony Blair.
Yeah. Him. That monster. The man who killed Iraq.
He begins his video by talking about how he’s already done several other pieces on the Independents already. He points out that they aren’t a party, but a private company, and that this means that they don’t have to reveal their donors. They have, however, suggested that they might, just might, reveal the identities of people giving them over £7,500. He also says again that Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s remark that it might be racist or anti-Semitic to suggest, as Ruth George did, that the party’s funded by Israel is itself anti-Semitic. And he goes on to state that it’s obvious what the Independents are doing, considering who has just joined them: Joan Ryan.
He discusses how Ryan was accused of fabricating an accusation of anti-Semitism at a Labour party member in 2016, despite herself criticizing Jeremy Corbyn for anti-Semitism. He points his viewers to the Al-Jazeera documentary, ‘The Lobby’ and an accompanying article about it on the Electronic Intifada. Ryan was filmed by an undercover reporter fabricating her accusation against a pro-Palestinian activist, Jean Fitzpatrick, at the 2016 Labour party conference. The documentary also revealed Ryan discussing a million pounds of funding the Labour Friends of Israel were getting from Israel for junkets there with Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot. And six of the eight, who have split off from Labour were members of the LFI. The report also said that Ryan had said to him that she talked to Masot ‘most days’. This who Joan Ryan represents – not her constituency, but Israel. And by extension that’s who the Independent group also is. He’s sees no reason why anyone should have apologise for that.
Dimmack also angrily points out that Fitzpatrick, the woman smeared, had her membership suspended. She was later readmitted, but no apology was given. Ryan herself was totally unrepentant. Dimmack then angrily points out to the Labour party that if they allow this to happen – which it has, repeatedly – then people like him won’t join. He also asks the BBC if they don’t think that they should also discuss how Ryan falsely accused another Labour member of anti-Semitism in the two articles that they wrote about Ryan the day Dimmack posted his video, articles in which she continued making her claims about anti-Semitism. He states that not doing so is clear bias, and it’s not towards a party, but to another country.
He then moves on to talk about the three Tory splitters – Sarah Wollaston, Anna Soubry and Heidi Allen. Wollaston is fairly quiet, and generally toed the Tory party line. But she astonished people in January by tabling an amendment which, if it had gone through, would have resulted in a second referendum. So she’s pro-People’s Vote and a Remainer. Like Chuka Umunna. Heidi Allen is also a Remainer, as is Anna Soubry, who can’t open her mouth without saying ‘People’s Vote’. He plays a clip of a reporter asking the Tory splitter if the honourable thing wouldn’t be for them to call a bye-election. They respond by telling him that, no, they don’t think it would, because they think the British people are sick of elections. He points out how colossally hypocritical this is, when they want a second referendum after another the first, in 2016, which hasn’t been implemented yet.
He then posts up Anna Soubry’s ‘Bloody horrible’ voting record as published on a Tweet by Dave Ward. She was
For the Bedroom Tax
For reducing corporation tax
For £9,000 tuition fees.
For phasing out secure life tenancies
Against investigating the Gulf War
Against a banker’s bonus tax
Against increasing a tax on earnings over £150,000.
Ward says in his tweet: Any former Labour MP prepared to welcome someone with this record into their new party was never a Labour MP to begin with.
Dimmack says this comment applies to all seven of the Labour defectors. And their ‘centre’ party isn’t centre, it’s centre-right. He then puts up a picture of this voting bloc from Red Resistance, another tweeter, and comments that if this is the starting 11, how crappy must the subs bench be like? They’re also trying to get two other MPs to join them. One is Ian Austin, whom Dimmack wrongly identifies as a Tory, an MP who is currently suspended on a charge of sexual harassment. They’re already a laughing stock, now they want a creepy pervert to join them. And they also want Stephen Kinnock to join them, but this guy’s holding back, because his wife will probably say ‘No’. Dimmack then plays a video of Kinnock looking absolutely dismayed when the Labour party under Corbyn got 266 seats with Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ playing.
He then criticizes Lucian Borgia, I mean, Berger for her accusations of anti-Semitism. He admits that she has suffered genuine anti-Semitic abuse, for which two people have been to prison. But she points it in the wrong direction, towards Jeremy Corbyn, the most anti-racist MP in parliament. And the most pathetic thing about her is that she was parachuted into the safest of safe seats in Liverpool in 2005. When she was going out with Euan Blair. He thanks Craig Murray for highlighting that little fact.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it can. Because there are rumours that Tony Blair will return to politics to lead it. And here he shows a photograph of Blair, with black irises in his eyes, looking absolutely evil in front of pile of human skulls. As an aside, he also mentions that when Chuka Umunna was asked which of Labour’s policies he disagreed with, he couldn’t name one. Dimmack declares that the Independents are a joke, and the only way he can see them getting through it is if Tony Blair comes back in a year or two’s time and stands to lead them.
Dimmack briefly returns to the point that the Independents are a company, not a party, so we don’t know who their donors are, but thanks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy, it’s anti-Semitic to say it could be Israel. And then he returns to the possibility of Blair returning to politics. He says that someone left it in a comment to one of his videos the previous day, and when he looked into it, he found others were taking it very seriously. And the possibility of this occurring gave him nightmares. Blair is a ‘fr***ing war criminal’, he says, but considering how awful the rest of them are, ‘a war criminal might fit right in’.
It’s a nice summation of how ridiculous, evil and pernicious the Independents are. But I think he missed the point about people not joining the Labour party because of the lack of consequences for those making false accusations of anti-Semitism. I think it is being done precisely to stop people like Dimmack joining, by a Blairite clique that is still in control of the party bureaucracy. Just as I follow Mike’s post today about Derek Hatton’s suspension from the Labour party for anti-Semitism being no accident. It’s another attempt to discourage genuine leftists, concerned with Israel’s brutality, from joining.
Yesterday, a group of three MPs, Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen and Anna Soubry, defected from the Tory party to join the Independent corporation, that had split from Labour.
At their press conference they gave three reasons why they had left. Heidi Allen said she was disgusted with the suffering the party had inflicted and its lack of benevolence. For Sarah Wollaston, it was the harm the Tories had done to the manufacturing industry. And for Anna Soubry it was the way her former party had wrecked the country with their massively inept handling of Brexit. Or it might have been Wollaston, who was most concerned about Brexit, and Soubry about the destruction of Britain’s manufacturing sector under the Tories. This is how the reasons for their departure was presented on one of the short videos on YouTube, although I got the impression from listening to Heidi Allen speaking on the 45 minute long video of their press conference put out by Channel 4 News that she was also concerned about Brexit and the attack on manufacturing, as she also ran her own manufacturing firm.
The Tories, who had previously been gleefully exploiting Chuka Umunna and company’s split from the Labour party, were left outraged in their turn. Hunt gave a speech saying how much he regretted the departure of such valued colleagues. Other Tory functionaries demanded that the Splitters should now call a bye-election. Just like the real supporters and activists in the Labour party have been demanding Umunna and his coteries of bitter Blairites do.
I don’t know how sincere Allen and her two colleagues are about the suffering caused by the Tory party. She made a number of speeches saying how upset she was by the suffering caused by her former party’s wretched welfare reforms, but voted for them all the same. So in her case it was, as Mike pointed out, a case of crocodile tears. She may be genuine, and that after years of dutifully following the party line her conscience has won at last. Or it may simply be that, like some other Tories, she’s just worried that the electorate will punish the Tories for the misery they’ve inflicted at the next election.
I think the three’s statement that they’re concerned about British manufacturing and the devastating effects of Brexit are rather more genuine. Margaret Thatcher and Blair in his turn ignored the manufacturing sector. One members of Thatcher’s cabinet, who was the only member in it from that sector of the economy, described how he couldn’t get Thatcher to understand that a strong pound would harm British manufacturing by making our products more expensive. She also uncritically accepted as an article of her neoliberal, free market dogma, that failing firms and industries should be allowed to go under, and should not be given government assistance. Which contrasted with Labour’s promotion of the National Enterprise Boards and state assistance for British industry, where the government would help firms acquire plant and equipment.
And as a good Thatcherite, Blair also adopted her destructive attitude to British industry. He was also quite happy to see British manufacturing collapse. Instead, its place at the heart of the British economy would be taken by the financial sector and the service industries. Deanne Julius, a leading official at the Bank of England, recruited from America, actually said that Britain should give up its manufacturing industry, and simply concentrate on the service industries.
The result has been that vast swathes of traditional British industry have been destroyed by Thatcherism, including mining. Which was done simply to destroy the miners’ union, so they could never overthrow a Tory government as they had Heath’s. However, as Ha Joon-Chang has shown in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, manufacturing is still an extremely important part of the British economy. It looks weak simply because it hasn’t expanded as much as the other sectors of the British economy. But if it went, the British economy would collapse completely.
As for Brexit, the past few weeks have seen company after company leave the UK because of the Tory party’s incompetence. They’re leaving because we haven’t reached a trade agreement with EU, and so the tariff barriers that will be erected after Britain leaves will make it difficult for them to sell their products after our departure. The latest firm to announce it was closing down its British plant has been Honda in Swindon. When this goes, so do 3,500 jobs.
But I doubt that this will concern those in the Tory party demanding a hard Brexit, like the odious Jacob Rees-Mogg. The financial sector has also been hit, with various banks and international financial regulators announcing that they will leave Britain for Dublin, Paris and the Netherlands. But this doesn’t seem to dismay Mogg and his comrades. They seem to be all financiers, who make their money through investing in companies around the world. And so the destruction of the British manufacturing sector simply doesn’t affect them. They’ll get their money anyway.
The Tory party is seriously split over Brexit. It was to call the Eurosceptics’ bluff that Cameron called the referendum in the first place. He was so confident that people would vote ‘remain’ that he didn’t do any proper campaigning. The result was that he was astonished when the ‘Leave’ vote prevailed. But I gather that the Tories were on the edge of splitting years before, when Tony Blair was in power. Blair stole their policies, and indeed moved further right than the Tories had dared. The party was also split between the Tory paternalists and Thatcherites, and the rural sector, which believed that British agriculture and country communities were being ignored. I’ve heard it said that if Brown had won the 2010 election, the Tories would have collapsed completely, and would have tried to rebrand themselves instead as the English Nationalists. This has the ring of truth, as I do remember one opinion piece in the Heil actually recommending that the party thus rename itself.
I hope that the departure of Allen, Wollaston and Soubry will spark a series of other defections from the Tories and bring about the party’s much-need demise. It’s brought nothing but misery and poverty to Britain’s working people since Thatcher came to power in 1979. And even if the party doesn’t collapse completely, I want there to be so many defections that at the least it causes the collapse of May’s vile, malignant, destructive government.
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