One of the issues regarding hate speech and racism that is particularly worrying some Christian groups is the definition of islamophobia that has been taken up by Labour and the other left-wing parties from the Lib Dems to the Greens. It’s been adopted by something like 62 local authorities, and with the Labour party apparently set to win the general election later this year, there are fears that they will make it national policy. This declares that ‘islamophobia is rooted in racism’ and seeks to ban prejudice or hostility towards Muslims based on their religion or ‘expressions of Muslimness’. The concern here is that it’s a blasphemy law by the back door as it does not distinguish between prejudice towards Muslims and dislike or criticism of the religion. I’ve said before now that I believe all ideologies and religions should be open to reasonable debate and criticism. But this is sharply curtailed in Islamic countries by blasphemy laws, such as that in Pakistan that carries the death penalty.
Mahyar Tousi in one of his vlogs has stated that islamophobia was formulated by the Ayatollah Khomeini when he was busy turning Iran into an Islamic republic. He could ban criticism of Islam there through the imposition of blasphemy laws, but was also determined to stop in the non-western world – what medieval Islam called the ‘dar al-harb’ or the Zone of War, as well. Hence he developed the idea of islamophobia as a form of racial prejudice. This was taken up in Britain by Trevor Philips, who now says he regrets having done so. I’ve more than enough problems with Tousi. He’s very right-wing, and seems to think that anyone to the left of the Tories is a Commie and is another who’s been telling the world that everyone supporting Gaza is an anti-Semite. But he is an ethnic Iranian and so I take some of what he says about Iran very seriously.
The most obvious criticism about the definition of islamophobia is its claim that prejudice against Islam or Muslims is ‘rooted in racism’. Islam isn’t a race. It’s a religion. The global nature of the religion means that there are White, Black and Asian Muslims, and the religion is not itself immune to racism. Although the adoption of Islam by African kings led to a positive attitude by the Arabs, as shown in books with titles like On the Excellence of the Blacks, the enslavement of Black Africans also created racial prejudice against them, very similar to the racist stereotypes that arose in the Christian west following the emergence of transatlantic slavery. During the war in the former Yugoslavia Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were racially extremely close. They were all White, as shown by a photograph of a group of blonde Bosnian Muslims leaving a mosque. Further north in Russia and, I think, the Baltic states, there are Muslim communities that have been there since the Middle Ages. I think they’re descended from central Asian Turkic tribes, who were pushed westward by the expansion of the Mongols. They’ve now been racially assimilated to the Slav and Baltic populations, as shown by a photo in one of the genuine Fascist rags back in the ’90s of a Lithuanian mullah. This man had blonde hair and blue eyes, as well as a splenetic hatred of the Jews, and so got glowing praise from Aryan supremacist nutjobs publishing the rag. One female Fascist in Mussolini’s Italy was heavily into Sufi mysticism, and so converted to Islam. In the ’90s there was a group of Fascists around Robert Pash, who were very impressed by Gadaffy’s Libya. In this century the BNP’s fuehrer, Nick Griffin, held a debate with the Islamist Anjem Chaudhary. To his surprise, Griffin got on very well with Chaudhary, as they both had similar views about the Jews. Islam got the legal status of a race in Britain following a ruling designed to protect the Sikhs from similar prejudice. The Sikh community, although very definitely largely South Asian, is composed of a number of different ethnic groups, all of which were vulnerable to prejudice because of their religion. After the Sikhs won their legal recognition as a single ethnic group based on their religion, the Muslims applied for a similar status. This is possibly based on the doctrine that all Muslims are members of a single ‘umma, or nation or community.
I don’t deny that Muslim people do need to be protected from prejudice and harassment, but the simplistic formulation of anti-Muslim prejudice makes genuine, necessary criticism of the religion and the behaviour and attitudes of some of its followers difficult. The burka is a case in point. It comes from a time and culture that stipulated that women should be confined to the home. They were not to mix with men who were not close relatives, and if they ventured out they should have to be accompanied by their husbands or another close male relative. Not all Muslim sects accepted its validity. I’ve read that the clause in the Quran demanding the veiling of women actually only demands that the bosom be covered. Nevertheless, when Boris Johnson wrote a piece in his newspaper column years ago attacking it, and comparing the women who wore it to ninjas and bin bags, he was justifiably accused of islamophobia, not least because abuse of women wearing it increased following its publication. On the other side of the Atlantic, a Canadian cartoonist was sued for islamophobia under the country’s hate speech laws because of a caricature he’d drawn a notorious female Islamist. He’d drawn in her in burka with only her eyes and glasses showing, declaring that she was going to sue someone else for prejudice so her husband could yet another Islamist training event. The subject of the cartoon sued on the grounds that it portrayed her in an islamophobic stereotype. This was despite the fact that whenever she did appear in public, in court or on television, she was always dressed in a burka.
And then there’s the issue of that mosque in Kethley, Yorkshire, whose members were sending death threats to a 14 year old autistic boy who scuffed a copy of the Quran. This, they declared, was islamophobic. It wasn’t. It showed disrespect for the Quran, and would have been a horrendous blasphemy in their eyes, but it was not a comment on Muslims as people. The shrieks of islamophobia served as an accusation of blasphemy. The police complied, and so turned up at a meeting of the mosque in question where the boy’s mother basically pleaded for her son’s life. The cops didn’t act on the mother’s side, and neither did the local authorities, possibly from fear that this would cause mass rioting across the Muslims world as happened when a Swedish man burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in fury at the Turks refusing to allow the country to join NATO. I’m also concerned for the safety of Christians from Muslim majority countries, who have moved here to escape real persecution in places like Pakistan. In the 1970s there was an influx of Christian Pakistanis, who allegedly came here to escape rioting against them in Pakistan after one of the newspapers printed a story about texts from the Quran being used on the wallpaper in a British restaurant. It’s unclear whether this story is true or not, as the sociologists who reported it weren’t able to verify it. But it seems more than plausible to me, given the religious rioting that has occurred more recently against Pakistani Christians.
I do not want genuine asylum seekers persecuted for their religious beliefs over here through religiously intolerant legislation passed under the guise of protecting Muslims from prejudice.
I found this video particularly interesting as a Bristolian. It’s a short piece, just over five minutes, looking at Stapleton Road in the Easton suburb of Bristol twenty years after it was dubbed Britain’s most dangerous road. The video looks at the local environment, noting the shops lining the street, the ranks of terraced housing and also remarking that some of the houses there would have been good quality, expensive properties in their time. It also shows the area’s parks and green spaces, frequented by urban foxes. Unfortunately, the buildings are covered with graffiti tagging, there’s extensive fly-tipping – the video shows mattresses and other rubbish dumped in side alleys and there are heroin needles just left lying around in the parks. The narrator says that it’s not as dangerous as it once was back in the ’90s and early 2000s, but he’s been told by locals that it’s dangerous to go out at night and people don’t feel safe during the day.
I think the area had been in its 19th century heyday an upper class, prosperous district that began to decline. When I was small we used to go to the dentist there. I don’t remember much about the place, except that it was more multicultural than some of the other areas of the city with a sizable south Asian and Black community. The video states, however, that Easton and Stapleton Road is less diverse than some of the other areas of Bristol. There was a newsagents/ sweetshop over the road, run by a Sikh chap, if I remember rightly, which we used to go in as a treat for going all that way into town to have our teeth looked at. There was also a church or a gospel hall, which used to put up the subjects for that Sunday’s sermons on posters just over the road from the dentists’, so that you could read them from the waiting room. I think there was also a motorcycle salesroom, which sold Japanese Jawa bikes. I can remember one day looking at the adverts for these and wondering if that was where George Lucas got the name for the little aliens in Star Wars. I can’t say I ever felt threatened in the area, though Mum later told me that she didn’t like going there because of the street walkers.
In the first years of this century the area seemed to have become much more dangerous. There were items on the local news about the number of murders, violent crimes and gun-related incidents there. At one time there was one of these just about every day. A woman from a charity helping refugee women appeared on local TV to say that every day they had a young man walk in there wielding a gun. I was on a bus going through Stapleton Road to UWE, where I was studying for a Master’s in history when I saw the armed police there with the rifles. This was about the same time Blair was visiting the city, so whether they were expecting trouble because of it is a good question. The police and experts on the local crime scene attributed the violence to the fact that the street was the front line between various drug gangs, one of which had moved there from London.
It’s a bit saddening watching the video, as looking at the housing and the parks it does look like it could be a pleasant place to live. And it’s not just the violent crime. It’s also the neglect, the casual dumping of rubbish and the graffiti scrawl. Some of the street art in Bristol is really great. The council organised a festival of it a few years ago, and there were some really superb paintings done on the buildings on one of the streets going from Union Street to the Centre. But this isn’t it. It just looks a mess. Bristol’s inner city, including most notoriously St Paul’s, has had a lot of problem: poverty, unemployment, drugs, crime and the marginalisation of the Black population. I think the council has done a lot to try and solve these problems. The video states that Stapleton Road isn’t as dangerous as it was, but is still quite dangerous. I would imagine, however, that areas in other cities, such as London, would probably be more dangerous. It’d be great if there were ways to solve the problems of places like this, but I don’t think there’s any quick fix that’ll solve them at a stroke. But I think much could be done if there was less unemployment. That might solve some of the hopelessness that makes some people turn to drugs and crime. But you’re not going to get that under Thatcherite neoliberalism.
It’s not just Open Britain that’s petitioning for Cruella de Braverman to be given the heave-ho – so is the anti-racist, anti-religious extremist organisation Hope Not Hate. So I’ve signed their petition as well.
‘Hi David,
It’s simple. Suella Braverman must go. Today we saw violent clashes as the far right, emboldened by the Home Secretary’s talk of “hate marches” and threats to the Cenotaph took to the streets, attacking the police and the media, and abusing passers by.
For months now, Braverman has been stoking the flames of division and hatred, and in doing so, emboldening the far right. She’s called multiculturalism a failure all while placing asylum seekers in dangerous and inappropriate accommodation in ill-prepared communities.
We are now calling for Suella Braverman to go. Either she resigns or the Prime Minister fires her. Whatever happens , it’s clear the situation has crossed a line – it cannot continue.
We aren’t the only ones saying this – the First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf said today, “The far right has been emboldened by the Home Secretary. She has spent her week fanning the flames of division. They are now attacking the police on Armistice Day. The Home Secretary’s position is untenable. She must resign.”
The Prime Minister might not have the guts to sack her, but we, the people, do.
Cruella Braverman unleashed a wave of outrage and condemnation today with her remarks about asylum seekers and scrapping the international convention on refugees. Elton John and gay rights groups were angry with her statement that homosexuality was not a good reason for claiming asylum, while anti-racist campaigners and left-wing activists were also furious about her wanting to take Britain out of the UN convention guaranteeing sanctuary to refugees. In making these claims, Cruella also made a number of untrue statements about the regulations governing asylum. I got this email this evening from the CEO of the pro-democracy movement Open Britain. Mr Kieran states that he used to work for the Home Office deciding asylum claims, during which he rejected many false claims by people who were really coming here for economic reasons. But he also granted asylum to many genuine victims of persecution, some of whose tales are very harrowing.
‘WARNING: THIS EMAIL CONTAINS GRAPHIC LANGUAGE WHICH MAY UPSET SOME READERS
Dear David,
What a monster Suella Braverman is.
Not just a moral vacuum but embarrassingly incompetent in the way she deploys her own misleading arguments about asylum seekers.
Having worked at the Home Office deciding asylum applications, I know the 1951 Refugee Convention’s terms are far clearer than her pernicious propaganda would suggest.
She says many asylum seekers base their claims on “feeling” discriminated against in their home countries. But the scope of the Convention is limited to people who believe they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” for reasons of race, nationality, religion, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, who are unable or – owing to that well-founded fear – unwilling to return home. Mere feelings of discrimination would not meet that rigorous test, and any application made on those grounds would (rightly) be fast-tracked for refusal.
She suggests that persecution, by definition, must involve a threat to life. Not true. Persecution often DOES involve a threat to life, but other things can qualify as persecution (arbitrary detention, unjustified confiscation of assets, withdrawal of state protection from crime). Braverman knows this, but the boneheads whose votes she is soliciting do not, so hey, why not give it a go?
In my time at the Home Office, I refused many asylum applications which, on the evidence presented, clearly did not meet the test of a well-founded fear of persecution on Convention grounds. The majority of those applications were made by people (mostly young men) who appeared to be seeking better economic futures for themselves and their families. That’s completely understandable, and I never blamed them for trying, but it’s not grounds for asylum, so neither did I feel any guilt in refusing them…that’s not the purpose of the asylum system.
However, I did grant asylum to a number of people who had clearly faced unimaginable horror in their own countries before escaping to the UK, where they felt safe and where they believed they would be able to live the rest of their lives in peace.
There was the Sikh activist who had a kettle of boiling water poured over him during a police interrogation. There was the woman from a minority Muslim sect who, when her husband died, and her neighbours started throwing stones through her windows at night, sought the protection of the local police only to be publicly ridiculed and then gang-raped by six officers in front of her three young children. And there were many more with genuine experiences just as gruesome.
Nearly thirty years on, I can still recall the faces of those people as they recounted their experiences to me during interviews and the tears in the eyes of the interpreters as they translated words no one should ever have to hear.
Since my days in the Home Office, I can’t recall a single Home Secretary who hasn’t had to wrestle one way or another with the asylum system. But neither can I recall one who has approached the task with as little humanity in their heart as Braverman. Truly, she is in a league of her own.
I simply don’t believe the majority of people in this country support the cruel policies that Braverman embraces so enthusiastically. As I listen to her today, my sincerest hope is that when Open Britain and our partners finally deliver a functional democracy in this country, monsters like her will never again be able to game their way into high office and abuse the power they find there.
In this video I argue that the contemporary debate and memorialisation of the slavery should also include that of White Europeans. Slavery is currently the subject of debate because of the claim that the continuing inequality and marginalisation of western Blacks is due to transatlantic slavery depriving them of the skills needed to improve themselves on the one hand and the institutional racism alleged to prevent them from rising on the other.
But slavery was not just something Whites did to Black Africans. It was found all over the world. It was practised in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans, in the Middle East, India, China and North and South America, as well as in ancient Europe. The debate about slavery and its legacy has been particularly prominent in Bristol, because part of the city’s wealth was based on the transatlantic slave trade. A few years ago the local council passed a motion almost unanimously, with the exception of the Conservatives, for the payment of reparations for slavery. Bristol was the first council to do so outside London. The deputy leader of the city council and head of equality Asher Craig was also approached by a group, who wanted to set up a museum of slavery in the city like those in Liverpool and Nantes. She told them to go and find private funding for the project. Nevertheless, she appeared on Radio 4 a few years ago stating that she wanted a museum of slavery for Bristol.
There is a slavery gallery in Bristol’s M Shed museum. It also shows that the city was dealing in slaves long before it started trading in Black slavery. In the 11th century it was visited by bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, who preached against the city’s trade in English slaves to Ireland. This was successful, but nevertheless in the following century a group of French clergy, touring England to raise money for the repair of one of the French cathedrals, were warned against dining aboard Irish ships after one of the party had done so the previous day. The ships were slavers who would lure people aboard with an invitation to dinner before slipping anchor and setting off back to Ireland with them.
From the Sixteenth Century to the middle of the 19th, White Europeans were also captured and enslaved by Muslim pirates from north Africa. The Barbary Pirates of Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia raided the coasts of Italy, France, Spain, Britain, Ireland and as far as Iceland. In the 16th century five ships were taken by the pirates from Bristol harbour. And in 1625 they enslaved White colonists from Boston Massachusetts. This rather complicates the picture of American history presented by the 1619 Project, which claims that before the founding of the modern United States following the American Revolution, America was built on Black slavery from the very establishment of the first British colonies. But Americans and Brits were also enslaved. As were the peoples of south-east Europe when the Ottoman Turks conquered the Balkans and advanced into Hungary in the 15th and 16th centuries. Bayezit, the Ottoman sultan, demanded that the Hungarians pay him ten per cent of their population as slaves in each decade. The occupation of the Balkans by the Muslim Turks and the atrocities they committed during the nationalist revolts of the 19th and early 20th centuries created a legacy of hatred in these nations to Islam and may be the reason countries like Hungary will not accept Muslim asylum seekers from Syria and north Africa.
I quote from a number of books in the video, such as Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture, two contemporary accounts of slavery in the Barbary states from Charles Sumner’s White Slavery in the Barbary States. One of these is of an account by an English man, who eventually settled in America, of the sale of himself and his fellows at a slave market in Sale. The other is a description of how captives from Bristol managed to retake their ship, kill several of the pirates, and sailed for Spain, where they sold the remaining pirates as slaves.
My point is not to demonise Muslims or anyone else, but simply to correct the misleading notion that may be given by the concentration on Black, transatlantic slavery, that slavery was only something done by Whites to Black Africans. Instead, the debate about slavery and its commemoration needs to include that of White Europeans.
The thumbnail for the video shows the Moroccan king, Mulay Sultan, who presided over the slave trade from his kingdom. I also recommend a number of books on slavery, such as Jeremy Black’s A Global History of Slavery and Sean Stilwell’s Slavery and Slaving in African History along with the two others already mentioned.
Eritrean and Sudanese Asylum Seekers Marching to claim Asylum In Israel
Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants African refugees deported from Israel.
I’m posting this following Netanyahu’s calls for African migrants to Israel to be deported following clashes between pro- and anti-government Eritreans. Their really isn’t any similarity whatsoever between Jackie Walker and Netanyahu. Walker is a Jewish woman of colour, a scholar and activist, who has had a long career attacking racism. Her mother was a Black American civil rights activist, her father a Russian Jew. She campaigned against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and turned to attacking it in Israel. Last week she expressed her outrage at Lee Anderson’s cavalier and dismissive attitude to the Channel Migrants. Benjamin Netanyahu, is ardent supporter of apartheid in Israel and the expansion of Jewish settlements into occupied Palestine. He is actively continuing the decades-long policy of the Israeli state of cleansing Eretz Israel of Palestinians.
And last week, following the rioting between different groups of Eritreans, President Netanyahu, demanded the expulsion of all illegal African migrants from Israel. The Middle East Monitor in its coverage of his speech, describes how he called such migrants ‘infiltrators’ threatening the very character of the Jewish state, and include a video clip of the rant. And liberal Israel papers such as Ha-Aretz have also been appalled at Netanyahu’s demand.
The witch-hunters would have you believe that Jackie Walker and others like her are terrible anti-Semites posing an existential threat to Israel. She has apparently been named, with Jeremy Corbyn, as either the No. 1 or No. 2 threat to the country by the Office for Strategic Affairs, the department of the Israeli state charged with combating the international opposition to Israel. This is despite the glaring obvious fact that she is not self-hating and fervently opposed to anti-Semitism. It is only be carefully selecting and twisting her words that scummy organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism have tried to portray her as such.
But Netanyahu’s attacks on Jewish and liberal Israeli critics and his savage, racist denunciation of African migrants, does make him somewhat similar to the person below.
That was a headline I caught this morning when I briefly glanced at the internet newsfeed this morning. This comes after rioting in Jerusalem between pro- and anti-government Eritreans. There was a piece of news yesterday that Netanyahu was planning to expel Eritreans from Jerusalem. And then it was followed by this headline this morning. The reports about these incidents state that Israel really isn’t keen on accepting asylum seekers. This comes from its determination to remain an ethnically Jewish state, and there have been reports of an extremely authoritarian and discriminatory attitude towards African migrants trying to pass through the country into Europe. There have also been reports of a strong current of anti-Black racism in the country, with Jews of Black African origin, such as those from Ethiopia, abused, threatened and assaulted.
I was told yesterday that the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper with a proud future behind it, is writing a book, Israelophobia, in which he claims that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. I think he may well have his work cut out with Netanyahu’s regime. Not only is Israel an apartheid state with institutional discrimination against the Palestinians, but many ordinary Israelis are worried about the direction their country is taking. Netanyahu’s government has passed legislation curbing the freedom of the judiciary. An independent judiciary is a fundamental democratic institution. Israeli citizens have been concerned about this assault on one of their fundamental civic freedoms, and there have been demonstrations. One report profiled a family, who immediately after the Sabbath meal on Friday went out to demonstrate. Liberal and secular Israelis feel under threat because of the favouritism Netanyahu and his coalition partners show to the nationalists and right-wing settlers. Some of these extreme right-wing groups are exempt from national service, and so the burden of defending the country falls to liberal Jews. Many have been talking about emigrating. It’s been suggested that about a third of the population may leave, mainly middle class professionals in science, medicine and law. Well, if they do emigrate, we should be glad to have them to fill our skills shortage. And we could do with a few lawyers, keen to preserve democracy, to guard against the assaults on it in this country. The number of prospective emigrants might be exaggerated, as over the past few decades many people in Britain have said that they’re going to leave if a particular party get in, and then very conspicuously don’t. But even so, it shows the outrage of ordinary Israelis to Netanyahu’s creeping authoritarian.
And then there was this headline that he was considering expelling all Africans. If Netanyahu did say something like that, then I don’t see how anyone can reasonably claim that Israel is not turning into a Fascist state. This is, after all, ethnic cleansing of the type the NF wanted for Britain and Oswald Mosley wanted for British East Africa. He wanted the indigenous Black inhabitants to be expelled and the colonies developed as White states. Buddyhell, the left-wing blogger behind Guy DeBord’s Cat, in one of his pieces about Israel noted that in the 1920s the Jewish settlers in Palestine even had their own, proper, Fascist outfit, the Maximalist Legalists, who wanted to model the future Jewish state on Mussolini’s Italy. Well, Musso threw in his lot with Hitler, passing discriminatory race laws against Jews and Black Africans while the Nazis rounded up Jewish Italians for slaughter in the Holocaust.
But just as anti-racists and liberals are worried about the rise of the far right in Europe, it seems the spectre of genuine Fascism is also rising in Israel.
I found this video on YouTube the other day of ‘No Justice’ aiming some very justified criticism at the Labour candidate for the newly created seat of Stockport. ‘No Justice’ appears to be a woman of the left. Looking through her videos they seem to be very definitely from a genuinely left-wing, old Labour viewpoint. She makes the point in this video, however, that she is not a member of the Labour party, especially not now under Keef Strangler. But despite her protests that it doesn’t really matter to her how the Labour party deals with its members, she’s clearly appalled by the hypocrisy by which Starmer used accusations of supporting other parties to purge the left. Left-Labourites were purged for just liking Tweets by members of competing parties, like the Greens. But Bowyer and other members of the Labour right were allowed to remain, even when, as Bowyer did, they actually called for people to vote against Labour and for the Lib Dems in 2019 to get Corbyn out.
And Bowyer comes across as a typical, modern career politicians. He has no experience of life outside academia and politics. He was born in Stockport, and joined the Labour party. He’s been a member for forty years. He graduated from Manchester university and then took a job as a researcher for a Labour politician. He then spent much of the next forty years in London, before heading back to Stockport with the opportunity of becoming its MP. But what really annoyed ‘No Justice’ was his response on Twitter to someone who dared to say what an appalling disaster the Iraq invasion was. His angry response was that the Iraq invasion was a success, and that Brexit was a disaster. Well, I agree that Brexit is a disaster. But it is not of the same magnitude of the carnage of the Iraq invasion. Let’s go through everything that makes the Iraq invasion a bloody fiasco.
We sent our bravest young men and women to fight and die on the false pretext, fabricated by Blair, that Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass distruction’.
The war cost 200,000 Iraqis their lives and resulted in the further displacement of another 2 million. Many of the Channel migrants are Iraqis fleeing the devastation inflicted on their homeland.
The war was fought, not give the Iraqis democracy, but for the oil companies to seize their oil and the multinationals to seize their state enterprises. It was also going to be an experiment for the Neocons trying out their idea of a low tariff, free trade economy. This resulted in the world dumping their products in Iraq. Their domestic industries could not compete, there was a wave of bankruptcies and unemployment rockets.
The invasion worsened sectarian divisions. There were attacks and mass violence between Sunni and Shia that had not occurred before and peace walls had to be built to separate them in Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was Islam-based, but broadly secular. This has been largely destroyed. Women had been free to pursue careers outside the home. This is now denied them. But western politicos, like various members of Barack Obama’s foreign office, refused to accept this and got a rough reception when they spoke in Turkey to claim that the invasion had benefited Iraqi women.
The private military companies supporting the allied troops behaved like a bunch of Nazi criminals. They shot ordinary Iraqis for sport and ran drug and prostitution rings. This profoundly shocked a US ambassador, who publicly spoke about this uncontrolled lawlessness when he returned to the US.
The invasion created the conditions for the rise and further expansion of DAESH, who imposed their narrow and barbarous interpretation of Islam on the country’s luckless people. Ancient churches and mosques were vandalised and destroyed, homosexuals killed and Yezidi women kidnapped and sold as sex slaves. They also attempted to erase its pre-Islamic history by destroying ancient archaeological artifacts.
Since the invasion some kind of democratic order has appeared in Iraq, but I don’t think you can honestly call the invasion a success. Not after that chaos, and not after the victors had it written in to the country’s new constitution that they didn’t own their own oil.
Bowyer’s view that the invasion was a success is sheer, Blairite, New Labour nonsense. And it makes me wonder what other bloody and unjust wars he is also prepared to support, because his right-wing leader says he must.
This is another video of myself reading yet another of my pamphlets, Empowering the Precariat: Guy Standing’s ‘A Precariat Charter and Its Programme for the Poor and Borderline Unemployed. Guy Standing’s a political scientist, and the author of two books, The Precariat and A Precariat Charter. The precariat is the term he applies to those in precarious employment, such as failed asylum seekers barred from finding work, people on zero hours contracts, workers in low paid and insecure work who suffer periodic bouts of unemployment, including university graduates forced to find work flipping burgers. And also benefit claimants abused and humiliated by the current welfare system and exploited through workfare. He argues that this sector of the population have been stripped of their rights as citizens, and so are denizens – residents in the state who do not have full civil rights. The charter he gives in his book is intended to restore them to full citizenship.
This policy includes giving immigrants the right to work, better employment rights for insecure workers, ending the humiliation of benefit claimants and workfare, introducing Basic Universal Income, restoring public amenities, making university education about developing well-rounded, truly educated people rather than just preparing workers with the skills demanded by industry, and stimulating political discussion by ordinary people.
These arguments are extremely current, even though I think Standing’s book may have been published nine years ago in 2014. The status and legal position of immigrants is, or should be, part of the debate about the channel migrants. And those in precarious employment were given some hope last week when Angela Rayner gave a speech in Scotland saying that Labour were going to introduce legislation granting them more employment rights. Well, that is until Keef announced that Labour wouldn’t, in case it alienated business. And then he and she got tied up in knots claiming that this wasn’t another U-turn. Oh, yes, it is! Starmer’s leadership really is like some awful, horrendous pantomime, just one pretence at true Labour values after another. Anyway, here’s the video:
The situation in the UK these days really is dire. More than ever, we’re seeing the Tories align themselves with extremist nutjobs in a desperate attempt to distract from their dismal performance in government. Out of ideas. Out of energy. But still in office.
Sunak’s latest asylum plans? Straight out of the UKIP playbook. It’s “take back control” all over again – whipping up hate and turning us against each other.
For over a decade, we’ve watched the Tories fail on immigration. But Rwanda flights, prison ships like the Bibby Stockholm and now Ascension Island? That’s not just failure; that’s downright cruelty. A new league altogether.
The Conservatives claim to be the party of law and order, yet they ignore fire service warnings that the Bibby Stockholm is a death trap for the sake of a political stunt that will deliver no practical benefit to the shattered asylum system they preside over. Their disgraceful claim that the Fire Brigades Union’s concerns were politically motivated lies shows that their contempt for asylum seekers is matched only by their contempt for working people.
Remember, this current generation of Tories will throw anyone under the bus to save their hides and shield themselves from democratic accountability.
And all the while, Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson continue to spout hate at every turn, making immigrants the scapegoats instead of doing their jobs properly. They seek to normalise xenophobia and division, undermining the foundations of our democracy.
Anderson’s qualifications as a national disgrace are already beyond question, but his most recent outburst – telling asylum seekers they should “F*** off back to France” if they don’t like barges – is a new low, even for him. It’s no wonder his party colleagues refer to him smugly as Lee Anderthal Man behind his back.
The last 13 years of Tory rule have left people questioning our nation’s capacity for compassion. Outsiders wonder aloud where the self-confident country of old has gone. They look at the London 2012 Olympics and the positivity those games spread around the world and wonder how the hell we got here so fast.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, Brexit changed our country for the worse – and it continues to do so – but there’s still hope. Our electoral system and our right-wing media give undue prominence to the views of the people Braverman and Anderson are pandering to, those whose ignorance is matched in scale only by their cruelty. The majority of people in this country do not share that outlook on life. If we stand together, we can win back the country we love, where justice and human decency matter.
We need a government that cares for all people. A government driven by empathy, not extremism, accountability, not contempt. Our future depends on it.
To that end, the OB team and I are using the summer months to prepare for the next phase of our campaign to stop the rot that’s eating away at British politics so that we can begin the process of getting our country back on track. I look forward to sharing more about that next month.
Change WILL come if we stand together and use our democratic power wisely. We’re glad to have you on our side for that fight ahead.
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