After a pause of a few days, CJ has returned to writing down his thoughts on ghosts. These are an ongoing attempt by him to sort out his ideas on the matter. This is not an easy matter, as scholars – scientists, theologians, and philosophers, whether sceptics and believers, have been arguing about what ghosts are, if they exist, down the centuries. CJ in this series of blog posts follows the line of the founders of the Society for Psychic Research that ghosts are a kind of hallucination broadcast telepathically by a mind. It’s the same idea that provided the great 19th century writer L. Sheridan LeFanu with the basis for his short story ‘The House and the Brain’. In this latest post, CJ ponders the vexed question of ‘Phantasms of the Living’ as the SPR put it.
Along with investigating ghosts as the spirits of the dead, the SPR also investigated and compiled records of cases where the apparition was of a living person. These were full, so full, in fact, that Gurney, Podmore and Myer, three of the founders, published a book devoted to them, Phantasms of the Living. This comprised two volumes with a total of 1,400 pages. It is one of the books CJ recommends that serious researchers into ghosts should start before moving on to later works, such as Hilary Evans excellent Seeing Ghosts.
Looking through the surveys done over the past century of the appearance of ghosts and apparitions, it appears that there has been something of a change in the phenomenon. It may surprise the modern reader to known that in the census of hallucinations, of those that were recognised there were rather more of the living than of the departed: 32 per cent of the total number of recorded cases compared to 14.3 per cent. In 1948 Mass Observation carried out a survey for Donald West. Of the cases they recorded, only 9 per cent were of the dead while 40.5 per cent of the living. Both of these surveys also recorded cases were the apparition wasn’t recognised: 41 per cent in the census of hallucinations and 31.5 per cent in the Mass Observation’s survey. Mass Observation were a peculiar outfit. They were a group of anthropologists who lamented that ethnographically we knew more about other societies, the primal cultures over which the empire ruled, than we did ourselves and so set about the anthropological study of the British themselves. How they didn’t get arrested with some of their antics I honestly don’t know. This included studying how long it took men to urinate in lavatories to how long it took women to undress for the night. Most of their studies were much more ordinary and socially acceptable than those two examples, and I do wonder if the men making these studies ended up being beaten up or in court trying to explain to a judge that their suspicious activities weren’t voyeurism but serious science.
Back to the spooks. Over the next few years this situation was reversed. Of those ghosts the percipients recognised, the majority were of the dead. The postal survey carried out by the Institute of Paraphysical Research in 1968 and 1974found that of the 28 per cent of cases where the apparition was recognised, two-thirds were of the dead. Another postal survey carried out in 1974 by Erlendur Haraldsson found that only 11 per cent were phantasms of the living, and 31 per cent of the dead. He also cites the findings of ASSAP treasurer Becky Smith, whose survey found that 25 per cent of recognised apparitions were of the living. However, only 16 of the cases in her survey were of people recognised by the percipient. From the available information it appears that there was a change in the phenomenon between 1948 and 1968, but this may be illusory. We naturally don’t know how many of the apparitions in the unrecognised cases were of the living and dead. It’s possible that the real figures may be different, but this is impossible to know because the percipients didn’t recognise the people whose shades they saw.
One of the explanations the SPR put forward for the appearance of ghosts of the living was that they were crisis apparitions. These are broadcast telepathically by people undergoing an emergency or crisis, including their own deaths, to their loved ones. CJ notes that this feels like a natural explanation due to the fact that we are used to ghosts as distressed or seeking help. He could have added here that this type of apparition seems related to the doppelganger or fetch of traditional fairy lore. The term ‘doppelganger’ is German for ‘double goer’ or perhaps ‘double walker’. They were supernatural doubles of individuals, and it was considered an omen of that person’s death if one was seen. One of the explanations advanced in the 16th or 17th century for them was that the bodies of seriously ill or dying people exuded vapours, which coalesced into a replica of the original. After this person’s death, the fetch then went to join the fairies in their hills.
Becky’s suggested solution to this apparent change in the phenomenon is that the publicity surrounding the publication of Phantasms of the Living or the SPR’s hypothesis that ghosts were created telepathically made it more likely that people would report instances where the apparition was of someone still alive. The fact that Sheridan LeFanu uses the idea in his ghost story shows that it had permeated some way into popular ideas about spooks, at least among that section of the public that read ghost stories.
Another possibility CJ considers is that these are cases of mistaken identity. He cites an instance where he himself was struck by the astonishing similarity of a young woman drinking a milkshake in an ice cream parlour on Cheltenham High Street and that of a young female friends who had sadly passed away from lung cancer. It’s quite possible that some cases of doppelgangers and apparitions of the living are indeed due to mistaken identity. There is a limit to the number of different faces human biology can create, and so, in the words of the popular saying, ‘everyone has a double’. Well, possibly not everyone, but a few. There are cases of people who are physically identical but who are completely unrelated. I was once mistaken for someone who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture’s laboratory outside Bristol.
CJ ends his piece by wondering how many of us can visualise ourselves, and that it’s probably easier for someone to project an image of somebody else than of themselves. He therefore believes that if the ghost of a murdered girl is seen, it probably comes from the minds of other people, such as the murderer or the girl’s relatives and loved ones, rather than the girl herself. Could it come from folklorists thinking of the tale? And so could we build a ghost?
This takes us into the realm of the ‘Philip’ experiment, in which a group of psychical researchers constructed an entirely fictional entity, ‘Philip’, with whom they tried to make contact during seances. They succeeded, which seems to suggest that it’s possible for living experimenters to create entirely fictional communicating spirits, spirits that have never lived and which don’t exist outside of the imaginations of the researchers.
Related to this is an apparition that haunts the house of one of the American pulp writers. I’ve forgotten the details, but the pulp writer wrote a series of stories of a tough crime fighter. Visitors to his house since his decease have seen a dark, shadowy figure haunting it. One of the British Marvel magazines, in which this story appeared, posed the question of whether the writer’s intense concentration had resulted in the psychic creation of this apparition. I can’t remember who the writer was, but one of the writers on that magazine was Alan Moore, a titan of British and American comics as well as a ritual magician. This was about forty years ago, but it may be that whoever wrote the article based his supposition on the experiences of Moore and others.
Now, I respectfully differ from CJ in that I don’t think there is a single, one-size-fits-all solution to the question of what ghosts are. The telepathic hypothesis may explain some ghosts and apparitions, but not all. It certainly offers a solution to the old sceptical question that if ghosts are the souls of the dead, why don’t they appear naked? A few naked ghosts were reported in 17th century Quebec, but apart from that the vast majority of spooks appear clothed. I also agree with CJ in that we don’t really know offhand what we look like, although obviously we have no trouble recognising ourselves in mirrors. I dimly remember reading back in the ’90s in one of the papers that scientists had discovered that subconsciously people think of their appearance as it was when they were in their 20s. In the Welsh medieval classic, the Mabinogion, the inhabitants of Annwn, the land of the dead, all look like young people of 30 with the exception that their hair is white. And according to some Spiritualists, at least from what I’ve read, on the after death plane we age backwards, becoming young and vital once again. Despite this, most ghost reports seem to be of the person as they were in life and seem to show that age, no matter how young or old they were.
There have been a number of attempts to solve the problem of ghosts and their appearance. Terry Pratchett in Mort explained it with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. Mort is Pratchett’s third book following the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. In it, a young lad gets recruited by Death to take over the Grim Reaper’s job. One of the souls he collects is that of a witch. At the woman’s death, the morphogenetic fields maintaining her appearance collapse, and she goes from aged crone to beautiful young woman before finally become a floating light ready for her next incarnation. The idea that our post mortem appearance could be due morphogenetic fields is interesting, though somewhat different from the theory as it was propounded by Sheldrake. I doubt Pratchett was serious about it though. My impression is that he was a Humanist, although when he was suffering from the Alzheimer’s that took him from us, he said that he could feel the presence of his father reassuring him that everything was all right. He was serious about his own writing, and clearly loved Fantasy literature, but he was also much less than respectful towards it. He couldn’t tell whether he was writing it or satirising it. At a talk he gave at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature back in the ’90s he described himself as ‘a giant hairy maggot crawling over its [Fantasy’s] corpse’. He certainly didn’t seem to believe in magic, which he found far less interesting that science, which had produced wonderful things like street lights. And it all came from the brains of monkeys, as he said in a Beeb programme on him. It seems to me that when he cited morphogenetic fields, it was as a literary device rather than a serious proposition.
Another suggested solution, proposed by the German physicist Gerd Wassermann, was an alternative form of matter, shadow matter. This could explain the ghost phenomenon, though as it stands it’s purely theoretical and so the Magonians concluded that it was another case of trying to explain one unknown with another. Nevertheless, this week there was an article in one of the journals suggesting that along with the objects of the normal matter in the universe there was an invisible, dark matter mirror universe. If ghosts are composed of exotic matter, could this dark matter universe somehow be their origin and domain. If so, what would be the physics in which this normally invisible substance becomes visible during a haunting?
I’ve also wondered before now our consciousness, our sense of self, also includes our appearance and our clothes. We do have a sense of our own bodies. For example, if we lift an arm up, we’re aware that we have done so, and although we may not always consciously be aware of it, I wonder if at some level we’re also aware of our clothes. It could be that it is this awareness of our bodies and our clothing that results in ghosts being visible and clothed in hauntings.
Another idea is that ghosts may be the product of Platonic Ideal Forms. Plato believed that apart from raw matter objects were shaped by transcendent ideal forms, somewhat like the idea a sculptor has when carving stone. Apart from the general ideal forms, there are transcendent forms of individuals as they are at any given time. Their matter may decease and decay, but their ideal form continues and is intelligible and perceptible to those with psychic gifts.
Returning to CJ’s suggestion that ghosts may be impressions of a person’s appearance as seen by another, it may be able to test this. If this is true, must an observer be in the same position as the person, whose observation generated the spook, in order to see it? Would a person in a different position not see the ghost at all, or would they see the ghost from the same perspective as the first person? For example, suppose a ghost appears in a room directly facing the entrance door. Would someone also have to be in this position to see it? Suppose there was a second person occupying a position sideways to the ghost. Would they also see the ghost facing them straight on, as the person who made the original observation saw it, and which the observer at the entrance door sees it? Or would it see it sideways, or not at all. If they see it sideways, then either there was another person there, whose telepathic impressions are still generating the ghost, or the ghost isn’t a telepathic impression from an observer.
This experiment reminds me of my experience viewing an exhibition of holograms at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Bristol in the summer of 1980. Holograms in this sense were three dimensional photographs made by lasers on glass. It was a strange experience, as when you moved from one to another the image would suddenly materialise in front of you out of, it seemed, thin air. Would something like that occur to the observer of a ghost that had been created as an image by another observer, long since departed? As he or she adopted the position of the original observer, would the ghost suddenly materialise just as the holograms did when someone moved in front of them?
CJ is raising some serious and definitely thought-provoking ideas in his series of blog posts, ideas which deserve serious consideration.
One of the people, whose videos I’ve been watching on YouTube over the past few weeks is the Outlaw Bookseller. He’s a Welsh chap who runs a bookshop in Bath and is an SF enthusiast. He’s extremely knowledgeable and well-informed, and is the author of the book 100 SF Novels You Should Read Before You Die. In his videos, he discusses the great SF authors of the past, like Robert Silverberg, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delaney, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and so on, as well as those writing today. His views are sharp and incisive, even if you don’t share some of his tastes. Many of his videos are about him going to other bookshops or book fairs, looking at what’s one display, buying books and talking to other SF fans and collectors.
In this rather long video, he looks round and praises Codex Books in Cirencester. He’s particularly impressed with it, despite there being a few gaps on the shelves, as it’s a real, bricks-and-mortar business. This is, as he says, very brave in these times when shops and businesses are closing across the country thanks to competition from the internet.
Down here in Bristol we’ve got Forbidden Planet, which is part of a chain of stores based in London. It’s a huge place, but I still miss Forbidden Planet, Bristol’s own SF books and comics shop half-way up Park Street. As well as comics and SF and Fantasy books, it also stocked role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, as well as magazines on illegal recreational substances like High Times and Weed World. Yes, I think it was very much a product of the Hippy era. It closed down when Forbidden Planet opened. There was also a similar SF/comic shop, the Hobbit Hole, on Gloucester docks in the ’90s. I don’t know if it’s still there. On the day I went there, they were having a promotion and had a Dalek costume complete with ring modulator for the voice. There were two of them in the store, and while one operated the suit the other pushed it outside so that the guy inside could tell them about their sale day, all in the harsh mechanical tones of Dr Who’s classic monsters.
I’m putting this up here, not just because I’m something of an SF fan myself, but also because I feel that small businesses and shops fully deserve all the help they can get in these straitened circumstances. These businesses are keeping Britain’s high streets alive, helping not just the local economy but also building and cementing communities. People go in their local newsagents not just to pick up the local paper, but also to talk to the other customers they may know and see around and the staff. Some of the shops specialising in comics and role-playing games, like Proud Lion in Cheltenham, also seem to hold sessions where their customers and the RPG community in Cheltenham come in to play some of the games.
Cirencester itself is a beautiful town, with a history going all the way back to the Romans. There’s a Roman villa close by, with a museum which shows you what the villa may have looked like in its heyday. It was also an Anglo-Saxon town, and you can see some of the remains for this period of the city’s history in the local museum.
Horrible. Unfortunately, the custom has spread into some of the immigrant communities in Britain. A few years ago there was a feature on the local BBC news for Bristol, Points West, about an African girl in the city campaigning against it. Despite it being illegal in Britain, I think so far there’s only been one prosecution. Part of the problem is that those cultures which practise it take their daughters back to their countries of origin to have this barbarous operation performed. I’ve therefore had absolutely no hesitation in signing this petition.
‘Gambian politicians want to make female genital mutilation legal again, and we have just 90 days to stop them. They think that cutting off the genitals of 5-year-old girls is the right thing to do… For many it’s too late, but we have the chance to protect the girls who haven’t been cut yet by keeping the ban on the books. So sign now and we’ll work with local partners to make sure lawmakers know the whole world is watching!
More than 200 million women and girls worldwide have been forced to have their genitals cut off, and sometimes their vaginal opening sewed up.It’s called female genital mutilation (FGM), and it’s done to girls as young as 1 year old.
Over the last 30 years, people all over the world took a stand against FGM. They made an impact: country after country has outlawed it.
Some Gambian politicians want the country to become the first in the world to reverse its ban – putting young girls at risk of being cut apart and setting a dangerous precedent.
We can help stop them. We have less than 90 days before they vote – less than 90 days to raise a global outcry so loud, so powerful, that Gambian politicians will have no choice but to listen. Local organizations are already protesting in the streets. Sign now and we’ll work with them to bring our global call to the corridors of parliament!
FGM still happens, of course, even with the bans. But legal protections are a massively important step in stopping the horror. In fact, last August three women were brought to justice in The Gambia for performing FGM.
Justice is possible. Protecting girls is possible. Ending this horrific practice is possible.
But only if we all stand together, united, and face those who want to roll back progress. We can’t give even an inch of ground, because there are millions of people who would like nothing more than to go back to the days of backroom butchery.
They’ll see The Gambia as a beacon. But if we bring a massive wave of global protest to The Gambia, we can keep the ban on the books and send a strong signal to the rest of the world. Sign now and help share widely!
Avaaz has fought for the rights of women and girls – together, our community has stood up for reproductive rights, for a definition of rape based on consent, for girls’ education and against child marriage. We’ve helped make some important wins, now let’s come together again for girls in The Gambia and across the world.
With hope and determination, Nate, Huiting, Antonia and the whole Avaaz team
I caught a brief headline on the internet newsfeed yesterday about Starmer getting a bit flustered because a mayor somewhere had urged people not to vote for the Labour party but instead vote Green. This was round about the same time when Guardian journalist and author Owen Jones had written in his column that he had resigned from Labour and urged others on the left to take their vote away from them. Instead they should vote for the Greens or independent candidates. This was because Starmer had reneged on all the promises and pledges he’d made when seeking the Labour leadership. Most of you out there no doubt remember how he set himself up as a continuity Corbynism candidate. He’s said all the guff when he was with Corbyn in government how he admired him, and had pledged to support the renationalisation of the utilities and the NHS, restoration of the welfare state, greater rights for workers and so on. And the moment he got his backside on the chair, or possibly throne as he may see it, as head of the party he set about breaking all of them. The last straw, or last straw but one for Jones, was when Starmer declared he was going to follow the Tories self-imposed fiscal limits, and so keep to austerity. I have mixed feelings about Jones and the Guardian. Jones, I think, was one of those who joined in the fake accusations of anti-Semitism directed at Corbyn, as did the paper he worked for. The Guardian is popularly supposed to be far left, but it’s a Liberal paper that has urged its readers to vote Liberal/ Liberal-SDP Alliance/ Lib Dem far more often than it has Labour. What gives the impression that it’s a far left or at least Labour paper is its concentration on minority rights – anti-racism, feminism and gay and trans rights. But it’s economic outlook is firmly Blairite neoliberalism.
Jones has joined Mike, myself and many others in leaving the party and advising others, who really want genuine change, to put their votes to alternative, genuinely left-wing candidates and parties. Mike has been advising people to think very carefully about who they want to vote for after Labour threw him out for refusing to go on a training course about anti-Semitism, run by the people who had falsely accused him of it. This was Labour Friends of Israel or the Jewish Labour Movement, people who falsely conflate Jewishness with Zionism and anti-Semitism with the mildest criticism of Israel. The kind of people who joined Maureen Lipman in accusing Ed Miliband of being a monstrous Jew-hater almost on a par with the Hitler, about to hit British Jews with a hideous wave of persecution comparable to the bastard’s Third Reich or Mussolini’s Italy. This was because Milliband, hardly any kind of firebrand, had made a few mild and reasonable criticisms of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. Oh, yes, and Red Ed was also Jewish, though I think he was largely secular rather than observant. Not that it matters to these fanatics. I forgotten the precise figures, but about three fifth or four-fifths of the people expelled from the Labour party are Jews who dare to criticise Israel. Which should tell you that their claims to stand up for British Jews against anti-Semitism is just so much balderdash and codswallop.
Starmerism is just Blairism reheated. He follows Blair in his frantic enthusiasm for Thatcher, even waving the union flag and proclaiming his patriotism as she did. And he’s followed Blair in thinking that he could move to the right and appeal to Tory voters, press barons and donors and need not worry about the working class vote, as they would just have to put up with it as there was nowhere else for them to go. That’s no longer true. The Green vote has been growing. In Bristol they’re challenging the Labour party for control of the council. There are alternative socialist movements backing Corbyn in his constituency, aspiring Muslims politicians are standing as Independents. I don’t know, but the Trades Union and Socialist Alliance may still be around, as well as the Socialist Party, formerly the Socialist Workers’ Party, and they may be worth voting for. I’ve heard friends say they’d even vote Communist in preference to Labour, not because they’re Commies, but simply because they think they’d be preferable.
To the right of the Tories, meanwhile, are Reform and various other right-wing outfits, like Laurence Fox’s Reclaim and the New Culture Forum. These are also laying claim to the White, working class vote. Reform are especially – and ludicrously – hungry for a piece of the Tories’ action, with Richard Tice claiming that only his band of dements and not Sunak have a chance of defeating Labour. These fringe parties could very well chip away at the votes of the two main parties. For all the assumption that a Labour victory is certain, I think it’s very far from inevitable. This could be a very interesting general election.
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.
I had this message come from my local MP Karin Smyth. I think it’s a response to the letter writing campaign against NHS privatisation by We Own It, which I also joined. I think Smyth works hard for her constituents and genuinely wishes to protect it, but I don’t trust Starmer and the leadership. They’ve talked about using private medicine to reduce waiting lists, which sound very much like the Tories. And I’m very sure they’re using it as a wedge to privatise the NHS still further. Blair has said he wants more private participation in the Health Service, and this is echoed by Wes Streeting. Quite frankly, and with respect to Karin Smyth, I honestly don’t know how far this should be trusted given Starmer’s record of breaking one promise and pledge after another. But have a look at it and see what you think.
‘Dear David,
Thank you for contacting me to raise concerns about NHS privatisation and the state of the NHS.
The Labour Party has pledged to safeguard our NHS as a publicly funded service, free at the point of use. It is not, and never will be, for sale. We will empower commissioners, alongside NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care, to act as a bulwark against privatisation. The NHS will be the preferred provider of services, and there will be an end to the reliance on outsourcing.
To address the immediate crisis, I support a fully-funded plan to tackle waiting lists – an additional £1.1 billion to pay staff extra to deliver two million more operations, scans and appointments every year, and a £171 million a year investment in state-of-the-art equipment and technology, doubling the number of CT and MRI scanners. These plans will be paid for with the money raised by scrapping the non dom tax status.
In the short term, I believe we have a responsibility to utilise spare capacity in the independent sector too, to get through the current crisis and cut NHS waiting lists. Nobody should be left languishing in serious pain, while those who can afford to, pay to go private.
To build an NHS fit for the future we must boost capacity, reform health and care services to speed up treatment and shift care into the community where possible, harness life sciences and technology to reduce preventable illness, and cut health inequalities. I believe, for example, that by deploying advances in technology such as newly developed AI to interpret chest x-rays, we can reduce outsourcing and speed up care.
Nye Bevan – who spearheaded the creation of the NHS – said in 1948 that “this service must always be changing, growing and improving”. I support a 10-year plan of investment and reform that seeks to do just that: dealing with the root causes and immediate challenges while building an NHS that is fit for the future.
Thank you once again for contacting me about this issue.
I dare say you’ve seen the various spluttering in the media and online. There’s been frothing outrage on the Islamophobic right after the events of Wednesday night. At the same time as the abortive debate on the SNP’s motion for a ceasefire in Gaza, there was a Stop the War protest outside parliament as well as other protests outside MP’s constituency offices. As a result, GB News and other right-wingers have been accusing MPs, and particularly the Labour party, of cowardice for supposedly giving in to Islamist demands. GB News in particular has been ranting about how Britain is now under Islamist mob rule, a stance echoed and repeated by others on the nationalist/populist right.
There are several criticisms of this view which clearly demonstrated it to be completely false.
Firstly, it wasn’t an Islamist protest. It was a protest against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza, present as a reprisal for Hamas’ butchery of the kids at a music festival. As such, it naturally involved a large number of Muslims. Which is pretty much as you’d expect, as Muslims are keenly interested and deeply upset by the treatment of their coreligionists in Israel and the Occupied Territories. But the Palestinians aren’t just Muslims – they’re also Christians, and there are any number of videos on YouTube of Christian clergy and lay people being abused, spat at and struck by bigoted Israelis. This is the face of Israel that the Israel lobby and the official Jews of the Chief Rabbinate, Board of Deputies, Jewish Chronicle and Campaign Against Anti-Semitism don’t want westerners knowing about. They want you to believe that the only people persecuting Christians in the Holy Land are Muslims. It’s true that Christians are persecuted by Muslims, but they’re also persecuted by Israeli settlers and quite often the people literally standing between Christians worshipping in church and an mob of Israeli fanatics intent on destruction is the Muslim doorman. The secular Israeli state also persecute the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Old Jewry. These are the descendants of 19th century Jewish immigrants to the Holy Land, who came to practise their faith in the land of their ancestors. They reject, however, Israel as a secular state and, like their brethren and sisters overseas, believe that Israel will only be restored by divine will under the Mashiach – the Messiah. You can find videos on YouTube of them being tormented and beaten up by the IDF. If you want to know how Israel really treats the Palestinians, I strongly recommend reading the blogs and books produced by Israel-critical Jews, like Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni and so on. Also, the marchers for Palestine included a number of severely normal White Brits. The Islamophobes have made much of Starmer being confronted by ‘Islamist’ protesters on the train and on the station in Edinburgh. Well, I’ve seen the video, too, and most of them looked White to me.
Now I do think that the right does have a point when it comes to the massed protests outside MPs constituency offices. It does look like intimidation after MP David Freer announced he was resigning because of the abuse and threats he and his family suffered. This comes after the murder of Amess by an Islamist fanatic, as well as the attack on Lib Dem MP a few years ago by a nutter with a Samurai sword in which the MPs assistant was tragically killed, as well as the assassination of Jo Cox back in 2015 by a native British rightist. I agree with the Stop the War Coalition that such protests should not be banned, as it would isolate MPs from public opinion, but believe it was wrong to do so in this case. Not least because it hands ammunition to a government determined to curb any kind of public protest.
Secondly, the Labour party doesn’t appear to have given in, whatever it looks like from outside. From what has been said by critics of Labour’s behaviour towards the SNP motion, it appears like the opposite, carefully crafted to look like a call for a ceasefire. According to a message I put up from the StWC yesterday, Starmer presented the motion after a phone call with Israeli PM Isaac Herzog. Herzog is in no way a peacenik, and I’ve come across several quotes from him indicating that he has an absolute and unyielding hatred of the Palestinians. It looks like Starmer deliberately added his amendments knowing that this would upset the SNP and they’d walk out. Damo Kernow, the man from the ancient British kingdom of Cornwall, has put up several videos about this. He notes that Labour’s amendment stripped out any criticism of Israel and removes the stipulation that the ceasefire should be immediate. He also notes that the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, allowed the amendment to go ahead despite breaking parliamentary rules he declared were antiquated. These were rules that had last been amended in the 1980s during the IRA bombing campaign. Hoyle has very strong pro-Israel views, and proudly tells the world how his grandfather was one of the founders of Labour Friends of Israel. This now looks less like parliament caving in to Muslim opinion than a carefully crafted piece of sabotage designed to look like genuine support for a Palestinian ceasefire. Which is what you’d expect from a master of lies and deceit like Starmer. As the Native Americans used to say in Westerns during their pow-wows with the cavalry, ‘White man speak with forked tongue’. Well, definitely not all White men, but definitely in the case of Starmer. He’s made a career out of it.
But I don’t doubt that there were Islamists among the marchers. Any kind of left-wing protest attracts firebrands and extremists. I was at secondary school during the St. Paul’s riots in Bristol in 1980/81. Our school fortunately wasn’t affected, but I do remember a White guy standing on the stone square supporting the trees lining the school entrance, ranting down a megaphone trying to incite the kids to join the rioters. Mahyar Tousi put up a video showing a group of Muslims waving the black banner of Jihad, while telling the cops and everyone else that it was merely the shahada, the Muslim creed. It wasn’t, and waving an enemy banner is outlawed, so they should have been arrested. But these are the bigots and extremists, who I’ve no doubt comprised only a small minority of the crowd.
And the statement that Britain has now fallen and is now under the Islamist heel is more than a little exaggerated. Last time I looked, King Charles was still ensconced on the throne, not a caliph. Rishi Sunak is still PM – unfortunately – and not a mullah, as in Iran. I live in Bristol, which is a multicultural city with its fair share of mosques, as well as Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras. I haven’t seen any rampaging Muslims hordes up my way, nor from anywhere else in the city. I’ve mentioned how Patrick Christys, one of the esteemed fixtures of GB News, more Grievous Bodily than Great British, put up a video calling for sharia law to be banned. Well, last time I looked, sharia law had no official standing and only five per cent of Muslims wanted it introduced. Over 70 per cent of Muslims polled believe Islam was compatible with British society. But Grievous Bodily News has form when it comes to alarmism and scaremongering, so it’s no surprise that they’re doing it now about the protests for Gaza.
I do think, however, that we also need to be very cautious and suspicious of some of those marching. I’ve no doubt that the Islamists are trying to exploit massed Muslim opinion against the war in Gaza in the same way some Marxist sects used to practice ‘revolutionary entryism’ and deliberately infiltrate conventional, social democratic parties like Labour in order to disrupt and radicalise it. The critical event that mobilised specifically Muslim politics in Britain, according to the scholar Alfred Kepel in his book, The Revenge of God, was the confected outrage over the Satanic Forces. This was falsely accused of blasphemy by the Ayatollah Khomeini as a cynical political gesture to take the spiritual leadership of the Islamic world away from Saudi Arabia. It has led to death threats and attempts on the lives, some of them all-too successful, of the author, Salman Rushdie and his publishers. I can remember the mass book burnings in Bradford, and the rantings of its leaders, Mohammed Akhthar and Kalim Zaddiqie. Akhthar’s pamphlet, Be Careful With Mohammed, was a full-scale attack on Christianity and western secular democracy, and exaltation of Islam as absolutely perfect. It ended with a short section ‘What Western Intellectuals Think of Islam’, containing a series of quotes condemning the religion from various writers and public figures. As for Zaddiqui, He was filmed in a BBC documentary, The Trouble with Islam, telling his congregation that ‘British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them’. When he was challenged, Zaddiqui muttered some nonsense about the publication of Rushdie’s notorious book marking the beginning of ‘a holocaust of Muslims’. That was 30 and more years ago, and it’s no more come true than Alex Jones’ telling the world that Obama was going to become a dictator and put ordinary, White Christian Americans in FEMA camps. I don’t doubt that some of the Islamists who joined the marches are considering ways in which they can spread their disaffection and hate amongst bog-standard ordinary Muslims who simply want peace and dignity for the Palestinians.
We cannot let the forces of hate use the marches to spread fear of the Islamic threat on one hand, and Islamist disaffection on the other. The marches are not Islamist mob rule, and are not to be presented or used as such.
There was some kind of upset in parliament Wednesday night. From what I gather the SNP tabled a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Labour party tabled an amendment, which some people say the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, was bullied or tricked into upholding, and the SNP walked out. There have therefore been demands for Hoyle’s resignation, while Labour has been accused by the anti-Islam right of cowardice for supposedly caving in to ‘Islamist’ demands. There was indeed a demonstration outside parliament, and while I don’t doubt that Islamist firebrands were out there, it was a demonstration in support of Gaza and the Palestinians, not a demand for sharia law. But you wouldn’t think that by some of the ludicrous videos put up by GB News. Patrick Christys, a particularly horrible right-wing sprog, has called for sharia law to be banned in Britain. Well, sharia law has no legal standing. I haven’t noticed people having their hands amputated for theft, or being whipped for other offences as prescribed by Islamic law. If they were, the people involved would be arrested for assault of various degrees of severity, and hopefully convicted and imprisoned. But that’s another issue. From what I’ve read of the amendment, not only does it call for a ceasefire, but it also demands a halt to the construction of Israeli settlement and a two-state solution to the problem. Corbyn, I feel, would also have demanded a halt to the expansion of Israeli settlements. Which is ironic, as according to Starmer and his faction, he was a terrible anti-Semite and threat to Jews. I think, however, that most pro-Palestine activists feel that a two-state solution is unworkable and that what should happen is that the Palestinians should be integrated as genuinely full and equal citizens of Israel.
Here’s what Karen Smyth said:
‘Dear David,
On Wednesday, Parliament resolved to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, agreeing the text of the Labour amendment to the Scottish National Party motion without a division.
Like all of us, I have watched the events of the last five months in the Middle East with horror and sadness at the abominable loss of life. I know members of Bristol South Labour Party are extremely concerned by the continuing conflict.
This Labour amendment was much stronger than the original motion brought by the SNP, which failed to address violence elsewhere in Palestine and the need for a massive, unimpeded relief effort in Gaza. Not only did our motion definitively call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, it also called for an end to settlement expansion and violence in the West Bank. In addition, it re-stated long-standing Labour policy on a two-state solution.
It was gravely disappointing and saddening to see this important decision by Parliament being overlooked due to events in the chamber that night.
The fighting must come to an end. The UK must now work with our international partners to bring about that immediate ceasefire, and provide a credible plan to end this conflict. Statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people alongside a safe and secure Israel.
Please see below for the full text of Labour’s amendment.
Yours sincerely,
Karin Smyth
Labour amendment in full
“That this House believes that an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences and therefore must not take place; notes the intolerable loss of Palestinian life, the majority being women and children; condemns the terrorism of Hamas who continue to hold hostages; supports Australia, Canada and New Zealand’s calls for Hamas to release and return all hostages and for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, which means an immediate stop to the fighting and a ceasefire that lasts and is observed by all sides, noting that Israel cannot be expected to cease fighting if Hamas continues with violence and that Israelis have the right to the assurance that the horror of 7 October 2023 cannot happen again; therefore supports diplomatic mediation efforts to achieve a lasting ceasefire; demands that rapid and unimpeded humanitarian relief is provided in Gaza; further demands an end to settlement expansion and violence; urges Israel to comply with the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures; calls for the UN Security Council to meet urgently; and urges all international partners to work together to establish a diplomatic process to deliver the peace of a two-state solution, with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state, including working with international partners to recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to rather than outcome of that process, because statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people and not in the gift of any neighbour.“
Okay, as you’ve no doubt seen on the news, the Labour party won the Wellingborough and Kingswood bye-elections. In Kingswood, a suburb of Bristol, I think they increased their majority over the Tories to 8,000. The local Bristol Labour party has been campaigning hard up there for the past few weeks. I suppose that, as a member of the party, I should feel delighted, optimistically looking forward to Labour enjoying a sweeping landslide when Sunak chooses to call an election.
But I’m not. Because I don’t think that the election is necessarily secure, and that even if Labour win, it’ll just mean a change of faces, not a change of policies. As the saying goes, ‘Same sh*t, different assholes’. And the week has definitely been mixed for Starmer, no matter what spin he chooses to put on it.
To begin with, Starmer has managed to destroy Muslim support for the Labour party. He could have called for a ceasefire, citing the massively disproportionate casualties suffered by Palestinian civilians, most notoriously women and children. He could have made it plain that he condemned the terror attack by Hamas that killed the kids at the music festival, and said something about Israel having the right to defend itself while stating that the death toll on civilians had gone too far. In short, he could have acted as a statesman in waiting. He didn’t. He rejected a ceasefire, then when this started to lose him votes he did what he usually does when faced with electoral or political embarrassment: he started lying and claimed that he had always supported a ceasefire. Nobody bought this latest set of untruths. The result is that the party’s support among Muslims has collapsed, and various Muslims are now standing against Labour in their constituency as independents. In Rochdale he disavowed the Labour candidate, Afzal Ali, because he said something that one of the ultra-Zionist watchdogs decided was anti-Semitic. In fact, Ali simply repeated the Egyptian story about the attack and made a few observations and questions of his own. The Egyptians have claimed that they told the Israeli authorities that the attack was coming days before, and the Israelis did nothing. There are other questions as well. Israel is circled by surveillance equipment, including alarms that go off whenever anyone breached their defensive wall. But somehow all this highly sophisticated equipment failed to detect the terrorists when they flew into Israel. The music festival itself was only miles from a number of IDF bases, so why did it take the army eight hours to get there? And the festival was originally a bit further away, and actually moved closer to the Gazan border. Various people, and not just Ali, have smelt something very fishy. Sonia Paulton on her YouTube channel said that it looked very much like a false flag attack, of which the Israelis have been responsible for a number. The most famous was the attack on the USS Liberty during one of the wars in the 1960s. The Liberty was in the Mediterranean off Israel collecting intelligence. The Israelis were afraid they’d pass this on to Egypt and the Arabs, and so attacked the vessel.
But Ali was accused of anti-Semitism and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews. Er, no. He raised reasonable questions about the Israeli state, which is not synonymous with the Jewish people or religion whatever Netanyahu and his supporters over here may say. Starmer apparently threw Ali out. But this has led to further embarrassment. I think Ali is set to win, despite no longer being a member of the Labour party. And a number of Starmer’s own right-wingers have been accused of anti-Semitism, because they’ve said much the same as Ali. Or uttered other comments that could be viewed as anti-Semitic. The ever-excellent Damo Kernow has made a brilliant video about this. One of those who could be accused of anti-Semitism is Ruth Smeeth, the malign women who made a completely bogus accusation of anti-Semitism against anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth after he commented on her passing on pamphlets to a hack from the Torygraph. The bug-eyed Zionist right is now appearing on GB News and other right-wing propaganda outlets declaring that Labour still has a problem with anti-Semitism.
And along with this embarrassment, Starmer ditched his £28 billion pledge for Green energy and technology. The right hates the Green movement with a passion and so I doubt that they’re terribly upset at this. But that hasn’t stopped the Torygraph noticing that Labour’s lead was falling in the polls. There is preciously little now, if anything, that separates Labour from the Tories. Starmer has just about dumped the last left-wing policy he had. His stance now is basically, ‘Vote Labour – we’re not the Tories’. And many people are now wondering who they should vote for. I’ve had friends tell me that they don’t know, because Labour is now the same as the Tories. They’ve even said that they’d rather vote Communist, not because they are Commies, but because that party would offer a genuine alternative.
I’m very happy that the Tories didn’t win Kingswood, but I don’t really have any enthusiasm for Labour’s victory. I would have been happier if it was smaller, and there was a break out vote for the Trades Union and Socialist Coalition, the Socialist Party or the Greens, and that one of these parties had come second. Such a result might convince some people in the party that they should start returning to socialism sharpish if they don’t want Labour to start to come second to them. But that’s far too much to hope for.
At the moment it looks like a Labour victory is still on the cards, but with a reduced majority. I believe that, if they do get in, we should still prepare to carry on the fight to preserve the NHS and the welfare state just as the left is doing now under the Tories.
Because Starmer hates the nationalised NHS and the welfare state as much as they do.
Yesterday I put up a form letter from the pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It, which would be sent automatically to all the local electoral candidates in the area of the person signing it asking them to pledge their support to a properly funded, renationalised NHS. I’ve received an automatic reply from the office of my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth. I’ll let you know if I get a reply from her and the others.
This set me wondering if I should also start a similar campaign for the other electoral candidates in my bit of Bristol. I few years ago I produced a couple of booklets against the privatisation of the NHS. One is simply a few bits of paper I put together on my computer, another is a more professional booklet I self-published with the print on demand service Lulu. I am extremely concerned about the state of the NHS and especially statements from Keir Starmer’s Labour party. Streeting has said he would love to find a big entrepreneur to invest in it, Blair wants more private enterprise and Karin Smyth has not disavowed further partial privatisation of NHS services.
My movements are very restricted thanks to the disease, otherwise I’d be highly motivated just to print off and order a pile of these pamphlets and set up a stall in the centre of Bristol or Cheltenham, the town where I took my first degree and have many friends, and try to make people aware of the threat to our most precious national institution. But perhaps I can do something by mailing out these pamphlets to the various political candidates.
Let me know what you think.
Here are the pamphlets:
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp.
This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
If you would like one of the pamphlets, please get in touch giving your name and email address and I’ll get back to you. All details will of course be kept strictly confidential, and will not be passed on to third parties. If you only want single copies of the above, let me know and I’ll post them free to you.
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