This is a very short video from the PoliticsJoe site on YouTube of the leader of the SNP in Westminster having a very sharp dig at Keir Starmer for his betrayal of the country’s students. Flynn says that David Cameron convinced his coalition partner, Nick Clegg, to drop his pledge to end tuition fees. Flynn therefore has to congratulate Rishi Sunak on similarly convincing Starmer to drop his commitment to ending tuition fees. Of course, the Tories are highly delighted. Sunak grins like a maniac and looks around him to the Tory benches, who are also enjoying the joke immensely. Starmer just sits there with an expression half-grimace, half-stupid grin. Sunak then take to the despatch box to state that more people have gone to university under the Tories than ever before. Flynn responds by taking the floor again to say that the Conservatives don’t believe in ending tuition fees, the Liberal Democrats don’t believe in ending tuition fees, and now Labour doesn’t believe in ending tuition fees. He therefore appeals to the Speaker, ‘isn’t it true that all of them mainstream parties have failed Britain’s young people?’ Sunak responds by stating that more underprivileged young people are going to university in England than in Scotland.
I don’t like the way Flynn handed Sunak an opportunity to make the Tories look good, but his gibe at Starmer is right on target and deserved. As for more people going to university under the Tories than ever before, that’s probably true but it’s the continuation of a trend that began under Blair. It also doesn’t answer the real point underneath Flynn’s statement, which is that students are being burdened with mountainous debt. As for more underprivileged young people going to university in England rather than Scotland, that’s because the population of England is far greater than Scotland and there are more universities. Sunak is not helping students, as they’re faced not only with student debt, but also with the costs of living away from home during the cost of living crisis.
But Starmer isn’t going to help students either, although he still seems to want people to believe that he might with his wibbling that the current system is wrong and Labour will look at alternative ways of paying tuition fees. Well, some of us can remember Thatcher’s big plan in the 1980s to get businesses to sponsor students at university, even if they weren’t studying a subject related to the sponsor. That idea didn’t last long, despite all the fanfare. I don’t think any similar alternative to state payment of tuition fees Starmer might dream will last long either. The Guardian was similarly sceptical about Starmer’s ambiguous statement. They compared it to Schrodinger’s Cat, a metaphor for the behaviour of sub-atomic particles in quantum physics. In the metaphor, a cat is locked in a box with an instrument measuring atomic decay and a flask of poison. The atomic device randomly decides whether or not to smash the flask and release the poison, killing the cat. How can you tell if the moggy’s alive or dead? You can’t unless you open the box and make an observation. Until that time, the cat is both alive and dead, in the same manner that, in quantum physics, particles can be in two contradictory states until the scientist makes an observation. Starmer’s position on tuition fees is like the cat: it both is and isn’t in favour of dropping tuition fees.
But quantum physics, while it holds sway in the sub-atomic world, doesn’t work in the macro world which is subject to Einsteinian relativity. Similarly, Starmer’s position on tuition fees comes down to him deciding against ending them and betraying students. He wants us to believe otherwise, but that’s what it amounts to.
His repeated betrayals and breaking of pledges and promises have made him a laughing stock. As a leader, he’s a treacherous liability. And unfortunately we can’t blame this on Tory influence.
I posted another piece last night attacking Critical Race Theory and the theory of White privilege as a racist attempt to redefine racism that didn’t fit reality. This used the example of the murder of seven White vagrants in Florida by the Nation of Yahweh, a new Black religious movement that combined religion with a flourishing business empire. Its leader, Yahweh Ben Yahweh, and his commanders bitterly hated Whites, and to get into the upper, governing ranks of the organisation you had to kill a White person. They did so with the murder of seven White tramps. Yahweh Ben Yahweh had been honoured by former president Bill Clinton for his organisation’s regeneration of run-down Black districts in Miami. In this instance, it was the Black religious leader who had the power and privilege, and his White victims absolutely none.
JP, one of the great commenters on this blog, also posted this comment, pointing out that the theory of White privilege also ignores or plays down Black achievement, both in modern America and in the great civilisations that have arisen in Africa throughout history. He writes:
‘>Critical Race Theory and its activists have attempted to redefine racism as prejudice + power. Blacks cannot be racist, because, according to CRT, they are powerless.
That redifinition is insulting. It does 2 things very well:
1. discredits any power that Blacks have ever achieved.
2. deprives the individual Black of self expression
African Americans have achieved power. Justice Thomas has wielded large power over the law in the US since the 1990s, Oprah dominated American society and was the 1st Black billionaire, Obama was elected (and re-elected) President of the US, on and on the list goes. I’ve heard people trying to claim that such powerful, successful people are just “Black face”. What?! That these people are traitors to real African Americans. Wow. That is how far these people will go to nullify Blacks who don’t fit their redefined racism.
Africans have achieved power and greatness. Great African societies and cultures are forgotten or just ignored. The Songhai Empire, Mali Empire, etc. The ancient Egyptian civilization is exempted from being “African” for … well whatever reason besides literally being on the same continent. Even if African achievements are acknowledged, these examples are waft aside as being ancient history; and that European white privledge and racist slavery overpowered them. Not so fast. West African, aka. “Black”, merchants were already enslaving peoples long before Europeans colonized the West Coast in the 18-19th centuries. The timeline of history doesn’t support the narrative that European white privledge caused or started slavery or racism.
This redifinition is revisionist. It’s made by people who don’t like the facts, or are ignorant of history, and who redefine words to fit a narrative of how they want to manipulate the future.’
He has also posted a video of an angry Black mother objecting to CRT being taught in schools. There are many videos like this of Black parents strenuously objecting to their children being taught it in schools. In one of these, a father stated that he had never encountered racism, and that he wanted his son to believe that he could do or be anything he chose. But CRT worked against this by telling Blacks they would always be marginalised, poorer and discriminated against. The father believed in the American Dream. This has taken a bashing through repeated depressions and the Reaganomics that have meant that the middle class – Black, White, Asian, whatever, has become impoverished. Generally speaking, Blacks are less prosperous than Whites, but this is an average. Black conservatives are worth reading in this respect, as they point out paradoxically the immense progress Black America made after the ending of slavery. Despite real oppression in the form of the Jim Crow Laws and segregation, they built up capital, opened businesses and entered the professions. Black districts like Harlem also had their commercial centres, just like their White counterparts. In the 1950s an American advertising magazine hailed Blacks as the new middle class.
Since then, things seem to have gone backward. Authors like Thomas Sowell recall how the streets of areas like Harlem were safe when they were growing up. I think Sowell says that when he lived there, he never heard a gunshot. They were less run-down, and residents had far more self-respect. This isn’t racial – the same conservatives will point to similar conditions and attitudes among the White underclass in Britain. I don’t accept that this relative decline is due to the welfare state incentivising such anti-social attitudes and behaviour. But it’s clear that something has gone seriously wrong, something that the victim narrative of Black America and Britain isn’t addressing and may actually be making worse.
I got this message on Thursday. I’m glad that the Labour party are preparing to confront the Tories, but I am concerned by the serious lack of detail about policies. I think Labour’s already been challenged about that in parliament this week, and it looks like Starmer is just playing the game of letting the Tories hang themselves rather than present any real concrete alternatives. If he’s anything like Blair, he’ll just pick up their old policies and carry on as they did. Or go even further and complete his betrayal of Labour’s real activists and supporters.
‘Dear David,
As we approach the end of 2022, we find ourselves in a worse place than where we started.The mess we are in is not just a result of 12 weeks of Conservative chaos, but 12 years of Conservative economic failure.
Inflation is spiralling. Growth is plunging. Living standards are falling.
And today, Jeremy Hunt delivered a fiscal statement with less for public services and more tax rises for working people.
Yet again with this Tory Government, it is working people who will foot the bill.
David, Britain is a great country, with fantastic strengths. But the Tories are holding us back.
They have pick-pocketed the purses and wallets of the entire country.
A double whammy of frozen tax thresholds and inflation eroding people’s wages.
The stealth taxes, excuses and unfair choices announced by Jeremy Hunt make one thing very clear: the Tories do not deliver for working people.
No plan to deliver economic growth, no plan to fix our crumbling public services and crucially, no plan for the future.
What we need is a serious, long-term plan to get our economy growing again – powered by the talent and effort of millions of working people and thousands of businesses.
We need a greener, more dynamic economy, creating jobs across every part of the country, with a modern industrial strategy where government works hand in hand with business.
That is what Labour will deliver.
David, after 12 years of failure, Britain can no longer afford the Tories. It’s time for a fairer, greener future with Labour.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves MP Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer’
Here’s another piece I got yesterday from the pro-democracy group Open Britain, giving their damning opinion on our new, unelected Prime Minister and his wretched cabinet.
‘Dear David,
Here we go again. Rishi Sunak claims that he is a unifier, that his administration will be a fresh start, and that he will bring “integrity, professionalism, and accountability” to office. Unfortunately, his words are already conflicting with his actions.
Sunak may have seen off Jacob Rees-Mogg today but he went on to reinstate some of the most dangerous ideologues from the Johnson and Truss administrations. It doesn’t look like the fresh start we’ve been promised.
Dominic Raab, a man dead-set on dismantling our human rights framework with a bill that the Law Society says would “damage the rule of law” and “prevent access to justice”, is back in post. Even Truss saw the danger of this bill and it’s astonishing that it now looks to be back on the agenda.
Suella Braverman, anti-woke culture warrior and architect of the reprehensible Rwanda-deportation scheme, is back as Home Secretary. Just six days ago she resigned from office after breaking ministerial rules and jeopardising national security. Don’t forget, Braverman is a former chair of the European Research Group and her reappointment shows that the group’s stranglehold on government priorities did not depart with Liz Truss.
Michael Gove, Therese Coffey, Kemi Badenoch, Steve Barclay and others have also returned. It looks like this cabinet will be more or less a hybrid of Johnson and Truss’ senior teams…the very people who got us into this mess.
But what about Sunak’s programme for government? Well, we still haven’t heard much at all about what his plans are. Perhaps we will get some early clues at PMQs tomorrow, but it is astonishing that he has been installed in Number 10 on the say-so of about about 160 MPs with almost zero discussion of the plans he has to fix the economy and restore political stability. Surely a sign that our democracy is not exactly in tip-top shape.
And while all this was going on in Downing Street, in Parliament the Second Reading of the Retained EU Law Bill was taking place. If passed, that bill will automatically scrap regulations and protections associated with the EU, and give ministers massive powers to replace them with whatever they want. It will put all kinds of regulations in danger, including environmental rules, food safety standards, worker protection laws, and more. It will be a disaster for businesses and will undermine our democracy (Ministers should not have that much unchecked power).
We can be grateful that Boris Johnson isn’t back in office, but this cabinet and these bills remind us that not much has really changed. We’ll be watching what the new PM does over the coming days and weeks, but the early signs are that the chaos will continue and that our campaigning will be as important as ever.
Nothing that has happened in the last 48 hours or so has persuaded us that this is what the country needs. We are still firmly of the opinion that the only credible route to sustainable political stability is to let the people decide how we should move forward. We won’t stop pushing for a general election.
As readers will have probably noticed, I have very strong objections to Critical Race Theory and particularly its concept of White privilege. Critical Race Theory is a postmodern revision of Marxism, dreamt up in the 1970s by Kimberle Crenshaw and a group of Black Marxist legal scholars in the 1970s. It replaces class as the instrument of oppression with race. ‘Whiteness’ is a bourgeois quality possessed by all Whites which guarantees them social, economic and political superiority to Blacks and other people of colour. Even if the individual White person is not racist. Racism, it also holds, has not declined, but is just better hidden. Whites must be made to know Black oppression and feel guilty about it. Much of the literature of Critical Race Theory and its activism is about deliberately humiliating Whites. For example, several years ago there were student riots at Evergreen College in Oregon. The college was very liberal, and there had been for decades since the 1970s an annual withdrawal of Black students during the summer months to mark the absence of Blacks during a critical phase in the civil rights struggle or so. By the middle of the last decade, this had changed into demands for the White students to absent themselves in favour of Blacks, in order to appreciate Black marginalisation. This was succeeded by a series of aggressive student demonstration in which Blacks and their White allies insisted on forcing Whites into inferior positions. At meetings, for example, Whites were required to sit at the back and not speak. Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist with liberal views, describes it as ‘Black supremacy’. Not all Blacks supported this aggressive demonstration of racial vindictiveness, and one of Weinstein’s students, a young Black woman, shouted at the mob that she wasn’t oppressed. Students of whatever colour, who didn’t conform, were chased by the mob. Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay also demonstrated the irrationality and vicious prejudice of this woke pseudo-scholarship in the spoof papers they sent to various woke, postmodern journals, which were eventually collected up and published as Grievance Studies. In one paper, they argued that White male students should be forced to sit on the floor in order to teach them about marginalisation and persecution. They believed this would be too much for the academic journal to which they had submitted it. Alas, no; it was accepted with a reply complaining that they didn’t go far enough: the young men shouldn’t just be forced to sit on the floor, but should be chained up as well.
Part of what worries me about the concept of ‘White privilege’ is that privilege is something usually said of rich minority groups, who haven’t worked for their position, such as the aristocracy. Or the half of the British business elite that has inherited the ownership of their companies, rather than having worked their way up. It also recalls the legal privileges that accompanied the European class system, particularly under feudalism, and the legal restriction placed on Blacks in Jim Crow America and in the White-ruled colonies, like Rhodesia, Malawi and South Africa, until the beginning of Black majority rule. For example, until the establishment of democracy in the 1920s in Britain, women were barred from voting and there was a property qualification on the franchise, so that the majority of working class men did not have the vote either. I also believe that there was a property qualification on serving on juries, which was only abolished by Woy, sorry, Roy Jenkins in his socially liberal reforms of the 1960s. Much of the ire directed at Jenkins from the right comes from his decriminalisation of homosexuality and his relaxation of the divorce laws. One splenetic right-winger- from the Daily Heil perhaps? – once described him as a destroyer of British society comparable to Stalin or some other totalitarian monster. Really? Just Jenkins on his own? With his ‘good claret expression’, to use the words of caricaturist Gerald Scarfe. The last time I looked, Britain’s buildings were all standing rather than reduced to rubble by the rampaging hordes, and Jenkins and the Labour party following him had sent a precise number of zero people to concentration camps or re-education centres. But a certain type of high Tory does want all this back. The Financial Times reviewed one such book, which looked forward to the return of the property qualification for juries so they would protect property rights, and the restoration of the old order before anti-discrimination legislation.
In fact there are very strong arguments against White privilege. For a start, east Asian such as the Chinese and Japanese, perform much better educationally and economically than Whites in America and Britain. In Britain the proportion of Asians in management positions, for example, is identical to Whites. In America, they earn more and occupy superior jobs. And while Blacks are sacked before Whites, Whites are sacked before east Asians. This isn’t because east Asians are superior in IQ. It’s because they seem to work harder and have a particular set of cultural skills that allow them to succeed. And in many instances, they earned their position through very hard work against prejudice and discrimination. One social study found that the Japanese in Canada were the most ‘privileged’ ethnic group. But Japanese Canadians had had a long struggle against punitive discrimination which was worse than that experienced by people of Japanese descent in the US. And immigrants to the US from the British Caribbean earn more on average not just to native Black Americans, but also to Whites. For Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Blacks are held back not by racial discrimination in the wider society, though he doesn’t deny this exists, but because the majority Black culture hasn’t acquired the necessary social and economic skills to uplift themselves And he is fiercely critical of multiculturalism because he believes it isolates and ossifies different ethnic groups into separate enclaves and cultural preserves, thus preventing from learning from and acquiring the skills of other, more successful groups. As for White privilege, it is hard to see what privilege a homeless White man possesses compared to tenured and respected Black academics and radicals like Crenshaw.
To me, Critical Race Theory and White privilege tackle the problem of Black poverty and marginalisation from the wrong end. Instead of seeing Black poverty as the anomaly which must be tackled, it sees White success as the anomaly, which must be destroyed if Blacks and people of colour are to take their rightful place in society. Thus White people must be brought down and Whiteness abolished. The Guardian, which promotes Critical Race Theory, as claimed that this doesn’t mean White people but Whiteness as the social quality that gives them their exalted place. But one of the writers anthologised in the collection of papers, Critical Race Theory, states that there is no difference between Whiteness and White people. And one of the fears of CRT’s critics is that after attacking Whiteness, the radicals will indeed move on to attacking Whites.
It seems to me that the Critical Race Theory and White privilege are essentially a continuation of the mindset that Whites enjoy their superior social position through mechanisms of power long after those legal mechanisms had been officially abolished and the ideology on which they were based was discredited. It’s an attempted to explain why, after the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the majority of Blacks are still poor. And the rhetoric of decolonisation over here seems to be a direct transference of the bitterness felt by indigenous Africans to privileged White settlers to mainstream British, White society. And that worries me, because of the brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the White farmers in Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s thugs at the beginning of the century. I also have to say that I’m worried about the trends in Afrocentric and other Black pseudohistory that claims that Blacks are the original inhabitants of the British isles. Simon Webb of History Debunked yesterday put up a post about the claims in a book on African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK, that there are folktales of Africans invading Britain before the Romans. Webb has his own racial biases and some the historical claims he makes are also false. But if he’s right about this, then the author of the book, Hakim Adi, a professor at Chichester university, is talking pure tosh. I am aware of no such folktales, not even when I was a member of the Society for Contemporary Legend Research back in the 1990s. The closest I’ve come to it was in the long-running and sadly missed Celtic warrior strip, Slaine, in the zarjaz SF comic 2000AD. This included a race of Black Atlanteans, the Rmoahals, described as giant aboriginals. The strip’s writer, Pat Mills, based them on a legend that the standing stones of the isle of Callanish in the Hebrides were built by Black-skinned giants who dressed in feathers. Aside from that, the only other source for this curious assertion may be a garbled memory of one of the waves of colonisation that swept over Britain and the continent during prehistory. The Neolithic reached Britain from the fertile crescent over two routes. One was directly across Europe itself, the other was across North Africa and then up from Morocco through Spain. But this occurred so long ago that it was lost to memory for millennia. Archaeologists have only now been able to reconstruct it by using genetic data. Has Adi heard a garbled version of this from within the Black community, from people who mistakenly thought this was a Black African invasion? It also reminds me of the claim made a few years ago that the ancient Egyptians settled in Birmingham before the Roman conquest. This appeared in the Independent, but has, I understand, since been discredited. It also seems to me to have a certain kinship to another piece of Black myth-making, that sailors from Mali discovered America before Columbus, but didn’t enslave the Amerindians. If this happened, it would be truly remarkable, as I’ve seen claims that the Malians didn’t have any ocean-going ships. And the Malinka were a powerful slaving nation, so if they did discover the Amerindians, there would have been nothing preventing them from enslaving them as well.
My fear is that this rhetoric and pseudohistory will cause Blacks, or a minority of Blacks, to see themselves as the oppressed, true inhabitants of Britain and attack the White British as colonialist oppressors. Even if, at present, they claim otherwise. When the Black Lives Matter movement broke out, its Bristol branch stuck up posters claiming that ‘We’ve always been here’ – which is hi8storically very debatable, although some Blacks have been present in Britain at various periods from the Middle Ages onwards. Claims of Black presence further back, such as the supposed Black skin colour of Cheddar man, are more conjectural. Webb has claimed that this reconstruction was based on a false interpretation and has since been retracted, but I have not seen him cite his source for this.
Marx himself held some extremely unpleasant racial views. He’s most infamous for his anti-Semitism, as shown by him sneering at his German rival, Ferdinand Lassalles, as ‘the Jewish ni++er.’ But he also had strong prejudices against European ethnic groups. He held that the Celts, Basques and the Slavs were backward peoples who had no intrinsic right to exist and national independence. When the 1848 Revolutions broke out, he was afraid that their bids for independence would stop the class revolution he wished to promote. In a chilling passage, he looked forward to the class war becoming a race war. This recalls the horrific ethnic cleansing and deportations Stalin inflicted on the national minorities in the USSR, including the Holodomor, the artificial famine in Ukraine which killed 7 million people.
Thomas Sowell in his book Conquests and Cultures talks about the ethnic cleansing by Muslim mobs of the Ibo people by Muslims in Nigeria and the horrific bloodbath of the Biafran war. The Ibos had previously been a minor, poor tribe but had seized the opportunities presented by western, Christian missionary education, which the northern Muslims had rejected as against their faith. As a result, Ibos were better educated and held better jobs and positions of responsibility even in the Muslim north. This was naturally resented, and the resentment grew into violence. Sowell notes that these tensions were heightened by the language each side used against the other. He writes
‘The problem was not simply that there were differences of opinion, but that there were not established and mutually respected traditions for airing those differences with restraint and accommodation. Vitriolic polemic in the press and in the political arena became the norm. Epithets like “fascist” and “imperialist stooge” became commo currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.’ (p. 127). In the West there are respected means of airing such differences, but the insults sound very much like the language used by the woke, radical intersectional left against its opponents.
And there is anti-White racism and violence. Two decades ago the number of Whites killed in racist attacks was nearly the same as members of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. There have been armed attacks by Blacks on Whites in the past few weeks and months. One was when a man opened fire on the passengers on a subway. Another was when a Black man deliberately drove his car into a parade in a White community. He left behind a manifesto which made it very clear that this was an act of anti-White terrorism. But this was not treated as such by the Biden administration.
I am very pessimistic about the success of affirmative actions schemes in creating a sustainable Black middle class. As I understand it, this was originally intended to be only a temporary measure. Once Blacks had gained entry into education, the sciences, politics and business on a level comparable with Whites, these schemes were to be dismantled as they would no longer be needed. But forty years after the Runnymede Commission recommended ‘positive discrimination’ in which Blacks are to be favoured by offering places with lower grades to universities and colleges, and preferential job offers if they have lower qualifications, the mass of Black Britain still remains poor and marginalised. I don’t, however, know how bad the situation would otherwise be if these policies had not been implemented. It could be they would have been much worse.
Nevertheless I do fear that these policies will continue to fail and that, in their anger and desperation, some Blacks will begin pogroms against Whites, encouraged by the rhetoric and arguments of Critical Race Theory.
This comes from Fenkow’s channel on YouTube, and is sung by Karsten Troyke. Unfortunately, it is all in Yiddish, and although the explanatory piece on the song’s YouTube page gives the lyrics in Hebrew and Latin letters, there’s no English translation. But I’m putting it up anyway because it’s another reminder that Jews formed a vital part of the international Marxist and socialist working class movement. This is, however, very much contrary to the current Blairite leadership of the Labour party, to whom such brothers and sisters are ‘the wrong kind of Jews’. Indeed, while Corbyn was in power one wretched female Labour politico declared that socialism was anti-Semitic, because it was anti-capitalist. She therefore expressed the same anti-Semitic identification of Jews with capitalism and business that Hitler and the Nazis did. And the Blairite purge of socialists and critics of Israel is chiefly directed against Jews. Four-fifths of those expelled are Jewish, with Jewish groups supportive of Corbyn and socialism, like Jewdas and Jewish Voice for Labour, particularly attacked. As for the attack on Marxists and socialists, Tony Benn observed decades ago that once the witch hunters had finished with the Marxists, they’d start on the socialists. And this is happening to decent people ,whether they’re Jews or not.
Jewish socialists have always been a part of the Labour party alongside their non-Jewish brothers and sisters. It is grossly anti-Semitic to throw them out. They, and everyone else who has been falsely smeared and purged, should be reinstated with an apology.
Nadine Dorries’ appalling decision to press on with the government’s plans to sell off Channel 4 has been widely condemned. I put up a piece about it yesterday. It has nothing to do with saving anyone any money, but is merely yet another Tory assault on public service television in the service of media monopolists like Rupert Murdoch. It is part of their ongoing campaign to enforce a uniformity of right-wing opinion across the media, until all you hear is just Tory propaganda. As if that isn’t already mostly the case.
I got this internet petition from the pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It against the privatisation today. I’ve signed it. If you feel the same about the issue, please do so as well.
‘Dear David,
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has finally announced her outrageous plan to sell off Channel 4.
Channel 4 is ours, and it doesn’t cost us a penny. It produces shows and films that bring us together – like Slumdog Millionaire, Father Ted, It’s A Sin. It reinvests profits into nurturing new talent, working with small businesses and providing jobs across the UK.
That’s why an overwhelming 82% of the public don’t want Channel 4 to be privatised. Sign the petition to tell Nadine Dorries to get her hands off Channel 4 now!
Nadine Dorries says that “government ownership is holding Channel 4 back”. This is just as false as when she said “Channel 4 is in receipt of public money”.
Channel 4 is entirely funded through advertising and is highly successful financially, reinvesting profits into developing programmes and supporting emerging talent.
Any plans to privatise the broadcaster have to go through Parliament – but thanks to you taking action to get this issue on the radar, Tory MPs are already worried.
In response to thousands of your emails, a group of Conservative MPs came out against their own party and called for the government to leave Channel 4 alone.
You have created the conditions for the fight back over the past months. You contributed to the HUGE 60,000 responses to the government consultation. 12,600 of you emailed your MP, resulting in Conservative MPs using your reasons against the sell off in their public letter to Boris Johnson.
Now is the time to show just how many of us back Channel 4.
A range of voices – from senior Conservative politicians to celebrities – have come out against the privatisation.
Julian Knight MP, Conservative Chair of the Parliamentary Culture Committee, publicly said that privatising the channel would be a “big risk”, and even pointed out that this announcement seemed like “revenge” for news coverage that has been critical of the Prime Minister.
Kirstie Allsopp has said that if these plans go ahead, “news & current affairs, and cutting edge dramas are likely to be thinned out. Profit will be king and the passion & inclusion of Channel 4 will be lost.”
Sir David Attenborough has backed an open letter warning ministers to stop “these short-sighted political and financial attacks”.
Business leaders, politicians, and unlikely allies are coming out against this sale alongside unions, actors and workers in the cultural sector. But it’s your voice, as the 82% of the public, that has the power to really swing this.
Every additional voice has an impact – add yours by signing the petition now.
We know that we need Channel 4 for the future, as part of shaping a more equal UK: providing opportunities outside of London, holding power to account, and platforming new voices.
Thank you for standing up for our public broadcaster in its time of need, for all of us.
In the words of We Own It supporter, Jon: “Channel 4 produces brilliant work, excellent documentaries and independent news – what’s not to like?”
Solidarity,
Cat, Zana, Jack, Johnbosco, Alice, Matthew, Tom – The We Own It team’
I’ve put up several pieces today commenting on far-right Labour MP Neil Coyle and his anti-Semitic tweet about members of Jewish Voice for Labour being ‘Communists’ with their ‘own parties to ruin’. I commented on how this is very close to Nazi rantings about ‘Jewish Marxism’ and power in the SPD and government generally. But it wasn’t just the German Nazis who held these vile beliefs. There were also in British Fascism from the very start. During the War radical right anti-Semitic groups accused Jewish Anglo-German businessmen, such as Alfred Mond, of secretly aiding Germany. The coalition government was reviled as the ‘Jewalition’, while the post-War Conservative Die-Hards were anti-Semitic, anti-Socialist and believed that there was a secret Jewish plot to bring down the Empire. This sounds highly relevant to me, despite the distance of time and space. The Blairites are also anti-Socialist, and Blair’s wars were another form of western imperialism, disguised as freeing countries from tyrants and giving them democracy. In fact it was about removing checks to Western dominance and, in the case of Iraq, looting the country of its oil and state industries. British anti-Semites like Rotha Orne Linton and Nesta Websta were bonkers conspiracy theorists, who believed that Jews and Freemasons were responsible for every revolution and every calamity that had befallen humanity from the French to the Bolshevik Revolutions. One of these ladies also claimed that Nudism was also part of this vast Jewish plot! These people really weren’t well. I can hear Frankie Howerd, the great comedian, who would almost certainly have been killed or put in a concentration camp because of his homosexuality, saying, ‘Oh don’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted!’
I found this piece in Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987) describing British Fascist denunciations of what they saw as the corruption of the British parliament dominated by Jewish interests:
‘Other members did not mince their words with regard to the British government. William Joyce attacked the ‘Slobbering, bastardised mendacious triumvirate’ of Churchill, Eden and Cooper and argued that conscription would bring into the army thousands of young fascists whose training should not be wasted. Elwin Wright, who up until 1937 had been secretary of a respectable Anglo-German Fellowship, advocated the shooting of Jews, called Neville Chamberlain a liar and a traitor and stated that Parliament was a ‘blackmailing corrupt body of bastards.’ For Commander Cole, the Palace of Westminster was full of dirty, corrupt swine and the House of Commons was a ‘house of bastardised Jews’. Cole’s extreme anti-Semitism had developed as a result of his exposure to the Protocols when he had been involved with allied help to the White Russians in the Civil War in the 1920s.’ (p.82).
One of the various Fascist magazines circulating in the early 1920s was The Hidden Hand, published by The Britons. This had originally been called Judentum Ueber Alles when it appeared in 1920, but changed its name in the September of that year. Judentum Ueber Alles – ‘Jewry Over Everything’, an obvious play on the German national anthem, Deutschland Ueber Alles. Perhaps that’s how we should refer to any announcement by Starmer or the Blairites of another purge of innocent, decent Jews, on the spurious pretext that they are somehow anti-Semitic, because they criticise Israel, or ‘communists’ because they’re socialists?
And there was another nasty, anti-Semitic publication, The Jews’ Who’s Who. Presumably this was a list of Jewish figures in parliament, industry, culture and the arts, and the gentiles who supported them. This reminds me of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and related groups, who apparently put together a map of the people they accused of anti-Semitism – who were naturally supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, including Jews – and where they lived. This resulted in one entirely blameless Jewish woman having her car firebombed.
We have gone very far through the looking glass here, folks, where anti-Semitism is dressed up as its opposite and racists use its accusation to smear genuine decent, anti-racists, especially if they’re Jewish.
If this carries on, will the next time Starmer speaks he’ll be met by a uniformed mob chanting ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Starmer!’ Because if he isn’t, he should.
Stephen Howe’s book Afrocentrism also includes discussion and refutation of the vicious anti-Semitism in parts of the movement. This anti-Jewish prejudice is particularly notorious in the case of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan’s assertion that Jews were responsible for the transatlantic slave trade. Howe attacks and refutes this assertion as it appears in the Nation of Islam’s anonymously published boo, The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews. Howe writes
‘The book is credited to the ‘Nation of Islam Historical Research Department’, an entity which has had no traceable existence or publications apart from this work. Under the guise of a scholarly treatise, and utilizing (though often misquoting or otherwise abusing) a very wide range of sources, this is in reality a violently anti-Jewish tract. It massively exaggerates the role of various Atlantic Jewish communities in slavery – a role which was in reality minuscule, with the partial exception of Jewish investors in the Dutch West India Company (Jewish investment here having been estimated at different times between 0.5 per cent and 10 per cent of the total, while the company itself controlled, at its peak, a maximum 16 per cent of the Atlantic slave trade, a handful of Jewish plantation owners in Surinam (Dutch Guiana), and a not precisely quantifiable number of Portuguese Marranos (Christians of actual, alleged or partial Jewish ancestry, who formed a significant portion of Portugal’s and her colonies’ populations after the Inquisition).
More revealing still of the book’s real nature is the repeated suggestion that Jewish involvement in slavery (no less and no more blameworthy than the far greater Christian and Muslim embroilment, and hugely overstated by mis-citation and innuendo) stems from some uniquely evil racial-religious characteristic, and has subsequently been concealed by all the all-too-predictable conspiracy of media and financial power. Yet The Secret Relationship is afar cleverer work of propaganda than its critics seem to assume. An impressive amount of research – albeit almost entirely in secondary sources – has gone into its compilation, however egregiously the results are then misused. It does not directly claim, as responses from the Anti-Defamation League and elsewhere asserted, that Jews are ‘genetically predisposed towards the exploitation of blacks; though the unwary reader might easily draw such a conclusion from it, and that, no doubt, was the anonymous author’s intention. It draws attention dozens of times to instances across the centuries and the continents when Jews were accused of rapacious and dishonest business dealings. It never quite directly says that such accusations were true, or that they reflect a noxious, invariant pattern of Jewish racial behaviour. Nor, of course, does it say that they were not true. It just leaves the reader to conclude that such multifarious and insistent charges must be solidly based.’ (276-7)
This is a good point, as unfortunately not all Fascists are clowns, and anti-Semites, whether White, Black or whatever, can dress their poisonous assertions up to make them apparently rational and historically grounded. You have to be careful not to be caught by such rhetoric.
In footnote 3 to that chapter, Howe recommends the following books giving scholarly overviews of Jewish participation in the slave trade. These are David Brion Davis’ ‘ The Slave Trade and the Jews’, published in the New York Review of Books, 22nd December 1994; Seymour Drescher, ‘The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Immigrants and Minorities 12, 1993; and Harold Brackman’s Farrakhan’s Reign of Historical Error: The Truth behind The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (Los Angeles 1992). Howe describes this last book a polemical with a touch of ethnocentrism itself.
I thought it worth posting Howe’s passage demolishing Farrakhan’s nasty little book, as I think these poisonous assertions are still being made. The sensitivity over this issue has also been used by the witch-hunters to smear entirely respectable historians and academics like Jackie Walker as genuine anti-Semites. Walker’s real crime in the eyes of groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is that she opposes the Israeli state’s persecution of the Palestinians and the system of apartheid it has erected to keep them very securely as second-class citizens. However, they smeared her as an anti-Semite with a comment with two colleagues discussing Jewish involvement in the slave trade, in which she stated clearly that the Jews were ‘her people’. As a Jewish woman of colour, whose father was a Russian Jew, practises the religion herself, and whose partner is Jewish and whose daughter attended a Jewish school, there should be no doubt that Walker is not any kind of anti-Semite. But because of some ill-guarded words in her post, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were able to smear her as such.
Oh ho! This is very amusing. The Tory party has always positioned itself, at least since the 19th century, as the party of Britishness. If you listen to its supporters and propaganda, it’s the party of the British constitution and the union, protecting our ancient liberties and defending our great nation from plots and attacks by evil foreigners. Historically this largely meant the French, but today means the EU and Scots Nationalists. Under Maggie Thatcher this nationalism became particularly shrill. The 1987 Tory election broadcast showed Spitfires zooming about the sky while an excited voice told us that ‘We were born free. It’s our fundamental right’ and ended with ‘It’s great, to be great again!’ Political theorists who’ve read, or at least heard of Rousseau could correct the first statement. At the beginning of his book, The Social Contract, which became one of the founding texts of the French Revolution, Rousseau said: ‘Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’ Which is probably not something Thatcher wanted said about her government. As for being ‘great again’, this was the period when Thatcher was selling our state industries off to foreign investors, destroying trade unions, cutting unemployment and other welfare benefits and trying to find ways to get people to take out private medical insurance instead of relying on the NHS. She would have liked to have privatised that, but was prevented by a massive cabinet rebellion. At the same time she was using her ‘strong state’ against striking miners and anyone else she thought was an evil Commie subversive while at the same time propping up truly evil Fascist dictators abroad. Like the brute General Pinochet, responsible for the murder and torture of 30,000 people in his native Chile. The country’s present grinding poverty and crumbling infrastructure are all a result of her policies. The identification of the Conservative party with Britishness was so loud and crass that, reviewing the election broadcast on Radio 4’s The News Quiz, the late, much-missed humourist Alan Coren referred to the planes as ‘the Royal Conservative Airforce’. I also remember one of the Observer’s columnists referring to the Tories as ‘the patriotic party’.
But now aspersions have been cast on the Britishness of the Tories’ leader and current head of the country, Boris Johnson. Simon Webb of the History Debunked YouTube channel put up a piece yesterday asking ‘How British Is Boris Johnson?’ This speculated that Johnson carries on the way does because, quite simply, he isn’t really British. He was born in New York, and is of mixed Turkish and American ancestry. He is also part Jewish, which is one reason why I’m not going to put the video up here. One of the elements of the genuine anti-Semitic conspiracies is the allegation that Jews aren’t really patriotic citizens because of their international connections and foreign ancestry and relatives. They have frequently been accused of being ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ with no real connection or loyalty to the gentile peoples among which they settle. It’s a poisonous allegation that has resulted in the murder of countless innocents and encouraged the formation and growth of Fascist organisations and parties like the Nazis. The vast majority of British Jews are as British as everyone else. And before the Second World War, the vast majority of Jews wished to remain in the countries of their birth, to be accepted as patriotic fellow citizens by their gentile countrymen. It’s why the leaders of the British Jewish community during the First World War actually opposed the Balfour Declaration. They did not want the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine nor anywhere else, as it could lead to the accusation that their loyalties were divided. And they weren’t. They were, and wanted to be seen as, patriotic Brits.
But there is a kind of irony in Boris Johnson, a pukka old Etonian, and true-blue Tory being accused of not being British enough.
And I think Webb has a point, though not in the sense he means. At the heart of the right-wing ranting and suspicion about the ‘globalists’, supposedly plotting to create an evil, Satanic one-world Communist state, there’s an element of truth. Regardless of their nationality or ancestry, it appears to me that the global superrich really are forming a separate international class whose loyalty is primarily to themselves and not to the people below them, even if these people are of the same nationality. You can see that in the way the Tory grandees and those like them move their capital around the world, investing in countries on the other side of the world while making pay and conditions worse over here and cutting benefits. As far as I know, Jacob Rees-Mogg is thoroughly British in his ancestry. He also projects a caricatured, right-wing image of Britishness very much like his nickname of ‘Lord Snooty’. He also backed Brexit, which was supposed to be another patriotic gesture in which Britain took back her sovereignty.
In fact Brexit has wreaked massive harm to our economy, disastrously cutting British firms off from continental markets and suppliers. The deals we’ve made, or are trying to make, with the Americans, Australians and New Zealanders are to our disadvantage, whatever the Tory mouthpieces say to the contrary. And the response of Rees-Mogg and the superrich like him amply demonstrate where their loyalties lie. Even before Brexit, Mogg had invested in companies in the far east. And when he was urging everyone to vote to leave the EU, he was moving his own financial interests to Eire. This was to pick up on all the EU business he would otherwise have lost if they’d remained centred in Britain. Which is, to me, another example of Tory hypocrisy.
Back in the 19th century Disraeli declared in his books Coningsby and Sybil that Britain was divided into two nations, the rich and poor, who had no knowledge or connection with each other, and demanded that this should be remedied. They’ve been talking about ‘One Nation’ Toryism every since. This is done by leaders like John Major, Michael Howard, David Cameron and so on, and is supposed to show that they are from that branch of the party that still has some paternalistic regard for those below them. The same people talk, or used to talk, about ‘caring Conservativism’. This is all the while doing what Tories always do – cut benefits, wages, and employment conditions and make it easier to sack people. All while manipulating the stats to persuade people that this is actually working and that they’re somehow better off.
Tony Benn in one of his books said something about the British ruling class regarding the lower orders as indeed like a foreign nation. Thinking about the Britannia Unchained mob, he had a point. This was the book written by a group of Tory MPs, including the smirking insult to decency, Priti Patel, that said that for Britain to compete in the global market, British workers must endure the same terrible conditions and wages as those elsewhere in the world, like India. A similar view was put forward by a former Lib Dem MP for Taunton Deane in Somerset. I’ve forgotten who he was, but I do remember his appearance on the local news. Introducing him, the interviewer stated that he came from a family of colonial administrators and governors. This strongly suggests to me that, deep down, he regarded British people of all colours in the same way his family had regarded the Africans and other indigenous peoples they governed.
And going back back to the 1920s, George Bernard Shaw attacked the Tory claim that they and the rich represented Britain and her interests in his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism by pointing out that the rich spent much of their time and money abroad, and preferred to invest in firms in the colonies using cheap indigenous labour. And this still remains absolutely true. One of the problems with Britain’s banking system is that its investment banks are geared to putting money into commonwealth rather than domestic industries.
At a fundamental level, Boris Johnson and the rest of the Tory elite really don’t have any connection to the Brits below them. It’s not because of their ancestry. In my view, they’re the same whether they’re completely British by descent. It’s because they are part, and see themselves as part of an international industrial and political class, who move their businesses and investments from one country to another without concern for how this affects their fellow countrymen. All the while trying to deceive the rest of us by yelling about their Britishness and British values.
Johnson and the Tories aren’t British patriots, except at the crude level of repeating nationalist slogan and anti-immigrant attitudes. Ordinary Brits are foreigners to them, like the low-waged workers in other countries they also seek to exploit.
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