Rees-Mogg Would Like to Be the Pope, But Would Left-Wing Catholics Want Him?

One of the most ridiculous things Jacob Rees-Mogg said this week was during an interview on Points West with host David Garmston. Points West is the local news programme for the Bristol, Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire area. Mogg is the local MP for Bath in Somerset, and now one of the leading personalities in the Tory party. Garmston went to visit him at his palatial home in the Georgian city.

The Beeb interviewer asked him if he’d like to be Prime Minister. It’s a good question, as it’s clear that Mogg is very ambitious, and there are those in the party that would desperately like him to be in charge and in No. 10. But Mogg denied that he had any plans in that direction. Instead, he declared, he’d rather be Pope. Garmston then asked him the natural question: how could he be, when he’s married with six children? Oh no, Mogg declared, any Roman Catholic man could be.

Now this is news to me, and to just about everyone else, I should imagine. The pope is the bishop of Rome, and so should already be a member of the clergy of a sufficiently high rank. Like a cardinal. Or so it seems to me, as an Anglican, looking at the history of the Roman Catholic church. If laymen have been made pope, I can only assume that this occurred sometime during the Middle Ages as part of the political maneuvering surrounding the papacy. For example, after the collapse of the Roman Empire the only form of government left in many towns in Gaul and elsewhere were the bishops. Hence there were instances where, after the death of the previous incumbent, local townspeople chose laymen, including pagans, to become their bishop. Those laymen, who accepted the demand, then had themselves baptized and converted to Christianity. There are accounts of such conversions and the election of lay people in Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks. Or so I believe. I did medieval history at school, and these are the only instances I can remember, in which a layman entered the episcopacy directly, let alone the papacy.

Of course, Rees-Mogg is saying all this just to present himself as a good Roman Catholic. But I wonder how many Roman Catholics would actually want someone as right-wing as him as a member of the clergy, let alone sovereign pontiff. There’s a range of political views amongst Roman Catholics, just as there is in any religion or metaphysical ideology. And there’s also a strong tradition of genuinely social, left-wing activism. For all that elements within the Roman Catholic church during the War and after have supported Fascist regimes, I got the distinct impression that most Roman Catholics in Britain and the British colonies were actually left-wing. Certainly in Australia Irish Catholics formed the backbone of the Ozzie Labor party, and the Roman Catholic members of my own family were very staunch Labour. Radical organisations for Roman Catholics have included Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, and I have the impression that, as well as Quakers, there were many Roman Catholics involved in CND and other peace movements. One of my Catholic aunts was a member, and I can remember her telling us that when she was on a march, she found herself next to a group of Franciscan friars.

A little while ago I bought a book on Roman Catholic social thought, which is broadly left-wing, although outside formal party politics. This includes activism and work on behalf of the poor, for peace and on behalf of women. This latter obviously doesn’t include supporting contraception or abortion, which feminists obviously see as central women’s rights. And there have been Roman Catholic prelates, who have been martyred because of their advocacy of the poor. Like Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down by a Fascist death squad in one of the central American countries, who brutal dictator Reagan was supporting. He was assassinated outside his church. After his murder, the assassins scrawled on the wall, ‘Be a patriot – Kill a priest’.

The present Pope, Francis, seems to have moved the papacy closer to supporting the poor, defending the environment and even stating that it is not his place to judge gays. Some of that may reflect the wider changes in social attitudes, at least in the developed West. For example, right-wing Roman Catholic traditionalists, like Peter Hitchens, who are against same-sex marriage, have said that they feel the battle against it, is lost. It may also reflect a genuine horror on Francis’ part against the vicious homophobia that exists in some parts of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. But also the centre of Christianity, and Roman Catholicism, is moving towards the global south as the developed West becomes more secular. Thus the Church has to speak out on issues that directly effect the peoples of the developing world. Like poverty, hunger, exploitation, the rape of the environment. Issues that also concern other Christians around the globe.

I can’t see Rees-Mogg being interested in any of that. Indeed, his voting record shows he’s strongly against it, although I’ve no doubt that, like Margaret Thatcher, he is probably personally very generous. It seems to me that Mogg’s comments may partly have been to appeal to the religious right within the Tories. Like Ian Duncan Smith also stressed what a good Catholic he was, and how he was very concerned at poverty in Britain. Their appeal goes beyond Roman Catholics, of course. Under aIDS the DWP seemed to be stuffed with right-wing Christians of various denominations. Mogg may have made his comments partly with an eye to inheriting the Gentleman Ranker’s grubby mantle.

But no matter how pious he appears, I can’t imagine any left-wing Roman Catholic wanting to see him anywhere near an official position in the Church, just as an increasing number of Christians of all denominations are turning away from the religious right and their vile policies.

Sinn Fein Senator Niall O’Donnghaile Demands Expulsion of Israeli Ambassador over Gaza

This is a video posted on YouTube by the Sinn Fein senator, Niall O’Donghaile, of his speech in the Irish Senate last May demanding sanctions against Israeli and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador for Israel’s continued bombing of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Senator O’Donghaile pays due tribute to the efforts of the Dublin government to reach a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but he rejects this approach. He says it assumes that the conflict is between two equal countries, and that Israel is interested in diplomacy. They are not. And the bombing is not a one-off situation either. It is part of the continued genocide of the Palestinian people. He also says that the Americans would block any diplomatic attempt to end the Israeli action. He states that they know from their own history when to support diplomacy and when not. He therefore calls on the Irish government to boycott Israeli goods and follow South Africa’s example and expel the Israeli ambassador. He also states that, as Ireland has also suffered from imperialism and colonialism, they should stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

I realise that this going to be a controversial video, not least because of the speaker. I remember how Sinn Fein was the mouthpiece of the IRA during the Troubles and the carnage caused by Ulster terrorists. I am also very much aware that it was through efforts of Sinn Fein politicians like Gerry Adams that the Good Friday Agreement was reached and peace and normality returned to the Six Counties. A peace that remains fragile, and has been upset thanks to the breakdown of government at Stormont and Brexit, which threatens the open border to the South.

And I am also very much aware how desperate the Tories and their lackeys in the press and media have been to find any link between Jeremy Corbyn and Irish Republican terrorism, as well as Palestinian and Arab groups.

But Senator O’Donnghaile is right here, and his speech is a very statesmanlike summary of the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli state is not interested in a just and equitable peace. It is only interested in carrying through its decades long policy of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The speech also shows that I was correct in linking the Irish boycott of Israeli goods from the Occupied Territories with the Irish nationalist campaign against British imperialism. And possibly more closely than Mr. O’Donnghaile realizes. A few weeks ago Tony Greenstein put up on his blog a very long piece describing how Britain promoted and armed Saudi Arabia in the 1920s to attack and overthrow the traditional Arab and Muslim authority in the region because they would not support the region’s partition and continued to support the Palestinians against the nascent Jewish settlements. And it was very much about preserving and extending British power in the region.

After Ireland passed its BDS legislation, Netanyahu went on a predictable rant about them being anti-Semitic – they weren’t: Ireland still recognizes Israel and purchases Israeli goods. They just won’t purchase them if they’re made in the West Bank. The Israelis also called in the Irish ambassador for a telling off.

Senator O’Donnghaile says in his speech that Ireland is a small country on the world stage. Which is true. But as I pointed out in a previous post, Ireland has massive cultural cachet through its music and literature, especially in America and Australia, which have very strong Irish populations. In America the Irish formed a major constituency for the Democrats, at least in New York, while I understand that in Australia they were the backbone of the Labor Party. What Ireland says or does about an issue therefore carries weight far above the country’s economic or demographic figures.

I’m also very sure that Mr O’Donnghaile’s speech is what Israel fears the most, and why the Israel lobby has been so keen to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites. They are afraid of him standing up in parliament to make a speech like this, and of Britain also passing BDS legislation. Hence also Shai Masot’s shenanigans a year or so ago, where he took it upon himself to decide who should be in Theresa May’s cabinet, forcing Alan Duncan out because he was insufficiently loyal to Israel.

Unlike Ireland, Britain is a major economic power. Or we were up to the point the Tories decided to wreck it with their inept plans for Brexit. If we ban goods produced in the Occupied Territories, it will be a profound blow. And it would encourage more countries to begin criticizing Israel. And the Israeli state cannot tolerate that. We can expect more hysterical denunciations of decent people for anti-Semitism as the Israelis try to stop more people following Ireland’s example.

Maria the Witch on the Rise of Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Fascist Candidate

This is a mirror on Kevin Logan’s channel of a piece by Maria the Witch warning and explaining about the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, the Far-Right, Fascist candidate in the Brazilian elections. From what she says about herself at the beginning of the video, Maria is a Brazilian who studied in the US. However, Bolsonaro’s dangerous ascent to power has pushed her into making this video so that when the time came, she ‘wouldn’t be laughing like an Anglo’.

At the moment, Bolsonaro is only a few votes away from the Brazilian presidency, at 46 per cent he’s just shy of the 50% + 1 required for him to take power. At a 49 per cent approval rating, he’s way ahead in the polls.

As for who he is, the video has a clip of Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman explaining that he’s a former army officer, who has openly praised the country’s military dictatorship, which last from 1964 to ’85. He has a long history of making racist, misogynistic and homophobic comments, and encouraging police to kill suspected drug dealers.

Glenn Greenwalt of the Intercept explains that he’s been called Brazil’s Donald Trump, which radically understates the case. He’s much closer to Duterte in the Philippines or General Sisi in Egypt. He is far more dangerous than Trump, as democracy in Brazil is far more fragile. It lacks the political infrastructure that America and the UK have to limit the power of the president. He is likely to win against Lula’s successor – Lula da Silva was Brazil’s previous, left-wing president – because of the animus built up by the media and the business class against PT, the Workers’ Party.

As for his bigoted comments, he once said in an interview that he’d rather hear that his son died in a car accident than was gay. He defended torture and rape during the dictatorship, and when a member of Brazil’s lower house confronted him about it he told her she needn’t worry, because she didn’t deserve to be raped by him – meaning that she was too ugly for him to rape her. He’s made a whole slew of similar comments about Blacks and the indigenous peoples. More worrying are his models for dealing with crime. They’re taken from the world’s worst dictators like Pinochet. As in the Philippines, he wants to send in the army and police to slaughter indiscriminately anyone they consider to be a drug dealer or criminal without trial. He believes in military rule. He does not regard the military coup of 1964 as a coup, and wishes to replicate it. And he has the entire top level of the military supporting him.

The institutions that would constrain Bolsonaro or somebody like him in the US – a strong supreme court, the CIA or the FBI, and other political parties, don’t exist. Due to his popularity, there is a sizable part of the Brazilian population that fears he will bring back the worse elements of dictatorships, such as the summary execution of dissidents, shut down media outlets, and closed congresses.

Maria then asks how this is possible in a country that has been ruled for 14 years by the centre left PT. Back to Greenwald.

Greenwald explains that it’s similar to what is happening in America, the UK and Europe where this kind of extremism is spreading, and the media outlets that have aided its rise refuse to take any responsibility for it. The media is very oligarchical, and in the hands of a small number of very rich families. The journalists themselves are afraid of Bolsonaro and don’t support him, but continue to create the narrative that supports him: that Bolsonaro and PT are simply two sides of the same coin. PT are a left-wing dictatorship, like Bolsonaro represents a rightwing dictatorship, and both are equally bad. Greenwald makes the point that during the 14 years PT governed the country, there was a very free and open press that constantly attacked them. they impeached one of their presidents and put the other in prison, so the idea that it’s a dictatorship like that to which Bolsonaro aspires is grotesque. But this is what is normalizing Bolsonaro.

As for Lula da Silva, he was thrown in prison just as he was leading in the polls and banned all of the media from interviewing him. The Intercept/em> has tried, as have others, but there are prevented by a prior restraint order issued by the Supreme Court. He states that Brazilian institutions carry much of the blame for the rise of Bolsonaro, just as American institutions do for Trump and British for Brexit, and European globalization policies for the rise of the extreme Right on the continent.

Maria also explains that there have also been a series of events that have weakened Brazilian democracy, aimed not just at PT but also at other left-wing parties. Earlier this year councilwoman Marielly Franco was murdered, PT president Dilma Rousseff was impeached and then Lula was arrested.

There is then a segment from a report by Amy Goodman explaining that Franco was a member of Rio de Janeiro’s council, a human rights activist. She and her driver were assassinated as they returned from an event on empowering Black women. Franco was a Black lesbian, who was fiercely critical of the police’s killing of people in the favela neighbourhoods. The night before her death she had Tweeted ‘How many more must die before this war ends?’ In January alone 154 people were killed by the cops in Rio State. Goodman goes on to say that last month President Temer ordered the military to assume control of police duties in Rio. Dilma Rousseff was impeached three years ago by the Brazilian senate in a move she denounced as a coup. Lula was leading in the polls, but had been convicted of corruption and money-laundering, charges many believe were trumped up. Rousseff stated that this was the second part of the coup, after her impeachment.

The British human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, told The New Internationalist ‘Extraordinarily aggressive measures are being taken to put Lula in jail by the judiciary, by the media, by the great sinews of wealth and power in Brazil’.

Maria then goes to a Brazilian academic at King’s College, London, Anthony Pereira, the professor and director of the Brazil institute there, who explains that this is nothing new but a relapse into Brazil’s ‘fashy disease’ from the 1960s, which was never properly cured.

Pereira explains that the transition from dictatorship to democracy was unique in that it was very slow and gradual, and unlike the Chilean transition, informal. It was managed by the regime itself, which changed the rules when it feared instability, dividing the opposition and making a lot of deals. Tancredo Hernandez was the first civilian candidate to win the presidency indirectly in 1985. After he won the election, Hernandez talked to the military and many other politicians and promised that there would be no revenge, no trials for human rights abuses, and that he would make sure that the political elite could make a smooth transition from the military to the civilian. There was a church report organized by the diocese of Sao Paolo on the human rights abuses, and people knew there had been torture, but these revelations were not state policy. This informal transition kept things very much as they had been. This explains why Bolsonaro’s discourse – his rhetoric – sounds very much like what was said in 1964, talking about the unity of the Brazilian family, how the left cannot divide the country, it cannot allow women to be against men, Afro-Brazilians to be against Whites, for homosexuals to be against heterosexuals. It’s a bit like One Nation Conservatism in Britain where there is a view of an organic, hierarchical society, patriarchal, dominated by the social elite. It has a place for everyone, but it rejects what it calls ‘activism’, associated with subversion and not being really Brazilian. And it rejects the Left, because of its association with Communism, Socialism and Venezuela. It’s a unity which excludes an awful lot of people.

Maria goes on to recommend that people watch the full pieces by Pereira and Greenwald explaining the country’s relationship with the workers’ party, PT. She also recommends that people look at the videos by the Intercept and Democracy Now. She states that people should be interested in this, not just because one of the world’s largest countries is going full Fascist, not just because the US and Britain have both had a hand in Brazil’s dictatorship, but also if they don’t want her to be silence or, worse, hunted down. She also recommends another female left-wing YouTuber from Brazil for those of her viewers who speak Portuguese. The videos and links to them are shown at the end of Maria’s video.

I’ve put this up as it seems that every Fascism in one guise or another is on the rise again. And the Fascist in one part of the world embolden and strengthen the stormtroopers in others. It’s also important to know that Britain also was involved in supporting the Brazilian dictatorship.

And Greenwald is right in that the forces that are enabling the rise of Bolsonaro are the same as those aiding the rise of the extreme right over here: globalism – not just confined to the Continent, but also a part of British economic policy – and an oligarchic media that is heavily biased against the Left.

And I was talking a few weeks ago to a left-wing minister at my local church, who wondered if Corbyn would ever be allowed to take power if he was elected. If his fears are justified, then what has happened to Lula da Silva will be repeated over here to stop Jeremy Corbyn and a genuine reforming, Socialist Labour government.

Fabian Pamphlet From the 1980s: What Women Want are Left-Wing Policies

For a very brief period in the 1980s I was a member of the Fabian Society. The other day I managed to dig out of my collection of old Fabian pamphlets one by Patricia Hewitt and Deborah Mattinson, entitled Women’s Votes: the Key to Winning, published in 1989.

I haven’t read it yet, but the first page, in the introduction, astonished me by completely challenging the received wisdom about women’s voting preferences. As Hewitt and Mattinson point out, women have been considered far more Conservative politically than men. But at the last general election (1987), they supported the Labour party and left-wing policies just as much as men. The Introduction runs

The Labour Party needs women’s votes in order to win the next election. The evidence suggests that these votes can be won but the Party must persuade women that it will not only stand by it values but also carry out its policies when in government.

Until quite recently, it was accepted political wisdom tht women were more conservative than men. Within the labour movement, women voters were widely blamed for electing Mrs Thatcher and it was believed that a future Labour victory would depend more on men than on women.

Before the 1987 general election, the Conservatives generally did better amongst women than amongst men. The reverse was true for Labour. There was a ‘gender gap’, and it worked in the Tories’ favour.

That has now changed. In 1987 Labour closed the gender gap for the first time. There is good evidence for believing that, in future, Labour will do better amongst women voters than amongst men.

We start by looking at the 1987 and 1983 voting patterns to analyse Labour’s relative strength amongst women and men, and amongst different groups of women. We then look in more detail at women’s and men’s values and attitudes, drawing on recent opinion polling and qualitative research, including a series of small discussion groups undertaken especially for the Fabian Society and reported in this pamphlet.

Next we examine attitudes to issues and suggest the policy areas on which Labour should concentrate, before turning to proposals for how Labour can become more representative of women. Finally, we briefly consider unplublished and published material from Australia and the USA, where the Australian Labor Party and the American Democrats are reaching similar conclusions to our own.

The evidence strongly suggests that women voters are more likely to share and respond to Labour’s values than men. They are more likely to vote for an ‘enabling’ state which intervenes to protect the environment, regulate business and industry, redistribute income and wealth, provide a high level of social and welfare services, and promote greater equality between women and men. Increasingly, women are Labour’s natural constituency. (Emphasis mine.)

This bears out the ideology behind much of the right-wing, Conservative, and Libertarian misogyny in the US. The Libertarians, right-wing Republicans like Anne Coulter, and the Fascists in the Alt-Right, would like to deprive women of the vote partly because they see them as more left-wing than men, and more willing to expand the power of the state. Which challenges their notion of freedom under classical liberal economics, in which the ideal state is that of the mid-19th century.

It also shows why millions of women did not vote for Killary. For all Clinton’s promotion of herself as a feminist representing women, she signally did not. She was a bog-standard, corporatist politician and foreign policy hawk. Her gender made absolutely no difference whatsoever to the policies she promoted and espoused. She was far too right-wing for many American women, who voted with their feet. And they did so not because they were told to by their husbands and boyfriends, as Killary later claimed, or because of misogyny by nonexistent ‘Bernie Bros’.

The same goes for the female Blairites in the Labour party. They’re simply a continuation of Blair’s pro-corporate, neoliberal programme, which was basically just reheated Thatcherism with sickly grin. The comments by some of these female faux ‘moderates’ that they will be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories is not going to impress ordinary working women, already doing the worst paid jobs and, like working men, suffering from precarious unemployment conditions.

And this shows how desperate and threadbare the corporate, mainstream media has been in pushing the narrative that the Labour party under Corbyn, and Bernie Sanders’ supporters in the Democrats in America, are misogynists. Because they aren’t, and the neoliberal entryists know it. Hence too the portrayal by some of these corporatist women to draw a difference between themselves, representing the glorious middle-class, pro-woman future, and male-dominated, working class Old Labour.

The truth is, women seem to be more left-wing than corporatist, neoliberal shills like Hillary Clinton, Angela Eagle and the rest of the post-Blair faction in the Labour party. And its frightening them, and the rest of the Right-wing establishment. And so we’re left with stupid lies about misogyny and intimidation from them and the corporate media.

Videos on Liberals Trashing Environment with Fracking Down Under

This is another video I found on Youtube, which, although it comes from a different country a continent away, nevertheless is relevant to what’s happening in Britain now.

It’s by an Ozzie bloke attacking the way Mike Baird, the Liberal premier of New South Wales, has passed legislation allowing the mining and fracking companies to operative irrespective of the immense ecological damage they cause. This includes pumping 20 different toxic chemicals into the ground. Apart from creating a mountain of salt 11 km long, it’s also threatening to poison forever Australia’s precious farmland and the Great Artesian Basin. The video’s producer, Friendlyjordies, points out that only 4 per cent of Australia’s massive landmass is farmland. So it’s obvious that polluting what little farmland the country has available is immensely stupid. As for the Great Artesian Basin, this is the massive underground lake that supplies water to much of the eastern part of the Australian landmass. Much of the water supporting Oz’s ecosystem comes from this underground lake, which last fell as rain thousands of years ago. Poisoning this immense water source is therefore not only immensely stupid, but could effectively turn much of Oz into a polluted desert.

Not counting the fact that the contracts allow frackers to drill near Sydney’s cataract falls, and are causing house prices to fall in the great metropolis itself.

Here’s the video.

It’s the same justifiable fears about the effects fracking will have over here in Britain. And some of the issues are the same – farmland being seized and polluted through fracking, contamination of groundwater through toxic chemicals, fracking near towns and affecting the property of private citizens. Even the political complexion of the government doing all this is similar. The video states that Baird is a Liberal, who has helped the Conservatives do this. Like Nick Clegg has supported the Tories here in Blighty. I don’t know if the companies involved are the same, but I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if they were. I’ve no doubt that they have their supporters in the British press. Way back in the 1990s the Torygraph was complaining about how racist and unfair it was for the Ozzie government to ban uranium mining on Aboriginal land. I think press support for fracking globally is pretty much a foregone conclusion from the Murdoch press.

Even if the companies mining over there are different from those wanting to frack over here, I’ve no doubt that some of the personnel and PR people are the same, or in very close contact with each other. In the same way that Cameron’s spin doctor, Lynton Crosbie, also hails from Down Under.

Even the rhetoric of political blame to justify the fracking programme is the same. The video states that there are people trying to excuse the Liberals and Conservatives fracking, because ‘Labor started it’. The vieo shows that the present Labor opposition in NSW actually wants a moratorium on fracking. It’s similar to some of the comments Mike has had to refute over at Vox Political, that the British Labour party are just as much in favour of it as the Tories, because they insisted on legislation restricting it, but not prohibiting it. A total prohibition would probably have been the better policy, but as Mike points out, it stood no chance of getting through.

It’s now a globalised, deeply interconnected world, where what happens in one country impacts on what they do in others. And the same things are going on across the world, in America, Britain and Australia. We have to learn from and stand together in order to resist it.