This is another piece about one of the issues raised at the Labour party deputy leadership hustings in Bristol on Saturday. It could be controversial, because in it I question some of the assumptions underlying some of the pro-minority movements and campaigns. I’m doing this not because I’m opposed to them, but simply to try to correct what I regard are flaws and defects in them, which may be the source of other kinds of injustice and fuel a backlash against these programmes from the right.
One of the questions at the hustings came from a student at one of the city’s universities. They were upset at the appearance of posters saying, ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ around campus. Racism was on the rise, and they wanted to know what the candidates would do about it.
Now let’s be clear about it. Racism is on the rise. There has been an increase in racist incidents since Brexit. Yesterday the papers carried a story about poster that had been put up in a block of flats telling non-Anglophone residents that they should only speak English. If they couldn’t do this, it said, that they should hand their property over to an English family and leave for their countries of origin. One of the documentary shows following real police doing their job last night showed them tackling a racist incident. A Romanian family had been abused by their English neighbour, and the father had been attacked. One of the two female rozzers, who made the arrest, said that she didn’t feel that the number of racist people had increased, but that the racists had been emboldened by Brexit. Some of Zelo Street’s posts confirm this. The supporters of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, whose anti-immigrant abuse and vitriol was uncovered by the blogger Jacob’sfriends, also seems to be strongly pro-Brexit. As were the right-wing posters attacking Rachel Riley for getting Katie Hopkins banned from Twitter, whatever lies Oberman wants to push about the far left.
But the situation is complicated by the fact that many Whites do not feel themselves to racist, and believe that the anti-racism campaigns are racially smearing them. Over a decade and a half ago the Spectator expressed and tried to capitalise on this resentment with an article ‘Blackened Whites’. Another article stated that the only minority not welcome in central London was White working class men. The slogan ‘It’s okay to be White’ is another expression of this feeling. As far as I can make out, it started in America among Conservatives, who believed that Whites were being unfairly tarnished as racists. These Conservatives include Blacks as well as Whites. There’s a series of videos by a group of Black activists carrying a placard bearing the slogan as the confront liberals and left-wingers.
And unfortunately, they do have a point. I’ve read material from anti-racist and Black activists that seems to assume that if you’re White, you have to be racist and which does approach a kind of racial essentialism. There’s a hidden assumption that, through their history, somehow all Whites are racist and can only be stopped from being so through Black activism. I’ll admit that not all Black or anti-racist activists are like this by any means. But it is there, and it is causing a backlash against anti-racism programmes.
All of the candidates expressed their firm determination to combat racism. One of the female candidates – I’m fairly sure it was Dawn Butler, but I could be wrong – announced that she wanted to defend and promote the rights of all minorities. Not only did she want all-women shortlists, she wanted all-Black shortlists, and similar representation for the LGBTQ communities and the disabled. She, or one of the other female candidates, also said that they were also determined to stamp out misogyny.
There have been calls for greater numbers of Black and Asian MPs for a long time. It has been said that if the number of BAME MPs reflected the size of the Black and Asian population, there would be 50 of them rather than the handful there is at the moment. However, as many Black communities form a minority within White majority constituencies, there’s a tendency, conscious or otherwise, to choose White candidates. Hence there was a letter in one of the papers during an election in the first decade of this century by a Black writer, stating that Black people could represent them.
I am absolutely sure in many cases that this is correct. But this also raises the question of Black racism and double standards. If Whites can’t represent Blacks, then it could be asked if it is also unfair to assume that Blacks can represent Whites. And Black and Asian anti-White racism exists. At the same time that letter was written, Whites became the majority of victims of racial abuse and assault. Reading between the lines, I think that the majority of victims were still Black and Asian, but Whites constituted the single largest group of victims. The rise in anti-White racism was throughout the country, and the organisations set up to help victims of racial abuse made it clear that they were also going to help Whites. Since then, and particularly after 9/11, the situation has returned to Blacks and Asians being the victims of most of this abuse and violence. But anti-White racism is still present. And unfortunately some of the Black anti-racist organisations don’t want it recognised or tackled.
A few weeks ago, Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, put up a video about the Black and Asian organisations, which had written to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. They were upset because the Commission was also including stats on incidents against White British. This, they felt, could not be justified because Whites don’t have the long history of racist persecution as non-White minorities. This is an extremely dangerous view. The recognition of racial abuse and violence by ethnic minorities against Whites in no way subtracts from the racism experienced by those communities. It is merely a recognition that anti-White prejudice also exists, and needs to be tackled. If it isn’t, it hardly needs to be said that a certain section of the White community will look instead to the far right as their protectors. Racial tensions have also increased due to the mishandling of the cases of Asian paedophile gangs abusing White girls. In Rotherham it went on for years, and the Manchester police and local authority knew about it, and did nothing. They were afraid that if they did act, it would start riots.
I am very much aware that the majority of child abusers in this country are White. I am also aware that the abusers were secular individuals, and that they weren’t abusing White girls because they were Muslims, as the Islamophobes have claimed. One academic, who has covered the case, has denied that race was a motivation behind their assaults. However, it was a factor in the authorities decision not to prosecute the offenders for about ten years. They did not want to do so because they were Asian, and the girls were White. And this has promoted the feeling that the liberal establishment, as it is so considered, has no interest in defending Whites from victimisation by ethnic minorities. It’s a gift to organisations like Britain First and the EDL. Or simply the Conservative party, as it has moved so far to the racist right under Johnson.
There is also the problem that some of the alienation experience by Whites in constituencies with large ethnic minority communities, has been increased immensely when the parties seem only interested in choosing candidates from those communities. Following the Oldham riots, the Financial Times sent their correspondent, Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, to the town to investigate. The Asian and White communities there were nearly equal, with the White a fraction larger. However, all of the parties – Labour, Lib Dem and the Conservatives – had chosen Asian candidates. And these candidates seemed less interested in the local issues that affected everyone in Oldham, regardless of colour, than in issues far away in India and Pakistan, most specifically the issue of Kashmir. A section of the White community felt ignored and marginalised, tensions increased and then exploded into violence.
This puts any politician elected from an all-Black or Asian shortlist in a difficult position. They are there to represent all of the community. But many will be on the list because they specifically want to help Blacks and Asians. In constituencies where Whites are in a minority, like parts of London, that could mean that parts of the White population feel discriminated against. Some might turn to the far right. Others may leave London to White majority in the ‘White flight’. And some will remain, but become alienated and cynical. It’s recipe for increasing racial tension, not fighting it. The situation is made worse by the network of organisations and schemes that are only open to Blacks and Asians and which exclude Whites in a system that the Financial Times called ‘liberal apartheid’. Black and Asian politicians elected through such shortlists will be seen as part of an establishment that actively discriminates against Whites. Individual politicians elected through such lists will have to show that they can also represent Whites as well. Which means that they also may be too cautious, and fail to give deprived ethnic minority communities adequate help and support.
All-Black and Asian shortlists will help solve the problem of Black underrepresentation in Parliament, but depending on the local personalities and organisations involved, they risk increasing racism by excluding Whites.
Tomorrow, UK Gold is set to begin screening the first of its recreations of three episodes of the classic comedy, Dad’s Army. As you’ve probably seen from the adverts and the splash page about it in the Radio Times, as well as a piece about it on The One Show, the actual episodes were lost years ago. They were recorded on videotape, which was then re-used for another show. The scripts, however, has survived, and so they’ve decided to re-shoot them using other actors to replace the original cast. Along with other, younger actors, whose names I don’t recognise, is veteran thesp Timothy West, playing Sergeant Godfrey. It looks great, the actors look and sound like their brilliant predecessors, more or less, and have the right attitude. They say they can’t replace the original team, and are just being their understudies.
But there’s one thing that stops me from watching it. They’ve cast Tracey Ann Oberman as Pike’s mother.
Tracey Ann Oberman is Rachel Riley’s best mate in her persecution of bloggers, who support Jeremy Corbyn. Like Riley, she also likes to throw accusations of anti-Semitism around willy-nilly, insulting and smearing decent people simply because they’re Socialists, left-wing Labour party members and/or simply critics of Israel. And if anyone makes a few acute observations about her, she threatens them with a libel suit.
She’s been a firm supporter of Riley in her prosecution of the 17 people, who blogged about Riley’s bullying of a 16-year old girl with anxiety issues. Riley, amongst other things, declared that she wanted to ‘re-educate’ the poor girl, a term I’ve only used in the context of totalitarian brainwashing. When the child refused, Riley smeared her as an anti-Semite and managed to whip up a troll army into bullying and harassing the girl online. When Mike and 16 others blogged about this, Riley claimed that it was libel and initiated legal proceedings.
But when Mike challenged Riley to state what was libelous when she initially complained, neither she nor Oberman could explain why or how. They also haven’t challenged the facts of the case. This seems to me to be another SLAPP suit, in which the forces of the right attempt to shut down criticism through vexatious legal action. Action they know their opponents won’t be able to afford to defend themselves against.
Oberman herself was threatening to do something similar to Ash Sarkar, the head of Novara Media a few weeks ago. She was accusing Sarkar of being anti-Semitic, again based on no evidence or reason whatsoever, except that Sarkar and Novara have supported Corbyn and criticise Israel and the Israel lobby for the country’s maltreatment of the Palestinians. When Sarkar made a few pointed remarks about Oberman’s privileged background, Oberman whined that she was a ‘jobbing actor’, and that these remarks put her career at risk. She also claimed that she was ‘as White’ as Sarkar is. Sarkar is very definitely a dark complexioned Asian, while Oberman is definitely White. Of course, Oberman meant that she couldn’t be White, because Nazis and racists don’t regard Jews as White. Sarkar saw through that subtext, and said that she was not disputing that Jews didn’t suffer victimisation. They do, and horrendously, it’s growing. But as Tony Greenstein, Buddy Hell and many others have pointed out, Blacks, Asians and Travellers suffer far greater levels of racism. And some of this is perpetrated by the right-wing individuals, who are making so much fuss about the supposed anti-Semitism in the Labour party. And Oberman, as an ardent right-wing Zionist, should herself be very much aware that the original Jewish settlers in Palestine were Whites from eastern Europe, who despised the Misrahim, the indigenous Arabicised Jews, or Jewish Arabs, of Palestine and the Middle East. And there is also massive prejudice in Israel against Blacks and Black African Jews, such as those from Ethiopia. And Nazi racism is utter, murderous rubbish, so no-one should believe the bilge about Jews not being proper Europeans. Including spurious racist sputterings that they can’t be as White as they’re European compatriots.
I also know drama graduates and real jobbing actors. They’re immensely talented people, who work hard trying just to get bit parts in TV and other shows, simply because of the intense competition and uncertainty of the profession. They are most definitely not like Oberman, who was boasting a few weeks ago that every time someone criticises her, she gets another job offer.
So the news that the wretched Oberman is going to be in it puts me in a bit of a quandary. I’d like to watch it, but I don’t want to give any support to Oberman. At the same time, I don’t want to deny the other actors their chance to shine. Perhaps one way round this is to put in the equivalence of a swear box. If I watch anything with Oberman in, then I have to give money to help Mike’s defence fund against Riley’s fake libel action. That might do the trick and salve my conscience.
This is one of the classics of the graphic novel. Joe Sacco is an American journalist. He spent two months with the Palestinians in late 1991 and early 1992 in Gaza and the West Bank during the time of the first Intifada. He wrote and drew Palestine after his return to the US, basing it on his notes, publishing it as a nine-part comic strip. These were later collected into a single volume to form the graphic novel. The book also has a kind of introduction, ‘Homage to Joe Sacco’, from Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, critic of western imperialism and attitudes to the Arabs, and himself a Palestinian.
This is precisely the type of book the Israel lobby does not want people to read. Not BICOM, not the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which was set up because Gideon Falter, its founder, was worried about British attitudes becoming more hostile to Israel after the blockade of Gaza, not the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion and the companion party to the Israeli Labor Party, not the various ‘Friends of Israel’ societies in the political parties, Tories and Labour, nor the Jewish Leadership Council and definitely not the Board of Deputies of British Jews. All of them shout ‘anti-Semitism’ at anyone who dares to publish anything critical of Israel, or show the barbarity with which it treats the Palestinians.
The book shows Sacco’s experiences as he goes around Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, talking to both Palestinians and Israelis, meeting them, entering their homes, and listening to their stories. He starts the book in Cairo, the beginning of his journey to Israel, and to which he returns at his departure. During his time there, he visits the Vale of Kidron, the Arab quarter of Old Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza strip, as it then was, Balata, another refugee camp on the West Bank, Nablus, the town of Gaza itself, and finally Tel Aviv.
It’s not an easy read. This is an occupied country during deep unrest, and the threat of violence and arbitrary arrest and detention without trial is every where. There are patrols of soldiers, demonstrations, explosions and stone throwing. And he shows, with quotes, the contemptuous, lofty and hostile attitude the early Zionists and Lord Balfour had for the indigenous population. He quotes Balfour as saying
‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit this ancient land. We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the inhabitants’.
Ben Gurion thought it would be simple to expel the Palestinians, because he felt they had no real attachment to their homeland. He wrote that the Palestinian ‘is equally at ease whether in Jordan, Lebanon or a variety of other places’. With the approach of war, he made it clear their expulsion was going to be through military force: ‘In each attack a decisive blow should be struck, resulting in the destruction of homes and the expulsion of the population.’ When that was done, ‘Palestinian Arabs have only one role – to flee’. He also quotes Golda Meir, who stated that a Palestinian people, defining itself as a Palestinian people, did not exist, and ‘we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They do not exist’. 400 Palestinian villages were razed in the war marking the birth of Israel. Meir’s lie – that the Palestinians don’t exist as a people – is still repeated by Republican and pro-Israel bloggers. Golda Meir was also concerned about the Palestinian population outstripping that of the Israelis, another issue that is still very alive today.
His hosts are polite, welcoming him into their homes, and plying him with tea. But occasionally there is an outburst from one of them, when he’s asked what the point of him being there, of them talking to him, is. Because other journalists have been there too, and they’ve talked to them, and nothing has happened, nothing has changed. They also talk to him about the other factions, and of the peace process. In a separate text at the beginning of the book, he states that, while the peace process set up the Palestinian authority and gave them a government, it changed nothing for ordinary Palestinians, and the occupation and theft of land by the Israelis still goes on.
He also reveals that the Israelis appropriate 2/3 of the land in the West Bank for their own us, which includes the establishment of Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law. And the governments gives Israelis plenty of incentives to move to them. They’re given a government grant if they do, lower interest rates on loan, the housing itself is cheaper than in Israel, and an income tax rate of 7 per cent. The settlers themselves can be extremely aggressive. Sacco’s hosts tell them about incidents where settlers have come into Palestinian villages, smashing windows and demanding that the owners come out. Of people shot by them, and the trivial sentences given to the settlers guilty of this. They’re given jail sentences of a few months. If they’re convicted in the first place. Palestinians who shoot and kill Israelis are jailed for years. Some lavish homes do exist in Palestine, occupied by Arabs, but most live in very bare houses, often with leaking roofs, which are vulnerable to storms.
His cartoons show what his Palestinian hosts tell him it’s like in prison camps like Ansar III, with crowds of prisoners crammed into small, bare rooms with no heat and poor ventilation. There are also few eating utensils, to the various political factions in the camp – Fateh, Hamas, Popular Front, organise meal times so that everyone gets a turn with the cup and plate to eat and drink. Several of the people he talks to were arrested simply on suspicion. Israeli law allowed them to be held without charge while evidence was compiled, with his captors returning to court over and over again to request a few more days more, until the judge finally listens to their lawyer, has the procedure stopped and the prisoner released. He also shows how the prisoners were tortured through beatings, being forced to stand for hours with bags over their heads, a process permitted under Israel law. A judge ruled that torture could not be used, but what methods were to replace them were kept secret. So many Palestinians have been incarcerated, that a green identity card showing a man has been in jail is a matter of pride. And not to have been to prison correspondingly is a mark of shame.
He talks about how the Israelis have a deliberate policy of not allowing the Palestinians to industrialise, so that they compete with the Israel. The State has also put obstacles in place to prevent Palestinian farmers competing with Israelis. They also deliberately uproot the olive trees many Palestinians grow to support themselves. The Israelis also appropriate most of the water, and dig deeper wells, so that the Palestinians have a much poorer water supply and their own wells are becoming increasingly saline. As a result, unemployment in Gaza was at 40 per cent. And Sacco himself was approached several times by Palestinians, hoping he could do something so that they could leave and go abroad to study or find work.
He describes a school, without electricity, as well as a school for the deaf, which is supported through volunteers and whose staff complain of their lack of training for dealing with people with disabilities. He also hears and illustrates the story of one Palestinian woman, whose son was shot by Israeli soldiers, but was prevented from taking him directly to hospital. Instead she was ordered to go hither and thither, where she was told a helicopter was waiting to take her and the boy. When she gets there, there is no helicopter. She eventually takes him to the hospital herself in a car, by which time it’s too late and the lad dies.
The book also shows the mass of roadblocks and the permit system which Palestinians have to go through to go to Israel. At the same time, Israelis are simply allowed to whiz through in their separate lanes.
Sacco also doesn’t shy away from showing the negative side of Palestine – the anti-Semitism, and particularly infamous murders, like the killing of Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro, and the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team by the terrorist group Black September. This can turn into support for the murder of Israeli civilians. There’s also a chapter on the plight of Palestinian women, This is a society where women are still very much treated as inferiors and subordinates, where honour killings are carried out as the punishment for female adultery. It is also a society where collaborators are murdered, and those, who belong to the wrong faction may also be shot and killed.
The book was written 27 years ago, but nothing really seems to have changed since then. The illegal settlements are still there and expanding. Settlers are still seizing Palestinian homes and property, the apartheid separating Israelis from Palestinians is still in place, unemployment is still high, and Palestinians are still being treated as foreigners, refugees and second-class citizens on their own land.
However, some attitudes are changing. The Israeli liberals Sacco talks to only support the Palestinians up to a point. When pressed, some of them will say that Israel should keep the Occupied Territories, because they seized them in war. Or that they need to keep them for security reasons. But an increasing number of young Jews in America and elsewhere are appalled at the continuing maltreatment of the Palestinians and are becoming increasingly critical and hostile to Israel because of this. And there have also grown up major opposition groups like the human rights organisation B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence in Israel.
The Israeli state and its lobby and supporters in this country and others are increasingly scared. It’s why they’re trying to pass laws to criminalise the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in America, and to outlaw criticism of Israel in this country through tortuous definitions of anti-Semitism that are stretched to include it. It’s why they’re smearing, with the connivance of the right-wing media, the Blairites in the Labour party, and the Conservatives, decent people, who have fought racism and anti-Semitism, as anti-Semites.
Very long, detailed books have been written about Israel’s brutal treatment, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Sacco’s Palestine presenting this as graphic novel, is an example of how comics can also be serious literature, tackling a difficult subject with both narrative and artistic skill and style. I’ve mentioned on this blog before the alternative comics that were also published from the ’60s to the 1980s/1990s on political topics, including the Israeli maltreatment of Palestinians in Pat Mills’ Crisis. Palestine is very much in that tradition, and in 1996 won the American Book Award.
This is the third part and final part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. She’s a tireless critic of American imperialism, and the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and before that, on RT.
Dore and Martin discuss how the Empire and the Deep State loathes Trump because he ain’t good for the Empire’s image. After Bush had nearly pushed Americans towards revolution, Obama managed to placate people, and win them back to the Empire. But Trump is worse for the Empire because he’s such an a**hole and psychopath. There are people, who are just as psychotic. Paul Ryan, another Republican, hates the poor. But Trump is ramping up the Empire to colossal levels. There are now troop surges in Afghanistan, and the formation of Africom to deal with Somalia. Everybody’s heard of a horrific massacre committed by one of the warlords, and blamed on al-Shabaab. But what you aren’t being told is that week before his village was subject to a bombing raid which killed a load of kids. Martin talks about Trump’s hypocrisy and cynicism. He attacked Killary for the way she sold arms to the Saudis, but has been more than willing to sell them arms himself so they can kill civilians in Yemen. Under Trump, there has been a 400 per cent increase in drone strikes, and a 75 per cent increase in civilian deaths. Under Bush and Obama, the US military just killed every military-age male in a given locality. Now they’re carpet-bombing whole villages. Just like the Israelis kill Palestinians. Well, Trump said he would kill not only the terrorists, but also their families, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, he has not honoured the promises Martin hoped he would, like normalising relations with Russia.
And then they get on to MOAB – the Mother Of All Bombs. This ‘mini-nuke’ – actually a conventional bomb that approached some of the destructive power of a nuclear device – was dropped on a cave system in Afghanistan. They said it only killed terrorists, but there were people in that area, and we won’t know if it only killed terrorists, because nobody’s allowed in there. Martin describes ISIS as a barbaric death cult – which is true – but states that this doesn’t give us the right to kill the people, who live in these countries. She makes the point that the applause which greeted the MOAB attack was a dehumanisation of the Afghan people and the victims of this weapon.
They then discuss whether some of the people on the Right, who supported Trump, may now be disillusioned with the orange buffoon. Many people probably voted for him because they thought he was anti-interventionist. But he hasn’t been. This might be because the military-industrial complex and the warfare state are beyond his control. Martin hoped that this part of the Republican based would speak out, but she was disappointed. The base is just interested in having a more efficient War On Terror. They aren’t speaking out about Venezuela, nor about the push for war with North Korea, they just don’t want us to fund al-Qaeda. As for Trump himself, he was never anti-interventionist. He just appeared so as it was a useful stance against Killary. He doesn’t have to surround himself with generals, who just want war because with every new invasion they launch, they get another star on their jacket. They two then discuss how nobody knows why America was in Niger.
I realise that this is an American programme, discussing American issues. But it also directly and acutely affects us. A number of our politicos have attended Republican conventions, and one of Trump’s British buddies was Nigel Farage. The Tories have been copying and utilising Republican policies since Maggie Thatcher took over as premier in the 1970s. And New Labour did the same with the Clintonite wing of the Democrats, adopting their stance against the welfare state, and introducing neoliberalism, deregulation and privatisation, including the privatisation of the NHS, into the Labour Party.
The situation is rather different over here in Blighty, as we are now lucky enough to have a real Socialist as leader in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn. But New Labour is desperately trying to hang on in the shape of Progress, Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement. And they have been using the smearing of decent anti-racists, the majority of whom are Jewish, as anti-Semites and their expulsion from the party as a weapon to purge their left-wing opponents.
As for imperialism, we are still riding on the back of America’s coat-tails, trying to be a world power by exploiting the ‘Special Relationship’. And so we support their wars in the Middle East, and the looting of these countries’ state industries and the brutalisation and impoverishment of their peoples.
Our media isn’t quite as bad as the Americans’ just yet. The news over here does accept that climate change is real at least, and there are still news reports about the poverty caused by austerity and Tory cuts to the welfare state and health service.
But it is heavily biased towards the Tories. The Beeb is full of public school, very middle class White guys, and its news and editorial staff have contained a number of high profile Tories, several of whom have left their posts to work for the party under Cameron and May. ‘Goebbels’ Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg are members of the Tory party. Robinson led a whole series of Tory groups, while Kuenssberg spoke at a fringe meeting in the Tory party this year.
The Kushners noted in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, that the Beeb does not allow anyone to question austerity, and it is just assumed, entirely falsely, as true and necessary by the rest of the media. And academics from Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have noted that the Beeb is far more likely to talk to Tory politicians and managing directors about the economy, than Labour politicos and trade unionists.
And the war on alternative media is happening in this country as well. The Tories would love to close down RT. We’ve already seen them join in the baying mob accusing it of being Putin’s propaganda arm interfering with British democracy over here. All the while being very silent about how the Israelis were caught trying to get the people they don’t like removed from May’s cabinet. We’ve seen them criticise Labour MPs for appearing on the network, while ignoring their own people, who also have. And May got on her high horse to write a letter to Alex Salmond telling him not to take up a job as presenter with the Network.
And the bots and algorithms cooked up by Google and Facebook to protect us all from ‘fake news’ are having an effect on ‘controversial’ read: left-wing bloggers and vloggers. They direct potential readers away from the sites the corporations have decided are a threat to democracy. Mike’s suffered an inexplicable fall in the readership of some of his articles, and some of his posts have had to be reposted after mysteriously vanishing from Facebook. Even before then, there was an attempt to censor Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge by claiming that his site was unsuitable for children. The pretext for that was some of the coarse humour he employs in his satire. This is nothing compared to some of the language you will hear on YouTube. It looked very much like his real crime was sending up Dave Cameron and the other walking obscenities taking up space on the Tory benches.
What Abby Martin says about the media and the crimes of Empire describe the situation in America. But it also describes what the neoliberal elites are doing over here.
We have to stop this. We have to take back parliament, and end the warmongering. Now.
Next Thursday, 23rd November 2017, at 11.30 in the morning, Radio 4 are broadcasting a programme, Where Are All the Working-Class Writers? by the writer Kit de Waal. The blurb for the programme on page 137 of the Radio Times runs
Birmingham-raised writer Kit de Waal published her first novel in 2016, aged 55. She used part of the advance to set up a scholarship in an attempt to improve working-class representation in the arts. She talks to writers, agents and publishers about barriers for writers from working-class backgrounds.
More information about her and the programme is in another piece on the opposite page, 135. This states
“I never expected to be a writer,” says Kit de Waal in this thoughtful exploration of class and writing. “I was working class, I was the daughter of immigrants. People like me weren’t even expected to go to university. ” De Waal did go to university, but at 51; she’d left school at 16. She knows that her background and – and how it influences the stories she tellls – makers her an oddity in literary circles. As she speaks to writers, agents and publishers to find out why this is, it becomes clear that class is an intrinsic part of the under-representation question, overlapping with race and gender. She gleans erudite contributions – take Tim Lott’s description of working-class writing as “the literary equivalent of soul music”, as he asks, “who’s making the soul music?’ Who’s making the rock ‘n’ roll?’
This is an issues that the great British comics writer, Pat Mills, raised in some of the interviews I posted up on here. Mills, who created the classic anti-war strip, Charley’s War, and wrote and created many of the classic characters in the SF comic, 2000 AD, has said that he felt angry that there were no working class characters in comics and very few in mainstream literature. Worse, there was an attitude amongst the media that was determined to exclude them. He has described how he was working on a story for Dr. Who in the 1980s, which was to have a working-class spaceship captain. This was rejected by the script editor, who really didn’t like the idea.
As for popular music, I was told by a friend of mine a little while ago that this was another traditional working class area that was being taken over by the middle classes. Most of the stars now in the charts, or at least at the time, were graduates of university courses in music or the performing arts. The pub rock scene, which emerged in the ’70s and which the launched the careers of many of the great working class bands of the ’70s and ’80s is now very much disappearing.
Once upon a time, back in the 1980s and 1990s, Private Eye’s literary column took a somewhat similar view of the contemporary literary scene. The reviewer back then was acutely critical of the snobbishness and cliquishness of literature and the publishing industry. The Eye believed and very strongly argued that British literature was dominated by a small clique of writers, who were largely vastly overhyped, to the exclusion of better writers and aspiring authors, who were rejected out of hand. They gave as an example of this a conversation they’d heard about with one of the editors of Granta. When the editor was asked about a piece submitted by one aspiring author, they responded by asking what colour the enveloped it was send in was. This, the Eye’s reviewer went on, showed precisely what the attitude towards outside submissions at the magazine was. It was geared entirely towards people within the literary clique. Those outside were automatically rejected, manuscript unread.
The Eye wasn’t particularly interested in the class aspects of this question. Which isn’t surprising, as Richard Ingrams, the former editor pointed out during a talk one year at the Cheltenham Literary Festival that the magazine’s founders – himself, Willie Rushton, Peter Cook and so on, were all middle-class and privately educated. The Eye’s reviewer said several times that there was no reason why working class writers should be particularly promoted over others. They also made the occasional sneering comments directed at left-wing authors stressing their very working class roots that they were ‘prolier than thou’. I think they may even have made a comment about ‘Prole-lit’ for a type of very stereotypical ‘working class’ literature.
But they also attacked authors, who seemed to be published solely on snob value, because they were members of the aristocracy or the upper-middle classes, rather than because their writing had any intrinsic merit. Regarding one such author, the Eye’s reviewer said that any miner, who ever picked up a pen to write a sonnet, was of far more interest and value than them. They also savaged authors from the upper classes, who struck them as having a particularly patronising attitude to the lower orders, who read her books. There’s one review, which takes Jilly Cooper to task for this, whether the reviewer writing as her, sends her up by describing her readers as ‘pawps’ as an example of the class snobbishness in her novels. I’ve never read Cooper, so can’t really say whether this attitude is entirely fair or not, or, if it is, whether Cooper is any worse than many other authors.
I think that in more recent years the Eye’s literary column lost a little of that fierce opposition to the cliquishness of the literary scene, and particularly the London literary milieu. It still attacks and parodies overhyped, bad writing, but this seems part of a simple attack on overrated, mediocre literature. This now includes the works of the stars of reality TV shows and vapid, but inexplicably popular, bloggers and vloggers on the Net. But working class representation in writing, and other areas of the arts is a genuine part of the wider issues of access and exclusivity. Whether the Net will have an impact here, in popularising the work of working class writers, who would otherwise remain unpublished if left to the world of traditional literary agents and publishers, remains to be seen.
This is the amended version of an article I posted earlier, when I had yet to hear from Mike himself about what happened. This was because his blog was extremely difficult to log onto late last night, so I feared Mike had been personally libelled by Stevens – he hadn’t – and that the internet was censoring his replies. It probably wasn’t either, but it has in the past.
Yesterday, Chris Stevens, the Tory councillor for Horley in Surrey, went off on a rant denouncing the articles journos like Aditya Chakrabortty and bloggers, vloggers and disability activists like Mike had put up describing how Tory welfare policies are killing the sick and disabled as ‘inflammatory rubbish’.
So Mike yesterday put up a list of some of his own ‘inflammatory rubbish’ articles to prove exactly that that is precisely what they are not. He states in his brief introduction to the list that it isn’t exhaustive, but it makes his point.
It may not be exhaustive, but it is a long, long list. And as you can expect from Mike, the articles come from reputable sources.
I’ve had repeated difficulty getting on to the article, although that’s been easier than the article before it, where he denounced and refutes Stevens’ rant. This looks to me very, very much like net censorship.
Here’s the link to Mike’s list of articles about the Tories’ chequebook euthanasia of poor and disabled.
As for Stevens, I put up an article last night attacking him for his vilification of journos and bloggers like Mike, comparing him to Chris Davies, the MP for Mike’s part of Wales, who libelled him as an anti-Semite. These were based on the gross smears made by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, whose name is a deliberate misnomer. They are in reality an Israel lobby group, who were founded to manipulate public opinion after they found out that severely normal Brits despised the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the murder of Palestinian civilians. Very many of the people they have libelled as anti-Semites, perhaps even the majority, are Jews – secular, Liberal, Torah-observant or ultra-Orthodox. It doesn’t matter. One word out of place, and decent people are presented as something monstrous, close to Nazis. Even when Jewish critics of Israel have themselves been victims of anti-Semitic abuse and violence, as some of those who supported Mike in his struggle against this libel have been.
‘Michelle’, one of the many great commenters on this blog, told me that on Question Time Stevens was so upset that he shouted at Chakrabortty. This uncomfortable reality was too much for the delicate soul to bear. It’s all very reminiscent of the old joke about the incompetent vicar, whose curate one Sunday finds in the vicar’s written for his sermon ‘Point weak here – so shout’.
I’m sick and tired of Tory shouting and vilification. I’m sick of it from Stevens, sick of it from Davies, sick of it from IDS, Damian Green and the other murderous apparatchiks in the DWP, and heartily sick of it from Theresa ‘Goody-Two Shoes’ May.
They should all do the decent thing and resign. Immediately.
This is awesome. I’ve posted up videos from Blagrove before, particularly one in which he laid into the mainstream media for their reporting of the Grenfell Tower disaster. In this very short piece from Double Down News, he rips into the mainstream media for its class bias – for the White, middle class elite, and against poor Whites, Muslims and so on. He has very forthright views about the Heil, stating that, yes, he would use it as toilet paper. Well, it’s got to be good for something. He tells how he was asked by someone from the mainstream media what they were doing wrong. He told them about how they were for the elite, and constantly attacked Jeremy Corbyn. This even included nominally left-wing papers like the Groaniad. Corbyn’s popular because he gives people hope and builds them up. The MSM does the opposite. When they talk about youths committing crime, they aren’t talking about the children of the middle classes, but lower class Whites. The same with their constant attacks on Muslims, and their refusal to recognize that British foreign policy and military action abroad has an effect on terrorism.
He talks about how he was an independent film maker for about 17-18 years, and never got a commission from the Beeb or Channel 4. Now both channels want him and his team. He rhetorically asks where they were when he was young and hungry? They don’t want him; they just want his contacts. But he talks about an independent film on young gun crime, which garnered four million views. He seems to be talking directly to DDN at one point, stating that he dislikes their name, but good on them, because they’re successful. He concludes by saying that the days of MSM are over. The revolution will be livestreamed!
Warning: the video contains images of Eton or other public schoolboys acting as such, which some people may find offensive.
Blagrove’s absolutely right. Corbyn is successful, precisely because he does give people hope. And that absolutely terrifies the media and corporate elites. As Servalan, the supreme commander of the Terran Federation, once said in Blake’s 7 ‘Hope is very dangerous’.
It’s why the Heil and Torygraph a few days ago started ranting about how the young supported Labour and Corbyn because they’d been indoctrinated by left-wing teachers. They haven’t. The vast majority of teachers simply want to stand in front of a whiteboard and teach. When they do become political, and criticize the government, or start mooting strike action, it’s because of genuine professional concerns, both for their careers and the teaching profession as a whole, and also because of the harm Tory educational policies are having on schoolchildren and their intellectual and moral development.
There is also very stringent legislation in place to make sure teachers cannot indoctrinate young children. If there is a situation, where they are asked to make a judgement about a political or religious belief, they have to state clearly that this is only their view.
The idea that there are somehow legions of left-wing teachers poisoning young minds is just more propaganda. I really shouldn’t expect anything more or better from them. Back in the 1980s under Thatcher the Fail and the Torygraph, along with the rest of the right-wing press, were screaming the same lies about Communist teachers and the Peace Studies courses, taught in some schools. Quite apart from the scaremongering about Brent Council and its crusade against sexism, anti-gay prejudice and racism.
There are very good reasons why many young people are turning to Labour: Corbyn is giving them hope. Hope that they might actually get a job, or if they don’t, that they might actually receive unemployment or disability benefit from the state. That the 50 per cent, which the government wants to go to uni, will emerge without something like £40,000 worth of student debt, a debt that they will never be able to pay off, and will stop them owning their own home. Corbyn gives them hope that their parents just might be able to afford to retire to a well-earned, decent pension. Hope that we are going to live in a civilized Britain, where the elite aren’t constantly whipping up hysterical fears about immigrants to divide working people, or demonise the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the weak, the disenfranchised.
But the corporate elite are so convinced of their own right to rule, that they simply can’t get their heads round all that. Or rather, they don’t want to. And more importantly, they don’t want the British public, who buy their disgusting rags, to understand that either. And so it’s all back to the stale, antiquated Thatcherite lies about teachers.
Blagrove is also absolutely right too, about the way Corbyn has been properly reported and supported by the internet and social media, just as Obama and now Bernie Sanders is in America. And the plutocrats, who own it are frightened. It’s why YouTube is demonetizing left-wing internet news shows like The Young Turks, The David Pakman Show, Secular Talk and so on. It’s why Mike and other left-wing bloggers have found that Facebook has changed its sharing buttons, to make it more difficult for them to be reblogged and shared.
Because, as Blagrove has said, he trusts blogger to report the news better than the professional media.
I also applaud this video because Blagrove stands up, not just for Muslims and people of colour, but also for poor White kids. I’ve commented on a number of pieces in Counterpunch, which have observed that White and Black in the working class need to stand together, and that Trump and elite are using White racism to divide working people. These articles argued that Whites needed to reject racism. Blagrove here has embraced poor Whites. He doesn’t accuse them of racism, but recognizes them as fellow victims of elitist class rule.
It’s a very trenchant criticism of the media, and its failure to serve the real interests of the public over its corporate masters. But the internet has put the power of the media in the hands of the ordinary, working people, who are excluded from the corporate elite. And they are livestreaming the revolution.
Here’s another drawing from my series of cartoons attacking the Tory party and their sycophants and cheerleaders against the poor in the media. It’s another cartoon of Iain Duncan Smith, the former head of the DWP and the Tory party, before it was taken over by David Cameron. Cameron’s austerity campaign, launched with the support of the Tories’ coalition partners, the Lib Dems, and their leader, Nick Clegg, has been responsible for the deaths of untold tens of thousands. Many of these are due to IDS’ massive expansion of the sanctions system in the DWP, which has seen terminally ill cancer patients told they are no longer entitled to benefits because they’re fit and healthy. Other disabled and unemployed people were sanctioned because they missed interviews, when they were in hospital. A number of whistleblowers have come forward and revealed that the DWP operates a quota system, in which a certain number are to be found fit for work, even if they aren’t. Several offices were also caught giving prizes and gold stars for the worker, who could throw the most people off jobseekers allowance.
After a long struggle, Mike over at Vox Political got figures from the DWP under the Freedom of Information Act, which revealed that for a specific time, 13-14,000 people died after the DWP decided that they were fit for work. Researchers at Oxford University have also found that in 2015, austerity killed 30,000 people. If we assume this figure has remained constant, then to date, in mid 2017, something like 75,000 people have died – 30,000 in 2015, another 30,000 in 2016, and about half that number, 15,000, this year. Add the 13-14,000 Mike found, and you have a total of 87-88,000. And this may well be an underestimation.
Johnny Void, Stilloak, DPAC and other disability bloggers like Mike have also put up lists of the names of some of the poor souls, who have died in misery and starvation, and the circumstances in which they died. There are 500-600 + people on it. Some of them took their lives as they saw no way out of the poverty and starvation that was being inflicted on them. Mike and the other bloggers are calling this death toll what it is – the genocide of the disabled, and ‘social murder’, following Friedrich Engels discussion of the concept in his The Condition of the Working Class in England.
I’m something of a comics fan, including 2000 AD and Judge Dredd, Mega-City 1’s toughest lawman. And so I decided that one of the best metaphors for the carnage IDS and the Tories have inflicted on the poor and innocent was to show him as JD’s arch-enemy, Judge Death. Or Sydney, as he was also known. Judge Death was an animated corpse, who came from a parallel world in which life itself had been declared a crime, because all crime was committed by the living. Which is close to IDS’ and the Tories’ idea of punishing the poor, simply for being poor.
If you can’t read them, the captions are ‘The crime issss poverty, the sentensssse isss death’, and ‘The Tories – You cannot kill what doesss not live’, paraphrasing Death’s catchphrases ‘The crime issss life, the sentenssse issss death’, and ‘You cannot kill what doesss not live’.
If anyone from the 2000 AD crowd is reading this, please accept it as a twisted homage to the subversive, anti-authoritarian and satirical nature of 2000 AD and its strips, which have made it one of the leading comics for nearly forty years since the late 70s.
This is the text of another pamphlet I wrote a year or so ago against the highly exploitative workfare industry. As the pamphlet explains, workfare, or ‘welfare to work’, is the system that provides industry with cheap, unemployed temporary labour under the guise of getting the jobless back into work by giving them work experience. If the unemployed person refuses, he or she is thrown off benefit.
These temporary jobs go nowhere, and it’s been proven that the unemployed are actually far better off looking for jobs on their own than using workfare. And it’s very similar to other systems of supposed voluntary work and forced labour, such as the labour colonies set up in Britain in 1905, the Reichsarbeitsdienst in Nazi Germany, and the use of forced labour against the ‘arbeitscheu’ – the ‘workshy’, as well as the compulsory manual labour required of all citizens in Mao’s china during the Cultural Revolution, and the Gulags in Stalin’s Russia.
Mike over at Vox Political has blogged against it, so has Johnny Void and the Angry Yorkshireman of Another Angry Voice, and many other left-wing bloggers. It’s another squalid policy which New Labour and the Tories took over from Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Jeremy Corbyn has promised to get rid of the work capability tests. I hope also that under him, the Labour party will also get rid of this vile policy, so that big corporations like Poundland and supermarkets like Tesco’s will have to take on workers and pay them a decent wage, rather than exploiting desperate and jobless workers supplied by the Thatcherite corporate state.
End Workfare Now!
Workfare is one of the most exploitative aspects of the contemporary assault on the welfare state and the unemployed. It was advocated in the 1980s by the Republicans under Ronald Reagan in America, and in Britain by Thatcher’s Conservatives. In 1979 the Tory party ranted about the need to ‘restore the will to work’. Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared that ‘The Government and the vast majority of the British people want hard work and initiative to be properly rewarded and are vexed by disincentives to work’. At its heart is the attitude that the unemployed should be forced to work for their benefits, as otherwise they are getting ‘something for nothing’. Very many bloggers and activists for the poor and unemployed, including Vox Political, Johnny Void, Another Angry Voice, and myself have denounced it as another form of slavery. It’s used to provide state-subsidised, cheap labour for big business and charities, including influential Tory donors like Sainsbury’s. And at times it crosses the line into true slavery. Under the sanctions system, an unemployed person is still required to perform workfare, even if the jobcentre has sanctioned them, so that they are not receiving benefits. Workfare recipients – or victims – have no control over where they are allocated or what jobs they do. The government was challenged in the courts by a geology graduate, who was forced to work in Poundland. The young woman stated that she did not object to performing unpaid work. She, however, had wanted to work in a museum, and if memory serves me correctly, had indeed got a place at one. She was, however, unable to take up her unpaid position there because of the Jobcentre’s insistence she labour for Poundland instead. A young man also sued the government, after he was sanctioned for his refusal to do 30 hours a week unpaid labour for six months for the Community Action Programme. The High and Appeal Courts ruled in the young people’s favour. They judged that the government had indeed acted illegally, as the law did not contain any stipulations for when and how such work was to be performed.
Iain Duncan Smith, the notorious head of the Department of Work and Pensions, was outraged. He called the decision ‘rubbish’ and said, ‘There are a group of people out there who think they are too good for this kind of stuff .. People who think it is their right take benefit and do nothing for it – those days are over.’ This is rich coming from IDS, who was taking over a million pounds in farm subsidies from the EU. Eventually, Smith got sick of the criticism he was taking for the government’s welfare policies, and flounced off early in 2016 moaning about how unfair it all was that he should get the blame, when the notorious Work Capability Tests inflicted on the elderly and disabled were introduced by New labour.
Those forced into workfare are in no sense free workers, and it similarly makes a nonsense of the pretense that this somehow constitutes ‘voluntary work’, as this has been presented by the government and some of the participating charities
The political scientist Guy Standing is also extremely critical of workfare in his book, A Precariat Charter, demanding its abolition and making a series of solid arguments against it. He states that it was first introduced in America by the Republicans in Wisconsin, and then expanded nationally to the rest of the US by Bill Clinton in his Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It was part of his campaign to ‘end welfare as we know it’. Single parents receiving social assistance were required to take low-paying jobs after two years. Legislation was also passed barring people from receiving welfare payments for more than five years in their entire lives.
David Cameron, unsurprisingly, was also a fan of the Wisconsin system, and wanted to introduce it over here. In 2007 he made a speech to the Tory faithful at the party conference, proclaiming ‘We will say to people that if you are offered a job and it’s a fair job and one that you can do and you refuse it, you shouldn’t get any welfare.’ This became part of Coalition policy towards the unemployed when they took power after the 2010 elections.’ Two years later, in 2012, Boris Johnson, speaking as mayor of London, declared that he was going to use EU money from the Social Fund to force young adults between 18 and 24 to perform 13 weeks of labour without pay if they were unemployed. In June that year David Cameron also declared that there was a need to end ‘the nonsense of paying people more to stay at home than to get a job – and finally making sure that work really pays. Ed Miliband’s Labour party also joined in. Liam Byrne, the Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions, declared that
Labour would ensure that no adult will be able to live on the dole for over two years and no young person for over a year. They will be offered a real job with real training, real prospects and real responsibility … People would have to take this responsibility or lose benefits.
This was echoed by Ed Balls, who said
A One Nation approach to welfare reform means government has a responsibility to help people into work and support for those who cannot. But those who can work must be required to take up jobs or lose benefits as such – no ifs or buts.
Forced Labour for the Unemployed in History
Standing traces the antecedents of workfare back to the English poor law of 1536 and the French Ordonnance de Moulins of twenty years later, which obliged unemployed vagabonds to accept any job that was offered them. He states that the direct ancestor is the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the infamous legislation that, under the notion of ‘less eligibility’, stipulated that those receiving support were to be incarcerated in the workhouse, where conditions were deliberately made much harsher in order to deter people from seeking state
support, rather than paid work. This attitude is also reflected in contemporary attitudes that, in order to ‘make work pay’, have demanded that welfare support should be much less than that received for paid work. This has meant that welfare payments have become progressively less as the various measure to make the labour market more flexible – like zero hours contracts – drove down wages. The workhouse system was supplemented in 1905 by the Unemployed Workmen Act, supported, amongst others, by Winston Churchill. This directed unemployed young men into labour, so that they should not be ‘idle’ and be ‘under control’. Nor were leading members of the early Labour party averse to the use of force. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two of the founders of the Fabian Society, were also in favour of sending the unemployed to ‘labour colonies’, chillingly close to the forced labour camps which became such as feature of the Nazi and Communist regimes. Weimar Germany in the 1920s and ’30s also developed a system of voluntary work to deal with the problems of mass unemployment. This was taken over by the Nazis and became compulsory for all Germans from 19-25 as the Reicharbeitsdienst, or Imperial Labour Service It was mainly used to supply labour for German agriculature. Because of its universal nature, the Reicharbeitsdienst had no stigma attached to it, and indeed was seen as part of the new, classless Germany that was being created by Hitler. In a speech to the Service’s workers, Hitler declared that there would be no leader, who had not worked his way up through their ranks. Much harsher was the Nazi’s treatment of the serially unemployed. They were declared arbeitscheu – the German word, which forms the basis of the English ‘workshy’. These individuals were sent to the concentration camps, where they were identified with a special badge on their pyjamas, just like those marking out Jews, gay men, Socialists and trade unionists, and so on.
Liam Byrne also harked back to the Webbs to support his argument for workfare as Labour party policy. He stated
If you go back to the Webb report, they were proposing detention colonies for people refusing to take work … All the way through our history there has been an insistence on the responsibility to work if you can. Labour shouldn’t be any different now. We have always been the party of the responsibility to work as well.
The Workfare Scheme
The result of this is that many unemployed people have been placed on the Mandatory Work Activity – MWA – scheme, which requires them to perform four weeks of unpaid work for a particular company, organisation or charity. The scheme also includes the disabled. Those now judged capable of performing some work are placed in the Work-Related Activity group, and required perform some unpaid labour in order to gain ‘experience’. If they do not do so, they may lose up to 70 per cent of their benefits.
This has created immense fear among the unemployed and disabled. Standing quotes one man with cerebral palsy, who was so afraid of being sanctioned for not performing the mandatory work, that he felt physically sick. Mental health professionals – psychiatrists and psychologists, have also released reports attacking the detrimental effect the stress of these tests are having on the mentally ill. So far they have estimated that upwards of a quarter of a million people with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety have had their condition made worse – sometimes very much worse – through the stress of taking these tests.
The system also affects those in low-paid part-time jobs or on zero hours contracts. These must prove that they are looking for more working hours or a better paid job. If they do not do so, they may lose benefits or tax credits. In 2013 the Tory-Lib Dem government made it even harder for people to claim tax credits by raising the number of working hours a week, for which tax credits could not be claimed, from 16 to 24.
This is an angry, impassioned rant by Kevin Logan against the gross social injustice of Tory Britain that has produced the Grenfell Tower fire. Logan’s a male feminist, who makes vlogs attacking the Alt-Right and Men’s Rights movements and their lunacies.
Logan begins the video by discussing the fire itself. He mentions how Grenfell Tower is an area of low-income housing in Kensington, one of the richest places in Britain. As it is a pocket of low class housing – he calls it ‘slum’ – amidst extreme wealth, the local council decided to cover it in cladding, so that the richer residents wouldn’t have to look at it. The fire spread rapidly because this cladding was inflammable. The disaster was entirely avoidable, as fire-proof cladding was only an extra £2 per unit more expensive. Thus it would have cost a mere £5,000 more to protect these people from the horror that engulfed them.
He also queries the official figures for the number of victims. At the time he made the video, the official death toll was 30. This, he states, will be revised upwards. It may well go over 100, and some have suggested that the real figure will be over 300. We don’t know at the moment, as the government has decided that it’s politically sensitive and so have slapped a D notice on it.
He lays the blame for this tragedy firmly on the Tories, and specifically David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. George Osborne is responsible, as he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who launched the Tories’ austerity policies. David Cameron was the Prime Minister, who stated clearly in 2012 that he was against the culture of health and safety. He therefore was determined to repeal the ‘red tape’, which means the laws actually protecting humans beings. And Theresa May is responsible because she cut emergencies and the number of fire stations in London when she was in charge of the Home Office. As for Boris Johnson, he made the situation worse by cutting the number of counsellors available to help fire fighters get over the horrors they’ve seen. There were 14 of them before he took office as mayor of London, and those weren’t enough. But Boris then went and reduced them to two.
Logan states quite clearly that austerity kills. Not just through cuts to the emergency services, but also in cuts to hospitals and the welfare state. He also states that this country needs to decide what it is. Either we’re a nation too poor to afford to give decent cladding that will protect people for a mere £5,000, or we’re a nation so rich we can afford to give billions in tax cuts to millionaires. Not to mention the fact that we’re spending another £100 billion on nuclear weapons. He states that he isn’t going to get into the debate about nuclear weapons, only that apparently we can’t afford to feed and shelter the poor, but we can find money for nuclear weapons, and bombing brown folk elsewhere in the world.
He also informs his viewers how Jeremy Corbyn attempted to introduce legislation to protect people in poor quality housing, but 311 Tory MPs voted against it. This included 80, who were private landlords. This was a massive conflict of interest, which should never have been allowed to happen. And the media are complicit in it because they have remained silent on it.
Over half of the video is Logan discussing patriotism, and the question, often asked, whether he is patriotic. He states that when a tragedy like this occurs, no, he can’t be patriotic. Not for a country that cares more for the rich, than to spend £5,000 stopping poor people from being burned alive – or, rather, killed by smoke inhalation, in their beds. He states very clearly that there needs to be riots about this, and for those responsible to be properly prosecuted. He doesn’t know where legal responsibility for this tragedy lies, with local council or elsewhere, but a large number of people need to be prosecuted, far larger than a small number of sacrificial lambs. He states that corporate manslaughter needs to be taken far more seriously in this country. The politicians responsible should be given absolutely no peace until they either resign or pass the necessary legislation to protect people against further tragedies like this.
He also predicts that the Tories will find some way of tricking people out of their homes. They’ve said they won’t, and that the residents will be rehoused in the borough, but they will do it anyway. Logan states that it is wrong that there are people, who are homeless, while there are mansions, owned by the rich, that are going empty. The people made homeless by the fire could be housed in them, and the state could pay for their accommodation. But this won’t happen, because the rich always come first.
He says that he isn’t interested in what we claim to be, or what we were, but what we are and will be, before he will say he’s patriotic. He doesn’t hate the country, but we have to stop being a Tory vassal state. And Theresa May needs to go. If, however, we want to be a country where the rich come before stopping the poor die, then as far as he concerned, you can burn the country to the ground.
I agree with nearly everything he says here – about the twisted system of values we have in our society, where the profits of the rich come before human life, and where invading nations in the developing world for the benefit of multinationals is far more important than tackling the poverty back in Britain. As Mike and other disability rights bloggers – DPAC, Stilloaks, Johnny Void and many others have shown time and again, austerity is killing tens of thousands each year. There is absolutely no question about it. And neither should there be any question about who is responsible for this carnage as well. It’s the Tories.
I reject the call to riot, and his angry rejection of patriotism. Rioting only results in local residents having their lives and property threatened and damaged. It doesn’t threaten the politicians and corporations ultimately responsible for the iniquities against which the riots are aimed. And it allows the Tory press to dismiss those protesting as thugs and extremists. We’ve already seen it happen this weekend, when a peaceful crowd spontaneously invaded Kensington council offices to make their voices heard. No-one rioted, there was no violence, and no begging. But that didn’t stop the media and Tory press from claiming there was. All to frighten the millions watching and reading the papers away from supporting them.
As for patriotism, I’m a patriot in the sense that I want the best for my country and its people. There is still much that is good in this country. But its government is mendacious and corrupt. And the very people, who insist that we all be patriotic, are usually those responsible for the injustices that mar it. Like the Tories under Thatcher, who made much about how they stood for Britain and patriotism. Or the right-wing nationalists in the NF, EDL, BNP and similar organisations.
There’s a lesson here for the Alt-Right on why many people in the West don’t feel patriotic. According to the Alt-Right and similar right-wing ideologues, it’s all due to ‘cultural Marxism’. The Frankfurt School has undermined western self-confidence in order to destroy its culture, and place everyone under the Communist heel. It’s also because of ‘cultural Marxism’ that feminism is making such inroads to the point that men are being treated unjustly.
No, ‘cultural Marxism’, if it even exists, doesn’t have anything to do with the rejection of patriotism by many in the contemporary West. It’s gross injustices like the Grenfell Tower fire. Decent people are outraged by a social system that has gives such massive, disproportionate power to a rich minority, and has allowed the poor, non-Whites and women to be mistreated and oppressed. But I very much doubt that this obvious fact will make much impression on them, as they’re not going to listen.
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