I have to put this up, as I’ve been banging on for years that Saddam Hussein, contrary to the bullshit George Dubya Bush and Tony Blair fed us, had zilch to do with 9/11. It was just an excuse for American multinationals and the American/Saudi oil industry to rob them of their oil and seize and privatise their state industries. It was pure mercenary greed which used the terrible events of that day as a pretext. Quite apart from Blair and the ‘dodgy dossier’.
It comes from @therestispolitics channel on YouTube, and has the title ‘”Iraq Had Nothing to Do with 9/11″ from Former Head of MI5′ or The Two Spies| Former MI5 MI6 Heads on the Iraq’ It’s another short, so it won’t demand too much attention.
The speaker is Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was the head of MI5 at the time. The speaker says that she was deputy head of MI5, head of GCHQ and SIS. She states from the outset that 9/11 was nothing to do with Iraq, as al-Qaeda were in Saddam Hussein’s jails at the time, and the distortions the Americans went to in order to claim that it was were disgraceful. She recalls that SIS went to America 24 hours after 9/11 to discuss what they were going to do together. The Americans hadn’t been to sleep. The head of the FBI was Paul Mueller, whom Buller knew from Lockerbie and had only just come from the Department of Justice, She does not recall any mention of Iraq. They knew it was al-Qaeda from prior intelligence and they were going to launch an attack in the autumn. They went back to the British embassy, who said that there was no evidence linking Iraq to what had just happened. The CIA had also concluded that Iraq wasn’t behind it. So Donald Rumsfeld set up a unit in the Department of Defense to claim that it was involved.
Bush and Blair are war criminals, who wrecked an entire nation just for corporate greed. They squandered the lives of Britain’s most courageous young men and women to do so. It’s too bad that the attempt by Canadian and Greek activists to have them arrested and tried at the International Court of Justice in the Hague failed.
And Blair keeps trying to sneak back in. He’s a butcher. Keep him out!
I’ve been watching videos by the Outlaw Bookseller recently. He’s a retired bookshop manager, now living in Bath, who talks about literature and book collecting, and particularly Science Fiction and Horror. In one of his videos he discusses Horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s novel, My Work Is Not Yet Done. This differs from much horror literature in not being set in Gothic castles and catacombs, but instead in the corporate work place. One of the characters is a manager, who comes along with flip charts and checklists purporting to improve productivity and employee performance. As the story goes on, the characters realise that all his management strategies are rubbish. They don’t actually work, and instead make the situation work. At which point, the manager gets promoted to another position.
Ligotti’s been going for decades now. He was published in a variety of British small press horror, SF and fantasy magazines in the ’80s and ’90s and is very much respected as one of the great writers of the genre. I’m not a big fan of ‘Orror. I’ve read Dracula, some of Brian Lumley’s grim tales, H.P. Lovecraft and a few others, but it’s not a genre that really appeals to me. But that description of the manager seems very well observed. Way back in the ’80s and ’90s Private Eye used to cover various big businessmen, who were recruited to head blue chip companies like ICI with very generous salaries. These men then proceeded to wreck these companies so that their share prices plummeted, at which point they were released. Again, with obscenely generous severance packages. The same people would then go on to be recruited by another, previously successful company or organisation and then proceed to do the same again. And I’ve met people who’ve experienced this in real life. I was talking about it to a taxi driver, who told me that it happened to a company he had worked for. The company recruited a manager at an expensive pay package, who then proceeded to run it into the ground, before being given the heave-ho with another massively generous pay package. Who then went off to do it to some other company.
No wonder British industry’s in a state. It’s full of the incompetent and greedy running companies into the ground, while being massively rewarded for their greed and incompetence. And I dare say that if anyone says anything about their grossly inflated pay, they’ll get the usual nonsense about market rates and having to pay large amounts to recruit talent.
Even when the people recruited are massively untalented and a real destructive force with their incompetence. But no doubt they went to the right schools and know the right people, so they carry on in their mission to wreck western business in order to get themselves bigger and more lucrative promotions.
A day or so ago pro-Palestinian protesters painted graffiti over the Labour party’s headquarters, doubtless in protest at Starmer’s continuing support for the Israeli state and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. GB News has posted a video about this, and the response of Lord Walney. Walney has blamed the far left, of course, and according to the blurb for the video said it shouldn’t be allowed. I haven’t watched the video, but I was struck by its thumbnail. This had the line ‘Democracy has failed!’ Well, I always had the suspicion that GB News didn’t believe in democracy. This is the broadcaster that flouts Ofcom regulations against employing politicians as news presenters. And it has been described by one Labour MP as having two points of view: right, and far right. With this latest headline from them, I’m left wondering if they’ve got a portrait of Oswald Mosley down in the basement. I suppose it’s a good thing that there’s no longer a TV closedown, as there was when I was growing up in the 1970s. The TV companies went off at about 10.30 or so. Just before then, there was the Epilogue, which I think consisted of a clergyman or other spiritual person giving us his thought for the day. Then I think you had the national anthem and that was it. Programmes are over, it’s time for bed. If GB News ended its broadcasting like that, I wonder if instead of ‘God Save the King’, we’d have the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song, and a photo of Mussolini.
But I think they have a point – democracy has failed. It’s failed because the three main parties don’t believe in it. Leaving aside the controversy over Scotland’s hate crime laws for a moment, neither Labour nor the Tories actually want to give the British public what they want. Poll after poll shows that severely normal Brits want a fully nationalised NHS and trains and the public utilities taken back into public ownership. A majority of Brits also want arms sales to Israel to stop. But neither party wants to enact such policies. Despite the massive profiteering of Thames Water, one of the Tory ministers appeared on TV the other day to say that nationalisation wasn’t the answer. Well, of course not. It would prevent their corporate chums from screwing their customers and then screwing the British taxpayer to bail them out. The Tories have been passing legislation after legislation to make public protests and demonstrations difficult, and both Blair and the Tories also set the legal foundations for secret courts. These are tribunals where, if it is deemed in the interest of national security, the trial may be held behind closed doors with the defendant not informed who his accuser is or the evidence against him.
Democracy is being stifled thanks to Labour and the Tories. It’s time to consider voting for the other parties, like the Greens and Independents, who may offer the voting public what they really want and need.
Last week I resigned from the Labour party. This may not come as a surprise to many of you, as I’ve been extremely critical of the leadership and the right-wing faction that has seized control of the party bureaucracy for years. And truth be told, I have been considering it for a little while now. There are a number of reasons for it, some of them local to my bit of Bristol. There are local issues here that the Lib Dems have shown they’re much better on, though I have no intention of joining them and have not forgotten how Clegg jumped in bed with the Tories and his shameful betrayal of our students with the increase in tuition fees.
But I am also angry and disappointed with the Labour party’s swing to the right and its transformation into Tories Mk 2 under Keir ‘Stalin’ Starmer. Whatever I may be culturally, economically I’m a Corbynist. And I also strongly maintain that neither Corbyn nor his followers were anti-Semites, and especially not the very many left-wing Jews who gave him their considered support. Their purging is an utter disgrace. Corbyn’s economic and welfare policies are right, and they were supported by the British public. As the massive failures of the water companies, the galloping energy prices, that many are finding increasingly unaffordable, and the collapse of one railway franchiser after another shows, we need renationalisation of the utilities. This also includes schools, as we’ve seen one academy chain after another fail and having to be taken over by central government. Thatcher never had any more than 50 per cent support for her privatisations anyway. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Brits wants the utilities renationalised. But this frightens the companies running them, big business generally, and the right-wing press and the magnates who own them, like one Rupert Murdoch. So Starmer has broken all his promises about renationalisation in order to appeal to Tory swing voters and corporate donors. The Labour party is making noises about setting up a new energy company, Great British Energy, but given how Starmer lies without pausing for breath, I don’t whether he’s serious about it or what difference it would make when set up. And I’m not sure it outweighs all the other right-wing policies Starmer has embraced.
Privatisation is wrecking the health service and bringing it to its knees. There are increased management costs and bureaucracy, while services are being cut, as shown by the various doctor’s surgeries that have been closed after they’ve been handed over to private health companies to run in order to maximise those corporations’ profits. This week I got a message from my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, stating that the Labour party was dedicated to keeping the NHS nationalised and free at the point of use. But we’ve had Blair selling parts it off when he was in power. Now he’s out of power, he’s demanding more private involvement. And Wes Streeting apparently stated that he wanted to find a big private investor to sort the health service out. While I’m sure Smyth is genuine, I don’t trust Starmer and the leadership.
And I am utterly disgusted by their attitude to the welfare state. Liz Kendal announced this week that, under Labour, there would be no chance for young people to have a life on benefits. This is the same rhetoric that comes out of rags like the Daily Mail, all too ready to accuse genuine claimants of being welfare scroungers. She promised support for getting people back into work, such asa an increased number of mental health advisers. But it millions are signing off through stress, then it isn’t just a case of ‘nerves’, as one grotty right-winger said on YouTube. It’s real, soul-destroying anxiety caused by the various employment strategies successive government have embraced to give power to the employers at the expense of making their employees’ job precarious. Zero hours contracts are a case in point. And I don’t see any change in wage policy with Labour either. The Tories have kept wages frozen, with the result that they haven’t kept up with inflation and the real cost of living for some time now. The majority of people on benefits are in work. But this doesn’t appear to be about to change. As for the Tories, they showed what they are like when one of them expressed his wretched concern that Labour might dump their wonderful sanctions system. The system that has consigned thousands of the unemployed and disabled to starvation and death.
Starmer has also continued Blair’s policy of ignoring and sidelining the unions, because they obviously don’t appeal to Tory voters and are a threat to the corporativism he wishes to continue. But working people need them. Just about every benefit and working right was won by the hard struggle of the unions. The Labour party was set up to defend unionised working people, but I see no change in the attempts to diminish their power so that they become irrelevant under Starmer.
I see the old, Blairite corporativism returning, in which big corporations were given places at the top of the bureaucracies overseeing their industries in exchange for their big donations, and no doubt places on the board when MPs come to retire or lose their places in an election. Starmer is going to do what Blair did, and so we’re going to have policies and decisions forced on people, not for their benefit and often against their wishes, but because it benefits these corporations. I can see more public works going over time and budget, with the British taxpayer expected to pick up the costs when they’re too much for the private contractors to Public-Private Partnership Schemes. Just as what happened under Labour. The criticisms of these policies under Blair, by George Monbiot in his Captive State and Rory Bremner and the Long Johns in their You Are Here are going to be all too relevant again.
And I really don’t trust Starmer to defend democracy. It’s been under threat for a while now through the establishment of secret courts and increasing legislation by the Tories to strangle the right to protest. I don’t see Starmer repealing any of that and standing up for traditional British liberties. Quite the opposite, given the authoritarian way he and the Blairites have used every means they could to stifle democracy in their Labour party, purging the left and critics of Israel under false accusations of anti-Semitism.
And if we’re talking about Blair, we should also mention that he is a war criminal. He told lies about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction in order to support an unprovoked war which looted the country and reduced it to sectarian chaos. Blair, it seems, was also a leading voice for the bombing of Libya and the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafy, which has had much the same effect in that country. But with the addition that the half run by Islamists has now opened slave markets to sell the Black Africans that have migrated to the country in search of a passage to Europe and the West.
I could go on. There are other policies Starmer is embracing, to which I object, but these are the main issues. Given these, I no longer feel that I can stay in the Labour party. I particularly object to the new advertising campaign they put up a few weeks ago, which had piccies of Starmer and Reeves. It announced that they were for business, for workers and aligned with ‘your values’. They are very much for business, but not in a positive way, and aren’t going to do anything for workers.
And they very definitely don’t align with my values.
I shall very definitely consider who to vote for very carefully at the next election, and will give serious consideration to their more left-wing rivals, even if these at present enjoy far less electoral support. Because I want to make a stand for serious left-wing policies that will improve working peoples’ lives, and not a party that makes much noise about standing up for them while doing everything it can to keep them down and poor.
This comes from a headline I found on my internet newsfeed this morning, and I didn’t read any further. I really didn’t have to, because the headline itself told me that this was a political disaster. Truss, the woman who nearly totalled our economy and reduced our people to destitution in a mere 48 days is planning a comeback campaign. She’s launching a movement for Popular Conservatism. This is a woman whose Tufton Street thinktank policies were so godawful that the Tories themselves hoiked her out to replace her with Sunak. Who is also terrible, but not as catastrophically so. And now Nigel Farage is backing her. This also tells you all you need to know about him. Off comes the genial friend of the working man and woman mask, to reveal what those of us with any sense already knew: that he, like her, was mad keen on promoting big business at the expense of quality of service and the welfare state. If these two clowns have their way, it’ll be more privatisation, including that of the NHS, and the further dismemberment of the welfare state. All couched in the language of making work pay, getting British people working again, supporting big business with tax cuts, unleashing the power of private enterprise and the other nonsense the Thatcherites have been parroting for the past 40 years and more. Ignore them and their doctrinaire stupidities.
This is going to need very careful scrutiny. I got this from the Labour party on Thursday, and it outlines the party’s economics plans, and their intention to ‘partner with business to kickstart growth’. I’m extremely suspicious of this, as it looks like more corporativism where the interests of big business, its CEOs, senior executives and shareholders are paramount while those of the workers are ignored or attacked. And the talk about such partnerships reminds me of the Blairite ‘Public-Private Partnerships’, taken over from the Tories and expanded, which comprehensively wrecked public services. It saw them go over budget and their projected duration. The private companies that were supposed to pick up some of the costs got away scot free leaving the taxpayer to pay their debts. There’s a link to the Labour party site for more information, and this will definitely need looking at too.
‘David, what the British people have been through in the past fourteen years cannot be overstated.
Fourteen years of economic failure. The Tories’ inability to provide security for working people is holding back Britain’s potential.
With Labour, things will be different.
Our mission is to achieve the highest sustained growth in the G7. This will underpin the focus of an incoming Labour government.
And central to our strategy for growth is a transformative shift in Labour’s relationship with business.
That’s why today, at Labour’s Business Conference, we launched our new plan: ‘Labour’s Partnership with Business for Growth’, with business leaders, investors, and international ambassadors hearing our long-term plan for growth.
Labour will:
Get Britain building again with new homes and infrastructure
Partner with business to make work pay for working people
Back British business with a new industrial strategy
Kickstart a skills revolution for higher growth and rising living standards
Create the stable economic conditions required for delivering growth
Find out more on our five point plan for growth here:
For the last fourteen years, the Tories’ track record on growth has been one of failure.
The British economy is falling behind its competitors in the race for the jobs and industries of the future.
It’s not just the permanent cycle of crisis, there is something much more fundamentally broken in the way this country creates wealth.
The Tories have shattered the promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will have a chance in Britain and the future will be better for your children.
Labour will do the hard yards, roll up our sleeves, and get under the bonnet to fix an unprecedented stagnation in British productivity growth.
Today’s conference has made one thing clear: Labour is back in business.
By working with business to kick-start growth across our country, Labour will make working people better off.
That is how we will get Britain’s future back.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer
Jonathan Reynolds Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade’
No single person sums up the absolute state of British politics better than Liz Truss. After serving as PM for just 49 days – without ever having a real mandate from the general public – her premiership crashed and burned in a catastrophic, economy-busting meltdown. But she’s still hanging around, like a foul smell, reminding us of the putrid state of politics these days.
Bizarrely, Liz Truss was given a podium by the esteemed Institute for Government yesterday to rehash her outdated and uncaring vision for an unequal and austere Britain. Why is our country’s shortest-ever serving and least popular PM being given a platform from which to pontificate on things that have been so comprehensively rejected?
Baffling arrogance and senselessness were on full display during that speech. Truss called for an end to the green agenda, more fracking and fossil fuels, lower taxes for the rich, and further slashing of regulations. Given her close ties to the oil industry and its lobbyists, it’s clear who these proposals are really designed to help.
As we watch Truss, we catch a glimpse of the battle for the soul of the Conservative Party, a party that seems to know its time in power is coming to an end but cannot quite bring itself to do the right thing for the country and call an election. Truss’s speech is a naked attempt to shape the next incarnation of her party, presenting a personal brand of hyper-libertarian insanity as the solution to decades of her own party’s mismanagement and corruption.
Unfortunately for Truss, people don’t want to live in her dystopian future where climate disasters run rampant, infrastructure crumbles, and the few continue to be privileged over the many. The UK wants clean waterways, public services that function, buildings that aren’t falling apart, and a green agenda that ensures a safe and sustainable future.
To get to our future instead of hers, we need a democracy that works. We need to crack down on the think tanks and lobbying groups that churn out specious talking points for people like Liz Truss; we need to curb politicians’ ability to lie with impunity and shut the revolving door of corruption between Westminster and big business; and we need a voting system that accurately reflects how people really feel. If the next government doesn’t address these things, Truss’s vision could well be the one foisted on us at the 2029 election.
Our new report ‘UK Democracy Goals: A Plan for Functional Democracy by 2030‘, published last Friday, sets out how we begin to turn things around. Our country is broken because our democracy is broken. If we’re ever to get our country back on track, we first need to fix our democracy.
Truss’s upcoming book ‘10 Years to Save the West’ gets one thing right – we are running out of time to build a fair political system and get this country back on track. What she doesn’t seem to get is that the people we need to be saved from are people like her.
Check out the report and support us below if you want to help ensure that the next government doesn’t blow the one opportunity we have to keep people like Liz Truss out of British politics for good.
Right-wing YouTuber Mahyar Tousi put up a video last night alleging that Kiddie Starving Starmer had recruit a very right-wing investigative organisation, Hakluyt, to help prepare for the election. Tousi criticised this supposed move – and one that Starmer has denied – because Hakluyt was set up by a former MI6 officer and recruits other former MI6 officers. Its head of European coverage was of particular concern to Tousi, because he allegedly worked to sabotage Brexit while ostensibly supporting it. Tousi also noted that Labour was moving away from ordinary working class people to big business, the EU and ‘the globalists’. In his view, Labour should change its name, because now it has nothing to do with the working class.
I agree. Starmer’s Labour doesn’t. It’s just a shell, a facade of a former working class, socialist party. I think Tousi had earlier put up a video commenting on Starmer’s pivot to business and corporate donors. The Labour party has received £15 million in donations from private companies and their bosses, including David Sainsbury. Tousi argued that it was because Starmer didn’t want to rely on funding from the unions. Nor, it could be added, does he apparently want to depend on contributions from the party’s grassroots supporters and their subscriptions. Tony Blair had exactly the same attitude towards the unions, and used the money he gained from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen, raised by Lord Levy, in order to achieve his independence from the unions.
Even though the Labour party was initially set up partly to defend them.
But the alleged recruitment of Hakluyt goes much further than simply seeking independence from trade union backers. It’s actually anti-union. The real Hakluyt was a 17th century writer, the author of Voyages and Discoveries, which celebrated jolly English jack tars and sailors exploring the world in search of trade and new commercial opportunities. Hakluyt the organisation is a squalid outfit set up, like its sister, the Economic League, to compile blacklists of trade union radicals for industry. If Starmer really has teamed up with them, it’s part of his ongoing campaign to purge the party of anything vaguely left-wing or genuinely centrist.
And it also shows, once again, how establishment he is and how close he is to the police and the state against the British people.
Starmer is a Tory infiltrator and an authoritarian, who does not have the interests of working people at heart and is an active danger to them and democracy.
This is going to be the first instalment of a series of videos of myself reading my self-published little book, For A Worker’s Chamber. It argues that as parliament is dominated by millionaires, who legislate in their own interest, Britain’s great working people need their own parliamentary chamber to represent them, occupied by working people elected by working people. It draws on the Chartists, who looked forward to having their own ‘parliament of trades’, the syndicalists and Guild Socialists, who believed in a society run by working people through trade unions, the corporativism of the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon, and the worker’s, soldiers and peasants’ councils of the 1919 German Revolution. It also discusses the Fascist corporative state, and the liberal corporativism of the planned economy after the War, as well as the experiment in workers’ self-management in the former Yugoslavia. And yes, it does draw on Marx’s view that the state in an instrument of class rule. There are very many problems with Marxism, but when all the parties seem to be rushing to advance the interests of big business against small business, the working class, the disabled and the unemployed, then it’s very clear that Marx is right at least in this point.
I got this petition last Wednesday, and needless to say, I’ve signed it.
‘BREAKING NEWS: Whilst millions of us struggle to get by, bosses of Britain’s biggest companies have landed eye-watering £500,000 pay rises – an outrageous 16% average increase. The CEO of Shell is now on a tidy £9.7 MILLION. [1]
In fact, last year CEOs of the biggest 100 companies made 118 times more on average than a typical person earning £33,000. Meanwhile, ordinary workers are called greedy for wanting inflation-matching pay rises during this cost of living crisis. [2] It’s one rule for them and another for us, David.
During these tough times, companies should cap their CEO pay – and use their profits to help those struggling most. But they’ll only change if they’re faced with a MASSIVE scandal. If hundreds of thousands of us come together TODAY, it’ll put their greedy salaries under the microscope and create a backlash they just cannot ignore.
So David, will you join us by demanding that the UK’s biggest companies cap their CEOs salary – and do more to help those struggling most?It only takes 30 seconds to sign but could make all the difference!
People power works against big companies. We’ve proved it again and again. Last year we helped force British Gas to stop putting vulnerable people onto prepayment meters after over 100,000 of us joined forces: signing petitions, emailing our suppliers, and landing media that put them under the spotlight. [3]
These companies aren’t untouchable. So let’s prove it again, by coming together in our thousands and forcing them to change.
David, will you use your outrage to demand these corporate fat cats address their greedy pay – and instead do more to help people struggling?It only takes 30 seconds to sign!‘
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