David Starkey is also one of the speakers at the National Conservatism conference, and once again has stirred up controversy because of his comments on race. According to the Independent, the Tudor historian said that the left is jealous of the Holocaust and wants to replace it with Black Lives Matter. And they’re not interested in protecting Black lives, but it tearing down western, White culture. The article says
‘Left-wing activists are “jealous” of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery, a leading historian has said.
In a speech to the National Conservatism conference in London, David Starkey claimed that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy “white culture” and “do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust”.
He said: “The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery.”
The historian’s comments brought swift condemnation, with Daniel Sugarman, public affairs director at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, tweeting that they were “pathetic attempts to drive a wedge between communities” that “will not work”.’…
‘In his speech to the National Conservatism conference on Wednesday, Dr Starkey renewed his criticism of Black Lives Matter, denying that the movement cared about black lives at all.
To applause from the audience, he said: “Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be.
“They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.
“The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this.”
He added: “The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.”’
Starkey’s wrong about the left seeking to replace the Holocaust with slavery, but he does have a point about Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter being used to discredit White culture. Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour, was unfairly charged with anti-Semitism by the witch-hunters in the Labour party a few years ago because she dared to ask questions about how other genocides, such as the Black Holocaust of slavery, would be commemorated as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. She said this in a Labour party workshop about the proper commemoration of the Day, which stated that there would be no restrictions on what anyone could say. I think she’s technically wrong to describe transatlantic slavery as a holocaust. The Holocaust and similar genocides are deliberate attempts to wipe out nations and ethnicities. That wasn’t the case with transatlantic slavery, which aimed at the forced use of the enslaved peoples’ labour. This doesn’t remove the fact, however, that the violence and cruelty involved in the transatlantic slave trade was horrendous and it contributed to increased warfare and conflict in Africa, as tribes competed to capture slaves to sell to Europeans. The ceremonies on Holocaust Memorial Day also include the remembrance of other genocides, and Walker definitely did not want to replace the Holocaust with the slave trade, merely add it to the other atrocities also commemorated. Walker’s case, which was an attempt to silence a long term and principled critic of Israel, is the only one I know that comes anywhere close to a demand to replace the Holocaust with the commemoration of slavery. And she didn’t do that. When left-wingers have denounced the commemoration of the Holocaust, it’s been because of the way it is used as a propaganda device to muster support for Israel against the Palestinians. Who are being ethnically cleansed from their traditional home.
Starkey has much more of a point with Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Black Lives Matter was a response to a deep felt issue – what was perceived as racism in the American police which resulted in the greater shooting of Blacks. In fact, Black and other Conservatives have challenged this, and shown that more police get shot than Blacks, and more Whites are shot and killed by cops than Blacks. The organisation itself is Marxist, and rejects capitalism and the traditional family. In America, it’s also been rocked by scandal as its leader, Patrice Cullors, has used the millions donated to the organisation to enrich herself, her relatives and lieutenants. There have been a couple of similar scandals in Britain. A Black Lives Matter activist from Bristol is being sued for similarly taking donations. And a few days ago it was reported that the British Film Institute is taking a BLM-supporting film maker to court. She received funding from them to produce a documentary about Black liberation and the BLM movement, but hasn’t done so. Moderate and Conservative Black commenters have also criticised BLM for ignoring the problem of Black on Black violence and killing, which seriously afflicts many Black communities in America and Britain. Innocent Black people are still being murdered, but the movement ignores those lives unless the killers are White.
At the same time, Critical Race Theory holds that Whiteness is a bourgeois quality that automatically gives White people a privileged position in western society, which is intrinsically and systematically racist. The amount of racism in western society hasn’t changed, but only become more hidden. Hence demands to ‘destroy White privilege’ and for Whites to ‘be less White’. Slavery has become part of this, because the current disadvantaged state of Black communities in America and Britain is attributed to the slave trade and its legacy. Hence the demands for reparations. And yes, it is being used to delegitimise those nations. The 1619 Project about the influence of slavery and racism in America deliberately took that date as part of its name, because it considers it the true date of the founding of America. This was when the first Black slaves were imported into the nascent British colonies. At the same time, Britain is also coming in for criticism because of slavery and imperialism. For campaigners, the two or intrinsically linked, despite the fact that the later British empire and its annexation of Africa was partly motivated by a crusading zeal to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. Apart from the toppling of slavers like Edward Colston in Bristol, there are campaigns by Critical Social Justice activists to censor art and literature connected to slavery. And one of the problems is that slavery and imperialism is framed as something that only Whites do to people of colour. One of the arguments used by the slave-owners against the abolitionists was that slavery had been practised across the world down through history, and its abolition would leave Britain vulnerable to other nations and empires that had no such moral scruples. I’ve put up videos from the Arab, Turkish and Iranian world about their Black citizens, who also have their origins in those countries’ slave trades. Dubai, to its credit, has a museum to its history of slavery and slave trading. But few in the west seem to be aware of this and there is an active opposition amongst western anti-racism campaigner to tackling the resurgence of real slavery in Africa and elsewhere in the world. One of the left-wing writers in the I, Emma Maltby, rejected such demands as a distraction from the goal of achieving racial equality in the west. And Critical Postcolonial Theory rejects any criticism of extra-European societies traditional cultures as racist. Radical ideologies like Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory are part of the wider movement of Critical Theory which is a postmodernist revision of Marxism that seeks to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy and the gender binary as part of the intersectional leftism called for by the German-American Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s.
I’m not a fan of Starkey, and he’s way off with his complaint about leftists trying to replace the Holocaust with slavery. But he does have a point in that slavery is being used as an ideological weapon against traditional western culture as part of a wider, postmodern assault on the Enlightenment values of individualism, rationality and reasoned debate. And this not only bothers those on the right, like Starkey, but also people on the left, like Helen Pluckrose, one of the trio of critics of Postmodernism and its assault on western culture with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. They have pointed out that CRT and related ‘isms’ differ strongly from the traditional anti-racism and feminist movements.
You can therefore criticise them without necessarily wanting the extremely right-wing economic and social order called for by people like Starkey.
I got this message from the Labour leader celebrating Labour’s victories in last Thursday’s local elections, and praising the great work he expects the new Labour councillors will do.
‘David, last week’s local election results saw Labour become the largest party in local government.
Labour offered a positive alternative, and people have given us their trust. It’s now our duty to tackle the Tory cost of living crisis and ease the burden on working people.
Now, we cannot waste a day in delivering on the Labour commitment to put money back in people’s pockets.
That’s why we’re setting the pace. I’m working with our new council leaders to create emergency cost of living action plans and review local housing plans.
We’ll act now, to ease the squeeze on people’s pockets, and support their aspirations.
Our new leaders will review their inheritance and pull every lever possible to relieve the pressure that this government has placed on working people.
Because, where Labour is in power, we deliver. We make fairer choices for working people and their families, and we improve lives.
I’m proud of the gains we made last week, but that pride will now fuel our pursuit of change.
We have a chance to show that Labour can not only improve communities across the country, but that we have plans to build a better Britain for everyone.
It’s time for change and Labour will make that change happen.
Thank you,
I’m sure the new councillors will work hard for their communities, but last week’s elections weren’t the golden victories Starmer seems to believe. To many people, Labour doesn’t offer an inspiring alternative that fills them with enthusiasm for a Labour government. It’s why the cephologists are predicting a hung parliament. Starmer has rejected all the socialist policies that gave working people such hope for real change under Corbyn. And Starmer has also shown himself to be personally vindictive, persecutory and untrustworthy. When Rachel Reeves was called upon to defend him during a brief TV interview and the list of all the promises he’s broken was mentioned, she could only reply with telling the interviewer all he policies he had kept: that’s right, all three of them. Policies to tackle the cost of living crisis and provide proper, affordable housing are sorely needed. But I’m not sure Starmer can be trusted even here. His promise that the new Labour councillors would cap council tax was meaningless. By the time he stated the policy, the tax had been set for the year. And it was only a cap. The tax would still remain at a level many citizens would find difficult to afford. Any true reform could only come from a Labour government.
There are a whole range of local issues that require reform at the national level. Bus services have been cut so that many working class, suburban communities around the country – my home city of Bristol is one example – don’t have them are effectively cut off. Privatisation of the bus companies has failed. But national legislation passed by Thatcher prevents local governments from renationalising them. This needs to be repealed, but I doubt that Starmer will do it. Similarly, we need a return to council housing, but Thatcher again banned local councils from doing so. A piece of legislation that also needs to be repealed. But I doubt he’ll do that either.
Labour offers to make things a little better than the Tories, but that’s all. It won’t do any more when the leadership, the bureaucracy and the parliamentary party are still in thrall to Blair and his brand of Thatcherism. I’m glad Labour did do so well last Thursday and want it to win the national elections. But I also want a leadership that recognises that, whatever the establishment says, Thatcherism is a dismal, destructive failure.
The BBC local news for the Bristol region, Points West, reported last night that 400 people in Somerset had been turned away from the polling stations last Thursday because they either didn’t have voter ID, or didn’t have the correct voter ID. This is appalling. There never was any need for the voter ID legislation in the first place. It was just a ruse by the Tory party to prevent the sectors of the population most sympathetic to Labour and the left – students, young people, the poor and Blacks and ethnic minorities – from voting for them. These laws are an affront to democracy and the fact that so many people have been turned away up and down the country amply shows that they need to be ditched.
Okay, I’ve got to confess to making another mistake. Earlier today I put up a piece reporting that Starmer had told the leaders of the Labour party that people weren’t interested in woke, and condemned the Tories for being ‘out of touch’. This had been covered in a video put out by That Preston Journalist. I watched it and got the wrong end of the stick. He seemed to me to be saying that Starmer had decided that woke policies weren’t appealing to the public and was ready to ditch them. At the same time I thought that Starmer was also attacking that part of the Conservative party that is woke.
How wrong I was! It seems Starmer isn’t prepared to ditch ‘woke’ at all. He just doesn’t think that voters care enough about it to vote against Labour because of it. Instead they’re more interested and concerned about the NHS and the cost of living. When he said that Sunak and the Tories were out of touch, he meant that they failed to appreciate that these issues took precedence over the woke policies Starmer is promoting and defending and that the British public generally didn’t share their concerns about woke policies. This is how it’s been interpreted by GB News and their presenters.
Before I go further, let’s try and unpack what is meant by the term ‘woke’. Gillyflower, one of the great commenters here, remarked that I should refresh my memory over what it means. As I understand it, it’s Black slang meaning being awake to injustice. Looking at how it’s now being used, it seems to have replaced the old term ‘political correctness’ for extreme and intolerant anti-racist, feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic views. More narrowly, it’s being used to describe the various Critical Social Justice ideologies derived from the Postmodernist, Critical Theory revision of Marxism which narrowly sees societal issues through the lens of privilege and oppression. These differ from previous forms of anti-racism, feminism and so on in rejecting individualism. In Critical Race Theory, all Whites are privileged because of their skin colour and the fact that some Whites are less privileged than some Blacks is ignored. It isn’t enough to be non-racist, and judge people on their merits and character regardless of race. You must be positively anti-racist and fight against White privilege and for Black uplift through social programmes that demand the granting of opportunities to Blacks and other underprivileged minorities simply because of their colour. For example, in America Black and Mexican students generally do less well at Maths at school than Whites and Asians. So some schools in California are trying to even these results out by giving pre-calculus lessons only to Black and Hispanic students to the exclusion of Whites and Asians.
In the eyes of GB News’ Mike Graham, however, woke means just about every anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and radical gender view or ideology. Yes, he conceded, people did care about the NHS and the cost of living, but people also cared about: woke teacher telling kids there were 73 genders, environmental protesters gluing themselves to the road, petrol and diesel cars being phased out in favour of electric vehicles, and the cost of power rising due to green energy policies. And so on.
Piers Morgan also did a piece about whether people cared about ‘woke’. This included Reform’s Richard Tice and a woman from the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, Morgan and Tice believed that people did care about ‘woke’. The lady from Labour didn’t. She didn’t like biological men being allowed into women’s private spaces and sports, nor rapists in female prisons, when asked by the former editor of the Mirror. He replied with, ‘Ah, but they’ve prevented you from talking about this’. She replied that they hadn’t, and she’d been talking about it for a year or so. This contrasts with the case of Rosie Duffield, who has been isolated and shunned by Starmer and other senior Labour members for her views. I can’t remember whether the lady believed that people didn’t care about woke policies, or did, but that they were far more concerned about the cost of living and the NHS. I think Morgan had claimed that it was because Labour was pushing these woke policies that it looked like they would not have an absolute majority at the election next year.
My guess is that the Labour lady is probably right. People are directly affected by the cost of living, and wondering how they will afford food, heating and their rent or mortgages. The latter was one of the major issues on the local news tonight in Bristol, which has been revealed as the most expensive city outside London. One woman spoke of how she had been forced to move back in with her parents after the landlord raised the rent by 66 per cent. And they are very much concerned about getting hold of a doctor, thanks to all the wonderful privatisation that Rishi’s so proud of. These are issues that immediately affect everyone. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the debate over transgenderism, let alone so concerned that it affects the way they vote. Some are, and it may become a more important issue in the public consciousness by the time the next election comes round.
But Starmer’s less than exciting performance can also be blamed on other problems apart from the ‘woke’. Like he broke every promise and pledge he made, and has done his level best to purge the left. Corbyn’s policies were genuinely popular, and he enthused and inspired the public in a way Starmer can’t. The turnout at the local elections was low, and my guess is that many of the people Corbyn had appealed to didn’t vote. They had been alienated by a party leadership that was actively hostile to them and which to many people just offers the usual Tory policies, or something not too different from them. Tice, I think, said that Labour’s woke policies wouldn’t appeal to the socially conservative voters of the red wall. He might be right, though if they do become disenchanted with Labour, it’ll be far more to do with the lack of proper, old-style, socialist Labour policies.
I’ve said before that I’m a monarchist, but I am also aware that some the protesters against the monarchy have very good reasons for doing so. One of these is the immense cost of the Coronation when three million Brits have to use food banks to stave off hunger. The mellifluous voiced Irish vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, put up a very pointed video about this the other day, commenting on a clip from the news in which Joanna Lumley commented on the monarchy’s generosity. The guest’s going to the event had the cars valeted and refuelled free. Robespierre commented that the monarchy wasn’t paying for this, but the British taxpayer. It wasn’t done free of charge, but the cost was being placed on the British taxpayer at a time when very many ordinary Brits are finding it extremely hard to make ends meet.
Rather more troubling is the allegation, which I’ve heard has been made by the Labour MP Clive Lewis, that our sovereign lord Charles III exempted himself from something like 120 different laws in order to rake in a cool £2 billion. If that’s true, then it’s just greed as well as using his personal position as head of state to unfairly enrich himself. When ordinary people do this, like politicians and government officials, it’s called corruption and ends up with an investigation from the rozzers. And it’s also an affront given the three million or so ordinary Brits, who are now forced to use food banks and the rising levels of real poverty in general in the United Kingdom.
People have been criticising Charles for years. Some of this has been general attacks on the monarchy, but some of has been about his personal profiteering. One documentary – I think it might have been ‘Charles: The Man Who Shouldn’t Be King’ – pointed out that normal jars of honey are below a pound in price. Unlike the honey Charles is producing from his estates in Cornwall, which is over £4. Other issues are that he doesn’t observe the same distance the Queen did between the monarchy and politics. There was an article in the Independent or the Groan years ago about the numerous letters he wrote to various authorities calling for the return of grammar schools. Some of Charles’ causes have made him genuinely popular. One of these was his attack on modern architecture, which he derided as ‘monstrous carbuncles’. This enraged various elite architects, but captured the mood of many ordinary people sick of grey, concrete monstrosities. After he made his stinging remarks, some wag wrote on the hoardings surrounding a building site in Bristol ‘another monstrous carbuncle – way hey, right on Charlie!’ But this attitude is dangerous, as not everyone shares his opinions. There have been a number of posts from various right-wing types who believe in the various conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum and the Green Movement expressing their paranoid fears about Charles’ sympathies and connections to them. Charles is almost certainly correct in his support for Green issues, but it does mean that there is a section of right-wing opinion now alienated and distrustful of the monarchy.
I don’t think there are very many of them at the moment. A far more serious issue is the king’s profiteering. If he continues to do this as poverty in Britain grows, then more people will justifiably become anti-monarchists.
I’ve been looking through Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England for anything suitable to put up for the coronation. I thought of something written for the restoration, but the only piece I could find like that is this ballad by Henry Jones of Oxford, published in 1660. It celebrates Charles II hiding from Cromwell and his troopers in the oak at Boscobel, which then became commemorated every year afterwards as Oak Apple Day. Palmer gives a description how it was celebrated in one school in Leicestershire, which is rather alarming: the children went around with stinging nettles wrapped in dock leaves looking to inflict a few stings on people who were insufficiently royalist. Given the debacle yesterday, when the Met police was arresting anti-monarchy protesters simply for the terrible crime of protesting, I think some of those cops have the same mentality. The ballad goes on to describe how Charles pretended to be the servant of the serving maid helping him to escape, and there’s several touches of humour as the disguised Charles comes a cropper in front of Roundhead troopers, who all have a good laugh. He finds sanctuary at the Three Crowns in Bristol, where he’s told to wind up the jack, but overwinds it instead. The ballad finally ends with Charles catching a ship to safety in France.
I recite the ballad’s lyrics and also play the tune as reproduced in the book. I don’t, however, do the two together because words and music are printed separately and I haven’t worked out how to fit the one to the other. Sorry.
I hope people enjoy it, whatever their views on the monarchy.
A week or so ago I wrote to Karin Smyth, the local MP for south Bristol, at the behest of one of the internet petitioning organisation. Rishi Sunak had stated that he intends to privatise more of the health service, as privatisation has worked so well. Which shows how ideologically deluded and completely removed from anything resembling reality he and the other Thatcherite privatisation maniacs are. The petitioning organisation asked its supporters to write to their MPs requesting them to block this. If your MP was Labour, then you were urged to ask them to write to them asking them to write to Starmer and request him to oppose the privatisation. Or say if he would oppose it. I got this response yesterday from Karin Smyth:
‘Dear David -,
Thank you for contacting me to raise concerns about NHS privatisation.
I know that many people are rightly concerned at the very serious pressures facing our NHS. Our health service is struggling and performance against many waiting time measures is at a record low: patients are waiting hours for ambulances to arrive, A&E departments are overstretched, and more than seven million people are waiting for treatment.
Ministers point to the impact of COVID-19. But we entered the pandemic with record NHS waiting lists and 100,000 staff vacancies. We must build capacity in the NHS so that all patients who need it can be treated on time again. But I believe we have a responsibility in the short term to utilise spare capacity in the private sector to get through the current crisis and bring down NHS waiting lists. Nobody should be left languishing in serious pain, while those who can afford to, pay to go private. That is the two-tier healthcare system that I and my colleagues want to end.
In the long term, I want the NHS to be so good that people never have to go private.
Building an NHS fit for the future is one of Labour’s five key missions for government, reforming health and care services to speed up treatment, shift the focus of healthcare out of the hospital and into the community, and reduce health inequalities.
Paid for by ending the non-dom tax status regime, the plan will double the number of medical school places, create 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery clinical placements a year, train double the number of district nurses each year, and deliver 5,000 more health visitors.
Thank you once again for contacting me about this issue.
Yours sincerely,
Karin Smyth MP Labour MP for Bristol South’
I thank her for her response and am convinced that she is sincere in her belief in the NHS and defence of it. But I don’t trust Starmer. Not after he’s broken every promise he’s ever made. I also remember how Blair constantly accused the Tories of priatising the NHS – rightly – but then went much further than them when he came to power. So much so that the Tories under Cameron pretended to be further left and opposed the hospital closures of Blair’s regime. Of course, that lasted right up until Cameron got his public school arse through the door of No. 10.
As a member of the Labour party, I hope Labour supporters will continue to vote Labour in the local elections today and we can get the Tories out, because they will make things worse if they’re returned to power. But I remain unconvinced that Starmer will be significantly better.
I don’t know how true this is, as it was reported on GB News by Tom Harwood, former teaboy to far right outfit Guido Fawkes. According to the station that a Labour MP has said has two political biases, right and far right, LGBTQ Labour, the gay rights wing of the party, is considering withdrawing from Pride marches because they are afraid for their safety. It’s because of the anger Keir Starmer has generated within the gay community due to his flip-flopping on the trans issue. First he was solidly behind reforming the gender recognition act, then after seeing it contribute to the fall of Nicola Sturgeon, he wasn’t. The militant gay rights organisation are also angry that he was talking to a ‘homophobic’ pastor about allowing gender critical organisation to attend and speak at conference.
There are several things to unpack here. The first is that, if this is true, then I believe LGBTQ Labour are entirely justified in their fears. There is a culture of violence in militant trans activism. We’ve seen this played out in violent demonstrations against gender critical activists on university campuses and public meetings. The most recent example of this was the mobbing of Kellie-Jay ‘Posie Parker’ Keen in New Zealand. And this is quite apart from Audrey Hale’s shooting of six people, including three children, at an American school. Militant trans rhetoric online is soaked in slogans about killing ‘TERFs’ with some of those posting pictures of themselves with firearms. In fact, LGBTQ Labour are fully behind and pushing for reform of the gender recognition act as well as outlawing anything but the affirmative care model of gender therapy on the grounds that anything else amounts to conversion therapy.
But it absolutely wrong to associate the gender critical movement with homophobia. Many of the women in the gender critical movement are lesbians. There are also gay men, some of whom, like Ted Sargent, are veterans of the original Stonewall riots. Sargent was assaulted and knocked to the ground at an American Pride march recently because he carried a banner stating that trans rights were nothing to do with gay rights.
There is a growing dissatisfaction among gays and lesbians with the mainstream gay rights organisations like Stonewall. They feel that these organisations have kicked gay people to the kerb in order to concentrate almost solely on the trans issue. Again and again they have posted up pieces about various gay rights meetings and events in which nearly all the speakers have been trans, speaking about trans, with only a minority of gay men speaking. And absolutely no lesbians.
There is also growing anger with attempts by the trans lobby to change the definition of homosexual from same-sex attracted to same gender attracted. This means that trans-identified biological men have and are demanding sex from lesbians because, despite their masculine biology, they identify as women. Ditto with gay men being pressured to have sex with trans-identified women, who identify as men and therefore consider themselves gay men. Gender critical gays and lesbians have stated that this is a new form of conversion therapy, similar to the old where gays were pressured to have straight sex in order to cure them.
There are a number of complaints online that where this ideology is being upheld and enforced – in Canada, America and Britain, it has led to the massive closure of traditional gay and lesbian pubs and clubs. The gay scene has, according to them, moved back underground, with gays meeting and socialising in private homes as they used to when homosexuality was illegal.
As for gender critical organisations attending the Labour conference, I think they have every right to. The LGB Association, a gay organisation that solely represents gay men and women, tried to attend the last one but were banned because of the trans activists. They have been accused of being a hate group, but I have seen absolutely no evidence of this except real concerns about how the trans ideology is damaging the mental and biological health of vulnerable people as well as excluding and marginalising gay people within the organisations. They have a right to be heard as well as their opponents.
I don’t know, however, how much this will affect relations between gay Labour members and activists and Pride at a local level. A group from my local Labour party attended the Pride march in Bristol last year, and the year before the Labour administration painted one of the zebra crossings in Bristol’s old city in the trans flag.
Aside from the trans issue, I’ve also read online comments from gay people, who have become generally disenchanted with Pride. In their view it has gone from something that had a real point – fighting real homophobia and anti-gay legislation – to something rather more menacing. Rather than being subversive and liberating, they feel that it has become oppressive and conformist, with corporations and organisations using it as an opportunity to demonstrate how virtuous they are in this regard. I don’t know about over here, but in America there are also growing concerns about the blatant displays of kink in Pride as the marches state they welcome children.
There are some real fractures occurring in the British gay movement. How big the supposed split between LGBTQ Labour and Pride is moot. GB News is a right-leaning broadcaster with an interest in attacking the Labour party so the report may well be exaggerated. But there are cracks appearing as many gays become increasingly disenchanted with their organisations’ focus on trans to what they feel is their exclusion.
This comes from Amanpour & Co, a US news and comment channel on YouTube. They’ve put up a video discussing the news that supposedly 117,000 American doctors, one in five of them, is planning to leave their healthcare system. If this is true, then it’s very important as it shows America’s private healthcare system is also on the brink of failure. I put up a piece yesterday of a Bristol plastic surgeon, who was concerned about the numbers of British doctors planning to leave the NHS for greener shores downunder with the Ozzies and Kiwis. Those countries are more attractive because they’re offering better wages and conditions. Are the American doctors planning to leave US medicine also considering going there as well? And what does this say about the superiority of private medicine? The Bristol surgeon was suggesting that the NHS should be shrunk to deal with the problem – meaning certain services should be privatised, thus ending the NHS’ commitment to provide uniform healthcare free at the point of delivery. But as America’s healthcare is private, privatisation is obviously no solution. And what about the market forces Thatcher was always bleating about? They should dictate that in order to encourage doctors to stay with the healthcare system, they should have their pay and conditions improved. But obviously something in the American private healthcare system is preventing that from happening. It means that Blair and the Tories are utterly wrong when they try to outsource NHS services and look to American private healthcare as the model for efficiency. In fact the US healthcare system almost broke down a couple of years ago.
The message from this is that a fully private healthcare system is a disaster, as is the privatisation of the NHS. But you won’t find either the Tories or Starmer, let alone the British right-wing press, acknowledging or telling you this.
And we all know what that means: more privatisation. This has got me really angry. The BBC local news for the Bristol area, Points West, has added a little local slant on the current NHS crisis. It has covered the views of a plastic surgeon, who was at one point appointed to an NHS committee of some description. Now the surgeon’s calling for a Royal Commission to examine the NHS and what changes should be made to it. The man’s concerned that 40 per cent of doctors graduating are planning to leave the health service, lured by higher salaries and better conditions in Australia and New Zealand. That is a problem that needs solving. However, his solution is to shrink the NHS. He opines that it’s too big, and is actually one of the world’s biggest employers. The NHS is indeed huge. I read somewhere that it employs more people than the Indian railway. But it’s always been big, and historically it always has given value for money. Until David Cameron, Tweezer, Johnson, Liz Truss and Sunak. But way back in 1979 the Royal College considered that improvements to the Health Service would be easily paid for by tax revenue. And to be fair to Tony Blair, it was properly funded during his tenure of 10 Downing Street, even though he really wanted to privatise whatever he could of it.
This is what we’re talking about here: Privatisation. Selling off some of the NHS’ services, so that it no longer provides a service to everyone, free at the point of delivery.
This is what the Tories have been aiming for, and what their media mouthpieces, like GB News’ Nana Akua, are demanding. The present Health Secretary denied that there were any plans for any such thing. Yeah, and Thatcher denied that she wanted to privatise the NHS, but she did. What probably alarmed the Health Secretary was that this surgeon spoke their plans out loud. The Tories are despicable, as is this surgeon’s views. I hope, I really hope, that more medical professions will come forward to challenge the government and their slow privatisation of this precious institution.
And that the government pays our junior doctors what they’re worth.
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